I first fell in love with Greta Gerwig on a sweltering summer’s evening in 2013.
I’d just finished a semester at Queen’s University, Belfast where I’d been convening the Scriptwriting module on the MA. I’d juggled my teaching with the office day-job and had managed to save enough to fund my first proper holiday in five years - a month in the States.
It was the start of my trip and I was staying in a 4th floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, NYC. The tiny 1-bedroom apartment that I shared with my AirBnB host (he slept on the couch) was just off Bleeker Street and within walking distance of five or six independent cinemas, each offering a different selection of films.
It was heaven and I was going to the cinema at least once a day.
Frances HA was the second film that day, just something to do late on a bustling evening when I felt like staying out but not drinking in bars alone. I wasn’t sure I would like it but when you see a dozen films in a week what does it matter if one is a dud?
I was completely charmed.
Frances felt like a real person, and the story she was living felt recognisable – what it was to be a woman in your 20s/30s, navigating changing friendships, feeling a little bit lost, trying to find direction in your love life and career.
And thus began my love of Greta Gerwig.
While her work is strong enough to be widely accessibly, I think it chimes with me because we’re about the same age, and it seems, after watching Ladybird, that growing up attending Catholic School and drama classes in 1990s Sacramento wasn’t all at that different to my own Catholic-dominated, drama-loving teenage years in 1990s Dublin.
Considering my admiration for, and identification with, Gerwig, I was delighted when she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director in January 2018.
Listen, I know the Oscars aren’t everything. But you can’t deny their significance. I see them as a good indication of what kind of work is valued by the western mainstream film industry.
So that’s why I was pissed and disappointed when del Toro won but I wasn’t surprised.
You probably already know this but only five women have been nominated for Academy Award for Best Director*:
Lina Wertmüller, Seven Beauties, 1977
Jane Campion, The Piano, 1994
Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2004
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker, 2010
Greta Grewig, Ladybird, 2017
(Five African-American men have been nominees, including Jordan Peele for Get Out, but none have won. There’s never been a female African-American nominee.)
It was Kathryn Bigelow who got to make history in 2010 when she became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director. It’s worth nothing the only female winner is also the only female nominee who wasn’t writer/director for her nominated film.
Instead the first woman to win an Academy Award for Direction won it for a film written by a man with no significant female characters.
Whatever the merits of The Hurt Locker it is not a film about women by a woman – and I think that’s why it won. Similarly, Seven Beauties, for which Wertmüller became the first woman to be nominated, has at it’s centre a male protagonist. (Seven beauties is his nickname though there’s an obviously interplay between this nickname and the seven ‘ugly’ sisters Wertmüller gives him).
Is that because the only way to be the first woman is to first show you can tell male stories as well as the boys can?
In contrast, Campion, Coppola, and Gerwig’s films have complex, interesting, not always likeable female characters at their centre.
Of the five films, The Piano is my favourite (we’ll talk about my even greater love of Jane Campion later).
While Bigelow’s win was obviously a great achievement in some ways for women, I don’t think it broke barriers, and it wasn’t the herald of real change in the Academy or the industry at large.
How else do you explain Ava DuVernay’s 2015 snub for Best Director for Selma? If you don’t think she missed out on a nomination at least partly because she was black and female you must be a massive fan of The Imitation Game.
I’m not saying the Academy is massively racist or sexist (anymore) – members nominate and vote for the films they believe are great and don’t sit around twirling their grey moustaches, brainstorming ways to oppress non-white, non-male people.
But who gets to decide what a great film is? Who gets to decide what’s good enough to win, to be nominated, to be promoted, to be made in the first place?
As Susan Wokoma told the Radio Times the “gatekeepers” who make those decisions aren’t sufficiently diverse.
“I really believe that ultimately nothing is going to change that much unless the gatekeepers change. It means people losing their jobs, that’s why it’s not gonna happen soon. I just believe that in those rooms where decisions are made… where there is an equal amount of women and men in a room, the decisions are different. I’ve experienced that.”
Who is in control of those decisions matters.
It matters because, as Nijla Mu’min (an emerging black female writer and filmmaker) wrote for IndieWire in reaction to DuVernay’s Oscar Snub:
“This is personal. It is personal because we endeavor to tell stories about black women, black people, black human beings within an industry that doesn’t always care about those people.”
The data, which I’ll deal with in a later post, indicates that the industry doesn’t value anyone who isn’t a (mostly straight) white male.
But, I do.
And it’s in this context that this project, Watching Women, was born.
*By the way, I’m focusing on the Academy Awards in this post, but it’s not just the Oscars that have this problem:
The BAFTAS – 6 Women, 7 Nominations, 1 Winner - No Women of Colour
Jane Campion, The Piano, 1993
Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003
Valerie Ferris (co-director), Little Miss Sunshine, 2006
Lone Scherfig, An Education, 2010
Kathyrn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker, 2010 – Winner
Lynne Ramsay, We Need to Talk about Women, 2011
Kathyrn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty, 2012
Golden Globes – 5 Women, 7 Nominations, 1 Winner
Barbara Streisland, Yentl, 1984 – Winner
Barbra Streisand, The Prince of Tides, 1991
Jane Campion, The Piano, 1993
Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker, 2010
Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty, 2013
Ava DuVernay, Selma, 2014
ENDNOTE
As a white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heterosexual woman, my personal frustration’s focus on my gender and that’s why I’ve chosen to focus on watching women’s work in 2019 rather than work from black or POC filmmakers, LGBTQ+ filmmakers, non-English Language filmmakers, filmmakers with additional needs, or filmmakers from a different socio-economic class. BUT I’m going to have to broaden my viewing palette to keep up my usual volume of consumption, which means I’ll be seeking out films by these kinds of female filmmakers.
This is a one-year experiment and I’ll be keeping a list of interesting work that falls outside of the scope of the project to explore in 2020.
Farset Films prioritises the voice and vision of all women and wants to tell diverse stories so check out our submit page if you want to work with us.