Crossing boundaries - The films of Kathryn Bigelow

In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman ever to win the Best Director Oscar for her film THE HURT LOCKER. At that point she already had a long, although far from linear, directorial career behind her. Born in California in 1951, she first studied painting before coming to New York at the age of 20 with a Whitney Museum grant. She began studying film at Columbia University and quickly became part of the city's active art scene. She worked with Richard Serra and Robert Rauschenberg and also joined the conceptual art group Art & Language. Her interest in conceptual art and fascination for the depiction of violence first revealed themselves in a short film that she made as a student. "The Set-Up" (1978) is about two people who get into a fight on the street. On the soundtrack, the two theoreticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky analyze the soundtrack.

THE LOVELESS (1982), Bigelow’s first feature-length film, also emerged directly from the New York scene. Inspired by Kenneth Anger's SCORPIO RISING, it's about a motorbike gang that turns up in a backwater town in the American South. Bigelow fetishizes the key ingredients of the biker film genre - shiny leather, big bikes and guns. STRANGE DAYS, which was written and produced by James Cameron in 1995 and examines the objectifying gaze of the camera, voyeurism and mediality, was a box office flop and put Bigelow's promising career on ice for a while. It was only in 2000 that she was able to shoot another film. Her two most recent films, THE HURT LOCKER and ZERO DARK THIRTY, catapulted her back into the public eye.

Outsiders and groups in which allegiance has to be pledged play central roles in Bigelow's films. The bomb disposal experts in THE HURT LOCKER, just like the CIA agent in ZERO DARK THIRTY and the police officer in BLUE STEEL, all act alone - without back up or a safety net. Substitute families and sub-cultures competing against a common exterior enemy are found amid the vampires in NEAR DARK and in the surfer clique in POINT BREAK. Bigelow's films tend to be set in typically male environments; yet her often androgynous female figures never take on the role of the passive subject, but define themselves as characters in their own right.

Bigelow’s relationship with Hollywood lies in the tense area between affirmation and self-reflexive deconstruction. Her masterly grasp of the conventions and codes of Hollywood cinema allow her to subvert them over and over again. She not only stretches the boundaries of Hollywood with regard to form, but also in terms of how gender is depicted, as well as with her enjoyment of playing with genre.

Arsenal is showing all nine features by Kathryn Bigelow, as well as her acting debut BORN IN FLAMES (Lizzie Borden, USA 1982).