WOMEN
WITH A
MOVIE
CAMERA
The 14-hour documentary ‘Women Make Film’ explores the art of cinema through a compilation of
clips from some of the world’s greatest films. Its director, long-time ‘S&S’ contributor Mark Cousins,
explains the project’s genesis and picks ten images that highlight the full range of its eclectic treasures’m not sure when I first became interested in
films directed by women. Maybe it was in 1993
when, as a programmer at the Edinburgh Film
Festival, I saw Antonia Bird’s realist masterpiece Safe.
Antonia then asked me to join a production company
she was setting up. I’d read the feminist film theorists
Laura Mulvey and Annette Kuhn by then, and then came
across Cari Beauchamp’s 1997 book Without Lying Down,
about the screenwriter Frances Marion and the other
powerful women in early Hollywood.
I know that by the time I went to Iran in 2001, I was
aware that the great poet Forough Farrokhzad had in-
fluenced a generation of directors with her poignant
documentary portrait of a leper colony The House Is Black
(1962). My interest increased sharply when I started
watching the movies of Soviet filmmaker Kira Mura-
tova. Her worldview and use of imagery was unlike any-
thing I’d seen. From then on, every time I went to a coun-
try I’d not been to, I asked about their female filmmakers.
And, simplest of all, I googled. I typed “Great female film
directors from...” and then added country after country:
Colombia, Portugal, France, Germany, Finland...
My list grew. The discoveries mushroomed. I felt
joy at finding so much great cinema, and anger that a
lot of it wasn’t being talked about or shown or taught.
I wanted a film to take me on a guided tour of what I
was missing. As I couldn’t find one, my producers at
Hopscotch Films and I decided to make that film. No
one commissioned us, or gave us money; we did it off
our own backs. I knew that what we made should be
about the work of these filmmakers rather than their
gender or the film business. Antonia Bird wanted to be
treated as a director, not a female director. Many otherfilmmakers I got to know felt the same, and were tired
of being seen as a symbol of the (huge) inequalities in
the film industry.
Years passed. Weinstein happened. #MeToo grew. I’m
sure some people would have wanted us to reference these
events in Women Make Film, but we stuck to our plan to
show the work, the art. This would be our contribution,
our shoulder to the wheel. Others were better at talking
about the more theoretical aspects, such as the female gaze.
We kept watching and watching, month after month. The
editing was exhausting, but fascinating. It’s great to insert
a Kathryn Bigelow chase scene next to an Alice Guy-Bla-
ché chase scene. We loved cutting between song or dance
scenes directed by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren,
Chinese feminist pioneer Huang Shuqin, Soviet screen-
writer and director Vera Stroyeva, Scottish poet of the
cinema Margaret Tait, Belgian dynamo Marion Hänsel,
Brazilian Oscar nominee Petra Costa, groundbreaking
Norwegian filmmaker Edith Carlmar, Western director
Valeska Grisebach and Portrait of a Lady on Fire director
Céline Sciamma, Brazilian singer, writer, actor and film-
maker Gilda de Abreu, Hester Street and Crossing Delancey
director Joan Micklin Silver, Afro-French trailblazer Sarah
Maldoror, radical documentarian Shirley Clarke, nouvelle
vague luminary and grande dame of French cinema Agnès
Varda, early Hollywood pioneer Dorothy Arzner, Greek
filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, Hungarian Cannes
Grand Prix winner Márta Mészáros and superstar Beyon-
cé Knowles. Even typing that list is exciting. It conjures
images, visual collisions and affinities.
Overleaf are images from ten of the 183 movies we
feature. The original title of our film was ‘Eye
Opener’. ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIROI
54 | Sight&Sound | May 2020