College Literature

It is a truism that the majority of films, even those directed by and/or created for women, are troubling in their representation of women. Ever since Laura Mulvey brought our attention to the problematic of the gaze, critics, filmmakers, and film viewers alike have grappled with the difficulties of representing women on screen without serving them up for objectification. [End Page 234] Anyone who has seen a movie recently knows that most films made today continue to aestheticize and eroticize the female body—the parade of actresses’ bodies as objects to admire, desire, scrutinize, and/or envy, never ceases. Hence, it is of great importance that Geetha Ramanathan examines an array of feminist filmmakers from a variety of cultural, racial, and national traditions in order to examine how feminist visions can disrupt the dominant visual and aural gender hierarchies.

Ramanathan places much emphasis on the concept of the gaze and of vision, and how feminist filmmakers deliberately work to change the focus of that objectifying point of view. Moving beyond Mulvey and other critics who also mark as deeply flawed the visualization of women on film, including Mary Ann Doane, Jane Gaines, and Ann Kaplan, Ramanathan presents the reader with a culturally nuanced study of the difficulties inherent in representing women on screen. While these scholars share Ramanathan’s quest to find female subjectivity and authority within cinema, they define their studies in terms of national or regional studies. Ramanathan, on the other hand, refuses to confine herself to a single national or racial lens with which to view feminist work. Instead, she insists that feminism—that is “the impression of feminist authority” (3)—can be a multinational, transcultural way in which to work visually. For her, feminist auteurship is an ideological standpoint that can take many trajectories. A feminist approach to filmmaking, she contends, while not a single essentialist vision, works with three crucial elements: “the effort to enhance feminist authority; visual, aural and narrative restructurings that occur because of the inhibitions placed on the cinematic representation of women; and the aesthetics that emerge as a consequence of a shift in the strategies of representation” (1). Through close readings of a well-chosen collection of films, as well as a broad knowledge of film criticism and theory, she persuasively demonstrates how directors from the U.S., Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Asia strive to achieve feminist auteurship; the filmmakers she examines are committed to rethinking the way women are envisioned in film, and their strategies diverge widely.

In her first chapter, Ramanathan discusses the ways in which women are aestheticized, rendered into objects for others to look at, and how feminist filmmakers like Lizzie Borden, Aparna Sen, and Nelly Kaplan attempt to deaestheticize their female protagonists through a range of canny techniques. For example, Ramanathan notes how Borden constructs a feminist vision out of Working Girls, including a sequence of shots that depict one of the prostitute protagonists working with a client framed within a mirror. Here, she asserts, the camera obliquely sanctions “the female gaze’s narrative and interpretive function by framing Molly’s look as calm, unconcerned—seldom gazing into the man’s eyes or looking at his body, but surveying the [End Page 235] entire frame to check that her control of the session is not shaken” (19). Moreover, she argues, Borden’s characters “name patriarchy for what it is—pimpery” (20). Close readings like this helpfully illustrate some of the forms of resistance feminist auteurship can achieve.

Other chapters delve into the interplay of race, gender, and nationality; the quest for genres that can accommodate women heroines; aurality and the representation of women; and the possibility of depicting female desire. In chapter two Ramanathan explores the contributions of feminist filmmakers like Julie Dash (Illusions) and Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), who, she asserts, ask “us to acknowledge black women’s presence” and authority (58). Working with “different kinds of looking,” such as destabilizing the racial knowledge of the viewer, and by setting up viewer expectations only to topple them, feminist auteurs make the political visible and contest the ways in which women of color have been filmed (75–76).

A particularly interesting chapter of Ramanathan’s work is devoted to genre, as genre films have typically excluded or marginalized women. Women rarely get to be the heroes of buddy films, westerns, or thrillers, for example; the “woman’s film,” which usually replicates stereotypical ideas about women, is the only “genre” in which women always star. Thus Ramanathan’s search for films that feature women heroines, especially outside of classic melodrama or domestic plots, is crucial. In this section she explores feminist auteurs ranging from Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust this time) to Sarah Maldoror (Sambizanga), and contends that these directors’ works foreground “what is at stake for women in the narration of histories of migration, liberation and nation formation” (79). Dash’s film, for instance, centers on a group of black Gullah women, creating a specific black female aesthetic that provides black women with the power to narrate their own history. Ramanathan usefully situates this film as a feminist epic, able to restore the past for women (88), but she also looks at the reworking of historical vision, reportage, and mythmaking by feminist auteurs in this section.

Overall, Ramanathan acknowledges that thematic revisions are not enough to create feminist authority in film. She convincingly asserts that the issue of the representation of women must be addressed by each auteur as a creative visionary—hence her focus on auteurship—and that aesthetics, sound, and narrative are all ways in which feminist filmmakers resist the heavy burdens placed on women by traditional (read patriarchal) forms of filmmaking. Admittedly, she does not address deeply some recent trends in feminist criticism, such as the performance of gender. However, she explicitly avoids essentializing womanhood and feminism by suggesting that there are multiple ways to inhabit female authority, and that each auteur does so uniquely. This is a middle-of-the road position in terms of feminist theory [End Page 236] and politics, but it adequately serves the purpose of this book and allows for compelling comparative film criticism.

There are two minor but notable problems with this book. First, as with other works of film criticism, the size, quality, and use of film stills can be difficult to read. Some of the images, transferred from color into black and white, are but an inch in height, which renders their usefulness questionable, and many, regardless of their size, don’t necessarily illustrate the complexity of Ramanathan’s arguments. Second, some film descriptions could be more coherent; Ramanathan tends to allow her readings of the films to dictate how she narrates them (i.e., not necessarily within the films’ internal chronologies), and for those readers who have not seen every film she discusses, this can be confusing.

These two points aside, Ramanathan’s contribution to feminist film criticism is significant. Her serious commitment to synthesizing the elements that create feminist auteurship on an international level is admirable, and should pave the way for further scholarship in this area. [End Page 237]