Jump to content

LA-based, FEMALE cinematographer comfortable shooting 16mm


Alexander Boyd

Recommended Posts

Oh please Alexander, you posted in the, JOBS forum! You wrote, "Looking for a LA-based female cinematographer comfortable shooting on 16mm. Let me know if you could think of anyone."

Will you please not insult our intelligence!

R,

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Many years ago... I had a job investigating discrimination in employment.  In the state where I worked, discrimination based upon sex was forbidden.  With the exception that there was a "bonafide occupation qualification". An example might be that the job included cleaning the woman's rest room while it was open for use etc.

So for a cinematographer, that might mean shooting a documentary about woman's health issues, or maybe even a woman's prison.

The law's purpose is to create a level playing field in hiring, not to have an employer create their own private affirmative action program.  The exception to this, would be a situation where it can be proved that a company has never, or almost never employed a female cinematographer, for example, despite having had qualified female applicants in the past.  But this would need to be proved, after the fact. Listing a sexual requirement in employment advertisements is forbidden under most state's laws.

So, even here on cinematography.com, a request or offer of employment should describe the reason for a sexual qualification.  Otherwise, it seems as unfair a request, as asking for men applicants only.

Of  course, in the end, the employer will choose a hire for reasons that only they will know, and there is not much anyone can do about it unless it becomes a provable pattern of hiring.  But in our "one company/one project" business, this will almost always be impossible to prove.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, Bruce Greene said:

The law's purpose is to create a level playing field in hiring, not to have an employer create their own private affirmative action program. 

Yes, precisely Bruce, you can't simply self identify a problem and then decide you have the legal right to fix it.  Doesn't work like that. 

That said, a man in any state or province would have near zero chance of winning an employment discrimination case based on gender.  Whereas a woman will win just by showing up.

R,

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, Richard Boddington said:

Yes, precisely Bruce, you can't simply self identify a problem and then decide you have the legal right to fix it.  Doesn't work like that. 

That said, a man in any state or province would have near zero chance of winning an employment discrimination case based on gender.  Whereas a woman will win just by showing up.

R,

That was not my experience in my brief career as an investigator for employment discrimination.  Just showing up doesn't cut it.  There must be provable evidence.  Or course my experience dates from 40 years ago!!!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

40 minutes ago, Bruce Greene said:

That was not my experience in my brief career as an investigator for employment discrimination.  Just showing up doesn't cut it.  There must be provable evidence.  Or course my experience dates from 40 years ago!!!!

I'm sure that's accurate I was  exaggerating of course.  Fact is a man will have 10X the burden of proof to win one of these vs a woman.

R,

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Richard Boddington said:

Interestingly enough, there are zero women that post on this forum.  So the ad can't read, "please women DOPs send in your resumes," there aren't any here to read it.

Which goes to Phil's point, how many women actually apply for these jobs as a DOP in the first place?  If I enter the cinematography class at USC and I see all men sitting there, whose fault is that?  You can hardly blame men if women don't even sign up for the production classes in any significant numbers.

And of course there are zero barriers to women posting on this forum, all they have to do is sign up.  Why don't they?

R,


 

Why do you think that is?

I've noticed a lack of women on many forums I am on. They got lady cinematographers, why are they not posting??

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Richard Boddington said:

Oh please Alexander, you posted in the, JOBS forum! You wrote, "Looking for a LA-based female cinematographer comfortable shooting on 16mm. Let me know if you could think of anyone."

Will you please not insult our intelligence!

R,

You‘re a trip, man. So one cannot even ask around for names and reels of female cinematographers without you shouting „discrimination!“? 

 

there‘s a reason I‘m looking for a camerawomen specifically. I should have included that information in my initial post. I just incorrectly assumed that you‘d be intelligent enough to consider that aspect instead of complaining from the get-go.

Edited by Alexander Boyd
  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, Alexander Boyd said:

You‘re a trip, man. So one cannot even ask around for names and reels of female cinematographers without you shouting „discrimination!“? 

Yes actually.  Because your post is discriminatory, not sure why you have difficultly in understanding that?

R,

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm not afraid to say it. Men have to watch their backs big time in female-dominated industries. They push men out. They work together as a team. They look out for the sisters and the sisters only. I'm talking about particular workplaces that in some cases have a toxic environment. No man who has never experienced this or known men who've admitted it would believe it. Men can do these things too, to women, so I hear, but I've never experienced, seen, or taken part in such bad goings on. All people can do bad things. Both sexes. It's illegal but it happens. So, we hear how women tend to always be good and fair. It's simply not true. I'm not a supporter of making up for historic mistakes by making new mistakes.

So, if you're a man and find yourself in a job/industry that values you, and you find there's few women in that industry, don't worry about it.

Edited by Jon O'Brien
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 minutes ago, Richard Boddington said:

Yes actually.  Because your post is discriminatory, not sure why you have difficultly in understanding that?

R,

Poor you. I hope crying like a baby helps you getting jobs.

And you don‘t seem to understand that this project requires a camerawomen. Not sure what’s so difficult to grasp.

Edited by Alexander Boyd
  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
21 hours ago, Alexander Boyd said:

Looking for a LA-based female cinematographer comfortable shooting on 16mm. Let me know if you could think of anyone. 

Thanks!

Cinematographers XX is a US-based resource to help people find and hire cinematographers who identify as women:

https://www.cinematographersxx.com/

Somehow it's not illegal. ? 

There's a UK one too:

https://www.illuminatrixdops.com/

  • Like 1
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

It's not about ascribing blame - but something must be putting women off from the camera dept.

Not to jump on you unfairly, but why must something be putting certain groups of people off doing a certain thing? Is it possible that certain groups of people simply have different desires? It is widely accepted that men and women, typically and on average, are not psychologically identical. Even if you want to have the nature-versus-nurture debate, there are sound and well-understood biological reasons for this in terms of hormone metabolism.

The cruel irony is that we are speaking here of averages, and of typical behaviour, and this has no meaning for the individual. This means we need to be even more careful that people who want to do what might be considered gender-atypical work are treated fairly. Unless we want to force people to take jobs they quite literally do not want, I suspect there will never be equal representation in many jobs, which means that the minority group will always face being looked on as unusual.

So in the end, pushing the (in my view clearly incorrect) agenda that every group has identical psychology and identical desires actually harms people who do have unusual desires, because it overlooks their unusual circumstances.

P

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Alexander Boyd said:

there‘s a reason I‘m looking for a camerawomen specifically. I should have included that information in my initial post.

Yes, you should. There are sometimes good reasons why the gender of a crew member is important. Being up front about that helps to deflect accusations of sexism. I do notice though, that despite your protestations, you still haven't explained your reasons.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

No-one’s pushing the agenda that every group has identical psychology and identical desires, that’s an absurd extrapolation. But for such a small percentage of women to be involved in the upper levels of a career that is in no objective sense a masculine activity - unless you want to argue that photography or painting or theatre are also activities that women aren’t very good at - there has to be some institutional bias going on. I mean come on, what biological reason could there be for women not wanting to engage in a career that is creative, technical and interested in telling human stories?  I’d be more inclined to agree if you were talking about a career as an abattoir worker or an oil rigger, and yet I suspect these days even those jobs would have more than a 4% female participation rate.

It’s not like athletes, where the obvious physical differences between the sexes makes an even playing field impossible. It’s not even like the military or jobs like firefighting or search and rescue where it might be argued that the male physique is better suited to certain arduous tasks, although those fields also have women involved. It’s a job that requires a good eye, visual flair and an ability to relate to human emotions and storytelling. Discipline and organisational skills, thinking on your feet. Nothing traditionally gender biased, except for the fact that film sets are hierarchical which has in the past also meant patriarchal.

I suppose it will just naturally evolve over time, as the dinosaurs die off and our cultural landscapes begin to reflect our actual diversity, but it still shocks me that only last year we had the first female nomination for a cinematography Oscar in the history of the Academy. Not even a win, just a nomination! 

 

 

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
7 hours ago, Dom Jaeger said:

No-one’s pushing the agenda that every group has identical psychology and identical desires

That's sort of the problem - lots of people very much are pushing that agenda, or at the very least sort of assuming it. You only need to run a Google search for the phrase "50-50 representation" to see the claim being made again and again.

The point is, I've no very accurate idea what representation of any group in any role would be fair, at least no idea with any real evidence behind it. I suspect your 4% figure is too low, and I suspect 50% is too high, but that's just us guessing wildly based on life experience. That's not a very reliable guide to anything, and certainly not something we should use to make rules that affect people's lives - either way.

I have asked this question a few times in my work as a journalist, when people have made claims about insufficient representation of a particular group in a particular role, what proportion they would expect. Usually there's an awkward pause as the people I'm asking become aware that it simply isn't something they ever thought about. Sometimes there's a rather longer pause as rather smarter people suddenly realise what an important question this is.

What worries me is not that any particular outcome is being sought, but that the question is not even being sensibly addressed. 

P

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I think arguing over what exact proportion we should aim for is just a semantic diversion when the current figure is around 4%.  Of course it's hard to set definitive goals with nebulous things like this, but it's no reason to dismiss the obvious inequality. 

The 4% figure comes from a variety of sources, but the commonly cited study related to the top grossing 250 movies from 2018:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_film

But you could also cite the number of female members of the ASC (4.6%), the BSC (4.5%) or our Australian ACS (5.6%). 

It's one of those difficult scenarios where the lack of representation leads to a lack of role models which reinforces the lack of representation, but I find it an oddly extreme disparity when there are twice as many directors, four times as many writers and six times as many producers in the same study. And I utterly reject any suggestion that women are somehow not biologically or temperamentally capable of being superb cinematographers.

Anyway, I'm not here to push any agenda, other than pointing out the vast disparity and hoping that it changes.  I understand it's a loaded topic and that the lack of women on this forum is another reinforcement of the idea that women simply aren't interested in cinematography (though I imagine it might be daunting to speak up in a room full of male voices). I wish more women joined in our discussions here (I miss Freya!). But things are changing, and will continue to change.

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

For the sake of painful levels of clarity, I don't think anyone's suggesting that anybody of any particular group, with the possible exception of people with serious sight problems, are less able to shoot movies if they feel the need. The question is whether they feel the need.

I think it's nonsense to try to solve a problem when we have no idea of its severity or any indication of when we might have solved it. Of these the second issue is by far the most important. Without realistic numbers, we can't figure out if the special measures we're putting in place even work. Further, if these measures do work, at some point the problem will be solved, and we should reasonably be able to withdraw them. Even if we take the position that it's OK to discriminate for certain ends, which I don't, we must accept that allowing discrimination creates problems of its own, and it is important to establish the criteria for ending the discrimination up front. Without any form of sunset clause, we are left having to argue for equality (which is crazy enough) in circumstances where where equality will actually take something away from a previously-favoured minority group.

In case the problem with that isn't obvious, the political shitstorm this is likely to create hardly bears thinking about, and we risk ending up with permanent perks for certain people based on entirely historical circumstances. The situation we have right now already encourages the soft prejudice of low expectations ("[group] aren't good enough to succeed on their merits") and the suspicion of inadequacy ("[person] was undeservedly awarded a position for political reasons.") 

Or, as I have previously posited, we can but strictly avoid any form of discrimination, which does not suffer any of these problems. In 2019 it should not be necessary to argue for equality for anyone, under any circumstances, ever.

  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
On 12/15/2019 at 12:08 PM, Alexander Boyd said:

All I was asking for were some names of cameraWOMEN, because the project I‘m working on asks for it (for reasons I at this point no longer feel to share here except with the camerawomen themselves).

I know quite a few. 

Auden Bui is a fantastic DP. She's worked with pretty much all the heavy hitters and is one of the best people in the industry I've met. You can hit her up through her website www.audenbui.com or instagram https://www.instagram.com/audenbui/

Rachel Dunn is another DP friend of mine. She's been around the industry from a long time and comes from a background of visual effects, so that helps if you're doing a bunch of FX work. https://www.racheldunn.com/

Both are very comfortable shooting on film as I've worked with both of them on film projects. 

Edited by Tyler Purcell
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Phil, I think that's one of the best things I've read in a while, what you just wrote. 

That's a fine summation of what has beset the entire western world in the last decade/s. This strange need to play fixer of things, to 'know best', to change things, to make artificial rules that turn things around, to set quotas, to treat people like material objects to be assigned places according to some idea.

Yes, of course women make just as fine cinematographers as men. People bend over backwards to help a woman in her chosen profession. Don't set up artificial quotas for sex discrimination set by some sort of meddling from on high. That's replacing a mistake with a mistake. Have no quotas, no agendas, no discrimination at all. Just be supportive where you can be supportive. Encourage people. And look out for your own job, and do what you can to protect it, lest someone tries to decree that you can't do that job because someone else wants it or artificially sets up a system where, no matter who you are or what you are, you just don't materially 'make the grade' according to the discrimination. My God, that's unjust.

 

Edited by Jon O'Brien
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
12 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Without realistic numbers, we can't figure out if the special measures we're putting in place even work. Further, if these measures do work, at some point the problem will be solved, and we should reasonably be able to withdraw them.

What measures have been put in place in this instance? Who’s arguing for quotas here? You’re arguing against a straw man.

All I was saying was that someone should be able to hire a female DP if they want to. Now if advertising specifically for a woman breaks anti-discrimination laws, so be it. I agree with the spirit of those laws too. No-one likes to feel excluded.  But the reality of course is that people in this industry will often hire who they want anyway, whether it be friends or family or from within their own tribe or whatever. Those websites listing female DPs are not breaking anti-discrimination laws, they are making more visible a spectrum of workers that are under-represented. 

How we gauge if representation is skewed is sometimes difficult, but at some point we have to be able to recognise systemic bias. If our indigenous population is vastly over-represented in prisons, do we simply shrug and decide that they must be more prone to criminal behaviour or do we ask ourselves if other factors are at play? Do we need to cite a specific percentage of indigenous prisoners that is acceptable before deciding that there might be a problem that needs addressing? 

Systemic bias doesn’t always mean racism or sexism, it can simply be the habits of the past, or limited access to opportunities or faulty assumptions or systems that skew in favour of the majority. It can be self-perpetuating which makes breaking cycles difficult. It can also be a source of puzzlement to those who benefit from the bias and don’t see anything to complain about. 

How we address this kind of bias is a difficult thing, I totally agree. Sometimes positive discrimination is a terrible idea, other times it seems to be the only solution to at least begin to change things. In an ideal world we would all treat each other with respect and equality, but it’s still far from an ideal world.  

12 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Or, as I have previously posited, we can but strictly avoid any form of discrimination, which does not suffer any of these problems. In 2019 it should not be necessary to argue for equality for anyone, under any circumstances, ever.

That’s a terrific sentiment but unfortunately it doesn’t relate to reality. There are any number of studies (not to mention news reports) that show that discrimination is alive and well in 2019, and possibly getting worse in the current climate of populism and rising far-right groups. I’ve had people say anti-Semitic things to me recently as if it was totally OK to say that stuff in conversation. 

That’s at the extreme end, but even in terms of simple comparisons like women’s pay rates compared to men’s for doing the exact same job there is still a significant disparity. It shouldn’t be necessary to argue for that sort of equality in 2019, I totally agree, but the inequality is still there.

I’m also aware that people resort to accusations of sexism, racism and bigotry all too easily, which muddies the pond considerably. It shouldn’t be the first conclusion when something seems unfair. But it also shouldn’t blind us to actual discrimination, or the reality of systemic bias.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
3 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

That's a fine summation of what has beset the entire western world in the last decade/s. This strange need to play fixer of things, to 'know best', to change things, to make artificial rules that turn things around, to set quotas, to treat people like material objects to be assigned places according to some idea.

It’s not just the last few decades that people have tried to “fix things”. Without that impulse we wouldn’t have had the fight to abolish slavery or to give women the vote, the civil rights movement or the struggle for workers rights. Our indigenous population was only given the right to vote in 1967 thanks to activists who had been arguing to fix that since the start of the century. The list of things we’ve needed to change over the years is very long, and every time there was resistance. Sure, sometimes we make mistakes and what we thought was beneficial was actually paternalistic, or overly idealistic, or simply wrong-headed. But we muddle on, and I’d argue that generally things are improving thanks to that impulse. 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Dom Jaeger said:

It’s not just the last few decades that people have tried to “fix things”. Without that impulse we wouldn’t have had the fight to abolish slavery or to give women the vote, the civil rights movement or the struggle for workers rights. Our indigenous population was only given the right to vote in 1967 thanks to activists who had been arguing to fix that since the start of the century. The list of things we’ve needed to change over the years is very long, and every time there was resistance. Sure, sometimes we make mistakes and what we thought was beneficial was actually paternalistic, or overly idealistic, or simply wrong-headed. But we muddle on, and I’d argue that generally things are improving thanks to that impulse. 

Fixing things ... that's good. Trying to fix things by hugely mucking things up isn't good. I guess that's where we would agree. There's indeed many encouraging things happening in society worldwide, by all reports. So hooray for that.

Edited by Jon O'Brien
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...