“Is it merely a farrago of sexual and hallucinatory images of great
skill, or is it a work of multi-layered complexity, crowded with
religious emblems, politico-historical allegory, scathing social
attack and compassion?”

Really EmileZ, of course I take you seriously.  Where is your self-
confidence?  And of course I watched the 1:16 minute very short
bit of it.  Having a casual understanding of what is schizophrenia, a
father-in-law was identified and treated with the disorder, and I have
a niece who is getting her Ph.D. in the psychology sciences and we have
had some talk about the condition, it seems to me that if the story of the
film were an allegory for humanity, there would have to be some explicit
one-to-one references in the film.  I should have to watch it to see.  So I
will.  Now I don’t really take you too seriously about Sally Sense though.

Reality is too often where “madness(es) have gone” (see the graffiti on
the wall).  If humanity is truly suffering that form of being split off from
reality, schizophrenia, then who is left that could be the therapist(s)? 
What is the treatment of a multicultural world with nearly 7 billion
people?

But you, now, to be courteous, will have to experience Seven Beauties.

You’re not going to watch it are you.

You don’t take me seriously.

We each have our aesthetic, EmileZ.  I always enjoy our intellectual
interactions, and will watch the excerpt of the film you like.  I didn’t
cry rape, however.  Your hallucinating heroine did.  You have more or
less fictionalized my reaction.  It looks like is is to inflate your
perception of yourself!  I have no idea who is Sally Sense.

I have been busy with real life that demands much more time than
does posting on electronic forums.  No apologies for that! 

As I said Wertmuller is nonpareil in directing films.  My favorite of her
contribution is Seven Beauties, which is about ideals that somehow get
sunk in the ridiculous and pathetic rationales humans face in life.  The
absurdities we are faced with from time to time force us to take the most
incredible pathways to sanity, if that is at all possible.  This film, among
many many excellent specimens is arguably Wertmüller’s masterpiece.  It
is as intense as it is a beautiful tragicomedy at its highest dramatic level. 
It shows two sides, though not a schizophrenic pathology, a man might
find himself having to deal with simultaneously.  Not the least of which
is the most inhuman tragedy of the last century, the Holocaust, becomes
a roman a clef occurring in the middle of the film to give the beginning
and end to buffer to that kind of madness that can underwrite some
human’s action against other humans. Wertmüller used that most
horrific of all human acts, the Final Solution, to illustrate the extremes
of collective irrationality and what one man can do in the face of it.  The
story is a microcosm of the savage opposition of individual self-interest
with the salvation of the cohesiveness of the collective, that can be just
as, if not more, savage than men lost in neurotic derangement.  All in all,
it is a story of survival. What survives is more than a single man but
humanity as well. 

I’d give a list of her most wonderful films but if you are interested, and
you really should be interested, you can just google them, or better yet,
rent or buy them.  They are worthy of taking up space in one’s home as
would a good book.

@ Shenonymous

Come on… you just can’t cry rape and run off without even seeing the movie and the alleged rape scene.

Well, there is always Sally Sense, who is pretty fucking awesome.

@ Sheynonymous

I got to thinking about “No Mercy, No Future” and felt compelled to watch it a second time.

I am glad I did, because it was even better the second time around.

Here is a link to a scene. I think the description provided by the uploader is as good as any I have seen, which is to say… inconclusive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnoxcLij054

@ Sheynonymous

I dunno, I thought it was interesting and well done, though now that I think about it, I suppose it is not for everyone. There is one scene in particular that I found difficult to watch, so I held up my hand in front of the screen until it was over (as I often do in such circumstances).

It is not an easy film to analyze. It is not your typical storyline where someone finds redemption or learns an important lesson or triumphs over hardship or whathaveyou. It is what it is.

Incredible performance by the lead actress. Great camerawork, editing, pacing, music, direction.

A masterpiece in my opinion.

Anyhow, it is my favorite movie by a woman director that I can call to mind.

There is another German woman director who made two films which I kind of liked: Margarethe von Trotta.

The films being “Sheer Madness” and “The Lost Honor Of Katharina Blum”. I noticed that according to IMDB, she is currently filming a movie about Hannah Arendt, at least that is the title.

Agnes Varda also made a couple films I thought were interesting: “Vagabond” and “Happiness”.

I just thought I would throw those out there for whatever it’s worth. They are all pretty unconventional. The last two I mentioned are downright wierd.

I have always meant to check out Lena Wertmuller, but have not yet got around to it.

EmileZ, thank you for the recommendation.  I appreciate it.
I’ve checked out the storyline of the film and I’m afraid it sounds
dreadful.  Poor mentally ill woman with an obsessive need for Jesus
who gets raped , then feels the need to “take up” with various men she
thinks is Jesus and has sex with them?  I wonder what that paradigm is
really about?  I see nothing “redeeming” about this film that makes me
want to experience it.  Why do you find it a good film?  Course the
real-life dancer, Nijinsky also had a Jesus complex, and didn’t do too
well after that illness started.  His redemption was in the beauty of his
dancing before he took ill.

@ Shenonymous

I am quite fond of “No Mercy, No Future” directed by Helma Sanders-Brahms. I would highly recommend it.

I am not so sure that psychology classes are the key to a broad understanding human nature. Such a thing is difficult to manufacture or bestow.

@ diamond

I have been fortunate enough over the course of my life to get much more desirable, intelligent, talented, soulful, incredible, crazy-mad women to befriend, and even at times go to bed with me (among other things) then that particularly vapid lifeless “pretty woman” (and no I didn’t even have to pay, I am quite poor in fact).... and it has driven me insane.

I think I disappeared my first attempt, sigh.

First, @gerard: Happy Birthday to you, sir.  (I used to post comments on here as NYCartist.) I hope to celebrate my 18th Leap Year Birthday at 72 on Feb. 29, 2012.

Next: for all readers of comments:
To answer the question by someone, Where are the women artists in history?, or Why were there more men than women? Short answer: Men wrote women artists out of history and still do.  Grants, art shows and reviews of art shows by women, who can get into galleries or museum shows, are fewer in number(s) than men. Fewer work by women are bought for public collections. 

There have always been women artists.  I’m sure as far back as the cave in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, but it is assumed by men (and women who buy the propaganda) that the artists were all men, based on too little or no evidence. 

The National Museum of Women in the Arts was founded in 1986 to work on this gap.  See http://www.nmwa.org. Tell every woman artist you know to set up a file in the museum: it’s easy and cheap.

Read Germaine Greer’s book on women in art history and how men wrote us out of history. And still do, but it’s more difficult now.

Women artists are as obsessed with art as are men.
Art is an itch that must be scratched.

First, @gerard: Happy Birthday to you.  (I used to post on here as NYCartist.)  98 years old: good for you. I hope to celebrate my 18th Leap Year birthday at 72 on Feb. 29, 2012.  When we disagree in future, I’ll remember it’s your birthday.

Next:
For everyone who reads comments:
For more sexist comments on this topic, see the Guardian today http://www.guardian.co.uk.

Why, someone asks, are there more men in art history than women?  I suggest you read Germaine Greer’s book on the subject of women artists.  Short answer: men write women out of history.  There have always been women artists.  Sexism lives: most interesting recent example - in the wonderful film, “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, one French (woman) scientist gently reminds another French (woman) scientist, who is the head scientist of that department, to say “human” not “man”.  It is assumed the artists of the cave paintings of 32,000 years ago were men, with too little to no evidence.

  As to obsession and career drive in women artists: it is the same as for men.  Art is an itch that must be scratched. 

  The National Museum of Women in the Arts was started in 1986 to remedy (some) women being left out of art.  Visit http://www.nmwa.org.  Please tell any woman artist you know to start at file in the museum: it’s cheap and easy and important.

EmileZ, January 28 at 5:42 am – 99% of male directors and
male actors in the movies are stinking bastards.  So the tribe
of the cinema are mostly whores and bastards.  Hmmmm   Is
it a wonder the movie industry has entries on the Stock Market
and ticket sales are still in the billions of dollars?  Where do the
poor get such fun money?  Hmmmm   What does that say about
our culture and the lure of fantasy entertainments?  And Europe,
and Asia by the way, is not that far behind, if at all.  The movie
industry is huge in India.  Bet they don’t have that many women
directors either.  It is a gender thing that is evolving affected by
culture, but as in all other walks of life, women have to play catch
up without losing their femaleness. Or do they?  Maybe good
filmmaking is really genderless?  Maybe that is what women need
to learn?

German, Lena Wertmuller, but who directed Italian films, is one of
the great movie directors of all time. Her work ought to be studied
in depth.  Almost nothing transcends Seven Beauties.  One of
the most unforgettable lines of all times comes from that movie,
“To pee is to live!”  LOL

It isn’t that wealthy women don’t have money to invest in films. 
Women need producers who can deliver funding for film projects. 
Seems the key to more parity to having more female directors is
the same throughout the industry.  Aesthetic imagination, but
sophisticated imagination.  Projects have to be conceived before
anything else.  Then a passion to make it happen is needed. 

More schools that have cinema studies departments need to
graduate more females educated in the skill of directing.  But
they also need trained skill in selecting or even writing screen-
plays.  Women are not as practiced in being dictators which is
what a director turns into on the job.  It is a holistic craft, and
a learned art, meaning an understanding of parts to whole and
wholes to parts, what is the difference of quality verses schlock. 
Also in order to direct top-notch films, takes a broad understand-
ing of human nature, which then requires the student director to
take psychology courses as well. 

Women have to be told as girls at least by high school they have
the potential ability to be successful directors in the industry.  Most
girls I’ve had experience with in schools haven’t the foggiest idea
they could be anything let alone film directors, mostly chittering on
their iPhones or Blackberries.  Nowadays the learning the craft can
be done with social electronic devices. iPhones can make videos. 
Schools could sponsor competitions and have an assembly where
productions are shown and voted on.  There are all kinds of ways
to encourage more girls to go into areas of occupation that have
had only a few of them.

EmileZ you make no sense, in French or English. I can only imagine that you know you will never get a woman like Julia Roberts to go to bed with you and it has driven you mad.

Dear Angelina Jolie,

Tu es betes comme tes pieds.

Vous avez le cervau d’un sandwich au fromage.

Vous êtes une pomme de terre avec le visage d’un cochon d’inde.

Yours Truly,
EmileZ

The big problem that nobody wants to talk about is that (at least) 99% of movies suck and 99% of females who make it in the movie business are stinky whores.

Okay, referring to the latter, maybe not 99%.

But Julia Roberts is a stinky whore.

Perhaps if we drop the statistics and examine what a stinky whore Julia Roberts truly is we might get somewhere. It is as good an angle as any from which to approach the problem with women in cinema.

Someone should interview Deborah Kampmeier for her thoughts on the subject
of female directors and stories centered on female protagonists.

2003: Virgin
2007: Hounddog
2013: Lonely Hunter (based on the Carson McCullers book)

IIRC, there is an interview included with the “extras” of Virgin that shed some
light on the subject.

The issues are industry wide.

Thanks to the truthdig writer, jjohnjj, who wrote about the women of the silent
era, and adding those facts to the conversation. Indeed, during the silent era,
women worked as innovators in all areas of the silent film industry.

Frances Marion wrote many of Mary Pickford’s scripts, and went on to win two
Oscars, one for The Big House in 1930, and the second for the 1931 film, The
Champ. By the middle 1930s the Hollywood moguls were effectively
marginalizing women and pushing them aside. Cari Beauchamp wrote a
biography about Ms. Marion, published in 1998—Without Lying Down: Frances
Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood.

Although Agnieszka Holland (scenario collaborator for Blue) worked on the
1993 film, Blue, she did not direct the film. Krzysztof Kieslowski directed the
film. Indeed, though, Agnieszka Holland has an impressive resume as a
director.

“These Amazing Shadows” is a documentary I saw recently on PBS, about the National Film Registry and how films are nominated and chosen for preservation at the Library of Congress.

One of the curators interviewed in the film spoke at length about about the large number of women involved in production, writing, and directing during the silent era. They were innovators and their films took on significant issues; domestic violence, birth control, even abortion.

After sound came along, production costs went up, banks exerted control over production and the Hollywood studio system was born. Only one woman, Dorothy Arzner, continued directing feature films on a regular basis, and she retired in 1943.

It appears that when cinema was a new and independent medium, women were the first to put it to creative use. Once the old-boy network took over, the women were pushed aside.

I wonder if that’s been also true in other “new media”... were there women pioneers in the early computer game industry?

http://www.theseamazingshadows.com/

This is from Wikipedia’s entry on “Women’s Cinema”

Alice Guy-Blaché made the very first narrative film La Fée aux Choux in 1896. More than 700 films followed, working in France and the U.S. Lois Weber was among the most successful film directors of the silent era. Actresses like Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and others were the stars. Women screenwriters were highly sought after including Frances Marion, Anita Loos, and June Mathis. June Mathis was the first female executive in Hollywood and produced and wrote several silent films.

http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Women’s_cinema#Silent_films

This is such BS…We don’t have enough women landscapers either. Oh AND there are way too many whites in AA and not enough blacks or women either for that matter..Blah..blah..blah..Some cheese with your Whine??

dbr: You don’t want ‘gender-equitable norms’ you want ‘special norms’...

It’s a matter of culture; the jews control Hollyweird and women are relegated to
lesser roles as a result.  They also have to sit in separate areas within their
temples—they’re unclean donchaknow.  Thanks to religion were so damn
advanced!  Monkeys make more sense!

as a composer working in the classical tradition, the question once came up in a
symposium: “Why so few women composers?  It came to me without giving it a
thought: “They’re smarter than us.”

some think this sort of work glamorous - perhaps for .01% - those who really
break through, by whatever means - in this time and place, everyone else is
deemed a looser - most women are too smart to play at odds like that

and for most in the fray it has nothing to do with fame or fortune - it’s
compulsion to project voice and vision - again, few women are so obsessed

Where are the women directors? When they direct things like ‘The Hurt Locker’, who cares? The quality of the work is what matters, not the gender of the director.

“...women’s interior life is badly skewed.” (My comment on this one:  If it is badly skewed,, some badly skewed male with no interior life should be held responsible!)

“Now we have real kick-ass females, but too often their behavior and attitudes reflect male fantasies,”
(My comment on this sentence, for what it’s worth, is that “real kick-ass females” are reflecting real masculine violence and sexusl abuse rather than actually being “real kick-ass females.”
Why?  Because for some reason or pressure, they have to do so to “git ‘er done”. Oddly enough, I’ve lived within two weeks of 98 years and have never known a “real kick-ass female” in that entire time.)

This is exactly the kind of thinking that has turned the left into little more than a political
oddity..

That what matters most is the outside of a person and not what they think and feel on
the inside….

I guarantee that more women could be elected politically, but those women will more
than likely be conservatives..This is the kind of thinking that led the left to the hang
mans noose behind their first African American president, for all intents and purposes he
behaved like George Bush number 2.

Cosmetic change means nothing… It only serves to keep up appearances and nothing
more…

Please don’t try and destroy Hollywood, with your out dated mental software, this kind of
thinking has done enough damage already.

Each of the statistics cited (17% of all seats in Congress held by women, 12% of the governor seats) are unacceptable because they are the result if sexism, bigotry and exclusion, denial of equal opportunity to women. 

I could give you some more statistics, such as only 18% of partners in law firms are women.  In my county, 18% of the judges are women, and it’s been like that for decades, almost as if somebody decided “that’s enough.”  It just goes on and on.  The demand should be 50% and not one less, in all these positions.  Tenured university professors:  predominantly white male.  The director on a film is like the boss, and sexism continues to exclude women. 

The interesting development in this area is in television.  Women actresses over a certain age (40) are turning to TV to find good roles for themselves on the small screen, sometimes on HBO or Showtime, but sometimes on other stations.  Now we see older male actors (Dustin Hoffman, Steve Buscemi) moving towards TV to find better roles for themselves.  The movies are unfortunately controlled by a small group of white men who mostly sponsor violence and sex.  If you want anything else, go to independent film, foreign, or sometimes TV.

We should have a woman’s union for all working women, support each other, demand all businesses and employers reach the 50% point.  Let’s start with Congress.

Thanks for this important article. The perpetuation of such sexist practices in a major social institution like popular media undermines progress toward gender-equitable norms across society.

And I hope that more studies release data on the average marketing budgets for films directed by women vs. by men.