The most egalitarian professions are often the ones “no one wants to work in”—meaning no one who can easily do better. So it was a fact that in the earliest days of cinema, women figured heavily behind the camera as well as in front of it, largely because it was then considered a lowly medium sure to go the way of most short-lived fads. Once film became recognized as something more permanent, not to mention hugely profitable, of course such silent-era women producer/director/studio chiefs etc. like Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blache were hastily shown the door. Today we get retrospectives for Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino not just because they did some interesting work, but because they were virtually the only female directors to attain significant Hollywood careers over the entire first half-century of sound moviemaking.
Things were somewhat better in the realms of experimental, independent, and foreign films… but not by much. It wasn’t until 1977 that Italy’s Lina Wertmuller became the first-ever woman nominated for the Best Director Oscar; another 26 years for an American (Sofia Coppola) to get the same nod; and in 2009 The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow finally won. The list is long of women who managed to make a first feature, then never another—a syndrome that seems much less common among men, who presumably encounter less resistance in the realms of executive and financier support.
One notable pioneer who hasn’t gotten the attention she deserves, at least outside Scandinavia, is getting a posthumous tribute retrospective at Berkeley’s BAMPFA over the next ten weeks. “Swedish Outsider: The Films of Mai Zetterling” pays tribute to an actress turned writer-director whose curiosity and drive led her to work around the world. She also created some films that contributed notably to the often furious public arguments around art, censorship, gender roles, and sociopolitical engagement in the 1960s, happily knocking down old proprieties.
Born into a working-class family in 1925, she entered the Royal Dramatic Theater at age 17, and almost immediately became a stage star. But because “I need to travel—I need adventure!” (as she says in a short documentary shown in the series, Meeting Mai), she was soon expanding into film jobs, then big and small-screen work abroad.
The Berkeley schedule begins this weekend with two Swedish features that were important in both her career and Ingmar Bergman’s. Alf Sjoberg directed 1944’s Torment, a daring international success. Bergman wrote for her the role of a doomed shopgirl driven to drink by the same sadistic schoolmaster (Stig Jarrel as a Latin instructor not-fondly nicknamed “Caligula”) who terrorizes the youth (Alf Kjellin) she finds some comfort in. Its intimations of psychosexual cruelty and institutionalized abuse were very strong stuff at the time. Four years later, Bergman himself directed Music in the Dark, a more conventional if stylish star-crossed romance between an embittered, accidentally-blinded pianist (Birger Malmstein) and the loyal servant girl whose love he finally learns to accept.
By the time of the latter, Zetterling had already begun accepting English-language parts in U.S. and British projects, eventually working opposite such names as Peter Sellers, Tyrone Power, Danny Kaye and Dirk Bogarde. But soon acting grew less compelling to her than the desire to direct. After a couple shorts for the BBC, she was able to direct and co-write (with then-husband David Hughes, an English novelist) four Swedish features—all drawing on fellow Bergman collaborators, all playing in the BAMPFA program. 1964’s Loving Couples is a period piece taking place about fifty years earlier. It follows three women of differing station in a well-to-do household over a timespan that encompasses loveless marriage, near-rape, infidelity, gay flirtations, sterility, miscarriages and childbirth.
Two years later, Night Games caused a sensation with its more Fellini-influenced portrait of decadence in another privileged enclave. At the San Francisco International Film Festival, jury chief Shirley Temple Black quit in well-publicized outrage at such “pornography.” (Within a couple years, however, far more graphic movies would make that pronouncement seem ludicrous.) Another two years on, The Girls had Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom as three actresses touring a stage production of Lysistrata, trying mostly in vain to engage one another, their audiences and the media in relevant dialogue around the changing roles of women and men.
That last was her most overtly feminist statement, though as she said elsewhere, “I don’t make women’s films. I make personal films, and I happen to be a woman.” Nonetheless, what is striking about them now is their head-on wrestling with issues that would soon become much more widely debated under the banner of Women’s Liberation. But in the mid-1960s, they were radical, and often received with hostility. Asked just what Modern Woman’s demands and/or principles are, one figure in The Girls admits “We haven’t formulated them yet.” You can criticize these movies now for their somewhat heavy-handed chasing after shock value, trying-too-hard arty flourishes, and rhetoric that in retrospect seems very 101. Still: What other female director was working, let alone raising such questions then? (Maybe Agnes Varda, to an extent.)
These films are all aesthetically refined, ambitious in their freewheeling mixes of flashback, fantasy, pseudo-documentary, comedy, indictment, eroticism, symbolism and the proverbial kitchen sink. Like other time capsules such as I Am Curious (Yellow) or Easy Rider, they are perhaps better viewed as cultural landmarks than as lasting works of art. Arguably best of them is the least-known. It’s also the only one to center a male character: The 1968 Doktor Glas, which has the superb Per Oscarsson as a small-town bachelor physician incapable of grasping how his own extreme, puritanical skittishness around sex and the human body is his life’s tragedy. While deploying many of the same stylistic and structural ideas as the three features above, it’s a much more constricted narrative. Somehow, limiting herself to one severely repressed viewpoint allows Zetterling to make her points with greater delicacy and more damning force.
None of these movies were not commercial triumphs, however, and going forward she had few offers to direct beyond television gigs. There was a final feature in the 1986 Amorosa, a little-seen biopic about Agnes von Krusenstjerna, the controversial proto-feminist Swedish author who greatly inspired her. (And who wrote the source material for Loving Couples.) Like that controversial figure, Zetterling died too soon, of cancer at age 68 in 1994. The BAMPFA series will include Amorosa as well as the 1977 mid-length drama We Have Many Names. Plus several shorts, and two 1946 films (Sjoberg’s Iris and the Lieutenant, rural romance Sunshine Follows Rain) from her initial breakout period, both co-starring Torment’s handsome Kjellin. Decades later she made a brief return to acting, notably in films by Nicolas Roeg (The Witches) and Ken Loach (Hidden Agenda).
“Swedish Outsider: The Films of Mai Zetterling” plays March 1-May 8 at BAMPFA in downtown Berkeley, for full schedule & other info go here.
Also incoming this week:
Portraits of Artists: Liza Minnelli, Art Spiegelman
Two new documentaries offer largely first-person career assessments from giants in very different creative fields.
Liza Minnelli needs no introduction… or does she? Do people under, say, 40 have the slightest idea who she is? Bruce David Klein’s Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story assumes they do, or perhaps that no one would be watching if they didn’t. Yet she might be a classic instance of someone who was “born too late,” in that her incredible old-school skill set (so reminiscent of superstar mother Judy Garland) was already growing dated by the time she was coming of age in the rock era. Cabaret aside, “they” no longer made the kinds of movies she could flourish in—and indeed, most of her film career is omitted here, as is much of her resume in other media.
Instead, the focus is primarily on mentoring relationships she credits as shaping her talent: Eloise author-vocal coach Kay Thompson (who told her “Don’t waste your time with dull people”), French singer Charles Aznavour, choreographer-director Bob Fosse, lyricist Fred Ebb (of Kander & Ebb), fashion designer Halston, and a few others, including fond mentions of several husbands. (But no one has anything nice to say about that last one.) Then there’s the person with whom she’s always associated, fabled “Mama”—though as recounted by various friends here, that relationship was as much a burden as a blessing.
Frail but good-humored in her late seventies, Minnelli is an eternal optimist who refuses to dish dirt, sometimes to a baffling extent. (She actually claims “Nobody did drugs” at Studio 54.) There is valuable input here from Ben Vereen, Michael Feinstein, George Hamilton, Chita Rivera, Joel Grey, John Kander, Darren Criss, Lorna Luft, and Mia Farrow—who knew she’s been besties with the latter since childhood?—as well as a rich array of archival performance footage. Minnelli’s life and times no doubt could have filled 10 hours of juicier, more detailed analysis. But these very “authorized” 104 minutes are satisfying enough as a one-stop tribute to a remarkable figure whose heyday really only lasted about a decade… though in a just world, it would have gone on and on. The documentary opens Fri/28 at SF’s Roxie and Marin’s Smith Rafael Film Center.
Glitz and glamour do not figure in Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s Art Spielgelman: Disaster Is My Muse. Almost exactly Ms. Minnelli’s peer, the famed cartoonist was raised by parents who’d survived the Holocaust—unlike virtually their entire extended families—but never left its toxic shadow, his mother eventually committing suicide. Art escaped this rather grim upbringing by creating comics from an early age, inspired by Mad Magazine. He was an early presence in that medium’s countercultural underground, moving to San Francisco in 1971 where he met like minds such as Bill Griffith and R. Crumb.
His own artistic evolution (which included work for trading-card company Topps and later co-creating The Garbage Pail Kids) culminated of course in Maus, the graphic novel depicting the Holocaust as enacted by cats and mice. Among many firsts for the form, it won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Later he’d create equally hard-hitting work about 9/11, Trump, hotly divisive covers for The New Yorker, and so forth. Some of that work (including Maus) has since been banned from schools amidst what he calls “a new kind of fascism” very much redolent of the old kind.
Spiegelman is a serious artist and a serious person—so I’m not quite sure why this solid if uninspired, PBS-produced portrait has such an antic musical score, as if it labored under the assumption that he’s still a guy who makes “the funny papers.” Nonetheless, it’s a sturdy appreciation one wishes weren’t quite so timely, as the subject keeps saying all-too-resonant things like “My father was a collaborator on this book, but then so was Hitler.” It opens at the Roxie this Fri/28.
