Book Reviews LAUGHING AND CRYING WITH FEMINIST FILM

It is a funny thing about feminist film theory that it has a tendency to take main-stream, non-feminist films as its objects of study. By now, 25 years after feminist film theory can be said to have ‘begun’, with Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking article on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ’ (1975), the love/hate relation-ship between feminist theorists and classical Hollywood cinema can claim some highly respected adherents: Claire Johnston, E. Ann Kaplan, Mary Ann Doane, Judith Mayne, Kaja Silverman, to name just a few. To be a feminist film theorist in this vein has meant to some extent ‘sleeping with the enemy’, by concentrating critical attention on the construction of sexual difference and female subjectivity within the confines of films produced by and for a patriarchal culture. The other, less common, choice of feminist film theorists has been to focus on experimental feminist cinema, a practice which is more overtly political, perhaps, but which has the disadvantage of speaking to a smaller audience and, worse, of celebrating the demise of visual pleasure together with the patriarchal inflections of narrative cinema