WHY DOES ANGELINA HAVE TO DIE?

by Michael Carlson & Portland Green

Traditionally, film has found it difficult to deal with successful women. As the American film scholar Jeanine Basinger pointed out in her seminal study A Woman’s Way, the ‘crackpot plots’ of women’s films in the golden age of Hollywood served to ‘unintentionally liberate’ the audience. ‘When the end of the movie came along,’ she writes, ‘the surrogate woman was usually dead, punished, or back in fold, aware of the error of her ways.’ It was a ‘perfectly safe form of pseudo liberation.’

And when it comes to dance feature film, we’ve moved further backwards, to before the 1940s! Liberation, even unintentional, today seems unattainable. Why is it that whenever contemporary mainstream film encounters dance, female dancers suffer? In re-examining the potential for dance in feature or long format films, we found ourselves comparing their fates to an observation about women’s health made by another American, the feminist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book, Smile and Die. ‘In some versions of the prevailing gender ideology, femininity is by nature incompatible with full adulthood — a state of arrested development.’

We see this message espoused by some of the most successful dance films of industrialised cinema, many of which are perennial staples of holiday television. In these films, featured and supporting female dancers are portrayed as fragile of mind, sylph-like of body and pink of dress. When the feature film Black Swan, opened in a London in 2010, The…