ABSTRACT
Criticism and theory are processual, characterized by struggle, internal and external. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as feminists challenged the confines of women’s social, political, and economic roles, feminist critics and theorists examined the roles and representations of women in the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural texts; they questioned the process that constructs and reconstructs “woman,” aiming to intervene in that process. Feminist film critics in the United States, by revealing the inadequacies of women’s roles and images in Hollywood films, challenged the assumption that entertainment texts are either insignificant or neutral; these critics claimed that the films had had detrimental effects on real women and argued for more positive representations of women. Their criticism was characterized by a sociological orientation. The pioneering journal Women and Film (published from 1972 to 1975) was established to provide an outlet for their work, and special issues on women and film were published by Velvet Light Trap, Take One, and Film Library Quarterly. The high point of this early era of feminist film criticism came in 1973, when both Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosen published books that surveyed Hollywood’s stereotyping and misrepresentation of women and women’s experiences. 1
During this period, American feminist filmmaking closely paralleled American feminist film criticism, with filmmakers’ primary concern being the documentation of the “real” lives of “real” women. Feminist documentaries filled women’s film festivals in New York, Toronto, Washington, and Chicago. In 1971 alone, Growing Up Female, Janie’s Janie, Three Lives, and The Woman’s Film were released in the United States, products of the first generation of feminist documentarians in the United States. 2 By the mid to late 1970s, however, the arena of American feminist film studies and filmmaking became internally conflicted; documentarians and critics alike faced charges of theoretical naiveté, and sociological feminist film criticism was rapidly displaced from the mainstream of feminist film criticism and theory in the United States by an approach based in semiotics and psychoanalysis, a displacement that had already occurred within French film theory and within the British feminist film theory directly influenced by French theory.
