Breaking Hollywood's celluloid ceiling
In the pink: Amy Adams in 'Sunshine Cleaning'
Last month, in the aftermath of Cannes, New Zealand film-maker Jane Campion made an impassioned plea to women to take up arms against what she described as the "old boys' network" of the movie industry. She was referring to the so-called 'celluloid ceiling', a barrier -- perceived or otherwise -- to the advancement of women in the production and direction of films.
Certainly women remain radically under-represented in film: it's estimated that between 6pc and 7pc of film directors are women, and the figures for screenwriters, cinematographers and so on are equally low.
Campion, now 55, is one of the few who have successfully (she won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1993 with The Piano) and consistently flown the flag, and it sounds like she's getting a little lonely up there. "I would love to see more women directors," she told journalists in the south of France, "because they represent half of the population and gave birth to the whole world. Without them, the rest [of the world] is not getting to know the whole story."
A fair point, and Ms Campion might be slightly heartened to note that two ambitious dramas by rising female directors will be released over the next few weeks (her own latest film, Bright Star, will appear here in the autumn). In two weeks' time Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee will open in Ireland, and today Christine Jeffs' comic drama Sunshine Cleaning is released.
Based on her own novel of the same name, Miller's film stars Robin Wright Penn as a woman married to a much older man who has a kind of midlife crisis after moving to a sedate retirement community, and is well worth checking out. Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning is a sparky independent American film that stars Emily Blunt and Amy Adams as dysfunctional sisters who learn a lot more than they bargained for when they decide to enter the crime-scene cleaning business.
In fact, the situation does seem to be slowly improving: some of the most outstanding independent films of the last year have been made by women and, perhaps more significantly, Catherine Hardwicke has proved that woman can muscle in on the blockbuster market too, with her supernatural hit Twilight. I say more importantly because the received wisdom has been that female directors tend to make quirky, emotional, offbeat films but lack the 'vigour' required for the big-budget action stuff. This of course is arrant nonsense, for the truth is that movie-making since the very beginning has been rigged in favour of the male.
From the earliest days of Hollywood, the only place for women in the studios was in the secretarial pools, the make-up departments and, necessarily, in front of the cameras. The glamorous stars who lit up the silent screen were cast aside once their looks began to fade (Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard addresses the plight of these forgotten idols), while the men were allowed to work into older age, usually paired with younger and younger women.
It took a special kind of female to stand up to all this misogyny and stake their claim as players.
Mary Pickford was one such woman: one of the biggest stars of the silent age, she refused to be dismissed as a bimbo, became increasingly involved in the production of her own films, and ultimately set up her own studio, United Artists, with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks.
Pickford would be a role model for the likes of Katharine Hepburn, but was very much the exception to the rule. Most of the female stars were paid less than men and had much shorter shelf lives, and the business of making films was very much a male preserve.
There were exceptions, however. Often called the first ever female film director, Alice Guy-Blaché was a pioneering film-maker at the Gaumont studios in Paris who later moved to America and made a series of silent films in Hollywood, including an early horror film called Vampire (1920). Unusually for the time, she was a fan of naturalistic acting and placed large signs around her sets warning her players not to ham it up.
But on busy sets packed with male crews, a female director remained a very rare beast. Women fared slightly better behind the scenes, and a number of outstanding female screenwriters made names for themselves in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably June Mathis and Anita Loos.
One of the only female directors to survive in Hollywood during its golden age (the 1930s and 1940s) was Dorothy Arzner, a truly remarkable person. After learning the ropes as a scriptwriter and editor at Paramount in the early 1920s, Arzner gathered enough clout at the studio to demand a chance to prove herself behind the camera.
Her first feature, Fashions for Women (1928), was a hit, and her career was underway. Until she mysteriously stopped making films in the early 1940s, Dorothy Arzner remained a significant force in Tinseltown, making films that launched the careers of Katharine Hepburn and Lucille Ball, among others.
She also influenced Hepburn's dress sense. A lesbian, Arzner often wore men's suits and ties, and Joan Crawford once said, somewhat immodestly, "I think all my directors fell in love with me -- I know Dorothy Arzner did!"
If female film-makers were to have a patron saint, though, it might as well be Ida Lupino. Born in London in 1918, Lupino was the ultimate Hollywood transgressor -- a beautiful young starlet who decided she wanted to make the films herself. Dark, petite and very pretty, Lupino rose through the ranks in the late 1930s, and began to be taken more seriously as an actress after appearing in two heavyweight dramas, High Sierra (1941) and They Drive By Night (1943), both alongside Humphrey Bogart. Better roles followed, but Ms Lupino had the temerity to have brains as well as beauty, and she baulked at the restrictions of a studio system that treated her as "the poor man's Bette Davis".
She left Warner Brothers in 1947 to become a freelance actress, and when her director had a heart attack during the filming of Not Wanted two years later, Lupino took over and did a very creditable job. It was the beginning of a brief but remarkable film-making career in which she wrote, produced and directed films with themes as daring as rape and serial-killing. Mainstream Hollywood, though, was not supportive, and Lupino drifted into television work in the early 1960s.
Fifty-odd years on, the celluloid ceiling persists, but so too do remarkable film-makers who happen to be female. One of the best -- perhaps the best -- film I've seen in the last year was Kelly Reichardt's Wendy & Lucy. A subtle, haunting and deeply political film, Wendy & Lucy draws stark parallels between modern America and the Great Depression, and Reichardt shot it in 18 days for just $300,000.
pwhitington@independent.ie
- Paul Whitington
