Critical mass

For most of 20th century, film writing – in the US, at least – was a girls' girls' girls' world where the so-called "ladies who wore white gloves" reigned in queenly fashion. But things have changed utterly, writes TARA BRADY

IN THE beginning was the motion picture and the motion picture was with woman and woman was with the motion picture.

We tend to speak of the history of film in terms of its founding fathers – DW Griffith, August and Louis Lumière, George Méliès – but the medium was conceived and nurtured into being with a complete contingent of parents.

There are many reasons why early film pioneers such as Dorothy Davenport Reid and Lois Weber were downplayed in the official record, but mostly it comes down to antiquated turn-of-the-century attitudes and prejudices; the great Australian film-maker Lottie Lyell had presided over dozens of projects as a writer, editor and star before she was officially credited as a director in 1931. Others never received their dues at all.

Still, for the new Thoroughly Modern Millies of the 20th century, film was a land of opportunity less bound to patriarchal structures and strictures found elsewhere. In Europe, the US, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt and India, silent cinema was shaped by female film-makers: women such as Dorothy Arzner, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Mrs George Randolph Chester, Helen Gardner, Elinor Glyn, Marie-Louise Iribe, Hanna Henning, Fatma Begum, Giulia Cassini, Karin Swanström and Olga Preobrazhenskaya – to name just a few.

These women do not represent a historical lineage cobbled together after the facts; they were genuine architects of the medium; Alice Guy Blaché invented and codified the narrative film; MGM’s Margaret Booth developed the classical fluid editing style that continues to define studio output.

In early Hollywood, women worked as film editors and cinematographers and in every sector of the industry. Between 1916 and 1923, women in the film business were more powerful than in any other line of work; they wrote half the films released in 1920; in 1923, they owned more independent production companies than men did.

Nowadays, things look very different. According to last year’s annual report from Dr Martha Lauren, the executive director of the Centre for Study of Women in TV and Film at San Diego State University, in 2008, women comprised a mere 16 per cent of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 grossing films in the US. Just 9 per cent of US directors are women; only 12 per cent are writers.

Where did all go wrong? The Hays Code? The McCarthy purges? The so-called “butchification” of cinema that began in the studios in the 1940s didn’t help. The macho swagger of the French nouvelle vague and the blustering stand-offs between riders and bulls in post-classical Hollywood were of vital importance to the development of cinema. But no one could have predicted that swagger would, in due course, define every other movie.

Similarly, it would be churlish and stupid to chastise a virtuoso film-maker such as Steven Spielberg or a pioneer like George Lucas for privileging spectacle over narrative in the 1970s; a world without Jaws, after all, is an inconceivably gloomy notion. But their efforts to restore the matinee to its former glory would kickstart an unintended revolution. The new cinema was a shiny cinema, a noisy cinema, a cinema of novelty, of explosions, of car-chases and, most of all, it was a cinema made for 23-year-old boy-men. Movies weren't movies for the masses anymore; they were male-oriented events.

As cinema changed, so did the people who wrote about cinema. Back in the day, both men and women made movies but only women wrote film reviews. As the gender which, in plain Darwinian speak, requires sharper critical faculties, women twigged the potential of the medium long before their male counterparts.

Women invented film criticism. Women such as Bryher and Hilda Doolittle, the lesbian hipster couple who founded and wrote for Close Up, an film quarterly published between 1927 and 1933. Women such as Lotte Eisner, the patron saint of all film critics, who, from 1927 championed such talents as GW Pabst and Fritz Lang in the wildly influential magazine FilmKurier. A concentration camp survivor, later a scribe for Cahiers du Cinémaand the chief archivist at the French Cinematheque, Eisner was such a revered figure that Werner Herzog once walked from Munich to Paris to see her.

For most of the 20th century, US film writing was a girls' girls' girls' world where Peggy Doyle of the Record American, Nora Taylor of the Christian Science Monitor, Rose Pelswick of Hearst's Journal-American, Judith Crist of the Herald Tribuneand, most of all, Marjorie Adams of the Boston Globe, reigned in queenly fashion.

These pioneers of the art represented an industry-wide trend. Capt Joseph Patterson, the founder of the New York Daily News, spoke for many newspaper editors when, in the late 1920s, he declared that: " . . . women film critics are more intuitive and understand movies better". Patterson went on to hire such noted female critics as Irene Thiver, Loretta King and Kathleen Carroll, who retired in 1992, after 32 years of reviewing.

In the UK, the author Graham Greene, who reviewed films during the 1930s and 1940s, was overshadowed by the gargantuan reputations of grandes dames CA Lejeune and Dilys Powell. The influence of Penelope Houston, the editor of Sight & Soundbetween 1956 and 1990, was equally far-reaching.

But as film went from gentleman’s club to boy’s own treehouse, “the ladies who wore white gloves” started to disappear. In the age of shiny cinema, film criticism would become as commodified and compromised as the rest of the business. A new breed of boy-racer reviewers emerged to keep the public up to speed with this week’s must-see blockbuster. They didn’t watch movies; they consumed them. Critical language gave way to star ratings, plot spoilers and set visits.

There is, of course, a place for this sort of thing in film writing, just as there is a place for mindless novelty in cinema. But it cannot be healthy that only 23 per cent of US film critics are female or that 47 per cent of US newspapers do not employ women reviewers.

US critics, however, have it comparatively easy. Though clearly outnumbered, there are several prominent female voices – Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, Ella Taylor for the Village Voice, Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly,Cynthia Lucia, the co-editor of Cineastemagazine – occupying plum jobs, all "name" critics and all legitimate contenders for übercritic Pauline Kael's crown.

In this part of the world, women can’t claim anything like those numbers. Dwindling advertising revenues have ensured that editors and producers play ball; they won’t hire female film critics, but they will dispatch an unqualified girl Friday to write up the latest rom-com or report back on hairstyles at the Oscars.

This isn’t good news for anyone.

Like it or not, film critics matter. Writing in Slatemagazine in 2008, Erik Lundegaar charted a close correlation between critical opinion and box-office takings. Unlovely blockbusters may rake in squillions of dollars despite receiving pungent notices, but when one looks at the only sums that really matter – the per-screen average – then the weightings on metasites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic start to look rather crucial.

We should not, then, be surprised that the absence of female film commentators has had negative consequences. The woman’s picture, once the jewel in Hollywood’s crown, is now devalued beyond recognition.

The effects, sadly, extend far beyond cinema. Without female critics, it is no longer considered acceptable to point out the unacceptable. Complain about the shrill fishwives in Judd Apatow pictures (as Katherine Heigl, the star of Knocked Up once did) and people will call you a spoilsport. Complain about the clown-women at the heart of It's Complicatedor Leap Yearand they'll think you're a nut.

Women instinctively know that the slender, lady-humped Alpha Girls of Avatarare utterly bogus, but they'd rather not take flak for saying so. Neat marketing categories are created for females – wolf-whistling girls in Diet Coke commercials, "cougars" in Sex and the City– by men who make movies.

But deprived of regular schooling from the columns of a Dilys Powell or a Pauline Kael, younger generations lack the critical faculties to do anything more than acquiesce.

It would be neither fair nor true to say that male critics have killed movies for everyone – there are at least a dozen working male critics that no cineaste should go without – but without a yin to their yang, the 10th and liveliest muse is starting to look awfully peaky.

Tara Brady is the film correspondent for Hot Press