I saw the film am immediately looked p the cinematographer, and it was a female! I was very excited because I am a girl majoring in cinematography. Typing that word a lot is difficult. I found this youtube video about the cinematography of Australia and Mandy Walker, the DP. Watching this makes me get camera and equipment envy. It also makes me feel bad that such a beautiful film is getting such terrible reviews. It takes so much work to make a film like 'Australia' that it is sad that someone didn't stop them along the way and say, okay, it's a little long for the general public. Anyway back to Mandy- here is an article about her nomination for Hollywood Film Festival's Cinematographer of the Year.
Lines like: "...things are looking good for Walker to become the first female Best Cinematography nominee in Oscar history." are pretty inspiring. I happen to agree that she does incredible work and I hope she gets the recognition she deserves.
Here are some interesting statistics about female cinematographers from the article:
- By genre, women were most likely to work on romantic comedies, romantic dramas, and documentaries and least likely to work on science fiction, horror, and action-adventure features.
- Among the top 250 films, women were most likely to serve as cinematographers on documentaries (17%), followed by comedy dramas (9%) and animated features (9%), and comedies (7%).
- Women did not serve as cinematographers on dramas, romantic dramas, romantic comedies, action- adventure features, sci-fi features, or horror features.
- Only 4% of cinematographers on the largest budget American films are women.
Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, a professor at San Diego State University in the US, recently published a report called The Celluloid Ceiling that revealed only 2% of the people working as cinematographers on the top 250 films made in 2007 films in Hollywood were female. Ninety eight percent (98%) of the films had no female cinematographers, which translates roughly to a grand total of five (5) camerawomen working on the top 250 big budget movies.
Even so Mandy Walker may be the woman to start making a change in those numbers. I also found an interview with her in which she states:
"I never knew until I started working in the industry that there weren't many women in the camera department, and I couldn't see why. Basically, I have never taken it on as an issue, and I think that people will hire me because I am good at my job, not whether I am male or female"
right on.
2 comments:
I'm commenting on my own post because I forgot to mention that all of the "Set to Screen" videos are on youtube and they are about the sound design, on set photography etc. of 'Australia' it's very cool. check it out.
This may add an other point in the argument that I am a misogynist, but this reminds me a little of a great anecdote I heard from my friend in the film school at NYU I heard over the holiday. A female student asked why there were so few women in the film industry. The professor's explanation was an open question to the entire class: "How many of you have seen a movie by yourself in the past six months?" Every male student raised his hand and only one female.
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