 |
| From Chapter 20: Home: Ung flukt / The Wayward Girl / Edith Calmar, Norway 1959. Screenshot from the Women Make Film website. |
 |
| From Chapter 21: Religion: Priest / Antonia Bird, GB 1994. Screenshot from the Women Make Film website. |
 |
| From Chapter 22: Work: Araya / Margot Benacerraf, Venezuela 1959. Screenshot from the Women Make Film website. |
Women Make Film. A New Road Movie Through Cinema
Women Make Film. Uusi matka elokuvaan
GB © 2019 How To Make A Movie Ltd. PC: Hopscotch Films. P: John Archer. EX: Clara Glynn, Tilda Swinton. Assistant P: Sonali Choudhury. Associate P: Carl Beauchamp, Catherine Glynn Benkaim, Barbara Timmer.
D+SC: Mark Cousins. Sound mixing: Diane Jardine. S: Joe Harfield. ED+script consultant: Timo Langer. Online: Chas Chalmers. Edit assistant: Scott Bilsbrough. P coordinator: Mhairi Valentine. P team: David Brown, Rowan Ings, Raja Kryda. World Sales: Dogwoof. Head of sales: Ana Vicente. Legal: David Burgess.
https://www.womenmakefilm.com/
14 hours – 14 episodes of 1 hour each
Festival premiere: 1 Sep 2018 Venice Film Festival
Finnish telepremieres of the 14 episodes: 3.3.2020, 10.3.2020, 17.3.2020, 24.3.2020, 1.4.2020, 8.4.2020, 15.4.2020, 22.4.2020, 29.4.2020, 6.5.2020, 13.5.2020, 20.5.2020, 27.5.2020, 3.6.2020.
Corona lockdown viewings.
Yle Areena.
Viewed on a 4K tv set at home in Helsinki, 22 April 2020.
Official synopsis: "The epic, four years in the making, still in production, is made up of forty “chapters” to be narrated by Tilda Swinton, Jane Fonda and other key women in cinema, still to be announced. Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema follows in the footsteps of Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: An Odyssey, to give us a guided tour of the art and craft of the movies. Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, Cousins asks how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest directors – all of them women."
Episode 8/14: Home, Work, Religion
Jakso 8/14: Pyhä ja arki
Narrators: Sharmila Tagore, Jane Fonda
Finnish / Swedish subtitles: Jaana Wiik / Anna-Sofi Pettersson
Chapter 20. Home
Ung flukt / The Wayward Girl / Nuoret syntiset / Edith Calmar, NO 1959
Zacharovannaya Desna / Зачарованная Десна / The Enchanted Desna / Lumottu Desna / Yuliya Sointseva, SU 1964
Ratcatcher / Rotanpyydystäjä / Lynne Ramsay, GB/FR 1999
Hedi Schneider steckt fest / Hedi Schneider is Stuck / Sonja Heiss, DE 2015 [unreleased in Finland]
Nattlek / Night Games / Öiset leikit / Mai Zetterling, SE 1966
Niupi er / Niu pi II / 牛皮贰 / Oxhide 2 / Jiayin Liu, doc, CN 2009
Tailpiece / Margaret Tait, c.m., GB 1976
Khaneh siah ast / خانه سیاه است / The House is Black / Forough Farrokhzad, IR 1963
Safe / Tillflykten / Antonia Bird, GB 1993
Home / Ursula Meier, CH/FR/BE 2008 [unreleased in Finland]
Povest plamennykh let / Повесть пламенных лет / The Story of the Flaming Years / Liekehtivän taivaan alla / Yuliya Solntseva, SU 1961
Nachalo nevedomogo veka 2: Rodina elektrichestva / Начало неведомого века 2: Родина электричества / The Beginning of an Unknown Era / The Beginning of an Unbeknown Age Part 2: Homeland of Electricity / Sähkön kotimaa / Larisa Shepitko, SU 1967 [unreleased in Finland]
Chapter 21. Religion
Hypocrites / Lois Weber, US 1915
Gahanu lamai / ගැහැණු ළමයි / The Girls / Sumitra Peries, LK 1978 [unreleased in Finland]
Khovanshchina / Хованщина / Hovanshtshina / Vera Stroyeva, SU 1959
La niña santa / The Holy Girl / Lucrecia Martel, AR/IT/NL/ES 2004 [unreleased in Finland]
Nachalo nevedomogo veka 2: Rodina elektrichestva / Начало неведомого века 2: Родина электричества / The Beginning of an Unknown Era / The Beginning of an Unbeknown Age Part 2: Homeland of Electricity / Sähkön kotimaa / Larisa Shepitko, SU 1967 [unreleased in Finland]
Priest / Papin tarina / Antonia Bird, GB 1994
Lourdes / Jessica Hausner, AT/FR/DE 2009 [unreleased in Finland]
Persepolis / Persepolis / پرسپولیس / Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud, FR/US 2007
Chapter 22. Work
The Future / Miranda July, DE/US/FR 2011 [unreleased in Finland]
American Honey / American Honey / Andrea Arnold, GB/US 2016
Baby ryazanskie / Бабы рязанские / Women of Ryazan / Rjazanin naiset / Olga Preobrazhenskaya, SU 1927
Araya / Margot Benacerraf, doc, VE/FR 1959 [unreleased in Finland]
Nachalo nevedomogo veka 2: Rodina elektrichestva / Начало неведомого века 2: Родина электричества / The Beginning of an Unknown Era / The Beginning of an Unbeknown Age Part 2: Homeland of Electricity / Sähkön kotimaa / Larisa Shepitko, SU 1967 [unreleased in Finland]
O něčem jiném / Something Different / Jostakin muusta / Věra Chytilová, CZ 1963
Nana / Valérie Massadian, FR 2011 [unreleased in Finland]
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles / Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels / [Finnish title:] Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles / Chantal Akerman, BE/FR 1975
The Selfish Giant / Clio Barnard, GB 2013 [unreleased in Finland]
Skyscraper / Shirley Clarke, Willard Van Dyke, doc, c.m., US 1960
Monster / Monster – Aileen Wuornos / Patty Jenkins, US 2003
SherryBaby / SherryBaby / Laurie Collyer, US 2006
American Psycho / Amerikan psyko / Mary Harron, US 2000
Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions / Barbara Hammer, doc, JP/US 2000 [unreleased in Finland]
Chircales / The Brickmakers / Tiilentekijät / Marta Rodríguez, Jorge Silva, CO 1972
Samt el qusur / صمت القصور / The Silence of the Palaces / Palatsin hiljaisuus / Moufida Tlatli, TN 1994
AA: Three more playful chapters in Mark Cousins's epic saga of women making films. I love his way of going against the grain and his taste of the unexpected. I have never seen The Wayward Girl starring Liv Ullmann, and watching these scenes I understand that this film is the Norwegian counterpart to My Summer with Monika: the rebellious young love, the dismal everyday reality. I was surprised to see the samples from Julia Solntseva and Larisa Shepitko here, as well as Forough Farrokhzad: scenes of non-home actually. Seen from a traditional viewpoint, Chapter 20: Home could be a centerpiece of the project. Cousins has an interesting insight about "the house looking at us". The room, the house, the home, is usually a female space even in a patriarchal society, traditionally a symbol of femininity. The relevance is not diminished in a feministic perspective (Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own). The Female Gothic, not discussed here, is an intriguing genre: the woman as a stranger at her own home. The cinema's immortal accounts of home have been written by women (Gone With the Wind, Rebecca) but perhaps until now they have been produced by men (such as Selznick) with an understanding of what intrigues women.
Chapter 21 is about cinema and religion, and it is not a very rewarding contribution to the theme, but again, it does not matter because all the clips are fascinating: Hypocrites (early cinema from Lois Weber), Khovanshchina (a Mussorgsky opera adaptation, a lavish spectacle, in continuation to Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible and Vera Stroyeva's own Boris Godunov) and a discovery from Sri Lanka, Gahanu lamai by Sumitra Peries. The spiritual and the sacred have been unforgettably conveyed by directors as different as Larisa Shepitko and Pirjo Honkasalo, perhaps more strongly elsewhere than in the clips selected to this chapter.
Chapter 22, on work, in turn makes sense also thematically and not just as a brilliant compilation of clips. It starts with a heartbreaking sequence about a door-to-door solicitor (in Miranda July's The Future). The embarrassment of job interviews is dramatized from a female / feminist viewpoint in Patty Jenkins's Monster with the unrecognizable Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos and Laurie Collyer's SherryBaby with Maggie Gyllenhaal in a scene relevant to Me Too. From Mary Harron's American Psycho we see a satirical sequence of alpha males comparing business cards. From Olga Preobrazhenskaya's masterpiece The Women of Ryazan we see a classical harvesting sequence, worthy of Tolstoy and Dovjenko. A rediscovered gem here is Margot Benacerraf's Araya, a powerful documentary on the labourers who extract salt from the sea off the Araya Peninsula in Venezuela in the traditional way: it shared the Cannes International Critics Prize with Hiroshima mon amour in 1959. Also rediscovered here: the Colombian documentary Chircales (The Brickmakers) by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva which was released even in Finland at the time, launched at the Tampere Film Festival if my memory serves.
No comments:
Post a Comment