After Eve

The imagery of films both reflected and spurred radical shifts in women’s lives throughout the 20th century. The history of film, and of responses to film, provides evidence of social attitudes and prejudices—those in Hollywood but also regional biases, pertaining to race as well as to gender. Those who were socially denigrated, such as prostitutes, were often treated with a degree of respect in screen narratives. The traditional genres had depended on closure; film, especially post–World War II, featured women and children with complexly difficult lives often lacking neat resolutions. Resnais, Bergman, and Antonioni each focused on women with humdrum rather than heroic lives, and made them the linchpin for studies of the psychological pressures of the modern world.