Break the Frame: Conversations with Women Filmmakers

by Kevin Smokler

Overview

A diverse group of women filmmakers speak for themselves about their careers and their work In the twenty-first century alone, women filmmakers have succeeded at directing every size, genre, and style of motion picture. Their movies have won Oscars (Free Solo), made actors into household names (Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone), received induction into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry (Real Women Have Curves), and become worldwide box office phenomena (Captain Marvel, Deep Impact). Nevertheless in 2023, the year of Barbie, women directed only 12% of the top 250 movies in America. demonstrating how far moviemaking remains from gender parity. When women filmmakers succeed, they do so against these odds. Break the Frame is a collection of 24 career-spanning interviews with America's celebrated, reigning, and rising women filmmakers. Each conversation considers the director's complete filmography as a map of their evolving artistry and evidence of their unassailable contributions to a historically misogynist industry. Author Kevin Smokler listens as women filmmakers speak to the struggle and triumphs of developing and directing movies that are shaping how the film business sees women in the director's chair, and how their audiences see themselves and each other. This book is both an opportunity and invitation to devote one's time, admiration and enthusiasm to movies directed by women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197619780
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/24/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Kevin Smokler is the author of Brat Pack America and Practical Classics, and the co-director of the award winning 2022 documentary film Vinyl Nation. His essays and criticism have appeared in Salon, Vulture, Buzzfeed, and NPR.org. Onstage, he has interviewed comedians, actors, architects, filmmakers, and musicians at venues throughout North America

Table of Contents

Introduction: "Bigger and Louder Than Silence" Section 1: Trailblazers 1. Barbara Kopple 2. Cheryl Dunye 3. Amy Heckerling 4. Patricia Cardoso 5. Julie Dash Section 2: Sages 6. Mimi Leder 7. Jamie Babbit 8. Jessica Yu 9. Tamra Davis 10. Aline Brosh McKenna 11. Debra Granik Section 3: Documentarians 12. Chris Hegedus 13. Dawn Porter 14. Tiffany Shlain 15. Dream Hampton Section 4: Directing in Partnership 16. Shari Springer Berman (w/ Robert Pulcini) 17. Betsy West & Julie Cohen 18. Anna Boden (w/ Ryan Fleck) 19. E. Chai Vasherlyi (w/ Jimmy Chin) Section 5: The Female Future 20. Felicia Pride 21. Jessica Sharzer 22. Tanya Saracho 23. Alice Wu 24. Erin Lee Carr

Editorial Reviews

2025-02-01
Interviews with more than two dozen female filmmakers from a wide range of genres.

In 2017, a report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that “every major Hollywood studio systematically discriminated against hiring female directors,” even though “the graduating classes of America’s top film schools are 50/50 male/female.” Moreover, Smokler was surprised to discover that “articulate, well-heeled, filmgoing friends” were uninformed about women’s contributions to cinema, such as not knowing that Greta Gerwig was an accomplished director well beforeBarbie. In this entertaining corrective, Smokler, a writer and documentary filmmaker, interviewed 25 writers, producers, and directors—all of them Americans who “have at least one film or television series a reasonably avid movie watcher would have heard of or seen”—and asked them “to focus on the stories of their triumphs that we can all learn from and share.” Among the participants are Barbara Kopple, “the Mother Courage of American documentary filmmaking”; Julie Dash, “the first black woman to direct a feature film in general release in America”; and Chris Hegedus, whose enormous contributions to documentaries would “raise the level of innovation in nonfiction cinema that had already seemed to be at its apex.” As is often the case with books like this one, some interviews are more insightful than others. For the most part, the exceptional talent interviewed here provide valuable perspectives on the art of filmmaking. There are many amusing anecdotes, as when Jessica Yu, director of the short subjectBreathing Lessons, a documentary about a polio-stricken man who lived his life in an iron lung, says the biggest change in her life after she won her Oscar was that “I gained a bit of professional identity from doing that and your family stops asking ‘what is it exactly that you do?’”

A welcome spotlight on the considerable achievements of female filmmakers.

Kirkus Reviews