Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

[Mr Sausage]

Her Evolution is worth a look as well.

Certainly one of the most original and interesting science fiction movies made in the last 20 years. I hope I’m not alone in vastly preferring her films to that of her more renowned husband.

[bottled spider]

Averaging can deliver almost eerily accurate results. I'm sure many of us have witnessed the classic demonstration made in many first year math or science courses where a student is asked to stand at the front, and the classroom asked to write down guesses about height or weight, and even where the range of guesses is comically wide, the average will be extraordinarily accurate.

Which raises the question, how the fuck does Bachelorette (Leslye Headland, 2012) have only 5.3 on IMDb???

I weep for humanity.

[domino harvey]

My experience is that many (most?) viewers find the characters too unlikable, but I think their rough edges make them funnier and more relatable. On the topic of Bachelorette, in addition to being overwhelmingly hilarious, the movie is also forever tied to a certain radio hit from the 90s that is employed with unexpected emotional heft in the finale.

Also I forgot to add the To Do List to my provisional list but it deserves a look too. I wrote at length about it here

[bottled spider]

Yes, and there's some nicely deployed classical music in the Bachelorette too. It's not all blowjob gags. Just mostly blowjob gags.

For this project I'm definitely going to be focusing on movies in English made this century. I note that To Do List has a promisingly low IMDb score.

[Rayon Vert]

Which raises the question, how the fuck does Bachelorette (Leslye Headland, 2012) have only 5.3 on IMDb???

I weep for humanity.

I haven't seen it, but reading these 1-star IMDB reviews (out of several like them) doesn't make me want to...

One of the most annoying films I'ever watched. From the constant, nagging soundtrack to the clichéd friends-that-would-never-be-friends-in-real- life female characters hysterically running around to fill out the tiresome 90 minutes of plot to "save" the wedding dress- nothing anyone does in this movie rings true or is remotely pleasant to watch. Characters exist as "dysfunctional" cardboard cutouts who run down the gamut of expected dysfunctions that we're first meant perceive as hilarious and bawdy, but ultimately as troubling and touching, because, you know, deep down, they're just girls looking for love. And, oh, the hook ups, mess ups and hang ups are just so funny, had I not seen them coming from a thousand miles away and a thousand comedies before. When you create messed up, stupid and selfish characters just to advance a bad comedy, it's hard to care about or buy the upbeat ending "with a heart," which is so bogus it elicited the loudest sarcastic laugh of the movie.

I was expecting to love it, but despite myself, it took all of 30 minutes before I ended up aggressively hating this film and resenting the makers of it for wasting my time and hard earned money on such drivel.

I would describe this film as watching a friend who is really paralytically drunk or high. They think they're having the time of their lives. You on the other hand, get to watch the reality of them, bleary-eyed, snotty-nosed, puking, declaring inappropriate slurry love to randoms, publicly exposing themselves and finally crying in the middle of the street about how **** up they are all the time wishing that you had just stayed home. Im not exaggerating, this is LITERALLY most of the plot of the movie!

The characters are nasty, mean-spirited bitches. Male and female. Only the bride, groom and one best man are likable and even then they are portrayed/seem pathetically naive or just plain stupid. The amount of drug-taking in this film is neither necessary nor interesting. The women only seem to be able to get it together after they all find a romantic attachment for the night in the form of 1) old flame that she never got over and that's why she's so tormented, but not anymore. 2) Equally horrid male character who manages to dominate head bitch and therefore distracts her from all her neuroses so she can be successful and happy again. 3) Super nice guy who has always been there for the stupid slutty girl and make her feel good about herself again.

Yuck!

This film suffers from the fact that the three main characters are selfish, cruel, mean- spirited, self-pitying, shallow and hateful, plus they have nothing even remotely funny to say. They're so obnoxious, it kind of raises the question: is it even remotely likely that the bride, who appears to be relatively decent and wholly sane, would invite them to be bridesmaids at her wedding?

It's not enough to say that people are like that in the real world. In the real world I would never choose to spend time with people this dull, humourless and unkind. Even the key insult that sets in motion events - pig face - is totally witless. Symptomatic of entire movie: witless, pointless, lacking in intelligence, humour or likability. Save your money and time. I wouldn't spend five minutes in the same room as these obnoxious creeps, so why should I pay to watch them wallow in spite and stupidity at the movies? Didn't raise a single smile let alone a laugh. More like revulsion - and peeve that I'd paid good money to see it.

Unwatchably boring, couldn't even get to the end. Zero stars if they'd let me. As it is will have to give it one.

[bottled spider]

Yeah. Well. These people probably voted for Trump.

They're wrong nearly to the point of 'rediculosity'. To address one obvious point: all of the drug use in this film was TOTALLY necessary. How could anyone object to the music? Save for one over-the-top bimbo, most of the characters were, in fact, highly intelligent. And these reviewer's notions of what is nasty and mean-spirited strike me as pantywaisted. They should snort come coke or something.

[Rayon Vert]

Ha! I'll definitely try to catch this if/when I get a chance.

[Randall Maysin]

Come coke? That sounds more interesting than regular coke.

[bottled spider]

That's literally from the movie. See what happens is this guy...

[Werewolf by Night]

Dare I ask if anyone else plans to vote for Marina de Van’s Dans ma peau (In My Skin)? I hope I won’t be the only one.

[Michael Kerpan]

My top 2 will almost certainly be Varda and Ann Hui. Unfortunately much (most) of Hui's work seems to be out of print. And many films have never had even a B-minus-level DVD release.

[knives]

Conversely unless her newest does some unique magic Varda won't appear at all on my list. (haven't seen any of Hui, though I will be getting to A Simple Life for this list).

[Michael Kerpan]

Simple Life is one of Hui's very good films -- though I prefer July Rhapsody (pretty Naruse-esque) and The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (initially funny, but progressively more and more bittersweet). Lots of other wonderful films. One of the most interesting is the almost unfindable Romance of Book and Sword (and its second, half, Princess Fragrance). All I managed to get -- even long ago -- was a VCD release. A really marvelous (very low budget) wuxia film (possibly my favorite film in this genre, alongside HHH's Assassin).

[Kirkinson]

Thanks for those recommendations, MK. I've only seen her most recent, Our Time Will Come, and thought it was just OK, but I gather from other reviews I've read that it's not a very typical work. A Simple Life and Love in a Fallen City can both be rented on Amazon, at least. And it looks like several more are on YouTube with English subs, though they obviously aren't there legally and the quality is quite poor.

[Michael Kerpan]

The quality of some of the legit Hui DVDs (usually never re-released in better quality) were execrable in the first place...

Haven't seen Our Time Will Come yet. I've seen almost all her earlier films, however. Her quality level is a little variable -- but more often than not her work is very interesting.

I recall Love in a Fallen city being pretty good (but only saw it once long ago).

She's my favorite HK director (tied with Johnnie To).

[domino harvey]

Jackie Reynal's Deux fois (1968) is something that exist, and it seems like it is not trying to be more than that. Not sure what was the point of Zanzibar films, judging from this. I liked watching her eat I guess, but now there's a whole Youtube niche for that

Stuff like this and Home Movie shows a transition away from traditional narrative and moves towards embodying the true insularity of communal thinking and filmmaking in its forms and processes. They're interesting artifacts at least

[swo17]

Women have been responsible for some of my favorite experimental films...

Night on Bald Mountain (Claire Parker w/ Alexandre Alexeïeff, 1933) - the first pinscreen animation

Synchromy No. 2 (Mary Ellen Bute w/ Theodore Nemeth, 1936) - playing around with light patterns

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren w/ Alexander Hammid, 1943) - an American housewife has a totally normal dream (on Blu-ray from Flicker Alley)

Begone Dull Care (Evelyn Lambart w/ Norman McLaren, 1949) - 10,000 paintings in 8 minutes

Bridges-Go-Round (Shirley Clarke, 1958) - superimpositions of New York; I also really like her film Trans from the Magic Box set

Odds & Ends (Jane Conger Belson Shimané, 1959) - maybe the 1950s equivalent of domino's Hipster Runoff video

Lights (Marie Menken, 1966) - bright and shiny ones

Apotheosis (Yoko Ono w/ John Lennon, 1969) - here comes the sun

Mutations (Lillian Schwartz, 1973) - science class in the '70s

Bouquets 1-10 (Rose Lowder, 1995) - visually assembles bouquets of images by treating frames like flowers and mashing them together

True to Life (Gunvor Nelson, 2006) - abrasive soundtrack contrasts with visual splendor as Nelson explores her flower garden up close and personal with an HD camera and mic (on Blu-ray from Re:voir)

[domino harvey]

Forgot about Guvnor Nelson! My Name is Oona could make my list

[swo17]

It occurs to me that much of my description of her later film would equally apply to that one!

[zedz]

This is going to be an exceedingly difficult list project, because there's such a huge range of superb work to consider. Just looking over my shelves and prompting my memory I easily came up with fifty major, important, excellent directors I needed to consider, so here's a brain dump, with my favoured films noted for each filmmaker:

Maren Ade – Toni Erdmann
Eija-Liisa Ahtila – Love Is a Treasure - Finnish installation artist who's made a number of short films and this episodic near-feature, which explores the psychoses of five women. A collection of her work is available from the BFI.
Chantal Akerman – Je, Tu, Il, Elle, Jeanne Dielman , Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad - Nargess - Probably the most important female director from Iran after Farrokhzad. A lot of her films are somewhat conventionally shot and structured, but, as is the case here, she's unafraid to confront 'forbidden' topics such as prison and criminality, particularly as they pertain to women.
Clio Barnard – The Arbor
Sadie Benning – Jollies - Pixelvision pioneer with a teenage, lesbian aesthetic all her own.
Julie Bertuccelli – Since Otar Left - Bertuccelli kind of fumbled her follow-up, the Charlotte Gainsbourg-versus-a-haunted-tree oddity The Tree, but this is a beautifully observed small masterpiece.
Lidia Bobrova – Hey You Wild Geese!, In That Country - A modern Russian master who's struggled to make four films in thirty years. In That Country will be near the top of my list.
Catherine Breillat – An Old Mistress, Bluebeard - I'm no great fan of a lot of her work, but with these two everything seems to synthesize well.
Jane Campion – A Girl’s Own Story, Two Friends - Her first feature, Two Friends, is little-known but really worthwhile. Milestone released it in the US.
Vera Chytilova – Daisies, Fruit of Paradise
Shirley Clarke – Portrait of Jason
Julie Dash – Daughters of the Dust
Claire Denis – Where to stop? The fourteen year run from 1994 to 2008 is practically peerless in contemporary cinema: J’ai pas sommeil, US Go Home, Nenette et Boni, Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day, Vendredi Soir, L’Intrus, 35 Rhums
Maya Deren – Ritual in Transfigured Time, At Land
Molly Dineen – The Ark - Great documentarist, with several volumes of her work available from the BFI.
Ildiko Enyedi – My 20th Century, On Body and Soul
Forough Farrokhzad – The House Is Black - This short is her only credited film as director, but she still casts a long shadow over modern Iranian cinema.
Pascale Ferran – L’age des possibles, Petits arrangements avec les morts - Her later works (Lady Chatterley and Bird People) are more readily available and also excellent, but these are even better, if you can track them down.
Su Friedrich – Sink Or Swim, Rules of the Road - Most of Friedrich's work is available from Outcast Films.
Heddy Honigmann –Crazy, Forever - One of the great modern documentary filmmakers. All of her work is worth seeing.
Joanna Hogg – Exhibition, Archipelago - Like a lot of the films on this list, Exhibition is a film no man would ever have made (sorry Domino!). A brilliant analysis of the impact of domestic architecture on a relationship.
Ann Hui – Song of the Exile - I'm not a huge fan of her work, but for a long time Hui was the most significant female director in Asia.
Miranda July – The Future
Naomi Kawase - Suzaku - Nothing I've seen from Kawase since has lived up to the promise of her first feature.
Kim Longinotto – Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, Sisters in Law (with Florence Ayisi) - Like Honigmann, Longinotto is one of the great contemporary documentarists, and all her films are worth seeing.
Rose Lowder – Bouquets
Ida Lupino – The Hitch-Hiker
Samira Makhmalbaf – The Apple
Lucrecia Martel – The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman
Marzieh Meshkini / Makhmalbaf – The Day I Became a Woman
Marta Meszaros – Diary for My Children
Merata Mita – Mana Waka, Mauri - Mana Waka is dreamy resurrection of archival footage from the 1930s of the making of two waka. A mesmerising one-of-a-kind film. Mauri is a feature that's often dramatically clunky but is punctuated by sequences of pure visual poetry.
Tracey Moffatt– Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, Bedevil – Important Australian artist who made several visually striking films in the eighties and early nineties.
Laura Mulvey – Riddles of the Sphinx (with Peter Wollen) - I've tended to avoid films co-directed by men to keep more in the spirit of the list, but I reckon Mulvey was wearing the pants on this film.
Kira Muratova – Brief Encounters, Long Goodbyes, The Asthenic Syndrome, Three Stories, Melody for a Street Organ - Muratova has been making masterpieces for half a century, none of which have been released in the US or UK.
Gunvor Nelson – My Name Is Oona
Yoko Ono – Apotheosis (with John Lennon), Fly
Ulrike Ottinger – Dorian Gray as Represented in the Popular Press, Chamisso’s Shadow - The latter, epic documentary (twelve hours exploring the lands, people, wildlife and history of the Bering Strait) is available on English-friendly discs from Germany.
Susan Pitt – Asparagus - Unforgettable psychedelic, erotic animation. Nothing else Pitt has done matches it. A collection of her work is available from Re:Voir.
Lourdes Portillo - The Devil Never Sleeps - Strange autobiographical / true-crime narrative that shades into fable and myth.
Sally Potter – The Tango Lesson
Gaylene Preston – War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, Bread and Roses
Lynne Ramsay - Ratcatcher
Kelly Reichardt – Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women
Lis Rhodes – Light Music - This installation work is strictly for projection only, but a disc of Rhodes' more 2D work has been released by Lux.
Valeria Sarmiento – Lines of Wellington
Larisa Shepitko – The Ascent
Naomi Uman - Leche
Yesim Ustaoglu – Journey to the Sun
Agnes Varda – Cleo from 9 to 7, Vagabond, Ulysse, Ydessa, the Bears and etc., Visages, Villages
Joyce Wieland – A and B in Ontario (with Hollis Frampton) - A perfect, fun collaboration. Wieland gets the nudge as auteur because she was the one that assembled it.
Mai Zetterling – The Girls

Then there are a handful of great films by filmmakers who never did much more, or whose other work I don't know

Take Care of My Cat – Jae-En Jeong
Hour of the Star – Suzana Amaral
Sweetness – Rachel Davies: https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/sweetness-1992" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Nana – Valerie Massadian
The Reunion – Anna Odell

[Kirkinson]

Woodpeckers Don’t Get Headaches (Dinara Asanova, 1975)

I've decided to make my first task in this list project to watch as many films by female filmmakers from the former Soviet Union as I can get a hold of (if I haven't seen them before—I know Shepitko already has a spot on my list) and I've started off with one who's been on my radar for a long time, Kyrgyz director Dinara Asanova. While I'd really like to see Dear, Dearest Beloved, which seems to be her most formally daring work—it takes place almost entirely inside a car at night—for now I've had to settle for this instead, the only film for which I can find English subtitles.

In many respects it's a fairly standard Soviet teen drama from the 70s—but this seems to be a genre they did remarkably well at that time, at least judging from this and the only other one I've seen, 100 Days After Childhood (from the same year). This film, like that one, is remarkably candid and honest about the volatility and egotism of teenage emotions, yet neither judges nor excuses the characters for their more hurtful or destructive words and actions. They both also feature excellent scope photography and very loose, comfy plotting, and are surprisingly free of any trace of didacticism (except for one anti-abuse scene in Woodpeckers which seems pitched at the parents in the audience rather than the teens themselves!).

The story here, such as it is, concerns a blossoming romance at the end of the school year between a boy who wants to be a jazz drummer living under the shadow of his famous basketball playing brother, and a girl who...well, the girls are pretty underwritten here, though Elena Tsyplakova's performance is naturalistic enough that she at least gives you the sense of an interior life even if we never really get to see it.

But beyond those two occasionally fighting and making up, the plot is fairly breezy. It's the sort of the thing that just lets the characters take a whole scene to appreciate the weird way a particular gate creaks. When our main character wanders into a jazz club in awe of the drummer playing there, the movie shows us the entire performance, getting lost in the music just as he does. There are no huge stakes, but lots of smaller ones that take on greater importance by the end.

I don't know that it necessarily adds up to much, and it didn't leave me with the same kind of grip on my heart the way 100 Days After Childhood did, but I enjoyed it a great deal and it inspired me to seek out more Soviet teen movies from this era. It has pretty much no chance of ending up on my list, though.

Dzhamilya (Irina Poplavskaya, 1969)

So I went from a Kyrgyz director making films in Russia to a Russian director making films in Kyrgyzstan. Note that IMDb credits Sergei Yutkevich as a co-director on this, but from what I can tell this is a mistake. In the film he is credited separately as an “artistic director,” and it’s not clear what that means exactly, but from what I can tell, Russian sources unambiguously refer to this as Poplavskaya’s film.

Dzhamilya feels like the kind of internationally underrated gem waiting to be rescued by someone like the World Cinema Project. While I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a great film, it is nevertheless a rather unique one.

It takes place during WWII in a remote mountain village of wheat farmers. Dzhamilya is a young bride whose husband, whom she barely knows and was forced to marry, is fighting in the war, and who slips into an untimely and ill-advised romance with an injured, discharged soldier while they transport their wheat together to the train station. They’re accompanied by her husband’s little brother, Seit, an aspiring painter who narrates the story as an adult, and whose early primitivist paintings are intercut in bright, eye-popping color with the black-and-white narrative.

There’s definitely an ethnographic perspective to much of the first act, as if the film was intended in part to introduce these remote Kyrgyz neighbors to the rest of their Soviet comrades. Such scenes aren’t without interest, and they all serve the story, but at times their almost documentary-like gaze actually made the characters feel more distant, and I think it took me a while to get into it as a result.

When the film does sweep you up, it does so mostly through some exciting, creative editing. A flashback to a horse race that preceded Dzhamilya’s marriage is a brief, sudden fountain of joy in a largely somber section of the film. A folk song sung by the disabled soldier triggers a gorgeous reverie of montage in Seit’s mind, basking in the beauty of the country but also flashing back with fear and panic to the outset of the war. A climactic chase scene is rendered entirely in still frames of Seit’s paintings—and a couple scenes later, his recollection of honing his art is portrayed metaphorically through a chase scene (capturing and taming a wild horse).

Even after the more doc-like scenes have subsided, I think the film ultimately lets itself down a bit by adopting the perspective of a character who is mostly an observer, as Dzhamilya herself remains somewhat elusive in what is ostensibly her own story. No doubt this is precisely as Chingiz Aitmatov intended (he wrote the story this was based on, and the script, and reads the narration) and Seit is also the motivation for almost all of the film’s most imaginative visuals, so it’s hard to argue that it’s a “wrong” choice. But the moments in which I felt like I was spending time with Dzhamilya herself rather than with Seit’s remembered impressions of her were compelling enough that it’s hard not to wish there were more of them.

Perhaps the most fascinating of these moments is a scene I am not at all sure I’m interpreting correctly. Dzhamilya is comforting Seit, cradling him in her lap, and a close-up on his head moves slowly up to Dzhamilya’s face, rests there for a while as she gazes into the distance, and then moves slowly back to Seit. The slow moves up and down may be purely functional, just a way to get from one close-up to another without cutting. But these moves are so remarkably slow that the camera ends up lingering conspicuously on Dzhamilya’s chest, and this after we’ve just witnessed another woman breastfeeding a scene or two earlier. The effect is that Dzhamilya’s disconcerted expression reads as her considering her proscribed future as a mother. It’s a deeply moving instance of purely visual storytelling achieved through very simple means in a film that often redundantly explains its visual metaphors in voice over. Rightly or wrongly, it’s also a shot at which I imagine I might have raised a slightly suspicious eyebrow if a male director was responsible for it.

[hearthesilence]

Maren Ade's Everyone Else is definitely the other Ade film I'm putting on my list.

Sweetie is still my favorite Campion film, followed by An Angel at My Table - outside of her short films, they're possibly the only two films of hers that I love without any major qualifications.

[knives]

Here's a nifty resource, by the way, for a lot of woman directed short films. The quality is as hit and miss as you'd expect from such a large collection, but there are a few gems hidden within. This fashion company also has a line of shorts (usually producing two a year) directed by women. Ava Duvarney and Martel have my favorite if you want to be choosy.

[hearthesilence]

Maren Ade's Everyone Else is definitely the other Ade film I'm putting on my list. I remember when it played at the NYFF - after the festival was over, it probably had the best word-of-mouth of any film that played, so I was really disappointed that I had skipped it. When it finally opened at IFC, I took a few friends who knew nothing about Ade or the film, and maybe a week after we saw it, they IM'ed me out of the blue, telling me that they were still thinking it over. She's just wonderful with actors and an incredible writer. Kent Jones said he saw it with Claire Denis at an earlier festival and apparently at one point during the film, he turned to Denis and asked "is this as great as I think it is?" and she nodded back 'yes.'

Sweetie is still my favorite Campion film, followed by An Angel at My Table - outside of her short films, they're possibly the only two films of hers that I love without any major qualifications.

As I mentioned in one of the other threads, The Heartbreak Kid and Mikey & Nicky are my two favorite May films, they're both flat-out masterpieces (though A New Leaf may be up there as well). In a lot of ways I vastly prefer The Heartbreak Kid to Mike Nichols's The Graduate - they share very similar ideas, but I think the way they're handled in The Heartbreak Kid is funnier and more cutting.

Akerman's D'Est is my favorite of her documentaries, and it's a stunning piece of history - I actually remember when the Soviet Union came to an end and the news reports of interminably long lines at the supermarket, and it's quite something to be immersed in that time through Akerman's film.

I'll probably include Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan - both are credited as co-directors, and it's easily the best film I've seen from the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Not for everyone - I remember a handful of walkouts when I saw it at NYFF and there are stories of motion sickness elsewhere - but it's quite something to behold on a very big screen.

I'll probably include Laura Poitras's Citizenfour, a once-in-a-generation documentary that captures historical breaking news as it happens.

And of course Věra Chytilová's Daisies, a marvelous farce.

[zedz]

Bouquets 1-10 (Rose Lowder, 1995) - visually assembles bouquets of images by treating frames like flowers and mashing them together

Remind me never to be your Valentine!