Tag Archives: Women directors

For One Week Only: Women Directors – 5. Barbara Loden & the Seventies

16 Monday Nov 2015

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Introduction

After a long period where female directors were working outside the mainstream and making experimental movies, the Sixties had started to see more women making movies that were accessible to a wider audience. This new generation of women directors wanted to tell stories that featured strong female characters, and as they garnered more and more recognition within the industry, so they also gained awareness with the general movie-going public. One movie, and its director, showed exactly what could be done on a small budget, and how powerful a story could be when told simply, and without resorting to accepted ideas about how a movie should look and feel.

Barbara Loden (1932-1980)

Barbara Loden

Loden began her career as a model and pin-up girl, but in the Fifties she decided to study acting and by the decade’s end she was appearing on Broadway. She was discovered by Elia Kazan who cast her in a minor role in the Montgomery Clift movie Wild River (1960). She followed it with Splendor in the Grass (1961) in which she played Warren Beatty’s wayward sister. Further movie roles failed to come along, and she did some work in television, but in 1964 she won a Tony award for her performance in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall (playing a fictionalised version of Marilyn Monroe). She continued with theatre roles, though in 1966 she was cast opposite Burt Lancaster in the movie version of The Swimmer. However, a dispute between the director Frank Perry and the producer Sam Spiegel over her scene with Lancaster – Loden apparently out-performed her more experienced co-star with ease – led to Perry being fired and several of the movie’s scenes being re-cast and re-shot. Loden’s role went to Janice Rule and it’s her performance that is seen in the finished movie.

In 1967 she married Kazan, and the following year appeared in the unsuccessful Fade-In (1968) with Burt Reynolds. At first she decided to go into semi-retirement, but out of the blue she wrote, directed and starred in a movie that was so innovative and so emotionally detailed (despite the main character’s disaffection with her life) that it took critics and audiences alike by surprise. The movie was Wanda (1970), and at that time it was one of the few American movies directed by a woman, independently or through a studio, to be released theatrically.

Loden’s tale of a coal miner’s wife who hooks up with a petty criminal was filmed in a cinéma vérité style that matched its melancholy subect matter; it’s so haunting at times that the viewer’s sympathy for Wanda is assured from the start. It’s an incredibly matter-of-fact movie, without a false note to it anywhere, and in all three capacities – writer/director/actress – Loden is supremely confident in what she’s doing, and the movie casts an hypnotic spell that’s hard to shake. You root for Wanda even though you know her life is heading in a downward spiral and the likelihood of her being saved is slim, but Loden’s pessimistic outlook allows for hope as well. It’s a fine line that Loden treads but she proves more than up to the task.

Wanda - scene1

Her efforts were rewarded when Wanda won the International Critics’ Prize at the 1970 Venice Film Festival. Rightly regarded as a masterpiece of independent movie making, Wanda cemented Loden’s place in cinema history, but instead of following it up, she withdrew altogether from making movies and returned to the semi-retirement she’d begun two years before (some say Kazan expressed doubts about Wanda that led Loden to question her ability). Eventually she made two short movies, The Frontier Experience and The Boy Who Liked Deer (both 1975), but they proved to be the final projects that Loden worked on. In 1978 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she died two years later.

Loden’s impact on the women directors who followed her can’t be stressed enough. Although she only made one movie, and even though it went virtually unseen for the best part of forty years before being restored for the 2010 Venice International Film Festival, it’s a touchstone movie that is as influential now as it was in 1970. Loden was an assured actress who could be glamorous and confident on screen, but her real talent lay behind the camera, dissecting the lives of ordinary people who are trying to find their place in Life. Whatever the reasons for her not making any more movies, ultimately they’re unimportant, because in Wanda she left us something very special indeed.

The Seventies

The new decade saw an increase in the presence of women directors across the globe. In America, Elaine May began her directing career with A New Leaf (1971), and after making two short movies, Joan Micklin Silver came to prominence with Hester Street (1975). They were followed by Barbara Kopple, a documentarian who won an Oscar for her first movie, Harlan County, USA (1976). In the UK, feminist filmmaker Jane Arden became the first British female director to gain a solo credit on the movie The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). Down Under, after spending most of the decade making shorts and a documentary, Gillian Armstrong broke into the mainstream with My Brilliant Career (1979) (it was also the first Australian movie to be directed by a woman in forty-six years).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In Europe, female directors seemed to be everywhere as the decade drew on. Even though she had begun her career in the Sixties it wasn’t until the release of The Night Porter (1974) that Liliana Cavani came to the attention of a wider audience. Her fellow Italian, Lina Wertmüller, also started her career in the Sixties, but also didn’t find fame and a wider audience until the release of The Seduction of Mimi (1971). Germany’s Margarethe von Trotta made two movies with Volker Schlondorff, including the hugely influential The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), before she made her first solo feature The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978). In France, Catherine Breillat began her often controversial directing career with A Real Young Girl (1976), and in neighbouring Belgium, Chantal Akerman secured her position as one of the most influential female directors working at the time with Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

In Africa, Senegalese movie maker Safi Faye became the first female Sub-Saharan director to have a movie commercially distributed. The movie was Letter from My Village (1975) and it gained her international recognition. In Angola, Sarah Maldoror’s examination of the Angolan struggle for liberation, Sambizanga (1972) was a powerful movie that showed the tragedies caused by war, and the despair those tragedies trigger.

Sambizanga

As the decade drew to a close, the establishment of so many different women directors from all around the globe had the sense of “At last!” about it. It wouldn’t be long before female directors began to be heard from in South America and the Middle East as well, and they would bring even more ways of telling stories and entertaining audiences. In the Eighties the ratio of women directors to their male counterparts would still be minimal, percentage-wise at least, but they would definitely enjoy as much commercial and critical success as their male colleagues, a situation that had been long overdue. And as they headed into the Nineties, those barriers were lowered even further. Women directors were here, and they were here to stay.

For One Week Only: Women Directors – 4. Agnès Varda & the Sixties

14 Saturday Nov 2015

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Introduction

With the Fifties seeing a gradual rise in the number of female movie directors, the Sixties saw that slow expansion get bigger and bigger as more and more women took up the challenge of making movies that were at least as interesting or entertaining as their male counterparts (if they could be financially successful as well would be a great help too). Following in the footsteps of women such as Maya Deren, female experimental movie directors continued to flourish, but this independence didn’t seem to spread to more mainstream movie making. Only one female director of note emerged in the Sixties, and she forged a career for herself that is still going strong today.

Agnès Varda (1928-)

Agnes Varda

Although she’s regarded as a French movie director, Varda was actually born in Belgium. She moved to France in 1940 to live with her mother’s family, and studied art history and photography. Growing up she saw very few movies, but always viewed this as an advantage, so that when she came to make her first movie in 1957, La Pointe Courte, she did so with a naïvete that allowed her to do things she might otherwise have felt she couldn’t do.

Varda made a number of short movies before her next movie, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), made audiences and critics alike sit up and take notice. A sensitively handled drama about a woman (Corinne Marchand) who is waiting for the results of a biopsy, the movie deconstructs the way in which its heroine is seen by everyone around her, and how she deals with the possibility of her imminent mortality. If you’re new to the French New Wave of the early Sixties, then this is as good a movie to start out with, and shows Varda already has a distinct narrative style.

Cleo from 5 to 7

Her abilities as a director were further recognised with the release of her third feature, Le Bonheur (1965). A beautifully crafted rural drama, it’s about a young, happily married man who looks for even more “happiness” with another woman. Though the focus is on the young man, Varda doesn’t downplay the female characters, or make their roles of lesser importance. Instead she emphasises their strength and resilience, and reinforces the idea that neither of them is dependent on the young man’s attention. (1965 was also the year that Varda hired a young actor named Gérard Depardieu for a project called Christmas Carole; it was his first screen role, but alas the movie was never finished due to lack of funding.)

Les créatures (1966) followed, a puzzle box of a movie where the basic storyline of a mute woman’s husband who writes a novel that reflects the lives of the villagers, but in doing so, allows the distinction between fiction and reality to become irrevocably blurred, allowed Varda to play tricks on the viewer throughout. But she’s just being mischievous, and none more so than by casting Catherine Deneuve as the mute wife, using the actress’s physical presence to reinforce the character’s self-reliance and determination.

Les creatures

She contributed a section to the documentary Far from Vietnam (1967), along with the likes of Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, before making a fascinating though not entirely focused semi-documentary road trip through Los Angeles called Lions Love (1969). Varda had originally wanted Jim Morrison to appear in the movie but he declined (though he can still be seen as a member of the theatre audience in the opening scene). Interestingly enough, Varda attracted several well-known celebrities to appear as themselves, including fellow directors Peter Bogdanovich and Shirley Clarke. There’s no story as such, and what narrative there is is firmly non-linear, making this particular road trip/odyssey one that relies on its visual style to get its message across.

Varda was referred to as “the ancestor of the New Wave” when she was just thirty, but her literary influences and use of location shooting and non-professional actors marks her out as a member of the Left Bank cinema movement instead. She herself describes her style of movie making as cinécriture (writing on film), and she builds her finished product in the editing suite where she finds a movie’s motifs and its rhythm. She is a fiercely intelligent director whose international acclaim in the Sixties helped give other women directors a boost toward realising their own careers.

The 60’s

With the Sixties, female directors who had begun their careers in the Fifties continued to make challenging, independent movies outside the foundering Hollywood studio system. Shirley Clarke made her most well-known movies in the Sixties, The Connection (1962), about a group of junkies waiting in a room for their next fix to arrive, and Portrait of Jason (1967), a documentary about Aaron Payne (alias Jason Holliday) and his experiences of being black and gay in Sixties America. Both movies were well-received in critical circles but lacked for a wider audience. They were movies that held up a mirror to American society at the time, and are all the more powerful for the way they dissect the way said society actively marginalised some of its more vulnerable citizens.

The Canadian artist Joyce Wieland turned her hand to making movies in the Sixties. She made experimental, avant garde shorts on a variety of eclectic themes, and with titles such as Barbara’s Blindness (1965), Handtinting (1967), and Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968). She made her first feature movie in 1969, Reason Over Passion, a prosaic yet highly abstract voyage of discovery through the Canadian psyche as presided over by then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Wieland’s movies were distinctive by the way in which she manipulated the film stock to provide a connection to the artistic style she had developed elsewhere in her work, and to make it feel more organic.

Joyce Wieland

Outside of experimental movie making, female directors tackling more conventional narratives were very thin on the ground. Swedish actress Mai Zetterling made her first feature, Loving Couples, in 1964, and packed it full of controversial elements, from a lesbian kiss to two gay men getting “married” in a church, and a close up of a real birth. She made three more features in the latter half of the decade and each showed a confident hand at the tiller.

In the world of low-budget exploitation features, Stephanie Rothman went from being an executive producer for Roger Corman to co-directing Blood Bath (1966) with Jack Hill, and then flying solo with It’s a Bikini World (1967). She added a strong feminist perspective to her movies, and did her best to mitigate the crassness of the movies she worked on. She was aware of the necessity for female nudity in these low-budget movies but focused on the visual presentation to make these scenes less repulsive and more transgressive.

After making several shorts, Czech director Věra Chytilová won international acclaim for her movie Daisies (1966), a funny, liberating attack on the formal traditions of Czech movie making, and a fascinating glimpse into the minds of two wilful young girls whose attitude to Life is to tear it down and damn the consequences – along as they’re having a good time doing it. It’s an invigorating experience, and eschews the rigid formalism of other Czech movies of the time. Chytilová’s career would pick up again in the Seventies, but Daisies was a statement of intent if ever there was one.

Daisies

And there was another statement of intent waiting just around the corner in 1970…

For One Week Only: Women Directors – 3. Maya Deren & the Fifties

12 Thursday Nov 2015

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Introduction

Women directors had been prevalent during the Silent Era, but with the advent of sound, many prominent careers foundered or were unable to continue. In Hollywood, only Dorothy Arzner maintained a career within the male-dominated heirarchy that viewed women directors as “box office poison”, and she did so by making moderately successful, conservative movies that weren’t transgressive in any way at all. In 1943, she made her last movie before making the switch to television. But while Hollywood showed no interest in encouraging would-be women directors to replace her, elsewhere, there were women who, like Ida Lupino at the end of the decade, weren’t letting Hollywood tell them how to make movies…

Maya Deren (1917-1961)

Maya Deren

An experimental movie maker, Deren made a series of short, avant garde experimental movies between 1943 and 1948 that remain some of the most impressive movies of their type ever made. Her first movie, Meshes in the Afternoon (1943) is a surreal tale of a woman whose dreams may or may not be happening in reality, and is technically astonishing for the scene where there are multiple Derens at a table (the movie was filmed using a 16mm Bolex camera). It’s dreamlike (naturally) and enigmatic, but fascinating to watch nevertheless.

She followed this with Witch’s Cradle (1944), a collection of images and static shots that wasn’t as well received, and in the same year she and her husband Alexander Hammid collaborated on a documentary short The Private Life of a Cat. She ended the year by making At Land, a haunting study of a woman’s trek through various foreign environments that she encounters; her sense of herself in these environments and her reaction to them makes for an intriguing study of isolationism and the need to belong.

In 1945 she made A Study in Choreography for Camera, a movie that packs so much about time and motion through the movement of a dancer in its four minutes that it’s almost dizzying how much Deren has managed to include in that time. It’s a movie that confronts ideas about space and time and motion that are so stimulating, it makes the viewer wonder why there aren’t more movies like it. Dance was also the main feature of her next project, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946); its blend of dance and surrealism, allied to notions of freedom of expression, makes for some very eloquent and poetic imagery.

In 1946 her work was acknowledged with a Guggenheim Fellowship for “Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures”. She also won the Grand Prix Internationale for 16mm experimental film at the Cannes Film Festival (for Meshes in the Afternoon). Deren’s last movie in the Forties was Meditation on Violence (1948), a collaboration with martial arts expert Chao Li Chi that looks at the ideals of the Wu Tang philosophy. It’s a cloistered affair with the movie being rewound part way through, thus obscuring the message (unfortunately). It’s still an intriguing look at a way of living life in a particular fashion, and Chao is a mesmerising figure.

Meditation on Violence

The 50’s

At the same time that Ida Lupino made her last independent movie, The Bigamist (1953), a member of the New York avant garde modern dance movement called Shirley Clarke made her first short movie, Dance in the Sun. Clarke had wanted to be a choreographer, but she was unsuccessful at this, and on the advice of her psychiatrist, followed her interest in movies instead. She made several more shorts in the Fifties, including A Moment in Love (1957) and Bridges-Go-Round (1958). All were well-received, and Clarke continued to make her own kind of experimental movies in the Sixties.

Shirley Clarke

Maya Deren made two more short movies in the Fifties, Ensemble for Somnambulists (1951) and The Very Eye of Night (1958), two similar explorations of dance form and composition that also looked at ritual and expression as shown through movement. Deren stayed true to her beliefs about the nature of film, and her sudden death in 1961 was a tragedy in every sense of the word. She once said, “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick”; but what she achieved in such a short directorial career was nothing short of miraculous, and she remains a tremendous influence on experimental movie makers the world over.

1953 was also the year that saw Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka make her debut as a director with Love Letter. Only the second woman to have a career as a director – after Tazuko Sakane – Tanaka’s romantic drama was entered into the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. She made five further movies between 1955 and 1962, one of which, The Moon Has Risen (1955) was co-scripted by Yasujirô Ozu. Tanaka had a surety of touch behind the camera and her visual style was eloquent and disarming. She maintained her career as an actress, and won several awards later on, but her movies, though hard to find now, show a smart, capable movie maker who was comfortable behind the camera because of how comfortable she was in front of it.

Kinuyo Tanaka

In France, the career of Jacqueline Audry, which had begun with the short Le Feu de paille (1943), flourished in the Fifties, and she had particular success with a series of adaptations of novels by Colette, Gigi (1949), Minne (1950), and Mitsou (1956). Audry often tackled topics that were considered controversial, such as the relationship between a schoolmistress and one of her pupils in Olivia (1951), a movie that has come to be regarded as a “landmark of lesbian representation”. With the rise of the French New Wave her more traditional style was at odds with the prevailing trends in French cinema, and she only made three movies in the Sixties, but overall her career shows she was a woman who wasn’t afraid to challenge conventional notions of sexuality and female submissiveness (even if it meant her movies were often heavily censored).

Jacqueline Audry

Another actress who made the transition to directing was Norway’s Edith Carlmar. In 1949 she made what is regarded as the very first film noir directed by a woman, Døden er et kjærtegn. It was a success, and she followed it up with a drama about mental illness called Skadeskutt (1951). Another female director who wasn’t afraid to tackle serious issues that most mainstream (male) directors wouldn’t go near, Carlmar made a total of ten movies between 1949 and 1959, and each one was both a box office success and critically well-received, a remarkable achievement for the period, and one that makes her one of the most successful female movie directors of the last seventy years.

Edith Carlmar

Even though these women were forging careers for themselves, and were making sometimes controversial, challenging and experimental movies, they remained a minority in an international industry that still didn’t trust women to be successful or able to attract audiences in the first place. But this misogyny was about to face its first real, and proper, challenge, as the movement towards female empowerment that began to express itself in the Sixties encouraged women movie makers to become bolder and to demand more of an equal place in cinema.

For One Week Only: Women Directors – 2. Ida Lupino

07 Saturday Nov 2015

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Introduction

The Golden Age of Hollywood, regarded as the years between 1928 and 1943, was also the period in which there was only one female director working in Hollywood, and that was Dorothy Arzner. Although she never made a movie that was a complete box office and/or critical success, Arzner was respected by her male peers, and worked with some of the biggest stars of the era. But she made her last feature in 1943, after which there were no female directors working in Hollywood. Until 1949 that is…

Ida Lupino (1918-1995)

Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA --- Hollywood, CA: Ida Lupino directs one of the scenes from her latest picture, "Mother of a Champion." She is shown peering through the movie camera. Undated photograph. --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Ida Lupino’s importance as a female director can’t be downplayed. Although she only made eight movies (two of which she didn’t receive an on-screen credit for), Lupino’s rise from studio starlet to challenging actress – at Warner Bros. she was often suspended for refusing roles she was offered – to respected director came about by a strange combination of happenstance and good/bad luck.

During the occasions when she was suspended, Lupino would spend her free time observing other directors as they worked on set, and also how movies were edited. To her it seemed as if everyone else was “doing the interesting work” on a movie while she sat around bored between takes. She learnt the basics of directing throughout the Forties, but still didn’t attempt to get a directing job. When she left Warner Bros. in 1947, it was to become a freelance artist, and while she continued to work as an actress, she and her husband, Collier Young, formed a production company called The Filmakers.

In 1949, she and Paul Jarrico collaborated on a script for the company’s first production, a (for the time) searing drama about pregnancy out of wedlock and the psychological impact on the young mother when she gives up her baby. The movie was called Not Wanted and it was to be directed by Elmer Clifton. But when Clifton suffered a heart attack part way through filming, Lupino stepped in to finish the movie (Lupino refused a screen credit out of respect for Clifton). The result was a controversial movie that drew attention to the problem of unwed mothers, garnered a huge amount of public debate, and made people aware of Lupino’s role behind the camera.

Ida Lupino 2

In the same year, Lupino co-wrote, co-produced and directed Never Fear, another drama, but this time about an aspiring dancer who contracts polio. It was a modest movie, effective in its way, and enough for the Screen Directors Guild to offer her membership in 1950, which she accepted, becoming only the second female director in its ranks (after Dorothy Arzner). Her acceptance within the industry as a director was rapid though well-deserved, and Lupino continued to make challenging social dramas that cemented her reputation and were successful both commercially and critically.

Lupino’s attraction to “difficult” subject matters was confirmed with the release of Outrage (1950), about the rape of a young woman and the problems that arise because she doesn’t tell anyone what’s happened to her. It shows Lupino still learning her craft as a director, but also growing in confidence, and her decision to tackle such a topic is entirely laudable: it’s a movie that Hollywood would never have made at the time, and which was only possible because of Lupino’s independence from the studio system. (By coincidence, Akira Kurosawa tackled the same subject, but from a different angle, in the same year’s Rashômon.)

Outrage

Lupino’s next movie seemed, at first glance, to be a step back from the powerful social dramas she’d already made, but Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) was a deceptively intriguing look at female jealousy and longing as experienced by the mother of a tennis prodigy. It features a great performance from Claire Trevor, and shows that Lupino was entirely capable of making the subtext of a movie more interesting than the main storyline. It was also Lupino’s first time directing a movie that was written by someone else.

Lupino’s next directorial stint was filling in for Nicholas Ray when he fell ill during the filming of film noir thriller On Dangerous Ground (1951), a movie Lupino had a role in. It’s a measure of Lupino’s regard within the industry at that time that she was asked to do this, and though it’s difficult when watching the movie to work out which scenes she shot specifically, that in itself is a tribute to Lupino’s skill as a director in that she was able to mimic Ray’s idiosyncratic style of directing.

The film noir approach of On Dangerous Ground may well have prompted Lupino to seek out a similar project for her next movie as a director. If so, the result was perhaps her most well-received movie yet, the tense and menacing The Hitch-Hiker (1953). With its claustrophobic car interiors and bleak desert vistas, Lupino’s strong visual style served as a compelling background to the psychological battle occurring between fishermen Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy, and psychotic William Talman (never better). It may be a short movie, a lean seventy-one minutes, but it’s one of the most compelling crime dramas of the Fifties, and Lupino’s grip on the material is so assured that her increasing skill behind the camera can no longer be questioned.

Hitch-Hiker, The

With audiences and critics alike impressed by The Hitch-Hiker, their response to Lupino’s next movie should have been even more emphatic, but despite being widely regarded now as her masterpiece, The Bigamist (1953) was coolly received. And yet it’s a movie that addresses its subject matter head on and is still as uncompromising in its approach even today. It was a first for Lupino in that she directed herself – as the object of the main character’s bigamous relationship – but her confidence as a director ensures that each character gets the screen exposure they need. The ending is particularly impressive, and has an emotional impact that is as unexpected as it is effective.

Sadly, Lupino’s short career as an independent producer/director came to an end after The Bigamist. Budgets had always been tight, and though Lupino was always well prepared and planned ahead on all her movies, the returns on her movies weren’t enough to keep The Filmakers going. Fortunately, in 1952, Lupino had been approached by Dick Powell who had started up a television production company called Four Star Productions; he wanted her to replace Joel McCrea and Rosalind Russell after they’d dropped out. Lupino began working in television in earnest, and it wasn’t until 1966 that Lupino made what would be her final movie as a director, The Trouble With Angels. A comedy about the students at an all-girls’ school who challenge the nuns that run it (including, ironically, Rosalind Russell), the movie received a mixed to negative reaction, but viewed today holds up remarkably well. Afterwards, Lupino continued acting and directing in television until her death, and along the way took supporting roles in horror movies such as The Devil’s Rain (1975) and The Food of the Gods (1976) (as many of her contemporaries did in the Seventies).

Trouble With Angels, The

Lupino’s importance in the history of women directors is due to the fact that she did it all by herself: she founded the production company to make the movies she wanted to make, she wrote (at first) the screenplays for those movies, and she tackled topics that her male peers would have run a mile from (or just not been allowed to make). If she couldn’t completely undermine the conservative values of the time, it was enough that she challenged them and held a mirror up to some of the more uncomfortable social issues of the day. She was a tough, determined director who didn’t short change her audience, and she achieved industry and public approval on her own terms, as well as long-lasting respect. And more importantly, she helped inspire a new generation of female movie makers, a generation that would tackle many of the same issues Lupino had, and with the same sense of propriety.

For One Week Only: Women Directors – 1. Dorothy Arzner

06 Friday Nov 2015

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Later than advertised (and now running from 5-11 November 2015), this edition of For One Week Only is going to focus on women directors.

Introduction

Women have been directing movies since the very beginnings of cinema. In 1896, Frenchwoman Alice Guy made what is regarded as the first movie directed by a woman, La fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy). It’s not the most sophisticated of early silents, and only lasts a minute, but it does go some way to proving that it wasn’t entirely a man’s world at the end of the 19th century. Guy went on to have a prolific career as a director: between 1896 and 1920 she made a staggering 430 movies.

During the silent era there were many other “firsts” involving women directors, from Lois Weber’s being the highest-paid female director of the silent era – $5000 a week – to actresses such as Cleo Madison and Grace Cunard finding as much or more success behind the camera than they did in front of it. And the world’s first full-length animated feature, Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), made in 1926, was directed by Germany’s Lotte Reiniger. But with the advent of the Talkies, women’s involvement in directing – in the US at least – began to lessen, although by coincidence, there was one woman who managed to buck the trend and carved out a career that included a significant number of achievements.

Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979)

Dorothy Arzner

It’s ironic looking back over Dorothy Arzner’s life and career that she had a connection to Hollywood from quite a young age. Her parents ran a café in Los Angeles that was frequented by such movie luminaries as Charles Chaplin, William S. Hart and Erich von Stroheim, and Dorothy worked there as a waitress. But her ambition lay in the medical profession and she enrolled in a pre-med programme after graduating from high school; during World War I she served as an ambulance driver.

Once hostilities had ceased, Arzner changed tack and got a job working for a newspaper. There she was introduced to William C. DeMille – Cecil’s brother – and landed a job as a stenographer at Famous Players-Lasky (the forerunner of Paramount Pictures). Having become very interested in working in the movies, Arzner began to amass as much knowledge as she could and she soon became a script writer, as well as an editor. Between 1919 and 1926 she worked on eight features as a screen writer, and eight features as an editor, including uncredited duties in both capacities on James Cruze’s Old Ironsides (1926). So good was her work that she was the first person of either gender to receive an on-screen credit as an editor.

Old Ironsides

Her ambition though was to become a director, and in 1927 she made her first feature, Fashions for Women, a drama about a cigarette girl played by Esther Ralston who falls in love with a count while finding success as a model. It was a rather innocuous start to her career as a director but did well enough for her to tackle two more movies that year, Ten Modern Commandments, a romantic comedy-drama that also featured Ralston, and Get Your Man, a romantic comedy set in Paris that starred Clara Bow. But it was Manhattan Cocktail (1928) that was to be the second of many “firsts” that Arzner would achieve in her career, as she became the first female to direct a sound feature (albeit a part-talkie).

Reuniting with Bow for The Wild Party (1929), Arzner found her star struggling with the demands of making her first talkie, and specifically the microphones that were being used. In order to accommodate and reassure her star, Arzner came up with what was, for then, a unique solution: she devised the industry’s first boom mike so that Bow could move around unhampered by having to be near a microphone.

Wild Party, The

As her career continued into the Thirties, Arzner made a number of moderately successful pre-Code movies, and worked with a variety of Paramount stars, such as Claudette Colbert, Pat O’Brien, Ginger Rogers, Fredric March, Ruth Chatterton, Paul Lukas, Sylvia Sidney, and a young Cary Grant. But as Paramount’s fortunes suffered due to the Depression, and the company insisted on pay cuts across the board, Arzner became a freelance director and was quickly snapped up by RKO to direct Christopher Strong (1933). The movie starred Katharine Hepburn and the two didn’t get along, so much so that Hepburn complained about Arzner to the studio; wisely, RKO backed their director.

Despite the animosity between the two women the movie was a critical, if not financial, success, and Arzner moved on to Nana (1934), a vanity project for Anna Sten, a Russian actress being promoted by Samuel Goldwyn. Alas the movie was a flop, and it wasn’t until 1936 that Arzner made another picture, the well-received and critically lauded Craig’s Wife, starring Rosalind Russell. Also that year, Arzner was the first woman to be enrolled into the recently formed Screen Directors Guild; for many years afterward she would remain the only woman in the Guild until Ida Lupino joined in 1950.

Craig's Wife

1937 saw Arzner work with and establish a close friendship with Joan Crawford, firstly providing uncredited direction on The Last of Mrs Cheyney, and then directing the star in that same year’s rags-to-riches tale The Bride Wore Red. Both movies were successful with audiences, but Arzner was unable to secure another picture until 1940 and the romantic drama Dance, Girl, Dance. Though it was a critical and commercial failure at the time, the movie underwent a re-evaluation in the 1970’s and is now regarded as one of Arzner’s more intriguing and important movies and as an early example of female empowerment. Three years later, Arzner made her last feature, the wartime drama First Comes Courage, an exercise in propaganda that featured the clearly Scandinavian Merle Oberon as a resistance fighter torn between Nazi Carl Esmond and Brit Brian Aherne.

Arzner turned her attention to the war effort after that, and made several training movies for the Women’s Army Corps. After the war she decided to work in television, making documentaries and commercials until the 1950’s when she became a filmmaking teacher. She first taught at the Pasadena Playhouse before moving to UCLA in the Sixties (one of her pupils was Francis Ford Coppola). She stayed there until her death in 1979.

Even though Dorothy Arzner was the most well-known female director working in Hollywood during its so-called Golden Age, the late Twenties through to the early Forties, she was also the only female director working in Hollywood during that time. She made movies that featured strong female heroines, and she found ways of including some of her feminist beliefs in the movies she made, slyly and with style. She also had a unique visual approach to the material she directed, and if you watch her movies today there’s a freshness about them that separates them from the otherwise formulaic movies being made at the time.

Arzner fought her way up from the bottom, and refused to be intimidated by the phallocentric system she worked in. She occupied a unenviable position in Hollywood, both as a woman and as a lesbian, but did so without compromising those values she felt strongly about. That she chose to give up directing movies after World War II is a cause for disappointment; it would have been interesting to see what she made of the role of women in the post-War era. But perhaps she’d had enough of being the only woman in such a male-dominated industry. After all, she did have this to say: “When I went to work in a studio, I took my pride and made a nice little ball of it and threw it right out the window.”

Dorothy Arzner 2

Preview: For One Week Only 2 – 8 November 2015

31 Saturday Oct 2015

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In the October issue of UK movie magazine Sight & Sound, the feature article was entitled, The Female Gaze: 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women. In the article’s introduction, Isabel Stevens asks the question, “Other than decrying the status quo and highlighting and critiquing new films by female directors, what can a film magazine do?” The answer is to shed light on a variety of movies made by women directors and to reinforce the notion that they were and are just as capable as their male counterparts of making intelligent, thought-provoking, and entertaining movies on a wide variety of subjects.

Lois Weber

In recognition of this, and over the coming week, thedullwoodexperiment will be looking at some of the movies on the Sight & Sound list, and celebrating the contribution that women directors have made since those groundbreaking days of 1896. In the meantime you may want to look at the reviews of the movies directed by women that are already on the site, women such as:

Sima Urale, Margot Benacerraf, Allison Burnett, Ellie Kanner, Jennifer Kent, Amma Asante, Kimberly Peirce, Laura Poitras, Stacie Passon, Carol Morley, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Madonna, Jennifer Lee, Ana Lily Amirpour, Rebecca Johnson, Susan Seidelman, Lois Weber, Lake Bell, Courteney Cox, Lynn Shelton, Megan Griffiths, Karen Leigh Hopkins, Sara St. Onge, Gillian Robespierre, Jane Anderson, Gren Wells, Jen & Sylvia Soska, Clio Barnard, Susanne Bier, Laura Lau, Caryn Waechter, Annette K. Olesen, Maggie Carey, Vivian Qu, Karen Moncrieff, Angelina Jolie, Marjane Satrapi, Haifaa Al-Mansour, Shira Piven, Jocelyn Towne, Crystal Moselle, and Lauren Montgomery.

Angelina Jolie