Women’s transnational cinema: displacement, projection, and identification

Sharon Willis (bio)
University of Rochester

A review of White, Patricia. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Duke UP, 2015.

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 women’s cinema–in conditions of often dramatic juxtaposition–to shocks of reorientation and reframing as films from widely divergent cultures come into contact. And festivals have increasingly grown in importance and impact in the twenty-first century. Accounting for her book’s primary “focus on filmmakers who emerge after 2000,” White indicates that since this moment, “feminist cultural politics [has] offered a less stable frame through which to view women’s work” (7). She continues:

Ultimately, the works of these filmmakers were selected not only for their aesthetic and cultural significance but also for the ways they reveal the institutional shapes of film culture—the politics of funding and programming, protocols of reviewing and the anointing of celebrities, and various political agendas. (7)

These different cinematic objects, as well as the concepts of reception, production, circulation and exhibition contexts, are held together by White’s consideration of issues around authorship and identity, aesthetics and reception, national and transnational context. This is a vast terrain to map and manage. White is obliged to embrace some risks, and they largely pay off. Her choice of a case study model focuses on commonalities—or even conversations—among film texts that might at first seem entirely foreign to one another.

However, the case study model presents some limitations as well; notably, it tends to suggest exemplarity and representativeness, about which this study remains justifiably ambivalent. It also risks the implicit suggestion that the film in question exists primarily as an illustrative example of the tendency under exploration; its portraits of women directors are somewhat uneven and seem to represent or exemplify various analytical issues. For example, Samira Makmalbaf (1980, Iran) anchors an analysis of the shifting critical status of national cinema as a category. Lucrecia Martel (1965, Argentina), whose work appears in the same chapter, seems to count more as an example of international auteurist appeal and of celebrity status, much like Jane Campion (1954, New Zealand), and Deepa Mehta (1950, India). The framing of the case studies raises and perpetuates the question: what is each “case” exemplifying? Could it also provide an example of something else? For example, could the analysis of Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005) have sustained more attention to the rise of Gandhi’s passive resistance movement for independence? Could it have devoted more attention to the film’s references to Satyatjit Ray’s Apu Trilogy? Could it have taken Mehta’s particular position as a transnational filmmaker (India/Canada) as a more powerful anchor for the book’s commitment to global circulation and exchange? In White’s own assessment of her project’s complexity: “Water could be analyzed in the chapter addressing women’s human rights, but appears in the chapter on cultural authenticity” (21).

Another key strategy for managing this ambitious and complex analysis depends on the figure of the auteur, which “is operative across all chapters” (21). Central as it has been to the emergence of film studies as a field, the figure of the auteur has a long and sometimes vexed history, and remains haunted by traits that seem incompatible with the commitments of White’s project. It stubbornly clings to the national cinema model, and it emphatically shapes analysis around the individual, often to the exclusion of social/historical context and at the expense of acknowledging the invariably collective process of film production. As White observes:

Surveying the status of women’s cinema in the early twenty-first century persuades me that the categories we have used—authorship, aesthetics, and address—remain vital, yet they are insufficient at this juncture. They must be supplemented by consideration and theorization of institutional questions—of production, distribution, exhibition and reception. (13)

In retaining the figure of the auteur as an historical and cultural touchstone and as a category of identity and aesthetics, one whose valences are plural, White also launches her project into much broader circulation than traditional film studies. She considers, for example, the translation of cultural capital built within national industries into transnational cultural capital, often through the woman director’s star status, and her place in a circuit of generational mentorship—familial or otherwise (Mehta, Llhosa, Makmalbaf). In examining Llosa’s work, Madeinusa (2006) and The Milk of Sorrow (2009), White names lead actor Magaly Solier as a “coauthor, in part, of the film’s construction of a new image of indigenous femininity,” suggesting that the “‘fictional character’ could be read as her persona as well as her role,” so that “her collaboration with Llosa” becomes a “‘co-production of newly emerging cultural identities’” (190). Each chapter strives to complicate the organizing figure of the auteur while simultaneously using it to question and reframe the categories of national cinema, always maintaining the centrality of gender to its analysis. This is a complex project because, as White observes, “‘Woman’ is as frequently associated with national ideologies in film as in other forms of politics, and feminist approaches must tease apart competing representations and self-representations” (16).

The book’s structure is further complicated by its strategies of juxtaposition. Staging collisions and encounters across cultures, it may remind us of the centrality of surrealism to the earlier twentieth century ethnographies, including Michel Leiris’s and Jean Rouch’s. Each of Women’s Cinema, World Cinema’s five chapters elaborates a kind of “transnational conversation” designed to capture the significance of commodification and consumption in dialogue with politics, auteurism, and identities. But each reframing highlights the contradictions and volatility that attend the cinematic practices under examination. As White puts it, “The case studies are marked by the return of the author: the personae of woman directors are read as closely as their films,” but her textual analyses also always focus on the “frames through which [the films] are seen. These may be biographical, political, figural, or generic” (21). Thus, the case studies are invariably complex, even messy, and messy in ways that complement the subject of this study.

The first chapter situates Lucrecia Martel (1966, Argentina) and Samira Makhmalbah (1980, Iran) in relation to the classic European festivals—Cannes (especially), Venice, and Berlin. Their auteurship comes into view alongside that the now iconic Jane Campion. This chapter turns on the tension between the film text’s enunciation and address and the transnational currency attached to the author’s persona—linked to classical Western film traditions and to newly reconfigured national identities. Yet, as White insists, in this work “the national does not disappear into the transnational” (21).

Chapter II, “Framing Feminisms” offers perhaps the cornerstone argument of the book, considering Deepa Mehta (1950, India/Canada) and Water alongside Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) (1969, Iran/France) as representatives of the category “women’s cinema as art cinema.” This chapter interrogates “the potential of art cinema to serve as a transnational feminist public sphere,” while suggesting “that new critical practices are needed to cultivate” this possibility (68). It wrestles with the weight of “cultural capital” that accrues to these directors— themselves embodiments of transnationalism—and it leads us to question the tension between local specifics and transnational address.

In “Feminist Film in the Age of the Chick Flick,” the third chapter, White explores global flows of cinema and generic exchange, arguing “that the globalization of the chick flick taps into feminist energy through the link with popular forms” (106). She continues with the characteristically bold assertion that “their themes—homosocial bond; critiques of women’s limited role in the public sphere; the radical implications of reformed kinds of intimacy—also inform the global chick flick.” She continues with this challenge: “The scholarship on world cinema has yet to address these multidirectional flows and the ways women filmmakers modify the process by which national cinemas cross into transnational fields” (107). This provocative claim opens new lines of inquiry that should command all of our attention. The chapter pairs Jeong Jae-eun (1969, Korea) and Nadine Labaki (1974, Lebanon) to argue that these directors “negotiate the constraints of the globally traveling commodity form of the festival film—signed by a auteur but inevitably positioned through regional and national frames.” White asserts that “their engagement with women’s genres allows them to challenge both auteurist singularity and the dominant reception patterns of national cinemas” (131).

In “Network Narratives: Asian Women Directors,” White approaches the “rise in influence, both cultural and economic, of Asian cinema” (132). Exploring “a broad range of practices and topics in gender and Asian cinema, this chapter “stress[es] both the transnational nature of the phenomena (one example suggests another) and the specificity of each development (each example asks for explication)” (133). This fourth chapter maps what she calls “the centripetal and centrifugal forces” that mark these films and structure their interactions—“network narratives”: “these regional, gendered dynamics in world film culture generate what I will call network narratives” (133). The foregoing, by the way, constitutes an apt description of this book’s analytical strategies in general. Taking as its point of departure the International Women’s Film Festival in Seoul, this chapter offers a special case study: it examines the impact of Asian women’s work internationally, but particularly on queer culture and youth culture. Focusing on the work of Nia Dinata [(1976, Indonesia)] and Zero Chou (1969, Taiwan), it explores the contemporary vicissitudes of transnational circulation and influence. As White contends, “Chou enters transnational spaces with local identity and community politics trailing—if she doesn’t quite gain the status of art film auteur, she is able to travel these networks without having to transcend nationality, queerness or feminism” (168). “Shaping careers that defy standard pathways limiting women’s achievement,” she continues, “Nia Dinata and Zero Chou are feminist icons. They connect with audience through their incorporation of popular and youth-oriented idioms without relinquishing their political affiliations” (168).

The final chapter, “Is The Whole World Watching?: Fictions of Women’s Human Rights,” explores “the implication that perhaps women’s films are worldlier than some other types of film, that they travel outside national boundaries more feely, on a particular kind of passport” (169). White considers the tension between aesthetics and ethics that structures three films about war and trauma: Silent Waters, 2003 (Sabiha Sumar, 1961, Pakistan), The Land of My Dreams, 2006 (Jasmila Zbanic, 1974, Bosnia), and Milk of Sorrow, 2009 (Claudia Llhosa, 1976 Peru). She resolves this tension in the three films through what she calls a “gaze of engagement,” which is

crucial to fiction films about women’s rights. It makes a claim on the viewer. Not a legal claim, but a claim on attention—attention to language and location and all that film is capable of revealing of the world, but also attention to the frame itself, so prominent in these compositions. (198)

For White, acknowledgment of the frame is also recognition of the spectator’s “difference and displacement” (198), perhaps crucial for any real ethical engagement across cultures.

Here Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms asserts perhaps its most daring—and productive—position. With the “gaze of engagement,” White works to rewrite the terms and forms of address by which women’s cinema from the global South and the global North relate to each other. This argument offers a way out of the frequent impasse of projection, which has too often characterized the posture of Western feminisms towards the rest of the world. As she writes at the end of her introduction, “projection can of course imply cross-cultural insensitivities (their lives, their feminisms, must look like ‘ours’) but it is also a vision of futurity, based on knowledge, partial as it must be, that is currently available” (27). In this final chapter, the book sketches a framework for engagement that does not confine itself to the forms of projective identification through which Western feminist criticism has often elaborated its analyses. To arrive at this compelling point, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema has developed through a consistently curatorial impulse. In other words, this book is itself structured like a film festival. White’s career-long affiliation with Women Make Movies and her scholarly commitment to attending a wide range of film festivals have particularly prepared her to produce a series of powerful cross-cultural juxtapositions that offer us newly framed transnational conversations in women’s cinema. In doing so, this book makes a significant claim on our attentive gaze.

Works Cited

Dennison, Stephanie and Song Hwee Lim, editors. Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Film. Wallflower Press, 2006.