Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

[domino harvey]

L'avenir sounds great, I'll add it to my queue!

Chicago Reader names five best films directed by Latin American women-- not familiar with any of these, can anyone vouch?

[swo17]

zedz already vouched for Hour of the Star, and Araya is well worth a watch--it's out on DVD from Milestone.

[domino harvey]

Huge Soderbergh quote on the cover for Araya, so I guess that's an endorsement!

[bearcuborg]

This seems to be as good as any place to mention Martha Stephens, Passenger Pigeons.

It's lumped into the mumblecore group of films, so perhaps some will have to overcome that hurdle. But as good as anything I've ever seen. It slowly builds into a story that haunts me still - filled with the terror of regret. It's also shot really well. Altmanesque. I caught it SXSW when it came out.

Glad to see Samira Makhmalbaf mentioned, for a time she was a good as anyone making movies - and then kinda disappeared. While talking about Iranian filmmakers - The House is Black by Forough Farrokhzad. I caught a screening of this at Facets while I lived in Chicago in the 1990s. Rosenbaum introduced it - there's a lovely DVD out there somewhere with a small collection of her poems.

[zedz]

L'avenir sounds great, I'll add it to my queue!

Chicago Reader names five best films directed by Latin American women-- not familiar with any of these, can anyone vouch?

Araya is visually stunning, but there are a lot of other quasi-ethnographic films in a similar vein that I like more. Still well worth a watch. Danzon I barely remember as generic arthouse ostensibly gritty / covertly feelgood fare.

The only Bemberg film I've seen is her last, I Don't Want to Talk About It. It's a weird modern fable in which a mother determines that her dwarf daughter is never going to find out she's different from other people, so she sets out to destroy anything in the real world that might reveal that to her (like garden gnomes). I couldn't quite see from it just why Bemberg was so highly regarded, but it's certainly an unusual and interesting film.

[zedz]

I've started dragging out films I need to rewatch, and first up is:

Two Friends (Jane Campion, 1986) - Campion's first feature is a little rough around the edges, but it shows just why hers was such an exciting new voice in the 1980s. It's the tale of the dissolution of the friendship of two schoolmates. This is not a spoiler, because the story is told in reverse, starting when they're near-strangers and working its way back to when they were eternally inseparable. It gets the fragility and intensity of young friendships exactly right, and the antipodean '80s details are so on point I was cringing at times. There's also a delightful, purely Campion sequence in which the long letter Kelly is writing to Louise during various classes is imagined as semi-animation. Highly recommended.

[hearthesilence]

I posted this elsewhere but I'm not really a fan of Jane Campion's adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady. However, it does have passionate fans, so maybe it has (or will have) more on this board?

Amy Taubin wrote an excellent review in the Village Voice back when it was first released, but here's another long review from Film Comment.

[Michael Kerpan]

Another thumbs up for Araya and for L'Avenir....

[Hopscotch]

L'avenir will definitely make my list should I get around to submitting one, as would Kathleen Collins's extraordinary Losing Ground, Yvonne Rainer's Journeys from Berlin/1971, Muratova's Melody for a Street Organ, Akerman's Les rendezvous d'Anna, Brett Story's The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, Peggy Ahwesh's Martina's Playhouse, and Leslie Harris's Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.. Will try to write these all up before lists are due.

re: the Latin American women directors list domino posted: I've been meaning to see One Way or Another forever. There was a serviceable print with subs on YouTube for awhile -- maybe it's still there?

[zedz]

Peggy Ahwesh and Yvonne Rainer are major names I should have included on my big list, but overlooked because their works are all unavailable on home video. Is that correct?* I haven't seen the films you recommend for them, but I can put in a good word for Rainer's Film About a Woman Who. . . and Privilege, and Ahwesh's Strange Weather and (extremely explicit) The Color of Love.

* Well, it might as well be. Zeitgeist have Rainer's seven features available on DVD, but it'll cost you $499 - and this is the non-institutional / 'private home use' price!

[Kirkinson]

Three Poplars on Plyushchikha Street (Tatyana Lioznova, 1967)

For the first couple minutes of this I wondered if I had actually stumbled upon an overlooked masterpiece. It opens with a dream sequence in a forest that had me from the first shot. The camera glides around the lead actress while the blurry outlines of the trees swirling in the background give everything a kind of dizzy, merry-go-round feeling. It’s disconcerting, stark, and strange. The film settles into something rather more conventional after that—aside from another dream sequence late in the film—but it’s still quite good.

Country bumpkin Nyura (Tatyana Doronina, excellent) has a somewhat unhappy marriage: nothing abusive, just a husband who is grouchy, stern, and inattentive. She takes a trip to Moscow to sell some ham and visit with her sister-in-law. Along the way she’s presented with a series of what-ifs and could-have-beens as she meets a taxi driver who takes a clear romantic interest in her, and her sister-in-law explains how much happier she’s been since separating from her husband. Curiously, Nyura does little to drive the plot herself. Every step of the way, other characters tell her where to go and what to do, and the story is built entirely around her reactions and observations. It takes place almost entirely in a single day and ends on a poignantly ambiguous and unresolved note. There’s no major drama, just a small, quiet, wistful, humanist story about a woman slowly realizing she has never really thought about her own happiness before.

It’s also just exquisitely constructed. There are shots and cuts and camera movements that might seem a bit showy if they didn’t all seem so perfectly suited for the moments they were made for, so perfectly blended with the drama and the characters’ feelings. Moscow is also superbly rendered as a setting, with some lovely, forlorn-looking shots of the city that always seem to be in some kind of psychic conversation with the characters’ inner thoughts.


Robinsonade, or My English Grandfather (Nana Djordjadze, 1987 - Camera d’Or winner)

There’s always something slightly irritating about Nana Djordjadze’s films that I can never quite pin down. I felt this way about A Chef in Love and 27 Missing Kisses and I feel it even more strongly here. A lot of it I think comes down to the scripts, which are always written by her husband, Irakli Kvirikadze. He has certain tropes that seem to fall flat for me again and again, like the flashback structure he always seems to impose on his stories (a child or grandchild reconstructing the protagonist’s life).

There are so many things here that, if I just describe them, sound like interesting ideas to me: interviewing characters documentary-style both in the past and the present-day sequences; the grandson in the present being a composer writing a symphony about his grandfather, which gives the score a kind of diegetic motivation in the past sequences; the obscuring of the image of the past through various kinds of diffusion or other obstructions on the lens; the central premise of the telegraph operator declaring the area around a telegraph pole English territory and basically granting himself political asylum there. The film that has all these things ought to be interesting, at least. And yet, I watched the whole thing just feeling vaguely annoyed the whole time. Something in Djordjadze’s basic tone or approach just doesn’t work for me.

[Hopscotch]

Peggy Ahwesh and Yvonne Rainer are major names I should have included on my big list, but overlooked because their works are all unavailable on home video. Is that correct?*

That's correct, though you can stream a number of films by both (including the two I highlighted) on Ubuweb.

[knives]

Washington Square (dir. Holland)
I was initially going to skip over this as on the surface there is nothing particularly appealing to me here though I am tremendously glad I did not listen to those instincts. The film naturally stands in the shadows of Merchant Ivory, being sourced from one of their favorite authors, but more effectively escapes that shadow than any of the other '90s films in this vein I have seen. That's mostly thanks to Holland's well thought out decision to replace their psycho-sexual concerns with an earthy grim full of as much blood and urine as you'll see outside of Ozu. This is a very dressed down look into Henry James' world full of very ordinary people (there's a real Eastern European sense to the casting here) living in one of the uglier transitions in human history. The film seems a completely real presentation of its era. The most impressive element to that is that the movie also plays out with a feeling of Romantic era poetry giving a sense of why Shelley or Keats might have seemed real in their time.

The use of color matches this. Despite being draped in mud it feels heightened and exposed allowing for moments of real oppression (the use of red in one scene in particular has all of the intensity of Chabrol) and even flighty fun. Color is also used to play with the contrasting of emotions so that they meaning is left unstable. Whereas early on blue and yellow seemed to yield a success halfway across the film its a horror and a risk of dreams failed.

Holland presents a determined and grand vision of this tale which is actually rather small and intimate. Her contributions to the film's success shouldn't be ignored, but I must admit if one contributor really caused me to be whisked into this strange world it is Jennifer Jason Leigh who gives perhaps her greatest performance. I don't remember The Heiress much, which given my memory of its quality is probably a good thing, but Wasikowska playing basically the same character in Crimson Peak highlights all the ways this could have gone wrong being too pretty, smart, modern, or meta-reflexive. JJL engages and becomes fully this woman who has never had positive interactions before and thus gets lost within them. With interior warts and not just those reflected by others' opinions this naive woman tries to forge a reality where love exists. This is where her performance has me at a lose for words except to say it impresses a great deal of complexity where other performances of the same type of character have gone for a comfortable simplicity. This sort of masculine ugliness as a way of coping that her character has actually makes the whole role a wonderful precedent to The Hateful Eight (the closest relative at the very least). Though that is not to say she gives the only great performance. Maggie Smith, for instance, plays her variation of the nurse from Romeo and Juliet with perfect self serving charity that it is basically impossible not to laugh as she squawks onscreen. Even the most minor characters like the couple that has one half played by Jennifer Garner are memorable for how they support the psychology of this whole enterprise. The closest thing to a sour not is Ben Chaplin as the object of JJL's desire, but that works out well as the script never asks more of him than to be a sexy enigma who others can place their beliefs upon. Still he goes reasonably beyond that with a nervous energy and dangerous edge. It really is a film that can keep an audience on its toes.

[Michael Kerpan]

I recall Holland's Secret Garden as being surprisingly good -- but I saw it very long ago (on VHS) and can't remember much in the way of details.

[zedz]

Peggy Ahwesh and Yvonne Rainer are major names I should have included on my big list, but overlooked because their works are all unavailable on home video. Is that correct?*

That's correct, though you can stream a number of films by both (including the two I highlighted) on Ubuweb.

Great news. Thank you!

[zedz]

Brief Encounters (Kira Muratova, 1967) - This is such a great film, way ahead of its time in so many ways, which is a good thing, as it was immediately shelved by the Soviet authorities and didn't resurface until the 1980s. The main issue was probably the depiction of Soviet bureaucracy as obstructive and incompetent, though that's only a background detail, and the film is far more remarkable for its casual feminism and Muratova's already mature and daring style.

It's the story of an inchoate romantic triangle that seems to hinge on a huge coincidence (the prospective lover of a woman's former partner turns up on her doorstep to work as a maid) that actually isn't one.

SpoilerShow

Nadya has actually come to Valentina's house in search of Maksim, under the pretext of a completely different job offer - chef at a geological camp, and is mistaken for a new maid

.
The back-story is filled in through a series of associative, non-chronological flashbacks for the two women, the young Nadya and the older Valentina (played superbly by Muratova herself), which punctuate the social realism of the present-day story with some striking visual effects (fades to white well ahead of Fassbinder's Effi Briest; a striking rack focus shot that leaves Nadya's face as a smeary blob in the middle of the screen as we see another her in the far background come into focus; an abrupt cut to an extreme close-up of a dog's head that, on returning to the master shot, we realise had been just out of frame). The narrative is resolved without any conventional drama, because Nadya turns out to be mature enough to figure out the truth of the situation.

In many ways this is a very classical film for Muratova, but there are plenty of signs of the oddness to come. Her trademark verbal repetitions are already in evidence, albeit in a more sparing and naturalistic context, and the film's soundtrack has moments of chaos, complexity and confusion (as when a conversation runs over the top of a loud recording of Valentina rehearsing a speech). When Valentina visits her manicurist, we linger briefly with the women there after she leaves, immersed in their gossip: a kind of micro-anticipation of the grand discursions that would characterise many of her later films.

Perhaps the most audacious sequence in the film is when a character physically moves into a flashback through a door with the fateful date of the memory scrawled across it, and - this is the touch which separates a director like Muratova from any common or garden visionary - the door still bears the same scrawled date at the end of the flashback.

I'll try and work my way through all of Muratova's available (by hook or by crook) films over the course of this project.

[Satori]

Some recent viewings

Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983)
One of the great weirdo 80s indie New York movies. Penned by Kathy Acker, this bizarre movie follows a woman named Christine who gets a job as a ticket taker at a porn theater and becomes fascinated by porn, overhearing it from the lobby and peeking through the curtains of the theater. We get a tour of New York’s sleaze days as Christine goes into adult bookstores and peepshow booths. This is intermixed with a Rivette-style pseudo conspiracy narrative in which she follows a guy from the porn theater who might (or might not) be involved in a mob union conspiracy that her boyfriend is investigating. Not only is this an essential document of early 80s New York—from Peepland to Yankee Stadium—but it offers a way of thinking through issues of feminism and pornography that thoroughly rejects the hysterical anti-porn feminism dominant in the early 80s. Christine begins to narrate the events of the porn films novelistically, describing detailed sexual encounters in the third person to her boyfriend. He is disturbed by this—perhaps above all with the idea that she might actually be enjoying porn. I think these long monologues are a way of taking control of porn images and repurposing them for her own erotic purposes. The film is also about Christine violating male spaces, especially the adult book stores where men browsing porno mags and clearly made uncomfortable by her presence. Later in the film she dresses up like a porn star, but only to pose in front of the mirror in her apartment. She is taking control of porno sign systems, making them available for her use but not subjecting herself to the outside gaze. All of this is developed through a slow-moving opaque narrative that has something of the dreaminess of Sara Driver’s Sleepwalk.

Blockers (Kay Cannon, 2018)
I went to see this after reading some positive reviews but was a bit skeptical. This is being talked about as a feminist teen sex comedy, but that isn’t a completely novel thing—Amy Herkerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High managed it in 1982 at the height of the sexist teen comedy (and, by the way, is well worth revisiting for this project alongside her 90s masterpiece Clueless). But I was largely won over by Blockers.

While the film is seemingly structured around the attempts of the parents to stop their kids having sex, it is at the same time about the social pressures to have sex as a way of entering into adulthood. But what is so great about the film is that it isn’t the womens' dates that are pressuring them (they are all wonderfully feminist), but completely abstract ideas about what one does at prom or how one creates lasting memories with one's best friends. This contradiction at the heart of the film helps to set up what I think is the film’s true political importance. Despite the premise, this is not just a film about overcoming parental sexual repression, but equally a film about how sex isn’t actually that important when it comes to defining yourself or the important moments in your life. All three of the girls have radically different narrative trajectories and all three are satisfying in their different resolutions. If each generation gets the teen sex comedy they deserve, then Blockers reconfirms my high opinion of the young millennials.

Also, this probably says more about me than the film, but Blockers reminded me of one of the Gidget movies (I think Gidget Goes Hawaiian), which also uses a parallel narrative structure to show how the parents are just as fucked up as their kids when it comes to relationships and sex. Indeed, Blockers spends about as much time with the parents as it does the kids, which strikes me as unusual for the genre (are there actually any parents in Fast Times at all?) As in the Gidget movie, it’s the kids who end up having most of the answers to the social problems facing them.

Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, 1985)
While I’ve always felt this was an essential lesbian film (and one which seemed to set the agenda for 90s lesbian cinema in the same way that Mala Noche set the agenda for 90s gay cinema), the criterion release also reveals how aesthetically beautiful it is. It is a film about space: the wide-open desert spaces of Reno as contrasted with Vivian’s life in New York. Deitch’s outdoor long shots focus our attention on these landscapes, embedding Vivian and Cay within them. The film’s geography also includes oppositions between these outdoors spaces and Francis’ house where Vivian stays. The former represents freedom for Cay while the latter is entrapment. It’s no surprise that Vivian and Cay’s first kiss happens through an open car door window, straddling the inside and outside. As central as space is to the film, it is also a film about time. There isn’t a clear temporality for most of their courtship—we get fragments of them getting to know each other without a sense of how they correspond to calendar days. So when Vivian suddenly announces she only has a week and a half left, it comes as a shock. Reno is not only the spatial opposite of New York, but they have different temporalities too: in New York, Vivian was expected to conform to the time of work, marriage, and professional social life. Cay rejects conventional temporality: she works late at a casino and stays up all night. Vivian gets to participate in this queer form of temporality as well, at least until she has to return to New York. Which brings us to the ending:

SpoilerShow

The idea that Cay will only agree to go “to the next stop” is such a perfect ending because it rejects a firm destination in both space and time. She is refusing to be bound by the temporal and spatial straightjackets of Vivian’s former life. Their relationship does not have a firm endpoint, but must be remade hour by hour. The train is going into the unknown.

Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990)
An absolutely essential film! I’ve written about his before (in the documentary list project I think), but here are some additional thoughts. One element of the film that reveals itself now is how much of a document of the 1980s it is: there is a scene in which Octavia, one of the transwomen featured in the film, goes to a model casting call. This is a great sequence because it really lets Livingston investigate how constructed the appearance and behavior of these cis women are. This is exacerbated by the fact that they are all decked out in the worst of 80s fashion (which, while some of it works on gay men, is just awful on everyone else). The scenes of actual business people walking down the street serve the same function: while crafting a juxtaposition with the ball performances, they actually reveal as many similarities as differences. The big 80s hair and the tacky outfits worn by these people are no less gaudy than what the drag performers wear. The difference is in the level of awareness that each have.

[zedz]

Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990)
An absolutely essential film! I’ve written about his before (in the documentary list project I think), but here are some additional thoughts. One element of the film that reveals itself now is how much of a document of the 1980s it is: there is a scene in which Octavia, one of the transwomen featured in the film, goes to a model casting call. This is a great sequence because it really lets Livingston investigate how constructed the appearance and behavior of these cis women are. This is exacerbated by the fact that they are all decked out in the worst of 80s fashion (which, while some of it works on gay men, is just awful on everyone else). The scenes of actual business people walking down the street serve the same function: while crafting a juxtaposition with the ball performances, they actually reveal as many similarities as differences. The big 80s hair and the tacky outfits worn by these people are no less gaudy than what the drag performers wear. The difference is in the level of awareness that each have.

Great pick, and I see the Second Sight DVD is cheap from amazon.uk. I remember the "free as the wind blowing out here on this beach" line (and its hilarious rejoinder) being a running joke for years with my group of friends back in the early nineties.

[zedz]

Satori's post reminded me about New Queer Cinema, but I can't think of too many other films directed by women from that historical moment (though arguably the two most important producers of the movement, Christine Vachon and Andrea Sperling, were both women). Most obviously there's Rose Troche's Go Fish, which is a lot of fun. There's also a terrific Canadian documentary by Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (the pulpy title is a part of the film's particular aesthetic). It's a hugely entertaining, rollicking account of lesbian lives in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and a fantastic piece of social history to boot.

[knives]

Watermelon Woman is another obvious choice. The DVD also has a few of Dunne's short films.

[Satori]

Yes, the New Queer Cinema was very male dominated (at least in terms of directors). I completely agree with the recommendations for Go Fish and Watermelon Woman, though- both have the formal inventiveness of the more well known NQC directors. Go Fish has those montages between sequences that are basically mini-experimental films and has a fun self-referential narrative structure in which some of the characters comment on the plot of the film as it happens. The Watermelon Woman has an even more interesting blend of documentary and narrative fiction. Plus the Camille Paglia cameo absolutely slays me every time.

There are a couple of other quasi-NQC films that I think are worth recommending (although they come a bit later than NQC proper):

All Over Me (Alex Sichel, 1997), which is another great New York film set in Hell’s Kitchen. It's an angsty lesbian romance with a great riot girl soundtrack.

Finally, But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999), the comedy about a conversion therapy camp. It plays up its campiness (pun intended), casting RuPaul as an ostensibly ex-gay therapist and brilliantly mocking the process of turning gay kids straight. The mise-en-scene looks like a cotton candy machine blew up all over everything while the soundtrack features amazing sugar-coated pop music. Plus you get to see young Clea DuVall and young Natasha Lyonne being adorable together.

It's been awhile since I've seen Forbidden Love, so I'll have to make that a priority to rewatch. If I remember correctly, it did something interesting with the narrative structure of the dramatized part, beginning with the sad ending (as standard for lesbian pulp) and then working backwards. There is a Su Friedrich film from the mid-90s (Hide and Seek) that is a similar mix of documentary and a fictionalized narrative of a young gay girl. I was already planning to watch that again, so I might watch them together and see if there are any interesting connections.

[domino harvey]

But I'm a Cheerleader is a sweet little movie, but pales against better films of similar ilk. It's cute though and has a great soundtrack. Paris is Burning was one of my favorite new to me films from the All Time List (not a discovery, since I knew about it beforehand). I won't be voting for it, but it's def worth watching

[Satori]

I'm certainly not going to try and make the case that But I'm a Cheerleader is anything more than a cute guilty pleasure, but it's top tier when it comes to queer rom-coms (I once watched all of the gay and lesbian rom-coms of the 90s and early 2000s that I could find. There are a surprising number of them and most of them are really bad). And I'd argue that its overtly queer sensibility would separate it from similar hetero coming of age/ romance movies.

[domino harvey]

Quite possibly true when looked at from that vantage. I feel like I had Kissing Jessica Stein (not eligible here) in my Netflix disc queue the entire time I had an account, so maybe that one's a real hidden gem since it was at the time the go-to example and unusually something of a commercial success

[Satori]

Yeah, it was a bigger film (I'm sure it got a much wider release than Cheerleader, which probably did most of its business on home video and at LGBT festivals) but Stein is only nominally a queer film.

SpoilerShow

It's about a straight girl who experiments and goes back to men. I don't think it even implies that she's bi.

Plus it doesn't have ties to the queer aesthetic tradition like Cheerleader does.