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.
The films of Edgar G. Ulmer have generally been classified as ?B? pictures. However, it might be more appropriate to reclassify some of these films as ?Z? pictures. On an average, Ulmer?s pictures were filmed on a six-day shooting schedule with budgets as small as $20,000. He often worked without a decent script, adequate sets, or convincing actors. But these hardships did not prevent Ulmer from creating an individual style within his films.
There is a sense in which Josef von Sternberg never grew up. In his personality, the twin urges of the disturbed adolescent toward self-advertisement and self-effacement fuse with a brilliant visual imagination to create an artistic vision unparalleled in the cinema. But von Sternberg lacked the cultivation of Murnau, the sophistication of his mentor von Stroheim, the humanity of Griffith, or the ruthlessness of Chaplin. His imagination remained immature, and his personality was malicious and obsessive. His films reflect a schoolboy's fascination with sensuality and heroics.
Erich von Stroheim had two complementary careers in cinema, that of actor-director, primarily during the silent period, and that of distinguished character actor when his career as a director was frustrated as a result of his inability to bring his genius to terms with the American film industry.
In 1928 Fred Zinnemann worked as assistant to cinematographer Eugene Sch?fftan on Robert Siodmak's Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), along with Edgar Ulmer and Billy Wilder, who wrote the scenario for this semi-documentary silent feature made in the tradition of Flaherty and Vertov.
Corinne Cantrill is one of Australia?s preeminent experimental filmmakers, whose long-term collaboration with her husband Arthur has proved to be both prolific and influential. Before embarking on her film career, Corinne spent time in Europe where she studied music in Paris, sang in a choir in Denmark, and taught English in Italy. After she married Arthur Cantrill, she began making films with him in 1960. Since then, the Cantrills have made more than 150 films, including seven feature-length films.
In the early years of their film career, the Cantrills made a series of documentaries
Lottie Lyell is credited with being the first Australian movie star, but she is also noteworthy as a director, producer, writer, art director, and editor. For more than a decade, during the 1910s and early 1920s, she enjoyed a productive personal and professional partnership with filmmaker Raymond Longford. Nevertheless, her long career was overlooked by Australian film historians, despite her status as a cinema pioneer. Indeed, as film historian Andr?e Wright contends, Lyell is ?the outstanding Australian personality of early film.?
Lyell?s acting career began in the theater in 1907,
