Author Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

Gillian Armstrong’s High Tide (1987) can be seen as a variant on the maternal melodrama. It centres around the struggles of a teenaged young mother who is unable to care for her daughter and abandons her to her...

“For if one history is lost, all of us are less rich than before.” — Barbara Hammer Barbara Hammer’s first feature-length film, Nitrate Kisses (1992) is a landmark of LGBT+ cinema. After a lifetime of teaching...

While it’s impossible to say when film theatres will reopen, on the bright side, it has been both exciting and humbling to be involved in the rapid evolution of streaming platforms to accommodate radical experi...

Vittorio De Sica’s wartime drama La ciociara (Two Women, 1960) had a decidedly peculiar genesis. Adapted from a 1957 novel by Alberto Moravia, with a script by De Sica’s long-time collaborator Cesare Zavattini,...

William A. Wellman was known throughout his career as a tough director who made grimy, realistic movies about tough people surviving desperate situations. Though he is perhaps best known for his films about des...

One of the most sublime of all Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedies, Trouble in Paradise (1932) is a delicate and carefully balanced mixture of languorous romance, luxurious exoticism and sophisticated comedy, in...

Claude Chabrol is often called the French Hitchcock, but, to my mind, Chabrol is the far more provocative director, because of his brutal honesty about the hopelessness of human behaviour in a patriarchal world...

Though she is best known in the West for her widely celebrated anarchic experimental feminist classic Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966), Věra Chytilová has a large body of work. She was one of the members of the Czec...

Based on the life story of tanka poet Fumiko Nakajo (1922–1954), Kinuyo Tanaka’s Chibusa yo eien nare (The Eternal Breasts, 1955) is a remarkably feminist film in many respects. The film’s director, Kinuyo Tana...

b. 6 June 1950, Brussels, Belgium d. 5 October 2015, Paris, France “When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.” -  Chantal Akerman Chantal Akerman was one o...

Fearless, ruthlessly economical and deeply felt, 2 Friends (1986), Jane Campion’s first feature – actually made for Australian television, and clocking in at a spare 79 minutes – is a modest yet accomplished fi...

Nearly forty years after her death in 1979, Dorothy Arzner remains one of the most fascinating American filmmakers to work within the Hollywood studio system. While a few of her films, such as Dance, Girl, Danc...

“From childhood, history was a subject that fascinated me, and what I kept wondering was how everyday life might have been different, if Caesar or Mussolini had changed course. My sympathy always went to those...

I’d like to be able to report that Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l'enfer, 2004, adapted by the director from her 2001 novel Pornocratie) has been praised by critics as magnificent, playfully...

Along with Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jō, 1957), Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) – aka Kaidan, or ‘g...

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) is the most well known and celebrated of the genre known as the ‘maternal melodrama.’ Stella Dallas (Barbara Stanwyck) is but one of many unsung female heroes who sacrifice, yet...

It’s a shame that Hollywood audiences have been taught that films are made primarily to entertain and amuse. That’s only for the mass audience; other films challenge us to look inside ourselves, especially the ...

One question I am often asked is why the women in my films are more lucid than the men. I was raised among women: my mother, my aunt, and lots of cousins. Then I got married, and my wife had five sisters. I hav...

“Chance governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later. If I have a soft spot for any one of my movies, it would be for The Phantom of Liberty, because it tries to wor...

One never forgets Bresson. Admiration is a very complicated thing. It’s like alchemy; you admire something and then one day you realise that this admiration has permeated your skin. You don’t have to say, “Am I...

“When one is in prison, the most important thing is the door.” – Robert Bresson (1) Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped, 1956) is one of Bresson’s most sublime and ...

As Lucrecia Martel demonstrates in La Ciénaga (The Swamp), there is more twisted banal horror and caustic humour to be discovered in the forms of personal narrative than found within the boundaries of the horro...

Leo McCarey may be revered for his string of film masterpieces (Duck Soup, The Awful Truth, Love Affair, Going My Way, et al), but he is equally reviled for his anti-Communist propaganda, My Son John. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster explores how the film shines a light on the cultural politics of the time.

In this career-spanning interview, the filmmaker and prolific author discusses his participation in the '60s counterculture and avant-garde film scene.