The Celluloid Ceiling

Criticized for its gender inequality, the Festival de Cannes has in recent years begun to move towards inclusion. Will the Festival be able to change its past and make a move towards the future?

In 1993, Jane Campion became the first ever female director in all of the Cannes Film Festival history to receive a Palme d’Or for her film The Piano. Twenty-eight years later, in this year’s celebration of the festival, Julia Ducournau became the second female director to receive this award with her most recent film, Titane. The topic of the role that women in the film industry play is one that has been widely debated for many years now and one that still has much to achieve. The inequality that women face in the world of film (and in general) is an important issue to tackle and, although the subject is very broad and seen worldwide, in recent years the focus has turned towards the Cannes Film Festival in order to represent this fight for equality. For many years now, women’s art has been discredited and undervalued compared to that of men.

One night, while I was having dinner with some friends I decided to test out something from a Tik Tok I had seen just a few days beforehand. I asked all of my friends to name the first artist, be it filmmaker or painter – it didn’t really matter– that came to their minds. Names like Tarantino, Warhol, Picasso, Hemingway were blurted out with only one woman’s name, Georgia O’Keeffe, among the mentioned men. I was stunned but that shock quickly turned into disappointment. This feeling was not aimed at my friends, however, because I knew that it was not their fault that society has conditioned us to focus more on the art that men make. In our high schools, universities, even in some museums, art made by men overshadows the art made by women.

In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin wrote an essay titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” where she discusses why men’s art has been far more valued than women’s art in history. In it she examines the various institutional barriers that women face not only in their professions but in society overall. Women have had a much harder time accessing education, support and social net- working to mention a few than men. In short, the cards have been dealt and women have had to play the hand that they have received. This debate is still very much prominent in the twenty-first century where women have to fight for recognition and credit as artists. The fact that female erasure is still so evident forces us to ponder on the question if institutional gender-related reasons are the cause for this inequality and erasure in the creative field.

The fight for equity is as present as ever. For example, widely criticised by audiences and by women from the industry for its lack of transparency and gender parity, the Festival de Cannes has been put under the microscope and is making audiences realize that even now when supposedly we have come a long way in the history of feminism and equality, there are still things to be done, especially in the film industry. Among other controversies surrounding the festival, the mere fact that only two women have won the Palme d’Or is enough to shake the world and people are taking notice. The Festival de Cannes, like the majority of film festivals and awarding events, has many different prizes and categories in order to accurately give representation to the different roles of the behind the scenes of a film. However, the jury always seems to favor films made by men in both the awarding as well as the nominating process.

Nevertheless, the times appear to be slowly changing. Appear. One important thing to keep in mind about the Festival de Cannes that makes it stand out from other events such as the Academy Awards is that the awards themselves show an evolving nature and a desire to give more people a voice. All of this sounds beautiful, and in theory the Festival de Cannes should be seen as inclusive but, is it really? It is true that they have special awards made for LGBTQ+ related films as well as for students or up and coming filmmakers that supposedly show the festival’s commitment to evolve and grow with the times, but they also have created a new category called ‘Women in Motion’ where the award is always to be delivered by a French multinational corporation to honor major achievers who are raising aware- ness on the topic of lack of female representation and inequality. Now, that’s amazing, you might think, and yes, it is amazing that they are taking a step forward to honor people fighting against inequality but it doesn’t quite fix their errors, does it? The problem with the festival, or at least the one I am wishing to highlight, is exactly that – why do women need a separate category instead of simply giving women the space they deserve inside male dominated categories?

In 2018, during the peak of the #MeToo movement, eighty-two women, among them Jane Fonda and Marion Cotillard, protested on the steps of the Palais de Cannes demanding inclusion. The event was led by a group called 5050x2020 who ever since have fought for better gender representation and who have presented shocking statistics. According to a French study, in seventy one years of the Palme d’Or, only eighty-two films made by women have been nominated (out of which only two have won) and a total of about 1,645 films by men have been nominated, producing quite a gap. These numbers are merely talking about female representation in the Cannes Film Festival, however, if we look at it in a broader way analyzing the film industry as a whole, the numbers become even more worrying. Over the last two decades, the percentage of women working on top grossing films hasn’t moved as much as one would expect it to. In 1998, there was a total of 9% of women directors which then rose to 13% in 2019; in this same period, the amount of women cinematographers went up only one percent, from four to five. These are all part of Martha Lauzen’s “Celluloid Ceiling” reports which for two decades have been released annually, tracking the employment rate of women in a wide variety of fields such as directing, writing, editing, cinematography and producing.

Female representation has been a discussed topic for decades now and I doubt that the problem here is that there are no good films directed by women, no good art, but that the problem is so deeply ingrained in the patriarchal system of an industry where men make up about 71% and have held all of the power which has for decades been stuck in the same stagnation and is just beginning to evolve.

All around the world, there are more than fifty festivals dedicated to women only where about 100 films are shown which further proves that the problem does not lie on the fact that there are no great women artists but that women artists are not being given the opportunity to show off their greatness. Gender inequality is and will continue to be an issue in the recent Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021) future but steps toward equality are being made, slowly but surely. Although the Festival de Cannes has in the past mostly focused on celebrating male achievement, this is not a rarity considering it has been a festival mostly programmed by men. However, this year definitely showed audiences a change for the better by including more women in their juries, which are usually male dominated. The statistics on female representation continue to rise, even if slowly, looking like the fight for gender equality on the screen will be more of an evolutionary change rather than a revolutionary one. Change takes time and at least we are moving forward, not backwards. But still, shouldn’t we be further along by now instead of still debating wheth- er or not women deserve to gain recognition? Instead of creating specialized awards for them, shouldn’t we be valuing it on the same level as other types of art, next to men’s art? I would argue that by creating categories made specifically for the art that women make does not fix the problem but creates a simple solution to a permanent problem.

“...only eighty-two films made by women have beennominated (out of which only two have won)...”

Although it is pretty maddening and regretful that as a society we are still stuck on this situa- tion where we are debating over equality and accurate representation, I believe there will come a time where the lines between gender and their roles will begin to blur and women, as well as men, will have equal levels of representation in not only the film industry but in other fields as well. Even as I say this with my whole heart, there is inevitably a piece of me that believes this statement to be a fantasy. Society is aware that gender inequality still exists and, although we are still living in a world where the lines between gender (which is something that is socially constructed) are not completely blurred, everyday we inch closer to that desired reality where the importance of assigning gender dissipates.

As Julia Ducournau remarked upon winning this year’s Palm d’Or, “I don’t think our gender defines us. However, because that’s not yet something that’s socially understood, it becomes a topic. I’m saying this for everybody: for me, as a woman, I don’t want my gender to define me at all. When people say I’m a woman director – I mean, that’s always a bit annoying, because I’m a person. I’m a director. I make movies because I’m me, not because I’m a woman. I’m me.”