Felicity Collins,
The Films of Gillian Armstrong.
Melbourne: The Moving Image no. 6, Atom, 1999.
ISBN 1 876467 037
98pp
A$19.95 (paper)
(Review copy received from Australian Teachers of Media)
Uploaded 12 November 1999

Felicity Collins’ book on the films of Gillian Armstrong might best be described as an extended reflection on the conditions of possibility for feminist filmmaking and, by implication, contemporary feminist film theory. In a move that might therefore seem curious, Collins states at the outset that she aims not to evaluate Armstrong’s place in Australian (or women’s) cinema but rather “to decipher, from her films, the idea of cinema entailed in ‘A Gillian Armstrong film'” (91).

To be sure, the idea of cinema that emerges from Armstrong’s films can hardly be described as neoformalist. Instead, it is quintessentially modern and unmistakably woman-centered. Similarly, the idea of film criticism and theory to emerge from Collins’ analysis is as quietly transformative as the films themselves. According to Collins, Armstrong’s cinema expands and deepens our relationship to characters, objects, settings, and time. It is a cinema of landscapes and interior spaces, of revelatory objects and significant gestures (most especially of faces and hands within an aesthetic force field of a peculiarly female-inflected modernity). It is therefore a mistake to describe Armstrong’s films as somehow “about” generically strong, rebellious or independent heroines, for to do so is to reduce Armstrong’s vision to predictable national archetypes (the spirited bush woman or squatter’s daughter). It is also to miss the range of figures and acts of self-differentiation which are realized visually and performatively in all of her films, from My Brilliant Career to Oscar and Lucinda.

In Collins’ estimation, Armstrong’s films are nothing less than extended reflections (they are literally aesthetic meditations) on cinematic space and time, which reveal “something of the cinema’s embroiled relation to modernity.” (39) And it turns out that this relation to modernity reveals something, if not entirely novel, then at least compellingly different about contemporary feminist film practice and the possibilities for feminist work today. Much in the way she describes the films, Collins endeavors in her criticism to evoke a different, more subtle and nuanced, approach to questions of sexual and cultural and gender difference. Armstrong’s films, she writes, have “nothing to say, only something to show.” (44) Or later, as she explains, “Armstrong’s films never generalise, never argue. Instead they invite us to look.” (75) The same might be said of Collins’ own approach to film analysis.

Starting with the films themselves rather than a theory of them, Collins aims to capture an experience (of looking and hearing, of image and sound) through attentive, intelligent, and probing analyses of individual scenes and privileged motifs. She believes that the most compelling element of Armstrong’s cinema is her “revelatory eye” for everyday objects in interior spaces (and, at the end of her book, she singles out “oranges” that appear somewhere in the scene in most of her feature films). It seems to me, however, that the most remarkable motif of this book (if not of Armstrong’s films) is of a woman’s hands – as evidenced, for example, in Collins’ choice of frame enlargements. In chapter after chapter, and image after image, she singles out and reflects upon the hands of women writers (Sybylla in My Brilliant Career or Jo in Little Women) or the hands extended between women and across generations (Ally and Lilli’s in High Tide). More than this, of course, is the “hand” of the director herself, who, much like women in her films, takes matters into her own hands, and makes public and visible an otherwise unremarkable (and often un-remarked) female experience. It is in this sense, for Collins, that Armstrong’s films are irrevocably modern.

Towards the end of her book, Collins remarks on her own approach to feminist film theory, for which she sees an analog in Armstrong’s films. She explains, for instance, that the “shift in focus of feminist critique from psychoanalytic theories of narrative, subjectivity, and spectatorship to historical questions of cinema as a public sphere which articulates the experience of modernity, has opened up a promising vein of enquiry into the sexual politics of cinema.” (78) Although she doesn’t say much more than this, Collins is clearly concerned to move away from notions of voyeurism and masochism and sadistic looking in the cinema to consider discriminating, intelligent acts of looking and analysis. Referencing the work of Frankfurt School theorists and the feminist scholars who have reinterpreted it, Collins argues the necessity of rethinking the female experience of modernity through recurring figures of modern femininity, “in particular those of the public woman, the streetwalker, the window shopper, the flaneur/flaneuse, and the prostitute.” (78) Much like Armstrong’s films, she suggests, such attention to figures is not a matter of identifying and promoting a singular national or gendered type (the “strong” or “independent” Australian woman, the one-dimensional and unchanging “female spectator”). Rather, it involves a commitment to exploring a range of peculiarly modern experiences (captured perhaps most brilliantly in Armstrong’s documentary series beginning with Smoke and Lollie in 1976 and ending with Not Fourteen Again in 1996).

Needless to say, Felicity Collins has done an admirable job in rethinking the commonplace assumptions surrounding Armstrong’s idea of cinema and has, in the process, provided feminist film theorists with something more than just a new object for analysis. Indeed, by focussing on women’s experiences of modernity as they emerge in this particular body of films, she has given distinctive shape to her own transformative vision of film theory and analysis. And it is this vision, as much as the vision of “the irrevocably modern in the cinema” offered by Armstrong’s films, which has much to offer feminist film theory today.

Patrice Petro