Jane Campion

Jane Campion was born in 1954 in New Zealand and now she lives in United States. She began filmmaking in the early 1980s, has a BA in Anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975 and a BA with a painting major at Sydney College of Art in 1979. While she was attending film school in Australia, Campion made a short film, An Peel – Exercise in Discipline and the film won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes film festival in 1986. In 1989, she co-wrote and directed her first feature film, Sweetie, and it won the Georges Sadoul prize in 1989 for Best Foreign Film, as well as the LA Film Critics' New Generation Award in 1990, the American Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Feature, and the Australian Critics Award for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress. Three years later, her third feature film, The Piano, released and the film won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. It made her the first woman ever to win the prestigious award. She also captured an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Director at the Oscars in 1993.

The films she has made until today have in common that woman characters in them are trying to find their identities against social norms and suppression of sexual desire. Campion is interested in the ego-identity of women who are disregarded in society. As she is Anthropology major, she finds the root of this problem through Anthropology in her film. The Piano received extraordinary critical and popular public attention. Vincent Canby of The New York Times described The Piano as ‘a triumph . . . so good, so tough, so moving and, especially, so original.’

The piano is a story about a mute Scottish woman, Ada McGrath, whose father sells her, along with her young daughter into a marriage to a man, Alistair Stewart, who she does not know. Since she stopped speaking at the age of six, Ada expresses herself through playing piano and some sign languages. Her husband, Stewart, thinks their house is too small for having the piano, which is very important object for Ada, and throws it away at the beach. Ada and Stewart never have a sexual interaction. Ada gets help from Baines, who lives like a primitive man, to move the piano. They have love affairs and Stewart finds out about it. Her husband cuts her finger and Ada and Baines departe from that place. They start to have a new life in Nelson and Baines makes a silver finger to replace hers.

The piano plays an important role in the film. Campion says “The piano was chosen by the designer Andrew McAlpine. I queried it at first, because I imagined a tall piano and I found it hard to think of this table as a piano. But at the same moment as I saw it, I loved it.” In Campion’s films, women usually are the main characters. They are all considered incompetent and powerless but trying to find their talent or an escape to have a better life. The movies by Campion are about the lives of women who cannot live normally in a male-dominated society. She is also using feminism and pictorial imagery together in her films. This is why her works are unique as auteur. The films also show what her interests are and she is combining women with common problems that happen in families and society. Campion is not just talking about the problems which can happen to anybody but also emphasizes how they can affect women. As Bell Hook’s writing in Introduction Making Movie Magic “They give the reimagined, reinvented version of the real. It may look like something familiar, but in actuality it is a different universe from the world of the real.”, Campion creates films with the sense around herself like real world and it touches people’s mind. The piano is her alter ego.

Campion describes a woman who is suppressed sexual desire in Victorian Age. Stewart destroys his wife because he is jealous and angry. That Ada is a mute is a symbol that expresses women's social status that they cannon do anything

External Sources

1. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/30/movies/film-view-jane-campion-stirs-romance-with-mystery.html?scp=3&sq=Jane+Campion+piano&st=nyt

2. http://flickeringmyth.blogspot.com/2009/12/burning-brightly-jane-campion-profile.html

Meet Sally Porter

Met Sally Potter is one of my greatest adventures in the summer of 2010. She is a British female director, I don’t know her name even I have admire the amazing “Orlando” for about 15years. In one of typical hot July afternoon, my dear friends calls me, “No matter what are you doing tonight, you have to come to Moma tonight, Sally Porter is here.” I wasn’t listening to my friend. I end up spent 3 night in Moma watch Sally Porter’s films, listen to her interviews and talk to her after events.

Her journeying of growing to be a female artist is very fascinating. At age sixteen, she left school to become a filmmaker. Later on she was trained as a dancer and choreographer at the London School of Contemporary Dance. Sally Potter’s work from the early 1970’s, embraced dance, performance, theatre, music and film.  

As Catherine Saalfield says, “Filmmaking is the most efficient creative and satisfying form of activism”(Saalfield). Sally Porter’s films have strong voice in visual style. The best way to know her is through her films. From the glory “Orlando”, the beautiful “The Tango Lesions” and the quaky “Rage”, her characters and herself as character act for her voice. 

The internationally distributed Orlando (1992) brought Potter’s work to a wider audience. In addition to two Academy Award nominations, Orlando won more than 25 international awards. The film was based on Virginia Woolf’s novel and adapted for the screen by Potter. This film is a great example to explain the theses of Writing in Light lectures, the ways in which the language of film has influenced poetry and fiction and how they share technique.  In Orlando Potter visually broken up time, gender limitation on film and poetry. The film brings the novel close to audience by vivid visual language.  In the movie, Orlando has some shots out of story, acts off scene to stare at audience. These nuances of framing, inflection and particularly authorial viewpoint prove that, “No concept of gendered media representation can function without a concept of Authorship.”

THE TANGO LESSON (1996) was directed by Sally Potter. She also was the leading actress of the film. Potter plays herself in this story about a filmmaker who becomes enamored of the tango—and her dance instructor. Their relationship is fraught with tension, laying bare the power dynamics between dance instructor and film director, leader and follower. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfn5_sz_B8M

Female filmmaker always been put on the hot chare of challenging men’ leading roll in society. The great line from the movie is, “I have been fallow you in the Tangle, but to make a film, you have to fallow me. “

RAGE (2009) is Potter’s latest film and the first feature ever to premiere on cell-phones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B2spyclmw8

RAGE was in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009 and nominated for a WEBBY for Best Drama in 2010. This is a fiction film using documentary film style. The whole 1-hour and half film is a back stage of a fashion show. The whole movie is in one interview setting. Characters just walk in the scene and talk to camera. As Auteur theory point out, “Also social contexts shape film processes, it was the director who authored a film.” When Lily Cole introduces herself as, “My name is Lettuce, they call me Lettuce leaf… They told me to make me a big star, I have to be small.” Sally potter gives voice to those object women hidden behind the fashion industry. They are human they are scared. It’s Sally Potter’s desition to view fashion industry this way, she is the one has power to isolate the whold glory fashion show in back stage interviews.

I remember when I was asking her a typical film student question. “What advise you would like to give to a struggle film student?” She holds my hand and says, “If you know film is what you want, you have to work hard everyday, even there seems like no hope at all. Keep crawling and be happy with every little step you made. ”

http://www.sallypotter.com/

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1090

Jamie Babbit

In Maggie Humm's Author/Auteur piece, she expresses how much being a female auteur of their own work is significant to vocalizing the unheard thoughts of women to their community and its supporters. Jamie Babbit is a director, a writer, a producer, a radical feminist, an activist, a lesbian... Jamie Babbit is also very much an auteur. Babbit has directed several films, including short films and also has written scripts for TV shows such as The L Word, Gilmore Girls and Nip/Tuck. All of the works that she auteurs has the presence of a female, either an identified lesbian or one with an unidentified sexuality, in the foreground.

Gynocentrism, as demonstrated in Humm's piece as well, is a system used to try make feminist culture more prevalent; to bring out the female voice as the primary voice in a work of out to relate to the female on-lookers. Babbit's distinctly tries to bring out two voices: the female voice and the lesbian voice. She works with a film production company called POWER UP! which tries to 'challenge the perception' of women and the LGBTQ community through film and her dedication to the organization can easily be seen in her works, which commonly have a female lead, usually a defined lesbian or one who has an ambiguous sexuality, silenced or filed into a gender role and the movie visualizes how the lead woman finds her voice.

'But I'm A Cheerleader', Babbit's perhaps most popular and first major film, depicts a girl who is pressured into the social role of being a cheerleader and gets silenced by her own family and friends after suspicions are raised about her sexuality, thus she is sent to a camp that would not only silence her, but silence her true desires. In the end, her inner-voice strengthens rebelling against the camp and vocalizing, even illustrating, her desires more. Another film of hers 'Itty Bitty Titty Committee', which was produced through POWER UP!, is about a female who doesn't express her sexuality because of her traditional upbringing and is taken under the wing by a feminist friend who not only brings her a new culture to identify with, but brings out the desires that laid inside of her.

Babbit has expressed that the reason her films center around lesbianism and feminism is because she wants to represent a community that she believes is unheard yet scrutinized, which is also her reasoning in partnering up with POWER UP! Her work is mostly humourous because she feels that not only does it create an accessibility, but that it can show the humanity and progression of a community when they can depict themselves in a comical fashion. Her films generally appeal to younger audiences, as older audiences tend to be more offended at her works, in which she believes because she's poking fun at issues that were more taboo in older times and she finds the younger appeal more favourable, because the younger audiences will soon be the prevalent voices and can bring the issues more attention, so she now tries to specifically target the younger demographic with her films.

Not only does Babbit put her touch on the scripts, but she likes to create awareness through her soundtracks. Soundtracks to her movie have included bands like Dressy Bessy, Le Tigre and Cat Power, all musical projects with a strong female voice heard in the audio and lyrics. To get the attention of the fans of these artists is significant, because the awareness is spoken in the lyrics and the music and with a visualization like a film, it's likely to create a response, which is a tactic of an auteur.

Babbit is an auteur representing two communities, the feminist community and the LGBTQ community. Her works always feature a powerful female character who is facing sexual ambiguity or androgyny and their resistance to social norms and gender roles. Being an auteur is about trying to get your message into all shots of a frame, all dialogue of a scene, and the output of an audio speaker, which is something Babbit intentionally seeks out to do, by spotlighting female characters in her films or soundtracking her works with feminist bands, she's certainly created a voice.



http://www.afterellen.com/archive/ellen/People/interviews/62004/jamiebabbit.html (Interview with Jamie Babbit)
http://www.afterellen.com/movies/2007/5/ittybitty (Movie review of Itty Bitty Titty Committee)
http://www.powerupfilms.org/ (Film organization for Women and the LGBT community)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Babbit (Naturally...)

Diablo Cody has a very intriguing and unique approach to writing. It begins with her name of Diablo Cody, Diablo meaning bull in Spanish and Cody, which she got from passing through a town called Cody in Wyoming. This is just the beginning to Diablo’s super open and eccentric lifestyle.
After graduating college, Cody began to strip for money but also continued to write. Because of the feeling of being afraid to fail, Diablo opted for the internet after working from some local newspapers because then no one could tell her what to write or deny any of her writings. As Katherine Sall Field states in her article, “I teach the kids how media works and how powerful it can be, and how they can use for their own ends.” She began her blog on the sex industry and stripping and shortly after became very popular on the internet. Even earning the interest of Mason Novick, the producer. At first Diablo wasn’t interested on writing for Hollywood but was convinced and then began her script for Juno.
An auteur sees beyond the film, beyond the script but bring there life into the story and writings. That is exactly how Cody came up the script for Juno. On writing the script she called it, “a spontaneous thing.” Writing from a vision, Diablo said in an interview, “thinking about the image of a teenage girl sitting across from uptight yuppies and basically auditioning to be the parents of her unborn child. And I was like that is usually the most awkward thing I could imagine, and it is therefore hilarious.” As easy as that an award winning script was developed.
Because of the fear of failing and the sense of optimism Diablo’s success on the internet ignited her career. In Debra Zimmerman’s article, she says that she was moderating a panel of film makers in San Francisco and the film makers were trying to do something different with the films but the audience didn’t like it. Diablo, although, as the auteur of Juno does exactly that and that is why she has won awards.

Belma Bas

“Could existing film auteur theory, if reconsidered, provide sufficient conceptual tools to deconstruct feminist films?” is one question stated in the article Author/ Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film that caught my attention. An “auteur” is mainly the director who executes the words of an author and puts them into play with a motion picture. Currently, the argument is very simple, why are “auteur’s” focusing on accomplishing a block buster hit rather than actually taking the time to deconstruct their work process in order to produce a movie that does not project a stereotype? One common growing stereotype is a damsel in distress or a woman being insufficient to play the part of a hero. But if the author and the “auteur” are both a women, would “existing film auteur theory” change? It did when Belma Bas, a Turkish director, wrote and produced “Zephyr.”

Belma Bas introduced Turkey to Zephyr, an 11-year-old girl who is

left to her grandparents by her mother. Instead of focusing on the future and on her new life with her grandparents, Zephyr reminisces on her mother’s memory. Her absence has become her focus and takes a toll on her overall personality, causing her to be an unhappy little girl.

Bas as an author, wanted to make sure the film would focus on the absence of a mother and the affect it would have on an innocent child. The direction she chose for the movie was one that was surely not to categorize her as a feminist movie maker. According to writer Dorian Jones, ““Zephyr” drew condemnation from some female critics for its unsympathetic portrayal of lead female characters.” As an auteur, she played with the setting and the characters overall portrayal. “The lead female character in "Zephyr" is often portrayed in a less-than-positive light, which Bas says allowed her to avoid a feminist discourse.”

Bell Hooks, writer of the introduction “Making Movie Magic” describes film making relevant to us, the audience, with common stereotyping. ”Most people find it very difficult to journey away from the familiar and fixed boundaries.” In “Zephyr’s” case, this movie may be highly targeted to women because of the relationship between a child and their mother. However, the “boundaries” Hooks touches upon on are not present in this film, or at least not to me.

Bas also directed a short film named Poyraz which also features a child. However, Bas the auteur is mainly seen in this film. The landscapes she used to shoot the film in addition to the cloudy days Bas chose to record, portrayed very well the lifeless lifestyle of a young girl.

http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/834/Poyraz---Boreas

Culture Unplugged; Poyraz/Boreas. Belma Bas 2006.
>http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/834/Poyraz---Boreas>

Indie Wire; Zephyr
<http://www.indiewire.com/film/zefir_zephyr/>

Jones, Dorian; “Women Directors Stand Their Ground In Turkey’s Film Industry”
<http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6240588,00.html>

Nadine Labaki

Nadine Labaki is a Lebanese Film director who is known for her movie Caramel (Sukkar Banat), even though she started her career as a director for Arabic music videos. Her biggest break was in 2003 when she directed a music video for the female icon singer Nancy Ajram. She continued to rise up as director and played small roles in a variety of music videos as well as films; which includes her 1998 short film 11 Rue Pasteur (her graduating project at Beirut's Saint-Joseph University) which won the top prize at an Arabian film festival in Paris (Dawson).

Her first and most noted movie is Caramel. Labaki did not only direct the movie, but wrote the screenplay and took on one of the major roles in the film. Her role as Auteur is very clear in this movie. She did not only write the screen play which makes her the author but she also directed how it will be shot and what kind of characters are used. She stated in an interview that the idea of the movie “was something very personal. It started with something I used to feel and am feeling sometimes, this contradiction between [the fact that] I live in a country that is very modern and exposed to Western culture, and at the same time I'm confused between this culture and the weight of tradition, religion, education and there's always a lot of self-censorship, self-control” (Dawson). As an auteur we see that she does not try to imitate mainstream plots and stereotypes her movie. Rather, she designed her movie to explore contradictions that exist in Lebanese culture, but mainly wanted to break the stereotypes and misconceptions that exist about life in war zones.

The major difference between author and auteur is authors are a creator of a purely literary work while auteurs are the true creators visual narration. For example, if a movie is based on a book, the director of the movie is the true author of everything shown and done in the movie and the author of the real work truly has little influence on the movie. This reality is because a director decides the lighting, camera shots, as well as the expressions given to the characters for the lines they recite. Labaki is not purely an auteur in her film Caramel; this film is actually better categorized with the director Gorris discussed in our readings: Gorris’s imprint is much more subtly autobiographical and marks framing and camera movements…Rather than representing Gorris as some exemplary auteur, feminist literary criticism would make instructively explicit those minute textual places where authorial energies surface (Humm 94). She explains in the interview that the actors were real people that were asked to be themselves with some modifications for the movie. This indicates that it is not the director’s ideas that are solely guiding this movie, but her intention was to discuss real people’s “everday problems.” Therefore as an auteur she did not have full control over the script of the film (Dawson).

Labaki understands that Homosexuality as well as other contradictions in her culture are considered “secret,” because they exist but are not talked about in the public sphere. Her film is all about those issues brought out during a conversation in a beauty Salon where women can be who they are. In addition the Salon represents the only place where women can really go to become beautiful and above all be theirselves and talk about politics, culture, and sexuality. Just like the feminist film Madwoman in the Attic, Labaki’s movie focuses on “women’s subcultures and anxieties of femininity” (Humm 99). The movie received good reviews and is accepted as the most exposed Lebanese film on an international level (NYtimes). One of the reviews I’ve read agrees with the message of the film as well as the plot. The criticism however is about the quality of the actoris and actresses themselves (Berardinelli). Overall the movie is popular and was reliesed in over forty countries, which indicates that it was a success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadine_Labaki
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/01/caramel_director_nadine_labaki.html
http://www.croydonfilms.org.au/Croydon_Films/Nadine_Labaki.html
http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/directorinterviews/2008/02/nadine-labaki-caramel.html
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/movies/01cara.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caramel_(film)
http://www.reelviews.net/movies/c/caramel.html

Agnieszka Holland

As the movie industry is undeniably dominated by men, it is important for women directors to make their presence known through the films they create. As auteurs, female directors have the choice to make their voices heard, whether they choose to concentrate on spreading the feminist message or in the form of other social or political contexts. A woman who is successful as a filmmaker is a great stride on its own.

According to Maggie Humm's Author/Auteur chapter in her book, Feminism and Film, "Feminist literary critics have already made a firm decision that gender shapes signature and that there is an aesthetic difference in the way in which gendered signatures write" (Humm 110). For this reason, female filmmakers are essential to bring forth issues and stories as viewed through the female mind onto the general public. Humm goes further to support her theory by citing Alexandre Astruc's idea of "the camera which Astruc identifies as a writer's pen, or metaphorical penis, and as the mechanism with which directors inscribe their ideas onto film" (Humm 96).

Agnieszka Holland is a prominent Polish director as well as screenwriter. Born in 1948 in Warsaw, Poland, Holland graduated from the Prague Film and TV Academy (FAMU) in 1971 as Poland’s best cinema institute was inaccessible to her in 1966 due to her mixed Polish Catholic and Jewish ancestry. Holland started her career as a filmmaker by working with Polish directors, Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, as an assistant director. Soon after, Holland began making her own films. Even though, Holland realizes the importance of women in her film, feminism is not the central theme in her work. Rather her early work mainly consists of political agendas. For example, while making movies in Poland under the communist regime, Holland concentrated on what appeared to be the main political issue – cross-gender solidarity against censorship. As an auteur, Holland is most known for her highly politicized contributions to Polish New Wave cinema.


It is thanks to this "metaphorical penis" that Holland has managed to receive international acclaim for her films. After escaping the Polish martial law in 1981, Holland moved to Paris, France. Her 1985 film "Bittere Ernete/Angry Harvest", which is an examination of the relationship between a gentile farmer and the Jewish woman he conceals during World War II, has earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Even though the film may be construed as counter-productive in the feminist world, that is not the story's focus. The film concentrates on political and social context by shedding light on the human atrocities that occurred in the Holocaust. Holland garnered even greater international acclaim through her 1991 film "Europa, Europa." The film tells the true story of a Jewish man who assumes the identity of a Nazi in order to survive the Holocaust. Again, this film concentrates on political and social context. This powerful film highlights the human atrocities that occured during World War II but also adds a dimension by discussing the nature of identity.

Presently, Ms. Holland continues to create films and directing various other projects. In a 2000 interview with a Polish newspaper, "Rzeczpospolita," Holland spoke of the attempts to reach a wider audience. She confesses that she wants to make "cinema of the middle," understandable to the average spectator, yet "with a certain scale of complexity and an intellectual message."

Photo Credit: Jeff Vespa / WireImage.com
Humm, Maggie. "Feminism and Film." Indiana University Press: 1997.
NYTimes.com Person Profile: Agnieszka Holland - http://movies.nytimes.com/person/94664/Agnieszka-Holland
Agnieszka Holland feature - http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_holland_agnieszka