Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema

With examples from 1943 to 2013, from China to Iran, Australia to Finland, we look at how to open a film: from mysterious, direct, floating, foreboding to plunging straight in. All are instructive in how to create an immediate world. Learning from example. What’s the tone of a film - not its story or theme, but what its world feels like? Back to Hollywood and Director Dorothy Arzner with MERRILY WE GO TO HELL AND and its glamorous amorous mood setting the - tone. This chapter looks at the myriad of ways in which directors set the tone of their films: delight, anger, poetic, double tone, moral seriousness, caring, edgy, violence.

Easy to spot, but not so easy to understand. Believability is about simple human stories, truth about life, real emotions, responding to the world. How do directors create a reality without it feeling fake? True stories can help. But what’s the trick? Here are some answers, with a masterclass in believability from Lois Weber’s THE BLOT to Maren Ade’s TONI ERDMANN.Going to a house, overhearing people, witnessing bizarre action – there are many ways to meet people and be introduced to characters in films. In Shirley Clarke’s THE CONNECTION from 1961 she has a documentary crew introduce the characters to us; Andrea Arnold puts her characters centre of the frame in FISH TANK; and in THE STORY OF THE FLAMING YEARS directed by Yuliya Solntseva the main character is introduced filmed like a statue on a building.The classic Hollywood trope of a “meet cute”, and a myriad of interpretations. From intimate glimpses to worlds colliding spectacularly. Unique examples such as the feverish pivotal meet cute in Germaine Dulac’s experimental THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN, Céline Sciamma playing two girl gangs against each other in GIRLHOOD, and the cynical FBI old guard meeting the idealistic newcomer in Kathryn Bigelow’s POINT BREAK. Then a masterfully choreographed, layered meet cute in Mania Akbari’s ONE.TWO.ONE captured in one wide shot composed like a Renaissance altarpiece.

A basic human interaction - how to make it cinematic? Angela Schanelec directs us to focus on body language in PLACES IN CITIES, Cecile Tang uses the zoom as guide through the emotional shifts in THE ARCH, and Sofia Coppola in THE VIRGIN SUICIDES shows us an unspoken conversation through division with songs and split screens telling a story of impossible longing.Frames describe and paint the scenes. They can make sport look balletic, like in controversial Nazi iconographer’s Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIAD. They shape the cinematic world - through impressionist glances in Kathryn Bigelow’s BLUE STEEL, suffocating close-ups in Lucrecia Martel’s THE HOLY GIRL, and camera angles as extreme as the titular character’s emotions in Mahalia Belo’s ELLEN.Tracking shots are to many an essence of filmmaking magic. They can ask questions and talk when hardly anyone else in the film is talking – like in Chantal Akerman’s D’EST or Marion Hänsel’s LE LIT. In Antonia Bird’s FACE, a seamless tracking shot gives us an illusion of the camera being the extension of our eyes. Kinetic in nature, tracking can help dynamically show and express a desperate escape, like in Ursula Meier’s HOME.

Scene staging is an element of film form pointing clearly to cinema’s origin – theatre. Kinuyo Tanaka in THE MOON HAS RISEN uses staging to shape the scene’s invisible geometry, accentuating the tension between characters. Maren Ade in TONI ERDMANN stages the scene through depth, facilitating the tragicomic punchline. And in Maria Schrader’s STEFAN ZWEIG: A FAREWELL TO EUROPE, the criss-crossing complex staging in the final scene makes the space where it takes place come alive.Movement is key to a motion picture, and journeys in film can be horizontal as well as vertical (into the self). Travel can be like glue and bind characters from two different worlds, like in KRANE’S CONFECTIONERY where a middle class woman and working class man go on a moral journey against society. Driving can be a test of will and courage, like in Nell Shipman’s SOMETHING NEW. The mode of transportation itself can serve as a safe space and a social microcosm, like the car in Andrea Arnold’s AMERICAN HONEY. Or, like in Jennifer Kent’s THE BABADOOK, it can take the character on a journey into their nightmares.Discovery and revelation shape some of cinema’s most iconic moments. But beyond the best-known scenes, there lies the humanity, craft and insight of discovery – like in Céline Sciamma’s TOMBOY, when the mother suddenly sees her child in a new light. There’s the discovery of the opposite sex’s naked form, like in the male-gaze-flipping scene from Patty Jenkins’ WONDER WOMAN. Then in Sabiha Sumar’s SILENT WATERS the audience itself is guided through a discovery that changes everything about how they view the story.

The famous movie genres – war pictures, westerns, etc – are about adults, but in this chapter Jane Fonda narrates the story of 18 films about children in film, from Germany, Belgium, Mongolia, Sweden, Russia, Canada, Senegal, Argentina and Scotland.We’ve all seen overblown films, but what are the visual and story lessons we can learn from Claire Denis, Maria Louisa Memberg, Kinuyo Tanaka, Agnes Varda, Valeska Grisbach and Desiree Akhavan about keeping things simple?How have filmmakers like Ava Du Vernay and Kathryn Bigelow in America, Sarah Maldorer in Mozambique, Leni Riefentahl in Germany, Drahomira Vihanova in the Czech Republic, and their editors, pushed the techniques of editing to their limits?

Is cinema the art of point of view? Jocelyn Moorhouse, Ida Lupino, Norway’s Edith Carlmar, Sofia Coppola, Italy’s Liliana Cavani, Kelly Reichart, the great Larisa Shepitko, Jennifer Kent and other great directors demonstrate the art of POV in films.If close ups give movies their intensity, films from Belgium, Hungary, Australia, Finland, China, America, France, Germany and Ukraine, shot over ten decades, show how best to do that intensity.One of the great movie stars, India’s Sharmila Tagore, narrates this bold chapter that looks at dreams in films, from Wayne’s World, to experimental film, to Jane Campion, Sally Potter, Bulgaria and silent movies.