The relationship between women and cinema is no less precarious now than it was almost twenty years ago, when B. Ruby Rich urged her readers to rethink project of successfully naming a truly feminist [film] c ri ticism (Rich 268). Women's cinema is, and has been, plagued by a crisis in naming: cinema, pictures, films, woman's film, weepies, feminist films, more recently chick flicks, and in German (where crucial semantic distinction between the woman's film and women's films does not exist), equally slippery terms der Frauenfilm and its plural Frauenfilme. The most commonly used of these terms is also most ambiguous: cinema. As Teresa de Lauretis notes, `Women's cinema' is a term whose definition or field