DVD Chronicle

When Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker won six Academy Awards in 2010, including Best Picture, it was big news, the first time a film directed by a woman had been so honored. In my view this exciting and troubling film deserved all the praise it got, and I trust it will be only one of many successes for Bigelow—at present, according to the Internet Movie Database, she is in pre-production work on an action thriller set in South America, teamed again with the writer Mark Boal. I trust as well that there will be further successes for other women directors working today, like Debra Granik (Winter's Bone), Lisa Chodolenko (The Kids Are All Right), Agnès Jaoui (Look at Me), and Agnieszka Holland (Olivier, Olivier, and several episodes of The Wire and Treme). While we are waiting for their future projects to materialize, let us move backward through the decades, sampling work from the long history of female filmmaking that lies behind The Hurt Locker, skipping over the most famous names (Lina Wertmüller, Leni Riefenstahl) in favor of those less well known. A lot of women have made a lot of films which, whether recognized by Oscar or not, are still capable of giving enormous pleasure, and pleasure of varied kinds.

To date, the Danish director Lone Scherfig has made six features, two of them considerable international hits, An Education in 2009 and Italian for Beginners in 2000. An Education owes a great deal to Nick Hornby's script (and the memoir by Lynn Barber on which it is based) and to the performances of a remarkable cast, including Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, and Rosamund Pike in a too-little-lauded supporting role as a disillusioned but still trying party girl. As part of the collaborative team Scherfig directs the action skillfully, but her individual talents are seen to better advantage in Italian for Beginners—even if, paradoxically, her name does not appear in the credits for the film, in keeping with the Dogme95 principles under which it was made. These principles were promulgated sixteen years ago by the Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg and include: no studio shooting, no special effects, no fancy lighting, no background music, no Hollywood glamor, no obtrusive auteurist touches, in other words raw experience austerely photographed, the Ding an sich onscreen. A strict form of Lutheranism onscreen, one is tempted to say, and coincidentally two of the characters in Italian for Beginners are Lutheran pastors, one believing and one backsliding. It is noticeable that in the film Scherfig does a little backsliding herself. She shoots on location with a handheld digital camera in available light, which is all very well, all orthodox, but not so the piano music heard on the soundtrack when the scene shifts from Copenhagen to Venice, and which doctrinaire Dogme95 would anathematize. It is as though Scherfig, like the characters of her film, starts to shed inhibitions under the influence of Italy and Italians. Personally, I welcomed this development.

Italian for Beginners follows a group of young Danish misfits to a council-funded Italian language class, where their individual states of loneliness (note how they sit apart from each other in the too large classroom) begin to find common cause in the search for the right way to order una colazione or request una camera con doppio letto. Several of these lonely-hearts have to cope with demented, enraged, or tyrannical authority figures, parents or supervisors—the Dogme95 ethos at work again, perhaps, a young filmmaker taking the opportunity to score points against the previous generation—but once the...