Abstract
Veronica Pravadelli’s last book delves into the history and practices of women in Western cinema. Its title (lit. tr.: Women in Cinema: Stars, Directors, Spectators) declares the aim to analyse three main roles of women in cinema history through the use of a specific theoretical framework and the analysis of many case studies. Great importance is righteously accorded to the mapping of the various theories and methodologies involved in approaching every aspect of ‘women in cinema’. The volume is greatly successful in its ambition to locate the experiences of female spectatorship, stardom and authorship in their complex historical contexts and to depict the wide scope of the theories they imply. Moreover, it systematically analyses each issue through a few case studies, selected not according to some impossible completeness but by following the essential criterion of pertinence, while not neglecting to take into consideration the author’s own competence and pleasures as well.
The book is therefore part of an important list of international volumes concerning the theories and practices of the relation between women and cinema. In particular, Le donne del cinema traces the evolution of feminist film theory and of women’s cinema history, producing an original network of figures, issues and moments. Moreover, it locates itself within the Italian academic debate, which is problematic in its ongoing misrecognition of a variety of feminist theories. Pravadelli had already recognized in some of her other essays the importance of being part of the feminist theoretical framework as a way of making a political statement; this volume is not just another neutral history about the roles of women in Western cinema, quite the contrary: it wants to affirm the necessity of theorizing the different models available for women’s empowerment, highlighting the problematic asymmetries of gender relations. In this sense, to have a position in the film industry and to be a woman at the same time is never related to plain anatomy: it mainly indicates a difference and a struggle to produce new senses and models for the identity.
The aim of the first section of the volume is to create historically located models of filmic experience. Pravadelli starts with historical research about the New Woman and the new regimes of vision, such as the ones by Peiss, Hansen and Friedberg, and connects this research with writings about modernity by Benjamin, Balász and Simmel. In her original intertwining of these theories, Pravadelli underlines how early cinema partakes in a new dimension for visuality and visibility, strictly related to the female body. In many early films, the woman’s body is an object exposed to the gaze, but it is not trapped in this role as is the case in Hollywood cinema.
The birth of cinema coincides with social, economic and cultural changes in the lives of women and with the beginning of their emancipation (also through feminism). The New Woman can be looked at because she has conquered the public spaces of work and entertainment; finally free from the control of her family and the household, her exhibition is a component of a wider empowering process. The female body is part of the exciting spectacle offered for the gaze of the audience, and is also part of the continuous physical and emotional shocks which configure the experience of modernity. At the same time, the audience does not consist only of male viewers, quite the opposite; a great part of the cinemagoers in the USA at the beginning of 20th century were female, and from different social statuses. As in the practice of window-shopping, in Pravadelli’s powerful statement, the New Woman is an active subject who expresses her will through her consumption and entertainment choices. Here, the author underlines how the female spectator of early cinema does not ‘identify’ with the apparatus or with any onscreen characters through an unconscious process, but she consciously recognizes herself onscreen. This recognition forges her status as a modern citizen and consumer.
It is only with the raise of the feature film and of stardom that identification actually becomes the main device for spectatorship. Indeed, the cinematic apparatus combines itself with the filmic form of classic Hollywood cinema and produces an experience that would be read through a psychoanalytic approach. Pravadelli underlines the multiple possibilities for female desire and pleasure in such a scenario: going beyond the founding analyses by Bellour and Mulvey about the male gaze (and power) over the female object, the author proposes a few examples from woman’s films in order to expose instances of such complex identifications and multiple identity positions. According to feminist film theory, however, identification with the narrative is still happening from a hegemonic position, and it can only offer shades of a heteronormative, phallocentric desire. The main way to subvert patriarchy in cinema is feminist avant-garde, which produces a viewing experience dominated by the erasure of narrative pleasure and by consciousness-raising practices.
The second part of Le donne del cinema is dedicated to the divas, and depicts the main theories of stardom discussed within film studies (e.g. Dyer’s reflection). This section focuses on the confluence of different models for women’s emancipation, the cultural contexts in which they surface and the new possibilities they bring for the female spectators. In particular, Pravadelli goes back to the beginning of narrative cinema, underlining the roles opened for the New Woman, from the serial-queen melodramas of the 1910s to the flapper films of the 1920s (perfectly represented through an analysis of Clara Bow’s films). She proceeds towards the configuration of the working girl from the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on stars such as Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford.
Hollywood’s changes during the late 1950s and the 1960s caused a shift in the audience’s attention; great importance was accorded to European cinema and the New Wave. Pravadelli therefore analyses stars of European cinema, whose enigmatic faces become a synecdoche for their tormented souls (e.g. Monica Vitti, Anna Karina). However, this model is not a hegemonic one; its power is undermined by popular production, often dominated by the earthen charm and the explicit sexuality of Mediterranean divas such as Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren. However, the stardom orbiting the female body offers a rather regressive position for its spectator.
Pravadelli hence goes back to the USA to discover instances of rebel divas; she particularly analyses the figure of Jane Fonda, and her many changes during the last decades. Then, she impressively depicts the passage from stardom to celebrity culture through the global figure of Angelina Jolie: her various filmic roles, her multiple public positions, and the multi-ethnic family she has formed with her fellow celebrity Brad Pitt. The contradictions implied by Jolie’s public image underline the fluidity of gender identity, and they particularly undermine the conventional opposition between feminism and the postfeminist culture.
The final section focuses on women directors, beginning with a discussion of the debate about authorship. Pravadelli relates to the idea of an author as a function in a filmic production, not as an artist expressing him/herself. Women film historians have already addressed the importance of women pioneers, beginning with Alice Guy, who probably directed the first fiction film in 1896 (La fée aux choux). Pravadelli also recalls the intense career of Lois Weber and her engagement with social and moral reforms, and the Neapolitan director Elvira Notari. When the classic mode of production started to impose itself, women directors managed to obtain their greatest power of expression within the avant-garde movements, from the Surrealists Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren, to the feminist directors of the 1970s. These models still reverberate in contemporary women’s cinema, for instance in the found footage documentaries by Alina Marazzi or in the Dunyementaries by Cheryl Dunye.
However, women directors are still present in narrative cinema, and their work is the focus of the last, rich chapter of Le donne del cinema. Pravadelli points out how both Hollywood cinema and the European New Wave leave only a small space for women – very few are the names of those who achieved the visibility of their male counterparts. Moreover, the author originally highlights two recent modes of production and the different ways they configure imaginaries: on the one hand is US independent cinema with its attention to the declination of ‘identity politics’, and on the other hand is the impressive female presence in Mediterranean cinema, part of the wider tendency of contemporary World Cinema. Pravadelli proposes to use the transnational comparative approach in order to underline the usually underestimated aesthetic similarities and thematic convergences in many films directed by women in North Africa and the Middle East. These women directors are particularly interested in exploring the possibilities opened up for female characters, notwithstanding the difficulties originated by neoliberalism and ethnic/religious fundamentalism; they are also interested in depicting the empowerment produced by the constitution of female communities based on friendship (considered through Derrida’s theoretical frame).
To conclude, Le donne del cinema proposes an extensive and detailed revision of feminist film theory and gender studies in cinema in general, updating some of their main frameworks and producing an original and powerful reflection about the multiple roles available for women in film history. Pravadelli’s volume is therefore a fundamental instrument for the development of the theories and histories of women’s cinema, and also for the knowledge of film studies at large.