a male dominated field, but what about writers? You might find it surprising that a decent amount of the top films in these years were written, at least partially, by women.

In 1930, the sixth highest grossing film was The Rogue Song, a romantic musical directed by Lionel Barrymore. The script was penned by John Colton and Frances Marion. Marion is easily one of the most significant female screenwriters, especially in her time period.

That same year, she also wrote The Big House, which garnered her an Academy Award win for best adapted screenplay. This made her the first woman writer to win an Oscar.

She won another Oscar in 1932 in the Best Story category for The Champ, thus making her the first writer of any gender to win twoAcademy Awards. The Champ was the fifth highest grossing film of 1932. She even got nominated again in 1934.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky is an undisputed legend in art house cinema, mainly for his renowned works Andrei Rublev, Stalker, and Solaris.

I finally saw his first full length film recently, Ivan's Childhood. It was released in 1962; previously Tarkovsky had only made student films no longer than 45 minutes. Ivan's Childhood is much different than his later works in many ways.

Absent are the shots that go on for minutes unbroken. Not to say the editing is fast, it is still slower than most Hollywood films, even of the era.

According to the Unspoken Cinema the average shot length of Stalker is a minute and eight seconds. The