Killing Kathryn Bigelow

Tony Keily takes the publication of a new study on director Kathryn Bigelow as an excuse to look at her work.

Kathryn Bigelow is an unusual filmmaker in lots of ways. The most obvious is that she's a woman director in Hollywood. The most important is that anything she touches (I can't speak for K 19, which I couldn't watch because it had Harrison Ford in it) turns interesting: she takes an auteurist approach to her work even when working in action and/or blockbuster mode, providing a cinematic experience that is witty, multilayered and revisitable. Another 'famous thing' about Bigelow is that she started out in the Fine Art ghetto, headed into performance art, and got into film with an experimental short, The Set-Up (1978). She decided pretty soon that she wanted to make "accessible" films, and from her first feature, the mannered and fetishistic The Loveless (1982), through the most recent K 19: Widowmaker, you could say that with the exception of the underrated The Weight of Water (2000) her films have become more and more located, at least from a business and marketing perspective, in the American mainstream.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 93