On 23 October, 1915, over 25,000 women marched along Fifth Avenue in New York City advocating for women’s suffrage. Among them, 27-year-old Francis Marion, a woman with a rebellious side and an iron will, who would later become the highest paid writer in Hollywood and the first writer to receive two Academy Awards.

Born Marion Benson Owens in San Francisco in 1888, Marion’s defiant side was apparent from an early age. After drawing a cartoon of her teacher, Marion was kicked out of school. Nonetheless, her artistic talents were encouraged and she later enrolled at Hopkins Art Institute, before working a variety of jobs, including as a photographer’s assistant, model, telephone operator, and later as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 1912 Marion moved to Los Angeles with her second husband Robert Pike. It was during this time that her love affair with the movies was born. After befriending the vaudeville star, Marie Dressler, Marion was introduced to silent film stars including Lillian Gish, Marion Davies, and Mary Pickford, who would later become her close friend and collaborator. Shortly after, Marion was introduced to the renowned director Lois Weber who hired her as an assistant. At Weber’s studio Marion worked as an assistant director, and even dabbled in acting.

Mary Pickford soon realised Marion’s potential and offered her a job at Famous Players-Laskey where she worked on many scenarios for films including, The New York Hat (1912), Rags (1915), and Fanchon the Cricket (1915). Her original scenario for the film The Foundling (1916) was sold to Adolph Zukor for $125. Soon after, she applied for work at World Films. Ambitious to prove her worth, Marion carefully reconstructed a film which had previously been deemed as ‘un-releasable’. The revised film sold for $9,000.

Impressed at her skillset, William Brady offered Marion a $200-a-week contract for her writing services. She later became head of department and was credited with writing 50 films, but left in 1917 following the success of The Poor Little Rich Girl, to reunite with Famous Players-Laskey. Marion was one of the highest paid writers in the industry, earning a reported $50,000 a year; equivalent in today’s standards to over $700,000.

“Who shall say that she is not the bravest soldier of them all?” reads one of the title cards, of Marion’s directorial debut film The Love Light (1921). We then see Angela, the film’s protagonist journey home after her night watch, battling her way along the rocky shoreline and through the crashing waves and heroically saving a deserted soldier washed up ashore. Towards the end of World War One, Marion volunteered as a war correspondent and witnessed the horrors of war first-hand.

Her duties involved filming the work of Allied women and documenting their war efforts abroad. Marion would later incorporate these horrors into her work in films, such as The Love Light. That same year Marion would direct Just Around the Corner and The Song of Love in 1923, before turning her attention back to screenwriting. Throughout the 1920s, Marion was contracted with MGM, earning $3,000 per week where she wrote films such as The Scarlet Letter (1926), and The Mysterious Lady (1928).

After the introduction of ‘talkies’ in 1927, Marion embraced the arrival of sound. In 1930, Marion adapted Eugene O’Neill’s play Anna Christie into a screenplay. The film was Greta Garbo’s first sound film, in which Garbo utters her famous first line, “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side – and don’t be stingy, baby!”

Marion would go on to win her first Academy Award that same year at the third Academy Awards, but not for her work on Anna Christie, instead winning Best Writing for The Big House. She would win another Academy Award a year later for Best Story for The Champ, becoming the first person to win two academy awards for writing. She would later be nominated a third time in 1933 for The Prizefighter and the Lady.

“We tear it down, we reconstruct it, we make the woman dominate, and the male character as passive as every woman would like to have her husband. We end up with a splendid vehicle for a woman star – and the cyclone-wrecked story,” said Marion in a 1926 Photoplay interview. Throughout her career, Marion defied stereotypes by telling the stories of strong leading women.

One of Hollywood’s first rebels, Marion helped shape the industry through the early days of silent cinema to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Beyond the silver screen, she also pioneered the screenwriters’ self-help guide with her 1937 book, ‘How to Write and Sell Film Stories’. Yet, despite all this, Marion is a largely forgotten figure, many of her films since lost and destroyed. It’s time to reclaim her legacy.

Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy and Maeve O’Boyle’s documentary The 8th may be filmed in English, but in many ways protest is its primary language. Charting the months leading up to the 2018 referendum to overturn Ireland’s controversial Eighth Amendment, which for almost 35 years had effectively criminalised abortion, the film is marked throughout by the voice of the people. Colourful placards plastered with equally colourful slogans (“Get your rosaries off my ovaries”) fill the screen, while angry chants of “Repeal the Eighth” echo through city squares, screamed over and over by impassioned crowds.

Released on the three-year anniversary of the historic vote and its subsequent milestone victory, the arrival of The 8th feels even more prescient in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and Kill the Bill demonstrations that have taken place over the past year. “When we were going to festivals some people were saying ‘Well, how relevant is this really given that we’re in Covid and people can’t go out on the streets’,” Kennedy says. “And then George Floyd was killed and the protest movements in the US and other parts of the world just erupted. One of the things our film shows – and honestly one of the things that is terrifying about the proposed legislation in the UK – is that protest is essential for change.”

“A protest itself doesn’t make an activist or cause change immediately,” agrees Kane, “but it’s incremental: it’s the passion that it arises in people, and what that will ignite and spark. There is an agent of change in all of us.” This idea of grassroots action is central to The 8th, which features remarkably little electoral politics for a documentary hinging on the results of a referendum. Rather, this is a film that belongs to activists and community organisers, locating political agency within the actions of everyday people and revealing the tireless work that lies behind the collective struggle for human dignity. Bringing together a large cast of campaigners, notably from both sides of the debate, two activists in particular take centre stage: renowned feminist academic Ailbhe Smyth, and Andrea Horan, owner of Dublin-based nail and beauty salon Tropical Popical.

“The movement to change the Eighth Amendment was not something that came from the Irish government,” explains Kennedy, reflecting on their uniquely community-driven approach. “This was a hot potato before January 2018: people didn’t even want to use the word abortion. It was from the activists, it was from the grassroots, it was from people like Ailbhe who had been working on it for 35 years.” O’Boyle adds, “When you’re documenting something as large as this, you have to have a really enigmatic protagonist. We met many incredible activists along the way, but Ailbhe had the history: she was in her seventies and had lived through [the passing of the Eighth Amendment] and had fought all the way along. This was her fight to win, and the stakes were high for her.”

While Smyth represents a generation of feminists who have been opposing the Eighth Amendment ever since it was passed into law, the dual focus on Horan also speaks to a newer cohort of young, often working-class, women working to effect change within their social and professional circles. “Andrea wanted to bring the campaign to people that followed her,” Kane explains, “to meet them where they were, as opposed to expecting them to come to where the activism was happening. She wanted to find – and she did find – authentic ways of engaging with people to unleash their own power.”

In one of The 8th’s most poignant scenes, Horan sits with colleagues and friends in her salon as they exchange stories of the harm the abortion ban has caused to them and their loved ones, the camera lingering intimately on clasped hands and Horan’s tearful face as she offers support and sympathy. “She’s just this extraordinary character who illustrates how to bring people into activism in a way that suits them,” Kennedy says.

The painful legacy of the Eighth Amendment is palpable throughout, from the testimonies given in Horan’s salon to the more widely publicised contemporary accounts that Kane, Kennedy and O’Boyle refer to. These vignettes revolve around specific historic cases that were formative to Ireland’s current pro-choice movement, such as the remains of neglected children being discovered in Catholic mother-and-baby homes, or the tragic case of Savita Halappanavar, who died from sepsis after being refused an abortion following an incomplete miscarriage.

Their combined presence in the film underscores not only the cruelty and violence of the amendment’s restrictions, but also the ways in which these restrictions – and the politics of healthcare more broadly – inevitably discriminate across existing fault lines of class and race. “If you think about it, the women who could afford to travel, travelled,” Kennedy says. “They went to the UK [where] they could get childcare for their other children. They could take that time off work. They could get a plane ticket. It’s women who are on the margins of society financially, who it was a bigger burden for.”

“Initially we wanted to cover the last 100 years in Ireland, but because the film is 90 minutes long, we realised we would have more impact if we focused on the last 35,” O’Boyle adds. “With Savita’s story, for example, we incorporated a number of other medical cases around that section to show this isn’t just a one off – there are many, many women who have been in horrendous scenarios. We were trying to speak to that, so by the end of the film it becomes a culmination of the ways in which women have been sidelined for such a long time in our society.”

By bringing together long-neglected stories of women’s suffering over decades of state-inflicted violence, The 8th crafts a compelling, emotionally resonant argument for reproductive rights, aligning itself in many ways with the activism it represents. “We didn’t come to the film as activists,” Kane reflects, “we came to it as filmmakers, and ultimately it’s a film about an extraordinarily successful grassroots movement that won. We didn’t intentionally make this film to be an activist tool, but […] a lot of the reaction we’re getting in screenings… someone said to us it fills an activist’s soul.”

“When you’re making a film, what you’re ideally trying to do is document what you’re seeing and how things are changing,” O’Boyle adds. “Initially this was about reproductive rights and abortion but as it continued it [took on] this narrative of care and compassion. There was this idea around what kind of society we want to be. Let’s look at ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘Are we going to take responsibility?’”

Find out more at the8thfilm.com

Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with the state of womanhood. His preoccupation with beautiful, blonde leading ladies became a trademark, yet these casting choices ran deeper than good looks. His filmography reads as a man desperately trying to unlock the mystery of women.

Hitchcock was definitely not a feminist, but to write off his work as misogynistic would be an oversimplification; his female characters were just as complicated as his male ones. Their darker psyches were often evident despite their perfect facades. This is undoubtedly true in 1940’s Rebecca, where we are given three examples of women who transgress the traditional ideologies surrounding femininity.

The film’s unnamed heroine (Joan Fontaine) meets the worldly and aristocratic Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) while working as a paid companion in Monte Carlo. The power imbalance between the two is clear from the outset. Despite her conventional attractiveness and respectability, Fontaine plays her with constant nervous energy, revealing her insecurity. Her lower-class status, in contrast to the blue-blooded Maxim, pushes her into a submissive role, something he takes full advantage of during their whirlwind romance. Our heroine’s alleged failings as a woman only become more evident once the pair are married and she assumes the title of the new Mrs de Winter.

Upon arriving at the daunting Manderley estate, the second Mrs de Winter is haunted by the ghost of the first, the titular character, Rebecca. Although she has been dead a year, her presence is everywhere. Maxim’s new bride is overshadowed by her predecessor, whether through comparisons made by Maxim’s friends and family or by the stylish ‘R’ monogram prevalent throughout the house. Rebecca remains exceptional at all she set her mind to, while the second Mrs de Winter is rebuked by Maxim for merely trying a new style of dress.

It is Mrs Danvers, the stoic and intimidating housekeeper played by Judith Anderson, who keeps Rebecca alive. Her subtle undermining of the protagonist stems from her fervent loyalty to Rebecca with whom she was infatuated. However, Mrs Danvers is more of a threat through her failure to adhere to the heteronormative standards of womanhood typical of the period. She is plain, never once accommodating to anyone, and her affection for Rebecca has always appeared queer-coded.

Mrs Danvers’ worship of Rebecca is fanatical. This is revealed when she shows the second Mrs de Winter her former mistress’ bedroom, shut off in Manderley’s west wing. The room has an almost ecclesiastical stature, towering windows and gilded mirrors which shine light onto Rebecca’s perfectly preserved vanity, where Mrs Danvers has not allowed a speck of dust to settle.

The housekeeper gently handles Rebecca’s possessions with a love and devotion reserved only for heteronormative romance at the time, pointing out the sheerness of her nightwear and opening her cabinets of undergarments with reverence. Yet the explicit queerness was unacceptable for Hollywood at the time and therefore portrayed as disturbing and frightening.

Rebecca herself was an alluring and attractive woman, yet, she is condemned for using her feminine wiles to live beyond her wifely role. She has three hallmarks of a good wife – “breeding, brains and beauty,” as told to Maxim – in spades. However, Maxim despises his spouse for refusing to be the perfect housewife he desired. Like Mr Rochester before him, Maxim is guarded and stern, with monstrous wives lurking in the background, mocking him. The west wing of Manderley, much like Rochester’s attic in ‘Jane Eyre’, is locked, shuttering Maxim’s fragile ego. When Rebecca taunts Maxim by flaunting her sexual history and refusing to be tamed, she is punished for her “failures” as a woman by his fatal strike.

While the Hays Code and producer David O Selznick prevented depiction of Maxim intentionally killing Rebecca – as he does in the novel – Maxim is still is culpable and admits that he wanted to murder his wife. There is an unsettling familiarity in how easily Maxim gets away with his crimes, especially considering his powerful upper-class status.

The new Mrs de Winter’s transformation into an idealised woman is realised when Maxim confesses his role in Rebecca’s death. Rather than fearing or rejecting him, she is instead relieved that Maxim truly desires her over his first wife. As she becomes increasingly complicit, her loss of innocence is reflected in her maturing dress sense. Her first outfit post-confession is a black, shoulder-padded dress which Maxim himself notes marks the death of her youth, stating, “I killed that when I told you about Rebecca.” Yet she embraces the change as it means she can finally be the acceptable wife for Maxim.

The film concludes with Mrs Danvers, distraught over the truth of Rebecca’s death, setting fire to Manderley. This violent act is an attempt to destroy the new couple’s domesticity. Nonetheless, it is Mrs Danvers who succumbs, and the closing shot is Rebecca’s monogrammed pillow set ablaze. For failing to appease the men in their lives, they are destroyed. Meanwhile, the second Mrs de Winter is rewarded for her complicity and for this reason, she is allowed to live and thrive.

I Spit on Your Grave did not exactly take the world of cinema by storm when it was released, first opening in a handful of drive-ins in America and then in grindhouse cinemas in 1980, two years after it was completed. There is good reason to believe that the film would have never reached a wider audience were it not for the critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who waged a war against what they perceived to be a totally despicable film and, according to Ebert, the worst he had ever seen.

“Ebert sure didn’t like it, I heard him talk about it and it really hurt my feelings,” says Camille Keaton, the star of the film. “But [writer/director] Meir [Zarchi] told me not to worry about it: ‘Camille, this is the best publicity that we could ever get!’ And he was right. That made everybody want to go see it.”

In the film, Keaton plays Jennifer Hills, a young woman who escapes the chaos of New York City by going on a solo writing retreat in an isolated house upstate. After a few brief moments of blissful solitude, beautifully captured by Zarchi, Jennifer is raped and left for dead by four local men in an extended sequence of rare brutality – the source of the controversy around the film, which saw Siskel and Ebert go so far as to stand outside theatres advising viewers to buy tickets to any other film instead.

Although Keaton says that she always knew the film would be controversial, she is also very candid about her part in it. “It’s my profession; I do my work and I do what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know how other people see it.” She explains that her main reason for taking on the role at the time was that after appearing in a few giallo films in Italy, she was eager to make a film in America. “Also, what attracted me to it was that there’s quite a few different things in the film for my character to do. In the beginning she’s not having any problems, then she gets attacked, and then she goes on her revenge. And that was fun, especially the revenge part!”

Indeed, I Spit on Your Grave is just as well-known for the scene of the attack on Hills as it is for the retributory violence then inflicted by the young heroine on her assaillants. Luring them one by one, she proceeds to murder them in increasingly specific and imaginative ways. “I especially enjoyed doing the motorboat scene,” Keaton reflects, referring to the moment when her character chases down one of her attackers in a speedboat, steering the engine with one hand and holding a small axe in the other. “We did those in the last couple of days of filming. I’d never operated a motorboat before!”

Though she evidently had fun making the film, Keaton explains that she initially worried that I Spit on Your Grave might not be the best way to kickstart her acting career in America. “But then I stopped worrying about that, and I thought I should do it. A lot of famous actors out of Hollywood have done films in their past that they probably don’t like to talk about very much. I don’t think that kind of thing really affects you.”

Time has ultimately validated Keaton’s decision: not only is she still acting, but the film’s new Blu-ray release (which also includes the 2010 remake, two subsequent sequels and the most recent addition to the franchise, Deja Vu, in which Keaton reprises her role) only solidifies its already sturdy reputation as a cult classic and one of the best rape revenge movies ever made.

I Spit on Your Grave: The Complete Collection is available on Blu-ray and DVD on 5 October courtesy of Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment.

Ida Lupino was a cinema pioneer, especially when it came to telling women’s stories. After starting out as an actor, she became the first woman to direct a film noir (1953’s The Hitch-Hiker) and the only woman to direct an episode of The Twilight Zone. She described herself as a “bulldozer” when it came to finding finances for her projects, but a “mother” on set, nurturing her actors to ensure natural performances.

In the eight films she directed, after forming independent company The Filmmakers with her husband of the time, Collier Young, she was unafraid to tackle controversial subjects. Not Wanted, made in 1949, explores an unplanned pregnancy, while she also tackled infertility and bigamy in The Bigamist. But her crowning achievement is the B-movie Outrage. Made 70 years ago, it focuses on the rape of a young middle-class woman named Ann Walton (Mala Powers). Having been attacked by a stranger on her way home from work, a devastated Ann is unable to continue with normal life, alienating herself from her family and ultimately running away.

I’m vice chair of Peterborough Rape Crisis Care Group, and a professional obsession of mine is the use of language around rape. One of the main reasons I set up Survivor Stories – a platform featuring long-form interviews with survivors of sexual violence – was to correct some of the problems that traditional media still has when talking about rape. Outrage has been a useful tool to help me emphasise some of these problems – and no doubt it has helped generations of survivors to start to express themselves.

A central theme in Outrage is this struggle to communicate. Neither Ann, her family, nor the professionals tasked with helping her are able to say the word ‘rape’ (‘vicious assault’ is as far as anyone gets). This tension around language continues to be a problem 70 years on, including for rape charities themselves – centres are often put under pressure to omit the word ‘rape’ from their organisation’s name, for example on collection buckets. The implication of this is that rape is too horrific and disturbing a crime to speak about. And, whether subconsciously or not, that has a knock-on effect on many survivors, leaving them feeling a sense of shame, or of being somehow damaged. This is certainly how Ann feels about herself.

For all it goes unnamed, the characters all understand rape. Ann realises she’s in danger well before anything actually happens, in a truly effective, ominous scene. The sudden curtailing of the sound track – the transition from her carefree whistling, to his shrill wolf whistles. The sound of their twinned footsteps, which make Ann and her attacker sound like the only two people left in the world. It’s a brilliant device for highlighting the loneliness that rape can leave in its wake.

After that, the attacker isn’t given a second thought. He’s not even named. We’re not invited to care about his psychology; Lupino’s focus is solely on Ann and her recovery.

Ann is visited almost immediately by the police, who question her without acknowledging her obvious distress. During her interrogation her face is framed by the bedposts so that her mouth is covered. No one is really listening. A policeman complains: “We pick up cases every day, slap them in jail…after that I don’t know what happens.” With rape conviction rates currently at an all-time low, this again feels gloomily familiar to a modern audience.

Ann is under a huge amount of pressure. Her family want her to move on, her fiancé wants to get married, and the police demand her help with catching her attacker. “Try to remember, we don’t want this man on the streets tonight,” says the police officer, inadvertently making her responsible for the fates of other women. It’s no wonder she runs away.

The film’s ultimate message is that to help survivors we need to be more like ‘the doc’, Bruce Ferguson, a kindly reverend who finds Ann by the roadside with a sprained ankle, and takes her in. While the feminist in me rankles a bit at the idea that a man comes along to save her, to give him his dues, he is the only character who actually listens to Ann. He repeatedly asks her if he can help her, and waits for her to tell him how. He shares his own experiences when she’s quiet, helping her relate to him, and giving her space to share her own, when she’s ready. He never gives up; he makes suggestions – a walk in the countryside – and leaves her time to make a decision. It’s baby steps, but that’s what’s often needed after trauma: gentle opportunities to make small choices.

As you might imagine for a low-budget B-movie on such a controversial subject, Outrage wasn’t particularly successful, especially when compared to the male-centric The Hitch-Hiker – it still isn’t available on DVD or any UK streaming platform (although it is on YouTube). Watching Outrage today is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it proves how forward-thinking Lupino really was; on the other, it demonstrates how little progress has been made for survivors of sexual violence.

In 1950 it was extremely rare to show any type of rape on screen, but the key for writers and directors now is to cast a wider net for experiences of sexual violence to portray. We are just starting to see a breadth of stories told, across different races, ages, sexualities and experiences, and it matters – there’s a measurable relationship between portrayals of specific groups, and calls to helplines. Cinema is, and always has been, a powerful tool in making people feel less alone. And Ida Lupino was a trailblazer for survivors.

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Delphine Seyrig was born in 1932, but in 1975 she became a representative for French women. Under the direction of various high-profile men – including the likes of Jacques Demy and Luis Buñuel – Seyrig established a star image which she brought to three films directed by women: Marguerite Duras; Chantal Akerman; and Liliane de Kermadec. They transformed the Chanel-dressed sylph Seyrig, who made her name in Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad, into an everywoman, housewife and mother.

These ordinary women took to the streets of Paris in the 1970s. Seyrig signed the Manifesto of the 343 presented by women who had illegal abortions in 1971. She formed the collective Les Insoumuses (Disobedient Muses) with director Carole Roussopoulos, who filmed protests with the second Sony Portapak camera sold in France (after Jean-Luc Godard). With Seyrig on the front line, it was vital that other women identified her as one of them.

The image Seyrig created across the woman-directed films she made in 1975 – India Song, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Aloïse – forms a triptych. In the left panel, directed by Duras, Seyrig plays Anne-Marie Stretter, the adulterous wife of the French ambassador in Calcutta. In the right panel, by de Kermadec, Seyrig plays Aloïse Corbaz, the real-life Swiss artist who was kept in a mental hospital after becoming obsessed with Kaiser Wilhelm II. In between is Akerman’s magnum opus, in which Seyrig plays Jeanne, a housewife and sex worker. We initially align with the male gaze when we see Seyrig – glamour, womanhood, artistry – but, through these films, our perception shifts.

Unlike the naturalism of Jeanne Dielman and Aloïse, India Song mythologises Seyrig’s character into an emblematic figure. When Anne-Marie is faithful to her husband, she is the dutiful wife dressed to the nines in a burgundy gown. But she’s developed a “leprosy of the heart” and refuses to play the piano anymore. She fills the void with affairs, although she takes little pleasure from them. We imagine Jeanne took to sex work for the same reason, to break up the day, but now it’s just part of the routine. Why satisfy men who don’t value you?

Aloïse asks the same question. The artist’s paintings feature military men embracing women with closed eyes. They are blind to the world and disallowed the same experiences as men. The actor Michael Lonsdale co-stars in both India Song and Aloïse, which makes them inverted mirrors of each other. Where in India Song Lonsdale’s Vice-Consul of Lahore fails to win Anne-Marie’s love, the doctor he plays in Aloïse ties her down. Anne-Marie has agency while Aloïse doesn’t.

Lonsdale’s men trap Seyrig’s women in confined spaces, with the embassy in India Song and the hospital in Aloïse functioning as prisons. The depression into which Seyrig’s characters spiral reflects women’s acquiescence to being held hostage – what Betty Friedan in her 1963 polemic The Feminine Mystique called “the problem with no name” in the context of housewifery. Just as Aloïse’s art is the work of a woman denied a voice, India Song visualises the unspeakable sense that Anne-Marie deserves more than her husband gives her.

Duras does this in two ways. The sound is desynchronised, meaning the characters appear mute while we hear their narration in voiceover. This disjunction between image and sound in India Song prevents us from seeing Anne-Marie as an individual. Then, by framing the central room of the embassy within a large mirror, characters are visible onscreen despite the actor being stood, unseen, behind the camera. The mirror makes Anne-Marie’s duplicity literal, crystallising her alternate personas as wife and adulteress into two distinct images.

Then there’s the additional image of Seyrig herself. All three directors want us to connect the actor to her characters. In an interview about Jeanne Dielman, Akerman said, “If I had chosen a nonprofessional actress for the role of Jeanne, she wouldn’t be more than a single woman. Because she is an actress, she represents all other women.” The ambassador’s wife is as good as the housewife; individuals, but two sides of the same coin.

While working on these films, Seyrig directed a documentary about women’s acting experiences called Be Pretty and Shut Up!. In her interview, Jane Fonda reveals how male producers altered her appearance. She reflects that, ‘I, Jane Fonda, was here, and this image was there, and there was this alienation between the two.’ Seyrig said she found playing characters written by women felt more real to her than previous roles written by men, that they were borne of uniquely feminine empathy. She was closing the gap between herself and her image.

By starring in films directed by women, Seyrig hoped to bring their films into the spotlight. Jeanne Dielman remains the most well-known. Akerman’s film is an unflinching snapshot of a woman’s life and its mind-numbing unpaid labour – peeling potatoes, making beds, running errands… Snap! Jeanne throws herself onto a client and plunges a pair of scissors into his neck. Filmed through the bedroom mirror like Duras’s framing in India Song, Akerman gives Jeanne a dual personality that is more violent than the staid housewife we have seen hitherto.

Where did that come from? In her book The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson criticises Jeanne Dielman for this irrational climax which appears to have no basis in the character we’ve watched closely for over three hours. Look again. It’s subtle, simmering, but it’s always been there. That moment is the Manifesto of the 343, the Wages for Housework movement, Andy Warhol being shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, whose ‘SCUM Manifesto’ stood for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’. The visual pun of scissors aligned with the cinematic cut realises Freudian castration anxiety for the male viewer. It’s Akerman’s caustic way of telling men the women are coming.

But it’s not the end. Jeanne sits at the dining table as she does every evening. There may be ruptures, but we are bound to repeat. It’s like the haunting piano theme composed by Carlos D’Alessio which drifts through the embassy in India Song, the same music Anne-Marie dances to with man after man, the record seemingly stuck. It’s a pessimistic endnote, that there’s no exit, but it remains a pertinent tune forty-five years later. Seyrig was instrumental in bringing it to our attention, but just like Jeanne Dielman’s endless chores, there’s still work to be done.

India Song is available to view on MUBI now.

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate.” These early lines by dream extractor Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) establish the eponymous concept behind Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending sci-fi Inception, where dream-share technology is used to sow ideas in the mind of anyone.

These implanted ideas are parasitic and can come to define a person’s outlook, future choices, even their personality. Although the main plot concerns corporate espionage carried out through dreams, the emotional core of the film is Cobb’s failure to cope with the loss of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). However, our empathy for him is compromised when it becomes clear that, through inception, Cobb was the cause of Mal’s death.

Moral absolutism is hardly at the forefront of Nolan’s filmography, and Inception crosses straight into morally dubious territory – the titular act itself is a form of gaslighting, designed to significantly alter someone’s mental state without their knowing.

Despite being set up as a classic femme fatale, Mal is a profoundly tragic figure without agency. She was appropriately nicknamed ‘The Shade’ in promotional material, which perfectly encapsulates her role in the film. The Mal we see is not the real Mal, but a violent and malignant manifestation of Cobb’s guilt, a shadow formed of memories and regrets. She is disturbed and quick to anger, sabotaging his work and attacking his team in their dreams.

Yet from the perspective of Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), one of the few characters besides Cobb who knew Mal, “she was lovely”. This begs the question of whether Cobb imagines Mal to be furious and vengeful to make himself kinder by comparison, or if Mal was as toxic as he is.

In life, their bond appeared mutually obsessive: after all, they chose to spend the equivalent of 50 years in a dream world with just each other for company. They regularly quote a riddle about boarding a train with no idea of its destination, deeming it unimportant as long as “they’ll be together”. The problem is that their codependency is much like a dream state: momentarily appealing but ultimately an escape from reality.

They cannot properly function in the real world, at least not in a happy or healthy way, as we see with the progress of their dream experiment. When Mal refuses to leave their shared fantasy, Cobb incepts and inevitably gaslights her. He justifies his actions as an attempt to bring her out of the dream world, yet fails to consider how dangerous it is to fundamentally alter her sense of reality and deprive her of her agency.

The 1938 stage play ‘Gas Light’, where the term ‘gaslighting’ originated, told the story of a husband psychologically manipulating his wife by modifying elements of their environment while pretending nothing had changed. Similarly, Inception blurs the line of reality and fantasy by using ‘totems’ to distinguish between the worlds. Cobb explicitly states that no one but the owner should interact with the totem; even weight and dimension are details only they should know. This later reveals his hypocrisy as his own totem, a spinning top, originally belonged to Mal.

When Cobb discovers Mal’s totem buried away in the recesses of her mind, he spins it and Mal’s sense of reality begins to spin out of control. Like the husband in ‘Gas Light’, he never reveals this information to her, a cruel act which causes Mal’s descent into madness and eventual suicide. After Mal’s death, he ironically depends on the totem to establish his own sense of reality. It is poetic justice that the object which tormented Mal ends up tormenting Cobb.

While Cobb grieves for Mal, it is questionable whether he earns his redemption. Despite knowing the dangers of inception, he continues to incept CEO Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) while endangering his team by risking falling into limbo, an unconstructed dream space from which one can never wake up. When he finally confronts his actions, it is only to absolve his guilt and move on with his life; yet the projection of Mal tearfully stating “you infected my mind” shows that the damage he inflicted can never entirely be undone.

Abusers delude themselves into believing that they are redeemable, that their actions can exist without consequence. The final scene of domestic bliss may only be a projection of Cobb’s desire for a future where he is forgiven, a fantasy he has constructed to escape the awful truth of his actions. The spinning top begins to lose its balance because, deep down, Cobb knows the illusion is not built to last.

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Dorothy says this line excitedly – it’s thrilling to leave the drab sepia world of 1930s America for the glorious Technicolor of Oz. It’s soon turned upside down, a puff of red smoke and the Wicked Witch of the West appears, doing everything she can to stop Dorothy returning home. For all its wonder, Oz isn’t home. Its uncanniness frightens her, and through sheer will power she escapes. “There’s no place like home… There’s no place like home… There’s no place like home…”

When you’re undergoing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), one technique is to close your eyes and transport yourself to a safe space. For me, it’s my grandparents’ house. My therapist says the magic words I chose, and I’m sitting in my grandad’s armchair in their cosy living room, the scent of lavender wafting through. We do this when my treatment triggers something and I start to disassociate as my mind convinces me I’m reliving the past. A click of the ruby slippers, “There’s no place like home…” and I’m safe again.

I hadn’t made this connection between The Wizard of Oz and my PTSD until I saw David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Despite being released in 1990, it was one of those rare moments when a hand reached out, took mine, and told me it knew how I felt. It wasn’t what I’d expected – wasn’t this just the pulpy one with Nicolas Cage in a snakeskin jacket? I hadn’t thought of Lynch as an empathetic filmmaker, as someone capable of tackling the psychological effects physical abuse has on women. In fact, if I’d known the film would be dealing with sexual assault, I’d have avoided it.

What distinguishes the sexual assault in Wild at Heart from Lynch’s other films is that Laura Dern’s Lula is given full agency in its depiction. Unlike the laughing gas-induced attacks in Blue Velvet or the mysterious murder of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, we don’t see the act itself so there’s no risk of it being confused for narrative pleasure; we see only the aftereffects on a female character we instantly fall in love with. She’s fun-loving, sexy, and in total command of herself. What’s more, her relationship with Sailor (Cage) is unmistakably romantic, and their sex life is shown to be fulfilling and consensual. Light a match, extreme close-up of a burning cigarette, and we settle in for a stream of post-coital duologues consisting of startling trust and honesty.

It’s clear that Lula has told Sailor about her trauma before, and it’s through their healthy sex life that she refuses to allow the rape to control her – she’s a survivor, not a victim. I didn’t feel that way. Like Lula and the statistical majority of other survivors, I was assaulted by someone I already knew. Lula claims she couldn’t talk about it with her mother, and neither could I – it wasn’t until I met my loving boyfriend that I learned to respect myself, to identify the spiral of depression I’d fallen into. And just like Lula, a significant part of that recovery came through not only tolerating but enjoying sex.

That’s not to say those demons have been laid to rest – far from it. But being able to write about it is a sign I’m on the road to recovery. Wild at Heart showed me that you can appear to be better on the surface while invisible scars lurk underneath. Just as I’m triggered by loud noises and sudden movements, Lula’s flashback erupts onto the screen when Sailor slams a window shut. Lynch uses the visual language of film editing to recreate a facsimile of post-traumatic experience. A cigarette calms her nerves, but it’s a short-term fix. Therapy isn’t an option for a woman on the road, not least in its financial cost, and her ‘home’ in the domestic sense is totally dysfunctional. She’s found a home in Sailor, and that’s beautiful.

While Lula clearly knows she needs Sailor, he’s less astute. He’s misguided, committed to an independent life of crime that sees him in and out of jail. In the end, he’s also Dorothy; after the Wizard leaves in his hot air balloon, it takes Glinda in her bubble-gum-pink orb to make him realise that his place is with Lula, that she is his home. Perhaps only Lynch could get away with a sequence like this in a film that’s otherwise coherent. It’s a necessary apotheosis – the Good Witch come to chase away the Wicked Witch of the West who frequently appears onscreen in the place of the violent acts committed against Lula. Together they douse her in water until she melts into nothing. “Oh, what a world! What a world!”

The scene I found hardest to watch in Wild at Heart sees Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) taunt Lula. It realises the fear inherent to PTSD, that those traumas aren’t over, they’re ongoing and may come again. Against the peeling wallpaper of the bedroom our eyes are drawn to Lula’s blood-red heels as she draws on her cigarette, a moment of solitary bliss. Then Bobby asks to use her loo before pressing himself up against her, ordering her to say, “Fuck me!” It’s clear he wants to intimidate her, and he leaves soon after, as the camera closes on her shoes as she clicks her heels. She doesn’t say anything, but the direct parallel with Dorothy is heart-breaking. It’s hard to escape from the nightmare when you’re living it.

In Wild at Heart, Lynch gives this seemingly tame gesture from The Wizard of Oz, one of the most iconic images in cinema history, new significance. Lula doesn’t need to say anything for us to get the message – it’s her silence in this scene that’s so arresting, a realistic depiction of how the body can shut down when it’s being assaulted. She’s found her therapeutic methods, and we see her refusal to let it weigh her down. Her ruby slippers might not be magic, but Lula reminds us that it’s possible to leave our troubles behind, somewhere over the rainbow. I’d choose Kansas over Oz any day.

“A caravan park has the capacity to be both dream and nightmare, with only a flimsy plastic wall as the line between the two.” This quote from writer/director Claire Oakley, taken from the production notes of her debut feature, Make Up, sets the tone for an oneiric fever dream in which a teenage girl experiences her sexual awakening against the bristling backdrop of sand dunes and static caravans on the north coast of Cornwall.

Oakley uses this central location to elicit feelings of suffocation, claustrophobia and banality, juxtaposed with the eeriness and wilderness of the sea, the wind and the natural habitat surrounding these stark, static structures. Here, the caravan site becomes a psychological terrain, forging a unique evocation of girlhood.

The Dardenne brothers’ Palme d’Or-winning 1999 drama Rosetta is also set within a static caravan park, this time in the Belgian town of Seraing. Unlike the out-of-season holiday park in which Oakley’s film is set, Rosetta follows the poverty-stricken lives of 17-year-old Rosetta (played by Emile Dequenne) and her alcoholic mother, who permanently reside in a static caravan. Their modest home is often filled with harsh light, and Rosetta is tightly framed as if she were physically trapped, calling to mind the pond traps her mother sets up illegally in order to catch wild trout.

Like the final gasps of the trout as they are pulled from the water, we hear Rosetta’s breaths on the soundtrack as she constantly navigates her desolate urban surroundings, capturing the vitality of her body and her impassioned existence, in spite of the suffocating misfortune she must endure. Following Dequenne’s moving performance and the Dardennes’ sensitive treatment of their subject matter, a new law was passed in Belgium, the ‘Rosetta Law’, prohibiting employers from paying teenagers less than the minimum wage.

In Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me, Sarah Polley plays Ann, a cleaner in her former high school with an unemployed husband and two small daughters, all living with Ann’s mother (brilliantly played by Debbie Harry) in a static caravan. When Ann is diagnosed with a terminal illness she decides not to tell anyone, instead picking up a video camera and filming her lasts as permanent means through which to remain in their lives forever.

This subtle, poetic film finds joy in small places, not least the caravan where the family are seen savouring pork ribs soaked in milk and eating out of cereal bowls as Ann starts to reposition herself as detached observer, taking on the guise of watchful filmmaker lovingly embracing them through her self-made film (Polley also went on to achieve success as a director with Away From Her and Stories We Tell).

While domesticity is seemingly uneventful and all who reside within the walls of Coixet’s narrative make the most of their modest existence, the caravan is an altogether different space of dispossession and arrested development in Daniel Wolfe’s dazzling British thriller from 2014, Catch Me Daddy. Adrift in a caravan on the Yorkshire Moors, Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) runs away with her boyfriend, fleeing her Pakistani family. On the run from what is strongly suggested throughout as the threat of an honour killing, Laila finds momentary transcendence in the mist and grass below her feet and the music she plays loudly in the shaky caravan, dancing feverishly to Patti Smith’s ‘Wild Horses’).

While Laila is seen living with her boyfriend (Connor McCarron), it is through Laila’s appreciation of her strange and feral new world, combined with the gauzy, shuddering textures of Robbie Ryan’s dreamy cinematography which make this not only an incisive look at female agency and the cultural systems which negate it, but also precariousness of freedom, of the mind and body, held together by the thin walls of a pitched up caravan.

Finally, in Marc Evans’ unconventional 2010 road movie, Patagonia, we follow a Welsh woman named Gwen (Nia Roberts) and her photographer boyfriend (Matthew Gravelle) as they leave Cardiff in search of the latter’s ancestral home in South America. This story runs parallel with another, older woman’s plight to journey back to Wales from Argentina, hoping to locate her mother’s village.

The singer Duffy plays a Welsh caravan park employee and we watch her sitting in the dappled light of the valley in which her caravan is sited, rather like a little icon of what home should look like, but rarely seen from the inside, the caravan is a marker of domesticity which is never fully realised, a myth further emphasised through the ancient imagery of the Welsh hillsides and Patagonian mountains, an uncanny symmetry emerging between them.

Like Oakley’s reckoning with the plastic and the permanent, the static and the wild, the aforementioned films use the caravan as a metaphor for female expression and self-discovery, turning the idea of the domestic space and the home upside down. As such, they stand among most intimate portrayals of class, sexuality and girlhood contemporary cinema has to offer.

In the end credits for Proxima the names and images of mothers and their children are shown, family portraits where each of these women are kitted out in full astronaut gear. These brave women are the real-life individuals that Alice Winocour’s film honours. Through exploring Sarah Loreau’s (Eva Green) aspiration of leaving Earth, while battling her role and responsibility as a mother to her young daughter, Proxima unites the roles of mother and astronaut; both are synonymous with venturing into the unknown.

While pregnant astronauts are prohibited to fly in space, many individuals who have had children have ventured beyond Earth’s orbit. Anna Fisher was the first person to travel into space as a mother, launching and returning the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1984. Though other women have come before Eva Green’s Sarah in Proxima, no amount of preparation can ever fully equip someone for leaving the Earth or raising a human. Both are intrepid adventures tackled in different ways and with no set instruction manual.

Exploring uncharted territory is what intrinsically connects the journey of motherhood and astronautical exploration. Climaxing with daunting prospects of childbirth and liftoff; two moments of immense pressure, hopefully then followed by a miraculous celebration of human life and achievement.

Both these feats of human engineering, one within the body creating a new life and the other a triumph of technological power, act as efforts in the preservation of humanity. The miracle of life is celebrated as a child is born and as a space shuttle takes off, both motherhood and the role of an astronaut ask for a dedication from the body that is ultimately for the progression of humankind.

To venture beyond the boundaries of Earth is to put your life in the hands of others and hope they’ve made the right calculations, in the same way a child innately relies on their caregiver to survive. Sarah’s gravity is the love she has for her daughter, which anchors her to Earth and repeatedly pulls her back into her child’s orbit. Choosing between mother and astronaut is not an option because these roles are not interchangeable, they are one and the same.

Parents often remark on how their worldview changes after having a child, similarly to how the outlook of an astronaut is forever changed when they see Earth from space. Both eventualities result in an experience of shifting perspectives on morality, humanity and reliance.

This blurring of mother and astronaut is also seen in Proxima visually. Astronaut training requires Sarah to undergo tests and simulations to prove her readiness for space travel. In doing so, her body is put under intense strain as her willpower to withstand inhuman experiences is assessed. In replicating zero gravity, the astronauts have to perform tasks underwater with restricted movement; the moment replicates a womb-like experience of floating in darkness, disorientated. In the process of experiencing outer-space, Sarah finds herself returning to a place innately human: the womb.

Other reincarnations of replicating outer-space show Sarah connected to the space shuttle via a tether that appears like an umbilical cord. These visuals further the thematic links of dependency and connection that tie into the comparison between space exploration and motherhood. With a vehement determination, Sarah embarks on a journey of emotionally testing motherhood and an astronomical adventure in a way that is innately caring, doing everything she can to be close to her daughter while the space between them grows.

Perhaps the most adventurous trip in the experience of being human, comparable to leaving Earth for space, is the journey of raising another life.