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Seeing is Believing: Women Direct
Oct. 29th, 2018 07:21 amThere is only one problem with Seeing is Believing: Women Direct, and that is the fact that the screening isn’t accompanied by a handout that lists all the directors and films mentioned in the documentary. I’ve spent the better part of the year watching and reading about movies directed by women, so I’ve seen a number of the movies mentioned and recognized even more, but there were also plenty I hadn’t heard of and even as I tried to gather them all in, I could feel them slipping out of my head like handfuls of sand.
There isn’t a list on the film’s website, either. Would it be obnoxious to email them the helpful suggestion that such a list would be a wonderful resource to promote the work of female directors?
I did manage to scribble down a few names once the credits rolled, at least. Someday I will watch Li Lu’s There Is a New World Somewhere and Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette.
But honestly this is a compliment to the inclusiveness - the comprehensiveness of this documentary. Cady McClain interviewed so many women directors for this movie! Women of many races and ages and different career stages. And for even more diversity, McClain included intertitles with quotes from women directors she couldn’t interview (Ava DuVernay, Patty Jenkins, and the Wachowskis are doubtless all pretty pressed for time), and stills from even more movies, and… you can see why the deluge of names and titles got overwhelming.
There was even a great capsule history of women directors in America: Alice Guy-Blache and Lois Weber and the brief flowering of female directors during the silent era, followed by the decades when Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino held up the standard for women directors solo, and then the slow burgeoning again in the 1970s… which got us to where we are today, with something like 4% of major feature films (and about 10% of movies overall) directed by women.
Which is an improvement over four decades with only one female director in all of Hollywood. But there’s still a long way to go, and it’s easy to feel frustrated that there’s still so very far to go decades after the 1970s… but the great thing about Seeing Is Believing is that it leaves you feeling pumped, instead, about all that we might achieve. There are so many wonderful, talented female directors out there! So much energy and creativity and enthusiasm for change! Think of the possibilities.
There isn’t a list on the film’s website, either. Would it be obnoxious to email them the helpful suggestion that such a list would be a wonderful resource to promote the work of female directors?
I did manage to scribble down a few names once the credits rolled, at least. Someday I will watch Li Lu’s There Is a New World Somewhere and Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette.
But honestly this is a compliment to the inclusiveness - the comprehensiveness of this documentary. Cady McClain interviewed so many women directors for this movie! Women of many races and ages and different career stages. And for even more diversity, McClain included intertitles with quotes from women directors she couldn’t interview (Ava DuVernay, Patty Jenkins, and the Wachowskis are doubtless all pretty pressed for time), and stills from even more movies, and… you can see why the deluge of names and titles got overwhelming.
There was even a great capsule history of women directors in America: Alice Guy-Blache and Lois Weber and the brief flowering of female directors during the silent era, followed by the decades when Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino held up the standard for women directors solo, and then the slow burgeoning again in the 1970s… which got us to where we are today, with something like 4% of major feature films (and about 10% of movies overall) directed by women.
Which is an improvement over four decades with only one female director in all of Hollywood. But there’s still a long way to go, and it’s easy to feel frustrated that there’s still so very far to go decades after the 1970s… but the great thing about Seeing Is Believing is that it leaves you feeling pumped, instead, about all that we might achieve. There are so many wonderful, talented female directors out there! So much energy and creativity and enthusiasm for change! Think of the possibilities.
