The director Kathryn Bigelow is seventy years old. – Culture

Things didn’t always go so well for the first woman to win an Oscar for directing. In 2002 Kathryn Bigelow sank 30 million dollars with the submarine film “K-19 – Showdown in the Deep”. Despite starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. Her two previous films, the mystery thriller “The Weight of Water” (2000) and the science fiction film “Strange Days” (1995) had also flopped and hadn’t even brought in their production costs. The film industry is forgiving, but after three flops in a row it becomes difficult for any director to raise money for a film again. After such a series of defeats, many do nothing at all. Kathryn Bigelow did “Fatal Command – The Hurt Locker”.

Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) defused bombs for the American army in the Iraq war, and the film makes it absolutely clear why he does such a crazy job: He just loves it. The uncertainty, the tension, the constant mortal danger when he ponders over homemade explosives in the dust of the streets of Baghdad as if they were a crossword puzzle. When everything is focused on that one moment when it comes to life and death. The family at home and comrades in the security of the barracks pale against such a mission. Only the next use brings something like a feeling of life.

“The Hurt Locker” is a character study that leads deep into the heart of America

In this figure one can easily read a metaphor for the constant interventions of the USA around the world at the time. “War is a drug” is the motto of this breathless trip. But Bigelow does not judge in the film, which often looks like a documentary, shot with shaky handheld cameras and grainy images, of course with real military equipment and at more than 50 degrees in the Jordanian desert. A real thunderstorm of steel, interrupted again and again by small, almost poetic moments. “The Hurt Locker” has little storyline to speak of. It is more of a series of scenes showing American soldiers at work. The things you see and the things you don’t want to see. The soldiers are neither heroes nor criminals, just people.

Before doing a Masters in Film from Columbia University, Bigelow had come to New York on a scholarship from California in the 1970s to study art, and you can see that look even when she stages sweaty, filthy soldiers.

“The Hurt Locker” is neither an anti-war film nor a propaganda film. It’s a character study that goes deep into the heart of America. For this Bigelow was awarded the Oscar for best director in 2010, as the first woman ever. This year she asserts herself against Quentin Tarantino and her ex-husband James Cameron, among others. “The Hurt Locker” won a total of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Bigelow had gotten rid of the flops. More than that.

This was followed by “Zero Dark Thirty” (2013) about the hunt for Osama bin Laden and “Detroit” (2017) about a racist police raid. Both films earned her a lot of criticism. In “Detroit” you mix reenacted scenes with historical recordings, it was said, and have illegally appropriated the blacks’ perspective. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek accused her that the realistic and emphatically neutral portrayal of waterboarding in “Zero Dark Thirty” legitimized torture. Some American senators also intervened, saying that torture had provided no evidence of bin Laden’s hiding place. Bigelow’s longtime screenwriter, war reporter Mark Boal, probably saw it differently, and so did the director herself argued in the Los Angeles Timesthat waterboarding was a part of history that she couldn’t ignore. That does not mean that it justifies these methods.

The fact that Bigelow’s films repeatedly trigger such discussions shows how she works. Because even before the Oscar success, her films were often very close to current events or even ahead of their time. Not always in the political field. In “Dangerous Surf” (1991) she helped Keanu Reeves to breakthrough and also invented something like a new film genre: the surf thriller. “Strange Days” begins with a chase lasting several minutes, without any cut, filmed from the perspective of a criminal. Bigelow and her team developed their own camera for this sequence. Today many filmmakers use such elaborate sequences, back then it was absolutely avant-garde. And as one of the few women she made horror, action and science fiction films decades ago.

Open detailed view

In the still sexist film business, a successful woman like Bigelow is probably offensive because she is a successful woman. Perhaps your last films in particular provoke such a violent backlash because they show police officers and soldiers who are racist, who make mistakes, who act inconsiderately; because they represent violence without playing down; because they extensively demonstrate the often glorified soldiery and military equipment without classifying them; because they show a reality that is otherwise often hidden.

The viewer often has to establish the connections himself, and the images that Bigelow offers can often be read in several ways. Isn’t “Zero Dark Thirty” also to be understood as a question of whether the killing of bin Laden justifies the brutal torture methods of the American secret services in retrospect? With the relentless honesty of her films, Kathryn Bigelow is the great documenter of the conflicts of our present day. She will be 70 years old on Saturday.