Written and directed by Mark Cousins (in case there were any doubt)
Featuring Tilda Swinton, Adjoa Andoh, Jane Fonda and many others
Running time: nearly 7 hours for this first half and about 14 hours in total

Recap of Episodes 1-7

by Fiona Underhill

So - Mark Cousins’s 2011 15-part documentary The Story of Film (shown on TCM in 2013) took us through the entire history of cinema … and barely mentioned women directors… unless they were Leni Riefenstahl. Now he’s back again, to rectify that with a 14-part documentary with the unwieldy title of Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema, in which Cousins has the nerve to start by saying “film history has been sexist by omission.” Surely the little ladies can’t possibly complain this time? Well.

Whereas The Story of Film took an approach that contextualized films within their historical and cultural backdrops, Women Make Film is very different. Tilda Swinton narrates the first four episodes in their entirety and she starts the first episode by saying “what follows is not about the directors’ lives, it’s not a chronological history…” But that was the exact approach taken in The Story of Film, an approach that the women directors are not being afforded here. One could argue that historical and cultural context is much more relevant when dealing with directors who have been overlooked, buried, ignored and ‘omitted from film history.’ Every time a director is mentioned in Women Make Film, especially if it’s someone I’m unaware of, I’m desperate to know more about them, when and where they were working and why I have not come across their work before. We are not given any of this context.

Instead, Swinton’s ASMR-like narration, which sounds like a commercial “this is not like other documentaries” tells us that this series will answer “the sort of questions you ask when making films or watching them.” And what follows is forty chapters with titles such as framing, tracking, editing, close-ups etc and how these techniques have been used by women directors. “This is a film school in which all the teachers are women” we are told. A noble aim. But crucially, the women may be ‘writing the course,’ but the person delivering it is Mark Cousins, who is the writer and director of this series. And he’s decided to analyze these film scenes in excruciating detail, giving us his interpretation of them and then asked women to narrate his words. Swinton is an executive producer on the series, but Cousins is the only one with a writing credit. I assume that most of TCM’s audience and the majority of the audience of this documentary are already film-literate. They know how to watch a film scene and interpret it and are probably aware of most of the techniques involved. Therefore, we maybe do not need every single thing we’re seeing explained to us, as if it is audio description for the visually impaired.

The narration becomes more chaotic in episode five, where, after four straight hours of Tilda, we now have a variety of different narrators doing different chapters. The narrators in episodes 5-7 are Jane Fonda, Adjoa Andoh, Sharmila Tagore and Kerry Fox, and in the second half of the documentary, Thandie Newton and Debra Winger will also appear. The highlight thus far has been Kerry Fox doing the chapter on sex, which feels like the only instance of the narrator being well-matched with the subject matter, instead of it just being random and slapdash. One of the biggest frustrations is that with each film clip, the name of the film and director briefly appears on screen in one of the corners (where it appears each time keeps changing, so blink and you’ll miss it). So therefore, the vast majority of my time watching has been spent pausing and rewinding so I can note down the names of the directors. Could the name not have stayed onscreen throughout the clip? Or would that distract from Cousins’s words?

The painfully patronizing narration can perhaps best be demonstrated from the chapter on editing, where it’s introduced with (and I quote verbatim): “Editing – The Connecting Machine” (once again said as if it’s an advertising slogan). In the same chapter, we’re told: “Metaphor – two separate things make us think of a third thing.” I am mystified by who Cousins thinks his audience is, because it seems to oscillate from elementary school children to film students and beyond. Further clunky contrivance comes when we switch narrators for the first time and we immediately get to see our first Tilda film (We Need to Talk about Kevin). Also, we have to be constantly reminded that this is a “new road movie through cinema” with POV shots from cars driving down roads in various landscapes. Thank goodness Cousins is driving, because we’d be utterly lost without him explaining everything we see and hear in excruciating detail. However, he should have paid more attention during the editing chapter, because every episode begins with a laborious repeated introduction, but ends extremely abruptly.

The most positive thing I can say about this documentary is that (for me), the balance of directors is very good - between those I’m familiar with (roughly 60%) and those I’ve not heard of or seen their work. This, of course, will vary widely with each audience member and must have been a nightmare to curate. It is mostly well balanced in terms of history and geography as well, but because of the bizarre determination not to do things chronologically, it takes until episode four before pioneer Alice Guy-Blache gets a mention, for example. The only glaring omission for me (so far) is I don’t know how you can do a whole hour-long episode on bodies and sex, mentioning approximately 35 directors and not include Eliza Hittman (but still include Riefenstahl, of course). Cousins clearly has his favourites – across the seven hours, I feel like I’ve seen the entirety of Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution and Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann. Both of which are films I like a lot, but when you’re omitting other directors entirely, it feels like overkill.

So, in the seven hours of this documentary that I’ve sat through thus far, I’ve not been given the historical and contextual information I’ve been craving, but instead have had reams and reams of description of what I’m looking at with my own eyes and brain, which are capable of computing the visual information they are receiving. But frustratingly, I’m not in a position to tell anyone not to watch this documentary, because we have to take the crumbs we are given, when it comes putting women directors under the spotlight (at last). Will I watch the second half? Probably, because I want to learn more about women directors from around the world. Will I mute the insufferable narration? Almost definitely.

The Women Make Film doc series will air Tuesday evenings on TCM September 1 until December 1.