Sue Thornham (ed), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) ISBN 0 7486 0890 7 361pp NZ$64.95
Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory. (London: Arnold, 1997) ISBN 0 340 65225 X 204pp NZ$64.95
Uploaded 1 March 2000
In 1972, when the first essay included in Sue Thornham’s Feminist Film Theory: A Reader originally appeared, there was very little academic discussion of women and film and certainly not enough material in print to supply readings for a course on the subject. Since then, enough material has appeared, and with what almost amounts to periodic regularity, that those of us who teach courses on women and film can update our course structure and readings with relative ease. In fact, the difficulty is usually deciding what to exclude.
Although Thornham’s Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory appeared two years before her Reader, the two books are clearly meant to work in tandem. Perhaps I should be writing this review a few months from now, after I have had the experience of teaching with both books as required texts. I am so impressed, though, by Thornham’s clarity of presentation in Passionate Detachments (and her introductions in the Reader) as well as by the appropriateness of her selection of essays (and her abbreviating of them) that I am not only prepared to make them required texts but also to review them favorably beforehand.
Thornham provides both an historical overview of feminist film studies and a clear presentation of the intellectual debates involved &endash; as they have evolved. The six sections in her Reader correlate with the eight chapters in Passionate Detachments, with additional suggested readings included at the end of each section of the Reader. Some of these readings, for example, Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks in conjunction with the section covering race, indicate the breadth of Thornham’s coverage, for her introductions also attempt to situate the feminist film theory that she discusses within a more general context of cultural analysis.
The title phrase “passionate detachments” comes from Laura Mulvey’s “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (originally published in 1973 and extensively anthologized, including in Thornham’s Reader), but it has also been used, Thornham tells us, by Donna Haraway, “to describe her own ideal of the ‘critical vision’ required of theorists engaged in what she calls ‘the politics of visual culture'” (Passionate Detachments ix). The Reader begins with Sharon Smith’s “The image of women in film: some suggestions for future research” (originally published in Women and Film1 [1972]) and concludes with an excerpt from Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993). Each of Thornham’s volumes, in other words, takes us on a journey from the beginnings of feminist film studies nearly up to the present moment.
While other anthologies and surveys have served well as required texts for feminist film studies courses, or simply as introductions to the subject for the interested reader, they all, at best, eventually date. Some eventually begin to look biased in their selection, or not quite in touch with what now looks like an appropriate overview of the subject. At the moment, Thornham’s books, either alone but especially together, are the best, most current books of their sort.
The Reader‘s six parts generally contain four essays each. The titles of these sections tell Thornham’s story. Her chronology begins with “Taking up the struggle”, moves to “The language of theory”, which turns to “The female spectator”, followed by “Textual negotiations”. Part V, “Fantasy, horror and the body”, has only three essays, by Carol Clover, Barbara Creed (the sole non-Anglo-American in the anthology), and Linda Williams, with Kristeva’s work on the abject as an implicit backdrop. Part VI, “Re-thinking differences”, deals with both race and queer theory, a division more fully acknowledged in Passionate Detachments‘ separate chapters devoted to race and to lesbian responses to film and film theory.
In fact, the chapter titles in Passionate Detachments, while clearly paralleling the Reader‘s structure, flesh out Thornham’s overview of the history of feminist film theory. “Taking up the struggle” is almost as clear as “Forerunners and beginnings”, but “Structures of fascination: ideology, representation and the unconscious” more precisely indicates Thornham’s coverage than “The language of theory”; while “The female spectator” is admirably clear, “Female spectators, melodrama and the ‘Woman’s film'” says more.
The textual negotiations Thornham covers deal with the transition in research practices and foci indicated by her parallel chapter in Passionate Detachments: “Negotiating the text: spectator positions and audience readings”. From this point in each book, Thornham balances between research and researchers associated, on the one hand, with psychoanalytically-oriented film studies and the spectator studies connected with that approach, and with more empirically determined studies of audiences in all their historically specific diversity. Her final chapter in Passionate Detachments, “Postmodern scepticisms”, attempts to summarize the latest developments in the ongoing debate between the two approaches.
Thornham’s focus is both a strength and a weakness for Passionate Detachments. The opposition she works with between research that generally does or doesn’t accept psychoanalysis helps to structure our perceptions and understanding of several decades of feminist film theory. However, such a focus doesn’t seem to accommodate any feminist research outside that opposition; for example, the extensive work on costume by authors in Britain and the United States, or attempts to bypass the opposition throug applications of Deleuzian analysis.
Smaller concerns might include Thornhanm’s heavy reliance on quotations from primary sources, especially in Passionate Detachments, but Thornham integrates her sources well both stylistically and substantially into the structure of her survey cum explication. Neither volume is illustrated, a lack most sorely felt in connection with Doane’s analysis in “Film and the masquerade” of Doisneau’s photograph called “Un regard oblique”.
Penley’s Feminism and Film Theory sought to anthologise hard-to-find articles originally published in relatively obscure journals. In contrast, many of Thornham’s selections come from books on other anthologies. That difference probably reflects changes in film studies generally as much as changes over the decades in feminist film theory. There will be another good anthology soon, I’m sure, and it will then be interesting to see how Thornham’s selections of essays and her analysis of the state of feminist film theory holds up.
Harriet Margolis