Afterword

As I stated in the introduction, one of my aims in writing this book was to explore issues in women’s cinema that have not been widely addressed. While I realize that the subtitle of my book—Feminism and Women’s Cinema—indicates a preoccupation with the concerns shared by women’s films with other films and with feminist theory, I nevertheless approached this project with the assumption that global definitions of women’s cinema, no matter how many qualifiers and disclaimers they provide, are usually quite limiting. Thus, I wanted to discuss very specific contexts for women’s cinema, with the understanding that these are not in any way exclusive categories. Certainly, I wanted to look at common ground—at how, say, Helke Sander’s representation of a women’s political community in Redupers would read in relation to Julie Dash’s exploration of a black feminist response to filmmaking, or how two filmmakers (Akerman and Ottinger) whose works are otherwise quite different nonetheless read authorship in relationship to lesbian desire, or how the appropriation of the “primitive” style of filmmaking can provide a point of departure to reread the relationship between three women filmmakers working in the French language. But I wanted to explore these connections in a way that would be more attentive to the interesting and compelling details that sometimes get lost when one is attempting to construct a panoptic survey of women’s cinema.

My interest in the screen as the ambivalent site of projection, for instance, began some years ago when I saw The Big Sleep as both a confirmation of and a challenge to feminist insights about the classical cinema. While Hawks’s film offered textbook-like demonstrations of the separation between the man who looks and the woman who is looked at, I kept returning to the scene where Harry Jones is killed and to the peculiar relationship between the two sisters, elements which did not seem so immediately readable or obvious. At about the same time, I saw Helke Sander’s Redupers, and I began to see a connection between the way the Berlin Wall and the billboards functioned in that film and the screen surface and its narrative implications in The Big Sleep. Put another way, what was beginning to coalesce in my mind was a relationship between women’s filmmaking and the classical Hollywood cinema based not so much on the dominant features of the latter but on its stubborn features, its own points of ambivalence.

Ambivalence is a term that appears frequently in this book to describe what is—despite my claims of nonuniversality—a feature of virtually all of the films discussed. While I am obviously drawn to ambivalent representations which encourage conversation and dialogue, I am aware too—as I have suggested in previous chapters—that ambivalence can become an easy abstraction, a value to be celebrated in its own right rather than examined and explored. There has been in recent years a tendency in film studies—in part as a response to the groundbreaking work of Laura Mulvey and others—to emphasize conflict and contradiction rather than hegemony and authority, particularly insofar as the classical Hollywood cinema is concerned. The desire to challenge monolithic constructions has sometimes led to a reading of every tension as a contradiction, every conflict as a symptom of patriarchy’s weak links. At the same time, the very terms for such critical oppositions (either you see Hollywood as a monolith or you don’t) can speak to a rigid dualism.

Such dualism is much harder to shake than one might think. In the discussion of the “primitive” in women’s films (chapter six), for example, I found myself on more than one occasion wanting to find proof, incontrovertible evidence, that the white, Western filmmakers discussed either do or do not replicate the colonial appropriation of “primitive” cultures. And when I began writing on Trinh’s and Jayamanne’s films, I hoped initially for reformulations which would make clear and visible the dividing line between what is complicit with white, patriarchal definitions of the subject and what is not. Their films are reformulations, certainly, but ones that refuse such secure positions of knowledge and authority. Indeed, resistance to easy categorization inspires all the women’s films discussed in this book, but that does not mean that an engagement with the ambivalence in theoretical terms is any easier than it is in visual or narrative ones.

In any case, my own desire for a “local” analysis of films by women notwithstanding, it has come as something of a relief to discover, during the writing of this book, that the cinematic topics at hand are not so local—or narrow, depending upon your point of view—after all. I knew there were plenty of lesbian films (however one wishes to define the term) which had been discussed rarely, if at all, in feminist writing; but the particular contours of lesbian authorship in Akerman’s and Ottinger’s films initially seemed to me nonetheless to constitute a fairly limited category of films. But in the course of writing the book, I discovered other films—such as Sheila McLaughlin’s She Must Be Seeing Things (1987) or Léa Pool’s La Femme de l’Hôtel (A Woman in Transit [1984]) and Anne Trister (1986)—in which lesbian authorship was central in ways quite compatible with Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return. My point is that reading what initially appears to be an “atypical” or “unusual” strategy can often lead to questioning the very categories that made you define the strategy as atypical in the first place.

By way of conclusion, then, I would like to turn to a film which is an appropriate epilogue to this book, since as felicitous coincidence would have it, it is preoccupied with the three areas of inquiry—the screen, lesbian authorship, and “primitive” narration—that give this book its structure. Midi Onodera’s Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax) (1985) is a short (30 minutes) film, divided into three sections, each concerned with a different configuration of sexual desire and language. A split screen is used throughout, so that the two players in every scene are divided from each other. In the first section, two women, while waiting for (or just having finished) dinner in a Japanese restaurant, discuss whether or not they will have a sexual relationship. In the second section, shot from a high angle, two men have sex with each other in a public restroom. And in the final section, a man and a woman engage in phone sex. The use of the split screen creates a wide-angle effect, since the top and bottom of the frame are masked, and the two screens appear “projected” against a black background, with a dividing line between them.

The relationship between the two screens in each section acquires the contours of simultaneous connection and separation. In this way, Onodera’s use of the screen is quite close to how the screen functions in Redupers, Illusions, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, and The Man Who Envied Women, evoking, as in those films, a figure of permeability and division at the same time. In each of those films, the screen becomes a site of tension, and this occurs in Onodera’s film by the doubling of the screens, and by the relationship between the two edges that never quite touch. In the first section of the film, one of the two women is portrayed by Onodera herself. She is both the “experienced” lesbian discussing the possibility of an intimate relationship with a woman she had considered “essentially straight,” and an Asian-Canadian having dinner in one of the most popularized Western cliches of Asia, a restaurant. In other words, she appears to occupy a position of some authority, but like Akerman in Je tu il elle and Ottinger in Ticket of No Return, Onodera defines authorship so as to expose its fictions as well as its desires.

Figure 36. Midi Onodera’s Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax) (Women Make Movies)

For the position that Onodera occupies, on the right side of the screen, is taken up by a gay man engaging in anonymous sex in the next section, and a woman offering phone sex (for sale, one assumes) in the last part of the film. Given the extent to which anonymity and sex for sale are defined, in much lesbian writing, as symptomatic of either male sexuality or heterosexuality, the affiliation between Onodera’s position and those of the man and the woman in the subsequent scenes brackets any simple notion of lesbian desire as isolated from other forms of sexual desire. At the same time, of course, the lesbian scene is different from the other two, with more emphasis on conversation and the erotics of the look. Onodera’s ambiguous role in the film, as both author and actor, and as both like and unlike gay men and heterosexuals, thus evokes the lesbian irony central to Akerman’s and Ottinger’s films, with the lesbian author defined as both complicit in and resistant to the sexual fictions of patriarchal culture.

Ten Cents a Dance, like the films discussed in the previous chapter, cites the frontality and the immobile camera of the early cinema. The use of real time in each of the individual segments is somewhat evocative of Akerman’s use of the “primitive” film style in Jeanne Dielman, in the sense that each scene in Onodera’s film captures a sense both of pleasurable duration and of occasionally uncomfortable pauses. Whereas all of the films discussed in chapter six cite “primitive” style as it relates to the earliest years of motion picture history, Ten Cents a Dance goes even further back in cinema history by citing one of the visual “predecessors” of the moving pictures—the stereoscope. The stereoscope card is a doubled image which, when viewed at the proper distance, creates the illusion of depth. In Onodera’s film, however, the two views are juxtaposed to disrupt the seamless fit between the participants in sexual dramas.

I have spoken throughout this book of the threshold, of the attention drawn to relations between women on either side of the keyhole, as both subjects and objects of the look. The visual and narrative structure of Onodera’s film articulates beautifully the stubborn dualities to which I just referred, acknowledging the lure of symmetrical halves, yet refusing to ground itself in any easy oppositions. The two women in the first section of Ten Cents a Dance look at each other, but they also avoid each other’s gaze; they talk, but they experience long periods of awkward silence, too. Like the films discussed in this book, Ten Cents a Dance dramatizes both the possibilities and the difficulties of the cinema in relationship to women’s conversations, both with each other and with the “other”—however that other is construed.

The “screen tests” performed in Redupers, Illusions, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, and The Man Who Envied Women affirm and question simultaneously the possibilities for communities of women. The communities thus examined are diverse—in Illusions, it is a community of women based on a common exclusion from white, male culture, certainly, but it is also the shared community and spectatorship possible amongst black women; in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing it is a community where art is celebrated as self-expression, and sexual marginality defined as a position of simultaneous investment and distance. In Redupers and The Man Who Envied Women, artistic communities make possible a critical dialogue about alternatives and the risks of recuperation.

Lesbian authorship, as defined in Arzner’s films, as well as in Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return, explores relations between women in erotic terms and—to paraphrase the title of Akerman’s film—the possibility of a “je/tu” relationship from which “il” has not exactly been banished, but certainly has been displaced from center stage. The reconceptualization of the “primitive” in films ranging from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage and Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon engages with the definitions of “woman” and “women” (to again borrow Teresa de Lauretis’s formulation) insofar as they determine, and are shaped in their turn by, cultural definitions of the “other.” In the films discussed in this book, thresholds of representation are defined in various ways, and the kinds of relationships established between women are both complex and complicated. Yet all of these films affirm the necessity and the vitality of conversations between women—conversations where impossible ideals of “simple” communication and impermeable boundaries of rigid isolation are both put to the test, overlapping yet separate like the edges of the screens that both divide and connect the two women in Ten Cents a Dance.