Documentary puts women in spotlight
14part TCM series surveys techniques, accomplishments of several directors
When she first watched Turner Classic Movies’ 14part documentary “Women Make Film,” TCM host Alicia Malone wondered why all the terms for filmmaking styles — “Hitchockian,” “Kubrickian,” “Wellesian” — derive from men.
“Why not ‘Vardian,’ or ‘Nairian’ or ‘Bigelowian?’ ” Malone asked during a recent video call with The Chronicle on Zoom.
The female directors she namechecked, all featured in the documentary, are among the world’s most respected: the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda, Indian/New York director Mira Nair and San Carlos native Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first — and so far only — woman to win a directing Oscar, for the 2009 Iraq war film “The Hurt Locker.”
Directed by U.K. critic and filmmaker Mark Cousins, “Women Make Film” includes 500 clips from movies directed by women from around the world and airs in 75minute installments every Tuesday. The series opened Sept. 1 by highlighting San Franciscoborn early Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner, and it also acknowledges Oakland’s Cheryl Dunye and Napa Valleyraised Sofia Coppola and makes a strong case for Bigelow as one of the cinema’s greatest action directors.
Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” is next up on Tuesday, Sept. 15, while “Hurt Locker” airs Nov. 10, with the documentary referencing Bigelow’s 1991 Patrick SwayzeKeanu Reeves surfing/bankrobbing cult classic “Point Break.”
“Point Break,” as Malone observed, contains a famous foot chase “that has been copied again and again.”
“Bigelow has made all these great films about men, and people will say again and again that she makes films ‘like a man,’” said Cousins, who joined Malone on the Zoom call. “(But) Kathryn Bigelow makes films like Kathryn Bigelow. Women need to be free to make any type of cinema.”
And men can make 14part documentaries about female filmmakers.
“I would love if a woman had made this,” said Cousins, who also directed the epic 2011 documentary “The Story of Film: An Odyssey.” “We would all be more comfortable.” But it was Cousins who decided to devote five years to making the doc, without the help of any initial studio funding. (TCM and other distributors later bought rights.)
“The industry is discriminatory and sexist,” Cousins acknowledged, “but this is about cinema. The medium — shots and cuts and the beautiful language of cinema — is genderless. And I could speak about it because I had this head full of knowledge about all these great filmmakers.”
Cousins presents clip after clip in a “road trip”style survey, stopping every minute or 90 seconds to highlight how a director chose to compose a shot, or place a character in a frame. The clips are lightly contextualized, by categories like “framing” and “conversations,” but the presentation is ultimately more stream of consciousness. Exhilaratingly so, for cinema lovers, who will be happy to pause or rewind, to catch the title of that 1976 horror film made by an Indian actress (“Yakshagaanam,” by Sheela), or the name of that midcentury Hong Kong director who became a wellknown Los Angeles restaurateur (Cecile Tang).
The journey encompasses not just awardcaliber films or overlooked gems, but also clips from movies like Angelina Jolie’s critically drubbed 2015 drama “By the Sea” and the Penelope Spheerisdirected 1992 blockbuster comedy “Wayne’s World.”
“I am not snobby; I watch every kind of film,” Cousins said. His documentary bears this out when narrator Tilda Swinton describes, in plummy tones, how “We plunge into ‘Wayne’s World,’ which has its own anthems and language,” right before Mike Myers, as Wayne, talks about how monkeys might fly out of his butt.
Cousins’ road trip — or speeding train — approach “overwhelms you with movies made by women, so it covertly makes you ask these questions like ‘Why don’t we know more about these women? Why don’t we study these movies?” said Malone, who introduces each Tuesday’s program with Cousins.
Malone has written two books about female filmmakers but says that “there are so many movies in this documentary that I have not heard of before. And that’s frustrating, but it’s also exciting, because you get a real sense of discovery.”
The third installment of the series moves to “Sofian,” in highlighting “The Virgin Suicides” (1999), the first feature by Coppola, who later would be nominated for a directing Oscar for 2003’s “Lost in Translation.”
Based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, “Suicides” follows a doomed family of 1970s sisters and shows some of the hallmarks, like gauzy visuals and a wellcurated pop soundtrack, that would characterize Coppola’s body of work.
“That film is so impressive because she created something right out of the gate that is so distinctly her,” Malone said of Coppola. “Her aesthetic is so easy to recognize.”