Fronza Woods | |
|---|---|
 Woods in October 2019 | |
| Born | October 20, 1943[ citation needed ] Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Wayne State University |
| Occupations |
|
Fronza Woods is an American filmmaker best known for her short films including Killing Time (1979) and Fannie's Film (1982).
Woods was born in Detroit, just before the start of the automobile industry's boom. Woods grew up towards the end of the Golden Age of Radio, and listened with her siblings to programs like The Jack Benny Program , Burns and Allen , The Life of Riley , Amos 'n' Andy , The Shadow , Fibber McGee and Molly , Beulah , The Great Gildersleeve , and The Lone Ranger . That ethos of portraitive, reciprocal representation comes through in her two shorts Killing Time (1979) and Fannie's Film (1981). [1] She attended Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and graduated with a BA in Mass Communications and Russian. [2]
Woods began her career as a junior copywriter at a small Detroit advertising agency. [3] In 1967, she relocated to New York City where she started working in television at ABC as a production assistant in the documentary unit. [4] [2] She also taught Pilates for a number of years at the Robert Fitzgerald Studio in Manhattan. [2]
Before making her own films, Woods worked on shorts at the Women's Interart Center in Hell's Kitchen, [5] with the support of Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer. [3] She also worked as a guest filmmaker in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Artist in the Schools program." [6] Fronza reflected on the start of her film career: "Almost nothing I've done in my life has really been by choice. I went into advertising because I was offered a job, I went into television because I was offered a job. The first time I chose something, it was movies." [7]
In addition to making her own films, Woods was an assistant sound engineer for the John Sayles-directed film The Brother from Another Planet . [8] She was also involved as a cast member in the 1985 film, The Man Who Envied Women . [9] Of her role in the film industry, Woods said "I think the male-female divisions are more defining". [5] Woods said that she was influenced by people as diverse as Bill Moyers, Malcolm X, Georgia O'Keeffe and others. [10]
Woods attended NYU film school until she left to become a teacher. She moved to Milwaukee where she taught filmmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. [4] After meeting her husband she immigrated to France in 1987. [7]
Killing Time is a 1979 narrative short film written and directed by Fronza Woods. [11] The film is a dark comedy that follows a woman (played by Woods but credited with the stage name "Sage Brush") as she prepares to commit suicide. The duration of the film is 9 minutes. [12] Richard Brody called Killing Time "very simply, one of the best short films that I've ever seen." [13] In response, Woods reflected: "The most beautiful, thoughtful, understanding and generous analysis being Richard Brody’s review of the series in his The Front Row column for the New Yorker. I was touched and stunned that he was able to empathize so deeply with the plight of black women filmmakers of that era." [14] Hugues Perrot describes the film: "...a bitter and insolent ballad, shows the casual disarray of a woman, alone in her room, searching for the appropriate attire for her suicide. In a jaunty rather than joyful tone (her artificially cheerful whistling), the film ends up hypnotising us, humour acting less as a safety valve than as a corollary of despair." [15] Woods says of the film: "I would have a protagonist whose inability to decide what to wear in order to kill herself would ultimately save her life. It was never a film about suicide. It's a film about what you think will happen if you kill yourself. I don't want to make light of suicide, it's not a light matter." [7] Speaking on the impetus and conditions that bore Killing Time (1979), Woods describes what, in many ways, was a serendipitous orchestration of constraint: "To tell the truth, Killing Time was the best I could come up with, on the quick, for a subject for a student film. It was developed around this very simple truth a friend observed about me—that I would never be able to commit suicide because I wouldn't know what to wear." Meditating on themes such as vanity, ego, self-pity, self-importance, and, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the life-saving effects of indecision, Woods's film sought to employ humor not as a means of trivializing the subject of suicidal ideation, but, instead, as a way of humanizing it.
Fannie's Film is a 1981 documentary short [16] that follows 65-year old Fannie Drayton, a cleaning woman. [17] The film is told from the perspective of Drayton and is 15 minutes in duration. [18] [19] Hugues Perrot writes: "In parallel with the hieratic figures that come and go on the sports machines, she is filmed alone cleaning the studio emptied of its ghosts. The film upends paradigms, plunging the visible world into a bare space and giving body to an inaudible voice – a voice that is especially moving as it recounts the joyfulness of the life it has led." [20] Fannie's Film was selected for the 1985 Créteil International Women's Film Festival. [21] Woods comments: "I like films about real people. I am inspired by almost everything but especially by struggle. I am interested in people who take on a challenge, no matter how great or small, and come to terms with it. What inspires me are people who don't sit on life's rump but have the courage, energy, and audacity not only to grab it by the horns, but to steer it as well." [22] With Fannie's Film, Woods' saw the short as an opportunity to filmically express her own anger about inequality and "benign" racism. Woods, of the film, said "I really did want people to think about the "invisible" people who make their lives more livable. I wanted to make a film that showed that those people have rich lives and people that love them, too. They, too, dream. They, too, can be funny and insightful. But you'll never know it if you don't engage with them, if you pretend they don't exist. In hindsight, it sounds embarrassingly 'worthy!'" [23]
Woods is one of the first black woman directors that completed multiple short films. [4] In 2017, BAM Cinematheque in New York City included both Killing Time and Fannie's Film in a new season. [24] This proved to be the start of a contemporary "re-discovery" of Woods's work. Woods describes receiving the news in 2017 that her films were to be featured, nearly thirty-five years after they were produced: "It was very strange, not to say a bit destabilizing. Suddenly... I was catapulted forward, backward and sideways in time. I was an artist, and I use that word loosely, who had never really been discovered — I'm speaking solely of critics and the media, the people who have the power to make or break one's career — yet was now being re-discovered." [14]
Richard Brody called Killing Time "very simply, one of the best short films that I've ever seen." [13] Melissa Anderson of the Village Voice praised Woods's film Fannie's Film: "she makes the mundane facts of Drayton's life indelible." [25] Hyperallergic writes that Woods gives otherwise invisible women like Drayton a platform and calls the documentary "extraordinary." [19] The New York Times wrote that Woods "humorously yet movingly contemplates existence" in Killing Time. [26]
In 2019, Killing Time and Fannie's Film were screened at a film festival of the Institut Jean Vigo at the Cinémathèque de Perpignan in France. [27] That same year, both films were featured at the Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent, Belgium as part of the series "Breaking Sacred Ground: African-American Independent Filmmaking on the US East Coast, 1967-1989. [28] [29] In November 2019, Woods' films were featured during the 41st edition of the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, France. [30] [31] [32] In June, 2021, Killing Time and Fannie’s Film were screened by Royal Cine Cineclube in Lisbon, Portugal.
In an essay titled "40 Years and 19,979,520 Feet From Stardom or, The Perils of Being (Re)Discovered…" published online in June 2021, Woods humorously reflects on her time as a filmmaker and the late recognition of her work: "When I was a confused, ambitious, younger woman embarking on my filmmaking career, I went to a psychic who I was hoping would tell me "one day you're going to be a famous filmmaker." Alas, there was no mention of filmmaking, let alone fame, I had to content myself with "yours will not be just any old name in the phone book." At the time I was disappointed, not to say terribly disappointed with his lackluster prediction. As it turns out, he was right, and now I'm thinking this late recognition is good enough for me. 19,979,520 feet from stardom is not such a bad place to be." [14]
Julie Ethel Dash is an American filmmaker, music video and commercial director, author, and website producer. Dash received her MFA in 1985 at the UCLA Film School and is one of the graduates and filmmakers known as the L.A. Rebellion. The L.A. Rebellion refers to the first African and African-American students who studied film at UCLA. Through their collective efforts, they sought to put an end to the prejudices of Hollywood by creating experimental and unconventional films. The main goal of these films was to create original Black stories and bring them to the main screens. After Dash had written and directed several shorts, her 1991 feature Daughters of the Dust became the first full-length film directed by an African-American woman to obtain general theatrical release in the United States. In 2004, Daughters of the Dust was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its "cultural, historical and aesthetic significance". Stemming from the film's success, Dash also released novels of the same title in 1992 and 1999. The film was later a key inspiration for Beyoncé's 2016 album Lemonade.
Sabiha Sumar is a Pakistani filmmaker and producer. She is best known for her independent documentary films. Her first feature-length film was Khamosh Pani , released in 2003. She is known for exploring themes of gender, religion, patriarchy and fundamentalism in Pakistan.
Cinema of Africa covers both the history and present of the making or screening of films on the African continent, and also refers to the persons involved in this form of audiovisual culture. It dates back to the early 20th century, when film reels were the primary cinematic technology in use. As there are more than 50 countries with audiovisual traditions, there is no one single 'African cinema'. Both historically and culturally, there are major regional differences between North African and sub-Saharan cinemas, and between the cinemas of different countries.
Women's cinema primarily describes cinematic works directed by women filmmakers. The works themselves do not have to be stories specifically about women, and the target audience can be varied.
Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.
A no-budget film is a film made with very little or no money. Actors and technicians are often employed in these films without remuneration. A no-budget film is typically made at the beginning of a filmmaker's career, with the intention of either exploring creative ideas, testing their filmmaking abilities, or for use as a professional "calling card" when seeking creative employment. No-budget films are commonly submitted to film festivals, the intention being to raise widespread interest in the film.
Marzieh Meshkini is an Iranian cinematographer, film director and writer. She is married to filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who wrote the script for her debut film The Day I Became a Woman.
Jennie Livingston is an American director best known for the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning.
Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl is a 2002 black comedy short film directed by Newfoundlander Brad Peyton. It stars Nadia Litz in the title role, and Joshua Close, and is narrated by Maurice Dean Wint. The film is sometimes called Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl Ever.
Leila Afua Djansi is an American and Ghanaian filmmaker who started her film career in the Ghana film industry.
Haifaa al-Mansour is a Saudi Arabian film director. She is one of the country's best-known and one of the first female Saudi filmmakers.
Black women filmmakers have made contributions throughout the history of film. According to Nsenga Burton, writer for The Root, "the film industry remains overwhelmingly white and male. In 2020, 74.6 percent of movie directors of theatrical films were white, showing a small decrease from the previous year. In terms of representation, 25.4 percent of film directors were of ethnic minority in 2020. Of the 25.4 percent of minority filmmakers, a small percentage was female.
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker and producer. Her films explore the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. Interpreting the notion of "double consciousness," coined by sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, Owusu aims to create a third cinematic space or consciousness. In her work, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces.
Michelle Parkerson is an American filmmaker and academic. She is an assistant professor in Film and Media Arts at Temple University and has been an independent film/video maker since the 1980s, focusing particularly on feminist, LGBT, and political activism and issues.
Nan Triveni Achnas is an Indonesian film director.
Ana Lily Amirpour is an Iranian-American film-maker, screenwriter and actress. She is best known for her feature film debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, self-described as "the first Iranian vampire spaghetti western," which made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014, and which was based on a previous short film that she wrote and directed, which won Best Short Film at the 2012 Noor Iranian Film Festival.
Millefiore Clarkes, is a Canadian filmmaker from Prince Edward Island. She has produced music videos, experimental shorts and documentary films, as well as commercials. She also owns and operates One Thousand Flowers Productions. The name of the film production company is derived from her first name, which means "one thousand flowers" in Italian.
Ja'Tovia Gary is an American artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, and others. She is best known for her documentary film The Giverny Document (2019), which received awards including the Moving Ahead Award at the Locarno Film Festival, the Juror Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and the Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Nikyatu Jusu is an American independent writer, director, producer, editor and assistant professor in film and video at George Mason University. Jusu's works center on the complexities of Black female characters and in particular, displaced, immigrant women in the United States. Her work includes African Booty Scratcher (2007), Flowers (2015), Suicide By Sunlight (2019), and Nanny, which received the Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. She has endorsed the use of Generative artificial intelligence in filmmaking and uses the technology in her work.
Killing Time is a 1979 American short black comedy film written and directed by Fronza Woods, who also stars in the film under the pseudonym Sage Brush, and produced by the Women's Interart Center.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
