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Why Have There Been No Great Women Cinematographers


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Hyperallergic is the left's view of art and film. They banned me from commenting on their posts long ago, but I still read it. I always like to hear both sides of the story. 

The American Society of Cinematographers, which was founded in 1919, only admitted their first female Director of Photography in 1980. The organization meant to advance and protect the art of cinematography remains one of the most exclusive and important societies in Hollywood in terms of prestige and influence. Since 1980, women have remained underrepresented in the Society, representing less than 5% of the membership. In 2018,  cinematographer Rachel Morrison was nominated for an Oscar for her work on Dee Rees’s Mudbound, the sole only woman acknowledged in the category that year. For this year’s awards, yet again, there’s not a single woman DP in contention. 

Full story:

https://hyperallergic.com/540434/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-cinematographers-according-to-hollywood/

 

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I should preface this by restating my position, which is that nobody should be unfairly prevented from doing anything they want to do.

The problem with all this is that we just don't know what proportion of DPs we'd expect to be female. I suspect, in a completely fair world, it'd be higher than it is right now. I also suspect that it wouldn't be 50% simply because of the differing average psychology of men and women. There may be no easy answer to this question but it doesn't mean we should ignore it, nor should we endorse a blank-cheque attitude to affirmative action without these questions at least being raised.

P

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The ASC membership is comprised of cinematographers working at the top end of the industry. If female DPs only represent 5% of the DPs working in that rarified world, then the membership is what you would expect.

3 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

 "Since 1980, women have remained underrepresented in the Society"

Clearly the author of this article has already decided what a fair percentage of women members would be, regardless of how many women are:

1. working as DPs, and

2. qualified for membership.

 

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1 minute ago, Stuart Brereton said:

Clearly the author of this article has already decided...

Actually I suspect that no such decisionmaking process took place at all, and the author simply decided that 5% is too low. Which might be fine, but I also suspect that we agree it's hogwash to argue for "more" when we have no idea what "more" looks like.

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2 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Actually I suspect that no such decisionmaking process took place at all

Oh, I'm not suggesting that they sat down, researched the topic, and crunched the numbers. I'm pretty sure they just said it should be 50%. Or rather 51%

Just to be clear, my issue is not with women DPs getting their rightful recognition, but rather with the lazy argument put forward in the article, where the apparent lack of any real research allows the writer to draw any conclusion she wants, regardless of the underlying facts.

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Wow 5%? That's a higher rate than auto mechanics, or garbage "men."  I've never once in my life seen a woman driving the garbage truck, getting out and putting people's garbage into the truck.  Oddly there's no outrage over female participation in auto mechanics or garbage "men."  Gee why is that?

I'm still wondering what is the barrier to women posting here?   There are zero.  I'm sure that as a white male it's some how my fault.

R,

 

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Another day on Cinematography.Com where a bunch of men talk about women. It must be Tuesday.

The average age of an ASC member is over 50, so it's a reflection of the industry 15-20 years ago.  It would be a bit more productive to look at the gender breakdown in the camera union.

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21 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

This site has ten dudes who post regularly -- what's the incentive to be the one female here? 

Not sure I follow your logic here David?  Again....what's the barrier to women posting here?  Lack of computers or internet connection?

Other than that....I can see no barrier.

R,

 

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22 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

This site has ten dudes who post regularly -- what's the incentive to be the one female here? 

I think that's a little harsh, David. No one here is trying to discourage women from joining this site and posting. It seems we're forced to discuss these issues without female input, but at least they are being discussed and not ignored.

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3 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

we just don't know what proportion of DPs we'd expect to be female.

I do a lot of statistical analysis at my day job,  and it always aggravates me to see people make claims about the percent of people meeting some criterion being disproportionate while not accounting for the composition of the population they are trying to discuss (I'm not disagreeing with you).

I was curious and had a few minutes while my lunch was cooking to do a quick look.  I went to the list of Oscar eligible films from 2019 on IMDB (link below), which lists 341 eligible films.  I drew a random sample giving each film a 20% chance of being drawn, but which will not necessarily provide a sample of 20% (when we talk about things like probabilities, we're talking over a large number of instances). This resulted in a sample of 60 movies.  I looked to see who was listed under cinematography for each one.  Five of them listed a female solely, while two listed 4-5 with 1 female in the group.  There were several films for which this information was not listed.  That's a marginally higher rate than the 5% listed in the article, but given the sample size, I seriously doubt it's a statistical difference.  This isn't a perfect look at things, but it doesn't appear the 5% is that far off based on this

.

(https://www.imdb.com/list/ls093754362/?st_dt=&mode=detail&page=1)

 

Edited by Leanne Summers
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35 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

This site has ten dudes who post regularly -- what's the incentive to be the one female here? 

I don't post on here much, but I've certainly found a lot of helpful information on here.  This site is a much better place to post at as a female than many other places.  A lot are certainly much worse.  It's not as anonymous here, I suspect that plays a large role in that.

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Also...quite the long list of female dominated industries out there, no one is making an effort to get more men into those careers.

Take a look at casting directors, a field in the film industry now dominated by women, no screaming over that gender imbalance.

R,

 

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Keep in mind that the union / industry in Hollywood actively kept women and minorities out until the end of the 1970's, with extremely few exceptions. So that's not just cinematographers, but camera assistants who might in 10 or 20 years become cinematographers. You can say "that's the past" but it is not so far into the past as to not have repercussions today.  

So Richard, you're saying that you had to fall back into producing features because the lucrative world of babysitting was shut off from you?

 

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35 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

So Richard, you're saying that you had to fall back into producing features because the lucrative world of babysitting was shut off from you?

Barriers to women producing feature films = 0.

R,

PS: That's a bit insulting toward women to imply that most of them are low paid babysitters.  That is far from the truth in 2020, take a look at the number of women practicing law for starters.  The list goes on.

PSS: You also forget David that there are a lot of men who work in low wage jobs as well. Not all men in America make $150, 000.00 a year with stock options.  Millions work in low wage jobs, look at the fast food industry, school janitors, mall security guards, need I list more?

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Its very different to measure though, there are fewer female DOPs (particularly at the high end). But its going to be tricky to ascertain what percentage of that is due to: 

A: A smaller proportion of women want to be DOP's

B: Fewer opportunities for women to become DOP's and move up 

The real answer is probably something of both and we'd agree A isn't a problem and B is. 

I do think its changing in my year (2009) at the NFTS the gender mix was 66/33 (male/female) on the Cinematography MA

I'm teaching an undergrad cinematography elective at the moment and the split is about 50/50 really even - so the balance may shift. 

Some careers do make it harder for women to progress to the higher levels, in Academia in the UK gender pay gap is about 15% (in favour of men). In many departments there are similar numbers of female academics to men, also people are generally paid the same a Male senior lecturer gets the sames as a female.

The pay gap occurs due to fewer women landing the more senior roles: Dean, VC, Full profetc... So is that because they don't want climb the ladder, or something else? In most western societies women take on the greater brunt of child rearing duties etc... and being a parent can negatively impact the mother more than the father. Very demanding jobs like academia can end up with this built in gender bias. The rockstar female academics at the highest level are less likely to be parents than their male equivalents. 

You only have to look at the lack of maternity time/funding. I've also been told by a previous "boss" he would never hire a women in case they took maternity leave and left him out of pocket. I understand both his position in struggling to fund 15 weeks paid leave, but he's reducing employment options for women on the off chance they "might" get pregnant. (it's probably illegal but there you go)

So on some level women are still disadvantaged in some careers and if that's the case in the camera dept. As Richard notes women are more represented in the highest levels of some departments, particularly producing.  So is producing more accessible to women then cinematography or is it just that more women prefer it? From a male perspective, I'm not in a position to call. 

The quoted article considers if the work of women cinematographers is devalued, I'm not sure that's not so much the case anymore. Sue Gibson BSc was a visiting tutor at the NFTS, while I was there and believe me, no one doubted her abilities. In my own experiences is been more of a numbers game, when I advertise a job looking for a DOP I get very few applications from women. As a director maybe 3-5% of the productions I've done had a female DOP/Camera op - so I guess this 5% statistic could be true. 

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I think David in your case you suffer from a conflicting view on this, the same as many liberal/left leaning men in the film industry do.  If I were to ask you, should women be promoted as DOPs in the film industry?  You would enthusiastically say, yes. The problem comes in when you realize that you are a man, and you would have to step aside to allow a woman into your shoes, and therefore you lose the income, income which you need. 

If you were asked by the producers of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel to voluntarily step aside so that a woman DOP could have your position, what would you say?  Would you be willing to recommend a woman DOP to the producers who could take your place, so that she could forward her career?  The only other DOP to work on The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is Eric Moynier, no women. You shot 17 episodes David, why didn't you step aside and suggest a woman who could of shot 3 or 4 episodes? Can you honestly say that you and Eric fought for a woman DOP to shoot at least ONE(1) episode?  If not, maybe you're more part of the problem than the solution, and don't realize it.

And so what I find many men in your position do, is that you say to the younger up and coming male DOPs...sorry guys but you have to let women into the game so that they can move forward as well.  Those younger guys will look at you and say, well that's all well and good for you to say that, you're an established ASC member, etc.

R,

PS: I see that my casting stats are born out by the Marvelous Mrs Maisel, all three casting directors are women, cue the outrage.  Oh wait, all I hear are crickets chirping. Hmmmmm?

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If the producers of the show decided to fire me and hire someone else who happened to be a woman, that's their prerogative. I don't have a problem competing with women, I have to compete with other men after all so why should I care about the gender of the person I lose a job to?  I don't have some sort of ego problem about that.

What you're really asking me about is a quota or equal-opportunity situation where a company decides to hire more women and minorities to improve representation. And no, I don't have a problem with that myself though I understand the arguments against it, it's not a clear-cut issue but a very messy one.

 

 

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More on this....the camera and electrical dept of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel shows 109 people, over the series run.  12 were women, or 11%.  Why is this so low?  Isn't the hiring of this dept under you and Eric? Why did you hire so few women?

R,

 

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As you know, the DP hires the keys and the keys hires the key assistants and often the key assistants hire the crew under them, etc. And yes, Eric and I tried to hire women. I actually looked for a female B-operator but all the ones in NYC I contacted were working at the time we started the show. This past season I had a female gaffer, all the assistants on B-camera were women.  And yes, we could do better, I admit that.

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Richard, I get why positive discrimination can get messy fast.

But if the actual situation on the ground, for whatever reason makes it harder for equally talented/motivated women to succeed compared to their male counter parts. In that situation is it not better to try and level the playing field a bit more? Isn't it the case that we should aspire to a "fair" system? It can also benefit the actual films, the more diverse the people able to make film's, the more diverse and interesting the films could be. If you have mostly white, male, middle class, directors of a certain age, making films it seems you'd just end up with tons of boring superhero movies. 

Your not going to have a situation where David (or anyone) is or should going to step aside for a women, that argument is madness. I'm not going to give up on my career either, because white middle class men are over-represented in my field. But I'd like to think that if I was up for a job against a women, it would be a fair fight and they weren't disadvantaged for reasons of sexism etc..  I don't think it should be adversarial - it's not that women are taking jobs from the boy's. We shouldn't be on different teams. In an ideal world, we are all just filmmakers and should be discriminated by our talent/ability/work ethic etc.. not gender. 

I don't know for certain, to what extent gender discrimination happens in cinematography. As a male I don't experience it and I've not spoken to enough women about their experiences. But even if I've not seen it happen personally, It would be wrong for me to state it doesn't exist. 

As a producer yourself you hire the best people that apply, often for camera dept roles you don't get many female applicants. The question is are we fine with that or not? The opposite would be true if I were advertising for make-up artists. The issue in the camera dept is if there are excellent potential female dop's that would like to progress and are disadvantaged for sex reasons. 

The reality is complex and doubt any of the great women DOP's coming up would appreciate being considered victims either.

The conversation on this board lacks female perspectives and as bunch of guy's we can't truly know what issues women encounter. It can be very subtle, few employers these days are going to be outright "sexist" but I gather at times the experience can be death by a thousand cuts that just wears people down. 

 

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16 minutes ago, Phil Connolly said:

As a producer yourself you hire the best people that apply, often for camera dept roles you don't get many female applicants. The question is are we fine with that or not?

I am fine with it actually for three reasons, 1) I am not saying women can't apply or be hired. 2) I don't run a training school, and the lack of female applicants is quite frankly, not my problem. 3) No one complains when women dominate a dept in the film industry or other occupation.

R,

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I would not want to work in a place where they inspect one's genitals and skin color in the job interview to confirm that they surely hire the right type of person ? 

it will become even more messy if it is taken into account that there is more than two genders.

 

Yes, positive discrimination will easily get messy very quickly. I have understood that the best approach against both negative and positive discrimination is anonymous hiring where the applicant's background or gender cannot be seen so that it does not influence the hiring decisions. I don't know how possible that would be for HODs but it works very well in other industries so it is at least something to think about

 

Edited by aapo lettinen
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You've got a low scale war going on in the American industry between white women and black women.  Black women keep saying, well yes you're a woman, but, since you're white, you're more privileged than me!

I know of cases where white women were told, sorry, you're the wrong colour.  So at some point white women might be joining white men in the huffing and puffing category.

R,

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