A perfect lockdown gift has landed, one which might have sounded daunting in ordinary times: a 14-hour documentary about female directors, which goes live from next week on BFI Player. This glorious enterprise unearths footage from some of the greatest movie-makers of this century and the last – all of them female. At the same time, the BFI is showing 36 of the hundreds of films mentioned, so that viewers can enjoy full immersion over weeks, possibly awarding themselves a degree in, say, The Cinema of the Second Sex afterwards.
Narrated by women including Tilda Swinton and Thandie Newton, Women Make Film – A New Road Movie Through Cinema is the latest encyclopedic romp from the Northern Irish film historian and documentary-maker Mark Cousins, who previously directed the 15-hour television series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, in 2011. The new documentary will be released in palatable chunks over five weeks from 18 May, and aims to open a conversation on the lost legacy of women behind the movie camera.
The film does not waste time wondering why women have been sidelined by mainstream cinema – we knew the answers to that long before #MeToo. This is not about slamming the patriarchy, but a joyous trip through women’s work on screen, puckishly curated into 40 chapters on different themes including openings, interiority, meet cutes, sci-fi, tone, love, death, editing and musicals. The clips cover six continents, 13 decades and 183 directors, from the studio owner Alice Guy Blaché’s early silent work to the Russian director Kira Muratova, populists Dorothy Arzner and Kathryn Bigelow in the US, and China’s Wang Ping under Mao. Cinephiles previewing at festivals have been gobsmacked by the sheer quality of work excavated from previously obscure film-makers.
“For years when I was visiting a country, I’d ask who their great female directors were,” says Cousins, citing his encounter with the 86-year-old Sri Lankan director Sumitra Peries, who was astonished to be contacted. “Yes, we’re interested in her life, but in this film we’re interested in her camera, her images, her social and psychological ideas.”
Cousins started thinking about missing female films in the mid-90s when he curated a season of great documentaries, and realised that he had included only one by a woman, Barbara Kopple’s powerful mining story Harlan County, USA (1976). “Afterwards I thought, that’s gunk.” (Gunk is a Northern Irish term meaning “a shock of disappointment”.) Cousins gathered a team at Hopscotch Films in Glasgow to rectify the situation. It began as an unpaid labour of love, years in the making. “I wanted to be an ally with the great female activists who are pushing for change in the film industry today.”
Women Make Film is helping spawn a movement to bring this lost archive into the light, reminding older feminists of the days when the green spines of Virago books rescued early writers from obscurity and changed the literary canon. The charity Birds’ Eye View, which promotes female-made films, will launch an extension of its #ReclaimTheFrame scheme, which previously ran in cinemas countrywide.
Under lockdown #ReclaimTheFrame will attempt to #ReclaimTheCanon, hosting weekly home “viewing parties” for each section of Cousins’ documentary, with Facebook Live responses from women filmmakers and debates afterwards. Birds’ Eye View’s director, Mia Bays, says: “This is the best possible primer for a conversation which will have film-makers talking about who they love, and their new discoveries, and also about how cinema is controlled: who decides what’s shown, what’s archived, what’s digitised for a new audience.”
Birds’ Eye View has been working with the doyenne of feminist cinema, Prof Laura Mulvey of Birkbeck University, famed for creating the term “the male gaze”. At 78 years old, she is taking to Facebook Live debates with alacrity. Cousins cites as one of his inspirations the first Women’s Film Event at the Edinburgh film festival in 1972, which was curated by Mulvey and others. As their blurb then said: “A festival of men’s films would be simply absurd. It’s because so few women have been able to make films that this festival exists.”
Mulvey is delighted that her work is being continued. “With this new compilation, an exciting staging post has been reached in the long process of recovery,” she says. “The amazing extent of the work, with over a thousand clips, has the potential to bring women directors out of gender categorisation and into film history as such. But it also offers an unprecedented opportunity to enjoy women’s cinematic vision and reflect on the way women have seen and indeed made the world through film – a source of wonder and of speculation!”
Even those immersed in female film, such as Bays, have been surprised by the archival finds, such as Germany Pale Mother (1980) by Helma Sanders-Brahms, which is also on BFI Player. “It’s the best film about war I’ve seen, a remarkable work. A mistresspiece!”
The documentary is also a resource for film schools wishing to explore horizons beyond the Scorsese-Tarkovsky-Fellini triangle. Cousins has already heard from universities who want to use his film, and he hopes even more material will emerge. “We have to ask, what do we not know? The old canon was a kind of comfort blanket which we need to throw off.”
Women Make Film has sold around the world to mainstream television broadcasters from the US to China to Spain – but not yet in the UK, although BBC Four has declared an interest. “Maybe we’re having an intellectual and cultural lockdown, post-Brexit, as well as a physical lockdown,” laughs Cousins. But despite losing a cinema release, he points with hope to the “sense of community in lockdown, the sense of something bigger. People are looking for a bit of structure in their lives, something affirmative.”
Women Make Film launches on the BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema and Blu-ray on 18 May.
