ABSTRACT
Of all the films considered in this volume, Breaking Glass (1980) may be the one that conforms most awkwardly, even questionably, to accepted definitions of the ‘woman’s picture’ and women’s genres. I want to propose, however, two things. First, that there is a connection between Breaking Glass’s awkwardnesses and contradictions – which it exhibits in relation to feminist or postfeminist expectations of a female-centred film as much as the ‘woman’s picture’ – and the late-1970s British context (cinematic/industrial, social and popularcultural) from which it emerged. Second, that this female-centred film – which works within popular and genre conventions, but would not claim to be a ‘woman’s picture’, and is dominated by a distinctive female protagonist, but never references gender-consciousness or feminism – and its contexts are, despite this, an illuminating example to consider in this book. In particular, for the insights it offers into the gender politics – and the more particular, but lessinvestigated, punk-inflected gender-neutral politics – of the late 1970s, and the transitional (and hence uneven) shifts in female representation taking place in British films (and indeed the wider culture) at that time. These shifts in the spheres of representation and consciousness were, of course, taking place against an equally shifting industrial and political backdrop, as the UK film industry emerged from crisis towards its early-1980s revival, and the May 1979 election brought to power a new, radically ideologically reorientated, Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. As Sue Harper notes in her astute study Women in British Cinema, Britain in
the 1970s saw a range of ‘radical improvements to the everyday lives of women’, as well as ‘many theoretical advances in feminism and a broad shift in consciousness about what this might entail’ (2000: 127). The decade also, of course, saw the beginnings of feminist film theory and a theorised feminist film practice – although the latter, by its nature and by choice, remained ghettoised within the independent/co-op sector. However, as Harper notes, ‘the British film industry of the 1970s was in no condition to respond to [such] changes’ (ibid.). On the contrary, in a context of industry crisis coupled with patriarchal panic, the dominant tropes of mainstream female representation, particularly in the most prolific 1970s British genres – low comedy, sex films, horror and their
hybrid permutations – showed a regression into sexual objectification and misogyny, while cinema exhibitors focused significantly on the predominantly male audiences who could be lured by the promise of X-certificate gratifications unavailable (in the pre-VHS era) at home. This was not a climate in which female audiences were a priority for the main-
stream industry. As a search of the standard reference sources (such as Goble 1999 and Gifford 1986) attests, the 1970s on the whole presented thin pickings for anyone seeking ‘women’s genres’ in British cinema. Harper argues that even many of the 1970s British films made within genres with a traditional female appeal, such as the costume film, either ‘locked’ women ‘into rigid caricatures’ or ‘foregrounded masculine sensibilities, even when the subject matter seemed to require the reverse’ (2000: 129). ‘Female’ genres and female-centred narratives flourished instead on 1970s British television – from soap opera to a great variety of period dramas, the latter ranging from the ‘quality’ Classic Serial via popular formats to the expressly feminist (notably Shoulder to Shoulder, BBC TV’s remarkable 1974 mini-series on the Suffragette movement) – albeit alongside the persistence of overt sexism elsewhere in the schedules.1
