Linda Lin Dai at Shaw Brothers

January 28, 2011December 14, 2016 BrianLeave a comment

This essay was commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image for the impressive Linda Lin Dai retrospective they mounted in 2011. The essay can also be found at the ACMI website here.

With the impact of Communist ideology on Chinese cinema after 1949, “the star” being replaced with “the film worker”, it was up to the overseas Chinese to continue the glamour and celebrity of 1930′s Shanghai. Singapore and Hong Kong-based studios like Hsin Hwa, MP&GI, and Shaw Brothers had their own training schools and publicity teams to develop stars with the flair and charisma of the pre-revolution generation. Amidst the prima-donnas and the girls-next-door, one star shone brightest: Linda Lin Dai.

Born Cheng Yueru in Guangxi, but renamed Lin Dai in Hong Kong, the star known throughout Asia and beyond as Linda was the goddess of the Mandarin-speaking world. In Taipei, perhaps the biggest market for Chinese cinema, Lin Dai had a film amongst the top ten money-makers every year between 1956 and 1966 – including four of the top ten films in 1957, and three in 1961.

Even after her tragic suicide at the age of 29, Lin Dai continued to cast her spell and score big box office returns with posthumously-released films. She was critically acclaimed too. In a span of six years, she won four best actress awards at the Asian Film Festival, a feat that earned her the nickname “Movie Queen of Asia.”

When Shaw Brothers attempted to break into the western market, Lin Dai’s films were the ones chosen for export. When co-producers around the world asked MP&GI to borrow an actress for overseas work, studio boss Loke Wan Tho picked Lin Dai. And when Shaw Brothers needed a face for the inaugural issue of their fan magazine Southern Screen, of course it was Lin Dai’s. In fact, she graced four of the first 15 covers of the widely-circulated magazine.

Off screen, Lin Dai was known for getting her way in the industry at a time when actors were considered the property of individual studios. On screen she was a softer, sexier, and more effortless version of that same persona, her characters ranging from plucky heroines with a verve for life, to tragic figures undone by their own ambitions.

Whether in comedy, opera, romance, or thriller, Lin Dai was the feisty one: the troublemaker in a chaste world, a firecracker when everyone else was a cardboard cutout. She excelled at comedies, especially the ones she did for MP&GI. But today, Lin Dai is best remembered for her work with Shaw Brothers, thanks in large part to Celestial Pictures’ recent digital restorations.

At Shaw Brothers, Lin Dai was queen. In Southern Screen profiles of younger actresses, Lin Dai was consistently mentioned as a role model, mentor, and standard of beauty. Her name, which conjures feminine beauty and classical literature, was synonymous with the studio and its growing stature in the greater Chinese market. Lin Dai’s celebrity was so great that in Shaws’ The Fair Sex (1961), she had a cameo as herself: the biggest movie star of them all. She was also cast in many of Shaw Brothers prestige pictures, such as their first foray into color, Diau Charn (1958), and Les Belles (1961). When Shaw Brothers wanted to revolutionize Chinese cinema, they relied on Lin Dai to be the face of the revolution.

In the late 1950s, Lin Dai was one of the few actresses in Hong Kong who could simultaneously work for multiple studios. For Shaw Brothers, MP&GI, and Yung Hwa, she made a number of rustic pictures starring as fishermen’s daughters or rural ingénues. However, by 1961, she found Shaw Brothers to be an ideal fit, and it was with that rapidly-rising, ambitious, and well-connected studio that she made her biggest films.

The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959)

The record-breaking success of Diau Charn and The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959) helped launch the extraordinarily popular huangmei opera cycle in Mandarin films. The latter film is perhaps the best of the bunch, thanks to Lin Dai’s award-winning performance, clever songs, and Li Han-hsiang’s deft direction. The regal but girlish Lin Dai fit Han-hsiang’s opulent, even excessive, vision of classical Chinese court life perfectly, and when he launched a project to make films about the “four great beauties” of Chinese history, he cast Lin Dai as two of them. In one of these films, Diau Charn, Lin Dai plays a maid who learns the power of her beauty. In the other, Beyond the Great Wall (1964), Lin Dai plays a concubine whose looks and musical ability drive men to war.

Throughout her career, Lin Dai also made a number of costume pictures for Griffith Yueh Feng, the best of which is the sublimely romantic huangmei opera, Madame White Snake (1962), which also features some of Shaw Brothers’ early experiments with special effects.

Les Belles (1961)

Lin Dai excelled at another type of costume picture as well: the fashion extravaganza. In Les Belles, she sported costumes from around the world; most famously, and most daringly, a leggy can-can outfit. In Love Parade (1963), Lin Dai is a gynecologist who butts heads with her fashion designer boyfriend, before – as a prudish woman in a musical comedy must! – discovering her true talents as a runway model. Lin Dai was associated with cutting-edge fashion to such a degree that she was even credited as the costume designer of the picture. These two films, featuring Lin Dai’s liveliest performances for Shaw Brothers, showcased the comic actress at her prime. The near-silent comedy of missed connections which closes Les Belles is the pinnacle of joy in pre-martial arts Shaw Brothers films.

Today, the name Lin Dai not only conjures up extravagant images of silver-screen glamour, but also song. Long associated with musical films, Lin Dai, with uncredited dubbing by Tsin Ting, starred in two of the most memorable songstress films later in her career. One of Shanghai cinema’s most important legacies in Hong Kong popular culture, songstress films were melodramas about women risking romance and reputation to belt out torch songs in nightclubs. Lin Dai, so adept at capturing a woman’s anguish, so convincing as a character who balances innocence, sacrifice, modesty, and depravity, all while maintaining an audience’s sympathy, took the genre by storm.

With the two-part Blue and the Black (1966), Lin Dai took on one of her most memorable characters: a stubborn romantic who also serves up one of Chinese cinema’s most heartfelt ballads. Unfortunately, Lin Dai committed suicide before the film was completed and Shaw Brothers had to find a stand-in to “hide” her way through the picture, Game of Death-style. Predictably, the Lin Dai replacement had the star’s diminutive frame but not her explosive emotional charge. Though the two-parter was completed, the film remains, for Lin Dai fans, unfinished.

Perhaps a better way to remember Lin Dai is through the songstress film Love Without End (1961). As she sings the title song onstage for the last time, the audience is completely still. When the camera tracks back to reveal her husband’s face, we can’t help but feel his fear that even though the song sings of love’s immortality, this may be the last time we get to hear the tearful ballad in the flesh. “Forget not your tears, forget not your laughter. Forget not the sorrow of leaving…”

Criterion Reconsidered: Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours

August 7, 2010December 17, 2016 BrianLeave a comment

More gracefully and more effortlessly than any film I’ve seen, Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, newly released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, captures the spiritual tug-of-war between France’s formidable aesthetic tradition and France’s place in a networked world economy. Three siblings deliberate the fate of their inheritance – not money, but objet d’art in a house that once belonged to a legendary great uncle, whose stature represents not just family ancestry, but the legacy of a fading nation. The eldest sibling (played by Charles Berling) falls to the inertia of tradition, arguing to preserve the treasures as-is out of respect for family, though he can’t seem to form a credible argument why. The younger siblings are pulled east and west; a brother (Jérémie Renier) and his young family are settled in China, and a sister (Juliette Binoche) is getting married in the United States. Like family, culture can’t be liquidated, nor can it be easily discarded. Summer Hours portrays the gentle friction that surfaces above cataclysmic cultural transformation: the casual conversations that glide over long-brewing ruptures, the hesitations that mask the deepest regret.

But what does that gentle friction feel like?

Like the graceful mundaneness of little gestures and glances. The siblings and their spouses convene to discuss the future of their inheritance. Or to not discuss. Nobody wants to confront each other, let alone argue. We witness not the venting of frustrations, but characters peeling apples, setting tables, preparing food, sipping wine. Death may bring emotional discontinuity, but the siblings are too mature to break the rhythm of everyday life, whose momentum had been breaking them apart, but now provides a chance for them to intersect again, if only for a moment. Like Jérémie Renier’s jet-lagged eyes, which nervously never seem able to stay on his older brothers’ for more than a second at a time, conflict is diverted out of respect for living. The only theatrics at play are the gentle clamor of everyday life.

Like sunlight peering into a dusty home, preserved as-is since the death of its final owner. Appraisers and museum representatives stroll past the house’s treasures, their eyes agape at the relics of cultural history and the relics of an old friend, now passed. Eric Gautier’s camera strolls by as well, taking in each slice of light peeking through the old windows, illuminating old books and older desks, bringing warmth into a house that has for weeks not been a home. In the background of each frame are paintings, vases, decorations – in shimmering view in Criterion’s blu-ray disc – that stand witness to the years past, as well as the lived nature of art: that a vase once held flowers and an antique cabinet once stored children’s toys.

Like the tired gaze of the old housekeeper Eloise, who returns to the house after the paintings have been bubble-wrapped and hauled away. Eloise walks by the locked house, peering through the windows to soak up the remnants of a house emptied out. As the sunlight strikes her face through the trees, she comes to life as the lone survivor of a Renoir painting, a flâneuse at a Montmarte soiree returning to the setting of those glory days.

Like teenagers dancing in the final hours of summer. With the parents away, cousins use the old house for one last house party. Gautier follows the teens through the old corridors in breathtaking long takes. Friends cross paths and hip-hop blasts. The music switches to a poppy indie rock and the girls shimmy away. As the sun starts to set we realize that these moments in the film’s eloquent final scene are not of teens who forsake the past with their boomboxes and beer. No, they, unlike their jaded parents, are the only ones left who still live this house rather than preserve or sanctify it. They party just as their great great uncle did there a century earlier. Their jubilant faces match the youthful statues in the yard. Nostalgia is for those coping with loss. For the young, the final sunset is for dancing.

Bong Joon-ho: laughing at genres

July 28, 2010December 17, 2016 BrianLeave a comment

It seems critics are incapable of writing about Bong Joon-ho without talking about genres. Sometimes he’s called a master of genres, other times he’s praised for reinventing them, mixing them, or transcending them. Critics love to count them off: to date, there’s the quirky comedy (Barking Dogs Never Bite), the police procedural (Memories of Murder), the monster film (The Host), and the melodrama (Mother). And from there, critics love to express fascination over the way the films seem to defy such genres while inhabiting them. The Host is also a family melodrama, Memories of Murder is also a black comedy, Mother is, as Manohla Dargis puts it, “a love story that turns into a crime story before fusing into something of a criminal love story.”

If Bong’s films slip from every genre they encounter, if they defy categorization at every plot turn, why bother evoking genres at all? If genres are defined by the categorical cleanness of their boundaries, aren’t Bong’s films “genre-less”? The temptation to classify the unclassifiable reminds us of Derrida’s famous take on genres: that all texts have genres, even multiple ones, not because they belong to genres per se, but because they diffusely participate in a kind of understood generic code shared by writers and readers. So it’s not that Bong’s films are melodramas or monster films, but that they evoke genres, manipulating them for other purposes, and in the process mix them into incomprehensibility.

Isn’t this paradox the same one debated over multiculturalism and post-racialism? Is a cultural-hybrid – a mestizo, a hapa, a migrant, an ethnic minority – the “sum of its parts” or the transcendence of such categories altogether? One of the most exciting aspects of Bong’s four features to date is that they pose both sides as possibilities, and then, fittingly, laughs in the face of the paradox.

To Bong, genres are nothing more than categories placed on certain situations, characters, settings, and narrative traditions. Bong has mastered many such tropes, and so it’s tempting to think he’s a master of genres as well. And yet, in interview after interview, Bong acknowledges his awareness of genres but hesitates before naming the genres of his own films, preferring instead to talk about thematic considerations. For instance, on Mother, he admits to crime film influences, but that “ultimately it’s story about a strange mother and son.”

So if we look beyond genre and toward themes, we find a compelling resistance of classification that is resonant with issues of identity. In fact, Bong’s films often pose the question: when driven to the extremes of the human experience, are we willing to drop our classifications? In, Shaking Tokyo, Bong’s short film in the omnibus Tokyo!, a hikikomori is enamored by an adorable girl’s exposed thighs and angelic vulnerability (embodied by teen darling Yu Aoi). A flurry of infatuation and the seduction of possibility overcome him. In the face of love, can a hikikomori choose to stop being a hikikomori? Or can a hikikomori simultaneously be a lover?

In Mother, Bong wrings our morality through the opposing pressures of maternal love and social order. If a mother commits a murder to clear her son of the very same crime, does that make her the ultimate mother? Or the worst possible one, since we get clues the son realizes her sin? Bong Joon-ho refuses to define for us what a mother is or what she must do. More than most directors, he understands that such definitions are untenable in a world of social unrest, of bureaucratic disorder, of authoritarial ineptness. And he never places blame or makes qualitative judgment, no matter the outcome. What we get at the end of Mother isn’t a new or hybridized definition of motherhood, but a daze in the form of dance: flailing arms, strobing sunlight, a jittery camera. It’s not just ambiguity, but a refusal to judge, settling instead for that mambo-like delirium, that sensorial sunset-on-your skin warbling jubilance experienced on the road of motherhood. (The last shot: a busload of mothers.) The way out of the paradox is through empathetic feeling.

Memories of Murder coldly depicts just what happens one tries to classify – or in this case, profile. If a man wears red panties, is he the killer? What about a man with soft hands? The police too are subject to profiling: by all stereotypes, the city cop believes in order and the rule of law, and the country cop believes in intuition and brute force. Of course, doting on personal identities, which are then elevated to the status of probable cause, leads to one disaster after another. As in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, released the same year as Memories of Murder, clues and character types are scattered throughout – a crying woman, an outhouse, red clothes, a Band-Aid – yet they drive us in indefinite directions because we insist that they must be pieces in a puzzle, rather than simply people or objects.

In one of the film’s final moments, a cop who prides himself on being the ultimate profiler stares a suspect in the eye, only to finally realize he sees nothing. In the film’s final shot, the cop looks directly at the camera and says the killer is probably an ordinary person. Given that the film exposes the cop’s brutality, we’re tempted to accuse the authorities for being the true killers. (The film is often called a critique of Korea under martial law.) But his gaze into the camera is unsettling for another reason: he’s looking at us. Are we who possess the gaze, we who play along as armchair profilers of this murder mystery, guilty as well?

That final shot mirrors the film’s opening scene. Bong loves rhyming his opening shots with his final ones. Barking Dogs Never Bite begins and ends with shots of nature, and Mother with a perplexing dance. After an expositional prologue, The Host opens on a boy stealing from a food stall; the film ends on an improbably poignant return to that opening gesture. But for Bong, a circular return to the beginning is never meant to create geometric order. It’s there instead to drive us in circles, to lead us back to the beginning dizzier than ever. We have not transcended the beginning, but nor have we surrendered to the myth that a return to origins provides some kind of order.

There’s a sneakiness at play here. A snarkiness. A mischievousness. Bong Joon-ho never rests at the opportunity to joke around and jostle our minds a bit, an extraordinary achievement given how disciplined Bong is as a storyteller. As Dennis Lim puts it, while Bong defies genres, he seems to nevertheless operate in a consistent tonal mode: black comedy. Not surprisingly, so often comedy is Bong’s preferred strategy for breaking our expectations of how people can be defined. In Mother, a lawyer makes a rather bizarre joke about buffets (he eats standing up because it saves time) which seems to throw away our (and the mother’s) entire sense of what a defense attorney is.

In one of the most memorable split-seconds of The Host, a father attempts to save his daughter from a charging monster. In the chaos, he grabs her hand, only to soon realize that he’s grabbed the hand of someone else’s daughter. We gasp at the tragedy but laugh at the shocking hilarity of the mistake. Then he lets go of the other girl. At such a moment, is he a father who cares only for his own daughter, or a man of the community who will save all daughters from the charging creature? From the comedy comes a central moral dilemma about identity that persists until the film’s final scene.

And then there’s the nose-bleed reverse-shot. It’s happened in three of Bong’s films so far and I’m tempted to call it a signature image in Bong’s young oeuvre. A character will look off-frame. The camera then cuts to what she’s looking at: a face with blood dripping from the nose. The reverse-shot is always a shocker. One never gets used to a face sullied suddenly by crimson, the flow of blood kinesthetically triggering the nerves on our own upper lips as if we could feel warm viscous blood tracking down our own faces. It’s also funny. The absurdity of unprompted blood somehow never gets old. We’re fixated on the nosebleed just as the viewer in the scene is. The nosebleed is such an effective narrative device: it draws attention to the bleeder by having our heart skip a beat and tickling our taste for dark comedy.

When it happens in Mother, the nosebleed helps us identify a character: the nosebleed becomes a critical clue about the identity of a murderer. In Barking Dogs Never Bite, the opposite happens: the nosebleed distracts the viewer from identifying the cold-blooded killer. While the nosebleed seems to serve different purposes, they in fact operate the same way: to raise the question of identity via shock and humor. That the result is different is simply a result of different punchlines to the same joke.

But Bong is too sneaky to let it simply be about identity. Hidden beneath the joke, the joke’s engine which needs to be suppressed to create the humor, is the disturbing heart of the matter: why is the person’s nose bleeding to begin with? The blood seems unprovoked to the viewer, thus making the nosebleed such an effective foil and such a hilarious image. But Bong leaves it a devastating mystery for those who care. In these two films, the nose might be dripping with blood for any number of reasons: guilt, fear, anger, confusion, exasperation, etc. These characters are suffering: one will soon be murdered, the other has already murdered. The nosebleed doesn’t explicate what that suffering is, only that hurt is happening, and that’s sufficient for Bong. If we can look beyond the identity-baiting, we may notice that there are emotions at stake, emotions too complex for us to pin-point and categorize, but clear enough as blood dripping down a person’s face.

The Crank Program Notes: Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

April 29, 2008December 15, 2016 BrianLeave a comment

Preston Sturges has a knack for comedic dialogue so absurd that it’s borderline Brechtian. Consider Barbara Stanwyck’s famous quip against the hapless Henry Fonda in THE LADY EVE, “I need him like the ax needs the turkey!” – a line that at first you think makes perfect sense, before you realize how grotesquely weird it actually is. It’s in the double-take that Stanwyck’s character in all her quirky sadism comes vividly into focus. Or consider Rudy Vallee’s proud declaration in THE PALM BEACH STORY that “Tipping is un-American!” – which first makes you laugh out loud, and then has you scratching your head at the illogic. Does tipping reward hard work or is it communist? Or do I simply not know what “American” means? Rare is the filmmaker who can in three seemingly simple words deftly have viewers questioning their cultural and national values as they gasp for air from laughing too hard.

Tonight’s film, CHRISTMAS IN JULY, has Sturges’ most delirious head-scratcher: Dick Powell’s “winning” coffee slogan, a line so bizarre I daren’t give it away here. Its complete disregard for common sense (and its brilliant use of a double – possibly triple – negative) apparently can only be solved by the latest Viennese scholars and uncommon geniuses like Dick Powell’s Jimmy MacDonald. Luckily for the rest of us, it’s repeated throughout the film until it, as Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it, “becomes a kind of crazed tribal incantation.”

The chaos that the line incites is hilarious, because for the audience, there’s so much pleasure to be had in simply watching as each subsequent character struggles to figure it out. Because surely the audience hasn’t a clue. We’re told there’s a pun in there, and maybe it’ll emerge if enough people give it a shot. And as in the best of Sturges, the double- (and triple-) take creates a feverish comic estrangement out of which the true meaning emerges. For this “tribal incantation” isn’t simply the murmur of MacDonald’s hopelessly confused friends and co-workers, it’s the rumbling of capitalism tearing at its seams. The hypnotic repetition of the line takes aim at tagline-crazy America and the myth of upward mobility. Sturges reminds us that if you stare at anything long enough, you realize just how crazy the world really is. Despite the requisite happy ending, which Sturges’ critics were always quick to point out, CHRISTMAS IN JULY contains what James Agee said are “some of the most intoxicating bits of nihilism the screen has known” and what Rosenbaum calls “comedy-satire about capitalism that bites so hard it hurts.” Ultimately, what interests Sturges isn’t just the laughs but the question of a man’s sense of self-worth when wrung through a society obsessed with financial success. The heart-wrenching closing conversation MacDonald has with his employer is as tragic as it is completely logical. And then all you can do is laugh.

In Response to the AFI: Top 100 American Films by Women Directors

June 1, 2007February 13, 2023 BrianLeave a comment

In Spring 2007, Erin Hill and I, then editors of the UCLA-based online journal Mediascape, conducted a poll to determine the “Top 100 American Films by Women Directors.” It was conducted, published, and promoted to counter the American Film Institute’s “10th anniversary edition” of their famous “greatest 100 American films” list.

Over a decade and a half later, the project seems both redundant in that such lists are commonplace on the internet, and still essential given that the majority of the films on our 100 are not the types that pop up on the more mainstream, post-2010-leaning Indiewire or Rotten Tomatoes lists. It should be underscored how different the view was in 2007, before streaming, social media, the Criterion Channel, Letterboxd, and #MeToo. Despite the absence of social media, our list got some traction online. Henry Jenkins dedicated a post to it. Readers discussed it on the estimable Dave Kehr blog.

When I did a similar alternative-canon poll for the LA Times (the 20 best Asian American films of the past 20 years) in 2019, the motivation and process was very much the same as what Erin and I did over a decade prior. I hope the Mediascape list still serves as a useful resource today.

By Erin Hill and Brian Hu

In 1998, the American Film Institute celebrated the centenary of cinema by announcing its list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. Needless to say, their list, topped by Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, sparked more than a little controversy. The AFI responded that dissent was exactly their mission: their list was meant to elicit discussion about a century of American cinema.

However, Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum was one of the few commentators bold or astute enough to pinpoint the AFI list’s real mission: to get viewers of the AFI’s CBS TV special to go out and view all of these movies again. Rosenbaum draws attention to the “holy or unholy alliance of the AFI, Blockbuster Video, CBS, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, and the home-video division of 13 film studios,” all of which had financial incentives for revitalizing interest in their classic film libraries. His main point is that the American Film Institute’s list is more a product of “corporate greed” than any cultural reflection, and so he came up with his own alternate list of 100 American films, many of which were not distributed by the major studios, and of those that were, many at that time were not available on home video.i

Nine years later, it looks like Rosenbaum’s list, predictably, had little impact on public demand, and even less on the AFI’s criteria for their “10th anniversary edition” of their original list, to be announced the night of June 20, 2007. Like any DVD anniversary edition, this list promises to sell the same product to the same consumers, with a few updates to re-whet the public’s appetite.

Mediascape took a look at the AFI’s ballot of 400 eligible films, and instead of writing the usual criticism against canonization, bad taste, or corporatization, decided to “review” the AFI’s new list with a top 100 of its own. Of the 400 films on the ballot sent to AFI voters, only 4 were directed by women. (Five if you include Shrek, which was co-directed by a woman.) Does that mean that women are inferior directors? Hardly. Does that mean that women have been kept out of the director’s chair? Yes and no. What our list aims to demonstrate is that, while women have certainly faced sexism in Hollywood, both in and outside of the mainstream American film industry (which the AFI list represents almost exclusively), women directors have made extraordinary achievements in filmmaking. But 100 films? That’s the challenge we put to several dozen film scholars, filmmakers, and movie buffs.

From their responses, we compiled a list of the 100 greatest American films directed or co-directed by women. What we discovered was that there are indeed many great American films by women—in fact, many more—but to come to this realization, one must alter how we define such terms as “great,” “American,” and “films.”

We’ll start with the last term. The AFI list is limited to feature narrative films—a format traditionally monopolized by Hollywood—at the exclusion of documentaries, experimental films, or shorts, formats in which women directors have traditionally excelled. For that reason, we opened our list to non-narrative films and video works. While our intention was never to rank our top 100 list, it’s worth noting that our top vote-getter was Maya Deren’s 1943 experimental short Meshes of the Afternoon (co-directed by Alexander Hammid). Deren’s film may not be very well-known to mainstream audiences, but it’s generally accepted among film buffs and historians as perhaps the most influential work of the American avant-garde. But if we play by the AFI’s rules for how to define “film,” Deren’s landmark work won’t see a spike in Netflix rentals, as Citizen Kane certainly will after June 20th.

Any attempt to define “American” will certainly be problematic, so we at Mediascape had no intention of doing so. Officially, we defined “American film” as the AFI does on their ballot: “Motion picture with significant creative and/or production elements from the United States.” Beyond that, it was up to the voter to define “American.” As with the AFI list, many of our titles were foreign co-productions, and given how complicated the world of co-production is (which includes both culturally-hybrid films, as well as “American” productions that take advantage of foreign financing benefits), we decided to simply accept them all.

However, the AFI ballot of 400 films has a rather whitewashed definition of “America.” Few films by American-born minority directors are represented, even though many European-born directors working in Hollywood (such as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean) had multiple films on the AFI list. Here at Mediascape, one of the biggest inspirations for our own list was Chon Noriega’s 1998 list of the 100 greatest films by Chicano filmmakers, which was published in the journal Aztlán as a response to the stark absence of minority American films on the AFI list. Noriega prefaced his list with the stirring proclamation: “But why should we care? Because the list is being done in our name: Americans.”ii Mediascape is proud that its voters have a more comprehensive definition of “American” than the AFI list does.

Finally, there is the tricky term “great.” It’s not very important to us that we have criteria for greatness (in fact, we didn’t specify any such criteria in our invitation to voters). It’s not that we’re necessarily against canonization, but simply that our time and resources were limited. A better top 100 list could be possible if we had a larger sample size. (Let’s forgo the old “canon wars” debates for now; refer to Mediascape’s review of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Essential Cinema for more of our thoughts on the topic.iii)

A few conclusions can be drawn from our list of 100 films by women directors. First, it’s clear that women directing is not a new phenomena, and that in fact, before Sofia Coppola, Penny Marshall, and Amy Heckerling, there were prolific pioneers like Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Stephanie Rothman, and others who worked both outside the industry and within it.

Second, this list asks that we divorce the idea of “classic” from “greatness.” If CBS’s presentation of the AFI’s top 100 is like a nostalgic stroll down memory lane, our list is a contestation of expectations and conventions. “That was directed by a woman?” “I forgot about that film.” “Why is it that I tend to forget the titles of great documentaries I’d seen in the past?” “Why is it that I can’t find any of these films on video?” Our list forces readers to ask questions rather than simply throw around the old titles in a new order.

Third, the list asks that we give more attention to non-mainstream formats and distribution channels. As our list demonstrates, many of the great works by women are documentaries, experimental films, exotica—not formats one typically thinks of when thinking about the “greatest American films of all time.” They are also aligned with social movements off the mainstream radar: African American cinema, Asian American cinema, queer cinema. And while they may not be available at Blockbuster, they can be found at public libraries, specialty rental stores, or educational outlets. In fact, one of the most important American distribution companies of all time, Women Make Movies, specializes in films directed by women.

Lastly, we hope that our list shows that it’s not hard to come up with a list of 100 American films directed by women. You just have to know where to look, and to realize that some of your favorite films, unbeknownst to most, may actually have been made by a woman.

Here is our list, in chronological order:
MABEL’S BUSY DAY (Mabel Normand, 1914)
SOMETHING NEW (Nell Shipman & Bert Van-Tuyle, 1920)
THE LOVE LIGHT (Frances Marion, 1921)
THE BLOT (Lois Weber, 1921)
TWO WISE WIVES (Lois Weber, 1921)
THE WILD PARTY (Dorothy Arzner, 1929)
LINDA (Dorothy Davenport aka Mrs. Wallace Reid, 1929)
CHRISTOPHER STRONG (Dorothy Arzner, 1933)
DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)
FIRST COMES COURAGE (Dorothy Arzner, 1943)
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943)
NOT WANTED (Ida Lupino & Elmer Clifton, 1949)
OUTRAGE (Ida Lupino, 1950)
THE BIGAMIST (Ida Lupino, 1953)
THE COOL WORLD (Shirley Clarke, 1964)
BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL (Doris Wishman, 1965)
PORTRAIT OF JASON (Shirley Clarke, 1967)
FUSES (Carolee Schneemann, 1967)
RAPE (Yoko Ono & John Lennon, 1969)
WANDA (Barbara Loden, 1971)
A NEW LEAF (Elaine May, 1971)
THE VELVET VAMPIRE (Stephanie Rothman, 1971)
TERMINAL ISLAND (Stephanie Rothman, 1973)
DYKETACTICS (Barbara Hammer, 1974)
THE WORKING GIRLS (Stephanie Rothman, 1974)
HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)
NEWS FROM HOME (Chantal Ackerman, 1977)
GIRLFRIENDS (Claudia Weill, 1978)
CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER (Joan Micklin Silver, 1979)
OLD BOYFRIENDS (Joan Tewkesbury, 1979)
THE LIFE AND TMES OF ROSIE THE RIVETER (Connie Fields, 1980)
TELL ME A RIDDLE (Lee Grant, 1980)
THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (Penelope Spheeris, 1981)
LOSING GROUND (Kathleen Collins, 1982)
FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (Amy Hecklering, 1982)
SMITHEREENS (Susan Seidelman, 1982)
VALLEY GIRL (Martha Coolidge, 1983)
YENTL (Barbra Streisand, 1983)
DESERT HEARTS (Donna Deitch, 1985)
DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (Susan Seidelman, 1985)
WORKING GIRLS (Lizzie Borden, 1986)
CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD (Randa Haines, 1986)
BORDER RADIO (Allison Anders, Dean Lent, & Kurt Ross, 1987)
NEAR DARK (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN? (Christine Choy & Renee Tajima-Pena, 1987)
DAMNED IF YOU DON’T (Su Friedrich, 1987)
ISHTAR (Elaine May, 1987)
BIG (Penny Marshall, 1988)
SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989)
BLUE STEEL (Katherine Bigelow, 1990)
SINK OR SWIM (Su Friedrich, 1990)
PARIS IS BURNING (Jennie Livingston, 1990)
RAMBLING ROSE (Martha Coolidge, 1991)
A PLACE CALLED LOVELY (Sadie Benning, 1991)
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (Julie Dash, 1991)
LITTLE MAN TATE (Jodie Foster, 1991)
MISSISSIPPI MASALA (Mira Nair, 1991)
DOGFIGHT (Nancy Savoca, 1991)
GAS FOOD LODGING (Allison Anders, 1992)
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (Penny Marshall, 1992)
WAYNE’S WORLD (Penelope Spheeris, 1992)
HISTORY AND MEMORY (Rea Tajiri, 1992)
MI VIDA LOCA (Allison Anders, 1993)
GO FISH (Rose Troche, 1994)
THE ELEGANT SPANKING (Maria Beatty & Rosemary Delain, 1995
STRANGE DAYS (Katherine Bigelow, 1995)
CLUELESS (Amy Heckerling, 1995)
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (Jane Campion, 1996)
WATERMELON WOMAN (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)
FOXFIRE (Annette Haywood-Carter, 1996)
WALKING AND TALKING (Nicole Holofcener, 1996)
MANNY & LO (Lisa Krueger, 1996)
ALL OVER ME (Alex Sichel, 1997)
PRIVATE PARTS (Betty Thomas, 1997)
COMING SOON (Collette Burson, 1999)
HOLY SMOKE (Jane Campion, 1999)
BOYS DON’T CRY (Kimberly Peirce, 1999)
AMERICAN PSYCHO (Mary Harron, 2000)
GIRLFIGHT (Karyn Kusama, 2000)
LOVE AND BASKETBALL (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2000)
THINGS BEHIND THE SUN (Allison Anders, 2001)
SOUTHERN COMFORT (Kate Davis, 2001)
STRANGER INSIDE (Cheryle Dunye, 2001)
LOVELY & AMAZING (Nicole Holofcener, 2001)
THE ANNIVERSARY PARTY (Jennifer Jason Leigh & Alan Cumming, 2001)
THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING (Jill Sprecher, 2001)
THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE (Nanette Burstein & Brett Morgen, 2002)
PERSONAL VELOCITY (Rebecca Miller, 2002)
FRIDA (Julie Taymor, 2002)
AMERICAN SPLENDOR (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 2003)
LOST IN TRANSLATION (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
MONSTER (Patty Jenkins, 2003)
SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE (Nancy Meyers, 2003)
YES (Sally Potter, 2004)
THE TIME WE KILLED (Jennifer Todd Reeves, 2004)
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (Miranda July, 2005)
SHERRYBABY (Laurie Collyer, 2006)
MARIE ANTOINETTE (Sofia Coppola, 2006)
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton, 2006)
OLD JOY (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)

i Jonathan Rosenbaum, “List-o-Mania: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love American Movies” (26 June 1998)
<http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/100best.html>. Another version of this article appears in Rosenbaum’s Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See. Chicago: A Capella Books, 2000.
ii Chon Noriega, “The Aztlán Film Institute’s Top 100 List.” Jump Cut 42 (1998) 65-67. Republished online at: http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/press/Media/Top100List.asp
iii Brian Hu, “Taking Film Studies to the Streets (and Back Again): On the Necessity of Criticism,” Mediascape 1.1 (2005)
<http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/archive/volume01/number01/reviews/hu.htm>