Women Screenwriters

Women Screenwriters
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Women Screenwriters
An International Guide
Edited by
Jill Nelmes
University of East London, UK
and
Jule Selbo
California State University, Fullerton, USA
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo 2015
Individual contributions © Contributors 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-31236-5
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
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Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments x
Notes on Contributors xi
Foreward by Cari Beauchamp xxvii
Introduction 1
Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo
Part I Africa
Burkina Faso 7
Jule Selbo
Egypt 9
Koen Van Eynde
Ghana 18
Jule Selbo
Kenya 21
Jeremy B. Warner
Morocco 23
Stefanie Van de Peer
Namibia 29
Jule Selbo
Nigeria 30
Noah Tsika
South Africa 39
Haseenah Ebrahim
Tunisia 45
Ouissal Mejri
Part II Asia
China and Hong Kong 55
Cristina Colet, Jule Selbo and Jeremy B. Warner
India 69
Alexis Krasilovsky, Debashree Mukherjee, Jule Selbo and Anubha Yadav
Iran 87
Debbie Danielpour
v
vi Contents
Israel 104
Jule Selbo
Japan 108
Lauri Kitsnik, Jule Selbo and Michael Smith
Korea 131
Jeremy B. Warner and Brian Yecies
Palestine 143
Jule Selbo
Russia 145
Michele Leigh, Jule Selbo and Tatiana Tursunova-Tlatov
Part III Australasia
Australia 163
Nicolette Freeman, Lisa French, Margot Nash and Mark Poole
New Zealand 194
Hester Joyce
Part IV Europe
Armenia 209
Carl Wilson
Austria 214
Robert Dassanowsky
Belgium 238
Ronald Geerts
Czech Republic 249
Alice Němcová Tejkalová, Filip Šára and David Sorfa
Denmark 266
Eva Novrup Redvall
Estonia 288
Margit Keerdo-Dawson
Finland 302
Riikka Pennanen and Raija Talvio
France 311
Kelley Conway, Kath Dooley, Mary Harrod, Susan Hayward,
Florence Martin, Jule Selbo, Alison Smith, Isabelle Vanderschelden
and Elena Von Kassel Siambani
Germany 363
Andrew Kenneth Gay, Alexis Krasilovsky, Ervin Malakaj,
Juliane Scholz and Carl Wilson
Greece 398
Tonia Kazakopoulou
Contents vii
Ireland 410
Susan Liddy and Díóg O’Connell
Italy 433
Mariapia Comand, Alexis Krasilovsky, Bernadette Luciano,
Paolo Russo, Jule Selbo and Bridget Tompkins
Malta 488
Monika Maslowska
Netherlands 493
Thomas van den Berg, Erik Buikema, Gert Jan Harkema,
Annelies van Noortwijk, Jennifer O’Connell, Rianne Pras, Vincent Ros,
Johanna Seelbach, Steven Willemson and Jauke van Wonderen
Norway 516
Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson
Poland 523
Jule Selbo
Romania 526
Monica Mitarcă
Serbia and Yugoslavia 533
Olga Dimitrijević
Spain 538
Natalia Sanjuan Bornay, Julia Sabina Gutiérrez and Jeremy B. Warner
Sweden 550
Johanna Forsman and Kjell Sundstedt
Switzerland 578
Michael Burri
Turkey 586
Jule Selbo
United Kingdom 591
Lavinia Brydon, Marcella Forster, Christine Gledhill,
Stella Hockenhull, Susan Liddy, Nathalie Morris, Jill Nelmes,
Jamie Sherry and Paul Wells
Part V North America

Canada 685
Michael Coutanche, Jule Selbo and J. T. Velikovsky
Cuba 693
Michelle Leigh Farrell
Jamaica 700
Tanya Gail Davies
viii Contents
Mexico 714
Maria-Teresa DePaoli and Felipe Pruneda Sentíes
United States of America 726
Jean Ansolabehere, Robert Arnett, Kristiina Hackel, Helen Jacey,
Warren Lewis, Sam Lively, Victoria Lucas, Bettina Moss,
Claudia Myers, Megan Reilly, Dorin Schumacher,
Jule Selbo, Anne Slatton, Tom Stempel, Anna Weinstein and Rosanne Welch
Part VI South America
Argentina 859
Linda Craig and Felipe Pruneda Sentíes
Brazil 870
Camila Malagolini Gama
Chile 875
Carmen Sofia Brenes
Venezuela 889
Belkis Suárez Faillace
Index 901
List of Figures
4.1 Aksella Luts as the forester’s daughter in the Young Eagles

(1927). Estonian Film Archives 294
4.2 Morsian yllättää (1941) featuring the film’s screenwriters
Kersti Bergroth, Lea Joutseno and Valentin Vaala working
on the script, accompanied by an unknown typist (left).
Valentin Vaala: Morsian yllättää 1941 ©KAVI/Suomi-Filmi Oy33.1 304
4.3 Tot Ziens/Goodbye (1995, Honigmann). Courtesy of Ariel Film 502
4.4 Director and leading man Mauritz Stiller sits centre stage,
holding leading lady Ester Julin in the theatre play
Bakom Kuopio/Behind Kuopio at Lilla Teatern, Stockholm, 1911.
Stiller adapted the play for film in 1912 as Den Tyranniske
Fästmannen/The Tyrannical Fiancée and cast Ester Julin to
repeat her role. It was her first contact with the film industry 553
5.1 The MPPDA Seal of Approval 730
ix
Acknowledgments
We have so many people to thank for the existence of this project; first of all the
long list of female screenwriters who have been active from the outset of the film
industry in 1896 to today (2015) across the globe. Their lives and works are inspi-
rational. We would also like to acknowledge those female screenwriters who may
not be mentioned in this volume, but who deserve to be part of this ambitious
endeavour. We would love to hear about these women, so that, in future editions,
they too can be included.
This volume represents the efforts of scholars from more than 50 nations –
freely giving their time and energy to research an array of sources that were often
difficult to access. We would like to thank the Margaret Herrick Library of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the British Film Institute Library,
Women Film Pioneers Project based at Columbia University, the Women and
British Silent Cinema website, and the multitude of researchers referenced in the
book. On a personal front, we would also like to thank those who led the two
of us into the field of film history and this project, especially Ted Larson, Rusty
Casselton, Scott Hudson, Cari Beauchamp, Kevin Brownlow, and the works of
Tom Stempel, Lizzie Francke and Marsha McCreadie.And of course, we wish to
thank the fine folks in the film, culture and media studies division at Palgrave
Macmillan, especially Felicity Plester, Chris Penfold and our editor, Anne Hudson.
x
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Jill Nelmes is reader in film at the University of East London, UK. She is the
author of The Screenwriter in British Cinema (2014), Writing the Screenplay (2012),
editor of An Introduction to Film Studies (1996) and Analysing the Screenplay (2010),
and founder of the Journal of Screenwriting. She studied screenwriting at UCLA,
has been a script reader in Hollywood, and has had a number of feature-length
screenplays in development.
Jule Selbo is a professor in the MFA in Screenwriting programme at California

State University, Fullerton, USA. She is an award-winning American screenwriter
with work in feature film, network and cable television, and animated series with
all the major Hollywood studios. She is co-editor of the Journal of Screenwriting.
She has written two books on screenwriting structure (2008, 2015) that include
information on the business of screenwriting, and her latest book is Film Genre for
Screenwriters (2014).
Contributors
Jean Ansolabehere is a script coordinator and bilingual editor working in Los

Angeles, USA.
Robert Arnett is an associate professor at Old Dominion University. He teaches

screenwriting, film history, and film theory. His writing has been published in the
Journal of Popular Film and Television, Film Criticism, and Quarterly Journal of Film
and Television.
Cari Beauchamp is the award-winning author of Without Lying Down: Frances

Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood, Joseph P Kennedy Presents, and
four other books of film history. She has also written and produced documenta-
ries, serves as the resident scholar of the Mary Pickford Foundation and is seen
frequently on Turner Classic Movies. She writes for Vanity Fair and other maga-
zines and is the only person to twice be named an Academy of Motion Pictures
Arts and Sciences Scholar.
Thomas van den Berg graduated from the University of Groningen, specializing
in the development of videographic film studies. He is currently expanding his
research on the topic, while also engaging in film scoring and videography.
Natalia Sanjuan Bornay is lecturer in academic skills for NESB students at

Flinders University, where she has previously taught Spanish language, culture
and cinema. She has published several journal articles on the topics of language
teaching and strategic learning as well as a chapter in the edited volume Film,
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
History and Memory, based on her PhD research. Her thesis explores issues of
memory, gender and identity in women-authored fiction films and documentaries
that reconstruct Spain’s contested past.
Carmen Sofia Brenes is professor of poetics and screenwriting at University of

los Andes in Chile. As well as academic director of the screenwriting Master’s
programme (MGDA), she is the director of a research project, funded by Fondecyt-
Chile, on the practical and professional current validity of Aristotle’s Poetics in
screenwriting. She is a member of the executive council of the Screenwriting
Research Network (SRN).
Lavinia Brydon is lecturer in film at the University of Kent. Her research interests
centre on the issues of space and place in film, with a particular focus on ques-
tions of mobility. She has published work that relates to these interests in the
Journal of British Cinema and Television, Dandelion, and Short Film Studies. She also
co-edits the book reviews section of NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies.
Erik Buikema graduated with honours from the international Master’s programme
in arts, culture and media studies at the University of Groningen, specializing in
cognitive film theory. He currently holds a position as junior lecturer in film stud-
ies at the University of Groningen, while also working as an intern at EYE Film
Institute Amsterdam.
Michael Burri teaches film and European studies in the writing programme at the
University of Pennsylvania. He studied film with Andries Deinum, co-founder of
Film Quarterly, and has written on film, history, and literature in German Studies
Review, New German Critique, The Austrian History Yearbook, World Film Locations:
Vienna, and in leading Czech and US dailies.
Cristina Colet is adjunct professor in the history of Italian cinema, the business
of film, and modern China at Saint John International University in Vinovo, Italy.
She also collaborates with Università degli studi di Torino and in particular with the
Studium Department (DAMS – Faculty of Film Studies). She is part of CRAD (Centro
Ricerche Attore e Divismo), a centre which studies actors and stardom. She is the
author of The Legend of Bruce Lee (Li Xiaolong Chuan Qi, 2008) and L’adattamento
per la serie televisiva e la questione dell’identità nazionale e culturale (2014).
Mariapia Comand has the teaching chair in Italian cinema and screenwriting
at the Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy. She directed the Master’s degree in
writing for cinema: screenwriting/criticism (2005–8). She has been a member of
the academic board for the FilmForum, International Film Studies Conference.
She has been director of the Screenwriting Research Centre Sergio Amidei
since 2004, an archive comprising original Italian screenplays. She is a mem-
ber of the academic board of the Bianco e Nero, Rome, and the academic board
of the series Italiana on cultural studies in Italian cinema for Il Castoro, Milan.
Her research has centred on the concept of writing, in both the theoretical sense
(I personaggi dei film, 2013) and the historiographical (Sulla carta: Storia e storie della
sceneggiatura in Italia, 2006), with a special interest in Italian cinema (Commedia
Notes on Contributors xiii
all’italiana, 2011), paying particular attention to cultural and social dynamics in

cinema that also involve the whole audiovisual industry.
Kelley Conway is associate professor in the department of communication arts

at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Chanteuse in the City
(2004) and Agnès Varda (2015). She has published essays on music in the films of
Jean Renoir, the installations of Godard and Varda, the American career of Brigitte
Bardot, the French musical, and sexually explicit films in contemporary French
cinema.
Michael Coutanche is an associate professor at the Ryerson RTA School of Media

in Toronto, Canada. He is co-author (with Charles Davis) of the 2012 Report
on Canadian Screenwriters, which sheds light on the employment statistics of
Canadian screenwriters.
Linda Craig, now retired, was senior lecturer in film and literature at the University
of East London, specializing in Latin America. Her monograph Marginality and
Gender in the Works of Juan Carlos Onetti, Manuel Puig and Luisa Valenzuela was
published in 2005, and she has published numerous articles on Latin American
and Spanish literature and film, the most recent of which is ‘Transnationalism in
Pedro Almodóvar’s All About my Mother’, Transnational Cinemas, 1 (2), 2010.
Debbie Danielpour writes screenplays, fiction, libretti and essays. She has taught
fiction and film writing for over twenty years – at San Francisco State University,
Emerson College, Harvard University Extension, and now at Boston University.
Her latest work includes the adaptation Halfway Somewhere Else and the libretto
for The Great Good Thing. Her historical feature Stand Accused is in development.
Professor Danielpour has an AB from Harvard College, an MA in film production
and screenwriting from San Francisco State University, and an MFA in fiction and
literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Robert Dassanowsky is professor of German and film and director of film studies
at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and works as an independent film
producer. His articles on film and culture have been published internationally and
his recent books include Austrian Cinema: A History (2005), New Austrian Cinema,
co-edited with Oliver C. Speck (2011), Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds:
A Manipulation of Metafilm (ed.) (2012), World Film Locations: Vienna (2012) and
Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope 1933–38
(2014).
Tanya Gail Davies is a creative agent who resides in Jamaica. She writes, pro-
duces, illustrates, designs, teaches and consults in the field of traditional, digital
and interactive media. She has received honorary mention in the Organization
of Black Screenwriters’ screenwriting competition and Jury of Peers competition
for her feature-length script, Maroon, and was an honorary recipient of a Princess
Grace Award for her undergraduate thesis. A current lecturer at the University of
Technology in Jamaica, she teaches TV production and scriptwriting. She is also
a founding member of the Writer’s Clinic (2009); the clinic offers consultations,
xiv Notes on Contributors
script analysis, screenwriting workshops/seminars, and basic legal/contract counsel

for aspiring or professional screenwriters.
Maria-Teresa DePaoli is an associate professor of Spanish at Kansas State

University. She received her doctorate from Purdue University in 2001. Her
research focuses on Latin American literature, film, media, and cultural stud-
ies. She has published several peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Letras
Femeninas, Graffylia, Hispanet, and Inter-Disciplinary Press, among other scholarly
publications. Her book The Mexican Screenplay: A Study of the Invisible Genre, and
Interviews with Women Screenwriters was published in 2013.
Olga Dimitrijević is a Yugoslavian playwright and dramaturg. Her film and

theatre reviews have been published in Vreme, Teatron, Yellow Cab, and Popboks.
She has participated in many international workshops, seminars and conferences
dealing with arts, theory and gender studies. Her play Boarding School was staged
at the Dadov Theatre in Belgrade. Other notable projects include a cabaret, Behind
the Mirror, depicting the lives of transgender sex workers in Serbia (2012), and the
book Between Us: Untold Stories of Gay and Lesbian Lives (2014), a co-edited research
project on the history of homosexuality in Serbia.
Kath Dooley is a filmmaker and academic in the department of film, television

and screen arts at Curtin University, Western Australia. She recently completed
a creative PhD exploring portrayals of the body in the work of contemporary
French directors Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat and Marina de Van at Flinders
University, South Australia. Kath has written a number of short and feature-length
screenplays, and has directed several award-winning short films and music videos.
Haseenah Ebrahim is head of the Division of Dramatic Arts (Theatre and

Performance) in the Wits School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand
(Wits) in Johannesburg. She received her PhD in film/media studies from
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Her research and teaching inter-
ests include children’s and youth-targeted films, Bollywood, youth and media
culture, consumption, fandom and anti-fandom. Her publications include several
journal articles on Caribbean cinema, on Bollywood in South Africa, and on Pixar
Animation Studio’s construction of little girls. She is currently editing a collection
of essays on cinema in post-1994 South Africa.
Johanna Forsman is a screenwriter and transmedia producer, educated at Broby

Grafiska, Sweden. Together with Kjell Sundstedt, she is the author of the screenplay
Pater Noster and the theatre play Fallet Sigrid Gillner, as well as the forthcoming book
Filmmanusets svenska historia/The History of the Swedish Screenplay, the research for
which is being supported by the Swedish Film Institute. She is also the originator
and co-creator of MyStoryTours, a transmedia universe of travelling and fiction,
launching in 2015.
Marcella Forster is a writer-director specializing in short films about parent-child

dynamics. Her short film Daddy’s Girl (2007) won Best UK Short at the British Film
Festival Los Angeles and was screened at festivals around the world, including
Notes on Contributors xv
Palm Springs International Short Film Festival and Rhode Island International
Film Festival. She has written for EastEnders (BBC1) and Crossroads (Carlton) and
has had several feature film screenplays optioned and developed. She is senior lec-
turer in script and screenwriting and programme leader of the MA in media, film
and television production at the Lincoln School of Film and Media, University of
Lincoln.
Nicolette Freeman is head of the School of Film and Television at the VCA,
University of Melbourne. She obtained BAs in filmmaking at Sydney’s University
of Technology and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, where she
specialized in cinematography. She has shot many acclaimed drama and docu-
mentary films, including Road to Nhill (1997), Eclipse of the Man-Made Sun (1991),
Leaping off the Edge (2000), and The Lifestyle Experts (2005). She also has a Master’s
in Research in film and television, during which she investigated poetic form in
the documentary genre.
Michelle Leigh Farrell earned her PhD in Spanish: literature and cultural stud-
ies from the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University in
Washington, DC. In her research she focuses on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean
and Brazilian national cultural productions in literature and film. As a trilingual
scholar, she teaches Spanish language, Portuguese language, Latin American film
and literature, and is active in fostering a dialogue in her research between Brazil
and Spanish-speaking Latin America.
Lisa French is deputy dean (media) and associate professor in cinema, media and
communication at RMIT University (Melbourne). She has published extensively
on Australian film.
Camila Malagolini Gama studied social communication at the University of São

Paulo, Brazil. She has worked in different areas of communication such as envi-
ronmental communication, organizing events, social media, and text production,
and studied screenwriting at California State University, Fullerton.
Andrew Kenneth Gay is an independent filmmaker and assistant professor of

convergent media at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon, where his
research is focused on non-industrial models of motion picture development and
production. As a writer-director-producer of shorts and features, he has received
multiple awards and over 50 official selections at festivals across the globe, and
his scholarship has been published in Frames Cinema Journal and the Journal of
Screenwriting. He has an MFA in entrepreneurial digital cinema from the University
of Central Florida.
Ronald Geerts teaches theatre and film courses at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel,
a screenwriting seminar at the Universiteit Antwerpen, and screenwriting history
and theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He originally trained as a photog-
rapher, cinematographer and screenwriter and became passionate about theatre
when studying literature at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He has also been a guest
lecturer at the drama and writing departments of RITS, School of Arts, Brussels. As
xvi Notes on Contributors
a member of the executive council of the Screenwriting Research Network (SRN),

he helps to promote the screenplay as an object of serious academic research.
Christine Gledhill was professor of cinema studies at Staffordshire University

and more recently visiting professor at New York University. She writes and edits
work on feminist film criticism, melodrama, and British cinema, including Home
is Where the Heart Is: Essays on Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (1987), Reframing
British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (2003) and Gender Meets
Genre (2012). With Julia Knight at University of Sunderland she established the
Women’s Film and Television History Network, co-organized the first Doing
Women’s Film History conference (2011) and has co-edited Doing Women’s Film
History: Reframing Cinemas Past and Present (2015).
Julia Sabina Gutiérrez earned her PhD at CEISME (Centre d’Etude sur les Images
et les Sons médiatiques), Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris III), granted by
the interdisciplinary Labex ICCA (Industries Culturelles et Création Artistique).
She has contributed a number of conference papers and articles about Spanish
Cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. She is member of the XIII CILEC (International
Congress of Spanish Literature) and also a member of the international coordinat-
ing board of the CILEC. Julia is a screenwriter and previously studied and taught
in Madrid, Spain.
Kristiina Hackel is a professor at California State University, Los Angeles; associ-

ate chair of the department of television, film and media studies; and director
of the MFA programme in television, film, and theatre. An active BEA and UFVA
member, she has contributed to three volumes of the World Film Locations series
by Intellect Press. An award-winning filmmaker, her last directing project, Speedie
Date, was nominated for a 2009 Webby Award.
Gert Jan Harkema is a PhD candidate at Stockholm University. His research

focuses on very early cinema and aesthetic experiences.
Mary Harrod is assistant professor in French studies at the University of Warwick.

She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on French and
global film and media. Her books include The Europeanness of European Cinema
(2014, co-edited with Mariana Liz and Alissa Timoshkina) and From France with
Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (2015).
Susan Hayward has written widely on French cinema. Her most recent book was
on French costume drama of the 1950s. She is the author, amongst other books,
of Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts.
Trinidad Herrera graduated from the Universidad de los Andes in Chile. She
studied the Screenwriting Master’s Programme (MGDA). Currently she works at
the School of Communication of Universidad de los Andes.
Stella Hockenhull is reader in film and television studies at the University of

Wolverhampton and co-director of the Research Centre for Film, Media, Discourse
and Culture. Her research interests include British cinema and landscape, British
Notes on Contributors xvii
women directors and animals in film. She has published widely in the field with
recent publications including a monograph titled Aesthetics and Neo-Romanticism
in Film: Landscapes in Contemporary British Cinema (2013). Her forthcoming pub-
lication with Palgrave Macmillan, titled British Women Directors, is due to appear
in early 2016.
Helen Jacey is a professional screenwriter and story consultant who has devel-
oped numerous projects for the UK and international film industry, and is author
of The Woman in the Story (2010), the first screenwriting guide on creating female
characters. She is senior lecturer in scriptwriting at Bournemouth University, UK.
Hester Joyce is a senior Lecturer in the Media: Screen + Sound programme at

La Trobe University, Melbourne, with professional credits in acting, script edit-
ing and consulting in film, theatre and television. Research interests include
scriptwriting research, policy and practice; biography and film memoir; national
cinema/indigenous cinema; and creative project assessment. A recent publication
written with Trisha Dunleavy is New Zealand Film & Television: Institution, Industry
and Cultural Change (2011). She is a co-editor of the Journal of Screenwriting.
Tonia Kazakopoulou has completed her PhD with a thesis titled Women’s Popular
Cinema in Greece: The Case of Olga Malea at the University of Reading, where she
also works as an associate lecturer in film and television studies. Tonia’s research
focuses on women’s cinema, particularly in small nations, contemporary Greek
and European cinema, and world cinema. She was a guest editor of a Special Issue
of Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies (Issue 2, September 2014). She is the co-
editor of Contemporary Greek Film Cultures from 1990 to the Present (forthcoming,
Peter Lang, 2016). toniakazakopoulou@gmail.com
Margit Keerdo-Dawson is a screenwriter and script consultant. She has worked in

the film industry since 1998, working both on film sets and in production offices.
She studied cinematography and directing at Tallinn University and screenwriting
at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. She wrote the seven-part TV drama
series The Class: Life After (2010), and the film and six-part drama series Zero Point
(2014–15). She teaches screenwriting, script editing and storytelling at the Baltic
Film and Media School in Tallinn, Estonia.
Lauri Kitsnik is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, having recently

completed his dissertation on the history and readerships of scriptwriting in
Japan. His interests include East Asian cinema, silent film, adaptation, and star
studies. He has previously taught courses on Japanese literature and cinema at
Tallinn University.
Alexis Krasilovsky is professor of screenwriting at the Department of Cinema

and Television Arts, California State University, Northridge. She wrote and
directed the global feature documentary Women Behind the Camera about the
challenges and visions of camerawomen in Hollywood, Bollywood and beyond.
She co-authored with Harriet Margolis the book Shooting Women: Behind the
Camera, Around the World (2015). Her film Blood was described in the LA Times
xviii Notes on Contributors
as ‘in its stream-of-consciousness way, more powerful than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver’. Krasilovsky is an active member of the Writers Guild of America.
Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson is chair of the School of Media Arts and Design and
professor of film at Minnesota State University, Moorhead. Her film work has
been presented at festivals in Asia, Europe, North America and Australia and been
screened at venues such as the Walker Art Center, the D. C. National Museum for
Women in the Arts, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, and the Croatian Film
Association Cinema. She was a Fulbright scholar to Iceland in 2005, a Bush Artist
Fellow in 2007, and was named 2014 Minnesota CASE Professor of the Year by
the Carnegie Foundation.
Michele Leigh is an assistant professor of film history at Southern Illinois University.

She received her PhD from the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of
Southern California. Her research interests include representations of women in
pre-Revolutionary cinema, female industrial practice in Russian cinema, gender
construction in adult animation, and issues of post-feminism in film and televi-
sion. She is currently the co-president of Women in Film History International, an
organization dedicated to the preservation of women’s film histories.
Warren Lewis teaches at California State University, Fullerton and participates

in the UCLA and University of San Diego extension programmes. His profes-
sional credits include screenplays for Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros, Fox, and
Disney.
Susan Liddy lectures in the department of media and communications, Mary

Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Her research interests include gender
issues in script development and the production process; female screenwriters and
a female ‘voice’, and the representation of aging femininity in screen narratives.
She is currently researching the work and experience of Irish female screenwriters
and the potential for affirmative action strategies in the Irish film industry. She
has produced a number of documentaries with Puddle Films and her feature-
length script was supported by the Irish Film Board.
Sam Lively is a writer and film critic. He holds a BA in radio-TV-film and an MFA
in screenwriting from California State University, Fullerton. His writings on film
and television can be found at the ScreentoScreed blog.
Victoria Lucas is a development and production executive at both major stu-

dios and independent film companies, and a screenwriting consultant. She is
proud of the strong women filmmakers in her family, including her mother, Joan
Winfield (actress and playwright), and her screenwriter/actress grandmother, Bess
Meredyth, one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, who taught her from infancy that story is the most important element
in any movie.
Bernadette Luciano is an associate professor at the University of Auckland. She

specializes in Italian cinema and cultural studies. She has published articles and
Notes on Contributors xix
book chapters on Italian cinema, film adaptation, Italian women’s historical

novels, women’s autobiographical writing and literary translation, and co-edited
an interdisciplinary book on cross-cultural encounters between New Zealand and
Europe. She is author of The Cinema of Silvio Soldini: Dream, Image, Voyage (2008)
and of the co-authored book (with Susanna Scarparo) Reframing Italy: New Trends
in Italian Women’s Filmmaking (2013).
Ervin Malakaj holds a BA and MA in German studies from the University

of Illinois at Chicago and is currently a PhD candidate in the department of
Germanic languages and literatures at Washington University in St Louis, where
he has completed the graduate certificate program in film and media studies. His
research, funded in part by a Fulbright Research Fellowship at the Eberhard Karls
Universität Tübingen, focuses on the literature of the long nineteenth century and
early film history.
Florence Martin is professor of French and francophone cinema and literature at

Goucher College and an editor of Studies in French Cinema. She is most recently
the author of Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema (2011), the co-editor
(with Patricia Caillé and Kamel Benouanès) of Les Cinémas du Maghreb (2012), and
co-editor (with Guy Austin) of French and Francophone Cinema and Contestation,
a special issue of Studies in French Cinema (Vol. 13, No. 3), 2013.
Monika Maslowska is a screenwriter and PhD candidate at Bangor University,

Wales, and a visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences,
University of Malta, where she teaches screenwriting. Her research interests fall
between the history and practice of screenwriting, film as art, and the concept of
hybrid documentaries. Monika is currently working on three audiovisual projects
as a writer.
Ouissal Mejri received her Master’s and doctorate from the University of Bologna.
Her thesis was titled ‘The Cinema in Egypt and in Tunisia from 1896 to the Sound
Period: the Foreign Influence’. Topics of current research include Arabic cinema
and its relationships with European cinema, and the role and contribution of
important women pioneers in the history of silent movies in Arabic cinema.
Monica Mitarcă graduated in journalism and mass communication studies at

the University of Bucharest and holds a PhD in communication studies (Media
and Pornography: Encoding and Decoding Practices). She is interested in the repre-
sentation of sexuality in the online media, Romanian cinema and social media/
Facebook. Since 1999 she has been an assistant professor at Media University, in
the journalism department, and, later on, film and television department, teach-
ing genres and formats in television. Since 2011 she has been a lecturer at the
Christian University ‘Dimitrie Cantemir’ in Bucharest, in the political studies
department.
Nathalie Morris is senior curator of special collections at the BFI National

Archive. She has published and curated exhibitions on various areas of British
cinema including women’s work and women as audiences, Ealing Studios, British
xx Notes on Contributors
Hitchcock, and film design and costume. Her current research interests include
food and drink on film, and Powell, Pressburger and their collaborators.
Bettina Moss is an associate professor in the school of professional studies at

National University in California, where she is programme lead and creator of the
MFA in professional screenwriting programme. She has worked on independent
and big-budget films, both in casting and as a production coordinator. For over
eight years she was managing story editor and served as a development executive
for HBO Films in Los Angeles. She is a sold screenwriter, nationally published
journalist, and received her MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University film
school in New York City. She is also a Fulbright senior specialist candidate.
Debashree Mukherjee is assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern,

South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She earned
her doctorate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University
(2015), with a dissertation that tracks cultures of work and material practice in the
late colonial Bombay film industry (1930s–40s). She is currently an editor with the
peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.
Claudia Myers wrote and directed the features Fort Bliss and Kettle of Fish. The
script of the former was an outgrowth of Claudia’s extensive work with veterans
and soldiers over the last several years. She has produced and directed two award-
winning documentaries and a multi-media, interactive feature for the US Army.
As a screenwriter, she has won several awards and is an alumna of the Hamptons
Screenwriters Lab. Claudia is a professor in the film and media arts division of
American University’s school of communication in Washington, DC.
Margot Nash holds an MFA from the College of Fine Arts UNSW, Australia. She
is a filmmaker and a senior lecturer in creative practices at the University of
Technology, Sydney, where she coordinates the postgraduate writing programme.
Her areas of research include the theory and practice of screenwriting, developing
subtext, film directing and Australian independent film history.
Annelies van Noortwijk is a senior lecturer in the department of arts, culture

and media studies, University of Groningen. Her research focuses on questions of
engagement, resistance and ethics. She is currently working on a project on life
representation in contemporary documentary.
Eva Novrup Redvall is assistant professor in the department of film and media
studies at the University of Copenhagen, where she is head of the Research Priority
Area on Creative Media Industries together with Ib Bondebjerg. She holds a PhD
in screenwriting as a creative process and has published a number of articles on
Nordic film and television in books and journals. She is part of the editorial board
for the Journal of Screenwriting. Her latest book is Writing and Producing Television
Drama in Denmark: From The Kingdom to The Killing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Díóg O’Connell is lecturer in film and media studies at the Institute of Art,
Design and Technology, Ireland. She is the author of New Irish Storytellers:
Notes on Contributors xxi
Narrative Strategies in Film (2010) and co-editor of Documentary in a Changing State:

Ireland since the 1990s (2012). She was co-organizer of the ‘Irish Television Crime
Drama Symposium’ at the National Film School, IADT, in 2014. She has written
extensively on Irish television drama and Irish cinema for books, journals and
magazines.
Jennifer O’Connell is an MA student in the department of arts, culture and media

studies at the University of Groningen, specializing in film festival policy and
documentary film theory. She has programmed for several Dutch festivals and is
currently researching the possibility of applying cognitive film theory to docu-
mentary film for her Master’s thesis.
Riikka Pennanen has an MA in film studies from the University of Westminster

in London. Based in Helsinki, she is a freelance film researcher at the National
Audiovisual Institute and writes about film at Elonet.fi and on her blog 21stcen-
turyflapper.com. Riikka’s interests include silent and pre-Code cinema, female
filmmakers and the representation of gender and sexuality.
Mark Poole is an award-winning writer and director of both drama and docu-
mentary. In 2008 he was awarded an Australian Writers Guild AWGIE award for
screenwriting, and was the chair of the AWG in Victoria for five years from 2007
to 2012. He is an occasional lecturer at Monash and RMIT Universities.
Rianne Pras is an MA student in the department of arts, culture and media stud-
ies at the University of Groningen. She is currently finishing her MA thesis on
how emotions evoked by identification, empathy and sympathy with fictional
characters relate to the experience of narrative unreliability.
Megan Reilly, MFA, is a print and internet journalist and script supervisor.
Vincent Ros graduated from the international research Master’s programme in

literary and cultural studies at the University of Groningen with a thesis on nar-
rative complexity in film noir and contemporary cinema. His current research
focuses on the cognitive and hermeneutic dynamics of film interpretation.
Paolo Russo is senior lecturer in film studies at Oxford Brookes University. He is

on the editorial boards of the New Review of Film and Television Studies and Journal
of Italian Cinema and Media Studies; of the book series ‘Cinemaespanso’ (Bulzoni,
Rome) and ‘Mimesis’ (Milan); and is a member of ISO (Italian Studies at Oxford)
and of the Screenwriting Research Network. He currently researches and teaches
screenwriting, film narrative, film history and film genres. He is also a screen-
writer: he co-wrote Three Days of Anarchy (2006), premiered at Tokyo IFF and
at 30+ international festivals.
Filip Šára is an MA student of journalism at Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles

University, Prague. Since 2008 he has been working as a freelance editor at the
news server Novinky.cz. In recent years he has been the film reviewer and editor
at Kultura 21.cz, Filmweb.cz, and Obrazor.cz.
xxii Notes on Contributors
Johanna Seelbach currently attends the international Master’s programme in the

department of arts, culture and media, University of Groningen. Her specialism is
film studies and in her thesis she researches Dutch scriptwriters and their role in
the Dutch film system.
Juliane Scholz is a researcher and lecturer at the Cultural Sciences Institute,

University of Leipzig. She earned her doctoral degree in 2014 with a dissertation
on the history of screenwriters in the US and Germany. From 2010 until 2013 she
held a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. She was a
member of the international doctorate program, Graduate School Global and Area
Studies at the Research Academy Leipzig. Her research areas include modern, com-
parative, cultural and social history, migration and exile studies, film and media
history, and the history of professions and intellectual property.
Dorin Schumacher, an independent scholar, has been doing research on the

life and career of Helen Gardner for many years. Schumacher has presented talks
on Gardner, published papers and book chapters on her, and restored one of her
independent features, A Sister to Carmen (1913). Schumacher is currently writing
Gardner’s biography.
Felipe Pruneda Sentíes is a teaching fellow in film studies at Hendrix College and
a PhD candidate in critical and cultural studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is
completing his dissertation on the history of Mexican film criticism and theory, and
has published on subtitles and cinephilia in the inaugural issue of the International
Journal of Cinema. He is currently at work on a project on screenwriting and ethics.
Jamie Sherry is lecturer in screenwriting at Bangor University, secretary

of the Association of Adaptation Studies, and reviews editor for the Journal of
Screenwriting. He has published research on the theories and processes of adapta-
tion through screenwriting. He is also a practising screenwriter and script editor
for UK film and media production companies including Screen Yorkshire, Leeds
Bridge, and BBC Leeds, and is involved in writing and developing film scripts
for Leeds Children’s Film Festival, First Light Scheme, Berlinale Talent Campus,
and BBC Writers’ Room. He is currently completing the monograph The Adapted
Screenplay: Theory, Practice and Process (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Psychomania
(2015) with I. Q. Hunter.
Anne Slatton is an award-winning writer and director. She teaches video produc-
tion and film studies at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. A frequent
panelist on issues of diversity and women in film, scholarly works include chapters
on Sofia Coppola and Lorraine Hansberry.
Alison Smith is subject head of film studies at the University of Liverpool. She
has researched and published extensively on French cinema of the New Wave and
beyond, including a monograph on Agnès Varda (1998) and another on Jacques
Rivette, co-written with Douglas Morrey. She has also published on the career
path for women as cinematographers in France, as well as on the representation
and significance of language difference in European cinema.
Notes on Contributors xxiii
Michael Smith was awarded his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2013. His
research looked at the representation of women in early postwar Japanese cin-
ema, particularly focusing on how the key political and social issues of the period
affected their onscreen portrayal. In 2012, he curated a retrospective on the actress
and filmmaker Kinuyo Tanaka for Leeds International Film Festival.
David Sorfa is senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Edinburgh and
editor of the journal Film-Philosophy. He has published on Michael Haneke, Jan
Švankmajer, Czech cinema and a wide variety of other film-related subjects. He is
the co-editor of The Cinema of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia (2011).
Tom Stempel is professor emeritus of cinema at Los Angeles City College, where
he taught film history and screenwriting from 1971 to 2011. He is the author
of six books about film, five of them about screenwriting and screenwriters. He
currently writes the online column ‘Understanding Screenwriting’, which can be
found at www.slantmagazine.com/house.
Belkis Suárez Faillace is an assistant professor of Spanish at Mount Mercy

University. She holds a PhD in Latin American literature from the University of
Florida. Her research focuses on the representation of urban spaces through the
discourse of violence in contemporary Latin American literature and film. She has
organized and presented for panels at national and international conferences that
have brought together scholars from different countries to examine literature,
violence, and film. She has also presented on the topic of using film to teach
Spanish and culture.
Kjell Sundstedt has worked in the Swedish film industry since 1972, and written
more than 30 screenplays for film and television, as well as several theatre plays,
most notably Juloratoriet/The Christmas Oratio (1996), Elina – Som om jag inte fanns/
Elina – As If I Didn’t Exist (2002), and Den nya människan/The New Man (2007). He
is the author of Att skriva för film/To Write for Film (1999), which is used in many
film schools throughout Scandinavia, and translated into several languages, most
recently Kurdish. Together with Johanna Forsman, he is the author of the forth-
coming book Filmmanusets svenska historia/The History of the Swedish Screenplay,
the research for which is being supported by the Swedish Film Institute.
Raija Talvio is a doctoral candidate at Aalto University ELO Film School in Helsinki,
where she also teaches. The topic of her thesis is the history of screenwriting in
1930s Finland. Talvio is an award-winning screenwriter whose credits include the
feature films Little Sister (1999) and August Fools (2013), several hours of television
drama, and a stage play for the Finnish National Theatre. She has also worked as
a film editor. Her publications include articles in the Journal of Screenwriting.
Alice Němcová Tejkalová is director of the Institute of Communication Studies

and Journalism, Faculty of Social Science, Charles University, Prague. She is a prin-
cipal investigator of the Czech branch of the Worlds of Journalism study project
and a member of the Journalism Studies section of ECREA. Since 2000 she has
also been working as a freelance TV journalist. Books include The Other Athletes
xxiv Notes on Contributors
(2012). Articles include ‘The Undressed Newsroom: The Application of Visual

Ethnography in Media Research’ (2014), ‘Framing the National Indebtedness’
(2013) and ‘The Relationship between Journalism Studies and Media Professionals
in the Czech Republic’ (2011). She has also contributed book chapters titled
‘Foreign Correspondents in the Czech Republic’ (2015) and ‘Journalist Education
and Truth in the Digital Age (2014).
Bridget Tompkins holds a PhD from the University of Auckland. She is an inde-
pendent researcher and writer living in New Zealand and working in the field of
contemporary Italian literature and film. She is author of Calvino and the Pygmalion
Paradigm: Fashioning the Feminine in ‘I nostri antenati’ and ‘Gli amori difficili’ (2015).
Tatiana Tursunova-Tlatov graduated in screenwriting and cinema studies from

the Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK) in 1989. She has worked
as a journalist, script editor, paralegal and screenwriter and now heads the office
of international affairs at VGIK in Moscow. She represents VGIK worldwide and
travels as a visiting professor to universities such as the Beijing Film Academy –
Modern Creative Media College, Qingdao China.
Noah Tsika is assistant professor of media studies at Queens College, City

University of New York, where he teaches courses on African cinema, queer and
feminist theory, and media technologies. He is the author of the books Gods and
Monsters: A Queer Film Classic and Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West
Africa and the Diaspora. His research focuses on the political economy of media
stardom in sub-Saharan Africa, the global politics of access to queer and feminist
media platforms, and the roles of state institutions in shaping theories and practices
of documentary cinema.
Isabelle Vanderschelden is head of French in the department of languages, infor-

mation and communications at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research
focuses on contemporary French cinema and has written articles on popular film,
genres, subtitling and using film in language classes. She has published a critical
study of Amélie (2007), a series of essays on key films and directors titled Studying
French Cinema (2013), and has co-edited with Darren Waldron a volume on popu-
lar cinema, France at the Flicks (2007). She is currently co-authoring with Sarah
Leahy (University of Newcastle) a volume on the history of French screenwriters
from the 1930s to the present.
Stefanie Van de Peer is a teaching fellow in global cinema at the University of

Stirling in Scotland. She specializes in Arab and African women’s filmmaking,
the ethics of solidarity in spectatorship, and film festival studies. She has edited
two books: Art and Trauma in Africa (I. B. Tauris) and Film Festivals and the Middle
East (St Andrews) and curates Arab and African film programmes for festivals.
Koen Van Eynde has worked for more than five years at the Netherlands-Flemish
Institute in Cairo, teaching Arabic and doing research on Egyptian cinema and
gender representations. He has presented his work regularly at international
conferences, and is now working as an independent researcher. He has recently
Notes on Contributors xxv
finished his PhD at the University of Leuven in Belgium titled Men in the Picture:
The Representation of Men and Masculinities in Egyptian Cinema.
J. T. Velikovsky is a transmedia writer, and a doctoral candidate in communication:

film/transmedia at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. He is a graduate
of the University of Newcastle (screenwriting major), and of the Australian Film,
Television and Radio School (screenwriting postgraduate certificate). His transmedia
writing weblog can be found at http://on-writering.blogspot.com/.
Elena Von Kassel Siambani teaches MA English courses in theatre, film, litera-
ture and poetry, drama and film at the University of Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle,
as well as courses in English and American History at Cergy- Pontoise University.
She is the author of Humphrey Jennings, le poète du cinéma britannique (2009).
More recently she has published articles in The Documentary Film Book (ed. Brian
Winston, 2013) and the anthology British Cinema (ed. Robert Murphy, 2013).
Jeremy B. Warner is a scholar, film editor, and film producer and has been
integrating theoretical concepts with production for over ten years. His writings
and presentations include works on transmedia and the evolution of narrative
structure. He received his MFA from Temple University.
Anna Weinstein teaches screenwriting at Auburn University. She is a develop-

mental editor for Cengage Learning, and she has served as editor of the Truman
Pierce Institute’s peer-reviewed journal, The Professional Educator, since 2007. Her
Film International series ‘Diva Directors Across the Globe’ has featured interviews
with Oscar-winning directors such as Susanne Bier, Marleen Gorris, and Caroline
Link. She is currently writing a family comedy for Furthur Films.
Rosanne Welch teaches in the masters of screenwriting programme at California

State University, Fullerton and has multiple credits as a television writer/producer
in the United States. Her research interests include Doctor Who, The Monkees, and
marriage in the movies. Publications include Torchwood Declassified: Investigating
Mainstream Cult Television, Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology, and the Journal of
Screenwriting.
Paul Wells is director of the Animation Academy, Loughborough University, a

research group dedicated to cutting-edge engagement with animation and related
moving-image practices. He is also a screenwriter and director, having published
widely in animation and film studies, and written and directed numerous projects
for theatre, radio, television and film. Books include Understanding Animation,
Animation and America, The Fundamentals of Animation, and The Animated Bestiary:
Animals, Cartoons and Culture.
Steven Willemsen is a PhD candidate and junior lecturer in film theory at the
University of Groningen, researching cinematic narrative complexity from a cog-
nitive perspective. He is the co-author of a forthcoming monograph, provisionally
titled Impossible Puzzle Films, which addresses cognitively dissonant storytelling in
contemporary cinema.
xxvi Notes on Contributors
Carl Wilson is an associate lecturer in media at the Sheffield College. Writing on

a variety of media topics, his work has recently appeared in four volumes of the
Directory of World Cinema series (American Hollywood and American Independent),
and three volumes of the World Film Locations series (Vancouver, Toronto, and
Havana). Carl looks at UK Heritage film tourism in the forthcoming Fan
Phenomena: Jane Austen, has an essay on ‘Hollywood North, Canada’ forthcom-
ing in Mapping Cinematic Norths, and is currently developing the multi-media
digitization archive project at Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield.
Jaukje van Wonderen currently attends the international Master’s in arts, culture
and media at the University of Groningen, where she is a former coordinator of
the film archive and research laboratory.
Anubha Yadav teaches broadcast studies at the University of Delhi, India. Her
key research areas are screenwriting practices in Indian cinema and gender
in screenwriting practice. Her research work has appeared in the International
Screenwriting Journal. She has also presented papers at the Universities of Helsinki
and Copenhagen. At present she is working on compiling a book of interviews
with women screenwriters in Mumbai cinema. She also writes fiction. A short
story was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2013.
Brian Yecies is senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Wollongong,

Australia. He is author of Korea’s Occupied Cinemas, 1893–1948 (2011, with
Ae-Gyung Shim) and The Changing Face of Korean Cinema: Planet Hallyuwood,
1960–2015 (forthcoming, with Ae-Gyung Shim). His writes on transnational film
and digital media in Asia.
Foreword
Cari Beauchamp
Here, for the first time, the breadth and depth of the talent of female screenwrit-
ers is put front and centre. We see how women screenwriters from around the
globe have proven themselves in all genres, entertaining while revealing injus-
tices, hopes, ambitions, tragedies and possibilities – all from a unique, ‘female’
perspective.
The ripple effect of these writers’ lives and work may be impossible to quantify,
but it is difficult to overstate the impact their films have had from the very begin-
nings of the film industry. For instance, French filmmaker Alice Guy, who began
in directing in 1895, influenced the work of American Lois Weber who went on
to have protégées such as Frances Marion who became the highest-paid American
screenwriter – male or female – from 1915 through the mid 1930s. Marion’s work
in turn made an impression on female screenwriters in Russia such as Ayn Rand
and Zoia Barantsevich who were also influenced by German Thea von Harbou’s
Metropolis and other women writers from throughout the world including Japan,
Spain and the United Kingdom.
Half of all films written in America before 1925 were written by women, and
in the silent era, when there was no competition from radio or television, their
films were particularly revelatory. At a time when most people had been only a
few miles from their birthplace, they could enter their local cinema to witness
different lifestyles, cultures and ideas of freedom on the big screen.
The focus on female screenwriters also underscores how international film has
been from its very beginnings. Readers may know a lot about Hollywood and a
little about Bollywood, but here they will also learn about Nollywood, southern
Nigeria’s remarkable film industry, and women’s important role in it. We also see
how nuances in culture affect opportunities for female screenwriters in countries
such as Jamaica, Malta, Cuba, Mexico and Israel. With over 50 nations represented
here, there is so much new to discover and appreciate.
Excavating the history of women writers is a challenging calling – in part
because they often did not keep archives – either because they thought so little
of their own work or because they were so busy doing other things. Jule Selbo,
Jill Nelmes and their over 100 contributors should be commended for what they
have unearthed – it is a work of committed scholarship that is also a work of love.
Just like the women whose stories they spotlight, the editors’ perseverance,
passion and dedication elevate and illuminate the power and significance of film.
Please let this serve not as the last word, but as the beginning of the discussion of
the importance of hearing the female voice.
xxvii
Introduction
In this study of female screenwriters, from the first film scenarios produced in
1896 to the present day, we highlight the work of more than 300 writers from
over 50 nations. Each entry gives an overview of the history and background of
women screenwriters in that country, highlighting its most influential females in
individual entries.
The scope and range of the book is ambitious and there is no existing work
that gives such coverage of the subject. The guide is divided into six sections by
continent: Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and South America.
There are entries for the more frequently written about nations such as the US, the
UK, France and Australia, as well as countries like Malta, Romania, Korea, Poland,
South Africa and Switzerland where we have found a rich but rarely discussed
tradition of female screenwriting. Indeed the entries for individual countries show
how varied the experience of female screenwriters is – experiences that are very
dependent on historical, social and political factors. We have tried to include
entries on all the film-producing countries, although unfortunately it has not
been possible to do this where there is very little information available or where
we were unable to find a contributor. We hope that publication of the book will
encourage discussion of these omissions as well as promoting the subject further.
In subsequent editions, we hope to include information on more females who
have used their talents as screenwriters in the feature film industry.
Women screenwriters were at the forefront of the film industry in its earliest
days in many nations around the world. The sudden popularity of early film-
making created opportunities for women in key creative positions; early screen-
writers and filmmakers such as the Frenchwoman Alice Guy, Americans Gene
Gauntier and Lois Weber, Australian Lottie Lyell, and Fatma Begum in India were
writing, directing, producing and creating their own film companies.
In most countries the myriad opportunities for women in the film industry
changed after a relatively short period. By the coming of sound in 1928, it had
become evident how much money might be made in the industry. This meant
that corporate interests (dominated by males) began to dictate, more males were
drawn to the industry and the ranks of female screenwriters diminished. Even in
Sweden, a country with a strong tradition of female writers, women only wrote
1
2 Women Screenwriters
6.5 per cent of the 240 films made during the 1930s. In the UK, for instance, a
small number of talented women writers such as Muriel Box and Janet Green were
very successful in the 1940s and 1950s, but most women only wrote one or two
films. The decline of the studio system in the 1950s in Hollywood and parts of
Europe did little to help women writers and, as audiences fell, fewer films were
made. At the same time, television began to attract millions of viewers and some
female screenwriters moved their careers to the new medium, not only in the
United States but wherever television programmes were produced. In Sweden,
Astrid Lindgren adapted her very popular Pippi Longstocking children’s books for
film and television in a career that lasted 33 years.
More recently there are grounds for optimism; in countries such as Sweden,
the Netherlands and Denmark the gender balance is now almost even. In South
Africa, for example, television has provided a platform for women writers like
Sara Blecher (Zero Tolerance, 2011); she has gone on to make feature films and
documentaries. Indeed it is noticeable how many women now move from film
to television with ease. However, there are still nations that pose restrictions and
strong censorship; Iran levies severe constraints on women’s freedom, yet some
of its female writers and filmmakers, like Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Samira
Makhmalbaf, have received worldwide acclaim for their films. In the Soviet
Union, after World War II, countries like Estonia, Czechoslovakia and Romania
had strict censorship imposed on the content of screenplays. Greater freedom
following Stalin’s death in 1953 allowed women writers and directors to work,
and Perestroika, in 1985, ended state control of the studios. When Estonia gained
independence in 1991, it took some time for women screenwriters to gain a
foothold, but by the 2000s a new generation of women had emerged.
The late 20th and early 21st centuries brought a greater awareness of gender
inequity in the film industry, particularly regarding writing and directing. Many
countries are now trying to redress this imbalance and some have initiated quotas
to ensure there are more women film writers; in the Netherlands many of their
most successful films are written and directed by women. In Argentina, of 64 films
made in 2005, 13 were by women; however, the numbers have not remained this
high; in 2012, of 51 films produced, only five were by women. Unfortunately, for
every success, or partial success, there are other countries, such as Romania, where
very few scripts written by women are produced.
Despite difficulties along the way, a great many outstanding women screen-
writers from across the world have emerged in the last 110 years and there is rea-
son for celebration. Poland boasts award-winning screenwriters such as Agnieszka
Holland, Italy celebrates Suso Cecchi d’Amico and others, and China claims Li Yu
and Ann Hui among their talents. Women screenwriters in the Middle East are
exploring difficult narratives of identity and freedoms, and female filmmakers
in Africa are contributing stories that are shining lights on social and political
situations.
There is still a need to encourage the film industry in the majority of nations to
be more receptive to women writers and women’s stories. We hope this volume
will inform and inspire and point to the fact that women screenwriters have
Introduction 3
shown their creativity, capabilities and value from the beginning of cinema into
contemporary times.
We thank all the contributors who have been so diligent in their research and
helped to illuminate these women’s lives and work.
Enjoy!
Part I
Africa
Burkina Faso
Jule Selbo
Burkina Faso (formerly the Republic of Upper Volta and also referred to as Burkinabe or
simply as Burkina) is in West Africa. It is one of the most prolific feature-film-producing
countries in Africa and, in 1969, established the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de
la Télévision du Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the largest film festival in sub-Saharan
Africa, which takes place biennially in March and boasts more than half a million
attendants. FESPACO focuses on African film and filmmakers, and its focus is to
encourage and support the expansion of African cinema as a means of expression,
education and awareness-raising. Burkina also headquartered the Federation of
Panafrican Filmmakers (FEPACI) before it moved its operations to South Africa.
Directors such as Gaston Karbore, Idrissa Ouedraogo and Dani Kouyate hail
from Burkina. Traditionally, due to the cost of education in the country (roughly
$100 a year per child), most families have chosen to send only male children to
school; this caused the literacy rates for girls to be low. In recent years, however,
this policy seems to be changing.1
Fanta Régina Nacro (1962–), screenwriter and director, was born in the
landlocked Burkina Faso. She earned her first degree at the African Institute for
Cinematographic Studies (INAFEC – the only training venue in French-speaking
sub-Saharan Africa until it closed in 1986) in Burkina and then moved to Paris to
earn her Master’s degree in film studies at the Sorbonne. She wrote and directed
a short film, Un Certain Matin, in 1992 and continued making short films, choos-
ing to employ a humorous perspective on the traditions of her country and the
multiple obstacles that present themselves in relation to the modern world. In
1993 she founded her own production company, Les Films du Défi. Her film
Bintou (2001) won more than twenty prizes at international festivals, including
Cannes, Bermuda and FESPACO, for the best short film of 2001. It is the story of
the mother of three children (Bintou) who is beaten by her husband for using
housekeeping money to send her daughter to school. Her husband believes only
men should be educated. Determined to give her daughter more than she expe-
rienced, Bintou decides to earn her own money by growing millet sprouts. Her
husband continues to sabotage her efforts but Bintou does not give up. Bintou
was included in a collection of three short films called Mama Africa, hosted by
American actress and musician Queen Latifah. This collection includes works
7
by African female filmmakers such as Ingrid Sinclair (Zimbabwe), Raja Amari

(Tunisia), Bridget Pickering (Namibia), Ngozi Onwurah (Nigeria) and Zulfah
Otto-Sallies (South Africa).
Nacro penned and directed her first feature, Night Of Truth, in 2004; this was a
French/Burkinabe production. The genesis of the narrative idea, according to Nacro,
came as she read about the atrocities in the war in Yugoslavia in the early years of
2000 – specifically about women being raped and tortured. She was taken aback
and reflected on the dualistic nature of humankind – that human nature is both
good and bad. The question she examines is: what causes one or the other to
dominate? Night of Truth is set in a fictional West African country and explores the
relationship between two warring ethnic groups, the Nayak and the Bonandes. The
leader of the Bonandes calls for a reconciliation. Things begin to progress – until
the village idiot causes things to fall apart.
Sarah Bouyain was born in France in 1968. Her mother was French, her father
half French and half Burkinabe. She originally studied mathematics, but moved
on to study cinematography at the Louis Lumière School of Cinematography. She
began to concentrate on her African heritage and wrote the book Métisse façon;
its narrative focuses on children born to African women and French soldiers dur-
ing colonial times. She penned (co-writing with Frenchwoman Gaëlle Macé) and
directed the film Notre Étrangère/The Place in Between (2010), a film that explores
the life of a mixed-race young woman who leaves Paris to explore her familial
roots in Burkino Faso.
Note
1. ‘Education – Burkina Faso’, Nationsencyclopedia.com (2009).
Egypt
Koen Van Eynde
Pioneering women in the liberal period (1920s and 30s)
Ali Badrakhan, a prominent Egyptian ‘new wave’ director active from the 1970s
until the present day, is reported to have said that ‘Egyptian cinema was shouldered
by women, namely Aziza Amir, Fatma Rushdy and Assia (Dagher)’. It is perhaps not
a coincidence that Fatma Rushdy herself has referred to this statement in her mem-
oirs (quoted in Abdel Rahman 2002: 29), and the importance of the contributions of
these and other women – behind the camera – to an emerging national film culture
in Egypt cannot be denied. Nevertheless, the available studies about women’s con-
tributions often focus on their acting careers, and they are remembered in Arabic or
Egyptian film historiography in terms of their actual ‘visibility’ as actresses, rather
than as filmmakers who wrote, directed, acted in, composed the soundtracks of,
and sometimes designed the costumes and décor for, their own films.
Important to understanding these early films is the context in which they were
made, and in which the female pioneers of cinema – Aziza Amir, Bahiga Hafez,
Assia Dagher, Mary Queeny, Fatma Rushdy and Amina Mohamed – started working.
In early-twentieth-century Egypt, feminist movements were formed under the
guidance of middle- and upper-class women like Hoda Shaarawi. The first feminist
movements were mainly concerned with constructing women’s support networks.
Hoda Shaarawi was the first to politicize women’s demands (Badran 1996: 51), and
as the president of the Egyptian Feminist Union strove for women’s equal rights
in Egypt. Although in the 1923 constitution all citizens were considered equal,
a later electoral law did not give women the right to vote. Other female writers
and poets in the time of Hoda Shaarawi were publishing their work within the
context of this modernization and education of the nation in the late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries. An important feature of this modernist discourse
was the focus on male-female gender relations and a reinterpretation of Islamic
texts. These modernist discourses also reappeared in novels and articles by male
writers, like Qasim Amine and Taha Hussein (the latter was a vehement proponent
of equality between men and women and opposed polygamy).1
In this setting and shortly after (formal) independence from the British in 1922,
Aziza Amir (1901–52) produced her first film, Layla (1927, originally titled Nid̄ ʾ
9
All̄h/God’s Calling).2 Aziza Amir was an actress, director, producer and screenwriter,
one of the most important pioneers in the Egyptian film industry; she made the
first Egyptian feature-length narrative film and wrote at least seventeen scenarios.3
Talaat Harb Pasha, a banker and founder of the Studio Misr in 1935, congratulated
her for ‘accomplish[ing] what men could not’ (Darwish 1998: 11). However, some
critics found fault; her first film incorporated commercial ‘Hollywood-elements’
according to Abdel Rahman, referring to Rudolph Valentino’s 1926 performance
in the film The Son of the Sheikh.4 Abdel Rahman’s comments are not entirely sur-
prising, as Ifdal Elsaket notes that films about ‘peasants, Bedouins, or […] “ques-
tionable” traditions and cultural practices’ were often shunned by Egyptian critics
in the early days of cinema. They were worried that a ‘wrong’ image of Egypt
would be perpetuated rather than the proposed national image of progress and
modernity, i.e. images of modern cities and industrialization (Elsaket n.d.: 294).
Layla tells the story of the young Bedouin girl Layla who was raped by Salim
but initially saved by Sheikh Ahmed who promises to marry her to safeguard her
honour. A Brazilian tourist lures Ahmed away from Layla before they marry – and
when her pregnancy starts to show Layla is cast away from the village. Wandering
around, she is hit by a car driven by Ra’ouf Bey. He takes her in and will even-
tually take care of her child while Layla is destined to die.5 Later in 1933, Aziza
Amir wrote and directed the film Kaffari ‘An Khatɩ ʼatik/Atone for Your Sin about an
˙
Indian family moving to Egypt for medical treatment. Amir plays the daughter
of the Indian man who will fall in love with a young Egyptian man. Her brother,
however, has already betrothed her to a wealthy Egyptian, after which the girl
and her lover decide to run away. They eventually return, but a gruesome destiny
awaits her: she will commit suicide by poisoning herself.
Amir started writing scenarios in 1940 after the establishment of a flourishing
cinema industry in Egypt. Her 1940 film – in which she also plays the main char-
acter – Al-Warsha/The Workshop features her as the successful owner of a workshop
after the disappearance of her husband. When one of her new customers passes
by, he initially believes she is a man since she is dressed in a man’s overalls, doing
‘masculine’ work, resulting in the expected misunderstandings and ‘awkward’
situations. When he finds out the truth, he immediately falls in love with her.
The girls and women Amir wrote about (and often portrayed herself) were idealist
depictions of women. In Egyptian dialect they are usually described as ‘gadaʿa’,
meaning trustworthy and having integrity (El-Messiri 1978: 49). These are women
who would stand by their husbands and support them whenever necessary, but
also women who fight for their fair share against patriarchal oppression embodied
by one or more male relatives.
Furthermore, in films like Ibn al-Balad (1942)6, Amir also wrote about and por-
trayed the Egyptian ‘effendi’ class, the new educated middle class that had started
to become more and more prominent in Egyptian social life at the beginning of
the twentieth century.7 The more political film of 1949, Fat̄t Min Filistɩn/A Girl
˙
from Palestine, features a melodramatic love story between an Egyptian pilot and
a Palestinian girl whose home is used to store the weapons of the Resistance. The
film exposes a pan-Arabic theme through the love story between the Palestinian
Egypt 11
girl and Egyptian pilot, a theme that will continue to play a prominent role in
Egyptian cinema. Amir’s final screenwriting credit was in 1952 with ʼĀmint bi-All̄h/
I Believe in God (1952), a film where she received story credit and which was directed
by her husband, Mahmud Zu al-Fikar.
Another pioneer of Egyptian cinema was Bahiga Hafez (1901–83) who was a
student of music and an actress. There are various versions of the start of her career
in cinema; film critic Abdel Rahman claims that her family discontinued any con-
tact after her decision to work in the cinema industry (Abdel Rahman 2002: 46).
However, historian Mona Ghandour notes that Hafez’s start was rather coinciden-
tal, occurring after her picture was on the cover of a music magazine, and that
this was the actual reason for her family’s scorn (Ghandour 2005: 201). She wrote
the scenarios of at least two films, of which Layla Bint as∙-S∙ ah∙ r̄ ʾ/Layla Daughter of
the Desert (later changed to Layla al-Badawiyya/Layla the Bedouin, 1937 and 1944
respectively) is important. With a similar ‘oriental’ setting to Amir’s Layla, the
Bedouin girl Layla (played by Bahiga Hafez) is kidnapped and imprisoned in the
castle of the Persian king, Kusra.
The film caused a stir after the 1938 engagement of Egyptian Princess Fawzia
to the Persian Shah (they married in 1939; the union often referred to a political
union). The Persian Exterior Ministry pushed for the film’s censorship and with-
drawal from theatres, as well as from the Venice Film Festival in 1938; however, it
returned in cinemas seven years later.8 The subject of Bedouins was popular at the
beginning of the cinema in Egypt and attracted audiences, but it also resulted in
negative remarks from critics for various reasons, as mentioned earlier. In this film,
however, Layla is allowed to return to her family and fiancé, Buraq, as opposed to
Amir’s Layla who was (perhaps) destined to die.
A third screenwriter of the time is Amina Mohamed (1908–85); she was from
a lower-class rural background without any link to the art scene in Cairo. When
she moved, together with her niece, Amina Rizq,9 and their mothers, to Cairo,
they were locked in the house after their first theatrical performance (Ghandour
2005: 391). They persevered, however, and both became famous actresses; Amina
Mohamed was also a famous dancer. She was furthermore the director, producer,
screenwriter and editor of the film Tita Wong (1936), in which she also played the
main role. The film is set in Cairo, in one of the nightclubs that dotted the city in
the interwar period (1920s and 30s), catering to British soldiers and rich Egyptian
men. Tita Wong (played by Mohamed) was the daughter of poor Chinese immi-
grants in Cairo and she was forced to dance in one of those nightclubs. She is later
accused of murdering her uncle, while her lawyer tries to convince the judges of
her innocence, telling stories about Tita’s life through a series of flashbacks.
Similar to the other films of the era, Tita Wong portrays a magical and exotic
‘Orient’, and its featured lead character – the female ‘victim’ of circumstances – was
part of a common trope in the Egyptian film industry. The subjects of these films
have similar traits: a virtuous woman is seduced and surrenders herself to a man.
The men in these films – and this remains true for most Egyptian films up to the
present day – are either the brutal husband or relative and his antagonist, who is
often the good and soft-hearted male, full of noblesse and righteousness.10 This
meta-narrative is commonplace in Egyptian cinema, a modernist discourse on the

gender relations between men and women where the ‘old’ concept of male domina-
tion through patriarchal advantage (institutionally, through marriage and divorce,
but also on socio-cultural levels like freedom of movement and the right of edu-
cation) is discouraged and replaced by a ‘new’ concept of masculinity, a concept
that requires men to be an active part of the family and an ‘equal’ through ‘just
guidance’ to their wife and children.
The new pioneering female filmmakers of Egypt
After Egypt gained independence in 1952, and particularly after the establishment
of the public sector filmmaking industry in the early 1960s,11 women directors
were entirely absent.12 However, there was a woman screenwriter, Wafiya Khairy,
who adapted stories from novelists Naguib Mahfouz and Lotfy El Khouly for the
big screen. She adapted Mahfouz’s Cairo Modern and El Khouly’s Case 68; both
films were directed by Salah Abu Saif in 1966 and 1968 respectively. Only after
the bankruptcy of public sector filmmaking and with the start of a new wave in
Egyptian filmmaking in the early 1970s (Bouzid 1995: 244) did women screenwrit-
ers (and directors) start to become more prominent again, centring their storylines
on ‘women issues’. In 1975 Hosn Shah (?–2012) wrote the highly influential film
ʼUrɩ du H 13 14
∙ allan/I Want a Solution. The film’s plot is centred upon Doria, a middle-
aged upper-class woman who is seeking a divorce from her abusive and adulterous
husband. While Doria has always lived a life in luxury, far removed from the daily
misery and abuse that most lower-class women have to go through, she now comes
face to face with the daily reality of these women in the court. Her class, which for
most of her life has shielded her from the abuse of officials, is of no value in the
courtroom and in front of the law when seeking divorce. The melodramatic fea-
tures of the film and the usual plot developments in Egyptian melodramas allow
Doria to meet and fall in love with a soft-hearted, understanding man, in stark
opposition to her husband’s misogynist character.
Hosn Shah’s films are usually about women who are in one way or another
wronged by their husbands, and they address patriarchal personal status laws.
Nevertheless, her main characters refer to Islamic sources to argue for equal
rights for women.15 The film Ad∙ -D ∙ ̄iʿa/The Lost Woman (1986) is a story about
Zaynab; she supports her husband and family financially, and yet her husband
divorces her in her absence and marries someone else. The film ends dramati-
cally with the murder of the husband, mother-in-law, and his second wife by
Zaynab. Imraʾa Mutallaqa/A Divorced Woman (1987) also questions the husband’s
˙
privileges in marriage and divorce. The two women in the film empathize with
each other, however, against the will and authority of the husband. One of her
last films, Al-Gharq̄ na/Drowning (1993), explores the story of a Bedouin woman
whose bad luck in marriage is considered a curse by the other villagers. She is
then abused by the tribe’s elder, a partly paralysed charlatan pretending to have
‘special powers’; he convinces her to marry him to rid her of the spell. Ignorance,
fear and abuse lead to her murder at the end of the film. Although the Bedouin
Egypt 13
woman is murdered, the film primarily condemns male authority in the figure of
the paralysed elder.
In the 1980s and 90s, two female directors gained attention with their popular
films. The most famous and controversial is Inas Eldegheidi (1953–), who does
not shy away from controversial statements.16 In 1985 she co-wrote and directed
(the first female director since the 1940s) the controversial film ’Afwan ʾAyȳh̄
al-Q̄n̄n/Pardon, Law!. In it she criticizes the double standards in the law regard-
ing adultery and testimony. Interestingly, she applies Islamic law and sources to
criticize this old-fashioned law based on traditionalist interpretations of Islamic
jurisprudence and secular Western influences. However, Eldegheidi refuses to be
called a feminist and denies the existence of ‘woman cinema’ (Qasim 2010: 98).
Her other films, however, revolve around ‘women’s issues’, including forced mar-
riages, prostitution, polygamy, and matters relating to divorce. Her newest film,
As∙ -S∙ amt/Silence (2011), about a father who sexually abuses his daughter, was with-
held by the censors because it ‘tarnishes’ the image of the father figure in Egyptian
society. The censors demanded that the father be depicted as mentally unstable so
as not to be portrayed as representative of ‘normal’ Egyptian men.17
The other famous director and screenwriter is Nadia Hamza (1939–2012), who
did call herself a feminist filmmaker, contending that directors should stop depict-
ing women in the way society wanted them to be, instead presenting them as they
are, opposing the popular image of the morally superior heroines in many Egyptian
melodramas (Hillauer 2005: 86). She wrote several of her films while often working
together with other female screenwriters, including Inas Bakr, Mona Noor El Din
and Samira Mohsen for her other films. Many of the films feature female leads and
a few are autobiographical, usually with a heroine named after herself. Hamza’s
films can be read as empowering to women as they feature working women and
single mothers who have to go to great lengths to ensure their children’s upbring-
ing or assert their position in a male-dominated workplace.
Hamza’s film Bah∙ r al-ʾAwh̄m/Sea of Illusions (1984) is about women working
as prostitutes, while Nis̄ ʾ Khalf al-Qad∙ b̄n/Women Behind Bars (1986) talks about
a female prison guard whose daughter, Nadia, ends up under her supervision
after being caught on the set of a pornographic film. In one of her last films,
Imraʾa wa-Imraʾa/A Woman and a Woman (1996), Hamza’s main characters are two
women, one with an established career as an objectified actress in the cinema
industry, the other a lower-class woman aspiring to a brilliant future as an actress.
It is obvious from the start that the lower-class woman’s only hope is her looks,
since she otherwise lacks any acting skills. Women in Hamza’s films are thus not
‘exemplary’ virtuous creatures, but women who – driven by poverty or misery – are
forced to sell their bodies. Although not a ‘new’ plot in Egyptian films, Hamza’s
women are not destined to die at the end and are somehow redeemed for their
actions and choices in life.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a new, young and vibrant genera-
tion of filmmakers, screenwriters and artists appeared, not only within the com-
mercial cinema industry, but also outside of it as independent artists.18 New and
young screenwriters like Hala Khalil (also a director; 1967–), Maryam Na’oum
(1977–) and Wessam Soliman19 often cooperate in successful productions. Hala

Khalil and Wessam Soliman co-wrote the scenario for Ah∙ l̄ al-ʾAwq̄t/The Best of
Times (2004, directed by Hala Khalil), in which three women pick up their high-
school friendship during a road trip to Alexandria. Each one of them has a differ-
ent story to tell: one is married and expecting her third child, another is preparing
to get married, while the third is trying to find her roots by reliving her childhood
memories in her old neighbourhood and looking for the person sending her
letters. They are three different female characters and identities, while the men in
their lives play only a minor role.
Maryam Na’oum wrote the scenario for one of the most acclaimed films in Egypt –
a rare example of a film about which critics and the public actually agreed –
of the past decade, W̄h∙ id Sifr/One-Nil (2009).20 The film’s story takes place in
∙
one day – the day Egypt wins the African Cup of Nations. Of the different female
characters, the story that most inspired reactions in Egypt was that of the Coptic
woman, Nevine, trying to remarry after obtaining a divorce.21 Na’oum (a Coptic
Christian herself) stated in an interview with a leading Egyptian French-language
newspaper that she wanted to disarticulate a religious discourse from a social one,
something that religious conservatives continue to merge together.22 Although
her film scenarios are less explicitly activist, she continues to tell her stories from
a woman’s point of view. In the same way as the feminist director and screenwriter
Nadia Hamza, she contends that the ‘perfected’ image of Egyptian women in
popular media is no longer attainable or desirable, instead opting to show women
in more diverse roles, with their own flaws, merits and expectations.
While these women screenwriters’ films from the 1970s through the 1990s are
more politically ‘activist’ in terms of topics, though conformist in style, the last
decade has seen a development of films that talk about the ‘normal’ lives of aver-
age women, without the previously ubiquitous misery and abuse. The men in
these films are also no longer the common misogynist type, abusing women for
their profit and benefit. They are, rather, kind-hearted men, respecting women
for who they are. Furthermore, women’s lives are no longer defined by men; it is
rather the other way around. Apart from new depictions of gender relations, these
women’s films continue to provoke reactions for their blunt and ‘controversial’
tackling of social issues, but also for their different ways of storytelling.
Conclusion
Although women were not, for most of the Egyptian cinema industry’s history, a
majority or strong presence in terms of numbers, their presence as screenwriters was
and remains significant. Their films are part of a national discourse proclaimed
by Egypt’s governments but also espoused by subsequent feminist movements. As
historian Lila Abu-Lughod states, ‘feminists have tried to link the advancement
of women to national development and progress’ (Abu-Lughod 2005: 81), which
can also result in some ambiguity. For linking women’s causes to a paternal-
ist autocratic regime essentially does not create an environment in which they
are allowed to construct their own identities. Yet, the film industry has always
Egypt 15
demonstrated a certain inclination for subversion, often being blown back by the
censor – like Bahiga Hafez’s 1937/44 film Layla the Bedouin and Inas Eldegheidi’s
newest film The Silence from 2011. It shows that these films continue to provoke
and push the boundaries of such paternalist and autocratic institutions as the cen-
sorship committee and cannot simply be dismissed as commercial products with
little artistic or social merit.
The recent contributions of young and independent (female) filmmakers such as
Hala Lotfy, Nadia Kamel, Hanan Abdallah and Jehane Noujaim continue to offer
new ideas, styles and boundary-pushing films in the theatres, although the com-
mercial products, aimed at a male audience, of one major producer, El Sobky, occupy
a leading position in the current cinema industry. Nevertheless, the relatively small
number of women screenwriters makes their voices heard in the continuously male-
dominated industry, telling their stories from a woman’s point of view.
Notes
1. Hoda Elsadda claims that these men’s writings are furthermore instructive with regard
to what it means to be an Egyptian male, although a new masculine identity was hith-
erto not considered in studies about gender and nation building that primarily focused
on women and their relation to, or role in, the nation and nation building (Elsadda
2007: 34–5).
2. Amir initially hired Wedad Orfi as the film’s director, but because of problems between
Orfi and Amir, she later appointed Stéphane Rosti – an Austrian-Italian resident in Egypt –
and also contributed herself as director and script writer in the end (Hilmi 2013: 44–5).
3. Recently a copy was found of In the Country of Tutankhamun, directed and produced
by Victor Rosito, an Italian resident in Egypt, but arguably not an ‘Egyptian’ director.
Therefore Egyptian national film historians and critics usually consider Amir’s 1927 film
as the first Egyptian feature film, being produced and co-directed by Egyptians.
4. See Abdel Rahman 2002: 24. Valentino’s persona was well known to Egyptian moviegoers.
In the 1960 comedy Isha’it Hobb/Agony of Love by Fatin Abdel Wahhab (based on John
Emerson and Anita Loos’s play The Whole Town’s Talking), he is referred to as the ideal
seducer, an admirable type to imitate in order to approach and win the hearts of women.
5. Sami Hilmi (2013) argues that, because of the last-minute removal of director Wedad
Orfi, Aziza Amir and Stéphane Rosti changed the ending to a more positive one in which
Layla is allowed to live, and this on the advice of a select public to whom the film had
been screened prior to its release (Hilmi 2013: 46). Still, Mahmoud Qasim writes in his
encyclopedia of Egyptian films that Layla passes away at the end of the film (Qasim
2008: 13).
6. ‘Ibn al-balad’ is Egyptian for ‘son of the country’, meaning a typical local male who
espouses several characteristics like integrity and courage (El-Messiri 1978).
7. Although the educated ‘effendi’ middle classes around the 1900s indicated social status,
by the 1930s it was associated more commonly with an impoverished urban middle-
class male.
8. See: http://www.elcinema.com/person/pr1086762/ (accessed 5 January 2014), http://
www.bibalex.org/alexcinema/actors/Bahiga_Hafez.html (accessed 21 February 2014) and
Abdel Rahman 2002: 46–7.
9. Amina Rizq (1910–2003) is particularly famous for her role as a mother in post-inde-
pendence (1952) films, melodramas that Abu-Lughod called ‘development realism’ (Abu-
Lughod 2005: 81). The realism Abu-Lughod refers to is strongly informed by ‘educating’
principles, an attempt to ‘educate’ the nation through films and television while adher-
ing to some form of realism in the depiction of social topics.
10. Arab women novelists also often portray the father figure as an all-powerful male,
revered and feared either as a king or god-like creature (Abudi 2011: 36).
11. President Abdel Nasser nationalized businesses and factories in the late 1950s and
60s, including Bank Misr and Studio Misr, as well as other studios. They remained
nationalized until the 1970s when President Sadat started to reprivatize business.
12. Film critic Samir Farid describes women’s absence as directors following the establish-
ment of Studio Misr in 1935 as the ‘masculinization of the industry’, after the more
adventurous early period of filmmaking in Egypt. He likens women’s work in the
background, like screenwriting, designing costumes and doing make-up, to working
in the ‘kitchen of the film industry’. Source: http://www.almasryalyoum.com/News/
Details/383860 (accessed 22 February 2014).
13. The film was an important popular reference for changing the divorce law in 1979,
commonly referred to as ‘Jihan’s Law’, after the name of former president Anwar Sadat’s
wife, Jihan al-Sadat. She pushed for the changes in the law, giving women, among other
things, the right to divorce if the husband were to marry a second wife without their
consent.
14. The role of Doria is played by the tear-jerking melodrama actress Fatin Hamama, nick-
named ‘First Lady of the Screen’. Yet, Fatin Hamama has always condemned women’s
oppression and abuse in her films.
15. Egyptian feminists have often referred to Islamic sources to argue for a critical analy-
sis of ‘normative’ gender relations. Margot Badran states that ‘contemporary feminist
women insist on retaining their space within Islam’ (1996: 11).
16. Eldegheidi, for example, called for the legalization of prostitution in Egypt, causing
angry reactions from religious figures in the country. Source: http://www.alarabiya.net/
articles/2008/08/06/54386.html (accessed 2 December 2013).
17. Source: http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/3093 (accessed 2 December 2013).
18. Although the actual ‘independent’ film scene in Egypt is rather small – and begs the
question ‘independent of what?’ – the recent developments in digital filmmaking have
made this medium available and affordable for a wider range of people and budgets.
Furthermore, with more inconspicuous digital material, filmmakers are now able to film
in the streets without special licenses to do so, as for example Ibrahim Battout did for
his film Ain Shams of 2009.
19. Wessam Soliman also wrote the scenario for three of her husband Mohamed Khan’s
films, Ban̄t Wust∙ al-Balad/Downtown Girls (2005), Fɩ Shaʼʼit Mas∙ r al-Gidɩda/In a Heliopolis
Flat (2007) and Fat̄t al-Mas∙ na’/Factory Girl (2013).
20. Although not number one at the box office of 2009, the film was relatively well received
thanks to its cast of popular actors like Ilham Shahin and Khalid Abu al-Naga. The film
also won the ‘Naguib Sawiris’ prize for best scenario in 2008 (Sami 2009).
21. Divorce is regulated by personal status laws based on the citizen’s religious affiliation.
Coptic divorce laws are strict considering the Church does not allow it except for very
specific reasons. When the divorcees receive the legal right to divorce from a state court,
this does not mean that the Church will accept their remarriage. Divorce is also regu-
lated by Church laws for Copts, and Islamic Shari’a for Muslims (which is more lenient
towards divorce and marriage).
22. Source: http://hebdo.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentPrint/9/44/3604.aspx (accessed 9
January 2014).
References
Abdel Rahman, Magdy. 2002. R̄ʼid̄t al-Sɩnima fɩ Mis∙ r (Pioneering Women of the Cinema in
Egypt). Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Abudi, Dalya. 2011. Mothers and Daughters in Arab Women’s Literature: The Family Frontier.
Leiden: Brill.
Egypt 17
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2005. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Badran, Margot. 1996. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt.
New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Bouzid, Nouri (trans. Shereen El Ezabi). 1995. ‘New Realism in Arab Cinema: The Defeat-
conscious Cinema’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 15: 242–50.
Darwish, Mustafa. 1998. Dream Makers on the Nile: A Portrait of Egyptian Cinema. Cairo: American
University in Cairo Press.
El-Messiri, Sawsan. 1978. Ibn al-Balad: A Concept of Egyptian Identity. Leiden: Brill.
Elsadda, Hoda. 2007. ‘Imagining the “New Man”: Gender and Nation in Arab Literary
Narratives in the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 3 (2):
31–55.
Elsaket, Ifdal. n.d. Projecting Egypt: The Cinema and the Making of Colonial Modernity: 1896–1952.
Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney.
Ghandour, Mona. 2005. Sultanat al-Shasha: Ra’idat al-Sinima al-Misriyya (Divas of the Screen:
Pioneering Women of Egyptian Cinema). Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books.
Hillauer, Rebecca. 2005. Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers. Cairo: American University
in Cairo Press.
Hilmi, Sami. 2013. Bid̄ȳt as-Sɩnim̄ al-Mis∙ riyya (The Beginnings of Egyptian Cinema). Cairo:
General Authority for Cultural Palaces.
Qasim, Mahmud. 2008. Dalɩl al-Afl̄m f ɩ al-Qarn al-’Ishrɩn f ɩ Mis∙r wa al-’Ālim al-’Arabɩ
(Encyclopaedia of Films of the 20th Century in Egypt and the Arab World). Cairo: Madbouli
Publishers.
Qasim, Mahmud. 2010. Maws̄’at al-Mukhrigɩn f ɩ al-’Ālim al-’Arabɩ (Encyclopaedia of Directors
in the Arab World). Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli.
Samir, Farid. 2014. ‘Min Aziza Amir ila Jihan Nujaim’ (‘From Aziza Amir to Jihan Nujaim’).
Available at: http://www.almasryalyoum.com/News/Details/383860 (accessed 22 February
2014).
Ghana
Jule Selbo
The film industry in Ghana cites 1948 as the year of its birth, when Gold Coast
Film Unit and African Pictures Limited were formed. Government support has
been sporadic. One of Ghana’s best-known filmmakers is Kwah Ansah whose
films include African Pot (1980) and Heritage Africa (1988). In 1999 the Ghana
Film Awards were held. Veronica Quaashie, a graduate of Ghana’s National Film
and Television Institute (NAFTI), won several awards for her films A Stab in the
Dark and Ripples. NAFTI was formed in 1978 by the government of Ghana to
foster professional and academic excellence in film and television, and students
from other African nations such as Zambia, Ethiopia, Mali, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and
Cameroon have taken advantage of its courses and facilities. Ghana boasts many
successful female documentary filmmakers such as Yaba Badoe (1955–), known
for Witches of Gambaga (2010), and Rungano Nyoni, who made Mwansa the Great
(2011). Zina Saro-Wiwa has written and directed documentaries (This is My Africa
[2008/9]) as well as short films commenting on the woman’s role in Africa such
as Phyllis (2010) and The Deliverance of Comfort (2010).
Akosua Cyamama Busia
Akosua Cyamama Busia (1966–) was born in Ghana, the daughter of an ex-prime
minister of the Republic of Ghana. She was educated at Oxford University in
England. She is an actress, novelist, songwriter, director and screenwriter. Feature-
film screenwriting credits include a co-writing credit on the adaptation of Toni
Morrison’s novel Beloved (1998), directed by Jonathan Demme. This credit was
hard-won and somewhat acrimonious; the Writers Guild of America (WGA) initi-
ated arbitration proceedings after Busia, who had written the first draft for Harpo
Productions (Oprah Winfrey’s production company), was not credited on the
screenplay along with Richard LaGravenese and Adam Brooks and felt strongly
that important story elements of her draft had been used in the production. In an
article in 1998 in Entertainment Weekly, Daniel Fierman describes Busia as ‘intelli-
gent and slightly eccentric in a New Age-y way’ and goes on to write, ‘[I]n a move
that borders on professional suicide, that’s precisely what virtually unknown
scribe Akosua Busia has done – allowing a nasty behind-the-scenes battle over
18
Ghana 19
credit, race and screenwriting cred to spill out into the press’ (Fierman 1998). In
the article, Busia stated that, through her sister, a professor at Rutgers University
in New Brunswick, she had read a galley version of Beloved, the story of the effects
of African-American slavery on a family, prior to its publication. Busia, who por-
trayed Nettie in Steven Spielberg’s production of The Color Purple, recommended
the book to actor Danny Glover and actress/producer/superstar Oprah Winfrey.
Winfrey’s Harpo Productions immediately purchased the film rights and hired a
writer to do a treatment for a screenplay. That initial treatment was unsuccessful
and Busia, on spec, wrote her own 28-page proposal. Winfrey’s production com-
pany declined her proposal ‘citing Busia’s inexperience’ (Fierman 1998). Three
years later, Busia sent her first screenplay, Seasons, to Harpo Productions under
the pseudonym Mia Oshwegus – ‘an anagram for “guess who I am”’ (Fierman
1998). The script received a positive response and Busia was hired to do a draft of
Beloved. She handed in the script in November 1991 and, although it was long,
it, too, received a positive response. The project, however, did not find a home
at a studio and Harpo Productions brought on screenwriter Richard LaGravenese
(The Fisher King [1991], A Little Princess [1995], Bridges of Madison County [1995],
The Horse Whisperer [1998]) to do a draft of the screenplay. LaGravenese claims he
was never given Busia’s draft to read. When LaGravenese left the project to direct
a film, Adam Brooks (French Kiss [1995], Wimbledon [2004]) was hired to work
with director Jonathan Demme on the production script. The film, with Disney
committed to distribution, was made. The WGA then issued tentative credits that
did not include Busia. When Busia read the production script, she decided to pur-
sue credit arbitration. She wrote a letter to Winfrey and to Harpo’s development
executive: ‘I felt as though two white men were picking over my bones. I find
it sadly ironic that here we have a story such as Beloved, where a black woman,
Sethe … fights for freedom for herself and her children from their white oppres-
sors. And then here I am, a black female writer from Africa, writing the script,
and then being left in a position to battle alone against Disney, who recommends
that two white male writers who were paid, literally, millions of dollars more …
credited instead of me!’ (Fierman 1998).
Busia, finally, did receive first credit on the film. Harpo Productions states that the
other writers on the project were never given access to Busia’s script. All of those
involved in the production note that in adapting a story from a novel, the pos-
sibilities of similarities in narrative choices may often occur. Regarding the WGA’s
decision, LaGravenese noted, ‘The guidelines favor the original screenwriter for
an original production. The problem is that those same guidelines are used when
it comes to adaptation – which doesn’t make sense, because the original writer for
an adaptation is the novelist. There needs to be some aesthetic judgment. Where
does craft come into it – the ability to translate a book to a screenplay that can
be made into a film? Just taking a book and putting it into screenplay format ...
allows anyone, even a nonprofessional, to get credit’ (Fierman 1998).
Taking on Harpo Productions (Oprah Winfrey being a popular and power-
ful force in the entertainment community) as well as Disney and accusing fel-
low screenwriters of taking credit for another’s work may have affected Busia’s
subsequent screenwriting career. Beloved remains her only screenwriting credit.

She directed Ascension Day in 2007 and continues in her acting career.
Leila Afua Djansi
Leila Afua Djansi (1981–) attended primary and secondary schools in Ghana. She
was interested in studying medicine and criminology. She met Ghanaian actor
Sam Odi and he suggested she write a script for him. Her first feature-film credit
as a screenwriter came at age 19, with the film Babina (2000). She worked with
Socrates Safo’s Movie Africa Productions as a writer and line producer and wrote
The Sisterhood, a film exploring gay and lesbian rights. She wrote and produced her
next film, Legacy of Love, made under the auspices of the Gama Film Company.
She then entered the Ghanaian National Film and Television School but trans-
ferred to the Savannah College of Art and Design in the United States and even-
tually established Turning Point Pictures in Los Angeles, a production company
focused on narratives exploring social issues. She often uses voiceover narration in
her screenplays. Other credits include the short films Subcity (2007), Ebbe (2012)
and Grass Between My Lips (2009), a film exploring female circumcision and forced
early marriages set in a village in northern Ghana. Feature credits include I Sing
of a Well (2010), a fictional story of an African prince who must marry to win
the throne from his father. His choice of bride and his political choices cause his
kingdom to be overrun with slave traders. Ties that Bind (2011) is a film focusing
on three dissimilar women who share a similar tragedy – the loss of a child. They
come together to renovate a run-down clinic in an African village. Other credits
include Sinking Sands (2011), And Then There Was You (2013) and Where Children
Play (2015). Djansi has been nominated for and received awards from the African
Movie Academy Awards, WorldFest Platinum Awards, and the BAFTA/LA Pan
African Film Festival Choice Awards.
References
Fierman, Daniel. 1998. ‘Brawl Over Beloved’, Entertainment Weekly, 16 October 16.
Kenya
Jeremy B. Warner
Before the independence of Kenya from the United Kingdom in 1963, foreign
production companies used Kenya as a backdrop for films shot in the country.
After becoming a republic, film production started to rise, however, the quality
of production values were extremely low. After the year 2000, the number of
films created in the country rose due to the advent of digital video and acces-
sible technology. Film scholar Wanjiku Beatrice Mukora, born and raised in
Kenya, writes:
Women filmmakers have been very significant in forming the foundations

of national cinema in Kenya. They comprise more than fifty percent of film-
makers with men occupying positions of cameramen, members of the lighting
crew and other assistant or behind-the-scene posts. (Mukora 1999: 43)
Kenyan documentary producer and media advisor Dommie Yambo-Odotte

states that it hard for men to enter cinema production due to financing – but
even more difficult for the women (Ouédraogo 1995: 20). Most of the films
produced by Kenyan women have been documentary and educational films.
The Kenyan Film Commission was established in 2005 and promotes Kenyan
filmmakers, as well as offering incentives to foreign production entities to shoot
in the country.
One of the few women producing narrative films in the country is director,
producer and screenwriter Wanuri Kahiu (1981–). Originally she pursued a degree
in management, but went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts from the University
of California, Los Angeles. Returning to Kenya, she directed the dystopian sci-fi
film From a Whisper (2009), which swept the 2009 Africa Movie Awards by win-
ning Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Film (Seibel 2010). Kahiu is executive
director of Dada Productions, which she started with Anna Marano. The company
works with local authorities to focus more on domestic production and to bridge
the gap in production values of Kenyan cinema.
In 2014, UDADA (translates to ‘sisterhood’), East Africa’s first female film
festival, was held in Nairobi, Kenya and other continents. Two of the festival
organizers are screenwriter/directors Wanjuri Kinyanjul and Matrid Nyagah
21
Munene, whose goals include bringing to the foreground the work of Kenya’s
female filmmakers.
References
Mukora, Wanjiku Beatrice. 1999. ‘Disrupting Binary Divisions’: Representation of Identity
in Saikati and Battle of the Sacred Tree. Source: digitool.library.mcgill.ca (accessed 2 October
2014).
Ouédraogo, Noufou. 1995. ‘Dommie Yambo Odotte’, African Screen, 12 (2): 20–1.
Seibel, Brendan. 2010. ‘Kenyan Sci-Fi Short Pumzi Hits Sundance with Dystopia’, WIRED,
22 January, n.p.
Morocco
Stefanie Van de Peer
Moroccan film production was slow to develop into a credible film industry,
but today it is the most productive and successful industry in the Maghreb, and
arguably in the Arab world. As Jamal Bahmad, expert on Moroccan cinema, has
argued, it is mainly since the 1990s, and the relaxation of censorship laws as well
as a renewed investment in the arts, that a new energy has been injected into
Moroccan cinema. The importance of the urban, young, creative generations is
visible in this trend: the Moroccan Cinema Centre (CCM, based in Rabat) invited
a large number of new, young Moroccan filmmakers to attend the Tangiers
National Film Festival in 1997. This landmark event gave Moroccan cinema a new
impetus: New Urban Cinema (NUC) was born (Bahmad 2013).
From independence in 1956 until the death of King Hassan II in 1999, Morocco
suffered from a dictatorial, oppressive regime that inhibited the creative powers
of its filmmaking constituency through censorship, paranoia and a lack of invest-
ment. Filmmakers and other cultural producers had exiled themselves from the
oppressive regime and what are now known as the Years of Lead (Les Années de
Plomb). They were, however, encouraged to return to Morocco towards the end
of the weak king’s rule, and by the more lenient new monarch, Hassan II’s son,
King Mohamed VI.
During the eighties and nineties, young filmmakers who had been taught
abroad returned to Morocco. They not only brought with them their expertise and
training on the technical side of filmmaking; they also had the urge to develop
new concepts of social and political realism. One consequence was that film-
makers who had stayed in Morocco learned a lot during this time, and the gap
between the filmmaker and his or her audience diminished.
Farida Benlyazid (b. 1948) was one of the first women in Morocco to get
involved in filmmaking. She studied Literature at Paris 8 and received her
degree in 1974. She continued her studies and received a degree in filmmaking
at ESEC, École supérieure d’études cinématographiques (Higher Institute of
Cinema Studies), in 1976. After that, she worked in film production in France,
but returned to Morocco in 1980. In 1978 she produced the Moroccan classic
Une brèche dans le mur (A Hole in the Wall, Jillali Ferhati) and wrote the script for
Poupées de roseaux (Reed Dolls, Ferhati, 1980). Her own filmography includes both
23
fiction and documentaries, with titles such as Une porte sur le ciel (A Door to the Sky,
1989), Ruses de femmes (Women’s Wiles, 1999) and Casablanca, Casablanca (2002).
She has also written creatively: a novel, Une Journée dans la vie de Hajja Leithmath
(1990), as well as for publications such as Le Liberal and Autrement. This article
will look briefly at the historical circumstances within which women make films
in Morocco, in order to focus on the pioneering woman of Moroccan filmmaking –
scriptwriter, producer and director Farida Benlyazid. I focus on her three most
popular films as a writer, and draw parallels between her autobiography and
her scripts, in order to come to a better understanding of her circumstances and
inspiration. Benlyazid is well respected for her attempts to provide her viewers
with a better understanding of Morocco’s rapidly changing society and the young
demographic of the country, without being patronizing. Instead, she looks for
indigenous strengths in solutions that are familiar to her audience and takes into
consideration local as well as international trends and issues.
Farida Benlyazid had returned to Morocco in 1980 and was the first woman to
make her own film in 1988: Une porte sur le ciel (A Door to the Sky). She was one of
the returnees who had been educated in France, and contributed significantly to
the rapprochement between filmmakers and their audiences through her script-
writing skills and her collaborations with some of the most successful filmmakers
in Morocco today.
Before writing, producing, directing and editing her own first feature film,
Door to the Sky, in 1988, Benlyazid had been working as a scriptwriter on a few
other successful movies, such as Poupées de roseaux (Reed Dolls, Ferhati, 1981). She
had produced Jillali Ferhati’s first film, A Hole in the Wall (1978), and married
him. They continued their collaboration on Reed Dolls, which is still regarded
as the most successful, popular Moroccan film of all time, together with A la
recherche du mari de ma femme (Looking for My Wife’s Husband, 1995) by Mohamed
Abderrahman Tazi. Both films were scripted by Benlyazid.
Reed Dolls (Ferhati, 1981) is set in the 1950s in Tangier. It was then still terri-
tory run by Spanish, British and French administration as a free international
zone, and a beloved city of the Beat poets. As an area in rapid transition towards
independence, the city seems the fitting background for a complex story about
a woman’s limitations and opportunities. Aisha, the main protagonist, is spurred
on by the dawn of Independence to seek her own independence from her family.
Her husband has recently died and traditional mores prescribe that she marries
her brother-in-law. However, inspired by female solidarity and optimism about
the future for women in an independent nation, her mother-in-law supports her
in her decision to explore her new identity outside of the private sphere stereo-
typically occupied by women. Aisha stumbles across con artists and men with
dishonest intentions, and in her innocence and inexperience falls pregnant out
of wedlock. In a downward spiral of rejection by her secret lover, an attempted,
but unsuccessful, abortion, and abuse by her in-laws, she ends up in court, as this
pregnancy is considered illegal in traditional Morocco. She loses her family, her
three children from her previous marriage and her home. She becomes home-
less and is taken for a prostitute by men on several occasions. This leads her to a
Morocco 25
Zawiya – a spiritual home for ‘fallen’ women, where all that is left for her is seclu-
sion and prayer. The film has no straightforward ending: it rather presents Aisha
with options, as she is still very young and full of potential. However, in a way, the
narrative seems to have come full circle, as she is once again in the private sphere,
with only women as company. The women may come to embody a replacement
family, and the Zawiya a new home, but they do both constitute a new sense of
limitations and boundaries.
If Reed Dolls depicted the complexities of the opportunities and limitations for
women in Moroccan society, Door to the Sky (Benlyazid, 1988) goes even further
in its searching, questioning attitude. The existentialist nature of the film speaks
to global audiences and it has won several awards for its script. A film full of
contradictions, it explores the return of a young Moroccan woman who has lived
in France to Morocco as her father lies on his deathbed. The protagonist, Nadia,
is one of three siblings: she has a sister in Morocco and a brother in France. Her
brother stands to inherit most of their father’s possessions, mainly a house in the
old village. Not wanting anything to do with his Moroccan heritage, the brother
wants to sell the house, and after a lot of obstacles – the main one being that
she is a woman and under Islamic jurisprudence cannot inherit the house from
her father – Nadia manages to buy the house. From being modern and western-
ized, she transforms into a Moroccan woman and even becomes more and more
interested in religion. Once she has managed to obtain the full ownership of the
house, she reconnects with the childhood memory of an old spiritual Sufi leader
in the village. On her spiritual quest, he is her guide. Her increasing spirituality
attracts others to her, as she becomes a healer and her home turns into a Zawiya,
where women are granted protection from abusive husbands or fathers. As such,
her increasingly strong association with her traditional roots does not necessitate
a rejection of her modern womanhood. Once again, as in Reed Dolls, Benlyazid
does not pit one attitude against the other. Instead, she subtly weaves a story
that encapsulates the simultaneity of tradition and modernity, and searches for
concepts and issues in tradition that can help to work through the problems of
modernity. This is a film that explores contradictions and, through spiritual-
ity and female solidarity, seeks to come to a mutual understanding between its
characters and its audiences. The issue the audiences in Morocco had with the
film was the question of whether it deals with a personal journey or whether it
problematizes Islam. The fact that she combines her role as spiritual leader with
having a young lover who is not religious, and the fact that, at the end of the film,
Nadia leaves the Zawiya as she starts to perceive the community of women as too
oppressive points to the fact that tradition and modernity can and must co-exist
for Benlyazid. And thus it is in particular this personalized Islamic spirituality
that draws the most criticism. Although it is her mysticism that enables Nadia to
rediscover and reassemble a moderate Islam, this humanism is not shared by her
co-habitants, and so it is ultimately what drives her out of her own home.
Looking for My Wife’s Husband (Tazi, 1995) was Morocco’s first internationally
successful comedy, a box-office success in Europe and the Arab world at large. It
was one of the films that became associated with the renaissance of Moroccan
cinema in the nineties, and Tazi, its director, is still highly respected as a producer
and director, and for his outspoken opinions in the press regarding the lack of
distribution of Moroccan films abroad. Benlyazid wrote the script, and with this
film turned a corner from her usually more serious stance on women’s issues.
Nevertheless, this film, in its own humorous way, also addresses the unfair divi-
sion of space and labour between men and women. Al Hajj, the male protago-
nist, has three wives: Lalla Hobby, Lalla Rabea, and the very young and beautiful
Houda. The film divides its time between the man and his three wives very well,
and portrays the home as a safe and warm space for the women and the children.
But Al Hajj is an aging man, who loses his temper quite easily with his children
and with Houda, who is herself still very young and naïve. It becomes apparent
that Al Hajj has – in his furies – divorced Houda twice before, but always taken
her back immediately. When one day she opens the door to a delivery man and
shows a bit too much flesh, he sees it and explodes in another rage, divorcing her
instantly, not realizing that a third divorce is much more complex than the first
two. In traditional society in Morocco it means that the divorce is final, unless
the woman marries another man and consummates the marriage, after which
they can divorce and remarry their former husband. This complex Islamic law
borders on the ridiculous, and Benlyazid and Tazi derive much slapstick humour
from it. The second half of the film shows Al Hajj gradually going mad in his
quest to win Houda back – a futile one, as her new husband has fled the country
and Al Hajj cannot obtain a visa to go abroad. This subtly hints at the fact that
women are in fact trade goods for their husbands and do not usually get the
opportunity to decide for themselves who they will marry or divorce. This last
issue is important for Benlyazid, as it is an autobiographical element that reflects
what she experienced, first-hand, when she wanted to divorce her first husband.
Houda remains a fairly naïve girl throughout the first half of the film, but later on
tries to (unsuccessfully) balance her energetic nature and embrace of modernity
with the traditional pleasures and comforts of Al Hajj’s house and his wealth.
When she first experiences her freedom after the third divorce, she spends a lot of
time with her friend, who is a widow and lives alone and in Houda’s eyes can do
what she wants. But after Houda has her hair cut short and changes her outfit to
that of a modern woman, men start to harass her more openly. This means that
she becomes torn between the safety of a traditional shelter and the protection
of a rich husband on the one hand, and her freedom and the imposing nature
of presumptuous young men on the other. Her widowed friend shows her that
freedom is not so wonderful after all, and Houda starts to mourn the community
feeling she enjoyed in Al Hajj’s house. In this 1995 film, then, it is once again a
matter for the young woman to find and maintain a balance in order to manage
the clash between tradition and modernity. Benlyazid shows a complex Morocco
that is developing too quickly and failing to adequately stay in touch with its
traditional mores.
Until recently, it was very difficult to be a woman and a filmmaker in Morocco.
The difficulties of being a woman in a society struggling to merge tradition and
modernity are not only very well reflected in her scripts, but she also experienced
Morocco 27
it first-hand. Her films are arguably all, to a certain extent, inspired by her own
autobiography. Of course, the complexity of being a woman in a society that is
still dealing with its traumatic past (the Years of Lead) and struggling to define
its national identity, and the precarious condition of women in Islam, are all
central to the portrayal of women in Moroccan cinema in general. Reed Dolls
was an opportunity for Benlyazid to explore her own oppression and come up
with creative ways of dealing with it afterwards. Door to the Sky was even more
an exploration of her own experiences as a student returning to Morocco from
France and the transformational journey she went through on the way. The inter-
subjective relationships that exist between women often offer an alternative route
to self-acceptance in a society that is steeped in tradition and ritual, and in which
women are often neglected or disadvantaged. Door to the Sky is still regarded as the
first feature film made by a Moroccan woman, and Benlyazid is revered for its sub-
tleties and complexities. Looking for My Wife’s Husband, while it was such a huge
box-office success in and outside of Morocco, also had to tackle serious criticisms.
As the comedy centred on Al Hajj and his antics, critics ignored Houda’s complex
characterization. She is the figure in the film who best chimes with the growing
younger population of Morocco’s outlook on life. She is the representative char-
acter of the new Morocco that came through in the cinema of the nineties and
really put Moroccan cinema on the map. Her struggle to seek the freedom that
is appropriate to her society, and her attempt to balance the safety of tradition
with the promises of modernity, is what most likely spoke, and still speaks, to the
young demographic of the new Moroccan audience.
Benlyazid married her first husband and had two children before deciding to
go to France for her higher education. When she started to make plans to travel
to France, her husband had her passport seized and forbade her to travel. The
confrontation with these false restrictions put on women in the name of religion
as well as the numerous attempts to overcome seemingly never-ending obstacles
pervade most of her scenarios. Her major obstacle was the fact that women at that
time were not legally allowed to request divorce from their husbands. She had to
overcome numerous obstacles herself, which undoubtedly inspired her treatment
of the complexities of Moroccan life and the resourcefulness of women. She never
disparages Islam; on the contrary, she uses it time and again as an alternative to
the way men exercise their authority over women in the name of Islam.
Benlyazid is a politically and socially engaged writer, for whom it was vital to
show the reality of oppressions and contradictions. She is especially interested in
women’s suffering and the inequality between men and women under the guise
of Islam. In sparse dialogues and aesthetically moving images, she synthesizes the
extremes of a society under pressure. Benlyazid first and foremost aims to estab-
lish a cultural identity of union, illustrating that women can be both modern
and traditional at the same time. She still makes films, among others CasaNayda
(2007), a film about the subculture of rap and hip hop music in Casablanca, and
Frontieras (2013), screened at the 14th National Film Festival in Tangiers. Other
notable early female filmmakers include documentary filmmaker Simone Bitton;
she was born in Morocco but moved to Israel when she was a young teenager.
Moroccan screenwriters since the 2000s include Yasmine Kassari, Narjiss Nejjar,
Laila Marrakchi and Fatima Jebli Ouzzani. These are all strong women who write
their own scripts and often also produce their own films, winning prizes at inter-
national film festivals.
The credits of Yasmine Kassari (b. 1972) include short films, documentaries, and
the feature L’Enfant endormi/The Sleeping Child (2004), winner of the Great Amber
Award for Best Film and the Jury Prize for Best Film at the Bos’art Film Festival.
The narrative focuses on a woman living in the Atlas Mountains who realizes she
is pregnant after her husband has left her and decides to ‘sleep the fetus’, which
relates to a white magic tradition in the Maghribian rural world. The film was shot
using the Berber and Moroccan Arabic languages.
Laila Marrakchi (b. 1971) was born in Casablanca, Morocco. Her films include
Marock (2005), made in collaboration with a French production company. It con-
tains ‘multicultural themes in its narrative’ (Khannous 2013) and focuses on a
romance between a Muslim girl and a Jewish boy.
Marrakchi’s other screenwriting and directing credits include Rock the Casbah
(2013). The narrative focuses on three very different women who come together
to mourn the death of a rich entrepreneur. The film was screened in a special
presentation category at the Toronto Film Festival.
The films of Narjiss Nejjar (b. 1971) include Les yeux secs/Dry Eyes/Cry No More
(2003). Film reviewer Touria Khannous noted at the 27th Cairo Film Festival that
‘outside the competition there is a programme entitled Arab Cinema Now. This
features excellent films that we would have loved to include in the competition,
mainly from the Maghreb. The highlights include two Moroccan debuts: Fawzi
Ben Saaidi’s A Thousand Months and Narjiss Al-Nejjar’s Dry Eyes’ (Khannous 2013).
Nejjar’s other screenwriting credits include Wake Up Morocco (2006), using the
game of soccer/football as the setting for her narrative, Terminus des anges (2010),
and L’amante du rif (2011), based on a novel by Noufissa Sbai. The film focuses on
a young Moroccan woman who feels trapped by her life but is ‘untamable’. The
story moves back and forth in her lifetime as she grows up and eventually lands
in prison.
This winning streak of Moroccan women filmmakers promises to continue with
such impressive scriptwriters and filmmakers as Leila Kilani and Rahma Benhamai
El-Madani.
References
Bahmad, Jamal. 2013. ‘Casablanca Unbound: New Urban Cinema in Morocco’, Francosphères,
2 (1): 73–85.
Khannous, Touria. 2013. ‘Cinema: Films Made by Women Screenwriters, Directors, and
Producers: Morocco’, in Suad Joseph (ed.) Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.
Brill Online. Available at: http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-
women-and-islamic-cultures/cinema-films-made-by-women-screenwriters-directors-and-
producers-morocco-EWICCOM_0647 (accessed 14 April 2015).
Namibia
Jule Selbo
Namibia gained independence from South Africa in 1990. Before this period, lit-
tle cinematic data is available. John Marshall, an American working and living in
Namibia, released documentaries about the country between 1958 and 1980. In
2000, the Namibian government passed the ‘Namibian Film Commission Act’ to
attract filmmakers to use the country as a film location and to promote native
filmmakers such as Cecil Moller and Bridget Pickering.
Pickering, born to a Namibian father and a South African mother, attended
Syracuse University in the United States and worked for Universal Pictures before
returning to Namibia to work in its film industry. She created the Namibian con-
tribution to Africa Dreaming (1997) and was chosen in 1999 as one of six women
filmmakers in Africa to direct a short story for the Mama Africa series (2001), a
compilation of short films sponsored by American Queen Latifah. Pickering’s short
film in the Mama Africa series is titled ‘Uno’s World’. The character Uno (Sophie
David) is a sexually inexperienced young woman. She gets involved with a wom-
anizer, Kaura (Muhindua Kaura), and the affair leads to an unplanned pregnancy.
When Kaura refuses to take responsibility, Uno leaves the baby in the care of her
mother and embarks on a dangerous journey to track Kaura down. Pickering is
also credited as a producer on the Academy Award-nominated Hotel Rwanda (2004,
distributed by the North American film companies United Artists and Lions Gate.).
Oshosheni Hiveluah, in 2012, co-wrote (with Onesmus Shimwafeni) and
directed the film 100 Bucks. The film asks: what would someone risk if they had a
deep desire for money? The narrative follows a hundred-dollar Namibian note as
it makes its way through the various social strata of Namibian communities – and
gives insights into the lives of very different characters.
Tjiraa (2012), a short film by Krischka Stoffels, focuses on Vezuva, a modern
ovaHerero woman who completes her studies abroad and returns home. She is told
she is to follow the customs of her community and marry her cousin. However,
she is in love with another. Vezuva’s pleas for understanding and compassion are
not rewarded and she realizes that she is left without a choice – and can only hope
that, in the future, her sister will be allowed more freedom.
The documentary form, to date, is most popular among the Namibian
filmmakers.
29
Nigeria
Noah Tsika
The standard story of Nollywood, southern Nigeria’s remarkably prolific film

industry (currently the world’s second largest in terms of annual output), is thus:
with the average production budget settling somewhere between nine and ten
million naira (or between 45,000 and 50,000 US dollars), the shooting of an
individual feature often occurs on a necessarily tight (typically two-week) sched-
ule, occasioning planned as well as unexpected shortcuts, compromises, and
combined professional functions. Directors often double as performers; costume
designers can be recruited from the ranks of production assistants; and sets –
more often than not – are Lagos living rooms belonging to relatively well-heeled
patrons of the arts who may or may not be acting out of a self-centred desire to
see their properties employed as on-screen backdrops (Haynes 2007: 138).
In Nollywood filmmaking, one of the most common of all ‘double duties’ is
that which combines writing and acting, although it is important to point out
that both vocations, as developed within exclusively Nollywood contexts, have
received little critical attention in West Africa and the diaspora. That is partly
because, as Jonathan Haynes points out in his essay ‘Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in
Nollywood Films’, Nollywood’s on-screen performers are sometimes ‘improvising
from a scenario, rather than reciting lines from a script’, thus evoking a doubly
amateur approach to film production (Haynes 2007: 139). Haynes does not take
into account that numerous Nollywood narrative traditions are founded on some
rather famous stories-turned-screenplays, despite the relatively high rates of illit-
eracy in southern Nigeria. Nollywood filmmaker Charles Novia describes adapting
the world-famous folk tale of Cinderella into a screenplay in 2003, suggesting that
he ‘had always wanted to produce the Cinderella story from an African perspec-
tive’, and that constructing the script thus became a matter of ‘preserving’ the
familiar plot (particularly as grounded in the Grimm Brothers version) while
imbuing it with southern Nigerian cultures and colloquialisms (Novia 2012: 69).
Novia’s subsequent screenwriting ventures have followed a similar process of
preservation-plus-supplementation, whether in updating his ‘old’ stories or in
adapting some iconic Hollywood films.
The persistence of a limiting popular and even scholarly focus on Nollywood
as a ‘rebel’, rootless enterprise, which posits the habitual absence of a traditional
30
Nigeria 31
screenplay from the industry’s creative ventures, is consistent with the way that
African screenwriting is devalued or ignored more generally (Cham 2009: vii).
Such negative appraisals have, in some cases, aligned an alleged lack of writing
talent with the absence of any sort of practised performance method (such as
the celebrated Stanislavskian approach) as the Nollywood style. Critics point to
the Nollywood style as a function of affective self-indulgence or simply – from a
distinctly racist, white Western perspective – as a consequence of African ‘embodi-
ment’, the opposite of the kind of European ‘rationality’ that would allow an actor
or actress to invent from a well-informed position. In other words, there have
been several insidious discursive consequences of the failure to pay close critical
attention to the very viable vocation of Nollywood screenwriting. Assuming that
there are no bona fide Nollywood screenwriters is a prejudiced view of the indus-
try. In reality, some of Nollywood’s top performers are the screenwriters respon-
sible for their own star vehicles, and their twinned, increasingly formally trained
talents powerfully give the lie to notions of Nollywood as an ignorant and utterly
‘authorless’ enterprise.
In one of the most famous scenes in Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder’s 1950 gothic
about the so-called ‘golden age’ of Hollywood cinema, screenwriter Joe Gillis
(William Holden) complains, ‘Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and
writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along.’ A similar
assumption has haunted Nollywood reception, as Uche Jombo’s character argues
in the Jombo-scripted film Last Celebrity, about a top television talk-show host
who also laments the equally limited public perception of her as ‘perfect’. As in
Sunset Boulevard, the fans’ inability – or adamant unwillingness – to understand
that a script is the source of a film’s narrative serves only to demean or dismiss
individual filmmakers. In Last Celebrity, a drama that allegorizes Nollywood by
depicting Nigerian television production, and thus suggests the long-standing
synergy between the two media industries; Jombo’s talk-show host undergoes a
crisis of confidence as a result of persistent rumours suggesting that she is ‘on the
way out’ professionally. Compounding matters is a patent lack of popular recogni-
tion for her self-transformative achievements, which include her daily ‘elevation’
from ordinary woman to extraordinary, Oprah-style personality. Jombo isn’t sim-
ply playing an ‘unappreciated’ media star in Last Celebrity; she is also, as the film’s
scriptwriter, tethered to a profession that is perhaps similarly misunderstood in
today’s Nigeria. The question is presented: who is going to honour the contribu-
tions of Jombo the scriptwriter when the widely held assumption is that, as an
actress, she is simply, unthinkingly, ‘playing herself’, with no written source from
which she is creating a character?
Jombo has addressed such concerns on multiple occasions; in a 2012 inter-
view with Exquisite magazine, she noted that, if Nollywood fans often forget or
refuse to believe that she is in fact ‘a real writer’, then they also forget or refuse
to believe that she is extremely well educated – that she holds degrees from the
University of Calabar as well as from the Federal University of Technology, Minna
( Jombo 2012). That these degrees are in the fields of mathematics and computer
science further surprises people, she says – a surprise derived from misogynistic
assumptions, from the notion that no woman can balance a chequebook, pro-
gramme a computer, or compose a film screenplay. Jombo chose to satirize such
gender bias in her screenplay (co-written with Emem Isong) for the film Nollywood
Hustlers (2011). Directed by Moses Inwang, Nollywood Hustlers features Jombo as a
seemingly clueless waitress who becomes caught up in the comedic intrigue of two
men who want to make it big in Nollywood but who have no skills whatsoever –
creative or otherwise. They must rely on Jombo’s character, Scholarstica, to
support their dreams (both fiscally and by carrying out a series of harebrained
schemes). While a not-uncommon name in Nigeria, ‘Scholarstica’ points, in this
English-language production, to the ‘true book smarts’ of the character – to the
young woman’s ‘inner scholar’, which remains invisible to the affable yet deeply
misogynistic men who surround her.
The matter of language has long been a contentious one in Nollywood studies,
inspiring debates about whether Yorùbá films – which tend to maintain practi-
cal as well as symbolic ties to the traditions of the Yorùbá theatre – merit the
Nollywood label, or whether that label should be limited to English-language
films. At the local level, the industry itself does embrace so-called ‘language
films’ – those produced using African dialects, or whose English is pidgin rather
than standard (McCain 2012). iROKOtv.com, one of the most popular sources of
licensed, streaming Nollywood films, even contains a Yorùbá section that show-
cases the overlap (in terms of personnel) between Yorùbá- and English-language
productions. One such crossover star is Funke Akindele, whose screenplay for
2008’s Jénífà is a Yorùbá-language account of the complicated journey of a vil-
lage girl (played by Akindele) to attend the University of Lagos, where she is met
with – and resists – the pressure to rely exclusively on English when socializing
with her fellow students. While she remains proud of her Yorùbá heritage, Jénífà
(who has adopted her new name, no longer using her very traditional birth name,
Suliat) eventually joins a group of high-priced campus prostitutes. Having por-
trayed the lead role in the long-running Nigerian television series I Need to Know
(1997–2003), a production of the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) that
focused on adolescent sexual and reproductive health education, and having con-
tributed scripts to that series in collaboration with UNPF officials, Akindele has
long been recognized as one of the faces of HIV/AIDS advocacy in Nigeria. With
Jénífà, she crafted a screenplay that culminates in its titular character’s contract-
ing HIV from one of her johns, and then deciding to devote her life to educating
young Nigerian girls about their sexual health.
Jénífà is ultimately as didactic and melodramatic as any Nollywood feature, but
prior to its eleventh-hour capitulations to pedagogy, it is a fine platform for Funke
Akindele’s comedic talents. Shaping the screenplay to suit those talents, Akindele
wrote a series of dialogue-free sequences in which her character strides through
a variety of university locations, confidently wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes (high-
heeled leather boots and billowing, childlike pyjama pants) while proudly taking
stock of a series of campus landmarks – landmarks that Akindele, as a graduate of
the University of Lagos (where much of the film is set and where some of it was
shot), must know extremely well. Cannily creating opportunities for her physical
Nigeria 33
humour to shine, Akindele also wrote extensive monologues – as well as a few

terse insults: ‘O da abo., Gbogbo Big Girl!’ she shouts at one of her antagonists,
which roughly translates as ‘Goodbye, Total Big Girl’ (the ‘total’ referring to the
self-assigned designation of the campus prostitutes, known locally as ‘big girls’).
As written by Akindele, Jénífà is a record of some of the Lagosian campus trends
and associated sayings that were reaching their peak in 2008; it offers a glimpse of
a hyper-specific urban Nigerian subculture that, in less complex Nollywood con-
texts, has often been reduced to caricature. Here, that subculture retains its histori-
cally specific colloquialisms; they are peppered throughout Akindele’s screenplay,
suggesting that, as a kind of time-capsule film, Jénífà is bound to age well.
In many ways, Jénífà represents a transitional film in Nollywood’s well-known
campus genre. Before Akindele’s work, that genre had mostly consisted of ensem-
ble films about teams of young women, most of them torn apart by infighting
(often over a man, but sometimes over a ‘competitive’ lesbian sexuality). These
narratives were finally rendered shameful according to the proscriptions of the
Nigerian Censor’s Bureau, which regulates Nollywood film content. While Jénífà
retains the campus genre’s use of the all-girl group, its narrative is also individu-
ated in ways that set it apart from such multicharacter conceptions as Sexy Girls
(Caz Chidiebere, 2008) and Women’s Affair (Andy Chukwu, 2003). The narrative
and thematic payoff is that, in Jénífà, Akindele’s title character can serve a sym-
bolic function; she can stand in for – as she herself says, and as an end title later
tells us – ‘so many young women’ who have fallen victim not simply to pimps
and various prostitution rings but also to those individuals who would deny or at
least downplay the existence of HIV/AIDS, and who, in the process, would dismiss
condoms as unnecessary.
Jénífà closes with an AIDS-themed quotation from Ghanaian Kofi Annan, who
served as Secretary General of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006, and also a
lengthy plea to the viewer to ‘show love to people living with HIV/AIDS’ – a plea
written by Akindele herself. Both the Annan quote and the Akindele plea arrive
via intertitle, as white text superimposed over a black screen. The attributions
of authorship that appear beneath the quote as well as beneath the plea, which
interrupt the colour scheme by materializing in yellow typeface, set up a certain
activist equivalence between Annan and Akindele. The one proclamation fol-
lows the other, and they are both devoted to raising awareness about HIV/AIDS.
Akindele’s quotation advocates youth education and empowerment, identifying
her Jénífà – the fictional human subject of the preceding film – as both a ‘comic
creation’ and a ‘teaching tool’, one designed to reduce the vulnerability to infec-
tion of young Nigerian women. By ending her screenplay with a series of prose
‘teachings’, which appear in the finished film as a series of textual superimposi-
tions, Akindele further inscribes herself as the writer of Jénífà, providing the kind
of clear, on-screen attribution of authorship that Uche Jombo’s character craves
in Last Celebrity, and whose significance Jombo herself has stressed in interviews.
Akindele’s ‘stamp’ – as an actress, activist, and perhaps most especially as an
accomplished screenwriter – is all over Jénífà; she turns it into another kind of
teaching tool – a Nollywood film that, in crafting an intertextual relationship
with its writer-star’s earlier efforts (such as I Need to Know), foregrounds the cen-
trality of the creative consistency of a screenwriter’s commitment to a single,
broadly defined subject.
Helen Ukpabio, the Pentecostal preacher known for performing compli-
cated ‘exorcisms’ on unruly children, has written and produced a series of
Nollywood scripts, using film as a platform for promoting her controversial views
(Oppenheimer 2010). Perhaps most notable in Ukpabio’s oeuvre is her screenplay
for Teco Benson’s 1999 film End of the Wicked, which follows a Beelzebub who pos-
sesses children and also manifests as ‘evil penises’ that attach themselves to the
groins of vicious witches. Working to undermine the allegedly ‘virtuous’ gender
norms of contemporary Nigeria – the very same norms that Uche Jombo’s films
have sought to subvert – these witches use their new appendages to rape and pos-
sess their female foes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the apparent ‘point’ of End of the
Wicked is to present a Pentecostal preacher (played by Ukpabio) who specializes in
possession as the heroine of the film’s story and also as a heroine ‘of all Nigeria’
(a far from feasible proposition, given the country’s remarkable religious diver-
sity). Ukpabio’s scripts aren’t simply silly and nakedly partisan; they also reflect
the sort of beliefs that have made Ukpabio the focus of numerous human rights
organizations (Oppenheimer 2010). According to Ukpabio, ‘if a child under the
age of two screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating
health, he or she is a servant of Satan’ (in Levack 2013: 2000). Ukpabio has con-
sistently provided portraits of a Pentecostalist triumph over ‘liberal’ social forces.
Whatever her political and religious allegiances, a figure such as Helen Ukpabio
helps to demonstrate that women screenwriters are a diverse lot in Nollywood.
Another writer whose projects are distinct is Peace Anyiam-Osigwe; it is perhaps
instructive that she got her start as a poet and a prose stylist. For Anyiam-Osigwe,
writing ‘comes from the bottomless pit of inspiration called the heart and the
soul’; each of her works, whether in the form of a film screenplay or a lyric poem,
‘has a story to tell’, such that ‘a thousand and one interpretations will be given,
whether true or false matters not, for it’s what the words mean to you that is
important – nothing else’ (Anyiam-Osigwe 1993: 1). Many of the themes that
drive her Nollywood screenplays are apparent in her first book of poetry, Looking
from the Outside in. Published in 1993, when Anyiam-Osigwe was 24 years old,
Looking from the Outside in contains an array of poems, from the nakedly auto-
biographical to the intensely imaginative; they all centre on the experiences of
black African womanhood. ‘The Last Decision’, for instance, envisions the world
from the perspective of a wife who re-evaluates her life upon turning 42 – an age
that Anyiam-Osigwe selected because it represented a reversal, an inversion, of
her own age at the time (Anyiam-Osigwe 1993: 8). The vaguely numerological (or
simply mischievous) decision to invert an age – to turn 24 on its ear, as it were –
masks a more profound strategy: in writing from the perspective of a 42-year-
old, the young Anyiam-Osigwe offered herself an experiment in empathy, one
that would find its own reversal, some fifteen years later, in her appearances in a
pair of documentary films about the Nollywood industry. The first of these films,
Jamie Meltzer’s Welcome to Nollywood (2007), provided Anyiam-Osigwe with an
Nigeria 35
opportunity to describe some of the basic working conditions for the industry’s
practitioners, and in particular its young women artists. Anyiam-Osigwe also
appears as an experienced mentor figure in Dorothee Wenner’s 2008 documentary
Peace Mission, whose title describes Anyiam-Osigwe’s commitment to promoting
Nollywood’s global visibility; in the documentary she considers the aspirations
of young women – as well as the misogynistic obstacles that they face in the
Nollywood film industry.
With the publication of Looking from the Outside in, Anyiam-Osigwe confirmed
that her personal, professional mission would be to combat racist and essentialist
stereotypes of Africa and Africans, while at the same time celebrating uniquely
Nigerian experiences. Her poem ‘Lagos’ is an impressionistic account of the
sights, sounds, and inchoate sensations of life in the title city – complete with
several of the languages (from Pidgin and Yorùbá to Hausa and Arabic) that can
easily be heard there. Like the great Christy Essien-Igbokwe, Nigeria’s famed ‘Lady
of Songs’, who wrote and performed lyrics in multiple African languages, Peace
Anyiam-Osigwe has worked to honour Lagos as multilinguistic, multiethnic, and
also religiously diverse – a place of ‘chaos life’ (Anyiam-Osigwe 1993: 24). This
valorization of Lagos finds its correlate in Anyiam-Osigwe’s screenplay for La
Viva (2007), which presents the Nigerian military as ‘beautifully and brilliantly
diverse’, in contrast to popular, essentialist assumptions.
La Viva, along with Anyiam-Osigwe’s screenplay for 2003’s Fear of the Unknown,
focuses on the inter-ethnic conflicts that often characterize black-majority coun-
tries. Many of her other works focus upon the psychic effects of white supremacist
discourses upon contemporary Nigerians, particularly women. Anyiam-Osigwe’s
poem ‘Colour Blind’, published in Looking from the Outside in, laments that ‘it’s
1992 and we still await the someday’ when race will cease to matter. At the same
time, Anyiam-Osigwe is communicating through this poem her awareness of
being black; by the end of it, she’s exulting in her blackness, defying and denounc-
ing the proliferating temptations of skin lighteners and hair straighteners. She
proclaims, ‘[N]ever going to change am I’ (Anyiam-Osigwe 1993: 36). This senti-
ment later turns up in Anyiam-Osigwe’s screenplay for Fear of the Unknown, which
culminates in a critique of the Osu caste system as well as in a celebration of ‘the
simple fact of being black’ – a celebration that powerfully recalls Aimé Césaire
and the politics of Négritude. In preparing for this plot development, Anyiam-
Osigwe punctuates the screenplay with stories about hate crimes that are told by
the victims themselves – a tactic that her poems often embrace, rendering har-
rowing encounters through the use of the first person. ‘Thick Skin’, for instance,
describes a young, black African woman’s experience of riding a crowded train
and having to confront the fact of her blackness. When ‘the racist jokes begin’,
and suddenly ‘a knife is pulled’, she is forced to disembark. Walking away from
the train, she recognizes not merely her vulnerability to oppression, but also the
sad chronological fact that it’s not ‘1940, or 1960, but 1992’, and she is ‘still fight-
ing for [her] right to be allowed to be a human being’ (Anyiam-Osigwe 1993: 35).
A similar lament turns up in Fear of the Unknown, with many a character decrying
the persistence of the Osu caste system in the twenty-first century. Throughout
her work, Anyiam-Osigwe expresses an awareness of history and also a principled

exasperation with the sort of odious history that repeats itself.
Like Uche Jombo, Peace Anyiam-Osigwe has written her share of sexually
sophisticated, romantically themed stories. However, unlike Jombo, Anyiam-
Osigwe has thus far confined these stories to her poetry, apparently preferring to
use Nollywood screenwriting to focus on class conflict and ethnic prejudice (as in
Fear of the Unknown) and the history of the Economic Community of West African
States Monitoring Group (as in La Viva). Looking from the Outside in is, in fact, full
of poems that seem to anticipate some of Jombo’s concerns as a screenwriter: the
hopeful ‘Make it Last’ might describe the opening sequences of Games Men Play,
given its focus on the goal of one confident, sexually active young woman to
better understand men; conversely, the caustic ‘Open Letter to Him’ and ‘Staying
Away’ could be blueprints for the more outraged sections of Jombo’s film, in
which the prickly truth about husbands and boyfriends is revealed, leading some
women to find empowerment in openly, even angrily, critiquing male deceit.
As these examples attest, there are many surprising, productive points of conver-
gence among Nollywood’s women screenwriters, not one of whom has neglected
to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic, in one way or another. Indeed, even Helen
Ukpabio has managed to embed references to AIDS in her various screenplays –
though this is perhaps unsurprising, given the moralism and misogyny that con-
tinue to surround sexually transmitted diseases in today’s Nigeria, particularly
among the Pentecostalist set. (In Ukpabio’s oeuvre, AIDS is often evidence of
‘sin’ – a major mark of shame.) Several of Jombo’s screenplays acknowledge AIDS,
as do Anyiam-Osigwe’s Fear of the Unknown and La Viva. Nevertheless, Akindele’s
Jénífà is perhaps alone in being a work of explicit AIDS advocacy that focuses on
young women, although its central moral mandate can be traced back to Anyiam-
Osigwe’s Looking from the Outside in, which contains a startling, informative poem
entitled ‘Statement of Facts about AIDS’. As its title suggests, this 1993 poem
outlines what was then known about the pandemic, anticipating the end titles
of Jénífà, with their plainly pedagogical bent. If, in that film, Akindele’s closing
summation combines ‘the cold, hard facts’ with her own subjective, expressive
assessment of the pandemic and its effects upon young Nigerian women, then
so does Anyiam-Osigwe’s 1993 poem place AIDS at the centre of efforts to better
understand the risks associated with African womanhood.
The feminist inflections in the work of so many Nollywood women screenwrit-
ers are difficult to miss, and they resonate with the statements that these screen-
writers have made in the Nigerian popular press and on television – statements
such as Akindele’s anti-essentialist claim to ‘have many layers that deserve the
spotlight’ (Okiche 2012: 41). However, the precise political project at the centre
of a Nollywood screenplay can sometimes seem hidden – buried beneath a heap
of generic requirements and further obscured by the sort of surface ‘errors’ that
inevitably accrue to films shot cheaply and rapidly – and this is perhaps nowhere
more apparent than in a romantic comedy. Uche Jombo’s recurrent subjects,
apart from those explored in her Damage trilogy (tracing such hot-button top-
ics as AIDS, drug addiction, spousal abuse, and human trafficking), may seem
Nigeria 37
‘superficial’ and strictly celebrity-focused, but they manage to explore issues of

relevance to contemporary working women. There is a definite feminist project at
the centre of Last Celebrity, which considers gender inequality among professional
public figures. Games Men Play, which Jombo wrote with her frequent screenwrit-
ing partner Emem Isong, suggests that women needn’t stick their heads in the
sand, ostrich-style, while their husbands and boyfriends scheme and cheat. The
film suggests that they can take action, either by confronting and dumping them,
or by seeking to better understand male psychology, to provide ‘compassion’ and
work towards experiencing empathy.
In spite of dismissive popular presumptions, Nollywood screenwriting pro-
vides a forum for artists to express their political positions. There is perhaps no
stronger confirmation of this possibility than the work of the industry’s women
screenwriters, who often need to fight allegations of frivolity that arrive wrapped
in a well-worn misogyny, as Uche Jombo has consistently suggested. In his
essay on Nollywood’s most dismissive critics, Onookome Okome explains that
Nigeria’s formally credentialled ‘cultural mediators’ tend to view Nollywood films
as ‘no more than curios, which are produced by naive artists who have little or
no critical sense of the “grave” matters that confront the African in the post-
independence era’ (Okome 2010: 28). Okome argues that this ‘negating approach’
ignores the subversively satirical, productively allegorical, and socially relevant
aspects of countless films. The careers of Peace Anyiam-Osigwe, Uche Jombo, and
Funke Akindele indicate how central these aspects are to the work of Nollywood’s
women screenwriters. Of the scripts referenced in this essay, none are currently in
print in Nigeria, and only brief prose treatments for Peace Anyiam-Osigwe’s films
Fear of the Unknown and La Viva were ever commercially available – and then only
as ‘tie-ins’ to reprints of Anyiam-Osigwe’s popular book of poetry, Looking from
the Outside in (which itself is no longer in print). Okome notes that even Nigerian
university archives are missing Nollywood screenplays and that this is perhaps a
measure of the anti-Nollywood intellectual prejudice. However, as the industry
continues to grow, and to acquire new promotional avenues both at home and
abroad, it might eventually embrace the potential of the published screenplay.
Circulating the words of some of Nollywood’s most prolific women would cer-
tainly prove that a Nollywood film isn’t always improvised; that the screenplays
contain a series of pedagogical interventions, incisive dialogue exchanges, and
complex portrayals of Africa and Africans.
Chineze Anyaene is a director, producer and screenwriter. She attended the
University of Abuja and the New York Film Academy. Ije:The Journey (2010, co-
written by Anyaene and Samuel Tilson and shot in Nigeria and America) is the story
of a child, Chioma, in the Nigerian countryside who warns her sister, Anya, about
believing in the myth of the ‘American Dream’. Many years later, Anya is accused
of killing three men in Hollywood, California and Chioma travels to Los Angeles to
find out the secrets that her sister is trying to hide. The film received several awards
and for two years held the record as the top-grossing film in Nigerian cinemas.
Stephanie Okereke (1982–) is an actress, screenwriter, director and producer.
She was born in Imo, Nigeria and was educated at the University of Calabar,
receiving a degree in English and literary studies. Okereke wrote, directed, acted
in and produced Through the Glass (2008). The film received an African Movie
Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.
Ngozi Onwurah (1966–) was born in Nigeria to a Nigerian father and a British
white mother; she was educated in the United Kingdom. She is a writer, director
and lecturer. Many of her short films focus on growing up in a mixed-race house-
hold and investigating the role of women in society. Her feature film, Welcome II
the Terrordome, a sci-fi drama which she wrote and directed, was released in 1995.
Zina Saro-Wiwa (1976–) is a video artist and screenwriter and filmmaker. She
is the founding member of the alt-Nollywood movement – a movement designed
to use typical narrative and conventional Nollywood-style filmmaking, using
low budgets and aimed at politically subversive challenges. She has worked as a
reporter for BBC Radio, a documentary filmmaker (This Is My Africa [2008/9] and
two short film narratives in 2010, Phyllis and Deliverance of Comfort).
References
Anyiam-Osigwe, Peace. 1993. Looking from the Outside in. Lagos, Nigeria: All Media.
Cham, Mbye. 2009. ‘Foreward’, in Bhekizizwe Peterson and Ramadan Suleman, Zulu Love
Letter: A Screenplay. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. vii–xii.
Haynes, Jonathan. 2007. ‘Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood Films’, Africa Today, 54
(2): 131–50.
Jombo, Uche. 2012. In conversation with Exquisite magazine. Exquisite, ‘The Get Gorgeous
Issue’, 45, p. 18.
Levack, Brian P. 2013. The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West.
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McCain, Carmen. 2012. ‘Kannywood, the Growth of a Nigerian Language Industry’,
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the-growth-of-a-nigerian-language-industry-carmen-mccain-2/ (accessed 12 August 2013).
Novia, Charles. 2012. Nollywood till November: Memories of a Nollywood Insider. Bloomington:
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Okiche, Wilfred. 2012. ‘Funke Kan! Nigeria Kan!’, Y! Magazine, 7, pp. 40–5.
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html?_r=0 (accessed 12 August 2013).
South Africa
Haseenah Ebrahim
Overview
The involvement of women in the film industry in South Africa dates back to the
apartheid era when several white women worked within what was then, as now,
a white, male-dominated industry. In some instances, these women worked in
professional partnerships with their husbands, such as producer-director Katinka
Heyns who continues to work with her scriptwriter husband, Chris Barnard.
While women screenwriters remain outnumbered by their male counterparts, a
number of white women, especially those who write in English, are relatively well
known, and still outnumber women of colour in the mainstream film industry,
despite their minority status in terms of the country’s population demographics.
This remains a legacy of the colonial and apartheid-era privileging of the minor-
ity white population in South Africa. Two significant findings have emerged from
this research undertaken to map the presence of women screenwriters in the
South African film industry: first, an awareness that, while a few women of colour
have begun to enter the filmmaking sector, they remain at the margins of the
mainstream film industry, writing primarily for documentaries and short films;
and, secondly, the complete absence of black African women screenwriters. The
reasons for this are unclear, and suggest that further research is warranted into the
structural factors that continue to hamper the participation of women of colour,
and black African women in particular, in the film industry in South Africa, other
than as actresses.
As in other parts of the world, television provides a more open environment
for aspiring writers than does the world of feature film production. However, it is
also an environment in which much of the scriptwriting and story development
is done collaboratively, usually as part of a series writing team, with a certain level
of anonymity or limited recognition. The profiles that follow indicate that even
when women write for feature films, they often not only collaborate with other
writers, but also with directors and actors. This may reflect a particular gender-
inflected preference in terms of modes of working, and may also provide easier
access to feature film production for women screenwriters within the current film
production landscape.
39
In the post-apartheid period, the establishment of the state-funded National

Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) has brought with it opportunities for emer-
gent screenwriters to develop their skills through several screenwriting training
programmes. Although criticisms are regularly levelled against these screenwriting
programmes for their emphasis on Hollywood narrative formulae and genres, a
number of aspiring screenwriters, male and female, have utilized this opportu-
nity to develop their feature film scripts. The Sediba Spark screenwriting training
programme is directed by two women screenwriters, Thandi Brewer and Julie Hall
(profiled below). While most scripts are written in English, some of these training
programmes include scripts written in Afrikaans (a South African language based
primarily on Dutch, but also including vocabulary from Malay, Portuguese and sev-
eral African languages), and a few in the more prominent African languages such
as IsiZulu, TsiVenda or Sesotho. Much needs to be done to encourage both male
and female writers to write in some of South Africa’s other eleven official languages.
It is apparent from the profiles included here that most women screenwrit-
ers wear multiple hats as producers/directors/writers. One filmmaker noted that
the South African film industry is small and dominated, as elsewhere, by male
producers and directors who tend to work informally with a small group of male
screenwriters. Women screenwriters often expend considerable time and effort
working within the independent sector to see their scripts realized. As a result,
they develop skills and expertise in several aspects of filmmaking, and quite fre-
quently are forced to utilize all of these to see their scripts produced.
Many of the screenwriters profiled here are keen to tell stories that have not
been told before about their own communities, or that draw on South Africa’s
rich, multicultural heritage. They often also express a desire to tell their stories in
a way that would cross the racial divides that still persist within the country. This
survey’s identification of the dearth of black African women screenwriters indi-
cates that the road ahead for women filmmakers, including screenwriters, is still
a long one and that there are many stories to be told by the different segments of
South Africa’s diverse population.
The short profiles that follow are listed in alphabetical order by surname, and
this is the first attempt to identify the women screenwriters in South Africa in any
one review. As such, there are, no doubt, some names that have been inadvert-
ently omitted, but it is hoped that the list will be expanded in the years to come.
Sara Blecher is a graduate of New York University, and a co-founder of Cinga
Productions. Although better known as a director and producer, Blecher also co-
created and wrote many episodes of the television series Zero Tolerance, which
she directed and produced and which was nominated for an international Emmy
award, as well as the award-winning 36-part drama Bay of Plenty. Blecher works
across several media platforms and formats, including short films, television series
and documentaries. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film Otelo Burning
(2011), which she also produced and directed. The film tells the story of a group
of black teenage boys who discover the joys of surfing in the subtropical waters of
the Indian Ocean holiday resort city of Durban, just a few miles away from their
crime and poverty-ridden township of Lamontville. Set in the apartheid era of the
South Africa 41
1980s, the boys’ dreams and joys in the hitherto unknown world of surfing are
soon brutally impacted by political, social and interpersonal conflict. Blecher also
produced and directed the documentary Surfing Soweto (2010), screened by CNN,
which follows the lives of a group of Soweto teenagers who surf moving trains,
using footage shot by her filmmaking team as well as by the boys themselves.
Lauren Beukes has worked as a scriptwriter for animated television series and
is a comic-book writer, but shot to fame when her novel, Zoo City (2010), won the
prestigious Arthur C. Clarke award. She is currently working on the screenplay
for the novel’s film adaptation, which Beukes describes as ‘ a dark and twisty love
story murder mystery noir in a gritty magical Jo’burg’.
Thandi Brewer is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, producer, direc-
tor and script editor for the NFVF. Brewer graduated from Trinity College, London.
She is the current Chair of the Writers Guild of South Africa, and also heads up the
Sediba Spark screenwriting training programme for the NFVF, together with Julie
Hall. Her film writing credits include Story of An African Farm (2004) and several
uncredited contributions to scripts for international films, including Paris Le Cap,
Cheap Lives, The Weatherman, 12 Dancing Princesses, Corner Pocket and The Chemo
Club, and she has credits as a script editor/script doctor on a number of feature
film productions, including Otelo Burning.
Julie Frederikse is a screenwriter, film producer and novelist, who wrote the
screenplay for the feature film, Izulu Lami/My Secret Sky (2008), which tells the
story of two recently orphaned children who leave their rural homestead on a
quest and find themselves caught up in a desperate struggle for survival with a
gang of street children. The film has won several international awards. Frederikse,
a graduate of Cornell University, writes in English, Afrikaans and Zulu.
Margaret Goldsmid is a successful television producer, script editor and educa-
tor in screenwriting for the NFVF, where she also acts as script editor on feature
films in development, and mentors aspiring screenwriters in the NFVF’s screen-
writing programme. Goldsmid has worked as a script editor for fifteen years, and
has written for, or produced, a number of award-winning television drama series,
including Justice for All (1998) and 7de Laan (2000–). She has also taught short
courses in screenwriting at the South African School of Motion Picture Medium
and Live Performance (AFDA) and Monash University.
Julie Hall is a television scriptwriter, having worked on numerous television
series in various genres and formats, including sitcoms, edutainment series,
miniseries and various dramas. Her scriptwriting experience includes working on
South Africa’s most popular soap, Generations (1993–) , for five years. Hall co-heads
the Sediba Spark screenwriting training programme for the NFVF with Thandi
Brewer, and works as a script editor/doctor for various feature film projects. She is
currently writing a romantic comedy feature film.
Acclaimed writer Rayda Jacobs turned her award-winning novel, Confessions
of a Gambler, into a screenplay, then directed and played the lead role in the
adapted film, Confessions of a Gambler (2007). Set amidst the conservative Cape
Malay Muslim community in Cape Town, the film draws on Jacobs’ own experi-
ences in its story of a pious Muslim woman who becomes a gambling addict. This
controversial theme is, however, only one of a number of social challenges facing
the community; the film includes a storyline in which a Muslim mother comes
to terms with her son’s homosexuality, and AIDS. Jacobs is also a documentary
filmmaker who has produced, written and directed several documentaries about
Islam and Muslim women.
Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren is a screenwriter and academic, teaching
screenwriting at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Arts (WSOA),
while writing scripts for radio and television documentaries and series, including
the children’s television series Thabang Thabong and Rivoningo. Her screenplays for
feature films include Wolf Wolf, Hoe laat is dit? (2010), an innovative filmmaking
project involving twenty directors, and Babalas (2012), which she co-wrote with
Carl Stemmet. She is currently developing a feature film screenplay entitled En
Garde Rooinek as part of the NFVF’s Sediba Spark scriptwriting programme.
Shirley Johnston is an actress, screenwriter, playwright and educator who has
written for several South African television series, including Isidingo, Backstage,
Madam and Eve, Shooting Stars and Montana. Her early efforts in several mediums/
formats have won her awards: her first short film, Clean Hands, won an M-Net
New Directions Screenwriting Award; her first play, Plastics, won the South African
Committee of Performing Arts Councils (SACPAC) Best Playwright award, and her
debut feature film, Felix! (2013), won the 2004 Writer’s Forum Award at Sithengi
and was a quarter finalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Screenwriting
Competition. Felix! is an all-woman collaboration, written, directed, shot and
line-produced by women, but the story is about a teenage boy from the townships
who dreams of becoming a jazz saxophonist.
Justine Loots is a screenwriter, independent filmmaker, educator and script
editor. Currently writing a miniseries for television, and co-writing an adaptation
of the play Green Man Flashing for the big screen, she has worked on the writing
teams of several television series, including Erfsondes, and actuality programmes
such as Carte Blanche and Carte Blanche Africa. Loots headed the script develop-
ment programme at Videovision Entertainment for some time, and currently
teaches screenwriting at the NFVF. Loots currently also works as a script editor
for the NFVF.
Raeesa Mohamed is a radio and TV producer, presenter and news anchor,
whose foray into screenwriting is very recent, with the release of the romantic
comedy For Better For Worse (2010). The film, which she wrote (and produced) to
highlight the east coast city of Durban, explores the eccentricities of contempo-
rary Indian South African life.
Jayan Moodley’s debut film, White Gold (2010), is an historical drama inspired by
her search for her ancestral roots. Moodley wrote and directed the film. Surprisingly,
in a country which has the largest Indian-descent population outside India, White
Gold is the first feature film that explores the experiences of Indian indentured
workers on their arrival in South Africa in the late 1800s to work on the sugar cane
plantations of the British colony which is now known as KwaZulu- Natal.
Beverly Mitchell is a producer/director/writer who works mainly in television.
Mitchell co-wrote the screenplay (with Weaam Williams and Dingi Ntuli) for 34
South Africa 43
South (2004), the first South African full-length feature film to be directed by a
black South African woman, Maganthrie Pillay. 34 South is a road movie about a
group of young Capetonians on their way to Johannesburg. Mitchell also wrote
and produced the documentary Footprints in Africa: Our Nation in Colour (2008) for
the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation).
Born in Mozambique, Helen Nogueira is a writer, director and editor who
became the first woman to direct a feature film in South Africa with Quest for
Love (1988), which she also wrote. Quest for Love focuses on the lives and conflicts
of two lesbian women against the tensions of South Africa’s political climate.
Nogueira wrote and directed several short films, as well as the feature film The
Good Fascist (1992), and a documentary, Ingrid Jonker: Her Lives and Time (2002),
which explores the life of the iconic Afrikaner poet. Nogueira is writing a screen-
play for a feature film on Jonker entitled All That Breaks.
Zulfah Otto Sallies is a screenwriter, filmmaker, writer, playwright and poet
whose films reflect the vibrancy of her upbringing in the Cape Malay Muslim
community of the Bo-Kaap in Cape Town. In 2001, she wrote and directed the
short film Raya (2001), broadcast as part of the Mama Africa series featuring films
by African women. The film highlights the generational tensions amongst the
residents of the Bo-Kaap whose Muslim identity is constantly tested against the
seductions of sexual freedom and drug abuse. She also co-wrote the screenplay for
the short film Stompie and the Red Tide (2000).
Elaine Proctor is a novelist, film director, screenwriter, actress and producer
who graduated with a Master’s degree from the National Film and Television
School in England. Her screenwriting credits include On the Wire (1990), Friends
(1993) and Kin (2000), all of which she also directed. On the Wire (1990) was her
graduation film and earned her the British Film Institute’s Sutherland Trophy for
most original and imaginative first film, while Friends won the Camera d’Or –
Mention Speciale prize at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. She released her debut
novel, Rhumba, in 2012. Now resident in London, she continues to write novels
and scripts set in southern Africa.
Hanneke Schutte is a young writer and director whose screenplays for several
short films have won awards both locally and overseas. Schutte shot to fame when
she was selected as the South African winner of the Jameson First Shot competi-
tion with her screenplay for the short film Saving Norman (2013). The win provided
Schutte the opportunity to fly to Los Angeles to direct Willem Dafoe in the leading
role. Saving Norman, produced by actor Kevin Spacey, is the story of a hypochon-
driac ping pong player who has never fully recovered from missing a major tourna-
ment. Schutte’s first feature film, which she wrote and directed, Jimmy in Pienk, was
released in 2013. The film is an Afrikaans-language social satire targeting Afrikaner
conservatism about homosexuality. Her other screenwriting credits include the
short film script The City Swallows, which was a semi-finalist at the Berlin Today
Awards, and a screenplay provisionally titled A Chameleon called Gatiepie, a film
adaptation of Riana Scheepers’ youth novel Blinde Sambok. She also wrote the
third installment in the popular Bakgat film franchise, and acted as script editor on
Wolwedans in die Skemer (2012), adapted from a long-running radio drama series.
Jann Turner co-wrote the screenplay for White Wedding (2009), which was
also her directorial feature film debut. The romantic comedy/road trip film was
very successful in South Africa, and was nominated in seven categories at the
South African Film and TV Awards (SAFTA). It was South Africa’s entry for Best
Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. Turner’s collaboration with
two well-known South African actors, Rapulana Seiphemo and Kenneth Nkosi,
also inspired their next film, Paradise Stop (2011), for which Turner once again
co-wrote the screenplay. Paradise Stop is a high-speed action comedy/heist film
which she produced and directed. Turner is a graduate of the New York University
(NYU) film school, and has also written for a number of television series, in addi-
tion to producing several novels, including Heartland (1977), Home Is Where You
Find It (2001) and Southern Cross (2002). She also co-created several television
drama series such as Hard Copy (2005), a drama series set in the newsroom of an
independent, influential weekly newspaper, which went on to win in the Best TV
Drama category of the South African Film and TV Awards.
Janet van Eeden began her screenwriting career in the United Kingdom, writ-
ing plays and teaching drama, before returning to South Africa. Van Eeden has
written a number of screenplays, including A Matter of Time, No Going Back and
Skeleton Coast, and the short film The Red Shoes. Although several of her scripts
were optioned, none was produced, until she responded to a call to develop a
full feature film script about a white lion. Drawing on traditional African beliefs
about the ancestral links to white lions, van Eeden’s screenplay focuses on actual,
not romanticized, lion behaviour. There is a strong conservational approach in
its story about a white lion cub that is rejected by its pride and the Shangaan
tribesman who takes on the guardianship of the cub, in accordance with the
beliefs of his people. The film, White Lion (2010), won the Audience Award at the
Lucas International Festival of Films for Children and Young People. Van Eeden
also acted as script editor for the documentary Property of the State (2003), which
explores the status and experiences of gay men in the apartheid-era military in
South Africa.
Sandra Vaughn is an actress and comic who wrote the screenplay for the
Afrikaans-language romantic comedy Semi-Soet (2012), much of which is set on a
wine estate, hence the title (semi-sweet). Her other writing credits include the TV
series Getroud met Rugby (2009) and Liefste Kayla (2013). Getroud met Rugby, which
translates into English as Married To Rugby, is an Afrikaans-language television
series similar to the British television series Footballers’ Wives. Liefste Kayla focuses
on the life of a 13-year-old girl who writes and sings her own songs.
Weaam Williams and Beverley Mitchell co-wrote the screenplay (with Dingi
Ntuli) for 34 South, the first South African full-length feature film to be directed
by a black South African woman, Maganthrie Pillay, a road movie about a group of
young Capetonians on their way to Johannesburg. Weeam Williams, a published
poet and short story writer, has also directed two documentaries, The Feminine
Divine, profiling three women healers, and Hip Hop Revolution (2006), which
explores the twenty-five-year journey of hip hop in South Africa and approaches
hip hop as a source of inspiration and activism.
Tunisia
Ouissal Mejri
The Tunisian Cinema
Since its birth, the Tunisian cinema has been at the forefront of the feminist move-
ment, trying to rehabilitate the dignity and equality of women in the country.
In most cases, Tunisian women screenwriters are also the directors of their
scripts. These screenwriters/directors often have a leading voice in the social
causes that Tunisia began to recognize in the age of Bourguiba, and which
continue to be recognized today. ‘The emergence of women’s cinema and the
proportionally high participation of women in national filmmaking have been
facilitated by Tunisian jurisdiction, which is considered to be the most liberal
in all Arab Muslim countries in terms of gender equality’ (Dönmez-Colin 2007:
148). The cinema is the means of communication that these women directors and
screenwriters decide to use to denounce, explain, affirm or deny daily situations
in Tunisian society.
This work about Tunisian women screenwriters focuses initially on the work of
the first woman screenwriter in Africa and Tunisia, Haydée Chikly Tamzali, who
wrote Zohra (1922) and The Girl from Carthage (1924), and then on Salma Baccar
(Fatma 75 [1978], Habiba M’sika/The Dance of Fire [1995]); Néjia Ben Mabrouk
(Al-Sâma/The Trace [1982]); Moufida Tlatli (Samt al Qusur/The Silence of the Palaces
[1994]); Kalthoum Bornaz (Keswa/The Lost Thread [1998]); Kalthoum Bornaz
(Keswa/The Lost Thread [1998]); and Raja Amari (Satin Rouge/Red Satin [2002]).
Haydée Chikly Tamzali
Haydée Chikly participated in building the history of Arabic and African cin-
ema. She was the first actress and screenwriter in Africa. In a memoir she wrote
about her father, Albert Samama Chikly, an important cinematographic inventor
(Tamzali 1992: 109) who allowed her to enter the world of cinema. Haydée Chikly
had three jobs: first, creating and writing scenarios; second, being her father’s
principal actress; and the third as a film editor. She even hand-coloured film
on occasions (Mansour 2000: 200). Albert Samama Chikly filmed Zohra in 1922
and The Girl from Carthage in 1924 with his sixteen-year-old daughter as the lead
45
actress. She was also the screenwriter. About the film The Girl from Carthage, she
said, ‘I wrote this story to show how badly women were treated when they were
just sold off with an arranged marriage into a man’s world’ (Tamzali 1992: 112).
These two film narratives were the first made on the African continent and they
are preserved in France; the negatives are in the Bois d’Arcy archives.
After The Girl from Carthage, Haydée Chikly played a part in The Arab (1924);
this was directed by the famous Hollywood director Rex Ingram and also starred
Ramon Novarro. She also recited for Ferid Boughedir’s film Un été à la Goulette/A
Summer in La Goulette (1998) and for Mamoud Ben Mamoud’s documentary
devoted to Albert Samama Chikly. Haydée Chikly, who became Haydée Tamzali
after her marriage, is a woman of letters highly appreciated in Tunis; she remains
the benchmark and is also intent on keeping a faithful memorial of her father.
Later on, Haydée Chikly wrote several stories and articles for the Tunisian
newspaper La Presse and in 1998 a book entitled Images retrouvées from true stories
inspired by common memory. She wrote about her life and her memories and
dedicated a text to her family, ending it as follows: ‘I would like to conclude today,
at the end of my life, saying that the most beautiful character of woman is to be
a woman’ (Mansour 2000: 200).
A part of the Zohra script still exists in the family archives, written in French
and in typewritten format. What follows are short synopses of some of Chikley’s
film narratives:
Zohra
The film Zohra tells of the loss of a young French girl following a shipwreck due
to a storm in the Mediterranean Sea. She is found by the fisherman Amor; he tries
to revive her. Then he takes her to a Bedouin’s Douar where she is warmly wel-
comed. The Shiek of Douar Brahim proposes the community accept her and she
soon lives a bohemian life. Shortly after, Zohra joins a caravan heading north and
contacts the European authorities. Meanwhile, her adoptive mother is kidnapped
by bandits and her adoptive father is killed. That night Zohra hears the sound of
a plane’s motor; she escapes and reaches it. She discovers it to be a French plane
and she explains her situation. Finally, Zohra is saved and finds her real parents.
The Girl from Carthage

In the early 1980s, the script of The Girl from Carthage was withdrawn from
the family archives, when the Ministry of Tunisian Culture planned to open a
museum of cinema. This material was lost.
The fact that Haydée Chikly is the screenwriter is reinforced by the first interti-
tle of The Girl from Carthage: ‘Ain-el-Ghezal, The Girl from Carthage, a drama from
Arab life played by the author, Ms Haydée Chikli’. The Girl from Carthage tells the
dramatic story of a young girl forced by her family into marriage. She runs away
with her lover and commits suicide when he is killed. The story appears to be a
remake of the impossible love between Romeo and Juliet, but for this movie, it is
the crazy and impossible love between Ain-el-Ghezal and Taleb. This topic would
be revisited frequently in subsequent Tunisian productions.
Tunisia 47
Salma Baccar
Some time elapsed before the appearance of the next female scriptwriter in the
1970s – Salma Baccar, born in 1945 and the first Tunisian woman director since
Tunisia’s independence. Earlier, Baccar took part in the rehabilitation of Tunisian
women. In 1978 she wrote and directed the movie Fatma 75 supported by the
Tunisian government and focusing on women’s emancipation. This pioneer of
Tunisian cinema wrote several scripts during her career including: L’Eveil (1968),
Le Crépuscule (1968), Khochkhach/Flower of Oblivion (2005), the documentaries De
la Toison au Fil d’or (1985), Au Pays du Tarayoun (1985), and L’Histoire des coutumes
(1985), and the docu-drama Habiba M’sika/The Dance of Fire (1995). She has also
written for television (FESCAPO 2000: 51).
Whether working with documentaries, movies or TV series, Salma Baccar
always chooses a woman as her main character and the Tunisian female world as
the film’s backdrop. For her first film, Fatma 75, she contributed to the progress
of the thinking about the future of Tunisian women. Fatma 75 tells us about
a research student who, through flashbacks, introduces famous women in the
history of Tunisia. Three generations of women and three ways of thinking are
presented in the film: 1930–38, when the Tunisian Women’s Union (UFT) was
created; 1938–52, showing the relationship between the fight for women’s rights
and the national fight for independence; and, finally, the period from 1956 up to
the 1970s, presenting the achievements of Tunisian women made possible by the
Code of Personal Status. In an interview with Wassyla Tamzali, published in the
book entitled En attendant Omar Gatlato, Salma Baccar says that:
My film is aimed at women, in particular the Tunisian ones. I hope that this
film will be shown to those who do not usually go to the cinema, leaving the
traditional circuit. I’m sure that there will be undoubtedly some of them that
will be against the film. Today, only a few intellectual women are mobilized for
the struggle. In general there is no dialogue between those who are conscious
and those who are not aware. (Tamzali 1979: 54)
In Habiba M’sika/The Dance of Fire, Salma Baccar focuses on the life of Habiba
Msika, one of the greatest theater and songwriting stars of the 1920s. The frame-
work of the film is inspired by the life of the artist, showing the last three years of
her career starting from 1927. In these years the star was at the top of her career
and managing ‘Salons’ where poets and artists used to meet. The personality of
Habiba Msika is, in a sense, strongly symbolic. She is an example of a young and
talented artist who is in need of liberty. Salma Baccar describes her in this way:
‘It is a symbolic character that represented the women’s condition with several
facets’ (Baccar 1994: 12).
Finally, the movie Khochkhach/Flower of Oblivion, for which the scenario and
dialogue were written by Salma Baccar and Aroussia Nallouti, comes back to
Haydée Chikly’s first topic: the arranged marriage. The movie tells us about the
story of Zakia, married following the Tunisian traditions of wedding arrangement.
After having discovered that her husband is homosexual, she becomes addicted to
opium. Zakia starts to neglect everything in her life – including her daughter – in
pursuit of her growing addiction.
Néjia Ben Mabrouk
Another woman who rose in the Tunisian cinema after the Independence (1952–62)
is Néjia Ben Mabrouk.
Néjia Ben Mabrouk was born in Ouédiane in Tunisia. She studied cinema in
Brussels at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts et du Spectacle (INSAS). Her
first full-length feature film, Al-Sâma/The Trace (1982), contains elements of her
own biography, looking at the long years spent by her father in the phosphate
mines of M’dilla in the south of Tunisia (Boughedir 1998: 174). Al-Sâma/The Trace
relates the story of Sabra, a girl from the south of Tunisia whose father is a mining
worker and whose mother is illiterate. It describes the struggle of a young woman
to obtain an adequate education and the right to determine her own life. The
young girl wishes to continue her studies in Tunis, the capital. For Sabra, studying
is the only way to achieve freedom. ‘The narrative of Al-Sâma/The Trace constantly
shifts between past and present, between the protagonist’s childhood and her vain
efforts to graduate from high school’ (Shafik 1998: 205). The major concern is that
she finds herself in the situation of every Arabic woman for whom life is decided
by someone else. It tells of the fragility of her future. The movie is structured by
alternating childhood memories with current situations. Sabra, as a child, dreams
of invading the spaces reserved for men, so she rides a bicycle, a privilege author-
ized only for men, and plays with a spinning top, shocking the neighbours and
provoking them to blame her mother for her bad moral education. The interior
of the house is defined by Néjia Ben Mabrouk ‘as the female domain, which men
rarely enter, the realm of the embracing, protective, but also devouring mother.
This juxtaposition is made already at the beginning of the film in a dream of the
protagonist’ (Shafik 1998: 206).
This film offers a similarly claustrophobic description of the female environ-
ment, set in the prison-like universe of a family full of taboos, creating conflicts
between mother and daughter. The specificity of this conflicted relationship
between mother and daughter is not only linked to the Tunisian tradition but
can also be traced back to the Islamic culture. In Moslem society the mother is
responsible for the behaviour of her daughter and she might be punished even if
there is only the smallest suspicion of guilt.
The title of the film, The Trace, is very meaningful and is linked to the scar on the
mother’s forehead. The scar has been induced by acid; it was used to remove the
traditional tattoo, a symbol of obedience and submission. The story about the trace
covers what the mother says to the daughter: ‘For a girl, it is easy to get smeared.
Men are not easy, they don’t get the trace. Young girls have to protect themselves
against the masculine threat. Girls are locked because adults believe that they
cannot resist the temptation of the flesh’ (Khelil 2007: 151). The voice of the
screenwriter joins the screaming of the protagonist who denounces the injuries
Tunisia 49
undergone by women: in a patriarchal society all kinds of barriers are raised to

confront the desire for emancipation.
In the same manner, the main character, by refusing her past heritage and by
fighting for emancipation, will burn her books and decide to join her brothers in
Europe where she will finally have the opportunity to make her dream come true.
The dialogue refers also to the painful past of Tunisian women and to this feared
trace: this sexual defilement. Al-Sâma/The Trace was finished in 1982, but was
released only in 1988 due to a dispute between the author and the film’s producer.
Moufida Tlatli
Another screenwriter who revisited these topics is Moufida Tlatli through the
movie Samt al Qusur/The Silence of the Palaces.
Moufida Tlatli was born in 1947 in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia. She studied cinema
at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, graduat-
ing in 1968. ‘She worked for French television until 1972 as a scriptwriter, then
as a director of production’ (Pallister and Hottell 2011: 34). Her first feature film
was Samt al Qusur/The Silence of the Palaces (1994). This film develops some of
the social and cultural paradoxes in Tunisian society, illustrated by the transi-
tion from the traditional to modern era. It chronicles the experiences of a young
woman, Alia, who tries to discover the truth of the present through her past. The
narrative structure of the movie seems well synchronized with the passage of
time, both in front and in back. It is built on a very smooth structure that allows
some time points to be omitted from the regular chronology. The movie has Alia
as the pillar, playing both child and adult, while the other characters revolve
around her. The dramatic attention is focused on the principal character of Alia.
Her childhood is marked by complexes brought about by the sufferings of her
mother and feelings of guilt relating to responsibility for her death. Nevertheless,
Alia, the adult woman, has a hard life fixed in the past. Her forgotten suffering is
revived again when her companion asks her to abort a baby, thereby refusing a
precocious and unexpected paternity. The character of Khedija, the mother, is in
total conflict with that of her daughter who becomes ever more unmanageable;
she finds within herself the strength to be impassive and resistant to any form
of pain. Based on a structure that mixes contradiction and contrast, the director
has understood how to evolve her characters, ensuring more artistically credible
choices. This contrast empathizes with a whole generation of women who must
learn and manage their freedoms and rights. Therefore, the scriptwriter/director
knows how to play with her characters so as to introduce to the public the true
issues of a society taking the first steps towards modernity. It is not a coincidence
that the 1960s were selected as the backdrop of the movie, for this was the period
when women acquired most of their rights within the ‘constitution of June 1,
1959 to have the full right to exercise their political, economic, and social rights’
(Doumato and Posusney 2003: 173).
The above films addressed an issue both relevant and specific to Tunisian soci-
ety, namely, the emancipation of the woman and the limits of such emancipation;
the contrast between the official emancipation by law and the inherited submis-
sion arising from traditions. Following on from these topics, another screenwriter
and director from Moufida Tlatli’s generation is Kalthoum Bornaz.
Kalthoum Bornaz
Kalthoum Bornaz (1945–) was born in Tunis. She is a director, editor and screen-
writer who revisits the issue of marriage, the most common topic in Arabic and
Tunisian culture. This time it is related to the film Keswa/The Lost Thread (1998),
which was her first movie, a gently satiric comedy. The film is about Nozha, a
young Tunisian woman who has defied her parents’ wishes for an arranged mar-
riage and moved away to strike out on her own. ‘Nozha returns home from France
for her brother’s wedding, but finds herself left behind when the party leaves for
the ceremony. Looking for her family, she wanders through Tunis wearing her
expensive traditional wedding dress (Keswa), which gradually unravels’ (Armes
2005: 66). Kalthoum Bornaz followed this effort with several short fiction films:
Couleurs Fertiles (1984); Regard de moutte (1991); Trois personnages en quête d’un
théâtre (1988).
Kalthoum Bornaz wrote Regard de moutte for Tunisian television. She based the
scenario on Ali Louati’s poem entitled Parfois. Regard de moutte is about a man
who ‘alone on a deserted winter beach remembers, meditates and wonders. He
suffers, emotes, laughs, wanders around, and becomes satirical. A redemptress
(his muse, lover, or death?) will come to relieve him of his torture’ (Pallister and
Hottell 2011: 164). She also wrote Trois personnages en quête d’un théâtre (1988) for
Tunisian television; the synopsis concerns ‘the evocation of the municipal theatre
of Tunis through famous characters who have been produced there’ (Pallister and
Hottell 2011: 165).
Raja Amari
Raja Amari was born in 1971 in Tunis and is now a resident in Paris. She was
enrolled in the Paris film school, La Fémis, where her first short film, Avril/
April (1998), won a number of awards. The author’s fame arose in 2001 with
her movie Satin Rouge/Red Satin. The script, which was written while she was at
school, earned a New Directors’ Showcase Award from the Seattle Film Festival;
the Audience Award at the Maine International Film Festival; and the Grand Prix
at the Turin Film Festival. ‘Raja Amari has written film reviews for Cinécrits maga-
zine, a radio feature, and screenplays’ (Hillauer 2005: 370).
Satin Rouge/Red Satin is about a widowed Tunisian housewife, tired of living in
the shadow of her daughter and dead husband. She finds herself drawn to the
seductive, but socially unacceptable, belly dance cabaret down the street. From
then on, nothing is out of the question, not even a bizarre love triangle. Raja
Amari, in this movie, describes a specific woman’s personal story and is not mak-
ing a statement on the role of women in Tunisian society. In fact, she declares:
‘I started out with Lilia, the main character, who is not representative of Tunisian
Tunisia 51
society. I didn’t want to set the character in conflict with society. That was not my
intention’ (Hillauer 2005: 370).
What is new in this film is the introduction of a new woman – not the mother
of a family, living inside the house, but one who is outside, in a cabaret. Lilia is a
model housewife with a great deal of moral conviction and a strict sense of duty.
She goes against everything for which she has ever stood when she goes dancing
all night in a nightclub. The nightclub offers her an alternative life by providing
her with new friendships. Raja Amari, in this film, presents the consciousness of a
woman awakening little by little in an impelling silence. In the sclerotic Tunisian
cinema, which repeats a lot of clichés about women, Raja Amari’s film seems origi-
nal and the restraint of its writing is clear. She declares: ‘Typically, in Arab films
and Tunisian films, you have a woman who is in conflict with society, and she’ll
fight against it. I didn’t want that. That was not my subject. She is involved in a
society that is hypocritical in the sense that there are two worlds out there: the
world of the night and the world of the day’ (Hillauer 2005: 370).
A common theme in Tunisian cinema, including Raja Amari’s film, is the social
hypocrisy that makes all the religious and sexual prohibitions hidden and not
spoken. What brings up more and more problems in Tunisian films concerning
woman and written by women, however, is that the subject presents the same
motivation over and over again, causing this to become an easy and a stereotypi-
cal model.
Conclusion
It is true that Tunisian women since the 1950s have had to fight to get the current
roles they play in modern society. The emancipation of women was achieved, and
today this issue is out of date to a certain degree. Society has obviously changed,
and some of the situations that were represented in the earlier movies are not
on the agenda any longer. But the Tunisian woman today continues to live in
the shadow of the pre-independence generation. However, subjects and films
like those of Haydée Chikly, Salma Baccar, Néjia Ben Mabrouk, Moufida Tlatli,
Kalthoum Bornaz and Raja Amari report on the destiny of all women who are
prisoners of their own silence. Today, Tunisian women are present among the new
generation of movie directors and screenwriters. The new generation of screen-
writers are now able to create their work after the January 2011 revolution.
References
Armes, R. 2005. Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film. USA: Indiana University
Press.
Baccar, S. 1994. ‘Les années folles de Habiba M’sika’, Ecrans d’Afrique, 8 (2).
Boughedir, F. 1998. ‘Le cinéma tunisien avant la Trace: une thématique féministe’, in
A. Gabous, Les femmes et le cinéma en Tunisie. Tunis: Cérès-éditions, pp.173–81.
Dönmez-Colin, G. 2007. The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East. Great Britain:
Wallflower Press.
Doumato, E. A., and M. P. Posusney. 2003. Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle East:
Gender, Economy and Society. USA: Lynne Rienner.
FESCAPO (L’Association des trois mondes). 2000. Les cinémas d’Afrique Dictionnaire. Paris:
Karthala-ATM.
Hillauer, R. 2005. Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers. Cairo: American University in
Cairo Press.
Khelil, H. 2007. Abécédaire du cinéma tunisien. Tunis: L’Harmattan.
Mansour, G. 2000. Samama Chikly un tunisien à la rencontre du XX siècle. Paris: Simpact
Editions.
Pallister, J. L., and R. A. Hottell. 2011. Noteworthy Francophone Women Directors. UK: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press.
Shafik, V. 1998. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. Cairo: American University in
Cairo Press.
Tamzali, H. 1992. Images retrouvées. Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l’Edition.
Tamzali, W. 1979. En attendant Omar Gatlato. Algiers: Editions EnAP.
Part II
Asia
China and Hong Kong
Cristina Colet, Jule Selbo and Jeremy B. Warner
Overview
Jule Selbo
The art of filmmaking was introduced to China with screenings by the French
Lumière brothers in Shanghai in 1896, less than one year after they debuted their
work in Paris. China’s film industry, centred in Shanghai, began to thrive over a
decade later, around 1906. Initially, Chinese cinema consisted mainly of static
filming of the Beijing Opera, where traditions of the Chinese operatic stage dic-
tated that men played the female parts.
The Chinese term ‘cai nu’, or ‘talented woman’, was not necessarily a compli-
ment in China in the early 1900s. ‘Traditional beliefs held that talent (cai) and
virtue (de) were incompatible in women and their combination would result in
a tragic fate (ming) because heaven disapproved’ (Berg 2013). Despite this belief,
literary works authored by women play an integral part throughout Chinese his-
tory. Female writers helped to bring forth topics such as romance, marriage, gen-
der roles and the politics surrounding women. The first women writers in China
were poets. In the early 1900s, a few feminist writers came to the foreground;
however, there is no record of any women involved in scenario-writing for early
Chinese cinema.
It was not until 1913 and the making of the Hong Kong short film Zhuangzi
Tests His Wife that the tradition of having all roles – male and female – played
by male actors was broken. The first female to perform on screen was Yan Shuji
(under the name Yan Shanshan); she was well educated and from a prominent
family. She became an actress and a political activist and is considered in Chinese
history as one of the early Chinese feminists. She appeared in a minor role as a
servant in Zhuangzi Tests His Wife – the lead female role in the film was played
by a male, director Li Minwei. Some historians point to the fact that the film
was made in Hong Kong (then under British rule) as a possible reason for this
liberalization and break with traditions and practices. It was not until the film
Yan Ruisheng, in 1921, that a woman would act in a film produced in mainland
China; Wang Caiyun (a former brothel inmate) portrayed the infamous high-class
courtesan Wang Lianying in a film detailing her scandalous murder.
55
The opportunities for female screenwriters came many decades later. In the
early 1980s, the ‘Fifth Generation’ filmmakers graduated from the newly reo-
pened Beijing Film Academy. This was on the heels of the Cultural Revolution and
women were among the students accepted into the Academy. The late 1980s and
post millennium period produced screenwriters who are making their mark in the
industry such as Joan Chen (Xui Xui: The Sent Down Girl, 1998); Bonnie Bo (Loess
Ballad); Lui Miaomiao (Chatterbox, 1993, co-writer); Joanne Cheng (c/o Butterfly,
2014); Huang Shuqin (A Soul Haunted by a Painting – 1994, co-written with Min
Anqi, Zhiya Li, Heng Lui – and Hi Frank! – 2004, co-written with Lili Gao, who
also scripted Da Yu Bing in 1986; Ann Hui (Romance of Book and Sword, 1986, co-
writer; The Opium War, 1997, co-writer; As Time Goes By, 1997; The Post Modern
Life of My Aunt, 2006, co-writer); Yin Lichuan (The Park, 2007; Knitting, 2008); Xu
Jinglei (My Father and I, 2003; Go Lala Go!, 2010, co-writer); Ma Liwen (You and
Me, 2005; Desires of the Heart, 2008); Li Yu (Fish and Elephant, 2001; Dam Street,
2005, co-written with Fang Li; Lost In Bejing, 2007, co-written with Fang Li; Double
Xposure, 2012, co-written with Fang Li); television writers Gao Xuan and Baoru
Ren (Wo de qing chun shei zuo shu, 2009; and Tong Hua, a novelist and television
writer (The Perfect Couple, 2013).
Three Chinese female screenwriters: Ai Xia, Zhang Ailing

and Peng Xiaolian
Cristina Colet
Ai Xia
Ai Xia (1912–34) was a Chinese writer, screenwriter and actress who died very
young, becoming a symbol for Chinese women’s emancipation. She lived in
a period of transformation for her country after the loss of many territories at
the end of the Opium Wars (1839–42; 1856–60) and the passage from imperial-
ism to republicanism (1911). The pressures exerted by Confucianism and the
patriarchal system on Chinese society were strong. It was the latter reason, in
particular, that meant many Chinese women couldn’t live freely or completely
express themselves. As Bryna Goodman argued (2005), female suicide in China
was a current phenomenon among women who held both to old-style traditions
and new hopes and expectations. Old-style women were those who conformed to
the Confucian ideal of lovely mother and caring wife (xianqi liangmu). New-style
women (like Ai Xia) were those who reflected the need for emancipation; young
intellectual women (but not only them) who were very influenced by Western
models. Often used by Chinese directors as a metaphor for China, women – and in
particular modern women – represented the condition of a country that needed to
change. Ai Xia represented the kind of modern intellectual who wanted to express
women’s need for modernity, not just in terms of fashion or Western customs, but
in their desire for emancipation from men (Sang 2008).
During the 1920s, a model woman who represented emancipation was Nora
from Ibsen’s masterpiece A Doll’s House (1879). Many writers tried to create female
characters inspired by Nora, creating a sort of literary movement: ‘Noraism’. Ai

Xia, who came from a middle-class family and studied at university, represented
this kind of model; like Nora she left an arranged marriage to move to Shanghai
looking for fame and emancipation. She entered the film industry, becoming
an actress, but also a screenwriter. In 1933 she wrote a book, Xiandai yi Nüxing/
A Woman of Today, and then she scripted it for a movie of the same name. She
also acted the main character, Tao Tao. The story focused on a young woman,
Tao Tao, who is emancipated and works as an employee for a firm, but when she
falls in love with a married man, her apparent freedom is compromised. After
being shocked when Tao Tao robs the firm of money to fund her new lifestyle,
her lover Yu Leng abandons her. Tao Tao is imprisoned. After this punishment she
understands that it’s important for her to change her life and to dedicate herself to
revolution. The critics of that time did not appreciate the movie because it inves-
tigated controversial topics like profligacy and revolution. Ai Xia argued, on the
contrary, that she had tried to express the condition of many women at that time
who were apparently emancipated but whose lives depended on men’s will. Tao
Tao, whose name means ‘grape’ and symbolizes a sexual sphere, was considered to
be a woman who stumbled between glamour and political causes and thus could
not be accepted. For Ai Xia, the lover Yu Leng (whose name means ‘individuality’)
represents man’s egoism, which crushes women’s freedom and emancipation.
After the film did not perform well, Ai Xia decided to commit suicide herself – as
a protest against left-wing intellectuals who sanctimoniously used female char-
acters in their works to talk about Chinese society in general, but who weren’t
really interested in women’s emancipation. When a woman tried to express a real
woman’s point of view, they tried to destroy her.
After her death the actress Ruan Lingyu (1910–35), who committed suicide in
1935, played Wei Ming in a movie inspired by Ai Xia’s work and life, New Woman
(Xin Nüxing, by Cai Chusheng, 1934). The character of Wei Ming is sort of ‘Ai Xia’s
alter ego’ and, at the end of the movie, she decides to commit suicide because
she is a victim of Chinese patriarchal society. Lu Xun (1881–1936), who is con-
sidered the father of Chinese contemporary literature, wrote an important essay
about the condition of women, commemorating both Ai Xia and Ruan Lingyu
as two symbolic victims of the cruel Chinese patriarchal society that smothered
individual freedom.
Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang): Influential Chinese writer

Zhang Ailing (1920–95) is a screenwriter known for narratives in the comedy
genre that explore women’s sophisticated perspectives on life. Often referred to as
Eileen Chang, she also wrote novels, short stories and essays.1 However, screen-
writing was her major pursuit beginning in 1947. Filmmaking became, for her,
an ‘alternative space for self-expression’ (Fu Poshek 1999) and also an occasion
to stand apart from political issues: ‘Political topics are rarely favored [in today’s
motion picture] because our private lives are already packed full of politics’ (Zhang
Ailing 1946). Chinese literary circles often commented that her stories were full of
decadent elements and were too oriented towards the West.
The purpose of this essay is to outline the guidelines in Zhang’s screenplays,

examining four in particular, also considering plots, kinds of narratives and recur-
ring themes, glancing at the audience’s response and possible repercussions on
Chinese society.
Zhang’s approach to the filmic environment was a way to express herself and
continue to examine topics and themes she investigated in other literary fields.
For example, she concentrated on the life of the female – examining topics such
as marriage and family and domestic conflicts. These topics were wisely matched
with those of Hollywood comedies and she adapted Chinese farce to occidental
comic standards.
In 1947, Zhang Ailing wrote two screenplays: a melodrama, Unending Love
(also known as Buliao Qing/Lingering Passion), and a comedy, Long Live the Wife
(also known as Taitai Wansui/Long live the Misses), both produced by Wenhua
Film Company,2 situated in Shanghai. The latter was a great box-office success;
however, critics and intellectuals labelled it a frivolous comedy not appropriate
for the historical period in which it took place (the Chinese Civil War, 1945–9).
Long Live the Wife tells a story about a wife, Chen Sizhen (Jiang Tianlu), betrayed
by her husband, Tang Zhiyuan (Zhang Fa), with a young, cunning and gold-
digging girl, Shi Mimi (Shangguan Yunzhu), who only cares for his money. In
fact, Tang Zhiyuan, an ambitious bank clerk and typical example of a Shanghai
petty urbanite, convinces his father-in-law to fund a business; soon Tang Zhiyuan
faces bankruptcy. It is revealed that Shi Mimi is also married and, in accord with
her vicious husband, wants to cheat Tang Zhiyuan. Chen Sizhen discovers her
husband’s betrayal and decides to leave him; the elements of farce are clear in the
crossing over of desires, intents and misunderstandings. Long Live the Wife under-
lines the crisis of the patriarchal authority and women’s attempts to emancipate
themselves. Zhang earned ‘a reputation for having a flair for women’s stories’.3 As
Zhang herself admitted, the plot of Long Live the Wife conforms to ‘wifely virtues,
philandering husbands and conflict between mothers and daughters-in- law’
(Zhang Ailing 1947). Zhang was able to match comic periods to tragic events,
allowing the audience to be entertained and, at the same time, to make the audi-
ence think about Chinese reality.
Zhang’s work was appreciated by leftist filmmaker Xia Yan; he wanted her to
join the Shanghai Screenwriters Production Guild of which he was the chief.
However, other members had some doubts about her background. Due to the
hostile mood of her colleagues, Zhang decided to move to Hong Kong in 1952.
From 1957 until 1964 she collaborated with MP&GI (Motion Pictures & General
Investment Co Ltd), later renamed Cathay. Thanks to friend and director Stephen
Soong, the MP&GI’s production chief, she was introduced to the scriptwriting
committees of the film company.4 She divided herself between Hong Kong and
the United States where she established herself in 1955 (and where she lived
until her death in 1995). Her work at Cathay/MP&GI was strongly influenced by
Hollywood productions,5 and in particular by screwball comedies. Zhang blended
elements from Hollywood comedies with typical elements of Chinese comedy,
like farce and stories of familial conflict. She focused on the Hong Kong audience
because in the People’s Republic of China her movies were banned. As film histo-
rian Ng pointed out, Zhang’s screenplays are an example of pioneering renovation
in the Chinese comedy of manners and in the satiric cinema of postwar Shanghai
(Ng 2008: 149). It’s true that, for Zhang, Shanghai represents an ‘ideal’ location;
this is where all of her stories (literary and filmic) take place, where the ‘sense of
desolation’ corrupts human hunger and frustration (Hsia 1999: 395). Hong Kong
represents a prosthesis of Shanghai, a middle place between Chinese-ness and the
Western way of life where it is possible to mix different cultures (because Hong
Kong itself, as a British protectorate, is a hybrid city); therefore it is also possible
to create a hybrid genre where Hollywood screwball comedy meets Chinese farce.
Zhang also mixed Chinese dialects (Mandarin and Cantonese) and, in essence,
created a unique language in her work.
Why does Zhang adopt Western elements like Hollywood influences? She
thought that reproducing stories that incarnated modern life was a way to renew
Chinese society, encouraging the Chinese audience to change its customs. Film
scholar Fu Poshek, in 2007, pointed out: ‘MP&GI’s Hollywood-style feature films
represented not only the culture of modernity but also the global domination
of American popular culture in postwar Asian societies’ (Ng 2008: 152). Zhang’s
sophisticated comedies, as in the cinematic tradition of late 1940s Shanghai, focus
on love, marriage and womanhood (Ng 2008: 149). Although she focused on the
woman’s condition and the necessity for the woman to emancipate herself, her
female characters weren’t heroic, they were common people. Zhang presented
these women realistically, without moral judgement. She adopted the screwball
comedy form to speak about women’s feelings and family relationships as ‘symp-
toms of bourgeois malaise’ (Ng 2008: 141). In particular, Zheng Shusen affirmed
that the comparison between screwball comedy and Zhang’s filmic work is due
to her tendency ‘to mock middle class (or very rich) families by exposing their
domestic conflicts and emotional entanglements from a slightly detached per-
spective’ (Zheng 1994: 77–8).
Also, the utopic idea of enchanting marriages was a common element explored
by Zhang. Nanbei Yijiaqin/The Greatest Wedding on Earth (1962), Qingchang ru
Zhanchang/The Battle of Love (1957), and Liu Yue Xinniang/June Bride (1960) are
some examples. The Greatest Wedding on Earth is part of a popular trilogy which
also includes The Greatest Love Affair on Earth (1964) and The Greatest Civil War on
Earth (1961), and all were enormous box-office success. They are romantic com-
edies about love and cultural differences, including conflicts between Northerners
(people from Shanghai who emigrated to Hong Kong, representing Mainland
China) and Southerners (people from Hong Kong who speak Cantonese); their
rivalry escalates as their customs and different dialects clash. It is for this reason
that these comedies are known as North-South comic dramas. Ng (2008: 153)
points out The Greatest Wedding on Earth is an example of Zhang’s cosmopolitan
vision ‘melded with the city’s capitalist character and colonial milieu’.6 This
blending of elements from different cultures to create a new culture is something
that is neither properly Chinese nor Western; it reflects Zhang’s condition as an
exiled writer. She came from Mainland China, but she is no longer an ‘authentic’
Chinese, because her Chinese-ness has been corrupted by Western influences.

Zhang succeeded in make this hybrid her signature.
Another Zhang film about marital conflicts is June Bride (1960); it is set in the tra-
dition of screwball comedies, focusing also on aspects like gender conflicts, social
change and class mobility. The opening scene on a boat indicates the emigration
of many Chinese from Mainland China to Hong Kong. Film scholar Stephen Teo
defines it as a ‘transient place’ which symbolizes Shanghaiers’ transient identity
with a sort of homesickness for the country that they left and a sense of disorien-
tation vis-à-vis integration processes and their future in a new town.
Considered one of Zhang’s best screenplays, June Bride is a hectic and roman-
tic comedy whose female main character, Wang Tanlin, is played by the famous
actress and singer Grace Chang (Ge Lan). Wang Tanlin goes to Hong Kong to
solve some problems with her fiancé and future husband, Tung Chifang (Zhang
Yang), because she thinks he betrayed her. Her doubts about her forthcoming mar-
riage, her consequent disappearance, a greedy father, and the groom’s erstwhile
mistress are all elements related to contemporary and psychological aspects of
Western narratives and also Asian society. Wang Tanlin’s dream sequence is an
example of women’s need to escape, like ‘a Nora’ from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in
order to achieve independence in love. The plot is similar to Zhang’s novel, Love
in a Fallen City, where the main character’s sense of desolation and frustration in
leaving Shanghai for Hong Kong is the dominating story. However, the movie
reflects Hong Kong’s modern life style with well-finished interior settings worthy
of a sophisticated Hollywood comedy and focuses on conflicts between parents
and daughters, sentimental confusion and gender conflicts.
In Battle of Love (1956), Zhang’s first script produced in Hong Kong, the beloved
actress Lin Dai (1934–64) is Ye Weifang, a rich young woman who amuses herself
by keeping her lovers on a string, weaving a sweetheart’s net. The Battle of Love
arises in the screwball comedy tradition, dealing with themes like the battle of the
sexes and gender conflicts. The sophisticated interior design doesn’t reflect the
reality of a typical upper-class family from Hong Kong, and perhaps it is meant
to symbolize falsehood, a theme which is presented in the movie and is another
way for the audience to approach the sophisticated comedy of the American film
industry,7 but nothing in this narrative relates to the ‘real life’ that characterized
Zhang’s previous screenplays. As in the tradition of the American screwball com-
edy, the female character is at the centre, with the male in the position of sub-
mission; it is the female who seduces, and leads the courtship. All these elements
have no relation to Chinese culture. For this reason, her work is ‘less Chinese’ and
less realistic, even if it can be seen as her hope for the future of Chinese women.
Peng Xiaolian: a female answer during Chinese economic reform

Peng Xiaolian (1953–) graduated in 1982 from the Beijing Film Academy and is
considered a member of the Chinese Fifth Generation of filmmakers. She differs
from her colleagues in her approach to form and narrative. Both director and
screenwriter, she is best known for her second work, Women’s Story (also known
as Three Women/Nüren de Gushi [1987]). In this film she follows three women who,
taking advantage of economic reforms (the introduction of semi-private produc-

tion), go to town to sell yarn. For each character, it is an occasion to change their
life and see something new. For the first woman the trip is a way to escape from
an arranged marriage; for the second woman it is a way to show the villagers that
women can sustain their own families; for the third woman it is a way to earn
money and find wives for her three brothers-in-law. In town, attitudes towards
patriarchal traditions like fixed marriages and one-child policy are very different
from those in the village. The movie is considered a pro-feminist work about
‘female consciousness and sisterhood in the age of mainland economic reform’
(Yingjin Zhang 1998: 265) and for this reason, it was subjected to censorship. Peng
had to rewrite it many times to get the authorization for production.
The tradition of focusing films from a female perspective began with the work
of Wang Ping (1916–90) and Dong Kena (1930–), with some important titles such
as The Story of Liubao Village/Liubao de Gushi (1957) and A Blade of Grass on the
Kunlun Mountains/Kunlun Shan Yi Ke Cao (1962). In these films, the female char-
acters were no longer simple objects of desire; they were also upholders of their
own desires. As Laura Mulvey argues (1975: 4), traditionally women are looked
at and displayed as sexual objects, becoming sort of leitmotifs of erotic spectacle.
In China, and particularly in its early movies, women were often the object of
attention, there purely to stimulate male interest. During the 1930s, many movies
with female subjects gained plaudits from the critics; but even if female subjects
were an oblique way of talking about China (using the allegory of the woman’s
condition), all these movies were directed and written from the male perspective.
This is the reason why the work of Dong Kena and Wang Ping was considered
very innovative, providing a breath of fresh air and opening the door for gender-
oriented movies.
In Women’s Story by Peng Xiaolian, we can find some elements of what Freud
called scopophilia, which Laura Mulvey was able to connect, in her essay about
narrative and visual pleasure, to cinema (1975: 2). Peng’s work is a clear (and
comic) way of reflecting on scopophilia and the male gaze. In particular, she tries
to highlight the attitude of the young girl who, after having split her trousers,
looks at her naked body with shame. Peng Xiaolian emphasizes that kind of gaze
because it is very different from the man’s scopophilic attitude when he looks at
the same object, the female naked body.
Even as the film deals with gender consciousness, its narrative structure and
style of representation are conventional and lack a feminine aesthetic. As Shuqin
Cui argues, in this movie ‘woman bears the weight of social, cultural, and politi-
cal meanings rather than the subject of herself’ (2003: 183). Although the movie
is told from a woman’s perspective we can’t define it as a feminist work. This is
because the style is very similar to that used by male colleagues, without introduc-
ing a real female voice. In China, indeed, the term ‘feminism’ is not common.
During the period of feminist activism that occurred in many areas of the world
in the 1960s, in China there was the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Women
embraced the communist cause, with its emphasis on ‘good for the whole com-
munity’ as opposed to individual freedom. For this reason, and because the
feminist cause came from the West, it was considered something related to the
middle classes and capitalism, and for this reason forbidden.
After six years spent in the United States, Peng Xiaolian returned to China in
1996, where she began to write her next movie Once Upon a Time in Shanghai/
Shanghai Jishi (1998) for the celebration of the liberation of China by the Chinese
communist army. The city of Shanghai became one of the main characters and
the work became a trilogy that evolved from 2002–6: Shanghai Women/Jia Zhuang
Mei Gan Jue (2002), Shanghai Story/Meili Shanghai (2004) and Shanghai Rumba/
Shanghai Lunba (2006). Shanghai is an allegory for the changing woman in this
economically-oriented and capitalistic China.
Hong Kong
Jeremy B. Warner
For decades, Hong Kong was the third-largest film industry in the world after the
United States and India. Production first started in 1896, when the Lumière Studio
filmed scenes of city life in Hong Kong. Two years later, Edison Studios continued
with the documentary tradition of the early filmmakers and produced shorts such
as Street Scene in Hong Kong (1898) (Leung, Wong and Ho 2002: 371). Westerners
would continue using Hong Kong as an exotic subject for documentary films and
the backdrop for narrative films. The first Chinese-directed narrative film, Tou
Shao Ya/Stealing Roasted Duck, was shot in 1909.
The birth of the Hong Kong Cinema came with the Huamei Studio (Wah-Mei
meaning China-America). The first film produced by the studio was filmed in
1913 and entitled Zhuangzi shi qi/Zhuangzi Tests His Wife. Li Minwei directed
the film and also played the part of the wife, cross-dressing roles being common
practice on the theatrical stage in China. However, breaking from the tradition of
women being banned from appearing on screen, Li Minwei’s wife, Yah Shanzhau,
played a servant girl in the film. According to Ching Yau in Filming Margins, the
first female director in Hong Kong was Chinese-American Xie Caizhen, underlin-
ing the ongoing themes of diaspora (Yau 2004: 13). Her first, and possibly only,
film was directed in the 1920s, but little information exists about her work. Film
continued to flourish after the introduction of the first Hong Kong studio until
the Great Strike of 1925–6 caused many studios to close their doors or relocate
until the mid-1930s.
Global economic depression put a damper on film production in the early
1930s and some filmmakers resisted the addition of sound to motion pictures.
Eventually, sound production caused the Hong Kong film industry to boom. In
addition, the Kuomintang government (KMT) in China banned the production of
films based upon martial arts or ghost stories, causing many filmmakers to flee to
Hong Kong to produce these stories.
Women were often strong, leading characters in Hong Kong films produced in
the 1930s. These stories often featured women warriors based on female generals,
such as Hua Mulan or Mu Guiying, or women swordsmen in the wuxia tradi-
tion (Stokes 2007: 472). Esther Eng (also known in the Mandarin language as
Wu Jinxia or in the Cantonese language Ng Kam-ha) was a female director who

was born in San Francisco, but directed films in Hong Kong in the late 1930s. Her
film It’s a Women’s World was the first Hong Kong film to feature an all-female
cast, portraying women working in thirty-six different professions (Taylor 2011:
17). No writing credits are available on her films; it is unclear whether Esther Eng
also served as writer or co-writer on these works. At the end of the thirties, the
Japanese occupation forced Chinese filmmakers to flee to Hong Kong, but in 1941
the invasion halted production in Hong Kong altogether.
During the invasion, the Japanese melted films to extract silver, thus only a
handful of films produced prior to the 1950s still exist. After World War II, a
number of small studios began to appear, but two prominent studios emerged
that would drive the mainstream cinema of the area. The Shaw Brothers Studio
and MP&GI were both based upon the Hollywood studios’ model of production,
producing mainly Mandarin-language films and originally rooted in Malaya and
Singapore. Shaw Brothers Studio established a production branch in Hong Kong
called Shaoshifuzi/Shaw and Sons Ltd during 1950. The studio produced and
distributed Hollywood-like costume dramas in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia.
Though these films had high budgets, the stories were often lacking in quality.
The following year, MP&GI established their production branch in Hong Kong,
focusing on films that had intelligent scripts, were artistic, and profitable.
Hong Kong cinema of the 1950s and 1960s continued to feature women in
prominent positions, as musicals and melodramas gave actresses top billing. These
stories, often dark, focused on the struggles of women, often in the familial roles
of wives, mothers, and daughters.
One of the most influential women in Asian cinema was Zhang Ailing/Cheung
Ying/Eileen Chang. Originally from the Hebei province, she studied in Hong Kong
before the war, but moved to Shanghai during the war to publish short stories and
screenplays. She returned to Hong Kong in 1952 where she met Song Qi/Stepen
Soong, a member of the MP&GI scriptwriting committee. In 1955, Song Qi brought
Zhang Ailing onto the committee to help choose scripts and shape the story style
of the company. Later that same year, she moved to the United States, but contin-
ued contributing to eight additional screenplays produced by MP&GI. One of these
screenplays, Ching Cheung yue chin cheung/Qingchang Ru Zhangchang/The Battle of
Love (1957), cast Li Jingfang/Helen Li Mei. Li Jingfang entered the industry as a
screenwriter, but after winning the Miss Hong Kong pageant she went into acting.
She founded the Beidou Film Company in 1956, where she produced and starred
in two films. Around the same time, another actress, Bai Guang/Baak Gwong/Pai
Kwong, wrote and directed The Fresh Peony (1956) for the Shaw Brothers.
Yi Ji Yam/Yi Zhi Ren was an actress in the late 1940s who shifted her talents
towards writing and directing in the mid-to-late 1950s. Her first writer credit was
on a romance film entitled Tian tian mi mi/Sweet as Honey (1959), and she would
continue to work with films focusing on relationships in both the comedy and
drama genres until 1967.
Qin Yifu/Nellie Chin Yu (1929–) was born in the Zhejiang province into a fam-
ily of academics. She performed in theatres while she studied at the University
of Hong Kong. Originally she was an actress in films like The 72 Martyrs of
Canton (1954). In 1957 she appeared in Ching cheung yue chin cheung/Qingchang
Ru Zhangchang/The Battle of Love (1957), written by Zhang Ailing/Cheung Ying/
Eileen Chang. In the 1950s Yifu translated novels and stage plays from English
into Chinese. She was hired as a screenwriting supervisor for MP&GI in 1956.
Two years later, she wrote Hung wa/Hong wa/Scarlet Doll for MP&GI, which was
the first colour feature film at the studio. Yifu’s films focused on strong char-
acterizations of women and their daily struggles. Yifu wrote two other features
before completing Yuk lui shut ching/Yunu siqing/Her Tender Heart (1959). This film
follows a young lady being raised by a single father as she is exposed to shocking
revelations, such as learning her aunt is her mother, and that her father is not her
father, and also that her father has lost a leg. Following Yuk lui shut ching/Yunu
siqing/Her Tender Heart, Yifu penned Yau mooi gwai ji luen/Yemeigui zhi lian/The
Wild, Wild Rose (1960). Based upon Bizet’s Carmen, the film takes place in Hong
Kong, where everyone is a refugee. Filmed in a film noir style, this musical follows
a female nightclub singer who ultimately gives her life to show other refugees
the way to happiness. Based upon the current political environment and fleeing
of many Chinese into Hong Kong, this film outlined the chaotic state and social
dislocation of the exile culture. It won the Best Screenplay prize at the Golden
Horse Awards. Sing sing Yuet leung Tai leung/Xing xing Yue liang Tai yang/Sun, Moon
and Star (1961) and Tai siu yan yuen/Ti xiao yin yuan/The Story of Three Loves (1964)
were adaptations of novels and would both receive Golden Horse Awards. So Siu
mooi/Su xiao mei/Wife of a Romantic Scholar (1964) is based on a popular novel
by Feng Menglong and the film was awarded Best Screenplay at the Asian Film
Festival.
Qin Yifu co-chaired MP&GI’s screenwriting committee with Yao Ke, and mem-
bers included Wang Liuzhao, Eileen Chang, Yi Wen/Evan Yang, and Tao Qin. This
provided the high quality of story structure that Loke Won Tho demanded, thus
giving a distinctive brand and style to the films produced by MP&GI. Yifu retired
in 1967 and moved to Canada.
The Hong Kong riots in 1967 jolted audiences into a fear of smaller left-wing
studios that conveyed social messages of communism. The political climate fol-
lowing the riots led to an industry void of creativity, similar to the Hong Kong
industry of the 1930s. Meanwhile, the studios continued to compete, flooding the
film market, and Cathay Studios became defunct in 1972.
The early 1970s are often considered a dismal time overall in the Hong Kong
film industry. Mandarin-language films imported from Taiwan became popular
and Hong Kong productions quickly diminished. Martial arts films, especially
ones featuring Bruce Lee, were the top earners at the Hong Kong box office.
There were few instances of Cantonese films outperforming Mandarin films, but
one exception was the work of Tang Shuxuan/Cecile Tang Shu Shuen (1941–).
She was a female writer/director who had studied in the States before returning
to Hong Kong to write and direct Dung foo yan/Dong fur en/The Arch (1969). This
film foreshadowed the themes of gender and generational identity that would
shortly become the topics of Hong Kong’s new wave filmmakers (Yau 2002: 80).
Shuxuan was born in Yunnan, but grew up in Hong Kong. She travelled to the
United States and studied at the University of California, Los Angeles. She directed
commercials until she wrote and directed her first feature, The Arch (1969). The
Arch, set during the Ming dynasty in China, follows a widowed woman working
as a teacher and doctor. The widow falls in love with a soldier in the small village
where she works. According to tradition, the widow is not allowed to marry the
soldier, and decides to marry her daughter to the soldier instead. Law Kar’s essay
‘The Significance of the Arch’, in A Comparative Study of Post-War Mandarin and
Cantonese Cinema: The Films of Zhu Shilin, Chun Kim and Other Directors, describes
the film as ‘starting a revolution, in spirit if not in practice … posing an uncom-
promising challenge to commercial cinema’, with the writer/director exploring
mental struggles through story and visual metaphors. The Arch (1969) won Most
Creative Special Prize at the 9th Golden Horse Film Awards.
In 1974, Tang Shuxuan wrote and directed China Behind, which follows
five Chinese students trying to leave China during the Cultural Revolution.
Preparation, illegally crossing the border, and failing to adapt to capitalism in
Hong Kong illustrate the psychological elements Tsang Shuxuan had explored
in The Arch. The film was banned by the Hong Kong colonial government until
1987, but was screened in France in 1974. The film never received a theatrical
release, but embodies many of the ideals that the future Hong Kong new wave
filmmakers would tackle.
Tang Shuxuan then teamed up with Jeanette Productions, a production com-
pany started by the actress Jeanette Lin Tsui. Tang Shuxuan wrote and directed Sup
Sap Bup Dup/Sap saam bat daap/Shisan buda (1975). This was a comedic-sketch film
exploring themes of capitalism and identity. Tang Shuxuan wrote and directed
Hong Kong Tycoon (1979), before leaving Hong Kong for Los Angeles to start a
restaurant. Tang Shuxuan struggled with the anomaly of being both female and
a filmmaker. In an interview in Chinese Students’ Weekly, Tang Shuxuan stated:
‘Whether you said I’m good-looking or not, I’d still not be happy. Because what
should be important is my work, my works, not myself, especially not my cos-
metics.’ As noted by Ching Yau in Filming Margins, ‘Tang Shu Shuen’s gender has
always been a prioritized element in the public discourse’ (Yau 2002: 80).
An actress for Shaw Brothers during the fifties and sixties, Kao Pao Shu/Go
Bo Shu eventually became an assistant director. She left Shaw Brothers in 1971,
opening her own company, Park Films, where she would write and direct motion
pictures. Another notable actress who became a screenwriter in Hong Kong during
the seventies is Xiao Liang/Josephine Siao Fong-Fong. Though she was born in
Shanghai, she moved to Hong Kong in 1974, where she wrote and co-directed a
film noir piece entitled Tiu fooi/Tiao hui/Jumping Ash (1976). Three years later, she
founded Hi-Pitch Film Company where she wrote, produced and starred in Lam A
Jan/ Lin Ya Zhen/Lam Ah Chun (1978). Another precursor of the Hong Kong new
wave, she would reprise the role of Lam Ah Chun in the 1982 John Woo film, Baat
choi Lam A Jan/Ba cai Lin Ya Zhen/Plain Jane to the Rescue (1982).
Hong Kong saw a major film movement happen during the late 1970s as film-
makers who claimed Hong Kong as their home returned from overseas study
to work at television stations in their homeland, and who after a few years
abandoned television to make feature films. Visual style, a change in structure,
and social consciousness were some of the elements that Hong Kong new wave
filmmakers brought to the table. The Extra (1978) marked the beginning of Hong
Kong’s new wave, but it was quickly followed by Ann Hui’s The Secret (1979), writ-
ten by Joyce Chan Wan Man. Ann Hui would also write and direct four of her
own features, as well as a documentary. Joyce Chan Wan Man would also collabo-
rate in writing efforts with several other new wave filmmakers. Sharon Hui was
a writer for Tsui Hark on The Lovers (1994) and Love in the Time of Twilight (1995)
before she broke away from the Hong Kong new wave to work for independ-
ent studios. Sandy Shaw Lai King started by writing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
(1983) and Gigolo and Whore (1990) before writing in a variety genres for different
studios. Cheung Ai-chai/Sylvia Ngai-ga Chang/Sylvia Chang was a Taiwanese-
born actress who moved to Hong Kong in 1979, and produced Ann Hui’s Fung gip/
Feng jie/The Secret. She started directing features two years later, and began writing
screenplays for her films starting with Sisters of the World Unite (1991).
In 1997, Hong Kong was transferred from the British to the Chinese. Chinese
filmmakers had been active since the nineteenth century but, starting with the
Hong Kong new wave, they were brought to the foreground (Lu 2002: 276). Mabel
Cheung Yueng Ting/Zhang Wan Ting/Mabel Cheung and her husband, Alex
Law, wrote and produced the Immigration Trilogy, consisting of Fai faat yee man/
Feifa yimin/The Illegal Immigrant (1985), Chau tin dik tung wa/Qiu tian de tong huo/
An Autumn’s Tale (An Autumn’s Fairy Tale) (1987), and Baat a gam/Ba ya jin/Eight
Tales of Gold (1989). Each of these films won major awards at various festivals.
Janet Chun Siu Jan/Chun Siu Jan/Janet Chin set her screenplay, Die Xue Jie
Tou/Bullet in the Head (1990) in Vietnam to portray the fortitude of characters in
a harsh environment, this being a metaphor for the Chinese diaspora. John Woo
directed the film, and she wrote his next project, Zong Heng Si Hai/Once a Thief
(1990). Later in her career, she started directing her own work. Law Cheuk Yu/
Clara Law Cheuk Yu/Clara Law is a writer/director emerging from the second
wave of the Hong Kong new wave. She and her life partner, Eddie Fong Ling
Chang/Eddie Fong, were nominated for Best Screenplay at the Golden Horse
Awards for Ru meng/Like a Dream (2009). Not only do these filmmakers tell stories
of the Chinese diaspora; many of them, such as Ann Hui, Law Cheuk Yu and John
Woo, have left Hong Kong to make films.
Modern-day Hong Kong cinema has continued to grow with the help of women.
The first, Chan Bo Wa/Chen Bao Hua/Ella Chan Bo Wa, started her career by
writing screenplays for low-budget crime films including Clarence Ford’s The
Dragon from Russia (1990) before shifting to romance, collaborating with Ivy Ho
Sai Hong and Aubrey Lam Oi Wah on The Age of Miracles (1996). Aubrey Lam Oi
Wah entered the union, United Filmmakers Organization (UFO), as a screenwriter
and has worked closely with The Age of Miracles’ director, Peter Chan, for most
of her career. Her writing colleague, Ivy Ho Sai Hong, wrote July Rhapsody (2002)
for Ann Hui, and has continued to pen scripts mainly in the romance genre. She
has been nominated for four Hong Kong Film Awards Best Screenplay prizes, and
won twice. Chan Suk-Yin/Susan Chan Suk-Yin was nominated twice for Best
Screenplay at the Hong Kong Film Awards before winning in 2012 for A Simple
Life (2012). Another notable person is Hong Kong media personality Cheuk Wan
Chi/Chi See Goo Bi/Vincci Cheuk Wan Chi who worked in radio and television
before she began screenwriting in 1999 with Cross Harbor. She wrote three more
feature films and five short films before venturing into directing. Hei-yan Heiward
Mak graduated from the City University of Hong Kong and was hired to work
alongside Aubrey Lam Oi Wah to write for Peter Chan. Hei-yan Heiward Mak writes
and directs dramas dealing with the subject of the diaspora, focusing her stories
on younger subjects. Chun Chun Barbara Wong is another writer/director deal-
ing with the topic of young women in society, but her films, such as Truth or Dare
(2006), take a comedic approach. Chi Long To/Christine To started writing in the
crime genre with Jiang Hu/Triad Underworld (2004). Her second film was an action
thriller, Fearless (2006), and starred Jet Li. She recently finished writing Rise of the
Legend, which is being directed by her frequent collaborator, Chow Hin Yeung Roy.
Though men controlled a vast part of the cinema in Hong Kong, women have
maintained a strong presence. Far fewer in numbers than men, women have
played many important roles as producers, directors and board members through-
out the history of Hong Kong cinema. Ann Hui has become something of an icon
through the thirty-plus films she has created, influencing a larger group of women
to enter the film industry. In the last two decades, the number of awards and
nominations given to female filmmakers has risen, showing the growing presence
of women in Hong Kong cinema.
Notes
1. The comic genre that Zhang Ailing preferred was not appreciated in some intellectual
circles. Fu Lei (an important literary critic and french translator), for example, accused her
novels of being too cinematic and spatial, lacking in psychological depth. See: Xun Yu (Fu
Lei), 1944, ‘Lun Zhang Ailing de xiaoshuo’ (‘On Zhang Ailing’s Fiction’), in Chen Zishan
(ed.), 2004, Zhang Ailing de fengqi: 1949 nianqian Zhang Ailing pinshuo (The Fashion of Zhang
Ailing: Commentaries on Zhang Ailing before 1949), Shandong huabao, Jinan, pp. 3–18.
2. Wenhua Film Company was a major, founded in 1946 by Wu Xingzai, which produced
smaller-budget art films, sophisticated comedies and high-minded dramas.
3. Kenny K. K. Ng, 2008, ‘The Screenwriter as Cultural Broker: Travels of Zhang Ailing’s
Comedy of Love’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 20 (2), p. 132. Some scholars such
as Jiao Xiongping and Rao Shuguang have examined Long Live the Wife as a screwball
comedy. See: Jiao Xiongping, 1998, Shidai xianying: Zhong Xi dianying lunshu (Reflection on
a Era: Discourses on Cinema in China and West), Yuanliu, Taipei, pp. 81–8; Rao Shuguang,
2005, Zhongguo xiju dianying shi (A History of Chinese Comic Cinema), Zhongguo dianying,
Beijing, pp. 116–19.
4. This team also included other writers who came from Shanghai, like Yao Xinnong,
Sun Jinsan, and Song Zhiqi. Zhang Ailing wrote more than ten screenplays for MP&GI,
mostly comedies with melodramatic and farcical elements. During the 1950s and 60s,
Cathay/MP&GI was the main rival to Shaw Brothers with a similar studio system, and
also a similar star system. Founded in Singapore in 1947 by Loke Wan Tho (1915–64),
in 1956 he established a Cathay studio, also in Hong Kong (where he bought out the
bankrupt Motion Picture Studio, relaunching it as MP&GI/Cathay), to produce Chinese-
language movies (Mandarin and Cantonese).
5. As her brother pointed out, Zhang Ailing was a great film fan, in particular of Hollywood
cinema, and moviegoing was one of her favourite pastimes during her first years in the
United States. See: Zhang Zijing, 1996, Wo de jiejie Zhang Ailing (My Sister Zhang Ailing),
Shibao Wenhua, Taipei, pp. 117–19; Sima Xin, 1996, Zhang Ailing zai Meiguo: hunyin yu
wannian (Zhang Ailing in America: Her Marital and Later Life), Shanghai Wenyi, Shanghai,
pp. 90–1.
6. This screenplay is a rewrite of the popular farce Charley’s Aunt by Brandon Thomas. It’s
very difficult to consult Zhang’s screenplay because all MP&GI screenplays are owned
by an affiliate company and, for this reason, there are some restrictions in reproducing
these materials (even for academic purposes). This doesn’t allow all her productions to
be examined in depth.
7. This screenplay is inspired by another one, The Tender Trap (1954), by Max Schulman and
Robert Paul Smith, and for this reason it has the typical air of a sophisticated screwball
comedy, and is not typically Chinese.
References
Berg, Dania. 2013. Women Writers and the Literary World in Early Modern China. UK and USA:
Routledge.
Cui, Shuqin. 2003. Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Fu Poshek. 1999. ‘Eileen Chang, Woman’s Film and Domestic Culture of Modern Shanghai’,
Tamkang Review, 29 (4): 13.
Goodman, Bryna. 2005. ‘The New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory,
and the New Republic’, Journal of Asian Studies, 64 (1): 67–101.
Hsia, C. T. 1999. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 3rd edition. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Leung, P., Wong, A., and Ho, S. 2002. ‘Elegant Trails of the Quill: A Preliminary Study of
Scripts by Nellie Chin Yu’, in The Cathay Story. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive.
Lu, Sheldon. 2002. ‘Filming Diaspora and Identity: Hong Kong and 1997’, in P. Fu and
D. Desser (eds) The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (3): 2, 4.
Ng, Kenny K. K. 2008. ‘The Screenwriter as Cultural Broker: Travels of Zhang Ailing’s
Comedy of Love’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 20 (2): 132.
Sang, Tze-lan D. 2008. ‘Failed Modern Girls in Early Twentieth-Century China’, in Doris
Croissant, Catherine Vance Yeh, and Joshua S. Mostow (eds) Performing ‘Nation’. Gender
Politics in Literature, Theater, and the Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880–1940. Leiden:
Brill.
Stokes, L. O. 2007. Historical Dictionary of Hong Kong Cinema. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Taylor, Kate E. 2011. On East Asian Filmmakers. USA: Columbia University Press.
Yau, C. 2002. ‘The (Im)possibility of an Institutional Critique: A Study of “China Behind”’,
Spectator – The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, 22 (1): 80–97.
Yau, C. 2004. Filming Margins: Tang Shu Shuen, A Forgotten Hong Kong Woman Director. Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
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Publishing Co.
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Century Publishing Co.
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Taipei, pp. 77–8.
India
Alexis Krasilovsky, Debashree Mukherjee,
Jule Selbo and Anubha Yadav
Introduction
Jule Selbo
The Lumière brothers, French inventors and cinema pioneers, introduced their
film technology to a British-held India in July 1896 and ignited an interest in an
art and industry that continues to thrive. The first full-length film produced in
India was, according to most sources, Pundalik (1912, directed by R. G. Torne and
P. R. Tipnis); the narrative was based on a play by Ramrao Kirtikar. There is not much
information on the film except that its content explored Indian myths and the
life of a Hindu saint. Historical research on Dadshaheb Phalke’s 1913 film, Raja
Harishchandra, gives us a clearer picture of filmmaking in India, and the initial
challenges facing women entering the industry. Phalke wanted to go against the
tradition of males playing female roles; he wanted to find a young woman who
could take on the role of the female lead. However, no woman, even among the
prostitutes, courtesans and dancing girls he approached, was willing to do it, for
facing the camera was akin to laying oneself bare in a public square. Finally, one
night in a restaurant, Phalke found his heroine, an impressive womanly beauty,
working in the kitchen in a lowly position. Phalke made a monetary offer that
was promptly accepted by the worker. Phalke’s film provided India with its first
film heroine, Anna Salunke – in reality, however, ‘Anna’ was a young, slight male
actor who portrayed the female convincingly onscreen (in multiple films) until he
matured and his physique became more masculine. It was nearly a decade before
a female made her mark on the Indian film industry.
Fatma Begum
Film scholar Debashree Mukherjee (see essay in this chapter) has explored the
work of the earliest female screenwriters in India, noting that very little informa-
tion exists on the early decades of film in India and, specifically, details about
female film professionals. This absence is partly due to the fact that the film indus-
try (especially in Bombay) was not rigidly organized with clear specializations and
departments. As in America and other nations, those working on films – in front
of or behind the camera – multitasked, and onscreen credits were inconsistent.
69
However, there are clues and hints available in sources like fanzines, autobiogra-
phies and publicity materials that reveal perhaps the first female actress to appear
on the screen in an Indian film did so just before or in the early 1920s and that
there were women screenwriters in the early Bombay film industry. One of the
earliest Indian females who made a name for herself as an actress, producer and
screenwriter was Fatma Begum (1892–1983) who debuted in Ardeshir Irani’s silent
film Veer Abhimanya in 1922. Many sources note that Fatma Begum was married
to Nawab (viceroy) Sidi Ibrahim Muhammad; however there are no actual records
supporting this and no documents of the Nawab claiming paternity of any of her
children. She began her career as an Urdu stage actress and moved to film. After
her film acting debut, she was soon writing and producing her own films and then
opened her own studio in 1926. When the Nawab objected to her career, they
separated and she continued to make films – and raise their children who went
on to become Indian film stars themselves.
The film industry today

The film industry of today in India is divided into various cinematic cultures –
all stem from different regions of the country. These include Mumbai City’s
Hindi-language cinema (popularly referred to as Bollywood), and other promi-
nent regional-language industries located in the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala,
West Bengal, Bihar and Maharashtra. While many films are made in the official
language of the country – Hindi – others are made in Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati,
Marathi, Malayalam, Bhojpuri and Assamese or other languages. More than 1,000
commercial films are distributed each year, with revenue nearing two billion dol-
lars, making India one of the top film-producing nations of the world. Female
screenwriters in India in the most recent decades include Kalpana Lajmi, whose
credits as a screenwriter/director include Ek Pal (1986), Rudaali (1993), Damon: A
Victim of Marital Violence (2001) and Chingaari (2006). Screenwriter and actress
Aparna Sen (1945–) has received eight National Film Awards; her credits include
36 Chowringhee Lane (1981, winner of the National Film Award for Best Director
and for Best Feature in English), Paroma (1984), Yugant (1995, winner of the
National Film Award for Best Feature in Bengali), 15 Park Avenue (2005, winner of
the National Film Award for Best Feature in English), and Goynar Baksho (2013).
Screenwriters of Indian heritage working in Canada, the United Kingdom, the
United States or other nations include Deepa Mehta, Pratibha Parmar, Gurinder
Chadha, Nisha Ganatra, Sonali Gulati, Eisha Marjara and Shashwati Talukdar.
Jaddan Bai and early Indian cinema
Debashree Mukherjee
Historical accounts of women’s film work in late colonial South Asia (1920s–1940s)
are rare and the common understanding is that, apart from actresses and extras,
there were no female film professionals in the subcontinent’s many film indus-
tries.1 In this essay I discuss the work and significance of one of these ‘not there’
professionals – Jaddan Bai. I use a mix of cultural biography and textual analysis
India 71
to construct a story of her screenwriting career. Through her particular story I raise
some larger questions about how we might turn to print materials in the face of
absent film archives, the social position of female film professionals in Bombay,
and the transnational movement of film genres and their appropriation and resig-
nification in the Indian context.
Writing about screenwriting as a specific type of work inadvertently contributes
to some ontological and methodological questions. First, it brings into sharp focus
the range of charged discussions around film as text and cinematic authorship
that have taken place in film studies through its brief history.2 On a material
level the film script is indeed text, ink on paper. And yet, the object of study
eludes grasp because screenwriting constitutes a range of paper-based technolo-
gies that include synopses, step outlines, screenplays with dialogue, shooting
scripts with shot breakdowns, continuity scripts and so on. To complicate mat-
ters further, what does one do when both the celluloid film object as well as the
screenplay are absent? This essay has been written in the absence of both these
primary sources, marshalling instead certain extra-filmic or secondary sources
such as publicity booklets, song booklets, film reviews and interviews to recon-
struct the lost films. This set of materials comprises a parallel written universe
that dispersed the promises and pleasures of a film contemporaneously. Through
this essay I try to demonstrate that these written documents also constitute the
horizon of experience, sensation, and subjectivity that makes for cinema.
In Hollywood’s silent years, scenario writing initially meant the barest of step
outlines. The emergence of the continuity script led to an altered understanding
of the screenplay as a complex technology produced by professionals. With the
arrival of sound, new profiles like dialogue writers and, in the Indian case, dialect
coaches and lyric writers were created. Unfortunately, there is a near total absence
of studio records or production files for the silent and early talkie years in South
Asia. Thus, it is very difficult to trace a history of screenwriting practices as they
change and expand during these decades. Nevertheless, through film journals and
fanzines it appears that the lack of adequate and good-quality screenplays was one
of the major problems facing the Bombay film industry in the 1930s. For example,
here is a typically disparaging opinion from the time:
A better picture is only possible with a better story. With all the technique
in the world, a poor and lame story cannot be dressed into a big show … In
India, scenarios are written by Munshis, fakirs and street minstrels. With the
exception of three or four good scenario writers, we have no men for this job.
( Judas 1937: 11).
Written in 1937, this lament comes a full six years after India’s first Hindustani talkie
film was released (Alam Ara, 1931) and the work of the screenwriter had considerably
transformed. If there were ‘no men for this job’, perhaps there were women?
I ask this question as one who is familiar with feminist film historiographical
work that has emerged from the United States and Britain since the 1990s. This sig-
nificant archaeological work indicates that women writers were a prominent and
socially acknowledged presence in the silent and early talkie era (see Beauchamp
1997, Muscio 2010, Acker 1991, Francke 1994, McCreadie 1994, McDonald 2011).
For the period 1910–27, Wendy Holliday asserts that ‘the popular image of the
scenario writer, especially the amateur, was almost always female … The most
common portrayal of the successful amateur writer was that of the housewife who
made good in her spare time’ (Holliday 1995: 100–1). There was a ‘subtle, femi-
nine sex-typing of screenwriting’ (Holliday 1995: 119) which is unsurprising given
Ally Acker’s claim that ‘From the end of the century to the mid-1920s, women
outnumbered men in the screen writing trade ten to one’ (1991: 155). However,
there are sharp archival as well as experiential differences between the Indian
context and these newly written histories of the West.
Very little information exists on the early decades of film in India and histories
of female film professionals are rare. The consensus seems to be that there simply
were no women working in the Bombay film industry except in the capacity of
actresses, dancers or junior artistes. Many practitioners from that era, women as
well as men, corroborate this view.3 However, preliminary evidence suggests that
female film producers, directors, screenwriters, music composers, costume design-
ers, and even art directors appeared on the scene in the first decades of South
Asian cinema (1910s–1940s), albeit occasionally. Several factors, both historio-
graphical and contextual, have led to the invisibility of these women from public
memory and official history.
First, there is the sheer paucity of archival documentation and evidence.
Nearly 2,200 talkie films were produced in Bombay alone between 1931 and
1950 (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy: 294) and less than 10 per cent of these films
are available for viewing at the National Film Archive of India.4 From the silent
era there is barely a handful of surviving prints. As I mentioned earlier, there are
no studio records or production notes from this period.5 The evidentiary mate-
rial that is available is mostly extra-filmic and includes secondary sources such
as publicity material, autobiographies, film magazines, newspaper reviews, and
government reports. Irrespective of their sex, it is difficult to find credits for film
technicians who were not at the top of the work chain. Second, the early film
industry in Bombay (up until the mid-1930s) was not yet rigidly organized with
clear specializations and departments. Studio employees routinely multitasked,
often without official onscreen credit. Feminist historiography in such a context
has to contend with anecdotal accounts of actresses designing costumes, washing
film negatives, and determining set design (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 18;
Mukherjee 2013: 26).
However, nowhere is the contextual contrast between ‘East’ and ‘West’ so
stark as in the case of women screenwriters. While there were sporadic cases of
women wielding the pen in the late colonial Bombay film industry, it appears
that the female screenwriter did not exist as a socially distinct or profession-
ally plausible category. The women I discuss in this essay have likely never
been written about as screenwriters. This is partly because screenwriters such as
Fatma Begum, Jaddan Bai, Enakshi Rama Rau, Frene Talyarkhan, Snehaprabha
Pradhan, Protima Dasgupta and Ismat Chughtai primarily identified themselves
India 73
as producers, directors, actresses, or literary writers. Jaddan Bai’s screenwriting

credits are available to us mainly because she also directed and produced her
own films. The other difficulty has been that women’s screenwriting careers were
either short-lived (often limited to 1–2 films) or an extension of their ‘primary’
work profile. Therefore, screenwriting work often became an uncredited facet
of the role of a producer-actress or was dismissed by contemporary media as a
foolish hobby.6 Feminist film historians across the world have come up against
this stumbling block – the uncredited or unacknowledged work contributions of
women. However, to return to the particularity of the Indian situation, I must
emphasize that, far from being perceived as ‘women’s work’, as has been suggested
in the early Hollywood context, screenwriting in Bombay, like most other tasks in
a studio, was considered to be a man’s job.
Given the absence of direct evidentiary sources such as films, screenplays, or
autobiographies, I have used sources such as song booklets, biographies, inter-
views, film reviews, photographs, and industry almanacs to reconstruct these his-
tories. The most comprehensive and valuable resource in the writing of this essay
has been the now-obsolete song booklet. This humble document was essentially
a slim publicity pamphlet that carried miniaturized versions of the film poster on
the cover, complete cast and crew credits, the film’s synopsis, production stills,
and the lyrics of the songs. Most song booklets carried this information in two or
more languages and scripts in order to cater to the multiple linguistic competen-
cies of Bombay cinema’s reading publics. We do not have definitive histories of
song booklet circulation and reception but they were certainly sold on occasion
as they sometimes carry a printed price. In the 1930s these booklets carried elabo-
rate synopses often peppered with key dialogues, in a format that is akin to what
is called the ‘film treatment’ within the Bombay film industry today. These vivid
narratives enable a present-day historian to reimagine the lost films in remarkable
detail. Thus, I analyse a range of satellite texts around the film object to open out
Jaddan Bai’s creative oeuvre. As film scholar Vicki Callahan reminds us, ‘the his-
tory that we present as feminists always implies a kind of reclaiming, rewriting,
and re-contextualization of materials’ (2010: 5). This is an effort at active histori-
cal reconstruction, joining together fragile pieces of a puzzle to create a sense of
a life and a career.
Screenwriting and feminist rewriting: the lost films of Jaddan Bai

(1892–1949):7 singer, actress, producer, director, screenwriter, composer
Directed and produced by a woman and that woman the author of the story
and script, the writer of the music and songs, as well as the singer, and to
crown it all, the star of the picture, Madame Fashion, at the Imperial Talkies,
Lamington Road, has an irresistible claim upon the attention and sympathy of
Bombay’s film fans … India’s only woman director and producer, and one of
the country’s famous songstresses ...’ (Times of India 1936: 7)
By the time Jaddan Bai died, in 1949, she had become a veritable institution of the
Bombay film industry. Legendary was her imperious manner, her ability to settle
complex personal and professional industry disputes, her generous open kitchen,
her penchant for colourful language, and the high premium placed on her advice
and introductions (see Desai 2007, George 2004). Jaddan Bai had achieved this
level of fame in the film industry within a short span of 16 years. Her film career
began in 1933 as an actress and she soon went on to produce, direct, and write her
own films. Her screenwriting credits include Talash-e-Haq (Search for Truth, 1935),
Hridaya Manthan (Call of the Soul, 1936), Madam Fashion (1936), Jeevan Swapna
(Journey’s End, 1937), Moti Ka Haar (Pearl Necklace, 1937), Anjuman (Audience,
1948), and Darogaji (Mister Inspector, 1949).
Jaddan Bai was born in 1892 in the historic city of Allahabad in northern India.
Her mother, whose own remarkable life story cannot be discussed here, was a
professional singer of the tawaif or courtesan tradition (see Desai 2007). Jaddan
was trained in classical Hindustani music and nurtured a passion for poetry. The
tawaifs (courtesans) of Allahabad, Lucknow, Calcutta, and Lahore were usually
well read and expertly trained in the performing arts. It was a matrilineal profes-
sion, with mothers passing on their knowledge to daughters who were groomed
from an early age to become singers and dancers. These women survived on
patronage from the aristocratic class and were invited to perform concerts at the
private and public gatherings of North India’s last remaining royalty. It is note-
worthy that, in the nineteenth century, tawaifs were perhaps the only women
who owned property and paid taxes (see Oldenburg 1990). While many were
sexually exploited by patrons, mentors, or relatives, many others also enjoyed
a kind of brazen sexual freedom unheard of at the time. These factors led to a
contradictory play between professional fame and social notoriety, a conflict that
doggedly shadows Jaddan Bai’s screenplays. In Jaddan Bai’s lifetime, the courtly
system of patronage went through serious decline and a prescient few gaanewalis
(professional singers) turned to new avenues of sustenance like the gramophone
and radio. Jaddan Bai did one better. She chose the cinema.
In her early teens Jaddan moved from Allahabad to Calcutta where she would
have a better choice of gurus (teachers) and a larger audience to appreciate her
talents. She achieved fair acclaim as a singer in the new city and at one of her
concerts met Uttamchand Mohanchand, a wealthy Brahmin from Rawalpindi
who was on his way to England to study medicine, that is, until he got sidetracked
by Jaddan Bai. The fact that she already had two sons from previous liaisons did
not deter him and the two married despite stiff opposition from his parents. In
1925, with Mohanchand, she had a third child – a girl named Fatima Rashid.
Mohanchand was devoted to his wife but, as he was not equipped for any special-
ized profession, he remained dependent on her for financial support. Jaddan Bai
was thus the primary breadwinner for a family of five.
In Calcutta, Mohanchand was not the only man impressed by Jaddan Bai. A
Lahore-based film producer, Hakim Ramparshad, was charmed by her singing and
offered her a role in a forthcoming film.8 Jaddan Bai joined Playart Phototone in
1932 and her first film as an actress was 1933’s Raja Gopichand. If the birth date
of 1892 is accurate, Jaddan Bai would have been forty years old when she acted
in her first film. By any standard, forty was an advanced age for a lead acting
India 75
debut and many reviewers commented on this in the years to come.9 We must
remember, however, that this was 1932, barely a year after the subcontinent’s first
‘all singing all talking’ feature film, Alam Ara (1931), was released. Many beautiful
and accomplished actresses of the silent screen had been forced to retire because
of a poor singing voice, or inability to speak in Hindi-Urdu. Jaddan Bai was a
renowned singer trained in the Hindustani classical tradition and, moreover, she
was proficient in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and Persian (Hussain 1932: 10). Hired not for
youth but for her voice and diction, she was cast in her debut film as the mother of
the title character, Raja Gopichand (Oberai 1933, cited in Desai 2007: 33).
It is a measure of Jaddan Bai’s ambition and courage that in 1933 she gave up
established fame and riches in Calcutta and relocated to Bombay with the radi-
cal plan of becoming a film producer. An apartment on posh Marine Drive was
rented and, according to Kishwar Desai, Jaddan Bai proceeded to contact old
patrons ‘who had appreciated her performance in earlier days, and perhaps could
sponsor her next project’ (Desai 2007: 37–8). In the interim she took up a couple
of acting offers in Bombay. Bombay city had emerged as the leading metropolis of
the subcontinent, a cosmopolitan port city that hosted the heady confluence of
anti-imperialist politics, finance, and entertainment. Bombay’s film industry was
also poised to outstrip all the other regional film production centres as Bombay’s
studios chose to make films in Hindi-Urdu, which had a far wider audience reach
than languages such as Bengali (Calcutta), Punjabi (Lahore), and Tamil (Madras).
Jaddan Bai launched her own film production company, Sangeet Movietone, in
1934.10 The song booklet for the company’s first feature film, Talash-e-Haq/Search
for Truth (1935), credits her for ‘Story, Dialogues and Music Direction’, potentially
making Jaddan Bai the first female music composer of the Bombay film industry.11
Jaddan Bai also cast two of her children, Anwar Hussain and Fatima Rashid, in this
film. Fatima, about five years old at the time, had already been ‘launched’ under
the screen name ‘Baby Rani’ in the 1934 film Naachwali, a film that had also fea-
tured Jaddan Bai. Mother and daughter now started a professional collaboration
that would reap rich future dividends as Baby Rani would one day become one of
Hindi cinema’s most beloved superstars and an icon of respectability.
It is worth quoting Jaddan Bai’s prefatory remarks in the Search for Truth song
booklet at some length. This is the closest we might ever get to hearing her own
thoughts, reproduced in the original English version:
The soul is not an abstract figure of speech – it is as positive an actuality as the

body and the intention with which I have written the story of Talash-e-Haq or
Search for Truth – my first production – is based on my earnest desire to rouse
some few of my fellow creatures out of the strange torpor and spiritual lethargy
in which they lie, not feeling the terrible responsibility to possess that ‘Vital
spark of Heavenly Flame’, the direct gift of the Creator. Every mean desire,
every sensual craving – withers the delicate essence of the soul, the only thing
we possess of pure Godhead in us and whose nature is to shrink from the very
contact of evil. It springs to life and grows with every effort towards betterness. …
The person who lives in a dark and dismal cave has no right to complain that the
sun is not shining. The sun shines only for those who step out into the sun-
light. Life is full of good if we look for it. (Search for Truth song booklet, 1935: 1)
Such a mode of direct address must constitute a thrilling moment for the film
historian who suddenly has unprecedented access to the first-person voice of a
forgotten technician. However, despite its promises of unmediated ‘intentionality’
this preface is still a kind of public performance, a posturing that leads us from the
text to the ideological contexts of its production.
Throughout her authorial career, Jaddan Bai recurrently performed the pious
morality evident in this passage. In this first film, she created a heroine named
Feeroza, a ‘very popular stage actress’ but ‘her private life was the life of vice.’
(Search for Truth: 1). Feeroza has been introduced to ‘this profession of prostitu-
tion’ by her uncle, Subhan Khan, and she is responsible for the ruination of many
an impressionable young man. The synopsis outlines two incidents that establish
Feeroza as the fount of all evil. First, an admirer called Shaukat is driven to steal-
ing from his own father in order to satisfy Feeroza’s lust for jewels. A widower,
he even mistreats his little daughter (played by Baby Rani) when she pleads with
him to spend time at home. One day, he arrives at Feeroza’s residence to find her
in the arms of another man and is completely broken. An outcast from his fam-
ily, Shaukat decides to become a ‘highway robber’ (Search for Truth: 2). The second
incident involves a man called Salim who is besotted with Feeroza. Unable to gain
her affections he shoots himself outside her house. Feeroza is terribly affected by
these tragic incidents and her ‘moral metamorphosis begins at this stage’. She sets
off on a ‘Search for Truth’ (Search for Truth: 3).
Writer and columnist Kishwar Desai has noted that Jaddan Bai’s ‘stories were
usually morality tales and they voiced “Bai” Jaddanbai’s concern about a society
rapidly degenerating due to “Western” influences.’ Further, Desai suggests that,
with films like Search for Truth, Madam Fashion, and Call of the Soul, Jaddan Bai
was consciously participating in a nationalist discourse: ‘[These films] also served
as a veiled gesture of support for swadeshi values.12 Perhaps it was the only way
in which filmmakers of the period could fight a subversive war against British
colonialism and censorship’ (Desai 2007: 38).
Desai’s hypothesis seems plausible but assumes too much. Yes, the synopses of
Jaddan Bai’s first three films are structured as morality plays. Nevertheless, tradi-
tion and modernity, or even ‘East’ and ‘West’, are treated as complex configura-
tions with shifting values. As I will discuss in the following sections, the dramatic
conflict in these films pivots on the question of the heroine’s moral virtue as it is
tested by artificial social parameters. ‘Society’ is a major protagonist in these films
but does not necessarily equate to ‘Western influences’. In her own private life,
Jaddan Bai was able to embrace elements of swadeshi as well as Western culture.
A publicity piece published in 1932, on the eve of Jaddan Bai’s film acting debut,
deliberately flaunts this ease of navigation:
She [ Jaddan Bai] is not only well educated in Urdu, Arabic and Persian, but
can also converse fluently in Hindi and Bengali. Socially, therefore, she is quite
India 77
cultured. Her hobby is the study of classical poetry, writing verses and compos-
ing her own Gazals. In sports, Jaddan Bai is fond of swimming, motoring and
tennis. (Hussain 1932: 10)
This biographical sketch strives to highlight her cultivated charms and the spe-
cialized skills that heightened her social status. Among these are fashionable
‘Western’ pursuits like swimming, motoring, and tennis, which are given as much
prominence as her ‘swadeshi’ literary interests.
The overt ‘concern’ about a depraved society had particular undertones that
derive much of their significance from Jaddan Bai’s biography. Jaddan Bai’s pro-
fessional status in her early musical career and the last years of her life presents
a picture of fame and solid repute. However, in this middle period when she first
entered the film industry, she must have struggled hard to rid herself of the tawaif
tag. It is critical to note how closely this melodramatic narrative conformed to
official as well as everyday social discourse about tawaifs and female performers.
The celebrated Urdu writer Sa’adat Hasan Manto has narrated an incident wherein
a ‘respectable’ female relative, speaking to Jaddan Bai herself, unknowingly rues
the entire courtesan class.
Apa Saadat was in her element: ‘God protect us from these women. Whosoever
falls into their clutches is lost both to this world and the next. You can say
goodbye to your money, your health and your good name if you get ensnared
by these creatures. The biggest curse in the world, if you ask me, are these cour-
tesans and prostitutes.’ My wife and I were severely embarrassed and did not
know how to stop Apa Saadat. (Manto 2008: 515)
Jaddan Bai apparently heard out this harangue with equanimity and then dis-
closed her identity to the mortified woman. This incident took place almost a
decade after Jaddan Bai wrote Search for Truth, but attitudes towards traditional
female performers had remained unchanged.
The link between female performers and cinema was also entrenched in a
deeply moralistic discourse. It is common knowledge that the earliest actresses on
the South Asian film screen belonged to professional performative traditions like
theatre, dance, and music. Such public women were greatly stigmatized and their
liminal social status was the condition for their entry into the dubious new realm
of cinema. At the same time, their presence exacerbated anxieties about the nega-
tive implications of this new medium. By the time talkie technology appeared
on the scene, the industry needed these talented women more than ever but the
dominant nationalist rhetoric of ‘respectability’ and ‘self-improvement’ pulled in
the opposite direction.13 And, predictably, it was women and their sexualities that
became the locus of nationalist concern (see Chatterjee 1999).
It is crucial to note that Jaddan Bai herself played the part of Feeroza in Search
for Truth. After Feeroza embarks on her expedition of moral renewal she ‘patiently
endures many cruel incidents. People sneer at her, cutting cruel jokes. Fed up and
realizing that the so called Society shall never acknowledge her as a respectable
woman however noble and good she becomes, she thinks of committing suicide
by drowning herself in the sea’ (Search for Truth song booklet, 1935: 3).
Lines such as these give the lie to any straightforward moral argument. Feeroza
has the clear-eyed wisdom to see through society’s hypocrisies and she chooses to
withdraw from the world forever. She survives the suicide attempt and achieves
many noble goals, reuniting Shaukat and his daughter, and even setting up a
charitable hospital and orphanage along the way. However, her past is too volatile
to be erased from public memory and the film resolves the matter through chaste,
penitent religiosity. Feeroza exits the film when ‘in answer to the call of that vital
spark of heavenly flame, the soul sails on a pilgrimage to Mecca to complete her
Search for Truth. The End’ (Search for Truth song booklet, 1935: 5). Jaddan Bai, on
the other hand, continued in the film industry and used her controversial lineage
to her advantage. In her second film, Call of the Soul, Jaddan Bai squarely ques-
tions parameters of morality. The cover of the song booklet features a quote from
Hamlet: ‘There is nothing Good or Bad in this world but the thinking makes it so.’
The Introduction tells us that the film is interested in ‘depicting the iniquities of
our Society’ and exposing the ‘false ideas of social conventions and popular moral-
ity justified in the name of religion …’ (Call of the Soul song booklet, 1936: 1).
In any discussion of screenplay motivations we must also look to genre histo-
ries outside the local. Search for Truth and Call of the Soul were written at a time
when the women’s melodrama mode was internationally popular. This cinematic
mode often featured ‘fallen women’ who were pitted against society due to their
transgressive choices and behaviour. Late 1920s and early 1930s Hollywood saw
the dominance of the fallen woman protagonist, who was either cheated or
compelled into sexual compromise or was a debauched child of hedonism who
could not help herself. In either case, the plot demanded that these heroines pay
up their ‘wages of sin’ and end up single, broke, or dead. We see this in Madame
X (1920), Coquette (1929), A Woman of Affairs (1928), Hold Your Man (1933) and
What Price Hollywood! (1932), all of which were screened in Bombay between 1930
and 1934.14 Based on the synopsis of Search for Truth, I suggest that the film can be
read as a part of the transnational appropriations of the fallen woman melodrama.
Such a reading enables us to see connections across urban sites that were similarly
grappling with anxieties about female sexuality and consumerism. The ‘modern
girl’ who had embraced fast cars, fashion, and sexual freedom featured centrally
in this globally circulating mode, even starring in Jaddan Bai’s next film, Madam
Fashion (1936). Thus, it is not enough to state that her films were responding only
to local contestations of tradition versus modernity – they were also imbricated
within a larger network of shared generic subjects, plots, anxieties, and desires
that were dispersed through transnational routes of theatrical distribution and
individual travel. In Bombay cinema, these same generic concerns were adapted
along local lines of tension, bringing in unique permutations of gender with class,
religion, and modernity.
Released in 1936, Madam Fashion was apparently inspired by a ‘high moral tone’
(Times of India 1936: 7). The song booklet synopsis opens with prefatory com-
ments by producer-director Jaddan Bai, and states that ‘fashion fanaticism’ will
India 79
lead to the ruination of hundreds of citizens of India who spend all their time,
money, and moral energy as blind devotees of western fads:
Citizens of India! … It is now time to stop mimicking other countries and to

contribute to India’s progress by following in the footsteps of our ancestors. …
Every citizen of this nation should have only one wish – that our women emu-
late the saintly women of yore and become dutiful wives and model mothers.
(Madam Fashion song booklet, 1936: 1, trans. from Hindi by author)
The main object of critique in this preface is Western modernity, particularly

Western femininity. Nevertheless, the very detailed film synopsis that follows is
quite ambivalent in its tone. This time Jaddan Bai plays Sheila, a wealthy and
middle-aged mother of two. Her husband, Seth Amarnath, takes his dutiful wife
on several foreign trips, buys her pretty things, and unwittingly converts her
into a fashion victim. As the song booklet puts it, Sheila is transformed into a
‘Society lady’ (Madam Fashion: 1) Significantly, these are the only words rendered
in English in the booklet, which carries the synopsis in three languages – Hindi,
Gujarati, and Urdu. And yet ‘Society lady’ remains untranslated, perhaps because
it had come to take on an untranslatable power of its own, as a distinct urban
figure. The newly ‘fashionable’ (also transliterated to the Devnagari script) Sheila
goes to the races, shops on the continent, and throws fancy yacht parties. One day
she loses all her betting money at the races and is helped out by a smooth operator
she has previously met in Germany. Her husband recognizes him as a cheat but
Sheila refuses to believe him. One thing leads to another and Sheila walks out of
her home and marriage. Her grown son’s wedding is called off as the bride’s fam-
ily does not want to be associated with such a scandal. Her little daughter roams
the streets plaintively looking for her mother. Surprisingly, Sheila remains blithely
cheerful and finds new friends and clothes. Ultimately, however, she has to sub-
mit to the demands of creditors and is reduced to beggary and good intentions.
On the surface, this seems like a classic tale of punishment and transforma-
tion. But, if one is to judge by the synopsis, the script provides empathetic spaces
for Sheila’s interior life to be revealed. For example, when her husband wrongly
accuses her of having an affair with Jagdish, she retorts: ‘You want me to stay
confined within the four walls of this house, like the women of yore, and slowly
get stifled to death. Every day there is some new quarrel, fights, harassment, nag-
ging. There is a limit to how much one can tolerate’ (Madam Fashion: 3). She then
lovingly bids farewell to her sleeping children, packs her jewellery, and leaves.
This is a free-thinking woman who dotes on her children but refuses to accept
unjust accusations and abuse from her husband. Moreover, her liberated spirit is
recognized as such by the script itself. Characterizing Jagdish as a conniving con-
artiste, the synopsis states that he is an expert at swindling ‘free and independent’
women. Granted, in the moral universe of this story, free and independent may be
negative attributes for a woman; however, the Hindi words used in the booklet are
‘swantantra aur azaad’, words that had much affective resonance in contemporary
South Asia, deeply linked as they were with the national struggle against British
colonialism (Madam Fashion: 1). When associated with a modern woman instead
of the ancient motherland, these same words take on a charged meaning.
Whereas in the early Hollywood context we often see women screenwriters in the
role of star makers (e.g. June Mathis’s championing of and writing for actor Rudolph
Valentino or Frances Marion’s work with actress Mary Pickford), in Jaddan Bai’s case
she was using her screenplays to create an elaborate star image for herself. On the
one hand, she repeatedly acknowledged her past profession and its social status by
presenting herself in spectacles of consumption, fashion and debauchery. This was
commercially canny as these images satisfied audiences’ cravings for glamour and
sensation, drawing simultaneously on the global circulation of fallen woman melo-
dramas. On the other hand, Jaddan Bai actively sought to rewrite the significance
of her past through screen narratives of moral transformation and social hypoc-
risy. These acts of rewriting can be interpreted as direct exhortations to her public
against social prejudice. Written during the era of transition to sound and the large-
scale entry of courtesan-singers into the film industry, Jaddan Bai’s films represent a
woman’s social activism on behalf of her female professional community.
The film industry at this time provided a relatively open playing field for those
with the capital to finance their own ventures. Caught between the scarcity of
talented singer-actresses and the clamour for ‘cultured ladies’, Bombay cinema
negotiated a fine balance. Applauding her decision to choose cinema rather than
radio or gramophone, film historian Saleem Kidwai avers that:
Jaddan Bai had the foresight to sense the inevitable as the Indian liberals got
closer to power. She chose wisely for her talented daughter and prepared her for
tremendous success. Those who continued to be gaanewalis [professional sing-
ers] had to deal with the indignity of All India Radio insisting that its female
singers be married, even insisting that they use a separate entrance so that their
presence at recordings wouldn’t offend regular, well-born staffers. (Kidwai 2004)
In a scenario where patronage for courtesans was steadily diminishing along

with the dying world of rajas and nawabs, women such as Jaddan Bai had little
option but to reinvent themselves. The 1930s film industry retained some of its
early democratic impulses but was being pushed towards the road of middle-class
respectability and moralistic prejudice. Having succeeded in this environment on
her own terms, Jaddan Bai ensured that her daughter, Fatima Rashid, would grow
up thoroughly respectable and perhaps that is why she was not taught how to
sing (Kidwai 2004). Fatima had a second name change when she made her adult
lead debut – this time it was the elegant ‘Nargis’. Nargis became a major superstar
of the 1950s and her career pinnacle was a far cry from her debut as Baby Rani in
Naachwali/Dancing Girl. This was a film called Mother India (1957), an allegorical
classic of modern India that is even today screened on public television during
national holidays. Kidwai points out that, ‘With the success of Nargis, both as a
star and a public figure, the cover up of the origins of these artistes was complete’
(2004). And yet, at the start of her film career, Jaddan Bai was interested not so
much in ‘covering up’ her origins as rewriting their consequences.
India 81
Author’s note: I would like to thank Ravi Vasudevan for his help with acquiring the song
booklets without which this essay would not have been possible. Paulina Suarez Hesketh
and Kartik Nair read through an early draft with close attention and magnificent com-
ments. Thanks also to the American Institute for Indian Studies for a research grant
during the year 2012–13.
Sooni Taraporevala
Alexis Krasilovsky
Sooni Taraporevala (1957–) was born in Bombay, now known as Mumbai, in
1957. She credits her fourth-grade teacher, Rati Wadia, for her love of writing. In
1976, while studying at Harvard under a full scholarship, she met fellow student
Mira Nair, who encouraged Taraporevala to take a film course, leading to graduate
school in cinema studies at New York University (Viets 2009). In the meantime,
Nair made several documentaries. In 1986, the two friends travelled together
researching stories, and Taraporevala suggested they go with an idea that Nair
had come up with about street kids, culminating in Salaam Bombay! (1988), about
a boy who is abandoned by his mother on the streets of Mumbai, who befriends
a heroin addict and the daughter of a sex worker, while trying to earn enough
rupees to return home. Their first feature with Nair as director and Taraporevala as
screenwriter, Salaam Bombay! was nominated for an Oscar and won over twenty-
five awards worldwide, including the Lillian Gish Award from Women in Film for
Taraporevala (Taraporevala 2005).
Their second film, Mississippi Masala (1990), starring Denzel Washington, is a
love story between an Indian daughter whose family has been exiled from Uganda
to Mississippi and an African-American carpet cleaner who works in her family’s
motel. Taraporevala says the story ‘was rooted in research’, including travel with
Nair to Uganda and the Deep South. Mississippi Masala won the Osella Award for
Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival. In an interview with Sonia Faleiro,
Taraporevala described her collaboration with Mira Nair: ‘We share a certain short-
hand together. A certain perspective, a way of looking at the world. We’ve never
clashed creatively … we discuss things, and I go off and write’ (Faleiro 2004),
They also worked as the director/screenwriter team of My Own Country (1998), for
Showtime Television, and The Namesake (2006), a film about the immigrant expe-
rience based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Jhumpa Lahiri. In an interview
with Dylan Callaghan for the Writers Guild of America in 2013, Taraporevala
stated, ‘For adaptations, they should have two awards – one for the screenwriter
and one for the author. When I adapt I always try and put myself in the service
of the author, to use whatever craft I’ve learnt to translate from one medium to
another. [But] while adaptations are easier, originals are more fun to write’.
After working as a screenwriter for twenty years, mostly for Nair, but also
with directors Sturla Gunnarson and Dr Jabbar Patel, Taraporevala wrote a script
for herself: Little Zouzou, a light-hearted comedy based on the serious issue of
religious intolerance in the Indian Parsi community. In an interview by Majula
Narayan, Taraporevala stated, ‘Because I wrote it with certain actors in mind,
certain locations in mind, I thought that since this was a world that I really knew
well, that I was confident I could direct it’ (Narayan 2009). Taraporevala’s first film
as writer-director, Little Zouzou (2008) won over ten international awards includ-
ing Time/Warner Best Screenplay. It was modelled on aspects of her son’s life and
featured her own children, Jahan and Iyanah, in the starring roles.
Taraporevala enjoys a non-Bollywood lifestyle in India while working interna-
tionally, sometimes by Internet. The first of seven drafts for The Namesake, for
example, involved a process of emailing Mira Nair adapted scenes every few days
‘while she read the book and marked out her selections – which coincided with
mine. We were perfectly in sync’ (Lambert 2007). (Special thanks to Maria Victoria
Hubbard for her research assistance.)
Screenwriter: Honey Irani
Anubha Yadav
Indian cinema has not had many women screenwriters. The number has been
low across all regional film industries. This minimal presence has always been
even more noticeable in popular cinemas of India. Honey Irani (1950–) is a wel-
come presence in one such popular practice. In the last three decades, Honey has
penned eighteen films for popular Hindi-language cinema.
Early years in Mumbai cinema – star to apprenticeship

In 1950s and 60s Honey Irani acted in more than seventy Hindi films as a child
actor. She appeared in box-office hits like Talaq/Divorce and Bombay ka Chor/Thief
of Bombay. After two decades in the industry she left acting to settle into married
life with screenwriter Javed Akhtar; however, they separated after less than a dec-
ade. Irani returned to the Mumbai film industry around 1980, assisting Ramesh
Talwar for seven years on three films: Zamaana/The Times (1985), Duniya/The
World (1984), and Basera/Shelter (1981).
Screenwriting – early years

Honey Irani began to write short stories but did not seek publication of them.
However, the wife of filmmaker Yash Chopra read one short story and decided to
adapt it into a television drama. Eventually, Yash Chopra asked Irani to develop
the idea further for a film. Irani narrated a detailed treatment based on the short
story and, seeing her talent, Yash Chopra hired her to also write a different project.
This project became Irani’s debut film as a screenwriter. Lamhe/Moments was
released in 1991. Despite its commercial failure, Lamhe won several awards.
Chopra and Irani collaborated again shortly afterwards in Darr/Fear (1993). Two of
the first four films written by Honey Irani (Darr/Fear and Aaina/The Mirror [1993]),
became box-office hits in India.
Successes and failures

Due to professional differences, Irani and Chopra parted ways. Differences
stemmed from the writing credits on Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge/The Brave Hearts
India 83
Will Take the Bride. Irani claimed she had collaborated on the screenplay with Yash
Chopra’s son, Aditya Chopra. The demand was dismissed and Irani was denied
screen credit. The film became one of the most popular films in the history of
Mumbai cinema. Irani never went to court regarding the credit, and still claims
she co-wrote it, although she has refused to discuss it in interviews. In 1994, Irani
wrote Suhaag/My Husband, Suhaag; this film became one of the highest-grossing
Hindi-language films of the year, and Irani was recognized as one of the important
factors behind its success.
Over the next four years (from 1995 till 1999) Irani wrote six screenplays: two
box-office hits and four films that did not find financial success. She was trying to
find a new collaborator, a production house/director that understood her vision. She
often changed her directors, and worked with different producers on all six projects.
After a decade as a screenwriter, Irani found a collaborator in the actor-turned-
director Rakesh Roshan. For the first time, Irani moved out of her preferred genres
of family drama and romance and collaborated on a romantic action thriller, Kaho
Naa ... Pyaar Hai/Say You Love Me (2000), which became a commercial success.
Almost simultaneously, Kya Kehna/What Is There to Say was released and was suc-
cessful at the box-office. Kya Kehna was hailed by critics for its sensitive treatment
of the issue of pre-marital pregnancy. The film was seen as a breakthrough for
popular cinema: it could handle a serious issue with song and dance.
Deciding to ride on this success, Irani followed her ambition to become a direc-
tor. She chose to direct her own story, co-written with Javed Akhtar, but Armaan/
Wishes did not do well at the box office. This stalled her career as a director. In the
last decade, Irani has continued her screenwriting work and mainly collaborated
with the director Rakesh Roshan. The films are in the superhero/science-fiction
genre. Roshan chooses to work with a team of screenwriters (usually six or seven),
and the entire team receives onscreen credit. The films are highly marketed and
branded as Indian Superhero films – much of the credit being taken by Roshan,
the star cast, and the high production values.
Thus, the last three films by Irani have been highly collaborative. Irani states
that she finds the process very enjoyable and does not feel troubled or stifled by it.
She adds that she shares a great rapport with most of the male writers in the room,
and there are no ego hassles because of a woman’s presence. In the last decade
this deeply collaborative writing is the only work she has done as a screenwriter
(except for Har Pal/Every Moment – a film that was never released). This, on the one
hand, has solidified her presence in popular cinema, while on the other somewhat
eclipsing her unique creative voice.
Looking for Irani’s authorship

There is almost no academic interest in Honey Irani, despite her unique pres-
ence in popular Mumbai cinema for three decades. Honey Irani creates atypical
romances in which the characters, plot and narrative structure do not always
abide by genre conventions. Lamhe/Moments ushered in a new genre of socially
conscious love stories in popular cinema. In almost all her films there is a constant
search for a ‘good man’; however, the ‘bad’ men are not typical villains. They are
everyday men – obsessive lovers; spoiled, diabolical, and mentally challenged

albeit with special powers. Irani’s conception of female characters and their seem-
ing submission to fate is also of interest. In my conversation with her regarding
Aaina/The Mirror15 she rejected my understanding and said:
If I really wanted to punish Roma (the career-oriented elder sister in Aaina),

I would have killed her. And it was suggested by a few people. And I said noth-
ing doing. Why? Why, should you kill her? Why kill such a strong character?
She has made a mistake and she has learnt her lesson. (Irani, from interview
with author)
The genealogy of Irani’s filmography does not elucidate why she deviates so dras-
tically at times from her thematic feminist preoccupations. Perhaps there can be
no one master ‘blow’ to the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conven-
tions in popular cinema. Irani’s work is surely indicative of this and deserves far
more attention and recognition.
Notes
1. This essay speaks only of the Bombay film industry, one of several key film production
centres in pre-Independence, undivided India including Calcutta, Lahore, Madras, and
Kolhapur. India became an independent nation-state in 1947, signalling the end of
more than two centuries of British colonial rule and the political partition of the Indian
subcontinent into two separate nation states: India and Pakistan. Pakistan subsequently
went through another political bifurcation in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh.
Some cities mentioned in this essay are in present-day Pakistan.
2. For a look at some of the key voices in the authorship debates see John Caughie (ed.),
2001, Theories of Authorship (London: Routledge/British Film Institute), and also Barry
Keith Grant (ed.), 2008, Auteurs and Auteurship: A Film Reader (Oxford, Malden: Blackwell
Publishing).
3. This opinion is based on interviews conducted by the author with actresses, directors, make-
up artists, and other film industry associates from the 1930s and 1940s including Sushila
Rani Patel, Ram Tipnis, Shanti Mahendroo, Peter Wirsching, and Shankar Mukherjee.
4. This percentage figure is based on the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) online as
well as on-site catalogues.
5. In 2012, parts of ‘the only film script available from India’s entire silent cinema era’,
Gul-e-Bakavali (Kanjibhai Rathod, 1924), were published in BioScope: South Asian Screen
Studies, 3 (2): 175–207.
6. For example, the prominent critic Baburao Patel declares (in filmindia, 1 August 1943)
about Snehaprabha Pradhan’s screenwriting debut that ‘this is the second time that a
well-known Maharashtrian film actress has had the foolhardiness to venture into the
difficult field of story-writing. The first instance was that of Leela Chitnis presuming to
claim talent in this field. Both the girls have failed miserably and it will be a mercy if they
leave story-writing for the screen severely alone.’
7. The main sources for culling Jaddan Bai’s biographical details were Bharucha 1938,
Chatterjee 1994, Desai 2007, Hussain 1932, Kidwai 2004, Manto 2008, and Rajadhyaksha
and Willemen 1999.
8. Ramparshad was partners with A. R. Kardar, who later became a famous producer and
studio boss in Bombay. Kardar was among the cluster of film production elite who made
up Jaddan Bai’s circle of influence in later years.
India 85
9. For example in July 1935 a journalist praises Jaddan Bai saying, ‘It was a noble sight to
see an elderly woman like Jaddanbai playing a heavy leading role in Talash-e-Haq …’
( Judas 1935).
10. The company’s name is differently spelt in every iteration, e.g. Sangit Movietone,
Sangeet Movitone, etc., and I have picked the most frequently recurring version.
11. Jaddan Bai shares this honour with Saraswati Devi, née Khorshed Homji, who was the
music composer for Bombay Talkies Studio Limited from 1935 until 1941. Her first
film was released just a few months after Talash-e-Haq in September 1935 – Jawani-
ki-Hawa (see Ashok Da. Ranade, 2006, Hindi Film Song: Music Beyond Boundaries, New
Delhi and Chicago: Promilla & Co., p. 114). On the other hand, recent popular sources
suggest that Ishrat Sultana, also known as Bibbo, might have been the first female
music director with the 1934 film Adil-e-Jehangir (see ‘Fairer Sex Makes a Mark’, Times
of India, available at: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-03-08/news-
interviews/28667954_1_film-industry-silent-films-debut-film [accessed 15 September
2013]).
12. The word ‘swadeshi’ is an adjective deriving from the Sanskrit ‘Swa’ meaning self and
‘Desh’ meaning country. The term was used to describe all that was ‘of one’s own
country’ and became the main force behind Gandhi’s anti-colonial economic boycott
strategy.
13. In fact, Neepa Majumdar has argued, ‘[An] ambivalence toward cinema began in the
1930s, when a desire to participate in the cultural mainstream, which was informed at
the time by predominantly nationalist concerns, reshaped cinematic discourse from the
cosmopolitan mode of the 1920s to an increasingly bourgeois-nationalist mode begin-
ning in the 1930s’ (2009: 9).
14. See Times of India, ‘Engagements’, 6 February 1930, p. 4, 1 March 1930, p. 11,
8 November 1933, and 17 May 1934, p. 3.
15. Aaina is the story of two sisters. One is career-oriented and the other is domestic. The
career-oriented sister is shown as a negative character.
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Iran
Debbie Danielpour
Very few women living in Iran are active screenwriters as many Iranian-born
screenwriters/directors are exiled outside their native country due to the current
Islamic government’s codes, which control all aspects of a screenplay and film
production. This entry features screenwriters who have accomplished their work
while living in Iran.
History
An overview of Iran’s history in the 20th and 21st centuries provides context
for understanding how different regimes exerted artistic/commercial censorship,
controlled women’s participation and ultimately influenced women’s entry into
the country’s film industry.
Early Persian cinema, 1900–60

The earliest documented use of film in Iran dates back to a royal court visit in
Belgium. The footage, which shows Iranians gazing upon modern Europeans,
stands as a prescient metaphor for the tension that has coloured the history of
Iranian film. Iran’s first cinemas appeared during the politically tumultuous years
of 1905–11, screening primarily European films to a gender-partitioned Iranian
audience drawn exclusively from the court and aristocracy. Religious authorities
then denounced Tehran’s first movie theatre as the mark of Satan and the cinema
was shut down (Sadr 2006: 14).
The ascension of Reza Shah to the Pahlavi throne in 1926 began a new era
in the history of Iranian modernity. The Shah banned the chador for women,
dictated a westernized dress code for men, and forbade Iranian passion plays,
although his aim to provide educational opportunities for women and establish
an Iranian National Cinema was not successful. Nonetheless, the cinema of this
era marked the first time women could watch other women in public without
veils (Dabashi 2001: 18). Prohibition of the veil, however, was initially opposed
by most traditional Iranian families, as for many women the chador represented
honour, femininity and ease. These women were therefore reluctant to leave their
homes, which led to their isolation from public activities.
87
In 1931, the first Iranian sound films were praised as examples of Iran’s artistic
and political progress, while in fact they were poor imitations of European and
American comedies and melodramas. At the same time, clerics and a large meas-
ure of the populace resisted the films’ portrayal of modernity. The nine feature
films that were produced between 1931 and 1937 were simple comedies, clas-
sic Iranian love stories, tales of adventure/conquest, or expanded mythologies
designed to entertain an emerging middle class and unify the population around
modernity. Stories that exposed the reality of the regime’s brutality were strictly
forbidden (Sadr 2006: 24). Female characters followed Western paradigms, typi-
cally being cast as mothers or the ‘girl’ to be rescued or wooed.
In Iran’s first widely distributed talkie, The Lor Girl (Ardeshir Irani, 1933), the
subject and characters of the film borrow from Western imagery and ignore eth-
nic, religious and national contexts. The film mimics a colonialist perspective
on women, which objectifies them as exotic spectacles and renders women nar-
ratively impotent. This depiction of women was inspired by Hollywood represen-
tations of exotic Oriental women in American film epics (Dabashi 2001: 22). It
has been suggested that the film stands as an example of the reach of Reza Shah’s
propaganda, while some critics have argued that the story emphasized feminine
power and self-reliance, challenging traditional views of a woman’s role as con-
fined to the home (Lahiji 2002: 217). Perhaps the most telling barometer of the
public’s reception is the fact that, after the release of the film, the actress who
played the protagonist was subject to much public scorn.
The regime’s forced modernity did little to truly open creative opportunities for
women. During the Shah’s push to westernize, Ovanes Ohanian established Iran’s
first film school and solicited applications from both male and female filmmakers,
yet no women applied (Sadr 2006: 17, 26). It appeared as though gender politics
could not ‘catch up’ with the regime’s demands for modernity.
From 1937 to 1948, there was a decrease in Iranian film production and the cin-
emas mostly exhibited foreign films, particularly those imported from Hollywood
and India. In 1941, Britain and Russia occupied parts of Iran, and Reza Shah was
sent to exile. American troops entered the same year and supported the installa-
tion of Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in September 1941. The new
regime established deeper commercial and political ties with the US and Britain,
which, it has been argued, opened up educational and employment opportunities
for women (Sadr 2006: 41).
By the mid 1950s, Iranian cinema had become entirely commercial, and stories
were controlled by vast lists of prohibitions, mainly forbidding demeaning depic-
tions of the regime. Hollywood’s film language, including genre conventions and
screenplay structure paradigm, was so pervasive that by the 1960s it had become
a standard in Iranian films. Iranian native narrative art only lived on in fiction
and poetry.
1960s westernization and the New Wave

Iranian filmmakers, almost all of whom were male, portrayed women either as
good or bad, the ‘good women’ fulfilling traditional roles at home and the ‘bad
Iran 89
women’ as Western-influenced, dressed provocatively, drinking alcohol and

destroying families. This binarist and hyper-sexualized representation shifted the
blame to women as carriers of modernity’s excesses and, no doubt, made it dif-
ficult for women to participate as serious filmmakers. The later revulsion against
Pahlavi-era commercial movies and the push for purification and Islamization of
Iran’s film industry can be traced to this initially extreme drive toward moderniza-
tion (Naficy 2012: 98).
The Shah’s White Revolution of the early 1960s granted Iranian women the
right to vote, increased women’s minimum legal age of marriage to 18, and
improved women’s legal rights in divorce and child custody matters. These
reforms were opposed by the country’s conservative families and the majority of
Iran’s clergy, in particular Ayatollah Khomeini, who led many of the country’s
artists and intellectuals into the 1963 uprising. Although the authorities quelled
resistance, the populace’s resistance to westernization had been registered and the
regime’s brutal enforcement of new laws increased (Bill 1970: 30–3).
The first sparks of native Iranian cinema emerged with what has been called
Iran’s New Wave, characterized by films that reflected a rejection of the state’s
authoritarianism and its overblown reports of progress. Most notable is Darius
Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969), a dystopian vision of Iranian society that emphasizes
fear, loss and a lack of true personal connection. The film was banned until it
won the Best Actor award at the Chicago Film Festival (Sadr 2006: 133). With
these films, Iranian work gained visibility at international festivals and generated
a more discerning Iranian film audience (Hirchi 2013: 262). Despite the gritty,
realistic themes in these films, women characters remained passive, the screenplay
stories were sexist, and women seldom had opportunities to work in the produc-
tion process (Sadr 2006: 144).
1970s – women step in

The 1970s saw the gradual emergence of Iranian women as screenwriters and
filmmakers. The School of Television and Cinema was established in Tehran in
1969, fully financed and supported by the government of Iran through the NIRT
(National Iranian Radio and Television). Of the students, 95 per cent were men
(Talachian 1980). Among the few women who enrolled at that time were Pouran
Darakh’shandeh (more information below) and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, who cur-
rently teaches film at Columbia College in Chicago.
Because cinema was seen primarily as entertainment, filmmaking was not con-
sidered a respected profession. Therefore, children of the middle-class and profes-
sional classes, the only classes with the opportunity to attend university, were
discouraged from studying cinema. Nonetheless, Iranian cinema of the 1970s
saw a significant growth in output and number of filmmakers. Many filmmakers
ignored state censorship and abandoned traditional film formulae, characters and
situations, and a new generation of socially conscious writers emerged, including
the few women who were active in the industry (Talachian 1980).
The Institution for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults,
founded by Lili Jahan Ara, a close friend of Farah Diba (the Queen of Iran),
established a cinema department in 1969 and supported artists who were allowed
relatively more freedom of expression (Rezai-Rashti 2007: 197). Many prominent
directors, all men, started their careers here or made films for the institution:
Bahram Baizai, Amir Naderi, Abbas Kiarostami, Reza Alamzadeh and Sohrab
Shahid-Sale. In fact only three women had been able to made a feature film before
1979: Shahla Riahi (Marjan, 1956), Marva Nabili (The Sealed Soil, 1976–8), and
Kobra Sadi (aka Shahrzad, a cabaret singer and dancer, Maryam and Mani, 1979)
(Naficy 2012: 138).
1978 – present: post-revolutionary cinema

August 19, 1978 marks the burning of the Rex Cinema in the southern city of
Abadan, where 300 people perished. This was the trigger that set the 1979 Iranian
revolution in motion. Between 1979 and 1981, 125 movie theatres were burned.
Cinema before the revolution had been deemed a source of corruption and seen
as a symbol of colonization and westernization. Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the
revolution, later stated ‘we don’t disagree with cinema, we are against prostitu-
tion’. Interestingly, he cited The Cow, a film that is said to have germinated Iran’s
native cinematic voice, as a good, Iranian film (Sadr 2002: 241).
Once in power, Khomeini declared the role of cinema to be a tool for ‘educating
the people’, which, like all art, should be ‘put in service of Islam’. Cinema that
seemed to follow the clergy’s guidelines was officially legitimized (Zeydabadi-
Nejad 2007: 379). As long as women filmmakers followed the new Islamic guide-
lines, which fluctuated from one administration to another, they were able to
gain education and employment and therefore become publicly visible and vocal
(Naficy 2012: 116).
In 1983 film producers bifurcated into two groups: those well-educated, expe-
rienced professionals familiar with Western culture, and the more traditional,
conservative and less educated individuals who supported the Islamic Propaganda
Organization. The latter group’s films often focused on ‘proper’ gender relations.
The first group established a filmmaking institute, restricted the importation of
foreign films, financially supported indigenous filmmakers and entered Iranian
films in prestigious international film festivals. In order to receive production
permits, however, all films were expected to be ‘Islamic’, that is, to follow codes
reinforced by the conservatives (Rezai-Rashti 2007: 198).
The portrayal of women in Islamic films shifted dramatically as these codes
forced screenwriters to reroute many of the conventions used in previous narra-
tives. The guidelines dictated that men and women could not gaze at one another
unless they were family members or married; unrelated men and women could
not touch one another; the hejab or chador must be worn in all public places, and
women must behave chastely. The film heroine was now pictured as pure, usually
in the kitchen or at home, dedicated to God and family, and platonic in all expres-
sions of love. The seductive, Western ‘star’ was replaced by the lower-class worker
or peasant. Sensual women were conveyed as ‘bad’ characters who were entirely
lacking in honour. Dramatically this was extremely limiting; a scene where a
wife covers her face in the privacy of her home and in front of her husband, for
Iran 91
example, would not seem credible, but, because of the presence of a film crew,
actresses were obliged to veil themselves. To counter this ‘unrealism’, many film-
makers sought ‘workarounds’, such as shooting the same scene outside, where
women’s veiling would seem credible. Another workaround is the ‘fragmented
presence’ of women, meaning that in a given shot the whole woman is not seen
on screen.
Contrary to what would be expected, given these restrictions, women became
active in the Iranian film industry after the Islamic Revolution. The Islamic
Republic News Agency reported that women constituted 10 per cent of screenwrit-
ers and six per cent of film directors (Naficy 2012: 139). By 1998, Iranian cinema
ranked tenth in the world in terms of output (Mottahadeh 2004). In the effort
to purify the public space, regulations restricting foreign films had inadvertently
encouraged indigenous filmmaking and opened up possibilities for women to
work in a variety of roles. Yet other changes seemed to restrict women’s par-
ticipation: compulsory veiling in public spaces and the abrogation of the Family
Protection Law (Rezai-Rashti 2007: 193). However, in the two decades after 1979
more women were active in every field of cinema and other artistic activities. This
is possibly because the Islamic Revolution brought the women’s question to the
forefront of discourse (Najambadi 1998: 59). Furthermore, the enforcement of the
hejab allowed women to participate more publicly because public spaces in which
citizens dress and behave properly were seen as morally correct (Mir-Hosseini
2000: 7).
With each change in administration since the Islamic Revolution, artistic free-
dom in Iran has vacillated significantly. During the time of the reformist, post-
revolutionary government, women were encouraged to enter Iranian universities
(Ramazani 1993: 413). By 2006, the proportion of women accepted by Iranian uni-
versities was over 60 per cent. But the second term of Khatami’s presidency, 2001–5,
became more turbulent as the power struggle between conservatives and reformists
intensified. In this period, some professors, intellectuals and editors of newspapers
and cinema magazines were arrested and imprisoned (Rezai-Rashti 2007: 200).
Women in contemporary Iranian cinema

Despite the fact that, post-revolution, women as screenwriters and filmmakers
represented a significant force in Iranian cinema, Iran’s culture of cinema under
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad experienced significant setbacks. The limitation on
screening art films, for example, amounted to a new type of censorship in Iran
(Zeydabadi-Nejad 2010: 385). In 2012, the Iranian government implemented
wide-ranging restrictions on courses women were permitted to take, forbidding
women from majoring in 77 of the fields in which they had previously flourished
(Tait 2012). Restrictions on filmmakers continue in many phases, either in obtain-
ing funding, production permits, distribution or screening permits. Censorship
regulations prohibit the distribution of many of Iran’s internationally acclaimed
films within the country itself (Shakil 2011). For instance, Manijeh Hekmat’s
film Women’s Prison was banned for domestic screenings, so Hekmat distributed a
censored version in Iran while the complete cut was screened at festivals overseas.
The dynamic of making films for an international audience versus films for
a domestic audience renders it difficult to pinpoint precisely what is common
to Iranian films written and directed by women. Western critics are often cited
as claiming that films exclusively distributed in Iran are pedestrian comedies or
melodramas not intended to challenge viewers. However, these popular Iranian
films, such as Ceasefire, written and directed by Tahmineh Milani, should be seen
as ‘legitimate’ objects for study as they yield insights into an Iranian woman’s
perspective on the contemporary culture in which they are created (Brown 2011:
336). As will become evident in the discussion of Iranian women’s screenplays,
they reveal the country’s culture as influenced by modernity while trying to recap-
ture its native traditions, values and concerns.
Women screenwriters and directors in Iran are in a constant state of negotia-
tion between government regulations, spectators and their own artistic visions.
The presence of women as filmmakers stands as evidence that women have not
been passive in responding to restrictions or cultural expectations, but rather have
participated actively, particularly with films that provide a lens on social issues.
Many film theorists suggest that cinema provides a metaphor for the construction
of identity. If this is true, then Iranian women working as screenwriters and direc-
tors are shifting their nation’s gaze to a different type of Persian woman: complex,
active, intelligent, outraged against injustice and often surprisingly powerful.
Screenwriters
The following women represent a sample from the socio/political/artistic spec-

trum of women screenwriters working in Iran, some of whom worked prior to
the revolution. Because filmmaking was dominated by men, by the time women
entered the industry in greater numbers it was difficult for a woman screenwriter
to gain recognition or have her work considered for production; therefore many
women directed their own films or wrote for women directors.
While my research uncovered a dozen other Iranian women screenwriters who
have worked in Iran and in other countries, the following four are particularly sig-
nificant for several reasons: they span the length of time that women have been
working in the field; they have pursued their work while living in Iran; they have
created the largest body of work of any Iranian women filmmakers; and their films
have demonstrated the greatest impact both inside and outside Iran.
Rakshan Bani-Etemad (b. 1954)

One of Iran’s most celebrated writer-directors, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad began her
career before the 1979 revolution as a documentary filmmaker for television and
cinema and is Iran’s earliest well-known woman filmmaker. Her awards include
the Best Directing (2004) award at the Fajr Film Festival (Iran’s largest and longest-
running festival) for Gilaneh (2001), and many others from festivals in Locarno,
Montreal, Moscow, Thessaloniki, Torino, and more.
Bani-Etemad received her Bachelor of Arts degree in film directing from Iran’s
University of Dramatic Arts. She worked as a television reporter, then began her
Iran 93
independent career behind the camera in 1984, researching and documenting the
issues that were defining the lives of the underprivileged. This area of concern, as
well as challenging Iran’s deeply entrenched patriarchy, continues to inform all
Bani-Etemad’s fiction films.
Bani-Etemad’s early screenplays were not granted production permits by the
Council of Screenplay Inspection either because of their story content, ideological
implications or the Council’s disapproval of the project’s cast and crew. Therefore,
her first three features were not based on her screenplays, even though she sub-
stantially rewrote them before production (Iran Heritage Foundation 2008).
One of the few documentary filmmakers to move into feature filmmaking,
Bani-Etemad infuses her films with a documentary sensibility. Her scripts craft
sympathetic portrayals of realistic and believable characters and shed light on
Iran’s most significant contemporary problems – poverty, and questions of cul-
tural and religious morality. Hamid Dabashi explains:
Bani-Etemad’s cinema is the return of the Iranian repressed … she exposes the
material misery of the dominated, a misery that has to be collectively denied
in order for that collective amnesia to begin to authorize itself. (Dabashi
2001: 227)
Bani-Etemad’s fiction screenplays typically feature female protagonists who strug-

gle to balance love, family and material survival. Her films are often set in deso-
late or war-torn regions and are populated by poor families, drug addicts, petty
criminals or loners. Some convey the concerns of an extremely young population
confronting the discontents of the Islamic Revolution, or of women discovering
newfound freedoms and chafing at the obstacles of the new Islamic state’s reli-
gious traditions.
This entry will focus on the following films: Nargess (1991), Under the Skin of the
City (1995), and Gilaneh (2001), which demonstrate the breadth of Bani-Etemad’s
narratives and the consistency of her screenplay and filmic voice.
The first film for which Bani-Etemad wrote the screenplay, Nargess, was awarded
Best Film of the Year by the Iranian film critics. The screenplay focuses on a
relationship between a divorcee, her petty-thief lover and a young, innocent
woman, Nargess. One of the first post-revolutionary films to focus on sexuality,
Bani-Etemad pushes the boundaries even further – sex between an older woman
and younger lover is central to the story (though never shown). Regulators forced
Bani-Etemad to rewrite the story to show that the couple were originally married
and resumed their relationship after divorcing (Sadr 2006: 259).
In the screenplay, Adel, the young lover, is determined to marry Nargess despite
his unemployment and disreputable lifestyle. Desperate to lead a respectable
married life, Adel visits his estranged mother in the hope that she will arrange
a proper family introduction, but she rejects him. With Adel unable to find a
family advocate, Afagh, his accomplice and former lover, proposes a treacherous
scheme – she will pose as Adel’s mother and validate his eligibility in exchange
for the continuation of their affair and criminal partnership after the marriage – a
proposal that Adel tragically accepts. Despite the fact that Afagh is a social outcast,
the narrative renders her fully self-aware and confident in her sexuality without
presenting her as the stereotypical ‘bad’ woman – the likely portrayal in a less
culturally tolerant and sophisticated Iranian screenplay, as Dabashi points out:
What is successfully shattered and dissolved by Bani-Etemad’s confident cam-

era is the presumption of the primacy of masculine sexuality. Afagh is in fact at
the center of both the sexual and the textual tension of Nargess. Bani-Etemad
achieves this reversal of the primacy of masculine sexuality despite the fact that
it is Afagh who is being abandoned by Adel for a younger and more ‘respect-
able’ woman (Dabashi 2001: 228)
While the young thief, Adel, appears to hold the greatest agency, in that he makes
the choices and takes actions that shape the story and thus would be considered
the protagonist of this noir-ish screenplay, it is actually the ageing Afagh who
pulls the most powerful strings, a statement on the workings of Iran’s sexual poli-
tics as seen by a female film director.
One of the more fascinating and powerful aspects of Bani-Etemad’s screenplays
are their intertextuality. In her subsequent film, The May Lady (1995), Nargess,
played by the same actor, is now a woman in the documentary-within-the-
narrative. She holds a child in her arms, not only suggesting that she and Adel
stayed together and produced a child but also that the lives of these characters are
somehow closer to reality than that of most fictional characters.
In Bani-Etemad’s later film Under the Skin of the City (1999), the main character,
Tuba from The May Lady (1995), reappears as a blue-collar worker whose house is
the anchor for her family – herself, her disabled husband and three children. The
story’s primary tension revolves around Tuba’s husband and son scheming to sell
the deed of her house. Her oldest daughter is beaten by a husband burdened by
economic hardship, and the teenagers are active in the reform movement. It is in
this story that we see an example of a female character disembodied: a close-up
of Tuba’s long, wet hair drying over the heater while her body remains offscreen.
The conflict in the script highlights recurring themes in Bani-Etemad’s films:
how families endure economic hardship and the social tensions that ensue. Laura
Mulvey analyses the unique complexity of this film, noting how:
In Under the Skin of the City, she [Bani-Etemad] refuses to idealize her main pro-
tagonist or extract her from the everyday into the heroic … At the very end, the
film suddenly mutates, something beyond either melodrama or social realism
overtakes the screen. (Mulvey 2010: 10)
In Gilaneh (2001), co-written with Mohsen Abdolvahhab, Bani-Etemad explores

a mother’s courage, hardship, and dedication during the 1988 Iran-Iraq war.
Gilaneh escorts her pregnant daughter, Maygol, from the calm of their village into
war-torn Tehran to search for Maygol’s husband, Rahman. On their journey they
encounter wounded and desperate soldiers who have descended into madness.
Iran 95
They reach Tehran to learn that Rahman has been conscripted and will likely not
return from battle. The story jumps to 2003, when the American invasion of Iraq
has begun. Gilaneh is home caring for her son, Ismaeel, who is now an invalid,
haunted physically and psychologically by the trauma of war. Bani-Etemad points
out, ‘My intention in the second part of the film was to show, above all, the amne-
sia that has been prevalent in the entire society, and the loneliness of people like
Ismaeel.’ She continues:
When I set him [Ismaeel] in that beautiful scenery, that village, in nature,
I thought he could be more of a universal figure. He could be a young American
who goes to war and is a victim, he could be an Iraqi soldier, a Palestinian,
an Israeli soldier, for that matter … This is how I wanted to show my hatred
for war, and my sorrow that we, in the twenty-first century, should be going
through such horrific experiences. (Laurier and Walsh 2005)
While the screenplay’s events are well designed to make a political statement
about Iran’s participation in the Iran-Iraq war or America’s hand in their war
with Iraq, its focus remains on the people at the margins whose lives are shat-
tered and haunted by the ravages of war. Bani-Etemad elaborates, ‘Usually what
I do is that I grasp the realities of the society – of course I dramatize it, but in the
process of dramatization I will try to make it as close to the documentary style as
possible, so that it will reflect the reality intimately.’ She points out that she has
not been inspired by particular filmmakers, but rather by society itself (Laurier
and Walsh 2005).
Bani-Etemad’s later films demonstrate a growing radicalization of the writer-
director’s work, most evident in her films’ female subjectivity, female autobiogra-
phy, and female modernity. At the same time, her stories reveal an anxiety about
the social position of women in Iran and therefore resolve many stories with
‘reactionary appeasement’. As Naficy notes, ‘Bani-Etemad’s attempt to reconcile …
rebellion and resignation, progressivism and conservatism’ is a recurring compo-
nent of her cinematic style and voice (Naficy 2012: 162).
Bani-Etemad is the wife of Iranian film producer Jahangir Kosari. Her daughter
is Iranian actress Baran Kosari, who has worked with her mother on some of her
films. Bani-Etemad continues to be an active filmmaker and mentor in the culture
of Iranian cinema.
Pourān Derakh’shandeh (b. 1951)

A film director, screenwriter and producer, Pourān Derakh’shandeh graduated
in film directing from the Advanced School of Television and Cinema in 1975,
though she has directed six of her own screenplays and written four screenplays
directed by others. She launched her professional career working in television in
Kermanshah and later in Tehran.
Where Bani-Etemad’s screenplay stories could be categorized as social realism,
Derakh’shandeh’s approach is more akin to psychological realism. Bani-Etemad’s
tone is sometimes satirical, whereas Derakh’shandeh’s is primarily sombre, often
examining problems in communication, focusing on disabled characters whom

she sees as symbols for ‘all those who are internally handicapped in our society’
(Naficy 1994: 135).
Regarding the themes of her films, Derakh’shandeh explains, ‘My films are
about those who have been forgotten. Family and children have always been the
central themes of my films’ (PressTV, 2009).
Derakh’shandeh’s latest screenplay, Hush! Girls Don’t Scream (2012), co-written
with Mitra Bahrami, won Best Film at the 2012 Fajr International Film Festival
and has received international distribution, starting its US tour at Los Angeles’
Laemmle Movie Theater in November 2013. The screenplay opens with a descrip-
tion of a bride with blood splattered across her white dress. The central character,
Shirin, confesses to killing a man who abused her repeatedly as a child and had
been lurking around the fringes of her life ever since. The script builds a case
against Iran’s legal system and the social constraints that make justice, especially
for women and children, almost impossible to attain. There are scenes of Shirin’s
childhood where parents and school officials ignored what the distraught little
girl was trying to say. The girl is given medication rather than proper attention or
protection. Shirin insists that she committed this crime to protect another little
girl. However, because the second victim’s father refuses to file a complaint (citing
the family’s ‘honour’), Shirin’s defence fails (Chute 2013).
By focusing on story tensions that are not necessarily particular to Iranian girls
or women, Derakh’shandeh hopes to explore the conflicts facing these characters,
not because of their gender or social position, but because they are human beings
in a struggle for understanding and love.
Other screenplays written by Derakh’shandeh include Masoume, 2005; Farangis,
2004; Wet Dream, 2004; Candle in the Wind, 2003; Love without Frontiers, 1998;
Parvin Etesami, 1993–5; That Night in the Train, 1989; Lost Time, 1988; Passing
through the Dust, 1988; Mute Contact, 1985.
Samira Makhmalbaf (b. 1980)

An internationally acclaimed filmmaker and screenwriter, Samira Makhmalbaf is
the daughter of director Mohshen Makhmalbaf who is considered to be among
the most influential directors of the Iranian New Wave (Egan 2005: 174).
Makhmalbaf left high school at the age of 14 to study cinema with her father,
at what became the Makhmalbaf Film House. At 17, she directed The Apple, her
breakthrough work for which she has been the recipient or nominee of numerous
awards. She won the London Film Festival’s Sutherland Trophy for The Apple in
1998, Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival for Blackboards (2001) and Five in
the Afternoon (2003), and the Venice Film Festival’s UNESCO Award in 2002 for
11.09.01 – September 11. In 2003, a panel of critics at the British newspaper the
Guardian named Samira Makhmalbaf as one of the 40 best contemporary directors
(Bradshaw et al. 2003).
Samira has been strongly influenced by the work and tutelage of her father, as
well as by events in her life. Her father was imprisoned for five years during the
Pahlavi regime and released just a year before Samira was born. Her mother died
Iran 97
in 1992, when Samira was 13. Her father later married his sister-in-law, Marziyeh
Meshkini, a women’s rights activist and documentary filmmaker. Family pro-
vided much of Samira’s later education and cinematic opportunities; however, her
cinematic voice is entirely her own.
Released just after the election that ushered in the reformist president Khatami,
Samira’s film The Apple (1998) won seven international awards. Samira was the
youngest director at the Cannes Film Festival. Co-written with her father, the
screenplay is based on a true story about an old man and his blind wife who keep
their 12-year-old daughters locked up from birth. The family portrayed in the film
are not actors, but the people who lived the experience.
In Samira’s film, as with the actual events, concerned neighbours report the
case, a social worker discovers the girls, and they are released. The father justi-
fies the entrapment by saying he fears his daughters will mix with boys. It is
also shown that he cannot afford to provide his children with the things other
modern children expect (Sprio 2009: 4). The film focuses on the girls’ first expe-
riences with the outside world, thus acting as a metaphor for the clash between
the past and modernity. Throughout the film many symbols convey this theme:
the mother’s blindness and veiling, the metal-barred door behind which the girls
are kept, the girls seeing their reflections in the mirror for the first time, one girl’s
hand trying to water a dying plant through the bars of her cage, and the central
symbol of the apple, which signifies freedom rather than the traditional fall from
grace in the Adam and Eve myth.
By underscoring the father’s draconian restrictions, Samira turned modesty into
oppression: the girls are imprisoned in darkness and the mother is similarly incar-
cerated by a head-to-toe chador. Margherita Sprio’s analysis of The Apple suggests
the film’s ‘performative endeavour is both within its narrative and outside of it.
The work of art here performs the very act of modernity that the parents seem so
against and Samira Makhmalbaf enables a national news story to become global’
(Sprio 2009: 5).
In an interview, Samira explains the contradictions that women living in Iran
experience, but also hope for the future:
After my film The Apple, many people questioned me about Iran. They won-
dered if Iran was really a country where thirteen-year-old girls could be locked
up for eleven years and where an eighteen-year-old girl could have her first film
at Cannes. I think Iranian women are like freshwater springs: the more pressure
applied, the more force they show once they are freed. (IMDB)
Samira’s second feature film, Blackboards (1999), was released to a large inter-
national audience and won several prestigious awards. The film was shot in a
remote region of the country without a production permit and was smuggled
out of Iran for submission to the Cannes Film Festival. The screenplay follows a
group of itinerant teachers who carry blackboards on their backs, wandering the
desolate mountains of Kurdish Iran, looking for children to teach. Two teachers
separate from the group. One finds a group of teenage boys carrying illegal and
unspecified contraband. In exchange for bread the teacher proposes to teach them
to read and write. The second teacher offers to guide a group of people trying to
reach their homeland in return for a bag of walnuts. In an impromptu ceremony,
he marries one of the women in the group after she learns to read ‘I love you’.
Throughout the film, Samira negotiates the government’s restrictions by using
fables and symbols to convey potentially incendiary ideas about the plight of a
nearly stateless people.
Soon after September 11, 2001, French film producer Alain Brigand invited 11 film-
makers from 11 countries to create a short film lasting 11 minutes 9 seconds, and one
frame. Each director made a film on the consequences of the attack through the lens
of their native country. Samira was among the chosen directors. Critics have lauded
her segment, ‘Iran’, as one of the most outstanding. The short film shows a teacher
in an Afghan refugee camp who tries to explain the events that have occurred in
New York City to a group of children who have no knowledge of the world out-
side their village, no access to television or other educational resources. Her episode
reminds the viewer there is an entire population who struggle to makes sense of his-
tory’s tragedies without the lens of modern media or the understanding bestowed by
education and broader knowledge. Implied within the narrative is the question: can
all people develop empathy despite their lack of privilege or basic comforts?
At Five in the Afternoon (2003) was inspired by Samira’s travels in Afghanistan
during the months when a million refugees poured back into Kabul and the sur-
rounding areas. She was struck by the desperation of families who returned to vil-
lages where their homes were gone and jobs were scarce. The documentary-style
film, Jahad argues, makes an ‘audacious statement against antiquated religious
thinking and the fundamentalist and pro-violence interpretation of Islam’ ( Jahed
2012: 198). As with all her screenplays, this film is concerned with the changing
status of women.
The film’s protagonist, 23-year-old Noghreh, dreams of becoming president.
She wears Western-style shoes as a symbol of this wish for liberty. Her funda-
mentalist father believes that women who wear inappropriate shoes or do not
veil themselves ‘have abandoned the path to heaven’. Samira’s film exposes how
the change in a regime does not necessarily reform a larger culture as she notes,
‘I wanted to show reality, not the clichés on television saying that the US went to
Afghanistan and rescued the people from the Taliban’ (Sadr 2006: 277).
Tahmineh Milani (b. 1960)

One of the few women filmmakers to have produced popular and ‘art house’
films, Tahmineh Milani’s work is mostly about ‘the economic, social and psy-
chological problems facing Iranian women, in particular middle-class women’
(Philips 2006). Milani’s Ceasefire, about relationships in a middle-class Iranian
family, was the highest-grossing film in Iranian history at the time of its release
(Brown 2011: 336).
Milani studied architecture at the University of Science and Technology in Iran
in 1986, but when the universities closed in 1979 she began to write screenplays,
was apprenticed as a ‘script girl’, and then worked as an assistant director on sev-
eral films, soon authoring her first screenplay for Mohammad Reza Alami, Love
Iran 99
and Death (n.d). Her debut work as a screenwriter-director, Children of Divorce, was
co-winner of the Best First Film Prize at the 8th Fajr Film Festival in 1989.
In her second film, The Legend of a Sigh, Milani explores a subject rarely dis-
cussed in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema; the travails of women intellectuals.
A frustrated female writer in a creative crisis sighs deeply only to have her sigh
become a character who enables the writer to turn into five different people. The
idea of choice with regard to one’s identity, which suffuses the film, raises themes
critical to gender politics in Iran. The film has been interpreted as demonstrat-
ing that the writer-character is ultimately a helpless, humiliated and dependent
person and a captive of ruthless and selfish men. On the contrary, the script can
more easily be interpreted as the demonstration of a woman’s unyielding imagi-
nation, a spirit that cannot be confined by men or social mores. The Council of
the Ministry of Islamic Guidance claimed that ‘the characters of this film do
not provide appropriate role models for our youth’. This verdict resulted in the
Council refusing to grant Milani an exhibition permit for the film for more than
six months (Naficy 1994: 135).
Just after the release of The Hidden Half in 2001, Milani was arrested and jailed
by Iran’s Islamic judiciary for ‘abusing arts as a tool for actions which will suit
the taste of the counter-revolutionary and mohared [those who fight God] grou-
plets’ (Scott 2001). It was the first time an Iranian director had been jailed in
Iran. Milani was held for one week and threatened with the death penalty, but
eventually released following mass protests and a petition signed by1,500 Western
filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Martin
Scorsese, Ang Lee and Mike Leigh.
Set in the 1990s, The Hidden Half tells the story of Fereshteh, a former left-wing
radical married to a judge, whom she tells about her love affair with an older man
during her university days. The story is told in a series of flashbacks that show
the repression unleashed by the fundamentalist Islamic regime against university
students. It underscores the fact that the government shut down the universities
for four years, redirecting the futures of young people, particularly women. This
was the first film to vividly illustrate the events around the closing of Iranian
universities. Milani says of the film:
Political movies about my country are dangerous because you never know what’s
going to happen. Firstly, you don’t know whether the government will give you
permission to go ahead and then if they do whether it will be released or not. …
With The Hidden Half, I understood that it could lead to my arrest and imprison-
ment but I was an established director and felt it was my duty to make this film.
I had to do it for all those who had been exiled or killed. (Sadr 2006: 263)
When first shown in Tehran, Milani’s next film, The Fifth Reaction (2003), was met
with strong adverse reactions from both reformist and conservative critics: secular
critics noted the one-sided view of gender issues, claiming that the film placed
all the blame for women’s misfortunes onto men. When the film was released
throughout Iran, one cinema in which it was screened came under an arson attack
(Zeydabadi-Nejad 2010: 110).
In the film, women are shown as being at the mercy of their husbands, both
in terms of material and emotional power. The protagonist, Fereshteh, played by
Niki Karimi, a perennial presence in Milani’s films, has recently lost her husband
in a car accident. Much against the values of Hadj Agha, her wealthy father-in-law,
his son had married for love, and now the older man plans to remove Fereshteh’s
two sons from her custody. She will be permitted to live with her father-in-law
and children only if she agrees to marry one of her brothers-in-law, for the sake
of propriety and honour. Fereshteh plots to escape the country with her children.
At this point, the film becomes a fast-paced, suspense-filled pursuit film that illus-
trates our protagonist’s powerlessness and ingenuity at the same time. Hadj Agha
traces his daughter-in-law’s movements, declaring ‘I am the law’, positioning this
film as one of Milani’s strongest indictments against a culture that aims to silence
and disempower its women.
Milani’s successful 2006 romantic comedy, Ceasefire, while vastly different in
tone from her other films, is still fuelled by the theme of the strength of women’s
voices that lie beneath Iranian society’s attempts to silence them. The film depicts
a newlywed’s rocky marriage: Sayeh is a strong-willed, educated female architect
and Yousef is her confident, handsome engineer husband. At the film’s opening,
Sayeh accidentally walks into a therapist’s rooms, rather than a divorce lawyer’s
office. The therapist listens to her story, shown in flashback, and later hears
Yousef’s story, ultimately teaching them to ‘love their inner child’ – a satirical
swipe at this therapeutic undertaking. The antics between the couple are reminis-
cent of American screwball comedy. It has been suggested that the cat-and-mouse
dynamic between the couple has similarities to Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot
(1959) and takes on added, ‘hidden’ layers because of its intertextual references to
Wilder’s film (Brown 2011: 336).
Ceasefire laid the groundwork for the production of films portraying Iran’s
contemporary middle class, a focus that had previously been absent from Iran’s
art-house cinema. ‘Mobile phones are ubiquitous, Sayeh is seen checking her
emails in a home defined as much by its mod cons as by its white-walled interi-
ors’ (Brown 2011: 337). Other films depicting Iran’s middle classes followed the
release of Milani’s film, such as About Elly (Ashghar Farhadi, 2009), Orion (Zamani
Esmati, 2010), and A Separation (Ashghar Faradi, 2011). The film is not, however,
a wholesale appropriation of Hollywood tropes: Yousef plays Iranian music, Sayeh
cooks traditional Iranian dishes, and their home, with Frida Kahlo reproductions
on the walls, reflects a diverse cosmopolitanism.
Most recently Milani has written and directed Yeki az ma do nafar, 2011;
Superstar, 2009; and Tasvie hesab, 2007.
Tahmineh Milani’s screenplays and films reveal a potent juncture in the evolu-
tion of Iran’s national cinema and the role of Iranian women in it. When asked
if being a woman and a critical director is a dangerous combination, Milani
asserted:
No, it isn’t. Let me tell you a little story. Upon finishing my studies, I became
an architect. I went to my building sites and had problems with the workers.
Iran 101
This was perhaps 20 years ago and they didn’t accept me as an architect. The
same thing happened when I began to shoot my first film, Children of Divorce.
I was 26 or 27 years old and the team with which I worked ridiculed me the
whole time. They made jokes and laughed. But by the time I made my second
film, everything was fine. This was probably because other women filmmak-
ers had since appeared. Things went better for me than for those first women
filmmakers, and it will be even easier for those who come after me. We want
to show our films and we find a way. At present, I do not have any more prob-
lems, as people now accept me in my profession. (Auer 2006)
Most of Milani’s screenplays, as well as the majority of those written by Iranian

women, concern the material and psychological struggles of Iran’s modern
women, and yet, as seen in Ceasefire, they extol the possibility of a middle-class,
nuclear-family-based, heteronormative lifestyle, one which is a product of a com-
bination of Western modernity and Iranian tradition, a dynamic that has charac-
terized the development of Iranian cinema since its inception.
Despite the obstacles Iranian women face in creating, producing and distrib-
uting their work, many women screenwriters have been able to professionally
thrive in Iran’s Islamic society. About the filmmaking climate in Iran, Samira
Makhmalbaf has stated:
One of the benefits of censorship is that we have been allowed to develop

our own cinematic language in Iran. Don’t forget that Iran is one of the few
countries because of legislation where Hollywood cannot export, so we have
in many ways avoided some cinematic clichés and found more personal ways
of expressing the ideas which we have. (Wood 2003)
Indeed, women screenwriters in Iran have developed an imagistic and verbal lan-
guage that works within the imposed artistic restrictions, yet nonetheless results
in films that are seen as entertaining, powerful and influential, both within Iran
and around the world.
References
Auer, Claudia (translated from the German by John Bergeron). 2006. ‘Interview with
Tahmineh Milani, Between Censorship and a Smash Hit’, Qantara.de. Available at:
http://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-tahmineh-milani-between-censorship-and-
a-smash-hit (accessed 4 January 2014).
Bill, James A. 1970. ‘Modernization and Reform from Above: The Case of Iran’, The Journal
of Politics, 32 (1): 19–40.
Bradshaw, Peter, and Xan Brooks, Molly Haskell, Derek Malcolm, Andrew Pulver, B. Ru Rich
and Steve Rose. 2003. ‘The World’s 40 Best Directors’, Guardian, 13 November. Available
at: http://film.theguardian.com/features/page/0,11456,1082823,00.html (accessed 30
April 2012).
Brown, William. 2011. ‘Cease Fire: Rethinking Iranian Cinema through its Mainstream’,
Third Text, 25 (3): 335–41.
Chute, David. 2013. ‘Film Review: Hush, Girls Don’t Scream’, Variety, 26 November. Available at:
http://variety.com/2013/film/reviews/film-review-hush-girls-dont-scream-1200879737/
(accessed 5 January 2014).
Dabashi, Hamid. 2001. Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future. London and
New York: Verso.
Egan, Eric. 2005. The Films of Makhmalbaf: Cinema, Politics and Culture in Iran. Washington,
DC: Mage Publishers.
Hirchi, Mohammed. 2013. ‘A Review of “A Social History of Iranian Cinema”’. Available at:
http://www.theinternational.org/articles/172-iranian-film-industry-thrives-amid-contin
IMDB. ‘Samira Makhmalbaf’. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0538533/
Iran Heritage Foundation. 2008. ‘Film Season Notes on the Retrospective of Films Directed
by Rakshan Bani-Etemad’. BFI Southbank, London. Available at: http://iranheritage.org/
rakhshanbanietemad/default.htm (accessed 5 January 2014).
Jahed, Parviz. 2012. Directory of World Cinema: Iran. Bristol: Intellect.
Lahiji, Shalala. 2002. ‘Chaste Dolls and Unchaste Dolls: Women in Iranian Cinema Since
1979’, in Richard Tapper (ed.) New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity.
London: I. B. Tauris.
Laurier, Joanne, and David Walsh. 2005. ‘An Interview with Rakhshan Bani-Etemad,
Co-director of Gilaneh’, World Socialist Website, published by the International Committee
of the Fourth International (ICFI). Available at: http://www.wsws.org/ (accessed 9 January
2014).
Mottahadeh, N. 2004. ‘Life is Color!: Toward a Transnational Feminist Analysis of Mohsen
Makmalbaf’s Gabbeh’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30 (1).
Mulvey, Laura. 2010. ‘Between Melodrama and Realism: Under the Skin of the City (2001)’,
in James Walters and Tom Brown (eds) Film Moments. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 8–11.
Naficy, Hamid. 1994. ‘Veiled Vision/Powerful Presences: Women in Post-Revolutionary
Cinema’, in Mahnaz Afkhami and Erika Friedl (eds) In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post
Revolutionary Iran. New York: Syracuse University Press.
Naficy, Hamid. 2012. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era,
1984–2010. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Philips, Richard. 2006. ‘Iranian Director Tahmineh Milani Speaks with WSWS’, World
Socialist Web Site, 29 September. Available at: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/09/
mila-s29.html (accessed 9 January 2014).
Ramazani, Nesta. 1993. ‘Women in Iran: The Revolutionary Ebb and Flow’, Middle East
Journal, 47 (3): 409–28.
Rezai-Rashti, Goli M. 2007. ‘Transcending the Limitations: Women and the Post-
revolutionary Iranian Cinema’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 16 (2): 191–206.
Sadr, Hamid Rez. 2002. An Introduction to the Political History of Iranian Cinema (1900–2001).
Tehran: New Publishing.
Sadr, Hamid Rez. 2006. Iranian Cinema: A Political History. London: I. B. Tauris.
Scott, Stephanie. 2001. ‘Tahmineh Milani Fights Back’, New England Film.com. Available
at: http://www.newenglandfilm.com/news/archives/01december/milani.htm (accessed
8 January 2014).
Shakil, Sakina. 2011. ‘Iranian Film Industry Thrives amid Continuing Censorship’, The
International, 1 October.
Sprio, Margherita. 2009. ‘Filmic Performance: Authenticity and The Apple’, Wide Screen,
1 (1): 1–9.
Tait, Robert. 2012. ‘Anger as Iran Bans Women from Universities’. Telegraph, 20 August,
Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9487761/
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Iran 103
Talachian, Reza. 1980. A Brief Critical History of Iranian Feature Film (1896–1975). A Thesis
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Zeydabadi-Nejad, S. 2007. ‘Iranian Intellectuals and Contact with the West: The Case of
Iranian Cinema’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 34 (4): 375–98.
Zeydabadi-Nejad, S. 2010. The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic
Republic. London and New York: Routledge.
Israel
Jule Selbo
Train Station in Jerusalem (1896) was one of the earliest films ever made, shot in
Ottoman Palestine by the French Lumière brothers, long before the advent of
Israeli statehood. The first full-length feature film in Hebrew was Oded the Wanderer
(1933); the film focuses on a young student who gets separated from his class on
a field trip and teaches the lesson of respect for the land and advocates a Jewish
connection to it. After the dawn of Israeli independence in 1948, there was a large
migration of people from Europe and Muslim countries, and thus the creative base
in Israel stems from many sources.
Israeli cinema, according to Amy Kronish, curator of Jewish and Israeli film at
the Jerusalem Cinemathèque and contributor to the Jewish Women’s Archives, has
developed ‘along unique thematic and stylistic lines …’ and women filmmakers
are heavily present in both the narrative and documentary modes (Kronish n.d.).
Within the Israeli cinema, there are distinct groups of filmmakers, mostly divided
between the Orthodox communities (films typically made for women by women
and not shown outside of the community) and the commercial film industry. The
Orthodox films are shown in their own festivals; ‘it’s a shadow industry in which
directors make films for women only, without subsidies and without establish-
ment recognition’ (Glinter 2013). One of the prominent female filmmakers in
the Orthodox filmmaking sector who has now enjoyed more commercial suc-
cess is Rama Burshtein (1967–). She was born in New York City and moved to
Tel Aviv with her family at the age of one. Having attended the Sam Spiegel Film
and Television School in Jerusalem, she joined Orthodox Hasidic Judaism at age
twenty-five; this commitment is one that usually comes with accepting member-
ship in a community that forbids secular films and television. Burshtein began her
filmmaking in the typical and accepted way of her community. ‘In the (Orthodox
Hasidic) community, we have an industry – only women making (the films), only
women watching them. We fund ourselves and we have to make sure the women
buy the ticket’ (Dawson 2013). Burshtein, however, expanded the accepted
parameters; she is known as the first ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman to write and
direct a feature film for a general audience (Wax 2013).
Burshtein’s Fill the Void was released in 2012. She noted that it took her fifteen
years to move from conception to finished film; this included a stint with the
104
Israel 105
work at the Sundance Screenwriting Lab. The tale takes place in a circumscribed
world where gender roles are strict and ‘every aspect of life, from the spiritual to
the mundane, is governed by a complex array of laws and customs designed to
emphasize the perceived needs of the community over individual desires’ (Eisner
2013). The tale focuses on the questions of honour and duty that face a family
after a tragedy. A religious Jewish woman, Shira, lives in a cloistered Israeli Hasidic
home. Her sister has just died in childbirth; the husband is bereaved. Shira’s mother
wastes no time in pushing for a quick marriage between Shira and the grieving
widower so that the child will not be taken from the familial unit, and Shira has to
decide whether or not to marry her dead sister’s husband. The film was entered in
the Venice Film Festival; at the conclusion of the screening the film received a ten-
minute standing ovation (Dawson 2013). The film also garnered Burshstein three
Ophir Awards (Israeli Oscars) and it was chosen for North American distribution
by Sony Pictures. She says: ‘I’m a storyteller more than anything, and I realized
that we had no cultural voice. Most of the films about the community are done by
outsiders and are rooted in conflicts between religious and the secular … I wanted
to tell a deeply human story’ (Wax 2013).
Burshstein has a strong point of view on the woman’s role in her community.
‘I don’t have to be a king. For me, it’s very good that my husband is a king. It
doesn’t mean I don’t exist. We do it quietly. It doesn’t have to be so loud, our exist-
ence as women’ (Eisner 2013). Burshstein also notes, ‘I’m just telling my story,
with more heart and feeling than brains. I believe in the rules, but I will find the
passion within them’ (Eisner 2013).
Director of the Israel Film Center in New York City, Isaac Zablocki, points to
Burshstein as one who is moving the perimeters of Israeli cinema. ‘It’s a sign that
Israeli culture is coming into its own. Filmmakers like Rama Burshtein are confident
enough to tell a story from within and know it will have an audience. For Israelis
to understand their own experiences – this is a revolution in Israeli cinema’
(Eisner 2013).
Most Israeli films are made in Hebrew and many have been nominated as Best
Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, as well as for other awards across
the globe. There are many women who have contributed to Israeli commercial
cinema, including Michal Bat-Adam (1945–). She was born Michal Breslavy in
Afula, Israel to parents who fled Poland in 1939. She studied music at Tel Aviv
University and acting at the Beit Zvi School of Performing Arts in Ramat Gan. She
was cast in the title role of director Moshe Mizrahi’s film I Love You Rosa (1972),
and when the film went on to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at
the Academy Awards, her professional acting career blossomed. During the 1970s,
Bat-Adam began to write screenplays. She wrote, directed and starred in Moments
de la vie d’une femme (1979); she is often credited as the first Israeli woman to direct
a feature film. Moments explores an intense relationship between two women and
includes a ménage a trois. She wrote and directed The Thin Line (1980); the film
focuses on an eleven-year-old girl who must care for her mentally ill mother
(Bat-Adam’s mother suffered from mental illness – thus her interest in pursuing
this topic). Ben Loke’ah Bat/Boy Takes Girl (1982) focuses on Bat-Adam’s memories
of growing up in a kibbutz. Other screenwriting credits include Ha-Me’ahev (1985),

Elef Neshotav Shel Naftali Siman-Tov (1985), Life is Life (2003), and Sof Shavua
be-Galil (2007, co-written with Moshe Mizrahi). Bat-Adam is also a teacher at Tel
Aviv University and Camera Obscura.
Mira Recanati is an artist, screenwriter and director of A Thousand Little Kisses
(1985); the story focuses on a complex relationship between mother and daughter
and is a study in the importance of forgiveness. Recanati notes that ‘everything is
so small and tightly knit in Tel Aviv, families are so dependent upon each other
that there is an emotional blackmail which doesn’t change from generation to
generation’ (Thomas 1985).
Ayelet Menahemi (1963–) is a screenwriter, editor and director; she graduated
from Beit Zvi Academy. Her screenwriting credits include Noodle (2007, co-written
with Shemi Zarhi). Noodle focuses on an airline stewardess, Miri, whose cleaning
lady, surprisingly, leaves her Chinese son in Miri’s care. The two must forge a rela-
tionship as Miri tries to locate the boy’s mother. Menahemi, in an interview at an
Asian film festival, noted that the idea for the film came during a retreat in India.
She used scripting and improvisation in the creative process (Stefan S. 2008).
Menahemi also co-wrote and co-directed Surpurei Tel Aviv/Tel Aviv Stories with Nirit
Yaron. Yaron also graduated from Beit Zvi Academy and started her screenwriting
career on a popular Israeli television series Zeho Ze. She works as a producer,
director, screenwriter, song writer, and also works in advertising.
Gila Almagor’s screenwriting credits include Malkat Hakvish (1971, co-writer),
the adaptation of her autobiographical books about being a Holocaust survivor,
Ha-Kayitz Shel Aviya/The Summer of Aviya (1988, co-adaptor) and Under the Domin
Tree (1994, co-adaptor).
Ronit Elkabetz (1964–) was born in Beersheba, Israel into a strict Moroccan
Jewish family. She is a screenwriter and Ophir award-winning actress and works
in Israel and France. Screenwriting credits include Tzalet (1995, co-written with
director Haim Bouzaglo), and three films she also starred in and co-wrote with her
brother Shlomi Elkabetz: 7 days (2008), To Take a Wife (2004), and Gett: The Trial of
Viviane Amsalem (2014). These films focus on the role of women in strict religious
and male-dominated societies.
Shira Geffen (1971–) is a screenwriter, actress and director. Screenwriting credits
include Meduzot/Jellyfish (2007, winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film
Festival) and Boreg/Self-Made (2014). Geffen wrote and directed Self-Made, the story
of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman whose lives get mixed up at the
border crossing. They must learn to live each other’s lives.
Keren Yedaya (1972–) trained at the Camera Obscura School in Tel Aviv. She is a
political activist for women’s rights. Her screenwriting credits include Jaffa (2009,
co-writer), Or/My Treasure (2004, co-writer and winner of the Camera d’Or at the
Cannes Film Festival), and That Lovely Girl (2014).
Talya Lavie (1978–) was born in Petah Tikva, Israel. She is a writer and director
for film and television. Her feature film screenwriting credit is Zero Motivation (2014);
the story focuses on a unit of female Israeli soldiers stationed on a remote desert
base and the events that befall them as they wait to return to civilian life.
Israel 107
Veronica (Ronni) Kedar (1984–) was born in Tel Aviv. She is a writer, producer,
actress and director. She has written and directed multiple short films and her fea-
ture screenwriting credits include Endtime (2014) and Joe + Belle (2011, co-writer).
Joe + Belle premiered at the Outfest Festival in Los Angeles. Her film project Family
(2014) won the top money prize at the Jerusalem International Film Lab. The
award is intended to help finance promising film narratives (Aviv 2013).
Filmmaker Yuta Silverman’s screenwriting credits include Sheffield’s Manor
(2010) and Arranged (2007, story credit).
Other screenwriters with roots in Israel, working in both narrative and documentary
films, include Tzipi Trope, Hanna Azoulay-Hasfari and Anat Zuria.
References
Aviv, Uri. 2013. ‘Kedar’s Family Wins Top Prize at Jerusalem Lab’, Twitch Film. Available
at: http://twitchfilm.com/2013/07/kedars-family-wins-top-prize-at-jerusalem-lab.html
(accessed 28 April 2015).
Dawson, Nick. 2013. ‘Rama Burshstein on Fill the Void’, Filmmaker Magazine, 23 May. Available
at: http://filmmakermagazine.com/71342-rama-burshtein-on-fill-the-void/#.VIMn92TF_38
Eisner, Jane. 2013. ‘An Unconventional Look at Orthodoxy,’ New York Times, 3 May.
Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/movies/fill-the-void-directed-by-rama-
burshtein.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& (accessed 28 April 2015).
Glinter, Ezra. 2013. ‘Is There an Orthodox Film Industry?’, The Arty Semite, 22 May. Available
at: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/177084/is-there-an-orthodox-film-industry/
Kronish, Amy W. 1996. World Cinema, Israel. USA: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Kronish, Amy W. n.d. ‘Filmmakers, Israeli’, Jewish Women’s Archives, Encyclopedia. Available
at: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/filmmakers-israeli (accessed 28 April 2015).
Stefan S. 2008. (A Nutshell) Review: Probably Singapore’s #1 Moview Review Blog, 5 September.
Available at: http://anutshellreview.blogspot.com/2008/09/israel-film-festival-noodle.
html (accessed 28 April 2015).
Thomas, Kevin. 1985. ‘Movie Review: ‘Little Kisses’: Plight of a Failure to Forgive’, Los Angeles
Times, 4 December.
Wax, Emily. 2013. ‘Rama Burshstein Is First Ultra-Orthodox Woman to Direct for General Audience’,
Washington Post, 7 June. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide
/movies/rama-burshtein-is-first-ultra-orthodox-woman-to-direct-for-general-audience/
2013/06/07/ecc1f9ea-c7a2-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html (accessed 28 April 2015).
Japan
Lauri Kitsnik, Jule Selbo and Michael Smith
The beginnings
Jule Selbo
The Industrial Revolution in the 1800s changed the way people lived their lives in
many nations around the world. Japan entered this era of technology in a resolute
manner after 1854 when – after nearly 200 years of seclusion and refusal to trade
with the Western world – the nation was challenged when American Commodore
Matthew Perry steamed into Nagasaki. (Perry was a futurist who, after the advent
of the steam engine, championed the modernization of the US Navy.) As a result
of fairly strong-armed methods of negotiation, America was awarded a treaty (the
Convention of Kanagawa 1854); this treaty opened Japan to the new skillsets,
machinery, equipment, ideas and products of the United States and other Western
nations. Japan began to see firsthand the early technological wonders and soon
entered the race to compete in the modern world. Early film technology was being
invented by the late 1880s; a fascination with moving pictures was prevalent in
all industrialized countries – and Japan was no exception.
As a result of the Industrial Revolution, rural ways of life shifted as people
moved into urban centres to work in factories and offices. This changed men’s
lives, but perhaps one can argue that the lives of women changed in a more dra-
matic fashion. There were shifts in educational opportunities, in family dynamics,
and ultimately in female independence.
Japan, shortly after entering the industrial age, instituted compulsory education
for both sexes. However, policy makers of that period stated that education for
females was primarily to facilitate women becoming more productive daughters,
wives, mothers and homemakers. (As an interesting historical sidelight, historians
note that in 12th century Japan [700 years earlier in the Heian period] women
could own property, be educated, and were allowed, if discreet, to take lovers.
These freedoms and opportunities were curtailed under the Shogunate feudal gov-
ernments and into the Meiji period and, by 1898, women in Japan were denied
nearly all legal rights and subjugated to the will of male household heads.) The
compulsory education reform did not necessarily bring Japanese women into
the workforce beyond the factory, for the focus was on gender-specific ‘moral
108
Japan 109
training’ – which included self-control, obedience, patience, and discipline.

Classes in proper tea ceremony and flower arranging were also part of the cur-
riculum for females.
Pre-World War II opportunities for women in Japan’s film industry

Strong censorship in Japan was in place at the beginnings of the national film
industry (the first films being made in the late 1890s). There was also govern-
ment oversight of narrative content. Filmmakers were, in some way, ‘vetted’ to
ensure they were in line with the Japanese government’s policies and purposes.
Propaganda films, usually referred to as ‘culture films’, were favoured and many of
the soon to be major screenwriter-directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro
Ozu were expected to create these culture films. This they did to stay in favour
with the government. At the same time they lobbied to gain permission to make
their more personal films. Some of these personal films made it through the cen-
sorship oversight board and saw distribution within the country; others did not.
(Interesting note: The more personal films were mostly low budget and shot on
lower-grade film with less expensive cameras.)
Due to the proscribed role of the woman in Japanese society at the time, there
were very few female creatives working as scriptwriters in the Japanese film indus-
try pre-World War II. One of these females, Tazuko Sakane, forged a place for
herself in the nearly all-male industry:
Men I will fight to the bitter end.

I will make my film!
That’s why I have dared
To enter this world of cinema –
To show men, not to work for them! (Onishi 1993: 53, from McDonald 2007)
These are the words written by Tazuko Sakane (Tatsuko Sakane) (1904–75) in 1936
when she was 32 years old. Sakane was one of the first women to rise through
the ranks of the Japanese film industry – from production assistant to script girl
(continuity) to assistant director to screenwriter. Sakane was born into Japan’s
‘privileged’ society; her father was a wealthy inventor and businessman (who
often used early film technology to showcase his inventions – he also wrote and
produced scenarios) (Ikegawa and Ward 2005: 259; McDonald 2007: 129). Sakane
was enamoured with the cinema from a young age; most likely she was watch-
ing benshi-narrated silent films – all directed and written by men – with most of
the acting roles (male and female) performed by men. (In 1911, the first Japanese
actress was allowed to perform in a film; she played a servant while the male
director played the lead female role.It wasn’t until the early 1920s that women
began to take on lead acting roles in films.) It is also very likely that many of the
early films Sakane viewed were very theatrical, using kabuki style or shinpa (overly
melodramatic tales of women suffering because of social prejudice).
Sakane’s father held over 200 patents and his inventive mind also led to him
being open to new ideas – one of them was a Western-style education for his
eldest daughter (McDonald 2007: 129). Sakane attended and graduated from the
privileged Kyoto Prefectural First girls’ school. Many Western-style schools were
founded by Christian missionaries; at these schools there were policies stress-
ing freedom and individuality (McVeigh 2003). Sakane went on to attend the
Christian-sponsored Doshisha Women’s College; there she studied English litera-
ture (Ikegawa and Ward 2005: 259). The stated goal of the college was ‘to nurture
independent women who use their knowledge and skills as conscience dictates,
working actively for the good of society’(DWCLA).
Unfortunately, Sakane’s father’s second wife was opposed to female education
and Sakane was forced, in 1924, at age 20, to drop out of school and enter an
arranged marriage with a physician. After four unhappy years, Sakane defied
expected social behaviour and left the marriage. Because it was difficult for a
woman to gain a divorce, her father eventually paid her husband to gain Sakane
her freedom (Ikegawa and Ward 2005: 259; McDonald 2007: 129). Instead of seek-
ing a new husband, Sakane again went against tradition and decided she wanted
to get a job – specifically in the film industry. Her father arranged a job for her
at the Nikkatsu Studio in Kyoto. The film business in Japan in the 1920s was not
considered respectable; actors and actresses were referred to as kawara kojiki (beg-
gars of the riverbank) and film studio employees were also ill-considered, often
disowned by their families and even denied proper burial in family cemetery plots
(McDonald 2007: 130).
A few females were making headway in screenwriting at this time. In 1924,
Ayame Mizushima received on-screen writing credit for the silent film The Song of
the Fallen Leaves. She worked at the Shochiku Kamata Studios until 1935. Female
screenwriters Yoshiko Hayashi and Noriko Suzuki were also given opportunities.
Sakane, first working in production and with a strong desire to direct, had a more
difficult journey.
By 1929, Sakane was an oddity in the industry because no other females worked
in production (except in the hairdressing department). However, she had proven
her worth as an assistant director’s assistant. After an introduction to Mizoguchi,
she became his ‘script girl’ (her duties similar to those of a script supervisor today).
Mizoguchi employed, at this time, the shinpa style of filmmaking, focusing on
the tribulations and self-sacrifice of ‘good women’. He asked Sakane to help him
with the script for The Foreigner’s Mistress (1930). The collaboration was successful
(although Sakane did not get screenwriting credit); she became his screenwriting
partner and assistant director – and eventually took on the task of being his film
editor. She worked as a scriptwriter on Yet They Go (1931) and The Man of the
Moment (1932) (McDonald 2007: 131). Again, she did not receive on-screen credit
as a scriptwriter, although she did receive credit as assistant director. As Mizoguchi
moved from studio to studio, Sakane moved with him.
Perhaps to blend in – being the only woman in Mizoguchi’s on-set production
crew – Sakane cut her hair short, gave up wearing a kimono, and hired a tailor to
create pairs of pants for her to wear at work. This attire was new to women’s cloth-
ing in Japan (although in America it had become fashionable in the late 1920s;
in 1929, Dorothy Arzner had taken to dressing in men’s clothing and wearing
Japan 111
her hair in a masculine style when she moved from screenwriting into directing
at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood). Because of Sakane’s family’s elevated social
position andher abnormal choice of profession, Sakane was considered ‘pecu-
liar’ and often subjected to questions concerning whether she had a ‘sufficient
amount’ of femininity.
In 1935, at age 32, Sakane decided to pursue permission to write and direct her
first feature film (Ikegawa and Ward 2005: 260). As noted previously, there was a
vetting process – government sanction of the filmmaker as well as the narrative
content. Sakane was required to publicly state her support for Japan’s aggressive
colonization policies and the government’s social measures. This she did; and thus
she was given the go-ahead by the Daiichi Eiga film company, a company where
she now worked with Mizoguchi (McDonald 2007: 132). Sakane hoped to adapt
and direct A Woman’s Life based on a novel by Yuzo Yamamoto; however, the
patriarchal system assigned her to adapt and direct Hatsu Sugata (translated vari-
ously as New Clothing or New Year Finery or First Appearance). The narrative was an
adaptation of Kosugi Tengai’s shinpa tragedy, a human study focusing on a young
geisha-to-be, Otoshi – the illegitimate daughter of a promiscuous woman – and a
young man, Ryutaro, who is about to become a Buddhist priest (McDonald 2007:
132). The two fall in love; however, there is much conflict in their relationship (it
is suggested that, because of her parentage, Otoshi’s passionate nature can never
be controlled), and in the end the two lovers know they cannot be together.
Otoshi makes the ultimate sacrifice and marries a wealthy businessman to help
her family. This plot was somewhat controversial; however, the narrative outcome
of the film fell in line with government policies and expectations of its people –
that duty and tradition will always triumph.
Because Sakane’s first film – as with many early Japanese films – is no longer
in existence (due to many factors: the 1923 earthquake that was responsible for
many of the early Japanese films being destroyed, multiple wars and poor preser-
vation in the humid climate of Japan), there are no records of the actual credits
of the film. Keiko McDonald, in her article in Asian Cinema in 2007, based in part
on Etsuko Onishi’s biography of Sakane, notes that, reportedly, Mizoguchi and his
cameraman, Minoru Miki, were overly involved in the film. Film reviews noted
that it was ‘weak-water Mizoguchi’, and the film did not do well at the box office.
In 1936, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan signed a pact against the Soviet
Union. In 1937, Japan invaded China, initiating the Sino-Japanese War, and
eventually World War II began in the Pacific. During this time, the Film Law (the
censorship body) was given even more power and, by 1939, government oversight
of the film industry and story content was immutable (Ikegawa and Ward 2005:
261). ‘The Home Ministry issued stringent regulations … Scripts were not to pro-
mote frivolous behavior or Western notions of individual freedom, especially with
respect to women’ (McDonald 2007: 135).
Male filmmakers like Mizoguchi, Ozu and others continued to make films dur-
ing the war; however, Sakane could not obtain government permission to make
another film. Mizoguchi cast actress Kinuyo Tanaka in his film The Women of Osaka
and began a close professional and personal relationship with her. According to
McDonald, this was difficult for Sakane, for she was close to Mizoguchi, but also
close to his wife who was suffering from the debilitating effects of syphilis and
was soon committed to an insane asylum. McDonald also suggests that Mizoguchi
proposed marriage to Sakane (McDonald 2007: 136), introducing more challenges
in their relationship. In order to put distance between herself and Mizoguchi, and
to continue her craft, Sakane accepted the position of director of education films
at the Manchukuo Film Association. An article in a newspaper of the time stated,
‘In order to appeal to the women of the Co-prosperity Sphere in the future, we
must make films in which women themselves have a hand. This is why Sakane
(Tazuko) has been selected as a director’ (Ikegawa and Ward 2005: 262).
Sakane moved to Manchukuo (Manchuria) for three years; there she made over
a dozen culture films; these were called bunka eiga films – scripted ‘non-fictional’
films shot in documentary style and meant to help ‘nurture the national spirit
and enlighten people’ (McDonald 2007: 137). The Manchukuo Film Association
was run by Masahiko Amakasu, a formerly high-ranking Japanese military officer
who had been court-martialed and imprisoned in 1923 for brutal actions fol-
lowing that year’s earthquake. He was released after three years to oversee the
Japanese Army’s involvement in smuggling opium into China, and to help smug-
gle the last Emperor of China (Puyi) into Manchukuo. Amakasu was determined
to make the Manchukuo Film Association a strong producing entity. Amakasu
offered Sakane the chance to continue her filmmaking and, although she made
culture films there (several sources note she did 10 films, others credit her for 14),
it is noted that Amakasu, for the most part, gave his filmmakers the freedom to
choose their topics and how they would present them. Sakane’s chosen subject
matters focused on exploring the plight of women in war-torn Northeastern
China and include Hataraku Josei/Working Women (1942), Kaitaku no Hanayome/
Brides on the Frontier (1943), and others. Brides on the Frontier (sometimes referred
to as Bride of the Settlement) is a culture film dealing ‘with a scheme promoted
as part of the Manchurian emigration policy, whereby women were lured to the
colony by the prospect of marriage’ (Ikegawa and Ward, 2005: 262). Sakane’s leg-
acy was her focus on ‘seeing things from a woman’s point of view’ (Ikegawa and
Ward 2005: 272). One of Sakane’s films, a ‘news film’, was found in the Russian
State Film Archives in the mid 1990s; it focuses ‘on female students put to work
helping out on a training exercise for the Japanese troops’ (Ikegawa and Ward
2005: 263) and ‘Chinese men and women in aprons finely cutting, boiling and
drying the leaves of wild grape plants’ in preparation for making tartaric acid ‘to
be used for scientific weapons, such as radar’ (Ikegawa and Ward 2005: 272). Two
months after this film was shot, the Japanese surrendered and the Manchukuo
puppet state collapsed. Most of the films of the Manchukuo Film Company were
confiscated by the Soviet Army (Ikegawa and Ward 2005).
In a 1939 volume of the Japanese film magazine Eiga Junpo, found among
Sakane’s personal belongings, Sakane is quoted as saying that ‘if something is
depicted by men only, it is controlled by men only … I hope that as many female
scriptwriters, camerawomen, etc. as possible come into the Japanese film world,
because I would like to take them on as staff to make a film celebrating women,
Japan 113
such as only a woman could make’ (Ikegawa and Ward 2005: 272).1 From this
quote it could be surmised that Sakane, having enjoyed the relative freedom of
scripting and directing films of her choice in Manchukuo, was hoping to return
to Japan to continue in this vein.
However, returning to Japan, Sakane was denied work as a film director. The
reason she was given was that, postwar, it was now mandatory for all film direc-
tors to have a college degree. However, the narrative content of her work in
Manchuria, and her association with the Manchukuo Film Company, which had
held on to its own autonomy by not allowing the Japanese government to control
narrative content of the films it produced, may have been contributing factors.
At age 42, Sakane, simply wanting to work, again signed on to Mizoguchi’s film
crew and worked as a script girl. According to film historians Ikegawa and Ward,
she worked her way back up to scriptwriting and editing positions; however,
in searching Mizoguchi’s post-World War II work (11 of his 18 films starred the
popular and beautiful actress Kinuyo Tanaka), Sakane’s name is not credited as
a scriptwriter. (Mizoguchi turned mostly to screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda in these
years.) When Mizoguchi died of leukemia in 1956, Sakane’s work in film reportedly
slowed down. In 1962, Sakane (now age 58) was asked to script Miss Ogin, a film
to be directed by Kinuyo Tanaka. When Tanaka found out who the scriptwriter
was to be, she refused to work with Sakane (each of their personal histories with
Mizoguchi may have been at the crux of the animosity). The studio backed Kinuyo
Tanaka (McDonald 2007: 144) and Sakane retired from the Shochiku Studios in
1967; however, she continued to do freelance scriptwriting for the Daiei Company
until her death from cancer in 1971 at the age of 67 (McDonald 2007: 144).
Japanese women screenwriters: collaborators
Lauri Kitsnik
The 1950s Golden Age of the studio system in Japanese cinema is commonly tied
to the efforts of directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu,
Mikiro Naruse, and Kon Ichikawa. Less attention has been paid to the fact that
the careers of all these filmmakers are characterized by long collaborative relation-
ships with a number of notable screenwriters. Western histories of Japanese film
have seldom touched upon this phenomenon whereas it has usually received a
more balanced treatment from Japanese scholars,2 allowing considerable prestige
and visibility for screenwriters such as Kogo Noda (1893–1968) and Yoshikata
Yoda (1909–91), who worked with Ozu and Mizoguchi respectively. Two of the
biggest screenwriting names that emerged after World War II, Shinobu Hashimoto
(1918–) and Kaneto Shindo (1912–2012), also scripted films directed by the era’s
leading filmmakers. Remarkably, though, shaping the oeuvres of Naruse and
Ichikawa in particular, are the contributions of three female screenwriters: Yoko
Mizuki (1910–2003), Sumie Tanaka (1908–2000), and Natto Wada (1920–83).
In addition, Mizuki worked extensively with Imai Tadashi, a prolific and popular
director notoriously ignored in Western scholarship although enjoying almost
unanimous acclaim for socially conscious work in Japan at the time.
The strong presence of women screenwriters in early Hollywood, attested to by

the work of Anita Loos, Frances Marion, and June Mathis, is well documented.
However, in the Japanese film industry, very much a male-dominated one – even
to the point that up to the early 1920s female roles were still played by male
actors – there were considerably fewer chances for women to become part of film
production in roles such as producers, directors, or screenwriters. The distinction
of being the first female screenwriter is commonly given to Ayame Mizushima3
(1903–90, born Takano Chitose). The pen name was created for the occasion of
her receiving her first screen credit on The Song of Fallen Leaves, which opened
in November 1924. Using her real name would have resulted in her being expel-
led from Japan Women’s College, where viewing films, let alone participating
in making them, was prohibited. The next year, Mizushima entered Shochiku
Kamata Studios, where she remained employed until the studio’s move to Ofuna
in 1935, when she retired from the film industry to become a children‘s writer.
Known for scripting comedies and melodramas, she had a total of 29 of her
screenplays produced.4
In 1928, Mizushima penned a screenplay for the film Sora no kanata e/
Beyond the Sky, 1928, dir. Takeo Tsutami), based on a novel by Nobuko Yoshiya
(1896–1973), a notable and commercially successful contemporary woman writer
and pioneer of lesbian literature in Japan, as well as a major influence on shojo
manga (a genre of comics targeted at teenage female audiences).5 Mizushima’s
last film, Kagayake shonen Nihon/Shine On, Boy Japan! (1935), commissioned to
celebrate the birth of the Crown Prince (the future Emperor Akihito), was also
her only talkie, indicating that her withdrawal from writing for film might, in
part, have resulted from the changes the medium was going through in its shift
to sound. In sum, Mizushima had a chance to work with notable male directors
such as Mikio Naruse and Hiroshi Shimizu, often turning her own original stories
into screenplays, employing genres encompassing melodrama, mother’s films
(hahamono), comedy, period films, adventure, and even a sports film (Kagayake
Nihon no josei/Shine On, Japanese Women! [1932], co-written with Kogo Noda) set
at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. However, Mizushima did not remain
the only woman writing for film at the time. Only three months after her debut,
the rival Nikkatsu studio released Shitaiyuku kage/Yearning Shadows (1925), scripted
by Yoshiko Hayashi. Indeed, the July 1926 issue of the journal Shibai to kinema/
Stage and Cinema featured an illustrated introduction to Mizushima and Hayashi
as the flag bearers of newly emerging women screenwriters. Subsequently, nine
more of Hayashi’s scripts were produced, her version of the story of the legendary
swordsman Musashi Miyamoto in the eponymous film of 1929 becoming her
last screenwriting credit. A third notable woman screenwriter of the era, with
27 scripts to her credit, was Noriko Suzuki (1909–85). She worked for the Nikkatsu
studios from 1933 to 1937, and then for Toho until 1941. Among her work is an
adaptation of yet another Nobuko Yoshiya novel, Hanatsumi nikki/Flower-Picking
Diary (1939). A print of Chokoreeto to heitai/Chocolate and Soldiers (1938), consi-
dered her representative work, was recovered in the United States in 2004. This
fact hints at a perennial problem: the majority of pre-war Japanese films are lost,
Japan 115
making it very difficult to adequately assess the mark left by women screenwriters
on Japanese silent and early sound cinema.
However, there was a definite and well-documented impact in the 1950s when
three of the most important women scriptwriters in the history of Japanese cinema
emerged. Given the relative scarcity of female screenwriters before the war, it is all
the more remarkable that Mizuki, Tanaka and Wada were to become some of the
most prominent writers in their trade. Belonging roughly to the same generation
as Mizushima, Hayashi and Suzuki, they only started working in film after the
war, were most active in the 1950s, and largely disappeared from the scene by
the mid 1960s, all three writing 30 or so films in total. Of the three, best known
outside Japan is Natto Wada who scripted most of her husband Kon Ichikawa’s
directorial work up to 1963, Biruma no tategoto/The Burmese Harp (1956), Kagi/
Odd Obsession (1959), and Yukinojo henge/An Actor’s Revenge (1963) being some
of the more famous examples. Working mostly on adaptations of contemporary
literature, often adding new twists peppered with black humour to the original
story, Wada gradually moved from light-hearted comedies in the early 1950s to
more serious subject matter by the end of the decade. Mizuki and Sumie Tanaka,
who shared an early background in writing for the stage, scripted what were some
of the most celebrated films of the 1950s, including Meshi/Repast (1951), Nigorie/
Muddy Waters (1953), Ukigumo/Floating Clouds (1955), Yoru no kawa/Night River
(1956), and Kiku and Isamu (1959). Interestingly, Sumie Tanaka also scripted two
films directed by her namesake, Kinuyo Tanaka, the first Japanese woman director
(see separate entries on Mizuki, Sumie Tanaka and Wada).
Why the sudden emergence of women screenwriters in the 1950s? The phe-
nomenon can be partly explained by simultaneous shifts in the composition of
audiences and the literary canon. On the one hand, film production companies
started to employ women screenwriters to accommodate rapidly growing female
audiences, providing films with a ‘feminine touch’. On the other hand, there
were female fiction authors such as Fumiko Hayashi (1903–51) who reached the
peak of popularity in the early 1950s. Hayashi, whose work had previously been
categorized by the somewhat derogative label of ‘women’s literature’ (joryu bun-
gaku), had a postwar revival, one that delivered her to the literary canon proper.6
There are strong indications that this happened with the aid of a string of Naruse-
directed films scripted by either Mizuki or Tanaka, which arguably ‘smooth[ed]
out Hayashi’s rough edges’ (Russell 2008: 219). This interplay with the literary
canon, a reciprocal movement where women writers found a larger audience and
appreciation through screen versions of their work, helped to cement Hayashi’s
critical reputation while providing a commercially viable pattern for film pro-
duction by way of literary adaptations. In fact, something akin to this can be
detected as early as the late 1920s, in the work of the very first women writing for
film. More than 40 films based on Nobuko Yoshiya’s works were produced before
World War II, with a number of the screenplays written by women screenwriters
such as Mizushima and Suzuki: in addition to the ones mentioned above, Bofuu
no bara/The Rose in the Storm (1931, co-written with Kogo Noda) and Nyonin
airaku/Woman’s Sadness and Joy (1933). Indeed, adapting Yoshiya seems to have
been something of a yardstick for women screenwriters even after the war, as
the early 1950s saw most of the women screenwriters of the time participating
in the endeavour of adapting her work, including Mizuki and Sumie Tanaka.
Nevertheless, pointing out this particular tendency is not meant to reduce the
contribution of women screenwriters to simply bringing women’s literature to the
screen. In fact, Mizuki, Sumie Tanaka and Wada penned a number of screenplays
for critically acclaimed films based on novels by such Japanese literary giants as
Yasunari Kawabata (The Dancing Girl of Izu/Sound of the Mountain), Yukio Mishima
(The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), and Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (The Key).
There were a few other women writing for film at the time, such as Yoshiko
Kusuda (1924–2013), sister of the renowned director Keisuke Kinoshita. She ear-
ned 18 screen credits. From the 1960s, when the film industry witnessed a deep
slump, most women screenwriters started to shift their attention to new opportu-
nities brought about by television. Sugako Hashida (1925–), something of a link
between the Golden Age of the studio system in the 1950s and the advent of TV in
the 1960s, entered Shochiku Studios in 1949. Her 15 film credits include a take on
the A-bomb genre, Nagasaki no kane/Bells of Nagasaki (1950, co-written with Shindo
Kaneto), and a Nobuko Yoshiya adaptation, Kyoshu/Nostalgia (1952). Hashida left
Shochiku in 1959 when she came under the threat of being demoted to the rank
of a secretary, becoming instead a successful freelance scriptwriter for television
dramas such as Oshin (1983–4). Other female screenwriters with prolific output
since the 1960s include Yasuko Ono (1928–2011), Hiroko Nishizawa (1929–),
Ikuko Oyabu (1929–), Mieko Osanai (1930–), Kei Hattori (1932–), Fukiko Miyauchi
(1933–2010), Takako Shigemori (1939–), Tomomi Tsutsui (1948–), and Michiko
Nasu (1952–). A new generation that appeared at the end of the 20th century inc-
ludes Akiko Tanaka (1960–), Miwako Daira (1966–, Chakushin ari/One Missed Call
[2003]), Satoko Okudera (1966–), Mika Omori (1972–), Erika Seki (1973–, Sakura
no sono/The Cherry Orchard [2008]), and Miwa Nishikawa (1974–). Besides film and
television work, there have been notable women writing anime screenplays, such
as Keiko Nobumoto (1964–, Cowboy Bebop), and there is even the moniker ‘Yokote
Michiko’, which stands for a team of female screenwriters of undisclosed indentity.
Finally, a number of female filmmakers who emerged at the turn of the millen-
nium also write their own scripts. Those that have a considerable international
following include Naomi Kawase (1969–) – Moe no suzaku/Suzaku (1997), Mogari
no mori/The Mourning Forest (2007) – and Naoko Ogigami (1972–) – Kamome
Shokudo/Kamome Diner (2006), Toilet (2010). Emiko Hiramatsu (1967–), who
in 2012, with Himawari to koinu no nanokakan/Days of Himawari & Her Puppies,
became the first female director at Shochiku Studios since Kinuyo Tanaka, has a
number of co-writing credits for films: Kabei: Our Mother (2008), Ototo/About Her
Brother (2010), and Tokyo kazoku/Tokyo Family (2013).
A closer look
Yoko Mizuki
One of the most important and accomplished Japanese female screenwriters of
all time, Yoko Mizuki was active in the 1950s Golden Age of the studio system.
Japan 117
Mizuki is notable for her work with directors Imai and Naruse in particular, and
for introducing a woman’s point of view and various socially sensitive topics to
Japanese cinema. She was born Tomiko Takagi on 25 August 1910, in Tokyo7 and
graduated from Bunka Gakuin. She started acting at the Tokyo Left-Wing Theatre
(Tokyo Sayoku Gekijo). In order to support the family after her father’s death,
she began to write stage plays at the age of 23. Before World War II she was brie-
fly married to film director and screenwriter Senkichi Taniguchi (1912–2007), a
frequent collaborator of Akira Kurosawa. During wartime she started writing radio
dramas. It was Mizuki’s former Russian teacher, Toshio Yasumi (1903–91) – the
single most prolific screenwriter of his time with almost 200 screen credits and
mentor to a number of fledgling screenwriters such as Shinobu Hashimoto and
Ryuzo Kikushima – who encouraged her to take up screenwriting. Mizuki’s first
effort was Onna no issho/The Life of a Woman (1949), co-written with Yasumi, the
story of a pregnant woman working in inhumane conditions at a printing plant.
However, it was her second screenplay, Mata au hi made/Until We Meet Again
(1950), that brought her instant critical acclaim, with the film taking top place
in the influential Kinema Junpo’s film critics’ annual poll, and triggering Mizuki’s
long and successful collaboration with director Tadashi Imai.
Mizuki claims that at the time of making Until We Meet Again, a film about
young love doomed by the closing stages of the Pacific War, she was still strugg-
ling, despite her background in writing for stage and radio, to learn the very basics
of screenwriting. She had to rewrite most of scenes during filming.8 Although
based on Romain Rolland’s novel Pierre et Luce (1920), set during the First World
War, it was probably due to this working method that it turned out to be a very
loose adaptation (in fact, the film’s credits even fail to mention its literary source).
While having adapted a number of works of Japanese literature for the screen,
Mizuki always admitted to being more comfortable with working from her own
original material. This sets her in sharp contrast to the other two notable women
screenwriters working at the same period, Sumie Tanaka and Natto Wada, whose
work consists mostly of literary adaptations. This also suited the director Imai
who over the years developed an unflinching trust in Mizuki’s ability to come up
with new ideas, which in turn gave her considerable power in shaping the film to
come. As an outspoken, left-leaning director, Imai had been forced to leave Toho
Studios during the Red Purge in the late 1940s, and the majority of his subsequent
films were produced independently, which apparently enhanced the experience
of the screenwriter.
Mizuki suggested that her work could be thematically divided in two: films
dealing with a woman’s world and those tackling particular social issues. While
asserting that screenplays in the former type usually took her only about 15 to
20 days to complete, Mizuki admitted that the latter required thorough research
not always compatible with the time frame of standard film production, singling
out Himeyuri no to/The Tower of Lilies (1953).9 This story about schoolgirls who
had taken on the role of nurses during the Battle of Okinawa casts a grim, almost
naturalistic look at the last days of the Pacific War, contrasting it with contem-
porary tear-jerkers dealing with similar subject matter such as Keisuke Kinoshita’s
hugely popular Nijushi no hitomi/Twenty-Four Eyes (1954). The same year, 1953,
saw another Mizuki-Imai collaboration, Nigorie/Muddy Waters, an omnibus of
three stories about hardships endured by women living on the margins of soci-
ety, adapted from the works of Ichiyo Higuchi (1872–96).10 The Story of Pure Love
(Jun’ai monogatari, 1957), winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film
Festival, merges in its story, a Mizuki original, a tale of adolescent love with issues
arising from the heroine’s A-bomb-inflicted radiation disease. Kiku to Isamu/Kiku
and Isamu (1959), perhaps Mizuki and Imai’s finest effort, deals with an uncon-
ventional topic for the time, the fate of two mixed-race children growing up in
Okinawa. Mizuki’s simple but delicate build-up of the story in combination with
the use of amateur actors make it a touching film. It went on to win a number of
awards, including a Blue Ribbon Award for her screenplay.
While collaboration with Imai came to define both their careers (one third of
her scripts are for him), Mizuki also wrote for other notable directors, often with
highly acclaimed results. Like Sumie Tanaka, she worked with Mikio Naruse, the
main proponent of women’s film in the 1950s through early 1960s. While Tanaka
scripted four Fumiko Hayashi adaptations for Naruse, it is Ukigumo/Floating Clouds
(1955), adapted by Mizuki, that has often been hailed as his definitive masterpiece.
It is a story about lovers who find it hard to sustain their relationship amidst the
postwar chaos. Just when a brighter future finally looms, as the man takes up an
appointment as a forestry warden on a remote island, the woman contracts tuber-
culosis and dies. While one of Naruse’s most celebrated films, it is known that
the director himself did not think much of it. Apparently Naruse had wanted to
end the film with the couple getting on the ship, but Mizuki insisted on going all
the way to the small island to have her die during a typhoon. Because of Mizuki’s
contribution, then, Floating Clouds ended up quite different from other Hayashi
adaptations by Tanaka that have been accused of being somewhat watered down
in comparison to their sources.
Among her 34 screen credits, Mizuki’s own five favourites were Until We Meet
Again, Floating Clouds, The Story of Pure Love, Kiku and Isamu, and The Age of
Marriage (Konki, 1961, dir. Kozaburo Yoshimura). In her obituary, Tadao Sato
concludes that Mizuki scripted some of the best films by directors who did not
themselves participate in writing screenplays, adding that her work indicates
how the Japanese both succeeded and failed in coping with their country’s rapid
transition from wartime militarism to postwar pacifism (Sato 2003: 132–4). Films
scripted by Mizuki landed at the top spot of Kinema Junpo’s annual critics’ poll five
times between 1950 and 1960, the last of them being Ototo/Younger Brother (1960).
Based on Aya Koda’s autobiographical novel about a young woman trying to take
care of her delinquent sibling, it was a rare occasion when Kon Ichikawa did not
collaborate with his wife, screenwriter Natto Wada. Mizuki was awarded Kinema
Junpo’s prize for Best Screenplay in 1962, jointly for Are wa minato no hi da/These
Are Harbour Lights (1961) and The Age of Marriage; and again in 1965 for Amai ase/
Sweet Sweat (1964) and Kwaidan (1964, dir. Masaki Kobayashi, Cannes Special Jury
Prize), the latter an adaptation of ghost stories by Lafcadio Hearn. In her later
career Mizuki continued to work extensively for television: her credits include
Japan 119
Ryoma Forever (Ryoma ga yuku, 1968), a taiga drama, an entry in the year-long
historical drama series about Japanese historical figures aired by the Japanese
Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). Mizuki died on 8 April 2003 in Ichikawa, Chiba.
Her former home has been turned into the Mizuki Memorial Museum.11
Sumie Tanaka
One of three notable women screenwriters active during the Golden Age of
Japanese cinema in the 1950s, Sumie Tanaka is known for her long collaboration
with director Mikio Naruse and for writing screenplays for Kinuyo Tanaka, the
first major Japanese female filmmaker. Born as Sumie Tsujimura, on 11 April 1908
in Tokyo, Tanaka was married to the playwright Chikao Tanaka and first gained
recognition for her stage plays in the late 1930s. After the war, her whole family
was baptized into Catholicism, which remained a strong influence on her work.
Her very first three screenplays, Waga ie wa tanoshi/Our House is Happy (1951),
Shonenki/Record of Youth (1951), and Meshi/Repast (1951), jointly brought her the
Blue Ribbon Award for Screenwriting in 1952.
It was the screenwriter initially appointed to write Repast, Toshiro Ide, who
decided to bring in Sumie Tanaka, already an established writer for stage in the
Bungakuza theatre company but inexperienced in film. Based on an unfinished
novel by Fumiko Hayashi who had died earlier that year, the story about the
decaying marriage of a young couple needed a proper ending. While the screen-
writers wanted it to conclude with the couple getting a divorce, the studio insisted
on a happy ending brought about by reconciliation; this resulted in bitter disil-
lusionment for the screenwriting duo. While pointing to the problematic legal
position of married women in Japan, this reinstating of the status quo failed to
provide an alternative solution. However, the film was a critical success and set the
general tone for a string of subsequent Naruse-directed adaptations of Hayashi’s
work scripted by either Ide, Sumie Tanaka or Yoko Mizuki. It seems safe to say
that Naruse’s reputation as the fourth great Japanese director (after Kurosawa,
Mizoguchi and Ozu) and a proponent of women’s film stands in great part on
his collaboration with Tanaka and Mizuki. Nevertheless, as is apparent from the
following anecdotal account provided by Audie Bock, Naruse had a markedly dif-
ferent working relationship with these two women screenwriters:
Different scenarists describe a different Naruse. Sumie Tanaka who says he

taught her everything about scriptwriting on their two prize-winning films
Repast and Lightning, portrays a terribly strict director who like Mizoguchi gave
no explicit instructions at the outset, but demanded as many as three complete
rewrites of the 400-page Repast script in the interval of only ten days, and never
offered a word of thanks or praise. Yoko Mizuki, on the other hand, said Naruse
told her to begin writing from wherever she pleased and not to worry about the
theme, and that all in all he was the easiest person in the world to work for. But
he had such strong objections to her script that he wanted to talk all night. He
told her to rewrite all of the location scenes, and then went off and shot them
while she was doing it. (Bock 1978: 111)
Indeed, in comparison with Mizuki, whom Naruse seem to have trusted to make a
solid independent contribution, Tanaka mostly worked in a duo with male screen-
writer Ide, calling into question the gender dynamics of the screenwriting process,
where the female writer is brought in to provide a ‘woman’s point of view’ (Russell
2008: 239). At any rate, Naruse’s postwar films consistently present strong-willed
women characters who refuse to be victims of male-dominated society, mak-
ing them diametrically opposite to the long-suffering, submissive heroines of
Mizoguchi. This feature is quite unimaginable without, and could certainly be
attributed to, Naruse’s long collaboration with Mizuki and Sumie Tanaka.
Sumie Tanaka had a key role in the pivotal moment in the history of Japanese
cinema when a woman screenwriter and a woman director collaborated in adapt-
ing for the screen material written by yet another woman. The actress-turned-
director Kinuyo Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955),
was based on the autobiography of the poet Fumiko Nakajo (1922–54) who,
shortly after leaving her abusive husband, was diagnosed with terminal cancer of
the breast and had to undergo a mastectomy before eventually succumbing to the
disease. Discussing Sumie Tanaka’s screenplay, Fuyuhiko Kitagawa has called it the
first truly existentialist film to come out of Japan (Kitagawa 1956: 91). In addition,
referring to a scene where the protagonist gets into a bath after the surgery, Mikiro
Kato points out that, rather than evoking an erotic image, the loss of the symbol
of femininity prompts the erasure of the male gaze for the first time in the his-
tory of Japanese cinema (Kato 2011). The two Tanakas went on to collaborate on
another film, Onna bakari no yoru/Girl of Dark (1961), set in a rehabilitation centre
for former prostitutes whose trade has been criminalized by the 1956 Prostitution
Prevention Law.
While Sumie Tanaka’s work with Naruse will probably remain her strongest
legacy, she wrote screenplays for other notable directors such as Kozaburo
Yoshimura, effectively depicting the rupture of traditional values while
employing a woman’s viewpoint in films such as Yoru no kawa/Night River (1956)
and Yoru no cho/Night Butterflies (1957).12 Parallel to her work with Kinuyo
Tanaka, she penned screenplays for another actor-turned-director, Shin Saburi,
with Kokoro ni hana no saku hi made/Until Flowers Bloom in the Heart (1955) and
Yoru no kamome/Night Seagull (1957). Tanaka excelled at adapted screenplays, in
contrast to her contemporary, and something of a rival, Mizuki. Sumie Tanaka
died on 1 March 2000. In addition to her 35 film credits, Tanaka turned to
writing for television in the 1960s, and had a parallel career as a prize-winning
essayist.
Natto Wada
Born as Yumeko Moji, the screenwriter Natto Wada (1920–83) was best known for
her work on the films of her husband, Kon Ichikawa. Wada studied English litera-
ture at Tokyo Christian University and shortly after graduating began working as
a translator for Toho, one of Japan’s major film studios. Along with Ichikawa, she
was part of the group of Toho staff that left the company after a labour dispute
to form the breakaway Shintoho film studio in 1947. Wada and Ichikawa wed the
Japan 121
following year and, according to Keiko McDonald (1994: 448), it was Ichikawa
who encouraged Natto to begin writing the scripts for his films, with Hateshinaki
jonetsu/Passion Without End (1949) being the first of 35 films the couple worked
on together.
Using novels, short stories and serials as the basis for screenplays was extremely
common in postwar Japanese studio cinema, and Wada (a keen essayist in her
own right) followed this trend by adapting a wide range of popular literature for
the screen throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Although Ichikawa wouldn’t always
take a writing credit, the creative process behind their scripts seems to have been
a genuinely collaborative one. According to Ichikawa, both he and Wada would
initially read the source material and then discuss their ideas of how to transform
it into a film, firstly deciding on the genre. In the course of their domestic life they
would then work out the finer details relating to character and structure. Wada
would finally write an extremely detailed script, which enabled Ichikawa to start
preparing the technical aspects of the film (Bock 1978: 41).
While this process may, on paper, appear to be logically sound and harmonious,
both reported on the problems of interweaving professional and matrimonial life.
For Ichikawa, he regarded disagreeing with his wife’s ideas as a dangerous game:
[W]hen you get Natto-san to write you a script, you’re in for a lot of trouble. If
your opinions clash about something like a character’s role, the disagreement
might escalate to a discussion of divorce. She may say, ‘If this is really the way
you think, I simply cannot live with you a moment longer.’ (Sato 2003: 127)
For her own part, Wada compared attempting to be both a screenwriter and a
housewife to ‘like chasing two rabbits’, but was somewhat more vocal about the
pitfalls of adapting respected literary work for the screen. In an essay on the film
Shokei no heya/Punishment Room (1956), Wada identified the problems inherent in
page to screen adaptations:
[Y]ou can either remain faithful to the original work or, conversely, deal with
it critically in order to bring its spirit to life. The latter option, however, places
you in a difficult position as a screenwriter, for not only is it likely that your
film will clash with the image held by those who have read the original, it will
also almost certainly put the author’s nose out of joint. Optimally, of course,
you would like to avoid making enemies on either side, but there are still occa-
sions when you have no choice. (Sato 2003: 191)
An instance where Wada and Ichikawa made a significant diversion from the
source material was in their 1959 adaptation of Shohei Ooka’s 1951 novel Nobi/
Fires on the Plain. Set in the final days of World War II, the story concerns Tamura,
a tuberculosis-ridden soldier banished from his unit by a commander who sees
him as a drain on already scarce resources. As Tamura traverses the landscape of
the Philippines with no mission other than survival, he encounters and even par-
ticipates in the abject horrors of a dystopia physically and morally decimated by
the events of a sustained war. As Audie Bock (1978: 45) has pointed out, whereas
the book is structured around a recovered Tamura’s recollections of the war, the
film ends with the soldier walking into Philippine gunfire with arms aloft.
Even by the standards of today, Fires on the Plain is an extremely graphic film;
we see corpses piled up indiscriminately, cold-blooded murder and cannibalism.
Although Ichikawa modestly claims to be a director who ‘did not have any unify-
ing theme – I just make any picture I like or any that the company tells me to
do’ (Bock 1978: 38), much of his work with Wada is characterized by an uncom-
promising directness, both in theme and dialogue, which at times borders on the
inflammatory. Indeed, several of the 1950s and early 1960s films scripted by the
pair have been widely interpreted as critical of the path taken by Japan in the
war and the proceeding years. Alongside the open condemnation of the atrocities
of war found in Fires on the Plain, Natto also adapted Michio Takeyama’s 1948
novel Biruma no tategoto/The Burmese Harp for Ichikawa in 1956. An immensely
successful movie that was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1957 Academy
Awards, Natto’s screenplay draws out the psychological motivations behind the
actions of Mizushima, a soldier who is sent on a mission by his captured supe-
riors to persuade a remote Japanese platoon to surrender to the Allied forces.
Citing duty to their country, the soldiers stubbornly refuse to heed Mizushima’s
warning and the mountain on which they are hiding is subsequently obliterated.
Mizushima somehow survives the onslaught and, rather than joining his platoon
in a prison camp as previously ordered, makes his way across Burma posing as a
monk. When his comrades discover his true identity shortly before they are due
to be repatriated, they invite Mizushima to return to Japan with them in order
to rebuild the country. He declines, and in a letter that is read to the platoon by
their captain in the final scene of the film, explains that seeing the bodies of the
dead piled up throughout Burma has convinced him that the real work of human
beings is ‘simply to ease the great suffering of the world. To have courage to face
suffering, selflessness and irrationality without fear, to find the strength to create
peace by one’s own example’. Mizushima stays in Burma to enter the priesthood
and vows not to return until all the dead have been buried. The broadly paci-
fist messages of the two war films are widened into a critique of the nation as a
whole in Wada’s adaptation of Taiheiyo hitori-botchi/Alone Across the Pacific (1963).
Based on the true story of Kenichi Horie’s unassisted solo journey from Osaka to
San Francisco in a tiny custom-made vessel, Wada’s script goes back and forth
in time to rationalize the sailor’s wish to escape from Japan by focusing on his
prior strained relationships with his family and friends. His blue-collar father is
dismayed at his son’s decision not to attend university in order to learn a trade.
When Horie explains that being the same as everyone else ‘doesn’t interest me’,
his father brusquely replies that ‘work isn’t supposed to interest you’. His mother,
meanwhile, is reduced to a nervous wreck over her son’s determination to escape
Japan in such a dangerous fashion. Outside his family, Horie is portrayed as a
social misfit whose self-interested demeanour offends even those who are trying
to help him achieve his goal. This is memorably captured in Wada’s script, which
is based on the memoirs of Horie himself, through a monologue from an older
Japan 123
sailing friend who finally snaps at what he perceives as the youth’s condescend-
ing attitude:
You always do exactly what you want and you do it your way. There’s nothing
wrong with that. When you’re the only one you can trust, you have to believe
in yourself. Having said that, in order to protect what’s around you, surely you
have to treat those around you with respect. You might not see eye to eye with
everyone, but they’re still friends and family, right? You are one man and they
are many.
Horie’s lack of interest in engaging with the familial and economic structures
which govern Japan is certainly not condemned by the film, but any complete
approval is tempered by the humanist warning given by the elder; the overall
message is that it is fine to follow individual rather than group ambitions, but it
is also important to remember how others feel. The angry young man character
trope is also explored in two harsher films scripted by Wada for Ichikawa. Based
on a Yukio Mishima novel, Enjo/Conflagaration (1958) is one of four films that
Wada worked on as a co-writer with Keiji Hasebe. Mizoguchi, a bright young man
with a stutter, follows in his father’s footsteps by training as a Buddhist priest, but
is ultimately left dismayed, both at the rampant commercial exploitation of the
temple and the lack of basic humanity shown towards him by friends, teachers
and family members. His only respite is found in his reverence for the physical
temple itself, and when Mizoguchi is finally worn down by the moral corruptness
of the world around him, he razes the temple to the ground in an act of defiance.
The cynicism of youth towards society is dealt with more viciously in Punishment
Room, where a disaffected teenager rebels through participating in both sexual
and physical violence. Wada was in her mid-thirties when she adapted Shintaro
Ishihara’s controversial novel for the screen and she offers an interesting explana-
tion as to why she elected to confront its taboo themes head on in her screenplay:
This may sound overly dramatic, but the society in which I grew up is so
radically different from the one today’s young people inhabit that none of my
youthful experiences could provide me with a handle to grasp the significance
of their actions. Faced with this utter incomprehension, there was no alterna-
tive but to take a direct approach. (Sato 2003: 192)
Along with Sumie Tanaka and Yoko Mizuki, Wada was one of a band of high-
profile female screenwriters working in the Japanese film industry, and her female
characters generally, but not always, tend to be strong-willed, smart, and of a more
stable mindset than their often rash male counterparts. Indeed, it could be argued
that Wada’s women often appear superior simply by being placed alongside male
characters with deep psychological flaws, which range from egotism (Alone Across
the Pacific), to sexual perversion (Kagi/Odd Obsession, 1959), to simply failing as
a male role model (Watashi wa nisai/Being Two Isn’t Easy, 1962). Often labelled
as a feminist by critics (and not always in a complimentary way), one of the few
filmmakers other than Ichikawa who Wada worked with was the maverick actress-
director Kinuyo Tanaka. Wada’s screenplay for Ruten no ohi/The Wandering Princess
(1960) is centred around a typically headstrong woman wronged by historical
events entirely out of her control.
After helping Ichikawa plan the seminal sports documentary Tokyo Olympiad
(Tokyo Orinpikku, 1965), Wada retired from screenwriting at the young age of 45.
Much like her characters, who often felt cut off from a society depicted as callous
and cruel, Wada left the Japanese film industry, which had grown increasingly
graphic due to the rise of Nuberu bagu/Japanese New Wave practitioners such as
Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima, because she disliked the ‘new film grammar’
and felt that modern cinema lacked humanity. Although Wada never formally
returned to film, in her final days she reportedly helped Ichikawa with the ending
of Sasame-yuki/The Makioka Sisters (1983).
Short biographies of Japanese women screenwriters
Michael Smith (with contributions by Jean Ansolabehere)

Kyoko Inukai
Kyoko Inukai (1974–) was born in Saitama, Japan. Credits include Heaven’s
Bookstore (2004, co-written with Tetsuo Shinohara), Strawberry Shortcakes (2006),
The Signs of Love (2007), and Sweet Little Lies (2010), based on a novel by Kaori
Ekuni.
Yukiko Mishima
Yukiko Mishima is a screenwriter and director. Her screenplays focus on the ideas
of heritage and characters going back to, or accepting, traditional and familial
ways: Tsukuroi Tatsu Hito (2015, based on the manga by Aoi Ikebe) is about a dress-
maker who works on an old sewing machine that belonged to her grandmother
and, when her dressmaking skills are recognized, refuses to change her traditional
ways. Budou no Namida/Tears of Grapes (2014) looks at a brother who returns to
the family’s wine business and finally wins acceptance, and Shiawase no Pan/Bread
of Happiness (2012) follows a young married couple who leave Tokyo to open a
bread shop and restaurant in a small town. Mishima has also written for Japanese
television.
Miwa Nishikawa
Miwa Nishikawa (1974–) was born in Asaminami-ku, Hiroshima. Although her
name is little known overseas, screenwriter-director Nishikawa is one of the most
acclaimed filmmakers currently working in Japan. Nishikawa began in the film
industry as assistant director to Hirokazu Koreeda, arguably the premier modern-
day Japanese auteur, on Wandafuru Raifu/After Life (1998). A year before her 30th
birthday, Nishikawa made her first feature, the Koreeda-produced Hebi ichigo/
Wild Berries (2003). Since then, Nishikawa’s work has been greeted with rapturous
critical acclaim in Japan; the hugely commercially successful Yureru/Sway (2006)
Japan 125
was the only Japanese film entered in competition at the 2006 Cannes Film
Festival and won the Best Film award from national newspaper Mainichi Shinbun,
while the venerable Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo named Dear Doctor/Dia
dokuta the best Japanese film of 2009. Nishikawa also received the critics’ Blue
Ribbon Best Director award for both films, and her work as a screenwriter has
been acknowledged with the Mainichi award for Wild Berries, and Kinema Junpo
accolades for Sway and Dear Doctor, with the latter also receiving the 2010 Japan
Academy Prize for Best Screenplay.
Many of the most renowned filmmakers in Japanese cinema history are those
who locate their work within the realm of the everyday. This is true not only of
world-famous names from the classical era such as Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse,
but also modern-day filmmakers like Koreeda. By ostensibly focusing her work
around the Japanese domestic world, Nishikawa is no different in this respect.
Wild Berries looks at the classic theme of generational differences between parents
and children, while Sway examines the strained relationship between two broth-
ers, one of whom remained in their small hometown as an adult while the other
fled the nest to the city at the first opportunity. In Dreams for Sale/Yume uru futari
(2012), Nishikawa’s attention switches to a young couple trying to fund their
ambition to open a restaurant, and the impact of a doctor on the life of a tiny
remote village is the theme of Dear Doctor.
On the surface, Nishikawa’s narratives sound wholly quotidian, but where her
approach differs is in her tendency to involve one or more protagonists in often
quite disturbing criminal acts. In Sway, an employee of the family business falls
to her death on a bridge and the elder brother is convicted of her murder after
evidence given by his younger sibling. The doctor who brings such stability to
the lives of the villagers in Dear Doctor turns out to not be a licensed medical
practitioner, something which comes to light only when he knowingly misdi-
agnoses an elderly widow’s cancer. The remaining two films take similar turns;
the restaurant-opening ambitions of the couple in Dreams for Sale are funded by
calculated, repeated financial exploitation of lonely and vulnerable women, just
as the son of the family in Wild Berries helps to solve his father’s financial woes
by stealing donations from the funeral ceremonies of strangers (in Japan, it is cus-
tomary to offer the bereaved family a sum of money, known as koden, as a gesture
of condolence).
The descriptions of these crimes may sound repugnant, but any moral condem-
nation is halted by the rationalist complications that are inserted into the stories.
Writing on Dear Doctor, Laird (2012: 73) states that ‘Nishikawa asks viewers to
reconsider conventional cultural ethics that automatically render falsehoods as
wrongdoings’. This holds true across Nishikawa’s work, as all four films dwell
upon the ethical ramifications of the crime or the decision to incriminate the
perpetrator. In Dreams for Sale, Satoko and Kanya’s relationship becomes increas-
ingly strained as their duplicity takes more abject forms, the height of which is
when the pair convince an emotionally fragile Olympic weightlifting hopeful
that Satoko is suffering from cancer and needs expensive experimental treat-
ment. Despite the seriousness of their actions, Satoko and Kanya’s behaviour is,
to a degree, both rationalized and redeemed. The film begins with a scene of the
two working happily in their small, hugely convivial neighbourhood restaurant.
A kitchen accident leads to the restaurant burning down and both former own-
ers frequently visit the condemned site throughout the film, ensuring that the
viewer does not forget that the crimes of the couple, as morally abhorrent as
they may be, are underwritten by the simple desire to return to what made them
happy. The weight on their consciences is also noted. Satoko keeps highly visible
notes promising to repay their victims on the wall of their small apartment and,
towards the end of the film the couple’s original sponsor is repaid as a symbolic
gesture.
After Ino’s lack of medical credentials is discovered in Dear Doctor, even the
outraged police officer who leads the investigation is forced to admit that the
fraudulent doctor ‘held the village together’. During his questioning of Torikai,
the elderly woman whose request that her cancer diagnosis be hidden has been
granted by Ino, he asks her ‘Did that man ever do anything for you?’ Torikai
replies, ‘Nothing at all,’ and smiles, before the film flashes back to Ino caring for
and, most importantly, passing time with the lonely widow in her home. The
fraternal and emotional bonds which Ino has with his patients are repeatedly
emphasized through his interactions with those he treats, and Nishikawa makes
it clear that, though Ino’s posing as a doctor is illegal and highly dangerous,
his impact on the village has undoubtedly been a positive one. In Wild Berries,
high-school teacher Tomoko searches her soul before incriminating her brother,
and at the conclusion of the film there remains ambiguity over whether her
decision was the right one. The conundrum between family loyalty and adher-
ence to a personal moral code is a subject that occurs again in Sway. Although
we are not given a definite answer to whether Minoru did push Chieko off the
bridge, the moral ramifications of the choice made by Takeru to give decisive
evidence against his brother are directly questioned. After Minoru’s conviction,
the film jumps forward seven years and we see a meeting between Takeru, who
has since happily resumed his life as a photographer in Tokyo, and Yohei, a
long-time employee of the family business. In their conversation, Yohei reveals
that Minoru is about to be released from prison and urges Takeru to meet his
brother at the gates. When he refuses, an exasperated Yohei uncorks his frus-
tration, telling Takeru that he should never have given evidence against his
own family and questions the benefit of Takeru’s actions by pointedly asking
him, ‘What exactly did you gain?’ The question points to an idea which recurs
throughout Nishikawa’s work: ethically sound actions made by an individual,
be it a sibling with a heavy conscience or a police officer pursuing justice, often
occur to the detriment of a larger group. Intersecting everyday domesticity
with criminality, Nishikawa’s work is ultimately concerned with the subjective
nature of morality.
Naoko Ogigami
Naoko Ogigami (1972–) attended college in her hometown Chiba before mov-
ing to America in 1994 to study film production at the School of Cinematic
Japan 127
Art, University of Southern California (USC). From the beginning of her career,
Ogigami has enjoyed a particularly fruitful relationship with both domestic and
international film festivals; her debut feature, Barber Yoshino/Yoshino’s Barber
Shop (2004), was the winner of the Pia Festival Scholarship Award and was also
shown in Berlin, where it received a special mention in the Kinderfilmfest strand
of the festival. Since then, Ogigami’s work has enjoyed a relatively high profile
internationally, with Kamome shokudo/Kamome Diner (2006) being shown as part
of Japanese film programmes in both the UK and US, while Rentaneko/Rent-a-cat
(2012) had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival and was also shown at the
2012 edition of the Edinburgh Film Festival. As well as international recognition,
Ogigami’s work has enjoyed commercial success in Japan. Kamome Diner was a
sleeper box-office hit which went on to sell over 100,000 copies on DVD, and the
more widely distributed Megane/Glasses was reported to have made upwards of
600 million yen ($5.6 million) on its domestic release.
At USC, Ogigami learnt how to make narrative film following the conventional
American model but began to doubt whether she would find creative fulfillment
from making films in this fashion. While promoting Glasses in 2008, Ogigami
told Nikkei Weekly that seeing the ‘boring Hollywood movies’ being turned out
by her classmates convinced her that ‘just following the formula won’t work and
I had to go a step further’ (Zaima 2008). One of her main objections to mainstream
American film is that the protagonists must always be the bearers of a ‘problem’
that the narrative then tries to ‘solve’. For Ogigami, ‘a lead character doesn’t
always have to face troubles’ (Zaima 2008) and, as such, the chief characters in the
majority of her films are not afflicted with a dramatic conundrum that must be
answered before the status quo can resume. This is not always the case, as there is
some adherence to conventional narrative trajectory in both Yoshino’s Barber Shop
and Kamome Diner, but a reticence to indulge the traditional expectations of story
and plot is a defining feature of Ogigami’s style. Instead, the events of the films
are based more around the abstract, existential and occasionally absurd concerns
of characters we often know very little about. For example, in Glasses there is scant
information given about the various protagonists and, as a result, the viewer has
no firm idea of who they are or why they have ended up in a hotel on a remote
beach. What unites all the characters is their interest in and practice of the mys-
terious act of ‘twilighting’, which is defined late in the film as simply ‘thinking
of someone or something’. The main character of the film is Taeko, a woman in
her mid-thirties whose initial unease with the relaxed environment of the hotel
manifests as hostility towards the other inhabitants. However, once she learns
how to relax, or twilight, Taeko becomes more comfortable. The same can be said
of Yomogi, a younger acquaintance of Taeko who somehow finds his way to the
hotel. This approach is typical of how Ogigami resolves her narratives; although
we do not always know the specifics of exactly what troubles her characters, they
always end up in a better psychological position at the end of the film than they
were at the beginning. By the end credits of Yoshino’s Barber Shop, the uptight
and slightly menacing barber who had insisted that all schoolboys in her town
receive the same haircut has mellowed and no longer demands uniformity. The
three Japanese women who operate a Helsinki cafe in Kamome Diner eventually
manage to bridge the gap between themselves and the local community at the
same time as finding a degree of mental clarity about their own positions in life,
while the three very different siblings in the Toronto-set Toiretto/Toilet (2010) are
gradually brought together through their attempts to understand and commu-
nicate with their Japanese grandmother. Whereas the traditional expectations of
conventional narrative often result in the restoration of the original equilibrium,
Ogigami typically goes a step further in ensuring that her protagonists are actually
improved as people by the end of her films.
Although establishing firm connections between an artist’s biography and their
creative endeavours is often risky work, a recurring trope in Ogigami’s career that
may be related to her own time overseas is the attention paid by her films to
encounters with the culturally and socially unfamiliar. The most obvious exam-
ples of this are the two films set abroad, Kamome Diner and Toilet, but the theme
persists throughout most of her work; in Yoshino’s Barber Shop the young city boy
who moves to the village is incredulous as to why all of his peers submit to the
conformity represented by the haircut, just as Taeko and Yomogi in Glasses are
initially mystified by the appeal of the resort and the idiosyncratic behaviour of
its inhabitants. The incongruity between protagonists and their surroundings is
often drawn out through humour and Ogigami is a particularly skilled constructor
of comedy set pieces; this is most evident in Rentaneko/Rent-a-Cat (2012), which
follows the adventures of Sayoko, a young woman who operates a cat rental ser-
vice. Episodically structured around the various eccentric characters that rent cats
from the equally mercurial Sayoko, the film is Ogigami’s most complete immer-
sion in the absurd to date.
There have been mixed opinions on the representational impact of Ogigami’s
work. Aaron Gerow (2004: 17) has observed that, despite the characterization
of the eponymous barber clearly corresponding to the rigidity of mainstream
Japanese social customs, there is little broad social critique in Yoshino’s Barber Shop
and the result is a film that ‘is more concerned with individuals than generalized
political lessons’. This largely holds true for the rest of Ogigami’s work; her general
style is one that gently hints at the problems in society while offering little in
the way of identifying causes and even less in the way of criticism. On the other
hand, Adam Bingham (2010: 61) points out that while social commentary may
be avoided, there is also ‘an admirably tacit refusal to make any sweeping grand
statements about “women” and “womanhood”’. Women are not tarred with the
same generalizing brush in Ogigami’s films; we see characters of different ages,
appearances, and backgrounds, with the result being an overall reluctance to ste-
reotype female characters. Rather than the demure, silently suffering housewives
and wild, adventurous modern girls that populated Japanese cinema in the clas-
sical era and beyond, we find a palette of independent female characters who are
resolutely not defined by their relationships to men. As uninterested as Ogigami
is in following the well-worn path of cause-and-effect narrative, her female pro-
tagonists show little enthusiasm for the tried and tested modalities of Japanese
Japan 129
womanhood. Whether they be domineering village hairdressers, expat fledgling

cafe owners or proprietors of cat rental services, Ogigami’s women fly in the face
of convention to take control of their own destinies.
Michiko Ohishi
Michiko Ohishi’s screenplay credits include Tounan kadobeya nikai no onna/Total
Rendezvous (2008, co-written with Masaki Tamura), Gegege no nyobo/Wife of Gegege
(2010, co-written with Takuji Suzuki), My Way of Life (2012), and the adaptation
A Band, Rabbit and a Boy (2013).
Mika Omori
Mika Omori (1972–) was born in Fukuoka, Japan. She graduated from Aoyama
Gakuin Women’s College and became an assistant director for drama at Fuji
Television. She is a screenwriter, director and editor. Her screenplay credits include
Koibumi-biyori (2004), Install (2004), Heaven’s Door (2009), Pool (2009), Space
Brothers (2012), and Akko’s Secret. She won the Mukoda Kuniko Award for her work
as a writer on the television series Fukigen na jiin.
Akiko Tanaka
Akiko Tanaka is a Japanese screenwriter responsible for the screenplays behind 12
feature films, movie teleplays, and shorts. She has been prolific and active since
the early 1980s. Her credits include Manon (1981), Jealousy Game (1982), Lovehotels
(2006), and Dog in a Sidecar (2007). She lives in Japan.
Notes
1. Source cited by Ikegawa and Ward: Tokushu Nyonin Shinsei, Eiga Junpo, #4, October 1939,
pp. 8–9. Ikegawa and Ward also refer to the magazine as Eigajin; however, in 1939, it
might have been Kinema Junpo.
2. Anderson and Richie 1959 (1982), commonly credited as the only comprehensive his-
tory of Japanese cinema in English, completely omits the topic of screenwriting while
dealing with a plethora of other facets of film production. In contrast, Sato Tadao, in
his seminal Nihon eigashi (1995 [2006]), dedicates a number of chapters to screenwriting
and discusses the contributions and style of individual screenwriters.
3. A highly informative and well-maintained electronic resource in Japanese on the life and
work of Ayame Mizushima can be found at http://mizushimaayame.kane-tsugu.com.
4. Unfortunately, most of the prints have been lost, with the exception of the melodrama
The Dawning Sky (Akeyuku sora, 1929, dir. Torajiro Saito), which has been released in the
Digital Meme’s Talking Silents series.
5. On Nobuko Yoshiya, see Suzuki 2010: 32–63.
6. On Fumiko Hayashi, see Ericson 1997.
7. Mizuki herself preferred to use 1913 for her birth year.
8. Mizuki 1964a: 102–3.
9. Mizuki 1964b: 124.
10. The first notable modern female writer in Japan, her face currently gracing the 5,000-
yen bill.
11. See its website at http://www.city.ichikawa.lg.jp/cul01/mizuki.html
12. See Jacoby 2008: 367.
References
Anderson, Joseph L., and Donald Richie. 1959 [1982]. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bingham, Adam. 2010. ‘Original Visions: Female Directors in Contemporary Japanese
Cinema’, Cineaction!, Summer: 56–61.
Bock, Audie. 1978. Japanese Film Directors. Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Ericson, Joan. 1997. Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Gerow, Aaron. 2004. ‘Barber Sweet but Avoids Issues’, Daily Yomiuri ( Japan), 8 April.
Ikegawa, Reiko, and Julian Ward. 2005. ‘Japanese Women Filmmakers in World War II:
A Study of Sakane Tazuko, Suzuki Noriko and Atsugi Taka’, in Gordon Daniels and Hiroko
Tomida (eds) Japanese Women Emerging from Subservience, 1868–1945. Trans. Helen S. E.
Parker. Kent, UK: Global Oriental, pp. 258–77.
Jacoby, Alexander. 2008. A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors: From the Silent Era to
the Present Day. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press.
Kato, Mikiro. 2011. Nihon eigaron 1933–2007: tekusuto to kontekusuto. Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten.
Kitagawa, Fuyuhiko. 1956. ‘Tanaka Sumie’, in Kinema Junpo. Tokyo: Kinema Junposha
( January), p. 91.
Laird, Colleen A. 2012. ‘Dear Doctor’, in John Berra (ed.) Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2.
Bristol (UK): Intellect, pp. 70–1.
McDonald, Keiko. 2007. ‘Daring to Be the First: The Japanese Woman Director Tazuko
Sakane (1904–71), Asian Cinema, Fall/Winter.
McVeigh, Brian J. 2003. Nationalisms of Japan: Managing and Mystifying Identity. Rowman &
Littlefield, pp. 228–9.
Mizuki, Yoko. 1964a. ‘Ano koro to ima’, in Kinema Junpo zokan: Shinario sanninshu: Hashimoto
Shinobu, Mizuki Yoko, Shindo Kaneto. Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 10 April, pp. 102–3.
Mizuki, Yoko. 1964b. ‘Shinario sakuho zakkan’, in Kinema Junpo zokan: Shinario sanninshu:
Hashimoto Shinobu, Mizuki Yoko, Shindo Kaneto. Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 10 April, p. 124.
Onishi, Etsuko. 1993. Mizoguichi Kenji o aishita onna: Juryu eiga kantoku daiichigo: Sakane
Tauzko no shogari (The Woman Who Loved Mizoguchi: The Life of Tazuko Sakane, the First
Woman Director). Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo.
Russell, Catherine. 2008. The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sato, Tadao. 1995 [2006]. Nihon eigashi, 4 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Sato, Tadao. 2003. ‘Sengo Nihon eiga no mottomo juyona kyakuhonka no hitori’, in Kinema
Junpo. Tokyo: Kinema Junposha ( July), pp. 132–4.
Sorte, Waldemiro Francisco ( Junior). 2005. ‘Bounded Rationality in the Japanese Cinema:
Director Miwa Nishikawa’s Yureru Revisits the “Rashomon Effect”’, Psychology, 26 (2): 202.
Suzuki, Michiko. 2010. Becoming Modern Women: Love & Female Identity in Prewar Japanese
Literature & Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Zaima, Daisuke. 2008. ‘Film Director “Returns” to the US’, Nikkei Weekly ( Japan), 30 June.
Korea
Jeremy B. Warner and Brian Yecies
Beginnings
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Confucianism greatly
influenced the people of Korea and Japan. This philosophy led to women being
confined to private space and men dominating the public sphere – and basically
prevented women from working in any industry culturally considered a male
career. The Japanese began to pull the Korean Joeson dynasty out of isolation in
the mid 1800s; it was put under the protection of Emperor Meiji in the Japan-Korea
Treaty of 1876. Three years before the turn of the twentieth century, the Joeson
dynasty proclaimed itself the Korean Empire, bringing forth Korea’s industrial rev-
olution. According to the London Times, it was during October of 1897 that actual-
ity films1 from France’s Pathé Pictures screened in Jingogae, Bukchon (2001: 20).
The first Korean theatre, Dongdaemun Motion Picture Studio, opened in 1903
and the Dansung-sa Theatre opened in Seoul during November of 1907. Actuality
films continued to play until the audience’s insatiable demands for the medium
led to the import of films from the United States and Europe. The Russo-Japanese
War in 1904 deflected control of Korea away from Russia, and Japan annexed
Korea under the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty in 1910. Hollywood fiction films
continued to be imported during the annexation. Kino-dramas, which imitated
the shinpa2 melodramas of Japan, were being produced in Korea in the late teens
of the twentieth century, leading to the production of narrative features in the
early 1920s. Women were not allowed to appear onscreen until 1923; the first
onscreen actress was Lee Wol-hwa, she appears in The Vow Made Below the Moon.
Korean cinema flourished in the 1920s, but production companies were strictly
under the control of the Japanese. Control was tightened in the 1930s by the impo-
sition of strict censorship guidelines; this led to a steep decline in the number of
films produced. With the advent of sound, the Japanese made Korea the central hub
of colonial film production, producing films that assimilated Japanese culture into
their governed territories. In 1945, Korea was freed from the control of the Japanese
and the embargo imposed by the Japanese on Hollywood films was lifted. Freedom
from the Japanese and the influence of Hollywood cinema led to women having a
greater presence in the ‘public space’; however, only a handful of films were produced
131
at the beginning of the 1950s due to the Korean War. When the war ended, South
Korean president Syngman Rhee exempted film production from taxes in an effort
to rejuvenate production. Screenwriter/filmmaker Park Nom-ok started working
for the Chosun Film Company after liberation from the Japanese and worked on
the Film Crew of the Ministry of National Defence during the war. Afterwards, she
independently wrote and directed Mimangin/The Widow (1955, co-adapted with Lee
Bo-Ra), a film focusing on the struggles of a woman raising a daughter by herself.
The financial failure of the film prevented Park Nom-ok from writing additional fea-
tures (In-young 2007: 161). Hung Eun-won began working in the industry around
the same time as Park; she wrote screenplays during the early forties and directed
Yeopansa/A Woman Judge (1962), based on the controversial death of a female judge
at the time. The film follows the growing presence of women in the public space, and
the female judge tries to balance her life between work and home (In-young 2007:
162). She directed two more films and continued working as a screenwriter until
the early seventies. Hwang Hye-mi (1932–) majored in French literature at Seoul
National University and then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. She began as a direc-
tor on Cheosgyeongheom/First Experience (1970) before going on to write and direct
two more features and write Naleul deo-isang goelobhiji mala/Don’t Torture Me Anymore
(1971). Her last film was Relationships (1972). ‘Although she was praised for her efforts
on First Experience, winning an award for Best New Director, she stopped taking part
in filmmaking. This was because of the times she was living in. Government control
of the film industry was at its strongest and making movies was like pouring money
into a hole. Hwang Hye-mi made no other movies after 1972’ (Seen in Jeonju, 2010).
The near-global women’s movements during the 1970s did affect Korea, leading
a group of women to form the ‘Kaidu Club’. The club was an alliance of female
filmmakers reacting against male chauvinism as well as the plethora of melodramas
produced by the Korean film industry. Han Ok-hee and Kim Jeom-seon were two film-
makers in the club; they produced experimental films, screened anti-establishment
works, and challenged the assigned roles of women before the club disbanded in
1977 (Park 2008: 139). The activism led by Han influenced the rise of women film-
makers in social realism and documentary films during the 1980s, most of these
being funded personally or on a low-budget scale with little to no exposure. The
1990s brought forth the Korean New Wave, which would influence emerging women
filmmakers. Women increased their presence during the 1990s and early 2000s
through creating shorts for the festival circuit. One current writer and director, Lee
Jeong-hyang, has had commercial success with her Misulgwan-yeob dungmul-wan/Art
Museum by the Zoo (1998), The Way Home (2002), and Oneul/The Way Home (2011).
The number of women working in the film industry has risen since the 1970s, but
social constraints still inhibit many from achieving great success. (Jeremy B. Warner)
Korean female writer-directors and the reach of their work
Brian Yecies, with contributions from Jie Yang, Matthew Berryman,

Aegyung, and Kai Soh
Since the late 1990s, South Korean cinema has become one of the most exciting
and dynamic national cinemas in the world – a phenomenon signalled by the
Korea 133
unexpected success of the domestic action-crime drama Shiri (1999), which

eclipsed Hollywood’s mega-blockbuster Titanic (1998) at the Korean box office.
This ‘David and Goliath’ accomplishment in an industry dominated by a cosy
club of male writer-directors demonstrated the newfound strength of Korean
cinema both at home and abroad. Perhaps surprisingly, a stable of previously
unheralded female writer-directors, drawn from both the independent and com-
mercial sides of the industry, have done much to ensure Korean cinema’s global
popularity. In addition, the work of female writer-directors is influencing the
continuing rise of Korean cinema in China. China has the largest number of
multiplex screens and the fastest-growing online and mobile media audience
in the world – factors which between them are contributing to the potential for
enormous box-office success and the creation of new audiences for films from
across the globe.
With this background in mind, we analyse the online commentary – often called
electronic word-of-mouth (hereafter eWOM) – on a range of films made by a select
group of female Korean filmmakers by thousands of Chinese fans who utilize the
popular Douban social networking service (SNS) website. Douban commentators
share and evaluate information and opinions about films accessed across cinemas,
video on demand (VOD) platforms, DVD shops and illegal kiosks, as well as illicit
peer file-sharing networks. To facilitate this unique cross-cultural analysis, this
study employs innovative data-collection and analytical tools developed by the
SMART Infrastructure Facility at the University of Wollongong. We aim to inves-
tigate how these Korean women filmmakers and their films are making transna-
tional connections outside of Korea with a particular subset of the world’s largest
audience of ‘digital natives’ – a label that describes mainstream Chinese movie
fans in their twenties who spend a large proportion of their waking hours using
online and mobile Internet and Web 2.0 applications.3
We first introduce the Korean women writer-directors – Hong Ji-young, Lee Jeong-
hyang, Byun Young-joo, and Roh Deok – responsible for The Naked Kitchen (2009),
A Reason to Live (2011), Helpless (2012), and Very Ordinary Couple (2012) respec-
tively. These films were selected for their significant place in the works of Korean
writer-directors and also because they attracted the largest number of Douban
user comments by Chinese film fans in relation to similar films. We initiated the
project in the hope that these case studies will help us understand how geographi-
cally dispersed Chinese-speaking movie fans on Douban – a segment of the largest
media audience in the world – are expanding awareness of these Korean women
writer-directors, thus adding depth and complexity to the global rise of Korean
cinema. In sum, we set out to investigate the local reception of these films, and
to gauge the level of awareness of Korean women writer-directors and their films
among active Chinese audiences who use Douban.
Korean women filmmakers in China’s social media scene
Among film fans active on the Chinese Douban SNS, the four most popular Korean
female writer-directors – in terms of the number of online comments – are Hong
Ji-young, Lee Jeong-hyang, Byun Young-joo, and Roh Deok. All four women
undertook formal film studies at different times in their lives, with most entering
the field after studying an unrelated discipline – a common pattern in Korea’s
contemporary film scene. Hong and Lee attended Korean Academy of Film Arts
(KAFA), which has a significant influence on Korean cinema through the training
and nurturing of many of the country’s leading filmmakers. Over the past 30
years, KAFA has empowered female writer-directors by equipping them with
technical knowledge and skills of an international standard that have enabled
them to compete, not only in Korean cinema, but also in the global film industry.
In concert with other institutions with long-standing film programmes such as
Chung-ang University and Dongguk University, as well as specialized art institu-
tions such as the Korea National University of Arts (established in 1992), KAFA has
provided aspiring female filmmakers with the kind of opportunities that, in the
past, were available primarily through an informal apprentice system dominated
by male practitioners.
These four females followed circuitous pathways into the industry; however,
their early experiences helped them develop a mature view of the world embrac-
ing diverse perspectives. In turn, their considered views of Korean society, and life
in general, are reflected in the stories – both original and adapted from existing
sources – that they write for the screen. All four made short films or documenta-
ries before their debuts as feature film directors, thus gaining valuable experience
of industry practices.
Hong Ji-young (1971–) was born at a time when Korean cinema was experiencing
a ‘dark age’. She received a Master’s degree in philosophy from Yonsei University
and then graduated from the KAFA in 1999. As the scriptwriter and assistant direc-
tor on HerStory (1995), directed by her husband and fellow KAFA graduate Min
Kyu-dong, Hong gained valuable filmmaking experience.4 After making her short
film Rosa Story (1998), Hong made her debut as a feature film writer-director with
The Naked Kitchen (2009, aka Kitchen) – a light-hearted commentary on adultery
and the unpredictability of love. The film, which Hong co-wrote with Lee Kyoung-eui,
came to the attention of European audiences at the 2010 Berlin International Film
Festival, when it screened (by invitation) in the late-night culinary cinema sec-
tion, which celebrates the themes of food, love, nature, and the environment.
According to the Variety reviewer, Hong’s ‘handsomely shot romantic dramedy’
was reminiscent of Korean cinema’s ‘metaphysical’ films of the 1990s, associated
with well-known male directors such as Bae Chang-ho and Lee Myung-se (Elley
2010). The Naked Kitchen was released at a time when Korean cinema was recover-
ing from a downturn at home – in terms of total admissions, numbers of films
exported, and the proportion of completed films that were actually released.
After The Naked Kitchen, Hong directed Secret Recipe, one of four horror omnibus
films in Horror Stories (2012). Her episode is a drama of sibling rivalry in which a
woman has facial plastic surgery in order to steal her sister’s wealthy and attractive
fiancé. (All the episodes in Horror Stories were directed by females.) Also in 2012,
she directed the short film Star Shaped Stain for the Korean Ministry of Health and
Welfare’s omnibus film Modern Family (2012), which explores the social and cul-
tural factors behind Korea’s low birth rate. Hong’s most recent directorial project
Korea 135
was the light-hearted romantic drama Marriage Blue (2013, aka The Night Before
Marriage, written by Myeung-ju Ko) – starring 2PM Kpop idol Ok Taecyeon – which
follows a series of events preceding the weddings of four couples.
Lee Jeong-hyang (1964–) is the writer-director of A Reason to Live (2011), her debut
feature film starring the popular pan-Asian actress Song Hye-gyo. Lee studied French
literature at Sogang University in Seoul and then entered KAFA in 1988. After work-
ing for Lee Jang-ho, a leading male director who made his name in the mid 1970s,
as an assistant director on Declaration of Genius in 1995, Lee Jeong-hyang made
her writer-director debut with the feature film Art Museum by the Zoo (1998), one
of only 43 domestic films produced in 1998. This semi-autobiographical drama –
which was the fifth most popular Korean film in terms of annual total attendance –
portrays the awkward but heartfelt relationship between two strangers who end
up living together. The couple co-author a romance film script about a woman
working at an art museum and a male zookeeper, thus transforming Art Museum
by the Zoo into a film-within-a-film which also manages some serious reflections
on the meaning of life. The film, which Lee began writing in 1995 at a time when
government censorship was in full swing, earned numerous awards, including
Best Actor (for Shim Eun-ha of Christmas in August fame) at the Grand Bell Awards,
and Best New Actor awards for Lee Sung-jae at the Baeksang Arts Awards, the
Chunsa Film Art Awards, and the Blue Dragon Film Awards. Art Museum by the Zoo
is considered by local and foreign critics alike as a post-censorship (i.e. post-1996)
Korean cinema classic (Paquet 1998; Sung 2011).
Lee Jeong-hyang’s second feature, The Way Home (2002), was another box-office
hit, earning her the status of Korean cinema’s ‘most commercially successful’
female director at the time, and making her a beacon of hope for makers of
low-to-medium budget films (i.e. films made for under US $2 million) of either
gender (Paquet 2002). The film reached the number two spot in the top ten Korean
films in terms of annual total attendance, drawing audiences of over 1.6 million
in Seoul. Despite the film’s lack of commercial appeal, admissions for The Way
Home surpassed those of Hollywood blockbusters Minority Report (2002), The Lord
of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and Spider-Man (2002), as well as
star-driven Korean films such as Public Enemy (2002) and Oasis (2002).5 The film
explores the relationship between a seven-year-old boy from Seoul and his mute
elderly grandmother who lives deep in the countryside. Through their clashing
lifestyles and attitudes, and the boy’s eventual warming to her and appreciation of
her simple and traditional way of life, the film underscores the social and cultural
divide between Korea’s urban and rural communities.
During interviews in 1998 when Art Museum by the Zoo was released, Lee
spoke about the ‘handicaps’ that she and other female filmmakers faced in a
male-dominated industry. First, the small number of women (including students)
interested in pursuing a film career had very few role models to emulate, and they
often faced discrimination from a core group of ageing male film professors whose
attitudes were rarely questioned. Thus, aspiring to become a director (or producer)
at this time – before the mid 1990s, pre-dating the rise of ‘new Korean cinema’ –
was a near-impossible task. Second, the pressure to return a profit (or at least
recoup most of a film’s budget) in a period when funding was severely limited
made it especially risky for female filmmakers to experiment with art-house and
independent stories and projects.6
Lee Jeong-hyang’s much-anticipated third film, A Reason to Live (2011), offers a
range of viewpoints on the theme of forgiveness, which has traditional roots in
religious practice and belief. Lee focuses on the pain and suffering of the victim’s
family and friends who must deal with the deep emotions occasioned by the
loss of a loved one. The question that rings throughout the film is: who should
benefit from an act of forgiveness? (Gwy-hwan Kim 2010). Reminiscent of Lee
Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), A Reason to Live questions the role of religion
in people’s lives as a potential source of strength in times of emotional vulnerabil-
ity; at the same time, it traces ‘a woman’s purgatorial ordeal in accepting a loved
one’s unjust murder and a world without providence’ (Lee 2011).
The third woman writer-director in our study, Byun Young-joo, is Lee
Jeong-hyang’s contemporary and a key member of the first generation of female
directors who have emerged since the 1990s. She was born during the tumultuous
mid 1960s, in 1966, the same year that authoritarian president Park Chung Hee
established a screen quota system for domestic films in Korea, making it manda-
tory that a minimum of one-third of all films screened in cinemas should be
domestic films.7 Byun received an undergraduate law degree from Ewha Women’s
University and a graduate degree in theatre and film from Chung-ang University.
Along with Kim So-young, Mun Hyae-joo, and Hong Hyo-sook, Byun founded
the Bariteo, a feminist film collective, in 1989 with a view to spreading women’s
film culture and practice. Byun entered the film industry as a cinematographer on
Kim So-young’s Even Little Grass Has Its Own Name (1989) – a short independent
film exploring gender discrimination in the workplace – followed by My Children
(1990). The sex trade in Asia and ‘sex tourism’ in the famous Korean honeymoon
destination, Jeju Island, was the topic of her first independent documentary,
Women Being in Asia (1993), which was produced by Kim Dong-won of Repatriation
(2003) fame. She is best known for her critically acclaimed and award-winning
documentary trilogy The Murmuring (1995), Habitual Sadness (1997), and My Own
Breathing (1999). This poignant and visually compelling trilogy uncovers the
painful and suppressed experiences of Korean women who were forced by the
Japanese colonial government to serve as sex slaves or ‘comfort women’ during
World War II.
The positive critical and popular reception of Byun’s short films and independent
documentaries eased her pathway into commercial filmmaking, and many other
female directors have followed her. Like Byun and Hong Ji-young, they gained
valuable training while making short films and documentaries before turning
their hand to feature films. In making the transition, Byun, Hong, and other
female directors such as Park Chan-ok and Jeong Jae-eun initially became known
in the less competitive arena of independent films. For top female film producers
such as Shim Jae-myung, the founder of Myung Film, the increasing number of
female directors working on the male-dominated commercial side of the film
industry was a natural progression, given the prowess they were demonstrating
Korea 137
on the independent filmmaking scene. In fact, at the turn of the millennium, at

least one local commentator felt that Korean cinema was on the cusp of a new era
in which female directors would be dominant. Since then, the four filmmakers in
this study have made their mark both at home and abroad.
Byun’s use of film to give a voice to some of the hidden and unknown stories of
Asian women, as well as her focus on human rights, has made her an iconic mentor
for both male and female filmmakers in Korea and beyond. Her first feature, Ardor
(2002), was an erotic drama following the sexual re-awakening of a middle-aged
woman, Mi-heun (played by Kim Yunjin of Lost and Shiri fame), who has suppressed
her deepest desires after learning of her husband’s affair with another woman.
Byun’s second feature, Flying Boys (2004), was a romantic coming-of-age story
about a boy in his last year of high school; he has a crush on a neighbourhood
girl. The film gained the attention of both foreign and domestic critics for the pro-
gressive way it portrayed gender roles, sexuality and class distinctions in Korean
society. Byun’s most recent film, Helpless (2012), is discussed below in the data
analysis section of the Douban study.
The final writer–director in our analysis is Roh Deok (aka Nho Deok), who was
born in 1980. She is a graduate of Seoul Institute of the Arts’ film program and is
the youngest of the filmmakers in our study. Roh worked as a script assistant on
Jang Joon-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), going on to direct The Secret Within
Her Mask (2005), a short award-winning film about a girl who wears a mask to
hide her embarrassing facial hair, offering a moral about learning to accept and
love one’s inner beauty.
In 2013 Roh Deok’s feature debut, Very Ordinary Couple (2013, aka Temperature
of Love), which she wrote over a seven-year period, won the Best Feature award
in the Asian New Talent competition at the 16th Shanghai International Film
Festival (Conran 2013). When interviewed, Roh spoke of her nagging sense that
both cinemagoers and her fellow filmmakers viewed her as a woman rather than a
director, reaffirming the challenges of succeeding in the macho world of filmmak-
ing in Korea and across the globe. As a survival strategy for overcoming the gender
barriers and stereotyping still in force in parts of the industry, Roh maintains a
calm and collected ‘feminine’ exterior when interacting with others. She believes
that this approach gives her the upper hand as a woman in a male-dominated
industry, enabling her to surprise those who underestimate her technical and
creative abilities as well as her project management skills. In adopting this stance,
and despite experiencing her fair share of obstacles and failures, Roh serves as
an example for other women filmmakers to follow – particularly since (as she
believes) here patience and forbearance stand in stark contrast to the manic ways
of many male filmmakers.8
These four writer-directors and their filmographies showcase both the diversity
of contemporary Korean cinema and the multiplicity of viewpoints that women
filmmakers bring to the screen. Each one has contributed in her own special way
to the expansion and changing face of Korean cinema, not only at home, but
also among the numerous Chinese fans, including those who use the Douban
SNS site.
Douban’s invigoration of Korean cinema in China
Since its inception in early 2005, Douban has become one of China’s biggest
online social library systems and platforms for facilitating user-generated interac-
tions and reviews of creative and cultural content – films, television programmes,
books, music, and radio programmes – as well as cultural events in selected
Chinese cities and other international centres. (It was initially launched as a
platform for discussing books; films and music were added as major discussion
topics in the middle of 2005.) Both registered and unregistered users can use the
tools on this hybridized Amazon-IMDb-Myspace-Facebook Web 2.0 SNS site to
create and share a library of personal details, search for information, and make
recommendations to their followers as well as casual readers. The result is the
generation of vast quantities of participatory and collaborative eWOM, not to
mention increasing users’ motivation to engage with the media being discussed.
According to the website itself, Douban attracts more than one hundred million
unique visitors each month, and has amassed over 65 million registered users.
It is currently accessed by over 30 per cent of Chinese Internet users, making
the site a major magnet for the new waves of film marketing targeting film fans
across China.
Like Twitter, Douban is known as a ‘follower network’, meaning that users can
share information and spread messages and ratings of media texts among geogra-
phically dispersed followers and/or follow others. It also falls into the category of
an ‘interest-oriented’ SNS, as opposed to a ‘relationship-oriented’ site (Zhang and
Wang 2010). Today, eWOM is a critical factor in a film’s commercial success and,
by extension, its longevity among film viewers.
While previous studies have shown that high production values, critical response,
and ‘star power’ often do no more than create public awareness of a new release,
our study shows that, in China, star power also creates a sense of expectation or
‘buzz’ around a film. For example, many of the Douban user comments on Lee
Jeong-hyang’s A Reason to Live mentioned popular actress Song Hye-kyo by name,
but not the film or the writer-director. Of all the personal names recorded in the
dataset, Song’s name appears most frequently – with a majority of users citing her
as the primary reason for watching the film under discussion.
With these and other factors in mind, the value of using data quarried from
Douban to achieve a better quantitative and qualitative understanding of Chinese
audience tastes and a firmer perspective on Korean cinema in China becomes
apparent. We have used the four feature films The Naked Kitchen, A Reason to Live,
Helpless, and Very Ordinary Couple as our starting point in this process.
The SMART data analysis platform
To develop new connections between cinema studies and the burgeoning field of
digital humanities – an interdisciplinary arena for studying the evolution of the arts
and humanities in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world – this pilot
project utilizes the expertise of a team of IT specialists from the SMART Infrastructure
Korea 139
Facility at the University of Wollongong, a national centre for infrastructure solu-

tions. SMART stands for ‘Simulation, Modelling, Analysis, Research and Teaching’.
Specifically, we employ a range of machine learning algorithms and cloud comput-
ing techniques for data analysis, as well as the translation of conceptual models
into implementation programs and code prototyping. In plain English, the SMART
team employs advanced IT skills to develop a novel and more efficient technique
for investigating big data connected to audience analysis than those available to
researchers using traditional qualitative and quantitative survey and analysis instru-
ments. While the Douban dataset for these four Korean films is not exactly ‘big
data’, the complex systems modelling and analysis techniques employed in this
exploratory study constitute a working prototype for analysing films and case studies
involving the much larger volumes, variety, and velocities typically associated with
sources of big data.
The findings
Most of the users studied posted their comments for A Reason to Live, Helpless, and
Very Ordinary Couple around the time of each film’s festival and/or cinema release
in Korea, when they would also have become available via illegal DVD shops and
kiosks, and unlawful peer file-sharing networks in China.
The Naked Kitchen is an entertaining commentary on adultery and the unpre-
dictability of love. The film presents a light-hearted caricature of a married woman
who becomes involved in a ménage-a-trois. In taking this approach, director Hong
Ji-young suggests a liberal alternative to society’s general view of adultery, which
is a crime in Korea and punishable with a jail sentence (Chosun Ilbo 2009). Of the
four films analysed here, The Naked Kitchen attracted the largest number of user
comments. Douban commentators were more interested in the story, as opposed
to the director and actors, although the highest average rating (3.98) was given
by those who commented on the main characters. Of the relevant comments,
40 per cent of users mentioned aspects of the storyline, while only 4 per cent
showed any awareness of the writer-director. No one acknowledged her gender.
However, around 37 per cent of the comments used the word ‘Korea’ when dis-
cussing the film and/or the actors, as well as the marriage laws linked to the story,
revealing some awareness of this aspect of Korean social life.
Following a nine-year hiatus following the release of The Way Home, Lee Jeong-
hyang wrote and directed A Reason to Live (2011). The film presents two inter-
woven stories involving a female television producer whose fiancé is killed by a
teenager in a hit-and-run incident and a teenage girl (the producer’s friend’s sister)
who is abused by her father. Both women are at pains to forgive the men who have
caused them deep suffering. In this way, Lee interrogates such formidable topics
as the death penalty and Korea’s male-dominated society. Following the release
of this ‘deeply philosophical and layered work on forgiveness and crime’ in the
Pusan International Film Festival’s Gala Presentation section, Lee was interviewed
by a reporter for the Korea Herald (Lee 2011). Perhaps surprisingly, although
gender plays a key role in the story, neither Lee nor the reporter broached the
topic of the day-to-day experiences of female filmmakers in the male-dominated

domestic industry. However – perhaps just because it is an intense story told from
a woman’s perspective – a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal ranked A Reason to
Live among the ten most notable films of 2011 (Napolitano 2011).
Of the films analysed, A Reason to Live attracted the second-largest number of
user comments. It received the highest average ratings among users sharing their
opinions about the actors, director, story setting (location), main characters, and
story – with the story achieving an average ranking of 3.92 out of 5 among slightly
over half (54 per cent) of the commentators. Unlike the film discussed above, a
majority of commentators on A Reason to Live knew that the film was written and
directed by a Korean woman filmmaker. It is likely that this awareness stemmed
from her reputation as the critically acclaimed director of two previous films, Art
Museum by the Zoo and The Way Home. Given the positive nature of the comments
on the film’s incorporation of the television industry, references to mass media
clearly resonated with the tastes and interests of this Douban cohort. In addition,
and like The Naked Kitchen, about one-third of the comments used the word ‘Korea’
when discussing the film and/or the actors, as well as the capital punishment laws
linked to the story. In other words, commentators showed an overt awareness
of this aspect of Korean social life. However, few if any comments broached the
subject of a male-dominated society.
Byun Young-joo’s latest writer-director project, Helpless, is based on the 1992
crime novel by Japanese author Miyuki Miyabe, All She Was Worth. Both the original
novel and Byun’s version tell the noir story of a woman who mysteriously disap-
pears and the detectives and family members who attempt to find her. During the
investigation, the woman’s financial problems are uncovered, and a picture of her
monstrous transformation emerges. In Byun’s adaptation, the female protagonist’s
dark trajectory, which includes murder and identity theft, is linked to the larger
economic woes of Korean society, with its dog-eat-dog ethos. Byun shifts the
original story’s setting from Japan’s precarious bubble economy of the late 1980s
and early 1990s to Korea in the late 2000s. This period was marked by the nation’s
struggles to overcome the damaging impact of the global economic crisis, not to
mention the residual hardships instigated a decade earlier by the 1997 Asian eco-
nomic crisis. At the same time, Byun’s psychological mystery-thriller shows how her
female protagonist is alienated from society and forced to live on its fringes – despite
her efforts to find some sense of normalcy within Korean society (Kim 2012).
Of the films in this study, Helpless attracted the largest proportion of users who
expressed positive opinions about the actors and storyline, with two-thirds of rel-
evant comments focusing on the story alone. These users gave an average rating of
between 3.3 and 3.6 for the actors, writer-director, story location and setting, and the
story itself. However, despite these positive ratings, less than 4 per cent of the cohort
specifically mentioned the writer-director – either by her name or job description.
One might have anticipated this, given the misinformation about Byun prevalent
in China. When Helpless was screened at the Pusan International Film Festival in
2012, Byun was interviewed by a Chinese film critic who had seen the film for sale
in various shops among stacks of illegal DVDs. While Byun was pleased to learn of
Korea 141
the film’s apparent popularity outside of the formal and legal film exhibition envi-
ronment, particularly given the localized Korean story in Helpless, she was bemused
to discover that the DVD cover named someone else as the director (a common
occurrence in the region owing to the hasty design of illegal DVD artwork).9
The final film in the study, Roh Deok’s romantic comedy Very Ordinary Couple,
recalls the treatment of the less attractive side of human nature displayed by the
main characters in War of the Roses (1989). It focuses on a secret workplace relation-
ship between a feuding couple who attempt to save face in front of their friends and
colleagues. Roh Deok’s creative inclusion of documentary-type footage, in the form
of an historical video project about the company, de-romanticizes the sugar-coated
love story while throwing the spotlight on the tumultuous relationship between
an estranged couple who are, despite their constant fighting, seeking to get back
together. Kim Min-hee, the heroine of Helpless, portrays a woman in a constant state
of flux vis-à-vis her male partner, as their love for one another oscillates between
hot and cold. Always a popular choice, Very Ordinary Couple received the highest rat-
ings of all four films in the Douban dataset: commentators gave an average rating of
3.75, 3.89, 3.63, 3.85 and 3.41 in comments including the keywords for actor, direc-
tor, location, main characters, and story respectively. Roh’s award for Best Feature in
the Asian New Talent competition at the 16th Shanghai International Film Festival
would have helped promote this film to Chinese audiences. As with Helpless, 75 per
cent of comments focused on the story alone, while almost 12 per cent mentioned
the story’s location or settings. However, as with the other films in the study, the
name and designation of the film’s director was scarcely mentioned.
Taking all four films into account, very few comments acknowledged that each
film was written and directed by a woman. Clearly, this aspect merits further
consideration and action by Korea’s commercial and independent producers who
are interested in global markets, as well as the Korean Creative Contents Agency
(KOCCA), which is tasked with promoting the nation’s popular media content
and culture to the world.
Notes
1. ‘Actuality films’ pre-dated the emergence of the documentary. One of the most well-
known early actuality films was shot by the Lumière brothers, in France: the camera
caught workers leaving a factory.
2. Shinpa is a form of theatre and cinema in Japan, usually featuring melodramatic stories,
and usually more realistic than narratives in the kabuki style.
3. In a recent interview, Mr Zhang Zhao, CEO of Le Vision Pictures (the film production
division of Leshi Internet Information and Technology Corp) and the co-producer
of the box-office hit Tiny Times 3.0, used the phrase ‘Internet aborigines’ to describe
China’s digital natives. See Liu Wei, ‘Film Company Utilizes Marketing Techniques’,
China Daily, 8 May 2014. Available at: www.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2014-05/08/
content_17493073.htm (accessed 29 April 2015).
4. She also worked on the adapted screenplay of Antique (2008) directed by Min Gyu-dong,
which was based on Fumi Yoshinaga’s manga Antique Bakery.
5. The Way Home was the top-grossing film among all domestic and foreign films screening
in Seoul (1 January to 30 September) when Korean Cinema 2002 was published.
6. Lee’s reflections were documented in two interviews, available at: http://www.hani.co.kr/c21/

data/L981214/1q4ece01.html and www.cine21.com/news/view/mag_id/1409 (accessed
29 April 2015)
7. The 1966 Screen Quota System conveniently adopted the oppressive contents of the
colonial-era Chosun Film Law introduced in 1941 by the Japanese colonial government
in Korea, as a means of controlling Korea’s burgeoning film industry. This law remains
in effect today. For more details, see Yecies 2007.
8. See Roh’s comments at: www.tvreport.co.kr/?c=news&m=newsview&idx=328383 and www.
newsen.com/news_view.php?uid=201303211358291110 (accessed 29 April 2015).
9. Personal interview with Byun Young-joo, Seoul, August 2014.
References
Chosun Ilbo: English Edition. 2009. ‘Hong Ji-young Looks at the Brighter Side of Adultery.
Available at: http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/05/01/2009050100286.
html (accessed 29 April 2015).
Conran, Pierce. 2013. ‘“Very Ordinary Couple” Wins Prize in Shanghai’, Korean Film Biz Zone.
Available at: http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/jsp/news/news.jsp?mode=VIEW&seq=2560
Elley, Derek. 2010. ‘Review: “The Naked Kitchen”’, Variety, 18 January.
In-young, Nam. 2007. ‘Korean Women Directors’, in Kim Mee Hyun (ed.) Korean Cinema
From Origins to Renaissance. Seoul: Communication Books, pp. 161–8.
Kim, Gyu-hwan. 2011. ‘Reporter’s Notebook: Behind the Stories – A Big Hit Right Now, Focusing
on Forgiving Others (Gijap Sycheop: Yongseo – Reul Gangyohaneun Yi Sidaereul Hyanghan
Ilchim – Chwijae Dwitdamhwa), Maxmovie. Available at: http://news.maxmovie.com/movie_
info/sha_news_view.asp?newsType=&page=&contain=&keyword=&mi_id=MI0094063618
Kim, Hyeong-ho. 2012. ‘Interview: “Helpless”, Director Byun Young-Joo – 1. What Was
Rewriting “Helpless” Twenty Times Like for the Director? (Inteovyu: Hwacha, Byon Young-Joo
Gamdok – 1. ‘Hanttae’ Yeonghwagamdok-Ege 20goui Hwachaneun?), Maxmovie. Available
at: http://news.maxmovie.com/movie_info/sha_news_view.asp?newsType=&page=&
contain=&keyword=&mi_id=MI0094966985 (accessed 29 April 2015).
Lee, Maggie. 2011. ‘“A Reason to Live”: Busan Film Review’, Hollywood Reporter. Available at:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/a-reason-live-busan-film-245844 (accessed 29
April 2015).
Liu Wei. 2014. ‘Film Company Utilizes Marketing Techniques, China Daily. Available at:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2014-05/08/content_17493073.htm (accessed 29
April 2015).
Napolitano, Dean. 2011. ‘The Year in Asian Film, Wall Street Journal. Available at: http://
blogs.wsj.com/scene/2011/12/29/the-year-in-asian-film/ (accessed 29 April 2015).
Paquet, Darcy. 1998. ‘Short Reviews: “Art Museum by the Zoo”’, Korean Film.org. Available
at: http://koreanfilm.org/kfilm98.html#zoo (accessed 29 April 2015).
Park, Nohchool. 2008. A Cultural Interpretation of the South Korean Independent Cinema
Movement, 1975–2004. Kansas: University Press of Kansas, p. 139.
Seen In Jeonju. 2010. Available at: http://www.koreanfilm.org/tom/?p=512 (accessed 29 April
2015).
Sung, So-young. 2011. ‘In New Film, Director Puts Spotlight Back on Women’, Korean Joongang
Daily. Available at: http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/Article.aspx?aid=
2942454 (accessed 29 April 2015).
Yecies, Brian. 2007. ‘Parleying Culture Against Trade: Hollywood’s Affair with Korea’s Screen
Quota’, Korea Observer, 38 (1): 1–32.
Zhang, Weiyu, and Rong Wang. 2010. ‘Interest-oriented versus Relationship-oriented Social
Network Sites in China’, First Monday, 15 (8). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/
index.php/fm/article/view/2836/2582 (accessed 29 April 2015).
Palestine
Jule Selbo
Palestine has a relatively young cinema with a multilingual output – films are pro-
duced using Arabic, French, English, and Hebrew. In the early days of the industry,
work was focused primarily in the documentary mode. In 1945, the Arab Film
Company was founded; however, most of the films of this period are thought lost
due to political and social upheaval in the regions. In 1967 Palestinian cinema
was supported by the PLO and other Palestinian organizations; many of the films
in this period have also been lost due to continuing political unrest in the 1980s.
By the mid 1980s, Palestinian films had begun to receive international recogni-
tion. Then – as now – there was strong censorship and filmmakers often needed
government approval of projects. Despite the difficulties, however, women have
been working in the industry.
Annemarie Jacar (1974–) was born in Bethlehem, Palestine. Her work includes
screenwriting, producing and directing; she is also a poet and chief film curator
of the Dreams of a Nation Palestinian cinema project, an organization dedicated
to promoting the history and future of filmmaking in her nation. Her screenwrit-
ing credits include Lamma shoftak/When I Saw You (2012). This film focuses on an
11-year-old Palestinian refugee who is put in a temporary camp and searches for
a way out of the difficulties. The film earned awards at the Berlin Film Festival,
the Cairo Film Festival, the Carthage Film Festival, and the Amiens International
Film Festival. Other credits include the romance drama Milh Hadha al-Bahr/Salt of
the Sea (2008).
Filmmaker Cherien Dabis (1976–) was born in Omaha, Nebraska in the United
States and grew up in America and Jordan. Her parents are Palestinian and
Jordanian. She received her Master of Fine Art degree from Columbia University
in New York City. In 2009, she was named in Variety Magazine as one of the ‘Ten
Directors to Watch’ (Jaafar 2009). While living in America during the Gulf War,
she and her family faced discrimination. Musing on why she entered the film
industry, Dabis says, ‘I saw how the media was stereotyping Arabs and I decided
I wanted to have a hand in changing that’ (Jaafar 2009). Her film Amreeka (2009)
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. ‘Amreeka is as much a mother-son story
as it is about life under occupation. I want to show the universality of an average
Palestinian family. The film is also about hope …’ (Jaafar 2009). Amreeka opened
143
the New Directors/ New Films 2009 programme at New York’s Museum of Modern
Art and the Film Society at Lincoln Center (Mitchell 2009), was nominated for
Best Film at the Independent Spirit Awards, and won Best Arabic Film at the Cairo
International Film Festival. Other credits include May in the Summer (2013).
Documentary filmmakers Leila Sansour, Mai Masri, Ibtisam Mara’ana, Helga
Tawil-Souri, and others are also adding to the body of work by females in the film
industry of Palestine.
References
Jaafar, Ali. 2009. ‘“Amreeka” unveils Arab-American life’, Variety, 14 January. Available
at: http://variety.com/2009/film/features/cherien-dabis-1117998519/ (accessed 29 April
2015).
Mitchell, Wendy. 2009. ‘New Directors/New Films to open with Amreeka, close with Push’,
Screen Daily, 12 February. Available at: http://www.screendaily.com/new-directors/new-
films-to-open-with-amreeka-close-with-push/4043292.article# (accessed 29 April 2015).
Russia
Michele Leigh, Jule Selbo and Tatiana Tursunova-Tlatov
Introduction
Jule Selbo
The Lumière film technology created in the mid 1890s in France – and the
Lumière brothers’ actuality films – may not have reached Russia until 1905,
nearly a decade after the technology was introduced in many other nations.
Under Tsar Nicholas II, Russia was slow to industrialize, and political unrest was
nearly constant as an underprivileged and repressed working class faced difficult
working conditions. These citizens began to organize against the bourgeois class
and the ruling royalty. Notwithstanding the fact that the country was politically
aligned with France (despite antagonistic relations in the Crimean War and the
Napoleonic invasion), the filmmaking movement stalled. It was once thought
that the film industry in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) consisted
mostly of European imports, as companies such as Lumière, Gaumont, Pathè and
Danish Nordisk had large distribution branches. However, once the Russian film
archives were opened to the West in 1980, nearly 1,720 films were found that had
been made before 1917. The history of early Russian filmmaking is still unfolding.
One of the first production companies in Russia, the Drankov Studio, was
founded in 1908, releasing Stenka Razin, ‘a sensationalized account of a historical
outlaw’ (McReynolds 2003: 270). On the surface, filmmaking did not seem to gar-
ner the support of Tsar Nicholas, who is quoted as saying: ‘I consider cinematog-
raphy an empty, useless, and even pernicious diversion. Only an abnormal person
could place this sideshow business on a level with art. It is all nonsense and no
importance should be lent to such trash’ (Ferro 1995). The truth was revealed
years later, however, when it was discovered that Nicholas had set up a cinema
theatre in the basement of the Kremlin where he indulged in frequent late-night
screenings. He even sponsored, in 1911, the first full-length feature (100 minutes),
co-written and directed by Alex Khanzhonkov – Obonora Sevastopolya/Defence
at Sebastopol. The film narrative is based on stories by Leo Tolstoy focused on
events in the Crimean War. Khanzhonkov formed the Gomon I Siverson studio
in Moscow in 1905 and bought film equipment from Pathè. His wife Antonina
Khanzhonkov (also known as Antonina Nikolaevna Batorovskaya) worked as a
145
screenwriter, director, producer and film editor; however, she does not receive
screen credit as a screenwriter (Rollberg 2008: 339). Female screenwriters working
at the Khanzhonkov Studios from 1913-17 include Zoia Barantsevich and other
actresses who penned scripts during short production schedules.
After the Revolution in 1917, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin stated: ‘Of all the
arts, the cinema is the most important for us’ (Taylor 2008: ix). Lenin sought
to marry social reform with art through cinema. In 1919, he nationalized the
cinema and, in the same year, an acting school formed by Vladimir Gardin and
Lev Kuleshov became a training ground, becoming the first film school in the
world. In 1921 the school was designed as a college (GTK) and gradually became
the All Union Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). Both men and women were
trained in the art of filmmaking; female screenwriters who studied here and then
moved into the professional film industry include Viktoriya Tokareva and Maria
Nikolayevna Smirnova.
Nina Agadzhanova (1889–1974), under the name N. F. Agadzhanova-Shutko,
penned the massive The Year 1905, part of which became Battleship Potemkin
(1925, directed by Sergei Eisenstein); she received co-writing credit of the film.
Agadzhanova’s other credits include The Deserter (1933).
The film industry of the Soviet Union (USSR) (1922–91) encompassed the
work of filmmakers in Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Moldavia, Lithuania
and Byelorussia, as well as other areas in the Union. Although many films were
censored in the 1950s by the state, others found success at home and abroad. By
the 1970s, its status in international circles had increased and, with the advent
of Perestroika and Glasnost, works that would have formerly been censored made
it into the marketplace. By 1991, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union took
place and 12 independent republics were acknowledged, filmmakers began to
make films under the banners of their individual nations.
Female screenwriters have been active throughout Soviet and Russian history,
from the early silent films till today. They include Natalia Ryazantseva, Renata
Litvinova, Lidiya Bobrova, Kira Muratova, Lana Gogoberidze, Inna Churikova
and Elena Rayskaya.
Zoia Barantsevich and the Khanzhonkov Studios 1913–17
Michele Leigh
Zoia Fiodorovna Barantsevich (1896–1953) was a screenwriter, actress and novel-
ist. The years between 1913 and 1917 demarcate what is generally considered
the Silver Age of Russian cinema, filled with rapid growth and fledgling Russian
studios struggling to legitimize cinema as an art form while, at the same time,
Russian films gained dominance on Russian screens. During this time, feature-
length films were becoming the standard in worldwide filmmaking, thus marking
the transition from brief scenarios to well-crafted scripts. These factors, among
others, created space for women to become involved in a variety of roles in an
already male-dominated art form.
Zoia Barantsevich was one such woman. During her brief 14-year career in film-
making, from 1914 to 1928, Barantsevich was an actress, author and screenwriter.
Russia 147
During this period Zoia Barantsevich is credited with having worked on some
53 films, either as an actress or screenwriter – or both (only 12 of these films are
still in existence in some shape or form). The bulk of her film work was made in
the three years prior to the Revolution and, after 1918, she shifted back to acting
as her career tapered off. After 1928, it appears that she left the film profession
entirely and served in the administration of the All-Russian Theatrical Society.
Barantsevich began her career as a stage actress in Rostov working with
Konstantin A. Mardzhanov, but transitioned to cinema in 1914. From Mardzhanov
she learned the finer points of acting and, more importantly for her career as a
writer, learned to appreciate music, poetry and literature (Barantsevich 1965: 153–4).
Barantsevich’s first role in the cinema was that of Kitty in Vladimir Gardin’s
1914 production of Anna Karenina. According to fellow actor Amo Bek-Nazarov
(1965), Barantsevich immediately gained popularity after her screen debut in
Anna Karenina, which was produced by the company Rus’ Golden Series. The Rus’
Golden Series was known for its association with quality literature, thus establish-
ing a connection between Zoia Barantsevich and Russian high art.
Barantsevich was quickly courted by Alexandr Khanzhonkov, who wanted her
to join his production firm, Khanzhonkov & Co. She was signed to a three-year
contract to make 12 films per year (Barantsevich 1965: 158). Barantsevich is noted
for playing ‘young, helpless girls, inclined to the spirit of sacrifice and mystical
moods during the pre-Revolutionary period’ (World Art). In her book The Magic
Mirror, Denise Youngblood (1999: 12) lists Barantsevich as a ‘noteworthy’ but
second-tier film star. Zoia’s ‘second-tier’ status as an actress is challenged when
one considers the fact that, as Bek-Nazarov stated, ‘she worked with the best direc-
tors at the time – Vladimir Gardin, Evgenii Bauer, Pavel Chardynin, A. Chargonin,
and B. Tchaikovskii. In addition to this she acted with the ensemble of some of
the most widely known actors. Her inventiveness and her quick-wittedness were
never exhausted. To work with her was pleasure’ (Bek-Nazarov 1965).
It was possibly this inventiveness and quick-witted nature which gained her
access to the world behind the camera. Or perhaps her foray into scenario writ-
ing was due to the business acumen of Alexandr Khanzhonkov, who frequently
employed staff whom he could utilize in a variety of roles within the industry.
Based on extant films, 15 women were credited as screenwriters in Russia prior
to the Revolution and Khanzhonkov alone employed ten of them. Most of these
women also acted, edited and/or directed for him as well. Bek-Nazarov noted that
it became commonplace for Barantsevich to also appear on set as the scriptwriter.
‘She created numerous scenarios, including such unique, poetical works as Kto
zagubil?/Who Spoiled it? (1916); Umiraiushii lebed/The Dying Swan (1917); and
O, esli b mog vyrazit’ v Zvukakh/Oh, if Only I Could Express Myself in Sounds (1916)’
(Bek-Nazarov 1965). Regardless of the reasons she began writing, Barantsevich
is credited with having written at least eight screen scenarios between 1916 and
1918, four of which feature her in a starring role. Besides the three films already
mentioned she wrote: Legenda chernykh skal/Legend of the Black Cliffs (1916),
directed by B. V. Tchaikovskii; Skazka sinego moria/Tale of the Blue Sea (1916),
directed by Evgenii Bauer; Chortovo koleso/The Devil’s Wheel (1916), directed
by B. V. Tchaikovskii; Eto bylo vesnoi/It Was Spring (1916, director not listed);
and Marionetki roka/Marionettes of Fate (1917), directed by B. V. Tchaikovskii.

Barantsevich also mentions another film, entitled Zhena prokurora/The Prosecutor’s
Wife (date/director unknown), for which she wrote the scenario (1965: 160).1
The period in which Barantsevich was writing also marks the push to legitimize
cinema as an art form. One way for studios to attain legitimacy was to produce
film adaptations of already established literary works, as is the case with Rus’
productions and Barantsevich’s first screen role as Kitty in Anna Karenina. Russian
movie theatres abounded with adaptations of works by authors such as Leo
Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev. When discuss-
ing attempts to legitimize the cinema, Denise Youngblood mentions prominent
writers like Tolstoy and Andrei Bely who openly endorsed the cinema, adding
credence to the newest of art forms. Youngblood goes on to note that other
‘popular’ authors ‘like Mikhail Artsybashev, Leonid Andreev, Zoia Barantsevich,
Vladimir Mayakovskii and Anastasiia Verbitskaia wrote screenplays’ (Youngblood
1999: 65). While not considered among the ranks of literary greats like Tolstoy
and Bely, these popular authors who Youngblood mentions were well known to
Russian readers of pulp fiction and ‘boulevard’ literature.2
Ranked as a popular writer of the time, two of Barantsevich’s screenplays were
based on her previously published work (1965: 159). The first of these two adap-
tations was Kto Zagubil? (1916), directed by N. V. Turkin, based on her novella
Lesnaia Storozhka/The Forest Lodge.3 In her brief memoir, Barantsevich provides
a little insight into her approach to adapting her own writing and her writing
process for the film: ‘When the actors felt “cramped” within the framework of
the scenarios given to them, they tried to overcome the problem themselves.
Sometimes this worked well, and sometimes it didn’t, but such attempts were
made. Nor was it something I avoided’ (Barantsevich 1965: 160). In other words,
as an actor cum screenwriter, she was not overly attached to the letter of the origi-
nal work; she valued the input of her fellow actors and allowed them to influence
her in adapting the writing for the screen. The review of Kto Zagubil? in Vestnik
kinematografii/The Cinematographic Herald illustrates that her loose adaptation
style and free-form method of writing was successful; ‘this is not a real life drama
in the strict sense, but that is to its advantage, it is not mired in superfluous eth-
nographic detail, and that allows the author to use the country as a back drop for
this life-like drama’ (1916: 8).
The countryside again features prominently in the second of Barantsevich’s
literary adaptations, her scenario for Umiraiushii Lebed, directed by Evgenii Bauer
in 1917. Barantsevich based the scenario on her novella of the same name; it was
written specifically with Imperial Ballerina Vera Karalli in mind (Barantsevich
1965: 160). The film was an instant success and received many positive reviews,
including this in the Obozrenie Teatr/Theater Review: ‘The content is quite inter-
esting. In general, the actress gave great thought to all the material put at her
disposal by the author of the screenplay, and the image she has created captures
one’s attention. Be that as it may, Umiraiushii lebed is an interesting film and will
no doubt appear on the screens of our cinemas for a long time to come’ (1917: 16).
This film about love and obsession was a success for the studio.
Russia 149
Barantsevich was not only an actress and screenwriter for motion pictures; she
also established herself as a writer of fiction and poetry and appeared as a frequent
contributor to the Khanzhonkov studio trade/fan journal, Pegas’/Pegasus, which
was published from 1915 until 1917. The clamouring for information about films
and film stars was developing in Russia; fans wanted to read about their favourite
stars. In response to these desires, A. Khanzhonkov & Co. was the first studio to
publish a non-trade journal on film that was intended, primarily, for a middle-
class movie-going reader. Khanzhonkov named this new journal Pegas’ zhurnal
isskustvo/Pegasus: A Journal of Art, drawing on the company’s already well-known
logo of the winged horse. It is important to note, however, that Pegas’ was pre-
sented as a ‘journal of art’ and as such was modelled on the successful literary
magazines in Russia at the time. The acceptance of fandom as a valid preoccupa-
tion was implied, as fans of cinema were the target market for the journal.
Pegas’ catered to the avid film fan, with plenty of film stills from their favourite
pictures, but also appealed to the fan’s desire for legitimacy by connecting film
to the other arts, such as painting, theatre and literature. Shelley Stamp argues
that, within the American context, serialized story tie-ins (i.e. the literary repro-
duction of film stories) ‘were used to increase cinema’s audience by drawing in
readers of newspapers and women’s magazines; production companies exploited
new methods of sustained, advanced publicity to promote chapter plays…’ (2000:
115). Pegas’ worked in much the same way – by connecting it to the other arts
by replicating the format of literary journals, the studio was able to increase the
readership beyond that of normal trade journals, reaching a broader audience
and thereby creating new interest in the cinema and cinema-going. According to
Stamp, the use of terms like ‘photoplay’ ‘connoted a dignified sphere of leisure
far from the world of cheap urban amusements with which cinema might oth-
erwise have been associated’ (Stamp 2000: 11). Pegas’ borrowed this trope quite
liberally and presented the films (or rather the plot summaries of the films) in
literary format, referring to them as kino-plays, kino-novellas and kino-novels. In
addition to appearing in the various film stills throughout the run of the jour-
nal, Barantsevich’s byline was regularly featured in association with kino-etudes,
kino-novellas, and kino-poems. Barantsevich’s writing is featured in six of the ten
issues, often appearing multiple times.
Slavic scholar Beth Holmgren notes that, in literary journals, names and por-
traits of women writers began to be placed alongside names and portraits of
male writers (Holmgren 1996). Pegas’ followed a similar tactic with the images it
placed on the cover of the journal. The inaugural issue of Pegas’ was released with
a photograph of Tolstoy on the cover, commemorating the anniversary of his
death. Subsequent issue covers featured various actors and actresses and one issue
featured Zoia F. Barantsevich. Just as Tolstoy was a literary star in Russian culture,
by virtue of such reverential treatment Koreneva, Kholodnaia and Barantsevich
(as both a writer and actress) attained the status of stars of Russian culture as well
as cinema. (That, at least, is what Khanzhonkov wished his viewers to believe.) In
addition to this, Zoia Barantsevich is the only screenwriter/actress to appear on
the cover of the journal, further elevating her as Tolstoy’s equal.
Barantsevich’s role within the Khanzhonkov company was fairly significant. At

least one of her films, Umiraiushii lebed, was directed by the company’s most pow-
erful director and was financially and critically successful. Her image and byline
were prominently featured on the pages of Khanzhonkov’s journal, Pegas’, provid-
ing her with recognition that few other stars/screenwriters could boast.
Investigating women screenwriters in Russia
Tatiana Tursunova-Tlatov
With thanks to Nataliya Chertova and Jule Selbo
Nina Ferdinandovna Agadzhanova (Shutko)

Nina Ferdinandovna Agadzhanova (1889–1974) (also known as Nina
Agadzhanova Shutko and Antonina Nikolaevna Batorovskaya) was born on
27 October 1889 (some sources put her birthdate as 8 November 1889) in
Ekaterinodar (now Krasnodar), Russia. Her father was a merchant. She studied
history and philology at the Pedagogical College in Ekaterinodar (Rollberg
2008: 30). She became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(CPSU) in 1907 and, as a revolutionary in Moscow and St Petersburg, was jailed
five times and exiled twice. In 1914, she was executive secretary of the peri-
odical Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker). She played a significant role in the October
Revolution in 1917 and was drafted to work on the staff of the Soviet embassy
in Prague from 1921–2 (Rollberg 2008: 30). Her husband, Communist cultural
functionary Kirill Shutko, encouraged her interest in cinema. In 1925 she
penned In the White Roses, which was semi-autobiographical, focusing on her
experiences on a propaganda mission among White Army troops. Her extensive
screenplay The Year 1905 was entrusted to Sergei Eisenstein. He focused on part
of the script and this work was released under the title The Battleship Potemkin
(1925). Peter Rollberg, in his book Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet
Cinema. notes, ‘Agadzhanova-Shutko’s fame mainly rests on this one work,
although she disagreed with certain liberties taken by Eizenshtein. In hindsight,
despite Eizenshtein’s continued praise for the screenwriter, it was obvious that
(she) primarily provided the raw material that inspired the filmmaker’s unique
vision’ (Rollberg 2008: 30–1). Other parts of the comprehensive script (its scope
covered much of the era’s revolutionary unrest) were produced, including the
short film Krasnaia presnia (1926).
Agadzhanova-Shutko moved into directing and co-wrote and co-directed Two-
Buldi-Two (1929); the narrative focuses on a clown and his son who participate
in the struggles of the Revolution. In 1933 she co-wrote The Deserter; the story
follows a German dock worker who dreams of staying in the Soviet Union where
communism is becoming a reality. The film was directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin
(Rollberg 2008: 31).
Agadzhanova-Shutko worked as a script consultant at Mezhrabpomfilm
Studio before becoming, in 1945, a teacher at the All-Union State Institute of
Cinematography (VGIK).
Russia 151
Natalya Bondarchuk
Natalya Bondarchuk (1950–) was born in Moscow, USSR (now Russia). She is a
writer, director and actress. Her screenwriting credits include Gogol. Blizhayshiy
(2011), Pushkin: Pslednyaya duel (2006), Gospodi, uslysh molitvu moyu (1991, co-
written with Yevgeniya Rudykh, Oksana Strekova, and based on a story by Nikolai
Leskov), and the family fantasy films Yunost Bambi (1986) and Detstvo Bambi
(1985), both of which were co-written with Yurily Nagibin and based on Felix
Salten’s novel Bambi (1923).
Zinaida Brumberg/Valentina Brumberg

Zinaida Brumberg (1900–83) and Valentina Brumberg (1899–1975) were born
in Moscow, USSR (now Russia). They worked as screenwriters and directors, and
became well-regarded writers/directors of animated films (early credits include
Krasnaya Shapochka/Little Red Riding Hood [1937]). Other screenwriting credits
include the animated The Night Before Christmas (1951, which they jointly wrote
and directed; Mikhail Yanshin is also credited as a writer). The film is based on the
Nikolai Gogol story and is considered an example of the Soviet-Realist period in
Russian animation. Other credits include the animated short fantasy Propavshaya
gramota (1945, which they co-wrote with Zinoviy Kalik). Their work is also high-
lighted in the Soviet anti-Nazi propaganda film 4 Newsreels (1941).
Zoya Kudrya
Zoya Kudrya (1953–) was born in Tula, USSR (now Russia). She studied in the
department of journalism at Moscow State University and after graduation was
sent to work in Turkmenistan as a correspondent for the Turkmenistan Komsomolets
newspaper. After working as a journalist for several years, Kudrya decided to
move into screenwriting. She enrolled on the Higher Courses of Directors and
Screenwriters (the workshops arranged by filmmakers Vladimir Khotinenko, Pavel
Finn and Vladimir Fenchenko) where she attended the class of screenwriter and
actor Valeri Frid. One of Kudrya’s first scripts was for a full-length film, Homo Novus
(1990). The film won a number of international awards including the Grand-Prix
and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Locarno Film Festival, the Golden
Dolphin of the Lisbon Film Festival, and the First Prize at the Ennio Flaiano Festival
in Pescara where the film competed with works by great screenwriters such as Akira
Kurosawa, Nikita Mikhalkov, Alexander Adabashyan, Vazlav Havel and others.
The collapse of the USSR affected the Russian film industry and the production
of feature films had slowed by the mid 1990s, leading Kudrya to join the rapidly
developing television industry. In the early years of the third millennium, she
worked as a scriptwriter on such TV shows as Café ‘Strawberry and Simple Truth.
However, talented Russian film directors of different generations sought to col-
laborate with her. Thus appeared the script Bogie; it was to have been directed by
Alexander Bibartsev, but production plans had lapsed due to Bibartsev’s untimely
death. Kudrya was then invited by Semyon Aranovich, an acknowledged master
of Soviet and Russian cinema, to write the script for The Year of a Dog (1994). The
film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.
In 2001, her script for the TV epic The Border: A Romance in the Taiga brought
her the Russian Federation State Prize in Cinema Art as well as the TEFI (Television
Broadcasting) Prize. In 2006, Kudrya accepted a position as assistant professor at
the Russian Federation State University of Cinematography (VGIK). Kudrya is a
member of the Film Expert Council of the Russian Ministry of Culture.
Maria Khmelik
Maria Khmelik (1961–) was born in Moscow, USSR (now Russia), the daughter of a
Spanish woman who resided in the Soviet Union. As a young girl, Maria often went
to Madrid and Barcelona with her mother to stay with relatives and felt at home
in both countries. In 1983, she graduated from the Screenwriting Department of
VGIK, the top Russian film school. She worked at the Mosfilm studios from 1983–5
and began to work in collaboration with her husband, Vassily Pitchul, a film direc-
tor. Khmelik’s screenwriting credits include Little Vera (1988), Dark Are Nights on the
Black Sea (1989), Idiot Dreams (1993), The Sky with Diamonds (1999), and Film Festival
(2006). She penned episodes for the television series Farforovaya Svadba, which
depicted the social changes during the Perestroika (events taking place in the 1980s),
with all its conflicts and contradictions, and the series Spy Life and World at War Four.
Other work includes research and writing on Pitchul’s documentary projects – a
number of films devoted to Soviet political leaders from Lenin to Andropov.
Few films have made such a scandalous stir in Russian cinema as Little Vera. This
was Khmelik’s first produced script and it received unexpected success – winning,
in 1988, the Special Jury Prize at the Montreal World Film Festival and the FIPRESCI
Prize at the Venice Film Festival. The narrative follows a troubled teenage girl (Vera)
who feels trapped in her provincial town; she meets and begins a relationship with
Sergei. They move into Vera’s parents’ small Russian apartment. Tensions with her
parents grow. The film contains a harsh look at life – at alcoholism, shortages, dis-
enchanted people and their inhuman, and often violent, relations. The narrative
also touches on people’s sexual lives, a relatively new and disturbing subject for
Soviet cinema at the time. The film features scenes of an unprecedented intimacy
and makes the point that the tempestuous relationship between Vera and Sergei
does not prevent them from being happy together and truly caring for each other.
The comedy Dark Are the Nights on the Black Sea explores the concept of hap-
piness, setting forth the idea that, because a human being does not choose the
time of his or her birth, all must live in the here and now. Despite suffering and
despair and disappointment in love, one can eventually come to understand that
life continues and that bitterness can be happiness.
From 1995–9, Khmelik completed a course at the Russian Academy of Sciences
Higher School of Psychology while working for a suicide rehab centre. She also
went back to her alma mater and works as an assistant professor and screenwriting
workshop supervisor at the Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK).
Renata Muratovna Litvinova

Renata Muratovna Litvinova (1967–) was born in Moscow, USSR (now Russia). She
graduated from the Screenwriting Department of VGIK in 1989. She is an actress,
Russia 153
director and screenwriter. In 2003 she was the recipient of the Honoured Artist of
Russia award, and in 2007 she served as a member of the jury at the 29th Moscow
International Film Festival. Screenwriting credits include Leningrad. Nyobar (1990,
co-written with Oleg Morozov and Andreas Schadt), Nelyubov (1991), Traktoristy
(1992, co-written with Glen Aleynikov), Nebo. Samolyot. Devushka/Sky. Plane. Girl
(2002, based on a play by Edvard Radzinsky), Boginya/The Goddess (2004), Dva v
odnom/Two in One (2007, co-written with Yevgeni Golubenko), and Poseldnyaya
skazka Rity (2012).
Julia Loktev
Julia Loktev (1969–) was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St Petersburg, Russia).
She moved to the United States when she was nine years old. Her screenwriting
credits include Day Night Day Night (2006), a narrative that focuses on a 19-year-
old suicide bomber whose reasons for planning the crime are never clear, and The
Loneliest Planet (2011, based on a story by Tom Bissell), a story about a couple
who face physical, psychological and political troubles when they hike into the
Caucasus Mountains.
Kira Muratova
Kira Muratova (1934–) was born in Romania as Kira Georgiyevna Korotkova. Her
work includes screenwriting and directing. Screenwriting credits include shared
credit on The Tuner (2004), The Asthenic Syndrome (1990) and Chekhov’s Motifs
(2002). She is featured in a documentary made by Sally Potter (UK), Women
Filmmakers in Russia.
Viktoriya Tokareva
Viktoriya Tokareva (1937–) was born in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now St
Petersburg, Russia). She studied piano at the Leningrad Music College, graduat-
ing in 1958, and then attended the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography
(VGIK), graduating from their Screenwriting Department in 1969. Her first
published short story, A Day Without Lying (1964), earned her a screenplay com-
mission. Her adaptation was titled A Literature Lesson (1968). She has adapted
other original stories into screenplays, as well as working on original narratives
and adaptations from other literary sources. Tokareva is admired not only as an
author of vivid short stories shot through with psychological insight and subtle
irony, but also as a screenwriter. She has written over 20 screenplays and teleplays,
including such landmarks of Russian film as Gentlemen of Fortune (1971, in col-
laboration with G. Daneliya, winning the USSR State Award), The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1973, in collaboration with G. Daneliya), Mimino (1977, in col-
laboration with R. Gabriadze and G. Daneliya, USSR State Award and Gold Medal
of the 1977 Moscow International Film Festival), and A Dog Was Walking on the
Piano (1978). Other film credits include Krasny petukh plimutrok (1975), O tom,
chego ne bylo (1986), Tu es … (1995), and Lavina (2001, based on her own book).
She writes mainly about women. The ‘eternal feminine’ is described by her with
such empathy and understanding that foreign critics consider her a feminist. She
believes that the strength of a woman is in her active approach to life. Tokareva
was awarded the Russian Film Festival ‘Literature and Cinema Award’ in 1998. In
2000 she received an award ‘for the contribution to literature and films’ at the
Cannes Film Festival. Tokareva is a member of the Russian Writers’ Union (since
1972) and the Russian Pen-Centre. She is a recipient of the Moscow-Penne Literary
Award (1997) and the Order of Honour Pin (1987). Her daughter Natalya Tokareva
is also a screenwriter, writing for the television medium.
Elena Rayskaya
Elena Rayskaya (1957–) was born in Moscow and works as a screenwriter, direc-
tor and producer. In 1976 she entered the Screenwriting Department of VGIK
and graduated in 1981. The short film My Angel (1978), written by Rayskaya and
produced by the Debut company, won prizes both inside and outside Russia. The
claustrophobic atmosphere of the 1980s is reflected in the personal drama of a
little girl whose father deserts his wife for another woman. Rayskaya also explored
this atmosphere in Live Broadcast (1989), adding mayhem to the mix. In her film
Butterflies (1991) a man and woman are involved in crime and find themselves in
a locked apartment under surveillance. The film was inspired by the unhealthy
interest in the underworld that was peculiar to the ‘Great Criminal Revolution’
in the minds of the Soviets at the time. In her work, Rayskaya tends to model the
reality, but her ‘models’ are simplifying rather than generalizing. The writer’s style
manifests itself in the excessive nervousness of the narration, its overexcited tone.
The characters are forced to live on the edge and they are always ready to spill out
cherished beliefs.
Rayskaya’s script for The Role (1993) (also her directorial debut) showed the
confusion of intellectuals in the new political situation and their attempts to find
moral support in the past. Her next film, President and His Woman (1996), exagger-
ates the fear of the potential of image making and mass media and its manipula-
tion of the public’s mind and opinions.
Rayskaya also writes for television; Endangered Empire (2000) explores the life
of a notorious Russian revolutionary and double agent of the early 1900s. She
upturns the traditional view of the character and challenges the audience to draw
its own conclusions regarding the actions of the anti-hero. The historic lesson is
obvious: terrorism has become part of our present life and the pre-revolutionary
experience of fighting against it may come in handy.
Other screenwriting credits include The Snow Queen (2006), Hatred (2008),
Assumed Circumstances (2009), Piranhas (2011), and An Officer’s Wife (2013).
Rayskaya is an impressive personality who is always at the centre of attention.
Her originality cannot but lead to very different, even contradictory, opinions of
her work.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand (1905–82) was born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg,
USSR. Her family belonged to the ‘bourgeoisie’ and suffered financial and
Russia 155
political hardships during the Russian Revolution, causing them to flee to the
Crimean Peninsula. After the Russian Revolution, in the early 1920s, universi-
ties were open to women and, at age sixteen, Rand was part of the first group
of women to enroll at Petrograd State University (St Petersburg was renamed
Petrograd at this time). She majored in history, focusing on social pedagogy.
Rand came to the United States in 1926 to visit relatives in Chicago, Illinois;
one of her relatives owned a movie theatre where Rand could watch films for
free. She determined to become a screenwriter and moved to Hollywood. She
met director Cecil B. DeMille and worked as an extra on King of Kings (1927)
and then as a junior screenwriter (Britting 2004: 34–6). She sold a screenplay,
Red Pawn, to Universal Pictures in 1932; the film never went into production
(Britting 2004: 40). She married Frank O’Connor and became an American citi-
zen in 1931 and continued to write novels, plays and screenplays. Films based on
her work include The Night of January 16th (1941, based on her play), and We the
Living (1942, based on her novel about the struggle between the individual and
the state in Soviet Russia). Notable works include the screen adaptation of her
novel The Fountainhead (1949); the success of this film led producer Hal Wallis
to hire her as a screenwriter and script doctor. Her work for Wallis included the
adaptation of Love Letters (1945, based on the novel by Christopher Massie), and
You Came Along (1945, co-written with Robert Smith). Rand also wrote for tel-
evision in the 1950s and 1960s. Several adaptations of her novel Atlas Shrugged
have been produced (2011, 2012, 2014). She is the founder of a philosophy she
named ‘Objectivism’.
Natalya Ryazantseva
Natalya Ryazantseva (1938–) was born in Moscow, USSA (now Russia). Now
recognized as an Honoured Art Worker of the Russian Federation, a screenwriter
and publicist, she graduated from the Scriptwriting Department of VGIK in
1962. Her father was of noble descent and, in one of her interviews, Ryazantseva
mentioned that all the women in her family had a very strong will. After gradu-
ating from VGIK she contributed, as a screenwriter, to Ilyich’s Gate/I Am Twenty,
directed by Marlen Khutsiev. This film became a landmark in the history of the
Soviet cinema and its characters symbolized the new era in postwar Soviet society
of the sixties, called ‘Ottepel/the thaw’. Her next film, co-written with Valentin
Ezhov, Krylya/The Wings (1966), brought her to the attention of the professional
film industry.
The film investigates the complicated and difficult inner world of the main
character, a woman pilot, as she negotiates postwar life and reflects on her career
as head of a college, her family life and her struggle to understand the meaning
of life. The film has become a classic in the Soviet cinema because it shows the
depths of its female character. Ryazantseva’s screenplay Dolgie provody/Long Good-
byes (1971) is another example of an investigation of a woman’s life in postwar
Soviet Union. The film depicts the limitless love of a mother for her child and
how this love eventually causes conflict in the family. The shooting of Long
Good-byes took three years and the script underwent many changes; Ryazantseva
notes that the script was radically reshaped.
Ryazantseva married twice; both her husbands (Gennady Shpalikov and
Ilya Averbakh) were talents of the Soviet cinema. Ilya Averbakh directed her
screenplays Golos (1982) and Other People’s Letters (1976). Other screenwriting
credits include Buket mimizy I drugie tsvety (1984), Portrait of an Artist’s Wife
(1982), The Scarlet Flower (1978), and Akme (2008). Ryazantseva also writes for
television and has written books, including Don’t Tell It to Mother (2005) and
The Voice (2007).
Ryazantseva’s literary works are marked by psychological insight and original
characters, true-to-life conflicts, and an ability to see the diversity of situations.
It is no wonder that there are no happy endings in her films and that the major
conflicts remain unsolved. ‘I have realized long ago …’ noted Ryazantseva in
an interview, ‘… that cinema attracts me as a microscope because no other
kind of art can approach a human being so closely and watch his or her life
in its constant movement.’ Ryazantseva teaches at VGIK in the Scriptwriting
Department. Ryazantseva served on the jury of the Venice Film Festival in
1988 and is featured in the Sally Potter (UK) documentary Women Filmmakers
in Russia.
Avdotya (Dunya) Smirnova

Avdotya (Dunya) Andreevna Smirnova (1969–) was born in Moscow, USSR (now
Russia), the daughter of film director Andrey Smirnov, who directed Byeloruskiy
Vokzal/Belarus Station (1971), an iconic film in the Soviet Union. Her grandfa-
ther was a well-known Soviet writer, Sergey Smirnov, the author of Brest Fortress.
Dunya’s father did not encourage her to enter the main cinematographic institute
of the USSR, the Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK). For this rea-
son, Dunya entered Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Arts (GITIS), and pur-
sued a specialty in theatre studies. She also studied in the Philology Department of
Lomonosov Moscow State University; however, she did not graduate from either
institution.
Dunya Smirnova worked with director Alexey Uchitel on the successful docu-
mentary The Last Hero (1992). The film was dedicated to Victor Tsoy, legendary
musician and frontman for ‘Kino’, who died in a car accident. She continued to
work with Uchitel, penning the scripts for Gisele’s Mania (1995), His Wife’s Diary
(2000), and The Stroll (2003). The film The Stroll tells about a girl and her two
casual fellow travellers who walk around St Petersburg, flirting, exchanging caus-
tic remarks, and falling in love with each other. The stroll is filled with laughter
and tears, and the everyday bustle of streets presents an ominous mystery that is
solved unexpectedly. The open ending of the film makes the viewer empathize,
but also manages to engage the audience as co-authors of the film.
Dunya Smirnova then moved into directing her own screenplays, and these films
include Love Affair (2006), Fathers and Children (2008), Two Days (2011), Kokoko
(2012). Her marriage to Anatoly Chubais, a well-known politician of post-commu-
nist Russia, laid the foundation for the plot of the film Two Days: Petr Drozdov,
Russia 157
a high-ranking official from Moscow, arrives at a provincial museum in Russia at

the insistence of the local governor, who wants to take away the museum’s land
to build a new residence. At first, Drozdov supports the governor’s intention, but
after making an acquaintance with Masha, a specialist in the study of literature
who works as a deputy director of the museum, he changes his mind – not only
on this issue, but on the whole of life.
Dunya Smirnova has received praise for her real and expressive dialogue. In
interviews she has said that every good script has its own soul, its own character,
and that it is impossible to define who the author of it is, a man or a woman.
Maria Smirnova
Maria Nikolayevna Smirnova (1905–93) was born in Samoykino in the Samara
province of Imperial Russia (now Russia). She came to Moscow in 1924
and entered the Acting Department of the All-Russian State University of
Cinematography (VGIK). She acted in sketches, appeared in short films and, at
the same time, began to contribute as a writer to the materials in which she was
performing.
After her graduation in 1927, her screenplay for the silent film Her Way
(1929, co-written with D. Nikitin and D. Poznansky) was directed by Aleksandr
Shtrizhak. The story explored the character of a loving, strong-willed woman, for
whom the Revolution had opened new paths and who was now ready to work for
the people’s good.
In 1930, her screenplay for the silent film Aina was produced at the Ashgabat
Studio (now Turkmenistan). The narrative focuses on a Turkmen girl who escapes
to study in the city. Smirnova’s gift became apparent in a number of silent
films, and she continued to explore the character of the woman-toiler, aspiring
to knowledge for the people’s happiness. Her comedy Bear Home, dedicated to
the Komsomol members at a small railway station received the first prize at the
Lenfilm contest. In 1939, Smirnova took the first prize for the best script, Country
Women, at the All-Union competition.
During World War II, Smirnova was working on Martial Collections with other
writers, and published patriotic stories and essays. She continued writing screen-
plays; her The Village Teacher (1948) explored the life of an inconspicuous teacher
who became a hero to the people. ‘To live means to serve the Motherland’ was
a line of dialogue that resonated with the public. This film, featuring the actress
Vera Maretskaya as the village teacher, became a symbol of patriotism for sev-
eral generations and has become a classic in the history of Soviet cinema; it was
awarded the State Prize of the Soviet Union, one of the highest government
awards. Smirnova continued to explore the idea of a village intelligentsia in
screenplays that came to form part of a trilogy, starting with The Village Teacher
and moving into The Village Doctor and then Polushko-Pole (1957). However,
these films did not achieve the emotional tension of the first film. It should be
noted that the heroines of these films, Doctor Tatiana Kazakova and agronomist
Valentina Chernyshova, are spiritual daughters of Varvara Martynova, the main
character of The Village Teacher.
While working on literary adaptations (The Story of Real Man by Boris Polevoy,
Mother by Maxim Gorky, and Floating Station by Vitalii Zakrutkin), Smirnova
always looked for specifically cinematographic ways to realize the material, while
at the same time carefully trying to preserve the essence of the source material.
In 1956, Smirnova wrote a screenplay with Indian filmmakers for a Soviet and
Indian co-production; the successful film, Pardesi/Journey Beyond Three Seas, was
co-directed by Indian director Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Soviet director Vasili
Pronin. Smirnova’s other credits include The Story of First Love (1957) and Under
One Roof (1963).
Ekaterina Vinogradskaya
Ekaterina Vinogradskaya (1905–73) was born in Orel, USSR (now Russia). She
studied drama at the First Studio of Moscow Arts Theatre, but after seeing
P. Chardinin’s film A Woman of Tomorrow (1914) became interested in screen-
writing. Her credits include the silent film Wreckage of the Empire (1929, directed
by Fridrikh Armler). The film focuses on the rather complicated postwar life of a
confused soldier with amnesia who remembers his life under the tsar, but finds
himself in the world of the Bolsheviks and Lenin. The film was well received and
today continues to surprise audiences with its brave and harsh treatment of the
subject.
When sound was introduced into Russian cinema, Vinogradskaya demonstrated
new sides of her talent. Her artistry with dialogue became her unique trait. The
film A Party Card (1936) sets out a complex story of Soviet times in which the
story’s main characters are forced to act within certain limits; it is a love story
between a working-class girl and a talented revolutionary.
The film The Member of the Government (1939) was released on the eve of the
Second World War. It became a phenomenon not only because of its depiction of
the political life of the day but also its examination of Soviet cultural life. Other
credits include The Road of Glory (1948) and Towards Life (1952). From 1956 to
1973, Vinogradskaya devoted herself to teaching at the Russian State University of
Cinematography (VGIK). Her methodology, derived from her own work, became
a basis for teaching such remarkable postwar masters of Russian dramaturgy as
Yui Dunsky and Valeri Frid – two screenwriters who received their VGIK diplo-
mas after having spent many years in Stalin’s camps. A significant quote from
Ekaterina Vinogradskaya, the screenwriting teacher, is this: ‘A hack, sometimes
possessing certain qualities of a true master, is interested in the result only – but
not in the process.’
Notes
1. This research is based on extant films only. This last film, for instance, no longer exists
and it is currently impossible to verify if it was ever produced.
2. In other words, the sensationalist literature that fulfilled readers’ desires for loose
women, murder and intrigue.
3. Exact publication information in unavailable, which may mean that these were pub-
lished in serialized form rather than in book form.
Russia 159
References
Barantsevich, Zoia. 1965. ‘Liudi I vstrechi v kino/People and Meetings in the Cinema’, in
Kino I vremia/Cinema and Time, vol. 4. USSR: Moscow.
Bek-Nazarov, Amo. 1965. Zapiski aktera i kinorezhissera/Notes from Actors and Directors.
Moscow: Isskustvo.
Ferro, Marc. 1995. Nicholas II. UK: Oxford University Press.
Holmgren, Beth. 1996. ‘Gendering the Icon: Marketing Women Writers in Fin-de-Siècle
Russia’, in H. Goscilo and B. Holmgren (eds) Russia Women Culture. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
McReynolds, Louise. 2003. Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era. USA:
Cornell University Press.
Obozrenie Teatr/Theatrical Review. 1917. ‘Umiraiushii lebed/The Dying Swan’, 3360: 16.
Rollberg, Peter. 2008. Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema. USA: Scarecrow Press.
Stamp, Shelley. 2000. Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the
Nickelodeon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, Richard. 2008. The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917–1928. UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Vestnik kinematografii/The Cinematographic Herald. 1916. ‘Kto zagubil?/Who Spoiled It?’, 118: 8.
World Art: Art in all Displays. Zoia Barantsevich. Available at: http://world-art.ru/people.
php?id=13171 (accessed June 2012).
Youngblood, Denise. 1999. The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908–1918. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press. ustrated Lives Series. New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co.
Part III
Australasia
Australia
Nicolette Freeman, Lisa French, Margot Nash and Mark Poole
Women writers and the Australian screen
Lisa French and Mark Poole
Introduction
The Australian film industry has been recognized for its creative innovation and
cinematic power, and Australian female screenwriters have played a significant
role in many of Australia’s most well-known films. For example, Judy Morris was
a co-writer of Babe: Pig in the City, 1998 and Happy Feet, 2006; Jane Kennedy co-
wrote The Castle, 1997 and The Dish, 2000; Melina Marchetta adapted Looking for
Alibrandi, 2000, from her own novel; Christine Olsen wrote Rabbit-Proof Fence,
2002; and Rachel Perkins co-wrote Bran Nue Dae, 2009. Australia’s female writ-
ers cover a range of genres and Olsen and Perkins were writing about Indigenous
Australia, a recurrent theme in Australian film; Morris was working in animation,
another key genre; Marchetta addressed issues of Australian multicultural society;
and Kennedy is known for her work in local comedy.
Indeed, the quality of Australian women screenwriters was highlighted when
Jane Campion was given the Academy Award for Screenwriting for The Piano,
1993 – and while other writers have received nominations in the screenwriting
categories of the Oscars, Campion remains the only one to have won. Originally
from New Zealand, Campion trained in film in Australia and went on to build a
transnational career from her Sydney base, working in the United States (In the
Cut, 2003) and the United Kingdom (Bright Star, 2009), as well as Australia (Holy
Smoke!, 1999) and New Zealand (The Piano), writing roles that could attract inter-
nationally renowned actors such as Kate Winslet, Holly Hunter, Meg Ryan and
Harvey Keitel.
In the non-feature sector, women writers have also been successful across a
range of genres. For example, women writers have achieved numerous screenplay
nominations in the ‘Best Screenplay Short Fiction’ category of the Australian
Film Institute’s (AFI/AACTA) Awards over the last decade; these include Erin
White, Kathleen O’Brien, Rachel Ward, Sally Riley, Trudy Hellier, and Mirrah
Foulkes. In the documentary sector, women have been prominent, penning such
163
films as Joan Long’s The Pictures That Moved, 1968 and The Passionate Industry,
1972; Sue Castrique’s Federation, 1998; Barbara Chobocky’s The Raid, 1994; and
Katherine Thomson’s Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst,
2004, winning recognition for their work in the Australian Writers Guild AWGIE
Awards. Women writer-directors have also been prominent in documentary, for
example, Gillian Armstrong’s series of five films on young women growing up,
most recently Love Lust & Lies, 2010.
Australian television has experienced a golden era since the mid 2000s, and
women have been prominent in creating, originating and writing a number of
the most successful television dramas of recent years. For example, Sue Smith
co-wrote the iconic mini-series Brides of Christ, 1991, and also The Leaving of
Liverpool, 1992 and Mabo, 2012. Debra Oswald wrote episodes of the highly
successful drama The Secret Life of Us, 2002, and then created the show Offspring,
2010, starring Asher Keddie, currently in its third series. Deborah Cox was the
co-producer (with Fiona Eagger) and one of the writers for the successful series
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, 2012 – indeed, almost all of the show’s 13 episodes
were penned by women. Cox was also a co-creator of the iconic series Seachange,
1998, and has written two feature films. Women are also writing for reality
television, taking good ideas and developing storylines, often drawing on the
conventions of drama; Claire Haywood, for example (Being Lara Bingle, 2012 and
Kalgoorlie Cops, 2011 – the latter uses three main storylines to frame each episode
and direct focus to the characters).
As a small industry with a medium-sized output, it is common for writers to
work across several forms (and genres); even Jane Campion, who has an extensive
international feature career, has also written narrative shorts, and television. Some
playwrights also work as screenwriters: Hannie Rayson, for example (writer on Sea
Change, 2000, Seven Deadly Sins, 1993), and Beatrix Christian (who wrote Jindabyne,
2006). Some novelists have also written for the screen, such as Julia Leigh, who
adapted her book as a feature film (Sleeping Beauty, 2011). Both Rayson and Leigh
have also had their non-screenplay work adapted to the screen by other writers.
With a particular focus on contemporary writers, this chapter offers an overview
of Australian women screenwriters in the context of the Australian film and tel-
evision industry (particularly film). This is undertaken in relation to their careers
within international circuits, and through a discussion of their participation and
representation within the industry.
Background and industry overview

As early as the 1920s, Australian women writers such as Kate Howarde, the
McDonagh sisters, Lottie Lyell, Mary Mallon, and Juliet De La Ruze were mak-
ing a contribution to the film industry. While their output was not large, they
were working across craft areas and many also directed and produced their films.
Indeed, the first woman ever to direct a feature film in Australia was also a writer
(Kate Howarde, who adapted her stage play Possum Paddock to the screen in 1921).
After this promising start Australian film production as a whole declined, and
between 1930 and 1970 few feature films were made. In the 1970s there was a
Australia 165
‘revival’ of the Australian industry (also referred to as a ‘renaissance’) when the

federal government moved to support the production of Australian film. Since
then the Australian industry has continued to rely on government subsidy to
survive, and this government funding has influenced the nature of the screen
works produced and the type of screenplays funded for development: for exam-
ple, nationalistic period films were popular with the Australian Film Commission
(now Screen Australia) when it was first established in the 1970s. This government
influence has also been read in some quarters as promoting a positive environment
for women: ‘The reason why women’s cinema flourishes in Australia, Canada,
France and even Iran is that they have governments that care about developing a
national cinema’ (McCreadie 2006: 144). The revival of the Australian film indus-
try in the 1970s was significantly influenced by equal opportunity policies operat-
ing at the time, and so the Australian Film Commission’s Women’s Film Fund was
established, which enabled many women to become writers and supported films
that were often political, female-centred and creatively innovative; for example,
funds were provided for writers Joan Long for Caddie in 1976, Helen Grace for
Serious Undertakings in 1983, and Tracey Moffatt for Nice Coloured Girls in 1987.
Today, government funding is available via the federal agency Screen Australia
and agencies located in each state (e.g. Film Victoria, Screen NSW). However,
women’s film funds no longer exist, having been phased out by the end of the
1980s (e.g. the AFC’s Women’s Film Fund 1976–89).
There are a considerable number of female writer-directors in Australia, and it
could be argued that, for women, directing their own work is one way for them
to get their projects realized. This is not unique to Australia; research globally has
shown this, for example, in the UK: ‘[T]he more women there are in decision-
making roles, the more likely it is that women will be able to take up writing
roles’ (Sinclair et al. 2006: 15), and in America: ‘[M]otion pictures with female
directors were more likely to hire women [as writers] than films with male direc-
tors’ (Sinclair et al. 2006: 38). To this day, Australia continues to produce many
writer-directors who are amongst the most notable of the country’s talent: Jane
Campion, Shirley Barrett, Ana Kokkinos, Tracey Moffatt, Jocelyn Moorhouse,
Cate Shortland, Sarah Watt and Rachel Ward (just to name a few). Indeed,
Australia has developed a reputation for supporting women filmmakers, includ-
ing women writers, and there are more women writer-directors coming out of
Australia ‘per capita’ than in the US (McCreadie 2006: 96).
Increasingly, Australian filmmakers have looked to international funding and
relationships to support their filmmaking and this has internationalized their
careers. Female writers have been able to develop transnational livelihoods, some
working in Hollywood or with international partners. Laura Jones is a major
international writer working both locally and internationally. She has written
projects directed by Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong and Samantha Lang in
Australia, and also works outside the country; for example, she wrote the UK/
India co-production Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007). According to McCreadie,
‘Laura Jones, the screenwriter from Australia, built an entire reputation writing
films about women’ (McCreadie 2006: 11). The same could be said for numerous
Australian women writers whose output is equally interested in representing

women, amongst them in features: Jane Campion (Top of the Lake, 2013; Bright
Star, 2009); Shirley Barrett (South Solitary, 2010; Love Serenade, 1996); Cate Shortland
(Lore, 2012; Somersault, 2004); Alison Tilson (Japanese Story, 2003; Road to Nhill,
1997); and in television: Deb Cox (Sea Change, 1998–2000; Simone de Beauvoir’s
Babies, 1997) and Kath and Kim, written 2002–7 by Gina Riley, Magda Szubanski
and Jane Turner. These writers have produced an abundance of female-centred sto-
ries, and this is their particular strength and contribution to global cinema. It also
contributes to the international perception that Australia produces and supports
women in the industry, including writers (McCreadie 2006: 96; French 2012: 42).
Adaptations
Australian film and television has a long history of adapting novels for the screen;
indeed, the revival of the industry in the 1970s was built on a large number of
screenplays based on novels, many of which were written by women. For exam-
ple, Eleanor Witcombe adapted two novels which became important films of the
1970s renaissance: My Brilliant Career (1979) from a novel by Miles Franklin, and
The Getting of Wisdom (1978) from a novel by Henry Handel Richardson (a pseu-
donym for Ethel Richardson). Witcombe won ‘Best Screenplay’ at the AFI Awards
for both films.
Contemporary women have successfully written adapted screenplays of signifi-
cance, including Head On (1998), written by Ana Kokkinos and Mira Robertson
(with Andrew Bovell), from the novel Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas; Puberty Blues
(1981), adapted by Margaret Kelly from the novel by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle
Carey (also made into a television series in 2012, the majority of which was written
by women: Imogen Banks, Alice Bell and Fiona Seres); Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002),
written by Christine Olsen from a novel by Doris Pilkington; Looking for Alibrandi
(2000), written by Melina Marchetta from her own novel; Anna-Maria Monticelli
wrote the screenplay for Disgrace (2008), an adaptation of the J. M. Coetzee novel,
which she also produced as a co-production (Australia/South Africa); and The Eye
of the Storm (2011), adapted by Judy Morris from a Nobel Prize-winning (1973)
novel by Patrick White. The majority of these films are from novels that offer a
female point of view, and even where that is not front and centre, the writer’s
empathy with a gendered view of the world often comes through. This is the
case with Morris’s adaptation of The Eye of the Storm, which brings something of
a female perspective. Morris has said, ‘I had enormous compassion for Elizabeth
Hunter [the mother, who was played by Charlotte Rampling] because I know that
woman … [her] sense of entitlement through extraordinary beauty and money,
but I [also] knew her kindness’ (Tynan 2011: 21–2). The writer’s affection for the
character of Elizabeth Hunter incorporates her fragile state of mind, her dreams,
visions, memories and examines her identity as a matriarch (Tynan 2011: 22).
Aboriginal stories
Australia is a bi-cultural nation, a fact that was not particularly evident on
Australian screens until the 2000s. However, Indigenous women have played a
Australia 167
significant role as writers, particularly writer-directors. The first Aboriginal women

to make careers for themselves were avant-garde filmmaker Tracey Moffatt (with
postcolonial interventions), and, in documentary, Essie Coffey championed a
path for Indigenous activism when she presented her documentary My Survival as
an Aboriginal (1978) to Queen Elizabeth during her visit in 1988.
Screen Australia continues to fund ‘Indigenous Programmes’, established an
Indigenous Drama Initiative (IDI) in the mid 1990s; these supported Indigenous
people to gain experience in drama, enabling numerous women who now have
significant roles and status in the industry to write short films. These women
included writer-directors Sally Riley, Darlene Johnson and Erica Glynn. As
Aboriginal scholar and activist Marcia Langton has observed, these women pro-
duced narratives important to communicating Aboriginality: ‘Kinship and famil-
ial narratives underpin much of Aboriginal society’, as can be seen in the IDI films
(Langton 2003: 53). Erica Glynn’s My Bed Your Bed (1998) is a contemporary story
of the arrangement of marriage in Aboriginal society. Darlene Johnson’s Two Bob
Mermaid (1996) examines the experience of an Aboriginal girl who looks white
in a period of apartheid (Indigenous people were not allowed in the whites-only
swimming pool), and she has to choose between white society and her family.
Sally Riley’s Confessions of a Headhunter (2000), an adaptation of a short story
by novelist and playwright Archie Weller, is another familial narrative where a
character discovers his Indigenous family links. As Langton has observed, the
contribution of Aboriginal women filmmakers lies especially in their distinctive
narratives of kinship, in communicating the complexity of Aboriginal social
organization and histories of contact with the settler society, which provide
‘a rich storehouse of story, legend and narrative’ (Langton 2003: 47). Langton
has collaborated with Indigenous screenwriters herself, having appeared as the
daughter in Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990), and also as the
mother in Beck Cole’s Here I Am, a story about three generations of Aboriginal
women, one of whom, Karen (Shai Pittman), is released from prison and seeks to
reunite her family.
While Aboriginality is only one aspect of who these writers are as creative
individuals with their own artistic trajectories, it is true that to this day women
Indigenous writer-directors have continued to make political films, to document
Australian history and relations between black and white, and engage in intercul-
tural dialogues that communicate aspects of Aboriginal culture and experience
(e.g. Rachel Perkins in both television and film: First Australians, 2008; One Night
the Moon, 2001).
Multicultural perspectives
As well as being bicultural, Australia is also multicultural, and many stories on
the screen have explored this aspect of the culture. This was a strong feature from
and during the 1980s (particularly in relation to those of European heritage),
and numerous women brought second-generation migrant stories to the screen,
including writer-directors such as Ana Kokkinos (Only the Brave, 1994; Head On,
1998) and Monica Pellizzari (Fist Full of Flies, 1996; Rabbit on the Moon, 1987).
Both of these writer-directors focused on the experiences of the children of

migrants in Australia. In her writing of the documentary Letters from Poland
(1978) and the feature Silver City (1984), Sophia Turkiewicz examined her Polish
heritage, running lines back to Australia through the migrant or refugee experi-
ence. From the 1990s, multicultural experiences of people from Asia began to be
written. Chinese immigrant Clara Law wrote documentary, short and feature
films about the displacement and alienation felt by new Australians, and the
development of diasporic communities. Her feature Floating Life (1996), shot in
Cantonese, was the ‘first feature film in Australia to be made in a language other
than English’ (Cunningham and Sinclair 2000: 1).
Participation and success

Recent figures (Screen Australia 2013) indicate that women represent 20 per cent
of the writers of Australian feature films, and 36 per cent of the writers of docu-
mentary films, and they have increased their participation in television (although
the actual percentage is not given). Over the last decade at the AFI Awards, now
called the AACTA Awards, women have won the Best Original Screenplay Award
(feature film) 45 per cent of the time (2003–12), yet women represent between
20–24 per cent of feature film writers during that period; this indicates that, where
women do take part, they enjoy great success, and are punching well above their
weight.
An examination of the participation of women writers in the Australian film
industries over the last 20 years reveals that although the actual number of
screenwriters, including women screenwriters, has increased, there has been lit-
tle growth in their proportional numbers: according to a comparison between
three surveys of the industry, in 1985/6 women comprised 18 per cent, in 1992
they were 27 per cent, and they are currently 20 per cent (Marsh and Pip 1987;
Cox and Laura 1992; Screen Australia 2013). This situation mirrors the global
trend for the proportional participation of women screenwriters to remain static
or shrink in Western industries; in fact, there is also a backwards trend from
the early 2000s across all key creative areas. For example, a US study by Martha
Lauzen (2008) found that 22 per cent of feature films released in 2008 did not
employ any women in the key creative roles, including as writers, and her com-
parison over ten years (1998–2008) showed that women’s employment as writ-
ers had slightly declined. A Danish study by Knudsen and Rowley (1992–2002)
discovered that women made up only 17 per cent of screenwriters, and a 2006
UK study by Sinclair et al. revealed that women screenwriters were still only
credited on fewer than 15 per cent of UK films overall (French 2012). So from
a global perspective, Australian writers are proportionally well represented in
an international industry that is dominated by male screenwriters. This is a sig-
nificant international issue. There are business/industrial, ethical, social, cultural
and legal impacts and it is vital to know the reasons why so that global, Western,
industrialized film industries can ensure women achieve equal participation, in
order to achieve productive, diverse and innovative industries (French 2012).
It logically follows that if the participation of women writers in Australia and
Australia 169
elsewhere is only around 20 per cent, then global industries are missing out on
stories and storytelling innovation:
When the products turned out by our media are mainly created by men, it’s
not only a pity for the women in the business; it’s a pity for all of us. Because
the consequence is that all of us – both women and men – miss out on a lot
more multifaceted and much more interesting stories about our lives. (Knudsen
2005: 7)
Conclusion
Australian women screenwriters are successful, transnational, and represent all
parts of Australian society, but they remain a minority by percentage. Their
success has made them appear to be a larger group than they actually are. They
are visible in all genres and forms, and Australia has produced a large number of
female writer-directors. A significant contribution to global film and television
has been their stories from female perspectives that centre female characters and
experiences, and examine what it is to be a woman in the worlds they create.
The silent work of Australian women scenario writers
Margot Nash
Introduction
The early days of silent cinema in Australia were extraordinary. Over 200 narrative
films were produced in Australia before the advent of the talkies in 1928. This
included what is believed to be the first long-form dramatic film in the world,
The Story of The Kelly Gang (1906).1 Australians were passionate about the cinema
and audiences flocked to screenings in makeshift tents, community halls and
the many picture theatres that were quickly built in cities and country towns.
Showmen travelled to remote areas by horse and cart, screening films, often in the
open air. With small portable cameras, dramatic locations, and a hungry cinema-
going public, it was a time when anyone could have a go, and they did. In 1907
the Harvester Judgement ruled that the male basic wage should include the price
of a ticket to the pictures for a man, his wife and two children. While this did
not include the many single mothers and widows who were sole breadwinners, it
is indicative of the popularity of the cinema and its place in the life of everyday
Australians.
During this time a number of remarkable women rose to prominence as writers
and directors. I will focus on the early scenario-writing work of some of them,
in particular Lottie Lyell (1890–1925) and the McDonagh sisters, Isobel (1899–
1982), Phyllis (1900–78) and Paulette (1901–78). Lyell was a much-loved silent
screen star, but her work as a scenario writer and script collaborator with director
Raymond Longford is less well known. Of the 28 films they made together Lyell
holds scenario-writing credits on 12, but it is now generally accepted that she
contributed much more to the writing and directing of all the films than was ever
officially acknowledged (Pike and Cooper 1998: 19, 109; Dooley 2000:4). The
McDonagh sisters worked collaboratively, making four feature films and a number
of short documentaries. Paulette is credited as the writer and director, yet years
later she was furious when a television programme claimed she was the author
of the films. She rang archivist Graham Shirley immediately to set the record
straight, saying the films had been made by the three sisters together, and it was
incorrect to credit her as the sole author just because that was the way they had
divided up the credits.2
Two other women scenario writers are also worth noting here: Agnes Gavin
(1872–1948) and Louise Lovely (1895–1980). Agnes Gavin turned her hand to
writing scenarios for her husband, director John Gavin. They were both stage
and vaudeville actors who became best known for making low-budget ‘quickie’
bushranger stories and convict-era melodramas (Pike and Cooper 1998: 11). In
1911 alone Agnes Gavin is credited as the scenario writer on six films, most of
them about bushrangers. Bushranger stories were enormously popular with local
audiences as Australians loved outlaws and cheered on anyone brave enough to
take their colonial masters to task. The Gavins were not the only people cashing in
on the genre and, by 1912, the New South Wales, Victorian and South Australian
governments all banned films about bushrangers, concerned they were undermin-
ing the authority of the police. World war broke out in 1914 and film production
turned to supporting the war effort. Gavin and her husband achieved some inter-
national success with their film The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell (1916). It was based
on the true story of an English nurse who was executed by the German Army for
helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium. Their
next film, The Murder of Captain Fryatt (1917), was also about German war atroci-
ties, but it was not received as well. They returned to genre with His Convict Bride
(1918) also known as For the Term of Her Natural Life, before moving to Hollywood
where John Gavin worked as an actor on westerns and comedies. In 1925, Gavin
and her husband returned to Australia where she wrote Trooper O’Brien (1928).
Silent screen star Louise Lovely left Australia for America in 1914, making
approximately 50 films in Hollywood before returning to Australia in 1924.
Lovely’s interest in areas other than acting had been evident as early as 1913 when
she and her husband, Wilton Welch, had co-written The Warning, a play about
the white slave traffic (Wright 1986: 27). In 1924 she returned to Australia and
toured with Welch in a show they devised together called ‘A Day at The Studio’.
It capitalized on her stardom by offering local fans the experience of seeing how
films were made. Travelling with a cinematographer and editing facilities they
offered locals a chance to screen test and then return the following week to see
themselves on film. While in Tasmania, writer Marie Bjelkie-Peterson requested
Lovely consider the novel Jewelled Nights as a possible film. Lovely wrote the
adaptation, co-directed and co-produced it with Welch. She also starred in it, and
edited it (Wright 1986: 27). Jewelled Nights (1925) was an expensive production
and, while the film was received well, it didn’t recover its costs. Lovely attributed
this to the amount of money taken by distributors and exhibitors – she claimed
that in one week in Melbourne the film took ₤1,565, out of which the producers
Australia 171
received £382.3 Her marriage disintegrated and she remarried a film exhibitor who
offered to take her back to Hollywood, but she declined (Wright 1986: 29).
My interest in sharing the stories of the early women scenario writers has come
from teaching both screenwriting and Australian film history and realizing that,
although much of Australia’s early film history, including the role of women
in it, was meticulously researched in the aftermath of the 1970 Australian Film
Renaissance by film scholars such as Andree Wright, Marilyn Dooley, Graham
Shirley, Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, many students had no idea of the rich
history waiting to be explored, or that women had played a major role from the
beginning as both scenario writers and filmmakers. Stepping back in time and
looking at some of the original screenplays in the archives, typed on delicate rice
paper with love and care, I feel a sense of urgency for, unless history is retold again
and again it is lost, and unless women’s history is recovered and, in the case of
the early women scenario writers, re-evaluated, then the work of these women
will be forgotten.
Lottie Lyell
For a young woman like Lottie Lyell, growing up in Australia during the early days
of the new century was a time full of possibility and promise. The suffragettes
had been campaigning for votes for women since 1894, and by 1908, when Lyell
was 19 years old, white women4 in all states finally won the right to vote ahead
of many European countries. Two years later Lyell starred in The Romantic Story of
Margaret Catchpole (1911), and it was this early film that brought her to the atten-
tion of Australian audiences. It was based on the true story of a woman convict
transported to the penal colony of New South Wales for stealing a horse to help
her lover escape. Lyell played the title role, riding the producer’s magnificent dap-
ple grey horse, Arno, in a dashing and swashbuckling sequence that is one of the
few scenes from the film that have survived. When Lyell stole the horse, disguised
as a boy, and bravely rode it, pursued by the law, she rode into the hearts and
minds of Australians looking for new kinds of heroines.
Lyell didn’t fit easily into the image of a glamorous screen star. Instead she had
a genuine quality and an understated performance style that touched people’s
hearts. She never played antagonistic characters, usually playing plucky, intelli-
gent heroines facing danger, exploitation or discrimination. She did all her own
stunts and was an accomplished horsewoman. While men dominated the new
film industry, young women seized opportunities where they could. Budgets were
low and film crews small, often just the director, the cameraman and a couple of
assistants. It was an opportunity for young women who found themselves on set
when things needed to be done, and actresses like Lottie Lyell and Louise Lovely
jumped in and got their hands dirty, learning all aspects of production at the same
time as rising to stardom both at home and abroad as silent film heroines.
At the age of 20 Lyell was working as a professional stage actor, and when she
toured New Zealand in the play An Englishman’s Home (1909), her parents put
her in the care of fellow actor, Raymond Longford, a family friend, and a married
man. Lyell and Longford soon formed a creative partnership that would last right
up until her death from tuberculosis in 1925, aged 35. Longford directed and Lyell
starred in nearly all the films, but she also worked tirelessly behind the scenes,
writing, editing, art directing, co directing and producing. Years later Longford
wrote: ‘Lottie Lyell was my partner in all our film activities’.5 Yet Longford’s
name is on all the scripts until 1916 when Lyell is credited as co-writer on both
A Maori Maid’s Love (1916) and Mutiny of the Bounty (1916). The following year
Lyell starred in The Church and the Woman (1917) and then The Woman Suffers
(1918), yet curiously she is only credited as an actress in them. Both films feature
stories about women who are unjustly accused of crimes, or treated poorly by men
they have loved and trusted. Asked if he thought Lyell played a significant role as
a screenwriter from the beginning, Australian producer Anthony Buckley, who as
a young man met and interviewed Longford, replied: ‘Without question: The Lyell
fingerprints are over everything.’6
My search for evidence of Lyell’s contribution as a writer on the early films has
meant looking for those fingerprints, and this has inevitably involved a degree
of speculation. Feminist film scholar and archivist Marilyn Dooley believes that
Lyell was ‘the reader’; that many of the early films were based on potboilers or
popular romantic stories of the day that targeted women readers, and it was Lyell
who read them and championed them.7 Given the sexual division of labour of the
time it makes sense to assume that Lyell was also the typist, that she typed while
Longford dictated; but given accounts of their relationship, it is probably closer
to the truth to suggest that they discussed every aspect of the screenplay, while
her hands were on the typewriter, forming words on the page and thinking about
the images. Silent films depended on visual storytelling and Lyell was an actor
whose work on screen showed a clear understanding of the demands of the new
medium. The films she and Longford made are distinctive for their naturalistic
acting style as well as the sophistication of their film language. This grasp of film
language is usually attributed to Longford. For example, the screenplay of Mutiny
of the Bounty (1916) ‘indicates the great advances Longford had made in his use
of editing and close-ups’ (Drew 2002), but it was Lyell who was editing the films,
not Longford. Having her hands on the film itself would have quickly taught her
about the new language, and this in turn would have informed her work as both
an actress and writer.
The copyright requirements of the time required the scenario, along with a still
photograph from each scene, to be submitted for copyright. This put pressure on
filmmakers because it meant the film had to be shot first and copyright applied
for later. Luckily this has meant that a number of the original scenarios, plus
accompanying stills, survive where the films are themselves lost. Lyell is reported
as having been a meticulous person, and this is borne out by the scenarios that
are available for study. All the scenarios I saw were typed on rice paper that was
almost transparent, usually in purple ink.
In the early 1900s typewriter ribbons were available in black and various other
colours, but in 1910 some typewriters were equipped to use two-colour ribbons
as well. The usual combination was purple and red. Users could switch easily
between the two colours. Copies could also be produced by using sheets of very
Australia 173
thin paper, and placing carbon paper between them (Polt 1910). The scenario for
The Woman Suffers (1918) is typed in purple, but the main title has been typed in
blue on page one and underlined in red. Perhaps Lottie hurriedly added it later for
the copyright submission, but even this small fingerprint shows an attention to
detail as she has adjusted the ribbon in order to neatly underline the title in red.
Longford’s name as sole author of the scenario has been handwritten under this
title, yet the first line reads ‘Our picture opens with …’
It was well known in film circles that Longford and Lyell’s relationship was
more than just a business one. Longford’s Catholic wife refused to give him a
divorce so they never married, but when Lyell’s father died, Longford moved into
the house with her and her mother. ‘Living with the fatherless family may not
have appeared as scandalous as it actually was’ (MacDonald 1985), but no one
really knows what went on under that roof.
Longford always claimed Lyell was very religious, implying she was chaste,
but this is at odds with stories like The Woman Suffers (1918) and The Church
and the Woman where the young female protagonists are not chaste. They are in
fact passionate and sexually adventurous, but ‘suffer’ when taken advantage of
by unscrupulous men, with devious agendas. In The Woman Suffers (1918) the
cad who has taken advantage of Lyell’s character returns to apologize to her in
the end and they are reunited, along with the child she has had out of wedlock.
Longford’s wife finally agreed to a divorce, but it came through just after Lyell
died. Curiously, none of Lyell’s papers have survived. Longford was the executor
of her will and they would have ended up in either his hands or her mother’s, but
apart from one letter and her signature on a few documents there are no papers
left to study.
Silent films often used handwritten letters to convey exposition and Lyell’s
handwriting is quite distinctive, in particular her capital Ds and Ls. Comparing
the one surviving letter and the handwritten letters that appear on screen in The
Woman Suffers, I quickly realized the handwriting was hers.
The mystery of Lyell’s personal papers remains unsolved. Perhaps her mother or
Longford destroyed them as they proved Lyell had lived a more sexually adventur-
ous life than she’d admitted to, and, like many artists of the time, and the char-
acter in The Woman Suffers, she would have been condemned publically for this.
Longford remarried after her death and his new wife took charge of all his papers.
These papers were later donated to the National Film and Sound Archive and
Marilyn Dooley then went through them carefully, but found no sign of Lyell’s
papers, although she did find a faded copy of the scenario for The Sentimental Bloke
(1917), which Lyell has a co-writing credit on. The original had been submitted to
the NSW Police Department, as Longford wished to film an illegal Two Up game
being raided by the police, and needed permission. Luckily the police failed to
return it and Longford’s papers contain correspondence, which led Dooley to the
State Records Office of New South Wales where the original scenario is still held.
During the silent era scenarios often looked more like prose outlines or
treatments. Some included locations and intertitle cards, but they were a lot less
detailed than the screenplays we are used to today. Silent films didn’t require
dialogue to be written; they plotted out the story describing the main actions as
necessary. Intertitle cards were included if exposition was considered necessary
and could always be rewritten later. This meant directors and actors could work
freely on set, developing complexity through improvisation, and any changes
could be incorporated during the editing process. Scenarios were therefore
written with a different mind set or production process in mind.8 They were also
significantly shorter than screenplays for talking pictures. The scenario for The
Sentimental Bloke (1917) is one of the longest scenarios from the Longford/Lyell
team that survives. It is 40 pages long, which is closer to the length of a modern
feature treatment, but it is a lot more spaced out and has scene numbers written
down the left-hand side like a stage script. The scenario for The Church and the
Woman (1917) submitted for copyright is written in prose paragraphs and is only
ten pages long.9
The scenario for Mutiny of the Bounty (1916) is only 13 pages, yet it was feature-
length and in terms of format looks more like a modern screenplay. Scene num-
bers and locations are included along with intertitle cards, which are indented
in the same way dialogue is now routinely indented. This was only the second
film where Lyell received a formal credit as co-writer and the scenario shows an
artistic attention to detail that is distinctive. Lyell was clearly using a blue and red
two-colour ribbon as the scene numbers and title cards are typed in red, and the
locations and scene descriptions are typed in blue. She was also making copies as
the original scenario in the archives has been typed on delicate, extremely thin,
rice paper. If Lyell was ‘the typist’ then this careful use of colour is surely another
fingerprint, as is the correction on page 10 where ‘House’ has been crossed out
and ‘Home’ has been written instead.
Longford and Lyell achieved both local and international success with their film
The Sentimental Bloke (1919), which was based on the C. J. Dennis poem of the
same name. Lyell starred as the lovable Doreen, but she also holds co-screenplay,
editing, art direction and production assistant credits. Cameraman Lacey Percival,
who did two pictures with Longford and Lyell, claimed:
She allowed him to take the credit for everything, which he did. I think her
name should have come first. […] My experience was that she directed the
pictures and everyone looked to her. They hardly ever went to Ray to ask a
question. […] I reckon she put him on the map.10
Marjorie Osbourne, who played the lead in The Blue Mountains Mystery (1921),
said:
Lottie Lyell appealed to me. I like brains in a woman and she had them. […]
She assisted Mr Longford and the two of them had plenty of healthy arguments
when their ideas on a scene differed.11
The Blue Mountains Mystery (1921) was an adaptation of the novel The Mount
Marunga Mystery by Harrison Owen, and in this case Lyell holds the sole
Australia 175
screenwriting credit as well as a co-directing credit. Only three of the 28 films

Lyell and Longford made together have survived and only one in its entirety.
Some scenes from The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole and The Woman Suffers
exist, but a 35mm print of The Sentimental Bloke (1919) was found in Melbourne
in 1952. In 1953 it was repaired by a young Anthony Buckley who respliced it in
order for a 16mm duplicate negative and print to be made:
My first discovery was that although the film was silent, it was not in black and
white, each scene was tinted a different tone, […] There was not the money to
provide for a 35mm negative and print. Eastmancolour processing had not yet
arrived in Australia for a tinted print to be made. (Buckley 2009: 17, 18)
In 1973 Australian archivist Ray Edmonson discovered the original 35mm camera
negative in George Eastman House in New York. It had been re-edited and the
intertitles changed as the Americans altered the Australian vernacular for the
American market. This made it possible to marry the surviving Australian copy,
which was poor quality and thought to have been a 35mm copy of the 16mm
print made in the 1950s, with the American one (Case 2009: 67–9). The film was
lovingly restored by Australian archivists and film technicians and completed in
2003. The colour tints were matched as the edges of the frame on the one surviv-
ing faded nitrate print reel had not been exposed to the projector’s arc, and the
traces of colour found there were a significantly deeper hue (Case 2009: 71). Like
the multicoloured typed scenarios, could this careful use of colour be another
Lyell fingerprint?
After Lyell died, Longford never again achieved the success of the early films.
He ended up a solitary figure working on the Sydney waterfront as a night watch-
man. Lyell’s death had meant the end of a dynamic and creative partnership and
he was heartbroken, but it was also a difficult time for local filmmakers. The talk-
ies had meant a massive increase in production costs and Australian filmmakers
were increasingly unable to compete with the Hollywood juggernaut, which was
dominating cinema exhibition and distribution. Lyell and Longford are buried in
the same grave. Her epitaph reads Lottie Lyell Cox – Photo play artiste.
The McDonagh sisters

The McDonagh sisters, Paulette, Phyllis and Isobel, produced four feature films
together between 1926 and 1933. They were arguably ‘the most talented of the
late silent era filmmakers in Australia and the most courageous of the early talkies’
(Shirley 1978: 5). Paulette was the writer and director, Phyllis the production
manager and art director, and Isobel, the eldest, was the star under the name
Marie Lorraine. They worked collaboratively ‘from discussion of the storyline
onwards, although Paulette had final say as director’ (Shirley 1988: 3). Paulette
and Phyllis wrote the scenario for Those Who Love (1927) while they were still
at school. They always shared a bedroom, even when they were producing films
together, and would often stay up all night discussing books, plays, films and
ideas for storylines. In an interview in 1988, their younger sister, Paula Dornan,
claimed: ‘They would never have bought a hairpin without consulting each other,
they were so close’ (Dornan 1988). The neighbours often heard raised voices at
night and thought they were fighting, but this was not the case. It was just the
three sisters engaged in robust discussion, often into the small hours of the morn-
ing. ‘They would spend days fighting over a subtitle. The wording’ (Dornan 1988).
In an interview in 1974, Paulette McDonagh said: ‘We were so loyal. We were so
close. We didn’t need outside friends or companionship.’12
The McDonagh sisters grew up in a large house in College Street in inner city
Sydney with four younger siblings. Their mother was the Spanish daughter of
the Argentinian consul and a trained nurse and their father was a surgeon who
had a love of the fine arts, theatre and music. McDonagh inherited his father’s
prestigious Macquarie Street medical practice, but moved it into the family home,
which he rented in the heart of Sydney. McDonagh was the honorary surgeon
for the Stadium, where he regularly went to watch boxing matches, and also
for J. C. Williamson’s Theatre Company. This meant the girls grew up going to
the Saturday theatre matinees. ‘We cut our teeth on theatre. When we went to
boarding school that’s all we talked and thought about. Schoolwork was a poor
second’ (Shirley 1978: 15). On Sunday nights their parents would often host
soirees for local and visiting actors and the girls witnessed high society rubbing
shoulders with bohemian life. They also witnessed poverty as their house backed
onto the laneways of the working-class suburb of Darlinghurst. Their sister, Paula,
tells stories about Isobel, Paulette and Phyllis pouring pitchers of water over the
young blades and their girls, all dressed up in their finery on their way to the
Domain Park to promenade, and how the younger children would often thrust
the family’s silver spoons and food through the slats in the back gate to the poor
and hungry children of Darlinghurst (Dornan 1988). When it came to charging
for his medical services their father was always generous with the poor and tough
with the rich and the first three films the sisters made were society melodramas
set in the city that ‘contrasted an upper middle class with that of the slum dweller
or underprivileged’ (Shirley 1978: 16).
Their mother loved the pictures and every Saturday night the whole McDonagh
clan would go to see a film. There were seven children and they would occupy a
whole row (Dornan 1988). The girls were in their early teens when war broke out
in 1914, and during these impressionable years would have witnessed women
routinely doing men’s jobs. (Before the war Australian women workers had been
extremely militant; forming their own trade unions in the face of the male-only
trade unions, and during the war they kept up their campaigns for equal pay.) The
sisters grew up in an urbane and privileged environment where social justice was
valued, but they were also exposed to risk-taking as their father often made ‘bad
investments; gold mines, silver mines, strings of racehorses and he was robbed on
every one of them. Never made any money. What money he had he spent or gave
to charity’ (Dornan 1988). The sisters perpetuated the myth that they came from a
wealthy background when in fact money was often scarce, particularly after their
father died. They also perpetuated the myth that they made their first film with
money their father gave them. He may well have, but it came from an inheritance
Australia 177
from a Chilean uncle on their mother’s side, Uncle Ernest Amora, who died leaving
eight thousand pounds to the family, one thousand of which was used to finance
Those Who Love (1926) (Dornan 1988). In this case the investment did make money.
Most Australian films of the time were set in the bush and portrayed male
protagonists as heroes or buffoons battling both an unhospitable environment
and their colonial masters. The McDonaghs were more interested in relation-
ships. Their films were emotional ‘melodramas of romance, sacrifice and parental
opposition’ (Wright 1986). Those Who Love told a story about ‘an upper class
outcast falling in love with, losing and regaining, a lower class showgirl’ (Shirley
1978: 16). It was enormously popular, earning more money in Australia in 1926
than Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (Dornan 1988). The sisters set their films in the city
and rejected the prevailing ethos that Australian films had to be ‘redolent with
the smell of gum leaves’.13 Having grown up watching American and European
films they wanted to make films that were as good as or better than overseas
films. ‘They had the sense to realize that they knew so little that they had to
find that knowledge’ (Dornan 1988). They spent hours at the cinema watching
the Hollywood and European movies over and over again and studying the way
they were put together. ‘Paulette realised that scenario writing was an art. You
could be the greatest playwright, but you can’t write a scenario’ (Dornan 1988).
She set about learning how to do it and as there was no one in Australia offering
courses, she signed up for a Hollywood scenario-writing course by correspond-
ence. Correspondence courses with Hollywood ‘experts’ were being advertised in
Australian newspapers as early as 1916:
Great local interest has been aroused by the announcement that a real live
American photoplay expert is conducting classes for tuition in the highly
remunerative art of scenario (or picture play) writing. Many enterprising local
residents of both sexes […] have taken advantage of this splendid opportunity
and rapidly qualified themselves under the expert tuition of Mr R. W. Williams.
[…] Send in your name and address, accompanied by an enrolment fee, and by
return post the full and complete course will be mailed you.14
After taking one of these courses Paulette became the main writer, and Phyllis,
who later became a short story writer and successful journalist, worked with her.
After Phyllis and Paulette had spent ‘whole days and nights’ working out the
storyline, they would flesh out the characters; then Paulette would spend up to
two months writing the scenario, or shooting script. Further collaboration with
Phyllis would come in the co-writing of dialogue for intertitles (Shirley 1978: 17).
Isobel, the family beauty, had already started acting in theatre and films and
they created female protagonists for her to play, complex characters with conflict-
ing desires which allowed her to develop her acting skills. Like Lottie Lyell, she
developed a naturalistic and understated performance style that was more suited
to the demands of the big screen.
On 14 September 1925 Paulette submitted Those Who Love for copyright. She
called the document a ‘Detailed Synopsis’. Unfortunately there is no record of
any of their shooting scripts in the archives. The only other entry is a 19-page
unproduced scenario for a film called The Greater Love. Written in prose like a
short story it was obviously still a working document as it contains numerous
handwritten corrections.
Their father died before he could see Those Who Love (1926). The house in
College Street was rented and a group of McDonagh’s friends got together
and advised his widow to use what money there was to buy a large house, big
enough to live in and also run a convalescent home. She was a trained nurse and
the friends promised to send patients to her, which they later did. Eventually
Drummoyne House, a stately mansion with 40 rooms, became available. A
convalescent home was set up on one level and the family lived on another. The
girls quickly realized that the house, along with the family furniture, could be
used as a set. ‘When Uncle Ernest died it gave the girls the opportunity of starting
pictures. We had this lovely home and they were able to do it on a shoestring
budget’ (Dornan 1988). Those Who Love (1926) and The Far Paradise (1928) were
both shot there. The sisters were quickly feted in the press as plucky society girls
who were headstrong and talented.
The McDonaghs’ films were ‘infinitely more sophisticated than any other local
films of the period’ (Shirley 1978:5). They showed a clear grasp of film language
and a sophistication in their plotting that was unusual for the time. The influence
of German Expressionism is also clear in their use of shadows and deep space.
The first two films did well at the box office, but things were proving difficult
for local filmmakers. (Both Raymond Longford and Isobel McDonagh testified at
the 1927 Royal Commission arguing for protection for the local industry.) After
their mother died, Isobel took charge, but like their father she was reckless with
money and by the time the sisters made The Cheaters (1930) the money had run
out and they had had to sell Drummoyne House:
We were young and we had nobody in charge of us. Had we had a manager
or somebody to tell us what to do, we’d have been on top of the world. […]
When we made films anything we earned we used to put on these huge parties
at Drummoyne House of 150 people, full evening dress. Great parties and it
would go on all night and until dawn the next day.15
Then the talkies arrived and everything changed. The McDonaghs attempted to
turn parts of The Cheaters (1930) into a talkie in order to enter it into a competi-
tion, but technology failed them and the screening was a disaster. In another risk-
taking decision the McDonaghs turned down a lucrative offer from Frank Thring
Senior, who ran Efftee Studios, to make films for him. He promised to take them
to Hollywood, but they declined. They had younger siblings to bring up, but they
were also headstrong and still believed they could continue to make their own way.
Despite the Depression, the sisters made several short sporting documentaries
with financial backing from Standardtone Film Production Co.
The McDonaghs’ fourth and final feature, Two Minutes Silence (1933), was
based on Les Haylen‘s stark anti-war play. In strong contrast to their early
Australia 179
melodramas, its theme of serious social realism was praised by critics but failed
to please audiences craving romance and comedy. (Wright 1986)
Two Minutes Silence (1934) was a talkie and financed by Isobel’s husband-to-be,
businessman Charles Stewart. Paulette worked on the adaptation with the play-
wright Leslie Haylen. The Australian poet and critic Kenneth Slessor described the
film as ‘capable of challenging comparison with world standards. The whole effect
is one of beauty and strength. There is nothing cheap about the theme, noth-
ing rubbed or shop soiled; and the treatment is surprisingly free of banality.’16
However, the sisters paid dearly for their earlier decision to snub Thring who now
owned the Hoyts cinema chain and refused to screen it.
Paulette wrote a scenario for a feature film called Flynn of the Inland about
Australia’s pioneering flying doctor, John Flynn, but it was never financed and she
eventually gave up. Isobel had married and gone overseas and Phyllis had moved
to New Zealand where she was working as a journalist. They had chosen different
paths and it just wasn’t the same without them. Paulette lived a bohemian life
in Kings Cross until her death in 1978. A little over a week before she died the
sisters were honoured by the AFI’s lifetime achievement award, the Raymond
Longford Award, but Phyllis lost the award in a cab. It was never recovered, but
it was replaced.
(It is interesting to note that, after industry consultation, in 2014 the Raymond
Longford AFI [Australian Film Institute] and AACTA [Australian Academy of Cinema
and Television Arts] Award for outstanding contribution to the enrichment of Australia’s
screen environment and cultures was changed to the Longford Lyell Award.)
The screenwriting of Jane Campion: female-centred stories,

characters and perspectives
Lisa French
Jane Campion (1954–) has had one of the most internationally significant and
prominent careers relative to any writer-director from the Australasia region. Born
in New Zealand in 1954, she trained in Sydney during the 1980s and since then has
lived and worked from an Australian base. Campion’s film work ‘has been supported
in an economic and cultural way by her adopted Australia’ (McCreadie 2006:139).
From the beginning of her career, Campion was widely recognized as an auteur with
her own distinctive vision and style, emerging on the international stage in 1986
when she won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film for An Exercise in Discipline – Peel
(1982), a film she wrote and directed. At the time of this writing, she had written
the screenplay for five features financed both in Australia and internationally (and
directed two others) and has written nine shorts between 1980 and 2008 (including
student films). In addition, she has script-edited, produced and directed numerous
other productions. Her critical success is demonstrated by numerous international
awards – including an Academy Award in 1994 for her screenplay The Piano (1993).
She also has the distinction of being the only woman director to ever win the Palme
d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (Campion’s The Piano shared the award with Chen
Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine at the 1993 festival).
On her graduation from the Australian Film and Television School (now
AFTRS) in 1984, Campion’s entry in the school yearbook read: ‘I want to work
for Kennedy-Miller (when they start making “girls’ films”).’ While that company
was making dynamic and interesting work in Sydney, the reference to ‘girls’ films’
reveals that from the beginning she had ‘an affinity with women, perhaps an
“oppositional consciousness”, and that her interest is in the concept of “women’s
films” where women explore the cultural construct of the “feminine”, and what
it is to be a woman in our society’ (French 2007: 143).
Campion is one of the few women filmmakers who ‘make big films that are
both critically acclaimed and marketable, capturing the popular imagination’
(Jayamanne 2001: 25). As a significant voice in mainstream cinema, and a writer-
director whose films largely explore the experiences of women characters, she
is in a powerful and leading position in relation to female representation. I will
examine Campion’s work as a screenwriter, with a particular emphasis on her
contribution to presenting female worlds and perspectives.
Campion on female subjectivity and desire

Campion foregrounds and conveys female subjectivity and desire in her films.
She has observed that ‘[a]s a woman, you have a unique and different vision. It’s
good that these voices are heard in the world’ (Andrews 2003). Campion ‘under-
stands the intricate circuits of vision between a woman and the world she tries
to see’ (Gillett 2004a: 10). If one considers the way in which Campion’s feature
films open, it is clear that this is the first thing she consistently establishes. The
script of The Piano immediately positions the audience as looking out from inside
Ada’s head and orients the audience towards her viewpoint: ‘The voice you hear
is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice.’17 The script does not provide the
action sequences (perhaps because Campion was going to direct it herself), but
the vision of this scene works in the same way to place the viewer inside Ada’s
body: a subjective shot of Ada’s hands covering her face. As she moves her fin-
gers from her eyes, both the audience and the character see a subjective view of
the sporadic, dappled scene in front of Ada. Campion uses an internal voiceover
that structurally works to foreground the protagonist’s viewpoint, a device she
repeatedly uses to ensure the audience engages with the central character’s sub-
jectivity or female perspective (she also did this in her 1989 film Sweetie). These
scenes have an absence of music which writers on anthropology Mascia-Lees and
Sharpe note disrupts audience expectations of the consonance of oral and visual
messages, unlike much of continuity editing; so while ‘Hollywood film studiously
synchronized voice and image, especially in the portrayal of women, Campion
disrupts … to portray the tension between how Ada appears and how she feels’
(Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 2000: 104).
The screenplay of Bright Star (2009) begins with an exterior of Hampstead
Heath circa 1818. In the morning light ‘A SQUIRREL runs along the BRANCH of
a tree’, we cut to the interior of a bedroom: ‘A THREAD of COTTON noses its way
through the eye of the needle’ (Campion 2008: 1). The completed film omits the
squirrel and instead begins with a close-up (macro lens) view of the fine work of
Australia 181
needlecraft, a determinedly female pursuit, particularly at this time. Women’s

culture is foregrounded and valorized in this opening by the heroic tone of the
music. These first scenes offer an emphasis not just on what Fanny Brawne sees,
but the place she makes for herself in the world through her creativity (a major
theme throughout Campion’s oeuvre, but in this scene it also enables Campion to
signal the idea of female creativity as bound by the constraints of the historical era
in which the character lives). Campion has offered that Fanny’s ‘sewing also rep-
resents a kind of patience that women had to have, or still have to have – a kind
of patience that they learn. Sewing is a literal metaphor for making one’s will,
stitch after stitch’ (Guerrasio 2010), and this links to the repeated preoccupation
in Campion’s films with female will.
Campion’s Collaborations
Time is an issue for any writer-director because both creative fields take a long
time, and it is faster and more productive to write with others. Campion has said
that it is ‘more difficult writing alone’ (Wright Wexman 1999: xvi), which she
knows from being sole writer on most of her shorts and The Piano and Bright Star.
She clearly values writing collaborations, and this has been an important part of
her writing process. She collaborated with Gerard Lee, co-writing the 1983 short-
Passionless Moments, and approached him to work on her feature Sweetie and the
mini-series Top of the Lake. She has said that he is a good writing partner because
they share a common way of seeing things, a sense of humour, and they have
‘the same inappropriate emotional responses’, both being amused by the ‘absurd-
ity of life and also touched by it’ (Dow and Rolfe 2013). Campion and Lee have
a process where they begin each writing day by spending ten minutes dealing
with their issues or ‘respective whinges’ (Dow and Rolfe 2013), and then get on
with the work. Campion also co-wrote the film and the subsequent novelization
of Holy Smoke! (1999) with her sister Anna Campion. However, Campion has said
that the choice to write alone or with others depends on the project. When writ-
ing The Piano, her process was:
… almost like an actor, I spend some time alone, a week or something like that
and try to enter right into the mood of the whole story and understand Ada’s
being, thinking and sometimes I’d cry and totally try to enjoy the whole emo-
tional mood. … and then once I’ve got it, I can … work sort of from a nine to
five basis. (Wright Wexman 1999: 176)
In making her films, Campion has been able to work with significant industry
talents, and there is evidence that the excellence of her scripts has been a factor in
attracting these collaborators. Campion wanted composer Michael Nyman, who
had scored several films for Peter Greenaway, to compose the music for The Piano.
According to Nyman, it was the script that convinced him to do it: ‘Jane had the
vision to see, through that music, that I could do the emotion she wanted. I read
the first couple of pages of the script and realized, from the compelling way she’d
written the opening, that I was going to love it. So I rang her back and pretended
I’d read the whole thing and accepted’ (Tims 2012). Actress Holly Hunter claimed
she was ‘attracted to the script [of The Piano] partly because of the vast dimension
of things being unexplained to the audience or even to the characters’ (DuPuis
1996: 59). This aspect of Campion’s writing has been observed by others, such as
Australian writer-director Cate Shortland who said that Kathryn Bigelow and Jane
Campion ‘tend to create what Laura Jones calls the “shadow narrative” – a space
within their films that is ambiguous, where they don’t feel the need to answer all
the questions’; and Shortland noted ‘that women audiences seem to really enjoy
that space of thinking and dreaming about the ambiguity, long after they leave
the cinema’ (Norfor 2013). This may be one reason why Campion’s films are loved
by female audiences; many women have claimed that her films ‘speak to them
as women, and critics have observed that her films have divided audiences along
gendered lines’ (French 2007: 12).
Adaptations by Campion
In interviews, Campion has frequently acknowledged her love of literature, and
that she has been influenced by novels and poetry (particularly the romantic
and gothic) from writers such as the Brontes, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot,
Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Leo Tolstoy and Katherine Mansfield. So it is not
surprising that her screenplays include adaptations; she wrote the screenplay for
The Portrait of a Lady (from the 1881 Henry James novel), In the Cut (from the 1999
novel by Susanna Moore, with whom she co-wrote the script), and collaborated
with screenwriter Laura Jones on An Angel at My Table (1990). from Janet Frame’s
trilogy: To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy from Mirror
City (1984). Campion has also turned her screenplays into novels (The Piano and
Holy Smoke!).18 Remarkably, her novelization of The Piano in 1994 was ‘identified
as less literary than the film: as if the film was more of a novel than the novel
itself. [And it] received almost no critical attention’ (Gelder 1999: 157). So while
Campion has a great interest in writing prose, it appears that there is some fix-
ing of her into the box of writer-director, and not novelist. Indeed, despite the
voluminous publishing on Campion’s work, very little has been written specifi-
cally in relation to her writing, even in Australia, where the earliest recognitions
she received were mostly for screenwriting: for example, AFI Awards for Best
Screenplay in a Short Film for A Girl’s Own Story in 1984; Best Original Screenplay
for her feature Sweetie in 1989 – shared with Gerard Lee – and the same award for
The Piano in 1993.
Campion’s Characters
Campion’s consciousness of herself as a woman is evident in the characters she
creates. From a female point of view, her films play out the central character’s
experience of gender, and of what it is to exist in a sexed body (French 2007:
244). Her central female protagonists share this awareness of difference from the
male gender – and this is evidence that she is explicitly conscious of herself as a
woman. Difference is central – it is something that Campion’s characters come to
understand through their interactions with the societies in which they live, and
Australia 183
in particular through the men they encounter (for example, her leading women
often suffer because of patriarchal culture but find ways to disrupt it, and so
reveal the female voice and perspective as different to, but existing alongside, the
masculine). According to Campion herself, she makes films about women because
she is ‘speaking in their language; I’m speaking through the body of a woman,
the psyche of a woman, and that’s my particular insight’ (Goodridge 2002: 85).
Throughout her early career Campion deflected questions about the evident
feminism in her work, but she has more recently embraced it, and lobbied for the
equal participation of women in global film industries (as exemplified in her 2007
short film The Lady Bug, a critique of the male domination of the Cannes Film
Festival). Her approach to feminist ideas has always been subtly integrated in the
scripts, rather than inserting any feminist monologues or overt female heroes. She
has mobilized feminist thinking in an international context through films such
as The Piano, Holy Smoke! and Bright Star, and their ‘willful’ characters Ada (Holly
Hunter), Ruth (Kate Winslet), and Fanny (Abbie Cornish). She creates a view of
female experience through claiming the attribute of willfulness, something that
enables her to form and explore feminist questions, and to create characters that
resist patriarchal ideology. Academic Sara Ahmed (2011) has theorized feminist
willfulness as ‘audacity’, ‘standing against’, and as ‘creativity’ – all of which are
useful if applied to thinking about Campion’s work. She approaches this not so
much as rebellion (although it is this too), but from the viewpoint of trying to
understand how women are in the world – how they might feel their gender and
feminism, and make sense of and claim their place through fearless acts of willful-
ness. The way in which Campion has created these characters can be understood
through Ahmed’s concept of ‘willfulness’, which establishes the problem for the
screenwriter to explore: the willful character is someone ‘who poses a problem
for a community of characters, such that willfulness become[s] that which must
be resolved and even eliminated’ (Ahmed 2011: 233). Ahmed describes one of
Campion’s influences, George Eliot, as ‘a novelist of the will’ (Ahmed 2011: 233),
and this is perhaps why this concept is so appropriate for considering the structur-
ing of Campion’s characters. In Holy Smoke! the men surround Ruth (Kate Winslet),
corralling her like an animal, insisting she bend to their will and engage with the
cult deprogrammer PJ (Harvey Keitel). From then on it is the story of a battle of
wills, and of Ruth’s willfulness. Fanny in Bright Star rejects the propriety of the era
in which she lives by refusing to be demure; she pushes herself forward, battling
against Mr Brown (Paul Schneider) for the attentions of Keats (Ben Whishaw),
refusing to wait for his advances. Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady declares she will
not marry (although she does). Sweetie (in Sweetie) is a female grotesque, overly
sexual and voracious in every way – breaking social constructs of femininity. Other
Campion women battle to be themselves rather than creatures of their gender. So
her characters are fearless, even reckless. They refuse the constraints of the worlds
they live in and Campion’s representation of their willfulness can be seen as her
participating in the feminist struggle through characterization.
Campion’s films mark both local and/or national specificity (The Piano, Holy
Smoke!), and at the same time do not mark it (Bright Star, In the Cut). Her writing
and characters have been influenced by her antipodean origins; for instance, her
interest in the gothic is a direct result of being a descendant of colonials who,
both in Australia and New Zealand, profoundly felt themselves as strangers in
an unfamiliar and often inhospitable land. Australian writing and filmmaking is
filled with gothic landscapes and stories (although they are usually produced by
men, films like The Well (1997), written by Laura Jones, and The Piano or In the
Cut being the exceptions). Antipodean origins are also denoted by the presence
of landscape as a character or to communicate place. This is particularly evident
in the scenes of outback Australia in Sweetie and Holy Smoke! and in The Piano
and Top of the Lake where ‘[g]reat flanks of mountains; deep, glassy alpine lakes;
primeval forests: the sheer mythic scale of this remote South Island New Zealand
landscape insists it be the dominant character in any scenario’ (Chenery 2013).
Preoccupations of Campion
Campion’s projects have frequently been described as cinematically representing
‘women’s’ desires, and no film has been able to embody this more than The Piano,
which inflects desire in multiple ways. Academic Sue Gillett gives many examples
of this, including a description of how Ada’s gaze at herself in a hand mirror is
not an interrogation of her own image but instead ‘she is trying to fall through
her image into a release of her passion. In kissing the mirror she uses her reflec-
tion as a means of transporting herself back to the remembrance of sexual desire
(she has been forcibly separated from her lover)’ (Gillett 2004b: 2–3). Desire is not
just inflected in an erotic sense but her characters are always desiring; for example,
Ada’s piano is ‘the most effectively charged object in the film, both as plot mecha-
nism and as love object’ ( Jayamanne 2001: 27) – her body is linked to it: on losing
a finger she sends one of the piano keys to Baines (Harvey Keitel).
Campion’s features also often deal with traumatic encounters: Kay (Karen
Colston) witnesses the death of her sister in Sweetie (and the film alludes to her
sexual abuse – a thematic trauma in other films, such as A Girl’s Own Story and Top
of the Lake); Ada (Holly Hunter) is subjected to male violence in The Piano; Ruth
(Kate Winslet) suffers a crisis of loss of faith and is traumatized by the experience.
In the Cut subjects Frannie (Meg Ryan) to her sister’s murder, and then Frannie
is almost slain. In Bright Star the lovers are separated by the untimely death of
Keats (Ben Whishaw). Even in the films Campion directed but did not write, the
screenplay shares this interest in trauma: Janet Frame loses multiple siblings and
experiences electric shock treatment and madness in An Angel at My Table; and
in The Portrait of a Lady, the death of Isabel’s child is only once referred to but is
represented in the mise-en-scène in the form of the cast of the baby’s foot which
Isabel caresses from time to time – silent in her grief. While there wouldn’t be
any drama without something happening to the central protagonist, Campion’s
vision here is clearly tied to the experience of loss and pain – and the trauma of it.
Jane Campion’s success as a filmmaker is indisputable. As a winner of the Palme
d’Or at Cannes, an Academy Award, and numerous others, she is recognized as
a powerful filmmaking force. But her work is usually studied and applauded for
her ability to direct. However, Campion’s status as a writer is far more than a
Australia 185
director who also writes. The fact that her screenwriting has been recognized by
an Academy Award, as well as a Writers Guild of America Award, that she has col-
laborated with many others as well as written on her own, and has penned the
novel versions of two of her films, lifts her into another category. Her writing,
imbued with her preoccupations with relationships, love, female desire, trauma,
female bravery, gender relations, and ideology, is a primary force by which
Campion has been able to successfully explore female worlds, perspectives and
experiences.
Laura Jones
Margot Nash
Laura Jones (1951–) is one of Australia’s most respected and awarded screenwrit-
ers. Her work is characterized by strong and complex women characters and a
clear understanding of the visual power of the cinematic image. After the success-
ful adaptation of Janet Frame’s autobiography An Angel at My Table (1990) Jones
found herself in demand as a writer skilled in adapting literature for the screen.
She adapted the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady (1996), which starred
Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich; Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda (1998),
which starred Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett; and Elizabeth Jolley’s novel The
Well (1997), which screened in Competition at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.
She shares the writing credit for Angela’s Ashes (1999) with Alan Parker, Possession
(2000) with Neil LaBute and Brick Lane (2007) with Abi Morgan. In 2011 she wrote
an adaptation of the short story Runaway by Alice Munro for Jane Campion. Her
original screenplays include High Tide (Gillian Armstrong, 1987), which won the
New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Screenwriting and a prize from the Australian
Writers Guild, and the telemovies Every Man for Herself (1986) and Cold Comfort
(1985), which were part of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Spring
and Fall series.
Jones grew up in a house where a pleasure in language was part of everyday
life. Her mother, Jessica Anderson, was a novelist who had a late start, publish-
ing her first novel in her mid forties. There was no television in the house, but
her mother’s bookshelves provided inspiration for a young woman exploring her
creative pathway in the world. As a young art student Jones was introduced to
the cinema of Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard and Losey and con-
sequently her film-going life became as important as her reading life. While she
tried her hand at various things, it was an opportunity to write for the 1970s ABC
series Certain Women that proved the turning point. Up until then she claims she
had little ambition, but the experience of suddenly understanding just how much
she had to learn activated her. Watching the process of the actors working with
directors on her scripts, then seeing the episodes as they went to air, became her
film school.
Jones describes her screenwriting life as one of luck and chance, but ‘[i]t’s how
we use the luck and understand the chance that makes the difference’. At the
ABC she met producer Sandra Levy who produced the Spring and Fall series. They
had both been to see the new wave of European art films and shared a passion
for the cinema and for storytelling. Levy offered Jones the opportunity to write
two original stories for the Spring and Fall series. It gave Jones the rare opportunity
to ‘choose characters and a world, to find a structure, a shape and a tone that
worked’. She immersed herself in original research and wrote two scripts which
‘opened up a new way of thinking about writing’.
Jones met director Gillian Armstrong through a screenplay that didn’t get made,
but they decided to work together to develop the original screenplay of High Tide.
Set in a small coastal town, High Tide, which starred Judy Davis, gave Jones the
opportunity to explore her interest in visual storytelling, ‘in the way images carry
meaning, in the importance of place and the creation of a fictional world. It was
about how people cobble together families; our desire for this, our desire to escape
from it.’
Luck intervened again and Jones was offered a six-week stint teaching screen-
writing at AFTRS where she met Jane Campion. Campion asked her if she would
read the Janet Frame autobiography and introduced her to producer Bridget Ikin.
Frame was a poet and her autobiography ran to three books and covered many dif-
ferent time frames and continents. The experience of researching and writing and
then the making of An Angel at My Table would become one of the most reward-
ing and pleasurable experiences of Jones’s career. Jones and Ikin both describe the
making of An Angel at My Table as ‘cubby house filmmaking’. Originally written
as a three-part low-budget television series it was only later that the decision was
made to turn it into a feature and release it theatrically. It went on to win numer-
ous awards including the Silver Lion and the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Venice
Film Festival.
Jones believes that, in adapting literature for the screen, the writer should be
‘true to the intention of the heart of the novel, but it would be stupid to be true to
the structure and the dialogue on the page’. She believes in the exploratory nature
of the writing process as opposed to the adherence to screenwriting formulas;
that entering the source material for a film and searching for the key that might
unlock its mysteries is part of the uncertain and often solitary detective work of
the screenwriter, and that this process involves intuition and experimentation as
well as the difficult job of becoming the internal critic, or analyst, of the work
when things go wrong.
Jones’s work is highly regarded in the Australian film industry and in 1996 she
was awarded the prestigious Australian Film Institute Byron Kennedy Award for
excellence and contribution to Australian cinema.
Alison Tilson
Nicolette Freeman
Alison Tilson, born in Adelaide, Australia, is the screenwriter of the Australian
feature films Road to Nhill (1997) and Japanese Story (2003). Both films are dis-
tinguished by their contemporary depictions of the Australian rural and outback
landscape, and their characters’ relationships shaped by that landscape.
Australia 187
Alison Tilson grew up in Whyalla, South Australia, ‘where the outback meets the
sea’, as the town’s website dramatically proclaims. In the 1960s Whyalla became
one of Australia’s three major steel manufacturing towns, after mining giant BHP
built a steelworks there. Tilson’s childhood home in Whyalla was a place full of
books, music and storytelling; parables about living a good life, as well as funny
stories. The house was at the edge of scrubby paddocks, which stretched towards
railway shunting yards, and further away, but still visible from the house, was ‘the
works’, with its blast furnace and ship building yards. Tilson’s father was a civil
engineer at the steelworks, and he would take young Alison with him on visits to
the mines, huge dam-building projects, and the ship launches at ‘the works’. She
also saw molten steel being poured in blast furnaces; red-hot. She noted, in an
interview with the author (Freeman 2013): ‘It was an amazing way to have your
mind opened to shape shifting.’
One could suggest then that Tilson’s screenplay themes and locales were
informed by this childhood; living on the edge of an industrial town, with her
awareness of the vast, arid landscape beyond and her direct knowledge of large-
scale enterprise. ‘It was remote then, and very hot,’ Tilson recalled, ‘and there
was a lot of stuff as a kid about survival.’ Interestingly, the inciting incident of
both Road to Nhill and Japanese Story is a significant physical accident, and Tilson
has admitted to a fascination with fate, acknowledging it is there, somehow, in
anything she writes.
Tilson’s initial enthusiasm for film, and her early days as an amateur filmmaker,
commenced after her family moved from Whyalla to the more cosmopolitan
Melbourne, where her school French teacher introduced her to the films of
Jacques Tati, and where the Tilson family continued to seek out French cinema at
screenings hosted by the Alliance Française.
Tilson has also acknowledged the Ealing comedies as early influences, and The
Lavender Hill Mob (1951) as one of her all-time favourite films. She saw Catch-22
(1970), M.A.S.H. (1970), Nashville (1975) and The Deer Hunter (1978) and mar-
velled at how certain material was being treated in novel ways by the new genera-
tion of American filmmakers. ‘I can remember seeing Catch-22 and not having
any idea about that sort of black comedy, and it just completely threw me against
the wall – and then, when I first saw M.A.S.H, they were laughing, but it was a war,
and it completely fried my brain,’ she recalled.
At university, where Tilson was training to be a teacher, she immersed herself
in filmmaking clubs and feminist groups. She was a member of the Melbourne
Women’s Film Group, Reel Women, and Women in Film and Television (WIFT),
which were part of the nationwide emergence in the 1970s of independent,
experimental, and feminist film production practice, bolstered by newly available
government financial support. The Women’s Film Fund was established during
this period by the Australian Film Commission to proactively encourage the
production of screen stories about and by Australian women. Tilson participated
in cinematography workshops funded in part by these schemes, and in Sydney,
at one of these workshops, she first met women who were making their own
films professionally. ‘I was working on films,’ she recalled, ‘and I used to write,
and suddenly I thought you can put the two of these together.’ Her early short
film scripts were ‘fairly domestic and realistic – but stylistically weird’, Tilson has
remarked: ‘There would’ve been a script that was one long shot, with a lot of
people doing a lot of things. It was fairly dreamy, and then I probably would’ve
had an argument in a love affair, so there would’ve been a script about that.’
Unsurprisingly, Tilson has cited Marguerite Duras’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
and Chantal Akerman’s work, particularly Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles (1975), as seminal influences.
The realization that screenwriting could be a proper job, rather than simply
a hobby, led Tilson to enroll, in the early 1980s, in the screenwriting course at
Australia’s recently established national film school, AFTRS. At film school Tilson
met like-minded colleagues Sue Brooks and Nicolette Freeman, who she observed
saw the world from a similar perspective to her, and shared her enterprise – to
depict the ordinary in a way that hadn’t been seen before. Brooks, who was study-
ing in the directing programme, went on to direct Tilson’s scripts for both Road
to Nhill and Japanese Story, and Freeman, who was studying as a cinematographer,
went on to work as director of photography on Road to Nhill.
This encounter at film school was exciting and reassuring to Tilson. Given her
interest in the Brechtian enterprise of making strange, Tilson has acknowledged
the importance of collaborators who have a similar sensibility, and who can
significantly enhance a film with their own particular craft. To a lot of people, the
writer’s intention may be invisible in the script, she has commented. Even with
the best of intentions, collaborators who don’t ‘get it’ can reinforce a familiar view
of the world, rather than work to make it strange. ‘You can’t say [to them] “no, it
doesn’t say that”, because of course it’s all about interpretation when you hand
[a script] over,’ she has said.
Tilson’s first produced feature screenplay was Road to Nhill. The film was pro-
duced by Gecko Films, a company set up by Tilson, with director Sue Brooks and
producer Sue Maslin. Set in the rural country town where director Sue Brooks grew
up, the story revolves around the accidental overturning of the car of four lady
lawn bowlers, the townsfolk who come to their rescue, and the loved ones who
anxiously await their return. ‘The script attempts to pay homage to the kind of
caring and gentle accommodation of each other, possible in a community’ (Tilson
1998: viii).
In the foreword to Road to Nhill: Original Screenplay, Tilson, Brooks and Maslin
admit, ‘It was a ridiculous first film to embark upon. There would be 42 characters,
all filmed on location in the country over eight weeks and made to look as if eve-
rything pretty much happens on one day, would involve car crashes, upside down
bowling ladies and helicopters!’ (Tilson 1998: ix). Popular Australian film reviewer
Margaret Pomeranz declared the film ‘a national treasure [which] should be shoved
in a time capsule post haste’ (Tilson 1998: xi). Pomeranz identified elements of
French farce and ‘Oz country style’ in the film, picking up on Tilson’s forma-
tive influences and background: ‘The attention to the details of the Australian
countryside warmed the cockles of my heart: the tea leaves on the azalia (sic),
the squeaking screen door, the reverberations of the cattle grid’ (Tilson 1998: xii).
Australia 189
Most importantly however, Pomeranz was drawn to Tilson’s original and emo-
tionally generous treatment of Australian male-female relationships. Over the
afternoon of the accident, the subsequent days, and briefly at an unspecified
time in the following year, the audience follows rural Australian men coming to
terms with the fragility of their relationships with their women folk. These men
are poor at verbally expressing their emotional attachments, but Tilson’s acute
description of their physical gestures reveals their underlying vulnerability and
dependence. Pomeranz called it an ‘Oz-specific relationship’, one in which ‘the
women understand the male need for “face” and discreetly grant it, often to their
own discomfort’ (Tilson 1998: xii). Tilson’s research for the film involved many
months of living in and observing the community in which the film was shot.
‘I would be completely behind the eight ball – because [how they speak] is all sub-
text,’ she said. ‘For an outsider, everything everybody says is coded with unspoken
knowledge and ways of doing things.’
The subject matter of Road to Nhill appears at first relatively conventional, but
as Tilson has declared, she wants to work with ‘the ordinary’ in oblique ways and,
in making strange, she aims to give her audience the opportunity to reflect upon
themselves. Consciously using the device of ‘standing back’, she encourages her
audience to see overall patterns and interactions in her story while also engaging
emotionally with the individual characters. For example, while humour arises
from many of her characters’ foibles in Road to Nhill, Tilson’s intention was for
the audience to recognize aspects of themselves in the characters, and thereby
laugh at themselves. ‘You are not watching silly people,’ she remarked: ‘You are
watching ordinary people who are flawed, and I’m wanting you to feel that they
are like you.’
Road to Nhill is a multi-stranded story, told in many scenes. The script originally
had 234 scenes, and the final film has 175 scenes, even though an average feature
film of this running length has 40–75 scenes. The majority of the story is set in
simultaneous time, and Tilson has acknowledged her deep fascination with the
manipulation of time in cinematic storytelling. She has said that the three prin-
cipal tools at a screenwriter’s disposal are sound, image and time; and with these
the writer can take the audience on many kinds of journeys – emotional, visceral,
intellectual and moral, and even, ‘if you were really cooking with gas’, she added,
‘transcendental journeys’. When asked about her consideration of international
audiences when writing Australian stories, Tilson has acknowledged the ability
of film to overcome national boundaries. ‘They’re human stories in the end,’ she
has said, ‘so [international audiences] get them, even though they think “that’s
so weird or different”.’
Tilson’s next produced feature screenplay was Japanese Story in 2003. It tells the
tale of a cross-cultural relationship between an Australian woman and a Japanese
man. There are only two principal characters, and a modest number of second-
ary characters; however, the film is no less formally adventurous than Road to
Nhill, and was similarly difficult to finance. ‘In some people’s minds,’ Tilson has
observed, ‘there are films that everybody knows will work when they get made
– and it’s just not like that. [In fact] the more that people like that [have their
judgements shown to be] wrong, the more desperately they need there to be a
safe, secure haven of a film that will work. They become more risk averse.’
The screenplay for Japanese Story originated from a conversation between Tilson
and Sharon Connolly, a producer at the government film production unit, Film
Australia. Connolly wanted to commission Tilson to write a film about relation-
ships between Australian women and Japanese men. Tilson was at first reluc-
tant, but when Connolly described an image she had of a Japanese man driving
through the Australian desert, Tilson was intrigued: ‘I saw it on the screen as she
was describing it. I saw it on a big screen. Your first thought is “I want to see that”,
and that quickly turns into “I want to write that”.’
Tilson then had to discover who the Australian female character was. ‘She
could’ve been anything at that stage,’ Tilson declared, but unsurprisingly, given
Tilson’s childhood in Whyalla, Sandy, the Australian woman (played by Toni
Collette), became a geologist. Tilson researched story possibilities in the Queensland
sugar cane and tourist industries, and in the mines of South Australia, but the story
eventually settled in the remote Pilbara region of northwestern Australia because
of its startling visual possibilities. Known for its vast mineral resources, the region
is central to Australia’s early-twenty-first-century mining boom.
For the screenplay, Tilson read hundreds of haiku and rewatched the films of
Yasujiro Ozu, ‘because that was my personal, great, and most immediate love of
Japanese culture’, she recalled. She travelled to Japan, engaged a Japanese cultural
consultant, drove the Australian desert back roads, and visited the enormous and
male-dominated open-cut mines.
Japanese Story’s heroine, Sandy, begrudgingly accepts the job of escorting a visit-
ing Japanese businessman, Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima), to the remote Pilbara
open-cut mines region. She is resentful and fiercely independent, even selfish. As
Australian academic Felicity Collins has noted, in this regard she is reminiscent of
many white settler male archetypes in Australian literature, painting, and cinema.
Hiromitsu is taken aback by Sandy’s brashness and lack of grace and femininity.
Yet it is the mythologized character of the Australian outback, and its archetypes,
that attracts Hiromitsu. He is on this particular journey to discover something
unavailable to him at home in Japan; a reckless connection to the mysterious and
expansive unknown, symbolized for him by Australia’s vast interior.
Sandy and Hiromitsu’s relationship is a mismatch, which conventionally
should lead towards narrative reconciliation, but something surprising happens in
Tilson’s script, and the story resolves unconventionally and unexpectedly.
Felicity Collins has reflected on Tilson’s solution to the complex issues of ethnic
and gendered difference that Japanese Story articulates:
Breaking with the melancholy, defeated endings typical of landscape cinema,

Japanese Story hopes that, by delivering a sudden shock, it will take the audi-
ence with it on Sandy’s journey out of habitual isolation, both personal and
cultural. This turning point contains a new idea, suggesting that it is grief
rather than sexual intimacy that is capable of breaking down the defensive
hide that preserves a certain insularity in the Australian identity. (Collins 2003)
Australia 191
Japanese Story was a critical success, and the film and its screenplay won numerous
awards. The film was invited to be part of the Official Selection in Cannes 2003
in Un Certain Regard, and was sold to over 30 territories worldwide. It was
released in North America by Samuel Goldwyn Films; however, the US distributors
demanded a re-cut, and while Tilson has said the US version is effective, for her
‘it just has nothing like the emotional impact that the Australian version has’.
Collins has commended Tilson’s, and director Brooks’s, ‘distinctive view of life’.
It is ‘expressed in the film’s shifting of gears back and forth between the closely
observed minutiae of everyday life and sudden devastating moments of clarity
about our common fate, writ large’, writes Collins. This is certainly a strong char-
acteristic of Tilson’s writing in both Japanese Story and Road to Nhill, and reflects
her declared ongoing admiration for Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne
Dielman, with its surprising turn of events, and her fascination with shape shift-
ing, first witnessed as a child in the Whyalla blast furnaces.
Although Tilson is a self-declared boundary pusher, she is mindful of the tight-
rope between clarity and obscurity. ‘I have a clothes-line theory of scriptwriting,’
she has said: ‘– an old-fashioned clothes line, with a pole [at each end]. The
stronger the poles and the washing line, the more you can hang off it – that’s not
the through line.’
Over her career, Tilson has also written television drama and documentary.
She has script-edited or consulted on a number of produced feature screenplays
including Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002), Somersault (Cate Shortland,
2004), Little Fish (Rowan Woods, 2005), Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton,
2009), and Bran Nue Dae (Rachel Perkins, 2009). Tilson also works as a screen-
writing lecturer and script lab advisor.
Notes
1. Australian Screen: Australian Film and Television Chronology: the 1900s. Available
at:http://aso.gov.au/chronology/1900s/ (accessed 4 July 2013).
2. Personal communication with Graham Shirley, 19 March 2013.
3. ‘Australian Films: Obstacles to Exhibition, Louise Lovely’s Evidence’, Argus, 11 June
1927.Melbourne: National Library of Australia, p. 17. Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.
au/ndp/del/article/3860087 (accessed 30 January 2012).
4. For an official précis of the history of Australian suffrage, see http://www.aec.
gov.au/Elections/australian_electoral_history/wright.htm and http://www.aec.gov.au/
indigenous/history.htm (accessed 4 May 2015).
5. Raymond Longford – written history NFSA.
6. Personal communication, Tony Buckley, 22 August 2012.
7. Personal communication, Marilyn Dooley, 20 January 2012.
8. Personal communication, Tony Buckley, 22 August 2012.
9. National Archives of Australia Series, No. A1336, Item 3434876, The Church and the
Woman – dramatic work. Screenplay and still photographs.
10. Lacey Percival interviewed by Alan Anderson, 26 October 1966 at Manly, Sydney.
National Film and Sound Archives, Title No. 325633. Oral history sound recording. Dur:
00:34:33. Alternative title: The Pictures That Moved. Source Material.
11. Marjorie Osborne interviewed by Trader Faulkner, 24 March 1980, Australia. National
Film and Sound Archives, Title No. 376615. Oral history sound recording. Dur: 00:43:00.
12. Paulette McDonagh interviewed by Graham Shirley and Joan Long,4 August 1974.
National Film and Sound Archives, Title No: 799472. Oral history sound recording.
13. Marilyn Dooley – interviewed in Don’t Call Me Girlie (Wright 1985).
14. ‘Money in Pictures’ (advertisement). Brunswick and Coburg Leader, 19 May 1916,
Victoria, Australia.
15. Ibid.
16. ‘Smith’s Weekly’, 10 February 1934.
17. This opening is quoted for comic effect in the film starring a mute Eddie Murphy:
A Thousand Words (Brian Robbins, 2012). This quotation demonstrates the reach, influ-
ence and broad popular recognition of Campion’s writing.
18. In the 1960s and 70s the novelization after the film, and from the script, was common.
It is less common now but Campion is someone who has engaged in this practice.
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St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
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ScreenSound Australia.
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20130218-2emm7.html (accessed 4 June 2013).
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at: http://www.gildasattic.com/longford.html (accessed 29 March 2013).
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Piano’, The Contemporary Pacific, 8 (1): 51–79.
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Television, Melbourne, Australia.
French, L. 2007. ‘Centring the Female: The Articulation of Female Experience in the Films of
Jane Campion’, PhD thesis, RMIT University. Available at: http://researchbank.rmit.edu.
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New Zealand
Hester Joyce
Defying the odds: women screenwriters in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Are the women portrayed as weak and confused? Are unmarried women usually
portrayed as incomplete? Do the men respond positively to strong, independ-
ent women? If rape is shown, is it dealt with as a basically sexual experience or
a physical assault? Do the male characters express anger or frustration through
acts of physical violence? Are the men portrayed as the ones who have the ‘real’
power and influence? (NZFC 1987a)
The success of the New Zealand screen industries internationally and globally belies
the nation’s geographic isolation, small population and economic vulnerability.
The growth of the film industry from its ‘cottage industry’ beginnings in the
1970s to the extraordinary success of An Angel at My Table (1990, written by Laura
Jones, based on the Janet Frame autobiographies, directed by Jane Campion),
Heavenly Creatures (1994, co-written by Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson, directed
by Jackson), and Whale Rider (2002, written and directed by Niki Caro, based on
the book by Witi Ihimaera)is the result of national characteristics of ingenuity
and doggedness, matched with strategic policy interventions from government
quarters. Opportunities for women screenwriters, at least until the mid 1990s,
have been dependent primarily on two government bodies, the New Zealand
Film Commission (NZFC), established in 1978, and the state-funded television
industry, which began broadcasting on one channel in the 1960s. The NZFC has
been bound by its legislative parliamentary act with an original, relatively open
mandate: ‘To encourage and also to participate and assist in the making, promotion,
distribution and exhibition of films’, as well as to encourage and participate in the
education of filmmakers, maintain archives and ensure the development of a film
culture (New Zealand Film Commission Act 1979: 695). Within these mandates
the organization is responsive to myriad changing political, social and cultural
factors.
The opening quote, taken from one of two 1987 memos to script assessors, is an
example of a policy intervention by the NZFC that indicates a strategic response
to those factors influencing film production and New Zealand screen storytelling.
194
New Zealand 195
The other equally compelling memo, issued simultaneously, is ‘Notes to Assessors

for Portrayal of Maori Characters’:
Are Maori characters written in roles that are stereotyped? Are the Maori roles
written by Maori writers, or bicultural writers? Are Maori characters presented
as positive because they have been able to ‘make it’ in the Pakeha world? Do
Pakeha respond positively to strong, articulate Maori characters? Are Maori
presented as ‘different from’ the norm? (NZFC 1987b)
Both are undoubtedly mindful of New Zealand’s earliest instances of human rights
legislation, the most significant being the Race Relations Act 1971 and the Human
Rights Commission Act 1977.
Bicultural relations between Maori (indigenous/first peoples) and Pakeha
(New Zealanders of European descent)1 and the potency of the feminist move-
ment, both coincident with the development of the screen industries through
the 1980s, were critical influences on the prospects of women screenwriters in
New Zealand. This group can be classified into the following: writer-directors,
screenwriters (small screen and big screen), and script editors/consultants. Each
decade, the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, has seen a turning point in the fortunes
of women screenwriters motivated and affected by historical and policy factors.
Broadly, the government-owned television industry, established 15 years before
the resurrection of a film industry in the 1970s, supported in-house production,
including dedicated screenwriting departments for drama series and serials. By
contrast, the film industry grew independently, frustrated at the outskirts, in
reaction to the institutionalization demonstrated within the television industry
(Dunleavy and Joyce 2011: 69–100). In the intervening years (1970–90), and
in an environment where there was relatively little privately funded screen
production, co-operation between the two government-funded industries was
minimal.
These factors had consequences for the careers of women screenwriters. The
peculiarities of government film policy meant that funding decisions historically
favoured writer-directors – so the majority of women screenwriters within the local
industry tended to be those directors who chose to also write their own screenplays.
This is truer for first and second films than later career choices, when the possibil-
ity of ‘jumping’ to the Hollywood industry became an option. Consequently the
discussion of women screenwriters in the New Zealand screen industries begins with
writer-directors from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s and, in parallel, screenwriters and
script editors within television drama.
Writer-directors: Melanie Rodriga and Gaylene Preston
The situation for women filmmakers seems to have been different in New Zealand
because the industry developed later. When the new wave of [feminist] political aware-
ness came in Australia, the industry was already entrenched … In New Zealand,
the feminist awareness was there before the industry developed so they were
able to have more impact. […] we seem to be able to make a mark on the
mainstream. (Horrocks: 1985)
In the mid 1980s the production of Melanie Rodriga’s Trial Run and Gaylene
Preston’s Mr Wrong (aka Dark of the Night), fiction feature films written and
directed by women, signalled a breakthrough in NZFC financing policy. These
films were the first features from women writer-directors at a time when, even
internationally, this was unusual, and both subverted the well-established and
popular thriller genre in New Zealand.
Melanie Rodriga was born in Malaysia in 1954; her family moved to Sydney,
Australia in 1961. She studied filmmaking in England at the Ravensbourne
Polytechnic in Kent. She began her career in New Zealand as a film editor in
1980. She wrote and directed shorts funded by the Australian Film Commission
(AFC) – Second Sight (1980) and Them’s the Breaks (1980) – and a short funded by
the NZFC – Hooks and Feelers (1983) – before writing her first feature, Trial Run.
This is the story of Rosemary, wildlife photographer, who takes a commission on
an isolated peninsula for six months where she lives away from her family. She
is in training for a woman’s marathon under the supervision of her athletic and
science-mad son, James. The screenplay contests those aspects of the genre that
depict women as victims:
I like the thriller genre and I like the devices. I like the discipline of making a
thriller film … When you saw Psycho you wouldn’t have dared laugh and it’s
only because those things have been created and treated in so many different
ways that now we can laugh at them. That was what I was trying to get at with
Trial Run. (Melanie Rodriga, quoted in Horrocks 1985)
Conventions within the thriller genre that irked Rodriga included stereotypes of
women as passive and as victims, while assailants were coded as psychopathic
male strangers. In Trial Run, the persecutor is the protagonist’s over-zealous son,
who sets up scenarios to make her ‘run for her life’, consequently exhorting her
to run faster and improve her running times. Violence, isolation and loneliness
were ongoing themes in New Zealand cinema and this narrative explores the
idea of the violence coming from within the family. The peripheral characters are
predominantly women: a farmer, publisher, real estate agent and policewoman.
Rosemary’s husband, Michael, is positively portrayed, consistently supporting her
decisions and actively taking on family and domestic responsibilities so she can
pursue her career.
Gaylene Preston (1947–) was also motivated to rewrite representations of
women on screen:
As a young woman at that time I was used to feeling scared … So that’s one
thing, the other is that having gone to Cannes, you had to decide as a filmmaker
[whether] you wanted to be part of the solution or the problem and I decided
that the thriller had a lot to answer for. (Preston 1997)
New Zealand 197
Adapted from a short story by Elizabeth Jane Howard, Preston’s Mr Wrong is the
story of Meg, a country girl who buys her first car for a questionably cheap price,
only to later discover that a ghostly woman who disappeared suspiciously several
years earlier haunts it. Meg experiences a number of natural and supernatural
trials, including being stalked by the murderous ‘Mr Wrong’. Mr Wrong subverts
the thriller genre by focusing on an initially passive female protagonist, a capable,
ordinary woman who becomes increasingly reactive to physical and emotional
threats to her safety.
Preston, formerly an art director, adapted the screenplay with Graeme Tetley
(co-writer of Vigil, 1984), and they changed aspects of the original story. ‘I did
not want Meg to die in the end. In the book Meg dies watching the blood trickle
out with a knife between her ribs and I didn’t want that’ (Preston 1997). These
decisions to confound the genre created difficulties in marketing the film with
distributors who claimed any reference to feminism in the publicity would be
detrimental:
It wasn’t really until the audience claimed it, that we knew we had a film that
worked … It is so hard to imagine now but it was only 1985, and it was 1983
when we were writing it, but obviously what we were on about was hard for
people to get a handle on. (Preston 1997)
The NZFC had, since the mid 1980s, been funding trainee positions in all areas
of filmmaking, with candidates selected that included Maori and women, thereby
encouraging fair representation and opportunity in terms of race and gender. The
feminist politics of Rodriga and Preston extended beyond the content of their
films as they adopted positive discrimination policies within their productions,
providing crew opportunities for women in non-traditional technical roles. It was
also at this time that Merata Mita, a Maori filmmaker, emerged, firstly with two
landmark documentaries, Bastion Point Day 507 (1980) and Patu! (1983), and then
a feature film, Mauri (1988).
A significant case: Merata Mita (1942–2010)
The 1985 amendment to the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between Maori and Pakeha
required government organizations to act as good treaty partners, a duty placed
on all agents of the crown. The NZFC published its own guidelines on Treaty of
Waitangi obligations in 1995:
The Film Commission is mindful of the special needs of Maori and of its obliga-
tions under the Treaty of Waitangi. This commitment underpins every aspect
of the Film Commission’s work and its assistance programmes. (NZFC 1995)
If carving out a career was difficult for Pakeha women filmmaker/screenwriters in

the consolidation period of the screen industries, then for Maori women it was
even more so. When Maori women speak (korero) through the screen, traditional
protocols that assign this aspect of leadership to Maori men are challenged (Peters
2007: 104–5). The period marked a renaissance of Maoritanga (Maori culture/life)
that was occurring along with the rise of the feminist movement through the late
1970s and 80s.
Out of this ferment Maori filmmaker Merata Mita arose. Forerunner Ramai
Hayward paved the way in the post-World War II era; however, Hayward was a
co-director/writer/producer with her partner, pioneer filmmaker Rudall Hayward;
they directed To Love a Maori (1972) and subsequent (non-New Zealand) docu-
mentaries. The distinction of being the first female to be sole director of a feature
film belongs to Mita, this being the 1983 documentary Patu! (to strike, a club)
(Peters 2007: 103). As with the feminist task undertaken by Rodriga and Preston,
Mita’s body of work extends beyond a simple definition of screenwriting; she
speaks for tangatawhenua (indigenous people of the land) and especially for Maori
women. In addition, whai korero (oral tradition) governs the functions of this
storytelling within her community. The tribal traditions mean that screen story-
telling from her perspective challenges established industry practices within both
the processes of screenwriting and the conventions of fiction and documentary.
Mita’s filmography attests to this extensive voice and cultural responsibility,
containing political and creative documentaries, biographies, archival documen-
tation, television current affairs, as well as acting and cultural advising on others’
screen projects.
Between 1979 and 1990, Mita made a film or television documentary almost
every year. In addition she wrote and directed a feature film, Mauri (1988), and
consulted on two others, Utu (1983) and The Quiet Earth (1985). The documenta-
ries, in which Mita variously took the roles of director, producer and editor, were
all motivated by themes of political struggle with respect to Maori (indigenous)
and class (labour) rights. In these roles Mita is rewriting and reclaiming histories
regardless of whether her method is by way of a formalized screenplay. Many
of these films were created in partnership, notably Bastion Point Day 507 (1980),
which documents the occupation in 1977 of Bastion Point/Takaparawhau (a parcel
of coastal land in Auckland city) over a proposed development on what was histori-
cally tribal land (Ngati Whatua). Activists occupied the land for 506 days before
being removed by the police and army. Mita recorded the protests and clashes
with law enforcement on the day of the protestors’ removal, the 507th day, which
ended tragically. The land was later returned to Ngati Whatua as part of Treaty of
Waitangi settlements. Bastion Point Day 507 was made in collaboration with two
men, New Zealander cinematographer Leon Narbey and German filmmaker Gerd
Pohlmann, and the use of atmospheric sound and radio tracks reflects Mita’s
preoccupation with providing ‘voice’ to the community she is representing.
Within three years Mita directed and produced Patu!, a record of the nationwide
protests against the 1981 South African rugby team tour of New Zealand. The tour
by the Springbok, a team selected along apartheid principles, incited protests from
both Maori and Pakeha, and these were depicted in Patu! as tandem political move-
ments. Again Mita constructed the documentary from footage collected from sev-
eral sources – people who had been at the protests in various capacities: protestors,
New Zealand 199
witnesses, and documenters. As with other Maori filmmakers, Mita uses the cinematic
form informed from within her own culture – for example, observing the rituals of
whai korero (oral tradition), acknowledging ancestors and offering prayers are rep-
resented as fundamental features of cinematic storytelling. Such characteristics are
embedded into the form of the documentary so that films become toanga (highly
prized artifacts). Mita’s writings include discussion of these aspects, extending the
life of the works beyond the screen.2
Mita’s second feature-length film, Mauri (1988), tells the story of Kara, a village
elder, and her passing of knowledge to her granddaughter, Awatea. A felon, Paki,
returning to Kara’s marae (village) following a prison sentence, assumes the iden-
tity of Kara’s dead son, Rewi. Paki befriends Kara and learns from her that his
behaviour is corrupt and has spiritual and cultural consequences. The film, set in
the 1950s, embraces themes of identity, land, life and death, opening with a birth
sequence and ending with Kara’s death. As with other of Mita’s projects, Kara’s
death is depicted with respect to cultural mores. Here a flight from Kara’s body
across the land to Cape Reinga (departing place of the spirits) in the far north is
depicted in a long aerial shot representing the journey of the spirit believed by
Maori to be taken in the afterlife.
Mita embraced Maoritanga in the form of the films she made and the process
of making these films. Kara is played by Eva Rickard, a land rights activist and
leader with mana (prestige, authority) that is (re-)embodied on screen, reflecting
the prominence of women in Maori leadership at the time. Further, Mita used
the production as a training ground for Maori crew. The story challenges conven-
tional narrative, relying on a multilayered technique that embraces documentary
as well as fictional sequences, and celebrating depictions of Maori life, including
rituals of birth and death, food gathering and preparation. Despite being recog-
nized internationally (Rimini Film Festival, Italy), Mauri challenged local Pakeha
reviewers who criticized its contestations. Mita’s project was for Maori:
… as a probing enquiry into concepts of culture using birth, marriage and death.
Individuality and community come under the same scrutiny but the story is
really a parable about the schizophrenic existence of many Maori in Pakeha
society. […] The Maori response to the film was more positive than the Pakeha
one, but that was the way it was from the beginning; from scripting to the final
cut. (Mita 1992: 49)
Mita left New Zealand in 1990 to work with indigenous filmmakers internation-
ally, basing herself at the University of Hawai’i and mentoring for the Sundance
Institute in the United States. She maintained contacts with work and family
in New Zealand, returning for various projects. Significantly, she was director of
the 2nd New Zealand Screenwriters Laboratory in 2003, supported by the NZFC
and run with the guidance of the Sundance Institute. Her last film, for which she
returned to New Zealand, was Hotere (2001), a portrait of one of New Zealand’s
most distinguished artists, Ralph Hotere. The documentary placed the Maori artist,
known for his pursuit of privacy and reticence regarding his work, within his
house. As in Mita’s other work, she captures his mauri (life force) in the construc-
tion of the documentary. The works are embedded within montages that circle and
weave through Hotere’s home and studio, consolidating notions of work and life
and art forming an intricate tapestry, and completing the circle in Mita’s own work.
Small screen
On the small screen women had considerably more success as screenwriters.

Government-owned television broadcasting, in its most recent iteration called
Television New Zealand (TVNZ), was run as a public service from its inception
in 1960 until deregulation of broadcasting in 1989. Based on ‘public service’
principles the organization included television drama production departments
with script development teams for the writing of soap serials, drama series and
serials. Despite having no quota for local production, there was a consistent, if
small, output in the first 25 years of broadcast. The certainty of employment,
defined wages and the benefits that the public service provided may have offered
more secure career pathways for women than the competitive cut-and-thrust
of the independent film production industry. In addition, development teams
offered opportunities in roles allied to screenwriting, including script editing,
story editing and script producing. The pathway to television drama writing was
mainly through playwriting (Janice Finn, Norelle Scott, Riwia Brown, Philippa
Campbell, Frances Edmond, Fiona Samuel), novel writing (Anne Kennedy, Sue
MacCauley, Stephanie Johnson, Paula Boock), and journalism (Judy Callingham,
Debra Daley, Rosemary McLeod). As with the film industry, many of these women
developed a number of career portfolios either in addition to or in moving on
from screenwriting alone. Television series ‘classics’ Close to Home (1975–83), Gloss
(1987–90), Shark in the Park (1988–91), Open House (1986–7), Country GP (1984–5)
and others provided significant training opportunities for women interested in
screen storytelling. Often authorial control rested with female producers (such as
Janice Finn, Philippa Campbell, Caterina Denave), and in those times of positive
discrimination both the content and the staffing were often oriented towards
women’s issues.
Rachel Lang, screenwriter and co-creator of several television drama series, was
a key screenwriter for the small screen in the 2000s. Beginning as a story editor on
such local series and serials as Shark in the Park (1988–91), Open House (1986–7),
and Shortland Street (1992–), she then co-created (with Gavin Strachan) Jackson’s
Wharf (1999–2000) and Mercy Peak (2001–3). The majority of these are family and
community-based serials or series. Outrageous Fortune (2005–10), co-created with
James Griffin, is ‘an upside down morality tale about a woman who tries to make
her family go straight’ (Lang 2010). It tells of the West family and, in the tradition
of other series focused on the working classes, is ‘large, comedic, rude and outra-
geous’ (Lang 2010). Like the more successful New Zealand films, this series also
centres on a mother’s quest to protect and manage her family. Significantly the
format has been adapted for British television by ITV and for the American market
under the titles Honest (2008–) and Scoundrels (2010–) respectively, a first for a New
Zealand television series (Dunleavy and Joyce 2011: 199–201).
New Zealand 201
Deregulation and the 1990s
By the early 1990s, and after 15 years of government-originated film financing, six
films had been written and directed by Rodriga, Preston and Mita. These six films
were from a total of 70 films funded by the NZFC during the period, challeng-
ing Rodriga’s previously cited optimism. However, legislative changes in the local
screen industry in the early part of the 1990s, deregulation of broadcasting, and the
development of ‘art cinema’ internationally fostered a new generation of women
filmmakers and screenwriters who, over the next 15 years, made substantial contri-
butions to the majority of internationally acknowledged New Zealand films. Initially
NZFC policy remained focused on writer-directors with the production of Alison
Maclean’s Crush (1992, co-written with Anne Kennedy) and Anna Campion’s Loaded
(1994) – a pathway that invariably included writing and directing several short films
as part of a development programme. These policy decisions were based partly on
the extraordinary success of Maclean’s short Kitchen Sink (1989), a noir thriller that
also played with conventional gender representation. Jane Campion3 wrote and
directed Sweetie (1989) (co-writer Gerard Lee) and The Piano (1993). Although not
funded locally, at best they were claimed as culturally New Zealand’s own, and they
at least set the benchmark for what antipodean women could achieve worldwide.
Jane Campion’s Academy Award for the screenplay of The Piano proved the point.
Other than Preston and Jane Campion, the majority of the women cited in this first
wave have moved away from writing their own screenplays and on to careers as
directors or producers. For example, Maclean established a consistent career direct-
ing television and music videos in the United States, including Gossip Girl (2009)
and Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays (2011). The second feature film she directed was
Jesus’ Son (1999), a USA/Canadian production written with a team of three.
The new regulatory environment and the expansion of the international film
market through the 1990s meant that financing could be sourced from a variety
of areas. It also saw the emergence of screenwriting as a dedicated career path for
women. The most prominent example is Fran Walsh, co-writer on Peter Jackson’s
films, including Meet the Feebles (1989), Braindead (1992), Heavenly Creatures
(1995), The Frighteners (1996), the Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3),
King Kong (2005), The Lovely Bones (2009), and The Hobbit (2012–14). Walsh was
born Frances Rosemary Walsh in Wellington, New Zealand in 1959. She attended
Victoria University in Wellington, majoring in English literature. She began her
screenwriting career in television before joining forces with Jackson. Philippa
Boyens, a playwright, teacher, editor, screenwriter and producer who received
a BA in history and English from the University of Auckland in 1994 joined the
screenwriting partnership of Jackson and Walsh in 1996 during the development
of the LOTR trilogy; her credits include co-writing on the Lord of the Ring series
(2001–3), King Kong (2005), The Lovely Bones (2009), and The Hobbit (2012–14).
Making a mark
Ten years on from the pioneering efforts of Mita, Rodriga and Preston, the indus-
try had matured to the point where women were accessing screenwriting roles
independently of directing roles. The two films released in 1994 that confirmed
this progress were Heavenly Creatures, written by Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson,
and Once Were Warriors (1994, winner of the New Zealand Best Screenplay Award),
written by Riwia Brown. Brown is a playwright and screenwriter. Both Heavenly
Creatures and Once Were Warriors surpassed all previous films with respect to
international recognition and sales returns. Both tell tragic tales of women within
families, and of relationships between mothers and their daughters. Heavenly
Creatures, a fictional account of the actual murder of Honora Rieper by her daugh-
ter Pauline Parker and Pauline’s friend, Juliet Hulme, in 1954, was given a fantasti-
cal rendition as Walsh and Jackson adapted the story from Parker’s diaries. The
writers were nominated for an Academy Award for their screenplay.
Once Were Warriors, adapted by Brown from the novel by Alan Duff, was a signi-
ficant breakthrough for both indigenous filmmakers and women screenwriters.
Brown, a Maori playwright and theatre practitioner, initially acted as a script con-
sultant on the novelist’s drafts, advising on the female protagonist, Beth, in what
was a deeply ‘macho’ story about family violence. Producer Robin Scholes and
director Lee Tamahori ‘had envisaged a team of writers working on the screenplay,
but Brown ended up doing the whole job’ (Smith 1994: 32). Brown recalls she
had no aspirations to write for film: ‘The miraculous thing was that I had never
written a screenplay, and for some reason way above me I had a very strong sense
of the structure, strong sense of the story’ (Brown 2001).
Warriors was the melding of social and cultural concerns that ignited the local
population to the extent that the film broke all New Zealand box-office records.
Its story of a disenfranchised urban Maori family violently disintegrating under
the pressures of postcolonial life spoke to both Maori and Pakeha audiences, while
Beth, the ‘mother courage’ at its centre, appealed to international audiences.
Into the millennium
The emergence of a number of notable screenwriters within the local and inter-
national industry reflected the transition undertaken by the NZFC and screen
industries from being primarily nationally oriented to partaking in the interna-
tional film and global screen industries. Peter Jackson and the development and
production of the Lord of the Rings trilogy from 1999 intensified the internation-
alizing of what had been a relatively discrete national cinema and an even more
contained television industry. The period saw an unprecedented engagement in
the arts by Helen Clark’s Labour government (1999–2008), drawing upon the
legislative reform of the creative industries by the Blair government in Britain.
Clark took on the role of arts minister herself, promoting an arts recovery pack-
age of 146 million dollars in 2000, with a one-off investment of 22.1 million
dollars earmarked for film production. This new Film Fund 1 (FF1) financed
eight films, three written and directed by women: Caro’s Whale Rider and The
Vintner’s Luck (2009) (co-writer Joan Scheckel) and Gaylene Preston’s feature
Perfect Strangers (2003), certainly a more favourable ratio than 20, or even ten
years earlier.
New Zealand 203
Screenwriter, director and producer Caro (1967–) was born in Wellington, New
Zealand. She attended the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland
and then received a Master of Fine Arts from Swinburne University of Technology.
Her feature screenwriting credits include Memory and Desire (1998), Whale Rider
(2002), and The Vintner’s Luck (2009). Caro had previously written and directed
several shorts, with her first feature, Memory and Desire (1998), indicating her pref-
erence for stories that she has adapted herself. Like her predecessors, her films have
feminist themes and feature women, or girls, battling the odds. Memory and Desire
tells of a Japanese bride, widowed while in New Zealand on her honeymoon, while
Whale Rider follows the journey of a young Maori woman in a quest to become
her tribe’s spiritual leader. In between these features Caro had written and directed
for a number of television series, primarily for South Pacific Pictures, producers of
Whale Rider.
Preston’s Perfect Strangers continued her preoccupation with the thriller genre,
‘in which mythical and fairy tale elements are incorporated into contemporary
narratives for political rather than purely narrative purpose’ (Tincknell 2007: 82).
Within a noir aesthetic, Preston reverses the trope of female victimization as the
protagonist, Melanie, kills her new lover, albeit accidentally, and, in a farcical but
uncannily female way, stores his dead body in a freezer while she takes another
lover. Preston’s next film, Home by Christmas (2010), is a film memoir that departs
from the thriller genre of Mr Wrong and Perfect Strangers and captures the bio-
graphical elements of her television series Bread and Roses. This time the subject
is Preston’s own family and her parents’ experiences of World War II, her father’s
service in Italy, and her mother’s waiting at home for him to return. The feminist
concerns are continued from the earlier War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us
(1995), interviews with New Zealand women about their wartime experiences, and
both works universalize these personal experiences for an international audience.
Emerging also at this time was Christine Jeffs, writer and director of Rain (2001)
and director of Sylvia (2003) and Sunshine Cleaning (2008). Jeffs was an assistant
editor on Preston’s Ruby and Rata and Maclean’s Crush, demonstrating the close-
ness of the New Zealand filmmaking community. Rain is a dark tale of the fracture
of a nuclear family while on their summer holiday. In a quintessentially New
Zealand holiday home (bach) the family falls apart through the mother’s drunk-
enness, father’s despair, and daughter’s burgeoning sexuality: emotional and spir-
itual poverties that reminded audiences of a forsaken centre in the modern family.
A significant, complementary film about a Maori family, The Strength of Water,
was released in 2009. The screenplay was written by Maori playwright Briar Grace-
Smith, directed by Armagan Ballantyne, and produced by Fiona Copland, these
latter two being Pakeha. The film presents a darker version of Maori community
life than either Whale Rider or Boy (2010). Here, too, a child dies early in the
story, the result of an unholy coalition of economic, social and familial factors.
The project was in development for an extended period of seven years and, as
with Whale Rider, the creative team spent a considerable amount of time living
and liaising with the local Maori community, Te Rarawa. This was a first feature
film for both Grace-Smith and Ballantyne, and The Strength of Water was selected
for Competition at Rotterdam International Film Festival, for Generation at the

Berlinale, and was a nominee at the Asia Pacific Film Awards.
In 2013, Campion completed Top of the Lake, a seven-part detective series co-
written with Gerard Lee; this returned Campion to New Zealand and to television.
The series uses New Zealand’s sublime landscapes to explore existential themes
and is funded by the Sundance Channel, UKTV in Australia and the BBC, signal-
ling the globalization of the industries and the movement of women screenwriters
within it. What emerges in this historical overview is that there are few women
dedicated to a career solely in screenwriting, instead choosing the path of writer-
director to explore themes of motherhood, family and relationships. This in turn
has catapulted several into directorial careers. Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens,
arguably New Zealand’s foremost women screenwriters, have based their careers
in Hollywood, even though they remain domiciled in New Zealand. Significantly,
the New Zealand films that have impacted most strongly since Campion’s An
Angel at My Table, including The Piano, Once Were Warriors, Heavenly Creatures,
Whale Rider, and the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, have been written by
women. Further, these writers reveal through their screenplays a preoccupation,
like their male counterparts, with New Zealand’s place in the world. In addition
the writers and directors use the local landscape to reflect these concerns of isola-
tion and loneliness, in gothic and dark ways. The majority of films dealt with here
are passionately concerned with issues that are both politically and intimately
connected to women, and combined with the government mandates to tell local
stories, this has meant that the resulting screen products are often disturbing and
always distinctive.
Notes
1. All translations Maori to English/English to Maori are from The Maori Dictionary, http://
www.maoridictionary.co.nz/ (accessed 4 February 2013).
2. See Mita 1992 and Barclay 1990 for more detailed accounts of Maori aesthetics.
3. See essay on Jane Campion in the Australia section.
References
Barclay, B. 1990. Our Own Image. Auckland: Longman Paul.
Brown, R. 2001. Interview with Hester Joyce, 21 February.
Dunleavy, T., and H. Joyce. 2011. New Zealand Film & Television: Institution, Industry and
Cultural Change. Bristol: Intellect.
Horrocks, R. 1985. Melanie Read: New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art Gallery
(Catalogue).
Lang, R. 2010. Interview, 13 September. Available at: http://screentalk.nzonscreen.com (accessed
13 March 2013).
Mita, M. 1992. ‘The Soul and the Image’, in J. Dennis and J. Bieringa (eds) Film in Aotearoa
New Zealand. Wellington: Victoria University Press.
NZFC. 1987a. ‘On the Portrayal of Women and Men on Film’. Wellington: NZFC.
NZFC. 1987b. ‘Notes to Assessors on the Portrayal of Women and Men on Film’.
Wellington: NZFC.
NZFC. 1995. Programmes of Assistance and Policy Guidelines Handbook. Wellington: NZFC.
New Zealand 205
Peters, G. 2007. ‘Lives of Their Own’, in I. Conrich and S. Murray (eds) New Zealand Filmmakers.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Preston, G. 1997. Interview with Hester Joyce, 7 September.
Rodriga, M. 1998. Interview with Hester Joyce, 18 February.
Smith, P. 1994. ‘Warrior Woman’, NZ Listener, 7 May, p. 32.
Tincknell, E. 2007. ‘Between the Personal and the Political: Feminist Fables in the Films
of Gaylene Preston’, in I. Conrich and S. Murray (eds) New Zealand Filmmakers, Detroit:
Wayne State University Press.
Part IV
Europe
Armenia
Carl Wilson
After Armenia was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922, the centralized
government formed the Armenian Film Foundation in 1923. With the establish-
ment of Armenfilm (Hayfilm) studios in the same year, Armenian cinema began
to flourish until the onset of World War II, when production declined. After
the resurgence and revitalization of Hayfilm in the late 1950s, the film industry
again began to increase its momentum. Receiving their orders from the Central
Television of the USSR, and in collaboration with Mosfilm, the largest and most
significant studio in Russia and Europe at the time, the Armenian film industry
eventually grew to regularly release six to seven feature-length movies a year
during the 1980s. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s,
and Armenia declaring full independence in 1991, Armenia encountered severe
economic difficulties, which impacted significantly upon their film industry.
According to Peter Rollberg, the funds allocated by the Armenian government
were ‘barely sufficient to pay salaries and maintain the rapidly aging, underused
equipment’ (Rollberg 2009).
It is only since 2000, when Armenia moved towards a market economy, looking
outwards towards Western coproduction and inwards with a greater appreciation
of their own cultural potential, that the volume of titles, and the presence of
Armenian cinema at international film festivals, began to substantially improve.
In 2006, the non-commercial National Cinema Centre of Armenia (NCCA)
was created to encourage and facilitate this expansion. Furthermore, in 2004,
Armenia’s KIN International Women’s Film Festival was created with the intent
to ‘promote women’s creativity, [and] establish a network between woman film-
makers from different parts of the world and give hand to a better understanding
of different cultures and each other’ (KIN 2013). When Mariam Ohanyan, the
director of the festival, was asked about current Armenian female filmmakers, she
reeled them off, proudly stating: ‘One of them is working and famous in Russia –
Maria Sahakyan. Her last two films are I Want to Change My Name (2012) and
Antropia (2013). We have Nika Shek, [who will soon] premiere her first feature
length film: From Two Worlds as a Keepsake (2012). Ludmila Sahakynts shot a
film in 2000. Other filmmakers are working in documentary or have shot films’
(Ohanyan 2013). Focusing on a new cultural identity that is based on shared goals
209
and attributes, rather than abstract political and ideological lines, has allowed
female screenwriters and directors to develop in Armenia, and as we can see in
Anna Melikyan’s work (see entry below), it is of critical importance to the develop-
ment and expression of the New Post-Soviet Person.
Anna Melikyan (b. 1976) and the New Post-Soviet Person
Anna Melikyan was born in Baku, Azerbaijan and raised in Armenia. In 2002,
Melikyan graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK),
Moscow, Russia, where she had worked under the esteemed directors Sergei
Solovyov and Valeri Rubinchik. While at VGIK, Melikyan produced three
short films that won recognition at Russian and international film festivals:
Andante (1997), Let’s Fly (1999), and Poste Restante (2000), which won the Grand
Prix at the St Anna student film festival in Russia, as well as the City of Melbourne
Award for best short experimental film at the Melbourne International Film
Festival, Australia. Melikyan’s final student piece, Contrabass (2002), secured her
a grant from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. With this grant,
and the financial backing of Central Partnership, Russia’s largest independent
film distributor, Melikyan was able to write and direct her first feature film, Mars
(2004). Following Mars, Melikyan directed the critically well received Mermaid
(2007), which brought her an Academy Award nomination, and a directing award
at the Sundance Film Festival. In addition to currently working on her third film,
Star (2008), which was co-written with Andrey Migachev and Viktoriya Bugayeva,
Melikyan has also moved into producing film and television features with her
new production company, Mars Media Entertainment.
Melikyan’s original screenplay for Mars presents the story of Boris, a boxer from
the capital city of Moscow who enters and engages with a provincial Russian
town called Marks – and promptly tries all manner of ways to leave. The town is
named after Karl Marx (‘Marks’ in Russian), the founder of communist ideology,
but a train station sign, seen by the lead protagonist, has dropped the letter ‘K’,
hence the pun that the people follow Russian/Communist traditions as though
they are from another world: the ‘red’ planet. The script wrestles with the char-
acters and their inherited cultural background, innovatively presenting their lives
and desires in a cavalcade of memorable inserts, dream sequences, flashbacks,
and flashforwards. The absurdist comedy of Mars is like an updated, kaleidoscopic
reconstitution of Afanasyev’s Russian fairy tales, one where everybody works in a
toy factory, there is an ‘outsider’ traveller, and the tale is resolved melodramati-
cally with a character (Greta) committing suicide and being resurrected via the
deus ex machina of love.
Melikyan’s work engages with Russian culture, but, as we can see in Mars, the
manner in which she portrays this immersion is distanced from the Stalinist
paradigm of the New Soviet Man/Woman, where heroic reality was imbued with
patriotic romanticism. Her films also separate themselves from the subsequent
postmodern destabilization of character and idealistic reality that former VGIK
Russian alumni such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Bondarchuk, and Alexandr
Armenia 211
Sokurov examine in their own work. Melikyan taps into what Natascha Drubek-
Meyer and Bettina Lange term the ‘New Russian Man/Woman’ (Drubek-Meyer
and Lange 2009), referring to the time at the turn of the century when tales of
new Russian capitalism met ‘patriarchal stories of the fairy tale’ with a focus on
‘individual characters and their life-stories’. For example, Star could be seen as a
simple ‘Cinderella in the city’ tale, where the rural girl falls in love with the young
son of a wealthy Moscow business family; except, the film also encompasses opti-
mism, misunderstandings, misplaced arrogance, and the insecurity of not having
a predetermined life in modern Russia from a variety of intersecting perspectives.
Mars was written with classic Russian fiction in mind, but Melikyan’s second
feature film, Mermaid, is a modern update of one fairy tale in particular: Hans
Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid (1837). In Mermaid, a young girl, called
Alisa, is conceived in the sea and lives by the ocean with her mother and grand-
mother. While awaiting her father’s return they struggle with their impoverished
lives. Alisa has selective mutism, and believes that she lives in a fantasy world
where her wishes come true. This leads her to eventually move to Moscow with
her family, where she saves Sasha, a suicidal Moon property salesman, from
drowning, and falls in love with him – like in Anderson’s story. However, instead
of marrying him, she becomes his house cleaner.
Sasha sells Moon property so that other people can ‘have somewhere to escape’
to, but does not have property himself as ‘I don’t need to escape anywhere, I feel
bad enough here’. This bleak contrast between fantasy and reality is a thematic
continuation of Melikyan’s work in Mars, and is presented in a stylistically similar
way.
In Mermaid, the magical elevation of Alisa’s surroundings through her own voli-
tion promotes mixed feelings; she is shaping her life to please herself, but at the
same time her denial of reality is painfully tragic. Yet, Melikyan suggests that her
characters don’t all share the same collective response to their diegetic reality. As
with Alisa in Mermaid, who dreams about becoming a ballerina, and awaits the
return of her father, in Mars the Russian townspeople of Marks are equally solip-
sistic, comprising:
a precocious, scheming girl and her mother, both dreaming of a French suitor;
a young idealist, Grigorii, in love with an ethereal librarian Greta […] whose
daily routine includes watching Casablanca in the local movie theater; and a
barmaid fantasizing about a sexual encounter with Vladimir Putin. (Russian
Film Symposium 2005)
Yet, in a reversal of Mars, Mermaid is centred on one character who illuminates the
depression of those around her, precisely because she is the one with an optimistic
inner-belief system that to some extent negates the diegetic reality around her.
The coherence of the narrative is largely due to Melikyan finding inspiration
in the form of actress Masha Shalaeva, who plays the eponymous character.
According to Melikyan: ‘Writing the film was not linear. I wrote different parts
at different times. Masha, the lead, was a friend I studied with [at VGIK], and
I was always thinking and thinking about her. I wrote the screenplay especially
for her, always thinking how she would appear in certain scenes’ (Kamenev 2008).
Furthermore, Melikyan has stated that ‘The script was very easy to write, because
I wasn’t thinking about an abstract image, but a specific person – her face, voice
and attitude’ (Moscow News 2008). This focus on the life of an innocent and naive
female character in love, with a unique perspective on the world, has invited sev-
eral comparisons to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s classic quirky French film Amélie (2001).
As with the protagonist of Amélie, the New Russian Woman isn’t an ‘abstract
image’ to be constructed in relation to one country alone; she is a highly indi-
vidualized reflection of contemporary life across modern, capitalist culture. In
an interview for Mermaid, Melikyan points out the significance of these shared
points of orientation between the viewer and her work: ‘I understand that this
is the main thing that you shoot your films for, to make people see the film and
encourage them to think about something that is very important’ (Bugrova 2008).
The appeal to a wider audience partly explains the critical success of Mermaid
overseas. In 2008 the film won the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award in the
World Cinema category and Variety magazine singled out Melikyan as one of the
ten most promising directors in the world. Mermaid was selected as Russia’s official
submission for the Foreign Language Film category at the 2009 Academy Awards,
which suggests that the state-run Russian nomination committee had formally
validated Melikyan’s New Russian cultural typology. In the future, films of this
type could well be precluded from gaining international prominence because of a
new conservatism in Russian filmmaking. The Russian Filmmakers’ Union Ethics
Charter of 2013 calls for a return to ‘the portrayal of positive heroes, promotion
of traditional family values and national unity, and the respect for the history and
symbolism of the Fatherland’ (Talvio 2013).
Through using social permutations and colliding agendas as the subject mat-
ter for her films, Melikyan’s interest in examining the New Russians reflects her
own post-Soviet experiences and thoughts. However, Melikyan also has a wider
perspective, having been brought up in Armenia as it transitioned from Soviet to
independent Armenia. The varied fortunes of Armenia and its culture have not
only been formative of Melikyan’s world view, and present in the Russian charac-
ters that inhabit her films, but they are also a vital part in the wider formation of
the New Post-Soviet Person.
References
Bugrova, O. 2008. ‘“Rusalka” (“Mermaid”) – Russian Film is the Prize Winner of
the Berlin Film Festival’, Voice of Russia [Online]. Available at: http://voiceofrussia.
com/2008/03/26/184389/ (accessed 10 November 2013).
Drubek-Meyer, N., and B. Lange. 2009. ‘The Splendor and Misery of the Little Mermaid:
Roundtable on Anna Melikyan’s “Rusalka” (Introduction)’, ARTmargins Online [Online].
Available at: http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/the-splendor-and-misery-of-the-
little-mermaid-roundtable-on-anna-melikyans-qrusalkaq (accessed 10 November 2013).
Kamenev, M. 2008. ‘Sundance Contender’, Moscow Times [Online]. Available at: http://www.
themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/sundance-contender/356186.html (accessed 10
November 2013).
Armenia 213
‘KIN’ Women’s International Film Festival [Online]. 2013. Available at: http://kinfestival.
com (accessed 10 November 2013).
Moscow News [Online]. 2008. ‘Cinema – Russia Selects Anna Melikyan’s Rusalka to Enter
2009 Oscars’. Available at: http://themoscownews.com/arts/20080925/55347989.html
(accessed 10 November 2013).
Ohanyan, M. 2013. ‘Re: Anna Melikyan and Armenian Female Filmmakers’. Email to
C. Wilson (carl.wilson@sheffcol.ac.uk), 14 October.
Rollberg, P. 2009. ‘Armenfilm studio (Hayfilm)’, Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet
Cinema. Plymouth: Scarecrow Press.
Russian Film Symposium. 2005. ‘Program Notes: Mars’, the yellow house of cinema [Online].
Available at: http://www.rusfilm.pitt.edu/2005/pn/mars.htm (accessed 10 November
2013).
Talvio, R. 2013. ‘Re: Ethics in Screenwriting’. Email to the Screenwriting Research Network
(screenwriting-research-network@jiscmail.ac.uk), 12 March.
Austria
Robert Dassanowsky
Women screenwriters in Austrian film history
Given the sprawling Central European nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

Austrian film has been transcultural since its inception and has remained so
throughout its history. The first Austrians to produce feature films were the team of
Louise Veltée (also known as Louise Kolm and Louise Fleck), her husband, Anton
Kolm, and their cameraman, Jakob Julius Fleck, and it was their efforts, beginning
in 1906, that mark the beginning of a mainstream, Vienna-based Austrian film
industry. Traditionally, however, Count Alexander Kolowrat-Krakowsky, known
as Sascha Kolowrat, has been labelled the father of the Austrian film industry
because of his business successes and discovery of film talent, and early Austrian
erotic films have been discovered that predate the Veltée-Kolm productions.
After the founding of the First Austrian Republic in 1919, and through the
1920s, both the Kolm-Fleck and Kolowrat studios attempted lavish biopics and
adapted operas for the screen. Sascha Kolowrat had long admired American films
and their exportability, and his intention to create an Austrian cinema inter-
national in theme and groundbreaking in presentation was something that he
had planned throughout the war years. He employed two Austro-Hungarian direc-
tors, Mihály Kertész (later Hollywood’s Michael Curtiz) and Alexander Korda, to
create the monumental silent epics Sodom und Gomorrah (1922) and Samson und
Delila (1922), respectively.
Early émigré Austrian writer-directors worked in Berlin and Hollywood; though
they were mostly male, for instance Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg,
Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann. Two Austrian-born women, Salka
Viertel and Vicki Baum, were among the few female screenwriters in the Golden
Age of Hollywood, and among the most well known. Salka Viertel (Salomea Sara
Steuermann, 1889–1978) was the daughter of a Jewish lawyer and long-time mayor
of Sambor, Austria-Hungary (today Western Ukraine), Joseph Steuermann. Viertel
began her career as a stage actress in Bratislava, Berlin and Vienna and married
Austrian-born writer, film and theatre director Berthold Viertel in 1918. German film
director F. W. Murnau arranged a contract in Hollywood for Berthold Viertel to work
as a writer and director in 1928. His wife and family relocated with him and they
214
Austria 215
remained there after the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party in Germany. Salka won support-
ing roles in four films between 1929 and 1931 and her friend Greta Garbo insisted
she take a significant role in the German-language version of Anna Christie (1931).
Viertel was co-author of the original story with Margaret P. Levino and she subse-
quently became a close friend and advisor to Garbo. Beginning with Queen Christina
in 1933, Viertel co-scripted most of the actress’s films. She had always constructed
resilient female figures in her fiction writing, but with Garbo as influence and idol,
her screenplays became known for their strong female leads and political themes.
Viertel’s friendship with the Hollywood-exiled Bertolt Brecht resulted in a col-
laborative but unfinished screenplay about a contemporary Joan of Arc figure,
involved in resistance against the Nazis. She additionally wrote for three more
productions between 1947 and 1959, including Hedy Lamarr’s episodic Italian
film (which Lamarr co-produced, with Austrian-born Edgar G. Ulmer co-directing),
L’amante di Paride/Love of Three Queens (1954), which Lamarr hoped would demon-
strate her abilities beyond the typecasting she had suffered in Hollywood.
Viertel’s famed salons attracted many of the exiled German and Austrian lit-
erati, and she was a co-founder of the European Film Fund or EFF (created in
1938 by Austrian-exile Hollywood agent Paul Kohner and German-born direc-
tor Ernst Lubitsch). The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) later
accused Viertel of having communist sympathies (her friendship with Brecht was
obviously considered incriminatory). Blacklisted in Hollywood, she subsequently
relocated to Switzerland in 1953.
Vicki Baum (Hedwig Baum, 1888–1960) was born into a family of Jewish-
Viennese civil servants and attended the Vienna Conservatory of the Friends of
Music. She published her first novel, Frühe Schatten (Early Shadow) in 1919, going
on to work as an editor for the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin from 1926–31.
Baum wrote the screenplay for her 1927 novel Hell in Frauensee for the German
film Die drei Frauen von Urban Hell/The Three Women of Urban Hell (1928), which
was later remade as the French Lac aux dames/Ladies Lake (1934). She adapted
what would become her most famous literary work, the 1929 novel Menschen im
Hotel (‘People in a Hotel’), for stage productions in Berlin and on Broadway in
1930. MGM asked her to write the screenplay, based on the novel and renamed
Grand Hotel (1932), as a star vehicle for Greta Garbo and she then moved to Los
Angeles in 1932. She remained in Hollywood partly due to the success of the film
but also because of Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany in 1933 and the
burning of her books there in 1935. Her bestselling novels and stories became the
basis for more than thirty American films (such as Hotel Berlin [1945] and Weekend
at the Waldorf [1945]), television productions (for Kraft Theater and Celebrity
Playhouse), and French and West German films and remakes. She received no
credit for her story contribution to the Johann Strauss biopic, The Great Waltz
(1938), or for her screenplay work on Unfinished Business (1941). Baum was given
idea credit for the films Powder Town (1942) and Girl Trouble (1942), and story
credit for Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) and Behind City Lights (1945),
and for the Michael Kanin-scripted Honeymoon (1947). Her final credit as a screen-
writer is on the French film, Retour à l’aube/She Returned at Dawn (1938).
Sound brought the creation of a genre that has become synonymous with
interwar Austrian cinema, the ‘Viennese Film’. Created by screenwriter-director
Walter Reisch and director-actor Willi Forst, these elegantly stylized and heav-
ily atmospheric Old Vienna-milieu melodramas, with rich musical scores, first
dealt with artists who sacrifice love for their art, then became more general in
theme. Austria’s film industry essentially split in two after 1934: the mainstream
‘Aryanized’ productions supported by the Austrian Nazis, which informed
Germany of the racial quality of cast and crew, and the Emigrantenfilm or emigrant
films, which included German talent that had fled to Austria and those Austrians
who were unacceptable to Germany, or refused to bow to Nazi pressure. These
films were mostly co-produced with Hungarian or Czech studios and were shot in
several languages for distribution across Europe, with the exception of Germany.
Even as the political catholicism of Austrofascism (1934–8) influenced cin-
ematic trends, the Emigrantenfilm positioned itself against Nazi cinema, offering
international-style, class-conflict musicals and comedies that questioned archaic
gender roles. Although there were few female screenwriters, those that had found
recognition continued to work in one or both industries, but their general lack of
surviving personal information points to the male dominance in films of the era.
Like Ida Jenbach, Rosa Wachtel (c. 1900–?) began her career as a journalist and
film critic, and co-scripted eleven films between 1921 and 1932 for Austrian and
German directors Max Neufeld, Robert Wohlmuth (known as Robert Wilmot in
Hollywood after 1938) and Carl Boese. Maria Stephan is even more elusive and
her personal details are unknown. She received credit as co-writer of Die Fahrt in
die Jugend/The Trip to Youth (1935), as sole screenwriter for Tanzmusik/Dance Music
(1935), and for one of the major costume dramas of the period, Manja Valewska
(1936). Although her three films had post-1933 German premieres, indicating that
there were no ‘known’ Jewish artists working on the film, Stephan obviously fled
the 1938 annexation for Italy, which also became the haven for Austrian director
Max Neufeld who was labelled ‘half-Jewish’ by the Nazis. Her last recorded film
credit is as assistant director on Vittorio de Sica’s comedy Maddalena ... zero in
condotta/Maddalena, Zero for Conduct (1940).
With the Anschluss, or annexation, of Austria by Germany in 1938, female
screenwriters were not encouraged. The Viennese film studio, Wien-Film, had a
specific role in the film production structure of the Third Reich as the centre of
lavish operetta, period comedy and entertainment films. The division of Vienna
and Austria following the war did not end until 1955, though historical biopics
on Mozart, Empress Maria Theresa, Beethoven, and Schubert helped reconstruct
a cinematic national identity in terms of high art and the imperial past, while
avoiding the Nazi period. The most important genres to emerge from the 1950s,
which marked a boom in Austrian film production, were the provincial melo-
drama or Heimatfilm and the imperial film, which romanticized the Habsburg
Empire in lavish colour costume epics. While there were women in other aspects
of the film industry, screenwriting remained male territory.
Austria’s commercial film industry disappeared in the mid 1960s. There was
no new wave movement to take its place as in other European cinemas of the
Austria 217
time; instead, a masculine-dominated, isolated, experimental-style film based on

Actionist performance art evolved from artists Peter Kubelka, Ferry Radax, Kurt
Kren, Günther Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Peter Weibel. Their shock-
art, which attacked traditional forms and bourgeois complacency, along with
the lack of quality commercial productions, alienated established audiences who
abandoned the cinemas and turned to television.
The 1970s marked a return of narrative film, although these were small, local
productions. Valie Export, who experimented with her ‘expanded cinema’ con-
cepts and produced short films with Peter Weibel in the late 1960s, emerged
as one of the leaders of international feminist filmmaking and her work found
mainstream audiences.
In the late 1970s the national television network ORF (Österreichischer
Rundfunk) became a major film-financing source, and a national subsidy was
announced in 1980, allowing narrative films to gain limited commercial or tel-
evision screenings. New socially critical film was produced by Christian Berger,
Wolfram Paulus, Peter Patzak and Michael Haneke that focused on racism, xeno-
phobia, sexual repression, and psychological abuse, while Axel Corti and Nikki
List gained limited international attention for their work in historical drama and
comedy, respectively.
The broader possibilities created by production support for filmmaking in the
1980s and 1990s brought a relatively significant number of women into film writ-
ing and direction, giving the nascent New Austrian Film a reputation for being
one of the most female-driven cinemas in Europe. Greek-born director-actor-
artist Penelope Georgiou (b. 1949) settled in Vienna in 1970 and began her self-
produced run with Petunia in 1980, which she wrote and directed and performed,
with Valie Export. She also wrote other short productions in which she performed
such as Tonis+Eleni (1983) and Kallas and Kennedy (1991). Kitty Kino’s (Kitty Judit
Gschöpf, b.1948) first feature film, a comedy about a woman infiltrating the male
world of billiards, Karambolage/Collision (1983), co-scripted with Reinhard Meirer,
generated controversy for its feminist aspects. Kino has continued to write and
direct sporadically, with Die Nachtmeerfahrt/The Night Sea Journey (1986), and a
specifically Austrian comic take on sexual confusion in the self-important upper-
class yuppie milieu, Wahre Liebe/True Love (1990). Kino moved into the main-
stream as a television series writer and director.
Susanne Zanke (b. 1945) has been writing and directing teleplays and series
television since 1982, though she did not write and direct her first feature film,
Die Skorpionfrau/The Scorpion Woman, until 1989. Zanke followed with television
features that continued her focus on the difficult lives of women, such as Ein
Schloss für Rita/A Castle for Rita (1997), an update of the late 1940s and 1950s
Austrian female innkeeper films, and Vergewaltigt – das Ende einer Liebe/Raped – The
End of a Love (1998). Käthe Kratz (b. 1947) made her first film in 1976, but it was
the television specials on women’s lives, Lebenslinien/Lifelines (1983–6), which she
wrote and directed that brought her to the fore. Her next screenplays were for
the features Marlene – Der amerikanischer Traum/Marlene – The American Dream in
1987 and Das zehnte Jahr/The Tenth Year in 1995, which attempted a revision of
the woman’s picture genre. Her feature documentary Abschied ein Leben Lang/Life-
Long Farewell (1999) follows three US residents who return to Vienna to witness
the reconstruction of the façade of a synagogue destroyed sixty years earlier.
Maria Knilli (b. 1959) was educated at the Munich Film School, and has been a
writer and film editor since 1980. Beginning as a cinema feature writer-director
with Lieber Karl/Dear Karl in 1984, she has maintained her socially critical stance
as a television feature director and documentarian in the 1990s. Vienna-born
Maria Arlamovsky (b. 1965) began her career as a short filmmaker and made her
feature writing and directing debut in 1996 with Seltsame Unruhe/Restless Solitude,
which looks at an alienated group of young people who avoid integration into
mainstream society. She scripted the documentary feature Abenland/The West
(2011) by Nicholas Geyrhalter who also produced her short documentary A White
Substance (2008) on sexual violence in the Congo.
The creator of a controversial and confrontational video of female physical
self-exploration, Toilette (1979), Friederike Pezold (b. 1945) offered more artistic
experimentation in 1980 with her Radio Free Utopia, a completely private broad-
cast station installed at Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1983, she returned
to the motion picture medium with a film she wrote, directed and appeared in,
Canale Grande/Grand Canal. Rather than couch her feminist visions in audience-
pleasing co-productions with ORF, Pezold remained provocative and produced
her next films under the banner of her own No Budget-Filmproduktion company.
Eines Tages/One Day (1986) was written, directed and shot (with Thomas Meissner)
by Pezold, who also appears in the film. Pezold’s next film, Das geheime Labyrinth
des Horrors/The Secret Labyrinth of Horror (aka Allein gegen die Würstel/Alone Against
the Sausages) (1989) was also written, directed, and shot by Pezold.
Margareta Heinrich (1951–94) studied direction and scriptwriting at the
Vienna Film Academy, creating films that focused on her political and feminist
interests. She wrote and directed seven feature documentaries between 1980 and
1994 on feminist and Third World topics which took her to Mozambique and
Nicaragua. Her first and third of three feature films produced, Zwielicht/Twilight
(1979) and Ihr glücklichen Augen/Her Happy Eyes (1993), were both based on a short
story by influential Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73). Heinrich’s
final work, the award-winning documentary Totschweigen/Deathly Silence (with
Eduard Eme, 1994) investigates the massacre of Rechnitz where 200 Hungarian-
Jewish slave labourers were murdered in March 1945. Writer and translator Lida
Winiewicz (aka Lida Winiewicz-Lefèvre, b. 1928) has been a recognized teleplay
and series writer since 1964. In 1986, she served as screenwriter with Wolfgang
Glück on his film based on Friedrich Torberg’s novel 38 Auch das war Wien/38,
about the doomed love affair of an ‘Aryan’ actress and Jewish journalist in Vienna
as the 1938 Anschluss approaches. It was the first Austrian film nominated for
the Foreign Language Film Oscar. Screenwriter Karin Brandauer was also active
in the 1980s.
Painter and media artist Maria Lassnig (1919–2014), whose early art was con-
sidered degenerate by the Nazis, came into her own as a painter in Paris and New
York in the 1950s and 60s, creating short 16 mm films before her return to Vienna,
Austria 219
where she founded Austria’s school for film animation in 1982. Bulgarian-born
performance artist Mara Mattuschka (b. 1959), a former student of Lassnig, has
scripted and directed experimental live action and animation films that feature
her in her ‘star’ alter ego, Mimi Minus.
Susanne Freund (b. 1954, Vienna), who has since become a prolific teleplay
writer and director, and Gerda E. Grossmann (b. 1953, Linz), who has moved into
sound engineering and is a television editor, co-wrote, with director Paul Harather,
Die Gottesanbeterin/The Black Widow (2000). The film, based on the true story of a
homemaker who financed her racetrack addiction by marrying and subsequently
poisoning several men. The material is given a satirical treatment by Harather
and his screenwriters. Barbara Albert’s award-winning Nordrand/City Skirts (1999)
led the strong female presence in the New Austrian Film of the early twenty-first
century to become the first Austrian film presented at the Venice Film Festival in
fifty-one years. The films of Ruth Mader, Jessica Hausner and Ruth Beckermann
have all gained national acclaim and international audiences in dealing with
shifting social and gender roles in Austria and Europe. American critic Ed Halter
considered the specific New Austrian Film style, at least among female directors,
to be ‘quiet, cool, and subjective … [These films] achieve a detached, contempla-
tive air so rarely attempted by overcompensating American cinema, communi-
cating a bittersweet beauty through the simple evocation of interior life’ (Halter
2003). Like Ulrich Seidl and Ruth Mader, Sabine Derflinger (b. 1963) ruptures
the façade of an orderly and satisfying life in her feature debut. Derflinger began
by writing and directing dramatic shorts and then turned to documentary shorts,
with Achtung Staatsgrenze/Attention, State-Frontier (directed with Bernhard Pötscher,
1995–6), about illegal aliens and those awaiting deportation in Austrian jails, and
The Rounder Girls (also directed with Pötscher, 1999), based on a soul and gospel sing-
ing group. Her feature film directing and writing debut, with Maria Scheibelhofer,
was Vollgas/Step On It (2002), where behind the images of beauty and relaxation at
an Austrian winter resort, an overworked and frustrated single mother’s unhappi-
ness leads to self-destructive alcoholism and one-night stands. She has continued to
write and direct feature documentaries and the occasional teleplay.
The daughter of Austrian actor Lukas Resetarits, Kathrin Resetarits (b. 1973)
studied direction at the Vienna Film Academy and writes documentary shorts.
She has encountered many of the new wave filmmakers in her work as actor
and casting director and assistant for director Michael Haneke. Haneke’s 2001
dramatic feature, Die Klavierspielerin/The Piano Teacher, which secured him inter-
national controversy and renown, is based on the novel by 2004 Nobel Prize-
winning Austrian author and writer of several television movies, Elfriede Jelinek
(b. 1946). Her meditation on self-abusive repression in the prosperous atmosphere
of Austria found international audiences and critical acclaim, as has Ulrich Seidl’s
Hundstage/Dog Days (2001), which exposes the sinister interiors of Vienna’s pris-
tine middle-class suburbs. Themes of ethnic and psychological self-realization also
pervade the new wave films. A standout among these is the feature Mein Russland/
My Russia (2002) by Barbara Gräftner (b. 1964). Having emerged from short film
production, Gräftner completed her doctorate as a physician then studied with
Austrian director Peter Patzak at the Vienna Film Academy. Her writing-directing
feature debut, about a divorced middle-aged Viennese woman who resists her son’s
marriage to a Russian girl, is based on family experience. The unique quality of her
now classic black comedy is the result of a bringing together of what she sees as
the pragmatic, even metaphysical Russians and the goal-oriented, often prejudiced
Austrians. She has followed up as writer and director of several features and docu-
mentaries, including the Austro-HipHop film Rise Up! And Dance (2014). Andrea
Maria Dusl (b. 1961) is another screenwriter whose subject is Eastern Europe. She
has been writing and illustrating for Austrian periodicals since the mid 1980s and
has written and directed a series of six shorts under the umbrella title In Achtzig
Tagen um die Welt/Around the World in Eighty Days (1989/1991). Her writing-directing
feature film debut, Blue Moon (2002), is a mystery/romance that moves from Vienna
to Slovenia to the Black Sea in its tale about a money courier caught between his
fascination for a missing woman and her mysterious sister in the Ukraine.
South-Tyrolean Tizza Covi (b. 1971) has written and directed documentaries
with her partner, Vienna-born Rainer Frimmel, since the late 1990s. Their feature
film debut La Pivellina (2009) premiered at Cannes and was scripted by both
Covi and Frimmel. The existentialist character drama Nogo (2001), a cinematic
triptych about three diverse couples who arrive at a distant gas station, was writ-
ten and directed by another creative coupling, the experimental filmmaking
team of Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl. They co-wrote and co-directed the
feature Anfang 80/Coming of Age, an ‘octogenarian romantic comedy’, in 2011.
Gabriele Neudecker’s (b. 1965) Freaky (2001) is a short film about longing, loss,
and the concept of home, in which a fifteen-year-old Austrian girl recalls her
friendship with a Russian girl, Natalja, who suddenly disappears. It became a sur-
prise hit at several film festivals and she has continued to write and direct short
documentaries including Deserteur/Glorious Deserter (2012). Elisabeth Scharang
(b. 1969, Bruck an der Mur), daughter of Austrian writer Michael Scharang, has
been writing and directing documentaries, screenplays and teleplays since 2001.
Her most recent film is Vielleicht in einem anderen Leben/In Another Lifetime (2011),
which she co-scripted with the playwrights Peter Turrini and Silke Hassler
(b. 1969, Klagenfurt), based on Turrini and Hassler’s play about the death march
of Hungarian Jews to the Austrian concentration camp, Mauthausen.
Given the newly found international interest in Austrian cinema, filmmak-
ers have become a political force with some influence in the first decade of the
twenty-first century and have worked to increase film subsidies and control of
national festivals and promotion. Male auteurs Michael Glawogger, Ulrich Seidl,
Stefan Ruzowitzky, Götz Spielmann, and Michael Haneke have received copious
award nominations and prestigious international prizes, whereas Austria’s influen-
tial female writer-directors have not yet experienced the same level of global rec-
ognition. Nevertheless, a new generation of notable female screenwriters emerged
in the 2010s. Bosnian-born Nina Kusturica (b. 1975) edited Mirjam Unger’s
Vienna’s Lost Daughters and has also written short films and a feature documen-
tary, Little Alien (2009), about the plight of unaccompanied child refugees. The
Austrian Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture named Kusturica outstanding
artist in the category of Intercultural Dialogue in 2010. Born 1976 in Eisenstadt,
Austria 221
Barbara Eder’s debut dramatic film, Inside America (2010), examines the contra-
dictory and often troubled experiences of the students at Homer Hanna High
School in Brownsville, Texas, and their belief in the American Dream. It received
the Special Jury Prize at the German Max Ophüls Film Festival. Marie Kreutzer’s
first drama screenplay and directorial effort, Die Vaterlosen/The Fatherless (2011),
received recognition at the 2011 Berlinale Festival, while Anja Salomonowitz
(b. 1976) attended the Vienna Film Academy and is a trained editor as well as
writer and director of shorts and documentaries on critical sociopolitical topics
such as human trafficking. Her promising first feature film, Spanien/Spain (2012),
also premiered at the Berlinale and was followed by the documentary (written and
directed) Die 727 Tage ohne Karamo/The 727 Days without Karamo (2013), on mixed
European and non-European couples confronted with immigration laws.
Louise Kolm-Fleck (1873–1950)
While the role of France’s Alice Guy as the first feature film director has often
been discounted in film history texts or qualified by her gender, the prolific studio
founder, writer, director and producer Louise or Luise Veltée, born in Vienna in
1873, has been, until very recently, completely elided from cinema scholarship.
There is scant primary documentation on Louise Kolm, or on her role as filmmaker.
The best source regarding this aspect of research has been her son, Austrian film
director Walter Kolm-Veltée (1910–99), who describes his mother as ‘energetic and
full of humour. She loved fantasy but also desired to comment on the problems of
society and the relationships between men and women’ (Dassanowsky 2005: 13).
Unfortunately, much of her work in silent film is now lost, but the resurgence of
interest in Austrian cinema brought about by the success of New Austrian Film, has
led to the screening of a few of her creations in Viennese art houses.
In January 1910, the first true Vienna-based Austrian film production company
was formed by the trio of Louise Veltée (1873–1950), her husband, photographer
Anton Kolm (1865–1922), and their cinematographer Jakob Julius Fleck (1881–1953).
Louise Kolm, as she would be credited, co-scripted, edited, and assisted her brother,
Claudius Veltée, in the laboratory work (Hansch and Waz, n.d.). The Kolm-Fleck
company and its rival, the Sascha Kolowrat studio, dominated Austrian film
production until the eve of the First World War.
The 1910 Kolm-Fleck production of Der Müller und sein Kind/The Miller and His
Child is today considered the first true Austrian feature film; it was adapted from
a five-act drama by Ernst Raupach that was first performed in Vienna in 1830
and became popular throughout the German-speaking world. The continued suc-
cess and growing visibility of the Kolm-Fleck productions enabled the studio to
expand its scope and, in 1910, it increased its production of feature films, opened
a distribution office, and began publishing a weekly newsletter. Die Glückspuppe/
Doll of Happiness (1911) was co-written and directed by the team of Louise Kolm,
Anton Kolm, Jakob Fleck, and Claudius Veltée, displaying a more sophisticated
style of film writing, acting and music composition for the first time in Austria.
The premiere of the second version of the Kolm-Fleck Der Müller und sein Kind
on 21 October 1911, again adapted by Louise Kolm, signalled the strength of
feature film production in Austria. Two more films were made by the original
Kolm-Fleck company: Das goldene Wiener Herz/The Golden Viennese Heart (1911)
and Trilby (1912), which was based on the popular novel by George du Maurier,
and co-written and directed by Louise and Anton Kolm, Fleck and Veltée. Trilby
tells the story of a Hungarian musician who controls his singing protégée by
hypnosis.
Louise and Anton Kolm disagreed with a financial investor in their film com-
pany and left with Jakob Fleck and Claudius Veltée, in early 1912, to form a new
company, Wiener Kunstfilm (Viennese Art Film), which had a new studio and
sound stages in Vienna’s seventh district. The theatre drama Der Unbekannte/
The Unknown Man was to become the Kunstfilm company’s first production,
directed by Louise Kolm. Despite the success of the film, Louise Kolm preferred
co-direction, and shared the creation, as she did with many of her scripts, with
Anton Kolm, and her second husband, Jakob Fleck. Apparently, Louise Kolm and
her husband worked as a ‘committee’ on the set although Louise had the more
dominant voice in writing and acting direction, particularly in her work with
second husband, Jakob Fleck.
Most of the films made during this prolific phase of the Kolm-Fleck partnership
were progressive social dramas, and included the 1913 production Der Psychiater/
The Psychiatrist, also known as Das Proletarierherz/The Heart of the Proletarian. An
attempt at melding documentary, operetta and feature film on a subject which
has become one of the more popular ‘Austrian’ themes in international film his-
tory, Johann Strauss an der schönen blauen Donau/Johann Strauss on the Beautiful
Blue Danube in 1913, was a misfire despite its lavish conception and a premiere
which coincided with the unveiling of the Johann Strauss Memorial in Vienna’s
City Park.
Die Hochzeit von Valeni/The Wedding of Valeni (1914) was the Kolm-Flecks’ most
successful production on the eve of the First World War. Unlike previous theatre-
based films that cut back the drama to a skeletal plot, Louise Kolm sought to
extend the narrative of the Valeni film to include more character background and
motivation, setting the standard for future cinematic treatments of theatrical and
literary properties. Perhaps the pinnacle of all Kolm-Fleck artistry, Der Pfarrer von
Kirchfeld/The Priest of Kirchfeld (1914), based on the work by Austrian naturalist
playwright Ludwig Anzengruber, followed, the combination of famous actors,
beautiful nature photography, and Viennese literary credentials ensuring its suc-
cess (Nepf 1999: 29). The Kunstfilm company was also significant in bringing
the Great War into cinemas. Co-written and directed by Louise and Anton Kolm,
these features melded heroic notions with sentimental drama and rousing mel-
ody or song and include Mit Herz und Hand fürs Vaterland/With Heart and Hand
for the Fatherland (1915), with war songs by operetta great Franz Lehár, Mit Gott
für Kaiser und Reich/With God for Emperor and Empire (1916), and the 1918 drama
Freier Dienst/Voluntary Service.
Not all production was dedicated to war propaganda. The Kolm-Fleck team co-
adapted Austrian folk-dramatist Ferdinand Raimund’s (1790–1836) magical tale
Der Verschwender/The Spendthrift in 1917.
Austria 223
Louise Kolm’s desire to break with traditional gender norms is apparent in

several of her scripts; Liane Haid (1895–2000), the first true Austrian film star,
took on the lead role in Eva, die Sünde/Eva, The Sin (1920), in which she portrays
a femme fatale who attempts to seduce a monk. She also adapted work by Rudolf
Hawel, Louis Taufstein, Eugène Brieux, and Henrik Ibsen for silent film.
With the collapse of the Empire and the birth of the Austrian Republic,
Kunstfilm established a board of directors and renamed itself Vita-Film in 1919.
Following Anton Kolm’s death in 1922, Louise Kolm and Jakob Fleck disassoci-
ated themselves from Vita-Film and relocated to Berlin in 1923, where they mar-
ried. Louise continued to write and co-direct, now with her second husband and
under the name Louise Fleck. The couple then wrote and directed close to forty
German silent features for the Hegewald-Film company owned by Liddy (aka
Lydie) Hegewald, Berlin’s female film mogul, between 1923 and 1933. Among the
‘Austrian’ films made in Berlin was the Flecks’ second version of Der Pfarrer von
Kirchfeld in 1926, starring an unknown German actor who was to become a major
Hollywood director, Wilhelm (William) Dieterle.
Having left Berlin upon Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 and returned to
Vienna, Louise and Jakob Fleck brought the icon of the lost Empire to sound film
in Unser Kaiser/Our Emperor (1933). The film was an attempt to define sovereign
identity in the face of German designs for annexation by encouraging a nos-
talgia for the lost polyglot Empire. Following this film, the Flecks concentrated
on Austrian co-productions with Czechoslovakia, co-writing and directing two
films in Prague (with Louise Kolm-Fleck’s son, Walter Kolm-Veltée), both pro-
duced by a Brno-based company: the marriage farce, Csardas/Czardas (1935), and
the Heimatfilm, Der Wilderer von Egerland/The Poacher from Egerland (1935). The
Flecks, who had been so instrumental in developing socio-critical melodramas in
Austrian cinema, carried their ideology into other genres where, according to offi-
cial criticism of the time, it was misplaced. The press considered Csardas a tasteless
comedy due to the ‘too liberated’ persona of the female lead role (Loacker and
Prucher 2000: 152). Nevertheless, Louise Fleck’s script had succeeded in reaching
far beyond the limited or repressed female image so common in film of the era.
The 1937 Austrian-Czechoslovakian co-production of Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld/
The Priest of Kirchfeld was the third film version of the Anzengruber drama by
Louise Fleck (the second co-directed with Jakob Fleck). Due to their pro-Austrian
stance and Jakob Fleck’s Jewish ancestry, the pioneering film couple were forbid-
den from working in the film industry after the German Anschluss in 1938. They
were arrested and Jakob Fleck was interned for sixteen months at Dachau and
Buchenwald concentration camps. Thanks to the financial assistance of William
Dieterle, the German émigré director in Hollywood who had launched his career
in the couple’s 1926 version of Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld, Fleck was released, and the
couple fled to Shanghai in 1940. There they created the first Austrian-Chinese film –
Söhne und Töchter der Welt aka Kinder der Welt/Sons and Daughters of the World aka
Children of the World) (1941) – co-written by Louise with the co-director, Chinese
filmmaker Mu Fei. The film premiered on 4 October 1941 in the Jindu Theatre in
Shanghai (Teng 1994; Rosdy 2001).
The Flecks returned to Vienna in 1947, hoping to achieve fame through the
mounting of postwar productions, but it was not to be. Louise Kolm-Fleck died
on 15 March 1950 in Vienna, followed three years later by her husband and
creative partner. Walter Kolm-Veltée, her son by her first husband, Anton Kolm,
continued the long family tradition into the Austrian Second Republic as a
director and founder of the Film Academy at Vienna’s University of Music and
Performing Arts.
Louise Kolm-Fleck wrote more than eighteen screenplays, co-directed over fifty
films, and co-produced 129 film projects, although several sources suggest these
numbers are conservative since Louise often put her husband’s name on her
own work (Dassanowsky 2004). Her legacy as one of the first women to take on
nearly all the roles in the process of filmmaking may have been reflected in her
preference for socially critical material, particularly films that suggest repression
by gender, class, or, as the Austrian/Catholic ideology of her 1937 version of Der
Pfarrer von Kirchfeld signifies, the defence of the nascent ‘Austrian Nation’ against
the designs of Nazism. Louise Kolm-Fleck was also an individualist who chose to
leave Vienna and the studio she helped build rather than be pressured by business
intrigues, and who remained with her Jewish second husband when she might
have escaped arrest and exile. Louise Kolm-Fleck found her personal and creative
identity in the transculturalism and progressive artistic hothouse of the last years
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Ida Jenbach (1868–1941?)
The previous lack of published information on Ida Jenbach is symptomatic of

the long scholarly neglect of Austrian cinema history, in and outside the coun-
try. With research, film restoration, and archival work only beginning in the last
decade of the twentieth century, much has been examined for the first time; this
includes the work of the few female artists behind the camera, and the careers of
those who perished in the Holocaust. The triple layer of cultural ‘amnesia’ sur-
rounding the work of screenwriter Ida Jenbach (as Austrian film talent, female
artist, and Shoah victim) is certainly a case in point.
Ida Jenbach, born Ida Jakobovits in Miskolez, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary),
studied acting at the Vienna Conservatory and made her stage debut in
Mannheim in 1888. She subsequently found acting work in theatrical produc-
tions in Vienna, Munich, Salzburg and Kronstadt. Jenbach was then employed
as the dramaturge for ‘Wiener Kunstfilm’ (Viennese Art Film), the studio where
Louise Kolm-Veltée was based, and she must have been influential in Jenbach’s
career. Her first recorded credits as screenwriter are for Der Giesel der Menscheit/
The Hostage of Mankind (1917), directed by Louise Kolm and Jakob Fleck, and Der
Schmuck der Herzogin/The Jewels of the Duchess (1917) for Sascha Kolowrat’s film
company, which she co-wrote with Edmund Porges. One or both of its writers
may very well have directed it. Just prior to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy, Jenbach scripted what is one of the few German-language detective
films of the era, Frauenehre/Women’s Honour (1918), directed by Georg Kundert.
Austria 225
Jenbach mostly wrote for the Austrian directors Hans Karl Breslauer and Max
Neufeld, helping to develop new genres for both of them. She was also a scenarist
for Carmen Cartellieri, a leading silent screen star who formed her own produc-
tion company, and created one of the first significant roles for future German-
language leading man and film director Willi Forst in Breslauer’s Oh, du lieber
Augustin/Dear Augustin (1922). Jenbach’s talent for neo-realistic melodrama and
on-location productions is shown in her screenplay for Strandgut/On the Beach
(1924), about a female shipwreck survivor who is rescued and pursued by two
brothers. The drama of a woman caught between the desires of two men, and the
equating of the female with dangerous natural forces, would become a popular
trope in the Bergfilm (mountain film) genre of the late 1920s and early 30s.
Jenbach’s best-known film is Die Stadt ohne Juden/The City without Jews (1924),
for which she adapted the popular satirical novel on anti-Semitism by Hugo
Bettauer. Directed by Breslauer, Jenbach’s script of Bettauer’s Novel about the
Day after Tomorrow, as it was subtitled, was met with more controversy than
the original publication of the novel, particularly in National Socialist and
other anti-Semitic circles. Literary critics tend to agree that Bettauer’s novel
was not intended as a visionary warning against a future expulsion of the Jews
from Austria, but functions as a wry commentary on the absurdity of bigotry.
Economic disaster in the city of Utopia (indicated to be Vienna) leads to the
expulsion of the Jews, who are then asked to return when the original problem
is only exacerbated by their expulsion. A romantic pairing also symbolically
reunites the divided culture. Jenbach contextualizes the novel’s satirical political
statement with a mollifying ending in which the film’s narrative is revealed to
have been a dream by an anti-Semite locked in an Expressionist, Dr Caligari-like
holding cell. Nevertheless, the subsequent murder of the author by a Nazi party
member resulted in a very limited release of the film. Alarmed theatre managers
made unauthorized cuts in prints when screenings were greeted with violence or
stink-bomb attacks.
Although she had not received a credit for film direction, Jenbach became the
only female member of the Austrian Directors Club (Loacker 2003). There is a
possibility that she assisted in the direction of Der Schmuck der Herzogin, and –
given Louise Kolm’s timidity regarding her own credits and her willingness to
share the directorial task – Jenbach might also have co-directed other scripts
she wrote for the Kolm-Fleck team and for actress-producer Carmen Cartellieri.
Writer-director Heinz Hanus, who had worked with the filmmaking couple at
the inception of studio production in Vienna, headed the club and it was with
Hanus and the founder of the Austrian Stage Association, Alfons Bolz-Feigl,
that Jenbach co-founded the Vereinigung aller am Filmschaffenden Österreichs
(Union of the Austrian Film Industry), more commonly known as the Filmbund,
in late 1922.
Jenbach again courted controversy with her adaptation of nineteenth-century
Austrian author Ludwig Anzengruber’s Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld/The Priest of
Kirchfeld (1926). It was the second of three film versions of the play to be directed
by Louise Kolm and Jakob Fleck. Although interpreted as a Heimatfilm (a rural
melodrama in which Catholicism and provincial tradition resolve conflict), the

aspects critical of Catholicism in Anzengruber’s naturalist drama are maintained
by Jenbach. Her pause in script production between 1928 and 1930 remains unex-
plained, but it may have been due to her need to adapt to the impact of sound
film. Jenbach had also worked as a journalist, film critic and foreign correspond-
ent, and in 1929 apparently published an article (as an unnamed reporter) in a
German magazine titled ‘Wien für Ton – aber gegen Sprechfilm’ (Vienna is for
Sound Film but against Talkies) (Loacker 2008: 47). When Jenbach returned to
scriptwriting, she worked in German film and again primarily for the Kolm-Fleck
team, which had moved to Berlin in 1923. Germany’s female silent picture mogul,
Lydie (aka Liddy) Hegewald, produced most of these features. Jenbach abandoned
the socially critical aspects of her earlier work and concentrated on operetta
and imperial-era romances, which became lavish audience pleasers (Hansch and
Waz 1998). Among them is her screenplay for Max Neufeld’s first sound film,
Opernredoute/Opera Ball (1931), which earned critical praise at its New York screen-
ing (Hall 1931) and was remade the following year in England as After the Ball
(1932), with only Neufeld receiving credit for the original script.
Because she was of Jewish extraction (although she claimed Protestant faith),
she and the Kolm-Fleck team were unable to continue to work in German
film after 1933. Jenbach’s final credit is as co-writer for the sound film Hoheit
tanzt Walzer/His Highness Waltzes (1935), a lavish ‘Viennese Film’-style operetta
directed by Max Neufeld. Produced in Prague, the film was simultaneously shot
in German, French (Valse éternelle), and Czech (Tanecek panny Márinky). With the
German ban on Jewish and other ‘unacceptable’ film artists, racial laws govern-
ing film imports from Austria, and Nazi infiltration of Austrian production, a
secondary ‘independent’ film industry had emerged in Vienna. This consisted
of films made mostly with Czechoslovakian and Hungarian studios by German
émigrés and Austrians not allowed to work in films exported to Nazi Germany.
Jenbach was well suited to this type of multicultural cinema, which concentrated
on internationally marketable contemporary, and often socially critical, comedy,
and it remains a mystery why she did not remain active in film. Two professional
relationships in the film industry certainly soured and may have been a factor in
her exit from film; Heinz Hanus, head of the Austrian film union she co-founded
with him, supported the outlawed Nazi party and provided ‘racial’ information
regarding performers and crew to producers (Dassanowsky 2005: 59), while direc-
tor Hans Karl Breslauer, who retreated from filmmaking after Die Stadt ohne Juden,
also became a Nazi party member in 1939 (Loacker 2000: 171).
Jenbach was forbidden to work following the German Anschluss in 1938, and in
1941 she was deported to the ghetto at Minsk and either perished there (the site
was liquidated in 1943) or at the nearby Maly Trostenets extermination camp. No
records survive. Ida Jenbach’s films and her considerable organizational involve-
ment with the Austrian film industry have been crucial to the ongoing research
on the female presence in early Central European film production. Her life and
work are no less important in understanding the female artistic response to the
creation and destruction of a democratic society.
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Leontine Sagan (1889–1974)
The early 1930s saw the brief but potent emergence of Austrian writer, director
and theatre pioneer Leontine Sagan, who is often mistaken for a German because
of her landmark film, Mädchen in Uniform/Girls in Uniform (Germany, 1931). Born
Leontine Schlesinger in Vienna, she began her career as an actor under the aus-
pices of theatre director Max Reinhardt. Sagan soon defied the male-dominated
world of theatre with her work as a stage director in Austria and Germany in the
1920s. After promoting several female dramatists, Sagan decided to base a film
on the drama Gestern und Heute/Yesterday and Today by German playwright Crista
Winsloe, which had already gained notoriety for its all-female cast. Sagan adapted
the stage work into her 1931 film, which she directed in Germany. In addition to
the female cast, it was also the first German-language film to be produced coop-
eratively, whereby those involved with the production obtained shares in the
film rather than a salary. The obvious financial and creative empowerment of the
female performers and crew as co-owners of the film should rank as a unique and
progressive development in international film production history, but its revolu-
tionary value has largely been forgotten.
Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform is remarkable on an ideological level. The story,
which takes place in an aristocratic girls’ boarding school, parodies Prussian mili-
tary values and male social constructs. The result is not only a criticism of these
aspects in German and Austrian culture, but of the displacement of women, their
lack of identity, and their problematic self-definition. In her 1979 study, Sexual
Stratagems, Nancy Scholar considers the film all the more remarkable ‘when we
consider the historical context in which it appeared’:
By 1931, Hitler was in the ascendancy … In this milieu, Sagan’s film appeared
overtly anti-nationalistic, anti-Prussian, anti-authoritarian, and surprisingly, a
separate ending, which was pro-fascist, was shown in Germany, and eventually
Goebbels had the film banned as unhealthy … The film departs radically from
convention in its open presentation of the possibilities of love between two
women. (Scholar 1979: 219)
Perhaps the film’s most fascinating aspect is the humanist non-conformism of the
teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck), who rejects the notion of being
a repressive male manqué to her female charges. The value of nurturing over a reg-
imented sense of discipline and the ‘difference’ of the female persona as a desir-
able human condition is a protofeminist statement that remains provocative even
today. The subsequent censorship of the film ultimately forced the director and
her crew to leave Germany, but in 1932 Sagan was asked by Austrian silent film
director Alexander Korda, then based in London, to co-script and direct Men of
Tomorrow in England. Sagan also eventually edited the film, which was intended
as a star vehicle for Korda’s protégée, Merle Oberon. It was a box-office failure,
but Sagan’s maverick work precipitated a call in 1934 from Hollywood producer
David O. Selznick. Unfortunately, the Hollywood practice of importing female
film writers and directors, patterned after the cultivation of such expatriate female
actors as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Luise Rainer and the Austrian Elisabeth
Bergner, did not materialize for Sagan.
With the Selznick call failing to develop into a serious offer, Sagan moved to
South Africa with her husband in 1939, returned to theatre direction and co-
founded the National Theatre of Johannesburg, with which she was still associ-
ated at her death in 1974. She returned to film only once more, as co-director in
George King’s collaborative musical, Showtime (Great Britain, 1946).
Valie Export (b. 1940)
Valie Export, born Waltraut Lehner in Linz, Austria, is a photographer, installa-

tion, performance and video artist, computer animator, sculptor, and arts and
feminist writer who successfully made the transition from the ‘expanded cinema’
experiments and abstract shorts of the mid 1960s to writing and directing narra-
tive feature films in the late 1970s and beyond. Working with her partner, Peter
Weibel, she created the Tapp und Tastkino/Touch Cinema (1968), which she called
the ‘first real woman’s film’ (Export 2003). This performance art action consisted
of inviting the viewer to insert their hands into a box strapped to Export’s chest
and was intended to transcend male-dominated cinema with a female material
destruction of cinematic illusion.
Export continued to redefine the spectator relationship and to extend filmic
conventions in other film ‘happenings’ such as Cutting (1967–8) and Der Kuß/The
Kiss (1968), which explored the value of the female body in a patriarchal soci-
ety. Her twelve-minute film, Mann&Frau&Animal/Man&Woman&Animal (1973),
returned to her Actionist roots, featuring, among other visuals, the artist filming
her menstruation in a visceral examination of gender and the ‘artistic nature of
blood’ (Export 2003).
In the 1970s Export garnered critical appreciation with her first feature, the
‘feminist science fiction’ film about female identity, Unsichtbare Gegner/Invisible
Adversaries (1978), which she directed and co-scripted with Peter Weibel. It is
now considered one of the few important Austrian films of that decade. In a
loosely structured tribute to Hollywood’s alien invasion films of the 1950s,
Anna, a photographer and video artist, comes to the shocking conclusion that
her alienation from an icy and technocratic lover and from male-dominated
society as a whole is the result of a body-snatching invasion of aliens from the
planet Hyksos.
A popular Austrian tabloid newspaper, Die Kronen Zeitung, launched a campaign
against the film, labelling it ‘perverse trash’ and condemning the government for
supporting its ‘call to anarchy’. Although Export’s work was selected by a jury for
the 1978 Austrian State Prize in the arts, Fred Sinowatz, the Minister of Education
and Culture, refused to award Export and gave no prize that year (Dassanowsky
2005: 199). She followed this scandal with another feminist feature, co-scripted by
Peter Weibel, Menschenfrauen/Human Women (1979), which examines four women
who rebel against male domination in their lives.
Austria 229
Export’s breakthrough outside Austria came with the popular political thriller
and feminist feature film Die Praxis der Liebe/The Practice of Love (1985), which she
wrote and directed. She satisfied the mainstream audience’s desire for suspense
entertainment without compromising her ideology and style, particularly regard-
ing the visual exploration of the female body. Export’s Praxis takes on the profes-
sional and personal ‘glass ceilings’ of a female television reporter who is trapped
in relationships with an emotionally unstable psychiatrist as well as a suspected
arms dealer. Export’s female archetype (Adelheid Arndt) comes to realize the
undemocratic aspects of the press and the government, as well as her repression
as a woman in society and her sexual relationships.
Export is recognized as one of the most important pioneers of the Austrian New
Wave, in addition to her role as an internationally influential feminist artist and
writer. Her early experimental films are included in the collection of the Museum
of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Reine
Sophia, Madrid; and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles,
among other venues. Since the late 1980s she has held various academic posi-
tions and, in the 1990s, has been the recipient of many Austrian arts prizes and
national awards, with her more recent art exhibited at major showings in Venice,
Kassel, Vienna, Bregenz, and Bolzano. She held a professorship in multimedia
performance at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne from 1995 to 2005.
Karin Brandauer (1946–92)
Karin Brandauer was born in Altaussee, Austria, and married Austrian stage and
screen actor Klaus Maria Brandauer. She wrote and directed over forty documen-
taries and literary adaptations, although she was a television director for the
most part, contributing greatly to the reputation of ORF productions, with her
dramas often being screened as theatrical features abroad. Her TV films of Arthur
Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie/The Way Outside (1982) and Peter Rosegger’s Erdsegen/
Earth Blessings (1986) brought wide attention to her elegant style and her adapta-
tion of the Heimatfilm (provincial melodrama) form. Brandauer’s docudrama, co-
written with Heide Kouba, about a village’s suffering during a mining strike in 1930,
Einstweilen wird es Mittag – Marienthal/Meanwhile it is Noon – Marienthal (1988), was
praised by critics for its sensitive study of the effects of rural unemployment.
Brandauer was one of the few Austrian filmmakers who offered intellectually
and emotionally satisfying period dramas following the collapse of commercial
film in the 1960s. These were meticulous in their attention to historical detail,
for example her work on Tyrolean playwright Felix Mitterer’s Verkaufte Heimat/
Bartered Homeland (1989) (Elsaesser 1999: 44). She co-wrote and directed two epi-
sodes of a four-part miniseries about the post-war effect of Mussolini’s sham 1939
referendum regarding Austria’s truncated South Tyrol province, which the Allies
had ceded to Italy following the First World War (Brennende Lieb’/Burning Love and
Leb’ wohl du mein Südtirol/Farewell, My South Tyrol). After Brandauer’s death, stage,
opera and television director Gernot Friedel (1941–) directed the postwar episodes
she had co-written (Feuernacht/Fire Night and Komplott/Plot) in 1994. Brandauer’s
final work as writer-director was based on the novel by Erich Hackl, and focused
on the plight of a gypsy girl who is taken from her ‘Aryan’ foster parents by the
Nazi regime and placed into a concentration camp. She completed the script for
Die Wand/The Wall before her death from cancer aged 47. Her husband directed
the film based on her script in 1999.
Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952)
Born in Vienna, Ruth Beckermann studied journalism and history of art there
as well as in Tel Aviv and New York. She went on to write for several Austrian
and Swiss magazines, beginning her impressive run of documentaries in 1983
with Wien retour/Vienna Return, which she wrote and co-directed with Josef
Aichholzer. The film approaches the eras of the Austrian First Republic (1919–33),
Austrofascism (1934–8), and Nazism (1938–45) through the recollections of Jewish
writer, historian and communist Franz West. Her own Jewish identity is explored
in Die papierene Brücke/The Paper Bridge (1987) as Beckermann, the daughter of an
Austro-Hungarian Jewish family, journeys to Czernowitz in Bukovina (now in the
Ukraine) to trace her father’s idealized recollections of his life there. Beckermann’s
reasons for the documentary are both personal and theoretical: ‘What I had in
mind was not only to trace the few clues to my family history but also to find out
how the proven and the narrated historical narrative strands would blend in with
my own experiences and emotions’ (Steiner 1995: 105).
Her next film, Nach Jerusalem/Towards Jerusalem (1990), is a mosaic of diverse
landscapes and ethnic images that examines ‘what happened to the dream of
a Jewish homeland’ (Beckermann n.d.) and completes her trilogy on Jewish
identity. Conflating memory and representation, Beckermann often explores
commonplace locations that do not in themselves display a past in order to re-
imprint them with both personal and historical events. Reassigning the past onto
the present, Jenseits des Krieges/East of War (1996) uncovers atrocities committed
by the German Wehrmacht or army (previously attributed only to the SS) on the
Eastern Front.
In an even more prismatic vision of Beckermann’s own journey as woman and
artist, Ein flüchtiger Zug nach dem Orient/A Fast Train to the Orient (1999) attempts
to take space out of time to free it for memory. Fascinated by the journeys and
significant writing talents of Empress Elisabeth and her iconization as ‘Sissi’ in
Austrian popular culture and film, Beckermann suggests an unseen Elisabeth on
a train, fleeing the constraints of the imperial Viennese court. Contemporary
images of Cairo are accompanied by voiceover readings from her diaries.
Beckermann’s documentary Zorro’s Bar Mitzvah (2006) not only explores the
renewed Jewish culture in Vienna, but also this ethnically mixed group’s main-
tenance of a series of homelands (Guenther 2011: 74–5). ‘This film accompanies
four 12-year-olds – Sharon, Tom, Moishy and Sophie – as they prepare for their
bar or bat mitzvot. It takes a critical and ironic look at Jewish tradition and its
interpretations, questions the significance of initiation rituals, and attempts to
explore the diffuse terrain of adolescence’ (Beckermann n.d.). While American
Austria 231
Passages (2011) offers a panorama of Obama-era America and a wide collection

of Americans discussing their contrasting American Dreams, ‘[it] is an associa-
tive journey through the United States: a disillusioned Iraq veteran, gay adoptive
fathers, black judges, white party animals and a pimp at a casino table in Las
Vegas’ (Beckermann n.d.).
Film historian Christina Guenther describes Beckermann’s films as constructing
a ‘counter memory’, which challenges ‘the dominant narrative of Austrian his-
tory and national identity’. As a screenwriter, Guenther argues, Beckermann is an
experimental ethnographer who is ‘less interested in representing “other” cultures
than … [in] reflecting on the discourse of culture in representation’ (Guenther
2011: 65).
Barbara Albert (b. 1970)
A new era in Austrian film was heralded at the 1999 Venice Film Festival, when
critics praised the work of emerging filmmaker Barbara Albert. After writing and
directing several short films and a documentary, Albert co-wrote and directed
the feature film Alles Bunt und Wunderbar/Slidin’ with Reinhard Jud and Michael
Grimm in 1998. The film is an intertwined trilogy focusing on the countercul-
ture of the teenage world, which foreshadowed her breakthrough, Nordrand/
North Side, aka City Skirts (1999), and also dealt with the topic that most fasci-
nates Albert – the loss of innocence. Written by Albert with cinematography by
Christine Maier, Nordrand focuses on two women (played by Nina Proll and Edita
Malovcic) whose lives attract other young people of different ethnic and socio-
cultural backgrounds: a Romanian immigrant, a Bosnian refugee, and an Austrian
who has just completed his military service. Seeking self-realization, emotional
support, and concerned with bringing children into this world, they live in a
housing project on Vienna’s north side, and flounder between memories of the
war in Yugoslavia, temporary jobs, and unwanted pregnancies until they finally
drift apart. Albert sets inserts from television news, flashbacks, symbolic montages
and spaces of impermanence (bars, discos, underground passages, shopping areas,
streets) against the characters’ desire for stability and control. In a more authentic
manner than Michael Haneke’s French-based ‘Austrian’ cinema, Albert populates
her films with the ethnicities that make up Vienna, and have always been a part
of the city and its culture.
Albert, who had won laurels for her short film work and co-founded the COOP
99 production company, attained widespread critical acclaim for this ‘small’ film,
which also generated significant box-office receipts and garnered Nina Proll the
Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Best Newcomer Actress. There were rumours that
American festivals and the Oscars ignored her film because of fallout from the
EU boycott of Vienna’s government coalition with the xenophobic party of right-
wing politician Jörg Haider. The films success, however, did not launch Albert into
the rapid production of new work. As she explains, ‘I am not a director who con-
siders the shoot the most creative aspect of the production process. I am always
expending a great deal of energy. I first have to feel relaxed enough to think about
what I want to say in my next story’ (Schiefer 2000a: 15). Albert’s screenwriting
tends to underscore ‘characters in contemporary Austria who are trapped in diffi-
cult social or political situations and in unfulfilling everyday routines’ (Wauchope
2011: 120). Certainly, as Meyer argues, ‘nostalgia and politically regressive notions
of Austria have been banished’ from Albert’s films, and both public and private
spaces tend to be universal in terms of a postmodern industrialized nation (Meyer
2011: 96).
Zur Lage/Situation Report (2001) is a documentary written and directed by Albert
and three leading male New Austrian Film directors, Michael Glawogger, Ulrich
Seidl, and Michael Sturminger, that critically explores the political and social atmos-
phere under Austria’s neo-conservative coalition government formed in 1999.
Albert’s next fiction film, Böse Zellen/Free Radicals (2003), again shows her vir-
tuosity in writing for and working with ensemble casts on the subject of contem-
porary alienation, this time in a more philosophical film created around the idea
of the ‘butterfly effect’. Her film begins with a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico,
whose sole survivor, Manu (Kathrin Resetarits), is later killed in an automobile
accident. Manu becomes the hub of several parallel stories involving her troubled
surviving family and friends, haunted by the irony and unpredictability of life as
they fight off abuse and loneliness. A pastiche of the coming-of-age, thriller, and
erotic film genres, the film hovers disturbingly between existentialist choice and
the incomprehensibility of fatalism.
Albert has contributed to or co-written scripts for other women filmmakers
including Ruth Mader’s debut feature (with Martin Leidenfrost), Struggle (2003),
and Nina Kusturica’s feature Auswege/Sign of Escape (2003). She was one of the
twenty-six writer-directors involved with the European comedic-episodic film
Visions of Europe (2004), then co-wrote Slumming (2006) with its director Michael
Glawogger, and was a collaborating writer on Swiss filmmaker Andrea Staka’s
Fräulein (2006). Albert followed these projects with two significant features, which
she also wrote: Fallen/Falling (2006) and Die Lebenden/The Dead and the Living
(2012). Fallen deals with the reunion of five women who have not seen each
other for fifteen years and meet at the funeral of their former male professor. The
film might be considered the final part of a trilogy (begun with Nordrand and Böse
Zellen) focusing on alienation in contemporary Austria, particularly as manifested
in the female experience of a globalist, consumerist society (Meyer: 2011).
Die Lebenden approaches the topic of the Holocaust through the explorations
of Sita, a young Austro-Romanian living in Berlin, who discovers her 95-year-old
grandfather may have been a member of the SS. To trace his involvement with
Nazism she travels to Vienna, Poland and Romania, where she not only wants
to find out the truth but must confront her family’s silence about the past. It
is perhaps Albert’s most personal film to date, as her script is based on her own
discovery of her grandfather’s involvement with Nazism. Albert reflects on such a
terrible heritage: ‘for grandchildren, it’s much more bearable than for the children
because there is already a certain distance’ (Arteaga 2012). Ironically, Albert’s own
‘accidental’ confrontation with this life-changing knowledge mirrors aspects of
her early screenplays and the revelatory experiences of her characters.
Austria 233
Mirjam Unger (b. 1970)
Born in Kosterneuburg, near Vienna, Unger has been a radio and television
journalist, a photographer, and was a student at the Vienna Film Academy. She
emerged from a spell of making short films with her writing/directing feature
debut Ternitz, Tennessee (2000). The film takes on the fanciful and generally out-
moded European notion of escaping a small town for a Hollywood-style happy
ending in America. It suggests the universality of late-twentieth-century popular
culture and parodies the Hollywood road movie, romantic adventure films, and
the female ‘buddy movie’. Unger claims the major influence on her creation of
a postmodern, television-based ‘fantasy in pink’ that plays out in a world that
doesn’t exist in reality, is American underground-turned-camp director John
Waters’ Cry Baby (1990) (Schiefer 2000b: 4). In Ternitz, Tennessee (2000), Betty
(Sonja Romei), a dog groomer, and her friend Lilly (Nina Proll), a car mechanic
who drives a red Mustang and longs for Pamela Anderson-sized silicone breast
implants, set their sights on a television host/Elvis impersonator and an African-
American stagehand and former rodeo performer from Memphis, seeing them
as their love-tickets out of Ternitz. Unger followed this tongue-in-cheek, play-
ful script with two distinctive documentaries. Her 2007 Wiens Verlorene Töchter/
Vienna’s Lost Daughters (written with Sonja Ammann and Lisa Juen) surveys the
lives of eight women who were forced to flee Austria at the Nazi German annexa-
tion in 1938 because of their Jewish heritage, and now live in or around New
York City. Unger attempts to comprehend their view of history and identity as
Austrian-born Americans, but also their relationship to Vienna, its culture and its
history, as women and members of a former Jewish community there. The film
received the Audience Award at the Austrian Diagonale film festival in 2007.
In 2012 Unger co-wrote, with Veronika Weidinger, and directed Oh Yeah, She
Performs, a documentary about four female Austrian pop/rock musicians who will
not compromise their multitalented creativity and non-conformist lives: Gustav
aka Eva Jantschitsch, Clara Luzia, Teresa Rotschopff (a member of the band Bunny
Lake), and Luise Pop, who also fronts a band as singer, writer and guitarist. Unger
explains her motivations for creating the film:
From the moment I had the initial idea for this film, I also wanted to make
it for my daughter, who is 17 now and will go into the world with a new
sense of self-awareness – a world where women strive to create their own role
models and tackle re-emerging stereotypes. This film is a road map to a (yet-
to-be-established) utopian world, where the battle of the sexes no longer exists
because society has outgrown it; a world where men and women respect and
support each other and work together on the vision and sound of a new era of
equality. (Unger 2013)
Whether creating a satire on the driving force of popular culture in self-realization,

tracing the creative desires of women pop/rock singers, or dealing with the memo-
ries of Viennese women who fled Nazism as children in 1938, the commonality
in Unger’s writing is her desire to locate and explore a subjective, female-centred

‘normality’ outside male-dominated social conventions and identities.
Jessica Hausner (b. 1972)
Born in Vienna, Hausner began her film writing and directing career as a student
of both Michael Haneke and Wolfgang Glück. Her short films were well received
by the public and press, but it was her debut feature film, Lovely Rita (2000), which
Hausner both wrote and directed, that contributed, along with Michael Haneke’s
Die Klavierspielerin/The Piano Teacher (2001), to the international emergence of
New Austrian Film at Cannes in 2001. Lovely Rita generated much discussion
about Hausner’s vision of the teenage outsider. Unlike the more established
Haneke, and perhaps for financial reasons, Hausner’s early work tends to adhere
to the minimalist dictates of the Dogme movement. As critic Roman Scheiber,
a reporter on the Austrian film scene for Variety’s International Film Guide noted
at the time, Hausner is a ‘good example of how young Austrian filmmakers can
make rapid progress – if they get enough money to put their visions on screen’
(Scheiber 2002: 85). At a reception at Vienna’s city hall celebrating Haneke,
Hausner and producer Veit Heidruschka, the cinema-friendly City Councillor for
the Arts, Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, responded by referring to ‘these historic days
at Cannes’ (OTS 2001) and appealed to the Austrian media, particularly to the
ORF, to maintain its financial partnership with the impoverished film sector.
Film scholar Catherine Wheatley points out that the films of Hausner, along
with those of Barbara Albert and the German-born Valeska Griesbach, who works
in both German and Austrian film, are ‘notable for their deployment of what
might be termed a “feminine aesthetic,” which draws on modernist devices
not to produce a Brechtian alienation effect in service of an ideological agenda,
but rather to encourage spectatorial engagement with a plurality of meanings’
(Wheatley 2011: 137). Hausner moved into more stylized writing and direction
with her second feature, Hotel (2004), also screened at Cannes, in which a young
woman (Franziska Weisz), working as a receptionist in a luxury mountain resort
hotel, stumbles upon the mysterious circumstances of her predecessor’s disap-
pearance. She is pulled into a maze of secrets and false conclusions, until her
own identity and possible fate begins to replicate those of the victim. Although
referencing the crime thriller, Hausner avoids formula and concentrates on more
Hitchcockian themes of perception, the interpretation of reality, and fear of the
unknown. Unlike the almost documentary feel of Lovely Rita, the anxiety and
paranoia of Hotel is aided by a more distant and stylish look, which enforces the
façade of beauty, control and safety (Dassanowsky 2005: 282).
Following her work as producer of German director Benjamin Heisenberg’s
German/Austrian feature Schläfer/Sleeper (2005) and her short Toast (2006),
Hausner returned to feature films with the Austrian-French production of Lourdes
(2009). Once again revealing Hitchcock’s influence on her writing and directing,
Unger’s drama about Christine (Sylvie Testud), a multiple sclerosis patient bound
to a wheelchair, follows her journey to the pilgrimage site of Lourdes despite her
Austria 235
dismissal of faith in God. When a ‘miracle’ does happen and her limbs heal, the
Catholic Church refuses to record the event before medical examination and
advice is given. But the event becomes a near ‘MacGuffin’ as the film moves away
from the ‘miracle’ itself and instead explores the different psychological and emo-
tional effects that it has on those surrounding Christine. Hausner explains that,
just as she made a horror film without a monster (Hotel), so this film is a very un-
miraculous attempt at portraying a ‘miracle’. Lourdes can be seen as a metaphor for
self-realization but also a consideration of the strong forces that have influence in
one’s life, ‘regardless if they are called coincidence, luck or God ...’ (Hausner n.d.).
The film garnered Hausner four major awards at the 2009 Venice Film Festival,
including the FIPRESCI Prize; two awards at the 2009 Warsaw Film Festival, includ-
ing the Grand Prix; and three at the 2011 Viennale for Best Film, Best Director, and
Best Screenplay, as well as other international film festival prizes.
Jessica Hausner revised the historical biopic in her feature for 2014, Amour Fou.
Written and directed by Hausner, her screenplay is, she notes, ‘inspired by the
life and death of the poet Heinrich von Kleist and his partner in death, Henriette
Vogel. However, rather than being a biographical portrait, the film is a parable
about the ambivalence of love’, the inescapability of death, and the desire to
forestall its ultimate isolation. After failing to find a personal formula for happi-
ness and success as a Romantic, German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811)
came to understand life as a collection of illusions that disallowed fulfilment and
harmony, and his later writings are masterworks on the theme of irony. Hausner’s
overriding theme of the individual’s desire to understand the codes of human
social behaviour has become more philosophical since Hotel, and Amour Fou more
directly approaches the metaphysics that Lourdes suggested.
Ruth Mader (b. 1974)
Ruth Mader was born in Vienna and attended the Vienna Film Academy as a
student of film direction. Her 2003 feature debut, Struggle, scripted with Barbara
Albert and Martin Leidenfrost, underscored her concern for the difficult lives of
the underclass she examined in such early short films as Endstation obdachlos/End
Station: Homeless (1992), Gfrasta (1998), about life in a housing development on
the outskirts of Vienna, which received the 1999 German Max Ophüls Award in
the short film category, and the eleven-minute ‘propaganda film’, Null Defizit/
Zero Deficit (2001), which was screened as part of the official selection at Cannes
in 2001.
Struggle follows the lives of two troubled, even desperate, characters: a Polish
woman (Aleksandra Justa) who has moved to Austria, finds work in a turkey-pro-
cessing plant, as a berry picker and as a cleaning woman, in order to better provide
for her young daughter, and a wealthy, divorced Austrian who seeks diversion
from his unfulfilling life with sex and sadomasochism. Ultimately, their lives are
altered when they meet in a swinger’s club. Abandoning a classical narrative for
the sake of an ‘anti-dramatic’ exploration of the dehumanization and alienation
of various work environments, the intersecting stories also relate to the collision
of two classes and geopolitical worlds: the woman represents the impoverished
yet hopeful Eastern Europe while the man embodies a hollow consumerist and
‘emotionally bankrupted’ West.
Mader dismisses the Cannes critics who compare her film style to that of
Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, or a mix of both. Unlike their male gaze, which is
disturbingly voyeuristic and often dialogue-laden, Mader and the other women
of New Austrian Film, such as Barbara Albert and Jessica Hausner, utilize a more
neutral, distant camera, and leave much to the imagination. Since Mader wants to
show what ‘cannot even be conveyed with words’, dialogue is noticeably limited
in her scripts. Mader also rails against television, which in its rapid and expedient
product orientation, she argues, has ‘ruined’ actors for the thoughtful, detailed
work of motion pictures (Greuling 2003: 10–13). Catherine Wheatley considers
Mader’s Struggle, and her work as a whole, to be the most ‘politically engaged’
of any woman working in New Austrian Film and closer to the ‘overt social cri-
tiques of Ulrich Seidl than films such as Lovely Rita (Hausner) or Sehnsucht/Longing
(Griesbach) …’ (Wheatley 2011: 144–5).
Mader returned to documentary writing and directing with her feature What
is Love? in 2012. The film, which is divided into five segments, each depicting
marriage, family, happiness, loneliness and fulfilment, is influenced by the clas-
sical portrait photography of Walker Evans and August Sander. Mader believes
that, although it is a film primarily about Austrian society, it deals with universal
themes about the possibility of love in modern life (Schiefer 2013).
References
Arteaga, J. 2012. ‘The Dead and the Living: My Grandfather was a Nazi’, Cineuropa. Available
at: http://cineuropa.org/nw.aspx?t=newsdetail&l=en&did=226698 (accessed 8 April 2013).
Beckermann, R. n.d. ‘Ruth Beckermann’. Available at: http://www.ruthbeckermann.com
Dassanowsky, R. 2004. ‘Great Directors Series: Louise Kolm-Fleck’, Senses of Cinema. Available
at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/kolm_fleck (accessed 8 April 2013).
Dassanowsky, R. 2005. Austrian Cinema: A History. Jefferson, NC and London: MacFarland.
Elsaesser, T., with M. Wedel. 1999. The BFI Companion to German Cinema. London: BFI.
Export, V. 2003. ‘Expanded Cinemas Expanded Reality’, Senses of Cinema. Available at:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/28/expanded_cinema (accessed 8 April 2013).
Greuling, M. 2003. ‘Der Existenzkampf wird härter: Ruth Mader’, Celluloid, 2: 10–13.
Guenther, C. 2011. ‘Cartographies of Identity: Memory and History in Ruth Beckermann’s
Documentary Films’, in R. Dassanowsky and O. C. Speck (eds) New Austrian Film. New York
and Oxford: Berghahn.
Hall, M. 1931. ‘Opera Ball at Carnegie Playhouse’, The Screen, New York Times, 6 November.
Available at: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E0CE0D6123BE23ABC4E53
DFB767838A629EDE (accessed 8 April 2013).
Halter, E. 2003. ‘Das Experiment’, The Village Voice, 12–18 November. Available at: http://
www.villagevoice.com/2003-11-11/film/das-experiment/full (accessed 8 April 2013).
Hansch, G., and G. Waz. n.d. ‘Biographie Luise Kolm (=Luise Fleck)’, Deutsches Filminstitut
Biographien [unpublished].
Hansch, G., and G. Waz. 1998. Filmpionierinnen in Deutschland. Ein Beitrag zur
Filmgeschichtsschriebung, Berlin [unpublished].
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8 April 2013).
Loacker, A. 2000. ‘Johann Karl Breslauer’, in G. Geser and A. Loacker (eds) Die Stadt ohne
Juden. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, pp. 169–71.
Loacker, A. 2003. ‘Kino vor dem KZ. Österreichische Filmschaffende als NS-Opfer’,
Filmarchiv, 7.
Loacker, A. 2008. ‘Max Neufeld: Schauspieler, Regisseur, Produzent. Ein biographischer
Abriss’, in A. Loacker (ed.) Kunst der Routine. Der Schauspieler und Regisseur Max Neufeld.
Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, pp. 10–87.
Loacker, A., and M. Prucha. 2000. ‘Die unabhängigen Filme – eine kommentierte
Filmographie’, in A. Loacker and M. Prucha (eds) Unerwünschtes Kino: Der deutschsprachige
Emigrantenfilm 1934–1937. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, pp. 139–98.
Meyer, I. 2011. ‘Metonymic Visions: Globalization, Consumer Culture, and Mediated Affect
in Barbara Albert’s Böse Zellen’, in R. Dassanowsky and O. C. Speck (eds) New Austrian Film.
New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 94–107.
Nepf, M. 1999. ‘Die ersten Filmpioniere in Österreich. Die Aufbauarbeit von Anton Kolm.
Louise Veltée/Kolm/Fleck und Jakob Fleck bis zu Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs’, Elektrische
Schatten: Beiträge zur Österreichischen Stummfilmgeschichte. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria,
pp. 11–36.
OTS Press Service. 2001. ‘Rathaus-und ORF-Gratulation für Michael Haneke’, 22 May.
Rosdy, P. 2001. ‘Emigration und Film’, Zwischenwelt: Zeitschrift für Kultur des Exils und des
Wiederstands, 2: 61–5.
Scheiber, R. 2002. ‘Austria’, in P. Cowie (ed.) Variety International Film Guide 2001. London:
Variety, p. 85.
Schiefer, K. 2000a. ‘A Stormy Winter: Barbara Albert’, Austria Kultur, 10 (3): 15.
Schiefer, K. 2000b. ‘Go West: Ternitz, Tennessee’, Austrian Film News, 2: 4–5.
Schiefer, K. 2013. ‘Ruth Mader – What is Love? – Interview’, Austrian Film Commission. Available
at: http://www.afc.at/jart/prj3/afc/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=
1164272180506&artikel_id=1322554784018 (accessed 8 April 2013).
Scholar, N. 1979. ‘Leontine Sagan’, in P. Erens (ed.) Sexual Stratagems. New York: Horizon,
p. 219.
Steiner, G. 1995. Film Book Austria. Vienna: Bundespressedienst.
Teng, G. 1994. ‘Fluchtpunkt Shanghai. Louise und Jakob Fleck in China 1939–1946’,
Filmexil, 4: 50–8
Wauchope, M. 2011. ‘Place and Space of Contemporary Austria in Barbara Albert’s Feature
Films’, in R. Dassanowsky and O. C. Speck (eds) New Austrian Film. New York and Oxford:
Berghahn, pp. 108–21.
Wheatley, C. 2011. ‘Not Politics but People: The “Feminine Aesthetic” of Valeska Grisebach
and Jessica Hausner’, in R. Dassanowsky and O. C. Speck (eds) New Austrian Film. New York
and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 136–47.
Belgium
Ronald Geerts
As Fowler (2010: 257) notes, the history of Belgian film is a ‘relatively ill-defined
field’. This is certainly true of the history of Belgian female screenwriters who,
despite being in the minority, have played a vital role in the development of
scriptwriting in Belgian film and have gained a prominent place in film history
by taking artistic and producer control over their work. A number of women
writers-directors have put their stamp on Belgian cinema: Anna Frijters was an
early pioneer, as was Edith Kiel who was important in the 1930s and continued
to work into the 1950s and early 1960s, while Chantal Akerman put Belgian
film on the map in the 1970s, and in the 1980s Marion Hänsel’s work has
received great acclaim. In the twenty-first century a new generation of women
writers-directors has emerged who have produced a corpus of highly personal
and intimate films; two of these, Patrice Toye and Fien Troch, are discussed in
more detail below.
The limited scope of this entry leaves out other domains in which women
writers have had some impact, such as documentary film. Lydia Chagoll, for
instance, a Dutch-born Jewish former ballet dancer and choreographer, wrote and
directed documentaries about the Second World War of which In de naam van
de Führer/In the Name of the Führer (1977) is the best known. Anne Levy-Morelle
made highly personal documentary films, for example Le rêve de Gabriel/Gabriel’s
Dream (1998) in which she traces the emigration in 1948 of a Belgian family patri-
arch to inhospitable Patagonia, or Manneken Pis, l’enfant qui pleure/Manneken Pis,
the Child Who’s Crying (2008), about the city of Brussels.
Belgian film, from the beginning of the sound film era, became ‘a “split screen”
divided between its Flemish (Dutch-language) and French-language components’
(Mosley 2001: 5). In the early 1960s, when the Belgian unitary state began its
gradual development toward a federal state with three communities (Flemish-,
French- and German-speaking), the ‘split screen’ became even more evident
(Overbergh 2011: 12–16). Mosley argues that Belgian cinema can be considered ‘as
a cultural system [...] within its own history and in its relationships to the Belgian
nation-state’ (2001: 7).
238
Belgium 239
The early days
Although cinemagoing had become a very popular pastime, there was no film pro-
duction of any significance in Belgium until the early 1920s (De Poorter 1997: 30;
Convents 2000). Yet, acting and film schools were very popular and it was at one
of these acting classes in 1921 that four film fans from Antwerp met and decided
to produce their own film. The result was Verdwaalde zielen/Lost Souls (1923), a
melodrama about a country girl and a philanderer she meets who takes her to the
big city (Geens 1986: 40–1; Geens 1988: 84). It was two years before the film was
finished and, sadly, only two of the three reels survive today. Besides the four fans,
the screenwriting credits mention two women,’Ms Dubrulle’ and ‘Ms Claes’. The
film was not a success, in part because of the amateurish acting (Geens 1988: 83).
Aimée Navarra (n.d.) was the first Belgian woman director, yet she is largely for-
gotten today and not even mentioned in Sojcher’s La Kermesse Héroique du Cinéma
Belge/The Heroic Fair of Belgian Cinema (1999). Navarra also co-wrote ,with Abbé
De Moor, her 1923 Coeurs Belges/Belgian Hearts, which is considered by Christel
Stalpaert to be more than a patriotic First World War melodrama as it contains the
early signs of a critique of gender equality (2002: 365–6).
Anna Frijters (1889–1966)
A copy of the 1928 movie Leentje van de zee/Peggy of the Sea, once considered lost,
was discovered in 1986. The author of the screenplay was Anna Frijters (née Anna
Velders), who also published in newspapers and journals. She and her husband
François Frijters, a diamond worker, travelled to the United States where they met
Ruth Roland, a Hollywood film star. The meeting turned out to be inspiring and,
on the advice of Roland, Anna Frijters wrote a screenplay in English, which she
entered in a contest held by the Brewster publishing company (which owned sev-
eral film fan magazines) in 1925. It won second prize and, as a Flemish counter-
part of Brewster’s Motion Picture Magazine triumphantly exclaimed, ‘And look, the
puny entry from this tiny country attracted the attention of the jury. In the classic
country of the Silent Art it was not considered as futile as some suggested over
here. It even passed a second selection round and after the third ... it remained
intact and undamaged, claiming the laurel. The puny entry has become a screen-
play, approved by American professionals’ (Geens 1986: 50).1 The Frijters insisted
on keeping artistic control over their project and rejected offers from American
studios to produce the film as well as fielding interest from the UFA studio in
Germany (Geens 1988: 84). Instead they built a film studio near Antwerp with
some help from American friends, and possibly Ruth Roland, who sent make-up
from California. The production itself, despite the destruction of the studio by
a storm, became a media event. It took until 1928 to finish Leentje van de zee/
Peggy from the Sea and by then sound film was arriving. Reviews mention that the
first and possibly only screening was not the success the makers had hoped for
(Geens 1986: 51; Thys 1999: 146). Despite the lack of public success, Anna Frijters
wrote another screenplay, De verloofde uit Canada/The Fiancé from Canada (1934).
According to her son, Roland, the main character was written with the popular
Antwerp comedian Louis Staal in mind (Geens 1986: 57). It tells the melodramatic
story of an Antwerp working-class emigrant who, upon returning home, discovers
that his fiancée no longer loves him. The silent film received much public acclaim
and Frijters envisaged a sound version. Unfortunately the film studio was again
destroyed, this time by fire, and only the musical score survives (Geens 1986: 57).
The destruction of the studio also meant the end of Anna and François Frijters’ film
careers. But Anna will be remembered as a highly experimental screenwriter, using
flashback techniques and mixing animation with live action (Thys 1999: 157).
Edith Kiel (1904–93)
In 1934, the same year as De verloofde uit Canada/The Fiancé from Canada
premiered, Edith Kiel, who was to become one of the most influential screen-
writers in Flemish cinema history, wrote De witte/Whitey, an adaptation of the
popular Heimat (regional) novel by Ernest Claes. The production was financed
by Jan Vanderheyden, a film distributor who imported German films and who
asked Kiel to collaborate on the film project. Kiel, also an actress, was to write
the screenplay, and according to a number of sources, including Kiel herself, she
also directed the movie, although the credits note Jan Vanderheyden and Willem
Benoy as directors (Geens 1986 :63; Van Meerbeeck and Van de Vijver 1999). Kiel
thought the novel was too episodic and added a love interest plotline for coher-
ence. The author, Ernest Claes, apparently nearly had a fit when he heard this but
finally agreed to the changes (Geens 1986: 63). Vanderheyden turned De witte/
Whitey into a real media event even before it was finished (Biltereyst and Van
Bauwel 2005: 15). The film became a huge public success, drawing upon Flemish
right-wing nationalist emotions that were already apparent in the novel.
After World War II, both Claes and Vanderheyden were convicted of collaborating
with the Nazi regime and Vanderheyden spent two years in prison. After his release
Vanderheyden lost his civil rights, making it impossible for him to produce or direct
films (Geens 1986: 63; Thys 1999: 248; Biltereyst and Van Bauwel 2005: 29–30;
Stalpaert 1996: 159). Edith Kiel, although German, was neither accused nor con-
victed; however, because she was a legal and financial partner in the pair’s produc-
tion company, the Belgian tax authorities targeted her as well (Stalpaert 1996: 159).
Kiel then founded a company in her own name, the Antwerpse Film Onderneming
(AFO, Antwerp Film Company), and became not only the writer, but also the
director and producer of all her films. She created an oeuvre of popular moving
pictures, rooted in colourful locales and Antwerp dialogue, that were seemingly
‘unexportable’, even to other parts of the country (Fowler 2010). Schipperskwartier/
The Bargee District (1953) is set in the mariners’ quarter, or red light district, of
Antwerp. The film is a melodramatic comedy of errors about a widower with
three children he cannot handle, who – against his will – is helped by his best
friend to find a new wife (Thys 1999: 326). Min of meer/More or Less (1955) can
be considered a Don Camillo and Peppone story situated in Antwerp (Sojcher
1999:143).2 The films were extremely successful in the Antwerp region, not least
Belgium 241
because Kiel used popular revue and vaudeville actors the public knew from the
theatre. Focusing on regional audiences was not unusual after the Second World
War (Fowler 2010). Despite the regional marketing, Kiel’s cinematic productions
had a major influence on the emerging television broadcasting serials in the
1950s, which drew upon the Antwerp themes; an early example is Schipper naast
Mathilde/Skipper next to Mathild (1955–63, 185 episodes), a sitcom about a retired
skipper living together with his sister Mathilde and little niece Marieke. De witte/
Whitey was recycled as a TV series entitled Wij Heren van Sichem/We Gentlemen from
Sichem (1969–72). Though no formal research has been done on the influence of
Kiel’s film production on Flemish television, it seems that the popularity of the
actors who moved from film to TV created a kind of hegemony of the Antwerp
dialect in television comedy.
Recent studies present Edith Kiel as an early model of female entrepreneurship,
though her role diminished during the war, and after her husband, Vanderheyden,
died in 1961 she stopped producing films.
Edith Kiel, once reviled, is now hailed as one of the icons of popular Flemish
cinema. In the 1980s the left wing enfant terrible filmmaker Robbe De Hert paid
tribute to Kiel when he not only remade De witte/Whitey (1981) but also directed a
number of comedies that draw heavily on Kiel’s heritage, even engaging the same
actors. When, in 1989, the first private broadcasting network (VTM) went on air,
it initially achieved success by reverting to Antwerp-inspired comedy. Edith Kiel’s
influence on Flemish television production cannot be underestimated.
Women writers and erotic film
Inspired by the success of erotic films in Europe in the early 1970s, a number
of Belgian filmmakers tried to cash in on the trend. Perhaps surprisingly, some
women writers were active in the genre, though most of these films are forgotten
today. In 1968 Catherine Nelissen is credited as the writer of Hippy Hippy Sex (aka
Der Porno Graf von Luxemburg). Apparently the film was a success in Germany,
since the only two reviews to be found in the collection of the Brussels Film
Archive are German3 (see also Thys 1999: 444). Writer Jeannine De Coster wrote
three erotic scripts for her husband, Guy J. Nys: Pandore (1969), In Love with
Death/Villa Porno (1970), and The Naked D (1970). The first script was loosely
based on marital vicissitudes, the storyline provided by a count who actually
sponsored the production (Geens 1986: 268). A couple travel to Greece in order
to resolve their marriage problems, but the woman falls for a Greek man. The film
secured its place in Belgian film history because the Greek was played by Rik Van
Steenbergen, a former world champion cyclist. De Coster not only wrote the script
but also co-produced and edited the films as well as acting in Pandore. These erotic
thrillers were something of a family business, with brother John De Coster as DOP.
As it became harder and harder to get ‘independent’ films financed, Nys and De
Coster relocated to Swaziland and later South Africa to shoot The Naked D (Geens
1986: 281). According to Sojcher, the cheap and fast production conditions make
these films look rather ‘involuntarily surrealistic’ (Sojcher 1999: 307).
Chantal Akerman (1950–)
Chantal Akerman made her first film Saute ma ville/Blow Up My City (1968), when
she was only eighteen and went on to become one of the best-known Belgian
filmmakers. She has been a major influence on Francophone Belgian cinema from
the 1970s well into the 1990s, and along with Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, who
won two Palmes d’Ors at the Cannes Festival for Rosetta (1999) and L’enfant/The
Child (2005), has become Belgian’s most prominent filmmaker. Both the Dardenne
brothers and Chantal Akerman continue a Belgian tradition of a ‘cinema of the
real’, often treading a thin line between documentary and fiction. Akerman has
produced a number of documentaries or documentary-like films, and she made a
nod to the tradition she works in when Belgian documentary pioneer Henri Storck
appeared in her breakthrough movie, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080
Bruxelles (1975), a guest appearance that ‘represents the equivalent to the use of
Jean Renoir in French cinema, John Ford in American cinema, or David Lean in
British cinema. Through the figure of Storck, Akerman conjures up a whole history
of Belgian cinema, within which it is inferred Jeanne Dielman should be placed’
(Fowler 2003: 90).
Akerman attended the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des
Techniques de Diffusion (INSAS) when she was 18 but left after a few months and
went on to make a number of short films: Saute ma ville (1968), L’enfant aimé (1971),
and La chambre (1972). She then left Brussels for New York where she immersed her-
self in the 60s avant-garde. On returning to Brussels she began working on a feature
film, Je, tu, il, elle (1974), that was funded partly by friends and partly by Flemish tele-
vision, where her long-time friend and soul mate, Erik De Kuyper, produced and pre-
sented a show De Andere Film (‘The Other Cinema’) that screened experimental films.
De Kuyper, a writer, director and semiotician also co-wrote a number of Akerman’s
films, including Je, tu, il, elle, La captive (2000), and Tomorrow We Move (2004).
The screenwriting process has always been important for Akerman, even though
she has opined ‘I wanted to make films without narration’ (Sojcher 1999: 141). The
early Akerman movies look more like recordings of art performances, as in Je, tu,
il, elle, or the Warhol-inspired, narrated-time-equals-real-time films Hotel Monterey
and La Chambre. The films might be without narration but Akerman has a love of
the written word and always wanted to write (Martin 1979: 29). As she explains,
‘I believe more in books than images. The image is an idol in an idolatrous world’
(Brenez 2011). Besides screenplays – some of which have been published – Akerman
has written in other media as well as film; her play Hall de nuit was published in
1991, and there have also been the autobiographical texts Une famille à Bruxelles/
A Family in Brussels (1998), Autoportrait en cinéaste/Self Portrait as a Filmmaker
(2004), and Ma mère rit/My Mother Laughs (2013).
Although Akerman made her reputation in the first place as a metteur-en-scène,
her films are carefully scripted (De Kuyper 1983: 12). The early screenplays are very
detailed, without compromise, and what is written has to go in the film. Akerman
describes the screenplay of Jeanne Dielman as written in the style of a nouveau roman
( Jean and La Rochelle 2007: 38). In a documentary about the making of Jeanne
Belgium 243
Dielman, directed by French actor Sami Frey (1974), a passage shows actress
Delphine Seyrig, who plays Jeanne Dielman, rehearsing. Akerman kept the script
and her watch in hand, insisting that gestures and movements be performed
exactly as written in the script, much to the despair of Seyrig who can’t find any
motivation for these gestures (Margolies 2009).
Akerman’s writing practices illustrate the oscillation between fiction and docu-
mentary; between the written and that which cannot be written. Published excerpts
of early scripts reveal her varied approach to film writing. The screenplay of Jeanne
Dielman is a continuous prose text with many hesitations and pauses, and is
strongly focused on the main character, with sentences that often start with ‘She’.
In some films the writing is complemented by the editing phase in postproduc-
tion. In Toute une nuit (1982), which has a mosaic structure, Akerman prepared a
short text that is more like a synopsis, and the actual construction of the narra-
tive was decided upon while editing (Aubenas 1982). Only the beginning and the
thunderstorm that closes the film were written in advance (Jean and La Rochelle
2007: 38).
Akerman has produced a diverse oeuvre. Besides the well-known early films she
wrote and directed such as Jeanne Dielman and Les rendez-vous d’Anna/The Meetings
of Anna (1978), Akerman also made musical films (Les années 80 [1983], Golden
Eighties [1986]), comedies (A Couch in New York [1996]), documentaries (Un jour
Pina m’a demandé/On Tour with Pina Bausch [1983], Sud [1999]), and even adapta-
tions (La captive/The Captive [2000], after Proust, and La folie Almayer/Almayer’s
Folly [2011], after Conrad). As a screenwriter Akerman only occasionally col-
laborates with others, but these co-writers have included the writer-director Erik
De Kuyper on Je, tu, il, elle/I, You, He, She (1967), La Captive (2000), and Demain
on déménage/Tomorrow We Move (2004), and critic/screenwriter/director Pascal
Bonitzer on Nuit et jour/Night and Day (1991). In the 1990s Akerman turned to the
visual arts and started creating a number of installations in which she combines
visual art and video. The installations allow Akerman to approach ‘time’ in new
ways: different screens simultaneously tell the story and narrative time is trans-
lated into spatial terms. (for an analysis, see: Chamarette 2012: 145–6). In certain
ways these installations refer to her first films, the ones that feel and look as if
they were recordings of performances (Saute ma ville/Blow Up My City [1968], La
chambre/The Room [1972], or Je, tu, il, elle/I, You, He, She [1967]). The installation
Maniac Shadows (2013) uses footage in which we observe
Akerman cleaning up her living space while the 2008 Obama inauguration
plays on the television. Meanwhile, another projection offers a darker repre-
sentation of the quotidian and recounts her mother’s daily routine as she stares
out the window of her Brussels’ apartment for what seems like eternity. This is
followed by footage of a street party in New York which lasts late into the night
where no one seems to notice the static camera. (Feldman 2013).
The first fragment might refer to Saute ma ville and the second to Jeanne Dielman,
while the third echoes Histoires d’Amérique. Maybe it is no coincidence that
Akerman often ‘recycles’ her old films into installations, thus creating new contexts
for these films. Woman Sitting after Killing (2001), for instance, literally reuses Jeanne
Dielman, as does In the Mirror (2012) with one of her very first shorts, L’enfant
aimé/The loved Child (1971). Some of the films created for these installations also
exist as ‘traditional’ linear films (D’Est/From the East [1993] and Femmes d’Anvers
en novembre/Women of Antwerp in November [2008]). Writing reappears literally
in the installation Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans une frigidaire vide/Walk beside
One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (2004), when fragments of the diary of her
grandmother are being projected on a wall and a spiral screen.
Many books and articles have been published on the films of Chantal Akerman,
yet her screenplays, stage plays and novels have received little attention.
Marion Hänsel (1949–)
Less well known than Akerman, Marion Hänsel (born Ackermann) is not only
important as a screenwriter-director, but also as a producer, often encouraging young
filmmakers during the 1980s. Hänsel is unusual in Belgian cinema because her
films look very un-Belgian with foreign settings and using international casts
such as Trevor Howard, Jane Birkin, Marianne Basler, Heinz Bennent and Malcolm
McDowell. Hänsel rarely writes original material, preferring to adapt and rework
literature, though her recent film La tendresse/Tenderness (2013) is an exception.
Hänsel explains that she is not a real writer and finds it reassuring to have the
story in front of her (Sojcher 1999: 215). This lack of confidence possibly explains
why her only other original script, Sur la terre comme au ciel/In Heaven as on Earth
(1991, based on a story by Jaco Von Dormael), though having, as Mosley notes,
‘an extremely daring premise of a foetus refusing entry into a damaged world [...]
failed to resolve the representational difficulties of dialogue between a woman
and her unborn child’ (2001: 196).
Hänsel’s early films gained much critical acclaim, though they did not appeal to a
wide audience: Le lit/The Bed (1984) tells the story of a dying man surrounded by the
two women in his life who recall their past; Dust (1985), an adaptation of a Coetzee
novel, relates the suffocating relationship of a father and his daughter; Les noces bar-
bares/The Cruel Embrace (1987), adapted from the award-winning novel of the same
name by Yann Queffelec, develops an even more distant, almost Brechtian approach
to its subject that left everyone, including the critics, puzzled (Sojcher 1999: 216).
Nevertheless, Hänsel gradually built her reputation as a writer and director with
films such as Li: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1995), Si le vent soulève
les sables/Sounds of Sand (2006), and Noir Océan/Black Ocean (2010). Her most
recent film, La tendresse/Tenderness (2013), received mixed reactions, especially
because of the lack of conflict and action in the story about a couple who have
been separated for 15 years. They get together again to pick up their son after he
has an accident when skiing. Hänsel often feels she has to defend her work and
explains that she knows about traditional screenwriting, having studied at the
first American Film Institute (AFI) screenwriting seminar in Brussels in 1979. For
La tendresse she wanted a story without ‘big events; there are no major dramas.
Belgium 245
There is a dramaturgy but very, very fine, very subtle and it is not at all fashionable’
(Hänsel 2014).
The new generation of women writer-directors
Belgian film boomed in the new millenium, doubling in output from 30 films
produced in 2004 to 64 in 2012. The popularity of Belgian film also expanded,
attracting four times as many viewers in 2011 than in 2004, and international
festival selections and awards increased accordingly (VAF 2013: 107–20). A new
generation of women writers-directors emerged from this evolution, including
Patrice Toye with Rosie (1998), (N)iemand/Nowhere Man (2008), and Little Black
Spiders (2012); Fien Troch with Een ander zijn geluk/Someone Else’s Happiness (2005),
Unspoken (2008), and Kid (2013), and Caroline Strubbe’s Lost Persons Area (2010),
the first part of a trilogy that tells the story of the survival of a dysfunctional
family working in an unsettling landscape full of high-tension masts and mobile
homes. I’m the Same, I’m Another (2013) is the second part of the trilogy in which
a man and a girl try to come to grips with a tragic past. Though it continues where
Lost Persons Area left off, Strubbe says it is not necessary to have seen the first in
order to understand the second (Mestdagh 2013: 4). I’m the Same, I’m Another is,
even more than Lost Persons Area, founded upon atmosphere more than narrative
development. Dorothée Van Den Berghe had worked for TV, as a documentary
filmmaker, and in theatre before she wrote and directed her debut movie Meisje/
Girl (2002) about three generations of women whose destinations are intertwined.
My Queen Caro (2009) is partly autobiographical and tells the story of a couple
who move with their daughter to Amsterdam to live in a squat in a hippy comu-
nity. The narrative focuses on the experience of the little girl who grows up in
an anti-authoritarian environment. Other female writer-directors of note include
Sophie Schoukens (Marieke Marieke [2010]), Vanja d’Alcantara (Beyond the Steppes
[2010]), Ilse Somers (Weekend aan Zee/High Heels, Low Tide [2012]), and Hilde Van
Mieghem (De kus/The Kiss [2004], and Smoorverliefd/Madly in Love [2010, remade
in 2013 for the Dutch market]).
These writer-directors all have a somewhat minimalist approach to exploring
human relationships, often with little or no dialogue. Loss, grief and mourning
form the threads that link their stories, and they often make references to acclaimed
writers and directors such as Haneke, Akerman, Bresson, and others. Only a few
prefer the romantic comedy genre for telling their stories. Hilde Van Mieghem’s
Smoorverliefd/Madly in Love (2011) and Ilse Somers’ Weekend aan Zee/High Heels, Low
Tide (2012) are both ensemble films with women as main characters. Most of these
stand out because of a more adventurous approach to screenwriting than previous
Belgian writer-directors.
Patrice Toye (1967–)
The central theme of Toye’s work as writer-director is concerned with characters

who create a world for themselves to survive in. Rosie is told in flashbacks and
begins with the 13-year-old Rosie in a juvenile prison. The clever flashback struc-
ture allows empathy to be built for the main character, who does some terrible
things to create her new life, stealing a baby and committing murder. Doubts are
raised about her relationship with Jimi, the boy Rosie chooses to be ‘her czar’. In
Toye’s next film, Nowhere Man, the main character dreams of a different reality,
then takes action, stages his death and disappears to a tropical island, only to
decide he wants his former life back, but that this might not be possible. In Little
Black Spiders a group of young pregnant girls are locked up in a nunnery and kept
hidden from society until their children are born. The story is very dark but the
girls’ lives seem remote from reality and, as they don’t understand their situation,
it is not presented as tragic.
Fien Troch (1978–)
Troch is an award-winning screenwriter as well as being highly regarded for her

directing skills. The following quote by Troch refers to her first feature, Someone
Else’s Happiness , but similar themes are present in her other films:
When I started writing the script, my real intention was to portray characters
who are full of words, ideas and stories, but are unable to utter or express
them because they are held back by some strange force. As a consequence, the
unspoken [also the title of her next script] now lies like a veil over the whole
story of the film and is the reason of the pain affecting most of the characters.
(Troch 2005)
The narrative has a crime storyline in which a child is killed in a hit-and-run

accident that acts as a catalyst for the psychological development of the different
characters. The film ends without a resolution and the perpetrator of the crime
remains unknown. At the Thessaloniki Film Festival in 2005, Someone Else’s
Happiness won the award for best screenplay.
Unspoken is Troch’s second feature and a very intimate film about a woman and
man who lost their daughter five years previously and are incapable of communi-
cating their grief and feelings of loss. As the title indicates, there is little dialogue
in the film, which called for a specific writing process. Because of the primacy
of the visuals, with many close-ups, and the lack of physical action, Troch made
cards on which she wrote how the images should look, which resulted in ‘half of
the découpage’ or editing happening at the development stage. As Troch explains,
‘When the screenplay was written, the visuals were finished as well. Because the
two are so intertwined … When I write for instance that two people are sitting
in a living room, nothing much happens than that one looks at the other, and
suddenly the door closes. When you read that, you could say: I can come up with
that as well. Whereas the whole context indicates the how and why ...’ (Troch, in
Sartor 2009).
The screenplay for Kid won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award
in 2011, which made financing the project much easier. The challenge for Troch
Belgium 247
was to tell the whole story from the point of view of Kid, a boy who loves his
mother above everybody else. When she disappears, Kid and his brother are
forced to move in with their aunt and uncle, a situation that Kid finds dif-
ficult to adapt to. The narrative becomes elliptical because it focuses on Kid’s
viewpoint and we only know as much as he does, which is often very little. For
instance, we do not know what has happened to the father or what the finan-
cial situation of the pig farm is that makes the mother try desperately to keep
working.
Conclusion
More women than ever before are writing for film in Belgium, though their work
remains largely unexplored. Only Edith Kiel and Chantal Akerman have received
scholarly attention, yet the focus has been on their directorial work rather than
their scriptwriting. Nevertheless, women writers have made a significant contribu-
tion to the development of screenwriting in Flanders and Belgium.
Notes
1. All translations from Dutch and French are mine. The English translations of film titles
are those in Thys 1999.
2. Don Camillo and Peppone are the prototypical antithetical protagonists in popular
humorous stories created by Italian writer Giovannini Guareschi in the 1950s. Don
Camillo, the village priest, is continuously at odds with the communist mayor, Peppone.
French actor Fernandel immortalized Don Camillo in a number of film adaptations.
3. See: http://www.cinematek.be/index.php?node=54&page=detail_film&id=10673&search
type=film (accessed 11 May 2014).
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Czech Republic
Alice Němcová Tejkalová, Filip Šára and David Sorfa
Czech women screenwriters: from socio-critical films to fairy tales
Alice Němcová Tejkalová

Czech screenwriting has tended to be a male profession, however more women
have written for the screen than have directed. Czech women screenwriters usually
fit into one of the following four categories: screenwriter and director, screenwriter
and actress, successful book writer turned screenwriter, or writer of children’s films
and TV fairy tales.
Early film
Between 1898 and 1930 only eight women screenwriters are in the Czech Feature
Film I (1995) catalogue, even though 388 films were shot in this period. The most
prolific of these eight women, Suzanne Marwille (1895–1962), was well known
to the Czech public as a popular film actress. Born Marta Schölerová, Marwille was
initially a theatre actress in Vienna. When she began her film career, she was pri-
marily supported by the director Václav Binovec, who owned the film production
company, Weteb, for which Marwille worked. She wrote many screenplays in
different genres, ranging from drama to romance and comedy, and in which she
also starred. The most famous were Černí myslivci (The Black Gamekeepers, 1921),
Irč in románek I, II (Irč a’s Little Romance I, II, 1921), Román boxera (The Romance
of a Boxer, 1921), Děvče z Podskalí (The Girl from Podskalí, 1922) and Adam a Eva
(Adam and Eve, 1922). After the arrival of the sound film, Marwille’s career came
to a standstill (Fikejz n.d.a).
Only three other women wrote more than one film in the pre-sound era in
Czechoslovakia: Thea (Tereza) Červenková (1882–1961), Zdena Smolová, better
known as Zet Molas (1896–1956), and Zorka Janovská (n.d.). Thea Červenková
wrote the screenplay for Zloděj (The Thief, 1919), which she also directed, becom-
ing the second Czech woman film director. Zloděj is a comedy about relationships
between men and women in which Červenková had a small role as a housemaid. She
wrote several other films such as Ada se učí jezdit (Ada Learns How to Ride, 1922), and
Paličova dcera (The Fire-Raiser’s Daughter, 1923). Her most highly regarded film was an
adaptation of Božena Němcová’s book Babička (Grandmother, 1921) (Hudec 2000).
249
Zdena Smolová was also a screenwriter and director who studied art in Prague
and at École des Beaux Arts in Paris. With the financial support of her husband,
Bohumil Smola, Smolová was able to run her own film company, Molas-Film. Her
first movie was a melodrama, Závět' podivínova (The Eccentric’s Will, 1923). She
then worked as a journalist for the magazine Český filmový svět (Czech Film World),
and after this made two films: Mlynář a jeho dítě (The Miller and His Child, 1928)
and Pancéřové auto (Armoured Car, 1929), starring in both of them. After a long
break from screenwriting, Smolová returned in 1936 with the screenplay Lojzička,
going on to write and direct her most lauded film, the biopic Karel Hynek Mácha
(1937), about one of the most famous Czech poets (Fikejz n.d.b).
Zorka Janovská (real name Božena Štěpánková-Kamilovová) wrote the comedies
Čertisko (The Little Rascal, 1918) and Šestnáctiletá (Sweet Sixteen, 1918), and dramas
such as the melodrama Tanečnice (The Dancer, 1919) and Plameny života (The
Flames of Life, 1920), directed by Václav Binovec and starring Suzanne Marwille.
Four other women screenwriters have credits in the silent era: Andula (Anna)
Sedláčková (1887–1967) was also a famous actress and director of her own theatre
in Prague, the Theatre of Anna Sedláčková, and wrote the film Dáma s barzojem (The
Lady with the Borzoi, 1912) in which she also starred; Beatrice Dovská (real name
Božena Dřevikovská) wrote the screenplay for the comedy Osm srdcí v plamenech
(Eight Hearts in the Flames, 1926); Hana Temná wrote the film Sivooký démon (The
Grey-Eyed Demon, 1919), directed by Václav Binovec and starring Suzanne Marwille;
and Květoslava Semonická wrote the drama Ve spárech upíra (In the Clutches of a
Vampire, 1927), which she also produced and co-directed with Theodor Pištěk.
Only a few films were written by women between 1930 and 1945, a period
framed by the first Czech sound movie and the end of World War II. Jarmila
Svatá (1903–64) wrote a comedy about male and female relationships, Mořská
panna (The Mermaid, 1939), and Monika Jelínková wrote another comedy, Koho
jsi vč era líbal? (Who Did I Kiss Yesterday?, 1935). The latter film was so popular
that it was adapted for the French screen, titled Le Coup de Trois (Opěla et al.
1998). Actress Gill (Julie) Sedláčková wrote the comedy Polibek ve sněhu (Kiss in
the Snow, 1935), which was remade in German. Jarmila Kmínková (n.d.) wrote
sentimental movies starring Zita Kabátová and co-wrote the screenplay Žena na
rozcestí (Woman at the Crossroads, 1937) with her husband and director of the film,
Oldřich Kmínek. She also wrote the script for Její hřích (Her Sin, 1939).
The ethnographer Svatava Pírková (1908–2000), married to the world-renowned
linguist Roman Jakobson, wrote a screenplay for the staged documentary Mizející
svět (Disappearing World, 1932) about the culture of a region in Moravia. The
screenwriter and director Ada (Milada) Pelleová-Czivišová (n.d.) also acted in
her own and other movies. The first film she directed was a fairy tale, Zlatý květ
(The Golden Flower, 1929), co-directed with Jaroslav Schäffer, and the first movie
she both wrote and directed was Cikánská láska (Gypsy Love, 1938) (Fikejz n.d.c).
The way towards a better tomorrow – after 1945

Women screenwriters began to appear again after the end of World War II. The era
following the communist putsch of 1948 was concerned with social realism and
film topics tended to be ideological. For example, Olověný chléb (Red Whitsuntide,
Czech Republic 251
1953), a screenplay written by Alena Bernášková (1920–2007), with a story set

in 1930, portrays capitalists as greedy and predatory and workers as moral and
heroic. Three films based on the books of communist writer Marie Majerová
(Marie Bartošová, 1882–1967) were made between 1945 and 1960. The first one,
Siréna (The Strike, 1947), won a prize at the film festival in Venice and was later
used by communist ideologues as proof that social realism was the best approach
to film (Bilík 2000). Majerová wrote the script for Výstraha (A Warning, 1953), the
most ideological of the three.
During this period, the women belonging to the two most important groups
of screenwriters in Czech film history began to emerge: the socio-critical film
represented by Věra Chytilová (1929–2014) and Drahomíra Vihanová (1930),
who collaborated on Jan Němec’s interesting film Sousto (Mouthful, 1960); and
films concerned with children and fairy tales, represented by Věra Plívová-
Šimková (1934), Drahomíra Reňáková-Králová (1930–2007)) and Jarmila
Turnovská (1930–2010). Most of these women were also directors, and Chytilová
and Turnovská started out as actresses. Chytilová was to become one of the most
important people in Czech film, whose first film as screenwriter and director,
Kočičina (Caterwauling, 1960), immediately attracted attention. Plívová-Šimková
and Králová were assistant directors on several films, making their debuts as
directors in student films when studying at the Film and TV School, Academy
of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), as did Chytilová and Vihanová. Plívová-
Šimková wrote and directed a film about a company of amateur actors called Než
se rozhrne opona (Before the Curtain Goes Up, 1957) and Králová directed a film
about two boys who borrow a yacht, Lhář (The Liar, 1957).
The New Wave in Czech film

Czech film critic Jan Žalman argues that it was not so much the climate of the
1960s that shaped the roots of the Czech ‘New Wave’, even though the influence
of foreign philosophy and filmography was evident, but the arrival of a fresh
generation on the Czech film scene (Zalman 1993). Unfortunately, this creative
spark was dampened by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and was
the beginning of so-called ‘normalization’ in the 1970s, which strictly repressed
any dissent. Some people left the country, while others had to wait until 1989
for the freedom to make movies of their choosing. Among the most important
women of this generation were Věra Chytilová, Ester Krumbachová (1923–1996)
and Drahomíra Vihanová.
Krumbachová worked as a director, screenwriter, and costume designer. She was
a close collaborator with Chytilová and together they wrote the scripts for Ovoce
stromů rajských jíme (We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise, 1969) and Faunovo velmi
pozdní odpoledne (The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun, 1983). Krumbachová stopped
filmmaking for ideological reasons after she wrote and shot the comedy Vražda
inženýra Čerta (Murdering the Devil, 1970), which she co-wrote with Jan Ncěmec.
Drahomíra Vihanová ended her course at FAMU with a short film called Fuga
na černých klávesách (The Black Keys Fugue, 1964) about an African piano student
studying in Prague. Her only feature film from this era, Zabitá nedcěle (A Squandered
Sunday, 1969), about the tragic destiny of a soldier from an elite troop who was
transferred to a remote unit, was placed in a safe on completion and kept there
for 18 years. The organizers of the film festival in San Remo requested a copy of
the script and awarded it a special prize (Ptácek 2000). Vihanová directed and co-
wrote the black and white film Pevnost (The Fortress, 1994) with Alexandr Kliment,
a film about power and helplessness in a totalitarian regime. She then co-wrote,
with Vladimír Vondra, Zpráva o putování studentů Petra a Jakuba (The Pilgrimage of
Students Peter and Jacob, 2000), but it was not well received by critics or audiences.
Comedies, children’s films and fairy tales

After 1970, the ‘normalized’ communist regime only accepted either ideologi-
cally supportive films or what Ptáčková terms the ‘seemingly ideologically neutral
requirement of “mass entertainment”’ (2000: 157), which is why so many com-
edies were shot in that period. Author and director Marie Poledňáková (b. 1941)
skilfully made entertainment films for the whole family; S tebou mě baví svět (What
a Wonderful World with You, 1982) was voted Czech comedy of the century by TV
viewers. Several other women screenwriters (usually also directors) specialized
in children’s films: Věra Plívová-Šimková made her first film for children, Kát’a
a Krokodýl (Kate and the Crocodile), which was co-authored with Ota Hofman in
1965. The film describes what can happen during the holidays at home in Prague.
Her popular film Lišáci – Myšáci a Šibeničák (Foxes, Mice and Gallows Hill, 1970),
co-authored by František Pavlíček, was shot in the snowy countryside, as was
Krakonoš a lyžníci (Giant and Skiers, 1980), which starred the charismatic Karel
Heřmánek, though the script was written by Jana Knitlová (b. 1944). In the late
1980s, Plívová-Šimková wrote Nefňukej, Veverko (Stop Mewling, Squirrel!, 1988),
about a young girl envious of her newborn twin brothers, scripting a sequel in the
same year (Kovaříková, 2000). In 1994 she directed, with Drahomíra Králová, a
film written by her daughter Kateřina Priščáková (b. 1960), Artuš, Merlin a Prchlíci.
Drahomíra Králová’s most famous film is Potkal jsem ho v ZOO (I Met Him at the
ZOO, 1994), which was co-written with Edgar Dutka. The film is about a friend-
ship between two boys, one of them blind, and it was the best-selling Czech film
shown in foreign countries of the year (Kovaříková 2000).
Fairy tales are very popular on Czech television, although some are screened
in the cinema, and are often scripted by women. The script for the most popular
Czech Christmas fairy tale in recent years, Andě l páně (An Angel of the Lord, 2005),
was written by Lucie Konášová (b. 1969). Jarmila Turnovská worked as a script
editor for Czechoslovak Television, later to become Czech TV, as well as writing 33
fairy tales for television and a screenplay for the famous TV series Kamarádi (Friends,
1969–74). Anna Jurásková (b. 1924) has written 70 fairy tales for television, and in
2010 was given an award for her work by the director general of Czech TV. Markéta
Zinnerová (b. 1942) wrote the screenplay for the controversial film Bolero (2004),
based on the real murder of a medical student. She is also a famous screenwriter of
films for children and fairy tales, as well as an author of children’s books.
Without the work of Hermína Týrlová (1900–93), Czech animated film would be
much impoverished. Týrlová was both writer and director of many witty, original, and
internationally successful films such as Vzpoura hraček (Revolution in Toyland, 1946), in
Czech Republic 253
which she combined animation with the performance of actors, and Vlněná pohádka
(A Woolly Tale, 1964), a fairy tale about characters made of wool (Polenská 2000).
The comedy Vrat’ se do hrobu! (Go Back to Your Grave!) was released in 1989,
directed by Milan Šteindler, who co-wrote the script with Halina Pawlowská
(b. 1955), a prolific author of many books and scripts for TV shows and series.
Pawlowská received the Czech Lion for the screenplay for her semi-autobiographical
film Díky za každé nové ráno (Thanks for Every New Morning, 1994).
Of the women who have written screenplays for feature films since 1970, some,
like Milena Jelinek (b. 1935), have left the country. Jelinek now teaches screen-
writing at Columbia University, but was known in the Czech Republic for her
screenplay, the acclaimed Zapomenuté světlo (Forgotten Light, 1996), a story about
a village priest. Scriptwriter and director Jana Boková (b. 1948) has made docu-
mentaries about Anthony Quinn and Eric Clapton, in addition to writing and
directing the feature film Hotel Ráj (Hotel du Paradis, 1986) (Kresta 2000).
Irena Pavlásková (b. 1960) is known for her socio-critical films. Her first fea-
ture film, Čas sluhů (The Time of Servants, 1989), was about the manipulation and
personal misuse of power. The sequel Čas dluhů (The Time of Debts, 1998) was
not as well received by the critics, but it was the most viewed Czech film of the
year. One of her best films as director is Zemský ráj to na pohled (An Earthy Paradise
for the Eyes to Behold, 2009), though the script was written by Tereza Boučková
(b. 1957), who also wrote the film Smradi (Brats, 2002) about prejudice against
adopted Roma children in the Czech Republic.
One of the most interesting contemporary screenwriters and directors to emerge
in Czech cinema is Karin Babinská (b. 1974) who attracted attention with her first
feature film, Pusinky (The Dolls, 2007), a road-trip movie about three friends whose
relationship is changed forever by their journey on holiday. Her new film, the dra-
matic comedy Křídla Vánoc (Wings of Christmas), premiered at the end of 2013. Alice
Nellis (b. 1971) and Irena Hejdová (b. 1977) should also be included in the list of
younger Czech screenwriters. Hejdová’s most successful script was Děti noci (Night
Owls, 2008), directed by Michaela Pavlátová, who helped with the adaptation. The
script won the SAZKA Award in 2006 for the best Czech screenplay not yet realized.
The adaptation of Petra Hůlová’s novel Pamě mojí babičce (All This Belongs to Me),
written by Hejdová, was awarded a Special Mention as a part of the ScripTeast work-
shop during the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, but has so far not been realized.
Ester Krumbachová (1923–96)
David Sorfa
Ester Krumbachová was a Czech screenwriter, costume and set designer, author
and a one-time film director. She was born in Brno, 200 kilometres north-east of
Prague, moving to the capital city in the early 1960s after studying at local art col-
lege and working on theatre productions in České Budějovice. After a first marriage
to Slaviček Písařík, Krumbachová married the Czechoslovak New Wave director Jan
Němec and collaborated with him on a number of films. She first entered the film
industry in 1961 as a costume designer and went on to provide aesthetic advice
on many productions, including Transport z raje (Transport from Paradise, Zdeněk

Brynych, 1962), and At žije republika (Long Live the Republic!, Karel Kachyňa, 1965).
Krumbachová is credited as writer or co-writer for ten films; her first screenplay
credit as co-writer was in 1965 for … a pátý jezdec je Strach (The Fifth Horseman Is Fear,
1964), and her last was for Faunovo velmi pozdní odpoledne (The Very Late Afternoon
of a Faun, 1983). After her divorce from Neměc in 1968, Krumbachová wrote and
directed her only feature film, Vražda ing. Čerta (The Murder of Mr Devil, 1970).
She subsequently fell foul of various political machinations at the Barrandov film
studio following ‘normalization’, which meant that she found it difficult to work
during the 1970s and 1980s. Her collaborators believed that ‘she was imbued with
a versatile talent; they compare her to a renaissance type of an artist’ (Urgošíková
1999: 224). In her seventies, Krumbachová published a collection of her letters and
reworked Czech fairy tales in 1994 as První Knížka Ester (The First Book of Ester).
A defining feature of Krumbachová’s life is her essentially social nature and a
preference for working collaboratively. This may go some way towards explaining
both her apparent lack of productivity and the dearth of attention paid to her
work, in comparison to her most famous collaborator, the director and screen-
writer Věra Chytilová, probably the most famous Czech director aside from Miloš
Forman. Krumbachová saw filmmaking as an exciting group venture and one that
necessarily brings anonymity to many who work in cinema. Invoking medieval
craftsmen (and the paranoia of post-normalization Czechoslovakia), she explains:
I am fascinated by the harmonious interplay of the huge number of compo-

nents that make up a film. In other ways, too, a film resembles a gothic cathe-
dral. The painter paints, the sculptor contributes his talents, the large army of
people who contribute to a film remains more or less anonymous. (in Liehm
1974: 277)
The venerable director Otakar Vávra, with whom she co-wrote an adaptation of
Václav Kaplický’s novel Kladivo na čarodějnice (Witch Hammer, 1969) points out
that ‘she’d often do more talking than drawing or writing’. Krumbachová’s port-
manteau career and her designation as a ‘muse in the service of other geniuses’
(Hanáková 2014: 216) have made it easy for her to fall out of film history and
Antonín J. Liehm notes that ‘because she never refused to help anyone who was
at his wit’s end […] we will frequently find the imprint of her hand where her
signature is missing’ (Liehm 1974: 271).
Although Krumbachová is often mentioned in histories of Czech cinema,
her work is seldom given specific attention. The important exceptions are Petra
Hanáková’s two articles, ‘Voices from Another World: Feminine Space and Masculine
Intrusion in Sedmikrásky and Vražda ing. Čerta’ (2005) and ‘The Feminist Style in
Czechoslovak Cinema: the Feminine Imprint in the Films of Věra Chytilová and
Ester Krumbachová’ (2014). Also worthy of mention is Zuzana Formánková’s unpub-
lished, Czech-language 2013 BA thesis on the reception of The Murder of Mr Devil.
Hanáková argues that Krumbachová, and to a lesser extent Chytilová, have
been written out of cultural history because of the lack of a specifically feminist
and gender-sensitive discourse, in both historical and contemporary accounts of
Czech Republic 255
women in communist Czechoslovak film. While the question of the develop-

ment of feminism under communism in Czechoslovakia requires further nuanced
research, it is clear that both Krumbachová and Chytilová were often discussed by
their male colleagues in terms of their supposedly ‘feminine’ qualities, with a par-
ticular emphasis on their looks rather than their work (see Hanáková 2005: 65–6).
Indeed, in his early history of the Czechoslovak New Wave Škvorecký describes
Krumbachová on first mention as ‘an uncommonly beautiful woman’ (Škvorecký
1971: 118). In addition, the prominence of auteur theory in film writing since the
1960s tends to ignore the role of scriptwriters and directors who do not produce a
substantial body of individually authored work. Nevertheless, it is clear that a host
of related issues – collaborative working practices, the unavailability of material,
the denigration of women’s roles among filmmakers and critics – served to make
Krumbachová’s important role in Czechoslovak film history nearly invisible.
Liehm characterizes Krumbachová thus:
Ester Krumbachová’s artistic vision exerted an influence first on the Czech

stage and, later, on the films of numerous directors. It might be said that she
long anticipated the artistic and visual fin-de-siècle inspiration that has since
become a fad throughout the world. Her thinking and what she wrote (which
for the most part went unpublished) became an ideological hinterland, a
framework, for many films. (1974: 271)
Krumbachová co-wrote her screenplays; despite Urgošíková’s claim that The Murder
of Mr Devil was ‘truly her own,’ even this film was not written solely by her. The
collaborative approach causes problems for more traditional methods of film
analysis that prefer to identify a single practitioner as the source of what we might
call the film’s ‘meaning’. Nevertheless, by considering all the films that she wrote,
with a variety of people, we should be able to make a claim for the specific quali-
ties and concerns that Krumbachová brings to these films. These elements are, I
argue, an interest in the body, particularly in sensual pleasure, which is combined
with an examination of the relationships between men and women, especially as
this relationship can be seen as a broader metaphor for the functioning of politi-
cal power. Fundamentally, Krumbachová is concerned with the issue of freedom
and the complex ways in which pleasure cannot be an easy index of value. Just
because something is enjoyable, be it sex or food, does not mean that it is neces-
sarily valuable, but, at the same time, Krumbachová celebrates a certain jouissance
available to us only through pleasure and enjoyment.
Krumbachová’s first contribution to a script was on Zbyněk Brynych’s …a pátý
jezdec je Strach (The Fifth Horseman Is Fear, 1964) where she helped the director
rewrite the script to ‘deprive it of references to any particular time and space’
(Hames 2005: 140). The resulting narrative was no longer a historically realis-
tic portrayal of Jewish life under Nazism, but could serve more generally as a
warning against the continuing threat of Fascism. Krumbachová’s pivotal role
in the rethinking of The Fifth Horseman Is Fear is obscured by the fact that she
is only listed in the on-screen credits as the costume designer and omitted as a
scriptwriter. Nevertheless, here we can see very early on Krumbachová’s taste for
abstraction and myth rather than history. This predilection is not one of mystical
passivity but, on the contrary, one which strongly realizes that history should not
be forgotten and that its lessons need to be made relevant and alive in the present.
She was clearly deeply affected by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938
and the subsequent atrocities of the Second World War and, perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, given the rumbling of Russian tanks into Prague in 1968, acutely aware that
such barbarities are not consigned to the past.
The Fifth Horseman Is Fear is set in Prague, where Braun, a Jewish doctor, is
forbidden from practising. Braun’s task is to categorize the various objects confis-
cated by the new totalitarian regime. He is forced to confront his collaborationist
pragmatism when a seriously wounded resistance fighter stumbles into his build-
ing and he is asked to help by one of his neighbours. The film has clear echoes
of Franz Kafka’s bureaucratically beleaguered protagonists as Braun navigates the
unofficial and official worlds in his attempt to save the dying man. He has to go to
a nightclub in order to find some morphine and is nearly mistaken for an inmate
in an insane asylum. Braun’s interrogation by the secret police is reminiscent of
the opening of The Trial (1925), as is the general atmosphere of paranoia and
vague threat. The narrative eventually unravels under the weight of mutual mis-
trust. The film’s ending in 1960s Prague drives home the point that the allegory is
contemporary rather than historic. Krumbachová’s impact on the script, costumes
and set design seems to infuse the film with an abstract tone which maps political
power onto sexuality in a way which she develops in her later work.
The next two films to which Krumbachová contributed as screenwriter are the
most well known in her oeuvre: O slavnosti a hostech (A Report on the Party and the
Guests, 1965), which she co-wrote with the director and her then husband, Jan
Němec, and Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966), her first collaboration with Věra Chytilová.
In A Report on the Party and the Guests, Krumbachová was interested in creating a
sense of the meaninglessness of everyday polite language and the fact that real injus-
tice is ignored through the application of a veneer of phatic drivel. She elucidates:
In The Party and the Guests, the main creative element was distorted dialogue.
I tried to create conversation in which the characters said nothing meaningful
about themselves. The audience heard only isolated fragments of sentences, as
if they had walked suddenly into the midst of a sophisticated party and had
no idea what the conversation was about. Some critics claimed to have found
hidden meanings in the fragments, but it was my intention to demonstrate that
people generally talk only in terms of disconnected ideas, even when it appears
that they are communicating with one another. I tried not to mimic real speech
but to suggest its pattern, to find a language of the sort of phenomenon that
Ionesco discovered in drama. Not a single word in the film was intended as a
secret code; the dialogues were not intended to conceal anything but to reveal
the nonsense that we hear around us every day. In the past, heroes used words
to express tragic situations. Now, tragedy is revealed by pictures, and our words
have no relationship to what we see. Newspapers and televisions are full of
the killed and wounded, and people sit around with legs crossed and sipping
Czech Republic 257
coffee. I know that this is connected with the development of communication

media, but all the same it is hard to accept. (in Liehm 1974: 280)
In the film, a happily chatting bourgeois picnic group are accosted by a group of
men, one of them obsequiously intimidating and the others thuggish, who coerce
the gathering to attend a birthday banquet for the Host. The fawning guests are
unsure as to why these strangers are there but, nevertheless, feel the importance
of appearing enthusiastic as the Host begins his formal speech. Proceedings are
halted, however, when one of the picnic guests goes missing and a search party
with dogs is sent to retrieve him. The ‘guest who refused to be happy’, as he is
dubbed by Škvorecký (1971: 123), is the only person at the party who refuses to
co-operate with the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’ As Škvorecký explains, ‘It is evidently a
parable about the process which takes place in all modern societies – the adoption
of a dominant ideology – and about the destruction of those who do not adopt it’
(1971: 121). The clear political allegory of the film caused much consternation at
the Barrandov studios, especially when it was noticed that the Host, played by Ivan
Vyskočil, uncannily resembled V. I. Lenin, apparently an unwitting coincidence.
Daisies has been extensively analysed in film and feminist academic literature
and Hanáková discusses Krumbachová’s role in the film in her two articles (2005,
2014). She points out that the film is ‘acknowledged as an allegorical and philo-
sophical statement against materialism and consumerism’ (2005: 67), but that this
reading contrasts with the film’s presentation of ‘a female space of desire, enjoy-
ment and disruptive creativity, with the space of jouissance’ (2005: 67). Hanáková
goes on to posit that the ‘productive tension’ between the film’s political critique
and its anarchic celebration of destruction may be due to:
the fact that the first version of the scenario was written for Chytilová by Pavel
Juraček, probably the most misogynistic writer and director of the Czech New
Wave. The script was then reworked by Chytilová and Krumbachová, but it can
still be read as revealing traces of the original sexism (destruction appears as a
symptomatic trait of female activity) revalorized by the reworking (destruction
of norms appears liberating and amusing). (Hanáková 2005: 67)
In Daisies, two young woman, both named Marie, live a feckless life where they
taunt men into supplying them with food and gifts, but then decide to destroy
themselves because everything is spoiled anyway. In an echo of A Report on the
Party and the Guests, in the final sequence of Daisies the Maries go to the coun-
tryside and find a lavish but eerily abandoned banquet which they proceed to
annihilate. What they cannot eat they wreck until they are brought to their senses
as the chandelier in which they are swinging crashes into a river. Now dressed in
newspapers, they return to the banquet hall and attempt to clean up their mess
until the chandelier falls on them again and the scene cuts to war bombing (for a
more detailed discussion of this film see Sorfa 2013: 137–9; Hames 2005: 187–97).
Daisies gives Krumbachová and Chytilová the opportunity to present a form of
feminist revolution which is both political and diabolically destructive. The film
explicitly engages with the problem of moving into what we might call a new
economy of thought: an economy in which the old order is completely rejected
but which has no ground on which to base itself. Krumbachová went on to co-
write and collaborate with Chytilová on two further films, Ovoce stromů rajských
jíme (The Fruit of Paradise, 1969) and Faunovo velmi pozdní odpoledne (The Very Late
Afternoon of a Faun, 1983).
Krumbachová and Němec’s next film, Mučedníci lásky (Martyrs of Love, 1966),
unlike A Report on the Party and the Guests, was not seen as a problem at Barrandov.
Their most experimental film was ‘not an attack on a political climate, or its meth-
ods, but it was guilty of something almost as obnoxious: it was incomprehensible’
(Škvorecký 1971: 126). The film is associated with interwar Czech Poetism and
what Němec called ‘dream realism’ (Hames 2005: 177). It is divided into three sec-
tions: ‘Temptations of a White-Collar Worker’, ‘Nastěnka’s Revery’ and ‘Orphan
Rudolf’s Adventure’. The film is almost silent and the first section features a dumb
protagonist, reminiscent of Chaplin, who engages in a number of sexual scenarios
which are never consummated. In the second, Nastěnka is ignored by a famous
singer and then picked up by an army officer who dresses her as a veiled bride
for an obscure ritual. In the third and final part, Rudolf is mistaken for Jakub by
the guests at an amiable garden party and invited to join their drunken revelry.
Němec and Krumbachová describe the film thus:
These aren’t pictures of or from life, but three stylized love-adventures. Rather
than attempting to show the world as it is, these are fables or songs. The first
story […] is intended as a silent comedy; it has practically no dialogue, and it
aims to be funny with a bit of sadness. If somebody gets put off by the some-
what gloomy character of its milieu, let him kindly remember the places in
Chaplin’s comedies – the huts, dives, hovels, and dumps – which as everybody
recognizes do not serve to nauseate life, but rather are a backdrop for the spirit
of the work; the work itself being almost exclusively a defence of a withdrawn
and unsuccessful person. This should also be the meaning of the three stories:
the grotesque confession of the operator, Nastěnka’s sentimental dream, and
the wonderful adventures of Rudolf the orphan. (in Škvorecký 1971: 129).
Martyrs of Love is perhaps the most inaccessible of Krumbachová’s scripts, and even
the unfailingly generous Hames remarks that it ‘is not a seamless film, and its
mood is sometimes broken by what appears to be miscalculated overstatement’
(2005: 182). But we see again Krumbachová’s hallmarks in the importance of
sexual desire, social ritual and the inability of both men and women to find true
freedom or happiness except in the absurdity of the moment.
Krumbachová’s following screenplay, The Fruit of Paradise, co-written and directed
by Chytilová, was filmed just after the Prague Spring invasion of 1968. It is an alle-
gorical tale of Eva and her husband, Josef, on holiday, or retreat, at a country spa,
while the highly attractive Robert acts the role of the tempter devil. Robert also
appears to be a serial killer who has marked Eva out to be his seventh victim, but
it is she who shoots him instead. The film is loosely structured and interspersed
Czech Republic 259
with highly impressionistic scenes, most famously the long opening sequence in
which the parable of Adam and Eve is played out. Finally Eva finds herself, ‘not
only outside society […], but also outside the story, language and time’ (Hanáková
2014: 221). For Eva, then, the only way to escape is to leave her philandering and
ineffectual husband or to succumb to the temptations of the devil, which is to
enter a form of exile. This may also be a reflection of the political pessimism of the
late 1960s, and the ending of The Fruits of Paradise presages the depressive exile,
both internal and external, so characteristic of the normalization years (1968–89).
After her work on The Fruits of Paradise, Krumbachová perhaps unexpectedly
teamed up with the elderly Otakar Vavra, who had begun his directing career in
the early 1930s and had taught Chytilová and many of the other Czech New
Wave filmmakers at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in
Prague (FAMU). Vavra’s films were primarily historical or literary adaptations and
Krumbachová helped him adapt Václav Kaplický’s 1962 novel Kladivo na Čarodějnice
(Witch Hammer) for the 1969 film which, apart from the scriptwriting credit, also
includes an acknowledgement of Krumbachová’s ‘creative collaboration and sol-
diers’ song lyrics’. Witch Hammer is set in 1680 in North Moravia and chronicles
the mania following the arrest of an old woman for stealing communion wafers
to feed to cows in the belief that this would make them yield milk. Following the
familiar structure of such witch-hunt frenzies, innocent superstition is used as a
cover for large scale ideological, political and personal gain. A principled dean’s
career is ruined because of an innocent relationship with his servant woman.
Clearly the novel and the film were both intended as comments on contemporary
abuses of ideological power.
There are specific changes in the adaptation of the novel to screenplay. The novel
begins sedately with Susanne Voglick, the dean’s servant, knitting stockings for her
master and thinking ruefully of a wedding taking place later that day. The film’s
introduction is much more dramatic; a monk whispers, ‘Through woman sin enters
the world. Woman is sin,’ and then lasciviously intones, ‘The womb of woman is
the gateway to hell. Bodily desire is the root of all evil, in woman insatiable.’ The
monk concludes, ‘The embrace of woman is like unto the snares of the hunter.
Woman works her trickery with the devil who appears in the form of a man.’ All
the while he stares at a montage of naked women bathing. Vavra and Krumbachová
quickly set up the premise that the terror to come is a result of the sexual repres-
sion and violence of the church, a message that would have been palatable to the
communist regime, thus sidestepping any possible accusations of political allegory.
Sexual repression itself, then, comes to symbolize political oppression, which is the
argument that Krumbachová will follow in two of the films remaining to be dis-
cussed, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and The Murder of Mr Devil.
Krumbachová adapted Valerie and Her Week of Wonders with the film’s director
Jaromil Jireš. The film, released in 1970, was based on the 1935 gothic novel by
the surrealist poet Vitěslav Neval. The narrative is a heightened psychoanalytic and
incestuous drama with vampiric overtones, in which Valerie experiences her sexual
awakening at the hands of various family and quasi-family members (for a detailed
discussion of the film, see Hames 2005: 201–8). Krumbachová’s interest here is in
the intricate and exaggerated mise-en-scène, but also in the young girl’s search for
authentic pleasure, which is, for Krumbachová, the sign of a certain freedom.
In late 1969, Krumbachová and Němec wrote the script of The Murder of Mr Devil
and, according to Němec, the film was not written as something that would actu-
ally be made but rather as a script to fulfil a prior contractual obligation: ‘We needed
a screenplay and we made easy money.’ Němec’s reaction to the film is extremely
negative and he goes on to say, ‘I can’t think of a more stupid film than Killing the
Devil. I’m very ashamed to have been the co-writer and that I’m in it as an extra.’
Perhaps his cynicism here can be attributed to the difficult political period in which
this ostensibly lightweight film was made. Nevertheless the film has been ignored
in discussions of Czech cinema. Hanáková rather hyperbolically claims that
‘Vražda remains one the most underestimated and misinterpreted films of its time’
(2005: 68). Certainly, Hames does not mention it at all in The Czechoslovak New
Wave, but Škvorecký does refer to the film even though he had only read the script:
Judging by the scenario, the film should bear no traces of Chytilová’s feminism.
It is a phantasmic, dream-like story, gently ridiculing the amorous dreaminess
of gentle women. A story not of this world, full of magic, miracles, and of very
original humour: the protagonist falls in love with an engineer called Devil,
who in the end turns out to be a real devil, who once in a while turns into a
kind of abominable snowman. The whole thing cannot be described in tradi-
tional and rational terms. It contains a touch of surrealism, with its delight in
sentimental campy kitsch. Once again everything is conceived very visually,
with an overwhelming display of colours, shapes, costumes, objects, hair, etc.
All told, The Murder of Engineer Devil (1970) is a portrait of Ester’s soul, which is
just as feminine as Věra’s. (Škvorecký 1971: 133)
The film is set in one location, a flat, and has no exterior scenes. It is essentially a
two-hander with the unnamed woman and Čert (meaning ‘devil’ in Czech). The
story itself is fairly basic as the woman tries to seduce and satisfy Čert with increas-
ingly elaborate meals until she realizes that he is indeed a real demon. She then
decides to use his weakness for raisins to trap him in a large hessian sack full of the
fruits. Once he is caught in the sack, he disappears, but she realizes that the raisins
are now ‘more potent than best quality hashish’ and that by eating one single
raisin she could ‘taste the beauty of the clearest illusions’. Ever the pragmatist, she
sells the raisins for an enormous profit and decides to fund an expedition to Tibet
in order to bring herself back an abominable snowman, but a ‘better snowman’
(lepší sn̆žný muž), a ‘better, gentler man’ (lepší n̆žný muž).
The overall structure of The Murder of Mr Devil consists of a rhythmic pattern
alternating between her cooking preparations for Čert’s visits, his actual visits in
which he stuffs food into himself in every greater quantities, and odd chorus-like
sections in which she addresses the viewer directly. In these disquisitions she
adopts a flowery, literary tone in contrast to the coarse language of Čert, in which
she deliberates on her desires and considers what steps to take next. The film has
resonances of the nineteenth-century Czech fairy tale Otesánek in which a desper-
ate childless couple carve a wooden trunk to resemble a baby, which miraculously
Czech Republic 261
comes to life. The ‘baby’ begins to consume everything, eating his parents and
various villagers. An old woman eventually strikes Otesánek down with a hoe and
releases everything and everyone he had eaten. The original couple live happily
without ever desiring a child again. In the film, Čert functions as a perverse child
for whom, as Hanáková writes, ‘the heroine tries to perform the ideal of “feeding”
and caring femininity, [but] it is she who is facing the danger of being eaten by
the “devil”’ (2005: 73). We can then see Čert as the embodiment of female desire,
but a desire that will inevitably destroy its subject.
Krumbachová’s last two co-written films were released in 1983: a New Zealand
film, Strata, directed by Geoff Steven, and The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun, her final
collaboration with Chytilová, in which an ageing lothario, Karel Faun, seduces a
series of much younger women and worries about his own decrepitude. Hanáková
sees Faun as a:
basically tragicomic figure trapped in his role much more fatally than the
women of the earlier films: unlike them, he does not even try to break free; on
the contrary, he clings stubbornly to his ways irrespective of the fact that, at his
age, they bring him more problems than pleasures. (2014: 223)
Krumbachová’s subtle sense of humour and interest in joy and freedom is some-
thing that defined her contribution to the two earlier films made with Chytilová.
This film looks forward to Chytilová’s more brutally pessimistic films such as
Pasti, pasti, pastičky (Little Traps, 1998), in which two men, in an act of revenge,
rape a veterinarian who then drugs and castrates them.
For Krumbachová, who remained single until her death, her own film ends
with the image of a woman alone, drinking, but happy. It is this happy aloneness,
without bitterness or misanthropy, that would appear to define Krumbachová’s
cinematic legacy. In a letter that she writes to herself, she says:
From my own life I remember precisely this, that I was once a child and that now
I am not, and also that I have had many different occupations (hodně různých
zaměstnaní), some of which suited me, and others which I myself left – […] I had
thirty eight lovers, I left thirty of them and eight left me and one of them was a
dentist – and then when one day I found myself in a film studio, my heart was
pierced by the fatal/fateful (osudný) arrow of love and that was it (a byl se mnou
konec), I submitted/succumbed (podlehla) to film in the way some people do to
alcohol. (1994: 7; my translation)
Krumbachová’s particular contribution to Czech cinema is a peculiar sense of aes-

thetics and humour that is acutely aware of the power dynamics, both political
and patriarchal, of the real world, but which nevertheless insists on the pleasures
of fantasy and reality:
The feminine temperament is, of course, quite different from the masculine.
We live and function in a man’s world. We live in the twentieth century, yet
in many respects it is still hard for a woman to get along without a man.
Particularly in the social sense. We are still living as guests in a man’s world.
Naturally, this also implies a certain advantage for women, since we can laugh
at this world made by men. (Krumbachová in Liehm 1974: 281)
Věra Chytilová (1929–2014)
Filip Šára
Věra Chytilová was the most significant Czech woman screenwriter and director
and a vital part of the Czech New Wave, working successfully with the powerful
masculine personalities of the era. Typical of her work were long, improvised scenes
of dialogue by non-actors, an absurd sense of humour, and scenes that looked like
they were not arranged at all.
Chytilová graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 1962. She
attended Otakar Vávra’s classes and was the only woman to specialize in film, stud-
ying with colleagues such as Jiří Menzel and Evald Schorm. She graduated with her
movie Strop (1961), about the life of a mannequin and then made the documentary
Pytel blech (A Bagful of Fleas, 1962). Chytilová began working in film as a clapper
loader at the Barrandov Studio, after which she became an assistant director.
With the exception of the television film Kamarádi (1971) Chytilová was not
allowed to work from 1969 to 1976. The StB (former national security) tried unsuc-
cessfully to force her to collaborate on productions and she was continuously
attacked by the communist authorities. Chytilová began teaching at the Film and
TV School in 1989 and in 2003 became a professor, then in 2005 she became head
of the direction department, and taught there until her death in 2014.
The main characters in Chytilová’s earlier films were women, but she was
interested in a wide range of topics, being a provocative writer and director who
presents ethical dilemmas and breaks down clichés. Although in some movies her
characters are unorthodox, like in Pasti, pasti, pastičky (Traps, 1998), her female
characters are not desperate, they are active victims. Faunovo velmi pozdní odpoledne
(A Faun’s Delayed Afternoon, 1983) can be perceived as a parody about men, while
casual sex is discussed in Kopytem sem, kopytem tam (A Hoof Here, a Hoof There, 1988),
and reflects the reality of the communist era. Chytilová describes Traps as a film
about male aggression in a regime that masks certain crimes, explaining the film
is, ‘Mainly about male machismo, tyranny, their tendencies of superiority and on
the other hand about status of women. Beside that it shows the pollution huge
advertisments on billboards and about destruction of the environment (Pilát and
Chytilová 2010: 430).
Chytilová’s most lauded film is Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966), co-written with Ester
Krumbachová. The film is one of the highlights of the Czech New Wave. The
story is a metaphor for the lives of young people in the Czech state during the
communist regime and a sort of moralistic grotesque.
Besides writing and directing many feature films, Chytilová has also made some
acclaimed documentaries such as Chytilová Versus Forman (1981) and Pátrání po
Ester (Searching for Ester, 2005), about Ester Krumbachová. The documentary series
Czech Republic 263
České milování discusses subjects of interest to Chytilová, mostly the mistreatment

of women by men.
Chytilová has received many awards during her long career as a writer-director,
including the Bronze medal at the Venice International Film Festival (1962) for
A Bagful of Fleas; FICC Award in Oberhausen (1963) for Strop; the Grand Prize at
Mannheim International Film Festival (1963) for O ně čem jiném; the Grand Prize
at Bergamo IFF in 1966 for Daisies; the Silver Hugo at Chicago IFF for Hra o jablko
(The Apple Game, 1976). Her contribution to film was recognized when she was
given the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1992 and the Medal of Merit in
1998, then the Czech Lion award for her contribution to Czech cinematography
in 2000 and the Special Prize for her Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema
at the Karlovy Vary IFF in 2000.
Chytilová was a courageous and challenging filmmaker though, ironically, her
most popular film is the comedy Dědictví aneb Kurvahošigutntag (The Inheritance or
Fuckoffguysgoodday, 1992).
Marie Poledňáková (b. 1942)
Filip Šára
Screenwriter and film director Marie Poledňáková was born in the South Bohemian
city of Strakonice. She studied screenwriting and script editing at the Film and
TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Though Poledňáková is
primarily considered to be a director, she wrote the screenplays for all her films.
Poledňáková was hired in the 1960s by Czechoslovak TV as an assistant director,
where she gained valuable skills that proved to be useful when she first became
a screenwriter and director in 1970, moving on to write and direct films at the
Barrandov Studio in 1983. At the beginning of the 1990s, she co-founded the
commercial television station Premiéra, directing the station until 1994.
Poledňáková is best known for her comedies. Her films for Czechoslovak TV
during the 1970s and 1980s were very popular, often receiving critical acclaim
and frequently winning awards at international film festivals; for instance, Jak
vytrhnout velrybě stoličku (How to Pull Out a Whale’s Tooth, 1977) was awarded sev-
enth place by viewers for the ‘Most Popular Comedy of the Century’; Jak dostat
tatínka do polepšovny (How to Get Daddy into a Fix, 1978) won the ITF Monte Carlo
Award for the Best Screenplay and Best Director; and S tebou mě baví svět (What a
Wonderful World with You, 1982) won the IFF Fijón Special Award (Spain, 1983). As
a result of this success, many international TV stations have broadcast her films.
At the Barrandov Studio, Poledňáková continued to make comedies. Dva lidi
v ZOO (Season at the ZOO) was released in 1989, while later family comedies such
as Jak se krotí krokodýli (Taming Crocodiles) were shown as recently as 2006. In 2008
she made the romantic comedy Líbáš jako Bůh (You Kiss Like a God), noting how:
Stories lay in the streets waiting for you to pick them up. I had planned an
easy life of looking forward to travelling, new experiences and discoveries.
Not to walk in the streets, let alone to bend down! However, then there was …
SOMETHING ... you cannot resist, you have to hold it and fully go for it. And
it was the beginning of the ‘You Kiss Like a God’ project. I haven’t written so
easily and spontaneously in years. (Poledňáková 2012)
Regarding Poledňáková’s most recent film, Líbáš jako d’ábel (You Kiss Like a Devil,
2012), which she wrote and directed as the sequel to You Kiss Like a God, she
wanted to try something different. Although the film was coolly received by crit-
ics, her films have generally found an appreciative audience, and the narratives
in her films aim to bring pleasure and happiness through comedy, rather than
exploring darker themes.
Alice Nellis (b. 1971)
Alice Němcová Tejkalová

Alice Nellis grew up in Poděbrady, a small town in Central Bohemia, then studied
English and American studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague.
In 1997 she went on to study screenwriting and script editing at the Film and
TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and during her studies
she began making documentary films for Czech television. When Nellis wrote
the script for her first film Ene Bene (Eeny Meeny, 2000), the director she initially
approached, Saša Gedeon, could not make it because he was too busy, so Nellis
decided to make the film herself. Eeny Meeny went on to win awards at respected
film festivals like San Francisco, Bergamo, and Vancouver. Because Nellis was busy
writing and directing Výlet (Some Secrets, 2002), she did not finish her course at the
Film and TV School, but the film was very well received and went on to win
many awards, including the Czech award ‘Český lev’ (Czech Lion) for the Best
Screenplay, as well as Best Screenplay at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Nellis also
wrote the lyrics for the songs in the film and sang on some of them. It was five
years before her next film was released – Tajnosti (Little Girl Blue, 2007), which won
the Czech Lion for the best Czech film of the year. Following this Nellis made a
film about different kinds of parenthood, Mamas & Papas (2010), and one year later
Perfect Days – I ženy mají své dny (2011) was released, about a 44-year-old woman
who wants to have a baby. The tragicomedy Revival (2013) won the Audience
Award at the film festival in Karlovy Vary in 2013. The film is very different from
her usual subjects and, for the first time, Nellis has built her film around male
actors, in a witty tragicomedy about the revival of an imaginary Czech band called
‘Smoke’. The main subjects of Nellis’s screenplays are the dynamics of relationships,
especially relationships within the family, and parenthood. Nellis usually shows
people in difficult situations, who need to resolve a problem with the people
they are closest to. But she does not create straightforward happy endings and the
audience often has to think about the conclusion of the story. Czech film critics
have labelled Nellis’s ouevre as ‘women’s films’, although she disagrees with this
viewpoint. Yet when asked about the male-centred cast in Revival, Nellis explains:
‘When you look back at films like ‘Eeny Meeny’ or ‘Some Secrets’, you realized
they are set in a different environment, but they have very similar topic. They
Czech Republic 265
are also about the life balance, about the relationships, about friendship. ‘Revival’
differs only because of its main characters that are all men, but it is typical for
musicians. So it may look like a ‘film for men’, but it is a ‘women film’, in which
men are starring’ (Rozhovor s Alicí Nellis, 2013).
References
Bilík, Petr. n.d. ‘Kinematografie po druhé světové válce’, in Luboš Ptácek (ed.) Panorama
českého filmu. Prague: Rubico, pp. 85–130.
Fikejz, Miloš. n.d.a. Marville Suzanne. Available at: http://libri.cz/databaze/film/heslo/2924
(accessed 18 December 2013).
Fikejz, Miloš. n.d.b. Molas Zet. Available at: http://libri.cz/databaze/film/heslo/3122 (accessed
18 December 2013).
Fikejz, Miloš. n.d.c. Pelleová-Czivišová Ada/Milada. Available at: http://libri.cz/databaze/film/
heslo/3608 (accessed 18 December 2013).
Hames, Peter. 2005. The Czechoslovak New Wave, 2nd edition. London: Wallflower Press.
Hanáková, Petra. 2005. ‘Voices from Another World: Feminine Space and Masculine
Intrusion in Sedmikrásky and Vražda ing. Čerta’, in A. Imre, East European Cinemas. London
and New York: Routledge, pp. 63–77.
Hanáková, Petra. 2014. ‘The Feminist Style in Czechoslovak Cinema: The Feminine Imprint
in the Films of Věra Chytilová and Ester Krumbachová’, in H. Havelková and L. Oates-
Indruchová, The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice.
London and New York: Routledge, pp. 211–33.
Hudec, Zdeněk. 2000. ‘Němý film’, in Luboš Ptácek (ed.) Panorama českého filmu. Prague:
Rubico, pp. 9–32.
Kovaříková, Radana. 2000. ‘Dětský film’, in Luboš Ptácek (ed.) Panorama českého filmu.
Prague: Rubico, pp. 353–83.
Kresta, David. 2000. ‘Čeští režiséři v emigraci’, in Luboš Ptácek (ed.) Panorama českého filmu.
Krumbachová, Ester. 1994. První Knížka Ester. Prague: Primus.
Liehm, Antonín J. 1974. Closely Watched Films: The Czechoslovak Experience. White Plains,
NY: International Arts and Sciences Press.
Opěla, Vladimír et al. 1995. Czech Feature Film I. Prague: Národní filmový archiv.
Opěla, Vladimír et al. 1998. Czech Feature Film II. Prague: Národní filmový archiv.
Pilát, V., and V. Chytilová. 2010. Věra Chytilová zblízka. Prague: XYZ.
Poledňáková, M. 2012. ‘1. Marie Poledňáková – Show Jana Krause 8.6.2012’ (video file).
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HSceeg5CPw (accessed 21 December 2013).
Polenská, Radka. 2000. ‘Animovaný film’, in Luboš Ptácek (ed.) Panorama českého filmu.
Ptáčková, Brigita. 2000. ‘Hraný film v období normalizace’, in L. Ptáček (ed.) Panorama
českého filmu. Prague: Rubico, pp. 155–93.
Ptácek, Luboš. 2000. ‘Nová vlna’, in Luboš Ptácek (ed.) Panorama českého filmu. Prague:
Rubico, pp. 131–54.
Rozhovor s Alicí Nellis. 2013. Available at: http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10524804270-
revival/21251212060/6802-rozhovor-s-reziserkou-alici-nellis/ (accessed 13 December 2013).
Škvorecký, Josef. 1971. All the Bright Young Men and Women: A Personal History of the Czech
Cinema. Trans. Michael Schonberg. Toronto: Peter Martin and Take One.
Sorfa, David. 2013. ‘Beyond Work and Sex in Czech Cinema’, in Ewa Mazierska (ed.) Work in
Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 133–50.
Urgošíková, Blažena. 1999. ‘Krumbachová, Ester’, in St James Women Filmmakers Encyclopedia.
Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, pp. 223–5.
Denmark
Eva Novrup Redvall
Introduction
This entry highlights women writers from the silent film era to the classical period
of Danish cinema from 1930–60, the modernist and auteur-oriented 1960s to
the more feminist films of the 1970s and 1980s; it then outlines the coming of a
generation of educated writer-directors and screenwriters, after the establishment
of a screenwriting department at the National Film School of Denmark, and the
emergence of a wide variety of women writers now working within feature films
and television as well as documentary.1
Since the 2000s, Danish films have been made by renowned women directors
with international careers such as the Oscar-winning Susanne Bier (e.g. Hævnen/In
a Better World, 2010) and Lone Scherfig (Italiensk for begyndere/Italian for Beginners,
2000), which might suggest that all is well in the Danish film culture in terms of
issues of gender. However, if one looks behind the few established frontrunners,
the Danish film landscape is marked by gender difference. When the newspaper
Politiken launched a series of articles about gender and film in 2013, statistics
showed that, since 2008, only one in four screenplays was written by a woman
and only one in five feature films directed by one (Benner 2013a; 2013b). These
statistics are especially notable because Denmark aims to have equal rights and
gender equality in terms of who works behind the camera. Yet, while there are
fewer women in directing and screenwriting, women tend to dominate in the
field of producing and organizing productions.
The topic of gender among filmmakers has often been discussed in a coun-
try where the film industry is heavily subsidized by the government, partly to
ensure a plurality of voices in the national film culture. However, the debate in
Politiken was the first time that the role of the screenwriter was highlighted and
counted as a specific profession next to the director, and signals the way in which
screenwriting has become more respected in the national film culture in the last
15 years. Whereas directors have traditionally been the only ones singled out in
the press, in what has, since the 1960s, been an auteur-oriented film culture, the
2000s saw the emergence of a number of successful writers who also became well
known among the cinema-going audience and television viewers. The National
266
Denmark 267
Film School of Denmark played an important part in this change by starting to

take screenwriting as a craft seriously, establishing an independent screenwriting
department and creating strong director-writer collaborations (Redvall 2010). The
success of Danish television drama was also instrumental, since the writers enjoy
a much more privileged position in the world of television where head writers
oversee a long-running series all the way through to production, while episode
directors come and go (Redvall 2013).
However, while film writers such as Kim Fupz Aakeson or Anders Thomas Jensen
became national stars in their own right during the 2000s, and TV writers such as
Søren Sveistrup (Forbrydelsen/The Killing) and Adam Price (Borgen) gained world-
wide recognition in the 2010s, there have been surprisingly few female screenwrit-
ers taking part in this success. But many of the acclaimed women directors are also
screenwriters, writing or co-writing the screenplays for their films. Several of these
directors have developed their films in regular collaboration with specific screen-
writers; Susanne Bier has worked with Anders Thomas Jensen for many years and
Kim Fupz Aakeson has written screenplays with Annette K. Olesen or Pernille
Fischer Christensen. While these directors can also be regarded as accomplished
writers, one can argue that there were no female screenwriting stars until Maya
Ilsøe became famous for being the first solo female head writer in the prestigious
Sunday night television drama slot with Arvingerne/The Legacy (2014–) for the
Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DR. Screenwriters are traditionally not in the
spotlight, but women screenwriters have been excluded to a remarkable degree.
The age of the amateurs and the silent film writers
Denmark was an important player on the international film scene in the days
of early silent film. During the 1910s, as films became longer, the writing of the
screenplay became more important (Thorsen 2009: 126). From 1911, Nordisk
Film, Denmark’s most prestigious production company, had an independent story
department, which among other things scrutinized more than 1,000 screenplays
that the company received during just nine months of one year (Schröder 2006:
101). Most of the screenplays were submitted by amateurs. By 1916, Nordisk
Film received around 2,000 unsolicited screenplays a year, but, according to
one employee, 95 per cent of these were unsuitable for use (Thorsen 2009: 127).
Stephan Michael Schröder argues that the time of the amateurs or of the semi-
amateurs ended when the continuity film became the norm in Europe after the
end of the First World War, as it became impossible for people without connections
in the film industry to sell their screenplays (2006: 112).
The first Danish screenwriting manual was authored by Jens Locher in 1916,
but before this companies such as Nordisk Film had guidelines for how to develop
good stories for the moving pictures. A good screenplay was defined as having no
more than three main characters, and audiences had to feel sympathy for at least
one of these. A straightforward plot was preferred, but the films had to contain
some kind of original twist. The stories should take place in the present among
the upper classes and should not contain national markers (Schröder 2006: 100).
While Swedish cinema developed films with a distinctly Scandinavian flavour, the
Danish filmmakers aimed at a more international style with the erotic melodrama
emerging as a successful genre and Asta Nielsen as a major star.
There were few female screenwriters in this period. Agnete von Prangen
(1880–1968) was married to director August Blom and acted in films from 1912,
then moved into writing screenplays from 1914 to 1919, but she was mainly
known as a lead actress for Nordisk Film. However, Harriet Bloch (1881–1976)
had an impressive track record, writing a number of films from 1911–23, and has
been credited as the first professional female screenwriter (Sundholm et al. 2012:
405). In an interview recorded in 1962, Bloch tells how the idea of writing mov-
ies came to her when she saw Afgrunden/The Abyss (1910), starring Asta Nielsen,
at the cinema and figured that she would be able to write something of a similar
quality herself.2 She sent an unsolicited screenplay to cinema owner and film pro-
ducer Constantin Philipsen, who had opened Denmark’s fist cinema, Kosmorama,
in 1904. According to Bloch, Philipsen was not interested in her story because he
only wanted films that were either really vulgar or really exciting and this was a
romantic melodrama. However, Nordisk Film took an interest in the story, which
became August Blom’s Hendes ære/Lady Mary’s Love (1911), and the film was presented
as a play in 50 sections by ‘Mrs Harriet Bloch’.
Bloch estimated that she had written around 150 films, many of which were
never made. Around 100 of her screenplays were sold to Nordisk Film, but she also
wrote for other companies in Denmark, as well as in Germany and Sweden. Bloch
explains that she never met the head of Nordisk Film, Ole Olsen, but apparently
she was his favourite screenwriter. As the titles of many of the films credited to her
bear witness, many of these were stories about women and love. She also wrote a
number of films for the popular actor Valdemar Psilander, who is credited as star
on the printed programme for August Blom’s 1916 film Du skal elske din næste/
The Samatarian, which was presented as a ‘novel on society’ (‘samfundsroman’) in
three acts and 60 sections, directed by Blom and starring Psilander, but with no
mention of Harriet Bloch in the programme. Over the years, she also wrote lighter
comedies, for instance for Lau Lauritzen Sr, who invented the comedy couple Fy
og Bi, a Danish version of Laurel and Hardy.
Bloch describes how she sometimes could not sit through the films she had
written, because they had been changed to such a degree that she couldn’t recog-
nize the original text. In one case, she explains how a film was so ‘modernized’
that she would never have believed it to be her screenplay and notes that some-
times it was difficult to know what they actually paid her to do. At the beginning
of her career Bloch was paid in the range of 50 DKK for writing shorter films, but
at the end of her career this had increased to 3,000 DKK. She wrote continuously
from 1911 to 1920; however, she wrote her stories from home where she lived
with her husband and their six children. Bloch notes that her husband probably
never saw her writing as she wrote while he was at work, and besides meetings at
the production companies she didn’t socialize with the industry (int. Bloch – see
note 2). There were few film reviews at the time, and they rarely mentioned the
writer. Bloch describes how she could have tried to make a name for herself, but
Denmark 269
didn’t really take screenwriting seriously and found that ‘the films at the time
didn’t have anything to do with art’ (int. Bloch – see note 2). For Bloch, one of
the attractions of writing screenplays seems to have been that they didn’t take too
long to write and they could be fitted into her other duties.
Harriet Bloch is an interesting example of how it was possible for a woman to
enter the industry in the ‘age of the amateurs’, without having any film connec-
tions. Over the years, Bloch gained a solid reputation as a writer, having offers of
work from Sweden, where she wrote films like the Mauritz Stiller comedy Kärlek
och journalistik/Love and Journalism (1916), and explains how she tried to get a film
made in the US, but didn’t succeed (int. Bloch – see note 2). However, based on
her description of her career, she did not regard screenwriting as a real profession,
but rather as a fun hobby, which earned her some extra money.
The professional writers of the studio era
The coming of sound film resulted in the establishment of a classical film style
that was dominated by a studio system, with production companies working
with regular crews and directors. This was a time when several female writers and
directors emerged, the most prominent of these being Alice O’Fredericks, Grete
Frische, Bodil Ipsen and Annelise Reenberg.
The most well known of these is Alice O’Fredericks (1899–1968) who from
1934–67 directed nearly 80 films, alone or in collaboration with others, making
her the most productive female director in the world (Sundholm et al. 2012:
405). O’Fredericks began her career during the silent film era as a script girl for
the director Benjamin Christensen, and she had a minor role in his film Häxan/
The Witch (1922), which led to other roles as an actress. In the mid 1920s she
found herself out of a job and thought about writing stories for films, and when
her fiancé gave her a typewriter she had the means to get her ideas on paper.
O’Fredericks wrote a screenplay for the two popular characters Fy and Bi, which
won an anonymous screenplay contest in a Danish newspaper. After being
announced as the winner, director Lau Lauritzen asked whether she would like
to work for him (Piil 2005: 302).
The screenplay that made O’Fredericks break through, Filmens helte/Long and
Short (1918), was set in the film industry, and portrayed the fight behind the
scenes at a film studio where Fy and Bi suddenly become the stars at the expense of
other actors. O’Fredericks either wrote or co-wrote ten screenplays for the popular
silent film duo in the years 1927–33, while also learning the tricks of the trade as
a directing assistant and editor for Lau Lauritzen (Piil 2005: 303). She then started
working with Lauritzen’s son, Lau Lauritzen Jr, and became the first woman to be
credited as director on a feature film as the co-director of Ud i den kolde sne/Out in
the Cold Snow (1934).
O’Fredericks continued to write or co-write most of her films as a director,
and her impressive career covers a wide range of films. She is most famous for
directing popular comedies based on the novels of Morten Korch and for the
family film franchise Far til fire/Father of Four (1953–61). She often made films
based on the work of women authors, for instance the film version of Alice
Guldbrandsen’s Hr Petit (1948), about an elegant serial killer who offers single
women moments of feeling loved before killing them. Alongside the comedies of
the 1940s, O’Fredericks made a number of so-called ‘problem films’, dealing with,
among other things, women’s position in society. She is credited for directing
the first Danish ‘women’s film’ Saa mødes vi hos Tove/Then We Will Meet at Tove’s
(1946), about eight women catching up on each other’s lives ten years after their
graduation.
Saa mødes vi hos Tove was written and co-directed by Grete Frische (1911–62)
who was a productive screenwriter in the studio era. Film historian Peter
Schepelern attributes more than half of the 350 sound feature films made between
1930 and 1960 to just six screenwriters (1995: 19). Frische is credited with writ-
ing 22 screenplays and co-directing three films in this period (Piil 2001: 112),
but she seems to have contributed to several other films as ‘screenplay doctor’
(Pedersen 2010: 117; 2012: 124). In the press, she was sometimes referred to as
the ‘house poet’ of the production company ASA (Pedersen 2012: 28). Frische was
the daughter of the actor and playwright Axel Frische, with whom she wrote her
first co-directed feature film Kriminalassistent Bloch/Inspector Bloch (1943). She had
a 24-year career as a freelance writer and wrote several of the series of eight Far til
fire films, which were directed by O’Fredericks between 1953 and 1961.3 She was a
good friend of O’Fredericks and, besides collaborating on the popular family fran-
chise, they also made several problem films. Among them is Jeg elsker en anden/
I Love Someone Else (1946), which has been described as a romantic comedy with
‘the message that more kindergartens are needed’ (Pedersen 2012: 32) – according
to Lau Lauritzen Jr’s biographer, Paw Kåre Pedersen, an important issue for Frische
(Pedersen 2012: 287). Frische was also a writer on O’Fredericks and Lau Lauritzen
Jr’s Vi vil ha’ et barn/We Want a Child (1949), about the lives and problems of
young people. Another of their films with an interesting female role at the core
was Min datter Nelly/My Daughter Nelly (1955), based on a play by Leck Fischer, and
adapted by Ingmar Bergman as Kris/Crisis in 1946, in which a young woman has
to choose between her biological mother and her surrogate mother.
One of Frische’s most acclaimed screenplays was the war drama Støt står den
danske sømand/The Viking Watch of the Danish Seaman (directed by Bodil Ipsen and
Lau Lauritzen Jr), which won the 1949 Bodil Award for best Danish feature film.
The film is based on the war-time diaries of her brother, Kaj Frische (Pedersen
2010: 584), and the idea for the film arose when Frische told O’Fredericks about
her brother’s experiences during the war (2010: 556). This led to Frische doing
substantial research into the war-time experiences of the seamen, based on some
of the experiences of her brother (2010: 584). Frische made a great effort to keep
everything as true to the actual events as possible and arranged a reading of the
screenplay for navy representatives to check the portrayal of life at sea (2010:
584–5).
The studio era provided Frische with the opportunity to write many kinds of
material for very different directors. However, the few women writing films in
this period gained knowledge about the industry through their acting careers,
Denmark 271
and both O’Fredericks and Frische started in acting. While acting was the most
common path to writing and directing, there is, however, the notable exception
of Annelise Reenberg (1919–94), who trained as a photographer and became
Denmark’s first female cinematographer before debuting as a solo director in
1953. She is particularly known for establishing the popular family film fran-
chise Min søsters børn/Six Kids and Their Uncle (1966–71) and for popular classics
like Baronessen fra Benzintanken/The Baroness from the Gas Station (1960) and
the operetta Frøken Nitouche/Miss Nitouche (1963).4 Reenberg wrote 13 of her 19
feature films herself. She occasionally tried to get more personal projects of her
own off the ground, such as a highly ambitious film on the life of Hans Christian
Andersen, but they proved hard to finance as the 1960s was a time of insecurity
in the industry, suffering competition from the introduction of television (Piil
2005: 336). Reenberg ended up retiring after directing her fourth feature in the
Min søsters børn series, which cemented her role as the queen of the popular family
films along with O’Fredericks.
Film as art and international acclaim
As in most other countries, the view of the film medium changed during the
1960s when the writers and directors of la nouvelle vague presented ideas of ‘the
camera as pen’ and insisted that film is a personal work of art. In the 1960s, there
was still widespread production of popular films in Denmark, but there was also a
gradual transition from what Ib Bondebjerg has described as classical film culture
to a modern one where the director became the centre of attention (2005). In sev-
eral respects this development was a serious blow for the professional screenwriter,
since many directors now made films based on the notion that they should write
their screenplays themselves. This new perception of cinema meant that some
parts of the filmmaking community no longer had the same interest in efficient
craftsmen producing formula films, and if directors were looking for collaborating
writers, they were often more likely to collaborate with authors who came from
the ‘new realism’ in literature.5
Astrid Henning-Jensen (1914–2002) is an example of a writer-director who
from the outset insisted on film as a medium for telling important stories about
society and brought new kinds of characters to the screen in a serious manner, for
instance in her films about children and young people. Usually working outside
of the established popular genres, she wrote original dramas or adapted novels on
her own or with her husband Bjarne Henning-Jensen.
Astrid Henning-Jensen had a brief acting career under her maiden name, Astrid
Smahl, before marrying Bjarne Henning-Jensen in 1938, who had a background in
theatre, although his passion was film. She started working as an assistant in cam-
era, editing, scripting and directing together with Bjarne at Nordisk Film. Her first
writing credit is a short film from 1940, co-directed with Bjarne, and she helped
write the screenplay for her husband’s first feature film, Naar man kun er ung/While
Still Young (1943). Gradually, Astrid moved into co-directing. The exact nature of
her contribution in their early collaboration is sometimes unclear. For example,
she was credited as a director’s assistant on Ditte Menneskebarn|Ditte, Daughter of a

Man (1946), but describes the process as a co-creation in her biography (Henning-
Jensen and Gress 1999: 39). However, she also explains how it was decided ‘to
let Bjarne have this film’, since she was regarded as ‘the coming man’ (1999: 40).
Over the years, the couple became known as a writing/directing husband/wife
duo following the success with De pokkers unger/Those Damned Kids (1947) on
which Astrid was credited as a director alongside Bjarne. Their adaptation of the
novel Ditte Menneskebarn by Martin Andersen Nexø gained international recogni-
tion and was discussed as a new kind of neo-realist sensibility in Danish filmmak-
ing.6 In her biography, Henning-Jensen describes how she had no idea what this
meant when the international critics compared the film to the work of Rossellini
and de Sica at its premiere in Venice (1999: 41). Those Damned Kids won interna-
tional as well as national acclaim, but following this the couple found less success
with their projects. In the 1950s, they refused to direct the popular comedies of
the time because, as Astrid explained to a Danish newspaper, their desire was to
make films about something substantial rather than just another charming story:
‘We would so much like to make films that tell human beings something about
human beings’ (in Piil 2005: 163).
Astrid and Bjarne then separated for some time. Astrid started directing her own
films, among them the poetic 25-minute film Palle alene i verden (Palle All Alone
in the World, 1949) based on a popular children’s book by Jens Sigsgaard. Bjarne
and Astrid’s five-year-old son, Lars, played the lead as the boy Palle who suddenly
finds himself all alone in the world, which he first finds to be great before real-
izing the nightmarish dimensions of a world with no one else in it. The film had
its world premiere in England in 1949 and won a special prize at Cannes in the
same year (Jørholt 2001: 146). During her separation from Bjarne, Astrid went to
Norway where she wrote and directed Kranes Konditori (Krane’s Tea Room, 1951),
based on a novel by Cora Sandel. The story follows events in the life of a single
mother and found international mention in, for instance, Sight and Sound, which
saw the film as a contrast to the Danish filmmaking at that time, which allowed
little artistic freedom (Piil 2005: 163).
Henning-Jensen’s career had several ups and downs over the course of the next
three decades. When she reunited with Bjarne, they co-wrote most of their films,
but Astrid took over as the director. The couple received international attention
at Cannes in 1960 with Paw (1959), based on a novel by Torry Gredsted, about a
Caribbean boy trying to get used to his new life in a small town in Denmark. The
Oscar-nominated Paw is often mentioned as the first Danish film dealing with
issues of tolerance between different races (Piil 2005: 430).
Henning-Jensen directed radio drama for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation
from 1967–79.7 However, she came back to filmmaking after reading the novel
Vinterbørn/Winter-born by Dea Trier Mørch (1978), which takes place in the
maternity ward of Denmark’s biggest hospital, Rigshospitalet (also the location of
Lars von Trier’s Riget/The Kingdom). She wrote the screenplay for the film, which
became a big audience success, despite mixed national reviews, and won her the
director’s award at the Berlinale in 1979.
Denmark 273
With its setting among pregnant women, Winter-born brought a number of

women on screen while dramatizing the micro world of the maternity ward.
Henning-Jensen has described the writing of the four drafts of the screenplay as a
laborious process of eliminating scenes and characters, since the film was ‘already
breaking records with the amount of main characters in it’ (1999: 202). After this,
Henning-Jensen’s films are centred on women, even if she was not part of the
women’s movement of the time and insisted that she should compete with male
filmmakers on equal terms. As she stated: ‘I don’t believe in closed groups for
women. It is very good to talk about things among women, but things happen
out among the men, and if we are to compete it has to be on equal terms’ (Piil
2005: 167).
While she wasn’t politically involved in the women’s movement of the 1970s,
her films nevertheless offered stories about the lives of women. She wrote the
screenplay for Øjeblikket/The Moment (1980), about a woman with breast cancer,
and then inherited the project Barndommens Gade/Early Spring (1986), based on
the novel by famous Danish author Tove Ditlevsen, from another director. There
were already seven drafts of the screenplay by Erik Thygesen, but Henning-Jensen
decided to write a new version, which she felt would be closer to the original book
and could also embrace Ditlevsen’s poetic dreams (Henning-Jensen and Gress
1999: 209–17). She cast the 17-year-old Sofie Gråbøl (now of The Killing fame) as
the 14-year-old alter ego of Ditlevsen in the story of the author’s life growing up in
a working class Copenhagen neighbourhood in the 1930s. Henning-Jensen’s last
film Bella, min Bella (1996) was based on her own screenplay and told the story of
a single mother’s difficulties in raising her teenage daughter.
Besides Early Spring, Henning-Jensen’s later films on women received mixed
reviews, and the realist and socially engaged films of the 1940s, such as Those
Damned Kids (made together with her husband, Bjarne), are normally highlighted
as her best work. However, with her production of shorts, documentaries and
feature films over a 40-year career, she stands out as one of the only women
screenwriters and directors who managed to stick to her own agenda, even if quite
a few projects failed along the way. It is interesting how her later films so clearly
took an interest in female destinies and problems, while she kept a distance from
the outspoken feminists of the time and described herself as being gender neutral
when working.8
In a similar way, Annelise Hovmand (1926–), another woman writer-director,
who told stories about women for the big and small screen in the 1980s, did not
become an integrated part of the women’s movement in spite of the clear gender
issues in several of her later works. Hovmand also had a long career in filmmak-
ing following her move from script girl and editing assistant to directing when
she met director Johan Jacobsen, with whom she lived between 1951 and 1965.
She wrote the screenplay for her first film, Ingen tid til kærtegn/No Time for Kisses
(1957), together with Finn Methling. The film was inspired by her own life with
children from a previous marriage and a busy career that made it hard to find
enough time for both family and working life. The film was awarded a Bodil for
best film of the year and launched her directing career, though she only directed
one feature film in the 1970s, Et døgn med Ilse/24 Hours with Ilse (1971), which
portrays the life of a stripper. She moved into producing some of the collective
projects by women at the time, such as Ta’ det som en mand, frue/Take It Like a Man,
Ma’m! (1975), co-written and directed by Mette Knudsen, Elisabeth Rygård and
Li Vilstrup. The film had an all-female team and was relatively popular, not least
because of the use of humour in the story of a housewife who gradually becomes
aware of life outside her traditional home. Particularly memorable is a sequence
where she imagines a society in which all the traditional gender roles in the private
and the public sphere are reversed.
Take it Like a Man, Ma’m! grew out of the women’s movement, although
Annelise Hovmand wasn’t an outspoken member, despite participating in col-
lective film projects. In the 1980s, she was part of the six-woman directorial col-
lective behind the TV series Krigsdøtre/Daughters of War (1981), which portrayed
the lives of different females from the 1950s to the 1970s, but she only directed
three other productions before withdrawing from filmmaking in 1991. Hovmand
has argued that her career as a writer and director didn’t stand out, since there
were several other women making films in Denmark when she started directing.
In an interview from the early 1960s, she described being a woman in a male-
dominated industry as rather unproblematic, but also underlined that it would
have been more difficult had the other women not been around.9
New stories of women and the women’s movement
The 1970s saw the coming of a new generation of female directors who empha-
sized their gender and took an active part in the women’s movement. Take It Like
a Man, Ma’m! is one example of this new approach to filmmaking, giving women’s
films a more political edge, so that they contained ideas of women’s emancipa-
tion rather than merely focusing on stories about female characters and problems
in society. Mette Knudsen’s documentary Rødstrømper – en kavalkade af kvinde-
film/Women’s Libbers – A Cavalcade of Women’s Film’ (1985) tells the story of the
women’s movement of this period in Denmark, drawing on clips from around 20
films which focus on the realities of women’s lives, several of them documenting
important events of the women’s movement at the time such as festivals, demon-
strations and the women’s camp at Femø.
The emergence of a new range of female voices in Danish filmmaking is often
linked to a general democratization of the film medium in the 1970s, making
it easier to gain access to filmmaking (Pedersen 2001). One example of this is
writer and director Mette Knudsen (b. 1943) who started her work in filmmak-
ing as the co-writer of Christian Braad Thomsen’s feature film Kære Irene/Dear
Irene (1971) in which she also played the main part. She became interested in
directing, and attended one of the short courses at the National Film School
of Denmark. Following this, she had financing from the Film Workshop of the
Danish Film Institute to make her first film, the documentary Fremmed/Stranger
(1971), consisting of interviews with guest workers in Denmark.10 She collaborated
with Li Vistrup and Dola Bonfils on the documentary Kvinden og fællesmarkedet/
Denmark 275
The Woman and the EEC (1973) and later established the production collective
Røde Søster (‘Red Sister’) together with Vilstrup and Elisabeth Rygård (b. 1946),
which, among other things, produced Take It Like a Man, Ma’m!11 In terms of the
importance of the institutional framework around filmmaking in aiding the emer-
gence of more female screenwriters and directors, it is worth noting that none of
the commercial producers wanted to finance the film, and Flemming Behrendt, the
commissioner at the Danish Film Institute, was thus instrumental in its making
by providing 71 per cent of the film’s funding (Piil 2005: 362).
Knudsen has written and directed a number of documentaries on different
women’s topics as well as fiction such as the short Lasse, Lasse Lille (1993), about
the challenges of being a full-time working mother, or the feature film Skat, det er
din tur/Honey, It’s Your Turn (1997), similarly focusing on being a modern family
with two full-time working parents, where the woman ends up being in charge of
the housework. Knudsen often worked in close collaboration with other women,
and she is an example of a filmmaker who has been working for women’s rights in
many different ways throughout her career. She has made films based on a desire
to improve women’s position in society, since the film medium, according to her,
‘has a much stronger emotional appeal than the written word’.12 Moreover, she
has argued that it has been a major issue for her to ensure the existence of pictures
and stories of women for future generations.
Another influential writer and director telling stories that portray women in a
new way is Helle Ryslinge (b. 1944), who started her work in fringe theatre before
moving into film acting. In 1979, Ryslinge and fellow comedienne Anne Marie
Helger toured the country with their two-women crazy show, Dameattraktioner
(Lady Attractions), which made fun of the common conceptions as to how women
should behave. The show has been described as a variation of the burlesque caba-
ret shows, combining satire and striptease while using erotic posing in extrava-
gant costumes to challenge bourgeois ideology.13 Filmmaker Christian Braad
Thomsen used the show as the centre of his road movie Koks i kulissen/Ladies on
the Rocks (1983), with Ryslinge and Helger as co-writers of the screenplay. This
was Ryslinge’s entrance into filmmaking, and she found great success with the
screenplay for her feature film Flamberede hjerter/Coeurs flambés (1986), which was
awarded both the Bodil Award of the film critics and the Robert Award from the
Danish Film Academy as best film of the year. The film, a comedy about a nurse
and her troubled love life, pokes fun at men and women as well as traditional
and liberal views of life. However, there is also a sense of melancholy in the story
about the difficulties of finding love and a direction in life.
Ryslinge’s next film, Sirup (1990), is also a comedy that tells of the troubles of
her own generation, and is set in the self-indulgent art world. The film shared the
screenplay prize at the film festival in Venice in 1990, but didn’t find the large
audiences or awards of her debut feature. Her following screenplay for Carlo og
Ester/Carlo and Ester (1994) more provocatively dealt with physical love between
an old couple, putting issues of the sex life of older people on the agenda. The
film contained less humour than her previous films and didn’t do well at the
box office. Ryslinge lost the money she had invested in the film, expressing great
frustration about the stresses of being a writer and director (Piil 2005: 366). She also
noted the industry’s change from a trust-based way of commissioning, where she
could hand in a single A4 sheet with a few vague thoughts for her first feature
film, towards a support system where ‘you don’t get any money unless you main-
stream your films, so you have to mobilise the standard dramaturgical model’
(Hjort and Bondebjerg 2001: 133). Ryslinge has opposed this way of working
where you ‘have to mess around with your scripts forever to accommodate what
everybody and his uncle might have to say about them’ (2001: 136). However, she
continued making films, and wrote and directed one more feature film, Halabalad
Blues (2002), telling the story of a female photographer in Copenhagen who falls
in love with a Turkish man. The film raised issues about Denmark’s relationship
with immigrants and offered yet another critical gaze at Danish society, an aspect
which Ryslinge has often pointed a finger at from a comedic perspective through-
out her career, while also playing remarkable female characters on screen in the
films of other directors.
Early in her career, Ryslinge played the lead in three ground-breaking films
by artist and filmmaker Jytte Rex (b. 1942), an important writer and director in
Danish filmmaking, who has constantly challenged traditional approaches to
filmmaking and understood cinema as a visually expressive medium. Rex was
educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1966–9) and ventured into
filmmaking together with the artist Kirsten Just, co-writing and co-directing the
super 8 short Tornerose var et vakkert barn/The Sleeping Beauty (1971). Rex was active
in the women’s movement, but represents a more personal and artistic approach
to telling about the lives of women than the more dominant, explicitly political
films of the time. She has described her interest in the idea of counter-images
connected to the social ferment during the 1960s and 1970s, but how it gradually
became necessary for her to ‘take a stance against many of the attitudes motivating
the women’s movement when it reified into a platform for neo-marxism. There
were a lot of painters who suddenly found themselves at odds with the official,
feminist party line, and we were accused of being reactionary simply by virtue of
the fact that our work was art’ (Hjort and Bondebjerg 2001: 96).
In 1977, Rex wrote and directed the experimental feature film Veronicas sve-
dedug/Veronica’s Veil, which explores women’s lives and dreams and plays with
reality and myth in a patchwork structure that came to be significant in her later
work. Her next feature-length film, Achilleshælen er mit våben/Achilles’ Heel Is My
Weapon (1979) – a study in male and female longing, shot in super 8 – was the
first ever 100 per cent state-financed film (Piil 2005: 349) and again points to how
several women writers and directors have been dependent on the institutional
support system to make their visions come alive. However, Rex has also had
her share of clashes with different commissioners when proceeding to make her
unique films, such as Belladonna (1981), Isolde (1989), Planetens spejle/Mirrors of the
Planet (1992) and Silkevejen/Silk Road (2004). She has described how her early films
were marked by ‘a very anarchistic relation between the scriptwriting phase and
the actual shooting of the film’, while her later films are based on spending a lot
Denmark 277
of time working through the text and also working with other people in the final
stages of the screenwriting process (Hjort and Bondebjerg 2001: 93).
Thematically, many of her films deal with aspects of women’s lives and the
nature of memories, and she has repeatedly pointed to the Argentinian author
Jorge Luís Borges as a source of inspiration for her often labyrinthine style, which
has a transcendent relationship between dreams and reality; for instance, her
poetic short from 1985, Den erindrende/The Memorious, united together two stories
by Borges and won her the Danish film critics’ Bodil Award. Rex is one of the few
writer-directors to make the move from the world of fine art to filmmaking, which
might explain the remarkable visual sensibility in her images for the big screen.
It is noteworthy how easier access to the means of production and the women’s
movement in the 1970s and 1980s paved the way for a number of different voices
in the Danish world of filmmaking, but also how the writing process was often
closely connected to the actual making of the films, with several women writers
and directors working closely together in small communities. Professional screen-
writers disappeared in the national production culture, where directors primarily
wanted to write their own screenplays, and the number of films produced in
Denmark declined to an all-time low with an annual output of 12.4 films a year in
the 1980s (Bondebjerg et al. 1997: 15), making it hard to sustain a career by only
writing for film or the rather limited television drama productions.
However, the 1970s and 1980s did provide one example of a now legendary pro-
duction by a woman screenwriter, namely the TV series Matador (24 episodes for
four seasons, 1978–82), which was based on an idea by journalist and author Lise
Nørgård (b. 1917) who wrote most of the episodes with Karen Smith, Jens Louis
Petersen and Paul Hammerich. The series follows life in the small fictional town of
Korsbæk between 1929 and 1947, depicting the rivalry between the families of two
businessmen, but also including many characters from all classes of society and
dealing with the impact of the Second World War on the community. The series,
directed by Erik Balling and produced by Nordisk Film for DR, was an enormous
success at the time and has since then enjoyed repeated reruns with impressive
audience figures (Redvall 2013: 37). Before its making, Nørgaard had written epi-
sodes of the popular TV series Huset på Christianshavn/The House in Christianshavn
(1973–7) and also tried her hand at writing two films for the Danish comedian
Dirch Passer, but she stopped writing for the screen after Matador.
The film-school-educated generation of screenwriters
While there were very few women focusing specifically on screenwriting during
the 1970s and 1980s, this began to change during the 1990s, when the National
Film School of Denmark started taking screenwriting as an independent craft seri-
ously. The first students from the then part-time teachings of the screenwriting
department graduated in 1982. Peter Thorsboe, a graduate from the students in
1984 who went on to became a celebrated TV drama writer, has stated that there
was no prestige in writing films at the time; for most people screenwriting was
something they would do over a summer break outside their official careers in
literature or journalism (2006: 144–5).
A full-time screenwriting education was established in 1988, and this is still
the only official place to study to be a screenwriter in Denmark. From 1982 until
2013, more than 50 women have studied screenwriting at the School:
1982: 4 students, 1 woman: Bente Clod

1984: 6 students, 3 women: Marie Louise Lauridsen, Marie Louise Lefèvre and Grethe
Poulsen
1987: 3 students, 1 woman: Ilse M. Haugaard
1989: 13 students, 7 women: Kirsten Brøndum, Lone Erritsøe, Kit Goetz, Randi
Langkilde, Nina Malinowski, Lone Thau and Julie Wieth
1990: 11 students, 5 women: Nina Grünfeldt, Lisbeth Jessen, Nana Simonsen, Anette
Sveinsson and Rose Marie Tillisch
1992: 7 students, 5 women: Susanne Giese, Lisbeth Kolind, Katja Vimpel Krøyer, Pia
Stangerup and Lotte Tarp
1994: 4 students, 1 woman: Charlotte Sachs Bostrup
1996: 11 students, 5 women: Jytte Borch Andersen, Mai Brostrøm, Dunja Gry Jensen,
Charlotte Sieling and Anna Karina Steenholdt (now: Lolita Belstar)
1997: 13 students, 3 women: Kristiane Louise Korf, Kim Leona and Anne Dorthe
Michelsen
1999: 9 students, 4 women: Elin Heinesen, Dorte W. Høgh, Anne-Mette Rosenkilde
and Ida Maria Rydén
2001: 8 students, 3 women: Maj Bovin, Mette Heeno and Abelone Koppel
2003: 8 students, 4 women: Karina Dam, Ine Euheim, Maya Ilsøe and Elsebeth Nielsen
2005: 5 students, 3 women: Rikke de Fine Licht, Anna Neye Poulsen and Paola
Pellettieri
2007: 6 students, 3 women: Kett Lützhøft Jensen, Tine Krull Petersen and Maja Jul Larsen
2009: 6 students, 4 women: Berit Seidelin, Cathrine Classon Holst, Maren Louise
Käehne and Tone Mygind Rostbøll
2011: 6 students, 1 woman: Lone R. Frydendal
2013: 6 students, 2 women: Carina Kamper and Astrid Øye
Among the first alumni some found careers in writing fiction, but they did not
have steady careers writing for the screen. From the mid 1990s, a few graduates
managed to establish themselves as professional screenwriters in the industry.
Some of the graduates moved into directing; Charlotte Sachs Bostrup has directed
numerous successful youth comedies and dramas, many episodes of TV series
and most recently the drama Kartellet/The Cartel (2014, co-written with Henrik
Kristensen). Charlotte Sieling also moved into directing, moving from episode
director of popular TV series such as Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007–10) or Borgen
(2010–13) to conceptualizing director of Bron/The Bridge (2011–) and later director
of US television series. Mirroring the career paths of several women writers and
directors of the early years of Danish cinema, both Bostrup and Sieling started
their film work in acting before choosing to stay behind the camera.
Denmark 279
While some of the successful female directors of the current Danish film scene
thus have a background in the screenwriting department rather than a directorial
education from the Film School, most of the women graduates now working in
the industry have an identity as screenwriters first and foremost and several of
them have managed to have continuous careers writing for film and television. In
2004, writing television drama became an integrated part of the curriculum in the
form of a specific term where the students develop a potential series for DR, and
since then numerous graduates have gained their first assignments in the world
of television (Redvall 2013).
Mai Brostrøm (b. 1958) has had a career working for television only, mov-
ing from episode writer of Rejseholdet/Unit One (2000–4) to co-creating the
Emmy-winning DR series Ørnen/The Eagle (2004–6) and Livvagterne/The Protectors
(2008–10) with her husband Peter Thorsboe, with whom she has most recently
co-written the European crime series The Team (2014–). Several other writers from
the School have worked extensively in television: Ida Maria Rydén moved from
episode writer on various series to head writer of the crime series Dicte (2012–);
Karina Dam co-created the Emmy-nominated youth series Mille (2009) and has
most recently written episodes for Arvingerne/The Legacy; Lolita Belstar co-created
the popular crime comedy Lulu & Leon (2009–10, together with Jens Dahl); Rikke
de Fine Licht went from shorts and the soap 2900 Happiness (2007–9), which has
been a training ground for several writers, to youth TV series such as Isa’s stepz
(2008–, created by Mariella Harpelunde Jensen), the advent calendar Ludvig &
Julemanden (Ludvig & Santa Claus, 2009) and crime series such as Den som dræber/
Those Who Kill (2011). She has also written a feature film about a children’s home
in Greenland set in 1951, Eksperimentet/The Experiment (2010), for director Louise
Friedberg.
Alumni from later years are currently establishing themselves in the industry
as episode writers, for instance Maren Louise Käehne who has written for Borgen
and The Bridge and has now penned a forthcoming romantic comedy by first-
time director May el-Touky. Maja Jul Larsen received attention for writing Mads
Brügger’s boundary-pushing documentary Ambassadøren/The Ambassador (2011) – in
which a journalist goes undercover as a Liberian ambassador to expose the state
of the blood diamond trade in Africa – and then scripted the comedy drama
Undskyld jeg forstyrrer/Excuse me (2012) before starting to work as an episode writer
on Borgen and The Legacy. TV is an attractive platform because of the steady pay,
the longer periods of employment and the possibility of reaching large audiences,
but as highlighted by Maja Jul Larsen it is also an excellent platform for gaining
extensive experience and self-confidence before proposing projects or series of
one’s own (Larsen 2012). Contrary to the US, Danish production does not usually
have spec scripts in circulation. Ideas for films are generally driven by directors
who then seek the help of screenwriters to make their ideas come alive, often in
collaborations from one project to another. Working in TV can be an effective way
for writers to get the right kind of industry know-how and access to an efficient
network for proposing new ideas of their own, since the writers are much more
central when compared to film.
While many women screenwriters from the School have gained employment
writing for television, some have found success in writer-director collaborations
over several years. One example of this is the collaboration of director Per Fly
and the screenwriters Kim Leona and Dorthe W. Høgh. Kim Leona (b. 1965) was
part of the team developing Fly’s successful feature Bænken/The Bench (2000), a
research-based investigative process that focused on people from working-class
Denmark. Fly has explained how the screenwriting collaboration and the process-
driven approach to creating the film was a revelation to him as a filmmaker
(Hjort et al. 2010). Leona described the process as a long journey, where she and
the director searched for ‘the right film’ and were willing to try all possibilities:
‘I can feel when something in the psychology of a character is wrong. Suddenly
we discover that a doctor’s secretary should be a farmer’s wife. What does that
contribute? Discussion, discussion, discussion. Out of 30 possibilities – 30 small
films – the task is to find the one with the most substance’ (Christensen 2004).
Leona and Fly continued this process of working when moving on to what
became the second film in a trilogy, Arven/The Inheritance (2003), this time with
the ambition to tell a story set among the upper classes. Dorthe W. Høgh (b. 1968)
had personal experience with this environment and became part of the writing
team together with the Danish ‘screenwriting guru’ (and head of the screenwrit-
ing department for many years) Mogens Rukov. Once again, the collaboration
resulted in a successful drama, and the four of them continued the collaboration
on the middle-class drama Drabet/Manslaughter (2005). However, Leona’s hiring
as commissioner at the Danish Film Institute put an end to this collaboration.
Instead, Fly collaborated with Høgh on his next feature, Kvinden der drømte om
en mand/The Woman Who Dreamed of a Man (2010), where he wanted to explore
issues of female erotic obsession. For numerous reasons this turned out to be a
more complicated process of writing, but again Fly was highly appreciative of the
writing input and the constant dialogue about the story (Redvall 2010).
Since writing with Fly, Høgh has been working in television, and several other
writers have moved back and forth between the big and small screen. Contrary to
many other production cultures, the worlds of film and television are closely con-
nected in the Danish industry where, for instance, DR, the Danish Broadcasting
Corporation, has expressed the wish to have ‘crossover’ talent from the film
industry working on their series (Redvall 2013). One example of a writer who
moves back and forth is Mette Heeno (b. 1976), who wrote several films targeted
at children and young audiences with very different profiles; the provocative ani-
mation comedy Terkel i knibe/Terkel in Trouble (2004), the family adventure Fakiren
fra Bilbao/The Fakir (2004) and the teenage drama Supervoksen/Triple Dare (2006)
for Christina Rosendahl, as well as the comedy Nynne (2005) and two low-budget,
experimental features, Princess (2006) and Ekko (2007) for Anders Morgenthaler,
before creating the dramady Lærkevej/Park Road (2009–10) for TV 2, which also
became a feature film (2012). Heeno is an example of a professional writer with a
broad register in terms of genre, style and content, who seems to enjoy working
on very different projects and adaptations, while insisting that as a writer one
always has to feel that the project is one’s own (Michelsen 2005).
Denmark 281
Many writers try their hands at various formats and follow the natural ‘food chain’
of the industry, moving from traditionally less prestigious and less expensive formats
towards writing feature films and creating drama series, but some writers seem
to thrive in several media. One example of this is Dunja Gry Jensen who worked
in theatre, radio drama, shorts and documentary before winning the award for best
screenplay of the year for Frygtelig lykkelig/Terribly Happy (2008). It is remarkable how
the vast majority of writers now come from the screenwriting department of the Film
School, with only a few notable exceptions such as Iben Gylling (who has written
extensively for TV series as well as the feature film Karla og Jonas, 2010) or Hanna
Lundblad (b. 1961), who had a background as a dramaturge working in theatre and
television before writing highly popular DR series like Krøniken/Better Times (2004–7)
and developing the ‘depression comedy’ Lykke/Happy Life (2011–12) with her hus-
band Stig Thorsboe. Most recently, the couple have written the historical series
Badehotellet (The Seaside Hotel, 2013–) for TV 2, which became the broadcaster’s big-
gest drama success in many years in spite of receiving mixed reviews. Lundblad has
also been highly influential as one of the founders of the TV term at the Film School
where she has been teaching the course on writing TV series since its inception.
One of the alumni of the so-called TV term who is the closest to being a female
‘screenwriting star’ in the 2010s is Maya Ilsøe (b. 1975). Ilsøe graduated in 2003 and
gradually worked her way up from episode writer and creating the popular TV advent
calendars Absalon’s hemmelighed (Absalon’s Secret, 2006) and Pagten (The Pact, 2009) to
being the first female showrunner for the prestigious DR drama slot on Sunday nights
with the family series The Legacy. Ilsøe has said that the starting point for writing The
Legacy was to say something true about families of today, and describes her approach
to writing as being inspired by real life, drawing on her own experiences as well as the
experiences of people close to her (Kjær 2014). However, the material is developed in
close collaboration with several episode writers and consultants (for more on this pro-
cess, see Redvall 2013).14 The Legacy premiered to great reviews and impressive audi-
ence figures and at the time of writing is moving into its third season. The series was a
courageous attempt to try something new in the high-end drama format, rather than
going for more Nordic Noir, and the press took great interest in the creative intentions
of Ilsøe and her status, one article describing her as DR’s ‘golden bird’ (Rud 2014).15
Writer-directors of the 2000s
Whereas there are now several women screenwriters who have made names for
themselves in the industry and who do not direct, there are also important writer-
directors with a strong, personal voice. One example is Lotte Svendsen (b. 1968),
who graduated in directing from the National Film School in 1995. Her films
show a social awareness but are delivered with much poignant humour. Svendsen
has described how she is driven by ‘social outrage’ and wants to question author-
ity and examine differences in status among people, but in an entertaining way:
Hopefully the many political ideas I have in connection with what I do don’t
amount to raised fingers, but are played out, rather, in various grotesquely
comical situations. The goal of entertainment will always be more important

to me than my political stance. In fact, I would much rather entertain than
preach and I think it is a crime to be boring. (Svendsen in Hjort and Bondebjerg
2001: 259)
Similar to the criticism voiced by Rex, Svendsen finds that ‘everything went
wrong’ in the 1970s where content was only ‘understood in political and ideo-
logical terms and there was no room for formal, aesthetic concerns’ (Hjort and
Bondebjerg 2001: 258). She argues that one has to resist being intimidated by that,
since ‘(I)t will never be old hat to talk about content, quality, society, social strati-
fication and hierarchy. After all, that’s us, that’s our life. We are society’ (2001:
258). Svendsen is one of the few women filmmakers with an outspoken political
agenda in the current Danish film landscape and she has brought a wonderful
range of eclectic characters to the screen in her satirical stories on the differences
in class (and taste!) in Danish society. She received early recognition for her shorts
Harmony (1995), Mors dag/Mother’s Day (1996) and Royal Blues (1997), which was
co-written with Elith Nulle Nykjær, all based on her own screenplays, as well as
for Café Hector (based on a screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen) where a man
takes as hostage the hip clients in a chic café. Nykjær and Svendsen co-wrote her
first feature film, Bornholms stemme/Gone with the Fish (1999), a comedy about
unemployment among fishermen on the Danish island of Bornholm, off the coast
of Sweden. Svendsen’s left-wing inclinations also marked Tid til forandring/What’s
Wrong with This Picture? (2004), telling the stories of seven Danes, among them
the last eccentric Marxist in Copenhagen. As part of the women’s comedy group,
Emma’s Dilemma, Svendsen has also worked with stage shows and TV satire. In
2007, she directed the popular family TV series Max (written by Jens Korse and
Oliver Zahle), about a teenage boy with a well-meaning mother who makes his life
difficult in numerous ways. The ‘Max’ character lived on in three popular feature
films, with the main actress, Mette Horn, and Svendsen writing the screenplays
together with Tommy Bredsted (2008, 2010) and David Sandreuter (2012).
Another director regarded as an accomplished screenwriter is Lone Scherfig
(b. 1959) who graduated as a director from the National Film School in 1984. She
won international attention for her first feature, Kajs fødselsdag/The Birthday Trip
(1990), based on a screenplay by Peter Bay and Kris Kolodziejski. Following this, she
worked in television for several years before co-writing and directing the children’s
film Når mor kommer hjem/On Our Own (1998, which was co-written with Jørgen
Kastrup). She started working with Zentropa as screenwriter and director of the pro-
duction company’s TV series Ved Stillebækken/Morten Korch: Quiet Waters (1999) and
then became the first woman to take up the challenge of Lars von Trier’s Dogme
95 manifesto with her comedy Italiensk for begyndere/Italian for Beginners (2000). As
discussed in Mette Hjort’s excellent analysis of the film and its production (2010),
Scherfig devised a story that could be easily executed in the nearby surroundings of
Zentropa’s Film Town and encouraged the actors to contribute extensively. The film
became a huge national and international success and has led to an international
career where Scherfig is now mostly directing the screenplays of others.
Denmark 283
However, before that, Scherfig co-wrote Wilbur begår selvmord/Wilbur Wants to

Kill Himself (2002) with Anders Thomas Jensen and was part of the team devel-
oping the rules for Lars von Trier’s so-called Advance Party Project, where one
of the films produced was Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006).16 Before moving on
to major international productions such as An Education (2009), she also tried
experimenting with traditional approaches to screenwriting in the national realm,
during the production of the feature film Hjemve/Just Like Home (2007), co-written
with Danish singer, songwriter and comedian Niels Hausgaard. The intention of
the film was to develop the screenplay during the process of shooting to allow
for what Scherfig and Hausgaard described as an authenticity which cannot be
achieved by planning or writing in advance (Hjort 2010: 34–5). The film is gener-
ally regarded as more of an interesting experiment than a successful end result,
and Scherfig has noted that the film might have benefited from taking the con-
cept of ‘nonplanning’ further rather than trying to produce a coherent story along
the way (Hjort 2010: 38).
The limited budgets of a small national film industry, Scherfig has argued,
might be one possible explanation for the presence of more women screenwriters
and directors than in many other production cultures. She finds that the lower
budgets call for setting films in the here and now, drawing on everyday contexts,
which she links to the domains traditionally associated with women (Hjort 2010:
21). In her book on Italian for Beginners, Hjort discusses possible links between eco-
nomic constraints and ‘gender-relevant genres’ and whether it seems conducive to
think of certain approaches as a specific kind of feminine aesthetics (2010: 22–5);
a highly relevant question not least in terms of whether a feminine approach to
screenwriting can be identified.
While the feminist directors of the 1970s would have insisted that this is the
case, few of the current women screenwriters and directors seem keen on dis-
cussing their work from a gender perspective. As an example, from the outset of
her career, Scherfig has insisted on being a director, not a female director (Hjort
2010: 23), but she longs for films in which she can recognize herself as a woman,
though these can be made by men as well as women. However, she argues that as
a woman one tends to approach both female and male characters in a different
manner (2010: 24). On a similar note, Susanne Bier in the early 2000s argued that
her generation of filmmakers have ‘broken with old-style feminism. The women
who were making films fifteen years ago were very interested in their being
women. We’re not’ (Hjort 2010: 23). But she also moves on to address how there
might be differences in male and female approaches to filmmaking, suggesting
that a certain kind of character-based humour might be ‘a woman thing’ (2010:
24). However, neither Bier nor Scherfig is keen to foreground gender issues, even
though they are increasingly on the film political agenda in the early 2010s.
Conclusions and cliffhangers
As exemplified by the newspaper articles on gender balance mentioned in the

opening of this entry, the 2010s have seen new discussions regarding gender,
not only among directors but also screenwriters in Danish film culture. However,
these debates are driven by researchers, policy makers and journalists rather than
practitioners. With the exception of a few outspoken feminists such as director
Kathrine Windfeld (who sadly passed away in 2015), almost no women writers
and directors in Denmark engage in the discussion of gender equality in the
industry. This is in sharp contrast to the debates taking place in Sweden and
Norway, where a clear gender perspective informs the film policies and where one
can find specific support for women filmmakers.
There are no special quotas for women in the Danish support system, however
the CEO of the Danish Film Institute, Henrik Bo Nielsen, addressed the latest sta-
tistics in the news by calling for better data on how to interpret the figures, which
show that 76 per cent of the state film support was allocated to male screenwriters
in the years 2008–12 (Benner 2013a). This led Nielsen to conclude that the problem
lies somewhere else, before applying for support, and he suggested that possible
explanations might be that women often have children after graduating from Film
School or might prefer working in television. Following this line of thought, part
of the new focus of the Danish Film Institute is to investigate whether male and
female screenwriters and directors behave differently in the first three to five years
after completing their Film School education (Benner 2013b). Other people in the
industry call for an investigation into the approaches and values in different com-
missioning frameworks, based on the understanding that certain notions of the
concepts of quality and talent might lead to more support for male rather than
female filmmakers (Benner 2013b). When Vinca Wiedemann became the first
woman head of the National Film School in 2014, she was asked what she intended
to do about the lack of women in Danish film. She expressed her reluctance with
regard to any kind of quotas, but stated that she would work actively towards mak-
ing female talent aware of the film medium as an attractive mode of expression and
would be getting more female teachers on the staff (Wiedemann 2014).
In terms of screenwriting, the past 15 years have seen the emergence of a new
generation of film-school-educated screenwriters, including several interesting
female voices, and there are also still influential writer-directors enjoying both
critical and audience success, but there is still a long way to go before the num-
ber of women equals that of the men in the industry. As this entry has aimed at
illustrating, there have been influential women writers in the industry since the
silent film era, and several writers and directors express the sense of working in
an industry where successful women have proven their worth and made room for
others. While the writers and directors of today might not be political in terms of
discussing gender issues, most of them seem appreciative of the issues raised by
the feminist movement, which did have an impact on Danish society. Susanne
Bier describes how she has been fortunate that other women paved the way for
her: ‘As a result of their efforts I’ve never had to fight for the right to be a woman
and a film-maker. So in a certain sense I’m not preoccupied by feminist issues.
I don’t make films because I want to make some political statement about women.
I do make films in which I say a lot about women, because they’re what really
interests me’ (Hjort and Bondebjerg 2001: 247).
Denmark 285
Some influential people in the industry highlight broader gender issues in soci-
ety as important in terms of understanding not only the production of Danish
film and television, but also the recent interest in its output. Former head of DR
Fiction, Nadia Kløvedal Reich, has thus praised the existence of kindergartens,
together with the right to free abortion and state support while studying as part
of the crucial structural elements enabling gender equality in Denmark (Nielsen
2012). She finds that part of what attracts and fascinates foreign audiences when
watching Danish TV drama fare is the portrayal of the relations between the sexes,
and she believes Denmark to be ten years ahead of many other countries in terms
of women’s liberation and self-realization (Nielsen 2012). Reich’s statements are
an example of the general sense of Denmark as a frontrunner in terms of establish-
ing gender equality and there are a wide range of female voices working within
cinema, television and documentary in the 2010s, but it is a fact that there are still
fewer women than men writing and directing new productions.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the years to come. As this account
has outlined, the history of women screenwriters in Denmark points to how there
have always been strong women in the industry, but their numbers rose dramati-
cally with the coming of an institutionalized support system through the Danish
Film Institute and a formalized education for screenwriters at the National Film
School of Denmark. The next few years will show whether the mid 2010s was
the point in time at which women writers made a stronger mark, following the
increased focus on screenwriting in general and a new interest in the women who
are not only directing films but also coming up with and writing the all-important
ideas that films are made of.
Notes
1. The author would like to thank research librarian Birgit Granhøj from the Danish Film
Institute for her kind assistance during the writing of this chapter.
2. The interview with Harriet Bloch was conducted by Arne Krogh and Ib Monty on 1 May
1962. The sound file is available through the library of the Danish Film Institute.
3. The first Far til fire film had the journalist and author Lis Byrdal as a co-writer. When she
was replaced with Frische for the next film in the franchise she demanded compensa-
tion for the use of certain ideas and the development of some characters, and there was
a settlement (Pedersen 2012: 370). However, besides the screenplay for Min søn Peter/My
Son Peter (1953), Byrdal never wrote for the cinema again.
4. The first film in the Min søsters børn franchise was co-written with Gitte Palsby, but she
is only credited as the writer of one other feature film, namely as the co-writer of Hopla
på sengekanten (1976), one of the erotic features in the series of films known as Danish
Escorts (‘sengekantsfilm’).
5. While the director was in focus, director/novelist teams like Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt/
Klaus Rifbjerg and Bent Christensen/Leif Panduro emerged, as noted by Dan Nissen
when writing on a New Wave in Danish film in the 1960s (2001: 206–7).
6. Martin Andersen Nexø also wrote Pelle Erobreren/Pelle the Conqueror, which Bille August
adapted in 1987. His film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988.
7. A chapter in Henning-Jensen’s biography entitled ‘mine filmiske smertepunkter’
describes the three main projects that she would have liked to produce, but never got
the chance to make (1999: 165–79). While there is great value in documenting the
produced work of female screenwriters, another interesting perspective comes from

researching the many ideas and screenplays of women filmmakers that have never seen
the light of day.
8. In a quote from an interview in her biography on the Danish Film Institute website.
Available at: http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/person/da/996.aspx?id=996 (accessed 28 May
2015).
9. In a quote from an interview in her biography on the Danish Film Institute website.
Available at: http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/person/da/1359.aspx?id=1359 (accessed
28 May 2015).
10. The Film Workshop was established in 1970 to support filmmakers who would like to
experiment with untraditional modes of expressions and working methods.
11. Rygård later wrote and directed numerous shorts and documentaries, before making the
feature film Omfavn mig måne/House of Hearts (2002), about a family from Anatolia com-
ing to Denmark as guest workers in the 1960s, the first 100 per cent nationally financed
feature film shot in a foreign language in a foreign country. Li Vilstrup also continued
writing and directing documentaries as well as fiction, among them the children’s fea-
ture film Negerkys og labre larver/Tootsiepops and Candyfloss (1987), about two bullied girls
imagining a world where they are in control, and Jeg elsker dig/I Love You (1987), on the
troubles of a young couple, with Vilstrup’s screenplay based on recordings of a real-life
counselling session of a couple in relationship therapy.
12. Quoted in the National Filmography at the Danish Film Institute website. Available at:
http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/person/da/3991.aspx?id=3991 (accessed 28 May 2015).
13. In Vibeke Pedersen’s biography of Ryslinge. Available at: http://www.kvinfo.dk/side/597/
bio/1643/origin/170/ (accessed 28 May 2015).
14. One of the consultants was Vinca Wiedemann, one of the only professional story
supervisors in Denmark, also working on e.g. Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-nominated
Jagten/The Hunt (2012) and Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013). Wiedemann wrote
the screenplay for Fruen på Hamre/The Lady of Hamre (2000), directed by her sister,
Katrine Wiedemann, but has since then worked as film commissioner for the Danish
Film Institute and as a screenplay consultant before taking over the job as head of the
National Film School of Denmark in 2014.
15. While the Film School has been influential in educating screenwriters and bringing
the worlds of film and television closer together, it has also played a part in educating
a number of interesting documentary filmmakers working consciously with using ele-
ments traditionally known from the world of fiction and aiming for cinematic qualities
in their films, among them Phie Ambo, Mikala Krogh, Eva Mulvad and Pernille Rose
Grønkjær. These directors can also be regarded as a particular sort of screenwriter, offer-
ing their ‘filtered’ views of the world in their films. The 2010s have seen the emergence
of several interesting films, blurring the boundaries between scripted and non-scripted
material. Birgitte Stærmose’s Ønskebørn/Out of Love (2009), which tells the stories of
children in post-war Kosovo in a hybrid form, is a stunning example of what can come
out of the meeting between a highly visual director dealing with harsh material from
reality and a screenwriter from the world of fiction (Peter Asmussen).
16. For more on Advance Party, see, for instance, Hjort (2010: 26–9).
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Estonia
Margit Keerdo-Dawson
History and background
The Estonian film industry celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2012 and its
evolution can be divided into three time periods: the first Republic of Estonia
(1918–40), Soviet Estonia (1940–91) and Republic of Estonia (since 1991). There
have been a considerable number of female filmmakers as well as screenwriters
throughout each of these periods of Estonian cinema, the first of whom emerged
in 1919 when some of the first full-length fictional films were produced in the
country. Aksella Luts (1905–2005) is the only female screenwriter of the first
Republic of Estonia. She studied film in Paris with her husband, Theodor Luts,
and returned to Estonia to make documentaries and feature films. Luts worked as
a screenwriter, make-up artist, choreographer and actor, becoming Estonia’s first
film star. She co-wrote two feature films: Young Eagles (1927) and Estonia’s first
sound film Children of the Sun (1932).
In 1940 Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union. Under Moscow’s instruc-
tion there was a cleansing of any ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and the majority of the
elite and intelligentsia were arrested and deported to Soviet prison camps and/
or killed (Estonica 2013). This was followed by a German invasion and occupa-
tion in 1941 after which Estonia was ‘liberated’ by the Soviet Union in 1944. The
Estonian Film Foundation, Eesti Kultuurfilm, like all other companies and organi-
zations, became nationalized in 1940 and started producing propaganda films.
Many filmmakers left the country, including Aksella Luts, while others were not
allowed to continue in their profession as the totalitarian system regarded anyone
who had been active during the Republic as suspicious (Kärk 2012). Filmmaking,
like the other arts, became strictly controlled and censored by the government.
There were ambitious plans to revive the film industry, orchestrated mostly by the
decision-makers in Moscow (Lõhmus 2007). Meanwhile, talent and technicians
were brought in from Soviet Russia to help establish the new industry, including
women who had minor roles in film crews. A minister of cinematography was
appointed, Algus Raadik, and his successor was a female, Olga Lauristin, although
she was not a filmmaker (Orav 2003: 10).
288
Estonia 289
Films in Soviet Estonia were made with the support of Soviet Russia’s Lenfilm
and were designed to represent the successful reorganisation of the society and
the building of a better life, acting as instruments of Stalinist ideology (Kärk
2012). The first feature film in Soviet Estonia – Life in the Citadel, produced by
the state film studio Tallinnfilm, was released in 1947 (Orav 2003: 81). During
the following decade several women worked at Tallinnfilm as assistant directors,
assistant editors, art directors, costume designers and script editors.
The first full-length feature film to be written by a female screenwriter in Soviet
Estonia was Cheerful Curves (1959) by Dagmar Normet (1921–2008), co-written
with Sandor Stern. It is a romantic comedy of mistaken identity set in the world
of motorcycle racing (Orav 2003: 164). Another film, based on the same screen-
play, Dangerous Curves (1961), was filmed at Mosfilm studio and became the first
widescreen film in the Soviet Union (Orav 2003: 20). Dagmar Normet was mostly
known as a literary author and translator and went on to write short animation
films during the 1970s and 1980s.
A puppet animation section was established as part of the state film studio in
1957. From 1957–69, 29 films were produced, some of which stood out because of
their imaginative and inventive nature (Histrodamus 2010a). Women often wrote
animation films, including Dagmar Normet, the screenwriter and prolific script
editor Silvia Kiik (b. 1931), and children’s authors Ellen Niit (b. 1928) and Aino
Pervik (b. 1932).
After Stalin’s death in 1953 there was less ideological pressure and greater free-
dom of artistic expression (Kärk 2012). The ‘iron curtain’ meant that access to
Western universities was out of the question, but a new generation of Estonian
filmmakers emerged at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, who graduated from
the Russian State University of Cinematography in Moscow (VGIK). This included
many women: the cinematographer Aimée Beekman, directors Virve Reiman and
Valeria Anderson, and producers Virve Lunt and Vaike Kalda. From 1950 to 1990
there were between five and ten Estonians studying different fields in each cohort,
which meant that most Estonian filmmakers were highly qualified in their area
(Orav 2003: 21). Amongst the filmmakers who shaped the look and feel of the
1960s were female directors such as Leida Laius and Virve Aruoja.
Estonian feature films went through a period of artistic and technical devel-
opment and the filmmakers became more inventive in their use of allegory to
include serious political themes. This met with ideological disapproval in Moscow
and some of the films, such as Madness (1968), were banned (Kärk 2012).
During the 1950s and 1960s many feature film and animation scripts were writ-
ten and adapted by women whose backgrounds were in literature. Out of the 30
films produced at Tallinnfilm during the1960s, 16 were adapted from novels or
stage plays (Orav 2003: 27). Aimée Beekman (b. 1933), best known as a novelist,
co-wrote two feature films. She started out as a cinematographer but gave up due
to health reasons. The original screenplay for The Men of One Village (1961) was
co-written with her husband Vladimir Beekman (Orav 2003: 20) and tells the story
of a group of fishermen who end up on the Finnish shore during a storm and have
to decide between staying in democratic Finland and returning to Soviet Estonia

(Orav 2003: 242). The couple also co-wrote Regina in 1989, which is a melodrama
about marriage and alcoholism based on Beekman’s own novel.
Lilli Promet (1922–2007), also known as a literary author, wrote three feature
films that were released during the 1960s, two of which were based on her own nov-
els. The Pink Hat (1963) is a short film about two female soldiers yearning for beauty
(Orav 2003: 299). Promet wrote the script for the Tallinnfilm studio and Estonian
Television’s film department, Eesti Telefilm (Histrodamus 2010b). Water Colours of
One Summer (1966) is a coming-of-age drama about a young artist. Promet’s screen-
play for the psychological drama A Girl in Black (1966) is based on her short story,
while Dark Windows (1968) is in three 45-minute parts based on Promet’s novella set
during the last days of German occupation in 1944 (Orav 2008: 119).
Screenwriter and film director Leida Laius (1923–96) is the grand dame of
Estonian film and most of her oeuvre are now considered classics (Kärk 2012).
Laius made documentaries and feature films, which were largely adapted from
classic novels, including the two screenplays she co-wrote. Her films exam-
ined women’s roles during different historical periods in the form of classical
psychological drama. Werewolf (1968) is based on August Kitzberg’s stage play
and the screenplay was co-written by Leida Laius and Lembit Remmelgas (Orav
2003: 428). The romantic drama Master of the House of Kõrboja (1979), Laius’s last
screenplay, was based on the novel by Anton Hansen Tammsaare and co-written
with Paul-Eerik Rummo. Laius stated that women’s issues were important to her;
she has always viewed women as strong individuals and wanted to explore their
development and destiny throughout different time periods (Orav 2003: 26).
Similarly to Leida Laius, Virve Aruoja (1922–2013) was a film director who
co-wrote some of her films, which include Water Colours of One Summer (1966), co-
written with Lilli Promet, and the TV film My Wife Became a Grandmother (1976),
co-written with Arvo Valton. Aruoja’s experimental short film An Unending Day
(1971), co-directed with Jaan Tooming, is exceptional. The film depicts a day in
the life of a man in a kaleidoscopic assemblage of short episodes of everyday life,
accompanied by Tõnu Tepandi’s chant-like lyrics such as ‘What kind of a man
am I!?’. The film, produced at Eesti Telefilm, caused such a stir that the heads of
Estonian Television decided to destroy the film. Aruoja found out in time and a
copy of the film was hidden in her brother’s cellar until Estonia regained its inde-
pendence in 1991. In 1978 Aruoja emigrated to Sweden but returned to Estonia
in 1994 (Teinemaa 2009).
Some female screenwriters during the 1960s are only credited with one film.
Russian screenwriter Maria Smirnova scripted Under One Roof (1962), which is
based on Hans Leberecht’s novella, a psychological drama about the cult of the
personality (Orav 2003: 271). Azerbaijani writer Nora Adamian co-wrote Zero
Three (1964), a drama set in an emergency hospital, which explores moral dilem-
mas (Orav 2003: 322). Actor Karin Ruus wrote To a Cold Country (1965), based on
Eduard Vilde’s novel. Helgi Oidermaa (1929–2004) wrote the family adventure
film Monkey in the Mirror (1966). Oidermaa went on to write for documentaries
and later co-wrote the musical family film Bumpy (1981) with Helle Karis and
Estonia 291
Olav Ehala. She spent most of her life working for Estonian Television as a
content editor and writer of quizzes, documentaries, and children’s programmes
(Rohtla 2005).
The 1970s was a decade of stagnation in which there was a decline in the num-
ber of feature film screenplays written by women and of film releases in general.
Politically outspoken films faced being banned, and the political climate, espe-
cially the Prague Spring, resulted in censorship being significantly tightened and
all state film studios in the Soviet Union were directly regulated from Moscow
(Histrodamus 2010c). Brezhnev’s economic reforms had caused an overall stagna-
tion in the Soviet Union, which further hindered the development of filmmaking
(Kärk 2012).
Feature filmmaking was revived at the end of 1970s with a new wave of young
women filmmakers such as Helle Karis (b. 1944), Renita Lintrop (b. 1955), and
Elo Tust (b. 1954), whose career came to an immediate halt after graduating from
VGIK in 1979. This was probably because Tust was married to a foreigner and
was not allowed to make feature films, despite submitting a screenplay each year,
and she ended her career working as a director in the chronicle film department
of Tallinnfilm (Orav 2004: 725). Lintrop started out as an editor and has worked
as a script editor and documentary director, also co-writing and co-directing the
documentary The Craftsman (1989) and the feature film Too Tired to Hate (1995).
Writer-director Helle Karis is especially interested in mythology and fairy tales.
Her musical children’s film Bumpy (1981), based on Oskar Luts’s novel, was co-
written with Helgi Oidermaa and Olav Ehala. Karis’s second film, Karoliine’s Silver
Yarn (1984), was co-written with Vladislav Korzhets. Her third film, The Wild
Swans (1987), was based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen and co-written
with Savva Kulish and the poet and actor Juhan Viiding.
In the 1980s a few Russian female screenwriters collaborated with Estonians:
Marina Sheptunova (b. 1955) wrote three films released in Estonia, including the
social-realist drama Well, Come On, Smile! (1985), adapted from Silvia Rannamaa’s
novel, co-directed by Leida Laius and Arvo Iho. It was the very first glasnost-film
in the Soviet Union and received some attention in the West (Kärk 2012). During
Perestroika, in the second half of the 1980s, filmmakers gained more freedom
to express themselves as well as criticize the communist ideology (Histrodamus
2010d). Sheptunova continued her collaboration with Iho and wrote The Observer
(1987) and For Madmen Only (1990). Maria Zvereva (b. 1950) wrote The Stolen
Meeting (1988) and An Old Man Wants to Go Home (1991).
Perestroika, post 1985, brought a more liberal economy, which heralded the
end of state film studio monopoly and freedom from the ideological control of
Moscow (Histrodamus 2010d). In 1991 Estonia regained its independence, the
state film studio, Tallinnfilm, became an exclusively distributive operation, and
there was a radical change in the way films were financed. The state studio’s
full-time employment of filmmakers was replaced with project-based funding.
The Ministry of Culture took on this role until the Estonian Film Foundation
was established in 1997 (Kärk 2012). At Tallinn University a film department was
created in 1992 that grew into the Baltic Film and Media School, which now has
students from more than 20 countries (Baltic Film and Media School 2013). Out
of the 26 screenwriting BA and MA students admitted between 2007 and 2012, 16
were women (Pulk 2013).
The first feature films produced in the 1990s leant towards lighter entertain-
ment, such as Those Old Love Letters (1992), while some filmmakers moved
towards a more complex film language (Kärk 2000: 5). During the first half of
the decade, due to lack of funding, fewer films were made: in 1996 there were
no feature films at all. Most of the female screenwriters who emerged at the start
of the 1980s, or had been working prior to 1991, did not continue into the third
era of Estonian film and, as a result, there were very few female filmmakers and
screenwriters working during the 1990s.
The 2000s saw the emergence of many new women screenwriters. As the
state-subsidized film-funding system gathered momentum, a new generation of
writer-directors emerged such as Katrin Laur (b. 1955), Anu Aun (b. 1980), and
Kadri Kõusaar (b. 1980). Most of the screenplays written during the 2000s and
2010s have been written by newcomers, while the 1970s and 1980s generation
has moved into documentary filmmaking. The only exceptions are poet and chil-
dren’s author Leelo Tungal (b. 1947), who has continued her work on a series of
animation films, and Helle Karis, who has submitted feature film projects to the
Film Foundation (Estonian Film Institute 2013). The number of female screen-
writers has grown in recent years and includes graduates from the BFM (Baltic
Film and Media School) as well as foreign film schools. There are fewer novelists
writing for film and the number of writer-directors is increasing. In 2012, 110
projects, comprising short and feature films and animation, sought funding from
the Estonian Film Foundation (now the Estonian Film Institute). These included
work by 28 female screenwriters, many of whom are writer-directors (EFI 2013).
In addition to the screenwriters examined here, there have been a large number
of women working as writers and directors on documentaries, popular science
films, chronicle films, corporate films, advertising, and television. Screenwriting
as an area of Estonian film history has received little academic attention, mostly
due to the small number of film scholars and the low status of screenwriters in the
industry, and a production culture in which screenwriters and their contributions
are often overlooked.
Aksella Luts (1905–2005)
Aksella Hildegard Kapsta was born into an Estonian family in Moscow. Her father
was very patriotic and his influence is apparent in Aksella’s films and interviews.
Her first visit to the cinema was a visceral emotional experience that stayed
with her throughout her life (KÖP: Aksella Luts 1999). In 1924, Aksella married
Theodor Luts, a business graduate and former military officer, with whom she
shared a common interest in dance and film, and they started a dance studio.
In 1926 the couple moved to Paris to study filmmaking, working at a production
company owned by Russian émigrés. There Aksella studied modern dance, film
make-up, various film production duties, and started watching actors at work
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(Lõhmus 2008: 122). The couple returned to Estonia and began making documen-
taries and feature films together; they also taught modern dance and published
the magazines Tantsuharrastaja (‘Dance Hobbyist’) and Tants, film ja mood (‘Dance,
Film and Fashion’) (Kaadris ‘Noored Kotkad’ 2012). In winter they taught modern
dance and in summer they made films (Lõhmus 1996).
At the time there were no set job descriptions and various creative and manage-
rial duties were shared between everyone working on a film (KÖP: Aksella Luts
1999). Aksella worked as a writer, actor, choreographer, and make-up artist, and
assisted Theodor in duties ranging from management to film stock processing
(Lõhmus 2008: 124) and editing. She helped fund the films and every penny she
made as a dance tutor was spent on filmmaking because ‘after you’ve been bitten
by the film bug you won’t be able to escape from this trade’ (Mägi 2005).
Their first feature film, The Young Eagles (1927), was co-written by Aksella
and Theodor with some help from Theodor’s brother, Oskar Luts, who was a
recognized novelist. Aksella had great respect for her brother-in-law, for his down-
to-earth writing style and respect for the so-called ‘small people’. Theodor had
studied in military school, taken part in some of the decisive battles in the War
of Independence, and the screenplay was partly based on his memories (Kaadris
‘Noored kotkad’ 2012). When the screenplay was near completion Aksella realized
that it did not contain a role for her as an actor and so she created the character of
a forester’s daughter, who is part of a romantic subplot involving one of the main
characters (KÖP: Aksella Luts 1999).
The Young Eagles is a full-length silent film set during Estonia’s War of
Independence and it tells the story of three young men – a student, a blacksmith
and a farm hand – who volunteer to join the army and fight against the Red
Army for Estonia’s freedom. In battle, they often survive on their wits and supe-
rior tactical abilities, while the enemy is portrayed as oafish and incompetent.
One of the three young ‘eagles’ is killed; the other two survive, meet their future
wives and find happiness. The film contains adventure, light humour, and ambi-
tious battle scenes, and – according to advertising materials – some four thousand
extras, including professional actors and members of the Estonian Defence League
(Lõhmus 2008: 124) who helped to plan and execute the elaborate set pieces
(KÖP: Aksella Luts 1999). The film became a popular and critical success and
Aksella became the first ‘movie star’ of the country.
Children of the Sun (1932) was Estonia’s first sound film, a romantic drama about
an artist caught in a love triangle, which was co-produced with the Finnish com-
pany Suomi-Filmi. Aksella co-wrote the screenplay with Theodor, and worked as
a choreographer on the dance scenes.
Aksella moved to Finland in 1938 after Theodor accepted an invitation to
work there as a cinematographer (Paas 1980: 144), becoming a Finnish citizen
in 1940. In 1939 Aksella and Theodor travelled to Italy to work and learn about
Italian filmmaking, staying mostly at the Cinecittà studio (Tykkyläinen 2006:
150). In Finland, Aksella wanted to study at the university but her plans changed
when she sold her first screenplay; she became a screenwriter (Lõhmus 1996),
using the Finnish male pseudonym Antti Metsalo. In 1943–4, Aksella worked
Figure 4.1 Aksella Luts as the forester’s daughter in the Young Eagles (1927). Estonian Film
Archives
as a screenwriter for Fenno-Filmi OY, which was co-owned by her husband. She
wrote the thriller The Secret Gun (1943), the anti-Soviet spy thriller Shadows on
Kannas (1943), Mistaken Hearts (1944), and an adaptation of Kaarina Viitainoja’s
novel The Secret of a Summer Night (1945), all of which were co-written with other
screenwriters (Elonet n.d.). Her films were often about spying and war and were
cut by the censors, remaining blacklisted for many years after the end of World
War II (‘Aksella Luts’ 2005).
In 1944, after the release of the anti-Soviet film Shadows on Kannas, Aksella
received a note warning her that it would be ‘healthier’ for them to leave Finland,
and that she should flee to the West. Aksella packed a few things and left imme-
diately, and Theodor followed her a few weeks later (KÖP: Aksella Luts 1999). The
couple lived in Sweden where Aksella worked as a librarian (TLÜAR Väliseesti isi-
kud 2004). Two years later they discovered that Sweden was extraditing refugees
to the Soviet Union and decided to move to Brazil (KÖP: Aksella Luts 1999).
Estonia 295
In Brazil, Aksella and Theodor continued to make documentaries together,

with Aksella working under the pseudonym Antonio Mezzalo. They produced
mostly short films and documentaries, or ‘culture films’, as they called them,
covering topics such as the history of lighting and how light bulbs were made as
well as the operation of factories, radio and television stations. Aksella worked
as a screenwriter, camera assistant and photographer, though she wrote screen-
plays for Theodor as well as others, such as the German director Milo Harbich
(TLÜAR Väliseesti isikud 2004) who taught her film editing (KÖP: Aksella Luts
1999). Unfortunately, the titles and the number of films she worked on in Brazil
is unknown.
After Theodor’s death in 1980 Aksella continued editing their films, which
were given to a Finnish archive (KÖP: Aksella Luts 1999). In 1996, after Estonia
had regained its independence, Aksella returned to her homeland where she took
part in organizing a film festival dedicated to her late husband in his home vil-
lage, Palamuse, and taught foreign languages (‘Aksella Luts’ 2005). Aksella died in
Estonia at the age of 99, and her ashes were buried in Brazil next to her husband’s
grave.
Leida Laius (1923–96)
Leida Laius is the grand dame of Estonian film. She directed five documentaries
and seven feature films, mostly adaptations of classic Estonian novels, some of
which she also co-wrote. In her work she often focused on being a woman, being a
mother, and women’s role at home and in society. Laius was also interested in wider
human issues, values and the development of personality, but acknowledges that
female characters have played a decisive role when choosing the source material for
a film (Orav 2004: 711). She often portrays women as strong characters who know
what they want, control their own fate and are determined to do the right thing.
Laius has been praised for her ability to portray different historical time periods, but
criticized for the lack of roundness in her stories, and for having little philosophical
depth when adapting classic novels (Orav 2003: 26). Though friendly and modest,
her private life was difficult: she had witnessed the horrors of World War II, never
married and regretted not having any children (Virve 2013). According to actor Ene
Rämmeld, Laius suffered discrimination from the mostly male Tallinnfilm studio
staff who had a hard time accepting a woman with such willpower, and she could
not fully assert herself because she was female (Leivak 2003). Laius spent the last
years of her life forgotten by the public, selling lottery tickets to make ends meet
(Virve 2013) and caring for her mother, who died in 1995.
Laius was born into an Estonian family in Ingria (currently Russia). Her father
was arrested and shot in 1938 and Laius, her mother and brother were deported
to Kirov oblast (Laasik 2012b). Laius arrived in Estonia in 1944 and in 1950
graduated from the Soviet Estonian State Theatre Institute, then worked as an
actor for four years. In 1962 she graduated from the Russian State University of
Cinematography in Moscow (VGIK) as a film director. She started working for the
Tallinnfilm studio as an assistant director in 1960 while still attending university.
The Milkman of Mäeküla (1965) was written by theatre director Voldemar Panso,
based on Eduard Vilde’s novel, and directed by Laius. It tells the story of a peas-
ant who ‘sells’ his wife to a nobleman in return for a milkman’s position, but the
peasant doesn’t get rich and begins to appreciate his wife when it’s too late. The
only person to come out of this disgraceful trade with a pure heart is the industri-
ous peasant’s wife. Film critics praised the film for the well-balanced composition
of the script, attention to historical detail and a convincing milieu, but criticized
Laius for her characters’ emotional sameness and the lack of a strong climax.
Laius then adapted and co-wrote August Kitzberg’s stage play Werewolf (1910),
about the terrible effect of superstition in a nineteenth-century Estonian village.
The resulting film, Werewolf (1968), was co-written by Tallinnfilm’s head of the
story editing department, Lembit Remmelgas (Orav 2003: 26), and directed by
Laius. The film follows Tiina whose mother is beaten to death at the stake as
a witch. Tiina grows up in a foster family with their son, Margus, and another
foster-child, Mari. During village celebrations Mari accuses Tiina of being a were-
wolf, claiming she saw Tiina kill a young horse, an accusation which results in
Tiina being cast out of the community. Mari acts out of jealousy because she’s in
love with Margus, who is interested only in Tiina. Tiina sees that no one doubts
Mari’s accusation and she tries to persuade Margus to run away with her, but
Margus is not ready to leave his family for a life in the wilderness. Through Tiina’s
protests the story explores issues of patriarchy, social rigidness, embedded archaic
attitudes, and superstition (Orav 2003: 430). The film begins with the summer
solstice celebrations where Tiina hears the accusation and is shunned by the
community. The rest of the film consists of the three main characters’ flashbacks,
which are interwoven with their current dilemmas. Soviet critics did not like
avant-garde art and the film was criticized for its use of symbolism, elements of
literature, music and fine arts that carry no meaning, and for the lack of natural-
ism, which blurs the intellectual concept of the story (Orav 2003: 432). It should
be added that film reviews at the time were written by literary critics who were
unfamiliar with film language and believed that an adaptation had to be an exact
reproduction of its literary source (Teinemaa 2003).
During the 1970s Laius wrote and directed documentary films such as But
Where is Mother? (1972), A Human Was Born (1975) and Childhood (1976). Laius
became interested in the fate of children who grew up in orphanages without a
caring family, and in 1974 she planned a documentary in four parts, the first
about mothers who were dedicated to their home and family, and three parts
about mothers who abandoned their children and sent them to orphanages. The
Tallinnfilm documentary department approved the first part, but rejected the
other three, claiming that, in the Soviet Union, the problem of abandoned chil-
dren didn’t exist (Orav 2004: 488). The first part became A Human Was Born, but
Laius later returned to the subject in Well, Come On, Smile! (1985).
Laius’s next writing and directing project was The Master of Kõrboja (1979),
which she co-wrote with the poet Paul-Eerik Rummo, and it was her last film as a
screenwriter. Based on A. H. Tammsaare’s novel (1922), it is the tragic love story
of Anna of Kõrboja and Villu of Katku, who are both hereditary owners of their
Estonia 297
farms. Villu, recently released from prison, is hot-tempered, naive, optimistic and
restless, while Anna is calm, stable and determined. After Villu is crippled in an
accident, Anna invites him to become her husband and master of Kõrboja farm,
but Villu believes he is not good enough for his beloved Anna and commits sui-
cide. Laius was attracted to the story because love plays an important role in this
story as a redemptive and creative force that the characters can’t live without;
Kõrboja farm has no meaning for Anna without Villu, while Villu is too proud to
marry her as a disabled man, but cannot live without her and so takes his own
life. It is a story not only about being the master of the land but about being the
master of one’s life (Orav 2003: 88).
Laius’s last two films are her most complex examinations of an individuals
psychological development. She was inspired by Silvia Rannamaa’s youth novel
Stepmother to make Well, Come On, Smile! (1985; co-directed with cinematographer
Arvo Iho), but the finished film scarcely resembled the novel: the screenplay was
written by the Russian screenwriter Marina Sheptunova who included her own
experiences of life in an orphanage (Orav 2003: 69–70). Laius’s last film as a direc-
tor, The Stolen Meeting (1988), asks how a woman can survive in a man’s world
without compromising her conscience.
Helle Karis (b. 1944)
Helle Karis was born in central Estonia. She moved to Tallinn to study ballet and
fine arts before discovering cinema, which fascinated her because of its potential
to combine all art forms. She began working for Estonian State Television in 1962
as an assistant director, then as a writer-director from 1965–9. She produced and
directed the medical documentary series Contra Mortem for two seasons in 1965–7,
with a follow-up in 2002–3. Her debut, Legend (1968), was a film of Adolphe
Adam’s ballet Giselle. In 1970 Karis graduated from the Leningrad Institute of
Theatre, Music and Cinema (Orav 2004: 694) and continued to work for Estonian
Television, writing and directing stylized literary and arts programmes. In 1968
she made a documentary about the graduates of a local theatre course, includ-
ing some charismatic individuals who later went on to innovate within Estonian
theatre. The documentary depicted the actors’ spontaneous, frantic, creative out-
bursts, with influences as diverse as Brecht, Jung, Kafka and Nietzsche, expressing
ideas which had been bottled up for a long time due to the relentless hold of Soviet
censorship: a bicycle was executed by hanging at a rubbish dump, they danced on
city ruins, and sang songs as they took a raft across the pond in a city park. The
initiators were reprimanded and labelled ‘enemies of state ideology’; Karis lost her
job and was banned from travelling abroad (Peep 2009).
In 1979, Karis started working for the Tallinnfilm studio, where her creative
concepts didn’t fit with the studio management’s ideological views. Her previous
attempts to make a feature film had failed: her screenplay for The Wild Swans had
been shelved in 1973 and the feature films Quite a Criminal Story, based on Eno
Raud’s short story, and Boys’ Rides, based on Rein Saluri’s stage play, submitted
respectively in 1976 and 1978, were both cancelled. In 1976 she submitted two
more projects, which were approved in Moscow, but the decision was ignored by
Tallinnfilm: Mustamäe Love, based on Arvo Valton’s short story, and A Long Walk
into Sunday, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s novella (Peep 2009). Finally, the Tallinnfilm
studio told Karis that she could make Bumpy (1981) (Kaadris: Nukitsamees 2012),
which was to be her debut film.
Bumpy is based on Oskar Luts’s novel and the screenplay was written by Helle
Karis, Helgi Oidermaa (Orav 2004: 203) and film composer Olav Ehala, who took
part in designing the ‘musical dramaturgy’ of the story (Kulli 2011). Bumpy is a
musical children’s film about a young brother and sister who are kidnapped by
a witch when they get lost picking berries in the woods. In the witch’s house they
meet a little boy – the witch’s son, Bumpy (referring to two little horns on his
head) – and take him along when they escape and make their way back home.
Bumpy is welcomed into a large, supportive family where they try to turn him
into a ‘civilized’ boy. Karis has said she approached the material intuitively and
everything seemed self-evident (Peep 2009). In her notes for the studio she writes
that it is possible to make use of Brecht’s alienation effect as the evil characters
comment on their own evil deeds, while the positive characters become even more
tolerant (Laasik 2012a). Before Bumpy’s release the filmmakers received frequent
criticism from the censors in Moscow who wanted to shut down the film; their
biggest problem was with the witch’s family and their ‘aesthetisised ugliness’, but
the authors managed to defend the film and it was released without any changes
(Kaadris: Nukitsamees 2012). The film was well received by the public and won
several awards, but some film critics found fault with the character development
and Bumpy’s eclectic, uneven style (Orav 2004: 206).
Karis’s next film was co-written with Vladislav Koržets. Karoliine’s Silver Yarn
(1984) is a fairy-tale film loosely based on Estonian and Scandinavian folk stories.
It is about a spoilt princess who, after being forced to travel with a commoner,
is transformed into a better person through self-sacrifice and true love. Karis
deliberately chose to make another fairy-tale film, and to do it as a musical (Orav
2004: 308). She prefers the fairy tale as a genre because of its condensed, pure
form, which allows for creative expression through arbitrary devices, without any
rational explanation (Orav 2004: 308).
Karis’s third feature film, The Wild Swans (1987), is widely considered to be her
greatest professional and artistic achievement (Orav 2003: 60). The screenplay was
written by Helle Karis and the poet Juhan Viiding, with Savva Kuliš as writer-script
consultant. The narrative is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about
a princess, Eliise, whose 11 brothers are turned into wild swans by their evil step-
mother. Eliise, under a vow of silence, has to knit sweaters out of stinging nettles
for her brothers or they will perish. Regarding the difficulties in adaptation, Karis
points out that ‘writing is very easy – you write it down and that’s how it will
remain: swans fly, swans transform ... but film language is different, it’s difficult to
realise it for the screen. It’s easy to say that the swans are a symbol but how do you
visualize it? It’s not possible to do a one-to-one adaptation of Andersen’s idea, it
will definitely change. I will have to retell it, find my own solution’ (Filmikanal 9
1987). Karis stated that she can’t make a film without her own viewpoint, and
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there are elements in this story she found personally important, otherwise she
would not have adapted the story. On the surface, Andersen’s story and her
adaptation are similar, but essentially there is a difference as the film contains
her personal philosophy (Filmikanal 9 1987): for her, The Wild Swans deals with
existential problems.
Since 1989 Karis has taught film in secondary schools and colleges, and since
1995 has run a small production company, Myth Film, working as a producer,
writer and director on predominantly documentary films.
Kadri Kõusaar (b. 1980)
Kadri Kõusaar is a novelist and one of the most provocative writer-directors of her
generation. She studied Spanish philology at Tartu University and has published
three novels: Ego (2001), Free Rise (2004) and Alfa (2011). Kõusaar has worked as a
television and radio presenter and translated poetry by Fernando Pessoa and Pablo
Neruda (Koch 2013).
Kõusaar is known for her outspoken and provocative public persona, causing a
scandal with her debut film, Magnus (2007), for which she was the screenwriter,
director and co-producer. The story, inspired by true events, is about the relationship
between a youth and his father, and explores themes of alienation and emotional
coldness. Magnus’s parents have divorced and pay little attention to how he is
raised. As a small boy, Magnus had suffered from an incurable lung disease and,
knowing he might die soon, played potentially lethal games. As a teenager he lives
with his mother, who runs a modelling agency, and his illness has been cured, but
his obsession with death has intensified. His suicide attempt has an effect on his
father’s conscience and he invites Magnus to live with him. Magnus’s father is a
human trafficker and he tries to encourage the boy to live with carnal pleasures.
What Magnus needs is love and comfort, but the people around him believe that
everyone should deal with their feelings on their own.
Magnus was accepted for the Un Certain Regard programme at the Cannes Film
Festival, but the screening was jeopardized by a lawsuit in Estonia. The claimant
accused Kõusaar of making a film based on their family’s private tragedy and the
court banned the film from domestic screening and distribution. The ban was
lifted in 2009, but the lawsuit has not concluded.
In her second feature film, The Arbiter (2013), Kõusaar continues to explore
controversial subjects. The film is an Estonian-Swedish-British co-production
filmed in Estonia and England, with the British actor Lee Ingleby in the leading
role. The story is set in England and tells the story of an Oxford genetic scientist
who, after being left by his girlfriend, decides to make the world a better place
by implementing his long-developed theories concerning social engineering,
cleansing, and murder. He is accompanied by a 14-year-old donor child, Ronja,
whom he tries to convert to his radical ideas. The story was inspired by a person
Kõusaar met who, unfazed, told her that he was in favour of mass deportations
and believed that ‘lesser’ people, regardless of their race, should be prevented from
breeding. She was aware that the film would be provocative, and perhaps serve as
a warning, as she was exploring themes in a politically incorrect way, but with a
‘morally correct’ conclusion (Kõusaar n.d). The film was praised for tackling bold,
international subjects and for its visual aesthetics, but criticized for lack of drama,
overuse of undramatic dialogue, ideological monologues and insufficient concern
for the main character’s background, motives, and psychological complexities.
Kõusaar’s next project is to be set in the Sinai desert and explores the relation-
ship between a journalist and her kidnapper, while another screenplay is based
on the Finnish author Kjell Westö’s novel, Lang: A Novel of Suspense, about the
tragic end of an affair between a writer and a single mother 20 years his junior
(Koch 2013).
References
‘Aksella Luts’. 2005. Helsingin Sanomat, 8 January. Available at: http://www.hs.fi/muistot/
a1364357625460 (accessed 10 July 2013).
Baltic Film and Media School (BFM). 2013. ‘About BFM’. Available at: http://www.bfm.ee/
about-bfm (accessed 19 May 2013).
Elonet. n.d. ‘Aksella Luts’. Available at: http://www.elonet.fi/name/he2l35/ (accessed 11 July
2013).
Estonian Film Institute (EFI). 2013. ‘Taotlused ja toetused 2012’. Available at: http://www.
efsa.ee/index.php?page=486& (accessed 17 May 2013).
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www.estonica.org/en/History/1939–1945_Estonia_and_World_War_II/Soviet_occupation_
and_takeover_of_Estonia_in_1940 (accessed 17 May 2013).
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Eesti%20filmilugu%20ajaperioodide%20kaupa%20-%20uus.pdf (accessed 14 May 2013).
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Finland
Riikka Pennanen and Raija Talvio
Overview
Riikka Pennanen
The history of film in Finland began at the same time as modern motion picture
technology was invented. The Lumière brothers screened the first moving images
in Helsinki in 1896. However, it was a decade before the first narrative film was
produced: Teuvo Puro’s comedy titled Salaviinanpolttajat (The Moonshiners, 1907).
Puro was also in charge of directing the first full-length feature, Sylvi (1913),1
a drama based on a play by Minna Canth. Russian officials stopped all filming in
Finland in 1916, and it did not begin again until after the Civil War and the Finnish
declaration of independence in 1919. Thanks to the success of a new production com-
pany, Suomi-Filmi, and its chief director and head of production, Erkki Karu, Finnish
cinema reached new heights in the 1920s. While the filmmakers in early Finnish film
were male, films based on texts by female playwrights and writers, such as Minna
Canth and Anni Swan, have played an important role in Finnish film history.
Finland’s pioneering female screenwriter, Kaarina Kaarna (1898–1972), 2 born
Karin Viitainoja, published her first novel in 1926, before approaching director
Kalle Kaarna, whom she later married, about an idea for an original script. Kaarina
Kaarna wrote Työn sankarilaulu (A Song about the Heroism of Labour, 1929), a silent
drama directed by Kalle Kaarna, under the pseudonym of Katri Viita. The pair
then adapted the tragic love story Kuisma ja Helinä (Kuisma and Helinä, 1932)
from a collection of poems, which Kalle Kaarna also directed. In the 1930s and
1940s, Kaarina Kaarna focused on writing popular literature, mainly under the
pseudonym of Tuulikki Kallio. Two of her novels were adapted into highly suc-
cessful war-time movies: Kaivopuiston kaunis Regina (Beautiful Regina of Kaivopuisto,
1941), written and directed by Toivo Särkkä, and Katariina ja Munkkiniemen kreivi
(Catherine and the Count of Munkkiniemi, 1943), adapted by Nisse Hirn. Kaarina
Kaarna’s final script, Suviyön salaisuus (The Secret of the Summer Night, 1945), was
directed by Eino Kari and based on her 1941 magazine serial and 1943 novel.
Gerda Hintze (1905–77) is the only other recorded female screenwriter working
in the silent era. Hintze was a pharmacist and lacked a writing background, but
did have a keen interest in history and photography. At the age of 24 she penned
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Finland 303
the original script for Carl von Haartman’s historical drama Kajastus (Mirage,
1930), the last fully silent Finnish film.
The flapper-esque, independent ‘New Woman’ began appearing in Finnish
cinema during the mid 1930s, in the comedies produced by Suomi-Filmi. Anu
Koivunen argues that ‘women’s literature’ and the influence of female screenwrit-
ers encouraged the popularization of this character type (1993). The most popular
of these writers was Hilja Valtonen (1897–1988). The first film to be adapted
from one of her novels is the Valentin Vaala-directed Vaimoke (Surrogate Wife,
1936), which was co-written by Tauno Tattari and the director. Reports note that
Valtonen approved the script and frequented the set as an ‘expert’, although she
is not credited as one of the film’s screenwriters. Vaimoke was the most watched
Finnish film of 1936. Based on its success, Valtonen was commissioned to write
an original script for a sequel, Mieheke (Surrogate Husband, 1936), which premiered
eight months after the release of Vaimoke. Both films were popular and highly
influential, and termed ‘Valtos-films’ by the critics, underlining the authorship of
the writer. Yet very few films were written by women in 1930s Finland.
In the 1940s, actress Lea Joutseno (1910–77), screenwriter Kersti Bergroth
(1886–1975), who worked under the pseudonym Tet, and director Valentin Vaala
wrote five films for Suomi-Filmi: Morsian yllättää (The Bride Springs a Surprise,
1941), Tositarkoituksella (With Serious Intent, 1943), Dynamiittityttö (Dynamite Girl,
1944), Vuokrasulhanen (A Hired Fiancé, 1945) and Viikon tyttö (Girl of the Week,
1946). Following in the steps of the Valtos-films of the 1930s, these modern come-
dies featured a young, independent, sassy female character, portrayed by Joutseno,
and were set in an urban environment. Fast-paced dialogue and social misunder-
standings formed the basis of these comedies. Joutseno and Vaala came up with
the stories for the scripts while Bergroth wrote the dialogue. Joutseno began her
collaboration with Vaala on Ihmiset suviyössä (People in the Summer Night, 1948),
for which the two won the Jussi award for best script, making Joutseno the first
female screenwriter to win this prestigious award.3 Joutseno wrote her last script
with director Ilmari Unho for Kilroy sen teki (Kilroy Was Here, 1948), based on Hilja
Valtonen’s novel of the same title.
Another actress to write her own roles during the studio era was Regina
Linnanheimo (1915–95). One of Finland’s first and foremost female film stars,
she collaborated with visionary director Teuvo Tulio in the mid 1930s, starring in
a series of films throughout the 1930s and 1940s when she carefully observed the
screenwriting process. Linnanheimo wrote original scripts for the Tulio-directed
dramas Rikollinen nainen (A Crooked Woman, 1952) and Olet mennyt minun vereeni
(You’ve Gone into My Blood, 1956),4 creating highly complex characters for herself.
In Rikollinen nainen Linnanheimo plays a woman first imprisoned by marriage
and later jailed due to memory loss and mistaken identity, while in Olet mennyt
minun vereeni, her last film, she plays an alcoholic. Both of Linnanheimo’s scripts
poignantly explore the role of women in 1950s Finnish society.
Seere Salminen (1894–1977), known as Serp, and Elsa Soini (1893–1952) began
their highly successful collaboration with a radio drama titled Suomisen perhe,
which was first broadcast in 1938 and ran until 1950. The popular radio play
Figure 4.2 Morsian yllättää (1941) featuring the film’s screenwriters Kersti Bergroth, Lea
Joutseno and Valentin Vaala working on the script, accompanied by an unknown typist
(left). Valentin Vaala: Morsian yllättää 1941 ©KAVI/Suomi-Filmi Oy33.1
sparked a series of films, written by Salminen and Soini under the pseudonym
Tuttu Paristo, which depict the life of a middle-class urban family, the Suominens.
A total of five Suomisen perhe films were released between 1941 and 1945. After
Soini’s death, Salminen wrote her last film, Taas tapaamme Suomisen perheen (The
Suominen Family Is Here Again), which was released in 1959. Both women also
had successful careers as individual screenwriters. Elsa Soini wrote her first script
for the controversial Runon kuningas ja muuttolintu (The King of Poets and the Bird
of Passage, 1940) with the film’s director Toivo Särkkä. Based on the romance
between Finland’s national poet, J. L. Runeberg, and Emilie Björkstén, it was
the most watched and talked about film of the year. Seere Salminen’s career as a
screenwriter spanned a total of three decades: from 1941, on the release of Poretta
eli keisarin uudet pisteet (Poretta, or the Emperor’s New Points), another collabora-
tion with Soini, to her last film in 1962, Ihana seikkailu (The Beautiful Adventure).
One of Salminen’s most celebrated scripts is Katupeilin takana (Behind the Mirror in
the Window, 1949), based on her 1947 play of the same title, for which she was
awarded the Jussi for Best Script. Set in late-nineteenth-century Helsinki, the film
centres on the rebellious daughter of a wealthy Swedish-speaking Finnish family and
boasts an array of eccentric characters and snappy dialogue that was characteristic
of Salminen’s works.
Hella Wuolijoki’s (1886–1954) impact on Finnish culture as a writer and
politician cannot be underestimated. A total of 14 films have been made based
Finland 305
on her writing. Although Wuolijoki often contributed to the scripts based on

her plays, she is credited as a screenwriter on only four films: Vihreä kulta (Green
Gold, 1939), Loviisa – Niskavuoren nuori emäntä (Louisa, 1946), Niskavuoren Heta
(Heta from Niskavuori, 1952) and Niskavuoren Aarne (Aarne of Niskavuori, 1954).
RKO Pictures’ The Farmer’s Daughter (1947) was adapted from Wuolijoki’s 1937
play Juurakon Hulda, which was previously adapted for a film of the same title
in Finland.
According to Raija Talvio’s research, the 1950s and 1960s held the lowest num-
ber of female screenwriters in Finnish film history since the 1930s, with only 8 per
cent and 9 per cent of the films made being written by women. One of the most
prominent screenwriters during the 1960s was Marja-Leena Mikkola (b. 1939).
Mikkola wrote the original script for the Mikko Niskanen-directed Käpy selän alla
(Skin, Skin, 1966), a film that was not only successful with audiences but also came
to define the new wave of Finnish cinema that followed the crash of the studio
system. The story, of four Helsinki students leaving the city for a camping trip in
the countryside, poignantly articulates the feelings and attitudes of mid 1960s
youth in a fresh way that is free of clichés.
Up until 1970, only three feature films were directed by women. The 1970s,
however, introduced several prominent female auteurs who were screenwriter-
directors. Women wrote 22 per cent and directed 8 per cent of the feature films
made in the 1970s, numbers that suggest a shift towards a more equal gender
division in filmmaking, particularly screenwriting.
Eija-Elina Bergholm (b. 1943) was not only a screenwriter and director of fea-
ture films, but has also written and directed for television, radio and theatre. Her
first feature film scripts were for the Timo Bergholm-directed Punahilkka (Little Red
Riding Hood, 1968) and Jörn Donner’s Anna (1970), both of which were co-written
with the directors. Marja pieni! (Poor Maria!, 1972) made Bergholm the fourth
female director in Finnish film, and the first female to direct a film from her
own original script. Previously, only Ritva Arvelo had directed Kultainen vasikka
(The Golden Calf, 1961), which she adapted from Maria Jotuni’s play. Marja pieni!
established Bergholm as one of the most distinct creative voices in the industry.
Her debut film centres around a 30-year-old bank clerk frustrated with her life
and demonstrates the motifs that reappear in Bergholm’s work: an individual’s
struggle – in particular that of a female individual – and that individual’s rela-
tionship with self, family and society at large. Bergholm next wrote the script for
Jäähyväiset (The Farewell, 1981), directed by Tuija-Maija Niskanen. Based on the life
of theatre director Vivica Bandler, who collaborated with Bergholm on the script,
the film portrays a wealthy Swedish-speaking Finnish family and focuses on the
daughter’s struggle to fit in with her family. Jäähyväiset is one of the first Finnish
films to feature a romantic relationship between two women. Bergholm is non-
judgmental about her characters, presenting the female protagonists as complex
and multi-dimensional. This is evident in Angelan sota (Angela’s War, 1984), her
second feature-length film, set during the Continuation War in World War II,
which centres on a Finnish nurse named Angela and her relationship with a
German soldier who has lost his memory.
Tove Idström (b. 1954) was educated as a dramaturge, having written for televi-
sion and taught screenwriting, making her feature film screenwriting debut with
Akvaariorakkaus (Aquarium Love, 1993), directed by Claes Olsson. The film, based
on Anna-Leena Härkönen’s novel, focuses on the relationship of a 20-something
couple and the female protagonist’s self-exploration through sex. Idström and
Olsson also collaborated on Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (Amazing Women by the
Sea, 1998), based on Monika Fagerholm’s novel. Set in the mid 1960s, it focuses
on a friendship between two frustrated housewives, who both yearn for independ-
ence and freedom. Following this, Idström was commissioned by the Finnish Film
Foundation to write an hour-long original script. As part of the project, the screen-
writer could also choose the director and producer for their script. Idström chose
Jarmo Lampela to direct her romantic comedy script, titled Rakastin epätoivoista
naista (I Loved a Desperate Woman, 1999). Idström and Lampela collaborated again
on the original screenplay for Eila (2003), the story of a cleaner in her late thirties
who finds herself in a difficult situation, both in her professional and private life,
but ends up finding a sense of worth through these challenges.
Auli Mantila (b. 1964) graduated from the University of Art and Design in
1995, after five years of studying screenwriting and film directing. She has writ-
ten and directed three feature films, all of which have left a positive mark on the
Finnish film industry because of their unique female representation. Mantila’s
debut film, Neitoperho (The Collector, 1997), was inspired by John Fowles’s novel,
in which a lonely young man kidnaps the object of his obsession and locks her
in the cellar of his house. However, Mantila’s thriller turns the tables by mak-
ing the protagonist of the film an impulsive, unpredictable and violent young
woman, who narrates the cycle of terror and destruction on screen. Mantila
further examines power dynamics and challenges traditional gender roles in her
sophomore film, Pelon maantiede (The Geography of Fear, 2000), based on Anja
Kauranen’s novel. After her sister is raped and mugged, a forensic dentist encoun-
ters a group of women who have taken matters into their own hands to stop the
constant abuse and fear. Mantila’s most recent feature film is Ystäväni Henry (My
Friend Henry, 2004), a drama that depicts the friendship of two 12-year-olds and
the secrets of the children’s families, while exploring themes of love and accept-
ance. Since 2001, Mantila has produced her films through Aamu Filmcompany
and DO Films, with the aim of ‘developing and strengthening the character of
Finnish film’.
Although still a heavily male-dominated industry, female filmmakers stand
out in contemporary Finnish film with their fresh and visionary works. 21 tapaa
pilata avioliitto (21 Ways to Ruin a Marriage, 2013), a comedy written and directed
by Johanna Vuoksenmaa (b. 1965), was the highest-grossing Finnish movie of
the year and also the highest-grossing film directed by a woman in Finnish film
history. Pirjo Honkasalo’s (b. 1947) critically acclaimed drama Betoniyö (Concrete
Night, 2013), written by Honkasalo with Pirkko Saisio (b. 1949), had its world
premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Masters Series, and
received six Jussi awards, including for the Best Film and Best Director. Raija
Talvio (b. 1959) is another prominent screenwriter in contemporary Finnish
Finland 307
film. Her recent scripts include Pikkusisar (Little Sister, 1999), a drama set in the
Continuation War, and a comedy titled Mieletön elokuu (August Fools, 2013), both
directed by Taru Mäkelä.
Hella Wuolijoki (1886–1954)
Raija Talvio
‘It is world literature! You cannot touch it.’ Hella Wuolijoki was certainly not
modest when she defended her dialogue writing in story conferences with film
director Valentin Vaala (Varjola 2004: 54). Hella Wuolijoki was one of the most
important Finnish playwrights of the twentieth century. Her plays became well-
loved classics and even today are staple items in the repertoires of theatres across
the country. Her active role in the writing and development of the screen adap-
tations of her plays is, however, less well known. Two original screenplays are
attributed to her: Vihreä kulta/Green Gold (1939) and Jossain on railo/Dark is the
Rift (1949). The only Finnish film ever to merit a remake in Hollywood is Juurakon
Hulda (1937), based on Wuolijoki’s play, reincarnated in America as The Farmer’s
Daughter (1947), for RKO, starring Loretta Young. Wuolijoki’s international vis-
ibility, including her collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, is not the only reason why
she still continues to be the object of research and interest in the new millen-
nium. While her fiction clearly reflected the changing social values of the period,
there is also something deeply human and timeless in her characters and in the
moral and emotional dilemmas they face. The importance of Wuolijoki’s output
as a dramatist is sometimes overshadowed by the remarkable impact she had as a
citizen, politician and controversial public figure in the development and in the
fate of her adopted country.
Estonian by birth, Ella Murrik came to Finland when she was 18, to study folk-
lore, history and Russian literature at the University of Helsinki. She eventually
became the first Estonian woman to gain a university degree. Both Estonia and
Finland belonged at the time to the vast but crumbling Russian empire. During
the political and social unrest in Russia, today known as the ‘Revolution of 1905’,
Murrik experienced a political awakening, became a Marxist and joined the Social
Democratic Students’ Association in Helsinki. In 1908 she married a fellow stu-
dent activist, Sulo Wuolijoki, a Socialist representative in the new and democrati-
cally elected Finnish parliament. From then on Ella Murrik was known as Hella
Wuolijoki. When the marriage ended in divorce in 1923, Wuolijoki had already
started a career as an independent businesswoman trading in timber and fuels – it
was never a problem for her to combine capitalist activities and socialist ideals.
Success as a writer did not come to Wuolijoki until she was in her fifties. An early
play, The Children of the House, fell victim to Imperial Russian censorship in 1914,
and the performance of another play, Law and Order, was banned by the Finnish
authorities in 1931 for posing a danger to law and order. Wuolijoki continued to
write, but was more or less persona non grata among the bourgeois cultural estab-
lishment of the country. She decided to solve the problem by using a pseudonym.
The first play she wrote as Juhani Tervapää (a male name), Niskavuoren naiset (The
Women of Niskavuori), in 1936, became a huge success. The true identity of the
writer was soon revealed, but Wuolijoki continued to write as Tervapää.
Niskavuoren naiset was the first in a cycle of plays scripted by Wuolijoki that
chronicled the life of a wealthy landowning family in the Finnish countryside.
The five-part cycle covers the stories of various family members, the servants of
the house and the local community from the 1890s to 1950s. Wuolijoki’s plays
are sometimes called rural melodramas, because her characters often face choices
between love and property, honour and betrayal, honesty and tradition. But there
is more Gone with the Wind than Douglas Sirk in their content: there is passion,
but also wit, warmth and sharp observations about the social conventions of
the times, alongside conflict of the human heart. Wuolijoki’s political idealism
is often evident in her writing, which is naïve, sophisticated and ruthless at the
same time. The Niskavuori family can be compared to their contemporaries, the
Forsythes or the Buddenbooks – members of a traditional ruling elite tackling
the challenges of modernity, class conflict and a desire for emotional fulfilment.
Seven feature films based on the five plays of the Niskavuori cycle were produced
in Finland between 1938 and 1984.
Wuolijoki has been praised for her strong female characters but also criticized
for portraying the men in her plays as spineless slobs. ‘Why not?’ she retorted to
an actor who complained about the lack of heroic attributes in the role he played
in Niskavuoren naiset. ‘Men are irresponsible weaklings and good for only one
thing.’ Her writing is defined by a contemporary critic as ‘glowingly Feminist’
(Vapaavuori 1989: 436).
Hulda, the main character of the play and film Juurakon Hulda (both 1937) was
popular with audiences. Hulda is a poor country girl who finds work in the service
of a conservative parliamentarian, a charming bachelor, and ends up becoming a
politician herself, as well as his bride. The genre may be romantic comedy, but the
story is neither a Cinderella tale, nor a version of Pygmalion. Hulda is ambitious
and aware of her own lack of knowledge. She studies secretly at evening school and
works her way through university while keeping her day job as a servant. When
she eventually graduates with a degree and becomes a candidate for the Socialist
Party in a general election, her employer falls for her. Hulda’s life story mirrors that
of Miina Sillanpää, who in 1926 was Finland’s first female cabinet minister and
rose from the position of domestic servant to become a leading politician. The nar-
rative reflects the deeply rooted egalitarian tradition of Finland, which, when still
a Grand Duchy within Russia, was the first country in Europe to grant suffrage to
women in 1906. The Hollywood remake, The Farmer’s Daughter, however, lost the
core values of the original story: the independent heroine who believes in learning
became, in America, a young woman who needs men for guidance at every turn-
ing point of the plot. Needless to say, any hints of socialist ideas had to be omitted
in the Hollywood of 1947. Juurakon Hulda was the biggest domestic box-office hit
of the 1930s in Finland and a source of inspiration for young servant girls dream-
ing of a better future. In some areas landowners ordered their milkmaids to stay
home in the evenings when the film was being shown in the village cinema, in
case the girls got peculiar ideas about themselves (Laine 1999: 360–4).
Finland 309
During the Winter War, 1939–40, Wuolijoki’s connections with her old revo-
lutionary comrades, some now in high places in Stalin’s Russia, proved valuable.
As an unofficial envoy of the government of Finland she played a crucial role in
setting up peace negotiations. Two years later, when the two countries were at
war again, Wuolijoki’s fortunes were reversed. Accused of helping a Soviet spy
she was sentenced to life for treason. She spent her time in prison writing her
memoirs, which according to some commentators ‘contain more fiction than her
plays’. When the war ended, her sentence was overturned, and soon she became
a powerful figure behind the scenes in the formation of the new government.
Within a few months she was nominated the director general of Yle, Finland’s
public broadcasting company. The position was exceptionally influential, since
Yle was a state radio monopoly at the time. Wuolijoki’s time as head of the radio
corporation proved controversial and she was removed from the post after five
years. One of her enduring legacies is the Radio Theatre, which she founded and
for which she also wrote material.
Wuolijoki was a raconteur by nature. Bertolt Brecht recorded in his diary how
fascinated he was by her and the stories of local life she told to entertain her
guests in the evenings at her manor. Brecht and his entourage (wife, secretary,
mistress and children) spent the summer of 1940 as Wuolijoki’s guests in Finland
on their long journey from Nazi Germany to America. The two writers decided
to join forces in writing a play that was based on an earlier unproduced play by
Wuolijoki, The Sawdust Princess. She had earlier written and sold a screenplay
based on the same story to the Suomi-Filmi production company, but that screen-
play had remained unproduced. The result of the collaboration was the play Herr
Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (Mr Puntila and His Man Matti). Knowing Brecht’s
reputation as a writer who freely used other people’s material, Wuolijoki made
him sign a contract in which the copyright of the play, as well as its royalties, was
to be shared equally by the two of them. True to form, Brecht later ignored the
contract. In Scandinavian theatre productions, the play is usually credited to both
writers. Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti has been adapted for the screen twice
(West Germany, 1960; Finland, 1979) and numerous television productions have
also been made of it in several countries.
Fourteen feature films based on Wuolijoki’s writing have been produced in
Finland; this includes two original screenplays as well as adaptations of her plays.
Wuolijoki contributed, in some way, to the writing of most of the films that were
made during her lifetime and was only sometimes credited. A testament to the
continuing fascination of audiences with Wuolijoki is the fact that when a biopic,
Hella W., was made in 2011, the film became one of the top-grossing domestic
feature releases of the year in Finland.
Notes
1. Sylvi was filmed in 1911 but did not open until 24 February 1913 due to post-production
issues.
2. Identifying all of the crew members of silent era films is challenging. Only a select
few crew members were officially credited and, according to the Finnish National
Filmography, often only a surname is known, making it difficult to identify the gender
of the crew member. Pseudonyms, often gender neutral, were commonly used, especially
by women.
3. Usko Kemppi wrote the script with Joutseno and Vaala.
4. Regina Linnanheimo wrote the script under the pseudonym Arel.
References
Laine, Kimmo. 1999. ‘Pääosassa Suomen kansa’: Suomi-Filmi ja Suomen Filmiteollisuus kansal-
lisen elokuvan rakentajina 1933–1939. Helsinki: SKS.
Vapaavuori, Anneli. 1989. ‘Haluan käydä kiinni maailman vipuun – Hella Wuolijoki’, in
Maria-Liisa Nevala (ed.) Sain roolin johon en mahdu: suomalaisen naiskirjallisuuden linjoja.
Helsinki: Otava.
Varjola, Markku. 2004. ‘Yleiskatsaus Valentin Vaalan tuotantoon’, in Kimmo Laine, Matti
Lukkarila, and Juha Seitajärvi (eds) Valentin Vaala. Helsinki: SKS, SEA.
France
Kelley Conway, Kath Dooley, Mary Harrod, Susan Hayward,
Florence Martin, Jule Selbo, Alison Smith, Isabelle Vanderschelden
and Elena Von Kassel Siambani
Overview
Elena Von Kassel Siambani

This overview will explore the role of the female screenwriter or scénariste in
France, from the silent period to today, when the proportion of female to male
screenwriters is one of the highest in the world.1
In early silent French cinema, five female scenario writers, Alice Guy (see entry
p. 322), Germaine Dulac, Irène Hillel-Erlanger, Colette and Musidora played
an instrumental part in its development. Guy, Dulac and Musidora were pioneers
and differed from their male contemporaries, with the exception of Méliès, in that
they were actors, directors and producers. Colette was an accomplished author
and before that a pantomime artist, Guy wrote novels and plays after becoming
disillusioned with the film industry, Germaine Dulac was a theatre and film critic,
and published seminal texts in film theory, Musidora wrote songs, plays and
film scripts and Irène Hillel-Erlanger was a poet, revered by the surrealists, whose
cubist approach to writing influenced Dulac’s kaleidoscopic innovations
Colette (1873–1954) is famous for her ground-breaking feminist and libertine
novels, yet was one of the first bona fide woman screenwriters in France. She
even wrote a manual in 1918 on how to write a film script titled ‘Petit manuel
de l’aspirant scénariste’ (Virmaux 2004: 243). Colette’s film career spanned more
than 30 years, during which she adapted several of her novels as well as writing
for the renowned directors Max Ophuls (Divine [1935]) and Marc Allegret (Ladies
Lake [1934]). She also wrote for the female directors Musidora, Solange Terac and
Jacqueline Audry, these collaborations enabling a strong tradition of feminist
filmmaking to become established in France.
Colette, Alain Virmaux argues, felt that cinema was first and foremost a mat-
ter of writing (Virmaux 2004: 24). In his book Le Scénario, Jean-Paul Török cites
Colette as one of the author screenwriters who is often forgotten, pointing out
that French cinema, especially during the first half of the century, had a literary
tradition (Török 1986: 53). A comparative study and analysis of Colette’s screen-
writing based on Alain and Odette Virmaux’s work on Colette would be valuable
and has yet to be realized.2
311
A screenwriting tradition, from a female perspective, is at the roots of French

cinema. Indeed Alice Guy was one of the earliest screenwriters and directors,
whose first film was shown in 1896. Her importance was not recognized in France
until 1954 when she was awarded the Légion d’honneur. Guy began her film
career as a typist for Leon Gaumont and convinced him to let her act a few scenes
in front of the camera that she had written for friends (Cazals 1978: 53). Even
though some historians regard the result as a ‘flat mise-en-scène and silly scénario’
(Pinel 1994: 40), La Fée aux choux (1896) was a great success (Pinel 1994: 40).
Musidora (née Jeanne Roques, 1889–1957) came from a Bohemian background
and her father, Jean Rocques, wrote songs while her mother was a feminist. In
April 1913 Musidora was performing at the Folies-Bergères in a burlesque act
when she was discovered by two young directors from Gaumont, Henri Frescourt
and Louis Feuillade. They were impressed with this daringly dressed woman,
wearing just a few feathers, who had a remarkable stage presence. Musidora went
on to become the first vamp, as Irma Vep in Louis Feuillade’s ten-episode film
Les Vampires (1915) (Pinel 1994: 38). But Musidora wanted to be a writer and was
passionate about writing, explaining that, ‘A film should be written like a good
book … and when you see it in ten or fifteen years it should be as beautiful as it is
today’ (Musidora 1943). She went on to found her own production company, La
société des films Musidora, and made her directing debut with Minne ou l’enigme
libertine (1916)3 and then Vagabonde (1917), both adaptations of Colette novels.
Unfortunately there is no trace of Minne ou l’enigme libertine, and historians’ views
differ as to whether it was lost or never completed. In 1918 Musidora wrote and
directed Vincenta, followed soon afterwards by La Femme cache, based on Colette’s
original scenario. Musidora began a trend for Colette adaptations, explaining,
‘I was the first to make Colette write a film script before she went on to become
the great scénariste’ (Musidora 1943).
Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) established herself as a key figure in early avant-
garde cinema. The second woman to direct a film after Alice Guy, she made her
directing debut with the historical melodrama Les Soeurs enemies (1915). Dulac
began her career as a theatre critic and wrote for the feminist periodical La Femme
française. She is described by her contemporary Henri Frescourt as a propagandist
for the cause of the avant-garde cinema. Dulac visualized each film when writ-
ing the scenario (Ford 1972: 36)4 and would follow the storyboard, making few
changes when filming.
Dulac adapted Denys Amiel’s play La Souriante Madame Beudet in 1923,
described as ‘a psychological comedy which was not really meant to be adapted
on the screen’ (Ford 1972: 34). Dulac invented new ways of showing the inti-
mate thoughts of the characters on screen. She did not revert to using title cards
to explain what was happening, but explained the characters’ feelings through
visual effects. Although the film enjoyed critical success, it did not convince the
producers, and Germaine Dulac went to the United States, returning to France full
of praise for the ‘team work’ in the Hollywood studios. She joined the Sociéte des
Ciné-Romans (Ford 1972: 37)5, and went on to write and direct Gossette, a ciné-
roman in six episodes.
France 313
Dulac found her calling with short, experimental films, going on to collaborate
with the poet Antonin Artaud, who wrote Le Coquille et le clergyman/The Clergyman
and the Seashell, which created a scandal at its screening at the Studio des Ursulines
cinema in 1928. Artaud supporters interrupted the screening and said that Dulac
didn’t understand what surrealism was about.6 Despite this criticism Dulac per-
sisted and in the same year wrote and directed her next film, L’Invitation au voy-
age, inspired by the Baudelaire poem of the same name. The title credits read:
‘Scénariste et Metteur en scène Germaine Dulac.’ The narrative tells of a bourgeois
married woman’s daydreams about a ship’s captain she meets in a music hall. The
captain asks her to dance and, once they are back at her table, the scene trans-
forms and they are inside a ship with him looking out of a porthole. The captain
starts to daydream, and Dulac used the same visual effects that she had used for
the female protagonist to show his thoughts. The feminist message at the end of
the film is spoiled when the woman leaves to go back to her unpleasant husband.
In 1928 Dulac adapted what would be her last feature film, La Princesse Mandan,
from the novel L’Oublie by Pierre Benoit. The script was very different to the origi-
nal story, about a Russian soldier after the 1917 Revolution, who is lost and forgot-
ten in the depths of Russia. Dulac said of the film, ‘I kept the main characters and
the whole spirit of adventure, but I made a kind of comedy. Benoit’s hero became
in my film a victim of the cinema. Obsessed with the glamour of the big cinema
screen he runs off looking for a fantasy world of marvels with a fairy princess.
There is a moral to the story: after all his adventures my hero finds happiness in
the simple life.’7
It was in the films made after 1929 that Dulac found her mode of expression:
experimentation with image and sound. Disque 957 illustrates the pages of a
Chopin score while Thèmes et variations was also inspired by classical music, and
Etude cinégraphique sur une arabesque is based on a piece of music by Debussy.
Dulac’s vision was that of a creative and feminist, but this often created conflict
with the male authors she adapted for the screen.
The screenwriter and director Marie Epstein (1899–1995) was overshadowed by
her three male collaborators, the directors Jean Epstein (her brother), Jean Benoit-
Levy and Henri Langlois (Vincendeau 1995). Even in 2014, at the Cinémathèque’s
tribute exhibition to Langlois, Marie Epstein was merely acknowledged as Jean
Epstein’s sister (Paini 2014). Marie and Jean Epstein came to France from Poland in
1921 and became part of the avant-garde. Marie is first credited as assistant director
and co-scènariste with her brother for his Coeur fidele (1923), a film that was critically
acclaimed for its use of close-ups. Marie also wrote the script for at least four of his
other films, including L’Affiche (1925), Le Double amour (1925), Six et demi onze (1927),
Vive la vie (1937) and La Liberté surveillée (Henri Aisner and Vladimír Vlcek, 1958).
Marie Epstein collaborated as writer and director with Jean Benoit-Levy on
seven feature films, the first being Le Coeur de Paris (1931). Her next film with
Benoit-Levy, La Maternelle (1933), is recognized by critics and academics as an
excellent early French sound film, adapted from a popular novel of the time by
Leon Frapie. La Maternelle preceded Jean Vigo’s film Zero de conduite (1934) and, as
Ginette Vincendeau notes, it depicts ‘school as an instrument of social liberation
rather than repression’ (Vincendeau 1995), arguing that it is ‘an extraordinary

combination of social propaganda for state nursery education, naturalism and
lyricism’ (Vincendeau 1995).8 Historian Basil Wright points out that ‘La Maternelle
is a film which is crudely made, and indeed is in every way the reverse of preten-
tious; but because it persuades us that these are real people with real emotions
we are able to enter into the inner lives of children and grown-ups alike’ (Wright
1974: 235).
Marie Epstein and Benoit-Levy’s Hélène (1936) is daring for the time, touching
on feminist issues. Epstein adapted the novel by Vicki Baum in which a brilliant
young student falls in love with a music student, Pierre Régnier, who wants to be
a musician. His father refuses to allow this and Pierre kills himself, leaving Hélène
pregnant. Epstein has inflected the film with a feminist perspective: Hélène suc-
ceeds, despite being a woman, training as a medical student, graduating, having
an illegitimate child and seducing her professor – all at the same time.9
Solange Bussi (1907–93), later referred to as Solange Terac, was a prolific screen-
writer and pioneer of sound film. She began her career as Gaston Ravel’s assistant
for Le Collier de la reine (1929) and worked on the French version of G. W. Pabst’s
L’Opera de quat’sous/Three Penny Opera (1931). Inspired by Pabst, Bela Balazs and
Bertolt Brecht, Bussi decided to become a director, choosing to adapt Colette’s
Vagabonde (1931), which had not done well commercially when Musidora
adapted the story in 1917. Bussi worked on the script in close collaboration with
Colette, who felt that the film had done justice to her novel. Bel-Gazou, Colette’s
daughter, was Bussi’s assistant director (Tierchant 2014: 131). Bussi’s next film that
she wrote and directed, Mon amant, l’assassin (1931), is about an eccentric woman
who wants to marry a murderer, but it did not do well at the box office.
Bussi’s films were ahead of their time, reflecting what would be termed in the
1960s as ‘cinéma de vérité’. Looking for the ‘truth’ or the real seems to be a con-
cern for most women screenwriters, as Bussi explains: ‘My ideas and thoughts are
far from being revolutionary really. What I try to do is bring together reality and
simplicity, and to do this I use a “direct imagery” which should make the action
intense, truthful and humane to the maximum’ (Ford 1972). Bussi purposely
distanced herself from the film studios and changed her name to Solange Terac,
going on to write at least ten plays and film scripts during the Second World War.
Terac’s adaptation of her play L’Honorable Catherine, directed by Marcel Herbier in
1943, did particularly well. Bussi’s later screenplays were often directed by Robert
Vernay and her last script, Tête folle, was made by Vernay in 1961.Unfortunately
the films that he made out of Terac’s scripts are considered failures (Tulard 1997).10
The 1930s and 1940s period of filmmaking in France could be termed ‘très mas-
culine’, when the poetic realism of filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier
and Marcel Carné dominated. According to Jean-Paul Török, the screenwriters
Charles Spaak and Henri Jeanson created a school of thought that prevailed in
French cinema for a decade in which the predominant narratives had the fol-
lowing traits: a character trapped in his fate falls in love with a woman and finds
hope, but through a cloud of pessimism is doomed and destined to failure or
death (Török 1986: 52).
France 315
The liberation of France at the end of World War II allowed women to have
the vote for the first time in 1945. Jacqueline Audry (1908–77) emerged in this
period; better known as a director, she was often closely involved in developing
and writing scripts. Audry frequently used the Belle Époque as a backdrop to her
films, but her narratives convey a feminist message. Audry’s first film was adapted
by her older sister, the novelist Colette Audry, and Pierre Laroche, from a novel
by the Comtesse de Ségurs, Les Malheures de Sophie. As Burch and Sellier note,
in adapting the novel the two sisters altered the message of the book, that girls
should be submissive. Instead the film denounced the way girls from middle-class
families were brought up, making the protagonist, Sophie, run away with a man
that her family do not want her to marry (Burch and Sellier 1996: 449). Audry’s
next film was an adaptation of a work by Colette, Gigi (1948), and she closely
collaborated on the screenplay with Colette11 and her second husband Pierre
Laroche, who is credited for script and dialogue, although Colette and Audry had
the greatest input with regard to both aspects (Flock 1999: 49.12 In Gigi and Minne
ou l’ingenue libertine (1950), Audry developed the myth of the woman with loose
morals during the Belle Époque, and then went on to script the more conformist
Huis clos (1954) and La Garçonne (1957).
Colette Audry (1906–1990), according to Jackie Buet, wrote the script, with
Réné Clement, for the La Bataille du rail (1946), which he directed, about resist-
ance on the railroads during the Second World War, and also various short films
such as Lettre A, which was part of an ambitious project in making a short film for
every letter of the alphabet (Virmaux 2004: 38).
The years after the war were partly defined by the rise of French documentary.
During World War II funds were limited, and filmmakers began to make short
films which were also a way of sustaining French culture and heritage on subject
matter such as the artist Rodin, or French traditions like barrel making and tap-
estry weaving. When the war ended these filmmakers continued to make short
films and a small informal group formed who produced films in the Jean Vigo
and Robert Flaherty tradition of documentary realism. The group, termed ‘des
Trente’, ‘did not come together to defend a particular ideology, but to preserve a
certain quality for short films’ (Von Kassel Siambani 2013: 180). Yannick Bellon
and Nicole Vedrès were two of the 30 filmmakers who signed a petition calling for
a law to make shorts mandatory before a feature film in cinemas.
Yannick Bellon (pseudonym Marie-Annick) (b. 1923) came from a family of
writers and artists; her mother was the photographer Denise Bellon. As well as a
writer and director of documentary and fiction films, Bellon is a creative and col-
laborative monteuses, editing films for Pierre Kast and Alexander Astruc. Her last
collaboration to date was with Chris Marker in 2001 on Le Souvenir d’un avenir.
Bellon wrote and directed the moving naturalistic film Goémons (1945), about
workers who extract iodine from seaweed on an island off Brittany (Von Kassel
Siambani 2013: 180). The remote island had no electricity and only one woman,
the wife of the foreman. Male workers would sometimes stay for years, having to
leave their families behind. The film asks whether an all-male society can exist
and shows how sad and lonely this can be.
In 1951 Bellon directed the documentary Colette (1951). Co-written by the

author herself, it was a documentary portrait presented as a dialogue with her
friend Jean Cocteau. The film begins with a reflexive tone in which Colette and
Cocteau are sitting at the window of Colette’s apartment at the Palais Royal. ‘They
want to make a film about me,’ says Colette. The camera then ‘revisits’ all the
houses in France she has lived in, and Colette adds her memories in voiceover.
Nicole Vedrès (1911–65) is described by Alain Resnais as intelligent, attractive
and charming, qualities that one can find in her text for Les Feuilles bougent (‘The
Moving Leaves’) (Liandrat-Guiges and Leutrat 2006: 182). Vedrès was working on
a montage film, Paris 1900 (1947), when she employed Resnais as an assistant
editor. The method of making such a documentary had arrived from across the
Channel, through the films of Alberto Cavalcanti, Jacques Brunius, and particu-
larly Humphrey Jennings. Vedrès also published several novels, and worked as
a radio broadcaster.
Marguerite Duras (née Marguerite Donnadieu, 1914–96) was born near Saigon
in Vietnam. Her parents were both teachers but, when her father died, her mother
struggled to make ends meet and she played the piano in cinemas. Marguerite and
her brother slept at her feet, which instilled a love of film in Duras who, though
she is better known as a novelist, went on to write 13 scenarios and direct 19 films.
Duras is associated with the Nouveau roman, a group of writers, including Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet and Paul Morand, who were united by the search for a
new form of narrative, or even eliminating narrative altogether. Her first success-
ful novel was Un barrage contre le pacifique/Sea Wall (1950), and a few years later
Moderato cantabile (1958). Duras began her long career in the cinema when Alain
Resnais asked her to write the scenario for his first feature film, what would be the
ground-breaking Hiroshima mon amour (1959). The French and Japanese co-pro-
duction called for certain conditions: there had to be locations in both countries, a
Japanese actor and a French actress. When this had been decided upon Duras was
free to write what she wished: what interested Duras and Resnais was the collision
of these two parallel stories through the montage, and its effect on the spectator,
and this is what still makes the film so fascinating today (Thomas 1989: 17).
After writing Hiroshima mon amour, Duras continued to experiment with nar-
rative, intent on producing films that challenged established literary and artistic
conventions. Duras had already been exploring narrative techniques in her novels
and, while most of her work is autobiographical, she expresses sympathy for the
oppressed in the French colonies. Between writing Hiroshima mon amour in 1958
and Une si long absence (1960), directed by Henri Colpi, Duras wrote the script and
dialogue for the film Moderato cantabile (1960), directed by Peter Brook. She collabo-
rated on the script with the journalist and writer Gerard Jarlot. Other scripts included
L’Itinéraire marin (1963) and Nuit noir Calcutta (1964). In 1966 she wrote the script
for Les Rideaux blancs by Georges Franju, and La Voleuse, directed by Jean Chapot.
From 1967 Marguerite Duras devoted her career to film. She co-directed La
Musica, with Paul Seban, who had experience in television, and the film has a very
personal style. In 1969 she adapted and directed her book Detruire dit-elle (1971).
Duras wrote and directed Nathalie Granger in 1972, starring Jeanne Moreau and
France 317
Gerard Depardieu, in which a mother worries about the violent behaviour her
daughter displays at school. In 1974 she wrote and directed La Femme du Gange,
about a man visiting the places he had been to with his deceased wife. Duras then
adapted India Song (1975) from her play about a British diplomat’s wife in 1ndia
in the 1930s. The film is divided into three sections, with three different loca-
tions and an experimental voiceover. Duras was awarded many prizes for the film,
as well as Delphine Seyrig winning the César for best actress in 1975. In 1977
Duras directed Le Camion, where again she plays with reflexive ideas in the script.
Her last script was for Les Enfants, which she also directed, in 1985.
A striking element of Duras’s work is the poetical and experimental use of
voiceover, which takes on very different forms in each of her films. Often punctu-
ated with silence, hesitation and stilted sentences, the voiceover is part of her nar-
rative and filmic style. There is a considerable amount of weight on the ‘non-dite’,
what is not, or what could have been, said, rather than what is heard. Duras’s film
writing demonstrates a penetrating psychological insight into the minds of her
characters which reflects ‘the suffering and solitude of the individual in a hostile
environment, the state of mind that can make one lose consciousness and the
grasp of who they are’ (Royer 1999: 32).
Françoise Sagan (née Françoise Quiorez, 1935–2004) was born in the south-
west of France, moving to Paris when she was an adolescent and frequenting the
après guerre nightclub scene of Saint-Germain-des Prés. Sagan did badly at univer-
sity but had an overnight success with the publication of Bonjour tristesse in 1954,
when the Nobel Prize-winning author François Mauriac called her a ‘charmant
petit monstre’ (a charming little monster).
Sagan’s novels are cinematic, set in fairy tale situations where issues of money
or day-to-day survival, so often the focus of Duras’s stories, are not an issue. The
characters inhabit a bourgeois world and lead comfortable lives – except they
have their emotions and their love lives to worry about, and certain social restric-
tions and conventions imposed on them from which they cannot escape. Sagan
adapted two of her novels and a short story for the screen and also wrote one orig-
inal screenplay. She adapted her novel Landru (1963), directed by Claude Chabrol
and set during the Great War, about a serial killer who murders women and feeds
them to his family. Sagan later adapted her novel Chamade (1968), directed by
Alain Cavalier, a love triangle about a young woman who lives with her very
rich and older boyfriend, then falls in love with a younger but poor man. Sagan
added some scenes to the script but felt that cutting dialogue from a novel was
the wrong thing to do, and that it was better to cut a whole scene rather than to
‘mutilate’ it (Fieschi 1985: 18). Producer Georges de Beauregard encouraged Sagan
to write and direct her own films and she went on to make the short film Encore
un hiver (1974), which did very well commercially. She then directed one of her
short stories, Les Fougères bleues (1975), but it did poorly at the box office. Sagan
also wrote the screenplay for Marc Allegret’s adaptation of Raymond Radiguet’s
Le Bal du Comte d’Orget (1969). Although Sagan’s work is sometimes labelled as
superficial she had the ability, like Radiguet and Jean Cocteau, to express great
truths in a poetic but simple way.
Both Duras and Sagan’s success became synonymous with self-destruction, while
their male contemporaries continued to direct and made films to a great age. One
cannot help but ask why these two women, who held the fort in the cinema for four
decades, had to drink themselves to death, while all the male filmmakers of their
generation – Resnais, Rivette, Rohmer and Chabrol – made it through to old age.
Agnès Varda (b. 1928) (see entry p. 326) had a theatrical background and was
employed as a ‘photographe du plateau’ for a theatre company. She wrote the
scenario and directed the only feminine Nouvelle Vague film – Cleo from 5 to 7
(1962). Her documentary about potato gleaners, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000),
in which she interweaves Millet’s paintings and other thoughts about life, was
voted one of the ten best documentaries of all time by critics and filmmakers in
a British Film Institute poll in 2014.13 Varda has embraced new media, achieved
commercial success and continues to make innovative films.
The Nouvelle Vague had other important female screenwriters: Suzanne
Schiffman (b. 1929) (see entry p. 330) was regarded as Truffaut’s screenwriter,
writing many of his films. Several actresses from the Nouvelle Vague, having
worked with an auteur, went on to write their own scenarios and film them,
including Marie-France Pisier (1944–2011) (see entry p. 337) and Anna Karina
(b. 1940), who wrote and directed Vivre ensemble (1973), La Dernière chanson
(1987) and the road movie Victoria (2004).
During the 1960s Monique Lange (1926–96) worked as a writer with some of
the most prestigious directors of the period, including Roberto Rossellini, Henri-
Georges Clouzot and Joseph Losey. Lange scribed a few acclaimed novels which
were mostly autobiographical and also wrote the biographies of Edith Piaf and
Jean Cocteau. Her recollection of being hired as a screenwriter on Rossellini’s
Vanina Vannini (1961) is that ‘it was a misogynist epoch’. Lange went to Rome
where she waited in her hotel room near the production unit, expecting to be
called on, but never was (Pradel n.d.: 75). Lange felt that she really began to learn
the art of screenwriting when she worked with Clouzot on La Prisonière (1968):
I really worked with Clouzot and he taught me an enormous amount. I had

been warned that he squeezes his scénaristes dry like lemons, that it would
be really hard work and that anyway he would drop me for someone else. It’s
exactly what happened. I was surprised to see myself in the credits, while there
were only two names left amongst those who worked on his scenario. I was
hired in the first place because I could write good dialogue, but I understood
nothing about the cinema, Clouzot taught me a lot, the notion of time passing,
for example. (Pradel n.d.: 75).
Audacious and forceful female screenwriters were emerging in France in the

1960s, who used their femininity and sex appeal to achieve theirs aims. Nelly
Kaplan and Nina Companeez, began writing in the 1960s, each with their distinc-
tive style, and Kaplan is still working today as a screenwriter-director.
Nina Companeez (1937–2015) first worked with the director Michel Deville,
not only writing scripts and dialogue, but designing sets and costumes. After
France 319
a ten-year collaboration with Deville, she began directing herself and is still
doing so for both cinema and television. She is the daughter of one of the most
prolific scriptwriters in France, Jacques Companeez – who holds the record for
having writen the most scenarios in a 15-year period – 360 (Török 1986: 59).
Nina has been equally productive, going on to extend her range into other
aspects of filmmaking such as editing; indeed her work shows how closely
linked editing and writing are. She wrote her first scenario with the director
Michel Deville when she was 21 years old. Nina has written the scenario, dia-
logue, and the montage for Ce soir ou jamais (1961), Adorable menteuse (1962),
A cause, a cause d’une femme (1963), L’Appartement de filles (1963) and Martin sol-
dat (1966). In 1967 she wrote the scenario and the dialogue for Benjamin, as well
as designing the costumes and editing the film, while also writing the music for
Bye, bye Barbara (1969). In 1971 she wrote and directed her first film, Faustine
et le bel été, followed by three more films: Colinot trousse chemise, Commes sur
des roulettes and Tom et Julie. Between 1977 and 1984 she wrote and directed
mostly for television.
Nina Companeez thought that being a woman wasn’t a problem until she went
on to write and direct and was then very badly treated by producers and journal-
ists. She felt that if a film was a success, her name was never mentioned; if a film
did not do well it was immediately her fault (Breton 1993: 110). She was banned
from the set of Benjamin by the producers although she had written the script and
designed the costumes. Yet the film was so successful that she could not easily be
ignored (Breton 1993: 110).
When Companeez and Deville began to make films they were labelled as part of
the Nouvelle Vague because they were making films at the same time as Truffaut,
Godard and Rohmer, but their films were strikingly different in décor and were
inspired by the Medieval and the Baroque periods. They also dealt more with
characters’ emotions, and hardly touched upon social issues. Companeez is still
working today: the prediction in her 1964 interview in Positif (Török and Cohn
1964: 25) that she would write a script and direct A la recherché du temps perdu
materialized in 2011, but for television as a mini-series. In 2014 she scripted and
directed Le General du roi, adapted from the Daphne du Murier novel.
Nelly Kaplan (b. 1931) came to Paris from Argentina because she fell in love
with French culture and film. In 1954 she was apprenticed to the legendary film
director Abel Gance, known for his silent epic Napoleon. He took her on as an
assistant for the short film he made, MagiramaI, in 1956, and then for Austerlitz
in 1960. The rigorous director even let Kaplan shoot some scenes in Cyrano
d’Artagnan (1964). A chance encounter with artist André Breton led Kaplan to
make her debut in writing and directing films with a documentary about Gustave
Moreau. She went on to make documentaries about the engraver Bresdin, the
painter Masson and Le Regard de Picasso, in 1967 for which she won the Golden
Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Her first fiction film, La Fiancée du pirate/Dirty Mary (1969), is described as
‘insolent and resolutely feminist’ (Tulard 1997). Kaplan wrote the script with the
producer of the film, Claude Makowski, in which Marie and her mother, who
are outsiders or ‘illegal aliens’, are taken in by the inhabitants of an imaginary

French village and treated like slaves. The atmosphere created is reminiscent of
Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana and there are references to Bertold Brecht’s Three Penny
Opera and Mother Courage in the depiction of the characters. Kaplan uses Brechtian
techniques to get her message across and make the audience react, hoping they
will be impelled do something about improving society and improving woman’s
position. But Kaplan does not like her films to be labelled as women’s films as she
feels ‘[t]he process of creating is androgynous’.
Kaplan’s next two films, Papa les p’tits bateaux (1972) and Nea (1976), were
written with director and filmmaker Jean Chapot. She went on to co-write
Charles et Lucie in 1979 with Claude Makowshi and Chapot, a road movie about
a couple who are concierges, which was particularly successful in the USA. When
writing the scenario, Kaplan explains, the three would each go off and write
and then get together and revise, each bringing a different aspect to the script.
Like her characters, Kaplan wants everyone who has seen one of her films to
feel that something has changed in them, that they have learnt something and
undergone a transformation.14 Her following film, Plaisir d’amour, was released
in 1991 and has a narrative that reverses the myth of Don Juan, but the film did
not do well at the box office. Kaplan, with Chapot, also wrote more than ten
scripts for television between 1981 and 1999. She has also written erotic novels
and history books, as well as an analysis of the film Napoleon,which is a BFI Film
Classic (1994).
The feminist movement emerged after 1967, linked to the May 1968 politi-
cal and social uprisings in France. Simone de Beauvoir penned a petition for
pro-abortion rights that was featured in the Nouvelle observateur on 5 April 1971.
Amongst the 343 women who signed the petition were Stephane Audran, Colette
Audry, Catherine Deneuve, Marguerite Duras, Jeanne Moreau, Marie-France
Pisier, Françoise Sagan, Delphine Seyrig, Nadine Trintignant and Marina Vlady.
Delphine Seyrig saw this manifesto as the impetus to continue her involvement
in feminist filmmaking. In 1975 she co-directed, with Nadja Ringart and Carole
Roussopoulos, Maso et Miso vont en bateau, and in 1976, with Carole Roussopoulos,
she co-directed Scum Manifesto. In the same year Seyrig directed Sois belle et tais-toi
with Roussopoulos as cinématographer. In this film, which was not released until
1981, Seyrig interviewed 20 actresses, including Louise Fletcher, Jill Clayburgh,
Ellen Burstyn and Jane Fonda, about how they dealt with male prejudice and sex-
ism in their profession.
In the 1970s video made filmmaking accessible to all, and film writing was also
changing. In 1969, Jean Genet recommended the Pontapak portable camera to
Carole Roussopoulos (née Carole Kalbermatten, 1945–2009), who was working
for Vogue magazine, and married to the painter Paul Roussopoulos. Together they
created the association Video Out, aiming to give a voice to everyone in society
who had been marginalized – women, workers, immigrants, homosexuals and
prostitutes. Roussopoulos affirmed her militant feminist voice up until 2001,
when she directed Debout! Une histoire de liberation des femmes 1970–1980 (Aude
2002: 135).
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From 1968 to 1980 there was an influx of new women writer-filmmakers who
made a number of films. Besides Nelly Kaplan and Nina Companeez, other prolific
women writers-filmmakers were evident, like Nadine Trintignant, who wrote
and directed five films. Women filmmakers who had begun making films in the
1940s and 1950s, such as Yannick Bellon, Marguerite Duras and Agnès Varda, also
continued their careers. Many other women made only one or two films, includ-
ing Vera Belmont, Charlotte Dubreuil, Madeleine Hartmann, Liliane de Kermadec,
Diane Kurys, Christine Laurent, Catherine Lipinska, Marceline Loridan, Arianne
Mnouchkine, Jeanne Moreau, Christine Pascal and Michèle Rosier (Buet 1995).
Very few of these films written and directed by women were dictated by feminist
ideals, with the exception of Histoires d’A, which was directed by Mariella Issartel
and Charles Belmont in 1973 and helped to pave the way for laws that legalized
abortion and extended access to contraception. In 1976 Coline Serreau (b. 1947)
wrote and directed another signpost feminist film, Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent?
Serreau’s first films were rather alternative, including Pourquoi pas? and Qu’est-ce
qu’on attend pour être heureux? But in 1985, she wrote and directed the box-office hit
Trois hommes et un couffin, which offered a positive view of fatherhood (Buet 1995).
In the 1980s Christine Pascal’s (1953–96) La Félicité (1985), stood out because
of its strong feminist ideas, while Aline Issermann (b. 1948) took up the same
theme in L’Amant magnifique (1986). Issermann’s first film, Destin de Juliette
(1983), had already set the scene for women filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s,
after which themes of feminism and female sexuality regularly occurred, includ-
ing: Catherine Breillat (Tapage nocturne, 1979), Marie-Claude Treilahou (Simone
Barbès ou le vertu, 1980), Juliet Berto (Neige, 1981, co-directed with Jean-Henri
Roger), Euzhan Palcy (Rue cases négres, 1983), Irène Jouanet (L’Intrus, 1984),
Danièle Dubroux (Les Amants terribles, 1985), Josiane Belasko (Sac de noeuds, 1985),
Camille de Casabianca (Pekin central, 1986), Claire Devers (Noir et blanc, 1986) and
Patricia Mazuy (Peaux des vaches, 1988) (Audé 1990: 50).
From 1988 more women were writing and directing films, yet out of almost a
hundred films that were produced in 1988 only three were made by women; in
1997, out of 121 produced only 27 were made by women. For example, Catherine
Breillat (b. 1948) wrote and directed her second film, Une vraie jeune fille, in 1976.
She had been Maurice Pialat’s assistant, and had a background as a novelist and
screenwriter. Her films are provocative and address many taboos. Jeanne Labrune
(b. 1950) is another unusual example because she had been working in television
since 1978 and found it difficult to break into feature filmmaking, but finally suc-
ceeded with De sable et de song in 1988 (Aude 2002).
Other women screenwriters made their mark in the 1970s and 1980s, but were
more concerned with their art as a whole rather than a feminist message; the actress
turned novelist Charlotte Dubreuil (b. 1940) penned scripts for both Claude
Goretta and Bertrand Tavernier, but also wrote and directed her own film Ma cherie
(1985). Writer and director Diane Kurys (b. 1948) is still working today. She began
her career with a film inspired by her childhood and the divorce of her parents,
Diabolo menthe, in 1978, going on to make Cocktail Molotov (1980) and Coup de
foudre (1983). Her most recent films are Sagan (2008) and Pour une femme (2013).
Christine Pascal made La Garce (1984), Coline Serreau Qu’est qu’on attend pour être
heureux? (1982) and Nadine Trintignant Première voyage (1980) (Aude 2002).
Claire Denis (b. 1946) is a prolific screenwriter-filmmaker who always prioritizes
her writing. She grew up in Africa but returned to France where she graduated from
IDHEC, then worked as an assistant for many directors, but particularly Jacques
Rivette and Wim Wenders, before writing and directing her first film, Chocolat, in
1988. Her most recent film is Les Salauds 2013.
Actress Nicole Garcia (b. 1946) co-wrote (with Jacques Fieschi) and directed her
first film, the ambitious Place Vendome, in 1998.
Julie Delpy (b. 1969) also on actress, studied in New York and collaborated
with Richard Linklater and her co-star Ethan Hawke on the second and third films
of the director’s trilogy, Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2012). She also
wrote and directed the low-cost Looking for Jimmy (2002) and Two Days in Paris
(2007). Delpy brings an American can-do attitude and quirkiness to the French-
style auteur film.
In the 1990s another school of young auteur filmmakers looked out of Paris and
to North Africa, including Agnès Mertlet (Le Films du roquin, 1993) and Marion
Vernoux (Personne ne m’aime, 1994) (Aude 1996: 51).
The French national school IDHEC has always given women opportunities
to train as screenwriters. In the 1970s and 1980s students from IDHEC such as
Dominique Cabrera and Claire Devers also found a voice. In more recent dec-
ades two women graduate screenwriters, Noémie Lvovsky (b. 1964) and Pascale
Ferran (b. 1960), have successfuly collaborated together on Arnaud Desplechin’s
Le Sentinelle (1992). Ferran in turn collaborated with Anne-Louise Trividic on
the screenplay for her first feature film, Petit arrangements entre les morts (1993).
Tridivic also wrote Au plus près du paradis (2002), directed by Tonie Marshall.
Ferran adapted D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2006), which she also
directed and which won the César for best film. Levsky went on to adapt the script
and write the dialogue for the actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s first film and her
following films: Il est plus facile pour un chameau … (2002), Actrices (2007) and
Un chateau en Italie (2013).
To discuss in detail all the women screenwriters in France is impossible in this
short overview and there are also many women writing for television who we do
not have room to include. There is certainly room for optimism for the future
of women screenwriters: Noel Burch and Genevieve Sellier point out that, since
the 1970s, France has had the most women filmmakers of any other country
(Burch and Sellier 2009). Yet it is also a country where women filmmakers, and
women artists more generally, are often reticent. The masculine universal model
still prevails over creation and femininity, and even more so over creation and
feminism.
Alice Guy (1873–1968)
Jule Selbo
Alice Guy was the first female screenwriter-director in the commercial film indus-
try. She was one of the pioneers of the art form, writing and directing more than
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400 films, 22 of which were feature-length. Her narratives investigate the human
condition, especially that of the female in the early 1900s. Guy was the first woman
to serve as a studio head and ran her own studio, Solax, in Long Island, New York.
Guy’s parents were Parisians living in Santiago, Chile but her mother returned
to France for Alice’s birth. Alice joined her parents in Chile when she was four,
going back to France for a boarding-school education. When she was 20, her
father’s business went bankrupt and he died soon after, leaving Guy to help sup-
port the family. Her education had prepared her for secretarial work and she began
work as a typist for Leon Gaumont, an inventor and engineer at a still photogra-
phy company in Paris (McKernan n.d.).
When Gaumont bought his photography company he was impressed by the
Lumière brothers’ screenings of their actualité films, depicting people from
everyday life, and in 1895 he decided to enter the filmmaking business. While
Gaumont focused on making actualité films, Guy had the idea to venture into
narrative storytelling. Several articles about Guy suggest that Gaumont ‘gave’ her
‘permission’15 to make her films as long as it did not interfere with her secretarial
work.16 Yet this paternalistic view seems unlikely when one considers the confi-
dence Gaumont must have had in the then 23-year-old, who was given access
to a studio and crew, shooting on expensive perforated film with a camera that
represented a considerable investment.
In May 1896 Guy directed her original scenario The Cabbage Fairy (McMahan
2002)17 and Gaumont’s investment in her did not disappoint.18 The Cabbage Fairy
is based on a French myth that purports that babies are grown and nurtured in
a cabbage patch by a beautiful fairy. Guy’s choice of subject is interesting, being
woman-centred and about a woman’s gender uniqueness. The National Women’s
Film Museum gives The Cabbage Fairy credit for being the first film narrative, with
a clear storyline.19 The film does have a beginning, middle and end, of sorts; it
takes place in a cabbage patch where a fairy, in a diaphanous low-cut gown, lis-
tens to the patch to sense ‘ripeness’. The fairy finds and takes out two very plump,
well-developed babies, but the third is a stiff, unmoving doll, and so the fairy puts
the child back.
The 60-second film is listed as the first narrative film by several film histori-
ans, including Aldo Bernadini, Charles Ford and Rene Jeanne, although Francis
Lacassin notes that, because it appears in Gaumont’s film catalogue as #379, The
Cabbage Fairy may not have been produced until a later date. In response, Jean
Mitry points out that Gaumont’s catalogues may not be relied on as other films
that were made in 1896 or 1897 appear in later catalogues. Guy, in her memoirs,
claimed she created the first fiction film but not the first narrative film, point-
ing out that the first narrative film was made in 1895 by the Lumière brothers, a
short slapstick comedy titled L’Arroseur arrose, sometimes listed as The Gardener or
The Waterer Watered (Guy 1996; McMahan 2002). Its narrative thread has a clear
beginning, middle and end; a gardener waters a garden; a young prankster, staying
out of sight, keeps stepping on the hose to stop the water flow; when the gardener
realizes it’s a prank, there is a chase, the gardener catches the boy and gives him
a spanking. It seems likely that Guy used the term ‘fiction’ to mean a story not
based in reality and based on imaginary circumstances.
Whatever the film’s provenance, The Cabbage Fairy was very successful, quickly
selling 80 copies, and it was remade at least twice because the original print dis-
integrated. Guy also reworked her cabbage-patch scenario in 1902 and retitled it
Sage femme de première classe. Whereas The Cabbage Fairy features one actress, Sage
femme features three actors: the cabbage patch fairy, a wife and her husband. Guy
herself plays the husband, wearing a Pierrot-type outfit. The narrative is fleshed
out with the husband convincing his wife to buy a baby from the fairy, but the
wife has a hard time deciding which one she wants from a choice of eight. When
she finally chooses a baby, the husband pays for it.
Guy went on to make further fiction and narrative films in 1896, and by 1897
Gaumont had installed her as head of film production at his company where she
helped train other writers and directors. The Gaumont studio went on to enjoy
great success and, from 1905 to 1914, its Cité Elgé studio at La Villette was one of
the largest in the world.
Guy is credited by Michael Ventura with many filmic innovations that include
use of the close-up in her first feature-length film in 1906, Life and Death of Christ
(a narrative told in 25 scenes and using 300 extras)20, and making the first sound
film in 1905, experimenting with lighting and cinematography (Ventura 2012).
Ventura also argues that Guy was the first to develop the technique of intercut-
ting, demonstrated in her 1906 film, The Drunken Mattress (Ventura 2012). The
American director D. W. Griffith is usually given credit for this but did not direct
his first film until 1908; however, American Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American
Fireman (1903) did experiment with intercutting techniques.
Although Guy was inspired by Georges Méliès’s technical work, the subject mat-
ter of their films was very different. Guy’s narrative topics were more domestic
and natural, showing that ‘women … worked and played in the world alongside
men’ (McMahan 2002: 45). Alison McMahan observes that, from the outset, Guy
‘articulate(d) a female address, a layer of messages aimed at women, mostly in the
form of satire on heterosexual relations’ (McMahan 2002: 45). Guy created sce-
narios where male characters performed stereotypical female duties and actions,
even portraying male nannies breastfeeding babies. She promoted active female
leads in her films and, although cross-dressing was not an uncommon narrative
element, McMahan suggests that Guy’s use of it presented a personal slant, and
that, merely by the change of clothes, acceptance into the male world was made
more palatable. Guy’s narratives often showed women cross-dressing in order to
pursue their own desires as opposed to helping or saving someone else (McMahan
2002: 50–1). Guy’s 1899 film Women’s Rights: Ladies Skirts Nailed To The Fence
flirted with the topic of women’s suffrage,21 which was not awarded to women in
France until 1944. Her 1906 film The Consequences of Feminism was a send-up of
gender roles and, in a more earnest vein, her film The Cruel Mother (1906) took a
serious look at child abuse.
In 1907, after ten years working in the business as a single woman, and writ-
ing and directing over 100 films for the French Gaumont studio, Guy married
an English cameraman, Herbert Blache. The next year they moved to America
to run the Gaumont studio in Cleveland, Ohio and later to head the Gaumont
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Studio in New York. In 1910 they opened their own Long Island studio, Solax.
Guy, as head of the company, told a reporter that she did not write political or
social-message films; however, the synopses of just a few of her narratives suggest
that she did. In Call of the Rose (1912) the wife goes to the American West with her
new coal miner husband to set up home (McMahan 2002: 49–50). The boredom
and emptiness of her inactive existence is too much for her and she leaves her
husband to go back East and resume her career. Eventually her husband gives up,
joins his wife, and she continues to work. The Two Little Rangers (1912) tells of
how two young girls chase a villainous wife-beater into a shack and set fire to it
with a bow and fire-arrow, causing the villain to perish. Guy’s A Fool and His Money
(1912) is thought to be the first American film featuring an all African-American
cast. Making an American Citizen (1912) is about new immigrants arriving in
America; as a couple get off the boat the husband puts a heavy bundle on his
wife’s back and expects her to carry this. He is jeered and laughed at by Americans
and goes on to learn various lessons about to how to properly treat his wife. The
man is finally arrested for beating her and, complaining that he wants nothing
more to do with this ‘new world’, heads back alone to his native land.
Guy stepped down as president of Solax in 1914 and her husband, Herbert
Blache, took over so that she could focus on writing and directing. However,
Blache then started his own company and in 1918 he left Guy and their two
children, moving to California with one of the Solax actresses.
Guy wrote and directed her last film in 1920: Tarnished Reputations, a narrative
focused on a young girl who poses for an artist; both the artist and painting go on
to great acclaim, but he forgets about the girl who now suffers from vicious gossip
concerning her relationship with him. She heads to the city, cannot find work, is
falsely arrested on a morals charge and sent to a girls’ reformatory. A playwright
notices the girl’s talent and beauty and the artist, oblivious to the turmoil of the
girl’s life, happens to come back into her life and they are reunited.22
In 1922, when Guy’s divorce from Blache was made official, she auctioned off
her film studio, claiming bankruptcy. The film industry, by this time, had largely
moved to California. The major California studios, such as Paramount, Warner
Bros, Universal and MGM, had begun to dominate the film industry and the dis-
tribution of films. After the closing of Solax, Guy worked for William Randolph
Hearst’s International Film Service, but then decided to move back to post-war
France to pursue her own filmmaking. Unfortunately, she found the doors of
France’s film industry closed to her, reporting that ‘sexism’ in France would not
allow her the opportunities to write or direct films there (McMahan 2002: 76).
Guy moved back to America, gave lectures on film and wrote novels, but was
quickly forgotten in the histories of film. When Leon Gaumont published a his-
tory of his company in 1930 he did not mention Guy or her work. According to
McMahan, this omission upset Guy so much that she wrote to Gaumont, hoping
he would revise his documents. Although he agreed to do this, the changes were
not published (McMahan 2002).23 However, in 1954, Gaumont’s son, Louis, gave
a speech in Paris noting, ‘Alice Guy Blache, the first woman filmmaker, has been
unjustly forgotten.’24
Recent research, especially McMahan’s enlightening publication, has proven

Guy’s importance as a writer and director and also as a pioneer of early cinema.
Guy’s legacy of ground-breaking work and her championing of opportunities for
women’s roles in filmmaking are now widely recognized. Even before running her
own studio, Guy was instrumental in helping other female screenwriters-directors
in their careers in the industry, hiring Lois Weber, for instance, in 1908 as a singer
to record on the Gaumont Chronophone machines. Weber went on to become
one of the most successful filmmakers in the US from 1911–20.
In 1955, Guy was recognized with the Legion d’honneur, France’s highest honour.
She died in 1968, at the age of 94, in a nursing home in New Jersey.
Agnès Varda (b. 1928)
Kelley Conway
The career of Agnès Varda is striking for its longevity and its variety, factors which
have had an impact on her strategies as a screenwriter. Varda began working
as a professional photographer in the early 1950s, first shooting family photos
and then documenting the productions of the Théâtre National Populaire. She
directed her first fiction feature, La Pointe Courte (1954), before making two short
documentaries commissioned by France’s tourism office. With the release of Cleo
from 5 to 7 (1962), Varda became linked directly to the French New Wave, but
her work has stretched well beyond conventional conceptions of that movement,
encompassing the making of experimental shorts, an autobiographical documen-
tary (Beaches of Agnès), and installation art. Varda’s capacity to work in different
media and in different cultural contexts, as well as her ongoing experimentation
with film style and storytelling, make her a particularly interesting case study for
questions of creativity and working method. This entry explores Varda’s evolution
as a screenwriter and, more broadly, as a creator of film ideas, showing that her
work, though decidedly heterogeneous, is nourished by a particular mixture of
planning and improvisation.
The working methods of screenwriters are generally marked by both continuity
and change. Moving from one project to another, screenwriters tend to encoun-
ter constraints relating to budget, genre, and cast and crew, yet they often retain
certain aesthetic commitments. Varda is no different. The most obvious form of
continuity in Varda’s career as a whole, whether as a screenwriter or director, is
the unusual degree of artistic control she has been able to maintain over her work.
She has self-produced the majority of her films through her production company,
Ciné-Tamaris, and has always maintained the right to determine the final cut of
her films. Furthermore, Varda has never adapted a pre-existing work, preferring
instead to create an original screenplay for each film. Despite her commitment
to artistic control and a well-known predilection for documentary realism and
a strong sense of place, Varda’s screenplays reveal a variety of inspirations and
stylistic forms.
Varda wrote the screenplay for her first film, La Pointe Courte (1955), in the
courtyard of her apartment in Paris over a series of weekends in 1954, whenever
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she had a break from her job as a professional photographer. Unconnected to the
film industry and unaware of the rich cinéphilic culture of 1950s France, Varda
began writing her screenplay in the same year that François Truffaut published
his polemical essay ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’ (Truffaut 1954).
Truffaut’s influential essay held that the predictable, mildly salacious literary adap-
tations written by aging industry insiders had been overvalued and that a more
vital auteur cinema must emerge. Varda, unaware of such debates, nevertheless
corresponded perfectly to Truffaut’s conception of the auteur, both writing and
directing her first film, and moving away from the traditional psychological real-
ism of the ‘Tradition of Quality’ and towards a modernist approach to narrative.
One of the surprising things about Varda’s inaugural screenplay is its precision
and detail. New Wave directors are often associated with an improvisational,
insouciant method of working. Young cinephiles, the romantic version of the
New Wave goes, worked without a traditional script, improvised dialogue and
cultivated a casual, naturalistic style of acting. Varda’s first script does, and does
not, conform to this New Wave model.
Like her New Wave counterparts, Varda rejected the mainstream strategy of
adapting a prestigious French novel for her first feature. Instead, Varda drew
inspiration from Faulkner’s The Wild Palms (1939). Faulkner’s novel possesses
two distinct narratives interwoven in alternating chapters: one offers an intimate
chronicle of adultery and abortion; the other is an epic tale about a convict
fighting for his life and that of a pregnant woman during a terrible flood of the
Mississippi. Varda’s script, likewise, juxtaposes two stories; one recounts daily
life in the southern French fishing village of Sète and the other is about a couple
from Paris whose marriage is in crisis. Varda’s structure results in a compelling
juxtaposition of the lives of labourers and intellectuals as they confront differ-
ent problems. This structure, combined with Varda’s depth of staging, unusual
compositions, long takes, and contrasting acting styles made La Pointe Courte an
important harbinger of the French New Wave. Like Truffaut and Godard, Varda
experimented with narrative structure, character development and visual style
to create a cinema that was different from both mainstream French and classical
Hollywood cinema.
Varda’s first script is different from those of the New Wave in its precision
and completeness. In contrast to Godard’s brief treatment for Breathless, Varda
created prose descriptions of her characters and events in early versions of the
script. Next, she created a detailed scene breakdown, and finally, a shooting script
complete with shot scale, camera movement, dialogue, and the occasional sketch.
Every shot of La Pointe Courte was imagined and planned in advance. Multiple
scouting trips to the town of Sète yielded still photos and lengthy interviews with
the town’s inhabitants. The still images frequently served as the basis for the shots
she would execute, while conversations with the villagers directly inspired the
film’s dialogue. This extreme precision in the script did not prevent Varda from
taking advantage of unexpected developments during the shoot, however; La
Pointe Courte is full of digressive shots of cats or of laundry flapping in the wind.
Although a newcomer to filmmaking, Varda was unusually well prepared for her
shoot as a result of her meticulous script. Unlike her New Wave counterparts such
as Godard and Truffaut, she left little to chance.
Varda created a very different sort of script for L’Opéra-Mouffe, an experimen-
tal short documentary she made in 1958. While Varda made her first film as an
outsider, the invitation to make L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958) came from Cinémathèque
Royale de Belgique curator, Jacques Ledoux, who invited Varda to contribute to
his programme of experimental cinema for the 1958 Exposition Universelle in
Brussels. The film offers a portrait of a crowded, working-class neighborhood
in Paris and is unusual in its refusal to offer a solution to the social problems
it reveals. Moreover, the film is infused with poetic images that are not in the
planning notebook: a nude, pregnant woman, abstract close-ups of vegetables, a
distracted woman eating a flower, and a pair of lovers in romanticized settings.
Eschewing a traditional script, Varda nevertheless created a document that helped
her plan the film and explore various creative possibilities. Both a photo album
and a notebook, this document contains still images of the neighbourhood’s
inhabitants taken by Varda on scouting trips, informational or poetic captions
scrawled in the margins of the notebook, and drafts of songs. The notebook is
organized around categories such as ‘food’, ‘wine’, and ‘clochards (bums)’, catego-
ries that Varda would retain in her film in the form of titles. This notebook did
not just provide a place for Varda to scrawl down various ideas about what the
film could be; it inspired the fundamental idea of the film, reflected by the film’s
opening title: ‘A notebook filmed on the rue Mouffetard in Paris by a pregnant
woman in 1958.’
In moving from the actual notebook to the film-notebook, Varda changed some
of the categories. For example, ‘the bums’ were changed to ‘departed dear ones’,
because many of the alcoholic homeless people she had photographed while
planning the film died over the winter of 1958. But the film retains the basic
structure of the notebook and, in some cases, contains the very images pasted
into the pre-production notebook. As with her first fiction feature, Varda imposed
a strong structure from the outset and relied heavily upon location scouting to
generate visual material for the film. Whether making a fiction film or a docu-
mentary, Varda tends to use the same strategies: she imposes a strong structure on
her material from the outset, but remains open to opportunities that arise during
the shooting of her films to create ironic, tender or contemplative digressions.
Mid-career, Varda’s scripting strategies changed somewhat. Vagabond (1985),
winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and perhaps Varda’s most
critically acclaimed film, chronicles the last months in the life of a young drifter,
Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire). The film was inspired by news reports about the ‘new
poor’ circulating in the press in the mid 1980s (Varda 1994: 166). Varda embarked
on several scouting trips to the south of France to explore the inhospitable winter
landscapes and isolated villages. As with La Pointe Courte, Varda embraced a spe-
cific place and then crafted a story about its inhabitants. She spoke with farmers,
shopkeepers and drifters, slowly developing her characters. Initially, Varda had
envisioned a plot focusing on eight people, but a chance encounter with a young
woman on the road convinced her to structure the film around a single female
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drifter (Varda 1994: 168). The film opens with the discovery of Mona’s frozen
corpse in a ditch; flashbacks provide a fragmented and ambiguous account of how
she got there.
When Varda began shooting Vagabond, she had a 25-page script and a precise
sense of the film’s locations and events. In contrast to her script for La Pointe
Courte, however, Varda’s script for Vagabond did not contain all of the dialogue.
Rising confidence developed through years of filmmaking had allowed Varda to
decide upon the exact dialogue shortly before shooting it. Further evidence of her
willingness and capacity to improvise can be seen in her addition of a series of
sequence shots that show Mona walking through fields and villages. Occurring
every five minutes or so and accompanied by the haunting music of composer
Joanna Bruzdowicz, the 12 striking shots track Mona laterally as she moves screen
left, and then leave her behind, often coming to rest on an inanimate object.
Graphic matches establish a connection between the 12 shots. The music grows
increasingly intense, suggesting Mona’s further isolation.
The idea for the series of tracking shots came five weeks into the production.
After viewing a preliminary edit, Varda felt that she had not yet managed to
convey the central fact of Mona’s nearly incessant walking. She hoped that the
‘travellings de la grande série’ (the ‘great’ series tracking shots), as she called them,
would help to enhance the impression that Mona walks nearly constantly and
that her movements are ultimately more important than her interactions with
people. Varda’s decision to add the 12 tracking shots extended the shoot by five
days, but they effectively underscore Varda’s characterization of a woman on the
move. Here, then, we can see a shift in Varda’s working methods from the earlier
part of her career. By 1985,Varda had achieved the confidence as a filmmaker to
incorporate more flexibility and spontaneity on the set, improvising dialogue and
introducing a key stylistic pattern late in the production of a film.
In her sixth decade of filmmaking, Varda’s embrace of digital technology
allowed her to amplify still further her improvisational strategies. Analysis of her
working methods for her feature documentaries The Gleaners and I (2000) and
The Beaches of Agnès (2008) reveals an intensification of mixing of the stages of
shooting and editing already evident in the making of Vagabond. The Gleaners and
I began as a proposed four-part television series, then became a 52-minute docu-
mentary, and eventually metamorphosed into a feature-length film that would be
released theatrically.
Varda’s initial outline for The Gleaners and I proposes a kaleidoscopic and whimsi-
cal exploration of gleaning primarily in a metaphorical fashion. Structured around
brief portraits – of her friends and neighbours, of her cats (both real and ceramic), of
an aspiring rock band, and of plants on a balcony that flower and dry up over time –
the series would show the results of Varda’s ‘wandering quest for images, sounds,
meanings and surprises … grains of wheat … that one gathers for nourishment’.
The criticism of industrial farming and food waste emerges only in later proposals,
while a proposed section on painting, mentioned only briefly in the first proposal,
expanded over time and became a major theme of the finished film. Similarly,
Varda’s self-presentation expanded as the script evolved. Varda’s presence in the
film was anticipated from the beginning: for example, one section of the proposal
anticipates the images of Varda filming her own hand. Initially, however, she
envisioned her presence as discernible primarily through the stylistic choices she
would make. As the project developed, Varda decided to foreground the aging of
her body and insert multiple scenes in which we see her changing hair colour.
Shots of Varda’s greying hair and aging skin would ultimately be amongst the
film’s most compelling and remarked-upon images, as would the close-ups of her
aging hands. The proposals for The Gleaners and I reveal both a shift in Varda’s
political project, from an apolitical and whimsical mixture of portraits to an overt
criticism of waste in a time of need, and an increasing willingness to implicate
herself, her aging body and her own activities as a gleaner in the film (Ciné-
Tamaris Archive n.d.).
Over time, Varda’s screenwriting, shooting and editing methods have moved
away from the careful planning and extreme precision we observed with La Pointe
Courte towards a more improvisational style. This shift in working methods, due
partly to her increasing professionalism and confidence, but enhanced by her
use of digital technology, has expanded Varda’s ability to take advantage of the
unexpected and to incorporate ideas that occur to her late in a production. Her
commitment to her films’ distinct structures remains, however, as evidenced by
her decision to organize The Beaches of Agnès around the five beaches that have
been crucial to her life. Likewise, her love of structure can be seen in her deci-
sion to organize Agnès Varda Here and There (2011), her television series about
contemporary art, precisely around her travels to festivals and museums. Just
as compelling as the continuity in Varda’s working methods is the recent inten-
sification of her predilection for digression and experimentation, enhanced by
her use of digital editing tools to layer images, speed up her editing and, in her
installations, experiment with the proliferation of screens. Varda’s career is thus
marked by a series of traits that may seem contradictory, but are not: she plans
and improvises; she retains long-standing aesthetic commitments, but also con-
tinues to experiment.
Suzanne Schiffman (1929–2001)
Alison Smith
In photographs taken at the tail end of the 1940s and early 1950s, in the front
rows of the Paris Cinémathèque, one young woman, Suzanne Schiffman (nee
Klochendler), could be seen in discussion with the eager young male film fanat-
ics who were to become the nucleus of André Bazin’s Cahiers du cinéma and later
of the Nouvelle Vague. A sociology student and native Parisian, Schiffman was
the only woman to take an active part in the emerging group, as an engaged and
highly critical member of Rohmer’s ‘Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin’. She, like them,
revelled in film talk, conscientiously acquired a vast reference base of films, both
new and classic, and assumed, as did everyone in the group, that at some time, in
some way, she would end up making films which she had written and developed
herself (Schiffman 1984: 77).
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In fact, Suzanne Schiffman was not to direct a film entirely under her own
name until 1987, although she was official co-director with Jacques Rivette on
the immense experimental project Out 1 in 1971. However, as a prolific screen-
writer, she was to become a structural element of the New Wave and that part of
French cinema production which developed from it, arguably being as influential
as the directors she worked with. For Schiffman, screenwriting was a collaborative
art: she always worked as part of a team, in close discussion with the director,
the actors and usually one or more colleagues. At the same time, she combined
screenwriting with other functions in almost every film she worked on, meaning
that she developed her scripts not as isolated pieces of writing conceived in an
office, but as integral, and ever-changeable, elements in the ongoing project of
making a film. Much of her scriptwriting took place on set, in response to new cir-
cumstances, last-minute doubts, and changing experiences as the film developed.
Starting out, officially at least, as script supervisor, she soon became a central
member of François Truffaut’s production team at Les Films du Carrosse, with
responsibility, apart from script supervision, for judging projects, assessing budg-
ets, scouting locations, participating in casting, and assisting in all aspects of
production management; from 1970 she became official ‘assistant director’ on
most of Truffaut’s projects, which included collaborating on the vast majority of
the screenplays.
Although it was not until 1973, with La Nuit américaine, that her contribution
to scriptwriting was recognized with a credit, this was not the first time her crea-
tive mark had been made at script stage. The credited writer for L’Enfant sauvage
(1970), Jean Gruault, stated that Schiffman had made a significant contribu-
tion: ‘There is something of mine, something of Truffaut’s, but 50% was down
to Suzanne’ (Gruault 2001: 21). From 1973 until her retirement at the end of
the 1980s, Schiffman was Truffaut’s most regular co-scriptwriter as well as his
assistant director and production assistant. She also worked several times for
Jacques Rivette. It was, however, relatively unusual for Schiffman to be the sole
scriptwriter on a project: as a rule, she worked not only with the director but with
one or more collaborators. With regard to Truffaut, that might include any one
or more of the several writers who regularly worked for him, while for Rivette,
she would also often develop the screenplay in collaboration with performers,
especially Rivette’s principal actresses.
Collaboration was not only one of Schiffman’s particular talents, but integral
to her conception of film work, which she always approached from the point
of view that a project must be seen as a whole: as a scriptwriter, recognizing the
financial and practical constraints of the shoot to come; and as an assistant direc-
tor and production manager, aware of the development history of the working
script and ready to adapt it appropriately to contingencies. When she is credited
as sole scriptwriter – along with the director – it is on smaller projects with direc-
tors who had also been her colleagues on other films, for example Eduardo de
Gregorio, himself a regular scriptwriter for Rivette, who collaborated with her on
Tangos volés (2001), or Pierre Zucca, part of the Carrosse team in his function as
set photographer, with whom she wrote the offbeat thriller Rouge-gorge (1985).
During their cinéphile youth in the early 1950s, Suzanne Klochendler was
an integral part of the lives of the proto-Cahiers group. Despite her devotion
to cinema, however, Suzanne, unlike others in the group, also took her official
studies seriously. In 1956, at about the time when the Cahiers writers were taking
their first steps behind the camera, Suzanne Klochendler graduated in sociology
and, on the strength of her work with Edgar Morin, won a scholarship to study
in Chicago. She returned to Paris three years later as Suzanne Schiffman, having
married an American painter named Philip Schiffman. She renewed contact with
her former close friends, but during her time in America had missed the launch-
ing of the New Wave, and her film education had been somewhat neglected.
She reported in 1984 that although Truffaut had hoped to involve her in Les 400
coups, ‘my total lack of professional qualifications alarmed the producers, quite
reasonably’ (Schiffman 1984: 77). Her re-immersion in the milieu came about, it
seems, almost casually, in the course of forming a team for the chaotic production
of Paris nous appartient, Jacques Rivette’s vastly ambitious, and impecunious, first
feature. Again according to Jean Gruault (Gruault 1992: 183–4), who was engaged
as scriptwriter for the project, the production had to use offers of participation as
a means of acquiring locations and props, and the Schiffmans’ flat was a desirable
location. Partly to secure the flat, Rivette suggested bringing Suzanne onto the
team. Once there it was obvious that she was invaluable.
On this semi-improvised project, the role of script supervisor was exceptionally
complicated, even disregarding the problems caused by constantly teetering on
the brink of bankruptcy. The sound was post-synchronized, and Richard Neupert
reports that Schiffman ‘literally filled her role by acting as stenographer on the set,
jotting down the spoken dialogue so the actors could more easily dub in their own
voices later during postproduction’ (Neupert 2002: 271). Her rigour and determina-
tion, as well as her absolute dedication to the challenging project, presumably acted
as assurances of her professionalism, and François Truffaut, who was contributing
funding for Paris nous appartient, had no difficulty in persuading Pierre Braunberger
to recruit her for their own project, Tirez sur le pianiste. Already, her involvement in
this film overspilled the boundaries of script supervisor to approach that of assistant
director (de Baecque and Toubiana 2001: 232). On the formation of Les Films du
Carrosse the same year (1960), she was immediately, and as it were naturally, incor-
porated into it. Thereafter the Carrosse became her ‘anchor-point’, according to
Gruault (2001: 21), even if throughout the 1960s she worked more often for others,
particularly Jean-Luc Godard, but also, at one point, Orson Welles.
Throughout the 1960s her nominal speciality was script supervisor, which
required that she prepare and keep an archive of daily reports for every film she
worked on. This meticulous diary of the progress of the shoots for the benefit of
producers and continuity editors offers a potentially invaluable resource for the
production history of the Nouvelle Vague.25
It was, however, in her collaborations with Truffaut and Rivette that Schiffman’s
involvement with filmmaking developed most fully. During the shooting of
Fahrenheit 451, in 1966, her fluency in English was invaluable to Truffaut, who
‘refused’ to speak English himself (Schiffman, quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana
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2001: 317). No longer officially script supervisor, Schiffman was freed from the
time-consuming need to prepare the daily reports and could make herself fully
available to the director. Truffaut consulted her on everything, ‘which made her
at least a script consultant’ (de Baecque and Toubiana 2001: 317). At the planning
stage of L’Enfant sauvage, late in 1968, she made observations of autistic children at
a clinic in the Gard département as preliminary research for Truffaut, and later took
charge of the casting process, which involved interviewing and photographing
some 2,500 children (de Baecque and Toubiana 2001: 383). Since Truffaut was also
a principal actor in this film, Schiffman was co-opted to stand in for him during
run-throughs of each scene and to direct the start and end of the takes when he
was performing. It was probably this latter function which led to her acquiring
the title of assistant director – a function which she had in many ways already
been fulfilling.
Schiffman’s contribution to the construction of the film was recognized, even
by the nominated writer, and by the turn of the 1970s she was already a co-
scriptwriter, with a well-established working method. We gain a vivid impression
of Schiffman’s activity during the preparation of a Carrosse film from La Nuit
américaine, the first film on which Schiffman’s role as writer was credited. About
halfway through this fictionalized account of a film shoot, the director Ferrand,
played by Truffaut himself, calls on the script supervisor, Joëlle (Nathalie Baye),
to prepare the final draft of the next day’s scene with him after the day’s work is
over. Joëlle immediately cancels her plans to go to the cinema with some of the
team: when the scene in Ferrand’s room opens she is sitting at the cluttered table
in front of a typewriter. The general plan of the film-within-the-film is pasted
to the wall in the form of a hand-written flow diagram, which Ferrand consults to
launch proceedings, announcing the expected action: ‘Alexandre meets his
daughter-in-law in the kitchen’ (Schiffman’s description of her work with Rivette
on Out 1, as we shall see, included preparing flow diagrams of this sort to guide
the shooting process). Ferrand presents Joëlle with a first draft of the scene, and
the two proceed to exchange questions, suggestions and criticisms, developing a
fully formed scene from an active conversation which, despite Ferrand’s volubility,
Joëlle largely directs.
Joëlle was acknowledged by director and assistant to be a thinly disguised repre-
sentation of Schiffman (de Baecque and Toubiana 2001: 436), and this little scene –
which did not appear in the scenarios for the film until a relatively advanced
stage – reflects perfectly her own description of their collaboration (Schiffman
1984: 80): ‘We would settle down, either at his home or at the Carrosse, with a
good old-fashioned typewriter ... We’d each make suggestions then take turns to
type and argue over who went faster and made fewer typos.’ Truffaut described
their collaboration as essentially a conversation, involving five or six hours of
work a day at the writing stage, but with ‘many digressions’ all feeding into the
eventual script.26
The scene from La Nuit américaine captures two of Schiffman’s particular tal-
ents as a scriptwriter: a willingness, indeed a sort of genius, for understanding
her collaborators and working in a team, and a talent for finding the ‘idea’, the
structuring principle which would give a film form. The genesis of La Nuit améric-
aine itself bears this out: the Bibliothèque du Film holds a nearly full set of draft
scenarios for this film,27 on which both Truffaut and Schiffman have scribbled
comments and suggested improvements. These papers offer a privileged access to
the kind of discussion process which the scene between Ferrand and Joëlle exem-
plifies, and they reveal, amongst other things, that the film’s famous double-take
opening was a suggestion of Schiffman’s. The ability to frame a story in a way
that would give it structure was a talent Truffaut particularly valued, and which it
seems he did not necessarily possess himself.
Another of Schiffman’s notable contributions to Truffaut’s scenarios was the
development of the role of Mme Jouve in La Femme d’à côté (1981) from second-
ary involvement in the story to narrator and confidante of the audience. This
inspired decision allowed the narration to begin with the dramatic ending, and
thus to acquire the inevitability of tragedy, considerably increasing its narrative
power. It also installed a direct connection between the audience and the fiction,
something which is a hallmark of Schiffman’s conception of film narration. The
opening of La Nuit américaine, with its shifting of the audience’s understanding of
the borders of the narrative world, similarly engages the spectator directly, forc-
ing us to actively reconsider our position. Truffaut’s instincts could be somewhat
more conventional. According to de Baecque and Toubiana (2001: 510–12) the
appropriate ending for L’Amour en fuite (1979) occasioned particular difficulties
between them, since Schiffman was of the opinion that, if this was really to be
the last Doinel film, then Truffaut should decisively eliminate his alter ego, by
assassination if necessary. Her preferred option, however (especially since Truffaut
was unable to resign himself to killing Doinel), was for the director to appear
on screen at the end to comment on the conclusion chosen, thus effectively
relegating Antoine Doinel to the world of fiction and debarring him from any
further appearances. Truffaut’s dissent from this ending led to disagreements and
last-minute changes, which may have contributed to the ‘lowering arguments’
(Schiffman 1984: 81) that she reports over this film.
Despite such arguments, Truffaut was increasingly dependent on Schiffman,
the one constant presence in his fluctuating team of collaborators. Attribution
of scriptwriting credits was nonetheless a subject of rivalry which Truffaut may
have taken some pleasure in stirring up. Again according to de Baecque and
Toubiana, his scriptwriters ‘more or less never ran into each other at the Carrosse,
and knew nothing about each other’s work’ (2001: 451). Such secrecy must have
been impractical with Schiffman, who was also the backbone of the production
house, but Gruault reports that he was sometimes asked specifically not to tell
Suzanne that Truffaut had asked him to summarize a certain book for a prospec-
tive script (Gruault 1992: 279). Truffaut’s distribution of credit could also be way-
ward. De Baecque and Toubiana (2001: 499) and the official scriptwriter, Gruault
himself (1992: 275), recall that Schiffman’s contribution to forming La Chambre
verte (1978) was essential, and yet she was not mentioned amongst the writers at
all, while publicity material for Les Deux anglaises et le continent, where she was
actively involved in casting and location hunting, left her name out of the list
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of those who had worked on the shoot.28 On the other hand Gruault’s irritation
at what he perceived as his sidelining in Schiffman’s favour on Adèle H (1975)
is apparent, even in his recollections of collaborating with her in 2004 (Gruault
2001: 21). Notwithstanding such inconstancies, however, Schiffman’s relations
with Truffaut remained close and affectionate, and her involvement in his pro-
jects increased constantly up to and including Vivement dimanche!, for which she
located the source novel and suggested the vital transposition of activity from the
male to the female protagonist.
Although the bulk of Suzanne Schiffman’s writing was carried out for the Films
du Carrosse and for Truffaut, she also worked as scriptwriter for other directors,
notably Jacques Rivette, who had offered her a first taste of work on a film set. It
was for Rivette, and not for Truffaut, that she was first attributed the title of co-
director, on the monumental Out 1 (1971). Ten years later, in his own biographical
note for the press pack of Le Pont du nord, on which Schiffman was part of the
scriptwriting team, Rivette cites her also as co-scriptwriter for Out 1. Although
their methods of working were very different, scriptwriting for Rivette, as for
Truffaut, involved intense and constant involvement with the project, which
continued throughout the shooting stage. If Schiffman is credited as co-director
but not co-writer on Out 1, this was largely because the function of writing was
subsumed into those of acting and directing. On this most improvisational of
Rivette’s films, the policy was to produce no script at all. The actors were left
to their own devices, to create their character, find their costumes, and even to
decide which of the other actors they wanted to meet with in the course of the
story. Rivette and Schiffman took on the task of forming the whole on the basis of
those decisions, with a general reference point in Balzac’s texts on ‘the 13’ and the
character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud as the link between all the others. Schiffman
recalled that, ‘while we were preparing the film, we set out the characters’ points
of intersection on a big sheet of graph-paper, and then I drew a sort of diagram,
on which we could pretty much see the continuity of the story’ (Schiffman 2001:
143). The evidence of La Nuit américaine suggests that she may have re-used this
method profitably even on more conventional shoots. The actors’ information
related only to their own character and each actor was required to improvise all
dialogue. Bulle Ogier recalls this as ‘very stressful’, ‘we didn’t know what to do, or
what to say, or why. Rivette knew, and so did Suzanne: but we were completely
in the dark’ (Ogier 2001: 140). Yet the film developed a coherent direction in
which Schiffman’s skill in giving form to unstructured material was particularly
called upon, alongside an understanding of her co-workers, recognizing their
strengths and weaknesses. For example, she wrote, ‘Jacques wanted him [Léaud]
to improvise, he didn’t want to write him any dialogue at all. But I was beginning
to know Jean-Pierre quite well, and I told Rivette: he won’t manage to improvise.
Jean-Pierre’s strength is that he can adapt to any instrument at all. So I suggested
that he play a deaf-mute and that he have a harmonica. And for the same reason
we did give him texts: Balzac, Lewis Carroll’ (Schiffman 2001: 143).
For Le Pont du nord (1981) the procedure was not so radical. A script was pre-
pared from the discussions between Schiffman, Rivette and the two actresses who
carry the film, Bulle and Pascale Ogier, but it was intentionally flexible and the
film, which was shot entirely on location in the Paris streets, did accommodate
chance occurrences and the inspiration of the moment. The Rivette of the late
seventies was a challenging collaborator, ‘capable of making us wait whole after-
noons,’ remembered Eduardo de Gregorio, who with Schiffman prepared the
treatment for the uncompleted project Phénix.29 After 1981, however, Rivette’s
approach changed, as did his method of working with writers. Although, accord-
ing to Pascal Bonitzer, even in his later films ‘[w]ith Jacques, you write during the
shoot, you take part in the life of the shoot, the actors discuss the dialogues with
you on set’ (Bonitzer 2001: 169), he was no longer interested in true improvisa-
tion, and Bonitzer also observes that ‘what I did was very much written’ (Bonitzer
2001: 169). Although Schiffman collaborated on two scripts with Bonitzer and
Rivette, L’Amour par terre (1984) and Hurlevent (1985), the evidence suggests that
her input was largely restricted to the early stage of constructing ideas, with the
elaboration of the dialogue and the close on-set detail entrusted to Bonitzer.
In the latter part of the 1980s, after Truffaut’s death, Schiffman worked on
smaller, more personal projects, with less prominent directors who were also
friends, such as Eduardo de Gregorio and the ex-photographer Pierre Zucca, with
whom she prepared the film Rouge-gorge from a concept that was apparently
largely her own. She finally moved behind the camera herself, writing and direct-
ing a well-reviewed, though relatively little seen, medieval drama, Le Moine et la
sorcière (1987), as well as a film made for television, Femme de papier (1989), star-
ring Jean-Pierre Léaud. In Le Moine et la sorcière, Schiffman’s interest in speaking
with a woman’s voice, and indeed in recording female history, is pronounced –
she is, essentially, putting on screen a defence and explanation of the difficult
condition of an ordinary countrywoman of the Middle Ages. Claude de Givray
considers the film ‘Rivettian’ (de Givray 2001: 86), and it certainly bears some
visual resemblance to Rivette’s Jeanne la Pucelle (a film with which Schiffman was
not involved). Given this evidence of her interest, it is perhaps not accidental
that the films with which she was most involved with Truffaut and Rivette tend
to have strong female protagonists, as indeed does Rouge-gorge; however, it should
also be noted that she firmly rejected any suggestion that in her collaborations
with Truffaut they adopted a simplistic gender-based division of labour when
developing characters (Pagès 1980), while Rivette’s commitment to his female
protagonists is a constant in almost all his projects.
From the earliest days of the Nouvelle Vague until her retirement at the end of
the 1980s, the influence of Suzanne Schiffman pervaded that part of the French
cinema most closely linked to the Cahiers du cinéma of the 1960s. Although her
face was not well known to the general public, her professional reputation was
immense.30 As a writer, she evinced a remarkable grasp of narrative form and an
understanding of the practicalities of filmmaking, which she applied from the
earliest writing stage; indeed, de Gregorio recalled that ‘she always thought about
a script in terms of its making’ (de Gregorio 2001). Schiffman’s talent included
incorporating her knowledge of the particular strengths of individuals into
script preparation, and a sensitivity to detail which she exercised in her critical
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overviews of proposed dialogues, especially on Truffaut’s projects. She also had a

gift for friendship with those who shared her passion: ‘It was very difficult to stop
working with Suzanne, because she was everywhere’ (de Gregorio 2001). Although
her youthful ambitions as a director might seem to have been somewhat disap-
pointingly unfulfilled, without her contribution as a screenwriter the Nouvelle
Vague and its sequels would surely have had a very different face.
Marie-France Pisier (1944–2011)
Susan Hayward
Film and stage actor, novelist, scriptwriter and director, Pisier appeared in 61
films. Author of four novels over a span of 13 years, she later adapted her first,
Le Bal du gouverneur (published in1984), for the cinema in 1990. She also had
a considerable television career (acting in TV films and series from 1972 until
her untimely death). In her lifetime, Pisier wrote four film scripts, two early in
her career, co-written, respectively, with Jacques Rivette (Céline et Julie vont en
bateau [1974]) and François Truffaut (L’Amour en fuite [1979]). The other two, Le
Bal du gouverneur (1990) and Comme un avion (2002), came later and were semi-
autobiographical. She directed both; the former was a qualified success, the latter
met with critical failure.
Pisier had no professional training as an actor and was in fact part of an amateur
dramatics society when she was discovered by Truffaut and cast in his 1961 Antoine
et Colette; undoubtedly it was her modernity as an intelligent woman who was
‘neither a Lolita nor a Rocker nor a silly young thing’ (as Truffaut so eloquently
put it!)31 that led him to give her this early break (she was only 17 at the time),
followed by a reprise of her role in Baisers volés (1968). She then went on to work
with a variety of ‘auteur’ filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, becoming something
of an ‘It’ woman of the 1970s, winning three Césars (the French equivalent of the
Oscars) in rapid succession for thought-provoking secondary roles in Souvenirs
d’en France (Jean-Charles Tachella, 1975), Cousin/Cousine (André Téchiné, 1975),
and Barocco (Téchiné, 1976). Curiously, critical discourses circulating around her
at that time give us a sense that the serious film journals, in particular Positif, did
not know how to place her, and tried to force her into a ‘sex-kitten’ mould or to
dismiss her acting as overly mannered. Eric Losfeld (1967: 65) writing in Positif
states: ‘Fascinating hybrid, half vamp and half woman-child, tender and cruel,
perverse and innocent, her ambiguity is but a sign of her great achievement.’ Later
in her career, a similarly dismissive tone prevails with regard to her two scripted
and directed films; for example, Positif critics Olivier Curchod and Pierre Eisenreich
refer to them as affected (Curchod 1990: 68) while cold and complacent (Eisenreich
2002: 50), which suggests that the hostility comes from a place of considerable
misogyny. There is some surprise at this hostility given that Pisier was a committed
woman of the left; she was also a campaigner for women’s rights (including the
right to abortion on demand). A polymath, she was not easy to pigeonhole.
Pisier’s two single-author scripts are based on personal experience. Thus, Le Bal
du gouverneur refers to her childhood as a colonial resident in New Caledonia,
where her father was governor; Comme un avion to the double suicide of her
parents some two years apart (1986 and 1988) – and also prophetically to her
own breast cancer. Both films present the spectator with uncomfortable narra-
tives: the former with the effects of colonialism, the latter with the depressive
forces that drive an individual to kill herself (in this instance her mother’s sense
of mutilation after her breast cancer operations). Comme un avion has a heavy
overlay of a future-anterior; the script clearly draws on Pisier’s mother’s double
mastectomy, yet it also prefigures Pisier’s own encounter with the illness in 2004.
In the film the mother (Claire) leads her two children (Lola, 25, and Guillaume,
16) to believe that she has gone to Italy for a sojourn of several weeks. When
she ‘returns’ she admits the truth, and claims that the operation is a total suc-
cess. Her children, relieved at the news, blossom (Lola completes her doctoral
programme, Guillaume finds love with a schoolfriend). Satisfied her children
are fulfilled, Lola (unable to continue with her suffering) commits suicide. The
film – which in many respects is a docu-fiction – does not shy away from the
graphic realism of this illness, showing, amongst other things, the breast recon-
struction (prosthetic implantations). Positif was deeply critical of this exposure
of the unpalatable (Eisenreich 2002: 50). Claude Tesson (2002: 87) in Cahiers
du cinéma was equally dismissive, finding it ‘exhibitionist’, ‘navel-gazing’ and
‘overly intimist’. And yet, although it is the case that the narrative and dialogue
feel forced, nonetheless the film’s strength lies in its willingness to confront a
difficult issue that affects ten per cent of women in France (in the year the film
was released, 11,000 women died of breast cancer). Two years after scripting and
directing this film, Pisier herself was diagnosed with the same illness, underwent
the same surgery, and died in unclear circumstances in 2011 (found dead in her
swimming pool).
Le Bal du gouverneur provides a different personal narrative, but is equally
strongly embedded in the political. The point of view is that of a young adolescent
girl observing her parents and interpreting their actions, in particular those of her
mother, through her own uncomprehending eyes. Thus, she does not understand
her mother’s unexplained sorties (to see her lover). She misinterprets her father’s
behaviour (seeing him as an ogre at times). Yet, she has an intuitive comprehen-
sion of the injustices perpetrated by the colonial presence. This autobiographical
approach to the colonial/postcolonial question (out and through the ‘mouths
and eyes’ of young girls) is in the same vein as Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988).
Indeed, Pisier’s film joins a handful of semi-autobiographical recollections by
female ex-colonials that appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including
Brigitte Rouan’s Outremer (1990). These films reflect an anti-colonial conscious-
ness explored through the subjectivity of the female protagonist. Central to their
discourse is the notion that the colonizer is the alien, not the colony or colonized.
Each film recalls the central protagonist’s childhood spent in France’s colonies
during the 1950s, a time of colonial unease and unrest amongst indigenous peo-
ple, with murmurings of the decolonization process to come.
In 1976, Marie-France Pisier (1976: 39) said of herself, ‘I do cinema as if it were
politics. I’m committed, active, and an activist.’ Indeed, it is a suitable epitaph
France 339
for a woman of many talents who remained committed to the advancement of

women her entire life.
French women screenwriters and comedy
Isabelle Vanderschelden
Coline Serreau, Josiane Balasko, Valérie Lemercier and Danièle Thompson
have made their names as French comedy authors and directors of films which
have rarely crossed borders for cultural and linguistic reasons, except when they
were remade by Hollywood.32
Susan Hayward has suggested that ‘comedy deliberately goes against the
demands of realism [...] yet [that] it is perceived as serving a useful social and
psychological function [...] where repressed tensions can be released in a safe
manner’ (Hayward 2006: 90). Comedy authors are therefore expected to invent
excessive situations for their protagonists, resorting to burlesque, slapstick farce,
melodrama, and enhanced by memorable dialogue. Scholars often link the craft
of screenwriters to the notion of ‘trade’ and ‘industry’, but also the creative aspect
to the inspiration of an author (Nelmes 2007: 109; Price 2010: 6–7).
The comedy writers discussed here mostly operate within popular cinema,
balancing craft and creativity in their screenplay writing. They also challenge the
division of labour linked to screenwriting in different ways, although they tend
not to work in isolation, but with co-writers, established teams of artists and crew
technicians.
Serreau, Balasko, Thompson and Lemercier’s work as screenwriters is often
ignored by French scholars and critics. Yet, public success has secured them vis-
ibility within the mainstream national film industry, and sometimes outside
francophone spheres. Serreau led the way in 1985 with Trois hommes et un couffin/
Three Men and a cradle, remade in Hollywood as Three Men and a Baby (Leonard
Nimoy, 1987). The other three appear in the so-called ‘millionaires’ club’ of
women directors with one or more box-office hits after 2000 (Palmer 2012: 201).
Thompson’s recent films, which recycle the Hollywood rom-com conventions,33
have received international distribution. Their success can partly be attributed to
high-profile casts – Décalage horaire/Jetlag (2001) stars Juliette Binoche and Jean
Reno. Their plots promote transnational values and French middle-class identity
in familiar locations (mainly Paris), as illustrated by Fauteuils d’orchestre/Orchestra
Seats (2006), which was nominated for an Academy Award. It is also significant
that Balasko’s now cult box-office hit Gazon maudit/French Twist (1995) should
attract attention from anglophone film scholars studying her comedies from
feminist and queer perspectives.34 Lemercier’s films are lesser known outside the
francophone world, probably because her screenplays (and use of language) resort
to quirky, less universal comedy mechanisms.
Coline Serreau is often seen as a ‘valeur sûre’ of ‘comédie à la Française’ (Rollet
1998: 19). Her artistic background led her to prestigious Paris drama and music
schools, the circus, the opera and the Comédie Française, all of which informed
her approach to comedy writing and performance. She began her career as a stage
and film actress in the aftermath of the May 1968 unrest in Paris, which marked
her engagement in feminist activism and café-théâtre style performing.35 Serreau
started writing scripts and directing her own films when she realized that she
could not access the roles she aspired to.36 In 1985, her film Trois hommes et un
couffin topped the French box office with over ten million spectators, and received
three Césars, including Best Screenplay. Amongst the 11 films that Serreau has
written and directed to date, some stand out from a screenwriting perspective: La
Crise (1992) 37 brings together French comedy traditions and an investigation of
gender roles; La Belle verte (1996) is a utopian ecological fable, rather than pure
comedy, set in the future, in which Serreau plays the lead role;38 Chaos (2001)
addresses in comedy-drama the issue of prostitution and immigration from
a female perspective; Saint Jacques-La Mecque (2005) revisits the motifs of family,
social prejudice and racism through comedy. Her latest production is a militant
documentary on the food industry, Solutions locales pour un désordre global (2010).
Serreau’s screenplays, although comedy-driven, are often political and utopian
in content, privileging the female point of view, with women protagonists who
are usually the plot initiators (Moullet 1994: 48). In Trois hommes et un couffin, the
mother leaving her baby behind to pursue her career sets up the gender role rever-
sals of the three male protagonists who become surrogate ‘parents’. In La Crise,
the disappearance of Victor’s wife, and his mother leaving the family, home trig-
ger his evolution into a more tolerant person. Both screenplays combine codes of
comedy and the realist touches of everyday life situations with recurring societal
themes such as family roles, gender stereotypes, ethnicity and ecology. In La Crise
the comedy is constructed around social contrasts, but it is also tempered by the
problems of Michou and his wife, Djamila, with whom Victor becomes associated
and who help him to come to terms with the selfish behaviour that drove his wife
to disappear.
Serreau has sometimes been accused of excessive political engagement in her
screenplays, especially her utopian vision of the green planet advocated in La Belle
verte or the ethnic and gender stereotypes about second-generation immigrants
in Chaos. She nevertheless remains a major comedy writer of the post-68 era, not
least because she develops her original ideas in an auteurist-like manner, enjoying
maximum autonomy by writing the dialogue, supervising the mise-en-scène, and
directing her films.39
Josiane Balasko (b. 1950) has appeared in over 70 films to date, and written
and directed seven of them. A popular comedy star in France since the 1980s,
she has recently experimented with darker roles in the thrillers Cette femme là
and La Clef (Guillaume Nicloux, 2003 and 2007) and the quirky Hérisson (Mona
Achache, 2009). She made her debut as co-writer of live shows and as a stage
actress in the 1970s as part of the Paris-based café-théâtre troupe ‘Le Splendid’.40
Balasko distanced herself from ‘Le Splendid’ as early as 1980 when, like Serreau,
she felt that she was not being offered the roles that she hoped for.41 Thanks to
the public success of cult comedy films derived from the plays Les Bronzés and Les
Bronzés font du ski (Patrice Leconte, 1978 and 1979), which she had co-authored,
the film version of her own first play, Les Hommes préf èrent les grosses, directed
France 341
by Jean-Marie Poiré, was released in 1981. Balasko took the lead role, announc-
ing the commencement of a series of ‘unruly’ female protagonists that Kathleen
Rowe describes as ‘rule breakers, joke makers and public bodily spectacle’ (Rowe
1995: 12; see also King 2002: 131–4). Balasko’s 1980s protagonists challenged
the canon of the female sex symbol, as illustrated by the suicidal, frumpy Anita
of Sac de noeuds (1985), co-written with Jacques Audiard, or Mireille Molyneux,
the unconventional policewoman of Les Keufs (1987), co-written with Christian
Biegalski and Jean-Bernard Pouy. From 1985, she wrote and directed her com-
edies, while pursuing a successful acting career, notably with Trop belle pour toi
(Bertrand Blier, 1989).
Gazon maudit (1995) was Balasko’s fourth film as writer-actress-director and
her largest commercial and critical success, being awarded the César for Best
Screenplay. Its genesis informs her screenwriting method in different ways: she
started a first draft after Trop belle pour toi, and returned to it after an intensive
period of work for the theatre, which influenced her writing in terms of charac-
terization and space unity (Strauss 1995: 62). As well as exploring comedy devices
which combine subversion and emotion, Balasko’s screenplay challenges male
comedy gender conventions, placing the lesbian protagonist, Marijo, at the centre
of the narrative. The film revisits familiar motifs of slapstick farce and vaudeville,
in a love triangle or Feydeau-like ‘ménage à trois’ in which Marijo falls in love
with Loli, a neglected housewife deceived by Laurent, her philandering, homo-
phobic husband. Balasko draws upon traditional popular comedy devices and
twists and turns (Cairns 1998: 226), integrating into the fast-paced linear plot a
sense of freedom of expression and sexual utopia inherited from May 1968, a fea-
ture also found in some of Serreau’s screenplays (Rollet 1997: 103–4). The plot is
articulated around farce scenes such as the main character ending up with his bike
in a pigpen, and a memorable head-butting fight in the kitchen, where Laurent
and Loli display uninhibited nudity.
Despite some caricaturing inherent to mainstream comedy, the screenplay
questions family norms, increasingly moving away from formulaic stereotypes,
and focusing on characters and emotions, for instance when Marijo explains
that she is a virgin before having sex with Laurent. Balasko’s writing does not
‘accumulat[e] provocative dialogue, but pay[s] close attention to situations and
characters’ ( Jousse 1995: 62). Her script includes numerous sexual jokes and
double entendre and the dialogue is crude, but always generates laughter, as
when Laurent calmly tells the rose seller in the café: ‘No thanks, we have already
fucked’; Marijo jokes about her sexual identity in the restaurant: ‘I am going to
powder my nose – I mean to have a piss’; and when Loli announces her new sleep-
ing week arrangements, sharing her nights between Laurent and Marijo, she adds:
‘On Sundays, I have a rest.’
Male gender stereotypes are constantly challenged, bringing ‘comedy into
the feminine through language, the body and the comic structures she creates’
(Hayward 1998: 132). This produces a textual tension which questions the con-
struction of gender (Hayward 1998: 136) and encourages ‘gender fluidity’ (Waldron
2001: 65); as couple combinations change, new gender roles are generated.
However, the ending favours resolution by extending family models rather than
exploding them, thus returning to mainstream comedy forms (Cairns 1998).
Balasko’s writing style, in this film and others, enhances physical performance
and revisits the tradition of ‘grotesque body’ and ‘carnival’, to use critical con-
cepts developed by Mikhail Bakhtin(e) in Rabelais and His World (1984).42 Marijo
masquerades as a man (Hayward 1998: 144) and portrays an ‘unruly heroine
whose parodic disguises deconstruct the mechanisms of mise-en-scène and arti-
fices of femininity’ (Tarr with Rollet 2001: 186). Before 1995, few comedy scripts
had focused on female homosexuality, while comedies around male homosexual
characters were more common. However, the screenplay is more subversive in its
treatment of gender stereotypes than in its actual take on female homosexual-
ity. Every character, Marijo in particular, is assigned some gender fluidity and a
potential to evolve as the plot develops, albeit combined with more conventional
farcical clichés (dress code, sexual jokes). This testifies to Balasko’s reactive answer
to society issues as comedy author, and her direct way of bringing to life female
protagonists who question and subvert social codes and double standards.
After the huge success of Gazon maudit, Balasko encountered difficulties in
financing her next screenplay, as producers seemed reluctant to back a provoca-
tive story that involved a mature woman who pays for the services of a younger
escort. The initial script of Cliente (Balasko, 2008) was rejected, and published as
a novel in 2004. It sold 250,000 copies, which finally enabled Balasko to make her
film, with Nathalie Baye in the lead role, and herself as the sister. This new type
of gender role reversal narrative addresses a different society taboo, but the script
focuses more on drama and less on comedy. The film had a cooler public recep-
tion, with Balasko criticized for including voiceover monologues to convey the
protagonists’ inner world, and for the unbalanced secondary roles, which diluted
the treatment of the main theme of prostitution (see Guichard 2008).
This brief overview shows how Balasko has built her screenplays around con-
troversial themes and more consensual forms of comedy that are broadly influ-
enced by the vaudeville conventions, using situation comedy and visual humour
together with physical comedy to generate entertainment. The situations that
she invents for her characters are engaging, her dialogue is punchy, though
often emotional, and her narratives include a social dimension with a gendered
perspective.
Danièle Thompson (b. 1942) is the daughter of director Gérard Oury, whose
comedy classics, featuring cult contrasting male duos (Louis de Funès and Bourvil)
topped the French box office in the 1960s and 1970s. From the 1960s, Thompson
collaborated on the writing of his screenplays, familiarizing herself with the craft
of comedy writing. After writing for television in the 1980s, she established her
reputation by scripting the successful melodramas La Boum/The Party (1980)
and L’etudiante (1988), which were inspired by her own family. In an attempt to
move away from comedy, Thompson contributed to the scripts of La Reine Margot
(Patrice Chéreau, 1994) and Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train (Chéreau, 1998),
but soon returned to what she enjoyed most: popular middle-class family come-
dies. From 1999, Thompson has written her screenplays with her son Christopher
France 343
Thompson and has directed the films on more substantial budgets than the other
directors discussed here, starting with La Bûche (Thompson, 1999) and Décalage
horaire in 2001. This marked a turning point in screenwriting ensemble romantic
comedies,43 culminating with Fauteuils d’orchestre in 2006.44
Thompson has contributed to over 30 film screenplays, and La Bûche and
Fauteuils d’orchestre were each nominated for a César for Best Screenplay. She has
a collaborative approach to screenwriting and constructs fast-paced narratives but
avoids pure comedy conventions to capture the ‘air du temps’, including signs of
social malaise and personal identity crises. Thompson often derives her comedy
scenes from potentially tragic situations: La Bûche starts with a funeral scene
where the dead man’s phone ringing interrupts the ceremony, and the protago-
nist of Fauteuils d’orchestre is homeless and desperately needs a job. Thompson
describes her authorial signature thus: ‘My films are similar in the sense that they
all combine the lightness of comedy and the depth of the characters’ malaise’
(Thompson, in Géliot 2008).
Like many comedy authors, Thompson draws her inspiration for dialogue
from ‘an old oral tradition in her family whereby people tell each other lots of
stories and anecdotes on one another’ (in Royer 1999). Illustrations of this can
be found in La Bûche when the father, as he faces the camera, tells the audience
about his childhood Christmas memories, and in Fauteuils d’orchestre when the
retiring theatre caretaker evokes the stars whom she met during her working life.
These features enhance Thompson’s links with theatrical writing, rather than
with cinematic mise-en-scène experimentation (see Baignères 1999). Her writing
has been described as having a flair for mixing the ingredients of popular comedy
to create a ‘clever arrangement of paradoxes and surreal situations’ (Attali 1999).
It is also significant that her work should often be defined in terms of cooking
metaphors and recipes, as this example of a review of her recent film Le Code a
changé illustrates:
Danièle Thompson is not a bad cook: she can organize ‘huis clos’ (it was
already the strong point of La Bûche, her first film), effectively create polished
dialogue and romantic intrigue. It is a shame that the film did not follow its
logical path all the way, opting to break time and space unity in favour of more
consensual parallel narratives. (Barnett 2009)
Unsurprisingly, Thompson, like many comedy writers, has received little support
from French critics, and may even be a victim, as Serreau and Balasko have been,
of a form of critical prejudice against comedies. Her films are rarely mentioned
in the likes of Cahiers du cinéma and are often harshly reviewed. For example,
Les Inrockuptibles describes La Bûche as a ‘compilation of hackneyed tricks by a
screenwriter running out of breath’ (Bonnaud 2001). Thompson’s writing has
evolved, moving away from farce and subversion in the days of her father’s
comedies, towards more emotional romantic comedies which embrace social
commentary, especially after she started writing with her son, Christopher, in
the late 1990s.
After training at the Conservatoire de danse, Valérie Lemercier (b. 1964)

began her career as a comedian writing her own sketches in the 1980s. She
hosted several successful one-woman shows in prestigious venues like ‘Folies
Bergère’ or ‘Théâtre de Paris’, many of which were inspired by the artistic world
of Jérome Deschamps.45 She received three Molière Awards, in 1991, 1996 and
2001. In 1988, she appeared in Jean-Michel Ribes’s TV series Palace, before
moving to film comedy with Les Visiteurs (1993), garnering the César for Best
Actress for her hilarious and touching caricature of a provincial bourgeoise.
She then began writing and directing her own films in which she also starred,
the first being Quadrille (1997), a Sacha Guitry play adaptation. Lemercier’s next
film was an original screenplay about gender crossing, Le Derrière/From Behind
(1999), and this was followed by a successful offbeat tribute to the European
royal families in Palais royal (2005). In addition to taking on the lead part in the
last two, like Balasko she continued to interpret comedy roles that she had not
written herself such as Agathe Cléry (Etienne Chatiliez, 2008) or Le Petit Nicolas
(Laurent Tirard, 2011).
Lemercier’s image is multifaceted, ambivalent and full of contradictions (see
Séguret 1999). Her screenplays often result from collaborative work (with Brigitte
Buc for Palais royal), though she is credited for the original idea in all her work
but Quadrille. Scenes in her films are carefully staged, assigning mise-en-scène
strategies to serve the actors’ performance and generate a quirky style of comedy.
Although Lemercier’s films often include satirical class commentaries and overt
gender issues, her comedy style is hard to classify and has been described in turn
as personal, bittersweet and ferocious. Her performance style is also conspicu-
ous and unpredictable, favouring physicality and expressions of eccentricity and
clownish giddiness (Chou 2005). She often writes for herself choreographed
scenes, literally staging her body and transforming herself. For example, in Palais
royal she revels in mimicking the aristocratic rituals to subvert them, and in the
final scene of Le Derrière she appears naked at the family dinner to prove to her
father that she is a woman. Lemercier’s so-called ‘method or an ideology’ of writ-
ing (see Séguret 1999; Lalanne 2005) displays a surreal, offbeat sense of humour,
which eschews traditional comedy conventions and formulae, and this has
become her personal trademark as an author. Her screenwriting also interrogates
original subject matter and raises a ‘sense of malaise’ (Séguret 1999), in that her
characters appear insecure and vulnerable. Yet, this tends to be contradicted by
surreal plots and dialogues, calling upon the burlesque tradition. The family of
Palais royal illustrates this contradiction perfectly.
Lemercier’s scripts embrace social commentary, but not as directly as the recent
ensemble films written by Thompson, or the more ordinary-looking but subver-
sive characters in realistic settings invented by Balasko. Like the latter, however,
Lemercier enjoys tackling taboo subjects, revelling in scatological jokes and social
satire. However, her characters, comedy situations and sense of humour appear
less conventionally mainstream than Balasko’s recycling of tried and tested dra-
matic modes of comedy, or Serreau’s political utopia and sense of everyday detail.
France 345
Lemercier even tends to distance herself from pure comedy roles and situations, as
illustrated in her appraisal of a recent role (that she had not written):
Funny situations don’t make me laugh. I prefer taboo subjects. Everything that
is viewed as ‘touchy’ (sic in French text) … The plot of Adieu Berthe [Bruno
Podalydès, 2013] is not comical as such. It is the gaze upon situations and their
offbeat nature which change the perception. (Lemercier, in De Bruyn 2012)
This provides an explanation for the close link between plot and character in her
own screenwriting process. It also suggests that her creativity is fuelled by a more
offbeat, sometimes abstract and nonsensical, sense of humour. For instance, the
ambiguous double role she creates for herself in Le Derrière is at the same time
subtle and excessive, amusing and dramatic.46 The aristocratic characters in Palais
royal, including Lemercier’s own role as Princesse Armelle, are not standardized
and she reinvents the structure and narrative pace of mainstream comedy, as this
review points out:
Palais Royal! resists screenplay formatting and script doctoring work, which
corresponds to the so-called demands of the national commercial cin-
ema […]. The film settles in gently, introducing the characters to the audience
and avoids a pure logic of efficiency. The tonality is undecided, and this is the
film’s most precious quality. Its humour is somewhat impromptu, provoked by
sudden breaks. (Lalanne 2005)
Lemercier’s quirky sense of humour manifests itself firmly in the dialogue of the
film, which is in turn polished, excessive and polysemic.
This brief overview of Lemercier’s work confirms the difficulty in classifying her
comedies, on which she leaves her individual stamp, demonstrating an ability to
renew herself from script to script while resisting the conventions associated with
comedy writing.
The four comedy screenwriters presented here draw upon their theatre experience
and established traditions in French comedy, ranging from popular vaudeville and
farce going back to Molière, Marivaux and Feydeau, to café-théâtre and comedy
shows. These elements contribute to explaining the close links that their screen-
plays (and films) maintain with dramatic modes and forms of comedy, the farce
and social satire of café-théâtre for Serreau and Balasko, vaudeville for Thompson,
and more burlesque forms of comedy for Lemercier.
Given that the main protagonists of the majority of the films discussed here
are female, it is no surprise that the narratives and the performance styles are
gendered in their perspectives or point of view. However, several of the films dis-
cussed also ‘destabilis[e] gender roles, but without alienating male audiences’ (Tarr
with Rollet 2001: 192). Furthermore, it can be argued that the writing process of
comedy is reinvented because the authors retain control of the script in produc-
tion by directing the film themselves, thus granting themselves the authority
often denied to traditional screenwriters operating in a division of labour system

(see Price 2010).
To some extent, these women authors link comedy screenwriting with a
personal vision of the world today, rather than reinventing visual style and cin-
ematography. This places them firmly within the post-war French tradition of
popular cinema, perpetuating the old screenwriter versus metteur-en-scène critical
debates that go back to the 1930s and 1950s when similar criticisms were made
about Henri Jeanson or Jacques Prévert. What this overview has revealed is that
all four screenwriters have found effective ways of bridging the gap between film
conception and execution, creativity and film industry. This puts forward their
desire for freedom of expression and performance, rather than an inclination to
transform film style.
More generally the films considered here, and their reception, unearth some
relevant criteria of quality assessment for comedy screenplays. As well as generat-
ing humour and entertainment, the scripts of La Crise, Gazon maudit, Fauteuils
d’orchestre or Palais royal convey emotions and ideas, primarily through language
and performative situations. This perpetuates trends initiated by the likes of
other French women such as Nelly Kaplan and Diane Kurys from the 1970s, con-
tinued in the 1980s and 1990s by Nicole Garcia, Catherine Corsini, Agnès Jaoui
or Tonie Marshall, and, in a more auteurist strand, by Jeanne Labrune, Noémie
Lvovsky or Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in the 2000s.47 Many of these screenwriters-
directors continue to build bridges between writing comedy films and theatre-
related practices. If Serreau is moving towards marginal militant documentaries,
and Thompson’s comedies increasingly function within a more commercial
cinema, Balasko and Lemercier remain popular, but tend to resist the pressures
of plot and character formatting imposed by producers. As a result, they have
been able to reinvent more subversive or surreal forms of popular, yet singular,
comedy, opening the way for a new generation of promising screenwriters, such
as Valérie Donzelli. We can only hope that they find ways to retain this freedom
in their future films.
Danièle Thompson
Mary Harrod
The daughter of one of France’s best-loved comic performers and directors, Gérard
Oury, Danièle Thompson is amongst the nation’s most prolific female scénaristes,
whose writing collaborations have spanned six decades. This includes mainstream
hits of the 1970s and 1980s like romantic comedy Cousin/Cousine (Jean-Charles
Tacchella, 1975), remade in Hollywood as Cousins (Joel Schumacher, 1989), and
the coming-of-age story La Boum/Ready for Love (Claude Pinoteau, 1980), as well as
‘quality’ productions of the 1990s, including a television version of Stendhal’s Le
Rouge et le noir ( Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, 1997) and an international hit film adap-
tation of Aléxandre Dumas’s La Reine Margot (1994), co-written with renowned
theatre and opera director Patrice Chéreau. Thompson also collaborated with
Chéreau four years later on his critically acclaimed and internationally successful
France 347
drama Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train/Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train
(1998). Since 1999 she has gone on to write and direct five films, all of which are
comedies, four (so far)48 having been released in multiple territories, including the
USA, while one, Fauteuils d’orchestre/Orchestra Seats (2006), was chosen as France’s
Oscar entry for Best Film in a Foreign Language.
Thompson began her career in collaboration with her father on the script of
the World War II comedy La Grande vadrouille/Don’t Look Now: We’re Being Shot At
(1966), which retained the record for the nation’s highest domestically grossing
release for five decades. Since then she has reoriented her work away from the her-
itage comedy favoured by Oury, going on to develop thematic preoccupations and
an authorial voice of her own; indeed certain consistencies are observable across
her eclectic body of written work. This underlines the importance of extending
the status of auteur to writers as well as directors, particularly when it comes to
women, for whom directing is still a relatively unwelcoming profession, even in
France.49 Thompson’s embracing of certain conventions of genre cinema in much
of her work can be interpreted as a feminist statement by an artist working against
a backdrop of male-dominated French ‘high’ cinephilic culture.
Many of the thematic concerns of Thompson’s works are related to her gender.
The privileging of female experience and point of view in early works like La Boum
and a television serialization of Colette’s well-known Claudine novels, in the late
1970s and early 1980s, were somewhat ahead of their time. More recently, direct-
ing her own screenplays has allowed Thompson greater freedom to explore issues
that chiefly affect women, even if her characteristically comical register means
that their treatment is rarely extensive.
In her first film as writer-director, family melodrama/comedy La Bûche, Thompson
wrings black humour from the way in which patriarchal culture has historically
pitted women against one another. The film’s opening scene gives us a burial
attended by the wife and stepdaughters of the deceased. When a ringing mobile
phone interrupts the solemnity of proceedings, it transpires it may be the dead
husband’s first wife, to whom he is still close and who is seen by his widow as a
bitter rival, unworthy of being informed of the death. Later in the film, however,
the removal of the patriarch allows the two women, who are rendered as lonely
human beings rather than warring seductresses, to become friends.
The removal of patriarchal ties is also crucial to female emancipation in the
ensemble comedy-drama Le Code a changé, where a storyline following unhap-
pily married couple Lucas (played by Thompson’s son and co-writer, Christopher)
and Sarah (Emmanuelle Seigner) constitutes one of the director’s most openly
feminist threads. Thus the visibly frustrated housewife Sarah chooses to divorce
her harried businessman husband and claims that she is only able to realize her
own potential by being single and becoming a bestselling children’s writer. Even
if this particular form of professional success is itself feminine-accented, Sarah is
constructed as happier (and equally, if not more, affluent) single than married, a
subversive claim for popular genres as a rule, especially those that, like this film,
are concerned with romance. Typically for Thompson, who routinely works with
star actresses, the casting of Seigner is also significant. Not only is the actress well
known in France and to some extent abroad (only partly thanks to her ongo-
ing marriage to Roman Polanski), but she has also been associated with several
troubled feminist or proto-feminist roles. Thompson’s film appears in this way to
liberate the persona of former model Seigner from the oppression that has dogged
her beautiful but tempestuous characters over the years.
Other films written by Thompson introduce feminist issues and notably the
theme of escape from men. For example, domestic abuse provides the motivation
for the main character of rom-com Décalage horaire, Rose (Juliette Binoche), to
leave her boyfriend and be swept up into a romance with a neurotic businessman
whom she meets while waiting to board a plane. This is more than a background
detail, since the violent ex confronts her at the airport as she tries to flee the
country, introducing a melodramatic note into the broadly light-hearted ambi-
ence of the film. In ensemble piece Fauteuils d’orchestre, too, it is the failure of
male ethics that catalyses the events of the film, since protagonist Jessica (Cécile
de France) has been forced to leave her job as a midwife and has to search for a
job waiting tables, due to sexual harassment at work. It is interesting to note here
the continuities with La Reine Margot, made over a decade earlier. In this spectacu-
larly baroque adaptation, great emphasis is placed on Margot’s (Isabelle Adjani)
status as the tragic victim of an unloving mother, who once omits to include her
in a list of her offspring, and three brutal brothers. Not only does the plot see her
married against her will ‘for the good of France’, a key feature of the source text
as well, but there are multiple allusions to incest, a new addition in this version,
which is revealed during a histrionic scene in which the distressed Margot is
physically restrained and one brother, Anjou (played by Pascal Greggory), taunts
and humiliates her by pushing up her skirt to reveal her genitals in public, as he
snarls recollections of sharing her between family members and celebrates their
good fortune that she was ‘barren’.
Margot’s status as a malleable object of exchange crystallizes an overarching
theme of Thompson’s work and feminist discourse: namely, role-playing. I have
argued elsewhere that deconstructing archetypal familial identities is a key con-
cern in La Bûche (Harrod 2013). This extends a similar exploration of the way in
which families seek to pigeonhole their members in reductive roles in Ceux qui
m’aiment prendront le train, whose narrative is also structured around the death
of a patriarch. The film is set entirely around the dead man’s funeral as his rela-
tives converge on the event by the titular train and other means of transport. The
largely negative influence of the dead man refuses to be symbolically extinguished
thanks to the presence of his corpse in the coffin, riding intermittently alongside
the train tracks, in a car driven by the man’s son-in-law. A slapstick car crash into
a field when the driver is high on cannabis meanwhile looks forward to the irrev-
erence of La Bûche’s opening burial scene.
Thompson (2005; see also Pion-Dumas and Delmas 1995) has stated that much
of the appeal of familial themes lies in their universal aspect. Indeed such themes
constitute only one example of a wider preoccupation in her work with myths and
archetypes. This is also visible in frequent intertexts with fairy tales, both specific –
a character scaling a wall to reach his forbidden love in Les Marmottes strongly
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recalls the Rapunzel story – and more diffuse – Jessica as a Dick Whittington-like
provincial ingénue in the big city as she arrives in Paris in search of fortune and
glamour in heavy boots, in Fauteuils d’orchestre. Borrowing from fairy tales is also
a facet of several of her films’ generic identity as romantic comedies, in a tradition
whose roots lie primarily in Hollywood. Allusion to pre-existing romantic stories,
especially fairy tales, has been seen as a defining feature of the strand of global
rom-coms popularized from the early 1980s and termed ‘new romances’ by Steve
Neale (1992: 295–7). Thompson frequently makes reference to and borrows from
an Anglo-American tradition in the service of constructing romance. La Bûche
echoes various rom-coms, notably two written by Nora Ephron (When Harry Met
Sally… [Rob Reiner, 1989] and Sleepless in Seattle [Nora Ephron, 1993]), in exploit-
ing the sense of time outside the everyday afforded by festive holidays, setting its
action over the Christmas period. More originally, Décalage horaire updates the
otherness of the ‘green world’ of Shakespearean romantic comedy and its film
descendants by reimagining such a realm in the liminal space of an airport.
A self-awareness about genre is the final recurrent theme of Thompson’s oeuvre
I would like to single out for analysis here. Genre is not a concept that sits easily
with French film scholars’ national cinematic self-image. The nation’s impressive
credentials in nineteenth-century naturalist literature can be seen to have shaped
a fascination with realism in cinema and film theory that saw peaks during the
New Wave, when influential critics and filmmakers stressed the value of sponta-
neity and raw contact with the external world, and in the 1990s, a decade when
auteurist discourse was dominated by a fascination with so-called New Realism.
Thompson’s unapologetic deployment of generic conventions helps to explain
her exclusion from auteur status in her home country. Moreover, besides romantic
or romantically inflected comedy, the other major genres in which she tends to
work, and often within the same films, are the melodrama, the heritage film and
the female coming-of-age narrative. These are all genres that have been associated
with female artists and consumers – an impulse that has frequently gone hand in
hand with their marginalization as ‘frivolous’. If this is the case in traditional
Western scholarship in general, it is particularly so in France, where a heavily
masculine accent in matters cinephilic gathered impetus in the 1950s and 1960s.
French feminist film scholar Geneviève Sellier has pointed out the overwhelmingly
male bias of New Wave narratives, alongside the critical marginalization of 1940s
and 1950s costume dramas, which continues to this day (Sellier 1997; 2005).50
Thompson’s appropriation of the rom-com and the teenpic, genres that are
more associated with Hollywood than French cinema, can be seen as a strategic
choice. As a woman who lived for some years in the USA, Thompson has often
discussed her openness to Hollywood-style filmmaking; indeed Décalage horaire
was originally planned as an English-language studio production. This film almost
slavishly reproduces many of the conventions of the more formulaic rom-com.
I have argued elsewhere that it pastiches both It Happened One Night and Pretty
Woman, two classics of the genre (Harrod 2012). It is tempting to see aspects of
its style, too, as not simply recreating but pastiching (that is, imitating in a par-
ticularly ostentatious way) the rom-com itself. This flirtation with self-reflexivity
sets the tone for the rest of the film, as a credit sequence that humorously coun-
terpoints the contrasting sensibilities of the two protagonists through parallel
editing gives way to a style dominated by classically Hollywoodian close-ups,
one-shots and short takes throughout. Additionally, snippets of dialogue subtly
allude to prominent films of the genre – for example, while an opening voiceo-
ver echoes Pretty Woman’s parting claim that Hollywood is a ‘land of dreams’,
a frank mealtime discussion of simulated sexual pleasure by Rose invokes the
iconic orgasm-faking scene from When Harry Met Sally … .
This kind of approach, which I shall call heightened genericity, can also be seen
in Thompson’s earlier works as writer. La Boum deploys many of the clichés of
the rites-of-passage teen narrative (either American or French). Indeed, the party
referred to in its title, and which commands all the attention of protagonist Vic
(Sophie Marceau), provides a metaphor for the limited purview of adolescents
evoked by teenpics and other teen narratives. A representative example of an
overdetermined sequence is the moment when Vic declares despairingly, ‘I have
nothing to wear,’ cueing a split-screen view of her in several outfits. This almost
obligatory moment has endured in female-focused genre films globally since La
Boum, from Clueless (Amy Heckerliing, 1995) to Sex and the City (Michael Patrick
King, 2008). Interestingly, it also features in La Reine Margot, where the scene in
which Margot and the ladies in waiting daub their faces with gaudy lipstick and
eye make-up comments on several forms of masquerade at play in the film: those
of royal and courtly life, of femininity and also of the historical biopic. This film
is again so ostensive about its relationship to other texts within the same genre
as to move closer to signalled imitation. However, the script is also characterized
by overblown dialogue that owes much more to the ‘mannerist aesthetic’ (Vidal
2012) of literary adaptations and costume films, including recent international
French exports like Jean de Florette (Claude Berri, 1986), Manon des Sources (Berri,
1986) and Cyrano de Bergerac (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1989), than to Dumas’s sty-
listically matter-of-fact source text. Salient here are the romantic scenes, which
heavily embroider those that feature in the relatively chaste novel. In the tradi-
tion of courtly love, Thompson elevates Margot’s illicit affairs, with both the Duc
de Guise and especially her star-crossed Protestant lover La Môle, to a quasi-spirit-
ual status through emphasizing the intensity of the lovers’ passion. For instance,
Margot, between fierce embraces, exhorts Guise to give her a ‘surrogate’ wedding
night, begging him in exalted terms to ‘love me like never before. […] I want an
endless night. […] I want to see the image of my death amidst my pleasure.’ It is
worth noting too that, for all their juxtaposition of euphemism and hyperbole,
phrases like these show how Margot’s active female desire is foregrounded by
Thompson, as well as by Isabelle Adjani’s lusty performance.
In general, then, Thompson chooses in her screenwriting to inhabit a world
more readable in terms of referentiality to other mainstream texts than through
the tenets of realism dear to many French film critics. Given her exclusion from
the French auteurs’ club, as a woman writer who has ‘stooped’ to work in televi-
sion, there is an ideological force to her embracing of a different set of discursive
parameters within her work. In the case of her recent, more Hollywood-like films,
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especially Décalage horaire (which kick-started a contemporary craze for American-

style rom-coms in French cinema), there is an element of opting to speak, to
borrow from Hamid Naficy’s (2001) conception of ‘accented cinema’, in a foreign-
inflected voice.
Rejecting the elitism of art cinema in favour of a mass address through recourse
to more universal experiences reverses the classic paradigm of much feminist
criticism, which has reinforced women’s marginalization in situating their discur-
sive potential in experimental narratives. Instead, Thompson repositions female
speech as a contender for mainstream space and has set herself up as a rival to the
male dominance of the French film industry and global screens. In so doing, it is
worth noting that she becomes a central figure in an alternative form of popular
feminine cinephilia that is emerging transnationally. Thus the work of younger
screenwriter-directors from both France and Hollywood can be seen in dialogue
with the texts she has authored. In Lisa Azuelos’s domestic smash hit teenpic LOL
(Laughing Out Loud) (2008), for instance, Sophie Marceau’s presence as the mother
and the use of the music from La Boum underscore the many points of compari-
son. Equally striking is the parallelism between a number of scenes from Sofia
Coppola’s blockbuster Marie Antoinette (2006) and La Reine Margot. Not only do
they share certain excesses in their mise-en-scène and an atmosphere of internecine
rivalry at the French court, but specific details are repeated. These include scenes
showing the heroine involved in an erotic encounter with a stranger while wearing
a mask to hide her royal identity; the aforementioned ‘dressing up’ scene featuring
the women of the court; and the use of the same actress, Asia Argento, to play the
courtesan favoured by a powerful royal.
Thompson’s place in this gallery may not be evident even to better-informed
film viewers, thanks to the lesser prominence of screenwriters than directors
in global film culture. Her participation through her writing in an aesthetic
exchange that informs mass consciousness should nonetheless be recognized,
both on its own terms and because this work has provided a ‘back door’ to gain-
ing an increased transnational profile and scope of address through her later
directing work. In view of the many challenges still facing women involved
in film industries all over the world today, especially at the commercial end of
the spectrum, Thompson’s incursions into male-dominated cinematic territo-
ries and in turn the popular imagination appear all the more remarkable and
important.
Agnès Jaoui (b. 1964)
Florence Martin
Actress, screenwriter and filmmaker Agnès Jaoui has had an affinity with sing-
ing, acting and the written word from her childhood. When she was 15, Jaoui
studied at the famous Cours Florent drama school in Paris, then entered the
Théâtre des Amandiers in 1984 to perfect her acting skills under the direction of
Patrice Chéreau. She was singing on stage by the time she was 17 (Toumarkine
2005: 22), and continued to write a journal (Nettlebeck 2008: 9). A sense of irony
characterizes her scenarios, written in collaboration with actor and playwright

Jean-Pierre Bacri,51 whom she met on stage in 1987, finding they shared a sense
of frustration with the world and its prescribed norms (Binh et al. 2012: 31).52
Hence the satirical tone of their dialogue and a style which has earned them sev-
eral awards for their depictions of the complexities of human relationships and the
denouncement of the petty power games.53
Initially, Jaoui and Bacri wrote plays and adapted these to the screen for vari-
ous French filmmakers. They co-authored their first scenario for Alain Resnais’s
diptych Smoking/No Smoking (1993), for which they obtained a César for Best
Scenario in 1994. A tour de force, it distilled the 16 hours of Alan Ayckbourn’s
Intimate Exchanges (1982–3), a play for two actors playing multiple characters, into
three hours of film. They also wrote the play Cuisine et dépendances (Kitchen with
Apartment), which was staged by Stephan Meldegg at the Théâtre de la Bruyère in
Paris in 1991, in which they both had parts. The play was a great success, running
for 450 performances, and they went on to write the script for the eponymous
film (Philippe Muyl, 1993).
Jaoui and Bacri repeated the experience in 1994, co-writing and acting in Un
air de famille/Family Resemblances, produced by Meldegg at the Théâtre de la
Renaissance in Paris. Again, Jaoui and Bacri adapted their play to the screen for
Cédric Klapisch’s eponymous film (1996), and received a César for Best Scenario
in 1997. Here they targeted family politics in a dark comedy that develops during
a weekly gathering one Friday evening in a café owned by one of the brothers,
Henri (Bacri), whose wife of 15 years has just left him. They would return later to
the mined terrain of family politics, as emblematic of society at large.
Their last screenplay together was for Alain Resnais’s On connaît la chanson/Same
Old Song (1997) in which they also acted, and for which they received another
César for Best Original Scenario in 1998. The film has many ironic twists around
the notion of a French musical and lip-synchs the actors with various French
stars of popular songs, to illustrate what the characters think: the only actress
lip-synched to her own voice is Jane Birkin. A Scarborough tea towel hangs on
the wall of Odile’s (Azéma’s) kitchen, situating the viewer in the world created by
Jaoui-Bacri-Resnais in their previous film, Intimate Exchanges, as Alan Ayckbourn
lives and stages his plays in Scarborough, England.
Jaoui started to direct films at this point and co-authored four original scenarios
for films centred on specific themes, which she directed, and in which she and
Bacri both acted: Le Goût des autres/Taste of Others (2000); Comme une image/Look at
Me (2004), inspired by Anita Brookner’s novel,54 about self-representation; Parlez-
moi de la pluie/Let It Rain (2008); and Au bout du conte/Under the Rainbow (2013),
about the belief systems that guide our actions. Again, with the exception of
Parlez-moi de la pluie, the critical reception was consistently superlative: Le Goût des
autres earned the duo the European Award for Best Original Scenario in 2000 and
a César in 2001;55 Comme une image gave them a European Award, an Étoile d’Or,
and the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Scenario in 2004. Jaoui’s films had
spectacular success at the box office too,56 making her the most popular French
woman filmmaker for the 2000–10 decade (Leahy 2012: 216).
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It is difficult to determine what is Jaoui’s and what is Bacri’s in the writing.57

According to Bacri: ‘It is an exchange, a long conversation that we note down.’58
Both actors/authors cite theatre and their concern and love for actors as the constant
guide to their writing (Binh et al. 2012: 27). Bacri states that it is ‘the pleasure of
writing for actors’ (Binh et al. 2012: 24) that prods the writing of dialogue, while
Jaoui declares: ‘savouring words, having fun writing dialogues, that’s what we love
to do’ (Binh et al. 2012: 29). When writing, they first agree on a theme that they
are interested in. For each film, they choose a structure that opens up a range of
characters and sub-narratives (Protat 2009: 31) . The characters are neither com-
pletely villainous nor saintly and the storyline can take on various forms: Au bout
du conte introduces variations on a fairy tale and contains around 200 references
(either musical or literary) to fairy tales. The structure of the film and the charac-
ters, such as the King, the Princess, and the Wolf, are understood through a shared
off-screen culture that relies on the narratives of a French childhood. Hence, Jaoui
explains, the production of meaning relies on both the spoken words and the gaps
in the dialogue: ‘Rhythm is everywhere. First, it’s in the script. Jean-Pierre Bacri
and I write a script like a musical score – a play of dialogue and silence’ (Oumana
2010: 86).
For Jaoui, writing a script is akin to composing music. She keeps the beat of her
filmic narrative alive and enriches it with sub-narrative cross-rhythms. The last
element of her composition is adding the music, often classical (with a taste for
Schubert), and this is crucial to her scripting of the entire film (Binh et al. 2012:
41). In the end, Jaoui is both co-writer and conductor of a score that makes visible
the political in the private and the public sphere.
Marina de Van (b. 1971)
Kath Dooley
Self-mutilation, cannibalism, body morphing, psychological breakdowns, tel-
ekinesis. These are but some of the themes tackled in confrontational fashion
by French screenwriter-director-actress Marina de Van. After first coming to
prominence as a screenwriting collaborator with François Ozon, with whom she
co-wrote Under the Sand (2000) and 8 Women (2002), de Van has gone on to pen
several screenplays of her own that take corporeality and the nature of existence
as their principle focus. The resulting films offer stark portrayals of psychologi-
cal and bodily disorder, encouraging both an intellectual and a visceral viewing
experience.
Born in France in 1971, de Van first studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris,
later moving to filmmaking. Since her 1996 graduation from the elite French film
school La FÉMIS, an institution that has ‘recently encouraged more provocative
filmmaking methods, in particular an emphasis upon a stark treatment of the
body on screen’, the writer-director has, at the same time, had a significant career
as an actress, often portraying women who are nervous, sexually non-conformist,
and/or perverse (Palmer 2006: 24). This time spent in front of the camera has con-
tributed to de Van’s interest in character psychology and seems to have influenced
her approach to screenwriting, particularly when considering physical danger and

the limits of the human body.
De Van’s debut feature film as writer-director, Dans ma peau (In My Skin, 2002),
in which she also plays the central character, can be located within the early-
twenty-first-century French cinema trend termed cinéma du corps (Palmer 2006).
These are films that explore stark portrayals of the human body, sexual debase-
ment, and trangressive urges in a fashion that is disturbing and often horrific;
however, the writer-director makes the point that an exploration of the mind is
her primary concern: ‘My interest is in identity and how the body escapes this
identity, or doesn’t escape. The body is just a vehicle for some questions and
ideas.’59 Her first solo-authored script tells the story of Esther, an upwardly mobile
and happily married marketing executive whose world is thrown off-balance
when she trips and falls in the rear yard at a party. Esther severely injures her
leg, but much to both her and the doctor’s amazement she cannot feel the pain
of the deep, bleeding cut in her calf. So begins a process of experimentation and
transgression where Esther digs at her wound, eventually alienating herself from
her husband and colleagues. The act of self-mutilation becomes an embodiment
of her ‘corporeal malaise’ (Palmer 2006: 175) and could be read as an internali-
zation of the pressures involved with capitalistic ideals and mundane corporate
life. Although not wishing to elaborate, de Van has commented on the fact that
funding issues meant that some of the screenplay’s more gruesome scenes had to
be removed: ‘I had to eliminate certain parts of the script […] It was hard to find
funding because it’s a difficult subject, with an actress who isn’t particularly well-
known, at a time when economics are rather unfavorable’ (Erickson 2003).
Palmer notes that de Van was involved in an accident as an eight-year-old,
receiving a horrific injury when a car ran over her right leg (2007: 175). This child-
hood experience, one in which de Van first encountered her own body ‘as just
another object, a deformed object … a scrap’ was fundamental in informing the
writing of her future work (de Van, quoted in Palmer 2007: 175). While the screen-
play for Dans ma peau revolves around physical injuries, the filmmaker’s second
film, Ne te retourne pas/Don’t Look Back (2009), similarly features a protagonist
injured in a car accident at the age of eight. In the latter work, de Van takes some
of the most recognizable elements of the cinéma du corps style, and transposes
them into a considerably bigger-budget project with a high-concept storyline.60
De Van describes the screenplay for the project as ‘challenging and expensive’,
factors she believes contributed to the long wait to make her second film (Palmer
2010: 1061). The story follows Jeanne (Sophie Marceau), a career-driven writer,
wife and mother, who is appalled and terrified to find her body physically trans-
forming into that of another women (Monica Bellucci), a problem of identity that
seems linked to the above-mentioned traumatic childhood memories, no longer
able to be suppressed. Jeanne’s husband dismisses her unease as irrational while
doctors suggest that it may all be in her head. It seems that, as a wife and mother,
she is a replaceable commodity, and that, moreover, her husband and children
are in on the ruse. Their bodies also transform, as does the décor in the family
home. At one point, terrorized by her changing surroundings, Jeanne moves from
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room to room in her apartment, watching furniture and personal items change to
a series of pleasant but unfamiliar configurations, much like walking through an
IKEA showroom. De Van describes this moving furniture as ‘a criterion to see that
the reality is fake’ and that ‘appearances are only appearances’.61 Dialogue in this
film is minimal, as is the case in all of de Van’s works. Indeed, the writer-director
comments, ‘I like to show physical things – I get bored with constant dialogue’
(Palmer 2010: 1061).
In her attempt to explore the distorted thoughts and impressions preoccupy-
ing her protagonists, de Van is careful to maintain a single point of view in her
screenplays, one that restricts the audience’s identification with that of the main
character. Speaking on her general dislike of changing or floating points of views,
and the situation specific to Ne te retourne pas, she comments that:
adopting a point of view other than Jeanne’s – for example the point of view of
those close to her – would have removed the emotion, turned her into some-
one who had descended into madness. I wanted us to share her experience and
her feelings when she thinks that the entire world – the way she sees it – could
be unreal’ (Vasse 2009: 6).
This approach was perhaps equally important when completing the screenplay
for Dans ma peau, a project written with de Van’s intention of playing the lead
role, and for de Van’s most recent project, Dark Touch (2013). This is an English-
language film exploring similar themes of bodily and psychological disorder with
a young female protagonist. Set in a remote village in Ireland, the story follows
11-year-old Neve, the lone survivor of a gory massacre in which her parents and
younger brother were killed. This supernatural bloodbath in an isolated house
sees haunted objects and furniture rise up and destroy the bodies of the inhabit-
ants; however, police dismiss Neve’s explanation that the house is to blame. The
young protagonist is placed in the care of well-meaning neighbours, but much to
her distress, horrific disturbances continue to manifest themselves. De Van then
reveals Neve’s own telekinesis as the culprit in this eerie horror/thriller. The writer-
director explains that she wants viewers ‘first of all to be scared with Neve – until
she herself realizes, at the same time as we do, that she is the source of the magic
[…] then I would like them […] to be scared for her since these threatening forces
choose to manifest themselves around her’ (Dark Touch Press Kit, 2013). Once
again, de Van challenges the audience’s understanding of reality as events are
relayed through the protagonist’s eyes.
While de Van does not consider herself a ‘feminine’ writer-director, Dans ma
peau, Ne te retourne pas and Dark Touch all focus on a female protagonist in cri-
sis; in particular, the physical manifestation of memory and trauma on their
skin. As with the works co-written with Ozon, these films have in common their
interrogation of female psychology; one can observe an attempt to represent the
protagonists’ psychological disturbances and identity crises in physical form. In
conversation with Claire Vasse, de Van comments that ‘it’s a pure cinematographic
pleasure to translate an interior phenomenon into images’ (Vasse 2009: 9). The
process of scriptwriting begins with this challenge of finding a visual way to com-
municate these psychological issues. The focus on mind and body means that de
Van’s intellectual and provocative genre films stand out from those of her horror
contemporaries.
Mia Hansen-Løve (b. 1981)
Kath Dooley
Born in Paris, Hansen-Løve’s introduction to the world of cinema came as an
actress in the films of Olivier Assayas (Fin août, début septembre, 1998; Les Destinées
sentimentales, 2000). Although she began studying at the Paris Conservatory of
Dramatic Arts in 2001, the writer-director later moved into the area of film criti-
cism, working alongside Assayas as a writer for the legendary film journal Cahiers
du cinéma. Her years spent as a film critic, like François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer
before her, led to a career as a filmmaker. Hansen-Løve’s debut film, Tout est par-
doneé/All Is Forgiven, was well received by critics in 2007 and nominated for a Best
First Film César in 2008 by the French Film Academy.
Tout est pardoneé positioned Hansen-Løve as an important young voice in con-
temporary French cinema. Drawing upon the deeply personal films of Truffaut
and Rohmer as an influence, the story centres on a daughter’s attempt to recon-
nect with her absent, formerly drug-addicted father. With a story that spans
11 years, this film features many of the thematic and stylistic elements present
in Hanson-Løve’s two subsequent screenplays: sudden changes to narration and
points of view, significant plot ellipses, a focus on the complexity of young girls’
lives, and lastly, the passing of time and what remains unsaid.
Hansen-Løve’s second film, Le Père de mes enfants/The Father of My Children
(2009), charts the journey of a young girl who must piece together the intricacies
of her recently deceased father’s life. As with Tout est pardoneé, the film’s narra-
tion and point of view changes from father to daughter at the halfway point, and
in the case of the later film following the father’s sudden and violent suicide.
Similarly, the quest of the young female protagonist involves a search for mean-
ing, self-definition and a form of reconciliation with her absent father. The plot
events featured in Le Père de mes enfants are based upon the real-life suicide of
Humbert Balsan, producer of films by auteur directors such as Claire Denis and
Lars von Trier and the father figure who encouraged the young Hansen-Løve down
the path towards her debut film. The writer-director notes that the screenplay was
written only two years after Balsan’s death meaning that ‘all the feelings, impres-
sions he left on me, the atmosphere of his office […] were still very, very alive. It’s
something I could not have captured in the same way if I had waited longer.’62
Despite Hansen-Løve’s fear that she did not have enough objectivity and distance
from Balsan’s death to do the project justice, this second film was rewarded with
the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.
Un amour de jeunesse/Goodbye First Love (2011), Hansen-Løve’s most recent
screenplay/film, also draws upon the writer’s life experience, specifically her first
teenage love affair. Written ‘without condescension’, the film follows the struggles
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of 15-year-old Camille, who is abandoned by her adventure-seeking boyfriend.63

Years pass and Camille eventually finds solace in the arms of an older lover, and
in a career as an architect. Once again, the young female protagonist moves from
a state of dependence to independence, strengthened, rather than held back, by
the past. Hansen-Løve states that ‘all the films that I have written are about love,
[…] it is what weakens my characters but also what gives them strength.’64
The writer-director’s next, most ambitious project, Eden, is a love story set amongst
the 1990s’ French house music scene. Hansen-Løve’s brother, Sven Løve, was a
famous DJ in this era, which represents ‘a huge chunk of [her] life’.65 She comments:
‘I don’t write to […] generalize about my own experience, but […] with the hope that
this truth that is only mine, will become some sort of universality.’ To date, Hansen-
Løve has produced three films that explore the complexities of human relationships
and the struggles of everyday life with a high degree of maturity and tenderness.
Notes
1. Jackie Buet, in Jonathan Broda, Le deuxième cinéma, Doriane Films, 2011. Buet says that
the percentage of women filmmakers in France is 13 per cent to 14 per cent.
2. Alain and Odette previously published Colette au cinéma, Flammarion, 1993.
3. There is no trace of this film being either lost or never completed.
4. The friend was Marie-Anne Maleville in Charles Ford, Femmes Cinéastes, p. 36.
5. Headed by Louis Naplas.
6. For an account of what happened at the première see Tumultes aux Ursulines (Alain
Virmaux interviewed by Prosper Hillairet) and Surimpression (featuring Tami Williams
and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis), two films by Nicolas Doin and Prosper Hillairet, in the
DVD Le Coquille et le clergyman, Light Cone, 2009.
7. It’s possible that Germaine Dulac developed an aspect of parody of all his novels put
together that some say Benoit had already intended in L’oublie.
8. Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Obituary: Marie Epstein, Independent, 12 June 1995.
9. The object of an important study by the American feminist writer Sandy Flitterman-
Lewis (1996).
10. Tulard (1997) says that ‘Vernay’s best film remains the first adaptation of the Count of
Monte-Cristo 1953’.
11. Flock 1999: 49.
12. Virmaux et al. 2004: 38.
13. See: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound-magazine/greatest-docs (accessed 24 May 2015).
14. Kaplan in Nelly Kaplan dans tous ses états: Interview Nelly Kaplan et Michel Drucker
(2004).
15. The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blache (1996); see also McMahan 2002.
16. See: http://www.oocities.org/hollywood/academy/9657/Esprit05.html (accessed 24 May
2015).
17. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTd7r0VkgnQ (accessed 24 May 2015)
18. The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blache (1996); see also McMahan 2002.
19. See: http://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/alice-guy-
blache/ (accessed 24 May 2015).
20. See: http://suite101.com/article/alice-guy-blache-first-woman-film-director-a150877
(accessed 1 February 2013).
21. See: http://www.weirdwildrealm.com/f-fallingleaves.html (accessed 24 May 2015).
22. See: http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-synopsis/tarnished-reputations/ (accessed
24 May 2015).
23. See: http://aliceguyblache.com/chronology (accessed 1 February 2013).

24. See: http://aliceguyblache.com/chronology (accesssed I February 2013).
25. The Fonds Schiffman is now held by the Bibliothèque du Film Archive in Paris.
26. Interview with Evelyne Pagès, ‘Féminin présent’, TF1, 30 September 1980. Available at:
http://www.ina.fr/video/I00012939/francois-truffaut-et-son-assistante-suzanne-schiffman-
video.html (accessed 24 May 2015).
27. Bibliothèque du Film Archive TRUFFAUT 587 – B 335 et seq.
28. Bibliothèque du Film Archive TRUFFAUT 24 – B23.
29. For the scenario of Phénix, see Rivette 2002.
30. Bibliothèque du Film Archive TRUFFAUT 24 – B23.
31. François Truffaut, cited in http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-France_Pisier (accessed 12
October 2014).
32. See Mazdon (2000: 91–107) and Moine (2007: 164–81) on successful remakes of French
comedies in Hollywood. Moine provides reasons why French comedy is not exportable
(2007: 164–5).
33. This screenplay is modelled on Frank Capra’s 1934 It Happened One Night (Rollet 2008).
Thompson wrote a first draft in the 1990s for Miramax, but she renounced it when her
script was completely transformed by the producers. She returned to it ten years later
(source Allociné 2001). See also Harrod 2012: 227–40.
34. See articles by Cairns (1998), Hayward (1998), Rollet (1999) and Waldron (2001, 2006).
Serreau received some comparable critical attention in Rollet 1998.
35. For discussion of French café-théâtre in the 1970s, see Rollet 1998: 107–9 and Merle
1985.
36. See Rollet 1998 for a discussion of Serreau’s early cinema and background.
37. Unless indicated, box office and budget information are from Allociné or CNC.
38. Her ‘worst’ film in terms of public and critical reception on release.
39. She has even contributed to the musical score on several films.
40. For discussion of Balasko’s involvement in Le Splendid, see Grenier 1994: 141–61.
41. On her early career and transition to screenwriting, see Grenier 1994: 291–8.
42. On concepts of ‘carnival’ and ‘grotesque, excessive body’ in French comedy, see Rollet
1998: 107–8 and King 2002: 63–7.
43. See Harrod’s unpublished doctoral thesis (2013) on French rom-com, which devotes a
chapter to La Bûche.
44. Le Code a changé (Thompson, 2009) and Des Gens qui s’embrassent (Thompson, 2013)
credit Danièle as director and Christopher as screenwriter. Reviews described these as
too stereotyped, relying on tried recipes, and lacking Thompson’s usual lightness of
touch (Odicino 2013; Libiot 2013).
45. Deschamps is an author, actor and theatre director who worked with Macha Makaief
from 1978 in an acting school, training many contemporary comedy actors, notably
through the ‘Deschiens troupe’ on Canal+ from 1993. His work is marked by the legacy
of his illustrious cousin, Jacques Tati.
46. See Tarr with Rollet 2001: 189–92 and Libération’s positive review (Séguret 1999) of the
film which suggests that Lemercier receives more attention from film critics than her
counterparts.
47. See Tarr with Rollet 2001 for more examples of female comedy screenwriters and Harrod
2012: 228 for female screenwriters-directors of rom-coms in the 2000s.
48. Her latest film Des Gens qui s’embrassent (2013) was released in France and some other
European territories in April 2013, but has so far only had a North American festival
release.
49. Kate Ince (2008: 281) claims around 14.4 per cent of French directors were women
between 2000 and 2007, while Ginette Vincendeau (2010) finds this rising to 19.4 per
cent in the year 2009, all basing data on CNC statistics.
50. An updated version of this argument appears in English in Sellier 2008.
France 359
51. Before his collaborative ventures with Agnès Jaoui, Bacri had written five plays: Tout sim-
plement (1977), Le timbre (1978), Le Doux visage de l’amour (1979, for which he received
the Prix de la Fondation de la Vocation), Quand je serai grand (1980, with Sam Karmann),
and Le Grain de sable (1980).
52. All translations from the French are mine. ‘Petite, je me suis sentie seule bien souvent, et
différente, et malheureuse. Heureusement que je suis tombée sur certains livres, certains
ro mans, certaines chansons, qui n’étaient pas ce flot de normes rassurantes. L’être est
plus divers et riche que ça. Je trouve exaspérant qu’on me dise tout le temps ce que je dois
penser, et c’est de ces exaspérations-là que partent nos envies d’écrire’ (Binh et al. 2012: 31).
53. Jaoui’s politics is visible in her stand against the French government’s law for the ‘inter-
mitttents du spectacle’ (see Jean-Jacques Agaillon’s letter to Agnès Jaoui, 24 February
2004); similarly, her film Comme une image, although filmed at the time of the parity
debate in France (about the political representation of women in the French Assembly),
focuses on the women never seen by other women along class and ethnicity lines (see
Rosello’s excellent study of it [2010]).
54. Anita Brookner, Look at Me, first published in 1983.
55. Jaoui won a Lumière Award for best director as well.
56. Number of spectators according to Unifrance:
Le Goût des autres: 3,859,151 in 2000

Comme une image: 1,629,469 in 2004
Parlez-moi de la pluie: 1,003,068 in 2008
Au bout du conte: figures unavailable at the time of writing
57. Jaoui and Bacri were also a couple off stage from 1987 to 2012, and still write together.
58. ‘Le terreau de notre collaboration repose sur des convictions, des valeurs partagées,
qu’on a plaisir à décortiquer. S’ensuit une sorte de ping-pong: […] c’est un échange, une
longue conversation dont on prend les notes’ (Binh et al. 2012: 26).
59. Personal interview with de Van, conducted in Paris, June 2011.
60. Ne te retourne pas had a budget of approximately 13 million euros.
61. Personal interview with de Van, conduted in Paris, June 2011.
62. Quoted in Rigg 2012, ‘Interview with Mia Hansen-Løve, Writer-Director, “Goodbye, First
Love”’ (audio), ABC Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Commision. Available at:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/movietime/interview-with-mia-hansen-
love/3935596 (accesssed 19 Jul 2013).
63. Ibid.
64. Quoted in Valente 2012, ‘Interview: Mia Hansen-Løve, Director of Goodbye First Love’,
Film Comment (online). Available at: http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/interview-
mia-hansen-lve-director-of-goodbye-first-love (accessed 20 April 2013).
65. Quoted in Solomons 2012, ‘Mia Hansen-Løve: the Broken Heart that Made Me a Film-
maker’, Guardian (online). Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2012/
apr/29/mia-hansen-love-french-director (accessed 19 July 2013).
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Germany
Andrew Kenneth Gay, Alexis Krasilovsky, Ervin Malakaj,
Juliane Scholz and Carl Wilson
Overview
Ervin Malakaj
Film script production in the early years of narrative film did not subscribe to
established cultural practices in Germany because, as Karin Bruns suggests, script-
writing in the institutional sense, as well as the activities surrounding the creation
of film, first needed to be ‘qualified and defined’ (Bruns 2005: 140). Delineation
among the roles of scriptwriter, director, cameraman, actress and other key areas
often did not exist, because the players in the production process of early narrative
film would take on multiple roles or swap roles – sometimes mid project. Women
in the early German film industry found a niche not only as actresses (although
they were prolific in this capacity), but also as screenwriters, helping to shape
industry standards of cinema. About a dozen high-profile women screenwriters,
such as Marie Luise Droop, who also directed many successful films, were active
between the Brothers Skladanowsky’s earliest exhibitions of moving pictures in
1895 and the end of the Great War in 1918. There were also an approximately
equal number of women whose screenwriting work was not credited. The number
of women screenwriters in the German film industry today is at least double that
in the formative years of film.
The extensive participation of women writers in the early German film indus-
try was due to a number of factors. The industrialization of the printing press
over the course of the nineteenth century saw a growing number of publication
venues for literary and journalistic writing of all sorts, allowing a greater number
of participants in the cultural sphere. Women made a significant contribution
in this climate of market expansion in Imperial Germany, often as producers
of highly popular genre fiction that often met with audience success abroad as
well. The public discussions shaping the women’s movement leading up to and
around 1900 additionally motivated a more public participation of women in the
cultural sphere, and paved the way for a professionalization of women authors
in literature, journalism, and other writing professions (Budke and Schulze 1995:
8–9). The standardization of literary production, with its roots and influences in
the printing press, served as a format to be adopted by a great number of writers
363
(especially women), giving rise to a popular pulp literature. Many of the estab-
lished female authors, like Vicki Baum (1888–1960), contributed significantly
to the development of genre fiction and popular literature, which gave them an
advantage in a burgeoning film industry that sought experienced writers who
wrote quickly and were able to adhere to generic writing approaches similar to
those employed in producing the pulp press.
These market conditions informed the early practices of film writing from
1900–18, which was often undertaken by freelance writers, who wrote for mul-
tiple media formats such as newspapers, literary magazines, the literary market,
and also the film industry. The attempt to standardize screenwriting practices
in the industry began in the 1910s, by affirming the need for screenwriters to
adopt the generic conventions of the serialized format, in which stock characters
contributed to plot development and tied together plotlines, to make screenplays
realizable as film. Such early standardization programmes called for a greater dif-
ferentiation between screenwriting and prose fiction, but nevertheless insisted
upon the need to rely on successful genres that appealed to the masses. Because
a number of the more successful genre writers were women – Vicki Baum and
Marie Luise Droop, for instance – the established female authors were able to find
a niche as screenwriters in the expanding early film industry. The romance plots
of famous novels or novel cycles served as blueprints for scripts, as did success-
ful film productions that were not protected by copyright laws. The pioneering
film director and screenwriter Ewald André Dupont writes in his Wie ein Film
geschrieben wird und wie man ihn verwertet (‘How to Write and Realize Film,’ 1919)
that only a few of the many writers who sent him their work seemed able to con-
ceptualize a feasible script in light of the technological limitations presented by
the medium (Dupont 1919: 7–10). Dupont calls for scripts that first and foremost
serve the director, cameraman, cast, and set designer with instructions about how
to execute the plot, rather than presenting their story in prose form.
Many women found a niche in film production in the early period because it
offered a degree of flexibility in participation. Due to often-collaborative practices
among scriptwriter, director and actor, and the standardization attempts that
demanded an adaptation rather than full-on creative reconceptualization of exist-
ing story material, early scriptwriters defined their artistic production more along
the lines of a trade ethic than through aesthetic and artistic autonomy (Bruns
2005: 142). In this sphere, where the players were not tied to specific functions, a
number of women screenwriters started their film careers as actresses, for instance.
But the majority of the early prolific writers, such as Marie Luise Droop and Ruth
Goetz (1880–1965), had a background in journalistic or novelistic writing that
aided them in the fast production of plays so often demanded by the studio system,
and the fast output of films from the mid 1910s onward.
The pioneering German screenwriter Luise del Zopp (1871–1950) started her
career as an actress. Del Zopp had been trained as a singer and performed notably
in many opera productions in Vienna, Munich and Frankfurt, as well as theatre
productions in numerous cities, before finally reaching Berlin in the early 1900s.
In the capital she met and married the actor, screenwriter and director Rudolf
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del Zopp, and met the established early film innovators, producers and directors
Oskar Messter and Adolf Gärtner. A working relationship developed after del Zopp
won the competition organized by Messter’s production company for best screen-
play. Gärtner filmed her submitted manuscript, Adressantin verstorben (‘Sender
deceased’, 1911), which featured the silent film star Henny Porten in one of her
first successful leading roles, alongside del Zopp’s husband. Later work includes
the screenplay for Das Kriegslied der Rheinarmee (‘The War Hymn of the Rhein
Army’, 1913), directed by famous film star and director Viggo Larsen. Del Zopp’s
career as a prolific screenwriter, between 1910 and 1915, led her to work primarily
with the same directors and actors, and resulted in an oeuvre of 41 screenplays.
Her writing often featured women in precarious situations, for example Ein
Fehltritt: Die Tragödie einer Geächteten (‘Misstep: A Tragedy of a Female Criminal’,
1911), as well as plots on the subject of unrequited love, as in Sklave der Liebe
(‘A Slave of Love’, 1911). Like many contemporary screenwriters she wrote nar-
ratives based on popular literature, for example Die Hochzeit von Valeni (‘Valeni’s
Wedding’, 1912), based on the successful work of Heimat-novel-author Ludwig
Ganghofer. After her husband’s death in 1926, the director, actor, and film critic
Gerhard Lamprecht supported her financially, but little is known of her artistic
work after 1915.
One of the earliest screenwriters with a background as novelist, dramatist
and journalist is Marie Luise Droop (1890–1959). She is famous for her close
relationship to Karl May, whose work inspired her most famous screenplay, Die
Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha (‘Maharaja’s Favourite Wife’, 1919–20), which had
three sequels and was directed by the pioneering German film director Max Mack.
Droop worked as an editor at the prominent Ullstein publishing house. Her suc-
cessful novels, which featured exotic romances often set in familiar places, depict
women who are ready to sacrifice themselves in the service of love. The Ullstein
publishing house owned shares in Terra studio in Berlin and operated on a busi-
ness model that sought to profit from the success of established literary works
issued by the house. Droop’s success in the literary market paved her way into
the film industry. The Ullstein publishing house enabled a number of women
screenwriters to enter the film industry, including the famous Austrian-born novel-
ist Vicki Baum and Ruth Goetz. Over the course of Droop’s career, between 1918
and 1936, she wrote over 40 screenplays for a diverse range of films with vary-
ing themes: the Wilhelm Meister adaptation, Mignon (1922), the costume drama
Das alte Ballhaus (‘The Old Ballroom’, 1926) whose success afforded it a sequel,
the historical drama Stolzenfels am Rhein, Napoleon in Moskau (‘Stolzenfels at
the Rhein, Napoleon in Moscow’, 1927), and the colonial drama Die Reiter von
Deutsch-Afrika (‘The Raiders of German Afrika’, 1934). Her ties to the Terra studios
enabled her to continue a long career that spanned the early film industry of
Wilhelmine Germany, through the Weimar Era, and even into the Third Reich,
her last screenplay being the romantic comedy Die Drei um Christine (‘The Three
Around Christine’. 1936).
With over 50 known screenplays, often written in collaboration with leading
directors and writers, Fanny Carlsen (n.d.) is one of the most prolific screenwriters
of the early period. Remarkably little is known about her, besides her Jewish back-
ground, which most likely forced her to emigrate before 1933. Through her close
ties to producer and director Friedrich Zelnik she served as house writer for the
Zelnik-Mara studios. Her first screenplay was the costume comedy Die tolle Heirat
von Laló (‘The crazy Marriage of Laló’, 1918), which featured the early German
film star Bernd Aldor, and was directed by Lupu Pick, both men influencing her
early work. She wrote several screenplays for Aldor, who often played gentle male
figures, especially in melodramas like Marionetten der Leidenschaft (‘Marionettes
of Desire’, 1919). Carlsen also wrote costume dramas based on popular literature:
Anna Karenina (1920), for instance, and Der Apachenlord (‘The Apache Chief’,
1920), which was based on Karl May’s popular novelistic cycle, Das Geheimnis der
alten Mamsell (‘Old Mamsell’s Secret’, 1925), an adaptation of E. Marlitt’s novel
of the same name, and Die Försterchristl (‘The Girl and the Kaiser’, 1925–6), based
on Georg Jarno’s popular operetta. Die Försterchristl was a great success; silent film
star Lya Mara played a poor forester’s daughter who, unbeknownst to her, falls in
love with Emperor Joseph II. Carlsen also famously collaborated with Willy Haas
on An der schönen blauen Donau (‘On the Beautiful Blue Danube River’, 1926), Die
Weber (‘The Weavers’, 1927), an adaptation of Gerhard Hauptmann’s famous play
that featured the film star and director Paul Wegener, as well as Heut’ tanzt Mariett
(‘Mariett Dances Today’, 1927–8). Heut’ tanzt Mariett, in line with the majority of
Carlsen’s screenplays, features innocent and naïve female figures, who are easily
manipulated by their male counterparts. The obligatory happy end, however,
leaves the heroine virtuous and forgiving, despite the relationship difficulties she
has encountered. This characterization contributed considerably to the shaping of
Mara’s star persona; her roles, written by Carlsen (sometimes in collaboration with
Haas), helped her achieve great fame as the likeable Viennese girl.
The pioneering and prolific film director and screenwriter Hanna Henning
(1884–1925) has directed over 40 films. She wrote the screenplay for the famous
Bubi film series, about a lively child and his adventures, often instigated by his
mischievous nature. Henning wrote the screenplay for Der Dämon von Kolno (‘The
Demon of Kolno’, 1920), in which the heroine’s husband commits suicide after
finding out that she was hypnotized by a stranger and forced to act against her
will. Henning’s Das große Licht (‘The Big Light’, 1919–20) features the then already
famous actor Emil Jannings, and attests to Henning’s stature in the industry. Her
screenplay and directorial work on Die Furcht vor dem Weibe (‘Fear of the Woman’,
1921) is an adaptation of Georg Engel’s 1910 popular novel of the same name and
features Aldor in the title role.
Screewnriter Hella Moja (1890–1951) also had ties with the Ullstein publish-
ing house, although her contribution to the early film industry was mostly as an
actress and occasionally as a film producer. Her first screenplay was So ein Mädel
(‘What a Girl’, 1920), in which she plays the title role of a woman who saves two
male performers from immanent ruin, by using her wits and performing talents.
Moja wrote another screenplay, Die Straße des Vergessens (‘The Street of Forgetting’,
1925), in which she performs the title role alongside starlet Ida Wüst. Die Straße
des Vergessens depicts a mother-daughter relationship in an aristocratic family and
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the life of women, at the time of the waning influence of the aristocracy and the
growing authority of industry moguls. Among Moja’s other screenplays, Die andere
Seite (‘The Other Side’, 1931) features Conrad Veidt and Wolfgang Liebeneiner in
the title roles of commander and lieutenant, respectively, who struggle to follow
rules in the light of war and love. Moja faced difficulty during the early years of
the Third Reich in proving her ‘Aryan’ lineage, because she was born in Russia and
changed her name to Hella Swea.
The novelist, actress, director, and screenwriter Rosa Porten (1884–1972) was
one of the earliest scriptwriters in the German film industry. Her first screenplay,
Das Liebesglück der Blinden (‘Love Luck of the Blind’, 1910), depicts the loving rela-
tionship between a blind woman and her physician, who helps his patient regain
her sight but fears being left when she sees how ugly he is. Porten’s female lead,
however, proves loyal and not superficial. With the development of the longer
film throughout the 1910s, Porten began to write and direct romantic melodra-
mas, some of which feature her sister and other leading stars of the period in psy-
chologically complex roles. Besides writing the screenplay for the adventure film
Das Testament eines Exzentrischen (‘The Will of an Eccentric’, 1920), based on the
popular Jules Verne novel, she also plays a leading role in the film. After the mid
1920s, when Porten produced the majority of her screenplays, she retired from the
film industry to write novels.
The first three decades of the twentieth century were the formative period for
the institutional practice of screenwriting. Women screenwriters in Germany were
able to shape an increasingly standardized practice that accommodated the rising
studio system, which often included formulaic and quickly made productions
and adaptations from literature to meet the growing demand for film during the
1910s and 1920s.
The establishment of the Reich Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and
Propaganda in 1933, by the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP),
saw a radical reform of film production. The NSDAP enlisted the film industry
as a major organ of dissemination of Nazi propaganda. The Nazi film industry
demanded films depicting the Germanic legends of the past and celebrating
‘Aryan’ ideals, while vilifying peoples considered to pose a threat to this ideal
(especially Jews). Alongside feature films and documentaries, most famously those
of Leni Riefenstahl, newsreels were produced by the semi-autonomous larger film
studios like UFA, Tobis, Bavaria, and Terra, all of which conformed to practices set
forth by the Reich Cultural Chamber. Under the auspices of the Reich Cultural
Chamber, ‘non-Aryan’ individuals were excluded from practising their trade in
the film industry, which forced a great number of film directors, screenwriters,
actors and other key players to go into exile. Among the most prominent of these
were Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk and Billy Wilder, who all went
on to have successful careers in Hollywood. The screenwriter and novelist Vicki
Baum was among those to emigrate, following a highly acclaimed career during
the Weimar era. Grand Hotel (1930) was based on her popular novel Menschen im
Hotel (‘People in a Hotel’, 1929), and was produced by MGM studios in Hollywood
to great popular acclaim.
The films of the period often featured women as mothers, wives and daugh-
ters, valorizing their domestic function as crucial for the longevity of the Reich.
A number of maternal melodramas featured women whose husbands and sons
prevail because of maternal support, despite difficulties posed by an external
threat. Though not intended to contradict the portrayal of the domestic as the
quintessential space for woman, films promoting women in the labour force were
supposed to find alternative ways to aid their contribution to the well being of
the Reich (Hake 2002:75). Despite the limitations imposed by the Reich Cultural
Chamber under the leadership of Joseph Goebbels, the film industry of the Third
Reich produced more than one thousand feature films. In this cultural climate,
a small number of women held prominent roles as screenwriters, directors and
actresses, among others. The most famous woman of this period is director, pro-
ducer, actress, and screenwriter Riefenstahl, who was already known for her acting
in the so-called Bergfilm (mountain films) Der heilige Berg (‘The Holy Mountain’,
1925–6), Das blaue Licht (‘The Blue Light’, 1931–2), and SOS Iceberg (1932–3). Her
directorial success, however, came with Triumph des Willens (‘Triumph of the Will’,
1934–5).
Thea von Harbou (1888–1954) remains the most famous screenwriter of
German film history. Known for her collaborative work with her husband, Fritz
Lang, during the Weimar era, Harbou wrote the screenplay for one of the most
important films of the twentieth entury, Metropolis (1925–6). She enjoyed a sig-
nificant career during the Nazi era, writing many films that were successful with
Third Reich audiences such as the screenplay for the crime drama Verwehte Spuren
(‘Covered Tracks’, 1938), directed by Veit Harlan.
Though her career spans the early period through to the post-World War II years,
actress and producer Lotte Neumann (1896–1977) wrote over 20 screenplays dur-
ing the Third Reich, most notably historical dramas featuring a rebellious and
tyrannical male genius as a precursor of German nationalist ideology. Neumann’s
screenplays for Robert Koch (1939) and Friedrich Schiller (1940) appropriate major
male historical figures in the service of Nazi propaganda by confirming ‘male sub-
jectivity as the foundation of German identity’, and insisting upon ‘innovative
and revolutionary impulses through patriotic feelings and nationalist ideas’ (Hake
83). Neumann’s screenplay for the romantic comedy Die Nacht in Venedig (‘Night
in Venice’, 1941–2), directed by Paul Verhoeven, features a separated couple who
find a way back to love after many hardships, the narrative promoting the keep-
ing of marriage vows despite temptation and marital difficulty. Neumann wrote
another romantic comedy in collaboration with Walter Wassermann: Die heimli-
chen Bräute (1942–3), which depicts a wealthy and unmarried farmer who faces
trials and tribulations before finding his way to the woman he loves. Neumann
wrote two more screenplays after the war, including the romance Hochzeit auf
Reisen (‘Wedding in Transit’, 1953), directed by Verhoeven and starring a young
Karlheinz Böhm.
Gullible heroines were also a feature of the screenplays by Ellen Fechner
(1895–1951). She wrote a handful of scripts that feature a naïve woman who
returns to her husband after a trial separation. Fechner’s debut screenplay was
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a collaborative effort with Willy Clever, Meine Frau Teresa (‘My Wife Theresa’,
1942). The film portrays a novelist’s wife, who becomes upset after her husband’s
successful novel reveals their life to the public. The wife returns to her husband
after learning that theirs was a model relationship despite the upset caused by the
revelations. Ich werde dich auf Händen tragen (‘I Will Carry You in My Arms’, 1943)
is another collaborative screenplay by Fechner, this time featuring an older mar-
ried couple who learn to love one another again. Fechner’s post-war collaboration
with Helmut Käutner and Rudolf Jugert on Film ohne Titel (‘Film Without a Title’,
1947–8) presents a major departure from the romance-based writing she produced
during the Third Reich. Film ohne Titel is a meta-reflection on narrative and filmic
practice in the aftermath of the war in which the director is in disagreement with
the cast about the outcome of the film; he finally turns to the characters to see
which direction they deem most appropriate for the film to end in.
Though the Nazi period famously employed the film industry in the service of
its propagandistic initiatives, a great portion of the films were intended to enter-
tain as well as to serve ideological aims. The popular genre cinema of the late
1920s and early 1930s served as a blueprint for many screenplays, especially those
with romance or historical plots.
The film industry of the immediate post-war period, Sabine Hake notes, is
marked by ‘historical ruptures and continuities’ (Hake 2002:87). The Allied mili-
tary governments aided Germany in rebuilding this important instrument of cul-
tural production, while at the same time implementing re-education and reform
policies designed to eliminate further threat that any remnant Nazi ideals could
pose. Yet, despite facing difficulties, the post-war film industry gradually emerged
and a large number of industry players, including directors, screenwriters, actors,
and so on found ways to re-integrate themselves.
Renée Stobrawa (1898–1971) was such a figure. After an extensive career as
an actress during the Weimar era, as well as the Third Reich, Stobrawa collabo-
rated with Fritz Grenschow on screenplays in the 1950s and 1960s in which she
often starred. Her adaptations of popular fairy tales were met with considerable
audience success and were shot in both colour and black and white. Rotkäppchen
(‘Little Red Riding Hood’, 1953) is a modern retelling of the popular fairy tale, as
are Hänsel und Gretel (1954), Frau Holle (‘Mother Hulda’, 1954), Der Struwwelpeter
(1954–5), Aschenputtel (‘Cinderella’, 1955), Dornröschen (‘Sleeping Beauty’, 1955),
and Tischlein deck dich (‘The Wishing-Table’, 1956). She directed a short documen-
tary film, Jungen und Lokomotiven (‘Boys and Locomotives’, 1956–7), and contin-
ued to write, produce, and/or act in fairy tales, children’s and young adult film
productions through the early 1960s. Her later screenplays, like Schneeweißchen
und Rosenrot (‘Snow White and Rose Red’, 1960–1), were primarily completed for
the burgeoning TV industry and the growing production needs that followed for
this new market.
Like Strobrawa, the prolific screenwriter Erna Fentsch (1909–97) enjoyed a con-
siderable career as an actress in the Weimar and Third Reich eras before turning
to writing in the mid 1940s. Fentsch’s work on the romantic comedy Der Milionär
(‘The Millionaire’, 1944–5) represents one of a number of productions that began
before the fall of the Third Reich, which were finished or screened long after pro-
duction was completed. The film is thus exemplary of the continuities that exist
in production between the Third Reich and the emerging film industry post-1945.
Fentsch subsequently wrote the screenplay for the melodrama Ein Herz spielt falsch
(‘A Heart Plays Wrong’, 1953), which is based on the popular Hans Ulrich Horster
story of the same name. She collaborated with G. W. Pabst on Das Bekenntnis der
Ina Kahr (‘The Confession of Ina Kahr’, 1954) as scriptwriter. The drama features a
woman who poisons an unloving husband and who turns herself in, only for the
murder investigation to be reopened and her mitigating motivation to be revealed.
Fentsch additionally wrote screenplays for historical melodramas like Kronprinz
Rudolfs letzte Liebe (‘Crown Prince Rudolph’s Last Love’, 1956), alongside screen-
plays for a number of Heimatfilme, as well as for two early episodes of the popular
TV crime series Tatort.
Women have played a smaller role in the film industry of the German
Democratic Republic (or East Germany), though a number of notable women
screenwriters exist. The consolidation of film production and exhibition practice
through the major film studio DEFA paved the way for a prolific film industry
that remained primarily insular, with only a few international exports. The direc-
tor and screenwriter Evelyn Schmidt (b. 1949) collaborated with Jürgen Kruse
on the screenplay for Seitensprung (‘Affair’, 1979–80), which features a woman
who learns to love her husband’s illegitimate daughter. A woman takes centre
stage in Das Fahrrad (‘The Bike’, 1982), which Schmidt directs and for which
she writes the screenplay. Das Fahrrad depicts a working-class mother who falls
in love with a wealthy man, only to find out that he will not support her or her
lifestyle. Among the East German screenwriters and directors to consider women’s
experiences is Iris Gusner (b. 1941), whose Alle meine Mädchen (‘All My Girls’,
1979–80) treats the difficulties that greed and money impose on interpersonal
relationships. Similarly, Gusner’s Kaskade rückwärts (‘Kaskade Backwards’, 1983–4)
considers a single mother’s struggles to find love, depicting the social setting that
the workplace offers in a positive light. The documentary filmmaker and screen-
writer Bärbl Bergmann (b. 1931) incorporates fairy-tale motifs in her screenplays
for children. Hokuspokus Fidibus (1957) tells of a young boy’s desire for a magical
shortcut to receiving good grades, only to learn that the best way to get good
grades is by working hard. This didactic component is present in Bergmann’s sub-
sequent documentary films, Ein ungewöhnlicher Tag (‘An Unusual Day’, 1958–9)
and Wegweiser Gesundheit (‘Guide to Health’, 1978).
The film industry of the 1960s is composed of a number of female artists who
began to train in the emerging film institutes in Germany, a practice that departs
from previous, less-standardized training practices. Women directors, producers
and screenwriters of this generation begin to develop and implement a decid-
edly feminist aesthetic in their work in light of the male-dominated film indus-
try and the public discussions surrounding the women’s movement – an early
such screenwriter is Ula Stöckl (b. 1938). Screenwriting in this period is marked
by experimentation with essayistic and documentary forms that blend with
traditional forms of film narrative, in seeking to investigate the role of women
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in contemporary society. The focus on form enabled more subjective or auto/

biographical approaches to narrative practice in films that were simultaneously
personal and political.
A number of women directors, screenwriters and producers emerged in the 1970s
with the aim of radically revising male-centred film aesthetics. They were influenced
by the women’s movement of the 1970s and reacted against the male-centred
student politics of the 1960s, as well as the male-dominated art and mainstream
film industry of the same period. Autobiographical and biographical storylines
sought to place centre stage the personal experiences of women. Director, pro-
ducer, actress and screenwriter Helke Sander (b. 1937) was one of the key feminist
filmmakers of this period. She completed her earliest work while a student at the
Film Akademie in Berlin. Subjektitüde (‘Subjectitude’, 1966), the short she wrote
and directed, studies the interior monologue of a couple on their first encounter
at a bus stop. In the documentary film Silvio (1967), Sander investigates single-
parenthood by presenting her son’s stressful day as being caused because she is a
working mother. Other documentary films follow, among them Brecht die Macht
der Manipulateure (‘Break the Power of the Manipulators’, 1967–8), which she
also wrote and directed. The film studies questionable media practices during the
time of the student movement and the outbreak of the Vietnam War. Sander’s
documentary films of the 1970s focus primarily on women’s experiences, con-
tributing to the broader issues at stake for the women’s movement of the 1970s.
She collaborated with Sara Schumann on the TV documentary film Macht die
Pille frei? (‘Does the Pill Liberate?’, 1972). In the early 1980s, her interest in the
subjective experiences of women was manifested in the feature film Der subjektive
Faktor (‘The Subjective Factor’, 1980–1), in which she blends autobiographical
and documentary elements with a fictive storyline about the women’s movement.
During the 1980s and 1990s she wrote and directed a number of documentary and
feature films, most prominently BeFreier und Befreite: Krieg-Vergewaltigungen-Kinder
(‘Liberators and Liberated: War, Rape, and Children’, 1990–2), in which she inter-
views officials and female victims of rape during Berlin’s occupation years in the
aftermath of the war, engaging the thesis that women are the true victims of war.
With a parallel background and aesthetic interest to that of Sander, Helma
Sanders-Brahms’ (1940–2014) documentary and feature films made her one of
the most important women of the New German Cinema, an aesthetic movement
that sought to politicize and redefine German film practice against the entertain-
ment film industry of the 1950s. Her debut documentary film, Angelika Urban,
Verkäuferin, verlobt (‘Angelika Urban: Sales Associate, Engaged’, 1970), which
she wrote and directed, is a portrait of a young woman struggling to negotiate
private and work life. Here Sanders-Brahms employs voiceover narration, which
became a dominant filmic practice for her, in an attempt to personalize the lives
of her heroines by empowering the characters to tell their own story. She wrote
the screenplay and directed Das Erdbeben in Chili (‘Earthquake in Chile’, 1974)
for TV, an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella of the same name, which
features a couple’s difficulties in staying together because of familial obligations
and class differences that forbid their union. Sanders-Brahms returns to Kleist in
the historic drama Heinrich (1976–7), after writing and directing Shirins Hochzeit
(‘Shirin’s Wedding’, 1975–6), one of the first films to address the question of guest
workers in Germany, albeit from a woman’s perspective. Deutschland bleiche Mutter
(‘Germany Pale Mother’, 1979–80) remains Sanders-Brahms’ most internationally
recognized film, which she wrote, directed and produced. The film traces the title
figure’s struggles before, during and after the war, examining women’s experiences
during this crucial period of German history that renders women as victims of
historical and political reality. During the 1980s and 1990s she continued to direct
and write scripts for her own productions, revisiting the political documentary
with Jetzt leben – Juden in Berlin (‘Living Now – Jews in Berlin’, 1994) before writ-
ing Die Farbe der Seele (‘The Colour of the Soul’, 2003), which features Eva Mattes
in the title role and depicts the sympathetic care of a nurse. Sanders-Brahms’ last
writing was for the historical drama Geliebte Clara (‘Beloved Clara’, 2007–8), about
the life of Clara Schumann.
A great number of Sanders-Brahms’ films received financial support from
TV channels, foremost from the public-service television broadcaster Zweites
Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), which helped shape her public profile in the mid
1970s (Knight 1992: 12). Shirins Hochzeit, for instance, ‘achieved exceptionally
high viewing figures and was selected as “television film of the month”’ (Knight
1992: 12). Indeed, a number of women screenwriters in the 1960s and 1970s
benefited from the TV industry, which often purchased completed products, com-
missioned specifically themed productions, and subsidized others.
Among the most notable screenwriters from the 1970s and 1980s is Pea
Fröhlich (b. 1943) who collaborated with Peter Märtelsheimer on the screenplay
for Reiner Werner Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun (‘The Marriage of Maria
Braun’, 1978) and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (‘Veronika Voss’s Yearning’,
1981–2). Both films address complicated historical and everyday situations that
place women in precarious circumstances and demand sacrifice and suffering
from women in the hope of a better future. Fröhlich wrote, often in collaboration
with Märtelsheimer, a total of 11 other screenplays over the course of the 1980s,
1990s and 2000s, including Ich bin die Andere (‘I’m the Other Girl’, 2005–6), which
was directed by Margarethe von Trotta (b. 1942). Ich bin die Andere Frau is an
adaptation from Märtelsheimer’s novel of the same name and features a mysteri-
ous woman who suffers at the hands of an abusive father.
Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942) is known for her documentary and narrative films
from the 1970s and is currently still active as a screenwriter, director and producer.
One of her earliest works is Laokoon & Söhne (‘Laokoon and Sons’, 1972–3), which
she directed and co-wrote with Tabea Blumenschein. The film depicts a woman
overcome by her inability to cope with the normative identity and gender expec-
tations imposed upon her by the surrounding world. Ottinger’s satire Madame X:
eine absolute Herrscherin (‘Madame X: An Absolute Mistress’, 1977–8) serves as a
critical reflection on the failures of the women’s movement. She then wrote and
directed the travel documentary China: Die Künste-Der Alltag (‘China: The Arts and
the People’, 1985), as well as the narrative film Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (‘Joan
of Arc of Mongolia’, 1988–99), which features a number of women travelling on
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the trans-Siberian railroad, who encounter mysterious cultural practices as well

as difficulties in understanding each other. In the documentary Exil Shanghai
(‘Exile Shanghai’, 1995–7), Ottinger studies the stories of various Jewish families
who were in exile in Shanghai during the Third Reich. Her most recent directo-
rial and screenwriting project was the documentary Unter Schnee (‘Beneath Snow’,
2010–11), which studies the everyday life and artistic practice of Japanese village
inhabitants and performers after the difficulties imposed by heavy snowfalls.
The films of writer and director Monika Treut (b. 1954) challenge heteronormal
attitudes to intimacy by studying various forms of sexual practice and orienta-
tion. From the beginning of her career to the present she has written 19 screen-
plays. Her early work includes Bondage (1983) and Verführung: Die Grausame Frau
(‘Seduction: the Cruel Woman’, 1984–5), the latter of which is based on Leopold
von Sacher-Maso’s novel Venus im Pelz, which studies sexual pleasure and passion-
ate forces. Treut’s later work includes the documentary film Gendernauts (1999),
which depicts a number of transgendered artists in the San Francisco LGBTQI
scene.
A number of key women of the film industry of the 1970s have enjoyed long
careers and are still working today. The practices important for screenwriters dur-
ing the formative years of the women’s movement in Germany informed the work
of a considerable number of women filmmakers and screenwriters who, through-
out the 1990s and 2000s, have contributed not only to art cinema, but also to
popular cinema. Doris Dörrie (b. 1955), for example, writes and directs popular
melodramas and comedies, while Jutta Brückner (b. 1941) produces screenplays
and directs films intended for a more specialized audience. Nina Grosse (b. 1958)
wrote and co-directed, with Helmut Berger, the dark comedy Nie im Leben (‘Never
in Life’, 1990), which received wide critical and popular acclaim. Grosse’s next
screenplay was Olgas Sommer (‘Olga’s Summer’, 2002–4), which she directed and
which features an eccentric and charming teenage girl and her adventurous day-
dreams. Grosse’s most considerable success lies with her work on the TV crime
drama 21 Liebesbriefe (‘21 Love Letters’, 2004), which features a female detective.
21 Liebesbriefe was very popular, which assured Grosse financing for a sequel:
Franziskas Gespür für Männer (‘Franziska’s Intuition about Men’, 2006).
Feo Aladag (b. 1972) is well known for her acting and directing, but she also wrote
screenplays for a number of episodes of the popular TV crime series Tatort (1970–).
Aladag wrote the screenplay for Die Fremde (‘The Strange Woman’, 2008–10), which
deals with a mother-daughter relationship within a Turkish immigrant family.
Considerable national and international attention, from critics and audiences
alike, was received by writer and director Caroline Link (b. 1964) for Jenseits der
Stille (‘Beyond the Silence’, 1995–6), which depicts a young woman’s life with her
deaf-mute parents. The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Her next international success was Nirgendwo in Afrika (‘Nowhere in Africa’, 2001),
which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Nirgendwo in Afrika features a German-
Jewish family in exile in Africa during the Third Reich. Link’s most recent directo-
rial work and screenplay is the father-son drama Exit Marrakech (‘Exit Marrakesh’,
2012–13).
Esther Gronenborn (b. 1966) is one of the women screenwriters who con-
tinue to integrate themes into their films that address the issues of migrants in
Germany. Adil geht (‘Adil Leaves’, 2004–5) is her most successful screenplay, for
which she won a number of national awards.
The sisters Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli (b. 1973 and 1979, respectively)
have composed screenplays and directed a number of dramas and dark comedies
that depict the quotidian life of Germany’s migrant youth. Most famous is their
collaboration on Almanya: Wilkommen in Deutschland (‘Almanya: Welcome to
Germany’, 2009–10), a comedic recounting of a Turkish guest worker’s family life
in Germany.
Today’s German film industry features approximately two dozen high-profile
women screenwriters, who have active careers writing scripts for the silver screen
as well as television productions. With the particularly interesting development of
the expansion of the film institutes in Germany, which train a growing number
of screenwriters and filmmakers, this still small number of women screenwriters
is likely to increase.
Ruth Goetz (1880–1965)
Juliane Scholz
Ruth Amalie Goetz, sometimes known as Ruth Goetz von Schüching or Ruth
von Schüching, was born in Silesia, Germany.1 After school she became a French
translator and writer, publishing her first novel in 1909, as well as writing for
magazines and newspapers. She was an editor at the publishing houses ‘Ullstein’
and ‘Mosse’ in Germany. At the advent of World War I, Goetz began to submit
writing for the film industry and went on to become one of many women in the
early days of the German film industry who published popular novels and then
became successful screenwriters in the 1910s.
From 1911 Goetz was employed by the French film production company
Gaumont, and wrote the screenplay for Les Amis in the same year. During the
First World War she worked as a full-time screenwriter for the German production
company Decla-Film, and wrote screenplays for director Alwin Neuß, producer
Erich Pommer (Der Weg der Tränen [1916]), and scripted Mouchy (1917) for star
actress Hedda Vernon.
After the First World War, in 1918–19, she co-wrote, with director and producer
Joe May, the epic movies Die Herrin der Welt and the three-part Veritas Vincit. She
wrote for other production companies, such as Ring-Film and Carl-Wilhelm-
Produktion, in a range of genres, but preferred dramatic and melodramatic subjects.
The advent of ‘the talkies’ finished her career in the movie industry in 1928. Her
last important work as a screenwriter in Germany was for the Asta Nielsen-starring
film Die Dirnentragödie in 1927. From then on she concentrated on her career as
a novelist and journalist. The Jewish Ruth von Schüching (Goetz took the last
name from her husband, Bernhard von Schüching, after their marriage in 1922)
was forced to emigrate to England after the Nazi takeover in early 1933 when the
national socialist regime forbade her to publish her work.
Germany 375
Victoria Claudia Wolff (1903–92)
Juliane Scholz
Victoria Wolff is one of the most successful German emigrant screenwriters to
make it in Hollywood, but is now mostly forgotten by film historians. Born into a
bourgeois, upper-class household in Heilbronn, Germany, she married her school-
friend Alfred Wolff in 1924. Wolff went on to work as an editor for different
regional newspapers, publishing her first novel, Eine Frau wie du und ich, in 1932
(under the name Victoria T. Wolf).
After the Nazi takeover in 1933, Wolff, Jewish by birth, emigrated to Ascona, which
became the centre of exile culture in Switzerland and offered Jewish emigrants the
possibility of writing and publishing. Wolff published novels and articles under
the pseudonym Ellinor Colling – for instance, Glück ist eine Eigenschaft in 1937. In the
late 1930s, publishing became nearly impossible when she was blacklisted by the Nazi
regime, after publishing a political statement in her novel Gast in der Heimat in 1935.
In 1938 Wolff’s request for an extension of her stay in Switzerland was refused. Wolff
was denounced because she earned money for her work and was seen as competition
for Swiss writers. She left Switzerland in 1939, emigrating to the United States in 1941.
As Wolff could not publish her stories, she decided to move to Los Angeles and sell
her translated novels to the film studios. She became a professional screenwriter and
was employed on a weekly contract of $800. 20th Century Fox finished a film based
on her novel Tales of Manhattan in 1942. Though many of her screenplays and the
screen rights for her novels were sold, but not produced, the sale of Truth in Demand
to Fox for $15,000 in 1943 meant that Wolff was able to afford a high standard of
living in Los Angeles for a while. Her career ended somewhat abruptly in 1949 when
Wolff claimed copyright for the screenplay of Case History. This became a precedent
case in copyright and author’s rights in Hollywood, but the lawsuit resulted in the
industry avoiding working with Wolff. She tried to reawaken her literary career after-
wards, but had only limited success as a novelist in the United States.
Vicki Baum (1888–1960)
Juliane Scholz
Vicki Baum was born in Vienna, Austria and, although a harpist by profession,
became one of the most famous novelists of the Weimar Republic. She left
Germany in 1932 to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood and is best known for
the film adaptation of her best-selling novel and the Broadway drama Menschen
im Hotel, which Edmund Goulding directed under the title Grand Hotel in 1931,
starring Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. Baum began her studies at the Academy
of Music in Vienna in 1904 and worked as harpist at the symphonic orchestra in
her hometown. After her second marriage to the conductor Richard Lehrt in 1916,
she began to work as a full-time editor for different magazines of the Ullstein
Verlag company in Hannover and Berlin. Her first best-selling novel was Stud.
chem. Helene Willfüer, published in 1928, which was a modernist, social discourse
on the so-called ‘new women’ in Germany. Vicki Baum, and her protagonist, were
role models for the independent woman, which was one of the reasons the novel
sold over 100,000 copies and made Baum famous worldwide.
A year later Baum published her most acclaimed novel, Menschen im Hotel/
Grand Hotel, which was dramatized for the theatre by Max Reinhardt in Berlin and
became an international success and Broadway hit. Baum mostly wrote popular
novels and stories, which made her work too trivial in the eyes of the intellectual
German reviewers and critics, as she didn’t fit in the canon of great authors like
Thomas Mann or Berthold Brecht, although Baum’s writing style and subject mat-
ter were the basis for her later success in Hollywood.
Baum went to New York for two weeks in 1931 at the invitation of her US pub-
lisher, Dr Pauker, who arranged her adaptation of Grand Hotel, which he had sold
to Paramount for $5,000. Baum was naïve about business finances and surprised
that her experimental and eccentric novel, with different episodes and many pro-
tagonists, would be such a hit on Broadway. But she had a feeling for narrative
and characterization and was offered work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Also,
because of the coming of sound, the film industry was searching for new, talented
authors who could submit story ideas and write dialogue.
Ernst Lubitsch asked Baum to write a short novel in German based on Grand
Hotel, but set in a department store. She was paid $5,000 and given a six-month
contract from Paramount Studios, with a weekly salary of $2,500, which was high
for a new screenwriter at that time. She moved to Los Angeles with her husband,
but then Paramount cancelled her contract. MGM went on to hire her for $2,000
a week to work on the treatment of Grand Hotel. Baum moved back to Germany
and worked at Ullstein Verlag, but the social tensions in Germany made her feel
unsafe. After Grand Hotel was premiered she emigrated with her family to Los
Angeles and they became US citizens in 1933.
Baum signed a new contract with MGM, agreeing to work only six months
a year as a full-time screenwriter, and the rest of the time she freelanced and
worked on her novels. Baum felt that she was not a good screenwriter and did not
understand much of the technical and narrative specifics of the medium. Yet, in
her US career she wrote mostly in English and had success with short stories and
novels like Hotel Shanghai (1939) and the sequel to Menschen im Hotel, which was
called Hotel Berlin, in 1943. The latter was filmed and directed by Peter Godfrey
in 1945. She also worked with Walter Reisch on the screenplay for the anti-Nazi
film Unfinished Business in 1941. Her novels and stories were adapted for the
screen and TV many times. Baum saw herself as a writer of novels and then a
professional full-time screenwriter. She tried to recognize the rules of filmmaking
in Hollywood and to fit into the studio system, succeeding in this where many of
the exiled community of writers had failed.
Thea von Harbou (1888–1954)
Juliane Scholz
Thea Gabriele von Harbou (for biographical data see Burgmer 1966: 645f; Klee
2007: 125; Schlatter 2010: 166–70), born in Tauperlitz, Germany, was one of
Germany 377
the first German women in the film industry to have a career as a professional
screenwriter. Harbou gained iconic status especially for her collaboration with her
second husband, Fritz Lang. Throughout her long career she became one of the
highest-paid film writers and her fame in the 1920s and 1930s was comparable to
the outstanding but controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Harbou wrote her
first script in 1917 and was an established screenwriter by the 1920s. After 1945,
Harbou, like Riefenstahl, refused to explain her involvement in the Nazi regime
and went on making movies in the Federal Repulic of Germany in the early 1950s
without showing any sign of regret. Harbou’s career is an example of how a new
professional craft like screenwriting was established when film became a com-
mercialized medium. Moreover, her career can be regarded as a prototype for a
professional screenwriter in Germany. Harbou is best known for the expression-
ist movies she co-authored with Fritz Lang, such as Metropolis (1925–6), and her
screenplays for the national socialist film industry.
Harbou is credited with around 80 screenplays, but her professional life was
overshadowed by her involvement in Nazi Germany and the cultural agenda of
Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler. Harbou’s early screenwriting, around the out-
break of the First World War, suggested a deep-rooted interest in the mystification
of German nationalism and the glorification of its imperalist past. Indeed, her
flexibility and well-trained ability to write emotional stories with a strong visual
style assured her success as a screenwriter.
Harbou has been considered of little importance by film historians and in litera-
ture studies because she wrote popular novels, short stories and light, entertaining
prose, aimed at a mass audience. Her role in the Nazi dictatorship also made her
persona non grata for most post-war film historians and critics. Nevertheless, her
works have more to offer than Nazi propaganda, and Harbou gained her biggest
artistic success in the 1920s when she collaborated with Fritz Lang. Academics
have rediscovered Harbou’s career as a screenwriter and researchers on the history
of screenwriting in Germany now include Harbou’s influence on the development
of the commercialization of the film industry, and view her oeuvre in a broader
social and cultural context (Bruns 1995; Keiner 1991; Sigmund 2002; Kasten
1990).
Harbou began her artistic career as an actress at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf
in 1906. Between 1908 and 1914 she performed in Weimar, Chemitz and Aachen,
at the same time writing her first novel, Die nach uns kommen/Those Who Follow Us
(1910), which became a big commercial success. Harbou then concentrated on her
writing and became a famous Unterhaltungsschriftstellerin who worked for big pub-
lishing houses like Ullstein. Her books were full of nationalist mysticism and very
patriotic: Der Krieg und die Frauen/The War and the Women (1913) and Die deutsche
Frau im Weltkrieg/The German Woman in World War (1916) were archetypes for
the bombastic nationalist epics about war heroes and the role of women within
the rise of nationalism (Bruns 1995: 5f). Harbou’s books appealed to the German
zeitgeist and were especially popular with the younger generation.
After moving to Berlin, in 1917, Harbou was approached by film producers with
offers to adapt her popular novels (Schlatter 2010: 166; Sigmund 2002: 195–9). She
was an astute businesswomen and negotiated with the film studios and publishing
houses for larger royalties (Schlatter 2010: 166). Harbou wrote her first screenplay
for Joe May Film GmbH, Die Liebe von Hetty Raimond/The Love of Hetty Raimond
(1917), based on her best-selling novel. Although her first work for Joe May is
not credited, she continued to write scripts for him, such as Die Legende von der
heiligen Simplicia/The Legend of Holy Simplicity (1920) and Frauen von Gnadenstein/
The Women of Gnadenstein (1920).
Harbou’s collaboration with director Fritz Lang began in 1921 (Burgmer 1966:
645). The couple made some of the best-known movies of the German expression-
ist film movement during the Weimar period. Lang’s films visualized phantastic
and surrealistic ideas with strong architectural forms. His approach matched the
sentimentalist and phantastic elements of Harbou’s writing and her visual concept
of mysticism. Harbou’s script ideas gave shape to Lang’s distinct cinematographic
style and her novels and stories became the basis for their films. The following
examples are the highlights of the films they made together as a writing-directing
team: Der müde Tod/Destiny (1921), the two-part epic Das indische Grabmal/The
Indian Tomb (1921), Dr Mabuse/Doctor Mabuse (three parts, 1921–2), Metropolis
(1925–6) and M (1931). These outstanding films established Harbou and Lang as
professional filmmakers in the 1920s and their artistic and cultural impact has
been profound (Sigmund 2002: 200–2).
Harbou’s most notable screenplay in the twenties was the adventure Das indis-
che Grabmal/The Indian Tomb (1921–2), which she wrote with Lang, and which
was an adaptation of her novel, published in 1917. The resulting epic was made in
two parts: Part I: Die Sendung des Yoghi/The Mission of the Yogi and Part II: Der Tiger
von Eschnapur/The Tiger of Bengal (1921), directed by Joe May. The screenplay was
refilmed three times and produced again in 1938 (directed by Richard Eichberg)
and in 1959 (directed by Lang). The films were not only romantic adventures,
but said much about the German national relationship to the Orient, and the
imperialistic attitudes and stereotypes about India, which had been a common
feature in the writings of philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche since the
nineteenth century (Shedde and Hediger 2005).
The first Joe May version of the movie was not a big commercial hit, but the
epic revealed the themes and genres to which Harbou was best suited: mystical,
spiritual, fantastic adventures, packed with emotion and a thrilling story. Before
releasing the first Nibelungen (1924) movie, Harbou’s novel, based on the epic
medieval poem Nibelungenlied, was published in magazines and was a great suc-
cess because of the clever cross-marketing strategy for the movie and the novel
(Schlatter 2010: 166). The Nibelungen films can be considered as prototypes of the
ballad film, a German film genre which contains fantastical elements and is based
on a beautiful setting and milieu, rather than story, dialogue and strong charac-
terization (Höfig 2008: 102–205). Harbou used the spiritual elements of places like
the mountains to obtain a particular emotional atmosphere. Her use of nature and
mountains as mystic elements influenced filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose first
directing job for Das blaue Licht/The Blue Light (1931), based on a fairy tale of the
Brothers Grimm, was set in the Dolomites and resembled Harbou’s ballad movies.
Germany 379
Adolf Hitler later would name Nibelungen as one of his favourite German movies
of all time (Sigmund 2002: 200–2).
After the Nazi takeover in 1933, Lang and Harbou were divorced and Lang,
because he was a Jewish artist, was forced into exile, emigrating to the United
States. Harbou then married an Indian student, Ayi Tendulkar, but was still writ-
ing three or four films a year (Schlatter 2010: 167). She had become a highly
ranked professional screenwriter, as well known as colleagues like Carl Mayer or
Robert Liebmann (Keiner 1991: 212–18). During the Nazi dictatorship her fame
continued and she became a member of the NSDAP in 1941 (Schlatter 2010: 167).
She soon became the ‘national socialist screenwriting queen’ with a salary up to
100,000 Reichsmark per year (Sigmund 2002: 204–7).
In fact Harbou collaborated with all the top national socialist filmmakers. Her
work with Veit Harlan for the movie Verwehte Spuren/Covered Tracks (1938) can be
considered the paradigmatic example of how the national socialist propaganda
agenda interlocked with the entertainment industry. Verwehte Spuren was based on
a German radio play by Hans Rothe and broadcast in 1935 by Deutschlandsender.
Unlike the screen adaptation, Rothe’s version criticized a capitalistic society with no
human face (Bolz 1991: 380–3). Notably Rothe had to emigrate to Italy in 1934 after
being the president of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin from 1932 until 1933. Harlan
and Harbou’s movie version of Verwehte Spuren became one of the most subtle feature
films of the Nazi propaganda machine. The film can be seen as an example of ‘hid-
den propaganda’, cleverly reconstructing the story to support the Gestapo’s persecu-
tion of millions of innocent people. The movie states that Volksgemeinschaft and the
fatherland are much more important than individual human rights (Schmid 2010).
Harbou’s films during the ‘Third Reich’ were full of national socialist propa-
ganda, but in most of her works this was hidden behind a veneer of light romantic
comedy. The German Press Association, in 1944, had Harbou on its list of indis-
pensable authors, who were allowed to keep on working for their fatherland and
were exempted from serving at the front (Reichsverband Deutsche Presse 1944).
Harbou held various high positions between 1933 and 1945; she was Spielleiterin,
a head screenwriter and head of the dramaturgy department for feature films.
She worked closely with Joseph Goebbels and his Reichspropagandaleitung (the
Nazi party’s central propaganda office). She was also head of the Verband deutscher
Tonfilmautoren, the professional organization for screenwriters in Germany at
that time. The organization was gleichgeschaltet (brought into line) after the Nazi
takeover in 1933 in the Reich Culture Chamber. Harbou became a consultant for
censorship issues, too. If a screenplay was questioned by censorship institutions
like the Filmprüfstelle, they would contact Harbou to ensure that she advised the
author until the script was written in correct Nazi terms and showed the ‘right’
Weltanschauung (Sigmund 2002: 242–6). Harbou scripted the last movie of the
Third Reich, Das Leben geht weiter/Life Goes On (1944–5), receiving her last pay-
check as a screenwriter in April 1945. Her leading role in national socialist cultural
life made her a compromised person and a political artist who had supported
Hitler since the ‘Machtergreifung’, when he seized power, in 1933 (Keiner 1991:
206; Sigmund 2002: 243).
Harbou was blacklisted in July 1945 when Allied troops took over Germany and
noted her pivotal role in the regime. After being arrested she spent two months in
a British camp where she cleared up destroyed buildings and became a Trümmerfrau
(rubble woman) (Schlatter 2010: 167). But the need to de-Nazify and re-educate
post-war Germany meant that every single professional was needed to rebuild the
film industry in Germany. Harbou gained a Persilschein, which absolved her of any
Nazi crimes and allowed her to work in the film industry again. Harbou began to
write again after the Federal Republic of Germany was established in 1949, working
with many other former national socialist artists. In post-war Germany she con-
centrated on popular romantic comedies like Dr Höll/Doctor Höll (1950–1) and sen-
timental regional background movies (Heimatfilme) like Dein Herz ist meine Heimat/
Your Heart is My Home (1953), but could not repeat her successes of the 1920s and
1930s. Thea von Harbou died in 1954 after attending the IV. Berlin Film Festival
where she gave a speech about her former husband Fritz Lang.
Harbou’s career as a screenwriter, despite her involvement with Nazi Germany,
should not be forgotten: she was a specialist in her craft and her professional work
since the 1920s, especially her partnership with Fritz Lang, and the films she made
during the national socialist dictatorship, make Harbou a significant figure in film
history, both nationally and internationally.
Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003)
Carl Wilson
Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl, or Leni Riefenstahl, was a German film director,
producer, editor, actress and dancer whose career spanned and reflected the major
cultural and political shifts of the twentieth century.
Prior to her work behind the camera, Riefenstahl acted in seven films. Most of
these pictures featured Riefenstahl as the beautiful lead actress in the highly suc-
cessful mountain genre films (Bergfilm), such as The Holy Mountain (1926), directed
by Arnold Fanck, and The White Hell of Pitz Palu, directed by Fanck and G. W. Pabst.
Yet, to a modern audience, Riefenstahl is noted for her pre-war documentary work
with the Nazi party, especially Victory of the Faith (1933) and Triumph of the Will
(1935), and her filming of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games with the documenta-
ries Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations (1938) and Olympia Part Two: Festival
of Beauty (1938).
In terms of scripting or directing the Nazi party films, when Riefenstahl was
asked in an interview if she had been involved in their meticulous organization,
she replied, ‘I had nothing to do with it. […] I just observed and tried to film
it well’ (see Müller 1993). To understand how Riefenstahl may have created a
theatrically heightened story in her documentary work, one might consider her
theory that, in addition to ‘a sense of dynamics, construction and rhythm’, ‘an
absolutely sure sense of style is the most important quality a film director should
have’ (Riefenstahl 1992: 245).
Riefenstahl co-wrote and directed two feature films, The Blue Light (1932) and
Tiefland (1954). However, she also wrote treatments and scripts for many poten-
tially fascinating films that were not realized for political, financial or cultural
Germany 381
reasons. Riefenstahl’s first script was titled Maria, and was written as early as 1927,
while acting in Fanck’s The Great Leap. Riefenstahl described Maria as ‘a love story
with a tragic ending’, which she ‘had written [for herself], showing it to no one’
(Riefenstahl 1992: 63), ensuring, therefore, that the film was never developed.
Riefenstahl’s next script was for The Blue Light, which was successfully released.
Buoyed by this achievement, in 1933 she became involved in the production of
UFA’s Mademoiselle Docteur. This film was to be based on the true-life adventures
of a German spy operating in France during World War One. While Riefenstahl
was officially attached only as an actress, she claims to have worked ‘almost
daily’ on the script with the screenwriter, Gerhard Menzel (Riefenstahl 1992:
140). Nevertheless, ‘The Wehrmacht Ministry was afraid that [spy] films would
reveal too much about the workings of espionage’ (Hinton 2000: 93), and so the
project was cancelled. Mademoiselle Docteur was later resurrected in 1936, without
Riefenstahl’s input.
Having spent six years working on documentary films, in 1939 Riefenstahl
developed Penthesilea; an ambitious fantasy film about the last Queen of the
Amazons, ‘the subject teetered on the razor’s edge between the sublime and the
ridiculous’ (Riefenstahl 1992: 249). She describes the writing process as one in
which ‘[t]he scenes loomed before my eyes, and all I had to do was write them
down’, yet just before shooting began on the big-budget epic, which was to fea-
ture 1,000 white Arabian stallions in the Libyan desert, the Second World War
began, and production halted permanently. Riefenstahl continued to work on
her earlier project, Tiefland, throughout the war, but during a brief hiatus in the
production schedule she began work on a smaller-scale screenplay about Vincent
Van Gogh. Written in 1943, the script was about Van Gogh’s ‘tragic life story’ and
artistic genius (Riefenstahl 1992: 35). Riefenstahl had planned to shoot the film
primarily in black and white, with the scenes that bring Van Gogh’s paintings to
life being shot in colour, although once more, according to David Hinton, ‘The
project did not develop beyond the treatment stage’ (Hinton 2000: 134).
Following the war, de-Nazification, and a series of trials, in 1950 Riefenstahl
wrote three treatments in two weeks (Riefenstahl 1992: 373). The Dancer of Florence
was written as a cinematic poem for her friend, the dancer Harald Kreutzberg.
Eternal Peaks featured a plot that ‘consisted of four historic first climbs’, culmi-
nating in the successful ascent of Mount Everest. The third treatment, which
was the only one to enter development, was called The Red Devils. This film was
Riefenstahl’s first comedy and, unlike the other two treatments, which drew on
her passion for dance and mountain climbing, The Red Devils was ostensibly
about skiing. However, in being about a competition between the sexes, the
script was also an ambitious rewriting of her earlier Greek tragedy, Penthesilea,
which Riefenstahl directly referenced in her treatment: ‘[Christa] loses her heart
to Michael, the skiing champion, just as Penthesilea lost her heart to Achilles’
(Hinton 2000: 95). In a German-Italian co-production, Riefenstahl had intended
to collaborate on the script with Cesare Zavattini, the screenwriter for most of de
Sica’s movies, but investment was withdrawn due to Riefenstahl’s changing pub-
lic image. Resurrecting the project with additional Austrian investment in 1952,
Riefenstahl worked with her new scriptwriters, Harald Reinl and Joachim Bartsch.
Based on a draft of the script, pre-production commenced, but once again the
project was aborted as Riefenstahl’s reputation in the media made it impossible to
secure further funding.
While working on The Red Devils in Rome, Riefenstahl wrote a film scenario
with religious overtones for the actress Anna Magnani, called Three Stars on the
Cloak of the Madonna. According to Riefenstahl, the exciting role for Magnani
was that of a Spanish mother, but the project was turned down because, as the
actress explained: ‘I’m too young to play the mother, the part has to be sexy’
(Riefenstahl 1992: 389). After The Red Devils and Three Stars projects had col-
lapsed, Riefenstahl briefly worked with Jean Cocteau on a film project called
Frederick and Voltaire. Cocteau would have played Frederick the Great and
Voltaire, to ‘show their love-hate friendship – symbolic of the relationship
between France and Germany’ (Riefenstahl 1992: 403); yet, despite offering to
work without pay, Riefenstahl’s black-listing in America meant that they were
unable to find financial backers, and the project failed to move beyond the
early conception stage. By 1960, Riefenstahl was enlisted by a British company,
Adventure Film, to help remake The Blue Light. W. Somerset Maugham had
shown interest in writing the script, but Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard
was selected as the screenwriter. Riefenstahl’s role was to ‘translate cinematically
the new completed script’ for Adventure Film, but this project also came to
nothing as new allegations were launched against Riefenstahl, which she refuted
in court (Riefenstahl 1992: 448).
Riefenstahl’s European projects were largely terminated before completion, and
while she became known for her later work, photographing and documenting
the Nuba tribe in Africa, Riefenstahl also had three African feature film projects
that were in various stages of development before they were also cancelled. In
1956, Riefenstahl developed a treatment for a film about the slave trade in Africa
called Black Freight. The treatment was an adaptation of Hans Otto Meissner’s
book Hassan’s Black Freight, and was developed into a script by Kurth Heuser and
Helge Pawlinin (Riefenstahl 1992: 408, 421). The project entered production, and
rushes were produced, but due to a series of misfortunes in Africa and a cash-flow
crisis, the project was cancelled. Five years later, in 1961, and wishing to return
to Africa, Riefenstahl planned an unnamed screenplay in which ‘the protagonist
was the Nile’ (Riefenstahl 1992: 456). However, the Berlin Wall was also built
later that year, which, according to Riefenstahl, was catastrophic for her Japanese
investors as ‘[t]hey had lost so much money that they had to shelve all film plans’
(Riefenstahl 1992: 458). Riefenstahl immediately began work on her final narra-
tive film project, African Diary, which was about an expedition through Africa.
The story was plotted, but ‘could not be shot on the basis of a precise script’ as it
‘had to be improvised’ (Riefenstahl 1992: 459). However, despite the micro-budget
required, Riefenstahl found that nobody would financially back her, which is
when she finally turned away from film production, towards a career as a photo-
journalist and documentarian.
Riefenstahl is credited with writing the story for and directing The Blue Light,
which was received with much critical acclaim on release in 1932. Riefenstahl
Germany 383
said that the source of the story came to her in a dream, which she immediately
recorded in an 18-page treatment, and she spent four weeks writing the screenplay.
However, Fanck later cited Gustav Renker’s novel Bergkristall (‘Mountain Crystal’) as
an uncredited influence (Hinton 2000: 11). As Riefenstahl explains to Ray Müller,
‘I met Carl Mayer, the famous playwright who’d written the material for Murnau’s
films and Béla Balázs, who was the best screenwriter then. […] Balázs wrote the
dialogue and I did the visual scenes. It was the ideal collaboration’ (Müller 1993).
Riefenstahl then points to a page of the script which features sketched diagrams
and tells Müller, ‘Here, for instance, I drew the waterfall and the position of the
sun. It says here “7.10 am, shooting must be finished by 8”. I even put the lens to
be used: a 7.5 focal length. It’s all noted […] I fine-tuned every scene through the
camera, worked out the light, and tested everything in advance’ (see Müller 1993).
The origins of the outline for The Blue Light may not be certain, but Riefenstahl’s
attention to technical and visual detail, as seen in her script notation and later
work on Olympia, shows that she considered plot and thematic content to be
implicitly contingent on presentation. Riefenstahl did not want to present her
fairy tale ‘the way Fritz Lang did it in his Nibelungs’, with sensationalist, artificial
studio sets. Riefenstahl’s meticulous script work demonstrates that she required
stylized natural locations that both grounded and reflected the fantastical quali-
ties of the story: a Bergfilm romantic-tragedy in which a young, outcast woman
finds a beautiful mountaintop cave full of crystals and is duped into giving them
up by a seemingly chaste, young love interest.
The Blue Light was conceived in 1931 and released to critical acclaim in 1932,
whereas Tiefland (1954) had a much longer period of gestation, going into devel-
opment in 1934. Shot during World War II, from 1940 to 1944, it was not released
until well after the war, in 1954. Once again, Riefenstahl collaborated on the
script, with her particular focus being ‘to concentrate on the visual’ (see Müller
1993). In an arrangement similar to that with Balázs, for this project Riefenstahl
worked with film novice Harald Reinl (who went on to direct over 60 films), as he
‘was such a great help with the dialogue that the script was completed within six
weeks’ (Riefenstahl 1992: 262). Tiefland is a melodramatic mountain film in which
‘man fights nature’ and Riefenstahl plays the lead actress. However, Riefenstahl
and Reinl’s script deviates from the operatic source material in adding the social
theme of an uprising of the people against their selfish lord/dictator.
Riefenstahl was always adamant that her works contained no political content,
although she did believe that The Blue Light was ‘[s]ymbolic of the ideal one
always dreams of but never attains’ (Müller 1993), much as Tiefland could appear
symbolic of her own protracted relationship with Nazism.
Ula Stöckl (b. 1938)
Andrew Kenneth Gay

Ula Stöckl is arguably the West German film industry’s first feminist screenwriter
and director, having made her professional debut nearly a decade prior to the
establishment of any organized movement towards women-centred filmmaking
in the Federal Republic (Richter 2005). Stöckl is credited with writing more than
14 screenplays and wrote the scripts for most of the films she directed. While a
handful of West German women were making their first motion pictures in the
1960s, ‘only the films of Stöckl give any indication of the feminist film culture that
was to emerge in the seventies’ (Knight 1992: 7). Jane Sloan credits Stöckl with the
‘first German film to address female identity’ (Sloan 2007: 88). Prominent German
film critic Peter W. Jansen has argued that Stöckl ‘belongs to the bedrock of “New
German Film,” where she represents the female, the maternal line’ (Jansen 2003:
13). Summarizing the content of Stöckl’s early work, Marc Silberman writes:
Stöckl shows women who are breaking out of conventional relationships but
who cannot find an alternative, women who refuse to be treated as objects of
male prerogatives but who nonetheless conceive of their own emancipation in
patriarchal terms. (Silberman 1984b: 322)
Stöckl also stands out among the few women filmmakers of the male-dominated
New German Cinema ‘who frequently write, direct and produce their films, exercise a
large degree of control over their work and have on occasion been discussed as author
figures’ (Knight 1992: 61). However, despite her early ground-breaking screenplays,
which focus on the experiences of women, ‘Stöckl has never been as well known
among the general public as other women filmmakers in New German Cinema’
(Reimer 2008: 282), and she has never been widely championed by the feminist
movements that formed in her wake. As Stöckl herself has lamented, ‘The leaders of
the organized women’s movement in West Germany completely ignored my work.
Indeed the fact that I had already achieved what they were still struggling for was
counted against me. For them I was a “man’s woman”’ (Silberman 1984a: 55).
Stöckl came of age in a politically conservative Federal Republic that still offered
only limited opportunities to women and, at the age of 16, she left school for a
secretarial job to help contribute to the family’s income. Stöckl became deeply
interested in language, mythology and writing and, certain that she wanted to
write, hoped to become a journalist. Stöckl’s first outlet for writing was the diary
she kept for over 40 years. Beginning in her early teens she filled these diaries
with fairy tales, short stories and dialogues, both autobiographical and fictional.
At the age of 20, Stöckl moved to Paris to study French at the Alliance Française,
then the Sorbonne, where she earned her certificate, and on to London to study
English. She travelled often, picking up Spanish and Italian along the way, and
sometimes published travel reports and other stories in various newspapers. In
1962, she began work as a copy editor for a production company in Baden-Baden,
where she had little to do and would wander from studio to studio and study the
organization of the industry. What she saw influenced her decision to write her
first screenplay and pursue a career as a professional scriptwriter, but her observa-
tions also revealed numerous instances of institutional sexism:
I found out for myself that if ever I wanted one of my screenplays to make it to
the screen or on stage, I would have to go on going to school, getting a degree
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which is higher than all of these men who are working in this industry, because
otherwise I would have the destiny to stay their assistant, giving them the good
ideas and helping them, and not being the one doing it. (Personal interview,
19 December 2013)
This recognition prompted Stöckl’s application in 1963 to become one of the

first women to study with Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz at the Institute for
Filmmaking in the Ulm School of Design. Kluge and Reitz were two of the original
signatories of the New German Cinema’s founding document, the Oberhausen
Manifesto. Describing the screenwriting training she received from Kluge and
Reitz, Stöckl points out how it differed greatly from the classical conventions typi-
cal of Hollywood storytelling. She was instructed:
Never tell stories you do not know anything about. Either have an experience
yourself with what you are telling or make yourself knowledgeable. Do research,
and find out why you want to tell that story. Not in the sense of, ‘for whom are
you writing,’ because we at the time did never ask ourselves if there was a group
of people outside who might be especially interested. The thing was, if you as
the writer were really interested in the subject, there will be enough people out
of your little room who are interested in the same sorts of stories. The only
thing was it had to be true in the sense that it had happened to someone or
could happen in this way. (Personal interview, 19 December 2013)
Students at the Ulm School were also taught to avoid excessive exposition or arti-
ficial conflict in their screenwriting:
It may be that the story you are going to tell is how you came home and there
was a power outage and that was conflicting your life for the next 24 hours.
And maybe then everything was normal again. And nobody had died. Because
that was also something we were learning, that very few people had really
witnessed a shooting in the street or a burglary in a house. Of course these
things happen, but they do not happen as systematically as the film industry
has taken care of. So why not tell stories from everyday life, and to get to know
through these stories people? (Personal interview, 19 December 2013)
While Stöckl had intended only to study screenwriting at the Ulm School, she
soon moved behind the camera and began directing her first short films, where
she realised the limits of the written word. After graduating from the Ulm School,
Stöckl took an assistant director job in Munich. It was there that she decided to
seek financing for her first feature-length project through the Kuratorium Junger
Deutscher Film (Young German Film Board of Trustees), which offered production
funds to filmmakers based on the level and quality of innovation in their screen-
plays. At the time of her decision to apply, Stöckl had collected many notes for
a new story about a woman journalist, but had not written a single page of the
script, and had only two days to complete it before the submission deadline. She
wrote the script overnight in what she describes as a ‘trance’ like state (Personal
interview, 19 December 2013). The resulting script, which would eventually
become known as Neun Leben hat die Katze/Nine Lives Has the Cat (1968), won the
requested production fund.
It was originally intended that Nine Lives Has the Cat would tell the story of a
struggling German reporter, Katharina, whose good friend from France, Anne, comes
to visit her in Munich for a week. Katharina’s occupation as a journalist had clear
echoes of Stöckl’s own past career aspirations. Indeed, Stöckl has described how her
screenwriting was very much born out of her personal memories and dreams:
You know, when I am really, really obsessed by a subject, then I have in my

brain people I am talking with, and I am arguing with them. They are my inter-
viewers, if you want, and I am working out the problems I have. But if you do
that only in your head, it does not get anywhere, really. Therefore, you have to
write it down, so my screenwriting was, in another way, a continuation of what
I also did in my diaries. So from documentary initiations came fiction, because
I might have written certain things in my diary, which of course I changed
into fiction and fictional facts in the screenplay. And I think that was always a
thing I loved to do, learning how to camouflage things I had observed in real
life into actions being shown in a film. (Personal interview, 19 December 2013)
The script for Nine Lives Has the Cat changed substantively during the course of
production. With the casting of Liane Hielscher as Katharina, Stöckl had to work
with a professional actress for the first time. She found this adjustment extremely
challenging. Stöckl felt so strongly that Hielscher was misinterpreting the lines
as written and delivering them with the wrong subtext that she finally told the
actress to toss out the scripted dialogue altogether and speak in her own words.
Hielscher seemed to look down on the low-budget status of the independent pro-
duction and failed to take the job seriously, frequently pressuring the first-time
feature director to release her early from the set to pursue social engagements.
Stöckl found the experience of directing Hielscher so frustrating that she began
to take scenes originally scripted for Katharina and give them instead to the char-
acter of Anne, played by non-actress Kristine De Loup, who herself came from
France and only spoke broken German. These changes resulted in a significant
shift in emphasis between the characters, such that the film’s distributor would
eventually choose Anne’s image over Katharina’s for the promotional posters.
Stöckl’s slogan for Nine Lives Has the Cat was ‘Never have women had so much
possibility to do what they want, but now they have to find out what it is that
they want’(Personal interview, 19 December 2013). The film explores this problem
of desiring from at least five perspectives, each represented by a different character.
Stöckl acknowledges that:
In Neun Leben hat die Katze I chose the characters as types: the not-yet-married
professional woman, the recent divorcee confused about her future, the career
woman, the deceived wife and the ultimate dream woman — a legendary Circe.
Germany 387
In this film the women seem to be sleeping because each thinks only of herself
and that she has an advantage over the other. Each one thinks she has a recipe
for happiness, or that being unhappy is her own fault because she’s too dumb
to be happy. In other words, these women cannot see their anxieties as hav-
ing something to do with the society in which they live. They exhibit a lack
of knowledge about how one could behave differently. (Silberman 1984a: 55)
As a first feature, Nine Lives Has the Cat bears many of the signature marks that
would come to typify Stöckl’s entire career, most notably its play with language
and myth. While the dialogue is mostly scripted in German, the character of
Anne slips frequently into French, which creates interesting tensions and high-
lights the challenges women face in communicating in languages that often
privilege the masculine. In explaining the inspiration for including the character
of Circe in the script, Stöckl recalls, ‘There were no female identification figures
for my generation. I found my identification figures in myth, and the sorceress
Circe was one of them. She could do whatever she wanted’ (Personal interview,
19 December 2013).
Once completed, Nine Lives Has the Cat premiered at the Mannheim Film
Festival, where it received some positive reviews but also ‘aroused the blatant
sexism of the male film critics. Leftists accused the film of being apolitical, oth-
ers bemoaned the lack of well-rounded male characters, and one critic damned it
as a film by ladies for ladies’ (Silberman 1984b: 327). Robert Acker concurs that
‘the male critics reacted negatively to the film, mainly because there were “too
many women” in it’ (Acker 1985: 2), while Julia Knight guesses that Stöckl’s first
feature ‘suffered from trying to explore the concerns of women too soon. With
the women’s movement barely in its birth throes when she made her directorial
debut, a critical audience had not yet emerged capable of appreciating her work’
(Knight 1992: 11). While the film had already been picked up for distribution by
the reputable firm Atlas Film, its release was delayed as a result of those initial
reviews. Coincidentally, Atlas went bankrupt two months prior to the scheduled
release of Stöckl’s film to theatres. Another distributor offered a deal if Stöckl
would agree to add pornographic scenes to the film, which she declined to do.
Throughout her career, Stöckl has fallen victim to censorship and male tastes:
In 1973 I received money from [German television network WDR], but for the
first time I was confronted with censorship. I was too modest then and too dumb
to recognize it. The producer — a man I respected and considered my friend —
asked me to reduce my budget by 90%. He said that was all he could give me,
and I thought it was purely a matter of economics, not censorship. After I had
rewritten the script to satisfy him, I suddenly had doubts about it and changed
it — not to be more expensive but more radical. Production was stopped until I
rewrote the script according to instructions. (Silberman 1984a: 55)
Another of Stöckl’s scripts, Killertango, could not secure financing because of

its ‘shocking’ content. ‘Apparently my personal radicalism must have shocked
producers who consider themselves “feminist.” What I perceive as radical is to do

away with taboos, to write down my dreams and images’ (Silberman 1984a: 55).
In Killertango, a woman dies of asphyxiation while performing fellatio. ‘For me
this symbolized the daily suffocation millions of women experience as the result
of male demands. Apparently this image was so violent that everyone rejected it
out of hand’ (Silberman 1984a: 55).
Though Nine Lives Has the Cat languished for years before critics, scholars, and
other film enthusiasts revived its reputation with a series of new screenings at
international festivals and other specialty exhibitions, its commercial failure did
not deter Stöckl, and she was soon hard at work writing more scripts. She had
grown more confident after directing her first feature, and her future screenplays
reflected that confidence in their meticulous detail:
What lens I would like to use, that I am cutting here to cut on a close-up or that
I’m cutting here to have a wider shot, and where I intend to have music and
for how long. Very, very, very detailed. That was always in my scripts going for-
ward. What I learned is that the more precise I am in my scripts, what I think
should be my visual style, my vision, everything the film should be, that gives
the [Director of Photography] an idea. (Personal interview, 19 December 2013)
Stöckl would write and direct or co-direct nearly a film per year for the next
decade, but much of her individual output would be overshadowed in the trade
press by two collaborations she made with her somewhat better known former
mentor, Edgar Reitz (Elsaesser 1989: 98). Structured in 23 loosely related episodes,
Geschichten com Kübelkind/Stories of the Trashcan Child (1969–70) was designed to
be viewed in any order, and ‘the filmmakers created a Kneipenkino (movie bar) in
Munich where guests could drink and choose episodes from this and other films
on the menu’ (Silberman 1984b: 329). Construction of the narrative thus became
an interactive, collective experience. In that sense, Trashcan Child was scripted
anew by each audience that chose to view it.
The Trashcan Child collaboration came about in part because Stöckl had written
a script and Reitz had the money with which to make a film. ‘We had so much fun
doing something, which, at the time, had no chance at all to ever see the light of
a screen,’ Stöckl remembers (Personal interview, 24 December 2013). They began
with one episode, for which Stöckl did all the pre-production planning, includ-
ing casting and production design, while Reitz performed the duties of cinema-
tographer and editor. After the experience of making the first episode proved so
exciting, Stöckl and Reitz ‘decided to go along as I found ever new stories, coming
from discussions we had about everyday problems, and how it might be when a
completely amoral person, a grown-up child so to say, came out of a trashcan,
not having known any social education’ (Personal interview, 24 December 2013).
For their next collaboration, Das golden Ding/The Golden Thing (1971), a retelling
of the Golden Fleece myth starring children, Stöckl and Reitz were one half of a
four-director partnership with Alf Brustellin and Nikos Perakis. The Golden Thing
was to be the first part of a trilogy and co-written by Stöckl and Reitz, the second
Germany 389
part was never written, while the third part became Der Schlaf der Vernunft/The
Sleep of Reason (1984), which would prove to be Stöckl’s most successful feature to
date. The film was met with wide critical acclaim and won several awards, includ-
ing the Best Drama prize from the Association of German Film Critics and a Silver
Ribbon at the German Film Awards. It again explores the problems of language.
This time Stöckl cast an Italian actress (Ida Di Benedetto, who knew no German
whatsoever) in the lead role, so each line of dialogue had to be rigidly scripted.
Nevertheless, Stöckl’s extensive experience directing improvised scenes helped her
write lengthy exchanges between the characters that feel completely ad-libbed on
the screen.
In retelling the Medea myth with a contemporary twist, Stöckl chose the char-
acter of an Italian gynaecologist named Dea, living in Germany, who is research-
ing the potentially dangerous side effects of oral contraceptives. Meanwhile, Dea’s
husband works for the pharmaceutical company responsible for manufacturing
the Pill and is having an affair with his boss’s daughter. Dea’s sexually liberated
daughter is taking the Pill and has accepted a job modelling for a contraceptive
advertisement. Dea’s Italian mother also lives with her, allowing Stöckl to explore
barriers that are both generational and linguistic between mothers and daughters
and granddaughters. The narrative climaxes with an extensive homicidal fantasy,
in which Dea murders her family and her sexual rival. By transubstantiating the
mythological Medea’s murderous revenge into Dea’s violent fantasy, Stöckl gives
women the freedom to ‘kill’ that which oppresses their interior life.
Another of Stöckl’s major accomplishments was to be among the first writer-
directors to address the reunification of East and West Germany after the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989. Das alte Lied/The Old Song (1992) follows Kati, an elderly
German woman, who returns with her brother, son, and granddaughter to her old
home in Dresden after years of exile in Hamburg. Only her ‘son’ is not her son at
all but the child of her sister, Ilse, whom she had betrayed to the Nazi authorities,
and her ‘home’ was purchased inexpensively from a Jewish family, thanks to the
policies of the Third Reich. In Dresden, Kati and her family collide with the past
and with Alf, a man Kati once loved but who loved Ilse instead. Here, in place of
the Greek myths that figure so prominently in much of Stöckl’s work, she turns
her attention to the mythologies that families construct around themselves,
which represent the national myths of a newly reunified Germany. Languages
again divide characters from one another, as East and West Germans struggle to
communicate. The Historical Dictionary of German Cinema praises Das alte Lied as
‘one of only a few post-Berlin Wall films to deal sensitively and honestly with the
end of the German Democratic Republic’ (Reimer 2008: 283–4).
In 1999, Ula Stöckl was awarded the Konrad Wolf Prize from the Berlin Akademie
der Künste for outstanding achievement in the field of film. She has served on the
selection committees for both the Berlin and Venice Film Festivals and taught at a
number of universities, including Hollins University, the Berlin Academy of Film
and Television, the University of Texas at Austin, and American University. She
currently teaches screenwriting, directing, and feminist film analysis in the School
of Visual Arts and Design at the University of Central Florida.
Jutta Brückner (b. 1941)
Ervin Malakaj
Jutta Brückner’s film career spans the past four decades. After completing doctoral
work in political science at the University of Munich, Brückner, deeply influenced
by the emerging feminist movement of the 1970s, turned to film as a form of
expression. For Brückner, film presented the most important artistic mode to
express the suffering of women in a world dominated by men. Unlike a number
of women filmmakers of her generation, Brückner never attended a film school
and thus received no formal training in film production.
Her earliest work on film was as screenwriter for several small productions for var-
ious German film television networks, primarily ZDF. Brückner’s earliest successful
screenplay was for the television documentary film Tue recht und scheue niemand–
Das Leben der Gerda Siepenbrink (‘Do Right and Don’t Be Shy: The Life of Gerda
Sipenbrink’, 1975). The film shows Brückner’s mother as she narrates her difficult
life as a lower-middle-class woman throughout a number of political regimes. The
emphasis on the biographical and on offering a woman the opportunity to tell her
own story was one of the guiding principles of a ‘feminine aesthetic’ that domi-
nated the filmic work of women of the New German Cinema. Brückner then wrote
the screenplay for Der Fangschuß (‘Coup de Grâce’, 1976), a feature film directed
by a prominent director of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff. The film
features a heroine who does all she can to catch the attention of an officer. In her
desperation, she fraternizes with the enemy and is captured by her initial admirer.
Brückner went on to write and direct Ein ganz und gar verwahrlostes Mädchen – Ein
Tag im Leben der Rita Rischak (‘An Utterly Neglected Girl – One Day in the Life of
Rita Rischak’, 1977). Blending biography with fiction, the film provides an insight
into a day in the life of a woman who is unable to find the stability she thinks is
everywhere around her: she has no long-term relationship, has money issues, is
constantly searching for jobs, and is raising a son on her own. The suffering of
the female protagonist also takes centre stage in the next screenplay that Brückner
wrote; Eine Frau mit Verantwortung (‘A Woman with Responsibilities’, 1977–8),
directed by Ula Stöckl, is about a young woman who takes care of all those around
her but has to learn to love herself as much as she loves those near to her.
Hungerjarhre – In einem reichen Land (‘Hunger Years in a Land of Plenty’, 1980),
written and directed by Brückner, depicts the experience of women in Germany
in the 1950s, a period of great economic growth for the country. The pubescent
female protagonist feels estranged from her body at the same time as post-war
Germany flourishes. Brückner develops the image of the abandoned, suffering
female further with her historical feature film Kolossale Liebe (‘Colossal Love’,
1986), which depicts an ageing Rahel Levin in her famous salon but with no visi-
tors. She meets her future husband, August Varnhagen, who initially admires her
for her stature and listens to her stories about the once-glorious salon, its many
famous visitors, and the multiple failed romances that she had there.
In the same year, Brückner wrote and directed Ein Blick – und die Liebe bricht aus
(‘One Look and Love Ends’, 1986). The film shows a woman’s obsessive thoughts
Germany 391
about love and the banality of the everyday, which seems to be the main obstacle
to the love-filled life the protagonist seeks. A decade later, Brückner’s next film
depicts the life and work of Berthold Brecht in Berthold Brecht – Liebe, Revolution
und andere gefährliche Sachen (‘Berthold Brecht: Love, Revolution, and Other
Dangerous Things’, 1997–8), which she directed, having collaborated on the
screenplay with Kaj Holmberg. Brückner’s latest writing and directorial work is
Hitlerkantate (‘Hitler-Cantata’, 2004–5), which shows a young woman struggling
to reconcile her love for the Führer, her music, and her career in Nazi Germany.
Since 1984, Brückner has been on the faculty of the Hochschule der Künste
Berlin (College of Art, Berlin) and serves, among others, on the advisory board of
the International Film Festival in Berlin.
Margarethe von Trotta (b. 1942)
Alexis Krasilovsky
Margarethe von Trotta has acquired an international reputation as one of the stel-
lar figures of the New German Cinema with an oeuvre that focuses primarily on
the relationships of women to other women, often in a political context. With
more than 20 credits as screenwriter and television writer from 1971 to 2012, at
least 16 of which are major films, more critical articles, entries and biographies
had probably been written about director-writer Margarethe von Trotta than any
other European women filmmaker.
Born during World War II in Berlin in 1942, the daughter of artist Alfred Roloff
and ‘an aristocratic Latvian war refugee’, Elisabeth von Trotta, von Trotta grew
up poor but artistically cultured (Eifler 2003: 446). Von Trotta’s’s mother, who
remained single, encouraged her to be assertive with others and independent in
her thinking. She attended the University of Paris at the heyday of the French New
Wave but, instead of studying French literature in Paris, von Trotta spent her time
watching the movies of François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard,
as well as Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman, whose portrayal of the inner
psychology of his characters particularly inspired her. Von Trotta joined a student
film collective then began acting for independent directors such as Fassbinder,
where she met Volker Schlöndorff, who was also studying in Paris (Coleman 2005:
20). She worked as an actress on Schlöndorff’s TV movie Baal (1970), as co-writer
with him on the TV movie The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (‘Der
plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach’) in 1971, the year she married
him. Von Trotta was then an actress and assistant on Schlöndorff’s film Morals
of Ruth Halbfass (‘Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass’, 1972), and again his co-writer
on A Free Woman (‘Strohfeuer’, 1972). The world-renowned box-office hit that
Schlöndorff and von Trotta made together as co-writers and co-directors, The Lost
Honour of Katherina Blum (‘Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum’, 1975), is based
on a novel by Heinrich Böll about an innocent woman whose life is destroyed by
the media after spending a romantic night with someone who turns out to be a
terrorist. The film exhibits both thrilling pacing and great psychological depth,
along with a social commentary that remains relevant in a post-9/11 world.
Parting ways with Schlöndorff to direct more psychologically nuanced work in

the tradition of Bergman, von Trotta’s first film as a writer-director (co-written
with Luisa Francia) was The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (‘Das Zweite
Erwachen der Christa Klages’, 1977). It was one of von Trotta’s many films to
use a female protagonist to explore the meaning of ‘the personal is political’, a
term widely used by the consciousness-raising groups of that era, although the
storyline may seem even more à propos in today’s recessionary climate: the film
is about a young mother who robs a bank to help a day-care centre that is in debt.
Von Trotta’s next three films can be seen as a trilogy on the theme of sisters:
Sisters or the Balance of Happiness (‘Schwestern oder die Balance des Glück’s, 1979);
Marianne and Juliane, also known as Leaden Times or The German Sisters (‘Die
Bleierne Zeit’, 1981); and Sheer Madness (‘Heller Wahn’, 1983). Her 1988 film
Love and Fear (‘Paura e amore’, or ‘Fuerchten und Liebe’), a loose adaptation of
Chekhov’s Three Sisters, co-written with Dacia Maraini, is also about the relation-
ship between sisters. Despite the intense examination of the intimate relationship
between sisters in Sisters or the Balance of Happiness, von Trotta had been raised as
a single child; but after the release of the film, a viewer of it contacted von Trotta,
and turned out to be her half-sister. The substitution of heterosexual romance
with the relationship between sisters as subject matter for her feature films made
it possible for von Trotta to explore ‘new ways of envisioning personal identity
and personal relationships’ (Mouton 1995: 36). Mouton describes the sisters in
Sisters or the Balance of Happiness:
Maria as big sister is the wise protector of Anna, who as little sister is her
trusting companion. The pair thus becomes bonded – not through rivalry and
mimetic desire as in traditional masculine versions of this story – but rather
through mutual support and mutual need. (Mouton 1995: 40)
What gives these sister films their depth is von Trotta’s focus on ‘the emotional
tenor of the psychological thriller rather than the melodrama’ through the explora-
tion of backstory (Seiter 1985: 112). Marianne and Juliane (‘Die Bleierne Zeit’, 1981)
examines the relationship of a feminist journalist to her younger sister, a terrorist
whom the government claims has committed suicide while in prison. The original
title of this film, Die Bleierne Zeit (‘The Leaden Times’), which refers to what von
Trotta calls ‘the unemotional, dreary 1950s’ (Seiter 1985), the post-World War II
era in which Germans were unable to acknowledge their feelings of guilt regarding
the Holocaust, comes from the poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Der Gäng aufs Land’:
Trüb ists heut, es schlummern die Gäng und die Gassen und fast will
Mir es scheinen, es sei, als in der bleiernen Zeit.
(Gloomy it is today, sleepy are the pathways and lanes and it seems as almost,
we are, in the leaden times.)
The poem ends with the idea of going out into the open air, and von Trotta’s film
concludes with a similar blast of fresh air. Just as the government and the media
Germany 393
have abandoned the search for the truth about Marianne’s death, the terrorist’s
little boy demands that his journalist aunt tell him ‘everything’ about his mother.
However, Marianne and Juliane is more about the relationship of sisters than it
is about Germany’s guilt over Nazism or the fate of sisters Christiane and Gudrun
Ensslin, the latter being the member of the radical left Baader Meinhof terrorist
group (Rote Armee Fraktion) on whom the film is partly based (Seiter 1985), and
who many believe was ‘murdered by state officials (though the death was ruled
a suicide)’ (Skidmore 2002: 552). In these probing films, the sisters explore their
childhood as well as the power struggles. Eva Rueschmann notes:
In Sisters as in Marianne and Juliane, the death of one sister initiates the sur-
viving sibling’s inner voyage of critical self-evaluation and self-discovery and
opens a path towards integration of different modes of being in the world.
(Rueschmann 2000: 158)
More feminist than the psychological portraits by Ingmar Bergman such as

Persona (1966), von Trotta utilizes ‘dreams, visions, flashbacks, and personal
obsessions … to portray psychological depth’ (Unterberger 1999: 442). Insofar as
Sisters, Marianne and Juliane and Sheer Madness are also ‘subtle portrayals of female
suicides’ (Kuttenberg 2003: 122), von Trotta ‘concludes with the possibility of
a way out of suicidal behavior and issues a call for action to break the silence’
(Kuttenberg 2003: 140). Mouton adds: ‘[T]hese films are actually about sisters
(along with mothers and others) in contrast to – the titles not withstanding –
Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters or Brian de Palma’s Sisters …’ or Hollywood’s
1940s ‘sister exploitation’ movies (Mouton 1995: 45). However, some feminists
feel that von Trotta’s focus on telling the sisters’ story through Juliane, the liberal
Ms magazine-style journalist, instead of Marianne, the radical left terrorist sister
who confronts her, is too conventional to create political change (Unterberger
1999: 442).
For the most part, von Trotta’s films have been produced through the company
Bioskop-Film, which also produces Schlöndorff’s films. Continuing to make new
films in the 1980s and 1990s when most other women directors of her generation
turned to teaching, von Trotta has often worked in television, despite its lower
budgets, faster pace and shorter rehearsal time. However, in 2003, she directed
and co-wrote with Pamela Katz the award-winning Rosenstrasse, co-writing again
with Katz on the 2012 film Hannah Arendt.
Instead of focusing on sisters, Rosenstrasse ‘merge[s] the memories of women
from three different generations who are linked through their positions as “mothers”
and “daughters”’ (Grobbel 2009: 81). Rosenstrasse begins with a widow in New York,
mourning her husband, just as her daughter is about to marry a non-Jew. Her daugh-
ter goes to Germany to find out about what it meant to survive a mixed marriage
in Nazi Germany, and to ask herself if intermarriage is right for her, with or with-
out her mother’s blessing. In her research, the daughter comes across the true-life
story of Aryan women who protested for seven days and nights outside a Nazi jail
until their Jewish husbands were finally released, a story that von Trotta brings to
life with astonishing mastery as director. The intertwining of different generations

and different cultures is an important screenwriting tool for writing our world
into the future, as well as an important way of commemorating the past.
By utilizing conventional story structure and less radical characters in her
screenplays, von Trotta has been able to make largely accessible films that
have won over 30 awards, including a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival
for Marianne and Juliane, the Grand Prix for Sisters at the Créteil International
Women’s Film Festival, the Guild of German Art House Cinemas Gold Guild Film
Award for Rosa Luxemburg, and Best European Film in the Italian Golden Globes
for Rosenstrasse (2003).
(Special thanks to Maria Victoria Hubbard for her research assistance.)
Doris Dörrie (b. 1955)
Ervin Malakaj
Filmmaker and author Doris Dörrie received formal training in the dramatic
and filmic arts in the USA and Germany. After studying drama and filmmaking
between 1973 and 1975 at the New School for Social Research in New York and
the University of the Pacific in California’s film programme, Dörrie enrolled at
the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film (College of Television and Film Studies)
in Munich. While in Munich she also served as film critic for the major news-
paper Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, and worked for several television networks such
as ZDF and the West Deutscher Rundfunk (WDR), primarily as the editor and
director of small-scale productions. Dörrie’s stands apart from other women
filmmakers and screenwriters in the 1970s and 1980s because of the mainstream
success of her films. Especially important in this regard is her romantic comedy
Männer (‘Men’, 1985), in which the film’s male protagonist, Julius, moves in with
his ex-wife’s new lover with the intention of turning him into another version
of himself. Männer was well received by film critics and was an enormous box-
office success. Largely because of the success with Männer, Dörrie was named one
of the most successful German filmmakers by the prominent German magazine
Der Spiegel.
Dörrie made her directorial debut with the documentary film Ob’s stürmt oder
schneit (‘If It Storms or Snows’, 1976–7), which depicts a female film-theatre pro-
prietor in a rural area. The documentary was screened in theatres and broadcast
on television, reaching a large number of viewers. She then wrote the scripts for
a number of television documentary films, including Hättst was Gescheits gelernt
(‘Should Have Acquired More Practical Skills’, 1978) and Alt werden in der Fremde
(‘Growing Old in a Foreign Land’, 1978), before working on the screenplay with
Erwin Keusch for the feature film Soweit das Auge Reicht (‘As Far as Meets the Eye’,
1979–80). The crime drama Soweit das Auge Reicht features a hearing-impaired
protagonist who is in line to inherit a great sum of money. Because of the inherit-
ance, a number of people want him dead, but one woman falls in love with him
and reveals the culprits and their plan to kill him just in time. Following a number
of acting roles in television films, Dörrie wrote and directed another television
Germany 395
documentary film about an elderly working-class woman: Katharina Eiselt, 85,

Arbeiterin (‘Katharina Eiselt, 85, Worker’, 1980).
Before her blockbuster success with Männer, Dörrie wrote the script for the
television documentary Dazwischen (‘In Between’, 1981–2) and the feature film
Mitten ins Herz (‘Right into the Heart’, 1983). The latter, a film that she directed
as well, is a somber drama about a young female protagonist who loses her job as
cash register attendant, then agrees to a strange offer by a foreigner to serve as his
live-in wife in exchange for money. She falls in love with the man, who does not
love her back, and feigns a pregnancy. Even though she kidnaps a toddler in the
hope of a relationship, she realizes that the man only cares for the child. Finally
she murders her lover and leaves with the child. Dörrie received the Max Ophüls
Preis for Mitten ins Herz in 1984. Much like the emphasis on the female perspective
in Mitten ins Herz, Dörrie’s drama Im Innern des Wals (‘Inside the Whale’, 1984–5),
which she co-wrote with Michael Juncker and also directed, features a struggling
teenage girl searching for the mother who left the family when she was younger.
Dörrie’s screenplays for the tragicomedy Paradies (‘Paradise’, 1986) and the
drama Wann – wenn nicht jetzt (‘When if Not Now’, 1986–7) both deal with the
anguish of failing long-term relationships in which the woman always suffers
most. Paradies features a caring woman who brings her best friend into her failing
relationship to spice things up in bed. When her husband falls in love with her
friend, she leaves the house and turns to prostitution. With Paradies, Dörrie was
hoping to show the destructive side of a relationship that is falling apart, and it is
a major departure from the light-hearted humour presented in Männer.
Dörrie wrote and directed the comedy Geld (‘Money’, 1988–9), which features
two couples robbing a bank after falling on hard times. Although Geld was by far
the least successful of her films, the crime drama Happy Birthday, Türke (‘Happy
Birthday, Turk’, 1991), based on Jakob Arjouni’s successful novel of the same
name, was an immediate box-office success. Dörrie then wrote the screenplay and
directed Keiner liebt mich (‘No One Loves Me’, 1994), which depicts a 30-year-old
woman, who desperately seeks to have a relationship but fails. Dörrie’s interest in
the difficulty of interpersonal relationships, especially those of the romantic sort,
forms a preoccupation for her anthology film Bin ich schön? (‘Am I Beautiful?’,
1997–8), where vignettes present a number of people struggling to find love and
belonging. In Nackt (‘Naked’, 2001–2), Dörrie continues this thematic preoccupa-
tion by depicting a dinner party and a conversation among several established
couples, who initially seem content with their life partners. Over the course of the
dinner party, the people at the table admit the difficulties that they face with the
increasingly difficult burden of routine behaviour that haunts their relationships.
More recently, Dörrie has received international acclaim for her screenwriting
and directorial work on Kirchblüten – Hanami (‘Cherry Blossoms, Hanami’, 2007–8),
which was shown at a number of international film festivals. The film depicts an
elderly couple who travel to Berlin to spend time with their family and let them
know that the mother has terminal cancer. The family is too busy with their
own lives to give the elderly couple a chance to tell of the fate that has befallen
the mother. Dörrie’s latest work as writer-director is alles inklusive (‘All Inclusive’,
2013–14), about a woman in her mid thirties who returns to her hometown to
face the past she has avoided for many years.
Note
1. Explanatory note: there is another Ruth Goetz (1908–2001) who was later a famous screen-
writer and dramatist in the US. The common sources on the Internet (www.filmportal.de
and www.imdb.com) contain wrong biographical information.
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Bruns, Karin. 2005. ‘Talking Film: Writing Skills and Film Aesthetics in the Work of Thea
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Greece
Tonia Kazakopoulou
Screenwriting has rarely been celebrated in Greek film or television and women
screenwriters have suffered from a neglect that is characteristic of women’s
creative work in general. Writing on the subject makes only passing reference
to screenwriting and screenwriters, usually when the production-credit details
of a film or television programme are provided. Yiannis Soldatos’s multi-volume
History of Greek Cinema (2002, 2004) or Vrasidas Karalis’s more recent A History of
Greek Cinema (2012), for instance, rarely mention the screenwriter or the screen-
play unless it has achieved some distinction.1 Reference to women screenwriters
is even more limited, partly because many Greek directors write their films, but
primarily because film direction has been a male-dominated activity and largely
inaccessible to women until recently.
Women screenwriters, however, have been present in Greek cinema since the
early 1950s, and in television since its introduction in the 1960s, though their
roles became more established in the early 1990s, when the television indus-
try began to boom after the introduction of private and commercial channels.
Karalis’s book does recognize the work of women director-screenwriters such as
Maria Plyta. However, attention is mostly given to directors, and the few refer-
ences to the script or screenwriting repeat the common notion that the quality
of writing in general has been mediocre in the history of Greek film, with the
occasional exception.
Film
Although film was first exhibited to Greek audiences just after 1895, and film-
making began at the turn of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1950s
that women regularly worked as scriptwriters. Aglaia Mitropoulou’s Greek Cinema,
first published in 1980, provides a brief account of women’s participation in the
early years of cinema in the country, but this is quite limited in scope, though
she does refer to the first female film critic, Irida Skaravaiou (Mitropoulou 2006:
357). Stathis Valoukos’s Filmography of Greek Cinema (1914–2007) (2007), one of
the main sources of information regarding production-credit details, reveals the
absence of women (in every role) before 1950.
398
Greece 399
The 1950s and 60s were a golden era for the Greek film industry when it saw
organized and regular production, distribution and exhibition practices on an
industrial scale, with genre films being the most popular. Despite this output only
two women were credited as screenwriters in the period, Maria Plyta and Inta
Hristinaki. Plyta was a dominant presence in film as a screenwriter and later as
a director between 1950 and the mid 1970s. She initially adapted well-known Greek
literature for the film screen but, by the 1960s, wrote her own original scripts and
continued to direct. Her best-known films are The Duchess of Plakentia/I doukissa tis
Plakentias (1956)2, O Loustrakos (1962) and Unknown Woman of the Night/I Agnosti
tis Nystas (1970).3 Plyta wrote in a variety of genres, from psychological and social
dramas, to musical and romantic comedies, and with great success, but did not
necessarily have the recognition she deserved. It is only recently that her name
has appeared in scholarly works as one of the earliest and most important women
writers and directors in Greek film history. Inta Hristinaki, though not as prolific,
collaborated with director Grigoris Grigoriou on social dramas such as Storm at the
Lighthouse/Thyella Sto Faro (1950) and Bitter Bread/Pikro Psomi (1951).4
In the 1960s Greek film was at the height of its popularity, with a strong star
system, and an average of 60 films were made each year for a relatively small
market.5 The increase in film production in an era of modernization and social
change opened doors for more women to become writers and directors. The col-
laboration of Katy Detzortzi as a screenwriter and Ilias Mahairas as a director is
quite notable and they are responsible for a great number of melodramas, war
films, comedies and social dramas throughout the decade, such as Matomeno
Peplo (1960), Sousourada (1960), Sparagmos (1965) and Gorgopotamos (1968). Kiki
Segditsa, Maria (or Mariza) Handari and Rena Galani, who directed many
of her scripts, also regularly appear as screenwriters in successful productions,
for example Grigoriou’s St Nectarios/O Agios Nectarios (Segditsa, 1969), Omiros
Efstratiadis’s Thyella se Paidiki Kardia (Handari, 1965) and Galani’s (both as writer
and director) A Woman’s Fate/I Moira mias Gynaikas (1968).
During the dictatorship of the military Junta, between 1967 and 1974, there
was a scaling back of the film industry when many Greek filmmakers turned
away from the genre productions favoured by the studios. After the fall of the
Junta, Greek cinema became more political and there was a desire to reinvent film
language with French auterism being particularly influential.
From 1974 and into the next decade a number of women explored a variety
of film-writing and filmmaking modes and there was a rise in avant-garde film-
making, which saw women at the forefront: for instance, Maria Gavala and
Antouanetta Angelidi began their careers in the 1970s, making Crepe de Chine
(short, 1976) and Variations on the Same theme/Parallages sto Idio Thema (1977)
respectively; Melpo Zarokosta made The Mutiny of Ten/I Antarsia ton 10 (Erricos
Andreou, 1970) and continued to write for film and television until the 1990s,
with scripts such as Eisai to Laheio mou (Kostas Karagiannis, 1990).
The most important female screenwriter-director in this period, however, is
Tonia Marketaki. Her films dealt with gender politics and the changing role
of women in a modernized Greek society and railed against the nationalist and
traditionalist discourse favoured by the dictators. Some of Marketaki’s most

important films are John the Violent/Yannis o Viaios (1973), I Timi tis Agapis (1984)
and Crystal Nights/Krystallines Nyxtes (1992).
The experimental and political filmmaking that predominated in the 1980s
alienated audiences, who turned to television after the introduction of new tel-
evision channels, or video. However, there are a number of noteworthy women
screenwriters (and directors) who produced interesting work during this decade.
Malvina Karali, who shared her talent between film and television, is one of the
most important female voices in both these industries, her highly ideological and
political scripts commenting with caustic humour on the reality of Greek society
of the time. Frieda Liappa wrote and directed some of the most beautiful films
made in Greece, such as Love Wanders at Night/Oi Dromoi tis Agapis Einai Nyxterinoi
(1981), A Quiet Death/Itan Enas Isyhos Thanatos (1986) and The Years of the Big
Heat/Ta Hronia tis Megalis Zestis (1992).
With the economic boom of the 1990s, Greece in general and artists in par-
ticular began to look outward, collaborating with colleagues abroad, mostly
within a European context. Many women, like Angeliki Antoniou, the award-
winning screenwriter and director, worked in Greece and abroad. As well as
Antoniou, many other women scriptwriters flourished in this period and helped
to spearhead a revival of Greek film in the 1990s. New wealth, new technolo-
gies and cine-literate writers and directors contributed to this revival, which
has continued to gather pace. These conditions, together with other social
and industrial changes,6 saw an ever-growing number of women succeeding in
a previously male-dominated and ‘closed’ environment. Some examples include
Maritina Passari (with directing and acting credits), who co-wrote The Years of
the Big Heat/Ta Hronia tis Megalis Zestis (1992) with Frieda Liappa (see above)
and later Too Late Tomorrow/Avrio Tha’nai Arga (2002), with Laya Yourgou, who
also directed; Manina Zoumboulaki; Katerina Bei, a film, and more recently
television, writer, with many comedy scripts such as Female Company/Thilyki
Etaireia (1999); Lucia Rikaki, who excelled in many genres and is considered
one of the most important screenwriters/filmmakers in Greece, with work such
as Kouarteto se 4 Kiniseis (1994), Dancing Soul/Symfonia Haraktiron (1999) and
Words of Silence/Logia tis Siopis (2002); Olga Malea, the most commercially suc-
cessful woman screenwriter-director of the last couple of decades with comedies
such as The Cow’s Orgasm/O Orgasmos tis Ageladas (1997) and The Mating Game/I
Diakritiki Goiteia ton Arsenikon (1999); and Laya Yourgou with thoughtful and
engaging scripts and cinematography in films such as Country House/To Spiti stin
Exohi (1994).
While these women are successful screenwriters, they have all had to ‘multi-
task’, often taking on directing or acting roles. In addition, there is often distrust
towards screenwriters because of the lack of established formal education and
training for screenwriting in Greece. For example, Antoniou works primarily as
a director, but admits that she has not yet learnt to trust another screenwriter
to work on her ideas. There are not enough professionals in Greece, and in
Germany, where she often works, who are able to understand and communicate
Greece 401
the Greek specificities that she requires for her films. In a recent interview,
Antoniou noted:
Unfortunately, most Greek scripts lack high quality and deep technical knowl-
edge. There are some very few brilliant exceptions, but they are counted on the
fingers of one hand. In Greece, there is no serious film education and only poor
financing of professional screenwriters. That’s why in many Greek scripts there is
a feeling that something is left unfinished, or a sense of amateurism. A good idea
is simply not enough, you also need the technical know-how in order to realize
the idea and make a good script out of it. (Interview with author, May 2013)
This demonstrates the difficulty of working exclusively as a screenwriter in Greece.

Despite this, a wide range of film forms and styles are employed in Greek women
screenwriters’ work, from generic pieces, to art-house, to experimental and docu-
mentary, attesting to the wealth of talent available, even if often unrecognized.
Many of the women writers and directors who ushered in the new era of popu-
larity of Greek cinema in the 1990s continued to produce work in the next dec-
ade: as well as Angeliki Antoniou, Katerina Bei had a successful collaboration with
director Nikos Perakis with popular comedies such as The Bubble/I Fouska (2002)
and Lisa and All the Others/I Lisa kai Oloi oi Alloi; Lucia Rikaki scripted a number
of shorts and documentaries until her death in 2011; Laya Yourgou wrote Hard
Goodbyes: My Father/Dyskoloi Apohairetismoi: o Babas mou (2002) and more recently
Red Sky/Kokkinos Ouranos (2011), which she also directed.
The period of optimism after the Olympic Games, held in Athens in 2004, was
short-lived and was followed by the international financial crisis that hit Greece
particularly hard. In this new climate, film writers and directors had to self-finance
their films or exchange labour, for instance producing, writing or directing each
other’s films, as in the case of Yiorgos Lanthimos and Athena Rachel Tsangari
with Dogtooth/Kynodontas (2009) and Attenberg (2010). A new generation has
pushed screenwriting and filmmaking into different territory, though still main-
taining the individualistic nature in the productions of the so-called ‘weird wave’7
of Greek cinema, or ‘New Greek Current’, as Greek scholars have termed it.8
Many of the new wave of women screenwriters have trained abroad and brought
with them, on returning to Greece, new knowledge and new industry practices.
Although screenwriting is still not an established discipline in the country, in the
last few years a number of screenwriting workshops with an international scope
are delivered yearly in Greece, and screenwriting is taught in university courses
and film schools. Tsangari, who studied in the USA, is the most distinguished
woman scriptwriter-director of this generation so far.9 She is in good company,
though, with Ioanna Karystiani, who may only have two screenplay credits to
date but these are for the very successful international production Brides/Nyfes
(Pantelis Voulgaris, 2004) and the recent multi-award-winning Mikra Anglia/Little
England (Pantelis Voulgaris, 2013), adapted from her own novel of the same name.
Elina Psykou wrote, directed and produced the recently successful and critically
acclaimed The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas/I aionia epistrofi tou Antoni
Paraskeva (2013), an innovative film which satirizes media cynicism and celebrity
status in the period of Greek austerity.
Television
Television did not arrive in Greece until the 1960s, and only became more widely
available after 1962.10 From 1967, the dictatorship restricted the development of
the television industry and the medium is still, in some respects, heavily con-
trolled and regulated by the state. Despite these difficulties, efforts were made to
produce local programming rather than solely depend on imports.
The first serial for Greek television, The House with the Palm Tree/To Spiti me ton
Foinika, was produced in 1970 and the script written by Kiki Segditsa, a female
journalist who had also written a small number of film scripts. It was not until
after the dictatorship, however, from the mid 1970s onwards, that more women
screenwriters gained work in television, mostly writing literary adaptations.
Soula Pierakkou, for example, adapted six novels by Gregorios Xenopoulos, an
important Greek novelist. She went on to write many more scripts for television
series and serials until her death in 2008, making her one of the most prolific
television writers. The Screenwriting Award given by the Screenwriters Guild in
Greece every year is named after her. Tonia Marketaki, already a successful New
Greek cinema director and screenwriter, made a brief foray into television with
the series To Lemonodasos (1978). A few other women wrote for television dur-
ing the late 1970s and into the 1980s: for example, Eleni and Maria Paxinou
scripted a number of comedy and drama series throughout the decade and into
the 90s such as Kafeneio Emigrec (ERT2, 1986) and Amarties Goneon (ET2, 1993–4),
while Elena Pantazoni’s career culminated with the very successful Orkisteite
Parakalo (1985). The television film became a popular form during the 1980s and
into the 1990s, when notable writers such as Maria Nikolakopoulou worked suc-
cessfully in this form with acclaimed works like A Seat by the Window/Mia Thesis
to Parathyro (1981).
The broadcasting of the first private commercial channel, MEGA, and a second
commercial channel, ANT1, in 1989 also created opportunities for more women
to enter the industry. The 1990s were a period of deregulation and commercializa-
tion of television, and the serial became the main focus of competition between
the newly introduced channels. As well as resulting in an increase in the number
of women television writers, the role of the writer began to take precedence over
that of the director.
From the early 1990s Mirella Papaoikonomou dominated the field of televi-
sion writing with a great number of successful dramas, making her one of Greece’s
most acclaimed writers.11 But many other women were also successful writers in
this period. Dimitra Papadopoulou wrote one of the most popular sit-coms in
Greek television history, Oi Aparadektoi,12 which aired on MEGA in 1991; Anna
Hadjisofia, in collaboration with Haris Romas, has excelled in comedy writing
since the early 1990s and to the present; Eleni Mavili’s Hi Rock (1992–4) became
the first of a series of well-liked sit-coms created and scripted by her.
Greece 403
Considering the contribution of women screenwriters in film and television,

which has only selectively been outlined here, there has been very little recogni-
tion of their significance in the development of the field. In a country which is
still heavily patriarchal and male-dominated, women’s work has been ignored
or generally dismissed as less worthy of entering the canon. Andrew Horton’s
article on the state of the screenplay in Greek filmmaking refers to five signifi-
cant Greek screenplays of that period, none of which was written by a woman
(2002: 32). Yet Horton could have mentioned equally interesting and challeng-
ing scripts by women: Laya Yourgou’s Too Late Tomorrow/Avrio Tha’nai Arga,
Katerina Evangelakou’s Think It Over/Tha to Metanioseis or Stella Theodoraki’s
Close So Close/Para Ligo, Para Ponto, Para Triha (all in 2002). Yourgou’s scripts
depict outcast, marginalized characters and demonstrate a humanist approach
to ethical dilemmas. The film and its themes13 were controversial and received
mixed responses from audiences and critics, yet stand out because of their origi-
nality. Evangelakou’s film, Think it Over, won an award for best script at the 43rd
Thessaloniki International Film Festival; the writer-director’s work often focuses
on the lives of women in contemporary Greece, an area neglected in mainstream
filmmaking. Finally, Theodoraki’s Close So Close deals with issues of subjectivity,
interiority and love. The script may present the challenges that Horton identifies
in his article, with multiple characters introduced without acquiring much depth;
however, it also shows the potential Horton notes in relation to the scripts he did
select as case studies.
The lack of attention accorded to screenplays by women in Greece is not neces-
sarily a conscious practice, but it does bear ideological and political importance
when considering the role of women in the arts in general. It is therefore impera-
tive that further research seeks to redress such biases. Further academic research
into screenwriting will enhance an embattled discipline’s confidence as a whole,
and strengthen the presence of women screenwriters as key contributors in the
development of two very important cultural industries.
Case studies
The case studies that follow discuss three women screenwriters currently working
in Greece. A contemporary context has been chosen, because the last two decades
have seen important developments and a surge of popularity for both film and
television in Greece. The television industry has continued to absorb scriptwrit-
ing talent when film production has suffered, but there is currently a significant
rebirth of Greek film internationally, which is positive for the position of women
screenwriters within Greece.
Angeliki Antoniou (b. 1956)

Angeliki Antoniou is a Greek film director and screenwriter working in Greece
and Germany who represents, as a writer and director, a generation of women
who have played an important role in kick-starting the rebirth of contemporary
Greek cinema.
As is most often the case in Greek cinema, direction and screenwriting are roles
undertaken by the same person, following the tradition of auteurism in the coun-
try. Antoniou has consistently worked on her own scripts for short films, films for
television, documentaries and features. Born in Athens, she studied architecture
in Greece and film direction at DFFB (the German Film and Television Academy in
Berlin). She lives in Athens and in Berlin, a transnationalism that is often reflected
in her films, both in terms of production and themes.
Antoniou’s career as a filmmaker started in the late 1980s; in 1987 she wrote and
directed Persephone, a 20-minute short that was awarded an Honorary Distinction
at the International Short Film Festival of Drama in Greece. From then on she has
worked continuously in a variety of media, having scripted and directed a num-
ber of documentaries (Prisoners of the Sea/Gefangene des Meeres, 1989; Dances of the
Night/Tänze der Nacht, 1996) and television films (Secret Dance/Heimlicher Tanz,
1999; Alone Among Men/Allein Unter Männern, 2000; Sharp Like a Knife/Messerscharf,
2001). Her biggest successes, however, have been in the cinema with Donusa
(1992), Nights Gambled Away/Verspiel te Nächte/Hamenes Nyxtes (1997) and Eduart
(2006–7). All her films have been international co-productions and received
many awards; Nights Gambled Away and Eduart were voted Best Screenplay at
Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 1997 and 2007 respectively.14
Antoniou is a filmmaker who has always chosen ‘difficult’ or taboo subjects for
her films. Donusa deals with the consequences of a cover-up of incest and rape in
a small, male-dominated Greek community. The silence of the female characters
plays a major part in establishing the tone of the film, as does the vocal foreigner,
a German, who helps to uncover the truth. Eduart is a forceful, Dostoevskian
story of crime and punishment with a young Albanian man as its main character.
Based on a true story, the film has been praised for its accomplished writing, harsh
realism, lack of melodramatic overtones, depth of character and its honesty and
rhythm in unfolding the narrative.15 Antoniou’s catalyst character is often a for-
eigner, the stranger in an established and secretive Greek society, whose viewpoint
is shared by the audience and whose presence opens opportunities for the narra-
tive to address taboo and controversial themes, such as rape, incest, immigration
and national identity. Antoniou has observed that her scripts have often been
criticized by the Greek establishment because of their subject matter and the alter-
native perspective she promotes. For example, when she applied for production
funding to the Greek Film Centre for Donusa, she was asked to change elements
in the script that presented incestuous rape (a father raping his daughter); the sug-
gestion, she notes incredulously, was to perhaps change the character of the father
to a stepfather, in other words someone unrelated to the girl.16
Antoniou has been very vocal about the need for women in the film and tel-
evision industries to help one another in order for their stories to be told. When
considering the role of women screenwriters in particular she observes, however,
that, ‘In the last few years there are plenty of female screenwriters who have
been successful writing for a domestic television audience. But it’s strange that
they have not managed to write for Greek cinema as successfully – they simply
haven’t broken through’ (Interview with author, 2013). One of the reasons she
Greece 405
cites is the fact that the television and film industries in Greece have not gener-
ally co-operated with each other, often making it difficult for talent to cross from
one medium to the other. For screenwriters in particular she notes that there
appears to be ‘an established mentality that [those] who write for Greek televi-
sion are not capable of writing for the cinema. Maybe the reason for that is the
insufficient quality of the Greek television industry, combined with the arrogance
of the Greek film industry’ (Interview with author, 2013). Although this is gener-
ally true, there have been a number of (women) screenwriters who have worked
successfully in both media – as was noted in the previous section, particularly
from the 1990s onwards. However, they and their work tend to ‘disappear’ in the
critical discourses that have thus far been dismissive of screenwriting as a whole.
Mirella Papaoikonomou (n.d.)

Born in Athens and studying English literature, interior and set design, and
advertising, Papaoikonomou has had a rich and varied career, initially working as
a copywriter in advertising, then as a set and costume designer at STOA Theatre
in Athens before turning to screenwriting for television.
Mirella Papaoikonomou’s screenplays have dominated the Greek television
landscape for over two decades and have provided some of the most popular and
critically acclaimed fiction series since broadcasting deregulation in 1989, when
privately owned television channels such as MEGA and ANT1 invested heavily
in producing serials for their primetime schedules. Her first script was for the
National Television (ET1) series Teenagers and Grown-ups/Mikroi Megaloi (1984–6).
In 1991 she wrote Women/Gynaikes for MEGA, initiating a long-running collabora-
tion with the channel. The story revolves around two sisters who have left their
partners for different reasons and find themselves living in the same block of flats
with their children. The characters support each other through the challenges
of life and their roles as mothers. The series ran for two seasons, and gained the
Greek National Television Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1992.
This success was followed by another popular series for MEGA, Anastasia
(1992–3), building on the writer’s capacity to deliver strong and engaging cen-
tral female characters. In 1993–4 she returned briefly to ET1 with the script for
Window by the Sun/Parathyro ston Ilio, only to return to MEGA the following year
with another drama, Don’t Be Afraid of Fire/Mi Fovasai ti Fotia, and Absent/Apon in
1995–6. The multi-award-winning Word of Honour/Logo Timis followed in 1997,
earning Best Original Screenplay and Best Drama Series awards (among others) in
the national Personalities/Prosopa Television Awards. Her next drama, A Life Never
Lived/I Zoi pou den Ezisa (MEGA), once again won the Best Original Screenplay at
the Personalities TV Awards 1998.
After a short break, Papaoikonomou wrote a number of screenplays from 2000
onwards for both public service and commercial television, which again were
extremely popular: No Problem/Ouden Provlima (STAR, 2000), Leni (MEGA, 2002),
It Was Just a Dream/Oneiro Itan (NET, 2002–3), All of a Sudden/Etsi Ksafnika (MEGA,
2004), Mauve-Rose (ANT1, 2005) and Ioanna Tis Kardias (ANT1, 2006–7). Her most
recent series for television was The Island/To Nisi (MEGA, 2010–11), an adaptation
of the novel with the same title by Victoria Hislop. The series was received very
positively by the viewing public, though not all critics were so generous about the
script and the series overall. For example, Kosmas Vidos argues that the ‘biggest
problem of the series is Mirella Papaoikonomou’s script, which exhausts itself in
setting up scenes’ while its characters ‘remain stereotypical and one-dimensional’.17
Nevertheless, others considered this one of the last big productions for Greek televi-
sion, as the recent economic crisis has resulted in both film and television production
budgets being slashed severely.
Papaoikonomou’s characters are marked by her interest in human emotions and
life experiences and their interiority. Dilemmas, crossroads and difficult choices
structure the character-led dramas that Papaoikonomou has offered over the years.
She notes in an interview about A Life Never Lived: ‘[W]hat matters is the problemati-
sation, the thoughts. Even if something leaves us with bitterness, we’re still winners
in the end. Sometimes we do not do what is expected, but a transgression leads us to
surprise ourselves. [...] What is dramatic in the end? Humanity.’18 Papaoikonomou’s
scripts often have challenging conclusions which do not subscribe to the predictable
‘happy ending’. Her contribution to bringing complex, three-dimensional female
characters to television has been immeasurable, not only for the development of
screenwriting but also for pushing these boundaries with thought-provoking nar-
ratives. For example, Women had female characters as leads and assumed a female
perspective, which was highly uncommon at the time, while Anastasia was one of
the first series on Greek television whose main theme was female desire. The series’
finale, when Anastasia, the lead character, walks away from both her male lovers
who claim her as ‘their own’, in search of a new adventure without any remorse or
guilt, is one of the most memorable moments in Greek television history.
In a recent interview Papaoikonomou lamented the aesthetic and technical pov-
erty of the television serial in Greece and has turned to theatre, most recently adapt-
ing Avory Corman’s Kramer vs Kramer (Emporikon Theatre, Athens). She believes
that the Greek economic crisis has affected the quality and creativity of television
production.19 Papaoikonomou is one of the few Greek women writers who have
devoted themselves almost exclusively to screenwriting, and she is certainly one
who has made an immeasurable contribution to Greek television history; despite
this, there is no academic research or other critical writing devoted to her work.
Manina Zoumboulaki (b. 1960)

Born in Kavala, Northern Greece, Manina Zoumboulaki lives in Athens with her
husband and three children. She is a screenwriter for film and television, novelist,
translator and journalist – an example of the multiple writing environments in
which women often operate in Greece. She summarizes the difficulties a screen-
writer faces:
We always say it’s a miracle how we manage to make films or television series
in Greece: usually the writer is employed at the last possible minute, for the
least possible ‘expense’ – the writer’s salary is considered an ‘expense’ since
more often than not, the filmmaker jots down the screenplay with the help
Greece 407
of their partner or some friends (right before shooting starts!). In other words,
scriptwriters are not highly looked upon in Greece … and are very badly paid!
If they are actually paid at all.20
As a novelist she has written ten books to date and has participated as a co-author
in a number of other publications.21 Memory Lapses or Gaps of Memory22/Kena
Mnimis (1995), Go!/Fevga (2000), which became a best-seller and has also been
adapted for television by her (the series was shown on MEGA channel with the
same title in 2002–3), Life Is (Not) a Movie/I zoi (den) einai tainia (2001), Dust of
a Day/I skoni tis imeras (2003), and her more recent Happiness/Eftichia (2012) are
among her fiction writing. She has also translated a number of literary works,
among them Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) and Norman Mailer’s Ancient
Evenings (1983). Zoumboulaki is a talented writer who has worked in various
genres, in both fiction and non-fiction.
To date, Zoumboulaki has co-authored two films: Love Knot/Eleftheri Katadysi
with Giorgos Panousopoulos, who also directed the film (1995), and Risotto (2000)
with director and co-screenwriter Olga Malea. She wrote the script for the TV series
Ksehase Me/Forget Me (2006, Alpha) and a television film, Apagogi/Abduction (2007,
Mega). As a screenwriter, Zoumboulaki is associated with popular and commercial
film and television,23 which is often neglected in critical writing. The variety of
her other output further diminishes her ‘prestige’, as well as the scholarly inter-
est in exploring the work of writers like her, particularly within the field of Greek
film studies. Although her production for the screen is not extensive, the fact that
she writes prolifically for a number of other media, rather than exclusively as a
screenwriter, makes her contribution to Greek writing in general – and women’s
writing in particular – significant.
In terms of content, much of her work features strong, independent, female
characters, evident in the aforementioned Risotto, who have generally been
missing from Greek film and television. Zoumboulaki identifies this attention
to female characters as an important contribution by women writers in the film
and television industries. As she observes, ‘From the ‘90s onwards, we have had
more “relationship-centred” series, even adventures, with well-rounded women-
characters and mainly strong heroines. Also, the work of women filmmakers like
Olga Malea has been a big help – mostly, women filmmakers are feminists and
they understand what makes a female character become a heroine.’24
Notes
1. Also see Dimitris Koliodimos’s series of catalogues/histories covering the years between
1993 and 1999 and published by the Greek Film Critics Guild, and the Dictionary of Greek
Films 1914–2000 by the same author (2011).
2. Where there is an established title for a Greek film in English, this is provided first,
followed by the Greek title in Latin characters. Otherwise, only the Greek title is given.
3. For a full filmography, see Valoukos, S. 2007. Filmography of Greek Cinema (1914–2007).
Athens: Aigokeros. See also the Greek Film Archive: http://www.tainiothiki.gr/v2/index/
collection/ (accessed 27 May 2015).
4. Interestingly, on IMDb Hristinaki is not billed as a co-scriptwriter (with Grigoris

Grigoriou) for Storm at the Lighthouse; moreover, Grigoriou is billed as co-scriptwriter for
Bitter Bread, though Valoukos (a more trusted source in my opinion) presents Hristinaki
alone as the screenwriter for that film.
5. Indicatively, 63 Greek films are released in 1960, already a much increased number from
22, only five years earlier; by 1966–7 a total of 118 films are released, excluding shorts
(Karalis 2012: 79). Very few films are exported, and those mostly to countries where
there is a strong Greek diaspora market. The vast majority of the films made are aimed
at the Greek market.
6. See Maria Chalkou’s (2012) excellent overview article on the subject.
7. Steve Rose (2011).
8. See, for example, Petros Alexiou (2011) and Thodoros Soumas (2010, 2011).
9. For a detailed account of Tsangari’s work see Anna Poupou 2014.
10. Valoukos notes that the first experimental transmission reaches the Greek audiences
in 1960 from the International Trade Fair of Thessaloniki with a signal covering only
a few kilometres around the transmitter. For a detailed account of the introduction of
television in Greece and its establishment eventually as the most powerful medium in
the country see Valoukos, S. 2008. History of Greek Television. Athens: Aigokeros.
11. More details about her work in the case study that follows.
12. She also acts as one of the main characters of the series; a multi-talented personality
who has continued producing interesting, funny and topical scripts as well as delivering
memorable comic performances.
13. Too Late Tomorrow tells the story of a petty criminal on prison leave for 48 hours.
During this time, he escapes with his girlfriend (a prostitute) and his younger brother
in a stolen car in search of freedom and a new start. The characters’ choices, as well as
society’s treatment of people at the margins seeking a second chance, are the focus of
the film.
14. For more details about Antoniou’s filmography and festival awards visit: http://www.
angelikiantoniou.com/bio and http://www.tainiothiki.gr/v2/lang_en/filmography/
view/1/531/ (accessed 27 May 2015).
15. See a collection of reviews of the film, and a note from the director about writing
the script and making the film at: http://www.koinotopia.gr/index.php?option=com_
content&view=article&id=49:2009-10-23-08-35-36&catid=10:2009-10-18-21-13-
18&Itemid=11 (accessed 11 July 2014).
16. Antoniou’s keynote address at Contemporary Greek Film Cultures 2013: An International
Conference, London, 5–6 July 2013.
17. See, for example, Kosmas Vidos’s ‘On Air – Culture’ commentary in the newspaper
ToVima, 24 October 2010. Available at: http://www.tovima.gr/culture/article/?aid=3627
60&wordsinarticle=%CE%BD%CE%B7%CF%83%CE%B9%3b%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%
80%CE%B1%CE%BF%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%BF%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE%BC%CE%BF
%CF%85 (accessed 21 September 2013). My translation.
18. Myrto Loverdou (1998).
19. Myrto Loverdou (2012).
20. Interview with the author, May 2013.
21. A list of Zoumboulaki’s works can be found here: http://www.biblionet.gr/author/632/
%CE%9C%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%AF%CE%BD%CE%B1_%CE%96%CE%BF%CF%85%
CE%BC%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%85%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%BA%CE%B7 (accessed 11
July 2014).
22. The title can be found in both translations although Zoumboulaki uses Memory Lapses
on her CV.
23. All the aforementioned screenplays were written in popular genres (dramas and comedies)
and were commercially successful.
24. Interview with the author, May 2013.
Greece 409
References
Alexiou, P. 2011. ‘Greek Cinema – Emerging from a Landscape in the Mist: the 51st
Thessaloniki International Film Festival’. Available at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/
festival-reports/greek-cinema-emerging-from-a-landscape-in-the-mist-the-51st-thessaloniki-
international-film-festival/ (accessed 10 July 2014).
Chalkou, M. 2012. ‘A New Cinema of “Emancipation”: Tendencies of Independence in Greek
Cinema of the 2000s’, Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, 3 (2): 243–61.
Horton, A. 2002. ‘Desperately Seeking Screenplays: Five Contemporary Greek Films
Considered’, Film Criticism, 27 (2): 31–42.
Karalis, V. 2012. A History of Greek Cinema. New York & London: Continuum.
Koliodimos, D. 1994–2000. Cinema ‘93 to ‘99 (yearly publication). Athens: Panellinia Enosi
Kritikon Kinimatografou.
Koliodimos, D. 2011. Dictionary of Greek Films: 1914–2000. Athens: Militos.
Loverdou, M. 1998. ‘Mirella Papaoikonomou’, To Vima, 18 October. Available at: http://
www.tovima.gr/relatedarticles/article/?aid=104081 (accessed 18 May 2015).
Loverdou, M. 2012. ‘Mirella Papaoikonomou: Today’s Televisual Aesthetic is Harmful/i
simerini tileoptini aisthitiki mas kanei kako’, To Vima, 18 November. Available at: http://
www.tovima.gr/culture/article/?aid=484178 (accessed 21 September 2013).
Mitropoulou, A. 2006 (1980). Greek Cinema. Athens: Papazisis Publications.
Poupou, A. 2014. ‘Going Backwards, Moving Forwards: the Return of Modernism in the Work
of Athina Rachel Tsangari’, Filmicon, 2, September. Available at: http://filmiconjournal.com/
journal (accessed 18 May 2015).
Rose, S. 2011. ‘Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema’, Guardian, Saturday
27 August 2011, p.16
Soldatos, Y. 2002, 2004. History of Greek Cinema, Vols I, II, III, IV. Athens: Aigokeros.
Soumas, T. 2010. ‘The New Wave of Greek Filmmakers’. Available at: http://camerastyloonline.
wordpress.com/2010/12/29/to-neo-revma-ton-ellinon-skinotheton-tou-thodorou-souma/
Soumas, T. 2011. ‘Greek Cinema: New Current’. Available at: http://www.cinephilia.gr/
index.php/prosopa/hellas/128-2011-08-24-16-37-17 (accessed 10 July 2014).
Valoukos, S. 2007. Filmography of Greek Cinema, 3rd edition. Athens: Aigokeros.
Valoukos, S. 2008. History of Greek Television. Athens: Aigokeros.
Ireland
Susan Liddy and Díóg O’Connell
Overview
Díóg O’Connell
While Irish cinema production was sporadic for most of the twentieth century,
women screenwriters were often at the core of key productions at the most sig-
nificant moments, albeit in small numbers compared to their male counterparts.
Evidence for this is found in the silent era, the Film Company of Ireland’s (FCOI)
key films in the 1920s, the emergence of television in the 1960s, and the first wave
of Irish film up to the last two decades of New Irish Cinema. Women have writ-
ten, directed, edited and set designed throughout the course of Irish cinema, in
small but noticeable numbers, given the limited female participation in the public
sphere and a film industry that progressed through the twentieth century in what
might be described as fits and starts (Rockett et al. 1987; McLoone 2000; Barton
2004). From as early as 1896, when the Lumière Brothers came to Ireland to screen
films such as Train Coming into a Station not long after their first public screenings
in Paris at the end of 1895 (Rockett et al. 1987: 3–5), film has played a significant
role in Ireland, at times more so in exhibition than production.
Public policy in Ireland failed to nurture the cultural activity associated with
film until the end of the twentieth century. Instead, Ireland’s relationship with
film has been primarily characterized by internal government policy on cen-
sorship and control of the medium, as well as its use as a propaganda tool for
official projects. The visual depiction of Ireland through cinema was mainly left
in the hands of Hollywood and British filmmakers. This meant that stories of
Ireland were often constructed and perceived from the outside. Yet, for a small
island nation located on the periphery of Europe, its command of international
cinema screens might be seen as disproportionate. This can be explained by the
diaspora connection between Ireland and the United States and the growing
interest in the silver screen among urban audiences in America, with a liking
for Irish subject matter that continued throughout the twentieth century. This
international presence is contrasted with the absence of any official internal
infrastructure to support the cultural function of film in Ireland between the
1930s and the 1980s.
410
Ireland 411
The silent era

One of the most interesting periods of early Irish film was the arrival of the Kalem
Company to the shores of Ireland in 1910, which was followed by three more sum-
mer expeditions, the last in 1914. Kalem was an American film company formed
in 19071 which played a significant role in early silent filmmaking (Rockett et al.
1987: 7–12). In 1910, the New York-based company headed by Sidney Olcott as
director, alongside Gene Gauntier as lead actress, scenario writer and scriptwriter,
arrived in south west Ireland, basing themselves in the small village of Beaufort,
near Killarney in Co. Kerry. Drawing on local labour as film extras and to work on
set, the Kalem Company produced not only the first American film to be made
in Ireland, but also the first fiction film, The Lad from Old Ireland (1910). The
film was directed by Sidney Olcott and written by Gene Gauntier, with Olcott
playing the part of Terry O’Connor and Gauntier as the female lead, Aileen. This
film established a successful pattern that would repeat itself many times and, as
screenwriter and Kalem’s lead actress, Gauntier was particularly influential, com-
bining romantic tales, authentic locations and attention to specific detail in these
narrative films, creating a link between the audience and their homeland, it was
an early example of diaspora film.
The films of the Kalem Company anticipated trends that were to develop in
future years, principally led by the Hollywood studios, where the Irish landscape
features not just as a backdrop but is central to the mise-en-scène, for example,
The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952); Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1935; and Ryan’s
Daughter (David Lean, 1969). It also introduced film production experience to
this corner of Ireland, inviting locals to become involved in production. The
first indigenous Irish talkie was filmed in 1934 and 1935, in Killarney. The Dawn
(Tom Cooper, 1936), a story centred around the War of Independence (1919–21)
(Rockett 1996: 14–15), was produced by a crew and cast that included people who
had direct experience of the historical events being told, providing an historical
connection between two eras of film production.
Early indigenous film

Irish film in the early part of the twentieth century showed some promising signs
that were unfortunately not realized with the foundation of the Free State after
independence in 1922. However, two very important films were written in this
period by Irish female screenwriters, Mrs N. F. Patton (unknown dates) and Mary
Manning (1905–99), signalling what indigenous film could produce with better
support structures. Ireland’s first indigenous film production company, the FCOI,
was active in a nation-building exercise in the production of a number of note-
worthy films between 1910 and 1920 (McLoone 2000: 28) and is regarded as the
most important production company in Ireland of the silent era. Unfortunately,
many of its films were lost during the Easter Rising in 1916. Mrs N. F. Patton
scripted one of the most important films, Knocknagow (1918), an adaptation of
Charles Kickham’s famous novel first published in 1873, which enjoyed both criti-
cal and commercial success at the time (Rockett 1996: 8; Rockett et al. 1987: 18).
Little is known about Patton as a writer, with most attention directed to the
author of the source material, Charles Kickham, and to its director Fred O’Donovan.
The advance publicity for the film described it as ‘adapted by Mrs N. F. Patton (Irish
Limelight, April, May and June 1917, back covers), and the version screened in
Ireland in 1918 also appears to have credited the screenplay to ‘Mrs Patton, a
Dublin lady’ (Clonmel Chronicle, 2 February 1918, 5). However, any discussion of
the script is limited to how it compares to the original source material and ‘the
company’s choices and omissions has hitherto centred largely on their political
implications’. The film is described as ‘an episodic adaptation of an already epi-
sodic novel’, and little attention has been given to Patton’s specific treatment.
While scriptwriters often take a back seat to the director in terms of recognition
and profile in the film industry, this is even more common with the female script-
writer. In a similar fashion to Knocknagow, the film Guests of the Nation (1935),
scripted by Mary Manning, a writer and journalist, is much better known as an
adaptation of Irish writer Frank O’Connor’s short story of the same name.
Knocknagow’s scenario deviated at an ideological level from its source material,
indicating the significance of the new medium and its contemporary resonance,
masking any internal class conflict, which ‘accorded with contemporary national-
ist politics’ (Rockett et al. 1987: 23). The adaptation of Knocknagow, which keeps
to the episodic approach of its source material while shifting the focus ideo-
logically so as to indicate something contemporary, reveals how developed the
medium of film narrative was in its short history and is testament to the script-
writer’s handling of this new form of storytelling. Similarly, the second major fea-
ture of the FCOI, Willie Reilly & His Colleen Bawn (1920), a story based on William
Carleton’s 1855 novel and adapted for the screen by Dr D. A. Moriarty, featuring
the romantic tale of a Catholic man and Protestant woman, also displayed the
nationalist sympathies of the FCOI (Rockett et al. 1987: 24–5). The possibilities
for the modern narrative form to intervene in public discourse and reinforce the
prevailing ideology was soon realized by the new government after independence,
and this was possibly one of the reasons why the growth of film as a cultural activity
came to a halt.
Mary Manning’s screenplay for Guests of the Nation (1935) was another key film of
this era, but unlike Knocknagow it set out to challenge the dominant ideology of the
time. The film tells the story of the capture by the IRA of two British soldiers during
the War of Independence, a similar scenario to that adopted by Neil Jordan in The
Crying Game (1993), which won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Ruth Barton describes Guests of the Nation as the ‘sole film of the period to ques-
tion the prevailing orthodoxies of heroic nationalism’, but in contrast to the earlier
films produced by the FCOI it is the most ‘amateurish of the independence films’
(Barton 2004: 46). The film was to be a sound film, but due to lack of funds it was
produced as a silent film with the intention of adding sound later; however, this
didn’t happen. Despite what some view as the amateur status of the film, Manning
shows a discerning and critical position towards the cinematic form.
As a scriptwriter and journalist Manning was particularly critical of the tradi-
tion of stereotyping the country in a ‘paddywhackery’ and stage-Irish manner. She
Ireland 413
wrote an extensive critique of the film Smiling Irish Eyes (USA, 1929) in the Irish
Statesman, suggesting that ‘if an international prize was offered for the worst film
ever made Smiling Irish Eyes would undoubtedly win it … At times waves of nausea
swept over me and the screen became a blur’ (Rockett et al. 1987: 54). Manning
welcomed films that differed from the ‘Irish’ stereotype approach to representa-
tion. When Song o’ My Heart (1930) was released, also an American film with Irish
subject matter and starring Hollywood star Maureen O’Hara, Manning noted that
the film brought ‘a certain amount of Hollywood gold’ to Ireland, as well as inter-
national publicity, because it was screened all over the world. Writing about the
film, she described it as ‘a picture of modern Ireland. An accurate picture. There
are to be no colleens, shillelaghs, squireens or begorras … An Irish super-talkie of
modern Irish life, for the first time accurately and intelligently portrayed on the
screen, is a chance for the Free State to show the world’ (Rockett et al. 1987: 55–6).
The two film companies Kalem and FCOI are credited with presenting Ireland
to the outside world in a more sophisticated way than the ‘begorrah’ approach,
with the press and public giving their unanimous approval to some of these
films. According to Kevin Rockett, the silent period of Irish cinema ‘represented
an initial important phase in indigenous fiction film-making that in volume,
quality and relevance to contemporary and historical events in Ireland, was not
to be emulated until the 1970s’ (Rockett et al. 1987: 46). After the foundation of
the Free State, Irish film showed little concern for its cultural dimension; rather
film was seen as something to be controlled through censorship and propa-
ganda. Furthermore, the 1937 Constitution of Ireland enshrined women’s role
in society as primarily domestic, in the home and as ‘mother’. Article 41.2 of the
Constitution declares that the ‘State recognises that by her life within the home,
woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be
achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not
be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties
in the home’ (Bunreacht na hÉireann 1937). For the next 40 years, until 1973,
women had to resign their job in the civil service or the bank once they became
married, commonly known as the ‘marriage bar’. While film culture was stymied
in its development by the emerging Free State, the role of women in the public
sphere of Ireland was minimal.
Only a handful of films credited to female scriptwriters can be identified in Irish
film production between 1935 and 1972: Sally’s Irish Pogue, 1958; The Big Birthday,
1959; Broth of a Boy, 1959; and This Other Eden, 1959, are all co-written by Blánaid
Irvine (Rockett 1996). Little is known about Blánaid Irvine (1922–2010) as a
scriptwriter although she was a very well-known stage, film and television actress
prior to her death in 2010. Best known of the three, This Other Eden was directed
by Muriel Box, produced by Emmet Dalton and based on a play by Louis D’Alton.
In her book This Other Eden (2001), Fidelma Farley reclaims this film as significant,
placing it within the important history of Irish cinema, pointing out that the film
‘makes a mockery of romanticized constructions of Ireland by the English, but
the principal target of its satire is Irish romanticization of Ireland and Irish iden-
tity’ (Farley 2001: 2). She sees the film as critiquing 1950s Ireland ‘by making the
audience laugh at themselves and the beliefs they take for granted’ (Farley 2001:
2). However, like Knocknagow and Guests of the Nation, more attention is given by
Farley to the author of the source material and the nature of adaptation than to
the scriptwriter.
Despite this neglect, female scriptwriters were associated with some of the key
films of the early decades of Irish film. But with the almost non-existent cultural
activity in film for 40 years, principally due to a lack of government policy in
fostering the emergent form, women scriptwriters found little opportunity to
practise their craft. It was not until the next wave of film activity in Ireland that
women scriptwriters resurfaced to play an important role in shaping trends in
Irish cinema.
First wave of Irish film – 1970s and 1980s

This period, now known as the first wave of Irish film, was an era of political
cinema when the dominant ideologies in Ireland were questioned, including the
representation and portrayal of women. Barbara O’Connor (1984) highlights such
representations and cites a number of examples of independent productions that
allow for alternative portrayals of women in Ireland. Films like Exposure (Kieran
Hickey, 1978), The Outcasts (Robert Wynne-Simmons, 1982) and The Kinkisha
(Tommy McArdle, 1977) may have been written and directed by men but were
concerned principally with the subversion of a patriarchal discourse. December
Bride (Thaddeus O’Sullivan, 1990) and The Playboys (Gillies McKinnon, 1992) raise
interesting scenarios around women’s defiance in the face of society, particularly
in the control of information. These later films centre on stories of women who
refuse to reveal the paternity of the children born to them outside of wedlock and
the community reaction to these women who step outside their defined roles in
a patriarchal society.
Despite the growing support for women’s issues, few films were written by
women in the 1980s, though three films were made that fall within the traditions
of feminist filmmaking: Maeve (1981) and Anne Devlin (1984) were co-written
and directed by Pat Murphy, and Hush-a-bye Baby (1989) was written by director
Margo Harkin and Stephanie English. Murphy, working within an avant-garde
and modernist aesthetic, constructs an uncompromising film with a debate
between feminism and nationalism at its narrative core, while also investigating
the mechanisms involved in the representation of women, particularly in the
media, against the backdrop of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Anne Devlin is
part of the history project that sought to re-write women into history, by telling
the story of one woman who was involved in the 1803 rebellion against British
rule in Ireland, but largely forgotten in the annals of history. Exploring the
experience of a 15-year-old girl who goes through crisis and confusion when she
becomes pregnant, Hush-a-bye Baby investigates how she copes in a country that
sanctifies childbirth only within the bounds of marriage.
In keeping with the context of first wave films, these scripts fluctuate between
the mainstream and avant-garde, experimenting with narrative and story struc-
ture. Murphy and Harkin, as scriptwriters and directors, share a space with other
Ireland 415
Irish filmmakers reflecting on a wider shift in Irish society, away from a protec-
tionist, inward-looking and conservative standpoint to one that was linked to
international trends in the avant-garde. They are part of a small but significant
movement in Irish cinema between the mid 1970s and late 1980s that found
some public sector infrastructural support in the form of the short-lived Irish Film
Board (1981–7).
The axing of the Irish Film Board in 1987 by Charles Haughey, Minister for
Arts at the time, had a negative impact on filmmaking and meant a return to
the previous decades’ form and a seven-year hiatus in film funding. During this
vacuum a number of female scriptwriters and directors concentrated their produc-
tion energies in the area of short film-making, including Boom Babies by Siobhan
Twomey (1987), Fruit 15 by Claire Lynch (1991), The Visit by Orla Walsh (1992),
Sunny’s Appearance by Deborah Scott-Speer (1994), The Big O by Clare Dowling
(1995), and Silences by Colette Cullen (1995). In moving away from the dominant
tropes of Irish cinema at the time, Siobhan Twomey’s script Boom Babies explores
the story of a young woman trying to defy the norm and pursue a job as a car
mechanic. But when her carefully restored car is stolen, she ends up taking a job
as a petrol pump assistant (Rockett 1996: 40). Unlike other films that attempt
to challenge at the level of form and content, this narrative closes with a return
to the status quo; however, its contemporary style was welcomed at the time as
refreshing and relevant. Orla Walsh works with common themes that challenge
the prevailing views, about Northern Ireland in The Visit and sexuality in Bent out
of Shape. The subjects of these films proved challenging at the time as they dealt
with changing traditions as Irish society shifted slowly towards modernity. In Fruit
15 Claire Lynch (who died in 1993) showed great promise with an experimental
film that looked at the complex notion of identity for Irish women in a society
controlled by the dominant Catholic teachings. An art college graduation film,
the narrative is experimental in form and content, adding narrative layers that
reflect and dissect a range of themes around women’s experience in Ireland, as
daughters and mothers, under the shadow of the cult of the Virgin Mary.
These short films reflect the tensions within feminist filmmaking at the time,
about whether to use narrative form as a means of challenging deep-rooted norms
within patriarchy or to produce popular films with a progressive story that would
appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Irish female scriptwriters, like their male
counterparts, in the absence of support for feature filmmaking, established the
short-film format as one where film culture could develop and evolve. It remains
a parallel track of film activity today, rather than a stepping stone to feature script-
writing. At the same time, filmmakers who began to establish themselves during
the first wave of Irish film were also putting their energies into agitating for the
reinstatement of the Irish Film Board.
One area that provided a consistent outlet for the work of Irish women script-
writers was television drama. Irish television was formally launched on New Year’s
Eve 1961. Its history of drama production is particularly interesting in the 1960s
and 1970s, partly because its output was remarkable for a television institution the
size of RTÉ (Radio Teilefís Éireann). Close proximity to Britain and the BBC meant
its nearest competitor set high standards. Television drama in the 1970s, coincid-
ing with the first wave of Irish film, was both challenging and interrogative of
the status quo. With economic recession in the 1980s, technological change and
deregulation, the production of drama was reduced dramatically, only regaining
ground in the last decade or so. Women scriptwriters were prominent in the areas
of soap opera and serial drama in particular. The first Irish urban soap opera,
Tolka Row (1964–8), was initially co-scripted by Maura Laverty (1907–66). Set in
Dublin’s inner city, it revealed the tensions in a changing state between urban
living and the rural idyll. From 1965– 79, The Riordans, primarily a rural-based
soap opera, turned out to be a vehicle for many of the social issues surfacing in
Ireland, as it shifted from a traditional society to one of modernity. Never shy-
ing away from controversy it tackled many issues that were playing out in the
public domain, and challenges particularly relating to women’s lives. Scriptwriter
Carolyn Swift (1923–2002) was a key writer throughout its long history as well as
working on a range of serial dramas, medical series and programmes about drama
which include Down at Flannery’s (1964), Looking at Drama (1971) and Partners in
Practice (1972). Down at Flannery’s was set in the fictional village of Ballybeckett
and included popular storylines of Irish drama that involved returned ‘Yanks’,
disputes over land and local politics (Sheehan 1987: 122). Looking at Drama was
a programme that sought to explore in an educational way the nature of drama,
in keeping with the public service remit of RTÉ. While it was mainly written by
Carolyn Swift, the programme was interactive in attempting to get the audience to
address questions about drama (Sheehan 1987: 137). Very much a programme of
its time, it reveals the central position television drama held within the national
broadcaster’s schedule and programming, and the wider public’s interest in story-
telling and narrative form.
Following a long absence of urban serial drama and soap opera, Fair City (1989–)
was introduced, currently airing four times a week. While initially it modelled
itself on the successful British soap opera EastEnders (1985–), after a few seasons it
settled down to become a more culturally specific half-hour drama, with female
scriptwriters occupying on average 50 per cent of the writers’ team. The presence
of women writers in this capacity ensures that female-centred stories consistently
occupy a central narrative space, in contrast to Irish cinema of recent times.
Writing for a soap opera gives an outlet for creative expression while also provid-
ing a regular income and, at the same time, many of the scriptwriters on Fair City
also wrote for other media. Harriet O’Carroll, a playwright and writer for radio,
was the scriptwriter on Aristocrats (1999), a six-part mini-series for the BBC, based
on the historical novel by Stella Tillyard. Maeve Ingoldsby writes extensively for
children, particularly children’s theatre, and has scribed two children’s operas
and numerous pantomimes, as well as work for radio and television. The work
of another Fair City scriptwriter, Lauren Mackenzie, also includes the medical
series The Clinic (2006–7), the crime drama On Home Ground (2001), and Eugene
O’Brien’s Pure Mule (2009). Kate Thompson has also been a successful writer of
romantic fiction since 1999, publishing a range of novels including Star Gazing
(2008) and The Kinsella Sisters (2009), while Colette Cullen, scene breakdown/
Ireland 417
script writer on Fair City (2000–3) moved into the film industry and has concentrated
on writing for film (See No Evil, 2008; Odd Sock, 2000).
Similarly the rural-based soap opera Glenroe (1983–2002) was a creative outlet
for Irish female scriptwriters, some of whom also wrote for Fair City, namely
Harriet O’Carroll and Maeve Ingoldsby. Although the ratio of male to female
writers wasn’t as favourable on Glenroe (around 30 per cent) as it was in the later
Fair City (around 50 per cent), it arguably allowed writers the space to develop in
other forms. Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, long-time writer with Glenroe, is also an author
in English and Irish and writes children’s fiction, collections of short stories, nov-
els and plays. Irish soap opera is often viewed as a training ground for emerging
scriptwriters to learn and hone their craft, but for many female screenwriters it
provides a continuity of employment in the field of scriptwriting, clearly giving a
presence to female practitioners in the genre.
The above list is by no means exhaustive as many more women writers have
contributed to soap opera while also writing in other genres. Television drama, in
general, facilitates women writers who work in other writing formats – novels and
short stories in particular – by providing regular employment and social capital
through a writers’ team. Some of Ireland’s internationally best-known and well-
regarded novelists have also turned to television drama: Edna O’Brien scripted A
Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers (1975), Maeve Binchy wrote two screenplays, Deeply
Regretted By (1978) and Ireland of the Welcomes (1980), Jennifer Johnston wrote
The Bondage Field (1981), and Anne Enright Revenge (1994).
These novelists have tended to stick with one-off dramas, returning to the writ-
ten word for their better-known works. For example, Maeve Binchy is the author
of 16 novels, four short story collections, a play and a novella. Although not a
frequent scriptwriter, she wrote two television dramas, both of which explored
the nuances and complexities of elements of Irish identity. Helena Sheehan in
Irish Television Drama (1987) describes Deeply Regretted By as the best of Irish drama
exploring ‘the human psyche and encompassing the rhythms of socio-historical
experience’ (Sheehan 1987: 61). In Deeply Regretted By, a married man from the
west of Ireland is forced to go to England to find work and, when he dies, it is
revealed he had been a bigamist. Sheehan says of the film: ‘[E]ven in stories in
which there was no hint of characters questioning the traditional norms in prin-
ciple, there were revelations of a complexity of experience that nearly compelled
a violation of the simplicity of their surface acceptance’ (Sheehan 1987: 246),
a trope recurrent throughout Maeve Binchy’s expansive oeuvre. This drama paral-
lels Binchy’s other work, which used popular forms of narrative to explore complex
and contradictory emotional states, mining beneath the surface of human experi-
ence and presenting stories that resonate with an audience.
Television drama in Ireland has provided a platform for female scriptwriters,
particularly in serial drama, soap opera and situation comedy, and has given more
consistency in terms of female representation in the field of scriptwriting than
feature film production. In terms of employment and regular work, the broadcast-
ing institution is more favourable as a space for the female scriptwriter, a situation
not unique to Ireland.
New Irish cinema

In 1993 the Irish Film Board was reactivated after seven years by Michael D.
Higgins, Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, and now president of
Ireland (2011–). This period of film is particularly important for being the first
time Ireland has produced a quantity of indigenous feature films. The period 1994
to the present has seen major shifts in aspects of national and international cin-
ema (O’Connell 2010; O’Connell 2012) and quite discernible phases are evident.
Irish cinema has developed within a context of global popular culture. Clearly, the
opportunities for women scriptwriters increased in this era as they did for their
male counterparts, but this was not necessarily on an equal footing. In this new
wave of Irish Film Board activity, over 50 films have credited a female scriptwriter
as either co-writer or principal writer. Many of these films work within very inter-
esting narrative forms, exploring familiar and less familiar tropes of Irish cinema.
The early phase (1994–9) is peppered with the more familiar themes of Irish cin-
ema from the 1970s and 1980s, with specific female-centred inflections by their
scriptwriters; this includes Snakes and Ladders, written by Trish MacAdam (1996),
The Sun, the Moon and the Stars by Geraldine Creed (1996), This Is the Sea by Mary
McGuckian (1996), and Gold in the Streets by Janet Noble (1996).
All of these films place female experience at the centre of the narrative. Snakes
and Ladders and The Sun, the Moon and the Stars explore themes of women and work
and the conflicts and complications in their lives. This Is the Sea returns to the dom-
inant trope of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, just as the cease-fire is announced,
and tells a tale of love across the barricades, this time between 20-year-old Hazel
(Samantha Morton), who comes from a very strict Protestant background, and
Malachy (Ross McDade), a Catholic from west Belfast. Gold in the Streets, with Liz
Gill as director and Janet Noble as scriptwriter, set out to explore, through a multi-
cast narrative, the emigrants’ experience in New York. Another common theme for
Irish cinema, but this time given a more urban and youthful hue.
Since 2000, there has been a noticeable policy shift at the Irish Film Board
towards more auteurist approaches to storytelling, supported by an artisanal
approach to low-budget filmmaking. Within this framework some very individual
narratives have emerged, reigniting the more formal approach to cinema of the
first wave. Carmel Winters’ Snap (2010) is a topical story of child abduction and
abuse, but explores the telling of stories through an interesting stylistic approach,
while Margaret Corkery also examines the dominant trope of family, but in a
fresh and innovative way. Corkery’s film was funded through the Catalyst Project,
launched in 2007, which is promoted as a risk-taking strategy that gives oppor-
tunities to new talent through ‘ultra-low budgets’. Similarly, Juanita Wilson in
As If I Am Not There (2010) and Rebecca Daly in The Other Side of Sleep (2011)
contribute to Ireland’s narrative voice with the production of individual and per-
sonal stories that speak beyond national borders and have a much wider cultural
address. Christine Molloy, with her co-writer Joe Lalor, collaborates in a formal
experimental realm (Helen, 2009; Mister John, 2013). These films fit quite comfort-
ably into an art-house space. The narrative pace of Helen is slow and stylized and,
according to one film critic, ‘Helen’s denouement makes it clear that these brave,
Ireland 419
talented film-makers are more interested in what makes sense for their characters
than serving any kind of story structure’ (O’Connell 2010: 162).
In the past 20 years, Irish film has been noted not so much for its continuity
with the first wave as for marking out this era of cinematic territory in a new way.
However, some formal links can be established between the two waves, notably
with the work of Pat Murphy. Distinguished as a filmmaker working within
feminist film, she continues her concern with female-centred narratives in Nora
(2000), a film about the relationship between Nora Barnacle and James Joyce.
The film reveals elements that link it to various stages of feminist film as it has
developed and changed since the 1970s. The narrative reclaims a forgotten female
figure and gives expression to a ‘woman’s story’, but by appropriating and sub-
verting classical structures. It presents a contemporary story framed in a modern
way. Far from being a heritage film which trivializes the past romantically, this
film offers an experience that plays with familiar cinematic devices yet uses them
for subversive ends. Furthermore, this film can be viewed as a bridge between the
two phases of Irish cinema since the 1970s. Nora reclaims Nora Barnacle from
historical oblivion, echoing Murphy’s earlier film Anne Devlin, which recreated the
figure of Anne Devlin as a politically motivated rebel. By presenting Nora as much
more than the wild, primitive girl from the west, the film succeeds in debunking
many of the myths behind the image that is Nora Barnacle, wife of James Joyce.
But it also offers a contemporary Irish love story while articulating a modern dis-
course, one of equality. When read in this way, Nora can be seen as echoing some
of Murphy’s earlier preoccupations while evolving and developing her oeuvre,
reflecting contemporary feminist and female issues through a treatment that is
modern and progressive.
More opportunities for Irish female scriptwriters to find an outlet for their crea-
tive work have emerged since the reactivation of the Irish Film Board in 1993.
While still an uneven playing field, some notable scriptwriters and directors have
managed to advance past the difficult first feature. Kirsten Sheridan, a graduate
of the National Film School at IADT, although known more as a director, has writ-
ten Disco Pigs (2001) and August Rush (2007) and scripted a range of interesting
short and feature films, including The Bench (1995), Patterns (1997) and Dollhouse
(2012). Susan Liddy (later in this chapter) highlights the shortcomings of the Irish
Film Board despite being charged with supporting and promoting the Irish film
industry. Liddy argues that this support appears to be directed, primarily, towards
male-driven projects. The IFB (Irish Film Board) film directory identifies a total of
two hundred and forty-eight (drama) features, produced from the re-instatement
of the second Irish Film Board in 1993 right up to 2013, with IFB financial back-
ing. That figure includes both indigenous Irish films and creative co-productions
(IFB 2014: 100). Of that total, only fifty-seven screenplays were written by female
writers compared with one hundred and ninety-one screenplays written by men
(Liddy 2015). Many barriers remain in place and obstacles in film are not dissimi-
lar to challenges facing women in the workplace and public domain elsewhere.
However, some of these barriers are due to unconscious biases within organiza-
tions and institutionally specific. The only way to break these down is to expose
the often camouflaged structures of discrimination, which further research can

uncover.
In spite of these difficulties, some of the most interesting, explorative, challeng-
ing and original work in Irish film is being realized by women scriptwriters. I Could
Read the Sky, written and directed by Nichola Bruce (1999), presents a very moti-
vating narrative and thematic study in the context of recent Irish film. Primarily
about the Irish emigrant’s experience in Britain, I Could Read the Sky is based on
a ‘photographic novel’ produced by writer Timothy O’Grady and photographer
Steve Pyke (1998). It explores themes more associated with films produced in
Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, featuring stories of memory and regret. Yet it puts
a new and subtle interpretation on this experience in a deeply poignant way, giv-
ing an account of one man’s life as he sits alone in his London bed-sit, his adopted
habitat, but not his home. The theme of emigration and the emigrant’s experience
is a complex yet little told one. I Could Read the Sky is filmed in the style of a per-
sonal diary, drawing a structure that recounts a life told rather than documenting
the events in a linear narrative form. Because the film is an adaptation of a photo-
graphic novel, rather than a filmed version of its original source, Bruce creates the
events in layers of images that tell the story. This film continues the shift towards
auteurist cinema that has been a feature of Irish cinema since 2000.
Irish women scriptwriters are still significantly underrepresented within Irish
cinema today (Liddy 2014), as they are in many national cinemas and mainstream
Hollywood film. In 2013, the IFB website listed 14 Irish films produced with
its support, three of them scripted by women: House of Shadows by Rossella de
Venuto, Mister John, co-scripted by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, and Run and
Jump, co-scripted by Ailbhe Keogan and Steph Green. Yet women screenwriters
in Ireland are breaking down barriers and they present a range of films that defy
easy categorization, films which display an eclectic range of narrative approaches
and thematic exploration. Just like their male counterparts, Irish female writers
are playing a game of catch-up with other national cinemas. The history of Irish
women scriptwriters reveals the significance of female participation at this level
of the film process. Despite underrepresentation in terms of numbers, women
scriptwriters have been part of each historical phase of Irish film and are central
to some of the key Irish films of recent times.
Gene Gauntier (1885–1966)
Díóg O’Connell
Gene Gauntier was born in Kansas City, Missouri and died in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
She moved to New York to pursue a career as a stage actress and fell into the movie
business by accident when she was spotted by the Kalem Company and quickly
became Kalem’s star actress, dubbed as the ‘Kalem Girl’. Not confined to working
as an actress, she supplemented her income through scriptwriting, quickly real-
izing the potential of movie storytelling. Her role in Kalem’s Irish expeditions, as
their lead actress and scriptwriter, was central. Gauntier was the writer of more
than 20 films shot in Ireland during this four-year period and acted in many more.
Ireland 421
When Gauntier suggested that Kalem make pictures in Ireland, the producers
greeted the idea ‘with smiles if not open laughter’ (Gauntier 1928). However, to
her surprise, she was summoned to the Kalem head office and asked when she
could sail to Europe.2 The Kalem Company, including Olcott and Gauntier, were
en route to Ireland a week later. According to Gauntier, ‘we were to be gone six
weeks, including two Atlantic crossings, and were to take three pictures which
I was to write en route, but not an inkling as to plot was given me’ (Gauntier
1928). While on the crossing from the United States to Cobh, Co. Cork, the sce-
nario for The Lad from Old Ireland (1910) was devised and written by Gauntier and
committed to paper. Filming started on the ship, and it was described by Gauntier
as a ‘transatlantic’ picture. The film’s scenario is characteristic of the films pro-
duced by Kalem, which appealed to the emigrant experience of pursuing the
American Dream while at the same time not forgetting one’s homeland, humble
origins and those left behind. The use of authentic locations and close attention
to detail in set design was part of establishing a connection with the audience in
America. The Lad from Old Ireland tells an archetypal diaspora story of emigration,
centring on the experiences of a young Irish man, Terry, who, through a combina-
tion of ambition and poverty, leaves Ireland in pursuit of the American Dream.
Starting off in unskilled labour he rises through the ranks of workers in America,
helping to build the skyscrapers of New York. Despite his progress from menial
labourer to successful businessman, he never forgets the homeland, his mother
and his sweetheart whom he left behind. The film displays a common trope that
combines a representation of the humble roots of the main character alongside
the success garnered through emigration to the United States, clearly a message
promoting the American Dream and appealing to the growing emigrant audience
in the urban centres of the United States.
Gauntier was central to the success of the Kalem Company, not only as their
lead actress and scenario writer, but also in influencing many decisions. The
second film scripted by Gauntier in Ireland, called The Irish Honeymoon (1911),
was described at the time as a travel picture. Clearly aware of the diaspora as a
major share of the audience, the idea was to film the landscape, which Gauntier
described as ‘universally bewitching’, with the attention to detail lending an air of
authenticity. The trip proved highly successful for Olcott and Gauntier. The film
was very well received by the audience in America and by the executives at Kalem,
who felt the film added ‘greatly to the glory of Kalem’ (Gauntier 1928).
Gauntier returned to Ireland with the Kalem Company in 1911, this time
staying 18 weeks. They produced 17 silent films of which four survive. In his
documentary on the Kalem Company, Blazing the Trail – The O’Kalem’s in Ireland
(2011), Tony Tracy describes the company as ‘pioneers’, their films depicting eve-
ryday life and covering everything from romantic melodrama to revolutionary
tales of Ireland’s resistance to British rule.
Gauntier was the principal actress but also contributed to story development
while in Ireland. She had already gained experience as a scriptwriter with Kalem
in America, writing among others The Wayward Daughter (1909), The Man Who
Lost (1910), The Slave to Drink (1909), and The Love of Summer Morn (1911). As she
explains in her biography, one of the Kalem bosses, Frank Marion (Gauntier 1928:
4–7), asked her to try writing scenarios, and even though she describes her first
scenario, Tom Sawyer, as ‘pretty dreadful’, it was what Marion and Olcott wanted.
She wrote the scenario for Ben Hur (1907) and became, as Gauntier explains, ‘the
mainstay of the Kalem scenario department’ (Gauntier 1928: 7), which ensured
she was central to the script process during the production trips to Ireland.
Kalem’s first productions in Ireland were politically quite controversial, leading
to censorship either by the Catholic Church or British authorities, who governed
Ireland at the time, but after this the company concentrated on literary adapta-
tions, melodramas in particular, often focusing on the work of Dion Boucicault.
Olcott and Gauntier parted company with the Kalem Company in 1912 to
form the ‘Gene Gauntier Feature Players’. Gauntier was a prolific writer and had
a great deal of control over many of the productions she worked on. Writing
to William Selig in 1915, Gauntier describes her time at Kalem: ‘For four years
I headed their foreign companies, writing every picture they produced abroad’
(Bisplinghoff 2013), and in 1924 she is quoted in a Photoplay article as saying that
‘in addition to playing the principal parts, I also wrote, with the exception of a
bare half-dozen, every one of the five hundred or so pictures in which I appeared.
I picked locations, supervised sets, passed on tests, co-directed with Sidney Olcott’
(Bisplinghoff 2013).
The outbreak of World War 1 in 1914 halted Gauntier’s activities, but not
without leaving a lasting impact on filmmaking in Ireland, as well as the local
community of Beaufort, Co. Kerry. The Kalem Company were innovative in using
location shooting and situating films in authentic settings, anticipating the real-
ism of later classical cinema. They made films that were very popular in Ireland
but, arguably, directed more towards the emigrant population in America.
Gauntier married fellow actor Jack J. Clark in 1912, divorcing him in 1918. She
left the movie business in 1920 aged 35. In the absence of existing documentation
it is possible that Gauntier, while having a very full and successful career in the
silent era, found it difficult to adapt to the coming of sound and the tighter stric-
tures of the studio system. Her flexibility and adaptability in the Kalem years was
not easily accommodated by the more streamlined approach of a more formal era.
Gauntier went on to write her biography, Blazing the Trail (1928), and two nov-
els, Cabbages and Harlequins (1929) and Sporting Lady (1933). Little is known of her
life after this. Her career in the movies involved acting in 93 films from 1906 until
1920, writing 68 films between 1907 and 1915, and directing The Grandmother in
1909. She also made four documentary shorts in 1912, mainly about her experiences
filming in Egypt and Ireland.
Irish female screenwriters 2007–13
Susan Liddy
This entry will discuss the position of contemporary female screenwriters in the
Irish film industry. It will also explore whether there is an identifiable female voice
in Irish screen narratives by focusing on women writers whose feature-length
Ireland 423
scripts have been produced between 2007 and 2013, with assistance from the IFB/
Bord Scannán na hÉireann, Ireland’s national film agency.
The Chief Executive of the IFB, James Hickey, has stated that ‘the central role of
the IFB is to invest in Irish creative talent’ (Irish Film 2014: An Eye on Talent: 7).
However, the annual IFB production catalogues and online funding decisions sug-
gest that their support is directed, primarily, towards male-driven projects. This
begs the question: where is the Irish female writing talent? As UK research has
cautioned, without women screenwriters the industry may be missing out on ‘a
range of new and interesting ideas, stories and storytelling innovation’ (Sinclair
et al. 2006: xi).
The IFB film directory identifies a total of 248 feature-length projects produced
after the reinstatement of the second Irish Film Board in 1993 to the end of 2013
that received IFB financial backing (Irish Film 2014: An Eye on Talent: 112–21).
Of that total (which includes indigenous Irish film, creative co-productions and
international productions), only 57 screenplays (23 per cent) were written by a
woman, or had a female co-writer. If attention is directed solely to indigenous film,
the underrepresentation of Irish, or Irish-based, female writers looks even worse.
In the 20-year period from 1993–2013, only 33 produced screenplays (13 per cent)
were written by Irish female writers (Irish Film 2014: An Eye on Talent: 112–21).
Because the IFB does not gather or collate gender statistics – a most unfortunate
omission – there are huge gaps in our understanding of precisely where, why and
how the industry loses women writers. David Kavanagh, CEO of the Writers Guild
of Ireland, says preliminary data gathered for its forthcoming 3rd Zebbies Report
points to a reasonably equitable distribution of funds for writer-only development
awards.3 However, at subsequent funding points, female writers drop off the radar
at an alarming rate. It is unclear whether female-written projects have difficulty in
attaching a producer or whether the IFB loses interest when it comes to investing
funds for further development or production finance.
What we do know is that screenwriting in Ireland is overwhelmingly male-
dominated and this begs the question: what impact, if any, does this have on the
stories we see on screen? It is clear from the IFB literature that the majority of male
writers create male protagonists. Only 24 per cent of all produced films (1998–
2013) with a male writer or writer-director had a female protagonist or female
central character at the heart of the narrative (Irish Film 2014: An Eye on Talent:
112–21). In comparison, over this 20-year period, 67 per cent of all produced films,
or 63 per cent of films with an Irish or Irish-based female writer attached, lead with
a female protagonist.4 These include Pat Murphy’s Nora (1999), Geraldine Creed’s
Chaos (2001), Maeve Murphy’s Silent Grace (2001) and Liz Gill’s Goldfish Memory
(2003) (Irish Film 2014: An Eye on Talent: 112–21). As Linda Seger observes, ‘hav-
ing female protagonists doesn’t seem like a revolutionary idea, until you look at
the number of films at any given time that are male-driven’ (2003: 116).
Impressive women screenwriters have emerged between 2007 and 2013, includ-
ing writer-only projects like Lauren Mackenzie’s Daisy Chain (Aisling Walsh,
2008), Jean Pasley’s How About You, based on a Maeve Binchy short story (Byrne,
2007) and Ailbhe Keogan’s Run and Jump (2013), co-written and directed by Steph
Green. In keeping with trends identified in the Irish film industry generally
(O’Connell 2010: 35) many female writers also direct their own work, including
the co-writing/co-directing team of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor with Helen
(2011). When attention is directed solely to those screenplays written by Irish
or Irish-based female writers, only four features in the seven-year period do not
have a leading female protagonist: Eamon (Margaret Corkery, 2010); Mister John
(Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, 2013); Silence (Pat Collins, Eoin MacGiolla
Bhride and Sharon Whooley, 2012), and Sanctuary (Norah McGettigan with co-
writer Gabriel Enrique Vargas Vasque, 2013)
A detailed examination of the work of all Irish female writers, or a comparative
analysis of female/male screenwriters, is not possible here. Instead, six films were
selected in order to explore whether their narratives shared any common threads:
Marian Quinn (32A, 2007); Juanita Wilson (As If I Am Not There, 2009); Carmel
Winters (Snap, 2010); Finola Geraghty (Come on Eileen, 2010); Rebecca Daly (The
Other Side of Sleep, 2012); Alexandra McGuinness (Lotus Eaters, 2012) and Kirsten
Sheridan (Doll House, 2012). All these writers are Irish with the exception of British
writer Finola Geraghty, whose film was part-funded by the IFB and produced by
the Dublin production company, Blinder Films.
A ‘woman’s voice’?
Firstly, it must be acknowledged that attributing particular writing styles and
genre competences to women writers as a whole is a contentious issue. It has
been suggested that women want to tell different stories; women’s writing is more
interior and concerned with personal issues; stories about character, emotions,
behaviour and relationships, as opposed to male writers who prefer stories of
action, conflict and heroism (Seger 2003: 116). But there is no consensus. In con-
trast to Seger’s findings, many of the female screenwriters interviewed by Marsha
McCreadie are loath to support the notion of a ‘female sensibility’ (McCreadie
2006: 47).
The perception of difference between the work of female and male writers is
affirmed by many British screenwriters and industry professionals: ‘male and female
perspectives, they are different. You are coming from a different angle. Women have
a particular point of view’ (anonymous female screenwriter, cited in Sinclair et al.
2006: 46). In an Irish context, 73 per cent of female writers and industry personnel,
and two of the three male screenwriters interviewed by Depuis, believe that female
and male writers tend to write different types of screenplays (2010: 61).
Most of Depuis’s Irish female interviewees accept that the narratives women write
are regarded as unimportant and uninteresting to male producers and development
executives. ‘The problem is that women’s stories are not valued. If a company or
IFB support a woman’s film that’s their minority box ticked for the year’ (unnamed
female screenwriter, cited in Depuis 2010: 61). Another Irish screenwriter ques-
tioned whether male executives really ‘get’ female stories: ‘they inherently cannot
understand them’ (unnamed female screenwriter, cited in Depuis 2010: 57). There
appears to be broad agreement among the British and Irish female screenwriters
interviewed in these studies that gender can indeed shape the screenplays that
Ireland 425
women write. However, there is a perception that such an acknowledgement could

inadvertently ‘obstruct women screenwriters’ by implying that they are unwilling,
or unable, to write across a variety of genres (Sinclair et al. 2006: 47).
Women’s lived experience differs from men’s in western, patriarchal societies,
resulting in different perspectives and preoccupations which, in turn, are likely to
colour the screenplays written by female screenwriters. Traditionally, Irish women
did not have a public voice; the Irish Constitution suggests that ‘a woman’s place
is “in the home”, implying that women do not have a role to play in politics and
public life’ (Galligan 2013: 2). While Irish women are still struggling for their place
in the public arena (e.g. see National Women’s Council of Ireland), Irish society
has undergone rapid social, cultural and economic change over the last number
of decades. Specifically, the lives of Irish women have altered significantly, due, in
no small measure, to challenges from the feminist movement. As a result, ‘a range
of questions and debates’ have been ‘propelled into the public arena’ (Connolly
and O’Toole 2005: 30). How do Irish female writers make sense of the changes in
women’s lives through their protagonists and story worlds? While the following
female-written narratives are very different in many ways, a number of themes
emerge that will structure the discussion here, loosely categorized as femininity,
motherhood and gender and power.
Femininity
The protagonists in many of these films challenge the more traditional representa-
tions of Irish women – the ‘feisty colleen’ and the self-sacrificing mother (Barton
2004: 114), both of whom exhibit elements of a traditional femininity, defined by
qualities like sexual caution, compliance and care-giving. The protagonists, Alice
(Lotus Eaters), Arlene (The Other Side of Sleep), Saundra (Snap), and Jeannie (Doll
House), are emotionally remote, even inscrutable, characters who are, in different
ways, living troubled lives that lack direction and meaning. In Lotus Eaters, Alice’s
(Antonia Campbell-Hughes) coterie of aimless, wealthy, female friends exhibit a
‘new femininity’, organized around unbridled sexual expression, autonomy and
individualization (Genz 2009: 8). Yet, when we join the narrative, Alice appears to
be outgrowing her hedonistic lifestyle and expresses a longing for ‘normal things’,
such as swimming or walking in the country.
Campbell-Hughes appears again as the sleep-deprived Arlene in the psycho-
logical drama, The Other Side of Sleep. Unlike Alice or Jeannie, the economic and
material circumstances of Arlene’s life are established; she is employed as a fac-
tory worker and lives alone in a small flat in an unspecified Irish midlands town.
Plagued by a long-held and deep-seated grief at the loss of her mother, Arlene
struggles with habitual sleepwalking, possibly a manifestation of a wider search
for meaning. Like Alice in Lotus Eaters, Arlene is emotionally and physically at
a distance from the life around her. Indeed, both characters avoid sexual and
emotional intimacy.
Equally, Jeannie (Seana Kerstake) in Doll House is disconnected from ties to fam-
ily, friendship and home. She leads four working-class teenagers to an exclusive,
unoccupied Dublin house for a wild night of partying. The relationship between
the young people is tenuous, with undercurrents of unexplained anger and vio-
lence. It is eventually revealed that the house, which they vandalize, is Jeannie’s
former family home. Whether she is mentally unstable or seeking revenge is
unclear; her reasons for leaving, and returning, are never addressed. To the amaze-
ment of her companions, she gives birth prematurely, an event that coincides with
the return of her parents. Yet, Jeannie still declines to return home and embarks,
with her child, into an unspecified future. Alice and Jeannie, particularly, appear
to be living in ‘an extended present – with anxiety, hedonism and a desire not to
grow up being part of that phenomenon’ (O’Connor 2006: 118).
Sandra (Aisling O’Sullivan) is an abrasive, and often unlikeable, protagonist in
Snap, a drama about a mother and her son, Stephen (Stephen Moran), and the
events surrounding Stephen’s abduction of a small child three years earlier. Like
the other protagonists, Sandra is emotionally and physically shut down, sugges-
tive of a legacy of child abuse that continues to haunt her adult life. She picks up
an older, drunken man (Mick Lally) at a Chinese takeaway and takes him home.
In a humiliating sex scene, motivated by disgust rather than desire, Sandra orders
him to strip, barking: ‘Close your eyes. And your mouth.’ As he penetrates her, she
smokes in nauseous detachment. Yet while he sleeps, Sandra tentatively places her
arm around him in a brief performance of intimacy; an outsider miming a ritual
that has eluded her.
Few cinematic stories focus on mature female protagonists yet O’Sullivan was
in her early forties when the film was released in 2010. The majority of all roles
for female characters are in the 21–39-year age bracket in mainstream US films
(Smith et al. 2013: 4), and in an Irish context it is equally uncommon for an
‘older’ female protagonist to drive the narrative. Indeed, Lincoln and Allen (2004)
have suggested that the intersection of gender and age creates a ‘double jeopardy’
for female actors.
Helen Jacey has argued that female writers are encouraged ‘to generate huge
levels of sympathy for a heroine in order to justify any difficult choices she might
make’; however, such ‘heroine softening’ is absent in all three of these films ( Jacey
2010: 25). Additionally, Jacey argues that while conflict is recognized as crucial to
the creation of any screen story, the concept of ‘union’ is just as central to stories
aimed at primarily female audiences. By union she means layers of joy, peace and
harmony, or the coming together of persons or people who connect with each
other (Jacey 2010: 139). However, Alexandra McGuinness (with co-writer Brendan
Grant), Rebecca Daly (with co-writer Glen Montgomery), Carmel Winters and
Kirsten Sheridan reject the necessity of creating immediately likeable and sym-
pathetic female characters; therefore Jacey’s concept of union is entirely missing
from all four narratives.
As Kirsten Sheridan, writer of Doll House, has observed: ‘There is an incredible
lack of complex, compelling, unique female leads. They seem watered down. Or
some version of a male perspective’ (Galvin 2012). In fact none of these four pro-
tagonists in the films discussed exhibit clear motivation or, arguably, demonstrate
any palpable dramatic need. Neither do their narrative journeys culminate in a
strong, clear, transformational arc. Their conceptualization may be influenced by
Ireland 427
a desire to break a long-standing representational straightjacket. The above narra-

tives do not rely on a wholly traditional structure, arguably, in keeping with the
troubled, fragmented lives of the four protagonists who are portrayed as emotion-
ally fragile and directionless. These female-led narratives suggest a pro-women
intervention in an overwhelmingly male-dominated industry. Yet, the world that
Alice, Arlene and Jeannie inhabit implies a post-feminist sensibility in that gender
appears to hold no particular relevance. The trials and tribulations of the protago-
nists are those of young people, rather than young women, struggling to find their
place in an uncertain world.
In contrast, 32A (Marian Quinn) is a more traditional rites of passage story,
told, unusually, from an exclusively female point of view. Set in Dublin in 1979, it
gently explores the burgeoning sexuality of a teenage girl: first bra, first real boy-
friend, first proper kiss, first smoke, first dance. Fourteen-year-old Maeve Brennan
and her friends are intrigued by all matters sexual from the cup size of random
women on the street to learning how to kiss properly. The local heartthrob is
16-year-old Brian Power, presumed to be ‘full of himself’, and outside their reach
until he and Maeve strike up a brief relationship.
32A valorizes female friendship over fleeting, and ultimately unsatisfactory,
relationships with boys. Interestingly, it simultaneously privileges the coming of
age of a young woman while sidestepping any in-depth exploration of her sexual
feelings, suggestive of a throw-back to an idealized purity of young Irish women.
Unlike Alice, Arlene or Jeannie, who do not seem to be future-orientated, Maeve
and most of her friends look, uncritically, towards a traditional future with marriage
and children in their twenties. Only Claire (Riona Smith) articulates a burgeoning
feminist awareness by suggesting that 30 might be time enough to settle down!
But she is swiftly reminded of the dangers of delayed motherhood – babies that
are ‘blind and retarded’.
Ageing femininity is explored in Come on Eileen (Geraghty, 2010), a drama set
in England about a middle-aged alcoholic of Irish parentage (Jackie Howe). In
western culture, femininity continues to be measured in terms of youthful physi-
cal appearance and sexual attractiveness. Middle-aged women – Howe was in her
late forties at the time of the film’s release – have not traditionally been encour-
aged to define themselves as sexual beings and are seldom represented as such in
mainstream cinema (Tally 2008; Weitz 2010). Certainly, the articulation of mature
female sexuality has been all but invisible in Irish screen narratives (Liddy 2014).
Unusually, then, Eileen is represented as a sexually forthright protagonist,
though her sexuality is inextricably intertwined with her alcoholism and the nar-
rative does not expressly affirm her sexuality independently of that addiction.
Neither is Eileen’s body exposed on screen, as the bodies of younger protagonists
routinely are, a reminder that the mature female body remains a representational
taboo. The film challenges another ostensible norm by pairing an older woman
with a younger man: a direct challenge to cultural links between youth and sex.
The narrative references the age difference between Eileen and Bill (Stephen
Taylor) only by gentle teasing, implying that, in this context at least, her inse-
curity has no substance in reality, but can be explained with reference to mature
women internalizing a cultural fear and disgust about ageing (e.g. Dolan and
Tincknell 2012).
Motherhood
The decadent young socialites in Lotus Eaters are, for the most part, unconcerned
with childbearing. The exception is Saskia who, towards the end of the film, asks
Alice to administer her vitamin shot in preparation for pregnancy, because she is
‘so bored’. Traditional motherhood is represented by Jean Brennan (Orla Brady),
Maeve’s mother in 32A, who provides a mixture of encouragement and tough love
to the teenager protagonist. This portrayal contrasts with that of Alice Murray,
Ruth’s mother (Marian Quinn), a lone parent separated from a violent husband,
who is characterized as uncommunicative and absent, often leaving Ruth to her
own devices.
More problematic representations emerge in Snap and Come on Eileen. Sandra’s
character provides the greatest challenge to a ‘nurturing, passive concept’ of Irish
motherhood (Barton 2004: 116). Sandra tells the camera, ‘I had my two legs in
stirrups having the first one dragged out of me.’ The second child was given up
for adoption immediately, without even being named. While Sandra’s behaviour,
as a mother, is partly explained by her own history of abuse, it nonetheless poses
an ideological challenge to dominant discourses about the ‘maternal instinct’ and
women’s ‘natural’ capacity to mother. Sandra is clear that she is ‘a shite mother.
Worse than shite. Criminal.’ Her relationship with her son, Steven, has always been
uneasy. ‘I remember a baby that screamed his head off every time I laid a hand on
it’. Even towards the end of the film, when mother and son try to make sense of
the events of the previous three years, Sandra remains physically uneasy with any
display of maternal affection and recoils as Steven leans towards her for comfort.
On-screen mothers are usually represented as asexual, though a number of recent
US and British films have started to (partially) challenge such representations (Tally
2008). Nonetheless, the manner in which such narratives affirm mature female
sexuality is typically restrained, even in those films that offer the mature female
libido a degree of narrative space (Liddy 2014: 46). Unusually, an annexing of
motherhood and sexuality can be detected in Come on Eileen despite the presence
of similar parameters. Finola Geraghty’s narrative posits that motherhood is not an
automatic barrier to desire and it is Eileen’s relationship with alcohol, rather than
sex, which challenges the security of her family and prompts her son, Jimmy (Felix
Malcolm Still), to run away from home. Indeed, it is the desire to become a good
mother again that gives Eileen the impetus to regain her sobriety.
Gender and power

Four of the six films studied make a link between gender and power: 32A, Snap,
As if I Was Not There and Lotus Eaters, and the latter two will be discussed here.
In Lotus Eaters Alice and her friends learn that Orna, the older female character,
on the periphery of the group, alleges that Benny has forced himself upon her
sexually. A partial flashback leaves the outcome of the sexual encounter ambigu-
ous. The incident serves to illustrate the superficiality of the characters, as they
feed on the dramatic gossip, but also trivializes rape in the process. McRobbie has
Ireland 429
noted that ‘the tropes of freedom and choice’ are now inextricably linked with
young women, and feminism is ‘decisively aged and made to seem redundant’ in
many popular cultural texts (McRobbie 2007: 28). This ‘ageing’ of feminism and
second wave concerns is embodied in the character of Orna. Similarly, it is left to
Suzi (Amber Anderson), as the unpopular, ‘needy’ character, to refuse to be her
boyfriend’s ‘punching bag’ when he gets angry and to ultimately walk out on him.
Second wave feminist preoccupations are thus pushed to the margins of Lotus
Eaters and deemed passé by the narrative.
As If I Am Not There, based on the 2001 novel by Croatian writer Slevenka
Drakulic, acknowledges gender and power by examining mass rape as a weapon
of war during the Bosnian war. Samira, the protagonist (Natasa Petrovik), travels
to a remote rural area to take up a temporary teaching position. The village is
attacked by rebels and the women are taken to a camp where, as ‘entertainment’
for the soldiers, they are routinely and systematically raped and brutalized. Samira
mentally disassociates herself from the rapes by focusing on anything, even a fly
on the wall, and acting ‘as if she was not there’.
The narrative charts Samira’s harrowing experiences and her conscious decision
to survive. When she catches the eye of the Captain (Ferja Stukan) she ‘performs’
(Butler 1999) a version of femininity that will be pleasing to him, fixing her hair
and applying lip gloss, to the disapproval of the other women captives. When the
Captain sanctions her release Samira makes her way to Sweden where she discov-
ers she is pregnant. The narrative conveys her horror and her desire to ‘get rid of
it’ at all costs. However, in this story world, men make all the decisions affecting
women’s live and a male doctor (Stellan Skarsgard) deems it too late to abort.
Ultimately, motherhood is invested with the power to transcend life’s unspeak-
able horrors. Samira breastfeeds the baby and cries for the first time. For Wilson,
‘this baby represents not just the enemy but her only surviving family member’
(Kuzniar 2012: 39). Thus, she suggests, the ending offers hope, not defeat, because
it demonstrates the strength of the human spirit.
Conclusion
Women’s underrepresentation in the media was conceptualized by Tuchman
as a ‘symbolic annihilation’ (Tuchman et al. 1978) and has been rigorously
documented over time. It has been argued that increasing the number of women
behind the camera will go some way towards diversifying cinematic content and,
importantly, reducing the objectification of female characters (Smith et al. 2013:
1). Certainly, in an Irish context, the majority of Irish female writers and writer-
directors have succeeded in steering narrative attention towards a complex range
of female protagonists, thereby affirming US findings that ‘women can drive
change’ (Davis 2010).
In keeping with Seger’s observations, the female-written narratives discussed
here focus on character, emotion and relationships, while conflict tends to be
internal rather than driven by an external force. That is not to say that women are
unable to write other kinds of characters or other kinds of screenplays; only that,
in this brief overview, Irish female screenwriters are writing in accordance with
many female writers internationally (Seger 2003; Sinclair et al. 2006).
The themes identified in these female-written narratives are varied; many do not
problematize gender at all and are significant for illuminating, rather than inter-
rogating, the lives and experiences of female characters. Others pose a limited ideo-
logical challenge to hegemonic discourses about femininity, motherhood, ageing
and power. Overall, however, it could be tentatively argued that a ‘female sensibility’
(McCreadie 2006) is discernible in the work of at least some female screenwriters.
IFB chief executive, James Hickey, appears cognisant of the importance of
‘indigenous talent as the foundation for lasting success’ for the Irish film industry
(Irish Film 2012: A Cut Above: 1). But unless ‘indigenous talent’ relates only to
male writers, the small number of female writers/writer-directors active in the
Irish film industry must surely be cause for concern.5 The status of Irish female
screenwriters is, arguably, indicative of an imbalance of power in the wider Irish
film industry, the analysis of which goes far beyond the scope of this article.6 In
brief, O’Connor suggests that the most effective exercise of power is when beliefs
and practices are perceived as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ and male privilege is main-
tained by our ‘realistic’ expectations (2007: 64). Such expectations may include
an unchallenged acceptance that the IFB fund ‘the best’ projects and that the vast
majority of those projects ‘just happen’ to be written by men; that women write
relationship stories that are not cinematic; that women’s writing is better suited
to television; that producers are less interested in the work of female writers; that
female writers are just not as tuned in to the requirements of cinema as male writers;
that is ‘just the way it is’.
But is it really conceivable that Irish women writers are uninterested in, or
incapable of, writing for Irish cinema? Male writers are, and have always been, the
recipients of the lion’s share of all available funding. A blind acceptance of the sta-
tus quo can shore up a structure ‘where different groups are rewarded unequally’
(Connell, cited in O’Connor 2007: 64). While affirmative action can be a conten-
tious position, there does appear to be a groundswell of support for change both
in Ireland and across Europe (see European Women’s Audio Visual Network). For
instance, a number of countries have agreed to implement data monitoring in
order to obtain a more complete picture of women in key creative positions in the
industry, something that is crucial to a greater understanding of gender underrep-
resentation in the Irish film industry. Other countries, such Sweden and the UK,
have gone further and introduced procedures to promote diversity.7
Two questions in contemporary Irish cinema loom large: why do female writers
occupy such a small foothold? And, more pressingly, will the IFB offer leadership
on this admittedly complex issue and put measures in place to identify, encourage
and support Irish female writers and the stories they want to tell?
Notes
1. The Kalem Company was formed by George Kleine, Samuel Long and Frank Marion. The
initials of the founders – KLM – developed into Kalem. It was formed in 1907 and ceased
to exist in 1915.
2. This version contrasts with that recorded by Proinsias O Conluain in a Sight & Sound
article entitled ‘Ireland’s First Films’. He attributes the idea of going to Ireland to Sidney
Ireland 431
Olcott, who told how he was called into the manager’s office, presented with a map and
told to pick a place to go to ‘with a full film-making unit’. He pointed to Ireland, ‘the
island where his mother had been born, and said: ‘I would like to go there’ (O’Conluain
1953).
3. Telephone conversation with CEO David Kavanagh on 18 August 2014. The 3rd Zebbies
Report will be published in 2014 and will be available on the WGI (Writers Guild of
Ireland) website at www.script.ie.
4. Since the IFB do not collate gender statistics, this information had to be extrapolated
from the production catalogues. Consequently, some minor inaccuracies/omissions are
possible but would not be numerically significant or distort the findings.
5. I am currently researching (August 2014) the underrepresentation of Irish women screen-
writers and am completing a series of interviews with CEO James Hickey and members
of the IFB about this and other related matters. Indications are that there is a growing
awareness of the gender imbalance by the CEO and some Board members, but as yet no
proposals for action have been identified by the Board.
6. During 2014 the lobby group Women in Film and Television has been reactivated in
Ireland; there have been two public panel discussions on the status of women in the
industry – at the Galway Film Fleadh and in the Irish Film Institute, Dublin; the WGI are
preparing to publish the 3rd Zebbies Report, which includes highlighting the underrep-
resentation of women in film. My own ongoing research project includes an assessment
of appropriate affirmative action strategies to support women screenwriters.
7. See European Women’s Audio-visual Network (EWA) at www.ewawomen.com. The
Swedish Film Institute committed to a 50/50 distribution of funding in all productions
over time; a target that was reached in 2014. In mid 2014 the BFI (British Film Institute)
introduced the ‘three ticks’, a measure designed to encourage diversity on screen and in
the industry.
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Italy
Mariapia Comand, Alexis Krasilovsky Bernadette Luciano,
Paolo Russo, Jule Selbo and Bridget Tompkins
A Short History of Italian Female Screenwriters
Bernadette Luciano
The history of screenwriting in Italy is, not surprisingly, inextricably linked to the
male-dominated history of the Italian cinema and its vicissitudes, to the way that
history has been written, and to the cinema’s aesthetics and productive practices,
which have tended to marginalize women. Monica Dall’Asta points out that while
the male-dominated nature of the Italian film industry can be attributed to a series
of complex social, economic and cultural factors, traditional film historiography
has done little to highlight women’s contributions to the cinema in both creative
and managerial roles (Dall’Asta 2013: 175). Even Elvira Notari, the first Italian
woman filmmaker, who established herself in Naples as a screenwriter and direc-
tor and founded her own production and distribution company, is still ignored in
major histories of Italian cinema. In similar fashion, Francesca Bertini has never
been credited for her contributions to screenwriting or directing or indeed the
‘invention’ of neorealism (see Assunta Spina [1915]); Bertini is recognized almost
exclusively as an actress and diva (Luciano and Scarparo 2013: 4–5).
Indeed, looking back to the era of Italian silent cinema, women have been pri-
marily remembered as ‘divas’ (refers to a prima donna personality – one with great
talent but also one who is very demanding, temperamental and desirous of great
attention). This appellation, true or not, does not discount their contributions.
Renée De Liot, wife of the actor/director Mario Guaita, wrote almost all the films
in which her husband appeared (using his stage name, Ausonia), hence contribut-
ing significantly to the ‘strong men’ genre in Italian cinema of the time (Dall’Asta
2008: 324). Nelly Carrère, wife of the writer and screenwriter Jean Carrère, is cred-
ited as subject writer for a number of films, her work being praised by one critic
of the time for its ‘lack of defects’ often associated with ‘writing for the cinema’
(Dall’Asta 2008: 324). Other occasional screenwriters include Lina Ferraris, Ofelia
Colautti, and Suzanne De Canalis, who wrote a screenplay that was very daring
for its time, La signorina madre di famiglia/The Single Mother (Carmine Gallone,
1924), about an unconventional woman who decides to have a child out of wed-
lock (Dall’Asta 2008: 324). The ‘divas’ Maria Melato and Irma Gramatica and
433
actresses Maria Jacobini, Anna Fougez and Vera D’Angara are also credited with
writing for the cinema. D’Angara wrote the treatment and screenplay for three
films that she starred in alongside her husband.
Because Italian silent cinema was primarily the purview of intellectual and artistic
circles, its narratives drew from both popular and high literature; historical figures
and events were often the subjects of films (Muscio 2009: 6). Texts designated for
the screen often bore the signature of literary figures; the most notable ‘screen-
writer’ of the time was prominent writer and political figure Gabriele D’Annunzio;
he wrote the intertitles for Giovanni Pastrone’s famed Cabiria (1914). Some of
Italy’s major Italian women writers of the period also wrote for and about the
cinema. Journalist and novelist Matilde Serao is credited with the first article on
the cinema by an Italian intellectual; she also wrote extensively about the cinema
in her newspaper Il Giorno and wrote two scripts that were made into films. The
Nobel Prize-winning Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda wrote a script based on her
local culture that unfortunately was never made into a film (Dall’Asta 2008: 325).
Finally, poet and novelist Annie Vivanti became involved with the cinema when
asked to write a narrative for an American diva. Despite the close connections
between the cinema and literature, Italian cinema of the silent era did see the
rise of salaried professionals who saw the act of writing for the cinema as a visual
process, thinking through images rather than approaching things in a literary
way and considering the requirements of the medium rather than those of high
culture (Ceselli 2012: 80).
The 1930s and the advent of sound cinema marked a significant change in
screenwriting practices in Italy. 1932 has been identified as a fundamental turning
point for Italian cinema and screenwriting for three reasons:
• the increased output of Italian cinematic productions given the Fascist interest
in promoting Italian products;
• Alessandro Blasetti’s publications on the birth of a film that outline the differ-
ent phases of filmmaking from idea to distribution, highlighting in particular
the importance of the story elements to be included in a screenplay, the value
and function of technical terms, camera movements, etc;
• the publication of the Italian translation of Vsevolod’s Pudovkin’s work on film
technique.
(Ceselli 2012: 82; Mazzei 2006: 89)
Umberto Barbaro’s translation of and lessons on Vsevolod Pudovkin’s theoretical

work on the stages and process of screenwriting encouraged the new generation
of screenwriters at Italy’s major film school, the Centro Sperimentale, to consider
collaboration between screenwriters as well as between screenwriters and directors
from the initial stages of defining a film project (Muscio 2009: 6). Screenwriter
Cesare Zavattini labelled the by-products of such collaborations ‘ammucchiate’
(heaps or piles), hybrid products of many ‘fathers’ but ultimately clearly attributed
to the director. Indeed, the credits of the neorealist films of the 1940s and 1950s,
many of which include long lists of screenwriters, attest to the collaborative
Italy 435
practice or workshopping that proliferated at the time; this would become a

defining feature of Italian screenwriting. The collaborating writers and director
would often gather in local restaurants or apartments to elaborate the film’s story,
which was generally based on the social realities of the war and post-war period.
These collaborative films, resulting in cohesive works of art, were also syntheses
of diverse experiences (Comand 2006: 14), built around experimentation and
innovative story structuring that privileged the fragmented and episodic nature of
a narrative. The audience was foremost in the minds of the creators who aimed to
produce a work that would resonate with the public’s sorrows and dreams (Muscio
2009: 6). Few women appeared among the collaborators, although one, Suso
Cecchi d’Amico, distinguished herself as a screenwriter; she is still considered one
of the most influential voices in Italian cinema from the 1940s onward. She wrote
for the cinema across many genres, and presented women both in traditional roles
and in roles that challenged traditional configurations of the Italian female.
In the 1950s, these collaborative writing efforts devolved into working groups
that saw screenwriters partnering with specific production houses such as Titanus
and Dino De Laurentiis’s Cinematografica. The emergent screenwriting couples,
such as Agenore Incrocci (Age) and Furio Scarpelli, Steno (Stefano Vanzina) and
Mario Monicelli, provided the stories for highly successful commedia all’italiana
films that relied on collaboration and constant exchange between contrasting per-
sonalities for the development of characters and situations; films that were at once
realistic and cartoon-like; contemporary while playing on and reinventing Italian
cultural and comic traditions and languages (Pergolari 2006: 197–200). The cinema
that gave birth to socially engaged comedies in the age of Italy’s Economic Miracle
also witnessed the emergence in the 1960s of a wave of art cinema that would
become synonymous with director-driven (auteur) cinema. While the very defini-
tion and nature of auteur cinema virtually cancelled out the important contribu-
tions of other members of the artistic and technical team fundamental to a film’s
production, the screenwriter was recognized as the privileged and essential soul-
mate of certain significant auteurs, as in the case of Cesare Zavattini and Vittorio De
Sica, Tonino Guerra and Michelangelo Antonioni, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano
and Federico Fellini, and Suso Cecchi d’Amico and Luchino Visconti. D’Amico was
paired not only with Visconti, but on occasion with a number of other renowned
directors in the history of Italian cinema including Fellini, De Sica and Antonioni.
D’Amico set the stage for future generations of Italian women screenwriters who
would assume an increasingly prominent position in Italian cinema from the 1950s
onward: Iaia Filastri (1950s and 1960s), Lianella Carell (1950s–1970s), Luciana
Corda (1970s and 1980s), and Barbara Alberti (1970s to the present). The 1960s
and 1970s also saw the emergence of women directors such as Lina Wertmüller,
Liliana Cavani, Sofia Scandurra, Dacia Maraini, Giovanna Gagliardo and the
Feminist Film Collective. Wertmüller and Cavani, both of whom authored or co-
authored many of their films, remain the two names most associated internationally
with Italian women filmmakers.
From the mid-1970s the growth of the Italian television industry impacted
on the nation’s cinema industry, which entered one of its darkest moments.
It was described by critics as a period plagued by the inferior aesthetic quality

of its films (their association with typical television offerings; their banal con-
tent, lack of cinematic and cultural relevance) and the economic decline of the
industry (Micciché 1998: 3–4; Brunetta 1995: 349–50). This dark period was,
however, accompanied by dynamic intellectual activity and debate. By the end
of the 1980s, Italy began to witness a rebirth of the industry due in large part to
a series of events and discussions on the revival of Italian cinema that often had
screenwriting as their point of departure. In the 1980s, directors and screenwriters
joined together in various forums to call for a new cinema that would break with
the old – one that would bring the profession of the screenwriter back to the status
it had once had. Important voices in that discussion included female screenwriters
Francesca Marciano and Roberta Mazzoni; Mazzoni was to become one of the
founders of Script, a journal specializing in topics on the theory of screenwriting
and the profession of the screenwriter. Private schools teaching screenwriting and
directed by veteran screenwriters opened and a distinct screenwriting specializa-
tion was introduced at Italy’s major film school, Rome’s Centro Sperimentale. On
the island of Maddalena, the Solinas Prize, dedicated to recognizing the year’s best
screenplay, was inaugurated in 1985. How-to manuals, screenwriters’ diaries and
notebooks and pamphlets that outlined the rules of screenwriting began to pro-
liferate and were adopted by specialized courses on screenwriting for television.
With the decline of the Italian film industry, many writer-directors found work in
Italian television, assisted by a series of laws in the 1990s that required the produc-
tion of national material and not simply importation of foreign products from the
United States and Germany (Zagarrio 2006: 23 –2).
The 1980s witnessed the emergence of its own screenwriting ‘couples’ or ‘trios’
who often formed alliances with particular director(s) – Stefano Rulli and Sandro
Petragli emerged as the most notable duo of the period. In the wake of feminism,
female groups also emerged, such as the trio of Francesca Archibugi and her
faithful screenwriters Claudia Sbarigia and Gloria Malatesta. The 1980s also wit-
nessed the proliferation of women scriptwriters such as Silvia Napolitano, Chiara
Tozzi, Anna Pavignano, Lara Femder and Carla Apruzzo (Zagarrio 2006: 241–3).
The birth of the movement ‘Maddalena 93’ on the evening of the 1993 Solinas
Prize marked an important moment for Italian cinema and screenwriting.
Discussion and debates between screenwriters of all generations about the future
of Italian cinema continued in subsequent gatherings; these were industry profes-
sionals determined to change the Italian cinema, those willing to take risks and
encourage innovation. In the early decades of the millennium, the screenplay
has certainly regained its position as the ‘saviour’ of contemporary Italian cin-
ema. The industry slogan ‘la sceneggiatura ci salverà’ (‘the screenplay will save
us’) highlights the centrality of the intelligent screenplay to a national cinema
otherwise plagued by the proliferation of homogenized products with visual and
narrative formats crafted to meet the requirements of the major Italian funders.
Today screenwriting remains one of the areas of the cinema industry most open
to women with the percentage of women screenwriters increasing from three per
cent in the 1970s to fifty per cent today (Mascherini 2009: 57). Since the 1990s,
Italy 437
a growing number of women have been writing screenplays for major films –
often in the ‘coupled’ relationship reminiscent of earlier decades. The collaborations
of Daniela Ceselli with Marco Bellocchio, Doriana Leondeff with Silvio Soldini
and Carlo Mazzacurati, Francesca Manieri with Giuseppe Piccioni, Federica
Pontremoli with Nanni Moretti, Francesca Marciano with Carlo Verdone,
Heidrun Schleef with Nanni Moretti, author Fabrizia Ramondino with Mario
Martone, Maria Nuccetelli with Giuseppe Piccioni, and Simona Izzo with her
partner, Ricky Tognazzi, have resulted in films which self-consciously attempt to
bring a female perspective to contemporary cinematic narratives across a range
of cinematic genres. Following the example of Monica Vitti, noted actresses
such as Stefania Sandrelli, Eleonora Giorgi, Valeria Golino and Asia Argento
have moved to writing and directing films. Finally, though still in relatively small
numbers, women are appearing in the double role of writer-director that has
become a growing phenomenon of Italian filmmaking, most notably in the cases
of Francesca Archibugi, Cristina Comencini and Roberta Torre, but increasingly
among the younger generation of women filmmakers such as Alice Rohrwacher,
Paola Randi, Elisa Amoruso, and Giorgia Cecere. While it would be overly
simplistic to propose that the increased presence of women screenwriters assures
a female-centred national cinema, the growing prominence of new female screen-
writers in Italian cinema (and also in the new era of Italian television, which
offers additional opportunity for work and innovation) has increased exposure
to women’s stories, women’s issues and alternative ways in which to represent
women on the screen.
Francesca Archibugi
Francesca Archibugi (1960–) was born in Rome and is a film director and screen-
writer. Because Archibugi’s childhood was complicated – her parents were separated,
her brothers were much older, and she was very close to her grandfather who died
when she was still quite young – loneliness led her to seek refuge first in books and
later in movies (Levantesi 1996: 20–1). When she started out in the entertainment
world, she worked as an actress in theatre and television; at the age of sixteen, she
starred as Ottilia in the television film Affinità elettive/Elective Affinities (1976) directed
by Gianni Amico, a man to whom she attributes the birth of her love for cinema.
Archibugi was trained at Italy’s Centro Sperimentale in Rome (the Italian
National Film School) where she specialized in directing. There she met screen-
writer Furio Scarpelli, who recognized her talent as a writer and was not pleased
to see her choose the path of directing (Levantesi 1996: 23). However, it was never
either one or the other for Archibugi. After experimenting with a few shorts,
Archibugi turned to a period of screenwriting, as she was attracted both by its
practice and by screenwriters themselves. Her screenplay Sott’acqua/Under Water
(1986), written with Gloria Malatesta and Claudia Sbarigia, won the esteemed
Solinas Prize for screenwriting in that year.
Archibugi writes the screenplays for all her films, either alone or occasionally
in collaboration with other screenwriters. Her debut full-length feature, Mignon è
partita/Mignon Has Left (1988), won the David di Donatello award for Best New
Director and Best Screenplay (with Gloria Malatesta and Claudia Sbarigia). The
coming-of-age film was seen as a breath of fresh air in Italian cinema of the time
and received much critical acclaim for its depiction of the young Giorgio’s first
experience of unrequited love and his struggle with the complex world of emo-
tions. Indeed, all of Archibugi’s films feature children or adolescents as central
figures and explore coming-of-age issues as well as a dysfunctional adult world
often too self-absorbed to respond to the needs of young people. Her second film,
Verso Sera/Towards Evening (1991), focuses on the disintegration of the nuclear
family and the abandonment and reappropriation of the parenting role (Laviosa
2003: 543). In 1993 Archibugi won a second David di Donatello award for the
film Il grande cocomero/The Great Pumpkin. The film, whose title derives from the
Peanuts comic strip, focuses on a young adolescent suffering from epilepsy who
is sent to a psychiatric clinic. There, a young psychiatrist, struggling with the
obstacles imposed by the health system and a set of personal problems, discovers
that the causes of the adolescent’s physical disease are tensions in her family envi-
ronment. In L’albero delle pere/Shooting the Moon (1998), it is a young adolescent,
Siddharta, who assumes adult responsibility and the care of his little five-year-
old sister, neglected by a mother who is addicted to heroin and a largely absent
father. Lezioni di volo/Flying Lessons (2007), co-written with Doriana Leondeff, is
an unusual excursus in Archibugi’s films, as she moves her story from Italian to
East Indian landscapes. The ‘road movie’ follows the physical and psychological
journey of two immature young men, one of whom was adopted as an infant and
wants to go to India in search of his birth mother and his native land.
Given Archibugi’s political engagement, which began at a very young age with
her enrollment in a communist youth federation, it is also not surprising that
many find, either directly or obliquely, a political element in all of Archibugi’s
works. As Àine O’Healy notes in the discussion of her four ‘Roman’ films (Mignon
Has Left, Towards Evening, The Great Pumpkin and Shooting the Moon), ‘they all
allude in different ways to the watershed years of activism and protest in the
1960s and 1970s provoking a reflection on the effects of those years on the sub-
sequent generation’ (O’Healy 1999: 122). Her films also demonstrate ‘a desire to
connect with the national cinematic tradition’ and to ‘speak to a broad range of
Italian audiences’ (O’Healy 1999: 122). Her politics, more than tied to a particular
ideology, are tied to what she sees as her obligation as a public intellectual; her
commitment is to feelings, ‘first to life and then to politics’ (Fusco 1995: 17).
Archibugi’s wider political agenda is evidenced in Domani/Tomorrow (2001),
a film set in the aftermath of the Umbria earthquake, and in Questione di cuore/A
Matter of Heart (2009). This latter film, much less child-focused than many of her
earlier ones, reinhabits the transformed Roman landscapes of neorealism and pays
direct homage to the Italian and international cinematic traditions that formed
her. A Matter of Heart is the film most self-reflexive of the Italian film industry
itself, featuring cameo appearances by Italian directors and stars, with one of the
main characters playing the role of a self-absorbed screenwriter with writer’s block
who delights in passing on the secrets of the craft of screenwriting to his new
Italy 439
friend’s young son. While in many films it falls to a child to highlight conflicted
or dysfunctional family environments, in this film the child is also positioned as
the inheritor of the cinematic gaze.
Be it literary works, comic strips or screenwriting, references to writing and to
its process abound in Archibugi’s works and her narratives are often framed by a
voiceover telling a story or reading a letter or another text. This is not surprising
given that, for Archibugi, directing and screenwriting go hand in hand; she herself
admits, ‘I consider myself above all a storyteller. I like to tell stories, to construct the
story in great detail. Making movies is like writing a novel’ (Bo 1988). (Bernadette
Luciano)
Lianella Carell
Lianella Carell (1927–2000) was born in Rome. Although principally a writer,

employed first as a journalist and comedy writer for Radio RAI1 and later as a
screenwriter for both film and RAI television, Carell is probably most universally
recognized as the actress who played the role of Maria Ricci, wife of the main
protagonist, in Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle
Thieves (1948). It was while she was interviewing De Sica as cultural journal-
ist for Rome’s Radio RAI that De Sica saw her potential to play the wife of his
unemployed and desperate protagonist, a role she interpreted with a heartrend-
ing sincerity (Lancia 2003: 65–6). This widely acclaimed performance launched
her ten-year acting career, which lasted until 1958 and saw her participating in
seventeen feature films.
Carell published a novel, La pellicana, in 1956, and in 1958 turned definitively
from acting towards writing for the cinema and television. Between 1958 and
1974 she collaborated on the screenplays of five feature films: the comedy Amore
e guai/Love and Troubles (story and screenplay), which was directed by Angelo
Dorigo; the Alessandro Blasetti-directed comedy Io, io, io … e gli altri/Me, Me, Me …
and the Others (1965); Roma come Chicago/Bandits in Rome (1968), a crime drama
directed by Alberto De Martino; De Martino’s thriller Femmine insaziabili/Carnal
Circuit (1969); and finally Bruno Gaburro’s drama Peccati in famiglia/ Scandal in the
Family (1974). Although 1974 marked the end of her professional involvement
in the cinema, Carell continued to work for RAI television until the early 1990s,
most notably as co-author of numerous scripts for the popular game and variety
shows hosted by Raffaella Carrà. (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Liliana Cavani
Liliana Cavani (1937–) is recognized as an innovative and provocative filmmaker

whose willingness to explore controversial themes in a non-judgemental, apo-
litical manner has often unsettled comfortable bourgeois sensibilities. She has
directed feature films, several documentaries and miniseries for television, as well
as a number of operas, but the film that brought Cavani to the international stage,
and has attracted the majority of critical attention, both in Italy and abroad, is Il
portiere di notte/The Night Watchman (1974). Although first and foremost a director,
Cavani has been intimately involved in the development of the screenplays of all
her films, and the interdependence of these two disciplines in her filmmaking
makes it impossible to discuss her screenwriting career without also addressing
factors more commonly associated with her role as director.
Cavani’s interest in cinematography and in the challenges and opportunities
offered by conveying ideas through images rather than via the written word,
together with her ability to ‘pursue an independent artistic vision’ and to remain
‘[i]ndifferent to the imperatives of political correctness’ (O’Healy 2007: 426), can
be traced to influences she was exposed to during her formative years. She was
born on 12 January 19372 in Carpi, a small town near Modena, in the province
of Emilia-Romagna. Her architect father was well educated and refined; he came
from a conservative, high-bourgeois Mantuan family, which was more tradition-
ally aligned with the Fascist regime of the day. In contrast, her Modenese mother
came from a working-class background, and her maternal grandfather, a com-
mitted communist and anarchist, introduced her early to the thoughts of Engels,
Marx and Bakunin (Marrone 2000: 4), and endowed her with an ideal of commitment
and the need to persevere against all odds (Buscemi 1996: 24).
The cinema figured prominently in Cavani’s childhood, for she frequently
accompanied her mother to the theatre to view the exaggerated romances that
typified the Italian viewing experience of the 1930s and 1940s. By her own
account, she was an introverted child with a rich and vast interior world, and
although her own films show no direct influence from her early cinema days
(Buscemi 1996: 24), indirectly it taught her to appreciate the power of the visual
as a means of communication. Cavani emphasizes her favouring of the visual, and
her affinity with both television and the cinema, in an interview conducted by
Gaetana Marrone, where she observes:
I have been, and I remain, a fanatic for communication through images, and
therefore I have ‘swum’ like a fish in the many possibilities that images have to
express thoughts. The separation between working for television and the cinema
has only existed for me in terms of technical factors. (Marrone 1999: 247)
After graduating from the University of Bologna with a degree in classical lit-
erature and philology, she decided against pursuing a career in archaeology and
moved to Rome, where she won a coveted place to study directing at the Centro
Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the Italian National Film School) and was the
only woman in her year. On finishing the course, despite gaining a management
position with RAI, the Italian state television network, Cavani opted to work
instead as a freelance director, and became involved in cultural programming with
RAI channel 2. The experience she gained in producing documentaries in this
earliest phase of her career proved invaluable when she progressed to writing and
directing full-length films for both television and the cinema.
Cavani’s first full-length film, Francesco di Assisi/Francis of Assisi (1966), was
the first feature film produced by RAI television (Martini 2009). Based on a story
Italy 441
and screenplay co-written with Tullio Pinelli, Cavani’s film divests the figure of
St Francis of legendary and mythological associations and portrays him as ‘one
of us, alive and extremely real’ (Martini 2009). It is a story of formation, writ-
ten and filmed in the style of a chronicle, in which Cavani uses the story of St
Francis’s youthful defiance of authority, and his rejection of the wealth that was his
birthright, as a prototype for all rebellions of individuals against societal rules and
conventions, past, present and future (Buscemi 1996: 43). Twenty years later, Cavani
returned to the story of St Francis, but this time with far greater resources and a
cast that included the internationally recognized actors Mickey Rourke, in the
title role, and Helena Bonham Carter, as Chiara (St Clare). Together with Roberta
Mazzoni, Cavani began working on the script for Francesco (1989) in 1986, adopt-
ing a completely different narrative structure to deliver the story from a very
different perspective. Whereas the earlier film delivers a chronological account
of the life of the saint, the later film takes on a mosaic structure and unfolds in
a series of flashbacks to important episodes in the life of St Francis, as recalled
by various friends some years after his death (Buscemi 1996: 103). Inspired by
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the emphasis in this interpretation moves from the struggle
of an individual with family and society, to the inner turmoil of the man striving
to come to terms with his own religious calling, and is ‘more resolutely linked to a
tragic conception of selfhood’ (Marrone 2000: 9). The film won Cavani a nomination
for the Palme d’Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.
Galileo (1968), Cavani’s second feature film, was originally filmed for television.
It tells the story of the seventeenth-century scientist Galileo Galilei’s struggle to
defend his right to freedom of thought against the Church’s accusations of heresy.
Although she and fellow screenwriter Tullio Pinelli won a nomination for a Nastro
d’Argento (1969) for the screenplay, it is perhaps better remembered as the first
of her films to be censored.3 Unusually for Cavani, whose films are typified by
silence, Galileo relies heavily on dialogue. In the end, RAI administrators decided
that the film was not suitable for a television audience and it was sold to Cineriz,
who made further cuts before eventually releasing it to the market.
Cavani’s first independently produced feature film, I cannabali/The Year of the
Cannibals (1969), marked the beginning of her screenwriting partnership with
Italo Moscati. Inspired by Sophocles’ Antigione, it is a highly stylized film, set in
an industrial city-state at some point in the near future and ‘addresses central
issues of language, culture and politics’ (Marrone 2000: 57). As with Francis of
Assisi, the story transcends both history and myth to reflect the youthful unrest
of the 1960s. Like Oedipus’s daughter, Cavani’s Antigone is a courageous young
woman, who sets out to find and bury her fallen brother in defiance of the orders
of the totalitarian regime. The sole person who will help her is a young stranger,
Tiresias, who speaks a language she does not understand. There is very little dia-
logue in The Year of the Cannibals, with Cavani displaying her preference for the
image over the word by relying heavily on gesture as the language of communi-
cation. The female protagonist of Cavani’s next film, L’ospite/The Guest (1971), is
also cast in silence and dwells on the margins of society. The film, which Cavani
wrote by herself, was inspired by conversations Cavani had with patients she
met during a visit to a mental asylum,4 and the story follows the protagonist,
Anna, as she vainly attempts to reintegrate into society after years in a mental
institution. Cavani teamed with Moscati once again to write Milarepa (1973),
a story that involves spiritual searching and a ‘journey into the unconscious
depths of the human being’ (Marrone 2000: 175). The idea for the film originated
in Cavani’s reading of Vita di Milarepa/The Life of Milarepa,5 and tells the story of
a young British philosophy student, who identifies so strongly with the medieval
Milarepa that he becomes, in metaphorical terms, a modern-day reincarnation of
the Tibetan yogi and poet.
Although Milarepa won Cavani a nomination for the Palme d’Or in 1974, it was
the release in that same year of The Night Porter that brought her to the atten-
tion of a worldwide audience. The idea for this film originated in the testimony
of two women Cavani had interviewed for her television documentary La donna
nella resistenza/Women in the Resistance (1965). This was a series of interviews with
women who had participated in the Resistance, or who had miraculously escaped
from Nazi concentration camps (Buscemi 1996: 31). The story and screenplay
of the film were co-written with Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani and Moscati,
and the film was greeted with both widespread acclaim and scandalized bewil-
derment. Events unfold in 1957, in post-Second World War Vienna, and it is
essentially an investigation into the ambiguous relationship that exists between a
victim and her oppressor. The film was produced in English, and Lucia (Charlotte
Rampling) is the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp – but this is not a Jewish
story, for her internment was due to the political views of her family. Max (Dirk
Bogarde) is the ex-SS officer who sexually abused the fourteen-year-old Lucia
when she was in the camp, and he is now working as a night porter in a Viennese
hotel when the two encounter one another once again. Nazism, in this film, is
narrated through sadomasochism, but it is a Nazism that is ahistorical and treated
as something that lies latent inside man, awaiting the right historical moment to
surface. The film centres on Lucia’s compulsive need to re-enact the episodes of
enforced submission she endured in her adolescence, and Max’s similar compul-
sion to reassume the role of abuser. Despite the shock and criticism that met the
release of the film, particularly in Italy where Cavani was labelled as scandalous
and the film was initially censored, The Night Porter received the support of many
important critics, both in Italy and abroad.6 This support has extended to feminist
critics, who, like Kaja Silverman, observe that, although Cavani does not move
her female characters beyond masochism, her films are not anti-feminist, for she
also ‘demonstrates the lure of that position for her male characters’ (Silverman
1988: 219).7
The Night Porter, together with Al di là del bene e del male/Beyond Good and Evil
(1977) and Interno Berlinese/The Berlin Affair (1985), comprise what Cavani called
her ‘German Trilogy’, a collection motivated by the strong German influence on
contemporary European culture and history. All three films deal with transgres-
sive sexual relationships that occur in very particular socio-political contexts. The
idea for Beyond Good and Evil was Cavani’s, but she was assisted by Moscati and
Franco Arcalli on the screenplay. The story unfolds in late-nineteenth-century
Italy 443
Europe, in a time of conflict between decadent morality and deep societal con-
straints. Commencing in Rome in 1882, it provides a fictionalized account of the
triangular relationship that existed between Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée, and
Lou Andreas-Salomé. The film’s title is a direct allusion to Nietzschean ethics,
which challenge the preconceptions inherent in societally imposed definitions of
the concepts ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’. Both Nietzsche and Rée desire a relationship with
Salomé, and it is she who suggests a ménage à trois. However, the relationship is
destined to fail in the struggle between attachment and independence, freedom
of expression and societal constraints, and the film ends with Nietzsche’s descent
into syphilitic madness and Rée’s death under uncertain circumstances. It is only
Salomé who appears to absorb and successfully apply a Nietzschean ethic, for she
alone survives and lives to continue her free-spirited existence.
The final film in the trilogy appeared ten years after the release of The Night
Porter. The Berlin Affair (1985) is loosely based on the novel Manji/Quicksand/La
croce buddista (1928–30)8 by the Japanese author Jun’ichiro – Tanizaki.9 Cavani was
captivated by the story (Marrone 2000: 140) and, with Roberta Mazzoni’s assis-
tance, she adapted the narrative to the westernized setting of 1938 Berlin, a city
in the grip of pre-war tension. The film tells the story of the wife of a German
government official who becomes obsessed by Mitsuko, the young daughter of
the Japanese ambassador. It evolves into a triangular relationship involving the
German couple and Mitsuko, with the racial difference adding a political dimension
to the transgressive sexual relationship.
Cavani’s La pelle/The Skin (1981), co-written with Robert Katz, is no less con-
troversial than Curzio Malaparte’s eponymous novel upon which it was liberally
based. Although nominated for a Palme d’Or, opinion was sharply divided about
the film, which paints a grim picture of life in Naples in 1943 during the Allied
occupation. Cavani exposes the living hell endured by the residents, questioning
the so-called ‘liberation’ of the city in the process and providing a stern reminder
that the true losers in war are always women and children. Cavani’s next film,
the psychological thriller Oltre la porta/Beyond the Door/Beyond Obsession (1982),
gained little recognition on its release and remains relatively unknown.
Since the release of Francesco in 1989, Cavani has made television films and
only two further films for the cinema, She teamed once again with Moscati to
write Dove sei? Io sono qui/Where Are You? I’m Here (1993), a film that sensitively
portrays the relationship between two young deaf mutes. The subject of this
film epitomizes Cavani’s strong belief in the power of non-verbal communica-
tion, providing a literal and very practical illustration of her preference for image
and gesture over the word. The film was not a commercial success, but it won a
number of awards and award nominations, including a nomination for a Nastro
d’Argento for the screenplay. Cavani’s last cinematic release was Il gioco di Ripley/
Ripley’s Game (2002), a thriller based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same
name. She was assisted on the screenplay by Charles McKeown; the film starred
John Malkovich in the role of the ruthless but beguiling murderer, Tom Ripley.
Cavani’s interpretation of the story received mixed reactions, which ranged from
‘brilliant’ to ‘uninspired’ and ‘pedestrian’.
In conclusion, the emphasis here is on Cavani as screenwriter, but although this

is a crucial component of her filmmaking Cavani is primarily known as a director.
Two prestigious awards that deserve special mention, because they recognize her long
and very significant contribution to the Italian film industry in general, are her career
Golden Globe, awarded in 2008, and the career David which she received at the 2012
David di Donatello awards ceremony. (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Suso Cecchi d’Amico
Paolo Russo
Suso Cecchi d’Amico (1914–2010) was born in Rome. Giovanna (nicknamed Suso)
Cecchi was the youngest of three children in a family of intellectuals, originally
from Tuscany. Her mother was the painter Leonetta Pieraccini; her father, Emilio
Cecchi, was a writer and one of the most influential literary critics of the twen-
tieth century who maintained correspondence and friendships with the likes of
Pirandello, Joyce, Chesterton, Valéry, Croce, Mann, Saroyan, to name just a few.
After completing school at the French lycée in Rome, Suso went to Switzerland
and then to England, to study English literature at Cambridge. If studying abroad
was already very unusual for an eighteen-year-old girl in Fascist Italy, when she
returned home in 1933 Suso was an even more independent spirit. At a time when
even families like hers were not unscathed by widespread poverty, Suso found a
job at the Ministry of Foreign Trade thanks to her knowledge of languages, in spite
of the prim attitude of a society where working women from respected families
were still frowned upon.
The early 1930s were also the years when Suso’s love for cinema bloomed. In
the two years spent as a visiting professor at Berkeley University, her father Emilio
had become a Hollywood enthusiast and visited the major studios and met several
filmmakers. Upon his return to Italy in 1932, he was soon made artistic director
of the renovated Cines studios, the regime’s answer to boosting the then ailing
film industry. Suso often attended the shooting of feature films on the sound
stages at Cines and got acquainted with crews, writers and actors. Her father
would often ask her opinion on the scripts that were in development but Suso
found Italian cinema of the 1930s degrading. She loved French movies and, above
all, Hollywood comedies; her idols were Joan Crawford, Gingers Rogers and Fred
Astaire, Gary Cooper, John Barrymore and Fredric March. In 1939, with the war
approaching, Suso quit her job at the ministry and started to work as a profes-
sional translator: among other titles, she translated the Italian versions of Jude
the Obscure and Tess of the d’Urbervilles for publication, Shakespeare’s Othello and
The Merry Wives of Windsor, English plays by George Bernard Shaw and others for
stage productions at the Teatro Eliseo. At the same time she continued to read the
film scripts that her father was collaborating on at Cines.
In 1938 Suso married Fedele (Lele) d’Amico, son of Silvio d’Amico, the notable
founder of the Italian Academy of Dramatic Arts. During World War II, Silvio was
arrested by the Germans and Lele, who was a member of an anti-fascist catholic-
communist group in charge of running a clandestine press, was forced into hiding
Italy 445
until he ended up quarantined in a Swiss hospital. Having to look after their chil-
dren on her own in war-stricken Rome, Suso took on any sort of job she could, for
example, writing recipe books for the Americans (when she could not even cook)
and magazine articles set in Paris or London, even though she never left Italy.
Cecchi d’Amico’s first attempt at screenwriting came in 1945. Carlo Ponti, then
a young up-and-coming producer who had previously worked with Suso’s father,
asked her to co-write – along with Alberto Moravia, Ennio Flaiano and Renato
Castellani, all habitués of Cecchi’s intellectual circle – an adaptation of Avatar, a
short story by Théophile Gautier. In the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima, they
all abandoned the project, feeling the urge to tell more compelling stories about
the present reality of the war. Ponti hired Cecchi d’Amico as the sole writer of Mio
figlio professore/My Son, the Professor (Suso’s first official credit) and in 1946 bought
her first original screenplay, Vivere in Pace/To Live in Peace, for a few lire. This was
a bitter comedy based on the chance encounter between a black American GI
who has escaped from a POW camp and a German deserter, partially inspired by
Suso’s own personal experience as an evacuee during the war. Directed by Luigi
Zampa, the film won several international awards, effectively launching Suso’s
career. The worldwide success of Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948) introduced
Italian neorealism to an unexpectedly wide international audience; Cecchi d’Amico
often singled out De Sica’s film as the prototypical example of a script originated
by a thorough, first-hand inquiry conducted among the actual people and places
depicted. She joined the team of writers on Bicycle Thieves at a later stage of devel-
opment and was responsible for creating the widely cited final segment of the film,
featuring the desperate protagonist’s attempt to steal a bike only to get caught
immediately and humiliated by an angry crowd of passers-by in front of his son’s
very eyes. Cecchi d’Amico collaborated with director Vittorio De Sica once again in
the early drafts of Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (1951). In those same years, she
also continued her association with director Luigi Zampa, by scripting L’onorevole
Angelina/Angelina (1947) and Processo alla città/The City Stands Trial (1952), and
director Renato Castellani, by co-writing È primavera … /It’s Forever Springtime (1949)
and Due soldi di speranza/Two Cents Worth of Hope (1952, uncredited).
Having earned a reputation for her versatility, over the following decades
Cecchi d’Amico either wrote or co-wrote dozens of films, collaborating with some
of the most celebrated directors and producers of the golden age of Italian cinema.
Francesco Rosi’s first three features as director were all scripted by Cecchi d’Amico,
including La sfida (1957), one of the first stories to portray organized crime in
southern Italy, and I magliari/The Magliari (1959), about the misadventures of
low-life Italian emigrants-turned-swindlers in Germany. Salvatore Giuliano (1960)
is painstakingly based on the proceedings from the trials that followed the murder
of the notorious Sicilian bandit in 1949 so that, due to the delicate subject matter
and the pressure from the producer, the writers (Cecchi d’Amico, Francesco Rosi,
Enzo Provenzale and Franco Solinas) were able to provide evidence for all the facts
represented in the film.
In 1952 Michelangelo Antonioni’s I vinti/The Vanquished was one of the few
big disappointments in Cecchi d’Amico’s career. The three episodes originally
conceived were supposed to explore the growing phenomenon of serious juvenile

delinquency in Europe through the stories of three underage offenders sentenced
to death in France, England and Italy. When the producer did not manage to
obtain the necessary releases from the UN and the local authorities, Cecchi
d’Amico (one of the five credited writers) had to cut the French episode and
redraft the Italian story substantially with a fictional character instead. Cecchi
d’Amico also co-wrote Antonioni’s subsequent two films: La signora senza camelie/
The Lady without Camellias (1953) and Le amiche/The Girl Friends (1955).
At the turn of the 1960s, Cecchi d’Amico began a fruitful working association
with director Mario Monicelli. In 1958, producer Franco Cristaldi commissioned
her to write a comedy with the specific aim of reusing the expensive sets built
in Cinecittà for Visconti’s Le notti bianche/White Nights (1957). She was joined
by Age and Scarpelli, Monicelli’s long-standing collaborators, and the result was
I soliti ignoti/Big Deal on Madonna Street, a story of small-time crooks that gathered
a stellar cast of comedians (Toto, Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni among
others), launched young actress Claudia Cardinale into international stardom
and became the prototype for numerous sequels and remakes, for example, Louis
Malle’s Crackers (1984), Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks (2000), Anthony and Joe
Russo’s Welcome to Collinwood (2002) and, to a certain extent, even the Sinatra
vehicle Ocean’s Eleven (1960) and its more recent remake and subsequent fran-
chise by Steven Soderbergh. For Monicelli, Cecchi d’Amico went on to co-write
Risate di gioia/The Passionate Thief (1960), and to write Renzo e Luciana (segment of
Boccaccio ‘70, 1962) and I compagni/The Organizer (1963, uncredited).
Other notable directors that Cecchi d’Amico worked with (as writer or co-writer)
include Alberto Lattuada (Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo/Flesh Will Surrender, 1946),
Alessandro Blasetti (Prima comunione/Father’s Dilemma, 1950; Altri tempi/Times
Gone By, 1952; Peccato che sia una canaglia/Too Bad She’s Bad, 1954; La fortuna di
essere donna/Lucky to Be a Woman, 1955), Luigi Comencini (Proibito rubare, 1948; La
finestra sul luna park, 1957; Mariti in città, 1957; Infanzia, vocazione e prime esperienze
di Giacomo Casanova, veneziano/Giacomo Casanova: Childhood and Adolescence,
1969), Valerio Zurlini (Estate violenta/Violent Summer, 1959) and Francesco Maselli
(Gli indifferenti/Time of Indifference, 1964).
Cecchi d’Amico’s longest-standing and possibly most rewarding collaboration
was, however, with celebrated director Luchino Visconti, who called her Susanna
as he disliked her nickname, Suso. Visconti approached Cecchi d’Amico as early as
1945; knowing that she had translated several stage plays, he hired her to script,
for the theatre, an Italian adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column
(1939). The play challenged the current moral compass as it featured a couple
making love in a rather realistic way and because the dialogue included the word
‘puttana’ (Italian for whore) for the first time. After translating for Visconti a few
more stage works – for example, Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), Zelda
Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz (1932), Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse’s Life
with Father (1939) and other American comedies that attracted large audiences in
the post-war years – and an unproduced screen adaptation of Prosper Mérimée’s
La Carrosse du Saint Sacrement (1829), Cecchi d’Amico eventually penned her first
Italy 447
feature film for the director in 1951, Bellissima. Their breakthrough title, though,
was Senso, aka The Wanton Countess (1954, d’Amico and Visconti share screenplay
credit). Adapted from a short story by Camillo Boito, and set in the nineteenth
century at the time of the Italian independence wars against the Austrian Empire,
Senso was the first Italian feature in Technicolor. Its innovative, expressive use of
colour is rooted in Visconti and Cecchi d’Amico’s study of nineteenth-century
painting, specifically the style of the Macchiaioli. On this occasion, Cecchi
d’Amico developed a writing style that accommodated Visconti’s symbolic colour
palette into her own script, emphasizing blues, reds and blacks in the description
blocks, resulting in a dramatic rendition on the page that was functional to the
mise-en-scène of the tragic love story between the Italian countess Livia Serpieri
(Alida Valli) and the Austrian lieutenant Franz Mahler. Senso was intended to be
a big international production starring Farley Granger as Mahler; therefore, Paul
Bowles and Tennessee Williams were hired to rewrite the English dialogue, which
in some scenes is completely different from the Italian version.
Senso’s lavish period staging earned Visconti a reputation as a very big-budget
director that discouraged producers from working with him for some years, to
the extent that, in order to make another movie, he and Cecchi d’Amico formed
a cooperative and produced their adaptation of Dostoevskij’s White Nights (1957)
on their own. Visconti and Cecchi d’Amico’s collaborative effort was eventually
crowned by international recognition thanks to Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and His
Brothers (1960) – the tragic tale of a migrant family in ‘economic-boom’ Milan
whose doomed protagonists, brothers Rocco and Simone, are moulded from
the traits of Dostoevskij’s characters, Prince Myskin and Rogozin, from The Idiot
(1869). This was followed by their collaborative effort on Il gattopardo/The Leopard
(1963). By her own admission, among all the films she scripted, The Leopard is
possibly the one Cecchi d’Amico loved the most and, as with most of Visconti’s
films, her contribution did not end with development but continued through
preproduction and the principal photography stage. Though acclaimed in several
countries, The Leopard failed initially at the US box office due to unconvincing
dubbed dialogue, unjustified cuts and a badly converted colour print. Years later,
the film was rereleased with great success in the US in its original version.
While working together on Vaghe stelle dell’orsa/Sandra of a Thousand Delights
(1965) and La caduta degli dei/The Damned (1969), Visconti and Cecchi d’Amico
attempted for over a decade to adapt Marcel Proust’s monumental In Search of Lost
Time/À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). Failing to attract American capital to
back such an expensive project, they finally signed a deal with French production
company Gaumont. When Visconti fell seriously ill during the shooting of Ludwig
(1973), Gaumont replaced him with Joseph Losey. Outraged, Visconti refused to
cede Cecchi d’Amico’s script, which prompted Losey to hire Harold Pinter. Losey
and Pinter’s Recherche was never released. With Visconti confined to a wheelchair
by his illness, Cecchi d’Amico co-wrote with Enrico Medioli the director’s last two
feature films, both featuring stories redolent of a decadent, late-nineteenth-century
atmosphere: Gruppo di famiglia in un interno/Conversation Piece (1974) and L’innocente/
The Innocent (1976), the latter adapted from a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Cecchi d’Amico also worked on a few international co-productions for foreign

directors. In 1949, she and Cesare Zavattini co-wrote René Clément’s Le mura di
Malapaga/The Walls of Malapaga (1949), winner of the Academy Award for Best
Foreign Film in 1950. Clément hired Cecchi d’Amico again the following year
to collaborate on his Le chateau de verre/The Glass Castle (1950). Appalled by the
mediocre quality of the French draft of the script, she quit the job after three days,
unhappy with the unfriendly atmosphere between Clément, his wife and the co-
writer, Pierre Bost.
The world success of Bicycle Thieves made Cecchi d’Amico an appealing writer to
American producers. Following the Paramount Decree of 1948, many Hollywood
majors found it less expensive to shoot their films in the Cinecittà Studios in
Rome, inaugurating the era of the so-called Hollywood on the Tiber. In 1950,
Cecchi d’Amico and co-writer Ennio Flaiano were commissioned to draft the
Italian script of William Wyler’s Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and
Gregory Peck. Cecchi d’Amico’s own accounts of the genesis of this particu-
lar experience show some inconsistencies – in her only book, Storie di Cinema
(e d’altro) (1996), a volume that is largely autobiographical, she claims that the rea-
son why the producers hired her and Flaiano was because the original American
draft of the screenplay, credited to Ben Hecht, was blocked by Italian censorship.
In one interview, she revealed that Wyler agreed with her about the low quality
of the original script and thus decided on a rewrite. However, in another inter-
view she notes that Wyler only had a beginning and ending for the story, so
asked Cecchi d’Amico and Flaiano to develop the remaining narrative according
to the canons of Hollywood comedies (Alonge 2004: 258). Regardless of the true
state of the original draft, Cecchi d’Amico and Flaiano accepted the commission
on condition that Ben Hecht – who would still be credited as the sole writer for
the US distribution of the film – would authorize and approve their revised draft.
Years later, when Cecchi d’Amico met Hecht in person, he candidly admitted to
her that he never wrote the script for Roman Holiday, nor did he ever read her
version. Cecchi d’Amico was astonished to learn that Hecht had indeed set up
an office in Los Angeles where other ghost writers developed the scripts he was
credited for, also as a cover to help fellow writers in trouble during the worst years
of McCarthyism. Blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo now receives credit on Roman
Holiday.
After a specific request by female lead Anna Magnani, who wanted a trusted
Italian writer to redraft her own dialogue, Cecchi d’Amico was supposed to col-
laborate with Tennessee Williams on the script for Daniel Mann’s The Rose Tattoo
(1955). Unexpectedly, Cecchi d’Amico was refused a visa to enter the United
States, therefore Williams met her in Paris to discuss the needed changes; however,
Cecchi d’Amico remains uncredited. Mostly thanks to the commercial success
enjoyed by Roman Holiday, Cecchi d’Amico was later hired to revise the script for
Melville Shavelon’s La baia di Napoli/It Started in Naples (1960), starring Sophia
Loren and Clark Gable, a story that, nonetheless, she openly detested. Cecchi
d’Amico continued to receive several offers from Hollywood but she always
declined because she did not want to move abroad and be tied to the same studio
Italy 449
for such a long time (the contracts that she was offered had a minimum duration
of seven years). Her last collaboration with a Hollywood major was on Franco
Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard
Burton, co-written with Paul Dehn for Columbia.
After an offer from Derek Jarman to collaborate on his Caravaggio (1986)
did not go through, Cecchi d’Amico collaborated on the screenplay of Nikita
Michalkov’s Oci Ciornie/Dark Eyes (1987), and was contacted by Martin Scorsese,
a director she admired. Scorsese had optioned two books; he asked Gore Vidal to
develop a script from one of them and Cecchi d’Amico to work on the second
book. He would then decide which project to pursue. Puzzled by what is rather
common practice in Hollywood, but one that she regarded as inconceivable,
Cecchi d’Amico declined. Scorsese later commissioned and optioned a story she
wrote on the ‘pupi’ (typical marionettes of Sicilian folklore) and eventually relied
on her close collaboration in the making of his Il mio viaggio in Italia/My Voyage
to Italy (1999).
Cecchi d’Amico continued writing for the screen even in her later years, despite
the long-lasting slump that the Italian film industry plunged into starting from the
mid-1970s. In particular, she continued her professional association with director
Mario Monicelli by working on almost all his films: Caro Michele (1976), Bertoldo,
Bertoldino e Cacasenno/Bertoldo, Bertoldino and Cacasenno (1982), Speriamo che sia
femmina (1986), Il male oscuro/Dark Illness (1990), Rossini! Rossini! (1991), Cari fot-
tutissimi amici (1994), Facciamo paradiso/Looking for Paradise (1995) and Le rose del
deserto/The Roses of the Desert (2006), her last feature film script. She also worked on
successful TV miniseries, including Comencini’s Le avventure di Pinocchio (1972),
Cuore (1984) and La Storia (1986), Zeffirelli’s Gesu di Nazareth (1978), Monicelli’s
Come quando fuori piove (2000) and Giulio Base’s L’inchiesta (2006).
In the 1940s and 1950s in particular, Italian films tended to be written by teams
of several writers. Although it is not possible to give here an account of Cecchi
d’Amico’s specific involvement in each of the projects she took part in, it is worth
mentioning that, over the years, the living room of her Rome house had become
a regular working place for many of her collaborators. Very much like writers’
rooms nowadays, the team of writers would break down storylines and then split
and assign ‘blocks’ (i.e. specific narrative segments) to each other.
Unlike most other Italian screenwriters of her generation, and even though she
admitted that they did not adhere to any fixed rules, Cecchi d’Amico studied the
craft of screenwriting systematically in order to acquire the techniques of writing
for the screen. Following a symposium held in the early 1950s where scholars
exalted Bicycle Thieves for its capacity to depict phenomenological reality and the
supposed lack of fictional characters, Cecchi d’Amico expressed her disagreement
in writing, stating clearly in a journal article that all stories, even in neorealist
films, need fully developed characters. While several of her scripts were based
on a thorough process of documentation and direct exploration of true locations
and real people – as in the case of Bicycle Thieves, Angelina, The Magliari and Rocco
and His Brothers – Cecchi d’Amico believed that a captivating protagonist is neces-
sarily the driving force of any good story. If, on one hand, she dismissed Robert
McKee’s analysis of Bicycle Thieves as a film that sticks to the classical three-act
paradigm that he and other screenwriting gurus have theorized in the past three
decades, on the other hand Cecchi d’Amico confirmed that, although co-writer
Zavattini might have been content with just a simple sequence of narrative situa-
tions, when she joined the film she tried to give a more defined narrative arc and
structure to the script.
Cecchi d’Amico never made any bones about her regular ‘stealing’ of lots
of ideas and character traits from novels, short stories and plays. She also had
American scripts sent to her so that she could study them; in particular, she
focused her attention on Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), of
which she appreciated the structure that alternates long sequences with much
swifter pinches (Zagarrio 2006:18). Quite soon in her career she found in Jeanie
Macpherson’s screenwriting manuals10 an influential reference that suited her
own method and penchant for the detailed construction of narrative arcs, i.e.
an overall three-part structure but also a triadic structure (set-up, development,
hook to new scene) internal to each individual scene. And while she considered
excessive the strict subdivision of each plot point and the related page numbering
typical of more contemporary American theorists, she used to divide her three
acts into a more specific two-three-two movement structure, a narrative symme-
try that can be detected in most movies she scripted, and in the ones of which
she was the sole writer in particular. According to Cecchi d’Amico, the essential
starting elements of a good script are a nice hook into the set-up of the story and,
most importantly, knowing the ending right from the beginning so that most of
the development work concerns the middle. She would usually write a thirty-page
step outline rather than longer draft treatments, in which she would identify
between sixty and ninety narrative situations (i.e. beats) that would later become
the building blocks of her two-three-two structures, usually pegged to a main
storyline interwoven with one or two subplots (cf. Incrocci, Cecchi d’Amico and
Benvenuti 1994). Her narratives are for the most part linear, but she also ventured
into daringly complex, non-linear patterns as in the case of Salvatore Giuliano.
Cecchi d’Amico’s writing career spanned more than six decades during which
she wrote or co-wrote over one hundred feature film screenplays and a dozen TV
movies and miniseries. She was awarded a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement
at the 1994 Venice Film Festival.
Daniela Ceselli
Daniela Ceselli was born in Rome and has been active in the Italian film industry
since the mid-nineties, collaborating on the screenplays of films with such well-
known directors as Marco Bellocchio and Paolo Franchi. Ceselli’s interests also
encompass theoretical questions associated with the roles of the screenwriter and
the script. In 2010, she earned a research PhD from Roma Tre University with a
thesis on cinema and the interrelations with other arts, which forms the basis
of her recently published text La sceneggiatura: un testo dall’esistenza incerta/The
Screenplay: A Text with Uncertain Existence (2012). Ceselli completed a diploma in
Italy 451
screenwriting at the Centro Sperimentale (Italian National Film School) in 1990,

and graduated with honours from Sapienza University of Rome in 1993 with a
degree in literature. In tandem with her practical screenwriting, since 2010 Ceselli
has taught the theory and technique of screenwriting at Sapienza University,
where she holds the position of adjunct professor.
Early in her career, Ceselli worked with director Francesca Pirani. Ceselli wrote
the story and collaborated with Pirani on the screenplay for Pirani’s first film,
produced by Bellocchio, L’appartamento/The Appartment (1997), as well as assisting
with the direction. Ceselli became closely associated with Bellocchio. She worked
with him on numerous short and feature films, collaborating on the screenplays
as well as acting as his assistant director. Her feature-film screenplay collabora-
tions with him include La balia/The Nanny (1999), which is loosely based on
Pirandello’s novella; L’ora di religione/My Mother’s Smile (2002); Buongiorno, notte/
Good Morning, Night (2003); and Vincere (2009), the only one of the four in which
Ceselli did not also function as assistant director. Together with Bellocchio, she
was nominated for both an Italian Golden Globe (2009) and a David di Donatello
(2010) for the screenplay of this last film, which relates the tragic story of Ida
Dalser, Mussolini’s unacknowledged lover and reportedly his first wife, and their
son Benito Albino Mussolini.
The other film director with whom Ceselli’s name is closely associated is
Franchi. In 2004, she worked with Heidrun Schleef, Rinaldo Rocco and Franchi
on the screenplay for La spettatrice/The Spectator. Soon after, she and Michele
Pellegrini collaborated with Franchi to write the screenplay of Nessuna qualità
agli eroi/Fallen Heroes (2006). Again with Schleef and Rocco, she joined Franchi to
co-write the screenplay for E la chiamano estate/And They Call It Summer (2012).
Ultimately Ceselli contradicts herself on the mark a screenwriter might leave
on a film. She claims, as do many screenwriters, that a film ultimately belongs to
the director; she identifies the presence of women screenwriters in films that she
sees, but denies that she sees this in her own films. (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget
Tompkins)
Giada Colagrande
Born in Pescara, in Italy’s Abruzzo region, Giada Colagrande (1975–) is a versatile

young director, screenwriter and actress, whose works are recognized for their
originality, readiness to confront controversial themes, and their ‘hermetic, dark
and dreamlike’ imagery (Morello 2012). Colagrande completed her higher educa-
tion in Switzerland, Australia and Rome, and although Rome remains her Italian
base, she also spends time in New York and Los Angeles with her husband, the
American actor Willem Dafoe.
Colagrande explains that her path to the cinema commenced at the age of
seventeen when she was introduced to the work of the American video artist Bill
Viola and was inspired to follow in his footsteps (Colagrande 2012). She arrived in
Rome in 1995 and began to make video art and documentaries on contemporary
art. Between 1997 and 2000 she participated in the art project Volume, realizing a
series of portraits on seven contemporary artists (Anon 2012). It was during this
period that she became ‘seduced by the narrative dimension’ (Colagrande 2012)
and found that she also wanted to tell stories. She began with three short films,
Carnaval (1997), Fetus – 4 brings death (1999) and n.3 (2000).
In 2001 Colagrande wrote, directed and played the leading role in her first
feature film, Aprimi il cuore/Open My Heart. A low-budget production, funded in
part by her grandmother, the film was shot in just two locations and is a ‘strongly
narrated tale about the obsessive love between two sisters’ (Young 2002). It is
a ‘glacial and exciting’ noir, which explores the themes of incest, prostitution,
heterosexual, lesbian and maternal love, delivering ‘a superb conjunction of the
sacred and the profane’ (Favetto 2003). Open My Heart opened at the Venice Film
Festival in 2002 and drew the immediate attention of the critics, who recognized
it as different from the prevailing ‘cute’ cinema and noted that it ‘did not seem to
be Italian’ (Favetto 2003). It was subsequently selected by many international film
festivals, including the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival (New York), in competition, and
Paris Cinéma 2003, where it was awarded the Prix de l’Avenir. Colagrande was also
nominated for Best New Director at the 2003 Nastro d’Argento awards.
In Colagrande’s second feature film, Before It Had a Name/Black Widow (2005),
she took the roles of director, co-writer and principal female actress. By her own
account, the idea for the film originated with Dafoe (Colagrande 2012), who
played the male protagonist and collaborated with her on the story and screen-
play. The film was invited to the Venice Film Festival 2005 and to other inter-
national festivals. In contrast, Colagrande’s third feature film, A Woman (2010),
which was also shown at the Venice Film Festival, was entirely her own idea. She
wrote and directed the film but did not act in it, and explains, ‘It feels like my
baby, so I am very proud of it’ (Colagrande 2012). A Woman is a psychological
thriller that tells the story of a woman obsessing over her love for the principal
male character played by Dafoe. By concentrating on the visual and sound effects,
rather than dialogue, Colagrande ‘attempted to construct a creative work that
takes viewers into [...] a cinematographic dream state’ (Bolin 2011). The inten-
tion, according to Colagrande, was to explore ‘female duality, light and darkness’.
It is ‘an intimate investigation of love and its effects, fear, madness and death’
(Colagrande 2014).
The Woman Dress (2012), which is the fourth short film written and directed by
Colagrande, engages once again with the themes of mystery and female duality.
The third film in the Prada series, Miu Miu Women’s Tales, it is a dark and esoteric
take on the glamour associated with creating women’s fashion, delivered meta-
phorically through the actions of three dressmaker-witches who ritualistically
transform a model into a blood-red dress. This short film premiered at Venice
2012 together with Colagrande’s feature-film-length documentary, Bob Wilson’s
Life & Death of Marina Abramovic (2012). Written and directed by Colagrande, this
docu-film tells the story of staging the opera written by Robert Wilson about the
life of the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic. A year later, Colagrande
followed with a further documentary about the Serbian artist, The Abramovic
Method (2013). (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Italy 453
Cristina Comencini
Cristina Comencini (1956–) is a writer, screenwriter, director, and outspoken

public advocate for women’s rights in Italy. Daughter of the renowned film direc-
tor Luigi Comencini and mother of Carlo, Giulia and Luigi, Cristina was born in
Rome into a prominent cinematic family. Her father’s fame as a director came
when she was about ten years old and the entire family was deeply influenced
not only by her father’s films but also by the discussions on cinema and the long
screenwriting sessions that took place in the family home. It is not surprising
therefore that not only Cristina, but also her three sisters, Francesca Comencini,
Paola Comencini and Eleonora Comencini, ended up working in cinema.
Cristina first entered the cinematic world as an actress in her father’s 1969
film Infanzia, vocazione e prime esperienze di Giacomo Casanova, veneziano/Giacomo
Casanova: Childhood and Adolescence. But Cristina’s first passion was writing, a
career which she arrived at in a somewhat circuitous fashion. She attended a French
high school in Rome, graduated with a diploma recognized in both France and
Italy and then enrolled in the faculty of economics at the Roma Tre University.
Not completely convinced she had chosen the right path, Cristina continued to
create time for writing as she balanced her family life with small children and
her studies. Her university degree led to employment in a research office writ-
ing economic reviews. But as her interest in economics began to wane and her
passion for writing increased, she began searching for work that would allow her
time to write. She left her economics job and began co-authoring screenplays for
her father’s films. In 1982 she co-wrote the script for her father’s television film Il
matrimonio di Caterina/Caterina’s Wedding and subsequently worked on the scripts
for two films adapted from literary texts, by De Amicis’s Cuore/Heart (1984) and
Elsa Morante’s La storia/ History (1986), and the comedy Buon natale … buon anno/
Merry Christmas ... Happy New Year (1989). It was through these ventures that she
came to work alongside Suso Cecchi d’Amico through whose encouragement and
tutelage she came to understand screenwriting.
Cristina’s success as a novelist is also due in part to another important voice
in women’s writing, Natalia Ginzburg. Comencini sent Ginzburg her novel Le
pagine strappate/The Missing Pages anonymously because she didn’t want her work
to be favourably looked upon because she was the daughter of the famous Italian
filmmaker. Ginzburg called her two days later telling her she had read the novel,
loved it and wanted to meet her. Most of Cristina Comencini’s novels revolve
around the family and relationships between women, themes also explored in her
films. Passione di famiglia/Family Passion (1991), a family saga about an aristocratic
Neapolitan family, allows Comencini to talk about the Italian south and more
specifically about southern Italian women. Her subsequent novel Il cappotto del
turco/The Turkish Coat (1994) traces the relationship between two sisters and the
very different paths they choose in the politically fervent period of the 1960s and
1970s. Matrioska (2002) also focuses on a female relationship, this time between
a sculptor and her interviewer. Her 2004 novel La bestia nel cuore/Don’t Tell, about
family abuse, was the first of her novels she turned into a film, a practice she was
to continue with a future novel, Quando la notte/When the Night (2009). Cristina
has published twelve novels to date.
While Cristina is most passionate about writing, she has become increasingly
fond of working in cinema and of the collective nature of the seventh art. In
addition to scriptwriting (Cristina has written or co-written all of her films), she
enjoys interacting with actors. As a filmmaker, Cristina’s attention to issues of
gender are evident from her first film, Zoo (1988), a film about an eleven-year-
old girl who lives in the Rome zoo where she meets and befriends a young Rom/
Gypsy boy. Cristina has experimented with a number of genres, including an
historical-costume comedy (I divertimenti della vita private/The Amusements of
Private Life [1990]), a thriller (La fine è nota/The End Is Known [1993], co-written
with Suso Cecchi d’Amico), and numerous melodramas and comedies. Cristina’s
films are often kaleidoscopic works that reflect on the institution of the family,
its transformation, and its dysfunctionality. Va’ dove ti porta il cuore/Follow Your
Heart (1996), adapted from Susanna Tamaro’s novel of the same name, was the
first film to bring her success as a filmmaker. This was followed by the comedy
Matrimoni/Weddings (1998), which reflects on the institution of marriage through
intersecting stories of a number of family relationships, and another comedy,
Liberate i pesci/Free the Fish (2000). While her father’s influence is most evident in
these early comedies, which feature stylistic elements of the commedia all’italiana
(comedy Italian style), as well as subsequent comedies such as Bianco e Nero/Black
and White (2008; the first Italian film about an interracial marriage), Comencini’s
dramatic films represent a move away from that influence towards darker subject
matter and reflect a more personalized style of filmmaking. Il più bel giorno della
mia vita/The Best Day of My Life (2002), which she co-wrote with her daughter,
looks at three generations of women in an Italian family while also exploring
issues of sexuality and sexual identity through a visual style that challenges tradi-
tional representations of the female body. A focus on the dark side of family life,
such as child molestation, as well as the exploration of sexual identity, are at the
core of La bestia nel cuore/Don’t Tell (2005), Italy’s contender for an Oscar in 2006.
Quando la notte/When the Night (2011) explores the experience of mothering from
a courageous perspective that refuses to romanticize maternity and explores what
has become known in psychological circles as ambivalent mothering.
A new comedy in preproduction, which she has also co-written with her daugh-
ter, Giulia Calenda (who also co-wrote Bianco e nero), Latin Lover (2014) features
an all-female international cast and explores the themes of love, egoism and free-
dom. It is the story of wives and daughters from different nationalities who all
come together to commemorate the man who was their husband or father.
Because Cristina Comencini has also always had a desire to write for the thea-
tre and to explore the relationship and possible cross-contamination between
literature, theatre and cinema, she has also produced theatrical works. Her first
play, Due partite/The Ladies Get Their Say, about two generations of mothers and
daughters, was subsequently turned into a film by Enzo Napoleone for which she
wrote the screenplay. She continues her journey into facets of the feminine in a
play that goes beyond national boundaries. Est Ovest/East West (2009) is a comedy
Italy 455
focusing on two women, a Ukrainian caregiver and an elderly woman needing

assistance. As is the case with many of Cristina’s works, the play’s subplots explore
the tragicomic dynamics of an entire family.
With Libere, Cristina Comencini weds entertainment with social engage-
ment; the one-act show, written by Cristina and directed by her sister Francesca
Comencini, was staged for the first time in the summer of 2010 at the Rome
Academy of Dance before touring to a number of Italian cities, and is based on
the encounter between two women of different generations. The show is based
on real and epistolary encounters between women from a range of ages and
professions who reflect on the status of women, their real and presumed liberty,
on work, wages, maternity and physical abuse. The group calls itself ‘Di Nuovo’,
which means ‘again’, because they feel it is important to repeat the fundamental
messages of feminism that many young women today do not know about. The
same association of women were at the core of the national and international
women’s movement Se non ora quando/If Not Now When, a movement whose
activities began on 13 February 2011 with simultaneous rallies all over Italy in
which more than a million woman took part. SNOQ has taken up the challenge
of keeping women’s issues at the forefront of political and media debates, through
direct intervention and online presence, so as to expand the space for debate and
reflection in an attempt to transform Italy into a country for women. Cristina
Comencini’s interest in women’s lives and women’s rights is certainly increasingly
reflected in all facets of her artistic production, extending into the public sphere.
(Bernadette Luciano)
Francesca Comencini
Francesca Comencini (1961–) is a film director, screenwriter and novelist. Born

in Rome, she is the daughter of Luigi Comencini and sister of writer and director
Cristina Comencini. The Comencini sisters share similar concerns regarding the
treatment of women in contemporary Italy, and are both key figures in the Se non
ora quando/If Not Now When ongoing campaign for the promotion of women’s
rights and dignity, but they make very different films. While Cristina’s cinema
has dealt almost exclusively with the private sector and family relationships,
Francesca’s films tend to be more overtly political, exploring family relationships
within a context of political events usually portrayed through a realist or docu-
mentary film style. She has written or co-written the screenplays for the majority
of her films.
As an adolescent, Francesca attended a French high school in Rome along with
her sisters. She began her university studies majoring in philosophy but aban-
doned them in 1982 to move to Paris where she met her first husband, French
producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier. Her first film, Pianoforte/Piano (1984), the
story of two young heroin addicts, won the De Sica Award for young directors
at the Venice Film Festival. She directed and wrote the script for two subsequent
films in France, La lumière du lac/The Light of the Lake (1988) and Annabelle partagée/
Annabelle Divided (1991). In her early years in the filmmaking industry, Francesca
also worked with her father co-writing the script for Un ragazzo di Calabria/A Boy
from Calabria (1987) and writing and co-directing with her father the television
remake Marcellino (1991). In the 1990s Francesca also began to make documenta-
ries, a genre she would return to regularly and whose techniques would become
increasingly visible in her feature films. One is on the Italian novelist, Elsa Morante
(1995), and another, Shakespeare a Palermo (1997), brings to light the theatrical
techniques of the stage director Carlo Cecchi. In 2001 she directed the feature film
Le parole di mio padre/The Words of My Father (2001), a film loosely based on Italo
Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno/The Conscience of Zeno. The film was screened in the
‘Un Certain Regard’ category of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.
In the third millennium, Francesca’s cinema became increasingly political with
personal stories providing the intimate backdrop for narratives examining the
political and social realities of contemporary Italy. Her moving documentary Carlo
Giuliani, ragazzo/ Carlo Giuliani, Boy (2002) reconstructs Giuliani’s brutal killing by
the police during the G8 meeting in Genoa in 2002. Francesca intersperses the
young man’s mother’s account of his final day with archival footage and Carlo’s
own writings to provide a unique, intimate perspective on the events leading
up to and following his death. The merging of the political and the personal is
further explored in her subsequent film Mi piace lavorare (Mobbing)/I Like to Work
(Mobbing) (2004), the first Italian film devoted specifically to the exploration of the
issue of workplace bullying and its psychological consequences. The film, starring
Nicoletta Braschi and Camilla Dugay Comencini (the director’s daughter by her
second marriage to French producer Philippe Dugay), and many non-professional
actors, is a powerful social document that highlights the gender-specific effects of
mobbing as well as its negative impact on personal relationships. The film won
the Nastro d’Argento for Best Story and the special prize of the Ecumenical Jury at
the Berlin International Festival.
Her next feature film, A casa nostra/In Our Country (2006), presented at the
Rome International Film Festival, is an invective against power and money and
the breakdown of morals in contemporary Milan. Her 2007 documentary In fab-
brica/In the Factory (2007) traces the evolution of the working class in Italy from
the post-war period onwards, together with the rise of Italian industrialism and
the transformation to the new economy. Lo spazio bianco/The White Space (2009),
perhaps her most female-centred film to date, is based on the novel by Valeria
Parrella with the screenplay co-authored with Federica Pontremoli. The film,
presented at the Venice Film Festival and nominated for numerous awards, is
a complex and intimate account of the experience of bringing a child into the
world. As the protagonist’s premature baby daughter remains suspended between
life and death, the mother also lives in an interim white space in which she
waits and tries to make sense of her new identity as a mother. Un giorno speciale/A
Special Day (2012), co-written with Giulia Calenda (Cristina Comencini’s daugh-
ter) and Davide Lantieri, is the story of an encounter between two young people
who live in the suburbs of Rome and meet on a very special day, their first day at
their respective new jobs. As the two journey through Rome together, the film’s
protagonists provide an opportunity for reflection on what it means to be young
Italy 457
in Italy today, a place where precariousness prevails and the future is uncertain.
The film was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the Venice International
Film Festival. In 2014, Francesca directed two episodes of the film series Gomorra,
based on Roberto Saviano’s book and Matteo Garrone’s award-winning film of the
same name.
While Francesca has had a long and successful career as a director and screen-
writer, she has only recently delved into fiction writing. Her novel Famiglie/
Families (2011) problematizes the complex relationships between parents and
children, and centres around the complex relationship between freedom and
solitude. The book is inspired by her own experience as a woman who became a
parent at a very young age, had children by two different men, but has ended up
a single mother, despite the fact that she claims she has done little in her life other
than try to construct families (Giovagnini 2011). The novel, an investigative work
not unlike her documentaries, highlights the changes to the traditional family
that have come to define today’s society. If her most recent film, A Special Day,
looked at the challenges facing young people today, her most recent novel, Amori
che non sanno stare al mondo/Loves That Don’t Last (2013), reflects on her own gen-
eration as well as the younger generation. A couple, in their fifties, break up and
the man and the woman both start new relationships with women in their thir-
ties, relationships that also fail. When asked why – after years of making films –
she turned to fiction writing, Francesca responded that writing has always been
what she has been most passionate about, and that even when she makes a film
the phases she enjoys the most are screenwriting and editing, where she works in
complete solitude (Fradiani 2014).
Ultimately, the themes that Francesca Comencini addresses in her feature films,
documentaries and novels are all inextricably linked to the real world, to pressing
social issues and events, to public and personal relationships between generations
and among generations. (Bernadette Luciano)
Linda Ferri
Linda Ferri (1957–) was born in Rome to an American mother and an Italian
father, but lived principally in Paris until she was twenty, where she graduated
in political science. After studying philosophy at Columbia University in New York,
she graduated in the philosophy of history in Florence, and has worked for many
years in the field of publishing as a translator and editor of foreign literature
(Pesce 2009). She is perhaps best described as an author who also writes for the
cinema. Although she admits to a lifelong passion for literature, for reading and
writing, she states that she never thought she would write for the cinema.11 It is
notable, therefore, that the publication of her first novel, Incantesimi/Enchantments
(Feltrinelli, 1997), came only a year before the release of her first screenplay col-
laboration, the comedy Voglio una donnaaa!/I want a wooooman! (1998), directed
and co-written by the brothers Marco and Luca Mazzieri.
Together with Nanni Moretti and Heidrun Schleef, Ferri co-wrote the story
and screenplay for the Moretti-directed La stanza del figlio/The Son’s Room (2001),
which won the Palme d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated
for Best Screenplay in both the David di Donatello and Nastro d’Argento awards
of the same year. Under the direction of Giuseppe Piccioni, she collaborated on
the screenplays of Luce dei miei occhi/Light of My Eyes (2001) and La vita che vorrei/
The Life I Want (2004); she also receives story credit on the latter. She co-wrote the
story and screenplay for Anche libero va bene/Along the Ridge (2006), the Kim Rossi
Stuart-directed film that was nominated for Best Screenplay in the 2007 David di
Donatello awards.
Ferri’s first novel, Enchantments, is a fable-like biography with clear autobio-
graphical roots. Told in a series of twenty-five short vignettes, it is narrated by
an unnamed Italian girl and relates, in the style of a memoir, the period from
toddler to early teen years. Ferri’s second book, Il tempo che resta/The Time that
Remains (Feltrinelli, 2001), is a collection of seven stories that variously manifest
the theme of love. Her adult novel Cecilia (Edizioni E/O, 2009), presents a reinter-
pretation, arguably feminist (Sankovitch 2010; New Yorker 2010), of the myth of
Saint Cecilia. It was born from what Ferri describes as an ‘innamoramento’, or a
‘falling in love’, stemming from emotions aroused by the baroque artist Stefano
Maderno’s statue of Saint Cecilia (1599–1600) in the Church of Saint Cecilia in
Trastevere (Recordati 2009: no 5). Those who are familiar with her work will
discern thematic and stylistic links between her prose and cinematic writing.
Film analyst Cristina Scognamillo remarks that Ferri’s writing style is particularly
notable for its cinematic quality, observing that the characters in Ferri’s novels
are described in such meticulous detail that the pages of her novels become like
‘pages of films’ (Scognamillo 2002: 95). Just as Ferri’s novels typically present
the interior thought processes of children and adolescents coming to terms with
the day-to-day reality of the world that surrounds them, both of her more suc-
cessful screenplay collaborations (The Son’s Room and Along the Ridge) confront
similar issues. Moretti’s The Son’s Room is an exploration of the psychology of
grief and moves beyond the adolescent mind. It describes the different ways in
which parents and a teenage sister come to terms with the untimely death in a
diving accident of a beloved son and brother. In contrast, the child’s perspective
is a prominent feature of Rossi Stuart’s Along the Ridge, which is presented through
the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. Tommi lives with his teenage sister, Viola, and
their mercurial and unpredictable father, Renato, and the film explores the emo-
tional turmoil caused by the comings and goings of wife and mother, Stefania.
In a 2009 interview conducted by Lorenzo Pesce for the Italian edition of the
Marie Claire magazine, Ferri admits that ‘children and adolescents come easily to
her’ and that she turns the microscope upon them. However, she adds with less
certainty: ‘Perhaps being a woman helps me delve into the emotions, or perhaps
not. I do not believe in a “feminine writing”, a film script involves a multiplicity
of gazes, it does not have a gender.’
In 2012, in a televised interview conducted by Biblioteche di Roma, Ferri admits
that, despite her lifelong love of literature, on reflection, it was the cinema, and
not books, that provided her most vivid and lasting memories of childhood. She
suggests that she could remember films better than books because she associated
Italy 459
them with excitement and family outings. The cinema was a social event, expan-
sive and with trans-Atlantic connections, whereas literature provided a more
complex and intimate experience. Just as going to the cinema is a physical activity
done in the company of others, screenwriting, at least in Italy, is typically a col-
laborative undertaking. Ferri describes screenwriting as ‘a maieutic process, a craft’.
The task of a screenwriter is to deal with situations and ‘to help the director to
develop his vision’ (Pesce 2009). On another occasion, when asked to comment
on the difference between writing literature and writing for the screen, Ferri gave
the following more detailed response:
[I]n the cinema, writing closes a process made up of discussions, notes, ideas,
character sketches ... In literature, instead, where the writing is everything,
where the writing is the beginning and the end, what does not live in the sen-
tence does not live at all. And this requires a rigour, due to the impossibility
of putting off the solutions, the urgency of finding the best immediately [...]
Often the screenwriter asks him/herself: and now, what do I need? According
to the response, s/he will invent, or find a scene, an image that meets that
need. When I write my books, it seems that instead I rely on the opposite pro-
cess. First I have an image, only later do I ask what it means, or where it will
lead me. (Recordati 2009: no 4)
Finally, despite the differences Ferri notes between writing for the cinema and
literature writing, she concedes that both activities have something unique to
contribute and that when ‘the two worlds work together there is a richness’ (Pesce
2009). (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Eleonora Giorgi
Eleonora Giorgi (1953–), actress, screenwriter and film director, was born in
Rome, Italy. Her screenwriting credits include Love, Lies, Kids … & Dogs (2003) and
L’Ultima estate (2009).
Fiorella Infascelli
Fiorella Infascelli (1952–) is an accomplished and versatile director and screen-

writer whose family has a long association with the Italian film industry. Born in
Rome, she is the daughter of the producer Carlo Infascelli (1913–84). She began
her career as a freelance photographer, working for the weekly news magazines Il
Mondo and L’Espresso, and the photojournalism agency Sygma. In this same period
she also commenced what was to become an ongoing relationship with the world
of commercial advertising. Infascelli’s professional involvement in the cinema
began in 1973 when she was assistant director to Emidio Greco on L’invenzione
di Morel/Morel’s Invention, a science-fiction film in which she also acted. This was
followed by further assistant director roles, including important formative experi-
ences with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuseppe Bertolucci and Bernardo Bertolucci.
In 1980 Infascelli emerged as a director and writer in her own right with the
45-minute television film, Ritratto di donna distesa/Portrait of a Reclining Woman.
She followed soon after with the short film Pa’/Dad (1981), which is a portrait-
interview with her father. Infascelli’s first feature-length film as director, La
maschera/The Mask, was released in 1988. The screenplay was a collaboration
between Infascelli and Adriano Aprà, with the assistance of Ennio De Concini
and Enzo Ungari. This eighteenth-century historical romance is an ‘abstract and
symbolic tale of seduction’ (Monti 2000: 404) and stars Helena Bonham Carter
and Michael Maloney. The film was selected for the 1988 Cannes Film Festival
where it was presented in the section ‘Un Certain Regard’. It was also selected for
a number of international film festivals, receiving the Audience Award at Annecy
and a nomination for the Nastro d’Argento for Best New Director in the 1989
National Syndicate of Film Journalists’ awards in Italy.
Infascelli’s next feature film was Zuppa di pesce/Fish Soup (1992). She wrote the
story for this largely autobiographical account of her youth, which is set in her
family’s seaside villa in Tuscany and spans a twenty-year period beginning in the
1950s, but collaborated with Patrizia Pistagnesi and Age on the screenplay. The
film was presented in Berlin and at numerous other international festivals and
earned Infascelli a nomination for the Nastro d’Argento for Best Original Story in
1993. Over the next few years, Infascelli worked as a screenwriter and director for
RAI television, alternating between fiction and documentaries. Her most signifi-
cant contributions were the TV movie documentary Conversatione italiana/Italian
Conversation (1999), a portrait of contemporary writers and poets, and Ferreri,
I Love You (2000), a documentary dedicated to the director Marco Ferreri.
Il vesitito da sposa/The Wedding Dress (2003), which was nominated for the
Pardo d’Oro/Golden Leopard at the 2003 Locarno International Film Festival, is
the third feature film directed and written by Infascelli. Central to the story is the
rape by four men of Stella, a young woman on the verge of marriage. Nevertheless,
Infascelli considers that the ‘film is on violence, not on rape’ and does not see it
as ‘a protest or sociological film’. She admits that she deliberately set out to arouse
conflicting emotions with this film, believing that ‘all men can and must redeem
themselves’. The ambiguity is introduced thematically when Stella, who has been
blindfolded so that she never knows the identity of her violators, unwittingly
begins to fall in love with one of them. Elaborating further, Infascelli explains
that she ‘wanted to get viewers to understand what Stella truly felt’, but also ‘to
help them see the “human” aspects of the monster’. In Infascelli’s opinion, a story
such as this, about ‘a man who experiences love and suffers a crisis, gives up vio-
lence and discovers tenderness but also despair […] such a story can be told only
through the merciful eyes of a woman’ (Anon n.d.).
In recent years Infascelli has focused more on making documentary films.
In 2008 she wrote and directed the section based on Article 9 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in the collective film All Human Rights For All.
However, more significant is her documentary Pugni chiusi/Clenched Fists (2011),
which relates the experiences of a group of workers who incarcerated themselves
on the Sardinian island of Asinara in protest at being made redundant with
Italy 461
the closure of the Vinyls Italia plant in Porto Torres. Although Infascelli states
that she only realized it after winning the Controcampo Italiano Prize at the
2011 Venice Festival, this documentary about the fate of factory workers recalls
Berlinguer, the national secretary of the Italian Communist Party, providing
a neat link between her mature work and her early directing experience with
Giuseppe Bertolucci (Canessa 2012). (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Doriana Leondeff
Doriana Leondeff (1962–) was born in Bari, Italy to a Bulgarian father and Sicilian
mother. Her interest in the arts took its earliest form in theatrical collaboration
with the children’s theatre and the Kismet Theatre in her hometown. Her idea
to write for the cinema came during a gap year spent in London after she had
finished high school. As she tells it, one day, leaving her English-language school,
curiosity led her to peek inside a building where a door had been left slightly ajar.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrej Rublev was being screened and she was deeply moved by
the images before her eyes. It turned out the building was the site of the London
Film School where she became a regular, made friends with some of the students,
and later began working with them on their shorts. One day a young Iranian
student asked Leondeff if she wanted to write a short screenplay with her. The
writing of that script – and its realization into a film – set Leondeff on the road to
screenwriting (Audino 2000: 37–8).
After the London experience, Leondeff moved to Rome to study at univer-
sity and to attend Rome’s famous film school, the Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematografia. She graduated from film school in 1987 with a specialization in
screenwriting and, a year later, from the University of Rome (Sapienza) with a
degree in the history of cinema. Shortly thereafter, she began collaborating with
Nicola Badalucco, who had been her teacher at the Centro and who had worked
with Luchino Visconti, among others. Badalucco had a three-year contract with
Mediaset and she worked with him on many miniseries, mostly unproduced. One
that was produced, written for Raiuno, is called Non siamo soli/We Are Not Alone.
In the 1980s, Leondeff gained recognition through the writing of a number
of shorts. Her first foray into feature-length films was the screenplay for Sibilla
Damiani’s film Dio ce ne scampi e liberi/May God Deliver Us from This (1989). In
1993 she wrote Vieni via con me/Run Away with Me for Marco Turco, and a few
years later she co-wrote with Turco and Andrea Porporati Vite in sospeso/Suspended
Lives (1998), about a close-knit group of exiled Italian terrorists, which went on
to the Venice Film Festival and won the Grolla d’Oro prize at St Vincent for Best
Screenplay.
It was in the mid-1990s that Leondeff met Silvio Soldini, the filmmaker with
whom she would begin a long period of collaboration. Le acrobate/Acrobats (1998)
was the first film the two worked on together (Audino 2000: 38). This is an inti-
mate film featuring coincidental encounters between cross-generational female
protagonists. Soldini and Leondeff have since paired on Pane e tulipani/Bread and
Tulips (2000) (for which Leondeff won a David di Donatello award), Brucio nel
vento/Burning in the Wind (2002), Agata e la tempesta/Agatha and the Storm (2004),
Giorni e nuvole/Days and Clouds (2007), Cosa voglio di più/Come Undone (2010) and
Il comandante e la cicogna/The Commander and the Stork (2012). In the past decade
Leondeff has also formed a strong partnership with Carlo Mazzacurati on La giusta
distanza/The Right Distance (2007), La passione/The Passion (2010) and La regina
della neve/Snow Queen (2014). She has also worked alongside a number of other
directors, including women filmmakers Francesca Archibugi (Lezione di volo/Flying
Lessons [2007]); Cristina Comencini (Quando la notte/When the Night [2011]), and
Anna Negri (In principio erano le mutande/In the Beginning There Was Underwear
[1999]).
Leondeff acknowledges that her working style is very much conditioned by the
relationship she establishes with directors and by the individual projects, which
may require different levels of collaboration between writer and director. Often
long periods of discussion with the director and other screenwriters alternate with
the much lonelier process of the actual writing. Reciprocal respect, she believes,
is at the basis of all good writing. Her closest and most trusted collaborations
are with Soldini and Mazzacurati, who respect her and who grant her significant
artistic liberty (Luciano 2013).
There is a certain ethos behind Leondeff’s writing. In every story she produces,
she searches for the truth, for something that as a narrator she would like to
tell, that as a spectator she would like to see, and that as a reader she would like
to read (Bogani 2009: 345). While direct attribution is difficult in collaborative
screenwriting, there are identifiable characteristics to Leondeff’s narratives. Her
scripts are often driven or connected by detail and objects, such as the Bulgarian
amulet in Acrobats, chance encounters and physical and metaphorical journeying.
Indeed, many of her narratives start from a character and are built around the
journey the character undertakes in search of him or herself. Her characters are
open to movement and change in search of their dreams, and her female characters
in particular venture away from traditional situations of enclosure.
While often asked if she aspires to directing, Leondeff finds herself very comfort-
able with the behind-the-scenes position of the screenwriter. She enjoys writing,
being part of the initial stages of coming up with the story, without having to
actually take on the many tasks of the director who has to move the pieces and
keep the cinematic machine in motion. She sees screenwriting as an artistic pro-
fession: screenwriters of bygone days used to compare the screenwriter’s craft to
that of the carpenter, Leondeff prefers the comparison of a weaver: threads and
colours, plots and texture, the fact that you can draft something and then go
back and rework it (Luciano 2013). In her mind there is no question that the film
belongs to the director, and it is the screenwriter’s duty to keep in mind the best
interests of the film project. At times this means being flexible and considering
the script a fluid text (Luciano 2013). Leondeff’s role models have included Ennio
Flaiano, Billy Wilder, Rodolfo Sonega, Erri De Luca, Age, and she in turn passes
on the craft to young Italian scriptwriters through courses taught at the Centro
Sperimentale and through other workshops, seminars and masterclasses. While
acknowledging that screenwriting and filmmaking may be changing due to the
Italy 463
ready access of information via the Internet, clearly a valuable tool, she warns
against the temptation and dangers of taking shortcuts. Ultimately, for Leondeff,
screenwriting is above all a passion and a privilege, nurtured by her unceasing
curiosity and desire to discover new worlds. (Bernadette Luciano)
Gloria Malatesta and Claudia Sbarigia
Gloria Malatesta and Claudia Sbarigia (1958–2009) formed an inseparable screen-

writing duo until Sbarigia’s untimely death from cancer on 8 January 2009.
During their more than 20-year partnership, they co-wrote numerous screen-
plays and worked with a variety of directors, writing scripts for both the cinema
and for television movies and mini-series. Sbarigia graduated from the Centro
Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the Italian National Film School Experimental
Film Centre) in Rome and both participated in the independent screenwriting
programme run by Leo Benvenuti at L’ANAC (Associazione Nazionale Autori
Cinematografici/National Film Writers Association). They were contemporaries of
the well-regarded director and screenwriter Francesca Archibugi, with whom they
collaborated on a number of their earlier and more successful screenplays.
In 1986, the trio Malatesta, Sbarigia and Archibugi were the first recipients of the
highly sought after Premio Solinas (Solinas Award) for their screenplay Sott’acqua/
Under Water. The following year, they made their feature film screenwriting debut,
co-writing the screenplay for the Bruno Cortini-directed L’estate sta finendo/Summer
is Ending (1987). Soon after, the three united once again to write the screenplay
for La cintura/The Belt (1989), an unremarkable film based on Alberto Moravia’s
theatrical work of the same name, which was directed by Giuliana Gamba. The
successful partnership continued through the early phase of Archibugi’s directing
career. Malatesta and Sbarigia collaborated with Archibugi on the script for her
first full-length film, the well-received Mignon è partita/Mignon Has Left (1988),
for which all three were awarded a David di Donatello award for Best Screenplay.
Two years later, their screenwriting prowess was again recognized, with the trio
nominated in 1991 for a Nastro d’Argento in the Best Original Story section for
Archibugi’s second feature film Verso sera/Towards Evening (1990).
Although Archibugi’s interests eventually led her in other directions, the screen-
writing partnership between Malatesta and Sbarigia continued. They worked twice
on screenplays with Peter Del Monte, a director whose films are known for their
abstractness, interiority and silence (Cercone 2001). Together with Del Monte
and Mario Fortunato they were nominated for both a Golden Globe (1996) and
a Nastro d’Argento (1997) for the screenplay of Compagna di viaggio/Travelling
Companion (1996). A few years later they again collaborated with Del Monte
to write the script for the less successful Controvento/Against the Wind (2000).
Commenting on his relationship with Malatesta and Sbarigia, Del Monte admit-
ted that it was somewhat conflicted, but he went on to observe that he was often
grateful to them because they had a good rapport with the ‘everyday’ and with
‘the way people spoke’, which contrasted with his own tendency towards abstract
relationships (Cercone 2001).
After this period, Malatesta and Sbarigia turned their talents towards writing for
television, although they collaborated with the esteemed director Marco Bellocchio
on the script for a short film Sorrelle/Sisters (2006), which Bellocchio later expanded
into the feature film Sorelle Mai/The Mai Sisters (2010). Since 2002, Malatesta has
taught screenwriting at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome, as did Sbarigia until
her death. Both also frequently formed part of the judging panel for the Premio
Solinas, something Malatesta continues to do. In 2009, Sbarigia’s contribution
to screenwriting was recognized under the umbrella of the Solinas awards with
the instigation of a special scholarship (Borsa di studio Claudia Sbarigia), which
is awarded for displaying special talent in narrating characters and the female
universe. After an understandable pause, Malatesta has recommenced screenwrit-
ing for television, currently working on a pilot series in partnership with Doriana
Leondeff. (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Francesca Manieri
Francesca Manieri (1979–) graduated with highest honours from Sapienza University
of Rome in 2002 with a degree in philosophy, writing her thesis on the history of
logic. Two years later, her name headed the list of those selected for the three-year
diploma of screenwriting course at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome (Italian National
Film School), from which she graduated in 2007. Manieri writes for film and theatre.
In film she has collaborated on the production of numerous short films and docu-
mentaries, many of which reflect her interest in the problems faced by groups that
exist on the margins of mainstream society. These include the documentaries Solo per
oggi/Only for Today (2005), an exploration of the existential maze of alcohol depend-
ency, which was directed by Andrea De Sica and presented at the 2006 Bellaria Film
Festival, and Zanzibar: una storia d’amore/Zanzibar: A Love Story (2009), which Manieri
co-wrote and co-directed with Monica Pietrangeli. This latter documentary tells the
story of Zanzibar, the Roman ‘locale’ opened in 1978 that was the first meeting place
in Italy solely for women. Catering to the lesbian and non-lesbian communities, the
bar quickly became a symbol and emblem of the Italian feminist movement in all its
multifarious guises (Flash 2010). While still a student, Manieri was a finalist in the
Story for the Cinema category of the Premio Solinas (2006) with her drama Oliver
Trans, a story which revolved around complex questions of sexual and social identity
explored through transgender and lesbian lenses, demonstrating her early attraction
to cinematic exploration of different horizons of identity.
Manieri’s entry to the feature film arena coincided with a collaboration with
director Giuseppe Piccione on the script of Il rosso e il blu/The Red and the Blue
(2012), for which the pair were nominated for the Best Screenplay Nastro
d’Argento in 2013. The film is based on the novel by writer, journalist, and teacher
Marco Lodoli,12 and takes its title from the celebrated and feared two-pointed
marking pencil that has long been employed by Italian teachers and is used in the
film as a visible metaphor for the inability of the Italian school system to adapt
to societal changes (Reverdito 2013). Manieri also collaborated with Marco Ponti
(director) and Elisa Amoruso on the screenplay of Passione sinistra/Leftwing Passion
Italy 465
(2013). La foresta di ghiaccio/The Ice Forest (2014) was co-written by Manieri and
Elisa Amoruso and director Claudio Noce. (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Francesca Marciano
Francesca Marciano (1955–) is an Italian novelist and screenwriter. She was born
(and currently lives) in Rome and has spent considerable periods in both New
York and Kenya. She was raised in a family with strong literary and cinematic
connections; she grew up surrounded by ‘young writers and poets’ who were
mentored by her grandfather, who was ‘something of a literary figure in Italy’
(Marciano 2013). By her own account, she assumed from a young age that she
would be a writer (Aloudblog 2011). She commenced her professional association
with the cinema as an actress, appearing first in the Lina Wertmüller-directed
Pasqualino settebellezze/Seven Beauties (1975), and then under Pupi Avati’s direc-
tion in La casa dalle finestre che ridono/The House of the Laughing Windows (1976)
and Tutti defunti tranne i morti/All Deceased Except the Dead (1977) (Berardi 2012).
Marciano quickly realized that her personality was not suited for acting; she
explains that she likes to have control of a situation, and the very nature of acting
involves exposing oneself without the ability to control that exposition (Berardi
2012). Spurred by a desire to travel, at the age of 21 Marciano left Italy for New
York and enrolled in a six-month course at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.13
She remained in New York for around seven years, supporting herself by working
as a freelance producer/director for RAI, the Italian television network, where she
learned how to shoot and edit films. Although she concedes that she ‘learned
to love the process of filmmaking’, she realized that journalism, like acting, was
not for her, discovering that she was ‘more attracted by the idea of telling a story
than by reporting actual facts’ (Marciano 2013). During this period, Marciano
and fellow Italian Stefania Casini co-wrote and co-directed their first feature film,
Lontano da dove/Far from Where (1983). The film, which was funded from Italy but
produced in New York, was well received in Italy. It was selected for the Venezia
Giovani section of the 1983 Venice International Film Festival, and also won
Marciano and Casini a joint nomination in the Best New Director category at the
1984 David di Donatello Awards. Marciano explains that the relative success of
this film gave her confidence to keep writing and made her decide to leave New
York and return to Italy (Marciano 2013). She went on to write and direct an
episode (Sirena/Siren) of Provvisorio quasi d’amore/Provisionally Almost Love (1989),
a collective work made with a number of other filmmakers. Marciano identi-
fied early that her cinematic future lay in screenwriting rather than directing.
Since 1990, Marciano has collaborated on the scripts of numerous films, working
alongside some of Italy’s most esteemed contemporary directors, and the qual-
ity of her writing has been recognized with the receipt of numerous awards and
award nominations. She has twice enjoyed success working under the direction
of Gabriele Salvatores, winning a Nastro d’Argento nomination (together with
Alessandro Vivarelli, Fabrizio Bentivoglio and Paolo Virzì) for Best Original Story
(1991) for Turné/On Tour (1990), and Best Screenplay nominations (with Niccolò
Ammanti) at both the Edgar Allan Poe and Nastro d’Argento Awards for Io non ho
paura/I’m Not Scared (2003), a film based on Ammanti’s novel of the same name.
Her most productive screenwriting partnership to date has been with director and
actor Carlo Verdone. She has collaborated with Verdone on five films, commenc-
ing with Maledetto il giorno che ti ho incontrato/Cursed Is the Day I Met You (1992),
for which she and Verdone won a David di Donatello for the Best Screenplay as
well as a nomination for a Golden Globe. Two years later she was nominated once
again with Verdone for the Best Screenplay David di Donatello with Perdiamoci di
vista/We Lost Sight of One Another (1994). Pasquale Plastino joined the writing team
to collaborate on Sono pazzo di Iris Blond/I’m Crazy About Iris Blond (1996), L’amore
è eterno finché dura/Love Is Eternal While It Lasts (2004), and finally Io, Loro e Lara/
Me, Them and Lara (2010), for which the trio were awarded a Nastro d’Argento
for the Best Original Story and a nomination for a Ciak d’Oro for Best Screenplay.
When questioned about the screenwriting process with Verdone, Marciano
explains that Verdone, who typically acts in, directs and writes his own films,
generally takes the lead in writing the character he will interpret. She and Plastino
work together offsetting Verdone’s character with the other characters in the film.
Although she often only deals with the female characters, something that irritates
her in principle, she states that this does not bother her in her collaboration with
Verdone, whom she believes understands women (Berardi 2012).
Marciano co-wrote La bestia nel cuore/Don’t Tell (2005), a film directed by
Cristina Comencini and based on Comencini’s own novel. She also collaborated
with director Wilma Labate on the story for La signorina Effe/Signorina Effe (2007),
for which she, together with Labate and Carla Vangelista, received a nomination
for a Nastro d’Argento for the Best Original Story (2008). Marciano worked with
director Bernardo Bertolucci, Ammanti and Umberto Contarello on the script
for Io e te/Me and You (2012), a film that is liberally based on Ammanti’s novel
of the same name. The trio received a nomination for a David di Donatello
and a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay (2013), while the film won the Nastro
d’Argento of the year in 2013. In much the same period Marciano worked with
Ivan Cotroneo and director Maria Sole Tognazzi on the script of Viaggio sola/A
Five Star Life (2013), for which they were nominated for a David di Donatello
and a Ciak d’Oro for Best Screenplay as well as a Nastro d’Argento for Best Story.
Marciano also collaborated on the script for Valeria Golino’s debut feature film
Miele/Honey (2013); this narrative is inspired by the novel Vi perdono/They Lose
You by Angela Del Fabbro (a pseudonym for Mauro Covacich), subsequently
republished as A nome tuo/In Your Name. The film, which confronts the topical
issue of euthanasia, was shown at Cannes 2013 and was nominated for the prize
‘Un Certain Regard’.
Although Marciano has put her signature to numerous screenplays, she is
probably better known internationally as a novelist. She has published several
novels including Rules of the Wild: A Novel of Africa (1999), Casa Rossa (2003) and
The End of Manners (2009) – and her short story collection, The Other Language
(2014). Commenting on the difference between script writing and writing novels,
Marciano notes that a film script is written for an audience. It will reach them
Italy 467
mediated by ‘the director’s work, by the actors, the costume designer [...] the final
result is a teamwork [and y]ou are only the initiator’. The relationship with the
written text is far more direct, for ‘there is nothing between you and the book’
(Aloudblog 2011). (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Adriana Monti
The filmmaking career of Adriana Monti (1951–) began in the 1970s and devel-
oped in conjunction with her active participation in the Italian feminist move-
ment of that era (Maule 2008: 199). An intellectual and educationalist, she was
one of a group of teachers at the school in via Gabbro, in Affori (on the outskirts of
Milan), involved in the adult education scheme known as the ‘150 Hour Courses’.
In 1979, she began ‘almost casually’ (Monti 1988: 80) to shoot footage for the
film Scuola senza fine/School without End (1983). Shot over a three-year period,
this 40-minute documentary-style film records the voyages of self-discovery and
the close interpersonal bonds that developed as a group of ‘housewives’ explored
‘literature, the body and the image’ (Monti 1988: 80) in seminars conducted as an
extension to the basic ‘150 Hours Courses’. The production of the first half of the
film involved a ‘cooperative approach to feminist filmmaking’, and as such rep-
resented a challenge to the monologic perspective of traditional auterist cinema
(Foster 1995: 268). When others eventually lost interest in the project, and after
a two-year pause, Monti decided to complete the film alone, describing as painful
her attempt ‘to contain in language the intense experience of our lives together’
(Monti 1988: 82).
Other films from this era that demonstrate Monti’s commitment to writing and
directing films that discuss feminist issues in a collaborative environment are her
documentary Filo a catena/Assembly Line (1986), which depicts the grim working
conditions of poorly paid female textile workers, and her first feature film Gentili
signore/Kind Ladies (1989). Co-written with Angelo Cordini and Sergio Vecchio,
this relatively unknown comedy revolves around a group of middle-aged house-
wives who start a textile printing cooperative only to find themselves dealing with
a series of financial and personal problems following the mysterious disappearance
of the company manager.
Monti was born in Milan, but since 1996 she has lived in Toronto, Canada,
where she is an independent video, film and documentary maker with her own
production company.14 Although her name is not as recognized in the wider com-
munity as that of many other Italian filmmakers, her contribution to women’s cin-
ema and to documentary filmmaking in Italy has been significant and deserves to
be acknowledged (Moliterno 2000: 378). (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Daria Nicolodi
Daria Nicolodi (1950–), actress and screenwriter, was born in Florence, Italy. She
acted in several horror films directed by Dario Argento and is given writing credit
on Suspiria (1977). She is also credited as co-writer on Paganini Horror (1989).
Elvira Notari and Italian silent cinema
Mariapia Comand
Elvira Notari (1875–1946) was not the only woman to write screenplays for films
produced in Italy during the silent era (Dall’Asta 2008: 324–6), but she was by far
the one with the longest and most prolific career. According to her son, more than
60 films were made based on her scripts over a span of 20 years (Reso 2011: 17),
as well as more than 100 short films and documentaries.
After retiring from the world of cinema in the 1930s, she disappeared into ano-
nymity, her name mostly unseen in the annals of film history. However, among
her contemporaries Notari was highly respected: a critic in 1916 called her ‘one of
the most important screenwriters of the great Italian art’ (La cinematografia italiana
ed estera, 1916, 3: 98). This is a surprising statement given the fact that screenwrit-
ers as a whole were largely ignored in that era; their names rarely appeared in the
credits, as the craft had not yet achieved any type of notable professional standards
(Alovisio 2005). Another journalist in 1916 argued that ‘script writers … should
make themselves known to the public’, implying that they should take responsibil-
ity for the stories they write (La cinematografia italiana ed estera, 1916, 5: 21), some-
thing Notari undoubtedly did. In the head credits and in all publicity materials she
took absolute ownership of her films – the credits ‘written and directed by Elvira
Notari’ or ‘adapted and directed by’ were featured explicitly. The advertising for
her film ‘E scugnizze/Urchins (1917) used her actual signature (film, 1916, 24: 10).
Notari was not only a director, editor, teacher and acting school director, but also a
businesswoman who, in spite of operating as an artisan in a family business, under-
stood the importance of creating a visible identity, recognizable by its specific type
of product, a ‘name’ that conveys what we would today describe as a ‘brand’.
Elvira Coda was born in Salerno in 1875, the third child of Diego Coda and
Agnese Vignes. She attended the Scuole Normali, an institution dedicated to train-
ing future grade-school teachers. In 1902 in Naples she married Nicola Notari, a
former painter and photographer who had become a specialist in the hand-tinting
of film. In 1903 their son, Eduardo, was born, followed two years later by their
daughter, Dora: the former became a protagonist in many films made by the
couple, going by the name Gennariello, while the latter provided the name the
parents would use for their company: Dora Film. Dora Film opened for business in
the first years of the early twentieth century, producing what were called ‘quadri
movimentati’ (paintings in motion), hand-tinted short films often shown in the
interstitial and closing moments of musical numbers and performances put on in
Naples’ café chantant. Having the more sophisticated cultural background, Elvira
took on the role of writer and director, while Nicola took care of the cinematog-
raphy and art direction. It’s interesting to note that their early short films – col-
lectively titled Arrivederci, Augurali o Buona Sera – were composed of varied genres,
as shown in the advertising from 1910 (Lux, 1910, 50: 6):
Il fotografo/The Photographer, 12 meters, comedy

L’arrivederci del Folletto/The Fools ‘Goodbye, 6 meters, fantasy
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Il chiar di luna/Moonlight, 4 meters, serious

Il girasole/The Sunflower, 6 meters, fantasy
Alla Luigi XIV/Like Louis XIV, 6 meters, heroic
Il ventaglio meraviglioso/The Magic Fan, 16 meters, heroic
All’impero/Empire, 3 meters, aristocratic
Il telefono dei bambini/The Children’s Telephone, 6 meters, dal vero (from real life)
Il saluto della bersagliera/The Salute of the Bersagliera, 6 meters, dal vero
Il coscritto/The Draftee, 10 meters, comedy
La maschera napoletana/The Neapolitan Mask, 20 meters, for the ending
Il saluto con la mano/The Wave of the Hand, 3 meters, eccentric
It’s important to note that the settings and styles of the early films were hetero-
geneous, often including stories set in the world of aristocrats or fantasy stories –
the opposite of what would later become the company’s core business – namely,
stories of the ‘people’, made for the ‘people’. These include stories set in the world
of the grimy alleys of Naples, often at the very borders of legality, and stories for the
working-class audience of southern Italy, an actual subculture with clear animosity
towards the official cultural offerings promoted by the Northern Italy apparatus.
The realism of early newsreels and documentaries on social strife and prepara-
tion for war also infused the narrative films written by Elvira Notari. In the second
decade of the twentieth century, the social and economic degradation in Naples
became the dominant background for the events and characters of her stories,
inspired by melodrama in particular. Her melodramas mixed an ancient heritage
of disparate cultural, religious and figurative influences, with modern needs and
desires. La figlia del Vesuvio/The Daughter of Vesuvius, (1912), for instance, based on
her original screenplay, tells the story of Dora, a guide who accompanies tourists
with her mule to visit Vesuvius; she is seduced by the Count of Torralta and then
abandoned with the ‘child of her guilt’, as a magazine ad of the time described
(La vita cinematografica, 1912, 11: 30). Dora decides to kill herself, throwing her-
self into the volcano. Onto this dualistic structure – woman/poor/succubus, man/
rich/incubus – Notari grafted an element that subverted the traditional patriarchal
polarities concerning gender and power. Giuliana Bruno has pointed out a sali-
ent moment in the story, when Dora ‘didn’t have the strength to rise up against
the man she had loved’: a detail, for Bruno, that reveals an idea of the female
identity as ‘the product of the friction between assertion of the self and the need
of the other’ (Bruno 1993: 279). The themes of guilt, sin, innocence and virtue –
manifestations of the Catholic heritage – formed the symbolic backdrop for many
popular works of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in
melodrama, as well as romantic and feuilleton. This latter genre saw the rise of a
new mood: the female desire ‘fills’ the heart of the story, freeing women’s aspira-
tions and dreams repressed by the morality of the era. This female desire was a
key element, for example, in the work of Carolina Invernizio, a well-known and
successful popular writer of the time, whose work was adapted into two films by
Notari, Il nano rosso o La fata di Borgo Loreto/The Red Dwarf (1917) and Chiarina la
modista/Chiarina the Milliner (1919).
Notari amps up this desire; her writing gives off heat, sound, noise and colour,
reverberating throughout all the senses. The sexual energy takes shape through
metaphors endowed with concreteness, using images drawn from nature. In the
script of La figlia del Vesuvio the three acts of the plot are parallelled with three
phallic references to the volcano: ‘a sleeping giant’ at the start, ‘rigid and impos-
ing’ when the Count seduces the young girl, and finally as a place of sacrifice, a
‘pinnacle’ that grasps her ‘in the coitus of death’. The poster of the film emphasized
the spectacle of the drama (La vita cinematografica, 1912, 13: 49):
A tale told in 32 magnificent, emotional scenes, a story rife with danger, spin-
ning through fascinating yet terrible regions … from the fuming Giant Monster
… and from deep within its crater, spewing its thick and threatening smoke,
the protagonist of our drama emerges in utter desperation.
The connection between figurative and narrative levels, between setting and story,
is evident; it’s a link that appealed to the Neapolitan public and the fans of stories
of passion and romance. In this way Notari found her audience. If in the first years
of the 1910s Dora Film seemed to display some signs of uncertainty – one industry
newspaper (Cinema, 1913, 60: 65) published the news that Dora Film had hired a
‘writer of novellas for use in cinema’, referring to G. L. Giannini – by the middle
of that decade their strategic objectives were quite clear. Almost all of the films
written and directed by Elvira Notari in these subsequent years were adaptations
of the dramas of Neapolitan writers. Many of her stories were published as serials
in installments with great success during those years in the local paper, Il Roma,
or adapted for performance at the San Ferdinando Theatre in Naples. In fact, the
famed actor Giulio Paternostro was cast from that theatre to play in several of her
films (Paliotti and Grano 1969: 89), an example of Elvira Notari’s acute under-
standing of the dynamics existing among different media. Paternostro appeared
in Carmela o la sartina di Montesanto/Carmela the Dressmaker of Montesanto (1916),
based on the novel of the same name by Davide Galdi; in Il nano rosso o La fata di
Borgo Loreto (by Carolina Invernizio); and in Ciccio il piazzaiuolo del Carmine/Ciccio,
the Pizzamaker of Carmin (1916), an adaptation of the play by Francesco Mastriani,
one of the most celebrated writers of the genre in that era. Notari also adapted his
other works, Il barcaiuolo d’Amalfi/The Boatman of Amalfi in 1918 and La Medea di
Porta Medina/The Medea of Porta Medina in 1919.
These serials by Mastriani, set in the slums of Naples, borrowed the techniques
and themes common in the popular literary serial: one-dimensional characters,
clear dichotomies, intrigues, coups de theatre, and often the sudden release of
dramatic tension. Notari’s screenplays took advantage of all of these trans-medial
clichés, but she used everything in a personal way. For example, her version of ‘A
Santanotte (distributed in the US as The Holy Night, 1922), inspired by a song from
1920 by Eduardo Scala and Francesco Buongiovanni, is quite different from the
play written by Enzo Lucio Murolo in the thirties adapted from the same song.
In the film, ‘the female character is far more complex … a girl with a drunken,
violent father, who has a job of her own and is autonomous and very much able
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to make her own decisions’ (Scialò 2002: 225). Notari mined dramatic potential,
always ready to burst out; the screenplays were drafted like dramatic ‘fuses’,
headed inevitably towards explosive emotions. A Neapolitan song from 1922 by
E. A. Mario – titled ‘Cinematografo’15 – tells the story of a spectator at a moment
watching one of these films, who ends up stabbing his own wife in the movie
theatre. He sings:
But this writer,

how could (s)he write
what’s locked inside a heart?
To succeed in generating this kind of impact on the collective audience, Notari’s

scripts were driven forward by the emotional rhythm of the story, built around
a reliance on the actual performances, and loaded with sensorial intensity. The
films were also hand-tinted in colours that had their own semantic codes: ‘love is
red and jealousy is green or violet’, her son, Eduardo, explained. ‘The color and
the music defined Dora Films’ (Masi and Franco 1988: 136). From 1913 on, in fact,
beginning with A Marechiaro ce sta ‘na finesta/At Marechiaro There Is a Window –
inspired by the brilliant hit song by Salvatore di Giacomo, set to music by Tosti –
their films were accompanied with live music, and the most important singers of
the era lip-synched to the images on the screen. ‘I recall my mother there at the
orchestra rehearsals with the singer and with my father, who doubled as the pro-
jectionist, and she would ask for changes here and there … our films were literally
built around the rhythms of the songs’ (Masi and Franco 1988: 136). We can only
guess at the actual effect of this original technique of finalizing the script while
shooting, beyond clues provided in the film Fantasia ‘e surdato/Soldier’s Fantasy
(1927), one of the very few films of Elvira Notari surviving today. In the 1920s
Notari drew her stories from the most popular songs of that time and produced
‘A legge o ‘O festino e ‘a legge/The Law or The Feast and the Law (1920), ‘A mala nova/
The New Criminal Underworld (1920), E’ piccerella (1922, distributed in the USA
as The Little Girl’s Wrong), ‘A Santanotte, ‘Nfama o Voglio a te/Infamous Woman or
I Fancy You (1924), to name but a few. Notari took advantage of the success of
these works at the Piedigrotta Festival, an important music event of the time:
often the scripts were spun out instantaneously, based on what was hot at the
moment. ‘Notari used to buy the film rights to all of the songs competing in the
Piedigrotta Festival, not knowing which ones would win; once the winner was
selected the film would be produced, often within ten days, so as to take advantage
of the success of the song’ (Martinelli 2008: 135).
As with ‘A Santanotte, these songs also generated ‘sceneggiate’, melodramatic
musical theatre pieces, combining acting and singing. The similarities with the
fiction serials – such as those of Mastriani – are notable, both in regards to the
clear externalization of raw emotion, as well as the style and décor used. All of
them were aimed at reinforcing the cultural identity of a community, people
marginalized from the overall society. In the plots conceived by Notari, personal
conflicts tended to develop on two tracks: both between a man and a woman, and
between a community and the society as a whole. ‘For Notari, the Law is a site of
narrative tension. The justice system goes after the underprivileged and the inno-
cent’ (Bruno 1993: 196). This was one of the reasons why the censors frequently
reacted against Notari’s films.16 Faced with ostracism from the institutional powers,
Dora Film attempted to collaborate; in 1917 Nicola Notari made a public declara-
tion, at the request of the governing authorities, promising to produce works in
support of the war propaganda (film, 1917, 36: 3):
Even before the war, we produced, with militant fervor, the patriotic film
Addio mia bella addio l’armata se ne va, which we followed with Sempre avanti
Savoia, and Gloria ai caduti, all three written by Elvira Notari. Now, at this very
moment, we are prepared to cooperate, with total enthusiasm and all our
energy, so as to be useful to our beloved Country, putting our company and all
of its staff to work at the disposition of this noble cause.
Nonetheless, Notari’s wartime films fell victim to the censors, as they ultimately
conveyed a realistic vision of war, hardly in line with the government’s demands.
It should be noted that the movies produced by Dora Film also had significant
international distribution. They were particularly aimed at the Italian-American
market, and the less than flattering image of southern Italy being generated was
setting off alarms with the authorities. A law was passed in 1928 proclaiming that
no films would be approved which featured ‘hustlers, derelicts, street urchins,
dingy alleys, people in rags and idle slackers’ … clichés that offend Naples and the
entire region’ (Martinelli 1987: 370). Notari’s work focused on those now taboo
elements: repressed desire, ‘eccentric’ behaviour, an undisciplined world of misery
and people on the edge.
Elvira Notari’s career ended with the arrival of sound recording in film, but also
because of the greater difficulties involved in production as a result of an increas-
ingly hostile political climate. After Trionfo cristiano/Christian Triumph (1930), a
feature financed with money from Italian emigrants abroad – an early form of
what is today known as ‘crowdfunding’ – the censorship board approved no fur-
ther films. Notari retired to Cava dei Tirreni, in the province of Salerno, where she
died on 17 June 1946.
Anna Pavignano
Anna Pavignano (1955–) was born in Borgomanero, in the region of Piedmont.

She worked closely with Neapolitan film director, actor and screenwriter Massimo
Troisi. Pavignano and Troisi met in 1977 while recording the RAI television experi-
mental variety show Non Stop. At the time, Pavignano was a psychology student
enrolled at the University of Turin, and was supporting her studies by working as
an extra on the show in which Troisi’s Neapolitan comedy trio ‘La Smorfia’ was
performing comic sketches. Although she had started writing as a child, ‘profes-
sionally everything began with Massimo and with the script of Ricomincio da tre/
I’m Starting from Three (1981)’ (Di Pace 2008). Their artistic affinity was profound,
Italy 473
with their professional relationship surviving the end of their seven-to-eight-year

romantic liaison and Pavignano’s subsequent marriage. Pavignano collaborated
with Troisi on the screenplays of all but one of his films, until his untimely death
in 1994 at the age of 41.17
The Pavignano-Troisi screenwriting partnership enjoyed immediate success, for
I’m Starting from Three won a number of awards and award nominations, including
a nomination for Best Screenplay at the David di Donatello Awards. In an inter-
view with Ugo Di Pace, Pavignano reveals that her professional relationship with
Troisi began when the producer Mario Berardi gave Troisi carte blanche to write
a film script about ‘whatever he wanted’. She recalls that, at that time, she and
Troisi were sharing a house with Lello Arena and Gaetano Daniele18 on Lake Nemi,
and observes that Troisi asked her to join in the writing process as he had read the
things she was writing in that period. Elaborating further, Pavignano explains that
‘in some manner we brought together in that story our lives and the mentality of
that era, our experiences at the end of the seventies’ (Di Pace 2008).
Together with Troisi, Pavignano went on to write the screenplays for Scusate il
ritardo/Excuse the Delay (1983), Le vie del Signore sono finite/The Ways of the Lord
Have Ended (1987), which won a Nastro d’Argento for Best Screenplay, Pensavo
fosse amore invece era un calesse/I Thought It Was Love (1991), and finally the multi-
award-winning Il postino/The Postman (1994). This last film, which was directed
by Michael Radford, is based on the Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta’s 1985
novel Ardiente paciencia/The Postman.19 Together with Troisi, Radford, and Furio
and Giacomo Scarpelli, Pavignano was nominated for both an Oscar and a BAFTA
award for the screenplay of this film (Troisi posthumously, as he died 12 hours
after the filming had finished).
The termination in 1987 of her romantic partnership with Troisi saw Pavignano
collaborating with other directors. She joined with four others to write the screen-
play for Sergio Sollima’s Passi d’amore/Steps of Love (1989), and single-handedly
wrote the script for Ma non per sempre/But Not Forever (1991), directed by Marzio
Casa. Together with Gioia Scola, she wrote the screenplay for the Fabio Conversi-
directed Malefemmene/Bad Girls (2001), and collaborated on the script for Paolo
Costella’s Amore con la S maiuscola/Love with a Capital S (2002). More significantly,
in 2002, she joined with director Alessandro D’Altri, to write Casomai/If by Chance.
This romantic comedy, which deals with the challenges posed by married life, was
nominated for a David di Donatello award for Best Screenplay. Pavignano turned
her hand to crime comedy in 2004, collaborating with Luciana Littizzetto and
Margherita Oggero on the screenplay for Se devo essere sincera/If I Have to Be Honest,
a film directed by Davide Ferrario and based on Oggero’s novel La collega tatuata/
The Tattoed Accomplice.
In 2007, Pavignano published Da domani mi alzo tardi/From Tomorrow I Will Get
Up Late, a book situated somewhere between novel and biography, in which she
relives and reveals unknown, or lesser known, aspects of the life of Massimo Troisi
(Di Mezza 2010). In 2010, together with director Alessandro D’Altri, she wrote the
screenplay for Sul mare/On the Sea, a film which is based on her own novel In bilico sul
mare/Balancing on the Sea (2009). Recent films include Something Good: The Mercury
Factor (2013), and an adaptation of Marco Carnevale’s Spanish-Argentinian romantic

comedy Elsa & Fred (2014). Pavignano has published narratives for both adults and
children, and has held courses in cinematic writing for for Dams (The Disciplines:
Art, Music and Theatre). (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Federica Pontremoli
Federica Pontremoli (1966–) was born in Genoa, Italy. After completing a degree
in literature, Pontremoli enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
(the Italian National Film School) in Rome, graduating in 1994 with a diploma
in screenwriting. She began her professional career writing scripts for short films,
experiencing almost immediate success collaborating with director Giuseppe
Gandini on the screenplay of Il mito della realtà/The Myth of Reality (1994), which
was awarded a Nastro d’Argento for the Best Short Film (1995). During this
early phase, Pontremoli also directed musical video clips for various artists, and
assisted with the production of Branchie/Gills (1999), a full-length film directed
by Francesco Martinotti.
In 2002, Pontremoli made her feature film directing debut with Quore (2002),
a low-budget production for which she also wrote the story and the screenplay.
According to Pontremoli, she never intended directing the film, considering her-
self a screenwriter. Nevertheless, she explains that her producers, Martinotti and
Laurentina Guidotti, ‘thought that only I could shoot it as I had it in my head, to
make the most of the screenplay’ (Donald.datti 2002). Quore is not a simple film
narrative. Heart, which is ‘cuore’ in Italian, is the elusive element in this story,
which narrates the difficulties confronted by a young woman as she copes with
an unplanned and ill-timed pregnancy. Although intended as a comedy, the film
exposes the total lack of support the protagonist receives from those she might rea-
sonably expect to help guide her through her predicament. In Pontremoli’s words,
‘the “q” was to signify that in the film there was something that wasn’t right, it is
the perturbing element, the melodrama inside the comedy’ (Donald.datti 2002).
In an interview conducted at a preview of Quore, Pontremoli stated that her
first feature film directing role was ‘probably her last’, because ‘in the work of a
director, the artistic element is only twenty percent’ (Donald.datti 2002). That
she appears to have maintained this stance probably owes a great deal to the fact
that her short movie Baci da Varsavia/Kisses from Warsaw won the prize for Best
Story at the 2003 Sacher Festival,20 and her short film Naufraghi/Shipwrecked (2004,
director and writer) won both the Elio Scardmaglia and Cortolazio awards at the
Citadella del Corto International Short Film Festival. These successes brought her
to the attention of the highly acclaimed film director Nanni Moretti. She began
working with Moretti, Francesco Piccolo and Heidrun Schleef (story only) on the
script for Moretti’s multi-award-winning satirical comedy-drama, Il caimano/The
Caiman (2006). Together with Moretti and Piccolo, the script earned Pontremoli
a nomination in the Best Screenplay category of the 2006 David di Donatello
Awards, and wins in the same category at both the Taormina International Film
Festival and the Ciak d’Oro awards of that year.
Italy 475
Pontremoli collaborated on the screenplay of the Silvio Soldini-directed Giorni

e nuvole/Days and Clouds (2007), winning a Nastro d’Argento nomination for Best
Screenplay in 2008 along with co-writers Doriana Leondeff, Piccolo and Soldini.
In 2009, her name appeared among the screenwriting credits in four feature films,
three of which are based on the novels of authors who also collaborated on the
screenplays: Giulia non esce la sera/Giulia Doesn’t Date at Night (2009), for which
Pontremoli and director Giuseppe Piccioni received a nomination for Best Story at
the Nastro d’Argento Awards; Generazione mille euro/Generation 1,000 Euros (2009),
a film directed by Massimo Venier from a novel by Alessandro Rimassa; Lo spazio
bianco/The White Space (2009), which was directed by Francesca Comencini and
is based on Valeria Parrella’s novel; and Meno male che ci sei/Thank Goodness You’re
There (2009), based on a novel by Maria Daniela Raineri and filmed under the
direction of Luis Prieto. Pontremoli joined Venier (director) once again to collabo-
rate with Massimo Pellegrini and Fabio Volo on the screenplay of Il giorno in più/
One Day More (2011), a film that shares its name with Volo’s novel but contains
significant plot variations.
During a recent panel discussion on the art of screenwriting, Pontremoli
observed that ‘[t]here is something magical about ideas. It is a creative moment
that transcends us and I personally live in expectation for something from on
high that may never arrive, hence I wait with terror’ (Quaranta 2013). The sug-
gestion that there might be something almost supernatural in the origin of ideas
does not seem at all strange when viewed in the context of her two other screen-
play collaborations: Habemus Papam/We Have a Pope (2011) (directed by Moretti)
and Magnifica presenza/Magnificent Presence (2012) (directed by Ferzan Özpetek).
Collaborating for the second time with Moretti and Piccolo, Pontremoli affirms
that every word of the script of We Have a Pope was written by all three, all of
whom also profess to being ‘non-believers’ (D’Ambrosio 2011). The film, which is
a gentle, farcical comedy, is about a cardinal elected to be pope, who is crushed by
the weight and responsibility of his role, sees a psychiatrist and eventually resigns
his position. In 2011, their combined efforts won the trio a Nastro d’Argento for
Best Original Story at the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Awards. In
the following year, Pontremoli took the stage again for the same award. On this
occasion it was alongside Özpetek for the story of Magnificent Presence, which is
an ironic film, infused with Pirandellian references, which, to use Pontremoli’s
words, plays ‘a game of mirrors between the present and the past and between
fiction and reality’ (Lo Verme 2012). Commenting on his first ever collaboration
with a female screenwriter, Özpetek remarks, ‘[T]he more feminine quips are
mine, the more masculine are hers […] The collaboration with Federica gave me a
great deal, women bring other attitudes, they change life, they lead you’ (Caprara
2011). (Bernadette Luciano and Bridget Tompkins)
Heidrun Schleef
Heidrun Schleef (1962–), screenwriter and director, was born Melle, Germany, then
studied film theory for two years at the New York University film school before
transferring to Rome in 1985 with a scholarship to study directing at the Centro

Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the Italian National Film School Experimental
Film Centre). Her directing career was brief, consisting of a short stint in television
in the role of programme director for the DSE (Department of School Education)
of RAI Tre. Circumstances soon led her from directing towards screenwriting,
and after an apprenticeship as script editor for the private multimedia company
Fininvest, and text writer for the state-owned RAI television, she co-wrote the
screenplay for Elisabetta Lodoli’s debut film La Venere di Willendorf/The Venus of
Willendorf (1996). However, probably more instrumental in launching her screen-
writing career was her collaboration in this same period with Mimmo Calopresti
and Francesco Bruni on the script for Calopresti’s La seconda volta/The Second Time
(1996), which was awarded the Premio Solinas for its screenplay (Corsi 2002: 103).
Since her screenwriting debut, Schleef has worked with some of Italy’s most
important directors, contributing in varying degrees to both the screenplay and
stories of more than 20 films. She enjoyed further success with Calopresti and
Bruni, co-writing the story (with Calopresti) and screenplay (with Calopresti
and Bruni) of La parola amore esiste/Notes of Love (1998), which won the Nastro
d’Argento for Best Original Story and was nominated for a David di Donatello
for its screenplay. Also with Calopresti and Bruni, she wrote Preferisco il rumore
del mare/I Prefer the Sound of the Sea (2000) and La felicità non costa niente/
Happiness Costs Nothing (2003). Schleef’s screenplay collaboration with director
Gabriele Muccino saw her awarded another Nastro d’Argento for Ricordati di me/
Remember Me (2003), while she was nominated for both a David di Donatello
and a Nastro d’Argento, along with Linda Ferri and Nanni Moretti, for Moretti’s
La stanza del figlio/The Son’s Room (2001). A few years later she joined Moretti
again to write the story and screenplay for the satirical comedy-drama Il
Caimano/The Caiman (2006).
Other notable directors with whom Schleef has collaborated include Stefano
Incerti, L’uomo di vetro/The Man of Glass (2007) (story and screenplay); Michele
Placido, Un viaggio chiamato amore/A Journey Called Love (2002) (story and screen-
play); Michele Soavi, Arrivederci Amore, ciao/The Goodbye Kiss (2006) (screenplay);
and Roberta Torre, Mare nero/The Dark Sea (2005) (screenplay). She also contributed
to the screenplay of Ruggero Dipaola’s award-winning debut film Appartamento ad
Atene/Apartment in Athens (2012). With her international background and breadth
of experience, it is perhaps not surprising that Schleef’s talents have also been
recognized beyond the Italian film industry. Under the directorship of Douglas
Law, she co-wrote the screenplay of The Last Sign (2005), a film based on Anne
Ray-Wendling’s French novel Un soleil trop tard, and collaborated on the script for
Unter Bauern/Saviours in the Night (2009), a German film directed by Ludi Boeken.
Alongside her screenwriting career, Schleef teaches script writing in Rome and
works as a tutor for Sources, a programme that is supported by the MEDIA pro-
gramme of the European Union. She also conducts screenwriting workshops both
in Italy and further afield (Umbria Film Festival 2010). Schleef stresses the impor-
tance of creating believable characters, stating that she prefers films in which
Italy 477
‘actors are not actors’ (Redazione 2007), and emphasizes the need for characters to
become people. A credible setting is fundamental to achieving this goal, according
to Schleef; as she observes in an interview for the Italian version of Marie Claire
magazine, ‘It is the environment that forges a person, they are not [merely] “char-
acters”’ (Pesce 2009). Schleef does not believe that perfect screenwriting is possi-
ble (Spagnoli n.d.); she recognizes the importance of a good story, and considers
that one identifies a good story from the strength of the characters and the way
they develop throughout the film: ‘When we screenwriters create a character and
make him/her “fulfilled and fulfilling”, inevitably we project this fulfilment also
to the spectators’ (Redazione 2007). She also stresses the need for research before
putting pen to paper and suggests that reading literature is of greater assistance
in this task than viewing other films. Borrowing from another writer is an act of
veneration, in Schleef’s opinion, for most often what one is borrowing is only a
‘sentiment’ that one is attempting to recapture in one’s own way (Redazione 2007;
Pesce 2009).
By choice, Schleef would only write what she considered ‘necessary’ (Pesce
2009), and she identifies with the long tradition of realism associated with the
Italian cinema, admitting to a particular interest in films that portray a reality
with a political gaze (Ga.G. 2001). Obvious examples of Schleef’s contributions
in this field from films mentioned earlier include Calopresti’s The Second Time,
which provides a reflection on terrorism, and Moretti’s anti-Berlusconi-inspired
The Caiman. However, the word ‘necessary’ extends beyond thematic considera-
tions in Schleef’s writing, for the emphasis on the necessary, or the essential, is
also reflected in her writing style (Corsi 2002: 104). Although Schleef considers
that, in comparison to her later work, her earlier scripts contained too many
embellishments (Pesce 2009), Corsi observes that a very direct and functional
approach, marked by the absence of frills, has typified Schleef’s writing style from
the beginning (Corsi 2002: 104).
Schleef’s preference for the essential and for the paring of unnecessary detail sits
alongside a tremendous ‘creative vivacity’ (Corsi 2002: 104) and a well-developed
talent for introspection. According to Calopresti, this combination of imagination
and ability ‘to make characters enter into internal universes and then make them
turn back, to construct stories and then to deconstruct them’ makes working with
Schleef ‘like being on a switchback that climbs up the stories and then descends
again vertically’ (Corsi 2002: 103–4). The result of the combination of Schleef’s
German heritage and her many years living in Rome is a unique contribution to
the Italian screenwriting industry, which may be less exhilarating than the image
conjured by Calopresti’s simile, but is certainly no less exciting. (Bernadette Luciano
and Bridget Tompkins)
Maria Sole Tognazzi
Maria Sole Tognazzi (1971–) is a screenwriter and director. Her screenwriting

credits include co-writing A Five Star Life (2013) and The Man Who Loves (2008).
Roberta Torre
Roberta Torre (1962–) was born in Milan, Italy. After earning a degree in philoso-
phy at the University of Milan, she studied at the Milan Film School and at the
Paolo Grassi Dramatic Arts Academy. Torre moved to Palermo in 1990 and finds
Palermo and Sicily to be major sources of inspiration for her narratives. For Torre,
Sicily is a land of dreams and of unique stories suspended between the real and
the unreal and privileged by its natural light.
Torre’s career includes filmmaking (writing and directing and producing fictional
narrative films and documentaries) as well as theatre directing. Her films mix gen-
res, intertwine the theatrical and the musical, and she gives considerable attention
to the music and to the eventual soundtrack of the films. The film that launched
her career was the highly original mafia musical Tano da morire/To Die for Tano
(1997), for which she was awarded two Italian Oscars, including the David for Best
New Director, and three Nastri d’Argento, including an award for Best Story. Torre’s
film is significant because she tackles the mafia movie (a traditionally male-centred
genre) by telling the story in the form of a musical. In the film, Torre uses parody
and excess in the action sequences performed by the merchants and local inhabit-
ants of the Vucciria market of Palermo; this is a strategy to question the code of
silence (known as omertà) and to explore gender relationships in the mafia.
In 2000, Torre co-wrote and directed Sud side stori/South Side Story, a satiri-
cal musical exploiting neorealist conventions, featuring amateur actors (female
immigrants) rather than professional actors. It recounts the impossible love story
of a Nigerian prostitute and a street singer; it unmasks prevailing anti-immigrant
racist attitudes in Italy. South Side Story is also linked to her filmmaking ethos;
she is motivated by an anthropological desire to discover people and places that
she would not otherwise meet. Angela (2002, directed and co-written by Torre)
continues Torre’s privileging mafia women from diverse perspectives, although as
Wood suggests in the case of Angela, ‘co-production arrangements with the BBC
ensured international distribution, but a more conventional style of film-making’
(Wood 2005: 133). With Mare nero/The Dark Sea (2006, directed and co-written
by Torre) Torre experiments with the genre of noir. Her most recent feature film,
I baci mai dati/Lost Kisses (2010, directed and co-written by Torre, with Torre
receiving original story credit), a completely invented story with fantastic and sur-
real elements, is her first film inspired by the imagination rather than emerging
from anthropological research. The story is recounted from the surrealistic point
of view of a pre-adolescent girl endowed with miracle-working powers; she walks
us through the Catania suburb in which she lives. The narrative pays equal atten-
tion to the mother-daughter relationship and to the neighbourhood residents
who ask for her to perform miracles for them. It is through these requests (the
majority seem to request a job) that Torre provides a fresco of contemporary Italy.
This was Torre’s first film produced by her own production company, Rosetta Film,
with which she had already made two docu-films on the borgate (working-class
neighbourhoods) of Rome. Torre sees her production company as also providing
a service to young filmmakers, particularly women, whose freedom of expression
is limited by today’s Italian film industry. Torre’s hope is in a new generation of
Italy 479
filmmakers who, with their access to lighter technological means and the Internet
as a means of distribution, may provide hope for Italian cinema. (Bernadette
Luciano)
Lina Wertmüller
Alexis Krasilovsky
A screenwriter with 35 credits and the first woman ever nominated for an
Academy Award as Best Director, Lina Wertmüller was born in Rome in 1928 with
the name Archangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Brauchich
to a family of Swiss aristocrats. Rebelling early in life, she managed to get herself
thrown out of 15 different schools. Wertmüller watched as many Hollywood
movies as she could, in secret, as Italy and America were enemies in World War
II. Interviewed by Judy Stone, Wertmüller noted, ‘The Hollywood movie was for
us religion. The falsity of Hollywood was our mother’s milk’ (Stone 1997: 435).
In the thirteenth school that she briefly attended, Wertmüller met a girl named
Flora, who introduced her to the theatre. She was eager to join Flora at Rome’s
Academy of Dramatic Arts, but was rejected because she was only 17. Instead
Wertmüller enrolled in a school headed by a former student of Stanislavsky and
began writing under pseudonyms such as George Brown and ‘then under her own
name for newspapers, radio, TV, and the theater’ (Stone 1997: 434). Her father
wanted her to go to law school instead of taking a mish-mash of jobs, including
travelling through Italy with a puppet troupe, founding an avant-garde theatre,
and collaborating with the television writing team of Garinei and Giovannini.
Her friend Flora, now Mrs Mastroianni (wife of actor Marcello Mastroianni),
introduced her to Federico Fellini, who hired Wertmüller as an assistant director
on 8½ (1962). Fellini helped Wertmüller with financial backing for her first film as
writer-director, The Lizards/I basilischi (1963), a critical and financial success about
three unemployed young men in a poverty-stricken village, inspired in part by
Fellini’s early film I Vitelloni (1953), about five young men stuck in a small Italian
town. Her second film, Now Let’s Talk about Men/Questa volta parliamo di uomini
(1965), was followed by Two and Two Are No Longer Four (1968), a hit play written by
Wertmüller, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, starring Giancarlo Giannini, with sets and
costumes by Enrico Job. Wertmüller later married Job, who became the art director
of her films; as for Giannini, he became the star of her greatest films: The Seduction
of Mimi (1971), about a Sicilian worker forced to relocate to Turin, where he falls in
love with a Trotskyite street vendor; Love and Anarchy (1972), about a farmer hiding
out in a bordello while plotting to assassinate Mussolini; Swept Away (1974), about a
rich, abusive woman shipwrecked with a surly communist; and Seven Beauties (1975),
about an army deserter in a concentration camp, who will do anything to survive.
These films of the 1970s contain some of the world’s most powerful screenwrit-
ing, with the funniest parodies ever of gender issues such as machismo, prostitution
and politics. Wertmüller won second and third place at the New York Film Critics
Circle Awards for Best Screenplay, for Swept Away and Seven Beauties respectively,
as well as Palme d’Or nominations at the Cannes Film Festival for The Seduction
of Mimi and Love and Anarchy, Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film,
Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Seven Beauties, a Women in Film
Crystal Award, and many other awards and nominations. The critical reception
that Wertmüller received in the 1970s, however, when she was ‘the hottest topic
in the culture industry’ (McCormick 1976), was fiercely divided between those
who saw her as a feminist and those who saw her as an anti-feminist, as well as
between those who saw her as a communist or socialist, and those who saw her as
an anti-socialist or even as a fascist. It may be beneficial to re-evaluate the work of
Wertmüller (and other women screenwriters) as our thinking about gender, politics
and lookism evolve. In ‘An Affectionate and Irreverent Account of Eighty Years of
Women’s Cinema in Italy’, Annabella Miscuglio described the year, 1963, when
Wertmüller was directing her first film as ‘a time of great creativity, which brought
a huge increase in the number of women involved in film-making’, which led
to the establishment of ‘women’s cinema’ (Miscuglio 1988: 155). Ten years later,
when independent productions such as La lotta non è finita by the Feminist Film
Collective (1972–3) and Aborto: parlano le donne (1976) by Dacia Maraini had been
completed, ‘the feminist movement took blind objection to her [Wertmüller]: her
caustic wit, her irreverent angle on national customs which made her caricature
aspects of comedy Italian style, the female characters in particular – her work was
regarded as an irritation and provocation by the “woman is beautiful” school
which once again separated women from history, to re-consecrate them into myth’
(Miscuglio 1988: 154-5). Perhaps the most enraged American critique appeared in
Rolling Stone, where Ellen Willis described Wertmüller:
She is not only a female woman hater – a type that has actually surpassed the
Jewish anti-Semite in popularity – but a woman hater who pretends to be a
feminist. She pities the benighted masses and calls it radicalism, evades respon-
sibility for what she says and calls it comedy … (Willis 1976)
On the surface, Wertmüller’s seduction scene in The Seduction of Mimi (1972) in

which Amalia, a grotesquely obese character, is seduced by Mimi, a man obsessed
with his honour, seems to merit Willis’s disdain as ‘an exercise in the sadistic
humiliation of the character, the actress who plays her, and women in general’
(Willis 1976). But Willis seems to ignore the fact that Amalia is using sex as a
means of revenge against her husband, and emerges triumphant at the end, not
only as regards this subplot, but with regard to the protagonist, whose male pride
reduces him to an abject buffoon.
AMALIA
My pretty husband, it’s the truth! You cuckolded me, so I went and cuckolded
you. You’re a cuckold, my dear brigadier! We’re even now! Don’t get too angry,
as a father you’re as much a shit as he is, which makes you a pair of turds. So,
what the hell! (Wertmüller 1977: 82)
From a screenwriting perspective, Amalia’s comedic arc is a brilliant example of

feminist subversion, while the earlier camera angles during the act of sex may
Italy 481
seem hysterically funny as a commentary on the male gaze, yet unforgettably

cruel from the standpoint of fat studies. Similarly, The Seduction of Mimi received
mixed reviews for its treatment of politics. But as Ruth Ben-Giat points out in The
Italian Cinema and the Italian Working Class:
The 1969 renewal of the metalworkers’ contract had occasioned a strike of

one and a half million laborers and support by the unions that cemented the
worker-syndicate relationship … By choosing to make her character a metal-
worker, Wertmüller placed him at the heart of contemporary labor agitations.
(Ben-Giat 2001: 48)
When the film opened in Turin, where the Sicilian Mimi is employed, Wertmüller’s
target audience – metalworkers and other labourers – cheered it on (Ben-Giat
2001: 49). In an interview with Judy Stone, Wertmüller asked, ‘Do you think peo-
ple in America understand Italian Communism and Socialism?’ (Stone 1997: 435).
Few American critics have commented on the ending of Love and Anarchy
(1973), in which the protagonist, Tunin, a would-be assassin of Mussolini, is
beaten to death in his prison cell. Following Tunin’s murder, a title card comes
on the screen with a quote from the Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta about the
heroism of assassins, ending with ‘When their extreme gesture will be forgot-
ten, we shall celebrate the ideal which spurred them’. This ideal is something
about which most American audiences had as little understanding as Tripolina,
the prostitute in the brothel where Tunin is hidden away, waiting to assassinate
Mussolini. Rather than explore the politics of her characters, some critics like
Molly Haskell simply dismiss the anti-communist rant of Raffaella in Swept Away
(1974) as inappropriate diatribe, unable to see it as parody (Haskell in Erens 1974:
245). Wertmüller combines gender and politics in an interesting way. However, in
an interview with Ernest Ferlita, Wertmüller claimed:
I reject every distinction between man and woman. This is so true that in my
film Swept Away I have the woman representing industrial society and the man
representing the third world. However, it could just as easily be the other way
around because as often as not you find the woman playing the role of the
third world. For example, the most obscure proletarian, when he comes home,
gives vent to all the frustration and humiliation he has endured during the day
by making his wife ‘the third world,’ by making her the butt of his rage. (Ferlita
and May 1977: 81)
Studying Swept Away (1975), Dr Phyllis Mael points out that Wertmüller’s parody-
ing of male fantasies seen in most films directed by men may in part be seen as
acknowledgement of her mentor, Fellini, who ‘parades a variety of women for the
men to ogle, seduce, abandon’, from I Vitelloni to Amarcord:
In Swept Away ... it is primarily in the ‘love’ scenes on the island that we enter
the land of vitelloni fantasies – the cold yet desirable woman who warms
under the brutal treatment of the male. Gennarino gives Raffaella the whip,
and she enjoys it and begs for more (as do the women depicted in 8½). The
more harshly he treats her, the more she adores him, bedecking his penis with
flowers as though she were worshipping a new god. What the vitelloni only
dream of becomes a heady reality for Gennarino. But that reality exists for
only a moment on Fantasy Island. Once Gennarino and Raffaella return to
the mainland – the real world – his fantasy world crumbles. Like her mentor,
Wertmüller turns male fantasy into parody. (Mael 2001)
One of those calling for a feminist re-examination of Wertmüller’s films is Rodica

Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, who concludes that ‘Wertmüller’s lau’ghter is a mask of
horror, and her feminism a feminism of despair’ (199: 399), in comparison to the
‘American studies of her films [that] have powerfully criticized her as misogy-
nist, reactionary, perverse, and intellectually confused (Haskell 246; Willis 377;
Quacinella 16; Modleski, “Swept Away” 18)’ (Diaconescu-Blumenfeld 1999: 389).
Her 1976 film, Seven Beauties, beginning with a cynical yet poetic voiceover and
ending in irony, is also interesting for its structure, in which ‘three episodes from
the past are enclosed within the four in time present’ (Ferlita and May 1977: 53).
Wertmüller’s screenwriting builds on medieval sayings that treat the number
seven in her seven-act structure ‘as the number of perfection’ (Ferlita and May
1977: 53), with a large dollop of Commedia dell’Arte from the puppet shows of
her travels through Italy thrown in for good measure.
After these huge successes, Wertmüller was given a four-picture contract by
Warner Bros. But when the first picture was unsuccessful financially, Warner Bros
terminated the rest of the contract. Wertmüller went on to make over a dozen
additional films in Italy, including Ciao, Professore! (1992), Too Much Romance … It’s
Time for Stuffed Peppers (2004) and Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (1985),
which won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival. While many critics
claim that Wertmüller lost her sense of the zeitgeist after the 1970s, Wertmüller
‘counters that such critics have not seen her poorly distributed latest films and thus
are in no position to judge them’ (Tanner 2004). Meanwhile, she continues to focus
on writing and directing films.
(Special thanks to Maria Victoria Hubbard for her research assistance and to Lindsay
Hansen, Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge)
Notes
1. RAI – Radiotelevisione Italiana.
2. Biographical information on Cavani is difficult to verify as she is an intensely private per-
son, and there is a difference of opinion as to the year of her birth. Internet biographies
such as IMDb suggest 1933, while Mira Liehm offers 1935 (Liehm 1984: 198). Gaetana
Marrone notes the uncertainty and remains uncommitted (Marrone 2000: 196), whereas
we have chosen to rely on Áine O’Healy (O’Healy 2007: 427) and Francesco Buscemi
(Buscemi 1996: 5) who both state 1937.
Italy 483
3. RAI administrators asked Cavani to shorten the scream of the mathematician and
philosopher Giordano Bruno as he burned at the stake (Buscemi 1996: 51).
4. The Psychiatric Institute in Pistoia (Buscemi 1996: 59).
5. According to Marrone, it was Elsa Morante who inspired Cavani to read Vita di Milarepa,
which was translated into Italian by Anna Devoto from a book originally transcribed by
Rechung, one of Milarepa’s disciples (Marrone 2000: 174).
6. Italian supporters included Luchino Visconti, Alberto Moravia, Renato Guttuso, Natalia
Ginzburg, many film directors and Eduardo De Filippo (Buscemi 1996: 71), but Michel
Foucault, Félix Guattari and Pier Paolo Pasolini have also praised and defended Cavani’s
films at various junctures (O’Healy 2007: 426).
7. When making this comment, Silverman specifically identifies Francis of Assisi, Milarepa,
Antigone’s male companion in The Year of the Cannibals, Max in The Night Porter, and
Paul Reé in Beyond Good and Evil (Silverman 1988: 219).
8. The novel was originally published in serial format.
9. An additional German connection in this film is that the Japanese title Manji refers to
the four-pronged Buddhist swastika. While the Buddhist symbol refers to the four lov-
ers, and the German connection is historically obvious, the English title of the novel
reflects the destructive cycle of obsession and jealousy inherent in the four-way bisexual
relationship of the main characters.
10. Cecchi d’Amico never cited any specific titles, though.
11. Much of the information attributed to Ferri comes from the 2010 interview with Moira
Miele found on the Mediateca Roma website. This website was developed as a col-
laboration between Biblioteche di Roma (Libraries of Rome) and Cinecittà Luce with
the intention of making available on demand audiovisual and photographic content
from both organizations. The interview with Ferri is a Biblioteche di Roma, bibliotv,
production.
12. Il rosso e il blu, cuori ed errori nella scuola italiana (Einaudi, 2009).
13. Now the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.
14. A&Z Media Ltd.
15. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsI_7WHVO9E (accessed 1 April 2014).
16. Censorship documents. Available at: http://www.italiataglia.it/search/1913_1943
17. The exception is Non ci resta che piangere/Nothing Left to Do but Cry (1985), which Troisi
wrote and directed with Roberto Benigni. Troisi had acting roles in a number of other
films.
18. Lello Arena was nominated for a Nastro d’Argento (Best Supporting Actor) for his role
in I’m Starting from Three, while Gaetano Daniele won a BAFTA Award (Best Film not in
English) and an Academy Award nomination (Best Picture) as one of the producers of
The Postman.
19. The novel is also known as El Cartero De Neruda, and it is from this title that the Italian
Il postino di Neruda and the English The Postman, or The Postman of Neruda, are derived.
20. The Sacher Festival was created by Nanni Moretti in 1996 and is dedicated to recognizing
and promoting short films.
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Malta
Monika Maslowska
Historico-political context
At the end of the nineteenth century, while Edison, Lumière and Méliès were
experimenting with early film (Dixon and Foster 2008), Malta was still a British
colony, only gaining independence in 1964 (Chircop 2013). At the turn of the
twentieth century, Malta became indirectly involved in the film industry when
British Instructional Films shot four films in Malta: Sons of the Seas (1925), The
Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927), Bolibar (1928), and Tell England
(1931). It was another 20 years before Malta realized its potential, however, not
only as a filming location, but also as a country offering film servicing. In 1963 a
shallow tank for filming was built to provide a backdrop for the natural horizon
to water-set scenes. The tank still attracts a substantial number of foreign pro-
ductions filming in Malta,1 and Malta Film Facilities was set up to facilitate the
growing demand.
After independence in 1964, Malta’s economy gathered pace and its first indig-
enous feature film was made which became a major filmic event. Il-Gag· g·a (The
Cage, dir. Mario Phillip Azzopardi, 1971) is an adaptation of Frans Sammut’s novel
of the same title. It was scripted and produced entirely in Maltese2 and exposes the
religious hypocrisy, political differences, and social taboos of 1970s Malta.3 From
1975, Malta has offered a fully operational film servicing industry, overseeing
almost 100 international feature film productions to date.
Malta’s tiny size and its limited audience makes the commercialization and
profitability of writing for the indigenous screen more difficult than in larger
countries (Sammut 2012), but two home-produced blockbusters with dialogue in
Maltese have been screened in the local cinemas: Maltageddon (2009) and Dec·eduti
(The Deceased, 2012).
The first Maltese feature production to credit a female as screenwriter reached
an international audience in 2014. The production of Simshar was spearheaded
by Malta’s pioneer female filmmaker/writer, Rebecca Cremona. Rebecca’s debut
feature film is co-written with Maltese screenwriter David Grech with dialogue in
English and Maltese.4 The story of Simshar is a real-life tragedy that exposes Malta’s
ambiguous attitude towards illegal immigrants and the price that a fisherman
488
Malta 489
pays when he loses his young son and crew at sea. Cremona explains ‘there is no
precedent for the film and no comprehensive infrastructure for indigenous films
on the island’ (Cremona 2013).5 Her film heralds a new era for Maltese film and
Rebecca has paved the way, not only for her female screenwriting colleagues, but
also for the emerging Maltese film industry.
Beginnings
The government established the Malta Film Fund in 2008 to promote and foster
an environment in which the audio-visual industry could develop and to encour-
age training and networking amongst audio-visual professionals. The Malta Film
Fund was strengthened in 2009 by the Malta Arts Fund, whose role is to sup-
port local artists and arts organizations in realizing their potential, their artistic
practice, and cultural development. In 2011 the Maltese government proposed a
strategic plan for the development of the creative industries to generate economic
growth, employment and development. This resulted in the Cultural and Creative
Industries (CCIs)6 report, which recommended a coordinated approach for the
film sector and a modular approach for film industry training, based on inter-
national film school standards that would enable students with basic training to
specialize in the various fields of film activity. The CCIs also suggested investing
in the technical and creative dimensions of film servicing, coupling it with train-
ing in screenwriting, directing and film production. The Malta Film Commission
has further encouraged this interest through the Malta Film Fund, assisting the
development and production of audio-visual works with screenplays for short
films, feature films, and documentaries.
Concurrently, the Malta Film Commission and Audio-visual Unit have
launched the Film Training Course, bringing to Malta high-profile film directors,
scriptwriters and producers, and addressing the skills necessary for screenwriting,
project proposals, script analysis, script editing, and creative script development.
The course has been well received and well attended by women writers, and the
emerging film industry is beginning to understand that, in order to establish
itself, it needs trained screenwriters, hence screenwriting is beginning to be seen
as a vocational subject rather than a recreational subject (MFC). Another mile-
stone for Malta’s advancement is the island’s capital city, Valetta, being chosen as
the European Capital of Culture for 2018, making this an opportunity to transform
Malta into a hub for creative audio-visual exchange and raise awareness of its
modern and professional infrastructures.
Scripting video units were introduced in the mid 1990s by Professor Saviour
Chircop at the University of Malta. In 2006 the scripting video unit became a
screenwriting unit. Professor Saviour Catania also lectures in film studies and
filmmaking’s formative principles, pushing his students to go beyond the ‘plot’
and look at cinematic language. In May 2013 the ‘Story Works’ programme
was launched to provide an opportunity for Maltese writers to work with
renowned screenwriting lecturers from the University of Southern California in
the US.
Women screenwriters based in Malta
Sammut suggests that ‘late industrialization, little secularization together with

tardy democratization and high political polarization’ up to very recently consid-
erably delayed the advancement of women in Malta (Sammut 2012). There are
women in Malta who write for different media such as theatre (Clare Azzopardi,
Simone Spiteri) and TV programmes (Eileen Montesin, Sharon Calleja).
However, life for women in the Maltese film industry is changing quickly, and
the following section discusses the contribution of six women screenwriters and
their experiences in the film industry. Rebecca Anastasi, Marie Briguglio, Cassi
Camilleri, Rebecca Cremona, Angelique Muller – a French national ‘adopted’ by
Malta – and Monika Maslowska, author of this contribution, are pioneers in the
screenwriting profession in Malta.
Screenwriting, like any other form of professional writing, is a specific craft
demanding an intense level of commitment, perseverance, passion, and a willing-
ness to wait a very long time before seeing your work on the screen. As Marsha
McCreadie notes, women screenwriters are bright, self-reliant, have a strong sense
of self-worth. and need a steely perseverance to succeed (McCreadie 2006: 4).
Rebecca Anastasi explains that she writes because ‘we need to project our voice
to the outside world’. She has always been extremely interested in writing and in
the written word, as well as film. Her academic specialization in literature and film
heightens her passion for screenwriting. Rebecca teaches and also works in feature
film and television production. She feels that Malta is at present a ‘no-man’s land,
as a track record is needed to apply for most reputable MEDIA and international
workshops and festivals. Rebecca believes that, because the Maltese film industry
is in its infancy, Malta lacks a ‘voice’ on the world stage, but writers must still
write and create stories. Projecting those stories is also a ‘means of connection to
other peoples and cultures, something Malta has always historically been able
to do: to be the connection of cultures at the crossroads’. Rebecca writes stories
that move people and make them think about themselves and those around
them, about identity, who we are and where we belong (Anastasi 2013).
Marie Briguglio’s day job is as an academic and lecturer in economic psychol-
ogy, marketing and environmental economics, while her ‘other life’ is that of a
screenwriter. She explains that she was ‘brought up in a liberal household, with a
politically active father and a feminist mother, both, in turn, artists and scholars,
so it is no surprise that my stories interact with strong women, politics, the church,
and the tiny fragile environment of Malta, often threaded with a healthy dose of
humour’. Briguglio is fascinated by the way people juggle the dilemma between
‘individual gain’ and the ‘greater good’. The theme is encapsulated in her Moo,
which is a clever union of coming of age and ecology. Briguglio, a co-author of the
CCIs, believes that the screenwriting industry is changing for the better and that
‘positive interventions and structured support are starting to emerge together with
a drive to expose the creative industry to international standards – and opportuni-
ties. “Opening up” has been good for Malta in the past. It will do us all a world of
good’ (Briguglio 2013).
Malta 491
Cassi Camilleri seeks to explore themes in her work that are close to her heart,
such as redemption, love, and motherhood. Her stories are usually born from
characters and grow organically; thus it is only after a script is finished that she
realizes the issues she has been delving into. As a writer she is ‘obsessed’ with sto-
ries in all their various forms, but she is especially intrigued by interactive media
and the evolving face of storytelling, and is fond of extremely strange characters.
Camilleri works as a freelance development executive at Immortal Transmedia
and was a narrative designer for the online component of The Mask of the Red
Death, which used various social media platforms and Robert Pratten’s Conduttr
to disseminate an interactive story to users. Her writing credits for the screen
include Is-Shab (Clouds, 2013).
Rebecca Cremona works as a commercial film director, but she is, first and fore-
most, a screenwriter-filmmaker whose historic debut was Simshar. Her previous
work, a short film titled Magdalene, was penned and shot overseas in 2009, win-
ning an honourable mention at the student Emmy Awards, and the Jury’s Prize at
the Student Directors Guild of America Awards.7
Cremona thinks that there is a problem in training women screenwriters in
Malta and a lack of infrastructure, but that there is room for optimism: ‘The seed
is the books and websites available at one’s fingertips. Surely it cannot substitute
a tutor, but at least it’s a start.’ Furthermore, there is no institution where one can
register a script officially, and intellectual property law in Malta suffers greatly
from lack of precedents.
Cremona’s stories are heavily inspired by real events, and they ‘happen the way
they do because of the societal framework […] I tend to be drawn to female char-
acters within these situations, and what they can and can’t do as characters, as
well as the situation they find themselves in, tends to be very tied to their gender’s
standing within the society.’ Cremona strives to foreground women – their envi-
ronment, thoughts, emotions and actions – not because she believes they are more
valuable than others, but because she feels in tune with them (Cremona 2013).
Angelique Muller is a screenwriter as well as a qualified CEFPF (Centre Européen
de Formation à la Production Films) assistant director and a freelance translator.
Her short film debut, Ward Sixty6, which she also directed, won the Grand Prize
at the Mediterranean Short Film Festival 2006 in Tangier. The short was described
by the president of the jury as a story that ‘captured the discomfort of the modern
day youth’ (Muller 2013). The film also won the Best Maltese Entry at the Golden
Knight Film Festival in November 2005, and was screened at Girls on Film –
Female Artists’ Festival in March 2006 in Manchester.8 Muller believes there are
still too few women working in the industry and that, at times, a Maltese film set
can be full of machismo, which can be daunting. There are times when she feels
that being a female, and especially coming from a different country, puts her at a
disadvantage. As a screenwriter, however, she encounters few problems working
with her male colleagues. She is an insightful storyteller who reveals deep human
connections in her stories, which focus on women in midlife, even though she
is only in her late twenties. Her writing can be characterized as ‘fluid’, moving
effortlessly between the interior and exterior. Muller’s writing credits include All in
Translations (2011) and A Tuna Can Philosophy (2012). The latter is an adaptation
of Aleksander Matic’s short story, which exposes a certain mal-être within society.
Muller is currently working on a feature-length script about post-war Serbian
migrants trying to make a living in Malta (Muller 2013).
Monika Maslowska, a screenwriter and academic, was born in Poland and
settled in Malta on her second visit. Her childhood years were spent in many
different locations because her father was an ambitious psychiatrist who sought
a better life, first within Poland, then within Europe and other continents.
Maslowska is attracted to certain themes and issues in her storytelling, particularly
love, being set free, and problems of faith and conviction. Her writing style tends
to be visual with minimal dialogue. Maslowska’s credits range from a children’s
animation series titled Saturday’s Child (2008), with stories woven around British
nursery rhymes; Bus Stop (2012), a story exploring a mutually disabling relation-
ship between a mother and son; and To the Lighthouse (2013), and experimental
short. She has been commissioned to write four feature films.
Notes
1. Orca The Killer Whale (1977), White Squall (1996), Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004), Munich
(2005), The Da Vinci Code and Agora (2006), WWZ (2013) and the Oscar-nominated Kon-
Tiki in 2012.
2. Maltese descends from Siculo-Arabic dialect. It is the only Semitic language written in the
Latin alphabet.
3. See: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0981001/ (accessed 29 May 2015).
4. See: http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/en/magazinedetails/magazine/film/Simshar-on-
film-we-re-getting-there-Rebecca-Cremona-20130123 (accessed 29 May 2015).
5. Ibid.
6. See: http://www.creativemalta.gov.mt/ccis (accessed 29 May 2015).
7. See: http://www.maltainsideout.com/12456/q-a-rebecca-cremona-film-director-scriptwriter/
8. See: http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2006-09-30/news/maltese-film-wins-grand-
prize-at-mediterranean-film-festival-97399/ (accessed 29 May 2015).
References
Anastasi, R. 2013. Email communication, 8 July.
Briguglio, M. 2013. Email communications, 8 February, 15 February, 1 July, 1 August.
Camilleri, C. 2013. Email communication and Skype interview, 19 February, 12 July and 10
August.
Chircop, S. 2013. Interviews with the author, 17 February and 17 March.
Cremona, R. 2013. Email communications, 8 February, 2 July and 1 August.
Dixon, W. W., and G. A. Foster. 2008. A Short History of Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press.
McCreadie, M. 2006. Screenwriters Today: Their Lives and Words. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Group.
Muller, A. 2013. Email communications and personal interview, 13 February, 12 July and
1 August.
Sammut, C. 2012. ‘Gender and Political Engagement: Assessing the Role of the Media in
the Maltese Islands’, in F. Sadiqi (ed.) Women and Knowledge in the Mediterranean. Oxon:
Routledge, pp. 211–31.
Netherlands
Thomas van den Berg, Erik Buikema, Gert Jan Harkema,
Annelies van Noortwijk, Jennifer O’Connell, Rianne Pras, Vincent Ros,
Johanna Seelbach, Steven Willemsen and Jaukje van Wonderen
Overview
Erik Buikema
Relatively little historical detail is available regarding female screenwriters in the
Netherlands. This lack of research is not surprising considering that research on
Dutch cinema and television is still in its infancy, with much of its data frag-
mentary and scattered among small archives (Dibbets et al. 1997). A study of the
cinematic history of the Netherlands does, however, reveal that the position of
female screenwriters has changed from being in the minority towards relative
equality. In order to understand this development we must view it against the
broader background of the socio-economic history of Dutch cinema as a whole.
Women screenwriters in pre-war Dutch cinema

Film production in the Netherlands first began in Amsterdam in 1896, and has
been defined from the outset by a combination of setbacks and obstacles as well
as a growing dominance of foreign films in Dutch theatres. National setbacks
included religious parties successfully encouraging the Dutch government to
impose censorship and high taxes on film, thus discouraging national produc-
tion. Distributing and exhibiting foreign fiction films became more profitable as
these films were cheaper to rent and abundantly available. Critics stressed how
foreign films were technologically, narratively and cinematographically more
advanced. Even the Nederlandse Bioscoopbond (NBB), a collaboration between
producers, distributors and exhibitors founded in 1921 to protect the national
film climate, focused more on nurturing the latter two domains rather than on
encouraging local production (Hofstede 2000b). Consequently, pre-war film pro-
duction remained unstable and rather unsuccessful compared to the blossoming
national film industries of the United States, Germany and France. Considering
the small number and poor quality of pre-war Dutch films, it is hardly surprising
that almost no credits for female screenwriters can be traced during this period.
Despite the discouraging climate several small production companies flourished
during the pre-war period in the Netherlands and produced documentaries, news-
reels and a handful of fiction films. These companies were generally dominated
493
by men (Schoots 2004: 141) and only three women are credited as screenwriter
throughout the entire pre-war period in Dutch cinema (EYE Film Institute
Netherlands 2011).
Actress Caroline van Dommelen is considered to be the first Dutch woman to
combine the roles of writer and director with her short film De Bannelingen/The Exiles
(1911), followed 20 years later by Willy Benno-De Bruijn who co-wrote Op Hoop van
Zegen/On Good Hope (1934) and then actress Corry Vonk who wrote the dialogue for
Pygmalion (1937). Contrary to their male counterparts, the work of these women
was incidental, with each of them having only one script or screenplay to her name
and all three already related to the film industry as an actress or the spouse of a male
scenarist. None of these women established successful careers as screenwriters and
can be considered exceptions in an otherwise male-dominated industry.
Wartime transitions
During the Second World War, Germany occupied the film studios of the
Netherlands and destroyed all film stock at the end of the war. Only one Dutch
fiction film was released during the war and in the two following decades very
few fiction films were released. In this period only two women are credited as
screenwriters: Inge van Eyck wrote Kees, De Zoon van de Stroper/Kees, The Son of
the Poacher (1950) and Carlotta Textor co-wrote Jenny (1958), the first Dutch film
in colour. Documentary films, being easier to produce and less expensive, fared
better during this period and the so-called Dutch Documentary School reached
a peak during the 1950s and 1960s. All these documentaries were produced and
written by men; it would be the 1970s before women would start to claim their
share in documentary and fiction film.
German occupation had made the Dutch government aware of the cultural
potential of cinema, which led to the first government subsidies for film in 1956
(Hofstede 2000a: 73). Since then, nine out of ten produced films have received some
sort of financial funding during the production process (Hofstede 2000a: 120).
Educational foundation for Dutch screenwriters

1958 is considered to be an important dividing line in the history of Dutch
cinema, marking the beginning of a move towards institutionalization (Schoots
2004). In 1958 the first colour film was produced, the first subsidized films were
premiered, and the Netherlands Film Academy was founded (Hofstede 2000a: 73).
As the academy made no gender distinctions, men and women could be educated
as screenwriters for feature films, documentaries and television.
The so-called first and second wave of graduates from the Netherlands Film
Academy produced filmmakers who would become especially successful during
the 1970s, forming the ‘golden years’ of Dutch cinema (Driesen 2007: 73). Among
those who graduated were some of the most prominent women active in filmmak-
ing and screenwriting: Nouchka van Brakel, Digna Sinke, and Annette Apon.
Later years would show a significant growth in female screenwriters: between 1989
and 2013 there were approximately 55 female scenarist graduates compared to 80
male graduates, and the gap between male and female graduates has gradually
diminished (Netherlands Film Academy 2013).
Netherlands 495
Social changes and the feminist movement

Social and historical changes in the 1960s and 1970s led to an increase in the
number of women writing for film and television. During this transitional period
there was a break with conventional norms and values and religious restrictions in
the Netherlands were lifted. The NBB lost its dominant grip on the film industry
and the alternative film circuit grew significantly, providing a platform for non-
commercial and art-house films through festivals and alternative theatres (Schoots
2004). New critical film magazines like Skoop (1963) and Skrien (1968) encouraged
this growth. The second wave of feminists organized screenings and festivals,
inspiring women to start producing their own films (Keizer 2009: 38). Feminist
distribution companies like Cinemien and collaborations between filmmakers like
the Amsterdams Stadsjournaal collectively addressed social concerns and notions
of womanhood in the Netherlands (Heijs 1984; Hofstede 2000a).
The second feminist wave had a lasting impact on Dutch society; the traditional
view of women changed and the image of the educated, working woman became
the norm (Loo 2005). Many of the first female filmmakers and screenwriters were
inspired by the feminist wave. Marleen Gorris was perhaps the most radical
among them, causing public uproar with her film De Stilte Rond Christine M./A
Question of Silence (1982). From the 1970s onwards, female screenwriters became
prominent in the Dutch film industry and gained success, not only on the alter-
native circuit, but also in commercial productions. Dutch films registered at the
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (2010) reveal that approximately 25
per cent of the screenwriters for films produced during the 1980s were female.
The growing influence of television

The year 1981 saw the first festival dedicated exclusively to Dutch cinema:
the Netherlands Film Festival, complete with its own award, the Gouden Kalf
(Golden Calf). Unfortunately, the ‘golden years’ of Dutch cinema seemed to be
over. During the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the success of foreign blockbust-
ers alongside changes in funding policies weakened the position of Dutch films
until, at the low point of 1994, they accounted for a mere one percent of the total
market value (Rovers 2010). In spite of this, the Dutch documentary continued
to thrive both nationally and internationally. Of the many women filmmakers
involved in this genre, Heddy Honigmann is the most successful; although she
also works in fiction film, her groundbreaking documentaries have earned her
international acclaim (Noortwijk 2013).
The decline in cinema attendance contrasted with the rising popularity of tel-
evision. In the 1990s, the Dutch government began to encourage collaboration
between cinema and television with projects such as Lolamoviola and TeleFilm.
The low-budget Telefilms achieved large television audiences and were a critical
success. This project confirmed the post-war growth of female screenwriters: of
the 81 TeleFilms produced between 1999 and 2013, approximately 36 per cent of
the screenplay credits were for women (TeleFilm 2013). Throughout the 1990s,
women screenwriters and directors had a strong presence in dramatic television
series, of which Maria Goos’s hit series Pleidooi/Called to the Bar (1993) is but one
example.
Current film climate

Government projects to revitalize the national film industry have met with rea-
sonable success. In 2011, the market share for domestic films in the Netherlands
rose to 22.38 per cent (Netherlands Film Fund 2012: 16), close to the 25 per cent
market share in the 1970s, during the ‘golden years’ of Dutch cinema (Driesen
2007: 73).
The number of women writing and directing in film and television has also
increased significantly, bridging the remaining gap between male and female film-
makers. In the current climate there is equality for filmmakers in terms of respect,
recognition and critical acclaim and the Golden Calf awards are now evenly
divided among male and female filmmakers each year. Furthermore, some of the
most successful box-office hits of the last decade have been penned and directed
by women. The Dutch romantic comedy Alles is Liefde/Love is All (2007), for exam-
ple, written and directed by Kim van Kooten, was the third most popular film in
Dutch theatres in 2007 (Netherlands Film Fund 2008: 10). In art cinema, women
have been prominent since the 1980s and continue to be well represented; exam-
ples of women writer-directors who have managed to break through successfully
to the international market are Nathalie Alonso Casale, Nanouk Leopold, Paula
van der Oest, and Esther Rots. Interestingly, few women focus purely on screen-
writing without also engaging in directing or production; Helena van der Meulen
is one of the few exceptions.
Despite the growing number of female screenwriters and directors, the Dutch
film industry remains in a minority position compared to the international film
industry: screens are flooded with foreign productions and native screenwrit-
ers find it hard to survive because of this (Hofstede 2000b: 7). Furthermore, the
screenwriter in Holland remains confined to a far more anonymous role in the
production hierarchy than writers in Hollywood (Breemer 2012; Burg 2012a),
which may explain why many women screenwriters have taken direction and
production into their own hands. This is less indicative of a persisting inequality
between genders in the national film climate than it is of the underexposure of
the Dutch screenwriter in general.
Nouchka van Brakel (b. 1940): breaking women from

society’s conventions
Jennifer O’Connell
Nouchka van Brakel’s first feature, Het Debuut/The Debut, premiered in 1977,
making her the first woman to penetrate the male-dominated world of Dutch
commercial film by writing and directing a fiction feature. Van Brakel has writ-
ten and directed for cinema and television and achieved several commercial suc-
cesses, such as Een Vrouw als Eva/A Woman Like Eve (1979) and Een Maand Later/
One Month Later (1987).
After studying at the Netherlands Film Academy, Van Brakel joined Dutch
feminist action group Dolle Mina (transl. Mad Mina) in 1969 and started mak-
ing politically and socially engaged documentary and fiction shorts. Dolle Mina
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carried out public action to draw attention to gender inequality and inspired van
Brakel to write screenplays featuring strong female characters (Weg 2003).
Van Brakel did not make her first feature until 1977 as before that she felt
she needed more experience to embark on major projects (Schoots 2004: 122).
Nevertheless, Het Debuut was one of the top three Dutch films of 1977. The film
is an adaptation of the novel by Hester Albach, and tells the story of a 14-year-
old girl who falls for a 40-year-old friend of her father’s and sleeps with him.
Van Brakel’s second feature Een Vrouw als Eva premiered in 1979 and centres on
a married housewife who falls in love and starts an affair with a Frenchwoman.
Een Vrouw als Eva became a national success, attracting over 560,000 visitors to
the Dutch cinema. The film is one of the most important Dutch contributions to
the feminist wave of the 1970s (Schoots 2004: 127). Van Brakel’s later screenplays
Van de Koele Meren des Doods/The Cool Lakes of Death (1982) and Een Maand Later/
One Month Later (1987) also enjoyed major commercial success in the Netherlands.
Her filmic essay Aletta Jacobs: het Hoogste Streven/Aletta Jacobs: the Highest Pursuit
(1995) drew in smaller crowds, and Van Brakel’s first commercial and critical flop
appeared six years later, De Vriendschap/The Friendship (2001).
Apart from the more experimental and diffuse Aletta Jacobs: het Hoogste Streven,
Van Brakel’s screenplays focus on telling stories in a straightforward and realistic
way. Her classical, somewhat conventional style appeals to a wide audience, as
she notes: ‘A lot of filmmakers don’t care if their films reach an audience, which
I think displays an exceptional arrogance. When my film flops at the cinema, I
blame myself for not telling my story well’ (Amsberg and Steenhuis 1996: 94). Van
Brakel’s screenplays portray familiar social surroundings and clear-cut characters
that audiences can easily identify with and which have helped in their appeal.
Because of her accessible style Van Brakel has been criticized for broaching con-
troversial subjects for personal gain. The screening of Een Vrouw als Eva, during
a women’s festival in 1979, ended in a debacle due to such criticism. Van Brakel
was blamed for using the Dutch feminist movement for commercial purposes, and
she left Dolle Mina shortly after. Van Brakel’s entire oeuvre portrays female pro-
tagonists who break from society’s conventions. Although most of her scenarios
develop out of personal interest and not from feminist ideologies, Van Brakel has
stated that all her screenplays are about women who are crossed in their efforts to
change their lives or society (Schoots 2004: 123).
Despite Van Brakel’s commercial success and her status as a female pioneer, a
number of her proposals for screenplays were turned down by the Dutch Film
Fund and several of her projects were cancelled due to insufficient financial
resources. She has only produced three features since 1995.
Annette Apon (b. 1949)
Jennifer O’Connell
Screenwriter and director Annette Apon was one of the first women to study at
the Netherlands Film Academy (NFA). After graduating in 1972, Apon wrote and
directed several fiction and documentary shorts before completing her first fiction
feature, Golven/The Waves (1982). From 1972 to the present, Apon has written and
directed several plays, short films, five feature-length documentary films and nine
feature-length fiction films.
Dutch film journal Skrien was co-founded by Apon in 1968. The journal
gave information on developments in the alternative film circuit as well as
a critique of the largely politically regulated Dutch film system. The editors of
Skrien decided to part ways in 1972. Some of them, including Apon, formed
a new collective in 1974: the Amsterdams Stadsjournaal (ASJ). The ASJ produced
socially engaged shorts, aiming to encourage audiences to rise up and protest
against social injustice (van Bohemen 2011). Apon wrote and directed several
short films under the ASJ, before leaving in 1980 because she felt distanced and
wanted to write screenplays with real characters rather than theoretical con-
structions (Burg 1999).
After leaving the ASJ, Apon began writing screenplays that were closer to her
personal life and she returned to the more experimental style of her earlier work
(Foster 1995: 12–14). Her fiction feature debut, Golven, premiered in 1982. The
film’s story is loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves and revolves
around six childhood friends who reunite in an attempt to recapture their youth.
Golven was praised by critics and selected to screen at several international film
festivals, including Berlin. Apon’s second fiction feature, Giovanni, premiered in
1983. The film centres on the events occurring in the hotel room of the protago-
nist, Diane, while she seeks to find her former lover. Giovanni was well received
by Dutch critics and screened at the Florence Festival of Women’s Films. Apon’s
following features enjoyed only moderate national success despite receiving good
reviews. Among these were Projekties/Projections (1984), Ornithopter (1985), and
Reis zonder Einde/Journey Without End (1988).
Apon’s work can be characterized as being between avant-garde and commer-
cial film. She employs narrative elements and structures other than the tradi-
tional conventions and this allows her to take a more personal and experimental
approach. Her screenplays usually only give a loose description of characters, have
little fixed dialogue, and minimal reflection of emotion and film technique, while
focusing on action and atmosphere. Apon does not elaborate on theme, favouring
this space in her work to enable a freer process of interpretation and association
(Burg 1999). In the screenplay for Golven, for instance, the thoughts expressed by
the characters through voiceover are combined with conflicting descriptions of
movement and behaviour in the scenes, thus emphasizing the gap between emo-
tion and action. This openness of interpretation is also evident in Giovanni. The
screenplay focuses on Diane’s hotel room, while she is absent, and hotel and city
sounds are described in combination with seemingly random events, such as the
maid and valet rummaging through Diane’s things and a man with a gunshot
wound climbing in and out of the room. Apon avoids creating closed and identifi-
able protagonists, and presents them as carriers of ideas, explaining, ‘I don’t like
to tightly define characters because it’s constricting. To me, the natural presence
of tension between an actor and the role is more interesting, which is exactly why
I allow actors to exercise an unusual amount of influence on their roles in my
Netherlands 499
films’ (Burg 1999). As an illustration of Apon’s methods, the screenplay for

Ornitopher is based entirely upon the improvisation of the actors.
Typically, Apon’s screenplays reflect some form of tension between social
behaviour and actual feelings and emotions. In Giovanni, the hotel room becomes
a symbol for adventure as soon as Diane leaves, with strangers secretly acting
on their urges. In juxtaposition, Diane is stepping into the socially controlled
outside world, and by doing so misses the opportunity to find what she was look-
ing for. A more ideological expression of this theme occurs in the lesbian road
movie Krokodillen in Amsterdam/Crocodiles in Amsterdam (1990), which displays a
denial of the laws of patriarchal society through the creation of a utopian female
friendship.
During the second half of the 1980s many of Apon’s projects were cancelled due
to a lack of finance and she was unable to produce stories that were very different
to her own style. Apon shifted her emphasis from fiction to documentary film at
the beginning of the 1990s, and over the last decade she has written and directed
12 short and feature-length documentaries. Her most recent feature documentary
Droom en Daad/Dream and Dead premiered in 2012.
Marleen Gorris (b. 1948)
Gert Jan Harkema

Marleen Gorris entered the Dutch film scene in 1982 with her screenwriting and
directing debut De Stilte Rond Christine M./A Question of Silence (1982), which won
the award for Best Feature Film at the Dutch Film Festival. In contrast to the main-
stream films that dominated cinemas in the early 1980s, this film was written and
directed by a radical feminist.
A Question of Silence tells the story of three ordinary women: the stay-at-home
mother, Christine M., a secretary, and an older, divorced lady who murder a male
shop owner. A psychologist is assigned by the court to investigate whether the
perpetrators of this irrational killing are accountable for their acts. Instead of sup-
plying answers, the three women refuse to talk and remain silent. Though the
screenplay deals with the arrests and interrogations of the three women, it avoids
all concrete information about the murder and its motivations. At the end of the
film, the three women face justice, but rather than submitting to their fate, they
break with filmic convention by bursting into laughter. The defiant stance of the
women in the film is thus reflected in its unconventional narrative structure.
A Question of Silence posed a challenge to distribution as the film divided its audi-
ences. Gorris’s outspoken feminist perspective was felt by some as ‘a celebration
of gut-level female solidarity’, while others experienced it as a ‘disturbing attack’
on male individuals (Root 1985: 58).
Though her film debut became a critical success, Gorris is not a filmmaker by
training. She studied drama and dramaturgy at the universities of Amsterdam
and Birmingham (UK). When she returned to the Netherlands, Gorris begin
writing for the screen, inspired by international feminist filmmakers such as
Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras and Margarethe von Trotta (Linthorst
1996: 192). In 1978, Gorris showed the first version of the screenplay of A
Question of Silence to Chantal Akerman, who advised Gorris to direct it herself
(Redding and Brownworth 1997: 173). It would take several years for the project
to be realized, but Gorris overwhelmed grant providers with ‘a stubbornness in
which [she] refused to change even a single comma to her screenplay’ (Linthorst
1996: 193).
Whereas the style of Marleen Gorris’s early screenplays seems objective and
distant, her most successful feature film, Antonia/Antonia’s Line (1995), is more
subjective and humane. Antonia’s Line tells the story of four generations of
women and their headstrong position in a conservative rural town shortly after
World War II. After years of absence, the protagonist Antonia returns to her
hometown to live together with her daughter. Their small farm soon becomes
a safe haven for outcasts. Under her roof, gay and straight are equal and single
parenthood is accepted. This utopia is violently disrupted when, towards the end
of the film, Antonia’s granddaughter is raped, showing us that the outside world
can never be completely excluded. With Antionia’s support, her granddaughter
manages to live through this tragedy and eventually gives birth to the next child
in her line.
Dutch philosopher Stine Jensen described Antonia’s Line as ‘a feminist regional
novel’ (1996: 17), yet the way in which the film introduced feminist debates
to a larger audience can be seen as Gorris’s biggest achievement. Through the
accessible format of a dramatic plot, the screenwriter poses important questions
concerning dominant male power structures. What is more, the film puts forward
the essential role of women – a role of acceptance and feeling – in a world defined
by the rational and the male.
With Antonia’s Line, Gorris did what no American female had done until then:
win an Academy Award for (Foreign) Feature Film (Redding and Brownworth
1997: 173). It was a success for the screenwriter and director, who throughout
her career has remained an outspoken feminist. While the female voice is ever
present in Gorris’s work, her tone has shifted over the years and her screenplays
have become more subtle and affectionate. She remains a highly distinguished
author with a very personal voice, who continues to exert complete control over
the production of her screenplays.
Digna Sinke (b. 1949)
Vincent Ros
Filmmaker and screenwriter Digna Sinke grew up in Zonnemaire, a small village
in Zeeland, a rural province of Holland (Amsberg and Steenhuis 1996: 204), and
was one of the second-wave graduates of the NFA. Her first feature film, De Stille
Oceaan/The Silent Atlantic, premiered at the International Film Festival of Berlin in
1984. Sinke joined Studio Nieuwe Gronden,1 making her first documentary, Niets
voor de Eeuwigheid/Nothing is Forever, in 1990. Under SNG, she wrote and directed
four feature films and five documentaries (SNG Film 2010). After the death of her
partner, René Scholten, in 2001 she took over leadership of the studio.
Netherlands 501
The landscape of Sinke’s youth is a major influence on her work. In an interview

with Kiki Amsberg and Aafke Steenhuis, she explained: ‘I experience the danger-
free, well-ordered landscape of Zeeland as a fundamental landscape. […] [T]his
space, this order, remains as my frame of reference’ (Amsberg and Steenhuis 1996:
213–14). Indeed, the natural landscape of the Netherlands plays an important role
in her screenplays. Boven de Bergen/Above the Mountains (1992) follows a group of five
40-somethings and a young man on a hiking trip from the northernmost tip of the
Netherlands to the Sint-Pietersberg (Saint Peter’s mountain) in the far south. The trip
turns into a pilgrimage, forcing the characters to come to terms with their fears and
abandoned ideals. Other films, such as Atlantis (2009), a dystopian science-fiction
story set in the landscape of Zeeland, reveal a similar use of space and theme. In her
latest documentary project, the Tiengemeten series (2001, 2006, 2010), Sinke returns
once more to the landscape of her youth, capturing the changes on a Zeelandian
island as it is being converted from an agrarian community to a nature reserve.
Order and space are important to Sinke both thematically and stylistically. Her
descriptions of character and location are detailed but concise. Dialogue is sparse
but interspersed with lyrical moments. The search for authenticity and its result-
ing struggle between rationality and emotion forms the central theme of Sinke’s
work. We see this in Boven de Bergen/Above the Mountains, where idealistic protago-
nist, Rina, struggles to suppress a traumatic memory, but finds release only when
she faces her emotions. Similarly, Xenia, the protagonist of Atlantis, forsakes the
safety of a regulated futuristic society to discover for herself what it is to feel. Belle
van Zuylen (1993) shows how a rational, well-educated, nineteenth-century noble-
woman allows her feelings for a young aristocrat to throw her life out of balance,
only to be bitterly disappointed by his lack of authenticity.
Sinke writes and directs all of her work. Many of her screenplays were com-
pleted years before they were filmed. This is in part due to the project-based
nature of Dutch film production, but is also due to the fact that she rarely accepts
alterations to her screenplays. Sinke admits that she was glad that an international
co-production on Belle van Zuylen fell through, for it allowed her to make the film
in her own way, rather than ‘play the director for an enormous foreign machine’
(Launspach 1993: 11).
As a filmmaker who has been active in both fiction and documentary for many
years, Sinke is well aware of the differences between writing screenplays for the
two modes: ‘In a documentary, you never know exactly what will happen, and
this is the fun of it, while in a fiction film you try to realize something you have
made up before as accurately as possible’ (Personal communication, 25 April
2013). For example, much of the structure of the Tiengemeten documentary series
only took shape on the editing table, while her fiction films tend to adhere strictly
to their screenplays.
Digna Sinke is an exceptional and highly independent Dutch screenwriter and
filmmaker who has always managed, despite setbacks, to keep complete control
over the realizations of her screenplays and to put her films on celluloid the
way she intends them to be. Her highly personal style is exemplary of a feminist
filmmaker who has never betrayed her own personal vision.
Heddy Honigmann (b. 1951)
Annelies van Noortwijk

Screenwriter and independent filmmaker Heddy Honigmann is one of the most
outstanding and internationally renowned contemporary Dutch filmmakers.
Although she has never limited herself to a specific film genre, her documentary
films in particular have ensured her recognition. She is responsible for all of her
own screenplays, which she usually writes in collaboration with other women
screenwriters.
Honigmann was born and raised in Peru as a child of Eastern European Jewish
Holocaust survivors. She studied filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematografia in Rome, then moved to Amsterdam in 1978 and has resided
there ever since. She holds Dutch nationality and has produced and published
most of her work in the Netherlands. In reality, however, her cultural identity is
far more complex and it is the multi or transcultural identity of her work that may
be the key to its international success.
Honigmann wrote and directed her first film, the documentary The Israel of
the Bedouins (1979), in collaboration with Carlo Carlotta in 1979. In the next
decade she wrote and directed eight fiction shorts and one feature fiction film.
She had her first international success with her second feature fiction film,
Hersenschimmem/Mindshadows (1988), based on the novel by Dutch writer
J. Bernlef. Hersenschimmen/Mindshadows tells the story of an elderly scholar suffer-
ing from loss of memory due to Alzheimer’s disease. Honigmann wrote the screen-
play for this Canadian-Dutch co-production in collaboration with Otakar Votocek.
Her next film, Tot Ziens/Goodbye (1995), a story about an impossible love between
a single woman and a married man, was co-written with Helena van der Meulen.
Figure 4.3 Tot Ziens/Goodbye (1995, Honigmann and van der Meulen). Courtesy of Ariel Film
Netherlands 503
Honigmann’s real breakthrough, however, came with a feature documentary

film, Metal y Melancholía/Metal and Melancholy (1993), co-written with Peter
Delpeut, for which she earned at least ten different international film awards,
including the Grand Prix of the Festival du Cinéma du Reel, Paris (1994) and a
Special Jury Award at the Golden Gate Awards, San Francisco (1995).
Her films reflect on themes as diverse as poverty, loneliness, loss, trauma, war
and remembrance, art and music, as well as the power and vitality of love. The
characters in her filmic documentary portraits range from multi-employed taxi
drivers in Lima to elderly people in Rio de Janeiro, musicians exiled from their
homelands, and war widows living in Bosnia. It is not difficult to see the relation-
ship between Honigmann’s engagement with the victims of war, or social, politi-
cal and economic injustice across the world, and her multifaceted identity. Her
innovative ethical and aesthetic approach to these subjects explains the powerful
impact of her films. Honigmann portrays her characters as active and autonomous
subjects, who are, almost without exception, real ‘artists of life’ (Noortwijk 2013).
This approach provides an alternative to the conventions of certain documenta-
ries that often portray their subjects as victims.
Since Metal y Melancholía/Metal and Melancholy, all of Honigmann’s feature-
length documentaries have garnered international awards. Two of her most recent
documentaries, Forever (2006) and El Olvido/Oblivon (2008), received more than a
dozen film awards each. Four different awards were conferred upon her for life-
time achievement, among them the Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award
(2008) and the IDFA Living Legend Award (2013).
Honigmann considers the writing and research phase of her film projects to
be extremely important, regardless of whether she is making a fiction or docu-
mentary film (Honigmann and Dominicus 1999: 16). It is in this phase that the
author completely immerses herself in the project, develops characters, and gives
a preliminary shape to its form, although she notes that one should never linger
too long on a screenplay: ‘Your premise must be clear in your own mind, but that
is not to say that the path you take to your destination has to be fully defined
before you set out’ (Honigmann et al. 2012: 90). She regards each film project as
a constant process of writing and rewriting in which it is important to keep an
open mind.
Honigmann usually develops her screenplays in close collaboration with a
second author, most frequently Esther Gould (1975), who may be considered
Honigmann’s pupil. Gould started out as co-author on The Underground Orchestra
(1996) and collaborated with Honigmann on the sets of many of her most suc-
cessful documentaries. According to Honigmann, Gould quickly understood her
unconventional research and writing methods, which consist partly of musing and
daydreaming about the characters she is looking for (Honigmann et al. 2012: 71).
Honigmann dismisses any strict distinction between fiction film and documen-
tary, as she considers authenticity the bottom line of filmmaking, regardless of
genre, and argues that this is about structuring reality by applying coherence and
beauty to the form (Honigmann et al. 2012: 9). She constructs her own realistic
style in both the screenplays for her fiction and documentary films, elaborating
on central themes by building up a poetic context around the main characters

and placing them in situations that illustrate or mirror their feelings and attitudes.
The description of the opening sequence of Goodbye (1995), in which not a
single word is spoken, illustrates Honigmann’s working methods and how this is
elaborated in her writing. The first two scenes describe how the main characters,
Lucia and Jan, meet at an ice rink where they crash into each other by accident.
When they get up, they look each other straight in the eyes. This is the coup de
foudre (the spark), the screenplay informs us. Following this, Lucia leaves and Jan
chases her on his bike. When they arrive at Lucia’s place, they crash into each
other again, and what follows is an unavoidable exchange of passion. The entire
description of the action in these scenes concentrates on the attraction and repul-
sion between Lucia and Jan, of whom no physical description is given, while their
behaviour is described in great detail.
The writing style of Honigmann’s screenplays reveals the hand of a writer-
director who gives much attention to how the main characters should be filmed,
the camera positions, angles, lighting, and so on. In this way a ‘mise-en-scène of
emotions’ of the main characters, so characteristic of all of Honigmann’s most
celebrated films, is carefully constructed.
Helena van der Meulen (b. 1952)
Jaukje van Wonderen

Helena van der Meulen studied translation, philosophy and film studies at the
University of Amsterdam. During her studies she started to write film reviews for
the film journal Skrien and became head of publicity at the reopened Dutch Film
Museum in September 1991 (Linthorst 1991).
Van der Meulen’s career as a screenwriter came about by accident: after an inter-
view with Heddy Honigmann about her new film, Hersenschimmen/Mindshadows
(1988), Honigmann asked van der Meulen to co-write the screenplay for her next
feature, resulting in the screenplay for Tot Ziens/Goodbye (1995). The love trian-
gle storyline gained both critical and public recognition and won several prizes,
including the Bronze Leopard for Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival and
the Dutch Critics Award at the Netherlands Film Festival (NFF) (Burg 2006: 190).
Shortly after this, van der Meulen collaborated with director Mart Dominicus on
fl 19,99/NLG 19,99 (1998), a film about the coming millennium, which premiered
at the NFF in 1998.
The Dutch Media Fund (Stimuleringsfonds) granted van der Meulen a stipend
which allowed her to develop her own film ideas; the first was a 50-minute fea-
ture for VPRO television network, Zoenzucht/Kissing Disease (1999), an absurd
fantasy film about a girl named Engel (transl: ‘Angel’) who yearns for physical
contact but is afflicted by a strange illness that causes every man she kisses to faint
(Dijksterhuis 2000).
The fourth screenplay by van der Meulen, Tussenland/Sleeping Rough (2002), shows
the relationship between a Sudanese minor and an aged veteran who fears foreign-
ers. This film, an unusual mix of documentary and fiction, won both national and
Netherlands 505
international awards, and was the first and, until 2013, only Dutch film to win an
award at the International Film Festival, Rotterdam (Anon 2002). The screenplay also
received a nomination for the Lira Screenplay Prize (Lira Scenarioprijs) (Anon 2013).
The feature-length Bluebird (2004) gained van der Meulen another nomination
for the Lira. In this film a lonely teenage girl, Merel, takes care of her handicapped
foster-brother and is bullied at school. In 2007, van der Meulen’s first short, Het
Zusje/My Sister, was selected for the Festival de Cannes’ short film competition.
Van der Meulen’s seventh feature film, Joy (2010), tells the story of an 18-year-old
orphan girl who embarks on a search for her biological mother. Comparing the
screenplay to the film (2010), it is noticeable how many of the visual details of
the film originate from detailed descriptions in the screenplay.
Mijn Avonturen door V. Swchrwm/My Adventures by V. Swchwrm (2012), van der
Meulen’s most recently completed project, had been in development since 1998
(Meulen 2012). This adaptation of a children’s book, by renowned Dutch poet and
writer Toon Tellegen, proved difficult to translate to the screen due to its uncon-
ventional narrative structure. Reception of her adaptation was positive, with one
critic remarking how she managed to ‘beautifully preserve […] Tellegen’s elegant
minimalism’ (Rovers 2012).
Central to van der Meulen’s screenplays are characters who have to survive on
their own and are trying to find out who they are, while yearning for human
contact. These complex characters and their subjective worlds are explored in
great visual detail, while dialogue is sparse. Van der Meulen considers the devel-
opment of her characters central to her screenplays, while plot is only secondary
(Communication with author, 8 May 2013).
Although van der Meulen acknowledges that feedback is useful during the writ-
ing process, she tries to ward off any undesired interference and chooses the direc-
tors she wants to work with (Burg 2012b). It is important for her that the director
shares her vision on the project before approaching a producer. As van der Meulen
explains: ‘You have to agree about the story you want to tell, and how you want
to tell it. […] A screenplay isn’t finished until the first screening. A screenplay is
not a dead manual, it’s alive’ (Personal communication, 8 May 2013).
Maria Goos (b. 1956)
Johanna Seelbach
Maria Goos was born in Breda, the Netherlands. From 1977–82 she studied
directing and drama at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Maastricht (Fokker et al.
2001: 10); then, after leaving the academy, she concentrated on directing and
screenwriting. Goos likes to begin developing a script with improvisation, role
interviews and close teamwork with the actors, but this method of story develop-
ment was not financially supported by the Dutch broadcasting channels and has
led Goos to become frustrated with the Dutch funding system for television and
film productions (Goos 2006: 41).
Goos had her first experience with film production in 1986, when she adapted
her own theatre play De Keizerin van België/The Empress of Belgium to film. Her
breakthrough in Dutch television took place with the launch of the very success-
ful drama series Pleidooi/Called to the Bar (1993). This series, which she co-wrote
with Pieter van de Waterbeemd and Hugo Heinen and which was directed by
Willem van de Sande Bakhuyzen, dealt with the private and working relationships
of a group of lawyers.
Goos wrote the script for Pleidooi with actors she had previously worked with
in mind. The cast included Peter Blok, Carine Crutzen, Yvonne van den Hurk and
Gijs Scholten van Aschat, who were all friends from the academy. Goos was con-
vinced that their friendships would aid the character development in the series
(Fokker et al. 2001: 11). Indeed, the quality of the series is still taken as the stand-
ard for new productions, even though it is now 20 years old (Goos 2006: 44). Her
next drama series, Oud Geld/Old Money (1998), which again featured a cast of close
friends, was written solely by Goos. Oud Geld proved to be even more successful
than Pleidooi/Called to the Bar (Goos 2013).
After having worked on television series for six years in a row, Goos needed
a break and began writing for the theatre company Het Toneel Speelt. The play
Familie/Family, about a disastrous family vacation, was the box-office theatre hit
of 2000–1 (Goos 2013). Goos adapted the theatre play for television, and the result
was so well received that it was also shown in cinemas with the same title, Familie/
Family (2001). Goos continued to write for theatre and had a hit with Cloaca in
2002–3, about four university alumni whose friendships are tested at a moment
of personal crisis. Goos adapted the play for film in 2003 and it was released in
cinemas that same year, proving to be a great success and showing in cinemas for
16 weeks. Her next feature film, Leef!/Live! (2005), was another collaboration with
Blok and van de Sande Bakhuyzen. The film focuses on a single character, Anna,
a midwife, a wife and mother of two daughters, struggling with family problems
and desperate for change, who finds the release she seeks in writing.
Goos then went back to theatre production, not working in film again until
2010, when she produced the script Vreemd Bloed/The Odd One Out, which is based
on the family stories of a friend. The film has quite a different style compared to
her earlier dialogue-based work, because so much is said indirectly. In 2013 Goose
co-wrote the series Volgens Robert/According to Robert with her husband and lead
actor, Peter Blok; it tells the story of a stressed-out family doctor who disagrees
with the modern medical system and suffers an existential crisis.
Maria Goos is noted for her ability to write about personal relationships, family,
friends and the struggles of everyday life. She prefers a straightforward storyline
in order to let the characters develop themselves and to show ‘how people are,
how they treat each other, which secrets they have, how they stand in life and
what their Achilles’ heel is. Most of Goos’s films are dialogue-based and are partly
autobiographical.
Paula van der Oest (b. 1965)
Steven Willemsen
Paula van der Oest is a prolific screenwriter and director in Dutch film and tele-
vision, who has been active from the late 1980s to the present. She has received
Netherlands 507
numerous awards for her varied work, including several Golden Calf awards and
an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film for Zus & Zo (2002). Her films range
from low-budget realist dramas to mainstream comedy and her screenplays are
characterized by their empathetic take on societal and interpersonal themes, often
addressing a subject through personal, recognizable drama or tragicomedy.
Born in the Netherlands, van der Oest moved to Amsterdam in 1984 to study
directing and editing at the NFA. She soon discovered a preference for writing
her own films (Heesen and Veerkamp 2004: 40) that resulted in short films such
as Zinderend, the winner of the Cannon Award for the best graduation project
in 1988, and Het Verlorene Zal Ik Zoeken (1994). Her first 45-minute television
film, Coma (1994), won her a Golden Calf for best television drama. The story
is based on a newspaper article about a man who accidentally kills his son in
an attempt to commit suicide. The script slowly unfolds to reveal this dramatic
history as its hospitalized protagonist gradually regains his memory and his
speech (Heesen and Veerkamp 2004: 13–14). De Nieuwe Moeder/The New Mother
(1996) was van der Oest’s first feature-length film, a road movie about a Latvian
father and his son who travel to the Netherlands in search of the father’s old
pen friend, Marie. It displays a series of tragicomic encounters, underlining the
contrast of cultures, interspersed by Marie’s old letters. Playing internationally
at more than 20 film festivals, the film was awarded several nominations and
prizes.
Along with van der Oest’s De Trip van Teetje/Tate’s Voyage (1998) and the script
Roos & Rana (Meral Uslu, 2000), these early low-budget films show a concern with
larger social issues and topical themes on the one hand, while focusing on the
small-scale consequences for the individual on the other. Van der Oest’s scripts
display empathy towards the characters, focusing on their inability to cope with
the situations they find themselves in and laying bare the struggles they undergo
to find meaning in their lives. ‘I am not that politically engaged,’ van der Oest has
noted. ‘Individual histories are easier to handle for me than large political issues.
Maybe that is my way to make a statement’ (Oest et al. 2004: 46–7).
Flawed protagonists are also central to van der Oest’s first mainstream produc-
tion, the 2001 comedy Zus & Zo/Hotel Paraiso, which deals with the struggles of
three sisters. The serious nature of her earlier scripts was supplemented with more
humorous and tragicomic elements, while the central characters are treated with
more satirical distance. Their personal problems, as well as the family-related
conflicts that drive the plot, are portrayed as their own egocentric but distinctly
modern shortcomings. ‘I tend to blow up the realism,’ van der Oest has noted
about the film’s comedy. ‘I like to look for tension, situations that wrench. My
intention was to make a romantic comedy. It could be that my view of life is not
romantic enough to let that happen without complicating it’ (Ockhuysen 2002).
Despite its commercial failure in Dutch cinemas, Zus & Zo gained acclaim with an
Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2003 Academy Awards.
Nevertheless, van der Oest’s subsequent plans in Hollywood failed to secure finan-
cial backing because the projects were, in her own words, ‘either too controver-
sial, contained too much sex or carried deviant attitudes towards relationships’
(Heesen and Veerkamp 2004: 48–9).
A prolific director, 2 van der Oest’s later scripts seek to achieve their storytell-
ing effects more through contrasts and emotion in film style and mise-en-scène.
‘I think you could say that my films are becoming increasingly “cinemato-
graphic”,’ she stated in 2002. ‘I find it more and more interesting to look for
maximal co-operation between story and image. Of course, this is what film is
all about, but I started out differently; back then it was all about the story for
me’ (Heesen and Veerkamp 2004: 48). This tendency is exemplified in the 2012
English co-production The Domino Effect, a complex drama on the worldwide
financial crisis. The ambitious script sets up six interwoven storylines that are
spread over different continents, showing how one banker’s decline evolves into
a series of interconnected dramas. The film won van der Oest a Golden Calf
(2012) for Best Directing and marks a return to films with large-scale topics that
focus on personal struggles.
Nanouk Leopold (b. 1968)
Thomas van den Berg and Johanna Seelbach

Nanouk Leopold graduated from the art academy in Rotterdam in 1992, where
she studied audiovisual and monumental art (Fokker et al. 2001: 12). During
this period she worked on video installations and photography (Ruven and Voss
2012: 34). After writing and directing two short films with her friend Froukje Tan
she decided that film would be the better medium for her to express herself. In
order to improve her chances at getting funding for a feature film she attended
the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam to study directing (Ruven and Voss
2012: 35). In 1998 she graduated with Weekend (1998), which won the Tuschinski
Award. At the screenings Leopold met Stienette Bosklopper who went on to
become the producer of all her subsequent films.
After directing the 1999 VPRO television film Max Lupa, based on a script by
Caspar Koetsveld, Leopold decided that she preferred to write her own scripts.
She then wrote her next script, Îles Flottantes (2000), with assistance from her
producer. The film revolves around the friendship of three young women, their
problems in relationships and everyday life. Though stylistically different, the
film is consistent with Leopold’s preferred subject matter and themes: domestic-
ity and psycho-personal relationships. Îles Flottantes won the ‘No more heroes’
prize, a funding initiative to help young filmmakers realize their films. The film
is dialogue-dependent, differing from her later films where this is reduced to a
minimum.
Leopold’s next three films, Guernsey (2005), Wolfsbergen (2007), and Brownian
Movement (2010), were all written and directed by herself, and serve to establish
the poetics her films are known for. The films mirror their scripts, which detail
physical action, but with no mention of intention, themes or symbolism. Though
not directly linked, the three films feature protagonists in existential crisis, and
are regarded by Leopold as a ‘trilogy’. While the stories are written with a clas-
sical dramatic arc, Leopold is known to make drastic cuts in post-production,
resulting in sparser narratives than originally written (Bosklopper 2011). Brownian
Netherlands 509
Movement was the first film to turn out the way Leopold had originally envisioned
it, going on to win two Golden Calves; although it was meant to be an art-house
hit film, it was not a domestic or international success.
In 2011, Leopold was approached by producer Bosklopper to write an adapta-
tion of the much-celebrated Dutch novel Boven is het stil/The Twin by Gerbrand
Bakker, and she decided to direct the film as well (Linssen 2013). Whereas the
book includes a multitude of parallel figures, flashbacks and other narrative
devices, the film Boven is het stil/It’s All So Quiet (2013) has a less complex narra-
tive that takes place only in the present. In contrast to Leopold’s previous films
which were about women, Boven is het stil is about a farmer, his dying father and
his attraction towards other men. Similar to her earlier work, however, Boven
is het stil revolves around problems in coping with, and adapting to, one’s sur-
roundings. According to Leopold, this leads us to the essence of her films, which
entails reducing everything to its minimum constituents in order to be able to
see what one is supposed to see (Ruven and Voss 2012: 37). Nevertheless, she
wanted to try something radically new, and rather than the extended rehears-
als she used to do with the cast in her earlier films, the whole film is based on
improvisation and hand-held camera work. The script was seen as more of a
guideline during the shoot, as opposed to closely following every word as in her
earlier productions.
Nathalie Alonso Casale (b. 1970)
Annelies van Noortwijk

Nathalie Alonso Casale is a Dutch screenwriter, film director and producer. She
graduated as a director in 1992 from the Amsterdam Film School (NFA) with
the short black and white movie Memorias sin Batallas y otros muertos/Memories
Without Battles and Other Deaths (1992), using personal family stories as a basis
for her screenplay. The film reflects critically on the history of the Spanish Civil
War (1936–9) using a non-linear style of narration. The protagonist, Natalia,
questions all the different memories and knowledge she has about the war, and
in doing so acknowledges her own subjectivity. Most of the text is an interior
monologue of Natalia, which is only occasionally alternated with remarks by
the characters she meets, sometimes in reality, but mostly in her imagination.
Her grandfather, who was executed by firing squad at the time, leads her in
demythologizing the quest for truth, while the English historian, in his search
for truth, looks only for facts and figures (Alonso Casale 1992). The film was
awarded a Golden Calf for Best Short at the Dutch National Film Festival in 1992
and received several international awards. Casale was honoured for her poetic
style, which follows in the tradition of surrealism and impressionism as developed
by Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren. In 1996 the short film was redistributed in
Dutch cinemas alongside Alonso Casale’s full-length film Memory of the Unknown
(1996). This road movie revolves around a group of bus passengers who, on their
way from Holland to the sunny tourist beaches of Spain, are confronted with the
realities of their past.
In 1996 Alonso Casale founded her own production company, Titanic

Productions, and over the next few years she wrote, directed and co-produced
several shorts. She then wrote the script for her next film, Figner, the End of a Silent
Century (2006), in collaboration with her father, José Luis Alonso Hernández. This
ambitious project, which portrays a Russian foley artist on his journey through
the twentieth century, uses a montage of over 100 archival fragments of classical
Russian movies to tell its story.
Alonso Casale is currently finishing a film that was shot in 2005, entitled Sortoï,
op zoek naar levensmoed/Sortoï in Search for Courage (2013–14). Based on the qual-
ity of the screenplay, which contrasts the excess of pessimism in the West with
the extreme recklessness of the East, she was awarded a grant from the Dutch
Film Fund. Another screenplay by Casale, Werther Nieland, has not yet gone into
production.
When writing, Alonso Casale almost always begins with an image that repre-
sents an idea. ‘From then on, it becomes a kind of puzzle: my scripts are almost
never linear narratives, but more like patchworks of representations interspersed
with corresponding or underlying concepts’ (Personal communication, 19 May
2013). Alonso Casale’s writing can be defined as associative; she searches for
the essences of human life, unravelling the meaning of the words we speak, the
images and text we create, and the essences of our emotional behaviour, seeking
to get behind the surface of people. As the grandfather in Memorias sin Batallas
advises his granddaughter when she discovers a document of the Civil War in
the form of a little banner floating in the river: ‘Lo que flota no tiene valor’/‘That
which floats on the surface is of no value.’
Esther Rots (b. 1972)
Thomas van den Berg

Esther Rots has written, directed, edited and co-produced three shorts and a fea-
ture film. Her work explores sensory experience and subjective memory, the dis-
crepancies between knowing and feeling, the conscious versus the subconscious.
In 2006, she founded a production company, Rots Filmwerk, with her brother,
Hugo.
From 1989–93, Esther Rots attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnhem (AFA),
Netherlands, where she studied fashion design. The methods of creative devel-
opment she picked up there would become the foundation for work to come,
entailing a combination of prose-style writing and visual collage making (Personal
communication, 19 April 2013). After graduating from the AFA, she went on to
study at the NFA in Amsterdam but found herself frustrated by the school’s rigid
demarcations between the various disciplines of filmmaking and left during the
second year.
After modest success with the co-created The Garden (1999), a sequence of
digitally scanned 35mm slides with a backstory by Rots, she decided to write and
direct alone. Her first short, Speel met me/Play With Me (2002) foreshadows her
general themes and aesthetics. A six-page, prose-style script with the working
Netherlands 511
title Halfslaap/Half-sleep sought to emulate an associative half-conscious state of

experiencing both past and present. The final pages specify its visual treatment,
which was faithfully reproduced in the final film (Rots 2002: 5–6). The film was
nominated for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. Rot’s second short,
Ik ontspruit/I Sprout (2003), was once again associative, involving a woman return-
ing to the house she grew up in. Both story and visuals oscillate between the
present-day woman and her former girl-self. In contrast to prior work, this script
featured decoupage of scenes and sequences.3 The short film was also selected
for Cannes. Her third short to date, Dialoogoefening no.1:Stad/Dialogue Exercise
No.1:City (2005), was commissioned by ‘Kort!’, a Dutch platform for short films.
A first draft contained a continuous monologue, which was later worked into final
draft format, with descriptions of locale and actions added.4 It deviates from the
rest of her oeuvre in that it only plays in an uninterrupted present tense.
The Dutch Film Fund recognized the success of Rots’s shorts, and commissioned
her to write a screenplay for a feature film – something she had not considered
doing up to that point. She started a project, Now She Yells, as a conventionally
formatted screenplay, but the format constrained her, and Rots looked for crea-
tive relief in a different project. Now She Yells was abandoned and Rots returned
to her earlier style of prose with notes on visualization. In order to get financing
from the Film Fund, she reworked the novel-like document into final draft for-
mat (Personal communication, 19 April 2013). The narrative, of a woman in the
aftermath of a break-up, became her first feature film, Kan door huid heen/Can Go
through Skin (2009). During principal photography, Rots returned to the novel-like
version as she felt it better communicated the chaotic atmosphere of the story
(Personal communication, 19 April 2013).
Kan door huid heen premiered in 2009 at the Berlinale, and received much
praise. In the Netherlands it was nominated for seven Golden Calf Awards (win-
ning three), and ranked third in the audience ratings at the Netherlands Film
Festival. Internationally, the film won a ‘Special Mention/New Voices in Fiction’
at the 2009 Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF), whilst at the Götenborg
International Film Festival it gained the Bergman International Debut Award in
2010, and the Fipresci. The film also ensured Rots’s inclusion in the book The
Future of Film: 100 New Directors (Bailey and Handling 2010).
Kim van Kooten (b. 1974)
Rianne Pras
Kim van Kooten is a successful screenwriter who began her career in the mid-
1990s, writing mainly for film, but also for television and the stage. Besides her
activities as a screenwriter, she is also a well-known actress.
Kooten had always wanted to be a writer but went to the NFA in Amsterdam
to study directing, not knowing that she could study screenwriting there. She left
the academy in her second year, when Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh asked her
to write the dialogue for his low-budget drama film Blind Date (1996), which tells
the story of a couple who, through a series of blind dates in which they assume
different roles, try to cope with the death of their daughter. The film was a minor
national success and was nominated for three Golden Calves.
Van Kooten’s next screenplay was for the children’s film Mariken (2000). She
co-wrote this screenplay with Peter van Gestel. It is based on his children’s book
and tells the story of Mariken, a young girl in the Middle Ages. Following this,
she collaborated on the screenplay for Met Grote Blijdschap/With Great Joy (2001)
as part of No More Heroes, a project that gave four Dutch directors the opportunity
to create their first feature film on a limited budget (Linssen 2001). The resulting
film is about a man who finds his brother and his wife, who disappeared 15 years
earlier, living on a remote farm, hiding a terrible secret in their basement. The film
is a mixture of family drama, psychological thriller and horror. The screenplay
won a Golden Calf at the NFF.
In 2001 van Kooten also wrote a short screenplay for the television documentary
drama series De Acteurs/The Actors (2001), which told the story of a new genera-
tion of Dutch actors, including van Kooten herself, with each episode highlight-
ing two actors and both of them playing a part in the screenplay (Takken 2001).
Van Kooten’s biggest hit to date is the 2007 film Alles is Liefde/Love Is All. This
romantic comedy, which combines 12 main characters and six plotlines, was
the idea of casting director Job Gosschalk, who wanted the film to have the
same vibe as Love Actually (2003) and asked van Kooten to write the screenplay.
The film was a huge success; with an audience of 1.3 million it was the most popu-
lar Dutch film of the year and ranked 13 in the most watched Dutch films of all
time (Netherlands Film Fund 2008: 12). The film won two Golden Calves, one for
Best Film and one for Best Director, as well as a nomination for Best Screenplay.
After making Alles is Liefde van Kooten wanted to make another film with the
same team; however, it would be five years before Alles is Familie/Family Way was
released in November 2012. Van Kooten once again paired up with director Joram
Lürsen for another romantic comedy following several members of the same
family, all of whom have their own problems. Although van Kooten was initially
planning this to be a more serious film, she found that writing comedy came
naturally to her (van de Sande 2012). Alles is Familie was the biggest Dutch film
release of all time and shown in 141 cinemas nationwide.
While van Kooten has a very diverse oeuvre as a writer, which includes drama,
comedy, a psychological thriller and a children’s film, characters are the founda-
tion for the stories of each of her films. In an interview about Alles is Liefde van
Kooten explains the special relationship she has with her characters:
I’m not someone who comes up with an entire story beforehand. The story
originated from the characters. […] The fact that I let myself be led by these
characters meant I wrote a lot of versions [of the screenplay] that amounted
to nothing. But after a lot of hard work you are one with them and know how
they will react in specific situations. (Roovers 2007)
The characters in van Kooten’s screenplays are the basis for the story and the
development of the plot. Regardless of the genre she writes for, her focus is on
human relationships and the characters trying to overcome personal struggles.
Netherlands 513
Notes
1. SNG was formed by a few members of the Amsterdams Stadsjournaal (see introduction
by Erik Buikema) who tired of the difficulties that arise from producing films as a large
collective (Maatjens 1996).
2. Van der Oest directed the feature films Moonlight (2002), Verborgen Gebreken/Hidden Flaws
(2004), Madame Jeanette (2004) and the international production Black Butterflies (2011),
as well as the television film Wijster (2008).
3. The script for I Sprout is the only one where the said sketches are preserved.
4. Only the final draft treatment survived as a document.
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Norway
Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson
Introduction
The first Norwegian female scriptwriters emerged in the 1970s, producing work that
confronted patriarchal society, gave voice to women’s rights and opposed Classical
Hollywood Cinema. Previously very few women had worked in film, though one
woman stands out, the pioneering film director Edith Carlmar, who was the first
female director in Norway. She directed ten feature films from 1949–59, though
most of her screenplays were written by Carlmar’s primary creative partner, Otto
Carlmar (Iverson et al. 1998: 121). Carlmar’s The Wayward Girl (Ung flukt, 1959)
was a particularly significant point in Norwegian cinematic history as it introduced
audiences to the actress Liv Ullmann, who then went on to become an inter-
nationally renowned actress, and later a screenwriter and director, in her own right.
Women’s voices emerge
The long overdue emergence of female screenwriters in the 1970s marked a huge
shift in Norwegian film culture, although other significant cultural, political
and economic changes were evident during this time as well. As second wave
feminism began sweeping across Norway, government funding of film production
changed. Loan guarantees were made for films on the basis of their artistic and
cultural merit, which created an economically viable pathway for socially progressive,
feminist filmmakers (Kindem 1987: 32).
Filmmakers in Norway during this period were influenced by the French New
Wave and strongly opposed Classical Hollywood Cinema, which resulted in a shift
in modes of storytelling and the exercise of greater authorial expressivity. Norway
experienced a period of art cinema as the state funding model supported those
who were writing and directing their own films, and were crafting personal stories
(Sundholm et al. 2012: 60–1). Many of the most prolific women screenwriters
in Norwegian film history, such as Anja Breien, Vibeke Løkkeberg, and Unni
Straume, began making art cinema and are considered auteurs. These women
took on multiple creative roles within a production (and continue to do so today),
most often as writer-director, as well as producer, editor and actress.
516
Norway 517
Significantly, the government of Norway’s system of film financing generates a

portion of its funding from international box-office earnings, of which 75 per cent
came from American films during the 1970s (Kindem 1987: 33). These state funds
enabled the rise of feminist auteurs, and the production of women’s screenplays;
screenplays that in some cases were ‘strongly anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist,
and anti-American’ (Kindem 1987: 33). As women screenwriters began to emerge,
the stories and characters created connected to audiences in new and often
controversial ways.
Women screenwriters in Norway
Screenwriters Anja Breien, Vibeke Løkkeberg, and Unni Straume are three of
Norway’s most prominent female filmmakers. Many of Norway’s women screen-
writers have experience working in different areas of the film industry, with
credits as directors, editors, producers and actors; experiences that undoubtedly
contribute to their unique abilities to communicate and connect with audiences.
Take for example, one of Norway’s most esteemed actresses, Liv Ullmann.
Liv Ullmann (b. 1938) is best known for her career as an actress, but in the
1990s she turned her energies towards writing and directing. Her screenwriting
credits include several co-written or adapted screenplays. For example, Ullmann
contributed the segment ‘Parting’ in the feature film anthology Love (1982); she
co-wrote her film Sofie (1992) and also adapted two works, Kristin Lavransdatter
(1995, adapted from a novel by Sigrid Undset) and Miss Julie (2014, adapted from
a play by August Strindberg).
Laila Mikkelsen (b. 1940) is best known for her work as a feminist director,
but she has also written and adapted a number of screenplays. In 1983 Mikkelsen
directed Søsken på Guds Jord, which she adapted from a novel by Arvid Hanssen.
Mikkelsen is also credited as co-writer for her film Liten Ida (1981) and Oss (1976).
Of the screenwriters emerging in the 1970s, Anja Breien, Vibeke Løkkeberg,
and Unni Straume are in a category of their own, having established themselves
as feminist auteurs with significant careers as screenwriters in the Norwegian
film industry. ‘The Norwegian cinema of the 1970s saw a wave of important and
talented female directors, and the year 1981 is often referred to as the “women’s
year” in Norwegian cinema, with films released by Vibeke Løkkeberg and Anja
Breien, among others’ (Sundholm et al. 2012: 263). Norwegian cinema saw a wave
of new female directors who were also writing their own screenplays.
Anja Breien (b. 1940)
Anja Breien studied French at the University of Oslo and started work in the
film industry as Nils R. Müller’s script supervisor in 1961. Breien then left her
home country for France, where she studied film at L’Institut des hautes études
cinématographiques until 1964 (Norwegian Film Database). Upon graduating
Breien began a long and successful career as a filmmaker, writing shorts and fea-
tures in both fiction and non-fiction.
Breien’s screenwriting credits include Growing Up (Vokse opp, 1967), Rape

(Voldtekt, 1971), Wives (Hustruer, 1975), Games of Love and Loneliness (Den allva-
rsamma leken, 1977), Heritage (Arven, 1979), Witch Hunt (Forfølgelsen, 1981), Paper
Bird (Papirfuglen, 1984), Wives – Ten Years After (Hustruer 10 År Etter, 1985), Twice
Upon a Time (Smykketyven, 1990), Second Sight (Trollsyn, 1994), Wives III (Hustruer
III, 1996), Solvorn (Solvorn, 1997), To See a Boat in Sail (Å se en båt med seil, 2001),
Untitled – Sans Titre (Uten tittel, 2005), Yezidi (Jezidi, 2009), Etching (Riss, 2009), and
From the History of Chewing Gum (Fra tyggengummiens historie, 2012). Breien directed
all of her screenplays except for Trollsyn, which was directed by Ola Solum.
Many of Breien’s screenplays feature strong female characters and highlighted
women’s rights. In Rape (1971) Breien exposes the inadequacies of the Norwegian
criminal justice system, and the film launched a significant social debate. Rape is
about a man who is accused of rape: interestingly, the victim’s point of view is
not included in the screenplay, differing from many of Breien’s scripts, which fea-
ture strong, female characters. Rather than focusing on the victim, Breien’s story
follows the accused rapist.
Breien followed this acclaimed film with Wives (1975), as writer and director.
The film focuses on three former classmates who reunite and decide to forget life’s
responsibilities for a while; after a little liquid courage they go on a journey of
thirty-something self-discovery. The film is a poignant, comical response to John
Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970). As Kindem notes, ‘Hollywood provides the focus for
political and aesthetic antipathy in Norwegian filmmaking today. In some cases,
such as Anja Breien’s Wives, the response to American film is direct and specific’
(1987: 31). Though Wives questioned women’s role in Norwegian family and soci-
ety, while taking aim at the American masculine perspective that has dominated
screen culture, the film was well received, prompting two sequels, Wives – Ten
Years After and Wives III.
Breien’s films have received numerous nominations and awards during her career.
Heritage won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (Cannes Film Festival, 1979). Paper
Bird won the Silver Hugo (Chicago International Film Festival, 1984). To See a Boat
in Sail won the Prix UIP Berlin (Berlin International Film Festival, 2001) and Best
Live-Action Short (Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2001), to name only a
few. The Norwegian Film Institute highlights the diversity and longevity of Breien’s
career and her place in Norwegian film history, especially her work as a screenwriter:
While first and foremost recognized as a director, it must also be noted that
Breien has extensive experience as a writer, and has written most of her own
films over the years, be they either original screenplays or adaptations. She has
also written screenplays for other directors, notably Ola Solum’s Second Sight
from 1994. A subject of academic interest on every level, a pioneer among
Norwegian female film professionals, and one of the still active longtime vet-
erans of the Norwegian film industry, Anja Breien is revered and respected as
one of the most influential and important directors in Norwegian film history,
as well as one of Norway’s most internationally recognized directors, with a
career spanning five decades. (Norwegian Film Database)
Norway 519
As the Norwegian Film Institute rightly suggests, Anja Breien is a pioneer for
women in Norwegian cinema and one of the first female writer-directors to
emerge. While Anja Breien became accepted as a prominent screenwriter who was
unafraid to tackle social issues, another controversial auteur emerged at that time,
Vibeke Løkkeberg.
Vibeke Løkkeberg (b. 1945)
Vibeke Løkkeberg was born in Bergen, Norway. Like Anja Breien, Løkkeberg spent
time in France while her then husband Pål Løkkeberg studied film at L’Institut
des hautes études cinématographiques (Sundholm et al. 2012: 263). Starting out
as a model and actress, Vibeke Løkkeberg then established a successful career as
an influential feminist writer and director, often cited as one of Norway’s most
controversial filmmakers.
Løkkeberg’s screenwriting credits include Liv (Liv, 1967), Abortion (Abort, 1971),
The Revelation (Åpenbaringen, 1980), The Betrayal (Kamilla; Løperjenten, 1981), The
Wild One (Hud, 1986), Seagulls (Måker, 1991), and the docu-drama Where Gods Are
Dead (Der gudene er døde, 1993). Løkkeberg directed all of her screenplays except
for Liv, and has several other credits as a director, producer and actress.
During the 1990s Løkkeberg’s focus changed from writing narrative screenplays
to making documentaries and writing novels. Løkkeberg’s book titles include
Leoparden (1989), Jordens Skygge (1995), Purpur (2002), Brev til Himmelen (2004)
and Allierte (2007). Her most recent documentary film is Tears of Gaza (2010),
produced by her husband Terje Kristiansen.
Løkkeberg has been nominated for several prestigious awards including the
Norwegian Amanda Award (Best Film and Best Documentary for Tears of Gaza),
and two nominations for Gold Hugo Awards at the Chicago International Film
Festival (Best Feature for both The Betrayal and The Revelation). Løkkeberg won the
Audience Award for Tears of Gaza at the Göteborg Film Festival.
Løkkeberg’s work has been controversial in Norway. According to the Norwegian
Film Institute’s Database, Løkkeberg’s collective works tell ‘stories of how both
everyday and extraordinary existence differs between men and women, predomi-
nantly focusing on experiences of female characters and the less than delightful
aspects of family life’. Coming to filmmaking in the 1970s, much of her work
exposes an oppressive patriarchal culture, has strong female characters, challenges
men’s representations of women, and offers a feminist voice to storytelling in
Norwegian screen culture.
Abort, her first dramatic short made in 1971, and The Revelation, her first feature
made in 1977, both firmly established Løkkeberg as a controversial scriptwriter
in Norway. In their different ways, Abort and The Revelation call into question
patriarchal systems that rule women’s bodies, their choices, their desires and
their freedoms; all themes that extend in one way or another to Løkkeberg’s later
screenplays.
Abort is the story of a young girl who discovers she’s pregnant. Seeking an
abortion, her fate rests in the hands of a male physician. At the time, abortion in
Norway was only provided to a woman by an application which the woman’s phy-
sician would present to a commission, with signed permission from the husband,
and this could only be ‘on medical grounds, fetal malformation, rape or incest, or
if the woman was mentally ill’ (Løkeland 2004: 168). Thus women’s health and
reproductive rights were highly contested issues at the time of Løkkeberg’s film,
which was all the more controversial to Norwegian audiences as it came from the
perspective of a young, female writer-director.
Much like Abort, Løkkeberg’s first feature espoused issues that once again
shocked Norwegian audiences. The Revelation depicts a sexually progressive, mid-
dle-aged woman with a less than screen-perfect body, which some described as
‘obese’ (Sundholm et al. 2012: 263). The controversy surrounding the film led to
what was widely referred to as the ‘bum-feud’ which played out in the Norwegian
press, the male critics reacting to a feminist film perspective they weren’t used
to seeing on screen; one that explored ‘themes such as women’s roles in society,
female sexuality, death and the visual depictions of the (aging) lead actress’ naked
body’ (Norwegian Film Database).
These two works set the stage for a long and fearless career. Løkkeberg continued
to write screenplays featuring strong, complex female characters and stories that
challenge social oppression and prejudices. In an interview with the Daily Beast on
her most recent controversial documentary, Tears of Gaza, Løkkeberg said, ‘Since
I am a woman in film and a writer, I want to use those forms to search for issues
that society wants to hide as not important … That is any artist’s mission. I only
live once and so I want to tell what affects me and what is an injustice. I want to
be on the side of the victims, not the powerful’ (Muñoz 2012).
Unni Straume (b. 1955)
As the first wave of female auteurs made their mark on Norwegian national cinema,
another budding auteur embarked on her film education. Norwegian screenwriter
and director Unni Straume attended Volda University College from 1976–8 and
for the first decade of her career focused on documentaries before turning to
feature films in the 1990s (Norwegian Film Database). Straume has worked as a
professor of directing at the Norwegian Film School since 2005 (Norwegian Film
Database).
Straume’s feature screenwriting credits include To a Stranger (Til en ukjent, 1990),
Dreamplay (Drømspel, 1994), Thrane’s Method (Thrane’s Metode, 1998), and Music for
Weddings and Funerals (Musikk for bryllup og begravelser, 2002), all of which she also
directed. Straume wrote and directed several short films, including Daddy’s Sunday
(Pappasøndag, 1999), Derailment (Avsporing, 1993), and T83 (1995).
Straume was awarded the Nordic Council’s Film Prize in 2002 for Music for
Weddings and Funerals, which took the 2003 Audience Award at the Rouen Nordic
Film Festival. Her films have screened at many prestigious international film
festivals, including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, the Venice
Film Festival, and the Cannes Film Festival. In May 2009, Straume and two other
filmmakers were signed by Zentropa, a Danish-Norwegian production company.
Norway 521
When interviewed by Cineuropa about the decision to sign them, then manag-
ing director Valerie Saunders said it was a ‘long-term strategy … to provide them
with a solid foundation upon which they can grow and expand’ (Pham 2009).
The commitment to and recognition of Straume’s work by Zentropa is significant,
not only in terms of her voice as a storyteller within Norway, but also within
the greater context of Europe, given the reach of Zentropa in European screen
markets.
In her creative process, Straume is a strong proponent of taking on multiple
creative roles when this is feasible. In addition to being writer and director, she
was also the editor for To a Stranger and producer for Dreamplay. In an interview
about her film Derailment, Straume said, ‘For me writing, directing and editing are
all parts of the same process’ (Raskin 2013). Straume views her role as director and
editor as an extension of her work as a screenwriter.
Straume introduces audiences to complex leading women. For example, To a
Stranger follows the story of a young female student on a hitchhiking journey to
the place she grew up; Music for Weddings and Funerals features a female novelist
who needs to find herself, after recently losing her child and going through a
divorce; and Dreamplay is about the daughter of a Hindu god. Even in her short
feminist screenplay Derailment, Straume demonstrates an ability to craft a decep-
tively simple story from a complex female perspective. In the narrative a woman
gets on the crowded Metro and takes a seat across from a sleeping man by placing
her legs in between his legs due to the crowded seating. The woman and man
slip in and out of sleep, and in and out of a dream state. The train reaches a stop
and the man gets off. This black and white story is told largely through the cin-
ematography, as perspective shots offer subtle hints of both the woman’s and the
man’s gaze, in this sleepy, erotic, travel dream. There is no dialogue between the
two, and the ending is left open to interpretation, as the off-screen sound leaves
the audience with a woman’s footsteps echoing in the Metro station. Issues of the
male/female gaze, desire and eroticism are brought to the forefront, though most
critics agree that ‘classic gender roles have been turned upside-down …’ (Nielsen
and Hjorth 2003). The film’s 1993 release was met with success and it was an offi-
cial selection in the Cannes Film Festival and New York Film Festival.
Conclusion: women’s future in Norwegian cinema
In 2003 Ansgar Gabrielsen, Norway’s Minister of Trade and Industry, was ‘respon-
sible for shepherding through Norway’s law stipulating that publicly traded com-
panies transform their boards beginning in 2006, and appoint 40 percent female
members, or risk forced dissolution by delisting from the Oslo Stock Exchange’
(Smale 2013). This same law has been applied to the film industry and, although
change has been slow, progress is expected. In a 2008 speech by the president of
the Norwegian Actors’ Equity Association, Agnete G. Haaland addressed the gen-
der inequity still present in the film industry and called on the film community
to do more. Haadland pointed out, ‘The reason for this demand is a survey we,
the actors union together with the Norwegian Film Institute, made in 2005. We
counted the reality. And what did we find? Eighty percent of all directors, script-
writers and producers were male. Twenty percent female.’ The cited percentages
may be much improved from the state of Norwegian cinema in the 1960s, but are
still a far cry from gender equality.
The emergence of women screenwriters since the 1970s has changed the land-
scape of film storytelling in Norway. Though the 1960s experienced a void of
women in the roles of writer and director, screenwriters like Anja Breien, Vibeke
Løkkeberg, and Unni Straume paved the way for women to work as screenwriters
and to craft screenplays that challenge conventional narratives.
References
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Gender Portrayal and Age Discrimination. International Federation of Actors. Riga, Latvia.
04 April 2008. Speech.
Iverson, Gunnar, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, and Tytti Soila. Nordic National Cinemas. 1st
ed. London: Routledge, 1998. Print.
Kindem, Gorham A. ‘Norway’s New Generation of Women Directors: Anja Breien, Vibeke
Løkkeberg, and Laila Mikkelsen.’ Journal of Film and Video 39.4 (1987): 28–42. Print.
Løkeland, Mette. ‘Abortion: The Legal Right Has Been Won, but Not the Moral Right.’
Reproductive Health Matters. 12.24 (2004): 167. Print.
Muñoz, Lorenza. ‘In ‘Tears of Gaza,’ Vibeke Løkkeberg Focuses on Children of War.’ Daily
Beast 21 Sept 2012, N. Pag. Web. 16 Jan. 2014. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/
2012/09/21/in-tears-of-gaza-vibeke-lokkeberg-focuses-on-children-of-war.html>.
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Studies 15 (2003): n. pag. Web. 23 Nov. 2013. http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_15/section_2/
artc5A.html>.
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2013 http://www.nfi.no/english/norwegianfilms/search/Person?key=30191>.
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1 Dec. 2013 <http://www.nfi.no/english/norwegianfilms/search/Person?key=32841>.
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1 Dec. 2013 http://www.nfi.no/english/norwegianfilms/search/Person?key=36750>.
Pham, Annika. ‘Zentropa Norway Signs Straume, Lien and Naess.’ Cineuropa 28 May 2009:
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Raskin, Richard. ‘An Interview with Unni Straume on Derailment’. P.O.V. Danish Journal
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tion_2/artc2A.html>.
Smale, Alison. ‘Progress, but Still a Long Way to Go, for Women in Norway.’ New York Times
4 June, 2013: n. pag. Web. 21 Dec. 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/world/
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Sundholm, John, Isak Thorsen, et al. Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema. 1st ed.
Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2012. Print.
Poland
Jule Selbo
In 1899, when filmmaking began in Poland, the nation was considered part of the
Russian Empire. Short narrative films, as well as early documentaries, were referred
to as ‘Living Picture Theatre’. Movie houses became very popular and were built
in almost every major town. Animated features began their development in 1910.
The animator Wladyslaw Starewicz created (using stop motion) Beautiful Lukanida
(1910); this is considered one of the first animated films ever made.
After World War II, in the mid 1940s, the Communist regime formed Film
Polski; however, the output of filmmakers at this time was limited, and only 13
features were completed before 1952 and Film Polski’s dissolution. In the mid
1950s, the Polish Film School movement came into being, with filmmakers such
as Roman Polanski, Agnieszka Holland, Krzystof Zanusi and Andrzej Wajda gain-
ing prominence. In the 1980s, the People’s Republic of Poland instituted martial
law to censor opposition to the Communist rule of the nation, targeting such
outlets as cinema and radio. In 1989, the ban was repealed after the communist
government was overthrown.
Agnieszka Holland (1948–) began her career in Poland and went on to work in
other nations. She was born in Warsaw, the daughter of two journalists. Her Jewish
father was a member of the Communist Party and, after World War II, wrote articles
critical of the underground Polish Home Army. Her mother, on the opposite side
of the political spectrum in the country, belonged to the Polish Resistance move-
ment. Holland studied at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing
Arts (FAMU) in Prague. She worked as an assistant director for Polish film direc-
tors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. Her screenwriting/directing feature
credits while living in Poland include Kobieta samotna/A Lonely Woman (1981) and
Goraczka (1980). She moved to France in 1981, avoiding the establishment of mar-
tial law in Poland, which was put in place that year. She had been promoting a film
in Sweden when General Wojciech Jaruzelski attacked the Solidarity Movement,
arrested thousands of the opposition and declared martial law. Holland was
unable to re-enter Poland for she would most likely have been arrested; she chose
France as her next home (Galetski 2011). She continued to write scripts for Polish
directors who were also in exile. Most of her screenplays deal with political issues.
These scripts include A Love in Germany (1983), The Possessed (1988) and Korczak
523
(1990). Her screenwriting/directing credits include Angry Harvest (1985, credited as

co-writer, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), To
Kill a Priest (1988, co-writer), Oliver, Oliver (1992, co-writer), the adaptation of
Europa Europa (1991, winner of the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language
Film and a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), and
In Darkness (2011, Polish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film).
In a 1988 interview Holland noted that although women were important in
her films, feminism was not the central theme of her work. She suggested that
when she was making films in Poland under the Communist regime, there was
an atmosphere of cross-gender solidarity against censorship (the main political
issue). Holland said that she was interested in happenings between people, not
the politics occurring outside them; in this context, ‘maybe you could say that all
my movies are political’ (Crnković 1999).
In 2003, Holland was a member of the 25th Moscow International Film Festival.
In the US, she has directed episodes of the television series such as The Wire,
The Killing, and Netflix’s House of Cards.
Dorota Ke˛ dzierzawska (1957–) was born to Jadwiga Ke˛dzierzawska, a filmmaker
who specialized in children’s films. Dorota graduated from the National Film School
in Lodz in 1981 after studying at the University of Lodz. She moved to Moscow to
study film directing at its premiere film school, VGIK. Her feature screenwriting/
directing credits include Wrony/Crows (1994, Gdynia Polish Film Festival Special
Jury Award), Diably, Diably/The Devils, the Devils (1991), I Am (2005), Nic/Nothing
(1998), Pora Umierac/Time to Die (2007), Introbedzie lepiej/Tomorrow Will Be Better
(2011, winner of the Grand Prix for Children’s Films, International Film Festival
in Berlin) and Another World (2012). Her narratives often focus on women and
children who are disadvantaged socially and financially.
Non-commercial by definition, her film narratives grapple with difficult and
painful issues. Her characters are people who have been pushed to the margins of
society. They are poor, awaiting love, help and human understanding, however
hopeless the wait may be. For Ke˛dzierzawska, this is a conscious choice (Nawój
2003; LeNart 2011).
To Ke˛dzierzawska, the visual is the most important and basic medium of com-
munication, and she is remarkably frugal with her language. ‘I am like that,’ said
Ke˛dzierzawska in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita Daily in October 1998. ‘I do
not talk a lot, so why should my films be verbose?’ When she can convey a mes-
sage through pictures alone, Ke˛dzierzawska prefers to do away with words entirely
(Nawój 2003; Lenart 2011). It follows that, when talking about her work, she
emphasizes the importance of accurate screenplays (Nawój 2003; Lenart 2011):
I also know that as long as we have dreams, as long as we have faith, and as
long as we keep hoping for the impossible, we find meaning in everything
that surrounds us; we manage to lift ourselves above the ground just a little
and rise above all that is ordinary, miserable, and sometimes just plain boring.
(Ke˛dzierzawska in Nawój 2003; Lenart 2011)
Poland 525
Other female screenwriters in Poland include Malgorzata Szumowska (1973–),

Katarzyna Roslaniec (1980–) and Urszula Antoniak (1968–). Szumowska was
born in Cracow, Poland, the daughter of a writer, Dorota Terakowska, and jour-
nalist, Maciej Szumowski. She studied art history and then graduated from Lodz
Film School. She is a screenwriter, producer and director, sometimes credited as
Malgoska Szumowska. She won the Silver Leopard Award in Locarno for 33 Scenes
from Life (2008), and a Teddy Award at the Berlinale for In the Name of (2013).
Other screenwriting credits include Happy Man (2000; winner of the Special
Prize for Artistic Achievement at the Thessaloniki Film Festival), Stranger (2004;
chosen for screening at the Sundance Film Festival, USA), and Elles (2011), a film
focusing on students who take high-risk escort work and the ethical dilemmas of
prostitution. Katarzyna Roslaniec was born in Malbord, Pomorskie, Poland. Her
screenwriting credits include Baby Blues (2012, credited as Kasia Roslaniec) and
Mall Girls (2009). Urszula Antoniak was born in Czestochowa, Slaskie, Poland. She
is a screenwriter/director, and studied at the Polish Film Academy and the Dutch
Film and TV Academy. Her screenwriting credits include Nothing Personal (2009),
Code Blue (2011), Nude Area (2014), and Het leven volgens Nino (2014).
References
Crnković, Gordana, and Agnieszka Holland. 1999. ‘Interview with Agnieszka Holland’,
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 52 (2): 2–9.
Galetski, Kirill. 2011. ‘Female Polish Directors to Watch (Cannes)’, Hollywood Reporter,
12 May.
Nawój, Ewa, and Agnieszka Lenart. 2003/2011. ‘Dorota Ke˛dzierzawska’, Culture.Pl. Available
at: http://culture.pl/en/artist/dorota-kedzierzawska (accessed 13 May 2015).
Romania
Monica Mitarcă
The Romanian fiction film industry has rarely produced scripts written by
women. The Romanian Fiction Film Dictionary (2004) credits only 34 women
screenwriters in productions between 1911 and 2004, out of 430 screenwriters.
Marioara Voiculescu is the only female credited with screenplays produced
before Communism and there are very few credits after the fall of the regime.
Most of these women wrote within the constraints of a totalitarian state and, of
the 34, almost half wrote only one screenplay, many having other professional
occupations, sometimes outside the film industry.
Writer-director Marioara Voiculescu had considerable success in 1913, when
at least eight of her scenarios were produced: Voiaj pe Dunăre’s was improvised
and filmed on a boat on the way to another film production, Dragostea mari-
narului, which was also written by Voiculescu. She wrote or co-wrote Spionul,
Fedora, Viorica, Detectivul and Amorurile unei prinţese with her partner, Constantin
Radovici. Their films were produced by the production house Filmul de Artă Leon
M. Popescu, whose story was illustrated recently in the film Restul e tăcere (2007),
directed by Nae Caranfil.
Screenplays written by women were often biographies or adaptations. These
include Mitrea Cocor (1952), which was written by Mihael Sadoveanu and adapted
for the screen by the writer’s daughters, Valeria and Profira Sadoveanu; Şeful
sectorului suflete (1967), adapted by Marica Beligan; Trei zile şi trei nopţi (1976),
adapted for the screen by Roxana Pană, with the original writer, Al Ivasiuc; Aurel
Vlaicu (1977), a flight pioneer’s biography written by Eugenia Busuioceanu; and
Patul lui Procust (2001), a play by Camil Petrescu, co-written for the screen by
Viorica Meşină. Women novelists also adapted their own work for films, usually
with the help of a co-writer. The mystery writer Rodica Ojog-Brasoveanu adapted
her novels into the films Şantaj (1980) and A doua varianta (1986), a modified ver-
sion of her novel Al cincilea as, which was changed to fit Communist expectations;
Nobel prize winner Herta Mueller adapted her novel Vulpe vînător (1993); Ioana
Postelnicu adapted Plecarea Vlaşinilor (1982) and Întoarcerea Vlaşinilor (1983); and
Anda Boldur adapted Vis de ianuarie (1978), an historical fresco.
Romania was a Communist state from 1948 to 1989; film production was state-
controlled and the Western model of the screenwriter did not exist. Market or
526
Romania 527
financial considerations always fell behind ideological ones and screenwriting was
less a profession and more an on-off occupation, writers being ‘selected’ based on
their previous compliance with the communist spirit, or family connections to
other high-status employees in the film industry. A ‘clean’ file was also important
to Communist officials; those with a bourgeois upbringing or from wealthy fami-
lies had no access whatsoever to higher positions in the arts, culture or education,
and writers were carefully selected according to Party-approved production plans.
Scriptwriters were assigned, as the screenwriter card indexes of the period reveal,
to projects based on their perceived conformity to ideological expectations. The
index cards held by the Romanian National Archives (the Communist Party’s
Central Committee archives for 1989) give details of the writers’ education, previ-
ous activity and a short resume about the proposed project. The cards mention if
the writer is a member of the Communist Party or not. Thus, in the film plan for
1989 proposed by the central Communist agencies, out of 38–9 projects only four
were assigned to women writers.
The more ‘successful’ female screenwriters specialized in either films for chil-
dren or social movies. Films for young people were viewed as ideological tools by
the Communist Party: this is referred to in the Party’s documents, which state
that films should aim at ‘mirroring realities’ of society, while ‘contributing to
educating the younger generation in the spirit of honesty, humanity, respect for
the socialist property, love towards country and party, and complete compliance
with the highest communist ideals’.
In the children’s genre, Elisabeta Bostan collaborated with Eva Sîrbu and
Ecaterina Farkaş to write Puştiul (1961) and co-wrote Veronica (1972) with Vasilica
Istrate, Veronica se întoarce (1973), the musical Mama (1977), and Saltimbancii
(1981). Aurora Icsari co-wrote Acţiunea Zuzuc (1983) and then Nişte băiet,i grozavi
(1987). Films for young people usually combined coming-of-age stories with the
accepted communist narratives, in which children were confronted with situa-
tions leading to an activation of their communist selves and thus imbued with
revolutionary ideals and values.
The social film has also proven to be a successful genre for women screenwrit-
ers, and this is where screenwriter Malvina Urşianu (b. 1927) has been most
active. Usually her narratives are a combination of personal drama and social
context. While social films are resolved with an acceptance by the main character
of socially approved and expected behaviour and end happily, when portraying
rebels the story has to end in tragedy. The social films written by women usually
contain female protagonists who struggle to keep their families together, as well
as coping with exhausting professional duties. These characters are an interesting
mixture of unacknowledged feminism and patriarchal observance. In Alo, ater-
izează străbunica! (1981), written by Rodica Padina (n.d.), the main character has
to come to terms with her husband leaving home. She asks her grandma for help
and is guided by the old, provincial woman into becoming a new person, who
goes out a lot, takes care of herself, and eventually leaves home, only to make the
father come back and take care of the children in her absence. In the end, they are
reconciled when the husband is confronted with the demands of the household
chores his wife took care of. Although some of the social films abound in humor
they are not meant to be comedies, but can be read in that way.
1948–89 – State control of the film industry
After 1948 Romania became a Communist regime in which films were state-
produced, financed and controlled. The nationalization of film production
through the production houses, numbered from one to five (Casa de Producţie
Unu to Casa de Producţie Cinci), meant that scripts were submitted to the Party
for control and censoring, in order to ensure that each film ‘must address, in
the Party’s ideological esprit, the current issues of our society, must take a solid
stance towards the various negative issues, and put first the propagation of our
Party’s revolutionary principles and concepts towards world and life’, as stated by
Ceauşescu (1982 Report of the National Conference of the Romanian Communist
Party). State control extended from choice of subject to the ‘reviewing and
improving’ of scripts already in production, in order to ensure their ‘political-
ideological orientation and adequacy’ met with current expectations. This even
went as far as ‘interrupting production of six films whose scripts need an extensive
work or even rewriting’, as the Propaganda and Press Section of the Communist
Party reveals in its records of 13 February 1989.
During this period, scriptwriters were either employed to glorify Communism
with heroic tales or to pinpoint any maladjustment to the communist spirit. This
educational approach to narrative content meant that even scripts based on liter-
ary works were changed to ensure the story fitted with a communist ideology.
Perhaps this is not so different a process as that in which literary works in capital-
ist societies are improved to appeal to audiences and increase box-office takings.
As such, film became the ideological battleground for Communism, where char-
acters were subjected to situations in which inner and outer forces led them to
confront their weaknesses, thus evolving as ‘better’ (communist) human beings.
Despite Communist Party control and censorship, some of the narrative con-
tent in screenplays was crafted to include official ideology while appealing to the
public; this applied to several social films, historical films and also love stories/
romances. A few women writers have addressed the issue of the dissolution of
the traditional family (the above-mentioned Alo, aterizează străbunica! [1981]
and Eva Sîrbu’s Angela merge mai departe [1981], for instance). The latter depicts
a woman taxi driver, Angela, in her attempts to get on with a life in which her
rather traditionally male role of taxi driver contrasts with all her other problems
and attitudes. She has an ill mother to take care of and decides not to follow her
new boyfriend, who is relocating abroad. In both films the protagonists face the
challenges of being female and having to keep their families together.
In a hetero-normative world, some female characters were depicted as challeng-
ing patriarchal behaviour and addressed immorality, which the Communist Party
believed to be infusing youth and destroying the (communist) social fabric; see
Cine mă strigă? (1979), written by Rodica Padina. Sexuality was largely confined to
non-explicit scenes, typical of the Romanian Communist films. All sexual issues
Romania 529
were treated in terms of ‘morality’; people living together outside marriage and
those without children were taxed more, sex outside marriage was seen as a form
of social dissent, and married couples were given preferential treatment. Films
produced between 1949 and 1989 only portrayed sexuality in judgmental narra-
tives, where sex was the reason people’s lives were destroyed. Even scripts written
by women presented women as non-sexual beings who sometimes learned from
other, non-problematic female characters about femininity and the proper con-
duct required in order to attain happiness; see Padina’s Alo, aterizează străbunica!.
Since the movies produced during Communism were either commissioned
by the Communist Party or the result of the year’s ideological plans, their goals
were the social edification of the communist citizen. This has resulted in the
films being overlooked and considered to be mere ‘ideological productions’. Yet,
these women writers had as their main characters women struggling – with men,
in the workplace, with their own socially complex pasts, and with various social
roles, as mothers and professionals. From this perspective these films are social
documents of life during Communism; see Raliul (1984), written by Melania
Chiriacescu-Constantiniu.
Several women co-wrote with male writers; for instance, Anastasia Anghel
(Băiet,ii noştri, 1960), Cristiana Nicolae (Râul care urcă muntele, 1977), and
Camelia Robe (Paradisul în direct, 1994). Usually, these films presented a group
of characters rather than creating a strong protagonist, the collective character
espousing socialist values and fighting bourgeois tendencies and mores.
In the Communist period, the actress Draga Olteanu-Matei adapted some of
her own drama and comedy roles, writing the scripts for Patima (1975), Cucoana
Chiriţa (1986) and Chirit,a în Iaşi (1988). Olteanu-Matei created characters with
great depth, in Patima making the avaricious character of Păuna the female
counterpart of Molière’s L’Avare. The need to fit the film’s narrative content to
Communist Party directives meant that it took nine years for the movie to get
produced: sometimes, portraying capitalism in order to show its rotten mores
proved to be rather difficult!
As the writer and director of ten feature films, Malvina Urşianu defied the indus-
try’s male dominance in Romania and produced some of the best cinema under
the authoritarian regime, which directly related to women’s lives. Thus, O lumină
la etajul 10 (1984) or her masterpiece, Figuranţii (1986), are both about women
fighting historical conditions and maintaining their strongly held principles.
Women screenwriters post Communism (1989–)
After the fall of Communism, there was a shift in film production towards decen-
tralization of the former state-owned and managed production houses. This led to
a sharp decrease in the number of fiction features produced in the 1990s. Women
writers almost disappeared, being credited with only three films out of 96 for the
period 1990–2006.
While some women were also directors, such as Cristina Nichituş, a faculty
member at the Romanian National Film School who wrote and directed Şi totul
era nimic … (2006), others secured work in the industry because of family ties,
frequently husbands who were either directors, producers or co-owned the pro-
duction houses.
One of the first films to be produced after the fall of Communism was Sanda
(1990), written by Cristiana Nicolae, a drama about the outcomes of the infamous
770/1966 Decree against abortion. Loredana Călina Soradi wrote Dragoste şi apă
caldă (1992), the first drama written by a woman on the subject of the post-Com-
munist female agenda. Two years later, Ioana Eliad co-wrote Pepe şi Fifi (1994).
For the following eight years, Romanian women scriptwriters were absent from
film production and only occasionally represented in TV writing. It was not until
almost a decade later, in 2002, that the next film to be written by a women was
released when Ileana Constantinescu co-wrote Furia with Radu Muntean, the
director of the film, whom she later married. In 2009, she resumed her co-writing
career with Cealaltă Irina (2009) and the award-winning Roxanne (2013, under
her married name Ileana Muntean). Mara Nicolescu went from acting to writing;
since 2006, she has written two features, Un acoperiş deasupra capului (2006) and
Tache (2007).
Between 2000 and the present, three factors contributed to the rise of a new
wave of women writing for the screen. First, the BA screenwriting programme at
the National Film Academy (ATF) produced a group of talented women writers
such as Ana Agopian, Oana Răsuceanu and Iulia Rugină, who debuted with
the medium-length Captivi de Crăciun (2010), followed by their first feature, Love
Building, which premiered in 2013; it was a low-budget film but a box-office suc-
cess. The three women founded Control N (Ctrl+N) Foundation, aiming to provide
screenwriting classes and other film-related workshops. Secondly, after the demise
of the Communist regime, the advertising industry opened up to employ young
professionals on a different basis to the previous production practices which had
kept most women away from important positions; these new practices were soon
adopted by the film production houses. Thirdly, the Pre-Media Programme in
Romania provided workshops and script development programmes that allowed
young women writers to promote their writing.
As a result of these changes more feature films written by women have been
produced. In 2013 Iulia Rugină’s Love Building and Anca Damian’s O vară foarte
instabilă premiered. The actress Oana Ioachim wrote the short Icre negre (2010)
and her debut feature, America, venim! (2014), directed by her husband, Răzvan
Săvescu. Eva Sîrbu’s writing career began in 1961 when she wrote Puştiul, continu-
ing with Angela merge mai departe in 1981 and then scripting, 46 years after her
debut, Logodnicii din America (2007).
In the field of documentary film, Anca Damian wrote Crulic (2011), an anima-
tion/documentary about the death of a Romanian citizen on hunger strike in
a Polish prison. For many decades, documentaries were filmed under the Sahia
label, but after the fall of Communism, Sahia gradually wound down its produc-
tion, though its traditions remain. Some woman filmmakers based there, such as
Ada Pistiner, who made Şi …, Stratul cel mai adînc al oraşului (1994), and Paula
Popescu Doreanu, an ethnographer, also wrote their own material, although not
Romania 531
all are credited because the writer did not usually receive a credit in documentary
film.
Female writers are better represented in the TV industry: Moştenirea (2010,
Media Pro Pictures) was written by Geo Caraman and Andreea Catană; Anca
Grădinariu (for the first series) and Loredana Novak (for the second series)
were writers on the Romanian adaptation of Be Tipul (În derivă, 2010 and 2012).
Original productions for Romanian television are unusual.
Some of Romania’s current production houses are co-owned by husband and
wife partnerships and run as a family business; this includes Hi Film, run by Ada
and Alexandru Solomon; Mandragora, run by Cristi and Anca Puiu, and Libra
Film, run by Tudor and Oana Giurgiu. While the women in the three families spe-
cialize in film production, the men direct, and they rarely develop stories written
by women: indeed few of the feature scripts written by women are produced. This
is the result of a lack of diversity and a subsistence film production system, which
is rather festival-oriented. It seems paradoxical that the Romanian film industries
art-house orientation does not give women screenwriters more opportunities.
Malvina Urşianu (b. 1927)
Urşianu was especially active as a writer and director between 1957 and 2002,
her films often placing strong characters amidst social upheaval, who are then
transformed by their experiences. Her first script was a dramatization of a novel,
Bijuterii de familie (1957); then, ten years later, she wrote and directed Gioconda
fără surîs (1967), a psychological drama and bitter-sweet story about a female
company executive who reassesses her life after meeting with two male friends
from her past. In 1970 Urşianu wrote and directed Serata, a historical drama, and
then Trecătoarele iubii (1973), a love story in which the main character returns
home terminally ill and contemplates the end of his life; Urşianu’s next film was
an historical drama, Întoarcerea lui Vodă Lăpuşneanu (1979), but with Liniştea din
adîncuri (1981), she changed direction and wrote a political film about the 1930s.
In the narrative for Pe malul stîng al Dunării albastre (1983), Urşianu focuses on
the decaying bourgeoisie in the last days of the Second World War and the first
decades under Communism.
In Urşianu’s screenplays the main characters act as embodiments of an ideol-
ogy, while also featuring strong personality traits, as in her following film, O
lumină la etajul zece (1984), in which the central character, Maria Dinu, the for-
mer chief engineer in a Romanian Communist plant, is obsessed with exceeding
production plans. She is then prosecuted for economic sabotage, but when she is
released from prison, Maria rediscovers herself and makes peace with her former
co-workers, who had let her go to prison, knowing she was not the culprit. In
communist ideology the individual dramatic character is a intertwining of ideas,
principles and moral dilemmas grafted onto a few basic human flaws.
Urşianu’s acknowledged masterpiece, Figurant,ii (1984), is termed an ‘historical
fresco’, and develops further the story of some of the characters depicted in the
earlier Pe malul stîng al Dunării albastre. In the film Leonora is now an adult and
we are shown the tribulations of her bourgeois offspring who are trying to fit into
the new communist society, while the only role for Leonora’s blue-blooded family
is that of extras on historical movie sets.
Ce lume veselă, made in 2002, is Urşianu’s last movie, a love story that plays on
the same ‘old versus new’ theme. Although written after the fall of the Communist
regime, her characters show the same class differences as in her previous films.
Urşianu’s leading female characters are strong, dignified women, self-made and
self-taught, run down by history, yet struggling to overcome it. In Communist
Party ideology-driven film production, her films combined personal achievement
with social requirements in a manner that, although a compromise, glorified
women in a man-made world.
References
Report of the National Conference of the Romanian Communist Party. 1982. 16–18 December.
Romanian National Archives
Report on the Feature Film Production of 1988 and the Projected Thematic Plan for the 1989
Production. 1989. 13 February. Propaganda and Press Section of the Communist Party
Archive (Chancellor’s Office).
Serbia and Yugoslavia
Olga Dimitrijević
Until the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, scholars, theorists,and historians had

talked almost exclusively about Yugoslavian cinema. After 1991, nationalist poli-
tics became dominant in the former Yugoslav republics when film scholars and
professionals began to construct separate histories, many researchers offering a
narrow and nationalist approach to the film histories of ex-Yugoslavian states. An
ideologically driven approach ignores the fact that production houses, directors,
screenwriters, editors, directors of photography, and actors from various republics
worked together throughout the history of Yugoslav film. This entry therefore
discusses women screenwriters who worked in Yugoslavia, of which the state of
Serbia was only one part until its break-up in 1991; the last section focuses on
authors from Serbia alone.
The first films to be screened in Yugoslavia were shown in Belgrade by the
Lumière brothers in 1896, a short time after their screenings in Paris. Interest in
the moving image quickly spread to the cities of Zagreb and Sarajevo, which, after
World War I, became part of Yugoslavia. The borders of the country expanded
after the First World War and Serbia became part of the larger federation, now
called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, which in 1929 was renamed
Yugoslavia. Between 1918 and 1939 several films were made in Belgrade, and
it is in this period that the first record exists of a woman scriptwriter: Darinka
Jovanović, who wrote the script for the silent movie Kroz buru i oganj (Through
Storm and Fire, 1929). The film no longer exists, but the reviews and press cover-
age tell us that the plot focuses on a strong female character at the centre of war
atrocities. In later years Jovanović worked as a journalist and playwright.
Films were still produced in Yugoslavia during the German occupation of 1941–4,
but the development of the film industry and cinema as whole only became a real-
ity after 1945. During the liberation struggle, near to the end of the war, in 1944,
the People’s Liberation Army, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, founded
a film department. This event marked the beginning of organized cinema produc-
tion in the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, later renamed the Socialist
Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). At the same time, social changes
brought about by the new regime ensured greater rights for women and easier
access to education and jobs. Despite a patriarchal heritage that was never fully
533
demolished, the emancipatory nature of the Yugoslav people’s revolution allowed

significant space for women in the public sphere that had not previously existed.
The first films produced in the newly created socialist state were dominated by
the topics and themes of the National Liberation Struggle; these were often con-
cerned with partisan life and fighting; indeed the films were mostly made by former
partisans. Directors were pre-war artists, while screenwriting practice often included
already established Yugoslav writers. The state recognized the need to develop
film as a creative art and, in May 1947, the Committee for Cinematography and
the Presidency of the Government of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia
decided to create a school for film acting and directing in Belgrade. In 1948 the
Academy of Theatre Arts was founded. Two film schools amalgamated in 1949,
eventually to become, in 1973, what we know today as the Faculty of Dramatic
Arts. At the same time two other important film academies were based in Zagreb
and Ljubljana. The development of the film industry was seen as being of inter-
est to the state in a country in which President Tito was a great film lover. The
Belgrade dramaturgy department opened in 1960, when the first group of 14
students were enrolled and taught by its founding professor, Josip Kulundžić.
Yugoslavian television first aired programmes in the late 1950s, as film studios
and production houses were opened throughout the country.
Despite filmmaking being a predominantly masculine field, women were able
to work as writers and directors. Sofija Soja Jovanović established herself as the
first female writer-director of Yugoslav cinema. A theatre director by vocation,
she co-wrote and directed her first film in 1954, Sumnjivo lice. Her opus consists
mainly of comedies, based on plays and books of popular works that she adapted
for the screen, co-writing most of her screenplays with literary figures such as
Arsen Diklić and Borislav Mihajlovic Mihiz.
Because of the late establishment of dramaturgy departments, the role of the
scriptwriter was mainly undertaken by writers and dramatists, and this prac-
tice continued for many years. Probably the most important women writers to
have contributed to Yugoslav cinema are Frida Filipović, Zora Dirnbach and
Dubravka Ugrešić. Frida Filipović, a novelist and screenwriter, worked on two
movies with director Živorad Žika Mitrović. The first one, Potraži Vandu Kos (Search
for Vanda Kos, 1957), is the most interesting, only recently rediscovered and val-
orized. It is a crime drama that takes place post-war, following a young woman’s
quest to resolve the death of her brother. This exciting and well-made story, with a
strong lead female character, remains one of the best examples of the crime genre
in Yugoslav cinema. The second film Filipović made with Mitrović, Gorke trave
(she also published the book of the same title), tells of the horror of the Ustaša
regime in the Independent State of Croatia. Filipović also wrote a third film, a
light comedy produced in Macedonia called Dugo leto (1961).
Although Ana Marija Car wrote her first script in 1963, for the movie U sukobu,
she is best known for her work with Mitrović, for whom she wrote two cult scripts,
both co-written with Arsen Diklić, which became pillars of the partisan genre.
Užička republika, (Guns of War, 1974) is a spectacular production, 160 minutes
long, depicting the story of the first liberated territory in World War II. The strong
characters and emotional power of the film make this one of the best examples of
the Yugoslav war film. Car again collaborated with Mitrović on Savamala (1982),
which takes place in the 1930s, in a Belgrade working-class neighbourhood. The
film is now recognized as a powerful social drama and one of the few Yugoslav
movies that tell the story of the pre-war era in Belgrade.
Stanislava Borisavljević wrote three scripts that were directed by Fedor
Škubonja. Their first film, Izgubljena olovka, released in 1960, was a children’s
drama that became an unexpected success by winning the Golden Lion in Venice
for a children’s film, and in 1966 the film was voted at Cannes as one of the ten
best children’s films. Her next film was again for young people, Veliko sudˉenje
(1961), and with Nizvodno od sunca (1969), about a teacher in the mountains
struggling to set up a school, they won the Golden Arena at the Pula Film Festival
in Yugoslavia (now Croatia).
Zora Dirnbach worked from 1963 to 1991 as a dramatist and editor of television
drama programmes on Radio-Television Zagreb. Dirnbach is the author of several
novels and collections of short stories, as well as the writer of three feature film
screenplays, and many TV dramas, TV movies, TV series, and adaptations. The
experience of surviving the Holocaust had a profound influence on the subject
matter of her work. Dirnbach’s best-known feature film is Deveti krug (Ninth circle,
1960), an account of the Holocaust in what was the fascist Independent State of
Croatia.
Actress Alenka Rančić co-wrote the following film scripts with her husband,
director Jovan Rančić, as well as acting in them: Dečak i violina (1975), Poslednja
trka (1979), Mahovina na asfaltu (1983), and Suncokreti (1988).
Dubravka Ugrešić is one of the best-known and most highly regarded Yugoslav
writers. Her novel Štefica Cvek u raljama života (Steffie in the Jaws of Life) gained
both commercial and critical recognition after its publication in 1981. The novel
plays with the romance genre in an ironic and witty manner, and is considered
to be one of the classics of Yugoslavian postmodernism. In 1984 it was made into
a film directed by Rajko Grlić, and is still one of the most popular comedies in
Yugoslavian cinema. Ugrešić also collaborated with Grlić on the screenplay for
Za sreću je potrebno troje (It Takes Three for Happiness, 1985).
Ljiljana Pavić is recognized for her commercial work in cinema and TV. In col-
laboration with her husband, Siniša Pavić, she has written numerous cult comedy
films and TV series. Tesna koža (1982) was to become a series of films which, at
the time, were the most popular films in Yugoslavia. Ljiljana and Siniša are best
known for their television work; the series Bolji život (1987–91) depicts the life of
a family in a late Yugoslav workers self-management system. Bolji život first aired
in 1987 and lasted for five seasons, while it is still being repeated on prime-time
television in Serbia. They have had other television successes with popular shows
like Porodično blago (1998–2002) and Bela ladˉa (2006–7).
In the 1980s several women screenwriters graduated from the dramaturgy
department at Belgrade FDA. Deana Leskovar (pseudonym Sara Koen) wrote
Špadijer (1986) and the popular urban youth drama Dogodilo se na današnji dan
(It Happened on This Very Day, 1987). Maja Volk scripted čudna noć (1990) and
Lager Niš (1986). At the end of the decade, Biljana Maksić began her career, going
on to become one of the most productive women screenwriters in the country.
Maksić first wrote for the cult urban omnibus Kako je propao rock¨n¨rol (1989), and
has since written many scripts for film and TV, including Povratak lopova (1998)
and more recently S/Kidanje (2013).
Several women are only credited with one screenplay in their career; these
include Irma Flis, Eva Balaž, Zaga Marjanović, Mirjana Lazić and Svetlana
Stojanović. There were very few women writer-directors in Yugoslav cinema
besides Soja Jovanović, as they mostly remained in the shadow of the critical
and commercial successes of their male counterparts, but Gordana Boškov did
succeed in writing and directing two films in the 1980s: Šta je s tobom Nina (1984)
and U zatvoru (1985). In 1988 Suada Kapić wrote and directed the movie Klopka,
and two years later Marija Marić made Slomljena mladost (1990).
Screenwriting post-1991 – after the war
The war in Yugoslavia began in 1991, and severed the communications that
existed between filmmakers in the country. The Serbian regime engaged in armed
conflict, foreign intervention, bombing, and eventually there was a final defeat
that marked the end of war over the territory of Yugoslavia. What used to be the
SFRY became seven independent states.
Understandably, films made in the 1990s are dominated by stories about the
war and the criminal milieu. Biljana Maksić wrote a few notable films in this
period, probably the best known of which is Lepa sela lepo gore (Pretty Village,
Pretty Flame, 1996) in which a group of Serbian soldiers are trapped inside a tun-
nel during the Bosnian war. There is much dispute as to whether the film serves
as a critique of Serbian nationalism and war politics, or affirms them. However,
if analysed from a gender point of view, it falls into the nationalist pattern that
suggests women are there to be murdered, and a patriarchal politics is brutally
reflected onto the few female bodies in the film.
At the same time, Biljana Srbljanović, who is now one of the most respected
European playwrights, devised and wrote episodes for the TV series Otvorena
vrata (1994–5). Aired on prime-time state TV, this series dealt with the position
of a bourgeois family in the new social and political circumstances. It gained
cult status mostly because of its strong humour, lovable characters and political
engagement. Besides Srbljanović, Katarina Pejović, Aleksandra Kostadinović
and Deana Leskovar also wrote several episodes for the show.
In 2001, Maksić wrote the script for Apsolutnih 100 (Absolute Hundred, 2001),
about a sporting gunman who becomes a hit man. Her further work includes
scripts for Mala noćna muzika (2002), over 300 realized scripts for the za školski
programme, as dramaturg on the series Crni Gruja II, and as screenwriter of the
Žene sa Dedinja series (2011–13).
The beginning of the millennium is marked by new subject matter: Hajdana
Baletić received attention for her script for Diši duboko (2002), this being the first
Serbian film to deal explicitly with a lesbian relationship. Although the film tries
to be sympathetic to the protagonists, it still fails to escape the stereotyping that

is characteristic of similar movies.
Milena Marković is the most distinguished of all the women screenwrit-
ers referred to because of her personal poetics. When her first film project, the
documentary Rudarska Opera, was shown, Marković was already established as
a highly acclaimed playwright and poet. Rudarska opera is about a scriptwriter
who comes to Bor, a town that used to be a mining-metallurgy industry giant,
but is now devastated, to direct Bertold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera with local
amateur actors. After this, Marković, in tandem with director Oleg Novković, cre-
ated another two films, Sutra ujutru (Tomorrow Morning, 2006) and i Beli beli svet
(White, White World, 2010). Sutra ujutru deals with a subject that is very topical
in Serbian dramaturgy – the generation of those who left, and those who stayed
in the country after the war broke out. The leading character returns to Belgrade
after 12 years of life abroad, and meets with old friends and an ex-lover, finding
they are all depressed and drinking heavily. The film convincingly tells the story
of one generation, using an evocative soundtrack for emotional impact. Her next
feature, Beli beli svet, is a continuation of the Bor stories, but this time Marković
incorporates Brechtian dramaturgy into the script.
Vladislava Vojnović is a talented writer and director whose main focus is youth
film. In 2011 she wrote the script for Miša Radivojević’s Kako su me ukrali Nemci
(How I Was Stolen by the Germans, 2011), a long and personal take on Radivojević’s
childhood in World War II. Maja Miloš recently emerged as promising writer and
director with her first film Klip (Clip, 2012). This coming-of-age drama follows a
group of Belgrade teenagers and their lives centring around music, sex, alcohol and
video clips. The movie was critically acclaimed and has won several international
awards.
The development of new technologies has allowed more women better oppor-
tunities in filmmaking, but the number of women in screenwriting practice is still
disproportionate in comparison to male colleagues. On a positive note, however,
this is slowly changing.
Spain
Natalia Sanjuan Bornay, Julia Sabina Gutiérrez and Jeremy B. Warner
Four Female Screenwriters
Julia Sabina Gutiérrez

Spanish cinema is renowned for its original personality. Although its industry is
not as strong as that of other European countries such as France or Germany, it
has the advantage of being associated with – in addition to European cinema –
Latin American cinema through a common history and language.
The Spanish film industry’s existence has had its ups and downs due to both
Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75) and censorship impeding its development.
However, this did not prevent Spanish exiles from making films with strong
political content outside of Spanish borders. The arrival of democracy in the 1980s
triggered an outburst of irreverent filmmaking full of colour and vitality typified
by the work of Pedro Almodóvar. And it is during the 1980s and 1990s that a new
generation of female filmmakers appeared who, like Pilar Miró, opened up new
creative avenues in Spanish cinema.
What place do women have in Spanish cinema? One thing we can immediately
appreciate is the number of mature and complex female characters that appear in
many of the most celebrated films of Spanish cinema, above all in the works of
filmmakers such as Isabel Coixet, Pedro Almodóvar and Icíar Bollaín. However,
Spanish cinema still has a long way to go in order to give women a more promi-
nent place in the overall film industry. Two years ago, an in-depth investigation
was published on the role of women in the Spanish film industry.1 The study is
focused on the period from 2000 to 2006. One conclusion of the study showed
that women accounted for only 10 per cent of filmmakers, 15 per cent of screen-
writers and 10 per cent of producers.
In 2007 the Spanish government introduced a new law to combat inequality
between the sexes, the Organic Law 3/2007 for the effective equality between
women and men. The law also covers the creative arts, and the film industry
in particular. Members of the Spanish Association of Women Cineastes (CIMA)
met with Inés París, former director of the CIMA association, who discussed this
issue.2 She explained that it is not so easy to talk about screenwriters, as they are
not as immediately visible as directors. In addition, there is a situation in Spain
538
Spain 539
where the majority of screenwriters tend to also be the directors of their own
films. Non-directing screenwriters are destined to be practically invisible to the
world at large and, in Spain, whether dealing with men or women, the develop-
ment stage of the script is the most fragile part of the industry. The professionali-
zation of screenwriting is difficult – for the producers do not invest in the writing
of scripts. In addition, there are some obstacles reserved specifically for women,
as explained to us by Inés París: ‘What happens is what almost always happens in
the audiovisual world as well as in other contexts. Women have access to certain
positions up to a point but when the job includes a factor of prestige and author-
ship the participation of women begins to disappear. There are very few women
who attain the title of being creators’ (CIMA). She notes that the problem is due
to a confluence of factors, one of which is film’s being a creative enterprise, dif-
ficult to gain access to for objective reasons. Working in the audiovisual industry
is all about contacts; power is currently in the hands of men who tend to think of
other men when filling positions. However, she points out, from her own working
experience, she has the impression that there are more female writers working in
Spanish television than in film. This is due to it being group work devoid of any
notions of prestige or creative authorship. (It should be noted that this is a subjec-
tive opinion and there are no objective studies with which to affirm it.) Despite
the introduction of the new equality legislation, the situation does not appear to
have improved, as París explains: ‘The participation of women has not increased.
In fact it feels as if it has decreased. In times of economic crisis everything is more
difficult’ (CIMA).
Despite the challenges, there are actually a number of women who have left an
indelible mark on the history of cinema in Spain. Four women are highlighted
here, yet there are many more who are equally deserving of discussion.
Icíar Bollaín
Icíar Bollaín (1967–) was born in Madrid, Spain. She began her film career as an
actress in El sur (1983), directed by Víctor Erice. She has been involved in more
than 15 films and made the leap from actress to director and screenwriter. She
stood out from the crowd in her first directing role in 1995 with Hola, ¿Estás
Sola?/Hi, Are You Alone? The film, about two friends who meet working summer
jobs as hotel hostesses, became a big hit in Spanish film theatres. In 1999 she
released Flores de otro Mundo/Flowers from Another World; this film went on to
receive multiple awards. The film centres on the story of a small village where the
local men organize a singles party with women who arrive by bus from the big
city. In Te Doy mis Ojos (2003) the plot revolves around an abusive relationship.
She followed that with Mataharis (2007), a film about three female detectives; this
film won the Goya award for Best Director and Best Screenplay. Her film También
la lluvia/Even the Rain (2010) is the first time she has directed a screenplay she had
not written. She has followed her Katmandú, un espejo en el cielo (2012) with The
Olive Tree (2016).
As Bollaín explains in the book Seis manifestaciones artísticas, Seis creadoras actu-
ales, ‘The screenplay is the basis, the embryo of the film (…) the screenplay must
function in two senses: for itself alone and as the initial building block of what
will finally become the film. For me, sincerely, it is the most complicated part of
filmmaking (…) anything that is not contained in the original screenplay is very
difficult to later add to the film’ (Gutiérrez Carbajo 2006: 61).
Isabel Coixet
Isabel Coixet (1962–) was born in Barcelona, Spain. She is one of the most inter-
nationally renowned Spanish filmmakers. Previous to her work as a filmmaker she
majored in history and worked as a journalist for the film magazine Fotogramas.
Coixet began her career as a screenwriter and director in 1988 with the film
Demasiado viejo para morir joven/Too Old to Die Young. Her next work did not arrive
until 1996, when she released her first English-language film, Things I Never Told
You. Two years later she returned to filmmaking in her native language with A Los
Que Aman/Those Who Love (1998). International recognition arrived in 2003 with
My Life Without Me, a modern fable which offers an original view of a woman
going through the process of terminal cancer. In 2005, she directed The Secret Life
of Words. These last two films earned her the Goya Award for Best Director while
the former saw her awarded the Goya for Best Original Screenplay. That same
year saw the release of the collaborative project Paris, Je t’aime in which Coixet
directed one of the segments about a single district of Paris. Among the other
directors chosen to collaborate on the film were Gus Van Sant, Walter Salles and
the Coen Brothers.
In 2008, Coixet released Elegy starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz. Her
most recent fictional film, Maps of the Sounds of Tokyo (2009), was shot in Japan
and revolves around the story of a fish market worker who doubles as a contract
killer.
Coixet is also a director of documentaries. At the 2011 Berlin Film Festival
she presented a black and white documentary on Judge Baltasar Garzón titled
Eschuchando al Juez Garzón/Listening to the Judge. Garzón first came to interna-
tional attention in 1998 when he issued a warrant for the arrest of former dictator
General Pinochet. In 2013 she wrote, directed and produced Ayer no termina nunca
with the background of the Spanish economic crisis as well as Another Me, with
an English cast, co-written with the novelist Cathy MacPhail. Apart from being a
filmmaker, Coixet has a successful career in the advertising industry.
Pilar Miró
Pilar Miró (1940–97) was born in Madrid. She was a writer and director of cinema
and television. She majored in journalism and law and also graduated from the
Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía. Miro began working in television during the
1960s as a writer and director before moving into the director’s chair in the 1970s.
Her early works include La petición/The Request (1976), Gary Cooper que estás en los
cielos/Gary Cooper, Who Art in Heaven (1980) and the polemic El Crimen de Cuenca/
The Cuenca Crime (1979). She directed the latter during Spain’s transition from
dictatorship to democracy. The film relates the true story of two farmers who
were found guilty of a murder they did not commit. The two men confessed to
Spain 541
the crime under severe torture. The film was immediately banned and it took two
more years for it to finally be given a theatrical release. Pilar Miró had to endure
a military trial, accused of defaming the Civil Guard who are shown torturing the
two innocent farmers in the film.3 When the film premiered in 1981, the cinemas
that screened it were kept under police surveillance due to the threat of attack.
During the 1980s she was appointed as Director General of Cinema for Spain.
Amongst other things she introduced the Miró law to protect homegrown Spanish
cinema:
The ley Miró brought about a series of measures to protect and encourage new
films that met its criteria. It appointed, for instance, a gatekeeper in the form
of the Subcomisión de Valoración Técnica de la Comisión de Calificación de
las Películas Cinematográficas (Sub-committee for Technical Valuation on the
Committee for Cinema Classification). Special grants ensured that producers
were only awarded ‘during the first four years of commercial life’ of a film (R.D.
3.304/1983/capítulo II/artículo 10) in order to ensure that production companies
would continue to foster new talent, and extra funds were made available if
the sub-committee considered a film to be de especial calidad (of special quality)
(R.D. 3.304/1983/capítulo II/artículo 11). In addition, under the legislation, new
directors could claim help to make films, a policy that benefited, among oth-
ers, Pedro Almodóvar, who partly financed La ley del deseo and ¿Qué he hecho yo
para mercer esto? with the help of ley Miró money ... (Triana Toribio 2003: 116)
Following this, Miro was appointed as director of the national broadcaster RTVE
(Radio Televisión Española). Between 1991 and 1997 she restarted her filmmaking
career. Her accolades from this period include winning the Silver Bear at the 1992
Berlin Film Festival with the film Beltenebros/Prince of Shadows (1991). El Perro del
Hortelano/The Dog in the Manger (1996), an adaptation of a seventeenth-century
theatrical comedy by Lope de Vega, which maintained the freshness and strength
of the era, went on to win seven Goya awards and become a huge success with
the public. She died of a heart attack at the age of 57.
Lola Salvador
Lola Salvador Maldonado was born in 1938 in Barcelona, Spain during the Spanish
Civil War. Exact details of her life are unclear as she has never been fond of giving
interviews. We do know that she began working in television as a trainee and from
there began writing scripts, although her true passion was always literature. Lola
(or Salvador as she is sometimes credited on her scripts) is a novelist, screenwriter
and producer. She is one of the only non-directing screenwriters who have excelled
in the Spanish film industry. Amongst her most notable works we find El crimen de
Cuenca/The Cuenca Crime (1979) with Pilar Miró; Bearn o la sala de muñecas (1983);
the adaptation of the theatrical work Las Bicicletas son para el verano/Bicycles Are for
the Summer (1984); El Jardín Secreto/The Secret Garden (1984); Barrios Altos (1987);
Tierno verano de lujurias y azoteas/Tender Summer of Lust on the Rooftops (1993); Puede
ser divertido (1995); and Salvajes/The Savages (2001). For the cinema she has written
screenplays exclusively for the producer Alfredo Matas of Jet Films. In recent years
she has been actively participating in programmes related to the development of
the audiovisual industry in Europe and Latin America. In 2014, the Ministry of
Education, Culture and Sports honoured her with the National Film Award.
Inés París: challenging stereotypes with humour: family,

relationships and social concerns
Natalia Sanjuan Bornay

Only 15 per cent of scriptwriters in Spain are women; the percentage of female
directors is even lower at 8 per cent according to post-millennium statistics (Arranz
2010). The underrepresentation of Spanish women in the film industry suggests
that Spanish cinema is disadvantaged in its ability to depict the social reality and
diversity of the country. Therefore, in the last decades, emerging women cineastes
in Spain have had to look for new forms of dramatic and ideological expression
within their cinema, starting with the construction of female characters. One of
the few established Spanish female screenwriters who dares to explore Spain’s
social structures through the comedy genre is Inés París. Based on this author’s
interview with París and analyses of París’s three comedies (A mí madre le gustan las
mujeres/My Mother Likes Women [2002], Semen, una historia de amor/Semen, a Love
Story [2005], and Miguel & William [2007]), this investigation examines the use of
humour to critically address contemporary social issues, vindicate feminist ideas
and challenge gender stereotypes in Spain.4 The study concludes with writer-direc-
tor Inés París’s own reflections on how her six-year position as president of CIMA
(Spanish Association of Women Cineastes) has impacted on her career.
Professional background
Inés París Bouza (1962–) was born and raised in a middle-class, left-wing, feminist
family. She followed in the steps of her father, philosopher Carlos París, and grad-
uated in philosophy from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and then con-
tinued with postgraduate studies in aesthetics and theory of art as well as in drama
(acting) at Real Conservatorio de Arte Dramático y Danza de Madrid. She also
attended a course in directing at Teatro Español. Over the years she gained exten-
sive experience in screenwriting for both television and cinema, mostly collabo-
rating with her colleague Daniela Fejerman. After getting a taste for screenwriting
and directing with their own scripted short films A mí quién me manda meterme en
esto/Who Asked Me to Get Involved (1997) and Vamos a dejarlo/Let’s Leave It (1999),
París and Fejerman jumped into the making of two feature-length comedies, My
Mother Likes Women (2002) and Semen, a Love Story (2005).5 During that time, París
also wrote several thrillers for television, such as El pantano/The Reservoir (2003),
and collaborated in writing the script for director Patricia Ferreira’s first work, Sé
quién eres/I Know Who You Are (2000). París’s solo debut as a writer-director arrived
with the international co-production Miguel & William in 2007. Another collective
project conceived by París is the four-piece documentary Ellas son … África/They
Are … Africa (2010), shot with her colleagues Ferreira, Chus Gutiérrez and Laura
Spain 543
Mañá in Africa. Throughout her career, París has been highly involved in the fight
for equal opportunities and the promotion of female screenwriters and directors
in Spanish cinema, in particular through her role as president of CIMA (2006–12),
and most recently, since 2012, as director of Instituto Buñuel in the Fundación
Autor SGAE.6 Additionally, París lectures in scriptwriting at prestigious universities
in Madrid such as the School of Cinematography and Audio Visual (ECAM) and
Universidad Carlos III.
Screenwriting and comedy in twenty-first-century Spain

Compared to other areas of filmmaking, screenwriting in Spain is not duly recog-
nized and, as a consequence, scriptwriters work in worse conditions and receive
lower salaries than other film professionals. The writing team of Fejerman and
París illuminate their profession with the following metaphor: ‘A scriptwriter is
like a mother who falls pregnant, has a being growing inside her during months,
gives birth, with more or less pain … And when finally the little one is out in the
world, gives it in adoption to new parents who don’t only give the baby their
surname, many times they even change its name without asking you, and besides
they forbid you to see it again’ (Fejerman and París 2003: 102). As these comments
suggest, the script is generally overlooked, despite it being the initial phase in the
process of making a film, constituting the skeleton of the story and often being
responsible for the end product’s quality.
In her recent role as director of Instituto Buñuel, París has attended numerous
meetings and conferences to debate the precarious future of scriptwriting in Spain
and to look for ways of supporting professionals in the field. París emphasizes that
‘without scriptwriters and good stories it is impossible for Spain to make good cin-
ema’ (Ruiz 2012). Writer-director Gracia Querejeta pointed out that ‘scriptwriting
has always been undervalued and it doesn’t matter if a script has been written by
a man or a woman. In a film, the percentage of the budget allocated to scripts is
always very little’ (Arenas 2008). In addition, Arranz’s study (2010), which indi-
cates that only 15 per cent of scripts in Spain are written by women, suggests that
female scriptwriters might have even more difficulties than men when seeking
to be commissioned for a script. In most cases, Spanish female directors write or
co-write their own scripts; however, very few female scriptwriters take the initia-
tive and become the directors of their scripts.
Regarding film genres, women cineastes in Spain appear to have a preference
for drama and many use documentary as their mode of choice. In the decade
2000–10, 38 per cent of the 130 films written by women were dramas and 36
per cent were made in the documentary style. Comedy narratives followed with
11 per cent.7 París acknowledges that the industry determines what type of films
and genres are trending and notes, ‘Nowadays, television decides what is done
in this country. And what are their criteria? The movie should belong to a genre
that seems to be in fashion. Since comedies tend to work, that’s what they ask
for.’ Despite being a commercial and popular genre in the country, comedy has
traditionally been less explored by female scriptwriters. This trend is chang-
ing, however, in particular in television, where popular series such as 7 Vidas
(7 Lives, 1999–2006) or Aída (2005–14) are gradually incorporating more women

into the writing teams. Scriptwriter Marta Sánchez, who has written for both
series, explains her experience writing about female characters in still male-
dominated teams: ‘Sometimes it was hilarious (or depressing, it may depend)
to see their complete ignorance about the female world (…). We are tired of
seeing that men are the funny ones and that women are serious, annoying and
distorted’ (Sirera 2013: 3).
Concerning the targets of humour in Spanish comedies, París criticizes the
pejorative approach to female characters, arguing that ‘in the world of comedy in
Spain political incorrectness is very popular, which seems to be a type of wilder
humour, more insolent. But politically incorrect humour always picks on the
weakest. It attacks women because they have big or small boobs, big or small bot-
toms, because they are very old, too fussy or know-all.’ Throughout the interview,
París expressed her disappointment in the standardized victimization of female
characters taht are mostly represented as ‘bereaved and suffering women’ by both
male and female directors. She claimed that there are still very few films about
powerful female characters that are positive and fully enjoy life. The following
analysis shows how París contributes to a more positive representation of women
by portraying independent, amusing female protagonists in all her comedies.
Introducing the films

The three appealing and provoking titles of París’s films are meant to attract the
viewer; however, they are somewhat misleading in terms of disclosing each film’s
plot.8 For example, in My Mother Likes Women, the theme of lesbianism remains in
the background as the film takes the perspective of the three daughters, Jimena,
Elvira and Sol, who need to redefine their sexuality or relationships after finding
out that their mother, Sofia, has a foreign and much younger girlfriend, Eliska.
Semen explores socially imposed parenthood roles when destiny joins Serafín, a
rational biologist who falls in love and strongly desires to become the paterfa-
milias, to Ariadna, a dreamy trapeze artist who travels around the world with her
circus. Similarly, daring to address two of the biggest geniuses in Western literature
(Cervantes and Shakespeare) by their first names, Miguel & William portrays an
imaginary encounter between these great writers whose respective creative crises
will be solved by a talented woman ahead of her time, Leonor de Vibero.9
Creating funny female protagonists

Elvira (My Mother Likes Women), Ariadna (Semen) and Leonor (Miguel & William) are
the female protagonists in each comedy, each of them powerful comical characters
who lead the narratives and are capable of finding their own solutions to problems.
Beautiful Elvira (Lenor Watling) is insecure about her job at a mediocre publish-
ing house, the quality of her first novel, her relationships with men and, after
discovering that her mother has a girlfriend, about her sexuality. In order to con-
front her fears, her low self-esteem and her middle-child complex, she regularly
sees a psychologist.
Ariadna (Leticia Dolera) is a client at an artificial insemination clinic who, after
various unsuccessful attempts, falls pregnant. She likes risks, believes in destiny
Spain 545
and needs to do things that make her feel alive. Her bubbly personality contrasts
strongly with control freak Serafín (Ernesto Alterio), the biologist treating her who
secretly becomes the sperm donor.
As a result of her father’s arrangement, Leonor de Vibero (Elena Anaya) is
obliged to abandon her vibrant independent London life in order to marry a
rich ugly old duke who lives in a huge castle in sixteenth-century Castile. Leonor
is literate, speaks English and loves theatre, and soon becomes bored with the
Castilian aristocratic way of living.
In spite of their different contexts and historical settings, these three com-
plex and well-defined female characters share common traits: a passion for life,
appreciation for the arts and/or literature and the search for passionate love.
Remarkably, the three characters are shown as sexually driven, independent and
unconventional women. For example, Elvira, who is confused about her sexual
identity and is afraid of ‘turning’ lesbian, desperately tries to have wild sex with a
famous writer, Miguel. The scene in her apartment is an amusing parody of stereo-
typical heterosexual sex scenes, as Elvira wants to assume the submissive/passive
role and demands that he be dominant: ‘Hold me so that I can see that you are
stronger, and call me bitch’ (Fejerman and París 2003). The character of Leonor
in Miguel & William, due to living in the Elizabethan era, is expected to keep her
virginity as a precious treasure, but this does not prevent her from having a fervent
affair with Shakespeare. Shakespeare, in his search for inspiration, insists in possess-
ing her, but also shows a progressive attitude regarding sex: ‘My love, there are other
ways that will afford us pleasure’ (París 2007). Perhaps the most unconventional
character is Ariadna in Semen; she does not seem to have a maternal instinct and
gives preference to her job rather than to her relationship with her male partner,
Serafín. Ariadna is the only character to appear partly naked (her breasts exposed)
in the sex scenes, and she is the one to instigate sexual relationships. Ariadna’s
liberal approach to sex differs from Serafín’s, whose automatic behaviour in their
first encounter appears to follow the cliché instructions on how to stimulate
women: ‘If you allow me to I am going to proceed to stimulate your … nipples.
Sometimes this accelerates the process’ (Fejerman and París 2003).
Incorporating social issues in comedies

París believes that ‘comedy is a very difficult, transgressive and interesting genre’
because it is ‘a wonderful way of speaking about reality, of putting the world
upside down and then being able to see it differently’. This is supported by the
narrative content in her three comedies which encompass some degree of social
criticism. My Mother Likes Women vindicates female independence and sexuality at
any age, showing the affectionate relationship between middle-aged and divorced
Sofia and her much younger partner, Eliska. París ironically noted in my interview
with her how, when they tried to sell the story, the common homophobic, sexist
reaction from producers was, ‘But it’s a film about a mother in her fifties who turns
lesbian and it’s a comedy? We think it’s a real drama …’ Another social issue that is
explored is immigration policies, since Sofia’s partner is from the Czech Republic
and her ability to live or fare well in Spain is in question. As a secondary theme,
the film hints at the loneliness and integration problems that face immigrants,
even when they are recognized as artists in their own countries. As an example,
Sofia’s older daughter, Jimena, when talking to her mother, remarks, ‘Here Eliska
has nothing. She doesn’t know anyone. You are all her world’ (Fejerman and París
2003); and later, in her homeland Prague, when the three daughters ask Eliska to
return to Spain to be with their mother, Eliska replies, ‘Here I am someone, there
I am nothing’ (Fejerman and París 2003).
Semen likewise introduces a critical approach to gender roles. París stated in the
interview that she considered the film ‘a joke about the maternal instinct’. This is
illustrated in the following dialogue:
SERAFÍN
Isn’t your blood calling? Where is your maternal instinct?
ARIADNA
I don’t know. I might not have one.
SERAFÍN
How can you say that?
ARIADNA
I don’t want to have children, or at least not now.
SERAFÍN
But I was excited about it. I do want to have children. I do have paternal
instinct, I have huge paternal instinct.
(Fejerman and París 2003)
This argument breaks with gender stereotypes related to parenthood; the male is
the one who desperately wants to become a father. After Serafín’s insistence on
keeping their baby, Ariadna rejects socially imposed motherhood, claiming asser-
tively her freedom to choose: ‘It’s my life, my body, my decisions’ (Fejerman and
París 2003). Other feminist concerns can be observed throughout the storyline.
For instance, when Serafín offers to grant the ‘bastard’ baby his surnames, Ariadna
replies, ‘The baby doesn’t need your surnames. The baby has its own surnames’
(Fejerman and París 2003).
Finally, Miguel & William points out that women can be as ingenious and
imaginative as men. Back in the sixteenth century, in a time when most women
lacked agency, Leonor is not only in control of her actions, but also finds inven-
tive solutions to help the male protagonists, rescuing Cervantes from the Spanish
Inquisition and Shakespeare from her fiancé, the duke. Throughout the love/
creative triangle developed between the three characters the film suggests that
both writers were aided towards realizing their genius because of this inspirational
woman. Leonor’s final monologue vindicates female sexuality and independence
as well as denouncing a husband’s violent behaviour:
Of being unfaithful, I am accused, but I think that when women are, it’s their
husbands’ fault. Then, they don’t comply with their duties or explode due to
their mean jealousy, imposing restraints on us, and they beat us. But atten-
tion, gentlemen, we women also have bitterness. Husbands shall know that
Spain 547
their wives have senses as they do, don’t we women have fondness, desires of
pleasure and frailty like men do? Then, they should treat us well, or shall they
know that our bad behavior, they showed it to us. (París, 2007)
Unconventional happy endings

París claims that her attraction to comedy and humour is possibly one of her best
attributes: ‘I tend to see things with irony and with optimism. Since my humour is
not sarcastic or very destructive, I rather prefer the comedy that gives an optimis-
tic view of life, with irony or with some degree of depth.’ Her optimistic viewpoint
can be observed in the positive way her stories are resolved; the three comedies
conclude with happy endings, but propose alternative social and family structures
that break with the traditional patriarchal model.
My Mother Likes Women advocates sexual diversity and normalizes lesbianism
by presenting Sofia and Eliska as committed to a mature, stable relationship
based on mutual respect and affection. The film ends with the celebration of a
triple wedding, a legal one between Miguel and Eliska, so that she can remain
in the country, and two symbolic ones between Eliska/Sofia and Elvira/Miguel.10
The final wedding party, celebrated by the respective families of Sofia and Eliska,
is a metaphor for lesbian acceptance and the immigrants’ integration in Spanish
society. Semen defends the choice of being a single mother or father regardless
of being the biological parent or not. According to film critic Paul Julian Smith
(2009: 183), ‘Semen boasts the most elaborate new form of family’ and ‘finishes
with a very modern ménage of adults and children’. Serafín, with an adopted
son, Próspero, comes back together with his girlfriend, Ariadna, who lives with
her twin sister, Penelope, and her test-tube baby, Ulises. In Miguel & William
the unwanted arranged marriage concludes immediately after the wedding cer-
emony when Leonor admits to the duke she had an affair with Shakespeare; this
provokes the duke’s heart attack. As a result, the widow duchess Leonor remains
happily single and ‘free’ (as emphasized by her), with her two lovers: one pla-
tonic (Cervantes), one physical (Shakespeare), and she asks, ‘Choose? Why do
I have to choose?’
Conclusion
Inés París has proven with her three features that women, together or individually,
can succeed in making socially interesting, progressive comedies which foreground
women’s position. Perhaps due to her extensive experience in scriptwriting, which
she has often undertaken as a shared task, and through her support for women in
her role at CIMA, París has always advocated female creative collaboration. París
insists on demystifying the long-established rivalry among women and in problem-
atizing the concept of authorship in cinema, which is mainly associated with only
one individual who is usually a male (Camí-Vela 2005: 363–4). In my interview with
París, she stated that her six-year role as the president of CIMA may have prevented
her from achieving her fourth feature. However, her role has assisted her in devel-
oping personal and creative relationships with other women film professionals,
defining herself as a feminist and devising more mature, reflective scripts. It fol-
lows, then, that París believes, in order to become a cineaste, women filmmakers in
Spain must do two things: ‘Join CIMA, where they can feel part of a collective with
common gender-related problems, but also with similar creative interests’ and ‘fight
until the end, believe in oneself and be convinced that they have a story to tell’.
Two women screenwriters of different generations
Jeremy B. Warner
Ana Mariscal (1923–95) was an actress, director, writer, and producer after the
Spanish Civil War. She starred in Raza (1942), which was a film penned by the
dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco. Under the rule of the conservative govern-
ment, the church controlled the cinema and women were usually confined to
traditional roles. Ana Mariscal’s accomplishments are impressive, but even more
so considering they were carried out under the oppressive government of Spain.
Ulrike Siehlor writes, ‘Ana Mariscal represents a repressed memory of the Spanish
cinema from 1945 to 1951’ (Siehlohr 2000: 187). Wanting to do more than act,
Ana Mariscal funded the startup of her production company, Bosco Productions.
She wrote and directed her first feature, Segundo López, aventurero urbano (1953),
which is considered by many critics to be one of the cornerstones of Spanish
neorealism (Bentley 2008: 171). The film was well received, but failed at the box
office along with her second feature film, Con la vida hicieron fuego (1959). Ana
Mariscal returned to Spain to teach acting at the National Film School (Instituto
de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematograficas) after a two-year stint in
Argentina. She left the school and produced films geared at more commercial
success. She directed seven more films, four of which she wrote. Box-office sales
of these films were solid; however, the films were met with antipathy by the crit-
ics (D’Lugo 1997: 239). Following her filmmaking career in the 1950s and 1960s,
Mariscal returned to acting, mainly for television. She died in March 1995.
Gracia Querejeta (1962–) was born to film producer Elías Querejeta. She worked
as an actress in his films as a teenager. She studied ancient history at Compultense
University of Madrid, developing a taste for dance and music. In 1987, she wrote
and directed the short Tres en la Marca. After dabbling in documentaries, she wrote and
directed Una estación de paso (1992), winning the Jury Special Prize at the Valladolid
International Film Festival. Gracia Querejeta’s films often focus on the interpersonal
relationships of families, such as the missing father figure in Héctor (2004) or the
relationship between three generations in Siete mesas de billar francés (2007). Her
films have garnered 23 nominations and have won 13 awards, including winning
Best Screenplay for Héctor at the Cinema Writers Circle Awards.
Notes
1. Cinema and Gender in Spain, written by Fátima Arranz, published by Cátedra. It was
awarded the Muñoz Suay Award in 2011, which recognizes the best works of historical
research on Spanish cinema.
Spain 549
2. CIMA is an association of women who work in film and audiovisual media. It has more
than 300 members, including many respected figures on its board of directors. This
interview took place on 22 September 2011.
3. The dictator General Franco had died just a few years before the making of this film and
the Civil Guard had been one of the pillars of his regime.
4. I interviewed Inés París in July 2012 during a research field trip to Spain funded by
Flinders University, as part of my PhD studies. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes
by París in this paper are from the interview.
5. All translations of films titles or quotes from interviews in Spanish are mine.
6. Founded in 2008 as part of SGAE (General Society of Authors and Editors), Instituto
Buñuel investigates, studies, promotes and shows Spanish and Latin American films.
7. Data collected from the Spanish Institute for Cinema and the Audio Visual Arts (ICAA)
online film database: http://catalogocine.mcu.es/index.html (accessed 25 February
2013).
8. According to ICAA data, My Mother and Semen did very well at the box office, with
431,092 and 429,471 viewers respectively, achieving fourth and fifth positions after the
successful films of Icíar Bollaín (Take My Eyes, 2003) and Isabel Coixet (The Secret Life
of Words, 2005; My life Without Me, 2003). Miguel & William was only viewed by 79,776
spectators at cinemas but a later screening on TV in 2010 achieved 1,425,000 viewers.
9. It seems that París has a predilection for the use of controversial historical female
names for her characters. Leonor de Vibero is a real historical figure. The Inquisition
persecuted her children, and some were burnt in an act of public penance in Valladolid
in the sixteenth century. Leonor de Vibero was also burnt in effigy after her corpse was
disentombed. The names of the three sisters in My Mother Likes Women, Jimena, Elvira
and Sol, were the names of the wife and daughters of El Cid.
10. Same-sex marriage in Spain has been legal since 3 July 2005.
References
Arenas, J. 2008. ‘Mujeres guionistas … La lucha continua’, ABC, 14 July. Available at:
http://www.abcguionistas.com/noticias/guion/mujeres-guionistas-la-lucha-continua.html
Arranz, F. 2010. Cine y género en España. Madrid: Cátedra.
Bentley, B. P. E. 2008. A Companion to Spanish Cinema. UK: Boydell & Brewer.
Camí-Vela, M. 2005. Mujeres detrás de la cámara: Entrevistas con cineastas españolas 1990–2004.
Madrid: Ocho y Medio.
D’Lugo, M. 1997. Guide to the Cinema of Spain. Portsmouth, NH: Greenwood Publishing
Group.
Fejerman, D., and I. París. 2003. ‘Las madres de A mi madre … (historia de una maternidad
compartida)’, DUODA Revista d’Estudis Feministes, 24: 99–105.
Gutiérrez, Carbajo, F. 2006. Seis manifestaciones artísticas. Seis creadoras actuales/Six artistic
performances. Six current artists. Madrid. Ediciones Uned.
Ruiz, R. M. 2012. ‘Sin guionistas no puede haber buen cine español’, Diario Montanés,
18 October. Available at: http://www.eldiariomontanes.es/v/20121018/cultura/cine/
guionistas-puede-haber-buen-20121018.html (accessed 20 March 2013).
Siehlohr, U. 2000. Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in
European Cinema, 1945–1951. UK: A&C Black.
Sirera, N. 2013. ‘Líneas de genialidad’, CineConElla: El cine español a través de la mujer.
Available at: http://cineconella.com/2013/02/28/lineas-de-genialidad/ (accesssed 13 April
2013).
Smith, P. J. 2009. Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Triana Toribio, N. 2003. Spanish National Cinema. UK: Routledge
Sweden
Johanna Forsman and Kjell Sundstedt
The first Swedish narrative films to be shown, in 1897, were the farces Byrakstugan/
The Village Barbershop and Akrobat med otur/Acrobat with Bad Luck, although the
scenarists are unknown. In the early years of cinema, Swedish audiences preferred
documentaries, such as Göta Elf-katastrofen/The Göta Elf Catastrophy (1908), which
portrayed the catastrophic shipwreck in Gothenburg’s harbour, and was filmed
by the cinematographer and cinema owner, Charles Magnusson. A few months
later Magnusson was appointed President of AB Svenska Biografteatern (Swedish
Cinematic Theatre), known as Svenska Bio. He soon became the most powerful
person in the Swedish film industry, and continued to hold this position for many
years to come.
The first two recorded female screenwriters had films produced in 1911, Elin
Wägner (1882–1949) and Anna Hoffman-Uddgren (1868–1947). Already a fic-
tion writer, Wägner wrote the scenario for Hon fick platsen eller Exkonung Manuel
i Stockholm/She Got the place or Ex-King Manuel in. Wägner went on to write five
more screenplays, her last film being released in Stockholm in 1946. Her first film
was a great success, and probably the reason why cinema owner N. P. Nilsson
asked Wägner to write the screenplay for Systrarna/The Sisters (1912). Theatre
director Anna Hoffman-Uddgren directed the film and wrote and directed the
earlier drama Blott en dröm/Just a Dream, released in 1911.
Hoffman-Uddgren became known as the ‘first lady’ of Stockholm’s entertain-
ment industry when Nilsson hired her as the principal director of his new produc-
tion company, Orientaliska Teatern (Oriental Theatre). She directed six films but
only wrote two screenplays by herself, her husband, Gustaf Uddgren, scripting
the majority. Gustaf received one of the most famous telegrams in Swedish film
history, from August Strindberg, stating: ‘Feel free to cinematograph my dramas
as much as you like. Kindly August Strindberg’ (Furhammar 1991: 37). That tele-
gram became Orientaliska Teatern’s trump card; Anna co-wrote Fröken Julie/Miss
Julie with her husband, who filmed Fröken Julie/Miss Julie (1912) and Fadren/The
Father (1912). When Nilssen died, in the same year, Anna returned to the theatre.
Danish melodramas were very popular in Sweden, therefore Svenska Bio, run by
Charles Magnusson, decided to hire Danish, and a few Norwegian, screenwriters
who had experience of this genre, which gave the Lidingö studio the nickname
550
Sweden 551
‘Little Copenhagen’ (Furhammar 1991: 57). Several female Danish screenwriters

were taken on, including Hanna Bernburg, Harriet Bloch, and Johanne Skram
Knudsen.
Sweden’s neutrality in the First World War benefited the film industry as it greatly
increased film exports, allowing Swedish films to establish themselves on the
international market. The first classic of Swedish film, Ingeborg Holm (1913), was
directed by Victor Sjöström and written by Nils Krok, provoking such a debate
that it changed the government’s policies on poverty. Ingeborg Holm proved that
the film medium could be used for social change, and in the subsequent decades
quite a few women screenwriters have tried to make the most of that potential.
Among the few Swedish women screenwriters before 1920, the Finnish-Swede
Sigrid Calamnius (1866–1947) and Ester Julin (1885–1931) are of note. Film his-
torian Gösta Werner believes that Calamnius, who is known to have worked with
director Mauritz Stiller on three films between 1912 and 1914, was involved in
many more of Stiller’s productions. Werner describes how central Calamnius was
to the writing process:
Stiller quickly arrived at a method for producing his screenplays […]. He hires a
secretary who successively becomes an important co-worker. It starts quite pri-
vate. A lady of his [Stiller’s] acquaintance, Sigrid Calamnius, writes down what
he tells her about how he wants to form an idea that he has or how he wants to
give a cinematic character to a text, which Svenska Bio has purchased. The lady
remains anonymous for a long time, but eventually her name is occasionally
acknowledged. (Werner 1991: 58–9)
One of Stiller’s most prominent co-writers was Ester Julin, who is the first Swedish
woman to have independently supported herself as a screenwriter, writing at least
12 feature film screenplays between 1915 and 1926. Julin met Stiller in a travelling
theatre group, and when he started to work as a film director he hired Julin as
an actress. How she made the jump to a screenwriter is unclear, but when Stiller
returned to Svenska Bio in 1915, after a period of directing for the theatre, Julin
is credited as screenwriter on his next film. The film, Hans Hustrus Förflutna/His
Wife’s Past (1915), was written in collaboration with Caja Wulff (pseudonym for
Karin Johnsson) who was a well-known travel book writer. This is Wulff’s only
film credit, but Ester Julin continued to co-write screenplays with both Stiller and
Victor Sjöström, sometimes under her own name but also under the pseudonyms
Alexander Vichetos (Julin and Stiller) and E. V. Julström (Julin and Sjöström).
After 1916 the Swedish film industry underwent a change in direction, influ-
enced by the success of Terje Vigen/A Man There Was (1917), an expensive produc-
tion adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s poem and adapted by Gustaf Molander. The
film was highly acclaimed, both in Sweden and internationally, which resulted in
Svenska Bio deciding to change their entire production strategy and focusing on
a few select, quality productions. Screenplays from the melodrama writers, who
were mostly Danes, were rejected as they ‘belong to a genre, which we have now
abandoned’ (Furhammar 1991: 65). Some of the female writers like Harriet Bloch
and Agnete von Prangen took their screenplays to another production company,
Hasselblads Fotografiska AB in Gothenburg, which produced films belonging to
the ‘old genres’ for another couple of years.
Ester Julin was one of the very few screenwriters who survived the change in
policy, becoming a part of both Stiller and Sjöström’s artistic successes. Her own
artistic breakthrough came through a collaboration with Victor Sjöström. The
majority of Swedish authors were unwilling to risk their reputation and good name
by writing for the film medium, but Victor Sjöström’s Terje Vigen/A Man There Was
(1917) made a great impression on the renowned author Selma Lagerlöf, who
granted him permission to adapt her work. Ester Julin co-wrote the screenplay
Tösen från Stormyrtorpet/The Girl from the Marsh Croft (1917) with Sjöström. Film
historian and critic Bengt Idestam-Almquist argues that the screenplay is the best
example of how Swedish film has evolved since the early years, and deemed the
screenplay to be ‘perfect in its simplicity and clarity’ (Idestam-Almquist 1939:
138). The film was a huge success, especially in the US, and with Lagerlöf’s
approval of the adaptation, film as an art form was accepted by the upper classes.
Many adaptations of Lagerlöf’s prose followed and were often co-written by Ester
Julin and directed by both Stiller and Sjöström. Julin had sole credit as writer for
Dunungen/In Quest of Happiness (1919), adapted from one of Lagerlöf’s short stories
(Cire 1920: 20).
Between 1900 and 1910, approximately 14 per cent of the 220 produced films
had screenplays which were written or co-written by a woman, with Ester Julin’s
films making up a large portion of these. However, in the 1920s only 8 per cent
of the credited writers or co-writers of the decade’s 161 feature films were female.
About half of the women from the 1910s continued to work during the 1920s,
and only four new female writers made their debuts, all but one – Greta Berthels –
being over 40 years of age. It is unclear if the 70-year-old Lotten Dahlgren wrote
(or co-wrote) the screenplay to Värmlänningarna/Harvest of Hate in 1921, based on
the often-adapted play by her father, as our sources are contradictory (see Swedish
Film Institute [SFI] 1921 and Winquist 1969: 48).
In late 1920 the Swedish film industry was in crisis; it had been severely affected
by the fall in demand for Swedish films abroad because of a recovered interna-
tional film industry after the end of the First World War. Several key directors,
writers and actors left Sweden for Hollywood, including Sjöström, Garbo and
Hjalmar Bergman, a prominent author who loved film. His wife, Stina Bergman
(1888–1976), bought a booklet on how to write for film as early as 1913, and
when Hjalmar began to write screenplays Stina did the typing. She sent his
first screenplay, without her husband’s knowledge, to Sjöström in 1917. The
screenplay was not accepted, but it was the start of Hjalmar Bergman’s career as
a screenwriter. How much Stina Bergman influenced the screenplays written in
his name is difficult to know, but according to literature professor Sverker Ek she
referred to all of Hjalmar’s works as ‘her children’ (Sundstedt 2012a). Their stay in
Hollywood was a fiasco for Hjalmar, but Stina learned a lot about the American
way of writing and producing films, knowledge that she would use later on in her
career. After her husband’s death, Stina Bergman became one of the most active
Figure 4.4 Director and leading man Mauritz Stiller sits centre stage, holding leading lady Ester Julin in the theatre play Bakom Kuopio/Behind
Kuopio at Lilla Teatern, Stockholm, 1911. Stiller adapted the play for film in 1912 as Den Tyranniske Fästmannen/The Tyrannical Fiancée and cast
Ester Julin to repeat her role. It was her first contact with the film industry
553
women screenwriters of the 1930s and one of the most powerful people in the film
industry during the 1940s, when she became head of the screenplay department
at Sweden’s largest production company, AB Svensk Filmindustri (Swedish Film
Industry), known as SF, which was founded in 1919.
The historic drama genre blossomed during the 1920s. Among the many male
screenwriters in the genre, one woman, Greta Berthels (1892–1971), is of note. She
worked alone as well as with her husband, Theodor Berthels, who directed all of
her four screenplays. She sometimes used the male pseudonym of Herbert Gran.
Berthels was the sole writer of the Viking saga Arnljot, produced in 1927, an expen-
sive production that most film critics dismissed as lacking in quality and suffering
from delusions of grandeur (SFI 1927).
The film industry was barely profitable at the end of the 1920s, almost causing
it to fold. The only genre in the 1920s that survived the introduction of sound
was that of the countryside films. A single film, the previously mentioned
Värmlänningarna/Harvest of Hate from 1921, inspired the genre. Värmlänningarna
was the third film adaptation of the popular play by F. A. Dahlgren. In 1929 no
Swedish films were released in the first six months. With the advent of sound, the
film industry as a whole was revived, but the production company SF was forced to
restructure. The managing director, Olof Andersson, appointed Lieutenant Stellan
Claësson as the new manager for the studio in Råsunda, outside Stockholm, and
Claësson’s wife, the theatre director and actress Karin Swanström, was appointed
as artistic director, quickly putting her personal stamp on SF’s productions.
The percentage of films written or co-written by women screenwriters decreased
after the advent of sound; from 8 per cent of 161 feature films during the 1920s,
to only 6.5 per cent of almost 240 feature films released during the 1930s. Among
the women who wrote their first screenplay in the 1930s, there were numer-
ous Nordic collaborations, for example the Danish-Swedes Ulla Kåge and Alice
O’Fredericks, and the Norwegian-Swede Edit Øberg. Øberg is one of the few suc-
cessful examples of SF’s attempt to produce some of their films in multiple lan-
guages at the beginning of the 1930s. En Stille Flirt/A Quiet Flirt (1933) was based
on Øberg’s novel of the same name, and made in both a Swedish and Norwegian
version. Øberg collaborated with Gösta Stevens on the screenplay for at least the
Norwegian version of the film.
After the success of Anna Q. Nilsson’s Värmlänningarna/Harvest of Hate (1921),
many films of this type were made, named after areas in Sweden. Ragnhild E. Ch.
Broberg wrote her only screenplay for the silent film Flickan från Värmland/The
Girl from Värmland in 1931, and Greta Berthels wrote Norrlänningar/The People of
Norrland (1930) under the pseudonym Herbert Gran.
Greta Berthels and Elin Wägner were the only two women screenwriters from
the 1920s who survived the transition to sound. The last film Berthels co-wrote,
Hans Majestät får Vänta/His Majesty Will Wait, in 1931, was produced as a silent
film as well as sound. Wägner, one of two candidates for Sweden’s first female
screenwriter, was 57 years old when she wrote the screenplay to Efterlyst/Wanted
in 1939, which was loosely based on her own novel Norrtullsligan/Men and Other
Misfortunes, published in 1908.
Sweden 555
Seven women screenwriters who began their careers during the 1930s were
relatively old, only one – Ulla Kåge – being under 35. Two women, Stina Bergman
and Ragnhild Prim (1890–1975), both began writing when they were 47 years
old and represent a ‘quality-trend’ in the otherwise male-dominated 1930s. Stina
Bergman’s first credit as screenwriter was Swedenhielms in 1935, based on her late
husband Hjalmar Bergman’s novel. She wrote four more screenplays during the
1930s and one during the 1940s, most of them adaptations of so called ‘quality
literature’, often written by her husband.
Ragnhild Prim worked as script supervisor and continuity clerk for Stina Bergman
on many productions during the 1930s. Prim’s first credit as screenwriter was in
1938 for En Kvinnas Ansikte/A Woman’s Face, together with Stina Bergman and
Gösta Stevens, in which Ingrid Bergman (no relation to Stina Bergman or Hjalmar
Bergman) played the lead. The film was so successful that the rights were sold
to Hollywood, where the American version of A Woman’s Face was produced in
1941. Prim and Bergman collaborated on one more screenplay during the 1930s,
Gläd dig i din Ungdom/Rejoice While You’re Young, Fellow Cadets (1939), which they
co-wrote with the director Per Lindberg and the author of the source text, Vilhelm
Moberg.
The Second World War, as with the First World War, proved to be beneficial for
the Swedish film industry. Audience attendance rocketed and the reduced number
of imported films gave Swedish films an advantage. The increased income made
producers more willing to take risks, and artistic films were produced to a degree
that had not been seen since the First World War.
The production company SF changed direction and started to focus more on
quality films. Stina Bergman was appointed head of SF’s script department and was
without a doubt a major part of the new focus on quality. When a young Ingmar
Bergman (no relation) made his debut as a dramatist, Stina Bergman was in the
audience, and the next day she gave him the opportunity to try his hand at ‘screen-
play scrubbing’, tidying up screenplays that were being developed at SF. Writer
Mikael Timm notes in his biography of Ingmar Bergman that ‘Bergman did not
have a formal education in film, but SF became his university’ (Timm 2008: 95).
Stina Bergman wrote her last screenplay, Hans Nåds Testamente/His Grace’s
Will, in 1940, based on her late husband’s play and novel of the same name. Her
brother, Per Lindberg, directed the film, and it received glowing reviews: ‘During
the last year there have been signs that Swedish film is slowly heading towards a
new, fruitful era. One has often been able to glimpse a new awakened ambition
and will to create. It can be said about Sunday’s premiere that it too gives certain
promises of a new vitality and a new cultural responsibility shown by Swedish
films’ (SFI 1940).
Several women writers contributed to a group of films that grew out of the mili-
tary farce films, but which took on more serious undertones in the late 1930s and
1940s, after Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. In these ‘preparation-films’
the jests and escapades were toned down and replaced by camaraderie and heroic
efforts. The preparation-films did not only show male soldiers in battle. The film
Ta hand om Ulla/Take Care of Ulla (1942), for example, focused on the hardships
of soldiers’ marriages, and it managed to consider abortions, infidelity, and adop-

tion. The film was written and directed by Ivar Johansson, and based on a novel
by Ebba Richert, a popular novelist who, a year later, adapted one of her own
novels for Brödernas kvinna/The Brothers’ Woman (1943). The screenwriters Ella
Fallenius, Eva Liewen and Ester Lindin also collaborated with Ivar Johansson on
their only screenplay. Ester Lindin, for example, had a great success with the adap-
tation of her novel, Tänk om jag gifter mig med prästen/What if I Marry the Priest,
co-writing the screenplay with Ivar Johansson in 1941. One review states that:
Tänk om jag gifter mig med prästen is a retribution in two different ways. It is a
retribution for Swedish films as well as for Ester Lindin. Since her novel was
released she has had the questionable pleasure of getting pilloried in cheap
cabarets and causeries as the amorality priestess number one. The film gives all
these moral busybodies an answer that should sting – never before has moral
hypocrisy and the false idyll of the philistine been exposed to such a mighty
attack. (SFI 1941)
Films with unhappy endings increased during the Second World War, as did por-
trayals of unhappy marriages, and ‘sociopathic characters’ (Furhammar 1991: 192).
Besides the farce-like comedies, the stories were noticeably darker, more brutal,
complex, and often disillusioned. One such film was Jag är eld och luft/I Am Fire
and Air (1944), written by the author and journalist Barbro Alving (1909–87).
Alving wrote four screenplays during the 1940s, but when her first script, Tåg 56/
Train 56, was produced in 1943, she was already working as a screenwriter with
the production company Wive Film, which suggests that she was involved in
more films than she received credit for. Alving co-wrote her last screenplay Åsa-
Hanna (1946) with Elin Wägner. The film continued the trend for bleak endings
as it follows the struggles of an unhappily married woman who sacrifices her own
happiness for justice.
Films with social agendas began to reappear during the 1940s. Else Kleen and
Bengt Idestam-Almqvist’s screenplay for Ungdom i bojor/Youth in Shackles (1942)
was an influential example. Kleen was as an author, journalist and opinion-former,
married to the Minister of Social Affairs, Gustav Möller, and was particularly inte-
rested in young people placed in protective custody and prison. This was her only
screenplay and she used the film to inform and agitate the audience, as the film
Ingeborg Holm had done many years before.
When the Second World War ended, the Swedish film industry entered a period
of crisis. In 1947 the newspaper Industria wrote that ‘[t]he financial forecasts mis-
fired to an extent that bears almost no comparison to previous years’ (Furhammar
1991: 199). Cinema audiences dwindled, and production strikes occurred as a result
of the worsening relations between the production companies and their employees.
Of the women screenwriters who were active during the 1940s, 13 out of 21
wrote only one film. About 6.5 per cent of Swedish films were written solely or in
collaboration with a woman; almost exactly the same percentage as during the
1930s. Dagmar Edqvist (1903–2000), who had written three or four screenplays
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during the 1940s, among them Musik i mörker/Night is My Future, directed by

Ingmar Bergman in 1948, disappeared from the film industry during the 1950s.
She returned in 1964 with her last screenplay, Lianbron/The Vine Bridge, which
was directed by Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, and featured
Harriet Andersson and Mai Zetterling in the lead roles.
The only screenwriter to work in the 1940s and 1950s was Majken Cullborg
(1920–2006). The production company Nordisk Tonefilm acquired an unpublished
novel by Cullborg, hoping to repeat the success of Hon dansade en sommar/One
Summer of Happiness (1951), which had been the biggest hit in Swedish film his-
tory. Nordisk Tonefilm thought they had the right ingredients in Cullborg’s novel,
but to ensure its success they cast the same male lead as in Hon dansade en sommar/
One Summer of Happiness, Folke Sundquist. The film, directed by Arne Matsson and
written by Majken Cullborg and Rune Lindström, premiered in 1952, with the
title För min heta ungdoms skull/For the Sake of My Intemperate Youth. Even though
some critics liked it, the film was mainly regarded as a failure and did not live up
to its predecessor.
Gun Zacharias (1927–2012) followed in the footsteps of Else Kleen’s Ungdom i
bojor/Youth in Shackles from the 1940s when she co-wrote Flamman/Girls without
Rooms (1956), tapping into an interest in making films with controversial content
that would attract a younger audience. Linda Larsson (b. 1909) also wrote enter-
tainment films for a younger audience. She is credited with three screenplays in
the 1950s, two thrillers and a comedy, writing one more comedy in the 1960s. She
co-wrote three of her four screenplays with her husband, the director Börje Larsson.
SF kept a low profile after the post-war crisis. They invested in artistically accom-
plished directors, but on riskier projects worked with co-producers. Even Bergman
had to turn to other producers for his more experimental films; however, as his
successes at SF became greater, and particularly after Sommarnattens leende/Smiles
of a Summer Night (1955) was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film
Festival, he gained their confidence.
Ulla Isaksson (1916–2000), renowned for her collaborations with Bergman, was
one of Sweden’s most productive women screenwriters, her career spanning more
than four decades, from 1953 to the 1990s. During that time she wrote six feature
film screenplays and three TV films. Isaksson’s first screenplay, Kvinnohuset/The
Women’s House or Caged Women in 1953, was directed by Hampe Faustman, and
based on Isaksson’s own novel. The censors decided to ‘cut five meters of female
togetherness with homosexual tendencies, but not so much so that anyone could
doubt the meaning of the scene’ (SFI 1953). Isaksson’s screenplay for Bergman’s
Nära livet/Brink of Life or So Close to Life (1958) was adapted from her novel and
takes place in a birthing clinic. The film’s depiction of the clinic was a shock for
the cinema audience at the time, in Sweden as well as in Norway, but the film
received glowing reviews:
Brink of Life is Ingmar Bergman’s best film. One of the best films ever to have
been produced in Sweden. Ingmar Bergman has had the sense that he has not
always had: he has associated himself with a first rate screenwriter. Ulla Isaksson
has left him an outstanding screenplay, from which his directing skills have
extracted maximum effects. (SFI 1958)
Isaksson’s greatest triumph was, however, in 1960 with the screenplay for Ingmar
Bergman’s Jungfrukällan/Virgin Spring, which won Best Foreign Language Film at
the Academy Awards and a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival. The film
was left completely untouched by the film censors, which led to strong criticism,
especially since other provocative films, such as Vilgot Sjöman’s later film, 491
(1964), were banned. Isaksson wrote her last feature film in 1977, but kept on
writing screenplays for TV films until 1993, when she was 77 years old.
Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002), one of Sweden’s most important screenwriters,
made her debut during the 1950s, at a time when cinema attendance was in decline
and the new medium of television was attracting large audiences. Lindgren’s chil-
dren’s books are well known around the world, but not many people know that
she also wrote around 30 feature film screenplays. The exact number is unclear,
since some of her TV series were edited into films. Her successful book Pippi
Långstrump/Pippi Longstocking, published in1945, was adapted in 1949 and writ-
ten by the director and screenwriter Per Gunvall. Lindgren was very upset by the
changes made to the story and from then on adapted most of her books herself.
Lindgren expanded her authorship to other media with an almost transmedial
approach. Many of her stories were published as books, transmitted over the radio
as well as adapted into TV series and films, and quite often the TV series or film
came first and the published book later. Lindgren’s long career as a screenwriter
spanned 33 years, her last film premiering when she was 81 years old.
Isaksson and Lindgren’s successes, however, were not the norm for women
writers during the 1950s. The number of films written or co-written by women
increased slightly to just 7.5 per cent of Swedish films and many are credited with
only one film.
The film industry was transformed in 1963 with the creation of Svenska
Filminstitutet/Swedish Film Institute (SFI). Creatively this was the start of a fertile
period, with about 60 feature film directors making their debut during the fol-
lowing ten-year period. The examples set by the French New Wave, English social
realism and the new generation of Italian filmmakers inspired young Swedish
intellectuals. Film was debated in film magazines, cultural magazines and also
on the culture pages of the big dailies. Demands were made for a practical and
theoretical training in filmmaking, which resulted in the SFI creating the film
school Filmskolan in the autumn of 1964, with two-year courses in direction,
cinematography, sound and eventually film production. Yet very few screenwriters
were active in Sweden during the 1960s, a fact that was noted by Bengt Forslund,
film producer and film researcher, who was employed by Svensk Filmindustri to
find young, talented filmmakers (Sundstedt 2012b). Inspired by the French New
Wave, everyone wanted to be an auteur director and there were no screenwriting
courses at the Filmskolan. The knowledge surrounding classic storytelling and
dramaturgy was forgotten by the younger generation and a screenwriting course
was not included in the curriculum until 1992.
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At SF, the new director, Kenne Fant, with support from Ingmar Bergman as an
advisor, encouraged younger authors to try writing for film. The result became the
anthology 20 berättelser för film/20 Stories for Film, yet only three women writers
were included: Birgitta Trotzig, Loka Ehnmark and Margareta Ekström.
Mai Zetterling (1925–94) was the only female Swedish auteur in this period.
She wrote and directed her first feature film in 1964, Älskande par/Loving Couples
(1964), which was co-written with her husband, David Hughes. The film was mostly
praised by the critics and considered to be a powerful and unusual film. Mauritz
Edström in DN wrote, ‘Mai Zetterling and her husband David Hughes have from
Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s novel cycle ‘Fröknarna von Pahlen [The Misses von
Pahlen]’ extracted an excellent film script’ (SFI 1964). He continued:
When I think about it, I suddenly realise that here Mai Zetterling has done no
less than beaten all her younger male debuting colleagues within the young
Swedish film. It is of course something that we today – after all we live in an
equal society – should not find particularly surprising. From the women we
have indeed great things to expect. (SFI 1964)
Mai Zetterling strengthened her position by writing and directing three more films
during the 1960s, all written in collaboration with David Hughes. Flickorna/The Girls
(1968) received much criticism, so much so that the female author of the adapted
novel, Sun Axelsson, went public and defended Zetterling, declaring that she had
a right to fail artistically because ‘she still succeeds in expressing her total despair
that we (women) have such weak voices, that in 1968 we still have to struggle to be
allowed to get even close to what is called human rights’. Axelsson concludes: ‘The
film has weaknesses, but also moments of sudden genius’ (SFI 1964).
The main reason for the crisis in cinema during the 1960s was television,
although it did allow new female authors like Gunnel Linde, Eva Moberg and
Marie-Louise Ramnefalk, who had not worked in the film industry, to write for
television, which had begun to make increasingly ambitious productions.
Artfilm, a small company that produced Astrid Lindgren’s children’s films,
managed to beat the trend and survive financially. The producer, Olle Nordemar,
and director, Olle Hellbom, were also responsible for one of the few Swedish teen
movie successes in this period: Raggare/Teddy Boys (1959). Two other successes in
this genre, Susanne (1960) and Chans/Chance (1962), had screenplays by women.
Chans was written by the author, Birgitta Stenberg, based on her own novel
about a ‘teddy boy’ girl who ends up in bad company. The film was a huge suc-
cess with young audiences, but critics accused it of a speculative superficiality (SFI
1962a). Susanne had completely different intentions. It was an amateur feature
film by the medical doctors Elsa Colfach and her husband, Kit, which aimed to
educate young people about traffic safety. Elsa directed and wrote the screenplay
for the film, sharing the production role with her husband. The film was in col-
our, with nightmare sequences in black and white. The couple had probably not
expected the film to be so popular with young audiences, who used the realistic
car crash and surgery scenes as an endurance test, with many in the audience
fainting. Susanne was Elsa Colfach’s only film but Stenberg wrote one more feature
film during the 1970s and two TV films in the 1980s and 1990s.
Contemporary social problems begin to re-emerge as a theme during the
1960s. As an example, Siska (1962), with a screenplay by Vilgot Sjöman and Ulla
Isaksson, tried to capture the ongoing sex debate, but received most attention for
its storytelling technique. Lasse Bergström in Expressen (Sweden’s biggest tabloid)
wrote:
The film [Siska] has in different contexts been called a contribution to the debate,
portrait of a woman and a comedy. In order to make it impossible for anyone
to know what it is, it has been broken down into little pieces then patched
together in a form that with its triple jumps in time feels hysterically modern.
(SFI 1962b)
Ulla Isaksson continued her collaboration with Vilgot Sjöman with the screenplay
for Klänningen/The Dress (1964).
The percentage of films from the 1960s with a woman screenwriter rose to
19 per cent, significantly higher than during the early years of film. Yet there were
only four women whose writing was regularly produced at this time: Mai Zetterling,
Ulla Isaksson, Yvonne Floyd and Astrid Lindgren, the latter credited with eight
titles during this decade, including several collaborations with TV. Yvonne Floyd
(1937–90) wrote three screenplays in the crime and thriller genre during the 1960s,
one during the 1970s, and one during the 1980s. She also wrote the documentary
Vem var Dracula?/In Search of Dracula in 1975, which discussed the existence of
vampires. Not all of Floyd’s films, however, were well received: her last screenplay,
the horror film Ondskans värdshus/The Sleep of Death (1981), had particularly bad
reviews as most critics found it to be not the least bit scary (SFI 1981).
Sex continued to be a popular theme for female writers. In 1969, Danish married
couple and sexual educators Inge Hegeler and Sten Hegeler began their sex-education
trilogy with Kärlekens språk/Language of Love (1969), and Nita Gamble wrote, in col-
laboration with the director Hans Abrahamsson, the provocative Ormen/The Serpent
(1966). By the 1970s, sex films had become increasingly synonymous with porn
films.
The Swedish film industry hit rock bottom in 1970–1, with only 26 million
cinema visits, two thirds less than the peak years of the 1950s (Furhammar 1991:
313). Cinema attendance figures were falling, but film production flourished, at
least in economic terms, since the government’s film agreement had radically real-
located money to the production process. Filmmaking had become independent
of audience figures and this was not always to its advantage.
Swedish children’s films did successfully buck the trend of falling attendance
figures by ignoring the existing conventions of the genre and producing films that
children could relate to. As Furhammar points out:
There were suddenly films which were not primarily aiming either to enter-
tain and pass the time or to educate and foster, but films which attempted to
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describe children and children’s problems, joy and pain without idyllic blink-
ers. Films that attempted to meet children’s needs both for processing reality
and fantasy. (Furhammar 1991: 335)
Lindgren was the main advocate of the new type of children’s films, writing nine
screenplays during the 1970s, several of which reached an audience of more than
one million. All her films became huge export successes and many of the stories
had already reached a large audience in the TV series before the films were made,
which ensured a ready-made cinema audience.
Another much-loved author of children books, Maria Gripe (1923–2007),
also chose to adapt her books, and her first screenplay Hugo och Josefin/Hugo and
Josephine (1967) won the award for ‘Best Film’ at the Swedish Film Awards. Gripe
continued to work as a screenwriter in the same genre during the 1970s with two
films made for TV and a feature film, all based on her own books. Furhammar
notes that the feature film Elvis! Elvis! (1977), which she co-wrote with the
director Kay Pollak, ‘paved the way for a different sort of advanced depiction
of children on film, with a powerful and realistic grounding in psychology and
awareness of the present time, but also with great poetic and dramatic qualities’
(Furhammar 1991: 335–6).
Collective screenwriting processes first appeared in the late 1960s, when the
actors Margaretha Byström and Solveig Ternström, among others, collaborated
on Vilgot Sjöman’s Troll/Til Sex Do Us Part (1971). The flight from old aesthetic
and dramaturgic traditions was liberating to begin with and had great creative
energy, but this was at the expense of the audience and the films became more
inward-looking.
In the middle of the 1970s, dramaturgy suddenly became fashionable again. SFI
and Filmskolan, now Dramatiska Institutet, arranged courses in dramaturgy that
proved to be popular, but dramaturgy alone could not save the Swedish film.
As Furhammar wryly comments: ‘To their great regret both producers and audi-
ences, writers and directors were eventually forced to realise that if you have
nothing to say, it can not become better said through ever so refined dramaturgy’
(Furhammar 1991: 328).
The number of films entirely or partially written by women increased to 22 per
cent during the 1970s, though the statistics year by year are uneven. From 1970–4,
Astrid Lindgren is credited with at least one film per year. Other notable women
screenwriters during this period are the sex educator Inge Hegeler who, together
with her husband, Sten Hegeler, continued with their feature films disguised as
sex information films in 1970 and 1971.
After 1976 there was a wave of successful female writer-directors. Marie-Louise
De Geer Bergenstråhle (b. 1944) made her debut with, according to Furhammar,
‘consciously bright coloured and appalling family life projections’ in the short
feature Mamma, papa, barn/Mummy … Daddy … Children (1977) and the feature
Barnförbjudet/For Adults Only (1979), both written and directed by her (Furhammar
1991: 338). The film was acclaimed for its provocative uniqueness: ‘Marie-Louise
De Geer Bergenstråhle has with ‘Barnförbjudet’ made a cinema feature that not
even remotely resembles anything else made in a Swedish studio. It is a plus.

It lights up the creative darkness like a sparkler on Christmas Eve’ (SFI 1979).
Bergenstråhle is still active in the film industry, her latest feature film, which she
both wrote and directed, Asta Nillson’s Sallskap, premiered in 2005.
Marianne Ahrne (b. 1949) has had a long career as a writer-director. Her first
film as director was co-written with Bertrand Hurault, Långt borta och nära/Near
and Far Away (1976), and she has since written and directed five more feature
films. Her last feature film premiered in 1997, but since then she has worked as a
film consultant and script developer on many productions.
Gunnel Lindblom and Ulla Isaksson co-wrote the screenplay to Paradistorg/Summer
Paradise (1977), based on Isaksson’s novel, and produced by Ingmar Bergman. The
film was quite well received by Swedish film critics and was followed by a debate,
which not only focused on the films themes of family dynamics and the relations
between grown-up children and their parents, but also the attitudes of male critics
to ‘women’s films’ and the difficulties in adapting literature to film. Paradistorg
became one of the greatest international successes during the 1970s; it was
voted by French critics as the third best foreign film in 1977 and was one of four
non-American films on the New York Times list of the best films of 1978 (SFI 1977).
During the 1980s, the most popular films were comedies, which were mostly writ-
ten by men. Many women wrote films about motherhood and women’s struggles,
a theme evident in Berget på månens baksida/A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon
(1983), the first screenplay written by the novelist Agneta Pleijel (b. 1940), as
well as Mai Zetterling’s Amorosa (1986). A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon focuses
on the life of Russian mathematician and author Sofia Kovalevskajatell in nine-
teenth-century Sweden. Her friendship with the author and radical feminist Anne
Charlotte Leffer is highlighted as well as their fight for equality. Amorosa depicts
the life of author Agnes von Krusenstjerna, whose novels were critiqued for their
open sexual attitudes, the portrayal of mental illness, and her marriage to David
Sprengel.
The theatre director and dramatist Suzanne Osten (b. 1944) wrote and directed
her first film in 1982, Mamma/Our Life is Now, co-written with the Norwegian writer
Tove Ellefsen. The film was recognized as a very promising first feature, about
Osten’s own mother, the film critic Gerd Osten, who during the 1940s dreamt
about directing films, but was never given the opportunity (SFI 1982). Osten con-
tinued her career during the 1990s with Tala! Det är så mörkt/Speak up! It’s So Dark
(1993), which tells the story of a young, racist gang member helped by a Jewish
doctor after being injured, and how he overcomes his fears by listening to the doc-
tor’s story about his flight from Hitler’s Germany. Another film that also focused
on conflict with immigrants and had much impact was Vinterviken/Winter Bay
(1996), written by Sara Heldt, Harald Hamrell and Mats Wahl (SFI 1996).
By 1998 the Swedish film industry seemed to have hit rock bottom, but the
release of Lukas Moodysson’s first film, Fucking Åmål/Show Me Love (1998), revi-
talized the entire industry. Autumn 1998 also saw Lisa Ohlin’s (b. 1960) feature
film debut with Veranda för en tenor/Waiting for the Tenor (1998), with a screenplay
co-written by her and the author of the original story, Klas Östergren. Much was
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expected from Lisa Ohlin after the promising TV series Nattens barn/Children of the
Night (1995), about two teenage girls who start performing witchcraft to get what
they want, and the short feature Ingen som du/No One like You (1994), which unu-
sually had a cinema run. Her first feature lived up to all expectations, as Helena
Lindblad wrote in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter:
In Veranda för en tenor Lisa Ohlin is finally showing her full size as a true story-
teller for film. Her imaginative joy is contagious and the ability to take care of
a truly good story and transform it into an even better film is very impressive.
(SFI 1998)
After many years of there being no female screenwriters in the comedy genre,
Monica Rolfner (b. 1958) wrote Tomten är far till alla barnen/In Bed with Santa
(1999). The film had mixed reviews from the critics but has since become some-
thing of a classic and is now obligatory TV fare at Christmas (SFI 1999). Rolfner
then disappeared from the film industry, but returned in 2015 with the screenplay
for I lust eller nöd/For Better and Worse.
During the 1980s and 1990s the number of women screenwriters increased; 28.6
per cent of the 143 feature films made in the 1980s had a woman writer or co-
writer, though this decreases slightly in the 1990s, to 24.8 per cent of 145 feature
films.
Many of the writer-directors who made their debut during the 1970s continued
to write during the next few decades. Marie-Louise De Geer Bergenstråhle, later
under the surname Ekman, made five more feature films during this period: the
artistic Fadern, Sonen och Den Heliga Ande…/The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit
… (1987), which baffled many critics as they could not make sense of a storyline
about how a son copes with his father when he has a breakdown, wears a ballet
dress and dances around his flat. During the 1990s her more conventional film
Nu är pappa trött igen/Now Daddy Is Tired Again (1996) was generally celebrated
for keeping in with De Geer Bergenstråhle’s distinct aesthetics, while being more
audience-friendly. Marianne Ahrne returned with På liv och död/A Matter of Life
and Death in 1986, the screenplay again co-written with Bertrand Hurault. Sally
och friheten/Sally and Freedom (1981) was the feature film debut for the writer
Margareta Garpe, who during the 1970s had co-written TV films with Suzanne
Osten. Gunnel Lindblom returned as screenwriter and director in 1987 with
Sommarkvällar på jorden/Summer Nights on the Planet Earth.
These two decades also include many newcomers who both write and direct;
among them are Ann Zacharias and the actress Ingrid Thulin. A number of
the newcomers have, however, already dramatized or directed in other media.
Some, like Hilda Hellwig, had previous experience in the theatre; she made a
one-off appearance in the film industry in 1993 with Dockpojken/The Puppet Boy.
The dramatist Suzanne Osten, who wrote and directed seven feature films during
this period, notably Bröderna Mozart/Mozart Brothers (1986), which was co-written
with Etienne Glaser and Niklas Rådström, was praised by the critics: ‘You leave
the cinema crying tears of joy. This is the kind of thing you are not allowed to do,
if Svensk Filmindustri [Swedish Film Industry] and Jantelagen [the Scandinavian

expression for tall poppy syndrome] are allowed to rule. Suzanne Osten does it
anyhow, with a forthrightness and imagination that surprises’ (SFI 1986a).
Agneta Fagerström-Olsson (b. 1948) was a successful television writer before
going on to write and direct feature films. She gained much attention in 1986
for her TV series Seppan, which a year later premiered in cinemas in a re-edited
version. Hanserik Hjertén comments on the quality of her writing in the daily
newspaper DN:
Here is a raw, unpolished closeness to life that is not everyday fare in Swedish
film. Life is full of hard work, drunkenness, sexual urges, taunting of strangers
and class divides. But also of togetherness, strength and ability to survive.
Above all it is an irresistibly true depiction of children. (SFI 1986b)
Fagerström-Olsson has since then written seven screenplays and directed 18 films,
TV films, and TV series.
The children’s film genre continued to provide opportunities for many women
during the 1980s and 1990s, among them feature film newcomer Judith
Hollander (b. 1944) who wrote the screenplay for Min pappa är Tarzan/My Dad Is
Tarzan (1986) in which a hamster narrates the story of seven-year-old Moa, who
loves reading Tarzan magazines and who, after her mother meets a new man,
starts to dream about her real father who lives in a jungle in Africa. Hollander is
also credited as a co-writer for Bang och världshistorien/Bang and the History of the
World in 2008, which focuses on the life of the previously mentioned journalist
and screenwriter Barbro ‘Bang’ Alving.
Gunnel Linde and Astrid Lindgren were still active within the children’s film
genre. Lindgren wrote seven feature films during the 1980s, among them the
grandiose Ronja Rövardotter/Ronja Robbersdaughter or Ronia the Robber’s Daughter
(1984). Furhammar notes that this film ‘can be viewed as a tender anthology of
the great Swedish film themes throughout the century: nature, togetherness and
death’ (Furhammar 2002: 359).
During the 1990s other writers took over the adapting of Astrid Lindgren’s
books: Catharina Stackelberg (b. 1938) wrote screenplays for two full-length ani-
mated films about Pippi Longstocking, and Johanna Hald (b. 1945) wrote two
screenplays about the character. Hald was also active within other genres, col-
laborating with the British director Colin Nutley on two screenplays during this
period: BlackJack (1990), which co-written by Kjell Sundstedt and Catti Edfeldt,
and Under solen/Under the Sun (1998), co-written with David Neal.
Several women made their debut within the teen movie genre during the 1990s.
For example, Gita Mallik wrote Sherdil (1999) and the aforementioned Sara Heldt
co-wrote Selma och Johanna/Selma and Johanna (1997) with newcomer Ingela
Magner. Birgitta Svensson, who made her first film in 1977, the much talked
about teen movie Mackan, wrote and directed two more teen films in the 1990s.
From the middle of the 1970s, the number of women screenwriters increased
alongside an increase in the status of the screenplay and the dramatist’s profession.
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The Dramatiska Institutet’s (from 2011, Stockholms Dramatiska Högskola) screen-

writing programme began in 1992 and has contributed to this change in attitude.
To date, 52 students have been accepted on the programme of whom 28 are
women and 24 men. By 2000, gender equality and the status of screenwriters
had become a political priority. The Kulturdepartementet’s (Ministry of Culture’s)
proposals to the Riksdagen (Parliament) were as follows:
Although there is widespread agreement that the quality of the screenplay is

crucial for a film’s success, the role of the screenwriter is obscured, in the same
way that there is a tendency to undervalue the role of the producer as a crea-
tor and artistically driving force. Together with the work of the director the
creations of the screenwriter and producer form the artistic base that a film
rests on. These professional categories are however often not directly involved
in, or make any financial gain from, the commercial exploitation of the film.
(Kulturdepartementet 1999)
The next Film Agreement, in 2006, stated that its aim was to increase the number
of women’s film productions:
The goal is that the percentage of women in film production central roles shall
increase during the period of the agreement. No less than a year before the end
of the agreement either sex should, counted in the number of projects which
get funding, be represented by at least 40 percentage points in the categories
screenwriter, producer and director.
The lack of equality within filmmaking has created much debate during the 2010s.
Maria Jansson, of the Swedish branch of WIFT (Women in Film and Television),
accused the SFI’s film consultancy system of hindering the careers of women within
the film industry (Söderling 2011). In the autumn of 2013 four Swedish cinemas,
in collaboration with WIFT and Rättviseförmedlingen (the Fairnessdistributor),
launched an ‘A-rating’ (‘A’ for ‘Approved’) of its shows that was based on the
criteria of the Bechdel test. The test originated from the American cartoonist,
Alison Bechdel, and in accordance with her criteria, the cinemas ‘A-rated’ those
films in their repertory that 1) included at least two named female characters,
who 2) talked to each other about 3) something besides a man. The ‘A-rating’
gained international attention and in Sweden it started a debate that, among
other things, touched on the question of whether female originators within film
tell different stories than male ones (Bivald and Jansson 2013).
In the latest Film Agreement, which runs until 31 December 2015, the aims for
equality are clarified and require that:
pre-production funding, counted in the number of projects that have been given
funding by the end of the agreement period, shall have been equally distrib-
uted between women and men within the categories screenwriter, producer
and director.
However, there is some way left to go towards this goal. Of the 261 feature films
premiered during 2000–9, 34.8 per cent had a woman as screenwriter. The cor-
responding figure for 2010–13 is only 33 per cent. These statistics solely concern
films that have been shown in cinemas, but there are a hidden number of women
screenwriters who work for TV and internet-based media.
During the late 1980s and 1990s soaps were a training ground for many screen-
writers and TV continues to develop new talent. Some women writers divide their
time between both media: Christina Herrström, for example, who wrote two
acclaimed TV series for young people during the 1990s and then went over to
feature films, and Pernilla Oljelund, who writes for both film and TV, with work
encompassing drama, children’s and thriller productions. Cecilia Björlind, with
an impressive 24 titles since her debut in 2001, has had several of her feature film
screenplays shown on TV but has not had a cinema premiere. Björlind only writes
crime dramas and works with her husband, Rolf Björlind. Married couples working
together in the Swedish film industry historically almost always consist of a direct-
ing husband and a wife who writes screenplays, sometimes with her husband.
As regards internet-based media, director, screenwriter and transmedia-producer
Hanna Sköld released her film project Nasty Old People (2009) on the Pirate Bay
under a creative commons licence. Her ongoing project Granny’s Dancing on the
Table within the transmedia universe Grannyverse has been funded by a successful
Kickstarter campaign and she collaborates with the audience as co-creators. The
traditional TV channels have also widened their output with web-series, and a
number of the female students who have completed the Stockholms Dramatiska
Högskola’s screenwriting programme work on these.
The effects of the screenwriting programme are evident; from 2003, gradu-
ates such as Sofia Fredén, Karin Arrhenius, Antonia Pyk, Pia Gradvall, Maria
Karlsson, and Linn Gottfridsson have writing credits. Several of them are screen-
writers not involved in directing, and the screenwriting programme has been
instrumental in breaking the trend of writer-directors, which on the female side
has been marked since the middle of the 1970s. Linn Gottfridsson wrote the
acclaimed teen movie I taket lyser stjärnorna/Glowing Stars (2009), which has been
compared to Moodysson’s Fucking Åmål/Show Me Love. Malena Janson, in the
daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, notes: ‘I taket lyser stjärnorna is one of the most
gripping depictions of youth that I have seen. It continues to live within you for
days after the credits have rolled to their end’ (Janson 2009).
Children’s films have traditionally been a genre where women screenwriters
have been at their strongest, but during the 2000s and 2010s there was a shift to
writing teen movies, often about young girls in contemporary Sweden. For instance,
I taket lyser stjärnorna, Hannah med H/Hannah with H (2003) was written by Per
Nilsson and Annika Thor, Fröken Sverige/Miss Sweden (2004) by Sara Kadefors,
and Hip Hip Hora!/The Ketchup Effect (2004) by Teresa Fabik. Hip Hip Hora! and
I taket lyser stjärnorna both became box-office successes and have in common
the same dramaturge, or advisor on the screenplay, Nathalie Drago. She made
her debut as screenwriter in 2000 with Vingar av glas/Wings of Glass, co-written
with the director Reza Bagher and Fredrik Lindqvist, but moved into working as a
dramaturge on a number of acclaimed films.
Sweden 567
The collective screenwriting process made a return during the 2000s, though
in a very different way to the films in the 1970s, which were made within the
framework of an (often very conflict-ridden) collective process where many mem-
bers of the film team could be included. The collectives of the 2000s are entirely
screenplay-oriented; the screenplay collective Unlimited Stories, which includes
among others Lovisa Löfhagen and Sara Wadell, wrote two feature films that
were premiered in 2003. A somewhat different collective work method was used
in the films Kärringen därnere/Her Downstairs (2006), with main writer Fredrik
Lindqvist, and Börje Peratt’s Bella & Real – The Movie (2010). Apart from the main
writers, these films gathered a further 29 and 14 people respectively as screenplay
collaborators.
For the future of women screenwriters in Sweden there are grounds for opti-
mism. First, the number of women screenwriters who write more than one screen-
play is increasing. The 2000s and 2010s have marked the return of many of the
screenwriters who made their debuts in previous decades. The majority of these
returning women are also directors, for instance Agneta Fagerström-Olsson, Lisa
Ohlin, Suzanne Osten, Marie-Louise Ekman (previously De Geer Bergenstråhle),
Ella Lemhagen, Lena Koppel, and Christina Olofsson. Many women who wrote
their first screenplay in the last decade have written more than one film. Among
these are screenwriters like Grace Maharaj and Anna Fredriksson, and the ex
StDH students Antonia Pyk, Karin Arrhenius and Maria Karlsson, but also women
who both write and direct their films, such as Lisa Langseth, Petra Revenue,
Gabriella Pichler and Alexandra-Therese Keining.
Second, women screenwriters are writing more and more box-office hits, and
with a range that covers the entire field of genres. The screenplay successes
Svinalängorna/Beyond (written by Lolita Ray and Pernilla August, 2010) and Äta,
sova, dö/Eat, Sleep, Die (written and directed by Gabriella Pichler, 2012) show that
films written by women do not have to be about ‘female issues’ or be directed
at a female audience. Both Svinalängorna and Äta, sova, dö were nominated for
and won many awards, both at the Swedish Awards Ceremony as well as interna-
tional festivals. In 2013 women wrote screenplays for such widely different films
as Hur många kramar finns det i världen/The Importance of Tying Your Own Shoes
(written by Lena Koppel and Santiago Gil), Känn ingen sorg/Shed No Tears (written
by Cilla Jackert), Snabba cash: Livet deluxe/Easy Money: Life Deluxe (written by
Maria Karlsson and Jens Jonsson), LasseMajas detektivbyrå: von Broms hemlighet/
LasseMaja’s Detective Agency: Von Brom’s Secret (written by Malin Nevander), and
Mig äger ingen/Nobody Owns Me (written by Pia Gradvall). All five films made it
into the list of the ten most watched Swedish cinema releases and through this
achievement they represent the very first time in this overview that I have been
able to write the symbolic – ‘50 per cent’ (Dunefors 2014).
Ester Julin (1885–1931)
Ester Julin helped to shape Swedish film during its golden age in the silent era.
Julin wrote at least 12 scenarios and was a highly respected professional in the
early 1920s, working with two of the world’s most famous directors, Mauritz
Stiller and Victor Sjöström. The press nicknamed Julin the ‘Silent-Movie Queen
from Gysinge’, and in interviews she willingly shared her knowledge about how
to write screenplays; indeed her thoughts on how to write a screenplay are still
relevant today (Cire 1920: 20, 29; O. K. 1921: 407–9).
Julin had a difficult childhood and left home at 16, gaining work as a maid in
Uppsala, north of Stockholm. She left to act in a touring theatre company where
she met the actor Mauritz Stiller. The company toured the country, performing
everything from French farce to Ibsen. Julin then moved to Stockholm, where
Stiller established himself as a director and hired Julin to play the female lead,
Naeimi, in a successful production of Bakom Kuopio/Behind Kuopio, based on a
Finnish comedy. At the same time the first Swedish film production company,
AB Svenska Biografteatern, known as Svenska Bio, expanded. The company were
looking for new talent, and so two young directors were employed with experi-
ence of travelling theatre companies, Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström.
Julin first began to write films because Stiller was not interested in this aspect.
He devised a system for producing screenplays in which Julin acted as his sec-
retary cum writer, although she later also wrote for Sjöström. In an interview at
the height of her career, Julin explains how the writer sat in a tiny room next to
the set and would hand the director the newly written pages just a few minutes
before they were filmed. ‘Sometimes the ink did not have time to dry before the
pages were being acted out in front of the camera’ (Cire 1920: 20). Exactly when
Julin’s career as a scribe began is difficult to determine, but she was first credited
as a writer in 1915 for Hans Hustrus Förflutna/His Wife’s Past. At that time screen-
plays were becoming more sophisticated, with more complex characters, and
Julin, influenced by the Danish screenwriters, quickly learned this new way of
writing and became more prominent and prolific as a screenwriter. Her scenario
for Hans Hustrus Förflutna/His Wife’s Past is evidence of a new cinematic language.
The film, a crime-comedy about an international adventuress, is not a remarkable
story in itself, but it is told with parallel story lines, which had not been used in
Sweden before then. Julin had probably learned the technique during her time as
an assistant or through one of the visiting foreign screenwriters.
Julin became even more renowned as a scenario writer when the crime drama
Dolken/The Dagger (1915), written by Stiller and Julin using their joint pseudo-
nym, Alexander Vichetos, was banned in Sweden for being too brutal. In Europe
the film was shown to full houses and great critical acclaim.
In 1916 Ester Julin and Victor Sjöström wrote Therèse (1916) under the
pseudonym E.V. Juhlström; it was about a woman accused of murdering a young
man who later turns out to be her son. Bengt Idestam-Almquist notes: ‘Therèse is
a crime drama, but surprisingly cleverly laid out. It’s a melodrama, but the script
could be used today. […] The authors work with alternating images and quick
recaps of past events. When Therèse tells the lawyer about her life it is shown
through flashbacks that constantly are being interrupted by close-ups of her and
the lawyer’s faces’ (Idestam-Almquist 1939: 125). Therèse was the first Swedish
film to use flashbacks, a style that Sjöström, a few years later, would develop to
perfection in Körkarlen/The Phantom Carriage (1921).
Sweden 569
The golden age of Swedish film had truly begun, but it had to compete with
Danish films. The Danish director Robert Dinesen boasted about how they would
produce 150 films that year. How were the Swedish films going to compete with
that? Sjöström had the answer: by making better films.
Julin, with Sjöström, wrote the first film based on one of Selma Lagerlöf’s
novels, Tösen från Stormyrtorpet/The Girl from the Marsh Croft (1917). Lagerlöf was
a revered Swedish storyteller and the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature.
The adaptation was highly acclaimed, as Bengt Idestam-Almquist notes:
Better than other screenplays ‘the marsh croft girl’ shows the difference between
early Swedish films and the Golden Age. […] The focus is on the inner work-
ings of the story where actions are given psychological explanations. […] The
screenplay to Tösen från Stormyrtorpet is perfect in its simplicity and clarity.
(Idestam-Almquist 1939: 136–8)
Tösen från Stormyrtorpet was a resounding success, especially in the US where the
New York Times, among others, gave it glowing reviews. Twenty-one copies of the
film were made for distribution in Sweden and, in 1918, 42 copies were delivered
to the United States (Sahlberg 1961: 190–1). Julin was involved in many other
film adaptations of Lagerlöf’s novels, directed by both Sjöström and Stiller. Herr
Arnes Pengar/Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919), Dunungen/In Quest of Happiness (1919),
Karin Ingmarsdotter/God’s Way (1920), and Körkarlen/The Phantom Carriage (1921)
followed the success of Tösen från Stormyrtorpet. It is often difficult to determine
exactly what Julin wrote as she collaborated so closely with directors who were
very involved in the screenplay process. In the case of the screenplays she wrote
for Stiller, there is reason to believe that Julin was responsible for the psychology,
character descriptions, and the humour. Gösta Werner points out that:
[W]hen it came to a person’s character and the finer psychological reactions, he

[Stiller] was mostly content with what was in the screenplay. If he contributed
with anything beyond what was there it usually became more burlesque or
grotesque. His psychological touch was after all still a little too rough for the
delicate, restrained humour. (Werner 1969: 58)
Karin Ingmarsdotter/God’s Way was written by Julin in collaboration with Victor

Sjöström, from another adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s work. The screenplay
shows greater narrative skill in comparison to the early films, since the inserted
text not only describes the action but also advances it. Of the 140 lines in the
screenplay, 80 are dialogue. Bengt Idestam-Almquist reflects that ‘[i]t is interest-
ing to study the text list to Karin Ingmarsdotter. […] The images speak for them-
selves. Image was linked to image, scene to scene, very skilfully. Dialogue texts
were there to reveal what the characters thought and felt. A sure proof that films
now contained a deeper psychology: the characters actually had thoughts in
their heads (Idestam-Almquist 1939: 161). During the 1920s Julin wrote several
original scripts on her own, such as Dar Fyren Blinkar (1924), which were not
adaptations. In an interview in Dagens Nyheter, a daily Swedish newspaper, it was

declared that ‘Ester Julin evidently belongs to those who know their stuff. She
has both humour and knowledge as well as a particularly good understanding
of what works on the silver screen’ (Nilsson 2011). Julin herself appeared quite
secretive in interviews, but she is said to have had a playful smile, a vivid imagi-
nation, and her desk was cluttered with stacks of papers (Nilsson 2011). One of
her regular duties was to read screenplays, as both amateurs and professionals
sent countless screenplays to the production companies and, like today, most
were rejected.
The art of writing screenplays was something that Julin took very seriously. In
interviews she repeatedly stressed how much work there was behind each screen-
play. Julin needed to see each scene in her mind’s eye before she would meticu-
lously describe it in speech and text. It was not enough, she believed, to simply
present a vague plan; every image needed to be carefully linked to the next image
in order to create a smooth chain of images and scenes. Since the rules about how
you should write a screenplay, and what you should write in it, were less strict then,
Julin was able be more flexible in her work. That she worked during a time when
Swedish films were renowned worldwide also enabled her to take certain liberties.
Her advice to her readers was straightforward, and she knew as much about struc-
ture and dramaturgy as the screenwriters of today, explaining: ’You cannot write
a screenplay as if following a recipe. Screenwriters do not have specific methods
that anyone can share in.’ As well as being knowledgeable she also enjoyed her
vocation, pointing out it ‘is an excellent occupation’ (O.K. 1921: 408).
By the mid 1920s Julin had became less active as a screenwriter. Victor Sjöström,
Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo emigrated to Hollywood and Swedish films took
another direction and became more commercial or ‘Americanized’, while sound
film was on its way, which meant that scenario writers had to adapt to the new
form. Julin went on to work as an office clerk, but also wrote a number of articles
and short stories.
In 1926, however, Julin wrote and directed the film Lyckobarnen/Fortunate
Children (1926) in which five orphaned children run away to avoid ending up in a
home for the poor. The film was not a success, but Julin had established herself as
one of the very few female directors of this time.
Stiller returned from Hollywood, disillusioned and ill. He planned to go back to
Hollywood and wanted Julin to go with him, as she had written a screenplay that
he really believed in. However, Stiller died of tuberculosis in 1928, and then Julin
died in 1931, when she was only 46, most probably of tuberculosis.
Stina Bergman (1888–1976)
Stina Lindberg grew up surrounded by the theatre. Her father, August Lindberg,
was the director of a travelling theatre group and her mother, Augusta Lindberg,
was an actress employed at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Stina
first met her future husband and collaborator, Hjalmar Bergman, when she was
17. Stina’s siblings regarded him as odd, anti-social, big, and clumsy, but the
Sweden 571
eccentric Hjalmar would become one of Sweden’s most famous authors of the
twentieth century.
Stina began to help in the translation of Hjalmar’s writing and assignments,
which he received from his publisher. In 1913 she bought a booklet about how
to write a film, probably published by Swedish Film in order to encourage people
to send them new screenplays. Hjalmar Bergman’s interest in writing for film
came out of necessity a couple of years later, when his father passed away, leav-
ing Hjalmar without an inheritance and having to support himself for the first
time. Hjalmar also wanted to start writing screenplays because he was impressed
by Victor Sjöström’s artistic film Terje Vigen (1917), which had received worldwide
acclaim. The studios were looking for new kinds of stories so Hjalmar and Stina
wrote Gycklaren/The Jester in January 1917. Stina typed while Hjalmar dictated
and she had much influence over the style and content of the screenplay. Stina
sent the screenplay to Victor Sjöström without her husband’s knowledge and,
although the screenplay was not filmed, it was their ‘calling card’. They were
taken on to write 40 screenplays in quick succession, which gave them a good
income, but little artistic success.
Hjalmar had a breakthrough in 1919 with the publication of his novel Markurells
i Wadköping/The Markurells in Wadköping. During the next few years he wrote nov-
els, dramas, fairy tales, short stories, articles, and screenplays with Stina’s help,
while she learned much about writing screenplays. During this time many of their
films were released but Stina’s work was not credited.
When influentiual members of the Swedish film community, such as Victor
Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo, left for Hollywood, the Bergmans
decided to go as well. The trip was not a success and they only stayed for three
months, but the experience helped Stina later in her career when she became
head of the script department at Swedish Film. Hjalmar had hoped to collaborate
with Victor Sjöström and the other Swedes who had a loose, if unfavourable,
agreement with MGM. After returning to Sweden from Hollywood they did not
write another screenplay together. Stina no longer protected his reputation and
the truth about his homosexuality became public knowledge, but she would
always defend him and his work which she referred to as ‘her children’ (Sundstedt
2012c). Hjalmar died in 1931 after which Stina collapsed and was admitted to
hospital.
Stina began to write again, and her first screenplay on which she received sole
credit, Swedenhielms (1935), was released four years after Hjalmar’s death and
based on one of his novels. The screenplays that followed were mostly adaptations
of ‘quality literature’, many written by her late husband. Between 1938 and 1943
she is credited as co-writer on six films: Dollar (1938), adapted from a play by
Hjalmar; the drama A Woman’s Face (1938); Gubben Kommer (1939); Rejoice While
You’re Young Fellow Cadets (1939); an adaptation of a novel by Hjalmar, Hans nads
testament (1940); and the drama Stora Skallen (1943).
The Second World War was looming when Stina Bergman was appointed as
the executive of the script department at the production company SF (Svensk
Filmindustri). Sweden was neutral and did not take part in the war, but the
lack of availability of foreign films meant that more Swedish films had to be
produced to satisfy the demand. Stina’s experience was invaluable and she went
on to compose a booklet on how to write screenplays, outlining what makes a
good film:
The story must from the start be so rich, so filled with life, and so much must
happen for the film to be complete, that every millimetre needs to be used for
an essential part. What then is essential? Well, it is the result and the climax in
each happening. The audience does not have the patience to watch a happen-
ing slowly happen where every little change build up the whole. The audience
wants to reach the climax fast. I usually make a drastic comparison. A scalp
hunter was satisfied with the best part of his victim, the scalp. He strung them
up next to each other on his belt, and he thus only had to carry the essential
part. A scalp is enough to show what kind of victim he was after. He displayed
his triumphs in a very concentrated form! (Bergman 1942: 9)
Stina Bergman created a successful script department at SF that eventually

consisted of six hired writers. Mikael Timm notes:
The work was organised the same way as Hollywood’s production compa-
nies. The writers worked regular office hours and wrote screenplays based on
novels and short stories, or they might be asked to rewrite existing screen-
plays. If you had an idea yourself you had to write it in your spare time.
(Timm 2008: 95)
Stina Bergman believed in the uses of American dramaturgy: ‘We were taught to
be clear, to build the action towards a climax. There should be a beginning, mid-
dle, and a resolution. […] I’ve had great use of if ever since. I didn’t enter formless-
ness without something to lean against. It was very helpful to use the American
film as a starting point’ (Timm 2008: 95–6).
Stina functioned as a mentor to many screenwriters and was often not cred-
ited for her work. Indeed her knowledge and understanding of the screenwriting
process is well recorded, as in this extract from her writing:
The camera cannot run around as it pleases. Its laws have to be studied. Indeed
it is said that if the writer states how he wants it then the team can do it. But
this saying is not correct, since the writer needs to know the limits of what is
possible, otherwise he asks for the impossible. (Bergman 1942: 3)
Through her executive position at SF, and through her influence over Hjalmar,
Stina Bergman played an important role in Swedish film history, not least of
course through hiring Ingmar Bergman. Unfortunately, despite the fact that she
outlived her husband by 40 years and had a successful career of her own, Stina
Bergman is forever associated with Hjalmar Bergman.
Sweden 573
Astrid Lindgren (1907– 2002)
Astrid Lindgren is known worldwide for her children’s books; however, it is little
known that she wrote about 30 screenplays. Astrid Lindgren, born Ericsson, had a
happy childhood in Småland, a district in southern Sweden. Lindgren’s father was
an accomplished storyteller, and her mother kept a journal that Lindgren would
eventually inherit.
Lindgren’s first story was published in the local newspaper when she was 13,
and after graduating she was hired as an editor at the same paper. Two years later
she left the job when she become pregnant with the chief editor’s child. The editor
offered to marry her but Lindgren turned him down and went to Copenhagen
where she gave birth to her son, Lars. Lindgren moved to Stockholm and had to
leave Lars in foster care. She began working as a secretary, and eventually married
the department’s executive director in 1931. Being a married housewife finally
gave her the means to get her son back.
In 1934 Lindgren gave birth to her daughter, who a few years later asked her
mother to tell her a story while she was ill; from this the stories about Pippi
Longstocking began. During World War II, Lindgren worked in the letter-censors’
department at the secret service. It was while she was there, with her colleague
Per-Martin Hamberg, that Lindgren wrote her first screenplay, När man blir kär/
When You Fall in Love, in the early 1940s. The script department at SF, run by
Stina Bergman, rejected the screenplay, but Lindgren argued against the decision,
and even though the film was never produced, she impressed the dramaturge at
the script department. According to director Ingvar Skogsberg, who was involved
with several of Astrid Lindgren’s film productions, the dialogue in the screenplay
was very funny and Lindgren established her characters with their first lines of
dialogue (Sundstedt 2012d).
Lindgren wrote Pippi Longstocking when she injured her foot and had to stay at
home. The first version was rejected but a reworked draft of Pippi Longstocking was
submitted to a competition at the same publishing house, which she won, and
the first novel in the series was published in 1945. Pippi remains one of her most
popular characters, both as a novel, TV programme and film. The first adaptation
of Pippi Longstocking (1949) to film two years later was not a success and Lindgren
did not like the changes made by the director, deciding to adapt most of her own
novels thereafter.
Lindgren then wrote a new story about the orphaned boy Rasmus. The feature
film was called Luffaren och Rasmus/Rasmus and the Vagabond (1955), but before
the film had premiered Lindgren adapted the screenplay for the radio (the show
was transmitted in 1955) and then adapted the screenplay into a book. A year later
she wrote a third installment about Rasmus, and again it was published as a novel,
transmitted over the radio, and then filmed as Rasmus, Pontus and Toker (1956).
Lindgren adapted the last installment of the Bill Bergson series into the film
Mästerdetektiven lever farligt/The Master Detective Lives Dangerously (1957), with a
new director, Olle Hellbom, who from then on became her first choice when
directing her work. It was this lasting collaboration and friendship that brought
about the international success of so many Swedish children’s films.
Hellbom and Lindgren completed 20 films before Hellbom died of cancer in
1982. Lindgren described him as follows:
He was a strange man, but it was as if he didn’t realise that himself. I’ve never
met a person less self-centred. He had no pretentions, and he was completely
unassuming but quick to praise others. ‘Brilliant’ was what he said when you
handed in a draft. It was his favourite word and you left feeling brilliant.
But eventually you realised that if anyone was brilliant, it was Olle himself.’
(Unknown Author 2013a)
Lindgren often wrote for television. The series Vi på Saltkråkan/We on Seacrow

Island (1968) was written for TV, but mostly shown in the cinemas, for legal rea-
sons. She received many offers to write for the film and TV industry, but refused
most of them and usually regretted taking those she accepted. Lindgren rewrote
the dialogue for a comedy series for adults, Nina, Nora, Nalle (SVT, 1961), thinking
her work was anonymous, but she was credited as the writer. She explains that the
director, Åke Falck, had added ‘horrible things’ (Sundstedt 2012e).
Astrid Lindgren remained faithful to director Olle Hellbom until his death.
Ingmar Bergman wanted to direct Bröderna Lejonhjärta/The Brothers Lionheart
(1977), which Lindgren had written and adapted, but she refused and let Hellbom
direct. It was to be his last big film. The film won many awards and became the
first Swedish children’s film to be exported to China. The Brothers Lionheart is
the story of two young brothers who die, but live on in the land of Nangijala.
Because of its difficult content Lindgren was accused of encouraging children to
commit suicide, but she stood by her work. She also received many letters and
visits from both adults and children who were comforted by the story and felt
that it provided them with a way to talk about death with children who were
terminally ill.
Lindgren was brought up with the oral storytelling tradition, and it was her
method of working; she woke up early and took down her thoughts in shorthand,
as quickly as if she had spoken them out loud. She adhered to the ‘tell not show’
method instead of the ‘show not tell’ that is encouraged in many screenwriting
books today (see, for instance, McKee 1998, Seger 2010, and Field 2005). For
Lindgren, the characters and the dialogue were the most important things, not
the creation of images. She explains her working method as ‘fast, almost so that
I’m ashamed when I hear how others work and struggle with their books. I have a
sort of funny feeling that the book is already finished when I start to write it, that
I’m only providing the printing’ (Unknown Author 2013b). There are numerous
examples from film shoots where the director has asked for an additional scene,
dialogue changes, or a new song, and she has returned 15 minutes later with the
new material.
Lindgren wrote many different kinds of stories but they all have one thing in
common: they centre on children. In a review of Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn/ The
Sweden 575
Children of Bullerby Village (1960), the newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen wrote that

‘the action packed and sensation filled Disney films are wrong from a child’s psy-
chological perspective. Children’s films should contain drama but not what we
adults find dramatic or exciting but drama according to the children. For them
the simplest everyday experiences, such as a visit to the shop or the pulling out of
a tooth, can be filled with drama’ (SFI 2013).
Lindgren was awarded more than 50 prizes for her novels, and many of her films
also won awards. In honour of her memory, the Swedish government established an
international literature prize, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is given to
authors, illustrators, or organizations that work for children’s literature and children’s
rights. The collection of Astrid Lindgren’s original manuscripts in the Swedish Royal
Library, which includes her screenplays, was added to Unesco’s World Heritage list
in 2005.
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Switzerland
Michael Burri
Women screenwriters in Swiss film history
In 1895, the year following its debut in London and Paris, the Edison Kinetoscope
delivered the first moving photographic images to Swiss viewers, with 1896 con-
stituting the annus mirabilis for the new medium. In the same year, the Geneva-
based Casmir Sivan who, with E. Dalphin, built and patented in Switzerland a
camera/projector device, projected moving images in the Edison Pavilion at the
Swiss National Exhibition held in Geneva. As elsewhere in Switzerland, travel-
ling fairground film entertainment promoters such as Georges Hipleh-Walt, Jean
Weber-Clément, and Louis Praiss gradually displaced the early film pioneers. Their
ambulatory production facilities, with on-site outdoor filming, developing, and
projection, presented the Swiss public with a constant stream of actualités – on
a scale that was itself an attraction. The Salon-Cinématographe of Hipleh-Walt, for
example, featured a transportable cinema, 98 feet long and 33 feet wide, with a
126 square foot projection screen, and room for 800 spectators. An early travelling
film entrepreneur, Marguerite Wallenda (1882–1952), founded a moving cinema
in 1905, in which she conceived and filmed street scenes and cityscapes in the
northwestern Swiss town of Biel/Bienne, travelled to Paris to develop the negative,
and quickly returned to project the filmed scenes for their astounded amateur
subjects. In 1912, Wallenda received an official commission to record the visit of
German Emperor Wilhelm II to Switzerland, a film document that is regarded as
a precursor to the ‘film weeklies’ that were to flourish across Europe in permanent
indoor cinemas only a few years later.
Certain factors greatly shaped Swiss film history and the women screenwrit-
ers working there. The first is that due to a combination of accessible geo-
graphic location, striking natural landscape, and advanced tourist infrastructure,
Switzerland had already established itself as an international destination for the
wealthy, many of whom embraced national habits and traditions during their
extended residences. The second is that a fascination with the Swiss natural land-
scape, whose roots lay in the Romantic period, was re-energized by a contem-
porary cultural disposition that associated mountain settings with good health
and successful convalescence, while such mountain settings also furnished a
578
Switzerland 579
backdrop for the modern European and North American quest for heroic action
and adventure.
The screenwriter Elizabeth Main (1860–1934), espoused this trend in continen-
tal filmmaking. Born in London as Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed, she relocated to
Switzerland for health reasons in 1881, and lived there for long periods between
1880 and 1900. Main became an advocate of winter mountain climbing, a perspec-
tive she championed in The High Alps in Winter, or, Mountaineering in Search of Health
(1883), as well as in the ten films that she made during the winters of 1898–9 or
1899–1900 in St Moritz in the Upper Engadine. These films each run from roughly
one to five minutes, and record winter sporting activities such as bobsled racing
(three films), tobogganing (three films), outdoor skating (two films), hockey, and
sleighing and snowballing. The film Bobsled Racing 2, for example, shows bobsleds
with women navigating the famous Cresta Road at a ‘very high speed’, with one
bobsled ‘narrowly escaping an upset’. Outdoor winter activities promoted robust
health, Main’s films suggest, and the female constitution could match the qualities
of hardiness so cultivated by males of the period. Recently acknowledged as the
first mountain filmmaker, earlier than the celebrated Frederick Ormiston-Smith
and Frederick Burlingham, Main found herself emancipated by the Alps. An early
practitioner of ‘manless’ mountain climbing, she later noted in her autobiography
that ‘I owe a supreme debt of gratitude to the mountains for knocking from me
the shackles of conventionality’ (Le Blond 1928: 90).
Rugged mountain settings continued to attract directors and women screen-
writers, even as the story film overtook the open air, non-fiction genre in the
years leading up to and after World War I. The American-born Ernette Tamm
(1890–1986) scripted and starred in two early 1920s feature films, set against
dramatic mountain landscapes, for Swiss producer and director Arthur Adrien
Porchet (1879–1956). In the melodrama L’appel de la montagne/The Call of the
Mountain (1923), the promotional slogans – ‘elegant climbers’, ‘gorgeous ski runs’,
‘fatal ice crevices’ – faithfully register the symbolic associations set in motion
by the mountain terrain. Tamm plays Hélène Harding, a village beauty who has
rejected the local mountain guide, André Moret (Emile Crettex), in order to marry
a wealthy American and pay off her father’s debts. Following her husband’s death,
she returns to the Valais village, where she is rescued twice by Moret – once from a
mountain storm and then from the importunate tourist admirer, Count Billinsky –
and ultimately yields to his sheltering arms. The Call of the Mountain is the oldest
surviving Suisse romande feature film and reflects a Swiss commercial confidence
in the mountain film: Porchet hired the high-profile Abel Gance cameraman Marc
Bujard, deployed new portable cameras for the heavy on-location filming, and
even the actor, Crettex, was a well-known mountain climber.
However, it was Tamm’s screenplay for Visages d’enfants/Faces of Children (1925),
a Swiss-French co-production directed by Jacques Feyder (1885–1948), that sug-
gested an aesthetically ambitious side to the Swiss mountain film. Also shot
on location in Valais, Faces of Children tells the story of Jean, a village boy who
witnesses the sickness, death, and funeral of his mother, followed by the swift
remarriage of his father. The film thus displaces a conventional narrative of adult
romantic conflict with the struggle of a child to mourn, a struggle that unfolds
partly via the discord between Jean and his new half-sister, Pierrette. Tricked by
Jean, Pierrette herself comes to be buried in a snow avalanche, though, unlike
Jean’s mother, she is saved – via a spectacular snow rescue. Focused on mountain
isolation, children, and loss, the film indicates a socio-critical purpose at best
implicit in The Call of the Mountain. In 1973, the French cinema icon Jean Mitry
singled out three unforgettable works from the 1920s: Gance’s Napoléon (1927),
a René Clair film, and Faces of Children. Tamm, also known as E. Tammy, is uncred-
ited in the 2004 restoration of Faces of Children, rarely mentioned in film histories,
and remains in need of critical re-evaluation.
That Faces of Children has often been situated within a French film tradition,
including Mitry himself, can be attributed partly to the enduring fracture brought
about by the First World War between the generally pro-French francophone
Suisse romande and the generally pro-Central Powers German-speaking region of
Switzerland. But it also reflects the low profile of indigenous Swiss film produc-
tion, outside of the Second World War period, and the scarcity of domestic film
production companies.
Beyond the Swiss borders, the colourful, Geneva-born adventurer Ella Maillart
(1903–97) was assembling material in Central Asia that would yield the silent docu-
mentaries Nomades afghans/Afghan Nomads (1939) and Auf abenteuerlicher Fahrt
durch Iran und Afghanistan/The Cruel Way (1939), among others. In Switzerland,
however, the Swiss production team of Marie Lips-Mattler (1893–1970?) and her
husband, Konrad Lips (1893–1970), had founded a recording studio in Allschwil
near Basel around 1910 that would emerge as a pioneering producer of advertising,
feature, and documentary films for the next 30 years. Lips-Mattler produced Der
Bergführer/The Mountain Guide (1917) for Schweizer Express-Films, a work considered
to be both the first Swiss feature film and the earliest ‘mountain film’. Summarizing
the reception of The Mountain Guide in the period film press, the Swiss historian
Dominik Schnetzer observes that ‘not even the monumental Griffith works, Birth
of a Nation and Intolerance, were … ascribed such great weight’ as what the trade
journal Kinema called a ‘national treasure in the truest sense of the word’ (Schnetzer
2009: 152). Lips-Mattler subsequently co-directed with her husband S’Wybervolch
isch schuld/Womankind is at Fault (1935), a title that underscored the growing
importance of dialect in defining a ‘Swiss’ film, in studio facilities that were ‘by far
the largest and most modern’ in the country (Dumont 1987: 186).
In 1987, the Swiss film historian Martin Schaub observed that ‘as a rule,
filmmaking is still a man’s business, not just in Switzerland, but especially in
Switzerland’ (Schlappner and Schaub 1987: 139). This observation hardly presents
a full account of Swiss film history, but during the post-war years and into the
1950s Swiss women screenwriters faced conservative gender expectations and
limited access to the film industry. Yet Swiss women screenwriters and filmmakers
such as Marie Lips-Mattler and Reni Mertens (1918–2000) surmounted these dif-
ficulties through a strategy of partnership with a male film entrepreneur. Mertens
founded Teleproduction in 1953 with Walter Marti; over the next 40 years they
produced more than 20 short and feature-length documentary films. Their early
Switzerland 581
films together highlighted problems of mental and physical disability which had
not been acknowledged publicly. Ursula oder Das unwerte Leben/Ursula, or The
Useless Life (1966), for example, is about Ursula Bodmer, a child once classified as
‘ineducable’ and thus ineligible to receive any state assistance. A pioneer in Swiss
documentary film, Mertens represented the socially engaged artist whose subject
was human potential.
The rise of the women’s movement and the internationalization of cinema in
the 1960s meant that attitudes were changing, and the Swiss woman film auteur
had begun to emerge. Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch (1917–2003), a graphic artist and
mother who had sketched illustrations for the Swiss woman’s magazine Annabelle
and travelled as a photographer for the newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and the Swissair
Gazette, began a late career as screenwriter and filmmaker with two experimental
short films, Spiegelei/Fried Egg (1969) and Memento Moritat (1969), at the Solothurn
Film Festival. ‘Everything changed,’ Hesse-Rabinovitch explained, ‘when I took
a small film camera in my hand, and recorded colourfully moving images, and
assembled these in a story.’ Three years later, Fried Egg, a film that captured visual
patterns on water surfaces as ‘rhythmic, musical experience’ (Hesse-Rabinovitch
1998: 129), opened New York’s first International Festival of Women’s Film in
1972. In 1974, Hesse-Rabinovitch screened Der rote Blau/The Red Blue (1971), with
its playful meditation on the predicament of a mime artist who is held in the grip
of an elusive melody, at the International Festival of Women’s Film in Paris. Two
years later, in 1975, she initiated the first festival of women’s film in Switzerland, a
forum that was to play a significant role in the emergence of women screenwriters
and filmmakers in Swiss cinema. A charismatic personality who added film por-
traits, documentaries, and video experiments to her portfolio, Hesse-Rabinovitch
became the iconic feminist artist in Switzerland during the second half of the
twentieth century. Sirenen-Eisland/Siren Island (1982) transported mythical sirens
to the modern underworld of ‘chanteuses’, drag performances, and the lunatic
fringe of entertainment in New York, Paris, and Zurich, and opened the prestig-
ious avant-garde film series Cineprobe at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982.
But it is Geister und Gäste/Ghosts and Guests (1989), an imaginative homage to
the Grand Hotel Brissago near Locarno, Switzerland, a staged documentary shot
in the hotel’s ruins, that remains Hesse-Rabinovitch’s – still largely unknown –
masterpiece.
Jacqueline Veuve (1930–2013) was born a little more than a decade later
than Hesse-Rabinovitch, but she was already active from 1956–8 at the Musée
de l’Homme in Paris, as a student of the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean
Rouch. Veuve emerged in the late 1960s as an axiomatic figure of Swiss cinema
and helped to forge the notable documentary film tradition that still flourishes in
Switzerland. Sharing credit with Yves Yersin, Veuve’s first film, Le panier à viande/
The Meat Basket (1966) records a disappearing local butchering tradition in the
Swiss canton Vaud – ‘bouchoyage’, in which, in a day of hard labour, an itinerant
butcher goes from farm to farm to slaughter pigs. Of her collaborative experience
with Yersin on that film, Veuve later recalled that ‘I was never given credit for it.
That’s always the lot of a co-filmmaker, especially a woman: she is forgotten …
even though the idea had been mine and I had worked on it’ (Fillipetti 2005: 3).
Despite such adversity, Veuve’s films were recognized early and often: Les lettres
de Stalingrad/Letters from Stalingrad (1972) showcased letters written by German
soldiers to their families before the legendary German defeat at Stalingrad, and
received First Prize at the International Youth and Film in 1972 at Cannes.
Following a study residence with documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock in
the United States, Veuve came back to Switzerland in the mid 1970s and returned
to the ethnographic documentation of Swiss life she had begun with The Meat
Basket. Two outstanding films from Veuve’s rich body of work, which she scripted
and directed, are La mort du grand-père ou Le sommeil du juste/Death of Grandfather,
or the Sleep of the Just (1978), a feature-length documentary told by five daughters
about their father, whose Swiss Protestant work ethic shaped a career that began as
a farmer and ended as a family factory owner, and Chronique paysanne en Gruyère/A
Peasant Chronicle in Gruyère (1990), a film that records a year in the life of a small
farming family in the Gruyère region.
Veuve’s official filmography is impressive and includes 46 items that cross con-
tinents, genres, and subject matter, and she served as an inspirational figure for
several generations of Swiss women filmmakers, even if those inspired by her did
not always share her intense fascination with the individual lives, traditions, and
multiple histories of the Swiss people.
Changes to the Federal Constitution in the early 1960s led to a permanent fund-
ing body for Swiss film production and cultural activities in the field of cinema;
indeed the early work of Jacqueline Veuve was supported by this. Under the wid-
ening film policy, which initially envisioned financial support only for documen-
tary films, the American-born June Kovach (1932–) delivered the script for the
landmark Siamo Italiani/The Italians (1964). Directed by her husband, Alexander
J. Seiler, the film explored the situation of roughly 500,000 Italian guest workers
present in Switzerland, whose existence was rarely commented on. Informed by
the American aesthetics of ‘direct cinema’, The Italians brought contemporary
Swiss social reality to the screen. Kovach had previously studied filmmaking as
a hobby, and her work with Seiler led to an independent career as a screenwriter
and filmmaker.
In addition to the lack of state support for film, there were many other obstacles
for prospective Swiss women screenwriters and filmmakers in the early 1960s;
Switzerland had no film school and few opportunities for training in the cinema.
But, by the early 1970s, a cohort of American-, French-, German-, and Russian-
trained Swiss women, including Lisa Faessler (1946–), Danielle Jaeggi (1945–),
Cristina Perincioli (1946–), and Maya Simon (1946–), began to constitute an
identifiable group of female Swiss documentary film writers and makers (Betz and
Schneider 1995: 14). In 1975, Hesse-Rabinovitch, Kovach, the Italian-born Tula
Roy (1934–), Veuve, and three others formed the Frauen-Filmschaffende Schweiz
(FFS) (the Women Filmmaker’s Association of Switzerland). Others, such as Jaeggi
in her video reportage of striking workers, Cerizay, elles ont osé/Cerizay, They Dare
(1971), and the Geneva-born multimedia artist Muriel Olesen (1948–), answered
the challenge of new visual media. The creation in 1977 of a department of film at
Switzerland 583
the Geneva School of Fine Arts (École Supérieure d’Art Visuel Genève), by Françis
Reusser and François Albera, meant that towards the end of the 1970s the future
of women’s screenwriting and filmmaking in Switzerland looked more promising
than it had a decade earlier.
From its inception, the FFS aimed to create films with female-specific themes
(Hausheer 1995: 46). In this genre, Cristina Perincioli’s Die Macht der Männer ist die
Geduld der Frauen/The Power of Men is the Patience of Women (1978) told the story
of a market worker who, through the support of other women, finds the strength
to leave her physically abusive husband, while Tula Roy’s Lieber ledig als unver-
heiratet/Better Single than Unmarried (1978) explores the alternatives to remaining
a single woman. In addition efforts were underway to make films cheaply using
unconventional methods, as in the ‘Cinéma des copines’ (girlfriends’ cinema) working
collectives, in which screenwriting, among other traditional filmmaking tasks,
were shared (Betz and Schneider 1995: 22–3).
Many Swiss women, during those years, found film training and work oppor-
tunities in Switzerland limited and social attitudes oppressive. The career of Léa
Pool (b. 1950) is illustrative; born in Geneva, she worked briefly as an assistant
to Yves Yersin before emigrating to Canada, where she studied film production
at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Screenwriter, editor, and director Tania
Stöcklin (1959–) studied film in Berlin and divides her time between Berlin and
Zurich, like many other Swiss women film professionals. Pool is a dual national
by circumstance, with several films co-produced by Canada and Switzerland.
Her early film Anne Trister (1986) was awarded a Golden Bear nomination at the
Berlin International Film Festival, as was Emporte Moi/Set Me Free (1999), a girl’s
coming-of-age story set in 1963 Montreal, which also received a Canadian Screen
Award for the Best Screenplay and Director, and the Swiss Quartz Prize (bestowed
by the Swiss Film Academy) for Best Fiction Film. Pool’s National Canadian Film
Board documentary Pink Ribbons (2011) is a critical look at breast cancer and the
politics of philanthropy. Both films were co-written by Pool.
For women screenwriters and auteurs, a dual-national professional identity
can also serve as a strategy to oppose a perceived Swiss provincialism in the film
industry. Stöcklin says that when she returned from Berlin, her ‘exotic allure’
meant everyone wanted to work with her (Buchan 2002). Anne-Marie Miéville
(1945–) is one of the most gifted Swiss women screenwriters whose careers have
blossomed outside their native country. The Canton Vaud-born Miéville is co-
author of the formidable mid 1970s Godard-directed films, which remain some
of the most potent questionings of cinematic representation, and include Numéro
deux (1975), Comment ça va (1976), and Six fois deux (Sur et sous la communication)
(1976). In Switzerland, Miéville made two short films with Françis Reusser, prior
to her two-and-a-half decade collaboration with Godard. The partnership with
Reusser led to the much-praised films Sauve qui peut (la vie)/Slow Motion (1980),
and Prénom Carmen (1983), but has also overshadowed her own three feature films
(all Swiss-French co-productions) and four short films.
Public financial support for feature and documentary films in Switzerland is
mostly provided through the Federal Office of Culture (BAK) and Swiss television
(SRG), the latter having also figured notably in the training of film profession-
als, especially in documentary film. In the mid 1970s the Zurich-born Marianne
Pletscher (1946–) worked as a reporter and foreign correspondent for Swiss tel-
evision before turning to television documentary filmmaking in the late 1970s.
Her Heimkehr nach Süditalien/Return to Southern Italy (1979) captures the less-
than-prodigal return home to Italy of former Swiss guest workers, while Einmal
vergewaltigt, mehrfach gedemütigt/Raped Once, Humiliated Again and Again (1982),
a documentary on female victims of sexual crime, is characteristic of Pletscher’s
focus on social justice in Switzerland (Schmid 2006: 49). Namibia: zwei Frauen,
ein Land, eine Geschichte/Namibia: Two Women, One Country, One History (1989)
prefigured the ongoing trend in Swiss documentary film towards examining
the global relationship between poverty in the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’
world. The films of Sabine Gisinger (1959–), who also trained as a Swiss televi-
sion reporter, may be seen as part of this trend. Homeland (2003) tells the story
of five visiting intellectuals – an Indian, a Palestinian, a Filipino, a Russian, and
a Senegalese – who encounter Switzerland as outsiders; Guru (2010) is an account
of two individuals who fall under the spell of the charismatic, but destined for
trouble, Indian spiritual teacher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
Switzerland continues to promote a robust tradition of documentary films. In
2013, BAK documentary film subsidies were roughly one-third of those for fea-
ture films, and the domestic audience for documentaries is the highest in Europe
(Schmid 2006: 39). But in recent years a promising new generation of Swiss women
screenwriters and feature filmmakers has emerged from Swiss film schools, espe-
cially the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (Zurich University of the Arts), including
Sabine Boss (1966–), Anna Luif (1972–), Bettina Oberli (1972–), Andrea Štaka
(1973–), the celebrated French-Swiss writer-director Ursula Meier (1971–), and
Stina Werenfels (1964–), as well as the Basel-born, Portugal-based Jeanne Waltz
(1962–). It was Boss who, in 2002, delivered the first commercial triumph by a
Swiss woman screenwriter and filmmaker with the situation comedy Ernstfall in
Havana/A Serious Case in Havana (2002). Also active in Swiss television, Boss con-
tinued her success with the television film Das Geheimnis von Murk/The Secret of
Murk (2008), which went on general release. Štaka cemented her reputation with
the feature Das Fräulein/The Woman (2006) as the most perceptive observer of new
Yugoslav immigrants in Switzerland. Meier’s last two films, Home (2008), winner of
the 2009 Swiss Quartz Prize for Best Screenplay and Best Fiction Film, and L’enfant
d’en haut/Sister (2012), which made the shortlist for the Best Foreign Film at the
2013 Academy Awards, show the cross-cultural resonances of the family drama.
Indeed there are now a growing number of internationally ‘bankable’ Swiss women
screenwriters and film directors, including Oberli, whose Die Herbstzeitlosen/Late
Bloomers (2006), is anchored in its small Swiss-German village setting in Canton
Bern, and the third-highest-grossing film in Swiss box-office history.
In the last decade, Swiss women screenwriters and directors have achieved
much, but what the future holds is far from certain. As Oberli pointedly remarks,
‘It’s a vicious circle. The fewer women who make film, the fewer women there are
who emulate them’ (Anonymous 2012).
Switzerland 585
References
Anonymous. 2012. ‘Es gibt keine Frauenfilme’. Interview with Bettina Oberli. Berner Zeitung,
17 May.
Betz, C., and Schneider, A. 1995. ‘Wege zum Film. Ausbildung, Arbeitsweise, Subventionspraxis’,
in B. Blöchlinger, A. Schneider, C. Hausheer, and C. Betz (eds) Cut. Film- und Videomacherinnen
Schweiz von den Anfängen bis 1994. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Nexus 11 edition. Basel: Stroemfeld
Verlag, pp. 13–35.
Buchan, S. 2002. ‘Exile, Identity, Cinéma des copines: Women Filmmakers in Switzerland’,
Senses of Cinema, 22.
Dumont, H. 1987. Geschichte des Schweizer Films. Spielfilme 1896–1965. Lausanne: Schweizer
Filmarchiv/Cinémathèque Suisse.
Fillipetti, S. 2005. ‘Jacqueline Veuve: Interview’, Ciné-Portraits, (Director’s Portrait/Veuve),
pp. 1–27.
Hausheer, C. 1995. ‘Frauen, Bilder, Politik. Aufbruch in den siebziger Jahren’, in B. Blöchlinger,
A. Schneider, C. Hausheer, and C. Betz (eds) Cut. Film- und Videomacherinnen Schweiz von
den Anfängen bis 1994. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Nexus 11 edition. Basel: Stroemfeld Verlag,
pp. 43–54.
Hesse-Rabinovitch, I. 1998. Das grosse Spiel Film, Edition Wendel Oberli. Bern: Benteli Verlag.
Le Blond, E. 1928. Day In, Day Out. London: John Lane/The Bodley Head.
Schlappner M., and M. Schaub (eds). 1987. Vergangenheit und Gegenwart des Schweizer Films
(1896 bis 1987). Zürich: Schweizerisches Filmzentrum.
Schmid, A. 2006. Erfolgsfaktor Schweizer Film? Norderstedt: Grin Verlag.
Schnetzer, D. 2009. Bergbild und geistige Landesverteidigung. Die visuelle Inszenierung der Alpen
im massenmedialen Ensemble der modernen Schweiz. Zürich: Chronos Verlag.
Turkey
Jule Selbo
A brief history of Turkish cinema reveals early private screenings of foreign film
imports in the late 1890s at the sultan’s court. Commercial production by Turkish
filmmakers began in the mid 1910s and generally focused on adaptations from
theatre or literature. In the 1940s, narratives that were written specifically for film
gained popularity. However, the political and social climate in Turkey of the late
twentieth century and into the twenty-first century affected the industry. There
were multiple military interventions, conflicts between the Kurdish and Turkish
armies, changing governmental practices, growing censorship, economic divides,
concerns over environmental conditions, and the expansion of business and
marketing and foreign investments in Turkey.
Yesilcam is a term used for the popular Turkish cinema; it is used in similar
fashion to how ‘Hollywood’ is used for the film industry in the United States. It is
named after a street in Istanbul where many film studios and production offices
are based. The 1950s through to the 1970s is considered a high point in Yesilcam,
for there were over 300 films made annually. Screenwriter, actress and producer
Cahide Sonku (1916–81) co-wrote and starred in Namik Kemal and the Motherland
in 1951, sharing credit with her then husband, Tatel Artemel, and Munir Hayri
Egeli. Sonku became a movie star in the 1930s, often compared to Greta Garbo
and Marlene Dietrich. She is known as one of the few females to gain a screenwriting
credit in early films. She also worked as a director and formed her own production
company, Sonku Film, in 1950. In the 1980s, another popular actress, Turkan
Soray (1945–) added directing to her credits, and she receives co-screenwriting
credit on Yilani oldurseler (1981).
The advent of television stalled the Turkish feature film industry in the 1970s;
however, two decades later, the industry revived. Film professor Asuman Suner,
in her book New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory (2010), examines
recurring themes that drive many of the new-wave Turkish screenwriters and film-
makers, such as a deep-seated desire for belonging, a sense of identity, and a desire
for the understanding of memories. New-wave stories have much to do with
understanding the memory of, or search for, a home or family that may no longer
exist. The film narratives are often stories of people dealing with loss, a desire to
reconnect (or not), or trying to deal with navigation through a world that has
586
Turkey 587
a long and important history and hierarchies – but due to its location and politics
is a society in near-constant flux. A recurring idea in the new-wave Turkish cinema
is what Suner terms ‘spectral home’. Suner notes that new-wave Turkish screen-
writers and directors approach the exploration of the Turkish character from two
different perspectives – nostalgia (a longing for home and belonging in familial
and provincial and religious identity), and political (changes in democratization,
censorship and relations with the European Union). Turkey’s new-wave move-
ment, in full force today, with several female screenwriters among the filmmakers,
encompasses ‘popular and art films alike, [and] constantly returns to the ques-
tion of belonging and interrogates it from different social, political, and aesthetic
perspectives’ (Suner 2010: 16).
Suner notes the absence of strong female character in Turkish cinema and
finds that, although this is problematical, there are positive signs in recent years
as there seems to be a ‘critical self-awareness’ of this fact, and the acceptance of
a dominant patriarchal society is questioned (Suner 2010: 21). Even so, as Suner
discusses, that although there has been an increase in ‘women’s films’ in Turkey,
many are helmed by male filmmakers and still function under a ‘patriarchal gaze’
(Suner 2010: 165).
In Alyson Neel’s article ‘Focus on female screenwriters’ in Time Out: Istanbul
(March 2013), it is noted, ‘Turkey’s movie industry is still a boys’ club, but women
filmmakers are breaking through barriers and winning acclaim.’ Neel notes some
of the challenges women face:
To start with, there’s the overall political and social context in Turkey – the
ruling government’s increasingly conservative social policies, the unyielding
gender pay gap and the daily murders and assaults against women. None of
this makes it easy for women to advance in any field.
Documentary filmmaker and screenwriter Mizgin Mujde Arslan, at age 11, was
pulled out of school and told she was to marry. She went against tradition and
patriarchal heirarchy and defied expectations. She went on a hunger strike and
stopped talking until her grandfather finally enrolled her in school. She went on
to earn a degree in biology, worked as a journalist, and then attended film school.
Arslan applauds the efforts of fellow female filmmakers like Yesim Ustaoglu, Pelin
Esmer, Asli Özge and Belmin Soylemez, noting that each of them make sacrifices
to work in the Turkish film industry. Arslan is quoted as saying: ‘Opportunities
in filmmaking are far more limited for women than men. Because men run the
film industry, their perspectives and wants dominate’ (Neel 2013). Arslan, due to
her controversial work, was arrested in 2012 for alleged connections to a Kurdish
terrorist organization. In 2013, the charges were dropped. Arslan noted that polit-
ical subject matter is not limited to the situation with the Kurds. ‘Just making
a woman the main character of a film is inherently political’ (Neel 2013).
‘Most [films directed by women] fall loosely under “drama” ... and they address
both political and social issues,’ Hülya Uğur Tanrıöver (director of the Women’s Film
Festival in Turkey) says. ‘They examine issues women deal with in Turkey – incest,
unwanted pregnancies, rape – as well as the identity issues of the Kurds’ (Neel
2013).
The following is a partial list of women screenwriters in Turkey:
Ilksen Basarir (1978–) is a screenwriter and director. Her writing credits
include Love in Another Language (2009, co-writer with Mert Firat); Atlikarinca/
Merry-Go-Round (2011, co-writer with Mert Firat), a film that focuses on the
effects of incest on a family; Erkek tarafi testoteron (2013, co-writer with Mert
Firat and Kemal Aydogan); and Once upon a Time (to be released 2015, co-written
with Mert Firat).
Pelin Esmer (1972–) is a screenwriter, director, cinematographer, and producer.
She studied anthropology at Bogazici University in Istanbul. Her credits include
Watchtower (2012) and 10 to 11 (2009). In an interview with news magazine
Today’s Zaman in 2012, when she was asked about the recurrent theme in her
two films of ‘getting even with the past’, Esmer responded, ‘I attach as much
importance to the past as the present and the future – which might be rooted in
the importance I see in the concept of “continuity.” I see ignorance … as some-
thing that makes life [incomplete]. And thus I make all the characters I write live
through that pain’ (Today’s Zaman 2012).
Ceyda Asli Kilickiran (1968–) was born in Izmir, Turkey. Her father worked as
a director and producer for Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT). She
studied English and philology at Istanbul University and graduated in 1993. She
began to write and direct her own films, noting that, in her opinion, the best
films are those where the writer and director are the same person (Today’s Zaman
2009). When asked about the content of her films, she noted: ‘I’ve always aimed
at reflecting the feminine perspective of life through my films … how I look at
life as a Turkish woman. This Turkish woman issue is a thing bleeding inside of
me’ (Today’s Zaman 2009).
Meral Kati Okay (1959–2012) was born in Ankara, Turkey and worked as an
actress, film producer, and screenwriter. As a child, her family moved throughout
Turkey because her father was a military judge. After completing high school, she
worked at the Turkish Grain Board. She became a member of the socialist Workers
Party and contributed as a writer to magazines and journals. After marrying film
and stage actor Yaman Okay, she began to work as an actress and screenwriter
in the film and television industry. Credits include Hiçbiryerde (2001), Yeditepe
İstanbul (2001), Bir Bulut Olsam (2009), and the television series Muhtesem Yuzyil
(2011–present). She died of lung cancer at the age of 52.
Lale Oraloglu (1924–2007) worked as an actress and screenwriter. Her credits
include Broken Pots (1960), Sevdigim Sendin (1955, an adaptation of the novel by
André Gide), Hatirla sevgilim (1961), and the comedies Hudaverdi – pirtik (1971)
and Bizimkiler (1971).
Asli Özge (1975–) graduated from Istanbul University, earning a degree in the
cinema-TV department. She wrote and directed short films and gained recogni-
tion in the festivals in Turkey. She moved to Berlin, Germany to pursue a Master’s
degree. There she co-founded a film production company. Her screenwriting cred-
its include Ein Bisschen April/ A Little Bit April (2001); this comedy was sponsored
Turkey 589
by the German Public Broadcasting ZDF/3sat. In this movie, which has not been
released in Turkey, she brings her experimental-realist style to the forefront, such
as expecting improvisation from the actors instead of following any stringent
scenario (Dilli 2014). Other screenwriting-directing credits include Köprüdekiler/
Men on the Bridge (2009) and Lifelong (2013). Özge employs more experimental
and non-structured methods in her scripts; she encourages improvisation and
combines reality and fiction, all to give her narratives an added gravitas. Men on
the Bridge is a hybrid narration, combining documentary and fiction. In A Little Bit
April, she set out to make a documentary following certain people in the ghetto
life of Istanbul; however, after an extensive research period, she decided to write
a script based on those people’s own stories – to fashion it as a fiction, but based
on hard truths. Aslı Özge sustains her director and screenwriter approach as ‘semi-
political’ in Lifelong (Dilli 2014), ‘a minimalist study of modern bourgeois malaise’
(Mintzer 2013). Özge’s conceptualization has been integral to the new-wave film-
making in Turkey, for her narratives generally concern a sense of belonging and
confrontation with ‘power’. Just as with the other members of this generation of
woman directors and screenwriters, Aslı Özge has been interested in deconstructing
patriarchy in a political way (Dilli 2014).
Yesim Ustaoglu (1960–) was born in Caykara, Turkey and grew up and attended
university near the Black Sea in Trabzon. She worked as a journalist, film critic,
and architect before moving into writing and directing films. Her credits include
The Trace (1994), Journey to the Sun (1999), Pandora’s Box (2008, winner of the
Golden Shell Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival), and Araf/Somewhere in
Between (2012, a Turkish/German/French co-production selected for the Abu Dhabi
Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, and Tokyo Film Festival).
Film critic Chris Kutschera writes about the topicality and relevancy of Journey to
the Sun. He notes: ‘Yesim Ustaoglu is a woman who values freedom …’ (Kutschera
1999), and Journey of the Sun keeps that value at the centre of the narrative. The
film was released soon after the capture of controversial Abdullah Ocalan, the
leader of the Kurdish armed rebellion in Turkey, and before his trial on the island
of Imrali. The film focuses on an intense friendship between a Kurd and a Turk;
they save each other from persecution and violence. Their relationship eventu-
ally transcends the political divide. The film received acclaim, but did not enjoy
distribution. Kutschera writes:
Paradoxically, despite winning the approval of the censor, it appears Turkish

distributors are scared of showing the film, especially after the upsurge of
Turkish nationalism that followed Ocalan’s death sentence. And, despite
the fact that visitors to the Istanbul Film Festival queued to watch the film,
described as the biggest event of the entire festival, several of Turkey’s best
known critics have consistently failed to review it. (Kutschera 1999)
In an interview in Film Comment in 2013, Ustaoglu talks about her film Arfa, noting
that the word, in Turkish, is akin to limbo or purgatory and, to her, its meaning is
‘a place of suffering, waiting while suffering …’ (Slifkin 2013). Kutschera queried
Ustaoglu on her opinions of Turkish women and how the women are portrayed
in cinema. Ustaoglu replied:
I think Turkish women are like everyone all over the world. They are women
with their own feelings and desires. To keep them in the traditional way – the
idea that they shouldn’t have any feelings or love – is ridiculous, and it is
impossible. To have a 13 or 16-year-old girl to be the wife of a husband and
never be loved is another crime. So (in Arfa) I wanted to talk abut the real
human being, how a woman is a human being like everyone else with heavy
emotions. (Ustaoglu interview, Slifkin 2013)
When asked about the reception of Arfa in Turkey, Ustaoglu noted:
It was really respected by the audiences – young people and ordinary people,
students. Of course the press was bad. It’s very controversial. That’s normal.
I was very surprised when I was checking the [attendance] results that it did
very well in small towns. So many people went who come from what we might
think would be conservative areas. (Ustaoglu interview, Slifkin 2013)
Ostaoglu, again in the interview with Kutschera, notes that she believes opportu-
nities for female writers and directors are opening up in Turkey; however, she has
advice for emerging screenwriters/filmmakers:
I and some other filmmakers are doing quite well, after what we started in the
nineties. We started with nothing, and the conditions didn’t change, but we
learned how to make films and express ourselves. The conditions in the indus-
try are changing but not that much, so we have to think about making films
in other countries.
References
Kutschera, Chris. 1999. 40 Years of Journalism. Available at: http://www.chris-kutschera.
com/A/yesim_ustaoglu.htm (accessed 13 May 2015) (text originally published in Middle
East magazine, October 1999).
Mintzer, Jordan. 2013. ‘Lifelong (Hayatboyu): Berlin Review’, Hollywood Reporter, 9 February.
Neel, Alyson. 2013. ‘ Focus on Female Filmmakers’, Time Out Istanbul, March.
Dilli, Sirin. 2014. ‘A snapshot of Asli Özge’s Early Career’, WSIG Research.
Slifkin, Meredith. 2013. ‘Interview: Yesim Ustaoglu’, Film Comment, 16 January. Available at:
http://filmcomment.com/entry/interview-yeim-ustaolu (accesssed 13 May 2015).
Suner, Asuman. 2010. New Turkish Cinema. UK: I. B. Taurus, part of the Taurus World Cinema
Series.
Today’s Zaman. 2009. ‘A Woman in the World: An Interview with Film Director Ceyda
Asli Kilickiran’, 20 August. Available at: http://www.todayszaman.com/news-184466-a-
woman-in-the-world-an-interview-with-film-director-ceyda-asli-kilickiran.html (accessed
13 May 2015).
Today’s Zaman. 2012. ‘Watchtower Director Pelin Esmer Says Contradictions Make Life More
Real’, 21 November. Available at: http://www.todayszaman.com/arts-culture_watchtower-
director-pelin-esmer-says-contradictions-make-life-more-real_298920.html (accessed 13
May 2015).
United Kingdom
Lavinia Brydon, Marcella Forster, Christine Gledhill, Stella Hockenhull,
Susan Liddy, Nathalie Morris, Jill Nelmes, Jamie Sherry and Paul Wells
Overview
Jill Nelmes
Despite the fact that screenwriting in the United Kingdom has been a male-dominated
profession there were numerous women scenario writers in early cinema and promi-
nent female writers between the 1930s and the end of the 1950s. By the early 1960s
television was replacing film as the mass popular medium and, as the demand for
melodrama and female-centred stories in cinema was replaced by TV soaps, the
number of women writing for film declined substantially. Several went on to work in
television where there have been many high-quality series and films for TV written by
women. Since 2010 the proportion of women film writers has reached its highest level
for many years and the need to have a more even distribution of gender in all aspects
of film production, but especially writers and directors, is hopefully being addressed.
Scenario writers 1895–1928

The Women in Silent Cinema UK website lists more than 45 women credited with
writing stories or scenarios in this period but there were many others who wrote
only one film and of whom almost nothing is known about their career.1 Ian
Macdonald notes that about 17 per cent of credited writers were female between
1895 and 1928 (2011: 48). Women scenario writers were frequently actors or took
on other filmmaking roles such as assistant editor, director or set designer. It was
also common for women to work in a husband/wife partnership, generally with
the woman as the assistant, as was the case with Margaret and Cecil Hepworth,
who worked together on many films. Rachael Low highlights the dearth of good
stories in the silent period and the fact that at one time almost half the scenarios
were written by Elliot Stannard and Kenelm Foss (Low 1971: 240). This might
seem like a monopoly of the writing work but there were some significant female
writers who had successful careers and whose skills were held in high regard by
the film industry. The following entries are of the most prolific and better-known
writers:
Muriel Alleyne (1884–?) was a writer and actress who wrote at least 16 film
scenarios, including A Bold Venture (1912), The Indian Woman’s Pluck (1912), In
591
Wolf’s Clothing (1912), The Forsaken (1913), The Dead Heart (1914), and adapted
Time and the Hour in 1915. Although Alleyne wrote five scenarios for Hepworth,
her last film was The City of Youth, written in 1928 for British University Films.
Helen Blizzard (1872–1954) is credited with writing two films, The Key of the
World (1918) for Gaumont-British and an adaptation, The Beetle (1919), for the
Barker Production Company, based on a novel by Richard Marsh about an Egyptian
princess who disguises herself as a beetle to avenge a British politician (W. Lee
1973: 29). She is also credited as assistant director, assistant editor and had small
acting roles in films.2
Billie Bristow (1897–1981) was a journalist and publicist who has 13 screen
credits as story creator, writer and co-writer; many of these were written with the
highly regarded screenwriter Charles Bennett, who wrote some of Hitchcock’s
most famous early films such as Blackmail (1929) and The 39 Steps (1935).
Bristow’s early scripts were written for George King Productions and her later ones
for British Lion. Her first credit as co-writer with Bennett was for the 38-minute
crime comedy Too Many Cooks (1930). This was also the first film directed by King,
as well as Laurence Olivier’s first screen role. Bristow’s films were mostly quota
quickies and she specialized in crime dramas and thrillers such as Deadlock (1931)
and Nightmail (1935), although she also co-wrote a musical with Charles Bennett,
Gay Love (1934), which was adapted from the play of the same name and directed
by Leslie S. Hiscott.
Adey Brunel (1865–1946), mother of director Adrian Brunel, wrote under the
pseudonym of Dale Lawrence. She adapted the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson,
Lady Clare (1919), and devised the story for A Light Woman (1928), which was
adapted by Adrian Brunel and Angus MacPhail for Gainsborough Studios. She
often worked as a scenario editor for her son, Adrian.
Ethel M. Dell (1881–1939) was a popular and prolific novelist who had more
than 20 of her books adapted for the screen. Many of her novels were adapted by
the Stoll Picture Company, who secured the right to Dell’s books and did their
utmost to keep her happy because of their popularity. Director Maurice Elvey
noted that Dell was more interested in keeping control of the story than the
money she made from the films and any scenarios had to be submitted to her for
approval (Harper 2000).
Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was born in the United Kingdom, going to Hollywood
to further her career in 1920, where she became a celebrity figure. She was a proli-
fic writer, credited with 22 novels and many other works of short fiction and
non-fiction. As a screenwriter she became especially famous for writing IT (1927),
starring Clara Bow. Glyn’s speciality was comedy-romance and she has 27 screen
credits as writer. The first of her novels that Glyn adapted for the screen was the
adventure-romance One Day in 1916, a sequel to her third novel, Three Weeks,
published in 1914, which caused a sensation because of its scandalous content.
Glyn moved to the US where she wrote the screenplay for a remake of Three Weeks
(1924) as well as The Only Thing (1925) and IT. Glyn returned to the UK in 1929
where few of her film projects came to fruition and she is only credited with one
United Kingdom 593
film, the comedy-romance Knowing Men (1930), adapted by Glyn from her novel
and her last film, which she also directed.
Kate Gurney (n.d.) is better known as an actor, but she has four credits as writer,
the first for a comedy short, Burglar Bill (1916), in which she also starred. She then
began to write for the highly regarded director Maurice Elvey, first scripting the
romance God’s Good Man (1919) and then the drama The Swindler (1919). The
crime drama Sword of Fate (1921) is her final credit as writer though she contin-
ued to act until the late 1920s. She also wrote uncredited scenarios for Nordisk,
Essanay and Hepworth.
Lydia Hayward (1879–1945) (see entry p. 310) was a prolific writer who worked
in the UK and US.
Margaret Hepworth (1874–1917) was married to Cecil Hepworth, one of the
most important figures in early British cinema, whose company, the Hepworth
Manufacturing Company, produced many popular films. Margaret was an integral
part of the team and wrote Rescued by Rover (1905), though Hepworth employed
other writers (Hepworth 1951: 66).
Blanche MacIntosh (1877–1954) wrote scenarios for Cecil Hepworth, script-
ing 28 films between 1912 and 1924, including Baby in the Barge (1915) and The
American Heiress (1917). She is best known for adapting Helen Mather’s novel
Coming through the Rye in 1923. Rachael Low notes MacIntosh was one of the
15 regular writers in the silent period in the UK (1971: 240). MacIntosh was a
family friend of the Hepworths and she was asked to write the scenario of In
Wolf’s Clothing in 1912, possibly after Hepworth’s regular writer-director, Lewin
Fitzhamon, left to form his own company.3 MacIntosh became Hepworth’s head
scenario writer, and he greatly valued her abilities. ‘Perhaps the first small step in
the right direction was asking Blanche MacIntosh to write a script for us instead
of relying on our own puny efforts’ (Hepworth 1951: 108). He further notes: ‘My
indebtedness to my excellent scriptwriter, Blanche MacIntosh (my long-term
friend, Mrs Hubbard), whose writing I scarcely ever altered …’ (Hepworth 1951:
139). Simon Brown describes her as versatile, pointing out that she adapted plays
and novels, and developed original ideas by performers, besides writing comedies
and melodramas.4
Edith Mellor (n.d.) was an actress, writer and director, although very little is known
about her career other than that she wrote two films, Then You’ll Remember Me (1918)
and Betta the Gypsy (1919), and is credited as writer and director of The Laundry Girl
(1919), produced by Garrick Pictures.
Irene Miller (1880–1964) began her career as a journalist, novelist and short
story writer and become an important scenario writer. She scripted many original
stories, firstly for Will Barker’s studios. Miller was taught how to write scenarios by
Barker and she went on to run the scenario department for the studio. She entered
the film industry in 1915 when credited with the scenario Mrs Cassell’s Profession/
The Striped Stocking Gang (1915), based on her own story. Miller went on to write
other original scenarios, including Meg o’ the Woods (1918) for Holmfirth and Her
Lonely Soldier (1919) for Barker. In 1919 Miller joined the publicity department
of Vitagraph and in 1920 she adapted Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon for the
Progress Film Company. The following year she wrote the scenario for The Night
Riders (1921), one of G. B. Samuelson’s American productions. Miller is described
by Kinematograph Weekly as ‘the first lady in England to become a scenario editor’
(7 September 1916, p. 19) but by the early 1920s she is described as being ‘sick of
it all’ after numerous scenarios were rejected (Motion Picture Studio, 1 April 1922,
p. 112).
Mary Murillo (1888–?), born Mary O’Connor, had an Irish background,
although she was born in Yorkshire. She was a talented musician and loved the
arts, leaving for Hollywood to become an actress in 1908. Her acting career was
not a success and she began sending scenarios to film production companies.
Murillo’s first script was bought by Lois Weber in 1913 or 1914 and she quickly
went on to become a very successful writer. In 1915 she was employed as chief
scenarist at the Fox Film Corporation, departing in 1917 to become independent,
when she was reputedly earning $25,000 a year. Murillo returned to the UK in
1923, amid rumours that she had left the country because of spiralling debts. She
initially wrote for the Stoll Picture Company, where she wrote three scenarios:
The Sins Ye Do (1924), The White Slippers (1924) and A Woman Redeemed (1927).
She also wrote other scenarios for director Frank Leroy Granville and British
Independent Productions and went on to adapt Edgar Wallace’s novel The Ringer
(1928).5 Murillo was considered a writer of some ability and when British Lion
Film Corporation was founded in 1927 she was named as an important element
of the writing team. Perhaps because of a downturn in film production in the
UK, Murillo went to work in France where she wrote English versions of the first
French sound films, and scripted one of the hits of early sound in France, Accusee,
levez-vous! (1930).6 Although her last film credit in the UK is for co-scripting My
Old Dutch in 1934, she may have written films at a later date as the crediting of
films in this period is often unreliable. Certainly Murillo was a prolific writer and
one of some importance in the UK, the US and France.
Violet E. Powell (n.d.) is credited with at least 13 scenarios and screenplays
for films produced between 1925 and 1934, yet little is known about her back-
ground. She wrote three Hollywood films, The Beautiful City (1925), Just Suppose
(1926) and The White Black Sheep (1926). She then returned to Britain to join
the newly established British International Pictures, where she contributed to
a number of prestigious late silent films, including Poppies of Flanders (1927),
The White Sheikh (1928), an adventure story set in the Sahara Desert, co-written
with Mary Murillo, and Victor Saville’s popular wartime romance, Kitty (1929).
Powell wrote for various studios, including Gainsborough with the adventure
The Rolling Road in 1928, although she seems to have mostly written for BIP, for
whom she is credited with an adaptation of the romantic drama Paradise (1928),
starring Betty Balfour, and the romance The Plaything (1929). Powell stopped
writing with the coming of sound but reappeared in 1934 with three low-budget
talkies for British and Dominions Film Corporation, all released in 1934: Adrian
Brunel’s Badger’s Green, Redd Davies’s The Girl in the Flat and George King’s To
Be a Lady.
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Alicia Ramsey (1864–1933) was born in the UK and wrote novels and plays
with her husband, the writer Richard de Cordova, but had sole credit for most
of her screenplays. The couple left the UK for New York where they were very
successful and wrote scenarios for Famous Players-Lasky, Metro and Vitagraph
between 1918 and 1921, after which they returned to the UK. Ramsey is credited
as writer on at least 16 films produced in the UK between 1922 and 1938. Many
of these were historical adventure stories such as Rob Roy (1922) and Bonnie Prince
Charlie (1923), but she also adapted popular novels for the screen. She is also cred-
ited as writer for Nell Gwynne (1921) and Fires of Fate for Gaumont-British (1923).
Ramsey’s last film, Doctor My Book, was co-written in 1938 with her husband, its
subject being a portrait of a biscuit manufacturer.
Alma Reville (1899–1982) (see entry p. 619) is best known for being married to
director Alfred Hitchcock but she was an accomplished writer of scenarios as well
as a major, albeit rarely acknowledged, influence on her husband’s films. She is
credited as co-writer on a few films but was probably involved in the writing of
many more, if only at the ideas stage.
Dinah Shurey (1888–1963) founded Britannia Films in 1923 where she regu-
larly took on the roles of writer, producer and director and was the only female
director in the UK in the 1920s. Britannia Films ceased trading in 1932 when
Shurey went bankrupt. Christine Gledhill notes her films were concerned with
the ‘popular themes of cross-class male friendships and rivalries forged by patri-
otic sentiment and noble sacrifice’ (2007: 552). Shurey devised the story for Every
Mother’s Son (1926), the scenario being written by Lydia Hayward. She then wrote
the scenario for Carry On! (1927) and the story for The Last Post (1929), the sce-
nario being again written by Lydia Hayward.
Rita Temple Thurston (n.d.) wrote with her husband. The couple were popu-
lar novelists who accepted commissions for film stories and scenarios as well as
allowing their work to be adapted.
Margaret Turnbull (?–1942) was born in the UK then went to the US as a writer,
returning to join Famous Players-Lasky’s Islington studios, where she wrote sce-
narios for four films between 1921 and 1922: Appearances (1921), The Princess of
New York (1921), Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush (1921) and Three Live Ghosts (1922).
When the studio closed down in 1922, Turnbull went back to US, where she
remained until her death in 1942.
Besides Turnbull, several women writers worked in the US and UK, for instance
Eve Unsell (1888–1937), a prolific American writer of over 90 films between 1914
and 1933, who wrote for Lasky’s London studio at the same time, presumably
until the studio closed.
The arrival of sound (1928–60)

The transition from silent film to sound meant that scenario writers had to
adapt to a new style of writing that included dialogue. At the same time the film
industry became more sexually divisive and the opportunities for women writers
lessened. Even though Lydia Hayward declared, in 1927, that there was a short-
age of writers, this gap was filled more often by university graduates and writers
who were predominantly male (Macdonald 2011). Indeed the film studios were
often not supportive of women writers: Sue Harper tells how Alma Reville, despite
being a co-writer, was not invited when producer Basil Dean held a scriptwrit-
ing ‘barnstorming’ weekend in Brighton for the film Nine till Six (1932) (Harper
2000: 168). Harper does note, however, that producer Michael Balcon, who was
head of Gaumont-British before going on to run Ealing Studios, encouraged
women writers like Jill Craigie (see entry p. 639); while Alexander Korda, head
of London Films, employed a few women on a regular basis (Harper 2000: 172).
Many women, as in the silent period, were taken on to write just the one script.
Although Harper argues that the 1930s and 1950s were the heydays for women
writers, by the 1950s the number of women screenwriters in regular work had
declined to a handful, Muriel Box and Janet Green being the notable exceptions
(2000: 188).
Evelyn Barrie (n.d.) only became a successful screenwriter after ‘a friendly direc-
tor advised me to specialize. Write about the kind of thing you know’ (N. Lee
1937: 181). She went on to write for City Films and Joe Rock of Rock Studios,
where she scripted The Flying Flea and Big Hearted Bill. Barrie is credited with two
comedies as writer – On Top of the World (1936), directed by Redd Davis, and Boys
Will Be Girls (1936), directed by Gilbert Pratt.
Muriel Box (1905–1991) (see entry p. 624) was one of the few successful writer-
directors in the British film industry with a career lasting from the 1930s to the
early 1960s. She mostly wrote with her husband, Sydney Box, co-scripting one of
the most successful and highly regarded British films of all time, The Seventh Veil
(1946), a melodrama about a famous pianist who has a mental breakdown and is
cured by hypnosis.
Anne Burnaby (n.d.) has seven film writing credits, and her first screenplay
was the romantic comedy Young Wives’ Tales (1951), starring popular stalwarts
Joan Greenwood and Nigel Patrick. This was followed by another comedy, Father’s
Doing Fine (1952), starring Richard Attenborough, which Burnaby adapted from
the play by Noel Langley. The Yellow Balloon (1953), a tense drama about a
young boy who is blackmailed by a murderer, was co-written with director J. Lee
Thompson, though Burnaby is credited with the highly original story. Her next
script was again written with J. Lee Thompson, The Weak and the Wicked (1954).
This was adapted from the novel by Joan Henry and drew attention to the depress-
ing fate of women held in prison in the UK. Thompson describes Burnaby as a
‘really excellent writer’ (Chibnall 2000: 53). No Time for Tears (1957), scripted
by Burnaby for APBC, is set in a children’s hospital and explores the problems
the doctors and nurses face in their work. She then co-wrote Operation Bullshine
(1959) with Gilbert Lang, about a group of army girls who are sent to a remote
part of England. Burnaby’s last film was for ABPC in 1960 as co-writer on Sands of
the Desert, starring the popular comedian Charlie Drake. She went on to write for
television, including an episode of ABC’s Armchair Theatre, Girl in a Bird Cage, in
1962, and one for the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse, The Loves of Larch Hill, in 1969.
Clemence Dane (1888–1965) was born Winifred Ashton, taking the pseudonym
‘Clemence Dane’ from the church, St Clement Danes on the Strand, London. She
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studied art in London and Germany and then taught at a girls’ school, where she
began writing. Dane went on to become a popular novelist and playwright. Her
play Enter St John, written with Helen Simpson, was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock
and Alma Reville as Murder (1930), and then her 1921 play, A Bill of Divorcement,
was filmed in the UK in 1922. Its continuing stage success led to a Hollywood
remake, starring Katharine Hepburn and John Barrymore, in 1932, and opened
up her career as a screenwriter. In Hollywood she went on to adapt Anna Karenina,
with Salka Viertel, in 1935, starring Greta Garbo. Dane returned to England where
she enjoyed a prolific career as a novelist and playwright as well as continuing
her career on such prestigious films as Fire over England (1937), St Martin’s Lane/
Sidewalks of London (1938), Perfect Strangers/Vacation from Marriage (1945), for
which she won an Academy Award, and Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948).
Marjorie Deans (1901–82) replaced Sydney Courtney and Cole Harvey as the
house writer for BIP after 1934. Deans is credited with 20 films as writer or scenario
writer; her first script was Catherine the Great (1934), directed by Paul Czinner for
Alexander Korda’s London Film Productions. Harper argues it is a much superior
script to those written by Deans after she went to BIP where conditions for writ-
ers were limited creatively (Harper 2000: 169–70). Indeed most of the films Deans
worked on were undistinguished but a collaboration with Norman Lee on Royal
Cavalcade (1935) and Kathleen (1938) led to a more interesting joint project with
Lee and Leo Marks, The Girl Who Couldn’t Quite (1950). By the late 1950s Deans
had gravitated to writing for television where she adapted Anthony Trollope’s The
Eustace Diamonds for the BBC in 1959 and scripted six episodes of The Small House
at Allington in 1960, a 30-minute drama series also for the BBC.
Janet Green (see entry p. 632) was an extremely successful writer who worked
with her husband, John McCormick. She wrote many screenplays from the 1940s to
the early 1960s, her most lauded being the trio of social-issue films written for pro-
ducer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden, Sapphire, Victim and Life for Ruth.
Marjorie Gaffney (1897–1963) wrote mainly for Gainsborough and for Michael
Balcon when he was head of Gaumont-British. She is credited with 11 films made
between 1933 and 1940, and is best known for writing the musicals Evergreen
(1934), First a Girl (1935) and Head over Heels in Love (1937), all of which starred the
popular singer and dancer Jessie Matthews. Harper points out that Gaffney’s scripts
were ‘remarkable’ and ‘all superbly crafted’ (2000: 170). Her first film was a com-
edy, Night of the Garter, released in 1933, then she co-wrote My Old Dutch (1934) for
Gainsborough, and Me and Marlborough in 1935. In 1937 Gaffney changed direc-
tion, writing The Rat, a remake of a romantic melodrama set in the Parisian under-
world, which had provided a highly successful role for Ivor Novello in the 1920s.
She then returned to another sort of musical, Boy Scouts putting on a show – The
Gang Show (1948) for Herbert Wilcox Productions. Gaffney’s last credit is for an
adaptation of the Edgar Wallace comedy-thriller, The Mysterious Mr Reeder (1939).
Dorothy Farnum (1900–70) is an American writer who worked in the UK in the
early 1930s and has over 40 scripting credits between 1914 and 1934. Her main
contribution to British cinema is her work with Basil Dean, for whom she adapted
the remake of Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph (1933), Dodie Smith’s
Autumn Crocus (1934) and R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1934), though she also
worked on Victor Saville’s musical romance Evensong (1934) and Michael Balcon’s
sympathetic adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jew Suss (1934).
Lola Harvey and Sydney Courtney were a husband-and-wife team of writers
based at British International Pictures who wrote many films for the studio in the
1930s. Norman Lee suggests theirs was an ‘ideal combination. The husband supplies
the male point of view, the wife adds the womanly touches’ (Lee 1937: 150).
Margaret Kennedy (1896–1967) was a successful novelist and playwright as
well as screenwriter with more than 20 film and television credits. She is most
famous for her novel The Constant Nymph, about a composer who deserts his pushy,
ambitious wife for the teenage girl who has always adored him. She dramatized
her novel into a successful play after which four film adaptations of the play
were made: a silent version in 1926, which credits Alma Reville and the director
Adrian Brunel as writers, a sound version in 1933, directed by Basil Dean with
Kennedy, a 1938 version for BBC Television, and finally a Hollywood adaptation
in 1943, with a screenplay by Kathryn Scola. Kennedy’s other scripting credits
include an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1934), made by
BIP, Mozart (1936), directed by Basil Dean, and Return to Yesterday (1940), which
Kennedy co-wrote with Angus MacPhail. Kennedy did her bit for the war effort
by writing two films for ‘forces sweetheart’ Vera Lynn, Rhythm Serenade (1943) and
the comedy-musical One Exciting Night (1944). Kennedy co-wrote the screenplay
for the highly popular The Man in Grey (1943) with Leslie Arliss and Doreen
Montgomery. Based on the novel by Lady Eleanor Smith, the melodrama stars
the box-office draws James Mason, Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert. Her
most interesting post-war film was Ronald Neame’s directorial debut, Take My Life
(1949), an ingenious thriller starring Myrna Loy and Marius Goring on which she
collaborated with Winston Graham and the actress Valerie Taylor. In the 1950s
Kennedy made the transition to writing television plays, which included a drama
for the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1950 in the US, and in the UK
her final credit was for Armchair Theatre in 1957.
Kennedy also wrote a satirical article in 1942, ‘The Mechanized Muse’, based on
her experiences working as a writer in the film industry.
Elizabeth Meeham (1894–1967) was born in the UK but moved to the US, where
she wrote many films for Famous Players-Lasky and RKO. Meeham came back to the
UK in the late 1930s. From 1937 she wrote for BIP, working on the screenplays for
the musical-comedy Over She Goes (1937) starring Stanley Lupino, the comedy
Spring Handicap (1937), the high-wire melodrama Star of the Circus (1938), and She
Couldn’t Say No (1940), a comedy starring Tommy Trinder. In 1939 she adapted
Philip Macdonald’s popular play A Gentleman’s Gentleman for Warner Bros UK
(1940). Meehan’s later credits are for Hollywood films so she probably returned to
the US after the outbreak of the Second World War.
Doreen Montgomery (1913–92) (see entry p. 646) worked in film and then
television for many years, initially for Gainsborough Studios, then going on to
script ‘B’ movies, often with strong female characters, before writing for television
United Kingdom 599
in the 1960s. She is credited with creating the Cathy Gale character for the classic
TV series The Avengers.
Diana Morgan (1908–96) was born in Cardiff and studied acting at the Central
School of Music and Drama in London. She went on to become a playwright and
screenwriter noted for her work at Ealing Studios. Morgan began writing for the
theatre when she met her husband, Robin MacDermot Barbour, who became head
of BBC Drama in the 1950s. The couple created many successful stage shows and
reviews in the 1940s.
Morgan was the only female to be a house writer at Ealing Studios and is cred-
ited with some of their best work, including Went the Day Well? (1942), Pink String
and Sealing Wax (1945) and Dance Hall (1950). Her first script as co-writer was for
the Second World War drama Ships with Wings (1941), set on an aircraft carrier.
Morgan went on to co-write another war drama, The Foreman Went to France, in
1942, but is not credited for this. Her next film, The Halfway House (1944), was co-
written with the Ealing house writer, Angus MacPhail and had contributions by
T. E. B. Clarke. It is an unusual and moving story with mystical elements, about
a group of people who meet in an inn that was bombed in the war but magically
reappears. The film is set in Wales and the script cleverly builds up an atmosphere of
otherworldliness, using the landscape and the Welsh Language as a way of enhanc-
ing this. Fiddlers Three (1944), again co-written with MacPhail, is another story
with a magical element in which three sailors visit Stonehenge and then travel
back in time to ancient Rome. Morgan is also credited with additional dialogue for
the comedy A Run for Your Money (1949). She was often called on to rewrite scenes
and dialogue, sometimes during the shooting of a film, pointing out that Ealing’s
script credits were often inaccurate: ‘Sometimes you got a credit for something
you hadn’t done, or you had written most of the picture and didn’t get a credit.
We didn’t worry about things like that’ (Houston 1992: 33).
Penelope Houston notes that the studio cultivated an anti-female atmosphere
and Morgan recalls they ‘used to say “We’ll send in the Welsh bitch to put in the
nausea”’ (Houston 1992: 33). Morgan relates how some women left the studio in
tears, put off by the boys-school atmosphere (Houston 1992: 33).
Morgan is best known as one of the writers credited with Went the Day Well?,
about a British village that is taken over by the Nazis during World War Two. The
film is loosely based on a short story by Graham Greene and there were rumours
that Greene had also worked on the script. Houston surmises that Greene and direc-
tor Alberto Cavalcanti may have collaborated on story ideas but that the project was
probably shelved in its early stages (Houston 1992: 33). Angus MacPhail and John
Dighton inherited the screenplay, retaining the basic idea but constructing a new
narrative that portrayed the villagers in a more positive way. Morgan, brought in to
improve the characters, considered MacPhail good with ideas but not with dialogue:
I went over and found this script which was almost ready to be done ... and it
was unplayable ... They knew it was, and that’s why they sent for me. It was
all a fearful muddle. The story was there, the action was there, but the people
weren’t. They were just names. And what I really did was make them into parts
for the actors and make them actable scenes. (Houston 1992: 33)
Dance Hall (1950), directed by Charles Crichton, was co-written with Alexander
Mackendrick and E. V. H Emmett, but has Morgan’s stamp upon the film. The last
of Morgan’s films for Ealing, it tells of life in post-war Britain for four friends in
their twenties. Melanie Williams draws parallels between this film and the later
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a film that came to exemplify the British
New Wave (2009: 288). Dance Hall gives greater focus to the plight of the central
female character who feels trapped by her marriage to a jealous husband who
eventually leaves her, under the wrongly held belief that she is having an affair.
Morgan only scripted two more films, co-writing the musical Lets Be Happy
(1957) and the screenplay for the well-received Hand in Hand (1960), a family
drama about two children, one Roman Catholic and one Jewish. The film, a plea
for tolerance between the two religions, won many international awards and a
Golden Globe in 1961 for ‘promoting international understanding’.
Morgan began to write for television in the mid 1950s, firstly on the historical
drama series Scarlet Pimpernel (1956) and then a number of TV dramas, before going
on to write for Call Oxbridge 2000 in the early 1960s, and then the long-running
hospital soap Emergency Ward 10, for which she wrote many episodes (1964).
Joan Morgan (1905–2004) often wrote under the pseudonym Joan Wentworth-
Wood, and began her career acting in films directed by her father, Sidney Morgan.
Morgan wrote the scenario for The Alley Cat/Nachtgelstaten (1929) for British and
Foreign Films, going on to write 13 sound films for television, her last script
being, Dr Joanna Marlowe, in 1963 for German TV. Morgan’s first sound credit was
in 1931 for the crime drama Contraband Love, directed by her father. Her writing
tackled a range of genres, from war drama like The Flag Lieutenant (1933), which
starred Anna Neagle, to the musical The Melody Maker (1937) and the romantic
drama Faces (1934), both directed by her father, as well as comedies such as
Mixed Doubles (1933). Her last film credit was in 1940 as co-writer for the comedy
Olympic Honeymoon. Morgan’s screen career had a short revival when she began
to write for television, penning an episode of Armchair Theatre in 1957 and two
episodes of Play of the Week for the ITV channel in 1962.
Katherine Strueby (1908–88) was born in the US but worked in the UK, where
she married British screenwriter and producer Gordon Wellesley. Strueby was an
accomplished and highly regarded writer who wrote in a variety of genres, from
thrillers and crime drama, to romantic comedies and the musical, She is credited
with 16 titles for screenplay, story and adaptation between 1935 and 1954,
co-writing her first film, Death Drives Through, with John Huston and Gordon
Wellesley in 1935. Strueby’s next film, the romantic comedy It Happened One
Night (1935), was again co-written with Huston. She continued to write comedy,
credited for Play Up the Band (1935) and Excuse My Glove (1936), as well as the
thrillers Café Collete (1937) and Special Edition (1938). Strueby is also writer for
The High Command (1937), a tale of jealousy, murder and intrigue set in British
Imperial Africa and the first film to be directed by Thorold Dickinson. Meet
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Maxwell Arthur (1940) was adapted by Strueby from the novel by Hugh Clevely
for RKO, in which a private detective helps an RAF pilot accused of a murder
he did not commit. Strueby then moved upmarket, with her friend producer-
director George King, writing The First of the Few (1942), the topical story of
R. J. Mitchell’s battle to design the Spitfire plane, starring David Niven and Leslie
Howard, who also directed. It was a huge box-office success and was followed by
Tomorrow We Live (1943), a melodramatic tale celebrating the struggle of General
de Gaulle’s resistance fighters in France, and Candlelight in Algeria (1944), a spy
thriller starring James Mason. Both films were directed by George King. She then
turned her hand to scripting the musical Flight from Folly (1945) with Lesley
Stern and adapting They Were Sisters (1945) from Dorothy Whipple’s novel for
Gainsborough, with James Mason cast as an unpleasant bullying husband who
drives his wife to suicide. Strueby continued her writing relationship with George
King on the musical Gaiety George (1946), starring Richard Greene and Ann Todd,
the melodrama The Shop on Sly Corner (1947), adapted from the play by Edward
Percy, about a man who uses his antiques shop as a front for selling stolen
goods, and Forbidden (1949), written by Strueby from a story by Val Valentine,
with Douglass Montgomery as a decent man who plots to murder his ambitious,
manipulative wife.
Strueby’s last credit was in 1954, as co-writer for the tense courtroom drama
Eight O’clock Walk, directed by Lance Comfort and starring Richard Attenborough
as a taxi driver wrongly accused of murdering a young girl. Brian McFarlane notes
that the film was well received and on release the Sunday Times praised ‘the direc-
tor and his writers (Guy Morgan and Katherine Strueby) for having made effective
use of the physical preparations for the trial’ (McFarlane 1999: 143).
Lesley Storm (1898–1975) was born in Scotland as Mabel Cowie, and became
a prolific playwright and screenwriter who often adapted her own work to the
screen. Storm is credited with writing and collaborating on more than 20 screen-
plays for film and television between 1941 and 1956. Harper notes that Storm’s
screenplays are ‘marvellously crafted’ (2000: 184). Her play Great Day was adapted
in 1945 by Storm, John Davenport and Wilfred Wilhelm, and directed by Lance
Comfort, and is an impressive film. Storm began her career writing for ABPC
with the crime drama East of Piccadilly (1941), co-written with J. Lee Thompson,
and the comedy Banana Ridge (1942). The musical Flight from Folly (1945) was co-
written with Katherine Strueby and Basil Woon. Storm changed tack with Meet
Me at Dawn (1947), an adventure-comedy about a man who hires himself out to
fight duels, and White Cradle Inn (1947), a drama about a French child who was
displaced in World War Two. Storm and William Templeton wrote additional
dialogue on the adaptation of Graham Greene’s short story The Basement Room,
titled The Fallen Idol (1948), which was directed by Carol Reed. Although Greene
is credited with the screenplay, Reed requested that Storm be kept on London
Films’ studio payroll to complete the script, which suggests that her input was
more than ‘additional dialogue’.7 Storm also wrote additional scenes and dialogue
for Adam and Evelyne (1949), a romantic comedy starring Stewart Granger and
Jean Simmons.
In the 1950s Storm often adapted other writers’ work as well as her own, includ-
ing Guy Hamilton’s version of Edgar Wallace’s oft-filmed play The Ringer in 1952,
Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter in 1953, starring Trevor Howard,
and popular novels like The Golden Salamander (1950), based on Victor Canning’s
novel, directed by Ronald Neame. Personal Affair (1953), adapted by Storm from
her own play, tells of a schoolgirl who falls in love with her teacher and the drama
that ensues when the girl disappears.
Of Storm’s last two screenplays, she is only credited with additional dialogue
on The Story of Esther Costello (1957) and Charles Kaufmann was nominated for a
BAFTA for Best British Screenplay. Her last credit as co-writer was for the screenplay
of A. J. Cronin’s popular novel The Spanish Gardner in 1956, starring Dirk Bogarde,
for the Rank Organization. Storm’s plays were often adapted for the screen and
Black Chiffon was televised at least four times during the 1950s. Like so many other
screenwriters Storm often worked on unrealized screenplays and London Film
Productions holds letters relating to Storm’s contract for adapting the Daphne du
Maurier novel The King’s General.8
Joan Henry (1914–2000) came from a privileged background but her life fell
apart after she was divorced and became addicted to gambling, when she resorted
to passing fraudulent cheques. Henry was sent to goal for 12 months but on
release she was encouraged by her publisher to write Who Lies in Gaol, about her
experiences there. The resulting book, published in 1952, was adapted by Ann
Burnaby into the more sensationally titled The Weak and the Wicked (1954), star-
ring Glynis Johns and Diana Dors. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, the film was a
great success, though the adaptation had some major differences and the addi-
tion of a romantic subplot. As Melanie Williams notes, this changed the tone of
the film and one reviewer complained that the ‘vice, squalor, sex and life’ of the
book Who Lies in Gaol had been usurped by a ‘pale, cloying “niceness”’ in its film
adaptation, with Henry’s sharp critique of Holloway prison (renamed Blackdown
for the film) blunted in order to placate the censors’ (Williams 2009: 289).
Yield to the Night (1956) was adapted by Henry from her novel, published the
previous year, directed by Thompson and starring Diana Dors. The idea for the
story came about when Henry and Thompson, whom she subsequently married,
were discussing capital punishment. Henry felt, ‘I couldn’t write about a man, but
I might be able to do that about a woman’ (Chibnall 2000: 70). The story tells
of a woman who finds out the man she is in love with is having an affair with
a wealthy socialite whom he is obsessed with. When the socialite rejects him he
commits suicide and she decides to avenge his death by killing her. She is then
charged with murder, found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.9 Henry
also acted as script advisor on other films directed by J. Lee Thompson but was
not credited for these (Chibnall 2000: 172).
Henry’s last screenplay, Passionate Summer (1958), an adaptation of the novel
The Shadow and the Peak, stars the popular actors Virginia Mackenna and Bill
Travers. She then went on to work in television, writing Rough Justice, an ITV Play
of the Week broadcast in 1962, and Person to Person, broadcast in 1967, becoming
one of the few women to write a prestigious Wednesday Play for the BBC.
United Kingdom 603
Several women had short-lived careers writing for the second feature or
‘B’ movie, which had a revival during the mid 1950s and early 1960s:
Margot Bennett (1912–80) was an actress and writer of crime novels, who
also wrote ‘B’ movies, though only two were produced, both comedies: The Man
who Liked Funerals (1959), starring Leslie Phillips, which Steve Chibnall and Brian
McFarlane point out has a ‘much wittier script than was common in second
features’ (2000: 273), and The Crowning Touch (1959), described as having some
‘genuine comic variety’ (2000: 273). Bennett then went on to have a short but
successful career in TV, writing for a variety of series, including ten episodes of
Emergency Ward 10 (1958–9) and seven episodes of the popular detective series
Maigret (1960–2). Her last credit is in 1966 for the children’s TV series Quick Before
They Catch Us.
Lyn Fairhurst (1921–2001) wrote five films between 1961 and 1965, four of
which were directed by Lance Comfort. Touch of Death (1962), a crime film about
a robbery that goes wrong, has a complex narrative that Brian McFarlane describes
as a ‘busy little film’ (1999: 127). Fairhurst then wrote three youth-orientated
musicals: Band of Thieves (1962), which was produced by Comfort and directed
by Peter Bezencenet, Live It Up (1963), and its follow-on, Be My Guest (1965), both
starring David Hemmings. McFarlane praises the tenor of the writing in Live It
Up, noting that those scenes with the central character, Dave, and his parents are
particularly effective (1999: 155). Fairhurst’s last script, Devils of Darkness (1965),
received mixed reviews although it did well at the box office. The film, a vampire
story with a 60s setting, was liked by The Daily Cinema who commented that ‘direc-
tor Lance Comfort and writer Lyn Fairhurst whip up a gripping suspense, blend-
ing theatrical shocks with contemporary kinks, sacrificial orgies and cliff-hanger
climaxes’ (McFarlane 1999: 161).
Jean Scott Rogers (n.d.) only had three film credits during her career as a
writer: One Way Out (1955), a neat story about a policeman who has to risk his
career when his daughter gets involved with a gang of crooks. Her screenplay
for the horror film Corridors of Blood (1958) provided good roles for its stars,
Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee. Her last film, The Flood, written in 1963 for
the Children’s Film Foundation, is about a group of children who are trapped in
a farmhouse when the surrounding area is flooded. Rogers also wrote for televi-
sion in the same period, including episodes of Emergency Ward 10 between 1958
and 1960.
The age of television

By 1960 the United Kingdom had entered the age of television; cinema attend-
ance was declining and because of this the number of films being made fell.
These changes also meant that the number of women writing screenplays went
down from six per cent in the 1950s to four per cent in the 1960s of the total
number of films produced (Harper 2000: 184). The two most prominent women
writers of the 1950s, Muriel Box and Janet Green, were at the end of their careers
and the majority of women were now writing for TV series and, more usually,
the TV soaps.
Films about the ‘swinging sixties’ and the realist ‘kitchen sink’ genre did give
some women new opportunities. A group of women novelists and playwrights
emerged in this period who in the few films they wrote were especially influential:
Nell Dunn (b. 1936), a novelist and playwright, adapted her first book of short
stories Up the Junction for the Wednesday Play, which was broadcast in 1965 and
co-written and directed by Ken Loach, going on to gain a cinema release in 1968.
She also wrote the screenplay for Poor Cow (1967), again directed by Loach, which
was adapted from her novel about a woman with a young child and a husband
who is a petty thief: when he goes to prison her life spirals downhill but she tries
to hold on to her dreams.
Margaret Forster (b. 1938) adapted her novel Georgy Girl for the screen. Released
in 1966 it was a box-office success, though Forster was only partly involved in the
adaptation and the screenplay, co-written by Peter Nichols, which made the central
character, played by Lyn Redgrave, dowdier (Harper 2000: 186). More recently Forster
scripted a BBC TV drama, Daphne (2004), about the author Daphne du Maurier.
Margaret Drabble (b. 1939), a popular author of 17 novels, had two film credits in
the 1960s: additional dialogue for Isadora (1968), based on the life of dancer Isadora
Duncan, and A Touch of Love (1969), which she adapted from her novel The Millstone
(1965), about a student who has an unwanted pregnancy, tries to abort the child. but
then decides to become a single mother with all the problems that entails.
Shelagh Delaney (1938–2011) (see entry p. 654), the playwright and screen-
writer, is best known for her adaptation of A Taste of Honey (1961) from her popu-
lar play. Delaney and director Tony Richardson won the BAFTA for Best Screenplay
in 1962 and were nominated for many other awards. She continued to write for
film and television until the 1990s, scripting Dance with a Stanger (1985), based
on the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK. The story
covers similar territory to Yield to the Night, written by Joan Henry 30 years earlier.
By the 1970s British cinema was in the doldrums, and very few women were
writing for film: television had become the major new employer of writing talent.
The 1980s was a little better, partly because of a new addition to British television,
Channel 4, which had a remit to produce high-quality but innovative films for
broadcast and cinema release. Although most films produced for Channel 4 had
male writers, some women did slip through: A Room with a View and Howard’s
End were both adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and
Bob Too and Dance with a Stranger by Shelagh Delaney. The BBC also began to
make quality films and this allowed writer-directors like Lynne Ramsay (see entry
p. 671) to make her first feature, Ratcatcher, in 1999. The independent film move-
ment also allowed opportunities for women writer-directors. Lezli Ann Barratt
made Business as Usual in 1982 and Mai Zetterling the hard-hitting Scrubbers
(1982). Sally Potter made her first feature film, The Gold Diggers, in 1983, while
Eva Hardy wrote the more mainstream She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas in 1985,
adapted from her own novel.
Rosemary Anne Sisson (b. 1923) (see entry p. 653) was one of the first of a new
generation of writers in the UK to begin their careers in television and become
very successful, going on to write for Disney in the US. She is first credited with
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a television play in 1959, The Vagrant Heart, then wrote for Compact (1962–5) and
Emergency Ward 10, then penning a variety of acclaimed television series, which
include a four-part adaptation of The Mill on the Floss (1965), an episode of the
TV classic The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), and 11 episodes of the very popular
Upstairs Downstairs. Her first screenplay for Disney was Ride a Wild Pony (1975),
and she later worked on the Ruth Rendell Mysteries and The Young Indiana Jones
series for George Lucas.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013) was born in Germany but fled with her
family to the UK in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. She went to live in India
from 1951 to 1975, finally settling in the US. A prize-winning novelist, she also
won two Academy Awards for her adaptations of A Room with a View (1985) and
Howard’s End (1992). She is best known for her long-term collaboration with
director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant. Jhabvala wrote 23 screenplays
during her distinguished career and was made a CBE in 1998 and awarded a joint
fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant.
Jhabvala’s first screenplay was adapted from her 1960 novel The Householder and
released in 1963. Heat and Dust (1983) was her first major success, adapted from
her novel about an English woman, played by Julie Christie, who moves to India
with her husband and is deeply affected by the very different culture she finds
there. Jhabvala then went on to write her best-known adaptations of what have
been termed ‘heritage films’, two novels by E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (1985)
and Howard’s End (1992), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1999) and three
Henry James novels, The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984) and The Golden
Bowl (2000). Harper points out that Jhabvala’s Forster adaptations ‘foreground
female relationships in a more intense way than in the original novels’ (2000: 188)
and Sheldon Hall notes that her script for Remains of the Day is respectful of the
tone and substance of the novel but ‘subtly alters the balance from the political
to the personal’ (2009: 52).
Angela Carter (1940–92) was a highly respected novelist who co-wrote the
screenplay for Company of Wolves (1984) with director Neil Jordan, which was
adapted from her novel, a feminist reworking of Little Red Riding Hood. She also
adapted her novel The Magic Toyshop (1987), about a young girl who goes to live
with her aunt and uncle when her parents are killed and finds out her uncle can
bring his toys to life.
Andrea Dunbar (1961–90) was a talented writer from a working-class part of
Bradford, who died when she was only 29. She adapted three plays written for
the Royal Court Theatre into one film, Rita, Sue and Bob Too in 1987, about two
schoolgirls who have a fling with a middle-aged married man. Dunbar, in contrast
to Jhbavala’s tasteful period depiction of England, painted a very different picture
of 1980s Britain, endowing the script with a gritty cynicism.
There were still few successful women film writers in the 1990s and this imbal-
ance continued into the new millennium. A report for the UK Film Council in
2006 noted that women writers were credited on less than 15 per cent of films
made between 1999 and 2003. Yet in the same period women over 35 made up
the single biggest part of the UK audience at 18 per cent.10
By the 1990s most of the outstanding women writers were to be found working
in television. Lynda La Plante (b. 1943) and Kay Mellor (b. 1951) had become
extremely successful TV writers who also wrote several film scripts, although these
were not as well received. La Plante began her career as an actor, going on to
become one of the most popular writers in television, best known for creating the
TV series Prime Suspect (1991–3), which stars Helen Mirren as a police inspector
trying to catch a murderer while coping with sexism in the police force. La Plante
has written many films for television but none have gained cinema release. Kay
Mellor’s work is very different to La Plante’s, focusing on personal drama. She began
her career writing for UK soaps then went on to create a number of popular TV
series, including Band of Gold (1995–7), Playing the Field (1998–2000) and the sen-
sitively written series Fat Friends (2002–5), about a group of women struggling to
lose weight. Like La Plante she has written films for television but only one film
for cinema release, Fanny and Elvis, which won the audience award at the Dinard
Film Festival in 1999.
Despite the paucity of films penned by women in this period several did write
screenplays for films that were well received:
Gurindar Chadha’s (b.1960) first film, Bhaji on the Beach, released in 1993, is an
entertaining drama about a group of Asian women, co-written with Meera Syal, who
went on to adapt Anita and Me (2002) from her own novel. Chadha next co-wrote
and directed What’s Cooking (2000) and Bend It Like Beckham (2003), which was an
international success and nominated for Best Screenplay by the Writers Guild of
America in 2004. This high profile gave Chadha the opportunity to write bigger-
budget films such as Bride and Prejudice (2004), Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging
(2008) and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010). None of Chadha’s more recent stories
have caught the popular imagination on such a scale as Bend It Like Beckham, which
she made as ‘ the most commercial, mainstream, wide-appealing, multiplex movie
(she) possibly could with an Indian girl in the lead’ (Korte and Sternberg 2009: 391).
Deborah Moggach (b. 1948) is a successful novelist who also writes for televi-
sion and film. Moggach began her scriptwriting career with an episode of the soap
Crown Court in 1983, a training ground for many new writers. In 1986 she wrote the
TV series drama To Have and to Hold about a woman who has a surrogate baby. Ten
years later Moggach adapted the BBC TV mini series Goggle Eyes in 1993, from the
novel by Ann Fine, about a child coming to terms with her parents’ divorce and
her mother’s new boyfriend. The series was highly rated by critics and the public,
winning a Writers Guild of Great Britain award. Moggach also adapted Nancy
Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate for the BBC in 2001, writing the two-episode
wartime drama, with a cast including Alan Bates, Celia Imrie and Rosamund Pike.
Moggach has written television films but is best known for her adaptation of
Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (2005), with additional dialogue by Emma
Thompson, which was highly acclaimed on release, and she was nominated for
a BAFTA award. She has since adapted The Diary of Anne Frank for a mini series
(2009), although more recently her novels have been adapted by others, and
include the surprise box-office success Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and Tulip
Fever (2015).
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Shawn Slovo (b. 1950) was born in South Africa and came to the UK in the
1960s, when her parents were forced to leave the country because they were
members of the Communist Party and anti-apartheid activists. Though she is
only credited with four films, Slovo is an extremely experienced writer who has
worked on many projects, often for Working Title, probably the most successful
production company in the UK. Slovo began her writing career as a script assis-
tant on the thriller Absolution (1978) starring Richard Burton, going on to become
story editor on Supergirl (1984). Slovo’s first screenplay credit is for A World Apart
(1988), a semi-autobiographical film about a 13-year-old girl whose parents are
political activists. The film won many awards, including the BAFTA award for Best
Screenplay in 1989. Slovo did not write her next produced script until 2001, an
adaptation of the best-selling Louis de Bernieres novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
The film, set on a Greek island during World War Two, tells the story of a Greek
woman who falls in love with a captain in the Italian army when they invade the
island. Her following film, Catch a Fire (2006), set in South Africa during the apart-
heid era, is about a policeman and a young anti-apartheid supporter. The screen-
play taps into Slovo’s knowledge of the period and features both her parents as
incidental characters. Her latest screenplay, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (2013),
focuses on Ali’s refusal to serve in the Vietnam war. This is a prestigious HBO
production directed by Stephen Frears and starring Danny Glover, Christopher
Plummer and Frank Langella. Slovo’s screenplay won the Writers Guild of America
award in 2014 for Best Adaptation.
Emma Thompson (b. 1959) began writing at Cambridge University where she
contributed to the Cambridge Footlights reviews. Better known as an accomplished
actress she began her writing career with three episodes of the television comedy
There’s Nothing to Worry About in 1983, which was co-written by Hugh Laurie,
Stephen Fry and Ben Elton. She worked with the same team on another comedy
series that followed, Alfresco (1983–4), going on to create her own comedy show
in 1988, Thompson. She demonstrated her ability as a deft and talented writer with
her adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995. Directed by Ang Lee,
the film was liked by critics and audiences and Thompson received many awards,
including the Academy Award in 1996 for the Best Screenplay Based on Material
Previously Produced or Published. Thompson is next credited with the TV film
drama Wit, adapted in 2001 from the play by Margaret Eden and co-written
with director Mike Nichols. Thompson’s adaptations of Nanny McPhee (2005)
and Nanny McPhee Returns (2010), from the Nurse Matilda books by Christiana
Brand, have proven to be very popular with families and at the box office. Her
most recent work and Thompson’s first original screenplay, Effie Gray (2014), has
a more serious tone, about the unhappy relationship between the Victorian art
critic John Ruskin and his wife Euphemia Gray.
2000 – to present
In the twenty-first century the overall percentage of women writers with film
credits is still barely more than 15 per cent. In the three years between 2010 and
2012, out of the 372 UK films released in this period, only 16.1 per cent were
written or co-written by a woman.11 The BFI report suggests that the commissioning
process acts as a barrier because producers of UK films ‘turn to mid-career writers
and screenwriters often already known to them, the majority of whom in the past
have been male’.12 There are, however, some grounds for optimism as the same
BFI report also notes:
After many years of under-representation, female screenwriters appear to have

made a breakthrough over the last three years, with an unusually high represen-
tation in the top 20 UK independent films (37%) and profitable UK independent
films (30%).13
While new women writers are emerging, some promising writers have not had
recent work produced. The film world is notoriously fickle and writers like
Andrea Gibb will hopefully resurface. Gibb scripted three well-received films
in quick succession: Afterlife (2003), Dear Frankie (2004) and Nina’s Heavenly
Delights (2006). Misan Sagay, the writer of Belle (2013), had a long break after
the release of her earlier films, The Secret Laughter of Women (1999) and Their Eyes
Were Watching God (2005), on which she was a co-writer. Belle, set in the late
eighteenth century, tells the story of the niece of Lord Mansfield, whose mother
is Afro-Caribbean. The positive reception of the film has given a boost to her
career. The writer of Calendar Girls (2003), Juliet Towhidi, had a barren period
but now has two films written by her on general release, the romantic comedy
Love Rosie (2014), adapted from Cecilia Ahern’s novel Where Rainbow’s End, and
an adaptation of Vera Britten’s classic novel of the First World War, Testament of
Youth (2015).
Several contemporary women writers slip easily between film and TV:
Heidi Thomas (b. 1962) began her career in theatre then went on to write for a
number of well-known TV series, including Soldier, Soldier (1994–6). Her first film
for TV was the thriller Kiss and Tell (1996) and she then adapted Madame Bovary
for the BBC, which was broadcast in 2000. Thomas’s screenplay of Dodie Smith’s
popular novel I Capture the Castle (2003) had a successful cinema release. But her
outstanding achievements have been in television, being nominated for an Emmy
in 2007 for an adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Cranford, and again in 2011
for Upstairs Downstairs (2010–12), a revival of a popular series set in the Edwardian
period. Most recently she devised the series Call the Midwife (2012–14), about mid-
wives working in the 1950s in the East End of London, which has proved to be so
popular that a third series has been commissioned.
Abi Morgan (b.1968) has also received many accolades for her film and TV
writing. She was born in Cardiff and studied at Exeter University, then went
to the Central School of Music and Drama in London. Morgan’s writing career
began in 1988 when her play Skinned was performed and she wrote two episodes
of the long-running TV soap Peak Practice. Morgan wrote her first TV film, My
Fragile Heart, in 2000, which was produced by Tiger Aspect. She was nominated
for Most Promising Playwright at the Laurence Olivier Awards in 2002. After
this Morgan’s career took off, scripting well-received TV films like Murder (2002),
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directed by Beeban Kidron and starring Julie Walters, and Sex Traffic (2004), which
received much attention because of its controversial subject matter. Morgan’s
first feature film was an adaptation of the best-selling novel Brick Lane (2007),
co-written with Laura Jones, which gained mixed reviews. Two very different
screenplays written by Morgan were released in 2011: The Iron Lady, about British
prime minister Margaret Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep, and Shame, directed
by Steve McQueen, in which the central character has an addiction to sex. The
BBC TV series The Hour, devised and written by Morgan, won an Emmy in 2013
for its outstanding writing. Most recently Morgan has returned to film, adapting
the screenplay for Claire Tomalin’s book about Charles Dickens’s love affair with
a younger woman, The Invisible Woman (2013), and completing the screenplay
Suffragette (2015), about the women who fought for equal rights in the UK in the
early twentieth century.
In addition to UK independent films, several female writers have had some
recent success working on UK-USA studio titles:
Jane Goldman (b. 1970) stands out in this respect, having adapted Susan Hill’s
long-running play The Woman in Black (2012) to some acclaim. She has also
proven herself to be an accomplished writer of the action genre, scripting Kick-Ass
in 2010, co-writing X-Men: First Class in 2011, and having a story credit for its
sequel, X-Men: Days of the Future (2014).
Sarah Smith (n.d.) co-wrote and co-directed the popular family film Arthur
Christmas (2011) for Aardman Animation. The film was nominated for a Golden
Globe award for Best Feature. Smith, having mostly worked in TV as a producer and
writer, has been based with Aardman for the last six years.
Jane English (n.d.) began her career writing for TV, going on to script the
popular StreetDance 3D (2010) and StreetDance 2 (2012), aimed at a youth audience
and part funded by BBC Films. The 2012 film is described by Megan Lehmann
of the Hollywood Reporter as ‘irresistibly exuberant’ and the two films have been
international box-office hits.14
Moira Buffini (b. 1965) has been writing for television since the mid 1990s,
but her first feature film screenplay was Tamara Drewe (2010), directed by Stephen
Frears. She followed this with an adaptation of Jane Eyre (2010), for which she was
nominated for the USC Scripter Award. Her latest script, Byzantium (2012), is a
vampire story, directed by Neil Jordan.
Debbie Isitt (b. 1966) won a BAFTA award for her TV film adaptation of Jacqueline
Wilson’s The Illustrated Mum (2003), about two children and their zany mother. Her
first feature films, Nasty Neighbours (2000) and Confetti (2006), received mixed reviews,
but Nativity (2009) and its two successors, Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger (2012) and
Nativity 3: Dude Where’s My Donkey (2014), have proven to be highly popular.
Women writer-directors have a long tradition of working in British cinema,
perhaps because of the control they exert over the entire film production pro-
cess. Art film writer-directors are generally less prolific, often spending years
developing a project, yet Sally Potter, Lynne Ramsay, Jan Dunn (see entry
p. 667), and Andrea Arnold (see entry p. 670) have all made well-received films
in the last decade and will hopefully continue to do so.
Lydia Elizabeth Hayward (1879–1945)
Christine Gledhill
Lydia Hayward, The Bioscope declared in 1927 (12 May, p. 33), ‘is the finest sce-
nario writer we have’, and for a 1920s British scriptwriter her name is unusually
prominent in film advertising and reviews. Moreover, she participated in a number
of collaborations that reveal much about the changing circumstances of British
film production as well as development of her own particular talents. However, as
Geoff Brown (2008: 247–8) notes, Hayward’s few published words on scriptwriting
are hardly radical; she worked exclusively in adaptation, which was for many crit-
ics the bane of British cinema. We need, then, a different approach to understand
a reputation built within the mainstream industry.
Hayward’s personal life was far from conventional. She grew up close to the
entertainment world, her father being recorded successively a comedian, actor and
writer. The year 1900 finds her acting in Swansea, where, aged 21 (though claiming
to be 23), she married Belford Forrest, also named as an actor. However, the 1901
census records him as single, living at home and a student. Presumably they rec-
onciled, since in 1903 a daughter was born to them, her birth certificate recording
Belford as a ‘clerk in Holy Orders’, the 1911 census lists Hayward living alone in
actors’ lodgings in Hammersmith and as having two children, not then living with
her.15 No more about the second child is currently known. She must have become a
spirited and dependable character actor, for 1914 found her playing with the Royal
Shakespeare Company at Stratford, and in 1920, aged 40, she was cast in her first
film role for Rex Wilson’s 1920 adaptation of Pillars of Society, playing Ibsen’s bois-
terous, convention-challenging Lena Hessel, who, returning from America, stirs up
the family past and the provincial townspeople. While Kinematograph Weekly notes
‘generally excellent acting’, its chief praise is reserved for ‘Lydia Hayward’s Lena ...
probably the best all-round piece of work in the film’ (30 September 1920, p. 82).
From here on, Lydia deserted acting to go behind the scenes as a scriptwriter.
However, at the decade’s end, personal adventure intertwined again with her
career, when, having scripted three films featuring the Australian-born William
Freshman, 23 years her junior, Lydia, at 59 (but recording her age as 47), mar-
ried him in August 1938. In April 1939 they sailed to Australia, where the
Sydney Morning Herald sent a reporter to interview not William but his wife, who
explained how the loan of a shilling guidebook inspired her scriptwriting career
(12 April 1939, p. 6).
Literary-film connections
Hayward’s entrée into filmmaking was facilitated by her participation in a loose net-
work of authors, playwrights, actors and incipient filmmakers, living in and around
London, linked by their membership of the Society of Authors – including the popu-
lar short-story writer W. W. Jacobs, his friend Jerome K. Jerome, Langford Reed (well-
known scenarist and handbook writer) and Manning Haynes. In 1919, it elected the
doyen of British scenarists, Eliot Stannard, to its cinematic sub-committee. Since
the 1910s Haynes had worked in the entertainment world, including stage and
film acting. Following a meeting with George Redmond, manager of Artistic, then
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launching into post-war film production, Haynes involved Lydia in co-scripting its
first film, Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1920), with Challis Sanderson directing. The
film was warmly received and quickly followed up by Artistic with Monty Works
the Wires (1921), Haynes now joining Sanderson as co-director, with Lydia as co-
scenarist, working on her only ‘original’ scenario, which exploited the popularity
of Haynes’s dog, Montmorency, whose antics had enlivened the Jerome adapta-
tion (Bioscope, l9 June 1921, p. 51). Encouraged by the success of Three Men and
its two spin-offs, Monty and Three Men in a Van (1921), Redmond sent Haynes to
‘his friend from earlier days’, W. W. Jacobs, with a proposal to adapt his stories to
film (James 1999: 134). The author agreeing, Lydia and Haynes set about their first
Jacobs script, A Will and a Way (1922), which, with Haynes also undertaking his
first solo direction, set them on a path that was to continue for the next two years.
Clearly these early forays into filmmaking involved Artistic’s production and
acting teams in an intense learning curve, but one which was also considerable
fun, and fondly remembered by Lydia: ‘When I first started with a small company
[Artistic] a visitor came to see us on the set of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, I was fixing the
curtains on the window, the director, Manning Haynes, was plastering the walls,
and the star, Moore Marriott, was hard at work on the carpenter’s bench’ (Sydney
Morning Herald, 12 April 1939, p. 6). Such collaboration, as against American spe-
cialization, was argued by many commentators, not least Eliot Stannard and Lydia
herself, to be vital to successful filmmaking.
British screenwriting in the 1920s

Scriptwriting was hotly debated in the trade and fan press of the 1910s and 1920s
and numerous handbooks published, revealing the context in which Lydia’s prac-
tice was formed. Emphasizing screenwriting as literary, if hidden, work, guides
and polemical articles explored how the written word could serve an apparently
wordless medium. Equally important was the question of adaptation versus origi-
nal scenario, an issue crucial for Hayward. Professionalization demanded equality
with the literary writer, to which end social networking and collaboration with
adapted authors was vital, promising not only integration with established culture
but, as Stannard and others argued, winning the middle-class audience. Equally
important was the scenarists’ inheritance of earlier nineteenth-century practices
of ‘realization’, whereby pictorial, narrative and theatrical arts interchanged and
fed each other, fuelling the rise of mass entertainment (see Meisel 1983). As a com-
posite art, embracing picture, performance and story, cinema provided one more
outlet for aesthetic realization and mass popularization, which some authors,
including W. W. Jacobs, were often keen to exploit. For many scenarists, then, the
existence of prior source material was taken for granted, even while they grappled
with the specificities of writing for film, with an inevitable eye on, if not always
an understanding of or sympathy with, American practices.
Central to the notion of film as a composite art was the scenario as the ‘cohesive’
force, binding together picture, dramatic situation and performance to produce
‘story’ as cinema’s primary product (Weston 1916). Adaptation, then, assumed
collaboration between author, scenarist and director. Stannard, recommending
the scenarist work with a director of compatible sensibility, cited ‘the cordial
relations’ between W. W. Jacobs, Manning Haynes, and Lydia Hayward, where

‘artists meet on an equality’ (Motion Picture Studio, 1 September 1923, p. 11), an
experience confirmed by Lydia: ‘I have done scenarios for 14 of W. W. Jacobs’s
books [sic], and we sit hand in hand at all the trade screenings of the films’ (Sydney
Morning Herald, 12 April 1939, p. 6). Similarly, Kinematograph Weekly, on the set
of The Monkey’s Paw (1923), notes: ‘the spirit of co-operation ... was very evident’
(11 January 1923, p. 44). Increasingly, the trade press linked Hayward and Haynes
as co-creators, Lionel Collier retrospectively remarking on ‘that exceedingly
happy partnership of Lydia Hayward, scenarist, and Manning Haynes, producer’
(Kinematograph Weekly, 3 May 1928, p. 64). For Lydia herself, co-creation was a
central principle of her work: ‘the completed film is the result of the fusion of
many minds … No single person connected with the production can point to any
section of the film and say, “Alone I did that”’ (Bioscope, 18 June 1927, p. 155).
W. W. Jacobs Series, 1920–4

Refinements in the conception of the scenario accompanied maturing film tech-
nique, longer films and the increasing value of the ‘natural’. This required delivering
‘story’ in terms of behavioural business, naturalistic gesture, and visual relationships
focusing on recognizable character interactions. In establishing this revisionary
formula, Lydia Hayward and Manning Haynes’s collaboration with W. W. Jacobs
for Artistic won both critical and box-office rewards. The Jacobs adaptations were
praised as filling a significant gap in the market, establishing a ‘new standard’ with
a literate kind of comedy, based not on slapstick but on humorous observation
of recognizable human weaknesses, while also offering audiences a post-war ‘feel-
good’ factor and attracting the middle classes through respected source materials
(Bioscope, 9 June 1921, p. 51; Kinematograph Weekly, 9 June 1921, p. 46).
Moreover, Jacobs’s stories offered techniques for script construction. As an
American reviewer noted, ‘Mr Jacobs’s stories, in [their] angularity and spareness,
are almost scenarios. They are skeletons, sketches, prolonged jokes’ (quoted in
Bioscope, 6 December 1923, p. 18). By spinning a comic situation through diverse
variations, Jacobs’s tales supported the episodic practices of British picaresque tradi-
tion, while providing ‘cohesion’ through the core joke. However, these are works
of the raconteur – yarns that depend on the voice of the storyteller. Arguably it
was in attempting to realize cinematically what Hayward later called the writer’s
‘elusive literary quality’ (Bioscope, 18 June 1927, p. 155) that she learnt her art as
a scenarist.
The Monkey’s Paw

The Monkey’s Paw, concluding Hayward’s first series of Jacobs adaptations, was the
best known of his tales, circulating since 1903 in a stage version by Louis N. Parker
and first adapted to film in 1915. It is a dark tale playing on human credulity,
acquisitiveness, and desire to sidestep fate. The White family has everything except
settlement of their mortgage. The arrival of a former friend, Sergeant Major Morris,
returning after years in India with a monkey’s paw magically empowered to grant
three wishes, suggests a way to end their debt. The money does indeed arrive next
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day – as recompense from the electrical company where their only son has met
with a fatal accident. The grief-stricken mother begs her husband to wish her child
back. He accedes but, as his wife struggles to unbolt the door in response to a heavy
knocking, his horror at what they might see prompts him to make the third wish –
that his son return to his grave – and the door at last opens to reveal nothing.
In converting discursive storytelling into photographic images, Hayward, following
established screenwriting practice, straightened the circular narration of story and
play into temporal linearity, while making free with ideas introduced by the play
and inventing new devices of her own. Thus, unlike story and play, she has the
film open on a cheerful domestic scene organized around the parents’ anticipated
return of their son from work, establishing the wryly comic tone now associated
with the Jacobs adaptations. However, darker impulses are insinuated into domestic
contentment with the unexpected arrival of Morris, who, against Herbert’s cheery
disbelief in magic, draws the family into his story with the line: ‘For instance, there
was the monkey’s paw.’ Anticipating Morris’s return with the paw itself, father and
son play chess, while a storm rages outside. Here, in a radical invention, Hayward
recasts the story’s later fireplace vision of a menacing simian face: while father and
son ostensibly focus on their competitive moves, wondering if Morris will come, a
shadow darkens the image and, through a dissolve, a monkey’s paw hovers over the
board. Thus the game of prediction is linked with their mental ruminations on the
possibilities of magical intervention – unspoken foreboding made visible.
Lydia Hayward’s skill was increasingly recognized as underpinning the Artistic
team’s success. When the final six films were released, Kinematograph Weekly
declared: ‘Lydia Hayward’s scenarios are brilliant. It is in a great measure due to
her work that the Jacobs spirit and humour have been so carefully preserved.
The sequences are excellent and the continuity perfectly smooth and concise’
(24 January 1924, p. 68). Motion Picture Studio concurred: ‘Lydia Hayward’s sce-
narios are perfect of their kind’ (26 January 1924, p. 8). There are, however, across
the reviews, sporadic hints about a tendency to leisureliness, an occasional lack
of tempo and energy. Cinematic sensibilities were acclimatizing to American
rhythms, exacerbating perhaps the downturn of the British film industry just as
Artistic appeared to be setting new standards for the future. Did their shift from
five- to two-reel Jacobs adaptations seek more storytelling concision or economic
retrenchment? According to Rachael Low, Artistic’s backer, Horace Lisle Lucoque,
had already resigned by early 1923 (1971: 153). The company was clearly in dif-
ficulties. Even while fêted for her Artistic films, Lydia was working at Stolls, with
a new directorial partner, Will Kellino, on His Grace Gives Notice, trade shown in
May 1924, while George Redmond resigned in September. Artistic was in receiver-
ship by late 1925 (Low 1971: 153–4). Manning Haynes’s credits cease until he
reunites with Lydia at Gaumont for London Love (1926).
With Will Kellino at Stolls 1924–6

At Stolls Lydia scripted five films between 1924 and 1926 for Will Kellino, who,
before moving into filmmaking in 1912, had been one of the ‘Famous Kellinos’,
touring turn-of-the-century music halls with tumbling acts of ‘frantic athleticism’
(Anthony 2006: 341). They appear to have made a good match, Kellino’s direction
adding ‘pace’ to Hayward’s scripts, which, with one notable exception, continued
to garner praise from the trade press. Not only were these films mostly adapted
from full-length novels – giving Lydia the task of contracting rather than expand-
ing the original material – but, significantly perhaps, the stories were all written
by women. While comedy remained the dominant mode, these sources, unlike
the Jacobs tales, took a romantic turn while broadening the class base of character
types to include upper-class characters as socially mobile romantic leads or cads
leading trusting femininity astray, only to be thwarted by honest toilers.
Lydia’s gift for witty dialogue, sharply drawn characters and situational by-play
lifted these films in the eyes of their critics above their implausible plots, mark-
ing ‘just the difference between real life and a clever work of fiction’ (Bioscope,
5 June 1924, p. 37). The press book for Not for Sale (1924) retails its story largely
through the film’s subtitles, revealing Hayward’s literary skill in shaping comic inci-
dent and character interaction while tapping into everyday experience. In We Women
(1925), vernacular truisms – ‘there’s never a taxi about when you want one’ – instil
recognition value into unlikely situations (two young men on hand and ready to
fall in love the moment the heroine faints with exhaustion). Cross-cutting between
eye-play and ‘crisp’ dialogue titles extends bodily gesture and meaningful looks into
written speech. At the same time Kellino’s music-hall experience and work with
performers injects into the scripted action the sassiness and direct address of the skit.
The expansion of incident provided by novelistic sources, combined with
Kellino’s experience in the variety act, intensified Hayward’s episodic construction –
collecting characters as new incidents required them – which was somewhat at
odds with the scenario guides’ demand for cohesion or American conceptions
of ‘continuity’. Ever defensive of Lydia Hayward’s work, Kinematograph Weekly
detected in His Grace Gives Notice ‘signs of the continuity’s partial mutilation’ by
others (5 June 1924, p. 40). On the other hand, episodic cross-class romances,
juxtaposing socially differentiated locations and characters, resonated with post-
war social changes. Not for Sale tells of a disinherited son, crossing from the idly
cynical lunch tables of fashionable Berkeley Square to a down-at-heel Bloomsbury
boarding house. Now employed as a chauffeur under a false name, he discovers
his love match among the ordinary if variegated social types housed there, only to
be rejected for his easy assumptions about the heroine’s showgirl sister.
Despite such romanticism, the introduction of new leisure venues – ‘skating rink,
cinema studio ... jazz hall, gambling saloon’ (vaunted in We Women’s press book) –
suggests outlets for the ‘sex’ that was subject to earlier caution. Adapting contem-
porary women’s novels enabled Lydia to field spirited heroines with a quickfire line
in sassy repartee against male exploiters, owners of dance halls, monocled upper-
class cads, and petty thieves. Adapted from a novel by the colourful ‘Countess
Barcynska’, We Women opens in a skating rink, introducing two friends (played
by vaudeville stars Billie and Dollie) – Bee in charge of the pay-box, and Paulee
(Dollie), violinist in the band and subject to the suggestive attentions of the
owner, Flash Wheeler, who tells her, ‘You certainly can tickle the fiddle, girlie, but
you’re working too hard. I could make it easy for you.’ Paulee’s struggle against
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his attentions gets her the sack, but Bee has an answer for any man who tries to
bully her or exploit her friend: ‘You can’t sack me, old four wheeler – you don’t
travel fast enough. I resigned 30 seconds ago.’ This is the only one of Hayward’s
films to have been unequivocally disliked by the trade press. Kinematograph Weekly
felt compelled to exonerate her of responsibility: ‘We are quite sure that Lydia
Hayward is incapable of including in a scenario two-thirds of what is shown. It
has evidently been drastically “revised” by others’ (5 March 1925, p. 65). However,
since the plot is no more preposterous than her other Kellino films, which were
warmly received by the trade press, one can’t help wonder whether the focus on
a rebellious woman and her devotion to her female housemate at the expense of
the men hit an uncomfortable gender nerve.
Scenario editor for Dinah Shurey

Following two more films, Kellino left Stoll for America, and the partnership with
Lydia Hayward ended. Haynes and Hayward were both at something of a hiatus.
Meanwhile Hayward was drawn into a script-editing role with a new company,
Britannia, set up in 1924 by Dinah Shurey – a colourful character who had got
into the entertainment business in the First World War, and eventually took over
the reins of film production as ‘Britain’s only woman director’ (Bioscope, 9 January
1929, p. 53; Gledhill 2007). Possibly her wartime experience led her to make what,
for the pacifist-orientated 1920s, struck many reviewers as anachronistic military
and naval melodramas, often involving rivalry between two contrasted brothers
or male friends, combining heroics on the field with tragic marital entangle-
ments – subjects somewhat removed from Lydia Hayward’s talent for comic irony.
However, she was now experienced in adapting women’s writing and stories of
female friendships and possibly she was sympathetic to another woman’s efforts,
because for the next few years she became closely involved with Shurey’s films.
Second to None (1926), credited as Hayward’s scenario, drew attention to Shurey
as a woman producer, its ‘unblushing warlike fervour’ surprising at least one
reviewer as ‘the most militaristic picture I’ve seen’ (Yorkshire Post, 29 November
1926). Shurey made two more films, involving Hayward as scenario editor or
scenarist: Carry On! (1927) and The Last Post (1929). Although these films were
denounced in the new, irreverent fan magazine Film Weekly as ‘clap trap patriotism’
(21 January 1929, p. 13), trade reviews thought their ‘blend of patriotism and sen-
timent’ would be ‘successful with the masses’ (Kinematograph Weekly, 17 January
1929, p. 53). However, Lydia’s involvement with Shurey cannot have furthered
her reputation as scenario writer, and there were complaints about ‘overlong and
dreary’ plotting, and ‘loosely knit and rather meandering’ continuity (Bioscope,
4 February 1926, pp. 42–3; Kinematograph Weekly, 2 December 1926, p. 56).
Writing for Britannia appears to have been a stopgap, since Hayward alternated
these collaborations with a renewed partnership with Manning Haynes, scripting
his first production for Gaumont, London Love (trade shown 1926, released 1927),
a crime-laden romance ‘with a strong Jewish flavour and a strong Old Bailey trial
scene’ (Kinematograph Weekly, 22 July 1926, p. 34). Again there were complaints
about ‘weak’ or ‘jumpy’ continuity and Kinematograph Weekly was stern: ‘Lydia
Hayward has done much better work than this’ (22 July 1926, p. 34). Nevertheless,
Lionel Collier, commenting on the poverty of the source material, suggested ‘Lydia
Haywood must have been hard put to it, and both she and Manning Haynes are
really to be congratulated on making something out of what must have been
suspiciously like nothing’ (Kinematograph Weekly, 29 July 1926, p. 31), while the
Westminster Gazette’s enjoyment of the film’s ‘clever studies of real-life types,
genuine characterizations ... [and] ... atmosphere’ recalls qualities of Hayward and
Haynes’s Jacobs work (20 July 1926).
The shifting cultural terrain of British filmmaking was the subject of much debate.
At stake was cinema’s reorganization of class values outside American influence. As
the Sphere argued, ‘London Love suggests a British angle, fishing for American taste’
(31 July 1926). Relief, then, was expressed when two newspapers reported that
Manning Haynes was to set up his own production unit at Pathé (Daily Chronicle
and Daily Express, both 24 November 1926), followed the next year by The Bioscope’s
headline, ‘Lydia Hayward Signed Up,’ announcing a year’s contract with the com-
pany for ‘the finest scenario writer we have’ (12 May 1927, p. 33). Passion Island
(1927) did indeed involve a regrouping at Pathé of colleagues from the former
Artistic and current Britannia teams, reuniting Haynes and Hayward, bringing Jack
Raymond across from Britannia as Haynes’s assistant and attempting to revive the
Jacobs connection with a story suggested by Jacobs but, according to his biographer,
Anthony James (1999: 137), never written. Despite its concocted plot, trade journals
praised the film for its dramatic story value and continuity ‘that flows easily’, while
The Bioscope congratulated Lydia Hayward for a scenario ‘of great power ... and ...
atmosphere’ (Kinematograph Weekly, 16 June 1927, p. 27; Bioscope, 2 June 1927, p. 37).
Lydia’s career now triangulated between Jack Raymond, Dinah Shurey and
Manning Haynes. The continuance of her ‘exceedingly happy partnership’ with
Haynes in their inventive adaptation of George Pleydell’s West End country-house
thriller, The Ware Case (1928), was the last of their collaborations to be greeted with
wholehearted enthusiasm. Kinematograph Weekly praised Lydia for her ‘bold move
in telling the real story of the murder at the trial in flashbacks’ (3 May 1928, p. 66).
Lydia Hayward as scenarist: Those Who Love (1929)

While praise for Hayward and Haynes testifies to their continuing teamwork,
‘invention’ is often attributed to Haynes. However, Lydia’s own comments, along
with her only surviving script for Those Who Love – based on Guy Fletcher’s 1927
novel, Mary Was Love – exemplify her literary visualization. As her Australian
interviewer reported: ‘Mrs Freshman ... also does the shooting-script’ and ‘in many
cases aids with the direction, and is on the floor all the time a picture is under
production’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 12 April 1939, p. 6). In ‘Concerning Scenarios’,
Hayward insists that ‘in the first instance, a film should exist on paper ... nor would
a firm accept a scenario in which they could not “see” a film’. For the adaptor,
reproducing an author’s plot is insufficient and reliance on titling un-cinematic.
The scenarist, then, searches ‘for a film equivalent of an elusive literary quality’
(Bioscope, 18 June 1927, p. 155). Hayward’s script for Those Who Love reveals a
process of visual translation circumventing the weaknesses of the original novel.
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Fletcher’s novel is a rambling, lachrymose tale, centring on the melancholia

of David Mellor, whose courtship of Mary emerges as memories that haunt him
on returning from the First World War, six years after her death. Trapped equally
by his promise that he will ‘love her always’, and her dying promise that he ‘will
find her again’, his later attraction to Anne is blocked by ‘visions’ of Mary. While
Hayward eliminates reference to the war and straightens out the chronology, her
script is strong on the visionary effects cinema is attuned to deliver. Concerned
not only with what but how the audience sees, the script indicates, if loosely, shot
scale, angle of view, and framing of characters in relation to each other; editing
devices such as fades out and in, cuts, mixes, double exposure and iris shots; cam-
era movements such as trucking and tricycling. Sometimes Hayward includes an
indication of what is spoken as a guide to performance while specifically ruling
out a subtitle, relying on the situation and scripted gesture to convey the feel-
ing of what is said. Thus, having received too late a legacy that would have paid
Mary’s hospital expenses: ‘David is speaking ... (no titles) “Look Mary ... look.”
Showing her the money, he falls on her body.’
Hayward’s visual scripting practice is exemplified in a sequence, not in the
book, that condenses Mary’s transition from hopeful bride to deathbed in a com-
plex series of dissolves and camera movements from a magazine wedding dress
pattern to Mary gazing at its completion from her sickbed, compressing days or
even weeks into a few minutes.
1930s: scripting for sound

Those Who Love was trade shown in November 1929, its release date not fixed.
It was two years before Lydia took on another script. She was now 50 years old
and the film industry in upheaval with the changeover to sound. Lydia was well
placed to continue across the silent-sound divide, since one of the strengths of her
scenario writing was her noted gift for trenchant dialogue titles. Moreover she was
eminently skilled at adaptation, which was to become the mainstay of the 1930s
British cinema. However, the new technology intensified the grip of American
companies, their distribution arms now diluting British production with cheaply
made quota quickies.
Meanwhile, somewhere between 1932 and 1933, Manning Haynes, now involved
with British Lion, called on Lydia’s skill to spin a tale out of the famous concert hall
ballad ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’. At the same time, Herbert Wilcox, whose British
and Dominions Company had signed a quota deal with United Artists, drew Lydia
together with Monckton Hoffe to co-script the apparently Noël Coward-approved
but also much-criticized adaptation of Bitter Sweet (1933). Keeping her busy, Wilcox
also reunited her with Jack Raymond for a celebrated adaptation of Warwick
Deeping’s much-loved Sorrell and Son (1933). According to Rachael Low, Wilcox
hoped his deal with UA would get his films ‘American distribution on equal terms’
(1985: 147). Lydia was clearly a significant player in this ambition, the American
press book including a handy ‘review’ asserting that the ‘tender mood’ of Warwick
Deeping’s story ‘[is] faithfully preserved by Lydia Hayward who adapted the novel
to the talking screen in close association with the author’.
Sorrell and Son: Lydia’s swan song

Sorrell and Son was undoubtedly Hayward’s most successful script of the 1930s. As
before, she cuts through the episodic meandering of the novel, in which the post-war
déclassé Captain Sorrell struggles to cope with unemployment, loss of status, deser-
tion by his wife and single parenthood. But more significant, the script of the earlier
Those Who Love suggests Hayward’s skill in visualizing Sorrell’s social fall and eventual
regeneration through his bond with his son. In the film a rapid series of dissolves
leads from Sorrell’s courtship through his failure to find work after the War to his
hand held out in a final plea to his departing wife. Hand imagery threads through the
episodic narrative, signalling Sorrell’s class fall and eventual regeneration through the
surgeon’s hands of his now grown-up son. Such concision of narrative into unfolding
images marks Hayward’s extreme skill as a visualizing scriptwriter.
Endgame
Following Hayward’s unusually maligned adaptation of Henry Arthur Jones’s 1900
play Mrs Dane’s Defence, an even longer gap in her screenwriting career ensued, pos-
sibly because her personal life took over when, in August 1938, she married William
Freshman and they sailed to Australia in April 1939. Returning in the summer
just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Lydia launched straight into
work with two scripts for Jack Raymond, now running his own company. Two
early wartime films remained, both directed by Norman Walker, both family
dramas, their endings signalling changing social priorities requiring personal
sacrifice to meet the current crisis: Man at the Gate (1941), once more co-scripted
with Manning Haynes, and Hard Steel (1942), the sensitively observed story of
an upwardly mobile steelworker bent on social and economic advancement at
the cost of family, workers and his own humanity. His responsibility for a fatal
accident at his steel mill and the country’s call for armaments brings about an
understanding of his place in a network of collaborative social relationships.
Although reviews of these 1930s films note the quality of filmic adaptation
and treatment, Hayward was named only in advertising or press-book copy.
Entertainment expectations set by Hollywood, changing values associated with
‘modern’ social attitudes, and rearguard class reaction to cinema as a now dominant
mass medium merge in ambiguous responses to Lydia’s films which, while often
valued for their professional skill and crowd-pleasing mix of humour, pathos
and patriotism, are felt old-fashioned in material and sentiment, with repeated
comments on their slowness.
Coming to maturity in the last years of the Victorian era, Hayward, while ahead
of the times in her sympathies, inevitably inherited perspectives and practices
derived from her nineteenth-century cultural context, central to which was the rise
of mass culture and cross-fertilization between media forms. Hayward’s practice
focused on rendering the spirit of the author in cinematic form. However, the works
she adapted were not modernist texts for minority readers, but populist, middle-
brow novels and short stories, cueing into the culture to which they contributed.
Working with W. W. Jacobs’s stories she learnt how to render sharp social observa-
tion of human foibles in wryly humorous subtitles and comic character interaction.
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For music-hall trained Will Kellino, Lydia adapted romantic novels, developing the
art of interlinking episodic skits sufficiently smoothly to satisfy continuity, while
broadening characterization to exploit social difference for cross-class romance,
making her heroines’ aspirations and slang-infused repartee more modern. Working
with Dinah Shurey introduced Hayward to full-blooded melodrama, harking back
to nineteenth-century military and naval spectacles, rendered more ‘realistic’ with
real battleships, while giving voice to the below-decks sailor and trench-worn
soldier, and interweaving the spectacle of war with personal domestic traumas.
These diverse influences came together in Hayward’s 1930s work, with source
material and resulting scenarios that responded in different ways to both the chal-
lenges and nostalgia instigated by social change. Trade press reviews expressed
ambivalent appreciation of these films’ characteristic mix of mode and mate-
rial, suggesting both discomfort at the industry’s dependence on mass audience
tastes and awareness that the material in which Hayward’s talents excelled no
longer resonated with contemporary attitudes. Thus, in summing up Hard Steel,
Kinematograph Weekly is typically torn between perceptions of box-office success
and distaste for the material and methods:
[P]roduction of the story and its interpretation are a little old fashioned ... but
human, domestic and spectacular technical by-play effectively coat the pill.
Moreover its patriotic ending is shrewd as well as relevant showmanship. It
should register with the unsophisticated. (29 January 1942, p. 31)
Released on 18 May 1942, Hard Steel was Lydia’s last film. Three years later, on 28
May 1945, she signed her will in a solicitor’s office near her Hampstead home,
naming William Freshman and her daughter, Helena Travers Forrest, as her execu-
tors and sole beneficiaries. She died six days later, aged 65, in Knaresborough
Place, Kensington. What her career as scriptwriter leaves to film criticism today is
a demand for a critical understanding of co-creation. As Lydia insisted, films are
not the products of singular creators; as suggested by her practice as scriptwriter,
a film can only be grasped through the productive interactions of collaborative
teams.
Alma Reville (1899–1982)
Nathalie Morris
‘Mrs Hitchcock knows a great deal more about scenario writing than
I am ever likely to know’ – Alfred Hitchcock
There is some irony in writing this entry on Alma Reville for Women Screenwriters:
An International Guide, given that Reville herself declined to be featured in a book on
the same subject in the 1970s. In a letter held within the Alfred Hitchcock papers at
the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, Mr (not Mrs) Hitchcock replies to the
volume editors’ request and asserts his wife’s desire to be omitted from the volume
on the grounds that she was ‘a technical writer of scripts [and] definitely not part
of the creative process’. He continues:
She insists quite rightly that she was never a creative writer in the sense that
we know it today […] so you see it would be quite wrong to include her – and
she is very emphatic about it – as a bona fide writer.16
Reville’s reluctance to be profiled as a screenwriter brings to the fore a number of

points about her career, her work as her famous husband’s most enduring collabo-
rator, and the nature of screenwriting: what it actually encompasses and how this
may have evolved or changed over time. As numerous commentators have noted,
Reville was notoriously reticent about her own talents. She rarely put herself for-
ward publicly, although those in the know fully acknowledged and understood
the importance of her opinions and contributions to her husband’s films. It has
often been suggested that the notion of the ‘Hitchcockian’ should be taken to
refer to the style of both Mr and Mrs.
Recent years have seen an increased interest in Reville’s work, both with and
without Hitchcock. The BFI National Archive’s restoration of The First Born (1928)
in 2011 promoted the film in the context of Reville’s status as co-writer (alongside
director and lead actor Miles Mander) and, in its major Hitchcock retrospective
the following year, the BFI repeatedly highlighted Reville’s role as the director’s
most longstanding and important collaborator. Since then, two films have created
interpretations of the Hitchcocks and their personal and working relationship.
The Girl (2012), telling the story of Hitchcock’s obsession with Tippi Hedren,
featured Imelda Staunton as a tough and influential, but ultimately powerless,
secondary character, unable to control her husband’s increasingly destructive
behaviour. Despite its title, Hitchcock (2013) was arguably as much about Alma
Reville as her husband. The casting of Helen Mirren ensured star status for Reville
as a character, with the script giving her a life and creative outlets and frustrations
outside of the Hitchcock oeuvre, while also depicting her rescuing the production
of Psycho while her husband wrestles with ill health and his own creative demons.
It is inevitable that Reville’s lifetime of work as Hitchcock’s writer, editor, reader,
sounding board and ultimate consultant will always overshadow that of her career
apart from him. But nevertheless, she was an important figure in her own right,
a fact that is increasingly recognized in the light of the steadily growing body
of new research into women’s work in the industry, especially during the silent
era. Reville has multiple credits for her work in the 1910s, 20s and 30s including
cutter, editor, floor secretary, second assistant director, assistant director, actor, as
well as numerous writing credits such as ‘scenario’, ‘co-scenario’, ‘screenplay’ and
‘continuity’. These credits included films with Hitchcock but also multiple fea-
tures on which she worked independently of her husband. Once the Hitchcocks
moved to America in 1939, Reville’s career, and specifically her career as a writer,
became almost exclusively tied to that of Hitchcock. Her last on-screen credit was
for the 1949 Hitchcock film Stage Fright, but it is also important to acknowledge
the significant uncredited contribution Reville made to Hitchcock’s films both
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before and after this point. It is the variety of Reville’s writing credits (and in par-
ticular her regular ‘continuity’ credit), as well as the uncredited nature of much
of her work, that makes her status as a screenwriter a fascinating, if difficult, one
to consider.
Reville’s early career encompassed a range of roles and it was not until the
later 1920s that she moved more decisively towards writing for the screen. After
starting out as a tea girl and then cutter with the London Film Company in
Twickenham as a teenager, she moved to Famous Players-Lasky’s British opera-
tion, based in Islington, in the early 1920s. While there she worked as an editor
and assistant director but she would also have been working in close proximity
to the host of talented women screenwriters such as Margaret Turnbull, Ouida
Bergere and Eve Unsell who were employed by the studio. Hitchcock biographer
John Russell Taylor has noted their potential influence on the young director, and
it is equally likely that their work helped to shape Reville’s development also.17
Hitchcock and Reville began working more closely together after Famous Players
withdrew from making films in the UK in 1922 and producer Michael Balcon took
over the studio. Reville worked as editor on films such as Woman to Woman (1923)
and The White Shadow (1924), on which Hitch was assistant director as well as art
director and writer, and she helped Hitchcock develop the scripts for subsequent
films such as The Blackguard and The Prude’s Fall (both 1925).
When Hitchcock directed his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925, Reville
was his assistant director but almost certainly contributed to the script develop-
ment as well. Reville became Hitchcock’s main writing collaborator from 1929,
when he was without a regular screenwriter (his first films had been scripted by
Eliot Stannard). Between then and 1933, after which Hitchcock began to work
regularly with Charles Bennett, the couple worked on six films together: Juno and
the Paycock (1929), Murder! (1930), The Skin Game (1931), Rich and Strange (1931),
Number Seventeen (1932) and Waltzes from Vienna (1934). These were all fairly close
adaptations of novels and plays and enabled the Hitchcocks to experiment with
sound films that were rich with dialogue. For these films Reville was credited with
‘scenario’ or ‘co-scenario’ alongside Hitchcock. After Waltzes from Vienna, Reville’s
standard credit on the remainder of Hitchcock’s British films became that of
‘continuity’. It was this credit that led Charles Bennett, Hitchcock’s regular writer
on these films, to ask ‘what is continuity?’ and to claim that Reville’s credit was
purely a ruse to bring an extra salary into the Hitchcock household. It is clear this
was not the case.
As noted above, one of Reville’s early film jobs was as floor secretary. This included
elements of script editing as well as keeping a close eye on continuity across scenes.
This work fed directly into her later role as a cutter or editor and was closer to
the modern-day role of continuity supervisor (now more frequently called script
supervisor). Reville’s ‘continuity’ credit on her films with her husband, however,
can be seen as more along the lines of actual screenwriting and story develop-
ment. Reville had a rigorous sense of the way a film was constructed, but her role
also encompassed further levels of contribution such as being a reader who identi-
fied suitable stories for film adaptation, and who then worked to reshape them as
cinematic narratives through developing new ideas and characters. This was often
done through informal, behind-the-scenes discussions.
Hitchcock preferred to work from home during the development process, both
in Britain and later in Hollywood, which has made Reville’s wider contribution to
Hitchcock’s films difficult to analyse. The boundaries between formal and informal,
on-set and behind-the-scenes contribution were often blurred. In a feature penned
for Cassell’s magazine, Hitchcock described the development of the script for
Murder! (1930) as a collaborative and participatory endeavour. As a specific exam-
ple, he wrote about the way in which the rhythm of the jury scene was developed
and acted out by him, Reville, his secretary and their maid, working from their
west London flat.18 Although Reville did receive an official writing credit for this
film, it is often difficult to assess her input.
Hitchcock’s films aside, Reville has numerous writing credits independent of her
husband, beginning from the late 1920s onwards. She moved away from on-set
work after her marriage in 1926 and the subsequent birth of the Hitchcocks’
only child, Patricia, in 1928, and took on writing assignments for other projects.
The majority of Reville’s screenwriting credits are co-credits, suggesting that she
worked best collaboratively, bringing particular qualities that would complement
and support those of others writers. That Reville started as an editor, or cutter (the
term more commonly in use at the time), was important to her development as
a writer. She understood the power of editing, and how it could make or break
a film, pulling in an audience and transporting them through the narrative, or,
alternatively, abruptly breaking the flow of the storytelling and alienating viewers.
It is likely that it also instilled in her a deft sense of construction, rhythm and
pacing, in conjunction with a flair for clever, witty visual touches and scene
transitions. The First Born, co-written by Reville, is a beautifully constructed film,
a model of often witty narrative economy, from its opening sequence in which a
young married couple, the Boycotts (Miles Mander and Madeleine Carroll), swiftly
move from passionate embraces to equally passionate arguments, to a beautifully
paced dinner party scene in which Madeleine tries to avoid the intense gaze of the
handsome Lord Harborough (John Loder).
Reville was one of four writers to work on The Constant Nymph (1928), a high-
profile film adapted from the best-selling novel by Margaret Kennedy. She co-wrote
the script alongside Kennedy herself, the film’s producer, Basil Dean, and writer
Angus MacPhail, a close friend and long-term collaborator of the Hitchcocks,
and Reville’s credit was ‘continuity arranged by’. The Constant Nymph tells the
story of the tragic love affair between a young girl and an avant-garde composer.
A Romance of Seville (1929) was co-written with Garnett Weston, and although
only fragments of the film are available to view via the BFI National Archive, the
script, held in the archive’s Special Collections, shows the film to be imaginatively
envisaged and constructed.
As Jo Botting and Christina Lane have pointed out, Reville’s non-Hitchcock
credits in the 1920s and 30s tend towards stories with strong female characters,
which becomes particularly evident in the sound era with films such as Sally in
Our Alley (1931), the story of a barmaid (Gracie Fields) who is wrongly led to
United Kingdom 623
believe her fiancé has been killed in World War One, and Nine till Six (1932), a
female-orientated drama set in a dress shop with a largely female cast.19 Although
uncredited, Reville was one of four writers to work on The Water Gypsies (1932),
in which a young woman living on a canal boat (Ann Todd) falls in love with an
artist. Her final British, non-Hitchcock, credit was 1935’s The Passing of the Third
Floor Back, a skilfully constructed and technically adept film in which the inhab-
itants of a boarding house find their lives changed for the better by the arrival
of a mysterious stranger (Conrad Veidt). The scene depicting the arrival of the
new boarder bears a strong resemblance to the first appearance of Ivor Novello in
Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926), on which Reville was assistant director.
In 1939, the Hitchcocks moved from Britain to America. Aside from a writing
credit (with three others) on the quirky Fred Allen and Jack Benny comedy It’s in
the Bag! (1945), Reville was credited only on films directed by her husband; for
the screenplay of Suspicion (1941) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and for adaptat-
ing The Paradine Case (1947) and Stage Fright (1949). Both of her screenwriting
credits were co-writing credits: with Samuel Raphaelson and Joan Harrison for
Suspicion and with Thornton Wilder and Sally Benson for Shadow of a Doubt. Her
adaptation credit was a separate one to those for the screenplay itself – producer
David O. Selznick received this credit for The Paradine Case, and Whitfield Cook
for Stage Fright.
As Botting and Lane have deftly argued, traditional credits do not offer adequate
understanding of the nature of Reville’s work, a point illustrated by the fact that
Hitchcock had originally hoped for Reville to receive an ‘adaptation by’ credit on
Suspicion.20 Due to the rules of the Screenwriters Guild at this time, this was not
allowed and Reville subsequently received a co-writing credit, listed third after
Raphaelson and Harrison, thereby demonstrating the often arbitrary nature of
credit assignment. Under the current rules of the Writers Guild of America, ‘basic
adaptation, continuity, scenario and dialogue’ all now qualify for a screenplay
credit with ‘adaptation by’ only being used in exceptional circumstances where a
writer’s contribution shapes the direction of a screenplay without including any
of the above-listed elements. If these rules were applied across Reville’s filmogra-
phy we would see a much higher number of screenplay credits for her from the
1930s through the 1970s.
As one of the few titles for which the archives contain extensive evidence of
Reville’s contribution, Suspicion shows how closely involved Reville was through-
out, despite the originally desired credit being ‘adaptation’ rather than ‘screenplay
by’.21 Likewise, Reville worked extensively on the The Paradine Case, having a diffi-
cult time with producer David O. Selznick (who received screenplay credit) and
his vision of the film. Reville recommended Selwyn Jepson’s novel Man Running,
which was the source of Stage Fright, to her husband and, as Botting and Lane
suggest, helped change it from a wrong man story into ‘a woman’s investigation
of female performance’. Reville was apparently so distressed at the film’s poor
critical reception, notably because its false flashback was seen by some critics as
fundamentally dishonest filmmaking, that she withdrew from formal credits on
her husband’s films thereafter.
This did not diminish her involvement behind the scenes, though. She contin-
ued to read and recommend subjects for films, and remained closely involved in
commenting on and shaping scripts, making casting suggestions (something that
is depicted in The Girl, as Imelda Staunton’s Reville draws Hitchcock’s attention to
Sienna Miller’s Tippi Hedren) and spotting errors and inconsistencies (shown in
Hitchcock as Mirren’s Reville spots Marion Crane blink when she’s supposed to be
dead). Reville continued to offer detailed feedback in written form, as evidenced
by Reville’s handwritten notes on a film as late as Torn Curtain (1966). These
include comments such as:
[T]he whole scene seems underwritten – surely at some point she would say he
never wanted her to come on this trip in the first place etc. This is covered in
her character delineation but I don’t think in script and would build up now.22
Notes such as these demonstrate Reville’s close and ongoing involvement through-
out the writing process, despite her lack of official credit. Published in Hitchcock’s
Secret Notebooks, Dan Auiler notes ‘there may have been hundreds of pages like
these written over the years; however, these are all that survive’ (1999: 275).
The availability – or lack – of archival evidence is just one of the factors that
contributes to obscuring the nature of Reville’s work as screenwriter. Her own
reticence, coupled with the collaborative nature of filmmaking, the informal way
in which she worked with her husband on their films, and the way in which film
credits have changed over time, all go to highlight the complexities of attempting
to assess her work and career, and women’s work and the role of the screenwriter
more generally. Reville’s career provides a multifaceted example of the importance
and value of collaboration to filmmaking. The fact that she worked as co-writer on
so many films demonstrates the way in which writers, particularly for films, can
bring different strengths to a project. Reville was not a writer of dialogue, which
for some would appear to be the essence of film. What she brought was a strong
and firm grasp of structure, the shaping and guiding of the audience’s viewpoint,
and an inspired sense of pace and cutting, drawn from her days as an editor. That
Reville never worked as sole author on a film in no way diminishes the value of
her work as a screenwriter. Her career instead shows the value of a compilation of
strengths and skills – for example, what a trained editor can bring to a film when
working as a writer – and demonstrates that film is a collaborative medium and
that different writers can bring different qualities to a project.
Muriel Box (1905–91)
Jill Nelmes
Muriel Box was a prolific writer of theatre plays and screenplays, many written
in collaboration with her husband, Sydney Box. She made a notable contribution
to British cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, credited as the writer of 22 films, The
Seventh Veil winning an Academy Award in 1946 for Best Original Screenplay.
Muriel is better known as one of the few successful women directors in British
United Kingdom 625
cinema, directing 14 feature films between 1952 and 1964. Research has mostly
focused on her work as a director rather than screenwriter yet she is described
by Sue Harper as ‘the most important female screenwriter in post-war British
cinema’, surmising that Muriel did the lion’s share of the writing in her partner-
ship with Sydney (2000: 179). Muriel also co-wrote and script-edited a number of
films she is not credited with, especially while head of the scenario department
at Gainsborough Studios, and she influenced the subject matter of many films
produced in that period. Caroline Merz notes she was a ‘wry, witty commenta-
tor’, particularly concerning gender (1994: 125) and was able to make (and write)
films which ‘clearly reflect her concern with feminism in a way that must have
been, at some level, read positively by women audiences of the time’ (1994: 126).
Although critics were not always kind about Muriel’s films she was without doubt
an extremely talented writer who was adept at making films that audiences liked,
especially women.
Muriel Violet Baker left school at 16 and trained as a shorthand typist. She joined
an amateur dramatics society and began to write for the stage. Muriel’s career in
film began through a contact in amateur dramatics when she was offered work as
a typist in the scenario department at British Instructional Films, based in Welwyn
Garden City.23 She was taken on in 1929, a time of great upheaval in the film
industry, when the studios were converting to sound and the scenarists learning
to write film dialogue for the first time. Typing out screenplays at BIF gave Muriel
the opportunity to understand more clearly the structure and narrative content
of a story and she began to offer improvements to the dialogue. Her suggestions
were often used, as she explains:
[T]he actors found themselves saddled with some execrable lines, quite una-
ware of the fact that they were enabling me to learn the craft of scriptwriting.
A privilege I was not slow to realise and appreciate. (Box 1974: 99)
While at BIF Muriel also worked in continuity where she learnt much about how
films are made. When BIF was taken over by British International Pictures, she was
offered work at BIP for a short time before being made redundant, and was then
taken on by Westminster Films in 1931, run by Jerome Jackson and Michael Powell.
She gained valuable experience while there, acting as secretary and continuity girl
as well as typing screenplays and dialogue sheets, and was given the opportunity
to read scripts, submit reports and assess their suitability as film material.
Muriel’s partnership with Sydney

Muriel first met Sydney Box in 1932, at a performance of his play Murder Trial,
which had won the Best New Play and the Welwyn Theatre Cup, awarded as part
of the Welwyn Drama Festival.24 Sydney was an experienced writer, whose work
impressed Muriel enough to recommend him to her employers at Westminster
Films, who had asked her to look out for talented writers.
The following year Jackson and Powell were in financial difficulties after a series
of films that did poorly at the box office. They struck a deal with Gaumont-British
Studios which included Muriel moving with them as a permanent member of

staff, where she was given her own room and had enough free time to write the
first drafts of two plays (Box 1974: 127).
Muriel and Sydney kept in touch and in autumn 1933 they decided to live
together, despite Sydney still being married. Muriel explains the arrangement was
very convenient as it also meant that they were able to work continually on their
writing projects:
It was then we began to collaborate in earnest. Every evening I sat down and
worked on the first draft of a play we had roughed out over our meals or in
bed at night. As soon as each draft left my pen it passed to Sydney to pol-
ish and amend in any way he thought would improve it. Our collaboration
worked smoothly and happily and in 1934 our first joint effort, Ladies Only,
was published. (Box 1974: 139)
The play was a success and they received substantial royalties, going on to write
a number of one-act plays together that were in demand from the amateur dra-
matic societies, finding particular success with plays for all-women casts. A second
volume of six short plays for women, Petticoat Plays, was published in 1935. Their
only screenplay produced in that period was a comedy, Alibi Inn (1935), directed
by Walter Tennyson, but it did not do well. By 1939 they had published more
than 50 plays, though the onset of the Second World War meant that amateur
drama societies disbanded, and with this the demand for new plays plummeted.
Muriel directed her first film, The English Inn (1941), for the British Council
when Sydney set up Verity Films in 1940 with Jay Gardner Lewis. The next film
she wrote and was set to direct, Road Safety for Children, was given to a male direc-
tor after the head of the films division at the Ministry of Information, Arthur
Elton, decided the subject matter was not suitable for a female director. Despite
this prejudice against female directors Verity was very successful, employing a
number of people including Sydney’s sister Betty Box. Muriel notes in her diary
in 1943 their punishing work schedule: ‘I have been busy adapting three of our
one hour plays to script form’ while ‘Sydney worked like a Trojan all weekend
scripting’ (Box, 14 March).
The Boxes writing relationship in this period was prolific but creative. They
valued each other’s opinions, working on projects together and separately, giv-
ing each other feedback at frequent intervals. Muriel explains their approach to
writing:
I used to do the overall plot, then Sydney would start on it and ‘diddy it up’
wherever he could. Then I’d have another go at the script, then he’d do a
further one; it would usually go through five or six drafts. (McFarlane 1997: 89)
Muriel’s experience in feature film production was invaluable and she was able to
give Sydney advice on the technical side when he produced his first feature film,
On Approval, in 1944. He was then approached by Two Cities Films to make three
United Kingdom 627
films as a contract producer: English without Tears (1944), The Flemish Farm (1944)
and Don’t Take It to Heart (1944). But Sydney was given little creative freedom while
a producer at Two Cities and he and Muriel decided to move into feature films as
a writing, producing and directing team, enabling them to control all aspects of
the production process. Their first film, 29 Acacia Avenue (1945), was adapted from
a popular play by Mabel and Denis Constanduros, about a family with teenage
children and what they get up to when the parents go on holiday. Muriel acted as
advisor rather than co-writer, her experience as script editor proving invaluable:
I didn’t do much on Acacia Avenue. It wasn’t necessary, she’d (Mabel Constanduros)

got the script there and it was all set. The main thing from the very beginning
was that I was able to advise on the way scripts were done and constructed.
I knew that. (Muriel Box, BECTU tapes)
The theme of teenage and female sexuality, in particular, was to become the subject
of many of Muriel’s films, but the narrative of Acacia Avenue caused the film’s finan-
cier, Arthur Rank, some consternation and he refused to back the film, even offer-
ing to pay £40,000 if the Boxes would keep it from distribution. Rank’s concern,
though, made it difficult to get anyone else to back the film. After some time,
Shipman, founder of Shipman and King Cinemas Ltd with S. S. King, invested
£20,000 in the film and went on to act as a producer-financier on The Seventh Veil.
While waiting to produce Acacia Avenue the Boxes began work on a new project,
Close-Up, whose title was later changed to The Seventh Veil and became the inter-
national success that was to make their names in the film business. The film was,
in many ways, the pinnacle of their achievement, as Muriel points out:
Although Sydney and I were subsequently responsible for a number of original

films as writer-collaborators, producer and director respectively, none of them
could hope to achieve the success of The Seventh Veil, despite the fact that each
received the same care and attention that was lavished on the former. (Box
1974: 184)
The Boxes wrote two more screenplays that were released in 1946. The Years
Between was an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel about an MP who leaves
England to become a resistance fighter during World War Two. He returns to find
he is presumed dead and that his wife has taken his place as MP. Muriel wanted to
make a film with a feminist and political message (Aspinall and Murphy 1983: 65),
and this powerful work demonstrates that a woman is capable of succeeding in a
profession generally considered a male province. The film is a sensitive portrayal
of the difficulties that both men and women faced in adjusting to the wartime and
post-war world, in which women expected a greater degree of freedom and equal-
ity while men had to learn to cope with these new expectations. Unfortunately
the comedy, A Girl in a Million (1946), an original screenplay by the Boxes, was
less well received. As Andrew Spicer comments, the story ‘betrays Box’s tendency
to think of a script as a one act play rather than a multi-minute feature’(2006: 64).
The success of The Seventh Veil, combined with the fact that it only cost £92,000,
led to Sydney being offered the job of head of production at Gainsborough
Studios. Muriel became scenario editor, in charge of developing scripts. The new
job was extremely demanding as Sydney was contracted to make ten to twelve
pictures a year, which left no time for either to write their own scripts. Extra staff
were taken on to help Muriel; she had a secretary, a trainee writer and reader.
The studio faced a shortage of good stories and experienced writers who were not
already contracted to a studio. The Boxes could not afford to employ prestigious
writers like Terence Rattigan who was paid £10,000 for a script. Muriel explains:
[I]n 1949 I had forty-two scripts in various stages of preparation which, though
it sounds a lot, was only just enough to keep the studio wheels revolving
smoothly and the numerous stages regularly filled. For every one that went
into production, three others were generally standing by in readiness for a
switch of programme due to a change in circumstances.25 (Box 1974: 186)
The quantity of output required had repercussions, as Robert Murphy notes:

‘Predictably quality was sacrificed to the pressure of time and money’ (1998: 150).
This was the major reason why the Boxes’ films failed to have the success they
would have had if more time had been devoted to development or they had been
more selective in their choice of projects.
The first films written by the Boxes for Gainsborough were adaptations; Graham
Greene’s novel, The Man Within (1947) a period story of smugglers and revenge,
received poor reviews; as Murphy comments ‘there was a lack of consonance
between Muriel Box’s script and Bernard Knowles direction, and the film is shape-
less and unsatisfactory’ (Murphy 1998: 1500); The Brothers, (1947) was an adapta-
tion of a novel by L.A.G. Strong, about two feuding Scottish families, while Dear
Murderer (1947) the story of a man who plans to kill his wife’s lover but then finds
out she has more than one, was adapted from a play by the Boxes.
Murphy suggests that ‘a sort of drabness shrouds the Box films’ (1998: 150) and
‘though they acted with the best of intentions, the Boxes wrecked Gainsborough’s
lucrative tradition of costume melodrama’ (1998: 150). Indeed, most of the films
after this, for which Muriel has writing credits, are based in a realistic world, mov-
ing away from the Gainsborough period melodramas towards films grounded in
everyday life, and often centred on the family. When the Bough Breaks (1947) and
Holiday Camp (1947) are early examples of a more realistic approach, the former
an issue-based drama about what happens when a young mother’s baby goes to
foster parents, and the latter a follow-on from 29 Acacia Avenue, about the Huggett
family. In 1948 Muriel is credited with co-writing six films, none of which is an
original story: another Huggett film, Here Come the Huggetts; Easy Money, adapted
from a play by Arnold Ripley, about a family who think they have won the foot-
ball pools until they find the coupon wasn’t posted; Portrait from Life, based on an
original story by David Evans, about an army officer who goes to Germany after
becoming obsessed by the portrait of a German woman who has amnesia, a film
which has elements of The Seventh Veil; Good Time Girl, loosely based on a novel by
United Kingdom 629
Arthur Le Berne, about a teenager, Gwen, who becomes involved with a criminal
underworld and is sent to an approved school. The film is co-written by Muriel
with Sydney and Ted Willis, as Muriel explains:
I worked very hard on the script, and went round homes for delinquent girls to
make it realistic. After it was filmed the censor got his hands on it and he was
an absolute bastard! (McFarlane 1997: 90)
Spicer called the film ‘an accomplished thriller’, yet the film is more than that,
depicting a harsh system of social justice for teenagers who are often at the mercy
of predatory adults (2006: 116). Harper points out that Muriel has given the
story a different focus to the novel and the film script ‘carefully locates social
deprivation as the source of Gwen’s problems’ (2000: 180).
Muriel’s last writing credit at Gainsborough was for Christopher Columbus (1949),
a film they inherited, and which neither she nor Sydney wanted to make, but
Rank insisted they do so because so much money had already been spent on
development. A new and carefully researched script was written but the film did
poorly at the box office.
After Gainsborough
When film production transferred to Pinewood Studios in 1948, Muriel decided to
leave Gainsborough to give herself more freedom to write, though her diary entry
for 1949 suggests she still had a hectic schedule of work. In 1950, Sydney decided to
take a year-long sabbatical, ostensibly because of ill health, and he and Muriel went
on a tour of the US, where they worked on many writing projects while travelling.
After returning from their tour, Sydney decided to resign from Pinewood and set
up London Independent Producers, with Muriel and William MacQuitty as part-
ners, in 1951. This would give them the freedom to develop their own projects
again and allow Muriel to prove herself as a director. But they were still finding
it difficult to get films into production, Muriel noting, in their diary of 1952,
‘Sydney and I have both been very down in the mouth today, feeling that we
were never getting anywhere with films after months of waiting, negotiating and
slogging at script after script’ (26 January 1952). Later in the year Muriel refers
again to the lack of films going into production: ‘[W]e will have completed eight
screenplays and only “The Happy Family” has been made’ (31 March 1952).
Despite these setbacks they still remained optimistic, Muriel writing, ‘We seem to
have so many ideas for plays and films and are beginning to wonder which one
we should tackle first’(17 March 1952). Muriel comments on how they cope with
the unpredictable nature of the film industry: ‘[O]ur sense of complete frustration
with the film business continues to lower our spirits. The only way to get above
this is to plunge into more work’ (5 April 1952).
Apart from the tremendous acclaim received for The Seventh Veil, the period
between 1952 and 1960 could be considered Muriel’s most creatively successful,
in which she wrote and directed five feature-length films. The first of these was
The Happy Family (1952), written by Muriel and Sydney, with the intention of
proving that she could manage to direct the film ‘on a reasonably low budget
with a measure of success’ (Box 1974: 212). The film, an adaptation of a play by
Michael Clayton Hutton, is about a family who barricade themselves inside their
grocery shop when plans are made to knock down the shop to build the Festival
Hall. The Happy Family did well at the box office and was also popular in the US,
receiving many good reviews. It is a lively story, about the people versus the state,
and the family’s plight is presented with sympathy and humour.
The next project, Street Corner (1953), was an original screenplay, credited to
both of the Boxes. It was Muriel’s second feature film as director and one of their
most successful films. The story was close to Muriel’s heart, about women police
officers in the Metropolitan Police, complementing Muriel’s interest in exploring
women’s issues. The film had a difficult gestation; many drafts of the script were
written and Muriel had frequent disagreements with Scotland Yard about the
content of the film. The screenplay’s interesting structure is composed of differ-
ent sequences, each telling a story about the role of women in the police force.
The film boasts lively dialogue, believable characters and some moving scenes.
Again, the research undertaken contributed to the realism, as Muriel explains: ‘My
research for the policewoman film gave me an insight into the force and its work
which I should otherwise never have obtained’ (Box 1974: 214).
Muriel’s next film to be released as co-writer and director was the entertaining
and witty The Passionate Stranger/A Novel Affair (1957). A first draft, in 1949, is
described by Muriel as ‘a mild satire on romance as opposed to reality and the
unhappy consequences of confusing the two’ (Box 1974: 221). Muriel was inter-
ested in experimenting with narrative form, explaining the plot had something
different to say about the relationship between men and women:
Intended to debunk the sentimental novel, it concerned an author who creates

a story around the members of her own household, thinly disguised, and the
odd and embarrassing results when one of them recognises himself on reading
the manuscript and proceeds to try and make everything come true. The film
was unfolded in colour, the real life sections in black and white’ (Box 1974: 221)
In this light, but imaginative, narrative there are elements of conflict between the
husband, Roger, and wife, Judith; he wanting Judith to withdraw the book from
the publishers because of its embarrassing content:
JUDITH
And if I don’t agree to withdraw it?
ROGER
Then you’ll have to choose between me and the book.
(Box 2.3:192)
In the end Judith does not have to make such a decision and a happy ending
and compromise is reached, but the tension between the couple is vividly and
realistically expressed.
United Kingdom 631
Muriel explains that the following film, The Truth about Women (1957), was the
most personal film that she wrote and directed, in which she wanted to:
[S]upport the cause of equality between the sexes. Thus my approach to this
subject was perhaps more enthusiastic and dedicated than to any other theme
previously attempted. Unable to chain myself to the railings, I could at least
rattle the film chains! (1974: 222)
The film’s subject matter stopped it from getting the publicity and strong theatrical
opening that it deserved. Possibly, as Muriel suggests, the film was not the type
of comedy that the distributors expected, being light-hearted rather than broad
comedy, and it was not given a West End run, thus limiting its exhibition. The
critics, though, when they eventually got to see the film, were much more positive
and it received good reviews. Leonard Mosely of the Daily Express describes it as
‘deliciously sly and funny’ (1974: 224), but the film suffered from poor box-office
receipts.
The last film to be written (and directed) by Muriel was Too Young to Love (1960),
an adaptation of an American play, Pick-Up Girl, by Elsa Shelley, set in New York
in the late 1940s. Muriel was in contact with Shelley while writing the script, who
gave feedback on the drafts and the meaning of American expressions and slang.26
The subject matter, about a teenage girl from a poor background who contracts
syphilis, proved to be controversial. Muriel approached the new censor at the
British Board of Film Classification, John Trevelyan, in the hope that he would
allow a film of the play. Even though the play had already been shown on televi-
sion, Trevelyan was only willing to pass the script if she edited out any mention
of abortion or syphilis. Muriel refused to do this and Trevelyan:
[F]inally agreed that the film might possibly act as a warning to them (young
people) instead of an encouragement to moral laxity but all that would depend
on the good taste exercised by me in interpreting the script. (1974: 226)
The film was eventually passed without any cuts by the British Board of Film
Censors and Trevelyan wrote to Muriel praising the released film.
The Boxes’ partnership began to dissolve after Sydney had a cerebral haem-
orrhage in 1960 and decided to take a break from filming. Muriel directed The
Piper’s Tune (1962) and Rattle of a Simple Man (1964) but after this was not able
to get support for any other film or television projects. She decided to focus her
creative energy on writing prose, publishing a novel, The Big Switch (1964), about
a future in which women run the world and men have a subservient role. The
Boxes decided to separate and Muriel went on to set up Femina Publications, a
feminist press which was especially innovative for its time. Muriel also became
increasingly involved in fighting for equality between the sexes. Muriel and
Sydney were divorced in May 1969 after 36 years of marriage. Muriel continued
her political activities, marrying Lord Gardiner in 1970, after first meeting him
when petitioning for divorce law reform.
Of her prodigious output, Muriel Box’s most successful screenplay was undoubt-
edly The Seventh Veil, yet she co-wrote and script-edited many other well-received
films. Muriel’s experience as script developer and editor was crucial to many of
the films the Boxes made together, and her significance as a writer might have
been more widely recognized were it not for the pressure to develop large numbers
of screenplays to keep the studios turning over. With no time to author original
stories, Muriel often had to resort to adaptations of plays and novels with the
consequence that the Boxes were never able to match the quality of writing and
dramatic intensity of The Seventh Veil.
Janet Green (1908–93)
Jill Nelmes
Janet Green was a highly regarded screenwriter both in the UK and Hollywood,
who co-wrote wrote with her husband, John McCormick. Green’s screenplays were
nominated for many awards and her writing was often praised by film critics of the
time, but contemporary focus on the director and producer has meant her contri-
bution to the success of films like Victim (1961) has largely been forgotten.27 More
recently Sue Harper draws attention to Green’s writing in Women in British Cinema,
but describes her work as merely ‘solid’, while Eyewitness (1954), one of Green’s
early screenplays, is ‘a modest little thriller’(2000: 195). Harper argues that Green’s
appeal to the studios was because ‘Rank’s henchmen valued her reliability, and her
scripts for Lost (1956) and Sapphire (1959) were socially liberal but conservative on
the gender front’ (2000: 183). Alan Burton and Tim O’Sullivan do acknowledge the
importance of Green’s screenplays to the success of the films produced by Michael
Relph and directed by Basil Dearden, citing Paul Dehn’s review of Victim for the
Daily Mail in which he comments, ‘[I]t was Janet Green who deserved the plaudits,
for her humane, observant and often very moving plea for tolerance towards the
homosexual’ (2009: 238).
A prolific writer in a variety of different genres, from detective stories to bodice
rippers, Green is best known for three ‘social issue’ films: Sapphire, a story about
the hunt for the murderer of a mixed-race woman, Victim, about the blackmailing
of homosexuals, and Life for Ruth (1962), which tells the story of a couple whose
daughter dies because of their religious beliefs. All three films were written for
Michael Relph and Basil Dearden.
Green’s career spanned three decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s. She began
writing at an early age and had short stories published before she was 16.28 Green
became an actress in her early twenties and, from 1931, had leading parts in West
End productions, going on to provide theatre for the armed forces until the end
of the Second World War. Green then began to write professionally, mostly for
theatre and film and occasionally for TV and radio. By 1946 Green had met thea-
tre director John McCormick and together they wrote numerous plays, having
early success with Lighten Our Darkness, performed in the West End and touring
the country from 1945–7, and Love Is My Reason, performed at the New Lindsey
Theatre in the same period.29
United Kingdom 633
Green’s writing potential was spotted by Muriel Box, whose assistant wrote to
Green’s agent in 1949, commenting on a screenplay that Green had submitted:
Mrs Box has asked me to return the script of ‘Many Happy Returns’ and to say a
little more than the usual bare ‘Thank You’, because they have a high regard for
Janet’s work and would like to encourage her, and they think she is developing
with everything she writes … her power of visualization is excellent, her con-
struction improved and it is only because the subject is so airy that we return
it.30 (Janet Green Collection, JG 48/1: 16/3/1949)
Later in the same year, Sydney Box wrote to Green rejecting a treatment she had
submitted, Lady in Hock, liking the idea but noting the dialogue would upset the
British Board of Film Censors. ‘It’s great fun – but not more than one line in three
would pass the film censor. So I’m afraid it’s destined to be a play or a novel’ (Janet
Green Collection, JG 33/13:10/11/1949).
Green and John McCormick were in such demand as writers that between 1956
and 1959 they were under contract to Rank to provide two original screenplays
a year. Although Green and McCormick did not share credits until after Sapphire,
they worked on the screenplays together, developing the story, with McCormick
acting as critic and sounding board and Green doing the writing, as she explains:
The basic ideas seem to be equally distributed between us … it is then a question

of discussions, reading, and research until we are ready to create the ‘whole’.
At this point, the entire writing is undertaken by me, but my husband remains
closely in the picture’.31 (Janet Green Collection, JG 11/5:28/2/62 – Letter from
JG to Diane Carter)
Sapphire and Victim were Green’s most critically acclaimed films, yet she wrote
the screenplays for other successful films, before and after. The Clouded Yellow
(1950) was Green’s first original screenplay to be produced, for which she was paid
£1,000. It is a lively and suspenseful script, with enjoyable plot complications, in
which a former secret agent takes a job cataloguing butterflies and finds himself
trying to solve a murder mystery.
Although not credited for her part, Green’s following writing project was an
adaptation of a Somerset Maugham play, Trio (1950). The film is divided into
three segments, Green writing a full treatment for the ‘Sanatorium’ section in
1948.32 Her next film, The Good Beginning (1953), credits Green with the story and
screenplay, though this is shared with the director, Gilbert Gunn, and producer,
Robert Hall, but it is a less successful story than The Clouded Yellow. The thin and
clichéd screenplay tells the story of a couple, Johnny and Kit, who are just married
and how this changes their relationship. Kit turns into a brittle, unpleasant char-
acter whose demands lead her husband to murder in the first draft and stealing
money from the man he works for in the second: that Johnny would murder for
money to buy Kit a fur coat is not believable, nor that Kit would stand by him.
The second draft changes the storyline to make it lighter and Kit is less hysterical,
but a conservative view of women’s place in society dominates the film, as Johnny
tells her:
JOHNNY
You know Kit, I don’t think pants suit a woman. I do wish you wouldn’t try
to wear them.
(JG 3/3:16)
Eyewitness (1956), written by Green and directed by Muriel Box, is a hospital

thriller, in which a girl who witnesses a murder is in a coma in hospital. The mur-
derer wants to kill her so she cannot identify him, but even though the premise
holds promise, the story is static, theatrical and plot-bound with unconvincing
characters. The director, Muriel Box, apparently ‘skewed Green’s script to give
more narrative attention to the female characters’ (Harper 2000: 195).
Lost (1956) is an original story by Green and a much more interesting and
accomplished film, about the hunt to find an American couple’s baby who has
been kidnapped. It is successful despite the fact that the story indicates a working
mother is to blame for leaving her child with a nanny, and the negative way in
which the women are portrayed in the film. As Harper notes, ‘Small script touches
make women seem fallible … By contrast it is the men who are more fitted for
motherhood’ (2000: 76). The 35-page story treatment is particularly emotionally
engaging, allowing the reader to visualise events from the parents’ point of view.
Green’s ability to write credible police crime stories and sympathetic detective
characters continued with The Long Arm (1956), adapted from a play by Robert
Barr and credited with Barr and Green as screenwriters. The story is engrossing and
often moving, focusing on a detective superintendent’s mission to catch a danger-
ous safebreaker. The demands of being a detective and the difficulties in keeping a
happy family life are perhaps clichéd but the characters are richly depicted and the
story well researched. This is the only film that Green wrote for Michael Balcon at
Ealing Studios. Although the screenplay is not an original story, it did give Green
valuable experience in writing about the world of the police and police procedure,
which would prove useful in her later films with Relph and Dearden.
Green’s next screenplay, The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958), was also an adap-
tation, of the novel Darkness I Leave You by Nina Warner Hooks. Produced for
Rank, and directed by Joseph Losey, the costume melodrama has a melodramatic
triangular storyline about the downfall of the protagonist when he marries a
gypsy, Belle, and her lover manipulates them. Belle’s character is one-dimensional
and, even though later drafts improve the story, the subject matter does not bring
out the best in Green’s writing. Green was, herself, very unhappy with the fin-
ished version (Janet Green Collection, JG 11/5:1/1/9162).
Green had the foresight to preserve her screenplays and correspondence,
affording us the opportunity to more fully understand her contribution to British
cinema. Letters in the collection are especially revealing about Green’s work-
ing relationship with producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden, when
writing Sapphire, Victim and Life for Ruth.
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The three screenplays, all original stories, are without doubt Green’s most valu-
able contribution to British cinema. Produced by Michael Relph and directed by
Basil Dearden, it is this collaboration which made the landmark films such a
critical triumph. Green was known to Relph as an accomplished writer of detec-
tive stories such as Lost and The Long Arm. The idea for Sapphire developed out
of the Notting Hill race riots in 1956 but there was a great deal of resistance to
the film from Rank because of its subject matter. The film was only given the
go-ahead once Relph offered to make the film for nothing, arguing there would
be redundancies if the film did not go ahead (Burton et al. 1997: 247). The story
is about a young woman, Sapphire, whose body is found on Hampstead Heath
and Detective Hazard’s subsequent quest to find the murderer. Ingenious twists to
the script include the revelation that Sapphire’s father is black, and in the finale
we find out that the racially motivated murderer is her boyfriend’s sister. Green’s
screenplay is much more dynamic and fine-tuned than most of her previous work,
her experience in the genre invaluable, with issue-led drama proving to be her
forte. The characters she creates have light and shade, the police are not presented
as perfect, while the dialogue is often very believable, and the plotting and addi-
tion of red herrings gives drama and tension to the story. In terms of style there
is some very effective cross-cutting and scene changes.
There are many examples of fine writing, though some of the ideas may
seem stereotyped, for instance the revelation that mixed-race Sapphire had racy
clothing underneath her smart clothes, the black beneath the white:
Suddenly, unexpectedly Hazard lifts a flame-red chiffon petticoat, holds it high for
a moment then lays it against the quiet tweeds. (Janet Green Collection, JG 8/2:3)
But many aspects of the story are handled with sensitivity, as in the example when
Dr Robbins, brother of Sapphire, is sceptical of the police finding her murderer
because she is black:
DR ROBBINS
Superintendent, I’ve been black for 38 years. I know. She may have looked
white, but Sapphire was coloured.
HAZARD
Sapphire was murdered. We’ll find out who killed her.
DR ROBBINS (wearily)
I’m sure that’s your intention.
HAZARD
It’s my job. (loses his temper) Don’t be so damn sceptical.
Surprised at himself, he looks at Dr Robbins. The black man softens.
DR ROBBINS
I’m sorry. (after a moment) When I was a child, another boy touched me, then
held out his hand. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘nothings come off on me!’ (shrugs) Trouble
is something came off on me.
(Janet Green Collection, JG 8/2:3)
Tim O’Sullivan and Alan Burton describe the film as ‘a timely and brave initia-
tive, given the backcloth of recurrent (racial) tension, conflict and associated press
coverage that had resulted from the so-called “Notting Hill Riots”, and which had
commanded widespread public and political attention’ (2009: 223). The film was
mostly a critical success in the UK and US, where Green’s writing was often singled
out for praise. Arthur Winton of the New York Post writes:
[T]here is a crispness of dialogue that makes you know it’s a winner … Perhaps
the screenplay writer, one Janet Green, deserves her own special notice for a
picture that is so special.33 (3 November 1959)
Relph, Dearden and Green were keen to work together again and Green and
McCormick proposed that Victim should to be their next film (Janet Green
Collection, JG 11/5: 24/8/1961). Although Green and McCormick wrote at least
four drafts of Victim, the basic plot outline changed little with each rewrite; the
story centres on a blackmailing ring who prey on homosexuals. Melvyn Carr is a
successful barrister and seemingly happily married until his life is turned upside
down when a young man, Barrett, to whom he is sexually attracted, commits
suicide. Barrett had become the victim of a blackmailing ring and, in the hope of
protecting Carr, stolen money to pay them off. Carr helps the police to trap the
blackmailers and agrees to be a witness, aware this will be the end of his career.
Carr’s wife, Laura, is devastated by the revelations but decides to stand by her
husband.
Victim was written at a time when practising homosexuality was still a criminal
offence in Britain. However, there was increasing pressure for legal reform in a
more liberal post-war era. The Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommended legaliza-
tion of homosexuality but the government baulked at such a drastic move, argu-
ing that the public were not yet ready for such a radical change.34 The report
resonated with Green and McCormick who ‘felt impelled to write an original
screenplay which would reflect the plight and life of the homosexual in London’
(Janet Green Collection, JG 10/6:12/9/61). They interviewed homosexuals, doc-
tors, social workers and the police to help them create convincing characters, but
they insisted on the need for a strong plot ‘so that the sociological side-kick would
be part of the story and not stick out like a sore thumb’(Janet Green Collection,
JG 10/6:12/9/61). Relph and Dearden were enthusiastic about working with Green
and McCormick again after the success of Sapphire.
From the outset Victim was seen as groundbreaking due to its exploration of a
subject that had not been openly discussed on the screen in the UK. Green, Relph
and Dearden were aware the development process would be particularly sensitive,
and the censor, John Trevelyan of the British Board of Film Censors, was closely
involved, especially in the early stages. Trevelyan, in a letter to Green, points out
‘it would be wise to treat the subject (of homosexuality) with the greatest discre-
tion’, and emphasized the need to carefully consider his suggestions: ‘[I]n this
revision you will take serious account of the comments that I have made in this
letter’ (Janet Green Collection, JG 10/6:1/7/60).
United Kingdom 637
The development of the screenplay Victim was an extremely successful collaboration

and while there were, at times, some serious disagreements and a clear struggle
for the emergence of one idea over another, the conflict was eventually resolved
because there was a common aim – to produce the best possible film about what,
all agreed, was an important subject. The development process involved some dif-
ficult negotiations with the BBFC, who were immoveable on certain points, but
did try to resolve issues and indicated a willingness to find alternative solutions.
Green’s contribution to the film was pivotal and her courage and passion as a
writer incontrovertible. Whether one considers the completed film, as Bogarde
suggested, ‘a modest, tight, little thriller’ (1979: 241) or something rather more
complex, it was certainly groundbreaking, and perhaps even more so in retrospect.
As Richard Dyer points out, Victim had been ‘the first film to defend homosexual-
ity as a cause in a mainstream context, the first to deal with gayness explicitly …
the first to have a major star playing a gay character’ (1993:71).
Although the relationship between Green, her husband, John McCormick, and
Relph and Dearden had been tested by the writing of Victim, they were enthusiastic
about working together on another issue-based drama, Life for Ruth. Initially called
God the Father the plot is about a young girl, Ruth, who is badly hurt and needs a
blood transfusion, otherwise she will die, but the parents’ religious beliefs will not
allow this. Eventually the mother decides to allow the transfusion, but she is too late
and the child dies. Dr Brown, who treats Ruth, is appalled by what has happened and
brings charges of manslaughter against the father, Harris, who appears in court. After
an emotional court case Harris is found not guilty but is racked with guilt and tries to
kill himself. Dr Brown saves him and is himself full of doubt about what he has done.
The final screenplay is moving and well written despite numerous disagreements
between Green and Relph during its development. Green and McCormick refused
offers to work on other dramas while writing the screenplay and explained they
were ‘deeply interested in the subject and believe in it wholeheartedly’ (Janet Green
Collection, JG 11/5). They spent months researching, which included learning
about medical and legal procedures. The first draft was not liked by Earl St John, the
executive producer at Rank, as Relph relates in a letter to Green and McCormick:
Earl has some reservations about its appeal as popular entertainment in its pre-
sent form. He feels that modern audiences are in general either irreligious or
not interested in religious issues being mixed up with entertainment. He sees
the value of the story as an emotional human drama. (Janet Green Collection,
JG 11/5: 24/8/1961)
Relph needed to appease St John if he was to gain funding from Rank so Green
agreed to do the changes Relph requested, but baulked at writing a happy ending,
as she explains:
We have done all that you asked for, but as you know, disagree profoundly with
the end, and feel it drops the subject into nothing. (Janet Green Collection,
JG 11/5: 21/9/1961)
Letters go back and forth between Green and Relph, who agrees the ending doesn’t
work and suggests they meet to discuss this. Green eventually bows to pressure,
noting:
You both seem to want a happy ending …This we are going to write, but remain
as positively of the opinion that the picture must not tail away to a sweet, sickly
end … (Janet Green Collection, JG 11/5: 17/10/1961)
Green’s argument proved persuasive and the filmed ending has great pathos and is
certainly not sweet or sickly: Harris nearly kills himself by walking into the path of
a bus but Dr Brown pulls him back. Harris then goes home, on his own, in a very
downbeat finale, but with the hint that he may get back to his wife. The ending
seems fitting for such a complex subject in which both Harris and Dr Brown are
forced to examine their beliefs. Whether the subject matter has audience appeal
is debatable, but the argument, the characters and the scenario are sensitively
written and the emotional issues are handled with dexterity.
The writing of Life for Ruth seems to have been an unhappy experience for
Green who was so upset with the final script that she wrote to St John, fearing the
film would empty cinemas, explaining:
A strong dramatic story has disappeared and a dull religious tract has been
put in its place. I am really so distressed Earl, I haven’t felt like this since I saw
the rough cut for ‘The Gypsy and the Gentleman’. (Janet Green Collection,
JG 11/5: 1/1/1962)
Burton and O’Sullivan praise the tenor of the film and the power of the conclu-
sion, noting that Life for Ruth is, in fact, ‘admirably open-ended and intentionally
provides space for a thoughtful audience to work through the complex ethical
issues at stake’ (2009: 274).
Brian McFarlane appreciates the quality of the film and its discussion of a
serious issue, describing it as:
A finely crafted and undeservedly neglected film, which, like so much Dearden-
Relph work, particularly from the post-Ealing days, has had scant critical notice.
It offers not only an absorbing entertainment, but also an honest attempt to
consider a serious ethical issue. (McFarlane 1997: 20)
Robert Murphy notes the film was able ‘to penetrate to a deeper level of realism
than mere surface reflection’ (1992: 42). Critical reception at the time, though,
was mixed, and often polarized, describing the film as either ‘outstanding’ or
‘offensive’, and it was not a box-office success (Burton and O’Sullivan 2009: 273).
After Life For Ruth, Green was approached by director John Ford to write the
screenplay for 7 Women (1965). Green and McCormick went to Hollywood for
what was to be their last produced script. Green continued to work on a number
of projects in the UK and US, and later, unproduced, screenplays are held in the
United Kingdom 639
collection, including The Big Fric Frac, dated around 1969. By the mid 1970s Green
had stopped writing professionally.
Green’s contribution to British cinema of the 1950s and early 1960s deserves
greater recognition. She enjoyed a long and successful screenwriting career, from
her first approaches to the Boxes and their encouragement of her skills, to her col-
laboration with Relph and Dearden, and what would be the zenith of her career
in writing three of the finest films in British cinema. Green may have been liked
by the studios because of her reliability, though she did not hesitate to challenge
their judgement when it affected her scripts. Green’s depictions of men were often
at the expense of the less sympathetic female characters, but she was a committed,
passionate writer who sought to highlight important social issues.
Jill Craigie (1911–99)35
Stella Hockenhull
Jill Craigie was born Noreen Joan Craigie to a Russian mother and Scottish father.
She began work as an actress and, despite a brief foray into directing, worked
mainly as a screenplay writer throughout her film career. She was married three
times, her third husband being fellow Labour Party supporter and Leader of the
Opposition, Michael Foot. Between 1940 and 1942 Craigie wrote patriotic and
advisory documentary scripts for the British Council, later declaring: ‘I was always
writing things and sending them in. I wrote some little documentary piece about
something or other, I can’t even remember what it was, but I got the job on the
strength of it’ (Craigie 1995). As a result of this, she explains, ‘I developed a great
urge to make a documentary for myself’ (Craigie 1986: 1); indeed, she wrote and
directed a number of documentaries during and immediately after the Second
World War. Her directorial debut, Out of Chaos (1944), on the surface is about
the determination of the National Gallery to remain open, despite the removal
of its prized works of art for safe keeping during wartime.36 The 30-minute film,
both written and directed by Craigie, reviews the contemporary art scene, and
conforms to her socialist ethic, its aim to enable the general populace access to
fine art. Craigie’s script includes a narrator who introduces the general public to
a number of artists employed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (Craigie
1995). Described by Picture Post as ‘[t]he first serious effort made by a film com-
pany to guide the public’s wartime interest in art into something more perma-
nent’ (9 September 1944, p. 16), Out of Chaos demonstrates Craigie’s collectivist
commitment and her interest in art.
The next film to be written and directed by Craigie, which expressed a similar
socialist message, was the post-war documentary The Way We Live (1946). This film
raises important collective issues concerning town planning and society as part
of post-war reconstruction. In comparison with other low-budget releases of the
period, unusually The Way We Live was a high-cost, polished production, made
on 35mm film. Craigie was especially ‘interested in the arts, and home-making’
(Craigie 1995), and her style was infused with a strong visual and aesthetic sensi-
bility. With a mix of drama and documentary, the film focuses on the proposals
put forward for the reconstruction of Plymouth’s town centre, which had suffered
severe bomb damage in the Blitz. Craigie later commented: ‘I wanted to show how
town planning and housing related to the people and especially to women and
I wanted to show the architects what the women thought and the people thought
and I wanted to show the people what the architects thought’ (Craigie 1986: 2).
If The Way We Live is scripted to create emphasis on solidarity, then it also offers
a female perspective by using a mothers’ meeting to explain the weaknesses
and deficiencies of the poor planning of housing estates. As she suggests, ‘I saw
architecture from the feminine point of view’ (in Rollyson 2005: 66).
Children of the Ruins (1947), written and directed by Craigie, is a short, ten-
minute documentary commissioned by UNESCO. The film opens with a montage
sequence depicting the impact of war on the adolescent victims of conflict-torn
countries, revealing Craigie’s commitment to the exposure of suffering, regard-
less of race or class. While she inserts a political slant, with comments on teacher
shortages and low salaries, Children of the Ruins also adopts an international
perspective. Exposing children in poverty, Craigie, to create dramatic effect, jux-
taposes images of Hitler Youth groups with displaced children in refugee camps,
thus emphasizing the loss of family and the adolescent casualties of war. This
idealistic and compassionate film received poor reviews, particularly from the
History and Civic Viewing Committee who declared it ‘entirely unsatisfactory: it
introduces irrelevant matter and confuses two of the functions of Unesco besides
giving a false impression of them ... As a teaching film the approach is too senti-
mental, appealing almost wholly to the emotions and not to the intellect’ (History
and Civic Viewing Committee 1949: 91).
Craigie’s subsequent film, To Be a Woman (1951), which she also wrote and
directed, is a bold attempt to define contemporary female societal roles at the begin-
ning of a new decade. A male voiceover (Julien Sommers) compares the position
and status of women in the nineteenth century to those of the present day, and
juxtaposes the same person, this time dressed in historical and contemporary
costume, to illustrate the point. The questions posed by the narrator at the outset
are ‘Can she develop her individual talents? Can she help to create the kind of
society she wants? Or does she still look upon marriage as the sole purpose of her
existence?’ At this point the camera cuts to a close-up shot of the woman seated at
a typewriter, but with an overhead shot of a town plan overlaid to the top right of
the image, followed by a superimposition of the woman pushing a young child in
a pram. Through the male narrator, the lasting impression is that of a family unit,
but subsequently the voice of Wendy Hiller subjugates that of Sommers, suggest-
ing that a woman’s place is not in the home, and that she is more than capable of
earning a living. This montage sequence thus demonstrates that women can exist
both as nurturers and in the workplace.
To Be a Woman speaks out for parity and egalitarianism between the sexes, and
Craigie’s aim with her scriptwriting was to ‘interpret life – I wanted to relate to real
life in a kind of dramatic, popular way and I had these ideas …’ (Craigie 1986: 1). The
documentary delivers its message through listing the various prominent women
who hold responsible and professional posts, such as a doctor, the director of the
United Kingdom 641
Sadler’s Wells ballet, the director of the Electrical Association for Women, and the
chairman of the TUC (elected by men and women, she is keen to point out). To
reinforce the importance of equal opportunities for women, Craigie cuts to actual
archive footage of marching suffragettes – an area that deeply interested her and
one which she pursued until her death.37
Many of the above documentary films, and in particular The Way We Live, dem-
onstrate Craigie’s ability as a director of high-quality productions, and she success-
fully combines performance and characterization with documentary to create a
distinct style.
In her desire to direct, Craigie perceived the role of scriptwriter as inferior and
she possessed little conviction of her own ability in this field. This is a point noted
in a later interview where she betrays her own insecurities and what she perceives
as the powerful status of the director, commenting that: ‘[T]he director is the
kingpin and they can do what they like with the script afterwards and they can
change it all … You’re very much a junior partner unless you’ve got a great name
as a writer’ (Craigie 1986: 10).
While Craigie’s documentary output during the 1940s was impressive, she was
also involved in screenplay writing for fiction cinema. Along with her second
husband, Jeffrey Dell, Craigie co-wrote the script for The Flemish Farm (Dell, 1943).
Critics noted the sense of adventure38 which they attributed to the screenplay.
Based on the true story of the recovery of the Belgian flag from behind enemy lines
by a young Belgian officer, and its subsequent arrival in Britain for a ceremony,
The Flemish Farm provides some space for its female characters, arguably through
Craigie’s poignant screenplay, which she injects with a ‘visual sense’.39 The set-
ting begins in Belgium and, at the outset, Fernard Matagne (Philip Friend) bids
farewell to his wife Tresha (Jane Baxter) who he has married in secret. She is intui-
tive enough to realize that she will never see him again, and only she shares the
secret of where the squadron’s flag is buried. Before he departs, they spend the
night together in the hay barn, and the next morning, watched by his friend,
Jean Duclos (Clifford Evans), Tresha retreats into the farm house. Although Dell is
the director, husband and wife closely collaborated on the project, and this is evi-
denced not only in Craigie’s representation of women as strong figures, but also
in the film’s final characterization. Tresha is represented as resilient, witnessed
at one point running across the airfield under the attack of German planes in
order to save her husband. What appears as a demonstrative display of emotions
evolves into an insightful intuitiveness on her part, as she has correctly proph-
esied Matagne’s death. Tresha leads the expedition to find the flag for repatriation
and, once recovered, it is she who initially holds it, the camera focusing closely
on her hands in order to display this act of heroism. There is no mistaking the
patriotism of the sequence. Despite being apprehended by the German soldiers,
Tresha remains calm and deflects the situation.
In 1949 Craigie both wrote and directed Blue Scar, a fictional account of a mining
community in South Wales. The film, as Gwenno Ffrancon argues, was based on a
script ‘characterized by ambiguity’ (2007: 172), which failed to realize a concrete
conclusion with regard to either the consequences of nationalization or its main
female character’s ambitions. Partly sponsored by the National Coal Board, and
described as ‘[a] sincere effort deserving wide recognition’ (L. H. C. 1949: 8), Blue
Scar makes criticism of management and the post-war situation in the coal mining
industry. The plot concerns a young girl, Olwen Williams (Gwyneth Vaughan),
who wins a singing scholarship to study in London. She demonstrates an inde-
pendent spirit by taking up her place rather than marrying her sweetheart, Tom
Thomas (Emrys Jones), at that time a pitman, who eventually becomes a man-
ager within the mining community. Later, Olwen weds a prosperous white-collar
worker but is unhappy. The message is that Tom remains where his roots are, and
the mining village, with its rural beauty and uncomplicated lifestyle, offers greater
happiness than riches and status. Blue Scar was shot on location, and its release
script provides detailed and specific instructions concerning the mise-en-scène
and the dialogue to strengthen its socialist message. Deliberately interspersing
various shots of the mining town to reinforce the need for community, her screen-
play directions note the camera work and ambience required for the setting. In a
conversation that takes place between Tom and Olwen she suggests that:
At the beginning when Tom and Olwen leave the house – ‘Camera Panning to Alley.’
reel 2. Choir Singing in B.G.
OLWEN
Whatever happens he’ll still only be a collier, right at the bottom of the social
ladder. You were always a bit of a dreamer Tom, even when you were little.
You dream of a future in mining, but you haven’t the eyes to see your own
valley. Look at the streets, look at the houses. There’s nothing here – absolutely
nothing.
TOM
Olwen be quiet. There’s a kind of spirit in the valley. Everybody feels it. You
feel it too. It’s something that keeps us together. You won’t find that anywhere
else in the whole world – least of all in the big cities.
(Craigie, Screenplay Blue Scar: 2–3)
Tom’s defence of the local community and its traditions is romanticized by the
dialogue, yet the sequence simultaneously indicates Olwen’s ambition and per-
spective on the locale. The message here offers plural interpretations, however.
Craigie simultaneously directs that ‘shots of landscape – slag heaps and mining
town’ be inserted, thus undercutting the strength of Tom’s argument, yet in some
respects the big city seems to offer more for women than the slag heaps and
mining town of South Wales.
Craigie’s aim for a realistic depiction of the mining community is evidenced in her
extensive research prior to commencing work on the film, and the visual imagery
she devised as a result. As one commentator suggests, ‘[s]he was always writing
things down, every detail no matter how small. When the film came out I was
amazed at the accuracy of the script’.40 A little later in the screenplay, following a
heated discussion between Tom’s boss, Mr Sharp (Francis Lunt), and Tom, Craigie
suggests that the mise-en-scène consist of ‘MLS. underground roadway. Miners come
United Kingdom 643
into picture around corner of roadway and walk towards camera. Some miners
break off and walk across camera. Other miners continue to walk towards camera’
(Craigie, Screenplay Blue Scar: 3). Thus, her aim is to show solidarity in the face of
management and this she inscribes into the film’s aesthetic.
The socialist principles that dominate many of Craigie’s films have been observed
by a number of contemporary critics. Indeed, as the critic for To-Day’s Cinema notes,
Craigie ‘endeavoured to be fair and therefore cannot be blamed for coming down
heavily on the side of Socialism. Her characters argue both points of view, but it
is evident that she sees in nationalization an eventual cure for all the troubles
that beset honest miners’ (L.H.C. 1949: 8). Impressed by the socialist proposals
of Aneurin Bevan, the film pursues the idea that a collective responsibility is
necessary, and that class distinctions should be dissolved for the greater good of
the country. Blue Scar does not disguise the unforgiving existence of the miners,
showing them drilling at the coal face in near darkness while Olwen and Alfred
(Anthony Pendrell) dine out in a London restaurant – also a comment, perhaps,
that Olwen was emancipated enough to choose a better existence.
Craigie’s concern for a realistic representation of the mining community stretched
to reproducing actual events. A meeting held to discuss the decline of coal produc-
tion in the mining village where the film was set was reproduced in the script
almost verbatim. Apart from her documentaries, this was the only fiction film that
Craigie both scripted and directed, and this she achieved using a documentary style.
Craigie’s next fictional work was specifically customized for the comedy actor
Norman Wisdom, entitled Trouble in Store (Carstairs, 1953). However, although
Wisdom liked the combination of comedy and satire, and was later nominated
for an award for his role in the film, the Rank Organization found it objection-
able owing to its Chaplinesque treatment. Because of this, Craigie refused to have
her name on the credits and disowned the project despite the film eventually
achieving acclaim and box-office success.
Probably Craigie’s most notable work was her screen adaptation of Mark Twain’s
short novel, The Million Pound Bank Note (1893). Noted by Sue Harper as a ‘witty,
well-balanced play with complex economic ideas’ (2000: 184), superficially The
Million Pound Note (Neame, 1954) does not possess the same traits as Craigie’s
documentaries, and follows a conventional narrative structure. The central char-
acter, Henry Adams (Gregory Peck), is the object of a bet between two wealthy
gentlemen, and the film follows a month in his life where he flaunts a million
pound note that two rich and elderly eccentric brothers have loaned him, gaining
him admiration, respect and, more importantly, credit. He falls in love with Portia
(Jane Griffiths), who, despite his fears to the contrary, loves him for himself, not his
money; by the end of the film he is wealthy in his own right, having sponsored a
friend in a promising mining business which, it transpires, has made him a fortune.
Albeit an adaptation from the novelette, Craigie modifies the script substan-
tially. In Twain’s original, it emerges that Portia is related to one of the elderly
gentleman, who is indeed her stepfather. Thus, she is not an impartial bystander
as suggested at the outset, but partially implicated in the bet. In the film, Portia
merely accompanies Henry to repay the note as an independent witness. For the
finale, Craigie offers a romantic aesthetic explicitly described in the script: ‘They
later go to the brothers’ house and return the intact million pound note. Oliver
has won his bet. Henry has ‘lived like a lord’, and amassed a fortune and won the
love of a beautiful girl. And with a wave of farewell, the happy couple drive off
down the street …’ (Craigie 1954).
Craigie’s script was deemed superior enough to send it to the Hollywood star,
Gregory Peck, who accepted the offer to play Adams. In the film it is Portia who is
represented as a strong and passionate character, and it is she who takes the initia-
tive and declares her love for Henry; indeed, when he informs her that he is not
wealthy at all, she rages and angrily storms off. He misunderstands and thinks that
she has reacted like this because he has no money. Portia’s disposition is devel-
oped by Craigie as a woman of independent thought, and this is demonstrated
later when Henry makes a fortune from his mining assets and his prosperity is
revealed. Craigie writes Portia into the screenplay as a strong and resilient char-
acter: as the notes dictate: ‘At that moment, Portia arrives. Delirious with relief
that Henry is unharmed, she forces her way through the crowd and meets him in
a tender embrace’ (Craigie 1954). Craigie’s script for Portia promotes robust char-
acterization, while providing a stance which ‘gently parodies Edwardian society,
the Stock Exchange and the fawning tradesmen of the era’ (Kinematograph Weekly,
7 January 1954, p. 14). Based on her success with The Million Pound Note, Craigie
was invited to join the Screenwriters Association, who were keen to gain her
membership ‘particularly as we are at this moment fighting several stern battles
on behalf of British Screenwriters’ (Craigie 1954).41
Craigie aspired to direct and was always modest about her ability as a screenplay
writer, this insecurity noted in a letter to the head of Ealing Studios, Sir Michael
Balcon. Replying to her misgivings in a letter dated 3 March 1954 he states, ‘Dear
Jill ... As to your scripts, frankly I am not sure that I ought to believe what you
say ... Anyway I do hope that you, like most of us, are not always right about your
own work’ (Balcon 1954: n.p.).
Balcon clearly saw little future for Craigie’s career as a director. Speaking in
1986, she commented on her disappointment, declaring that ‘it would have been
a dream to make my own feature film and the thing I had at the back of my mind
when I was very young was to make a film about the suffragettes’ (Craigie 1986:
10). Notwithstanding, a succession of correspondence ensued between her and
Balcon over a period of two years. With the advent of television, Craigie wrote
to him in 1956 requesting a fee of ‘fifty guineas a script ... plus a fee for evolving
the scheme – say a hundred guineas, as this would involve the most research.
I expect you would like this to be done on the basis that if the plan and first script
is acceptable, I would then do the rest’ (Craigie 1956: 2). Nothing came of this
venture, but Craigie continued to beleaguer her friend with requests to direct.
Despite being asked to write a screenplay by Balcon, she was reluctant, replying on
19 June, ‘I’m rather hoping that the direction of any scenes required at the studio
with you in them ... will be left open. Please count me as an aspirant for this part
of the job!’ (Craigie 1956: n.p.). To this he responded a day later, ‘Should the
proposal develop, I won’t forget what you say in your letter’ (Balcon 1956: n.p.).
United Kingdom 645
Just as Craigie ‘sneaked progressive economic and political views into The Million
Pound Note’ (Porter 2001: 90), so her later screenplay for Windom’s Way (Neame,
1957) demonstrates her own agendas. Described as a ‘political-cum-drama’
(Kinematograph Weekly, 26 December 1957, p. 15), the film, based on a novel by
James Ramsay Ullman, was set on an inaccessible island in the Far East, where
Dr Alec Windom (Peter Finch) is the medic for the local population, aided by his
adoring nurse, Anna Vidal (Natasha Parry). His estranged and glamorous wife, Lee
(Mary Ure), arrives for a visit with a view to reconciliation, and the two are even-
tually reunited. Problems arise on the island when the locals riot because they
are denied their rights by the rich plantation owners. Windom tries to placate
both sides, although he is accused of aiding the indigenous people. Lee, a London
socialite and artist, is initially written as a self-indulgent woman who cares more
about her appearance than her marriage, or the remote plantation area where Alec
lives. However, she soon adapts to living in this isolated place, a change observed
through her modification of dress into more casual and suitable clothing.
Less than two years after Windom’s Way, Craigie made a further plea to Balcon
to direct a film. In a lengthy, self-deprecating yet heartfelt letter, worthy of
inclusion here, she writes deferentially:
Dear Sir Michael, At the risk of boring you, I’ve decided to put the case for my
directing a film for you ... I know you have your own team, that even if you
hadn’t there are plenty of talented directors around and that, if it comes to
trying out someone new, a more exciting choice would seem to be one of the
bright, so called Angry Young Men. All the same, at this particular moment in
the history of British film making I think I have something to supply that most
of our films lack. But first I’d like to answer the doubts you may feel about my
technical knowledge. If my documentaries taught me anything it was how little
I know about the craft. Admittedly I came to this painful conclusion rather
slowly, but once I did I made up my mind to do something about it. That’s why
I persuaded Ronnie and John to try me out as a scriptwriter ... You see with them
I wasn’t just a scriptwriter, I was brought in on everything right through to the
dubbing. We worked as a team ... Of course one must have flair too. But no one
has ever suggested that I lack ideas, on the contrary. And I think I’ve always had
a bit of an eye for composition as anyone must who is interested in painting ...
Many of our stars ask me why I don’t direct. As for the technicians, I don’t think
there’s any resistance to women what with Muriel, Wendy and Etty ... Can you
honestly say that any of our directors ... ever shoot pictures that really get under
the skin of their women characters. (Craigie letter to Balcon, 12 January 1958)
In a response dated 14 January 1958, Balcon’s reply seems terse and irrevocable.
He stated that the entire year’s output was accounted for with a number of films
already in production. As he pointed out, ‘[T]here seems to be no immediate
possibility of our working together on a picture. I mean, of course, in your capac-
ity as a director’ (Balcon 1958). From this, one might surmise, however, that
Balcon was receptive to further scripts from the writer.
Following Windom’s Way, Craigie did not resume work until nearly 40 years
later when she directed the political coup entitled Two Hours from London (Open
Eye Productions, 1995). Achieving critical acclaim, its democratic bias focused
on the war in Bosnia and the suffering population undergoing ethnic cleansing
programmes. Close-up images of women in tears appear, defending their rights
to remain rather than being expelled from their country, and images of marching
groups of the homeless and disenfranchised lend the film its shocking impact.
Two Hours from London was praised for its ‘enormous cinematic skills [which] were
harnessed to deliver an unmistakeable message’ (Aitken 1994: 15), but it found dif-
ficulty in gaining a television slot. The senior commissioning editor for Channel
4, David Lloyd, in a letter to Richard Tindle for Open Eye Productions, criticized
‘the bald assertions in the film which have me twitching a bit. Take … the who-
dunnit of the Sarajevo market’.42 To this Craigie was compliant offering to cut ‘the
offending line’.43 However, in a letter to the film’s producer, Jason Lehel, she claims
greater involvement in the film’s production rather than the scriptwriting, stating
that ‘it is my view that I contributed to the production side of the film as opposed
to the writing and direction’.44
Throughout her career, Craigie lacked the confidence in her ability as a writer
and director. Claiming that her work was amateur and that her socialist and
feminist beliefs impeded her progress, nonetheless she acknowledges that she
could write ‘so that people could see what it would look like on the screen’
(Craigie 1995).45 That Craigie was unsuccessful in the longevity of her directing
career is unsurprising. Her strong political beliefs and feminist stance proved
unpopular, and emerged at a time when the contemporary climate appeared to
favour a male workforce. As C. H. B. Williamson, writing about British cinema
in the 1950s, comments, ‘[T]he girl who will do all the talking and seems to take
an altogether too lively interest in political and economic affairs is likewise not
going to remain very popular for long’ (Williamson 1953: 18). However, Craigie’s
feminist beliefs and political activism were presented in an equally tangible way,
both through her scriptwriting and her own personal research into women’s
rights for her suffragette project, her output spanning a period of over 50 years.
Craigie was a campaigning feminist and her legacy lives on in her films and
collections.46
Doreen Montgomery (1913–92)
Jill Nelmes
Doreen Montgomery had a long and successful career in film and television,
writing from the late 1930s to the mid 1960s, although her later films were
‘B’ movies. By the mid 1950s she had also begun to work in the TV industry.
Montgomery helped to create some of the earliest episodes of popular series such
as William Tell, and several action thrillers including Danger Man and the police
series No Hiding Place. She then went on to write episodes of the more parochial,
but extremely popular, Dr Finlay’s Casebook. Montgomery’s versatility as a writer
was boundless: she is also known for creating the Cathy Gale character, played by
United Kingdom 647
Honor Blackman, in The Avengers, although she is only credited with writing one
of the early episodes, Warlock, in 1963.
Montgomery’s first three screenplays were produced in 1938: Meet Mr Penny, an
adventure story co-written with Victor Kendall, Mr Reeder in Room Thirteen and
Lassie from Lancashire, in which she is given her first solo credit for the adapta-
tion. She went on to adapt many other screenplays, from the comedy Just William
(1939), about a boy who is always getting into trouble, to the espionage thriller
Bulldog Sees It Through (1940), which was co-written with Leslie Arliss, who was
to work with her on many other films. Montgomery continued to write murder
dramas like Poison Pen (1940) and detective dramas such as The House of the
Arrow (1940), but then began to write a series of melodramas for Gainsborough
Studios. On The Man in Grey (1943) she is credited for the adaptation and Margaret
Kennedy the screenplay. The film was directed by Leslie Arliss and they went on
to write Love Story, a romantic melodrama released the following year.
Her most accomplished screenplay was for the Gainsborough melodrama Fanny
by Gaslight, released in 1944. Montgomery adapted Michael Sadleir’s novel (1940)
in which an illegitimate child becomes a ladies’ maid in the household owned
by her real father, cutting out the laborious framing story and tightening up the
narrative (S15061 BFI Collection).
Montgomery continued to write for film throughout the 1950s and is credited
with seven scripts between 1954 and 1958. Born for Trouble (1955), about a New
York fashion buyer, but set in Europe, was written as three episodes for theatrical
release. Five of the films written in this period were for Fortress Films, a produc-
tion company that specialized in ‘B’ movies: The Scarlet Web (1954), followed by
A Time to Kill (1954), You Can’t Escape (1955), The Narrowing Circle (1956) and
Murder Reported (1957). While ‘B’ films indicate a fall in status for Montgomery,
and the pay would certainly have been much less than when she was at
Gainsborough, the experience in writing mystery murder crime dramas stood her
in good stead for her future career as a TV writer. Chibnall and McFarlane describe
her ‘B’ movie writing as ‘uneven’ but ‘her scripts are usually interesting in the
prominence that they give to spirited female characters …’ (2009: 165).
Montgomery’s first television assignment was for Douglas Fairbanks Jr Presents
(seven episodes between 1953 and 1957). By 1958 Montgomery was also employed
as a TV scenario editor and credited with writing an episode of Hawkeye and the
Last of the Mohicans and The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, then going on to
write 12 episodes of William Tell between 1958 and 1959. She also wrote the pilot
episode and one other of H. G. Wells The Invisible Man in the same year, then an
episode of Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan, in 1960, an extremely popular
TV series about a secret agent. Montgomery returned to costume drama with the
series Sir Francis Drake, writing three episodes from 1961–2.
Montgomery’s Cathy Gale character in The Avengers was Steed’s first female
partner, an emancipated anthropologist. Montgomery wrote the episode ‘Warlock’,
broadcast in 1963, in which Gale appears for the first time. Henceforth The
Avengers took on a very different tone, moving from serious to ironic and surreal.
The pacey screenplay, dealing with black magic and mysterious deaths, is very
readable and importantly sets up Gale’s character as independent and sassy. In the
following extract their meeting has been set up by Steed’s boss, hoping Gale will
be accepted by the conservative Steed, who has clearly met his match:
CATHY
You’re not just old-fashioned, Steed. You’re patronizing and superior too. Only
to women I suppose?
STEED
I hadn’t really thought about it.
CATHY
But do you think a woman’s place is in the home?
STEED
(smiles) Yes, I do.
CATHY
You need to modernise your ideas, Steed. Women can do without men now.
STEED
You haven’t been so sure of that.
CATHY
I know you’ve been snooping about my life, Steed. Tell me all you found out.
STEED
That you were married at nineteen and you went to farm in Africa. Your hus-
band was killed four years ago, so you came back to this country. You have an
honours degree. You’re an expert photographer and a first class shot. In fact
you’re really quite emancipated.
(‘Warlock’ – The Avengers, written by Doreen Montgomery TX 1963, S.5303 BFI
Collection)
After The Avengers, Montgomery went on to her last credited work, for the BBC,
writing episodes of Dr Finlay’s Casebook, adapted from the novels by A. J. Cronin.
Montgomery, the daughter of a Scottish doctor, had the ideal background knowl-
edge. The series, in which two doctors, one old and wise, the other young and
with new-fangled ideas, were looked after by their devoted housekeeper in the
small town of Tannochbrae, was extremely popular, attracting some of the biggest
television audiences in the UK.
Joy Batchelor (1914–91)
Paul Wells
Joy Batchelor, wife and creative partner of John Halas, is an often forgotten and
unsung figure, both in the history of British animation, and animation in general.
Overshadowed by the visionary activity of her husband, Hungarian émigré, John
Halas, Batchelor nevertheless played an important part in the Halas and Batchelor
studio’s 55-year history as a skilled graphic designer, illustrator, animator, and
director, but most crucially as a screenwriter versed in animation’s distinctive
vocabulary. Her place and position as a woman in the animation industry should
United Kingdom 649
not be underestimated, either, as she was a pioneering senior figure in a form of work
which employed women as in-betweeners and cel-painters, but rarely allowed
for women to participate in more authorial creative roles and tasks.47 Halas and
Batchelor had been collaborators since 1937 when they made their first completed
Technicolor cartoon in England, The Music Man (Dir. John Halas and Joy Batchelor,
UK, 1937). Their combined skills produced commercials; films for the Ministry of
Information (MOI), later the Central Office of Information (COI); more personal
independent films; their groundbreaking feature, Animal Farm (Dir: John Halas
and Joy Batchelor, UK, 1954); popular music cartoons; and numerous educational
and public information films, the latter being Batchelor’s particular forte.
Born in Watford, England, to middle-class parents, Joy quickly demonstrated
artistic talent and won a scholarship that led her to attend a local art college. She
graduated and was offered a further place at the Slade School of Art, but the neces-
sity to support her family led her to seek work first as an assembly line operator
and as a commercial artist. She soon joined a newly opened animation studio run
by an Australian, Dennis Connolly, starting out as an in-betweener but quickly
becoming an animator. Batchelor also worked as a silk-screen printer creating
posters, before responding to an advert placed in the Daily Telegraph by John
Halas, who was seeking animators for a series of projects he was undertaking for
British Colour Cartoons Limited.
Interestingly, Joy’s early curvaceous design style proved hugely influential on
the formative aesthetics of Halas and Batchelor’s initial films, and her illustrative
work for newspapers added a narrative dimension to articles and gossip columns.
These are important indicators of the way Batchelor was to impact upon the visual
scripting of the early work at the studio. The studio’s work effectively began when
Halas and Batchelor received commissions from the J. Walter Thomson agency,
upon the recommendation of director Alexander Mackendrick, who scripted and
designed Train Trouble (Dir: John Halas and Joy Batchelor, UK, 1940), a commer-
cial for Kelloggs cornflakes, featuring a forgetful squirrel who manages to change
a train signal on time because he makes and consumes the breakfast cereal that
only takes 30 seconds to make!
Batchelor’s design, animation and language skills were a hugely significant aspect
of settling the partnership both professionally and personally. Athough Halas’s
Eastern European modernist aesthetics were to prove defining in the look of the
studio’s work, it was Joy who ensured that there was an appealing and empathetic
‘Britishness’ in the studio’s output. Batchelor notes:
As bombs showered over London during the early years of the war, the British
Ministry of Information turned to two young animators to assist with essential
information about how to survive the war. Films were made about growing
your own vegetables, saving paper, metal and bones for the war effort and
how to protect yourself from enemy spies. We produced seventy propaganda
films between 1940 and 1944 with a very small unit working to the point of
total exhaustion, under the most difficult of circumstances; shortage of paper,
pencils, film stock and cel materials. (Quoted in Halas and Wells 2006: 90)
Batchelor’s resourcefulness and ability to improvise were important factors in

her work thereafter. In many of her projects she became an inveterate problem
solver, but, more importantly, determined particular methods by which she could
use animation as a visual communications tool to demonstrate approaches to
problems and offer solutions.
Although Batchelor co-authored many scripts during the war period, her first
outstanding solo script was for Modern Guide to Health (Dir: John Halas and Joy
Batchelor, UK, 1946). Made for the COI, and the Ministry of Health in support
of the National Health Service, it counselled on general health awareness, and
included some of Batchelor’s signature motifs, an advisory voiceover exercising
a playful tension between the ignorance of the subject (and by implication the
audience), the role of the expert, and simplified graphics in the service of making
clear points using memorable and iconic imagery – and, crucially, having diag-
nosed and articulated a problem, offering a positive outcome as a consequence of
undertaking suggested actions. In this case, the film demonstrates better posture
by showing the human skeleton and the problems caused to feet if socks and
shoes that are too small crush the malleable bones of young children. Further,
in the film’s most striking imagery, a woman is revisited by the anxieties of her
domestic tasks while she sleeps – a sewing needle stitches her bed, arousing her
from her slumbers. Indeed, calm and relaxing sleep is shown to be illusory in
relation to the oppressiveness and exhaustion of the constant cooking, cleaning,
ironing, shopping, etc., that characterize the woman’s life. The narrative hints at
Batchelor’s increasing concerns for women in her work, and though there can be
no radical interventions, the woman is advised to relax for at least half an hour
before she sleeps, and not worry about things she cannot change.
It is well known that John Halas wrote prodigiously about animation in numer-
ous books and articles; it is less acknowledged that Batchelor also theorized her
approach, particularly during the late 1960s and mid 1970s when she was an
instrumental figure in Halas and Batchelor’s Educational Film Centre. Papers in
the Halas and Batchelor Collection reveal that Batchelor gave talks and wrote
articles to explain her craft as a screenwriter working in the particular medium
of animation, which she considered to have a specific ‘language’ of expression.
Batchelor’s constant preoccupation, though, is how animation can be used per-
tinently within a British economy which was vastly different from the Hollywood
model, and how it should specifically address its ‘audience’. Always sensitive to
the times, an immediate comparison to the strategy in Modern Guide to Health is
instructive. The Five (Dir: Joy Batchelor, UK, 1970) is once more concerned with
foot care for girls of 11 years and older. Modern Guide to Health uses an authorita-
tive, some might say authoritarian, voice to point out that wearing poorly fitting
shoes will have future harmful consequences. By the late 1960s, though, after
‘Swinging London’, significant shifts in attitudes to sex, and the rise of feminism,
Batchelor points out:
Quite obviously the didactic approach was out. So was the voice of AUTHORITY.
(sic) The appeal to this particular audience had to be emotional and it is well
United Kingdom 651
nigh impossible to be emotional about a foot. (Italics in the original text) There
were other considerations to take into account. Young girls today buy shoes
for fashion. This was intended as a long-life film, and as shoe shapes change
yearly, showing shoes was OUT. (sic) Showing deformed feet was OUT for no
young girl of twelve can be expected to identify herself with what she will
become twenty or thirty years later, as a direct result of wearing badly fitting
shoes NOW. (sic)48
Batchelor’s solution was to personify the five toes of a young girl’s foot as if they
were five sisters. The girl returns home after a party and the toes bemoan how
tired and sore they are. They relive the day, first as the girl goes to the shoe shop,
but does not get a fitting, as she goes through numerous boxes choosing new
shoes. She walks home in the new shoes, and we feel the experience from the point
of view of the toes, who suffer further at the disco the same evening, ending the
night trodden on, and in pain. Finally relieved of the burden of the shoe, and
settling to rest, the big toe dreams of the joys of a proper fitting and a shoe that
affords the opportunity for the toes to have room and to grow straight.
Playful and entertaining, the film uses the particular capacity in animation for
anthropomorphism to speak to its audience without patronizing or offending
them. Animating the toes as characters in their own right enables the issue to
be addressed, cleverly bypassing the competing factors that might undermine or
confuse the message.
Batchelor’s skills both in relation to traditional script work, most particularly
descriptors and voiceover/dialogue, and her visual sense as a graphic designer
combine effectively to properly exploit what animation can distinctively offer. As
Batchelor explains, ‘[T]he great strength of animation lies in its power to make
literal what is normally figurative, in its power of exaggeration in order to pre-
sent ideas with impact, its ability to project a thought until it obtains an entirely
new and more truthful aspect.’49 This became especially apparent in her work on
the studio’s masterpiece, Animal Farm (Dir: John Halas and Joy Batchelor, UK,
1954), which added to the arsenal of the animation scriptwriter by adding what
Batchelor was to call a ‘Tension Chart’ articulating the film over a long stretch
of paper, including an unfolding storyline; a tension line noting the dramatic
expectancy of the action and situation; guidelines in relation to mood and
music; advice on the colour palette (anticipating contemporary colour scripts);
and finally, time lines noting the seasons, time of day, etc. Having achieved this
analytical breakdown, Batchelor could move to the script stage with greater con-
fidence, knowing that the script would remain fluid and develop further as the
storyboarding advanced.
This parallel development of script drafts and visualization suited feature-length
work, echoing practices at the Disney studio during the 1930s, and anticipates
the ways in which studios like Pixar and Dreamworks work in the contemporary
era. The most important aspect of Batchelor’s approach, though, was its flexi-
bility, making her creative skills pertinent to each project, researching each brief
carefully, and arriving at the most conducive method, for example, adapting a
Cornish poem in The Figurehead (Dir: John Halas and Joy Batchelor, UK, 1953),
improvising ideas and material during the production process of Automania 2000
(Dir: John Halas, UK, 1963) and reworking classic fairy tales in The Frog Prince (Dir:
Joy Batchelor, UK, 1968) and The Sleeping Beauty (Dir: Joy Batchelor, UK, 1968).
One of the most demanding script challenges for Batchelor was adapting
Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1887 opera Ruddigore (Dir: Joy Batchelor, UK, 1964). Halas
and Batchelor’s 55-minute television film was the first opera to be adapted into
an extended animation. Plans to rework The Mikado, Pirates of Penzance and HMS
Pinafore were rejected by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, on the basis that the
notoriously particular and purist Gilbert and Sullivan audience would not be able
to accept these classics in abridged form. Even Ruddigore, though less commer-
cially successful than the other operas, was a risk. This was reflected in the proble-
matic production process in which the musical and narrative continuity became
subject to constant revision. Ruddigore, also known as ‘The Witches Curse’, was
Gilbert and Sullivan’s tenth collaboration, opening at the Savoy Theatre in 1887,
and running for 288 performances. In typically witty style, Gilbert parodies melo-
dramatic conventions, making heroes less than heroic, villains more than success-
ful, and a happy ending subject to many compromises. By the time it was made as
an animation in the mid 1960s, Batchelor ensured it echoed the more ambiguous
moral and social climate of the era, and it works almost as a parody of a parody.
Embracing the challenge of the film, Batchelor recognized the profound dif-
ficulty of reducing the opera by over half of its original length, while responding
to the condition that no words or songs could be altered or rewritten. The story
was hard to adapt because it contained numerous subplots. For Batchelor, a strong
story relied on a sympathetic lead character and appropriate expositional dia-
logue, but here again, the story was in the song, making it harder to understand.
This led Batchelor ultimately to employ voiceover to help with narrative clarity
and continuity, and to emphasize the role of the central character.
Batchelor herself admitted that the first half of the film took too long to estab-
lish character and situation, but little could be done to change this in the light
of the conditions imposed on her. Only in the second half of the film is there a
genuine justification for animation in the more fantastical and supernatural epi-
sodes. The story had 16 sequences, some with as many as 72 scenes, and relied
a great deal on performance-orientated character animation. The D’Oyly Carte
Opera Company, for all its prevarication and anxiety about the project, never-
theless saw the film as having cultural importance, particularly in reaching new
audiences who may have not encountered Gilbert and Sullivan before.The film
enjoyed great success, and Batchelor herself was surprised that the film received
its best reception in Pittsburg, New Jersey!
Batchelor was a profoundly significant figure in the literally thousands of projects
undertaken by the Halas and Batchelor studio from 1940 onwards. A producer,
director and screenwriter, as well as a working mother, her scale of achievement
across a range of genres and styles makes her a unique creative figure, not merely in
British animation, and the history of animation worldwide – in which she possessed
extraordinary knowledge – but as a woman filmmaker per se. Her productivity and
United Kingdom 653
output is extensive, and though overshadowed by her husband’s own pioneer-

ing achievements, it is clear that her influence as a screenwriter and designer is
hugely important in defining the public information film, the animated literary
adaptation, and the experimental short. The often unfashionable nature of ani-
mation, and its easy dismissal as ‘children’s entertainment’ has denied Batchelor
her proper place as a significant filmmaker, who brought seriousness, invention,
and appeal to complex ideas and issues, and whose films touched and educated
thousands of citizens.
Rosemary Anne Sisson50 (b. 1923)
Jule Selbo
Rosemary Anne Sisson entered screenwriting by the back door, as a writer of chil-
dren’s books. Her first stage play, The Queen and the Welshman, was produced at
the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The cast, including a then unknown young actor
called Edward Woodward, used to tease her for going to see it so often. After The
Queen and the Welshman moved to London, David J. Thomas, drama producer at
BBC Wales, adapted the play for television and, under his tutelage, she wrote two
original television plays which were also well received. Sisson points out that BBC
Television at that time was very much a male preserve where writers, producers
and directors met and hatched deals in the bar, so with some disappointment she
went on to write for Compact, a serial about a women’s magazine. Yet it was her
stint on Compact that made her a professional, where she found writing a half-
hour script every three weeks, rewrites in two days and breathing life into some-
one else’s characters was a challenge. However, when Compact was at its height of
popularity, the BBC axed it.
As there were very few women television writers, Sisson explains, ‘we would
share the work between us, and if one of us was too busy we would recommend
another.’ Sisson received an unexpected offer to produce a children’s programme,
an American ‘Nursery School of the Air’ called Romper Room and was then almost
immediately commissioned by the BBC to write Catherine of Aragon (1970), the
first play in the series The Six Wives of Henry VIII, followed by Elizabeth R (1971).
In 1968 Sisson met Frank Paris, the Walt Disney story editor, who suggested
that she write the film of Black Beauty, but this fell through when Disney could
only buy the rights to Black Beauty, not to the title. But five years later, in 1973,
Frank sent a novel, A Sporting Proposition by James Aldridge, and suggested that
she might adapt it. Sisson notes, ‘It was a tough but charming story about the
disputed ownership of a pony by a rich little girl and a poor settler’s boy. It took
place in Australia, and I loved it. Suddenly everything fell into place. I was going
to Hollywood.’
Sisson would love to have known Walt Disney, who had died not long before,
but she explains, ‘I’m not sure he would have approved of my writing habits. I was
given a nice office all to myself with a large typewriter, and there I was supposed,
in true Hollywood Writer style to tap away, from 8.30 a.m., frequently scrumpling
up sheets of paper and throwing them on the floor, until 5 p.m. when I would
climb into my car and drive home. But my writing time was from 8 p.m. until
midnight or even 3 a.m.’
Sisson was surprised that writers, including some with well-known names, who
make a good living from writing, made even more from rewriting films that are
never made. She points out, ‘That would be dreadful to me, like having a still-
born child. But Disney was too thrifty to allow such a waste of time and money.
I remember asking at the very beginning whether I must write the film for any
particular star and Frank Paris replied, ‘No. Disney is the star and the most impor-
tant thing is the script.’ Each stage was amended or agreed before moving on to
the next, and all this, of course, took place ‘in house’ with the final approval being
given by Ron Miller, executive producer and Walt Disney’s son-in-law.’
Over the next few years, Sisson wrote five films for Disney, and for two of them
spent time on location. Escape from the Dark (1976) was an original story about
replacing pit ponies with machinery and was filmed in Yorkshire. The next film,
Candleshoe (1977), was based on the Michael Innes novel, and a major rewrite,
several other writers having had a shot at it before, including David Swift, with
whom Sisson shared the final credit. Norman Tokar, the director, was a long-time
Disney stalwart, noted for his knockabout comedy, especially The Apple-Dumpling
Gang (1975). ‘When he and I were introduced,’ Sisson relates, ‘he said, “You’ve
written two films which everyone said were good, but they didn’t make any
money.” I responded, “And you’ve made several films which were not very good
but which made a lot of money. Let’s see if we can put our talents together and
make a film which is very good and makes a lot of money.”’
Sisson wrote two more films for Disney, The Watcher in the Woods (1980) and an
animated film, The Black Cauldron (1985). Next Sisson created and wrote a six-part
series for prime-time television called The Manions of America (1981) and contin-
ued to write for television. To Sisson’s surprise she was still working some years
later, writing The Young Indiana Jones for George Lucas, her last credit being The
Young Indiana Jones: Journey of Radiance in 2007.
Shelagh Delaney (1938–2011)
Lavinia Brydon
The lack of consideration given to Delaney’s place within British film culture is
neatly evidenced by the fact that, on her death in 2011, the 72-year-old was still
best known for her stage work, in particular her first play A Taste of Honey, which
premiered in 1958 at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London. As the numerous
obituaries detailed, Delaney had cemented her position within British theatre his-
tory with the rebellious content of this two-act play. In sympathetically charting
the challenges facing a pregnant, working-class teenager named Jo who lives
among the canals and gasworks of Salford, Delaney was permanently labelled an
‘angry young woman’ to rival the likes of John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe. Thus,
writing for the Guardian, Dennis Barker began his obituary by calling Delaney
a ‘[f]eisty playwright’ (2011) while, closer to her native Salford, the Manchester
Evening News emphasized Delaney’s contribution to Britain’s post-war theatrical
United Kingdom 655
revival by defining her as a ‘“kitchen sink” playwright’ (Anon 2011). Typical of

the articles that appeared in the wake of her death, there was little or no mention
of Delaney’s contributions to British film. Some effort, admittedly, was made by
the Independent’s Chris Maume (2011) to recognize that Delaney’s talents extended
beyond her stage work, using the more inclusive term of ‘writer’, which, notably,
was the term also chosen by Delaney’s only daughter, Charlotte, to announce her
mother’s death (quoted in Anon 2011). Across the Atlantic Ocean, the New York
Times was more explicit in its view of Delaney’s cinematic achievements, discuss-
ing her as both a ‘British playwright and screenwriter’ (Weber 2011). However,
these exceptions aside, the need to foreground Delaney’s debut work remains,
revealing the extent to which the writer’s achievements beyond her teenage years
and outside the theatre have been greatly neglected. This includes Delaney’s
contribution to the film adaptation of A Taste of Honey, a key work of the British
New Wave.
Within film scholarship Delaney’s talent continues to be overlooked, though
typically her shared credit – with the director Tony Richardson – for the adaptation
of A Taste of Honey is acknowledged. As with the original play, interest in the film
primarily stems from its position within a broader movement rather than an exam-
ination of its stand-alone merits. This is understandable given that its working-
class content, industrial city setting and realist aesthetic, as discussed by John Hill
(1986: 127–44), connects well with other films of the period: for example, Room
at the Top (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and The Loneliness of
the Long Distance Runner (1962). Yet, as Terry Lovell observes, recognition of the
film’s value has not always led to vigorous analysis (1996: 169). Lovell, along with
Hill, Andrew Higson (1996) and, most recently, Robert Murphy (2014) have gone
some way to addressing this issue, but their thoughtful studies still largely sideline
Delaney’s major contribution to the film. There are several explanations for this,
including the lack of critical and commercial success for Delaney’s subsequent
1960s screenplays: Charlie Bubbles (1967) and The White Bus (1965). However, one
prominent reason lies with the elevated status given to A Taste of Honey’s other
key contributors, namely Richardson and the cinematographer, Walter Lassally. It
seems that Richardson’s screenwriting credit for A Taste of Honey, combined with
his directorial duties, makes it impossible for most scholars to consider the film
as anything other than the creation of its male director. When it is discussed in
other terms, the conversation moves towards Lassally’s photography, the location
shooting and, in particular, those shots that function beyond the construction of
narrative space (see Higson 1996). In this way, film scholarship reflects a bias that
has been apparent since the film’s release. As Paul Dehn’s comments make clear,
early reviews were quick to promote A Taste of Honey’s male contributors above
Delaney: ‘The film’s real heroes are Mr Richardson and his masterly cameraman,
Walter Lassally, who between them have caught Manchester’s canal threaded
hinterland to a misty, moisty, smoky nicety’ (quoted in Higson 1996: 142).
Delaney’s unfair exclusion from much of the discussion on A Taste of Honey is
especially troubling in that it denies her contribution to the film’s atmospheric
sense of place. It overlooks how Delaney’s story, which remains fundamentally
intact in its transposition from stage to screen, originates and develops from
personal observations about her home-city, Salford, and the larger neighbouring
city of Manchester. As she stated on the eve of her play’s West End premiere in
an interview for ITN, A Taste of Honey was inspired and informed by her experi-
ence of Salford – ‘it had to be [...] I’d never been anywhere else’ (1959). Indeed,
the sharp insights and rich detail regarding the smog-filled city and its struggling
but spirited inhabitants rely very much on local knowledge. Many of the refresh-
ingly blunt lines, pertaining to the inescapable dirt of Salford, make it into the
film, albeit in a revised order. A line originally spoken onstage by Jo’s boyfriend,
whereby he calls Salford ‘just the dirtiest place’ (1959: 36), thus finds an on-screen
equivalent in Geoff’s words, ‘You can’t help but get dirty round here’ (Delaney
and Richardson 1961: 66), whereas Jo’s highly expressive comments in the play
about the ‘filthy children’ playing outside (off-stage) and one particular boy
whose ‘hair, honestly, it’s walking away’ (1959: 54) undergo just the smallest of
cuts during the adaptation process (see Delaney and Richardson 1961: 69).
However, examining the screenplay also makes clear the pre-production decision
to explore and expand Delaney’s understanding of Salford in visual terms. To take
the example of Jo’s lines above, the screenplay is careful to detail the accompany-
ing camera’s movements and focus, in particular a lingering close-up of a ‘strange
vacant, slightly mongoloid child, very neglected’ before a pan to Jo’s ‘staring face’
(Delaney and Richardson 1961: 69). The combination of this visual and verbal
honesty regarding Salford life undoubtedly results in one of the film’s most striking
sequences, ensuring that the audience begins to share Delaney’s concerns for her
home-city, as seen and voiced by Jo. Therefore, it does not matter that the screen-
play was co-authored or that Richardson’s previous film work presumably had a
greater influence on any written camera directions; the visual details read here and
carried through to the released film are very much inspired by the candid remarks
that Delaney first assigned to Jo in the play. As the reviewer from The Times noted
on the film’s release: ‘The background is always alive and always changing; but the
visual image is in keeping with the spoken word’ (Anon 1961: 14).
A comparative analysis of the various texts relating to the film adaptation of
A Taste of Honey show that Delaney’s influence remains strong, even when the
source material is significantly cut and her words go unspoken. Indeed, in many
ways the omitted dialogue is as crucial to the film’s visual content as the lines
that remain, providing a template from which Richardson and Lassally clearly
worked. Jo’s observation in the play that the sun sets early (1959: 22), for exam-
ple, finds its way into the film via a darkly lit mise-en-scène replete with overcast
skies and shadowy streets. Likewise, comments about the city’s cool temperature
and unpleasant smell (1959: 7, 8, 11, 37) have visual referents in the wet pave-
ments, muddy canal waters and littered streets that are rarely absent from the
screen. There are also the omitted lines regarding the gasworks (1959: 7, 47) to
consider. Although the characters no longer refer directly to this particular marker
of England’s industrial North, Delaney’s original observations remain silently
present in those impressive shots of vast steel frames and smoking chimneys that
stand as omniscient structures while the action unfolds.
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Further study of the written texts alongside the film’s images reveals that Delaney
influenced A Taste of Honey’s visual composition as much its content. In the play an
early line from Jo’s mother, Helen, helps to elucidate the point. As a response to Jo’s
worries about their new accommodation, Helen states: ‘Everything in it’s falling
apart, it’s true, and we’ve no heating – but there’s a lovely view of the gasworks [...]
What more do you want?’ (1959: 7). Admittedly spoken with the dry irony that
characterizes much of the play’s dialogue, the line still hints at the often-ignored
picturesque quality of the industrialized landscape. In doing so it prompts some
consideration of the gasworks’ aesthetic appeal; how their hulking forms create
a dynamic vista that can be celebrated rather than criticized. The importance of
this idea was clearly reflected upon during the adaptation process, and then later,
as filming began. The original line is maintained in the final screenplay (Delaney
and Richardson 1961: 6) and Rita Davison’s continuity reports from 7 April 1961
(n.p.) prove it progressed onto celluloid. Its absence from the final film can thus
be seen as the result of Lassally’s thoughtfully framed images. Taking his cue from
Delaney’s oblique praise of the Northern landscape’s visual pleasures, Lassally fre-
quently allows Salford’s steel structures and brick buildings to take priority in his
compositions, thereby rendering the original line redundant.
Another of the city’s key qualities is made manifest in the thoughts, actions,
and even jobs of Delaney’s carefully drawn characters. Carried through from the
play to the film, these character details pertain to Salford’s uneasy restlessness,
as described by Delaney in Ken Russell’s short documentary for the BBC art
series Monitor: ‘Salford isn’t only alive, it’s restless with all the coming and the
going of the markets and the docks, so at the same time, somehow or another,
it seems to be dying’ (1960). Certainly Jo and Helen’s nomadic lifestyle resonates
with Delaney’s comment. Indeed, this mother and daughter partnership serves
to illuminate the two strands of Salford’s working-class population that Delaney
identifies in Russell’s documentary. As she observes, the city is composed of
figures in the ‘chaos of middle-age, [when] it’s too late to start again and it’s
too early to give up’, and also a frustrated younger generation who don’t always
know where they want to go but they ‘want to go somewhere [...] they are all
like tethered [...] like a sort of horse on a tether, sort of jerking about, waiting
for somebody to cut the tether’.
Interestingly, Helen and Jo’s romantic affairs fall somewhere in between these
two types but can still be considered key components of Salford’s instability. The
brash, cigar-smoking Peter (Robert Stephens) does not share Helen’s resignation
about life’s possibilities, continuing to favour the pleasurable over the practical
as illustrated by his pursuit and later abandonment of the older ‘semi-whore’
(Delaney 1959: 7). However, his desires do not extend into daydreams as they do
for the teenage Jo and, accordingly, he does not exhibit her level of rebelliousness.
Peter inhabits a curious space of limited freedom, which is marked by curtailed
movements and anxious activity. Trips away, for example, do not stretch beyond
nearby seaside resorts and, in one of the later scenes, he impatiently paces Jo’s flat.
Moreover, Peter’s success as a used car salesman serves to suggest that many of
Salford’s residents are equally unsettled, supporting and strengthening Delaney’s
view of the city as a ‘terrible drug’ which people want to leave but find they
cannot ‘for lots of different reasons’ (Russell 1960).
This sense of the city’s restless state is underscored by the departure of Jimmy, Jo’s
boyfriend, which is constantly anticipated in the film with lines such as ‘I’ll be gone
soon’ (Delaney and Richardson 1961: 37, amended) and ‘You can lie in bed and
hear me ship passing down the old canal’ (ibid.). While similar words are spoken in
the original play, the film undoubtedly reinforces the sentiment in its replacement
of the play’s fixed stage set – ‘a comfortless flat’ (Delaney 1959: 7) – for an unfixed
location shoot that incorporates the Manchester-Salford bus route, day trips to
Blackpool Pleasure Beach and Treak Cliff Cavern in Derbyshire, as well as the vari-
ous arrivals and departures of Manchester’s waterways. The lines regarding Jimmy’s
transient state certainly gain potency in the film from being spoken outdoors, as
he and Jo wander down the side of the canal beside boats that chug and bellow.
Delaney’s reduced involvement once filming began does not negate the impor-
tance of her work in such scenes. Even when reshaped or removed in the adapta-
tion process Delaney’s original dialogue regarding the waterways – their stench
(1959: 11) and dark colour (1959: 54) – informs the film’s exterior shots. There is
also her awareness of the waterways’ sounds to consider. Original notes for the
play’s sound designer – for example, ‘[Tugboat heard.]’ (1959: 11) – are developed
in the screenplay – ‘A ship’s hooter is heard very plainly in the distance’ (Delaney
and Richardson 1961: 37) – serving to provide Richardson with further detail on
how to present Salford on screen.
While Delaney’s original play shaped the later film’s depiction of Salford and
Manchester, her and Richardson’s screenplay contains numerous original scenes
that flesh out the settings and even specify particular sites of the two cities. The
film begins, for example, in the grounds of Jo’s school, described in the screenplay
as ‘a large Victorian building whose aspect is more impressive than its amenities’
(Delaney and Richardson 1961: 1). In the next scene, the film introduces Jo and
Helen’s soon-to-be-abandoned living quarters, the basement of a small house
that ‘stands in a terrace on top of a hill with some waste ground in front of it
[…] around the hill panorama are smoking chimneys’ (Delaney and Richardson
1961: 2). On leaving this subterranean Manchester home for the ‘bleak, sparsely
furnished’ (Delaney and Richardson 1961: 6) rooms of a Salford flat, however, the
film produces a sequence that must be solely (or mostly) attributed to Delaney
given its dependence on local knowledge. As detailed in the screenplay:
We see the centre of Manchester, Piccadilly – a very crowded place with plenty
of lights and plenty going on. Then as the bus leaves the city centre behind
everything is much quieter as it travels down through Chapel Street, Salford –
past Salford Royal Hospital and the River Irwell – seeing silent housetops and
church spires and chimneys, and great black granite monuments and statues
erected to the great men of the past – Oliver Cromwell, Robert Peel. (1961: 3)
Importantly, these details not only evidence Delaney’s local knowledge but also
relay a very personal experience of growing up in Salford.
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In Delaney’s desire to convey Salford’s dirt and drama early on via A Taste of
Honey’s extended bus sequence, the writer also demonstrates an awareness of the
unique possibilities of film. Released from the physical limitations of the staged
drama and the audience’s singular point of view, Delaney not only offers a vari-
ety of outdoor structures and statues for the camera to pick out, she also notes
that these must be presented as fragmented and fleeting images consistent with
Jo’s eyeline: ‘Jo cleans a patch in the steamed window with her gloved hand.
She gazes at the passing city’ (Delaney and Richardson 1961: 3). Character and
camera movements remain prominent throughout the screenplay even when the
story is not so centred on travel, from Jo and Jimmy’s movements described as
‘dance-like’ (Delaney and Richardson 1961: 37) in one sequence to the subtle pans
that accompany Jo on her afternoon off work, granting access to the Derbyshire
countryside, ‘the whole sweep of the valley’ (Delaney and Richardson 1961: 61).
To me, these instructions regarding movements are fundamental to the film’s
appeal, adding a dynamism that is absent in the earlier Richardson-directed New
Wave film Look Back in Anger (1959). To agree with Sue Harper, they help confirm
that the film ‘owes as much to Delaney’s reorientation of the play as it does to
Richardson’s direction’ (2000: 112).
The presence of Delaney within the final film resonates more strongly once the
consistencies between this work and her later Northern-set screenplays, The White
Bus and Charlie Bubbles, are noted. Jo’s interest in the Manchester cityscape,
including its many statues, at the beginning of A Taste of Honey, for example,
connects to The Girl’s (Patricia Healey) actions near the start of The White Bus, as
she arrives in the Northern city from London. As detailed in the third, incomplete
draft, the unnamed girl ‘walks across the deserted square. She observes the grimy
statue at its centre. She puts on her glasses to see more closely’ (Delaney [1965b?] 5).
In a sequence significantly developed from the snippets offered in Delaney’s original
short story (1963: 165–86) the girl’s subsequent meandering stroll across the city also
recalls Jo’s extended walk home from school, when she encounters Jimmy for the
second time. In both, the young women seem somewhat lost as they aimlessly
wander the city, observing the strange (and, as regards The White Bus, surreal) still-
ness of normally bustling roads and rivers. The two sequences are also comparable
in that their mutual interest in place and atmosphere prompts their respective
directors, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, to create some of the most
technically interesting sections in each film. Following the instructions of the
screenplay, Richardson takes a break from A Taste of Honey’s snappy, dialogue-
driven scenes to offer a ‘number of mute shots with music […] something of the
feeling of montage’ (Delaney and Richardson 1961: 16) while Anderson injects
colour into the hitherto black-and-white film, a poetically expressive manoeuvre
in keeping with the experimental writing style of Delaney’s source material.
In a recent article that examines Richardson’s contribution to British film, Robert
Murphy notes how the director and Delaney’s shared North of England upbringing
and their status as outsiders helped their collaboration on A Taste of Honey. He
is particularly keen to emphasize how their personal experiences ensured a sympa-
thetic portrayal of the film’s young characters: ‘Richardson and Delaney […] were
both misfits themselves, so they identify with rather than patronise Jo and Geoff’
(2014: 384). This is certainly evidenced in the sequence outlined above where
Jo’s solitary walk, beginning with an awkward stumble down school steps, never
prompts feelings of pity from the audience, but rather a peculiar sense of admira-
tion. With the dissolves emphasizing Jo’s lengthy navigation of towpaths, locks
and bridges, the reprised musical motif of The Big Ship Sails nursery rhyme lends
it a certain playfulness. Richardson’s montage respects and develops Delaney’s
early desire to present the Salford teenager as ‘extraordinary’, ‘unique’ (1959: 50)
or, indeed, ‘bloody marvellous’ (1959: 51). It is harder, however, to tell whether
Anderson felt similarly compelled to relate Delaney’s understanding and admira-
tion of Northerners while working on The White Bus. In his own words, he felt
that the film adaptation ‘derived closely from the original story, but […] went a
good way beyond it’ (Gourdin-Sangouard 2010: 6), most notably in the develop-
ment of the satirical element. That said, Anderson makes clear in John Fletcher’s
documentary, About the White Bus, that the crew were not simply ‘out to take a rise
out of Salford […] the ambition of the film must be larger than that’ (1968), per-
haps explaining his decision to maintain Delaney’s lines regarding the ‘warmth’
and ‘friendliness’ ([1965a?] 12) of the people despite the subsequent cuts and
changes to this section of the screenplay.
Anderson is regarded as a difficult director, who often refused to accept and
integrate others’ artistic visions into his work, but his appreciation for Delaney’s
writing talent was apparent early on in the film’s production history. Although he
initially ‘floundered’ (Fletcher 1968) when producer Oscar Lewenstein suggested
using one of Delaney’s short stories for his contribution to the originally intended
(but ultimately shelved) three-film project Red, White and Zero, he soon warmed
to the idea and selected Delaney’s subjective and rather surreal story The White
Bus for adaptation. A subsequent meeting with the like-minded Delaney offered
further reassurance: ‘[W]e met and decided we got on, and saw eye to eye about
the kind of thing that the story represented, the kind of material it represented’
(Fletcher 1968). This shared critical understanding no doubt secured Delaney’s
presence for script revisions once filming began, though Anderson later noted
that during the shoot ‘she didn’t say much. She was there, but didn’t really partici-
pate’ (2004 [1994]: 106). His comments certainly tally with Delaney’s infrequent
appearances in About the White Bus and the gentle way in which she instructs
the director on script changes when, at one point, her contribution does become
the focus of the documentary. However, Delaney’s quiet demeanour during the
shoot does not diminish her importance to the final film, not least because The
White Bus constantly returns to the writer’s knowledge of Salford for suitable film-
ing locations. In using many of Delaney’s old haunts, including Pendleton High
School for Girls and Buile Hill Park, the film adaptation thus maintains a strong
connection to its original material and ‘maker’ even as Anderson’s authorial con-
trol and his other collaborators ensured ‘it is not the film of the scenario’ but,
rather, ‘uniquely The White Bus’ (Fletcher 1968).
In The White Bus The Girl views the Salford locations as a detached but not
disinterested local. Her attitude sharply contrasts with that of the young female
United Kingdom 661
character, Eliza, in Delaney’s next Northern-set screenplay, Charlie Bubbles. Played

by Liza Minnelli, the American Eliza eagerly visits the various sites around Salford
and Manchester with her successful Northern-born employer, the eponymous
writer Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney). From an early draft of the screenplay, it is
clear that Delaney developed Eliza as a foil to the disenchanted Charlie, especially
as regards their attitudes towards his home-city. A note for one key sequence,
where Charlie and Eliza (or, rather, Elizabeth as she is called in the earlier draft)
take an early morning city tour, thus reads:
Throughout the whole of this sequence […] the comments made by ELIZABETH
are directly commented upon by CHARLIE, who is, in this case, the camera –
ELIZA sees the narrow streets and the railway and so on and so forth as charm-
ing and characterful – CHARLIE/CAMERA sees these places as they are and
whatever that is it certainly isn’t charming and romantic. (Delaney 1966a: 68)
While, in a later draft, the note is omitted, the contrast in outlooks between employer
and employee remains strong. Eliza, for example, is described as having ‘wings on
her feet’ when she leaps up a slagheap to survey the industrial landscape and con-
siders the unfolding view ‘marvellous’, whereas Charlie has ‘no wings on his feet’
but, rather, ‘stumbles on the loosely packed slag – his feet sink into the rubbish –
he scrambles over the random tippings of rag and bone men’ (Delaney 1966b: 61).
In presenting the landscape through these two perspectives, Delaney makes clear
that her ambivalence towards Salford and its surrounds not only persists but has
also grown more complicated since the early success of A Taste of Honey. For all
the area’s faults, as first outlined in that work, Delaney could still understand its
appeal: ‘For me, it’s always a question of coming back’ (Russell 1960).
On its release, many reviews commented on how Charlie’s uneasy return to
the North resonated with the film’s director and lead actor, Salford-born Albert
Finney. It is also fair to say that Delaney’s unease regarding the consequences
of her career success served to shape Charlie’s story. Delaney’s conflicted stance
regarding her geographical base is best sensed in Charlie Bubbles through the
words of Gerry (John Ronane), an old friend of Charlie’s. Having bumped into
each other at a football match the two discuss work, prompting Gerry to reveal
that he is reluctant to move to London despite job offers: ‘I don’t want to leave
this place. […] It’s not a beauty spot exactly, but it’s home and I don’t like it down
south very much – it seems to me that you can get bogged down with a lot of false
values living in London’ (Delaney 1966b: 86).
In the same way that Jo in A Taste of Honey and The Girl in The White Bus can
be considered surrogates for Delaney, Gerry also serves to reflect some of the con-
siderations and concerns held by the film’s writer. Along with Charlie’s open-eyed
view of his home-city and the contrasting enthused attitude of Eliza, he helps
convey Delaney’s complicated relationship with the North of England. It is this vivid
and layered imag(in)ing of place in all three films that surely makes Delaney a
‘heroine’ of the British New Wave and the later period, easily matching the contri-
butions of her male colleagues. She proved a driving force in capturing a particular
moment in the North’s history, first conveying the physical and social decline
of Salford in A Taste of Honey and then, in the later 1960s works, the unsettled
spaces of change and construction. In Charlie Bubbles, Eliza laments, ‘It’s a shame
in a way to pull all these lovely old places down – they have so much character’
(Delaney 1966b: 62). Indeed, it can be said that there is a certain urgency to
Delaney’s work at this time, a pressing desire to put her Salford on screen before
it was lost entirely. A similar comment might be made of this essay. Taking into
account that, in the four years since Delaney’s death, her debut play A Taste of
Honey still dominates discussions on the writer (aided by the National Theatre’s
recent revival of the work), it has seemed increasingly necessary to promote her
work for film lest it too be forgotten.
Sally Potter (b. 1948)
Jill Nelmes
Sally Potter knew she wanted to be a director from her early teens and began mak-
ing 8 mm films when she was only 14. She left school at 16 to become a filmmaker,
going on to study at the London School of Contemporary Dance. Potter has written
and directed six feature films and often been grouped with British avant-garde and
art filmmakers such as Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, though Potter’s more
recent films have a stronger narrative form. Potter’s second film, Orlando, released
in 1993, brought her both international and critical acclaim, allowing her to make
bigger-budget films like The Man Who Cried (2000) and Ginger and Rosa (2012).
Potter’s abilities as a film writer are widely recognized. As Catherine Fowler points
out, ‘The screenplays for Orlando, The Tango Lesson and The Man Who Cried show-
case Potter’s skillful dialogue and Yes reinforces her status as a talented writer’
(2009: 61). Potter devotes much time and energy to developing the screenplay,
explaining that ‘writing and re-writing make up the bulk of the writer’s working
life (Mayer 2009: 143). During this process she usually keeps ‘parallel notebooks,
and I have character notes in this great big folder, what they think, what they
feel, what they might do, what they might not do and stuff about the back story’
(Fowler 2009: 129). When developing a script she likes to work as freely as possible:
‘ I’m working on the basis that the more you turn around something and the more
freely you can let your mind rove, the more likely you are going to find more
interesting solutions and move away from cliché’ (Fowler 2009: 129).
The genesis of the story and the nature of the screenplay is of special interest, as
Potter explains: ‘A screenplay is a living thing. It’s hard to say when it’s “finished”.
Perhaps not until the first real audience watches the film’ (Potter 2000: vii). She
goes on to ask, ‘Why does a screenplay have such mutability? Because it must.
The process of making a film … involves a complex negotiation between dream
and reality, imagination and pragmatism’ (Potter 2000: vii). Potter notes the
screenplay ‘has the status of an imaginary body. It needs to have a sound skeletal
structure – one which allows it to move – a complex set of internal functions, and
a good heart … Eventually a document is reached at that must hold its own from
multiple points of view’ (Potter 2000: viii).
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Potter’s first film to attract attention as a writer-director was the short Thriller
(1979), a feminist reading of Puccini’s opera La Bohème (1895). She then made
the feature-length The Gold Diggers (1983), which was directed by Potter and co-
written with Lindsay Cooper and Rose English. The film explores similar themes
to Thriller; the relationship between women, power, wealth and patriarchy, and
has two contrasting central characters: the early-nineteenth-century heroine
played by Julie Christie and the modern heroine played by Colette Lafone. On its
release the film was poorly received, partly due to its experimental nature and
the complex, plotless narrative common to much avant-garde cinema. Although
Potter found writing collaboratively difficult, some of the problems with the film
were part of the process of creating a different style of film that ‘came out of a
practice in the theatre of going with the moment, incorporating ideas, and not
being completely text-bound’ (Ehrenstein 1993: 3). Unfortunately, this approach
resulted in a film that is a series of stilted vignettes and is often difficult to follow.
It was nearly ten years before Pottter’s next film, Orlando, was released in 1993.
Her adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel was made by Adventure Pictures, which
Potter formed with producer Christopher Sheppard, who had secured a budget
of £2 million to make the film. After her unhappy experience when writing The
Gold Diggers, Potter gave more time to the screenplay for Orlando, which had a
seven-year development period and many revisions; a first treatment was writ-
ten in 1984 and a first draft completed in 1988. As Potter explains, this involved
‘re-reading the book and reading everything else Virginia Woolf and others had
ever written about the book. I analysed it, drew up charts and tried endless things
to understand her not very conventional narrative, and in the process I became
extremely interested in the process of storytelling. I’ve always read fiction and
have always told stories, but not always linear ones’ (Potter in Fowler 2009: 123).
Potter also credits the importance of the script editor, Walter Donahoe, who on
Orlando ‘became the “guardian” of the script, an independent pair of eyes, and
made sure that my cuts made at the last minute were creatively astringent – a form
of distillation – rather than tearing into the fabric of the story’ (Potter 2014: 69).
This attention to the script resulted in an experimental film with a strong narra-
tive drive, in which Orlando travels in time, from the Elizabethan age to the present
day, changing gender from male to female in 1700. Sophie Mayer points out that
earlier drafts dealt with the subject of property and class, changing in the redraft-
ing to focus on the concept of immortality and the fluidity of gender (Mayer 2009:
17). Potter explains the film is ‘about the mutability of all things’ (Potter 1994:
ix), but feminism, imperialism and politics are an integral part of the narrative
in this witty screenplay that is written with great verve. David Ehrenstein in Film
Quarterly compares the film to Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons: ‘Like no
other film of the moment, it demonstrates that art and pleasure are not mutually
exclusive categories of experience’ (Ehrenstein 1993: 2). Orlando went on to win
numerous awards including Best Film at the Venice Film Festival in 1992 and Best
Young Film at the European Film Awards in 1993.
The screenplay is playful and brings out the original novel’s sense of irony, from
Orlando’s self-conscious direct address to the camera, to the confusion of sexual
identity. When Orlando becomes female, she boldly states, ‘Same person, just a
different sex.’ Potter explains:
I don’t think the book so much explores sexual identities as dissolves them,
and it’s that kind of melting and shifting where nothing is ever what it seems
for male or female that I think is the strength of the book and which I wanted
to reproduce in the film. (Florence 1993: 283)
Potter’s interest in the process of writing led her to create an online archive,
SPARK, that holds plans for the development of the film and includes a hand-
written rough draft, notes on individual scenes and two drafts of the screenplay
for Orlando, dated 1990 and 1991 (www.sallypotter/SP-ARK.com).
The Tango Lesson (1997), Potter’s next film, was inspired by her love of dance.
Potter developed the idea when she fell in love with the Argentinian tango and
spent time in Buenos Aires learning how to tango. The story for the film changed
considerably in the development process, as Potter notes: ‘I started out trying to
make a film about dance and ended up making a story about love’ (Potter 1997:
xii). The script is semi-autobigraphical, written when she was trying to work
on the screenplay for Rage. A difficult idea to pull off, the film received mixed
reviews; Janet Maslin in the New York Times, for example, liked certain aspects but
described much of the film as ‘unabashedly self-important’ (14 November 1997).
A first-draft screenplay of Potter’s next film, The Man Who Cried (2000), was
written before The Tango Lesson, but Potter felt that she was not ready to take on
such a big subject which dealt with the build-up to World War II and was set in
Russia, England, France and the USA. The resulting film had a much larger budget
than her previous films and was co-funded by Working Title and Universal. The
screenplay was reworked many times and, unable get the narrative to work, Potter
wrote the film as a short story having ‘decided to try another tack – to let the nar-
rative and characters go where they need to without thought of “scenes” or other
technical demands’ (Potter 2000: xi). The resulting story is an engaging read and
enabled Potter to be more objective, as she explains: ‘I then set about adapting
it, almost as if someone else had written it. This proved an extremely productive
and interesting way to work’ (Potter 2000: xi). Potter notes there were quite a few
changes from initial idea to the end film; Cezar, the gypsy horseman, was origi-
nally a Spanish anarchist, and a French Resistance subplot was taken out because
it would have made the film too long. There were also many endings to the film,
one of which was Suzie’s father having died and another that he was living in
poverty (Potter 2000: xi).
The screenplay tells the story of Suzie, a young Russian girl from a Jewish family,
and her search for her father, who leaves for America just before World War II.
Her journey takes her to England, where she is taken in as a refugee by a childless
couple. Initially Suzie refuses to talk, but her teacher at school finds out she can
sing and teaches her English. When 16, Suzie goes to France and joins an opera
chorus where she meets Cezar and falls in love. Her friend, Lola, has fallen for
the star of the opera, Dante, a Mussolini supporter. When the Nazi army takes
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over Paris, Suzie is helped to escape by Lola but has to leave Cezar behind. Suzie
arrives in New York and tries to trace her father, finding that he has become a
Hollywood mogul and thinks his daughter is dead. She is finally reunited with
her dying father.
The end result is an accomplished screenplay, which is vividly poetic and very
effective in taking the reader into the world of the film. The dialogue is minimal
but works with the superbly written description to develop the story. The scene
cuts are at times abrupt and not seamless, as in a conventional narrative, and this
sometimes leaves questions unanswered that more dialogue could reveal. But this
is one of the few obvious links to, or devices of, art film, and gives a condensed,
almost enigmatic feel to the narrative that also allows a long timescale to be cov-
ered without the narrrative seeming hurried. For instance, when Suzie arrrives in
England as a child she is sent to a new school then the scene cleverly cuts forward
in time to Suzie as a young woman:
INT. ASSEMBLY HALL – DAY

Suzie is standing on the platform in the school assembly hall, under an enor-
mous wooden crucifix, singing in English to the school. A teacher in a black
gown accompanies her on the tuneless upright piano. The children, normally
so restless, are still and silent as Suzie sings Purcell (‘Dido’s Lament’ from Dido
and Aeneas) in a small, pure raw voice.
SUZIE
(singing)
When I am laid, am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create no trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me …
The Welsh teacher in the tweed suit is standing proudly at the back of the hall, his
arms folded across his chest. His eyes fill with tears.
The song continues …
INT. AUDITION ROOM – DAY
… but now Suzie is no longer a girl, though she is not quite a woman. She stands at
one end of a wood-panelled audition room, singing the same song, in a voice that has
matured but retains much of its pure, direct quality.
SUZIE
… Remember me
But, ah! forget my fate …
(2000: 15–16)
The film was quite well received and nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice
Film Festival 2000. Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, described it as an ‘engaging
drama’, though some reviews were less kind.
Potter’s next film, Yes, was written in response to the extremist attacks in the
US on 9 September 2001. The film began as a five-minute script based around a
couple who meet in Paris. The story was then developed and expanded into a more
complex storyline with additional characters (Potter 2005: vii). The screenplay
explores the relationship between two lovers from opposite cultural backgrounds:
a white American female with an Irish heritage, played by Joan Cusack, and
a Middle Eastern male played by Abkarian. When differences in their cultural
backgrounds begin to show, conflicts emerge, and this eventually divides them.
The couple decide to part but are reconciled in Cuba, a ‘no man’s land’ of neutral
cultural heritage. The way the story unfolds is not especially unconventional but
the format is; the characters speak in rhyming couplets, and one actor, the cleaner,
speaks directly to the audience, in the style of a Greek chorus. The screenplay
often displays Potter’s characteristic witty dialogue, all presented in rhyming cou-
plets. The opening lines read to camera are an engaging begining:
CLEANER (to camera)

They say my cleaning is the best
They’ve ever known. But cleanliness of course
Is an illusion. Those of us who clean
As a profession know the deeper source
Of dirt is always there. You can’t get rid
Of it. You cannot hide or put a lid
On it, a long as human life is there.
It’s us. The skin we shed, and then the hair.
(2005: 1)
Overall the screenplay is cleverly written but has more resonance when read than
as a film.
Rage (2009), like Orlando, had been in development for many years. It is a star-
studded experiment in telling a story through a series of monologues to camera.
The narrative works around a tale of murder in the fashion industry in which
Jude Law acts as a transvestite and Diane Wiest, Judi Dench and Steve Buscemi
play their parts with enthusiasm. The idea falls flat because the script and the
filming style do not engage the audience. Reviewer Jonathan Romney notes
the film was not well received at the Berlin Film Festival and that, ‘As a serious
critique of the fashion world, Potter’s script offers little insight or subtlety,’ but
adds further that ‘Rage makes most sense if you approach it not as a film but as
a piece of intensely stylised video art’ (Independent, 20 September 2009). Despite
its lacklustre reception, Rage was nominated for a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film
Festival in 2009.
Potter’s most recent film, Ginger and Rosa (2012), part funded by BBC Films, and
set in the 1960s, is a coming-of-age story about two teenagers and their friendship
as they reach maturity. A more personal film than most of her other work, it taps
into the politics of Potter’s teenage years. The narrative very effectively focuses
on the central characters, particularly Ginger, but less so on the other shadowy
figures.
Potter is a bold writer-director who is willing to experiment, and one of the few –
male or female – in the UK who have managed to make feature-length films
that retain an individual vision and are outside of the conventional mainstream.
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While some films may seem self-indulgent, The Tango Lesson and Rage for instance,
others, such as Orlando and The Man Who Cried, are vibrant and imaginative with
outstanding screenplays. As a mark of her service to British cinema Potter was
awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2012.
Jan Dunn (b. 1963)
Susan Liddy
Jan Dunn is an award-winning British writer-director and co-founder, with producer
Elaine Wickham, of Medb Films, a small independent production company based
in Ramsgate. Thematically, her work explores the ways in which characters are
marginalized as ‘other’, questioning dominant discourses about sexuality by chal-
lenging heteronormativity. Dunn’s characters also confront the position largely
adopted by mainstream cinema that sexual passion belongs to the young, while
celibacy, and sexual inertia, is the inevitable province of aging adults (Weitz 2010;
Chivers 2011).
Dunn’s protagonists and central characters are distinctive in that they are drawn
from groups usually sidelined in cinematic representations, pointing out that she
and Wickham have ‘a social conscience’ and became filmmakers because ‘we feel
strongly about things and want to have a voice’ (Gilbert n.d.). In order to offer a
brief exploration of that voice, I will discuss Dunn’s three feature-length narratives,
Gypo (2005), Ruby Blue (2007) and The Calling (2010), all of which are examples
of micro-budget filmmaking.
As a female writer-director, Dunn is part of a small minority in British film-
making. Dunn trained as an actress but harboured ambitions to direct for many
years, describing it as ‘a huge secret I carried around’ (Gilbert n.d.) because there
were so few role models for working-class female directors. After producing a
number of shorts, she embarked on her debut feature, Gypo (2005), the only certi-
fied British Dogme film. It is a non-linear narrative that unfolds from three differ-
ent points of view, in which the viewer is invited to piece the story together and
make sense, retrospectively, of the timeline, character motivation and narrative
cause and effect.
Gypo explores the racism experienced by refugees Tasha (Chloe Sirene) and her
mother, Irina (Rula Lenska), Romany Czechs who are eking out a meagre living
in Margate while awaiting British passports. The protagonist, Helen (Pauline
McLynn), befriends Tasha, and empathizes with the women’s plight, because her
own family, as Irish immigrants, had been ‘pushed around and called dirty micks’.
The intolerance and mistrust of ‘gypos’ is best articulated by Helen’s husband,
Paul (Paul McGann), who believes that England has ‘too many mouths to feed as
it is’. The ‘bloody refugees’ are the scapegoats for all the ills that afflict Britain.
Indeed, Paul’s rising menace eventually contributes to the attempted abduction of
the women by Tasha’s estranged Czech husband.
Helen’s marriage is stony and loveless. Yet, despite a frugal and joyless existence,
she retains a generosity of spirit and openness to life that Paul cannot comprehend.
All her efforts to transcend the narrow parameters of her life, such as attending
a weekly sculpting class, are met with cynicism – ‘wise up, granma’. Unusually,
Helen’s sexuality is reawakened by Tasha, the young Czech refugee, in a surprising
narrative turn when they engage in a passionate love scene; rare for mature female
characters, and particularly for mature lesbian characters. Helen’s emotional and
physical experience with Tasha empowers her to leave Paul and, at the film’s end,
she is poised to reunite with the younger woman in a dramatic climax.
In Ruby Blue, Jack (Bob Hoskins) struggles to recover from his wife’s death and the
ghosts of an alcoholic past. Once a successful breeder of racing pigeons, ‘Grumpy
Jack’ has withdrawn from his community and battles with loneliness and the urge
to drink again. A number of unexpected, and somewhat unconventional, friend-
ships infuse him with a sense of purpose and the desire to re-engage with life.
Florrie (Jessica Stewart) is the little girl who teaches Jack to like himself again; Ian
(Jody Latham) is a delinquent youth who restores Jack’s prize pigeon, Ruby, to
racing form; and Stephanie (Josiane Balasko), exoticized by her Frenchness and,
arguably, offering a safe distance from which to explore transexualism, teaches
him about tolerance and love.
Dramatic tension is provided when Stephanie reveals her sexuality and Jack takes
flight, repulsed that he had sex with ‘a man’. The tension escalates when Florrie
goes missing and unfounded rumour and innuendo combine to outlaw Jack as ‘a
paedo’; ‘othered’ because an innocent and nurturing friendship between an older
man and a child has become automatically suspect. The narrative suggests that
the bonds that sustain us are not always found in conventional families, but in
the friendships and alliances we forge. Ultimately, Jack is reunited with Stephanie
and his acceptance of her is an acknowledgement that the expression of our
sexuality is not immutable but shaped by culture and more fluid than Jack ever
considered.
British and Irish cinema is generally marked by an absence of sexually active
mature female characters (Liddy 2013), giving credence to Kathleen Woodward’s
observation that: ‘The older female body is significant only in its absence’ (2006:
162). In both Gypo and Ruby Blue, the characters of Helen and Stephanie offer
non-normative images of sexuality and imply a fluidity surrounding gendered
sexual norms. However, neither narrative fully explores the sexuality of the female
characters, offering instead validation through visibility. Gypo captures the elation
of Helen when she acknowledges her love for Tasha but sidesteps the inevitable
disclosure to family and friends. Ruby Blue offers a glimpse of a utopian world in
which the prejudice experienced by Stephanie, as a transsexual, is minimal and
tangential; a small battle to be waged and won.
Dunn’s third film, The Calling, explores another community: a closed order of
Benedictine nuns. The narrative follows the ‘calling’ of a college graduate, protago-
nist Joanna (Emily Beecham). We follow her own spiritual journey; the resistance
of family and friends to her vocation; her entry to the convent as a postulant;
and the subsequent struggle for acceptance among an eclectic community of sisters.
The ensemble cast primarily features mature female characters (Brenda Blethyn,
Rita Tushingham, Susannah York, Pauline McGlynn, Amanda Donohoe) ranging
in age from the late forties to early seventies. Interestingly, the invisibility and
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stereotyping of older women in cinema has been specifically addressed in a

number of industry-commissioned publications (Randle et al. 2007; Sharp 2006).
Randle et al. suggest that ‘while older actors may be given positive roles, their
female counterparts are often doddery old ladies’ (Randle et al. 2007: 87), giv-
ing credence to Whelehan’s view that post-menopausal women ‘disappear into a
dismal, neutered future’ (2010: 182). Here, again, Dunn’s story world embraces a
range of characters underrepresented on screen.
Ironically, given that research commissioned by the UK Film Council suggests
that the consumer aged 45 years and older ‘has grown into a market force to be
reckoned with’ (UK Film Council 2011), Dunn could not access completion money
from the UK Film Council because, it was suggested, there was no audience for
the film. Yet Dunn observes that the film played to packed houses after its first
screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival: ‘I knew that The Calling would appeal
to an older, mostly female, audience and I’ve been proved right’ (Gilbert n.d.).
Unlike The Calling, in which the dialogue was fully scripted, Gypo and Ruby Blue
are often described as ‘improvised’ and having no script, something Dunn takes
issue with:
I wrote a fully structured screenplay – the only difference is I chose to write the
dialogue in prose because I wanted the actors to be fresh with it. Elaine and
I ended up calling it ‘Spontaneous Dialogue’ because strictly speaking it wasn’t
really improvised apart from the actual words themselves. (Wistreich 2006)
For Dunn, the demands of micro-budget filmmaking did not facilitate a lengthy
script development phase. Gypo and Ruby Blue were written in two weeks with-
out any script development funding. Though funding was forthcoming for The
Calling, that script was also written at breakneck speed, three weeks in total, in
contrast to the more usual lengthy process of drafting and redrafting. Arguably,
the scripts have suffered because of this, particularly The Calling, which tends to
be tonally inconsistent and lacks dramatic tension. Dunn also identifies chal-
lenges in writing for ‘a lot of good actors in decent sized roles […] You can’t give
everyone a great arc’ (Dunn 2011). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Dunn suggests that
subsequent scripts will be more fully developed.
Jan Dunn’s work attempts to represent the diversity of the British cinema audi-
ence. It is, I would argue, important that cinema represent new narratives of aging
and sexuality, if we are to mine the rich possibilities of our long and complex
lives. Indeed, concern about the absence of diverse groups in British cinema has
been noted in a 2011 industry report which points out that:
[I]t is absolutely vital that the film industry reflects that by serving the broadest
possible audiences, reflecting their lives and age, gender, ethnicity, race, sexual
orientation and physical ability. (UK Film Council 2011: 1)
Jan Dunn is currently adapting Rose Tremain’s best-selling novel Sacred Country
for the screen.
Andrea Arnold (b. 1961)
Marcella Forster
Andrea Arnold is one of the most important and successful writer-directors work-
ing in British cinema today. She won the Cannes Jury Prize for her first two feature
films, Red Road (2006)51 and Fish Tank (2009), and an Academy Award for her
short film Wasp (2003), all of which she scripted and directed, and was nominated
for a Golden Lion for Wuthering Heights (2011), adapted from Emily Bronte’s novel
(Arnold shares the screenplay credit with Olivia Hetreed).
Arnold grew up as the oldest of four children on a local authority estate in Dartford,
Kent. Her upbringing has clearly influenced her storytelling, as these estates form
the backdrop in most of her films. At 18 Arnold moved to London and became a
dancer on Top of the Pops (BBC, 1964–2012). She later presented children’s maga-
zine shows No. 73 (TVS, 1982–8) and Motormouth (TVS, 1988–92). She then studied
directing at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles, graduating in
1991. Her first short film, Milk (1998), was screened at Critics’ Week at the Cannes
Film Festival, and was followed by the short film Dog (2001), commissioned by
the BBC.
Arnold has been classed as a ‘new British realist’ filmmaker, distinct from social
realists such as Ken Loach, in that the emphasis is on the poetic and expressionistic
potential of the realist backdrop to her films, rather than on the socio-political
themes.52 Her screenplays are personal dramas, expressive in style and follow
a single protagonist.53 She is notable for creating intriguing, troubled female
protagonists and controversial sex scenes.
The Academy Award-winning Wasp (2003) was funded by the UK Film Council
Cinema Extreme programme. It tells the story of a single parent who leaves her
four kids foraging in a pub car park while she pretends to be childless and goes
on a date. Arnold’s portrayal of poverty-stricken single parenthood is sometimes
bleak, always honest but never hopeless. Her protagonist is so poor that she has to
feed her children sugar, but she dances, sings and laughs with them. Even though
she makes bad decisions, such as leaving her four children outside a pub while
she’s on her date, she could have made much worse decisions; for example, rather
than going for a drive in her date’s car, as he requests, she insists on staying in
the pub car park so she can keep an eye on her children, with the result that she
saves her baby from swallowing a wasp. Arnold never judges her characters, and
we don’t either.
In Red Road (2006) CCTV operator Jackie is paralysed by grief until she spies the
man who accidentally killed her partner and child. Her actions are shocking – she
sets out to seduce him. Then we discover that she intends to frame him for raping
her so that he will go back to prison. In Fish Tank (2009), the teenage protagonist,
Mia, has sex with her mum’s boyfriend. When she finds out that he has another
family, she pees in his living room and kidnaps his daughter.
In both Red Road and Fish Tank the protagonists actively seek revenge. However,
when they realize the harm that will be caused, they change their minds. In Red
Road, Jackie discovers her family’s accidental killer has a daughter who is looking
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for him and so drops the rape charge. In Fish Tank, Mia almost drowns Connor’s
daughter, but when she sees the child’s distress, she returns her to her family. Again,
the result is that, rather than judging these protagonists for their actions, we
empathize with them.
Arnold’s women have tough exteriors and are reluctant, or unable, to express
their vulnerability in human interaction. Love is usually expressed aggressively
(‘I hate you’ said with a hug).54 Their gentler side is often revealed through their
dealings with animals. In Fish Tank, Mia tries to release a horse from its tethering:
‘She moves towards the horse. It remains still. Flies buzz around its eyes and the
horse seems too weak to shake them off. Mia brushes them away from its eyes.’55
Animals are used symbolically in Arnold’s films; in Fish Tank, on a rare trip
away from the estate, Connor shows Mia how to catch a fish: ‘It is not such a big
fish out of the water. It flaps helplessly. Arching desperately. Its mouth opening
and shutting.’56 This mirrors Mia’s struggles to breathe, to survive, at home with
her mum, Joanne, as this extract from the script describes: ‘Joanne comes bound-
ing down the hall, smiling at Connor. She suffocates the space.’57 Later Connor
‘thrusts the stick down the fish’s throat. Blood spurts out. The fish writhes and
then stops. Eyes staring.’58 This description foreshadows his betrayal of Mia (and
Joanne) when he returns to his other family.
Arnold is a master at engaging us with her characters through their unpalatable
actions. At the end of her screenplays, we know her characters at a deep level and
they remain in our consciousness. Perhaps the most interesting and unique aspect
of Arnold’s work is her portrayal of children as an integral part of the fabric of
life and of story. She draws our attention to dolls, underwear, pram wheels, food,
a dead child’s clothes padded out and hugged as if they formed a live child – the
very stuff of female life. Her inspiration comes from everyday observations: ‘I see
someone on the bus, and I want to write about them.’59 Her advice to screenwriters
is: ‘Put everything into what you’re doing and don’t worry about what anybody
thinks.’60 She says she finds writing hard and that ‘directing is for pussies’.61
Arnold doesn’t think of herself as a female writer-director: ‘I’ve never thought
of myself as somehow able to do less. So I just get on and do it.’ But she admits
it’s hard having a child and directing: ‘It’s not an easy thing to juggle, though my
daughter is more independent these days and so it’s a bit easier.’62
Lynne Ramsay (b. 1969)
Jamie Sherry
Glasgow-born Lynne Ramsay’s career as a screenwriter, cinematographer and direc-
tor has been marked by significant industry obstacles, while her films display a
distillation and progression of British social-realist traditions coupled with an
expressionistic cinematic vision. Although Ramsay’s screenplays and films are
notable for their diverse range of stories and locations, they are also dominated
by a preoccupation with consistent themes that include death, grief, memory
and the crippling effects of guilt. However, her work is particularly noted for
its exploration of childhood and loss of innocence, to the extent that her early
films are compared to the seminal The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959) and Kes (Loach,
1969). Her preoccupation with children allows Ramsay to show profound emo-
tional changes, and the repercussions of childhood experiences. As she argues,
‘Childhood is an interesting time because opinions are not yet set’ as ‘perhaps you
see the world around you more clearly and openly, in a simpler way, without the
baggage of moral judgement’ (Ramsay 1999: viii).
Ramsay’s short films, in particular her award-winning Gasman (1998), display
a talent for exploring characters that are steeped in a history of social-realist
cinema, while being shot with a distinctively cinematic and expressionistic style.
Ramsay’s visual approach in both her screenwriting and directing can perhaps
be explained by her route into filmmaking, first as a graduate in photography
from Edinburgh Napier University, before going on to study for a prestigious
postgraduate course in directing and cinematography from the National Film and
Television School in London. Her graduating short film, Small Deaths (1996), con-
tains themes and stylistic choices that have come to dominate her later work, not
least the use of family members as cast, and the encouragement of improvisation.
Detailing three separate stories about children experiencing epiphanies as they
deal with the harsh realities of their families, Small Deaths immediately earned
Ramsay notoriety as a new, talented writer-director, going on to win the Prix de
Jury prize at Cannes in 1996. Ramsay continued to pursue her passion for the
form by writing and directing two more award-winning short films. Kill the Day
(1996) is a stripped-back and narratively disjointed piece of film storytelling from
Ramsay, almost free from dialogue and structured in a dream-like, non-linear way.
It details the trauma caused to a drug addict (James Ramsay) when he is released
from prison, abstract memories of his institutionalized life and his fraught child-
hood bleeding into each other to create a visually poetic ode to memory and loss
of innocence. The following year, Gasman (1997) became Ramsay’s break-out
short film, winning the Cannes Prix du Jury and Scottish BAFTA for Best Short
Film awards in 1998. Gasman is a stunning piece of imagistic storytelling that
once again utilizes the naturalism offered by improvisation and the use of non-
actors, combined with confident, expressive cinematography. Taking advantage
of the short form as a means to tell small stories with far-reaching significance,
Gasman follows a young girl (Lynne Ramsay Jnr) who comes to painfully realize
that her father has another daughter, her half-sister. It is perhaps Ramsay’s most
personal film, while also being her most narratively coherent, a clear structure
guiding the viewer to experience the plot twist as a simultaneous epiphany for the
main protagonist. As with all the children in Ramsay’s early short films, there is a
sense that their experiences permanently change them, and resonate throughout
the rest of their lives, as explored so tragically in Kill the Day.
These core elements of Ramsay’s writing and directing would eventually become
conflated into her feature film debut, Ratcatcher (1999), an ambitious work that
utilizes elements of all her previous works, both in terms of storytelling and cin-
ematography. Set in Glasgow in 1973, Ratcatcher details the rehoming of tenants
from slums to new estates, as a bin strike and a subsequent invasion of rats cause
difficulties for the inhabitants. The film follows 12-year-old James (William Eadie),
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a quiet child who blames himself for his friend’s death in the local canal due to his
inactivity. The expansion of storytelling into a full-length film allows Ramsay to
offer more complex narrative threads, including James’s befriending of a local girl
and his relationship with both his parents, and the parents of the boy to whom
he feels so indebted. Ratcatcher was a relative commercial and critical success, and
won numerous awards including the Carl Foreman Award for Newcomer in British
Film at the BAFTA Awards in 2000.
However, Ramsay’s next film would be a notable departure from a style of
screenwriting and filmmaking that had produced a cohesive and thematically
interrelated body of work, and her first encounter with both literary adaptation
and co-writing. Based on Alan Warner’s 1995 novel of the same name, from
a screenplay written with Liana Dognini, Morvern Callar (2002) sees Ramsay
approach a story with a clear, female protagonist, and without the overt pres-
ence of children that dominated her previous works. The story follows Morvern
Callar (Samantha Morton), a supermarket clerk who finds her partner dead after
committing suicide. Morvern takes credit for an unpublished novel he has writ-
ten, before going to Ibiza where she embarks on a journey of self-discovery that
uncovers familiar Ramsay motifs of grief and memory.
For her next film Ramsay returned to a literary adaptation in the form of We
Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), adapting Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel using a
screenplay co-written with her partner, Rory Kinnear. Set in the USA, with a
larger budget than her previous films, Ramsay continued her fascination with the
repercussions of death, and the complex relationship between guilt and grief. The
film uses non-linear storytelling to show the main character Eva Khatchadourian
(Tilda Swinton) in the years leading up to, and the aftermath of, a high-school
massacre carried out by her son, Kevin (Ezra Miller). Dealing with issues of mater-
nity and motherhood, nature and nurture, and the ambiguities of an unreliable
narrator, Ramsay’s adaptation sees a more fractured storytelling approach than
her two previous films, while employing a narrative structure that harks back to
the disjointed abstractions of her short Kill the Day.
Ramsay’s films are indicative of a strong, creative aesthetic and cinematic style.
However, the basis for this approach can be found in her screenplay texts, which
employ poetic flourishes and an expressionistic style in order to facilitate and
complement her photography. Although clearly indebted to the naturalist style of
directors such as Alan Clarke and John Cassavetes, Ramsay often transcends much
of the trappings of social-realist drama, instead stripping away dialogue to a bare
minimum, and employing a number of expressionistic, cinematic devices that
obscure meaning, and confront the viewer with sometimes surreal, often oblique
cinematography. In Ratcatcher a fantasy plays out in which a child (Kenny) ties
a mouse to a helium balloon and watches it drift away, followed by a fantasy
sequence that transcends notions of a social-realist contract with the audience:
Kenny’s hands holding the balloon appear over the window ledge … FX: the infinite
dark void of space, James’ dream. Green screen for magic camera special effects … ‘The
Kenny’ balloon and the tiny mouse drift away from planet Earth towards the moon.
INT. GILLESPIES’ LIVING ROOM. EVENING

On the flickering screen of the Gillespies’ grainy black-and-white TV set we see an
Apollo 11 type image.
The tiny white mouse lands elegantly on the edge of a crater. The mouse scurries off,
released on landing from the string of the balloon.
The ‘Kenny’ balloon floats upwards, framed against the black star-filled sky.
Snowball scrambles into the crater and congregates with the thousands of white mice
teeming over the surface of the moon.
(Ramsay 1999: 64)
Annette Kuhn describes the poetic qualities of Ratcatcher as signalling ‘a shift of

realities – in both the film’s world and the protagonist’s relation to the world’. In
doing so they ‘mark an entry into an inner world, a world separate and different
from, and yet still to be found within, the everyday’ (Kuhn 2008: 13).
The literary, subjective viewpoint of the We Need to Talk About Kevin source
novel is adapted by Ramsay and Kinnear into cinematic language through the
use of abstract imagery from the past, with brief, almost inaudible snippets of
dialogue, playing out like unreliable memories and fleeting moments in dreams.
The screenplay utilizes a number of literary, poetic devices and the use of an
expressionistic colour scheme in order to inform and evoke the resultant visual
language of the film:
Eva loses focus, the red and blue lights scatter into meaningless splotches.
CUT TO BLACK
SCREAMS IN THE DARKNESS.
EXT. STREET, BANOL, SPAIN 1983 – DAY
A mass of half-naked teenage bodies writhe together, piled on top of one another,
screaming and yelling, covered in a viscous, blood-red liquid. Is this hell?
SPLAT. A tomato flies through the air and squashes against the crisp white cotton of
a woman’s blouse.
Eva (36 and gorgeous) squeals and laughs, holding her hands protectively over her
face as more tomatoes fly in every direction.
(Ramsay and Kinnear 2007: 10)
The colour red is a symbol for Eva’s freedom, rebirth, passion, blood and paint and
is used to ‘mark’ her by an angry local community. Red is also used as a symbol of
freedom and claustrophobia, and its inclusion is copious to the point of expres-
sionism, while uniting the divergent time periods and giving cohesion to the
sporadic editing structure. The presentation of red and black resurface throughout
the screenplay using the sort of imagist techniques normally associated with the
flourishes of poetry rather than the pragmatism of screenwriting:
INT. BEDROOM – NIGHT.

A pulsing red neon light from the Chinese restaurant across the block strobes into the
room, alternately bathing the scene in it’s glow or leaving it obscured in darkness.
United Kingdom 675
RED: At first glance it looks like Eva and Franklin are locked in a violent tussle as
they furiously tear each others clothes off.
BLACK.
RED: Eva pulls Franklin’s damp T-shirt over his head and they fall back on the bed,
wriggling nakedly.
BLACK.
RED: Urgent and visceral in their movements as if they want to consume one another.
They roll around in a tangle then she moves on top of him. She leans down, kissing
his neck. She can’t get close enough.
BLACK.
LATER – POST COITAL.
Eva is dozy eyed but contemplative, the trace of a smile on her lips. The black/red light
flashes on and off like a warning signal.
(Ramsay and Kinnear 2007: 16–17)
These techniques foreground the role of the authored screenplay, and therefore
more general debates around authorship in Ramsay’s screenplays and films, particu-
larly the use of source literature. In her commentary for Gasman on the Cinema16:
British Short Films DVD, Ramsay notes that her adaptation of literary material
started long before Morvern Callar:
I started writing short stories at film school. I wanted to make something that
meant more to me than the films I was asked to photograph. I felt everyone
was trying to make a calling card for the industry. In the end, I ended up film-
ing three of the stories I wrote, and in each of them I tried to play with different
ideas and styles. (Ramsay 2006)
Ramsay’s preoccupation with adapting literature could seem counter-intuitive to

her tendency towards poetic screenwriting and a highly visual, non-literary style
of filmmaking. However, it is also a comfortable medium for Ramsay to explore
concepts and story that can be remediated into film, or to find literary source
material that contains the ideas and themes so important to her work. In particu-
lar, Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin is notable for its inherently
literary structure, which seems at first to resist adaptation. This epistolary novel
is presented as letters sent by Eva to her deceased husband about their son Kevin.
Eva confesses to her husband that she felt ambivalence towards Kevin and her
role as mother, and conjectures on whether this is the reason their son becomes
a mass murderer. Ramsay’s screenplay and film employ a number of cinematic
devices that both communicate and bypass the literary specificity of Shriver’s
novel. Almost every page and scene in Ramsay and Kinnear’s screenplay features
Eva, and we come to realize that we are seeing the story through her subjective
eyes and, as a result, doubt whether events have taken place because Eva’s guilt
drives her to readdress and reinvent her past.
Ramsay’s involvement with both cinematic adaptation and screenwriting-
directing is also characterized by two high-profile film projects that controversially
went on to be helmed by other directors. After Morvern Callar Ramsay continued

using literature as a source for her work when in 2000 she agreed to adapt and
direct Alice Sebold’s then unfinished manuscript that would become the best-
selling novel The Lovely Bones (2002). However, by the time that Ramsay, and
her previous co-writer Dognini, came to develop the script idea it had become
clear that her vision departed significantly from the source material. By 2004
New Zealand director Peter Jackson had been installed as the new director and
the subsequent release made a substantial loss at the box office, something that
Ramsay blames on the reverence shown to Sebold’s source. In 2013 Ramsay was
again involved in a problematic film project that saw her replaced as writer and
director. The drama Western Jane Got a Gun had been picked up from Blacklist,
a Hollywood screenplay slush pile of the most popular unproduced screenplays,
and Ramsay was attached as director. The film tells the story of Jane (Natalie
Portman) who must call on an ex-lover in order to protect her and her husband
from outside forces. Following disagreements with the producer, Scott Steindorff,
Ramsay eventually left the film on the day before filming was set to commence,
soon to be followed by actor Jude Law and cinematographer Darius Khondji. It
could be argued that Ramsay’s low-budget, minimalist early work, with its ad hoc
and improvised production ethos, closely controlled by her screenwriting, direc-
tion and cinematography, offered auteurist luxuries not afforded to her by the
Hollywood film industry.
The extent to which Ramsay’s screenplays (sometimes co-authored) can be under-
stood in terms of their poetics and some form of écriture féminine is certainly open to
debate, not least because of Ramsay’s view that her gender is something either unde-
finable or unimportant in terms of how it shapes her artistic voice. Ramsay, despite
the subject matter of her films, and the foregrounding of female protagonists,
maintains that she receives ‘questions about what it’s like to be a woman filmmaker,
and you don’t get that question a lot if you’re a man. I don’t really go there because
I can’t really define what I bring to films as a woman’ (Benedictus 2005). Ramsay’s
point raises issues regarding the further political gendering of screenwriters.
In the foreword to the published Ratcatcher screenplay, Ramsay addresses the
discrepancies between the script and the final film in a way that highlights both
the practical and industrial demands of filmmaking, and the director’s own
process of making film, with its accounting for chance and improvisation:
I have decided to leave the script as it was in the final stages before shooting,
as I feel that this is more informative than a scripted version of the film in its
finished form. It always bugs me when I read a straight rendition of a film, as
I can hardly believe that no changes were made as a result of the filmmaking
process. (Ramsay 1999: vi)
Ramsay explains this approach as a form of creative submission to chance, independ-

ent of the screenplay’s authority: ‘What excites me in a film shoot is the unexpected
things that happen on the day. Sometimes I let things run and see what happens’
(Ramsay 1999: xi). Ramsay’s position as a writer-director and photographically
United Kingdom 677
minded cinematographer single her out as a recognizable auteur. However, her

use of non-actors, her encouragement of improvisation, and the writing of expres-
sionistically poetic screenplays see Ramsay’s control of her projects become open
to the influence of outside forces. Furthermore, her co-written screenplays and
the search for adaptable story ideas in literature see Ramsay’s films as produced
in a less stable state of authorship than those of many other writer-directors. In
doing so she is able to find gaps to create naturalistic and often agonizingly real
stories, delivered with a cinematic style that is both experimentally progressive
and aesthetically beautiful.
Notes
1. See: www.womenandsilentbritishcinema.wordpress.com (accessed 21 May 2015).
2. See more on Bristow at http://womenandsilentbritishcinema.wordpress.com/the-women/
billie-bristow/ (accessed 21 May 2015).
3. See: Simon Brown, Women Film Pioneers Project. Available at: https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.
edu/pioneer/ccp-blanche-macintosh/ (accessed 21 May 2015).
4. Ibid.
5. Women’s Film History Database.
6. Ibid.
7. See London Films Collection, Box 24, 11/C/116.
8. See BFI Special Collections LFP, ITM-6163 Lesley STORM, Item number C/116, box
number 24.
9. Melanie Williams gives a very interesting account of the two films in her chapter ‘
‘Twilight Women of 1950s British Cinema’ in Robert Murphy’s The British Cinema Book,
2009, UK: BFI Publishing, pp. 286–95.
10. See: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/uk-film-council-women-
screenwriters-scoping-study.pdf (accessed 21 May 2015).
11. See: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-report-on-female-writers-
and-directors-of-uk-films-2013-11.pdf (accessed 21 May 2015).
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. See: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/streetdance-2-3d-film-review-313727
15. I am grateful to Janice Healey for help with birth, death and marriage records and
census returns.
16. Alfred Hitchcock to Madeline Warren, 20 February 1974, Alfred Hitchcock Papers,
Subject Files – General, Book Requests 1971–6 (119–f1382), Margaret Herrick Library.
17. Taylor, John Russell. 1978. Hitch: The Life and Work of Alfred Hitchcock. London: Faber &
Faber, pp. 18–20.
18. ‘Alfred Hitchcock Tells of His Trials and Triumphs Making “Murder”’, Cassell’s Magazine,
August 1930, pp. 58–63.
19. Lane, Christina, and Josephine Botting. 2014. ‘“What Did Alma Think?”: Continuity,
Writing, Editing, and Adaptation’, in Mark Osteen (ed.) Hitchcock and Adaptation. Maryland:
Scarecrow Press, pp. 324–49.
20. Ibid.
21. Suspicion files (55f–653–658), Alfred Hitchcock Papers, Margaret Herrick Library.
22. Auiler 1999: 275.
23. BIF began in 1910 making documentaries and then moved to feature films in the late
1920s to make ‘quota quickies’, attracting directors like Anthony Asquith. BIF was taken
over by British International Pictures in 1931.
24. In 1939 Sydney Box had three of his plays entered in the festival, each acted by a differ-
ent theatre group. See: http://cashewnut.me.uk/WGCbooks/web-WGC-books-1939-1.php
(accessed 21 May 2015) for images of the 1939 programme.
25. Muriel’s diary entry of 14 March 1948 refers to the pressure to use studio sets when they
are free and the shortage of ready screenplays. ‘They want to use a set that is now free
for filming and need to get the script right … the snag is that the plot isn’t right yet and
although I’ve been puzzling over it for two days. I still can’t hit on the right plot angle.
It will be a pity to waste those sets.’
26. See the letters held in 8.3 of the Muriel and Sydney Box Collection, BFI.
27. See the Janet Green Collection, JG 10/7, for press cuttings and reviews of the films.
28. Green’s birth certificate states she was born in 1908, although she was often vague about
her exact age.
29. In an interview with the author, Janet Green’s stepson, Barry McCormick, noted when
the couple started writing together.
30. See the Janet Green Collection, JG/17, for two drafts and a part draft of the unrealized
screenplay.
31. Barry McCormick, Green’s stepson, notes the couple collaborated equally in the
creation of a screenplay. Interview with author, 11 November 2012.
32. As in so many cases with uncredited writers there is the possibility that the treatment
was a separate project – but the Janet Green Collection notes ‘Dialogue and additional
scenes for “W. Somerset Maugham/Pormanteau”’.
33. For further reviews of Sapphire see Burton and O’Sullivan 2009.
34. The Wolfenden Report of 1957 was set up to investigate both homosexuality and pros-
titution. It recommended the legalization of homosexuality between consenting adults
over 21. The recommendations of the report were rejected by the government and it
was not until 1967 that homosexuality was legalized.
35. Her birth date is often incorrectly stated as 1914.
36. Many art galleries and museums closed at the start of the war and some, such as the
National Gallery, removed their permanent collections to safer places for its duration,
thus providing space for temporary exhibitions.
37. See the Jill Craigie Special Collection held at the Women’s Library, London School
of Economics. Throughout the 1940s, Craigie corresponded with Emmeline Pethick-
Lawrence while researching for her film on suffragettes. Mrs Pethick-Lawrence was a
campaigning suffragette and active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
38. See ‘Review: The Flemish Farm’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 10 (116): 88.
39. In an interview in 1995, discussing her work for the British Council, Craigie recalls:
‘Mr Bentley was an old film director, and he thought I had a visual sense, and so then
I did a whole lot of scripts and I enjoyed that’ – see Craigie 1995.
40. Craigie was asked to write a forward for No Time for Tears by T. J. Witts covering the his-
tory of coal mining at Llanhharan. In this the undermanager at the colliery makes com-
ments on her work. See: Women’s Library, London School of Economics (uncatalogued
labelled by Craigie as ‘Jill Craigie as Film Maker’) (refs 7JCC/B/survey/50 and 7JCC/B/
survey/51).
41. Letter from the Screenwriters Association dated 14 April 1954 in the Jill Craigie Special
Collection held at the Women’s Library, London School of Economics, ibid.
42. Letter dated 20 December 1994 from senior commissioning editor David Lloyd to
Richard Tindle in the Jill Craigie Special Collection held at the Women’s Library,
London School of Economics, ibid.
43. Letter dated 10 January 1995 from Craigie to Lloyd in the Jill Craigie Special Collection
held at the Women’s Library, London School of Economics, ibid.
44. Letter from Craigie to Jason Lehel complaining of what she perceived as a paltry figure
for Two Hours from London, dated February 1995, the Jill Craigie Special Collection held
at the Women’s Library, London School of Economics, ibid.
45. For a full account see Craigie 1995.
United Kingdom 679
46. The Jill Craigie Collection contains extensive archive materials, photographs and
objects regarding her work on the suffragettes.
47. The studio did encourage the creative work of women, though, particularly in the
talented figures of animator/designers like Kathleen ‘Spud’ Houston, Vera Linnecar and
Alison de Vere.
48. This is extracted from Joy Batchelor’s paper, ‘Scriptwriting for Animation’, an
unpublished piece from the Halas and Batchelor Collection, written around 1971–2.
49. Ibid.
50. The entry is based on an interview with Rosemary Anne Sisson by Jule Selbo.
51. Red Road was made as part of Advance Party, a Danish project instigated by director Lars
von Trier. Directors were challenged to make films using specific rules, including using
the same group of characters.
52. Forrest 2010: 31–43.
53. Parker 1999.
54. Arnold 2008: 102.
55. Arnold 2008: 9.
56. Arnold 2008: 35.
57. Arnold 2008: 24.
58. Arnold 2008: 36.
59. See: http://variety.com/2007/film/news/andrea-arnold-1117957600/ (accessed 19 April
2013).
60. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/aug/23/andrea-arnold-fish-tank-cannes
(accessed 10 October 2011).
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
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Part V
North America
Canada
Michael Coutanche, Jule Selbo and J. T. Velikovsky
Overview
Michael Coutanche and Jule Selbo

The Canadian film industry is divided into two contingents, the Anglophone-
Canadian and Francophone-Canadian groups. The anglophone (English-
speaking) industry is often connected to that of its neighbour, the United States;
the francophone industry in situated in the French-speaking Quebec province.
In 1897, the Lumière brothers, the Edison company and Biograph (a film
company started by William Kennedy Dixon, once an inventor at the Edison
laboratory) made films on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The first Canadian
feature film, Evangeline (1913; 75 minutes), was produced by the Canadian Bioscope
Company. The credited screenwriter on Evangeline is Marguerite Marquis; she
adapted the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem and is also listed in the cast
playing a Shawnee Indian Woman. The film was shot in Nova Scotia and released
with English subtitles. Early filmmaking did not take off as it did in the United
States; the Women Pioneers Film Project centred at Columbia University notes
that Anglophone Canada’s early film industry was devoted to exhibition and
distribution of US and foreign films.
The Francophone-Canadian film industry focused to a greater extent on actual
filmmaking; however, it did not produce many narrative films. By the early 1920s,
the Associated Screen News and Leo-Ernest Ouimet’s Specialty Film Import and
others were releasing actualities, newsreels and travelogues every week (Armatage
et al. 2013). Of the few fiction films that were produced, two female screenwriters
can be noted: Marguerite Marquis and Emma Gendron (Armatage et al. 2013).
Gendron’s screenwriting credits include Madeleine de Vercheres (1922) and La
drogue fatale (1924). Evangeline is Marquis’s only screenwriting credit.
Perhaps the most well-known early female screenwriter hailing from Canada
is Nell Shipman (1892–1970). She was born Helen Foster-Barham in Victoria,
British Columbia. When she was 13, her family moved to Seattle, Washington. At
age 18, Nell married Ernest Shipman. They moved to Hollywood to enter the film
industry. Nell Shipman worked as an actress and screenwriter, Ernest Shipman
as a producer. In 1913, while living in Hollywood, she wrote One Hundred Years
685
of Mormonism, a six-reeler (the film ran approximately 90 minutes) focusing on

the early history of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Nell Shipman was paid
a then unheard of sum of $2,500 for her screenplay (Brigham Young University
2010). No print of the film is known to be in existence. The Shipmans co-founded
a production company in Canada and produced Back to God’s Country (1919);
Nell adapted (taking great liberties) James Oliver Curwood’s short story and also
starred in the film. Back to God’s Country became Canada’s most successful silent
film. The film featured a nude scene, making Nell one of the first women to do
a nude scene in a film made for mass audiences. Curwood was incensed by the
loose adaptation, but could not contest the success of the film. After the film was
released, Ernest and Nell divorced and Nell created her own production company,
Nell Shipman Productions. She wanted to focus on elements that she felt were
important: wild animals (she kept quite a few herself), nature, feminist heroes and
filming on location (Morris 1978: 296).
Although Nell made her home in the United States, she continued to set her
tales in Canada. She wrote, co-directed and produced The Girl from God’s Country
(1921), Something New (1920, co-written with Bert Van Tuyle with whom she had
a long-term affair) and The Grub Stake (1923). Other screenwriting credits include
Under the Crescent (1915), and The Pine’s Revenge (1915). Nell is credited with one
‘talkie’, Wings in the Dark (1935, story credit). She penned her autobiography,
The Silent Screen and My Talking Heart. Boise State University in Idaho houses her
collected works and many of her films at its Albertsons Library.
In 2008, Canada produced 65 films – most were in the Anglophone-Canadian
system. Some of the notable filmmakers of the anglophone area are David
Cronenberg, Seth Rogen, Deepa Mehta, Sarah Polley, Mary Harron, James
Cameron, and Atom Egoyan. French-Canadian filmmakers include Jean Beaudin,
Xavier Dolar, Michel Brault and Lea Pool. Pool was born in Switzerland but now
lives in Montreal. Her films include A corps perdu/Straight from the Heart (1988, she
is director and co-writer), Anne Trister (1986, she is director and co-writer), and
Emprote-moi/Set Me Free (1999, she is director and co-writer).
Mary Harron (1953–) was born in Bracebridge, Ontario, Canada to parents
working in the film and theatre industries. She moved to England at age 13 and
attended St Anne’s College, Oxford University. After graduation, she became a
journalist and drama critic in New York City and London. She is a writer and
director. She studied screenwriting, and her credits include the adaptation of Bret
Easton Ellis’s controversial novel American Psycho (2000, co-written with American
Guinevere Turner), I Shot Andy Warhol (1996, co-writer), The Notorious Bettie Page
(2005, co-written with Guinevere Turner), and the adaptation of The Moth Diaries
(2011). Harron directed the above films, and with regard to The Notorious Bettie
Page, a story that focuses on a 1950s pin-up model who became a cult-style icon
of sexuality and helped ‘popularize pornography’ she notes:
Clearly Bettie is a very inspiring figure to young women because she had a
strong independent streak. She did what she wanted to do and she wasn’t just
doing it for men. But I think it’s a huge mistake to think of her as a conscious
Canada 687
feminist heroine. As far as I can see, she didn’t have an agenda, ever. She
just followed her own path unconsciously. (Harron interview with Calhoun,
2006)
Harron, in response to questions on the content of her films and their relation
to feminism, denies she has an overt agenda. American Psycho is a violent film;
however, Harron lent a satirical quality to a world featuring characters whose
insistence on beauty and high bank accounts are exemplars of the ‘me’ genera-
tion. Harron is grateful for the opportunities that she feels the feminist movement
opened for her, but she comments that she does not write or direct films that are
ideological (Hornaday 2006). Harron noted that, as adaptors of the material, she
and Turner felt they couldn’t be lectured on feminism, and knowing this gave them
strength to pursue the story in their own way. ‘We felt we could trust our instincts
and do things in our own way’ (Bendix 2014).
Deepa Mehta (1950–) was born in Amritsar, India and grew up watching
films (her father was a film distributor). She began her career as a screenwriter
for children’s films. She received a Master of Arts degree in philosophy from the
University of New Delhi and moved to Canada in 1973. She began her directing
career in Canadian television and her first film, Sam and Me (1991), was produced
on an $11-million budget – the most expensive Canadian film directed by a
woman up to that time. The film went on to win the Camera d’Or at Cannes and
earned her international attention. Mehta moved into writing the feature films
she was next to direct. Her ‘elements trilogy’ is regarded as her most salient work.
Fire (1996) is the first of three films all set in India and all dealing with the forces
that shaped Indian culture. Its release brought both critical acclaim and contro-
versy. The film centres around two sisters-in-law in India who, faced with loveless
marriages, find love and intimacy with each other. The depiction of lesbianism
and challenging the balance of power between husbands and wives in India
caused a strong protest from Hindu fundamentalists. Mehta arrived for the film’s
premiere in Bombay and had to be escorted by 40 armed guards. Ultimately, the
controversy abated and the film won 14 international film festival awards.
The next film in the trilogy, Earth (1998), is a period piece set during India’s
1947 partition as the borderlines between India and Pakistan were being drawn.
In keeping with Mehta’s focus on exploring how human emotions play out in the
midst of political and culturally charged situations, the film portrays the dissolution
of personal relationships under the pressure of religious hatred.
Protests surrounding Mehta’s films resurfaced with the final installment of the
trilogy, Water (2005). The film tells the story of widows who are ostracized from
society in conservative parts of India and left to live in abject poverty. Opposition
to the film was so strong that violent protesters threatened Mehta’s life and
destroyed film sets. The film shoot was eventually relocated to Sri Lanka. In an
interview, Mehta said of the ordeal of getting Water made:
It was a horrific time, but later I could put it in perspective. I thought about the
relationship between politics and art and freedom of expression and what that
means and what drives extremists. I realized it really wasn’t about me. (Mehta
to Longino 2006)
During the delay in production on Water, Mehta wrote and directed the musical
comedy Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) and The Republic of Love (2003). Her 2012
film, Midnight’s Children, is an adaptation of the novel by Salman Rushdie and
debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Other screenwriting credits
include Cooking with Stella (2009), Heaven on Earth (2008), and Beeba Boys (2015).
Mehta has received many awards and accolades including the Governor
General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement, several Genie nomi-
nations, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for
Water.
Sarah Polley (1979–) was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is a screen-
writer, director, actor, singer, and activist. She began her career as an actor at
the age of five; her first feature role was a lead character in Terry Gilliam’s The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). She went on to play Sara Stanley in the
CBC series Road to Avonlea (1988–96), earning three Gemini nominations. At a
very young age, she had established herself as a talented and versatile actor with
the ability to embody a wide range of roles in both independent and mainstream
films. In her early twenties, Polley took her talents behind the camera. In 2001,
she wrote and directed the short film I Shout Love; the film won the Genie Award
for Best Live Action Short Drama. Much of Polley’s writing and directing work is
focused on memory. I Shout Love is about preserving memory and her first feature,
Away from Her (2006), is about the decay of memory and its untimely resurrection.
Take This Waltz (2011) is about putting memories to bed. Polley’s Away from Her
(2006) earned an Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and
Best Actress for Julie Christie.
As an activist, Polley is an advocate for many left-wing causes. In 1991, she
attended an event wearing a peace symbol to protest the first Gulf War; this
raised the ire of Disney Channel (the American broadcaster of Road to Avonlea).
When asked to remove the symbol, Polley refused and subsequently asked to be
written off the show. A few years later, she had two back teeth knocked out by a
policeman when a protest against the then-sitting Ontario government escalated
to a riot. For a period of several years, she left acting entirely to focus on activism
and, to this day, continues to be an advocate for numerous causes including the
Canadian film industry and protection for child actors.
Other female Canadian screenwriters include Patricia Rozema (1958–), who was
born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She graduated from Calvin College in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, USA. She works as a screenwriter and director. Screenwriting
credits include I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), White Room (1990), When
Night Is Falling (1995), Mansfield Park (1999, adaptation), and Into the Forest (2015,
adaptation). Anne Wheeler (1946–) was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
After university and travelling the world, she returned to Canada to produce,
write and create documentaries. She moved into writing and directing features
and made-for-television films; screenwriting credits include Edge of Madness (2002,
Canada 689
co-writer on the adaptation), The Comic Book Christmas Caper (1990, co-writer
on the adaptation), the dramas Bye Bye Blues (1989), Cowboys Don’t Cry (1988,
adaptation), and War Story (1981, based on the diary of Ben Wheeler). Anita
Doron (1974–) was born in the former USSR (Ukraine) and works now in Canada.
Her screenwriting/directing credits include The End of Silence (2006), Europa, East
(2010), Mystico Fantastico! (2010), the adaptation of The Lesser Blessed (2012), and
co-writing and co-directing Last Fragment (2007).
Many female screenwriters in Canada write for both television and film. Karen
Walton was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree
in drama from the University of Alberta and then graduated from the Canadian
Film Center. She writes for film and television. Her television credits are numer-
ous; feature film screenwriting credits include the horror/thriller Ginger (2002,
sharing story credit with John Fawcett, and recieving solo screenwriting credit)
and Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004, co-written with Megan Martin). She has also
written the made-for-television films Heart: The Marilyn Bell Story (2001) and The
Many Trials of Jane Doe (2002). Lynn Stopkewich (1964–) was born in Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. She is a screenwriter-director and works in film and television.
Feature screenwriting credits include Suspicious River (2000, an adaptation of the
novel by Laura Kasischke) and Kissed (1996, co-writer of adaptation). Rebecca
Schechter’s concentration is on television (her credits here are numerous, includ-
ing creator of series); however, feature screenwriting credits include Taking Care
(1987). Leila Basen’s feature screenwriting credits include Good Cop, Bad Cop
(2006, co-writer), The Ladies Room (1999, co-writer), and Killing Them Softly (1982,
co-writer). Semi Chellas (1969–) was born in Palo Alto, California, but grew up
in Calgary, Alberta. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University.
Her feature screenwriting credits include The Life Before This (1999) and Picture
Claire (2001). She has written extensively for popular television series such as Mad
Men, The Eleventh Hour (co-creator of series with Ilana Frank), Bury the Lead, and
Rookie Blue. She shared a Gemini Award for the 2005 series finale, co-written with
Tassie Cameron. Tassie Cameron has extensive television credits in series and
mini-series; her feature screenwriting credits include Cake (2005) and Fast Food
High (2003, co-written with Jackie May). Coralee Elliott Testar (1946–) was born
on Prince Edward Island and works in Vancouver as a producer and screenwriter.
She is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada. Her screenwriting
credits include the made-for-television films The Little Kidnappers (1990) and
City Boy (1992). Danisha Esterhazy (1969–) was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba,
Canada. She studied at Winnipeg Film Group and is a graduate of the Directors
Lab at the Canadian Film Center. Her feature film screenwriting credits include
Black Field (2009, winner of the Best Feature Drama Award at the Vancouver
Women’s Film Festival. She is a member of the pUNK Film Femmes Lab founded
by Ingrid Veninger as a screenwriters’ initiative for female filmmakers. Other
writing credits include H & G (2013, co-written with Rebecca Gibson). Gibson
(1973–) also penned The Trials of Rasputin (2011) and Suddenly Ever After (2011),
as well as many works for the television medium. Alison MacLean (1958–) was
born in Ottawa, Canada. She is a writer and director. Feature film screenwriting
credits include Crush (1993). Alison Lea Bingeman works mainly for television;
her feature credits include Hurt (2009). Terri Tatchell (1978–) graduated in 2001
from the Vancouver Film School’s Writing for Film and Television programme.
In 2008 she co-adapted District 9 with Neill Blomkamp. The film earned an
Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. She also co-wrote, with
Blomkamp, Chappie (2015).
Nia Vardalos: Canadian-American (Greek) screenwriter
J. T. Velikovsky
One of four children, Antonia Eugenia (‘Nia’) Vardalos was born in Winnipeg, in
the Canadian province of Manitoba, on 24 September 1962, to Constantine, a
Greek immigrant turned land developer, and Doreen Vardalos, a homemaker and
bookkeeper (Griffiths 2003: 124). Vardalos grew up in an area of Winnipeg called
Greek Town (Advameg 2012). Her early forays into a theatrical career took her from
Toronto to Chicago, where she gained extensive experience in revue writing and
performance with the Second City comedy/improv troupe. In Chicago, she was
nominated for the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Actress in 1994. She moved to
Los Angeles in 1995 with hopes of breaking into screen acting (Vardalos 2001: 12).
Her one-woman show there caught the attention of Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks,
who became producers of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Toumarkine 2004: 22).
As it happened, Rita Wilson was also of Greek heritage (Staff 2002: 107) and,
with Wilson and Hanks producing, in 2002 My Big Fat Greek Wedding became the
highest-grossing romantic comedy (at that point) in Hollywood history (Hensley
2003: 157). The film is a heart-warming cross-cultural ‘Cinderella/Pygmalion/
Romeo and Juliet’-style romcom story, about:
Greek families, where fathers believe Windex is a cure-all, grandmothers

believe Turks are out to kidnap them, and daughters are expected to marry
nice Greek boys in the Orthodox Church and have babies instead of careers ...
In the film, directed by Joel Zwick, Vardalos plays Toula Portokalos, a frumpy,
bespectacled, unmarried woman of 30 working the counter at her parents’
Chicago-area restaurant, Dancing Zorba’s. (Welkos 2002: 10)
Though set in Chicago, the film was shot on location in Toronto, with mem-
bers of the city’s large Greek population cast as extras (Plati 2002: 54). The film
received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, a Golden
Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy Motion Picture,
a Screen Actors Guild nomination for the cast, a Writers Guild nomination
for Best Original Screenplay, an Independent Spirit nomination for Best Debut
Performance, and a People’s Choice Award for Favourite Comedy Motion Picture
(Toumarkine 2004: 22). Vardalos was also the recipient of a 2002 `Woman of the
Year’ award from Ms magazine (Plati 2002: 53).
The story of Vardalos’s eventual ‘big break’ in film reveals the social and cultural
challenges she overcame. Despite numerous small acting parts in TV and film
Canada 691
roles, Vardalos was once told by an agent that she ‘wasn’t pretty enough to be a
leading lady or fat enough to be a character actress’ and that ‘Greek’ doesn’t sell
in Tinseltown. Says Vardalos: ‘The greatest irony is that as soon as I stopped trying
to fit in, my career cracked wide open’ (Hensley 2003). Further to this Vardalos
has pointed out that ‘Casting agents would tell me that I wasn’t a visible minority
and I wasn’t white and they couldn’t find anything for me. One agent wanted to
tell people I was Puerto Rican’ (Plati 2002: 54). Trying to find her place in the film
industry, Vardalos recalled, ‘I had one agent after another sending me out for fat-
ugly-girl parts or Italian parts and they would caution me, “Don’t tell them you’re
Greek.” But to pretend you’re Italian in a room full of Italian actresses is rude.
So instead of waiting for someone to write me a Greek part, I wrote my own …’
(Griffiths 2003: 124).
Vardalos told Canada’s National Post newspaper that the genesis of the 2002 film
My Big Fat Greek Wedding was in 1998:
I started out with a twenty-minute monologue based on my family. I wrote

down all the stories I had been telling at parties for years. I realized I could
hook it on my wedding. I opened the show in Los Angeles in 1998. Rita Wilson,
who has Greek heritage, came to see the show and then she came back with her
husband, Tom Hanks. (Vardalos 2001: 12)
Other Hollywood financiers who previously held the option on the film script
had wanted to replace Vardalos with a famous actor, and also wanted the context
of the Greek-American family unit switched to the more familiar Italian model
(Seiler 2002). Vardalos resisted these changes, insisting that her Greek heritage was
integral to the story:
I wished I looked like everybody else at school. I didn’t want to be Greek and,
therefore, ethnic and different … My mom would come and pick me up with
27 cousins in the car because we were going to Greek school … If anything,
I think it made me funny. I’ve embraced my heritage so much that, at the end
of this whole process, I’m hoping that the whole world will know what it’s
like to be Greek … Each character is based slightly on somebody I know in our
family, but they probably won’t recognize themselves …’ (Dunlevy 2002: 38)
The film was made for US $5 million and grossed US $353,900,000, a return on
investment of 7,078 per cent, which makes it the 21st highest return-on-invest-
ment film of the past 70 years (Nash Information Services 2008).
With regard to her second feature film as writer-actor, Connie and Carla (2004),
a story about two women (playing men, playing women) as cabaret-singing drag
queens, Vardalos states: ‘Honestly, I just wrote the same movie twice, which is
“Hey, everybody’s a little bit different, and in the end we’re all fruit!”’ (Valby
2004: 15).
In public life, Vardalos is also an advocate for US foster care adoption; after a
ten-year battle with infertility, having adopted a child with husband, actor Ian
Gomez, in 2008, Vardalos served as the National Adoption Day spokesperson in

2009 and 2010 (NewsRx 2010: 205).
Regarding the themes in her film work, Vardalos has stated:
I just care about connecting to people, and I wrote from my heart. Women and
men of all shapes and sizes – people who don’t necessarily fit into the mold but
are attractive – say to me, ‘I am you.’ (Griffiths 2003: 129)
References
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com/film/62/Nia-Vardalos.html#ixzz2CZSafkzd (accessed 18 May 2015).
Armatage, Kay, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier. 2013. ‘The Absence of Canadian Women
in the Silent Picture Industry’, in Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (eds)
Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York, NY:
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Happened When One Winnipeg Woman took Tom Hanks’ Call’, Flare, 24 (8): 38, 104.
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Pediatrics Week, 11 September, p. 205.
Plati, Crystal. 2002. ‘Women of the Year 2002: Nia Vardalos’, Ms, 12 (4): 53–4.
Seiler, Andy. 2002. ‘“Greek Wedding” Marches On, Much to Hollywood’s Surprise’, USA
Today. Available at: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/2002-08-27-greek-side_x.
htm (accessed 18 May 2015).
Staff. 2002. ‘Big Fat Hit’, People, 58 (10): 107.
Toumarkine, Doris. 2004. ‘Big Fat Followup’, Film Journal International, 107 (4): 22–4.
Valby, Karen. 2004. ‘My (Big Fat Greek) Return’, Entertainment Weekly, 23 April.
Vardalos, Nia. 2001. ‘The Runaway Bride. Nia Vardalos: Comedian, Reluctant Screenwriter,
Tom Hanks Protege’, Saturday Night, 116 (26): 12.
Welkos, Robert. 2002. ‘Sending up the Greek in Spirit’, Los Angeles Times, 6 October.
Cuba
Michelle Leigh Farrell
From film’s arrival on the island of Cuba in 1897 until the 1959 Revolution, Cuba
made 80 feature-length films. In the first 62 years of male-dominated filmmaking
on the island, Cuba’s film industry was not a frontrunner in Latin American film.
In 1959, along with most aspects of Cuban life, film’s official role in the country
radically changed.
Three months after overthrowing the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in
1959, Fidel Castro established that film would be the key tool in teaching the
ideals of the Revolution. Castro thus created the Culture Division of the Rebel
Army, which later became known as the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria
Cinematográficos/the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry (ICAIC). The
ICAIC worked to inform and promote the Revolution using documentaries, fea-
ture films, and short newsreels. This move challenged imported representations of
Cuban history, life, and the Revolution on the silver screen, thus officially break-
ing the strong ties with the films of Hollywood; or, as Cuban film critic Sara Vega
writes, ‘the new [1959] cultural policy in terms of film attempted to decolonize
[Cuban] film screens’ (Vega 2010).
Despite the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution, which included education
and integration for all, the filmmaking elite were mostly male and of European
descent. The majority of the first generation of leading ICAIC filmmakers, includ-
ing the world-famous Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, Pastor Vega, Juan
Padrón, Julio García Espinosa, and Juan Carlos Tabio, had studied at the Centro
Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Italy before the January 1959 triumph
of the Revolution. These filmmakers became the official representatives, creators,
and critics of revolutionary Cuba. Given that film was central to the Revolution,
the ICAIC filmmakers held a nearly sacred space. While filmmakers did exist
beyond the ICAIC, these artists, including women, were overlooked once the
ICAIC was established.
While film sustained an exceptional space in Castro’s Cuba, it was not exempt
from controversy. Cuban film also came with a constant struggle to maintain a
level of artistic freedom from the government while also supporting the Revolution
in cinema. As Cuban cultural critic Nicola Miller writes, ‘There was a heady period
of unrestricted creativity in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, but this
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was prematurely brought to an end by the PM affair (the censoring of a film

showing hedonistic youth frolicking in night-time Havana), which culminated in
Castro’s ‘Palabras a los intelectuales’ (Words to the Intellectuals) of April 1961, in
the same month as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion’ (Miller 2008). PM (1961) is a
short film that was quickly censored for not reflecting the ideals of the Revolution
by focusing on Afro-Cubans participating in Havana’s nightlife. The topic of racial
inequalities in post-revolutionary Cuba was considered counter-revolutionary
since it challenged the concept of a classless, non-racial, division-less society.
Film critic Haseenah Ebrahim writes, ‘The confiscation of the short documentary,
by the ICAIC, PM reveals the discomfort Cuban authorities felt about attempts
to explore racial inequalities in post-Revolutionary Cuba’ (Ebrahim: 2007). The
PM affair prompted Castro’s 1961 speech, ‘Palabras a los intelectuales’/‘Words to
the Intellectuals’, where he made the famous declaration, ‘Within the Revolution
everything, beyond it nothing’ (‘Dentro de la revolución, todo, fuera de la
Relolución, nada’) (Castro 1961). This speech marked the beginning of a period of
constant struggle between filmmakers and the government, which has resulted in
over five decades of an ever-changing dynamic, both advocating for artistic space
and making concessions to the Cuban government.
While there was a population of select filmmakers who worked through the
ICAIC, negotiating artistic freedom and creative expression, the filmmakers them-
selves did not reflect the diverse voices of Cuba. With the scarcity of resources
and raw film stock, their use was limited to the select, previously mentioned and
educated (and predominately white male) ICAIC filmmakers.
Among this elite group of filmmakers, from the beginnings of the ICAIC in
1959 until 1974, there was only one female feature filmmaker: Sara Gómez
(1943–74). Gómez was born in Havana, Cuba. She was a scriptwriter and director
of documentaries, shorts, and one ground-breaking feature film, De cierta manera/
One Way or Another (1974/1977). Gómez began to study film in 1961 at the ICAIC
in the apprenticeship system of the institute, making her own documentaries as
early as 1962 for Octavio Cortázar’s larger work, Enciclopedia popular. She became
the first female filmmaker in Cuba and one of three Afro-Cuban filmmakers work-
ing at the ICAIC. Through her documentaries, shorts, and feature film on racial
and gender inequalities she became one of the best filmmakers in Latin America.
Her work as a female director, scriptwriter, and filmmaker is intertwined with her
Afro-Cuban identity. After making a series of poignant short films and documen-
taries such as Iré a Santiago/I Will Go to Santiago (1964), and …Y tenemos sabor/And
We Have Flavour (1967) among many others, she made her first feature film, De
cierta manera/One way or Another (1974). Before finalizing her feature film De cierta
manera she died of an asthma attack in 1974. Directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Julio
García Espinosa, and Rigoberto López finished her work and released it in 1977.
Critic Catherine Benamou writes of:
De cierta manera, which, aside from being the first feature film to be directed
by a woman in Cuba, was also one of very few to locate the ideological roots
of machismo in the Cuban colonial and patriarchal past. Unlike many of her
Cuba 695
male counterparts, however, Gómez did not focalize gender at the expense of
race and cultural identity but instead sought to demonstrate how historically
they have been intertwined. (Benamou 1994)
Gómez’s feature film is considered to be an exceptional work not only in Cuban

cinema, but also in world cinema. The film combines aspects of both fictional
and documentary genres, unmasking many of the social issues in Cuban society
by focusing on the story of Yolanda, the film’s protagonist, and her macho love
interest, Mario. The complex relationship between Yolanda and Mario serves as a
metaphor for the challenges of machismo, racism, gender equality, and societal
injustices. Gómez, during and after her career, won awards for her work in film,
including a mention in the Annual Selection of Critics (Havana, 1973) for her
work Sobre horas extras y trabajo voluntario. She also received an award posthu-
mously upon the release of her full-length fictional film, De cierta manera. The
Annual Selection of Critics nominated the film as one of the year’s most signifi-
cant ten films (Havana, 1977). In her honour the Consejo Nacional de Casas de
Cultura awards an annual Sara Gómez Award.
Gómez was the only female voice able to break into this exclusive group of
ICAIC male scriptwriters, feature filmmakers, and directors until the 1980s. She
was not only the first Cuban woman, but also the first Afro-Cuban woman creat-
ing, writing, and directing a feature film in Cuba that was ground-breaking in
terms of content and form. Through her film she blurred the lines between the
documentary and fictional genres by questioning gender roles and racial inequali-
ties at a time when the government considered such views counter-revolutionary.
Given the foundation of an egalitarian society based on opportunities for all, open
recognition of these inequalities meant recognition of a failure of the goals of the
Revolution itself.
Since Sara Gómez’s masterful work as a pioneer in a male-dominated field in
Cuba, there have been a number of female scriptwriters, documentarians and
a select number of feature filmmakers. Cuban filmmakers such as Rebeca Chávez,
and screenwriter-directors Gloria Rolando, Marisol Trujillo, Mayra Vilásis,
Mayra Segura, Ivette Ávila, Alina Rodríguez Abreu, Adriana F. Castellanos,
Susana Barriga, Marina Ochoa, Vanesa Portieles, Yanelvis González, Marilyn
Solaya, Jessica Rodríguez, and Milena Almira are a selection of the women
in Cuba who have further challenged the previous gender ceiling of filmmak-
ing since Gómez’s ground-breaking films. Many of these filmmakers have used
their films as a space to question, confront, and challenge taboo subjects such
as gender, identity, race, inequality, social injustice, official history, and even the
Revolution itself.
The trajectory for filmmaking in Cuba during the first decades of the Revolution
consisted of working within the ICAIC to prove one’s filmmaking abilities through
years of making shorts and documentaries before directing a feature-length fic-
tional film. Given limitations in terms of raw film stock and filmmaking budgets,
the feature-length fictional film became the culmination of an entire filmmaking
career. Within this context gender and genre further complicate Cuban women’s
filmmaking contributions, as many women working in film continue to focus pri-

marily on documentary filmmaking. According to Benamou’s analysis of documen-
taries in Cuba, ‘the most feminized area of production – that of documentary – has
increasingly played “second fiddle” to fictional works … This has had the overall
effect of curtailing the visibility, as well as the institutional power, of feminine
talent’ (Benamou 1994).
Therefore, while Cuban women filmmakers have greatly contributed to Cuban
film since Sara Gómez’s pioneering work, most of the Cuban women filmmak-
ers have created documentaries – and given the Cuban hierarchical context, the
documentary remains the overlooked genre. As of 2014, Diéguez explores the
secondary role of documentaries in the established Cuban film canon, explaining
that it continues a patriarchal and centralized ICAIC system since the documen-
tary genre is still considered a practice path towards a fictional feature film debut.
Diéguez (2014) further discusses the need ‘[t]o re-think the Cuban film canon
from a gender/genre perspective [which] means, for some filmmakers, it is impor-
tant to rescue the important role documentary has played in the formation of
Cuban women directors …’ (Diéguez 2014).
Many Cuban women filmmakers, such as screenwriter-director Gloria Rolando
(1943–), work primarily in documentaries (as noted, a genre that is crucial to
challenging the national narrative, but often relegated to a secondary role in
cinema in terms of visibility and distribution). Rolando was born in Havana. She
is a contemporary Afro-Cuban documentary maker who has made films in Cuba
for over three decades. She is a scriptwriter and director working both within the
ICAIC, and in an independent video group that she leads, ‘Imágenes del Caribe’,
based in Havana. Before working with the ICAIC she studied humanities and com-
pleted her art history undergraduate degree at the University of Havana. Upon
completing her degree she began her work at the ICAIC in that same year. She
later continued her graduate work, studying Caribbean literature at the University
of Havana. As a scriptwriter and director of documentaries she explores the his-
tory and culture of the Afro-Cuban people, analysing politics, migration, religion
(including the African Yoruba religion), work, celebrations, and popular culture.
She also works on films on the diverse Afro-Caribbean communities within Cuba,
and on the larger Afro-Caribbean diaspora.
Her independently produced short film Raíces de mi corazón/Roots of My Heart
(2001) was the first Cuban work to discuss the 1912 massacre of thousands of
members of the Independents of Colour Party in Cuba (PIC). In the film and in
her subsequent three-part series 1912 Voces para un silencio (2010–12) she explores
the Afro-Cuban independence movement, along with the ensuing massacre of
its leaders and over 6,000 Afro-Cuban people. Through her documentaries she
brings visibility to this unspoken chapter in Cuban history known as ‘El doce’.
The PIC was the hemisphere’s first black political party outside of Haiti, whose
struggle and massacre have been excluded from the Cuban national narrative. Her
work has documented and made these crucial stories visible in the Cuban con-
sciousness, creating the documentary as a form of both activism and archive to
explore political activism, racism, Afro-Cuban culture, and the silenced chapters
Cuba 697
of Cuban history. Her extensive filmography includes Oggun: An Eternal Presence

(1991), My Footsteps in Baraguá (1996), Eyes of the Rainbow (1997), El Alacrán/
The Scorpion (2000), Raíces de mi corazón/Roots of My Heart (2001), Los Marqueses
de Atarés (2003), Nosotros y el Jazz/The Jazz in Us (2004), Pasajes del corazón y la
memoria (2007), 1912 Voces para un silencio (2010–12), and Reembarque/Re-embark
(2014). Rolando has won an array of honours and awards for her work includ-
ing the Federico Fellini Medal in 2009, granted by the UNESCO for her work as
director, the Sara Gómez Prize in 2010, granted by the Consejo Nacional de Casas
de Cultura for her documentary Pasajes del corazón y la memoria (2007), and the
Caracol Prize from the UNEAC in 2012 for her work as director on the series 1912
Voces para un silencio. Rolando is part of the network Red de Mujeres Afrolatinas
y Afrocaribeñas, is a Global Board Member of the ARCUS Center for Social Justice
Leadership at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and has participated in various
tours in the United States and the Caribbean, sharing her work and contributing
to fostering visibility for the silenced chapters of not only Afro-Cuban, but also
Afro-Caribbean chapters of history.
In her work, Rolando focuses on Afro-Cuban history often excluded from the
national Cuban narrative, including the 1912 massacre (this is referred to as ‘El
Doce’; the Cuban army killed thousands of Afro-Cubans, many of whom were
members of the Independent Party of Colour), Afro-Cuban religious practices and
dances, and interconnected stories of the African diaspora. Rolando works both
within and beyond the ICAIC in an independent video production company called
Imágenes del Caribe/Images of the Caribbean. Through her work she explores the
often under-studied histories of the Afro-Cuban and Afro-descendant diaspora, and
she works as the scriptwriter, director, and often producer of her films.
Working within the ICAIC, both in documentary and recently in feature
films, Rebeca Chávez has long been a voice in Cuban film and the ICAIC.
Chávez has greatly contributed to the field of documentary as a scriptwriter and
director in works such as Cuando una mujer no duerme/When a Woman Does Not
Sleep (1985), Entre el arte y la cultura/Between Art and Culture (2004), and Antes del
59/Before ‘59 (2004). She also directed the award-winning feature film Ciudad
en rojo/City in Red (2009), adapted from a novel by Cuban female screenwriter
Xenia Rivery.
Despite the advancements of Cuban women scriptwriters and directors in the
documentary field, feature film remains an area with a scarcity of women. The
male-dominated, centralized ICAIC film industry in Cuba has been forced to
change with video and digital technologies. After the 1991 collapse of the USSR,
Cuba lost a main source of financial backing. Castro christened the ensuing eco-
nomic crisis the ‘Special Period in Times of Peace’, and this heralded radical short-
ages in all aspects of Cuban life for nearly a decade. In the face of this austerity,
Cuba’s insulated national film industry was nearly eliminated. One of the final
options was for the ICAIC to turn to co-productions with countries such as Spain
and Mexico to remain afloat. Co-production meant that the ICAIC needed to con-
sider an international audience and market demands when making its films, while
also trying to maintain its complete control over national filmmaking.
Concurrent with the ‘Special Period’ there was another change occurring
throughout the world: a transformation from film to digital moviemaking and
an expanding audio-visual field. Relatively inexpensive and user-friendly digital
technology has led to a democratization of the filmmaking process. Also, digital
technology lends itself to non-theatrical distribution through social media, allow-
ing new opportunities for audience building and visibility, thus weakening the
rigid hierarchy of the male-dominated ICAIC. With the international change in
moviemaking, less expensive technology, and the deteriorating role of the Cuban
state in film products coming in and out of the island, a generation of young, rela-
tively independent filmmakers have taken root. This young, diverse generation
of Cuban filmmakers, known as the Nuevos realizadores (New Filmmakers), relies
on digital technology to add to the voices previously unheard in Cuban national
film. In this new generation of filmmakers there is an unprecedented diversity in
terms of gender, race, sexual preference, and topics. The Nuevos realizadores are
a generation of filmmakers who have taken advantage of the international shift
to digital technology and the resulting changes from the ‘Special Period’. These
filmmakers, who range from 20–35 years of age, are part of a filmmaking phenom-
enon once unimaginable in revolutionary Cuba – and they continue to further
decentralize the filmmaking process. Many of the films are poignant, refreshing
critiques of Cuban life both on and off the island, while others are comedies and
animations poking fun at daily life. This award-winning generation of independ-
ent Cuban screenwriter-director combinations includes Alina Rodríguez Abreu,
Susana Barriga, Arigna Fajardo, Heidi Hassan, Yaima Pardo, and Milena Almira.
One of the most celebrated of this new generation is screenwriter-director
Milena Almira, who has shown her award-winning short El grito/The Scream (2007)
both in Cuba and internationally. The film explores the sexual power dynamics
between a male and a female character and concludes with the female character
ultimately taking control and changing the film’s ending. The film was controver-
sial after its showing on Cuban television; it left Cuban audiences and authorities
in a debate on what should be shown on national television. Almira was selected
to participate in a touring film showcase with her film Quorum (2009), along with
documentary maker and screenwriter Gloria Rolando, head of the Cuban Women
Filmmakers Mediatheque, screenwriter and director Marina Ochoa, and award-
winning Cuban film actress Claudia Rojas. This select group of Cuban filmmakers
and actors travelled to the US with the support of the ICAIC, Women in Film
International Committee, and the Cuban Women Filmmakers Mediatheque for an
unprecedented exchange with United States audiences (Levine 2013).
The above transformations are just the beginning of the accomplishments of
women filmmakers changing the face of Cuban cinema. With the recent passing,
in April 2013, of the ICAIC’s president, Alfredo Guevara, after holding the posi-
tion for decades, the country is at a crossroads in terms of the future of film on
the island. As of May 2013, there has been a movement among the filmmakers
working within and beyond the state to redefine the role of the state in filmmak-
ing. New screenwriter-directors, including many young women, have reached
their thirteenth festival of the Muestra Joven (Young Filmmaking Festival); they
Cuba 699
have participated in this dialogue to demand a space to redesign the role of the
state in Cuban filmmaking. A new chapter in Cuban filmmaking began, moving
from what Benamou referred to in 1994 as ‘men’s films about women’ to now
include women’s films about women, people, racial inequality, injustice, daily life,
fictions, and gender/race relations. Cuban film is still in grave need of the more
diverse voices and representations of those previously excluded from the filmmak-
ing process, but women continue to make their mark on Cuban filmmaking since
the pioneering work of Sara Gómez.
References
Benamou, C. 1994. ‘Cuban Cinema: On the Threshold of Gender’, Frontiers: A Journal of
Women Studies, 15 (1): 51–75.
Castro Ruíz, F. 1961. Public address speech,’Palabras a los intelectuales’, Cuban National Library,
30 June.
Diéguez, D. C. 2014. ‘Documental y feminismos: discursos y fronteras’, Género y comunicación,
8 (2).
Ebrahim, H. 2007. ‘Sarita and the Revolution: Race and Cuban Cinema’, Revista Europea de
Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 82: 107–18.
Miller, N. 2008. ‘A Revolutionary Modernity: The Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution’,
Journal of Latin American Studies, 40 (4): 675–96.
Levine, S. 2013. Latino Buzz: Cuban Women Filmmakers 2013 US Showcase. Sydney’s
Buzz: Indiewire Blog, 20 February. Available at: http://blogs.indiewire.com/sydneylevine/
latinobuzz-cuban-women-filmmakers-2013-us-showcase (accessed 1 February 2014).
Vega, S. 2010. ‘Soy Cuba, de cierta manera’, Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos, 41: 68–85.
Jamaica
Tanya Gail Davies
Screenwriting in the isle: the Jamaican female screenwriter:

moulding her way
Exploring the topic of the Jamaican female screenwriter is immensely thought-

provoking. Unlike her counterparts, she is not officially recognized as a profes-
sional crafter of visual stories like her counterparts in more developed societies. The
Jamaican female screenwriter, instead, has an inconspicuous existence that is often
attached to another profession or engages in screenwriting merely a personal indul-
gence similar to a hobby. This current reality could not have been more evident when
several attempts using Google and Wikipedia, the apexes of all search engines, to
locate works completed by a or any female screenwriter in Jamaica and the Caribbean
proved futile. The goal to pursue this topic, which clearly had not been broached
by others, therefore became a new inspiration. A topic that could lead nowhere – or
begin to uncover why Jamaica has not been able to locally produce successful female
screenwriters. To investigate Jamaica’s situation could, in a broader sense, highlight
similar problems that may afflict the rest of the Caribbean with regards to this craft.
Jamaica is already an international brand in music, tourism, and food. For a
small country it has also been at the forefront in other historical feats such as:
• Having electricity and running water before the United States, and a phone
system so sophisticated, it was copied by AT&T. It also had phone cards before
the United States.
• Home to the Daily Gleaner, established in 1834 and one of the oldest continu-
ally published newspapers in the western hemisphere.
• The first country to impose economic sanctions against the apartheid regime
of South Africa. These sanctions can also be heard in protest songs by one of
Jamaica’s reggae music legends, Peter Tosh.
• Having more than 1,600 churches or 2.75 churches per square mile, more than
any country in the world to date, according to The Guinness Book of World Records.
• The first country in the Western world to construct a railway.
• The first commercial producer of bananas in the western hemisphere and the
first island in the Caribbean to produce rum commercially.
700
Jamaica 701
• The first country to produce a winner at the US Scripps National Spelling Bee
in 1998 and the first Caribbean country to win the Interoperability Award at
the Microsoft Imagine Cup Tournament in 2010.
• The first tropical country to enter the International Olympic Committee (IOC)
1988 Winter Olympics, where the bobsled team’s efforts inspired the Disney
Pictures film Cool Runnings (1993).
However, the most interesting historical fact in relation to this topic is that
Jamaica was the first Caribbean island to enact the Motion Picture Industry
Encouragement Act to promote the making of films in 1948, and the first to start
a Film Commission in the Caribbean in 1984.
Why then has Jamaica, a country that has shown an interesting pattern of
firsts in the orthodox and unorthodox both internationally and regionally, not
emerged with similar triumphs and achievements in the motion picture industry
to develop a field that would ultimately allow the Jamaican female screenwriter to
emerge? Before delving further in search of an answer, it would be best to first look
at the other factors that may have strongly influenced and forged the Jamaican
culture, which in turn may have impacted and influenced the current state of this
creative individual’s status and state.
Living in Jamaica: the economy
Jamaica, which is located in the Caribbean region situated below the physical
underbelly of the American continent, is a very rich hybrid of cultures and races. It
is a country where, for two dramatic centuries, different nationalities were forcibly
thrust together within a small and physically challenging space for economic gains,
incidentally creating new ‘hy-breeds’ of peoples, traditions, customs and economies.
The historical core

This could be where the core of what has afflicted Jamaica and possibly the
Caribbean as a whole with regards to the creative industries lies. The Caribbean
economy was a merchant-based system created entirely to serve the governing
empire by providing valuable goods, whether raw (fruits, wood and spices) or pro-
cessed (sugar and rum). In return, each of these captured island ‘resources’ or satellite
economies of the continually competing and warring French, Spanish, Dutch and
English empires were guaranteed military protection from the frequent attempts to
capture these coveted neighbouring assets. This merchant-manufacturing-export
economy was the primary system used during the colonial era and for several dec-
ades after most of the islands within this archipelago attained independence in the
mid twentieth century. It is therefore not surprising that the Caribbean is economi-
cally fragile and highly dependent on external support with a weak foundation of
self-generated financial strength at its core.
An interesting cultural and social legacy of the warring empires within close geo-
graphical proximity to each other prior to emancipation and independence was and
is a strong segregational and tribalist mindset. This tends to override the long-term
logic needed in the contemporary environment to look at the bigger picture, which is
negated with more insular and/or extreme views, where differences are more empha-
sized over similarities. Therefore, as a result, growth, development and change on
many levels are slow or difficult to execute.
The fundamental and core weakness of the Caribbean economic structure
is recognized, but the many attempts to change this through the creation of
the Federation in the 1950s, The Caribbean Community and Common Market
(CARICOM) in the 1970s, and the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME)
in the current decade have not been successful in uniting the Caribbean region
into a more synergistic body combining all the economic and cultural strengths
needed to become a more powerful and influential lobbying unit internationally.
Few deep pockets and little foundation

In 2008, the United States of America experienced its economic crash; Jamaica had
already experienced this disaster almost two decades earlier. The banks did not
possess ‘deep pockets’ and each was borrowing from the other with no actual foun-
dation holding them up. The situation exposed the true condition of the soft under-
belly of Jamaican businesses and the fact that most were not fiscally solid amidst
claims that they were otherwise. It is therefore not surprising that the Jamaican
private sector generally does not invest in long-term goals unless these are directed
towards an acquisition for personal expansion, or guarantee immediate returns.
Why is this point relevant? The creative industries, which include the movie
industry in Jamaica, have been the victims of this outlook, as it takes time to
develop craft, brands and reputation. Hollywood had over a century of develop-
ment to become the powerhouse it is at present, and investments were fairly
consistent, even at its lowest points financially. The concept of consistent invest-
ments when the environment is already too volatile and heavily dependent on
external factors is enough to keep Jamaica’s private sector in low-key mode; there-
fore shortage of funds to support local narrative film production continues to
plague this sector. Foundations and grants exist but most tend to tackle less costly,
more urgent, and directly beneficial needs for the donor, such as education, crime
eradication and job creation programmes.
Living in Jamaica: the society and general psyche
As Jamaica, one of the younger cultures on this planet, currently seeks to create
an economic formula most appropriate for its environment by applying, altering,
and/or discarding known economic templates or official guidance (International
Monetary Fund [IMF]), it is expected that much trial and error will result. However,
when the population is the collective guinea pig of experimental economies striv-
ing to become ‘the economy’, what emerges is a general psyche of not trusting in
long-term promises, and the developed ability to rapidly adapt in order to survive
and enjoy life above poverty level. The measure of uncertainty and mistrust that
infiltrates all levels of society, and the way cultural and creative experiences are
undervalued, is understandable.
Jamaica 703
There is a reason why network radio, television, and newspapers fare better in
Jamaica than the filmmaking industry. Network radio, television and newspapers
are based on providing entertainment or news that benefit the sponsor. They are
extensions of the sponsors’ agenda to advertise their products to a wider audience;
therefore the sponsorship is deliberately intended to gain profits in the quickest
manner possible. The income-generating methodology is obvious and clear-cut. It
suits the Jamaican economic template better than that of the filmmaking indus-
try, which is more of an art form that hopes to appeal to a wide audience with
an intriguing story, with earning profits as the goal, but not guaranteed. In short,
it is a bigger gamble; a heavy investment with no real assurance that it will pull
in profits or break even. That risk is too much for an already timid private sector.
In 2008, Dr Nickesia Gordon, assistant professor of communications at Barry
University in Miami, Florida, and a Jamaican national, released a publication on
media in Jamaica and the politics of its culture. Her discussion referred to media
colonialism whereby, due to high private-sector ownership, few local productions,
indigenous to Jamaican culture and identity, were being produced and most were
foreign programmes or formulaic programme templates that originated from
other countries such as American Idol and Project Runway and the Oprah Winfrey
Show. These templates were less expensive and guaranteed profit generators. The
percentage of local television narrative serial programmes that were authentically
Jamaican was less than 9 per cent - local programmes accounted for 39 per cent
and most were news, lottery, death announcements, local home shopping, local
reality shows, and talk shows.
However, another tangent could be that the psyche developed by Jamaican
nationals based on the daily challenges of the environment is a strong factor. The
private sector is aware of the public’s appreciation of their culture and their desire
to see more. The longest-running soap opera, Royal Palm Estate or the Blackburns of
Royal Palm Estate, which ran from 1995 to 2013, was fortunate to possess the best
of all worlds. The creator, Mr Lennie Little-White, was part owner of the television
network (CVM TV) that broadcast the series and owner of a highly ranked media
production company (MediaMix Ltd) that most likely assisted in constraining
production cost issues. Although an obvious conflict of interest scenario, it may
have been this almost extreme set-up that allowed the drama series to achieve
such success in terms of its longevity.
Survive to thrive
Elaine Perkins, a female Jamaican journalist and writer, was used as a case study
in a book entitled Entertainment-Education; A Communication Strategy for Social
Change by Arvind Singhal and Everett M. Rogers. Mrs Perkins was classified as
the most successful scriptwriter of edu-tainment and social change for radio soap
operas worldwide from the 1950s to the 1980s, setting the standard for future
educational radio soap operas using her method. Although not a formally trained
screenwriter, she wrote serial scripts in narrative form and for a media platform.
Her radio serials were consumed by the Jamaican public and each episode eagerly
anticipated during their run. Phrases from the soaps became everyday lingo, such
as labelling wayward men in society as ‘scattershot’. This referred to the promiscu-
ous and misogynistic male character in her highly popular radio soap Naseberry
Street, which heavily emphasized family planning through narrative drama instead
of preaching. Mrs Perkins, in interviews, was also fairly casual in expressing her
view of writing scripts. To her it was a matter of finding ‘the most convenient way
of telling people about development issues’ (Singhal and Rogers 1999: 128).
In an article published on Jamaicans.com it was mentioned that:
With this legacy of moviemaking on the island, it is surprising that Jamaica’s

own film industry is so small. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that
filmmaking is an expensive business. Some observers blame its lack of growth
on the need for prospective filmmakers to leave Jamaica in order to learn about
the industry. (2009)
A case in point is the Caribbean independent film Home Again, which made waves
at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and had a good run before pre-
miering in Jamaica in late 2013. It was written and directed by Jamaicans living in
Canada, who for almost six years tried to get the film shot in Jamaica, ending up
filming it in Trinidad, on the proviso that it would be promoted as a Trinidadian
film. For Jamaica’s film commission, the very first created in the Caribbean, this was
an embarrassing affair that the government tried, not very successfully, to make
light of with promises of a film festival in 2014 to stimulate local film production,
regardless of the fact that it had announced previously that, due to IMF constraints,
no money was available for further support of the film industry at this point. At
the time of the publication of this article, the promised 2014 film festival, themed
‘Where Art Meets Business’, had been hosted in July of 2015. Incentives to stimulate
local production were not emphasized given that the announced purpose of the
festival was to attract foreign outsourcing and provide a networking platform. Once
again evidence as to why the Jamaican pysche does not embrace promises easily.
The Trinidad Film Commission was established in 2006, just over two decades
after Jamaica created its own, and within a decade was proving two things already
discussed in this article. The first being that Trinidad and Tobago, whose economy
has been more fortunate in being self-sustaining and less susceptible to external
factors through its oil production and reserves, has deeper pockets and therefore
the foundation to invest more in long-term ventures such as the creative indus-
tries. This revealed the second issue, which is that if the film industry in Jamaica is
not as highly valued as its theatre industry, what does one have to gain by stating
that screenwriting is one’s primary profession?
On closer inspection and interviews with other female screenwriters, it’s clear
that screenwriting is referred to and treated as one of the smaller ‘to do’ tasks of
a more relevant profession. It is approached in a manner similar to copywriting
for an advertising campaign or writing for a radio and television programme.
Scriptwriting in the Jamaican culture is mainly a necessity to get information on
air or published, and not a polished craft in its own right.
Jamaica 705
Living in Jamaica: women’s roles
Written interviews were conducted with several Jamaican female screenwriters

in an informal manner, as is best with Jamaican folk. The concern was that, if
approached formally, authentic information would be expressed in a subdued
manner by each interviewee to prevent future conflicts within the local and
regional media clique. The interviewees also had to fit the following criteria:
• She lives and resides in Jamaica. Exceptions, however, included short-term con-
tractual work that temporarily has/had the subject in a new location.
• Her main profession includes the craft of screenwriting for almost every project
or production she works on.
The interviewees were:
• Amba Chevannes: certified award-winning playwright/screenwriter/script

analyst/lecturer. She is single and without children. Amba recently returned
from Scotland in March 2014 from a successful run of her play, The Last Bloom.
She was also script analyst for the Caribbean film Hit for Six, released in 2007.
• Mary Wells: film director/producer, uncertified screenwriter. She is single and
without children. Her latest film, Kingston Paradise, was recently awarded the
Audience Award for Best Feature Film at the 2013 Caribbean Tales Film Festival,
at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the 2014 Pan African Film Festival.
• Audrey Bishop-Williams: public relations specialist, uncertified screenwriter,
mother and wife. Audrey has written a comedy television series, Chicketita,
which is under option for production. It is the female version of the United
Kingdom’s Mr Bean – Chicketita follows a woman who means well, but her
actions cause more harm than good for all those around her.
• Alison Latchman: creator, producer, director, writer of The Cabbie Chronicles, a
popular Jamaican animated series on the daily travails of a Jamaican taxi driver
in Kingston. The series, which was originally posted briefly online, was shifted
to cable television, then network television recently provided funds to expand
the series from five-minute to thirty-minute episodes. Alison also works as
both a traditional and voice actress, drama instructor, and is the mother of two
children and wife to her illustrator/animator husband and business partner,
Anieph Latchman.
The questions posed to these female screenwriters and their responses were as fol-
lows (typographical errors were corrected):
Define yourself in the field of screenwriting.

Amba Chavennes: ‘Writer.’
Mary Wells: ‘I’m a writer-director and producer.’
Alison Latchman: ‘Writer, producer, director, actor.’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘I would describe myself as a writer-director.’
What is the reason you write screenplays or scripts?

Amba Chevannes: ‘I have to express myself and it’s the best way that I can reach
people. I think I write because it’s natural to me; my calling.’
Mary Wells: ‘Because I have a deep desire to express myself in this way, and to
combine the words in a “visual poem” is important for me. I’ve always done
it, from childhood.’
Alison Latchman: ‘After graduating from drama school (UK), I found that roles
were skewed towards the stereotypical black female as defined by Europe – nurse,
teacher, maid. During one assessment I was actually told I should structure my
[acting] career around getting those roles mentioned. Of course, being a feisty
Jamaican woman, I rejected that suggestion and I immediately started writing,
mostly scribblings that contradicted any suggestion that black women could
only be a certain way. Then I penned a screenplay based on my experiences as a
black student living in the UK and its encompassing experiences. On returning
to Jamaica, I started shopping the idea to the people I knew in film and got a
lot of “no’s” as to why it couldn’t work – mainly logistics and expense. I parked
the idea and ventured into the world of advertising, writing for local radio
and television ads, populating websites with content and such. My husband
and I came up with the idea of Cabbie as advertising was sometimes limiting
creatively. My motivation comes from wanting to see stories that represent
many people like me, and their experiences. While many Jamaicans have been
affected by violence one way or another, I find there is a whole other side
of Jamaican life that is left unexposed, which only serves to perpetuate the
stereotype.’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘I write because I love it so much. It comes naturally.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a child. Stories come to me without effort.’
Are you where you would like to be professionally as a screenwriter? If yes, what factors
contributed to this? If no, what factors may have contributed to this?
Amba Chevannes: ‘No. I see myself as playing a significant role in the develop-
ment of a thriving industry. Also, it is my dream to use the dramatic arts to
help shape individuals with the view to unlocking our full potential as a peo-
ple. I have found that the art of dramatic writing is grossly undervalued, not
just monetarily, but also in its significance in the broad social and economic
sense. I believe that most people do not regard the dramatic arts as a real profes-
sion and therefore do not see its earning potential or its potential to support/
sustain economic growth. As a result, funding for these kinds of projects is
hardly available and there is little interest in developing the industry.’
Mary Wells: ‘I’m not a professional writer for screen. I’m a filmmaker, a direc-
tor/producer who likes to write her own stories ... an auteur of sorts. As a
filmmaker, I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be. I need to make many more
films, would like to do more movies and be able to truly earn from my craft.
I’m barely doing this, but it’s about to change. Wherever I am now, today, it
has been due to the wonderful love and support of my parents. And my share
of will and determination to do what I love. Plus, one of my parents is an artist
Jamaica 707
and I’ve always been encouraged in this way. Unfortunately, Jamaica is a third-
world society and economy and it is extremely hard to earn as a full-time artist.
I guess it is anywhere, but worse in Jamaica. Unless you’re into advertising and/
or teach part-time, it is difficult. So I’m thinking I would like to teach partly
and share, so as to secure a little more regular earning. I am not talented in
creating advertising ... and have never been terribly excited about doing music
videos either ... but who knows.’
Alison Latchman: ‘I would say I am on the road. There’s a lot more left in me,
but one thing at a time ...’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘No, I’m not. I’m in a corporate environment, doing
public relations for a company. I’ve not been able to finance my productions.
But also, to be honest, I’ve not written screenplays to make it viable as a full-
time occupation.’
Do your friends support or block your pursuit of this craft?

Amba Chevannes: ‘No. I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by very
supportive people.’
Mary Wells: ‘Close immediate friends and family are very supportive. But “friends”
among colleagues in the fraternity of the film industry in Jamaica ... yes,
they are also supportive to a point. I have felt jealousy and, unfortunately,
sometimes a distrust. Especially if you are very independent and don’t fit into a
“group” ... And for a woman it can be strange. Caribbean societies are very small
and operate like “small towns”, where film professionals are not really leaders.
They are bands of small groups that come together if money is flowing for some
corporate ad, or some Hollywood film visiting the island. They are often not real
artists with convictions who have a politics (belief) about them and will fight
and starve for what they truly believe in. Generally, they are a group that toes
the line and are afraid to upset the status quo ... other “friends” in the fraternity
of the film industry in Jamaica, like government institutions ... do not support
the local filmmaker. One might find oneself in a certain relationship with a film
project and suddenly its leadership at the helm changes (because the govern-
ment of the day changes), and your relationship and understanding with them
is out the window, despite the fact that you may have a contract ... they agreed
and signed ... (producers, directors, writers et al.) ... Clearly, it’s not a healthy
environment to really create ... And the difficulties that arise constantly in the
entertainment business. Because often, these CEOs have no experience in film
production. And, as mentioned earlier, the problem is way beyond a lack of
funds. Then again, there are some very positive sides to all of this ... there are
some other wonderful and talented colleagues out there, and so we have to just
plod on and continue ... But generally the filmmaker (screenwriter) is all alone,
just “out there” in a kind of desert ...’
Alison Latchman: ‘Development of the series has really contributed to honing my
craft and the response has been all positive. My friends, also, who are all avid
readers, act as good sounding boards when it comes to ideas and their ensuing
development. As long as I’m around Jamaican people, the stories will come.’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘No, they don’t.’
Does your family support or block your pursuit of this craft?

Amba Chevannes: ‘My family constantly encourages me to stay in the arts and
do whatever they can to help further my development. I had considered leav-
ing before for a more traditional field, but met with strong opposition from my
family. They show much enthusiasm for my work.’
Mary Wells: ‘Never, they are totally supportive.’
Alison Latchman: ‘My friends and family are very supportive of my craft. They
often call to tell me of incidences to include in my writing.’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘No, they don’t. Though the reality of a family and
work obligations means I must try even harder just to get time to write.’
Are other local writers supportive, collaborative, or not? Why do you think this is?
Amba Chevannes: ‘I find that the writers whom I have chosen to share with are
generally supportive, constructive and collaborative. I suspect that they are
supportive because I am supportive of them. Also, my work offers a different
perspective and I think they are curious about/entertained by it.’
Mary Wells: ‘Who ever I’ve met or worked with, yes, they are supportive. Supportive,
because it’s a small group … maybe ...’
Alison Latchman: ‘I haven’t collaborated with any local writers yet ... however,
the ones I have spoken with offer constructive suggestions and are very willing
to offer support.’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘I don’t really know other local screenwriters.’
Does your local environment affect your ability to pursue this craft?
Amba Chevannes: ‘I believe that my circumstances are unique. I suspect that for
many artists there is a general lack of support (and understanding) from their
families. As I stated earlier, I think that most regard the arts as a hobby and this
must affect those who wish to pursue it as a profession.’
Mary Wells: ‘No, my lifestyle is perfect for it. I’m fortunate ... I wouldn’t say it’s
the same for everyone.’
Does writing within the limits of local societal perceptions of this craft influence your
ability to perform as a screenwriter?
Amba Chevannes: ‘Yes. But, only when I am writing for others.’
Mary Wells: ‘I don’t think I could (or anyone for that matter) survive in Jamaica
as a full-time writer in film. There’s not enough work for them. And I don’t care
to be a full-time writer.’
Alison Latchman: ‘Personally, I don’t care for perceptions of any form. I do what
I love.’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘Not really. While it may not be as instantly lauded as,
say, medical practice, one can live with the perception of it being some kind
of “airy fairy dream”.’
Does the male perception of a Jamaican female screenwriter help or hinder your work?
Amba Chevannes: ‘I have never really considered how we are perceived.’
Jamaica 709
Mary Wells: ‘If you wanted to be a full-time writer in film in the Caribbean and it
was possible to do that, women would do well, as the men often do not write
or are more technical. They often feel writing is the woman’s job, while they
shoot and direct. But that’s changing as the last two feature films to come out
of Jamaica were both written and directed by men. Women artists (generally,
but particularly in Jamaica, I’ve found), whether writers, fine artists, musicians,
filmmakers, etc … often struggle absolutely alone. No one “rallies around” a
female artist at the helm, especially if it’s her own independent project, no
one, not like her male counterparts or colleagues ... even if she’s better than
her male counterpart. That is one of the disappointing things I find here. It’s
everywhere, but I refer to my very immediate environment. As a result, I per-
sonally had to go outside of Jamaica to get “better” support in more ways than
one. And I’m not talking about money. I mean any kind of “support” you can
think of.’
Alison Latchman: ‘Can we go back to the previous question and not caring?
However, I believe, good writing is good writing. Man or woman. If you’re writ-
ing you really can’t listen to what a few people have to say, especially when you
have a goal in mind. If you write with all that “noise” in your head, you will
always second-guess yourself and that doesn’t make for a good story. Whatever
issues some men have with female writers are rooted in insecurity, so women
writing or not writing is really not going to cure them.’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘I have never given it a thought. I don’t think it
matters.’
Do you believe that living in Jamaica helps or hinders your work and success as a screen-
writer, or is it self-imposed?
Amba Chevannes: ‘I think overall it has helped. There are not many of us here
who are trained and so I find that I am often sought after for work and/or
advice.’
Mary Wells: ‘Being in the Caribbean has definitely provided exciting stories to
write, direct and produce. Yes, it helps the work. The inspiration from Jamaica
and this region is boundless and amazing!’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘I’m really not sure. I think marketing the product and
access to funding are the biggest issues affecting success.’
Does your current lifestyle or life economically and otherwise affect your ability to pursue
this craft?
Alison Latchman: ‘Abso-friggin-lutely. I have a young family that demands and
requires a lot of my attention. Finding the time to write is quite challenging;
however, I try not to stress about it too much. When I do sit down to write,
the stories just flow. Finding the time to write in general is a challenge for most
writers, I believe. You have to be in a certain space, a certain frame of mind, to
create a story. You also cannot ignore that bills need to be paid!! Bottom line.
So unless your writing can support your lifestyle, most have alternative means
by which to make a living which can detract from losing yourself in the story.’
Audrey Bishop-Williams: ‘Definitely. Finding time to write is a real effort. I spend

a lot of time either working, commuting, or caring for the family.’
All these women are professionals, culturally exposed, of middle-class upbring-

ing or lifestyle, and highly educated. What is particularly intriguing, with the
exception of Amba Chevannes, is how they defined themselves in the first ques-
tion, placing the craft of writer first, when in reality they are recognized first and
foremost for other skills. The previous film commissioner, Ms Kim Spence, who
completed her tenure in December 2013, had this to say about the current state
of Jamaica’s screenwriting situation:
[T]he gendered view of the Jamaican and Caribbean film industry is under-
explored. Cuba is presently doing some research here. That being said,
I believe the question is more about screenwriting than about female screen-
writing/ers per se. I believe the key issues affecting the entire film industry –
lack of funding, lack of training – affect screenwriting more acutely – as it is
felt to be an aspect that people can try their hand at. People need a grip …
but screenwriting is seen as the aspect, due to its being a softer skill, that one
can try to do and therefore economize. The recognition that the story and a
good storyline/script is very, if not the most, important, has not quite been
recognized in the region. The glory position is that of director and, to an
extent, producer. In addition, I believe lack of training on all sides of the film
ecosystem has led to a devaluation/ignorance of the skills inherent in and
requirements of each position ... Let us be clear that many of the greatest crea-
tives are untrained. So training is not it alone. But add that to an environment
of lack of funding and the pressure to cut corners, and it becomes unrelenting.
Then you add the gender dynamics in the industry and within the wider crea-
tive industries and the society. (Kim Marie Spence, 23 February 2014, personal
communication)
Gender dynamics is another compelling source of continuous conflict within

Jamaican society, yet was not mentioned in particular by the two married inter-
viewees. It could be inferred that their marriages do not embrace the traditional
cultural practices, but there are a few realities in the Jamaican society about men,
and certain roles that women are expected to embrace. There are specific roles that
Jamaican men in general automatically expect of the Jamaican female, regardless of
her profession, and as long as those roles are performed, what the woman chooses
to do as her profession is of little consequence. This can be viewed as open-minded
until the ‘role’ of the woman is defined and clarified. The expectations of the
Jamaican female are based on biblical (submission) and colonial (produce offspring)
doctrines where women must acknowledge the Jamaican man as the solid core of
the relationship regardless of whether he is qualified to fulfil this role or not.
The traditional views have started to relax, yet Jamaican women still exist in
a society where nearly one quarter of murders are a result of domestic violence,
50 per cent of men are reported for hitting their partner and over 30 per cent of
Jamaica 711
domestic abuse goes unreported as stated by the United Nations’ study on vio-
lence against children. A tipping point was also revealed in the Caribbean Journal
article ‘Women in Jamaica’ by Marcia Forbes, where 60 per cent to 70 per cent of
university graduates locally are women who are more employable, while men who
are becoming less capable of offering stability are still demanding high respect
within the household based on their gender ideology. When the woman is in real-
ity the breadwinner, contrary to the man’s gender beliefs, it is not surprising that
conflicts ensue, as was mentioned in the Daily Gleaner’s 2010 article ‘Domestic
Violence Alarm’.
Jamaican women screenwriters most likely are at the mercy of the conditions of
their personal lives, needing spousal support in order to successfully create scripts
and screenplays. Especially as single mothers, which, according to a UNICEF study
on family structures in Jamaica, is at 45 per cent to 50 per cent, yet is treated as
a cultural norm (Noorani: 2005).
While in general it is true that a working female screenwriter who is married
and raising a family is not unusual or uncommon, there is a reason why Jamaicans
of the diaspora in developed countries tend to be more successful as creatives.
The system they live in is more supportive of the creative person and their craft.
However, to be a woman in Jamaica, raising children in an economically precarious
environment and most likely without a male spouse/partner, where will creativ-
ity find a place to develop or mature if it is not a priority? Based on the argu-
ment posed, it would prove useful to embrace these points as the more common
scenario, unlike the situation of the two interviewees who are in more stable,
supportive, nuclear marriages.
Living in Jamaica: the new mould
After the market crash in the United States in 2008, Jamaica and its governance bod-
ies woke up to the stark reality that the economic template once again needed to
change. What became clear was Jamaica’s need to look at new types of resources that
are not heavily dependent on manufacturing and the traditional supply and demand
markets. The focus on creative industries and intellectual property (IP), a new export-
able, has been the new crusade of the government with the primary big investment
being animation. In this push to start an outsourcing industry in animation and
gaming, it became clear that local animators and game developers could classify
their creations as intellectual property, an exportable product, and in turn become
a marketable brand in and on many platforms generating revenue for the country.
This new clarity has influenced officials and institutions to embrace animation
and gaming, not only as technical fields, but as art forms involving good storytell-
ing, which is the key ingredient to making them intellectual property goldmines.
The question is whether we have trained visual storytellers to teach this in the
animation programmes that have been implemented since 2013. What is ironic
is that screenwriting, primarily viewed in Jamaica as a ‘to do’ task for women, is
now possibly a door to the career opportunities that have begun to open up for
the already prepared and trained female Jamaican screenwriter.
Another element in the developing importance and growing recognition of

writing as a valuable craft and resource worth promoting and protecting (screen-
writing included) was the launch of the Jamaican Writers Society ( JaWS), in
October of 2013. Contact was established with the chairperson, writer/accom-
plished publisher/author and screenwriter Miss Tanya Batson-Savage, and a few
questions were posed to her by personal communication (11 April 2014).
What spurred the creation of JaWS? Although there is a mission statement and literature
on the purpose of this organization, what really planted the seed for JaWS’s creation?
Was it personal or general frustration(s)?
‘The particular germination came through JamCopy, the Jamaica Reprographics
Rights Licensing Agency, who invited writers in their membership to attend a
meeting to discuss issues surrounding the absence of an association for writers.
A group of writers who attended that meeting agreed to take up the mandate.’
How does this organization see itself in aiding local (female) screenwriters? The require-
ments to become a member seem to place more emphasis on authors and others of the
more traditional ilk than those who write for the screen. If this observation is correct,
why is it so?
‘The emphasis is largely perceptual. However, we do assume that the majority of
our membership will come from prose and poetry writers, because there are far
more of them in the local landscape than there are screenwriters. How we are able
to serve screenwriters, however, will be dependent on the membership.’
It is clear that JaWS intends to be the WGA (Writers Guild of America) of Jamaica. How
does it see itself in helping to build a more solid career in writing and also screenwriting/
scriptwriting?
‘That is a little tricky to answer. Basically, we are not trying to be prescriptive.
What we intend to do is build out the membership and then allow them to steer
us in the things that we need to do by pointing out what their needs are. Even so,
based on preliminary discussions with writers, we have created a general mandate
which has five elements: industry development, writer development, lobbying,
promotion of reading, and identification of publishing opportunities.’
The plight of the Jamaican female screenwriter … for now
The situation of the Jamaican female screenwriter when I began writing this arti-
cle a year ago was fairly dismal and stagnant. The support level was low and the
traditional routes were exhausted and frustrating to pursue. The advent of digital
and alternate storytelling such as animation, gaming, graphic novels, and even
comics may be the path that will elevate screenwriting’s lowly status to a profes-
sion of recognition and respect. Mary Wells, however, pointed out the following:
So now there’s this national thrust to ‘get into’ and to support the animation
profession. Fine, but the animation profession is a filmmaking process that is
Jamaica 713
no different to any aspect of filmmaking or for that matter ‘the arts’ in general.
What is different about it is that it is a filmmaking specialty ... that’s all. But it
is filmmaking. (Mary Wells, 17 May 17, personal communication)
This point is valid, but there is a saying, ‘Rejection means wrong direction’, and
Jamaica’s filmmaking professionals have spent decades pushing for a thriving
industry with the same approach, and each time it has been met with rejection
or little result. A new industry and economy possibly more suited to addressing
Jamaica’s urgent needs, weaknesses and strengths is required before actually read-
dressing how to support the more traditional art form of film. The most urgent
need is the immediate location of a resource that provides employment, and the
main weakness has traditionally been the cautious private sector. A strength, mean-
while, has always been Jamaica’s legacy, already an international brand, which will
make selling these new products less difficult and hopefully gain recognition, like
Japanese animae and manga but with a more tropical flavour.
The willingness of the government to listen and test these waters and their need
for qualified storytellers to guide and direct them through this new journey looks
like the new mould the Jamaican female screenwriter needs.
References
Gordon, N. S. 2008. Media and the Politics of Culture: the Case of Television Privatization and
Media Globalization in Jamaica (1990–2007). US: Universal.
Jamaicans.com. 2009. ‘Jamaican Culture: Jamaica and Film’. 28 February. Available at: http://
www.jamaicans.com/culture/articles_culture/jamaica-and-film.shtml (accessed 28 April 2014).
Noorani, S. 2005. ‘Parenting in Jamaica: Single Parent Households’. UNICEF. Available at:
http://www.unicef.org/jamaica/parenting_corner.html (accessed 18 May 2015).
Singhal, A., and E. M. Rogers. 1999. Entertainment-Education: A Communication Strategy for
Social Change. UK: Routledge.
Mexico
Maria-Teresa DePaoli and Felipe Pruneda Sentíes
Mexico and its movement into narrative film
Maria-Teresa DePaoli
Following on the heels of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the incipient film
industry was just awakening to what would become the most popular form of
entertainment before television. As has been documented by Moisés Viñas in
Historia del cine Mexicano (1987), people in Mexico relied on the travelling ‘vistas’
(cine transumante),1 as well as on the ‘Revolution documentary’, with its testi-
monial orientation, to get informed on the devastating war taking place. During
this period, the Mexican spectator demanded images that were a faithful reflec-
tion of the chaotic reality that was impacting everyday life. In consequence, the
few fiction narratives produced before 1917 were not popular; it was not until
censorship was established as an institution during Venustiano Carranza’s term as
president (1917–20) that spectators developed a taste for stories and melodramas
that enabled them to escape the close scrutiny of the state as well as to dream of
other worlds and (im)possibilities. Imported Italian melodramas were a significant
influence on Mexican filmmaking during the so-called ‘Reconstruction Period of
Cinema’ (1917–28).2 Italian divas of the period such as Lyda Borelli and Francesca
Bertini helped to shape the Mexican star system that developed with actresses
such as Mimí Derba and Lupita Tovar. Melodrama became one of the most sali-
ent and long-lasting traits of Mexican film; a pioneering example is Federico
Gamboa’s popular naturalist novel Santa (1903), adapted to the silver screen on
four separate occasions by four different screenwriters, including Orson Welles.3
In the case of Mexico, a certain liminality or lack of respect, and a sort of anony-
mous status seems to be a defining attribute of the screenwriter. Screenwriters in
Mexico, historically, did not get properly recognized, read or studied. In addition,
cultural aspects have traditionally doubly erased the work of Mexican women
screenwriters and their work – work that often enables the effective understanding
of prominent elements of the Mexican culture, such as political and ideological
censorship, as well as gender, class, and race issues, among others.
What I find relevant for my study of the Mexican feminine screenplay is to
underscore the fact that there is a legitimate need to formally study the screenplay
714
Mexico 715
as a literary genre as well as to address the issue of authorship by giving appropri-

ate credit to the screenwriter, because without his or her work, a narrative-based
film is impossible to achieve. In Script Culture and the American Screenplay (2008),
Kevin Boon underlines that the same is also true when a director authors his or
her own screenplay, since a writer’s vision often differs from a director’s. Mexican
women screenwriters have confronted not only the mistreatment of the screen-
play as a literary genre in general, but they have also been forced to overcome
cultural and economical obstacles as female authors of screenplays. For women
screenwriters, not only does the genre they work with lack a solid position in pop-
ular literature and scholarship, but also, for cultural reasons, male screenwriters
have been historically favoured within the closed, male-dominated circles of the
Mexican film industry. The result is that just a few women writers have been able
to succeed significantly in the business despite the great talent of many. Moreover,
for the majority of women authors, writing necessarily becomes a secondary activ-
ity because of the need to contribute to the household budget on a regular basis.
Thus, unless they happen to be part of the upper class or teach literature, film
media, cultural studies, or related fields, most screenwriters – particularly women –
are not able to earn a living by dedicating themselves full-time to the craft and
art of screenwriting.
The book The Story of the Mexican Screenplay: A Study of the Invisible Art and
Interviews with Women Screenwriters (2014) features an introduction to the his-
tory of the screenplay in Mexico, with an emphasis on women writers, and the
analysis of two Mexican screenplays: La negra Angustias/Black Angustias (1948) by
Matilde Landeta, and El imperio de la fortuna/The Realm of Fortune (1984) by Paz
Alicia Garciadiego. In addition, the text includes interviews with the following
screenwriters: Marcela Fernández Violante, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, Busi Cortés,
Carmen Cortés, Cecilia Pérez-Grovas and Carolina Rivera.
Mexican women screenwriters
Maria-Teresa DePaoli
Liliana Abud
Liliana Abud (1948–) is an actress and screenwriter of telenovelas in Mexico;
credits include Corazón salvaje (2009), La madrastra (2005), and Rosalinda (1999).
Busi Cortés
Luz Eugenia (Busi) Cortés Rocha (1950–) is a screenwriter, director, and film edu-
cator. She was born in Mexico City. Cortés completed a Bachelor of Arts degree
at Mexico’s Centro de capacitación cinematográfica, AC (Film Training Centre)
(CCC) in 1981. She has written and directed numerous short and medium-length
films, and also documentaries, as well as two feature films: El secreto de Romelia/
Romelia’s Secret (1988) and Serpientes y escaleras/Snakes and Ladders (1991). Her
debut feature, Romelia’s Secret, won multiple national and international awards. It
is one of the first films created from the so-called New Mexican Cinema movement
in the 1980s, a renovated attitude towards filmmaking with a focus on producing

high-quality films on a shoestring budget. Cortés adapted for the screen Rosario
Castellano’s short story El viudo Román/The Widower Román (1964) to create
Romelia’s Secret. Cortés asserts herself as a filmmaker devoted to illustrating women
as complex individuals. Thus she debunks traditional archetypes of Mexican cin-
ema such as the simplistic victimized and suffering mother, or the glamorized
prostitute. Since 1994 she has mainly focused on the documentary genre as well
as on television series, and she has worked on television programmes with direc-
tors Felipe Cazals and Alfredo Jokowics. In 1998, Cortés began to produce – for the
Secretary of Public Education (SEP) – a series of television documentaries entitled
Retos y respuestas/Challenges and Answers, focusing on people with disabilities.
Paz Alicia Garciadiego

Considered by many as one of the most prominent Latin American contemporary
women screenwriters, Paz Alicia Garciadiego was born in Mexico City in 1949. She
studied literature at the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico
(UNAM), and launched her career by writing for radio and television. In the mid
1980s, she met her work and life partner, Mexican film director Arturo Ripstein.
She has written numerous screenplays for Ripstein since they started working
together. She has produced several stories of her own and has also adapted literary
works by Rulfo, Mahfouz, Maupassant, García Márquez, and Séneca. Garciadiego
revisits the universe of Arcady Boytler and Leonard Kastle, and explores the
melodrama, which she effectively blends with the criminal narrative, tragedy, and
dark comedy. Garciadiego is considered a fine neo-realist of urban film narrative,
and Mexico City is the great canvas on which she creates the masterful, coarse
dialogues that have brought her fame and recognition. Some of her most multi-
awarded screenplays are El imperio de la fortuna/The Realm of Fortune (1986), Rojo
carmesí/Deep Crimson (1996), and Razones del corazón/Reasons of the Heart (2011).
Consuelo Garrido
Consuelo Garrido Romero (1951–) was born in Mexico City. She received her
Bachelor of Science degree in communication sciences from the Ibero-American
University in 1973. Later she studied screenwriting at the Film Training Centre
(CCC). In addition she has studied in workshops taught by Syd Field, Juan Tovar,
and Gabriel García Márquez. Her screenplay for the film Mi querido Tom Mix/
My Dear Tom Mix (1991), directed by Carlos García Agraz, received awards in
Colombia and Cuba. Garrido also wrote the screenplays for El Tesoro de Clotilde/
Clotilde’s Treasure (1993), directed by Julián Pastor, and she co-scripted, with José
Buil and Marisa Sistach, El cometa/The Comet (1997), directed by Sistach. Besides
her participation on feature films, Garrido has written scripts for short films and
has collaborated in numerous and diverse projects for radio and television.
Cecilia Pérez-Grovas
Francisca Cecilia Pérez-Grovas was born in 1951 in Mexico City. She completed
her Bachelor of Arts in Spanish literature at the National Autonomous University
Mexico 717
of Mexico (UNAM). She also studied screenwriting at the Film Training Centre
(CCC). As a student, she had the opportunity to take screenwriting courses
from Gabriel García Márquez and other prominent writers, most notably Hugo
Argüelles and Vicente Leñero. She began her writing career in 1995 on a high
note when her screenplay Mermelada de higo/Fig Jam was selected, enabling her to
attend the Sundance screenwriting workshop. In 1997, she won the Ariel for Best
Original Screenplay for Cilantro y Perejil/Recipes to Stay Together (1996). She wrote
the script with Carolina Rivera, with whom she shared the award. In addition to
cinema, Pérez-Grovas has worked extensively as a screenwriter in television series
for both adults and children. She has also collaborated with Enrique Rentería in
writing the screenplay for the ‘telenovela’ (soap opera) La casa del naranjo/The
Orange Tree House (1998).
Matilde Landeta
Matilde Landeta (1910–99) was born in Mexico City. She entered the field of film-
making as a script girl in the 1930s and became one of the most prolific screenwrit-
ers in Mexico. She did not have an official education in cinema and screenwriting,
however, she was an avid reader and learned the craft while collaborating with
prestigious directors. She worked with directors trained in Hollywood, such as
Emilio Fernández, Julio Bracho, and Roberto Gavaldón. As a writer, Landeta pre-
ferred to work during the night, originally writing numerous screenplays that were
rarely accepted. Most of the screenplays focus on the topics that always fascinated
Landeta, and which were reflected in her produced work: Mexico’s history, ethnog-
raphy, geography, and gender difference. In the 1940s, Landeta adapted two novels
by Francisco Rojas Gonzalez into films that she also directed: Lola Casanova (1948)
and La negra Angustias/Black Angustias (1949). With Louis Spota, she co-authored
the screenplay for Trotacalles/Streetwalker (1951), a film she also directed.
Landeta made strides in the Mexican film industry despite the fact that she
endured gender discrimination in the workplace. As screenwriter, one of the most
disturbing experiences of her life took place when her screenplay Tribunal de meno-
res/Juvenile Courts was preempted, and she was cheated out of the opportunity to
direct the film. She had worked on Juvenile Courts for over a decade and had man-
aged to save some money for its production; however, she did not have all the funds
necessary. She looked for financial assistance and Eduardo Garduño – the director
of the Cinematographic National Bank – accepted her proposal, or so she thought.
In reality what happened was that he deceived Landeta by convincing her to sell
him the screenplay rights in order to make minor changes so that all the produc-
ers could approve the project. After Landeta yielded (in good faith) her screenplay
rights, Garduño chose another director – Alfonso Corona Blake – to direct the film
and took Landeta off the project. She could not do anything to prevent the film
production because she had naively sold the screenplay rights. The movie was
renamed El camino de la vida/The Road of Life and released in 1956. The produc-
tion team tried to remove her name from the screenplay credits, but Landeta sued
and ultimately retained her credit. In 1957, the film won an award in Berlin and
multiple Ariel awards in Mexico; Landeta won the Ariel as screenwriter. As a result
of this disagreement, the Cinematographic Bank stopped supporting her projects.

Nevertheless, Landeta continued participating in many other projects and writ-
ing screenplays, despite being ostracized in Mexican cinema circles. Her work was
‘rediscovered’ because of the International Women’s Year in 1975, organized by
the United Nations and celebrated in Mexico. There was a main event entitled
‘Women Directors’, a series of 28 films from different historical periods directed
by women from all over the world. Among the selected directors were Lina
Wertmüller and and Liliana Cavani from Italy, Ida Lupino and Elaine May from
the United States, and Agnès Varda and Nelly Kaplan from France. Doing research
on what could be exhibited to represent Mexico, Black Angustias was found and
selected along with Marcela Fernández Violante’s Frida Kahlo. Jorge Ayala Blanco
wrote a laudatory review of Black Angustias, and as her films began to be watched
and studied, Landeta began to receive invitations to tribute events. Following
this ‘re-discovery’, at age 81, she wrote and directed Nocturno a Rosario/Nocturne
to Rosario (1991). The Matilde Landeta Cultural Association created an annual
scholarship for the best screenplay by a female author and has been awarding the
scholarship since 2004.
Beatriz Novaro Peñaloza

Beatriz Novaro Peñaloza was born in Mexico City in 1953. She studied drama
at the University Centre of Theatre at the National Autonomous University of
Mexico (UNAM), and screenwriting at the Film Training Centre (CCC). She has
co-written several screenplays with her sister María Novaro, the director of these
films. For Lola (1989), Danzón (1991), and El jardín del Edén/The Garden of Eden
(1994), the Novaro sisters received several significant national and international
awards. Beatriz has also co-scripted projects with other writers, such as Enrique
Rentería and Valentina Leduc. In addition, Novaro is the author of several dramas,
a novel and a collection of poems.
Carolina Rivera
Ana Carolina Rivera was born in 1966 in Mexico City. She received her Bachelor
of Science degree in communication sciences from the Western Institute of
Technology and Higher Education in Guadalajara, Mexico, and she also studied
screenwriting at UCLA. She began her career in Guadalajara as a writer for radio
programmes. In addition to cinema, she has written series for television such as
Lucho en familia/Lucho Family (2011), on which she also participated as producer.
Rivera has written the screenplays of El Segundo aire/Second Wind (2001), Atlético
San Pancho/St Pancho Team (2001), and Amar te duele/Loving Hurts (2004). She
has also written several other unproduced screenplays. Rivera has collaborated
with other screenwriters, such as Enrique Rentería on Todo el poder/Gimme the
Power (1999), and on Recipes to Stay Together with Pérez-Grovas. The film was
directed by Rafael Montero and produced by her husband, Fernando Sariñana.
During the 1990s, Rivera held some positions in administration. She led the
Department of Screenplay Content, Analysis, and Assessment at the Mexican
Institute of Cinematography (IMCINE) in 1993. She was also the coordinator of
Mexico 719
the department., She served as coordinator of the first screenwriters workshop

organized by TELEVICINE-IMCINE (1995–6).
Marcela Fernández Violante: champion of writers and writing
Felipe Pruneda Sentíes

Marcela Fernández Violante (1941–) was born in Mexico City. A filmmaker,
researcher, and professor, she once expressed her agreement with Kurosawa’s
assessment that ‘a mediocre director with a good script might make a good film,
but not even a great director can make a good film out of a bad script’.4 Her belief
in the centrality of screenwriting for fiction filmmaking is both a sign of her
training in dramatic arts at Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
(UNAM, Mexico’s National Autonomous University) and a hallmark of one of the
most consistent and lasting careers in Mexican cinema, a remarkable feat achieved
largely because Fernández Violante was able to continue making films during
the 1980s. This was a period of intense struggle to keep the national industry
afloat, when the administration of Margarita López Portillo withdrew funding
opportunities available during the previous decade and dissolved the Banco
Cinematográfico (Bank for Filmmaking), the institution that managed those
funds, and when Mexico’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) during the 1990s depleted even further the possibilities for national
production. Indeed, it is by constantly underscoring the importance of stories in
cinema that she has expressed her wish to support filmmaking in her home coun-
try. In an interview with José Luis Gallegos, Violante declared that the absence of
writers and stories worth producing in Mexican cinema is really ‘a dark legend.
The problem is that producers do not pay for those stories’ (Gallegos 1991).
Violante has consistently championed both writing and writers, often turning to
the literary or theatrical adaptation for her films and collaborating directly with the
authors of the works she commits to the screen, as she did in Misterio/Mystery (1980,
based on the novel Estudio Q by Vicente Leñero, who co-scripted) and in Golpe de
suerte/Lucky Break (1992, from co-writer Luis Eduardo Reyes’s play De interés social/Of
Social Interest). The former is actually a film about the tensions between adhering to a
script and improvising, which transform into the conflict between fate and free will
for Alex (Juan Ferrara), the film’s protagonist, a telenovela actor who progressively
discovers his life is like a television production, scripted and directed in advance. One
might imagine the many difficulties Violante has faced to get her films produced,
including a 1986 student strike that took over the offices of the Centro Universitario de
Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC, of which she was the chair at the time, and where
she studied filmmaking) at UNAM, where she did post-production work for her film
Nocturno amor que te vas/Fugitive Nocturnal Love, and the rarity of her being a woman in
a male-dominated industry. These events made her alert to the many tyrannies that
rule filmmaking, and Misterio, the story of a man who seeks liberation from the des-
potism of screenwriting and direction, plays like a statement about the environment
on her sets, where, she has often argued, she avoids any sort of cruelty towards her
cast and crew.5
Undaunted by obstacles of all kinds, Violante has a penchant for difficult mate-
rial, as her thesis short film Azul/Blue (1966), produced by her alma mater CUEC,
had already made apparent. A film about a little girl exploring an urban landscape
and finding unexpectedly beautiful vistas in seemingly mundane corners, the
short opens with a quote from Hermann Hesse that observes ‘no idea, however
simple, is ever innocent, but rather, it is always already complex, always already
problematic’. The film, which confronts us with a central image as adorable as it is
enigmatic and unpredictable is simultaneously unthreatening and explosive. Her
first film after graduating from CUEC, the short documentary Frida Kahlo (1971),
was commissioned by UNAM and became the second cinematic study of the artist
and the first by a woman filmmaker. The documentary’s success in national and
international festivals – most notably, the Guadalajara Film Festival in Mexico and
the Oberhausen Film Festival of East Germany – made it Violante’s calling card. In
both cases, Violante supplied her own scripts.
Violante drew on her screenwriting lessons with novelist, screenwriter, and
revolutionary José Revueltas (another advocate of endowing a script with consider-
able sacredness) to immediately tackle a controversial subject with her first feature
screenplay, a collaboration with Mitl Valdés and Adrián Palomeque: De todos modos,
Juan te llamas/Your Name is Juan, Anyway (1975), which she also directed, and in
which she uses the Cristera war (1926–9), a clash between the federal government
of President Plutarco Elías Calles and militias rebelling against the political neu-
tralization and exclusion of the Catholic Church in Mexico, to mount a critique of
the country’s religious and military institutions. Rather than a sweeping overview
of the struggle, the script concentrated on the machinations of the leaders of the
parties involved to expose the repressive structures of Calles’s policies. Violante did
regret one of her screenwriting choices: ‘Because of censorship,’ she recalls, ‘these
themes could not be touched, but I felt the university was like a trench from which
I could go against the clergy, the army, and the betrayal of the Revolution’s ide-
als. I regretted not naming my characters after the real people on which they were
based, however … It was my small concession to censorship.’6 Yet the courage does
come through: the film emerges as a scathing, bruising experience. And the same
adventurous spirit would shape the rest of her filmography. ‘Adventurous’ is, in
fact, the term she might have used, given her stated impression that ‘cinema is the
last remaining possibility for adventure available to human beings’.7 But whatever
the film’s insights into the Cristiada might be, it is impossible to overstate its impor-
tance as the first Mexican feature film directed by a woman in almost two decades,
after the efforts of Matilde Landeta in the 1950s. In fact, Fernández Violante would
be the first filmmaker to tell Landeta’s life on the screen in her documentary Matilde
Landeta (1982), thus bridging two generations of pioneering female filmmakers.
Violante’s risk-taking found a high point in her celebrated, and highly contro-
versial, film Cananea, a fictionalized account of the copper miners’ strike in the
titular town in the state of Sonora, Northern Mexico, in 1906. The strike against
the mine’s managers is often considered the immediate precursor to the Mexican
Revolution and it was the first such event in the country. Centred on Colonel
William C. Greene’s (Steven Wilensky) rise as the owner of Cananea Consolidated
Mexico 721
Copper Company, SA and, later, his confrontation with miner leaders Esteban
Baca Calderón (Carlos Bracho) and Manuel Diéguez ( José Carlos Ruiz), Cananea
methodically details the rising tensions between Mexican workers and their
American employers, the former demanding higher salaries and a ratio favouring
domestic over foreign miners, and the eventual explosion of violence, culminating
in the armed intervention of soldiers and rangers from Arizona at the behest of
Greene to repress the struggle. Even though the film’s subject matter would have in
itself inspired Fernández Violante, it was initially a project from producer Yolanda
Ciani (who also appears in the film), who pitched the idea directly to then Mexican
president Luis Echeverría, rather than the more obvious choice: the President’s
brother, Rodolfo Echeverría, the administrator of the Banco Cinematográfico.
Curiously, despite the potential political danger of the film’s story (which had been
an issue with previous films by Violante), President Echeverría loved the idea and
endorsed the production.8 Violante would work on the script, based on her own
treatment, with Spanish exile Pedro F. Miret, who had previously collaborated with
established directors in Mexican cinema, including Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza,
and with young filmmakers like Arturo Ripstein and Gabriel Retes. Cananea would
go on to win the cinematography award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 1978
(for legendary photographer Gabriel Figueroa) and remains a classic of Mexican
cinema and an essential film about the Revolution.
Misterio (1979) followed almost immediately, an adaptation of Vicente Leñero’s
novel Estudio Q. Leñero himself turned the film into a script that he sold to
the Corporación Nacional Cinematográfica (CONACINE, the National Film
Corporation), but that went unproduced until the head of the body governing
state-funded film production, Margarita López Portillo, decided Mexican cinema
would benefit from adapting three great contemporary Mexican novels. Estudio Q
was one of them, and it was an obvious choice considering a script already existed.
The problem, however, was that few believed in its cinematic potential, for it was
dialogue-heavy, theatrical and complicated in its questioning of reality. Executive
producer Benito Alazraki offered Violante the job, hoping she could make it work
on screen. After speaking to Leñero, Violante went about revising the script, cutting
out dialogue (a process that involved the actors themselves), opening up the action,
and, most significantly, changing the ending, where Alex, realizing his inability to
overcome the artificial predetermination of his every hour by television producers,
kills himself. Violante argued that the ending could still be shocking and poignant
without destroying all hope for the protagonist. Unsurprising, then, that she once
declared her belief in making films that ‘did not defeat their characters completely’.9
Misterio represented a change of pace for Violante, as she produced a witty, intricate,
absurdist picture rather than a critical period piece. Not that Misterio is devoid of
political undertones, interrogating as it does the relationship between destiny and
choice, and giving the former the institutional shape of television production. In
that regard, Misterio was also a cutting look at the world of Mexican telenovelas,
taking to disturbing extremes the existential angst that confusion between their fic-
tion and everyday life could generate. While satisfied with the result of the film, the
experience proved to be largely frustrating and infuriating for the filmmaker: she
suffered interference from producers (one of whom almost resorted to physical

violence) while trying to make the most out of a dismayingly limited budget
and shooting schedule. Her contributions went unrecognized by the Mexican
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who loved the film and showered
it with awards (the Arieles) for every major cast and crew member, except for its
director and co-writer (despite her crucial alterations to the script, Leñero alone
was credited with its authorship).10 Finally, the film was considered too difficult
and complex for large audiences, and did not enjoy a lucrative theatrical run.
Another very different interest of Violante emerged for her next project as a
writer and director – children’s cinema. En el país de los pies ligeros/In the Country
of Light Feet (1982, also titled El niño rarámuri/The Rarámuri Child) tells the story
of a white boy’s encounter with the Tarahumara people in the northern state
of Chihuahua. Framed as an adventure, the film had Violante once again tack-
ling injustice: En el país de los pies ligeros denounces the exploitation of both the
Tarahumara and timber supply in the region. Twelve-year-old Manuel travels to
the Sierra Tarahumara with his mother (Helena Rojo) to visit his father (Pedro
Armendáriz, Jr), an environmental activist. Manuel befriends Jesús and, as the lat-
ter introduces his new friend to the local culture and its love of nature, the two
come upon a group of men and their illegal woodcutting. The story idea came from
Antonio Noyola, who was making his screenwriting debut.
After her children’s picture, the 1980s saw two parallel developments in Violante’s
career: the slowing down of her filmmaking due to the multiple collapses of
production incentives and resources (the aforementioned closure of the Banco
Cinematográfico and of many distribution companies based in the important
United States market), and the increase of her services to Mexican screenwriters.
It was in 1985 that she became a member of the Observance Committee of the
Sociedad General de Escritores de México (the Mexican Writers Guild), or SOGEM,
an organization that protects the rights of authors involved in film production.
She would continue working for writers as the secretary of the authors and adapt-
ers section of the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica (the
Film Production Workers Union), a position she first occupied in 1995. She would
become the Union’s Secretary General three years later.11
Nocturno amor que te vas/Fugitive Nocturnal Love (1986) broke the longest period
between films for Fernández Violante up to that point (four years). Produced by
CUEC, which she chaired at the time, the film was her second incursion into the
thriller genre and another engagement with Mexican history, as the fiction that starts
the story slowly merges with real-life events. The script, which Violante penned with
Jorge Pérez-Grovas from the latter’s story (itself first developed in an award-winning
script by Grovas himself, submitted to a SOGEM contest), follows a single mother
whose lover, a taxi driver, suddenly disappears. She searches for him, only to discover
her lover was one of the victims of the Río Tula massacre, an infamous episode in
which police officers murdered twelve Colombian gangsters after the latter carried
out a bank robbery. Among the victims was a taxi driver who muled narcotics and
became the inspiration for the film – he was the only Mexican citizen in the group.
The name of the massacre came from the river where the bodies were found. Crucially,
Mexico 723
Nocturno amor que te vas featured Violante’s first female protagonist, and one who
was a conscious departure from the kind of leading lady that telenovelas had made
popular.12 As played by Patricia Reyes Spíndola, Carmen, a domestic worker turned
reluctant detective and, eventually, avenging angel, becomes a dark counterpart to
the young protagonist of Azul, as if Carmen were an older, world-weary version of
the girl in the earlier short: while the latter has a fantastical journey through the city
in daylight, Carmen’s travails show a hellish, grotesque side of Mexico City at night.
The nineties saw an economic crisis in Mexico in which the peso’s value took
a vertiginous fall and Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed NAFTA
with the executive powers of the neighbouring countries. Fernández Violante
responded to the climate of financial uncertainty with Golpe de suerte/Lucky Break
(1992), an adaptation of Luis Eduardo Reyes’s prize-winning play De interés social/
Of Social Interest, co-scripted by the director and the playwright. The screenplay
opens up the play without entirely abandoning the unity of place in the story of
a bureaucrat and his family’s attempt at adjusting to life after government budget
cuts leave him out of a job. Some of the absurdist, dark humour of Misterio returns –
the protagonist’s grandfather punches a hole through the floor of his apartment
to stage a robbery of the bank down below. The film is also Violante’s most direct
cinematic exploration of the theme of family, which to that point had never taken
centre stage, but had hovered as a desirable potentiality or failed project. The
larger historical scope of her first features, consistent with the politically charged
filmmaking of the 1970s, gave way to a much more intimate terrain that still
resonated with national anxieties.
It took Fernández Violante nearly ten years to see what is her latest feature screen-
play produced (in 1997, she contributed the short documentary De cuerpo presente/
Lying in State to the omnibus project Enredando Sombras/Tangling Shadows, which
featured works by several Latin American directors, commemorating the first cen-
tenary of cinema’s arrival in Latin America). Titled Piel de víbora/Made of Snakeskin
(2000, some sources list its title as Acosada/Cornered), the film is another descent
of a female protagonist into horror in the Mexican capital. Starring Ana Colchero
and based on the novel De piel de víbora by psychiatrist and feminist writer Patricia
Rodríguez Saravia, it is Violante’s first solo screenwriting credit since Frida Kahlo.
The film appropriates the author’s character study of the modern woman in Mexico
City (in this case, a young divorcee starting a new life) to take aim at the city’s
legal system. Finding her apartment – her first home after her failed marriage –
ransacked, and determined to recover her possessions to restore what she felt was
an already fragile personal world, Eugenia (Colchero) ends up becoming the victim
of her own quest for justice. Violante’s highly anticipated return to directing feature
films continued the tendency of her later-stage career of tackling current affairs in
Mexican politics and society through contemporary stories rather than in revisions
of the historical past. Where Golpe de suerte reacted to the economic climate, Piel de
víbora delved into insecurity and corruption, which over a decade after the film’s
release continue to be the primary concerns of Mexico City’s inhabitants.
Following several accounts of Marcela Fernández Violante’s life and work, it is
impossible not to delve into her extensive career as a film teacher. She demands
such attention herself, as she has claimed that ‘(o)nly when the student achieves
a balance (between theory and practice) can she properly master cinema’s lan-
guage’,13 a call for an integrated pedagogy of film. Her many roles in cinema
education include instructor on screenwriting and directing technique, festival
director, and criticism workshop coordinator. Her commitment to film pedagogy
is significant precisely because of her generation: she was part of the second grad-
uating class (1964–9) from CUEC, Mexico’s first film school, and one of the first
film graduates to be accepted as a member of the Film Workers Union. Once an
early student of CUEC, she also became one of its longest-standing faculty mem-
bers and director (1985–9), thus ensuring the continuity of the efforts to educate
Mexico’s future film professionals. She was largely responsible for the volume La
docencia y el fenómeno fílmico (Teaching and the Cinematic Phenomenon), a collection
of essays by former students and professors reminiscing about the first 25 years
of its existence. Violante served as the editor of that collection, and leads it with
an illuminating and highly entertaining interview with one of the key figures
in CUEC’s inception: Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez.14 To the list of her
contributions to Mexican film culture one can add the job of collector and keeper
of the memories of an institution that remains a vital source of filmmaking talent.
Besides representing Mexican cinema abroad through her films, she has lectured
at Loyola University in New Orleans, UCLA, and NYU. Even if the gaps between
her films have increased over the years, Fernández Violante’s legacy is not limited
to her body of work, but extends to the filmmakers she has helped prepare for
their own careers.
Notes
1. The first rudimentary films exhibited in mobile theatres. The distribution of new films
was slow and got even more delayed when the Revolution started. In order to make a
profit, the owners took the films from place to place and thus spread the concept of
cinema across the main cities of the country.
2. At the end of the Mexican Revolution, the Constitution of 1917 was created along with
policies that centralized the power of the state in order to minimize that of the ‘caudil-
los’. The new government put into effect laws and institutions that would put Mexico
on a stable path of socio-political and economic order and recovery. Unfortunately,
these affected the production of films since everything now had to be monitored
following the establishment of censorship.
3. Orson Welles wrote his own screenplay for Santa in 1940. The brilliant creator of Citizen
Kane (1941) sustained a passionate romance with Mexican actress Dolores del Río from
1938–41. Ramon David published a bilingual volume that includes the original text
written by Welles and an introduction that provides further information on this rare
screenplay, which never reached the screen.
4. ‘Una cineasta marginada’, Revista Motivos, No. 42, 10 May, 1992, p. 52. Quoted in
‘Marcela Fernández Violante’, in Escritores del Cine Mexicano Sonoro, UNAM. Available at:
http://escritores.cinemexicano.unam.mx/biografias/F/FERNANDEZ_violante_marcela/
biografia.html (accessed 11 April 2013). Escritores del Cine Mexicano Sonoro, a UNAM
database, is a great resource for information on Mexican screenwriters. It was the
primary source for this entry. Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own.
5. She speaks extensively about her methods in the short documentary 25 apuntes dispersos
para la reconstrucción del pasado, produced by Mil Nubes Cine, the Instituto Mexicano
Mexico 725
de la Cinematografía (IMCINE), and the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes

(CONACULTA). The 2012 interview concerns the production of her film Misterio.
6. Interviewed by Mónica Mateos in ‘Analizar los engendros del sistema patriarchal, afán
de mi filmografía’, La Jornada, Mexico City, 1 September 2000, p. 7. Quoted in ECMS.
7. Jatziri Sánchez, ‘Vuelve a dirigir con Piel de Vibora’, Reforma, 6 October 2000, p. 10.
Quoted in ECMS.
8. Marcela Fernández Violante, in an interview for the documentary Cananea: La forja de
una película, another Mil Nubes Cine/IMCINE/CONACULTA production, 2011.
9. Fernández Violante herself details the story behind Misterio’s production and its
aftermath, including her exclusion from award ceremonies, in the aforementioned
documentary, 25 apuntes dispersos para la reconstrucción del pasado.
10. Some sources, like the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), do list Fernández Violante as
Leñero’s script collaborator.
11. In ‘Marcela Fernández Violante’, ECMS. Escritores del Cine Mexicano Sonoro. Available at:
http://escritores.cinemexicano.unam.mx/biografias/F/FERNANDEZ_violante_marcela/
biografia.html (accessed 8 June 2015).
12. ‘Marcela Fernández Violante’, in Directores Cinematográficos, Sindicato de Trabajadores
de la Producción Cinematográfica, Sección de Directores. Available at: http://www.
cinedirectores.com/secciones/directores/sindicato/subsecciones/directores/activos/
marcela-fernandez-violante.html (accessed 23 May 2013).
13. Marcela Fernández Violante, ‘Objetivos y funciones del Centro’, in La docencia y el
fenómeno fílmico: Memoria de los XXV años del CUEC, 1963–88, Mexico City: UNAM, 1988,
p. 11.
14. Marcela Fernández Violante, ‘Gabriel García Márquez: México, el cine y el CUEC’, in La
docencia y el fenómeno fílmico: Memoria de los XXV años del CUEC, 1963–88, pp. 13–30.
References
DePaoli, Maria Teresa. 2014. The Story of the Mexican Screenplay: A Study of the Invisible Art
Form and Interviews with Women Screenwriters. US: Peter Lang.
Gallegos, José Luis. 1991. ‘Asegura Marcela Fernández Violante: Todas mis películas se
vinculan a problemas sociales y políticos’, Excélsior, 4 March, p. 3.
United States of America
Jean Ansolabehere, Robert Arnett, Kristiina Hackel, Helen Jacey,
Warren Lewis, Sam Lively, Victoria Lucas, Bettina Moss,
Claudia Myers, Megan Reilly, Dorin Schumacher, Jule Selbo,
Anne Slatton, Tom Stempel, Anna Weinstein and Rosanne Welch
Overview
Jule Selbo
The beginnings of filmmaking in the late 1800s in the United States coincided
with new freedoms and opportunities for females in the wake of the Industrial
Revolution. There were new education reforms for both sexes; the first compulsory
education law was instituted in Massachusetts in 1852 with other states following
soon after. These reforms were meant to prepare men and women to enter the
workforce in many capacities and for all to contribute to America’s technological
advancements. This led to the breaking of many domestic traditions and thus
female independence – social and financial – grew. The new opportunities in edu-
cation and freedoms in social and financial areas allowed females in America to
engage in the young film industry in creative positions from its very beginnings –
as screenwriters, directors, actresses and producers. Female screenwriters in the
early years of American film – many highlighted in this chapter – had the oppor-
tunity to write and produce entertaining tales and often, at the same time, they
were able to construct narratives that commented on inequities and strictures
facing various social classes and nationalities, and specifically on the challenges
facing the female in America.
One of the earliest female filmmakers in America was former evangelist Lois
Weber (1879–1939). A child of evangelical ministers, Weber became involved
in film in 1905 when she realized the potential of ‘moving pictures’ to spread
her beliefs. She began working as a film actress, moved into writing and direct-
ing in 1911 with On the Brink (co-directed with Edwin S Porter), and eventually
became one of the highest-paid writer/directors in Hollywood and formed her
own production company. Weber explored story elements like abortion, birth
control, alcoholism and drug addiction in films such as Where Are My Children,
The People Vs John Doe and Hop). Another early female screenwriter was Gene
Gauntier (1885–1966) who wrote and starred in silent films from 1906 through
1920, writing scenarios that took her to locations such as Florida, Ireland and
Palestine. Turner Classic Movies has named the 1912 film she wrote and starred
in, From the Manger to the Cross, as the most important silent film to deal with
726
the life of Jesus Christ; this film was selected for preservation in the United States
Film Registry.
There were many other American female screenwriters in the silent era includ-
ing Louella Parsons, Mae Murray, Anita Loos, Dorothy Davenport, Frances
Marion, Jeanie Macpherson, Lottie Blair Park. These women (along with their
male counterparts) wrote comedies and dramas and also stories that explored the
injustices and social taboos of the times. The advent of sound in American film
in the late 1920s made possible a new type of film narrative, one that could, due
to the addition of on-screen dialogue, more efficaciously and realistically explore
points of view and concepts concerning community, biases and political mores.
This technological addition to film – as well as a broader sense of the world
through a wider use of radio broadcasting – arrived at a time when American
society was again in flux, its attitudes now shaped by a post-World War I disillu-
sionment and exacerbated by the greed and lack of judgment that led to the 1929
Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and disdain for Prohibition.
By 1929, studios such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros, Columbia,
Paramount, Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) and United Artists churned out films at
such a staggering pace (a typical feature was shot in ten days and found its way
into the theatres four to six weeks later) that studios needed actors, directors and –
most importantly – screenwriters under contract. In 1930, studios had nearly
800 screenwriters under contract (Buhle and Wagner 2002: 4). Screenwriters had
direct access to the boss, they had offices on the lot, had lunch at the commissary,
knew the players. They worked long hours, wrote numerous scenarios, pitched
them to their production heads and – when given the green light on a project –
wrote the scripts. The fast-paced production style, so dissimilar from the produc-
tion schedules of major motion pictures today, created an atmosphere where the
screenwriter’s story, words, characters and intent had a greater opportunity to make
it, without much alteration, to the screen. In many instances, production execu-
tives asked the writers to be on the set during shooting so as to ensure the director’s
adherence to the approved script’s story, attitude and point of view. Anita Loos, one
of MGM’s contract writers, was often assigned to be on the set during production to
ensure that the director properly brought out the comedy and content of the script:
‘The directors were dunces, you know. That they ever made anything good was due
to (Production Head) Irving Thalberg. He handed them (our) scripts that were practi-
cally foolproof’ (Beauchamp 2006: 125). MGM was the richest, most powerful studio
in the early sound era and home to many top screenwriters. Irving Thalberg oversaw
production of almost a film a week and is often cited as the most innovative studio
boss in film history, and he believed in the writer. Screenwriter Frances Marion, one
of the most highly regarded writers in the MGM stable, wrote in her autobiogra-
phy, ‘Thalberg withheld any criticism that might destroy our creative forces, saying
“A picture is only as good as its writer. A writer is only as good as his inspiration.”
Thalberg did not want to dictate or impose too many ideas on the screenwriter. He
said, “You’re the creators, not I”’ (Marion 1972: 145). Other female writers such as
Zoe Akins, Dorothy Howell, Lenore J. Coffee, Becky Gardiner – and, of course,
Mae West – were among the top screenwriters focusing on female roles.
‘Goodness has nothing to do with it’, Mae West’s famous line from her 1933
screenplay I’m No Angel, was said by her protagonist, Tira (portrayed by West), in
response to a query about the heroine’s ability to strive for and achieve success.
The line also reflects the work of some of the most interesting screenwriters in Pre-
Code Hollywood. These years (most often referred to as the years between 1929
and 1934, before the film censorship code was strictly in place) have been laud-
ably explored in the economic, social and political arenas by film historians.1 The
work of female screenwriters working in these years is worthy of examination –
many contributed in ideation and scripting of the film narratives that explored
topics and themes of social relevance to the American populace of the time
(Selbo 2010). Goodness had nothing to do with the stories these screenwriters
were interested in telling – stories that created new role models for the audience;
female characters who were celebrated, not punished, for being intelligent, for-
ward-thinking, rule-breaking, soul-searching and complex human beings. Two of
the top American female screenwriters in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Frances
Marion (whose films explored the inequities in divorce laws, child custody laws,
prison standards and treatment of women in the workplace) and Adela St John
(who focused on societal reactions to premarital sex and a woman’s right to put
her career first), bemoaned the fact that, despite American women getting the
right to vote (in 1920), the role of women in American society was still far from
equal. Film historian Cari Beauchamp writes: ‘They knew it was their own mov-
ies that provided the fodder for a revolution in mores, attitudes, and dreams …’
(Beauchamp 1997: 193). The freedom to honestly explore a variety of top-
ics concerning the American female was seriously hindered with the escalated
enforcement of the Production Code in 1934.
Former Republican National Committee Chairman and USA Postmaster
General Will H Hays was hired by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors
Association in 1922 to shape a censorship code that would satisfy those in the
government and private sector who were concerned about the content (stories,
visuals and themes) of motion picture narratives. By 1930, ‘The Code to Govern
the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures’ had been written
by Father Daniel Lord under the eye of Martin Quigley, the devout Catholic pub-
lisher of the Motion Picture Herald, and adopted by Hays – to curb the presentation
of narratives and characters that could ‘lower the moral standards’ of the audience
(Motion Picture Code 1930). Hays asserted that no film was to be released without
the approval of his Studio Relations Committee (SRC). Much of the code, which
came to be known as the Hays Code, focused on sexual and gender relations and
directly affected the work of the screenwriter. In 1934, when Irish Catholic Joseph
Breen became the lead enforcer of the Production Code Administration (PCA)
and stated that ‘I am so enthusiastic about this whole (censorship) business and
so willing to work that I’d be tempted to bite the legs off of anybody who might
dare to cross me …’, things began to change (Leff and Simmons 1990: xii). Frances
Marion summed up her frustration in her book in 1972: ‘[W]riting became like
writing on the sand with the wind blowing’ (Marion 1972).
The newly formed Screen Writers Guild (SWG), with female screenwriters such
as Frances Marion, Clara Beranger and Laura Perelman helping to shape its
mission, gained strength in the 1930s. The SWG blamed the Hays Code for the
failure of screen stories ‘to deal with the everyday scene of life around us’ (Ward
2002). The sign of the new order was a title card superimposed over the oval seal
of the MPPDA before the credits: ‘This Picture Has Been Approved by the Production
Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.’ The
audience weighed in: when the Production Code seal of approval appeared on a
separate frame before the beginning of the film, ‘audiences greeted the emblem
with jeering, booing and what the Hollywood Reporter called “a good community
hiss”’ (Doherty 1999: 75). After these initial receptions, the size of the seal was
diminished and placed innocuously (one could suggest the term ‘hidden’) in the
title credits.
Anita Loos (1889–1981) had begun her career as a silent film scenarist by writ-
ing The New York Hat (1912) for DW Griffith, and by 1916 her intertitles (silent
film ‘cards’ containing dialogue or information necessary to the advancement of
the story) took aim at those who wanted to censor: ‘Women who cease to attract
men often turn to reform as a second choice’ (Beauchamp 2006: 41). Loos was an
early proponent of women’s liberation; in 1921, she was among the first to join
the Lucy Stone League – an organization that fought for the right of women to
retain their maiden names (Loos 1974). Loos became one of the most appreciated
wits of the decade and is often credited with perfecting the so-called ‘bad girls’ in
film. In Pre-Code films, the ‘bad girl’ is a woman who understands the joys and
power of sexuality and does not require the blessing of matrimony to embrace it.
The ‘bad’ girl rejects domesticity and motherhood and seeks financial independ-
ence and, sometimes ruthlessly, sexual and class-defying thrills. And, most impor-
tantly, the ‘bad girl’ is not forced to pay for her ambition, aspirations or sense of
morality. Once the Hays Code was in full enforcement in 1934, a frustrated Loos
headed back to New York to pursue writing books and plays. Hollywood did tempt
her back, but her post-code scripts lacked the Loos view of the world. Chafing
under the Code, Loos managed to slip in a dig with this sarcastic line spoken
by Princess Tamara, one of the characters Loos highlighted in her adaptation of
Clare Booth Luce’s play The Women (1939): ‘We’re off for Hollywood, where dear
Mr Hays will protect us’.
The Hays Code tempered, adjusted and shaped many film narratives for dec-
ades. Female characters could no longer be upfront about their ambitions, dreams,
or sexual desires. Film stories in general became sanitized and only the narratives
that contained moral messages or social commentary that adhered to the opin-
ions of those who held the censorship reins made it into the marketplace. The
censors’ ability to demand the rewriting of scripts or the re-cutting of completed
films to fit the strictures was often debilitating to the creative process. Mark Vieira,
in his book Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-code Hollywood, writes ‘The Hays Code endured
until 1968, depriving generations of moviegoers of a wide range of ideas and
images and in some cases, coherent works of art’ (Vieira 1999).
Figure 5.1 The MPPDA Seal of Approval
Some screenwriters worked to find their way around the Hays Code. Unfortunately
for screenwriter/actress Mae West (1893–1980), her rise to Hollywood stardom
coincided with the ascent of Joseph Breen to the top job in the PCA, the new
nomenclature for the SRC (Selbo 2010). West reacted to the new aggressive
enforcement of the Hays Code with characteristic determination:
When I knew that the censors were after my films and they had come to okay
everything, I wrote scenes for them to cut. These scenes were so rough that I’d
never have used them. But they worked as a decoy. The PCA cut them and left
the stuff I wanted. I had these scenes in there about a man’s fly and all that,
and the censors would be sittin’ in the projection room laughing themselves
silly. Then they’d say ‘cut it’ and not notice the rest. Then when the film came
out and the bluenoses were outraged, the censors came and said, ‘Mae, you
didn’t show us that.’ But I’d show them the scripts they had okayed them-
selves. (Leff and Simmons 1990: 46)
The PCA increased its efforts to curb West; they would not only delete lines such
as ‘Tira is a girl who has satisfied more patrons than Chesterfields’, but insist on
changes in character motivations and the final outcomes of West’s stories. The
production of West’s film Belle of the Nineties (1934) became a nightmare. The
initial Production Code letter ran to four-and-a-half pages of required deletions.
West lamented the final outcome of the film, saying it was disappointing because
it was no longer ‘a good story because they (the PCA) made me make it three times
before I found out what they wanted’ (West 1959). When the film was released,
Variety critics skewered it for its ‘benefit-of-the-clergy finale, an obvious curtsey
to Joe Breen’ (Abel 1934) and West herself suffered the consequences of the bad
reviews and the poor box office.
Paramount soon found that subsequent Mae West films, without her strong
point of view on the female’s place in society, were not box-office draws. West
issued a statement on the Code:
Strict censorship has a reverse effect. It creates resentment on the part of the
public. They feel their freedom of choice is being dictated. They don’t want
their morals legislated by other than criminal law … Every person who is not
a moron or a mental defective of some sort carries a very effective censor and
super critic of his action in his cerebral cortex – and in his heart. If that doesn’t
work, no amount of censorship from the outside will do anybody any good.
(Weintraub 1967)
Post-World War II, the opportunities for female screenwriters in the American film
industry changed. Film scholar Cari Beauchamp, in a lecture at California State
University, Monterey Bay (July 2012), noted that returning male soldiers saw the
film industry now as a lucrative business opportunity; its financial returns had given
the business legitimacy. Men moved into well-paying jobs at the studios. Added to
this, the late 1940s and the 1950s promoted the female homemaker, the ‘woman
behind the man’, and the independent woman forging ahead towards equality
was, in many circles, stymied. However, female screenwriters such as Marguerite
Roberts, Dorothy Parker, Leigh Brackett (see the ‘Women At work: Hollywood
screenwriters of the 1940s’ section), and others continued in the industry. Some, in
the late 1940s and early 1950s, fell victim to those with virulent anti-communist
sentiments; their names were recorded on the infamous Hollywood Blacklist. These
included some of the female screenwriters illuminated later in the USA segment:
Caspary, Karen DeWolf, Norma Barzman, Lillian Hellman (see the ‘Women At
work: Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940s’ section), Marguerite Roberts, Bess
Taffel, Tamara Hovey, Anne Froelich, and Ruth Gordon (see the ‘Women At
work: Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940s’ section). The Blacklist was instituted
in November 1947, activated by the United States’ House of Representatives.
The enforcers of the Blacklist came to be known as the House Committee on
Un-American Activities (HUAC); they targeted creatives working in the film
industry who were suspected of espousing communist beliefs and influencing the
popular and ever-growing motion picture industry. More than 300 entertainment
artists – including directors, radio commentators, actors and screenwriters – were
boycotted by the studios. HUAC held sway, but did not have complete support.
Highly respected and vocal Eleanor Roosevelt, then widow of the president, noted:
The film industry is a great industry with infinite possibilities for good and
bad. Its primary purpose is to entertain people. On the side, it can do many
other things. It can popularize certain ideals, it can make education palatable.
But in the long run, the judge who decides whether what it does is good or
bad is the man or woman who attends the movies. In a democratic country
I do not think the public will tolerate a removal of its right to decide what it
thinks of the ideas and performances of those who make the movie industry
work. (Roosevelt 1947)
Many screenwriters, male and female, fled the country; some were able to work
in Europe or Mexico, some wrote for Hollywood under pseudonyms, others
saw their careers end (Schrecker 2002: 244). Hollywood icons joined forces to
fight this ostracism; Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Danny Kaye, along
with director John Huston, created the Committee for the First Amendment
in protest against the accusations that were being brought against the motion
picture industry. In 1953, CBS radio personality John Henry Faulk sued one
of the authors of the Red Channels list (responsible for naming quite a few of
those who ended up on the Blacklist) for being included in their records. In
1962, a jury awarded him $3.5 million in damages. Although the award was
later reduced, the verdict marked the effective end of the blacklisting era (Cohen
2004: 167).
The 1960s marked a transition for Hollywood. The studio system had col-
lapsed, and creatives such as screenwriters, actors and directors were, for the
most part, no longer under contract and thus worked freelance – project by pro-
ject. 1963 marked Hollywood’s worst year in fifty years, with only 121 features
released (Dirks 2014). In France, screenwriter/director Agnès Varda was making a
mark exploring the place of women in society (Cleo from 5 to 7 [1962]), and Mai
Zetterling was coming to prominence in Sweden as co-writer of Loving Couples
(1964, banned at the Cannes Film Festival) and co-writer on The Girls (1968,
focusing on the lack of women’s liberation and control of society by men).
However, in the changing structure of the Hollywood film industry, despite
the second wave of feminism, female screenwriters did not find much success.
A few women found places for their work: Shirley Clarke (1919–97) co-wrote
and directed A Cool World (1963), a tale focusing on African-American gang life
in Harlem, before moving into making documentaries; Stephanie Rothman
(1936–) co-wrote and co-directed Blood Bath (1966) for independent producer
guru Roger Corman; Barbara Loden (1932–80, wife of Elia Kazan) penned the
script for Wanda (1970), then directed it in an ‘improvisational’ style, the nar-
rative following a female protagonist caught up in a string of abusive relation-
ships; Barbara Hammer (1939–), after leaving her marriage and her college
teaching job in Santa Rosa, California, ‘took off on a motorcycle with a Super-8
camera’ (DiFeliciantonion 1993) and made some of the first lesbian-themed
short films in America, Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976), prior to mak-
ing her first feature-length film in 1992; Maya Angelou (1928–2014), poetess,
actress and novelist, penned a screenplay for a Swedish production company,
Georgia Georgia (1972); Jay Presson Allen (1922–2006) was one of the few female
screenwriters hired for high-profile films, including Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964)

and the adaptation of her Broadway play (based on a book by Muriel Spark) The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), continuing through the 1970s and 1980s as a
top screenwriter.
By 1970, the studios were being challenged by independent production com-
panies, propelling studios to put most of their energies into creating tentpole
blockbusters. The new generation of filmmakers were taking more risks, hoping
to create new storytelling techniques and explore more meaningful stories. Joan
Micklin Silver (1935–) adapted Hester Street (1975, novel by Abraham Cahan), a
tale of Jewish immigrants arriving in New York City just before the 1900s and
their trials of assimilation. The film was deemed historically significant and
selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 1979 she adapted Anne
Beattie’s novel Chilly Scenes of Winter for the screen; Silver also directed the film
and it was initially released under the title Head Over Heels. The original release
was a happy-ending romantic comedy and did not fare well at the box office.
When it was rereleased in 1982 under the novel’s title, Chilly Scenes of Winter,
the ending was changed to match the original source material and was received
more favourably. Micklin’s directing career continued into the 1980s and 1990s;
however, she was never again given screenwriting credit on a film. Joan Stanton
Hitchcock (1946–) began her feature film screenwriting career in the 1970s and
then moved into writing for television. Susan Miller (1944–), in the 1980s,
wrote the feature Lady Beware (1987) and then moved into television writing.
Many female screenwriters were finding more success on the small screen, both
in half-hour situation comedy programming, hour-long programming and
made-for-television movies. Those focusing their work in feature films in the
1970s and 1980s included screenwriters illuminated in this USA segment such as
Leslie Dixon, Elaine May, Penelope Spheeris, Kathryn Bigelow, Nora Ephron,
Nancy Meyers and Lizzie Borden; some of them continue working in the third
millennium.
With the highly successful Disney animation feature The Little Mermaid in
1989, feature animation films began to flood the market. These films employ
multiple screenwriters, some of them female. These include Irene Mecchi, Linda
Woolverton, Noni White and Eugenia Bostwick-Singer. Brenda Chapman
(b. 1962), trained in animation, is credited as a co-director and co-writer on Brave
(2012, winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Film) and for story work
on Beauty and the Beast (1991). In 1998 she was the first woman to co-direct an
animated feature for a major studio (The Prince of Egypt for Dreamworks). She has
worked extensively as head-of-story on many Disney animated projects as well as
projects at Dreamworks, Pixar and Lucasfilm.
The 1990s began with promise for female screenwriters. Callie Khouri (1957–)
earned an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Thelma and Louise, a tale of
two female buddies on the run from the law. Sally Robinson (1959– ) penned
features A Far Off Place (1993) and Medicine Man (1992) before focusing her ener-
gies in television. Jane Anderson (1954 –) wrote It Could Happen to You (1994)
and adapted How to Make an American Quilt (1995). Maggie Greenwald (b. 1955)
wrote and directed Home Remedy (1987), Ballad of Little Jo (1993) and Songcatcher
(2000). Leslie Dixon penned box-office successes in the romantic comedy genre.
African-American writers Julie Dash (born in 1952, whose credits include
Daughters of the Dust [1991]) and Kasi Lemmons (born in 1961, whose credits
include Eve’s Bayou [1997]) gained attention for their work.
Despite the fact that the female to male ratio of working writers in the Writers
Guild of America (WGA) continued to be inequitable, a few women screenwriters
gained attention in the third millennium. These include Diablo Cody (born in 1978)
who gained attention for Juno in 2007, a dram-edy about a pregnant high-school girl
whose expectations and assessments on life and people are turned upside down. She
received an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for her efforts. Cody notes:
[T]he attitude towards women in this industry is nauseating. There are all sorts
of porcine executives who are uncomfortable with a woman doing anything
subversive. They want the movie about a beautiful girl who trips and falls, the
adorable klutz. (Knott 2013)
Melissa Anne Rosenberg (1962–) moved from writing television to film in 2006
with Step Up. She earned dual nominations for television’s Emmy Awards and
Writers Guild of America Awards. Her adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s block-
buster novel series resulted in Twilight (2008), New Moon (2009), Eclipse (2010) and
Breaking Dawn Parts I and II (2011, 2012). Rosenberg is active in the Writers Guild of
America’s Diversity Committee to support female screenwriters and co-founded the
League of Hollywood Women Writers. Other American female screenwriters illumi-
nated in the USA segment who are working post-millennium in a variety of film
genres include Nicole Holofcener (born in 1960, credits include Friends With Money
[2006], Lovely and Amazing [2001]); Darnell Martin (born in 1964, credits include I
Like It Like That [1994]); Aline Brosh McKenna (born in 1967, credits include The
Devil Wears Prada [2006], 27 Dresses [2008], We Bought a Zoo [2011]); Sofia Coppola
(born in 1971, credits include The Bling Ring [2013], The Virgin Suicides [1999], Lost
in Translation [2003]); and Nnegest Likke (born in 1970, credits include Phat Girlz
[2006]). Dana Stevens began with original work – Blink (1994) – and moved into
adaptations such as City of Angels (1998), For the Love of the Game (1999), Life or
Something Like It (2002, co-writer) and A Safe Haven (2013). There are many female
screenwriters working in Hollywood in recent years, such as Karen Moncrieff (The
Trials of Cate McCall [2013], The Dead Girl [2006, nominated for three Spirit Awards
and winner of the Grand Prix at Deauville in 2007], Blue Car [2002] and numerous
television credits), and many gain great respect (and good salaries); however, the
percentage of working females to males is still low – only 15 per cent of contracts
for feature writing gigs went to females (according to WGA statistics in 2014):
Female Screenwriters Lose Ground in Film: In the film section, female writers
fell further behind white males in 2012, accounting for just 15 percent of sector
employment (down from 17 percent in 2009). Women remained underrepresented
by a factor of more than 3 to 1 among screenwriters. (WGA Diversity Report 2014)
Female screenwriters in America have been ‘at work’ since film’s early years, many
in powerful business partnerships with mega-producers at the major film studios,
some by creating their own companies and writing/directing/producing their own
work. As the financial remuneration in the film industry grew, especially after
World War II, women found it more difficult to participate – for the now male-
dominated business tended to hire/reward its own gender. Research undertaken
by the Writers Guild of America shows that the ratio of female to male working
screenwriters does not look to be growing – in film or television.
The heritage of strong female screenwriters is evident in American film history.
Female screenwriters continue to supply thoughtful, adventurous and emotion-
ally resonating screenplays to the booming film industry, covering all film genres.
The League of Hollywood Women Writers hopes to raise the profile of women in
the industry and establish channels of opportunity. The advent of crowd-funding
and micro-budget filmmaking is providing young female writer/directors oppor-
tunities to produce work that will give them strong entry into the competitive
marketplace. New and exciting female screenwriters in the United States are gain-
ing footholds in commercial film nearly every day; this chapter includes many
of those who have contributed in the past and present – and with subsequent
editions of this book, the list is sure to grow. (Jule Selbo)
Women at work: Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940
Kristiina Hackel
The beginning of the 1940s found the Hollywood studio system thriving. The
vertically integrated studios known as the ‘Big Five’ – MGM, Warner Brothers,
Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and RKO – and the ‘Little Three’ – Columbia, United
Artists, and Universal – reigned supreme and turned out a mix of melodrama, film
noir, romantic comedies, and musicals to eager audiences. From the industry’s
perspective, war was great for business: the combined profits of the eight studios
rose from 19.4 million dollars in 1940 to 50 million in 1942, peaking at 60 million
in 1945 (Norman 2007: 208). However, by the end of the decade the film industry
was less robust, hurt by the beginning of TV service in 1946, the HUAC hearings
in 1947, and the Paramount Case in 1948. All of these destructive forces had been
brewing since the start of the decade. Studios had failed to take sufficient action
on the federal government’s ‘consent decree’ on block-bookings in 1940, so the
government had reopened its suit and sued the united ‘Big Eight’ all the way to
the US Supreme Court in 1948. As a result, the studios were forced to sell off their
theatre chains, ending their oligopoly and bringing the financial structure that had
supported the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood to an end. Although HUAC had been
investigating communist leanings in Hollywood as early as the 1930s, it gained
force when it became a standing committee after World War II. By the end of the
decade, its focus was firmly on the film industry and the nine days of hearings in
1947 led to the blacklisting of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ and hundreds of industry boy-
cotts. HUAC, and the investigations leading up to it, ruined careers and upended
an industry that had weathered a world war only to succumb to a different type of
paranoia and politics.
The studio lots of the 1940s looked much as they are depicted in Wilder’s Sunset
Boulevard (1950): each studio had a writers’ building and each studio commissary
had a writers’ table. Like actors, writers were usually contracted to the studios
and served the studio: the studio’s material, the studio’s producers and directors,
the studio’s stars. Women writers probably accounted for about 15 per cent of
studio writers in the 1940s, a significant but not large population (Francke 1994: 45).
However, for anyone viewing films of the 1940s, on-screen credits revealed very
few women’s names. Although the Screen Writers Guild had unionized as early as
1933, it was only officially accepted by the film studios as the ‘exclusive bargain-
ing agent for writers’ in 1939 after the end of a lengthy suit with the National
Labor Relations Board (New York Times 1939). The ‘screen credit’ system that
existed within the studios, even after the SWG was officially established, tended
to favour senior, and male, writers. Consequently, the first writer, or the name
that appeared on the screen, was just the tip of the iceberg, or the top layer of
complex, archeological strata: buried below the first writer was a second, and
often a third and a fourth. For example, the screenplay for the Joan Crawford film
Mildred Pierce (1945) is officially credited to Ranald MacDougall and earned him
an Oscar nomination. However, one click on the widely used industry credit site
IMDb reveals that seven additional writers worked on the picture, all uncredited
contract writers for Warner Brothers, four of them women. One of those writers
is Catherine Turney.
Born in Chicago in 1906, Turney attended the Columbia School of Journalism
and the Pasadena Playhouse School of the Theater. Early success with Bitter Harvest
(1936), her play that had a brief but popular run in London, led to her being
scouted by MGM; executives may have mistakenly thought that she was British.
After uncredited work on The Bride Wore Red (1938)2 for MGM with Waldo Salt,
Turney went back to the theatre with My Dear Children on Broadway in 1939.
Lured back to steady screenwriting in the early 1940s she worked as a contract
writer at WB from 1943–8 (Reginald 2010: 1108).
Turney’s work adapting James Cain’s Mildred Pierce reveals the complexity of
the screen credit system as it existed at that time. Turney was the first writer to be
approached by producer Jerry Wald to adapt James Cain’s 700-page novel. Turney
produced the first script, was replaced by Ranald MacDougall, then put back
on for rewrites when Michael Curtiz took over as director. Bette Davis wouldn’t
release Turney, who was working on A Stolen Life (1946) for her at the time.
According to Turney:
Randy MacDougall was assigned to work with Curtiz. The new flashback
sequence came through to me from the script department as I was still listed
as first credit on the script. When the final script was delivered to me, the
credits were reversed – I was second. It seemed a fair arrangement to me, as
Randy had been working closely with Curtiz … but my then agent thought
I should remove my name. I had received nothing but solo credits and my
agent objected to my being second banana, so to speak. As it turned out, it
was a grievous mistake on his and my part. (Vallance 1998)
So despite the offered credit, the fact that the film’s producer, Jerry Wald credited
Turney with ‘breaking the back of the story’, and the director, Michael Curtiz, stat-
ing that he used both the Turney and MacDougall scripts while shooting the film,
MacDougall ended up with the only on-screen credit and the Academy Award
nomination (Vallance 1998).
Turney describes her time at WB as follows: ‘They must have liked my work to
keep me on, for they were a male-oriented studio not particularly predisposed to
women writers. We were seen as a necessary evil and were seldom paid as much
as the men. But a lot of men were in the armed forces and they had all these big
women stars’ (Vallance 1998). When war broke out, thirty-five per cent of the
Screen Writers Guild was eligible for the draft, and around two hundred screen-
writers served (Norman 2007: 209). However, it wasn’t the absence of male writ-
ers that had the greatest impact on the careers of women writers in the 1940s; it
was the absence of A-list male actors. Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power,
Gene Autry, Robert Montgomery, Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda were just a few
of the huge names who went off to join the war effort. This led studios to place
more of an emphasis on their women stars, which led to more opportunities for
the women writers who were traditionally employed to write women characters.
Catherine Turney explains further: ‘The stars had to have roles that served them
well. They themselves wanted something where they weren’t just sitting around
being a simpering nobody’ (Francke 1994: 47).
Turney made a name for herself writing for the huge women stars of the time,
contributing to Roughly Speaking (1945) with Rosalind Russell and scripting One
More Tomorrow (1946) for Ann Sheridan and The Man I Love for Ida Lupino (1947).
She was a repeat collaborator with two of the greatest WB stars, scripting A Stolen
Life (1946) and Winter Meeting (1948) for Bette Davis, and My Reputation (1947)
and Cry Wolf (1947) for Barbara Stanwyck. Turney herself noticed the absence
of women writers on the lot. She states that she was often the only woman at
the writers’ table at the studio, as some writers like Lenore J. Coffee3 wrote from
home. Henry Blanke mentored Turney and showed her how to move away from
her playwriting background towards screenwriting. Turney is quoted as saying,
‘When I was first at Warners, I’d tell Henry, “I don’t know how to say this,” and
he’d say, “Have you ever tried saying nothing?” He taught me to let the camera
say it instead’ (Vallance 1998). Turney was also mentored by the German director
Curtis Bernhardt who taught her to handle sentimental moments ‘obliquely’ and
‘let the camera do as much as possible’ (Francke 1994: 49).
A 1944 article in the New York Times recognized the more prominent role that
women were taking in Hollywood. Stanley writes:
Picture-making, like everything else, is coming more and more under femi-
nine influence. The ladies, no longer content with being just glamorous, are
invading in increasing numbers the production field, a sphere hitherto almost
entirely masculine. For instance, Virginia Van Upp, the scenarist, will step into
the position of executive producer at Columbia … Miss Upp’s new berth is con-
sidered to be the most important executive position yet for a woman at a major
studio. She will have the overall supervision and the preparation and actual
filming of twelve to fourteen top-budget pictures to be made by Columbia dur-
ing the year. Working under her will be several associate producers – all men.
(Stanley 1945)
The ‘invasion’ this journalist describes was a very small military manoeuvre: only
three women had joined the ranks of producers in Hollywood.
Virginia Van Upp (1902–70) was born into the business: her mother was an
editor and title writer for Thomas Ince. Van Upp worked a number of jobs in the
industry before becoming a writer-producer. She was a child actress, a reader,
an assistant casting director, an assistant agent, and a secretary to writer Horace
Jackson before earning her own writing contract at Paramount from 1934–43
(Francke 1994: 62).
President of the studio, Harry Cohn, brought Van Upp over to Columbia to
write for Rita Hayworth on the script for Cover Girl (1944). Allegedly, Van Upp did
more than write the script for Hayworth, she ‘groomed her’ for stardom, down
to organizing her costumes (Francke 1994: 63). In doing so, she earned Hayworth
and Cohn’s trust. Although Van Upp wasn’t made a producer on Cover Girl, she
did get raised to assistant producer on her script The Impatient Years (1944) and
producer on What’s Wrong with Love (1944) weeks before the release of Cover Girl
(1944). Shortly after the successful reviews of the Irene Dunne vehicle Together
Again (1944), which Van Upp had written and produced, she was promoted to
executive producer. It is not a huge surprise, given her writing and producing suc-
cesses that year, that Van Upp made the Treasury’s list for high-salaried earners
in 1944. Van Upp made $118,833: more than Rosalind Russell and Charles Vidor,
but less than Harry Cohn.
Joan Harrison (1904–94), another of the ‘lady’ producers, is accurately described
as a ‘Hitchcock protégée’ (Stanley 1945). Harrison was hired as Hitchcock’s sec-
retary in 1933. Perhaps he was impressed by her education (Oxford and the
Sorbonne), or perhaps he was swayed by the extensive criminal knowledge she
had picked up by attending trials at the Old Bailey (where her uncle was a Keeper),
visiting Scotland Yard and attending the daily police line-ups (McCreadie 1994:
145). Although she started out with Hitchcock as a reader, she moved on to
become an advisor, a writer, eventually consulting with him on aspects of production,
and going with him to Hollywood in 1939 (Francke 1994: 56–7).
Harrison wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and received
Academy Award nominations for Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941)
and Saboteur (1942) before breaking off on her own as a writer for MGM and a
producer for Universal with Dark Waters (1944) and Phantom Lady (1944), both
film noir thrillers. A Universal Studios press release from the period struggles to
reconcile her feminine qualities and her genre of choice:
A girl with wavy blonde hair, dimples, and a 24-inch waistline could entertain
people with something besides crime stories. But not Joan Harrison. She lives
and breathes crime – in her imagination, of course – and then tells it to others
via the motion picture screen. Miss Harrison is a woman movie producer, one
of the few in Hollywood. Her feminine slant has added freshness to ‘cops and
robbers’ plots. (Francke 1994: 59)
The most extensive employer of screenwriters was MGM, which at the end of the
1930s employed twice as many screenwriters as any of the other studios (Norman
2007: 189). Dorothy Kingsley (1909–97) has one of those stories that demon-
strates the amount of perseverance it took to break into the film industry at that
time. As she tells it, she was lying in bed in Detroit with the measles thinking she
could write something just as funny as the radio show she was listening to. So
Kingsley wrote up some material, sent it in, and then went out to visit a friend in
Los Angeles to try to get an agent. Kingsley states that her age and her sex worked
against her: ‘It was impossible to get hired if you were a woman gag writer, as there
wasn’t such a thing at that time. Especially one that young’ (McGilligan 1997a:
116). When one agent agreed to take a chance on her, she went back to Detroit,
packed up her three kids and drove across the country. By the time she got back
to Los Angeles, that agent had gone out of business.
A friendship with star Constance Bennett led to one break, as Bennett used
her jokes on her radio show, The Pepsodent Hour. Kingsley also contributed to the
Bob Hope show under the table until her contact had a nervous breakdown and
was hospitalized. Her first legitimate job was for Edgar Bergen, who had placed
an ad in the paper stating that he would read anything. He got 400 submissions.
Kingsley and another writer were hired for a month-long trial, and at the end of
the month Bergen let the man go. Finally, Arthur Freed read one of Kingsley’s
scripts and brought her over to MGM to work on Girl Crazy (1943) for Mickey
Rooney and Judy Garland (McGilligan 1997a: 119).
Higham and Greenberg, in their comprehensive book, Hollywood in the Forties,
acknowledge the box-office appeal of women stars while denigrating the value
of their audience and content: ‘In the Forties, with the vast audience of lonely
women left behind by their soldier husbands, lovers and sons, the need for escap-
ist vehicles of this kind became clearly pressing’ (Higham and Greenberg 1968:
140). A popular Bette Davis film is dismissed, simply, as ‘piffle’ (Higham and
Greenberg 1968: 144). Even McGilligan, whose Backstory volumes were central in
rediscovering the history of women writers, had this to say about Kingsley’s work:
Kingsley specialized in patchwork construction and on-the-spot dialogue for

frothy musical comedies – especially the spectacular, escapist Esther Williams
vehicles, and later on, the more prestigious Broadway adaptations. Her motion
pictures are invariably lightweight and lavish, entertaining and jokey without
any overt social significance. Although something of an anachronism these
days they were popular with audiences in the years following World War II.
(McGilligan 1997a: 114)
Perhaps Kingsley didn’t help her own case by underselling her own artistic
leanings: ‘I only wrote because I needed the money. I had no desire to express
myself or anything like that’ (McGilligan 1997a: 120). However, Kingsley was
clearly a gifted writer whose work was in high demand, with a talent for originat-
ing and selling a story. Kingsley states: ‘I’d say that 70 percent of the things I wrote
came about because I went to the producer and said, “How about this?” or “I’ve
heard about this and I’d like to write it …”’ (McGilligan 1997a: 123).
Kingsley was especially gifted at placing music: one day Frank Loesser told her
he had a great song but didn’t know what to do with it. He played her ‘Baby, It’s
Cold Outside’. Kingsley loved it, wrote a scene for it in Neptune’s Daughter (1949)
for Esther Williams, and it won an Academy Award (McGilligan 1997a: 125). Some
of Kingsley’s later contributions include Angels in the Outfield (1951), Kiss Me Kate
(1953), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Pal Joey (1957), Can-Can (1960), and
Valley of the Dolls (1967).
One of Kingsley’s best friends at MGM was Isobel Lennart (1915–71). Lennart
started out as a stenographer and script girl before she became part of MGM’s
Junior Writer Program. Started by Thalberg in the 1930s and blossoming under
Mayer, the Junior Writer Program brought in up to a dozen writer hopefuls, often
women, who were informally mentored by a senior writer (Eyman 2005: 327).
Kingsley described Lennart as a ‘real writer’ devoted to her craft: ‘Isobel lived
for her work. She would get up in the middle of the night to write down a line’
(McCreadie 1994: 153). Lennart had a number of successes at MGM in the 1940s,
including Anchors Aweigh (1945), It Happened in Brooklyn (1947), and the charm-
ing, funny Holiday Affair (1949). Later films included the Elvis Presley vehicle Meet
Me in Las Vegas (1956), Academy Award-nominated Love Me or Leave Me (1956),
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), Academy Award-nominated The Sundowners
(1960), and Funny Girl (1968).
Helen Deutsch (1906–92) was another of the women writers at MGM. Deutsch
started in theatre, managing the Provincetown Players and then going on to write
theatre reviews and work for the Theater Guild. When she began to write for the
studios, she hit the jackpot with her second feature at MGM, her adaptation with
Theodore Reeves of Enid Bagnold’s popular novel National Velvet (1944) starring
Elizabeth Taylor. Other scripts from that decade were less wholesome, such as The
Loves of Carmen (1948) starring Rita Hayworth or Shockproof (1949), a film noir
directed by Douglas Sirk. Deutsch wrote throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and her
last screenplay was Valley of the Dolls (1967) with Dorothy Kingsley.
However, as one might expect in an industry dominated by men, it was not
only the ability to write for women stars that led to success. Strong relationships
with male directors and producers also created increased work opportunities.
Leigh Brackett (1915–78), a science fiction writer raised in Los Angeles, started
to explore screenwriting with The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) for Republic, but her big
break came from Warner Brothers when Hawks hired her to work with William
Faulkner on The Big Sleep (1946).4 The story is that Hawks read Brackett’s first
novel, No Good from a Corpse (1944), liked the dialogue, and had his secretary call
‘Mr Brackett’ in for a meeting. Brackett said that Hawks ‘was somewhat shaken
when he discovered that it was Miss not Mister Brackett but he rallied bravely and
signed me on anyway’ (Francke 1994: 81). During filming, Bogart complained
to Brackett about some of the lines he felt were too ‘genteel’. It turned out that
this was Faulkner’s dialogue. As Francke reveals, ‘Consequently, Bogart nicknamed
Brackett “Butch” and went to her with any dialogue he needed roughing up’
(Francke 1994: 82).
Brackett thrived writing for male characters: the private eye of film noir, the
lone sheriff of the western. Brackett went on to work with Howard Hawks for
twenty years. She states, ‘Hawks and I kind of tuned in on the same channel with
regard to the characters, and I think this is probably one reason that I worked
with him so long … I had somewhat of the same attitude towards the characters
as he did’ (McGilligan 1997a: 18). Later in her career Brackett was known for more
variations on her film noir and adventure characters with her screenplays for
The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
Another writer with a flair for masculine characters and dialogue was Marguerite
Roberts (1905–89). Born in Colorado, Roberts had bonafide western experience:
‘I was weaned on stories about gunfighters and their doings, and I know all the lingo,
too. My grandfather came west as far as Colorado by covered wagon. He was a sheriff
in the state’s wildest days. And my father was town Marshall’ (Francke 1994: 76–7).
A tough lady who allegedly had a fondness for jazz and horseracing, Roberts fol-
lowed her travelling salesman husband out to California, where she started out at
the Imperial Valley Press as a correspondent on the murder beat. She then took a
secretarial job at Fox and worked her way up to writer in 1933. By the 1940s she
was a contract writer for MGM, earning up to $2,500 a week, an extremely high
salary at the time. Roberts says of MGM, ‘I enjoyed MGM, it was like a club. If
you produced for them, they would treat you magnificently. They would throw
you right out the window if you didn’t’ (Francke 1994: 76).
Roberts’ first big hit for MGM was Honky Tonk (1941) for Clark Gable, an idea
she originated and co-wrote with her then-husband, screenwriter John Sanford.
Gable loved her writing – ’she writes men with more balls than any other guy
on this lot’ – and asked her to work on his next picture, Somewhere I’ll Find You
(1942) – Gable’s last picture at MGM before he enlisted (Francke 1994: 77). With
Gable’s departure, Roberts wrote for Katharine Hepburn: Dragonseed (1945) and
Sea of Grass (1947), as well as contributing to, Undercurrent (1946).
Betty Burbridge (1895–1987), Elizabeth Beecher (1898–1972), Frances
Kavanaugh (1915–2009), and Olive Cooper (1892–1987) didn’t work on prestig-
ious films with A-list stars. The majority of their work was at studios like Republic
that were much smaller and less significant than MGM or Warner Brothers. Their
titles, like Robin Hood of the Range (1943), The Silver Bullet (1942), and Western
Bound (1944), were mainly ‘oaters’, westerns done as ‘B pictures’ for Monogram,
Republic, Columbia, and Universal. Unlike Roberts, Burbridge had no western
experience, but she made up for that:
I read pulp westerns until I was bored to tears. But that’s how I learned the
story racket – that and talking to the movie cowboys on the set. When I began
doing these things I’d take my plots from the NY stage plays I’d seen. I’d simply
change the setting to the wide-open spaces, put the characters on horses, work
in a couple of chases with a sheriff and a posse – and there would be a screen
story. (Francke 1994: 75)
Although invariably shot in much less time and for a smaller budget than all
the other films mentioned thus far, these four women writers wrote prolifically
for decades, racking up an astounding number of film credits that testify to
their craft and professionalism. For example, between 1917 and 1949 Burbridge
scripted one hundred and twenty ‘oaters’ that never waned in popularity with
film audiences.
One of the most popular and beloved genres in the 1940s was the musical.
Musical writers Betty Comden (1917–2006) and Adolph Green met at the Village
Vanguard in New York, actors who wrote and performed their own material.
They were friends with Leonard Bernstein, who hired them to write the book and
lyrics for the Broadway musical On the Town, which they also performed in. They
came out to Hollywood in 1947 under contract to MGM and started work with
producer Arthur Freed. They were rarely rewritten, and no other writers were ever
assigned to their pictures (McGilligan 1997a: 78). Their first musical was Good
News (1947), followed by The Berkeleys of Broadway (1949) and On the Town (1949).
Their greatest hits were in the early 1950s: Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The Band
Wagon (1953).
Both Singin’ and Band Wagon were ‘catalogue pictures’, which meant Comden
and Green were handed an extensive song catalogue (of Freed and Brown, and
Schwartz and Dietz, respectively) and told to make a picture, nothing else. The
catalogue was unaccompanied by suggestions about period, characters or location.
As Comden put it, ‘All we were told was to write a movie and to get twenty or as
many as you can of these wonderful songs into a story … no clues’ (McGilligan
1997a: 87). Comden and Green were not married, but they wrote together for
over sixty years. Later scripts included It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), Auntie Mame
(1958), Bells Are Ringing (1960), and What a Way to Go! (1964).
A husband-wife writing team, film veterans Frances Goodrich (1890–1984) and
Albert Hackett, met as actors in 1924 in New York and swiftly became a writing
team working in theatre and then the pictures. They achieved great fame at MGM
with the witty comedy The Thin Man (1934) and the series of films that followed.
They went back to Broadway from 1939–44, but returned to Los Angeles to work
at Paramount, scripting a variety of genres: a musical, Lady in the Dark (1944),
for Ginger Rogers, the drama The Hitler Gang (1944), about the rise of Hitler, the
western The Virginian (1946), and finally the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life
(1946). They then returned to MGM with the musical smash Easter Parade (1948)
and In the Good Old Summertime (1949). Later successes included Father of the Bride
(1950) with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).
Another famous writing team that focused on comedies was Ruth Gordon
(1896–1985) and Garson Kanin. Ruth Gordon, best known to contemporary audi-
ences for her later role as Maude in Harold and Maude (1971), was a well-known
stage actor who had worked for twenty years in New York and London during
the 1920s and 1930s. Although Gordon had published a number of articles in
magazines such as Atlantic Monthly throughout the 1930s, it was her marriage
to Garson Kanin, the actor, playwright, stage director, and film director, which
prompted a new direction in her writing career. After returning from his army
service, Kanin was concerned he would return to his film work in Los Angeles and
Gordon would return to her theatre work and they’d be separated. He suggested
that Gordon work on his current film idea, A Double Life (1947), with him so they
could ‘be around each other all the time’ (McGilligan 1997a: 105). After Ronald
Colman won the Academy Award for the film and they were nominated for Best
Screenplay, they continued writing together: Adam’s Rib (1949), The Marrying
Kind (1942), Pat and Mike (1952). George Cukor, a friend of the couple, directed
all three films, which starred Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Unusually,
Gordon and Kanin5 were never under contract to any studio: all of their four
scripts were original story ideas that they wrote and sold. After their writing part-
nership dissolved, Gordon went on to write two other screenplays, The Actress
(1953) and Rosie! (1963), based on her plays, before winning an Academy Award
for her Best Supporting Performance in Rosemary’s Baby (1968).
Bella Spewack (1899–1990) and her husband, Sam, were leftist New Yorkers
who met when they were young reporters in the 1920s and spent years as cor-
respondents in Moscow before returning to New York and writing a play about
their experience. Many more plays followed, and the couple’s studio work began
in the 1930s by adapting their own plays into films. In addition to their many
screenplay contributions, the Spewacks were responsible for coining a Hollywood
formula: ‘Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl’, a line from their play Boy
Meets Girl (1935), which later became the screenplay Boy Meets Girl (1938) and
then the teleplay Boy Meets Girl (1949). Their later work stuck to the formula, but
somewhat eccentrically, as evidenced by My Favorite Wife (1940) with Cary Grant
and Irene Dunne, which received an Academy Award nomination for Original
Story, and Weekend at the Waldorf (1945).
Lillian Hellman (1905–84), unlike the Spewacks, was a writer whose poli-
tics remained at the forefront of her work throughout her career as she moved
between Broadway and Hollywood. In the 1930s she was a reader at MGM and
a successful Broadway playwright. Best known for her plays The Children’s Hour
(1934), In Days to Come (1936), and The Little Foxes (1939), she also worked on
the film adaptations of her plays, including The Little Foxes (1941), which was
nominated for Best Screenplay, Watch on the Rhine (1943), and The Searching
Wind (1946). Hellman received an Academy Award nomination for her original
screenplay The North Star (1943) about the Nazi invasion of a Ukrainian village.
Her activism helped establish the Screen Writers Guild in the 1930s, but also led
to her being one of the writers blacklisted in the late 1940s.
Aside from scouting writers from the theatre, studios were also on the lookout
for short story writers or novelists. One such writer was Margaret Buell Wilder
(1904–92), whose book Since You Went Away was based on her newspaper column,
‘Letters to a Soldier from His Wife’, for the Dayton Journal Herald about raising
two teenage daughters and taking in boarders to make ends meet while her
husband was serving in the war. Wilder wrote the screenplay for Since You Went
Away (1944) with contributions from David O Selznick, and also wrote Young Widow
(1946), A Stolen Life (1946) with Catherine Turney, and contributed to Pirates of
Monterey (1947).
One of the best-selling and best-known writers of the 1940s, Sally Benson
(1897–1972) earned her reputation writing film reviews and short stories at the
New Yorker. She contributed an outstanding ninety-nine short stories between
1929 and 1941, including two O Henry prize stories, earning a name for herself as
the New Yorker’s second most prolific writer of all time (Yagoda 2001: 156). Two of
her most popular series of short stories for that magazine, ‘Junior Miss’ and ‘5135
Kensington’, became the films Junior Miss (1945) and Meet Me in St Louis (1944).
Although Benson was not credited on the screenplay for Meet Me in St Louis, her
daughter recalls she was paid $5,000 for working on the dialogue (McCreadie
1994: 132). Other well-known films Benson shared credit on were Hitchock’s
Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), for which she received
a Best Screenplay nomination, and Conspirator (1949) starring Elizabeth Taylor
and Robert Taylor.
Like Benson, it was story writing that launched the screenwriting career of
Ketti Frings (1909–81). She got her break into the business when her novel was
optioned and scripted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett for Hold Back the Dawn
(1941). A structural contributor to Jane Eyre (1943), her first screenplay credit was
Guest in the House (1944). She went on to write additional screenplays including
the film noir The Accused (1949), The Company She Keeps (1951), and Come Back,
Little Sheba (1952). Frings had her greatest success writing for the stage, her play
adaptation of the Thomas Wolfe novel Look Homeward, Angel being nominated
for six Tony awards and winning the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Writers’ contributions were not only in the form of screenplays. Some writers,
like Virginia Kellogg (1907–81), excelled at story ideas. Kellogg’s first novel was
the basis for Mary Stevens, MD (1933) at Warner Brothers. In the 1940s her research
skills allowed her to sell a number of story ideas to the studios, including film
noirs T-Men (1947) and White Heat (1949) for Warner Brothers, the latter win-
ning an Academy Award Best Story nomination, and Caged (1950), an exposé of
the women’s prison system for producer Jerry Wald, for which she also wrote the
script. Vera Caspary (1899–1987) was also best known for her story contributions
to films of the 1930s and 1940s, with the exception of films based on her novels
like Laura (1944), for which screenwriter Elizabeth Reinhardt (1909–54) received
a Best Screenplay nomination. Caspary adaptated the Cosmopolitan Magazine
novel A Letter to Three Wives (1949) but did not receive screenplay credit (that
went to Joseph L. Mankiewicz) and therefore she missed out on an Oscar. However
the Writers Guild voted shared credit for Mankiewicz and Caspary and A Letter to
Three Wives won the Best Written American Comedy award.6
Mary C. McCall, Jr (1904–86) is another writer turned screenwriter, entering
the business when Warner Brothers hired her to help with the screenplay of Scarlet
Dawn (1932), which was based on her novel Revolt. She worked at Warner Brothers
throughout the 1930s and then moved to MGM to script Dramatic School (1938)
and then Maisie (1939) for Ann Southern. McCall went on to write eight out of
ten of the extremely popular ‘Maisie’ pictures, as well as The Fighting Sullivans
(1944) for Anne Baxter and Keep Your Powder Dry (1945) for Lana Turner (McCreadie
1994: 113). In addition to her work at MGM, McCall had the additional distinc-
tion of becoming the first woman president of the Screen Writers Guild, serving
from 1942–4 and then again from 1951–2.
Long partnerships between women writers and women stars were some of the
most rewarding collaborations for women screenwriters in the 1940s. For McCall,
and for Karen DeWolf who had success at Columbia with the ‘Blondie’ pictures
starring Penny Singleton, multiple films for the same woman star created the
foundation of their studio careers. Overall, although writers also thrived due to
a reputation built on noted plays or novels, during the war and the years that
followed the ability to write for female stars was a critical factor in the success of
women screenwriters.
Attraction and the pursuit of sex: an analysis of writer-directors

Cholodenko and Dunham’s female protagonists
Anna Weinstein
With screenwriters who direct their own scripts, we often have the opportunity to
watch films that don’t conform to the standard conventions of screen storytell-
ing. There’s a long history of writer-directors in US filmmaking; John Cassavetes,
Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson, for instance,
have been critically celebrated in the past quarter-century for their daring and
unconventional approaches to filmmaking.
Though there are far fewer female writer-directors in the United States, sev-
eral women have found critical and commercial success in recent years. Lisa
Cholodenko (1964–) has written and directed three award-winning films, High
Art (1998), Laurel Canyon (2002), and the Oscar-nominated The Kids Are All Right
(2010). She has also directed television and films written by other screenwriters.
Lena Dunham’s (1986–) work includes her 60-minute Creative Nonfiction (2009),
her festival-winning feature Tiny Furniture (2010), and her Golden Globe-winning
television series Girls (HBO, 2012).
Like their male contemporaries and predecessors, Cholodenko and Dunham
have found success in part because they explore provocative subjects in ways that
defy many of the covenants of traditional cinema. Perhaps most immediately
apparent are the unconventional journeys of their female protagonists, journeys
heavily weighted in the pursuit of sex. Traditionally, in Hollywood cinema, female
protagonists’ pursuits involve love, or more recently a balance between love and
career; however, in Cholodenko and Dunham’s work, we consistently see char-
acters trying to sort out the complexity of their sexual desires. Specifically, their
protagonists grapple with how attraction, or lack of it, plays into their sexual
experiences.
Cholodenko’s characters often explore sex acts outside their self-identified
sexuality – either lesbian sex when their experiences thus far have been hetero-
sexual, or heterosexual sex when they identify themselves as lesbian. Dunham’s
protagonists seek sexual experiences that they don’t particularly enjoy and sex
acts that take on forms other than missionary-style intercourse. Both filmmak-
ers continually question how attraction is reflected in a character’s journey. This
is particularly of interest to critics and the public because the female protagonists
in Cholodenko and Dunham’s stories often exhibit physical and emotional weak-
nesses, desires, and needs typically associated with male characters.
In both High Art and Laurel Canyon, Cholodenko’s heterosexual female protago-
nists find themselves unexpectedly pursuing older women. The films examine the
draw of same-sex partners and, eventually, the repercussions of their affairs. Her
most recent film, however, The Kids Are All Right (co-written by Stuart Blumberg),
approaches the subject of attraction from the other side of the continuum. The
film follows an ensemble cast of characters, including Jules (Julianne Moore) and
Nic (Annette Bening), a married couple whose lives are thrown off course when
their children, Joni and Laser (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson), seek out
a meeting with their sperm-donor father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). The family begins
to develop a relationship with Paul, and Jules soon finds herself attracted to him
and eventually having a sexual affair with him.
Despite being nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, critics have
found much to fault in Cholodenko’s script, including the representation of
same-sex parenting, white suburban lesbianism, and middle-class wives who don’t
work (Hernandez 2010). Some critics find fault in the dialogue and suggest that
the characters are simply prattling, saying nothing of relevance, and exposing a
lack of depth (Lane 2010; Ebert 2010). Several critics have faulted the script for
the major plot point of Jules’s affair with Paul, suggesting that audiences will read
into Jules’s choice (and thus Cholodenko’s choice) that lesbian parents need men
to complete their families (Garry 2010).
I would argue that it is distinctly Cholodenko’s attention to her characters’
dialogue and their choices as a means of revealing character that elevates The Kids
Are All Right. A writer’s task is to develop characters that surprise not only us as
viewers, but also themselves, and Cholodenko’s skillful and honest examination
of physical attraction in this film reveals the complexity of Jules’s desires.
There are two particularly telling events in The Kids Are All Right that offer
clues into the complexity of the journeys of Jules, Paul, and Nic with regard to
the role of attraction in intimacy and arousal. The first has to do with male por-
nography that Jules and Nic watch, apparently a routine part of their sex life. We
witness this scene, and then a later scene when Laser and his male teenage friend
discover the pornography and Jules walks in on them watching the video. Jules
attempts to explain to Laser why his ‘moms’ watch male porn:
JULES
Well, sweetie, human sexuality is complicated. And sometimes, people’s desires
can be ... counterintuitive ...
(soldiering on)
For instance, since women’s sexual responsiveness is mostly internal, some-
times it’s exciting for us to see sexual responsiveness more, you know ...
(beat)
... externalized.
Laser looks at them, still baffled.
JULES (CONT’D)
Like with a penis.
LASER
But like, wouldn’t you rather watch two women doing it?
JULES
You would think that. But in most of those movies, they’ve hired two straight
women to pretend and the inauthenticity is just unbear –
This and other scenes foreshadow and demonstrate the impetus for Jules’s journey
that follows. Screenwriters look for external representations of their characters’
internal conflicts, because it is the external (plot) that allows viewers to latch on
to and become involved in the characters’ internal struggle. And it is precisely
this external demonstration of Jules’s (and her lesbian partner, Nic’s) internal
struggle that helps us understand the complexity of attraction as it pertains to
sex. For these two characters, undoubtedly lesbian and wholly comfortable in that
identity, there is still an attraction to the opposite sex, and specifically to the male
member. We see this again later in the film, externalized even more sharply, when
Jules unbuttons Paul’s pants and is confronted with his penis for the first time:
She pulls down his underwear. Her eyes widen. It’s been decades since she’s seen
a hard cock in the flesh.
JULES
Oh. Well. Hel-lo!
Cut to them fucking. It’s gawky and passionate.
Undoubtedly we could view this moment as an illustration of the critical argu-

ment that the film implies lesbian couples need a man to complete their families.
However, the scene can be seen in another light: as a positioning to examine the
‘female gaze’, where a man represents merely a tool to help the woman become
aroused. This is in contrast to the ‘male gaze’, which feminist film critics have been
deciphering for decades – the male filmmaker behind the camera lens offering
images of women that serve only to pleasure male audiences.
This observation does not suggest an intentional rebellion on Cholodenko’s
part – to flip the gender roles and present man as object. Instead, I suggest that
this is an example of how a screenwriter and director who is interested in explor-
ing the uncomfortable zone of sexual attraction can seize an audience’s attention
by giving female characters complexity and depth.
Attraction and sex are not simple and easy to define. Elaine Blair deftly argues
in her review of Lena Dunham’s television series Girls for the New York Review of
Books (2012) that these are issues of great complexity, and that perhaps the way
in which women identify themselves as individuals navigating relationships is
entirely wrapped up in their image of themselves – the role of attraction in their
lives, and how sex, in all of its intimacy and potential awkwardness, is intertwined
with a person’s understanding of attraction.
In a persuasive analysis of the lesbian heroine in narrative feature film, Chris
Straayer (1994: 343) notes, ‘Acknowledgement of the female-initiated active sexu-
ality and sexualized activity of lesbians has the potential to reopen a space in
which straight women as well as lesbians can exercise self-determined pleasure.’
This is, perhaps, one of the reasons Lena Dunham is positioned to present her
hyper-sexualized version of twenty-something female stories on screen. Dunham
writes, directs, and stars in her work (Dunham’s feature film, Tiny Furniture, and
her earlier long-form narrative, Creative Nonfiction (2009), and her most recent tel-
evision series, Girls), focusing her efforts, especially in Girls, on twenty-something
female New Yorkers and their sexual endeavours.
There has been great interest and debate regarding Girls (see Nussbaum 2013;
Bennet 2013; Cadenas 2012). Golden Globe-winning television series are often
awarded plenty of critical reviews and analysis, but I suggest that, in this case,
Dunham is the subject of discourse because of what she looks like, the way in
which she exposes her body, and the arguably cruel emotional circumstances and
choices in the relationships that she offers her characters. Dunham is not conven-
tionally thin by Hollywood standards; her character, Hannah, regularly removes
her clothing and wears outfits that reveal the non-model-thin physique of her
body. Dunham allows Hannah to make choices regarding sex and attraction that
put her audience on edge; endless sexual encounters where Hannah engages in
sex acts that make her uncomfortable, such as when she watches awkwardly as
her boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver) masturbates.
In contrast to these positive responses from audiences and critics, Dunham has
been criticized for such things as being an exhibitionist, exploiting nudity and
sex for shock value, and using graphic sex as a ‘replacement for story’ (McNamara
2013). Yet, we might consider that Dunham has created a space where, as Straayer
suggests, women can acknowledge their sexual desires, celebrate their own large
or small forms, and explore their uncertainty about sex. Dunham’s work may be
providing an avenue for young women to begin tackling the complexity of how
attraction, or lack of it, dictates how they interact with others and the resulting
relationships that develop. Attraction doesn’t necessarily imply, as we see with
Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, that there is something more to be mined in
a relationship, such as the potential for love or even the desire for an emotional
or intellectual connection. Attraction, by itself and in all its complexity, is what
excites us and propels us into action. In an NPR interview with Terry Gross,
Dunham responded to some of the criticism aimed at Girls:
I think romantic comedy, when done right, is my favorite genre. It’s just a
genre that’s very human. Bridesmaids had a pink poster, and I loved it – and
I don’t want to call out any movie specifically, but there is a certain kind of
film that is not fun to me in a guilty-pleasure way, and there is a certain kind
of chick-lit book that isn’t even fun to me in a guilty-pleasure way, because
I don’t see any of myself in it. Because none of my actions – and maybe this is
speaking to my age, because I’m twenty-five – but none of my actions have ever
been [determined] by the search for a husband, or wondering if I was going to
have a family someday, or wanting to live in a really great house, or thinking
it would be really great to have a diamond.
The defying of the rom-com convention is evident in Dunham’s Tiny Furniture

(2010). When the film opens, Aura (played by Dunham) is just returning home
to her mother’s (Laurie Simmons, Dunham’s real-life mother) New York apart-
ment after graduation from college. Her sister, Nadine (Grace Dunham), quickly
verbally attacks her, and with Aura’s response, not two minutes into the film, we
discover her problem:
AURA
I just got off a plane from Ohio. I’m in a post-graduate delirium.
NADINE
I think you sound like you’re in the epilogue to Felicity.
AURA
The guy I thought I was going to marry just moved to Colorado. Cut me some
slack.
NADINE
You were not going to marry him. He’s like a little speck of granola on a bowl
of homemade yogurt.
Dunham’s dialogue in both Tiny Furniture and Girls sets her apart from her con-
temporaries; fresh, always surprising, and in a voice so confident and decisive, it
is impossible to ignore. With this opening dialogue in Tiny Furniture, one might
think that what Aura is about to pursue is a new man to marry; however, what
unfolds is a woman’s journey to resolve how she will establish herself as an artist,
specifically a filmmaker. Yet, Aura’s art overtly involves the pursuit of, if not sex,
then certainly the ‘gaze’. She’s a postmodern short filmmaker, posting her work
online and hoping to go viral; her work is images of herself slipping into a bikini
by a pool, resulting in comments from viewers about the size of her small breasts
compared to her belly, and so forth. Aura eventually pursues two men. One of
them, Jed (Alex Karpovsky), who she meets at a party, crashes at Aura’s mother’s
apartment, sleeping (finally) in the same bed with her but uninterested in sex or
intimacy. The other, a callous co-worker, Keith (David Call), the chef at a nearby
restaurant, is a constant source of anxiety, and he too mostly ignores her. Towards
the end of the film, Aura invites Keith to the public installation of her video; he
attends and then quickly asks her to leave with him. They have sex in a street
pipe, Keith spitting in his hand before entering her from behind. And impor-
tantly, Aura is disengaged from the act, certainly not reaching climax as Keith
does, nor finding any satisfaction in the experience; Aura, non-engaged, appears
to be reflecting on the journey and storing up the details for later recollection.
One of the many things that makes Dunham’s work compelling is that she
consistently defies the standard ‘rules’ of traditional screen storytelling – from
the bending of genre expectations to the exploration of unique banter-esque

dialogue that is often consigned to theatre. Perhaps one of the most interesting
elements in her work is the way she challenges the covenant that expects a pro-
tagonist to grow or change in a logical direction. Where we conventionally see
characters experience a recognizable arc of growth or change as a result of their
journey (as we witness, for instance, with Cholodenko’s characters, whose affairs
have repercussions), the emotional growth of Dunham’s protagonists is almost
imperceptible and certainly not logical. In Girls, Hannah’s growth over the course
of the show is something of a slow burning as she navigates the complexity of
her attraction for Adam and how this attraction, which is far more involved than
merely physical desire, leads to – scarily – love. Dunham allows Hannah to make
progress in one episode or series of scenes, but then regress even more readily in
the next. In Tiny Furniture, Aura’s growth is so insignificant that one could easily
argue it doesn’t exist. After finally experiencing the sex act, which she has been
pursuing throughout the film, she crawls into bed with her mother to ruminate
on the experience. She does tear up, which could be considered a form of growth,
because so far she’s only expressed her emotions by hiding behind self-reflective
humour. However, she’s nestled behind her mother in bed as her tears collect and,
in the end, her final action of removing the ticking clock (which is keeping her
mother from sleep) could as easily be read as a regression. She can’t make sense
of her attraction to Keith and the sex they just engaged in, so she will put that
ticking clock in another room so she doesn’t have to acknowledge it. One could
also read this as rebellion against the convention of the ‘ticking clock’ at the end
of the standard rom-com – where the protagonist races against time to reach the
love of her life and make amends.
Attraction, specifically for the female, as Dunham and Cholodenko explore, takes
on many forms. The multifaceted role of attraction in the dynamics of human inter-
action is never as simple as ‘me man, you woman’ or ‘me woman, you woman’. In
fact, there is a whole spectrum of physical, emotional, and intellectual attraction that
leads to desire and arousal on the most instinctive level of sex, but also on a deeper
psychosomatic level that is both exhilarating and terrifying. And when this universal
human truth is explored cinematically, in depth and with careful attention to char-
acter, this is when we are presented with the makings of great screen storytelling.
A to Z of American Women Screenwriters
Jay Presson Allen

Jacqueline (Jay) Presson (1922–2006) was born in San Angelo, Texas, daughter of
a department store clerk. She attended Miss Hockaday’s School for Young Ladies
in Dallas, Texas. At age eighteen, realizing she was not interested in pursuing a
higher education, she left for New York City with plans to become an actress.
Twenty years later she was a well-respected playwright, screenwriter, novelist
and producer for film and television and an Academy Award winner for Best
Adapted Screenplay for Cabaret in 1972. By the 1980s she was an important
Hollywood producer in a male- driven industry (Roddick 2005), one of ‘a handful
of first-rank screenwriters of the post-1960s who also happens to be female’

(McGilligan 1997b).
Film historian Patrick McGilligan interviewed Presson Allen in Backstory 3:
Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s. In the piece Presson Allen states, ‘I don’t
think I ever wanted to be a writer. I became a writer by default.’ In New York City,
while pursuing her acting career, she remembers, ‘[I] rather quickly discovered
that I only liked rehearsal. I didn’t like to perform. It was a shock.’ She tried mar-
riage (in her words, ‘marrying the first grown man who asked me …’), but shortly
after World War II, living in California, she was dissatisfied. Presson Allen decided
to try writing to gain ‘financial independence to end the union’ (Vallance 2006).
Her first book, Spring Riot (1948), was published. ‘I was so ignorant – I thought if
you wrote a book, it got published. It never occurred to me that you could write a
book which nobody would pay you for. The ignorance was breathtaking’ (Myers
2009). Presson Allen moved back to New York City, wrote a play and sent it to
theatrical producer Robert Whitehead.
I picked out this particular producer because he had produced Member of the
Wedding, which I loved, and my play was also about a child. I thought he
would like my play, so I sent it to his office. Ere long, I got it back, rejected,
and was astonished. I didn’t send it anywhere else for a couple of months.
Finally, I came to this conclusion; ‘I bet some reader rejected my play. I bet
Mr. Whitehead never read it.’ So I sent it back. And I had guessed right. The
reader who had read the play and rejected it had now gone off to Mexico with
a beautiful actress. This time Bob read the play himself and instantly optioned
it. The reader who had rejected my play came back in a couple of years, and
I married him … That was Lewis Allen, my husband. (Myers 2009)
Whitehead encouraged Presson Allen to write another play; in it she mined her
second marriage (to Lewis M Allen, the man who had rejected her first play and
who went on to be a successful theatre and film producer) for material and wrote
the caustic comedy The First Wife. This play never made it to the stage, but was
later made into a film, produced at Paramount Studios and titled Wives and Lovers
(1963). Presson Allen, after reading the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by
Muriel Spark, convinced Whitehead it would be a terrific play and said she wanted
to adapt it. Allen created a successful play out of the non-linear, somewhat experi-
mental novel that makes use of a flash-forward structure; she chose to approach
the characters and situations in a more realist manner and avoided the religious
issues brought up in the novel. She focused on Brodie’s failed love life (Stannard
2010). Her adaptation premiered in London at Wyndham’s Theatre in 1966 and
opened two years later on Broadway. It was the early draft of this play that caught
the eye of director Alfred Hitchcock; Hitchcock invited Presson Allen to come to
California to script Marnie (1964). Presson Allen said of Hitchcock:
He was a great teacher. He did it naturally, easily, and unself-consciously. In that

little bit of time that I worked for him, he taught me more about screenwriting
than I learned in all the rest of my career. There was one scene in Marnie, for
example, where this girl is forced into marriage with this guy. I only knew how
to write absolutely linear scenes. So I wrote the wedding and the reception and
leaving the reception and going to the boat and getting on the boat and the
boat leaving . . . I mean, you know, I kept plodding, plodding, plodding. Hitch
said, ‘Why don’t we cut some of that out, Jay? Why don’t we shoot the church
and hear the bells ring and see them begin to leave the church. Then why don’t
we cut to a large vase of flowers, and there is a note pinned to the flowers that
says, ‘Congratulations.’ And the water in the vase is sloshing, sloshing, slosh-
ing. Lovely shorthand. I often think of that. When I get verbose, I suddenly
stop and say to myself, ‘The vase of water.’ (Roddick 2005)
Presson Allen also credits Hitchcock’s wife, screenwriter and editor Alma Reville,
for tutelage: ‘[S]he was very influential in everything Hitch did. Alma was knowl-
edgeable, more sophisticated than Hitch. We were together all the time and got
along well.’
Although Marnie did not perform well in the marketplace, Presson Allen noted:
It is a very flawed movie, for which I have to take a lot of the responsibility – it
was my first script. Hitch certainly didn’t breathe on me. He loved the script I did,
so he did not make as good a movie as he should have made. I think one of the
reasons that Hitch was fond of me and filmed a lot of the stuff I wrote was that
I am frequently almost crippled by making everything rational. There always has
to be a reason for everything. And he loved that. (Myers 2009)
In 1968 Allen wrote her second Broadway theatrical hit, Forty Carats, an adapta-
tion of a French comedy. The next year, in 1969, 20th Century Fox produced
her film adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; the film garnered a Golden
Globe nomination for Best Screenplay. Her adaptation of the stage musical Cabaret
followed in 1972; she worked with Bob Fosse and producer Cy Feur, going back
to the Christopher Isherwood short novel, the original source material, Goodbye to
Berlin (1939). Cabaret received ten Academy Award nominations, including one for
Best Adapted Screenplay. Presson Allen became known as one of the ‘finest adap-
tors of plays and novels to the screen …’ (Bergan 2000). The trick, she stated in
an interview, ‘is not to throw out the baby with the bath water. You can change
all kinds of things, but don’t muck around with the essence …’ (Bergan 2000).
Presson Allen noted that she was a ‘chronic reader. Compulsive, chronic reader.
I could never get enough of books. I was and am a bookworm. And I’ve always
been interested in the why of human behaviour. I think most dramatic writers are
natural psychologists’ (Myers 2009).
Presson Allen’s experience on the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1969 novel
Travels with My Aunt was her first foray into rewriting. Screenwriter Hugh Wheeler
completed the first draft of the Katharine Hepburn vehicle; Presson Allen was
brought in by director George Cukor to do a rewrite. Hepburn, whose career was in
jeopardy at the time, did not want to play the lead character, a rather ‘crazy’ woman,
but she and Cukor were close friends and Hepburn did not want to disappoint him.
Hepburn stalled, consistently citing flaws in the screenplay. Finally Presson Allen,
knowing that Hepburn was a very good writer, suggested Hepburn take on the
rewrite, which she did. The film was eventually made in 1972 with Maggie Smith
in the starring role, and the only thing remaining of Presson Allen’s script was a
long piece of dialogue. However, the Writers Guild, noting that Hepburn was not
a member, forced the credit issue and, under pressure from the producers, Presson
Allen agreed to have her name on screen as screenwriter along with Hugh Wheeler.
In her interview with Patrick McGilligan, Presson Allen stated, ‘I’ve never made any
bones about writing that movie’ (Myers 2009).
Presson Allen parlayed her success as a screenwriter into executive producer
credits on feature films It’s My Turn (1980), Just Tell Me What You Want (1980),
Prince of the City (1981) and Deathtrap (1982). She optioned the 1978 book writ-
ten by Robert Daly titled Prince of the City for Lumet to direct; it was based on a
real-life New York Police Department narcotics detective. Lumet and Presson Allen
began to plan out the script:
I didn’t want to write that movie (Prince of the City). I was tired. I just wanted
to produce it. I thought it seemed like a hair-raising job to find a line, get a
skeleton out of the book, which went back and forth … all over the place.
I thought it was too big a job. I told Sidney there were other writers we could
get. But Sidney said he wouldn’t do it if I didn’t write it. He said, ‘Would you
write it if I do an outline first?’ I said, ‘Do the outline, and we’ll see.’ So we
sat down together and went over the book and the scenes, and agreed on the
scenes and characters that we felt we absolutely had to have, as well as a gen-
eral thrust for the movie … It was the first time I had ever written anything
about living people – so I interviewed almost everybody in the book. And I had
right next to me – the minute I was stuck on anything – all those phone num-
bers to dial. I could dial the real characters and say, ‘This doesn’t sound right to
me …’ Eventually, I sat down with my interviews, what Sidney had done, the
book and the telephone numbers, and turned out a three-hundred-and-some-
page script in ten days.’ (Myers 2009)
Presson Allen’s writing regimen was gruelling. She would do her thinking,
outlining and research and then:
I don’t do anything but write. I get up and I write and I write, until I have to go
to sleep; then, I get up, eat something, then go back to work. I do a script very
fast, because I don’t stop. All day. All night, until I’m too sleepy. Of course, I do
a lot of rewriting. A tremendous amount of rewriting … I take a little exercise
now and then, a little run. I use an old Underwood 1949 typewriter, which
takes a lot of pounding and gets a lot of aerobic stuff going for you … The easi-
est part is going into some kind of over(drive). When you come out, you don’t
know who wrote it. That’s kind of wonderful. You start writing at eight o’clock
in the morning. The first thing you know it’s two, and you don’t remember
that time. That’s when all the good stuff happens. If I have to labor and sweat,
it’s never any good. (Myers 2009)
Presson Allen would develop ‘some of the most memorable roles for women in
the late 1960s and 1970s’ (Robertson 2006); this is evident from her work on
Marnie (1964), Cabaret (1972), and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Her strong
female characters were often facing divorce or marital problems, or were in highly
charged relationships. Marnie featured a sexually repressed kleptomaniac with
fears of the colour red and thunderstorms. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Miss
Brodie was a woman of comical and sympathetic characteristics, far from the nov-
el’s portrayal of a damaged and complex character (Roddick 2005). Her adaptation
(co-written with Arnold Schulman, based on his story) of Funny Lady (1975) also
features a female character who possesses a wry wit and who often uses off-colour
wisecracks, a characteristic that Presson Allen possessed in her real life (Robertson
2006). Presson Allen noted, ‘male characters are easy to write. They’re simpler …
you have to put a little more effort into writing a woman’ (Vallance 2006).
Presson Allen also worked in television. She created the dramas Family (1976–80,
Spelling-Goldberg Productions for ABC Network) and Hothouse (1988, Lorimar
Pictures for ABC Network). Her final stage hit would be Tru, a one-man show,
based on Truman Capote’s writings, which she also directed (Vallance 2006). In
the later years of her career, Allen focused on script-doctoring work. She died of a
stroke on 1 May 2006 at the age of eighty-four in Manhattan. (Jule Selbo)
Allison Anders
Allison Anders (1954–), born in Ashland, Kentucky, the daughter of Luanna
Anders (veteran Roger Corman B-movie actress), experienced a difficult child-
hood. Abandonment, abuse and rape drove her to seek refuge in movies and pop
music, especially Beatles songs by Paul McCartney (Hudseth and Morris 2002:
9–10). The films of her childhood would go on to influence and find a presence
in her own filmmaking. From her early childhood she recounts:
The most significant movie I saw (when I was five) was A Stolen Life (1946),
which is one of the great melodramas, and the first film that Bette Davis pro-
duced for herself … it set up my idea of romantic love, of soulmates, for life. In
fact the original ending for Gas Food Lodging was the next to last image of that
film. (Lowenstein 2000: 50–1)
As a teen, Anders’ film-viewing experience expanded as she sampled films from

Europe, especially films of the French New Wave. Anders stresses that as a teen she
wrote poetry, because ‘movies weren’t something I ever thought I could venture
into. It was still like directors were guys. I think I was probably nineteen years old
when I realized that there were some female directors like Ida Lupino’ (Lowenstein
2000: 52–3). Her teen years also included a mental breakdown, institutionalization,
foster care, and several suicide attempts (Hurd 2007: 74). After dropping out of high
school, Anders left Los Angeles, where her mother lived, and took a bus to Kentucky.
On the bus trip Anders, now age seventeen, met a young man and followed
him to London, arriving at the start of the punk rock movement. There she had
her first child. While in England, she saw films not available in America, such as
‘Solaris and a lot of Russian films’ (Lowenstein 2000: 53). She also became aware
of the early films of German filmmakers Wim Wenders and Rainer Fassbinder
and appreciated their forms of storytelling. When she moved back to the United
States, she worked as a waitress to support herself and her child, and by the time
she applied to the UCLA film school, she had already put herself through an
extensive self-education in film by attending art-house cinemas.
UCLA refined her critical awareness and began her filmmaking experience. In
1984 Anders landed an internship on Wim Wenders’ film Paris, Texas (Hudseth
and Morris 2002: 10). From Wenders, she learned ‘the production always reflects
what the film is about …’ (Lowenstein 2000: 57). In an interview with Stephen
Lowenstein for his book My First Movie: Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk about
Their First Film (2000), Anders notes, ‘This is why I don’t subscribe to the Robert
Rodriguez school of “Just get a camera and shoot.” Film is not just about pointing
a camera at anything. You’ve got to learn how to create meaning’ (Lowenstein
2000: 55). Anders’ student screenwriting won prizes, such as the prestigious
Samuel Goldwyn Award and the Nicholl Fellowship. Before finishing at UCLA,
she and her writing/producing partner, fellow student Kurt Voss, began working
on an independent feature Border Radio (1987, co-written by Anders, Voss and
Dean Lent). Border Radio would take Anders and Voss four years to complete –
often having to stop to find more financing. Border Radio concerns a musician,
Jeff Bailey (evoking George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life [1946]), hiding in the
Mexican desert while his wife searches the Los Angeles punk rock scene for him.
Border Radio, like their student films, bore a particular stamp, according to Anders:
Our movies were very different from the films that anyone at UCLA was mak-
ing at the time. There was this weird excitement about them, because they
weren’t trying to be Hollywood movies and they weren’t experimental movies.
But they were personal, and very reminiscent of German cinema at the time.
(Lowenstein 2000: 56)
Border Radio would go on to win Best First Feature from the Independent Spirit
Awards. At the time, because it was her first feature, Anders claimed, ‘I didn’t
know what the hell I was doing’ (Hudseth and Morris 2002: 10).
Anders moved on to work by herself, adapting and directing her next film, Gas
Food Lodging (1991). It garnered even more attention for Anders, and reflected an
even more complex personal connection. She said, ‘There was a lot of unrequited
love stuff I used in the film …’ (Mercurio 1996: 26) and ‘I thought, God, I can’t
believe that I didn’t write this because I was a single mom myself’ (Lowenstein
2000: 60). Anders speaks of relying on the melodrama genre to guide the screen-
writing, giving her personal definition of the genre in this way:
Melodrama is a genre of film which tells the story from the inside out. It charts
the interior of a character, and their actions happen as a result of what’s going
on inside them … The voiceover helps you to get inside, because you’re starting
in someone’s head in a way. You’ve seen the environment and you’re standing
outside and you’re going inside. (Mercurio 1996: 26–7)
Gas Food Lodging earned a Best New Director Award for Anders from the New York
Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. In 1992, Anders became a
distinct female voice as a screenwriter/director in America’s emerging independ-
ent feature scene.
Her next film, Mi Vida Loca (1993), maintained Anders’ personal relationship
with the material, this time reflecting on the neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. In
a Rossellinian, Italian neo-realism style, Anders relied on real gang members for
‘their ideas, plot suggestions, line readings, and hand gestures’ (Foster 1995: 12).
She also cast gang members. Foster’s summary of the film reveals how Anders
combines her film education, directing, and personal experience in Mi Vida Loca:
[It’s] surprising that the acting in the film is often overwrought and lacking in
realism. If you can get past the acting, there’s a genuinely new story told in
Mi Vida Loca, that of the female gangster in Los Angeles, a melodramatic plot
suffused with realism. Anders calls the film ‘Douglas Sirk in the barrio,’ allud-
ing to her melodramatic flare. (Foster 1995: 12)
In 1995 Anders was among the few chosen to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant,
a yearly prize awarded to those who show exceptional merit and promise for
continued and enhanced original and insightful creative work. The prize is a
cash award to be spent as the recipient sees fit. Anders’ next work was an install-
ment, ‘The Missing Ingredient’, in Four Rooms (1995), a film that features various
narratives, all taking place in the same fading hotel room, each the product of a
different filmmaker (in this case Anders, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and
Alexandre Rockwell). In 1995, Martin Scorsese agreed to produce Anders’ Grace
of My Heat (1996), which would become the second film in her trilogy examin-
ing musicians and the music industry. Grace of My Heart follows a female singer/
songwriter in the 1960s and Sugar Town (1999) covers the ‘drug-addicted, fame-
obsessed, washed up glory’ of the Los Angeles music scene (Hudseth and Morris
2002: 11).
In 2001, Anders returned to personal introspection and melodrama with Things
Behind the Sun. In this film, Sherry is hitting it big as a female rock artist, espe-
cially for a song about being raped. The event haunts her. A rock journalist in Los
Angeles hears the song and realizes his brother was involved, and that he himself
was drawn into the crime. He heads to Florida, ostensibly to interview her, but
really to face his guilt. Anders, according to Hurd, returned to the house in Florida
where she was attacked as a teenager to film the rape scene. Things’ success was
more critical than financial; it earned Anders a Peabody Award.
The commitment to writing and directing personal material for feature films
has proven difficult for Anders, and she, like other women writer-directors of
the 1980s and 1990s, turned to television to keep working. Anders has directed
television shows that maintain strong women characters, like Sex and the City
(1998–2004, a series illuminating the lives, loves and sex lives of four best girl-
friends in New York City) and The L Word (2004–9, an ensemble series illuminating
the lives and loves of homosexual women). She has also directed crime dramas
and television movies. James Mercurio, in his interview with Anders for Creative
Screenwriting in 1996, asked if she considered herself a writer or a director first.
She replied:
I consider myself a director first. But my need to write is pretty intense, and
I might not always be able to direct, but I will always be able to write. There
is a kind of gratification I get from writing that I don’t get from shooting.
(Mercurio 1996: 26)
Anders, in addition to writing and directing, continues to explore her interest in

film, writing, and music by teaching courses such as rock ‘n’ roll films, autobio-
graphical writing, and music supervision at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. (Robert Arnett)
Jane Anderson
Jane Anderson (1954–) was raised in Northern California. She attended Emerson
College in Boston and studied drama for two years before dropping out at age
nineteen and moving to New York to pursue an acting career. In 1982 she was a
regular on The Billy Crystal Comedy Hour and moved into television comedy writ-
ing. In 1993 she earned an Emmy Award and a Writers Guild Award for writing
HBO’s The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom,
based on the true story about a Texas cheerleading mom who attempts to hire
a hit man to kill off her daughter’s cheerleading rival and/or the rival’s mother.
Anderson made her feature film screenwriting debut with It Could Happen to You
(1994), a romantic comedy based on real events about a police officer who jok-
ingly promises to share his potential lottery winnings with a café waitress to make
up for the absence of a tip. When he does win – and shares his winnings with the
waitress – his marriage to a greedy wife disintegrates – and he falls in love with
the waitress. How to Make an American Quilt (1995) was an adaptation of Whitney
Otto’s novel about a young bride-to-be who sits in on quilting sessions with older
women who tell their tales of romance. In 1998, Anderson adapted her play The
Baby Dance, about a wealthy Jewish couple trying to adopt a baby from a rural and
poor Louisiana family, for Showtime cable network. In 2003, Anderson wrote and
directed Normal for the HBO cable network, receiving Golden Globe nominations
in the process; the story was based on her stage play Looking for Normal, about
a husband and father to grown children who suddenly announces his desire for
a sex-change operation. She followed this by adapting and directing the feature
film The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio (2005), based on the true story of a mother
of ten children who supports her family by entering commercial jingle-writing
contests. In 2013, Anderson penned HBO’s Olive Kitteridge. Anderson works as an
artist, a playwright, screenwriter, director and producer. (Warren Lewis)
Edna Anhalt
Edna Anhalt (1914–87) won an Academy Award for Best Writing, Motion Picture
Story for the screenplay Panic in the Streets (1951, directed by Elia Kazan), which
she co-wrote with her husband, Edward Anhalt. Born Edna Richards on 10 April
1914 in New York City, she married Anhalt in 1935 and divorced him in 1956.
Edna and Edward began their writing partnership creating short stories for pulp-
fiction magazines using the pseudonym of Andrew Holt. Under that name they
sold their first screenplay, Strange Voyage (1946). Holt is also the name credited
with Avalanche (1946); that credit appears on Edward Anhalt’s Internet Movie
Database (IMDb) page, but does not appear on Edna’s; this is likely a recording
error on the site since, whenever Edward wrote alone, he used his own name. Edna
and Edward, under contract at Columbia Pictures, worked on Bulldog Drummond
Strikes Back (1947). In 1948 and through 1950 they worked individually rather
than as a team. Edna wrote a crime drama/romance, Embraceable You (1948), and
a series of westerns: The Younger Brothers (1949), The Return of the Frontiersman
(1950) and Sierra (1950).
Working again as a team in 1952, the Anhalts adapted Carson McCullers’ novel
and successful Broadway play The Member of the Wedding as well as The Sniper
(1952)å. Edna and Edward earned another Academy Award nomination for the
story of The Sniper. This film offers evidence of how involved these writers were
with directorial decisions. In his autobiography, director Eddie Dmytryk discussed
the offbeat casting choice of the usually debonair Adolphe Menjou as a dumpy
detective. Dmytryk specifically stated that ‘we’ agreed on Menjou and went on to
define ‘we’ as including producer Stanley Kramer and the Anhalts (Dmytryk 1978).
The Anhalts adapted Not as a Stranger (1955) and The Pride and the Passion (1957)
for director Stanley Kramer. According to Edward’s obituary, during the writing of
Not as a Stranger the couple began fighting with the studio and within the mar-
riage. They divorced the next year in 1956; however, they completed the adapta-
tion of CS Forrester’s The Gun into the 1957 film script for The Pride and the Passion.
After their divorce, Edna worked in television, writing ‘Circle of the Day’ for
Playhouse 90 (1957), ‘The Hole Card’ for Schlitz Playhouse (1957), and ‘Hideout’ for
The Virginian in 1965. She died in 1987. (Rosanne Welch)
Alice Arlen
Alice Arlen (1940–) was born Alice Albright Patterson and grew up in Chicago,
Illinois, the granddaughter of pioneering newspaper publisher Cissy Patterson.
She attended Radcliffe College and worked as a journalist in Chicago. After
marrying Michael Arlen, she moved to New York and re-connected with her
friend, Nora Ephron, who asked Alice to collaborate on the screenplay Silkwood
(1983). The film was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe nominations
for Best Screenplay. Other screenplay credits include Alamo Bay (1985), Cookie
(1989, co-written with Nora Ephron), The Weight of Water (2000, co-written with
Christopher Kyle, adapted from a novel by Anita Shreve) and the adaptation of
the Elinor Lipman novel Then She Found Me (2007, co-written with Victor Levin
and Helen Hunt).
Dorothy Arzner
Dorothy Arzner (1897–1979) is perhaps best known as a film director. Arzner
directed the ‘It’ girl Clara Bow’s first talkie, The Wild Party (1929). However, as
Arzner was working her way up to her desired position as director, she wrote
scenarios for numerous silent films: The No-Gun Man (1924), Breed of the Border
(1924), The Red Kimono (1925) and When Husbands Flirt (1925). She wrote adven-
ture films and western films as well as ‘women’s’ films (Hurd 2007: 3). Arzner was
born in San Francisco and had planned on going to medical school; however, on
returning from the First World War (where she had served as an ambulance driver)
she decided she would enter the film business. With the help of William C. de
Mille, she became a stenographer at Paramount Pictures. She moved into scenario
writing and then became a sought-after film editor at the studio before concen-
trating on directing. She was the first woman in the Directors Guild of America. As
a director, Arzner worked with screenwriters Zoe Akins, Mary C McCall and oth-
ers to develop storylines that explored the woman’s role in relationships and the
sacrifices and challenges of remaining true to oneself. These often explored the
desire for independence of female characters that, despite experiencing feelings of
love, felt shackled in romantic relationships with men, and included Christopher
Strong (1933) and Craig’s Wife (1936) (Hurd 2007: 4). Arzner’s most famous film
is perhaps Dance Girls Dance (1940); when given the assignment, Arzner worked
with screenwriter Tess Slesinger (1905–45) to make the two characters, burlesque
dancer Bubbles (Lucille Ball) and aspiring ballerina Judy (Maureen O’Hara) more
strong-willed, complex and fiercely independent; ‘the overriding mood of Arzner’s
films is sympathetic to the women characters who struggle to advance their own
ambitions even as the men in their lives oppose or destroy them’ (Heck-Rabi 1984:
81). Arzner felt her experience in the industry was not hindered by her gender:
‘No one gave me trouble because I was a woman. Men were more helpful to me
than women’ (Peary and Kay 1975). In the 1960s and 1970s Arzner was a profes-
sor at the UCLA film school, teaching screenwriting and directing until her death
in 1979.
Norma Barzman
Norma Barzman (1920–) was born in New York City as Norma Levor. She moved
to Hollywood in 1941 where her screenwriter cousin enrolled her in a left-leaning
school of writers (Baum and Miller 2012: 54). She married journalist/screenwriter
Ben Barzman in 1942 who was already a member of the Communist party. She
joined the Communist party noting, ‘The Hollywood progressive community in
the 1940s was so wonderful, so exciting to be part of’ (Baum and Miller 2012:
54). She began work writing for a newspaper and moved into screenwriting. She
penned Never Say Good-bye (1946; credited for ‘story by’) and The Locket (1946;
uncredited). In 1949, out of fear of being blacklisted by HUAC, she moved to
southern France with her husband. They were officially blacklisted in 1951, and
she later said, ‘From 1951 through 1956, we were frightened most of the time,
felt that our country was spying on us, and never knew if our next job would be
our last’. However, she continued with her screenwriting; credits include Finishing
School (1953, using the front name of Ennio Flaiano) and the television series Il
triangolo rosso (1967). Her book The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a
Hollywood Expatriate was published in 2003.
Barbara Benedek
Barbara Benedek (1956–) was born in the United Kingdom but immigrated to
the United States. Benedek majored in psychiatry at New York University and
worked as a psychiatric research assistant in Los Angeles and New York for eight
years. After becoming interested in film and television writing, she worked with
Witt-Thomas-Harris, a television production company, as a sitcom storywriter
and editor on series such as Making a Living and I’m a Big Girl Now. In 1983, while
working for screenwriter/director Lawrence Kasdan, Benedek collaborated with
the director and actor Tom Berenger to develop The Big Chill. She shares writ-
ing credit with Kasdan on the film; it focuses on a multi-character cast gathered
together for a funeral and includes the thematic motif of needing to face the past
in order to move on in life. The Hollywood Foreign Press nominated the film in
the Best Screenplay Award category and she shared the 1983 Academy Award for
Best Original Screenplay with Kasdan. In 1990, Benedek wrote Immediate Family;
the story focuses on a couple (Glenn Close and James Woods) who plan to adopt
a pregnant teen’s baby. When the baby is due, the teen has second thoughts. Later
that year, her screenplay (co-written with Paul Brickman), based on her screen
story inspired by the French film La vie continue, was released; this was Men Don’t
Leave, a comedy-drama about a woman whose husband dies and leaves her with
large debts. Financial troubles cause her to sell her home and move herself and her
two young sons to Baltimore to start a new life. False starts, children acting out
and a bout of depression follow; however, the family comes together in the end.
In 1995, Benedek collaborated with David Rayfiel on the commercially successful
remake of 1954’s Sabrina, originally penned by Billy Wilder, Samuel A Taylor and
Ernest Lehman. (Megan Reilly)
Sally Benson
Sally Benson (1897–1972) was born in St Louis, Missouri. She was a young girl
when her family moved to New York City where she attended the Horace Mann
High School. She was employed by the New York Morning Telegraph as a writer
and film critic and went on to write ninety-nine stories (two honoured with
O Henry prizes) for the New Yorker magazine under the pseudonym Esther Evarts.
The play and the film Junior Miss (1945) were based on her stories as well as
the film Meet Me in St Louis (1944); she was not involved in the writing of the
produced screenplays. Screenplays that she shared credit on include Shadow of a
Doubt (1943, sharing credit with Thornton Wilder and Alma Reville), the Academy
Award-nominated script Anna and the King of Siam (1946, sharing credit with
Talbot Jennings), Come to the Stable (1949, sharing credit with Clare Booth Luce
and Oscar Millard), Conspirator (1949, sole screenplay credit), No Man of Her Own
(1950, sharing credit with Catherine Turney), The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953, shar-
ing credit with Walter Bullock and Joseph Fields), Summer Magic (1963, based on
the book by Kate Douglas Wiggins), Viva Las Vegas (1964, sole credit), the adap-
tation of the play Signpost to Murder (1964), and The Singing Nun (1966, sharing
credit with John Furia). Benson also wrote scripts for television (McCreadie 1994:
127). Benson is quoted in the Brooklyn Eagle on 8 July 1952 about her work in
Hollywood: ‘I’m a fast worker – they found that out when I was under contract in
Hollywood, and you never saw more jobs shoved onto one author. I was darned
well paid, of course, but I realized too late that they actually were saving money
by letting Benson do it’ (McCreadie 1994: 138).
Clara Beranger
Clara Beranger (1886–1956) was born Clara Strouse in Baltimore, Maryland. Her
father, Benjamin Strouse, was an immigrant from Germany. She attended Goucher
College in Baltimore and graduated in 1907. Beranger married Albert Berwanger
in 1909 and began her career as the freelance scenario writer of nearly fifty silent
films on the East Coast (working under the pseudonym Charles S Beranger), for
Edison, the Kalem Company, Vitagraph and the Fox Corporation. Her silent
film credits include Anna Karenina (1915), Wanted: A Husband (1919) and Sadie
Love (1919), the two latter films starring actress Billie Burke. One of Beranger’s
most recognized titles is the adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1920, co-written with Thomas Russell Sullivan), starring
John Barrymore and Nita Naldi; the film was shot in New York’s Long Island
Astoria Studios. This experience solidified her working relationship with direc-
tor Cecil B DeMille and his brother, director/writer William C de Mille. (Cecil B
DeMille’s older sibling retained the original family spelling of the name.) When
DeMille’s Famous Players-Lasky film company moved to Hollywood, Beranger
also made the move, signing a long-term contract. She went on to write more
than twenty silent film scenarios for Famous Players-Lasky from 1920 to 1929.
In 1920, when Beranger and her daughter, Frances, moved to California, she
became engaged to her second husband, William C de Mille. He directed many
of her scenarios, including a narrative about a woman who discovers that her
husband is married to someone else. This story related to her personal life; when
William de Mille met Beranger he was still married but divorced his wife in 1926,
marrying Beranger in 1928. Beranger’s credits in the sound era include adapta-
tions of His Double Life (1934) and The Social Register (1934).
In an interview with screenwriter and movie columnist Louella Parsons in 1922,
Clara Beranger noted:
I will be out in California when Mr. DeMille begins operations. Under my old
contract I furnished eight continuities a year; now that I work only for William
deMille I only write four. That gives me an opportunity to see my work through
from the story to the screen. It makes it possible for me to go over my script
scene by scene with the producer, so he can make the picture with almost no
changes. In the old days I had to keep my nose to the grindstone continually
so as to finish the eight pictures in time for the different directors for whom
I was writing. (Parsons 1922)
In addition to writing, she worked as a producer for Marguerite Clark, Dorothy

Dalton, and John Barrymore (Lowrey 1920). Although she retired from screenwrit-
ing in 1934, she continued to write for various magazines and penned inspira-
tional books such as You Can Be Happy (1946). Beranger believed there was a need
to educate future generations in screenwriting and the film arts (Edwards 1988).
In 1929, she became one of the founding members of the University of Southern
California Cinematic Arts Department, which began as a collaboration with the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She also wrote a how-to text in
1950, Writing for the Screen. In her introduction she writes:
The art of fiction is the source from which every form of storytelling derives.
Thus, before a student attempts to apply his talent to screenwriting, he should
understand something of the parent art and the principles governing other
mediums of story expression. He should also recognize that … a drama is a
composition to be acted in a theatre before an audience. No matter how great
his inspiration, nor how brilliant his language, an author will not get far in
screenwriting unless he considers the vast audiences before whom his work
will be shown.
Clara Beranger died of a heart attack in 1956. (Megan Reilly and Jule Selbo)
Eleanor Bergstein
Eleanor Bergstein (1938–) was born in Brooklyn, New York. While attending uni-
versity, she worked as a dance instructor, using the talents she honed as a young
girl at summer resorts in the Catskill Mountains in New York state and compet-
ing in local ‘Dirty Dancing’ competitions (eventually, as a teen, being crowned a
‘Mambo Queen’). Her personal story inspired her to write the breakout low-budget
hit Dirty Dancing (1987); 2009 financials have the film (including rental and video
and DVD sales) reaching $214 million off a production budget of $6 million.
Despite initial mixed reviews (Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Richard Schickel) the film
struck a chord with audiences; the music and dancing connected as well as its
look at social issues such as abortion and social class. Other screenwriting credits
include It’s My Turn (1980) and Let It Be Me (1995).
Jessica Bendinger
Jessica Bendiger (1966–) was born in Oak Park, Illinois and attended Columbia
University. She is a screenwriter, film director and novelist. Her screenplay credits
include Bring It On (2000), First Daughter (2004), and Aquamarine (2006). She wrote
and directed Stick It (2006). She also writes for the television medium.
Marguerite Bertsch
Marguerite Bertsch (1889–1967) was born in New York City. She was a playwright,
screenwriter of silent films (scenarios) and film director, and in 1914 was named
one of the most powerful women working at Vitagraph. Among her 49 scenarios/
screenplays from 1910 to 1919 are A Florida Enchantment (1914, based on a play
of the same name), The Law Decides (1916), The Devil’s Prize (1916), and Shadows
of the Past (1919). In 1917 she wrote the book, How to Write for Motion Pictures,
Instruction and Information.
Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow (1951–) was born in San Carlos, California to Gertrude and
Ronald Bigelow. She inherited a love of the arts and creative expression from
her father, a cartoonist by passion but a paint factory manager by trade. After
beginning her college education as a painting student at the San Francisco Arts
Institute, she fell in love with a new medium: film. She credits the discovery of
film noir for her shift from fine arts to cinema (Hultkrans 1995). A fellowship with
the Whitney Museum brought her to New York, where she enrolled at Columbia
University to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in film, specifically to strengthen her
grasp of film theory. Film scholar Christina Lane identifies Bigelow as one of the
few women in contemporary mainstream film with an academic background in
film theory (Lane 1998).
Bigelow wrote her first work for the screen in 1978 while at Columbia, a
20-minute short called The Set Up. Characteristic of her screenwriting work, the
content of the script was collaborative. The short depicts several men engaged in
a physical fight as semioticians Marshall Blonsky and Sylvère Lotringer (the latter
her professor at Columbia) analyse the images in voiceover. This intensive focus
on violence would reappear in much of her later work.
Some of Bigelow’s greatest influences while studying at Columbia were Peter
Wollen and Edward Said, whose structuralist ideas played a formative role in her
early work (Hultkrans 1995). After graduating from Columbia, Bigelow collaborated
with fellow Columbia graduate Monty Montgomery on The Loveless (1981), a script
they later co-directed with a then-unknown Willem Dafoe in the lead role. The
Loveless follows a motorcycle gang as they stir up trouble in a tiny roadside town in
the South. In an interview with Art Forum’s Andrew Hultkrans, Bigelow described
The Loveless, with its slow pace, minimalist story and sparse dialogue, as a ‘medita-
tion’ springing from theoretical influences that had made her ‘resistant to narrative’.
After the production of The Loveless, Bigelow moved back to California to teach.
Having intended The Loveless as an avant-garde art piece, she was surprised to
find it had opened doors for her in Hollywood. She found work first in televi-
sion, writing the episode ‘Lady Cop’ for the police procedural The Equalizer in
1985. Shortly afterwards, she partnered with suspense-horror writer Eric Red
to co-write a series of mainstream genre pieces, an unexpected about-face for
Bigelow the academic and artist, who had confessed to ‘have nothing but disdain
for Hollywood’ (Hultkrans 1995). The first of these scripts was Undertow (1996), a
thriller about a man given shelter from a storm by a psychopath. This script went
unproduced for ten years, when it was produced (with Red directing – the only
one of Bigelow’s feature scripts to be directed by someone other than herself) as a
TV movie (Klemm 2008).
The next script generated through Bigelow’s partnership with Red was Near Dark
(1986), a story fusing teen drama, vampires and the tropes of the western genre.
The avant-garde narrative elements of The Loveless were largely absent from the
more mainstream Near Dark, but the broadening of the audience for her ideas
greatly appealed to Bigelow. As she told the LA Times in 1988: ‘I’ve had very lim-
ited access, in terms of audience, finances, options, and in filmmaking, you have
to justify the expenditures with wider audiences in order to continue. So I want
more access. I can’t just ask for money to fulfill my own creative desires. And yet
I want to be able to continue to make films I can live with’.
Bigelow would go on to write one more script with Red: Blue Steel (1989), a story
focusing on a female cop hounded by a serial killer obsessed with her. She has
since transitioned more exclusively into directing, winning the Academy Award
for Best Director, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing,
and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction for The Hurt Locker (2008). (Sam Lively)
Marian Constance Blackton

Marian Constance Blackton (1901–93) was born in New York City, the daughter
of J. Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph Company. She was a
screenwriter and actress. She grew up on film sets and notes that ‘location trips
with my father’s company were my idea of heaven’ (Howard 2013). Her parents
divorced and, after Marian finished high school, she moved to work with her
father in a new studio in London. There she moved from being her father’s script
supervisor to scenario writer of films that he would direct. Her credits (some writ-
ten under Marion Constance) include Behold This Woman (1924), The Clean Heart
(1924), The Beloved Brute (1924), The Redeeming Sing (1925), Tides of Passion (1925),
and The Happy Warrior (1925). Blackton, in her biography of her father (written
as Marian Blackton Trimble), also remembers the way she influenced her father’s
ideas about the portrayal of female characters and takes credit for the way she con-
vinced him to toughen them up. She writes, ‘They began to show some guts. They
stopped fluttering … in short, they stopped being my father’s “ideal woman”.’
When director Blackton reverted to his fluttery idea of women characters, Marian
Blackton would remind him to stick to the script, and, she says, ‘To [her] astonish-
ment, he invariably agreed’ (Blackton Trimble 1985: 153). In 1925, the Vitagraph
Company was sold to Warner Bros and daughter and father continued to work
together under the new banner. Marian’s screenwriting credits under Warner
Bros include The Gilded Highway (1926) and The Passionate Quest (1926). MGM
bought out her contract at Warner Bros, and for MGM she wrote Becky (1927) and
Buttons (1927). In the 1930s, during the American Depression, Marian’s father
was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to head the WPA (Work Progress)
Motion Picture Project; J. Stuart Blackton hired Marian to write the scenarios that
Washington requested; however, none of these films was produced. She married
director/dog trainer Laurence Trimble in 1941.
Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden (1958–) was born in Detroit, Michigan. Her feature film screenwrit-
ing credits include Working Girls (1986), about the lives of three prostitutes in
Manhattan, and the sci-fi film Born in Flames (1983).
Eugenia Bostwick-Singer
Eugenia Bostwick-Singer is an actress, short story writer and screenwriter. She
began her acting career in New York City. A friend suggested she adapt one of
her own short stories, Ridin’ the Greyhound, into a film script. The screenplay was
optioned by the Public Broadcasting Company. Bostwick’s other credits include
Disney’s Mulan (1998, co-writing with husband Raymond Singer), Iron-Jawed
Angels (2004, co-writing with Singer, nominated for Emmy and Humanitas Awards,
winner of the Pen-USA Award), and, for Dreamworks, Joseph, King of Dreams (2000,
co-writing with Singer).
Leigh Brackett
Leigh Brackett (1915–78) (see ‘Women at work: Hollywood screenwriters of the
1940s’, p. 735).
Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown (1944–) grew up in York, Pennsylvania, the adopted daughter of
Ralph and Julia Ellen Brown. She is a novelist, mystery writer, and screenwriter. At
age 11, Brown and her family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Brown attended
the University of Florida on scholarship, but was expelled in 1963 for her involve-
ment in the American Civil Rights movement. In 1964, she hitchhiked to New York
where she lived in an abandoned car before enrolling at New York University.
At NYU, Brown co-founded the Student Homophile League. Brown was also an
early member of the National Organization of Women, but left after a falling out
with Betty Friedan based on Brown’s advocacy on behalf of lesbian members. She
graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and classics. Brown continued
her education at the New York School of Visual Arts where she received a degree
in cinematography. In 1973, she went on to receive a PhD from the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, DC.
Brown’s breakthrough first novel, the coming-of-age Rubyfruit Jungle, published
in 1973, dealt candidly with lesbian themes. She remembered:
Nobody wanted to publish it. I mean, I’ve got splinters in my nose from
the best publishing doors in town. Finally this little tiny company that just
started, called Daughters Press, gave me $1,000 and published it. I never had
a book review, never had an ad, didn’t have a hard cover until I guess one
of its anniversaries. It exploded and they couldn’t keep up with the sales.
They couldn’t print them fast enough. So Bantam bought it. (Brown in Sachs
2008)
Brown has written over 50 books, including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
She is the author of numerous screen and teleplays; her feature The Slumber
Party Massacre was released in 1982. Numerous made-for-television movies
include I Love Liberty (1982), The Long Hot Summer (1985), My Two Loves (1986),
Rich Men, Single Women (1990), and The Woman Who Loved Elvis (1993). (Warren
Lewis)
Kristen Buckley
Kristin Buckley’s credits include How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days (2003, co-written
with Brian Regan and Burr Steers) and 102 Dalmations (2000, sharing writing
credit again with Regan and Noni White and Bob Tzudiker).
Vera Caspary
Vera Caspary (1899–1987) was a screenwriter, novelist and short story writer (see
‘Women at work: Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735).
Lilian Christy Chester

Lilian Chester (1887–1961) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a a young widow, she
met the married George Chester. When he eventually left his wife for Lilian, they
travelled to Europe to work at the Gainsborough Studios in London and began
writing short stories, theatrical plays and film scenarios together. She is credited
under her married name, Mrs George Randolph Chester. She wrote intertitles for
silent films, and is credited as a screenwriter, co-director and editor in the Women
Film Pioneers Project. She worked at Vitagraph (1916–21); among her credits
there is the co-writing, co-directing and editing of The Son of Wallingford (1921).
She soon moved on to work at Universal Manufacturing Company (1922–3) where
she collaborated on The Flaming Hour (1922) and Scarlet Car (1923) (Lane 2013). The
couple tired of Hollywood and returned to New York to write stage plays. When
George Chester died in 1924, Lilian did not pursue her writing career on her own.
Lisa Cholodenko
Lisa Cholodenko (1964–) was born in the San Fernando Valley, California. She
is a screenwriter and director (see ‘Attraction and the pursuit of sex: an analysis
of writer-directors Lisa Cholodenko and Lena Dunham’s female protagonists’,
p. 745).
Diablo Cody
Diablo Cody (1978–) was born Brooke Busey; she wrote her first blog in 2001 in
the form of a diary by a secretary in Belarus. Her second blog was written in the
voice of a fan of the Beach Boys. Her third blog was in her own voice. She had
become a stripper under the name Diablo Cody. That blog became her 2006 book
Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Here is the voice of the author:
My vanity was gone, replaced with regret and exhaustion and the strange
creeping clarity of dawn. In my bare feet, I could be far more graceful than in
those crippling stilettos. I whirled and twirled and caressed the poles as if they
were a gauntlet of handsome partners. I laughed aloud when I realized how
horrified my parents would be if they knew that nine years of childhood ballet
lessons had come to this.
It is a literary voice, talking to us in prose. There are no extensive dialogue scenes.

One might assume Cody would not have potential as a screenwriter; however,
Mason Novick, the manager who got her book published, encouraged Cody to
write a screenplay. She did, and Juno was produced in 2007.
Juno McGuff, a teenage girl, goes to the local pharmacy, where Rollo the phar-
macist says, ‘This is your third test today, Mama Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no
doubt about it.’ Some people loved the film’s dialogue, but many felt that all the
characters talked the same. Rollo does talk like Juno, but other characters do not.
The dialogue in general is smart-mouthed, and Cody is establishing that she is
a smart-mouthed woman writer.
Juno tells her friend Leah she will probably get an abortion. Juno is casual about
this, since she is only 16, and Cody captures the emotional reality of that. Cody
is not following the traditional emotional pattern of teen pregnancy films and
television movies, which is one reason the film is so striking. There is a franker
tone than usual for the subject. Juno decides to have the baby and give it ‘to some-
body who actually likes that kind of thing’. Juno and Leah check out prospective
parents in the Penny Saver newspaper and decide on a married couple, Mark and
Vanessa Loring – and the story plays out from there – getting deeper into Juno
and the voice of Diablo Cody.
Juno was a huge success, both financially (a box-office gross of $143 million in
the United States on an estimated budget of $7.5 million)7 and artistically (four
Academy Award nominations, with Cody winning for Best Original Screenplay),
and it established Cody as a fresh, new voice as a screenwriter. Juno gave Cody the
opportunity to explore a variety of screenwriting opportunities.
Cody’s second produced screenplay, Jennifer’s Body (2009), was not as success-
ful either commercially or artistically as Juno. Cody mixes two genres: the teen-
girl-best-friends drama and the teen horror movie. Jennifer has taken to killing
and eating boys, and her best friend, Needy, finally has to stop her. This is not
a feminist or even post-feminist take on the horror genre. Cody is not writing
like a Woman Writer, but like a woman who writes, with her own particular and
sometimes peculiar sensibilities. The film is interesting, but not fully satisfying.
Before Juno was shot, director/producer Steven Spielberg called Cody with an
idea for a television series about a woman with multiple personalities. The condi-
tion has a new name, Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, and Cody thought it
could be treated with a comedic touch. After the end of the first 2009–10 season,
Cody said, ‘It’s a comedy about mental illness, so the tone must be tricky. We have
to be consistently funny and have gravity’. Cody and the other writers managed to
bring off that difficult trick, as a look at the first season of the series shows. When
the show was cancelled in 2011, Cody told Patti Greco, ‘I never got the hang of
[running] the writers’ room – I worked with incredible writers, but I really do my
best work alone’. Given how distinctive a writing voice Cody has, it is not surprising
she came to that conclusion.
For her next produced screenplay, Young Adult (2011), Cody was writing alone
again, and more aware of the process:
Young Adult, in a way, was the first feature I wrote in the pressure cooker. I was
very precise and careful. I found it really pleasurable to write Mavis (Charlize
Theron). It was cathartic to channel my own misanthropic tendencies into a

character who makes no apologies for who she is. It’s challenging from a business
standpoint, though, because you know you’ve created something that might not
be marketable or easy for people to watch. But I wanted to take that chance.
Mavis is not a likeable person. She goes back to her hometown determined to
break up Buddy and Beth and get back together with Buddy because she thinks
they were always meant to be together. Mavis may not be ‘likeable’ in the usual
Hollywood way, but when she is on screen, things happen. The first person she
runs into back home is Matt Freehauf. He was called the ‘Hate Crime Guy’, since
he was beat up by a bunch of jocks who thought he was gay. Not only is he not
gay, he is just as sharp-tongued as she is, and not afraid to call her on her excesses.
A male writer may have been able come up with Matt, but probably not the great
running joke of watching Mavis prepare for each meeting with Buddy: different
nail polish for each event, different clothes. Mavis makes a fool of herself at the
christening ceremony for Beth and Buddy’s baby. The next morning Mavis talks
to Matt’s sister, Sandra, who idolized Mavis in high school and followed her career
later as an author. At this point that’s enough for Mavis: there are still people who
are in awe of her. More than The United States of Tara, this is the riskiest script
Cody has ever done. If the balance is not perfect, she’ll lose us. She doesn’t lose us.
In the first four years (2007–11) of her career as a screenwriter, Cody had three
screenplays produced, and she produced and occasionally wrote for a television
series that ran 36 episodes. Each work showed a fresh, distinctive voice willing to
take on a variety of subjects with talent and wit. Cody’s screenplay Ricki and the
Flash premiered summer, 2015. (Tom Stempel)
Lenore J. Coffee
Lenore J. Coffee (1896–1984) grew up in San Francisco; she was attracted to theatre and
film at an early age, attending both with family at every opportunity. She became a
screenwriter, playwright and novelist. In 1919, at age 23, she was working for an adver-
tising company and happened to walk by a cigar stand and noticed a Hollywood trade
magazine announcing that the silent film actress Clara Kimball Young, then working
at the Garson Studios in Glendale, California, was ‘in desperate need of a story’ (Coffee
1973: 11). Coffee fashioned a story for the actress, The Better Wife, and sent it off. The
Garson Studios bought it and Coffee received her first check as a motion picture writer.
A few months later, she found out that producer Harry Garson was in San Francisco
on business; Coffee sat in the lobby of the St Francis Hotel until she laid eyes on him.
She introduced herself and talked herself into a year’s contract at $50 a week, pro-
vided she move to Hollywood: ‘You know this is a mammoth industry and it’s going
to be bigger than anyone imagined. But you won’t learn how to write for it here in
San Francisco; you’d better come to Hollywood’ (Coffee 1973: 13). She moved
to Hollywood and, as an employee at the Garson Studios who was ‘learning the
business’, worked as a continuity person, actress, assistant director, and editor’s
assistant while continuing to write original stories and selling each of them for
$100 each to Garson.
Female screenwriters in the silent film era in America were not an anomaly; the
industry was open to those who had the ambition, talent and creativity to forge
connections and relationships with those at production companies and studios.
Coffee found a special niche. She took great pride in her ability to find a solid
structure for a story, one with a beginning, middle and end that the audience
would be able to follow and enjoy. When the Garson Studios closed in the early
1920s, with the encouragement of film editor Sada Cowan, Coffee set herself up
as a ‘fixer’ – someone who could take troubled films where the stories didn’t work
and were deemed unreleasable – take them off the producers’ shelves, recut and
restructure and retitle them, and make the properties viable candidates for distri-
bution, thus saving the investments of the producers (Coffee 1973: 56). Her initial
job was for actor/producer Lew Cody:
The first thing I did was to get a card index system, and number the cards in the
order in which the sequences came in the original film. I could then shuffle these
like a deck of cards, and see what order began to make sense. Sometimes I knew
I could start with Reel Three instead of Reel One. I could change the character
of an elderly husband married to a young wife to an uncle, a guardian or even
a father. The matter of intertitles (silent film dialogue and story cards) to fit
the new story line was simple; you had only to match the opening and clos-
ing lip movements and the gestures that went with them. For instance, if you
had visualized, without checking the film, a man saying ‘Get out! I don’t want
to ever see you again!’ with a violent gesture, and then found that in the film
he actually sat down with his head in his hands, you changed it to ‘Leave me,
please leave me. I can’t bear anymore’. (Coffee 1973: 61–2)
She would also add additional close-ups by using the ‘iris’ technique. Coffee used
a razor blade to splice the film, reconnecting the new order ‘with film cement
which smelt exactly like bananas. I used to love bananas, but I’ve never eaten one
since’ (Coffee 1973: 61).
Coffee, in 1922, was offered a full-time contract at Metro Studio as a writer,
working for playwright-turned-head-of-story Bayard Veiller. She was insecure and
‘(had) great difficulty in starting a scene’. Veiller would patiently talk her through
it and, once reassured, she noted about her work: ‘I did pretty well … [I could]
do a fairly decent job of writing that didn’t make for a bad picture, for my good
structure was always my great strength’ (Coffee 1973: 66).
When Veiller moved to New York to resume his playwriting career later that
year, Coffee got a message from Irving Thalberg. He had moved over to Mayer
Mission Road Studio and, in 1922, he wanted to hire her as a ‘fixer’ on The
Dangerous Age starring Lewis Stone and Florence Vidor. Coffee’s revised intertitles
for this film were among the first intertitles to be reviewed and praised by the
critics – in particular this one: ‘When a man of forty falls in love with a girl of
twenty, it isn’t her youth he is seeking, it is his own.’
In 1924, Coffee was still working for Thalberg when the MGM merger was
announced. Coffee’s contract was renewed; she was known for her high standards
and thoughtful process. Thalberg, when pressed to get one of his pictures before
the camera, denied one of his producer’s requests to put Coffee on the script: ‘For
Christ’s sake, [we don’t have time for] a writer with any ideas! She’ll have them
and I’ll listen to them – and we just haven’t time!’ (Coffee 1973: 97).
Coffee was a pragmatist. She was good at her craft and she loved the movies,
but she wanted to be paid for her work. Coffee stood her ground many times for
proper compensation and fair working conditions. Despite being under contract
at MGM, writers were able to come up with original stories and sell them to the
studio for an additional sum. In 1924, Coffee conceived a sympathetic story about
a stepmother, outlined it, and took it to MGM producer Harry Rapf. He wished to
buy it; however, when Coffee told him she wanted $5,000 for it, he balked. She
didn’t budge, saying if she could not get her price, she would write it as a novel.
The next day, studio head Louis B. Mayer called Coffee into his office and told her
that she had asked a ridiculous price for the story and that she would take $2,500
for it or ‘get the hell out of this studio!’ Coffee demurred and Mayer lashed back at
her, ‘You’re what I always thought you were: a cold, selfish, mercenary, unscrupu-
lous woman’ (Coffee 1973: 101). Mayer told her to sell the story to MGM for the
price Mayer was offering or he would put her out of the picture business: ‘You’ll
never earn another penny in it as long as you live!’ (Coffee 1973: 101). Coffee,
stung and feeling she was being treated unfairly, quietly packed up her office and
left the studio.
Coffee then worked freelance; her method of writing was to work at home,
block out the story in longhand, and then dictate it to a secretary (McCreadie
1994: 105). However, her reputation as a ‘fixer’ soon led to one of her favourite
jobs as a writer in Hollywood. She was contacted by director/producer Cecil B.
DeMille. A film set for production was in trouble. Coffee joined six or seven
people in a smoke-filled room; they were all strangers to her. Jeanie Macpherson
was there (DeMille’s screenwriter of choice on many of his projects, as well as his
mistress) and several directors involved in the project. She noted in her autobiog-
raphy that the mood of the room was dour and flat and she made it her mission
to bring about a change by being positive and getting to the heart of the story.
She asked DeMille what he felt the story was about. That started a new discussion
and Coffee was able to contribute to changes in the script. This led to her signing
a contract with DeMille; one which she thought was very generous for it allowed
her to work on and sell original material wherever she pleased – provided she gave
DeMille right of first refusal for an agreed upon sum.
Coffee found working with DeMille a delight; she appreciated his method of
shooting a film from beginning to end, keeping standing sets standing through-
out the shoot so that, as the filming progressed, one was able to go back and
rewrite and reshoot as necessary. She recalls in her memoir that DeMille would
hold an initial reading of the production script at his home and Coffee, as a writer,
was always invited to this reading. She was also present at casting and noted
that DeMille’s writers were always asked to be on the set to watch production,
and to watch rushes at the end of the day so as to be able to write new scenes
or sequences at a moment’s notice. Coffee worked closely with DeMille for three
years: ‘I cannot recall one unpleasant incident with either DeMille or any of his
staff’ (Coffee 1973: 142). Once DeMille felt that Coffee understood his methods
and he came to trust her talent, he asked her to write Volga Boatman.
When sound was introduced and accepted in the film industry after the success
of The Jazz Singer (1927), Coffee relayed a personal experience to DeMille. She
told him that, during the shooting of For the Soul of Rafael in 1920 at the Garson
Studios, the production of the dance scenes – guitars playing, the clicking of the
heels of the dancers on the floor, the castanets and tambourines and the Spanish
singers – had caused her to put her hands over her ears and try to imagine how
this would play on the screen in the theatres, for this would, of course, be a silent
movie. Garson, the director/producer, noticed and wanted to know why she was
blocking out the sound. She told him she had observed that the scene, without
sound, came across as flat. So Garson decided to add more business. Coffee, whose
experience in film began in the silent era and continued into the sound era, felt
she always understood the value of silence and stillness in storytelling, coming to
the conclusion that with sound one did not need as much ‘business’ on screen, but
adding that ‘nothing is so effective as long moments of silence in a talking film’
(Coffee 1973: 40). She added in her conversation with DeMille:
Oh, audiences will be very excited at the beginning with people jabbering away
at each other, but that is what we do all day long. Silence can be so wonderfully
used, especially in films of suspense. And I think something else – I think it
will be an era of spectacles … I think sounds are going to be terribly important.
One of the most exciting sounds in the world is that of distant drums – and the
hoofbeats of a galloping horse. And think what the emotional response will be
to a trumpet playing ‘Taps. (Coffee 1973: 164)
DeMille decided to close down his personal studio in 1928, knowing he could not
afford to make use of the new technology of sound on his own. He moved his
company over to MGM. He took Coffee with him and once again she was work-
ing for Louis B. Mayer – the man who had told her ‘she would never work in this
business again’. Mayer made a show of welcoming her with open arms, but she,
understandably, didn’t trust him again. Coffee, after many years in the business,
had many complaints against the studio contracts that writers were asked to sign
and preferred to work freelance. One of the contract clauses she was offended
by was this: if a writer under contract had a total of 14 sick days in a year (an
aggregate) the contract could be terminated. Another sticking point for her was
when the writer was on unpaid, predetermined vacation or leave – the writer
could not work for anyone else, including oneself. Therefore, if a writer wanted
to take unpaid time off to write a novel, he or she was not allowed do pursue that
desire (Coffee 1973: 122). The contracts also stated that a writer could be loaned
out to another studio for a higher weekly sum than he or she was being paid at
the studio where she was under contract, and the studio (not the writer) kept the
difference (Coffee 1973: 125). Coffee wrote, ‘[C]ontracts fell out of favor with me.
When you freelance, you sign to do a specific picture and they cannot call on your
services for anything else. Should they decide not to make the picture you were
signed for, they still have to pay you’ (Coffee 1973: 122).
When a contractual disagreement with Thalberg at MGM came to a head, she
was unemployed and once again on the freelance market. She was pregnant with
her second child and got a call from Universal to work on a project for Jim Stahl.
She began the job, was unhappy with Stahl’s method of working, but committed
herself to the work.
Finally, DeMille had a new project and he wanted her help on The Squaw Man
(1931) at MGM. But again Thalberg undercut her, and because she and her hus-
band had lost money in the stock market crash, she was soon working at half her
regular salary. After two years, when she found out that MGM had turned down
lucrative loan-out contracts for her, she packed up her studio office and left the
MGM lot. However, when DeMille found out about her contract problems with
Thalberg, he insisted that, when she worked for him, she would get her old salary
back – and DeMille insisted she begin to use an agent to look after her studio
deals. She hired Phil Berg as her agent and soon she was being paid her former
high salary.
Years later, working on her three-picture deal at Paramount – first on a rewrite/
fix for Torch Singer (1933) – Coffee had a meeting with the studio regarding her
plans for the rewrite. She told them it was a poorly constructed script (Lynn
Starling is credited as co-writer) and pointed out that all successful films have one
thing in common: ‘Although plots and characters have changed, it is still the great
scenes which are remembered, and which make great stars.’ What she proposed
was to leave the script structure intact but to insert some ‘good acting scenes’. This
Coffee did, and neophyte actress Claudette Colbert performed well in the ‘good
acting scenes’ and became a very important star.
By 1934, Coffee was back with a year’s contract at MGM at her $1,000-per-week
salary. Coffee’s reputation as a ‘fixer’ stuck with her and led her to writing jobs
where she was not only meant to rewrite the script, but also to work with the actor
or actress and mollify or cajole them into accepting the changes as well. Cary
Grant, under contract at MGM, had been assigned a movie, Suzy (1936), where
he was to co-star with Jean Harlow. Grant refused to do the picture as he didn’t
like the character he was to play. Producer Harry Rapf sent for Coffee. Coffee met
with Grant and asked Grant what changes in the script would make it acceptable
to him. He did not think it was possible to make the script acceptable, but Coffee
gave them each a pad of paper and pencil and a copy of the script and they sat
down to begin changes. She laid out the groundwork of critiquing scenes and
character choices and they improvised new variations on the scene. She wanted
Grant to document the process:
[W]henever we agree on a rewrite of a scene, or a completely new one, I want

you to make clear notes of it on the blank facing pages of your script, and to
do this throughout the script, and guard it with your life. Sleep with it under
your pillow. The reason is, if I fail to write or rewrite scenes as we have agreed,
you can produce the script as proof. (Coffee 1973: 117)
After spending a long afternoon of going through the script scene by scene and
making changes, Grant agreed to do the picture:
The only opportunity a writer has to shine is in a story conference and that
only if he is one of the lucky ones who can, as they say, think on his feet –
though it is more often on his tired behind. Then he can perform, and with
an audience – an audience famished and thirsting for help. Once you’ve per-
formed successfully, your contribution, even your salvation of a script, is soon
forgotten. But you’ve had your little hour in the sun. (Coffee 1973: 124)
In her book, Recollections of a Screenwriter (1973), Coffee remembers when she was
hired by International Pictures (soon to merge with Universal Pictures) to write
Tomorrow Is Forever (1946) for Claudette Colbert. Coffee delivered the script to the
studio, and both her immediate producer and Miss Colbert thought the script
was excellent and ready to be shot. The studio head, William Goetz, could not
commit. ‘Then quite suddenly, he rang me late one Saturday afternoon, his voice
full of excitement. “I gave the script to Orson Welles to read and he thinks it’s
wonderful … He wants to play the big male part – and he doesn’t want a thing
changed. Says it’s perfect, just the way it is. We’re starting Monday … aren’t you
pleased?” Coffee replied, “I’d have been more pleased if you had realized it was
a fine script and hadn’t waited for Orson Welles to tell you.”’ (Coffee 1973: 125).
Patrick McGilligan, in his book Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of
Hollywood’s Golden Age (1988) wrote: ‘(Coffee) prospered as one of the favored
writers of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis vehicles. And she reigned as a maharani
over her Mandeville Canyon estate in the days when lady screenwriters were the
toast of Hollywood (McGilligan 1998: 133). In an interview in that book Coffee
said, ‘I’ll tell you something interesting. A silent film was like writing a novel,
and a script was like writing a play. That’s why women dropped out. Women had
been good novelists, but in the talking pictures women [screenwriters] were not
predominant’ (McGilligan 1998: 143).
Coffee was nominated twice for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay;
the first was for Street of Chance (1929), a screenplay she co-wrote with Howard
Estabrook (adapted from a story by Oliver H. P. Garrett), and again for an adaptation
of a Fannie Hurst novel, Sister Act (1938), co-written with Julius Epstein.
Coffee continued working as a novelist and screenwriter in Hollywood until
1969, writing both for feature films and television. She later said: ‘They pick your
brains, break your heart, ruin your digestion – and what do you get for it? Nothing
but a lousy fortune’ (Coffee 1973). (Jule Selbo)
Suzanne Collins
Suzanne Collins (1962–) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of a father
who served in the military. She earned degrees in drama and communication at
Indiana University. She is a screenwriter, novelist, and television writer. Credits
include The Hunger Games films (2012–15), based on her novels. Other feature film
credits include Ticket Out (2012).
Betty Comden
Betty Comden (1917–2006) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She wrote plays,
screenplays and lyrics for songs with Adolf Green (see ‘Women at work: Hollywood
Sscreenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735).
Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola (1971–) was born on 14 May 1971 in New York City, the only
daughter of three children born to filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and set
designer/documentarian Eleanor Coppola. Sofia’s creative talents bridge several
areas of popular culture including film (screenwriter, director, producer, cos-
tume designer), music, art, and fashion. She has written original screenplays and
adaptations, and while her films cover distinctly different genres, they also share
similar themes and atmospheric sensibilities.
Coppola’s first screenplay, Life without Zoe (1989), is a fantasy co-written with
her father, who later directed the original short; it was included as part of the 1989
anthology New York Stories. Placed between Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen’s
segments, Life without Zoe is reminiscent of the children’s classic book series, Eloise
at the Plaza, written by Kay Thompson in 1955, about a precocious young girl who
lives on the top floor of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. In the Coppolas’ screen-
play, Zoe lives in a luxury hotel and works to reconcile her divorced parents while
helping recover a valuable piece of stolen jewellery for an Arab princess. Coppola,
age 17 at the time, also served as costume designer for the film. Edited heavily
by the studio prior to its release, Francis Ford Coppola maintains that much of
the screenplay’s darker content was eliminated in an attempt to make the story
charming and the mood upbeat (Duvall 2001: 26).
Throughout her teens and twenties Coppola continued to explore other areas
of artistic expression. As a student of the fine arts programme at the California
Institute of the Arts, she studied photography and costume design, while continu-
ing to pursue acting opportunities. Although she received harsh reviews for her
performance in The Godfather: Part III, she continued to act, direct and produce
music videos in the 1990s and co-hosted talk/variety show Hi Octane (Comedy
Central, 1994) with her friend Zoe Cassavetes.
The short film Lick the Star (1998) was co-written with friend Stephanie Hayman
and was Coppola’s directorial debut. The 14-minute black and white short was
inspired by an event at their junior high school. According to Coppola, a group
of her classmates were reading the novel Flowers in the Attic, in which a character
slowly poisons children with small amounts of rat poison, and this inspired one
of the more powerful girls in the school to try the same thing on a group of boys.
Lick the Star details the girl’s scheme and her eventual fall from popularity when
the other students turn on her.
Coppola’s first feature, The Virgin Suicides (1999), is an adaptation of Jeffrey
Eugenides’s 1993 novel. The film narrates the events surrounding the mysterious
suicides of five sisters in an upper-middle-class Michigan suburb. The film rights
to the book had already been secured by Muse Productions, but after reading the
book in 1994 Coppola immediately began adapting the novel for film as a writing
exercise. Her spec script attracted actors and producers and she subsequently
directed the film. Coppola stated, ‘There’s not much difference between my
first draft and what we ended up finally shooting. We just took out some scenes
because it was a low-budget film’ (Duvall 2001: 29). The finished work premiered
in the Directors Fortnight of the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, the same year in
which Coppola married director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation,
Her). After The Virgin Suicides, Coppola executive-produced the weekly soap opera
series Platinum (UPN, 2003), about two brothers running a hip-hop record label.
She and Jonze divorced in 2003 as Coppola developed her sophomore feature, Lost
in Translation (2003).
Lost in Translation, an original screenplay, is based on Coppola’s experiences
visiting Japan in her early twenties. The story centres on a young newlywed and
a middle-aged actor who become friends while both are visiting Tokyo. A quiet,
atmospheric film, the character study explores themes of loneliness, identity, and
culture shock. In 2004, Coppola won two Golden Globes – Best Screenplay and
Best Picture (Comedy or Musical) – for Lost in Translation. The film was also nomi-
nated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Bill Murray,
and Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Coppola. She was awarded the
prize for Best Original Screenplay at the 2004 Academy Awards. Although she did
not win an Oscar for Best Director, Coppola made history by becoming the first
American woman to receive the nomination.
For her next feature, Coppola wrote and directed Marie Antoinette (2006), a
period piece/costume drama, adapted from Antonia Fraser’s historical novel
Marie Antoinette: The Journey. Her third film continues to explore the theme of
self-identity with a rites-of-passage narrative that capitalizes on Coppola’s love
of fashion and pop music. She uses those tools to emphasize the infamous title
character’s coming-of-age struggle with self-definition as a young Austrian girl
who, at age 15, is obliged to marry a stranger and, at age 19, becomes the Queen
of France. Coppola stated she wanted to bring the world of pre-Revolutionary
France to life and capture the feeling of what fun it might have been to be there,
rather than looking at the time from a historical distance. An opulent costume
pic, Coppola utilizes style as substance – creating atmosphere and simultaneously
commenting on her subject and her environs. This approach, and the fact that
Coppola ends her narrative before the doomed heroine’s beheading, paints a more
intimate portrait of a young woman at once surrounded, isolated, and ultimately
misunderstood.
In Somewhere (2010), Coppola continued her work as both writer and director.
She has noted that she is more interested in unformed characters – characters that
are at a transition point in their lives, learning about or attempting to understand
themselves. Somewhere focuses on the identity crisis of a movie star holed up
drinking and partying in the Chateau Marmot, when his daughter unexpectedly
comes to stay with him. Somewhere won the top prize, the Golden Lion, at the
Venice Film Festival. Following that success, in 2011, Coppola married Thomas
Mars, lead singer of the popular French band Phoenix; they have two daughters
Romy, (b. 2006) and Cosima (b. 2010).
Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) was inspired by Nancy Jo Sale’s 2010 article
in Vanity Fair, ‘The Suspects Wore Louboutins’. The story follows a group of Los
Angeles teenagers obsessed with fame and its trappings as they break into celebrity
homes, raiding their closets and stealing clothing, shoes, purses, and more. Coppola
was fascinated by the commentary in Sale’s article that this behaviour reflects con-
temporary culture’s interest in the tabloids, reality TV, and Facebook. She optioned
the underlying materials for her family’s company, American Zoetrope, and spent a
year writing the script and negotiating for the real character’s life rights. ‘The open-
ing credits identify “The Bling Ring” as “based on actual events,” instead of using
the more common phrase “based on a true story”; this might seem like a minor dis-
tinction, but it’s an important one, because “story” implies a certain structure and
viewpoint. Coppola’s approach to the subject is largely impartial; depending on the
viewer, this can seem refreshing or off-putting’ (Vishnevetsky 2013).
In December 2013, American Zoetrope – the independent film studio founded
by Coppola’s father and George Lucas, and currently co-owned by Sofia and her
brother, Roman – announced that it had acquired the rights to Alysia Abbott’s
memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, which details Abbott’s childhood grow-
ing up motherless in the San Francisco of the 1970s and 1980s with her openly
gay father. Coppola currently plans to co-write the screenplay with Andrew
Durham and co-produce with Roman Coppola. (Anne Slatton)
Julie Dash
Julie Dash (1952–) was born in New York City and is a screenwriter, film direc-
tor, and producer. She attended the American Film Institute and University of
California in Los Angeles and is a member of the LA Rebellion, a film movement
referred to as the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers (or UCLA Rebellion);
this group is made up of African or African-American filmmakers who studied
at UCLA from the late 1960s to the late 1980s and who found inspiration in the
films of the Italian neorealists. Her credits include Daughters of the Dust (1992), the
first feature-length film by an African-American woman released commercially in
the United States. She has also written for American television series.
Vina Delmar
Vina Delmar (1903–90) was born Alvina Croter in New York City, the daughter of
actors well known in vaudeville and Yiddish theatre. She crafted her penname,
Vina Delmar, by taking the surname of her husband, Eugene Delmar, and shorten-
ing her first name. Under that name she earned an Academy Award nomination
for Best Screenplay for The Awful Truth (1937), directed by Leo McCarey and star-
ring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.
Alvina Croter and Eugene Delmar met and married in New York City in 1921.
Vina Delmar gained fame as a controversial novelist, covering the issue of pre-
marital sex in her critically acclaimed Bad Girl, published in 1928. She published
short stories and several novels from 1929 to 1937, many of which were adapted
into films by other writers. While she often said she collaborated with her
husband, Eugene’s name never appeared on a film credit except as co-author of
the novel Marido e Mujer, a novel she adapted into a play. Marido e Mujer was also
adapted for film in 1932 by screenwriter Jose Lopez Rubio. In 1937, director Leo
McCarey hired Vina Delmar to write her first film, Make Way for Tomorrow, based
on the novel by Josephine Lawrence and the play by Helen and Nolan Leary. She
followed it up the same year with The Awful Truth. Subsequently, Vina Delmar
went back to writing novels, including The Breeze from Camelot (1961), The Becker
Scandal: A Time Remembered, about the 1912 Becker-Rosenthal scandal (1968),
and The Freeways (1971). She died on 19 January 1990 in a convalescent home
in Pasadena, California. Her obituary identified Vina Delmar as a ‘controversial
novelist’ and Eugene Delmar as ‘her editor’. (Rosanne Welch)
Helen Deutsch
Helen Deutsch (1906–92) was born in New York City and graduated from Barnard
College. Credits include film adaptations of novels such as The Seventh Cross
(1944), National Velvet (1944), Golden Earrings (1947, shared credits), The Loves of
Carmen (1948), Shockproof (1949, co-written with Sam Fuller), King Solomon’s Mines
(1950), and It’s a Big Country (1951), Lili (1953, for which she was nominated for
an Academy Award and won the Golden Globe for Best Adapted Screenplay, also
writing the lyric for the song ‘Hi-Lili Hi-Lo’), Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), and
Valley of the Dolls (1967, co-written with Dorothy Kingsley). (See also ‘Women At
work: Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735.)
Karen DeWolf
Karen DeWolf (1909–89) was born in New York City. She is credited on nearly
50 screenplays from 1933 to 1954 including Condemned to Live (1935), many of
the Blondie movies from 1939–41, Pioneers of the West (1940), The Cockeyed Miracle
(1946), Appointment in Honduras (1953), and Silver Lode (1954).
Joan Didion
Joan Didion (1934–) is the co-screenwriter of Panic in Needle Park (1971), the
second remake of A Star Is Born (1976), and Up Close and Personal (1996). Didion
was born on 5 December 1934, in Sacramento, California. She graduated from the
University of California, Berkeley and moved to New York after winning a job in
the Vogue offices through an essay contest. As a young writer in the city she met
fellow writer John Gregory Dunne through mutual friends. In 1964 Didion and
Dunne moved back to Didion’s home state and were married. They were journal-
ists first, then they were novelists, and in between these passions they worked
as screenwriters. They had moved to Los Angeles in hopes that Dunne’s brother,
Dominick, who worked as a television director, could help them secure lucrative
writing assignments to keep them financially viable between novels. Their new
locale influenced Didion’s next books: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) covered
the dark side of the Haight-Ashbury scene in the 1960s, and Play It As It Lays
(1970) focused on the life of an unfulfilled actress.
Unlike their other writing work, which was done solo, they wrote all their screen-
plays as a team, beginning with Panic in Needle Park (1971), a love story set in the
world of heroin addicts in Manhattan’s Needle Park. Their screenwriting work

brought them to higher prominence in their favoured literary circles; film credits
made publishing companies more attentive and books gave them a reputation for
quality at the various movie studios. In an interview with the New York Times, direc-
tor Sidney Lumet said, ‘Joan goes into the ground and John finds the quick stroke
that captures the essence.’ Lumet, who had worked with them on the preparation of
The Deer Park (a film that never made it into production), went on to note, ‘I think
Joan does structure and John does language, but I’ll bet that changes’ (Garis 1987).
Didion and Dunne’s adaptation of the 1937 film written by Dorothy Parker and
Alan Campbell, A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson,
and directed by Frank Pierson (who shared writing credit with them), premiered
in 1976. This became one of Didion and Dunne’s major film successes. In inter-
views they discussed the origins of the project, which involved researching drug
use in the rock and roll concert world. Their next big-budget film, Up Close and
Personal, took nearly a decade, from 1988 to 1996, to reach production and
distribution, the time when the final monies of any writing contract are finally
paid to the writers. Up Close and Personal began as a hard look at the story of news-
woman Jessica Savitch, whose life involved cocaine addiction and sexual scandals.
The studio wanted the story to be watered down and made more appealing to a
wider audience. Against their journalistic instincts, Didion and Dunne fictional-
ized elements of Savitch’s life, watered down her ambitions and dangerous habits,
and ultimately, when it premiered in 1996, did not feel the work had much merit.
Dunne recorded their odyssey with the studio in the book Monster: Living off the
Big Screen, published in 1997.
By their own admission, Didion and Dunne worked in Hollywood mostly
because Dunne’s heart condition made the medical coverage offered by the
Writers Guild highly desirable. After Dunne’s death, Didion won the National
Book Award for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir chronicling the year fol-
lowing Dunne’s death. In 2007 she turned the book into a Broadway play, starring
Vanessa Redgrave. In November 2008, Didion began working on a screenplay of
the life of Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, but as of this writing her last
produced film remained Up Close and Personal. (Rosanne Welch)
Leslie Dixon
Leslie Dixon grew up in the Bay Area in California, the granddaughter of pho-
tographer Dorothea Lange and painter Maynard Dixon, and is a screenwriter
and producer. Screenwriting credits include Overboard (1987), Outrageous Fortune
(1987), Pay It Forward (2000, an adaptation of the novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde),
That Old Feeling (1997), and Limitless (2011, based on a book by Alan Glynn). She
has co-written other films including the remake of the 1968 film The Thomas
Crown Affair (1999), Mrs Doubtfire (1993), Freaky Friday (2003), Hairspray (2007),
and Just Like Heaven (2005). Dixon, living independently at age 18, couldn’t afford
‘to go to college’ (Marlow 2011) and lived in San Francisco. At 26 she moved to
Hollywood to try and break into the film industry, but found herself working
‘menial secretarial jobs’ (Smith 2011). Soon she found work as a script reader, and
through her daily readings learned ‘what was and wasn’t being bought, and how
you arrange words on the page. That was the start of it’ (Marlow 2011). After writ-
ing Outrageous Fortune in 1987, she began a ‘10-year hot streak writing comedies’
(Smith 2011). Dixon decided to challenge herself and move into other genres for,
according to Dixon, she felt afraid that there was only a small amount of comedy
left in her, and if she continued to write comedy, ‘some of that finite amount of
humor would be used up until there was nothing left’ (Nickel 2008). To be taken
seriously as a dramatic writer she wrote an adaptation of an ‘Edith Wharton novel’
(Nickel 2008). Although that project did not get made, the adaptation won her
serious praise from movie producers and led to her working on The Thomas Crown
Affair and Pay It Forward. As she puts it, ‘I never would have gotten those jobs if
I hadn’t just gone out on a limb and tried something different’ (Nickel 2008).
Dixon notes that her approach to adapting novels comes from the idea that
‘not all books are right for film’ (Nickell 2008). She reads novels in search of the
next big project, and what she is searching for is that one book that screams it has
a big movie inside of it. After reading Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields, Dixon knew
she had to make that movie (it was released under the film title Limitless). But she
also went after The Dark Fields because she wanted to jump into another genre –
action – and she wanted to concentrate on a male protagonist. She noted, ‘People
don’t think of women really, Kathryn Bigelow to the contrary, for thriller writing
assignments. I knew I was just going to have to write something to show people
that I could do it if I wanted to work in that genre’ (Crean 2011). (Jule Selbo)
Mrs Sidney Drew

There are two women screenwriters who used the name ‘Mrs Sidney Drew’.
The first was Gladys Rankin (1874–1914). She was an American stage actress and
playwright and the first wife of noted ‘urbane and irreverent’ (Ionita 2013) actor-
director Sidney Drew. The daughter of producer McKee Rankin, she is credited, in
the Women Film Pioneers Project, as a screenwriter, producer, director, and film
actress. She wrote plays, screenplays, and stories under the masculine pseudonym
George Cameron. Her credits include A Sweet Deception (1913).
After the death of Gladys, Drew married his second wife, Lucille McVey (who
sometimes used the name Jane Morrow). Lucille McVey Drew wrote, co-directed,
and acted with Drew in domestic comedies, many making fun of middle-class
married life. McVey and Drew worked at Vitagraph from 1914–16, then moved
to work under contract at Metro Pictures to produce a one-reel comedy every
week, earning $90,000 per year. Credits include Thou Art the Man (1916) and the
‘Henry and Polly comedies’, including Too Much Henry, Why Henry Left Home,
and Shadowing Henry – all produced in 1917. The couple then formed their own
production company. After Sidney Drew died in 1919, McVey continued to write
comedy shorts and directed a five-reeler, Cousin Kate (1921). Investigations of the
division of labour in the McVey/Drew relationship have found:
In the case of Mrs. Sidney Drew (Lucille McVey), for instance, fan magazines
and women’s magazines, the major sources of biographical information about
female scenarists and directors during the silent era, tend to emphasize her
contribution and de-emphasize her husband’s. The writer in Photoplay gives
Mrs. Drew seventy-five per cent of the credit for the conception of the Drew
comedies and describes her husband as the one who transposed her ideas on
the screen (Ionita 2013)
Henry MacMahon, looking back at Lucille’s career, sums up her work as exhaus-
tively doing everything: ‘She was the one writing the scenario, directing the settings,
providing the costumes, properties and furniture, coaching the actors, and manag-
ing the lights and picture-taking’ (MacMahon 1920: 13). Films she wrote and direct-
ing following her husband’s death include The Charming Mrs Chase (1920), The
Stimulating Mrs Barton (1920), The Emotional Mrs Vaughan (1920), and Cousin
Kate (1921), A Guilty Conscience (1921) and A Million Bid (1927). (Jule Selbo)
Lena Dunham
Lena Dunham (1986–) (see ‘Attraction and the pursuit of sex: an analysis of writer-
directors Lisa Cholodenko and Lena Dunham’s female protagonists’, p. 745).
Delia Ephron
Delia Ephron (1944–), the second daughter of playwrights and screenwriters Henry
and Phoebe Ephron (Carousel [1956], There’s No Business Like Show Business [954],
Desk Set [1957]), often collaborated with her older sister, Nora, a novelist, humor-
ist, screenwriter, and director (1941–2012). Screenplays they co-wrote are This Is
My Life (1992), Mixed Nuts (1994), Michael (1996), You’ve Got Mail (1998), Hanging
Up (2000, based on Delia’s novel), and Bewitched (2005). Delia noted that, when
working with her sister, ‘Nora is the boss’ (Pfefferman 2000). Delia has partnered
with other screenwriters on projects, including the adaptation of The Sisterhood
of the Traveling Pants (2005, co-written with Elizabeth Chandler), and Brenda Starr
(1989, using the pseudonym Jenny Wolkind and sharing writing credit with
Noreen Stone, James D. Buchanan and Dale Messick). She received producer credit
on Sleepless in Seattle (1993), You’ve Got Mail, and Hanging Up (2000).
Hanging Up is the film narrative that touches on Delia’s personal life (as Nora
used her relationship with Carl Bernstein in Heartburn [1983]). Hanging Up fol-
lows three sisters, daughters of a former screenwriter, as they manoeuvre in the
entertainment business. Eve, the middle sister and the one most likely based
on Delia, devotes the most time to caring for the elderly father. The focus is on
family dynamics: a father who is irritated and irritating and bizarre, and three
competitive sisters reacting with familial duty while taking care of their own
personal crises.
Delia also collaborated with Nora on an adaptation of the Ilene Beckerman’s
book Love, Loss, and What I Wore for an off-Broadway production in New York
City. It opened in 2008 and ran through 2010, winning the Drama Desk Award
for Unique Theatrical Experience. Delia has credits as a journalist and the author
of three adult novels. She has also written teen fiction, children’s books, and
humour collections. How to Eat Like a Child, a humour collection, was adapted
as a made-for-television movie in 1981; however, Delia did not work on the film.
(Robert Arnett)
Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron (1941–2012) was born in New York City, the eldest of the four
daughters (who all became writers) of playwrights/screenwriters Henry and
Phoebe Ephron. Nora grew up in Beverly Hills, California and graduated from
Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She worked as a journalist, playwright, nov-
elist, humorist, producer, and director and was nominated three times for an
Academy Award for her writing. Her screenwriting credits include Silkwood (1983,
co-written with Alice Arlen), Heartburn (1986, based on her novel about the dis-
solution of her second marriage), When Harry Met Sally (1989), Cookie (1989, co-
written with Alice Arlen), and My Blue Heaven (1990). She moved into directing
and wrote and directed This Is My Life (1992, co-written with Delia Ephron, based
on novel by Meg Wolitzer), Sleepless in Seattle (1993, co-written with David S. Ward
and Jeff Arch; nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and a Writers Guild of
America Award for Best Original Screenplay), Mixed Nuts (1994, co-written with
Delia Ephron), Michael (1996, co-written with Delia Ephron, Peter Dexter and Jim
Quinlan), You’ve Got Mail (1998, based on the book Parfumerie by Miklos Laszlo
and inspired by The Shop around the Corner (1940), co-written with Delia Ephron,
Bewitched (2005, based on a popular American television series and nominated
for a Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay), and Julie and Julia (2009, an adaptation
of the co-authored memoirs of Julia Child and Julie Powell). She also wrote for
television and the theatre. She contributed, as a blogger, to the Huffington Post.
Nora Ephron received the Ian McLellan Hunter Award from the Writers Guild of
America in 2003. The Nora Ephron Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival is given to
a promising female writer or filmmaker. She died from complications caused by
leukemia. (Jule Selbo)
Phoebe Ephron
Phoebe Ephron (1914–71) was born Phoebe Wolkind in New York City. She gradu-
ated from Hunter College and met her future husband and co-screenwriter, Henry
Ephron, at a summer camp where they both worked as counsellors. They married
in 1934 while Henry was working as a Broadway stage manager on many of the
works of playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The famous Broadway
writers often asked Henry to bring Phoebe to dress rehearsal and then quizzed her
on her reactions to the production (Ephron and Ephron 1977: 4).
The couple’s first collaborative writing came out of an incident where Henry,
working as a stage manager, suggested to the playwright Hart that the final
speech of his latest play, The American Way (1939), needed work; he had noticed
that the tryout audience did not react well to it. Hart relayed Henry’s opinion to
Kaufman and Kaufman told Henry to write what should be there. Henry did, and
then Phoebe added ‘a thought of her own changing the structure of the last two
sentences’. This speech was put in the play and stayed there. Henry described it as
‘the first of our collaborative efforts’ (Ephron and Ephron 1977: 5).
This initial acknowledgement from two such successful playwrights encouraged

the Ephrons to begin writing plays together; however, it was not until after the
birth of their first daughter, Nora, in 1942 that their play Three’s a Family found
financial backers for a Broadway production. Notably, it began their habit of
using personal family experience in their stories. Three’s a Family opened at the
Longacre Theatre on Broadway in May 1943, moved to the Belasco Theatre at the
end of the month, and ran for over a year, closing in July 1944. They were not
offered the job of adapting the play into a film (that assignment went to Henry
Chandlee and Marjorie Pfaelzer); however, the play introduced the Ephrons’ work
to Hollywood producers. RKO Studios hired the Ephrons to adapt The Richest Girl
in the World, a play by Norman Krasna, turning it into the film Bride by Mistake
(1944). With that assignment, they moved to Los Angeles full-time and on to a
contract at Warner Brothers Studios, where they became adept at adapting plays
and stories, including Reginald Denham’s Wallflower (1948), Norman Krasna’s
play, and John Loves Mary (1949). In 1950 they accepted a contract at 20th Century
Fox, where they worked on several adaptations: The Jackpot (1950), based on a
New Yorker article by John McNulty; On the Riviera (1951), based on Rudolf Lothar
and Hans Adler’s Broadway play The Red Cat; Belles on Their Toes (1952), based on
Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey’s novel of the same name; Carousel
(1956), based on the hit Broadway musical by Oscar Hammerstein II; and Desk
Set (1957), based on William Marchant’s play about computerizing the research
department at a television network.
In the early 1960s, the Ephrons wrote a play based on their daughter Nora’s let-
ters home from college; Take Her, She’s Mine opened in December 1961 and played
for a year at the Biltmore Theatre in New York City. The play was optioned as a
film, but the Ephrons were not offered the adaptation (Nunnally Johnson was
given that task). The Ephrons were offered the assignment to adapt a new novel
by Leo Rosten, Captain Newman, MD (1963); the story was a fictionalized account
of Ralph Greenson, one of the first military medical officers to study post trau-
matic stress syndrome seriously. The film earned them their only Academy Award
nomination for Best Writing. Phoebe’s cancer diagnosis and the depression and
alcoholism it exacerbated in both their lives stalled their careers. Phoebe Ephron
died on 13 October 1971 due to cirrhosis of the liver.
In his memoir, Henry wrote of offering Katharine Hepburn the job of directing
one of their plays. Hepburn, however, feared it would keep her away from caring
for the aging Spencer Tracy. ‘As I was leaving, she stopped me at the door and
said “Would you tell Phoebe something for me? She’s the woman I admire most.
She’s done it all – children, husband, career.”’ After her mother’s death, Nora gave
a eulogy in which she read a condolence letter from her college roommate that
praised Phoebe for dazzling Nora’s friends with her career, ‘by working with her
husband, by the four children, by the approach to life’. Yet even in his desire to
paint their marriage as perfect, Henry could not avoid considering some of the
darker moments. He recalled that Phoebe had dealt with the question of abor-
tion when it came to their last child. ‘We had a few talks about whether to have
the baby or not. Three children and a career seemed like a full-enough load for
Phoebe, and someone had misinformed her that at forty-two there was some dan-
ger in having a healthy child.’ They planned an abortion but ‘I came downstairs
to drive Phoebe over. She was sitting on the living room sofa, with her coat beside
her. “Well,” I said, “it’s time.” Phoebe said, “I’m not going through with it, Henry.
I think I’d like to have the baby. There’s no reasonable excuse not to. We have
the money, we have the room, and the children are really the most fun of all.”’
All the Ephron daughters wrote about their parents’ marriage in their work, and
spoke of it in many of the interviews they have given regarding their own writing.
According to Delia, around the time she turned 11, ‘family life took a turn for the
worse’. Both her parents’ drinking escalated, and the sisters were often awakened
by their screaming fights in the wee hours. Similarly, as Julie and Julia opened in
2010, nearly 40 years after her mother’s death, Nora told an interviewer that her
‘parents’ cocktails were strong, and the cocktail hour started earlier and earlier;
family dinners were a competitive sport of jokes and storytelling and their four
daughters didn’t get much in terms of hand-holding’. Nora, in her collections of
essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck, also accused her father of accidentally assisting
in her mother’s death, writing that when she arrived to deal with the unconscious
Phoebe, Henry asked her to flush a vial of pills down the toilet, ostensibly to avoid
Phoebe’s death being linked to a drug overdose. But his daughter later wondered if
he had actually hoped to avoid prosecution in Phoebe’s death in case he had dis-
pensed the overdose. Nora wrote, ‘At the time, this didn’t seem to me to fall under
the rubric of “Everything is copy”. Although it did to my sister Amy, and she put
it into a novel.’ Clearly, while much of Henry and Phoebe’s personal lives fuelled
their writing, even more of it has appeared in the books and films of their daugh-
ters. Though he married again (dancer June Gale in 1978), Henry ceased writing
upon Phoebe’s death. He died in 1992. (Rosanne Welch)
Marion Fairfax
Marion Fairfax (1875–1970), screenwriter, producer, director, and playwright, was
born Marion Neiswanger in Richmond,Virginia. After graduating from Chicago’s
South Division High School she went on to Emerson College in Boston. She
trod the boards briefly as an actress before focusing her theatrical ambitions on
writing; she created successful plays produced on Broadway in New York. She
became a screenwriter, writing many films for Famous Players-Lasky (Daw and
O’Malley 1921: 24). Screenwriting credits include The Roaring Road (1919), The
Valley of the Giants (1919), Sherlock Holmes (1922), and The Lost World (1925). In a
1921 Photoplay magazine it was reported, ‘The screen now has its second woman
producer-director. Lois Weber no longer holds the feminine fort alone. Marion
Fairfax – famous playwright and one of the most successful screen writers of the
day – has formed her own company and is at present engaged in “shooting” her
first picture’ (Daw and O’Malley 1921: 24).
Tina Fey
Tina Fey (1970–) is a screenwriter, actress, comedian, and producer. She was born
Elizabeth Stamatina Fey in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, attended the University of
Virginia, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama. She first came to promi-
nence as one of the Saturday Night Live writers/cast members. Screenplay credits
include Mean Girls (2000, an adaptation of a book by Rosalind Wiseman). Fey has
won multiple Emmy Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and Writers Guild Awards for
her work in television as creator and head writer of the series 30 Rock and was also
the youngest ever recipient, in 2010, of the Mark Twain Humour Award.
Rita M. Fink
Rita M. Fink wrote screenplays with her husband, Harry Julian Fink. Writing
under the pseudonym R. M. Fink, her co-writing credits include Big Jake (1971),
Dirty Harry (1971), and Cahill US Marshal (1973). According to one source, ‘[T]he
tail end of the 60s and the beginnings of the 70s were the Finks’ heyday. They
were on top of the world, hunkered over a smoldering Underwood, cigarette
dangling from the corners of their mouths. Their drug of choice was work, work,
work and clearly it paid off huge dividends. They get credit on not one, but five
Dirty Harry movies’.
Carrie Fisher
Carrie Frances Fisher (1956–) was born in Beverly Hills, California, the daughter of
actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher. She is a screenwriter, actress, and
humorist; she writes fiction, non-fiction, and memoir. In 1973 Fisher attended
London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. She is best known for her por-
trayal of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy and for her bestselling novel
Postcards from the Edge. She penned the screenplay adaptation of the film of the
same name, directed by Mike Nichols, released by Columbia Pictures in 1990 (Kehr
1990). In addition to numerous original and commissioned screenplays, Fisher
works extensively as a script doctor. She made uncredited contributions to films
including The Wedding Singer and Sister Act (Grossberg 2012). Her second novel
was Surrender the Pink, a bestselling semi-autobiographical story of a Hollywood
screenwriter, published by Simon and Schuster in 1990. Wishful Drinking, Fisher’s
one-woman, autobiographical play (Brantly 2009) recounting her struggles with
substance abuse and psychological challenges, was the source for the memoir of
the same name, published by Simon and Shuster in 2008 (McGrath 2010). The
play was filmed by and broadcast on HBO (Lloyd 2010). Fisher has described her-
self as an ‘enthusiastic agnostic who would be happy to be shown that there is a
God’ (Cooper 2013). (Warren Lewis)
Fannie Flagg
Fannie Flagg (1944–) was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of a small
business owner and motion picture projectionist. Her birth name was Patricia
Neal, but when she registered with Actor’s Equity as a teenage performer in
local productions, she chose her professional name, Frances Carlton Flagg, to
avoid confusion with Academy Award-winning actress Patricia Neal. Flagg is an
American writer, comedian and actor. Flagg’s childhood undiagnosed dyslexia and
attention deficit disorder caused her to lack self-confidence as a writer for many
years (Kingsbury 2013). She noted: ‘I was discouraged from writing and embar-
rassed’ (Champlin 1987). In 1965, she moved to New York, where she did stand-
up comedy. Flagg started her television career as a co-host for the original Candid
Camera. She then began writing comedy sketches for Candid Camera, which she
would memorize rather than have to read on camera. While working as an actress,
Flagg attended the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and wrote a short story.
Because of her lifelong struggle with dyslexia, Flagg recalled, ‘I wrote it in long-
hand as an 11-year-old girl and so all my misspelled words, they’ll think I did it
on purpose’ (Hillard 1999). The story was judged first place for fiction and became
the basis for her 1981 novel Coming Attractions (Kingsbury 2013). Flagg has mined
her experiences as a southerner to create a rich body of literary and screenwriting
work, and her books include Welcome to the World, Baby Girl? (1998), Standing in
the Rainbow (2002), A Redbird Christmas (2004), and Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven
(2006). Flagg co-adapted (with Carol Sobieski) her novel Fried Green Tomatoes at
the Whistle-Stop Café (1991). She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best
Screenplay Adaptation and the film garnered a GLAAD Media Award for ‘best
lesbian content’. In 2012. Flagg was honoured with the Harper Lee Award at the
Alabama Writers Symposium. Flagg jokes, ‘I am an inspiration to all writers. I can’t
spell’ (Hillard 1999). (Warren Lewis)
Naomi Foner
Naomi Foner (1946–) was born Naomi Achs in New York City. She graduated from
Barnard College and received an MA in psychology from Columbia University.
She married a college professor, Eric Foner, and, after their divorce, retained his
name for her professional work. Foner started her career as a producer for Sesame
Street, a popular public television show aimed at children. Moving into screenwrit-
ing, she focused on creating strong female characters. Foner stated, ‘It’s been an
unconscious crusade. Women’s stories need to be told’ (McCreadie 1994: 26). Her
screenplay Running on Empty (1988) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best
Original Screenplay and won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. Foner states
that this gave her ‘a little corner on character-based movies’. The movie follows a
radical couple from the 1960s who have taken their family underground to avoid
prosecution for anti-government activities. Foner followed up with other films, all
featuring strong roles for women; they include Violets Are Blue (1986), A Dangerous
Woman (1993), Losing Isaiah (1995), and The Bee Season (2005). In her book Women
Who Write the Movies, Marsha McCreadie interviewed Foner and noted her strong
desire to write about the world and the changes it deserves. Foner is quoted as
saying, ‘I truly felt – still do – that the best way to effect social change is through
people’s emotions’ (McCreadie 1994: 25). Foner finds early morning the best writ-
ing time, as it’s ‘the closest you can get to an unconscious or dream state. Many
times a problem I’ve been working on seems to be solved when I wake up in the
morning … lately some of the best writing I’ve done has been in the Beverly Hills
Library. There was all this productive work going on around me’ (McCreadie 1994:
26–7). Foner has been executive producer on many of her films; she believes the
writer should be on the set and an active participant in the filmmaking process.
Foner states, ‘I think men will do anything to get their films made. Women seem
to understand the process better. They tend to be more concerned with people’s
feelings. Some of my favorite producers are women who can get the job done but
without being totally tyrannical’ (McCreadie 1994: 26–7).
Dana Fox
Dana Fox (1976–) graduated from Stanford University in California with a degree
in English and Art History and then attended University of Southern California’s
School of Cinematic Art. She is a screenwriter. Credits include The Wedding Date
(2005) and What Happens in Vegas (2008), and she is credited as co-writer on The
Couples Retreat (2009).
Harriet Frank, Jr
Harriet Frank, Jr (1917–) was born in Portland, Oregon, where her father sold
shoes and her mother hosted a radio show and wrote short stories. Her family
moved to California during the Depression in the 1930s, and Frank Jr’s mother
became a story editor with MGM Studios where she presented summaries of
new novels to studio executives. Her mother arranged a job for young Harriet at
MGM, in a training programme for writers. There she met Irving Ravetch, who
explained in the few interviews he gave: ‘I saw this lovely creature, and she was
up the hall, about fifty yards. I knew a chap in the office next to her, so I went to
him and said, “A deal: I give you fifty dollars, you give me your office.” He said,
“Done and done.” So I paid for the office and courted her on L. B. Mayer’s time’
(McGilligan 1986: 279). They married soon after they met, in 1946. The training
programme ended and Frank moved to Warner Bros as a senior writer. Ravetch
remained unemployed so he used that time to write westerns on speculation. At
Warner Bros, Frank had three screenplays produced: Living in a Big Way (1947),
The Outriders (1950), and Vengeance Valley (1951), as well as numerous magazine
stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Frank and Ravetch decided to col-
laborate on projects because of ‘affection and loneliness’ (McGilligan 1986: 281).
Frank explained she grew tired of seeing that, each day, ‘[h]e would go down the
hall to one room, and I would go to another, to be confronted with two sets of
problems. Suddenly, one evening in 1955, we said to each other, “This is non-
sense. Let’s try it together.” Happily, we’ve been doing it ever since.’
As to their writing process when they became a team, it is interesting to note
that it seemed to be a fairly balanced and equal working situation. According to
Ravetch, ‘It’s really a pure collaboration in the sense that we get together; we talk
out problems at great, exhaustive length; we do some kind of an outline together;
and every word really is collaborated on. Every word is thrown up in the air for
approval – from one to the other. The script is not so much written as it is talked
onto the page.’ Once the extensive outline was completed, ‘We work off the first
rush of energy. Nine to one. I sit at the typewriter. Hank [her nickname] paces’
(McGilligan 1986: 295).
Ravetch and Frank’s first collaborations earned them story credit on the films
Ten Wanted Men and Run for Cover (1955). Both being voracious readers, the
couple then took the William Faulkner novel The Hamlet to producer Jerry Wald at
20th Century Fox as a story they wanted to adapt for the screen. This adaptation
became The Long Hot Summer (1958), and it involved some major changes from the
novel. According to Ravetch, ‘[H]ere’s a book in which is delineated, possibly, the
most evil and vicious character in American literature – Flem Snopes. We turned
him around into a romantic hero … A pretty desperate thing to do to Faulkner.’ The
film also began their collaboration with director Martin Ritt. According to Ravetch,
‘With Marty, we were on the set throughout the shooting … We were there before
the picture started, and we were there during postproduction. Marty Ritt had such a
strong sense of himself – he was unthreatened by the presence of writers at his side.’
The Long Hot Summer earned Frank and Ravetch their first Academy Award nomi-
nation for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay). They earned two other Academy
Award Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) nominations: Hud (1963) and Norma Rae
(1979). Their adaptation of Hud also earned them Best Screenplay awards from the
New York Film Critics Circle and the Writers Guild of America.
Frank and Ravetch adapted other Faulkner novels, The Sound and the Fury
(1959) and The Reivers (1969). Hombre (1967) was adapted from an Elmore
Leonard novel. Frank took time to write two novels, Single in 1977 and Special
Effects in 1979. After tackling the story of the unionization of a textile mill, Norma
Rae (1979), actress Sally Field (who had won a Best Actress award for Norma Rae)
wanted to work with them again. Frank and Ravetch adapted the mature romance
Murphy’s Romance (1985), a film that earned a Best Actor nomination for James
Garner.
The screenwriters combined social issues and mature romance in their next,
and final, film adaptation, Stanley and Iris (1989, the story of a recently widowed
middle-class woman, Iris, played by Jane Fonda, who learns that a kind cook in
her company’s cafeteria, played by Robert De Niro, is illiterate. Iris begins to teach
the man to read and they fall in love. Stanley and Iris marked the last of six movies
written by Frank and Ravetch and directed by Martin Ritt. Ritt died in December
1990. After losing Ritt, the Frank and Ravetch team continued writing spec scripts
in the 1990s, however, they remain unproduced. (Rosanne Welch)
Helen Gardner
Helen Gardner (1884–1968) was a silent film pioneer whose career as actress, pro-
ducer, screenwriter, costume designer, and film editor spanned the years 1910 to
1924. She appeared in over 60 films, playing the female lead in most. At least 45
were Vitagraph productions.
Gardner’s sole screenwriter credit listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
is for the Universal Rex one-reel Becky, Becky (1913) in which she also starred.
However, between 1912 and 1914, she co-wrote the screenplays for the ten fea-
tures she produced through her company, Helen Gardner Picture Players. The
seed funding for her films was provided by Gardner family money, and her studio
was on a property that straddled the border between Old Tappan, New Jersey and
Tappan, New York, near the Hudson River. Her films were shown in the United
States, Canada, England, Europe, and Russia.
The screenwriter credited for many of Gardner’s features was the director,
Charles L. Gaskill. Gardner, a married woman separated from her husband,
and Gaskill were lovers. A close analysis indicates that much of the writing was
Gardner’s, and in 1915 Gaskill gave her public credit: ‘Indeed she has always
collaborated in both the direction and authorship of all these stories’ (Sherwood
1915: 20). Additional proof of Gardner’s co-screenwriting can be found through a
stylistic comparison of the screenplays and her surviving personal and published writ-
ings, which were voluminous. Parts of the screenplays clearly reflect her personality
and the persona she was determined to project.
Five of the original manuscripts of Gardner’s screenplays have survived. They
include some or all of the following: complete dialogue with intertitles; casts
of characters; cast lists; directions to the performers; descriptions of settings;
narratives of actions; actor/camera interaction instructions, as well as instruc-
tions for the camera. The most remarkable example is found in the prologue
to Gardner’s feature Fleur-de-Lys (1914). Appearing on screen as herself and
addressing her viewers directly, Gardner proclaims her concept of film. (Gardner
had previously articulated her philosophy of film and her cinematic goals in
interviews and articles and her large, informative, colourful advertisements in
trade publications.) Gardner’s prologue in Fleur-de-Lys is original, innovative,
and autobiographical. Her language is dramatic, elevated, abstract and impres-
sionistic; it is her meditation on the nature of illusion and of cinema itself, on the
interplay between the image on the screen and the spiritual non-material realm.
She asks the audience to consider whether the two-dimensional images seen on
screen are real, and asks: is what you think you are seeing real? Or does reality lie
somewhere else, in some other dimension? Gardner’s answer to her own question
is that it is the ‘Spirit’, the eternal animating principle of all things, that is real.
This was an innovative way of claiming ownership of her creative work; these
questions were major issues for Gardner, especially during this period. Written
in the scenario:
Introductory scene: Miss Gardner, dressed a la mode, parts the curtains and walks to
the foreground. Smiling right and left, she bows and then says:
Dear good friends do not believe that I am only a shadow here – I am more
than that: Behold the Spirit! which is the flesh’s glory, the animating principle
of the shadow, the glorifying principle [strike-out] essence of all things and
which endureth forever! …
Tableau … Then slowly relaxing from the mood of seriousness, she smiles and bows
again, turns, exits slowly … The drapery is pulled aside disclosing –
[Scene 1. A garret room …]
Gardner’s words most likely reflected her interest in theosophy, a philosophical

movement based in part on Theravada Buddhism. The society was dedicated to
the movement founded in the 1870s by Helena Blavatsky; according to Blavatsky,
‘this postulated science provides a description of Reality not only at a physical
level, but also on a metaphysical one’ (Anonymous 2013).
Shortly after the release of Fleur-de-Lys, Gardner included in one of her advertise-
ments a mini-essay that contained more of her ars dramatica. She defended the
originality of her ‘picture plays’, which she said were ‘usually planned upon
the higher lines of dramatic thought, conveying in poetic and philosophic form
those greater and grander truths of life which compel at once attention and inter-
est, [so] it must be borne in mind that every picture is so finished a work of real
art …’ (Gardner 1914).
Gardner’s screenplays, co-written with Gaskill, focused on stories of power-
ful women. She created new female sagas and based these feminist stories on
well-known patriarchal myths and themes. She adapted narratives featuring his-
torical figures and characters from classical literature; she co-wrote and starred in
Cleopatra, scenarios for herself to star as the imagined wife of the biblical Cain, the
imagined sister of the Spanish Carmen, an Arabian Nights princess, and a daughter
of the Greek god Pan. Gardner’s forceful heroines reflected her own aspirations to
dominance and glory as well as her ambition to create a literate, elevated cinema.
In her independent features, she was a time traveller, crossing centuries and the
globe.
Many aspects of her screenwriting and creativity are important, but the focus
here will be on some of the clearer examples of her expressions of her own person-
ality in her screenwriting. The earliest screenplay manuscript known to survive,
that of her fourth feature, A Princess of Bagdad (1913), highlights female power
over men, a physical and sexual attribute she was drawn to, for she seems to have
included it in all her productions. Ojira (Gardner), the Bagdad princess, openly
and defiantly rages against her ruling father, Bedar, the Caliph, who is preventing
her from marrying Sardi, the poor cobbler she loves. The screenplay gives Gardner
a chance to emote broadly and forcefully. Detailed in the scenario is the scene that
follows Bedar’s order for Sardi’s execution:
Eunuch bears Sardi away. Bedar turns to Ojira. She lifts her head angrily, and
looks at him. He falls back a little. As directed. ‘Thou pig!’ she cries. ‘Thou she-
goat! Thou art without heart! Dost hear me? I say this – thy frail daughter – a
woman!’ She goes up to him close, and looks at him steadily. He is terribly
afraid of her. She snaps her fingers in his face, turns away, and deliberately,
slowly, walks out of the chamber, stopping at the door only to turn and cast
a look upon him which makes him shiver. When she is gone he rubs his head
foolishly, and looks at Saku-Bon [the Grand Vizier]. Saku-Bon scratches his
head, and going close, says, with great but humble ceremony:
Intertitle:
Commander of the Faithful! Consider me not a candidate for the hand of thy
amiable daughter!’
Ojira then disguises herself as Sardi to keep her love from being caught. Two of
the surviving stills from the film show Gardner as an adorable cobbler, a little
moustache pencilled on her upper lip. The screenplay creates a flattering image of
Gardner and her persona: ‘Ojira in this scene, although disguised as a beggar, is
herself in all she does – a person of royal blood, her method and manner that of a
princess’. As producer, writer, and actress, Gardner was able to control her image,
something few cinema women of her time were able to do.
In her fifth feature, A Daughter of Pan (1913), Gardner played a wild, untamed,
uncivilized Nature Woman who is caught between the life of the forest and the
seductions of a royal court. In this scene, a young courtier spies her in the woods
and demands that she show him her face:
Suddenly her rage breaks forth like a volcano, she turns upon him like a fury
and pushes him away. Here the manner of each character is changed com-
pletely. He, a coward at heart, cringes with fear before her wrath. She, like a
veritable titan of the forest, like an enraged queen, stands menacingly before
him, proud and erect, her face turned full upon him. She says: ‘Behold my face
thou simple fool! And may its lightning strike thee dead!’
In Gardner’s Olga Treskoff (1913), her character is a Russian woman who is fought
over by several men, including the characters Serge and Paul. Serge, having
eavesdropped on love talk between Olga and Paul, flies into a jealous rage. Here,
Gardner created a chance to play in her full melodramatic mode:
As Olga looks at him steadily, a conviction of his lowness seizes upon her, and
slowly, steadily, grimly, she eyes him from head to foot. ‘You common scoundrel!
You eavesdropped?’ she accuses. ‘Don’t come near me!’
[She] slowly approaches him, and he as slowly wilts before her onslaught. ‘You
stand revealed before me in your true character! That I should have felt a sym-
pathy for you is more than ever you deserved! I hope my eyes will never rest
upon your face again!’ [She] turns upon him like a tiger cat. Majestically she
sweeps by him to the door, which she opens wide.
In Fleur-de-Lys (1914), after the prologue in which Gardner plays herself, she plays
both Fleur, a poor Left Bank café denizen, and the historic Madame du Barry,
whom Fleur dreams she has become. When Madame du Barry is guillotined, Fleur
dies a violent death, and the film ends.
Fleur’s opening garret scene is followed by one in which the villain, Hawk,
makes an invasive and menacing entrance. Unsurprisingly, he wants to marry
Fleur or have her any way he can. Gardner suddenly becomes that physically
aggressive, dominant female and she manhandles the brute:
[Fleur] indignantly interrupts him with ‘Fool! fool! fool!’ She adds with great
vehemence: ‘I’d rather love a rat!’ She turns away laughing riotously. His anger
grows. He walks to a window and gazes out of it. Then turns and says: ‘Some
day I’ll get you!’ This is a threat. It angers her so that she looks vicious. Affecting
to laugh, she beckons him. He comes close to her. His face is full of expectancy.
‘What!’ he asks, a hideous smile upon his face. She takes her time. Suddenly she
manhandles him – turns him about and terrible laugh … He releases her … She
says: ‘Dear Hawk! ha!ha!ha! Put up your knife … Put it up!’ … He puts it away …
‘Come into my arms!’ she says, with affected languor and seductive gestures …
He smiles as he never has before … She falls into his embrace … She glides out
of his arms, unseen by him her face indicating a most horrible purpose … At
one side of her room she says: ‘Come, my love! let us sit in the balcony!’
In the next scene, set on the balcony off her garret room, Gardner showed her
taste for death and murder. Every one of her features had one or more deaths,
typically violent ones. She asks:
‘Do you love me?’ [Intertitle]

Pause … His back is towards the railing … ‘I love you!’ he says … She affects to
glide into his arms … Suddenly, like lightning, she turns upon him … With a
fierce gesture she grasps him by the coat, pulls him around so that he is almost
upon the railing. Releasing him, she then pushes with all her might … He falls
against the railing … He falls half over … She pulls his hands up from the rail-
ing, which he clutches with all his strength, and he disappears … She looks
over … Turns … Shrieks …
Gardner described Pieces of Silver (1914) in quasi-ethereal terms, saying it was

about ‘Sister Berenice and her struggle to express the beauty and wonder of her
soul through the materiality of the flesh’ (Gardner 1914: 44). Berenice (Gardner)
is a novice and teacher in a convent school, and her cousin Abner is studying for
the priesthood. Abner struggles against his feeling of love for Berenice, and she
cannot help responding. ‘For the first time in her life, perhaps, the woman in her
has been aroused … The blood of woman fills her eyes and face’. Berenice decides
she must give up convent life and marry so she can become a mother. She can-
not marry Abner because he is becoming a priest. Eventually a Mr Herbert King is
brought to her as a suitor. ‘King is the oleaginous lover.’ As he gets more and more
persistent, Berenice shrinks from him more and more. … ‘Like any other man, he
supposes it is because HE IS GOING TO PROPOSE TO HER! Therefore he becomes
more ardent’. He presses her to him; she is so frightened she can hardly breathe.
‘Suddenly, but with extreme deliberation, she flings him away from her. She gazes
upon him with a horror and an anger, blended and terrible in its meaning, that
begins to chill him to the marrow … She looks to him [like she is] insane. He may
even fear for his life.’ Bernice orders King out and then asks, in an intertitle, ‘Are
the sublimest motives of Woman entirely unappreciated by – Man? Oh Mothers!
is it so?’.
In Helen Gardner’s screenplays, in her film language and in her on-screen
actions, she defied female stereotypes and dared to humiliate and defeat the men
who were trying to dominate her and limit her freedom. She showed herself to be
a fearless, courageous woman – a true pioneer. (Dorin Schumacher)
Gene Gauntier
Gene Gauntier (1885–1966) was born Genevieve Liggett and grew up in Kansas
City, Missouri. In her late teens she made her way to New York City to become
an actress; there she adopted her stage name, Gene Gauntier. In 1906 Gauntier
found herself temporarily unemployed in her theatrical ventures and was in need
of income. Gauntier wrote in her autobiography: ‘My funds were running low,
and in a vague way I thought of the new opening for actors – moving pictures,
but, like the rest of the legitimate profession, I looked on them with contempt and
felt sure that my prestige would be lowered if I worked in them’ (Gauntier 1928).
Despite theatrical producers threatening to blackball actors who appeared in
films from legitimate stage work (Menefee 2004: 71), Gauntier accepted a role in
the film Paymaster for Biograph Studios; portraying a distressed damsel, she was
to be tossed into raging river waters under a mill’s dam. She was a non-swimmer,
but she performed the stunt (reportedly nearly drowning), won the respect of
director Frank Marion, was paid five dollars for the day’s work and, when director
Marion moved to Kalem Studios, he hired her as one of Kalem’s leading ladies. At
Kalem, Gauntier, as part of the film production group, learned every element of
production – and when asked to write a scenario in 1906, she did. Her first one
was based on a play she had attended entitled Why Girls Leave Home; Or Danger
Signal on the Path to Folly. By her own estimation, the scenario was ‘hopeless’
(Mahar 2008: 42) and the project was never filmed. One can assume that Kalem
Studios did not secure the rights to adapt the play for film release, for at the time
there were no copyright laws; in fact it is Gauntier’s 1907 adaptation of General
Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, Ben-Hur; Tales of Christ, that caused book publisher
Harper and Row to bring suit against the Kalem Company, the Motion Pictures
Patent Company, and Gauntier for copyright infringement. Harper and Row, after
years of litigation, succeeded in their suit, providing a precedent for the American
copyright law regarding film adaptations that is still in place today.
Gauntier did not shy away from controversial or difficult material; she wrote,
acted in, and produced successful films such as Days of ‘61 (1907), the first film
narrative focused on the issues surrounding the Civil War, as well as Daughter of
the Confederacy in 1909. Her scenarios featured female characters who were strong
and daring; she wrote and starred in Adventures of a Girl Spy (1909) (the alternate
title is The Cracker’s Bride), based on the real exploits of Confederate spy Belle Boyd.
The popularity of this film led to a handful of sequels and what may be cinema’s
first prequel, A Hitherto Unrelated Incident of the Girl Spy (1911). The series was shot
in Florida and took advantage of its swamps, bugs, water moccasins, and rattlers;
the crew carried medical supplies with them at all times and wild stunts and dan-
gerous elements were featured. The stories, unlike most of the Civil War movies
being made in the year of the conflict’s fiftieth anniversary, was told from the
Southerner’s point of view8 (Doll 2008).
Gauntier sought out realism in her work and fought to go on location – going
to Ireland (where she and director Sidney Olcott [her creative and business partner]
hoped to build a permanent studio), Germany, Palestine, and Egypt to produce
very successful films. Perhaps Gauntier’s most highly regarded production was
From the Manger to the Cross in 1912. The impetus for the film is interesting:
while shooting documentary footage for a travelogue of the Middle East for the
Kalem Company’s film catalogue, Gauntier suffered heat prostration and became
semi-delirious. In a near hallucinogenic state, she informed her crew, ‘We’re going
to make the life of Jesus of Nazareth. We’ll go to Cairo first and take the flight
into Egypt at the Pyramids, then to Jerusalem’ (Gauntier 1928). The partners at
Kalem balked at the idea; however, Gauntier instructed her production team (led
by Olcott) to quietly start to film background footage for the story as she quickly
wrote the script. When the Kalem hierarchy saw how committed Gauntier was to
the project, they finally agreed to finance the film. From the Manger to the Cross
was massive, an unheard of six-reel epic (71 minutes) – and it became hugely suc-
cessful both critically and financially. D. W. Griffith is often given the credit for
the first feature-length film, Judith of Bethulia (1914, running time of 61 minutes);
however, it is From the Manger to the Cross that was written and produced two
years earlier, running ten minutes longer.9 W. Stephen Bush described the film in
Moving Picture World magazine in October 1912, praising ‘the realism of it all. It is
not a Passion Play; it is the very story of the Passion … indeed a cinematographic
gospel’ (Menefee 2004: 79). The film, because of its historical – as well as critical –
importance, is now part of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
After six years as a successful single woman in the business, Gauntier married
Jack Clarke in 1912. She also formed her own company, the Gene Gauntier Film
Players with Clarke and Olcott. Films produced under her own banner include
In the Power of the Ku Klux Clan in 1913 and In the Power of the Hypnotist (1913) –
the story of a travelling entertainer who hypnotizes a young woman (played by
Gauntier) who, under his influence, joins his troupe and commits robberies for
him. When the young woman wants to break free, he sets up a situation in the
theatrical presentation where she is almost choked to death by a snake wrapped
around her neck; at the last minute the charlatan dies and the young woman is
released from his hypnotic spell10. Other films include The Octoroon (1913, based
on Dion Boucicault’s play), an interracial romance that takes place in the South11,
and finally the western Gene of the Northland (1915). Months after her last film,
Gauntier and Clarke were heading towards divorce and her creative partnership
with Olcott came to an end. Gauntier and Olcott were hired by Universal to
develop projects; however, the new departmental/compartmental business model
of the studio, where they were simply assigned projects, frustrated Gauntier who
was not used to wearing a creative leash. Film historian Susan Doll writes that as
the film industry became more and more systemized, people like Gauntier began
to be squeezed out (Doll 2008). Gauntier (after writing over 300 films in her
career) retired from filmmaking in 1918 and moved to Europe to become a war
correspondent and eventually a novelist (Doll 2008). (Jule Selbo)
Susannah Grant
Susannah Grant (1963–) was born in New York City. She is a screenwriter and direc-
tor. She graduated from Amherst College in 1984 and then attended the American
Film Institute in Los Angeles. Feature film credits include Erin Brockovich (2000;
Academy Award nomination and Writers Guild nomination for Best Screenplay),
Ever After (1998), 28 Days (2000), In Her Shoes (2005), The Soloist (2009) and
The 5th Wave (2016). Grant also writes for the television medium.
Joan Harrison
Joan Harrison (1907–94) (see ‘Women at work: Hollywood screenwriters of the
1940s’, p. 735).
Julia Hart
Julia Hart (1984–) is the daughter of screenwriter James V. Hart (Hook (1991) and
Contact (1997). He would read her screenplays as bedtime stories. Julia Hart gradu-
ated from Columbia University with an English major and then worked as a high
school teacher for eight years. In 2012, her original screenplay The Keeping Room
put her on the Black List (a script holding site founded for the film industry in
2004 that features yet unproduced screenplays). Her produced screenwriting cred-
its include The Keeping Room (2014).
Amy Heckerling
Amy Heckerling (1954–) was born in the Bronx, New York. She graduated from
New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1973 with a BA degree in
film and television. She went on to earn a Master’s degree from the American Film
Institute, where she wrote and directed Getting It Over With (1978), a short film about
a 19-year-old trying to lose her virginity. Based on that film, MGM offered her a con-
tract, which eventually led to her directing, but not writing, Fast Times at Ridgemont
High (1982). The success of Fast Times led to directing two more films, Johnny
Dangerously (1984) and National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985). Heckerling’s
screenwriting credits include Look Who’s Talking (1989) and Clueless (1995).
Clueless sets Jane Austen’s Emma in 1990s Beverly Hills and explores the conventions
of teen comedy (awkward negotiation of social and sexual/romantic structures) with
biting social commentary. In the screenplay, protagonist Cher (Alicia Silverstone)
expounds on love:
What a revolting development! Could this be? I loved somebody and they
loved someone else?? Could the world be that hideous? … And what about all
the effort I put into becoming a babe, when the man of my dreams likes someone
for her ‘good soul?’ It hurt! It just hurt … and I hate pain.
The strengths of Clueless, from a screenwriting perspective, reside in its complex

central characters. Cher is a conflicted character because her inner and outer moti-
vations seem to be in conflict (i.e. helping others while unable to help herself).
And, while she ends up with a boyfriend, the male love interest does not rescue or
save her – a point Heckerling may have been considering after Look Who’s Talking,
wherein the male love interest is part saviour.
Loser (2000), according to Heckerling, has autobiographical elements; it fol-
lows two social misfits through their first semester at NYU as they discover their
outsider status is a valuable asset. ‘They’re not part of any bigger social group,’
she explains. ‘They’re alienated, they’re lonely. I was influenced by movies ...
like Marty, about people that aren’t doing so well until they find each other’
(Donadoni 2000).
I Never Could Be Your Woman (2007) is a tale about a divorced mother (Michelle
Pfeiffer) who falls in love with a younger man while her daughter is hitting
puberty and beginning to explore her own sexuality. Heckerling wanted to
explore Hollywood’s obsession with youth and beauty:
It’s been that way from Sunset Boulevard on. Hollywood is the dream factory,
and no one dreams about older women. It’s a youth-and-beauty-obsessed place
that sells a certain image. Of course I have sympathy. If you look at all the pictures
of women in magazines, everybody’s got a forehead that looks like a billboard.
Completely blank. When I was 20, I had these furrowed lines between my
brows, because I was always angry. And I was 20. I don’t think that was a mark
of age; it was just my personality. Yet these people think that when you have
a completely blank head, you can put advertising on it. That’s not youthful.
What is that? Some of these young girls that I find and put in films, I see them
in a magazine a year later, and they’ve got big fat lips and stick figures. And you
go, ‘Why? Why are you buying into this?’ (Murray 2008)
Vamps (2012) focuses on two beautiful female vampires living in New York City,
attending Vampires Anonymous and trying to assimilate into the ‘normal world’.
Heckerling feels the task of being a working female screenwriter in Hollywood –
as well as trying to portray the female in a positive, gender-equal light – is
fraught with challenges: ‘It’s a disgusting industry. I don’t know what else to
say. Especially now. I can’t stomach most of the movies about women. I just saw a
movie last night. I don’t want to say the name – but again with the fucking wed-
ding and the only time women say anything is about men’ (Silverstein 2012a).
(Robert Arnett and Jule Selbo)
Beth Henley
Beth Henley (1952–) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She attended Southern
Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She adapted her 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning
play, Crimes of the Heart, in 1986; it was nominated for an Academy Award for
Best Adapted Screenplay. Other film credits include True Stories (1986, co-writer),
Nobody’s Fool (1986), and Miss Firecracker (1989).
Nicole Holofcener
Nicole Holofcener (1960–) was born in New York City and raised in show busi-
ness. Her mother was a set designer and her father was an artist. Her parents
divorced while she was young and, when she was eight years old, her mother
remarried, this time to Charles Joffe, producer of more than 50 Woody Allen films.
Holofcener grew up on her stepfather’s movie sets. She worked as an extra and
later as a production assistant and went on to study film at Columbia University,
being mentored by Martin Scorsese.
Holofcener is a writer-director with five features to date. Her films eschew genre,
being part-drama, part-romantic comedy, and part-social commentary. They
often feature an ensemble of female characters, who are smart, prickly, funny,
flawed – and ultimately relatable. Holofcener’s scripts don’t always have a strong
dramatic premise, and character goals are lower stakes than in more conventional
Hollywood fare. These are stories of everyday life: they focus on friendship, inse-
curity, money, how we deal with guilt, what motivates generosity. Authenticity
and realism are a hallmark of her work.
After a film school short that earned her some attention at festivals, Holofcener’s
feature writing and directing debut was Walking and Talking (1996). The film looks
at the strain on a close friendship between two women when one of them decides
to get married. Holofcener admits that the story draws on her personal experi-
ence, and this is a pattern in her work. Amelia (Catherine Keener) plays an inse-
cure, single 20-something, who feels abandoned when her best friend and former
roommate, Laura (Anne Heche), announces her engagement. Amelia’s problems
are compounded when she learns her cat has cancer, her ex-boyfriend asks her to
support his phone sex addiction, and the video store clerk she starts to date severs
contact after finding out she referred to him as ‘the ugly guy’. The simple story, set
in motion by Laura’s engagement, follows a loose three-act structure where Amelia
must now chart her path through early adulthood alone; she stumbles, recovers,
and finally understands that her friendship can endure if she lets it evolve.
Holofcener’s second feature, Lovely and Amazing (2001), focuses on four women
and their insecurities related to body image. Jane Marks (Brenda Blethyn) is
the divorced mother of two adult daughters, Michelle (Catherine Keener) and
Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer), and adopted, eight-year-old Annie (Raven Goodwin),
who is African-American. Michelle is a bitter, self-involved artist who strays from
her marriage and has a fling with a 17-year-old boy. Elizabeth is an insecure actress
who shows greater compassion for stray dogs than her own boyfriend. Annie is
overweight and wrestles with her black identity in her adopted white family. The
story takes off from complications surrounding Jane’s liposuction. While the plot
connects all four women, the film explores each one’s struggle with insecurity,
all in some way relating to the way they look or are perceived. In his review for
the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote: ‘Almost to a person, the film’s mostly
female characters are afflicted by our society’s obsession with looks, to the degree
that they never stop finding fault with themselves in the mirrors of their infinitely
self-critical minds’ (Holden 2002). The film won several awards, including an
Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.
In her third film, Friends with Money (2006), Holofcener uses income inequality
among friends as a point of departure. Its ensemble cast features Jennifer Aniston,
Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand, and, once again, Catherine Keener. The film
centres on Olivia (Aniston) who works as a maid to make ends meet while sur-
rounded by three wealthy best friends. Despite the disparity in their economic and
social circumstances, each woman faces a personal challenge (a mid-life crisis, a
husband who might be gay, a loveless marriage) and money doesn’t make it any
easier. Over the course of the film, the friendship among these four women is a
source of conflict, of amusement, and finally of comfort. The film opened the 2006
Sundance Film Festival and its screenplay was nominated for an Independent Spirit
Award.
Holofcener’s fourth feature, Please Give (2010), continues the trend of using a
mostly female, ensemble cast. Like Holofcener’s earlier Friends with Money, the
characters are smart, educated, professional women who deal with their indi-
vidual problems with humour and self-awareness. Kate (Keener) exploits people
for a living, yet is consumed by guilt. She demonstrates a generosity that is as
compulsive as it is misguided, and it is this impulse to assuage her guilt that acts
as the engine of the story. In the end, Kate discovers that the most rewarding gift
she can give is to buy her awkward teenage daughter a pair of overpriced jeans.
As with Holofcener’s earlier work, Please Give eschews a tidy resolution in favour
of a spirit of ‘life goes on’.
Enough Said (2013) is Holofcener’s fifth feature and can be classified more easily as
a romantic comedy. In an interview for the LA Times, Holofcener is quoted as saying:
‘I guess I like to dispel myths about people, but especially about women, what we’re
really like. But it’s not like I’m thinking, “Well, I’m going to show people what women
are really like.” I’m just writing what I know’ (Chocano 2006). Holofcener’s characters
are always searching, both self-involved and self-aware. In the end, everyone wants
happiness in some form. Holofcener’s talent is finding ways to ground this universal
need in the everyday. Every Secret Thing, Holofcener’s screenplay adaptation of the
book by Laura Lippman (directed by Amy Berg), was released in 2015. (Claudia Myers)
Drusilla Dunjee Houston

Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876–1941) was born in 1876 into a large, well-to-
do, and well-educated African-American family in Virginia, her parents being a
Baptist minister and a homemaker. She trained as a concert pianist but ultimately
became an educator. A woman possessed of tremendous intellectual curiosity, she
began her own schools when she grew disillusioned with the quality of public
school education for African-American girls. Eloping in 1892 with Price Houston,
they moved to Oklahoma where she opened McAlester Seminary for girls.
Houston wrote two unproduced screenplays. The first, The Klansman (1903),
depicted the lynching of African-American women in Oklahoma. The second,
Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob (1915), was written in response to D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation. The Maddened Mob was also a reaction to the highly popular
racist stage plays of the era, such as the one on which The Birth of a Nation was
based. Houston’s script is the first documented response to the Griffith film by an
African-American writer, and predates Oscar Micheaux’s silent film Within These
Gates, a similar commentary. In the script, Houston attacks racism and also takes
to task many political outcomes of the Civil War, such as Reconstruction.
Dunjee Houston’s screenplay has been brought to light for the first time in
recent years, the editors explaining that her eloquent attack on lynching was writ-
ten in verse and variously named ‘Spirit of the Old South: The Maddened Mob’
and ‘The Maddened Mob – America’s Shame’ (Brooks-Bertram and Nevergold
2007: 15). The 58-page elegy, written in screenplay format, was never produced as
a motion picture (Brooks-Bertram 2013).
Houston explained that she did not pursue the publication or production of
The Maddened Mob for several reasons: ‘The photoplay lay for long years, pushed
aside by executive duties and also because the author knew that American litera-
ture was only catering to Topsy, Uncle Tom, and slap-stick minstrel Negro types’
(Brooks-Bertram 2013). Another reason was that she did not want to put her fam-
ily in danger, for her content went against the Sedition and Espionage Acts, and,
in addition, the Ku Klux Klan was active in Oklahoma at the time. She wrote to
a friend in 1933:
For 23 years, I have had lying unpublished a motion picture play almost as
sensational as ‘The Clansman,’ but I did not dare to offer it to the literary
public because the American white man utterly refuses to recognize such
a character as my heroine, though the race has many of her counterparts.
(Brooks-Bertram 2002).
She ended her academic career as religious director of the Oklahoma Home for
Delinquent Boys. As a writer, she is best known for the historical text Wonderful
Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empires (1926), which is credited with anticipating
the Black and African-American studies movement in the United States.
She died of complications from tuberculosis in Arizona in 1941. (Bettina Moss)
Bonnie Hunt
Bonnie Lynn Hunt (1961–) is an American actress, screenwriter, director, producer,
television host, and voice artist. She was born in Chicago, Illinois and trained as an
oncology nurse (Grahnke 1992). In 1984, she co-founded An Impulsive Thing,12 an
improvisational comedy troupe, and then joined Chicago’s Second City in 1986.
In 1990, Hunt landed the lead role on the NBC sitcom Grand. In 1993, she
teamed with David Letterman to produce The Building.13 The show filmed live
and highlighted her improvisational style.14 Hunt and Letterman teamed up
again in 1995 to create The Bonnie Hunt Show (retitled Bonnie), but it was cancelled
after 11 episodes. In 2002, Hunt created Life with Bonnie, her role earning her a
2004 Emmy nomination.
Hunt also co-wrote, directed, and co-starred in the romantic comedy Return to
Me (2000). Other screenwriting credits include additional screenplay material on
Cars (2006). In 2012, Hunt and frequent writing partner Don Lake teamed with
Ben Stiller’s production company, Red Hour TV, to create compiKATEed, a half-
hour sitcom for the ABC network. Hunt described her character on the show as ‘a
confidently insecure woman with a complicated life’. (Warren Lewis)
Patty Jenkins
Patty Jenkins (1971–) grew up in various places around the world, due to the fact
that her father was in the United States military. While in the USA, she spent much
of her time in Kansas and Washington, DC. After graduating from high school,
she attended Cooper Union University in New York City to study painting and
moved into the study of filmmaking. She worked in production after graduation
and then was accepted into the American Film Institute’s Directors Programme
in Los Angeles. She wrote and directed short films, and Velocity Rules (2001) won
the Best Short Film award at Telluride Film Festival. Shortly after her graduation,
Jenkins became interested in constructing a film around Aileen Wuornos, a pros-
titute on death row in Florida for the murder of seven men. Jenkins contacted
Wuornos and, in the year before Wuornos’s execution, was able to get details of
the woman’s life, the crime, and a stack of Wuornos’s letters that were written
over a 12-year period. Jenkins then wrote the script, Monster (2003); it was named
Movie of the Year by the American Film Institute, nominated for an Edgar Award
and an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay, and actress Charlize Theron
earned an Academy Award for Best Actress in the lead role.
Fay Kanin
Fay Kanin (1917–2013) was born Fay Mitchell on 9 May 1917 in New York City,
to a housewife and activist mother and a store manager father. She won a state
spelling bee and met then-governor of New York Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
studied at Elmira College, and completed her BA at the University of Southern
California in 1937. After she graduated, Fay joined the RKO story department
as a reader where she, ‘stayed on at night to do my own writing. I walked on
sets, invaded editing rooms, snooped, made friends. Hollywood was like all your
childhood fantasies come true, full of beautiful people having a simply marvelous
time.’ One of the friends she made was writer Michael Kanin whom she married
in 1940. They spent their honeymoon in a rented house in Malibu adapting a New
Yorker short story (written by A. J. Leibling) about a woman running a boarding
house for fighters into a film. Produced in 1942, Sunday Punch became their first
joint sale, though they each continued to work on solo projects as they searched
for an idea for their next original screenplay. Fay wrote Blondie for Victory, a story
involving the comic-strip character inspiring local housewives to work for the
war effort (which bothered their husbands who were left at home to handle the
domestic chores). Fay earned the assignment thanks to a series of radio shows
she produced with the same theme. An activist like her mother, Fay used her tal-
ent to support her politics. After World War II, she and Michael created a female
congresswoman heroine for their Broadway play, Goodbye, My Fancy, modelled on
Eleanor Roosevelt.
Fay’s next original screenplay was My Pal Gus (1952, co-written with her hus-
band). The couple discovered they had not been blacklisted, but ‘gray-listed’.
Neither had formally joined the Communist party during the war, but they were
friends with many suspected members, so studios chose not to hire them to avoid
any potential issues. Two years later, director Charles King Vidor wanted them
to write a film for Elizabeth Taylor, but MGM refused to hire the couple. Vidor
threatened to expose the existence of the gray-list unless they were hired. Vidor
won and the Kanins wrote Rhapsody (1954).
Fay’s first Academy Award nomination came for Teacher’s Pet (1957). The script
involved a famous male journalist forced to take a class with a female journalism
professor. The two come to respect each other and eventually fall in love. Teacher’s
Pet turned out to be the last of their film successes. Together, Michael and Fay
wrote a theatrical version of Rashomon, and then a musical, The Gay Life, neither
of which succeeded. Eventually this pair of Kanins ended their partnership as well.
‘We decided we would have to keep the working collaboration or the marriage. We
decided on the marriage,’ Fay explained. Fay, in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
worked in the new form of the television movie, writing four in a ten-year period
from 1974 to 1984. She earned an Emmy for Tell Me Where It Hurts (1974), and an
Emmy and a Humanitas Award for adapting the true story of parents determined
to discover how their soldier son died in Vietnam into Friendly Fire (1979). During
that period she also served as president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts
and Sciences, followed by a 20-year run as chair of the National Film Preservation
Board. (Rosanne Welch)
Gloria Katz
Gloria Katz (1942–) penned many films with her husband/writing partner, Willard
Huyck. These include Messiah of Evil (1973), American Graffiti (1973, co-written
with George Lucas), Lucky Lady (1975), French Postcards (1979), Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom (1984, story by George Lucas), Best Defense (1984, an adaptation
of Robert Grossbach’s novel), Howard the Duck (1986, based on a Marvel Comics
character), and Radioland Murders (1994, based on a story by George Lucas).
Zoe Kazan
Zoe Kazan (1983–) was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of screenwrit-
ers Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord. Her grandfather, Elia Kazan, was a well-
known theatre and film director. She earned a degree at Yale University and works
as a writer and actress. She wrote and starred in Ruby Sparks (2012).
Virginia Kellogg
Virginia Kellogg (1907–81) (see ‘Women at work: screenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735).
Laura Kerr
Laura Kerr (1902–91), a Vassar-educated Ohio native, worked for ten years as a
New York literary agent before following her then-husband, Anthony Veiller, to
Hollywood in 1934, where he quickly established himself as a writer and producer
(Beaver, acc 2014). Kerr herself began a career as a writer in the early 1940s, follow-
ing the dissolution of her marriage to Veiller and her remarriage to scenarist Allen
Rivkin. Kerr’s first screenwriting co-credit came with Brazil (1944). Soon after, Kerr
and Rivkin joined forces to pen the 1947 film The Farmer’s Daughter, which earned
an Academy Award for Best Actress for Loretta Young. The collaboration contin-
ued through the 1940s and 1950s on adapted and original screenplays including
My Dream Is Yours (1949), Grounds for Marriage (1951), and Battle Circus (1953).
Kerr and Rivkin also wrote the book Hello Hollywood! A Story of the Movies by the
People Who Make Them (1962). (Jean Ansolabehere)
Callie Khouri
Callie Khouri (1957–) was born Carolyn Ann Khouri in San Antonio, Texas. She
is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter best known for her film Thelma and
Louise (1991). She attended Purdue University where she majored in drama, then
the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles. She worked on music videos, thinking
screenwriting ‘was something that was going to be out of … reach’. However,
her idea – ‘two women go on a spree’ (Field 2012) – led her to commit to writing
Thelma and Louise. The story follows two women who go on the run after Louise
kills a man who has attempted to rape Thelma. Realizing they can’t go back to
their normal and drab lives, they flee towards Mexico while being chased by
detectives and the FBI. Their trek allows them to find themselves, strengthens
their friendship, and leads them to make a momentous decision in the final
moments of the film.
Khouri did not want the movie to be about ‘two stupid women, or two evil
women who go on a crime spree’ (Field 2012). She wanted Thelma and Louise
to be strong, yet comical, so that the audience could identify and relate. Khouri’s
script was honoured by the Academy, and also with a Writers Guild of America
Award, a Golden Globe, a PEN Literary Award, the London Film Critics Circle
Award for Film of the Year, and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay by the
British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Another trait of Khouri’s screenwriting is that she allows the characters in her
films to write the film for her. According to Khouri, once she has the characters
and the scenes down in her mind, she’ll ‘go out in the backyard in the morning …
sit there … and let the characters come’ to her (Field 2012). From there they talk
to her. All she has to do is ‘shut up and listen’ (Field 2012). Then write the story.
Khouri was the 1992 recipient of the second annual Los Angeles Women
Making History Award and the New York Women in Communications Matrix
Award. Khouri’s other credits include Something to Talk About (1995), Divine Secrets
of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), and the television series Nashville (2012–15).
Bradley King
Bradley King (1894–1977) was born Josephine McLaughlin in New York City. She
was a screenwriter and playwright. After attempts at starting an acting career
failed, she took a job as a stenographer for a film scenario writer. When the
writer walked out on his commitment to the studio, King suggested one of her
own stories. By 1916, she was being paid as a scenario writer herself. She moved
to California with her husband and, in 1920, signed as a contract writer with
producer/actor Thomas Ince, eventually becoming one of his most important
scenarists (Taves 2013). Credits with Ince include A Man of Action (1923). After
Ince’s death in 1924, King worked as a freelance screenwriter in Hollywood, mak-
ing up to $10,000 per script. She wrote over 40 silent films. She was unlucky in
marriage, marrying her second husband, director John Griffith Wray, in 1928,
only for him to die of appendicitis a year later. While in Hawaii working on a
screenplay about Hawaii’s ancient peoples, she met George Hiram Boyd, a build-
ing contractor. They married in 1930, but he invested her wealth unwisely and
she lost most of her money. They divorced in 1940. Throughout these decades,
King wrote over 22 sound films, including Three Girls Lost (1931), Westward
Passage (1932), Passport to Hell (1932), Humanity (1933), Mystery of Edwin Drood
(1935, co-writer of the adaptation), and That’s My Man (1947, co-written with
Stephen Fisher).
Dorothy Kingsley
Dorothy Kingsley (1909–97) was born in New York City and moved as a child to
Grosse Point, Michigan. She married and divorced, and as a single mother decided
to move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in writing. She began in radio, working
for Edgar Bergen’s top-rated radio show. She then submitted scenarios to MGM,
earned a contract there, and quickly became the ‘go-to writer’ to fix ailing scripts
(McGilligan 1986). Kingsley noted this about her career: ‘I never think of myself as
a real writer. I only wrote because I needed the money. I had no desire to express
myself or anything like that’ (McGilligan 1986: 120). She earned writing or co-
writing credits on Half a Sixpence (1967), Valley of the Dolls (1967), Can-Can (1960),
Green Mansions (1959), Don’t Go Near the Water (1957), Pal Joey (1957), Seven Brides
for Seven Brothers (1954), Kiss Me Kate (1953), Angels in the Outfield (1951), and
more (see ‘Women at work: screenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735).
Diane Lake
Diane Lake (1950–) grew up in Iowa and graduated from Drake University in
Des Moines, Iowa. After going East where she received her Master’s (emphasis
in eighteenth-century rhetorical theory), Lake became a college professor in the
Midwest. In 1990 she drove to Los Angeles, California to write for the movies.
Three and a half years later, she sold her first idea, which led to writing assign-
ments for, and spec sales to, Paramount, Columbia/Sony, Disney, NBC, Miramax,
and various independent producers. In 2002 her film Frida (she shares credit with
Clancy Sigal, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas) opened the Venice Film Festival
and went on to be nominated for six Academy Awards, winning two. Lake is
a screenwriting professor.
Kasi Lemmons
Kasi Lemmons (1961–) was born Karen Lemmons in St Louis, Missouri. Her
African-American parents (her mother was a poet/psychotherapist and her father
a biology teacher) divorced when she was eight, and she moved to Boston with
her mother. She attended New York University and the University of California in
Los Angeles, and finally New York’s New School of Social Research, intent on pre-
paring for a career in documentary films. While making short documentaries she
earned acting roles in films directed by Spike Lee, Jonathan Demme, and Bernard
Rose, and decided to go into feature filmmaking. She wrote Eve’s Bayou (1997) and
was able to attach actor Samuel L. Jackson as star and co-producer. After a search
for a director, she decided to take on the task herself. Eve’s Bayou explores the
familial melodrama of a well-to-do African-American clan – nearly all women –
in the deep South. The tale, set in 1962, takes on miscegenation, identity, guilt,
voodoo, incest, and male/female relationships in the African-American commu-
nity. Other screenwriting credits include the drama/musical Black Nativity (2013),
based on a Langston Hughes gospel-song play, Wasn’t It a Mighty Day?; the story
revolves around a young teen visiting his relatives in Harlem and coming to grips
with his family’s past, its secrets, troubles, and aspirations.
Isobel Lennart
Isobel Lennart (1915–71) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She worked as a ste-
nographer and as a script girl, then enrolled in a junior writing course at MGM.
She became a studio reader – and eventually a screenwriter. Fellow writer Dorothy
Kingsley said of her, ‘Isobel was a “real writer” … (she) lived for her work. She
would get up in the middle of the night and write down a line. If someone didn’t
like her script, she’d throw up.’ Lennart is credited with over 20 feature films. In
1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was conducting inves-
tigations of people in the film industry believed to be taking part in Communist
activities, Lennart (who had been blacklisted for her left-wing sympathies) was
called to testify. She named 21 individuals she knew who had been members of
the Communist Party (she was a member from 1939–44).
Lennart received two Academy Award nominations for screenwriting:
Sundowners (1960), and Love Me or Leave Me (1955, co-written with Daniel Fuchs).
She received Writers Guild Awards for Best Written American Musical for Funny
Girl (1968, based on the book she wrote for the Broadway play), and Love Me
or Leave Me (1955), and Writers Guild Award nominations in the Best Written
American Screenplay category for Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), Please Don’t Eat the
Daisies (1960), and Period of Adjustment (1962). In 1966 she was presented with the
Laurel Award for Screen Writing Achievement. She was killed in an automobile
accident in 1971. (See also ‘Women at work: screenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735.)
Sonya Levien
Sonya Levien (1888–1960) was born Sara Opesken in Russia. When her father was
exiled to Siberia for his political views and actions, a man named Levien helped
him escape. When her father immigrated to the United States in 1891, he changed
the family’s last name to Levien to honour the man who had helped him (Ceplair
1996). In 1896, when Sonya was eight, her father managed to bring the family to
New York. Sonya became a naturalized US citizen in 1905.
While her brothers worked hard to become engineers, Sonya, when she was
of age, took a job in a feather duster factory, and later worked as a secretary. She
became interested in social justice and politics, and got involved in workers’
unions. In her spare time, she worked on her writing, taking advantage of her role
as a secretary and access to a typewriter (Ceplair 1996). She started to sell articles
to Life Magazine.
In 1906, Levien attended New York University Law School. She passed the
New York State Bar in 1909. Her career as a lawyer did not last long, however; she
practised for only six months before deciding to turn her attention back to her
writing endeavours. She was hired at Woman’s Journal, a publication focused on
women’s suffrage. The editor, Carl Hovey, whom she married in 1917, next hired
her as an assistant editor at Metropolitan, a prominent literary journal with a liberal
leaning towards radical socialist views, suitable for Sonya’s political interests. She
was sent to London in 1913–14 on behalf of the journal to report on the women’s
suffrage situation there (Ceplair 1996).
Jesse L. Lasky of Famous Players-Lasky noticed Levien’s short stories; her first
screen story credit was Who Will Marry Me? (1919), the story of Rosie Sanguinetti,
a young Italian immigrant about to embark on an arranged marriage to ‘Tony the
Barber’. Rosie flees from the wedding ceremony and takes refuge in a settlement
house. There she meets a wealthy young man, Jerry Van Tyne, who drunkenly
agrees to marry her. When sobriety dawns, Rosie and Jerry realize they are from
different classes and backgrounds, and Rosie, insecure, heads back to her mother.
When Jerry is willing to give up his personal freedom in order to protect the hon-
our of an ex-girlfriend who was involved in a murder, Rosie surfaces to testify in
Jerry’s defence at his trial. The two realize their chance encounter (and hasty mar-
riage) was fortuitous, for their love is true. Levien continued to explore the lives of
immigrants in America. Cheated Love (1921, co-written with Lucien Hubbard and
Doris Schroeder) is about a Jewish immigrant, Sonya, who works in her father’s
ghetto grocery store, and is involved in a love triangle with a young settlement
worker, David, and Mischa, a newly arrived doctor from Odessa. Levien made the
move to Hollywood in 1921 with a long-term contract; her husband Carl wanted
to see his wife succeed as a screenwriter, so he took a job as a story editor for the
silent film director Cecil B. DeMille.
Levien moved to the Fox Film Corporation in 1929 and was employed there
until 1940. She penned narratives for Fox’s major stars: six screenplays for Janet
Gaynor and five for Will Rogers. She is also credited as co-writer on film adap-
tations such as Daddy Long Legs (1931), Cavalcade (1933), State Fair (1933), The
Country Doctor (1936), and In Old Chicago (1938), and the adaptation of William
Faulkner’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). Her most recognized screenplay
was for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), adapted from the French novel by
Victor Hugo.
In 1941, she was contracted by MGM and received co-writing credit on films
such as The Valley of Decision (1945), The Green Years (1946), Quo Vadis (1951),
The Great Caruso (1951), the popular adaptation of the musical Oklahoma! (1955),
and Interrupted Melody (1955). She and co-writer William Ludwig were awarded an
Academy Award for Best Story and Best Screenplay for Interrupted Melody. Levien
was one of the most highly compensated screenwriters in Hollywood, known for
her ability to work fast and adapt stories, books, and plays into commercial films.
She was also hired as a script doctor, working on the final rewrites for screenplays
headed into production (Rivo 2009).
Levien is credited on more than 70 films from 1919 to 1962. She died of cancer
on 19 March 1960. (Megan Reilly)
Anita Loos
The career of Anita Loos (1889–1981) spanned 30 years, from the early days of
silent film to the heyday of the major studios. This essay will look at her career,
focusing on six of her screenplays, with a particular look at her collaborations
with actors, writers, directors, producers, and studios.
Anita Loos started selling screenplays for films in 1912.15 She was 24, lived in
San Diego, California, and mailed her original stories to the New York Biograph
Company (founded by ex-Edison employee and inventor William Kennedy
Dixon). She succeeded in selling these, seeing nearly 20 of them produced into
films. Finally, in 1914, she went up to Los Angeles and met D. W. Griffith, who
had directed most of her Biograph short scripts. He was astonished at how young
she appeared (Loos had already begun subtracting years from her age, a habit she
continued for the rest of her life). She was small (4’ 10”), appealing, talented, and
witty. Loos continued to write for Griffith, as well as for comedienne Fay Tincher,
and other production companies in Los Angeles.
Douglas Fairbanks and John Emerson, two New York actors, were brought to
Los Angeles to work under contract for Griffith, and Emerson found some of
Loos’s unproduced screenplays in Griffith’s files. Emerson wanted to direct one of
them and, despite the reservations Griffith had – he thought the script’s humour
depended too much on the interstitial titles – Griffith let Emerson direct Fairbanks
in Loos’s His Picture in the Papers (1916). To Griffith’s surprise, the 62-minute film
was a hit and established Fairbanks as a movie star. Fairbanks left Griffith to work
at Paramount; Loos and Emerson followed. Loos wrote and Emerson directed
nine Fairbanks films, with Loos’s wit and satire matched by Fairbanks’s acrobatic
skills. As Loos wrote later, ‘My chief requirement in writing scripts for all those
first Fairbanks movies was to find a variety of spots from which Doug could jump’
(Loos 1966).
In Wild and Woolly (1917), Fairbanks plays the son of a railroad tycoon, a char-
acter named Jeff who dreams of the Wild West: he has an Indian tepee, complete
with campfire, in his room. His love of the West gives Fairbanks opportunities
to jump around the family mansion. Loos’s wit in the titles is evident; when Jeff
tells his butler he wouldn’t last two days in ‘God’s country’, the butler replies,
‘I don’t think I should like God’s country, sir. New York is good enough for me, sir.’
Jeff’s father sends him to a town in Arizona, a place that is not all that wild any
more. However, the townspeople (who want the father to build a railroad spur)
decide they will gain the father’s good graces if they provide the Wild West for Jeff.
Eventually a real train robbery gives Jeff a chance to be a real western hero and,
again, Loos constructed the story to allow Fairbanks the chance to show off his
athleticism. In the script, Loos is having fun with the mythology of the western,
a mere 14 years after The Great Train Robbery (1903). After Jeff is feted for his feats,
he is on the train out of town, leaving Nell, the woman he romanced, dabbing
her tearful eyes. Loos throws in a title: ‘But wait a minute, this will never do. We
can’t end a Western romance without a wedding.’ But where will they live? The
film cuts to Jeff and Nell in a swanky mansion, complete with liveried servants,
presumably in the East. The servants open the front door and Jeff and Nell walk
out into the West and ride off on their horses.
Fairbanks was upset that Loos and Emerson seemed to be getting as much
credit as he was for the films, and he let them go (Carey 1988: 50). Producer
Joseph Schenck (1878–1961) hired Loos and Emerson to do for his sister-in-law,
Constance Talmadge, what they had done for Fairbanks: make her a star. People
often think of great actor/director collaborations (e.g. John Wayne and John
Ford), but there are also great actor/writer collaborations. Loos’s career is an exam-
ple of a writer with a great skill at writing parts that made actors ‘stars’. Talmadge
had charmed audiences as what Loos called ‘a sort of Babylonian flapper’ (Loos
1966: 93) in Intolerance (1916), but was later unsuccessful, until Loos began writ-
ing scripts for her. Loos realized that, as with Fairbanks, Talmadge was not a great
actor, but had a delightful and charming personality. Loos’s script of Virtuous
Vamp (1919) (a partial version of it appears in Loos 1978), has Gwen (Talmadge)
smiling in a variety of ways as men she meets at work fall all over themselves for
her. The picture made Talmadge a star.
The Talmadge pictures were made in New York, and Loos met the leading East
Coast literary figures. Once she noticed H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan
making fools of themselves over a not particularly bright blonde, not unlike the
men in Virtuous Vamp. That led her to write the comic novel Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes; it was published in November 1925 (Carey 1988: 87–8, 95). By March
1926 the novel was on its ninth printing, with ten more by the end of the decade.
In the early 1930s, Loos returned to Hollywood to work under contract at MGM.
Sound was now a staple in Hollywood films and this allowed Loos’s humour to
shine. One of her first assignments was to bring her wit to a script being prepared
for Jean Harlow. The film was Red-Headed Woman (1931) and did much to cement
the ‘Harlow character’ – the witty vamp. Harlow had been in small parts until
she had a hit with Hell’s Angels (1930). But she was a rather bland glamour girl
in that and the movies that followed. Her career began to slide until she came
to MGM. The novel of Red-Headed Woman was pure melodrama, following Lil
Andrews (Harlow) as she sleeps her way to the top, breaking up a marriage in the
process. Irving Thalberg, the head of MGM, had originally put F. Scott Fitzgerald
on the script, but Fitzgerald had no feeling for the character, or for Thalberg’s
idea that if you made Lil funny, the audience could laugh with her, rather than at
her. According to Sam Marx, the story editor at MGM, it was Paul Bern, Harlow’s
mentor, who suggested Loos’s talent was needed on the script (Carey 1988: 147).
Within a month Loos had finished the script. The director assigned was Jack
Conway, who did not find the material funny. He complained to Loos, ‘You
can’t make jokes about a girl who deliberately sets out to break up a family.’ Loos
replied, ‘Why not? Look at the family! It deserves to be broken up!’ (Carey 1988:
148). Red-Headed Woman was not well received at its first sneak preview. Thalberg
told Loos, ‘People don’t know whether they’re supposed to laugh or not. We need
an opening scene to set the mood’ (Carey 1988: 148). So Loos wrote a prologue.
Lil is looking at herself in the mirror, especially at her red hair (Harlow was well
known as a blonde), spies the audience in the mirror, and says, ‘Gentlemen prefer
blondes? Sure’ (a reference to Loos’s famous book). Then Lil is seen in a dress in a
shop and asks the off-camera sales girl, ‘Can you see through this?’ The girl replies,
‘Yes,’ to which Lil says, ‘I’ll wear it.’ (Carey may have seen a different print. He
has Lil’s line as ‘Is this dress too tight?’, to which the clerk replies, ‘It certainly is.’
Lil’s response is ‘Good.’ [Carey 1988: 148–50]). Loos’s prologue does set us up to
laugh, but Conway’s sluggish direction does not get as much out of the script’s
humour as could be got. In spite of that, the picture made a Harlow a star, even
though the mixture of comedy and drama was uneven.
The plot points and dialogue of Red-Headed Woman are considered responsible,
along with the ‘politically and socially incorrect’ work of screenwriter-actor Mae
West, for the development of stricter industry censorship, the Production Code
in the early 1930s. It is interesting that a good measure of the agitation that led
to the acceptance of the Code was over the work of two women writers, West and
Loos, both of whom refused to treat sex seriously.
After Red-Headed Woman, Harlow’s star persona was set: a smart-mouthed, sexy,
working-class, funny woman. Anita Loos could not resist writing for her, and
MGM appreciated Loos. Sam Marx told Loos’s biographer, Gary Carey, that ‘shady
lady’ stories were always a potential censorship problem, even in the pre-Code
days, but that ‘Anita, however, could be counted on to supply the delicate double
entendre, the telling innuendo. Whenever we had a Jean Harlow picture on the
agenda, we always thought of Anita first’ (Carey 1988: 150).
Loos’s next script for Harlow was Hold Your Man (1933). The picture starts like a
house afire. Eddie Hall (Clark Gable) is a street con man; he is running from the
police and ends up hiding in Ruby Adams’s apartment. The con man character
was a favourite of Loos; her beloved father was a con man, and she was great
friends with playwright, raconteur, and con man Wilson Mizner (1876–1933) –
and she found in Clark Gable the perfect actor to embody this character (he plays
another con man in her script San Francisco [1936]). Loos’s screenplay for Hold
Your Man provides great banter between Eddie and Ruby. Ruby gets involved in
Eddie’s cons, then gets arrested when Eddie accidentally kills a man. The tone of
the film changes in the second half; pressure had been building up for a stricter
adoption of the Production Code in 1934, so Loos and, more likely, her co-writer,
Howard Emmett Rogers (one of the most conservative writers in Hollywood),
turned the second half of the script into a drama about poor Ruby going off to a
reformatory as just punishment. However, there are occasional Loos-type lines in
the second half of the film; when, during a church service, one of the inmates is
not singing, a matron asks her, ‘You don’t like the hymn?’, to which the woman
replies, ‘It was a him that got me in here.’
One day Loos and MGM gagman Robert Hopkins were walking around the stu-
dio talking about their mutual love of San Francisco, and they soon came up with
a story for what became San Francisco (1936). Hopkins was great at gags, lines, and
jokes, but Loos was better at story (in this case, a battle between local saloon own-
ers, ending in the 1906 earthquake) and character (San Francisco featured Blackie,
the singer Mary, the priest, the villain, and even the villain’s mother). Loos based
the character of Blackie Norton (Clark Gable) on her friend Mizner’s days as a
gambler in San Francisco. As we saw with Fairbanks, Loos could write great ban-
tering male roles as well as witty female ones. Loos and Hopkins started the script
under MGM head of production Irving Thalberg, but when Thalberg became
ill, the production was turned over to Bernard Hyman. Hyman hailed from the
Bronx, New York, and did not understand the fast and loose gambler character
of San Francisco. Loos and Hopkins bullied him into accepting their version.
The director assigned was Woody Van Dyke, who in Loos’s eyes was ‘an oaf when
it came to the subtleties of the San Francisco Tenderloin’ (Loos 1979: 196). Loos
and Hopkins insisted that certain scenes be reshot, and Hopkins was assigned
to the set as a kind of protector of the San Francisco tone. The picture was an
enormous hit, and the following year Loos wrote for Gable a similar character in
the film Saratoga (1937) – a fast-talking and charmingly disreputable bookmaker.
One of Loos’s last major screen credits was in 1939, the wickedly funny adapta-
tion of the 1936 play The Women. The play was written by Clare Boothe, inspired
by the spoiled New York City society women she had found herself surrounded by
after her marriage to the wealthy head of Time-Life, Henry Luce. Boothe filled the
play with working-class women who served the rich as maids, cooks, and nurses,
each with biting comments on the stupidities of the rich.
The first drafts of the 1939 film of The Women were done by MGM contract
screenwriter Jane Murfin. The screenplay generally follows the play, which tells
the story of Mary (Norma Shearer), who learns her husband, Stephen, is having
an affair with Crystal (Joan Crawford), a salesgirl. Mary’s girlfriends encourage
her to deal with the situation in various ways as Mary tries to keep her pride. She
loses her husband to Crystal, then at the end of the play outsmarts Crystal and
appears to be about to get him back. The play is in three acts, with 12 scenes in
11 different sets. Murfin used all but one of the scenes. The film’s director, George
Cukor, was not entirely happy with the script and asked Loos to come in and
liven it up. It was Loos who wrote the opening scenes in which we see some of
Mary’s friends in their natural habitats, as well as in a combination of scenes
at a beauty salon and a gym. Loos, despite the Production Code, was able to
retain a surprising amount of Boothe’s raunchy wit. Miriam (Paulette Goddard),
a woman Mary meets at the ranch in Reno (where it was traditional for women
to go to get relatively quick divorces), talks about the local cowhand as having
‘a big horse’ and wonders if he can get his legs together. In the final scene of the
play and the film, there is a line from a woman at a party who is talking about her
married lover: ‘And he says: “My wife always expects me home on Easter Sunday.”
So I says, “What’s she expect you to do? Lay an egg?”.’ Unfortunately, most of
the biting comments in the play by the working-class women had to be cut from
the film script.
Frustrated by the producers at MGM after Thalberg died, Loos returned to
New York, and in 1949 wrote the book for the stage musical version of Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes (she was not involved in the 1953 film). In the 1960s she began writ-
ing the first of four volumes of memoirs, all of which deal more with the movies
than they do with her other literary work. (Tom Stempel)
Ida Lupino
Ida Lupino (1918–85) was an actress, director, writer, and producer. She was
born in England, but went to Hollywood as a teenager, staying there for the
rest of her life. By 1948, Lupino had established her own production company,
The Filmmakers, with then-husband Collier Young. This venture led to Lupino
notably working as one of the few women directors in Hollywood in the 1940s
and 1950s, enabling her to engage in screenwriting on a collaborative basis by

producing socially conscious and issue-oriented stories that explored difficult
subject matter, and which often had female protagonists. While Lupino may have
had little choice as an actress but to play femmes fatales, damaged prostitutes,
and harridans, she used her role as writer and director to create meaningful and
emotionally complex stories. Her work ‘behind the camera’ has received in-depth
attention in Queen of the ‘B’s’ (1995), a volume of essays on Lupino edited by
Annette Kuhn, which provides an important reference. This essay focuses on two
of Lupino’s films, Not Wanted (1949) and The Young Lovers (1949); Lupino was
credited as screenwriter on both films alongside Young and both narratives can
be read as examples of creative characterization paradigms.
How the Production Code, the censorship body of the film industry at the
time, and other industrial parameters required Lupino to adapt Not Wanted has
been extensively explored in Diane Waldman’s chapter in Queen of the B’s (1995).
However, re-reading of Not Wanted and The Young Lovers/Never Fear from the per-
spective of the screenwriter can explore what is arguably a certain resonance these
narratives have with contemporary screenwriting approaches. Viewing a pro-
duced narrative’s construction to explore elements such as theme, antagonism,
ideology, characterization, gender, and the character’s story (frequently described
as the ‘journey’ in popular screenwriting terminology) is relevant to the screen-
writer, as it actively facilitates a reading that is critical and creative in motivation.
As this essay suggests, studying Lupino’s films in terms of screenwriting elements
such as characterization, theme, and conflict is rewarding due to the extremity of
experience suffered by her protagonists, and their resultant states of mind, which
include vulnerability, denial, anger, rage, self-hate, self-pity, self-blame, hostility,
intimacy, and dependency. By linking her characters’ states of mind as propor-
tionate to their status in the world, Lupino effectively uses these deeply emotional
journeys to directly or indirectly comment on a need for gender equality. Her
films are thus effective examples of key screenwriting paradigms that can assist
the writer in developing their characters to support the narrative’s ideological
messages or themes, which I have suggested elsewhere (Jacey 2010). I suggest that
Lupino’s themes – an implicit but veiled attack on society’s inadequacy in terms of
gender equality (Not Wanted), and a call for collective solidarity and protection of
the vulnerable (Never Fear), can be revealed through an exploration of role-choices
and the nature of the emotional character journeys she builds.
The two films under scrutiny here offer portrayals of women experiencing very
different kinds of trauma. Lupino seems particularly interested in the subjective
experiences of her heroines’ emotional and physical rollercoasters. In Not Wanted,
a young woman deals with the unresolved emotional consequences of birth and
adoption in a society where unwed mothers are stigmatized. The heroine’s emo-
tional states involve ambivalence, fear, and desperation. Never Fear has a slightly
different focus when an upcoming dancer, on the verge of success and marriage,
discovers she has polio and her dreams are destroyed. There is an obverse set-up
in terms of relationships in both films that makes them interesting examples
of Lupino’s treatment of significant others. In Not Wanted, the heroine falls for
Mr Wrong and effectively ruins her chances of a conventionally acceptable court-

ship. Conversely, at the start of Never Fear, the heroine has an ostensibly happy
relationship and dance partnership with her Mr Right. In both narratives, the
trauma that ensues is a very private hell where the ‘good guy’ is pushed to the
sidelines for much of the story. Lupino’s main concern can be seen as the process
whereby the individual undergoes loss of identity in reaction to trauma before
finally finding some degree of self-acceptance of her changed state and subsequent
ability to accept the support from someone who deeply cares.
Two screenwriting paradigms particularly useful for reading Lupino’s narratives
are those of role-choices and transformational journeys. Lupino’s heroines’ emotional
journeys can be read in terms of certain societal roles the character has chosen to
play or subconsciously identify with – individual and unique responses shaped
by cultural norms. Similar to archetypes as useful models for characterization in
screenwriting, role-choices function as abstract concepts aiding characterization.
A role-choice potentially minimises stereotypical traits because it corresponds to
a subjective dimensionality required of the writer – i.e. a definition of how the
character relates to the role-choice, and why, is paramount. The role-choices par-
ticularly prevalent in Lupino’s narratives are those of the victim, the mother (in
Not Wanted), and the healer and the lover (in Never Fear). How the protagonists of
each film can be read as identifying with a role-choice is categorized according to
four modes of being: with collusion where the character can be seen to be using the
role to play a ‘game’, such as manipulate; resistance where the character actively
fights against certain connotations of the role; ambivalence where the character is
uneasy, but is not or can’t be resistant to aspects of role; or acceptance where the
character either has no choice but to ‘be’ in the role, or likes to be associated with
culturally accepted manifestations of the role.
In terms of transformational journey paradigms, Lupino’s almost obsessive utiliza-
tion of internal conflict in her protagonists results in emotionally intense journeys
where the subjectivity of the protagonist is relentlessly explored. A wide range
of screenwriting approaches aimed to support the development of narratives com-
monly utilize the notion of the ‘journey’ model, such as Vogler (2007), who utilizes
the heroic myth and archetypes, Marks (2007), who charts the transformational
arc of the protagonist using archetypal terminology, and Batty (2011), who has
suggested the Hero’s Journey model can help to map an emotional inner journey
through the narrative. Batty and Marks, in particular, elaborate the nature of the
transformational journey, where internal conflicts are clearly upfront, and the
character’s action and experience results in these conflicts being negotiated and
resolved to some extent by the end of the narrative in a progressive way. The degree
of resolution for the character normally signifies the tone of the ending of the
entire narrative, be it happy, tragic, or somewhere in between. I contend that Not
Wanted and Never Fear are useful examples for screenwriters of journeys that are less
concerned with the transformation in a character, but more to do with the causes
of transformation, the character’s changing attitude to these, and the factors sup-
porting change. Identifying emotional phases that dominate the protagonist can be
useful for journeys that do not privilege eventual self-mastery, but where the writer
seeks to explore themes that suggest agency and change are affected and dictated
by the prevailing social mores and cultural conditions of the diegetic world.
Not Wanted centres on the plight of a young woman, Sally Kelton, who is
arrested and locked up after apparently attempting to steal a child. The main story
takes the form of a long flashback, triggered by Sally not understanding how she
ended up in this situation. The flashback reveals the events leading up to Sally
landing in jail. It begins with Sally’s domestic life and her need to rebel against a
controlling and critical mother in order to have a social life with her peers. Her
subsequent infatuation with pianist Steve, at her place of work, leads to a string
of romantic exchanges, culminating in sex. This deepens Sally’s attachment to
Steve, and she pursues him to the big city where he reveals a lack of commitment
that devastates Sally. A parallel friendship meanwhile develops between Sally and
Drew, a war veteran with a disability, who becomes a practical and emotional
supporter of Sally. Drew finds her lodgings, gives her a job, and is a shoulder to
cry on – and morale booster – when she is rejected once and for all by the errant
Steve. Drew reveals the depths of his feelings to a recovering Sally, who indicates
she might in time be able to reciprocate these. When Sally discovers she is preg-
nant by Steve, she flees from her job, her lodgings, and Drew, eventually winding
up in the ‘Haven Hospital’, a female-run institution, home, and rehabilitation
centre for pregnant single women. Sally becomes friends with one of the moth-
ers, and becomes increasingly unsure about her decision to give up her baby.
After the birth, Sally’s ambivalence reaches a crisis point, but she realizes keep-
ing the baby is both unfair to him, as he would be labelled illegitimate, plus she
doesn’t have the means to take care of him. She gives her son up for adoption,
but is subsequently tortured by her decision, obsessing over children in the street.
Experiencing a near breakdown, she sees a baby in the street and lifts it out of
the pram – leading to the arrest in the prologue. Finally, due to the intervention
of staff from the Haven, the charges are dropped against Sally. Drew comes to the
police station, only for Sally to run in a bid to commit suicide in front of a train.
Drew tries to stop Sally, but he can’t keep up with her. When he collapses, Sally
finally turns around and goes back to him, and they finally hold each other.
On the basis of the broadest definition of a victim as being someone who suf-
fers oppression, injury or death due to an oppressive or a violating agency (real
or imagined), Not Wanted is rich with examples of characters, especially Sally,
who identify with this role-choice through acceptance, rejection, resistance, and
ambivalence. At the most extreme end of the spectrum, Sally’s mental breakdown –
presented in the opening sequence – reflects a woman whose loss and post-natal
state has left her outcast, from both her own rational functioning and society’s
strictures as it leads her to a criminal act. She is incarcerated, prior to trial, with
other ‘victim’ women who have fallen foul of the system, such as alcoholics and
the mentally ill. Sally’s helpless sense of displacement and confusion – which even
she articulates as ‘How did I get here?’ – indicates someone to whom ‘something
bad’ has happened. We soon learn from the backstory that Sally has been ‘victim’
to a seductive older man, Steve, who knows every trick in the book in the art of
seducing young women. Sally’s inexperience, repressive home life, and somewhat
impulsive personality have rendered her a lamb to the seductive slaughter. Later,
when Steve brutally spells out the fact that he never offered commitment, Sally
‘colludes’ with the victim role-choice, swinging between blame of Steve, self-pity,
and finally self-recrimination. Through this use of victim-identification, respon-
sibility for oneself seems to be a clear narrative message Lupino is making – that
maturity and life-experience are all Sally needs to avoid this kind of mistake
again, and that the promise of a respectful and nurturing relationship offered by
Drew should be enough to help her move on. This is reinforced by Sally’s lament-
ing mother, as well as pianist Steve, who both lament about their lives through
blaming others, in sharp comparison to Drew who actively resists the victim role-
choice in spite of his disability. However, Lupino shifts thematic gear with the
introduction of Sally’s pregnancy and a very new set of associations is introduced.
Sally’s unwed status isolates her from everyone, even Drew, and she has virtu-
ally no economic game plan for survival, nor any form of emotional or practical
support for her physical state. Her eventual incarceration at the Haven Hospital
further reduces any agency or autonomy, where Sally becomes one of a group of
unwed pregnant women, who are provided with care in return for rehabilitative
behaviours, and conditions that include adoption of their babies. Sally has no
clear desire to give up her child, but has no other realistic options, with no eco-
nomic or social support systems that will enable her to function as a single parent,
notwithstanding the stigma of illegitimacy. Thus, her mode of identification with
the victim role-choice is one of ambivalence. She finally demonstrates acceptance as
there is no way she can look after the baby, and she has no means to fight for
alternatives. Sally’s subsequent breakdown after the adoption both disables her
and leads to criminalization.
The mother role-choice reflects the human capacity for nurturing another,
where relinquishing the needs of the ego are, for the most part, necessary for
fulfilling the role. As motherhood is normally ascribed to women in societies
where the female sex is responsible for childcare, the mother role-choice is very
frequently associated with female characters. However, as it represents a capacity,
male characters are equally able to identify with this role-choice. Like the victim,
the mother has many forms of identification in Not Wanted. Sally’s decline, when
she learns that she is pregnant, demonstrates a form of ambivalence with regard
to the role-choice. Her depression and retreat implies a form of denial in think-
ing about her options, probably because she knows they don’t exist. We are never
given the impression she outright doesn’t want the child because it would ruin
her life. In fact, she shows great connection with the baby during pregnancy and
after, talking to it and trying to work out what their life together would really
mean. Ultimately, Sally wants the baby, but she knows she cannot be a function-
ing mother to him, nor will he escape judgment from others. Mrs Kelton shows
a ‘resistant’ identification with the mother role-choice. Embittered and joyless,
she is stuck in the kitchen, draped in her apron, a figure of total resentment and
dissatisfaction with her housewife/mother role. Her angry and ambivalent identi-
fication with the mother results in a range of envious projections onto her soon
to be sexually active daughter. The most effective example of ‘acceptance’ of the
mother role-choice comes in the form of Drew, who is a mass of nurturing energy
as he feeds Sally, massages her feet, buys her presents, gives her fun and amuse-
ment. Significantly, another aspect of his ‘good mothering’ is that he never sees
Sally as a victim. In general, Drew displays a tremendous capacity for the requisite
self-abnegation demanded by good nurturing. It is only in the climax, where Drew
attempts to prevent Sally from suicide by chasing after her until he collapses,
that he has to reluctantly give up the role – his body won’t let him continue.
Waldman refers to Claire Johnston (1976) who suggests Drew’s collapse and ‘child
like gestures’ are symbolic of Sally’s lost child; an alternative view could equate his
desperate frustration to a consistent character trait of needing to care and protect.
Sally’s recognition that Drew is equally vulnerable, and her subsequent turning
back towards him, reveals a capacity to reciprocate this need and elevates her from
a helpless state of mind.
The mother role-choice can be read as being equally complex. Sally’s palpable
dread after getting pregnant, culminating in a downward spiral to kidnapping
a child, exemplifies that far more than a nurturing disposition is required for the
task – it requires economic and social support systems. In Mrs Kelton, we have a
character we first experience as something of a ‘nagging mother’, a stereotypical
force of antagonism in Sally’s life. As the narrative progresses, we can view her
negativity as the product of an unrewarding life, isolated and ground down in the
limited territory of her kitchen. Sally also faces limitation in how she will mother;
she wants to keep her child, but to do so would be fraught with multiple difficul-
ties. Her shame at being an unwed mother ironically makes her flee from Drew,
the only ‘mother’ in the narrative who actually enjoys the nurturing aspects of the
role (and who, as a man, has economic means), and who would be likely to accept
the child. Finally, the collective of unwed pregnant women in the Haven Hospital
can be seen as identifying with the mother with a range of resistant and ambiva-
lent attitudes to the role-choice. One tertiary character voices the view that
women don’t have to be married to be mothers. The very existence of the Haven
reflects a society that has a huge problem with single motherhood; the only
autonomy afforded to these women is dubious: to make a decision about their
baby’s future. In this world, the unwed mother has little option but to identify as
victim. The implications of this curtailment of the freedom of unwed mothers has
been described by Waldman (1995) as having a ‘chilling relevance’ to more recent
US attitudes towards unmarried mothers at the political level (in itself another
vote of confidence in Lupino’s narratives’ enduring resonance).
Not Wanted provides a highly subjective emotional journey in which Sally, as the
protagonist, and her point of view dominate virtually every scene. Ronnie Shreib,
in a chapter in Queen of the B’s, describes Lupino’s narratives as ‘small scale rites of
passage films – passage into womanhood, nightmare and lack of control’ (1995).
From a screenwriter’s point of view in assessing plot events, Not Wanted actually
can be read as having no less than five ‘rites of passage’, or at least ‘life events’ –
sexual initiation; pregnancy, birth, and ‘abandonment of the baby through adop-
tion’; and criminal arrest. This is arguably a substantial amount of highly dramatic
narrative content, yet Lupino’s relentless focus on Sally’s subjectivity and changing
identity through this emotional rollercoaster is a strong containing element, giv-

ing a sense of compressed timescale and emotional intimacy. Central here is the
utilization of internal antagonism. Sally suffers a progressive loss of identity when
the carpet of first romance is pulled out from under her feet, throwing her into a
relatively safe state of self-pity and heartbreak, only then for her to descend into
an abyss of total dislocation from her world as a pregnant woman. Sally’s emo-
tional states of mind, culminating in a total loss of identity, are not linear or fixed.
Throughout, we share in her fragmented, regressive, repetitive, and sometimes
static states, which have little in common with a transformational storyline where
the character’s change is progressive. Sally’s emotional storyline involves sexual
desire, romance, inappropriate attachment to Steve, withdrawal, negation of her
own needs, emotional breakdown, and a suicide attempt. It is the vulnerability of a
true friend that finally triggers some kind of wake-up call for Sally in her bid for self-
annihilation. Not Wanted does not clearly offer healing or transformation for Sally,
who will always carry the internal scar of being forced to relinquish a child she
did not want to lose. The character of Drew offers compensation for this loss, but
cannot save her from it. As a supportive other, Drew is always available to Sally,
but after her pregnancy, she is incapable of valuing him or reaching out to him.
Lupino’s message in Not Wanted is clearly gendered. In a society offering little
autonomy and no active feminist resistance or empowerment, the unwed mother’s
burden is an assault on her self-esteem and identity. A significant other cannot save
her, but he can function as an emotionally available and supportive safe haven in
the life ahead, with its inevitable emotional scar tissue.
The function of the significant other as symbolic of empathy and solidarity – as
opposed to salvation – is continued in Never Fear (written by Lupino and Young),
which also has a traumatized female protagonist at the centre. Carol and Guy
have it all – a committed and loving relationship, a new dancing act, and the pros-
pect of success and ambition ahead. On a romantic beach holiday before a run
at the Wilshire Hotel, Guy proposes and Carol accepts. But the idyll is destroyed
when Carol collapses, to be diagnosed with polio. Guy remains optimistic, but
Carol starts to withdraw and wants to be alone in hospital. Guy is convinced she
will fight the illness, but Carol feels useless. Her father and Guy secure a private
room for Carol at the Kabat Kaiser Institute – a treatment and rehabilitation
centre for polio sufferers in the city. Carol turns her back to her father and Guy,
telling them not to visit her. She learns from the compassionate doctor that she
may not dance again, and the outcome of her treatment depends on her will. He
also shares that he was a polio sufferer himself and had to give up his dreams of
being a surgeon. Carol’s despair is revealed through hostility to Len, a wheelchair-
bound patient who tries to befriend her. Carol embarks on her laborious treatment
regime, making connections with other sufferers. Meanwhile Guy gets a job as a
real-estate agent, effectively abandoning his dancing career. When he visits her,
Carol resolves to become perfect again for him, failing to adapt to the new reality.
Subsequently, and against the doctor’s advice, she pushes herself too fast, which
only sets her recovery back. She goes into a deep decline, exhibiting much self-
hate. Len points out she is wasting her place at the institute, when others would
really value the chance to be there. His words seem to have an effect and Carole
accepts his ‘date’ to the institute’s square dance. In spite of herself, Carol begins
to have fun, responding to Len’s encouragement. Guy arrives at the dance with
his signature present of a gardenia, but Carol pushes him away, saying it can’t
work as she won’t be able to dance again. Guy feels rejected and insulted. His
declaration of unconditional love provokes her into a rage, and she accuses him
of being in denial about the fact that she is a cripple. Carol begins to latch onto
Glen, observing his positive attitude and expressing her admiration for him, and
is reluctant to see Guy. Pushed into going out with Guy for a drive, Carol’s rage
tips her over the edge and they break up. Weeks pass. Guy gets drunk with Phyllis,
a divorced woman who can tell he is still not over Carol. Phyllis also tells him
Carol’s behaviour is an unconscious test. In the weeks that pass, Carol works hard
on her rehabilitation, remembering Guy’s words of encouragement as she finally
manages to walk without the handrails. At her twenty-first birthday party at the
clinic Carol admits to the patients and staff that she’s learned her lesson, ashamed
she was so full of self-pity. Guy arrives at the party with a gardenia, and it is obvi-
ous that Carol wants him back, even if she can’t express this. Guy breaks the news
he has a new dancing partner and is off to perform in Las Vegas. Carol responds
with maturity, but her sadness at Guy’s departure is obvious. Len is there on hand
to comfort her, saying she hasn’t lost Guy. Before she is discharged, Carol learns
that Len is much more physically damaged than she has been by polio, but he has
total inner peace. At the door to the clinic, Carol walks out alone with the help of
her stick. Guy approaches, with a gardenia, and Carol goes to him.
In terms of the role-choice paradigm, Never Fear exemplifies the lover and the
healer. Mapping the characters’ identification with these can reveal Lupino’s clear
message of the importance of affiliation and connection in coping with vulner-
ability and aiding with recovery. Similar to Not Wanted, a woman’s experience of
trauma forces her to retreat from a primary supportive relationship. However, it
is the empathy and solidarity offered by her fellow patients in the institute who
enable her to access her own inner reserves to rebuild a sense of self-acceptance,
and to reconnect with her former partner. The limited nature of Carol’s ambitions
for life, other than happiness with Guy, after her illness have dismayed some
critics, including Scheib (1995), as well as the narrative’s seeming privileging of
the romantic couple over any meaningful female bonding. However, I prefer to
read the narrative as one that explores with emotional truth the tests that illness
imposes on a hitherto unthreatened compatible relationship, where identity in
one party is shattered, and a rebirth has to take place.
From the outset, Carol and Guy are engrossed in a deeply intimate partnership
where they spend every minute of their lives together; working together, rehears-
ing, performing, and generally ‘hanging out’ with each other. They know each
other intimately, and are each other’s sounding boards, life coaches, motivators,
and playmates. Like Drew in Not Wanted, Guy is something of a mother – feeding
Carol, massaging her, hugging her, wrapping her up, and generally fussing over
her. Of the two, he is the more sentimental and physical nurturer. On the basis
that the lover represents the human desire to bond intimately with another,
both Carol and Guy can be viewed as actively identifying with its more roman-
tic aspects, in terms of constant displays of hegemonic notions of love such as
words of devotion, flowers, passionate dancing, sunsets, and engagement rings.
However, the diagnosis of polio reveals the superficial level of Carol’s identifica-
tion with this role, as dependent on her beautiful dancer self; she simply cannot
trust Guy’s ability to sustain his love for her as an ‘imperfect’ woman. Her with-
drawal from Guy is hurtful and frustrating for him as, mother and true lover that
he is, he consistently declares her illness has nothing to do with his feelings for
her. Len and Josie (a female patient and friend at the clinic) also both identify with
the lover, in the deep sense of an unconditional, all-accepting sense. Permanently
wheelchair-bound Glen has no doubt he will meet the woman of his dreams,
whereas Josie tells Carol that her illness made her marriage stronger, declaring
‘Nothing could come between us’. In fact, Lupino ensures not one character is
depicted as rejected on the grounds of disability; and it is only the traumatized
Carol who projects and distorts her own self-hate into a rejection of Guy. Carol’s
slight infatuation with Len is significant as it finally demonstrates growth in her
capacity to be open to another. Carol eventually fully recovers her ‘true’ feelings
for Guy only after she has learned to stop judging her disability. The final image of
their embrace fully associates the lover role-choice with its unconditional aspects.
The healer role-choice represents the capacity, in society or individuals, to meet
the needs of the sick. In Never Fear, it comes in the form of the doctors, nurses, and
other patients of the Kabat Kaiser Institute. Their identification with the healer is
through embracing the holistic aspects of well-being; a belief that illness is not to
be feared or cause shame, and that recovery is possible. In fact, the mind is the
most powerful agent of healing of all, and the mind that cannot accept this is the
biggest impediment to healing. While Guy wants to heal, he is made redundant
from the role by Carol’s projected rage. While Guy’s care is limited to economic
support, as he found the clinic and pays for it, Len functions as a ‘wounded healer’
whose form of caring – the gift of plain speaking – has the most transformative
effect on Carol. The identification of the Institute with positive aspects of the
healer is emphasized by Carol’s treatment regime, which incorporates a sense of
community and connection through people. With group exercises, physical mas-
sage, swimming, and art, it is truly a home where people’s connections with each
other are fundamental to recovery. It can be safely concluded that the role-choice
of the healer – the character who embodies non-judgemental nurturing – can be
seen as symbolic of Lupino’s implied message that the concept of cripple should
not exist, in either an individual or in society.
As an emotional journey, Never Fear centres on the complete loss of identity
brought about by disability. It is an intimate portrayal of a physical and mental
breakdown, and the recovery process, during which Carol oscillates among many
states, from a need for total withdrawal, to self-hate, to rejection, to yearning for
love, to eventual self-acceptance. Her journey, like Sally’s, is not straightforward or
progressive, as Carol frequently regresses and becomes stuck, and as such is more
resonant of a journey reflecting ‘phases’ rather than progressive stages ( Jacey
2010). Implicit throughout is the message that the physically vulnerable self is
ultimately dependent on others, yet to access support one has to develop trust in
and respect for oneself. The Institute can therefore be seen as symbolic of the need
for a society that should collectively care for the vulnerable. Never Fear, on a the-
matic level, and as demonstrated through the subjective journey of one woman’s
illness, can be read as a call for social protection and solidarity rather than simply
the tale of a tortured woman who is saved by the love of a man. It suggests that
medical care is not enough; polio sufferers deserve dignity and empowerment,
echoing today’s mandate for respect of HIV and AIDS sufferers.
Reading Lupino’s narratives in relation to creative screenwriting frameworks
can open up rich terrain for the screenwriter. Her powerful emotional journeys
have a compelling relevance for today’s screenwriter; the label of melodrama does
not do justice to the creative interpretations offered by a complex linking of char-
acter and theme. Implicit in both Not Wanted and Never Fear is a call to protect
the vulnerable individual trapped by oppression and stigmatization, a theme that
unfortunately remains relevant today. Lupino’s strong focus on character, emo-
tional truth, and thematic complexity results in two narratives that have more in
common with the contemporary storytelling approaches utilized by creators of
today’s complex and internally angst-ridden heroes of film and TV. (Helen Jacey)
Mary C. McCall, Jr
Mary C. McCall, Jr (1904–86) was born in New York City. She attended Vassar
College and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. She worked as a film critic,
screenwriter, and novelist. She adapted her novel Revolt in 1932; it was produced
at Warner Bros as Scarlet Dawn (1932, she is credited for story, screenplay credit
goes to Nevin Busch and Erwin Gelsey). She became a contract writer at Warner
Bros at $50 a week and was soon known as a ‘corpse rouger’, which meant she
was brought in to polish up dialogue for scripts that were going into production
(McCreadie 1994). McCall wrote or co-wrote most of the films in the ‘Maisie’ series:
Maisie (1939), Maisie Gets Her Man (1942), Swing Shift Maisie (1943), and others.
She also receives co-writing credits on Babbitt (1934), Secret Bride (1935), Women
in Red (1935), Dr Socrates (1935), an adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Mr Belvedere Goes to College (1949), and Thunderbirds (1952). She was an organizer
of the Screenwriters Guild and served as its president in the 1940s and again in the
1950s. (See also ‘Women at work: screenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735.)
Jeanie Macpherson
Jeanie Macpherson (1887–1946) was born in Boston to a Scots father and a French
mother. She always claimed to have inherited her colour and imagination from
one side of the family and her caution and perseverance from the other. Educated
in Paris, she studied opera and musical theatre in Chicago and planned a career
on the stage. Her debut, a small role in the Broadway musical drama Havana, fol-
lowed by a stint with a touring production of Strongheart, changed her mind. ‘One
season of that and I wrapped my vocal ambitions in a sheaf of cancelled checks
and tucked them away for memories,’ she said in a 1916 Photoplay interview
(Martin 1916).
Convinced to try the new medium of ‘flickers’, she began her career at Biograph
in 1908, first as an extra, then working up to small roles. Her exotic beauty and
dark red hair made her a natural for what she called ‘emotional parts’, often play-
ing Spaniards, gypsies, and Indian maidens – roles she said used the French side of
her personality. As with a number of other silent film actresses, including Frances
Marion and Bess Meredyth, Macpherson soon began to write the screen stories
herself. In 1910, she was paid $15 per story (two for $25) by B. P. Schulberg at Rex
Pictures. She commented in a 1921 interview with Barbara Beach in Motion Picture
Magazine, ‘I am very thankful for all my acting experience in pictures for it taught
me exactly what could and could not be screened, an intimate knowledge which
is absolutely essential to become a successful scenarist.’16
In 1913, when the contracted director of Macpherson’s The Tarantula became
unavailable, Macpherson was handed her first opportunity to direct and star in
a film she had written. The box-office success of that film brought her a multi-
picture deal at Universal where she wrote and acted in two-reelers (directing two
of them), working with stars of the time such as Mary Pickford, Wilfred Lucas,
and Florence Lawrence.
In 1914, director Cecil B. DeMille (who had the title ‘Director-General’ at Jesse
L. Lasky’s Feature Play Company) cast Macpherson as Isabelita, the high-spirited
rancher’s daughter in The Rose of the Rancho. Shortly afterwards she began writing
for DeMille – a collaboration that would last more than 30 years and, by the mid
1920s, make her the highest-paid employee in the Lasky scenario department.
DeMille later recalled her as ‘a funny little tornado with a nose that turned up,
and hair that curled up, and a disposition that turned up, too’ (Khoury 1959: 79).
In an article she penned for aspiring screenwriters in the May 1921 issue of
Photodramatist magazine, Macpherson wrote ‘The first time I submitted a scenario
to Cecil B. DeMille he ironically informed me that I had plenty of imagination but
wrote like a carpenter! On another occasion I had to write six separate and distinct
scenarios running into hundreds of pages of copy paper to secure an acceptance
from Mr. DeMille.’17
While their working relationship was sometimes tempestuous – DeMille stated,
‘I’m sure I was frightfully insulting to her but the kid took it and plugged along …
when she got her fangs into anything you could not shake her loose. I fired her
regularly but it did no good, for she would always come back with another version
of the script’ (Khoury 1959: 80) – in most ways they complemented each other
perfectly. Alice Martin described Macpherson as ‘the left half of Cecil DeMille’s
brain’ and ‘a dynamo with dimples’ in the October 1916 issue of Photoplay.
Macpherson’s real genius was her ability to understand what DeMille wanted and
put it on paper. She also tempered DeMille’s love of spectacle with her emphasis
on character. For example, in the production of Joan the Woman (1916), starring
Geraldine Farrar as Joan of Arc, DeMille created lavish set pieces with thousands of
extras while Macpherson’s script humanized Joan as a frightened young girl, driven
by her spiritual beliefs. The same dynamic worked well in their epic King of Kings
(1927). DeMille told Macpherson he wanted ‘a story of Christ with popular appeal’
(Khoury 1959: 116), so Macpherson wrote fully fleshed out characterizations,
including Mary Magdalene as a young woman whose affair with Judas comes to
an end when she meets Jesus and is persuaded to mend her ways; Jesus himself is
portrayed as a strong, virile, and charismatic man.
In 1917, the partnership produced two box-office hits for Mary Pickford:
Romance of the Redwoods, and the patriotic film The Little American, with its oddly
modern anti-war themes.
Benjamin B. Hampton wrote in The History of the Movies about DeMille’s search
for a formula for box-office success. Macpherson had suggested to DeMille that
‘people are always interested in sex appeal’ (Hampton 1931: 219), but within more
contemporary stories than the typical Theda Bara vamp plot.18 To test the theory,
in 1919 DeMille had Macpherson adapt James A. Barrie’s play The Admirable
Crichton (retitled Male and Female), for which they cast former Mack Sennett bath-
ing beauty Gloria Swanson as the shipwrecked rich girl who falls in love with the
butler. The film was a huge hit. The DeMille/Macpherson partnership continued
with this formula as public taste evolved in the Jazz Age, with hits such as the
social melodramas Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), The Affairs of Anatole (1921),
and Manslaughter (1922), each containing scenes of barn-burning sensation and
sex appeal tempered by a distinct moral message.
DeMille and Macpherson had adjoining suites at the studio and, unlike the
sparsely furnished rooms given to other writers under contract, Macpherson’s
was decorated to look like a mountain cabin complete with redwood panelling,
and, according to Barbara Beach’s article in the July 1921 issue of Motion Picture
Magazine, boasted a huge desk, an open fireplace, Navajo rugs, and animal skins
on the floors. Cari Beauchamp writes in Without Lying Down; Frances Marion and the
Powerful Women of Early Hollywood that Macpherson’s long-term romantic relation-
ship with DeMille was an open secret in Hollywood, even (seemingly) accepted by
his wife, Constance. Despite that, Beauchamp adds, ‘there was never any inference
that Jeanie was hired because of their affair and not her talent; DeMille would have
many mistresses but few scenario writers’ (Beauchamp 1997: 73–4).
Macpherson wrote DeMille’s first three talkies, but then began to branch out
to work with other directors. In a departure from her usual subjects, she wrote
The Devil’s Brother (1933), a musical comedy for Hal Roach starring Laurel and
Hardy as two wannabe bandits at the service of a dashing nobleman who secretly
masquerades as notorious highwayman. Macpherson then headed to Rome for
a short-lived stint as story supervisor with Vittorio Mussolini’s ERA Productions.
She returned to work with DeMille, this time as a contract writer at Paramount
Pictures, doing uncredited work on a number of historical films including
Cleopatra (1934), The Crusades (1935), and The Plainsman (1936), starring Gary
Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok.
Her last credits for DeMille include the swashbuckling pirate film The Buccaneer
(1938), Union Pacific (1939), Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Unconquered (1947), and
also at Paramount, but for director Sam Wood, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943).
Macpherson was one of the 36 founding members of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, created in 1927, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk
of Fame in 1960. She died of cancer on 26 August 1946 in Los Angeles. (Victoria Lucas)
Frances Marion
Frances Marion (1888–1973) was born Marion Benson Owens in San Francisco,
California. She was a journalist, screenwriter, actress, author, and producer. After
serving overseas as a combat correspondent during World War I, Marion moved
to Los Angeles and worked as an actress and assistant to successful screenwriter,
director, and producer Lois Weber. Marion quickly moved into screenwriting
and described, in her Hollywood memoir, her less than wonderful initial inter-
view with film mogul William Fox, who founded Fox Film Corporation in 1915.
Fox asked Marion: ‘Why does a pretty girl like you want to be a writer?’ Marion
replied: ‘Because I like to write’ (Marion 1972: 29). Fox wanted to set Marion
straight: ‘Listen cuteness, don’t try to be a foolish somebody. Nobody cares noth-
ing about female writers. Actresses – Yes, they got glamour – but writers, the poor
schlemiels! Now if you’re smart you’ll gamble on yourself. Easy just like tossing
a coin.’ Marion was not to be swayed: ‘A coin, Mr Fox, can only fall heads or tails.
I’ll gamble on heads, they last longer’ (Marion 1972: 29). Marion’s gamble paid
off; she was the first person to win two Academy Awards. Marion, when given the
freedom to submit scenarios that reflected her own interests, explored the rights
of a single father (who battles alcoholism) to raise his son in The Champ (1931).
The story also features a woman who left her first marriage to find satisfaction
and sense of self. Marion took on the examination of the prison system in The Big
House, inspired by the 1929 prison riots over violent and substandard living con-
ditions. Marion and George Hill penned a narrative that centred on a first-time
lawbreaker, a young and naive man who is put in with hardened criminals and,
through self-preservation, begins to adopt criminal codes of behaviour – and then
is killed in a prison riot just as it becomes clear that he was innocent all along.
‘When we finish the picture, we want to feel that the story of John Morris is the
story of only one of thousands of boys whose lives are thrown away on a criminal
and ineffectual system which can be righted and will be if the eyes of the world
are turned upon present day conditions’ (Beauchamp 1997: 255). Marion explored
the vagaries of divorce in Their Own Desire (1929). Marion’s Cynara (1932) is built
on a fatal attraction scenario: the betrayed wife holds the strength and power to
decide if she wishes to continue with the marriage. Dinner at Eight (1933) exam-
ines a lower class female’s breaking of a strict social class structure, as well as her
use of sexual relations to gain power in her relationship. These films connected
with audiences, were box-office hits, and Marion won Academy Awards for The
Champ and The Big House.
Marion chafed under the Production Code in the early 1930s. She referred to
the reformers intent on film censorship as the ‘constipated citizens’ and did not
relish the idea of morality-pushers gaining a strong foothold in Hollywood. She
called the Hays Office ‘the neatest double-cross the Moguls ever met’ and a ‘poison
which they themselves have brewed’ (Beauchamp 1997: 138–41). In her biogra-
phy Off with Their Heads, Marion wrote, ‘Every time the good ship Respectability
threatened to sink, Will Hays stepped forward to man the lifeboats. Our work
at the studio became more and more complicated. The scenarists resented having
their wings clipped; they dared not write frankly on any vital issue. Whenever
stories were attacked by New York critics as imbecilic and fit only for the con-
sumption of ten-year-olds, we mailed these critics a sheaf or two of “cuts” (that
were) demanded by the Censors’ (Marion 1972: 94).
From 1929 to 1934, Marion wrote 21 films (some in collaboration with oth-
ers), but after the Hays Code took full effect in 1934, she is credited with only six
produced screenplays before 1946, again some in collaboration. Frances Marion
lamented the role of the screenwriter after the PCA took firm control of film con-
tent and narrative in 1934 and said ‘(screen)writing became like writing on the
sand with the wind blowing’ (Marion 1972: 94). (Jule Selbo)
Darnell Martin
Darnell Martin (1964–) was born in the Bronx, New York, daughter of an Irish-
American mother and an African-American father. She is a screenwriter, director,
and producer. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and New York University
Film School. She produced and directed music videos and crewed on films for
directors like Spike Lee and Jonathan Demme. Darnell Martin wrote and directed
the comedy-drama I Like It Like That (1994) for Columbia Pictures; the film was
shown at the Cannes Film Festival and Martin won a Best New Director Award
for the movie at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. The movie received five
nominations in the 1995 Independent Spirit Awards. Other screenwriting credits
include Prison Song (2001) and Cadillac Records (2008).
Sarah Y. Mason
Sarah Y. Mason (1896–1980) was born in Pima, Arizona, one of 12 children of a
railroad station manager. When she was 22, Hollywood director Allan Dwan came
to nearby Tucson, Arizona to film Headin’ South (1918). An undated article from
the Arizona Daily Star reported the story of a hometown girl (Mason) who was
claiming that popular actor Douglas Fairbanks had discovered her while watch-
ing a film at a local theatre and introduced her to Dwan. Declining Dwan’s offer
of a job as an actress, Mason suggested the position of a continuity girl (today
called script supervisor), someone who would make sure costumes, sets, and actors’
hair matched from shot to shot. This job brought Mason to Hollywood. Later that
year Fairbanks directed Arizona, based on a script by Dwan, and Mason received her
(and the industry’s) first continuity credit. Two years later, in 1920, Mason wrote
Bright Skies (1920). Not until her fifth film, The Poor Simp (1920), did Mason’s first
screenwriting credit appear alongside that of Victor Heerman, who directed the
film. Mason and Heerman married shortly after, on 20 April 1921, in Pasadena,
California. During the early years of their marriage, wife and husband were not
an exclusive screenwriting team; however, they collaborated on three films:
Chicken in the Case (1921), Divorce of Convenience (1921), and Modern Matrimony
(1923). During that time Mason wrote several films alone or with other col-
laborators. In 1933, Mason and Heerman adapted Little Women, the novel’s first
sound era adaptation. Katharine Hepburn, in her memoir Me: Stories of My Life,
explained why she felt the script for Little Women deserved the Academy Award
for Best Adaptation. ‘There were a number of scripts done on this. They were all
mediocre. Actually bad. Then Sarah Mason and Victor Heerman were hired. They

wrote a brilliant script, in my humble opinion. Simple and true and naïve but
really believable. It was amazing the difference between this script and its pre-
decessors. Mason and Heerman believed the book. So did I. The others didn’t’
(Hepburn 1991: 147). Winning the Academy Award marked Mason and Heerman
as a team capable of translating literary material to the screen. The next projects
they were assigned were screenplays for works by Edith Wharton (Age of Innocence,
1934), J. M. Barrie (The Little Minister, 1934), Olive Higgins Prouty (Stella Dallas,
1937), and Clifford Odets (Golden Boy, 1939, shared screen credit with Lewis
Meltzer and Daniel Taradash). (Rosanne Welch)
June Mathis
June Mathis (1889–1927) was born June Beulah Hughes in Leadville, Colorado.
Her parents divorced when she was seven, and when her mother married her
second husband, June took his last name as her stage name and became June
Mathis, performing at age 13 in vaudeville, and eventually in Broadway theatres in
New York City. In 1915, determined to support herself and her widowed mother,
Mathis decided to become a screenwriter. She entered a contest and her script
caught the attention of producers. She accepted a screenwriting contract at Metro
in 1918 and moved with her mother to Hollywood. She became head of the sce-
nario (writing) department at MGM in 1919, the first woman to be named a film
executive at a Hollywood studio.
Mathis was an innovator in the script-writing area; she included detailed stage
directions and location notes in her work. Writers working at MGM adopted her
style and much of the accepted present standard formatting of screenplays can
be attributed to her. Mathis later credited her success to a strong concentration
on plot and theme: ‘No story that did not possess a theme has ever really lived …
Occasionally one may make money and perhaps be popular for a time. But in the
end it dies’ (Slater 1984: 246).
A spiritualist and mystic who believed in reincarnation, June Mathis always
wore an opal ring when she wrote, believing it brought her ideas. Her films were
recognizable for their religious figures and esoteric themes. Mathis claimed that,
‘If you are vibrating on the right plane, you will inevitably come in contact with
others who can help you.’ She elaborates, ‘It’s like tuning in on your radio. If you
get the right wavelength, you have your station’ (Schumacher 2012).
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) assigns 107 silent film screenwriting cred-
its to her name, including Saphead (1920) for Buster Keaton, Greed (1924), Ben-Hur
(1925), and Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), for which she recommended
Rudolph Valentino to star. Other films she wrote in which Valentino starred were
Camille (1921), The Conquering Power (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), The Young
Rajah (1922), and a first draft of The Hooded Falcon (1924). She also wrote many
vehicles for popular actress Colleen Moore, including Desert Flower (1925), Sally
(1925), and We Moderns (1925). In 1926 Mathis was voted the third most influ-
ential woman in Hollywood, behind actress-producer Mary Pickford and actress
Norma Talmadge. ‘She fairly lives and breathes motion pictures,’ reported the
New York Morning Telegraph in February 1924, ‘and if ever a woman had her hand
on the pulse of the film industry, it is this indefatigable worker, who not only
knows what she wants, but knows how to get it’ (Ellenberger 2013).
When Valentino rejected the script for Falcon, their relationship suffered and
Mathis and Valentino did not speak for two years. They reconciled in 1926. When
Valentino died suddenly with no burial recommendations in his letters, Mathis
offered her burial crypt as a temporary resting place at Hollywood cemetery. It was
meant to be temporary; however, Mathis passed away less than a year later and
thus, they rest together, side by side, in her crypt.
Mathis’s only sound film writing credit is Reno (1930). (Jule Selbo)
Melissa Mathison
Melissa Mathison (1950–) was born in Los Angeles, California. She received a
nomination for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for E.T. the Extra-
Terrestrial (1982). Other credits include The Black Stallion (1979, co-writer), the
adaptation The Escape Artist (1982, co-writer), the adaptation The Indian in the
Cupboard (1995), and Kundun (1997).
Elaine May
Elaine May (1932–) was born Elaine Iva Berlin in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the
daughter of two Yiddish theatre professionals. She travelled with her parents as
they toured in various productions and then moved with her mother to Los Angeles
when her father died. She dropped out of secondary school at age 14, married at
16, and had a daughter. After her divorce, she studied acting and decided to go to
college. She searched for a university that did not require a high-school diploma
and ended up at the University of Chicago in 1950. May attended classes without
officially enrolling and met acting student Mike Nichols, with whom she struck
up a friendship. In 1955 they both became members of the improvisational group
the Compass Players, and eventually, in 1957, they went out on their own and
formed a duo act, Nichols and May. Their show ‘made fun of the new intellec-
tual, cultural and social orders’ (Nachman 2003: 319) and found quick success in
nightclubs, on stage, radio and television. When asked if there were any rules in
their early improv comedy, Nichols said, ‘The greatest rule was (Elaine’s): when in
doubt, seduce. That became the rule for the whole group … we figured … there
were only three kinds of scenes in the world – fights, seductions, and negotiations’
(Kashner 2013: 96).
By 1961 they decided to move in different directions; Nichols became a cel-
ebrated stage and film director and May moved into screenwriting, playwriting,
and directing. May’s screen credits include an adaptation, Such Good Friends
(1971), written under the pseudonym Esther Dale; a short story adaptation,
A New Leaf (1971), nominated for a Writers Guild Award for Best Screenplay; Mikey
and Nicky (1976); as co-writer of the adaptation Heaven Can Wait (1978), nomi-
nated for an Academy Award and winner of a Writers Guild of America Award;
Ishtar (1987); the adaptation The Birdcage (1996), nominated for a Writers Guild
of America Award; and the adaptation Primary Colors (1998), nominated for an
Academy Award and a Writers Guild of America Award. May is also known as a
‘script doctor’ and worked, uncredited, on Tootsie (1982), Labryinth (1986), Reds
(1981), and other films. In an interview in Vanity Fair in 2012, when asked why
she didn’t want a credit, May replied, ‘Well I didn’t have control … You’re a hired
gun. No matter how much you write, what you write, you’re still a hired gun and
you have no control’ (Wilson 2012: 106). Film critic David Thomson wrote of
Elaine May: ‘The air of Jewish fatalism is always there in her work’ (Kashner 2013:
99). Marsha McCreadie, in Women Screenwriters Today (2005), noted that while
May’s films ‘may be progressive in theme and content, as she has written and
structured them, there is no conscious effort to write particularly strong parts for
women, or to deliberately write for women’ (McCreadie 2005: 21). However, in his
book Seriously Funny Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, Gerald Nachman writes:
‘May cracked the stereotype of what roles a woman could play, breaking through
the psychological restrictions of playing comedy as a woman’ (Nachman 2003).
Irene Mecchi
Irene Mecchi was born in San Francisco, California. She is a screenwriter for
film and television, and a playwright. She attended the University of California
at Berkeley and the American Conservatory Theatre. She is the co-screenwriter
of Disney’s The Lion King (1994), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules
(1997), and Disney/Pixar’s Brave (2012).
Bess Meredyth
Bess Meredyth (1890–1969) was born Helen Elizabeth MacGlashan in Buffalo,
New York. She was a screenwriter, actress, and film director. As a child, she showed
a serious interest in music. She studied piano but turned her attention to writing
when a teacher in her English composition class, recognizing her talent, told her
that with diligence she might someday become an authoress ‘like Harriet Beecher
Stowe’ (Lucas 2004: 18–19). The 13-year-old girl marched into the office of the
editor of the local newspaper with characteristic boldness and came out assigned
to write a daily fiction column. She was paid a dollar per story.
However, it was music that got her out of Buffalo. She toured on the vaudeville
circuit, performing piano-logues – playing music while singing and reciting – and
appearing in small roles in theatrical stock productions. Then, intrigued by the
new medium of motion pictures, she found work as an extra for D. W. Griffith at
Biograph in New York.
Interviewed by Photoplay in her mid twenties, Meredyth explained that
a chance meeting at the Los Angeles Biograph studios with director Wilfred Lucas
in 1911 changed her life in more ways than one. ‘He advised me to try the pic-
tures and, after some hesitation, I canceled my (vaudeville) engagement and allied
myself with pictures. I enjoy it and keep busy, for besides acting I write a number
of scenarios and I also keep up my music, in case I ever want to go on the stage
again’ (Photoplay 1915). Thus, like many other screenwriters, including Jeanie
Macpherson and her lifelong friend Frances Marion, Meredyth began her work in
film as an actress.
Meredyth’s career quickly blossomed. With her tiny stature, vivacious personal-
ity, and unlimited energy she soon became popular with colleagues and fans alike.
Showbiz trade magazine New York Clipper wrote in 1914: ‘It is safe to say there is
not a single person who is not glad to see Miss Meredyth in the prominent position
she now occupies, for she is always ready to do anyone a good turn and is always
happy and in good humor.’
Meredyth excelled at comedy, both as a writer and actress, and created her
own serial, Bess the Detectress, in which she solved mysteries as Bessie Pinkerton
Holmes while fearlessly performing her own stunts. She often worked with direc-
tor Wilfred Lucas and in 1914 they enjoyed success with an epic 15-part serialized
version of the popular novel Trey O’Hearts by Louis Joseph Vance. In his foreword
to the 1914 edition of the novel, Vance wrote:
If the written work is lacking in the quality known as characterization, the fault
is the author’s, if the picture is not, the merit is all the players’. But both would
have gone for naught without the never-failing patience, ingenuity and intel-
ligence of Mr. Wilfred Lucas, who directed the production of the pictures. The
author would be guilty of high treason to his kind if he forgot the traditional
feud between author and adaptor long enough to give any credit whatsoever to
Miss Bess Meredyth, the scenario writer, who minced the story into such screen
fodder as is most palatable to the reeling cameras.
The 1916 Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual listed Meredyth as an
actress with five years experience as a comedienne and ingénue at Biograph and
Universal, and two years as a scenario writer, ‘author of ninety produced features
of five reels or larger, many smaller subjects’.
Meredyth left acting to concentrate on writing and co-directing a number of
films with Lucas. They were given their own production unit at Universal in 1917,
and shortly afterwards were married. A number of collaborations, including The
Romance of Tarzan (1918), starring Elmo Lincoln, followed.
When Australian actor-producer Snowy Baker invited them to partner with him
in 1919, they packed up their infant son and headed to Sydney, where they wrote
and co-directed a number of features, including The Man from Kangaroo and The
Jackaroo of Coolabong (both 1920).
Returning to Hollywood in 1920, Meredyth literally hung out a shingle: ‘Hers
was the only individual name listed in the Los Angeles phone book under scenario
writers’ (Beauchamp 1997: 155).
A prolific writer, Meredyth churned out dozens of scripts for smaller studios,
and in 1922 was hired by producer Louis B. Mayer to adapt the novel One Clear
Call, starring Claire Windsor. The same year she wrote The Woman He Married,
a drama-romance to be directed by Fred Niblo. The three would go on to create a
number of films, including Thy Name Is Woman (1924), Red Lily (1924), and the
epic Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ (1925).
Mayer and the recently formed MGM studio had a lot riding on Ben-Hur in
1924, but the shoot was wildly over budget and no one was happy with the film
coming back from Italy. One of Meredyth’s skills was handling difficult people,
often defusing situations with her trademark humour, so Mayer sent Meredyth
and fellow writer Carey Wilson to Rome to rework the script, and, in Meredyth’s
case, to supervise the massive production. She needed all her cleverness after the
huge naval battle sequence was shot. Many of the extras were Italian soldiers and,
as the ships collided, their heavy armour dragged some of them down into the
water. The sequence was triumphantly filmed by multiple cameras, but no one
had done a head count and a rumour started that some extras had drowned.
The representative of the Fascist government ordered the negative confiscated
while an inquiry was carried out, whereupon Meredyth promptly hid the film
reels in her hatbox, boarded the Rome-Paris express, and delivered the negative
safely to the laboratory in Paris. The film was a huge success. For years afterward,
‘bigger than Ben-Hur’ was used to sell tickets on epic pictures.
When Meredyth returned from Italy she and Lucas realized they’d drifted apart
and amicably decided to end their marriage.
Meredyth followed Ben-Hur with a film for Warner Bros, an adaptation of the
novel Moby Dick titled The Sea Beast (1926), starring matinee idol John Barrymore
and directed by Millard Webb. The pairing of Meredyth’s script and Barrymore’s
talent was so successful that two more films followed in quick succession: Don
Juan (1926), and When a Man Loves (also known as Manon Lescaut) (1927), both
directed by Alan Crosland. Barrymore and Meredyth became close friends; in the
December 1925 issue of film magazine Picture and Picturegoers, he described her to
a British magazine as ‘a perfect darling, a divine creature’. She was adept at dealing
with his bouts of drinking and depression, always keeping his favourite bowl of
cold potatoes in the icebox when he’d stop over at all hours of the day or night
(Lucas 2004: 35). She was also skilled at avoiding Barrymore’s drunken passes. On
one occasion she told him reasonably, ‘Look, Jack, I know you’re the Great Lover.
The world knows you’re the Great Lover. You don’t have to prove it – certainly
not to me.’ At first he looked offended, but after a moment he sighed with con-
tentment and said, ‘We’re friends, which is a hell of a lot better.’ ‘Goddamn it,’
Meredyth groused. ‘You don’t have to be that relieved’ (Lucas 2004: 36).
While at Warner Bros, Meredyth met Jack Warner’s newest European find,
Hungarian director Michael Curtiz. She helped Curtiz with the script of his first
American film, The Third Degree (1926), while also working on Don Juan. They
soon began to see one another socially and were married in 1929.
Though known as a writer of roles for leading men, Meredyth was equally at
home writing for women. Her films for Greta Garbo, including the racy melodra-
mas A Woman of Affairs and The Mysterious Lady (both 1928), and Romance (1930)
led to her being tasked with creating star vehicles for Joan Crawford: Our Blushing
Brides (1930) and Laughing Sinners (1931).
In the 1930s, Meredyth wrote scripts as diverse as the drama Strange Interlude
(1932), starring Norma Shearer and Clark Gable; the Wallace Beery comedy The
Mighty Barnum (1934, co-written with Gene Fowler); the historical bio-pic The Iron
Duke (1934); the musical comedy Folies Bergere de Paris (1935), starring Maurice
Chevalier and Merle Oberon; and the story for Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936).
As Curtiz’s career skyrocketed, Meredyth’s began to fade. A series of illnesses left

her close to bedridden. However, it was an open secret in Hollywood that she unof-
ficially worked from her bed on all Curtiz’s scripts. ‘Curtiz telephoned Bess at least
once or twice a day,’ reported his long-time sound editor, Francis Scheid. According
to Casablanca screenwriter Julius Epstein, ‘When we had a story conference and
Mike came in the next day with criticisms or suggestions, we knew they were Bess
Meredyth’s ideas, not his’ (Harmetz 1992: 123). Curtiz’s Casablanca was rewritten
throughout much of production. At one conference, when Curtiz expressed dis-
satisfaction with a particular scene, Epstein pressed for details. Curtiz frowned.
‘Goddamn. I don’t remember what the hell Bess tells me’ (Lucas 2004: 142).
In the 1940s, Meredyth wrote The Mark of Zorro (1940), directed by Rouben
Mamoulian and starring Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone, plus the musical
comedy That Night in Rio (1941) for producer Darryl Zanuck, starring Alice Faye,
Don Ameche, and Carmen Miranda. Her last produced screen credit was The
Unsuspected (1947), a noir thriller produced and directed by Michael Curtiz.
Bess Meredyth was one of the 36 founding members of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences. She was nominated for two Academy Awards, for
A Woman of Affairs (1928) and Wonder of Women (1929). (Victoria Lucas)
Elizabeth Meriwether
Elizabeth Meriwether (1981–) was born in Miami, Florida and at age five her family
moved to Michigan. She attended Yale University. She is a playwright, screen-
writer, and producer, working in feature film and television. Feature film credits
include No Strings Attached (2011) and she created the television series The New
Girl (2011–). She is a part of ‘The Fempire’, a small screenwriting group made up
of female screenwriters working in television and film.
Nancy Meyers
Nancy Meyers (1949–) was born in Pennsylvania. She is a screenwriter, director,
and producer. She attended American University in Washington, DC, and studied
journalism. At age 24, she moved to Los Angeles, and studied at UCLA, eventually
working as a story editor in the film division at Motown. While working at Motown,
she also began to work with fellow screenwriters Charles Shyer and Harvey Miller
on one of her original ideas for a comedy script, Private Benjamin (1980). This is the
story of a ‘Jewish American Princess’ (an entitled, spoiled young woman raised in
the Jewish religion) who joins the United States Army after her second husband
dies. The main character must go through basic training, endure physical and
mental obstacles, and eventually find personal strength in order to become a more
realistic and useful member of society. Private Benjamin was, according to Meyers,
originally turned down by ‘everybody … everybody. More than once’ (Merkin
2009). Meyers noted that the common film studio belief was that a film narrative
with no main male star was not going to perform at the box office. However, Meyers
got the chance to pitch the story to Goldie Hawn, who then agreed to star and
executive produce the film. Warner Bros took a chance, the movie was successful at
the box office, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing.
Meyers married Charles Shyer in 1980 and together they wrote Irreconcilable
Differences (1984), Protocol (1984; they share story credit with Harvey Miller), Baby
Boom (1987), the remake of Father of the Bride (1991) and I Love Trouble (1994), and
the sequel Father of the Bride II (1995). In 1998, Meyers made her directorial debut
on a Meyers/Shyer remake of The Parent Trap. In 1999 Meyers and Shyer divorced,
and in 2000 Meyers wrote, produced, and directed her first ‘solo’ film, What
Women Want. She followed that up with Something’s Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday
(2006), and It’s Complicated (2009). Meyers builds worlds that are populated
with women, and where women play lead roles. Most of her films are romantic
comedies; they explore the woman’s place in the world as well as her struggle
with finding the proper place for a relationship in her life. At the beginning of
What Women Want the voiceover explains, ‘You know the expression, a “man’s
man”. A man’s man is the leader of the pack, the kind of man other men look
up to, admire, and emulate. A man’s man is the kind of man who – just doesn’t
get what women are about’.. Throughout the narrative, Meyers makes a point of
showing that, despite many who believe in the stereotype, women do not allow
emotions to get in the way of doing their job. Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and
It’s Complicated (2009) explore the double standard that society uses to judge age
differences between romantic partners. In The Holiday (2009) Meyers again plays
with male and female stereotypes. One female character lives in a sleek home, is
successful in a typically masculine profession, and worries because she is unable to
shed a tear. Her male romantic interest is a single dad, super sensitive, and enjoys
homelife. Meyers’ characters are three-dimensional: they have jobs, they have
worries, they have romantic desires, they want/need friends. Relationships do not
come easily, insecurities and phobias abound – but somehow, things work out.
‘Writing is a bitch,’ Meyers confesses. ‘Movies don’t look hard, but figuring it
out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody’s character right and having it be
funny, make sense and be romantic, it’s creating a puzzle’ (Babb 2010). Meyers’
production company is called Waverly Films, named after the neighbourhood
cinema where, growing up, she went obsessively to see the screwball comedies of
Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, and others. Meyers wants to be
embraced as a filmmaker, not as a female filmmaker: ‘We’re filmmakers like every-
body. How many years in a row are we going to talk about the fact that we make
films and we are women? Enough already’ (Babb 2010). (Jule Selbo)
Annie Mumolo
Annie Mumolo (1973–) was born in Irvine, California and graduated from the
University of California, Berkeley. She is a comedian, screenwriter, and actress.
Screenplay credits include Bridesmaids (2012, co-written with Kristen Wiig, nomi-
nated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA for Best Screenplay), and Joy (2015,
co-written with David O. Russell).
Jane Murfin
Jane Murfin (1884[?]-1955) – various dates of birth are given for Murfin, from 1882
to 1892 – was born Joan Macklem in Quincy, Michigan. She was a screenwriter,
producer, and playwright. She married a lawyer, James Murfin, and although the
marriage lasted only seven years, she used his name throughout most of her career.
Her play, Lilac Time, co-written with actress Jane Cowl, opened on Broadway in
1917. The two women then collaborated on other plays that were later adapted
into films: Daybreak (1918), Information Please/A Temperamental Wife (1919), and
Smilin’ Through (1922). They inititally used a single pseudonym, Allan Langdon
Martin, thinking a male name would get them more serious consideration. Murfin
moved to California in 1919 and, until 1944, worked as a writer on over 60 films.
In 1921, Murfin and director/dog trainer Laurence Trimble brought a German
Shepherd police dog (he had served with the German Red Cross) to the USA, formed
Trimble-Murfin Productions, and produced films featuring their dog, Strongheart.
These films include Brawn of the North (1922; Murfin co-wrote and co-directed with
Trimble), The Love Master (1924), and White Fang (1925, adapted by Murfin from
the Jack London story). Strongheart became the first true canine star of cinema,
predating Rin-Tin-Tin by two years (Buck 2013). Strongheart received a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame. Murfin’s relationship with Trimble (their marriage is
unsubstantiated – however, they lived together in California [Buck 2013] for several
years) collapsed when Strongheart died in 1929. Murfin’s other credits include Way
Back Home (1931, based on characters created for a NBC Radio show), a drama that
explored alcoholism, its effect on children, and familial discord. In 1932 she married
actor Donald Crisp and was nominated as co-writer on What Price Hollywood (1932,
based on a story by Adela Rogers St John). She co-wrote Our Betters (1933, based on
a play by W. Somerset Maugham), a satirical comedy that takes a scathing view of
social class structure, and also co-adapted (with Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman)
The Little Minister (1934, based on a work by J. M. Barrie), which also looks at the
hypocrisies of social class structure in mid-nineteenth-century Scotland. The Little
Minister starred Katharine Hepburn, as did the Murfin-penned film Spitfire (1934,
co-written with Lula Vollmer, based on the Vollmer play). Other credits include
Rockabye (1932, based on a play by Lucia Bronder), the Silver Cord (1933, adapted
from a Sidney Howard play), the adaptation of the musical Roberta (1935), Alice
Adams (1935, co-written with Dorothy Yost and Mortimer Offner and again starring
Katharine Hepburn), The Women (1939, co-written with Anita Loos, based on Clare
Boothe Luce’s play), an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1940), and the
war drama Dragon Seed (1944, co-written with Marguerite Roberts, starring Katharine
Hepburn and based on Pearl S. Buck’s work). Dragon Seed explores the woman’s place
in her world. Murfin was one of the founding members of the Screenwriters Guild,
and she is also listed as one of the first female supervisors of a motion picture depart-
ment; in 1934, Murfin filled that role at RKO Studios. (Jule Selbo)
Claudia Myers
Claudia Myers is a screenwriter, director and producer. Her screenwriting credits
include Kindness of Strangers (2004), Kettle of Fish (2006), Below the Beltway (2010),
Fort Bliss (2014) and Wild Oats (2015). She was named one of the ‘10 Filmmakers
to Watch in 2015’ by Independent Magazine. She also works in the documentary
form. She is a professor at American University’s School of Communication.
Ida May Park

Ida May Park (1879–1954) was born in Los Angeles, California. She was a screen-
writer and director in the silent era. Park often addressed social issues, such as
sweatshop conditions (Fires of Rebellion, 1917) and sexual harassment in the work-
place (A Model’s Confession, 1916), and the adaptation of Katherine Leiser Robbins’
story Risky Road (1918). Park wrote over 500 scenarios and created her own pro-
duction company, Ida May Park Productions. Her screenwriting credits include The
Hidden Way (1926), Broadway Love (1918), and The Flashlight (1917). She adapted
stories by Nalbro Isadorah Bartley, including The Amazing Wife (1919) and The
Vanity Pool (1918), and stories by Evelyn Campbell, including Bread (1918). In
2009, a chapter Park wrote on filmmaking for the 1924 book Careers for Women was
quoted by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis in an article on Hollywood
sexism: ‘She (Park) warned other women about her chosen path in Hollywood.
“Unless you are hardy and determined,” she wrote, “the director’s role is not for
you. Wait until the profession has emerged from its embryonic state and a system
has been evolved by which the terrific weight of responsibility can be lifted from
one pair of shoulders. When that time comes I believe that women will find no
finer calling.” Park outlived her husband, director/producer Joe De Grasse, one of
the founding members of the Directors Guild. Park died in Los Angeles in 1954.
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) is known mostly for her prose and poetry, and as a
member of the famed Algonquin Round Table; however, Parker also wrote films,
among them the original A Star Is Born (1937), and Saboteur (1942), directed by
Alfred Hitchcock. Born Dorothy Rothschild in New Jersey, her mother died when
she was five years old. Her father remarried and Parker was raised in a household
with a stepmother she disliked. When her stepmother died, and then her father in
1913, Parker found it necessary to leave school, and began to earn her living playing
piano at a dancing school. In 1914 Parker sold a piece to Vanity Fair magazine and
soon segued into writing captions for Vogue and working as an editorial assistant. In
1917 she married a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Parker, and took his name. At the
outbreak of the First World War, Edwin joined the military and went to Europe, serv-
ing as an ambulance driver. Parker continued in her career, writing theatre criticism
for Vanity Fair. In 1919 Parker became a founding member of the famous Algonquin
Round Table; this was a meeting place where Parker and other up-and-coming writ-
ers, such as Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, and Edna Ferber
made up a ‘vicious circle’ who lunched and assessed New York and New Yorkers with
scathing wit and intellectual commentary. In 1920, her theatre criticism published
in Vanity Fair had offended theatrical producers once too often, and her contract
was terminated. Anita Loos and Frances Marion suggested Lillian Gish hire Parker to
write the film Remodeling Her Husband, which Gish was directing for D. W. Griffith,
starring her sister Dorothy. The experience proved unsatisfactory for all the women
involved, so Gish dismissed Parker. Parker then decided to join her friend Harold
Ross on the founding board of editors for his new magazine, the New Yorker, in 1925.
The magazine was a success. Parker’s contributions, many of which were absurdly
farcical and cruelly humorous about her own failed attempts at romance, along with
her publication of a collection of poetry under the title Enough Rope in 1926, caused
Parker’s reputation as a writer to grow. Her work began to appear in top-tier maga-
zines such as Life, McCall’s, and the New Republic. While her professional reputation
had clearly grown and spread across continents, her personal life had not. She and
Edwin divorced after he returned from his military service.
In 1929, Parker spent three months in Hollywood under contract to MGM.
There she met Alan Campbell, an actor 11 years her junior; they married in 1934.
They collaborated on the screenplay The Moon’s Our Home (1936), sharing credit
with two other writers before writing, from a William Wellman and Robert Carson
story, A Star Is Born (1937), the story of a young actress who falls in love with
an established actor whose alcoholism is exacerbated when her career begins to
overshadow his. Their work on this film earned them an Academy Award nomi-
nation for Best Writing, Screenplay. Sweethearts (1938) followed; this is a musical
focused on a married couple who move to Hollywood to exchange their successful
operetta careers for film careers – only to find that the trials and challenges of the
Hollywood industry will surely tear their relationship apart.
Campbell and Parker divorced in 1947. In the same year, Parker was one of
four writers who worked on Smash Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), the story of a
successful female singer (loosely based on Bing Crosby’s first wife, Dixie Lee) who
gives up her career for her husband and then descends into alcoholism. Parker
shared her second nomination for the Academy Award for Best Writing, Original
Story for the film (also released as A Woman Destroyed).
Parker struggled with alcoholism and survived several suicide attempts. She
and Campbell remarried in 1950. Parker was nominated and inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959. She served as a distinguished visit-
ing professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, from 1959–64.
Campbell died in 1963 and Parker remained single for the rest of her life, moving
back to New York where she reviewed books for Esquire magazine before her own
death on 7 June 1967. Because she was so impressed with his work on racial unity,
Parker willed her estate, consisting mostly of literary works still in print, to Martin
Luther King, Jr, for his use in his lifetime. After his death, her estate became the
property of the NAACP. (Rosanne Welch)
Nicole Perlman
Nicole Perlman received her Film and Dramatic Writing degree from NYU’s Tisch
School of the Arts in 2003, and was part of the Disney Screenwriters Programme.
She won the Tribeca Film Festival’s Sloan Grant for Science in Film for her unpro-
duced screenplay Challenger. Produced screenplay credits include Guardians of the
Galaxy (2014, co-writer).
June Diane Raphael

June Diane Raphael (1980–) was born in Rockville Center, New York. She is a screen-
writer, actress and comedienne. Screenwriting credits include Ass Backwards (2013,
co-written with Casey Wilson), and Bride Wars (2009, co-written with Casey Wilson).
Dee Rees
Dee Rees was born in Nashville, Tennessee in the late 1970s. She worked in market-
ing after earning her MBA from Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. Working in
the advertising field in New York City, she became interested in film and enrolled in
New York University’s graduate programme, and was soon being mentored by film-
maker Spike Lee. Her film Pariah (2011) focuses on an African-American teen (age
17) who faces challenges as she accepts herself as a lesbian; this was a story close to
Rees’s personal experiences. She pitched the project in hopes of finding financing,
but did not meet with much success, and ended up selling her apartment to help
bring the project to fruition. It premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
Kelly Reichardt
Kelly Reichardt is a screenwriter-director. She focuses her work in American indie
cinema. Screenwriting credits include River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006, based
on a short story by Jonathan Raymond), and Night Moves (2013, co-written with
Jonathan Raymond). Her work often focuses on characters who find themselves
frustrated because of lack of financial or emotional resources: ‘I guess it’s just
a good set-up for different kinds of searching: question-asking, looking for the
next place to go, what are you looking for, what are you leaving. All those things
are good for grounding it in getting from point A to point B’ (Adams 2011).
Reichardt’s work has been nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film
Festival (1994) and an Independent Spirit Award (1995).
Elizabeth Reinhardt
Elizabeth (Betty) Reinhardt (1909–54) was born in Ohio. She began her screenwrit-
ing career in the 1930s, co-writing three Spanish-language films, La buenaventura
(1934, for First National Pictures), El Cantante de Napoles (1935, for Warner Bros),
and Angelina o el honor de un brigadier (1935, for Fox Film Corporation). Partnering
with Hilda Stone, she sold the story Pardon Our Nerve to 20th Century Fox; the tale
involves two women who find themselves jobless and take on jobs as ‘high-society’
escorts for a promising young boxer. They become involved with the boxer’s entou-
rage and, in comedic fashion, coach a local waiter in the art of boxing – and inad-
vertently lead him into a successful career. Reinhardt, after selling a few more stories
with Hilda Stone and receiving only story credit, moved into full-time screenwriting.
Along with screenwriter Mary C. McCall, Reinhardt penned three of the ten films in
the successful ‘Maisie’ series starring Ann Sothern (1939–47). She also co-wrote Laura
(1944) and Cluny Brown (1946). Reinhardt worked for many studios, and in accord-
ance with studio practices at the time, she was assigned to various films to rewrite,
polish, or rework. She does not receive solo credit on any features. Reinhardt moved
into writing for television in the 1950s and died at the age of 44 in 1954.
Silvia Richards
Silvia Richards’ credits include Possessed (1947, co-written with Ranald McDonald),
Secret Beyond the Door (1947), Tomahawk (1951, co-written with Maurice Geraghty),
the film noir Ruby Gentry (1952, co-written with Arthur Fitz-Richard), and Rancho
Notorious (1952, credited for story). She was called to testify before the House
Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s, where she was a friendly
witness, hoping to protect her two sons. Her husband, Richard L. Richards, also
a screenwriter, did not comply with the Committee and was blacklisted. They
divorced; Richards eventually married another screenwriter (who had been black-
listed), A. I. Bezzerides. Sylvia Richards moved into writing for television in the
late 1950s and worked until 1961 in that medium.
Marguerite Roberts
Marguerite Roberts (1905–89) was born in Greeley, Colorado. She moved to
California with her first husband, and when their sales of imitation pearls did not
take off, she worked as a model, then as a reporter, and then, in 1926, as a secretary
for one of the executives at 20th Century Fox Studios. She sold her first script in
1931, and soon was under contract at MGM as a screenwriter. She co-wrote, with
Charlotte Miller, Sailor’s Luck (1933), and co-wrote, with Sonya Levien, Zeigfield Girl
(1941). She became one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood, preferring
to write for ‘tough men’: ’I was weaned on stories about gunfighters and their
doings, and I know all the lingo too. My grandfather came West as far as Colorado
by covered wagon. He was a sheriff in the state’s wildest days’ (Simkin 1997).
Before being blacklisted in 1951 for refusing to ‘name names’, Roberts’ – who was
a member of the American Communist Party along with her second husband,
writer John Sanford – screenwriting credits included Escape (1940, co-adapted from
a novel with Arch Obler), Dragon Seed (1944, co-written with Jane Murfin), Desire
Me (1947, co-written with Zoe Akins), Ambush (1949), Ivanhoe (1951, co-written
with Noel Langley), and Soldiers Three (1951, co-written with Malcolm Boylan and
Tom Reed). In 1963, when the Blacklist was lifted, Roberts went back to work; her
credits include co-writing the adaptation of Rampage (1963), and adapting Five
Card Stud (1968), True Grit (1969), Shoot Out (1971), and Red Sky in the Morning
(1971) from their novel form. Roberts died in Santa Barbara, California in 1989.
(See also ‘Women At work: Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735.)
Ruth Rose
Ruth Rose (1891–1978) was born in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her father was the
playwright Edward E. Rose; at an early age she appeared as an actress on Broadway
in New York City. In 1926 she was working as the official historian on the
New York Zoological Society expedition to the Galapagos Islands and met cin-
ematographer (later director) Ernest Schoedsack; they were married. Schoedsack
worked with film producer Merian C. Cooper. Rose wrote, for Cooper, Chang
(1927), and the final production draft (credited with significant changes) of King
Kong (1933, she shares credit with James Ashmore Creelman), as well as The Last
Days of Pompeii (1935), Mighty Joe Young (1949), and She (1935, co-written with
Dudley Nichols). Other credits include Son of Kong (1933) and Blind Adventure
(1933, co-written with Robert Benchley).
Jean Rouverol
Jean Rouverol’s (1916–) credits include So Young, So Bad (1950). In 1951 she
was blacklisted for her involvement in the American Communist Party, which
she joined in 1943. ‘I knew when the doorbell rang who it was,’ she said in an
interview for the Hollywood Reporter in November 2012. ‘I went to the peephole,
looked through, and it’s two men with hats … I was so terrified, tears were on
the verge’ (Baum and Miller 2012: 53). Rouverol and her husband, screenwriter
Hugo Butler, moved from one friend’s home to another to avoid subpoenas, and
eventually moved, with their four children, to Mexico. They continued to write
for Hollywood under pseudonyms. Screenwriting credits include The First Time
(1952, uncredited on screen), co-writer on Autumn Leaves (1956, using Jack Jevne
as a pseudonym), The Miracle (1959, originally uncredited), Face in the Rain (1963,
co-written with Hugo Butler), and the feature film adaptation of The Legend of
Lylah Clare (1968, co-written with Hugo Butler). When she returned to the United
States after 13 years’ exile, she served on the Writers Guild board. She moved into
television writing and served as head writer on the daytime drama Guiding Light.
She wrote about her years in Mexico in her book Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal
of the Blacklist Years (2001).
Frederica Sagor Maas

Frederica Sager Maas (1900–2012) was born in New York City, daughter of Russian
immigrants who changed their name from Zagosky to Sagor. Sagor studied at
Columbia University but dropped out in 1918, before graduation, to take a job
as an assistant story editor at the Universal Pictures offices in New York City.
She was head of the story department by 1923, and then decided to move west
to Hollywood and pursue screenwriting. She soon signed on with MGM and
joined the ranks of their contract writers. In Paul Zollo’s 2002 book, Hollywood
Remembered: An Oral History of Its Golden Age, Sagor noted:
I wrote a movie called The Waning Sex. It was a title I was given and we wrote
around it. I got into a lot of fights with the co-writer of the film, F. Hugh
Herbert. It was rough. I would work so hard on some of the scripts and the
moment I would turn it in, someone else would take credit for it. You’d be
ticketed as a troublemaker. Unless you want to quit the business, you just kept
your mouth shut. (Zollo 2002)
When MGM did not renew her contract, Sagor wrote films for Tiffany Pictures
(including The Model from Paris [1926] and The First Night [1927, co-written with
Esther Shulkin]). She and screenwriter Ernest Maas also worked on stories to sell
to the other studios. Those that did not sell they termed ‘swell fish’. While at
Universal in New York City, Sagor had worked with successful producer and studio
executive B. P. Schulberg; in 1927 he hired her to work (uncredited) on the scripts
Rolled Stockings (1927), Hula (1927), and It (1927, the film, directed by Dorothy
Arzner, that made Clara Bow a star). Maas and Sagor married and continued to work
freelance, Maas spending much of his time in New York working in the Paramount
short subjects division. By 1934, Sagor Maas was thoroughly disenchanted and the
couple moved back to New York City. Their only script to make it to production in
the post-sound era was The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947). They sold the film script
in 1941, and after six years of development at 20th Century Fox, they felt the pro-
duced film bore little resemblance to their original work. Sagor and Maas received
only story credit on the film; screenplay credit was assigned to George Seaton.
Sagor Maas, her disillusionment now even greater, became an insurance broker. In
1999, she wrote The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Hollywood, a memoir of her
life and times in Hollywood. The book received good reviews; it is an inside look
at Hollywood in the late 1920s through to the 1940s, and cites the creative slights
and non-creative business practices that necessitate the collaboration (for good or
ill) that are part of the life of a screenwriter. Sagor Maas died at the age of 111 years
and 183 days in La Mesa, California. (Jule Selbo)
Jennifer Salt
Jennifer Salt (1944–) was born in Los Angeles, California. Her father, Waldo Salt,
was a screenwriter who was blacklisted in the 1950s. She worked as an actress and
moved into screenwriting; credits include the adaptation of Eat Pray Love (2010,
co-written with Ryan Murphy), as well as television series credits.
Susan Sandler
Susan Sandler adapted her novel into the film Crossing Delancey (1988). She is
a visiting arts professor at New York University, and is active in the Fusion Film
Festival, an event that celebrates the work of women filmmakers.
Nancy Savoca
Nancy Savoca (1959–) was born in the Bronx to an Argentine mother and Italian-
American father. Raised in the Bronx, her interest in film blossomed in high
school through a ‘history of the movies’ class (Gaspard 2009). After graduating
from high school, she married fellow Bronx native and writer Rich Guay and
enrolled at New York University’s film school. At NYU, her short films Renata and
Bad Timing won the school’s Haig P. Manoogian award for excellence.
After graduation, Savoca and Guay penned the full-length film True Love (1989),
a slice-of-life romantic comedy-drama set in the Bronx (Gaspard 2009). Savoca
saw it as a counter to the hyper-romanticized Italian-American stereotypes of
contemporaneous films such as Moonstruck (Cavallero 2011). With the finan-
cial backing of mentor and fellow writer-producer John Sayles, Savoca directed
and produced her own script. The film went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at
Sundance, launching Savoca’s career as a writer-director.
Her next script, also co-written with her husband, was the adaptation of
Francine Prose’s novel Household Saints (1993). Savoca channelled her devoutly
Catholic heritage and New York Italian upbringing to direct this mystical story,
rich with magical realism, for the screen. The script was nominated for an
Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.
For her next project, Savoca collaborated with several other screenwriters on
the HBO film If These Walls Could Talk (1996), an episodic narrative following
three women of different eras wrestling with an abortion decision. Though Savoca
played perhaps the most prominent creative role in the film as the co-writer of
each episode and director of two, she ceded much of the public attention sur-
rounding the film to stars Demi Moore (also the producer) and Cher (also the
director of the third episode). If These Walls Could Talk stands out as her most
politicized script, though Savoca intended it as a human story first, telling
an interviewer: ‘Some people enjoy movies that are overtly political, but my
approach is different: get them at a human level, invite your audience to experi-
ence something with another human being, and then let them walk out and
figure out the politics’ (Serra 2006).
Savoca’s other screenwriting credits (co-written with her husband) include The
24 Hour Woman (1999) and Dirt (2003). Both stories keep Savoca in familiar terri-
tory: Latin women and family drama, all set in New York City. Though they share
a setting, the stories offer a stark contrast in perspective. The 24 Hour Woman
follows Grace Santos, a successful TV producer struggling to wrest a traditional
family life from her glamorous, but all-consuming career. Dirt follows Dolores, a
maid living and working in New York City illegally, saving money for her family
in El Salvador under the constant threat of deportation.
After Dirt, scarce financing and a shrinking independent film market posed
major obstacles for Savoca as she attempted to make new films. Inspired by the
challenge of writing a micro-budget film, she partnered with writer Mary Tobler
to pen Union Square (2011), an intimate drama about two mismatched sisters set
almost entirely in a single New York apartment (Silverstein 2012b). Savoca’s latest
writing project is an adaptation of Ki Longfellow’s novel The Secret Magdalene, a
biblical period piece with a revisionist take on the life of Christ. (Sam Lively)
Lorene Scafaria
Lorene Scafaria (1978–) was born in Holmdel Township, New Jersey. She attended
Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and Montclair College in New Jersey. She is a
screenwriter, actress, and director. Credits include Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
(2008) and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012).
Beth Schacter
Beth Schacter (1972–), screenwriter and director, was born to research scientists
Dr Lee Schacter and Dr Bernice Zeldin Schacter. She completed her BA in theatre at
Kenyon College in Ohio, going on to graduate studies in film at Columbia University.
She moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue a career as a screenwriter and inde-
pendent filmmaker. Her screenwriting credits include the Chinese-language Beauty
Remains (2005, co-written with Michael Eldridge) and Normal Adolescent Behavior
(2007, also directed), a drama exploring the fluid sexual relationships of American
teens. Most recently, she wrote two episodes as a staff writer on ABC Family comedy
series Bunheads (2012–13), winner of the Television Critics Association’s Award for
Outstanding Achievement in Youth Programming. (Sam Lively)
Robin Schiff
Robin Schiff was born in Los Angeles, California. She is a writer-producer and
director in both film and television. Following the production of her first play,
Ladies’ Room (first performed in Los Angeles in 1988), she went on to write the
comedy Loverboy (1989), cult classic Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997,
based on her first play), and its sequel, feature-length teleplay Romy and Michele:
In the Beginning (2005). Schiff has also worked extensively in television. (Jean
Ansolabehere)
Doris Schroeder
Doris Schroeder (1893–1981) was born in Far Rockway, Queens, in New York.
She worked as a screenwriter for nearly 40 years, starting with scripts she wrote
for filmmaker Lois Weber. She sometimes used the pen name Doris S. Green.
Her more than 70 screenwriting credits and co-screenwriting credits include The
Serpent’s Tooth (1917), Her Night of Nights (1922), Hop-a-long Cassidy (1935), Heart
of the West (1936), Gangs of Sonora (1941), Jesse James Jr (1942), Bandits of the
Badlands (1945), and Cisco Kid: The Gay Amigo (1949).
Kathryn Scola
Kathryn ‘Kitty’ Scola (1891–1982) was born in Paterson, New Jersey. Her
Hollywood career began in 1930 with the production of her script One Night
at Susie’s (1930, co-written with Forrest Halsey). She was an extraordinarily
prolific screenwriter, garnering more than 40 feature credits as a contract writer
for Warner Bros, Paramount, and Fox over the course of a career that spanned
25 years. She was a particular favourite of studio executive Darryl Zanuck, who
collaborated with her extensively during her time at Warner Bros. As Niven
Busch related in a LIFE magazine profile of Zanuck, Scola was one of the only
writers he seemed able to tolerate (Busch 1941). When he left Warner Bros to
create 20th Century Fox, Scola soon followed and remained at Fox for most of
her career.
Among her most notable credits are Baby Face (1933, co-written with Gene
Markey), a controversial story of an ambitious woman sleeping her way to the top
of the corporate ladder, and an adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel The Glass
Key (1935, co-written with Kubec Glasmon). Violent and sexual content featured
prominently in many of her scripts, especially her collaborations with Gene
Markey, which often led to struggles with the censorship office. Her final credit is
a teleplay for the anthology show The 20th Century Fox Hour (1955–7). Scola died
in San Diego in 1982 at the age of 90. (Sam Lively)
Jule Selbo
Jule Selbo (1952–) was born in Fargo, North Dakota. She is a screenwriter, play-
wright, and producer. She attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas,
Texas, and earned graduate degrees at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
and University of Exeter, England. Produced credits include Hard Promises (1991,
about a woman who takes control of her family and love life), and Hunchback
of Notre Dame II (2002), Cinderella II (2002), and Little Mermaid, Ariel’s Beginning
(2008, story). She has also written extensively for the television medium, including
HBO’s Prison Stories: Women on the Inside.
Alexandra Seros
Alexandra Seros (1947–) was born in Los Angeles. She studied film at UCLA and
the American Film Institute. Her screenwriting credits include the action films
Point of No Return (1993, a remake of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, co-written
with Robert Getchell), and The Specialist (1994, adapted from John Shirley’s novels).
(Sam Lively)
Amanda Silver
Amanda ‘Mandy’ Silver was born in New York City and attended film school
at the University of Southern California. She is the granddaughter of Academy
Award-winning screenwriter Sidney Buchman (he was blacklisted in 1951). Her
solo credits include The Hand that Rocked the Cradle (1992), and co-writing screen-
writing credits (with her husband, Rick Jaffa) include Rise of the Planet of the Apes
(2011, nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Writing), Dawn of the Planet of the
Apes (2014), The Relic (1997), and Eye for an Eye (1996). Silver and Jaffa sharing co-
writing credit on Jurassic World (2015) with Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly.
Tess Slesinger
Tess Slesinger (1905–45) was born in New York to a middle-class Jewish family of
Russian and Hungarian heritage. According to her biographer, Janet Sharistanian,
the Slesinger household was characterized by ‘indifference to Judaism, a marked
openness about sexuality, a strong concern for literacy, self-expression, and voca-
tion, and an interest in the systematic analysis of personality’ (Sharistanian 1984).
This environment produced several bizarre anecdotes: one neighbour had the
shocked recollection of Slesinger’s brothers ‘singing and dancing around the table
in celebration of her first menstrual period’ (Koppelman 1985).
Growing up in such a home helped shape Slesinger from an early age into
a writer, and a radical one at that. She attended Swarthmore College and then
studied fiction writing at the Columbia University School of Journalism, from
which she graduated in 1927. Shortly after college, she married Herbert Solow, an
editor for the Menorah Journal. The marriage ushered her into an influential circle
of young Jewish Marxist writers and intellectuals (Sharistanian 1984). This radical
milieu would serve as the setting for her first novel, The Unpossessed, one of the
first books to address the issue of abortion directly. Though The Unpossessed would
be her only completed novel, she was a prolific short story writer.
After her marriage with Solow collapsed, she looked to try her hand at screen-
writing. Irving Thalberg brought her to Southern California on a salary of $1,000
a week (Rabinowitz 2009). Her first credited work was The Good Earth (1937), an
adaptation of Pearl Buck’s celebrated novel. Slesinger was one of many writers to
contribute to the final script and had to fight MGM to ensure she received proper
credit (Slesinger was a frequent player in such disputes; she contributed substantially
to the formation of the Screenwriters Guild) (Sharistanian 1979).
While working on The Good Earth she met and later married leftist screenwriter
and movie producer Frank Davis, and fell in with another Marxist circle, which
included fellow New York transplant and screenwriter Dorothy Parker (Reid 2010).
She continued to write (often in partnership with her husband), with credits includ-
ing two scripts directed by pioneering director Dorothy Arzner: The Bride Wore Red
(1937), and the critically acclaimed feminist comedy Dance, Girl, Dance (1940).
Common threads across the body of her work are strong female characterizations
and sharp depictions of class inequalities, though the stridency of her pre-Hollywood
literary output and political activism is not evident in her work for the screen.
Her final screenplay was an adaptation, along with Davis, of Betty Smith’s novel
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1946), the story of a working-class girl growing up in a
Brooklyn tenement at the turn of the century. The script garnered Slesinger and
Davis an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Slesinger did not live to
learn of the honour, for she died, at age 39, of cancer. (Sam Lively)
Holly Goldberg Sloan

Holly Goldberg Sloan (1958–) was born Holly Goldberg in Ann Arbor, Michigan;
however, throughout her childhood she moved with her family across the
United States and Europe, spending time in California, the Netherlands, Istanbul,
Washington, DC, and Oregon. Following her graduation from Wellesley College in
Massachusetts, she spent a year in New York City before relocating permanently to
Los Angeles. In 1982, while supporting herself with a variety of production jobs in
film and television, she sold her first screenplay. That same year, she married her first
husband, Chuck Sloan. With the beginning of the 1990s, Goldberg Sloan’s screen-
writing credits for Disney and other studios included Indecency (1952, story credit),
Made in America (1993), Angels in the Outfield (1994), Big Green (1995), and The Secret
Life of Girls (1999). In the following decade Goldberg Sloan focused much of her writ-
ing on young audiences. Her most recent screenplays include Whispers: An Elephant’s
Tale (2000), Angels in the Infield (2000), The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course (2002),
Tangled Up in Blue (2004), Heidi 4 Paws (2009), One Christmas Eve (2014), and Tell the
Word (2014). She has also worked as director and producer on several of these films.
In 2011, she published her first novel, I’ll Be There. (Jean Ansolabehere)
Penelope Spheeris
Penelope Spheeris (1945–), screenwriter and director, was born to Greek immi-
grant parents who operated a travelling carnival. Her childhood was punctuated
with trauma and Spheeris found refuge in art and then film, which she studied
at UCLA. She got her first experience in the film industry as a music video direc-
tor and film editor, gaining acclaim for her punk rock documentary The Decline
of Western Civilization. With financing from Roger Corman, she was able to direct
her own script, Suburbia (1983), a dark tale of youthful rage surfacing in anarchic
violence in a repressive American suburb. Additional screenwriting credits include
teen thriller Summer Camp Nightmare (1987), the remake of The Little Rascals
(1994, co-written with Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur). (Sam Lively)
Robin Swicord
Robin Swicord (1952–) is a screenwriter, producer, and director. She was born in
1952 in Columbia, South Carolina. Following her graduation from Florida State
University, she moved to New York, where she worked briefly as an advertising
copywriter while she polished her craft as a writer. She says of her experience in
1978 New York: ‘No doors were open to me. I was told by several people that
there weren’t any women filmmakers, and if I wanted to get myself onto a movie
set, I should become a script girl – these professionals are called script supervisors
now – because that was the only job I’d ever be likely to find’. Swicord persevered
and sold her first screenplay to MGM. Although the screenplay ultimately was
never produced, the MGM deal brought her to Los Angeles, where she has written
a total of 12 feature films. Her adapted screenplays include Little Women (1994,
adapted from the Louisa May Alcott novel), The Perez Family (1995, adapted from
the Christine Bell novel), Matilda (1996, adapted with Nicholas Kazan from the
Roald Dahl novel), Practical Magic (1998, adapted with Akiva Goldsman and Adam
Brooks from the Alice Hoffman novel), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005, adapted from
the Arthur Golden novel), The Jane Austen Book Club (2007, adapted from the
Karen Joy Fowler novel), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, sharing
screen story credit with Eric Roth, adapted from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story).
She received a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination for Benjamin Button and
a Satellite Award in 2005 for Memoirs of a Geisha. (Jean Ansolabehere)
Bess Taffel
Bess Taffel (Boyle) (1903–2000) worked in the Yiddish theatre before moving to
Hollywood where she pursued screenwriting. Her first on-screen credit is the film
story for True to Life (1943). Other credits include Badman’s Territory (1946, co-
writer), A Likely Story (1947), Due South (1947), and Elopement (1951). She joined
the Communist Party in 1940, and was named as a member before the Hollywood
Committee on Un-American Activities and blacklisted in the early 1950s. Taffel
did not work again until 1969 when she wrote several episodes for television
series. She was married to art director Robert F. Boyle. She died from complications
from a stroke at age 86.
Joan Tewkesbury
Joan Tewkesbury (1936–) was born in Redlands, California, and worked as an
actress, producer, director, and screenwriter. She attended the University of
Southern California and earned a degree in their theatre programme. She began
working for filmmaker Robert Altman and went on to write two films for him:
Nashville (1975) and Thieves Like Us (1974, co-written with Calder Willingham
and Altman, based on a novel by Edward Anderson). Other screenwriting credits
include A Night in Heaven (1983) and several films made for television.
Anna Thomas
Anna Thomas (1948–) was born in Germany, but came to the United States as
an infant. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles. There she met
and married filmmaker Gregory Nava. Screenwriting credits include Frida (2002,
sharing credit with Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Clancy Sigal), My Family (1995,
co-written with Nava), A Time of Destiny (1988, co-written with Nava), The End
of August (1982, co-written with Nava, Eula Seton, Leon Elswit, based on a Kate
Chopin novel), The Haunting of M (1979), and The Confessions of Amans (1978,
co-written with Nava). She and Nava shared the nomination for an Academy
Award for Best Screenplay and a nomination for the Writers Guild Award for Best
Screenplay for El Norte (1983, based on a story by Nava). Both My Family and
El Norte focus on the plight of the hopeful immigrants fleeing countries of perse-
cution and danger to find refuge in the United States. She is also credited as a film
producer and has written books on vegetarian cooking. Thomas and Nava were
co-founders of the Independent Feature Project, formed to encourage filmmakers
to make films that studios would, in all probability, not finance. The Confessions
of Amans was produced for $24,000 and won many prizes, such as Best Feature
at the Chicago Film Festival. Roger Ebert, in 2004, wrote of El Norte, ‘Seen after
20 years, “El Norte” retains its direct power to move and anger. The story needs
no updating; it repeats every day’ (Ebert 2004).
Diane Thomas
Diane Thomas (1946–85) was born in Michigan. She worked as an actress and
as a screenwriter. She found the opportunity to pitch the idea for Romancing the
Stone (1984) to actor/producer Michael Douglas, who produced and starred in the
film. The film was a success and Thomas was at work on two screenwriting pro-
jects for director/producer Steven Spielberg when she was killed in an automobile
accident.
Caroline Thompson
Caroline Thompson (1956–) was born in Washington, DC. She attended Radcliffe
College and Harvard University and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English from
Amherst College in Massachusetts. Her novel First Born (1983) was optioned by
filmmaker Penelope Spheeris and Thompson was given the opportunity to write
the first draft of the adaptation. Screenwriting credits include two films on which
she receives sole screenplay credit while sharing story credit with Tim Burton:
Edward Scissorhands (1990) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Other
screenwriting credits include The Corpse Bride (2005, co-written with Burton,
Carlos Grangel, John August, Pamela Pettler), The Addams Family (1991, co-writ-
ten with Larry Wilson, based on characters by Charles Addams), Homeward Bound,
The Incredible Journey (1993, co-written with Linda Woolverton), the adaptations of
The Secret Garden (1993) and Black Beauty (1994), Buddy (1997), and City of Ember
(2008). She received the Hugo Award for Edward Scissorhands and was nominated
for the award for The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Addams Family. In 2011
she was awarded the Austin Film Festival’s Distinguished Screenwriter Award.
Rose Troche
Rose Troche (1964–) was born in Chicago, Illinois. She attended the University
of Illinois at Chicago. She works as a screenwriter, producer, and director, and
works in feature films and television. Her feature screenwriting credits include
Go Fish (1994, co-written with Guinevere Turner). This is a lesbian love story and
was made independently on a micro-budget; it premiered at the Sundance Film

Festival. She also directed and wrote the adaptation of The Safety of Objects (2001).
Catherine Turney
Catherine Turney (1906–98) (see ‘Women at work: Hollywood screenwriters of the
1940s’, p. 735).
Harriete Underhill
Harriete Underhill (?–1928) was an American film critic who also worked as a
screenwriter. A native of Troy, New York, she grew up in Passaic, New Jersey. She
married at age 16 and went on the stage, appearing on Broadway. According to
Jim Beaver, frequent contributor to IMDb, the website illuminating many careers
in the film industry, Underhill’s acting career stalled and two marriages were
unsuccessful. She entered the newspaper business with the help of her father,
Lorenzo Underhill, who owned the New York Sportsman periodical. She was hired
by the New York Tribune in 1908 and wrote dramatic criticism. An automobile
accident in 1919 undermined her health and while recuperating she began writ-
ing film scenarios, including Born Rich (1924). She died in her apartment at the
Whitby Hotel in New York City on 18 May 1928 (Beaver, acc 2015).
Helen Van Upp

Helen Van Upp was born in Michigan. She began her film career as an editor
and title writer for actor/producer Thomas H. Ince (known as ‘the father of the
western’). She penned the scenario for Wolverine (1921); the story focuses on an
ex-con, Ward Warren (Jack Connolly), who was unjustly imprisoned for another’s
crime. He gets a job on a ranch recently inherited by Billy Louise (Helen Gardner)
and when stock is stolen, he is again accused – this time by the rustlers themselves
(Langman 1992: 520). Billy believes in Ward and helps him prove his innocence.
Other credits include Bluebeard Jr (1922). She married Harry Van Upp, and their
daughter, Virginia Van Upp, became one of the top screenwriters of the 1930s
and 1940s.
Virginia Van Upp

Virginia Van Upp (1902–70) was born in Chicago. Her parents were connected to
the film industry; her mother, Helen, was an editor and titles writer for Thomas
Ince’s production company. Virginia worked as a young actress in silent films,
then went on to be a casting director, film cutter, and script supervisor. Virginia’s
first screenplay was The Pursuit of Happiness (1934) for Paramount. Other credits
for Paramount and Columbia Pictures include You and Me (1938), Honeymoon in
Bali (1939), Virgina (1941), One Night in Lisbon (1941), Cover Girl (1944), Together
Again (1944), The Impatient Years (1944), and She Wouldn’t Say Yes (1945).
Film historian Ally Acker (1993) notes that head of Columbia Pictures, Harry
Cohn, appreciated Van Upp’s work, and made her an executive producer; she was
considered second in command at the studio. In 1945, a writer for the Los Angeles
Times wrote about Van Upp’s success at Columbia Pictures, making a point of
describing her as bespectacled and small in stature. Working with Cohn, in 1945,
she was directly responsible for the production of approximately 40 features.
In 1951, Van Upp co-wrote Here Comes the Groom. She was responsible for wran-
gling filmmaker Orson Welles on Lady from Shanghai (1948); she rewrote scenes
and worked to trim down the expenses of Welles’s methods of working. (See also
‘Women at work: Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940s’, p. 735).
Pat Verducci
Pat Verducci (1960–) earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees at the University of
California, Berkeley: one in theatre arts and mass communication, and her Master
of Fine Arts degree in film production at the University of California, Los Angeles.
She wrote and directed the feature film True Crime (1995), a coming-of-age thriller
for Trimark Pictures. She has written screenplays for Touchstone Pictures, Witt-
Thomas Productions, Disney’s animation division, and has served as a story
consultant for Disney/Pixar. Her writing credits also include documentary work.
She is co-producer of Somewhere Between (2011), a feature documentary about four
teenaged girls adopted from China.
Jane Wagner
Jane Wagner (1935–) was born in Morristown, Tennessee. At the age of 17 she
moved to New York City to pursue acting and also studied painting and sculpture
at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. She began writing for television and
there she met actress/comedienne/writer Lily Tomlin. They began to collaborate;
Wagner wrote vehicles for Tomlin to star in, including the films The Incredible
Shrinking Woman (1981), Moment to Moment (1978, which she also directed), and
many television specials. She has won Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, a
New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Drama Desk Award for
the Tomlin one-woman show The Search for Intelligent Signs in the Universe (1986,
adapted for television in 1991), and a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film
Festival for her documentary Girls Like Us.
Luci Ward
Luci Ward (1907–69) was born in Monroe, Louisiana. She is credited on nearly
50 screenplays, mostly in the western and crime genres. She began as a contract
writer at Warner Bros in 1936. Credits include many films considered to be ‘B’
films, that is those with lesser budgets and non-‘A’ list stars, such as The Law in
Her Hands (1936, co-written with George Bricker), Land Beyond the Law (1937, co-
written with Joseph K. Watson), The Arizona Kid (1939, co-written with George
Geraghty), and The Lone Star Vigilantes (1942, adapted from a Milton Carver
story). She began writing with her husband, Jack Natteford, around 1946, and
shares credit with him on Black Bart (1948), Rustlers (1949), and Return of the Bad
Men (1949). Ward moved into writing for television, mostly on western series. In
1957, she co-wrote with Natteford the sci-fi film The Night the World Exploded. Her
last credit is the feature Ride to Hangman’s Tree (1967, co-written with Natteford
and William Bowers).
Lois Weber
Lois Weber (1882–1939) grew up in a community-service-minded household, and at
a young age volunteered to help the underprivileged in the Pittsburgh slums and
sang with a Salvation Army-like organization. She was a child-prodigy pianist and
planned on concert performance as a career; however, after a piano key broke
during a performance, she reconsidered: ‘The incident broke my nerve. I could
not finish and I never appeared on the concert stage again. It is my belief that
when that key came off in my hand, a certain phase of my development came
to an end’ (Hartford Courant, 1926). Needing to make her own living (this term is
used in many articles regarding the early females in the film industry, and at times
seems like a euphemism for ‘unmarried’), her uncle observed that ‘the theatrical
profession needed a missionary’ (Mahar 2008: 147). Weber agreed and, with evan-
gelical hopes, she became a stage actress. She performed in many plays, including
a road tour of Why Girls Leave Home in 1904, and reviews remarked on Weber’s
singing ability. Weber married in 1908 and left the stage to become a homemaker.
Soon bored, she began to write freelance film scenarios feeling that ‘a woman,
more or less intuitively, brings out many of the emotions that are rarely expressed
on the screen’ (Mahar 2008: 190).
In 1908, filmmaker Alice Guy hired Weber at Gaumont’s Long Island studios
to record songs on a chronophone. Weber realized the cinema could be a tool
to help man see a way to bettering himself: ‘I (found) at once the outlet for …
my ideals’. Soon Weber was working at Gaumont as a writer and director. Weber
was not a fundamentalist or a prude; her ‘evangelism’ was to support her lib-
eral stand on birth control, eugenics, social responsibility, and abortion. Weber
moved to Edwin S. Porter’s filmmaking group where she wrote scripts and acted
in films.
In 1910, Weber and her husband, Phillips Smalley, an actor, decided to make the
film industry their career. They worked freelance for a number of production com-
panies, Weber usually receiving sole writing credit or, on the scripts they worked
on together, using the writing credit ‘The Smalleys’. In 1912 they made the move
to Los Angeles. Weber wrote and/or directed 200–400 titles in the mid 1910s (50
have been identified thus far), and by 1915 she was a ‘celebrity filmmaker’ – as
well known as D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.
Cleo Madison, a female director of the time, noted: ‘Lois Weber’s productions
are phenomenally successful partly because her woman creations are true to
the spirit of womanhood’ (Mahar 2008: 190). Weber’s narratives reflected her
interest in social justice and women’s issues. In 1914 Weber wrote a film called
Hypocrites,19 focusing on societal corruption; this film included a nude actress por-
traying ‘the naked truth’. Other films include People vs John Doe (1916), a narrative
that pleaded for the abolition of capital punishment, Shoes (1916), a narrative that
investigated child labour and poverty, Hop the Devil’s Brew (1916), a narrative that
was anti-saloon, and Where Are My Children? (1916), a narrative that advocated birth
control while being anti-abortion. This last film created a lot of controversy and was
very successful; it cost approximately $12,000 to make and earned over $3 million
at the box office. Weber called her socially conscious films ‘heavy dinner’ movies,
and noted that she also wrote, directed, and produced ‘light afternoon teas’; these
were morality-tale melodramas.
Universal Studios gave Weber her own ‘studio space’ on Sunset Boulevard in
Hollywood, and in 1920 Famous Players-Lasky offered her $50,000 a picture plus
half the profits. In 1920–1 she wrote, directed, and produced five features; for
the most part women played the central roles and were the movers of the plot.
In the next years, things began to unravel; her morality-tale narratives did not
mesh with new American freedoms and lifestyles. Smalley and she divorced; her
company dissolved. By 1927, Weber was no longer at the top of the business and
she warned females ‘they would never get away with it’ – meaning that it was now
more difficult for women to gain a foothold in the industry (Mahar 2008: 204).
Lois Weber died in 1939, nearly penniless. Screenwriter Frances Marion paid for
her funeral. (Jule Selbo)
Lizzie Weiss
Lizzie Weiss (1971–) was born in Los Angeles, California. and attended New York
University’s Cinema Studies Master’s programme, but decided that she would
rather write films than ‘about’ films (Screenplay.com 2004). Her original specula-
tive screenplays earned her an assignment to write Blue Crush (2002), a story
focusing on female surfers in California. Weiss is also a television writer and
producer.
Audrey Wells
Audrey Wells (1960–) was born in San Francisco, California. She graduated from
the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to get a Master of Fine Arts
degree in film production at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1989
(Walters 2012). As a young woman trying to break into the highly competitive
film industry, Wells paid her bills in a variety of ways – from talking her way into
a job as a jazz disc jockey, to teaching broadcasting at dilapidated radio stations
in remote Alaskan villages. This latter gig served as the inspiration for her script
Radio Free Alaska. The script was bought by Paramount, but the resulting film was
then rewritten significantly, watering down Wells’s original vision (Walter 2012).
Wells’s break-out box-office credit was The Truth about Cats and Dogs (1996), a
modest sleeper hit that she wrote and produced. Her talents as a screenwriter
were professionally acknowledged when she won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting
Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999 for Guinevere (1999), which was
also her directorial debut. This film also garnered the Special Jury Prize at the
Deauville Film Festival. Other credits include Under the Tuscan Sun (2003; she
also directed and produced this adaptation of the Frances Mayes novel), Shall
We Dance? (2004, based on Masayuki Suo’s 1996 screenplay), and George of the
Jungle (1997, co-written with Dana Olsen). Wells is an active screenwriter and
director with numerous projects in the Hollywood and independent film pipeline.
She has been nominated for many awards, in addition to those won, such as the
Independent Spirit Award, Moscow International Film Festival, and BET Comedy
Award. (Bettina Moss)
Mae West
Mae West (1893–1980) was born in Bushwick, an area of Brooklyn, New York.
She began entertaining audiences at age five, entered amateur shows at the age
of seven, and found her way into vaudeville at the age of 14. West’s popular
characterizations, irreverent humour, and the ‘socially incorrect’ narratives cre-
ated interest in the Broadway community. Her 1926 play SEX caused her to be
thrown into a New York jail as the creator of an indecent public performance.
The subsequent trial was covered by the newspapers and made Mae West a star
(Selbo, 2010). The plot centres on a young prostitute and a society matron; both
women pick up sailors for love and excitement. West’s character, the prostitute,
points out the only difference between the two of them ‘is you can afford to give
it away’. Paramount, nearly bankrupt during the Great Depression, wooed West
to Hollywood. West knew her worth and, true to the characters she created on
stage and screen, demanded her paycheck reflect her talent. Her script fee was
$100,000, and when audiences packed the theatres to see her films, she was soon
making $500,000 a year. Mae West, along with William Randolph Hearst, had one
of the highest incomes in America in the early 1930s (West 1959).
‘Goodness has nothing to do with it’ is one of West’s famous lines, and typified
the female characters she created. West believed in ‘a single standard for men and
women’. West created a new woman in the films of the early 1930s; the women
were strong, sexual, and ambitious, female characters who called the shots in busi-
ness – as well as in relationships. Her leading female characters were not passive;
they were, in West’s words, ‘the kind of dame that always asks for more than she
expects to get – and then gets more than she asked for’ (Weintraub 1967: 16).
Middle-aged and lustful, her female characters were embraced by the audience,
but considered ‘filthy’ and ‘dangerous’ by the censors. Father Daniel Lord, one
of the writers of the Production Code, cautioned Paramount, stating they would
face a ‘day of reckoning’ if they continued to produce Mae West films (Leff and
Simmons 1990: 30). English writer Hugh Walpole wrote, ‘Only Charlie Chaplin
and Mae West in Hollywood dare to directly attack with their mockery the fraying
morals and manners of a dreary world’ (West 1959).
Mae West stated her purpose in writing for an audience:
The very best thing that I have done for the public during this Depression has
been the humorous manner – even ribald sometimes – in which I have treated
sex. My fight has been against depression, repression and suppression. You
know A Farewell to Arms, a great picture, was a story of sex, but it was tragic and
depressing. Men saw it and were afraid ever to fall in love again. They didn’t
even want to take a pretty girl around the corner and give her a kiss. I don’t
want to leave that sort of feeling with them. I want to treat sex and love lightly –
enough to make both men and women feel that life is worth living; that is still
holds heaps of fun, no matter what the conditions. (McCreadie 1995: 78–9)
West’s first two films, both released in 1933, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel,
topped the list of box-office hits for the year. She Done Him Wrong was nominated
in the Academy Awards’ Best Picture category. Dialogue such as ‘When a girl goes
bad, men go right after her’ infuriated those in the censorship office, but West
retorted, ‘Theft and unmarried love are put on the same evil level. To me, a state
of love is beyond that moral fence. A man and a woman in love commit no sin if
their codes are decent and they are honest only to two people: each other’ (Leff
and Simmons 1990).
In I’m No Angel West created a lead character – carnival performer Tira (portrayed
by West). Tira aggressively chooses and pursues Jack (Cary Grant), the man she
desires. She also uses intelligence and street-smarts to rise to the top of her pro-
fession as a lion tamer and becomes a financial success. Jack loves Tira, proposes
to her, and she says yes. When he breaks the engagement because he (wrongly)
thinks she’s cheated on him, Tira takes Jack to court for breach of promise. She
defends herself and exposes the double standard; a man can have affairs without
risking social ostracism, while a woman cannot. A man can engage in premarital
sex; a woman who does risks public condemnation. A man can defend his honour,
but a woman who does is considered a bully. Tira defends her honour with guts
and humour (echoing West’s real-life experience in the New York courts), and not
only wins over the judge and jury – she also restores the love of her man.
Unfortunately for West, her rise to Hollywood stardom coincided with the
ascent of a man named Joseph Breen to the top job in the Production Code
Administration (PCA), the new nomenclature for the Studio Relations Committee
(SRC). West reacted to the new aggressive enforcement of the Hays Code with
characteristic determination:
When I knew that the censors were after my films and they had come to okay
everything, I wrote scenes for them to cut. These scenes were so rough that I’d
never have used them. But they worked as a decoy. The PCA cut them and left
the stuff I wanted. I had these scenes in there about a man’s fly and all that,
and the censors would be sittin’ in the projection room laughing themselves
silly. Then they’d say ‘cut it’ and not notice the rest. Then when the film came
out and the bluenoses were outraged, the censors came and said, ‘Mae, you
didn’t show us that.’ But I’d show them the scripts they had okayed them-
selves. (Leff and Simmons 1990: 46)
The PCA increased efforts to curb West; they would not only delete lines such
as ‘Tira is a girl who has satisfied more patrons than Chesterfields’, but insist on
changes in character motivation and the final outcomes of West’s stories. The
production of West’s film Belle of the Nineties (1934) became a nightmare. The
initial Production Code letter ran to four and a half pages of required deletions.
West lamented the final outcome of the film, saying it was disappointing because
it was no longer ‘a good story because they (the PCA) made me make it three times
before I found out what they wanted’ (West 1959). When the film was released,
Variety critics skewered it for its ‘benefit-of-the-clergy finale, an obvious curtsey
to Joe Breen’ (Abel 1934), and West herself suffered the consequences of the bad
reviews and the poor box office.
Paramount soon found that subsequent Mae West films, without her strong
point of view on the female’s place in society, were not box-office draws. West
issued a statement on the Code:
Strict censorship has a reverse effect. It creates resentment on the part of the
public. They feel their freedom of choice is being dictated. They don’t want
their morals legislated by other than criminal law … Every person who is not
a moron or a mental defective of some sort carries a very effective censor and
super critic of his action in his cerebral cortex – and in his heart. If that doesn’t
work, no amount of censorship from the outside will do anybody any good.
(Weintraub 1967; also see overiew USA)
Mae West left Paramount by 1940, leaving with a final jab at the Production Code:
‘I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it’. West went on to do
radio, television, and entertain in Las Vegas, working for 40 more years, but she
was never again in a position to write or produce films. West’s voice was original,
her point of view both challenging and entertaining. One can only imagine, if
she had been given the chance to mature as a screenwriter, the body of work she
might have left for today’s film audiences. (Jule Selbo)
Noni White
Noni White started her career as an actress and moved into screenwriting. She
writes in partnership with her husband, Bob Tzudiker. Credits include Newsies
(1992), Disney’s animated Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996, sharing credit with Tab
Murphy, Irene Mecchi, and Jonathan Roberts), and other animated features such
as Anastasia (1997, sharing credit with Susan Gauthier and Bruce Graham), Tarzan
(1999, sharing credit with Tab Murphy), and 102 Dalmatians (2000, sharing credit
with Kristen Buckley and Brian Regan).
Kristen Wiig
Kristen Wiig (1973–) was born in Canandaigua, New York and attended the
University of Arizona, where she studied art. She moved to Los Angeles to pur-
sue comedy and joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2005 as a performer
and writer. Screenplay credits include Bridesmaids (2012, co-written with Annie
Mumolo) for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and BAFTA for
Best Screenplay.
Linda Woolverton
Linda Woolverton (1952–) was born in Long Beach, California, where she gradu-
ated with a BFA from California State University, Long Beach. In 1980, she began
working as a secretary for CBS, where she climbed the professional ladder to
become an executive. During this time, she freelanced as a children’s teleplay
writer and wrote two young-adult novels, which were published in 1986 and
1987. Woolverton set her sights on screenwriting for Disney. She presented her-
self at the Disney executive offices, where she dropped off a copy of her second
novel. Two days later, head Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg called Woolverton for
the interview that landed her a gig as screenwriter on a never-released Winnie the
Pooh film. She went on to write the animated feature Beauty and the Beast (1991,
she receives sole screenplay credit and shares story credit with Roger Allers and
9 other writers). During Academy Awards season, Beauty and the Beast became
the first animated film ever to be nominated for Best Picture, and Woolverton,
by extension, was the first female to write an animated feature film to be nomi-
nated for Best Picture. Woolverton reflects on her intentions with Beauty and the
Beast’s main character, Belle: ‘Belle is a feminist. I’m not critical of Snow White,
Cinderella … they reflected the values of their time. But it just wasn’t in me to
write a throwback. I wanted a woman of the ‘90s, someone who wanted to do
something other than wait for her prince to come’ (Los Angeles Times 1992).
Woolverton agreed to write the book for its adaptation as a Broadway musical. The
adaptation earned her a Tony award nomination. Other screenplay credits include
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993, adapted with Caroline Thompson
from the Sheila Burnford novel), The Lion King (1994, sharing credit with Irene
Mecchi and Jonathan Roberts), and Mulan (1998, story material pre-production
credit). Woolverton’s work continues: Arctic Tale (2007), a live action reinterpre-
tation of Alice in Wonderland (2010), Maleficent (2014), and Alice in Wonderland:
Through the Looking Glass (2016).
Notes
1. Among them Thomas Doherty, Lea Jacobs, Richard Maltby, Leonard J. Leff, and Jerold
Simmons.
2. Tess Slesinger, one of the credited screenwriters, was nominated for an Oscar for her
screenplay, an adaptation of the beloved children’s book A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945).
3. Lenore J. Coffee was a prolific screenwriter who wrote from 1919 through the 1960s.
4. When Hawks hired her, Brackett turned over her half-written novella, Lorelei of the Red
Mist, to her friend Raymond Bradbury to finish.
5. Michael Kanin, Garson’s brother, was also a writing team with his wife, Fay Kanin.
Michael Kanin co-wrote Woman of the Year (1942), the film that launched the Tracy-
Hepburn collaboration. Together, Kanin and Kanin wrote two 1940s films: Sunday Punch
(1942) and Blondie for Victory (1942).
6. Other Academy Award-nominated women writers are Irma Von Cube for Johnny Belinda
(1948), Muriel Box for The Seventh Veil (1945), Gladys Lehman for Two Girls and a Sailor
(1944), and Claudine West, who won for Mrs Miniver (1942) and was nominated for
Random Harvest (1942) in the same year.
7. Internet Movie Database (IMDb) (accessed 11 March 2013).
8. The state of Missouri, where Gauntier grew up, was officially a ‘Yankee’ state; however,
it was a border state and suffered from brother against brother and neighbour against
neighbour conflicts. Likewise, director D. W. Griffith (Intolerance, 1916), being Kentucky
born, may have had emotional ties to both sides; Kentucky never officially seceded from
the Union, but many in the state had Confederate sympathies.
9. Gauntier, in her autobiography, Blazing the Trail, writes that she recommended
D.W. Griffith for his first directing job in 1908, The Adventures of Dolly, which Gauntier
wrote for Biograph Films, and even recommended Billy Bitzer to be his cinematographer.
10. The Moving Picture World, Vol. 19, Issues 1–7, p. 499, Chalmers Publishing, 1913. Digitized
by Harvard University, 10 February 2009.
11. The Moving Picture World, p. 716, Chalmers Publishing, 1913. Digitized by Harvard
University, 10 February 2009. Available at: http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com/octoroon.
htm (accessed 9 June 2015).
12. See: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bonnie-hunt-living-large (accessed 14 November 2013).
13. Accessed 14 November 2013.
14. Scott Collins. 2008. ‘Hunt Ready to Take on Daytime’, Chicago Tribune, 31 August, p. 10.
15. The biographical information is from Carey, unless otherwise stated. Loos wrote several
memoirs, but Carey’s biography is more accurate.
16. Barbara Beach, Motion Picture Magazine. Available at: http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/
motionpicturemag21brew_0618 (accessed 9 June 2015).
17. The Photodramatist. Available at: http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/photodramatist31
depa_0282 (accessed 9 June 2015).
18. Theda Bara created a new archetype as a character known only as ‘The Vampire’ in
1914’s A Fool There Was, playing the part of a notorious homewrecker who seduces and
ruins a succession of men. Vampire was abbreviated to ‘vamp’ – and became synony-
mous with exotic, seductive enchantresses. Macpherson’s idea was to avoid the vampire
and siren types and broaden the notion of sex appeal to include the charm of modern
women who were coming of age during World War I.
19. Hypocrites was not released until 1915 due to the National Review Board of Motion
Pictures’ deliberations.
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Part VI
South America
Argentina
Linda Craig and Felipe Pruneda Sentíes
Overview
Linda Craig
The beginnings of Argentine cinema date back to 1897, when representatives of
the Lumière brothers screened their early moving pictures to audiences in the
capital, Buenos Aires. Before long a local industry began to develop, but it was
profoundly male-dominated and records reveal that only two women made silent
films, Emilia Saleny (La niña del bosque/The Girl from the Wood, and Clarita, both
made in 1919); and María Celestini (Mi derecho/My Right, 1920). Unfortunately,
there are no surviving prints of any of these films.
The 1930s, and the ‘talkies’, saw the arrival on the big screen of the comic
actress Niní Marshall (Marina Esther Traverso) (1903–96), known as ‘the Chaplin
in a skirt’. After working in radio and theatre, Marshall appeared in her first film,
Mujeres que trabajan/Women Who Work (1938), and is also credited with having
written some of the additional dialogue. She went on to make 38 films in all, often
in comic roles of her own invention such as ‘Catita’ or ‘Cándida’, representing
women who were stereotypes of different social classes in Argentina at the time. In
two of these films, Los celos de Cándida/Candida’s Jealousy (1940) and Una Gallega
en la Habana/A Galician in Havana (1955), Marshall is given a screenwriting credit,
and she also wrote the story that was to become the film Cándida in 1939.
It is not until the 1950s that a woman screenwriter is credited solely in this role,
rather than being also either a director or an actress. Beatriz Guido (1924–88) was a
novelist and short story writer, but she is probably best known for her screenwriting.
The most famous Argentine woman filmmaker is María Luisa Bemberg (1922–95),
who began her career writing the screenplays for two films before combining
screenwriting with directing on her subsequent films. Working in the same
period, Aida Bortnik (1928–2013) is arguably the most important screenwriter of
any gender to have emerged from the Argentine film industry.
Lita Stantic (1942–) is also a key figure in Argentine film, who has worked
largely in film production, contributing to 18 feature films between 1972 and
2013. She has worked as co-producer or associate producer on numerous other
feature films, documentaries and shorts, and has directed three films. Stantic
859
worked on the screenplay of Los Velázquez (Szir, 1972) with Roberto Carri, who
had also written the original play, and was the father of the director, Albertina
Carri. The latter’s exploration of her father’s ‘disappearance’ in 1977 during the
military dictatorship, in 1977, is the subject of her acclaimed 2003 film, Los rubios.
Stantic’s other venture into the world of screenwriting was with a film that she
also directed, Un muro de silencio/A Wall of Silence, made in 1993, starring Vanessa
Redgrave.
Jeanine Meerapfel (1943–) is a German-Argentine screenwriter and director.
Meerapfel studied in Germany and a large part of her output is from Germany
and in German. However, she has also made three films in Argentina, starting
with La amiga/The Girlfriend (Argentina, 1988), followed by two others: Amigomío
(1994), on which she was co-screenwriter and co-director, and El amigo alemán/
The German Friend (2012), on which she was sole screenwriter and director.
Ana María Schua (1951–) is a prolific writer of novels, short stories, journal-
ism, and children’s books. She is credited as co-screenwriter on the adaptation
of her novel Los amores de Laurita/Laurita’s Loves (1986), and as sole screenwriter
on another adaptation of her work, Soy paciente/I Am a Patient (1986). Probably
the best-known film on which she is credited as screenwriter, however, is Dónde
estás amor de mi vida que no te puedo encontrar?/Where Are You Love of My Life
That I Can’t Find You? (Jusíd, 1992), but her enormous output contains no other
screenplays.
In the early 1990s Argentine cinema was in a parlous state. According to
Andermann, Jusíd’s film was one of a mere ten feature films to be produced in
1992, and in 1994 there were only five (Andermann 2012: 1). However, change
was to come; its principal driver was a new law, the Ley de Cine (Cinema Law),
introduced by the government of Carlos Ménem in 1994, by which a tax was
levied, not only on cinema tickets, but also on video rentals and the screening of
films on television. Part of this tax was then channelled to what is now known as
the National Institute for Film and Audiovisual Arts, INCAA, and used as a means
of subsidizing local films.
At the same time film education was prioritized and two film schools were
opened; most importantly, the Fundación Universidad de Cine (FUC), founded in
1991, and the National School of Cinematographic Directing and Experimentation
(ENERC) were to prove a fruitful source of filmmakers from 1995 onwards. The first
production from this generation, a compilation of shorts, Historias breves (1995),
included the debut of a woman who was to become one of the key personages in
Argentine film from that point onwards, Lucrecia Martel (b. 1966).
In the wake of the appearance of these young filmmakers a new era of Argentine
film began in 1997 with Pizza, birra, fasos (Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes), by Israel
Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro, two more of Historias breves’ directors. Known
as the ‘New Argentine Cinema’, this phase, as is emphasized by critics Aguilar
(2008) and Andermann (2012), could not be considered a movement per se, since,
echoing the case of the earlier ‘New Latin American Cinema’ of the late 1950s and
1960s, the films do not share the same aesthetic or thematic concerns. However,
the film school connection is crucial and the emergence of a generation qualified
Argentina 861
in different areas of filmmaking coincided with something of a boom in Argentine

cinema: more than 400 films were made between 1996 and 2002.
This period also marked a turning point for women in film. They began to be
much more prominent behind the camera, though few were to work solely as
screenwriters. As is the case with many of the male filmmakers of this era, such
as Pablo Trapero, Lisandro Alonso, or the above-mentioned Adrián Caetano, the
women who came to the fore tended to be both directors and screenwriters and
they often share the screenwriting credits with others, frequently men. A notable
exception is Susana Silvestre, a writer and a co-screenwriter on three films, La
vida según Muriel/Life According to Muriel (Milewicz, 1997); Río escondido/Hidden
River (Guevara, 1999), where she shares screenplay credits with María García
Guevara, the director, and Alan Pauls; and Un año sin amor/A Year Without Love
(Berneri, 2005). There are few other women from this period who have dedicated
themselves solely to screenwriting.
The most prominent of these more recent female filmmakers is the aforemen-
tioned Lucrecia Martel. Her first film was La ciénaga/The Swamp (2001), a powerful
film which casts an acute eye on issues of class and the family in the more provin-
cial north of the country, on which she worked as both director and screenwriter,
and which was produced by Lita Stantic. Martel has gone on to make a number
of shorts, and two other feature films; on the first of these, La niña santa/The Holy
Girl (2004), she was director, but shared the screenwriting credit with Juan Pablo
Domenech; while on the second, La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman (2008),
she was sole director and screenwriter.
By 2005, women were seen to be really making their mark, and of 64 films
made that year, 13 were made by women. The numbers have not remained this
high, though; in 2012, when 51 films were produced, only five were by women.
Nevertheless, there has clearly been a change of culture, and women have become
a much more established part of the Argentine film scene in roles that were more
unusual prior to the advent of New Argentine Cinema.
Probably the main defining characteristic of these films, as with those made
by the men, is that they tend to be art-house films rather than commercial. They
are often films that would be screened at festivals, in Argentina itself, or within
Latin America, particularly at the Havana Film Festival, but also internationally:
in the USA, chiefly the Sundance Festival, and in different parts of Europe, where
many have won multiple prizes. Amongst these prize winners are Albertina Carri,
awarded Best Director for La rabia/Anger at the 2006 Havana Film Festival; Verónica
Chen, Best New Director for Vagón fumador/Smokers Only at the 2001 Huelva Latin
American Film Festival, and SIGNIS award for Best Film for Agua/Water, Amiens,
France, 2006; and Lucía Puenzo, Critics’ Week Grand Prize for XXY at Cannes
in 2007, and the Goya, Spain’s equivalent of an Oscar, for Best Spanish Language
Foreign Film, also for XXY, in 2008.
Some of the most outstanding films address issues of gender. Puenzo, for exam-
ple, who started in film as a screenwriter, was both director and screenwriter on
three films, two of which could be described thus: XXY (2007), which centres on
the issues that arise for a gender dysmorphic teenager, and El niño pez/The Fish
Child (2009) where two young girls fall in love. Julia Solomonoff’ s El último verano
de la Boyita/The Last Summer of La Boyita (2009) also looks at gender dysmorphia.
Carri’s film, La rabia, echoes Solomonoff’s first feature film, Hermanas/Sisters
(2005), dealing with issues that continue to trouble in the wake of the ‘disappear-
ances’ during the military dictatorship of 1976–82. But it is hard to create any
hard and fast categories for these filmmakers and their films.
Other notable women screenwriter-directors of this period, who have suc-
ceeded in making more than one film, and who have truly made their mark
include Anahí Berneri (Un año sin amor/A Year Without Love [2001], Encarnación/
Incarnation [2007], Por tu culpa/It’s Your Fault [2010]); Celina Murga (Interior-
Noche/Interior-Night [1999], with Dolores Espeja, Ana y los otros/Ana and the Others
[2003], Una semana solos/A Week Alone [2007]); Ana Katz (El juego de la silla/
Musical Chairs [2002], Una novia errante/A Stray Girlfriend [2007], Los Marziano
[2011]); and Sandra Gugliotta (Un día de suerte/A Lucky Day [2001], Vidas posibles/
Possible Lives [2007], En nuestros corazones para siempre/In Our Hearts Forever [2009],
and La toma/The Take [2013]).
What is clear is that there has been a sea change in the world of Argentine film,
and that women working as both directors and screenwriters have, in the last 15
or so years, achieved recognition in a way that would have seemed impossible
earlier. What previously would have been deemed remarkable has now become
quite normal. Argentina has no doubt become one of the countries in which
women filmmakers are most successful. There is a long way to go before anything
resembling equality is reached, but there appears to be an acceptance of women as
screenwriters and directors which surpasses that in many other more established
filmmaking countries.
Beatriz Guido (1922–88)
Linda Craig
Beatriz Guido was born in Rosario, Argentina, the first child of the architect,
engineer and writer Angel Guido, and Bertha Eirin, a well-known actress from
Uruguay. Through her parents, Guido was closely connected to many members
of the intelligentsia, and as a child she met the Spanish philosopher José Ortega
y Gasset and Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones. Her mother was a close friend of
the Chilean Nobel laureate, Gabriela Mistral.
Guido developed her talents first as a writer of short stories and novels, but
a meeting with film director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, in the early 1950s, led
to a relationship which lasted until his early death at the age of 54 in 1977. Torre
Nilsson persuaded Guido to turn her talents to screenwriting, and the first film that
they worked on together was his first solo effort after a number of years working
as co-director with his father, Leopoldo Torre Ríos. The resulting adaptation of the
short story, Emma Zunz, by Argentina’s most famous writer, Jorge Luis Borges, had
a long gestation. The screenplay was discussed at length by Torre Nilsson, Guido,
and Borges himself so that the story took off in quite different directions from the
original text, and the film was eventually titled Días de odio/Days of Hate (1954).
Argentina 863
Unusually in Argentine film, particularly amongst women, Guido did not go on

from here to direct films, nor indeed to act in them, rather she continued to write
or co-write screenplays, largely for Torre Nilsson’s films, many of which were
based on her own novels and short stories.
Their next collaboration was on a screenplay based on Guido’s first novel, La
casa del ángel/The Angel’s House, which in 1954 had won the Emecé prize for best
first novel, and the couple continued to work together until 1976. Guido and
Torre Nilsson were extremely prolific, working on 23 films; of these, five were
based on novels, six on short stories, and one on a play, all by Guido. During
Torre Nilsson’s lifetime, she worked on only one film by another director, though
it too was based on her short story, La representación. The film was entitled Paulina
cautiva/Pauline the Captive, and was directed by another prolific Argentine direc-
tor, Fernando Ayala. In the time that Guido and Torre Nilsson were together there
were only two of his films for which Guido did not write the screenplay.
Guido continued to write screenplays until 1986. Ever keen to encourage young
filmmakers, she wrote El hombre del subsuelo/The Underground Man, which was
based on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and directed by Nicolás Sarquis
in 1981; La invitación, which was directed by Manuel Antín, 1982, based on
another of Guido’s novels; and lastly, Los insomnes/Insomniacs, directed by Carlos
Orgambide in 1986.
Aida Bortnik (1938–2013)
Linda Craig
Although she was also a short story writer, dramatist, journalist and critic, unusu-
ally Aida Bortnik was best known, and indeed most lauded, as a screenwriter.
Her first play, Soldados/Soldiers (1972), a collection of songs and monologues
denouncing weapons, war and repression, was performed in Buenos Aires under
the vigilant eye of the military regime. Two years later her screenplay for La tregua/
The Truce (Renán, 1974) appeared on the screen. The film was loosely based on a
story by the Uruguayan writer, Mario Benedetti, and it went on to be the first ever
Argentine, and indeed Latin American, film to be nominated for the Academy
Award for Best Foreign Film.
La tregua tells the story of a widower in his late fifties who falls in love with a
girl who is his daughter’s age. The film was held to be a model of hidden subver-
sion by the brutal military dictatorship which was installed in 1976. In its wake,
the lead actor, Hector Alterio, went into exile, spending several years in Spain.
Bortnik left Argentina for exile in Spain after the ‘disappearance’, torture and
death of another friend, Haroldo Conti, with whom she had been working on the
screenplay of Crecer de golpe/Growing Up Suddenly (Renán, 1976). The dictatorship
proceeded to ban all of her work retrospectively.
After three years in exile, unable, as she admitted, to ‘control either fear or
temptation’, she returned home, having been invited to write a screenplay of her
own short story, La isla/The Island. The film, of the same title, was directed by
Alejandro Doria in 1979. It was her only ‘metaphorical film’, based in a psychiatric
institution, and for this reason it managed to escape censorship. It proved to be

the only Argentine film made during the dictatorship to win international awards.
In 1982, some months before the regime collapsed, Bortnik began to write what
was to become the most important Argentine film of the decade, La versión oficial/
The Official Story (Puenzo, 1985). The original idea was to film in Spain, but events
overtook them, and suddenly they found themselves able to film in a newly
democratic Argentina. This was the first film to confront the horrors of the seven-
year dictatorship, and it did this primarily through the eyes of a middle-class
woman who, like many of her compatriots, had lived in ignorance or denial of
the terrible things happening around them. This worked as a means of addressing
a local audience and drawing them into a story that many of them may also have
been ignoring. The woman, ‘Norma’, played by the peerless Norma Aleandro, is
a history teacher, and through her interaction with her pupils we gain an insight
into ideas around official and unofficial versions, and watch her realization over
time that there are many possible interpretations of history. Through this lens,
the film then focuses on her family life. She and her husband have adopted a
daughter they dote on, and the film unfolds with Norma’s realization that all is
not well. She is drawn to explore the circumstances of the child’s adoption, and
to question her husband’s version of events.
Ultimately her entire world crumbles as she faces the probability that her
daughter belongs elsewhere. She is almost certainly the daughter of a young
couple who have ‘disappeared’, and whose child has been given to someone
who is at the very least complicit with the regime. Moreover there is a group of
women, representing the famous ‘Madres de la Plaza de Mayo’, who are fighting
to uncover the truth about their lost sons and daughters, and also to find the
grandchildren born to them in captivity. There is some uncertainty in the film:
we can never be completely sure that the grandmother Norma finds is actually
the grandmother of her daughter, but this very uncertainty is one of its powerful
elements. Rather than reaching total closure, and perhaps some notion of a happy
ending, the film has opened up all of these issues, and revealed the dark reality of
the regime. Indeed the grandmothers of these children are to this day searching
for their grandchildren.
The film won many awards nationally and worldwide, including the Academy
Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Bortnik, its co-screenwriter with
Puenzo, went on to win the Konex Platinum Prize for best Argentine screenwriter
of the decade 1985–94.
Bortnik worked as screenwriter, or co-screenwriter, on 12 films, and with one
exception they were all made in Argentina. Apart from those mentioned above,
she also wrote or co-wrote: Una mujer/A Woman (Stagnaro, 1975); Volver/To Return
(Lypzyc, 1982); Pobre mariposa/Poor Butterfly (1982) with Raúl de la Torre, son of
Leopoldo Torre Nilsson; and then Tango feroz, la leyenda de Tanguito/Wild Tango
(1993), Caballos salvajes/Wild Horses (1995), and Cenizas del paraíso/Ashes from
Paradise (1997), all with the director Marcelo Piñeyro; and lastly, La soledad era
esto/This Was Solitude (2002), working again with Sergio Renán, with whom she
had worked on Growing Up Suddenly. In 1989, she collaborated again with Luis
Argentina 865
Puenzo, this time on a film made in Hollywood, Gringo viejo/Old Gringo (1989),
based on a novel by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes.
Immersed in film, she was one of the judges for the Sundance Film Festival,
and taught widely in different film institutes in Argentina. But on her death, the
greatest tribute to her came from the much-acclaimed actor Graciela Borges, who
described her as the ‘greatest screenwriter in Argentine cinema’.
María Luisa Bemberg (1922–95)
Felipe Pruneda Sentíes

Bemberg was born in Buenos Aires, to one of the most powerful families in
Argentina, and enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, though she was divorced with four
children at 32. Her career in the dramatic arts started relatively late in her life – her
first produced screenplay was released in 1971, when she was 49. Before becom-
ing a screenwriter she was a playwright in her own theatre company, Teatro El
Globo. The transition to writing screenplays was an extension of Bemberg’s stage
work, when her one-act play La margarita es una flor became the basis for Crónica
de una señora (1971), which she co-scripted with a promising new director, Raúl
de la Torre. The experience proved productively frustrating for Bemberg, given
the conflicted nature of the film’s authorship and that the project was largely
spearheaded by de la Torre, who commissioned a feature-length film script from
Bemberg. The story reflected aspects of her own life and was influenced by Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in which the central character re-evaluates her
existence, which has only prepared her for the role of bourgeois wife. Bemberg felt
de la Torre’s choices did not reflect the empathy for her main character’s plight
she had hoped her script would generate and felt that de la Torre ignored some of
the technical directions she had included in the script.1
The success of Crónica de una señora led to a second script, Triángulo de cuatro
(1975). This time the story has three protagonists and is shown from three differ-
ent perspectives rather than the focused point of view of Crónica. It features a love
triangle, composed of businessman Felipe (Federico Luppi), his bored wife, Laura
(Thelma Biral), and his successful, independent mistress, Teresa (Graciela Borges).
Bemberg did not necessarily intend a singular alignment of loyalties, but Grant
observes how, in the finished film, Teresa emerges as the only likeable female
character and Laura, who is herself having an affair, occupies the same unsym-
pathetic position as Fina in Crónica de una señora.2 The film’s director, Fernando
Ayala, was, unlike de la Torre, an established director, and again the film was well
received by critics and audiences, but the disparity between Bemberg’s intentions
and the resulting film further persuaded her to become a writer-director.
Bemberg next directed two short documentaries: El mundo de la mujer (The
Woman’s World) in 1972, a look at the merchandise aimed at women consumers,
and Juguetes (Toys) in 1978. But as she attempted to secure control over her own
screenwriting, president Juan Perón’s death in 1974 left his widow, María Estela
Martínez, in power, only to be usurped in 1976 by a military junta which was
antipathetic to Bemberg’s critical look at the sacred institutions of family and
marriage. Frustrated by the military regime’s censorship of her filmmaking pro-

jects, Bemberg flew to New York in 1980 for a short period to study acting at Lee
Strasberg’s Studio. In the same year she began writing Momentos (Moments, 1981),
her directorial debut, co-written with Marcelo Pichon Rivière. It was also the
first film produced with her new company, GEA Cinematográfica. Bemberg and
her producing partner, Lita Stantic, financed the project with their own money.
Bemberg’s script once again embarked on an empathetic study of an adulteress. For
some critics, Momentos was a bland representation of marriage and adultery, toned
down to get it produced under Perón’s rule. Bemberg had planned to accentuate
the eroticism and carnality of several scenes between a passionless married couple
and a successful young car salesman who is married to his boss’s daughter, but the
risk of censorship meant changes to the plot. Yet the obliqueness of the film is
influenced by European art cinema and Grant describes the isolated seaside resort
setting of the film as ‘Bergmanesque’, observing that the director’s use of fractured
chronology, non-diegetic sound, and other distancing techniques help Bemberg
emphasize the accidental quality of the mutual attraction between the characters.3
By the early 1980s, the military regime had ended and conditions were more
amenable to Bemberg’s cinematic interests. She returned to her script for Señora
de nadie (1982), which finally went into production in its original form, in
which Leonor catches her husband cheating on her and decides to leave home.
Eventually, she befriends Pablo, a gay man who allows her to stay in his apart-
ment. Bemberg experiments less with structure and more with her characters:
Leonor never confronts her husband about his betrayal – in fact, we never see her
husband and the film title’s underscoring of the absence of a husband is replicated
in the narrative. Also, Bemberg’s dialogue is even more sparse than in her earlier
works, suggesting a sharpening of her writing.
For the three productions following Señora de nadi, Bemberg turned to differ-
ent subject matter: female historical figures who rebelled against the institutions
of their time. She also established international co-productions and sought more
amenable collaborators in her screenwriting. She began with Camila (1984), fol-
lowed by Miss Mary (1986), and then Yo, la peor de todas/I, the Worst of All (1990).
Camila opened in 30 countries, becoming her biggest hit and only the second
Argentinean picture to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film. The scale of the project led Bemberg and Stantic to partner with
Spanish production company Impala and she shared screenwriting duties with
writers Beda Docampo Feijóo and Juan Bautista Stagnaro. The story tells of a
socialite who abandons her life in 1840s Buenos Aires when she falls in love with a
Jesuit priest and lives under a different identity. She is a typical Bemberg heroine:
a woman who obeys her own passion rather than the patriarchal dictates of the
state, the family, and the Church. Miss Mary (1986), Bemberg’s first and only co-
production with American company New World Pictures, and her sole cinematic/
linguistic excursion outside of her native Spanish, continued the trend of histori-
cal commentary. This time a fictional character takes centre stage: Mary Mulligan,
a British governess for a wealthy Argentinean family, played by Julie Christie,
who witnesses the rise of Fascism during the 1930s and the downfall of the clan
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that hired her, as Perón takes power in 1945. Reunited with Docampo Feijóo and
Stagnaro as co-writers in addition to Jorge Goldenberg, Bemberg delivers not only
another strong drama about the repression of female sexuality in a particular
era, but also a cutting observation of her own upbringing and social class. As an
employee charged with the education of the three children, Miss Mary has unique
access to the hypocrisy, cruelty and despair at the heart of a seemingly powerful
family. Mary acts as a catalyst, forcing tensions to the surface by having a passion-
ate affair with eldest son, Johnny (Donald McIntyre). The consummation of their
desire not only confronts the family with the toxicity of the ties that hold them
together, but also becomes Mary’s way to overcome her inhibitions and devout
adherence to her British values. The scope of the picture – a story that spans over
a decade and attempts to capture world-historical transformations and juggle
the multiple languages that reflect the characters’ backgrounds – took Bemberg’s
ambition a step further.
Yo, la peor de todas (I, the Worst of All, 1990) was Bemberg’s first adaptation of
someone else’s material: Mexican writer and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz’s Sor
Juana, o las trampas de la fe (Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith), a study of the life
and work of seventeenth-century neo-Spanish poetess and intellectual Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz. The essayistic nature of the source, and the clear biographical
objective, might explain the choice of a more expositional structure than that of
her previous films, and be one of the reasons why Yo, la peor de todas is the most
admired by feminists, and least favoured by critics, of Bemberg’s films. The film
shows Sor Juana choosing to become a nun and gain knowledge because a life in
the convent made it easier to have access to learning. Following the later years of
her life, the film underscores the extraordinary qualities that made her a veritable
polymath and a highly influential thinker for the feminist movement. Bemberg
co-wrote the film with playwright, novelist and critic Antonio Larreta, who, much
like Bemberg, came from an affluent family and lived in self-imposed exile. Yo, la
peor de todas is widely considered to be one of the most compelling studies of Sor
Juana’s life, and certainly her most famous screen incarnation.
Bemberg next turned to a more allegorical mode of representing the past for
what would become her final film as a writer-director, De eso no se habla (We Don’t
Want to Talk About It, 1993). It is based on the short story by Julio Llinás and
adapted by Bemberg and Aldo Romero, with dialogue by Goldenberg. The central
character in the adaptation is a widow (Señora de nadie’s Luisina Brando) who com-
ically goes to enormous lengths to protect her daughter from realizing that she is
a little person in the small town of San José de los Altares, and the film is largely
faithful to Llinás’s story. The author was little known when he sent Bemberg the
20-page tale,4 and she fleshes it out by providing a more vivid sense of place and
giving the characters greater depth. Interestingly, Bemberg’s script begins with a
note that reveals a great deal about her take on the strange atmosphere of the film
and her wish to make San José appear like a place out of time:
Given its relative isolation, the town does not go through the vertiginous
changes that technological development and fashion bring about. Therefore,
even though the events that follow could be set around the second half
of the 1930s, this fact does not fix a specific visual profile. As a result, the
attire, architecture, properties and transportations are presented as an eclec-
tic collection, which includes both anachronisms and ‘progressive’ modern
elements.5
The visual specificities of the time period in Camila, Miss Mary and Yo, la peor
de todas give way to a more indeterminate setting, more appropriate to a fable.
Marcello Mastroianni stars as the eccentric neighbour of Leonor and her daugh-
ter, Carlota, who comes into their lives when he falls in love with Carlota, whom
Leonor has succeeded in raising as a confident, bright young woman with no
immediate sense of her physical difference. But when the circus comes to town,
the links to fairy tales and the carnivalesque environment add a touch of the fan-
tastic to Bemberg’s body of work. The film also heralds an interest in the theme of
parenting and its dangers, which would also guide her last screenplay, El impostor
(The Impostor, 1997). Although released in 1997, work on the script for the film
version of Silvina Ocampo’s story began in 1993, after costume designer Rosa
Zemborain drew Bemberg’s attention to it. Bemberg collaborated with Alejandro
Maci, offering him a job as researcher on Yo, la peor de todas and then as her
second assistant director for El impostor. Maci drafted several versions of a first
attempt by Bemberg and Ricardo Piglia (who would not receive credit). Sadly,
cancer, which would eventually take her life in 1995, made it impossible for her
to continue. Bemberg suggested that Maci and producer Oscar Kramer finish the
project, a move also endorsed by Bemberg’s family, and Maci was helped by Jorge
Goldenberg with script revisions. Set in the 1930s, a period to which Bemberg
seemed irresistibly drawn, El impostor follows Sebastián Heredia who runs away
to his parents’ isolated country estate in Las Pampas. His father sends Juan
Medina to bring him back. The story is similar to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented
Mr Ripley, a connection also evoked in the title, but the tale takes a turn towards
the uncanny when Medina meets, and falls for, an enigmatic woman who might
have irresistible powers.
Bemberg was a declared feminist and intellectual, and her filmmaking showed
no sign of staleness or repetition and explored new avenues to the end of her
life. Given the challenges during her career for women filmmakers to sustain a
consistent output, she was always nothing less than adventurous.
Notes
1. See Catherine Grant, ‘Intimista Transformations: María Luisa Bemberg’s First Feature
Films’, in King et al. 2001.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 86.
4. Adrián Carrasco. ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’, Diario La Nación, 16 May 1993. Available
at: http://www.marialuisabemberg.com/descargas/dirigidas-de-eso-no-se-habla/de-eso-
no-se-habla3.pdf (accessed 13 March 2013).
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5. Second, unnumbered page of script draft dated 28 September 1992. Available at: http://
www.marialuisabemberg.com/descargas/guiones/de-eso-no-se-habla.pdf (accessed 13
March 2013; my translation).
References
Aguilar, Gonzalo. 2008. New Argentine Film: Other Worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Andermann, Jens. 2012. New Argentine Cinema. London and New York: I. B.Tauris.
King, John, Sheila Whittaker, and Rosa Bosch (eds). 2001. An Argentine Passion: The Films of
María Luisa Bemberg. London: Verso.
Brazil
Camila Malagolini Gama
The first Brazilian film was shown in 1898, produced by the Italian brothers
Afonso and Paschoal Segreto, the only filmmakers in the country until 1903.
Brazilian film production quickly increased to 209 releases in 1910 and included
a wide range of subject matter and many genres such as police, comedy and adap-
tations of literary classics. In the following decade film production almost came
to a standstill, partly due to the lack of technological resources, but also because
the country was flooded with international films that dominated the Brazilian
market. However, it was not until the early 1920s that a small number of women
began to appear in Brazilian cinema, when the national cinema had a revival.
This was partly due to the success of the Regional Cycles – so called because they
were from the more remote regions of the country such as Recife, Belo Horizonte
and some cities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, rather than Rio de Janeiro and
Sao Paulo.
Carmen Santos (1904–52), was as an actress, producer, director and screen-
writer, and is considered to have been a pioneer in many of those fields. Born
in Portugal, she emigrated to Brazil with her family when young and her art is
entirely influenced by Brazilian culture. Santos’s work shows a concern for histori-
cal and social issues, and one of her greatest achievements is Inconfidência Mineira/
Minas Conspiracy (1948), which she wrote, directed and produced as well as acted
in. The film depicts the situation faced by the many groups involved in this piv-
otal event in Brazilian history, when the Brazilian people struggled for freedom
against the oppression of the Portuguese government in the colonial period. The
film is not only important because of its content but also because it was scripted
and directed by a woman in the first half of the twentieth century, in a society in
which it was difficult for women to take part in activities that were not related to
the care of home and family. Carmen Santos acted as an agent of social change
and she became a key female figure at a time when women were still controlled
by a patriarchal society.
In 1933, with financial support from her husband, Santos founded Brazil Vox
Film, later renamed the Brasil Vita Filme, which was responsible for the produc-
tion of movies such as Favela dos Meus Amores/Shantytown of My Loves (1933) and
Argila/Clay (1940), which Santos produced and acted in.
870
Brazil 871
Gilda de Abreu (1904–79), was born in France, but made her film career in
Brazil. Her parents were artists and she grew up surrounded by creativity, finding
expression in music, which led to a career on the stage and then the big screen.
De Abreu, as well as being a talented singer was also an accomplished actress,
director and screenwriter. She started her career in the 1930s when Chanchada
films, musical comedies that mix genres such as detective and science fiction, were
popular in Brazilian cinema. Gilda de Abreu wrote for cinema and the theatre. One
of her most important films was Chico Viola não morreu/Chico Viola Did Not Die
(1955), a biography of the singer Francisco Alves. She also wrote Pinguinho de Gente/
Little People (1949), about the life of a poor girl; O Ébrio/The Drunk (1946), the story
of a doctor who suffers after the betrayal of his wife; and, much later, a script for
a short film honouring her husband – Canção de Amor/Love Song (1977).
The first film studios were formed in Brazil in the 1930s: Cinédia, founded
by Adhemar Gonzaga and located in Rio de Janeiro, and its greatest success was
O Ébrio/The Drunk (1946), written and directed by Gilda de Abreu; Carmen
Santos’s studio, Brazil Vox Film; and Sonofilms, whose most popular film was
Banana da Terra/Plantain (1939), and which boosted the international career
of Carmen Miranda, a successful singer and Brazilian actress. But by the 1940s
the three companies were experiencing financial and structural difficulties and
Sonofilms’ demise was ensured when the studio was destroyed by fire in 1940.
The 1940s were dominated by a newly formed production company, Atlântida,
but in the 1950s the studio Vera Cruz became the major studio in Brazil, aiming
to make serious and commercial films with aesthetic and cultural concerns, but to
Hollywood standards. Many of the films produced became public and critical suc-
cesses, with several winning international awards. O Cangaceiro/The Outlaw (1953)
was named as Best Adventure Film at the Cannes Film Festival 1952, and Sinhá
Moça/You Girl (1953) won the Bronze Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the Silver
Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and the OCIC (Vatican annual awards for films
with humane values).
Women were rarely involved in the production process in this period. It was
not until the 1960s that women took on film production roles with any success
and it was the influence of European cinema that led to this. From the 1960s,
Brazilian cinema had greater national and international impact, being inspired by
Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague. This led to the advent of what
was termed Cinema Novo/New Cinema, which aimed to portray the country’s
social, economic and political realities This resulted in an increase in the number
of women working in film as writers, producers and directors.
Norma Bengell (1935–2013), born in Rio de Janeiro, was an important Brazilian
filmmaker whose career spanned more than three decades. She started her career
as an actress and made her debut in 1959, in a film directed by Carlos Manga,
O Homem do Sputnik/The Man of Sputinik. Bengell went on to work as a producer, direc-
tor and screenwriter. In the late 1970s she wrote the short film Maria Gladys, Uma
Atriz Brasileira/Maria Gladys, a Brazilian Actress (1979). She is also the screenwriter of
Eternamente Pagú/Eternally Pagú (1988), which recounts the life of the writer and jour-
nalist Patrícia Rehder Galvão (Pagú), and the modernist movement she was part of.
Ana Maria Magalhães (b. 1960) is known mostly for her short films, but she
also wrote and directed documentaries and one feature. Of her best-known films,
Mulheres de Cinema/Women of Cinema (1978) depicts the history of Brazilian cin-
ema from the point of view of women who were part of that history. Assaltaram
a Gramática/They Assaulted Grammar (1983) is Magalhães’ only feature, which
she wrote with Charles Peixoto, and which portrays the life and work of differ-
ent Brazilian poets. Já que Ninguém Me Tira para Dançar/Since No One Takes Me
to Dance (1987) is a documentary that portrays the life story of Leila Diniz and
won the 1st Prize Video Women sponsored by the National Council of Women’s
Rights, Brasilia. The biographical drama Lara (2002) is based on the life of Odette
Lara, who was a muse of the 1950s and 1960s. One of Magalhães’ last scripts is
the documentary Reidy, A Construção de Utopia/Reidy, Building Utopia (2009), which
retraces the history of the Brazilian architect and urbanist Affonso Eduardo Reidy.
The documentary has divided opinion, addressing important issues, but from
a very limited viewpoint.
Dilma Lóes (b. 1950) became an influential writer and director. She was born
into a family of artists, and had contact with the performing arts when she was
very young. Her career has explored all aspects of film development and film-
making, including acting, continuity, costume design, production, and directing,
as well as screenwriting. Lóes began her career in Brazilian cinema as an actress
in 1969, in the movie by Mozael Silveira, Meu nome é Lampião. She then began
to write short films like Morrendo a Cada Instante/Dying Every Moment (1973),
Sassarico/Sassarico (1979), and Só o Amor Não Basta/Just the Love Is Not Enough
(1978), which was awarded Best 16mm Film at the Brasilia Film Festival in 1978.
Lóes’s later documentary, Nossas Vidas/Our Lives (1985), which she wrote and
directed, received an award at the Festival Video Stuttgart, Germany, and portrays
Brazilian women from different social and cultural perspectives.
Lóes wrote a variety of fiction screenplays, Quando As Mulheres Paqueram/When
Women Flirt (1971) being her first. This comedy is about three English women who
go on holiday to Brazil and undermine the moral structures of a Brazilian bour-
geois family. While one of them finds love, the other two become disillusioned
by it. Essa Gostosa Brincadeira a Dois/This Funny Game for Two (1973) is a romantic
comedy acclaimed by audiences and critics, which was written in partnership
with Cláudio MacDowell. The film portrays the story of two young runaways who
leave their parents’ house, and how their initially platonic relationship turns into
love. Quando O Crioulo Dança/When the Creole Dances (1988) is a documentary that
mixes fictional and real images of demonstrations and protests against racism in
Brazil. These fictional gaps in the evolution of the film serve as an analogy to the
black character in Brazil and aim to expose the racism present in everyday society.
Carla Camurati (b. 1960) was born in Rio de Janeiro and began her career as a
film actress in the 1980s, later moving into screenwriting, directing and produc-
ing. Her first film, A Mulher Fatal Encontra O Homem Ideal/The Fatal Woman Finds
the Ideal Man (1987), is a comedy which tells the story of a beggar woman who
is visited by her fairy godmother and becomes a star of film and TV, until it all
goes wrong. After this Camurati wrote and directed the short Bastidores/Backstage
Brazil 873
(1990), followed by her first feature, Carlota Joaquina, Princesa do Brasil/Carlota

Joaquina, Princess of Brasil (1995), which she wrote and directed, and which helped
to consolidate her career. The film revived the fortunes of Brazilian national
cinema and millions of viewers went see it. The historical comedy mixes real-
ity and fiction, depicting the life of Carlota Joaquina de Bourbon, a Spanish girl
who, when a child, marries Prince D. João de Bragança. When both the king and
queen of Portugal are declared insane, she becomes queen. The film also depicts
Carlota’s amorous adventures outside of marriage and the rise of Brazil as a colony
of Portugal.
La serva padrona/The Servant Mistress (1998) is an adaptation of the comic opera,
created by G. B. Pergolesi (1710–36). Adapted and directed by Camurati it tells of the
adventures of the maid Serpina, who has been educated from childhood by her boss,
Uberto. Upon reaching adulthood, Serpina falls in love with the boss and, helped by
Vespone, plans to trap him into marriage. Following this Camurati wrote Copacabana/
Copacabana (2001), with Melanie Dimantas and Yoya Würsch, Also directed by her,
the story is about a photographer who, on the eve of her 90th birthday, gets together
with her friends and starts to relive the most important events of her life.
Anna Muylaert (b. 1964) was born in Sao Paulo. She often writes for children’s
film and television in Brazil and had early success with her short films. As Rosas
Não Calam/The Roses Do Not Shut (1992) is a short about a filmmaker who has a
posthumous encounter with a modernist writer while filming at the poet’s house.
A Origem Dos Bebês Segundo Kiki Cavalganti/The Origin of Babies According to Kiki
Cavalganti (1995) is a 16-minute comedy depicting a couple’s life from the per-
spective of their little daughter. The feature-length screenplay she wrote for the
children’s film Castelo Rá-tim-bum/Rá-tim-bum Castle (1999) made it one of the
most successful Brazilian movies ever made. In the film, Nino, a sorcerer’s appren-
tice, lives with his aunt and uncle, Morgana and Victor. Nino longs to have a
normal life but unwillingly takes part in a plot orchestrated by his Aunt Losângela
who intends to steal Morgana’s spell book.
After this Muylaert co-wrote the historical drama Desmundo/Desmundo (2002)
and wrote and directed the comedy Durval Discos/Durval Records (2002). One
of her most popular screenplays, written in partnership with Cao Hamburgo,
Adriana Falcão, Cláudio Galperin, and Bráulio Mantovani, is O Ano Em Que Meus
Pais Saíram de Férias/The Year That My Parents Went on Vacation (2006). The film
tells the story of a 12-year-old boy who goes to live with a lonely Jewish man
when his grandfather dies and his parents have to leave the country because of
persecution by the government during the military dictatorship.
In Muylaert’s next film, É Proibido Fumar/Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (2009), the protag-
onist is a teacher who is addicted to cigarettes, but when she starts dating her neigh-
bour she manages to give up smoking. Xingu/Xingu (2012), written by Muylaert with
Cao Hamburgo and Elena Soárez, portrays the lives of three brothers who decide to
leave the city and join an expedition to explore an area of central Brazil that was
eventually to be designated as the Xingu National Park. In the same year Muylaert
also wrote and directed the thriller Camada a Cobrar/Call to Collect, and she was a
co-writer on the comedy television series As Canalhas/The Scoundrels (2013–14).
Elena Soárez (b. 1965), one of the co-writers of Xingu, was born in Rio de
Janeiro. Her first credit was as co-writer for Gêmeas/Twins (1999), a horror film
that tells the story of twin sisters who live by deceiving men. This was followed
by Eu, Tu, Eles/Me, You, Them (2000), a comedy she co-wrote about a woman who
lives with three husbands, while Redentor/Redeemer (2004), again co-writtten, is
about a journalist who believes he has received a message from God to save the
soul of his childhood friend, who is caught up in a real-estate scandal.
Soárez next wrote the screenplay for the highly regarded Cidade dos Homens/City
of Men (2007), which portrays the lives of two teenagers who live in the favelas of
Rio de Janeiro and how they cope with the violence and conflict. Her most recent
screenplay, A Busca/Father’s Chair (2012), was written in partnership with the
director, Luciano Moura, and tells the story of a career-driven father who realizes
the value of family when his 15-year-old son goes missing.
Chile
Carmen Sofia Brenes, Universidad de los Andes
(with contributions by María Luisa Prado and Trinidad Herrera)
This chapter has been financed by the Chilean Fondecyt Fund 11110275
Overview
The first film to be shown in Chile was in 1902 and titled Ejercicio General de
Bombas/General Fire Drill; it was shot just one week before being shown and only
three minutes long. The first attempt at making a feature-length film was in
1915, El violín de Inés/Ines’s Violin, and directed by Adolfo Urzúa Rosas, but the
film was not completed, possibly because it was thought unlikely to be a success
(Ossa 1971). Between 1910 and 1931, film production in Chile was small-scale,
and just 78 films were produced. Only two female writers and directors have pro-
duction credits in this period: Gabriela von Bussenius and Rosario Rodríguez
de la Serna.
Gabriela von Bussenius (1899–1975) was a pioneer filmmaker and in Chile was
said to have been ‘the world’s first film-director in skirts’ because she made La
agonía de Arauco/Arauco’s Agony (1917) (Ossa 1971). Von Bussenius was a journalist,
writer, filmmaker and screenwriter. Even as a young girl, she took an interest in
literature and the cinema and wrote articles and film reviews for Zig-Zag maga-
zine. In 1916, she married an Italian technician, Salvador Giambastiani, one of
the owners of the movie-making company Chile Films, and took over the techni-
cal direction of La agonía de Arauco as well as writing the script (Jara 2011). Von
Bussenius did not direct another movie, although she went on to collaborate
anonymously with her husband until his death in 1921. In the years that fol-
lowed, she worked as a journalist and film critic and wrote two novels, but did
not return to film. In the opinion of many of her contemporaries, she was a bril-
liant artist and ahead of her time (Jara 2013). Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna acted,
wrote and directed films in the 1920s and her first film Malditas sean las mujeres/
Damn Women came out in 1925. Four years later, she directed La envenenadora/
The Poisoner (1929) with a screenplay by René Berthelón. The two films were not
popular and only had a short run (Ossa 1971).
The first Chilean ‘talkie’ was released in 1934, Norte y Sur/North and South,
directed by Jorge Délano. It marked a surge in Chilean filmmaking after years of
little activity. CORFO, the National Development Agency, was created in 1939 and
is possibly the most important legacy of the left-wing Popular Front Government.
875
CORFO’s venture into filmmaking failed, though, as it overestimated the potential

for a filmmaking industry in Chile (Ossa 1971). Chile Films, a company related to
CORFO, was created in 1941. This initiative supported new filmmakers, though
there were no women writers or directors, and formalized the nascent local film
industry within a Latin American context by promoting local productions. But
film production was irregular as distribution was not guaranteed (Villaroel and
Mardones 2012). By mid 1948, it was clear that Chile Films was not financially
healthy and could not pay off the heavy debts it had incurred (Ossa 1971).
By the 1950s film production was in the doldrums and only 13 films were
released during the decade. However, this period saw the foundations estab-
lished for the rise of the ‘New Chilean Cinema’, especially through documentary.
Chilean society, from the 1960s to the early 1970s, was characterized by social
struggle, and films were used to encourage socio-cultural, political and ideological
transformation (Raurich and Silva 2010).
One of the milestones of the New Chilean Cinema was the first New Latin
American Film Festival, which was held in Viña del Mar in 1967, and once again
in 1969. Director Raúl Ruiz was to become one of the most important film direc-
tors in Chile, producing films with his wife, Valeria Sarmiento, which she wrote
and edited. Among the most successful productions were Tres tristes tigres/Three
Distressed Tigers (1968), directed by Ruiz, about three men from the provinces
who are dazzled by the capital, but fall prey to the big city during a tour around
bars, cantinas and seedy motels; Aldo Francia’s Valparaíso, mi amor/Valparaíso,
My Love (1970), which deals with the drama of four newly orphaned children
who must survive in a new reality where the street is their home; and El chacal
de Nahueltoro/The Nahueltoro Jackal (1970) by Miguel Littin, based on the true
story of a gruesome and horrific mass murder in the Nahueltoro area of Biobío,
in Chile’s Region VIII.
During the period 1970 to 1973, much film production in Chile showed an affin-
ity with the aims of the government of President Salvador Allende, also known as
the Unidad Popular government. Allende was elected by popular vote, but tried to
introduce reforms, particularly in connection with ownership rights, which were
seen by some as detrimental to democracy and promoting communism. On
11 September 1973 a coup was staged by General Augusto Pinochet, which
marked a new era for Chilean cinema in which censorship and self-censorship
shaped artistic production (Raurich and Silva 2010). Chilean films that expressed
views opposing the military regime (Villaroel and Mardones 2012) were smug-
gled into Germany through the Swedish Embassy, to prevent their destruction.
Chilean writers and directors, including many women, left the country, while
those who remained had to suffer the repression of the dictatorship.
Nieves Yankovic (1916–85) was one of the founders of the University of Chile
Experimental Theatre (1941), and an iconic figure among women filmmakers
who decided to remain in Chile when Pinochet was in power. Initially an actress,
she became interested in the production side of movie making and through her
work met Jorge di Lauro, one of Chile Films’ sound engineers, whom she married
shortly afterwards. They wrote, filmed and produced two documentaries which
Chile 877
are now considered Chilean classics: Andacollo (1958) and Artistas plásticos de
Chile/Chilean Visual Artists (1960). Yankovic also wrote and directed San Pedro de
Atacama (1964) and Isla de Pascua/Easter Island (1965). Di Lauro and Yancovic
stayed on in Chile during Pinochet’s rule, but at the end of November 1974, dur-
ing the filming of Año Santo Chileno/Chilean Holy Year (also written by Di Lauro
and Yankovic), Jorge Müller, who was in charge of shooting the scenes and one
of the most important cameramen in the country, was abducted by the agents of
the dictatorship and reported ‘missing’. The film was never finished and Nieves
Yankovic ceased filmmaking, devoting herself to teaching (Jara 2011; Horta 2014).
Angelina Vázquez (b. 1950) made her debut in 1971 as director and screen-
writer with her project Crónica del Salitre/A Chronicle of Chilean Nitrate. After
the coup in 1973 she went into exile in Finland, where she continued to make
documentaries, but has seldom worked as a screenwriter. Some years after Chile’s
return to democracy, she and her family came back. She and her son, Simón
Bergman, who is also a filmmaker, now own a production company, Gabinete de
Antropología Visual (Trujillo 2010).
Marilú Mallet (b. 1944) began working in 1972 at the Educational Radio and
Film Service of the Chilean Ministry of Education during Salvador Allende’s
administration, starting work on a project, Dónde voy a encontrar otra Violeta/
Wherever Can I Find Another Violeta, based on Nicanor Parra’s defence of his sister.
Her family was very close to Allende and, after the coup, Mallet left Chile for
Canada, where she wrote and directed several short films and documentaries.
One of her most outstanding films is Il n’a a pas d’oubli, which she co-directed,
and which was awarded a special mention at the 1976 Locarno Film Festival in
Switzerland. In 1983 Mallet wrote and directed Diario Inacabado/Unfinished Journal,
an autobiography in which she develops the theme of women in exile. The film
received funding from the Canadian Arts Council and was awarded a prize by the
Biarritz Film Festival judges the same year. The film was very popular, as Marilú
Mallet explains: ‘The film was screened and one and a half million spectators saw
it … It was a huge success because the feminist movement was very strong in the
eighties and what I showed in this film was the difficulty of being a woman, the
difficulty of being an exile and the difficulty of being a woman artist’ (Pinto 2013).
Although Mallet now lives in Canada, she returned to Chile for a period of
time and her films explore issues facing the country and defend human rights,
while still having a poetic and very personal vision. Much of her recent work has
a North American rather than a Chilean setting, though some Chilean features
can be gleaned and Mallet’s stories are universal, concerned with loss, pain, dis-
placement, and women’s existence in a difficult world. Mallet’s film La cueca sola/
Dancing Alone (2003) deals with the role women played in the recovery of democ-
racy in Chile. The film was screened at several film festivals and was awarded
many accolades, such as Best Canadian Documentary and Best Direction at the
2004 Hotdocs Festival of Toronto and the Women Filmmakers Film Festival of
Florence that same year (Mouesca 2011a).
Carmen Castillo (b. 1945) was also forced to go into exile. She had been work-
ing as a teacher of history and a researcher at the Catholic University of Chile
and was a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). She left Chile in
1974 and was received as a political refugee in France, where she wrote and made
documentaries for public television. The recognition of Castillo as an outstanding
filmmaker came years later, when she was awarded the Gold FIPA at the Biarritz
International Audiovisual Programs Festival for her film La Flaca Alejandra/Skinny
Alejandra (1994), which she wrote and directed. This film is based on her life in
1974, when she attempted to make public the torture and atrocities undergone by
opponents of the military regime. She narrates some of the experiences she went
through in a documentary in which she talks to another MIR member. She also
wrote Insensible María Félix/Insensitive Maria Felix (2000), Calle Santa Fe (2007),
and El Tesoro de América – El oro de Pascua Lama/America’s Treasure – Pascua Lama’s
Gold (2010).
Tatiana Gaviola is one of Chile’s most renowned screenwriters and, after
Valeria Sarmiento, has had the longest career in the industry. She was censored
by the military government because of her documentary on the death of former
president Eduardo Frei Montalva, Tiempo para un líder/Time for a Leader (1982),
which was co-produced with Joaquín Eyzaguirre. Public screenings of this film
were initially forbidden, but after an appeal, it was finally shown with certain
restrictions. In an interview, she admitted she was ‘one more among the mad
people who bet on the movie-making delusion in this country’ (Mouesca 2011b).
After the end of Pinochet’s rule and a return to democracy in 1990, the film-
making industry began to grow, producing 34 films in ten years (Cinechile 2014b).
Two films made by women in that period received some recognition: En Tu Casa
a las Ocho/Your place at Eight (1995), written and directed by Christine Lucas, and
Mi último hombre/My Last Man (1996), directed by Tatiana Gaviola and written
by Jorge Durán. The film had a strong cast but, unfortunately, did not get good
reviews and was a box-office flop (Cinechile 2009).
The National Endowment for the Development of Culture and the Arts
(FONDART) was formed in 1993 and aimed to support the development of the
arts, the dissemination of culture, and the preservation of Chile’s cultural herit-
age. Since its creation the fund has contributed to 90 per cent of the films made
in the country (Emol 2011). The Fondo de Fomento Audiovisual (Audiovisual
Development Fund) was created in 2004, a decade later, to finance the produc-
tion and distribution of films, screenwriting, equipment, training, research and
dissemination of new creative and technological innovation trends (Fondos de
Cultura 2014), and helped women screenwriters and directors gain a foothold in
the industry.
At the beginning of the new century, many Chilean films had become better at
pleasing their audience as well as the critics. The premiere of El chacotero sentimental/
The Sentimental Prankster (1999) marked the turning point, as this feature film
played to full theatres. The film is about parallel stories linked to three concepts,
poverty, love and sex, and its screenplay drew on real-life stories from a popular
Chilean radio programme. Four years later, Boris Quercia achieved unparallelled
success with Sexo con amor/Sex with Love (2003), which broke box-office records
in its first weekend. Some of the most successful productions of this period were
Chile 879
made by Alicia Scherson, Tatiana Gaviola and Paola Del Fierro. Yet despite the
encouraging success of local films, audiences are still small in relation to those of
foreign films shown in Chile.
Women writers in Chile have been accepted more readily in television. One of
the most successful television writers is Carolina ‘Coca’ Gómez (b. 1975), who
scripted Cerro Alegre (1999), an early hit for Channel 13,1 which she co-authored
with Sebastián Arrau. She, Arrau and Pablo Illanes were also the joint writers of
Machos (2003), a series that was sold to more than 18 countries and had a Mexican
remake. Gómez was also asked to launch the drama unit of Chilevisión (2006),
and was commissioned to write Vivir con 10/Living with 10 (2006), Mala Conducta/
Misconduct (2008), and Mujeres de Lujo/Luxury Women (2010), among others. In
2007, Normal con Alas/Regular with Wings, a film she wrote and directed, was
nominated for an award in the Best Debut Feature category of the New Latin
American Film Festival of La Habana.
Patricia Paola ‘Nona’ Fernández (b. 1971) also made a name for herself in
television as an actor, writer and screenwriter. She has written screenplays for
the National Television Channel (TVN), the most successful of which have been
Aquelarre/Witches Sabbath (1999), jointly authored by her and Fernando Aragón,
Arnaldo Madrid and Hugo Morales; Dónde está Elisa/Where Is Elisa? (2009) with
Pablo Illanes, Hugo Morales and Josefina Fernández; and Los Archivos del Cardenal/
The Cardinal’s Files (2011). The TVN series was about the human rights work carried
out by one of the Episcopal Vicariates of the Catholic Church during Pinochet’s
dictatorship. The series won the Altazor Award for Best Original Screenplay, which
went to the team of writers, Nona Fernández, Josefina Fernández, and Luis Emilio
Guzmán (La Nación 2012).
Since 2000 Chilean films written by women have had increasing success at
international film festivals. Alicia Scherson’s Play (2005) won at the Tribeca Film
Festival in the United States. She has gone on to write and direct several more
films, her latest being a drama, Il Futuro (2013).
Marialy Rivas (b. 1976), a writer and film director, is well known for her film
Joven y Alocada/Young and Wild, which gained the award at Sundance 2012 for the
Best Drama Screenplay. She directed the film, which was co-written with Pedro
Peirano, Sebastián Sepúlveda and Camila Gutiérrez. The film is based on the real-
life story of Camila Gutiérrez, and narrates the story of a rebellious young girl,
raised as an Evangelist, who explores new relationships and discovers love and
conflict between the sexes. While Rivas was a student at the Escuela de Cine de
Chile, she made an outstanding documentary, Desde siempre/Always (1996), which
won the Santiago Short Film Festival. In 2010, she wrote and directed the short
film Blokes, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival and gained prizes at
the Miami, San Francisco, Catalonia and other festivals (Cinechile 2015).
The award-winning director and occasional screenwriter Dominga Sotomayor
(b. 1985) is the youngest of all the Chilean filmmakers to have attained inter-
national recognition. Her film De jueves a domingo/Thursday till Sunday (2012),
which she wrote and directed, received the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Festival
and another project, Tarde joven para morir/Late to Die Young (in development
2014–15), gained partial funding from Sundance. Sotomayor believes that images
are the most important component of a screenplay because so little is understood
without them. Like many other Chilean screenwriters she explores the feelings
and sensations of childhood and enjoys working with children because they can
express a lot using very few words (Revista ONOFF 2012). She has also written and
directed the short films Videojuego/Video Game (2009), Noviembre (2007), Debajo/
Underneath (2007), and the documentary film Cessna (2006).
The film industry in Chile has become stronger in recent years. The role of
women screenwriters has been crucial to this success, creating films with universal
themes that touch upon core issues and contribute to a better understanding of
the Chilean identity. In 2011, 22 Chilean films were exhibited, with 870,879 spec-
tators. In 2012, the number of Chilean films exhibited had increased to 36, and
the audience more than doubled to 2,524,563 (Fondo de Fomento Audiovisual
2014). More recently the creation of the Film Commission Chile (FCCH), in 2010,
led by the National Council for Culture and the Arts, gave a substantial boost to
the film industry. The organization seeks to promote the country as a location for
international blockbusters, highlighting the variety of landscape and geography,
the lower costs and ethnic plurality in Chile. From its inception to the present, the
FCCH has negotiated the production of over 40 international audiovisual projects
in Chile (Film Commission Chile 2013).
There has been a dearth of literature about the contribution of women writers to
the Chilean film industry and it is only in the last decade that their role has been
recognized. Many exiled women screenwriters have returned to their homeland,
and are writing about Chilean society and its recent history, tackling topics such
as the traumas undergone during the military regime, or stories about real-life
events, while comedy is a popular subject. Most women screenwriters aim to make
the audience easily identify with their characters, who are created from everyday
life and put in situations the audience can relate to.
The next section looks in more detail at four Chilean female screenwriters
whose work has made a significant contribution.
Valeria Sarmiento (b. 1948)
Valeria Sarmiento was born in Valparaíso and studied at the Escuela de Cine of the
University of Chile at Viña del Mar from 1966 until it was closed down in 1970.
In 1968 she married the renowned Chilean film director Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011)
and began editing her husband’s short films, which were co-produced by Editorial
Quimantu and TVN, the Chilean national television channel. Sarmiento made
her debut as a filmmaker in her own right in 1972 with the premiere of Un sueño
como de colores/A Dream Like in Colour (1972), a short documentary that focused
on everyday events in the lives of a group of women working as strippers.
Sarmiento entered the film industry while the Unidad Popular Party was in
government. After the 1973 coup, Valeria, like many other writers and filmmakers
of her generation, was forced to leave the country and moved to Paris with her
husband. She began to make a name for herself by editing several French films,
Chile 881
working with her husband and respected directors such as Guy Mollet and Robert
Kramer (Mouesca 2011c). Sarmiento found it difficult to get funding for her pro-
ductions, and went to Spain, Belgium and Germany where she made fiction and
documentary productions between 1976 and 1982 (Kuhn and Radstone 1990).
Sarmiento has been nominated for many awards and is considered to be the
most important living woman screenwriter and director because of her valuable
contribution to the development of the Chilean film industry.
Sarmiento has explored various media formats during a career which has
included writing and directing feature films, series and documentaries for televi-
sion, as well as the role of producer, editor, and even costume designer. She has
also acted in films such as Diálogos de exiliados/Dialogues of the Exile (1975), and in
the short film Voyage d’une main/Voyage of a Hand (1985), both directed by Ruiz.
Although Sarmiento has made more documentaries than feature films, the same
themes are evident in all her work. Her writing is particularly critical of Chilean
society but other subjects in her fictions include the world of women, the pursuit
of happiness, love, and a rejection of machismo; even though men in her films
appear to be superior, this is resented and the women are often unhappy.
In 1972 Sarmiento wrote and directed three short films: Un sueño como de
colores/A Dream Like in Colour, Los minutes/The Minutes, and Poesía popular: La teoría
y la práctica/Popular Poetry: Theory and Practice. During her exile in Paris, in 1975,
she continued her movie-making career, directing the short film La nostalgia/
Nostalgia (1979). She also wrote and directed Gens de nulle part, gens de toutes parts/
People from Nowhere; People from Everywhere, which was sponsored by the Centre
Bruxellois de L’Audiovisual.
In 1982, Sarmiento wrote and directed the documentary El hombre cuando es
hombre/A Man, When He Is a Man, which shows, with some comic moments, the
traditions that have encouraged the very evident chauvinism in Costa Rican soci-
ety and machismo in Latin America (FicValdivia 2013). Two years later, Sarmiento
co-wrote the screenplay and directed Notre marriage/Our Marriage (1984), which was
made in Portugal and produced in France. The film was awarded the Gran Premio
Donostia para Nuevos Realizadores at the 1984 San Sebastian Film Festival. The film
is an adaptation of a story by Corin Tellado, which Valeria endowed with an allegori-
cal touch; it is a portrait of repressed sexuality and moves between irony and ridicule.
Following this, Sarmiento co-wrote and directed Amelia Lopez O’Neill (1991),
a drama set in her hometown, Valparaíso. The film develops Sarmiento’s often
recurring themes; critical awareness of Chilean machismo and the social class
differences in Chilean society. The film was one of the nominees in the feature
film category of the Berlin Festival, but failed to gain an award. The film is set in
a bar where a journalist meets Igor, who is helping his investigation into the life
of Amelia, a woman of ill-repute whose life has become the talk of the town. Igor’s
self-appointed mission is to clean up Amelia’s image and reputation. Igor tells her
story to the journalist, making it clear that Amelia was neither a bad woman nor
a streetwalker, just obsessed with being faithful.
The following year, Sarmiento wrote and directed two TV documentaries, Latin
Woman Beat in California (1992) and El planeta de los niños/The Planet of Children
(1992); then, in 1995, she wrote the screenplay for and directed Elle/She, a tribute
to Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece Él/He (1953), which describes a jealous and paranoid
husband in the process of losing his mind. In Sarmiento’s film, husband and wife
are tragicomically paranoid and jealous. Elle is, again, critical of Chilean society.
In the film, the man is clearly the woman’s superior in terms of patriarchy, yet
Sarmiento’s development of the story makes her become his equal.
Next Sarmiento wrote and directed the short film Carlos Fuentes: A voyage dans
le temps/Carlos Fuentes: A Journey Through Time (1998), and in the same year wrote
and directed the film L’inconnu de Strasbourg/The Stranger from Strasbourg (1998),
a thriller about lovers who decide to murder the woman’s husband so they can
continue with their affair. They part and arrange to meet again on a given date
and in a given place but, before the rendezvous, the lover loses his memory and
is mistaken for the heir of a millionaire family (Premiere 2014). In 2002 Sarmiento
wrote and directed the film Rosa la china/Rose, the Chinese, set in Havana in the
fifties. The film, a melodrama, was named after a radio serial which was so popular
that it brought the country to a standstill at siesta time. The film tells the story
of a husband who discovers his wife is having an affair with a handsome young
man (CineCuba 2008). Films like Rosa la China and L’inconnu de Strasbourg show
women who, in their search for happiness, become unfaithful and even attempt
to kill their spouses. In 2004, she directed another TV documentary, Au Louvre avec
Miquel Barceló/At the Louvre with Miquel Barceló, and most recently she created the
idea for and directed Secretos/Secrets (2008), with a screenplay written by her hus-
band, a comedy that critiques Chilean society by portraying its double standards
and hypocrisy (Mouesca 2011c).
Tatiana Gaviola (b. 1955)
Tatiana Gaviola studied at the Arts and Communication School of the Catholic
University, until it was closed down by Pinochet in 1973. Gaviola then began
to work in television production and remained in Chile when many in the film
industry left the country or were forced into exile. She became well known for
her video documentaries dealing with the history of Chile and women’s issues,
and she has also written fiction for cinema and television. Gaviola began work-
ing in the film industry in 1982, making her debut as a writer and director with
the documentary Tiempo para un líder/Time for a Leader (1982) about the life and
death of former president Eduardo Frei Montalva. The film was censored and
its exhibition banned, despite the efforts of Gaviola and her team, although it
was screened at La Comedia, a small cinema in Santiago.The following year she
wrote and directed the documentary Tantas vidas, una historia/So Many Lives,
One Story (1983), which presents a series of testimonies on the social marginali-
zation of working-class women at the time. In 1984 she wrote and directed the
documentary Machalí, 1951. Fragmentos de una historia/Machalí, 1951. Fragments
of a Story, which depicted the harsh lives of copper miners and the need to
form the Confederation of Copper Miners in the 1950s. Also in 1984, Gaviola
took her first steps in fiction with the six-minute short film Yo no le tengo miedo
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a nada/I Fear Nothing, a phrase continually repeated by the different women in

the film (Mouesca 2011b).
The difficult political situation in Chile did not stop Gaviola making films,
and her first medium-length film, Ángeles/Angels (45 mins), which she scripted
and directed, was released in 1988. This was one of the few Chilean productions
released in the same year in which elections were called and gave hope for the
restoration of democracy. Gaviola was invited to a screening of the film at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. The film, a combination of documentary
and fiction, tells the story of a group of university students and cultural activists
who, one after the other, go missing within the context of the military dictator-
ship (Mouesca 2011b).
Gaviola did not make another film until 1996, when she directed the film Mi
último hombre/My Last Man (90 mins), written by Jorge Durán, about a famous
journalist who records the moment in which a group of journalists take control
of a radio station, killing a man. The film was selected by the critics at the 1996
Cannes Film Festival. In 2004, she was awarded the Altazor Prize in the television
category of Best Drama Director for her film La Baby/Stories of Women. In 2006 she
directed some episodes of Reporteras/Reporters, a TV series for Chilevisión about
four women journalists who work for a women’s magazine (Portal del Cine y el
Audiovisual 2014).
The next film to be written and directed by Gaviola was Teresa, first screened
in 2009. This film, based on the life of Teresa Wilms, a famous and rebellious
Chilean writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tells of her
libertine character, her sexual adventures, and her passion for writing. Although
the film did not gain any awards, it is one of her greatest achievements and
helped her to regain her respected position in Chilean filmmaking. In Teresa,
Gaviola explores some of her personal concerns: the role of women, their lack of
freedom, and the injustice of patriarchal societies. The narrative tells the tragic
history of a woman who is punished by the father of her children because she
is unfaithful to him. Teresa is sent to a convent and barred from seeing her two
children, but escapes and moves to Buenos Aires where she becomes a success-
ful writer. She has an affair with a doctor who commits suicide. In a final spiral
of despair she meets her two children secretly, but is told that she will never
see them again. Deeply depressed Teresa commits suicide on Christmas Eve in
Paris 1921.
Between 1993 and 1995, Gaviola served as president of the Chilean Association
of Producers and was influential in the development of a film school project for
the Universidad Vicente Pérez Rosales (UVIPRO). Gaviola chaired the film school
and left her own mark, especially with regard to the curriculum in other film
schools in the country.
Gaviola’s work is particularly important because it gives an account of events
that have taken place in Chile. Her first years as a filmmaker coincided with the
dictatorship and Gaviola’s aim has been, and still is, to give a voice to those who
cannot express themselves, defend human rights, and show the political reality
of the country.
Alicia Scherson (b. 1974)
Alicia Scherson studied at the International School of Film and Television in San
Antonio de los Baños from 1994–5. During her student days she made several
16mm short films and documentaries which were screened at major international
film festivals. In 1999, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and travelled to
Chicago to do a Master’s degree in fine arts at the University of Illinois. While
there she made video recordings of short fiction stories and experimental work
which she showed at galleries and festivals.
Scherson has successfully worked as a screenwriter, director, producer, and
screenwriter since 2002, when she made the short fiction film Crying Underwater,
which was premiered in Holland. The 16-minute film recreates the loneliness of
waiting, showing short scenes shot at Chicago O’Hare International Airport and
from several airplanes flying across the Atlantic Ocean.
In 2003, she founded her own company, La Ventura, to produce and co-produce
films made by her and other filmmakers. This production company organized
the international premieres of Play (2005), Turistas/Tourists (2009), and Verano/
Summer (2011), directed by José Luis Torres Leiva. La Ventura has worked on co-
productions with Chile, Argentina, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, and has
won bids for funding and national and international awards (La Ventura 2011).
In 2004, she wrote and began shooting her first feature film, Play (2005), which
was released with great success the following year and is probably the most
internationally renowned of her films. The film narrates the story of Cristina,
a young woman who finds a briefcase containing valueless personal items that
belong to Tristan, a man she does not know. She wanders around Santiago spying
on him and his ex-fiancée, Irene. Cristina begins to dress and style herself like
Irene, and when Tristan attempts suicide she saves him and takes him to hospital.
Scherson won 17 awards for Play, including Best New Director at the 2005 Tribeca
Film Festival, the Glauber Rocha Award at the 2005 Montreal International Film
Festival, Best New Director at the 2006 Skip City D-Cinema Festival, and the
Opera Prima Coral Award at the 2005 Havana International Festival of New Latin
American Cinema. The New York Times announced: ‘Scherson’s sophisticated
movie is a reflection of the social fabric of Santiago’ (Filmaffinity 2014c).
In the same year, Scherson wrote and directed the short film Baño de mujeres/
Women’s Restroom (2005), which premiered on Television Nacional. The narra-
tive centres on three women, whose personalities and lives are very different
and who are accidentally locked in an airport restroom. In 2009, Scherson co-
wrote, with Cristián Jiménez, the script for Ilusiones Ópticas/Optical Illusions,
which tells in three separate strands the stories of characters whose lives con-
verge: a security guard at a mall, who falls in love with a woman who is a thief;
a conscientious worker who finds out in a strange way that he is about to be
fired; and a blind skier who recovers his sight and is frightened by what he sees
(Filmaffinity 2014b).
Again in 2009, Scherson wrote, produced and directed Turistas/Tourists (2009),
shot mainly at the Radal-Siete Tazas National Park in Maule, in Chile’s Region VII.
Chile 885
This film was screened at the 2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival, where it
was nominated for a Tiger award. It tells the story of Carla, a 37-year-old woman
whose husband drives off and leaves her on the highway when she tells him that
she has had an abortion, so she decides to join a 21-year-old Norwegian man who
is heading for the National Park.
It was not until 2012 that Scherson directed and wrote the script for her third
feature film, Il Futuro, an adaptation of the book Una novelita lumpen/A Lumpen
Novella by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. The film was screened at the Sundance
and Rotterdam festivals in January 2013 and was released in Chile in April of the
same year (Filmaffinity 2014a). The film tells the story of Bianca and Tomás, two
teenagers who are orphaned, leave school and are about to join the world of the
inner city, when a former TV actor takes them under his wing. Bianca attempts
to overcome her loneliness by having an intimate relationship with the man who
is old and blind.
Unlike many filmmakers of her generation, Scherson does not address political
or social issues in her screenwriting and, rather than focusing on great events or
moments of national history, she concentrates on the psychological traits of her
characters, their inner lives and their subjective world. Thus, there are traits that
many of the protagonists of her screenplays and films have in common – for
instance, Carla in Turistas and Cristina in Play are insecure, fragile and reflexive
characters. These two films invite the viewer to probe into the inner world of the
two women and reflect on their search for personal identity.
Paula Del Fierro (b. 1979)
Paula Del Fierro’s mother is the Chilean writer Ana María del Río, who co-wrote
the screenplay Bombal (2011) with her daughter. Del Fierro went to university
to study engineering, leaving when she realized that she really wanted to be a
filmmaker (Ya 2007). She studied at the Film School of Chile, where some of her
classmates were to become nationally renowned, for instance Sebastián Silva and
Matías Bize. While there she met Julio Rojas, one of her teachers, who became her
husband. Del Fierro explains he asked her to assist him in writing a script and they
have been working together since then (Ya 2007).
Del Fierro’s professional life started in 2003 when she co-wrote, with Rojas,
Sábado, una película en tiempo real/Saturday, a Film in Real Time, the debut film
of the Chilean director Matías Bize. It relates the story of the day on which a
bride-to-be finds out that her future husband has been unfaithful. The 65-minute
comedy takes the perspective of the bride-to-be and her vengeance as she runs
through Santiago looking for her fiancé. The story, filmed in real time, focuses on
the emotions of the girl.
In 2004, Del Fierro wrote the scripts for the TV series Bienvenida realidad/
Welcome Reality (TVN, 2004–5) and Loco por ti/Mad About You (TVN, 2004–5), as
well as the screenplay for Alberto Daiber’s film El roto/Tough Guy, based on the
novel by Joaquín Edwards Bello. This film, set in a whorehouse, tells the story of
a man who goes to collect a debt and discovers that the debtor is dead, leaving
him to deal with the debtor’s widow, son and daughter, with whom he falls in
love (Cinechile 2014c).
In 2005, again with Rojas, Del Fierro co-wrote, with Gonzalo Lira, the screen-
play for Secuestro/Abduction, and directed by Lira, it is about the abduction of
the daughter of a wealthy family and how the lives of the members of the clan
change after this event, including the (re)encounter of the parents who have been
divorced for a decade (Cinechile, 2014d).
That same year Del Fierro also worked with six other writers on the script of
Mi mejor enemigo/My Best Enemy (2005), directed by Alex Bowen. The film narrates
what happened while Argentinean and Chilean troops in Patagonia were waiting
for an armed confrontation between the countries. In 2006 she worked as a script-
writer on the TV series Urgencias/Emergency (TVN, 2006) and in 2008 she co-wrote,
again with Rojas, the script for Rodrigo Ortuzar’s film All Inclusive. It tells the story
of a family that, after many years, manage to go on holiday to an all-inclusive
resort on the Maya Riviera. An unexpected storm triggers heartfelt conversations
among the members of the family (Cinechile 2014a). The story reflects on the
family as something that has to be worked on. ‘The only way of being a family is
deciding to be, either way,’ says Ortuzar (Carvajal 2007).
In 2011, Del Fierro wrote the script for Marcelo Ferrari’s Bombal, in collaboration
with her mother. The film, set in the 1940s, is the true story of the famous Chilean
writer María Luisa Bombal whose obsession with her former lover, Eulogio, leads
to a suicide attempt and then attempted murder. Bombal is put in jail but Eulogio
drops the charges and she is freed, though still unhappy. The film, which won
the prize for Best Supporting Actor (Alejandro Goic) and Best Cinematography
at the Pedro Sienna Awards in 2012, underscores the theme of how obsessive
love, which centres exclusively on the person’s own needs and only seeks self-
satisfaction, leads to unhappiness. The protagonist, in an intense and passionate
relationship with Eulogio, seems to be strong, provocative and rebellious, but her
other self is insecure, tormented and in need of affection. Bombal is bent on self-
destruction and ends her life in solitude.
Note
1. A mixed-ownership television channel jointly owned by one of the most important
business conglomerates in Chile, the Luksic Group, and the Catholic University of Chile.
This university was originally Channel 13’s sole owner.
References
Carvajal Sandoval, A. 2007. ‘Nueva película chilena: Terminó el rodaje de All Inclusive’.
Available at: http://www.plazaespectaculos.cl/2007/06/20/nueva-pelicula-chilena-termino-
el-rodaje-de-%E2%80%9Call-inclusive%E2%80%9D/ (accessed 25 March 2014).
Cinechile. 2014a. ‘All Inclusive’. Available at: http://www.cinechile.cl/pelicula-253 (accessed
25 March 2014).
Cinechile. 2014b. ‘Cronología del Cine Chileno’. Available at: http://www.cinechile.cl/cronologia.
php (accessed 25 March 2014).
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Cinechile. 2014c. ‘El Roto (Perjudícame Cariño)’. Available at: http://www.cinechile.cl/pelicula-

74 (accessed 25 March 2014).
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March 2014).
Cinechile. 2015. ‘Marialy Rivas’. Available at: http://www.cinechile.cl/persona-6166 (accessed
16 June 2015).
CineCuba. 2008. ‘Rosa la China’. Available at: http://cinecuba.blogspot.com/2008/06/rosa-
la-china-2002.html (accessed 26 March 2014).
FicValdivia. 2013. ‘Chilenas en el exilio: Valeria Sarmiento. El hombre cuando es hombre’.
Available at: http://www.ficvaldivia.cl/2013/programacion-2/directoras-chilenas-exilio/
el-hombre-cuando-es-hombre/ (accessed 2 April 2014).
Film Commission Chile (FCCH). 2013. ‘About Film Commission Chile’. Available at: http://
www.filmcommissionchile.org/acerca-de-film-commission-chile/238/?lang=en (accessed
25 March 2014).
Filmaffinity. 2014a. ‘Il future’. Available at: http://www.filmaffinity.com/es/film940513.html
Filmaffinity. 2014b. ‘Ilusiones ópticas’. Available at: http://www.filmaffinity.com/es/film186807.
html (accessed 25 March 2014).
Filmaffinity. 2014c. ‘Play’. Available at: http://www.filmaffinity.com/es/film493615.html (accessed
25 March 2014).
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Fondos de Cultura. 2014. ‘¿Qué son los fondos de cultura?’ Available at: http://www.
fondosdecultura.gob.cl/fondos (accessed 25 March 2014).
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(2014). Available at: http://www.cinechile.cl/persona-4867 (accessed 25 March 2014).
Jara, E. 2013. ‘Gabriela von Bussenius Vega’, in J. Gaines, R. Vatsal, and M. Dall’Asta (eds)
Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York, NY:
Columbia University Libraries Available at: https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-
gaby-von-bussenius-vega/ (accessed 25 March 2014).
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Virago Press.
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Available at: http://www.lanacion.cl/serie-los-archivos-del-cardenal-arraso-en-premios-
altazor-2012/noticias/2012-05-08/230157.html (accessed 25 March 2014).
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Mouesca, J. 2011b. ‘Tatiana Gaviola’, in Diccionario de Cine Iberoamericano, SGAE, in Cinechile
Mouesca, J. 2011c. ‘Valeria Sarmiento’, in Diccionario de Cine Iberoamericano, SGAE, in Cinechile
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cinelatinoamericano.org/cineasta.aspx?cod=23 (accessed 25 March 2014).
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Villaroel, M., and I. Mardones. 2012. Señales contra el olvido; cine chileno recobrado. Santiago:
Cuarto Propio.
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index.asp?id={f250e2ea-e757-4c56-9e69-d4c191bab7ab} (accessed 25 March 2014).
Venezuela
Belkis Suárez Faillace
Women writers, directors and producers in Venezuela have helped to make it

one of Latin America’s most important film-producing countries. In Venezuela,
screenwriting has been closely tied to film directing, and it is common to find
many films with the same director and screenwriter. This entry outlines the work
of female Venezuelan screenwriters who have also served as directors and some-
times producers, focusing on women scriptwriters who have made a significant
contribution to Venezuelan film. One of the weakest areas in Venezuelan film is
script development and a sole credit as screenwriter is rare, with the exception of
work in soap operas.
Margot Benacerraf (b. 1926)
Margot Benacerraf is one of the most important figures in the nation’s film indus-
try. Her work as a screenwriter and director stands out in a world dominated by
men, and she opened the way for other female filmmakers. Benacerraf’s films
portray the ordinary Venezuelans’ lives in a way not shown before. Her contribu-
tion to Venezuelan film earned her recognition at the Cannes Festival in 1959,
when she shared the International Critics Prize. Benacerraf was born in Caracas,
Venezuela, growing up in a tense political climate during the dictatorial regime
of Juan Vicente Gómez, who governed the country from 1908 until his death in
1935. Despite the repressive nature of the regime, Venezuela experienced many
political shifts and significant cultural changes. With respect to gender roles,
Venezuelan society was conservative and women were expected to follow tradi-
tional patterns of gender behaviour. In most instances women’s education went
no further than elementary school but Benacerraf was a keen student and in her
second year of high school won the Pan-American Prize for youth essay writing.
She later studied literature at the Pedagogical Institute of Caracas and the Central
University of Venezuela. Benacarraf had a passion for theatre, which led to her first
theatrical work, Creciente/Growing (date of composition unknown). Benacerraf’s pro-
fessor submitted the play to the Hispanic American Theatre Competition held by
Columbia University in the United States, where it won first prize, which included
publication, its production in the prize winner’s country, and a scholarship to
889
study theatre for three months in New York. Benacerraf then went there to study
in the drama programme at the New School for Social Research, directed at the
time by the famous German director Erwin Piscator (McNamara 2011).
While studying, Benacerraf became more and more interested in cinema,
as it brought together the different artistic forms that interested her: scenery,
music, and plot. During the day she wrote scripts and studied various cinematic
techniques, and at night she studied with her professors, including Joris Jacob
and Dalton Trumbo, among others. Those three months in New York radically
changed her life (McNamara 2011). In the fall of 1949 she travelled to Europe
with her parents, and continued her studies in France at the renowned Institut des
Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC), remaining there until 1950, when
her father became ill and she returned to Venezuela.
The country was experiencing a period of great change in terms of its culture.
The Cinematographic Chroniclers Club of Caracas was founded in 1951 and the
country’s first association of independent film critics, as well as the Venezuelan
Film Club, an organization dedicated to the distribution of Venezuelan film. The
next year, in 1952, Televisora Nacional, Channel 5, transmitted the country’s first
television programmes (McNamara 2011).
Benacerraf made her first film, Reverón (1952), when the French New Wave
director Alain Resnais turned it down to do another project (Merin 2011). Reverón
is a 40-minute documentary about the Venezuelan painter Armando Reverón in
which Benacerraf captures the life of the artist at home and at work. As in her
later feature-length film, Araya (1959), Benacerraf developed a friendship with
the artist and, because of this, Reverón was little bothered by the proximity of the
director’s camera. This allowed the audience to understand the world of Reverón,
who at the time was considered crazy by many, yet he is one of Venezuela’s most
esteemed artists.
With Reverón Benacerraf gained national and international recognition. The
film won first prize at the Festival Internacional de Películas de Arte (International
Art Film Festival) in 1952. It was shown in 1953 in the Berlin and Edinburgh Film
Festivals, and in the same year it won the Premio Cantaclaro (Cantaclaro Award)
given by the Prensa Cinematográfica Venezolana. Benacerraf is credited with
making the above two films, but she also made a short film about Picasso’s life,
although unfortunately the film was lost (Merin 2011).
Benacerraf’s return to Venezuela and her work on the film Reverón coincided
with the military regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who remained in power until
1958. In 1957 Benacerraf began production of Araya (1959), which was co-written
with Pierre Seghers. The film documents the life of the people who worked fishing
and mining for salt on the peninsula, although, as Benacerraf explains, ‘the sun is
a protagonist – it makes everything. You combine it with the wind and water and
it makes salt – and it marked what happened day after day, over and over again,
for 500 years, every day – until the machine came and everything changed’ (Merin
2011). Benacerraf studied historical documents and texts in libraries in Seville,
Madrid, and Amsterdam, and then later visited the Araya Peninsula, in the east of
Venezuela, before she wrote the script. The research behind the writing of a script
is one of Benacerraf’s major contributions to Venezuelan cinema.
Venezuela 891
According to Benacerraf, Araya was intended as a poetic film about the lives of
three families and their interaction with the land and each other (Merin 2011). It
has been considered a documentary, but, as Benacerraf has pointed out on more
than one occasion, this is not correct; while the film includes actors who were
members of the local community, it had an extensive script, which did not aim
to document their daily lives (Calvo 2014). Araya is in reality ‘an epic lyric poem
whose documentary-style narrative can be said to derive from Italian neo-realism
and the Flaherty documentary tradition’ (Schwartzman 1996: 309).
In 1959 Araya was shown at the XII Cannes International Film Festival, where
it was awarded the Superior Technical Commission’s prize for both sound and
image, and it shared the International Critics’ Prize with Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima
mon amour (Calvo 2014). The film had successful openings in countries like
Canada and China, but it did not enjoy the same reception in Latin America or
in Benacerraf’s home country, where its opening was delayed for 18 years due to
various factors: a copy of the film was lost, the director became ill, the film editing
was not to Benacerraf’s complete satisfaction, and ‘the Venezuelan distributors
claimed that the Venezuelan public would never understand such an “intellectual”
film’ (Schwartzman 1996: 311).
Araya ‘stands not only as a landmark film in Venezuela, but is also one of the
first major social documentaries in Latin America to anticipate what would even-
tually become known through the 1960s and ‘70s as the “New Latin American
Cinema”’ (Schwartzman 1996: 309). The film, due to its innovative and creative
content, was selected as one of the five best films in the history of Latin American
film by the Neighbourhood Film/Video Project, in its Retrospective of Latin
American Visions: a Half Century of Latin American Cinema, 1930–1988, in 1990
(McNamara 2011). Nevertheless, Araya still had not been translated into Spanish,
nor had it been publicly screened in Venezuela. Finally, in May of 1977, Araya
opened to Venezuelan audiences, with Spanish narration by José Ignacio Cabrujas
(the original French narration was by Laurent Terzief).
After living in Paris for a period in the early 1960s, Benacerraf returned to
Venezuela where she helped to form the National Institute of Culture and
Fine Arts (Insituto Nacional de Cultura y Bellas Artes) and then the National
Cinematheque in 1966. Gabriel García Márquez asked Benacerraf to write the
script for the film La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndida y su abuela desal-
mada/The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndida and her Heartless Grandmother,
and to do this she travelled to Europe in August 1968, but it was never filmed.
Benacerraf is an important figure in Venezuelan film, not only because of her
scriptwriting, but because her work as a director gave her recognition and prom-
inence in a world dominated by men. Working in film in Venezuela at that time
was very difficult, and being a woman writing and directing film was even more so,
Benacarref’s films helped to open up the area for women. Moreover, both Araya and
Reverón were made with minimal resources, yet this did not stop Benacerraf from
producing films of great quality. Thanks to Reverón the life of one of Venezuela’s most
prominent twentieth-century artists is more widely known and better understood.
There are many areas in which Margot Benacerraf has contributed to Venezuelan film.
In 1971 she established the Caracas Athenaeum’s Film Center (Centro-Cine Ateneo
de Caracas) in Caracas, dedicated to cinematographic activities within the Athenaeum.

Benacerraf achieved national and international recognition for her work, taking
part in public life until a heart attack forced her to retire. As recognition for her
contribution to Venezeualan cinema the Caracas Athenaeum named a film theatre
after her in 1987.
Solveig Hoogesteijn (b. 1946)
Solveig Hoogesteijn was born in Sweden but her family emigrated to Venezuela
when she was a baby and she stayed there until she was 21, when she moved to
Germany to study sculpture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste,
Stuttgart. Hoogesteijn explains that it was after realizing sculpture was ‘a very soli-
tary activity, and one very closely confined to gallery and museum audiences, very
elitist and not open to the entire public, that she decided to study film’ (González-
Barreto and Silva 2011: 128). In 1975, at 29, she graduated in directing from the
Munich School of Film and Television, at the height of the New German Cinema
movement. ‘My time at the film school was very beneficial because not only did
I learn to direct and write scripts, but I also learned and worked in all the specialized
roles that make up this great art’ (González-Barreto and Silva 2011: 128).
For her thesis she wrote and directed an hour-long documentary entitled Puerto
Colombia (1975), about a Venezuelan fishing village. The film has a circular narra-
tive structure with numerous flashbacks and was well received. Bavarian television
asked her to work for them as an independent contractor and make a film on one
of the authors of the Latin American literary boom. The success of Puerto Colombia
allowed Hoogesteijn to secure a grant to finance her second film, El mar del tiempo
perdido/The Sea of Lost Time (1977), an adaptation of the short story of the same
name by Gabriel García Márquez, which she co-wrote, directed and produced. The
resulting film received several international awards, and after García Márquez won
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the film was distributed and shown in ten
different countries.
Although the film was not a financial success, its positive reception did allow
Hoogesteijn to secure financing for her third movie, Manoa (1980). When writ-
ing the script, she explains that she was ‘coming out of my academic experience,
which makes one formally disciplined and ambitious in terms of finishing pro-
jects and establishing goals but also less concerned with the public, much less
than I am now’ (González-Barreto and Silva 2011: 130). The film was a Venezuelan
and German co-production with a road-trip narrative about two young men trav-
elling through Venezuela. Manoa represented Venezuela at the 1980 Cannes Film
Festival.
Her next work, which she again wrote and directed, was Alemania puede ser
tan bella, a veces/Sometimes Germany Can Be So Beautiful (1982). Unfortunately,
little is known about this work. After this came Macu, la mujer del policía/Macu,
The Policeman’s Wife (1987), directed by Hoogesteijn, with a script co-written by
Hoogesteijn and Milagros Rodríguez. The idea for the film came to Hoogesteijn
when she read a newspaper article about a murder case that drew national
Venezuela 893
attention, involving an 11-year-old girl who had been seduced by a 20-year-old

policeman, with whom she had two children. Hoogesteijn said she wanted to
bring this story to the screen because ‘I saw this as the destiny of many Latin
American young women. It is the case of an exploited girl whose sexuality is the
only capital she can have and who has to face life as an adult’ (González-Barreto
and Silva 2011: 132). Based on the real-life Mamera case, Macu, la mujer del policía/
Macu, The Policeman’s Wife is the fictional story of María Inmaculada, an 11-year-
old girl who has to face the harshness and brutality of life. María has no other
option except to resign herself to the structures of power, to the man who controls
her, a police officer who dominates his neighbourhood, because even though eve-
ryone there knows what is going on, no one is willing to say anything (González-
Barreto and Silva 2011: 133). Hoogesteijn is interested in ‘barrio’ or slum culture,
in part because of her own privileged background. ‘It was a prohibited world, on
the one hand, and also dangerous and incomprehensible . . . besides the architec-
ture of the barrio is one of creativity, one that takes advantage of the space avail-
able, one of unique originality’ (González-Barreto and Silva 2011: 133).
Santera (1996), written and directed by Hoogesteijn, is a Spanish-Venezuelan
feature-length co-production about religious syncretism that focuses on the
blending of ideas and practices from the distinct religious traditions in Venezuela.
The plot follows the lives of two women, one in prison serving a sentence for
murder and the other a researcher who goes into the Venezuelan women’s pris-
ons to study the inmates. The film ‘explores the ability of women in general to
blame themselves for everything that happens to the men in their lives’ (Arreaza
1999). In Santera one encounters conflict between the rational and the irrational,
between Catholicism and santería, and between reason and intuition (Arreaza
1999), themes particularly important in Venezuelan society and which recur in
the work of Fina Torres, discussed below.
Hoogesteijn’s next feature film was released ten years later: Maroa (2006),
which she co-wrote and directed, and which went on to represent Venezuela in
the category of Best Foreign Language Film at the 79th Academy Awards. The
script was co-written with Fernando Castets and Claudio Nazoa, and focuses on
the life of an 11-year-old girl who is raised by her grandmother in a Caracas slum.
It seeks to open a window on the reality of many children and young people in
Venezuela who have found music as a way of combating poverty, violence, and
social injustice. Hoogesteijn explains that she ‘tried to understand how chil-
dren from the slums who make up the nation’s youth orchestras get hooked on
Mozart, Bach, and Handel’ (González-Barreto and Silva 2011: 135). Like Macu, la
mujer del policía/Macu, The Policeman’s Wife, Maroa tells the tale of a girl from the
slums, but from a more positive perspective. Maroa’s ending is one of hope, as the
protagonist manages to escape poverty and violence thanks to music. This con-
trasts with Macu, la mujer del policía/Macu, The Policeman’s Wife, where poverty
and violence feed off each other and produce a continuing cycle that appears to
have no end.
Hoogesteijn and her collaborators had high expectations for Maroa, which were
not entirely met. The film was first released in Spain, and by the time it reached
Venezuela, so many illegal copies of the film had been made that it had little success
at the box office.
One of the main themes of Hoogesteijn’s work is how to combat violence. For
her, Venezuelan directors have made themselves:
into masters of the representation of violence because we live very difficult

realities that affect our everyday lives. This is of great concern to many of us,
and because of this we try to denounce this violence through our films. We are
convinced that with more discussion on the subject, and with more portrayal
of it on screen, we will generate greater reflection on how to confront it and
eventually achieve a solution. If we do not speak out, the problem of violence
will only continue to grow. (González-Barreto and Silva 2011: 142)
Solveig Hoogesteijn is currently working on a new film entitled La duda/The

Doubt, which is scheduled for release in 2015. La duda/The Doubt takes place dur-
ing the years of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship and is told through the eyes of a
12-year-old girl from a German family.
Fina Torres (b. 1951)
Josefina Torres Benedetti, known as Fina Torres, was born in Caracas, Venezuela,
during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Torres grew up in La Castellana,
one of Caracas’s more comfortable neighbourhoods. From an early age Torres
knew she wanted to make movies and recounts how her father used to show
16mm silent films in their living room using a bed sheet as a screen. In 1970
she enrolled as a graphic design student at the Neumann Institute for Design
in Caracas, going on to take social communication at the Andrés Bello Catholic
University. Torres moved to Paris in 1974 to study cinematography at the Institut
des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, while working as a photographer.
Torres is one of the most widely recognized Venezuelan filmmakers, even
though she lived for 28 years in Paris, where she worked in the film industry.
Nonetheless, her work has always addressed themes close to Latin American
life and, after living in France, the United States, Mexico, and Singapore, Torres
returned to the country of her birth where she now forms part of an historical
moment in the development of the Venezuelan national film industry.
Over the course of her long career in film, she has worked on many projects
in multiple capacities, including screenwriter, director, producer, and editor. For
Torres the script is a guide that serves to give form and content to the film, and the
better and more developed the script, the more the likelihood of a quality film.
Script writing is, in her opinion, the most challenging aspect of movie making,
whether it is an original or an adaptation. Torres is a member of the Writers Guild
of America and the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD) of
France. She has written numerous scripts, both originals and adaptations, indi-
vidually as well as in collaboration with others. The protagonists of Torres’s films
‘are always female characters who in narrative terms defy society’s patriarchal
Venezuela 895
norms and in discursive terms distort the typical masculine view that dominates
film’ (Rodríguez 2013: 3).
Many of Torres’s works have been produced and have enjoyed wide distribu-
tion, and she has made both fiction and documentary films. Her first film was
Un largo viaje/A Long Trip (1977), a 30-minute short filmed in 16mm, which she
wrote, directed and edited. This was followed by the documentary Veronique
Sanson del otro lado del sueño/Veronique Sanson from the Other Side of the Dream
(1978), again written, directed, and edited by Torres. She is especially known for
the strong female characters in her fiction films such as Oriana (1982), Mecánicas
celestes/Celestial Mechanics (1995), Woman on Top (2000), and Habana Eva (2010).
All these fiction films were directed by Torres and, with the exception of Woman
on Top, written by her as well.
Of Torres’s extensive body of cinematic work, Oriana deserves special men-
tion as this 90-minute feature film made her famous. The script, co-written
with Antoine Lacomblez, is based on the short story Oriane, tía Oriane (1975) by
Colombian writer Marvel Moreno, which tells the story of María, a woman who
lives in Paris and returns to Venezuela to sell the ranch she inherits from her Aunt
Oriana. The house, where María spent some time as a girl, becomes the setting
in which the lives and idiosyncrasies of various generations are played out. The
plot has characters from different times who blend together, a very Borgian idea;
for example, María’s experience is continued by Oriana in a different era. As a
film Oriana has little dialogue, and perhaps for this reason it has generated many
interpretations. This was Torres’s first widely acclaimed film and it won many
international prizes, including the Camera d’Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival,
the Bronze Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1985, the Catalina
de Oro for Best Screenplay at the International Film Festival in Cartagena, also in
1985, and the Glauber Rocha for best Spanish-language film at the International
Film Festival in Figueira da Foz, Portugal.
Mecánicas celestes/Celestial Mechanics (1995), written and directed by Torres,
is a modern-day Cinderella story, set in Paris. According to Nicoson (2010) the
film is a parody of the classic fairy tale, in which Torres develops contemporary
themes that push the narrative away from the traditional tale, creating rebellious
female characters. In Torres’s version the main character travels to Paris in search
of fame and success. Mecánicas celestes/Celestial Mechanics won the audience award
at the NAMUE Festival in 1995; the Judges’ Grand Prize for outstanding narrative
feature at the Outfest Festival in Los Angeles; the ANAC National Award for best
Venezuelan film, 1996; and the special award at the Washington Film Festival,
also in 1996.
Habana Eva (2010), co-written and directed by Torres, is adapted from Cuban
writer Jorge Camacho’s original text, which takes place in Cuba in the period when
the Soviet Union ceased to offer economic aid to the island nation. A group of
French producers owned the rights to Camacho’s text, and they offered it to Torres
to make into a movie, and she accepted on the condition that she be allowed to
rework the script (El Nacional 2010). Habana Eva is a deceptively simple film in
which Torres allows for the development of a wide range of possible audience
perspectives and interpretations. It can be said that the film is about the city of
Havana and about Eva, the protagonist, hence the title, but it is also the story of
a girl who refuses to conform and who rebels against society to achieve what she
wants, while going through a personal transformation. The city of Havana is an
important character in the film, one that reveals contemporary issues within its
own social and political history by way of Eva’s life and experiences. Habana Eva
is a difficult film to categorize; the director says ‘it has a strange mix. It is comedy,
but at the same time it is sad. It is a combination of genres, with hints of romantic
comedy, which make people laugh, but deep down there is drama. Often I myself
do not know how to describe it. It’s very special’ (El Nacional 2010). This film
shows the importance of female characters in Torres’s work and how she likes to
portray strong women who move on in life regardless of the difficulties they have
experienced. There are three important male characters in this film who are all sub-
ordinate to women. In Habana Eva women subvert their usual role in society and
dominate all aspects of life; women are in charge of the labour force in a factory,
they are in charge of the family, the households and intimate relationships.
The film was honoured with many awards, including first prize for Best Picture
and second prize for the Audience’s Choice at the International Latin Film Festival
in New York and best Venezuelan feature-length fiction film in the Margarita Film
Festival, Venezuela.
Torres’s next screenplay, From Prada to Nada/From Prada to Nothing (2011), is an
adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and co-written with Luis Alfaro
and Craig Fernández. The romantic comedy tells the story of two Latin sisters who
are forced to move to Los Angeles after their father suddenly dies and leaves them
penniless. The two sisters progress from a superficial and luxurious life to one full
of difficulty, but this helps them to develop social values, and through these they
finally obtain true happiness.
In her latest work, Liz en Septiembre/Liz in September (expected release 2015),
Torres adapted the play Last Summer at Bluefish Cove by Jane Chambers. Torres
has worked on many other scripts, for example Nape Yoma (2006), directed by
Margarita Cárdenas, and also written scripts that have not been produced, for
instance Tierra de sombras/Land of Shadows (1986), Magic and Co (1996), I Am Just
(1998), and Tell Me What You See (2000).
Torres’s films follow the growth of her characters as they challenge established
societal norms and boundaries; Oriana, Mecánicas celestes/Celestial Mechanics, and
Habana Eva all portray ‘female characters who transform and free themselves
by way of some kind of transgression’ (González-Barreto and Silva 2011: 252).
Torres’s work in the Venezuelan film industry has had significant impact, not only
in her home country, but also throughout Latin America.
Margarita Cárdenas (unknown dates)
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Cárdenas studied social communication at Andrés

Bello Catholic University in Caracas. She quickly found work as a journalist and
in broadcasting on Channel 8, the national television channel, where she worked
Venezuela 897
until 1979, then moved to London. In England she worked as a producer and
director for the British Council and the BBC. During this time she wrote, directed
and produced her first film, a fictional work entitled Cindy or Cinderella Turned
Punk (date unknown) and then wrote and directed Land of Grace (date unknown),
a documentary about Venezuela.
In 1982 Cárdenas moved to France, and between 1983 and 1986 she worked
as an assistant director at the Societé Française de Production (SFP). Cárdenas has
collaborated with several directors in different countries, including Claude de
Givray, Gabriel Axel, Philippe Monnier, Michel Boisrond, and Jean-Jacques Goron.
In 1995 Cárdenas created the production company MC2 Productions. The
following year she wrote and produced Barrage sur l’Orénoque/Dam on the Orinoco
(1996), a TV movie, broadcast by TF1, that tells the story of a French engineer
who arrives in Venezuela to work on the construction of a dam on the Orinoco
River. This was followed by Marie et Tom/Marie and Tom (2000), a French-Canadian
co-production (IMDb 2014a).
In 2007 Cárdenas returned to Venezuela, where she has continued writing, direct-
ing, and producing films. In 2009 she wrote, directed, and produced Máscaras/
Masks (2009), a series of four short films, each 75 seconds long. She explains, ‘The
concept of each of the shorts is to give a first impression that invites the viewer to
discover what is behind every story’ (IMDb 2014b).
The same year Cárdenas wrote, directed, and produced Macondo (2009), a
62-minute documentary that takes its name from an important house once
owned by the Otero Castillo family and now demolished. The documentary
‘collects and saves for future generations a fragment of our 20th-century literary,
cultural, and political history’ (Corriente alterna 2014).
In 2011 Margarita Cárdenas returned to the subject of the Yanomami with her
fiction film Cenizas eternas/Eternal Ashes (2011). The film narrates the story of a
woman named Ana who suffers an accident while travelling in the Amazon with
her husband. The husband dies, and she is forced to survive in the hostile environ-
ment of the Amazon. Cenizas eternas/Eternal Ashes relates Ana’s experience with the
Yanomami as well as her daughter’s decision to go to the Amazon to search for her.
Mariana Rondón (b. 1966)
Mariana Rondón was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, the socio-political envi-

ronment in which she grew up shaping her view of the world and the subjects of
her films. The early part of her life was spent in ‘years of anguish, persecutions,
and jailings up until the peace process initiated by the Rafael Caldera presidency’
(Corneta 2010). Rondón’s films represent many of the activities her family and
friends had to employ to survive the violence that surrounded them. The narra-
tive is often told from a child’s perspective, which gives a particular feel to her
work, not only from a filmic perspective, but from one of technique as well.
Rondón works in many areas of the film industry and is a scriptwriter, direc-
tor, producer, and artist. She is one of first generation of students to study at the
School for Film in Cuba. There she wrote and directed several shorts, including
the 12-minute Cáscaras/Shells (1992). In 1991 she and other Latin American
filmmakers formed the Andean multinational company, Sudaca Films, which
has produced a wide variety of works, including Calle 22/22nd Street in 1994, a
short film directed by Rondón and co-written with Marité Ugás. The film won 22
international prizes, including Best Short Film at the Biarritz International Film
Festival in 1994 and the Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival, and was voted Best
Screenplay by the Caracas Municipal Council in 1993.
Her feature-length film, A la media noche y media/At Midnight and a Half (2000),
was another of her many collaborations with Marité Ugás. They jointly directed
and wrote the script for the film, based on a rumour in Caracas about a tidal wave
that will destroy the city: the population leave in a panic, running away from a
huge wave, with just a few characters left behind who turn Caracas into a giant
game board, where the stakes are love and the end of the world (Rondón 2012).
The feature film won five international awards, among them Best Film of 2000 at
the Providence Film Festival and Best Picture at the Montevideo Film Festival and
the Mérida Film Festival, both in 2005.
Postales de Leningrado/Postcards from Leningrad, written and directed by Rondón,
was released in 2007. The film takes place during the years of guerrilla fighting in
Venezuela and tells the story of these difficult years through the eyes of a girl and
her cousin. In the film, safe houses and false names form part of the girl’s daily
routine. The two children try to mimic their parents’ guerrilla activities, creating
labyrinths and superheroes that blur the lines between reality and fantasy. The
deaths, tortures, and accusations that characterize the guerrilla world form part
of the children’s lives; they know that some day their parents may not return
and they will only receive postcards from Leningrad. Postales de Leningrado won
23 international awards, including the El Abrazo Grand Prize for Best Picture at
the Biarritz Festival for Latin American Film and Culture in 2007, the Judges’
Award for Best New Film at the Mostra de Cine Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2007,
and Best Director at the Santa Cruz Film Festival, Santa Cruz, Bolivia in 2008.
Rondón co-wrote the script for El chico que miente/The Kid Who Lies (2011) with
its director, Marité Ugás. The film is set where the floods and massive mudslides
took place on Venezuela’s north coast at the end of the 20th century. The story
follows the life of a 13-year-old boy who leaves home and survives by telling
tales of the natural disaster. As Rondón explains, ‘These stories reveal some of
the truth, and his past becomes clearer. Ten years ago, a mudslide tore his world
apart. Many disappeared, his mother among them. Now the memories, carefully
threaded by his father, contradict each other and push him to search for his own
story’ (Rondón 2012). Since its debut in 2011, the film has been screened in over
30 film festivals and has won many accolades, including Best Film at the San Juan
Film Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the prize for Best Picture at the Flanders
Latin Film Festival in Belgium.
Rondón’s latest film is Pelo malo/Bad Hair (2013), which she both wrote and
directed. The 93-minute film follows the life of a nine-year-old boy with stub-
bornly curly hair, or, as it is commonly referred to in Venezuela, bad hair. The
boy wants to have it straightened for his yearbook picture. His mother, Marta,
Venezuela 899
who struggles desperately to raise two children after losing both her job and her
husband, is unhappy about this. Things are made more difficult by the fact that
they live in a country where girls dress up as beauty queens and boys as soldiers.
Rondón notes, ‘The more Junior tries to make himself look beautiful and make
his mother love him the more she rejects him. He will find himself cornered, fac-
ing a painful decision’ (Rondón 2012). Rondón points out, in an interview with
the Spanish newspaper El País, that Pelo malo/Bad Hair addresses the subject of
intolerance in Venezuela (García and Belinchón 2013). Although the film opened
quite recently in Venezuela, it has already garnered international attention, win-
ning the Concha de Oro for Best Picture at the San Sebastian Film Festival, 2013.
In addition to her work in film, Mariana Rondón has also worked on television
series with TZ Aztec and shown her artwork at numerous exhibitions.
Conclusion
Recent years have seen the emergence of other female Venezuelan film writers:
Carolina Paiz co-wrote the script for La hora cero/Zero Hour (2010) as well as
several episodes of television series like The Defenders, Grey’s Anatomy, and Gang
Related; Gabriela Rivas Páez wrote the short film Impoluto/Immaculate (2012)
and the screenplay for the feature film Patas pa’ arriba/Upside Down (2010); Irina
Dendiouk wrote the screenplay for Piedra, papel o tijera/Rock, Paper, Scissors (2012);
Milagro Rodríguez, in collaboration with Solveig Hoogesteijn, wrote Macu, la
mujer del policía/Macu, The Policeman’s Wife, and has sole credit as writer for Señora
bolero/Madame Bolero (1991); while Mariana Rondón’s frequent collaborator,
Martié Ugás, is a screenwriter, director, and producer originally from Peru but
who has lived in Venezuela for many years.
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Index: List of Screenwriters
Part I: Africa Pickering, Bridget, 8, 29

Stoffels, Krischka, 29
Burkina Faso
Bouyain, Sarah, 8 Nigeria
Nacro, Fanta Régina, 7, 8 Akindele, Funke, 32–4, 36, 37
Anyaene, Chineze, 37
Egypt Anyiam-Osigwe, Peace, 34–7
Abdallah, Hanan, 15 Isong, Emem, 32
Amir, Aziza, 9–11, 15 Jombo, Uche, 31–2, 33, 34, 36–7
Bakr, Inas, 13 Okereke, Stephanie, 37–8
El Din, Mona Noor, 13 Onwurah, Ngozi, 8, 38
Eldegheidi, Inas, 13, 15 Saro-Wiwa, Zina, 38
Hafez, Bahiga, 9, 11, 15 Ukpabio, Helen, 34
Hamza, Nadia, 13, 14
Kamel, Nadia, 15 South Africa
Khairy, Wafiya, 12 Beukes, Lauren, 41
Khalil, Hala, 13–14 Blecher, Sara 2, 40–1
Lotfy, Hala, 15 Brewer, Thandi, 40, 41
Mohamed, Amina, 9, 11–12 Frederikse, Julie, 41
Mohsen, Samira, 13 Goldsmid, Margaret, 41
Na’oum, Maryam, 13–14 Hall, Julie, 40, 41
Noujaim, Jehane, 15 Jacobs, Rayda, 41–2
Rushdy, Fatma, 9 Jansen van Vuuren, Anna Marie, 42
Shah, Hosn, 12–13 Johnston, Shirley, 42
Soliman, Wessam, 14, 16 Loots, Justine, 42
Mitchell, Beverly, 42–3, 44
Ghana Mohamed, Raeesa, 42
Badoe, Yaba, 18 Moodley, Jayan, 42
Busia, Akosua Cyamama, 18–20 Nogueira, Helen, 43
Djansi, Leila Afua, 20 Otto Sallies, Zulfah, 8, 43
Nyoni, Rungano, 18 Proctor, Elaine, 43
Quaashie, Veronica, 18 Schutte, Hanneke, 43
Sara-Wiwa, Zina, 18 Turner, Jann, 44
Van Eeden, Janet, 44
Kenya Vaughn, Sandra, 44
Kahiu, Wanuri, 21 Williams, Weaam, 42, 44
Kinyanjul, Wanjuri, 22
Munene, Matrid, 22 Tunisia
Amari, Raja, 8, 45, 50–1
Morocco Baccar, Salma, 45, 47, 51
Benlyazid, Farida, 23–7 Ben Mabrouk, Néjia, 45, 48, 51
Bitton, Simone, 27 Bornaz, Kalthoum, 45, 50, 51
Kassari, Yasmine, 28 Chikly Tamzali, Haydée, 45–7, 51
Marrakchi, Laila, 28 Nallouti, Aroussia, 47
Nejjar, Narjiss, 28 Tlatli, Moufida, 45, 49–50, 51
Namibia Zimbabwe
Hiveluah, Oshosheni, 29 Ingrid Sinclair, 8
901
902 Index
Part II: Asia Israel

Almagor, Gila, 106
China and Hong Kong Bat-Adam, Michal, 105–6
Ai, Xia, 56–7 Burshtein, Rama, 104–5
Chan Bo Wa (Chen Bao Hua/ Elkabetz, Ronit, 106
Ella Chan Bo Wa), 66 Geffen, Shira, 106
Chan Suk-Yin (Susan Chan Suk-Yin), 67 Kedar, Veronica (Ronni), 107
Chan Wan Man, Joyce, 66 Lavie, Talya, 106
Cheuk, Wan Chi (Chi See Goo Bi/Vincci Menahemi, Ayelet, 106
Cheuk Wan Chi), 67 Recanati, Mira, 106
Cheung Yueng Ting, Mabel (Zhang Wan Silverman, Yuta, 107
Ting/Mabel Cheung), 66 Yedaya, Keren, 106
Cheung, Ai-chai (Sylvia Ngai-ga Chang/
Sylvia Chang), 66 Japan
Chun Siu-Jan, Janet (Chun Siu Jan/Janet Hashida, Sugako, 116
Chin), 66 Hayashi, Yoshiko, 110, 114, 115
Chun Chun, Barbara Wong, 67 Inukai, Kyoko, 124
Ho Sai-Hong, Ivy, 66 Kusuda, Yoshiko, 116
Hui, Ann, 2, 56, 66, 67 Mishima, Yukiko, 124
Hui, Sharon, 66 Mizuki, Yoko, 113, 116–19, 123
Kao, Pao Shu (Go Bo Shu), 65 Mizushima, Ayame, 110, 114–15, 129
Lam Oi Wah, Aubrey, 66, 67 Nishikawa, Miwa, 116, 124–6
Law Cheuk Yu, Clara (Clara Law), 66, 168 Ogigami, Naoko, 116, 126–9
Liang, Xiao (Josephine Siao Fong-Fong), 65 Ohishi, Michiko, 129
Mak, Hei-yan Heiward, 67 Omori, Mika, 116, 129
Peng, Xiaolian, 56, 60–2 Sakane, Tazuko, 109–13, 130
Qin, Yifu (Nellie Chin Yu), 63–4 Suzuki, Noriko, 110, 114–16, 130
Shaw Lai King, Sandy, 66 Tanaka, Sumie, 116, 117, 118, 119–20, 123
Tang Shuxuan (Cecile Tang Shu Tanaka, Akiko, 116, 129
Shuen), 64–5 Wada, Natto, 115, 117, 118, 120–4
To, Chi Long (Christine T), 67
Yam, Yi Ji (Yi Zhi Ren), 63 Korea
Li Yu, 2, 56 Byun, Young-joo, 133, 136–7, 140, 142
Zhang, Ailing (Eileen Chang), 57–60, Hong, Ji-young, 136, 139, 142
63, 64, 68 Hung, Eun-won, 132
Hwang, Hye-mi, 132
India Lee, Jeong-hyang, 132, 133, 135–6,
Bai, Jaddan, 70–80, 84, 85, 86 138, 139
Begum, Fatma, 1, 69, 70, 72 Park, Nom-ok, 132
Irani, Honey, 82–4 Roh, Deok, 133, 137, 141
Lajmi, Kalpana, 70
Sen, Aparna, 70 Palestine
Taraporevala, Sooni, 81–2, 86 Dabis, Cherien, 143–4
Jacar, Annemarie, 143
Iran Sansour, Leila, 144
Bani-Etemad, Rakshan, 2, 92–5, 102 Masri, Mai, 144
Derakh’shandeh, Pour̄n, 89, 95–6 Mara’ana, Ibtisam, 144
Hekmat, Manijeh, 91 Tawil-Souri, Helga, 144
Kosari, Baran, 95
Makhmalbaf, Samira, 2, 96–101, 102, 103 Russia
Milani, Tahmineh, 92, 98–101, 102 Agadzhanova Shutko, Nina, 146, 150
Nabili, Marva, 90 Barantsevich, Zoia, 146–50, 159
Riahi, Shahla, 90 Bondarchuk, Natalya, 151
Sadi, Kobra, 90 Brumberg, Zinaida, 151
Index 903
Brumberg, Valentina, 151 Moffatt, Tracey, 165, 167

Khmelik, Maria, 152 Monticelli, Anna-Maria, 166
Kudrya, Zoya, 151–2 Moorhouse, Jocelyn, 165
Muratovna Litvinova, Renata, 146, 152 Morris, Judy, 163, 166
Loktev, Julia, 153 O’Brien, Kathleen, 163
Muratova, Kira, 153 Olsen, Christine, 163, 166
Rand, Ayn, 154–5 Oswald, Debra, 164
Rayskaya, Elena, 153, 154 Pellizzari, Monica, 167
Ryazantseva, Natalya, 146, 153, 155–6 Perkins, Rachel, 163, 167, 191
Smirnova, Avdotya (Dunya), 156–7 Rayson, Hannie, 164
Smirnova, Maria, 146, 157–8, 290 Riley, Sally, 163, 167
Tokareva, Viktoriya, 146, 153–4 Riley, Gina, 166
Vinogradskaya, Ekaterina, 158 Robertson, Mira, 166
Seres, Fiona, 166
Part III: Australasia Shortland, Cate, 165, 166, 182, 191
Smith, Sue, 164
Australia Szubanski, Magda, 166
Armstrong, Gillian, 164, 165, 185, 186 Thomson, Katherine, 164
Banks, Imogen, 166 Tilson, Alison, 166, 186–91, 192, 193
Barrett, Shirley, 165, 166 Turkiewicz, Sophia, 168
Bell, Alice, 166 Turner, Jane, 166
Campion, Jane, 163–6, 179–85, 186, 192, Ward, Rachel, 163, 165
193, 194, 201, 204 Watt, Sarah, 165
Castrique, Sue, 164 White, Erin, 163
Chobocky, Barbara, 164 Witcombe, Eleanor, 166
Christian, Beatrix, 164
Coffey, Essie, 167 New Zealand
Cox, Deborah, 164, 166 Boyens, Philippa, 201, 204
De La Ruze, Juliet, 164 Brown, Riwia, 200, 202
Foulkes, Mirrah, 163 Caro, Niki, 194
Gavin, Agnes, 170 Jeffs, Christine, 203
Glynn, Erica, 167 Lang, Rachel, 200
Grace, Helen, 165 Mita, Merata, 197–8
Grace-Smith, Briar, 203 Preston, Gaylene, 195–8, 202
Haywood, Claire, 164 Rodriga, Melanie, 195–8, 201, 205
Hellier, Trudy, 163 Walsh, Fran, 194, 201, 202, 204
Howarde, Kate, 164
Johnson, Darlene, 167, 200 Part IV: Europe
Jones, Laura, 165, 182, 184, 185–6, 194, 609
Kelly, Margaret, 166 Armenia
Kennedy, Jane, 163 Melikyan, Anna, 210–13
Kokkinos, Ana, 165, 166, 167
Leigh, Julia, 164 Austria
Long, Joan, 164, 165, 192 Albert, Barbara, 219, 231–2, 234, 235,
Lovely, Louise, 170, 171, 191, 193 236, 237
Lyell, Lottie, 1, 164, 169, 171–5, 192, 193 Arlamovsky, Maria, 218
Mallon, Mary, 164 Baum, Vicki, 214, 215, 314, 364, 365,
Marchetta, Melina, 163, 166 367, 375–6
McDonagh, Paulette, 164, 169, 170, Beckermann, Ruth, 219, 230–1, 236
175–9, 192, 193 Brandauer, Karin, 218, 229–30
McDonagh, Phyllis, 164, 169, 170, Covi, Tizza, 220
175–9, 193 Derflinger, Sabine, 219
McDonagh, Isobel, 164, 169, 170, Dusl, Andrea Maria, 220
175–9, 193 Eder, Barbara, 221
904 Index
Export, Valie, 217, 228–9 Červenková, Thea, 249

Freund, Susanne, 219 Chytilová, Věra, 251
Georgiou, Penelope, 217 Dovská, Beatrice, 250
Gräftner, Barbara, 219 Hejdová, Irena, 253
Hausner, Jessica, 219, 234–5, 236, 237 Hofman, Ota, 252
Grossmann, Gerda E., 219 Janovská, Zorka, 249–50
Heinrich, Margareta, 218 Jelinek, Milena, 253
Jenbach, Ida, 216, 224–6 Jelínková, Monika, 250
Kino, Kitty, 217 Kmínková, Jarmila, 250
Knilli, Maria, 218 Knitlová, Jana, 252
Kolm-Fleck, Louise, 214, 221–4, 225, Konášová, Lucie, 252
226, 236 Krumbachová, Ester, 251, 253–62, 265
Kratz, Käthe, 217 Majerová, Marie, 251
Kreutzer, Marie, 221 Marwille, Suzanne, 249–50
Kusturica, Nina, 220, 232 Nellis, Alice, 253, 264–5
Lassnig, Maria, 218, 219 Pavlásková, Irena, 253
Mader, Ruth, 232, 235–6 Pavlátová, Michaela, 253
Mattuschka, Mara, 219 Pawlowská, Halina, 253
Neudecker, Gabriele, 220 Pelleová-Czivišová, Ada (Milada), 250, 265
Pezold, Friederike, 218 Pírková, Svatava, 250
Resetarits, Kathrin, 219, 232 Plívová Šimková, Věra, 251–2
Sagan, Leontine, 227–8, 237 Poledňáková, Marie, 252, 263–4
Salomonowitz, Anja, 221 Prišcáková, Kateřina, 252
Scharang, Elisabeth, 220 Reňáková Králová, Drahomíra, 251, 252
Stephan, Maria, 216 Sedlácková, Anna, 250
Unger, Mirjam, 220, 233–4 Sedlácková, Gill (Julie), 250
Viertel, Salka, 214, 215, 597 Semonická, Květoslava, 250
Wachtel, Rosa, 216 Smolová, Zdena, 249, 250
Winiewicz, Lida, 218 Svatá, Jarmila, 250
Zanke, Susanne, 217 Temná, Hana, 250
Turnovská, Jarmila, 251, 252
Belgium Týrlová, Hermína, 252
Akerman, Chantal, 238, 242–4, Vihanová, Drahomíra, 251
245, 247, 248 Zinnerová, Markéta, 252
Chagoll, Lydia, 238
d’Alcantara, Vanja, 245 Denmark
Frijters, Anna, 238, 239–40 Bloch, Harriet, 268–9, 285, 551
Hänsel, Marion, 238, 244–5 Fischer Christensen, Pernille, 267
Kiel, Edith, 238, 240–1, 247, 248 Frische, Grete, 269, 270, 271, 285
Levy-Morelle, Anne, 238 Gylling, Iben, 281
Navarra, Aimée, 239 Heeno, Mette, 278, 280
Schoukens, Sophie, 245 Henning-Jensen, Astrid, 271–3, 285, 287
Somers, Ilse, 245 Høgh, Dorthe W., 278, 280
Strubbe, Caroline, 245, 248 Hovmand, Annelise, 273–4
Toye, Patrice, 238, 245–6 Ilsøe, Maya, 267, 278, 281, 287
Troch, Fien, 238, 245, 246–7, 248 Ipsen, Bodil, 269, 270
Van Den Berghe, Dorothée, 245 Knudsen, Mette, 274
Van Mieghem, Hilde, 245 Leona, Kim, 278, 280
Lundblad, Hanna, 281
Czech Republic Nørgård, Lise, 277
Babinská, Karin, 253 Nulle Nykjær, Elith, 282
Bernášková, Alena, 251 O’Fredericks, Alice, 269–71, 554
Boková, Jana, 253 Olesen, Annette K., 267, 582
Boucková, Tereza, 253 Reenberg, Annelise, 269, 271
Index 905
Rex, Jytte, 276–7, 282 Bellon, Yannick, 315–16

Ryslinge, Helle, 275–6, 286 Breillat, Catherine, 321
Scherfig, Lone, 266, 282–3, 287 Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria, 322, 346
Smith, Karen, 277 Bussi, Solange, 314
Svendsen, Lotte, 281, 282 Colette, 311–12, 314, 315, 316,
Von Prangen, Agnete, 268, 552 347, 357, 360
Companeez, Nina, 318–19, 321, 362
Estonia Corsini, Catherine, 346
Adamian, Nora, 290 De Van, Marina, 353–6, 359, 360, 361
Aruoja, Virve, 289, 290 Delpy, Julie, 322
Aun, Anu, 292, 297–9 Denis, Claire, 322, 338, 356
Beekman, Aimée, 289–90 Dubreuil, Charlotte, 321
Ehala, Olav, 298, 291, 300 Dulac, Germaine, 311–14, 357, 360, 509
Karis, Helle, 290–2, 297–9, 300 Duras, Marguerite, 188, 316–18, 320, 321, 499
Kiik, Silvia, 289 Epstein, Marie, 313–14, 357
Kõusaar, Kadri, 292, 299-300 Ferran, Pascale, 322
Laius, Leida, 289, 295–7, 300 Garcia, Nicole, 322, 346
Laur, Katrin, 292 Guy, Alice, 1, 221, 311–12, 322–6,
Lintrop, Renita, 291 357, 361, 844
Luts, Aksella, 288, 292–5, 300, 301 Hansen-Løve, Mia, 356–7, 358
Niit, Ellen, 289 Hillel-Erlanger, Irène, 311
Oidermaa, Helgi, 290–1, 298 Issermann, Aline, 321
Pervik, Aino, 289 Jaoui, Agnès, 346, 351–3, 359, 360, 361, 362
Promet, Lilli, 290 Kaplan, Nelly, 318, 319–21, 346, 357, 718
Ruus, Karin, 290 Karina, Anna, 278, 318
Sheptunova, Marina, 291, 297 Kurys, Diane, 321, 346
Smirnova, Maria, 146, 157–8, 290 Labrune, Jeanne, 321, 346
Tust, Elo, 294 Lange, Monique, 318
Tungal, Leelo, 292 Lemercier, Valérie, 339, 344–6, 358, 360
Zvereva, Maria, 291 Lvovsky, Noémie, 322, 346
Marshall, Tonie, 311, 322, 346
Finland Musidora, 311–14, 360, 361
Bergholm, Eija Elina, 305 Pascal, Christine, 321, 322
Bergroth, Kersti, 303–4 Pisier, Marie-France, 318, 320, 337–8,
Hintze, Gerda, 302–3 358, 361
Honkasalo, Pirjo, 306 Roussopoulos, Carole, 320
Idström, Tove, 306 Sagan, Françoise, 317–18, 320, 360
Joutseno, Lea, 303–4, 310 Schiffman, Suzanne, 318, 330–6, 358,
Kaarna, Kaarina, 302 360, 361, 362
Linnanheimo, Regina, 303, 310 Serreau, Coline, 321, 322, 339–41, 343,
Mantila, Auli, 306 344–6, 358, 361
Mikkola, Marja Leena, 305 Seyrig, Delphine, 243, 317, 320
Salminen, Seere, 303–4 Thompson, Danièle, 339, 342–6, 360, 361
Soini, Elsa, 303–4 Trintignant, Nadine, 320, 321, 322
Talvio, Raija, 306–7 Trividic, Anne-Louise, 322
Tattari, Tauno, 303 Varda, Agnès, 318, 321, 326–30, 360, 362,
Valtonen, Hilja, 303 718, 732
Vuoksenmaa, Johanna, 306 Vedrès, Nicole, 315, 316
Wuolijoki, Hella, 304–5, 307–9, 310
Germany
France Aladag, Feo, 373
Audry, Jacqueline, 311, 315, 360 Baum, Vicki, 214, 215, 314, 364, 365,
Audry, Colette, 315, 320 367, 375–6
Balasko, Josiane, 339, 340–6, 358, 360, 361 Bergmann, Bärbl, 370
906 Index
Brückner, Jutta, 373 390–1 Paxinou, Eleni and Maria, 402

Carlsen, Fanny, 365–6 Pierakkou, Soula, 402
Del Zopp, Louise, 364–5 Plyta, Maria, 398, 399
Dörrie, Doris, 373, 394–6 Psykou, Elina, 401
Droop, Marie Luise, 363–5 Rikaki, Lucia, 400
Fechner, Ellen, 368–9 Romas, Haris, 402
Fentsch, Erna, 369–70 Segditsa, Kiki, 399, 402
Fröhlich, Pea, 372 Theodoraki, Stella, 403
Goetz, Ruth, 364, 365, 374, 396 Tsangari, Athena Rachel, 401, 408, 409
Gronenborn, Esther, 374 Yourgou, Laya, 400, 401, 403
Grosse, Nina, 373 Zarokosta, Melpo, 399
Gusner, Iris, 370 Zoumboulaki, Manina, 400, 406–7, 408
Henning, Hanna, 366
Link, Caroline, 373 Ireland
Moja, Hella, 366–7 Bhride, Eoin MacGiolla, 424
Neumann, Lotte, 368 Binchy, Maeve, 417, 423
Ottinger, Ulrike, 372–3 Bruce, Nichola, 420
Porten, Rosa, 367 Collins, Pat, 424
Riefenstahl, Leni, 367–8, 377, 378, Corkery, Margaret, 418, 424
380–3, 396, 397 Creed, Geraldine, 418, 423
Samdereli, Yasemin and Nesrin, 374 Cullen, Colette, 415, 416
Sander, Helke, 371 Daly, Rebecca, 418, 424, 426
Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 371–2 Dhuibhne, Éilis Ní, 417
Schmidt, Evelyn, 370 Dowling, Clare, 415
Stobrawa, Renée, 369 English, Stephanie, 414
Stöckl, Ula 370, 383–90 Enright, Anne, 417
Treut, Monika, 373 Gauntier, Gene, 1, 411, 420–2, 431, 726,
Von Harbou, Thea, 368, 376–80, 396 791–3, 849, 852
Von Trotta, Margarethe, 372, 391–4, 396, Geraghty, Finola, 424, 427, 428
397, 499 Gill, Liz, 418, 423
Wolff, Victoria Claudia, 375 Green, Steph, 420
Harkin, Margo, 414
Greece Ingoldsby, Maeve, 416, 417
Angelidi, Antouanetta, 399 Johnston, Jennifer, 417
Antoniou, Angeliki, 400–1, 403–5, 408 Keogan, Ailbhe, 420, 423
Bei, Katerina, 400, 401 Laverty, Maura, 416
Detzortzi, Katy, 399 Lynch, Claire, 415
Evangelakou, Katerina, 403 MacAdam, Trish, 418
Galani, Rena, 399 Mackenzie, Lauren, 416, 423
Gavala, Maria, 399 Manning, Mary, 411, 412, 413
Hadjisofia, Anna, 402 McGettigan, Norah, 424
Handari, Maria, 399 McGuckian, Mary, 418
Hristinaki, Inta, 399, 408 McGuinness, Alexandra, 424, 426
Karali, Malvina, 400 Molloy, Christine, 418, 420, 424
Karystiani, Ioanna, 401 Murphy, Pat, 414, 419, 423
Liappa, Frieda, 400 Murphy, Maeve, 423
Malea, Olga, 400, 407 Noble, Janet, 418
Marketaki, Tonia, 399–400, 402 O’Brien, Edna, 417
Mavili, Eleni, 402 O’Carroll, Harriet, 416, 417
Nikolakopoulou, Maria, 402 Pasley, Jean, 423
Pantazoni, Elena, 402 Patton, Mrs N. F., 411, 412
Papadopoulou, Dimitra, 402 Quinn, Marian, 424, 427, 428
Papaoikonomou, Mirella, 402, 405–6, 409 Scott-Speer, Deborah, 419
Passari, Maritina, 400 Sheridan, Kirsten, 419, 424, 426, 431
Index 907
Swift, Carolyn, 416 Monti, Adriana, 467

Thompson, Kate, 416 Napolitano, Silvia, 436
Twomey, Siobhan, 415 Nicolodi, Daria, 467
De Venuto, Rossella, 420 Notari, Elvira, 433, 468–72, 484, 486, 487
Walsh, Orla, 415 Nuccetelli, Maria, 437
Whooley, Sharon, 424 Pavignano, Anna, 436, 472–4, 485
Wilson, Juanita, 418, 424, 432 Pontremoli, Federica, 437, 456, 474–6, 484
Winters, Carmel, 418, 424, 426 Ramondino, Fabrizia, 437
Randi, Paola, 437
Italy Rohrwacher, Alice, 437
Alberti, Barbara, 435, 442 Sandrelli, Stefania, 437
Amoruso, Elisa, 437, 464, 465 Sbarigia, Claudia, 436, 437, 438, 463–4
Apruzzo, Carla, 436 Schleef, Heidrun, 437, 451, 457, 474–7,
Archibugi, Francesca, 436, 437–9, 462, 484, 487
463, 484, 485, 486 Serao, Matilde, 434
Argento, Asia, 351, 437 Tognazzi, Maria Sole, 466, 477
Bertini, Francesca, 433, 714 Torre, Roberta, 437, 476, 478–9
Carell, Lianella, 435, 439, 485 Tozzi, Chiara, 436
Carrère, Nelly, 433 Vitti, Monica, 437
Cavani, Liliana, 435, 439–44, 482, 483, Vivanti, Annie, 434
484, 486, 487, 718 Wertmüller, Lina, 435, 465, 479–82,
Cecchi d’Amico, Suso, 2, 435, 444–50, 485, 487, 718
453, 454, 483
Cecere, Giorgia, 437 Malta
Ceselli, Daniela, 437, 450–1, 484 Anastasi, Rebecca, 490
Colagrande, Giada, 451–2, 484, 486 Azzopardi, Clare, 490
Colautti, Ofelia, 433 Briguglio, Marie, 490
Comencini, Cristina, 437, 449, 453–5, Calleja, Sharon, 490
462, 466 Camilleri, Cassi, 490, 491
Comencini, Francesca, 449, 453, 455–7, Cremona, Rebecca, 488–9, 490, 491, 492
475, 485 Maslowska, Monika, 490, 492
Corda, Luciana, 435 Montesin, Eileen, 490
D’Angara, Vera, 434 Muller, Angelique, 490, 491
De Liot, Renée, 433 Spiteri, Simone, 490
De Canalis, Suzanne, 433
Deledda, Grazia, 434 Netherlands
Femder, Lara, 436 Alonso Casale, Nathalie, 496, 509–10, 513
Ferraris, Lina, 433 Apon, Annette, 494, 497–9, 513
Ferri, Linda, 457–9, 476, 486, 487 Goos, Maria, 495, 505–6, 513, 514
Filastri, Iaia, 435 Gorris, Marleen, 495, 499–500, 514
Fougez, Anna, 434 Honigmann, Heddy, 495, 502–4, 514
Giorgi, Eleonora, 437, 459 Leopold, Nanouk, 496, 508–9
Golino, Valeria, 437, 466 Rots, Esther, 496, 510
Gramatica, Irma, 433 Sinke, Digna, 494, 500–1, 514
Infascelli, Fiorella, 459–61, 484, 486 Van Brakel, Nouchka, 494, 496–7, 515
Izzo, Simona, 437 Van der Meulen, Helena, 496, 502, 504–5,
Jacobini, Maria, 434 513, 514
Leondeff, Doriana, 437, 438, 461–3, 484, 485 Van der Oest, Paula, 496, 506–8, 513
Malatesta, Gloria, 436, 437, 438, 463–4 Van Kooten, Kim, 496, 511–12, 514
Manieri, Francesca, 437, 464–5
Marciano, Francesca, 436, 437, 465–7, Norway
483, 484, 486 Breien, Anja, 516, 517, 518, 519, 522
Mazzoni, Roberta, 436, 441, 443 Carlmar, Edith, 516
Melato, Maria, 433 Løkkeberg, Vibeke, 516, 517, 519–20, 522
908 Index
Mikkelsen, Laila, 517 Borisavljević, Stanislava, 535

Straume, Unni, 516, 517, 520–1, 522 Boškov, Gordana, 536
Ullmann, Liv, 516, 517 Car, Ana Marija, 534
Dirnbach, Zora, 534, 535
Poland Filipović, Frida, 534
Antoniak, Urszula, 525 Flis, Irma, 536
Holland, Agnieszka, 2, 523–4, 525 Jovanović, Darinka, 533
Ke˛dzierzawska, Dorota, 524, 525 Jovanović, Sofija Soja, 534
Roslaniec, Katarzyna, 525 Jovanović, Soja, 536
Szumowska, Malgorzata, 525 Kapić, Suada, 536
Kostadinović, Aleksandra, 536
Romania Lazić, Mirjana, 536
Agopian, Ana, 530 Leskovar, Deana, 535, 536
Anghel, Anastasia, 529 Maksić, Biljana, 536
Beligan, Marica, 526 Marić, Marija, 536
Boldur, Anda, 526 Marjanović, Zaga, 536
Bostan, Elisabeta, 527 Marković, Milena, 537
Busuioceanu, Eugenia, 526 Miloš, Maja, 537
Caraman, Geo, 531 Pavić, Ljiljana, 535
Catan̆, Andreea, 531 Pejović, Katarina, 536
Chiriacescu-Constantiniu, Melania, 529 Rancić, Alenka, 535
Constantinescu, Ileana, 530 Srbljanović, Biljana, 536
Damian, Anca, 530 Stojanović, Svetlana, 536
Eliad, Ioana, 530 Ugrešić, Dubravka, 534, 535
Farkaş, Ecaterina, 527 Vojnović, Vladislava, 537
Gr̆dinariu, Anca, 531 Volk, Maja, 535
Icsari, Aurora, 527
Ioachim, Oana, 530 Spain
Istrate, Vasilica, 527 Bollaín, Icíar, 538, 539–40, 549
Meşin̆, Viorica, 526 Coixet, Isabel, 538, 540, 549
Mueller, Herta, 526 Mariscal, Ana, 548
Nichituş, Cristina, 529 Miró, Pilar, 540–1
Nicolae, Cristiana, 529, 530 París, Inés, 538, 539, 542–8, 549
Nicolescu, Mara, 530 Querejeta, Gracia, 543, 548
Novak, Loredana, 531 Salvador, Lola, 541–2
Ojog-Brasoveanu, Rodica, 526
Olteanu-Matei, Draga, 529 Sweden
Padina, Rodica, 527, 528, 529 Ahrne, Marianne, 526, 563
Pan̆, Roxana, 526 Alving, Barbro, 556, 564
Pistiner, Ada, 530 Arrhenius, Karin, 566, 567
Popescu Doreanu, Paula, 530–1 August, Pernilla, 567
Postelnicu, Ioana, 526 Bergman, Stina, 552, 555, 570–3
R̆suceanu, Oana, 530 Bernburg, Hanna, 551
Robe, Camelia, 529 Berthels, Greta, 552, 554
Rugin̆, Iulia, 530 Björlind, Cecilia, 556
Sadoveanu, Valeria and Profira, 526 Bloch, Harriet, 268, 269, 285, 551
Sîrbu, Eva, 527, 528, 530 Broberg, Ragnhild E. Ch., 554
Soradi, Loredana C̆lina, 530 Byström, Margaretha, 561
Urşianu, Malvina, 527, 529, 531–2 Calamnius, Sigrid, 551
Voiculescu, Marioara, 526 Colfach, Elsa, 559, 560
Cullborg, Majken, 557
Serbia and Yugoslavia Dahlgren, Lotten, 552
Balaž, Eva, 536 De Geer Bergenstråhle, Marie Louise, 561,
Baletić, Hajdana, 536 563, 567
Index 909
Drago, Nathalie, 566 Ramnefalk, Marie-Louise, 559

Edqvist, Dagmar, 556 Ray, Lolita, 567
Ehnmark, Loka, 559 Revenue, Petra, 567
Ekström, Margareta, 559 Rolfner, Monica, 563
Fabik, Teresa, 566 Sköld, Hanna, 566
Fagerström-Olsson, Agneta, 562, 564 Skram Knudsen, Johanne, 551
Fallenius, Ella, 556 Stenberg, Birgitta, 559–60
Floyd, Yvonne, 560 Stevens, Gösta, 554, 555
Fredén, Sofia, 566 Svensson, Birgitta, 564
Fredriksson, Anna, 567 Ternström, Solveig, 561
Gamble, Nita, 560 Thor, Annika, 566
Garpe, Margareta, 563 Thulin, Ingrid, 563
Gottfridsson, Linn, 566 Trotzig, Birgitta, 559
Gradvall, Pia, 566, 567 Von Prangen, Agnete, 268, 552
Gripe, Maria, 561 Wadell, Sara, 566
Hegeler, Inge, 560, 561 Wägner, Elin, 550, 554, 556
Heldt, Sara, 562, 564 Wulff, Caja, 551
Hellwig, Hilda, 563 Zacharias, Gun, 557
Herrström, Christina, 566 Zacharias, Ann, 563
Hoffman-Uddgren, Anna, 550 Zetterling, Mai, 557, 559–60, 562, 604, 732
Hollander, Judith, 564
Isaksson, Ulla, 557–8, 560, 562 Switzerland
Jackert, Cilla, 567 Boss, Sabine, 584
Julin, Ester, 551–3, 567–70, Faessler, Lisa, 582
Kadefors, Sara, 566 Gisinger, Sabine, 584
Kåge, Ulla, 554, 555 Hesse-Rabinovitch, Isa, 581–2, 585
Karlsson, Maria, 566, 567 Jaeggi, Danielle, 582
Keining, Alexandra-Therese, 567 Kovach, June, 582
Kleen, Else, 556, 557 Lips-Mattler, Marie, 580
Koppel, Lena, 567 Luif, Anna, 584
Langseth, Lisa, 567 Maillart, Ella, 580
Larsson, Linda, 557 Main, Elizabeth, 579
Lemhagen, Ella, 567 Meier, Ursula, 584
Liewen, Eva, 556 Mertens, Reni, 580, 581
Lindblom, Gunnel, 562, 563 Miéville, Anne-Marie, 583
Linde, Gunnel, 559, 564 Oberli, Bettina, 584, 585
Lindgren, Astrid, 2, 558–61, 564, 573–5, 577 Olesen, Muriel, 582
Lindin, Ester, 556 Perincioli, Cristina, 582, 583
Löfhagen, Lovisa, 567 Pletscher, Marianne, 584
Magner, Ingela, 564 Pool, Léa, 583
Maharaj, Grace, 567 Roy, Tula, 686
Mallik, Gita, 564 Simon, Maya, 582
Moberg, Eva, 559 Štaka, Andrea, 232, 584
Nevander, Malin, 567 Stöcklin, Tania, 583
O’Fredericks, Alice, 269, 270, 271, 554 Tamm, Ernette, 579, 580
Øberg, Edit, 554 Veuve, Jacqueline, 581–2, 585
Ohlin, Lisa, 562–3, 567 Waltz, Jeanne, 584
Oljelund, Pernilla, 566 Werenfels, Stina, 584
Olofsson, Christina, 567
Osten, Suzanne, 562, 563, 564, 567 Turkey
Peratt, Börje, 567 Arslan, Mizgin Mujde, 587
Pichler, Gabriella, 567 Basarir, Ilksen, 588
Prim, Ragnhild, 555 Esmer, Pelin, 587, 588, 590
Pyk, Antonia, 566, 567 Kilickiran, Ceyda Asli, 588, 590
910 Index
Okay, Meral Kati, 588 Mellor, Edith, 593

Oraloglu, Lale, 588 Mellor, Kay, 606
Özge, Asli, 587–9, 590 Miller, Irene, 593–4
Sonku, Cahide, 586 Moggach, Deborah, 606
Soray, Turkan, 586 Montgomery, Doreen, 598–9, 646–8
Soylemez, Belmin, 587 Morgan, Diana, 599
Ustaoglu, Yesim, 587, 589–90 Morgan, Joan, 600
Morgan, Abi, 185, 608–9
UK Murillo, Mary, 594
Alleyne, Muriel, 591–2 Potter, Sally, 153, 604, 609, 662–7, 680, 681
Arnold, Andrea, 283, 609, 670–1, 679 Powell, Violet E., 594
Barratt, Lezli Ann, 604 Prawer Jhabvala, Ruth, 604, 605
Barrie, Evelyn, 596 Ramsay, Lynne, 604, 609, 671–7, 682
Batchelor, Joy, 648–53 Ramsey, Alicia, 595
Bennett, Margot, 603 Reville, Alma, 595, 596, 597, 598, 619–24,
Blizzard, Helen, 592 752, 760
Box, Muriel, 2, 413, 596, 603, 624–32, Scott Rogers, Jean, 603
633, 634, 681, 849 Sagay, Misan, 608
Bristow, Billie, 592, 677 Shurey, Dinah, 595, 615, 616, 619, 680
Brunel, Adey, 592 Sisson, Rosemary Anne, 604–5, 653–4
Buffini, Moira, 609 Slovo, Shawn, 607
Burnaby, Anne, 596 Smith, Sarah, 609
Carter, Angela, 605 Storm, Lesley, 601–2, 677
Chadha, Gurindar, 70, 606 Strueby, Katherine, 600–1
Craigie, Jill, 596, 639–46, 678, 679–82 Thomas, Heidi, 608
Dane, Clemence, 596–7 Thompson, Emma, 606, 607
Deans, Marjorie, 597 Thurston, Rita Temple, 595
Delaney, Shelagh, 604, 654–62, 679, Towhidi, Juliet, 608
681, 682 Turnbull, Margaret, 595, 621
Dell, Ethel M., 592 Unsell, Eve, 595, 621
Drabble, Margaret, 604 Zetterling, Mai, 557, 559–60, 562, 604, 732
Dunbar, Andrea, 604, 605
Dunn, Nell, 604 Part V: North America
Dunn, Jan, 609, 667–9, 680, 682
English, Jane, 609 Canada
Fairhurst, Lyn, 603 Basen, Leila, 689
Farnum, Dorothy, 597–8 Bingeman, Alison Lea, 690
Forster, Margaret, 604 Cameron, Tassie, 689
Gaffney, Marjorie, 597 Chellas, Semi, 689
Gibb, Andrea, 608 Doron, Anita, 689
Glyn, Elinor, 592–3 Elliott Testar, Coralee, 689
Goldman, Jane, 609 Esterhazy, Danisha, 689
Green, Janet, 2, 596, 597, 603, 632–9, 678 Gendron, Emma, 685
Gurney, Kate, 593 Gibson, Rebecca, 689–90
Hardy, Eva, 604 Harron, Mary, 686–7, 692
Harvey, Lola, 598 MacLean, Alison, 689
Hayward, Lydia Elizabeth, 593, 595, 610–19 Marquis, Marguerite, 685
Henry, Joan, 596, 602–3, 604 Mehta, Deepa, 70, 686, 687–8
Hepworth, Margaret, 593 Polley, Sarah, 686, 688
Isitt, Debbie, 609 Pool, Lea, 583, 686
Kennedy, Margaret, 597, 598, 622, 647 Rozema, Patricia, 688
La Plante, Lynda, 606 Schechter, Rebecca, 689
MacIntosh, Blanche, 593, 677 Shipman, Nell, 627, 685–6
Meeham, Elizabeth, 598 Stopkewich, Lynn, 689
Index 911
Tatchell, Terri, 690 Arzner, Dorothy, 110, 215, 759, 834,

Vardalos, Nia, 690–2 839, 854
Walton, Karen, 689 Barzman, Norma, 731, 759–60
Wheeler, Anne, 688–9 Beecher, Elizabeth, 741
Bendinger, Jessica, 762
Cuba Benedek, Barbara, 760
Almira, Milena, 695, 698 Benson, Sally, 623, 744, 760–1
Ávila, Ivette, 695 Beranger, Clara, 729, 761–2, 854
Barriga, Susana, 695, 698 Bergstein, Eleanor, 762
Castellanos, Adriana F., 695 Bertsch, Marguerite, 762–3
Chávez, Rebeca, 695, 697 Bigelow, Kathryn, 182, 733, 763–4,
Fajardo, Arigna, 698 852, 853
Gómez, Sara, 694–7, 699 Blackton, Marian Constance, 764, 852
González, Yanelvis, 695 Borden, Lizzie, 733, 764
Hassan, Heidi, 698 Bostwick-Singer, Eugenia, 733, 765
Ochoa, Marina, 695, 698 Brackett, Leigh, 731, 740–1, 765, 849
Pardo, Yaima, 698 Brown, Rita Mae, 765
Portieles, Vanesa, 695 Buckley, Kristin, 766
Rodríguez, Jessica, 695 Burbridge, Betty, 741, 742
Rodríguez Abreu, Alina, 695, 698 Caspary, Vera, 731, 744, 766
Rolando, Gloria, 695, 696–8 Chapman, Brenda, 733
Segura, Mayra, 695 Chester, Lilian Christy, 766
Solaya, Marilyn, 695 Cholodenko, Lisa, 745–50, 766, 780
Trujillo, Marisol, 695 Clarke, Shirley, 732
Vilásis, Mayra, 695 Cody, Diablo, 766–8
Coffee, Lenore J., 727, 737, 768–73,
Jamaica 849, 851
Bishop-Williams, Audrey, 705–10 Collins, Suzanne, 773
Chevannes, Amba, 705–9 Comden, Betty, 742, 774
Latchman, Alison, 705–9 Cooper, Olive, 741
Perkins, Elaine, 703–4 Coppola, Sofia, 351, 734, 774–6, 851
Wells, Mary, 705–9 Dash, Julie, 734, 776
Davenport, Dorothy, 727
Mexico Delmar, Vina, 776–7
Abud, Liliana, 715 Deutsch, Helen 740, 777
Cortés, Busi, 715–16 DeWolf, Karen, 731, 745, 777
Cortes, Carmen, 715 Didion, Joan, 777–8, 852
Garciadiego, Paz Alicia, 715, 716 Dixon, Leslie, 733, 734, 778–9, 851,
Garrido, Consuelo, 716 853, 854, 855
Landeta, Matilde, 715, 717–18, 720 Drew, Mrs. Sidney, 779–80, 852
Novaro, Maria, 718 Dunham, Lena, 745–50, 780, 850, 851, 854
Peñaloza, Beatriz Novara, 718 Ephron, Delia, 780, 781, 854
Pérez-Grovas, Cecilia, 715, 716–17, 718 Ephron, Nora, 86, 349, 733, 758, 781, 853
Rivera, Carolina, 715 Ephron, Phoebe, 780, 781–3
Violante, Marcela Fernandez, 715 Fairfax, Marion, 783
Fey, Tina, 783–4
USA Fink, Rita M., 784
Allen, Jay Presson, 732–3, 750–4, Fisher, Carrie, 784, 852
854, 855 Flagg, Fannie, 784–5, 852
Akins, Zoe, 727, 759, 833 Foner, Naomi, 785–6
Anders, Allison, 754–7 Fox, Dana, 786
Anderson, Jane, 733, 757 Frank Jr, Harriet, 786
Angelou, Maya, 732 Frings, Ketti, 744
Anhalt, Edna, 758 Froelich, Anne, 731
912 Index
Gardiner, Becky, 727 Mumolo, Annie, 828, 848

Gardner, Helen, 787–91, 842 Moncrieff, Karen, 734
Gauntier, Gene, 1, 411, 420–2, 431, 726, Murfin, Jane, 828–9
791–3, 849, 852 Murray, Mae, 727
Goodrich, Frances, 742 Myers, Claudia, 726, 829
Grant, Susannah, 793 Park, Ida May, 830
Greenwald, Maggie, 734 Park, Lottie Blair, 727
Hammer, Barbara, 732, 851 Parker, Dorothy, 731, 778, 830–1, 838
Harrison, Joan, 623, 738–9, 794 Parsons, Louella, 727, 761
Hart, Julia, 794 Perelman, Laura, 729
Heckerling, Amy, 794–5, 854, 855 Perlman, Nicole, 831
Henley, Beth, 795 Raphael, June Diane, 831
Holofcener, Nicole, 734, 795–7, 851, 692 Rees, Dee, 832
Houston, Drusilla Dunjee, 797–8, 851 Reichardt, Kelly, 832, 850
Hovey, Tamara, 731 Reinhardt, Elizabeth, 832
Howell, Dorothy, 727 Richards, Silvia, 832–3
Hunt, Bonnie, 798 Roberts, Marguerite, 731, 741, 829,
Jenkins, Patty, 798–9 833, 855
Kanin, Fay, 799–800, 849 Robinson, Sally, 733
Katz, Gloria, 800 Rose, Ruth, 833
Kavanaugh, Frances, 741 Rothman, Stephanie, 732
Kazan, Zoe, 800 Rouverol, Jean, 833–4
Kellogg, Virginia, 744, 800 Salt, Jennifer, 835
Kerr, Laura, 800, 850 Sandler, Susan, 835
Khouri, Callie, 733, 800–1, 852 Savoca, Nancy, 835–6, 852, 855
King, Bradley, 801–2, 855 Scafaria, Lorene, 836
Kingsley, Dorothy, 802 Schacter, Beth, 836
Lake, Diane, 802 Schiff, Robin, 836–7
Lemmons, Kasi, 734, 802–3 Schroeder, Doris, 804, 837
Lennart, Isobel, 740, 803 Scola, Kathryn, 598, 837
Levien, Sonya, 803–4, 833, 851, 854 Selbo, Jule, 837
Likke, Nnegest, 734 Seros, Alexandra, 838
Loden, Barbara, 732 Silver, Amanda, 838
Loos, Anita, 15, 114, 727, 729, 804–8, 829, Silver, Joan Micklin, 733
830, 851, 853, 855 Slesinger, Tess, 759, 838–9, 849, 854, 855
Lupino, Ida, 718, 737, 754, 808–17, Sloan, Holly Goldberg, 839
853, 855 Spewack, Bella, 743
Maas, Frederica Sagor, 834–5 Spheeris, Penelope, 733, 839, 841
Macpherson, Jeanie, 450, 727, 770, Stevens, Dana, 734
817–19, 824, 850 St John, Adela, 728, 829
Marion, Frances, 80, 85, 86, 114, 727–9, Swicord, Robin, 800, 839–40
818–21, 850, 853 Taffel, Bess, 731, 840
Martin, Darnell, 734, 821 Tewkesbury, Joan, 840
Mason, Sarah Y., 821–2, 829 Thomas, Anna, 802, 840–1
Mathis, June 80, 114, 822–3, 852, 855 Thomas, Diane, 841
Mathison, Melissa, 823 Thompson, Caroline, 841, 849
May, Elaine, 718, 733, 823–4 Troche, Rose, 841–2
McCall Jr, Mary C., 744–5, 759, 817, 832 Turney, Catherine, 736–8, 842, 855
McKenna, Aline Brosh, 734 Underhill, Harriete, 842, 850
Mecchi, Irene, 733, 824, 848, 849 Van Upp, Helen, 842
Meredyth, Bess, 818, 824–7 Van Upp, Virginia, 737, 738, 842–3
Meriwether, Elizabeth, 827 Verducci, Pat, 843
Meyers, Nancy, 733, 827–8, 850 Wagner, Jane, 843
Miller, Susan, 733 Ward, Luci, 843
Index 913
Weber, Lois, 1, 326, 594, 726, 783, Lóes, Dilma, 872

820, 837, 844–5 Magalhães, Ana Maria, 872
Weiss, Lizzie, 845 Muylaert, Anna, 873
Wells, Audrey, 845 Santos, Carmen, 870–1
West, Mae, 727, 728, 730, 731, 807, Soárez, Elena, 873, 874
846–8, 850, 855
White, Noni, 733, 766, 848 Chile
Wiig, Kristen, 828, 848 Castillo, Carmen, 877–8
Wilder, Margaret Buell, 743 Del Fierro, Paula, 879, 885–6
Woolverton, Linda, 733, 841, 848–9 Fernandez, Josefina, 879
Fernandez, Nona, 879
Part VI: South America Fernández, Patricia Paola ‘Nona’, 879
Gaviola, Tatiana, 878–9, 882–3, 887
Argentina Gómez, Carolina ‘Coca’, 879
Bemberg, María Luisa, 859, 865–9 Mallet, Marilú, 877, 887
Berneri, Anahí, 862 Rivas, Marialy, 879, 887
Bortnik, Aida, 859, 863–5 Rodríguez de la Serna, Rosario, 875
Carri, Albertina, 860, 861 Sarmiento, Valeria, 876, 878, 880–2, 887
Chen, Verónica, 861 Scherson, Alicia, 879, 884–5
Gugliotta, Sandra, 862 Sotomayor, Dominga, 879, 880
Guido, Beatriz, 859, 862–3 Vázquez, Angelina, 877
Katz, Ana, 862 Von Bussenius, Gabriela, 875, 887
Marshall, Niní, 859 Yankovic, Nieves, 876–7
Martel, Lucrecia, 860, 861
Meerapfel, Jeanine, 860 Venezuela
Murga, Celina, 862 Benacerraf, Margot, 889–92, 899, 900
Puenzo, Lucía, 861, 864–5 Cárdenas, Margarita, 896–7, 900
Schua, Ana María, 860 Dendiouk, Irina, 899
Silvestre, Susana, 861 Hoogesteijn, Solveig, 892–4, 899
Stantic, Lita, 859–60, 861, 866 Paez, Gabriela Rivas, 899
Paiz, Carolina, 899
Brazil Rodriguez, Milagro, 899
De Abreu, Gilda, 871 Rondón, Mariana, 897–9, 900
Bengell, Norma, 871 Torres, Fina, 893, 894–5, 899, 900
Camurati, Carla, 872–3 Ugas, Martie, 899

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Part V North America

4.1 Aksella Luts as the forester’s daughter in the Young Eagles

Jule Selbo is a professor in the MFA in Screenwriting programme at California

Jean Ansolabehere is a script coordinator and bilingual editor working in Los

Robert Arnett is an associate professor at Old Dominion University. He teaches

Cari Beauchamp is the award-winning author of Without Lying Down: Frances

Natalia Sanjuan Bornay is lecturer in academic skills for NESB students at

Carmen Sofia Brenes is professor of poetics and screenwriting at University of

all’italiana, 2011), paying particular attention to cultural and social dynamics in

Kelley Conway is associate professor in the department of communication arts

Michael Coutanche is an associate professor at the Ryerson RTA School of Media

script analysis, screenwriting workshops/seminars, and basic legal/contract counsel

Maria-Teresa DePaoli is an associate professor of Spanish at Kansas State

Olga Dimitrijević is a Yugoslavian playwright and dramaturg. Her film and

Kath Dooley is a filmmaker and academic in the department of film, television

Haseenah Ebrahim is head of the Division of Dramatic Arts (Theatre and

Johanna Forsman is a screenwriter and transmedia producer, educated at Broby

Marcella Forster is a writer-director specializing in short films about parent-child

Camila Malagolini Gama studied social communication at the University of São

Andrew Kenneth Gay is an independent filmmaker and assistant professor of

a member of the executive council of the Screenwriting Research Network (SRN),

Christine Gledhill was professor of cinema studies at Staffordshire University

Kristiina Hackel is a professor at California State University, Los Angeles; associ-

Gert Jan Harkema is a PhD candidate at Stockholm University. His research

Mary Harrod is assistant professor in French studies at the University of Warwick.

Stella Hockenhull is reader in film and television studies at the University of

Hester Joyce is a senior Lecturer in the Media: Screen + Sound programme at

Margit Keerdo-Dawson is a screenwriter and script consultant. She has worked in

Lauri Kitsnik is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, having recently

Alexis Krasilovsky is professor of screenwriting at the Department of Cinema

Michele Leigh is an assistant professor of film history at Southern Illinois University.

Warren Lewis teaches at California State University, Fullerton and participates

Susan Liddy lectures in the department of media and communications, Mary

Victoria Lucas is a development and production executive at both major stu-

Bernadette Luciano is an associate professor at the University of Auckland. She

book chapters on Italian cinema, film adaptation, Italian women’s historical

Ervin Malakaj holds a BA and MA in German studies from the University

Florence Martin is professor of French and francophone cinema and literature at

Monika Maslowska is a screenwriter and PhD candidate at Bangor University,

Monica Mitarcă graduated in journalism and mass communication studies at

Nathalie Morris is senior curator of special collections at the BFI National

Bettina Moss is an associate professor in the school of professional studies at

Debashree Mukherjee is assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern,

Annelies van Noortwijk is a senior lecturer in the department of arts, culture

Narrative Strategies in Film (2010) and co-editor of Documentary in a Changing State:

Jennifer O’Connell is an MA student in the department of arts, culture and media

Riikka Pennanen has an MA in film studies from the University of Westminster

Vincent Ros graduated from the international research Master’s programme in

Paolo Russo is senior lecturer in film studies at Oxford Brookes University. He is

Filip Šára is an MA student of journalism at Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles

Johanna Seelbach currently attends the international Master’s programme in the

Juliane Scholz is a researcher and lecturer at the Cultural Sciences Institute,

Dorin Schumacher, an independent scholar, has been doing research on the

Jamie Sherry is lecturer in screenwriting at Bangor University, secretary

Belkis Suárez Faillace is an assistant professor of Spanish at Mount Mercy

Alice Němcová Tejkalová is director of the Institute of Communication Studies

(2012). Articles include ‘The Undressed Newsroom: The Application of Visual

Tatiana Tursunova-Tlatov graduated in screenwriting and cinema studies from

Noah Tsika is assistant professor of media studies at Queens College, City

Isabelle Vanderschelden is head of French in the department of languages, infor-

Stefanie Van de Peer is a teaching fellow in global cinema at the University of