WOMEN MAKE FILM

A NEW ROAD MOVIE THROUGH CINEMA

ABOUT THE FILM

Boldly following in the footsteps of Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film, this long-in-the-making work draws on hundreds of film clips to show how films are made. Across 40 chapters, it asks questions such as how to shoot a great opening scene, how to frame an image, how to introduce a character, how to film scenes of sex, dance and death, how work and love are portrayed on screen, and how the genres of comedy, melodrama and science fiction work.

Uniquely, all of these questions are answered using clips drawn exclusively from films directed by women. Alongside celebrated women directors, hundreds of forgotten women filmmakers from every era of film history and from every continent appear in the film. Women Make Film is an illuminating work that brings the unknown to light, a celebration of the art and craft of cinema, and an “I Accuse”[1] (J’Accuse…) letter addressed to film history.

Most films have been directed by men. Most of the films we call cinema classics have been directed by men as well. And yet, for one hundred and thirty years and on all six continents where films are made, thousands of women have directed films too. Some of them are among the very best films ever made. What films did they make? Which techniques did they use? What can they teach us about cinema? By neglecting them, film history has been sexist. Women Make Film looks at film once again, through the eyes of the world’s women directors: it is a new road movie through cinema.

This film is not about the lives of directors. It is not a chronological survey. It is not an analysis of the ways in which women directors differ from men. And it is not one of those lists of the greatest films ever made.

No. Its lines are clearer than that.

This film is about films, about scenes. It answers practical questions. How do you begin a film in an intriguing way? How do you set the tone of a film? How do you make a film believable? How do you introduce a character creatively? How do you make a ‘tracking shot’ with a moving camera mesmerizing? It looks for answers to the kinds of questions you ask when you make or watch films. How do you approach dream sequences, dance routines, the workplace or politics? How do you film bodies? What is a wonderful way to show love? Or tension, memory or death? We will ask 40 questions like these. In 40 chapters. In 40 montages along the road. 40 stories about great films.

This film is a kind of film school in which all the teachers are women. It is a Venus Academy. It is a montage built from examples, hundreds of examples, bringing together film scenes from all over the world and from many eras.

Your favorite films may not be here, and neither may your favorite directors. This film does not try to be comprehensive. In fact, some of the more famous films were deliberately left out.

It is, however, full of surprises. Of revelations.

You are free to be annoyed that some of these great films have been overlooked.

But you are also free to take pleasure in the film medium, and in the women on whose shoulders we stand.

[1] Translator’s note: J’Accuse…! is the open letter written by the renowned author Émile Zola about the Dreyfus Affair, addressed to Félix Faure, President of the French Third Republic, and published in the newspaper L’Aurore on January 13, 1898.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

“Many films about cinema feature only male directors, so this work is a corrective. It is a film school in which all the teachers are women. The aim of this film, as Diaghilev and Cocteau put it, is to ‘astonish us.’ Fighting for equality in cinema is an imperative right. Part of that fight is to celebrate great women directors and to place them on the launch pad they deserve, one that many film historians, most of them men, have denied them. Women directors are only one part of this history. There have been great women writers, producers and actors on the stage of history, yet there is great ignorance and blindness about women who direct films. Our film will boldly fight that blindness.”
– Mark Cousins, 2018

Chapter 1: Opening

With examples ranging from 1943 to 2013 and stretching from China to Iran and from Australia to Finland, we will look at the wide spectrum of ways a film can open, from the mysterious, the direct and the gliding to the intuitive and diving straight into the subject. Every film is a lesson in how to create a world in an instant. It offers the chance to learn from examples.

Chapter 2: Tone

What is the tone of a film? It is not the film’s story or theme, but how its world feels. This time we go to Hollywood, to director Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell and its tone, which evokes an overwhelming sense of love. This chapter examines the countless ways directors set the tone of their films: pleasure, anger, poetry, double tone, moral seriousness, caring, unsettling, violence and more.

Chapter 3: Believability

It is a subject that is easy to spot but not so easy to understand. Basic human stories, the truth about life, real emotions, responding to the world. How do directors create a reality that does not feel fake? Stories from real life can help with this. But what is the trick? You will find some answers to these questions, together with a master class in believability, through examples ranging from Lois Weber’s The Blot (1921) to Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016).

Chapter 4: Introducing a Character

There are many ways to meet people and introduce characters in films: entering a house, overhearing people, witnessing a strange act. In Shirley Clarke’s 1961 film The Connection, a documentary crew is used to introduce the characters to us; Andrea Arnold places her characters at the center of the frame in Fish Tank; and in The Story of the Flaming Years, directed by Yuliya Solntseva, the main character is presented to the audience by being filmed as a statue on a building.

Chapter 5: Meet Cute

“The classic Hollywood trope of the meet cute and its countless interpretations. From intimate glances to worlds colliding spectacularly. Unique examples include the fiery central meet cute in Germaine Dulac’s experimental The Seashell and the Clergyman, Céline Sciamma pitting two girl gangs against each other in Girlhood, and the skeptical veteran FBI agent meeting the idealistic rookie in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break.

And then a layered meet cute in Mania Akbari’s One. Two. One, masterfully choreographed and shot in a wide angle, composed like a Renaissance altarpiece.

Chapter 6: Conversation

How do you make a simple human interaction cinematic? In Places in Cities, Angela Schanelec advises us to focus on body language; Cecile Tang uses the zoom to guide us through the emotional transitions of The Arch; and Sofia Coppola, in The Virgin Suicides, shows us an unspoken conversation by using songs and split screens that tell the story of an impossible longing.

Chapter 7: Framing

Frames define scenes and give them their color. They can make sport look like ballet, as in Olympia by the controversial Nazi iconographer Leni Riefenstahl. They shape the cinematic world through the impressionistic glances in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, the claustrophobic close-ups in Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl, and camera angles as extreme as the emotions of the title character in Mahalia Belo’s Ellen.

Chapter 8: Tracking

For many, tracking shots are the very essence of the magic of filmmaking. They can ask questions, and they can speak when almost no one else in the film does, as in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est or Marion Hänsel’s Le Lit. In Antonia Bird’s Face, an uninterrupted tracking shot creates the illusion that the camera is an extension of our own eye. Kinetic by nature, the tracking shot can help to show and express a desperate escape dynamically, as in Ursula Meier’s Home.

Chapter 9: Staging

The staging of scenes is an element of film form that clearly points to theater, the origin of cinema. In The Moon Has Risen, Kinuyo Tanaka uses staging to shape the invisible geometry of the scene, emphasizing the tension between the characters. In Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade stages the scene in depth to set up its tragicomic final lines. And in Maria Schrader’s Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, the complex staging of the final scene, full of crisscrossing movements, brings its setting to life.

Chapter 10: Journey

Movement is a key element of the moving image, and journeys in films can be vertical (into one’s own self) as much as they are horizontal. Travel can act as a glue that binds characters from two separate worlds, as in Krane’s Confectionery, which follows a middle-class woman and a working-class man as they set out on a moral journey against society. Driving can be a test of will and courage, as in Nell Shipman’s Something New. The vehicle itself can serve as a safe space and a small social universe, like the car in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey. Or the journey can take the character on a trip into their own nightmares, as in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook.