Initial Ideas

After first seeing the guide for the coursework i was drawn to the idea of representation. After further thought i had the idea of looking at the representation of women in action films. The reason i chose this is because it is a topic which has changed and developed from one extreme to another. The first extreme being the idea that women are the "damsel in distress". They are goals for the hero to save. The other extreme is the idea of women being the hero. My initial idea for the final product would be an advertisement for a action film with a female lead.

If i choose to further this idea then i'll have to research into films of both extremes as well as films where women are equal to men. I will need to research into feminist magazines and websites. This way i will get the opinion of women on the present state of equality. Film magazines will also be helpful as i can see which action films are seen as good by critics and compare them to the choices of the masses. I will also need to research websites with access to details of films, like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. These websites have access to ratings where i will be able to compare the scores between films with a strong male lead and films with a strong female lead. This will also allow me to get the international opinion of these films as they are rated by members of the public. Books are another good source of research as they have to be checked and edited before release. This makes them more likely to be correct. Books on feminism will be beneficial to read as they will also show what the state of feminism is at the moment.

After a brief search of my project's title into Google, i have found that several blogs already exist on the topic. Most of these are written by women as almost a protest against male action films. This helps to find the female view of action films at the present time. As well as blogs, the internet also showed that there was videos on YouTube which were informal lectures on the topic. For the topic of books, there are numerous texts which are based on the topic of women in the media. One example is the book "Women, Feminism and Media" which is about how women are positively and negatively portrayed in films.

The existing media texts that i hope to use will be one film from the "damsel in distress" genre, one from the "gender equality" genre and one from the "women lead" genre. This way i get a view of all ideas. The films will have to be mainstream films as those of an independent style tend to try and be more controversial and against the mould. A possible choice for the damsel in distress film is "Spider-man" as the main character in this film is a man. Also in this film the female lead gets captured or ends up in trouble several times. A possible film for men and woman equality is "Mr and Mrs Smith". There are two main characters in this film, one of both genders.  They are seen as a team and both have moments of weakness and strength. Finally the "woman lead" film i intend to study is "Kill Bill" as this not only has a female lead, but portrays her in a gritty, dark and realistic manner.

I expect from my research that the male lead films will be higher rated than female ones due to the average cinema audience being male orientated. That said, i imagine that famous woman lead films will be rated higher due to them breaking the mould. I imagine that in Spider-man and any other male orientated action film, women will be represented as less important and weaker than men. For the films with equality of gender i imagine there will be a difference to the male orientated films, as the way men were represented will be the same for both genders. And in contrast, the women in the female action films will be portrayed as more powerful compared to men. The way i plan on judging how they are represented is by using textual analysis. This will be split into four areas; Misce-en-scene, Editing, Camera shots and sound.