Introduction

This book examines how contemporary women filmmakers working in North America, Europe, and Australia have attempted to reinvent cinema as a narrative and visual form. The films and filmmakers to be discussed in subsequent chapters cover a fairly wide range, but share nonetheless a preoccupation with the devices of cinematic narration as central to a reinvention of film and to the representation of female desire and female points of view. Most of the films have had limited audiences, and so raise that nagging question of feminist “accessibility.” While I do not presume to make difficult films easy, I do attempt to situate films in contexts that engage with different aspects of feminism and feminist theory, contexts therefore which seem to me considerably more open to discussion than some of the theoretical agendas that have defined feminist film studies. Although for some feminist literary critics, women’s writing is anything written by a woman, women’s writing cannot be so easily or so readily defined. Given the extent to which cinematic representation is defined by a wide range of practices, and by the input of a number of “writers,” it is even more difficult to make the assertion that women’s cinema is any and all films made by a woman.

From the outset, there is an ambiguity in the phrase “women’s cinema.” The term has acquired two different meanings which to some minds are diametrically opposed. The examples of “women’s cinema” to be discussed in this book have redefined or challenged some of the most basic and fundamental links between cinema and patriarchy. To use Adrienne Rich’s phrase, which has been cited so often in the context of women’s cinema, these films are all engaged in a “re-vision” of the institutions of the cinema.¹ I assume from the outset that the exploration of the kind I want to undertake here must engage with the complex and often contradictory connotations that have arisen from the juxtaposition of “women” and “cinema.” First, women’s cinema refers to films made by women, and by women directors for the most part (as opposed, say, to screenwriters or actresses). These directors range from classical Hollywood directors such as Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino to their more recent heirs, including Claudia Weill (Girlfriends) and Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High); and from directors whom many feminists would just as soon forget, such as Leni Riefenstahl or Lina Wertmüller, to other contemporary directors concerned directly and consciously with female modes of expression, such as Chantal Akerman and Helke Sander. They range as well from such independent documentary filmmakers as Connie Fields (Rosie the Riveter) and Michelle Parkerson (Stormé), to more experimental independents attempting to reconcile feminist politics and avant-garde form, including Michelle Citron and Sally Potter. To attempt to account for the wide diversity of films represented in even this simple definition of “women’s cinema” is a gigantic task in and of itself.

The term women’s cinema, or more precisely, the woman’s film, has acquired another meaning, referring to a Hollywood product designed to appeal to a specifically female audience. Such films, popular throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, were usually melodramatic in tone and full of high-pitched emotion, from which came the pejorative title “the weepies.” Indeed, Molly Haskell characterizes the “woman’s film” as the “most untouchable of film genres.” Here is how Haskell defines the genre:

At the lowest level, as soap opera, the “woman’s film” fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The weepies are founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-pity and tears, to accept, rather than reject, their lot. That there should be a need and an audience for such an opiate suggests an unholy amount of real misery.²

As Mary Ann Doane has argued, the “woman’s film” identifies female pleasure in the cinema as complicit with masochistic constructions of femininity. Hence, a typical theme of the woman’s film, in Doane’s category of the maternal melodrama, is obsessive sacrifice for one’s children at the expense of self.³ At the conclusion of Stella Dallas (1937), for instance, Barbara Stanwyck is a pathetic spectator who peeks longingly through the window of an elegant mansion where her daughter’s wedding is taking place.⁴ Yet another typical theme of the woman’s film—in the category of what Doane calls “medical discourse”—is affliction.⁵ In Magnificent Obsession (1954), for example, Jane Wyman is stricken blind and is nursed back to emotional and physical health by her doctor, Rock Hudson.

Doane’s analysis assumes that if the woman’s film is indeed an exemplary form insofar as female subjectivity and female spectatorship are concerned, it is because the woman’s film demonstrates, again and again, the impossible position of female desire vis-à-vis the cinema—impossible, that is, in the terms of voyeurism and fetishism so central to cinematic pleasure in the first place. That the strategies of the woman’s film should be so evocative of psychoanalytic readings of femininity is no more of a surprising coincidence than the historical overlap so often claimed as the privileged bond between cinema and psychoanalysis. For Doane, much of the interest of the woman’s film has to do with its contradictory explorations of female desire:

because the woman’s film insistently and sometimes obsessively attempts to trace the contours of female subjectivity and desire within the traditional forms and conventions of Hollywood narrative—forms which cannot sustain such an exploration—certain contradictions within patriarchal ideology become apparent. . . . The formal resistances to the elaboration of female subjectivity produce perturbations and contradictions within the narrative economy.⁶

The contradictions which engage Doane’s attention are not contradictions within the classical Hollywood cinema, but rather contradictions that erupt when a form made to the measure of male desire and male subjectivity attempts to engage with other desires and other subjectivities. The process is not unlike the attempt, within psychoanalytic discourse, to account for female identity in the form of an analogy to male identity, in what Luce Irigaray would describe as the “old dream of symmetry.”⁷ The attempt usually fails but—more interesting for feminist analysis—reveals many of the large gaps between male and female subjectivity otherwise obscured. Doane’s account of the classical Hollywood cinema as the regime of the male psyche stands in sharp contrast to the views of other feminist critics, for whom the classical Hollywood cinema does not necessarily stand in rigid resistance to female subjectivity. Consider, in this regard, Tania Modleski’s argument that the films of Alfred Hitchcock, who has served as a key protagonist (or villain, if you will) in the evolution of feminist film theory, are contradictory texts in which woman’s desire figures centrally; or Lucy Fischer’s reading of the relationship between women filmmakers and film tradition as a productive intertextual dialogue.⁸

Doane does, however, identify a hypothetical relationship between the woman’s film and what I presume she would identify as women’s films: “These stress points and perturbations can then, hopefully, be activated as a kind of lever to facilitate the production of a desiring subjectivity for the woman—in another cinematic practice.”⁹ I read Doane’s statement as an indication that the only necessary relationship between the woman’s film and women’s films will be a purely theoretical one; that is, that the strategies of those women’s films which articulate other forms of cinematic pleasure—nonvoyeuristic and nonfetishistic, one assumes—might take as their point of departure a critical reading of the classical Hollywood cinema, but a reading that is detached, somewhat distant. Put another way, the “other cinematic practice” to which Doane refers suggests that the only connection between it and the classical Hollywood cinema will be one of distanced speculation.

While Doane’s exploration of the woman’s film is remarkably sophisticated and complex, her designation of the status of the classical Hollywood cinema suggests a rigid opposition between Hollywood films, made by men for female consumption, and films by women. Few contemporary critics would use the language of authenticity to describe this opposition (e.g., the inauthentic portrayals of the classical cinema versus the authentic portrayals by women directors), but there is something of that rigid opposition that lingers on in feminist accounts of the classical cinema.

Even while a critic such as Molly Haskell condemns the facile pathos of the woman’s film, she wonders why it is that emotional response should be so devalued as to be relegated to an “inferior” genre.¹⁰ I understand the necessity, or desire, to identify the classical Hollywood cinema in terms of its massive strategies for disavowal of the very fact of female difference, and its perpetuation of patriarchal definitions of masculinity and femininity, but I do not think that feminist discussion of the works of women filmmakers is well served by continued insistence upon an absolute division between the classical Hollywood cinema and its alternatives. To begin with, such a division places a kind of utopian burden upon alternative filmmakers, to such an extent that any traces of dominant cinematic practice—lurking fetishism or shades of voyeurism, to be precise—will be seen as suspect. Given the institutionalized ways in which the cinema functions, and how individuals are acculturated to respond to the cinema, it is difficult to know just to what extent a truly alternative cinematic practice is possible. This raises a larger question, and that is the extent to which voyeurism and fetishism, as they have been defined within psychoanalytically inspired film studies (feminist or otherwise), are synonymous with the cinema. It is not always clear when voyeurism and fetishism define the cinema in an absolute sense, and when they define a specific kind of film viewing, within a specific historical and cultural context.

Given the historical parallels so often commented upon between the advent of the cinema and the advent of psychoanalysis, it would seem as though the cinema had some manifest destiny to embody voyeurism and fetishism—and, needless to say, to embody them for the ideal male subject of culture theorized by psychoanalysis. For instance, noting that “dominant film practice orchestrates the burdensome transfer of male lack to the female subject by projecting the projections upon which our current notions of gender depend,” Kaja Silverman says that “the displacement of losses suffered by the male subject onto the female subject is by no means a necessary extension of the screening situation. Rather, it is the effect of a specific scopic and narratological regime.”¹¹ This specific “scopic and narratological regime” notwithstanding, it is not always clear just where the terms used to describe the classical Hollywood cinema shade into a description of the cinema as a whole.

Now one could argue that precisely what separates the “woman’s film”—where figures of women serve the “scopic and narratological regime” to which Silverman refers—from “women’s cinema”—where that regime is problematized or otherwise put into question—is the attempt to metaphorize the cinema in other ways. That is, women’s cinema may well be characterized, not necessarily by an outright rejection of voyeuristic and fetishistic desires but by the recasting of those desires so as to open up other possible pleasures for film viewing. It is somewhat ironic, in this context, that there has been more extensive work in feminist literary criticism and theory on female investment in voyeurism and fetishism—from Joan DeJean’s hypotheses on female voyeurism in Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves and Nancy K. Miller’s analysis of the “performances of the gaze” in Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, to Naomi Schor’s exploration of female fetishism in the writings of George Sand.¹² Of course, in these literary works (all of which predate not only the advent of cinema but the advent of psychoanalysis as well), voyeurism and fetishism are not convergent with the pleasures of the text to the extent that they are in the cinema.

I prefer to retain the term women’s cinema in an ambiguous sense, to suggest simultaneously the enormous impact of Hollywood’s versions of femininity upon our expectations of the cinema, and the representation of other kinds of female desire. The discovery in works by women filmmakers of other ways to define the pleasures of the cinema entails by extension a redefinition of the characteristics of “dominant” film viewing as well. While I have suggested that the very phrase “women’s cinema” is expressive of this ambiguity, this is not exactly or altogether the case, for it is the singular—the woman’s film—which is used more frequently to refer to the Hollywood product, and the plural—women’s films—to refer to works by women directors.

The difference in number is not inconsequential, for the “woman’s” film does indeed presume a unified set of traits to be ascribed to appropriately feminine behavior or subjectivity, while “women’s” films articulate a wide range of perspectives and points of view. Nonetheless, the phrase “women’s films” can also be used to suggest a kind of uniformity which, while obviously different from the femininity legitimated by the classical cinema, is rigid in its own way. I am aware, in other words, that the ambiguous sense that I want to attribute to the term women’s cinema can backfire in problematic ways; that the plurality of perspectives can be a subterfuge, beneath which there remains the specter of femininity, “woman” with a feminist inflection perhaps, but no less problematic for that. The shift from singular to plural is not necessarily an assurance of an emancipatory diversity.

The concealment of singular and plural forms within the phrase “women’s cinema,” with their attendant and interwoven implications of singularity as an imposed affinity and plurality as diversity, coincides with what Teresa de Lauretis, in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, describes as the informing tension of virtually all feminist intervention, the opposition between “woman” and “women”:

Represented as the negative term of sexual differentiation, spectacle-fetish or specular image, in any case ob-scene, woman is constituted as the ground of representation, the looking-glass held up to man. But as historical individual, the female viewer is also positioned in the films of classical cinema as spectator-subject; she is thus doubly bound to that very representation which calls on her directly, engages her desire, elicits her pleasure, frames her identification, and makes her complicit in the production of (her) woman-ness. On this crucial relation of woman as constituted in representation to women as historical subjects depend at once the development of a feminist critique and the possibility of a materialist, semiotic theory of culture. For the feminist critique is a critique of culture at once from within and from without, in the same way in which women are both in the cinema as representation and outside the cinema as subjects of practices.¹³

De Lauretis’s insistence on feminist critique as both “within” and “without” a culture suggests not only the difficulty but also the critical impasse of attempting to establish a rigid opposition between the dominant patriarchal culture (in cinematic terms, the classical Hollywood cinema) and alternatives to it. There is an obvious need for feminism to be able to analyze the distortion and lies of patriarchal culture; as Linda Gordon reminds us, because there are no objective truths, that does not mean there are no objective lies.¹⁴ But the notion of “truth” is decidely more problematic. For as de Lauretis’s strategic posing of the tension between “woman” and “women” suggests, the perspectives of women as “real historical subjects” may not be reducible to the images of woman projected within patriarchy (if this were the case, there would be no possibility for feminist intervention), but they are not absolutely separable or distinguishable from them, either.

Much of what is commonly referred to as “antiessentialism” within feminist theory has insisted, precisely, that claims for a unique “women’s” perspective are in fact nothing more than recuperations of “woman,” the feminine as it is defined by patriarchy. Antiessentialism has not, however, been particularly useful in articulating just what the valid terms for the claims of a women’s perspective might be, for the only female position that seems acceptably antiessentialist is one that punctures the illusions of patriarchal visions from the vantage point, not of “women” but of negativity and refusal to assume a gendered identity, the assumption being of course that any gendered identity within patriarchy accepts the terms of patriarchy. Ironically, the antiessentialist position assumes essentialism—the belief that there is a genuine female identity that has been repressed by patriarchy and which emerges through feminist practice—to be a position of noncontradiction. Yet antiessentialism, particularly in some of its current inevitably popularized and schematic forms, avoids what surely is, following de Lauretis, the contradiction most central to feminist inquiry, by bracketing the category of “women” altogether.

My concern in this book is with those works by women filmmakers in which the tensions between “woman” and “women” are articulated in ways that suggest other definitions of cinematic pleasure and desire. While feminist film theory and criticism are obviously informed and influenced by cinematic practices, I do not wish to conflate the works of women filmmakers with the project of a transhistorical and transcultural feminist aesthetics of the cinema. Indeed, one of the problems posed within contemporary feminist work on film is the inability to account for works that do not fit neatly within the parameters of theory. I am claiming, for a diverse group of women filmmakers, an activity that may not be avowedly feminist on their part, but which is part of the feminist rewriting of film history, and of cinematic pleasure and identification.

This book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on an area that has been, in feminist film theory and criticism, both extremely important and extremely difficult insofar as the analysis of women’s films is concerned. Each of the three parts is further divided into two chapters, the first of which explores a particular context for the issue at hand, while the second examines a group of women’s films. Each of the three sections of the book brings together a familiar topic in feminist film theory with one that is distinctly less familiar. I begin in chapter one (“Spectacle, Narrative, and Screen”) with the relationship between narrative and spectacle as it has been theorized, following Laura Mulvey, as one of the most basic conditions of sexual hierarchy in the classical cinema. But I focus on a frequently ignored element of cinematic representation—the screen—which is interestingly and peculiarly resistant to the hierarchy of male subject and female object. I examine a series of more or less “dominant” films in which the screen surface plays a central figural role, films in which more ambivalence is operative than one would suspect, given the relatively monolithic character ascribed to the classical Hollywood cinema by recent analyses. Chapter two, “Screen Tests,” examines a group of films by women directors (Helke Sander’s Redupers, Julie Dash’s Illusions, Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, and Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women) in which the screen also emerges as a dominant trope, and around which questions of female desire, community, and alternative institutions crystallize.

In chapter three, “Female Authorship Reconsidered,” I move to a reassessment of female authorship in the cinema, focusing in particular on the example of Dorothy Arzner as one of the most important discoveries and case studies for feminist film studies. The “less familiar” topic in this section of the book is lesbianism—a subject of obvious interest for any theory of female agency and desire in the cinema, yet one that has received little sustained critical attention in film studies. I suggest that female authorship in Arzner’s work is marked by an ironic lesbian signature, and in chapter four (“Mistresses of Discrepancy”) I examine two contemporary films which extend the implications of the relationship between female authorship and an erotics of female desire: Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle and Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return.

Chapter five, “ ‘Primitive’ Narration,” examines the emerging codes of the early, or “primitive,” cinema, particularly insofar as gender is concerned, both in the films themselves and in critical literature on the era. A fair number of women filmmakers have appropriated modes of representation associated with the early cinema, and in chapter six I examine how this appropriation of “primitive” representation engages with gender, in terms of both the female body and traditional female activities, and with cultural definitions of the “primitive other.” Although in chapter five I discuss in detail the connotations of the word primitive as they apply to the study of early cinema, let me say a few words about the term here: In the context of film history, the word primitive is used interchangeably with early. But the women’s films I examine in chapter six are concerned with the “primitive” in several senses, including the most offensive colonial meanings of the term. Thus I could not simply substitute early for primitive. What I do throughout, however, is follow the example of Trinh T. Minh-ha (one of whose films is discussed in chapter six), and use the term primitive in as foregrounded a way as possible, with quotation marks or with qualifiers, in order to call attention to its dubious status.¹⁵

Films discussed in chapter six (“Revising the ‘Primitive’ ”) include Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet, Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage, and Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon. While extensive attention has been paid to the representation of the female body in film, considerably less attention has been devoted to how other definitions of “otherness” shape and affect women’s cinema, and the exploration of the several meanings of the term primitive is extremely provocative in this regard.

The title of my book, The Woman at the Keyhole, takes as its most obvious point of reference those early films (several of which are discussed in detail in chapter five) in which mostly men, but occasionally women, peek through keyholes, offering bold demonstrations of the voyeuristic pleasure that has been central to virtually every contemporary theory of the cinema. While I have nothing against women peeking through metaphoric keyholes, I intend the figure of the woman at the keyhole to be as ambiguous—hopefully, productively so—as the phrase “women’s cinema.” For when we imagine a “woman” and a “keyhole,” it is usually a woman on the other side of the keyhole, as the proverbial object of the look, that comes to mind. I am not necessarily reversing the conventional image, but rather asking—as do, implicitly or explicitly, all of the women filmmakers whose works I discuss in subsequent chapters—what happens when women are situated on both sides of the keyhole. The question is not only who or what is on either side of the keyhole, but also what lies between them, what constitutes the threshold that makes representation possible. For in all of the films discussed in this book, the threshold between subject and object, between inside and outside, between virtually all opposing pairs, is a central figure for the reinvention of cinematic narrative.

When I first began working on women’s cinema some years ago, it seemed to me fairly obvious that the metaphor of the woman at the keyhole was an entirely appropriate way to represent the relationship of the woman director to the cinema. Now, I am not so sure—not on account of any deep suspicion on my part concerning the pleasures of the eye, but rather because, ambiguity notwithstanding, single tropes have a habit of hardening into abstractions. If I retain the image of the woman at the keyhole, then, it is not to argue, in the fashion that has been popular in some feminist writing, that women filmmakers should appropriate a cinematic “gaze” that up until now has belonged to men. There is a considerable and impressive body of women’s films that establish frames of vision—with keyholes or otherwise—which depart significantly from both the dominant models of classical cinema and the theoretical cliches of film theory. I make no claims to exhaustiveness in this study, and I certainly do not propose the categories of films examined here as exclusive ones. All of the films discussed in subsequent chapters are works that I have found challenging, moving, beautiful, and even on occasion inspiring. But most important, they are films which stretch the limits of feminist theory and criticism.