Feminism in The Eighties & Song of the Exile

Feminism in The Eighties & Song of the Exile

The emergence of feminist discourse in twentieth century films served in part to challenge certain social assumptions about gender roles in our societies. In the 1950s, prior to the influx of feminist films that characterized the following two decades, the social influence of the female was limited to “the power to gossip, inform, and effect discourse” (7), as Murray Pomerance observes in Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century. The role surrendered to women was, for the most part, “that of being beautiful and being loved” (6), Pomerance argues. We see this subservient female position exhibited in films like Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), where Scottie objectifies and fetishizes the ideal phallic woman to the point of coercing Judy (who obliges) to transform herself into a new Madeleine; and in Pickup on South Street (1953), where the conventionally beautiful Candy falls hopelessly in love with the criminal Skip McCoy despite his beating her on more than one occasion. As social attitudes about women have changed and feminist movements around the world evolved, so did the cinema, and the construction of new female identities in postcolonial and postmodern films raised new questions about our perceptions of women's roles. By portraying women undergoing strict training to fit predetermined female character roles in the theater, Chantal Akerman's film The Eighties draws a parallel to the actual female condition in society, suggesting that gender is a make-believe social construct, rather than a fixed biological state. Ann Hui's film Song of the Exile also examines the female condition and juxtaposes it with the predicament of the ethnic minority via the depiction of Hueyin, who encounters discrimination in Britain because of her race, despite her seemingly 'liberated' position as an educated female who goes off on her own, contrary to her mother's traditional expectations, to pursue her individual goals.
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