With her sophomore feature Unbroken, Angelina Jolie is the only female director releasing a film on December 25. And she is battling a number of notable male directors — including Rob Marshall, Tim Burton, and Clint Eastwood — for Christmas box office supremacy.
Unbroken, based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand (who also wrote Seabiscuit), tells the story of real-life Olympian Louis Zamperini. As a soldier during World War II, he repeatedly faces death: a near-fatal plane crash, more than a month at sea on a raft, and incarceration as a prisoner of war.
There's a good reminder for us here: A director's gender has no bearing on subject matter. The conventional wisdom is that Kathryn Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, is the rare women whose films tackle masculinity, power, and the grit of war. But she is actually one in a long line of female filmmakers exploring these subjects. The traumas and scars of World War II, in particular, have been explored by many of the world's leading female filmmakers in a number of classic films. Here are a few of the greatest:
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1. Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter
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Liliana Cavani is one of the few female filmmakers whose work has been championed by the Criterion Collection, which just revisited her 1974 film The Night Porter with a Blu-ray update. The controversial film explores the chance meeting of a concentration camp survivor and the Nazi officer who tortured her, which leads them both down a path of sadomasochistic degradation.
"Cavani is concerned with the thematization of compulsive, repetitive desire and pleasure that exceed the logic of history," author Gaetana Marrone writes in an essay accompanying the Blu-ray. Much of the actions in the film challenge common logic, which can be alienating, but it also provides a fascinating exploration of just how complicated, nuanced, and baffling the war became as civility and honor disappeared. The pair fall into a dark repetition of their earlier interactions, and as they retreat from the world and into their troubling power dynamic, they role-play their pain and become victims of their shame.
The Night Porter was made in another era (the early '60s), before the war had been explored from every angle, and when much about it remained unspoken. Her polarizing approach to the conflict was born from years of research and the documentaries she filmed, and Criterion release includes interviews with Cavani and one of her documentaries (Women of the Resistance), which crack into the rationale behind focusing on a rekindled affair between a victim and her oppressor.
2. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will
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Arguably, no filmmaker has a more powerful or controversial legacy than Leni Riefenstahl, the German director who crafted Adolf Hitler's infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally. Though the Nazi propaganda killed her career, her imagery lived on.
Triumph of the Will's legacy is as much a part of the viewing experience as the film itself. Roger Ebert called it one of "the best documentaries ever made" in 1994, and recanted in 2008, stating that he was "stunned" that he'd praised it. It's easy to understand the conflict; you can see the future of cinema in her filmmaking, with her use of cutting-edge camera angles and aerial photography, while reflecting on the deeply problematic aspects of its structure, its purpose, and its images.
Her work is a reminder that we've struggled with the division between the art and the artist for many years, and have come no closer at reconciling the two.
3. Gillian Armstrong's Charlotte Gray
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Cate Blanchett courted some critical praise for her performance as a young Scottish woman who joins the French Resistance and tries to find her RAF boyfriend lost in France, but the film tanked stateside due to a weak script, and courted much derision as a war-time romance.
And yet, Charlotte Gray might be the most unromantic romance ever made. The heroine does fall in love, and when she signs up for the resistance, she goes to France to (secretly) hunt down her missing-in-action boyfriend. But her life quickly becomes much more than impulsive romantic pursuit, as she's faced with the dangers of her position and the struggle to live and trust in an occupied territory. If not for the final few minutes, the film would be entirely about a woman who moves on from her capricious young love and becomes a solo survivor with power.
The film thrives in its exploration of mundane heroism — not of the untouchable heroes and icons of roaring epics, but of regular, flawed people who sometimes make heroic choices.
4. Agnieszka Holland's In Darkness
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Holland took the idea of mundane heroism a step further when she captured the real-life story of Leopold Socha, a Polish man and thief who helped Jewish refugees hide from Nazi soldiers in Lvov's sewers for over a year. Robert Wieckiewicz's Socha isn't a paragon of virtue. He robs neighbors, spits out slurs against Jews, and only starts helping the desperate refugees out of greed. Eventually, however, he begins to look at them as people, and evolves into a kind caregiver.
Holland's film is about literal and figurative darkness — of the people stuck in the dark and dank space underground, and the way darkness can ebb and flow inside of us.
5. Lina Wertmüller's Seven Beauties
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Lina Wertmüller's 1975 film juxtaposes the darkness of the Second World War with Pasqualino, a ridiculous Italian everyman struggling to survive a series of missteps, and always finding a method of escape. He is the prison camp worker angling for safety after deserting his post. He is a soldier not inspired by heroism, but the desire to escape an asylum, which he entered only to escape prison.
The comedy isn't without its counterpoint. Pasqualino's ridiculous journey is juxtaposed with the darkness of the war. He sees countless innocents shot dead — and when he makes a play for his own safety in a camp by seducing a stern German captor, she makes him complicit in her own choices of life or death. Wertmüller doesn't toe any socially defined lines. Instead, she relishes in the complicated nature of life and the absurdity that lurks in darkness — right from the film's iconic first moments.
Girls on Film is a weekly column focusing on women and cinema. It can be found at TheWeek.com every Friday morning. And be sure to follow the Girls on Film Twitter feed for additional femme-con.
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