Cinema has always told women that love will change them. Sometimes this change is framed as growth, sometimes as maturity, sometimes as “finding yourself.” But more often than not, it is a quiet demand to become smaller, softer, more pleasing — to shave off the parts that disrupt desire or challenge male comfort. Across decades of film history, women are repeatedly rewarded for self-erasure and punished for remaining whole. What makes this pattern so insidious is that it is rarely presented as loss. It arrives dressed as romance. As healing. As empowerment. The woman who alters herself is not framed as compromised, but improved. She is celebrated for adapting — for understanding, for forgiving, for bending. Meanwhile, the structures that require her to change remain intact and unquestioned. Cinema excels at turning sacrifice into spectacle. A haircut becomes a character arc. Silence becomes emotional depth. Endurance becomes virtue. The audience is invited to root for transformation without ever asking what has been surrendered in the process. And because these stories are so familiar — repeated across genres, decades, and cultures — they come to feel natural. Inevitable. Even aspirational. This is not an argument against love, nor against change. People evolve in relationships; intimacy reshapes us. But there is a fundamental difference between changing  with  love and changing  for  love. The former implies reciprocity and expansion. The latter asks women to contort themselves into versions that are easier to desire, easier to manage, easier to keep. Films like Grease,  The Blue Lagoon,  and  Paris, Texas  — each directed by men —  r eveal how deeply embedded this logic is within cinematic traditions that repeatedly frame women’s self-erasure as romantic, necessary, or redemptive . These stories do not simply reflect cultural attitudes; they help produce them — teaching women what is expected of them in order to be loved, and teaching audiences to read self-erasure as emotional growth. What follows is not a ranking of “problematic” films, but a close look at how cinema repeatedly frames women’s disappearance as romantic fulfilment — and what that framing asks us to accept, again and again, as normal. Grease (1978): Empowerment as Disguise Sandy’s original presentation in Grease Few films have sold this fantasy more effectively than Randal Kleiser’s Grease . Sandy’s transformation is still widely defended as liberating: she chooses to change, she “takes control,” she gets the boy. But this reading collapses choice into context, ignoring what pressures that choice — and what, exactly, she is being asked to abandon. Sandy does not grow into herself; she sheds herself. The transformation is total and carefully choreographed. Her soft Australian accent is flattened. Her curls — a signifier of innocence, gentleness, even awkwardness — are replaced with a rigid, hyper-styled silhouette. Her clothing shifts from light, flowing fabrics to tight black leather, visually aligning her with sexual confidence rather than emotional presence. Even her body language changes: shoulders back, hips forward, gaze sharpened. This is not a woman discovering desire — it is a woman learning how to perform it. The mise-en-scène reinforces this lesson. Sandy’s final appearance is staged as spectacle. The camera revels in the reveal, lingering on her body as a triumphant visual payoff. Music swells. The crowd reacts. Desire is externalised and confirmed through male approval. Danny does not need to reckon with his own insecurity, misogyny, or fear of vulnerability; Sandy absorbs the labour of transformation on his behalf. Sandy’s transformed persona What makes this so deceptive is that the film frames submission as empowerment. Sandy’s change is coded as confidence, as if sexualisation itself equals agency. But nothing in the narrative suggests mutual growth. Danny remains essentially the same — still smug, still emotionally avoidant — while Sandy is rewarded for learning how to be legible within a narrow, male-centred fantasy of femininity. The film teaches a devastating lesson with a smile: to be loved, a woman must be edited. Hardened. Rewritten. The final image is not romantic; it is instructional. Love,  Grease  suggests, is not something that meets you where you are — it is something you earn by becoming someone else.   The Blue Lagoon (1980): When Innocence Is Not Protected The Blue Lagoon  again directed by Kleiser is more difficult to place, but no less disturbing. It does not revolve around transformation so much as inevitability — and in doing so, it erases consent entirely. Marketed as a “story of natural love,” the film frames sexual awakening as organic and unmediated by power, culture, or history. Yet the camera itself betrays this fantasy. Aged just fourteen during filming, Brooke Shields’ body is framed through an unmistakably adult gaze: slow pans, soft lighting, a bare chest veiled by her hair, lingering close-ups that aestheticise vulnerability while disguising it as innocence. What the narrative insists is untouched by society is, in fact, meticulously constructed for consumption. Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon This is not love transforming a woman; it is cinema refusing to protect a girl. Childhood is collapsed into availability, and curiosity is mistaken for consent. There is no agency here, no selfhood to preserve or negotiate — only a visual language that normalises the disappearance of girlhood under the guise of romance. Placed alongside films like  Grease ,  The Blue Lagoon  exposes a continuum rather than an exception: whether through makeover or myth, cinema repeatedly prepares female bodies for desire long before they are allowed subjectivity.   It is not incidental that  Grease  and  The Blue Lagoon  share the same director. Both films were directed by Randal Kleiser — a man whose work repeatedly frames female transformation, sexual availability, and submission as natural progressions rather than ideological constructions. Across wildly different settings — suburban high school and tropical isolation — the same logic persists: female identity is shaped in response to male desire, while male subjectivity remains largely untouched. This is not an argument about individual intent so much as authorship and power. Kleiser’s films reveal how easily cinema normalises the idea that women must adapt, mature, or eroticise themselves in order for love to occur — whether through a makeover, a myth of “natural” sexuality, or the quiet erasure of consent. The repetition is the point. When the same story is told in different registers, it stops looking like romance and starts looking like ideology.   Paris, Texas (1984): Tenderness Without Accountability Paris, Texas  directed by Wim Wenders is often praised for its restraint, its melancholy beauty, its emotional seriousness. And visually, it is exquisite. But beneath that quiet surface lies a deeply familiar structure: a woman absorbs the damage so that a man can feel redeemed. The film’s most iconic scene — Jane and Travis reunited through a one-way mirror in a peep-show booth — is staged as intimacy through separation. They cannot touch. They cannot see each other directly. Jane performs behind glass, framed by artificial lighting and reflective surfaces, while Travis controls the terms of the encounter: when he speaks, when he listens, when the story begins and ends. The mise-en-scène is crucial here. Jane is positioned as an image first, a voice second, and a subject last. Her body is contained within a space designed for male fantasy, even as the film asks us to read the moment as emotionally sincere. Travis, unseen, is granted narrative authority. He speaks. He confesses. He reframes the past. Jane listens. Jane framed behind glass: blonde hair softened by pink, femininity carefully staged for consumption. The colour palette suggests tenderness, but the mise-en-scène confines her to an object of looking — visible, contained, and emotionally available on demand. What we learn is devastating: Travis was controlling, jealous, volatile. Jane fled for her own safety. And yet the emotional arc of the scene bends toward  his  suffering. His pain becomes the film’s moral centre. His regret is treated as sufficient acknowledgement. There is no demand for accountability, no confrontation with the long-term effects of abuse — only the quiet implication that love, once spoken gently enough, can undo harm. Jane softens in response. Her voice lowers. Her posture relaxes. She offers understanding. This is not healing; it is emotional labour reframed as romance. The woman changes by shrinking — by making herself safe again for the man who once made her unsafe. From a psychological perspective, this dynamic echoes patterns of trauma bonding and fawn responses: survival strategies mistaken for reconciliation. The film aestheticises this process, mistaking restraint for ethics, tenderness for justice. In doing so, it reinforces the idea that women’s endurance is a form of love — and that men’s remorse is enough to deserve it.   The Psychological Pattern What these films share is not just narrative structure, but psychology. They rely on a familiar internalisation: when something in a relationship fails, women are taught to look inward. To adjust. To soften. To try harder. Change becomes a moral responsibility rather than a mutual process. In real life, this looks like women abandoning careers, creative identities, friendships, or political beliefs to preserve intimacy. Sometimes this choice is conscious, even desired — and that distinction matters. But cinema rarely shows what comes  after  the honeymoon phase, when the self that was surrendered does not quietly return. Love that requires disappearance is not love; it is containment. Changing  With  Love To be clear, change itself is not the enemy. People evolve in relationships. The problem is asymmetry. Healthy love expands the space a woman can occupy — it does not ask her to step out of herself to make room for someone else. Cinema struggles to represent this because it confuses sacrifice with romance, endurance with virtue, and submission with growth. These films do not merely reflect cultural values; they help produce them, teaching women that love is something you earn by becoming less. The question these films never ask — and the one we must keep asking — is simple and brutal: Who are you allowed to be and still be loved? Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7  (1962) — a landmark feminist film about self-recognition rather than romantic submission

Still from The Passion of Joan of Arc Joan of Arc was born around 1412 in Domrémy, France, to a peasant family during the Hundred Years’ War. As a teenager, she claimed to receive divine visions and went on to lead French troops into battle — an extraordinary act for a young woman in a rigidly patriarchal society. Captured at seventeen, Joan was tried by an English-controlled ecclesiastical court that scrutinised her faith, clothing, and obedience as much as her actions. She was condemned for heresy and executed by burning at the stake in 1431, aged nineteen. Her conviction was later overturned, and she was canonised as a saint. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s  The Passion of Joan of Arc  (1928) is not simply a historical retelling of a saint’s trial; it is a confrontation with how women’s bodies, voices, and faces are scrutinised, doubted, and punished when they exceed the roles assigned to them. Joan of Arc is condemned not only for heresy, but for the far greater crime of certainty — of speaking with conviction in a world that does not believe women are entitled to authority, especially spiritual authority. Joan’s faith is treated as delusion, not because it lacks sincerity, but because it inhabits a female body. Her visions are interrogated endlessly, her language dissected, her clothing policed. The court demands that she explain herself over and over again, as though repetition might reveal a crack, a lie, a hysteria they are already certain exists. This disbelief is gendered. A young woman claiming direct communion with God is intolerable to an institution built on male authority and hierarchy. Her trial becomes less about theology and more about control. Dreyer’s radical decision to construct the film almost entirely through close-ups transforms Joan’s face into the primary battleground. There are few establishing shots, little spatial relief. Instead, we are pressed uncomfortably close to Joan’s skin, her eyes, her tears. Béla Balázs described the close-up as cinema’s greatest discovery — a way of rendering subjective interiority visible — and here it becomes an ethical demand. We cannot look away. Joan’s face fills the frame so completely that it feels less like we are watching her than being forced into proximity with her suffering. The Passion of Joan of Arc Poster This proximity produces an unsettling intimacy. Joan’s face is stripped of glamour, framed in harsh light, her skin textured, her head shaved, her expressions unguarded. The judges, by contrast, are often shot from distorted angles, their faces looming, grotesque, fragmented. Power is inscribed visually: Joan’s vulnerability is exposed, while the men’s authority manifests as spatial dominance and visual aggression. Yet despite this imbalance, it is Joan’s face that carries moral weight. Her expressions are not theatrical; they are raw, contradictory, human. Fear and resolve coexist. Pain does not erase conviction. John Berger’s assertion in Ways of Seeing that “women appear” becomes crucial here. Joan is punished precisely because she refuses to merely appear. She acts. She speaks. She leads armies. She claims divine purpose. The trial is an attempt to force her back into passivity — to make her explain herself into submission. The relentless close-ups resist this erasure. Joan is not reduced to spectacle for male desire; instead, her face becomes a site of ethical confrontation. To look at her is to be implicated. Illustration of Joan of Arc depicted in the 1850s. Henrietta Palmer/Stratford Gallery The film’s treatment of Joan resonates disturbingly with later historical persecutions of women, particularly the Salem witch trials. In both cases, women who deviated from social obedience — who spoke too boldly, believed too fiercely, or existed too independently — were recast as dangerous. Male fear masqueraded as moral authority. Punishment was framed as righteousness. The spectacle of trial became a warning: step out of line, and your body will pay for it. What makes  The Passion of Joan of Arc  so devastating is not only Joan’s execution, but the sustained duration of her humiliation. Dreyer forces us to sit with her suffering without narrative escape. This aligns uncannily with Antonin Artaud’s later ideas of cruelty — not cruelty as violence alone, but as an assault on comfort, an insistence that art should unsettle the nervous system. Watching Joan feels like exposure. By the end, the viewer is left raw, opened, unprotected — mirroring Joan herself. Renée Falconetti’s performance is inseparable from this impact. Her Joan is widely considered one of the greatest performances in cinema history, yet it was also her only major film role. Much has been written about Dreyer’s demanding methods and the emotional toll the role took on her. Falconetti never returned to film and died young after a troubled life. This haunting afterlife complicates the film further. The spectacle of female suffering did not end at the frame’s edge. The cost of embodying martyrdom was real. As a viewer, I found myself profoundly moved, not in a sentimental way, but in a bodily one. Joan’s face felt almost too close — invasive, confronting, intimate. Her tears did not invite pity so much as responsibility. Emmanuel Levinas writes of the face-to-face encounter as an ethical moment, one that demands recognition of the other’s humanity. Dreyer’s camera enacts this philosophy cinematically. Joan’s face asks something of us. It refuses neutrality. Nearly a century later,  The Passion of Joan of Arc  remains devastating because it exposes a pattern that has not disappeared. Women who speak with certainty are still doubted. Women’s pain is still interrogated. Belief is still withheld. Dreyer’s film does not offer comfort or resolution; it offers confrontation. Joan’s martyrdom is not romanticised — it is endured, moment by moment, breath by breath, face by face. Joan’s power lies in refusal. Refusal to recant, refusal to disappear, refusal to be rendered small. Her face — immense, vulnerable, unyielding — becomes cinema’s quiet accusation. And once seen, it cannot be forgotten. Still from The Passion of Joan of Arc

Detail of Cover image from Don’t Shoot Darling! Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia (1987) Last year, I attended Don’t Shoot Darling: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia , a lecture and screening held at RMIT’s Capitol Theatre in collaboration with the Australian Screen Research Collection. The evening foregrounded a lineage of feminist filmmaking that felt both urgently historical and deeply present — a reminder that women’s cinema has always been political, even when it has been intimate, domestic, or deliberately small. What struck me was not just the historical importance of the work discussed, but how insistently alive it felt. This was not a lecture about a closed chapter of feminist filmmaking; it was a reminder that feminist film practice has always been social, political, emotional, and collective. The lecture centred on the seminal feminist text Don’t Shoot Darling (1987), written by Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, and Freda Freiberg — a book written not about women’s filmmaking from a distance, but from within the movement itself. Equally compelling was its emphasis on feminist filmmaking as a living practice: women making films, writing criticism, organising screenings, lobbying for funding, and documenting their own labour simultaneously. There was no clean separation between theory and practice, activism and art. This approach also extended to feminist film criticism. Don’t Shoot Darling rejected a singular theoretical framework in favour of contradiction, disagreement, and feeling. Articles ranged from reflections on funding structures to deeply personal statements by filmmakers about their own work. This refusal to tidy feminist history into a clean narrative felt especially relevant now, when cultural discourse often demands clarity at the expense of complexity. In the wake of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, women across Australia formed film groups, festivals, workshops, and funding bodies: the Sydney Women’s Film Group, the Melbourne Women’s Film Group, the Women’s Film Fund, and many others. These weren’t just production spaces; they were political ecosystems. Women made films, taught each other technical skills, distributed work locally and internationally, and lobbied for structural change in funding and film education. The screening of three short films — Woman’s Day (Sydney Women’s Film Group, 1973), Super Duper (Sara Dowse, 1976), and And TENO (Margot Nash, 1984) — offered powerful, varied representations of women’s labour: not just paid work, but emotional, domestic, bodily labour. These films resist spectacle. Instead, they insist on attention — to repetitive gestures, undervalued work, and the rhythms of women’s lives that mainstream cinema has historically ignored or aestheticised without care. This resistance to spectacle speaks directly to what John Berger famously articulated in Ways of Seeing : that “men act and women appear.” Within classical cinema, women have often existed to be looked at — their bodies framed as surfaces rather than sites of experience. What Don’t Shoot Darling foregrounds is a refusal of that logic. These feminist filmmakers were not interested in making women appear more beautiful or more palatable; they were interested in allowing women to act, speak, labour, and exist without translation for a presumed male viewer. Looking, here, becomes ethical rather than consumptive. Attention replaces surveillance. What emerged clearly in discussion was the importance of intimacy in feminist filmmaking. Many women working during this period chose to tell personal stories — not as confession, but as resistance. Family violence, reproductive labour, domestic routines, exhaustion, anger, absurdity: these were not marginal themes, but central political concerns. Violence, when depicted, was often intimate rather than sensational. Emotion was not smoothed out for academic distance; it remained present in the writing and the films themselves. What still feels radical is how openly these filmmakers claimed personal voice. Their films and writings were not neutral or detached. They were emotional, political, sometimes angry, sometimes playful. This challenges the myth that “serious” film criticism or filmmaking must be objective. Feminist film culture, as presented through Don’t Shoot Darling , insists that subjectivity is not a weakness — it is a method. Crucially, the technological accessibility we now take for granted — cheaper equipment, expanded modes of distribution, online communities — rests on groundwork laid by women who fought for access to resources when filmmaking was far more restrictive. As one filmmaker noted, “We were here all the time.” The problem was never women’s absence, but the structures that refused to see them. This legacy of feminist critique becomes especially relevant when thinking about contemporary conversations around gendered violence on screen, particularly in the wake of the Me Too movement — which has not so much revealed new behaviour as made visible what was long normalised. Take The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985), a film often remembered fondly for its teen angst and character archetypes. One scene involves Bender hiding under a desk and placing his head between Claire’s legs without her consent. It’s played as a joke. The camera does not linger on her discomfort. The narrative moves on. At the time, this kind of moment was framed as harmless rebellion. Seen now, it reads clearly as sexual violation — normalised, minimised, and unchallenged. Feminist film criticism gives us the tools to name this violence retroactively — not to cancel the past, but to understand how deeply embedded these attitudes were (and still are). It reminds us that what cinema presents as “normal” shapes what society tolerates. Still from  A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night directed    by  Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014 What excites me is how many contemporary women filmmakers have reclaimed violence as something that can be reversed, reframed, or turned back against patriarchal power. Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) is a striking example. The Girl targets men who prey on women — addicts, abusers, men who mistake vulnerability for access. Crucially, she is not framed as “fragile and ethereal” (Backman Rogers, 43), nor as a moral lesson. Her violence is quiet, deliberate, and unsettling. She seduces in order to expose. She punishes without spectacle. The film refuses to eroticise her actions for a male gaze; instead, it positions violence as a form of protection — even a grim, ambiguous justice. Power is not decorative here. It is dangerous. Similarly, feminist horror — from The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) to The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) — uses genre to explore women’s bodies, ageing, motherhood, and rage. Horror becomes a language capable of holding what realism often cannot: the internalised terror of living in a body that is constantly watched, judged, and disciplined. Still From  Promising Young Woman  directed by  Emerald Fennell, 2020 By contrast, not all contemporary films directed by women succeed in escaping spectacle. Promising Young Woman (2020), despite its feminist branding, feels misaligned with the values articulated in Don’t Shoot Darling . Presented as a candy-coloured revenge fantasy, the film mistakes stylisation for critique. Trauma becomes a device rather than a lived condition — flattened into pop songs, ironic costumes, and narrative “twists” designed for audience satisfaction. The so-called revenge does not feel healing or cathartic; it feels hollow, even cruel. Instead of sitting with the long, unglamorous realities of survival — insomnia, panic, intrusive memory, endurance — the film stages violation as performance. It asks us to applaud cleverness rather than confront harm. What makes this especially troubling is perspective. Promising Young Woman feels written for the viewer’s thrill, not the survivor’s truth. It weaponises flashback-like imagery in ways that feel invasive, daring the audience to confuse shock with solidarity. In this sense, the film reproduces the very logic feminist film culture has long resisted: turning women’s pain into spectacle. Don’t Shoot Darling reminds us that feminism in cinema is not about aesthetic provocation alone, but about responsibility — about who is being looked at, who is being heard, and who is being protected. What the Don’t Shoot Darling lecture made clear is that none of this emerged in isolation. Contemporary feminist cinema exists because of the groundwork laid by women in the 1970s and 80s — women who made films on tiny budgets, fought for funding, wrote their own histories, and refused to wait for institutional permission. Many of them only made one or two films. That does not diminish their impact. If anything, it highlights how difficult it was — and still is — for women to sustain creative careers within unequal systems. Feminist film history is shaped as much by refusal — to aestheticise, to simplify, to entertain at the expense of truth — as by production itself. It is fragmented, collective, and emotionally charged. But that is its strength. To revisit these works is not an act of nostalgic recovery; it is an ethical engagement with the past that sharpens how we look at the present. Watching these films, listening to these voices, I was reminded that cinema is never neutral — and neither is criticism. To write about film is to take a position. Feminist film culture teaches us that looking closely, feeling deeply, and speaking personally are not indulgences. They are political acts. Still from  The Babadook  directed by Jennifer Kent, 2014