Grrls make movies: the emergence of women-led filmmaking initiatives for teenage girls

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Kathleen Sweeney

GENDER AT PLAY--WHY FEMALE-ONLY ENVIRONMENTS?

In his book Gender Play (1993), based on playground research conducted in California and Michigan, Barrie Thorne observes that some girls and boys play in single-sex settings, while others are adept at crossing the gender divide, fluently shifting from same-gender play to mixed-gender play. Girls accepted in boys' games are usually those with a comparable or superior athletic skill level. (5) Applied to technology, girls must have the same level of competency, or endure "keyboard takeover" by boys. Malory Graham, executive director of Seattle's Reel Grrls, taught youth in mixed-gender settings for several years before deciding "the only way for girls to learn technology was in a safer girl-only environment where they were not intimidated by boys and had women filmmakers as role models." Liz Slagus, director of education at Eyebeam's After-School Atelier, created the Girls-Eye View program not because of what she saw as girls' inherent inabilities but as a way "to get rid of one more distraction" keeping girls from deep engagement with technology.

In an era of animation and special effects, the number of credits at the end of a film for technical jobs greatly exceeds the number of actors. How many talented women wait tables for years in an attempt to make it as an actor when a comparable amount of effort backed by tech skills would land them a job as an off-line editor or an assistant producer in their twenties? Filmmaking initiatives like Reel Grrls, GirlsFilmSchool, and Divas Direct are inspiring women to adopt a lifelong career path rooted in these stepping-stone skills. As an example, take Thelma Schoonmaker, who in 2004, at age seventy, won her second editing Oscar for her work on Martin Scorcese's The Aviator (2004).

BEYOND MEDIA LITERACY

Parents and educators know that a "see no evil" attempt at insulating girls from mainstream media is a limited enterprise. No one in the U.S. exists in a pop culture vacuum. Whether we actively consume popular media or not, we collectively navigate the Lolitas, Mean Girls, and Amazon Barbies appearing in movie trailers, on television or the Internet, on billboards, and on grocery store magazine racks. Pop culture icons have always been part of the zeitgeist; they seep in through visual osmosis.

Media literacy, combined with courses in digital photography and film/videomaking, should help expose the technical underpinnings of image construction and icon-making in popular culture. Filmmaking requires females to look through the same kinds of lenses used to produce corporate media's images of beauty, power, and celebrity. And it grants them the power to create rather than simply consume. Once girls begin to frame their world through the lens, issues of power, reference, and choice come into focus.

REEL GRRLS

The Reel Grrls Web site opens with a startling Flash sequence that includes this fact: "Most girls will have watched 5,000 hours of television before entering kindergarten." Where does all of this electronic information get stored and how do children process it? And what does it mean to overcome the identity and gender encoding of those messages received by preschool brains? Reel Grrls' annual program encourages girls to tap the referential riches of their media minds.