Cinematic Howling: Women’s Films, Women’s Film Theories (review)

Over the last decade, the Women’s Film History and Women & the Silent Screen projects, which together comprise one of the main thrusts of current feminist scholarship in cinema studies, have been exploding received critical and historiographical categories. In particular, as so few women directors have become established auteurs with significant bodies of work, authorship has been up for grabs. Feminist scholars in film history reach out for screenwriters, sources of adaptation, exhibitors, critics, and producers, as well as directors.

While Cheu doesn’t acknowledge any theoretical or historiographical debt to these projects, his methodology adopts the explosion of categories that the Women’s Film History Project has instantiated. His embrace of ‘women’s films’ includes Disney representations of women characters, extended analysis of Angela Carter’s short story that formed the basis of The Company of Wolves (dir. Neil Jordan, 1984) and Marguerite Duras’ script for Hiroshima Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1961), as well as the more usual assignment of authorship in mainstream scholarship, director-writers such as Marleen Gorris (Antonia, 1996), and Agnes Varda (Vagabond, 1985). His choices of filmmakers and cinematic objects of analysis are often surprising, veering beyond the received texts of the feminist canon to include Canadian features by Lea Pool and Barbara Sweete and documentaries by Laura Sky, as well as a relatively unknown text – one of my favourites – The Goddess of 1967 (dir. Clara Law, 2000).

Cheu’s theoretical ballast is equally wide-ranging. His sources include Bhabha, Butler, Cixous, bell hooks, Mulvey (of course, although his interpretation of her construction of ‘pleasure’ is different from mine and from hers), Spivak, and other usual suspects, as well as the theoretical discourses concerning authorship and its death, the ‘butterfly effect’ (systems theory), diasporic studies, the male gaze, masquerade, meta-narrative, representation, post-feminism, psychoanalysis, spectatorship, and transcultural identities.

The method of most chapters is to bounce a film text against a theoretical conjuncture. For examples, his treatment of Marguerite Duras’s script for Hiroshima Mon Amour is juxtasposed against a rehearsal of the history of auteur theory; Female Perversions (dir. Susan Streifeld, 1996) is set as an ‘update’ of the ‘feminist aesthetics’ of Riddles of the Sphinx (dir. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977); and The Goddess of 1967 is introduced by notes on diaspora, globalization, national cinemas, and post-colonialism. In these introductory comments, as in the readings of the films, Cheu generously offers autobiographical anecdotes and his own opinions of theoretical issues along with observations on current culture (breast implants, family conflict, Hollywood, Hong Kong films, the ‘mass culture factory’ stereotypes of feminists, traditional Judeo-Christian thought). As this comment may suggest, the text is written in a highly readable and garrulously personal style.

While I was somewhat troubled by the lack of historicity in the treatment of feminist theory (the decades flowing together with neither differentiation nor sense of development of the debates), others may find this bricolage salutary. It surely condenses a complex literature of feminist film theory to some immediately graspable ideas.