《文化对比阅读》(下) 11 Entertainment 3 Film Industry in the United States.docxVIP

Film Industry in the United States by Patricia Erens The story of Jewish women in film reflects that of Jewish women in America in this century. Although, like their male co-religionists, a large number of Jewish women have contributed to the development of the film industry, they have had to fight for their place. From the early years of the silent era through today, the struggle of Jewish women to be recognized for their talents has been a difficult one. Any discussion of Jewish women in film must address several different areas. First, there is employment opportunity. How have they been treated as women at their work? What jobs have they been allowed? Second, there is the communication of the Jewish woman’s experience to the screen. How has their Jewishness influenced the way screenwriters wrote, actors acted, and directors directed? And finally, more broadly, how have Jewish women been represented as characters on film, and have those characters been played by Jewish women? In the early days of film, the silent era, the majority of women of all ethnicities were limited to acting. However, Jewish women also made their presence profoundly felt in the area of screenwriting, and continued to do so for the rest of the century. The first three decades of the twentieth century were a time of unusual freedom and discovery for the film industry, which was then more open than it would be in later decades. It made more films with ethnic story lines and roles, stereotypical and sometimes degrading as they were. In fact, by the 1920s, a distinct genre of films about Jewish life had developed: melodramas about Jewish life in the ghettos of New York. Some were sentimental, others harshly realistic, and still others broadly comic; all illustrated the dilemma of the immigrant Jews. During the teens, the films’ sympathies were with the older generation, but by the 1920s it was the children who were heroes, as those children chose assimilation over Orthodoxy. Jewish-Irish mo