Under Pressure: Women, Cinema, and the Limits of Representation
at Ilusion Cinema, the Museum of Film Art of the National Film Archive–Audiovisual Institute (FINA), Warsaw
Spring 2020
● Curating
Throughout the history of cinema, women have played leading roles on screen—yet rarely have they held power behind the camera or in the structures of storytelling. Filmmakers have portrayed women as mothers, wives, workers, rebels, lovers, and victims. They have been framed as resilient and fragile, sensual and unstable, dignified and desperate. In each case, what we see is not simply a character, but a cultural projection—shaped by the desires, fears, and fantasies of the societies (and often the men) who create them.
This program invites us to look more closely at how women are depicted under pressure: politically, psychologically, socially. These films offer gripping portrayals of female characters navigating systems that seek to contain them—whether through war, work, domesticity, madness, or desire. Some resist, others conform, still others collapse. What unites them is not a singular “feminine strength,” but a spectrum of contradictions that challenge the simplicity of that very idea.
What happens when a woman steps outside the role assigned to her by narrative? What do we see when, instead of the familiar image of “female strength,” we’re confronted with weakness, rebellion, instability—or rage?
These films do not offer easy resolutions or idealized heroines. Instead, they trace the fractures—personal, political, and cinematic—through which womanhood is imagined, contested, and performed.
At stake is not only the woman on screen, but the power of cinema to either reflect or distort her experience. Who speaks for her? Who watches? And who benefits?
War, history, and national trauma
① Two Women (Vittorio De Sica, 1960) — A harrowing wartime drama in which a mother and daughter experience the brutality of World War II firsthand, exposing the dehumanizing effects of violence on female bodies and bonds.
② The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979) — A postwar epic that traces the rise of a woman who adapts to Germany’s reconstruction through ambition and strategic sexuality—both a symbol and a casualty of economic rebirth.
③ Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Vladimir Menshov, 1980) — An epic melodrama tracing three women’s lives across decades, capturing the rhythms of love, labor, and quiet endurance in Soviet-era Russia.
Control, surveillance, and the State
④ The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Volker Schlöndorff & Margarethe von Trotta, 1975) — A political thriller about a woman persecuted by the media and state after a fleeting encounter, reflecting the paranoia of 1970s West Germany.
⑤ Little Vera (Vasili Pichul, 1988) — A groundbreaking Soviet drama about a rebellious young woman suffocating in a joyless, crumbling social order—emblematic of late-perestroika malaise.
⑥ Diary of a Lost Girl (G. W. Pabst, 1929) — A powerful early feminist film portraying a young woman’s fall from grace at the hands of a repressive bourgeois society, still shockingly relevant in its indictment of institutional cruelty.
Desire, objectification, and resistance
⑦ I Knew Her Well (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965) — A devastating portrait of a young woman chasing an acting career in Rome, whose optimism is gradually crushed by a cynical, patriarchal industry.
⑧ Les Bonnes Femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960) — A caustic, ambivalent depiction of four Parisian shopgirls whose lives oscillate between boredom and danger, desire and disillusionment.
⑨ And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) — A scandalous and iconic performance by Brigitte Bardot that redefined the image of female sexuality on screen, as both liberating and profoundly commodified.
①⓪ Women on the Edge (Michał Waszyński, 1938) — A little-known but striking drama about female migration and exploitation, exposing the perils of idealized escape and the violence of human trafficking.
Ambition, class, and self-making
①① Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988) — A sharp-witted Wall Street fable about class mobility, gender politics, and the cost of ambition, in which a secretary seizes the opportunity to step into her boss’s shoes—and power.
①② Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974) — A story of grief, resilience, and motherhood, following a woman’s attempt to rebuild her life after loss while carving out her own sense of identity.
Female psyche
①③ A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974) — A raw, intimate study of psychological unraveling and domestic constraint, with Gena Rowlands delivering a performance that refuses to be tamed by cliché.
①④ Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) — A haunting psychological descent into isolation, paranoia, and mental illness, captured with striking formal control and undercurrents of repressed trauma.
Sisterhood, solidarity, and strange kinships
①⑤ Three Women (Robert Altman, 1977) — A surreal, shifting portrait of female identity and interdependence, where the lines between imitation, obsession, and transformation blur.
①⑥ Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) — A dreamlike mystery where the disappearance of schoolgirls disrupts the oppressive calm of colonial society, hinting at repressed desires and unknowable forces.