Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement - Review

Afterimage, May-June, 1999 by Patricia R. Zimmermann

by B. Ruby Rich Durham: Duke University Press, 1998 419 pp./$59.95 (hb), $18.95 (sb)

B. Ruby Rich's Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement is a necessary, passionate and beautifully written call to arms for the feminist film community to remember that ideas are not imbedded exclusively within our lonely, computer-shackled selves, but demand collective action to imagine a better future. It is without question one of the most significant film books published in the past year, with brilliant deconstructions of legendary feminist films and searing exposes of the events and people who formed the feminist film movement. The importance of this book resides in how it deftly wrenches all of us from the thinking that feminist film theory represents merely a theoretical paradigm, an arcane academic lingo or a bourgeois individual pursuit for tenure and publication. Rich reminds us that feminist film is "a discipline that began as a movement" where "the present landscape of feminism and film has been deprived of its own history, substituting a canon of texts for a set of lived experiences."

Chick Flicks zeroes in on the overlooked, underanalyzed public sector of feminist film culture: film exhibition, film festivals, feminist film conferences and journals. As more and more academic film departments codify film studies and professionalize their production and screen-writing areas into industry clones, Rich's refocus on alternative media institutions provides an important reclamation of the rich, varied histories of the field. The very first sentence of the book sets out her agenda: "The aim of this book is both modest and grandiose: to bring history, theory, and experience back into better communication with one another, and to marshal the trio into a synthesis that exposes its process and preserves its parts in as rough-edged, disparate, even contradictory a form as possible."

Surveying the current scene, Rich observes that "overall, there is a growing acceptance of feminist film as an area of study rather than as a sphere of action." She worries that the heavy emphasis on feminist film theory in the academy in the 1990s has neutralized larger social and political issues that once provided a context for filmmakers to engage in debates about film form, content and practice. The communities that she describes anchored feminist media artists in larger political spheres of controversy, debate and social change. Rich adamantly emphasizes the moments connecting feminist film and the feminist movement. She hails feminist film pioneers like Chantal Akerman, Michelle Citron, Julie Dash, Ulrike Ottinger and Michelle Parkerson, who are "inventing new vernaculars for the future."

Rich's polemical accounts of her various theoretical debates, love affairs and programming schemes will perhaps irritate some academic film theorists in its ruthless braiding of politics and personal life, great films and even greater gossip. Rich is not always nice and polite to everyone here. She takes stands and comes out against those whose positions rankle her (such as academic film theorists E. Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn and Annette Michelson). Rich names names, reclaiming the women and men who forged feminist film and feminist causes into one of the major events of this century. Rich describes a large, lively transnational community of feminist film commandos, spanning Canada, the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia, brimming with committed scholars, critics, programmers, filmmakers and politicos.

She writes many footnote-free chapters with tell-all revelations that are sure to spark debates about academic: propriety and seriousness among those who like their politics in faculty meetings rather than at film exhibitions. But beyond the elegant writing and the well-told tales, Rich's personal history pumps life into the theories college students now study in feminist film courses. Autobiographical sections, or "prologues," establish the political and personal contexts for her landmark critical essays on feminist film, originally published between 1972 and 1991. In the prologues, Rich enfolds the past into the present: she reevaluates her own essays from the standpoint of today, describing the political debates that stoked her writing and how the debates have shifted. She refuses nostalgia and like every good radical tries to move forward to the future. It is hard to reduce Rich to a sharp-tongued gossip or a bon mot critic skewering the opposition with brilliant analyses. The autobiographical sections have a power all their own - unfolding like some epic Russian novel of feminism where people act in complicated ways, program films, have sex and argue their hearts out.

Rich started out as an alternative film programmer at Woods Hole, Massachusetts in the early 1970s and later moved to the Film Center at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she hooked up with the editorial collective of the journal Jump Cut and accrued a political film education. She cuts open the heated debates about feminist film launched between Jump Cut and the journals Screen and Camera Obscura. In 1981, Rich morphed once again, this time into a visionary arts administrator as Director of the Electronic Media and Film Program for the New York State Council on the Arts, where she instituted aggressive funding for multicultural artists and the decentralization of media exhibition across the state.