Gender Gap in Movies NYT

By Brad Kimbrough and Eric Feldman1:49

Chopping up a performance into numbers can reveal a multitude of hidden factors that may influence how it affects you. The minutes an actress is seen in close-up can point to the power of cinematography in generating feelings of empathy with her. Fast editing techniques create dramatic tension we might otherwise associate with an actor’s expressions.

David Bordwell, a co-author of “Film Art: An Introduction,” a widely used textbook in film studies classes, said in an interview that there were two main ways to assess a performance: “One is in the actor’s relationship to their environment and to other actors within a single shot. The other is in the editing,” in which cuts between shots of the actor and of other images create meanings and emotions.

Editing is but one aspect of screen performance that we aren’t supposed to notice. In “Gravity,” for instance, Sandra Bullock is seen for 73 minutes, but heard for 75. Most of that time isn’t spent on dialogue but on breathing, attesting to the power of sound design in creating an actor’s presence.

Whether by sight or sound, Ms. Bullock occupies 87 percent of “Gravity’s” running time, more than any other nominee this year and well above the average among her competitors for best actress. One disquieting finding from my research is that this year’s lead actors average 85 minutes on screen, but lead actresses average only 57 minutes. (When you add in supporting categories, all competing actors averaged 59 minutes, while all competing actresses averaged 42 minutes.) Last year’s results were even more imbalanced: nominated male stars averaged 100 minutes on screen to the lead actresses’ 49 minutes.

When I presented these figures to Geena Davis, an Oscar-winning actress, she said she was stunned, though she has spent the past decade covering on-screen inequality as the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. “But I think even more shocking than the number of female characters is to find out how little time they spend on screen,” she said. “I had never thought that about the Oscars. It’s really amazing and shocking to me.” The institute is working with Shrikanth Narayanan, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, to measure screen representations of male and female characters by digitally scanning movies frame by frame.

Mr. Bordwell said genre might help explain the gender gap. Male stars are typically the protagonists in action or goal-oriented narratives that require the viewer to follow the story through the lead’s experiences. Female stars are more typically cast in melodramas that require the lead to serve as a hub connecting different characters and subplots.

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Anthony Hopkins was in “The Silence of the Lambs” for only 18 minutes; he still won the Oscar. CreditMGM Home Entertianent, Library of Congress, via Associated PressThe disparity in depictions of men and women extend to how long we look at them in each shot. Take the front-runners in the four Oscar categories for acting: shots of Cate Blanchett in “Blue Jasmine” and Lupita Nyong’o in “12 Years a Slave” last twice as long on average than those of Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in “Dallas Buyers Club.” These findings may lend mathematical support to a theory advanced by the film scholar Laura Mulvey in her influential 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female,” with the male gaze dominating the dynamic.

Mr. Bordwell cautioned that the characteristics of a specific film may inform shot lengths as much as gender issues. The four nominated leads of “American Hustle” each average about six seconds a shot. Jay Cassidy, who is up for an Academy Award as part of the editing team for “American Hustle,” said that like most of his peers, he didn’t keep track of screen times while working on the film.

Mr. Cassidy, a 40-year industry veteran, expressed skepticism about the practical use of cinemetrics when it comes actually to putting a movie together. “It’s sort of no help when you’re staring at footage and trying to tell a story,” he said. “Jennifer Lawrence? You can’t measure what she’s got.”

Mr. Cassidy wagered that there wasn’t much of a gap in the screen time between the two nominated leads of his film. But Christian Bale actually has 60 minutes of screen to Amy Adams’s 46 minutes, a significant difference even in an ensemble movie. Among their supporting category counterparts, Bradley Cooper’s 41 screen minutes double Jennifer Lawrence’s 20. (There are occasional outliers: Anthony Hopkins won best actor in 1992 for his turn in “The Silence of the Lambs” even though he was on screen for 18 minutes, less than any of this year’s acting nominees.)

While its applicability to the filmmaking process may be up for debate, cinemetrics raises questions not only about how we look at movies, but also how we look at ourselves through them. These are questions perhaps more stimulating than who gets to take home a gold statue.