Beginning in the early seventies, feminist documentaries formed a strong element in women’s cinema. The first films addressed subjects such as health care, abortion, rape and other types of violence against women, day care, divorce, jobs, wages, sexual harassment, and aging. Later films dealt with outstanding individuals and the involvement of women in historical events (an involvement previously ignored). And even in the fictional narratives created by women, the documentary impulse was strong, manifesting itself in the use of documentary and reconstructed documentary footage.
The first essay in section three, “The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary” (1978) by Julia Lesage, describes the emergence of the feminist documentary as a genre, especially its aesthetics and relationship to the women’s movement from which it sprang. Using a traditional “realist” documentary approach, these first films often presented women who spoke directly to the camera as they told of their efforts to deal with “the public world of work and power.” By defining or redefining women’s experience, the filmmakers and their subjects challenged previously accepted ideas about male superiority and women’s “natural” roles. These explorations established a structure for social and psychological change and thus constituted a political attack on patriarchy.
Lesage discusses Self Health, a film made by the San Francisco Women’s Health Collective (1974), as an exemplary work. For Lesage, the film opposes both the artistic and the medical tradition of viewing women’s nude bodies. In its place the filmmakers present women collectivity, enhanced by a sense of warmth, intimacy, and friendliness. According to Lesage, “Reclaiming ‘the lost territory’ of women’s bodies and health care is a personal act that has a strong effect on women’s identity, emotional life, and sense of control.”1
Lesage discusses the adoption by women in the late 1960s of cinéma vérité documentary techniques and describes how feminist filmmakers used these techniques in new and different ways, often identifying personally with their subjects or working collaboratively, so that subject and filmmaker shared in the political goals of the project. She explains how such relationships were analogous to the mutual, nonhierarchical structure of women’s consciousness-raising groups.
Lesage addresses the criticism of some scholars that feminist documentaries assume a naive sense of realism or appear dull due to the preponderance of “talking heads.” In response, Lesage states that what is of prime importance are the stories the women tell: “The sound track, usually told in the subjects’ own words, serves the function of rephrasing, criticizing, or articulating for the first time the rules of the game as they have been and as they should be for women.”2 Furthermore, feminist filmmakers, by using an accessible form, encourage a politicized “conversation” among women. Lesage ends with a brief mention of the experimental feminist documentary, which will be taken up in more detail in the essay by Annette Kuhn.
Despite Lesage’s defense of the feminist documentary as a means of asserting sexual difference and achieving political ends, other critics voiced certain reservations. Among them is Sonya Michel, whose essay “Feminism, Film, and Public History” (1981) raises questions about the presentation of history. Michel first praises three films about U.S. working women—Union Maids (Julia Reichert, Jim Klein, and Miles Mogulescu, 1977), With Banners and Babies (Lorraine Gray, 1978), and The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980)—for their value as correctives to mainstream history. She discusses the difficulty of producing accessible films which can reach a wide audience, while simultaneously fostering a critical sense of awareness. In particular, she concentrates on the difficulties of turning history into cinema.
Michel focuses on the use of “talking heads,” which appear in all three works. She notes how this technique establishes the women as subjects within the film, in their own lives, and in history. But she adds, “From a historian’s point of view . . . these privileged subjects can become problematic if a film limits its perspective by relying on them as the sole or even primary informants. While oral history subjects are frequently both engaging and uniquely informative, their accounts of historical events of periods can be partial, fragmentary, idiosyncratic and sometimes—deliberately or unintentionally—misleading.”3 A second problem arises from the fact that the filmmakers have not always selected subjects who are truly representative of the events depicted. Finally, Michel finds that often the lack of a critical context leaves viewers with the impression that the women’s experiences occurred in something of a political vacuum. She reviews how each of the three films handled these issues, giving special praise to The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter for being the most sensitive to these problems and the most sophisticated in working out creative solutions. She further commends Rosie for its presentation of older women, who are allowed a sexuality often denied them in mainstream cinema, and for the film’s ability to integrate women’s work experience with their personal lives.
Along with the production and criticism of realist documentaries, feminist film critics began to think about a new cinema, a cinema not only directed by women and presenting new images, but also a cinema that was appreciably different in form as well as in content. In “Textual Politics,” Annette Kuhn takes up Claire Johnston’s call for a deconstructive cinema. Johnston had urged women filmmakers to reject an illusionistic realism by rupturing narrative flow and interrogating the processes of the film’s production in the hopes of creating a more critical audience and exposing areas of women’s oppression that had previously been unrepresented. This cinematic practice she called “counter-cinema.”
Focusing on works that use such strategies, Kuhn discusses Sara Gomez’s One Way or Another (Cuba, 1974) and Whose Choice? (1976), produced by the London Women’s Film Group. In analyzing the Gomez film, Kuhn shows how documentary sequences are interspersed with fictional ones, creating alternations that prevent viewers from becoming totally absorbed in the narrative fiction. In many ways a model for counter-cinema, One Way or Another forces audiences to come to terms with the political implications of its subject matter. Similarly, in Whose Choice?, a film about abortion, the three discourses—information, interviews, and narrative—separately and in combination serve to transform the ways in which audiences relate to the film. “If One Way Or Another deconstructs the conventions of Hollywood and socialist realist narrative and traditional documentary, Whose Choice? offers a challenge to the kinds of documentary address commonly associated with the agitational/political film”4
Kuhn next discusses four experimental works—Thriller (Sally Potter, Britain, 1979), Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer, USA, 1972), Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, USA, 1978), and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975)—each of which collapses the usual distinction between documentary and fiction. She highlights the strategies found in several of these works. Most prominent are the following: ellipses which allow the viewer to piece together story fragments, long single takes which allow time to contemplate an image, open narratives which allow for multiple interpretations, lack of certain manipulative shots (close-ups, cut ins, and point-of-view shots) which leave the viewer free to build up her or his own narrative expectations, and asynchronous sound (not tied to on-screen speakers) which allows for indiviudal responses regarding sound and image relationships. According to Kuhn, these stratagems, with their emphasis on heterogeneity and the multiplicity of meanings, set up “the possibility of sexual difference in spectator-text relations by privileging a ‘feminine voice’ ” and thus offer new forms of pleasure for female viewers.
The next essay, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism” (1980)5 by B. Ruby Rich, is also concerned with strategies used by feminist filmmakers. But first Rich focuses on critical responses to several works by women. As two examples, Rich cites Maedchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, Germany, 1931) and Jeanne Dielman, where most of the laudatory reviews ignored the works’ feminist underpinnings—in the former, by discussing the anti-Fascist elements while ignoring the lesbianism, and in the latter, by praising the work as hyper-realist or ethnographic, without discussing its feminist sensibility.
Similarly, much writing on filmmaker Yvonne Rainer highlights her use of distancing devices and post-modern structures, while Rich believes “Rainer’s films deal with the relations between the sexes . . . explicitly with woman as victim” and with “the burden of patriarchal mythology,” leading ultimately to “reworking melodrama for women today.”6 Such disregard for feminist elements, or misnamings, as Rich terms it, results in a failure to recognize the strengths of individual works or to acknowledge women’s oppression.
Rich next covers the two views of feminist film criticism, the British concern for the production of meaning and the U.S. interest in social change. Rich sees women’s film-going experience as one characterized by an active engagement with the film text, which produces dialectical readings, and thus finds British theory, which emphasizes women’s passivity, as too limiting. She argues, “It is crucial to emphasize here the possibility for texts to be transformed at the level of reception and not to fall into a trap of condescension toward our own developed powers as active producers of meaning.”7
Rich airs her concern that the process of misnaming is reducing “feminist cinema” to works that explicitly and exclusively treat feminism as their subject matter. She calls for a broader definition and suggests several provisional categories for feminist works. Rich’s categories can be seen as an attempt to map out an aesthetics of feminist filmmaking. They include: validative, correspondence, reconstructive, medusan, corrective realism, and projectile, all of which are explained in the body of the essay.
Teresa de Lauretis’s “Rethinking Women’s Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory” (1987)8 begins with a discussion of Sylvia Bovenschen’s essay, “Is There a Feminist Aesthetic?” (1976). De Lauretis observes that it is now time to alter the terms of the question. “The emphasis must be shifted away from the artist behind the camera, the gaze, or the text as origin and determination of meaning, toward the wider public sphere of cinema as a social technology. . . . The effort and challenge now are how to effect another vision.”9
Using Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, de Lauretis claims that the film is not just a picture of a female experience, but rather a work that addresses a spectator as female. “In saying that a film whose visual and symbolic space is organzied in this manner addresses its spectator as a woman, regardless of the gender of the viewers, I mean that the film defines all points of identification (with character, image, camera) as female, feminine, or feminist.”10 This cinema is not only by women, but for women.
De Lauretis also calls for more attention to be paid to the differences both “among and within women.” She views Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film, Born in Flames, as a project of great originality which portrays “differences which are not purely sexual or merely racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these together and often enough in conflict with one another.”11
De Lauretis closes by offering a new theory of women’s cinema, one in which “the spectator is the film’s primary concern—primary in the sense that it is there from the beginning, inscribed in the filmmaker’s project and even in the very marking of the film.”12
“Dis-Embodying the Female Voice,” by Kaja Silverman, unlike the previous pieces, is more concerned about voice than image. As Silverman points out, despite women’s access to language in the real world, in film male characters have linguistic as well as specular authority, which is enhanced by their function as off-screen narrators, granting them additional control as the possessors of superior knowledge.
Silverman points out that not surprisingly a good deal of feminist filmmaking has focused attention on the female voice, especially the dis-em-bodied, off-screen voice. She analyzes six works in which filmmakers have dislocated the sound from the image track, citing individual techniques such as the alignment of the female voice with a male body (Marjorie Keller’s Misconception); the delineation of more than one female body to which story and speech can be pinned (Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who); the disassociation of female characters from the words they utter (Sigmund Freud’s Dora by Weinstock, Pajaczkowska, Tyndall, and McCall); the separation of voice (the daughter’s) and words (the mother’s) (Chantal Akerman’s News From Home); the ‘traveling’ voice which, like the Rainer film, can be projected onto a diversity of female bodies (Bette Gordon’s Empty Suitcases); and finally Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys From Berlin/71, which she calls “the most remarkable deployment of female voices within the feminist avant-garde.”13 She sees Journeys From Berlin/71 as an expose, not only of the female voice, but also of the voice’s relationship to psychic, symbolic, and political forces.
The debates over what constitutes a feminist film practice continue, enhanced by the production of new works by women. Some of these films will be discussed in detail in the next section.
NOTES
1. Julia Lesage, “The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 4 (Fall 1978), p. 514.
2. Ibid., p. 519.
3. Sonya Michel, “Feminism, Film and Public History,” Radical History Review, no. 25 (1981), p. 51. This essay also appears in the present volume.
4. Annette Kuhn, “Textual Politics,” Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, London: Routledge & Kegan (1982), p. 166.
5. This article originally appeared in Jump Cut, no. 19 (1978).
6. B. Ruby Rich, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” Heresies 3, no. 1, issue 9 (1980). Reprinted in Movies and Methods, Vol. II, ed. Bill Nichols, Berkeley: University of California Press (1985), p. 347.
7. Ibid., p. 350.
8. This article originally appeared under the title “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women’s Cinema,” in New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter 1985).
9. Teresa de Lauretis. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1987), p. 131.
10. Ibid., p. 133.
11. Ibid., p. 139.
12. Ibid., p. 141.
13. Kaja Silverman, “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice,” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Los Angeles: American Film Institute (1984), p. 143.