(Credits: Far Out / Austrian National Library) Wed 15 January 2025 0:30, UK The film industry still lags woefully behind others when it comes to gender representation. In the nearly 100 years since the Academy Awards began, only eight women have been nominated for ‘Best Director’—compared to more than 400 men. Remarkably, it wasn’t until 2010—over eight decades after the Oscars’ inception—that a woman finally took home the coveted statuette.However, women have been helming movies since the dawn of the medium itself. Critics and studio heads might have repeatedly passed over them, but they were there, putting in the same blood, sweat, and tears as any of their male counterparts. The first woman to direct a movie was Alice Guy-Blaché, who began making films in 1896. Born in France, she began her career as a secretary at a camera manufacturing company, where she became acquainted with the Lumière brothers. Inspired by their work, she gained permission to try out her company’s cameras, kickstarting her career as a director. Between 1896 and 1920, Guy-Blaché made more than 400 films, including what is considered to be the first narrative film, La Fée aux Choux. After moving to the then-vibrant filmmaking town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, Guy-Blaché’s career accelerated, and she even opened her own company, becoming the first female studio head. In 1912, she directed A Fool and His Money, which is believed to be either the first or one of the earliest films featuring a Black cast.When Guy-Blaché moved back to France in 1920, she struggled to find work as a director. When she died in 1968 at the age of 94, she was all but forgotten. Her tombstone merely featured her name and the dates of her birth and death. It wasn’t until the 21st century that her influence on cinema was fully acknowledged. Alice Guy-Blaché – 1913 (Credits: Far Out / Apeda Studio New York)Who was Hollywood’s first female director? Guy-Blaché stopped making movies around the time the American film industry relocated to southern California. Hollywood reshaped cinema as we know it, turning it into an assembly line of entertainment that rakes in billions of dollars every year. Such a world was even more challenging for women to break into than the nascent film industry that Guy-Blaché conquered, which made Dorothy Arzner an outlier for decades.Born in San Francisco in 1897, Arzner got her start in the film industry thanks to World War I. With male filmmakers in short supply, the studios needed novices and women to fill their shoes, and Arzner was more than up to the task. She worked her way up from typing up scripts to editing, where she became an invaluable collaborator for several directors. She was so valuable, in fact, that she was able to leverage her way into her first picture by threatening to leave Paramount for Columbia Pictures. Between 1919 and 1943, Arzner directed close to two dozen films, including the first sound picture directed by a woman. Some of her movies were mainstream hits, including the burlesque comedy Dance, Girl, Dance, starring future television mogul Lucille Ball and frequent John Wayne co-star Maureen O’Hara. Arzner was the first female director to earn membership of the Director’s Guild of America, but retired from Hollywood in 1943 after she struggled to regain success at the box office. The fact that she was female and gay may have contributed to the lack of work that came her way. It wasn’t until the rise of the Feminist movement in the 1970s that her work was rediscovered and celebrated. Dorothy Arzner – 1934 (Credits: Far Out / Wikimedia)And the first female director to be nominated for an Oscar?Even though women had been directing movies since the 19th century, it wasn’t until 1977 that a female filmmaker was nominated for ‘Best Director’ at the Academy Awards. When it happened, it wasn’t a Hollywood filmmaker who received the distinction; it was an avant-garde Italian auteur. Lina Wertmüller was born in Rome in 1928 and got her start as a director under the mentorship of Federico Fellini. She was his assistant director on 8½ before making her directorial debut on 1963’s The Basilisks. Her films often featured political themes, but were full of colour, sound, and tonal dissonance. The film that earned her the ‘Best Director’ nomination was the perfect example. 1975’s Pasqualino Settebellezze (or Seven Beauties to English-speaking audiences) stars Wertmüller’s frequent collaborator Giancarlo Giannini as a low-level criminal in Naples who stumbles his way into World War II and ends up in a concentration camp. It’s visually arresting and tonally all over the place. It’s full of comedy but also features one of the most harrowing depictions of Nazi brutality of the decade. In her review of the film, famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael said of Wertmüller, “She says she has a penchant for the grotesque, but that is not the same as having a talent for it,” which may explain, along with the fact that some of the misogyny and themes of her films haven’t aged well, why Wertmüller is rarely mentioned alongside other pioneering female filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Jane Campion, and Kathryn Bigelow. Wertmüller lost the award that year to John G Avildsen for Rocky, who also beat Sidney Lumet, Alan J Pakula, and Ingmar Bergman. It took another 33 years for Bigelow to finally become the first woman to take home the statuette for The Hurt Locker.(Credits: Far Out / MUBI)Related TopicsSubscribe To The Far Out Newsletter
