The emergence of women film directors

The film "The Hurt Locker" won the awards for the best film and best director at this year's Oscar awards ceremony sponsored by the Academy for Motion Pictures in America. Kathryn Bigelow, the director of "The Hurt Locker", entered the history books by becoming the first female director to win the best director's award in the eighty-two-year history of this celebratory event. Interestingly she edged out James Cameron, the director of "Avatar", her ex-husband, to win these coveted awards. This film went on to win numerous other prestigious awards as well.

There are two important facts that need to be stressed about Kathryn Bigelow's remarkable achievement. The first is that, as I stated earlier, this is the first time that Hollywood has decided to give best director's award to a female. The second important fact is that this film deals essentially with a man's world. It is an action-filled war film that deals with a narrative related to the dangerous work performed by the United Stares Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team. The academy award-winning script was written by Mark Boal who was embedded as a journalist in 2004 with a United States army bomb squad. The brutal honesty and moral earnestness with which the lives and activities of the men in this team are portrayed bears testimony to Kathryn Bigelow's powers cinematic of representation. Her achieved effects are never reducible to cinematic frills. She has entered this man's world and captured its horrors and heroism, frustrations and self-doubts, with great perspicacity and a ruthless realism. The causes that move the narrative are vitally connected to military culture.

The term hurt locker is a colloquialism among soldiers for a place of intense pain. The sequence of events charted in the film takes place during the early days of the post-invasion period in 2004, Sergeant First Class William James is an experienced fighter, who has just become the team leader of the United States' Army Explosive Disposal unit. He replaces Staff Sergeant Thompson, who has been killed by an explosive device in an accident.

He teams up with Sergeant J.F. Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge whose task is to communicate with their teams via radio inside his bomb-suit as well as providing him with rifle cover when he is engaged in inspecting improvised explosive devices. During their missions of dismantling improvised explosive devices and pursuing insurgents, James acts in strange and unorthodox ways that have the effect of upsetting Sanborn and Eldridge. The tensions between them mount. James once orders his team to pursue two insurgents who are believed to be responsible for some explosions. Sanborn protests maintaining that this is a task that should be left to an infantry platoon. He is overruled by James.

During this operation, Eldridge is shot in his leg, and Eldridge blames James for this incident. After failing in a mission that was focused on removing and disarming a time-bomb, Sanborn becomes agitated and tells James that he can no longer deal with the exigencies of improvised disposal activities. He confesses to his intentions of leaving Iraq and starting a family. Meanwhile, James returns to his wife and family and begins to lead a normal and routine-driven sub-urban life. One day he tells his infant son that the one thing he really enjoys is working as a soldier. We see him later, once again in the battlefield.

This is the story of "The Hurt Locker", and it is evident that it deals with the experiences and sensibilities of a man's world. However Kathryn Bigelow, the director of the film, has succeeded in capturing the feel of war and she directs the film with supreme self-confidence. The success of "The Hurt Locker" serves to focus on the role of women in cinema and how female directors have now succeeded in breaking through the barrier and establishing their credentials and reputations as important filmmakers.

In recent times, a number of distinguished women film directors have emerged in countries such as India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan and so on. For example, surprisingly, one of the most important film directors in Malaysia was Yasmin Ahmad, someone I knew quite well. Her films such as "Sepet", dealing with inter-ethnic relations in Malaysia generated a great deal of interest both in Malaysia and beyond. Unfortunately, she died last year at a comparatively young age.

A country that has witnessed the emergence of a large number of talented women's filmmakers is India. During the last three decades we have seen the active and productive engagement of a substantial number of female directors, many of them associated with New Indian Cinema. Among them, Prema Karanth, Aparna Sen, Vijaya Mehta, Sai Paranjpye, Parvati Ghosh, Vijaya Nirmala, Suprabha Devi, Bhanumathi and Kalpana Lajmi deserve special mention. Many of these filmmakers have displayed an interest in exploring experiences, issues and problems encountered by women in modern India, from the declared viewpoint of a woman. it has been asserted by some women film critics in India, not without justification, that even the most liberal-minded and progressive film directors in India tend to betray a certain residual patriarchal leanings. This makes the endevours of the female filmmakers that much more compelling.

Let us consider a few films, Indian film directors which became associated with the New Indian Cinema that had its origins in the late 1960s. Prema Karanth is a talented filmmaker from Karnataka, who had made a mark as an art director in films. Her film "Phaniyamma" (Aunt Phani), made in 1982, is based on a novel by M.K. Indra. This film focuses in the question of female identity in an essentially patriarchal society. The narrative deals with the life of an Indian woman over a period of seven decades, against a backdrop of Brahmin orthodoxy. Phani is depicted as a good-natured and amiable girl who is willing to help with the household chores of older women while her brother attends the local school. In accordance with custom, at the age of nine, her horoscope is meticulously studied and compared with that of one of her equally young relatives.

As the horoscopes match admirably, the elders decide to arrange a marriage. Phani and her child husband go through the ceremonies and rituals associated with marriage, the camera beautifully and ironically catching their understandable bewilderment and boredom. After the marriage ceremonies are completed, Phani's husband goes back to his village while she goes to live with her uncle until she reaches puberty. Unfortunately for them, this carefully mapped out scenario goes sour when Phani's husband is stung by a snake and dies; tragically, she is left a widow while she is only a child widow. This misfortune results in her being subject to various humiliations and enforced restrictions. Her wedding chain is taken away; her attractive bangles are smashed; the red mark on her forehead is wiped away; when she reaches puberty, her head is shaved as prescribed by tradition.

She is now obliged to go about bald-headed, dressed in a white sari to signal her widowed state and make herself as unattractive as possible to males. Interestingly, as a consequence of the efforts of reform-minded activists, the Hindu Widow's Remarriage Act and the Child Marriage Restraint Act had by now found their way into the statute books.

A sense of saintly self-denial descends on her life. Fettered by an unyielding authority to an oppressive past, she is cut off from her normal social activities. Cowed by prohibitions, Phani endures her suffering in silence, not fully comprehending the reasons for her dark misery. As she matures, she resolves to rise above the sterility of her life and invest it with meaning by caring for others and helping those in need. As time elapses, the unfortunate and bewildered child widow grows into a caring and compassionate woman.

Aunt Phanni, as she is generally called, while going about helping others also begins to question some of the customs that conspire to keep women in servitude. For example, a young woman who is treated harshly by her husband for her alleged inability to bear children is persuaded by Phani to take the extraordinarily daring step of leaving him. At the age of seventy, we see Phani emerging as a champion of female independence and dignity.

In "Phanniyamma", the director Prema Karanth has succeeded in persuasively calling attention to the plight of women in male-dominated societies.

Aparna Sen's "Parama" is another film that focuses on the question of female identity and female agency. This film, when first shown, gave rise to some controversy; it deals with an illicit relationship that Parama, a married woman, has with Rahul, a nephew of a friend of her husbands. This is indeed a theme that Indian filmmakers would keep away from, knowing its explosive possibilities. What complicates matter further, is the tone of sympathy in which the experience of Parama is presented. "Parama" can be described as a film with a feminist vision in that the predicaments and marginalization of women are reconfigured with sympathy and discernment.

Vijaya Mehta's "Rao Saheb" (Barrister) is another film that has stirred a great deal of interest among film audiences in India. Set in the early twentieth century, at a time of palpable confrontation between westernization and traditional Indian life ways, it explores sensitively issues of Brahmin orthodoxy, widow remarriage and social reform" all pressing topics in the 1920s.

This film, like many others by Indian women filmmakers, broach issues of modernity, social change, female agency and patriarchy; it also captures the force and effects, endemic and lamentable, of calcified traditions operative in society.

Apart from these filmmakers that I referred to earlier, there are also Indian-born film directors such as Mira Nair ("Salaam Bombay") ("Monsoon Wedding") and Deepa Mehta ("Earth") "Fire". ("Water") who have garnered great international accolades.