Avant-garde Women Filmmakers

Previous editions of Film, Form, and Culture included a section on avant-garde women filmmakers.

Clearly, and sadly, our brief listing of film auteurs has not included the names of women directors. The simple and obvious answer to this is that women are allowed to play only a small role in film production, though, happy to say, it is getting better. Sofia Coppola, for example, daughter of the man who made the Godfather films, is quickly being recognized as a major talent, especially with her films Lost in Translation (2003) and The Bling Ring (2013). But in the complex, too-often frustrating world of women’s place in film, we need to discriminate between a number of issues. One is the representation of women themselves: how films “see” women, narrate them and their stories. We’ve discussed earlier how the basic narrative structure of intercutting shot/reverse shot, especially in the rescue narrative, is built upon men saving women. We have also seen, and will examine even more thoroughly in the following chapters, how the structure of the gaze—the looking of one character at another and the viewer at both—is directed toward women as erotic objects.

The simple point is that, as a part of the larger culture, film reflects the values of that culture and traps women with male-dominated ways of thinking and control. Commercial, narrative film persists in trapping itself within the old and worn-out master narratives of passive femininity and active masculinity, and of heterosexuality as the only means of intimacy. There have been some important exceptions to these narratives, but while a few recent mainstream films do touch upon homosexuality without stereotyping, only a few—Donna Deitch’s 1985 Desert Hearts (a melodrama), Mike Nichols’ 1996 The Birdcage, and Frank Oz’s 1997 In & Out

(the latter two both comedies)—have attempted alternative narratives to those that end in heterosexual union. Television has gotten into the act with the popular Will and Grace series and Mike Nichols’ extraordinary HBO film of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (2003). The

Hollywood story machine (of which television is an integral part) always responds, however briefly, to alternative cultural currents.

But these are narrative issues. Our discussion in this chapter is the story of women as filmmakers, the directors, behind the camera, making the images, forming the film. Women have been involved in the filmmaking process from the earliest days. They were scriptwriters and, most often, editors. They were “script girls,” the important figures who made sure physical continuity was maintained from shot to shot. They were very, very rarely directors. To begin with, we look at the avant-garde.

Women’s Avant-Garde Films

In the world of avant-garde film, especially in recent years, films and videos made by women have become common, and many of them deal in more complex ways than theatrical movies with gender, race, and alternatives to the norms of society. These are directors such as Pamela

Yates, who makes videos on welfare rights issues, and Christine Choy, maker of Who Killed

Vincent Chin? (1988, originally shot in 16 mm) and one of the founders of the Third World

Newsreel, a major distributor of independent political films, which, along with the group

Women Make Movies, and, in the commercial realm, the Sundance Film Festival (not to mention self-distribution on YouTube), has given the opportunity to many young filmmakers who might not get their films seen otherwise. But we have to go back a number of years to find the pioneer woman avant-garde director, whose influence was widespread.

Maya Deren

Maya Deren was Russian born but lived in America since her childhood. Active from the 1940S through the early fifties—sometimes collaborating with her husband—her films, writings, and activities in promoting avant-garde works helped establish the genre among the intellectual underground. Never self-indulgent but always interested in the subjective, soft, but at the same time, visually hard-edged and often dark response to the everyday, Deren’s short experimental films are lyrical, sometimes lyrically violent, and often surreal. In At Land (1944), a woman

(Deren herself) climbs out of the ocean, over driftwood, at the top of which is an elegant dinner party in a room. She crawls along the table, unnoticed by the guests, and at the end of the table sees a chessboard, on which the pieces animate themselves. The images are dreamlike, whimsical, and the result of a mind that associates and connects the unexpected.

Deren’s most famous work is Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, made in collaboration with her husband Alexander Hammid), an extraordinary work of rich dream images, using techniques such as jump cutting (in which a continuous movement is cut into so that continuity is itself replaced by rapid changes in space; a cinematic version of ellipsis in prose) that were years ahead of their most famous appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. In one sequence, the central figure—Deren herself—is seen mounting a staircase. But her movement is cut so that she goes up and down in a rapid montage, as if, between the cuts, she had leapt to various places on the stairs. The film is influenced by the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the French surrealist poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. In its turn, it influenced later directors, such as the Swedish Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and another Frenchman, Alain Resnais, as well as the American director Robert Altman, especially as it deals with the difficulties of impressing a feminine sensibility on the world. Meshes of the Afternoon touches upon core feminist issues of identity and ownership of the self. The central figure falls asleep in a chair and dreams of two other selves and a figure of death in black, with a mirror for a face (a figure that

Ingmar Bergman brought back, without the mirror, in his 1957 film The Seventh Seal). A key and a knife appear as important images of openings and endings: they disappear, reappear—one turns into the other. A male figure—a lover or a husband—wakes the woman, and she goes to bed. He caresses her, and in response, the flower lying next to her becomes a knife. The mirror by the bedside shatters, and its shards fly to the sea. When the man returns, the woman is dead—of the knife or broken mirror?

The woman’s death is a disturbing moment in a film otherwise dealing with the possibilities of female expression. It may be speaking to the frustration in ever getting the expression made or, on the level of avant-garde aesthetics, to an open-ended question, a lack of comforting closure and explanation that marks off this kind of filmmaking from the

Hollywood style.