You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shoppingOn the evening before the Oscars, Clémence Sebag reflects on the lack of female director nominees.
“I suppose I like to think of myself as a film-maker, rather than as a female film-maker.” Kathryn Bigelow
Feminist: /ˈfɛmənɪst / (noun) a person who wants to see screenplays written by all sorts of women, directed by women, and fleshed out by women.
Want to catch up on Oscar-winning female direction ahead of this year’s Academy Awards? You can do so in exactly 131 minutes. By watching Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. It’s just the one film in 85 years. That’s 1.19% of the Best Director statue going to women. One golden hand off that Oscar statue for women.
And it’s for a film that scores a big fat zero at the Bechdel test. Which started as a wry joke in Alison Bechdel’s 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, with one woman saying to another: “I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it who, two, talk to each other about something other than a man. […] Last movie I was able to see was Alien.”
(No, feminist is not a synonym of lesbian.)
Never mind women talking to each other, there are no women in the only female-helmed Best-Direction-Oscar-winner (still The Hurt Locker). So what does it mean that the only woman on the Oscar scoreboard for Best Director got there by making a stereotypically masculine war film? From Point Break to Zero Dark Thirty, should Bigelow feel guilty about not representing women or talking to them through her films? No. Because the point of achieving equal access to financing is for women to be able to make any film they want to make. Which includes taking over the boys’ corner, playing in the girls’ corner, and even, not playing to stereotype.
Feminist: /ˈfɛmənɪst / (noun) a person who goes to see films directed by women in the first week of their release to keep them in cinemas longer
It also includes box-office, not just indie films. While in independent film festivals there is a much greater balance between male and female directors – at Sundance in 2013 it was about 50/50 – sexism is still the name of the game in mainstream cinema.
Though half of film graduates are women, few go on to become established directors. Among those women who do become directors, the majority are making documentaries because they are not getting access to the level of funding needed to direct a feature film. Two Sundance 2014 directors shared the creative solutions they found. Director Cynthia Hill says: “We work from my house which is […] a beautiful mess because two of the associate producers I work with […] are mothers too. So we’re all there with this motley crew of kids running around while we do our thing. We have not treated motherhood like a hindrance or a deterrent, or something that needs to be kept separate from our work lives. We want to have very full lives, and I think we all do.” Director Sophie Hyde balanced motherhood and filmmaking by shooting only one day a week for a year: “I wanted to see if there was another way to make a movie, outside of the industrial model where for six to eight weeks I couldn’t do anything else, and I couldn’t see my child.”
Other women are working behind the scenes to get female directors into the limelight. In 2011 women-only film festival Birds Eye View closed with writer/director/actress Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture. Dunham has since started doing it for the Girls. Last year Birds Eye View celebrated Arab Women Filmmakers. Director Haifaa Al-Mansour has since gained global attention for Wadjda. And female filmmakers collectives such as Film Fatales, or initiatives such as Gamechanger Films and Tangerine Entertainment fund films directed or co-directed by women to get the films produced in the first place.
Feminist: /ˈfɛmənɪst / (noun) a person who knows how to spell ‘gender’ and ‘genre’.
British actress Jodie Whittaker has said “Women are not a genre.” Have we been confusing ‘gender’ and ‘genre’ all along? Each year, female actresses are rewarded for their talent – in equal proportions to men – because gender-specific award categories exist to make that happen. If more gender-based initiatives transfer to bigger and more visible (money-making) structures like the Oscars are we sending out the message that women aren’t able to go it alone? Should there be a woman-only category for best director, best female screenwriter and best cinematography?
And the Oscars for Best Direction go to: The Queen’s Speech, Slumbitch Millionnaire, No Country For Old Men, Million Dollar Baby, The Lady of the Rings. By Tam Hooper, Danielle Boyle, Joelle and Ethel Cohen, Clem Eastwood, Petra Jackson.
In an ideal world, talent is genderless. Meanwhile, in the real world, “we are missing out the stories of half of the population” as actress Zoë Wanamaker says. And at this rate, by the 22nd century our grand-daughters, feminist or not, will have 1.03 more female director role model(s) to aspire to. Could that have anything to do with the fact that 77% of voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are male?
Still, it’s a brave new year. Maybe on 2 March the Oscars will bring women to the forefront.
And the female director nominees for Best Direction are…
Nil. Oh, well, maybe next year.
About Clémence Sebag
Clémence Sebag is roamer, she started out as a West Londoner, worked her way up North, then ventured down South until all that was left was East. She tried Rio and Buenos Aires but couldn't get used to the weather. By day she works as a literary translator, by night she writes book reports for a literary scout. She wants to be a writer when she grows up and everybody knows Paris is where writers live. Fall-back career: literary groupie. She Blames Bridget Jones for not having gotten around to penning the 10th draft of her 31st novel. Meanwhile, you can find some flash fiction from her Goldsmiths Creative Writing MA here. She also dabbles in poetry and you can find her in the anthology The Dance Is New. Best place to find her: Café de Flore. If Paris is too far, Tweet her @clefranglaise or follow her blog.
