Gendering History on Screen: Women filmmakers and Historical films by Julia Erhart

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gendering History on Screen: Women filmmakers and Historical films by Julia Erhart Julie K. Allen Julia Erhart. Gendering History on Screen: Women filmmakers and Historical films. I.B. Tauris, 2018. Library of Gender and Popular Culture. 213 pp. Cloth, $99.00. This volume starts from the premise that gender makes a difference in both the kinds of stories films tell about the past and the way such sto-ries are told; in the introduction, author Julia Erhart announces that "this book is about women filmmakers' unique contributions to understandings of the past through the lens of historical film" (2). It is a simple but large claim to defend, requiring a large enough sample to illustrate the general argument as well as enough variety within the sample to demonstrate the applicability of the claim to the various film genres that fall under the rubric "historical film." Since the number of films made by women directors across the past eight decades that could qualify as historical films is impressively large, the author limits her study, with one exception, to films made between 1990 and 2015. She places particular value on feature-length films in which the woman filmmaker has a "relatively high creative presence," where "women's innovations are especially notable," and which intervene "in some way into conventional ideas about agency, memory, heroism, and activism" (3). Even using these much-tightened parameters, Erhart mentions around 120 films, from around the world and across the film industrial spectrum, in her 158 pages of text, with the result that many of them receive only very cursory treatment. Each of the book's five chapters focuses on three to five films, which allows a few pages to be devoted to each film, but the analysis still often feels abbreviated. Since the series and the author are more interested in the gender studies aspects of the project than the film studies dimensions, readers looking for an in-depth discussion of distinctively female cinematographic storytelling strategies will likely be disappointed. However, as an exploration of the significant [End Page 139] narrative contributions that these particular films by women directors make to a range of historical discourses, Erhart's book succeeds admirably. In setting up the book's parameters, terminology, and theoretical scaffolding in the first chapter, Erhart invokes Walter Benjamin's view of history as "something that probe[s] the present and deprive[s] it [. . .] of its 'peace of mind'" (155). She locates the significance of women filmmakers' approaches to history in their use of this disruptive innovation. Drawing primarily on A League of Their Own (1992, Penny Marshall, dir.), Erhart argues that women filmmakers working in historical film genres "create new understandings of women in history, reframe generic concepts such as fame, heroism, and historical worthiness, and call into question methodological components such as evidence and voice" (34). The second chapter considers how three contemporary female biopics strive to bring audiences "into the heads [. . .] of despised and denigrated women." In this way, Erhart contends, they render visible Benjamin's concept of history as a constellation of present and past by fashioning stories of "dereliction, abuse, and exclusion" (37) into oppositional texts that allow present-day viewers to recognize their "bond of suffering with the past" (38). Chapter 3 focuses on five feminist first-person documentaries about traumatic displacements—from World War Il-era Japanese internment camps to present-day migration odysseys—to prove the claim that women filmmakers are capable of crafting self-reflective, sophisticated historical narratives that facilitate the use of individual memories as a prism for collective histories. In chapter 4, Erhart transfers these insights about disruptive storytelling from documentary to the depiction of women in Holocaust feature films, looking in particular at how these films reframe narratives of collaboration and ground acts of resistance in women's bodies. This chapter offers the book's most explicit engagement with German studies in its treatment of German director Alexandra von Grote's 1985 film November Moon, about a German Jewish woman who survives the war through the self-sacrifice of her French lover, Férial. The final chapter explores the gendering of women in films about the recent and ongoing wars in...