Top Female Action Movie Directors
The 10 most important female directors of all time
Courtesy of UIP
10. LUCRECIA MARTEL
The author of La ciénaga (2001), La niña santa (2004), La mujer sin cabeza (2008 ) and Zama (2017) is the most important Argentine director of all time and, definitely, the most important in Latin American cinema today. Martel’s work is proof of how art can be produced without compromising freedom and artistic integrity. Her particular style changed the way of making films in Spanish-speaking countries (and that includes Spain), recovering and promoting an “anti-commercial” philosophy, which rejects the ideas of pitch : “ Pitching was invented by advertising to discover the unique characteristic of a product… It is an empty process ”. Martel also rejects the idea promoted by directors such as Quentin Tarantino of watching many films by other authors as a point of reference to make your own film and reaffirms the importance of subjective and personal vision: “ If you are only going to dedicate yourself to watching films, it is as if everything is already put together by others. “It’s great, but that alone is not going to help you; what is going to help you is your neighborhood, your house, your family, your country .” Unlike Oscar winner Chloe Zhao, who succumbed to the temptations offered by superhero movies, Martel was adamantly opposed to them because of the lack of artistic freedom they entail. That makes her a cinematic superhero.
9. LINA WERTMÜLLER
The Italian director who passed away in 2021 will always be remembered for being the first woman to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Director, thanks to her magnificent film Pasqualino Seven Beauties (1974): “ I adore grotesque poetry and I think my films have that style that combines humor and drama, irony and cynicism, comedy and tragedy… It's a style that reflects my personality .” Heir to and at the same time antagonist of the cinema of Fellini and Pasolini, her socially, politically and sexually committed works, such as The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and Anarchy (1973) and Unusual Fate (1974), subvert conventional values of family, masculinity, gender identity, class consciousness and capitalism, making Wertmüller an author far ahead of her time: “ I was never linked to the feminist movement. I consider myself a director, not a female director. I think there is no difference. The difference is between making a good film and a bad one. We shouldn't make any other distinction."
8. CLAIRE DENIS
The mother of transgressive cinema is interested, like David Cronenberg, in the integration and disintegration of the biological and the organic and in the implications of this for the emotional and psychoaffective aspects. But unlike the Canadian director, the French author finds in human relationships, as significant as they are ephemeral, the complex integration of the organic and the psychological: “ I guess I am interested in the variety of human life, in how people live. I am interested in individuals and how they respond to challenges, to difficulties and to each other. I am curious about people .” In his works such as Chocolat (1988), Buen trabajo (1999), Amor can íbal (2001), Bastardos (2013) , Un Bello sol interior (2017) or High Life (2018), life and death, identity and otherness, sex and love, violence and tenderness, youth and old age, are presented not as dichotomies, but as complementary aspects of the human condition, and he does this without concessions and without fear of exploring uncomfortable or taboo subjects: “ Cinema must be human and an integral part of people's lives. That is why it should focus on everyday life in extraordinary situations and places. This is what really motivates me.”
7. KATHRYN BIGELOW
A painter and filmmaker by training, James Cameron's ex-partner dared to explore what very few women have dared to do in the seventh art: “ If there is a specific resistance towards women directors, I choose to ignore that obstacle for two reasons: First, I can't change my gender, and second, I refuse to stop directing .” The person behind the cult classics When Darkness Falls (1987), Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995) and K-19 (2002), as well as the award-winning Live on the Edge ( 2008 ) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), showed that a woman can delve into horror films, police films, the crime genre, cyberpunk and war films, without any problem and being as brutal, raw, efficient and forceful as her male counterparts: “ Cinema has the possibility of transcending any class and cultural border. That’s why I’m excited .”
6. GERMAINE DULAC
Contrary to what is often said, the pioneers of experimental, avant-garde and surrealist cinema were not Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, but this French director. One of the most important figures of feminism in the twenties and an integral part of the European suffragette movement, Dulac is considered the second female director in the history of cinema, after Alice Guy: “ It is not enough to simply capture reality in order to express it in its entirety; something more is necessary to be able to respect it in its entirety. To surround it in its atmosphere and to make its moral sense perceptible .” Her masterpiece, The Snail and the Cleric ( 1927), evidences the director’s obsession with creating a “pure cinema,” removed from the interests of literature and theater, freed from the constraints of narrative and dramatic structures, and seeking to celebrate the plastic fascination obtained by the moving image: “ I seek to make films according to the rules of visual musicality .”
5. SOFIA COPPOLA
The first American woman to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director (before her, the other women nominated were New Zealander Jane Campion and Italian Lina Wertmüller), Sofia made her film debut as a child actress, playing the baby in the christening scene in The Godfather, one of the best films of all time, and appeared in seven more films directed by her father, the prestigious Francis Ford Coppola. However, her “official entry” into the world of cinema was very unfortunate. Sofia replaced Winona Ryder as the lead actress in the third part of The Godfather and was unanimously panned by critics: “ I didn’t want to be an actress and therefore it didn’t traumatize me. What did hurt me was the way the press attacked me. However, the scars were not permanent. It was painful, but not devastating .” Sofia decided to redirect her career to become a director, and the result couldn’t have been more fortunate. Unlike his father’s filmography, which was full of ups and downs, his collection of works is uniform, full of identity and simply exquisite: The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), Places in the Heart (2010), Thieves of Fame (2013), The Beguiled (2017) and On the Rocks (2020): “ I always try to do what I want to do and what I would like to see. I don’t think much about the audience . ”
4. CHANTAL AKERMAN
In the latest edition of the renowned list of the Best Films, organized by the magazine Sight & Sound and generated from the testimonies and arguments of the greatest experts of the seventh art, Jeanne Dielman’s film, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), inspired by her mother’s domestic rituals, has surpassed Citizen Kane and Vertigo as the best cinematographic work of all time: “ Prisons are very, very present in my work… Sometimes not in an explicit way. The prison comes from the concentration camps, where my mother was. She internalized the prison and gave it to me.” Called by the New York Times “the first feminist masterpiece in the history of cinema,” Akerman’s hypnotic film was filmed in five weeks with a crew made up only of women. The result was a new way of making films (Todd Haynes, Michael Haneke and Gus Van Sant have all acknowledged her enormous influence) and the introduction of a female perspective (Sally Porter and Sofia Coppola acknowledge her as a great mentor): “ Whoever seeks, finds. And they find so well that it ends up clouding their vision and their preconceptions .” Akerman committed suicide in 2015 at the age of sixty-five, but her legacy is increasingly clear.
3. JANE CAMPION
This director perfectly encapsulates what can be called feminine cinema: “ I would love to see more women directors because we represent half of the population and we gave light to the whole world. Without us writing and directing, the rest of the world will never know the whole story .” Thanks to her perspective, the women protagonists of her films Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano (1993) and Portrait of a Lady (1996) feel authentic and not mere portraits, the product of a male perspective that does not want (or cannot) understand what it truly means to be a woman. Likewise, the men in her films also feel authentic and very different, because it is a woman who is observing and studying them ( The Power of the Dog is a clear example of this). Her films are beautiful and delicate, but at the same time, they are brutal and immensely frank. If Akerman is the grandmother and Coppola is the granddaughter, Campion is the mother: “ To deny women directors is to deny the female vision .”
2. AGNÈS VARDA
Varda may not be the most important director of all time, but she is certainly the best: “ I had the feeling that cinema was not free and that bothered me .” Thanks to Varda, cinema was free and that allowed Truffaut, Godard, Resnais and Chabrol to shape the most influential movement in the history of cinema: The French New Wave: “ They called me the grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague when I was only thirty years old. This gave me both the naivety and the audacity to do what I did .” In her masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7 (1957), we find condensed one of the great themes of Varda's cinema, which she borrowed from Simone De Beauvoir: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” The American critic Pauline Kael said that this was “one of those few films directed by a woman, in which the spectator feels a difference.” In Homeless and Lawless (1985), the director’s other masterpiece, all the interests of her cinema are synthesized: the independence of women, coexistence with nature, the need for freedom, the acceptance of chance, the natural cycle of life and death, the personification of nature and the indiscriminate mix between documentary and fiction (the documentaries The Gleaners and the Gleaner and Faces and Places are considered two of the best in the history of the genre). Her cinema is a faithful example of the three aspects that every director must always keep in mind: Inspiration, creation and generosity: “ I am curious and that’s it. I find everything interesting. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But most of all, people. If you keep your eyes and mind open, everything can be interesting .”
1. ALICE GUY
Thomas Alva Edison, WKL Dickson and the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are considered the official fathers of cinema. The Lumières are also credited as the fathers of documentary film. But, contrary to what many people think, the person behind the narrative film (the kind of film that tells stories, conveys emotions, is made up of actors and dramatic actions, and which dominates cinemas today) is not a man. The mother of the narrative film is also one of the most prestigious directors of silent film along with Griffith, Murnau and Méliès. Since Alice Guy filmed a woman dressed as a fairy taking babies out of cabbage leaves, cinema stopped being a mirror of reality and became a magic mirror that has transformed reality for more than a century. Every director since, from Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino, owes their careers to the first female director in the history of cinema: “ My sex, my youth and lack of experience conspired against me .” It is time to do justice and take back what is rightfully the property of women: cinema. “ I have always been impressed with my fellow directors by the fact that their success comes from giving the public what it wants. I think there is something more. If you will allow me, I think that something is our individuality.”
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