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Sue Thornham, ed.
New York: New York University Press, 1999; 361 pp.
Reviewed by Zoe Druick
Department of English
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, Ontario
A decade ago, Teresa de Lauretis wrote that " 'women's cinema' is not just a set of films or practices of cinema, but also a number of film-critical discourses and broadly cast networks of cinema-related practices that are directly connected with the history of feminism" (cited in Armatage et al., p. 274). Adopting de Lauretis' definition here, we can certainly say that the two books under review both trace the history of women's cinema and are therefore simultaneously part of the history of feminism itself.
The past 30 years have been a fruitful time for both feminist filmmaking and for feminist film criticism. Not only have feminists taken up the challenge to make movies, they have also taken film to be an important ideological site for reading the currents of gender oppression in mainstream culture. Indeed, with its central preoccupation with looking and the production of images, film seemed a likely culprit in perpetuating sexism as well as a possible site of emancipatory feminist practices. Yet, while filmmaking has been encouraged, the going has been harder for women making and distributing films than for those making and distributing writing on the topic of filmmaking.
Feminist Film Theory, a new reader edited by British academic Sue Thornham, collects many of the most important contributions to feminist debates about film on both sides of the Atlantic into a well-organized anthology which would add valuable historical material to any contemporary film theory or gender and film course. Organized more or less chronologically into six themes in feminist film theory, each including a lucid introduction and a useful bibliography for further reading, the whole book gives an excellent sense of the shifts in academic film writing. As many of the articles refer to one another, I only wish Thornham had cross-referenced the page numbers with those of her reprinted versions.
Early selections from feminist film journals and publications of the 1970s, such as Women and Film and Notes on Women's Cinema, are most concerned with simply chronicling...