Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (eds.),
Feminism and Documentary.
Visible Evidence; v.5. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
ISBN 0 8166 3007 0 (pb).
365pp
US$19.95

(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Uploaded 1 March 2001

Feminism and Documentary is a valuable work that enhances discussion on both feminist documentaries and the history of women in documentary; and the reassessment of the field of documentary in general terms. It demonstrates that approaching the history of documentary from a feminist perspective can enhance our appreciation of documentary film and television, and serves as a very good starting point from which to investigate issues relevant to the genre. Theoretical concerns about the process of representing historical reality – for example how feminist writers and filmmakers have re-evaluated realist forms of representation over time ‘ make a powerful contribution to the literature. Diverse perspectives inform the book ranging from practical personal accounts of the experience of women documentary and experimental filmmakers, to theoretical and psychoanalytic criticism. While gender issues are always evident in each author’s contribution, feminist interpretation is not applied in narrow terms, but instead documentary history, the history of feminist documentaries, and the feminist reinterpretation of history in general, all feature throughout the work.

Part I, “Historicizing documentary”, like other sections of the book, presents both feminist re-evaluations and counter histories of documentary cinema and of the broader history which documentary represents. Paula Rabinowitz in her piece ‘Sentimental contracts: dreams and documents of American labor’ elaborates on the gendered discourse that exists in left wing characterisations of the male worker as inherently ‘male’ and unified, while scabs and the elite are feminised. Films like Michael Moore’s Roger and me (1989) and Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1990) demonstrate for Rabinowitz that gender in such films is exploited to provide ‘cheap shots’ with reliance on such gender stereotypes. She concludes however that gender is not so easily contained in such stereotypical terms, as both these films also represent the current changing world where stable gender roles, and the dream of workers solidarity, have been undermined. In her account of the history of the film seminars begun by Francis Flaherty, Patricia R. Zimmermann writes on “Flaherty’s midwives” reflecting on the role of women behind the scenes in the 15 years before feminist cinema ‘officially’ began in the 1970s. This piece looks beyond the nurturing role of women behind the scenes of experimental filmmaking to the very real contributions women have made not only as directors but in a variety of roles behind the camera. Also in this section, Michael Renov reflects on the importance of the feminist movement in creating new forms of documentary cinema which investigate the subjectivity and identity of the filmmaker.

Part II, entitled Filmmaker/subject: self/other has essays linked by the theme of the “documentary subjects’as’performers” and investigates questions of their agency in relation to filmmakers. (120) The films discussed in this section, such as Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, are not necessarily coded as feminist, yet all reflect on the loaded relationship between filmmaker and subject as pertinent to a feminist outlook. Susan Knobloch’s ‘(Pass through) the mirror moment and don’t look back: music and gender in a rockumentary’, is a concise analysis of the gendered discourse in Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, which successfully undermines any claims the film might make to ‘direct cinema’ and this genre’s implied transparent representation of the real. This chapter makes a useful addition to existing critiques of direct cinema, as Knobloch applies Laura Mulvey’s ideas about fictional narrative and discovers much of the heterosexual, male Oedipal trajectory of classical cinema in this documentary. In “Identities unmasked / empowerment unleashed: the documentary style of Michelle Parkerson” by Gloria J. Gibson (137), Gibson investigates the work of black Lesbian writer and filmmaker Michelle Parkerson who makes films about black women from diverse professsions and social backgrounds. These charismatic subjects become centered in the performance frame, only made possible Gibson argues, because of the close relationship between filmmaker and subject. This relationship challenges some of the traditional criticisms of realist documentary she argues, claiming that as they come from the margins they pose a challenge to dominant culture.

Finally in this section Ann Kaneko describes her complex experiences as American woman of Japanese ancestry making a documentary about the immigrant experience in contemporary Japan. This piece addresses in practical terms what a feminist approach to documentary might be, again (as in Gibsons’ analysis of Parkerson’s films) largely in terms of the dignity afforded the subject and the close relationship between filmmaker and subject. For myself however these last two articles raise more questions about the filmmaker/subject relationship than they solve. I would still question if you are filmmaker coming from the same political background as your subject, or approach your subject from a highly sympathetic position, you are somehow more removed from the difficulties/issues of representation. I remain much less convinced than Gibson and Kaneko that this is so.

In Part III, “Going back (with a camera): gender, nation, and documentary returns”, the essays are about “the desire for and/or horror of homeland.” (185) As documentary filmmakers and their subjects return to their ‘roots’ ‘ their family’s homeland ‘ issues of memory and identity come to the fore. Silvia Kratzer’Juifs investigates films which reflect on identity and the experience of Turkish women working in Germany. She sees these films as blending psychoanalytical and historiographical approaches to history ‘ the psychoanalytical approach viewing history as vertical, the historical view seeing the past as chronological. In other words for psychoanalysis, history is there all at once in the subject and filtered through the present moment, in the writing of history the past follows a more linear and chronological trajectory. For Kratzer’Juifs these films do more than reflect on the past of their subjects, but perform the process of memory itself. Feminist contributions to our understanding of the nature of filmic representation are taken up in Anahid Kasasbian and David Kazanjian’s essay on American documentaries about the Armenian diaspora, particularly An Armenian Journey (1988). They argue that Mariam Davis, a victim of genocide in Armenia and an interviewee in this film, breaks out of the restrictive frame and narrative supplied by narrator and filmmaker Theodore Bogosian. Through his authoritative voice’over explaining and correcting her testimony, and her appearance only at the margins of the filmic frame, American male filmmaker Bogosian (who remains centred in the frame at all times) attempts ‘ somewhat unsuccessfully ‘ to supress her more emotive and complex statements. Laura U. Marks then investigates film as fetish and fossil in the work of performance artist turned filmmaker Shauna Beharry. Displaced identity features in this essay also, as Beharry is of Indigenous Canadian descent. Her film Seeing is Believing (1991) reflects on the importance of the tactile, the sensory, even olfactory, to memory and identity challenged by displacement, questioning the power of the photographic image to represent the feminine past. In the final chapter of this section Deborah Lefkowitz describes her experiences as an American Jew investigating what German women, both Jewish and non-Jewish choose to say about the Holocaust. She addresses the film using the notion of silence as developed by feminist theorists.

Many of the essays to which I’ve referred above deal in some direct way with the identity of the filmmaker, or with the close relationship between filmmaker and subject. In the final section, “Innovative (auto)biographies” this relationship becomes even more directly the focal point of investigation as filmic autobiography is considered. The inevitable relationship between feminism and the personal is embraced and yet carefully considered in these essays. Michelle Citron reflects on her own experience as a personal filmmaker who chose a fictional style for her autobiographical works. Citron puts forward an interesting argument that to label autobiographies as ‘confessional’ is to denigrate them and ignore the intensely political and social aspects of autobiography made from the margins. Nevertheless ‘ while an obvious supporter of more personal feminist works ‘ she details some of the inherent problems in making films about self and family, and in the wake of her challenging film Daughter Rite (1979), the obligation the feminist filmmaker has also to her audience. Reflecting on Leslie Thornton’s There was an Unseen Cloud Moving (1987), Chris Holmund thinks through the problems of representing another woman’s life. For Holmund, Thornton’s avant-garde “distortions, fracturings, and embellishments of biographical authority” are appropriate for such a representation largely because of the kind of viewer response provoked. (304) Similarly Julia Lesage in her article on “Women’s fragmented consciousness in feminist experimental autobiography video” (309), emphasises the important – and close – relationship between film/filmmaker and the audience in these works. After outlining the properties of autobiography as a genre, she attempts the difficult analysis of the violence against women presented in these films and processes of identification involved.

Feminism and Documentary is hard to categorise overall given its large scope. Nevertheless it is drawn together by strong themes. These themes include a commitment to understand documentary beyond a limited realist perspective; to the role and challenges women and feminism present to documentary filmmaking; to the complex relationship between the individual/identity and History; and between filmmaker and subject. For myself – someone working on feminist autobiographical film within a documentary perspective – I particularly enjoyed the balance between different methods and approaches, some more descriptive, some more intensely analytical, and approaches to documentary beyond that easily categorised as feminist. Feminism has indeed left its imprint on documentary filmmaking, and I believe this book to be the first general work to acknowledge this fact so clearly and intelligently, keeping both documentary and feminism in view with neither eclipsing the other. As a useful summation of the literature and relevant issues this work would certainly make a valuable teaching tool and a good introduction to anyone seeking a broad and insightful introduction to documentary filmmaking and gender. A further strength is the inclusion of essays which are more original in their reflections on documentary such as Julia Lesage’s powerful consideration of why female audiences identify with the on-screen portrayal of violence in autobiography. Essays like this one will refresh debates about feminism and documentary and keep them alive.

Meredith Seaman