Where did I learn about this book? Not sure. Anyway, Phaidon, the publishers kindly sent me a BLAD, so I can admire a sample of the book’s beauty, and do a gender count. And it looks like a beautiful book, even has excerpts from scripts, which I love to see.
But, of the 100 directors (one, Taika Waititi, a New Zealander) only 17-and-a-half (one director is a mixed gender couple!) are women. Nine of the book’s eleven ‘curators’ are men, two of the men joint curators, and all past and present directors of major film festivals. Azize Tan, the solitary woman, is director of the Istanbul International Film Festival.
And the women are (druuuummmmm roooollllllllll): Maren Ade, Andrea Arnold, Sophie Barthes, Aida Begic, Anna Boden (the half), Valeska Grisebach, Mia Hansen-Love, Miranda July, Farah Khan, So Yong Kim, Liu Jiayin, Lucrecia Martel, Shirin Neshat, Asli Ozge, Sarah Polley, Kelly Reichardt, Axelle Ropert, Esther Rots.
I’ll be looking out for a complete copy of TAKE 100, with immense enthusiasm. I haven’t heard of some of these women before. It’ll be exciting to read about them and then to track down their work. And to see how the book honours the work of those I’m familiar with. But—of course—I hope that in film's future women make half of all films. Not under 20%.
Thank you for this!!! oh, and what does BLAD stand for, plz? :)
ReplyDeleteBLAD=Book (or Basic) Layout And Design, a booklet of a few parts of a book, as they'll appear, to give a taste of what it's like. This one had the cover, a blurb, a list of curators and the 100 filmmakers, a full entry for one filmmaker and some partials of others. I'd never heard of the BLAD term before this, though I've seen one or two, & I was very taken with it, as you probably realised.
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