Playing the Bitch: Why We’re Showing a Season of Fierce Females

Anna Bogutskaya’s 2019 BFI programming note provides an early point of entry into the questions later developed in her book. This is a curator explaining a selection, not a survey claiming to encompass all women in cinema. The distinction is important: a season creates an argument by putting films beside one another.

For FemRes, the most useful question is what changes when a programmer treats female characters as a body of work rather than exceptions within male directors’ careers. A retrospective can reorganize memory. It can move a performance previously treated as supporting spectacle into the center of discussion. Yet selection also excludes: availability, archives, rights, and the traditions of criticism shape which characters can enter the room. A feminist program should make those limits discussable instead of presenting its list as a natural canon.

The provocative title raises a separate problem of address. Reclaiming an insult can interrupt shame, but there is no universal audience that hears the word in the same way. A term shared affectionately between friends may operate as workplace harassment in another setting. The editorial question is not simply whether a word has been reclaimed once and for all. It is who uses it, who can refuse it, and whose injury becomes invisible when the joke is declared empowering.

There is a similar tension between agency and domination. A woman who organizes events around her own ends disrupts the expectation that she merely assist someone else’s story. But the presence of an agenda tells us little about its consequences. A strong feminist screening discussion can therefore hold two questions together: what freedom of action has this character acquired, and what does her action do to other people? Admiration for craft need not become admiration for power.

Read this piece before Unlikeable Female Characters, then compare All About Eve with Mean Girl Feminism. The pairing is proposed by FemRes, not presented as the original BFI program. This page is an editorial response to the linked source, not a translation of the essay.