FEMINIST FILM CRITICISM
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women, feminist literary critics were able to turn to a comparatively substan tial canon of works by women writers. In so doing they began, in Elizabeth Abel's words, "to reconceptualize sexual difference to women's advantage." Feminist literary critics began to emphasize not women's similarity to men, but the "distinctive features of female texts," tQ trace "lines of influence connecting women in a fertile and partially autonomous tradition."9 Here the feminist film critic has reason to be envious. For where in the classic cinema do we encounter anything like an "autonomous tradition," with "distinctive features" and "lines of influence"? And if, with some difficulty, we can conceive of Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner as the Jane Austen and George Eliot of Hollywood, to whom do they trace their own influences? In other words, it became possible for feminist literary critics, working within an image of woman tradition, to arrive at a validation of female difference through the study of women writers. By comparison, in the relative absence of a realist tradition of women film artists working both within and against a dominant male tradition, it is not surprising that feminist film critics soon seized upon methodologies that could account for the absence of "woman as woman."10 They began to interrogate the assumptions behind a cinematic language of representation which promoted the concept of "realism" and its effects on the construction and maintenance of sexual difference along patriarchal lines. This investiga tion necessitated a resort to more elaborate and complex theories of significa tion and subjectivity. Thus feminist film critics, first in Britain, then increasingly in the United States, began to embrace semiotic and psychoanalytic theories that seemed capable of accounting for the ways in which patriarchal ideology has elided the representation of women. Similarly, in formulating filmmaking practices, they began to conceive of radical avant-garde alternatives (initially formulated along a modernist, Godardian model) to traditional forms of representation. A key work was Claire Johnston's 1973 pamphlet, Notes on Women's Cinema with her essay, "Woman's Cinema as Counter-Cinema," which proposed that only a filmmaking practice that questioned and coun tered the dominant cinema of realist representation could begin to speak for women. In formulating a notion of a feminist "counter-cinema" that would counter not only the stereotypes but also the very language of patriarchy, the British feminists11 rejected the cinema verite practices of the first generation of feminist documentary films. Earlier U.S. feminist documentaries— Growing Up FemaleJanie's Janie, The Woman's Film, and Antonia, Portrait of a Woman—had aimed at creating more truthful, unstereotyped images of
women in their particular social, racial and class contexts. These works, and those which have continued in this tradition, are enormously important
