The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women by Alicia Malone

Image provided by Mango Publishing.

    I must say, other than a couple of exceptions (Alfred Hitchcock and Tim Burton), I don’t usually pay attention to who the director of a film is.  If I find out, great, but more often than not, the director is not what leads me to wanting to see a film.  Often, I never find out who the director is at all.  Or at least not consciously.  Many of the films mentioned in The Female Gaze I had seen, not knowing they were directed by women.  If you had asked me before reading this book, other than Penny Marshall’s Big and A League of Their Own, I probably couldn’t have been able to tell you the director’s gender for any of these films.  Now that I know, I will have to pay closer attention from now on. 

       The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women discusses films directed by women throughout the entire time there has been a film industry.  A mix of writing by author Alicia Malone herself and essays from female critics, the book discusses not only the films, but the director’s lives as well. 

I’m not talking about discussing their lives in a scandalous way.  What I mean is how each woman got to where she did.  Starting with Alice Guy and her film The Consequences of Feminism from 1906, the directors written about are from all times and from around the world.  This book shows that the unevenness in the number of male to female directors is not a modern, American situation.  The unevenness has been from the beginning of the film industry and from every part of the world.

           Each of the women discussed had to struggle to become directors.  Some had an easier road than others, then had to battle once they achieved their goal.  Sometimes, unable to get film opportunities, they moved onto other things, like directing television.  Others had to practically climb mountains in order get their first films completed.  Now that they have, they are able to direct more consistently.  Then there are all the women in between, with a mix of difficulty and achievement.  Each and every one, no matter the path, had a rough road.  There were funding problems and creative differences these women had to fight.  This wasn’t the usual type of difficulties, either.  These problems were to the point that entire films were paid for with personal credit cards, and walking away from a film because the producers wanted something so drastically different than the director did.  I’m sure male directors encounter these problems as well.  I just have to wonder if it’s to the same extreme, and if their careers would be tarnished as fast because of them.

             While each chapter is headed as being about one specific film, the chapters written by Ms. Malone also covers other work the director has done, which was a big help.  As I was reading, I knew I had heard the name Niki Caro before, but I couldn’t place where.  I knew it wasn’t with the film Whale Rider, which was being discussed.  It took further into the chapter for me to discover why I knew Ms. Caro’s name.  She is the director of The Zookeeper’sWife.  That was it!  The Zookeeper’s Wife was why I knew this director.

              Over and over this happened as I would realize, “I’ve seen that movie!”, without ever before recognizing it had been created by a female director.  One of the happiest realizations I probably had was when What’s Cooking? was brought up.  It was mentioned in the chapter about Gurinder Chadha’s film Bend It Like Beckham (another good film).  I was so excited to see What’s Cooking? mentioned because it is a film no one seems to know anything about.  In my house it’s watched every year during the holidays, and I’m very happy it was brought up for others to be aware of it too.

           Another thing the Ms. Malone chapters have is at the end there is a short synopsis about the main film being discussed, as well as interesting facts about it.  Sometimes the facts are about the film itself.  Other times they are about things that happened as a result of the film.  Really, the facts could be about anything in connection to the film.  While all the facts were interesting, the one that stuck out to me the most was how there was the suggestion of changing the title Bend It Like Beckham for when it came to the U.S. because at the time David Beckham was not a household name.  It’s so odd to think there was a point in time where people did not know who David Beckham was.  Haven’t we always?               

           Something else I found interesting while going through the book, was how many of the directors also wrote their own scripts.  It was the vast majority.  These women either wrote the scripts themselves, or worked with others in teams.  Either way, it made me curious as to why this was.  Were their scripts facing roadblocks because they were written by women, so they had to direct them themselves?  Could it be they weren’t being given other work, so they had to direct their own?  Or did these women feel they were the best person to visually show what they had written?  As a writer who would like to direct a film one day, I definitely understand that last one.

          While all the stories of these directors are interesting, I also found something very encouraging.  Many of these women did not get their success until they were older.  The reason I say this is because it feels as though we are in a society where so often you have to achieve everything by the age of twenty-five or else you will be considered a never-will-be.  Maybe that can be boosted to thirty if someone is feeling generous.  Yet, these women kept working, and many of them did not achieve what they wanted to until later in life.  Would it have been great if the success had happened earlier?  Of course.  My point is, in a world that does not want things to happen beyond a certain age, it still did.  And it frequently happened with little money, non-fancy equipment, and unknown actors.  This shows it is possible to achieve what you want with very little.  It takes a lot of hard work, but it is possible.

            Inspiring is not a word I usually use, yet it is the one that comes to mind when I think of this book.  As I was reading, I came up with so many new ideas for ways to do things, as well as storylines I would like to create.  I wasn’t sure at first about the book being split up between Ms. Malone’s chapters and the critics’ essay, but in the end, I found the two types of writing to be a good mix.  It helped even more films get mentioned (and more ideas come to my mind) without having a full chapter dedicated to it.  This way more female directors and their work were honored than may have happened otherwise because of the time and research it would have taken for those longer chapters.  While I did not agree with everything the critics wrote, I did start to see some of the films in a new light, as well as learn about others I never knew existed.

        Since I’m not big on the word inspiring, let me go back to encouraging.  It is encouraging to see that through hard work you can still make it, no matter the age.  It is encouraging that things in the industry are changing, even if it is changing slowly.  And it is encouraging that women are standing up for what they believe in, no matter how many times they get blocked and knocked down.  That is how women are going to finally get not only what they want, but what they deserve, and move ahead.  Not only in the film industry, but in all industries.  And it's about time.