Kathryn Bigelow has been a household name since 2010 when she won Best Director and
Best Picture for The Hurt Locker.
But the director has been crafting distinctive films for over 30 years.
She’s spent her long career working both within and outside of the Hollywood studio
system, and over those decades her filmmaking style has evolved.
Early in her career, Bigelow made a name for herself directing gripping genre and action films.
On closer examination, she's often subtly critiquing pre-conceived ideas of what a genre
film is.
But her reversals and upending of conventions might go unnoticed because of how well Bigelow
masters traditionally male-centric genres.
Just as she rejects the label of “female director” as being a big part of her identity, her
primary point isn’t to make us think about gender so much as to show that women also
share the same universal dilemmas and characteristics that are usually reserved, in the movies,
for men.
The simple maxim that a woman can do anything
a man can do.
And Bigelow herself is the living example.
Her debut feature, The Loveless - co-directed by Bigelow and Monty Montgomery - is a revisionist
western in the guise of a biker movie.
The movie shows us what happens when a group of bikers, or cowboys, enter a town and leave
it in shambles.
Bigelow has stated that in The Loveless, she was
"using the bikers as an iconography of power.”
After this debut, Bigelow released a vampire western, Near Dark,
and a cop movie, Blue Steel.
Near Dark reverses gender roles and critiques the western trope of the domestic woman, as
vampire Mae introduces chaos and adventure
while “cowboy” Caleb struggles to meet
vampire (or masculine) expectations.
Blue Steel puts a woman, Jamie Lee Curtis, at the center of a cop film, two years before Jonathan Demme
made Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Next came Bigelow’s most commercially successful film, the modern classic Point Break (1991).
Bigelow has called the movie a “wet western,”
since the surfing movie mirrors the central Western conflict
between domesticity and adventure.
Four years later, Bigelow made the sci-fi thriller Strange Days (1995), written and
produced by her ex-husband, James Cameron.
After directing a pair of thrillers, The Weight of Water (2000) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002),
Bigelow received lasting acclaim for The Hurt Locker (2009) and bested her ex -- who was
nominated for Avatar -- at the Oscars.
As the times change, Bigelow continues to tap into the shifting zeitgeist both in form
and subject.
When Point Break was released, she was interested in toppling the notion of a perfect
America that was prominent during the Reagan years.
In addition to the The Hurt Locker, she's also know for 2012's Zero Dark Thirty.
Both used the war film genre to get at deeper questions about US foreign policy in the Middle East
and comment about the state of America in the 21st century.
2017’s Detroit deals with the 1967 race riots
The film features some of Bigelow’s signature trademarks: it features a handheld camera
style and gritty realism, and it examines the real-life events of a problematic power
dynamic in Detroit in 1967 when the city was 40 percent black but the
police force was 95 percent white.
Before filmmaking, Bigelow was a formerly trained painter.
And she stated that her work is very much inspired by Willem de Kooning and
the abstract expressionist movement, which focused less on naturalism, and instead tried to express
deep-seated, submerged emotions that exist within all of us.
When discussing her own paintings, she said she would
“take a corner detail from a Raphael, blow it up and paint it in an Abstract Expressionist way."
We might say her variations on the cop or western genre formulas can be compared to fusing renaissance
art with abstract expressionism.
She’s reaching for complexity and inner-truth while working within the boundaries of an
established, conventional art style.