Educational Media Reviews Online

According to one of Martha M. Lauzen’s 2015 reports from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at the San Diego State University School of Theatre, Television and Film, “Women comprised 17% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 (domestic) grossing films of 2014. This represents an increase of 1 percentage point from 2013 but is the same percentage of women working in these roles in 1998.” On the broadcast television side, the growth is also stagnant: “In 2013-14, women comprised 27% of creators, executive producers, producers, writers, directors, editors, and directors of photography working on prime-time programs airing on the broadcast networks. This represents a decrease of 1 percentage point from 2012-13”. (Lauzen, 2015) It is somewhat disheartening to read these statistics 26 years after watching Calling the Shots (1989) an engaging Janis Cole and Holly Dale documentary dealing with the diversity of films being made by women, in the 1980s primarily, and the power structure of the film industry at the time. Many of the women interviewed for Calling the Shots ended up transitioning to successful work in television while others simply faded away. Even after Kathryn Bigelow won an Oscar for Best Direction for her film The Hurt Locker (2008), the first and only woman to achieve that honor in the 87 years the awards have existed, it now feels like an anomaly rather than the trend women had hoped it would start. In Part 3 of Ally Acker’s Reel Herstory: The Real Story of Reel Women, there is a clip of actress/director Lee Grant saying: “All the women directing today (the mid-1980’s) owe a lot to Dorothy Arzner. Not because she opened any doors. The irony is…there was only Dorothy Arzner… and then 40 years of closed doors that are just opening now to a very few of us.” How discouraging it is that that door has stayed only slightly ajar all these years since Lee Grant made that statement. In her documentary, Acker addresses some of the reasons these statistics have remained inactive.

In 1996 I discovered Reel Women: The Untold Story, a CD-ROM based on Acker’s 1991 book Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema 1896 to the Present. The technology of the time allowed an innovative interactivity and a new way of accessing information before the proliferation of usable information on the internet. For example, unlike linear documentaries, on a CD-ROM, Acker posed a question and the viewer was able to select an answer from a variety of women directors interviewed in the order preferred or just the one answer sought, rather than watching the answers as ordered and edited by the filmmaker as is common in a standard linear documentary. Acker was certainly a pioneer herself with the publication of this CD-ROM. But with the almost instantaneous obsolescence of CD-ROMs, it is now impossible to play it back without a Windows 95 emulator, if one even exists. Luckily much of the material that was on the CD-ROM is now on Acker’s Reel Herstory: The Real Story of Reel Women, along with the inclusion of additional material/interviews.

The first two parts of the documentary on the DVD I watched (the silent and the talkie eras) are actually blended together and the third part dealing with contemporary films follows. The liner notes are however incorrect in their listing of running times. What differentiates Acker’s film from both The Lost Garden: Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché (1995) directed by Marquise Lepage for the National Film Board of Canada and Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors (1993) directed by Anthony Slide and Jeffrey Goodman is that she not only deals with film directors but with editors, writers, producers and other trades except for cinematographers.

The contemporary section, which is approximately an hour long, is the most cohesive of the three parts and includes clips from interviews with newer director/writers like Sarah Polley and actor/writers like Greta Gerwig. Acker, perhaps owing to her own encyclopedic entries in her books, attempts to cover filmmakers in an exhaustive manner and occasionally there is a frustrating sense of mere enumeration for its own sake. She is, however, most successful when she demonstrates the working relationships of these women as well as their work ethic in longer segments. Those segments comprise the true heart of this film. The silent and talkie sections unfortunately appear quite choppy, perhaps due to their CD-ROM past. Many topics are dropped and returned to inexplicably just a few minutes later. For example, we are told that no film left MGM without Editor Margaret Booth’s approval twice within a half hour of running time. Dates are also often not given for films, which would be helpful in contextualizing the clips presented. Identifiers like the one for Marcia Nasatir read “1st VP of a Major Studio”. Why not identify the studio in question and provide the timeline when she was in that position. That sort of information is provided for other interviewees and the lack of consistency is often frustrating. One statement about Nathalie Kalmus can be perceived as misleading: “Nathalie Kalmus and her husband had perfected the 3-strip process we know today as Technicolor and as the Technicolor consultant on all motion pictures done in color until 1949, she developed the method of color separation and introduced the art of modifying color to get the desired shades and hues.” Nathalie Kalmus had an art background but she was not an engineer like her husband, nor did she “develop” color separation. She was the Technicolor consultant who contractually had to appear on the set of Technicolor pictures only, not all color pictures. She must be given her due as a highly paid businesswoman/publicist with a definite eye for color in the male-dominated film world of the period, but not as an engineer or inventor. There really is no need to pad Kalmus’ resumé to make a point about her place in film history, her presence, both positive and negative, was felt on two continents. I was also rather baffled by the example provided for the section where we are told that in the 1960s if writers had a personal story to tell, Hollywood was no longer an option but with video they could now produce it themselves. This, we are told, was the birth of the independent film movement and the example provided is from Shirley Clarke’s The Connection, a 35mm film. In fact, the example even shows the shadow of a 35mm camera in the shot. I’m not sure I understand Acker’s point about how the independent “film” movement came about from the use of “video”. I suspect that there was more material which led to the part about video, but in trying to keep the length of the documentary down, the section was edited down to what I have described.

There is also a marked difference in overall look and sound editing between the contemporary and silent/talkie sections. The look of the different sections that were originally on the CD-ROM vacillates between different approaches to how topics are presented, the partition of chapters, even to fonts in headings, and it lacks a unified look that one would expect from a documentary, thus creating a kind of hodgepodge thrown-together appearance that is unsettling and somewhat amateurish. The background music is correctly subdued in the contemporary section but awkward waves of a Nessum Dorma orchestration come and go in the silent/talkie section, sometimes quite jarringly. Unfortunately, there is also a rather annoying, and now embarrassingly archaic, reliance on imitating the “voice” of the person whose quote is provided in the silent/talkie section. Amateurish German, French and Southern accents are supplied rather than simply quoting the text and then identifying the author à la Ken Burns. The practice of impersonation comes to a head with a most inept imitation of Bette Davis. However, all these little annoyances aside, the section on editing is perhaps the best explanation of Hollywood editing I have seen on screen. This alone is worth the price of admission and should surely be used in classes where a good explanation of how Classical Hollywood editing was done, needs to be properly explained.

Rather than producing one unified documentary that follows the same general ideas or topics through the recounting of the history of women in film, the producers/distributors have decided to attempt to be all things to all people and are distributing the documentary with educational pricing separately for each of the three parts, or as a complete film. They are also providing paid-streaming access for each of the three parts or for the whole film. There is also an older 10-disc series called Filmmakers on Film from Ally Acker that makes use of a number of the chapters headings and footage found in the current complete documentary. With so many iterations of the material available, it is confusing for a library selector or film instructor to understand what is available and what they are indeed getting.

Acker has amassed incredibly valuable footage over the last 25 years and it would take almost a Hollywood blockbuster budget to edit it all together into a truly unified documentary series with a direction and a more focused vision. Her valiant efforts in addressing the issues of sexism in the film industry in order to have them resolved are to be applauded. Although this particular edit of her material is flawed, it should not be ignored and as in the case of most dedicated filmmakers, she continues to work on her opus, so let’s consider it as a constantly evolving and fluctuating work-in-progress. There is a great wealth of information to be further explored when one uses Reel Herstory: The Real Story of Reel Women as the starting point for teaching or research: The interviews are really important historical documents. I recommend this video for teaching film history courses and for students and researchers who could be inspired by it to go on and change the realities currently presented in it.