Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen provides an introduction to critical debates around women’s filmmaking and relates those debates to a variety of cinematic practices. Taking her cue from the ground-breaking theories of Claire Johnston and the critical tradition she inspired, Alison Butler argues that women’s cinema is a minor cinema which exists inside other cinemas, inflecting and contesting the codes and systems of the major cinematic traditions from within. Using canonical directors and less established names as examples, ranging from Chantal Akerman to Moufida Tlatli, the book argues that women’s cinema is unified in spite of its diversity by the ways in which it re-works cinematic conventions.

Alison Butler is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Reading, UK.

2002
144 pages
978-1-903364-27-7    £12.99 (pbk)


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reviews
‘An excellent introduction to the topic. It engages with complex ideas in a beautifully written and tightly focused manner, drawing on a wide range of film examples.’
Carrie Tarr, University of Kingston-on-Thames

‘An invaluable addition to the literature, offering new and valuable material while clarifying vexed, overly-debated issues once and for all … beautifully written.’
Pamela Church Gibson, The London Institute

‘Rejecting an essentialist understanding of gendered subjectivity, Women’s Cinema advocates actual historical positions occupied by women in real world cultures ranging from Hollywood to Iran, genre cinema to experimental video, African-American to German, heterosexual to lesbian … reading this book opens your eyes.’
Richard Armstrong, The Film Journal

‘While most studies on Women’s Cinema are either hidden away in some journal only available in the BFI library or take the form of a bulky over-sized text-book, this book is aesthetically pick-up-able … By the conclusion … we are shaken about, realising that paradoxically the definition of "Women’s Cinema" is something to be contested. In this way, you cannot dip into this book; you must necessarily, but satisfactorily, read the whole thing.’
Kamera.co.uk

‘Offers a smart and challenging introduction to readers unfamiliar with the field. Teachers, and others with a background in women’s cinema, will appreciate Butler’s fresh insights and her articulate synthesis of the critical material … Butler succeeds in presenting complex and nuanced ideas in a straightforward and uncomplicated manner … Useful for students in introductory film studies courses who are learning to write critically about films and who want to hone their close reading skills.’
Senses of Cinema

‘Alison Butler’s Women’s Cinema, part of Wallflower Press’s SHORT CUTS series of introductory film studies texts, shows considerable strength in explaining a wide range of difficult concepts that have concerned feminist film theory and practice over the last 25 years … This is an excellent book, not only as an introduction to women’s cinema, but also a step forward in its study.’
www.film-philosophy.com

‘Although women have been involved in filmmaking since the invention of the cinema, the idea of a women's cinema is much more recent, dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s with the onset of the feminist movement. In Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen, Alison Butler examines some of the key feminist filmmakers and the canonical perspectives on women's cinema from Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston to Teresa de Lauretis and Patricia Mellencamp in order to introduce readers to the critical debates around the concept of women's cinema in Anglophone film theory. The structure of the book reflects a number of considerations in women's cinema, examining notions of genre in mainstream Hollywood film, authorship in experimental cinema, and the politics of location in world cinema respectively.
Butler informs the reader that feminist film critics often talk about a special affinity between women filmmakers and experimental cinema. While Annette Kuhn suggests that "low investments in money and professionalism have meant that avant-garde cinema has historically been much more open than the film industry to women," Pam Cook notices "a coincidence between the avant-garde's concern with personal self-expression and feminist interest in the private sphere". This relationship between women filmmakers and the experimental cinema, although significant in terms of the work of feminist filmmakers on the margins of the mainstream, fails to take into account those big-name directors such as Kathryn Bigelow and Mimi Leder who work within Hollywood. Such a distinction between the avant-garde and the mainstream film industry has structured much modern cultural discourse, and the debate on women filmmakers and the experimental cinema can often be linked with the debate on high and low culture.
Butler appears to challenge existing debates on women's cinema and the debate on high and low culture as she examines the ways in which women filmmakers working in the low-budget independent sector expressed increasingly mainstream ambitions, and the ways in which mainstream directors crossed over from counter-cinema into Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s. In this way, one might suggest that the author negotiates the mass culture debate by viewing women's independent filmmaking as an "apprenticeship for the mainstream," rather than merely an oppositional practice.
In a section entitled "Girls Own Stories: Genre and Gender in Hollywood Cinema" we are told that "a new generation of women directors has learned to negotiate generic constraints, playing reflexively on the limits they impose and self-consciously invoking their cultural history". With this in mind, we are informed that the work of Kathryn Bigelow plays with the conventions of genre and gender as "the consciously experimental work of a woman director".
According to Butler, women's cinema can be understood as "those films that might be made by, addressed to, or concerned with women" and that this "plurality of forms, concerns and constituencies in contemporary women's filmmaking now exceeds even the most flexible definition of counter-cinema" … She focuses mainly on the work of alternative, avant-garde and experimental directors … and examines some of the key feminist filmmakers in order to position women's cinema as a minor cinema which exists inside other major cinematic traditions.’
Rebecca D. Feasey, Scope: Online Journal of Film Studies

books of related interest
Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema
Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility
The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor
The Trouble With Men: Masculinity in Hollywood and European Cinema
Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology
Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women's Films
Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre