Powerful Portrayals of Women in Film

Gillian Armstrong’s work as author/director of both documentaries and feature films, in Australia and the United States, has done much to bring attention to the female perspective on life, love, and the pursuit of freedom from male patriarchal domination and oppression. Armstrong, unlike so many film creators, has resisted making movies solely for male spectatorship. The strong-willed, stubborn, striving women, who dominate Armstrong’s films, display her determination to cast females into ruling roles. In this essay, a review of Armstrong’s artistic articulation of women’s voices, views, and visions, in such feature films as My Brilliant Career, Starstruck, Mrs. Soffel, The Last days of Chez Nous, Little Women, and Oscar and Lucinda, will show that she has taken care not to portray women as ineffectual objects of and for male attention. It will also show that Armstrong, through her cinematic endeavors and the power of those ventures, presents interpretations of women that evoke feminine power and elevate the female spirit.

The problem with some female directors is that they are still producing films that provide visual pleasure exclusively for masculine consumption. Even today, after several decades of feminists working to change societal views of women as subjects of men and of their watchful desire, too often, women are made the objects of the male gaze in films formed strictly for male pleasure. “Film could be considered a language of its own, but the language that it uses still symbolizes the same binary order that has dominated our society with its phallocentric perspective” (Fram-Kulik). In “What Meets the Eye: Feminist Film Studies,” Anneke Smelik, feminist film theorist, states:

“The traditional narrative structure establishes the omnipotence of the male main character, who actively carries both the look and the action. Narrative, camera work and editing make voyeuristic pleasure exclusively masculine; through the lens of the ‘phallic’ camera, the spectator in the theatre is sutured to the eyes of the male character in the film. This triple gaze—of spectator, camera and character—controls the female character and makes her into a spectacle” (Buikema 69).

Armstrong, however, refuses to cast herself into the mold of other directors who follow this traditional way of creating films that diminish the importance of women and their issues and play into the oppression of women through patriarchal culture. Much of her involvement in producing films with a feminist thrust may have started through her own personal inspiration but, too, she came to film at a time when both Australian film and feminism were evolving in the public forum. Although Australian film had thrived early in the Twentieth Century, when Armstrong became a student in the 1960’s, the industry was not much involved in producing films of any great importance. However, in the 1970’s, when she was just beginning her career, the Australian film industry became once again active. In 1975, the Australian Film Commission was set up and, interestingly, this coincided with the feminist movement then making women aware of their need for liberation from male oppression. “It is one of the happy peculiarities of recent Australian history that film and feminism grew up as sisters” (Wood).

Because of the feminist movement, the 1970’s brought about a kind of new vision in film. Women began to view film in a new and different ways. In some ways watching film as a feminist meant knowing how to criticize the evidence of gender hierarchy which the film had “set to celluloid.” In other ways it involved “rewriting some of the evidence by means of creative interpretation, focusing on the supporting characters or secondary storylines…or isolating a single aspect of a strong female character and ignoring her demise. Or it might involve supporting the work of feminist directors, writers, and actors” (Slane).

Film was examined for ways in which to evaluate equality and emancipation. Older films were looked at by feminists and, at women’s film festivals, forgotten films, women directors, women screenwriters, and actresses were rediscovered. Stereotyped images of women were closely screened resulting in the realization that female spectators had little opportunity for positive identification in film presentations. Feminist film researchers determined that false images of women in film greatly impacted society—and society could be changed. Women directors, the researchers believed, had only to “break through the enchantment of false images by showing ‘real’ lives of ‘real’ women on the silver screen. Working against the glamorized version of woman created by men, women film-makers could show the realistic lives of ordinary women with everyday problems” (Buikema 67).

The fact that most mass mainstream films were being created for the voyeuristic pleasure of men—with women as spectacle—was gaining definition. Laura Mulvey, writing in 1973 about negative images of women in film, said, “The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation…What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance” (19).

At this time, when female film analysis was gathering momentum and theorizing was demanding attention in the cinema world, Armstrong—born in Melbourne, Australia on December 18, 1950—came to study film at Australia’s Swinburne Technical School (now the Victorian College of the Arts). Here she studied stage and costume design and directed a short film, The Roof Needs Mowing, as part of a film class assignment. “Armstrong worked on Fred Shepisi’s Libido before moving to Sydney in 1972 where she won a place at the Australian Film and Television School (now the Australian Film, Television and Radio School)” (Great).

After completing her studies, she supported herself by working as a waitress in Sydney. Her responsibilities included making and serving tea for film crews—which undoubtedly increased her awareness of women’s roles in society. “I made tea and coffee for the crew. I was terribly scared—I spent most of the time in the kitchen.” She discovered that a TV series was going to be made at the place where she was working so she brought in her short film, The Roof Needs Mowing, from film school. “One of the editors said, ‘You’ve got some talent.’ It was actually a woman editor; she said, ‘Go into editing, because if you go into script assisting, you’ll never get out of it.’ It was the best advice anyone ever gave me” (Gillian Armstrong, Premiere).

Armstrong, soon after, was hired to work as an assistant designer and art director on a number of films including Margaret Fink’s The Removalists. On the strength of the construction of her short films—The Roof Needs Mowing, 100 a day, Satdee Night and Gretel— she was hired by the South Australian Film Corporation to make a documentary called Smokes and Lollies about the lives of three young teenage Adelaide girls. This documentary turned into a trilogy that was enthusiastically received in Australia. “Armstrong may be as well known for her documentaries…Smokes and Lollies; Fourteen’s Good, Eighteen’s Better; and Bingo, Bridesmaids and Braces” (Webster). These documentaries were followed by the creation of an hour-long featurette entitled, The Singer and the Dancer, which won the Greater Union Award for best short fiction at the 1976 Sydney Film Festival, bringing her both local and international acclaim (Great).

My Brilliant Career (1979)

In 1979, Armstrong became the first Australian female director to make a full-length commercially released feature film since Paulette McDonagh had—over forty years earlier—in 1933 (Great). My Brilliant Career brought Armstrong to the forefront of cinematic endeavors by women film-makers. My Brilliant Career, an adaptation of Miles Franklin’s novel, is a story about a young woman, Sybylla, who, during her growing up years in the outback of Australia, yearns to be a writer. A feisty, strong-willed, wild-hearted young woman, Sybylla turns down a marriage proposal and thereby respectability—as defined by the women and men of her patriarchal society. Armstrong’s effort with this film “is remembered fondly by tough women the world over. But its effect on the Australian film industry was far more dramatic…she set the pace for her female compatriots, what she calls the “exciting mix” of Jane Campion, Jocelyn Moorehouse, Shirley Bassett and others, all of whom acknowledge their huge debt to her” (Wood).

Though Miles Franklin’s novel was published in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1901, it remained a pertinent story for Director Gillian Armstrong to re-author, in the form of film, in 1979. And it is still relevant today as it follows a young girl’s hungering for life, love, and freedom in the outback plains of New South Wales. “…underneath its extravagances and its melodrama, which have their own charm of period, Miles Franklin’s spirit flashes indomitably; and in its picture of country life and in its image of the rebelliousness of youth there remains an abiding vitality” ( Middlemiss).

My Brilliant Career, starring Judy Davis as Sybylla, won seven major Australian Film Institute Awards, including Best Director and Best film, and was chosen for competition at the Cannes Film Festival (Hardesty). “Career—the story of a strong-minded turn-of-the-century woman who pursues her calling as a writer instead of marriage to a handsome landowner—was a major hit, and introduced the independent director, and the film’s equally assertive star, Judy Davis, to the world” (Webster). “Australia’s best known leading lady,” received wide acclaim for her portrayal of “the defiant heroine in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career” (Moghaddam).

With My Brilliant Career, Armstrong made her first major mark on the film world. Her films which are generally about unusual women facing difficult decisions in their lives have led to universal applause by women. “Her signature is her fine, clear-eyed observations of human relationships, with all their untidiness intact. Strong and independent heroines have been the central theme throughout most of her work” (Gillian Armstrong, Fox).

The theme of many of Armstrong’s films, like My Brilliant Career, centers on the breaking of barriers of oppression set forth for women by men who would have them stay focused on marriage, children, and serving males needs. While My Brilliant Career is a portrait of a young girl growing into womanhood and defying the unreasonable requirements of class respectability, it is also a vehicle for feminist cause and necessary change for the future of women. Armstrong reaches out through My Brilliant Career and nurtures the spirit of wild creativity and determination in women urging them to keep faith in themselves, to realize that they can take control of their lives, to understand that they may refuse to be molded into submission by a patriarchal society (Johnson 4).

Starstruck (1982)

With the success of My Brilliant Career behind her, Armstrong’s career was on the rise and, in 1982, she set out to create an entirely different kind of film. Starstruck, a modern musical comedy was so unlike its previous period piece that viewers might have had to look twice at the credits to be sure it had really been directed by Armstrong. But even though the new creation was presented in cartoon-like comedy, Armstrong’s underlying message was evident—women can do whatever they want but they must be willing to take a chance. “You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t take a risk,” fourteen-year-old Angus Mullens (Ross O’Donovan) tells his cousin Jackie Mullens (Jo Kennedy) as he’s encouraging her to walk a tightrope between two tall-storied buildings.

Once kooky red-haired Jackie is out on the rope, teetering over the city and wearing a rubber breastplate that makes her look like she’s half in the nude, Angus lights firecrackers to attract even more attention. The crowd below—gasping—grows larger and larger. Police, firemen, and news writers arrive to join the onlookers. When Jackie loses her balance, slips from her perch, and hangs clinging to the rope, an interviewer for the TV evening news, yells, “Are you going to fall?” To which she replies, “Not until I finish this interview!” Jackie will do anything to gain fame as a singer. Fame, Armstrong tells her viewers, is not always necessarily based on talent. Determination, drive, and promotion is what it takes.

Angus, an Elvis impersonator, is determined to promote his cousin into the starry world of show biz and will stop at nothing to attract attention. He skips school, telephones TV producers, and eventually arranges a takeover of a talent show already in progress. Here he and a group of male singers, The Wombats, pose as workmen and then accompany Jackie into the spotlight where she takes center stage. She sings, “The Monkey in me makes me want to make it,” steals the show, and becomes a star.

One of the most interesting scenes is a water ballet performed by a bevy of men wearing red female one-piece bathing suits—reminiscent of Gentleman Prefer Blondes—and viewed through the eyes of Jackie, Armstrong’s independent heroine. Using male, instead of female bodies in this spoof, Armstrong points out how women are the ones usually exploited in many such movie scenes. See what it would be like, she seems to point out to her viewers, if males were the ones cast into these negatively imaged roles.

With Starstruck, Armstrong also takes a jab at the ways in which the film industry approves and promotes the genre film. Popular culture films are often made strictly for the money that will be made from viewers who look for excitement and exhibition. The film acknowledges its own status as a product of show business and of the old-fashioned genre of the Hollywood musical. “In this view, cinema is a modern, industrial technology, accessed by producers who raise the money so that creative and technological teams can produce (genre) films, for an audience whose unpredictable desires for spectacle and performance are tracked by the adjacent media-marketing-publicity industry” (Collins 37).

Nonetheless, Starstruck is a wild, wacky, and wonderful display of Armstrong’s diverse abilities as a director, her capacity for humor, and her confidence in choosing a whole new vehicle for cinematic attention. Her camera captures many memorable shots—in particular the aerial views of the movement of the city, the on-stage antics of Jackie, and the colorful collage of odd characters who work—and/or play—in the family pub and fill in frequently as musical chorus members. Armstrong’s rock musical, like pop art, is unique, dazzling, and provoking.

Mrs. Soffel (1984)

Although Armstrong had received many offers of work in the United States, she chose to continue making films in Australia, until 1984, when she agreed to come to Hollywood to direct Mrs. Soffel. True to her feminist beliefs and to the many female film-goers who had applauded her previous presentations, Armstrong moved on to create yet another turn-of-the-century film worthy of women’s attention. The transition from Australia to Hollywood, was not easy for Armstrong as Mrs. Soffel, with film stars Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson in the leading roles and Matthew Modine, Trini Alvarado, Jennie Dundas, Terry O’Quinn, Danny Corkill, and Edward Herrmann in supporting roles, received mixed reviews (Webster).

Mrs. Soffel, is the tale of one woman’s attempt to escape the bonds of her oppression imposed by an early Twentieth Century male-dominated society. Based on a true story and set in 1903 Pittsburgh, the film opens to a icy, damp, and dismal winter setting, made colder by the grey-green sky that provides a backdrop for the rising brick chimneys of industrial factories and the smoke stacks of steel mills. Piano music—slow, sad, and haunting—hints at impending doom, despair, and even death. It is an oppressive scene marked by an explosion of fire that bursts forth from the mills, flashes across the darkening sky, then disappears; the cold calculated hammering of steel being forced into molds made by men; and ore cars traveling over railway tracks, grinding their way along a monotonous trail. A lone Christian church spire, competing with smoke, stacks, and steel, rises upward in this bleak and joyless scene.

But all of this serves simply as a brief prelude to the presentation of the prison in which Kate Soffel, a wife and mother, lives and where Ed Biddle, an accused killer, is housed. In a slow upward sweep of the prison’s exterior concrete and stone block impenetrable walls, Armstrong’s camera conveys the prison’s power to confine, restrict, and punish those who reside—or are forced to reside—within. The camera continues its message by sweeping up and along the walls, showing their formidable force and stunning magnitude. A woman in Victorian dress and two small children—all in black—walk briskly along the cement sidewalk that borders the prison. Their tiny silhouettes are completely dwarfed against the walls of the prison which looms above. Stopping at the wall, the woman prays, “Give them strength, oh Lord. Fill their hearts as only you can. They do not deserve to die. Dear Father hear my pleas for your lost lambs.” She is referring to the Biddle Brothers, Ed and Jack, who have been convicted of murder and are destined to be hanged.

The viewer, however, is interrupted from this scene and guided, instead, to the domestic quarters of the prison’s warden, his wife, and four children. Given the advantage of the entire screen, a close-up shot of Kate Soffel’s face shows that she is sleeping. But almost immediately her eyes widen in fear as she awakes, screaming from a nightmare. She tells her husband, “I dreamed I was lost…I couldn’t breathe!” She looks at her husband and continues, “But somebody pulled me out to a clear spot.” Kate has been ill for three months and the viewer suspects she has simply given up on her powerless life and taken to her room. Perhaps she does not know how to go on in a life that excludes her from decision-making. She adds, “I know what the dream means. It means I’m going to get better.” But her husband fixes her something to drink—something to anesthetize her. “Here, this will calm you down,” he says.

Mrs. Soffel’s home has become a kind of keep in which she is contained as a prisoner of her husband’s overbearing nature, society’s sexism and oppression of women, and her own desires which she disallows from surfacing. The status of women as domestic prisoners is clearly described by Armstrong on screen. It is similarly presented in text by feminist Catherine MacKinnon: “The liberty of prisoners is restricted, their freedom restrained, their humanity systematically diminished, their bodies and emotions confined, defined, and regulated…they become compliant…when they scream nobody hears…To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what is done to you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status. To be a woman is that kind of definition and has that kind of meaning (170).

Although married to a prominent man, Mrs. Soffel—as a female—has no functional status of her own in the workings of society. She would rather leave than live in her useless condition. She does this by sequestering herself in her room, by reading passages of hope from her Bible, and eventually by allowing herself the freedom to feel desire. This last she finds the courage to pursue through a relationship with Ed Biddle who seduces her into helping his brother Jack and him escape from prison. Mrs. Soffel is abandoned by her husband, by her current culture, and eventually by Ed as well. “Mrs. Soffel puts into play a series of actions and interludes which together form a set of propositions about the abandoned woman, the one who yields to passion and, at the same time, forsakes her faith, her family, and her position in society only to be forsaken in turn” (Collins 41).

When Mrs. Soffel, who regularly brings Bibles to the prisoners for their spiritual salvation, gives one to Ed, he tells her he does not want to read about death. But she says, “There’s a lovely section in Luke…Blessed are ye who hunger now for ye shall be filled…Blessed are ye who weep now for ye shall laugh…Blessed are ye when men shall hate you and when they shall separate you from their company and reproach you and cast out your name as evil. Rejoice ye in that day for behold your reward is great in heaven.”

Ed, however, is not convinced and wonders aloud, “You mean God makes you miserable in this life so he can make you happy in the next?” But Mrs. Soffel tells him she thinks it means that, when one suffers, one shouldn’t give up hope. The hope she refers to is her own. “I picture heaven as a place of peace…Why would God give us this short life with all of its troubles and not give us a better one afterwards.”

As Mrs. Soffel and Ed converse about God’s intent, suffering, and guilt, Armstrong’s camera travels from her face to his—framing first one and then the other behind the cold iron bars that keep them in their individual prisons. She says, “God means to test our love for Him.” But Ed asks, “By torturing us?” “You don’t have to tell me that innocent people suffer…I’ve been walking through this prison for quite a few years,” Mrs. Soffel says and Armstrong’s message here is two-fold—yes, she has seen others suffer but, too, she herself suffers in this place.

“So you know all about it,” Ed says. “I know enough…We all sin.” Mrs. Soffel answers. “God punishes you for your sins, doesn’t he, Kate? I think you suffer.” Armstrong poses her viewers in a voyeuristic position allowing them to see both Mrs. Soffel’s despair and suppressed desire and Ed’s knowledge that he can use this to his own ends. By showing his concern for her suffering, Ed begins his seduction of Mrs. Soffel. And she, ready to break free from the barriers of domesticity and powerlessness, reaches out and agrees to help him escape.

The treatment of Mrs. Soffel as a fragile flower, first by her husband and later by Ed, epitomizes the myth that women are weak, must be cared for, and protected. This fragile flower theme is carried out by Armstrong through a seduction sequence in which Mrs. Soffel gives Ed a handkerchief to wipe away his blood—after he’s received a beating from a guard—and Ed points to a little flower embroidered on the corner of the handkerchief and asks Mrs. Soffel if the flower is a violet. “You are a flower filled with light. I am a flower dying. But you will share your light with me,” he writes in a love poem, engineered to ignite her repressed passions and elicit her assistance. He then asks her to bring saws and candle wax so that he and Ed can prepare to escape. Mrs. Soffel complies, no longer resisting her desire, but has second thoughts when Ed asks for a gun. “Don’t you think I know why you flirt with me? You think you can talk me into anything, don’t you? I’m not one of those school girls ready to do your bidding.” She senses that she is being used but, torn between her confining Christian, domestic, and societal restrictions and a possibility of escape for herself with Ed, she chooses escape. To taste freedom, even for a moment, will be better than living as she does hiding away in her room with her Bible as sole companion.

A foreshadowing of what will happen to Mrs. Soffel—and to other women, in that patriarchal period and culture, who might attempt to escape their individual prisons—is shown by Armstrong in a scene with Mrs. Soffel reading from the Bible to women prisoners. The camera fixates on the faces of these women, capturing their hopelessness as they languish in their iron-clad cages. “Now faith is the subsistence of things hoped…for the evidence of things not seen.” Mrs. Soffel knows, if she is caught escaping, she may well end up as these women have.

When Mrs. Soffel runs away with Ed and Jack, she makes Ed promise he will not allow her to be taken alive. But, even with all their determined intentions, things do not work out as planned. Mrs. Soffel, at her insistence, is shot by Ed but does not die—as do Ed and Jack. Instead, she lives and is forced to return to the prison. This time, however, she will be on the other side of the bars. “I’m ready to go in now,” she says as she is led through the maze of circular bars that leads to the cell she will inhabit.

The prison matron reminds Mrs. Soffel that spring came early the previous year and asks if she remembers. “I was sick last year,” Mrs. Soffel says. Mrs. Soffel was sick. Now she is well—injured but alive. She has seen, touched, and even yearned for death so that she would not have to return to her home. But she has also seen freedom, experienced passion, and known what it was like to run with abandon as a child in the snowy streets, the hills, and the forest surrounding her home—the prison. She is no longer like a fragile flower. She is a woman who has lived through great crisis and survived. The final sweeping shots of Armstrong’s camera take us down the dimly lit corridors of the prison, along its iron bars, and away from the cells where Mrs. Soffel will remain confined.

Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel, is an artistic canvas on which she paints the sounds, sights, and feelings that give voice to women’s oppression. The symbolic use of bars, bricks, cement walls, mortar, stone, cell-like circular stairwells makes a significant statement about the prisons in which the concerns, cares, and passions of women are often locked. After Mrs. Soffel has been discovered attempting to escape with Ed and Jack, a voyeuristic camera shot shows two of the Soffel daughters reading the news in the paper. “I hope she’s dead,” one sister tells the other. “Father would never let her return.” Armstrong’s statement in this scene seems to say, “Our daughters are the future of our world. Let us not teach them to think, to believe, to act as men do.”

The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992)

Armstrong, in The Last Days of Chez Nous, brings us another story of a female writer, but this time the writer is a married woman, Beth (Lisa Harrow), who has already been published but who is faced with a number of family difficulties. Chez Nous, which means in English “our home,” is the setting for this tale of betrayal, loss, and new growth. The scenes shot in Sydney, Australia are sunny and bright, as is the disposition of forty-two year old Beth but the colors allowed by Armstrong are overcast with restraining browns and yellows. “Characteristic of Gillian Armstrong’s work is her extraordinary skill at working with actors to create very textured, nuanced, and realistic character studies of people undergoing intense personal conflict. And that certainly describes what’s going on in ‘Chez Nous,’ the French name for the house in a suburb of Sydney that is the center of this study of shifting emotions and relationships” (McAlister, Last).

As the film opens, Vicki (Kerry Fox), Beth’s sister, is dragging a large red suitcase up to the home Beth shares with her husband John Pierre, referred to as JP, (Bruno Ganz) and her teen-aged daughter Annie (Miranda Otto). Armstrong’s camera closes in on a heart-shaped cake, baked by Beth and decorated with the word “Welcome” then left on the dining room table to await Vicki’s arrival. A vision of what is to come is hinted at as Vicki, without waiting for anyone to greet or join her, greedily cuts herself a huge slice of the cake and removes it from the cake, leaving an open wound. The close-up shot of the cake and its missing slice indicates that Vicki will later wound—cut a slice from—her sister’s heart in the same way.

Pregnant when she arrives, Vicki goes on to have an abortion but is astonished both at the swiftness of the abortion clinic’s proceedings and her own immense grief once she has undergone the procedure. She leans on Beth for moral support—as do the others in the family—but Beth, who cares for them all, receives little in return. Her husband is having an affair with a young woman, refuses to have sex with Beth, and constantly berates her. He tells her she is selfish, unable to give love, and unlovable. Beth is anything but selfish and unlovable but she falls into the trap of many women who believe the constant onslaught of negativity hurled at them by men. Not only does she receive these kinds of blows from her husband but, in the past, she has been browbeaten by her overbearing father as well. Beth, a woman in control of her household, her family, and her writing career, imitates and internalizes the abuse she has received and blames herself for everything that goes wrong. Armstrong’s point is that strong women often pose a threat to men who then attempt to denigrate them…but women should not surrender to these falsehoods.

Films with stories of value should “somehow transmit effectively the knowledge of what it means to be human” (Bywater 37). This story, indeed, brings to fore moral conflicts, confrontations, and choices that must be made, all complicated by the complexities of individuals’ perceptions, needs, and desires. Beth’s desire to have close relationships with the men she loves is thwarted by both her husband and her father. And, when Beth takes a trip with her father to “sort things out before he dies,” Vicki, who desires to emulate Beth, has an affair with the wayward JP, who desires to have a child of his own. “The tensions among the three characters develop gradually. Beth is increasingly frustrated with her inability to maintain Chez Nous’s fragile surface calm…But it’s a surface built on years of crossed emotional wires and tacit agreements to look the other way. It’s a surface that has settled into small flare-ups and larger non-discussions” (Last).

When Beth shows JP a copy of her most recent manuscript, he tells her that she sees life as she wants to see it and that she is not realistic. “Will you be proud of me when I finish it?” Beth asks. JP responds, “No, I’ll be envious.”

“In The Last Days of Chez Nous the logic of film and writing is altered: as the film unfolds, life becomes more cruel than Beth’s book. Out of the matrix of female life and writing, Armstrong takes the potentially melodramatic events of Garner’s screenplay and transforms them with a detached but cherishing eye into a filmic articulation of love in a postfeminist milieu. The film relishes the details of domestic life precisely because they illuminate the mundane strife which comes with the territory of love, sex, and writing. In this milieu, women write in order to publicise (to make public) female experience” (Collins 57).

Small actions, scenes, and camera shots emphasize Armstrong’s feminist concerns with a patriarchal culture’s negative attitudes toward women. For example, a close-up of Beth with a friend, who has just given birth, contains this exchange: “It’s a boy,” her friend announces. To which Beth replies, “Better luck next time.” In this brief interaction, Armstrong seems to be pointing out that, while a male-dominated culture has historically had a preference for the birth of male children, female children should be cherished. In another short scene, when Beth and her father are traveling to the somewhat dismal outback of Australia, Beth’s father attempts to open a bag of potato chips and simply can’t accomplish the act. But, in one quick movement, Beth rips it open with her teeth. Armstrong, it appears, is speaking out against a patriarchal culture that embraces men as strong and women as weak. Women, Armstrong says, have learned to cope on their own and become resourceful—in even the smallest acts—where men have failed. Another scene shows JP admitting to his systematic abuse of the woman who has loved him so well. “You were proud and I made you humble,” JP tells Beth, when they are breaking up so he can move in with Vicki. Emotional abuse, says Armstrong, is all too often inflicted on women by men in our society.

Despite the troubles that Beth endures, she remains a strong independent woman who will survive no matter what else happens in her life. During the first part of the film, there is a church spire rising from a throng of trees that she and Vicki notice and wonder what lies beneath. But it is only after JP and Vicki have gone that Beth sets out to discover the answer to this question and others. “It is almost a relief,” Beth tells her daughter Annie, referring to the leaving of JP and the oppression she has endured at his whim. Beth is now free to discover herself more fully and realize her true potential. Armstrong’s ending is significant for all women who would dare to take the steps to start their own journeys and fulfill their deepest dreams.

Little Women (1994)

In 1994, Armstrong set out once again to direct a Hollywood film. Little Women, based on the novel by Louisa Mae Alcott, focuses on Jo (Winona Ryder), a strong-minded young woman who, much like Sybylla in My Brilliant Career, yearns to be a writer. But Jo’s story is different. Unlike Sybylla’s mother who reminds her she is plain, odd, and needs to stop thinking of literature as a means to a career, Jo’s mother, Marmee (Susan Sarandon), teaches her that women can be independent. Loving and supportive of all four daughters, Jo and her sisters, Meg (Trini Alvarado); Beth (Claire Danes); and Amy (Kirsten Dunst as younger Amy and Samantha Mathis as older Amy); Marmee gives them a strong sense of themselves as individuals with singular spirits, minds, and choices. Marmee makes it clear that corsets are unhealthy, that her daughters should speak up for their rights, and that women can make do with few monetary resources if they have the determined desire and drive to take matters into their own hands.

Armstrong’s Little Women makes a sweeping departure from the highly sentimentalized 1930’s and 1940’s Hollywood versions of Alcott’s book. “As a filmmaker, Armstrong has been obsessed with women who can’t quite adjust to the stricture of their society—too intelligent, too spiky, too unwilling to submit to propriety. She has also shown a flair for high emotion without sentimentality” (Gillian Armstrong, Fox). Armstrong, along with screenwriter Robin Swicord and producer Denise DiNovi, women who have grown up with feminism, has constructed a film with appeal for women of the current generation. While they may or may not identify themselves as feminists, they have included a “whole range of feminist ideas including that women are capable of making their own choices, whether or not they agree or diverge from the paths expected of them…As a result much of the feminist subtext of the novel is now brought to fore and highlighted in the film” (McAlister, Little).

The March family, with husband and father away from the domestic scene serving as a Union chaplain in the Civil war, disposes of the myth that a patriarchal head of the household is needed for survival. Composed of a sorority of strong females, Armstrong’s Little Women presents a picture of women taking care of themselves while still caring for others such as the impoverished Hummel family. They are enlightened women, knowledgeable and concerned about current events of the time—poverty, slavery, and the need for child labor laws.

Marmee, a kind of social worker in Victorian times, practices homeopathic medicine, and makes sure her daughters get plenty of physical exercise—often frowned on during this period of time. She “forthrightly teaches her daughters based on principles that are straight out of Mary Wollstonecraft” (McAlister, Little). Marmee warns them, “If you feel your value lies only in being merely decorative I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that’s all you really are. Time erodes all such beauty but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful working of your mind.”

Little Women was the ideal project for Armstrong’s feminist voice to show the strength and bonds of the March women as they experience and deal with the trials and tribulations of life. Marmee and her girls face adversity head on. When Father March is wounded in the war and Marmee must leave to be with him, their daughters pitch in to take over the running of the household and the family’s other needs. When Beth becomes ill, Marmee rushes home from her husband and, after the local doctors have given up hope, nurses her daughter back to life. When Beth later dies, the women, though deeply wounded by the loss, have the strength of spirit to move forward to face their future with confidence.

Accenting the drama of Little Women is the artful design of costumes and settings—rich, warm, and subdued—which invite a realistic look at the Victorian times in which the March daughters grow from children into young adults. Within the March home, mother and daughters form a circle of family, friendship, and feminist beginnings. Near the start of the film, Meg, Amy, Jo, and Beth form a circle around their mother. Armstrong’s camera, capturing mother and daughters through the outer window of their home, places them in a pose that looks much like a Christmas card. “They make their own Christmas light and music inside, against the darkness of poverty and the coldness of snow outside. This charmed circle is given to the viewer emphatically as an image composed for and framed by the camera” (Collins 27). Like so many women, they do not know what lies ahead but are gathering the strength to meet it through the formation of a circular bond that will last their lifetimes. While the circle transforms, with the loss of Beth, and expands to include husbands and new babies, the bond of the March women remains steadfast. Their strength comes from a collective development of character within the female sphere. The interactive growth of the group has enforced lifelong power upon which they may come to depend in the days to come. With so many positive images of women and messages for young girls, it is pleasing to note that this film received three Academy Award Nominations.

Oscar and Lucinda (1998)

Based on Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda, the film by the same name, directed by Armstrong, is set in the 1800’s. Armstrong’s articulation of the contemporary feminist can be seen in her 1998 directorial design of this unique tale of two people who, caught in the grips of gambling addiction, find an attraction for adventure, for the game, and for each other. Lucinda is anything but the usual prim and proper Victorian lady of her times. Adventurous, free-spirited, and bold, Lucinda’s character embodies the facets of a modern woman of the current times. “…Armstrong’s films, which range from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, are centrally preoccupied with the cinematic articulation of female experience in the modern era, rather than some kind of updating of the past” (Collins 78).

The viewers’ introduction to the child Lucinda, with her parents encouraging her to take the big step and snap the point of her birthday gift of glass, shows that she will likely follow the leanings of their adventurous spirits and grow up to be a daring adult. This is exactly what happens. Lucinda, “raised on an Australian farm to run free and think free by her feminist mother, finds herself an orphan and an heiress as a young women” (Stark). Against warnings from some of the local businessmen, she takes her inherited fortune and establishes a glass factory in Sydney, Australia. She travels alone, visits gambling dens where most women would fear to tread, and remains confident in her own decisions.

Oscar, on the other hand, is introduced to the story within the context of his mother’s death and the horrific response of his tyrannical father, an overbearing minister. Upon Oscar’s mother’s death, his father rushes into the wild waters to dispose of his wife’s clothing and Oscar is caught by a piece of the clothing which the waves wrap around his small legs nearly drowning him. The result of this frightening experience for Oscar is a lifelong fear and dread of water. “Oscar, faithful and literal-minded, his father’s son lives interpretatively: he smells death in water, tastes God’s will in forbidden Christmas pudding, and creates order and meaning by re-classifying his mother’s button collection. The intimate, tightly framed world of childhood object-relations is transformed into a more open public space” (Collins 84).

While the narrative of Oscar and Lucinda’s fragile relationship is told by Oscar’s great-grandson, it is Lucinda’s story as originally related by her to Oscar’s son. It is through Lucinda’s eyes that viewers see the unfolding of a love that like glass was lustrous but also fragile and breakable. “Glass is not solid at all, but a liquid,” the narrator says. “She [Lucinda] knew that glass was a thing in disguise, that even though it is frail as ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger than Sydney Sandstone. It was as good a material as any to build a life on.” But Armstrong soon establishes that lives and loves built on glass, coupled with gambling, are likely to shatter.

The fragility of glass and the all-consuming idea of water as impending danger surround Oscar and Lucinda’s relationship throughout the film. Felicity Collins, author of The Films of Gillian Armstrong, discusses the topic of Lucinda’s glass and Oscar’s fear of water as follows: “From the outset, the relationship of Oscar (Ralph Fiennes) and Lucinda (Cate Blanchett) is marked as much by water—by “a little aqua” and the paradoxical, solid-liquid qualities of glass—as by their fateful passion for gambling. Water is the mediating term which marks the fluid space of a second world, insistently female, social imaginary in Armstrong’s films” (80).

It is on the water that Oscar and Lucinda first meet on a ship going to Sydney Harbor. “By chance, Oscar and Lucinda meet during a voyage from England to Australia and instantly recognize that they are both animals of a similar nature. Neither fits comfortably into respectable society, and their love of gambling draws them together” (King). Their reserve against gambling is like glass—quickly broken. Lucinda, however, is the stronger of the two in accepting her failing. But Oscar, with his religious upbringing and sense of constant guilt, cannot forgive himself. Unlike many directors, who portray men as strong and women as weak, Armstrong gives her viewers exactly the opposite. She gives them Lucinda who is strong, determined, and bold and Oscar who is weak, indecisive, and timid. Lucinda starts her own glassworks plant; she dares to drive out at night alone; she smokes and plays cards with her accountant; she moves a man into her home. Oscar, in comparison, always fears the worst, falls faint from his fears, and wounds his own praying hands by clasping them too tightly as he begs God for forgiveness.

The female characters in Oscar and Lucinda are not only independent, strong, and willful but can even, as Armstrong shows, be filled with a passionate tendency toward violence—a tendency usually attributed to males. Mrs. Chadwick, a twice-widowed woman rapes Oscar, while caring for him following his harrowing trip to escort the glass church to its recipient, the Reverend Denny Hasset. The act results in a pregnancy for Mrs. Chadwick and an agonizing acknowledgment of betrayal by Oscar. The pregnancy leads to the eventual birth of Oscar’s son and the great-grandfather of the narrator. But it also leads to the death of Oscar as he revisits the church and is caught inside the glass as it slips mercilessly into the awaiting waters that surround it. When, finally following Oscar’s drowning, Lucinda learns the history of his child, she calls upon her womanly strength, power, and love to involve herself in the child’s life.

The strong-willed, stubborn, striving women who dominate the following films: My Brilliant Career, Starstruck, Mrs. Soffel, The Last days of Chez Nous, Little Women, and Oscar and Lucinda, display Armstrong’s determination to present interpretations of women that awaken feminine power. Women’s voices, views, and visions featured in these films bring into view the power, vigor, and resoluteness of women. An Armstrong film brings about a “re-visioning of the horizons of the public woman—as writer, singer, stripper, glassmaker, gambler, or runaway mother” (Collins 92).

Armstrong acknowledges and elevates understanding of the female experience through her many portrayals of mindful women. In My Brilliant Career, Sybylla chooses a career rather than marry. In Starstruck, Jackie rises to stardom through her determination not to give up. In Mrs. Soffel, Kate finds the will to leave her domestic life within her patriarchal prison. In The Last Days of Chez Nous, Beth grows stronger in the face of loss and abandonment. In Little Women, Armstrong presents viewers with the power that evolves from women joining together. In Oscar and Lucinda, Lucinda shows women that, no matter how shattered their lives become, they can rise above their troubles, go forward, begin anew.

Today, Armstrong at forty-nine years old still lives in Australia, in Sydney, where she makes her home with her companion, documentary editor John Pffefer, and their two daughters (Gillian, Fox). She continues to work and create films in both Australia and the United States and remains devoted to developing the voices of everyday women from long ago and from our present day culture. For women viewers around the world, who have experienced the films of Gillian Armstrong and look forward to her next creation with females portrayed in a positive light, the wait may seem simply too long. However, Armstrong film supporters can be assured that the next film, whenever it arrives, will undoubtedly feature females in unique, powerful, and provoking roles—roles that will work long after the story has ended to inspire and illuminate the head, heart, and human spirit of women everywhere.

By Coralie Cederna Johnson

WORKS CITED
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Bywater, Jim and Sobchack, Thomas. “The Humanist Approach: Traditional Aesthetic Responses to the Movies.” Introduction to Film Criticism. New York: Longman, 1989: 37.

Collins, Felicity. The Films of Gillian Armstrong. Australian Teachers of Media. Australian Film Commission. 1999: 27, 37, 41, 57, 78, 84, 92.

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“Great Moments on the Australian Screen – Biography – Gillian Armstrong.” Online. 15 Sept. 1999. Available: www.sna.net.au/greatmoments/bios/armstrong/greatmom_bio_armstrong.html.

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King, Greg. “Oscar and Lucinda.” Review. Online. Netscape. 18 Nov. 1999. Available: www.alphalink.com.au/~pjh/f512aol.htm.

“Last Days of Chez Nous, The.” Review. Online. Netscape. 3 Nov. 1999. Available: www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/WomensStudies/FilmReviews/last-dayys-
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MacKinnon, Catharine A. Feminism Unmodified. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1987: 170.

McAlister, Linda Lopez. “Last Days of Chez Nous, The.” The Women’s Show. Review. 31 July 1993. Online. Netscape. 28 Oct. 1999. Available: www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/WomensStudies/FilmReviews/chez-nous-mcalister.

McAlister, Linda Lopez. “Little Women.” The Women’s Show. Review. 7 Jan. 1995. Online. Netscape. 29 Oct. 1999. Available: www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/WomensStudies/FilmReviews/little-women-mcalister.

Middlemiss, Perry. “My Brilliant Career.” 1999. Online. Netscape. 5 Oct. 1999. Available: http://ncc1701.apana.org.au/~larrikin/lit/authors/franklinm/bcareer.html.

Moghaddam, Baback. “Judy Davis.” Biography from The Film Encyclopedia, Ephraim Katz, ed. 1994. 5 Jan. 1999. Online. Netscape. 5 Oct. 1999. Available: www- white.media.mit.edu/~baback/JD

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Indiana University Press. Bloomington, Indiana. 1989: 14-26.

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Stark, Susan. “Gambling’s the game that unites Oscar and Lucinda.” The Detroit News. Review.
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FILMS
Last Days of Chez Nous, The. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Perf. Lisa Harrow, Bruno Ganz, Kerry Fox, Miranda Otto, and Bill Hunter. New Line Home Video, 1992.

Little Women. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Perf. Susan Sarandon, Winona Ryder, Gabriel Byrne, Trini Alvarado, Samantha Mathis, Claire Danes, Mary Wickes, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Bale, and Eric Stoltz. Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1994.

Mrs. Soffel. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Perf. Diane Keaton, Mel Gibson, Edward Herrmann, Matthew Modine, Trini Alvarado, Jennie Dundas, Terry O’Quinn, and Danny Corkill. MGM Home Entertainment, 1984.

My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Perf. Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Robert Grubb, Wendy Hughes, and Max Cullen. Vestron, 1979.

Oscar and Lucinda. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Perf. Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett, Ciaran Hinds, Tom Wilkinson, Richard Roxburgh, Clive Russell, Billie Brown, and Josephine Byrnes. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1998.

Starstruck. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Perf. Trini Alvarado, Joanna Merlin, Lee Curreri, Jo Kennedy, Ross O’Donovan. Orion Home Video, 1982.