The term is used in film criticism and by film critics today: misogyny: a cinematic trope based on a primal fear of women. The fear expresses itself in the recycling of iconography where women are beaten; sexually assaulted; service men and their needs; and subordinate their own needs. For if women were truly not to be feared they would be doing all kinds of roles and working in all kinds of capacities in the film industry. There are exceptions and these exceptions are pointed out with godspeed, lest there be any causal link of misogyny to the auteur. As such, a misogynist film is an artful film. Its creator, an artist. This could describe a fair portion of the films that spectators and critics alike parade up the steps to see at Cannes. The artful arrangement of misogyny in films by auteurs from Jean Luc Godard to Lars von Trier provokes the scandals of each year's Festival de Cannes. Recall the infamous role given to Chloë Sevigny in Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny (2003).

Or Monica Bellucci's physical assault in nonlinear narrative order in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002), a film made by the French director who switched to hard porn at this year's Cannes with Enter the Void (2009). Also this year, Charlotte Gainsbourg endured genital mutilation in Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009). After the tragic death of her young son, she reverses her thesis as a women's studies scholar that women have been innocently persecuted through the centuries and instead claims that nature/woman is the church of the Antichrist. When she thereby becomes the Antichrist incarnate she suffers the same fate as thousands of women before her.

Despite such blatant themes in films by so-called auteurs, it is a delicate art to bring up the subject of cinematic misogyny and not without repercussions – especially for "the angry feminists”. When Roger Ebert called The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of Cannes, director Vincent Gallo called him "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader". This year he was far more diplomatic about Antichrist. Yet once the film is made it is out of the hands of the creator and owned by the spectator, each spectator with the imagination of his or her own mind in operation. Expressions of this multifarious mind are usually provocative.

Antichrist was given a prize from the “ecumenical” jury at Cannes as “the most misogynistic film from the self proclaimed greatest director in the world". The decision irritated many and the jury was accused of censorship for this award - preemptively taking an ax to the film before theatrical release. During the theatrical release of Antichrist scenes will be edited out. This is real censorship.

Many actresses support misogyny in films, which is presented as art to them, because these demanding roles are a fast lane to stardom. The Brown Bunny is a road movie whose outstanding journey is Sevigny performing fellatio on a fully clothed Gallo. She called him a "genius". Irréversible features the beaten-to-a-pulp Bellucci in a drawn out sexual assault within a Paris tunnel, a film she considered "beautiful" in its reverse trajectory. In Antichrist, Gainsbourg is genitally mutilated in a role that she thought twice about taking and which actually scared her.

Underneath the projection of the female body where we in turn project our fantasies in the dark is the corporeal female, a malleable dough where filmmakers mold their fantasies of torture, assault and degradation and present them as art. Gainsbourg won the best actress award at Cannes and wanted to share the prize with Lars von Trier. “I had trust in him and he is a great artist”, she revealed at the press conference following her award. Gainsbourg thanked Cannes for being courageous in taking in a film “like Antichrist” and said that her role was “the strongest, most painful and most exciting” thing she had done in her life. She announced that her father Serge Gainsbourg would have been “proud but shocked” and that her mother Jane Birken was her “confidante” on the set. Sharing her prize with the creator gave the picture a legitimate seal of approval. And so the question of misogyny must fall. The approval by the actress ultimately "liberates" the director. That is how misogyny becomes invisible.

The same kind of film made Catherine Deneuve a "star". Polanski's Repulsion (1965), Silver Bear winner at Berlin was the story of a sexually repressed woman that wigs out in her apartment in a nightie.

Belle de jour (1967), Luis Buñuel’s tale of a housewife that becomes a prostitute in order to satisfy her husband was winner of the best film at the Venice International Film Festival (1967). Isabelle Huppert, president of this year's jury, has also been cast in roles that are considered misogynist. She played a prostitute for Jean Luc Godard in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), a brothel madam in Michael Cimono's Heaven's Gate (1980) and most recently a sexually repressed self-deprecating piano teacher who falls in love with her younger student in Michael Haneke's La pianiste (2002). Also on the jury, Italian actress Asia Argento was sexually assaulted as a cop on more than one occasion by a serial murderer in The Stendahl Syndrome (1994), a film made by her father Dario Argento.

In David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), Isabella Rossellini is slapped silly by Dennis Hopper and Lynch (Rossellini's partner at the time) was nominated for an Academy Award. It is not uncommon that father and daughter, director and star, husband and wife, mother and daughter work in films that are perceived as misogynous, for with the tacit approval of women, misogyny is a matter of opinion.

The Stockholm Film Festival jury voted Irréversible best film in 2002. The year before the festival passed out vomit bags when Takeshi Miike's story of a sadomasochistic serial murderer in Ichi the Killer (2001) was screened. Miike took the manga on which the film was based to another level where women are slapped, mutilated sexually, assaulted and beaten. Men are pierced, fried, sliced and gutted. Hong Kong actress Alien Sun says that the film was "tastefully comic". Since so many women have declared so in PR for “these kinds of films”, misogyny is indeed a subjective chameleon. And that would probably be true if: a) we were not so sexually repressed as humans; and b) that because we are, misogyny is such a cash cow. But without film critics and film analysis, cinematic misogyny would remain an illusive mysterium. Since many of the films that are equated with it involve glamorous women could it be that beauty must be broken and captivated in order to control it? Often within this equation women are exchanged by other men as a commodity. Count how many times Deneuve is exchanged in Belle de Jour. What better way to do that then through physical and emotional subjugation? Could this be behind Vincent Gallo's projection of the licentious role of "slave trader" onto Roger Ebert?

Contributor details
Moira Sullivan, PhD, is a member of the Swedish Film Critics Association and a staff writer for Movie Magazine International, based in San Francisco.