Tag: Sherry B Ortner

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Truly Free Film

Sherry B Ortner’s “Not Hollywood”: Post-Feminism?

We’ve got another excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood. Subtitled “Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream”, its an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. This time Sherry looks at issues of sexism and Feminism’s current standing in the film world.

By Sherry B. OrtnerIt is a major point of the post-feminism literature that younger women find second-wave feminism irrelevant to today’s world, a world in which virtually all occupations are open to women, in which women—like the studio heads noted earlier—have been very visibly successful in many endeavors, and in which many men have been sensitized to the need for egalitarian relations between the sexes. Moreover, in this view, younger women see second-wave feminists as having more or less abandoned an interest in attractive femininity in the pursuit of gender equality; younger women reject this de-feminization and refuse to identify with the older feminist generation and often with the very term feminism.

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Sherry B Ortner’s “Not Hollywood”: Producers and the Neoliberal Economy

Here’s another excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood, an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. In this excerpt Sherry looks at social and economic background of producers in the independent sphere, finding that the majority come from upperclass background and educations.

The Sociology of Producers and the Neoliberal Economy of the 1990s

The independent producers who are part of this project are mostly within the age range of the filmmakers, Generation X, born between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. Some are a bit older, and most fall at the early end of the Gen X range, but on the whole there is not a major age/generation gap between the producers and the filmmakers. This is relevant in the sense that the producers and the filmmakers would share the worldview and the general aesthetic behind the independent films they make together. Beyond this, however, there are some interesting differences. First, gender: As we will see in the next chapter, women form a relatively small percent of directors and filmmakers. But it is a striking fact that women constitute almost half of the ranks of producers. In 1974, the Producers Guild of America (pga) recorded that 8 out of 3,068 members were female, or 0.3 percent (Abramowitz 2000: 65). According to Vance Van Petten, executive director of the pga, currently about 45 percent of its members are women (interview, December 13, 2007).

Next, class: It is an equally striking fact that independent producers tend to come from relatively high capital backgrounds and collectively are clearly part of the Professional Managerial Class or pmc. Many come from upper-middle-class families with significant amounts of money. Even if they are not all members of the pmc by virtue of money, they are almost uniformly so by virtue of higher education.

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Sherry B Ortner’s “Not Hollywood”: Dark Indies

Today we’re happy to provide you with an excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood. Subtitled “Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream”, its an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. In this excerpt Sherry looks at the darkness that is endemic of so many independent features. What do you think?

Dark Indies

From the beginning of this project, I immersed myself in independent films. At first I was somewhat mystified. While many of them were compelling, many of them were also quite dark and, in one way or another, disturbing. They were clearly ‘‘not Hollywood.’’ This generated the first question of my research beyond the purely ethnographic: what was this all about? In Part I of this chapter, I tackle this general question of ‘‘darkness’’ and propose to understand it in terms of the generational positioning of a new breed of filmmakers, the first post-boomer generation usually known as Generation X. I argue further that ‘‘Generation X’’ represents not a particular cohort that ended at a certain point in time, but an ongoing and open-ended social entity that is bearing the brunt of the massive economic transformations called ‘‘neoliberalism.’’

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