Bibliographic record
Abstract
WOMEN FILMMAKERS: REFOCUSING Edited by Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis and Valerie Raoul New York: Routledge, 2003, 496 pp. This is a great book. I'm sure that anyone who teaches women's cinema has felt the need for a book that brings the discussion of feminist theory up to date with current film practices. This collection of articles from the Women Filmmakers: Refocusing conference, which was held in Vancouver in March 1999, fulfills this need. The articles are well written and cover a wide range of topics. Most of them deal with the films of specific female directors, but there are sections on feminist film theory and on conditions of production. The book also includes sections on European auteurs, popular genres in Europe, postcolonial filmmakers, films on India, representations of and by minority women, and Canadian women filmmakers. It is a thick book with much to offer anyone interested in the field. The collection opens with an article by E. Ann Kaplan that gives a good overview of feminist film theory centered on questions relating to the gaze, as well as white feminism and its relation to minority groups. While the theoretical discussion is kept at a sensible level so as to be accessible to undergraduate students, it has some shortcomings. For example, Kaplan discusses Trinh T. Minh-ha's films and her theories without mentioning poststructuralism. In another instance, Angela Martin discusses the relationship between women auteurs and the female voice, arguing that Kathy Bigelow's films put into question the very idea of the existence of a female voice because they are mainstream films, but because Martin never clearly defines what she means by a female voice, her article is not convincing. Donia Mounsefs article on Germaine Dulac and Marguerite Duras is a fascinating historical study of the place of these women in the avant-garde movements of their time, but because Mounsef fails to address issues of feminist film theory inherent in their two different strategies, she misses an important distinction between the two filmmakers: the fact that Dulac emphasizes the construction of a visual language, while Duras privileges sound over image. Comparable problems appear in Katherine Fowler's essay on Sally Potter, Chantai Akerman and Yvonne Rainer. Fowler attempts to trace a change in strategy from their earlier films to their more contemporary ones. While these filmmakers were at one time concerned with the issues raised in Laura Mulvey's famous article on visual pleasure, the later films go beyond Mulvey's specific concerns to construct a carefully developed and negotiated pleasure for the viewer. Fowler feels that this new strategy needs to be reconnected to feminist film theory. I would agree with this, and her analysis of the films is a good start in that direction, but it does not go far enough. A general problem with the anthology lies in the avoidance of postmodern feminist theory, which hampers the development of the analysis of the films and obscures the changes that have come about in contemporary feminist filmmaking. The book is, however, full of informative, contextualized, discussions of the works of different women filmmakers that kept me reading avidly. The section on auteurs from Europe begins with an article by Steven Taubeneck on Helma Sanders Brahms' work and its relation to German history. Slew Jin Ooi's analysis of Margarethe von Trotta's The Second Awakening of Christa Klages sets the film in the context of the feminist film movement in Germany. Agnieszka Holland's use of the personal narrative to address political issues in her films is explained by B. Amarillis and Lugo de Fabrits. Corinn Columpar shows how dance is used by Sally Potter in The Tango Lesson to explore ways of constructing the female body. In a section on the uses of popular genres by European directors, Brigitte Rollet argues that women can use genre films to make strong statements about gender identity and gender roles, as in films such as Gazon maudit and Trois hommes et an couffin. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".