Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema

If you want to pass an (advanced) exam in film history and technique, you'd better watch this 14-hour illustrated lecture from Mark Cousins. And take notes. If you actually want to make movies, you'd better try to get a copy of the whole series, and watch it more than once. After three immersions (that's 42 hours) you'll begin to realise how much there is to learn. Movie-making is like getting behind the wheel of an automobile: some practitioners drive, some only steer, and some merely aim.

If on the other hand you just want to watch a movie, go find a movie to watch. This epic, or any part thereof, is not for you.

Commentary and narration are read by distinguished women actors, with magnificent voices (have you ever noticed how many young women these days speak English with a hard brassy tone, that lacks any depth - or evidence of vocal training in childhood?). These women actors speak, but the language they use is "Cousinsese" - where sentences never end with full stops, but drift away, so as to leave intervals of silence in which new sentences might get started (if you've seen the stunning "Eyes of Orson Welles" you'll be able to recognise Cousinsese).

So there it is: a steep learning curve. Or maybe it will be a case of... read 'em and weep.

An exciting premise for a documentary, the discovery of long forgotten women filmmakers starting with Alice Guy-Blache up through Nell Shipman onward to Wendy Toye and dozens of other international directors unknown inside and outside of their own countries today. The downside is the filmmaker approaches the subject matter as if he has to pad out a doctoral thesis by hammering multiple square pegs into round holes to make a point. The inclusion of a number of over-rated current women filmmakers lessens the strength of this film.

Best way to watch this film is to pre-record it and pause when you discover a filmmaker you want to deep dive into. The filmmaker has put screen grabs up on his websiteso you can find the films that are of interest. The downside is most of the films, if they're even on IMDb do not have current rights holders listed. Hopefully Cohen Media Group, The Criterion Collection, Turner Classic Movies and Kanopy who have teamed up to release this documentary across multiple platforms in the US will also track down the rights holders and release many of the films referenced.

"Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema" (2019 release from the UK: 840 min.) is a documentary about the role of female directors in the history of film making. In the Introduction, the voice-over and narrator (Tilda Swinton) reflects on the often overlooked role of female directors, and that this documentary aims to correct that once and for all. We then dig in, class style almost, into 40 further chapters about any and all aspects of film making, starting with "Openings", and then on to "Tone", "Believability", "Introducing a Character", "Meet Cute", and so on, you get the idea. Each chapter is subdivided into further subchapters (typically anywhere from 4 to 6), and of course each of them chock full of movie clips. If this sounds like it's almost too good to be true, well it is true nevertheless. Finger lickin' good for movie lovers!

Couple of comments: this is the latest from UK writer-director Mark Cousins, whose previous work includes "The Eyes of Orson Welles", among many others. Here his ambition is ever larger than usual, and he takes on the Herculean task of documenting what women directors have accomplished over the last 100 years or so, almost encyclopedia-like. I will readily admit that I had never heard of quite a few of these women directors. To be clear: Cousins isn't just looking at the US or the UK, no, he is examining this from a global perspective! Hence plenty of attention is given to female directors from the Soviet Union, Japan, and many other countries too many to name. It absolutely blows the mind.

This documentary isn't geared towards the masses, but instead is waiting to be discovered and treasured by serious film buffs (of which I consider myself one). I happen to stumble onto this earlier this week when I was channel-surfing, and noticed this listed on Turner Classic Movies. TCM is airing this documentary in weekly episodes of about 70 min. each (typically 3 chapters per episode), with every episode including a 10 min. interview with Cousins to introduce that night's episode. New episodes air on Tuesday at 8 pm Eastern. I can't wait to see this entire series as it unfolds in the next 10 weeks or so. "Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema" is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

When I saw this advertised, I was excited to see it because there have been some marvellous women directors including Lois Weber and Ida Lupino to name just two. Certainly many women are finally given some credit over the course of this series of 14 episodes but there were many flaws in the production. The biggest is that many of the films made by women and presented in clips here are not subtitled so you have no idea what is actually happening most of the time. And this is a series that is basically all clips and the majority of the films are not in English. Secondly, we are meant to trust the narrator (and there are a few) that what she is describing is actually what we are seeing but there are many instances that the narrator's assumptions do not look correct often because she is overly effusive and her description of what she says we are seeing can be easily questioned. Lastly, there are many ways the clips (this series is all film clips) are divided into categories but there is no cinematic division of categories. The categories can range for example from Montage to Leave Out (by which is meant someone en scene is left out of the action). So this kind of categorisation, hardly useful at best, seems completely at odds with educating us about film at all regardless of whether they were made by men or women. However, you will still get to see some wonderful clips made by great women directors from all over the world so it is worth persevering for this reason alone. It could have been a much better series but it is at least a start to acknowledge some tremendous and wonderful women directors like Varga and Muratova, and many, many others. And it's definitely not before time! Still worth seeing in its entirety.

This is probably the finest documentary I've ever seen on filmmaking. I've been trying to purchase it on Blu-ray, but it seems to be out of print on TCM. The series has a very calm, relaxed pace as several narrators quietly examine scenes from many films from all over the world. I've been able to locate some of these films to watch in their entirety, and it really opened my eyes re: understanding how a very small group of women have been creating films almost since cinema started. The series is long and consists of 14 different parts, but I found it to be almost hypnotic to watch and was never bored.