— Side of the Frame ৎ
A curated collection of films directed by women: stories told from the margins.
Items in this hypelist
— Fiction
The Very Eye of Night
Maya Deren · 1958
Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.
Daisies
Věra Chytilová · 1966
Two teenage girls embark on a series of destructive pranks in which they consume and destroy the world around them.
A New Leaf
Elaine May · 1971
After running out of funds, Henry Graham, a carefree playboy, plots to marry and murder wealthy botanist Henrietta Lowell.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman · 1976
A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores and takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart.
The Ascent
Larisa Shepitko · 1977
Two Soviet partisans leave their starving band to get supplies from a nearby farm. The Germans have reached the farm first, so the pair must go on a journey deep into occupied territory, a voyage that will also take them deep into their souls.
The Night Porter
Liliana Cavani · 1974
A concentration camp survivor discovers her former torturer and lover working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna. When the couple attempt to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them.
The Watermelon Woman
Cheryl Dunye · 1997
A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes.
Joy Street
Suzan Pitt · 1995
A nightmare of a woman depressed by the concrete world she lives in, and her journey from suicidal despair to personal renewal with the help of an unlikely spirit guide.
Vagabond
Agnès Varda · 1985
Mona Bergeron is dead, her frozen body found in a ditch in the French countryside. From this, the film flashes back to the weeks leading up to her death. Through these flashbacks, Mona gradually declines as she travels from place to place, taking odd jobs and staying with whomever will offer her a place to sleep. Mona is fiercely independent, craving freedom over comfort, but it is this desire to be free that will eventually lead to her demise.
Girlfriends
Claudia Weill · 1978
A photographer and her best friend are roommates. She is stuck with small-change shooting jobs and dreams of success. When her roommate decides to get married and leave, she feels hurt and has to learn how to deal with living alone.
Double Labyrinthe
Katerina Thomadaki · 1976
With this film-manifesto, the two artists invent what they called the Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body), they present themselves as a "double auteur femme" and they lay the foundations of the radical critical and esthetical positions of their work to come. Double Labyrinthe has a mirror structure based on their "mutual gaze": in the first part Katerina performs while filmed by Maria and in the second part Maria performs filmed by Katerina.
Cléo from 5 to 7
Agnès Varda · 1962
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
At Land
Maya Deren · 1944
A woman washes up on a beach and embarks on a surreal journey, encountering others and fragmented versions of herself in a quest for identity.
Asparagus
Suzan Pitt · 1979
A symbolic reflection on issues of female sexuality, art and identity constructs.
Blow Up My Town
Chantal Akerman · 1968
A young girl shuts herself away in her apartment and goes about her business in a strange way, as she wastes the night in the kitchen – humming all along.
Meshes of the Afternoon
Maya Deren · 1943
A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.
Je Tu Il Elle
Chantal Akerman · 1974
A woman suffers a subdued psychological breakdown in the wake of a devastating breakup.
Happiness
Agnès Varda · 1965
A young husband and father, perfectly content with his life, falls in love with another woman.
Mikey and Nicky
Elaine May · 1976
Nick is desperate, holed up in a cheap hotel, suffering from an ulcer and convinced that a local mob boss wants him killed. Desperate and terrified, he calls Mikey, his friend since childhood and a fellow gangster. So begins a long night…
Wanda
Barbara Loden · 1970
After a string of abusive relationships, Wanda abandons her family and seeks solace in the company of a petty criminal.
— Non-Fiction
Jane B. by Agnès V.
Agnès Varda · 1988
The interests, obsessions, and fantasies of two singular artists converge in this inspired collaboration between Agnès Varda and her longtime friend the actor Jane Birkin. Made over the course of a year and motivated by Birkin’s fortieth birthday—a milestone she admits to some anxiety over—Jane B. by Agnès V. contrasts the private, reflective Birkin with Birkin the icon.
The House Is Black
Forugh Farrokhzad · 1963
Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, The House is Black juxtaposes "ugliness," of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.
Women of the Resistance
Liliana Cavani · 1965
Documentary composed of interviews with female partisans who survived the German invasion of Italy in World War II.
The Amazonian Angel
Maria Klonaris · 1992
This filmic portrait is born of a double movement: the meeting of Lena Vandrey with our cinematographic universe, our meeting with her pictorial world, her space and her collection of processional figures and articulated dolls. Crossings of imaginations, of mythologies: the South, the origins, the search for a "greecity", the search for the magical potential of the image, the feminine one as "force in love". Crossings of plastic gestures: one on canvas support, the other on photographic and filmic support. We invited the artist to become herself body-painting, filmed painting. We have staged her texts, her paintings, her objects, her space. Attempt to reveal it as an embodiment of its own mythology.
Be Pretty and Shut Up!
Delphine Seyrig · 1981
The film is a series of interviews with various well-known film actresses, including Jenny Agutter, Maria Schneider, and Jane Fonda. The title, which is borrowed from a 1958 film with the same name by Marc Allegret, refers to the sense the actresses have of what is expected of them by the film industry.
Being Women
Cecilia Mangini · 1965
This documentary is one of the earliest film enquiries on women's condition in Italy, seen in its different aspects: social, economic, psychological. Starting from an analysis of the feminine role models proposed by the cultural industry, the film finds its protagonists among all kinds of women.
Diary of a Pregnant Woman
Agnès Varda · 1958
Impressions of the rue Mouffetard, Paris 5, through the eyes of a pregnant woman.
Le 15/8
Chantal Akerman · 1973
Mid-August in Paris (the title is a date: August 15) in a sunny, quiet apartment a young woman talks, thinks, reflects about herself, everyday life and little events in a long, uninterrupted monologue. The camera pictures her and her gestures in long, fixed shots moving around the rooms, the space, the light and shadows of a summer day.
News from Home
Chantal Akerman · 1977
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman lives in New York. Filmed images of the City accompany texts of Akerman's loving mother back home in Brussels. The City comes more and more to the front while the words of the mother, read by Akerman herself, gradually fade away.
Black Panthers
Agnès Varda · 1968
A film shot during the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California around the meetings organised by the Black Panthers Party to free Huey Newton, one of their leaders, and to turn his trial into a political debate. They tried and succeeded in catching America’s attention.
