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Information from Chambara.com:
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Women in prison film (WiP) is a subgenre of exploitation film that began in the late 1960s and continues to the present day.
Their stories feature imprisoned women who are subjected to sexual and physical abuse, typically by sadistic male or female prison wardens and guards. The genre also features many films in which imprisoned women engage in lesbian sex.
Before the '60s, films on women behind bars were serious, realistic dramas that depicted the miseries of prison life. They also carried an implied moralistic or cautionary message about the consequences of breaking the law.
The exploitation WiP films that followed discarded all moralistic pretentions. Instead, they are works of pure fantasy intended only to titillate the audience with a lurid mix of sex and violence. The flexible format, and the loosening of censorship laws, allowed filmmakers to choose from an extensive menu of misogynistic taboos. From voyeurism (strip searches, group shower scenes, cat-fights) to sexual fantasies (lesbianism, rape, sexual slavery), to fetishism (bondage, whipping, degradation), and outright sadism (beatings/whippings, electric shock, other torture/cruelty).
Most women-in-prison films employ the same stock characters and formulaic situations which have since become cinematic cliches.
- innocent or empathetic girl (or group) being wrongfully sent to a corrupt penitentiary or reform school run by a brutal and/or lecherous male or female warden
- strip search
- group shower
- lesbian elements
- cat fights with a tough "queen bee" gang leader
- cruel and often punishments and sexual assaults by sadistic guards
- riot (ex/ yard riot quelled by spraying the prisoners with a firehose)
- end: uprising or escape where villains are murdered by the inmates
My thoughts:
This genre, like most, comes down to this question: Do the predominately male audiences of these films take the role of the sadist/voyeur or of the victim? Though torture scenes are often filmed with the camera gaze on the woman (as opposed to her point-of-view looking at the perpetrator), the audience is always rooting for the victim. The nudity in the shower and strip search scenes is often filmed in a surprisingly not erotic way. Women's bodies are realistic, un-airbrushed, and often ungroomed (possibly due to the time period, when bodies were viewed differently). Women in contemporary films are always filmed more erotically and in an objectifying way than in these exploitation films.
Female comraderie, which is hard to find in both movies and real life, is valued and documented above almost every other value or topic. Teamwork is what allows the women to triumph at the end. The innocent girl and gang leader often join forces after initial spats. The women are all extremely self-sufficient, often achieving amazing feats of justice or self-preservation under extremely trying circumstances. Male characters are one-sided, and often look like bumbling fools compared with the women's competence.
That the women escape prisons, and the (predominately-male) audience is behind them, though not promoting certain morals, does point out the injustices of the system, and that it's better to give these women a second chance than to subject them to the humiliations that critiques point out as the problem in the first place.
These films have elements of blaxploitation, and are sometimes combined with naziploitation.
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