When the canon forgets women directors of the 1970s
The Criterion Channel is often treated as a reliable map of film history: curated, scholarly, and more adventurous than the average streaming service. Its collections have introduced viewers to international cinema, experimental work, and neglected movements. Yet its idea of the “classics” can still reproduce the exclusions built into traditional film canons.
How the Criterion Channel’s Classics Overlook Female Directors of the 1970s is therefore not simply a question of counting women in a catalogue. It is about which filmmakers receive recurring visibility, which films are framed as essential, and how a platform teaches audiences to understand cinematic importance.
The 1970s were a particularly rich decade for women behind the camera. Directors including Chantal Akerman, Barbara Loden, Elaine May, Agnès Varda, Lina Wertmüller, Larisa Shepitko, and Claudia Weill made formally ambitious films about work, sexuality, alienation, violence, and domestic life. Their marginal position says more about cultural power than artistic merit.
The canon was built through exclusion
The familiar story of 1970s cinema tends to centre male auteurs: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, and others. Their films are important, but their dominance can make the decade appear to have been a uniquely male achievement.
Women directors were working within the same political and industrial transformations, often with fewer resources and less institutional support. When their films are discussed, they are frequently treated as evidence of a “women’s cinema” category rather than as part of cinema history itself. That distinction matters. A male director’s film may be called a landmark, while a woman’s film is described as personal, marginal, or representative.
Streaming curation can soften this imbalance while still preserving it. A platform may carry a few films by women, but place them in a short-term spotlight rather than in the permanent mental map of essential cinema.
Availability is not the same as visibility
The Criterion Channel’s catalogue changes according to licensing agreements, regional rights, restorations, and programming cycles. A film appearing for one month does not guarantee that viewers will find it later. Nor does inclusion automatically give it the same cultural weight as a frequently resurfacing title from a celebrated male director.
Visibility depends on packaging. A film buried in a broad national cinema collection has a different status from one featured on the homepage, included in a director retrospective, or connected to a major editorial essay. The language surrounding a film also shapes expectations. “Women filmmakers” can suggest a niche interest, while “New Hollywood,” “political modernism,” or “European masterpieces” sounds like the centre of film history.
This problem extends beyond film. Popular media often turns women’s pain into a device while neglecting the structures shaping it, a pattern explored in mental health plot twists. Curation has a similar responsibility: it should provide context rather than reduce complex work to a marketable theme.
A different map of the 1970s
A fuller account of the decade would place women directors beside, rather than outside, the established canon. The films below demonstrate the range of their approaches and the kinds of critical conversations that become possible when their work is treated as central.
| Director | Film | Formal or political contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Barbara Loden | Wanda (1970) | A stark study of economic abandonment, gendered dependency, and limited agency |
| Elaine May | A New Leaf (1971) | A dark comedy that exposes class entitlement, marriage, and masculine self-interest |
| Chantal Akerman | Jeanne Dielman (1975) | Domestic labour and routine become the structure of avant-garde cinema |
| Lina WertmĂĽller | Seven Beauties (1975) | Grotesque satire confronts fascism, masculinity, and survival |
| Larisa Shepitko | The Ascent (1977) | Spiritual and moral conflict under wartime occupation |
| Claudia Weill | Girlfriends (1978) | Friendship, professional ambition, and heterosexual expectations in urban life |
These films do not form a single style or political position. That is precisely the point. “Female director” is an industrial description, not an aesthetic genre. Akerman’s durational minimalism has little in common with May’s comic cruelty, while Shepitko’s wartime cinema belongs to a different tradition from Weill’s New York independent film.
A serious platform would allow those differences to remain visible. It would connect women directors to movements in editing, genre, labour politics, documentary practice, and international modernism, rather than presenting them as a parallel history with limited influence on the main one.
The problem with the “lost masterpiece”
Calling a film a “lost masterpiece” may seem like praise, but the phrase can quietly preserve its outsider status. It suggests that the film is valuable because it was overlooked, while leaving the institutions that overlooked it unexamined. It also turns rediscovery into an occasional event instead of an ongoing correction.
Barbara Loden’s Wanda illustrates this tension. The film has received powerful critical reconsideration, yet its reputation is often framed through Loden’s brief career, personal history, and disappearance from filmmaking. Those details matter, but they can overshadow the film’s precise visual language and its devastating understanding of class and gender.
The same pattern affects directors whose careers continued. Chantal Akerman is increasingly recognised, but she is still often introduced through Jeanne Dielman alone. Agnès Varda may be more visible than many of her peers, yet her work is sometimes separated from the French New Wave and treated as a charmingly individual alternative. Recognition should expand a filmmaker’s place in history, not confine her to a single rediscovered title.
What feminist curation would change
Feminist curation does not mean replacing every male filmmaker with a woman or treating gender as the only meaningful category. It means questioning the hierarchy that decides whose work represents universality. It also requires attention to race, class, sexuality, nationality, disability, and access to production.
A stronger catalogue would pair canonical films with films that challenge their assumptions. A collection on 1970s American cinema could place Girlfriends beside better-known stories of male friendship and ambition. A series on political modernism could include Akerman, Shepitko, and Varda as foundational artists rather than supplementary discoveries. Programming notes could discuss labour and power without assuming that films by women are automatically autobiographical.
Useful editorial practices include:
- Make women directors part of recurring canon collections, not only temporary spotlights.
- Commission essays that analyse form, genre, and politics rather than biography alone.
- Preserve access to restored films through rotating but clearly signposted archival programming.
- Connect directors across countries and movements instead of isolating them under a “women’s cinema” label.
- Publish transparent context about catalogue changes, rights, and regional availability.
Rewatching the decade with wider eyes
The Criterion Channel cannot single-handedly repair decades of distribution and criticism. It operates within rights markets, restoration priorities, subscriber data, and the uneven survival of film prints. Still, a platform that presents itself as a guide to film culture has influence over what viewers seek next and what they remember as important.
The 1970s look different when women directors are not treated as exceptions. The decade becomes a history of competing aesthetics and political questions: domestic labour as cinematic time, comedy as feminist critique, war as a crisis of moral authority, and intimacy as a site of economic power.
Viewers can help build that broader history by searching beyond the homepage, seeking out films by women across genres and countries, and discussing them with the same seriousness granted to established male auteurs. Explore the Criterion Channel’s changing catalogue with a critical eye, and insist that its version of film history make room for the filmmakers who were there all along.