Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen (review)

Book Reviews Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. French Film: Texts and Contexts. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xviii + 348. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau's French Film: Texts and Contexts offers at once critical depth in the rich analyses of the twenty-four films selected for this 2000 edition and a breadth of perspective on the history of French sound cinema from the early 1930s to the mid1990s . The latter quality grows from not only the juxtaposition of all twenty-four works, covering a span of sixty-five years of spectatorship and popular and critical readings, but also each work's exemplarity as representative of a specific genre or creative process, an historical period, sociocultural movement, memory or mood. Hayward and Vincendeau have again succeeded, as with meir first edition in 1990, in garnering together from eighteen other specialists in the field a strikingly insightful and coherent collection of essays, invaluable to both students and scholars of French film—their explicitly stated goal in the introduction. The addition of chapter-based guides to further reading and filmographies and a final bibliography increases its usefulness to researchers. In this edition, Hayward and Vincendeau particularly wished to respond to the reemergence in the 1990s of the traumatic memory of the Second World War in me public consciousness, which has come to fixate on national identity. Indeed, in the last decades the subject of French national identity has dominated cultural discussion and debate, in which the social impact of May 1968 and the challenges posed by multiethnic strife and globalization cannot be, and are not here, overlooked. The editors' decision to adapt their text to France's present cultural context motivated the replacement of nine essays from the previous edition with original analyses of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, L'Air de Paris, Le Samouraï, Lacombe Lucien, Les Valseuses, Coup de foudre, Cyrano de Bergerac, Nikita, and La Haine. The analytical strands connecting the individual chapters include studies of gender politics; regional and national identity (e.g., the provinces counter the hegemony of Paris, further countered by American cultural power, represented by Hollywood) and the more recent phenomenon of the banlieue; historical memory (of, e.g., the Popular Front, Vichy and the German Occupation , the Algerian War, May 1968, and me urban riots of the 1990s) and its relationship to autobiography ; genre (from Poetic Realism to the Tradition of Quality, from the film noir to the New Wave, from "popular" classics to postmodernism); star power; authorship; and formal properties linking these essays to the broader concerns and methods of Film Studies. Thus, Hayward and Vincendeau's attention to the cultural specificity of French cinematic production as well as a wider interest in the medium as a whole has culminated in a rigorous examination of these films not only as cultural artifacts but also as technical and creative master productions to be studied and enjoyed by all. Meaghan Emery University of Vermont Alison Butler. Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen. London: Wallflower Press, 2002. Pp. 134. £11.99. Alison Butler's recently published comprehensive Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen attempts to map out the history and uieories of women's cinema in different genres, production modes and nations. Butler introduces me various theories that have contributed to feminist articulations on women's films since the 1970s. Her theoretical approach to films directed by women applies to American mainstream (Hollywood) movies and independently produced films in North 92 Fall 2002 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...