Conclusion

The Films of Margarethe von Trotta: Domination, Violence, Solidarity, and Social Criticism H-B. MOELLER In 1982, representatives of the New German Cinema's first generation frequently looked back over the two decades since the signing of the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 with pride; critics, for their part, either commended the New German Cinema's rise to success, or cautioned against its midlife crisis. The women filmmakers of West Germany, whose names were not yet included among those on the Manifesto, celebrated the anniversary alongside Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Peter Schamoni et al. -- and with just cause. The Hamburg Film Festival, arranged by the filmmakers themselves and conceived as the second Oberhausen Manifesto, i.e. as their second declaration of independence, opened in the fall of 1979; it did so with a women's film, Margarethe von Trotta's "Schwestern oder Die Balance des Glücks"/"Sisters or the Balance of Happiness." In the first years of the eighties, other women's productions stood out alongside Trotta's films: Helma Sanders-Brahms' "Deutschland bleiche Mutter"/"Germany Pale Mother" (1980), Heidi Genée's "1+1=3" (1980) — granted, a work without recognition from feminists — and Heike Sander's "Der subjektive Faktor"/"The Subjective Factor" (1981). Since then, Programmkino movie theaters, which specialize in art films, have made the transition to include weeks devoted to women's films in their calendar of events. Furthermore, representatives of critical women's film have made their way. into German colleges and gained academic recognition. Moreover, the third wave of the New German Cinema — recognized since the fall of 1981 in the United States -- has worked to the advantage of women filmmakers this side of the Atlantic. The Chicago Film Festival honoring this third generation praised Margarethe von Trotta in particular and conferred upon her the Golden Hugo, its grand prize. The world's economic crisis, the financing shortages of national television, and the change of government in 1982 to the conservative Christian-Liberal Bonn coalition show signs of having negative implications for future projects of German 129 women's film. Here, "women's film" is to be understood as production by and for women that contains feminine counter-proposals to mainstream culture, if not a direct, socio-politically critical stance. And the West German film industry, which is largely funded by federal and public boards, under the banner of the neo-conservative cultural climate could prove to be just as closed toward this kind of film as it is toward that of radical male filmmakers. Yet at the beginning of the eighties, German women's film made a breakthrough and reached its largest distribution to date. Against this background, Margarethe von Trotta's filmic studies of contemporary women take on their appeal. Since the making of her third independent film, "Die bleierne Zeit"/"Marianne and Juliane" (1981), she has been considered the primary representative of critical German women's film due to both the "Golden Lion" of the Venice Film Festival and the first prize of the Women's Film Festival in Sceaux, France, granted her in addition to the previously mentioned Chicago Prize. The quasi-literary character of her films in terms of an imaginative, emotional, complex and esthetic portrayal of intense experiences such as fear, grief and death, is undisputed, even if her intent may be to convert the audience to her emotional political views. For all this fascination with Trotta's work, several central questions about her film oeuvre have not yet been raised at all or been put forward only insufficiently. The intent of this article is to examine such core questions. Where is Trotta dependent upon her partner, filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, for whom she has writen several film scripts, and where is she to be considered independent of him? Is she to be seen as a representative of the international women's movement, or rather, and more specifically, as a West German filmmaker who makes films about women? Should one approach her as a champion of feminism, or as one of the political New Left? That is, what does her emphasis on women's films with socio-political overtones and her accentuation of counter-culture values mean? Should...

Margarethe von Trotta as Filmmaker: Biographical Retrospectives Hehr, Renate. Margarethe von Trotta. Filmmaking as Liberation. Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 2000. 128 pp. $58.00 hardcover. Wydra, Thilo. Margarethe von Trotta: Filmen, um zu uberleben. Berlin: Henschel, 2000. 287 pp. euro25.00 hardcover. The current scholarship on film director Margarethe von Trotta consists of approximately 60 substantial articles and entries in books, journals, and film lexica and numerous feuilletonistic reviews on each of her 15 filmic works. This secondary literature was dramatically enriched in 2000 with the appearance of the two biographies under discussion here. While this corpus still seems relatively small for one of the most prolific European women filmmakers, all other contemporary female moviemakers of her age fare even less well. For a long time most monographs on film as well as major publications on cinema made scant mention of any women directors. The most reputable German cinematic histories each devote only a few pages to Trotta (Thomas Elsaesser: New German Cinema, 1989; Timothy Corrigan, New German Film, 1994; Marc Silberman: German Cinema, 1995). In American global film histories she does not receive any mention (Robert Sklar: International History of the Medium, 1993; Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell: Film History, 1994; David Cook: A History of Narrative Film, 1996). Even British scholarship has little mention of her (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1997; John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., World Cinema: Critical Approaches, 2000). This lack of inclusion documents a very gender-biased critical condition, for women film directors are still a highly under-represented and neglected group of media artists in academia and the movie industry as a whole. While most film critical scholarship has been written by men about male film directors, women's film scholarship in the last decade has tried to make up for much of the exclusion of female directors (Sandra Frieden, Rick McCormick, Vibeke, R. Petersen, Laurie Melissa Vogelsang, eds., Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, 1993; Renate Fischetti, Das neue Kino: Acht Portraits von deutschen Regisseurinnen, 1993; Anette Kuhn with Susannah Radstone, eds., Women in Film: An International Guide, 1990; Amy L. Unterburger ed., The St. James Women Filmmakers Encyclopedia: Women on the Other Side of the Camera, 1999). Of course, women filmmakers represent a much smaller production group, maybe 250-300 worldwide in recent decades, but they have established a body of significant films that deserves to be treated as a very distinct and distinguished Women's Margarethe von Trotta turned sixty in March 2002. The second wave or generation of mostly European women filmmakers were all born around 1940, signaling a demographic group that is entering its senior years. As evidenced in the critical literature, their work has never gained mainstream recognition or equal status next to their German, French or British male colleagues. European new, nouvelle, orindependent cinemas became predominantly known through male directors, such as the French with Resnais, Malle, Godard, Rivette, and Marker, the Germans with Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, or the British with Greenaway and Jarman. While most of these male filmmakers have obtained more name recognition, they share with their female colleagues the limited distribution of their film work; their films remain within the boundaries of festival circuits, museum retrospectives and the academic arena. Women filmmakers, at least the European ones, usually belong to the contingent that makes up Independent Cinema. This characterizes those who script, cast, shoot and edit their films mostly themselves, resort to demanding film topics, have the hardest time finding funding for their films, work on minimal budgets with most rights signed away, have the least promotional assistance, and gain very little access to distribution. …

This chapter presents a historiography of a select group of Brazilian women's independent, alternative film and video production during the 1980s, which contributed to new definitions of citizenship during the last years of the dictatorship and the transition toward democracy. Concomitant to the goal to define new political and cultural identities, Brazilian women's alternative media at the time sought to reclaim and expand citizenship rights by intervening in understandings of brasilidade (Brazilian cultural identity) and shaping debates surrounding issues such as abortion and women's access to healthcare. The chapter then examines works by film and video maker Eunice Gutman, the Lilith Video Collective—a group of three women who dedicated themselves to bringing greater awareness to women's issues as the Brazilian constitution was being rewritten, and the feminist nongovernmental organization SOS-Corpo.

Reviewed by: Hispanic Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference ed. by Parvati Nair, and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla Deborah Shaw Nair, Parvati, and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, eds. Hispanic Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference. Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 2013. 282 pp. This edited collection examines Hispanic and Lusophone women film-makers from the 1930s to the present day. It includes analyses of films by directors from Portugal, Spain, and Latin America. It is also good to see the US included in this conceptualization of the Hispanic world, albeit in limited form, through a chapter on cinema of the important filmmaker Lourdes Portillo by Rosa Linda Fregoso. The focus of the book is on aesthetic, theoretical, and sociohistorical analyses of gender and sexual politics with particular attention paid to cultural representation. The introduction appears in part aimed at a specialist readership and in part aimed at undergraduates and non-specialists. It presents useful and well contextualized accounts of Catholic patriarchy, the history of Hispanic conquest, the development of gender models, and a brief overview of the Franco regime and its impact on women (with colonial histories, Catholicism, and dictatorships providing the common points in the Hispanic and Lusophone societies). The editors, Nair and Gutiérrez-Albilla, demonstrate a clear awareness of the complexities involved in gender categories. To their credit, they avoid the trap of attempting to define women’s filmmaking, an endeavour that has too often occupied feminist literary and film critics. The editors also acknowledge the dangers of ghettoization in the label. Nonetheless as they say, there is work to be done within academia and within the industry to address the lack of attention given to women directors and the fact that “women directors remain a relatively rare breed” (6). The methodological approaches are rightly heterogeneous, but there are unifying themes. Part 1 is organized around memory and history; part 2 has culture and conflict as the focus; the essays in part 3 concentrate on the themes of migration, transnationalism, and borders; part 4 considers women’s subjectivity through their filmmaking. These categories could, of course, also be applied to an exclusively male canon of filmmakers; however, the contributors highlight the relationship between their themes, gender and genre, and thus avoid essentialist applications of the “woman” question. The particular strengths of this collection are found in the ways in which it seeks to develop the critical field of Hispanic and Lusophone Women’s cinema, and through the quality of the contributors. All of the authors are, as the editors note, “emerging and internationally renowned scholars,” and they bring their expert knowledge of the Hispanic and Lusophone countries of their focus to the films and filmmakers under examination. The chapters are theoretically sophisticated, and well informed in terms of cultural and political context. The volume is also very comprehensive and broad in its scope. My only reservation in terms of structure is the decision to separate out Paul Julian Smith’s chapter “Transnational coproductions and female filmmakers: the cases of Lucrecia Martel and Isabel Coixet”: it appears after the introduction and before the three parts. While this chapter, as would be expected of Smith’s work, is excellent and locates the work of Martel and Coixet very well within transnational circulation, and within frameworks of auteurism, [End Page 597] film industry and art and indie cinema, it is unclear why it takes the position of a foreword when it is not really. Nonetheless, the division of the book into three parts works better and has a clear thematic structure with helpful introductions to each section. In Part 1, as would be expected, there is a broadly archeological approach in a number of the essays to the work of women directors, who have often been neglected and written out of film histories. This can be seen in the work of Patricia Torres Martin and Catherine Benamou and Leslie Marsh, and in Melero Salvador’s important critical interventions on Rosario Pi, the first woman filmmaker of the pre-civil war period. All of the essays in this section link women’s filmmaking to a social agenda; they discuss the formation of women’s social...

Hollywood’s women directors have received very little academic attention. The focus of much feminist scholarship is on those women filmmakers who have produced politicised films, and Hollywood histories have focused on the work of male filmmakers. This article argues for attention to be paid to Hollywood’s most financially successful directors as they have the potential to disrupt the patriarchal structures that govern the Hollywood film industry. Using writer-directors Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, and Nancy Meyers as case studies, this paper considers the industrial context within which these filmmakers have worked, and their films, in order to demonstrate the way in which women working within mainstream cinema have offered a form of counter cinema. The paper argues that Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers have capitalized on industry discourses that position them away from blockbuster cinema and that they offer a knowingness in their representation of romance and desire in order to create women’s narratives that function as a counterpoint to Hollywood’s dominant values.

ABSTRACTSince 2000 in particular, French cinema has witnessed an explosion in romantic comedy production. Women film-makers across the board from popular auteur to more mainstream cinema have been instrumental in the phenomenon. This essay explores the implications of women adopting a genre traditionally associated with conservative ideologies. It argues for a more inclusive, hybrid approach to rom-com, exploring its mobilization by women directors in a range of films. Notable trends are the way in which conventional gender positions are made fluid, the genre's frequent splicing with family narratives, and the prevalence of the ensemble rom-com, which is examined in the light of Tania Modleski's observations about the ‘femininity’ of episodic forms. The essay concludes that, despite its restrictions in addressing women within (usually white, middle class) heterosexual couples, the rom-com offers French women film-makers a means to speak in a widely understandable yet original and sometimes feminist voice.

Reviewed by: Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film Chris Stone M. Elise Marubbio Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film University of Kentucky Press, 2006; $30 Scholars have tended to encode the cinematic Indian as male, relegating Native women to the periphery. In challenging this literature, M. Elise Marubbio refrains from engaging the entire range of screen representations of Native women. Instead, she focuses on the “Celluloid Maiden,” an alluring, exotic young woman who engenders her own demise by entering into a relationship with the white hero. As she stresses, the Celluloid Maiden, is neither a static nor a monolithic figure. Variations exist; filmmakers decide which elements to incorporate; their choices, in turn, speak to the broader cultural and political milieu in which they operate. Despite these variations, Marubbio contends that the Celluloid Maiden, as the romantic, doomed avatar of a vanishing people, has sabotaged attempts to depict Native Americans with greater sensitivity and empathy. Marubbio traces the Celluloid Maiden back to the silent era, foregrounding two subtypes: the Celluloid Princess and the Sexualized Maiden. As the female counterpart of the ignoble savage, the Sexualized Maiden, as mandated by her “savage” blood, is a promiscuous, sexually aggressive femme fatale of mixed parentage who threatens to castrate white males. If this figure endangers white masculinity, violates sexual mores, and stokes fears of moral and racial degradation, filmmakers manage these threats to the social order by killing her off. In contrast, the Celluloid Princess “symbolizes the ‘best’ of Native America” (6). She is unspoiled, innocent, exotic, beautiful, and open to engagement with white culture. In “helper” films, the Celluloid Princess, in gratitude for a past kindness, sacrifices her life to warn whites of an impending Indian attack. In “lover” films, the Celluloid Princess marries and procreates with a transplanted Easterner seeking sanctuary in the West. With time, a crisis imperils their interracial union. Either she discovers that her husband loves another (white) woman, or she realizes [End Page 44] she cannot forsake her people and accompany him on his return to the East, or she becomes inconsolable after her husband enrolls their child in an eastern school. Whatever the crisis, the resolution is the same: she commits suicide, thereby releasing her husband from his obligations, facilitating his return to “civilization,” and ensuring the benefits of civilization for their progeny. The Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess each receded from screens in the 1930s (for reasons Marubbio never adequately foregrounds). A lustier, deadlier, more wanton Sexualized Maiden did reemerge, however, in the 1940s. As in the silent era, these films encoded female assertiveness as deviant, racialized promiscuity, conjoined miscegenation with degeneracy, and cast interracial romance and female sexuality as threats in need of containment. If Sexualized Maidens continued to appear through the 1960s, Marubbio argues that filmmakers fused the Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess into a hybrid figure in the early 1970s. The catalyst for this merger was the ascendancy of the revisionist western, which recast westward expansion as a tragic tale of murder and dispossession rather than an inspiring story of progress and nation-building. The Celluloid Maiden in these films, while as sexually assertive as the Sexualized Maiden of yesteryear, earned admiration, not scorn. Filmmakers cast the Celluloid Maiden as a harbinger of the sexual revolution and used her to inveigh against a “civilization” they deemed repressive. On the other hand, while these maidens resembled Celluloid Princesses in that they were full-bloodied Indians of social standing who entered into romantic relationships with whites, hybrid maidens practiced a markedly different brand of assimilation. Rather than seeking acceptance among whites, they detached their white lovers from “civilization.” Yet, for all of their good intentions and countercultural leanings, revisionist westerns, according to Marubbio, were less progressive than advertised. The Celluloid Maiden still died, an outcome that not only perpetuated the image of Native Americans as noble, exotic creatures destined for extinction, but also undercut the revisionist film’s bid to posit Indian culture as a viable alternative to the status quo. As revisionist films attest, the historically and ideologically laden baggage of genre can subtly undermine the liberal intentions of filmmakers. If Marubbio demonstrates nothing...

African Women on the Film Festival Landscape Beti Ellerson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure C. Women gather at FESPACO festival. Courtesy of FESPACO. [End Page 59] A vital function of the film festival is in its capacity to showcase on a local, continental and international level, the works of African women, and to serve as a networking space to professionalize their experiences as stakeholders on the global film festival landscape. As these entities proliferate on the continent and internationally, African women are leading the way, often at the helm of or in top-level positions at these institutions. The objective of many local film festivals is to facilitate an interconnected triadic relationship between the film, filmmaker and audience—especially with the organization of press conferences and panel discussions. Hence cultivating a critical audience via ciné-clubs and after-screening debates has been a long-standing practice of these local film initiatives. Drawing from this background and historical context, this article and the associated timeline, outline: women's film festival practices in Africa as a vehicle for promoting leadership and featuring women as role models; the cultural leadership functions that African women have taken on at the helm of film festivals on the continent and the diaspora; the diverse film festivals in Africa and their initiatives toward the empowerment and advancement of women in cinema; the showcasing of African women at African film festivals around the world; the flagship international film festivals and their interest in including African women in the global cinematic conversation. As there is an abundance of African and women-related film events, because of their obvious relevance they are described in the timeline that follows the discussion, while a few select festivals receive more detailed focus because of their historical importance, longevity and significance to this analysis of African women and film festival practices. Furthermore, this piece examines film festival practices and discourses to demonstrate the strategic function they have played in strengthening African women's participation in the myriad spheres of the moving image and beyond. Notably, Burkinabe Alimata Salembéré's trailblazing role in the creation of FESPACO carved a space for women who journey in her [End Page 60] path, as founders, organizers, curators, and stakeholders of film festivals (film events, screening venues, cinema conferences-symposia-colloquia). Likewise, it reveals the importance of film festival practices in the promotion, advancement, and visibilization of African women in cinema, visual media and screen culture over the past Fifty years. One of the particularities of the article is that it is informed by my primary-source based research derived from interviews with organizers, programmers, curators, festival planners, and other key players; the collection of posters, festival programs and catalogues; as well as my own participation at festivals as jury president and as member, as consultant, panelist, facilitator, and as festival participant. What inspired me to frame the film festival as a site of inquiry developed as I recognized the undeniable role that FESPACO—from its inception in 1969—and the cinema-related structures that it supports, have played in the capacity building of women in cinema as leaders. The interplay between FESPACO and the initiatives that derive from its prominence for a generation are now part of the cinematic landscape across the continent. The MICA marketplace, the Cinémathèque, Journées Cinématographiques de la Femme Africaine de l'Image (African Women Image Makers Cinema Days). This is the first mention of the JCFA, Institut Imagine, the historic film school INAFEC that existed between 1977 and 1987, all based in Burkina Faso, are important stakeholders in the country's cinema culture. While film festival scholarship highlights the significance of women's film festivals towards the global visibility of women in cinema since their rise in the 1970s, the emergence of continental-based film festivals/days in the 1960s marks the beginnings of an African-women presence in the milieu of the film festival event, notably the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC), the Carthage Film Festival, created in 1966 in Tunisia and as noted, FESPACO in Burkina Faso. The JCC's recognition of women dates to its early history, particularly at...

Research Article| December 08 2020 Brazilian Women’s Cinema from the Retomada to Bolsonaro Karla Holanda, Karla Holanda Karla Holanda is a professor and researcher in the Cinema and Video Department and the Postgraduate Program in Cinema and Audiovisual Studies (PPGCine) at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro. She has edited the books Mulheres de cinema (2019), about the history of world cinema from a female perspective, and Feminino e plural: mulheres no cinema brasileiro (2017), a history of women filmmakers in Brazil. She is also a filmmaker. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Mark Cohen Mark Cohen Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2020) 74 (2): 20–25. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.74.2.20 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Karla Holanda, Mark Cohen; Brazilian Women’s Cinema from the Retomada to Bolsonaro. Film Quarterly 8 December 2020; 74 (2): 20–25. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.74.2.20 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This entry examines multilingual commercial films by Pakistani women screen writers, directors, and producers. Set against the backdrop of Pakistan’s political inconsistency — the problems of migration and rehabilitation, East-West polity issues, and sovereign changes, the entry points to over three hundred commercial films that some eighty women producers and directors have made in Pakistan over the past seventy years. Starting with Saeeda Bano (Swaran Lata) as the producer of the first Pakistani Punjabi feature film Pheray (Marriage; Majeed 1949), and Noor Jehan as the first woman director of a Punjabi film Chanvay (Dearest; 1951), bilingual or trilingual women filmmakers have consistently made Urdu, Punjabi. and Pashto films while the Sindhi cinema has declined. Women made romantic musicals or mixed genres — romantic with social, fiction, fantasy, folklore, crime or history whose renditions cover Sindhi folklores, Pashto film crimes, Punjabi liberalism, and Urdu traditionalism. The entry finds that women made Sindhi films a decade and a half before making Pashto films. The women from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) did well under the successive regimes of Yahya, Bhutto and Zia, but it was actually during Zia’s period (of the so-called Islamization and terrorization) that eight out of a total of fifteen women filmmakers of Pashto films joined the silver screen, denying the social reality of the real (faceless) women of KPK through women who are open with their emotions, gaze, and sexuality in films. The article examines women’s identity and gaze issues in Amrita Pritam, Maya Devi, and Rukhsana Noor’s textual contributions to Pakistani commercial films and the musicals of Saeeda Bano, Salma Mumtaz, Noor Jehan, Shamim Ara and Sangeeta.

This paper focuses on the circulation of long-feature films by women filmmakers produced with Moroccan, Algerian or Tunisian funding, a purposefully small corpus of about 50 films produced over 35 years that raises questions of gender, the national, but also the regional (Maghrebi) and the transnational, each of these being raised in specific terms in different locations at different times. The apparently growing access to filmmaking for women directors is concomitant with the parallel decay of commercial film exhibition in most parts of the world, or its re-configuration. The objective of this enquiry is to reflect on what we know and what we don't know about the ways in which the films have been watched recently, the categories that are relevant to accounting for the ways in which viewers gain access to, watch and give meaning to films (in particular the relevance of gender, the national, and the terms within which the country of origin gets constructed, when it does, but also the regional and the transnational) at a time when the institutions have lost control over much of the circulation.

As the world’s fifth most populous nation and by far the largest Portuguese-speaking country, Brazil possesses a massive media market. Despite factors boosting demand for homegrown audiovisual content, the fortunes of the country’s film industry—prized as a means of expressing national identity and as a testament to technological modernity—have fluctuated over time. Historically, the sector has struggled in the face of competition from imported cinema, especially Hollywood product, which has dominated Brazilian screens since the mid-1910s. Nevertheless, Brazilian cinema has attracted mass audiences at home and won critical acclaim abroad, though not always with the same films. The humorous chanchadas (musical comedies) that characterized the industry from the 1930s through the 1950s were tailor-made for domestic audiences, but gained little traction internationally. By contrast, the politically charged and stylistically inventive films of the Cinema Novo movement attracted the attention of European and US critics, but held limited appeal for most Brazilian spectators. After Cinema Novo, few works of Brazilian cinema circulated in international markets until a series of gritty crime-themed films like City of God (2002) and Elite Squad (2007) reached global screens at the turn of the 21st century, bolstered by state incentives for private investment in film production. While this fare was also popular domestically, present-day Brazilian audiences often prefer romantic comedies, biopics, and religiously-themed films. These trends in Brazilian cinema have responded dynamically to the tastes and expectations of both national and international audiences. Onscreen representations create enduring images of the nation that circulate at home and abroad, while everyday practices of moviegoing forge an evolving realm of shared experience.

FROM NATIONALISM TO “BABY X”: AN INTERVIEW WITH NORTHERN IRISH FILMMAKER MARGO HARKIN MEGAN SULLIVAN although Ireland has recently been recognized as an international cinematic force, women filmmakers there have been making a mark since the early 1980s. Pat Murphy’s 1981 Meave and 1984 Anne Devlin examine women and nationalism in Ireland. Anne Crilly and the Derry Film Collective ’s 1988 documentary Mother Ireland explores the image of women in the nation. The film reveals how the “daughters” who fought for “Mother Ireland” in the Easter Rising, as participants in the IRA, and as recent activists problematize that pervasive female cultural image. Margo Harkin’s 1989 Hush-A-Bye Baby dramatizes the ordeal of a young girl who becomes pregnant in Derry’s Bogside; and Orla Walsh’s 1992 The Visit constructs a narrative about the wife of a Republican prisoner. Like the other works mentioned above, Hush-A-Bye Baby carves out a space for women in Irish cinema. The film also depicts women’s oppression in Ireland as not only a natural outgrowth of a colonial history, but as an added force against which they must struggle. During the current— and tumultuous—peace process, the voices of feminist filmmakers like Harkin convey how a new Northern Ireland might look. Hush-A-Bye Baby explores a young teenage woman’s experience in the Bogside, the contemporary working-class community in Derry, Northern Ireland, which was the site of the civil rights marches of 1968 and 1969 and Bloody Sunday in 1972. Just when the film’s protagonist, Goretti, a young Catholic girl, learns she is pregnant, her boyfriend Kieran is taken into custody by the RUC for suspected IRA activity. Although Kieran’s suspected Republican involvement is important as a narrative context for the film, Goretti’s primary concern throughout is her pregnancy. Because of Kieran’s arrest the prison becomes a crucial site in the film, but Hush-A-Bye Baby’s central icon is the Virgin Mary, not the prison. In AN INTERVIEW WITH NORTHERN IRISH FILMMAKER MARGO HARKIN 40 fact, Harkin remarked that before she conceived of the film as a script, she saw it visually, with a pregnant Virgin Mary as its dominant image (Murphy 9). This religious imagery appears early in the film, when a statue of the blessed Mary looms over a priest, who is explaining the sacramental concept of marriage to teenagers in a Catholic girls’ school. Although the students are more interested in the priest’s body than that of the Virgin, the statue suggests an unconscious affiliation. In later scenes, one of the protagonist’s friends (played by Sinéad O’Connor) dresses herself in a veil, white gloves, and rosaries in the privacy of her bedroom, while Goretti, with her sister and her sister’s children, lights candles in homage to Mary; meanwhile verses of the hymn “Ave Maria” echo behind them. In the climactic final scene of the film, Goretti, who has yet to tell her family that she is pregnant, goes into labor while asleep. Before awakening, she dreams of fragmented statues of the Virgin: First she sees Mary’s face, then her stomach, then the eye of the statue; and, finally, Mary’s face appears human. At least as compelling as this dream sequence is an earlier scene when Goretti and her friend Dinky walk past a grotto; automatically the two Catholic girls stop to pray. Later, on their return trip, after Goretti tells Dinky she is pregnant, the two not only walk past the grotto without stopping, but Dinky commands it sternly, “Don’t fucking move.” The icon of the Virgin Mary has had particular resonance in Ireland, as a 1985 report of a moving statue of the Virgin in County Kerry was followed by sightings throughout the Republic. Journalist Nell McCafferty situates the phenomenon of the moving statue in the nation’s highly publicized debates surrounding female sexuality, divorce, and abortion. McCafferty describes the Virgin as a traditional site of stability: “the Blessed Virgin does not mention sex. She walks right away from it. She is adored” (58). Yet Harkin’s film indicates that for many Irish women the traditional values invoked by...

An increase has been observed in the prevalence of HIV infection among Brazilian women in recent years. This study focused on women's knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the primary health care system in Campinas, São Paulo. Of the 249 women interviewed, 10% reported condom use, while consistent use was reported by 7.6%. Although most women reported receiving information from television (87.6%), the quality of such information was insufficient to sensitize women as to their risk of exposure to STD. Most of the women reported physician confidence as an important factor. We conclude that women do not opt for condoms to prevent STD/AIDS, but as a contraceptive method. An instructive dialogue on STD/AIDS should be adopted during physician consultation, and the kind and quality of information should be updated to foster compliance with safer sex practices by the population.

Reckoning Day:Race, Representation, and Redress in Women's Literature and Film William B. Covey (bio) Hilary Neroni . The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. New York: State U of New York P, 2005. xiv + 203 pp. Judylyn S. Ryan . Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. xi + 193 pp. In "Revolutionary Attitude," esteemed feminist and cultural critic bell hooks self-consciously admits, "Even those of us righteously committed to black liberation struggle, who feel we have decolonized our minds, often find it hard to 'speak' our experience" (2). Judylyn S. Ryan and Hilary Neroni confront this struggle in their new books as each speaks out about underrepresented areas of inquiry in literature and film studies. For example, Ryan reexamines liberation theology as represented in contemporary black women's literature and film, and Neroni focuses upon the field of psychoanalysis but through a lens of the violent and tough woman characters of current neo-noir and action films. Both critics employ their own versions of hooks's [End Page 705] "oppositional gaze" concept in order "to develop critical spectatorship" ("Oppositional Gaze" 117) toward each topic. Together, their books reaffirm the importance of female agency in women's art. From the opening dedication to her grandmother, her statement that "the purpose of life is to make more life possible" (v), her focus on black female agency, and her invitation to live an examined, spiritual life, Judylyn Ryan's Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature delivers kind-hearted and well-intentioned humanism to its readers. Besides the arguably more well-known left liberation philosophies of bell hooks and Cornel West, little recent work focuses on the importance of spirituality to women's cultural texts. Because of her interest in this marginalized field of study, Ryan is a trailblazer even if her book is concise at a length of six chapters. Ryan's introduction to the book sets up the parameters of her study. Invoking a non-denominational, broad-based theory of spirituality as a "life force" (2), Ryan promises to examine specific characters and auteur's visions from a selection of black women's texts in literature and film. While largely on her own in this subject area, Ryan has precursors and is especially indebted to the cultural work of Toni Morrison and the critical work of Barbara Christian whose bedrock ideas underlie her expanded analyses. Ryan's introduction sets up a dual argument: "that spirituality functions as a life-affirming ideology in Black women's art, and that, in the choices informing narrative construction and characterization, Black women filmmakers and writers embrace the role and responsibility of the priestess, bearing and distributing life-force to sustain the community of viewers and readers" (5). To the author, this priestess role is ideological and thus separates Ryan's views of ideology from left-leaning critics like Cornel West. West, for example, employs postmodern theory, specifically Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy, to define how the hegemonic power of white supremacist beliefs negatively impacts black life. To West then the "genealogical approach subscribes to a conception of power that is neither simply based on individual subjects . . . nor on collective subjects . . . but rather a history made by the praxis of human subjects which often results in complex structures of discourses" (49). Whereas West aligns black experience with forces of slave history and hegemony, Ryan chooses an optimistic framework based on the role of spirituality. Thus, West's agenda defines society through postmodern theory while Ryan relies upon humanistic self-redemption. As such, Ryan defines spirituality differently than West from the first chapter entitled, "Interpreting Spirituality" where she recognizes black agency and labels her approach as a "paradigm of growth [that] derives from and reflects specific principles of traditional African religious [End Page 706] cosmology" (15). Ryan sees the individual as in charge of producing their own culture and thus her "paradigm of growth supplants the paradigm of resistance that has prevailed in most theoretical approaches to African diaspora cultural studies" (16). Ryan believes in Romantic "self-perpetuation" (17) because she argues that, "even individuals whose presence is temporally...