Trigger warning: this article discusses eating disorders

Day by Day: A Lockdown project

 At the height of lockdown, a friend of mine, Sarah Ireland, shared a short film she’d written and starred in on Instagram. Made in collaboration with the filmmaker and student Jodie Jean Wood, the pair created the film impressively whilst in different continents. Having met around a year ago, it wasn’t until lockdown that the pair discussed creating the project. Written, filmed and edited in the matter of weeks, the short film deals with Sarah’s eating disorder.

Studying filmmaking and acting, Jodie has been making short films for the last nine months, but as Covid-19 has brought much to a standstill, the arrival of lockdowns interrupted her projects. However, this was not going to prevent Jodie continuing her filming; she adapted, as we have all been forced to. Reaching out to friends via Instagram, Sarah responded to the call to collaborate, and after bouncing around ideas, they set to work on their short film. Written as a diary entry, Sarah’s words punctuate the screen as she makes a batch of pancakes. At first it may seem an ordinary and mundane set of events, however the words reveal what is going on beneath the surface.

“I knew I wanted to talk about it because it’s been such a big part of the last couple of year for me”, Sarah tells me over zoom. Ready to talk about what she had been through; the film was an opportunity to share. Having found it difficult to find relatable films about eating disorders, it was important to Sarah that “it was a personal film and that you weren’t being bombarded with information”. Crucially, the film is something that Sarah would have liked to have seen on her timeline whilst she was struggling.

I’m not surprised by the impact of the film. Quiet but powerful, Sarah’s words remain with you long after watching the film. It was important to Jodie that it was subtitles and not a voiceover because “subtitles don’t tell someone how to feel when they are watching it. They are simply reading the story as if in a book so they can decide how to feel about a certain thing”. Not only did Sarah find it therapeutic, she found it a way to feel more comfortable with people.

Whilst always aware of the power of film, the conversations that have opened up as a result of this film provide crystal clear evidence. Friends reaching out, some from way back, to reveal that they have been through similar experiences, or others saying that watching the film has made it easier to understand and help family members or close friends who are struggling with an eating disorder, and others have been inspired by Sarah to write about their own experiences.

Many of us spend more time than we may wish to admit scrolling through our Instagram accounts, clicking on stories and posting ourselves. I’ve always been slightly dismissive of social media, only seeing the negatives but for Jodie, a young filmmaker, she understands the importance of social media: “Instagram is very direct. People see it immediately. Whereas only people interested on YouTube in the topic will give it the time of day. I have followers and people know it’s coming from me.” Instagram empowers her filmmaking and has given her an audience. We no longer have to take a trip to the cinema to watch a film because for those with a smartphone, we have the movies in our pockets.

At the end of the conversation they joked that we needed to end on an inspirational quote, but it missed the point. After nearly an hour, I didn’t need a pithy one-liner to be left inspired, they had already done that.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_FCEK6p8qu/

Links:

Beat Eating Disorders:

https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/support-services/helplines

Mind:

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/eating-problems/useful-contacts/

 

My mum is a woman of endless talent. Actor, illustrator, director, writer, teacher, master of all accents, the most wonderful storyteller, the list goes on. After beginning her career as a child actor, she went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama and graduated in 1991.  She married my dad in 1998 and at the same time became stepmother to my older sister who was then seven.  A year later she gave birth to me, and in 2004 to my younger sister whereupon we all upped sticks and moved to Spain where my dad was then working, and she found herself embarking on a new chapter of her life, one in which her career as an actor jostled for position alongside her role as mum.  After having interviewed so many interesting women on the podcast and for this blog, it seemed obvious that she should be my next interviewee.  Having gone home when lock-down was relaxed, I managed to find a moment to sit with her over a cup of tea and talk about her experiences.

It wouldn’t be particularly ground-breaking for me to say that women find it harder than men to pursue their careers when they choose to have children. My mum was no exception and for a very long time I have wondered how she went about restructuring her career with young children in a new country, where not only was she a new mum once more, but the language barrier and lack of opportunities for an English actor in Spain could not have been a cause for optimism.  In order to piece together her experiences, I asked her to take me back to the beginning.

When did you decide to become an actress?

It was some time after I had abandoned the idea of being a long-distance lorry driver.  When I was five I figured there couldn’t be any better job than driving miles and miles and miles and getting paid for it.  When I was about eight, and after a few school plays, I started to think about making my own theatre and writing stories.  I was an avid reader and one of my favourite books was the Wizard of Oz.  I remember sitting in the bathroom planning out an entire theatre production of the book, only to get stumped on how to recreate the Emerald city, which is where, I think, the plan stalled.

Why did acting become the thing you wanted to do?

To my young mind acting seemed to be the simplest way to go about making a piece of theatre happen.  I also don’t think I truly fully understood the role of a director at that time. The lack of female role models I met in the industry as a young actor might also have been a contributing factor.

When you were growing up, do you think you were aware of gender inequality and differences in opportunities for men and women?

My mum had been a newspaper reporter, and my dad had created his own work as an artist and maker. I grew up believing that if you worked hard at a particular craft, whatever it was, chances were, you could make a success of it, regardless of gender. It was only in my early twenties that I had an awakening, began to swallow up books by Gloria Steinem, feel more keenly the inadequacies in the roles available to women actors, and started to educate myself. 

You did lots of acting as a child. What was that like?

My brother and I belonged to a local kids drama club called Hill O’ Beans Theatre Company, and we put on productions of Shakespeare and did outreach theatre productions in the local community.  When I was twelve and my brother was seven, there was an advert in the local paper from a children’s agent called Stella Greenfield who was based in North London. Mum wrote to her, we went up for an interview, and she put us onto her books.  I got a decent sized part in a BBC TV series called Bleak House and worked from the age of 13 on television and radio until the time I went to drama school.  I remember being on my first job, on location in full costume, at 5 am on a freezing November day, with a grown up cup of coffee and a hand warmer in my pocket, about to film the next scene, and thinking that if I could spend the rest of my life acting, and hanging around on a film set, I couldn’t be happier.

Did you notice gender inequality or bias within the theatre industry when you went to drama school and after?

As an actor, particularly when you start out, the competition for work is so tough you are so thrilled that you have a job, you often don’t consider those things. However, it becomes quite obvious, quite quickly, especially at drama school when you are largely working on classical plays, that the ratio of parts that are written for women and men is vastly uneven.  Bristol Old Vic Theatre school had a policy, when I was at Guildhall where they took a smaller percentage of female actors to male actors based on the ratio of the work that was likely to be available to them.  Things have changed a great deal since then, and there are many more female writers writing parts for women, but it’s still not exactly balanced.

Did you feel as though the roles you were getting were all very similar?

I transitioned from the ingenue, to the slightly eccentric sister, to the unhappy young wife, to the unmarried older woman who had an axe to grind, (normally with a younger female character). You could say that a pattern was emerging (!) that supported a set of classical female stereotypes.

When you got married, what did you think about in terms of your career?

My life as a solo actor typically involved a tour in a different city every week, disappearing for a week or two to filming, and going for auditions with only a few hours warning. Actors have to be fairly self-focused and inward looking as a way of staying ahead of the pack and as part of their commitment to continuously improve their craft.  Once you have children you become very quickly aware of the world outside your ego, and you embark on a different kind of self-development.  Finding a way to work as part of a new ‘team’ with largely different disciplines and still be creative is not easy, but when you succeed it is both rewarding and liberating.

When you fell pregnant for the first time, how did you keep going with acting?

When I was four months pregnant with you, I did a film called Esther Kahn with the French director Arnaud Desplechin.  I was in a corset and after every shot a very wonderful wardrobe lady unlaced me in between each take, allowing both of us to breath comfortably for as long as possible before the director called ‘Action!’  Later on, that same year I was in a rehearsed reading of a play about Suffragettes at the Duke of York’s theatre, and at that time very obviously pregnant. The thing I remember most was needing to go to the loo because of the pressure on my bladder and having to hold out because the cast were on stage throughout the whole play.  I didn’t ever consider not acting, only how to adjust and find a way to balance it with being a mum.

What about when I was born?

When I went up to London for castings I’d call a friend and we’d meet somewhere near the venue, and I’d hand you over to them like contraband goods, with a blanket, a picture book and a bottle of expressed milk.  You were five months old, and because I was spectacularly unsuccessful in expressing milk there would only be a centimetre or so which you would then refuse to drink, and I would rush the audition to get it over as quickly as possible to get back to you for a feed.  When there was no one on hand to look after you, I tried a tactic I had observed with other actress mums who would hand their child to the receptionist at the desk whilst they went in to the casting.  The first time I attempted this was also the last.  From the moment I put you in the receptionist’s arms, to the moment I started walking towards the taping room you howled.  After three minutes the director said, “I don’t think this is going to work is it?” and I said “No.  Sorry!” and left the room to scoop you up.   How great would it have been if he had said, “Do you want to go and find someone to look after your baby and come back later, or when she’s asleep?” 

We moved to Spain because of dad’s job. When you made the decision, would you consider this a sacrifice you made?

In my head, the opportunity to go to Spain was a bit like being the mum in My Family and other Animals, and I was ready to embrace an adventure. I wouldn’t say that I sacrificed my acting career to become a mother, but I would say that I reduced the amount of opportunities that might have come from being more readily available.  However, I had only tentatively directed before moving to Spain and might never have pursued it as an option if I hadn’t been in a new country and as a consequence needed to be prepared to try new things.  My first ever production, in a small theatre in Valencia was a lightbulb moment.  As a director I discovered I could be creative without any of the constraints I felt as an actor.  Maybe all that production planning as an eight-year old was finally being put to use.

I remember being off school when I was unwell and going and sitting in the theatre seats, watching you direct that play La Lupe. Now that you’re back in England, and have been for the last 10 years, what do you think lies ahead for you?

One actor I worked with described acting as cultivating the skin of a rhinoceros with the soul of a butterfly and I think that he offers a very apt analogy.  I have slightly tougher skin and am still very much motivated to create artistic work, and I now feel a greater sense of autonomy. Directing and producing my own work, and the work of other writers and performers I work closely with, feels like a good place to be.  The irony is that I probably had access to those sorts of opportunities all along but allowed myself to get stuck in the actor’s trap of finding an agent, waiting for a phone call, going for a casting, getting the job/not getting the job, waiting for a phone call.  Directors are enablers of both the work of the actor and that of the writer.  No matter how rewarded you can feel as an actor working on a good production, you never have the same degree of artistic freedom that is afforded to you as a director.

Finally, what is it about acting that you love so much?

Acting is physical, psychological, emotional and all encompassing. It’s hard for me to select one thing I love about it over any other, but maybe the sense of family in the theatre comes close, and the companionship engendered by working cheek by jowl with other actors in an often high stakes environment, is as liberating as it is exhilarating. To be paid to experience the depth and variety of human nature and utilise it to entertain and move hundreds of people is pretty unique.  Then there is the discipline of working for weeks on a moment that might last seconds in performance but can shift the direction of the play in an instant, and the palpable feeling you get from sensing how the audience are going along with the story.  When you’ve worked on a bit of slapstick or a moment or a line, and the audience laugh, sometimes until their stomachs are hurting and tears are rolling down their face, that immediacy of response is very gratifying.  If there is one thing that I would say I get from being an actor, that I don’t get from being a director, it’s that. The feeling you are somehow holding the energy of that vast velvet seated room in your hands – that’s very powerful.

http://www.samanthaholland.com

It’s not surprising if when you, like me, first think of women in Horror films a half-naked, blood-soaked woman, screaming at something behind the camera comes to mind. With the lack of diverse female characters in film, this image doesn’t exactly help. In order to shed some light on this, I spoke to Dr Alice Haylett Bryan, a Film Studies fellow at KCL, who specialises in Horror and Extreme Cinema.

Alice’s two interlinking areas of research are those of Motherhood in film, and how being a mother changes the way in which we watch horror films. She explains that after having spent most of her academic career studying Horror films, and loving them, her maternal instincts appeared to kick in after giving birth. Suddenly, she found it much harder to watch scenes with children in peril. In Gaspar Noé’s 2018 film Climax, she found the scene with the little boy in the electrical room far too distressing to watch.

Meanwhile, female characters in horror films are most commonly bound up with ideas of sexuality and mothers are turned into monstrous beings. Alice explains that if you take Heyday American Horror, more commonly known as slasher films, “we get this representation of female sexuality and motherhood as being potentially dangerous.” Evil characters such as Mrs White in Carrie or Norman Bates’ controlling mother are just two examples. “We get this demonization of the mother,” who prevent their children from going out into the world to function within the patriarchy. These mothers are portrayed as “abject and horrific because it is something that patriarchy can’t control.”

A famous study by Molitor and Spolsky (looking at slasher films from 1980 to 1993) showed that “it takes women twice as long to die as men” and that “females are shown in terror for obviously longer periods of time than males.” Alice comments that Heyday Slashers, in particular, are all about “the woman in peril, the woman in agony, the woman screaming” which is “slightly balanced out by the introduction of the Final Girl.” Alice suggests that the Final Girl character does actually “hold a lot of potential,” despite the common opinion that it is “regressive.” There are a “few films that have made her more empowering.” Erin, in Adam Wingard’s You’re Next, suffers but she “gives as much as she gets.”

“It’s not just about the crazy mother, the sex-crazed teenager, or the Final Girl. We now have a variety of antagonists and protagonists.” Not only this, but “we have female directors creating really interesting horror films that don’t even need to be tied to those typical gender stereotypes. So yeah, there is definitely a shift.”

As film studies is beginning to bring the importance of women in horror from the last 60-70 decades into the limelight, it is also important to embrace the current surge of female directors and writers within the genre. One of Alice’s favourite directors is Jennifer Kent. Her film The Babadook (2014) is about a mother and son who are haunted by a book that arrives on their doorstep. The film explores grief and mourning, it is “dark, haunting, and wonderful.”

Alice defines horror as the unveiling of “society’s deep-seated, or unconscious fears and desires. There is something you can learn about a society from the horror films it produces.” From a feminist viewpoint, the way in which patriarchal societies work can be explored and revealed. Arguably, successful horror films are popular because of the particular political situation, or turmoil, at the moment of their creation and release. “People want to seek out things that allow them to have some sort of cathartic release.” Although not necessarily a horror, Kent’s most recent film The Nightingale (2019) is about the genocide of indigenous Australians in Tasmania. As a reflection on colonial legacy, it is a “hard but necessary watch, especially now with everything that is going on in America, and within our own country.”

Only relatively recently in Film and Television has the female mind been explored. The recent rise in female writers, directors and producers is providing a positive change. Despite “making up nearly 50% of the human race, periods are still monstrous, [and] mothers are either bad or amazing. There can be these really black and white ideas about what womanhood means, and with a trans-inclusive understanding of womanhood, I think you start to get films like Prevenge.”

Prevenge (2016) is a film written, directed, and starred in, by Alice Lowe. After finding out she was pregnant and realising the lack of potential job opportunities, she wrote this film in only two months about a pregnant woman who believes her baby is talking to her. Her partner is killed in a tragic accident and the baby tells her to go and get revenge on the people who are responsible for his death. Alice admits that it verges on the monstrous mother trope but, in fact, “it is a really truthful representation of what it feels like to be pregnant sometimes. It is about the anxiety you feel about carrying around this thing that you are entirely responsibly for” while “it functions on its own and grows without you controlling it.” Previously, there hadn’t been many depictions of pregnant women who resonated so honestly with the experience.

For me, this highlighted the importance of bringing historically underrepresented voices into the mainstream sphere. There are so many people who don’t connect with the people and the storylines they see onscreen and so to be able to find films that women identify with, especially within a genre so tainted with clichéd narratives of femininity.

My conversation with Alice was so enlightening and ultimately positive, I think, in the fact that horror seems to be moving towards a reality where there are more female directors and writers making films with diverse female characters and complex narratives.

I first published this in our university’s newspaper, ROAR, last autumn to coincide with our radio shows’ week on Romantic Comedies. Having always been obsessed with the film genre growing up, I wanted to explore the romcom in light of new discussions that we were having through ‘Into the Limelight’.

I have always believed that it was easy to love a romcom; a fictitious world with a guaranteed happy ending, full of irresistible clichés. The romantic comedy is predictable and comforting, and some might say an adult fairytale. Since the advent of the genre in the 1930s, little has changed. Almost always the plot will centre around the love story of a heterosexual couple, who will have a serendipitous meet cute, a small dose of conflict, which is resolved just in time for their happily ever after. Since I was little, I have fallen in love over and over again watching my favourite romcoms, from 10 Things I hate about you to It’s Complicated to When Harry Met Sally.  I rewatch the same romantic comedies regularly because I enjoy the satisfaction of escaping from reality to a completely implausible and absurd world. 

Before I continue, I want to make it clear that I love romcoms. However, for one particular week on my radio show, Into the Limelight, the discussion topic was whether romantic comedies can be feminist, and since then my relationship with the genre has been transformed. Reading articles and critiques of the genre, I began feeling uncomfortable, and confused over my beloved genre. Though I have always been aware of the problematic nature of the romcom, I have never fully confronted it until now. The research that I have done has led me to ask myself the question, is it time to break up with romcoms? 

The first problematic aspect of the romcom is the gender issue. Romantic comedies are rife with gender stereotypes, and unfair and false representations of men and women. Over and over again, I have witnessed these character tropes on screen, without giving them much thought. Women fall into various categories not limited to the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ who aids the male character’s development, the ultra-feminist who needs to be tamed by love or the geek in need of a makeover transformation in order to be noticed by the male lead. Similarly, men are expected to be unobtainable and allergic to commitment or be the uber nice guy. Whilst all representations are flawed, a double standard exists in what men and women are allowed to do in these films; it is only romantic if a man pursues the woman, if the woman does this she is seen as crazy. 

To that end, the ways in which characters chase their love interests must be called into question. A staple of the romcom genre has always been the big romantic gestures, generally carried out by the man. However, on reflection, many of these acts are highly controversial, and must be recognised for what they really are; whether it is stalking, cat-fishing or manipulation. For example, You’ve Got Mail is an example of lying and catfishing and Say Anything’s iconic boombox scene is exploitative of female vulnerability after a break-up. A beloved moment in Love Actually, the iconic cue card scene, is emotionally manipulative as Andrew Lincoln’s character is excusing his obsessive behaviour towards Keira Knightley’s character because he loves her. Somehow, we look past the behaviour for being simply romantic, and even a study at the University of Michigan concluded that romantic comedies have normalised stalking. This reaffirms that the actions that are normalised and praised on the screen find their way into our subconscious. So ultimately, if romcoms promote negative stereotypes, and criminal behaviour, why do we still like them? 

I have read many articles trying to grapple with this question. The discussions surrounding my favourite film genre are developing and expanding, and I have only touched the surface. Whilst, also, of course there are some examples within the genre which are far less problematic, such as, Obvious Child and Juno. There are clearly many things wrong with romcoms, but I have no shame in admitting that I will carry on watching romantic comedies, but now I watch them understanding what they are: rose-tinted, stereotypical depictions of love stories that exist in fictional worlds.

 

When I first started doing research for this project, I was unaware of quite how overbearing the inequality within the film industry is. Continually, it proves near impossible for women to even get their foot in the door when it comes to film production and direction. In the early stages of my researching, I came across a TED Talk called “What it’s like to be a woman in Hollywood” by actress, screenwriter, and director Naomi McDougall. Her TED talk is engaging and funny, and effectively highlights the issue within the industry that can be changed by us, the audience.  

She revealed alarming statistics: 50% of film graduates are women but only 18% of the smallest-budget films, only 12% of indies and only 5% of big budget films are being directed and made by women. There isn’t a lack of female filmmakers in the world; they’re just not being given the platform and the opportunity to turn their ideas into profitable films. 95% of the films we have seen in our lifetime, she claims, are told by men. She quotes, “Stories – and movies are just modern stories – are not frivolous. They’re actually the way that we understand the world and our place in it. They’re the way we develop empathy for people who have experiences different than our own. And right now, all of that is being funnelled at us through the prism of this one perspective. It’s not that it’s a bad perspective, but don’t we deserve to hear them all?”  

Having been so impacted by the TED Talk she gave, I managed to get in touch with Naomi and we set up a Skype call so that I could ask her some further questions. We were joined by another two female filmmakers and it became a really interesting conversation.   

Many would agree that female representation on screen has become so much better, not only with more female produced and directed material, but with the increase in interesting and complicated female characters. Naomi was of the opinion that things are moving a little bit, but that in the great scheme of things, the number of films made by women is still very minimal. She noted that there is a danger in believing in incremental change because now that things are sort of changing, everybody relaxes and thinks that there is no more to do. There needs to be a persistence in the movement for a change like this. What is the point in stopping the effort immediately after it has begun to make some progress?

Interestingly Naomi pointed out that streaming websites such as Netflix and Amazon have access to granular data of viewership in a way that studios don’t have and never have had. The streaming services understand and know what content the public want and enjoy; which is evidently more representation for everyone. They are basing their decisions on that data and so are making more inclusive choices. I think this proves that audiences are ready to be shown different perspectives, but it is the studios who don’t want to budge. 

 Throughout our podcasts, Lola and I spoke to our guests a lot about how a lot of female writers and directors now feel an added pressure to represent “Women” as a whole. This pressure usually becomes apparent once their film or TV show has been released and they receive a load of backlash. Notably, this negative reaction is mainly from women. I wondered whether Naomi felt this pressure too. She responded with a wholehearted “100%” and elaborated on the fact that this is happening across all historically underrepresented voices. She mentions a trans friend of hers, a fellow filmmaker, who receives the same sort of criticism from the trans community. It seems that anybody who breaks through gets torn to shreds by their own community, which Naomi suggests is a result of so much pent-up pain. Not being heard for so long is a really difficult thing to navigate because the stakes are so high. She points out that there are several bad movies made by white men that don’t receive the same sort of criticism for being bad models of the white male experience.

Naomi suggests that we all need to practice a lot more kindness, especially towards those who are starting to gain a voice they didn’t previously have. Eloquently she notes that “it’s tough because we are coming out of this culture of scarcity where it feels like we’re all starving” but that we must “begin acting from a place of abundance and love and not from scarcity and fear.”