They stay loyal to skating as a medium to tell their story whilst using it to explore more evident truths about their worlds, thereby creating a more complete portrait of reality which is absent from most skating stories. However, in the last two years films such as Skate Kitchen and Minding the Gap have challenged these ideas, telling very different stories, but in equally intimate and impressive ways. Even in a cult classic like Larry Clark’s Kids, women are treated as sex objects and with very little sympathy. While this masculinity may not fit traditional moulds, often more focussed on individualism and rebellion, it certainly wasn’t feminine or inclusive. Skating has always been portrayed as a masculine activity, from its ‘boy-meets-girl’ origins on film in 1965s Skaterdater, through to 1989s Gleaming the Cube and even Clueless. Christian Slater in Gleaming the Cube (1989), 20th Century Fox Not only does the genre challenge how we perceive skating itself, after years of stereotypical representation in pop culture, but it also continues to break down wider societal trends. Yet nobody could have imagined that skate films would provide some of the most interesting and fresh explorations of masculinity and gender in recent years. įilm has always been inherently valuable to gender studies, particularly masculinity, due to those behind the camera and writing screenplays. Much of gender studies has moved beyond gender labels entirely, and we find ourselves in another perceived crisis of masculinity. Now here we are, decades and many wars later, our fundamental understanding of masculinity has moved away from conflict and idealised manliness. After this, it was retroactively applied to post-World War Two America and the popularity of actors like James Dean, who rebelled against traditional ideas of manhood. It was first identified as a legacy of the Vietnam War, and seen in films like The Deer Hunter and Dog Day Afternoon. Since the mainstream conception of gender studies in the 1970s, it has often presented the idea of ‘masculinity in crisis’. The depiction of Camille’s quest for freedom and identity feels narrow and constrained.After decades of misrepresentation, Minding the Gap and Skate Kitchen provide a fresh perspective on masculinity in skateboarding culture. Vinberg is a wonderfully poised and thoughtful actor, and the entire cast holds the screen with spontaneous and focussed energy, but Moselle locks them into her sprawling story with short scenes that advance it as if on index cards. But Camille’s incipient relationship with Devon (Jaden Smith), a member of a rival-and aggressively misogynous-all-male skating group, soon threatens her new friendships. Camille (played by Rachelle Vinberg, the group’s founder) lives on Long Island with her mother (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who bars her from skating then Camille finds the Manhattan-centered group on social media, sneaks off to join it, makes her first close friends, and moves in with a member named Janay (Dede Lovelace). The director Crystal Moselle builds this drama, about an eighteen-year-old girl whose familial and sexual conflicts are intensified by her passion for skateboarding, around a real-life group of young female skaters.
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