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  • Feminist Filmmaking and the Future of Global Film Politics
  • Maggie Hennefeld (bio)
WOMEN’S CINEMA, WORLD CINEMA: PROJECTING CONTEMPORARY FEMINISMS
BY PATRICIA WHITE
Duke University Press, 2015

In an age of rising feminist activism and gendered media consumerism, how can we theorize the geopolitical aesthetics of women’s filmmaking? In Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, Patricia White gives us the critical tools to understand the global formations of our contemporary feminisms. She argues, “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). White traces the complex, transnational exchange between individual examples and collectivist models of feminism, focusing on twenty-first century, feature-length festival films by non-Western women directors. White looks at films by women who: (a) came of age during the hey-day of second-wave feminism, (b) whose filmmaking navigates the complexities of public space across national borders in an increasingly privatized, globalized media landscape, and (c) whose innovative aesthetics help make visible the unresolvable contradictions internal to present-day feminist film politics. Feature films by directors including Deepa Mehta, Claudia Llosa, Lucrecia Martel, Zero Chou, Nadine Labaki, Samira Makhmalbaf, Sabiha Sumar, Marjane Satrapi, Nia Dinata, Jeong Jaeeun, and others innovate new moving image paradigms for articulating the renewed centrality of women’s cinema as a concept. This is precisely White’s core argument: “In this book I seek to explore how feminism, a discourse that has been profoundly [End Page 194] reshaped by transnational perspectives and realities in recent decades, can inform [the] geopolitical reimagination” (14) of world cinema. By helping “to define twenty-first century art house aesthetics,” as White asserts (and as I will further explain), these “members of a new generation of women filmmakers are also transforming film politics” (4).

White’s book, the first of its kind to establish the centrality of women’s filmmaking to the geopolitics of world cinema, locates itself at the crossroads of film studies scholarship on transnational cinema and feminist theory. Recent work on world cinema has actively pursued a concept of totality—or at least a consolidated perspective from which to understand the complex vicissitudes of transnational film-making, distribution, and exhibition. Key texts that explore the circulation of cinema through the framework of “the world” include Natasa Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman’s edited volume World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (2009), Lúcia Nagib’s Theorizing World Cinema (2011), and Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt’s Queer Cinema in the World (2016).1 As White argues, “World cinema has the potential to renew [the] public emphasis [of feminist politics] amid the privatization of global mass media and the screens on which we encounter it. Women have a crucial role as producers of this public social vision” (3). Cinema’s capacity to project an image of the world thus becomes the stake for feminism’s renewed potential to politicize the public spaces of film reception—as opposed to merely fostering the private commoditization of film consumption.

Although the proliferating concept of world cinema still remains a far cry from Fredric Jameson’s bold assertion in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992),2 that all thinking through cinema “is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such” (4), the world still seems graspable (or at least conceivable) through the lens of these alternative film totalities. For example, Hamid Naficy’s notion of “accented cinema”—which theorizes diasporic and exilic filmmakers as “situated but universal figures” (10)3—inflects White’s own attempt to place women’s world cinema in relation both to transnational film geopolitics and to the histories of feminist film theory.

Since the 1990s, feminist film studies has been increasingly turning its gaze toward the local, the empirical, the fragmented archive, the forgotten microhistory, and the singular, pioneering individual. These pointedly archival and local approaches to the gender and sexual [End Page 195] politics of film representation have vividly reshaped the field of feminist film theory. Its key texts and debates concern the cultural scope and material lack of archival evidence, the paradoxes of assigning feminist authorship...

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