Never Too Old to be Seen

When feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey famously described classical Hollywood cinema as an art form dominated by a male gaze which objectifies women, she forgot to specify “Women under 35”. 75% percent of the audience of mainstream Hollywood cinema are between 14 and 30 years old, and starring roles for women are reserved for actresses largely in that age bracket. By contrast, European cinema increasingly seems to offer important roles for women over sixty, and stories, which validate and expand on the experience of ageing people of all genders. This partially reflects the fact that European cinema consists mostly of arthouse films, and that the audience for arthouse cinema has been ageing over the last decades. Furthermore, it also speaks to culturally and socially specific approaches to the visibility of older and aging people.

In the CGC Colloquium “Never Too Old to Be Seen: Ageing and Gender in European Cinema” specialists from five European countries – Britain, France, Italy, Romania, Germany – engage with different aspects of the cinematic representation of old age and gender. Through six instalments and a variety of formats the colloquium addresses issues such as the tension between screen age and physical age, questions of masculinity across cultures, female roles and questions of motherly authority, and cultural differences in standards of visibility for ageing women. Combining cinema studies and the social sciences with gerontology, the colloquium advocates for a cultural gerontology approach to questions of cinematic representation, visibility and well-being, with a particular focus on questions of gender.