When Women Hold the Mirror: How Female Filmmakers Are Changing What We See

There's a scene in Gia Coppola's "The Last Showgirl" that film critic Manohla Dargis can't stop thinking about. Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a 66-year-old cocktail waitress named Annette, climbs onto a small platform in a Las Vegas casino and begins dancing to "Total Eclipse of the Heart." The slot machines ping around her. Casino patrons barely glance her way. But Curtis, bathed in beautifully diffused light with the camera pointed up in seeming adulation, looks glorious.

Curtis herself said the scene shows the "degradation of women at the end of their lives," adding that "nobody cares." But Dargis cared. I care too. Because what we're seeing in this moment, and in films like "Babygirl," "The Substance," and "Nightbitch," is something that's been missing from cinema for decades: women looking at women with compassion, complexity, and truth.

This isn't just about representation. It's about who's holding the camera.

The Gaze That Changes Everything

"The essential way of seeing women" hadn't changed since the Renaissance. Women were depicted differently from men "not because the feminine is different from the masculine, but because the 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him."— Art critic John Berger, 1972

Walk through any major art museum and you'll see it everywhere. Madonnas, courtesans, dancers, come-hither nudes. All created with the male viewer in mind. Cinema inherited this tradition, giving us sweethearts and vamps, dutiful daughters and dangerous women, all filtered through what serves the male imagination.

But something shifted when women started getting behind the camera in meaningful numbers. Not just as token directors on a few prestige projects, but as storytellers with the power to decide how women's lives unfold on screen.

Bodies, Beauty, and the Truth Behind the Mirror

In "The Substance," Coralie Fargeat shows us Demi Moore's character analyzing her naked body in a mirror like a scientist examining a specimen. It's harsh, clinical, unforgiving. Compare that to Emma Thompson in "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande," standing before a mirror and regarding herself with softness, compassion, even love.

These aren't accidental choices. They're deliberate decisions about how women see themselves and how audiences see women. When female filmmakers control these moments, the mirror becomes less about vanity and more about recognition, acceptance, transformation.

In Marielle Heller's "Nightbitch," Amy Adams pulls a tail from her backside while looking in a mirror. It's surreal and funny, but what matters most is that she embraces what she sees. The mirror isn't judging her. Neither is the camera. Neither are we.

The Women Who Paved This Path

This didn't happen overnight. Women helped create cinema from the beginning. Lois Weber believed "there is a screen beauty higher than that of a pretty face: the beauty of character." By 1917, she was Universal's top director with her own company. But as the industry grew and financial stakes increased, women were systematically sidelined.

For decades, only Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino directed in Hollywood. Lupino grew tired of "standing around the set while someone else seemed to do all the interesting work." When she took over directing "Not Wanted" in 1949, she wrote that there was "an absolute and ironclad caste system in the film capital" with "its primary purpose the exclusion of females."

Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust" became the first film by a Black American woman to receive national theatrical release in 1991. She wanted to show Black families, "particularly Black women, as we have never seen them before." The characters wore ancient hairstyles and represented myriad complexions, creating what critic Greg Tate called "a praise-song to the beauty of dark-skinned Black women."

These filmmakers found ways to tell their stories with or without industry blessing. They built the foundation for what we're seeing today.

What Changes When Women Control the Frame

The numbers tell part of the story. In 2024, for the first time in recent history, the percentage of top-grossing films with female protagonists equaled those with male ones. But here's what's more interesting: most of these were still directed by men.

When women do direct, everything changes. Not just who gets hired (though women directors employ 52% women writers compared to 12% on male-directed films), but how stories get told. How bodies are lit. How pain is portrayed. How joy is captured.

"Babygirl" shows Nicole Kidman receiving spa treatments, and we watch a needle slide into her face as she winces. The production of idealized beauty and its cost are laid bare. This isn't gratuitous. It's honest. It's the kind of honesty that emerges when women control how women's experiences are shown.

The Global Picture

At Women's Voices Now, we see this shift happening worldwide. Our collection includes over 340 films from 65 countries, many by women telling stories about women that would never make it through traditional gatekeepers. These filmmakers aren't waiting for permission. They're creating the change they want to see.

Angels of Sinjar, about a Yezidi woman’s quest to rescue her Sisters from ISIS, didn't need Hollywood's approval to reach global audiences. Neither did the dozens of other films in our collection that document women's struggles and triumphs across every continent.

We're not just curating these films. We're building infrastructure for a different kind of storytelling. Our Girls' Voices Now program develops young filmmakers who will grow up knowing they can control the camera, frame the shot, and decide what story gets told.

The Mirror Test

Sometimes a look in a mirror is just a look. But in cinema, mirrors have power. They can reflect society's expectations or challenge them. They can shame or celebrate. They can show us what we're supposed to want to be or help us see who we actually are.

When women hold the camera, the mirror changes. It becomes less about vanity and more about truth. Less about meeting someone else's ideal and more about recognizing our own complexity.

That's what I see in Curtis dancing in that casino. That's what I see in Thompson regarding herself with compassion. That's what I see in the hundreds of films by women in our collection who refuse to accept that there's only one way to be a woman on screen.

The relay of gazes in cinema has changed. When women look at themselves onscreen now, there are often other women behind the camera, calling the shots, bringing them into focus.

This isn't just about making movies. It's about changing how the world sees women. And how women see themselves.

Source: The New York Times