Team Barbra and Team Orson: the Bechdel Test Is the Wrong Instrument

Vladimir Oravsky is a Swedish-Slovak writer and playwright, the author of more than fifty books. This is a signed opinion piece; the views are the author’s own.

The most accomplished woman in film, to my mind, is Barbra Streisand.

She won an Academy Award for her leading role in Funny Girl. She won a second Oscar for Best Original Song for “Evergreen,” from the 1976 version of A Star Is Born. The Prince of Tides, which she directed, was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture — though not, famously, for its director. Yentl took two Golden Globes in 1984, one for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) and one for Best Director, making her the first woman to win that award. And I still hold that Yentl is a film waiting to be discovered by the academic film world.

She has directed three features, produced and written others, acted in dozens of films and television programmes, and her music turns up in more screen work than anyone has bothered to count. It sounds like a productive and successful life in cinema.

But consider this: Barbra Streisand is not primarily a film worker. Not even secondarily. Alongside the Oscars and the Golden Globes she has collected the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement honour, the Chaplin Award from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and a Tony, an Emmy, a Grammy, a Cable ACE, a National Endowment for the Arts award and a Peabody. Cinema is one of several rooms in that house.

The women who do all of it

She is far from alone. What interests me is a particular kind of film worker: the one who does the whole job — acts, writes, directs and produces, and now and then composes the music, designs the costumes, edits and shoots as well.

The line starts with Alice Guy (1873–1968), generally considered the world’s first woman director and, by many accounts, the maker of the first narrative fiction film. Across a career in France and later in the United States she directed close to a thousand films.

Her sisters in the trade are many: Agnès Varda, Maïwenn, Julie Delpy, Ildikó Enyedi, Nadine Labaki, Kathryn Bigelow, Ida Lupino, Shonda Rhimes, Natalie Portman, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sarah Polley, Greta Gerwig, Olivia Wilde, Elizabeth Banks, Regina King, Chloé Zhao, Ava DuVernay, Jodie Foster, Barbra Streisand herself. Compiling the list I realised I had left out three enormously gifted Swedes — Gunnel Lindblom, Jessica Nilsson and, not least, Anna Odell — so now they are in it too.

That is a good number of women who do the whole job. Women who work in “only” three of those roles — Liv Ullmann, say, who acted, directed and wrote — are at least twice as many again.

Now try the same exercise with men

You may be wondering how hard it really is to master the producer’s job, the writer’s job, the actor’s job and the director’s job at once. Here is a test. How many men who are all four at the same time can you name in two minutes?

Here is my list, and I am not going to pretend it is complete: Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang, Jacques Tati, Jacques Audiard, Gene Kelly, Warren Beatty, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas, Bong Joon-ho, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, Sydney Pollack, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Kenneth Branagh, Mel Brooks, Mel Gibson, Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Ryan Coogler, Taika Waititi, Bradley Cooper, Tom Hanks, Marlon Brando, Park Chan-wook, Jack Nicholson, Forest Whitaker, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Alexander Payne, Paul Schrader, Sam Mendes, Barry Levinson, Guillermo del Toro, Denis Villeneuve, Oliver Stone, Aaron Sorkin, David Cronenberg, Baz Luhrmann, Joel and Ethan Coen, Terrence Malick, Wolfgang Petersen, Thomas Vinterberg, Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

I could keep going for a long time. That, in the end, is the point.