Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films Michael Brian Faucette Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films. Geetha Ramanathan. New York: Wallflower Press, 2006, 239 pp. Geetha Ramanathan’s newest work draws upon the recent movement by scholars such as Tom Gunning and Joe McElhaney to reexamine and rethink the notion of auteurism as a means of theoretical engagement and as an interpretative tool. However, unlike authors of previous auteur studies that simply argue for the greatness or legitimacy of a director or directors and their work, she adapts the theory to analyze female directors and how they use their abilities as filmmakers to acknowledge or attack cultural factors such as race, class, gender, voyeurism, and the repression of female desire. Furthermore, Ramanathan uses auteurism to examine how a lack of nuanced readings of feminist filmmakers and their films has been possible. In order to make this claim, she first lays out the framework of feminist film criticism both historically and methodologically, thus enabling her to argue that feminist film criticism has been bogged down by the need to legitimate the work of women as worthy of study, even as it forgets that the filmmakers are engaged in a conversation with other women and society at large. She notes that what she is attempting to conduct in this study is the synthesis of the terms “feminist auteurship” and “female authority.” This allows her to “confront the history of aesthetics, and visuality in film,” thereby enabling the reader/viewer to witness the means by which “women filmmakers have succeeded in impressing feminist authority in film, not necessarily or exclusively their own, or even that of the protagonist of the film, but over the representation of women in film in ways that counter prior cinematic renditions” (4). Thus, this study is one that, while drawing on the traditions of prior feminist criticism, as Ramanathan acknowledges in her references to Laura Mulvey, Judith Mayne, and Teresa de Lauretis, attempts to illustrate that the notion of the female form and authority onscreen is in fact more complex and contradictory than previously established. In order to support the idea of female authority onscreen she draws from films that have become canonized within feminist film criticism. In the first chapter she explores the notion of aesthetics and the female form through an insightful analysis of Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls, Aparna Sen’s Parama, Nelly Kaplan’s A Very Curious Girl, and Agnes Varda’s Vagabond. Building upon each of these films, Ramanathan makes the case that in the hands of female directors, the weakness or objectification of the female form can in effect become a powerful tool used to critique patriarchal society. In addition to this strategy, she connects the thematics of these films to one another, demonstrating that it is in fact possible for female directors to use their work to converse and argue about the nature of the female form in cinematic discourse. One of the strengths of this chapter lies in her critique and problematization of the notion of females as unwilling or unknowing commodities. This notion of the commodity or objectification is carried over in the second chapter, which looks at how women of color are projected onscreen. Ramanathan begins her analysis with an in-depth exploration of Julie Dash’s Illusions, a short film about the relationship of race to power. In keeping with the spirit of feminist critics who have long since argued that feminism has forgotten or misused the political struggle of women of color, Ramanathan attempts to engage in this debate by demonstrating that it has been possible for female directors to use their power to discuss the idea of race and womanhood in films such as Cheryl Dunye’s [End Page 74] Watermelon Woman, Claire Denis’s Chocolat, Marguerite Duras’s India Song, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach. Through a reading of each of these films, Ramanathan is able to demonstrate how difficult it is to show women of color onscreen in a favorable and realistic manner, versus the standard practices of mainstream filmmaking that opt for a conservative approach, such as having women of color be surrounded by the accoutrements of consumerism...