Renowned film critic and author Molly Haskell said the roles of women on the silver screen have continually changed since film was created, but female characters still are not as strong as they could be.

“Our expectations are so raised now,” she said. “We expect revolutions to happen overnight. It’s coming, but we must wait.”

Haskell’s presentation, titled “Whose Fantasy Are We Seeing? Women and Men in Film,” was held Wednesday in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union before a near-capacity crowd of more than 160 people.

“I don’t think we’re passive receptacles,” she said. “A lot of what you see in a movie is what you bring into it.”

Haskell spoke about the evolution of the way women have been treated since the inception of silent films in the 1920s.

She said silent films cast women in one of two types or roles: the Madonna and the whore.

However, the movie industry soon began to see regulation. After the installment of the production code of the 1930s, movie makers had to find ways to portray sex and violence through metaphors, leading to some very interesting movies, she said.

Haskell said the films of those days also were put in one of two categories: the screwball comedy and the film noir. The screwball movies were lighter and appealed more to women, and the film noir movies projected the sexual guilt of men onto women.

“And interestingly enough,” Haskell said, “the two genres that appeal to youngsters today is screwball comedies and film noir.”

Haskell said she found the films of the next decade, the 1940s, to be a lot like current films.

Specifically, she said a lot of women’s roles in the decade dealt with women struggling with working and trying to raise a family. She also said a large number of current roles revolved around the same concept.

“This either/or supposition in the ’40s was more than something exterior censors pushed on us,” Haskell said. “There is something in all of us that wants to see the woman and the man get together. No matter how successful a woman is, she’s still got to be a woman in the end.”

But although the women of the silver screen in the 1940s always turned out to be “women” in the end, they were remembered as being strong, independent women, Haskell said. She said because of this, she really liked the women’s roles in the 1940s.

“But that gets into just how should women be portrayed, anyway,” Haskell said. “Is it correct to show women triumphantly or victimized? Don’t we need both?”

Haskell said women’s roles in the ’70s were just terrible.

“The 1970s had wimpy women,” she said.

Haskell said the ’80s saw more of a return to strong roles for women. Those films led into the films of the current decade, which Haskell saw with mixed reviews.

Talking about femme fatale movies such as “Basic Instinct” and “Fatal Attraction,” Haskell said, “If a man were a woman, he would want to be this type of woman — a bisexual, violent rich writer.”

Haskell glowingly spoke of recent movies such as “Age of Innocence,” “Jackie Brown” and “Shakespeare in Love.”

Haskell’s speech was funded by the Government of the Student Body, in cooperation with the Student Union Board and the American Indian Symposium. It is one of the lectures in a series on film called Creating Reality: Film in America.

The week-long lecture series is sponsored by the Institute on National Affairs.