Remember the impact films had on you when you’re a tiny person absorbing stories in this way for the first time? Moments like in The Never Ending Story, when the boy, Atreyu, desperately tries to save his horse, Artax, from that swamp of sadness. The all engulfing swap that rains sadness upon the children watching it too. I remember it well (there’s something in my eye that’s all). That very scene had a devastating affect on 3 year-old Alicia Malone, who with a love of horses too was simply not equipped to deal with such emotions. A film reporter, critic, writer, self-declared super film geek in the making.
Nowadays covering film passionately via the likes of Fandango, Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, AMC Theaters, and of course a host on FilmStruck (in Cannes this year I saw her nail the Antonioni homage in Netflix’s Master of None), Alicia Malone has been an avid film fan from a very early age, then.
That first experience in a movie theater watching The Never Ending Story opens her recent talk given at a TEDx event, were she goes on to speak about, and shout out to, the first female directors in Hollywood – if you don’t know Alice Guy Blanche, Lois Weber, or Dorothy Arzner, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Alicia states that “movies are powerful because they tell stories, and telling stories is one of the most human things we do”, and relates this to the perceptions of women in the industry and what we think of when we think of the term director. The statistics of those female film graduates to those directing the highest grossing movies today is alarming to say the least. And it is not just the women behind the camera Alicia is serenading, but those, the female characters, represented on screen in the movies we watch.
Watch the 15 minute talk right here now, be enlightened some more, while we eagerly await her first book on the history of women in Hollywood released next month.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h-I5yCHrS0?rel=0&w=640&h=360]