Barriers to Diversity in Film – A Research Review – Aug 07

such as Stella Does Tricks (1996) and Under the Skin (1996) place
female lead heroines in a provincial setting in England and contest the
dominant traditions of British filmmaking, not only because they are
female leads, but because they come to represent female dilemmas
and choices. These women however, may be ‘representative’ (“local,
awkward and complex within the nation”) rather than a representation
of the nation, whereby the nation identifies itself as a unity. These
latter representations of a nation are embodied in The Full Monty and
Trainspotting, still self-consciously stories about boys (Brunsdon
2000).
5.8 Why stereotypes persist
Campion 2005, writing about television representation, argues that
the situation in broadcasting does not change for several reasons.
Minority groups are still seen as a ‘bolt on’; the representation debate
is focused on individuals and not the infrastructure in which people
work; there is no motivation for the powerful to change; and numbers
of people representing a group are counted, instead of examining a
more qualitative approach to stereotyping (Campion 2005). These
arguments may also apply to film.
Currently the film industry has no industry standards on monitoring,
either of employment or portrayal. Ethnic minorities are presented in
terms of large major groupings, rather than their specificity of region
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