The double bill that became Kathryn Bigelow’s favourite movies
Inspiration can be found anywhere; sometimes, it’s a sound, an image, or an inescapable thought. But for Kathryn Bigelow, the inspiration that struck at the beginning of her filmmaking career was the unexpected and genius programming of a double bill at the Waverly Place Cinema in New York.
Bigelow began her early creative career as a painter, studying at the San Francisco Art Institute before being awarded a scholarship at the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Arts Independent Study Program. During the subsequent years as a living archetype of the struggling artist, Bigelow had her work critiqued by infamous art critics like Susan Sontag, had a small part in ‘Prisoners Dilemma’, gained another degree (this time in film) at Columbia University and even started a business enterprise with Philip Glass in which they renovated old apartments and flipped them for a profit.
However, Bigelow’s directorial career began after she began working for the Art and Language collective and directed a short film called The Set Up, showing an early fascination from Bigelow into the deconstruction of masculinity and violence, often revealing a softness and vulnerability to characters that are in high-pressure environments, allowing them to be multi-faceted and contradictory all at once.
And when looking at the films from the double bill, she described as “…a life-changing experience. I thought they were just extraordinary”, you can clearly see the effect on her own style of filmmaking.
The first film that was shown during the life-changing double-bill screening was Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, listed as a favourite due to “[Sam Peckinpah] for his muscularity, his immediacy, his sheer genius in his storytelling and characters. I was knocked out.” The film follows a group of ageing misfits who plot their heist before retiring from the criminal world, set against the backdrop of the dying American West that starts to crumble and fade away. Here, we can see the similarities between The Wild Bunch and Bigelow’s later work – an interest in the macho facades and motivations of men, a delicate balance between violence and tenderness, a ratio so perfectly thought out that the work never feels obtrusive or offensive, but insightful and exact in its thematic relevance.
The second film that featured during the double bill was Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, describing the impact of Robert De Niro: “His kind of twitchy reverence to this wonderfully insane underworld. Somehow, the two [films] will always be forever linked in my mind. Whoever programmed those two movies together… it was at a moment when, in an art context, I was beginning to make short films.”
Adding: “So film was definitely becoming a medium that was intriguing to me, and I hadn’t quite made a complete transition yet, but I found those two films just extraordinary, and they opened up a kind of unimaginable landscape for me. That kind of great irreverence, and intensity, and strength of purpose in those characters.”
Mean Street is perhaps one of the most influential from Scorsese’s work, a simmering thriller about a group of criminals and friends living in the heart of Little Italy, focusing on the desperate inner conflict of its main character, Johnny Boy, creating a disturbing yet intimate portrait of men that only have the illusion of choice, something that Bigelow later explores in Point Break and The Hurt Locker, exploring the way that pain and power is expressed through violence and the turmoil that comes from the contradictory expectations placed on these men.
Over the years, Bigelow has carefully honed her sweeping action sequences and provocative images known for sparking important and sometimes controversial conversations about everything from masculinity, violence, race and class, using her voice to articulate complex ideas that many would steer far away from.
Inspiration can be found in the most unsuspecting of places, and Bigelow’s accidental screening just goes to show that sometimes, an unexpected moment can have a bigger impact than anything we might plan.
