Paying Attention: Feminist Film Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Occasionally, I think back to 1991 and my first Society for Cinema Studies conference in Los Angeles. I was a "nontraditional" (read "old") graduate student, considered myself a feminist, and was particularly interested in classical Hollywood cinema and its stars. I was not yet presenting my own work, but one of the panels I attended, made up primarily (if not completely) of other graduate students, focused on Hollywood stars. The room was packed, and I clearly remember that one of the panelists made remarks about how "depressing" some feminist film theory was—I heartily agreed with her—and that another presenter mentioned, in the course of her paper, that Carmen Miranda had some control over the terms of her representation onscreen.¹ The evidence was convincing, but during the question-and-answer period all hell broke loose. No fewer than three (women) audience members went after the assertion that a female star could have agency ("She was completely within the ideology!" still rings in my mind), and the hapless student, to get them to back down, ended up retreating and proffering an apology about her work being "preliminary." I sided with the panelist—as a woman born in the 1950s I knew that there had to have been politically active, astute, and resistant women in Hollywood's past, even if they did not proclaim or understand themselves to be feminists.

In fact, it will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that those students and their work turned out to represent what arguably was a vanguard of new approaches to women and film history. In the 1970s, film studies had begun to reject anecdotal and untrustworthy history and to theorize about films as purveyors of ideology with a particular focus on identity politics and sexual difference. Representation became the object of study and textual analysis the method; historical research seemed only in play in the study of the handful of women directors who worked in Hollywood. The past seemed to matter mainly, then, as a set of images and narratives that supported and continually reaffirmed the status of women as objects under patriarchy; as Claire Johnston famously put it in her 1973 monograph Notes on Women's Cinema, "In rejecting a sociological analysis of woman in the cinema we reject any view in terms of realism. . . . Within a sexist ideology and a male-dominated cinema, woman is presented as what she represents for man."²

But despite this, some scholars—male and female—were haunting the archives and, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, new industrial histories were challenging virtually all of our previously received wisdom about Hollywood's past: the founding of the studios, the history of the Production Code, the transition to sound, Hollywood's interactions with television in the postwar era, and on and on. And, perhaps just as important, cable television channels such as American Movie Classics and soon Turner Classic Movies made hundreds of films available from the first half of the twentieth century that no one had yet studied. If we knew about Dorothy Arzner, what about Wanda Tuchock? Her name appeared as co-director on a 1934 film starring Ginger Rogers and Frances Dee, Finishing School, that I saw late one night on AMC. And how could Virginia Van Upp be a producer on so many Columbia films of the 1940s when women supposedly did not occupy positions of power in Hollywood? Rita Hayworth, who interested me both as an ethnic star (she was half-Spanish) and as a figure who challenged the binary of object/subject through her dance performances, had founded her own production company in 1947—the Beckworth Corporation. How could that be, given that I had already been taught that James Stewart was the first star to form such an entity—in 1950? When I began to research Van Upp in particular, I was distressed to learn that she had died in 1970 (Hayworth in 1987). I would never be able to ask Van Upp or Hayworth the questions I wanted to pose to...