Women’s transnational cinema: displacement, projection, and identification. A review of Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms

Patricia White’s ambitious project sets itself the daunting task of tracking fast-moving targets. Its anchoring terms— “women’s cinema” and “world cinema” —remain in constant flux as a result of their uneven interactions. In a real sense, White’s book rises to the implicit challenge that Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim pose in their introduction to Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics. “In the final analysis,” they write, “World Cinema as a theoretical concept is destined not to definition and closure but to ceaseless problematisation, always a work-in-progress, its ground beneath one’s feet forever shifting even as one attempts to pin it down” (9). As White notes in her introduction: “Cultural globalization, in turn, puts pressure on the concept, content, and address of women’s cinema . . . while remappings of world cinema in the current phase of globalization are the object of growing attention in film studies, questions of gender have yet to structure such inquiry significantly” (6). Women’s Cinema, World Cinema shapes its broad analytical survey around the category or figure of woman, however unstable. In pursuing its ambitious project, this book recalls the shaping impact of feminist film theory on film studies at large from the 1970s onward. It asks some audacious questions: is “women’s cinema still a meaningful term” (11), and if it is, can it produce a similar shaping force in the arena of world cinema studies? Foregrounding women’s production and reception with special emphasis on the emerging and shifting channels of global film circulation, this book makes a powerful intervention in the most exciting discussions in contemporary film and media studies by carefully deploying a number of methodologies and analytical frameworks—not all of which seem immediately compatible.

Organized by what White loosely terms “case studies,” her project turns on metaphors of displacement, framing, and projection. Together, these concepts form the book’s central insight: that we must consider production and address, as well as circulation and reception, in order to understand women’s transnational cinema as a multivalent circuit of projection and identification. These powerful processes, understood in their psychoanalytic force, provide a potential framework for analyzing the elaborate cross-cultural exchanges that structure the global circulation of women’s cinema, especially across festivals. Film festivals, as White carefully demonstrates, subject transnational women’s cinema--in conditions of often dramatic juxtaposition--to shocks of reorientation and reframing as films from widely divergent cultures come into contact. And festivals have increasingly grown in importance and impact in the twenty-first century. Accounting for her book’s primary “focus on filmmakers who emerge after 2000,” White indicates that since this moment, “feminist cultural politics [has] offered a less stable frame through which to view women’s work” (7). She continues:

Ultimately, the works of these filmmakers were selected not only for their aesthetic and cultural significance but also for the ways they reveal the institutional shapes of film culture—the politics of funding and programming, protocols of reviewing and the anointing of celebrities, and various political agendas.

(7)

These different cinematic objects, as well as the concepts of reception, production, circulation and exhibition contexts, are held together by White’s consideration of issues around authorship and identity, aesthetics and reception, national and transnational context. This is a vast terrain to map and manage. White is obliged to embrace some risks, and they largely pay off. Her choice of a case study model focuses on commonalities—or even conversations—among film texts that might at first seem entirely foreign to one another.

However, the case study model presents some limitations as well; notably, it tends to suggest exemplarity and representativeness, about which this study remains justifiably ambivalent. It also risks the implicit suggestion that the film in question exists primarily as an illustrative example of the tendency under exploration; its portraits of women directors are somewhat uneven and seem to represent or exemplify various analytical issues. For example, Samira Makmalbaf (1980...