Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms
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Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822376019 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Women's Cinema, World Cinema
Projecting Contemporary Feminisms
By Patricia White
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7601-9
CHAPTER 1
TO EACH HER OWN CINEMA
World Cinema and the Woman Cineaste
The international film festival circuit has taken on unprecedented significance within world cinema in recent decades, updating the traditional concepts of art and auteur while playing an important geopolitical and economic role within contemporary audiovisual culture. This network, Thomas Elsaesser writes, "has globalized itself, and in the process has created not only a self-sustaining, highly self-referential world for art cinema, the independent cinema and the documentary film, but [also] a sort of 'alternative' to the Hollywood studio system in its post-Fordist phase." Women directors are better represented within this world than in the U.S. commercial sector, and which women are participating has changed over this period, with contributions by women from the Global South increasing notably in the 2000s. Within this circuit, the elite European film festivals established around World War II still confer the most prestige, even as the network has meaningfully diversified. Although inclusion of women directors in competition at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin is still deficient, these events have played an important role in the emergence of women's voices from outside Europe in the present-day sector that Rosalind Gault and Karl Schoonover refer to as global art cinema.
As Marijke de Valck reminds us in her book-length study of film festivals, "dominant labels such as 'art' and 'auteur' should ... not be regarded as intrinsic qualities of European film culture, but, instead, treated as part of the strategic discourse of the international film festival as such." This chapter looks at redefinitions of these labels along lines of gender and nation. An analysis of Jane Campion's career involvement with Cannes reveals the contradictory positioning of the figure of the woman cineaste within art cinema and its hierarchies. Whether celebrated or marginalized, Campion has been confined by a discourse of uniqueness.
In Campion's wake, directors Lucrecia Martel and Samira Makhmalbaf have risen to fame through exposure at Cannes and other A-list film festivals. I argue that these talented directors reflect on their own position by problematizing the figure of the exceptional woman in their work. Representing the once considered peripheral but currently deemed prestigious national film cultures of Argentina and Iran, these two women elaborate, in their personae and in the films I analyze, a critique of the Eurocentric construction of Woman that subtends art cinema traditions. But neither director simply replaces this construction with a national or subaltern female subject. Martel deconstructs the aestheticized figure of Woman while insisting on questions of ethics and authorial desire, and Makhmalbaf creates a heroine who is a cipher for ideas of democratic agency and aesthetic autonomy. This reflexivity is not an end in itself; it thematizes geopolitical distributions of power and status that are further illuminated through attention to the films' production and reception contexts. Campion, Martel, and Makhmalbaf: these artists illustrate how women's cinema and world cinema intersect and define each other over two generations within the traveling, taste-making, flexible mediascape constituted by the film festival circuit and consecrated by Cannes.
Jane Campion's Cannes Connections
In 2007 the Cannes Film Festival celebrated its sixtieth anniversary with an omnibus film produced by festival president Gilles Jacob. Jacob, affectionately known as Citizen Cannes, organized the festival tribute by inviting thirty-five filmmakers to make three-minute films around a common theme, officially phrased and rendered in slightly off English on the website as "their current state of mind as inspired by the motion picture theater." The contributions to Chacun son cinéma: Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s'éteint et que le film commence / To Each His Own Cinema are interpellated by this project title as auteurist and cinephilic (fig. 1.1). Asked to bridge the position of filmmaker and audience member, closing a gap while preserving an auratic distance, each participant pays tribute to the festival in the persona of the cineaste, a French term for both "a devotee of cinema" and "a person involved in filmmaking." To Each His Own Cinema also lives up to its (English) title in its gender politics; the omnibus film includes just one woman director—Jane Campion, whose privileged relation to the festival is signified by her status as the only woman to have won its top prize, the Palme d'Or, for The Piano in 1993.
This gross imbalance in gender representation among the tribute film's participants did not escape press attention. Kira Cochrane, writing online for the U.K. Guardian, reports, "A spokeswoman for the film confirmed that the line-up had depended on who had the time to contribute, but couldn't say which other women, if any, had actually been approached." While it would be nice to think that women directors are that busy, it is difficult to believe that the final selection was the result of a significant number of them having declined the invitation. Even Campion's agreement to participate, as we shall see, was a somewhat qualified one.
For those who attend to the statistics on films by women directors selected for prestigious competitive festivals like Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, it is not particularly surprising that this high-profile lineup features just one woman. In the main competition at Cannes the same year (2007), three out of twenty-one features (14 percent) had a woman director or codirector, a relatively good showing. But closing out the decade, 2010, the year of Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar for Best Director, was a shutout for women directors in the main competition at Cannes. Just as the failure of the anticipated "Bigelow bump" to materialize angered feminists in the U.S. context, so too did the Cannes shutout fuel advocacy for women directors in the elite festival sector. Not always acknowledged in these campaigns, but key to the momentum of the movement, is the fact that more and younger women from more places outside the United States and Europe are directing feature films for festival consideration. The backward-looking sixtieth anniversary project thus brings into sharp focus not only the issue of equity, but also the discursive, historical, and material construction of the auteur. Film genius, of the kind that a Cannes anniversary calls forth, is presumptively male.
Who Counts as a Woman Cineaste?
Variety's review of Chacun son cinéma invokes the festival's ongoing role in defining auteur cinema in this way: "A mourning for the passing of the classical Euro-style art cinema of the 60s—of the sort very much represented by films commonly shown in Cannes—filters strongly through the proceedings, no doubt in great measure because they were made by men who belong to that tradition or grew up on it. (Jane Campion, still the only woman to have won the Palme d'Or, is the sole femme in the group here)." Enjoying such distinction (the trade paper's clinging to its dismissive argot "femme" represents two steps back from its one step forward in noting the gender disparity), Campion evidently met the anniversary project's rather daunting criteria of being "universally famous" even if she didn't, couldn't, fully "belong to ... tradition." Campion is made to embody Woman, the sole femme—not one woman (director) among many. In fact, the New Zealand–born director's fame at the time of the commission had become rather burdensome; her minor-by-design contribution, The Lady Bug, was among the few short films Campion made between 2003 (In the Cut) and her return to features (and to Cannes competition) in 2009.
The republican sentiment that could be construed from the phrase "to each his or her own" does not exclude women's individual participation in the cinema. France values in the concept of republicanism a citizen's individual accountability, which arguably puts a check on collective identity politics and may account for some French women filmmakers' reluctance to identify with their gender. At the same time it is among the few countries consistently promoting gender equity among film directors. Due in part to a tradition of protectionist film policy and the high cultural status enjoyed by the cinema, and in part to feminist activism of the 1970s, there is no shortage of French réalisatrices who could have been included in the Cannes project. Yet in the end no female participants were found even within the national cinema that gives us the very word "auteur."
The fact that the omnibus film was so very imbalanced might well have been due to curatorial idiosyncrasy or ossification, or to circumstance, as the spokeswoman alluded. But perhaps it is the insistently individualist nature of the demand—that the maker reflect one's own cinema—that presents an uncomfortable fit with women directors' habits and with women's cinema as a collectively imagined formation. From this perspective, even the inclusion of more than one female director would not have mitigated the tokenism. An updated, cosmopolitan edition of what Andrew Sarris notoriously called the "ladies auxiliary" to his pantheon of great directors could be considered fundamentally at odds with feminist work on authorship. In Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen, Alison Butler develops the generative models "self-inscription" and "the politics of location" for thinking about women's cinema. These understandings of authorship—addressing nontheatrical, experimental, documentary, and collaborative work, or allied with national popular cinemas, genre-oriented or transnational projects in Butler's text—do not line up easily within traditional auteurist discourses of genius and ownership. And in her ground-clearing review of feminist theories of film authorship, Catherine Grant encourages work that moves beyond the limits of textual accounts of authorship but does not stop short of theorizing the forms of agency at work in women's cultural production.
Yet an interrogation of auteurist discourse is essential to any study of how cinematic value is constructed. Historically and currently, certain women directors do get called up and are materially and artistically enabled by the aesthetic concepts of world cinema and cineaste, as they circulate within and are shaped by the cultural politics of festival networks. Increasingly, this burgeoning group of auteurs comes from nations considered peripheral to global cultural flows and thus challenges the asymmetrical exchange of the representations, identifications, and affects carried by film culture. Does the value- adding process of festival recognition work differently for women, especially, perhaps, for those from the Global South? Reading backward from Campion's contribution to the Cannes project, I look at how elite definitions of art cinema and auteurism attempt to brand the careers of particular women directors. These rare cineastes in turn deploy their privileged status to bring to light connections and affinities that dominant discourses of auteurism would overlook, such as the relationship between artist and female image or between the female body and the nation.
Alone of All Her Sex
If I were to pick one woman filmmaker to stand for the lot, I would much rather it be Jane Campion, whose work speaks to feminist concerns and incites my passion, than, say, Leni Riefenstahl. I mention Hitler's favorite filmmaker, who is still one of the first names mentioned in the category "woman filmmaker," because she explicitly deployed the association between femininity and the aesthetic to emphasize her singular value and to extricate herself from politics—in her case from prosecution as a Nazi war criminal. Less egregious and much more common is female directors' discomfort with the label "woman filmmaker" or disavowal of feminism in the name of art (and in practical realization of the bottom line). But, as Jacob found, Campion isn't one of this type. She doesn't have a problem with speaking as a woman—to the press or in her films. The translation of Chacun son cinéma as "To Each His Own Cinema" makes its sexism more audible; Campion cannot be fully defined by European art cinema traditions.
Campion, a New Zealander educated and residing in Australia, has been a direct beneficiary of cultural policy that has promoted women's filmmaking since the early 1970s, and while she is sometimes cagey about the use of the word "feminist" to describe herself, she certainly acknowledges feminist themes in her work and the centrality of women's desire to it. At the press conference with the other directors who participated in the omnibus film, she commented, "It's strange to be with a great big football team like this." By comparing the showing at Cannes with what U.S. Americans call soccer, she's slyly calling out the way festivals resemble the World Cup, that other nationalist and U.S. hegemony-defying international competition, one whose masculine posturing is much more overt.
Acting as the fly in the ointment is the very topic of Campion's contribution, The Lady Bug, an odd little disquisition on relations between the sexes, dedicated to "the two gentlemen of Cannes, Gilles Jacob and Pierre Rissient." The film opens with a green-tinted film countdown. The image track then depicts the janitor of what looks like a community center or school auditorium trying to flush out from the loudspeaker an insect that is ostensibly both eavesdropping and filtering sound. By turning on the projector and drawing the shades, the janitor manages to draw the bug out of hiding; a female dancer in a padded green bug costume takes the stage, appearing larger than life in the projector beam. The asynchronous audio track consists of jazz music and a goofy conversation between two women and a man with tony British accents on what styles of masculinity might complement a woman's desire to discover "who I am." (It comes down to a question of Jeremy Irons versus Clint Eastwood.) At the end of the short, as the conversation turns heated and the gender trenches are drawn, the audio parallels our visual: "Don't you know you are playing with a killing machine?!" the man's voice cries. Just as we hear his voice-off say, "You silly fool, I'll squash you!" the janitor stomps on the bug. Bluntly satirical about women's chances in a world where "men are in control of everything," The Lady Bug shows Campion being what, mixing metaphors, the Hollywood Reporter calls her "squirrelly self." Other reviewers, like Michael Sicinski in his blog The Academic Hack, were less gentle: "Frivolous in the extreme, the film also fails to connect as any sort of indictment, since its blend of cheap mummery and doggerel would appear to justify any marginalization Campion feels post-Piano." Certainly other auteurs who contributed to the anniversary film are lacerated for self-parody, laziness, and "shtick," by this blogger and by other critics, but as far as I know none is blamed for his own career's marginalization.
Campion's film, which she describes both as "an homage to her favorite filmmaker, Buñuel," and "a sort of feminist thing" should be taken not as a blanket indictment of industry sexism or metatextual commentary on her career course but rather as an "occasional piece." The language of "ladies and gentlemen" befits the ritualistic context of Cannes. The dedication to the two gentlemen of Cannes suggests we read the film within the festival's economy of patronage—besides her prize for The Piano, Campion won the Palme d'Or for her short film Peel in 1986 at the very beginning of her career. That same year, two of her other film-school shorts, and her first TV feature Two Friends, were screened in the Cannes program Un Certain Regard. This remarkable showing was the result of her discovery by Pierre Rissient when he was scouting for talent in Australia.
The question of patronage registers uncomfortably in the film. Clint Eastwood, another Rissient favorite, is referred to by the ladies on the soundtrack as a "pussy pinup." Rissient himself was the subject of a tribute documentary titled Man of the Cinema, by Variety's Todd McCarthy, also presented at the 2007 festival, in which Campion (again the only woman director interviewed among a dozen male luminaries, including Eastwood) describes Rissient as "an ambassador, a consigliere." Within the performative act framed by her film's dedication to Jacob and Rissient, theatrical English accents poke fun, perhaps, at the solemn Francophilia that constrains everyone's cinema in the project within a certain traditional vision.
If she isn't exactly biting the hand that feeds her with this film, Campion's answer to the call to make her own cinema—whether we deem it a misfire or a targeted missile—recalls Virginia Woolf's contradictory conclusion in A Room of One's Own that "it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex." Woolf gives an example earlier in the text when her contemplation of "the great women of literature" prompts her to compare the calm of Austen's prose with an agitated speech of discontent with her lot as a woman uttered by Charlotte Brontë's heroine Jane Eyre. Of Brontë, Woolf writes, "She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance" (76). Campion's film shows a woman seemingly hardwired for cinema literally crushed underfoot by a man who looks not unlike the director's countryman, superstar director Peter Jackson. Woolf goes on in her critique of Brontë: "Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve" (76). For me, and one suspects even for Woolf, it is often the authorial swerve that is most thrilling. Read Kathleen McHugh's monograph on the director to appreciate Campion's immoderate passion, which her heroines share. Rather than a timeless work of art for Cannes's sixtieth anniversary, Campion makes the angry, "silly" The Lady Bug, saying, like Jane Eyre, "Anyone may blame me who likes" (quoted in Woolf, 74) for airing a grievance. From this perspective, the film could hardly bear its particular burden of representation more gracefully. Implying here that material circumstances affect one's ability to aspire to a Romantic notion of authorship ("to each his own cinema"), Campion goes on in her next major work, Bright Star (2009)—which premiered in competition at Cannes)—to unsettle the canon by examining the collaborative nature of the creativity of an actual Romantic poet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women's Cinema, World Cinema by Patricia White. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
1. To Each Her Own Cinema. World Cinema and the Woman Cineaste 29
Jane Campion's Cannes Connections 30
Lucrecia Martel's Vertiginous Authorship 44
Samira Makhmalbaf's Sororal Cinema 56
2. Framing Feminisms. Women's Cinema as Art Cinema 68
Deepa Mehta's Elemental Feminism 76
Iranian Diasporan Women Directors and Cultural Capital 88
3. Feminist Film in the Age of the Chick Flick. Global Flows of Women's Cinema 104
Engendering New Korean Cinema in Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat 108
Nadine Labaki's Celebrity 120
4. Network Narratives. Asian Women Directors 132
Two-Timing the System in Nia Dinata's Love for Share 136
Zero Chou and the Spaces of Chinese Lesbian Film 142
5. Is the Whole World Watching? Fictions of Women's Human Rights 169
Sabiha Sumar's Democratic Cinema 175
Jasmila Žbanic's Grbavica and Balkan Cinema's Incommensurable Gazes 181
Claudia Llosa's Trans/national Address 187
Afterword 199
Notes 203
Bibliography 235
Filmography 247
Index 251
What People are Saying About This
"Women's Cinema, World Cinema is an exciting book for the connections that Patricia White expertly draws and explicates between text and context, auteur and society, national and global. Her knowledge of the particularities of individual directors and national cinemas is remarkable, as is her familiarity with their relevant histories and critical literatures. Women's Cinema, World Cinema is a major work that will transform how these films and filmmakers are viewed and studied."
"Women's Cinema, World Cinema is the first book to offer a truly broad—dare I say global—perspective on the practices of feminist filmmaking as they have developed in the twenty-first century. Its balance of breadth and specificity makes it unique, and one of its strengths is Patricia White's willingness to step out of the narrow confines that have for too long shaped various constituencies in film studies. Women's Cinema, World Cinema provides exactly the context and the theoretical questioning that film studies needs."