The film Odyssey with women who are recalled by highlight moments

Author: Liu Qing

Women Filmmakers: A New Road Film Throughout Film History, directed by Mark Cousins, is a 14-hour, 14-episode documentary. The picture shows the poster of the film. Tanaka was the second female director in Japan, and in 1953, her first feature film, "Love Text", was shortlisted for the main competition unit of that year's Cannes Film Festival. Aside from a small range of researchers, few people know that Wang Ping, the director of the film "The Eternal Radio Wave", is China's first female director after 1949.

Draft: Feng Xiaoyu

The camera is in the car, the car is on the road, and on the screen, the road stretches endlessly forward, like a wandering with an unknown destination. Then came the narration of the British actress Tilda Swinton: "The vast majority of films are directed by men. The vast majority of films that are considered classics are directed by men. Over the past 125 years, thousands of women have devoted themselves to film directors, what kind of films have they made? What techniques do they use to make movies? What new horizons does their work give to cinema? This is the beginning of Mark Cousins' Women Filmmakers: A New Road Film Throughout Cinematic History.

It is a 14-hour documentary divided into 14 episodes, four of which will be screened in the Shanghai International Film Festival screening section this year. The documentary deserves attention because director Kazens picked up colorful fragments of film history, hooked the forgotten side of history, and was recalled by these highlight moments of female directors, some of whose works have appeared on the big screen in Shanghai, but most of them have not. If possible, all the female directors who have been "remembered" in this film deserve to be looked back at by the Shanghai International Film Festival and the audience here.

The forgotten side of film history

The Hollywood Reporter described the film as opening up "the forgotten side of cinematic history." The connotation of this definite phrase is complex, and it is not only some names that are "forgotten", but also the identity of "they" and their ability to use audiovisual language in an eclectic manner.

Few Chinese audiences would consider "The Eternal Wave" to be a buried film. It is a red classic of outstanding status, Sun Daolin's image and performance style have become legendary existence, constantly talked about, and even more than half a century later, when the dance drama of the same name appeared, most viewers instinctively recalled the last-minute lines of the male protagonist Li Xia: "Comrades, farewell forever!" I miss you guys! However, apart from a small range of researchers, few people know that wang Ping, the director of the film "The Eternal Airwaves", is China's first female director after 1949. Compared with the recent dance drama of the same name, the movie "The Eternal Electric Wave" is not purely based on the Shanghai of "Fancy Years, Ten Mile Ocean Field" as the background, director Wang Ping uses subtle and differentiated image presentation to create a revolutionary narrative context echoing the "Yan'an-Shanghai" confrontation, and she boldly borrows the audiovisual techniques of the heroes in western films, so as to establish and highlight Li Xia's dazzling image.

Karzens is keenly aware of these details, and in "Female Filmmakers", he has a high evaluation of Wang Ping's outstanding directing ability and delicate and rich image rhetoric. A curator at the Edinburgh Film Festival and a long-time contributor to Sight & Hear magazine, Cousins, with his extraordinary amount of views, has allowed clips from old films to rearrange and combine in Women Filmmakers, bursting with energy that shakes the audience's cinematic experience – images that not only reveal who "they" are, but also analyze what "they" did.

Tanaka Is known as an actress who has been working with Kenji Mizoguchi for a long time, but she is actually the second female director in Japan. In 1953, her first feature film ,"Love Text", was shortlisted for the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival that year. Tanaka's directing achievements are grossly underestimated and overlooked, and in this film that uses the sadness of male and female love as a metaphor for Japan's low post-war social mood, Tanaka highlights his superb theatrical structure and good composition aesthetic, and the position and movement of the camera are extremely accurate to capture the actor's fluctuating emotions and convey a sense of poetry. Kazens praised Tanaka passionately: "She has had experience working with Japan's greatest directors, but unlike any of them, she is amazed at her storytelling ability and precise control when portraying the pain and heartbreak in love." ”

Tanaka's encounters have been a long-standing norm in the film industry, where the actions and reputations of actresses have always existed as an adjunct to male directors. Barbara Loden is in the scraps of film history gossip as "Ilya Kazan's wife who died prematurely" and "the actress who died of depression after being hidden by the studio". The disillusioned marriage and career crushed her early, so that she only made the feature film "Wanda", and this only one was sincerely appreciated by Duras. The storyline of "Wanda" is simple, about a woman who has left her husband and wanders around, and the director creates a poetic audio-visual in a minimalist plot, showing a woman's vulnerability, vacillation and inner resistance.

When Anna Karina died at the age of 79, she was still regarded as "Godard's girl", but in fact, she had an independent life and spiritual world outside of Godard, and also had the ability to create boldly. The National Film Archive holds a rarely known and rarely borrowed video archive in an interview Karina gave in 1973 in which she confidently talked about her self-written and self-directed debut feature film, Living Together, about a bitter emotional relationship between a hippie girl and a neurotic professor, which Carina suggested in her words that it was an extension of Pirlo the Madman's line "You communicate with me in language, and I give affection", which is also a response to Godard.

Sometimes, the label "male director's spouse/muse" destroys the confidence of some highly talented female directors. After the death of her husband Dudurenko, Julia Sorenceva sorted out her husband's posthumous works and manuscripts to make "The Enchanting Jessna River". Sorenceva's 81-minute feature film is comparable to Duvrenko's life's achievements, but she humbly feels that she cannot desecrate her husband's reputation, and after completing "Charming Jessner River", she disappeared into the world. But she has created such a magnificent video poem - reality and fantasy blur the boundaries in photography, and the teenager walks through the sunflower-blooming flower fields, which is a rare passionate tribute in the history of cinema.

They are prefixed with "director" instead of "female director"

Alice Güy Blanch was the world's first female director, in 1896, at the age of 23, she made her first film, and throughout the silent film period, she participated in writing, directing, and producing more than 1,000 films; Sherman Durac set off a surrealist movement in the French film industry with "Shells and Monks", using images to find the characters in the irrational state of the self, she bravely proposed in the 1920s, when the film narrative gradually matured, "Film should be a visual symphony, and the realm of dreams is the sublime field of film." Maya Deren's entire work adds up to only 76 minutes, but she shows the audience that film can be not juggling, not drama, not spectacle, but a natural expression of the mother tongue...

In this Odyssey journey through the film, Cousins not only launches an archaeological search of the obscured female director, but also throws new perspectives on the recognized outstanding female director, looking for audiovisual details that the audience usually ignores. Compared with the complicated theoretical interpretation of film historians, Cousins's observations and commentaries highlight the intuitive impact of filmmaking. He especially admired the Ukrainian director Muratova, who wrote in "See and Hear", anxious about the industry's gossip about her and Tarkovsky's vicious confrontation, but did not systematically and large-scale Muratova retrospective film festival. Sadly, Muratova's reputation was finally late, and she died in June 2018, when the production of "Female Filmmakers" was not yet completed. In her enthusiastic recommendation of Muratova's work, Karzance outlines her "coexistence of love and violence" and "everyday ecology is both realistic and metaphorical", and also lists the details of the picture in great detail - the cluttered apartment is full of flowers, cushions and ornaments, "her worldview and use of images is something I have never seen before".

Idit Kalmar directed Death is a Caress in 1949, the first norwegian film to be directed by a woman, and Billy Wilder actually drew a lot of inspiration from the former in 1950's Sunset Boulevard, and the issues and character relationships of the two films are highly overlapping, but the shooting style is very different. And It is precisely how Kalmar uses fresh pictures to convey abundant emotions.

When Cousins produced a puzzle of the theme of "women filmmakers," audiences may be surprised to discover that women are found in all stages of cinema' development, genres, and almost all genres in the fields of avant-garde, expressionist, film noir, Western, and action films. As a director and writer, Cousins doesn't devote any space to explaining "why they're forgotten" because the answer is too obvious. The film is quite interesting in that he has no intention of emphasizing the slogan of "female gaze" that can please many people, nor does he deliberately distinguish between "female creators are different from men". He downplayed the gender factor and focused on the rhetoric of the film itself. In fact, if you look at the old and new in the visual collision with an open vision, you will find that in the creation, gender and identity can achieve a certain degree of mobility.

This is perhaps an important reflection brought about by "Women Filmmakers": the stubborn gender inequality in the industry is tiresome, and it is gratifying to find that the excellent works of female directors are worthy of joy, but whether in the past, present or future, when women in the industry strive for recognition that matches their abilities and achievements, their prefix is "director" rather than "female director". (Liu Qing)