Gillian Armstrong Films | Gillian Armstrong Filmography | Gillian Armstrong Biography | Gillian Armstrong Career | Gillian Armstrong Awards

While women directors in film industries around the world are still seen as anomalous (if mainstream) or marginalized as avant garde, the Antipodes have been home to an impressive cadre of female filmmakers who negotiate and transcend such notions.

Before the promising debuts of Ann Turner (Celid) and Jane Campion (Sweetie), Gillian Armstrong blazed a trail with My Brilliant Career, launching a brilliant career of her own as an international director. Like Turner and Campion, Armstrong makes films that resist easy categorization as either ?women's films? or Australian ones. Her films mix and intermingle genres in ways which undermine and illuminate afresh, if not openly subvert, filmic conventions?as much as the films of her male compatriots, like Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, or Paul Cox. Formally, however, the pleasures of her films are traditional ones, such as sensitive and delicate cinematography (often by Russell Boyd), fluid editing, an evocative feel for setting and costume, and most importantly, a commitment to solid character development and acting. All in all, her work reminds one of the best of classical Hollywood cinema, and the question of whether her aim is parody or homage is often left pleasingly ambiguous.

Although Armstrong has often spoken in interviews about her discomfort at being confined to the category of woman filmmaker of women's films, and has articulated her desire to reach an audience of both genders and all nationalities, her work continually addresses sexual politics and family tensions. Escape from and struggle with traditional sex roles and the pitfalls and triumphs therein are themes frequently addressed in her films?from One Hundred a Day, her final-year project at the Australian Film and Television School, through My Brilliant Career, her first and best-known feature, to High Tide. Even one of her earliest films at Swinburne College, the short Roof Needs Mowing, obliquely tackled this theme, using a typical student filmmaker's pastiche of advertising and surrealism. Like most maturing filmmakers with an eye on wider distribution, Armstrong dropped the ?sur? from surrealism in her later work, so that by One Hundred a Day?an adaptation of an Alan Marshall story about a shoe-factory employee getting a back-street abortion in the 1930s?she developed a more naturalistic handling of material, while her use of soundtrack and fast editing remained highly stylized and effective.

Made on a tiny budget and heavily subsidized by the Australian Film Commission, the award-winning The Singer and the Dancer was a precocious study of the toll men take on women's lives that marked the onset of Armstrong's mature style. On the strength of this and One Hundred a Day, producer Margaret Fink offered Armstrong the direction of My Brilliant Career. Daunted at first by the scale of the project and a lack of confidence in her own abilities, she accepted because she "thought it could be bungled by a lot of men."

While The Singer and the Dancer had been chastised by feminist critics for its downbeat ending, in which the heroine returns to her philandering lover after a half-hearted escape attempt, My Brilliant Career was widely celebrated for its feminist fairy-tale story as well as its employment of women crew members. Adapted from Miles Franklin's semi-autobiographical novel, My Brilliant Career, with its turn-of-the-century setting in the Australian outback, works like Jane Eyre in reverse (she does not marry him), while retaining the romantic allure of such a story and all the glossy production values of a period setting that Australian cinema had been known for up until then. Distinguished by an astonishing central performance by the then-unknown Judy Davis (fresh from playing Juliet to Mel Gibson's Romeo on the drama-school stage), the film managed to present a positive model of feminine independence without belying the time in which it was set. Like Armstrong's later Mrs. Soffel, My Brilliant Career potently evokes smothered sensuality and conveys sexual tension by small, telling details, as in the boating scene.

Sadly, few of Armstrong's later films have been awarded commensurate critical praise or been as widely successful, possibly because of her refusal to conform to expectations and churn out more upbeat costume dramas. Her next feature, Starstruck, although it too features a spunky, ambitious heroine, was a rock musical set in the present and displaying a veritable rattle bag of influences?including Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney ?let's-put-on-a-show? films, Richard Lester editing techniques, new wave pop videos, and even Sternberg's Blond Venus, when the heroine sheds her kangaroo suit to sing her ?torch song? ? la Marlene Dietrich. Despite a witty script and fine bit characters, the music is somewhat monotonous, and the film was only mildly successful.

Armstrong's first film to be financed and filmed in America was Mrs. Soffel. Based on a true story and set at the turn of the century, it delineated the tragic story of the eponymous warden's wife who falls in love with a convict, helps him escape, and finally runs off with him. The bleak, monochrome cinematography is powerfully atmospheric but was not to all reviewers' tastes, especially in America. For Armstrong, the restricted palette was quite deliberate, so that the penultimate images of blood on snow would be all the more striking and effective. A sadly under-rated film, it features some unexpectedly fine performances from Diane Keaton in the title role, Mel Gibson as her paramour (a fair impersonation of young Henry Fonda), and the young Matthew Modine as his kid brother. At its best, it recalls, if not McCabe and Mrs. Miller, then at least Bonnie and Clyde.

High Tide returns to Australia for its setting in a coastal caravan park, and comes up trumps as an unabashedly sentimental weepie, and none the worse for it. It features three generations of women: Lilli (Judy Davis again), backup singer to an Elvis impersonator and drifter; Ally (Claudia Karvan), the pubescent daughter she left behind; and mother-in-law Bet (Jan Adele), who vies with Lilli for Ally's affections. In terms of camera work, it is Armstrong's most restless film, utilizing nervous zip pans, fast tracking, and boomshots, and then resting for quiet, intense close-ups on surfboards, legs being shaved, and shower nozzles, all highly motivated by the characters' perspectives. Like Mrs. Soffel, High Tide uses colors symbolically to contrast the gentle tones of the seaside's natural landscape with the garish buildings of the town called Eden.

Armstrong wears her feminist credentials lightly, never on her sleeve. Nevertheless, her fiction films?like her documentaries, which have followed three women from the ages of fourteen to twenty-five?can be seen as charting over the years the trajectory of the women's movement: My Brilliant Career in the 1970s celebrated women's independence, as Sybylla rejects the roles of wife and mother; Mrs. Soffel in the mid-1980s reopens negotiations with men (with tragic results); and finally High Tide returns to the rejected motherhood role, with all its attendant joys and anxieties.

Fires Within is a well-meaning but insipid tale of a Cuban political prisoner and his encounter with his family in Miami. A fiasco, Armstrong lost control of the project during post-production. The filmmaker bounced back strongly, however, with two impressive films centering on the relationships between female siblings.

The Last Days of Chez Nous, which Armstrong directed back in Australia, is a thoughtful, well-acted drama focusing on the emotional plight of a pair of sisters. One (Lisa Harrow) is a bossy, forty-something writer, and the other (Kerry Fox) has just emerged from an unhappy love affair. The scenario centers on events that take place after the latter becomes romantically involved with the former's husband (Bruno Ganz). The film's major strength is the depth and richness of its female characters. Its theme, consistent with Armstrong's best previous work, is the utter necessity of women's self-sufficiency.

Little Women, based on Louisa May Alcott's venerable 1868 novel of four devoted sisters coming of age in Concord, Massachusetts, during the Civil War, was Armstrong's first successful American-made film. It may be linked to My Brilliant Career as a story of feminine independence set in a previous era. Alcott's book had been filmed a number of times before: a silent version, made in 1918; most enjoyably by George Cukor, with Katharine Hepburn, in 1933; far less successfully, with a young Elizabeth Taylor (among others), in 1949; and in a made-for-TV movie in 1978. Armstrong's version is every bit as fine as the Cukor-Hepburn classic. Her cast is just about perfect, with Wynona Ryder deservedly earning an Academy Award nomination as the headstrong Jo March. Ryder is ably supported by Trini Alvarado, Claire Danes, Samantha Mathis, and Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon offers her usual solid performance as Marmee, the March girls' mother. If the film has one fault, it is the contemporary-sounding feminist rhetoric that Marmee spouts: the dialogue is completely out of sync with the spirit and reality of the times. But this is just a quibble. This new Little Women is a fine film, at once literate and extremely enjoyable.?LESLIE FELPERIN and ROB EDELMAN