Much like the phrase 'Women's Cinema' itself, it is very hard to find the defining example, the core text that summarises the complexities and contradictions this pair of words makes up. It's not a movement, nor a genre, nor a cinema belonging to a certain national or historical specificity, but a diverse combination of all of these. Alison Butler's Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen sets out successfully to unite over-debated issues in a thorough manner, despite her opening sentence, "Women's Cinema is a notoriously difficult concept to define…".
This is one of Wallflower Press's great 'Short Cuts' series, which attempts to introduce the key concerns of film studies for students and the film enthusiast, with other titles focusing on psychoanalysis, mise-en-scène and the like. What is so refreshing is that, while most studies of Women's Cinema are either hidden away in some journal only available in the bfi library or take the form of a bulky over-sized text-book, this book is aesthetically pick-up-able.
However, do not pick it up presuming to get a step-by step beginners guide to the history and theory of Women's Cinema (although it offers this in a very dense way.) The language and discussions used assume the reader is already a bit intellectual, someone already aware of Freudian concepts of the uncanny and who happily digests terms such as 'counter-hegemonically' or 'aesthetic of negation'. This is Women's Cinema for academic interest.
The book's introduction is invaluable as an overview in defining Women's Cinema in relation to the initial historical and ideological struggles of the women's movement, starting by condensing the initial discrepancies between the bastions of feminist film theory, Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston. (Names who are often bandied about, without always clear exactly what their approaches were, which is why this simple outline of their ideas is welcome.) A question that the book does not concretely answer however, though often alludes to, is whether or not feminist cinema is the same as women's cinema. Throughout, the book also draws parallels and definitions from cultural, literary and linguistic studies, making the reader aware how these disciplines have affected changes in approaching Women's Cinema; predominantly moving on from a white Anglophone point of view to a post-colonial one.
The deliberate use of canonical and lesser-known names is not only important in highlighting women who may have been overlooked but integral in maintaining the reader's interest. What is so fascinating and compelling is that, even if you are well-read in film, you really do always learn something new. How many people actually know who is immortalised as 'The Mother Of The Underground American Film'? And the specialist films mentioned are described with such vividness that you want to go out and see them. Conversely, there is enough material on well-known women in film that you are not lost in an obscure myriad. Butler even says of Jane Campion's The Piano: "The film's narrative is too well-known to require re-telling here…", again, presuming the reader is bringing filmic knowledge with them.
There is a close study of Iranian cinema which places the book in an up-to-date milieu, as this is perhaps the most significant emergent contemporary cinema, for reasons of globalisation which lie at the heart of the book's concluding pages.
Looking at the contents page, three chapters may not seem enough, but the fact that they thoroughly cover Hollywood, the avant-garde and world cinema doesn't leave much room for improvement or categories, especially when each area is explained in detail with theoretical and chronological examples. One criticism is the lack of attention given to lesbian film, which may have been deserving of a special chapter of itself, rather than the couple of brushed-over examples it gets.
However, maybe the point is that of the Eighties counter-feminist arguments - if you denote something as removed then it remains alienated, just as Chantal Ackerman wishes not to be seen as a woman filmmaker but an auteur like any other. Perhaps it would also have been engaging to have a separate section on male filmmakers who purport to be groundbreaking in terms of Women's Cinema, for example Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue (1986), as this would have made for some interesting ripostes.
Again, assuming that the reader is bringing a certain how-to-read-a-film-as-text knowledge with them, the breakdowns of the technical aspects of the films discussed are educational, especially as each one seems to concentrate, though not exclusively, on a different aspect. For example, costume in Gillian Armstrong's Little Women (1994) or shot construction in Chantal Ackerman's Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974).
What is also refreshing is the knowledge of the limits of the publication - "It is beyond the scope of this book to map the extensive history of women's filmmaking and feminist criticism in its entirety." There seems to be a near-exhaustive bibliography, which includes helpful and unusual websites. What would have been extremely helpful is a summary table which compares the dualities delineated in the book's introduction (for example - Mulvey: woman not visible in audience / Johnston: woman not visible on screen). Or a timeline which reviews the major turning-points in the history of Women's Cinema so that the reader can follow what years Kathryn Bigelow's influential films were released, or when the focus on 'feminist counter-cinema' turned into one on 'accent cinema'. A glossary of such terms would have been helpful, too.
From the outset, it is made clear that the crux of the book's argument relates to its subtitle and that 'contested' is the watchword. From the introduction we understand that Women's Cinema exists not as its own entity, but as something based in other cinemas, from wherein it traditionally contests. But by the conclusion, in following this notion, we are shaken about, realising that paradoxically the definition 'Women's Cinema' is something to be contested. In this way, you cannot just dip into this book; you must necessarily, but satisfactorily, read the whole thing.
Reviewed by Nicci Tucker
