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213 Vision and Visibility Women Filmmakers, Contemporary Authorship, and Feminist Film Studies In her exploration of two Kathryn Bigelow films, Near Dark (1987) and Blue Steel (1990), Anna Powell observes in passing that auteurism “has a particular resonance within feminism.”1 While I agree absolutely that women filmmakers matter for a feminist cultural politics, it can be difficult to establish precisely why, not least since authorship is often regarded as a methodology that film studies has in many ways moved beyond. At worst reductive, at best naïve, auteurism privileges the authored text over the complexities of context. At the same time, the work of feminist film historians in documenting the contribution of women to the film industry represents not only an important attempt to write women’s history but a rejection of the claims made by, or more typically on behalf of, one person—the male director—to have priority over the text. Although women have only recently been working as directors in the U.S. film industry in any numbers , writers and researchers, including Lizzie Francke, gwendolyn Audrey Foster, and Ally Acker, have worked to foreground the contribution that women have made to the cinema across a range of other roles.2 And yet the figure of the filmmaker (typically, but not exclusively, the director) has rarely been so central to popular film culture as it is today.3 Moreover, at the start of the twenty-first century, women are now working in the American film industry as directors, producers, and even cinematographers , as well as in the more established female roles of screenwriter and performer, on an unprecedented scale. even so, the position of women filmmakers is typically both marginal and precarious. Clearly, this stems in part from the structure and character of the film industry itself. I’d also like to suggest here that, given the significance of the figure of the filmmaker 03 Chapters_8_11.indd 213 1/13/10 11:58 AM 214 Y V O N N e T A S K e r within contemporary film culture, there is a crucial question of the visibility of women filmmakers to be addressed. My argument focuses on contemporary filmmakers and film culture, considering the particular issues posed for women filmmakers within an era in which the visibility of the filmmaker, whether as personality or as auteur, is regularly foregrounded. The promotion of celebrity filmmakers is hardly new: in 1975 Victor Perkins talked in the British journal Movie of “the evasions and the image-mongering of the director, the whole projection business.”4 Of course there are very different issues at stake for men and women in this business. And although these differences might seem superficial rather than substantive, it is my contention that they are nonetheless quite significant. In short, I wish to make a case here for a sustained consideration of female filmmakers and their work. I acknowledge the irony of a situation in which the achievement of some measure of visibility for women directors dovetails so neatly with the falling out of favor of authorship criticism.5 And yet I would still insist that the female filmmaker remains a potent figure whose iconic presence has to do with the very possibility of a distinct women’s cinema. She is significant in terms of her visibility within a field that remains male dominated. Of course this point could equally be made in relation to other fields of professional practice, whether within the media more broadly or outside it in areas such as politics, law, medicine, and business. The filmmaker is only a special case in this context to the extent that she is a public figure of a quite particular type, both creative and commercial. That is to say, the emergence and success or failure of women filmmakers is also a question of women who visibly, publicly appropriate titles perceived as male. My concern here is less with authorship as a methodology or critical practice than with authorship as a discourse, a discourse within which women filmmakers have been marginalized. I discuss four American women filmmakers who have entered this discourse, taking up distinct positions within it: directors Allison Anders and Kathryn Bigelow, and cinematographers ellen Kuras and Maryse Alberti.6 These four filmmakers operate within and across the sectors (which are in any case difficult to truly separate) of U.S. mainstream and independent production. Bigelow and Anders are distinct in almost every way imaginable: sector, budget, visual scope, genre, and theme, not...

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