Women Directors: From the Editing Room to the Director’s Chair

By Olivea Herrera
LinkedIn

In the 1800s, when film was invented, women were not seen as contributing any value in society besides being a wife and a mother. Eventually, women were allowed to enter the workforce in the mid-1800s and typically took jobs like teaching or being a secretary. However, women soon broke into big business and industries such as film.

At first, women were only allowed to be editors during the silent era of film from the late 1800s to 1930. Editing is stitching together a movie, and women back then were known for sewing and stitching. That is, until the first woman director, Alice Guy-Blaché, came into the picture. Since her husband was part of a production company at the time, that was Blaché’s way into the film world. From there, she paved the way for women directors from then until now. 

Guy-Blaché innovated film by being the first person to create narrative film, the first of that being The Cabbage Fairy, and she also pioneered editing styles. The themes of her films challenged the norms of the time and even starred women as heroes. These themes can be seen in her films, such as Two Little Rangers, which is a cowboy movie starring two gun-toting women, or The Great Adventure, which stars a woman striving to accomplish her goal of being on Broadway. These women-led narratives may not be seen as a big deal in modern times, but having representation of a woman being a lead on screen, let alone going after a career she is passionate about or taking places that were traditionally held by men, were revolutionary for the time these films came out.  Her determination and forward-thinking attitude led the way for women directors to be nominated at the Oscars, like Justine Triet for Best Director and Celine Song for Best Picture in 2024. History does not credit Guy-Blaché for much of the work she has done, but the impact she has had on film and women directors as a whole will never be forgotten.

Around the 1950s, another French woman filmmaker came to compete with the male-dominated director business, and her name was Agnes Varda. Varda was a photographer at first, but her love of photography gave her an appreciation for film, and that is where her career as a director began. Today, she is known to be a big name when it comes to the French New Wave movement of film, but a prevalent theme of her films is existentialism. 

One of Varda’s most popular movies, Cléo from 5 to 7, focuses on a woman awaiting medical news, all the while being obsessed with her beauty, how it may fade because of illness, and how that can affect the way other people view her. To be a woman is to be seen, and this movie shows just how much a woman can be conscious of her beauty when that is all people value in her. Varda uplifted women and made the public know how complex they are and the unique challenges they have to struggle with. Another movie of hers, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, shines a light on the power of female friendships and how even though women may go through hard times with their romantic relationships or careers, they always have their friends to lean on. 

Varda may not have made many smash box office hits, but her films spotlighted human issues, such as self-consciousness and identity, that people have to deal with and, therefore, made people more knowledgeable about different perspectives of the human experience as a whole. This made other women directors feel more free to tell and dive into other female stories. 

One of the most well-known woman directors of the modern day has to be Greta Gerwig, not only because of her line of successful movies that have come out within the past ten years but because her latest movie, Barbie, has become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. Gerwig has actually had a history of telling female stories in her movies, starting with Lady Bird. 

Essentially, Lady Bird is a coming-of-age film about a high school girl figuring out who she is while struggling with a complicated relationship with her mom. This film not only represents difficult familial dynamics but also makes an effort to point out just how complicated a mother-daughter relationship can be and how important that relationship can be when growing up and shaping who that child is. Meanwhile, Barbie shows the audience the position of women in society by having the women in the film take the traditional place of men in the world. In this movie, men are the side characters, overlooked, and just an accessory to Barbie. The film goes back and forth between Barbie Land and the real world, and the juxtaposition of these two perspectives makes the viewer more aware of how the world grew and is rooted in the patriarchy and how it is still prevalent in different ways. Strides in directing such as these have made Greta Gerwig an acclaimed director as well as a multi-nominee for the Oscars.

History has shown that with mostly male directors comes a mostly male gaze for the audience to view. With the rise of female directors, people were finally granted a chance to view things from a woman’s perspective, giving a voice and perspective to female-identifying people who may have never felt understood in the media. While the career of directing has been and is still mainly dominated by men, women directors such as Alice Guy-Blaché, Anges Varda, and Greta Gerwig have made a mark on film and paved pathways for future female directors. When society closed doors on women, they simply just opened a window.