Women Make Film

Thrillers, but much more. We look at gripping scenes in films as diverse as Joel DeMott's documentary Demon Lover Diary, Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel, Carol Morley's Dreams of A Life, Mimi Leder's Peacemaker, and Marleen Gorris' remarkable A Question of Silence. Cinema is an action art, isn't it? Or is it? Directors Angela Schanelec, Anouk Leopold, Kira Muratova, Chantal Akerman, Sharon Lockhart, and Pakistan's Subiha Sumar, amongst others, show us the pleasures and beauties of the held Moment. Movies show the world, but what happens when they don't show something? In this chapter, some of the great filmmakers from around the world withhold a moment, a scene, and their films are better for it.

Paired with chapter 31, is this one, it's opposite. How does Lynne Ramsay do a reveal in Morven Caller? How does the great actor-director Kinuyo Tanaka? Or Sarah Polley? Or Italy's Alice Rohrwacher? As cinema is a kind of time machine, it's no surprise that it's great at memory. In this chapter we look at rare movie gems about memory directed by filmmakers including Petra Costa, Greece's Maria Plytya, Poland's Dorota Kedzierzawska, Vera Chytilova, Mai Zetterling and Mati Diop.Every filmmaker has to think about time. As this chapter shows, Alice Guy- Blache, Chantal Akerman, Hungary's Ildiko Enyedi, Hanna Polak, Marie Menken and Sally Potter did so brilliantly.

Novels are great at describing thoughts, but how do films do so? In this chapter, we see how great directors from France, Ukraine, the UK, America, New Zealand and Algeria used time in their movies. In the last chapters of our story, we look at the biggest things in life. Here we see how great filmmakers across the world, and from many decades, try to get to the essence of life. Movies soar with love, but can be too sentimental because of it. In this chapter we see great Chinese, Sri Lankan, American, Hungarian, Iranian, New Zealand, French, British, Korean, Turkish and Hong Kong films which avoid the pitfalls.

The biggest subject in life, the most universal subject – no wonder that Japan's Kinuyo Tanaka, Canada's Caroline Leaf, Spain's Ana Mariscal, Holland's Paula Van der Oest and other great filmmakers in this chapter embrace it. We begin to end our epic road movie with films from Sonja Heiss, Larisa Shepitko, Ida Lupino, Lizzie Borden, Claire Denis and Maya Deren. End with a song, they say, so our story does. Huang Shugin from China, Vera Stroeva from Russia, Scotland's Margaret Tait, Alice Guy, Edith Carlmar, Celine Sciamma, Brazil's Gilda de Ebreu, America's Joan Micklin Silver, the great Shirley Clarke, Dorothy Arzner and Beyonce make music with their films. We conclude our story, our road movie, and end in an unexpected place...