Isn’t that exciting?! I’ve got a really big announcement to make, but first I want to run through a few highlights of this last year.
As far as highlights go:
2014 has also been filled with a lot of great cinema (and TV!) watching as always (see all my monthly updated here), but that brings me to my big announcement. In watching so many movies for so long now, I’ve come to really feel the gender imbalance, both in storytelling and in the characters represented on screen. The most recent reports show that only 6% of the top grossing films in 2013 were directed by women. Writers aren’t much better, with 10% of the top grossing films of 2013. That, however, doesn’t mean that 94% of movies are being directed by men. Working at Rotten Tomatoes has shown me that almost one film a week that’s opening limited or on VOD is directed by women (a few weeks back there were 7!). What this means for me, living in Los Angeles, is that I have access to a lot more of these films than most people, yet I still find myself not going to them (I only saw 13 new release films this year directed by women!) Which brings me to my big announcement for 2015:
For the entire year of 2015 I will only be watching films that are directed, co-directed, written or co-written by women. This includes movies in theaters, as well as what I will be watching at home (my Netflix queue is so ready for this). There will be two moratoriums, one for Noirvember 6 and one for the TCMFF, because Ida Lupino and Dorothy Arzner only directed so many films!
But the rest of the year, this is what I am doing. I see this partially as a social protest, and partially as a year of discovery. While I will be denying myself films from some of my favorite directors, I will also be experiencing some classics I keep putting off and some new voices that I normally wouldn’t have time for. I probably won’t be seeing many of the top grossing films this year (if 2015’s figures are anything like 2013!), same goes for most of the prestige Oscar contenders.
I am excited to see what a year like this will be like. Every year 90% or more of the films I watch are from male creators. What will happen when I flip that percentage? What will my life be like? I’ll continue to do the YouTube reviews as I have been, but most of my self discovery I will be keeping in a journal for myself now (with hopes of possibly publishing it as a memoir in the future).
So these last few weeks of 2014 I’m going to try to fit in a few male directed films I’ve been putting off before I embark on my Year With Women.
