Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 17, May 2004
Jane Sloan
Contest and Renewal:
Butler's _Women's Cinema_
Alison Butler _Women's Cinema: The
Contested Screen_ London: Wallflower
Press,
2002 ISBN 1903364272 134 pp. Alison Butler's _Women's
Cinema_, part of Wallflower Press's Short Cuts series of
introductory film studies texts, shows considerable strength
in explaining a wide range of difficult concepts that have
concerned feminist film theory and practice over the last 25
years. The author, a Lecturer at the University of Reading
in England, is on solid ground in underlying her approach
with critical works from outside these fields, such as
Benjamin Anderson's _Imagined Communities_.
[1] Butler's introductory
synthesis of the literature coincides with a period of
stasis in the academic debates around feminist film theory
that marked the 1980s and 90s. It is preceded by many
similar introductions written by authors who found
themselves obliged to clarify a starting point for their own
monographs on the subject. During this period, much energy
was expended attempting to grasp the whole for feminism --
narrative theory, psychoanalytic theory, aesthetics, film
practice -- to the extent that the relationships became
elusive, and the thorny entrance way led to comparatively
little diversity within the films actually discussed. With
the reorienting of scholarly work towards gender studies and
global studies, this need for a prescribed path -- some new
books barely mention the debate at all, instead moving ahead
on their own terms -- has lessened. [2] A
pre-publication reviewer for this book states that the
author has clarified these 'vexed, overly debated issues
once and for all', [3] and I echo the idea that this
masterly synthesis comes with good timing. Certainly, in
1999, Judith Mayne's wondering about what other discipline
has discussed the same essay (Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure')
for 30 years, and if the dominance of critical theory isn't
just another form of (patriarchal) mastery, spelled a bit of
an off note. [4] Her observation fits very well, in
fact, with Butler's reliance on the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who worked outside the
prevailing semiotic-structuralist-psychoanalytic construct,
to guide her to the conclusions of this book. Butler's overview of the
debate on women's cinema is compelling partly because she
determines it is not necessary to address every theoretical
concern, but simply begins with the broadest definition --
films for women, by women, and about women -- then picks and
chooses among the theoretical underpinnings as she sees fit,
focusing on examples where all three conditions are met.
Sensibly and without extensive justification, she chooses to
discuss in detail two areas: the debate around women's
cinema in 'Anglophone film theory', and women's practice
within 'some major traditions' (2). In the arrangement and
content of her book, Butler also implicitly sees film theory
as a critical theory, reflecting practice rather than
prescribing it. Shoring up this most broad
definition of women's cinema, she states that it is neither
a genre, nor a movement. Further, it cannot have a history
for the reason it cannot be identified in the way, for
example, that a national cinema can. Instead, she sees it as
overlapping with other 'cinemas', movements, genres.
Resulting from this view is a notion of women's cinema as
'minor', after Deleuze and Guattari's book on Kafka's work
as 'minor literature'. [5] This concept of minor
cinema is quite fruitful for the purpose of concluding the
debate on the strong political ground that most interests
Butler. Since a 'minor' cinema is one that politicizes
everything, women's cinema well qualifies, generally finding
struggle in all aspects of life, and value in confronting
it. Further, a minor literature is written by marginalized
authors, and so focuses on the challenges of belonging to an
out-group. This means its politics are closely concerned
with boundaries, and in this way, the boundaries of women's
cinema: who practices, who doesn't, who identifies, who
doesn't, who watches, who doesn't; where its content begins
and ends can be left open. Above all, the approach is
subjective, the complete evocation of the personal as
political. By leaving aside the
boundaries, moving ahead, and looking at women's cinema
practice within other cinema traditions, Butler allows
herself immersion in a chosen series of 'major' traditions,
a grounding that contributes greatly to her critically acute
and wide-ranging readings. Butler's introductory
overview of the last 25 years of feminist film theory is one
of the best. The issues are well known. They begin in the
late 1960s with a 'split' among those engaged, which was
clearly articulated by Teresa de Lauretis. On the one side,
she stated, are those interested in political activism
involving 'consciousness raising, or self-expression, or the
search for positive images', and on the other, are those
interested in 'formal work on the medium understood as a
social technology', for the purpose of disengaging the
'ideological codes embedded in cinematic representation'.
[6] The latter, in general, won out. Certainly even
those questioning it have been obliged to address the issues
it raised, and therefore, to some extent commit to the
'master' theory informing it. Butler believes that this
theoretical emphasis dragged along with it the whole of
women's cinema (filmmaking), and so defined the practice of
it in the limited manner of the problematics of film theory
and Hollywood. For those intending to create films in
response to this call, this led to an emphasis on the search
for the female gaze, desire, and narrative agency, all
pre-defined as impossible within conventional narrative
feature filmmaking. Not every filmmaker fully identified
with women's cinema responded to this call, one of the more
clear-cut cases being Margarethe von Trotta. While crediting John
Berger with the concept of the 'look', Butler leaves behind
his larger concerns with class in _Ways of Seeing_, even
though they dovetail well with her eventual conclusions.
[7] Instead, she relates his line of reasoning
closely to that put forward by Laura Mulvey, who endorsed
avant-garde filmmaking as a model and insisted on the
negation of dominant (Hollywood) aesthetics on the basis of
the Male gaze and it's objectification of women. Mulvey's
thesis has a literal quality, based primarily as it was on
psychoanalytic meanings of static images. But her stating of
the three different looks involved in any cinematic
enterprise (camera, audience, and between characters on the
screen) and the way they function in Hollywood continuity
editing (the first two being obliterated by the last) went
far to suggest an alternative practice for filmmakers.
[8] However, the point-of-view
continuity system that produces the dominating look (gaze)
and 'seamless' quality of some Hollywood films, binding the
spectator into the fiction and making it seem 'real', had
been deconstructed by many creative filmmakers since at
least the 1940s. The original psychoanalytically based
definition of the Hollywood system as bourgeois
(patriarchal) aesthetic was articulated by Jean-Pierre
Oudart through close analysis of Robert Bresson's model
alternatives _Proces de Jeanne d Arc_ (1960) and _Une femme
douce_ (1969). [9] Ironically, these were films that
feminist theorists ignored as patriarchal 'art' cinema,
characterized by Claire Johnston to be even more dangerously
mystifying than the Hollywood system. [10] To
further the irony, Oudart concludes that the non-existence
of the binding suture (shot/reverse shot) in _Une femme
douce_ succeeds in expressing the communication gap between
the man 'looking for difference, absence, fascinated by lie,
attached to his own jealousy', and the woman, 'looking for
presence, identity, truth'. [11] That is, the
'disengaging' of the 'ideological codes embedded in the
cinematic representation', that de Lauretis described as a
goal of feminist film, results in _Une femme douce_, a
feminist commentary. [12] Continuing to build her
case, Butler foregrounds the complaint of B. Ruby Rich in
1978, who wondered whether or not women in the movie
audience could, in fact, be enjoying only their theoretical
invisibility in the films they saw. [13] Even more
pointedly, she quotes at length the admonition of Claire
Johnston (in 1973) concerning women's counter cinema as a
discursive struggle and the 'negative aesthetics' of the
avant-garde: 'Hollywood as a dream
machine producing a monolithic product . . . is a very
conventional view held by reactionary film critics for
decades. It expresses a distaste for the masses and an
elitism . . . To counter the objectification of women,
collective fantasies must be released: women's cinema must
embody the working through of desire: such an objective
demands the use of the entertainment film.'
[14] In quoting Johnston's idea
30 years later, Butler asserts that the reasoning remains
strong because it incorporates the ideological
contradictions of most art practice, and even parallels the
'postmodern preoccupation with appropriation, citation,
rewriting' (11). She then goes on to synthesize at length
Johnston's essay on _Maeve_ (1981) -- a conventional
narrative film directed by an Irish woman, Pat Murphy, who
made one more film, _Anne Devlin_ (1984), and then spent
many years outside feature filmmaking (presumably because of
her exclusive focus on women's issues) before producing
_Nora_ in 2000. As the occasion of Johnston's final essay,
_Maeve_ opens her eyes, just as Deleuze might have expected,
to a new theory of how films speak and how they might be
read, a theory where 'formalist criteria for assessing
whether a film is progressive or reactionary are
secondarised'. [15] Further, _Maeve_'s use of filmic
conventions actually 'works within and against their
conventional deployment', due to its particular placement of
Maeve within the republican politics of Ireland at the time.
[16] In other words, the film depicts a many layered
struggle within the context of a specific historical time
and place. Further, that specific context includes many more
codes than the technical ones of cinematic
representation. Butler continues her
argument that narrative is an essential tool of feminism
with a return to the work of Teresa de Lauretis. If the
'stories' depicted by women's cinema are concerned with the
representability of women as social subjects -- involving
formal strategies leading to alternative narrative systems,
differences in 'look' and editing patterns, genre bending,
gender and role reversal -- by 1987 (after many years of
feminist filmmaking) de Lauretis states that there is in
addition a third component. This component of women's cinema
is an aesthetic of reception, coming from the need to
address the specific communities that foster feminism --
marginal and emergent groups. In this way, de Lauretis
writes, one can work against 'imaginary self-coherence', and
avoid aiming for a universal, multinational audience, by
addressing a particular one in its 'specific history of
struggle'. [17] This definition of women's cinema,
Butler asserts, is 'rigorously exclusive on political
grounds' (17). Butler then returns to
Deleuze and Guattari's work on Kafka as minor literature
written in a major language, and sees a convergence with
feminist film theory in all of its attributes: 'on
displacement / dispossession / deterritorialization, on a
sense of everything as political, and on all parts of the
narrative taking on collective value (20). As such, a minor
cinema is characterized by the granting of prominence to the
socio-political context, and an aesthetic open to all kinds
of practice -- conventional, experimental, avant-garde,
Hollywood or 'art' cinema. Following this line of thinking,
women's cinema functions as the 'projection of community,
rather than an expression of it' (21). Not understood within
any of its host cinematic or national discourses, and
without a critical approach that emphasizes the value and
diversity of its otherness, it is vulnerable to being
developed merely as generic role reversal comedy/tragedy.
From here, it's a brief hop to the conclusion of women's
cinema as minor, rather than oppositional, the word Butler
uses to describe the theoretical efforts of the
past. A word on this verbiage:
outside academic circles (and this series is designed for a
general audience as well as students), the harm of relating
the term 'minor' to women's cinema is considerably more
risky than that for Kafka, who is, without doubt, a major
author. Women's cinema is a much more fragile enterprise,
and even some women have been known to question the
importance of it. As distribution is partly tied to
importance (often, even just an impression of it), and
access to of any of these films is a significant concern,
terming them 'minor' risks the appearance of
devaluation. Regardless of its naming,
this pluralistic critical approach has grown, along with the
wide variety of ways that feminist cinema happens. As
scholars focus on various types of cinema -- national,
genre, or minority -- they invariably address the impact of
feminism and women's films on whatever topic they
write. However, Butler's aside
that 'women's filmmaking did not develop at the same rate,
or, generally, in the same direction as feminist film
theory' (3), takes on greater weight as she proceeds with
her introductory text. Inevitably, she must pay attention to
the 'feminist canon, dominated by cinematic counterparts of
the theory', and listed by her as: Chantal Akerman,
Marguerite Duras, Bette Gordon, Sally Potter, Yvonne Rainer,
and Helke Sander (8). This is a mixed, if conscientious
list, where Duras and Sander provide brackets suggesting the
extremes of the theoretical 'split'. Duras, with an entire
academic journal devoted to her work -- the epitome of
'disengaging the codes' -- is an academic powerhouse not to
be ignored, while Sander represents the socialist origins,
the activist, straightforward, light hearted, and always
deeply intelligent filmmaker who is an important antidote to
the others. Explicit here also is the elision of race, for
which feminist film theory, particularly in its base
construct of the male gaze and in the 'overvaluing of female
desire' (107), has been criticized. Butler addresses this
lack implicitly by not following through on the list --
Duras, Gordon, and Potter are mentioned only in passing,
while whole sections of Butler's book are given over to
Julie Dash and Tracy Moffatt, along with the considerable
attention given to Indian and Arab productions. Nonetheless, the canon
persists, rationalized primarily by the fact that over time
these filmmakers are those most cited by feminist critics
and theorists. [18] The personalities listed, aside
from their necessary auteur status, present significantly
varying productivity and subject matter, having most in
common the creation of work that presents itself as
entertainment of a cerebral sort. Additionally, and
understandable given the tolerance for anything
women-related/supportive that is sometimes seen as feminism,
there is a disconcerting confusion of self-expression with
art in some of the work. Butler begins the critical
chapters of her book with an overview of Hollywood practice,
describing the interest of silent film in class issues and
sexual politics, the move away from progressive content that
came with sound and the Production Code (including the
negative effect on women in the industry), and the revival
of realism beginning in the 1970s: _Girlfriends_ (1978),
_Love Letters_ (1983), _Blue Steel_ (1990), _ Little Women
(1994), _Ballad of Little Jo_ (1993), and _The 24 Hour
Woman_, 1999. Given her overall concern with race issues, a
substitute like Alison Anders's _Mi vida loca_ (1994) in
place of the over-discussed _Blue Steel_ might have improved
this section. Nonetheless, Butler's choices here are
historically and theoretically rich, allowing her to fully
describe the contradictions of working in a generic popular
cinema, while desiring to present new subject matter. She
gently critiques some of the received wisdom around this
valorized set of films, and finds in Nancy Savoca, a
filmmaker not always recognized for her feminist work,
someone resolutely and subtly focused on social
change. In a chapter on authorship
in experimental cinema, once again Butler's choice of films
and filmmakers is eclectic and thoughtfully focused on the
broadly political, bringing back into this context the
neglected and important work of Valie Export, while looking
forward to the new generation of museum-installed video work
through a section on Mona Hatoum. Here Butler also examines
the two auteurs most identified with women's cinema, Chantal
Akerman and Yvonne Rainer. In discussing two of Akerman's
lesser known early films, Butler illustrates how difficult
it is to move away from the prevailing psychoanalytic
readings of the feminist canon towards a more fulsome
understanding of their aesthetic. She sensitively describes
nearly the whole of _News From Home_: 'static shots, many of
them centering the street so that its lines of perspective
dominate as they recede towards a vanishing point, giving
depth and direction to the image. Traveling shots
predominate in the last portion of the film, as it proceeds
to its final shot . . . taken from a ferry, of [the
Manhattan skyline] receding in the distance'
(81). Butler then offers a
reading around the film's 'linear, diachronic evolution,
recapitulating the infant's entry into culture in terms of
the elaboration of a film language' (82). While Akerman's
films, all fine art, can be read in any number of different
ways, it is their exceptional rigor and expressiveness that
allows them to be understood so. Akerman's design, in
editing, in composition, in all formal considerations, is
consistently engaging, and always capable of providing
pleasure in itself. The discursive aspect of the work is
amplified primarily through this strength. This kind of
meaning arising from rigorous design is in stark contrast --
and I think it's one of the sources of Butler's relative
valuing of the two filmmakers -- to Rainer's more didactic
method of stating an ideological theme, then figuring out
the filmic elements to put together the message.
Alternatively, Butler finds explanation for Rainer's
limitation in her stated definition of women's cinema,
faulting Rainer's work on the basis of its inability to
'invoke collectivity while respecting difference' (86), and
bolstering her criticism with Patricia Mellencamp's
admonition about Rainer's _Privelege_, that 'it fails to
listen and speaks for others'. [19] Butler's final chapter, in
its global focus most completely her own, introduces several
important contemporary and historical currents with sections
on 1970s German feminist cinema, 1990s Iranian cinema, and
an analysis of Moufida Tlatli's _Silences of the Palace_
(1994), that suggests a handful of potential theses. There
is also an important contrasting of Jane Campion's _The
Piano_ (1995) and Claire Denis's _Chocolat_ (1988), which
points out the latter's superior grip on racial politics,
and is significant because Denis is one of the few feminist
auteurs that can be said to critically rival Campion. The
section on Iran, focused on Rakshan Bani-Etemad, is also
forward-thinking in light of the Iranian New Wave's well
known core of accomplished male 'art' directors, many of
whom use beautiful young actresses in the typical way of
international 'art' cinema. Bani-Etemad, on the other hand,
is a mainstream filmmaker working in the generic mode of
melodrama with considerable cinematic skill, and employs
established, even middle-aged actresses. She effectively
brings class issues and modern sexual attitudes into her
depictions of Iran, and the strength of her work is revealed
by the fact that it is shown outside Iran at all. This
chapter of Butler's book is very strong in its diversity and
quality, and it carries the book forward to her conclusions
about the current state of women's cinema: 'There is now
enough [women's filmmaking] in a wide range of
styles and from a variety of cultures for a different kind
of writing to come to the fore, writing which is historical
and comparative.' (119) Finally, Butler's use of
the films of Deepa Mehta is a wonderful leap into the
growing world of feature films focused on cultural and
political resistance, made by feminist women and men, and
documenting the political realities of globalization. These
films are sometimes characterized by an easy use of the
Hollywood cliche of the you'll-laugh-you'll-cry variety, and
completely engaged with controlling point-of-view to
communicate a serious commentary on western hegemony. They
effectively illustrate it in a specific time and place,
using the Hollywood style, binding the spectator into a
concrete world of contradictions around sexuality, gender,
class, and race in the 21st century. This is an excellent book,
not only as an introduction to women's cinema, but also as a
step forward in its study. Butler's placing of Mehta, an
Indian-born Canadian filmmaker, at the center of a
'transnational cinema', is progressive, especially alongside
her acknowledgment of _Fire_ (1996) as an 'imperfect film'
(120). This illustrates the feminist spirit of openness and
generosity within Butler's criticism, but also underscores
the many grounds on which a film from a minor cinema might
be successful. Cinematographic excellence, like formal rigor
or a counter-aesthetic, is just one way (a cursory look at
some of the films men have justified as important shows us
that very well). The fact is _Fire_ has spoken to many
disenfranchised people, just as the fury of _Bandit Queen_
(1994) has. These instances of great audience attraction
show how perceptive Butler is in her conclusion that women's
cinema 'exists only in the eyes of its beholders, crossing
boundaries between forms, periods and cultures to engender
feminist communities' (122). It's a functioning if messy
ideal, and it has forebears. Oddly, but perhaps because of
the deeply plowed depth of theoretical ground that Butler
must move through, four of the most important of these
forebears are not mentioned in her book. While Butler takes pains
to note she has been selective, and though it's clear she
must be, it is still interesting to wonder why some
filmmakers do not appear -- by that I mean their names are
not mentioned at all in any context -- given their prominent
and early association with feminism and women's issues, and
the highest regard of the international film community: Mai
Zetterling, Marta Meszaros, Maria-Luisa Bemberg, and Kira
Muratova. There are certainly other well known women
filmmakers who are not mentioned -- Agnes Varda or Safi
Faye, for instance -- but these four have spent long careers
solely focused on the depiction of feminist ideas and power
politics. They are the esteemed first wave of the modern
era, women who found their inspiration in the women's
movement of the 1960s, and who, before anyone else, made
complex socio-historical narratives pointedly focused on
women's lives. Born between 1922 and 1931, they approached
their work with maturity and a significant experience of
art, culture, politics, and life. They mastered funding
strategies and film production, winning international prizes
with films about pesky women who rebel, insist on their
rights, and question authority. Three of them eventually
filmed 'great lives' of women: Agnes von Krusenstjerna
(Zetterling), Edith Stein (Meszaros), and Sor Juana Inez de
la Cruz (Bemberg). All worked with superior collaborators,
and creatively critiqued the prevailing aesthetic along with
innovative subject matter. Muratova and Zetterling made
their first features in 1964. Meszaros's first feature was
made in 1968, and Bemberg began, at the age of 48, in 1980.
The last two are each the subject of scholarly monographs,
an infrequent honor for any woman filmmaker.
[20] Why have they so fallen
out of fashion? Clearly it has something to do with the
rarified nature of women's cinema as described by Butler.
Also, many of the most relevant and important films have
fallen from distribution or not been transferred to video.
Some are only available in archives, more are not available
at all. Lastly, like Margarethe Von Trotta's _Rosa
Luxembourg_, the protagonists of the films are flawed, often
deeply. Consistently engaged in even-handedly expressing the
dilemma of women's condition, these films are works of
narrative art that do not fit well on either side of the
theory split described by Butler, which itself has been
exclusionary. More often than not, they are about open
resistance and its consequences, making 'positive images'
part of the mix, instead of a goal. At the other extreme,
all might be grossly characterized as examples of the
mystification of psychological realism and 'art' cinema.
While it may be that 'art' cinema cannot be theorized as
successfully as genre cinema for the purpose of revealing
the dominant ideology, dismissing such alternatives leaves
out a significant audience. Of course, there are other
reasons, but Butler's call for more work of a historical and
comparative nature should help retrieve these films and
others for a growing feminist audience. Efforts will be made
to document films that have disappeared, and their
historical import will be detailed. Butler herself has made
a start by bringing new names into an introductory context,
and conceptualizing women's cinema as incorporating the
broadest base of films and filmmakers. New Brunswick, New Jersey,
USA Notes 1. Benjamin Anderson,
_Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism_ (London: Verso, 1991). 2. For example, Murray
Pomerance, ed., _Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls:
Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century_ (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2001). 3. Pamela Church Gibson,
back cover. 4. See Judith Mayne,
'Introduction', _Framed: Lesbians, Feminists and Media
Culture_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000). 5. Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, _Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature_
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986). 6. Teresa de Lauretis,
quoted on p. 3. 7. See John Berger, _Ways
of Seeing_ (London: Penguin, 1972). 8. See Laura Mulvey,
'Visual
Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema', _Screen_,
vol. 16 no. 2, 1975, pp. 6-18. 9. See Jean-Pierre Oudart,
'La Suture', _Cahiers du cinema_ no. 211, April
1969. 10. See Claire Johnston,
'Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema', in Sue Thornton, ed.,
_The Feminist Film Reader_ (New York: New York University
Press, 1999), p. 33. 11. Jean-Pierre Oudart,
'Bresson et la verite', _Cahiers du cinema_ no. 216, October
1969, p. 56; my translation. 12. de Lauretis, quoted on
p. 3. 13. See p. 5. 14. Claire Johnson, quoted
on p. 9. 15. Johnson, quoted on p.
12. 16. Ibid. 17. de Lauretis, quoted on
p. 16. 18. An informal survey of
21 academic books on the general topic of feminist
film/women's cinema published from the mid-1980s to the
present shows that the subjects most frequently written
about are: generic Hollywood (18), alternative/independent
Hollywood (11), Akerman (10), Rainer (9), horror/thriller
genre (8), Marleen Gorris and Sally Potter (tied with 5),
Julie Dash (4), and Jane Campion (3). After that it's one or
two for everyone else. Others getting one or two essays are
Sander, Duras, Gordon, Margarethe Von Trotta, Sara Gomez,
Lina Wertmuller, Laura Mulvey's _Riddles of the Sphinx_,
Liani Cavani, Doris Dorrie, Mai Zetterling, Mira Nair, Clara
Law, Banietemad, Diane Kurys, Jane Campion, Marion Haensel,
Marta Meszaros, and Monika Treut. 19. Mellencamp, quoted on
p. 86 of Butler. 20. Catherine Portuges,
_Screen Memories: The Hungarian Cinema of Marta Meszaros_
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). John King,
Sheila Whitaker, and Rosa Bosch, eds, _An Argentine Passion:
Maria Luisa Bemberg and Her Films_ (New York: Verso, 2000).
Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Jane Sloan, 'Contest and
Renewal: Butler's _Women's Cinema_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol.
8 no. 17, May 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n17sloan>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
are published. here
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact the Editor (remove Caps before sending)
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
