Image via Complex Original
The Academy Awards are fast approaching (on February 24, to be exact), and all the talk about Kathryn Bigelow's Best Director snub for our favorite movie of last year, Zero Dark Thirty, has only increased. Although we don't disapprove of all the hullabaloo around the 61-year-old filmmaker, the discussion has gotten us to start thinking about all the other women behind the camera who also deserve some recognition.
That said, here are 10 female movie directors you need to know. If not for anything else, then at least so that you can name-drop more than just Ms. Bigelow at your friend's Oscar viewing party.
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Andrea Arnold
Most Notable Movie: Fish Tank (2009)
The Academy Award-winning director (for Wasp, named the Best Live Action Short) has come a long way from dancing on On Top of the Pops, and presenting the kid's television show No. 73. After her retirement from working in front of the camera, Arnold studied directing in L.A. at the AFI Conservatory. Most of her films—her latest being a reimagining of Wuthering Heights—revolve around themes of lower class struggles and single mothers.
Arguably her most striking work is Fish Tank, where Arnold truly mastered her presence as a director. On it, she worked mainly with non-actors or first-timers so the feel of the film could be more organic. She insisted that the film was shot all on location, in chronological order, to help her new actress, Katie Jarvis, understand her character. Arnold only gave Jarvis daily scripts for her to study. For her work, the filmmaker won the BAFTA for Best British Film.
Claire Denis
Most Notable Movie: White Material (2009)
Denis' signature strength lies in her ability to combine a country's history with her own personal history. The French auteur grew up in West Africa and it remains one of the strongest themes of her films, which often deal with colonialism and post-colonialism. Her debut feature film, Chocolat, which deals with African colonialism, was praised by critics as an astounding first film at the Cannes Film Festival.
In the case of her other films, like U.S. Go Home and Beau Travail, she's been lauded for her skill of blending the lyricism of French cinema while still capturing the harsh reality of contemporary France.
However, what truly makes her a great filmmaker is that her filmography is never confined to one genre. One minute she can make you feel the most disturbed you've ever felt in your life (with the horror in Trouble Every Day), the next she can make you bawl your eyes out (with the romantic drama Friday Night).
Penny Marshall
Most Notable Movie: Big (1988)
Marshall was best known as the cynical Laverne of Laverne & Shirley, but through the encouragements of her brother, famed rom-com director Garry Marshall, she started to grow interested in directing. After directing two episodes of her hit show, she realized she was destined for more.
In 1988, her now-classic comedy, Big, starring Tom Hanks as a 30-year-old 12-year-old, was released, and became the first film directed by a woman to gross over $100 million in the U.S. box office. Two years later, her film Awakening earned her a nomination in the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Julie Dash
Most Notable Movie: Daughters of the Dust (1982)
Shortly after her graduation from UCLA, Dash became inspired by black authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrisson. She wondered why we couldn't see movies like the dramatic work of the authors she loved, which made her decide to quit making documentaries and learn how to make narratives.
After her short film, Illusions, won the 1985 Black American Cinema Society Award and the Black Filmmaker Foundation's Jury Prize in 1989 as best film of the decade, she was able to move on to feature films. Her first feature, Daughters of the Dust, which she wrote, directed and produced herself, was the first full length film by an African American woman to have a general theatrical release in the U.S. In 2004, the film was chosen to be preserved in the United States Nation Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Chantal Akerman
Most Notable Movie: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
The Belgium-born filmmaker and artist was a founder of the art of turning traditional narrative on its head, which is made evident in her most famous film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (a film with an all female-crew). The movie follows a single mother's regular day-to-day regime, through the course of three days. It focuses on everyday tasks, like her cooking and cleaning, but also adds another chore to her list, which she considers another aspect of her every day life: prostituting herself out to a male client to help pay for her and her son's livelihood. The mother's life is thrown off on the second day, when she drops a spoon and burns the potatoes, leading to an unexpected climax on the final day.
Perhaps Akerman's knowledge of womanly anxieties helped to make her film so well respected. Her grandparents and her mother were sent to Auschwitz, and only her mother returned. To that end, her mother's anxiety is a very common theme in all of her work.
Sofia Coppola
Most Notable Movie: Lost in Translation (2003)
Sofia Coppola is essentially one of the coolest directors out there. No, not just because she's part of the most prolific family of filmmakers (her dad is Francis Ford Coppola and her brother is Roman Coppola), but because her films continue to feel modern and relevant despite how much further away in time we get from it.
From The Virgin Suicides and Somewhere to Lost in Translation, for which she won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the director has a remarkable ability to tell a profound story with the most minimal dialogue. Without too much camera trickery, she simply captures the essence of each story she tells and splashes it on screen.
Up next, Coppola is prepping to release the highly anticipated Emma Watson-starrer, The Bling Ring, about the group of rich kids who knocked off some of Hollywood's trendiest celebrities, including Paris Hilton.
Jane Campion
Most Notable Movie: The Piano (1993)
The New Zealand writer/director started off as a painter, inspired by Frida Kahlo, whose work still has a major influence on her career. Soon, Campion grew restless with the limitations that painting offered and moved on to films.
A filmmaker with a knack for airy and wistful period pieces, Campion has always received praise for her career in movies. Her second short, Peel, earned her the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes. Soon after that, she quickly became regarded as one of the best young directors of her time, her focus often being on gender politics, especially with female power.
Her most popular film, The Piano, was a commercial and critical success. It grossed $40 million, while only taking $7 million to produce, and won three Academy Awards. Campion won the Palme d'Or, making her the first female director to win.
Kathryn Bigelow
Most Notable Movie: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
At this point, Kathryn Bigelow is a household name. In fact, not knowing her is akin to not knowing who James Cameron is. The first woman to ever win the Oscar for Best Director, for her 2008 war drama The Hurt Locker, Bigelow followed that up with the most controversial film of the past year, Zero Dark Thirty, a gritty procedural drama about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, which was arguably better than her Academy Award-winning film.
And to think, back in the '80s and '90s, Bigelow, whose main focus has always been more action-oriented films, was having trouble gaining footing and respect in industry, dropping box office duds like Jamie Lee Curtis' Blue Steel and the laughable Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze flick, Point Break.
Catherine Breillat
Most Notable Movie: Fat Girl (2001)
The Paris-based filmmaker, who's scheduled to release her latest film Abuse of Weakness sometime this year, isn't interested in tradition. Instead, she's more concerned about conveying truth as close to the source as possible, which becomes problematic when your main focus is sexuality, intimacy and gender dynamics.
To get a sense just exactly what that means, watch Breillat's Fat Girl, a jarring and unexpected film that traces a young overweight girl's resentment and jealousy of her sister's sexual experiences. Sweaty palms and squirming while viewing her films is natural, as most of movies can't help but make their audience feel a tad guilty and voyeuristic.
Agnès Varda
Most Notable Movie: Cléo de 5 à 7 (1976)
All it takes is two minutes of observing the understated 84-year-old French filmmaker to get a feel for her films: eccentric, poetic, and youthful. A member of the Left Bank cinema movement, which was a contingent of the French New Wave of the '50s and '60s, Varda reflects an appreciation for other types of art outside of film into her movies, including photography and literature. Like Cléo de 5 à 7, an episodic masterpiece that follows her anxious heroine as she awaits confirmation of her possible cancer, Varda's movies (which she almost always writes herself) tell very simplistic slice-of-life stories that often recall themes of mortality, heartbreak and existentialism.
Her accolades include a Cesar Award for her breathtaking autobiographical 2009 documentary The Beaches of Agnès, and the Directors' Fortnight's 8th Carosse d'Or award for lifetime achievement at the Cannes Film Festival.