Redirected the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World (review)

284 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies envy provoked by the eleven year-old Clara who has stolen the show away from the other girls in a theatrical representation; only then will the women understand retrospectively their motive for murder. What comes to the surface through the macabre encounter ofthe women is their collective unconscious, which has been repressed since the moment of Clara's murder , yet nevertheless drives each woman in her present life. Lali's memory lapses and Aurora, whose mental incapacitation forces her to regress permanently to the moment before Clara's death, constitute a testament to the power ofthe repressed unconscious. The sensation of the uncanny is generated when the group "nombra lo innombrable por primera vez" (102), when it exposes what has been unspeakable and should have remained hidden. The theme of the family secret (i.e., the secret that unites the symbolic family ofthe "hermanas de sangre"), and the claustrophobic space within which the "secret" emerges, evoke, once again, the Gothic motif so typical of Fernández Cubas's works. At the end ofthe drama, the women arrive at a realization that a knowledge of their common secret will forever bind them together in a circular journey: they can neither return to a prelapsarian pasr (through a collective amnesia) nor move forward in time by transcending the past. In the end, the drama disturbs not only through its démythification of childhood innocence, but also through its symbolic reenactment in adult life of the same dynamic that motivated the childhood crime. The adult guilt initially awakened in the perpetrators ofthe crime soon gives way to childlike defensiveness, self-justfication, and egotism. Even Marga, who at first seemed to control the "theatrical" function from a distance, becomes increasingly implicated in the psychological game that she herself initiated. In spite of her claim that her goal is to "llegar al fondo de las cosas" (60), the truth seems to escape the participants in the drama that Marga has staged within the frame of the external play through yet another manipulable artistic medium, the film. In the end, the characters are left only with their own and each other's re-creation—and reenactment—of the original crime. The phantom ofthe past is all the more powerful because it perpetuates a disquieting fear ofthat which cannot be either forgotten or recovered fully. Although Hermanas de sangre boasts of an almost narrative quality, the constant elements of dramatic tension and suspense, together with its metatheatrical structure (with the added visual effect ofthe film projection on screen), make for a potentially innovative dramatic experiment. Akiko Tsuchiya Washington University Redirected the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World State University of New York Press, 1999 Edited by Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe Studies on Latin American film are close to reaching some sort of critical mass. Although there remain serious gaps—no detailed interpretive study of Cuban film since the Revolution; only sporadic in-depth coverage of contemporary Mexican filmmaking ; little or no coverage for the more modest film productions of countries like Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico. There is much to be done, but work that has been published on specific countries in recent years and on topics that cut across national productions is well worth consult- Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 285 ing. Particularly important is the way in which this work represents a high level of cultural analysis, of ideologically grounded interpretation, and not just the catalog of productions or the sort of anecdotal criticism that still predominates in many quarters of American or European filmmaking, pace the rather pretentious influence ofthe Cahiers du cinéma tradition. Robin and Jaffe's collection marks an important addition to this bibliography, even if it does not focus exclusively on Latin America (which I will do here because of this review forum). This importance lies in the way in which it frames a specifically gender -based critical project. Feminism and gender studies remain rather fragmented for Latin America: uneven and often contradictory penetration of U.S. and European models, accompanied by a rejection of the very notion of "feminism" among both the right (for obvious reasons) and...