Decades of lore are embedded into the perception of what it means to be a director in the studio system. Money and masculinity are inescapably at the center of it all. Kathryn Bigelow’s awards-season recognition for her superb work as director of The Hurt Locker is bringing out issues of power: presented in journalistic telegraphese, the question, “What does it mean to be a female director?” aims to be provocative but has little to say about filmmaking itself and more about the writer or the writer’s editors. “F.D.,” if about a woman, means “female director,” while for men, being an “F.D.” is what they’ve been lauded for in the masculine ethos of eons of studio production: being a “f—in’ dick.”
One of the first interviews I did starting out was with the director of a small, clever Sundance-style film. She said when she was asked what it was like to be a female filmmaker, she’d usually answer, “I dunno, I haven’t been a Martian filmmaker. What’s it like being you?” She had a nice smile to go with that. There’s another woman who directed a movie that had a cameo with someone well established in another art form. He was in the city for only a day or two for the scenes. A crabby sort. On the first afternoon, he didn’t care for a suggestion; she stepped away. Gave him his space. Came back and said for him to try it, please. He called her a “f—in’ c—. She raised an eyebrow, said, “You would know.” He glowered, then did the take. Or so the story goes. Bruised, they both won something still. And so the games persist. Power games.
There are traits you can identify in a director’s style and themes. But are they quintessentially matters of gender or simply of temperament? I defy a man or another woman to make films that are so filled with breath as those of Claire Denis, whether her French Foreign Legion demi-musical, Beau Travail or her daring memory fugue, L’intrus, or even 35 Shots Of Rum, her glowing, intimate story of family connections. She sees the world. She gets it down. Her world. A woman. Art. Bigelow’s own Near Dark evokes the dance of doomed romance in Nick Ray’s movies: it wouldn’t be so hard to forge an entertaining argument that Ray was more “feminine” as a filmmaker than Bigelow.
It’s remarkable about how the mere invocation of “female” identity stands in for other things a writer could be hinting at: that Bigelow is strikingly tall and beautiful; or that she had been mentored by or married to powerful men in her chosen field. Hardly anyone’s going to tap-dance in those minefields. But being female? And making more vital, urgent films than Nora Ephron or Ann Fletcher? Oooh. Guess who’s said it best? The ever-incisive Manohla Dargis called it already. “The take on Kathryn Bigelow is that she is a great female director of muscular action movies, the kind with big guns, scenes, themes and camera movements as well as an occasional fist in the face, a knee to the groin. Sometimes, more simply, she’s called a great female director. But here’s a radical thought: She is, simply, a great filmmaker. Because while it is marginally interesting that she calls ‘action’ and ‘cut’ while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.” In that same long essay/interview from June, Dargis brings up Bigelow’s physicality in relation to her own, critical self. “It’s hard to imagine Ms. Bigelow letting anyone push her around. She’s unfailingly gracious—and tends to speak in the second person, preferring ‘you’ over ‘I’—but there’s a ferocious undercurrent there too, as might be expected. She works to put you at ease, but even her looks inspire shock and awe. Because she was early for our interview and already tucked into a booth, I didn’t realize how tall she was until we both stood up, and I watched, from a rather lower vantage, her unfurl her slender six-foot frame. It was like watching a time lapse of a growing tree. Like a lot of tall women she describes herself as shy, but she has learned to take up space.” (The piece is also the most accessible of summaries of Bigelow’s origins in the painting, conceptual art and semiotics studies world of 1970s New York.)
The crushing economic structure of filmmaking is one thing, taking in the little green men (and women) with the greenbacks and blue men with the Euro notes who control production. The wooing and wowing of audiences is another. But you’d hope that a writer who’s seen what’s up on the screen would be able to take a view of the art, of how movies are forged, that gets beyond binary aggravation. That should be the moment to be utopian, not to suffer fools, simply to embrace the humanity of filmmaking, of faces and fears and faultlines. Unless you’re in line to make residuals from a project in the awards fray, it’s good to savor an epigraphsto B. Ruby Rich’s “Chick Flicks; Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement,” from Chris Marker: “Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.”

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