Women at Movies Irina Leimbacher Red Velvet Seat Women's Writing on First Fifty Years of Cinema ed. Antonia Lant with Ingrid Periz, Verso, 2006. Women joined mass culture because of and through institution of cinema, according to Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writing on First Fifty Years of Cinema. In fact, writings collected in Antonia Lant's new anthology, edited with Ingrid Periz, suggest, as Lant notes, cinema made women's new participation in public life evident and concrete as nothing before it had; that female collectivity of auditorium was part of female suffrage; that, in some way, cinema expressed that women had arrived. Yet women's responses to and perspectives on their cinematic experiences were far from homogeneous. Indeed, more than eight hundred pages that make up this volume suggest a vast array of concerns, opinions, and approaches, as well as a remarkable passion and eloquence regarding nature and import of cinema. Lant's selection of articles, authors, and themes aims for breadth and diversity, and it succeeds not only in raising numerous issues of interest to contemporary film studies, but also in reminding us of tremendous significance of cinema and cinema studies for our understanding of twentieth century. The historical and social experience of cinema-as lived, understood and written about by women in their infinite diversity-is brought to life by this anthology. We are privy to detailed descriptions of neighborhood theatres and picture palaces, of varied and often vocal audiences, and of personal and political investment of eager or wary consumers, commentators and participants in this image industry. We can hear chatty audiences at ethnic theatres in lower Manhattan, and see solitary mothers, figures of weariness at rest, at London matinees. We can smell the dark, ill-ventilated little theatres in Vienna where men smoked and wore their hats, and . . . a boy with an apparatus . . . went round spraying air or share Elizabeth Bowen's excitement: like a chocolate-box lid, entrance is still voluptuously promising: sensation of some sort seems to be guaranteed. From Emily Post, we learn rules of etiquette when attending movies in early twenties: it's alright to attend a matinee with a man, but reading captions out loud is considered annoying. For Dorothy Richardson, however, a loquacious fellow viewer, whose commentaries accompany entire screenings, reveals to her that cinema is a public place where women can speak out loud and that the onlooker is a part of spectacle. With coming of sound film, poet H.D. expresses her deep ambivalence about new talkies-fine for Lindbergh and newsreels that try to generate international understanding, but devastating for stars. On other hand, sound gives Geraldyn Dismore hope for greater African-American participation in film, given power and beauty of black voices. In addition to critics, poets, activists, actresses, screenwriters, columnists, psychoanalysts, proponents and critics of censorship, and specialists in etiquette and fashion, voices of women directors are also significant in this collection. Alice Guy Blache, Lillian Gish, Lois Weber, Germaine Dulac, Lotte Reiniger, and Maya Deren each give us their personal visions and hopes for cinema or describe their methods of work. Reiniger's essay is of particular interest, in form of an imagined dialogue in which she argues importance of frame, composition, and what she calls space-time diagonals, while Maya Deren's frank autobiographical piece for Mademoiselle illuminates her evolution as a young filmmaker. Nor is fiction excluded from Lant and Periz's anthology, when it so ably conveys psychic investments of women in world of cinema as in Katherine Mansfield's and Zelda Fitzgerald's finely honed stories of characters either deluded or empowered by their desire to be in movies. …