Mark Kermode on… Kathryn Bigelow, a stylish ruffler of feathers

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From vampire noir to Bin Laden, Point Break to Detroit, the first woman to win an Oscar for best director has never pulled her punches Watching new Jeff Nichols release The Bikeriders , starring Austin Butler and Tom Hardy as 60s Chicago greasers, I was reminded of two other movies: László Benedek’s 1953 Marlon Brando vehicle The Wild One , explicitly cited as an inspiration, and The Loveless , the 1981 feature debut of Kathryn Bigelow , the American film-maker (b.1951) who would go on to become the first woman to win a best director Oscar with her 2008 war drama The Hurt Locker . A symphony of leather-clad posing (with just a touch of Kenneth Anger ), The Loveless was a staple of the late-night circuit in the 80s, often on a double bill with David Lynch’s Eraserhead . Sharing directing credits with Monty Montgomery, Bigelow playfully deconstructed masculinity and machismo in a manner that was one part wry to two parts relish. I remember seeing The Loveless at the Phoenix in East
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Bill Butler obituary

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Cinematographer best known for his work on Jaws, Grease and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“I hear you’re making a movie about a fish,” the cinematographer Bill Butler said to the young director Steven Spielberg when they bumped into each other on the Universal lot in 1974. Butler, then in his early 50s, had already shot two projects for Spielberg – the TV movie Something Evil (1972) and Savage (1973), a pilot that was not taken up as a series. But it was their collaboration on the “fish movie” that cemented their reputations.

Summer was not previously regarded as an optimum time to release a big studio picture, which is why Jaws (1975), which flooded screens across the US rather than trickling out in stages, is considered the first summer blockbuster – though its finesse and skill, not to mention an intimate second half in which the cast dwindles to three men and a largely unseen shark, give it little in common with the sort of crash-bang-wallop productions that followed in its wake.

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