The Female Figure on the Sidelines

The women in these posters regularly occupy a subsidiary space, reduced not only in focus but relegated to the periphery - often literally reduced in size (as in fact everything is) in contrast to the fore-grounded and gigantic figure of the male hero.  These two posters, of the same movie, exemplify the habits of female representation:  the women hover in the background disembodied, peripheral and often monochromatic, detached from the central action which focuses on the male or males - the contrast is often one of female stasis versus male physical dynamism. 

Alternatively, the female is located below and at the mercy of the man and the action.  In both cases, the female is an insertion, an imposition into male space - the space of the battlefield and the space of the poster.  In the poster on the right, the visual subordination of the female matches, and indeed expresses, her sexual and narrative subservience.¹

¹ In fact, however, this scene does not occur in the movie at all:  the girl never clings to the hero’s leg as he hurls his spear.  Thus, while the scene conveys the plot of the movie in its vague essentials - the hero protects his homeland and his girlfriend - this particular image belongs only to the world of the poster.  These posters are, thus, often visual constructions which attain a life - that is to say, a narrative - of their own apart from the movies they purport to encapsulate.