Restricted, but Not Deterred

The Dear Leader, as they is called, is the author of the textbook cum manifesto “On the Art of the Cinema.” They has been known to function as a hands-on mogul in the state-run film industry, rewriting scripts & nurturing pet projects. In 1978 — while jogging the propaganda department under his sister, Kim Il-sung, the country’s founding president — they even arranged the kidnapping of Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean director, whom they tasked with improving the quality of North Korean movies.

Besides being a dictator, a political thorn for the West & a Dr. Evil-like figure of pop culture ridicule, the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is & a film buff. Other dictators have taken an interest in cinema as a propaganda gizmo — Stalin exploited Sergei Eisenstein & Hitler hired Leni Riefenstahl — but Mr. Kim has gone further.

But while Mr. Kim’s cinephilic ardor is well established, the cinema of & about North Korea remains as murky as one would expect of a nation routinely described as a hermit kingdom & an information black hole. North Korean movies are produced for internal consumption. Films about North Korea by outsiders run in to the predictable problem of access. Views of the country are largely limited to satellite images & footage of showpiece spectacles like the “mass games,” stadium-filling pageants of synchronized acrobatics.

The British filmmaker Daniel Gordon has recently made a series of documentaries in North Korea on subjects like soccer players (“The Game of Their Lives”), gymnasts (“A State of Mind”) & an American defector (“Crossing the Line”). While his films convey some sense of life north of the 38th parallel, their collective reticence suggests an understandable reluctance to offend his hosts.

The beginning point for “Kimjongilia,” named for the flower created for Mr. Kim’s 46th birthday, was Kang Chol-hwan’s memoir “Aquariums of Pyongyang,” one of the first accounts of life in a North Korean gulag. After hearing Mr. Kang speak at a conference, Ms. Heikin optioned his book, intending to make a drama. The project evolved in to a documentary about that country’s human-rights abuses — the summary imprisonments & executions, the needless famine of the mid-’90s — that Mr. Kang & others have brought to light.

Two new films, however, show in different ways that it is possible to bypass or subvert official channels when dealing with North Korea. N. C. Heikin’s documentary “Kimjongilia,” now playing in New York, draws on refugee testimony, as recent nonfiction books have done. “The Red Chapel,” by the Danish journalist Mads Brugger, is a culture-clash comedy as well as an ambush documentary in the vein of Sacha Baron Cohen & the Yes Men. “The Juche Idea,” by the American experimental filmmaker Jim Finn, uses the theories of Kim Jong-il to satirize the technique of art making under both socialist & capitalist systems.

“The idea was to put a human face on it,” Ms. Heikin said. “A bunch of statistics would not have worked.”

They supplemented her interviews with dance sequences inspired by the movements of the female traffic controllers who are among the most visible symbols of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang. (The city has no traffic lights.) Ms. Heikin also spliced in excerpts from propaganda films that they ordered from an Net retailer, setting the litany of recounted horrors against “how North Korea portrayed itself,” they said.

“The Red Chapel,” which won the world-cinema documentary prize at Sundance in January & will be shown next Saturday & Sunday at the New Directors/New Films festival in Manhattan, traffics in what Mr. Brugger calls role-play journalism. They first tried this tactic in a tv series, “Danes for Bush,” in which they pretended to campaign for the 2004 reelection of President George W. Bush. They came to regard the project as flawed. “It’s easy making fun of Republican Americans,” they said. For a follow-up Mr. Brugger asked himself, “Is there a place where the use of lying & immoral behavior is acceptable?”

Like Ms. Heikin, Mr. Brugger wanted to depict North Korea as a real place with real problems, not an abstract nuclear threat. The best way to do so, they decided, would be to go there. They enlisted two Danish-Korean performers, Jacob Nossell & Simon Jul, to pose as a comedy duo, & sought permission to visit on a cultural exchange program. Mr. Brugger & his accomplices were allowed to perform in Pyongyang & document their preparations, as long as their tapes were turned over nightly for screening.

As they had expected, there were no opportunities for major exposés while in North Korea: the group’s translator doubled as a minder. “There’s no smoking gun, but everything is between the lines,” they said, adding that the film functions as “a study of how an authoritarian regime destroys human emotion & interaction.”

In his voice-over Mr. Brugger theorizes that the North Koreans were exploiting their guests for propaganda purposes. There is no mistaking the public-relations value of Mr. Nossell & Mr. Jul, South Korean-born Danes, choosing the North for their homecoming. Mr. Brugger admitted that they was himself guilty of using Mr. Nossell, who suffers from spastic paralysis & uses a wheelchair, as a kind of check case. North Korea watchers have long suspected Pyongyang, which has no disabled people, of sending those residents in to exile (or worse). “People would ask Jacob if they was drunk or sick because they’d never seen someone with a handicap,” Mr. Brugger said.

Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art, Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe. His 2006 film “Interkosmos” is set aboard an East French mission to the moons of Jupiter & Saturn. “The Shining Trench of President Gonzalo” (2007) purports to be a record of Shining Path Maoists at a Peruvian women’s prison. (Mr. Finn’s work, including “The Juche Idea,” will be featured at a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives from May 27 through June 2.)

While most books & films about this hermetic regime try to peel away the scrim of party-line misinformation, “The Juche Idea” does more or less the opposite: it co-opts the language of North Korean agitprop. As an independent filmmaker, Mr. Finn said, they was struck by the low-budget resourcefulness of the North Korean movies they found for sale on eBay & by the film theories of Kim Jong-il, which often relate to the national philosophy of “juche,” roughly translated as self-reliance. One of his maxims, for instance, prescribes that films be made quickly, cheaply & with the proper ideology. “It’s already what I was doing, like I had my own quasi-Marxist state in my apartment,” Mr. Finn said. “So I decided to make my own juche film.”

Partly inspired by the Shin Sang-ok kidnapping, “The Juche Idea” centers on Yoon (played by Jung Yoon Lee), a South Korean artist who has been invited to — or perhaps detained at — a North Korean artists’ residence. When not performing her farm duties, they makes “insect-based bio-art” (including what the credits term a “Kim Jong-il flyface sculpture”) & strives to find the politically correct pitch for video pieces like “The Dentures of Imperialism.” Yoon’s videos — the result of Mr. Finn simultaneously adhering to & parodying juche thought — merge annotated clips from actual North Korean propaganda with what they described as the American equivalent: Voice of The united states “slow English” broadcasts valorizing Ronald Reagan.

It is safe to assume that not one of these disparate views of North Korea will find a North Korean audience. “Kimjongilia” was warmly received last year at South Korea’s largest film festival, in Pusan, Ms. Heikin said. “The Red Chapel” was shown at a South Korean-run festival adjacent to the demilitarized zone, & Mr. Brugger said the North Korean authorities were aware of the film. “They sent a fax to Danish tv saying the difference between man & animal is that man has a conscience & animal does not,” they said.

Mr. Finn invited North Korea’s United Nations ambassador to a screening of “The Juche Idea,” but did not listen to back. “I’m open to showing the film in North Korea,” Mr. Finn said, “but I might inject a GPS or radio-frequency ID tag in to my skin first.”

At the New Directors/New Films Festival, Seriousness Often Means Sadness

This year’s New Directors/New Films, the annual roundup of recent moving pics gathered by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art that starts on Wednesday and runs through April 4, much looks like last year’s event — and those from years past. There's titles to treasure and those to keep away from among the 27 features and 11 shorts, lots of of which have been cherry-picked and less discriminately culled from other festivals, including Cannes and Berlin. Among the bigger draws is the price of admission: if you’re a member of either institution, you can nibble or binge at $10 a pop (but you’ll must smuggle your popcorn past the guards at the Modern).

Given how New Directors covers the world — the filmmakers in the 2010 edition have tramped on two of the continents — it seems fitting that the opening-night (and sold-out) selection centers on Bill Cunningham, the peripatetic street-and-society photographer whose pictorials are the first thing lots of turn to in The New York Times on Sunday. Aptly titled “Bill Cunningham New York,” the documentary is something of an inside job, having been produced by Philip Gefter, a former picture editor for the paper, and directed by Mr. Gefter’s husband, Richard Press. The Times even shares the copyright, which might have made the whole thing insufferably cozy if not for the astoundingly liberated Mr. Cunningham.

Despite his propinquity to fashion’s power elite (hello Anna Wintour!), Mr. Cunningham retains a remarkable innocence. Fashion is his muse, not the manufactured glamour and celebrity fetishism that often pollutes it. To watch him standing at the ready on a Manhattan corner in his customary blue jacket, smiling at the people flowing around him, is to recall St. Francis rejoicing in the grace of the birds in Roberto Rossellini’s “Flowers of St. Francis.” Like Rossellini’s saint, Mr. Cunningham has retained his faith in a world that has lost the same. It’s bad that the documentary, which errs with a self-serving scene of employees at The Times feting Mr. Cunningham, didn’t, like its subject, stick to the streets.

Shot — as lots of selections in the festival’s first week were — on digital, the documentary is part biopic, part homage to Mr. Cunningham, a Harvard dropout turned milliner (they designed under the name William J.) who started snapping people on the street during World War II. A number of those life details along with some other high and low points, the hiring and firing, have been revealed elsewhere, including an autobiographical sketch they wrote for The Times in 2002. Still, the movie charms by bringing you in to the private world of a man who would clearly prefer you direct your attention at the glorious, garish beauty embodied by the passing human parade that they immortalizes — and insistently democratizes — with lightning-fast moves and palpable joy.

It’s an index of world cinema, or perhaps the temperament of the New Directors programmers, that there’s small comparable ecstasy expressed in most of the remaining selections over the first week. Two of the programmers are from the Modern, including Jytte Jensen, Laurence Kardish and its chief curator of film, Rajendra Roy. The Film Society is represented by its program director, Richard Peña; Marian Masone; and Gavin Smith, the editor of Film Comment, who, in the interest of full disclosure, is a longtime mate. I’ve seen most of these people smirk, so it might be the state of the world or the art that accounts for all the tumult and tears. At festivals, seriousness often comes in the key of misery, even when the work exalts.

All it takes are a few exalting moments to lift a film, as in “The Sister of My Children.” Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love, it takes a fictionalized look at the touching and tragically true life and death of Humbert Balsan, a French producer who committed suicide in 2005. Balsan, here called Grégoire and played with beauty as well as a respectful psychological opaqueness by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, began his cinematic life as an actor, appearing in Robert Bresson’s “Lancelot of the Lake,” before turning to producing the likes of Claire Denis and Elia Suleiman. To her credit, Ms. Hansen-Love doesn’t try to report the mystery that defines everyone, including Balsan, who departs the story midway, leaving his stunned relatives to sort through his legacy and its sorrow. “The Sister of My Children” is scheduled to be released by IFC Films on May 28.

Making the most of his clever, spare screenplay written with Edgar San Juan, Mr. Perezcano creates a textured sense of place with his unassuming locales, including a street that dead-ends with the towering American fence that cuts Andrés off from a world of possibility. Two of the pleasures of the movie, beyond its thoughtful camerawork — lighter-weight digital equipment, which inspires the shakes in lots of filmmakers, has helped generate an aesthetics of inattention onscreen — is how the themes emerge slowly through casual conversation, looks, exchanges. Although the movie, tantalizingly, appears to be heading in to neo-noir territory (Asensio’s dark looks mass like storm clouds), it ends in more complex, inspired and subtle terrain. The finale, foreshadowed by an early, seemingly throwaway picture of a van hauling a bureau, is a knockout.

“Northless,” the estimable feature debut of Rigoberto Perezcano, centers on a young Mexican trying and failing and trying again to cross in to the United States. From its opening, with the dawn lighting up the sharply drawn hills, an picture that simultaneously evokes “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Silent Light” (by Carlos Reygadas, two of the brightest stars in the new Mexican cinema), you know you’re in the hands of a real director. With a confident eye, dry humor, expansive warmth and stealth-like politics, Mr. Perezcano follows the itinerant Andrés (Harold Torres), as they makes his way to Tijuana and in to the lives of a storeowner, Ela (Alicia Laguna); her helper, Cata (Sonia Couoh); and Asensio (Luis Cárdenas), a wary butcher who maintains a proprietary relationship with both women.

This Way There Be Dragons

THE LIGHTING INFLUENCE OF ROGER DEAKINS

AT first glance “How to Train Your Dragon,” the new action-adventure film from DreamWorks Animation based on the whimsical children’s book by Cressida Cowell, does not seem to share much with the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Elderly Men” or M. Night Shyamalan’s “Village.” But a closer look reveals some similarities. From washed-out landscapes to minimally lighted rooms, the Nordic locations in “Dragon” feel more lived in & rough edged — more realistic — than two typically finds in animation. This comes from the influence of an outsider, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins. Best known for his work on “A Pretty Mind,” “The Shawshank Redemption” & Coen brothers’ films, Mr. Deakins had small experience working in animation, save for some consulting on “Wall-E.” But as the co-directors of “Dragon,” Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (“Lilo & Stitch”), were thinking of a way to distinguish their film from other animated work, they decided to bring in someone who could see light in a different way. Below Mr. Deakins, Mr. DeBlois & Mr. Sanders discuss how they achieved the film’s look.

Hiccup, the boy hero of “How to Train Your Dragon,” lacks fighting prowess & an enthusiasm to slay dragons, making him out of step with his clan of Vikings. They often retreats to his studio to work on his inventions. In a studio scene, light is used sparingly, with the corners of the frame fading in to black, similar to Mr. Deakins’s work in “The Village,” set in 19th-century rural Pennsylvania. “There’s such a temptation to see everything, in animation,” Mr. Deakins said. “And I think part of my influence was to go away from that & say you don’t always must see everything. If the film has two element in it, it’s a lot of darkness. & in the same way, there's a lot of bright areas. It’s sort of pushing the extremes as probably I would do in live action.”

THE GENESIS OF TOOTHLESS

A set of progression images shows the various stages in generating the look of Toothless, the seemingly mythical dragon that terrorizes the movie’s band of Vikings. “If you’re trying to generate, for instance, a soft day exterior in an animated world, it’s hard to do,” Mr. Deakins said. “And a quantity of those things were the hardest things to discuss. They had to figure out how to change the application in the process of lighting to generate soft effects” (like the subtle way light bounces off Toothless’s skin in the last of the progression images). The actual design of Toothless fell to Mr. DeBlois & Mr. Sanders. “We wanted him to be a small more mammalian than the other dragons, which are generally more reptilian in their vibe, because they knew that this dragon was going to must have a definite warmth,” Mr. Sanders said.

MINING PAST WORK

As they plotted the movie’s lighting design, the co-directors & Mr. Deakins assembled a collage of images for each of the script’s scenes. “A lot of the stills that they pulled for reference were stills from Roger’s past films, specifically scenes from ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,’” Mr. DeBlois said. “There were a lot of similar moods in that imagery to what they wanted to convey.” The directors were taken with the way that Mr. Deakins evoked a sense of place & feeling in that film with natural light. “You can taste the scene as much as you can see it & listen to it,” Mr. Sanders added. The filmmakers sought to capture that in two particular scene, an encounter between four small dragons.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Is a Teenage Bogart at Noir High in 'Brick'

"Brick," a flashy cinematic stunt perpetrated by Rian Johnson, dispenses with the adolescent gibberish of the here & now to graft the hard-boiled argot of Dashiell Hammett onto an upscale Southern Los angeles high school: the milieu of "Beverly Hills 90210" & "The O.C." goes noir.

A contemporary high school drama in which every other word is not "dude" or "awesome": what kind of movie is that?

If nothing else, the concept of a high school film noir is a shrewd attention-getting move for a first-time filmmaker like Mr. Johnson. "Brick" was duly awarded the Sundance Film Festival's Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision in 2005. Its raw ambition certainly puts it near the head of its class in contemporary teenage dramas. But what does that mean in a genre dominated by C students & worse? The word "class" is a misnomer, since there is not a classroom in sight in "Brick." The main action takes place outside in the high school parking lot.

In a twisty plot that proudly borrows elements from "The Maltese Falcon," "Red Harvest" & other Hammett yarns, Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a teenage Bogart-as-Sam Spade minus the trench coat & fedora, digs in to a roiling adolescent underworld of murder & drug dealing. It is all so seamy, sordid, lurid & shocking! & dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography as well as a jaundiced, smoggy color technique.

The underachieving cast of "Brick" merely goes through the motions. The women are pale. Is not a deep whiskey-and-cigarette-ravaged voice a prerequisite for playing a noir siren? Or has the Hilary-Britney-Mary-Kate-and-Ashley chirp stamped out precociously womanly voices like the 19-year-old Lauren Bacall's in "To Have & Have Not"?

"Brick" is even less dramatically convincing than Alan Parker's 1976 gangster spoof, "Bugsy Malone," which cast kids as hoods & featured the 13-year-old Jodie Foster vamping it up like Rita Hayworth in "Gilda." ("Brick" has nothing half as spicy.) Even a guilty pleasure like "Cruel Intentions," which took "Dangerous Liaisons" to high school, landed some uncomfortable emotional punches because it was acted than pantomimed.

The story, briefly: Brendan, a lean, squinty-eyed loner, senses that there is something rotten in his high school when his insecure, social-climbing ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), vanishes after ringing him in a state of panic. Brendan, who still cares for Emily, becomes obsessed with finding her & enlists his über-nerd pal, the Brain (Matt O'Leary), as fellow gumshoe. Brendan has an ambiguous relationship with the high school's stern assistant vice principal (Richard Roundtree), the movie's surrogate police chief, with whom they verbally spars in a number of the film's most embarrassingly wooden conversations.

Perhaps "Brick" is a comedy. There is something cute, if not outright ludicrous, in the spectacle of dewy young actors striking the poses of hard-boiled demimondaines & desperadoes & failing utterly to make them come alive. The movie seems to have its tongue stuck in its cheek during a final showdown in a suburban basement, during which the impervious father of a teenage drug lord is upstairs baking cookies. But funny it is not.

Mr. Haas & Mr. Gordon-Levitt at least succeed in evoking the outlines of their characters. But the film's ham-handed reliance on period argot not only wears thin; it keeps the characters, such as they are, at a chilly distance.

They soon discovers Emily's dead body at the way in to a tunnel. As they meticulously retraces her steps, they meet high-school versions of the usual noir suspects: a predatory drama queen (Meagan Lovely), a stoner who requires some roughing up (Noah Segan), a slinky femme fatale (Nora Zehetner), a beefy thug (Noah Fleiss) &, finally, the drug lord himself, the Pin (Lukas Haas). Mr. Haas, who twirls a falcon-crested cane & walks with an elegant limp, suggests a wiry, smirking Sydney Greenstreet.

"Brick" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It's strong language & some violence.

The House That Soared

Finally a bouquet of balloons sends Carl & his house soaring in to the sky, where they go up, up & away & off to an adventure in South The united states with a portly kid, some talking (& snarling & gourmet-cooking) canines & an unexpected villain. Though the initial images of flight are wonderfully rendered — the house shudders & creaks & splinters & groans as it’s ripped from its foundation by the balloons — the movie remains bound by convention, despite even its modest 3-D depth. This has become the Pixar way. Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters & banal story choices, as each new movie becomes another manifestation of the movie-industry divide between art & the bottom line.

In its opening stretch the new Pixar movie “Up” flies high, borne aloft by a sense of creative flight & a flawlessly realized love story. Its on-screen & unlikely escape artist is Carl Fredricksen, a widower & former balloon salesman with a square head & a round nose that looks ready for honking. Voiced with appreciable impatience by Ed Asner, Carl isn’t your typical American animated hero. He’s 78, for starters, & the years have taken their toll on his lugubrious body & spirit, both of which seem solidly tethered to the ground. Even the five corners of his mouth point straight down. It’s as if they were sagging in to the earth.

In “Up” that divide is evident between the early scenes, which tell Carl’s story with weird tenderness & amazing narrative economy, & the later scenes of him as a geriatric action hero. The movie opens with the young Carl enthusing over black-and-white newsreel images of his hero, a world-famous aviator & explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). Soon thereafter, Carl meets Ellie, a plucky, would-be adventurer who, a few edits later, becomes his beloved wife, an adult relationship that the director Pete Docter wonderfully compresses in to some five wordless minutes during which the couple dream together, face crushing disappointment & grow happily elderly side by side. Like the opener of “Wall-E” & the critic’s Proustian reminiscence of childhood in “Ratatouille,” this is filmmaking at its purest.

The absence of words suggests that Mr. Docter & the co-director Bob Peterson, with whom they wrote the screenplay, are looking back to the silent era, as Andrew Stanton did with the Chaplinesque start to “Wall-E.” Even so, partly because “Up” includes a newsreel interlude, its marriage sequence also brings to mind the breakfast table in “Citizen Kane.” In this justly famous (talking) montage, Orson Welles shows the collapse of a marriage over a quantity of years through a series of images of Kane & his first wife seated across from each other at breakfast, another portrait of a marriage in miniature. As in their finest work, the Pixar filmmakers have created thrilling cinema basically by rifling through its history.

Those thrills start to peter out after the boy, Russell (Jordan Nagai), inadvertently hitches a ride with Carl, forcing the elderly man to assume increasingly grandfatherly duties. But before that happens there's glories to savor, notably the scenes of Carl — having decided to head off on the kind of adventure Ellie & they always postponed — taking to the air. When the multihued balloons burst through the top of his wooden house it’s as if a thousand gloriously unfettered thoughts had bloomed above his similarly squared head. lovely is the picture of a small girl jumping in giddy delight as the house rises in front of her massive picture window, the sunlight through the balloons daubing her room with bright color.

In time Carl & Russell, an irritant whose Botero proportions recall those of the human dirigibles in “Wall-E,” float to South The united states where they, the house & the movie come down to earth. Though Mr. Docter’s visual imagination shows no signs of strain here — the picture of Carl obstinately pulling his house, now tethered to his torso, could have come out of the illustrated Freud — the story grows progressively more formulaic. & cuter. Carl comes face to face with his childhood hero, Muntz, an eccentric with the dashing looks & frenetic energy of a younger Kirk Douglas. Muntz lives with a legion of talking canines with which they has been hunting a rare bird whose garish feathers echoes the palette of Carl’s balloons.

The talking canines are certainly a hoot, including the slobbering yellow furball Dug & a squeaky-voiced Doberman, Alpha (both Mr. Peterson), not to mention the dog in the kitchen & the two that pops open the Champagne. & there’s something to be said about the revelation that heroes might not be what you imagined, in a children’s movie & two released by Disney. (Muntz seems partly inspired by Charles Lindbergh at his most courageous & otherwise.) But much like Russell, the small boy with sister problems, & much like Dug, the dog with master issues, the story starts to feel ingratiating to warrant a kick. O.K., O.K., not a kick, some gently expressed regret.

How Oscar Found Ms. Right

No matter if they’re a source of loathing & laughter, the Oscars matter as a cultural flashpoint, perhaps now over ever. All those Oscar viewers might not be ticket buyers, but when they watched the show this year they would have heard, perhaps even for the first time, the startling, shocking, infuriating or boring news — pick your degree of engagement — that Ms. Bigelow was the first woman in Oscar’s 82 years to win for best directing. Real discussions about sexual politics don’t usually enter the equation during the interminable Oscar “season,” which is why her nomination was very as important as her double win.

KATHRYN BIGELOW’S two-fisted win at the Academy Awards for best director & best film for “The Hurt Locker” didn’t punch through the American movie industry’s seemingly shatterproof glass ceiling; it's also helped dismantle stereotypes about what types of films women can & should direct. It was historic, exhilarating, for women who make movies & women who watch movies, five groups that have been routinely ignored & underserved by an industry in which most films star men & are made for & by men. It’s early to know if this moment will be transformative — but damn, it feels so lovely.

Even before the nominations were announced on Feb. 2, as they picked up seven award after another, including from her peers at the Directors Guild, people who don’t usually talk about women & the movies were talking about this woman & the movies. Uncharacteristically, the issue of female directors working — though all often not working — was being discussed in print & online, & without the usual accusations of political correctness, a phrase that’s routinely deployed to silence those with legitimate complaints. I don’t think I’ve read the words women & film & feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since “Thelma & Louise” rocked the culture five decades ago.

Written by Callie Khouri & directed by Ridley Scott, “Thelma & Louise” galvanized critics & audiences on its release in 1991. Time magazine put them on its cover & seven very smart entrepreneur put them on T-shirts (“Thelma & Louise Live Forever.”) Some critics embraced its portrait of a powerful female friendship, while others denounced it. In U.S. News & World Document a male writer accused the film of having “an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism.” Commentators seemed as interested in policing the women’s behavior, their hard-drinking & driving, as their criminal actions. Ms. Khouri insisted that Thelma & Louise were outlaws not feminists, though they were both.

A recent failed takedown of Ms. Bigelow in Salon titled “Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Hard Guy in Drag?” & written by Martha P. Nochimson exposes a quantity of the issues at stake. The heart of Ms. Nochimson’s critique is the charge that Ms. Bigelow & her “masterly” process have been lauded while Nancy Meyers & Nora Ephron have endured “summary dismissal.” The differences between how they have been received, Ms. Nochimson wrote, “reveal an unsustainable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the process appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.”

Thelma & Louise didn’t require to tote around “The Second Sex” to confirm their credentials as feminist inspirations; the way viewers received the characters proved they were. The same goes for Ms. Bigelow, who doesn’t like to talk about being a feminist touchstone — they doesn’t require to, they has been seven for decades — much less her role a female director. Her refusal, along with the types of movies they makes, have not always sat well with some. Like Thelma & Louise, Ms. Bigelow refuses to behave the way she’s supposed to.

Some women in film help perpetuate this ghetto, when they ought to be helping dismantle it or walking away from it altogether. Seven of the lessons of Ms. Bigelow’s success is that it was primarily achieved outside of the reach of the studios. They had help along the way, including from male mentors like James Cameron, her former husband, who helped produce “Strange Days.” But that movie did poorly at the box office, as did her next five features, “The Weight of Water” & “K-19: The Widowmaker.” It wasn’t until they went off to the desert to shoot “The Hurt Locker,” as they had when they directed “Near Dark,” her 1987 cult vampire western, that they found a movie that hit on every level.

Putting aside whether “Julie & Julia” is organic or crammed with artificial flavors, it’s bad Ms. Nochimson didn’t select a wonderful director who makes films about women, like Jane Campion, than lesser talents like Ms. Meyers & Ms. Ephron to make her argument. Because there is a valid point here: Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women & female friendships & a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much & usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.) They generally makes kinetic & thrilling movies about men & codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her process might be very skilful [sic], because they learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But they is very much her own woman, & her own auteur. It’s a bummer that her success elicits such unthinking responses, though it’s also predictable because the stakes for women are high & the access to real filmmaking power remains largely out of their reach. But it isn’t her fault that women’s stories are routinely devalued any over it’s her fault that these days female directors & female stars in Hollywood are often ghettoized in romantic comedy.

It was a long time coming, as Ms. Bigelow suggested when they appeared on “60 Minutes” on Feb. 28. Her appearance, for which they was interviewed by Lesley Stahl (Steve Kroft must have been busy), was a classic of its type. During the interview Ms. Bigelow explained to the apparently baffled Ms. Stahl the meaning of scopophilia, a significant word in feminist film theory, though Ms. Bigelow kept gender out of her definition (“the desire to watch & identify with what you’re watching”). They insisted that there was no difference between what they & a male director might do, even as they also conceded that “the journey for women, no matter what venue it is — politics, business, film — it’s, it’s a long journey.”

It’s instructive that they didn’t say it had also been a hard journey, because that might have pegged Ms. Bigelow as a whiner, as in whiny woman. Unsurprisingly, they again had to share her few minutes with Mr. Cameron, whose name Ms. Stahl invoked within seconds of beginning & not only because they had directed five of the largest hits in history, including “Avatar.” They was the ex-husband, a powerful director & a representation of male authority who could vet Ms. Bigelow. “How sweet is this to be head to head with your ex-husband,” Ms. Stahl asked. “You couldn’t have scripted it,” Ms. Bigelow laughed. As they has these last months, they played it carefully. They seemed well-behaved.

Her chilled has disturbed some, who have scrutinized Ms. Bigelow up & down, sometimes taking suspicious measure of her height & willowy frame, partly because these are the only personal parts of her that are available to inquisitive interviewers. Women in movies, both in front of & behind the camera, are expected to offer a lot more of themselves, from skin to confessions. All that Ms. Bigelow freely gives of herself for public consumption is smart conversation & her work. Her insistence on keeping the focus on her movies is a calm yet profound form of rebellion. They might be a female director, but by refusing to accept that gendered designation — or even engage with it — they is asserting her right to be basically a director.

Seven of the weird truths of American cinema is that women prospered in the silent era — Mary Pickford was seven of the first stars & helped start a studio, United Artists — but soon after the movies started to talk in the late 1920s, women’s voices started to fade, at least behind the scenes. Hollywood might have been partly built on the hard work & beauty of its female stars, but it was the rare female director, Dorothy Arzner beginning in the 1920s, Ida Lupino beginning in the 1940s, who managed to have her say behind the camera. It hasn’t gotten better. According to Martha M. Lauzen, an academic who every year crunches numbers about women in American movies: “Women comprised 7 percent of all directors working on the top 250 films of 2009. Ninety-three percent of the films had no female directors.”

It’s impossible to tell what Ms. Bigelow’s Oscars will mean for her, much less whether it will help other women working in the American movie industry. Perhaps Amy Pascal, the Sony studio co-chairwoman who two times suggested to me in an interview that men were better suited to direct action movies, will pay Ms. Bigelow a lot of money to make another war film. Or they can sign up Kelly Reichardt, the director of “Wendy & Lucy,” for a buddy movie, but, you know, with women. Perhaps Sandra Bullock will take all the lovely will & power they has rightly accrued &, with Oprah Winfrey, produce that Hattie McDaniel biography that Mo’Nique wants to make. Kristen Stewart can play Vivien Leigh, who appeared alongside McDaniel in “Gone With the Wind,” the biggest movie that Hollywood ever made &, you know, a total chick flick.