Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries Falling off a Cliff?

This book explores the challenges facing women from their mid-forties as they attempt to build/maintain careers in the screen industries. Essays are concerned with the intersection of gender and age on screen and behind the camera and how that can create a ‘double jeopardy’.

Existing research in this area has been primarily directed to onscreen representation. Female actors, with notable exceptions, struggle to get screen time and expansive roles as they age. Behind the camera, women 45+ also face challenges and roadblocks; to date, less attention has been directed to this group. The cross-cultural research in this collection offers an analysis of representation, on and off screen, touching on film, television, streaming services and film festivals. It includes an exploration of gendered ageism, age bias and stereotyping. It also highlights the achievements of mature female practitioners who, in their work and working lives, embody a resistance to restrictive cultural discourses about ageing women. 

Introduction.- Chapter 1: Susan Liddy Putting Age in the Picture: Sexism and Ageism in the Screen Industries.- Women and Screen Production.- Chapter 2: Julia Erhart and Kath Dooley Double Trouble? Charting the experiences of Australian women picture editors over age fifty.- Chapter 3: Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg ‘I am mature and established. There is no success in that.’ On Gendered Ageism in the Swedish Film Industry.- Chapter 4: Shelley Cobb and Linda Ruth Williams Caring, collaboration, confidence and constraint in the working lives of older women filmmakers in the UK.- Chapter 5: Susan Liddy. Exploring gendered ageism in the Irish Screen Industries: The Problem that Can’t Be Named?.- Interrogating Absence.- Chapter 6: Bernadette Luciano Nonnas on the Run: Ageing Women on the Move in Italian Cinema.- Chapter 7: Asier Gil Vázquez Losing the Spotlight: Ageing actresses in the Spanish Film Industry..- Chapter 8: Elizabeth Prommer The Gender-Age-Gap on screens: Cinema, TV and Streaming Services.- For the Record: Contribution and visibility.- Chapter 9: Marta Miquel-Baldellou From Actor to Director, and Beyond ‘Twilight’: Ida Lupino’s Metatextual Cinematic References to Aging and Gender.- Chapter 10: Sarah Louise Smyth  Nora, Julie, Julia: Legacies of Older Women in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia (2009).- Chapter 11: Estella Tincknell A commitment to representing “the unsayable and unseeable:” Jane Campion, cinematic politics, and gendered ageing.- Chapter 12: Deborah Jermyn and Nuala O’Sullivan ‘And I just thought I’m not having it. I’m going to set up my own festival: Curating and celebrating older women in the Women Over Fifty Film Festival (WOFFF).

Dr Susan Liddy lectures in MIC, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is editor of Women in the Irish Film Industry: Stories and Storytellers; Women in the International Film Industry: Policy, Practice and Power and co-editor of Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood. She has co-authored Auditing Gender and Diversity Change in Irish Media sectors for the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and The Pursuit of Change for Raising Films Ireland. She is Chair of Women in Film and Television Ireland and sits on a number of national and international industry boards.