As it’s Women’s Day this weekend, it’s an apt moment to celebrate the innovation, determination and imagination of cinema’s long history of female directors. These three films from the second half of the 20th century offer a tribute to the ingenuity, activism, and intellectual and aesthetic daring of their creators, who made their work in the face of financial restrictions and official outrage, paving the way for future generations of women to have greater freedom to make bold feminist cinema.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
Daisies — YouTube
Widely hailed as a landmark film of the Czechoslovak New Wave movement, director Věra Chytilová’s anarchic experimental classic is a visually innovative and anti-narrative postmodern satire of bourgeois decadence and societal norms. Chytilová described it opaquely as a “necrologue about a negative way of life” and its sharp critiques of Communism, censorship and patriarchy are more impressive considering the director managed to secure funding for the film from the Communist state in pre-1968 Czechoslovakia.
The film focuses on two characters, both named Marie who agree that the world around them is spoilt, so they will live their lives as spoilt young women. They set about inflicting bored but anarchic chaos on the lives of men in Prague, dancing around, smashing food and enjoying the opportunity to exercise their personal freedom no matter the consequences.
Using a variety of bold techniques, the film probes existential questions against the backdrop of the stifling repression of the Iron Curtain and remains a pioneering experimental feminist classic.
Accused of nihilism, decadence and celebrating the evils of consumerism on its release, Daisies was predictably banned by Czech authorities. It was, however, well received at international festivals. While it placed Chytilová firmly under the fist of post-Prague Spring Soviet authoritarianism, she continued to produce boldly anti-establishment work until her death in 2014.
THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
Wanda — YouTube
Produced, written, directed and starring Barbara Loden, this low-budget DIY classic of American independent cinema is a pioneering film in American feminist cinema history. Loden, who was described by The New Yorker critic Richard Brody as “a female counterpart to John Cassavetes”, was a theatre and film actress, married to legendary director Elia Kazan. An article about a woman’s involvement in a bank robbery inspired her to use her personal experiences and “feeling of aimlessness” as raw material for a film about a desperate, drifting young woman in the coalfields of Pennsylvania who becomes involved with a bank-robbing con man.
Shot on location in rural Pennsylvania with a crew of only seven people, the film is a largely improvised slice of hard-hitting social realism shot on gritty, 16mm film that gives it a documentary-style feeling of immediacy and urgency.
Loden plays Wanda Goronski, an unhappy housewife who has left her husband and is sleeping on her sister’s couch. She is forced to trek across the bleak landscape of the coalfields to attend a court hearing, where she relinquishes custody of her children and has little choice but to grant her griping husband a divorce. Things only go from bad to worse for Wanda as she tries to keep her life afloat, but is fired from her job, mistreated by men and robbed after falling asleep in a movie theatre. She meets a strange man in a dive bar, mistaking him for the barman, and soon finds herself living the life of a bank robber on the run in a misadventure that can only end badly.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the International Critics’ Prize for best film. It remained a cult classic and celebrated work of feminist cinema, but was little seen and underappreciated until the 21st century, when its DVD release introduced it to a new generation of audiences. Loden, who died in 1980, was not around to see the only film she directed take its rightful place in the canon of 1970s American New Wave cinema.
THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
The Watermelon Woman — Mubi.com
A seminal work of the New Queer Cinema movement and the first feature film to be directed by a black lesbian filmmaker, Cheryl Dunye. She wrote, starred in, edited and directed the singular mix of romantic drama and representational critique.
Inspired by her experience as a film student researching for a class on black film history by investigating the role of black actresses in American film history, the film stars Dunye as Cheryl, a black queer film student working at a video store who has an interest in the films of the 1930s and 1940s and the black actresses who feature, often uncredited, in them. When she sees a film that stars a beautiful actress credited only as “Watermelon Woman”, Cheryl decides to make a documentary to uncover the story of this actress and embarks on a journey that will lead to her uncovering truths about her own identity and society.
