Movie Making Madames Part Four

Sometimes it can seem like all the films being churned out are either remakes or sequels. Hollywood can seem formulaic and narratively simplistic. Ever since movies began there have always been people who have wanted to try something different and so the independent film industry was born. It lacked the money and influence of mainstream film industries but it made up for that with maverick ideas and inventive ways of bringing them to life.

Picture from here 

Germaine Dulac did a bit of everything. She started her career as a feminist journalist before pursuing her passion for still photography that propelled her on to working as a film director, writer, producer and theorist as well as becoming the president of Fédération des ciné-clubs, a group dedicated to promoting up and coming filmmakers and teaching photography and film, putting many of her contemporary counterparts to shame.
Dabbling in both Impressionism and Surrealism, Dulac’s big successes in cinema such as The Seashell and the Clergyman and The Smiling Madam Beudet came before the advent of sound cinema and before Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’sUn Chien Andalou, arguably the most famous Surrealist film ever (If you’ve never heard of it is the film where Buñuel slices a woman’s eye open, it turns into the moon and he and Dali are monks… watch it).

After the introduction of sound Dulac’s career faltered and she spent the rest of her life making newsreels for Pathe and Gaumont. When she died it took three weeks and numerous re-writes before her obituary to be published, she was so controversial.

In the US, Maya Deren is the Grandmother of Indie film and the experimental director Stan Brakhage called her “the mother of us all”, “Us” being everyone who felt like giving the finger at narrative and stylistic conventions.

Image from here

I first encountered Maya Deren during my second year of university when our class was shown arguably two of her most famous short films, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), which I later based my first solo project on and At Land (1944). Art films and experimental films usually get a bad rap outside of hard core film theorist circles because it can look like jumbled mess and overly pretentious. Deren thought of her films as visual poems, capturing fleeting emotions and states of being rather than events or characters. The films rely on striking images and haunting concepts to draw in the audience. Deren acted in her films but never credited herself, preferring to keep her characters as anonymous figures and her film crews were similarly simplistic. Deren worked on Meshes with only her second husband Alexander Hammid and a 16mm camera bought using inheritance money. Deren once claimed that “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick” and she was a fierce critic of the way she felt Hollywood was stifling creativity and diversity within American Cinema.

Tragically, Deren died in 1961 from malnutrition, possibly due to her drug use. A posthumous documentary was released in 1985 from footage Deren shot between 1947 and 1951 when she made multiple trips to Haiti. Divine Horsemen: the Living God’s of Haiti (1985) led to some criticizing Deren for leaving the avant-garde but Deren herself felt she needed to progress as an artist and Vodun traditions and rituals were fascinating to her. Her book of the same name is considered an important text on the subject. Sadly, Deren never completed the project and the last film released before she died, The Very Eye of Night (1958) gives us a glimpse at how her work could have unfolded.

Cross posted to Yellow Bunting

Life (especially work) has been a bit manic of late hence why there has been so little posting. My apologies for that and I can only say that things should become more regular after the christmas period!

Things to read and look at

• Now that the original script for Prometheus has been leaked, Film School rejects compiles a list of the worst parts of the film that actually make sense in original script here.

Picture from here

• Amethyst Marie of Thalia's Musings on my web series of the moment The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, specifically issues of representation in the series.

• Daisy has penned an article rating the Bond themes over at Yellow Bunting!

Are 'geek' and 'nerd' now positive terms? - BBC News

This is the question that Kathryn Westcott is pondering over at the BBC news website.

This question has come up a few times in various places and rather than give a concrete answer it mostly just leads to flame wars and posturing. Many a social group seeks to define itself but who they exclude rather than include and there is the eternal example of something being abandoned by one group when it becomes too 'mainstream'.

Picture from here

This is as relevant in the world of film as it is in other areas of the media, especially with the rise in comic book adaptations and the like. Everyone wants to retain 'ownership' of the works they love and there is a pervading idea that mass consumption somehow ruins it. This is of course nothing new but film and television are mass media with clear emphasis on the "mass". It reaches wider audiences than other mediums and now with the digital age we have access to far more content than we would previous and that in turn shapes that direction culture takes. It's a continuous loop.

For my part, as the girl who was voted second geekiest in the year in my sixth form year book, I not sure my knowledge of the things I'm passionate about is extensive enough to gain me geek status and in any case owning to the fluidity of the language in this case, its meaning is adaptable depending on the speaker.

Movie Making Madames Part Three

This is a few weeks late but since Part four is going up soon I wanted to link back to part three of my Movie Making Madames series over at YB.

Part Three focuses on Lotte Reniger, an animation pioneer from the silent era and her gorgeous shadow puppets. Check it out and leave a comment!

Enjoy

An apology and an update

So you have noticed that nothing has been posted here for a while. My internet was cut off and won't be restored until 12th November so now I have to rely of using my phone which is slow as hell hence why there have been no posts for the past few weeks. I am still contributing to Yellow Bunting so go and check out my series on women filmmakers and there only 12 days until I get a proper internet connection back!

Personal Hero: Alice Guy

Cross posted to Yellow Bunting

In the early years, when filmmaking was still new and being developed as an art form, there were more women working in the industry than there has ever been since. In fact less than 10% of film directors working today are women and that drops to 6% for Hollywood directors.

There has only been one woman in the history of cinema to own and manage a film studio and this was between 1910 and 1914. That woman was the Grandmother of narrative film, Alice Guy.

Born in France, Guy worked as a secretary for Léon Gaumont, a renowned photographer. Gaumont had made his own movie camera after a visit from Louis Lumière, one half of the Lumière brothers. Up until this point film had just been used as a device to document but Guy saw potential for something greater. She was allowed to experiment with camera as long as she didn’t neglect her work. What resulted was one of the earliest (if not the earliest, though it is hard to date these early films) examples of narrative cinema, a 50 second film titled La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy):

This was the first step in a career that saw Guy write, direct or produce over 700 films in 25 years, even when she was pregnant with her children she was still making 2-3 films a week. When titled La Fée aux Choux premiered Gaumont relieved Guy of her secretarial duties and put her in charge of his filmmaking division. She later established her own studio in New Jersey with her husband, Solax Studio, which at the time was one of the most powerful studios in the world.

However, history was not kind to Guy’s memory. The studio went bankrupt after her divorce and the rise of Hollywood as a more cost effective place to make films. The studio was auctioned off and Guy returned to France in 1922 but she never made another film despite the fact that she was beginning to venture into another fledgling medium – sound.  Gaumont made no mention of Guy’s role in developing his studio or even the medium itself when he wrote an account of his company in the 1930s despite Guy’s protestations. She was effectively edited out of the history of a movement she helped to kick-start. It even took until the 1950s for own country to honor her for her services to filmmaking with the Legion of Honor, France’s highest, non-military award.

Photo from here

Though she ceased making films, Guy continued to write about them and worked for International Film Service and we can only wonder at how she would have made use of the multitudes of technological advances that were introduced to the film industry after 1922.

Alice is Guy is an important figure in the early years of cinema not just because she is a woman but because the codes and conventions of cinema today have their beginnings in a whimsical experiment from a woman who realized before anyone else that a story could be told with a medium that many others thought would not see out a decade.