But because women haven't been given as much opportunity as men to be directors, it would be helpful if we seek out female directors just to do our part in changing the system in order to give more female directors a shot.
Around the forum here, most of us watch films we may not be interested in just to try out something someone else appreciate. If we all tried out female directors, just to give them a shot, then that would increase their audience and the powers that be will perhaps give other, newer female directors a chance.
Eh, just because there aren't a lot of female film directors it doesn't mean that they aren't being given shots. I went to two film schools and there were very few women in the programs (like 90% men to 10% women) and none of the ones I met wanted to be directors. Most wanted to be producers or editors and this is reflected in the "real" world with a good number of professional female producers and editors and not directors. Furthermore, many women who are directors are in television and not film, maybe because they like the relative stability or something. Too many people assume some nefarious institutionalized plot when really interest is the problem. It's similar to how not many women are engineers; despite recent pushes to recruit more women they don't seem to have the interest for whatever reason.
And last night I saw Winter's Bone. Everyone should be checking that out.
I saw it and didn't like it. There's been this whole big rash of poverty movies lately with
Winter's Bone,
Shotgun Stories,
Ballast,
Chop Shop,
Wendy and Lucy, and
Frozen River just to name a very few and I found
Winter's Bone to be a very generic version of the genre at large. Nothing about it's tone or characterization made it stand out at all and it just seemed like a duller and more clichéd version of the films coming out recently plus one good scene (that is fairly stupid when you think about it).
I think with the auteurist inclination here, very few of us here mostly watch a movie just to watch a movie in that who directed the film doesn't matter.
It's not that the director doesn't matter, it's that the director doesn't matter until the director gives me a reason why they should matter. I won't see
Movie X by Woman Y (for that reason alone) unless Woman Y has given me a reason to care that she made
Movie X. Take the movie
Moon for example.
Moon was directed by Duncan Jones, which meant nothing to me before I saw the film because it was his first credit. I saw the movie because it was well reviewed, not because Duncan Jones directed it. But now having seen
Moon, the name Duncan Jones means something to me. I liked the film so much that I will see his next film based on the fact that he is directing it. Conversely, take Sean McNamara - the auteur behind
Bratz: The Movie and
The Even Stevens Movie. McMamara doesn't have the same good will with me that Duncan Jones does because both McNamara movies I named are terrible. Therefore when I see "Directed by Sean McNamara," I'm not going to have the same drive to see the movie that I will have when I see "Directed by Duncan Jones." So any female director, in order to matter to me, will have to do the same thing that any male director must do to get me to care - make good movies. If a female director makes an
Bratz-quality film, I won't be inclined to see her further films. However, if she makes a
Moon-quality film, I will be inclined to see further films. It's really that simple.