Directed by Lois Weber • 1916 • United States
Starring Mary MacLaren, Harry Griffith, Mattie Witting

Decades before the artistic triumph of neorealism and the cultural revolution of the feminist movement, director Lois Weber expressed the seeds of both in what is perhaps her greatest work: an al...

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl • 1938 • Germany

More has been written about Leni Riefenstahl's OLYMPIA than about any other sports documentary in history. Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic e...

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl • 1938 • Germany

More has been written about Leni Riefenstahl's OLYMPIA than about any other sports documentary in history. In part two of OLYMPIA, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo...

Directed by Dorothy Arzner • 1940 • United States
Starring Maureen O’Hara, Lucille Ball, Louis Hayward

Judy (Maureen O’Hara) and Bubbles (Lucille Ball) move to New York City with dreams of ballet success, but Bubbles soon falls into a career in burlesque. And when Judy’s ballet company fails, sh...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1955 • France
Starring Silvia Monfort, Philippe Noiret

The great Agnès Varda’s film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complic...

Directed by David Eady, George More O’Ferrall, Wendy Toye, and Orson Welles • 1955 • United Kingdom
Starring Orson Welles, John Gregson, Elizabeth Sellars

Three strange and sinister tales of murder and supernatural mystery make up this atmospheric omnibus chiller. First, a museum worker crosses ...

Directed by Margot Benacerraf • 1959 • Venezuela

A work of such overwhelming grandeur that Jean Renoir told director Margot Benacerraf after viewing the film, “Above all . . . don’t cut a single image,” this poetic documentary-narrative hybrid is a landmark of both neorealist and feminist South ...

Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1961 • United States
Starring Warren Finnerty, Jerome Raphel, Garry Goodrow

Shirley Clarke made a splash—and ignited a landmark censorship case—with her controversial feature debut, an innovative adaptation of Jack Gelber’s off-Broadway play in which the line between...

Directed by Forugh Farrokhzad • 1963 • Iran

The only film directed by trailblazing feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad finds unexpected grace where few would think to look: a leper colony whose inhabitants live, worship, learn, play, and celebrate in a self-contained community cut off from ...

Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1963 • Czechoslovakia

The debut feature from Věra Chytilová interweaves two stories simultaneously: one a narrative about a frustrated mother (Vera Uzelacová) discontented with the drudgery of housework, the other a quasi documentary about a gymnast (real-life Olympi...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer

Though married to the good-natured, beautiful Thérèse (Claire Drouot), young husband and father François (Jean-Claude Drouot) finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attrac...

Directed by Larisa Shepitko • 1966 • Soviet Union

For her first feature after graduating from the All-Russian State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK), Larisa Shepitko trained her lens on the fascinating Russian character actress Maya Bulgakova, who gives a marvelous performance as a once heroi...

Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Ivana Karbanová, Jitka Cerhová, Marie Češková

If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named...

Directed by Barbara Loden • 1970 • United States
Starring Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins

With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of characte...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores ...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • France
Starring Chantal Akerman, Niels Arestrup, Claire Wauthion

Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman pl...

Directed by Elaine May • 1976 • United States
Starring Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty

Elaine May crafted a gangster film like no other in the nocturnal odyssey MIKEY AND NICKY, capitalizing on the chemistry between frequent collaborators John Cassavetes and Peter Falk by casting them to...

Directed by Barbara Kopple • 1976 • United States

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning HARLAN COUNTY USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikeb...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1977 • France
Starring Valérie Mairesse, Thérèse Liotard, Ali Raffi

In the early 1960s in Paris, two young women become friends. Pomme is an aspiring singer. Suzanne is a pregnant country girl unable to support a third child. Pomme lends Suzanne the money for an illegal...

Directed by Larisa Shepitko • 1977 • Soviet Union
Starring Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergei Yakovlev

The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the ...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1978 • France
Starring Aurore Clément, Helmut Griem, Magali Noël

Chantal Akerman’s narrative follow-up to her international breakthrough, JEANNE DIELMAN, is a penetrating portrait of a woman’s soul-deep malaise and a mesmerizing odyssey through a haunted Europe. Whi...

Directed by Jane Campion • 1982 • Australia

This short, concerning a father disciplining his son whilst on a road trip, went on to win the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival and effectively launched director Jane Campion's feature-filmmaking career.

Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield

A blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden’s explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revoluti...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1985 • France
Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stéphane Freiss

Sandrine Bonnaire won the Best Actress César for her portrayal of the defiant young drifter Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch at the beginning of VAGABOND. Agnès Varda pieces together Mona’s sto...