When I was finishing my BFA in the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 00s, Kathryn Bigelow was the school’s most famous filmmaker alum, despite the fact that she matriculated at SFAI as a painter (she studied filmmaking as a graduate student at Columbia after a stint in the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum). The work of the woman who made Point Break and Strange Days wasn’t exactly part of the curriculum of the then fine art-focused (sometimes to a fault) Film program at SFAI, where Hollywood film was rarely considered worthy of scrutiny; those who did readily embrace her success as part of the school’s pedigree often named glass ceiling smashing as Bigelow’s greatest achievement — as if to say, “Yes, she makes mainly action and genre blockbusters with big name stars, but she’s a woman, so that makes her subversive.” The argument that Bigelow’s work is somehow subversive just because she has a vagina is not only ludicrous, but unnecessary, being that her films are actually subversive. Marked by moral ambiguity, insistently complicating easy distinctions between good and evil, using Bigelow’s patented point-of-view camera to implicate the viewer in the dark worlds and questionable choices of her subjects, her films literally subvert the viewer’s expectations dictated by genre.
And yet the “good for a girl” backhanded praise continues to dog her. At the Q & A after the screening of The Hurt Locker at AFI Dallas on Saturday night, moderator Gary Cogill commented that his favorite book about the Iraq war was written by a woman (The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz) and then asked Bigelow a question that essentially amounted to, “Isn’t weird that The Hurt Locker is so good, since you’re a girl and all?” Bigelow deflected the question, but the issue came up again when an audience member who introduced herself as a member of Women in Film gushed that it’s “almost miraculous” that Bigelow has “embedded” herself in the making of “big boys movies.” This is when I decided it was time to leave; as i made my way out, I heard Bigelow respond that he choice of material is chiefly “instinctual” and not motivated by a desire to step where she supposedly doesn’t belong by virtue of chromosomal difference.
That the conversation surrounding Bigelow’s work seems to consistently get stuck in the mud of gender politics is all the more tragic in the case of The Hurt Locker, a film of such complex construction and complicated values that it should be able to sustain much deeper inquiry than what it feels like for a girl. If anything, it’s a film that bears the mark of a painter, full of deceptively beautiful imagery masking multiple layers of meaning.
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As the gap widens between the hundreds of features that play the festival circuit every year and the ever smaller handful of films bought and sold by the studio-dependent indie arms, certain overlaps become readily apparent between the inevitable day-todays of the young indie filmmakers who might have been inspired by a book like John Pierson’s Spike Mike Slackers and Dykes, and the indie rock kids who might have been inspired by a book like Michael Azzerad’s This Band Could Be Your Life. For one thing, both the record business and the film business (particularly as it concerns small films, mid-size non-genre films, and virtually anything without franchise potential) have, in the past few years, entered into periods of reckoning which has made it ever more important for emerging artists to take charge of their own marches towards destiny. Last night AFI Dallas assembled a varied panel to answer the question, WHAT LESSONS CAN INDIE FILMMAKERS LEARN FROM INDIE BANDS? To hear the panelists tell it, those lessons break down into two categories: taking advantage of the inroads made by bands to sell themelves (in ways easily monetized and otherwise) online; and taking the old school model of the DIY band on the run and using it to take advantage of brick-and-mortar institutions in financial crisis.
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