Alternative Media Group

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL RETROSPECTIVE: GIRLS 24/7

Author:

Amelia G

Posted:

Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Girls are front and centre in this selection of films by women directors from the 1960s up to the mid-1970s. With newly restored 35mm prints of classics like Angès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman to rarely seen films like Wings by Larisa Shepitko and Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Girls 24/7 will spotlight and celebrate a particular energy that was at play in an era of huge social and political transformation.

But these are not capital F Feminist films, festival director Clare Stewart is quick to clear up. “In curating the program it was important for me that the films were from the 60s and early 70s, because they’re films that break with a lot of traditions but came out of an era before formal feminist filmmaking entered the fray,” she says. “They have a brazen sensibility and feminist politic at their core but they’re not yet giving way to the theoretical structures that came to play in feminist filmmakers after the mid-70s.

“I looked at films from a few years later but they didn’t have the vibrant energy that I wanted to get across; the feeling of being at once critical of the status quo but highly anticipatory of what might be just around the corner.” Besides the politics they play into, these films are cinematic gems in their own right and have stood up against time because the exist on an individual level, Stewart says. “Rather than being stuck in the ideology of a movement that might have become outdated, these films have an incredibly sparkling relevance to them.”

Highly recommended from yours truly is the rampaging teenage anarchists of Vera Chytilová’s Czech new wave masterpiece Daisies. There is no other film like it. With a highly stylized, at times surrealist aesthetic, two young women make their way in the world of men using things like laughter and food as forces of disruption, embodying the valient vibrancy which runs throughout the retrospective.

Coinciding with Girls 24/7 is the Australian premiere of 80-year-old French director Angès Varda’s memoir The Beaches of Agnès. Stewart describes it as “a very moving, personalized memoir of an 80-year-old female director who has juggled with being a mother, a wife of another famous filmmaker and a grand dame of cinema in Paris.” The film goes into Varda’s creative choices while also showing how her everyday life impacted things, says Stewart. “That was one of the things that sparked me to do this program: the sense of everydayness is so much more palpable in all of these films, compared to what was coming out of Hollywood in that era.”

The program is also particularly relevant in light of the reports that have come out in the last few years about the difficulties female directors still have in the film industry. While women have made a lot of progress in production-oriented areas they remain severely under-represented in directorial roles – for example, of the roughly 13400 members of Directors Guild of America, only 1000 (7 percent) are listed as female.

Despite that, there’s a good representation of strong contemporary female directors across the festival program, with Danish director Lone Scherfig’s acclaimed An Education marking the closing night screening and one of the most anticipated premiers in the festival. The Sydney Film Festival runs from June 3-14, for more information see sff.org.au

Marie and Marie in Daisies (1966)

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