Journal of Screenwriting - Women in Screenwriting, Sept 2020

Tang Cheng (唐澄) (1919–86) was one of the most accomplished and versatile animation practitioners in the history of Chinese animation and the first female animation scriptwriter and director in the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–present). Animation in the PRC was once famous for its ‘Chinese school’ aesthetics, in which female professionals influenced all dimensions of the form, from animation techniques to aspects of narration and artistic style. Tang Cheng was best known for directing or co-directing representative Chinese school animated films. However, her early career in animation screenwriting has been largely forgotten. This article not only highlights her role as a scenarist commissioned to write the screenplays of the didactic fairy tales Old Lady’s Jujube Tree (1958) and Radish Is Back (1959) but also analyses how the spirit of collectivism and childlike simplicity revealed in her screenwriting affected her later directorial productions such as Little Tadpoles Looking for Mother (1961), Havoc in Heaven (1961, 1964) and The Deer Bell (1982).

During the heyday of the studio system in Japan in the 1950s, Mizuki Yōko (1910–2003) was one of Japan’s most prominent and celebrated screenwriters. Despite screenwriting being a markedly homosocial profession, Mizuki forged a remarkable career as a freelance writer, working both for major studios and independent productions. Her collaboration with directors such as Naruse Mikio and, above all, Imai Tadashi resulted in a string of critically acclaimed films. While Imai’s films were lauded by contemporary critics, his approach to directing has subsequently been regarded, especially by western scholars, as somewhat impersonal and his sympathies too leftist. Conversely, these social issue (shakaiha) films, often based on original screenplays by Mizuki, scrupulously displayed the anxieties and ambiguities of the post-war era when the social fabric of Japan was radically reconfigured as its people embraced the newly imported values of democracy and consumerism. In this article, I examine the contributions of Mizuki to the oft-neglected oeuvre of Imai and social issue film in particular. I argue that besides pointing at the capacity and bounds of narrative cinema to engage with timely and sensitive social topics, Mizuki’s working methods underline a screenwriter’s awareness of her own agency in filmmaking.

This article focuses on the Zimbabwean film Neria (1992), arguably one of the most important films in the history of sub-Saharan Africa. Directed by the Black Zimbabwean Godwin Mawuru, it was the first feminist film in Zimbabwe and in the region, highlighting the plight of women who become the property of their brothers-in-law after their husbands die. The article addresses the issues of the origins of the story and the authorship of the screenplay. On the final reel of the film, the story credit names the accomplished Zimbabwean female novelist, Tsitsi Dangarembga; while the screenplay credit names Louise Riber. Riber served as the film’s White American editor and co-producer who, with her husband John Riber, managed the Media for Development Fund in Zimbabwe. The key question of this article is simple: who wrote the screenplay for Neria? Through the physical and metaphorical journey of this research, we discover that the story is based on the personal experiences of Anna Mawuru, the director’s mother. This is the first time that this fact has surfaced. As such, this article also offers some reflections on issues of adaption/translation, particularly in the context of postcolonial collaborations.

In 2009, I was living in Damascus, Syria, writing The Hakawati’s Daughter. The film told the story of the last remaining hakawati, oral storyteller, in Damascus. Like many traditions in the Arab world, the hakawati profession is an inherited one, passed on through the generations since 600 AD from father to son and so on. But in my film, the last hakawati has only one child, a daughter, and rather than adapting/modernizing this tradition and passing it on to her, he allows it to die. Two years later, the Syrian revolution broke out and the story, along with the country, fell apart. I have spent the years since reimagining what the story could be instead. Prior to the revolution, what interested me was how the film would explore the battle between tradition and modernity. What interests me today is ‘who has the right to tell the narrative of what is happening in Syria?’ Sadly, it is mostly men. This is the theme The Hakawati’s Daughter now wishes to explore. This article is an account of how the Syrian revolution inspired the rewriting of The Hakawati’s Daughter.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Israel has known seven wars, seven prominent violent operations and numerous military conflicts. During this period (1948–2019), 86 Israeli screen stories have engaged with the motif of Israel’s military/wars. However, only two of them were written by women and focused on the female Israeli soldier. The marginal position of screen stories based on Israeli women’s experience in the military presents a unique opportunity to unravel the notions female screenwriters have of women’s conduct in a patriarchal military culture. Our findings suggest that female Israeli screenwriters (a) propose a dual vision for women – on the one hand, they are portrayed as silenced, while on the other they use silence as a coping tactic; (b) represent the hegemonic male as silencing women’s voices even though in some cases women silence hegemonic men; and (c) depict military service as an opportunity for women to unravel their femininity.

The films of Latin American female screenwriters, Lucrecia Martel (Argentina), Anna Muylaert (Brazil) and Claudia Llosa (Peru), have achieved international prominence in recent years. In this article we create new insights into the ways in which these screenwriters have developed scripts for films that have made a mark on the world stage. To this end we will investigate how this acclaim has been enabled by their screenwriting decisions which focus on the creation of women-centred films, as well as their use of the family story as a means of exploring contemporary social and political themes, to tell universal stories that highlight the global in the local. In doing so we canvas the personal, industrial and social factors which have impacted Martel, Muylaert and Llosa’s screenwriting careers which have been instrumental in the script development of the films: La Ciénaga (The Swamp) (Martel 2001); Que Horas Ela Volta? (The Second Mother) (Muylaert 2015); and La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow) (Llosa 2009). The research for this article is based on personal and media interviews with the writers, as well as contemporary information available only in Spanish and Portuguese, as translated from the original Spanish and Portuguese by Clarissa Miranda.

Like other successful genre shows, Wynonna Earp features a strong female lead character. Wynonna, however, is so much more than a ‘girl with a big ass gun’. In this case study of Emily Andras, I explore how women-centred writing and Andras’s engagement with fans, transformed Wynonna Earp from an overly sexualized comic book character, to a feminist icon, layered with nuance and breaking gender norms faster than revenants can make their peace. Andras’s leadership, her inclusion of LGBTQIA representation and refusal to succumb to the ‘bury your gays’ trope, also helped amass a passionate, loyal fan base that successfully lobbied producers for a fourth season after the show faced cancellation. The success of Wynonna Earp and the ‘Fight for Wynonna’, bolsters the legitimacy of women-led genre shows, women showrunners and producers, and the largely women-identified fan base, who have long loved science fiction, but have not felt accurately represented in male-centric products. Through qualitative analysis of interviews with Andras and Wynonna Earp fans, this article shows how Andras’s voice as screenwriter, leadership as showrunner, and engagement with fans on social media, demonstrates respect for fans as active and valued media partners, rather than market to be exploited.

The screenwriting of sketch comedy and, in particular, how female writers of sketch comedy engage with this form to illuminate female experience, are topics not yet widely theorized. This article reviews the scholarship, in order to bring together histories, definitions and distribution of sketch comedy from which to investigate how this form of comedy screenwriting can contribute to feminisms that ‘engage openly and playfully with humor and irony as weapons of choice’ (Willet et al. 2012). Drawing on anecdotal accounts and available archives from A Black Lady Sketch Show (2019–present), French and Saunders (1987–present), Inside Amy Schumer (2013–present), Wood & Walters (1981–82) and others, this article considers these against the theories of writing sketch comedy to draw some conclusions on how this short form, combined with its most popular form of distribution, can accommodate multiple perspectives and serve their audiences. This article offers itself as a starting point in identifying the unique challenges and strategies for women writing sketch comedy, and the possibilities offered by the form more broadly, while highlighting the need for further empirical exploration of the creative practice of female sketch comedy writers, and further critical attention to short form comedy screenwriting.

Review of: Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction, Cari Beauchamp and Mary Anita Loos (eds) (2003)

Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 322 pp.,

ISBN 978-05-20228-94-8, h/bk, $32.65

Review of: Modern Film Dramaturgy: An Introduction, Kristen Stutterheim (2019)

Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH, 211 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-631-79650-4, p/bk, $50.95

E-ISBN 978-3-631-79874-4, E-PDF, $50.95

E-ISBN 978-3-631-79875-1, EPUB, $50.95

E-ISBN 978-3-631-79876-8, MOBI, $50.95

Review of: Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood, J. E. Smyth (2018)

New York: Oxford University Press, 328 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-19-084082-2, h/bk, $29.95

Review of: How to Write for Moving Pictures: A Manual of Instruction and Information, Marguerite Bertsch (1917)

New York: G. H. Doran Company, 268 pp.,

ISBN 978-13-40460-04-4, h/bk, £20.79

ISBN 978-13-77165-03-5, p/bk, £15.99