Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (review)

It is a truism that the majority of films, even those directed by and/or created for women, are troubling in their representation of women. Ever since Laura Mulvey brought our attention to the problematic of the gaze, critics, filmmakers, and film viewers alike have grappled with the difficulties of representing women on screen without serving them up for objectification. Anyone who has seen a movie recently knows that most films made today continue to aestheticize and eroticize the female body—the parade of actresses’ bodies as objects to admire, desire, scrutinize, and/or envy, never ceases. Hence, it is of great importance that Geetha Ramanathan examines an array of feminist filmmakers from a variety of cultural, racial, and national traditions in order to examine how feminist visions can disrupt the dominant visual and aural gender hierarchies.

Ramanathan places much emphasis on the concept of the gaze and of vision, and how feminist filmmakers deliberately work to change the focus of that objectifying point of view. Moving beyond Mulvey and other critics who also mark as deeply flawed the visualization of women on film, including Mary Ann Doane, Jane Gaines, and Ann Kaplan, Ramanathan presents the reader with a culturally nuanced study of the difficulties inherent in representing women on screen. While these scholars share Ramanathan’s quest to find female subjectivity and authority within cinema, they define their studies in terms of national or regional studies. Ramanathan, on the other hand, refuses to confine herself to a single national or racial lens with which to view feminist work. Instead, she insists that feminism—that is “the impression of feminist authority” (3)—can be a multinational, transcultural way in which to work visually. For her, feminist auteurship is an ideological standpoint that can take many trajectories. A feminist approach to filmmaking, she contends, while not a single essentialist vision, works with three crucial elements: “the effort to enhance feminist authority; visual, aural and narrative restructurings that occur because of the inhibitions placed on the cinematic representation of women; and the aesthetics that emerge as a consequence of a shift in the strategies of representation” (1). Through close readings of a well-chosen collection of films, as well as a broad knowledge of film criticism and theory, she persuasively demonstrates how directors from the U.S., Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Asia strive to achieve feminist auteurship; the filmmakers she examines are committed to rethinking the way women are envisioned in film, and their strategies diverge widely.

In her first chapter, Ramanathan discusses the ways in which women are aestheticized, rendered into objects for others to look at, and how feminist filmmakers like Lizzie Borden, Aparna Sen, and Nelly Kaplan attempt to deaestheticize their female protagonists through a range of canny techniques. For example, Ramanathan notes how Borden constructs a feminist vision out of Working Girls, including a sequence of shots that depict one of the prostitute protagonists working with a client framed within a mirror. Here, she asserts, the camera obliquely sanctions “the female gaze’s narrative and interpretive function by framing Molly’s look as calm, unconcerned—seldom gazing into the man’s eyes or looking at his body, but surveying the entire frame to check that her control of the session is not shaken” (19). Moreover, she argues, Borden’s characters “name patriarchy for what it is—pimpery” (20). Close readings like this helpfully illustrate some of the forms of resistance feminist auteurship can achieve.

Other chapters delve into the interplay of race, gender, and nationality; the quest for genres that can accommodate women heroines; aurality and the representation of women; and the possibility of depicting female desire. In chapter two Ramanathan explores the contributions of feminist filmmakers like Julie Dash (Illusions) and Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), who, she asserts, ask “us to acknowledge black women’s presence” and authority (58). Working with “different kinds of looking,” such as destabilizing the racial knowledge of the viewer, and by setting up viewer...