Women filmmakers - New winds, new screens, and the Hollywood Academy Awards 2021
"I want to recognize the women who have not been recognized for their incredible work this year" ...
That was the answer Natalie Portman gave to a journalist on the red carpet at the 2019 Oscars, when asked about the names embroidered in gold along the trim of her black Dior cape. The American actress, producer, director and activist also wanted to highlight the obvious at the Oscar Awards year after year: the lack of recognition for women in the film industry.
Women filmmakers continue to represent a minimal percentage in the world of cinema despite all the efforts and initiatives by feminists. Although women have been present in the history of cinema since its inception, it is still difficult for the sets and clapperboards to have a female voice, for the scripts to tell how women see the world and for actresses to play characters conceived by women.
Just take a look at the factory workers' exit filmed by Louis Lumière in 1895, where two shifts of men, women and children crossed paths at the gates of the factory. At that time, Alice Guy-Blaché was twenty-two years old and perhaps already knew that she was going to devote herself to cinema: in fact, she shot and produced more than 600 films, even competing with the legendary Hollywood of Silent Cinema.
It was not until 1949 that Ida Lupino, known as an actress, took the reins of directing the shooting of the film that she had co-produced and co-written when its director, Elmer Clifton, suffered a heart attack; she would not appear in the credits as director, though, out of respect for Clifton. She would later direct 8 other films, including the well-known Outrage, about a rape, and was the first woman to direct a film noir.
She never gave up directing, achieving great success as a director of television series in the 1960s and 70s. However, we'll have to accept that it was an exception. Women weren't represented then and are not represented now in a balanced way, neither in culture nor in cinema.
Representation MATTERS
"The important thing is the quality of the films, not who directs them", or so they say... And in an ideal world, we would agree: cinema is one of the most powerful tools to represent who we are, who we were, who we will be. The problem is that this representation is not egalitarian, pretty much like the society in which we live. And that needs to be changed. Representation is extremely important for normalization.
You would be surprised how many women producers, screenwriters, directors, there were when cinema began in the Silent Cinema era.
In the history of the Hollywood Academy Awards ceremony, only five women have been nominated for the honor of director: Gerwig, Bigelow, Lina Wertmüller ("Seven Beauties" 1976), Jane Campion ("The Piano" 1993) and Sofia Coppola ("Lost in Translation" 2003). "). We had to wait until 2010 to see the Hollywood Academy award the first Oscar to a woman director, Californian Kathryn Bigelow.
Although the numbers have improved since then, it is clear that women are fighting every day on hostile ground, to paraphrase the title of the Oscar-winning film.
Looking at a glass half full, in 2019 the presence of women filmmakers reached 10.6%, more than double the previous year's figure of 4.5 %, and certainly an improvement in terms of presence of women filmmakers since 2007. This increase, however, does not equate to the woeful inequality experienced by female filmmakers: among the 113 directors of the 100 most successful films between 2019 and 2020, there were only 12 women (10.6 %), as compared to 101 men(89,4 %).
2021 is undoubtedly a mind-blowing year for women filmmakers. Never before in history have there so many nominations and awards. - This is not coincidence by the way, and I will write more on this topic in my next post ;-) .
At the beginning of this year, we stood up to celebrate the Bolivian Daniela Cajías, who is the first woman to win the Goya for Best Cinematography in the 35 years of the award's history.
And at the 2021 Hollywood Academy Awards for the first time in history 3 women have been nominated for an Oscar for Best Director: Chloé Zhao ('Nomadland') and Emerald Fennell ('Promising Young Woman') and Maite Alberdi (Chile) 'El agente topo',
I'm sure we are going to celebrate many more nominations and hopefully see award wins rightfully given to women filmmakers.
We need to open more spaces of visibility and new screens so that women can be recognized in the film industry and by the public as creators, as interpreters of reality. And we still have a long way to go to achieve equality.
But for now I will borrow Natalie Portman's black cape to continue embroidering in golden threads all the names of women who have not been recognized or rewarded in the artistic and cultural world for their great work in all these years.
