Studies in French Cinema. Vol.1, nos. 1 and 2 (2001) (review)

Book Reviews America (Canada and the United States). Her survey goes back to early silent American movies with French expatriate director Alice Guy for the 1910s and 20s, Dorothy Arzner for the 1940s, and Claudia Weill among others for the late 1970s and 80s. In a brief historical overview, Butler shows that 1970s feminist theoreticians and more recent film criticisms have "recuperated" some of these early filmmakers. The text moves swiftly along the lines of genre and gender construction in more recent Hollywood cinema with brief analyses of a selection of films made over the century, such as Blue Steel (Bigelow) and The 24 hour Woman (Savoca 1999). Butler does not limit her approach to American cinema. She ventures into international cinema since her interest in women's cultural production crosses borders and nations. Her perspective is informed by different theories such as Claire Johnston's, and Deleuze and Guattari's perspective on a "minor literature" applied here to women's cinema. A minor literature "is the literature of a minority or marginalized group" and espouses characteristics that can be found i woman's cinema with displacement, dispossession, and deterritorialization (19-20). The second part of the study engages with women's experimental cinema and a contextualization of the place of women in a traditionally male and misogynist category. Butler posits that one of the tropes of women's avant-garde cinema lies in the inscription of the filmmaker's signature , and a move away from this once the filmmaker has "secured" her position. Butler argues that Hamid Naficy's view on exilic and "accented" cinema applies to women's films in their authorial and autobiographical formations. She devotes a large segment to Maya Deren. Butler aptly identifies a rising concern for the Diaspora as a larger current in women's cinema with a politics of location and "dislocation." This part explores New German cinema, the Iranian New Wave, Tunisian cinema with Moufida Tlatli, Australian cinema with Tracy Moffatt, North American cinema with Julie Dash, and French cinema wiüi Claire Denis, all of whom address issues of postcolonial identity. Lastly, Butler opens a dialogue on transnational cultural politics, and closes with Deepa Mehta, a Canadian-Indian filmmaker, whose trilogy Fire, Earth and Water provoked numerous debates. Butler convincingly poses the terms of a very important debate concerning the definition of women's cinema, its place, its production, as well as its position in a growing global (transnational ) economy. Sylvie Blum-Reid University of Florida Studies in French Cinema. Vol.1, nos. 1 and 2 (2001). General Editors: Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie. Published mree times a year by Intellect Books . £32 (personal ); £90 (instit.); add £8 for delivery outside EU. The Editors Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie introduce the first volume of Studies in French Cinema as "one of its kind: a journal in English devoted entirely to French cinema." This new and very welcome British journal underscores the increasing importance of film and media to French and Francophone studies and provides a focal point for exchange lacking in the many excellent journals and reviews that publish occasional articles on French film but have a broader literary, filmic or cultural studies agenda. The journal's commitment to English (all French quotes appear in translation and studies written in French are translated) makes it accessible to a wider public, a not inconsiderable advantage, although readers of French might miss quotations in the original which are omitted for reasons of space. The thirteen essays that make up the first two volumes (a third, focusing primarily on Catherine Breillat's controversial Romance and Claire Denis's Beau Travail, is now in print) reflect an effort to include work by established as well as beginning scholars and to touch on each of the three areas which the editors designate as the review's major areas of investigation: film history, film genre and film trends (including the study of audiences and "the sociocultural context in Vol. XLII, No. 3 93 L'Esprit Créateur which French cinema functions"), and, finally, film technique and theory. The Editors also plan an annual review article of books published on French cinema and another on key conferences on...