Spike Lee has allowed a few more women-directed films to grace the list of essential films he gives to his class at NYU, bringing the total women-films he deems worth watching up to a grand total of eight, four of which are by the same filmmaker, Lina Wertmuller. (The others deemed admissible to the list are Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, and Julie Dash.) Indiewire points out that even with these new inclusions on Lee’s previously all-male-except-Katia-Lund list, overall women still make up proportionally less of Lee’s list than they do in filmmaking as a whole.
So, in an effort to supplement this list we offer our own, of 25 films by women directors that all film students should see.
A short rant for the men who will inevitably comment that none of this should matter because it’s Lee’s taste and why are women always on about this and yadda yadda yadda: Sure. I must tell you that in an ideal world I’d not have to write lists like these. I’d like to stop having to take time out of my day to point out that just as water is wet, women have been making movies for as long as men have, and deserve to be acknowledged as actually existing in the world. Individual taste is as individual taste does. When they cut entire swaths of people out of the dream-life of the culture, personal preferences shouldn’t be treated as an absolute good. Lists like these ask that people question and expand their viewing habits, that’s all. The end.
And now for the women filmmakers, and their movies. I chose just one film per filmmaker, to try to get as many names in as possible. Instead of trying to persuade you to watch them with text, I’m letting the trailers and clips speak for themselves. And I’ve assumed that Wertmuller, Bigelow, Campion, and Dash are already on your radar, since they’re on Spike’s. I also tried to pull from various geographical locations and even from experimental film. And I stopped at 25 because at a certain point I wanted some personal taste to inflect the selection here, so quite a few more women filmmakers — Sofia Coppola, Miranda July, Sarah Polley and Lena Dunham — could be added.
First up:
Sally Potter, Orlando
Naomi Kawase, The Mourning Forest
Claire Denis, White Material
Isabel Coixet, My Life Without Me
Kasi Lemmons, Eve’s Bayou
Lisa Cholodenko, High Art
Agnès Jaoui, The Taste of Others
Alison Anders, Gas Food Lodging
Ava DuVernay, Middle of Nowhere
Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Nora Ephron, This Is My Life
Claudia Llosa, The Milk of Sorrow
Zoe Cassavetes, Broken English
Ida Lupino, Outrage
Liv Ullmann, Faithless
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, “Meshes of the Afternoon” (short film)
Deepa Mehta, Fire
Margarethe von Trotta, The Promise
Susanne Bier, After the Wedding
Catherine Breillat, Romance
Cheryl Dunye, The Watermelon Woman
Mary Harron, I Shot Andy Warhol
Agnès Varda, Vagabond
Samira Makhmalbaf, Blackboards
Agnieszka Holland, Europa Europa