Trends in My Field (Film & TV)

The Canadian film and television industry, like so many others, has experienced tremendous upheavals and changes over the past decade, and particular in the past five years, due largely to rapid (if not complete) shifts in social attitudes and democratizing changes in technology.

Once (and let's be honest, still) dominated by straight white male artists and stories, big studio decision-makers, and technology that restricted the autonomy of independent filmmakers, film and television productions have found themselves more recently moving into the hands of radical new voices, creators, and distributors.

Long before the MeToo movement kicked into high gear in October 2017, author Virginia Woolf wrote that, in the fiction of her day, "all these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple...and I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that." Woolf's concern would be echoed over half a century later in Alison Bechdel's 1985 comic Dykes to Watch Out For, and immortalized in the oft-cited Bechdel Test.

In 2016, Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels published one of the most comprehensive and alarming studies on gender and age representation in film, shining a spotlight on the huge representation gap in story subject, character mix, and screenwriters. Gwilym Mumford expanded the gap to include underrepresentation along lines of ethnicity and sexual orientation.       

Slowly but surely, things have been changing. While the majority of rolling end credits are still overwhelmingly male-heavy, the demand and audience for stories by women, about women, and starring female-heavy casts is significantly on the rise. 2011's Bridesmaids is often viewed as a turning point where gross-out female buddy comedies, and female-driven films in general, became as demonstrably successful as similar films starring men, reinforced by the successful reboots of Ghostbusters and Ocean's 8. Though the 2010 Oscar nod to The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow came a bit late and was far too noteworthy, it pushed the door further ajar for Greta Gerwig, Patty Jenkins, and Dee Rees, while building on the legacies of already-successful filmmakers like Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, and Sarrah Polley. 

One can assume that three other relatively recent trends have been significant contributing factors to this change:   

1. How movies and television productions are filmed. With next-level improvements made every few months in media technology, aspiring indie filmmakers can get the job done today using a DSLR camera or even their iPhone.

2. How productions are funded. Thanks to crowd-funding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, producers can access the money they need relatively quickly without the need for studio approvals.

3. Where people watch film and television. After Netflix launched House of Cards in 2013, and with YouTube already exploring similar paid streaming services, it became clear that traditional television networks and theatres would no longer remain a viewer's only option for watching their favourite shows.

4. Insatiable demand for new and varied programming. One massive and fortuitous spinoff of the Netflix and Amazon revolution was an explosion in the demand for more programming and the democratization of what shows get made, by whom, and for whom. From Grace and Frankie to Dear White People to RuPaul's Drag Race, it's hard to argue that change hasn't come, and fast. 

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Sources:

Anderson, Hannah & Daniels, Matt, Film Dialogue from 2000 Screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age (The Pudding, 2016) https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/

Mumford, Gwilym, Hollywood Still Excludes Women, Ethnic Minorites, LGBT and Disabled People (The Guardian, August 1, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/aug/01/hollywood-film-women-lgbt-hispanic-disabled-people-diversity

Woolf, Virgina. Thomas, Stephen, ed. A Room of One's Own, chapter 5 (University of Adelaide Press, 1929) https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/chapter5.html