Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.5

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 28, 2021

While Women Make Film advertises itself as "a new road movie through cinema" in its very subtitle, that metaphor may be apt only if roads are taken as connective tissues between places, rather than a way to get somewhere in particular. In that regard, another kind of thoroughfare, namely a river, might be just as relevant as a veritable symbol, since Women Make Film often follows a meandering path that might be best compared to "stream of consciousness". The result is frequently almost overwhelming in its offerings of all sorts of international films helmed by women, many of which my strong hunch is few will have had much foreknowledge of, but that also means that any attempted generalizations about what's on tap are most likely futile. If, kind of like the film clips offered themselves, Women Make Film can often seem kind of random in terms of both its purported focal issues (like openings, conversations, and tracking shots) and the "subheading" chapters supposedly doling out even more narrow information, and if there's a perhaps needless reliance on repeated shots of roads as one of several narrators discusses the "road movie" aspects of "it all", this documentary is a veritable cornucopia of interesting insights and it certainly provides a monumental set of examples of scenes from films directed by women across the globe for the past several decades.

My review queue has often featured women directors, and a couple of larger than average sets, The Complete Films of Agnès Varda and Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, perhaps gave me hope that I would be at least relatively well prepared for this documentary, but the sheer number of films and filmmakers director Mark Cousins features is so vast that I think even someone who had specialized in researching films made by women might be surprised at what's on tap here. (As an aside, the fact that a male directed this documentary may offer a subliminal clue that at least a few men directors and/or filmmakers sneak into this overview at times).

Cousins was also responsible for the equally immense The Story of Film: An Odyssey, but Women Make Film , despite its supposedly "narrower" focus, probably comes close to and perhaps even tops the earlier effort in terms of the number of films featured and the filmmakers mentioned. In terms of that second aspect, this documentary takes what might be termed the "equal and opposite" approach to the kind of weird recent Academy Awards broadcast, which gave little biographical datapoints about many of the nominees. Instead, Cousins here tends to concentrate on what these female filmmakers actually did, rather than giving huge amounts of backstory or contextualizing information. That may be the one place where some viewers are going to feel like they've been shortchanged, but without sounding too cheeky about it, my personal advice is to simply keep a notebook nearby as you watch, in order to jot down names and/or films that you might want to explore more fully later.

In another way, though, Women Make Film serves as an almost mindboggling example of an aspect of film craft that Harrison Ford discussed in the recent Academy Awards broadcast: namely, film editing. It makes complete sense that editor Timo Langer is also credited as a script consultant, because the way this piece almost exhaustingly keeps making unexpected connections between various films is one of its most notable aspects. In fact, it kind of makes the artifice of supposed focal elements like openings, dialogue or genres like science fiction, along with the supposedly even more focused "chapter headings" within each broader focal element, seem positively superfluous at times. In other words, if you're careening down a stream of consciousness, some may feel that they don't really need sign markers along the way.

If the outright audaciousness of general premise of this enterprise pales only when compared to what Cousins has included in it in particular, there are a few weird presentational aspects that might at least occasionally throw viewers (and/or listeners) for an occasional loop. Tilda Swinton starts each episode off with a "canned" introduction that kind of (understandably, I guess) derides the historic emphasis on male filmmakers, and she offers some piquant if at times overly artificial sounding comments for the first several episodes, until she just kind of doesn't, and then a number of other narrators, including Jane Fonda, Debra Winger, Thandie Newton, Kerry Fox, Sharmila Tagore and Adjoa Andoh seemingly come and go, a lot like much of the rest of this piece, at random.

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer understandably in a glut of different aspect ratios, as can clearly be seen by shuffling through the screenshots I've included with this review. A lot of the material, including all of the interstitial shots of roads, is in 1.78:1, though both narrower and wider aspect ratios are repeatedly seen. As should probably be expected from a sprawling documentary like this which includes so many different films, many of which have obviously not been curated particularly well, the quality variations are wide, but need to be accepted as probably inevitable, given the rarity of some of the items on display. Some of the newer films look considerably better than older items, and some of the rarer offerings look to me like they may have been sourced from older, and at times either interlaced or upscaled, video, since things like stair stepping can be spotted at times. Palettes are also on the variable side, with some clips looking beautifully suffused and others looking faded and worn.

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that may be a bit of overkill, given the fact that so much of the documentary features narration and or voiceover, and the clips themselves are at least somewhat weighted toward older films in mono. There are some appealing moments of immersion, sometimes due to the brief piano interludes with accompanying sound effects of film leader whacking against a cannister and the like. There are some obvious amplitude differences in some of the clips utilized, and fidelity is also somewhat variable. All of the contemporary spoken material is clear and crisp sounding. Optional English SDH subtitles are available.

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Woman Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema Theatrical Trailer (HD; 1:45)

Note: This sole supplement can be found on Disc One of this three disc set.

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Though this may sound counterintuitive, Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema may actually occasionally provoke as much annoyance as it does delight, since it basically browbeats the viewer into submission with an unending series of connective tissues between various works. If you are willing to surrender, though, this is a truly gobsmacking piece from both an overall content perspective as well as for those very connective tissues it discusses. Some of the artier aspects are probably unnecessary, but Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema provides so many introductions to both films and filmmakers that any artifices it also offers end up seeming like a small price to pay, all things considered. As should be expected from a comprehensive piece like this which includes such a vast variety of source elements, quality in both video and audio can be pretty widely variable. Highly recommended.