MIFF Session 10: WOMEN MAKE FILM: A NEW ROAD MOVIE THROUGH CINEMA

The title of this does more than simply describe the contents of this massive documentary series, it expresses its approach. How to present cinema directed by women without potentially alienating audiences through politics? You make the entire thing a primer in cinema itself from focal length, editing to representing the meaning of life but you only use films directed by women. If you come out of this thinking "not all male directors" this experience has left you on the side of the road. This is a celebration and everyone's invited.

The framing device is also in the title. The various narrators are seen driving cars or unseen as the dashcam takes down winding roads while the story of cinema and how it is created is told by voices such as Tilda Swinton or Jane Fonda. That established we are given 40 chapters that inform us of what cinema is, how it is constructed and how its part of the essential bargain with the audience.

The size of the instalments is daunting (all but the last are three hours long) but the focus on the issues is kept so focused and accessible that viewing becomes a question of how to interrupt it rather than how much more you can take. This would work better in a tv on demand setting when the resumption of a paused episode was not prefaced with the masses of sponsor messages and advertising that every screening in the MIFF context was given. There are around eight chapters to an episode so the lines are pretty clearly drawn for the time-poor viewer. This would be essential on ABC or SBS on demand services.

This is a Mark Cousins project and features his writing. This is usually lucid and informative but can stretch into hyperbole and go spinning out of control in the space of a single sentence. It can also at times crawl under the viewer's radar when the thing it is meant to define is proving elusive and the accompanying footage presents a question that is not answered. These moments are not frequent but I can recall them and when you're talking a fourteen hour stretch that's something. Cousins' own voice on other series like The Story of Film has a Northern Irish lilt that stays on the right side of monotonous or grating but here, putting his commitment where his creativity is he employs some of the most sonorous voices he could find to tell the tale.

So, fourteen hours of cinema instruction and history that highlights the contribution of women film directors later and I'm ready to follow up on a mass of titles (listed here: https://www.womenmakefilm.net/) And I have a strong sense I have just experienced a marvel. This series starts at its title to tell you what it intends but, outside of a few lines in the opening credits of each episode, it is free of political agenda, concentrating on cinema that, increasingly sensed throughout, demonstrates that good films are good films. The potential for a kind of monument to tokenism quashed, we are given the key and the movies beyond the door are waiting.