The history of film, much like any other industry throughout time, has largely been male-dominated, with the vast majority of opportunities and accolades going to male filmmakers. However, it is important to note the influence of women in the film industry, and the sorely underappreciated role they have throughout the history of cinema. When tracking women directors through the 100+ years film has existed, their impacts and struggles has ebbed and flowed in surprising ways. From the silent film era’s breadth of opportunities to modern filmmaking’s slow but steady infiltration of women directors today, female filmmakers have had a long, fascinating and often unsung road to becoming a major influence on the film industry.
While it may seem as though women had fewer and fewer opportunities in fields like filmmaking the further you go back in history, the silent film era was surprisingly welcoming of female directors. Around the same time as the Lumière Brothers were inventing and popularizing the art of film, Alice Guy-Blaché, the first female director, was developing her own craft at the same time. In 1896, she debuted her first silent film, Le Fee aux Choux, a sixty-second film about the old French fairy tale about little boys being born in cabbages and girls in roses. While only a minute long, it was groundbreaking for being one of the very first narrative films, even predating the work of Georges Méliès. For the next ten years, Guy-Blaché acted as the head of production for the Gaumont Film Company, directing Mamore than a thousand silent shorts that explored similar innovations as Méliès, such as double exposures, reversing film, masking, split screen and more. Her later works even experimented with sound long before The Jazz Singer was touted as the first ‘talkie.’ Over the course of her career, Guy-Blaché pioneered the art form in ways few others did, and her influence is felt throughout the history of women’s cinema.
In addition to Guy-Blaché’s influence, the silent film era was an incredibly open field for female directors of all stripes to make names for themselves. From 1916 to 1923, the film industry was rife with female directors and producers, and there were even more women than men running independent production companies during this time (Potier). In America, Guy-Blaché-inspired female director Lois Weber made a name for herself directing several successful silent films, including Hypocrites (1915) and Suspense (1913). More than other directors at the time, Weber focused on social issues like abortion and birth control in works like Where Are My Children?, making some of the first ‘issue’ movies in cinema history (Lowe 1952). Most fascinating of all was Weber and other directors’ ability to use the medium of film to explore female societal roles and expectations, creating narrative fictions that nonetheless explored dark truths about the lack of women’s agency in a man’s world.
Unfortunately, after the silent film era, the industry became much more difficult for women. In the silent film days, motion pictures were a niche novelty, where independent houses made their own films without a large unified industry gathering around it. However, by the 1920s, Hollywood’s production companies were soon bought up by big banks and standardized in ways that were unfriendly to women. Hollywood’s Golden Age, for instance, only had one female director of note – Dorothy Arzner, a woman who managed to succeed and thrive in the restrictive days of the Hays Code. Among her innovations was the invention of the boom mike during the 1929 film The Wild Party, creating brand-new ways of recording sound on sets for the burgeoning talkie market (Casella 248). In addition to The Wild Party, her other films managed to achieve a certain amount of acclaim, including Sarah and Son (1930), Anybody’s Woman (1930) and Working Girls (1931). However, this was chiefly because of her willingness to create intensely conventional films that could find financial success; while she managed to weave themes of feminist power and feature strong female characters, these works could hardly be described as avant-garde. Even so, her ability to maneuver her way to the top of the Hollywood studio system and become successful in such a hostile environment for women is incredibly impressive.
This trend of women being largely left out of mainstream Hollywood continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s and into the late 1960s. Outside of Hollywood, the most successful female-drive films were foreign and avant-garde works by female directors outside the studio system, as well as the infamous work of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (e.g. Triumph of the Will (1935)). Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was a particularly notable early innovator in experimental film, using surrealist imagery and unnatural editing to create a feeling of tremendous unease and visual poetry that would influence many future films in the genre. In many ways, Deren created the language of experimental film, utilizing slow motion, canted angles and jagged editing that would influence other influential filmmakers like David Lynch.
However, in spite of this outsider status, the second wave of feminism began to gain traction along with the larger counterculture during the late ‘60s, leading to a tremendous criticism of America’s regressive cultural output in films, especially its lack of gender equality. Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1971) became one of the first influential American independent films, aiding significantly in the rise of independent films in the wake of the Hollywood Golden Age. These films challenged norms of filmic formalism, editing, performance and themes, all while providing many female directors with opportunities to establish themselves as artists.
Directors like Elaine May, Liliana Cavani, Jack Micklin Silver and Chantal Akerman began to craft intelligent, subtle and powerful films (The Heartbreak Kid, The Night Porter, Hester Street and Jeanne Dielman, among others) that provided distinctly feminine perspectives to the world of cinema, and were often released to significant critical acclaim (O’Hara). Many of these films provided an authentic look at the struggles of women attempting to assert their agency and desires in male-dominated spaces, perhaps an eerie metaphor for the tribulations of these female directors in the limiting world of mainstream cinema.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the world of comedy began allowing even more female directors to break through into the mainstream Hollywood studio industry. Works by Penelope Spheeris (The Decline of Western Civilization, Wayne’s World), Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Barbra Streisand (Yentl), and Penny Marshall (Big) showcased a burgeoning niche for women directors to create commercially successful works with a distinct voice in the world of Hollywood comedies and dramas. Women began to be recognized at the Oscars as well, Jane Campion becoming the second women to ever be nominated for Best Director for 1994’s The Piano.
With the increasing saturation of feature films and the advent of television, women have begun receiving more and more opportunities to direct big-budget films with wide audiences. The independent resurgence of the 1990s led to the development of singular voices like Allison Anders (Mi Vida Loca), Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!), and Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), as well as allowing theatre and television directors such as Mimi Leder (The Peacemaker) and Julie Taymor (Titus) to transition into major studio films as well.
Perhaps the most notable female director working today is Kathryn Bigelow, who got her start with testosterone-fueled action and horror movies like Point Break (1991) and Near Dark (1987) and eventually became the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar for her work on 2009’s The Hurt Locker. This major breakthrough signaled a greater, though still incremental, increase in the cachet and importance of women directors in Hollywood.
While the film industry still has quite a long way to go in order to achieve true gender equality when it comes to allowing women the same opportunities as men, the history of women in cinema appears to favor greater representation. Female directors were able to enjoy early success and innovation during the silent film era due to the industry’s relative lack of notoriety, only to see female directors fall by the wayside during the big-money era of the studio system and the Hays Code. The resurgence of independent film in the 60s and 70s allowed for an increased field of opportunity for female directors, and allowed greater avenues for tremendous filmmakers to find their creative voices and express them to a larger audience. The realm of mainstream Hollywood comedy provided an in for more women to succeed as directors, and in recent years even the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences is finally acknowledging the contributions of women in such a diverse and artistic industry. In a perfect world, these opportunities will increase, and even more women will be given the chance to become the next Alice Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, or Kathryn Bigelow.
Works Cited
Casella, Donna R. “What Women Want: The Complex World of Dorothy Arzner and Her
Cinematic Women.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 50 (1&2) (Spring & Fall 2009): 235-270. Print.
Lowe, Denise. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930.
Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2005. Print.
O’Hara, Helen. “34 women who changed cinema.” The Telegraph. March 8, 2016.
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/what-to-watch/most-influential-powerful-women/>. Web.
Potier, Beth. “Radcliffe Fellow Explores Early Female Film Pioneers.” Harvard University
Gazette. Nov. 6, 2011. Print.
