Andrew Butler's guide to Film Studies is a workmanlike, thorough, sometimes inspiring little book. But he spells Jackie Stacey's name wrong...
Combined with an emphasis upon male auteurs and films throughout, the fact that 'Stachey' even finds its way into the Bibliography makes you wonder. Film Studies usefully charts the terrain from auteurism to feminism, acting to camera angles, the 'Mirror Phase' to 'Buddy Movie'. Lacking the space, Butler nevertheless attempts to draw European art films and world cinema into the equation. I've yet to read such an accessible introduction to Saussure. Deciding on Australia for your example of a national cinema is sensible, given that, as an English-language tradition, it is accessible, yet also rich and specific. After traipsing though bloodless Semiotics and Structuralism, I welcomed the Return of the Repressed. I liked the section on Genre too, until it got bogged down in the slasher cycles.
Consonant with the politics and practices of industries worldwide, and the workings of individual film after film, there is an unstated emphasis upon contemporary male filmmaking and male spectating pleasure here. Butler teaches Film Studies at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, and I appreciate how reluctant students get if you plonk repertory films in front of them. But Film Studies is aimed at a general readership, amongst which there are many prompted to the subject because of repertory TV screenings, because Film Studies provision has finally caught up with them, or because individual movies make you curious about movies in general. While films ranging from Bringing up Baby (1938) to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) get a line or two, the "more interesting films of recent years - Reservoir Dogs (1992), Seven (1995), Scream (1996), Fight Club (1999)" - are pored over in especial detail. When I ran a Film Studies course for adults, the student intake consisted of many women of around 30 and above, some of who considered Thelma and Louise (1991) too safe an antidote to such masculinist fare. Given that women occupy, at best, marginal roles in Butler's choices, these films will scarcely represent the heterogeneity of filmmaking practice or consumption for those women who pick up this book.
Which brings me back to Jackie. Stacey published an influential book - Star-gazing - in 1993 in which she explored how British women in the 1940s and 1950s interacted on multiple levels with the star images of such as Bette Davis and Doris Day. (In mentioning Star-gazing, Butler draws attention to the vital and interesting field of academic reception studies.) However, suggesting that Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) didn't find problematic what she saw as the overwhelmingly male orientation of the classical gaze is patently sloppy. The implication that Ida Lupino has "now been forgotten" - there was a major season at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 1996, William Donati's major biography in 1996, and an NFT season this spring - seems patently unfair. Seen in this light, the misspelling of Jackie Stacey's name seems not merely typographically, but politically, incorrect.
Reviewed by Richard Armstrong
