The films discussed in this section are predominantly works directed by women, mainly feminist filmmakers, who are more than familiar with film theory and who have worked out their own strategies for a feminist film practice. Two essays address Hollywood production; the rest focus on works by filmmakers who have specifically chosen to work outside of the mainstream, both here and abroad. In addition to representing a diverse body of work, this section attempts to apply a variety of methodologies.

A comment on the selection process is needed, perhaps. I favored films that had been widely seen in commercial or alternative venues or that had been frequently discussed among those concerned with feminist filmmaking. Priority was given to works that raised questions about feminist theory and/or practice and articles that addressed the issues previously discussed in this book.

Several directors have now produced a sizeable body of work. Among the most active Europeans working in narrative fiction are: Marta Meszaros of Hungary; Vera Chytilova of Czechoslovakia; Doris Dorrie, Ulrike Ottinger, Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahams, and Margarethe von Trotta of West Germany; Diane Kurys and Agnes Varda of France; Liliana Cavani and Lina Wertmuller of Italy; and Chantal Akerman of Belgium, as well as Gillian Armstrong of Australia. In the U.S., Martha Coolidge, Elaine May, Susan Seidelman, and Joan Micklin Silver each have directed several works. All of these women are still active and all of their feature films have demonstrated both creativity and, in most cases, a concern for women’s issues. For an overview of their contributions, see Barbara Quart’s Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema.

In addition, there is a large group of independent women filmmakers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, such as Yvonne Rainer, Lizzie Borden, Michelle Citron, and Bette Gordon in the U.S. and Laura Mulvey (with Peter Wollen) and Sally Potter in the U.K., who have expanded the boundaries of filmmaking practice. All of these filmmakers are treated in brief in the essays in Section Three. Further information on women’s independent filmmaking is provided in the Bibliography.

In “Images and Women” (1986), Robin Wood asserts that for feminism to be admitted to the Hollywood cinema, it had to undergo a drastic change, namely the repression of politics. To demonstrate how this operates, he provides a structural analysis of the two films most associated with feminism during the 1970s—Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman and Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—exposing how the structures define the limits of what is ideologically acceptable and how these films defuse feminism, making it “safe and unthreatening.” In the end, what is conveyed is “a huge communal sigh of relief; the women don’t have to be independent after all; there are strong, protective males to look after them.”¹

Wood then takes a close look at four commercial films of the 1980s (three independent productions and one mainstream Hollywood movie) which attempt to walk a thin line between making a statement and vying for commercial success. These include Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978), Lee Grant’s Tell Me a Riddle (1980), Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), and Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). He discusses these works within the larger question of “What possibilities exist for a female (not necessarily feminist) discourse to be articulated within a patriarchal industry through narrative conventions and genres developed by and for a male-dominate culture?”² He is especially intrigued by Fast Times at Ridgemont High because of its ability to satisfy all of the genre requirements of the high school cycle and at the same time to construct a position for the female spectator that is neither masochistic nor merely compliant. Further, the film allows for both the expression of women’s desire and their critique of male assumptions, although it stops short of exploring any issues which would be threatening to male viewers.

“Unspoken and Unsolved: Tell Me a Riddle” (1985), by Florence Jacobowitz and Lori Spring, takes up the issue of Hollywood-style realism, a denigrated tradition since the days of Claire Johnston’s writings about counter-cinema. Like Robin Wood, the authors are interested in the degree to which such works can serve as a source for political and/or social change. Jacobowitz and Spring review the objections of some feminists to the realist tradition—specifically, its potential for disguising the ways in which woman’s image has been appropriated for the pleasure of the male spectator. However, they note that films like Tell Me a Riddle “reformulate, expand, and evolve generic possibilities by offering different kinds of images than those long perpetuated in mainstream culture.”³ Concomitantly, the film’s treatment of gender, class, and ethnic issues expresses social criticism and paves the way for change in the concrete world by affecting the viewer’s consciousness.

The authors discuss Tell Me a Riddle, focusing on how Eva, a poor, elderly, Jewish-Russian immigrant, seeks to resist the constraints of her life by carving out a place of dignity within her limited world. They see Eva’s withdrawal into the past and her attachment to her home as forms of resistance that provide solace, but also isolation. They demonstrate how the film foregrounds issues of gender and economic oppression through Eva’s relationship with her husband, her granddaughter, and Mrs. Mays, a recent widow. Through the growing support of the two women, Eva is able to emerge from her alienation. This is marked narratively by her ability to vocalize her feelings and is visualized by images of space and air. Memories of her past imprisonment in Russia and ceaseless economic struggles in America give way to cries of “freiheit” (“freedom”). In the end Eva finds the means to bridge the gap, brought about by years of resentment, between herself and her husband. Jacobowitz and Spring credit Grant, though, for not imposing a false happy ending. Instead we are left with a legacy of spirit and principle. The authors conclude that “by exposing images, voices, and narratives long suppressed and silenced” the film “attests to the possibility of producing art which is both popular and politically significant.”⁴

Using two films which focus on one woman’s obsession with another, Jackie Stacey in “Desperately Seeking Difference” (1987), raises questions concerning the representation of women’s desire and identification and how these produce pleasure for the female spectator, questions which are absent in Mulvey’s article on visual pleasure. Before addressing the male-directed All About Eve and the female-directed Desperately Seeking Susan, Stacey lays out three possibilities for female spectatorship: masculinization (Laura Mulvey), masochism (Raymond Bellour), and marginality (Mary Ann Doane). Finding all of these unsatisfying for most female viewers, she argues for “a more complex model of cinematic spectatorship,” one that separates “gender identification from sexuality.”⁵

In selecting All About Eve and Desperately Seeking Susan, Stacey claims that both works have “female protagonists whose desires and identifications move the narratives forward.”⁶ Further, All About Eve is of particular interest because “it is precisely about the pleasures and dangers of spectatorship for women. One of its central themes is the construction and reproduction of feminine identities, and the activity of looking is highlighted as an important part of these processes.”⁷

Stacey compares All About Eve with Desperately Seeking Susan, another film about a woman’s obsession, but one that does not result in punishment of the heroine. Like the character of the aspiring actress Eve (Anne Baxter) in the previous work, who wants to be another star like Margot (Bette Davis), Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), a suburban housewife, desires to become Susan. But despite the fact that Susan (Madonna) serves in the traditional function of “woman as spectacle,” Stacey feels that the crucial difference in this film is not sexual difference, but the difference between two women. Stacey points out how both films “tempt the woman spectator with the fictional fulfillment of becoming an ideal feminine other, while denying complete transformation by insisting upon differences between women.”⁸

The next essay, Judith Mayne’s “Female Narration, Women’s Cinema: Helke Sander’s The All-Round Reduced Personality/Redupers” (1981-82), picks up on some of the issues raised by Kaja Silverman in her essay on the dis-embodied female voice (Section Three). Here Mayne analyzes Sander’s attempt to define Edda, the film’s heroine, as the active, looking subject rather than as the object of the male gaze. She sees this attempt as connected with Edda’s work as a photographer and with the voice of the female narrator. As Edda and her coworkers set up a curtain on a platform at the Berlin Wall to look into East Berlin, they affect certain conditions of perception, not just what objects are seen, but how the viewer sees them. Mayne explains how Sander thus offers viewers the possibility of identifying with a woman who controls “the look” and with a female voice who controls our access to knowledge.

Mayne points out the various uses of the female voice in Redupers: (a) it personalizes the opening tracking shots of the city and describes the history of the women’s group; (b) it serves as a third-person narrator by introducing and summarizing scenes; (c) it creates a first-person voice by expressing fantasies and desires; (d) it becomes a quoting voice, referring to literary and cinematic sources; and (e) “perhaps most important, the narrator becomes, at the same time, a reader: the female voice performs two functions at once, thus taking the consolidation of ‘first person’ and ‘third person’ to another level, condensing the narrator within the text with the reader outside it.”⁹

Like Sander, Marleen Gorris of Holland is committed to a feminist film practice. Her 1982 film A Question of Silence stimulated animated controversy during its initial screenings, eliciting accusations of didacticism and prompting much provocative writing, among which is Mary C. Gentile’s “Feminist or Tendentious?: Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence” (1985). The film depicts the brutal murder of a male shopkeeper by four women, previously unknown to one another, who seemingly lack a motive.

Gentile notes that Gorris, like many feminist filmmakers, had an obvious investment in generating certain political interpretations for A Question of Silence. This contradicts Gentile’s belief that “feminism exists in the film reading, not the film text, and that a feminist film reading is one which seeks to hold contradictory perspectives in tension.”¹⁰ Her essay uses A Question of Silence to explore these two ways of responding to the film, especially how the work leaves a space for individual viewer response.

For Gentile, A Question of Silence functions as an oppositional film, meaning that it reacts against the status quo, in terms of both film content and film technique. She explains how this oppositional stance elicits a multiplicity of viewer responses, which works in tandem with the director’s intended meanings.

Gentile then offers an analysis of the film’s stratagems for promoting this diversity. These include: (a) the extremity of the narrative situation which raises questions about the filmmaker’s intent; (b) the narrative structure wherein each segment closes with several unanswered questions; (c) the denial of the shot/reverse shot paradigm which prevents viewers from identifying with certain characters; (d) the tendency to present the women in isolation, disconnected from one another, which pulls viewers in and out of the film; (e) the rejection of rationality, especially in the murder and courtroom scenes, which serves to expose patriarchal assumptions; (f) the stylized murder sequence which leaves viewers free to draw their own conclusions; and finally (g) the subversive laughter of the women which encourages viewers to reflect. In sum, Gentile feels Gorris achieves an uneasy balance, gaining our attention and involvement in the narrative, while at the same time, allowing us the freedom to make our own intellectual judgments. It is this dual consciousness and the tensions it produces (what she terms “Critical Subjectivity”) that constitutes a feminist film viewing.

The last two essays in this section deal with issues related to pornography and female sexuality, topics which have come to be hotly debated both within and outside of film studies, and have stimulated a good deal of writing.¹¹ Perhaps it was inevitable that after image studies and an interest in female spectatorship, feminist scholars would turn their attention to pornography. Clearly, if critics had noted the exploitation of women’s image in mainstream and most alternative cinema and had theorized on the alienation of women as spectators, then pornography represented the extreme of both conditions.

“Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World” (1983), by B. Ruby Rich, turns its attention to Bonnie Klein’s Not A Love Story, the first documentary to address the subject of pornography from a woman’s perspective. The film is influenced by the work of “Women Against Pornography” and the writings of Kathleen Barry, Susan Griffin, and Robin Morgan,¹² all of whom appear in the film.

For Rich, the documentary poses several problems. Rich views Not a Love Story as “a secret form of voyeurism disguised as outrage.” She finds it hardly surprising that the mass media, which thrives on explicit and latent sexual imagery, would accommodate this work, one she feels ultimately poses very little threat to male prerogative. Furthermore, Rich objects to the ways in which Klein has shot and edited the footage, placing the camera in the place of the male customer and thus doubly objectifying the film’s central figure, stripper Tracy Lee. As Rich points out, we are never privy to Lee’s point of view.

In the second part of the article, following her analysis of Not a Love Story as a latter day “religious parable” (or what she calls “conversion cinema”), Rich addresses the broader questions stimulated by the anti-porn debates, questions dealing with sex and violence, power relations between men and women, issues of class and race, the relationship between porn and advertising, and finally, women’s sexual expression—issues not dealt with in the documentary. She ends with a sense of dismay at the degree to which pornography has absorbed women’s attention and a plea that women now turn to the necessary and ground-breaking work of creating “alternative sexual discourses.”

The final selection, by filmmaker Bette Gordon, takes up the possibility of women controlling the gaze. In this respect, “Variety: The Pleasure in Looking” (1984) and her film of the same name can be seen as a direct response to Mulvey’s essay in Section One. Beginning with the assumption that “film plays on voyeuristic fantasy,” Gordon sets herself the task of exploring female fantasy and pleasure. In Variety she has reversed the rules of the game so that it is the woman who is positioned as voyeur and the man who becomes the object of “the look.”

Throughout the film, Christine, the film’s heroine who works as a ticket taker at a Times Square porn house, observes men and male activities. Like the articulation of her sexual fantasies which makes her boyfriend uncomfortable, her observation of men “looking” challenges a social taboo and thus constitutes a radial activity within the film.

Unlike Not a Love Story, there is no graphic depiction of sex in Variety. The purpose of Variety was to raise questions and explore issues such as the active and passive components of voyeurism, the relationship between fantasy and pleasure, and in particular how sexuality, along with fantasy and pleasure, are constructed in culture and therefore in cinema. For Gordon, pornography is just an extreme example of Hollywood cinema which exploits women by creating them as objects of male fantasy. In the end, it is the effect of pornography on Christine and Gordon’s efforts to make us “see” in a new way that form the major developments of the film.

As the final selection in this collection, Gordon’s essay, like all that precede it, encourages us to recognize the relationship between all representations of women and the socio-political structures in which women live. It speaks to the need for women to take up the means of production, to expose the sexual stratagems operative in contemporary society, and to recreate the world in their own image.

NOTES

1. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York: Columbia University Press (1986), p. 204.

2. Ibid., p. 211.

3. Florence Jacobowitz and Lori Spring, “Unspoken and Unsolved: Tell Me a Riddle,” CineAction!, no. 1 (Spring 1985), p. 15.

4. Ibid., p. 20.

5. Jackie Stacey, “Desperately Seeking Difference,” Screen 28, no. 1 (Winter 1987), p. 53.

6. Ibid., p. 54.

7. Ibid., p. 54.

8. Ibid., p. 61.

9. Judith Mayne, “Female Narration, Women’s Cinema,” New German Critique, nos. 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981-2), p. 166.

10. Mary C. Gentile, “Feminist or Tendentious? Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence,” in Film Feminisms: Theory and Practice, Wesport, CT: Greenwood (1985), p. 153.

11. The split between those women who actively campaigned against pornography and those women on the other side was reflected in two important conferences and the anthologies which resulted from these conferences. The first conference, organized by Women Against Pornography in the Media, was held in San Francisco in November, 1978, and was entitled “Feminist Perspectives on Pornography.” This resulted in the founding of the New York group, Women Against Pornography, the following year and the publication of Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, ed. Laura Lederer, New York: William Morrow (1980). The second conference was held at Barnard College in May, 1982, and was called “Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” This was followed by the publication of Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1984).

12. Among the important works that take and anti-porn stance, see Kathleen Barry’s Female Sexual Slavery, New York: New York University Press (1985); Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: Perigee (1981); and Susan Griffin’s Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature, New York: Harper and Row (1981). For books with a different perspective on pornography, see Angela Carter, Sadeian Woman And the Ideology of Pornogrpahy, New York: Pantheon (1978); Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, New York: Monthly Review Press (1983); Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship, ed. Caught Looking, Inc., 1986. Dist. Seattle, WA: Real Comet Press; For Adult Users Only, ed. Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1989); and Linda Williams, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy’ of the Visible, Berkeley: University of California Press (1989).