Ranking
Women in the collection
86 of the 707 directors the collection credits are women.
They are credited on 8.4% of the films on the shelf, and 9.2% of the films a guest has ever taken on its own. Those two numbers are close enough that this data cannot separate them: guests take films by women at about the rate the shelf offers them. Which is a measurement of 414 visits, and not an account of why the shelf looks the way it does.
The 10 women most visits reach for
Counted the same way the directors ranking counts everyone: visits that reached for them, a box set counting once and credited only to the directors who made a real share of it. Not films, so a large box cannot outrank a taste.
65 women reached by at least 1 visit · rank is among all 707 credited directors
| Rank | Director | Visits that reached for them Visits | Films of theirs on the shelf Shelf | Credits shared with a co-director Shared |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 | Agnès Varda | 22 | 1 of 22 | |
| 61 | Barbara Loden | 1 | · | |
| 65 | Jane Campion | 4 | · | |
| 69 | Claire Denis | 3 | · | |
| 75 | Charlotte Zwerin | 3 | 2 of 3 | |
| 75 | Gina Prince-Bythewood | 1 | · | |
| 83 | Jennie Livingston | 1 | · | |
| 93 | Chris Hegedus | 3 | 3 of 3 | |
| 93 | Ellen Hovde | 1 | 1 of 1 | |
| 93 | Muffie Meyer | 1 | 1 of 1 |
The shelf files three of these ten under a co-director
The collection holds no film credited to three of the 10 women above on their own. Chris Hegedus , Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer appear only beside a co-director, on films the shelf files under the men they worked with. The visits are real and so is the credit. What is partial here is the shelf rather than the work: this table can only count what Criterion released, and it says nothing about how much either of them directed.
A pick share only means something against the shelf
If Criterion stocked no films by women, a pick share of zero would be a fact about the catalogue and not about anybody's taste. So the only useful version of this number is the one set against the collection's own share, and both are printed here.
Intervals resample 414 visits, not rows · the shelf is a census and gets none
| Counted over | Rows | With a woman credited | Share | 95% interval | At most, if every unsourced credit were a woman | Counting a shared credit as half |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Films in the collection | 1,736 | 146 | 8.4% | census | 9.7% | 7.8% |
| Single-film picks | 2,966 | 273 | 9.2% | 8.0% to 10.5% | 9.2% | 8.6% |
| Films reached, box sets opened | 6,053 | 825 | 13.6% | 10.4% to 16.7% | 14.4% | 13.1% |
On the lens a guest actually decides, the single-film pick, women are 9.2% of picks against 8.4% of the shelf. The shelf's own share sits inside the interval, so there is no gap here this data can distinguish. The interval is drawn by resampling the 414 visits rather than the 2,966 rows, because one visit taking a box set produces dozens of rows that are one decision, and an interval over rows would describe a sample several times larger than the one that exists. It is wider for it, and on the reach lens it is several times wider.
Every share here is a floor rather than a point. 22 films on the shelf and 1 of the single-film picks carry a credit nobody has sourced, and those are counted as having no woman credited, because that is all the table supports. The last column is what the share becomes if every one of them turns out to be a woman.
The third row is one box set, counted 22 times
Opening box sets into their member films takes the share to 13.6%, and that number is packaging rather than taste. A set contributes one reach edge per film per visit, so 462 of the 825 edges that touch a woman come from The Complete Films of Agnès Varda alone: 56% of them. 552 of 825 arrive inside a set of some kind. The reach row is on the page because leaving it out would be the same choice in the other direction, not because it is the number to quote.
Films by women nobody has taken
The other half of a visibility question. These are on the shelf, they have a woman credited, and no guest has ever chosen one on its own.
71 films · 33 of them never reached at all
71 films with a woman credited have never been picked as a single film. 38 of them have at least been in the room, arriving inside a box set somebody took. The remaining 33 have never left the shelf in any form.
That last number is a ceiling, not a count. One box set has been taken and could not be opened: Criterion's page for Rebel Samurai Sixties Swordplay Classics gave no contents, so its films are not on record here. A film in there has been in the room and this site cannot see it.
| Spine | Film | Year | Reached in a box set |
|---|---|---|---|
| 74 | Vagabond Agnès Varda | 1985 | yes |
| 169 | Jimi Plays Monterey & Shake! Otis at Monterey D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus | 1986 | yes |
| 177 | The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta | 1975 | no |
| 419 | La Pointe Courte Agnès Varda | 1955 | yes |
| 420 | Le bonheur Agnès Varda | 1965 | yes |
| 896 | The Lure Agnieszka Smoczyńska | 2015 | no |
| 976 | Let the Sunshine In Claire Denis | 2017 | no |
| 978 | One Sings, the Other Doesn’t Agnès Varda | 1977 | yes |
| 985 | Europa Europa Agnieszka Holland | 1990 | no |
| 988 | The Inland Sea Lucille Carra | 1991 | no |
| 1111 | Dick Johnson Is Dead Kirsten Johnson | 2020 | no |
| 1115 | Adoption Márta Mészáros | 1975 | no |
| 1128 | Farewell Amor Ekwa Msangi | 2020 | no |
| 1143 | Sambizanga Sarah Maldoror | 1972 | yes |
| 1196 | Nanny Nikyatu Jusu | 2022 | no |
| 1210 | All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Laura Poitras | 2022 | no |
| 1274 | Compensation Zeinabu irene Davis | 1999 | no |
| 1276 | Saving Face Alice Wu | 2004 | no |
| 1277 | Born in Flames Lizzie Borden | 1983 | no |
| 1292 | Salaam Bombay! Mira Nair | 1988 | no |
| 1303 | Testament Lynne Littman | 1983 | no |
| 1310 | Fresh Kill Shu Lea Cheang | 1994 | no |
| 1324 | American Dream Barbara Kopple | 1990 | no |
| 1329 | Welcome II the Terrordome Ngozi Onwurah | 1995 | no |
The 24 lowest spine numbers of 71. Every one of them has a page, reachable from the films index.
Where the gender on this page comes from
It is read, never inferred. A name's spelling and a portrait decide nothing here.
99.2% of 707 directors sourced
Every director is matched to Wikidata by an exact name or alias, and the
value is that person's own P21 statement. Where two people
share a name and disagree, the answer is unknown rather than the more
famous of the two. 16 names Criterion spells differently from Wikidata were resolved by
hand through the film they are credited on, and each of those decisions
is written down in the repository next to the film that settled it.
613 of the 707 credited directors are men and 86 are women. 2 are neither, recorded as non-binary, and counted in a category of their own rather than folded into one of the other two. 6 are unknown, which here means the sources were checked and none of them says: Anthony Minghella, Chan Chuen, Charles Kiselyak, Dean Lent, Sara Gómez and Werner Herzog. Unknown is a category on this page, not a rounding error, and the shares above are over every film either way rather than over the ones with an answer.