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Patricia White’s ambitious project sets itself the daunting task of tracking fast-moving targets. Its anchoring terms— “women’s cinema” and “world cinema” —remain in constant flux as a result of their uneven interactions. In a real sense, White’s book rises to the implicit challenge that Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim pose in their introduction to Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics. “In the final analysis,” they write, “World Cinema as a theoretical concept is destined not to definition and closure but to ceaseless problematisation, always a work-in-progress, its ground beneath one’s feet forever shifting even as one attempts to pin it down” (9). As White notes in her introduction: “Cultural globalization, in turn, puts pressure on the concept, content, and address of women’s cinema . . . while remappings of world cinema in the current phase of globalization are the object of growing attention in film studies, questions of gender have yet to structure such inquiry significantly” (6). Women’s Cinema, World Cinema shapes its broad analytical survey around the category or figure of woman, however unstable. In pursuing its ambitious project, this book recalls the shaping impact of feminist film theory on film studies at large from the 1970s onward. It asks some audacious questions: is “women’s cinema still a meaningful term” (11), and if it is, can it produce a similar shaping force in the arena of world cinema studies? Foregrounding women’s production and reception with special emphasis on the emerging and shifting channels of global film circulation, this book makes a powerful intervention in the most exciting discussions in contemporary film and media studies by carefully deploying a number of methodologies and analytical frameworks—not all of which seem immediately compatible.
Organized by what White loosely terms “case studies,” her project turns on metaphors of displacement, framing, and projection. Together, these concepts form the book’s central insight: that we must consider production and address, as well as circulation and reception, in order to understand women’s transnational cinema as a multivalent circuit of projection and identification. These powerful processes, understood in their psychoanalytic force, provide a potential framework for analyzing the elaborate cross-cultural exchanges that structure the global circulation of women’s cinema, especially across festivals. Film festivals, as White carefully demonstrates, subject transnational...