A welcome spotlight on the considerable achievements of female filmmakers.
Interviews with more than two dozen female filmmakers from a wide range of genres.
In 2017, a report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that “every major Hollywood studio systematically discriminated against hiring female directors,” even though “the graduating classes of America’s top film schools are 50/50 male/female.” Moreover, Smokler was surprised to discover that “articulate, well-heeled, filmgoing friends” were uninformed about women’s contributions to cinema, such as not knowing that Greta Gerwig was an accomplished director well before Barbie. In this entertaining corrective, Smokler, a writer and documentary filmmaker, interviewed 25 writers, producers, and directors—all of them Americans who “have at least one film or television series a reasonably avid movie watcher would have heard of or seen”—and asked them “to focus on the stories of their triumphs that we can all learn from and share.” Among the participants are Barbara Kopple, “the Mother Courage of American documentary filmmaking”; Julie Dash, “the first black woman to direct a feature film in general release in America”; and Chris Hegedus, whose enormous contributions to documentaries would “raise the level of innovation in nonfiction cinema that had already seemed to be at its apex.” As is often the case with books like this one, some interviews are more insightful than others. For the most part, the exceptional talent interviewed here provide valuable perspectives on the art of filmmaking. There are many amusing anecdotes, as when Jessica Yu, director of the short subject Breathing Lessons, a documentary about a polio-stricken man who lived his life in an iron lung, says the biggest change in her life after she won her Oscar was that “I gained a bit of professional identity from doing that and your family stops asking ‘what is it exactly that you do?’”
A welcome spotlight on the considerable achievements of female filmmakers.Pub Date: May 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780197619766
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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