DOCUMENTARY MINISERIES PREMIERE: Every Tuesday this month, TCM is presenting what amounts to a film course, teaching both aesthetics and history, dealing specifically with what women directors have accomplished since the birth of cinema. The documentary, by writer and director Mark Cousins, is organized neither chronologically nor biographically – instead,
Women Make Film takes the novel approach of breaking the multi-part study, which presents new installments every Tuesday in September, into 40 topic “chapters,” starting with how selected female filmmakers chose to open their movies. Other close-up topics include editing, dream sequences and, yes, the close up. Eventually, films as old as Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1907 silent comedy short
Madame’s Cravings and as recent as Patty Jenkins’ 2017 comic-book blockbuster
Wonder Woman all get their due, along with about a thousand other samples. Several female narrators are used as guides for this documentary’s journey, the best of them being actress Tilda Swinton, one of the executive producers. But around and after
Women Make Film, TCM provides its own tour guides – TCM hosts Alicia Malone and Jacqueline Stewart – who set up not only the weekly documentary offerings, but films that are added to each Tuesday schedule to show some female-directed movies in full. Tonight’s lineup – which, like the documentary, hops all over in terms of decades, countries and filmmakers – includes Dorothy Arzner’s
Merrily We Go to Hell from 1932 (at 9:15 p.m. ET), Jacqueline Audry’s
Olivia from 1951 (at midnight ET), Teresa Prata’s
Sleepwalking Land from 2007 (at 1:45 a.m. ET), Lina Wurtmüller’s infamous
Seven Beauties from 1975 (3:30 a.m. ET, pictured), Chantal Akerman’s
Je tu il elle from 1974 (5:30 a.m. ET), Leontine Sagan’s daring
Mädchen in Uniform from 1931 (7:15 a.m. ET), and Lucrecia Martel’s
La Ciénaga from 2001 (concluding the first night’s female film festival at 9 a.m. ET). Haven’t heard of some of those films or filmmakers? That’s precisely the point of
Women Make Film – and precisely the reason to watch. For my full review on NPR’s
Fresh Air with Terry Gross,
visit the Fresh Air website.