In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Women Filmmakers: Refocusing
  • Robin Blaetz (bio)
Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, and Valerie Raoul, editors. Women Filmmakers: Refocusing University of British Columbia Press. 496. $90.00, $34.95

The three editors of Women Filmmakers: Refocusing have done a remarkable job of gathering material about the state of women's feature and documentary filmmaking in the world outside the borders of the United States, providing film historical background, and reminding the reader of the stakes and parameters of the feminist film theory that launched many women as filmmakers. The book is the final product of a multi-tiered examination of what has become of women in the cinema since the birth of counter-cinema in the 1970s. The event that inspired the book was a conference held in Canada in March of 1999, to which filmmakers and scholars were invited to talk about European feature film and postcolonial and documentary film. Although the organizers and editors, along with most of the writers, approach film through literature and women's studies, they intended to cross boundaries between disciplines, countries, theory and practice, and the university and the community.

The editors clearly state that their interest lies in the work of directors rather than in individual films, although the book contains several excellent essays about films such as Sally Potter's The Tango Lesson (Columpar) and Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties (Deleas). The book is divided into eight [End Page 371] sections, each one of which is both cohesive and part of the larger picture. The first sixty pages of the book offer an efficient introduction to the entire text, with E. Ann Kaplan launching the book by summarizing the place of women in film history and setting forth the book's key question about whether race and class have eclipsed gender as the predominant contemporary issue in film studies. Kaplan also introduces the issue of essentialism, rejecting the notion that only women can make feminist films. (One wonders if the book's editors agree, since all but three of the book's more than thirty authors are women.) This first section includes the book's only chapter about the avant-garde, which is useful, although it investigates only the well-known Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren and not the hundreds of women working with experimental cinema in the US and elsewhere who have received minimal critical attention. The introduction is rounded out by an amusing essay by Catherine Fowler called 'Cinefeminism in Its Middle Ages' which reminds readers that certain issues crucial to feminist theory involving the gaze are ever less interesting to filmmakers including Rainer, Potter, or Akerman in the postmenopausal period of their lives.

The second and third sections of the book focus on European directors of feature films whose work is both feminist and popular. Through interviews and descriptive essays about working conditions, the book brings the reader up to date with the careers of directors such as Helma Sanders Brahms, Margarethe von Trotta, and Agnieszka Holland, who were inspired first by Laura Mulvey's challenge to make counter-cinema in her influential 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.' The fourth section broadens the terrain by situating both recognized and a number of lesser-known filmmakers in particular political and geographical contexts, such as Poland, Germany, and France, with solid historical information. The second half of the book extends the project beyond Europe to introduce the reader to filmmakers working in Kenya, Malaysia, Argentina, China, and India, as well as women from the Magreb working in France, Afrikaans women, and Latin American women in Canada. The final section discusses the work of Canadian filmmakers working in both Québécois and First Nations traditions. This second half of the book is especially valuable because it covers cinemas that are, for the most part, little known in the field of film studies.

Women Filmmakers: Refocusing is useful for film researchers, students, and general readers as well as those working in women's and cultural studies. The balance between academic discourse and practical experience, as well as between theory, history, and analysis, will serve all readers, as will the solid scholarly apparatus in the form of footnotes and filmographies...

pdf

Share