Certain Women Directors: US Independent Filmmakers in the World

Patricia White

doi:10.1163/26659891-bja10002

Abstract

Abstract This article analyzes the work of Chloé Zhao and its reception in order to explore the role of female auteurs in 21st century world cinema. By comparing Zhao to Kelly Reichardt, another US director acclaimed internationally for distinctive works of US regional realism, the essay argues that US independent women directors critique American cultural hegemony and the global dominance of Hollywood both through the subject matter and formal structures of their films and through their positioning within the discourse of world cinema auteurism. After analyzing the authorial personae of both directors as constructed in their films and press reception, the essay offers close readings of Reichardt’s Certain Women and Zhao’s The Rider, both set in the US West, with specific attention to the perspectives of central Native American characters. The readings demonstrate how the filmmakers use realism to locate a singular, gendered authorial perspective on the world.

Highlights

As a director whose historic Academy Award wins were scrubbed from state news in China, her country of origin, Chloé Zhao
Zhao is exceptional to be sure, but her work pushes against exceptionalism in ways that leverage the figure of the world-class woman auteur for feminist politics
In the study of women and other underrepresented directors, the concept of authorship can carry a collective charge against the presumption of auteurist singularity, denoting not expressive uniqueness but the situatedness of a director and her labor in a social world

Summary

Millennial Discourse on Women Directors

When I published Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms in 2015, I couldn’t project just how central the figure of the female filmmaker would become to transnational cultural politics as the decade closed out. #MeToo leaped to the forefront of public consciousness and feminist politics after revelations of the pervasiveness of sexual assault in the American movie business and beyond. As Marchetti notes, Nomadland has drawn criticism from the left for not indicting the neoliberal policies that obliterated a safety net for older Americans like McDormand’s character Fern, displaced from both job and home by a plant closure.[18] Some even see the film’s sequence of Fern’s seasonal work at an Amazon plant as shilling for the retail behemoth In this regard Marchetti points to Nomadland’s affinity with the “lavish cinematography,” rural and minoritarian subjects and indirect approach to social commentary of the Chinese Fifth Generation filmmakers (named for their class at the Beijing Film Academy), who brought China’s cinema to international acclaim in the 1980s and 90s. I’m suggesting that the global travels of certain US women’s films enact a similar remapping of US national borders, asking us to parse exactly what we mean by the word ‘western.’

The Rancher

The Rider