Kathryn Ann 11 Bigelow
16C23.22192.1 Kathryn Ann 11 Bigelow
was born in San Carlos, California, 27 November 1951, the only child of
Gertude Kathryn (née Larson;
1917-1994), a librarian, and Ronald Elliot 10 Bigelow
(1915-1992), a paint factory manager. Her mother was of
Norwegian descent. Bigelow's early creative endeavors were as a student
of painting. She enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of
1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972. While
enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American
Art's Independent Study scholarship program in New York City. Bigelow’s
early work benefited from her apprenticeships with Vito Acconi, Richard
Serra, and Lawrence Weiner.
Also in her early days in Manhattan, Bigelow teamed up with Philip
Glass on a real-estate venture in which the pair personally renovated
distressed apartments downtown then sold them for a profit.
Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University, where
she studied theory and criticism and earned her master's degree. Her
professors included Vito Acconci, Sylvère Lotringer and Susan
Sontag, and she worked with the Art & Language collective and noted
conceptualist Lawrence Weiner. She also taught at the California
Institute of the Arts. While working with Art and Language, Bigelow
began a short film, The Set-Up (1978), which found favor with director
Milos Forman, then teaching at Columbia University, and which
Bigelow later submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia.
Bigelow's short "The Set-Up," is a 20-minute deconstruction of violence
in film. The film portrays "two men fighting each other as the
semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct
the images in voice-over." Bigelow asked her actors to actually beat
and bludgeon each other throughout the film’s all-night shoot. Her
first full-length feature was The Loveless (1982), a biker film which
she co-directed with Monty Montgomery and featured Willem Dafoe in his
first starring role. Next, she directed Near Dark (1987), which she
co-scripted with Eric Red. In the same year, she directed a music video
for the New Order song "Touched by the Hand of God"; the video is a
spoof of glam metal imagery.
Bigelow’s subsequent trilogy of action films — Blue Steel, Point Break,
and Strange Days — merged her philosophically minded manipulation of
pace with the market demands of mainstream film-making. In the process,
Bigelow became recognizable as both a Hollywood brand and an auteur.
All three films rethink the conventions of action cinema while
exploring gendered and racial politics.
Eric Red was also co-writer on Bigelow's 1990 film, Blue Steel. Blue
Steel starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer who is
stalked by a psychopathic killer, played by Ron Silver.
Bigelow followed Blue Steel with Point Break (1991), which starred
Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who poses as a surfer to catch the
"Ex-Presidents", a team of surfing armed robbers led by Patrick Swayze
who wear Reagan, Nixon, LBJ and Jimmy Carter masks when they hold up
banks. Point Break (1991) was Kathryn Bigelow's most profitable
'studio' film, taking approximately $100 million at the American
box-office during the year of its release, and yet it remains one of
her least well-received films, both in terms of commercial reviews and
academic analysis. This is perhaps due to the fact that it most
successfully conforms to its action genre and abandons much of the
stylistic substance and subtext of Bigelow's other work.
In 1993, she directed an episode of the TV series Wild Palms.
Bigelow's 1995 film Strange Days was written and produced by her
ex-husband James Cameron. The film was a critical and commercial
failure. Furthermore, many attributed the creative vision to James
Cameron, diminishing Bigelow's influence on the film.[10]
She directed episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street in 1997 and 1998.
Based on Anita Shreve's novel of the same name, Bigelow's 2000 film The
Weight of Water is a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating
relationships.
In 2002 she directed K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and
Liam Neeson, about a group of men aboard the Soviet Union's first
nuclear powered submarine. The film tanked at the box office and was
received with mixed reactions by critics, gaining an aggregate score of
58 on Metacritic.
Bigelow next directed The Hurt Locker, which was first shown at the
Venice Film Festival in September 2008 and released in the US in June
2009. It qualified for the 2010 Oscars as it did not premiere in an
Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles until mid-2009. Set in
post-invasion Iraq, the film received "universal acclaim" (according to
Metacritic)[17] and a 97% "fresh" rating from the critics aggregated by
Rotten Tomatoes.[18] The film stars Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty and
Anthony Mackie, with cameos by Guy Pearce, David Morse and Ralph
Fiennes. She won the Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding
Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (becoming the first woman to
win the award) and also received a Golden Globe nomination for her
direction. In 2010, she won the award for Best Director and The Hurt
Locker won Best Picture at the 63rd British Academy Film Awards.[19]
She became the first woman to receive an Academy Award for Best
Director for The Hurt Locker.[20] She was the fourth woman in history
to be nominated for the honor, and only the second American woman.
Bigelow's next film was Zero Dark Thirty, a dramatization of American
efforts to find Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty was acclaimed by film
critics but it has also attracted controversy and strong criticism for
its allegedly pro-torture stance. Bigelow won the New York Film Critics
Circle Award for Best Director for the film, making her the first woman
to win the award twice. She had already won previously for directing
The Hurt Locker. She also won the National Board of Review Award for
Best Director for Zero Dark Thirty, making her the first woman to win
that award.
One of the many visual elements that helps secure Bigelow's style as an
auteur is her use of slow motion. Slow motion is a recurring technique
in Bigelow’s storytelling, often most successful where it is the most
experimentally employed, where it can help the spectator participate in
a collective meditation on action and affect.
In the early 1980s, Bigelow modeled for a Gap advertisement. Her acting
credits include Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames as a feminist
newspaper editor, and as the leader of a cowgirl gang in the 1988 music
video of Martini Ranch's "Reach", which was directed by her ex-husband,
James Cameron.
Bigelow was married to fellow director James Cameron from 1989 to 1991.
She and Cameron were both nominated for Best Director at the 2010 82nd
Academy Awards, which Bigelow won.
References
1.^ "Bigelow, Kathryn". Current Biography Yearbook 2010. Ipswich, MA:
H.W. Wilson. 2010. pp. 38–42. ISBN 9780824211134.
2.^ "‘Hurt Locker’ wins best picture, director". Today.msnbc.msn.com.
2010-03-08. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/35752337/. Retrieved
2010-07-10.
3.^ "First woman to win top Guild’s award". Gulf Times. 2010-01-31.
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/printArticle.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=340344&version=1&template_id=43&parent_id=19.
Retrieved 2010-07-10.
4.^ Reuters (2010-02-21). "Kathryn Bigelow wins best director BAFTA for
'Hurt Locker' over James Cameron's 'Avatar'". New York: NY Daily News.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/2010/02/21/2010-02-21_kathryn_bigelow_wins_best_director_bafta_for_hurt_locker_over_james_camerons_ava.html.
Retrieved 2010-07-10.
5.^ Roberts, Soraya (2010-01-16). "Critic's Choice Awards 2010: Sandra
Bullock, Meryl Streep kiss; Kathryn Bigelow is Best Director". New
York: NY Daily News.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/2010/01/15/2010-01-15_critics_choice_awards_2010_kathryn_bigelow_makes_history_as_first_female_to_win_.html.
Retrieved 2010-07-10.
6.^ Stone, Oliver (April 29, 2010), "Kathryn Bigelow", TIME, The 2010
TIME 100,
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1984685_1984940_1985539,00.html,
retrieved May 7, 2010
7.^ "Kathryn Bigelow Biography". yahoo.com.
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1800091098/bio. Retrieved
June 26, 2010.
8.^ azcentral.com ("Cookies must be enabled to view articles on
azcentral.com"), 2009/07/08.
9.^ a b "Kathryn Bigelow: Road Warrior" – an interview published June
2009 in Newsweek magazine
10.^ a b c d e f Benson-Allott, Caetlin. "Undoing Violence: Politics,
Genre, and Duration in Kathryn Bigelow's Cinema" (preview/paywall),
Film Quarterly 64.2 (Winter 2010), pp. 33–43. University of California
Press; link via JSTOR. "Abstract: Kathryn Bigelow's eight feature films
all seek a balance between progressive representations of gender and
race and the demands of commercial filmmaking. Close attention to the
filmmaker's experiments with duration and camera technology reveals her
interest in reworking Hollywood conventions to critique conventionally
masculinist genres."
11.^ a b Filkins, Dexter (December 17, 2012). "Bin Laden, The Movie".
The New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/12/17/121217ta_talk_filkins.
Retrieved 9 January 2013.
12.^ a b Dargis, Manohla, "Action!", New York Times, June 18, 2009.
Access date: June 27, 2009.
13.^ Rapold, Nicolas, "Interview: Kathryn Bigelow Goes Where the Action
Is", Village Voice, June 23, 2009. Access date: June 27, 2009.
14.^ "Kathryn Bigelow – Filmmaking at the Dark Edge of Exhilaration",
Harvard Film Archive, July 1, 2009. Access date: December 17, 2009.
15.^ Perry, Michelle P., "Kathryn Bigelow discusses role of 'seductive
violence' in her films", The Tech (MIT), March 16, 1990. An interview
with the star (Jamie Lee Curtis) and writer-director (Bigelow) of Blue
Steel.
16.^ Jermyn, Deborah, and Sean Redmond. "Chapter Six – All That Is Male
Melts into Air: Bigelow on the Edge of Point Break." The Cinema of
Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. London: Wallflower, 2003.
106-07. Print.
17.^ The Hurt Locker at Metacritic
18.^ "The Hurt Locker (2009)". Rott>en Tomatoes. 2009-12-15.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hurt_locker. Retrieved 2013-01-25.
19.^ Roberts, Soraya (2010-02-22). "Prince William becomes President at
2010 BAFTA awards; Kathryn Bigelow wins best director". New York Daily
News.
http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2010/02/22/2010-02-22_prince_william_reigns_at_starstudded_2010_bafta_awards_kathryn_bigelow_wins_best.html.
Retrieved 2010-02-23.
20.^ Weaver, Matthew (2010-03-08). "Kathryn Bigelow makes history as
first woman to win best director Oscar". The Guardian (London).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/08/kathryn-bigelow-oscars-best-director.
Retrieved 2010-03-08.
21.^ "Zero Dark Thirty". Metacritic.
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/zero-dark-thirty. Retrieved 2013-01-15.
22.^ Child, Ben (2013-01-09). "Zero Dark Thirty premiere sparks
anti-torture protest". The Guardian (London).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/09/zero-dark-thirty-premiere-protest.
Retrieved 2013-01-15.
23.^ Polo, Susana, "Kathryn Bigelow Wins New York Film Critics Circle
Award Twice; Makes History", The Mary Sue, December 4th, 2012.
24.^ "NBR Awards name 'Zero Dark Thirty' best film", boston.com,
2012/12/05.
(Wikipedia sources and text)
rodbigelow@netzero.net 
