During her stay in London acting as UN Special Envoy and host for the four-day “End Sexual Violence In Conflict Global Summit’, Anglina Jolie explained to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour the reasoning behind making a scene from her hit Disney movie “Maleficent”; a metaphor for rape.
“We were very conscious, the writer [Linda Woolverton] and I, that it was a metaphor for rape,”; Jolie explained about the harrowing scene in which Maleficent has her wings ripped off her body after being drugged by a childhood friend.
“At a certain point, the question of the story is what could possibly bring her back?”; the actress continues. “The question was asked: “What could make a woman become so dark and lose all sense of her maternity, her womanhood and her softness?’ Something would have to be so violent and aggressive,”; she added about the “beautifully written’ storyline.
The mother-of-six explained that while the film is “an extreme Disney, fun version of it,”; at its core, the film is about “abuse, and how the abused then have a choice of abusing others or overcoming and remaining loving, open people.”;
Jolie also talked about her 2011 film “In The Land of Blood and Honey”; which she wrote and directed, detailing the rape of Muslim women in Bosnia.
Prompted to make the film after being “very emotionally moved,”; by the stories she heard from survivors of rape she met during a previous trip to the region, the actress said “I did not realize, of course, how emotional it would be,”; of filming the powerful scene.
Insisting that although the scenes are powerful, Jolie says “[they’re] not actually very graphic.”; Explaining, “it’s what you don’t see. I think, that we’ve left to the imagination. There’s no nudity in the rape and you don’t see much. Sometimes staying on the women’s face, seeing her reaction, it’s not so graphic, but it brings so much emotion to mind that it feels even more upsetting and graphic.”;
Have you seen both of Angelina’s films? Do you think that the use of such powerful imagery is warranted? Or too much?