If you take Hollywood at its word — and you absolutely shouldn’t — the last few years have been really good for female filmmakers. Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, was the third-biggest film of 2017, earning more than $412 million at the box office. That same year, Greta Gerwig set the zeitgeist ablaze with her exceptional Lady Bird. Ava Duvernay has capitalized on the success of her 2014 breakout hit Selma to move into blockbuster territory: her adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time flopped, but she has been tapped to helm The New Gods, a DC Comics franchise film to be released one day soon probably.
This year, Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart didn’t light up the box office, but it was buzzy and a kind of word-of-mouth hit. Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, meanwhile, is emerging as essential indie counterprogramming to another superhero summer. But let’s not forget that one of those comic book juggernauts, Captain Marvel, the second-highest grossing film of 2019 with close to $427 million, was co-directed by Anna Boden.
So, women are making it happen! Hooray for Hollywood, right? Not quite. Despite some legitimate high-profile successes, gender representation has not only not improved it has worsened. According to a report issued by the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, “Women comprised 15% of directors working on the top 500 films of 2018,” a 3% decline from 2017.
This erosion is distressing for a host of reasons — not least of which is that the number was so small to begin with — but it also contributes to a distorted narrative of American filmmaking: Men are the directors. Men are the visionaries. Men are responsible for the great cinematic stories. Directing is a man’s job, and only a select few women have what it takes — as if making a movie were the same as joining the Marines.
BAM Film has worked to correct that misconception. Over the past 12 months, it has programmed series meant to restore women directors’ place in American film history. That effort began last May with “A Different Picture: Women Filmmakers in the New Hollywood Era, 1967—1980,” and was followed a couple months later by “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers,” which highlighted films from the silent era.
“Punks, Poets & Valley Girls: Women Filmmakers in 1980s America,” the third chapter in what BAM Film programmer Jesse Trussell calls an “almost alternate history of films made by women in the 20th century in America,” begins August 7. Over a two-week period, BAM will screen more than two dozen features — narrative and documentary — and a handful of short films made by nearly three dozen women filmmakers.
“This was a nice way to continue that project of saying there have been women at all these points in history making some of the most remarkable and forward-thinking work in all of cinema, and we don’t necessarily think of them as part of that narrative history of film,” Trussell tells the Star-Revue. “So we’re sort of rewriting history a little bit.”
With more than three decades of hindsight, the story of ‘80s filmmaking in America is one of Reagan-era regressive politics, excess, and patriotic chest-thumping: hyper-macho action films like Top Gun and Sylvester Stallone shoot-em-ups; high-concept comedies like Ghostbusters and Back to the Future; franchises like Indiana Jones and Star Wars; John Hughes’ Brat Pack films. But the era was certainly not monolithic. Thanks to cheaper and lighter cameras and equipment, a burgeoning American independent scene began challenging the status quo, giving us filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise), Gus Van Zant (Mala Noche), and Alex Cox (Repo Man).
Though they tend to be overshadowed (or ignored), women were just as central to this era, creating films that were as zeitgesty and groundbreaking as the guys who got all the attention. Amy Heckerling’s 1982 adaptation of Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a touchstone of the era and a star-making vehicle for numerous actors, from Sean Penn to Jennifer Jason Leigh. Martha Coolidge’s 1983 film Valley Girl was another hit, bridging punk, New Wave, downtown, and suburbia, and giving Nicolas Cage a breakout role. Desperately Seeking Susan, directed by Susan Seidelman in 1985, burnished New York’s downtown cool and confirmed Madonna’s megastar status. Penny Marshall’s Big, the fourth-highest grossing film of 1988, put Tom Hanks on the road to becoming a Hollywood icon.
“Punks, Poets & Valley Girls” tracks this mainstream impact as a necessary corrective to the record of men-only box office domination. It also runs parallel to an impeccable survey of the non-Hollywood work being made during this time by women — often on various kinds of margins.
There are grungy films like Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982), a landmark of downtown New York punk cinema, and Born in Flames (1983), Lizzie Borden’s No Wave feminist sci-fi fauxcumentary dissection of race and gender in ‘80s America. There are luminous indies like Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground (1982), a recently rediscovered masterpiece of African American — of American — filmmaking, and Sara Driver’s Sleepwalk (1986), “a really neglected and fascinating downtown-scene movie,” Trussell says. There are shorts from the LA Rebellion collective, including Illusions (1982), an early work from Daughters of the Dust filmmaker Julie Dash. And there are documentary portraits of peripheral societies, like Penelope Spheeris’ chronicle of the LA punk scene The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) and Arlene Brown’s Navajo Talking Picture (1985), a groundbreaking piece of Indigenous cinema confronting and complicating our understanding of heritage and cultural assimilation.
If there’s an organizing principle to the series — beyond simply exceptionally talented women making exceptionally good films — it’s that the DIY ethos that we take for granted now, in an era of crowdfunding and carrying phones equipped with powerful 4K cameras, 40 years ago represented a sea change in how movies could be made. “Punk was about redefining the rules and breaking the rules,” Seidelman told Dazed in 2018. “Because there were no rules, no one could tell you not to make films, or that you couldn’t make films. It was so cheap to make movies, and the structure was so loose. And that was part of the aesthetic. People weren’t controlled by the power of money… It was liberating.”
Forgoing the gatekeepers may have been liberating, but it also kept exceptional filmmakers out of the conversation — and thus easily ignored by the money. But as the conversation about representation intensifies, the filmmakers of the ‘80s are starting to get their due, from rediscovery through low-grade rips uploaded to YouTube to preservation efforts, retrospectives, and series like “Punks, Poets & Valley Girls.”
“We’re trying to rewrite and expand canons,” Trussell says. “It’s important to not forget about the history of all these incredible women from all different sorts of identities that have been making work for so many decades. It’s not just starting fresh and new with the current, amazing generation of filmmakers coming up. Kathryn Bigelow was not the first female filmmaker just because she’s the first one that won an Oscar. There are decades of incredible films by incredible female filmmakers — including Kathryn Bigelow, who is in this series.”
Punks, Poets & Valley Girls: Women Filmmakers in 1980s America screens at BAM Film, 30 Lafayette Ave, August 7-20. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit https://www.bam.org/film/2019/punks-poets-valley-girls.
