Filmmaking and film criticism have always suffered from an absolute drought of female perspectives and canonisation and funding has always been easier to achieve for male filmmakers than female ones. It can feel like ancient history in 2019, but the notion of women directing a film with the independence to be transgressive, complicated or even angry is still a relatively new phenomenon.
Read more about BBC Culture’s 100 greatest films directed by women:
- What the critics had to say about the top 25
- Who voted? Critics A-K
- Who voted? Critics L-Z
- The 100 greatest films directed by women
- Why Agnès Varda was the most popular director
Many women featured on the BBC’s list of the greatest films directed by women have had to break glass ceilings to get their voices heard, and the challenge has been even harder for the women included who are gay or transgender. The poll shines a light on the deep pool of talent and diversity among women filmmakers, despite the obstacles they have faced, but there’s still a distinct lack of space made for the genre of queer cinema and films authored by gay or transgender women.
Unbridled queer sexuality
Akerman was an intensely biographical director who opted to tell her stories in a duet of repression and liberation that was coated in an armour of stillness and solitude. It saddens me that an early film of Akerman’s, Je, Tu, Ill, Elle (1974), did not make it onto the top 100, because it is in that film where Akerman’s unbridled look at queer female sexuality reaches its apex in a beautiful sex scene involving Akerman playing the lead character. In that scene, the camera is locked in position while she and another woman, played by Claire Wauthion, have sex with one another in an unbroken, static medium shot that documents their carnality and passion, and the pleasure they find in the bodies of one another.
If Akerman’s choice to keep the camera in a solitary position showed sapphic desire for what it was, then the American filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s 1974 short film Dyketactics turns the act into something magical. Dyketactics, and Hammer’s filmography as a whole, failed to make the list. While some of this can likely be chalked up to her work being preserved in academic spaces, which are not available to everyone, her films deserve a spotlight befitting of the true innovator that she was.
In Dyketactics, Hammer uses dissolves to create a sensual feeling of reclamation and celebration around female bodies and lesbian sexuality, with the image surging in and out of itself as the camera focuses on brief glimpses of touch. Hammer emphasizes the hands as a tool of sexuality, similar to how the The Wachowski sisters would do so in Bound (1996) nearly 20 years later. Hammer also shows the vagina in close-up as a cinematic monument to lust. With this film and her following short work Menses (1974), she demystifies the female body and wrangles it away from perceptions of the cisgender male gaze. The cinematic language of women loving women as an explicit act, rather than something gestured toward in tragic melodrama, began in the early 1970s with Dyketactics and Je, Tu, Ill, Elle. That neither of these films has made this list feels like a gigantic omission on our part as critics.
