Over at Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein responds to the exclusion of movies by female directors from the main competition at Cannes with a call for more transparency about the process by which films make the cut. I’m of two minds about this.

I think there are certain kinds of transparency that are valuable. When the National Magazine Awards came out this year and people were dismayed, I think the American Society of Magazine Editors did themselves a favor when they gave journalists some insights into the makeup of the pools that produced the nominations. Being transparent ended up dispelling the sense that a secret cabal of dude editors had systematically shut women out of the running and refocused the conversation on thornier questions like the differences between magazines aimed at men and women, or how to improve the pool of women who are writing magazine features on things that aren’t women’s issues. I’m all for exposing cabals if they exist, but they shouldn’t become a distraction from things that are much harder to address.

But there’s no question that some kinds of transparency can become a rabbit hole. If festivals or awards start explaining why they accept or reject every single movie or piece, they’re not likely to satisfy anyone. The Pulitzer’s one-line citations of nominees and eventual winners are a nice bit of economy, but explanations like that open the door to lengthy justifications of what got in and what didn’t, offered up to folks who want to champion a movie, or a show, or a piece that resonates with them. Ultimately, nominations and awards are always going to be products of their judging pools, rather than of popular votes, and opinions in those pools will always be subjective and brokered.

Better to know who the judges are than to try to get reasoning for their preferences out of them. It might even be interesting to see judges write statements about their preferences and the things that get them excited, and for competitions to try to put together balanced pools based on those as well. It’s not like putting Kathryn Bigelow on your jury will tilt it towards sympathy for carefully observed domestic stories about the inner lives of women. The basic facts and figures on who makes up judging pools is a good form of transparency that should be standard, along with the numbers on whose represented in initial submissions. But transparency is only the start: the decisions people make much earlier back in their careers are much murkier to fathom, and equally important.

Via Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood, this is profoundly depressing:

But this year we are back to two years ago when no women were included. NO WOMEN DIRECTED FILMS WILL BE IN THE MAIN COMPETITION AT CANNES. That is ZERO out of 21. Two women directed films out of 17 films — Trois Mondes (dir. Catherine Corsini) and Confession of a Child of the Century (dir. Sylvie Verheyde) — are in Un Certain Regard.

Cannes is the most prestigious world competition and to have no female directors is just a slap in the face. I cannot believe there were no films worthy of inclusion. I just don’t believe it. The whole process is fucked up that women can’t even get into the conversations about films that people are even thinking about will be included in lineups. For an industry that professes to examine questions about life, that challenges conventions, that pushes the envelope, the total neanderthal approach to women is breathtaking. How can this industry say it is progressive or forward thinking in any way when it constantly shunts aside the perspectives of half of the world.

The outlook is somewhat better for non-white directors, who directed five of the 21 films in competition. Lee Daniels, Sangsoo Hong, Sangsoo Im, Abbas Kiarostami, and Yousry Nasrallah will all be in the mix. She’d like to see a quota for movies directed by women. I’m not sure I’m ready to go there, both because such a quota is an incomplete way to address much broader-based discrimination in the industry, and because I worry that movies directed by women who got into the pool would then be viewed with suspicion, whether they needed the quota to get in or no. I’d hate to think that a move to make sure more women got considered ended up making it harder for women to win.