Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/618780
dga quarterly 77 pean films of its era, it purveyed the details of cleaning and cooking, and hid sex behind closed doors. Akerman would complete some 47 shorts, features, and documentaries before her suicide last year at 65. The films of Italian director Lina Wertmüller—including Swept Away (1974) and Seven Beauties (1975)—were zeitgeist litmus tests and lightning rods. These role-reversal stories of dominant women and submissive men wrestled with the politics of power and class, as well as gender. The first concerns a female aristocrat and a Communist male deckhand on her yacht. The film shows them at sea, where she has the upper hand, and shipwrecked on a desert island, where he does. In this overheated sexual melodrama, nowhere can they be equals. Her follow-up, Seven Beauties, depicts a similarly melo- dramatic role reversal, this time in a Nazi concentration camp where the female commandant pressures a male in- mate for sex. In all, Seven Beauties received four Oscar nomi- nations, including one for Wertmüller as best director—the first woman so honored. Likewise, she was the first woman to get a DGA nomination for a feature film. At the same time Wertmüller surveyed power struggles between the sexes, Joan Micklin Silver made Hester Street (1975), about a power struggle within a marriage. Set in 1896, the film is framed, lit, and shot in black and white and is most- one sector of the audience, these were sexy films; to anoth- er, they were allegories of women's liberation. As Student Nurses played grindhouses in 1970-71, two other movies directed by women appeared in art houses and major theaters. Barbara Loden, screen and stage actress, wrote, directed, and starred in Wanda (1970), her filmmak- ing debut. Shot in grainy 16 mm in cinéma vérité style— handheld camera and blunt cuts without dissolves—the story of a coal-country wife and mother who abandons her family was, like Rothman's movies, a rejection of the status quo and a search for personal identity. In the euphemism of The New York Times, the film was "a critical hit that failed to create excitement at the box office." So it was with A New Leaf (1971), comedian Elaine May's directorial debut, which she wrote and co-starred in with Walter Matthau. The satire of a gentleman gold digger (Matthau) and the millionairess/botanist (May) he plans to marry and murder, it played at Radio City Music Hall to many glowing reviews and too few in the seats. For A New Leaf, May created a droll film language that contrasts realistic scenes of said gold digger meeting a poten- tial spouse with exaggerated, surrealistically rendered fears of what his life with her might be like. May would continue her directorial career looking through a cocked eye at male mating rituals in her biggest hit The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and male friendships in Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987). Though she continued to work as a screenwriter, May's promising directorial career stalled after Mikey and Nicky and derailed after Ishtar flopped. Female directors, even of May's stature, are rarely given second chances. Among feminists of the 1970s, the films that won the most attention came from Europe. In pointed defiance of how male directors depict women, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) surveys the outer and inner life of a full-time mother and part-time prostitute. Unlike most Euro- PHOTOS: (TOP) CABIN CREEK FILMS; (BOTTOM & OPPOSITE) EVERETT Claudia Weill (left), Girlfriends (1978) Barbara Kopple, Harlan County U.S.A. (1976)