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Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen

By Richard Armstrong

Richard Armstrong is an Associate Tutor affiliated to the British Film Institute. His book, Billy Wilder, American Film Realist, appeared from McFarland in 2000. He is currently writing Understanding Realism for the Bfi's Understanding the Moving Image series and Chocolate Biscuits and Italian Neo-Realism, a blend of reception aesthetics and personal memoir. He is a regular contributor to the websites Audience, Bright Lights Film Journal, Senses of Cinema and Talking Pictures, and contributes book reviews to the Times Higher Educational Supplement.

The Silences of the Palace

Women's Cinema:
The Contested Screen
By
Alison Butler

Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press,
2002, 134 pp. (illus.) $18.00 (online)
ISBN 1-903364-27-2

Alison Butler, a lecturer in Film Studies at Reading University in the UK, conceived this book at around the time she conceived a baby. It is not inappropriate that we know this because the portrait of women's filmmaking practice that she outlines is one of multi-skilled multicultural heterogeneity.

This air of the 'Compleat Woman', as it were, evokes that moment in One Fine Day (Hoffman, 1996), the Hollywood romantic comedy which seems to 'stop' as Michelle Pfeiffer, rushed off her feet by motherhood and career, makes a plea for contemporary women pulling off both assignments with equal efficiency. That One Fine Day's Hollywood conceit appears to grind to a halt as Pfeiffer has her say bears out one of Butler's underlying assumptions. Women's cinema, i.e. films directed by women (as opposed to mainstream projects like One Fine Day that reproduce feminist discourse), truly constitute another cinema. Whilst women's cinema inhabits to varying extents a range of cinematic and national discourses, women's filmmaking is not at home and cannot be explained only in terms of these contexts. Gillian Armstrong, Dorothy Arzner, Nora Ephron, Ida Lupino may all have made films within the Hollywood system. But Little Women, (1994), Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), You've Got Mail (1998) and Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) cannot be explained purely by reference to this history. There is always something more to these films, something other that can be said about them. Women filmmakers, like women spectators, are not exhaustively defined in terms of their womanhood either. Rejecting an essentialist understanding of gendered subjectivity, Women's Cinema advocates actual historical positions occupied by women in real world cultures ranging from Hollywood to Iran, genre cinema to experimental video, African-American to German, heterosexual to lesbian. The female condition is really a potpourri of conditions.

It is quite a challenge to encompass such a variety of practices and backgrounds under one heading and in such a short book. But Butler achieves both with erudition and humility. Wallflower's growing Short Cuts series manages to remain readable, and to whet your appetite for more. There is a nice dovetailing of theoretical concerns and emergent cinemas here. At one point, Kathryn Bigelow's work is adroitly observed by the light of Carol Clover and Yvonne Tasker's discovery of fresh gender logics in 1990s action cinema. Butler is also careful to locate women's filmmaking and its theorization within wider intellectual landscapes, showing how their preoccupations map onto feminist thinking generally. Careful not to clutter her account with already overworked synopses, she combines thumbnail analyses of such as A House Divided (Guy, 1913), The Piano (Campion, 1993), and The Silences of the Palace (Tlatli, 1994) with useful historical and theoretical overviews.

Evoking Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theorization of Kafka's work as a 'minor literature', that of a minority or marginalized group though written in a major language: (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1986), Butler appropriates the term to describe women's cinema. More complex than it was when Laura Mulvey famously characterized dominant cinemas as motivated by masculinist looking relations in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), advocating, with Claire Johnston, a feminist counter cinema, "women's cinema now seems 'minor' rather than oppositional." This minor cinema "exists only in the eyes of its beholders, crossing boundaries between forms, periods and cultures to engender feminist communities."

In three chapters, Butler considers how women have negotiated the genres and genders of the mainstream, how women have employed reflexivity, autobiography and first person narration to inscribe their authorship in avant-garde cinema, and how women's cinema has intersected with located and dislocated cultural identities. The consideration of the mainstream from Alice Guy to Dorothy Arzner, through the "second wave" 1970s feminism of such as Girlfriends (Weill, 1978), to Blue Steel (1990) and Little Women offers plentiful opportunity to interact with the book. Its account of the transition to sound sees the decline of what had been a burgeoning culture of women directors in the silent period. One could argue that this is because the introduction of sound introduced the possibility of ideological subversion in an age when liberationist talk of the 'New Woman' was seen as dangerous by the conservative business interests which came to shape the American moral landscape, and dominate Hollywood, by the late-20s. Underlying my assumption is that, traditionally, language has been the prime vehicle of patriarchal ideology. Jane Campion's crediting herself as the 'Writer' of The Piano is a significant progression in this respect. One made explicit in Ada's words: "The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind's voice." (But as Natalie Neill points out in her review of this book in Senses of Cinema, it seems a shame that brevity didn't allow for consideration of a fuller range of women's contributions to filmmaking.) That the image, by contrast, bears a freight of meanings widely recognized in women's filmmaking and its commentaries is something Butler returns to again and again. Look for what she has to say about the mirror scene between mother and daughter in The Silences of the Palace, for example. Emerging out of a tradition of Egyptian melodrama, there is a sense of excess about Tlatli's film in which language, forbidden to the servants and concubines of a Tunisian bey, gives way to looks and images. Seen through a young girl's eyes, the film bursts with unspoken frustration, anger and longing.

Instructed by the conventional histories I had read in 1981 to see the American avant-garde classic Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren, 1943) as deriving from the European surrealist tradition, upon seeing it for the first time I was struck by its commentary on 1940s mainstream film noir. This is nicely borne out by critic J. Hoberman, quoted here, who writes that this erotic and violent fantasy could have taken place "around the corner from Barbara Stanwyck's place in Double Indemnity." Elsewhere, the plot of the revisionist woman's film Love Letters (Jones, 1983) parallels the mainstream The Bridges of Madison County (Eastwood, 1995) in a manner that illustrates the reciprocity between the overwhelmingly male mainstream and the women's cinema existing within and beyond it.

Further afield, the account of the Frauenfilm strand of 1970s New German Cinema and women filmmakers of the Iranian New Wave find directors engaging with 'politics of location', addressing the historical and cultural specifics of individual constituencies in such a way as to resonate with wider histories. In the section "Accented cinema", Australian aboriginal filmmaker Tracey Moffatt, African-American Julie Dash, and Iranian exile Shirin Neshat illustrate cinemas of hybridity, diaspora and exile, challenging the competing patriarchal discourses of globalization and local nationalisms which bind and influence so much non-Hollywood (as well as Hollywood) filmmaking.

Critiquing in the 1980s the universalist assumptions of 1970s US feminism, Adrienne Rich has written: "It was not enough to say 'As a woman I have no country: as a woman my country is the whole world.' Magnificent as that vision may be, we can't explode into its breadth without a conscious grasp on the particular and the concrete meaning of our location here and now." Adroitly orchestrating individual voices and overarching themes, particular films and bigger trends, Women's Cinema is a level headed and well-argued report on an ongoing efflorescence. As individual practices are for individual filmmakers, as Alison Butler's experience when writing it must have been, reading this book opens your eyes.