Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema

When I saw this advertised, I was excited to see it because there have been some marvellous women directors including Lois Weber and Ida Lupino to name just two. Certainly many women are finally given some credit over the course of this series of 14 episodes but there were many flaws in the production. The biggest is that many of the films made by women and presented in clips here are not subtitled so you have no idea what is actually happening most of the time. And this is a series that is basically all clips and the majority of the films are not in English. Secondly, we are meant to trust the narrator (and there are a few) that what she is describing is actually what we are seeing but there are many instances that the narrator's assumptions do not look correct often because she is overly effusive and her description of what she says we are seeing can be easily questioned. Lastly, there are many ways the clips (this series is all film clips) are divided into categories but there is no cinematic division of categories. The categories can range for example from Montage to Leave Out (by which is meant someone en scene is left out of the action). So this kind of categorisation, hardly useful at best, seems completely at odds with educating us about film at all regardless of whether they were made by men or women. However, you will still get to see some wonderful clips made by great women directors from all over the world so it is worth persevering for this reason alone. It could have been a much better series but it is at least a start to acknowledge some tremendous and wonderful women directors like Varga and Muratova, and many, many others. And it's definitely not before time! Still worth seeing in its entirety.