This review essay appeared in Cineaste 33:3, Summer 2008.

Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, edited by Robin Blaetz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 421 pp. Paperback: $25.95.

   Barbara Hammer isn’t my favorite avant-garde filmmaker, and Chuck Kleinhans isn’t my favorite film scholar, but Kleinhans’s essay “Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History” is my favorite chapter in Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, edited by Robin Blaetz, who chairs Mount Holyoke College’s film-studies program. I like this article because Kleinhans is the only critic in the book who actually takes a critical stance, finding weaknesses as well as strengths in Hammer’s large body of work. His praise can be generous, as when he applauds her 1980s films and videos for “technical mastery in the service of a deepened vision and understanding of life’s possibilities and limits.” Yet his criticism can be pointed, as when he disses History Lessons, her 2000 genealogy of lesbian images on film, for its “remarkably sappy feminist folksongs,” its “clumsy dramatic restagings of past events,” and more seriously, its reductive account of lesbian sensibilities, which leads to stereotyping and superficiality – for example, when Army Air Corps women in World War II are portrayed as a sort of Amazon Nation outpost rather than a diversified group (including heterosexuals) who were motivated by the rewards of rising to a challenge, responding to patriotism, and other aspirations grander than having a “playhouse lesbian romp.” Kleinhans also takes the opportunity to criticize the many critics who have assessed Hammer’s cinema on faulty or misguided grounds, flummoxed by the difficulty of pigeonholing her works or by her mischievous tendency to ignore avant-garde bandwagons that everyone else is scrambling to board. The result is a model of critical evaluation – fair and balanced, to coin a phrase – and now I guess Kleinhans is one of my favorite film scholars after all.
   I wish other essays in Blaetz’s collection took the same nuanced approach, but their failure to do so isn’t a fatal flaw. Advocacy criticism has a long and honorable history, and if it isn’t the loftiest analytic form, it has much to contribute by way of reasoned, sometimes impassioned exegesis by writers whose enthusiasm guarantees comprehensive knowledge of the artists and works at hand. The advocacies in this volume gain additional standing from the credentials of the people who’ve written them; whether or not you end up agreeing with their analyses and interpretations, anyone interested in the field will want to know what Paul Arthur has to say about Joyce Wieland, and Maureen Turim about Abigail Child, and Chris Holmlund about Gunvor Nelson, and Noël Carroll about Yvonne Rainer, and William C. Wees about Peggy Awesh, and M.M. Serra and Kathryn Ramey on Carolee Schneemann, to name just a few. I did a double-take when I saw that Robert A. Haller has written about Amy Greenfield, who happens to be his wife of  almost thirty years; but I immediately decided there’s no problem even here, since Haller is a long-standing hero of avant-garde archiving and historiography, and Greenfield needs no special pleading to confirm her as today’s most important practitioner of experimental dance-film. In any case, the essay is insightful as well as laudatory.
   Blaetz was inspired to edit this collection by the self-evident fact that women have been steadily marginalized in what Kleinhans calls “the boys’ club of the film avant-garde,” despite an extraordinary record of achievement dating back at least to Maya Deren’s activity in the early 1940s. (Pioneers like Germaine Dulac and Alice Guy-Blaché were at work decades before that, but Blaetz focuses on American filmmakers.) As experimental-film production gathered strength and speed in the 1960s, for instance, many emerging screen artists turned to Belgium’s well-known International Experimental Film Competitions to gain attention for their work; at the final event in 1975, the program included a mere twelve films by women, compared with sixty-two by men, and gender discrimination on the juries was worse still. Even under these circumstances, women won four of the competition’s ten prizes, but were then largely passed over for subsequent critical consideration and academic jobs. In such ways has avant-garde cinema been institutionalized throughout its history as, in Blaetz’s words, a “thoroughly masculine” enterprise.
   Although the book’s essays are diverse in perspective and tone, they share an interest in the filmmakers’ tendency to push cinema beyond its literal and metaphorical functions in an effort to reveal occluded levels of experience – an undertaking that characteristically discovers “complex feeling and sentiment behind the veneers of both life and the well-made film,” as Blaetz puts it. A more intermittent thread running through the book is a generalized attraction-repulsion relationship to the cinema of Stan Brakhage, whose work has been a sort of structuring absence for numerous American avant-garde filmmakers in recent decades. I don’t think Blaetz hits the mark when she praises such women as Schneeman and Marjorie Keller for evoking a feminine “relentless becoming and overwhelming intensity” that get beyond the “beautiful and striking surfaces” of Brakhage’s films; of course many films by women tap into specifically feminine layers of perception and experience, but I also find “relentless becoming and overwhelming intensity” in Brakhage’s best work, which is hardly as surface-oriented as Blaetz’s words suggest. A virtue of this collection, however, is the way its essays stir up this kind of discussion and debate.
   Blaetz acknowledges that her selection of filmmakers is somewhat arbitrary, inclining toward those well-enough known to attract scholarly research and analysis. She reports that she couldn’t find any scholar willing or able to write on such major figures as Storm de Hirsch and Julie Dash, which is so surprising that I wonder how hard she looked; and I regret the omission of younger talents like Jennifer Reeves and Janie Geiser, to single out a couple of brilliant ones. That said, the collection presents very good essays on important figures ranging from the canonical Marie Menken to the exhilarating Chick Strand and the protean Leslie Thornton, ending with Cheryl Dunye’s continuing “experimental sitcom of black lesbian life” and a concluding article by Scott MacDonald on using films like these in the classroom. Every one is thoughtful and lucid, and at least two – the sensitive examination of Su Friedrich’s extraordinary work and the perceptive look at Barbara Rubin’s rollercoaster of a career – are worth the price of the volume by themselves.
   In her introduction, Blaetz observes that ever since Laura Mulvey published her influential essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, the main response it’s elicited has been to deconstruct the patriarchal bias of mainstream film, overlooking the call for a liberating countercinema to take its place. Women’s Experimental Cinema takes an energetic and exciting step toward answering that call.—David Sterritt