Content area
Full Text
Statistical and anecdotal evidence suggest that, in both the Hollywood and commercial independent film industries, female directors are not given the same support and opportunities as their male counterparts. As a result, there are a number of activist projects and organizations working to challenge and raise awareness about this inequity. This essay examines the role a new genre of documentary plays in this larger activist endeavor. Beginning in the 1990s, several documentaries emerged featuring women filmmakers of varying national, racial, and sexual identities who work in a range of film production practices. I argue that by privileging the voices and experiences of these diverse female directors-something our own feminist film scholarship tends not to do-these documentaries function as important activist texts in women's studies and media studies classrooms. Because most undergraduates are woefully ignorant about the films of female directors, let alone the avenues to and barriers against filmmaking that exist for women, these documentaries play a crucial activist role in raising awareness about the social and cultural forces shaping women directors and their films. Moreover, by modeling a spectrum of "do-it-yourself" possibilities, these documentaries encourage female students to imagine their own potential as filmmakers.
Keywords: women filmmakers / pedagogy / feminist film / documentary / lesbian filmmakers / black filmmakers
In 2001, the feminist arts activist collective the Guerrilla Girls initiated a campaign directed against the film industry. Already notorious for their exposés of the sexism and racism of the art world, the Guerrilla Girls launched an activist art project targeting, among other offenses, the film industry's sexist hiring and promotion practices for film directors. Working with Alice Locas, an anonymous group of women filmmakers, the Guerrilla Girls created a series of billboards, stickers, and posters that brazenly displayed the dismal statistics for women working as directors in the commercial film industries. For example, one sticker disseminated at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001 featured the names of prominent independent distributors and claimed "These Distributors Don't Know How to Pick Up Women," taking independent producers to task for not backing the films of women filmmakers. In turn, a billboard erected in Hollywood in 2003 exclaimed that even "The U.S. Senate is More Progressive than Hollywood: Female Senators 14%, Female Film Directors 4%," thereby...