Film Studies: Women in Contemporary Cinema (review)

Alexandra Karriker's preface to Women in Contemporary Cinema observes that the anthology emerged from conferences held at the University of Oklahoma. While one of the book's merits is certainly its openness to a variety of approaches and topics, its heterogeneity also reflects its origins in conference proceedings, which may be the source of some of its shortcomings. The essays are often workman-like and engaging, but the anthology as a whole might have gained force from tighter focus and a firmer editorial hand, especially given the enormous scope of the topic. A preface that did more than preview the arguments of the essays to follow would have helped, but wherever Karriker wishes to draw our attention to recent general work on women and cinema, she simply provides footnotes for further reading rather than offering some sort of unifying take on the state of the discussion about women and film.

Two aspects of the anthology design may have inhibited tighter focus for the collection. To begin with, the geographical range covered by the ten essays is considerable—five deal with Anglophone cinemas (three for New Zealand and one each for the United States and Great Britain), while the remainder take up films from France, Paraguay, post-Soviet Russia, and the Ivory Coast. The critical approaches on display are less varied but still quite heterogeneous from essay to essay and sometimes within an essay. Karriker notes that the "narrative stances" of the essays include "theoretical, descriptive, aesthetic, and production orientations" (xi). What the reader typically gets are invocations of Laura Mulvey, some postcolonial theory, and close readings inflected by some contextual information (the approach taken by the majority of the essays). Only four of the essays approach film as a primarily visual medium, with the remainder more interested in exploring films emphasizing the experiences of women as manifestations of some other social or cultural formation.

The essays that involve themselves with the filmic properties of cinema (generally the most successful in this collection) include Susan Smith Nash's fluent and learned account of Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schembori's Artefacto de la Primera Necesidad. Nash attaches her reading of the film to a great deal of helpful context about Paraguayan culture and language while also engaging with the film as a visual text. Similarly, Karen Boyle's account of Heavenly Creatures and Sister My Sister unites a consideration of film style (Peter Jackson's reliance on slasher-film tropes at the commencement of his film, for example) with ways in which representations of female same-sex desire both explain and displace the murders her two films explore. More obviously, Katherine Patterson is concerned with how Agnès Varda's Vagabond defies the typical scopophilic way of looking at women in an argument that is nonetheless well written and well presented. Finally, in the most theoretically sophisticated but least user-friendly essay by far, Binnie Brook Martin examines the relationship between sound and image in Désiré Ecaré's Faces of Women. While the close examination the film receives here is to be applauded, the writing is nearly impenetrable. The reader needs to be rescued from sentences such as "Time images are the lacunas outside of the screen construction of the 'understood' narrative world, gaps that open to a specular world that is not iconoclast with meanings" (181). As opposed to Nash's graceful presentation of a filmmaking context little known even to most film scholars, Martin's essay relies exclusively on theory, leaving the reader to speculate about potentially important historical or institutional issues that also seem relevant to her argument. Ecaré, for example, was trained by the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, and one wonders how Ecaré's preparation in anthropological filmmaking might fit into Martin's view of a cinematic style that exploits disjunctions between image and text to suggest female empowerment.

More typical of the anthology as a whole are those essays that look at film as an illustration of some...