A bold, convincing call for new voices and perspectives in cinema.
An investigation of how the male-dominated film industry silences women’s stories.
Drawing on more than 100 hours of interviews and abundant studies and news articles, actress, writer, and producer Jones makes her book debut with a spirited critique of the film industry’s treatment of women at all levels. “I have lived and experienced the harassment, the casual dismissals, the closed doors, the patronizing head-pats, the blatant sexism, the indifference toward women in film for over a decade,” she writes, mounting compelling evidence that her experiences are widespread—and persist even after #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, and the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Fresh out of drama school, Jones knew she would have to spend a few years “furiously battling to get auditions” and working for little or no money in order to build a resume. She soon discovered that along with competition and disappointment, “sexual harassment, assault, and degradation make up the constant, thrumming, crushing backdrop of being an actress.” With men predominant as casting directors, agents, directors, and producers, she found that when trying out for a part, she was “being held up against a set of stereotypes of the type of women who are allowed to appear in films and on television” and “make sense to the creators and gatekeepers.” Frustrated as an actress, she faced gender discrimination, as well, as a film producer. Female film school graduates, argues the author, “have a far harder time than their male peers acquiring even the lowest-level entry jobs in the industry,” meaning less access to financial support and networking. Women behind the camera, moreover, have “to fight to command the respect from typically majority-male crews.” Sexism directly affects film’s cultural impact: Since 95% of movies have been directed by white men, the images they perpetuate “have shaped everybody’s cinematic visual language,” turning women into the objects of male protagonists’ “actions, desires, and gaze[s].” Jones offers concrete suggestions for change within and outside of the industry, including by filmgoers who should “vote with your dollars.”
A bold, convincing call for new voices and perspectives in cinema.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-80-703345-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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