Cinema and Death: Women in the Refrigerator

One common way to raise the stakes and drive a plot in cinema is to offer a character as a symbolic sacrifice

And most often the victims are women: heroines are kidnapped, thrown from bridges, subjected to violence — all to justify a dramatic storyline and the actions of the main character — a man.

This phenomenon has its own name — "Woman in the Refrigerator", where a heroine's entire role is reduced to being someone’s victim.

In the lecture we will examine

• why women so often become victims in film;
• how the image of the victim has transformed;
• how female characters have reclaimed their subjectivity;
• and why this topic remains relevant in contemporary cinema.

Speaker

Кирилл Ельцов — art curator, film theorist, author of the Telegram channel «Комнатный дискурс», host of the CinemaLAB film club.