Feminist cinema: first celebrated, then forgotten

All over the world, women directors are fighting for greater public recognition and presence in funding decisions and festivals. Even in the institutionalized history of film, the space granted to the sexes is distributed extremely unequally. But here, too, there are meanwhile diverse efforts to increase attention to female filmmaking in research, in retrospectives and in archives. Nevertheless, in the funding list published in mid-August by the Film Fund for the Digitization of Film Heritage, there are still 55 projects by directors compared to a total of seven by women directors.

A road movie through cinema history

The realization that film history is “sexist by omission” is also behind a 14-hour compilation film from 2018, which in three parts, forty chapters and countless film clips takes the audience on a “new road movie through the cinema”. New, because “Women Make Film” focuses exclusively on films by female directors. And it was also refrained from putting the well-known names in the foreground again. (The exceptions are Kathryn Bigelow and Leni Riefenstahl.)

More important are the many rediscoveries of films from all over the world that were once celebrated at festivals and then forgotten. Incidentally, in Mark Cousins ​​there is a director behind the combative film alongside producer Tilda Swinton. Interestingly enough, “Women Make Film”, which is also shown, is not structured chronologically or according to genre, but according to cinematic motifs. For example, there are (lavishly illustrated) chapters on the structure of film beginnings, on establishing credibility, on montage or on narrative and financial economy.

“Feel free to be angry, but feel free also to be delighted” is the motto. One can also be delighted with the Arsenal Institute’s extensive “Women Make Film” project, funded by the Capital Cultural Fund, in which curator Annette Lingg, based on Cousins, will present 13 female directors who will be presented in the film until mid-December. The Polish director Wanda Jakubowska, who will be showing four films in the programme, will start the second block.

In “The Last Stage” from 1947, Jakubowska processed her own imprisonment in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp two years after the end of the war. To do this, she went back to the scene of the crime with her camera and, after extensive research, realized a realistic drama with former fellow prisoners The resistance in the camp. It is the best-known film by the director, who was born in 1907. It was to be followed by twenty more over the next fifty years. Despite her beginnings in experimental films, Jakubowska later showed herself to be a loyal adept of the Polish Communist Party and that of it propagated aesthetic program.

Dinara Asanova, who was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1942 and trained at the Moscow Film School, was quite different. Before her untimely death in 1985, she made nine feature films on the fringes of the state film system. Thematically and formally, these stood for new beginnings and youthful non-conformity and set strong atmospheric accents with the use of amateur actors and contemporary popular music. As with Jakubowska, Asanova’s often semi-documentary approach is surprisingly contemporary today. Her 1975 debut, Der Woodpecker, is a breezy, impressionistic study of a teenager whose passion for drums is met with little enthusiasm from those around him.

(The second program runs at the Arsenal cinema until October 29)

In Spain, Ana Mariscal worked almost completely outside of the state film institutions. She earned her living as an actress and realized her ten directorial works with her production company Bosco Films largely from her own savings. In 1963, she directed El Camino, a coming-of-age study of the oppressive patriarchal climate of rural Spain that, unsurprisingly, was largely ignored by the Francoist public. It was not until 2021 that the film experienced its re-release at the Cannes Film Festival with a digitally restored copy.

The Arsenal project “Women Make Film” will continue until December 18th. It is a rare opportunity to continue to discover marginalized work by women directors such as Brazilian Gilda de Abreu, first Sri Lankan filmmaker Sumitra Peries, Indian pioneer Marva Nabili and Astrid Henning-Jensen, who died in 2002.

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