by Anthony Frajman
ACMI’s major screen exhibition looks at the women who blazed a trail on the screen, spanning the early years of Hollywood to today. Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion looks at pioneering women in screen history, both in Hollywood and globally, who defied expectations and refused to conform to conventions, ranging from Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis to Tilda Swinton and Margot Robbie.
Ambassador and two-time Academy Award winner, Geena Davis, will travel to Melbourne to open the exhibition, and take part in a live conversation.
Goddess will also feature a suite of programs, screenings and talks with Australian screen industry figures including Jan Fran, Sophie Hyde, Pallavi Sharda, Carly Findlay, and Taryn Brumfitt.
Ahead of its launch, FilmInk spoke with ACMI Director of Experience & Engagement, Dr Britt Romstad.
How did Goddess come about?
“It’s a project that’s been in the pipeline for three or four years. Initially, it was a project that came up with Katrina Sedgwick, who was our previous CEO. She was really interested in creating an exhibition that was structured around the idea of the screen goddess. I think that the kernel of the idea was really around those glamorous screen goddesses of the forties and fifties, and finding out stories about them that we may not have known. Some of those people are very well known to us. There are certain stories that we know about them, but the idea was to find the things about them and tell the stories about them that weren’t popularly known.
“And then it evolved and changed over time into Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion. And of course, when the project started as well, the other thing that was happening was the rise of the #MeToo movement and that whole reckoning in the industry around gender and power. There was a sense that as Australia’s National Museum of Screen Culture, we needed to be part of that conversation. We’ve got a lot of expertise in this area, and we really want to be leading the conversation around gender and film.”
The exhibition features major Hollywood figures like Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe. Can you take us through some of the main people it started with?
“We wanted to do an exhibition that was a real celebration of the screen goddess but was also interested in the screen goddess who was powerful and complex and not just an object of beauty. There was a desire to look at the screen goddess in a new way and try and pull out some of the complexity that’s been skimmed over, and the ways in which these women have been powerful in their own right. So, the exhibition’s divided into five main sections. There’s crafting the ideal, gender-bender, dangerous women, weaponizing femininity and fighting back.
“With that sort of framework in place, the curators could then go, ‘okay, what are the stories we can tell within each of these sections?’ For instance, the exhibition opens with crafting the ideal, and that really looks at the ways in which the female goddess has been idealised, exoticized by film and also constructed. This idea that, actually it was a construct right from the get-go. Marilyn is at the start of the exhibition, with a section that pulls out the ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’ performance from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
“But the great thing about that is that the curators have a common thread. There’s Marilyn performing ‘Diamonds’, and that’s juxtaposed through costume and video with reworkings of that idea amongst people like Madonna, who reworked that material for the ‘Material Girl’ video, someone like Winnie Harlow who was a reality TV contestant who challenged ideas of white femininity. There’s also the pink jumpsuit worn by Margot Robbie in Birds of Prey. So, that diamond pink dress that Marilyn wore has become a lightning rod. And it started a conversation right throughout screen culture up to the present day.
“The costumes there are the Margot Robbie Birds of Prey costume. There’s Winnie Harlow’s reworking of the pink dress, and also there’s a pink dress worn by Elaine Crombie in the ABC TV series Kiki and Kitty. That idea again of celebrating femininity and a sexuality that’s about Aboriginal women, something that’s being completely marginalized from that kind of ideal construction of femininity.
“That’s how the exhibition starts, and it continues that idea of women in dialogue with each other over the course of history.”
One of the key figures of the exhibition is Marlene Dietrich. How important was what she was doing at the time in terms of challenging on-screen and off-screen conventions?
“Yeah, she came from Berlin, and she really bought that Berlin underground scene with her to Hollywood. She really tested the boundaries of prescribed femininity, particularly through the ways in which she dressed in tuxes and male clothes. For a long time, she made sure that she conformed in many of the ways, she was obviously very beautiful, and when she was on the red carpet, she would wear appropriate dresses, not be too shocking. But there came a point around 1934, when she did finally wear a tux on the red carpet, and it caused an absolute sensation. It sounds incredible now. In that section, where her costume will be, there is that clip from Morocco when she’s in the nightclub entertaining and she kisses a woman. I feel like there’s still a sort of a radical feel in that moment when you think about Hollywood. That really lays down that progress isn’t always linear. It’s not always about coming from the dark ages into enlightenment. To think that 1930, it’s almost a hundred years ago now, which is incredible in itself. And, yet there she was. I think that’s what a lot of the stories do. And for people who aren’t familiar with the history of film, that might be quite a revelation”.
“That area is grouped together under the banner of gender-bender. It looks at the fact that gender’s fluid and in Marlene’s playfulness and adopting male outfits, really highlights the fact that having fixed binaries is nonsense in many ways.”
“In that section, there’s an area that looks at Orlando from the nineties directed by Sally Potter and then juxtaposed with Marlene Dietrich will be a costume worn by Billy Porter at the Tony Awards. So, there’s not a progression from 1930 to contemporary, it’s mixed in because what the goddess was, was contested and being poked at right from the very start and continues to be.”
There are a number of pivotal figures in the exhibition whom viewers may not be so familiar with. Who are some of these figures and why are they important?
“The other thing that the exhibition does in that section is it compares her with an African American performer Gladys Bentley, who was part of the Harlem uprising, and she was a lesbian and part of the underground queer scene. I think at some point, Bentley ended up in jail and was prosecuted. There’s an underlying story there too about white privilege and different people can get away with different things depending on who they are. I think other women looked back to Marlene and they have reaped the benefits of that, but it’s not all smooth sailing after that.
“There’s Meena Kumari, who was a very famous star in Bollywood. There’s a story around her ability to undermine some of the contemporary assumptions about appropriate femininity in India.
“Anna May Wong is another one of those really interesting characters. She’s part of Dangerous Women, which looks at what happens when women become powerful and how does film treat them. And what does film do with women who don’t conform to the stereotype? There’s a section which looks at looks at the ways in which she grappled with the pervasive racism. As an Asian-American actor, she was unable to play even in films where there were roles for Chinese women, they were played by white women, because of the Hays Code and just racism essentially.
“There’s a bit of an exploration of what happens when women age, what happens to them once they fall outside of what’s acceptable in terms of the age of the artist? There’s a story around Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and Davis famously took out an ad in Variety, ‘work wanted’, which is just incredible even now, but it’s also so contemporary. It’s fascinating and simultaneously heartbreaking that some of these things have just been in play and struggled against for (so long).”
Looking at actors today, who do you think is blazing a trail?
“I think there’s a lot more scope. There are not the controls that are in place now, because at that time, the studios were so dominant and really had such a major impact on what people could and couldn’t do. I think there’s a lot of trailblazers. Cate Blanchett is one of them. And there’s a whole array of women who have been nominated for awards this awards season, and many of them are older. People like Cate Blanchett, Michelle Yeoh, having her incredible moment, Angela Bassett. There’s all these women who even just being visible and present is kind of a radical act at this point, given how difficult it’s been for women after they turn 40 and become invisible.”
Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion opens at ACMI on April 5, 2023
Geena Davis will appear live in conversation on Wednesday 5 April at ACMI as part of a one-day conference, Being Seen on Screen: The Importance of Representation. Details and tickets here.
