I ♥ Female Directors

Dear Reader,

Every year there are studies and lists and think pieces about the lack of female directors working in television and film. And hey, we love studies and lists and think pieces as much as the next gal, but the numbers are soooo depressing and the problem is soooo entrenched and unchanging that reading about it starts to feel a lot like eating your vegetables if vegetables tasted like futility which they do.

We started iheartfemaledirectors.com because we think the biggest thing missing from the conversation about female directors is some good old-fashioned gushy fandom. We will not have achieved true equality until every film school student who ever jizzed himself talking about the exploration of violence and masculinity in Fight Club has also needed a change of pants after discussing the exploration of violence and masculinity in Beau Travail.

Yes, there are historically fewer female directors than male, but there have still been hundreds (thousands?) of great ones. And new female directors are being born and dismissed every minute! So while the major studios’ scientists toil away in their under-the-lot labs, manufacturing the single perfect, hireable female director*, we’ll be swooning over the ones who have already put amazing, love letter-worthy things into the world.  

So here’s our plan: every week we’ll put up a new love letter to a female director we’re obsessed with. And look, maybe that won't solve all of sexism in Hollywood. But it might get you to watch an Agnes Varda movie, and isn't that a close second?

Love,
Annabel, Laura & Charley

 

*Criteria:
• Experienced (but also fresh!)
• Works Constantly (but is always available)
• Commanding (but not emasculating)
• Will represent the wokeness and feminism of the studio (but won’t complain about institutionalized sexism)
• Has a unique voice (but wants to direct mediocre tentpoles)
• A visionary (but takes all notes)

Dear Alice Guy-Blaché,

Let me begin, as women do, with an apology. Until recently, I didn’t know your name. I didn’t know you were the first female director ever. I didn’t know you invented the close up, shooting on location, and saying “be natural” to actors. I didn’t know you were the first working mom director or one of the first women to run her own studio. I didn’t know that for a brief time on this earth, when you and Georges Méliès were the only two people making narrative films (historians argue over who finished first), that the gender split among directors was - for the first and last time in history - 50/50. In 1896.

But now I know. I know Léon Gaumont, your former boss, literally edited you out of the history books when he published the history of the first film studio, even after promising he’d pencil you in. I know you died believing your legacy had been lost.

I also know you made, among your 750+ films, one of the first great gender bending comedies. In Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) men ironed, sewed, and fended off rapey advances while women drank in bars and got in fist fights. While dumdums in the Youtube comments section are still mistaking the message of the film as feminism-will-make-men-gay (if only!) the rest of us get it. Under the cover of laughter and over the heads of idiots, you were able to literally put men in women’s shoes and comment on how limiting and perilous it was to be a woman in an inequitable world. In 1906.

Alice, do you want to know the real consequences of feminism? 120 years after you made your first film, thousands of men and women are fighting right now to make sure more female directors make it into the history books. But don’t worry, we’ll put you first.  

Annabel

Source: https://www.iheartfemaledirectors.com/alic...