Have you ever heard about Lois Weber, Frances Marion or Dorothy Arzner?
I guess not. Well, me neither, and I’m a total cinema freak, so there’s something wrong.
I stumbled upon their names for the first time in my life reading an article on Télérama about a movie presented at this year Cannes Film Festival in the section Cannes Classics: Et la femme créa Hollywood by sisters Clara and Julia Kuperberg.
This documentary tells a story kept almost secret until today: between 1910 and 1925, Hollywood was run by women. There was a majority of female film-makers, producers, screen-players, editors, even directors of the studios in all those years before the arrival of Talking Movies and the Great Depression. And before Hollywood became a mere business affair. Full of material coming from unknown archives and enriched by interviews to few specialists of this field like Ally Acker and Cari Beauchamp, the documentary is the story of an indecent descent: the only role for women in Hollywood, from the ‘30s until the ‘80s, has been the one represented by actresses, film-stars, sexual objects of (male) desire.
Nothing more.
We have to wait until 2008 for having a woman winning the Oscar for Best Movie (Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker) and only very recently actresses have started to complain about the pay-difference between them and their male counter-parts. It was the case for Patricia Arquette and her fabulous Oscar winning speech in 2015 and in many statements made by rising star Jennifer Lawrence, who pretends to be payed as she should, since audience go to see the movies she plays in because of her.
Patricia Arquette - Academy awards 2015
The sisters Kuperberg declared to have read the names of these pioneers while researching for other stories. Surprised by the fact they never heard about them before, they started to dig a bit, finding two books dedicated to these Hollywood women and written just in the late ‘80s. Among other stories there was the one of Mary Pickford, that everybody remembers as an actress, but in fact was also a producer and a very smart business woman, the one of Lois Weber, who directed no less than 300 movies per year, and especially the incredible one of pioneer Alice Guy, a French woman who moved to Hollywood in 1910 (after being the first female film-maker and producer in the whole world for Gaumont) and created her own studio, Solax.
Mary Pickford
Lois Weber
Alice Guy
In 25 years of activity she made or supervised hundreds of films, of all genres, launched many new directors and even tried sound techniques long before the invention of the sound system. The most outrageous thing is that for her, as well as for many other of these women, the descent has been cruel and pitiless. While they had a big freedom at the time cinema was considered just a simple entertainment, and men weren’t much interested in it (even because they were very often at war somewhere), after 1930 things drastically changed. Female film-makers were capable of making movies of all kind, touching different subjects, even political, on civil rights and many other controversial issues, but when the Great Depression broke out, audience wanted to see lighter movies, comedies, or musicals. That is the time of Hollywood industrialization: big studios are settled in and they immediately eat the small studios created by women. Syndicates show up, starting to make the law, and since women can’t be part of it, they are immediately marginalized. Obliged to be in shadow of men, relegated in minor roles, some of them decided to quit, some others went desperate and ended their days in poverty and solitude (it was the case of Alice guy).
Studies on early Hollywood era tend to focus only on stories starting from 1930, ignoring the tremendous amount of work made by these incredible women decades before. Once again, this is so unfair. I do hope that this documentary will give birth to other studies about this period and that these incredible Hollywood female figures will be acknowledged and recognized by official cinema institutions all over the world. Once again, girlspower! The road is still very long.
It is sad to realize we still need something called Women’s Day in the year 2016.
But this is the reality of things: the macho mentality is always around the corner, everywhere, with no exception, not to mention places (and there are many of them in this world) where women’s freedom simply doesn’t exist.
It sucks. It greatly sucks.
The other day I was reading an article about the female presence in cinema and television in the United States and in France and it was extremely depressing. The percentage of female film-makers, producers and screen writers is ridiculous, and when it comes to fields like cinematography or editing, simply forget about them!
Ida Lupino (courtesy of BFI)
Maggie Gyllenhaal, 38 years old, one of the best actresses in Hollywood, told the press she has recently been refused for a part in a movie since she was considered too old to be the love interest of her male counterpart, 50 years old!!! You gotta be kidding me, guys.
Some actresses, desperate about the too stupid and secondary roles they are constantly offered, have started to create their own production companies. It is of few days ago the news that Juliette Binoche and Jessica Chastain are creating one of those together.
And we don’t even mention the difference in salaries, of course!
J. Chastain&J.Binoche (courtesy of Madame Figaro)
If this is what happens in the so-called advanced world, of course the situation is much worse and often desperate in other parts of the world.
Last November, the Moroccan actress Loubna Abidar, who played the role of a prostitute in a film called Much Loved (by Nabil Ayouch), has been attacked outside a club in Casablanca by a group of men only because she played that part. She posted a video talking about this episode and about what happened to her when she went to the hospital and then to see the police: instead of being helped, she was basically told she deserved what she had.
She is now living in France to avoid death threats:
There are many movies talking about women’s conditions in difficult places: recent stories set in Iran, various parts of Africa, Middle East countries and even less suspicious countries.
I was personally shocked by the vision of a recent movie set in Israel, where a woman tries to get a divorce (yes, a simple divorce): in that country it could be granted just by rabbis and, useless to say, they are men who tend to give right to other men and not to listen to what women have to say (if you have the guts to see it, the movie is Gett - The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, and Zazie already wrote a post about it):
Viviane Amsalem (magnificent Ronit Elkabetz)
Possibly the worst country on this planet where a woman could live is Saudi Arabia, where apparently cinema don’t exist (my idea of hell on earth) and where, in any case, women are not allowed to enter into theatres. In 2012, the female film-maker Haifaa Al-Mansour wrote and directed a wonderful movie called Wadjda (La bicicletta verde): it was the first feature length made by a female Saudi director (in 2012!!!) and the first feature film entirely shot in Saudi Arabia (I told you it was hell!). Because of the ridiculous restrictions placed on women in that country, the film-maker could not interact with her mostly male crew, and so she was obliged to direct the streets scenes from a van near the shooting locations, watching in a monitor and giving directing instructions via walkie-talkie. Unbelievable! But, hey, she made it (the shooting of The Revenant looks like a stroll in the countryside compared to this, don’t you think?).
When I saw Suffragette (by Sarah Gavron) few months ago, I was so impressed by what our sisters from the past had to endure to give us the right to vote, but I was even more disconcerted when I read that the so-considered very civilized Switzerland gave to women the right to vote in… 1971. WTF!!!
The other depressing aspect, it is the way female characters are often portrayed in movies made by men.
For one Jane Campion, there are hundreds David Fincher.
It is still so, so, so rare to see modern, complex, interesting, independent women portrayed in movies.
Things are changing, it is true, but fuck they are changing too slowly for my taste.
This is why I salute and I often writes about Stella Gibson, the main character of the TV series The Fall (series created by a men, Allan Cubitt, you see… there’s hope!) who is a beautiful, sexy, feminine, smart, badass, bi-sexual, single woman who doesn’t need any help from men but who, at the same time, doesn’t hide her fears and, best thing of all, doesn’t need to justify herself for being what she is.
I hope there will be more and more Stella Gibson on screen in the future.
Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson)
I sometimes think about the scene in Zero Dark Thirty (by Kathryn Bigelow) when Maya is in a room full of men and they are saying to their boss where Bin Laden is hiding. And the moment she starts talking, the boss asks: who are you? And Maya answers back to him: I am the motherfucker that found this place, sir.
This is the end of the year, dear readers, and it is time to sum it up! In 2010, Zazie has been to the movies 67 times. Twenty movies were coming from France, another twenty from the States, few others from Italy and United Kingdom and the remaining from different countries: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Korea, Philippines, Germany, Israel, Norway, Spain. This, of course, without mentioning the movies seen in DVDs and all the TV series devoured. Furthermore, I have written 50 posts for my blog. Well, I hope you will agree with me on this important point: I have worked very, very hard!
Before letting you know the best and worst of 2010 (this is going to happen next February with the awarding of the Zazie d'Or prizes), here it is for you the top-seven list of
Zazie's Best Cinema Moments of 2010:
1 - April 2010 Twenty minutes talk seated on a bench outside Hampstead Theatre, London, with British actor Jeremy Irons (possibly to be considered also the Best Moment of My Life tout court!) 2 - May 2010 Bumping by chance in a London restaurant into British actor Ralph Fiennes and eating dinner in front of him (but not at the same table, unfortunately). I still can't believe he didn't recognize me!!! 3 - July 2010 Bumping by chance into Woody Allen (and the Première Dame de France, Carla!) filming in Rue Mouffetard some scenes of his next movie, Midnight in Paris 4 - July 2010 Meeting in Rome in flesh and blood Italian film-maker Pietro Marcello after having adored his two movies, Il Passaggio della Linea and La Bocca del Lupo 5 - September 2010 Meeting, having a short conversation and taking a picture at a Los Angeles party with "Hollywood New Rebel", American actor James Franco (!!!) 6 - September 2010 Having the guts to give my "blog card" to American film-maker Wes Anderson, met at a book launch in New York (at my defence, I can say that I already knew him and so he was used to be pestered by Zazie) 7 - December 2010 Bumping by chance at a friend's party in Paris into my favourite film-maker of the year, the young québécois genius Xavier Dolan (in this case, I can't say anything at my defence: he didn't know me and so, not being used to Zazie's enthusiasm, he simply run away...)
It seems I have been a VERY LUCKY girl, in 2010. Will 2011 be THAT lucky? I doubt it but, well, you never know...
I leave you with two short videos: one is taken from the movie Strange Days (1995) by Kathryn Bigelow, a movie set in the very last days of the year (just to remind you that Miss Bigelow has been the first woman in cinema history to be awarded of an Oscar for Best Director in 2010) and the other one is taken from Aprile (1998) by Nanni Moretti, where Moretti rages against... Strange Days (just to remind you that one of the best things in life is to have different views on the same movie).
