Women, like Julia Margaret Cameron, played an important part in the early history of photography. Not surprisingly, then, women were involved in filmmaking from the beginning of cinema, and not just as actresses. The most notable example was the Hollywood auteur, Lois Weber, credited with inventing the split screen. For most of the twentieth century, however, women behind the camera in any country were few and far between. It was only from the 1970s that they became a commonplace presence as writers, directors and producers both in the cinema and on television. Even then, it took time for their work to be recognized. The first woman to win the best director Academy Award was Kathryn Bigelow in 2008 for The Hurt Locker, a film about an explosive ordnance disposal team in the Iraq War. The expanding band of female auteurs in the late twentieth century, moreover, showed little interest in making history films. Their preference was for fictional dramas set in the present with a strong female theme. Women did make films set in the past but they were principally adaptations of nineteenth-century novels, such as the evergreen Little Women. With the exception of Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), a haunting imagining of immigrant life in mid-nineteenth-century New Zealand, they were not even original dramas.