Kathryn Bigelow is the first, and as of 2020, only woman to ever win an Academy Award for Best Director. While that speaks poorly of the Academy and its problems regarding inclusivity, it doesn’t take away from the fact that Kathryn Bigelow is one of the greatest filmmakers of our generation. Her work has managed to achieve the usually unfathomable balance between her own cinematic vision and commercial success. She is known to push the limits of the various genres she works with. On the Oscar winning auteur’s birthday today, we look back at five films that define her filmography.
The Loveless
Her feature film debut, The Loveless (originally titled Breakdown) is a 1981 American outlaw biker drama film. The film stars William Dafoe in his first leading role. Slow-paced and light on dialogue, the film takes a simple premise — a small band of slick-haired, motorcycle-riding delinquents shake up a sleepy southern roadside community while on their way to Daytona — and uses it as an excuse for long, languorous shots of characters who look like they’ve just stepped off the cover of a drugstore paperback. The film cemented what will be a long trajectory of experimental cinematic journey for the director.
Near Dark
In her solo directorial debut, Kathryn delves into the genre of American neo-Western horror film. The plot follows a young man in a small midwestern town who becomes involved with a family of nomadic American vampires. Despite performing poorly at the box office, critic reviews were very positive. Over the years, the film has gained a cult following. From here, the director began to merge her philosophically minded manipulation of pace with the market demands of mainstream film-making. In the process, Bigelow became recognisable as both a Hollywood brand and an auteur.
The Weight of Water
Point Break (1991), The Weight of Water (2000), and K-19: Widowmaker (2002) form an unofficial Water Trilogy in which Bigelow explores Water as a symbol, motif, and space. This 2000 adaptation of Anita Shreve’s 1997 novel of the same name follows Jean James (Catherine McCormack) as she and her poet husband, Thomas (Sean Penn), join her handsome brother-in-law Rich (Josh Lucas) and his alluring new girlfriend, Adaline Gunne (Elizabeth Hurley), for a weekend sail off the coast of New Hampshire. While the film has many commonplace tropes, it is still an exciting premise that really gets to show off Bigelow’s sense of domestic and erotic drama, which was rarely a part of her oeuvre thus far.
The Hurt Locker
The film that propelled Bigelow towards unprecedented success, The Hurt Locker won the director her historic Oscar. The film follows an Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Disposal team who are targeted by insurgents, and shows their psychological reactions to the stress of combat, which is intolerable to some and addictive to others. Much has been said about the film, however the general consensus is that the cinematic experience is akin to perfect. The use of sound, hand-held camera shots, long tracking shots and action sequences, all surmise an emotionally intense experience so powerful for the viewer, which is certainly a credit to Bigelow’s directorial genius. The film was path breaking for both the maker and the industry.
Zero Dark Thirty
Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 American thriller written by Mark Boal. The film dramatises the nearly decade-long international manhunt for Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks. This search leads to the discovery of his compound in Pakistan and the military raid that resulted in the notorious terrorist’s death on May 2, 2011. While the film did generate much controversy, as is expected of its controversial subject, its success was still undefeated. It managed to truly capture the dark side of terrorism and war