Bigelow's early creative endeavors were as a painting student atSan Francisco Art Institute, where she enrolled in the fall of 1970. While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into theWhitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York City from fall of 1971 to the spring 1972. While at the ISP, her advisers included artistBrice Marden andSusan Sontag. She received herBachelor of Fine Arts from SFAI in December 1972.[6] Returning to New York, for a while, Bigelow lived as an impoverished artist, staying with painterJulian Schnabel in performance artistVito Acconci's loft.[7] She had a minor role inRichard Serra's videoPrisoner's Dilemma (1974).[8] Bigelow teamed up withPhilip Glass on a real-estate venture in which they renovated distressed apartments downtown and sold them for a profit.[9]
Bigelow entered the graduate film program atColumbia University, where she studied theory and criticism and earned her master's degree. Her professors included Vito Acconci,Sylvère Lotringer, andSusan Sontag,[10] as well asAndrew Sarris andEdward W. Said,[11] and she worked with theArt & Language collective andLawrence Weiner.[12] While working with Art & Language Bigelow published an article, "Not on the Development of Contradiction," in the short-lived Art & Language magazineThe Fox, and began a short film,The Set-Up (1978), which found favor with directorMiloš Forman,[13] then teaching at Columbia University, and which Bigelow later submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia.[14] During her graduate studies at Columbia, she also studied under seminal film theoristPeter Wollen.[15] Bigelow immersed herself in the critical theory that heavily influenced her first feature film. She co-directed her first film,The Loveless, with her film school classmateMonty Montgomery in 1981.
Bigelow's shortThe Set-Up is a 20-minute deconstruction of violence in film. The film portrays "two men fighting each other as thesemioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonskydeconstruct the images in voice-over."[10] Bigelow asked her actors to actually beat and bludgeon each other throughout the film's all-night shoot.[14] Her first full-length feature wasThe Loveless (1981), a biker film that she co-directed with Monty Montgomery. It featuredWillem Dafoe in his first starring role. Next, she directedNear Dark (1987), which she co-scripted withEric Red. With this film, she began her lifelong fascination with manipulating movie conventions and genre.[7] The main cast included three actors who had appeared in the filmAliens.[18] In the same year, she directed a music video for theNew Order song "Touched by the Hand of God"; the video is a spoof ofglam metal imagery.[19] Bigelow's subsequent films,Blue Steel,Point Break, andStrange Days, "merged her philosophically minded manipulation of pace with the market demands of mainstream film-making".[14]
If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is.
Blue Steel starredJamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer who is stalked by a psychopathic killer, played byRon Silver. As withNear Dark, Eric Red co-wrote the screenplay. The film, originally bankrolled for $10 million, was shot on location in New York due to financial considerations and because Bigelow does not "like movies where you see a welfare apartment and it's the size of two football fields."[21] Bigelow followedBlue Steel with the cult classicPoint Break (1991), which starredKeanu Reeves as an FBI agent who poses as a surfer to catch the "Ex-Presidents", a team of surfing armed robbers led byPatrick Swayze who wear Reagan, Nixon, LBJ and Jimmy Carter masks when they hold up banks.Point Break was Bigelow's most profitable 'studio' film, taking approximately $80 million at the global box office during the year of its release, and yet it remains one of her lowest rated films, both in commercial reviews and academic analysis. Critics argued that it conformed to some of the clichés and tired stereotypes of the action genre and that it abandoned much of the stylistic substance and subtext of Bigelow's other work.[22]
I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions.
In 1993, she directed an episode of the TV seriesWild Palms and appeared in one episode as Mazie Woiwode (uncredited). Bigelow's 1995 filmStrange Days was written and produced by her ex-husbandJames Cameron. Despite some positive reviews, the film was a commercial failure. Furthermore, many attributed the creative vision to Cameron, diminishing Bigelow's perceived influence on the film.[14] She directed three episodes ofHomicide: Life on the Street in 1997 and 1998. Based onAnita Shreve'snovel of the same name, Bigelow's 2000 filmThe Weight of Water is a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships. In 2002, she directedK-19: The Widowmaker, starringHarrison Ford andLiam Neeson, about a group of men aboard the Soviet Union's first nuclear-powered submarine. The film fared poorly at the box office and was received with mixed reactions by critics.
2008–2016: Critical acclaim and international recognition
She became the first woman to receive anAcademy Award for Best Director forThe Hurt Locker.[26][27][28] She was the fourth woman in history to be nominated for the honor, and only the second American woman. A competitor in the category was her ex-husband,James Cameron, who directed the sci-fi filmAvatar.[7] In her acceptance speech for herAcademy Award, Bigelow surprised many audience members when she did not mention her status as the first woman to ever receive an Oscar for Best Director. In the past, Bigelow has refused to identify herself as a "woman filmmaker" or a "feminist filmmaker."[7] She has been criticized for the violence in her films by writers like Mark Salisbury, who asked inThe Guardian, "Why does she make the kind of movie she makes?" and by Marcia Froelke Coburn, who asked in theChicago Tribune, "What's a nice woman like Bigelow doing making erotic, violent vampire movies?"[7]
Bigelow at 82nd Venice International Film Festival
She served as executive producer ofTriple Frontier, a film that she was originally going to direct. She gave up directing duties toJ. C. Chandor to focus on other projects. Bigelow also directs commercials. She is represented internationally by commercial production company SMUGGLER, where she has directed commercials for the Army National Guard, Budweiser and AT&T, some of which were broadcast during the Super Bowl.[36] In 2022, Bigelow was nominated by theDirectors Guild of America forOutstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials forApple's "Hollywood In Your Pocket".[37]
In November 1976, she appeared in a political 56-minute film, entitled "Struggle in New York" which involved conceptual artistsArt & Language.[42]
In the early 1980s, Bigelow modeled for aGap advertisement. Her acting credits includeLizzie Borden's 1983 filmBorn in Flames as a feminist newspaper editor, and as the leader of a cowgirl gang in the 1988 music video ofMartini Ranch's "Reach", which was directed by James Cameron.
Bigelow has a shifting relationship with Hollywood and its conventional film standards and techniques. Her work "both satisfies and transcends the demands of formula to create cinema that's ideologically complex, viscerally thrilling, and highly personal".[43] Social issues of gender, race, and politics are entrenched in her work of all genres.[43]
While her films are often categorized in the action genre, she describes her style as an exploration of "film's potential to be kinetic".[44] She often uses "purpose-built" camera equipment[45] to create mobile shots. In many of her films, such asThe Hurt Locker,Point Break, andStrange Days, she has used mobile and hand-held cameras.
Bigelow's work is characterized by extensive violence. Most of her films include violent sequences and many revolve around the theme of violence. Violence has been a staple in her films from the beginning of her career. In her first short filmThe Set-Up (1978), two professors deconstruct two men beating each other up and reflect on the "fascistic appeal of screen violence".[45] For this film Bigelow asked the two actors to actually beat each other up in the film's all-night shoot.[45] This interest in violence seeped into her first full-length feature filmThe Loveless, starringWillem Dafoe, which follows a 1950s motorcycle gang's visit to a small town and the ensuing violence that occurs. Her next film,Near Dark, follows a young boy who falls in love with a vampire after being bitten by her. The film was conceived as aWestern but the genre was so unpopular at the time that Bigelow had to adjust her script and invert the genre conventions.[45] She still used the violent staples of the genre including sieges, shoot-outs, and horseback chases.[45] It is regarded for its combination of the Western andhorror genre and its exploration of "homosexuality and 'white America's illusion of safety and control'".[43] The film became acult classic within the horror genre community. Bigelow herself saw it screened inGreenwich Village with a horror genre crowd.[21]
Blue Steel was her first venture into theaction film genre, with which she has stayed throughout her career and has found most success. The film revolves around a female police officer who is falsely accused of a murder and who in the process of clearing her name investigates a killing spree connected to the original murder. Similarly toNear Dark, Bigelow inverts the typical action genre conventions by placing a female protagonist at the center.[45] The film digs deeply into feminist issues and is often taught and studied by feminist film scholars.[43] Her next filmPoint Break, starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, was her breakout film in terms of mainstream success. The film follows a detective who goes undercover in a suspected criminal gang of surfers who primarily rob banks. It marks the first time that Bigelow used lengthySteadicam tracking shots. It was also her biggest financial success yet, grossing $83.5 million worldwide with a budget of $24 million.[45] Although her next film,Strange Days, which ruminates on the relationships between media, sex, race, class, and technology,[43] had a budget of $42 million, it only grossed just under $8 million.[45] Although the film flopped, it led Bigelow and her team to spend over a year developing a camera that intended to approximate human vision.[45]
The commercial failure ofStrange Days was followed by a stream of commercial and critical flops for Bigelow. Her filmsThe Weight of Water andK-19: The Widowmaker received negative reviews from critics and little attention from the general public. With her independently produced filmThe Hurt Locker she made a commercial and critical comeback. This film was her transition into political and historical film.The Hurt Locker, which follows members of a bomb squad serving in the Iraq War, was Bigelow's first venture into pseudo-documentary style film, abandoning the aesthetic stylization found inStrange Days andNear Dark.[45] The film utilizes the genre's tendency to use quick cuts, shaky camera, and rapid zooms. It also breaks with the conventional narrative structures of her previous films, following a more unorganized and experimental narrative structure. Her next film,Zero Dark Thirty, is widely seen as a direct extension ofThe Hurt Locker, going further in-depth of historical analysis and addressing issues of geopolitics and American foreign policy. The film was criticised for its depiction of the CIA's torture practices.[45]
Throughout her career, Bigelow has tended to go to extremes for her films. InPoint Break, while filming the skydiving scene, Bigelow was on the airplane with a parachute on, as she filmed Patrick Swayze throw himself into the sky.[44] During surfing scenes in the same film, she would either paddle on a longboard or lean over a nearby boat as far as possible to get shots of Keanu Reeves surfing.[44] For the opening ofStrange Days she controlled a crane that dropped a camera man off the edge of a tall building. ForThe Hurt Locker, Bigelow filmed in Jordan in up to 130 °F (54 °C) heat.[44]
^abcdeKeough, Peter (2013).Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. pp. ix–xii.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
^abcdBenson-Allott, Caetlin."Undoing Violence: Politics, Genre, and Duration in Kathryn Bigelow's Cinema" (preview/paywall),Film Quarterly 64.2 (Winter 2010), pp. 33–43. University of California Press. "Abstract: Kathryn Bigelow's eight feature films all seek a balance between progressive representations of gender and race and the demands of commercial filmmaking. Close attention to the filmmaker's experiments with duration and camera technology reveals her interest in reworking Hollywood conventions to critique conventionally masculinist genres."
^Jermyn, Deborah; Redmond, Sean (2003).The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. Directors' Cuts. Wallflower Press. p. 6.ISBN9781903364522.{{cite book}}:Check|isbn= value: checksum (help)
^abKelleher, Ed (April 1990). "Kathryn Bigelow: Twisting Movie Conventions".The Film Journal.93: 2.
^Jermyn, Deborah, and Sean Redmond. "Chapter Six – All That Is Male Melts into Air: Bigelow on the Edge of Point Break."The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. London: Wallflower, 2003. 106–107. Print.
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