WORK by some of the greatest directors in film history will be presented in a five-part “road movie” at the Glasgow Film Festival.
Mark Cousins collected almost a thousand film clips spanning the silent era to the 21st century for his new 14-hour documentary Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema.
Like Cousins’s similarly epic 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Women Make Film has been bought by TV companies for broadcast in several episodes.
At GFF, audiences can see the work as it was intended – on the big screen – in five stand-alone segments with narrators including Adjoa Andoh, Kerry Fox, Jane Fonda and executive producer Tilda Swinton.
Rather than a Who’s Who of women directors or a marathon “best of”, Women Make Film is more a DIY guide investigating how filmmakers shoot scenes, create tone and make us believe in their stories.
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As well as work by Anges Varda, Lynne Ramsay and Kathryn Bigelow, there’s stunning excerpts from lesser-known figures such as Dorothy Arzner – the first woman admitted to the Directors Guild of America – Wang Ping, director of 1965 Chinese landmark The East Is Red and Soviet/Ukranian director Kira Muratova.
Introducing a segment from Muratova’s Brief Encounters (1967), Swinton notes how: “We could describe this scene as Lynchian. But why Lynchian and not Muratovian?”
“She was as great a filmmaker as Martin Scorsese,” says Cousins of the influential director, who died in 2018.
“I have been going on about her for years on my blog. Years ago I predicted that when she died, one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, that she wouldn’t get a mention in the memorial section of the Oscars, and that’s exactly what happened.”
Nowhere does Cousins fall into the trap of suggesting the directors do things a certain way because they are women.
“I know lots of female film makers and most of them say: ‘don’t treat me as a woman-director, treat me as a director’,” he says. “You’ll see there’s very little biographical information about these women or how the film industry treated them badly. This is about their work. I think the greatest respect you can pay to someone is to look their work.
Cousins adds: “There’s a revolution happening in the film world post-Weinstein, and exploring upon whose shoulders we are standing is a very positive contribution to that revolution, I think. And the answer is that there are loads. Some of the best films ever made were made by women.”
Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema: Part 1: March 6, 5.30pm; Part 2: Mar 7, 1.15pm; Part 3: Mar 7, 5pm; Part 4: Mar 8, 12.30pm; Part 5: Mar 8, 4.15pm, Cineworld, Glasgow, £6.50. Tel: 0141 332 6535. www.glasgowfilm.org/festival
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