Who is she?

The singular career of Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979), the rare woman filmmaker to have been taken seriously by studio bosses (notably B.P. Schulberg at Paramount, who gave her her first directing contract), is regularly revisited, but never quite enough. Unafraid to openly declare her homosexuality, at a (brief) time when Hollywood was quite liberal on the subject, she directed some fifteen movies - more than any other American woman filmmaker! Above all, she created strong female characters who did not need men for their identity.

What it’s about

The documentary contains a fairly classic cocktail of extracts, many of them of very high quality thanks to recent restorations, and interviews with American academic experts, since the feminist and queer movements have been active in the USA since the 1970s.

Highlights

There is a lot to learn, and this doc leaves nothing out: the filmmaker's technical discoveries in her early days (the use of stock shots and the invention of the boom camera at the dawn of talkies); the thematic originality of her films, finely analysed by the contributors; the moving testimony of Francis Ford Coppola, who had her as a film teacher and remembers a defining encounter; and finally the voice of the filmmaker herself, recorded in the 1970s, bringing together her memories with irony. She was a hell of a woman!

Dorothy Arzner, Pioneer, Queer, Feminist, 2023 © DR