Abstract
Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries: Falling off a Cliff? marks a welcome and overdue shift in scholarly concerns away from representational systems and towards the material practices and prejudices that adversely affect the lives of older women working in cinema, television and streaming services as writers, editors, producers, directors and camera operators; and that underpin the disappearance of screen actresses aged above 50. International in scope, the book’s case studies range from Europe (Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom), to Australia, New Zealand, and to the United States, both current and historical, while its titular question mark foregrounds a celebration of older women’s creativity, agency, skill and resilience as they ‘push back’ and refuse the screen industries’ regime of ageist sexism.
The book’s interrogation of the screen industries’ gendered ageism is articulated through lucid and jargon free contributions from authors who speak with integrity and conviction. Avoiding the merely decorative trap, charts and screen grabs are used sparingly and are properly integrated into lines of argument. The collection is coherently organised into four parts with titles that accurately announce their major themes. A concise editorial introduction from Liddy, ‘Putting Age in the Picture: Age and Ageism in the Screen Industries’ is followed by ‘Women and Screen Production’, ‘Interrogating Absence’ and ‘For the Record: Contributions and Visibility’.
The collection’s particular strength is a rich variety of contexts and methodologies since individual contributions consistently reach similar conclusions, forging a cumulative picture of ageist/sexist regimes that operate historically and globally to limit older women’s opportunities for work both off and on screen. ‘Section 2’ offers structured interviews from Erhat and Dooley, Jansson and Wallenberg, Cobb and Williams and Liddy that highlight the routine neglect of older women’s rich experience across production roles in Australian, Swedish, UK and Irish screen industries. Careers are halted when wider societal expectations of women’s primary caring roles are exacerbated by limiting assumptions that correlate female ageing with an inability to engage with new technologies and youth culture. Compounding this, the anxiety of age-related redundancy coerces women to avoid any embodied signs of ageing as a strategy of career survival. In ‘Section 3’, a discourse analysis of on-line Spanish press by Vázquez combines with content analysis of German audio–visual streaming services by Prommer to illuminate how the disappearance of ageing women producers extends to older actresses due to reduced opportunities for lead and supporting roles. Typically, any available roles place older women at the margins of stories as passive grandmothers and comic foils to youthful action.
The book’s welcome engagement with ‘push back’ emerges in ‘Section 3’ when Luciano’s study of three Italian films identifies their ageing female characters as wilful, nomadic subjects who ‘designate old age as a time of unforeseen potential’ (p. 117). It is a pity that this essay does not close the section since it forms a perfect segue to ‘Section 4’ and Miquel-Baldellou’s excavation of Ida Lupino’s survival as an actress and director who skilfully subverted the conventions of age and gender in her move from Hollywood to television in the 1940s and 1950s. The themes of survival as feminist and female auteurs as they age in a sexist and ageist industry also thread through studies of Nora Ephron from Smyth, and Jane Campion from Tincknell. Notwithstanding, the ostensible differences in style between Ephron’s reworking of Hollywood genres and Campion’s highly independent artistic vision, the late work of both these women includes older female protagonists that call out sexism and refuse the dominant narrative of age as decline, while suggesting powerful resonances with the examples of their own lives. In the spirit of ‘push back’, it is highly fitting that the book’s finale showcases the ‘Women over 50 Film Festival’ by including an interview between authors Jermyn and O’Sullivan, who are respectively WOFFF’s academic advisor and its founder. Established in 2015, the festival challenges the ‘unwelcoming and demoralising’ (p. 222) spaces typically encountered by older women producers and spectators, and aims to make itself redundant by making unremarkable the on and off screen presence of women above 50 years.
There is no doubt that this collection works in its own terms. In the context of the vastly under-researched area of women, ageing and the screen industries, it seems churlish to criticise some striking absences since they do not undermine either the success of the book’s stated aims, or its importance to current scholarship. So, rather than seeing absences as weaknesses, I choose to flag them as potential research directions. For instance, despite its international scope, the collection cries out for studies of national cinemas beyond its own ‘first world’ framing. Equally, the ‘whiteness’ of contributions illuminates the troubling limits of current academic paradigms as much as the ‘wider inequities in the cultural and creative economies’ that are noted, but necessarily unexplored, by Erhart and Dooley (p. 25). Overall, with its multiple exposures of sexist-ageism in the screen industries, and the resistant ‘push back’ of exemplary older women, this commendable book would be of interest to politically aware general readers, while offering valuable teaching resources for under and post graduate students, as well as providing informative and provocative scholarship that will appeal to researchers both in and beyond the academy.