Women in the Picture

Hello! My name is Madeleine Mazuzan and I'm an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. As a senior at Pratt Institute I worked on my thesis film, Women in the Picture, alongside my wonderfully talented co-director Alanna Phillips. I've been fortunate enough to know Alanna since our freshman year and I've always been so impressed by her poetic command of language and how this manifests in her film work, as well as her commitment towards radical kindness in large and small ways. I knew early on that I wanted to bring Alanna onto this project, and I'm so honored and excited to be sharing this experience with her.
Women in the Picture is a short, experimental narrative film that explores the impact of media representation on a "universal" womanhood. My connection to this project stems from my love for film, and my love for women. I was inspired by movies such as "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders," "Mon Crime," and "Helter Skelter" (2012), that all explore femininity in different ways and through different genres.
"Women in the Picture" is about a woman who works in film, and her journey to discover herself and her place in the industry with the help of the other women on set. In the film, our main character "Maiden" works as a miniature model builder on a set where she's the only woman aside from the three actresses who appear on screen. Each night Maiden comes home and plugs herself into her TV to dream through different film genre channels; a chick flick, a film noir, and a horror. Each genre channel corresponds to one of the actresses Maiden works with, who, in these dream worlds, assume the roles of various female archetypes across a shifting background of Western media throughout history. Together, Maiden and the other Archetypes must find a way to break free and claim agency over their own stories, and discover what a truly female gaze looks like to them.
I hope this film communicates the complex experience of womanhood and the feeling of being an object of the male gaze. It is based on research on female archetypes throughout art and film history, and also includes relevant commentary on misogyny and racism and the intersections between them. The film explores themes such as intersectional feminism, the duality of identity, the power of the gazes, and the effects of media consumption through a complex visual language built by repeating montages and thematic imagery. While watching this film, I hope that the audience will take away an understanding of the main character's struggle with media and how she's represented in it. I hope they can be empathetic to her journey and can relate to the difficulties of media addiction and the ways that we see women represented in the public eye. Ultimately, the film is about the experience of being a woman in the film industry under a male gaze; how we idolize pictures of women, but demonize them in real life.

Hiya! I'm Alanna! I'm a writer and filmmaker currently based in Brooklyn, NY, and co-director of Women in the Picture alongside Madeleine (Maddie) Mazuzan. I've known Maddie since our freshman year of film-school, and she has proved to be an artist of singular vision and herculean work ethic. Watching and helping her craft this vibrant story has honestly been a joy these past few months, and I'm very excited to be co-directing on set.
While my work apart from this project usually falls into more documentary modes of filmmaking, I think the place where Maddie's mind and my own mind meet is in the experimental. Turning cinema in on itself is a concept I am always considering when asking others to be in front of a camera, and it excites me that that is what so much of this film is about.
To me, Women in the Picture speaks to a self-awareness that comes with examining who makes the media we watch and what we come to believe about ourselves when we watch it. As a black woman who loves films and makes films, I've had my heart broken many times looking back on the movies and TV shows that filled my head as a young girl.
Under-representation and mis-representation were issues I attempted to gloss over when I was younger, much to my mother's dismay, who would challenge my understanding of these entertainment forms even in those early years. With older eyes, and with the privilege of being able to study film and pick it apart from its earliest conceptions, I've begun to trace bitter lines from many of my insecurities, misdirected desires, and forms of self-belittling back to the images of black women (and women in general) I was fed as a child. These images, of course, are not the only things to blame, but images do have the power to reinforce the shame and smallness we've learned in real-life.
I stand by the belief that images are powerful. There is no denying this. Thus, we cannot be reckless in our image making. I do not claim to be a perfect image-maker, and as skilled as Maddie is, I do not think she claims to be one either. This is why this film is a collaborative effort, so that there may be room for edits, redirections, and insertions that attempt to depict these issues in unintimidated, yet tasteful ways as best we can.