Kathryn Bigelow

Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, the only child of Gertrude Kathryn (née Larson; 1917–1994), a librarian, and Ronald Elliot Bigelow (1915–1992), a paint factory manager.[4] Her mother was of Norwegian descent.[5] She attended Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, California.

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 Program in New York City.[6] For a while, Bigelow lived as an impoverished artist, staying with painter Julian Schnabel in performance artist Vito Acconci's loft.[7] She had a minor role in Richard Serra's video Prisoner's Dilemma (1974).[8] Bigelow teamed up with Philip Glass on a real-estate venture in which they renovated distressed apartments downtown and sold them for a profit.[9]

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,[10] as well as Andrew Sarris and Edward W. Said,[11] and she worked with the Art & Language collective and Lawrence Weiner.[12] She also taught at the California Institute of the Arts.[13] While working with Art & Language Bigelow published an article, "Not on the Development of Contradiction," in the short-lived Art & Language magazine The Fox, and began a short film, The Set-Up (1978), which found favor with director Miloš Forman,[14] then teaching at Columbia University, and which Bigelow later submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia.[15]

Bigelow has a shifting relationship with Hollywood and its conventional film standards and techniques. Her work "both satisfies and transcends the demands of formula to create cinema that's ideologically complex, viscerally thrilling, and highly personal".[38] She has had success with conventional Hollywood cinema techniques as well as creating her own unique style that pushes against mainstream conventions. Social issues of gender, race, and politics are entrenched in her work of all genres.[38]

While her films are often categorized in the action genre, she describes her style as an exploration of "film's potential to be kinetic".[39] Her frequent action sequences are unique because of her use of "purpose-built" camera equipment[40] to create mobile shots that are distinctive and indicative of the physicality of her work. In many of her films, such as The Hurt Locker, Point Break, and Strange Days, she has used mobile and hand-held cameras.

Bigelow's work is characterized by extensive violence. Most of her films include violent sequences and many revolve around the theme of violence. Violence has been a staple in her films from the beginning of her career. In her first short film The Set-Up (1978), two professors deconstruct two men beating each other up and reflect on the "fascistic appeal of screen violence".[40] For this film Bigelow asked the two actors, including a then unknown Gary Busey, to actually beat each other up in the film's all-night shoot.[40] This interest in violence seeped its way into her first full-length feature film The Loveless, starring Willem Dafoe, which follows a 1950s motorcycle gang's visit to a small town and the ensuing violence that occurs. Her next film, Near Dark, follows a young boy who falls in love with a vampire after being bitten by her. The film was conceived as a Western but the genre was so unpopular at the time that Bigelow had to adjust her script and invert the genre conventions.[40] She still used the violent staples of the genre including sieges, shoot-outs, and horseback chases.[40] It is regarded for its combination of the Western and horror genre and its exploration of "homosexuality and 'white America's illusion of safety and control'".[38] The film became a cult classic within the horror genre community. Bigelow herself saw it screened in Greenwich Village with a horror genre crowd.[18]

Blue Steel was her first venture into the action film genre, with which she has stayed throughout her career and has found most success. The film revolves around a female police officer who is falsely accused of a murder and who in the process of clearing her name investigates a killing spree connected to the original murder. Similarly to Near Dark, Bigelow inverts the typical action genre conventions by placing a female protagonist at the center.[40] The film digs deeply into feminist issues and is often taught and studied by feminist film scholars.[38] Her next film Point Break, starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, was her breakout film in terms of mainstream success. The film follows a detective who goes undercover in a suspected criminal gang of surfers who primarily rob banks. It marks the first time that Bigelow used lengthy Steadicam tracking shots. It was also her biggest financial success yet, grossing $83.5 million worldwide with a budget of $24 million.[40] Although her next film, Strange Days, which ruminates on the relationships between media, sex, race, class, and technology,[38] had a budget of $42 million, it only grossed just under $8 million.[40] Although the film flopped, it led Bigelow and her team to spend over a year developing a camera that intended to approximate human vision.[40] Sequences filmed by this camera are widely regarded as innovative and startling regardless of the film's success.

The commercial failure of Strange Days was followed by a stream of commercial and critical flops for Bigelow. Her films The Weight of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker received negative reviews from critics and little attention from the general public. With her independently produced film The Hurt Locker she made a commercial and critical comeback. This film was her transition into political and historical film. The Hurt Locker, which follows members of a bomb squad serving in the Iraq War, was Bigelow's first venture into pseudo-documentary style film, abandoning the aesthetic stylization found in Strange Days and Near Dark.[40] The film utilizes the genre's tendency to use quick cuts, shaky camera, and rapid zooms. It also breaks with the conventional narrative structures of her previous films, following a more unorganized and experimental narrative structure. Her next film, Zero Dark Thirty, is widely seen as a direct extension of The Hurt Locker, going further in-depth of historical analysis and addressing issues of geopolitics and American foreign policy. The film is her most controversial to date, with heavy criticism on the depiction of the CIA's torture practices.[40]

Throughout her career, Bigelow has tended to go to extremes for her films. In Point Break, while filming the skydiving scene, Bigelow was on the airplane with a parachute on, as she filmed Patrick Swayze throw himself into the sky.[39] During surfing scenes in the same film, she would either paddle on a longboard or lean over a nearby boat as far as possible to get shots of Keanu Reeves surfing.[39] For the opening of Strange Days she controlled a crane that dropped a camera man off the edge of a tall building. For The Hurt Locker, Bigelow filmed in Jordan in up to 130 °F (54 °C) heat.[39]

In 1975, Bigelow published an article in the third and final issue of the Art & Language Foundation magazine The Fox entitled "Not on the Development of Contradiction." In it, Bigelow argued that the magazine's function was "the unintelligible manifestation of contradiction" (p. 38) and that it was connected to "a mode of socialization reproducing bourgeois-liberal thinking" (p. 39). The article quotes from writings by Jurgen Habermas and Mao Tse-tung to substantiate this proposition.[41]

In November 1976, she appeared in a political 56-minute film, entitled "Struggle in New York" which involved conceptual artists Art & Language.[42]

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 James Cameron.

Bigelow was married to director James Cameron from 1989 to 1991.[43]

• List of Academy Award records
• List of female film and television directors
• List of accolades received by Zero Dark Thirty
• List of accolades received by The Hurt Locker
• Vulgar auteurism
• Arthouse action film
• Cult film

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kathryn Bigelow.

• Kathryn Bigelow at IMDb
• June 2009 Interview with The A.V. Club
• Q&A with Kathryn Bigelow in Men's Journal
• Kathryn Bigelow at Rotten Tomatoes
• Literature on Kathryn Bigelow
• Davidson, Amy, "The Oscar for Torture?", blog, The New Yorker, January 2013. "The problems people have with Zero Dark Thirty are about directorial choices, and it is more than reasonable that Kathryn Bigelow be judged on them."
• Denby, David,"Bigelow's Fact and Fiction", review, The New Yorker, December 2012.
• G. Roger Denson, "Zero Dark Thirty Account of Torture Verified by Media Record of Legislators and CIA Officials", commentary, criticism, "Huffington Post", December 31, 2012.
• G. Roger Denson, "Women Looking at Men Loving: Eve Sussman, Kathryn Bigelow and the Women Writers of Mad Men", cultural criticism, "Huffington Post", March 8, 2013.
• Brockes, Emma, "Kathryn Bigelow: under fire", The Guardian (London), January 11, 2013. "[S]ome say her new thriller, Zero Dark Thirty ... endorses torture".
• The films of Kathryn Bigelow, Hell Is For Hyphenates, December 31, 2013
• Jérôme d'Estais, Kathryn Bigelow, passage de frontières, Editions Rouge profond, 2020, ISBN 979-1097309312