Research and analysis on the Suffragette Movement film. These are the questions that need to be answered after watching the film “Suffragette”, it’s on Netflix.
What communication methods/tactics did the women involved in this movement utilize to promote their ideals and their quest to gain the right to vote? (a minimum 3 paragraphs required)
Briefly research the Suffragette Movement. Who were some of the leaders of the movement and what were some key moments of that period? (a minimum 2 paragraphs required)
She is arrested and then released, a pattern that will continue, although the incarcerations grow brutal, involving hunger strikes and the barbaric practice of forcible feeding. A cop (Brendan Gleeson) doesn’t think much of women’s suffrage, and yet is concerned about Maud: he sees working-class women being used as “fodder,” taking risks that the upper-class women refuse to take. He is not wrong, nor is he entirely unsympathetic. Gleeson brings a welcome layer to the film.
Shot mostly handheld (the cinematographer is the talented Eduard Grau, whose last film was Joel Edgerton’s “The Gift”), “Suffragette” feels like a documentary in its visuals, but at the same time drowns in subjectivity (Maud’s face in repeated closeup). The peripheral (where the good stuff happens) is barely perceived. It’s telling that the most moving passage in “Suffragette” is newsreel footage of a real event.
“Suffragette” includes the events known by anyone familiar with the history: hunger strikes, bombs dropped into mailboxes, the blowing up of Lloyd George’s summer home. A turning point was in 1913, when Emily Wilding Davison (played in the film by Natalie Press) stepped out in front of King George’s galloping horse on Derby Day, a “Votes for Women” banner in her hand, and was trampled to death. A martyr. Thousands of people lined the streets to watch the funeral procession. It’s all in “Suffragette,” but you keep wanting to move Maud out of the way so you can get a better view.
Meryl Streep appears once as Emmeline Pankhurst, the movement’s figurehead. Pankhurst, wanted by the police, comes out of hiding to make a speech from a balcony. In a 1933 article, Rebecca West (suffragette, journalist, and, near the end of her life, one of the “witnesses” in Warren Beatty’s “Reds“), referred to Pankhurst as a “reed of steel.”
Streep, in the two minutes (tops) she’s on-screen, places a genteel overlay of breeding in her ringing hoity-toity voice, but her speech is filmed in such a haphazard way that what it ends up being about is her gigantic hat.