Movies about women, made, written or performed by women, have been of fundamental importance in cinema since its origins. More than half of the movies made in the age of the silent films was written by female screenwriters. The role of the expressiveness of female faces in silent cinema was fundamental: in them the highest value that we find in every image, beauty, is expressed at the highest levels.
Women movies at the origins of cinema
One of the first fundamental women in the history of cinema was Alice Guy, the first female director in the history of cinema to make feature films. She was present at the screenings of the Lumiere Brothers in Paris but she thought that cinema had not only documentary and scientific potential, but above all narrative. Fascinated, she immediately approached this extraordinary invention and looked for work in the nascent sector of the cinema.
Alice initially worked as a secretary for the Gaumont camera dealers, then became one of the most important personalities of the French cinema, first with the director of reproduction and then as director. He made his first film in 1896 The cabbage fairy, to be followed by many others. In 1907 she moved with her husband to the United States where she founded her own production company.
Watch Alice Guy Blanche
Women movies: Helene Gardner
Another key woman in the evolution of history of cinema was Helen Gardner. It was she who created the prototype of the Femme Fatale. He often played women with strong characters.
But Helene Gardner wasn’t just an actress, she had a visceral love of cinema. In fact, she was also a producer, set designer, costume designer, editor of the films she played. An artist who expressed himself completely through films, and who was among the first to dedicate themselves to feature films, formed almost unknown at the time.
Mabel Normand was one of the first movie star. I play several roles in the first films of Charlie Chaplin, helping to start his success. Film of which she was also the screenwriter and director. He died at the age of 37. One of the stars of the Hollywood Walk of Fame is dedicated to her.
Women movies: Julia Crawford Ivers
Julia Crawford Ivers was one of Hollywood’s first directors and screenwriters as the Los Angeles area began to transform from a wasteland into a movie Mecca. When the film industry developed and became one of the most prestigious names in film writing. He also made many films with his son James Van Trees, who took care of the direction of photography.
Women movies: Cleo Madison
Cleo Madison was one of the first women to become one Hollywood stars through films that had a totally feminine vision. Madison was also one of the first actresses to play denunciation roles, films that dealt with discrimination against women and women’s emancipation, going against the tide of dominant machismo. She was also hired by Universal as a director of short and feature films in 1915.
In the following years the Hollywood movies industry became a millionaire business and fewer and fewer women were seen in key roles. The most important figures of industry were monopolized by men. In the mid-1930s, most women held secondary roles as publishing and production secretaries.
With the exception of the roles of actress and writer for the cinema, women today hold only a small percentage in the film business, especially in the United States and in the mainstream film industry.
The executives of the big production companies are almost all men and prefer to finance projects that have a male vision of the world. Only a few female directors have had the opportunity to leave a trace in the history of cinema as they deserved.
Women Movies
Hollywood Dreams
Aspiring actress Margie Chizek seeks fame in Hollywood. She is rejected by the film industry, falls in love, discovers the deceptions behind the world of film advertising, and understands her identity better. Saved from ruin by a kind producer, Margie manages to enter the world of the rich in Hollywood and falls in love with a young actor, who is building his career by pretending to be gay.
Hollywood Dreams by Henry Jaglom is a subversive film, a satire of an industry that is based on deception. Made inspired by the productive freedom and improvisation of the independent cinema actors of John Cassavetes, more rigorous and exciting than Henry Jaglom’s other films, Hollywood Dreams focuses on a smiling actress who suddenly becomes famous.
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Custody – A Story of Violence
Miriam Besson and Antoine Besson are a divorced couple. They have a daughter who is about to turn eighteen, Joséphine, and an eleven-year-old son, Julien. Miriam wants to keep her youngest son away from her father, whom she accuses of being a violent man.
In Custody – a story of violence Xavier Legrand tells the characters with great humanity. A drama film in which little Julien is destined to lose the ingenuity of his childhood in a battle for survival.
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Adorable friends
Three 50-year-old friends are invited to the wedding of Philippe, a mutual friend of their youth, who after many romantic adventures seems to have found the right woman, Tasha . Chantal is alone, her relationship with her husband is in crisis and the bizarre job of promoting bitter chocolate is a disaster. Gabrielle is an uninhibited and libertine friend of hers, convinced that having sex is the only way not to grow old. And then there’s Nelly, depressed and frigid, or so it seems. All three have had a flirtation with Philippe in the past, they would like to avoid seeing him again, but curiosity wins and they leave.
Adorable friends
Babycall
Anna and her 8-year-old son Anders flee a tragic family past: the child’s father is a violent and dangerous man. They move into a secret house and Anna buys a babycall to keep Anders in check while he sleeps. One night Anna wakes up with a start: noises come from Anders’ room, it seems a murder is taking place.
Noomi Rapace brilliantly plays a restless and obsessed with control character. A woman who never smiles, shady, trying to save her fragile mental balance. Story of love, motherhood and violence, between gray city exteriors and claustrophobic interiors.
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The house is black
The house is black is a lyrical, transcendent film that places a gaze full of compassion and religiosity towards a suffering humanity. The only source of harmony is found outside the leper colony, in nature: suffering reigns inside. The film merges the images with the poetry of director Forough Farrokhzad and with quotations from the Old Testament and the Koran.
Forough Farrokhzad, a famous Iranian feminist poet with a controversial and modernist style, was one of the most important female voices in Iranian poetry and cinema. His authoritative and charismatic personality was severely tested by ostracism and disapproval from conservatives and the Islamic government.
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Ninnao
Ninnaò tackles the theme of milk mothers in a direct and raw way, highlighting in an original way the relationships that are established between two women who will end up competing for the baby. It will win that he will be able to take advantage of the situation more.
It is a film on the theme of the family, which tells of the intimate roots of the human being and family dynamics. The story takes place in southern Italy, mostly in a single location, with a completely female cast. The protagonists are the mistress and her servant, two mothers and a child to breastfeed who becomes a reason for intrigues and secrets.
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Loredana
The life of Loredana, a 32 year old girl who lives in Palermo. The documentary is divided in two. In the first part the story is more intimate and Loredana talks about her person, in the second part she tells how she lives. Interesting portrait selected in numerous festivals such as Amstardam Lift-off and New York Flash Film Festival. Winner at Istanbul Film Festival.
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Miss Oyû
The bachelor Shinnosuke falls in love with Miss Oyu, the companion of his younger sister Shizu who visits him as a future bride. The family taboo prevents Shinnosuke from marrying Oyu. He marries Shizu without consummating their marriage so that Shinnosuke can remain faithful to the unconscious Oyu. However, the couple’s commitment to appearances has a cost. A grand depiction of exotic and picturesque Japanese culture, Miss Oyu was the first of the 1950s costume dramas that would make famous Mizoguchi outside Japan.
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Osaka Elegy
Ayako Murai is a telephone operator for the pharmaceutical company Asai, in the city of Osaka in 1930. To pay off the debts of her father, unemployed and threatened with arrest for not repaying a loan, she agrees to become the lover of his employer.
Film about the condition of women, as a large part of the filmography of Mizoguchi. The protagonist is a victim of a patriarchal and male chauvinist society where money is the dominant value. Masterful film for the realistic description of the city of Osaka, lyrical and lucidity in its social criticism.
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Wheat Harvest Time
Noriko’s family pressures Noriko to accept Satake’s proposed marriage, agreeing that it’s time for her to get married and thinking that marriage is perfect for someone her age. When Yabe’s mother Tami impulsively asks Noriko to marry Yabe and follow them on their move north, Noriko accepts the offer. Wonderful drama about family unity that is part of the thematic trilogy of Ozu which is called The Noriko Trilogy.
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Gion’s Musicians
The story takes place in Kyoto and follows Eiko, a young woman who wants to become a geisha and asks the older Miyoharu to teach her the trade. One of her first clients tries to rape her but Eiko violently defends herself and sends him to the hospital. After Miyoharu also refuses a customer, the two women are banished from the Gion neighborhood; however Miyoharu will agree to sacrifice herself to preserve the future of her young friend.
One of Mizoguchi’s latest films and one of the most successful on the condition of geishas, often victims of dramatic lives. It is also a story of great female solidarity: while the young Eiko rebels, the older Miyoharu has now resigned herself to her condition.
Watch The Musicians of Gion
The Perverted Kiss
One of the most interesting films by the American director Samuel Fuller. Kelly is a prostitute who arrives by bus in the small town of Grantville, after moving away from the big city to escape her former pimp. She meets the local police captain Griff who hosts her in his apartment, but then invites her to leave the city. Kelly instead wants to give up her previous life and become a nurse in a hospital for disabled children. Griff thinks it’s opportunism, he doesn’t trust him and keeps trying to get her out of town.
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Festival in Cannes
Cannes, 1999. Alice, an actress, wants to direct a independent film, and is looking for financiers. She meets Kaz, a talkative businessman, who promises her $ 3 million if she uses Millie, a French star who has passed her youth and no longer finds interesting roles. Alice tells the story of the film to Millie and the actress falls in love with the project. But Rick, a prominent producer who works for a large Hollywood studio, needs Millie for a small part in a film due to shoot in the fall, or else he’ll lose his star, Tom Hanks.
A film shot with great stylistic freedom, like a documentary, during the 1999 edition of the festival, which focuses on the performances of the actors with a spontaneous and fluid improvisation method, inspired by the cinema of Cassavetes.
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Gold & Lead
An expedition that really took place in the 19th century in the harsh and wild lands of the West. For years, adventurers, treasure hunters and military have lost their lives trying to find a mythical gold mine hidden in the hostile mountains of Superstition, south of Arizona. Guarding the mythical gold mine, the ferocious and bloodthirsty Apache. This time a woman is about to try it: Clare Peralta, descendant of the first discoverers of the Mine and in possession of the famous mine map.
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Home care
This is the story of Vlasta, who after a life spent putting the needs of others before his own, falls ill and begins to realize that his existence needs a turning point. A film that deals with important issues such as illness and compassion, with an intimate, authentic and at the same time ironic gaze full of bitter-sweet humor.
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The smartphone woman
An old and sick man finds a smartphone: inside there are videos that tell the life of a woman who moves from a small town in southern Italy to work as a teacher in a city that reveals herself hostile and incomprehensible: Rome.
A film in balance between fiction and reality, between cinema and life. In The Smartphone Woman Fabio del Greco builds the film with different materials. On the one hand, there is the reconstruction of reality through fiction. On the other hand there are “pieces of real life”, videos shot with the mobile phone over time. However, these are not documentary scenes: Del Greco uses these fragments of reality to construct fictional sequences, he uses montage to explore the deep meaning of events.
Look at the smartphone woman
Dementia
It’s night. A woman suddenly wakes up from a nightmare in a seedy hotel in the Los Angeles suburbs. He leaves the room and wanders the neighborhood. Meet a dwarf who sells newspapers with the title “Mysterious Stabbing”. In a dark alley, a drunkard harasses her and a policeman rescues her. Then she meets a smartly dressed man with a thin mustache.
Un visionary and hallucinated nightmare, without dialogue, during a night of a lonely woman in Los Angeles. Between horror, film noir and expressionist film, initially conceived as a short film by Parker based on a dream told him by his secretary, Barrett, who also became the interpreter of the film.
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Faithful Heart
Marie is an orphan exploited hard by a bartender in the port of Marseille. They want to marry her to Petit Paul, a drunkard slacker. But Jean, a man who works in the port, is in love with her and Marie reciprocates his sentiment. Marie is forced to leave with Petit Paul, but Jean follows them to an amusement park where the two men argue. In the fight, a policeman is stabbed and, while Petit Paul escapes, Jean is arrested.
Forgotten masterpiece of the impressionist cinema, an exciting melodrama full of visual experimentation. Faithful Heart takes place outdoors in disreputable and real areas such as the port, the tavern, the proletarian and disreputable suburbs, in natural settings on the border between land and sea. The real environments become symbolic images of the feelings of the characters and raw material of the director’s style Jean Epstein.
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Arianna
Arianna lives and works on an island. It is the last day of the year, perhaps it is also the last of her relationship with a man who lives on the mainland, and feels the need to leave. This impending end, which Arianna cannot explain, is a wound that reopens, and she waits for his presence to become absence, holding the breath of love.
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From Astrid’s Parts
An experimental and innovative film by the indie director Federico Mattioni. An eighteen-year-old decides to leave her parents’ home and crosses a largely unrecognizable Rome. He aims to reach a place, an enchanted garden that is an intimate return to childhood, but also another dimension that seems to come to life only in his imagination. An imagination from predestined to something extraordinary.
Astrid
Carnival of soul
Mary Henry emerges unscathed from a car accident that killed her two companions, and sets off on a strange adventure in Salt Lake City, where she finds herself drawn to a dilapidated lakeside pavilion and haunted by a ghostly figure. A low-budget horror masterpiece that went unnoticed at the time of its release, it has become a cult film in the United States since the late 1980s.
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Nika (2020)
The film “Nika” follows the story of a young woman from Los Angeles who lost both of her parents in a car accident. Although she has embarked on a career as a model, Nika feels an emptiness in existence and the weight of the time she passes. Although she has studied in various artistic fields, she has not achieved the success she hoped for and her friend, who has become a popular star, does not seem happy. Nika, in financial desperation, faces a life choice that could make or break her: becoming an escort.
The film represents a world of fragility and characters who seek meaning in a society that seems hostile. The director Leilani Amour Arenzana, through surrealist and dreamlike inspirations, tells the story of characters imprisoned in a “Western” trap, where vices, psychological fragility and materialism take over. Nika is a film that mixes drama and romance, narrating a period of transformation and redemption for the protagonist.
