B. Ruby Rich
Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement.
Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1998
ISBN 0-8223-2121-1
448pp
US$18.95 (paper)
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
Uploaded 12 November 1999

In a disarmingly frank account of the political enmities and personal hatreds which divided the field of “cinefeminism” in the USA (and across the Atlantic in Britain) well into the 1980s, B. Ruby Rich prefaces the reprint of her 1983 essay, “Cinefeminism and its discontents,” with a brief description of a New York dinner party held in honour of Teresa de Lauretis. The hosts were Margie Keller and P. Adams Sitney and hostile guests included Annette Michelson and E. Ann Kaplan. Rich’s activist critique of academic feminism”s psychoanalytic approach to cinema had just appeared in American film in a review of recent books by Kaplan and her British counterpart, Annette Kuhn. Branded an “essentialist” by Kaplan and dismissed as merely “stupid” by the formidable Michelson, Rich survived the dinner party as she has survived more than three decades of film politics in the English speaking world (with frequent forays into Latin-American cinema), under attack but never silenced.

Insofar as writing from memory guards as well as inflicts a wound, Chick Flicks (a slick title that only the marketeers of the 1990s would inflict on a reading public supposedly leary of unhip feminism) revisits 1970s cinefeminism to defend its legacy as much as to expose its conceits. Rich reminds us that the currently atrophied field of “feminist film theory” was until quite recently a highly politicised battleground of festivals, journals, conferences, critics, academics and filmmakers, not to mention the occasional audience. With its revelations of love affairs, communal friendships, contingent alliances, principled boycotts and mobile geographics (featuring Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Havana and New York) Rich’s volume of reprinted essays dating from 1974 to 1986 (with a 1991 retrospective essay on the sixties) is a behind-the-scenes history, grounded in memory, leaning on autobiography.

The main attraction of the book resides in the diaristic prologues which provide an autobiographical framework for the reprinted essays. Nothing puts academic film theory in its place so thoroughly as an irreverent, partisan exposure of the network of personal connections and political interests that sustain an intense, rivalrous milieu. The retrospective gossip that tells the “truth” of a milieu is a useful corrective to the aggrandizing narratives that legitimise both political activism and an emerging academic discipline. The in-between location of Rich as both activist and non-academic film writer creates a perspective which is ultimately aligned with a grass roots politics. Rich’s critical trajectory took her from a Jewish childhood “without books” to curator of avant-garde film programs at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1970s to lesbian activist critic in the thick of the sexuality debates and the “women of color” critique of feminism in the 1980s. For Rich, feminism”s “most powerful legacy rests with the women of color” who have forged something new from “the lessons” of feminism. If there is a certain political righteousness to Rich’s tale it is undercut by an impressive loyalty to the political cinema which has engaged her and formed her as an activist and as a critic since the 1960s. Rich is a partisan critic and conceives of no other possibility for herself or her opponents.

The usefulness of the book to the teaching of feminist film history stems from the fact that Rich’s collected reviews and essays on feminist modernism are readily intelligible today, unlike much of the Lacanian feminism whose academic ascendancy Rich critiques at every opportunity. As Rich points out, Lacanian feminism of the Camera obscura variety had difficulty applying its critique to non-Hollywood films, having little to say about aspects of feminist, modernist and national cinemas which did not answer to a critique of the apparatus, the look and the gaze. This is a significant failing given the premise of Laura Mulvey”s 1975 essay, that the political avant-garde provided the only way out of a patriarchal cinema. Taking the opposite tack, Rich’s reprinted essays barely acknowledge the existence of Hollywood, defending a canon of avant-garde, modernist and political filmmakers from Maya Deren, Carolee Schneeman and Leni Reifenstahl to Chantal Akerman, Helke Sanders, Yvonne Rainer and Sally Potter. The limits to Rich’s own project as an activist critic are evident in her attempt to deal with Joyce Chopra”s 1986 feature film, Smooth Talk.. Academic work by Carol Clover, Barbara Creed and Rhona Berenstein on the peculiar pleasures of horror-slasher films has something to offer Rich’s narrowly ideological castigation of the film. The shift of women filmmakers to feature films in the 1990s and the demise of political modernism have to some extent forced Rich belatedly to reconsider popular cinema, however Chick Flicks ends with only a brief acknowledgment of this seachange.

As a collection of essays and reviews which represent the trajectory of a film critic (cum-curator, teacher, bureaucrat and activist) since the late 1960s, Chick Flicks has precedents in other volumes by American film writers, notably the collected essays and reviews of Patricia Mellencamp and Jonathan Rosenbaum where autobiographical memory plays a role in historicising critical practice. As autobiography, Rich’s prologues touch on the scar tissue of 1970s Anglo-American feminism. However, at heart this book is a reconciliatory history, aimed as much at the battle-weary veterans of cinefeminism as at a new generation of initiates into the culture wars of the late twentieth century. Rich’s prologues to each reprinted essay emphasise the joy of intellectual battles retold in memory”s anecdotal mode. The wounds of the New Left that remain as feminism”s scar tissue are ultimately dealt with in nostalgic terms: in the end the book is an epilogue to film feminism, celebrating the energising feuds and giving credit to forgotten protagonists eclipsed by academia”s current reading lists. As such, Chick Flicks is a work of memory which reconciles the past to the present, positing a continuity between feminist activism and the realigned politics of sexuality and race which emerged in the late 1980s as fertile grounds for both activism and film theory. The renewal of “white, heterosexual” feminist film scholarship since the mid-1980s through historical studies by feminists including Giuliana Bruno, Anne Friedberg, Miriam Hansen and Patrice Petro constitute another history which is absent from Rich’s “theories and memories of the feminist film movement.” The theories of memory and subjectivity which underpin this scholarship offer the beginnings of a critique of Rich’s own practice of memory. That critique of the New Left and its cinema legacy is a task for future scholars: Rich’s book will be a primary source for this endeavour.

Felicity Collins