Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World

Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe's Redirecting the Gaze comes at a time when cinema studies is spreading its interdisciplinary wings and establishing itself as a crossroads for doing critical theory. Redirecting the Gaze is an invaluable addition to an area within cinema studies that has gotten very little press. This area is oppositional cinema the and its usually termed third cinema aesthetic, that redefines the gaze as not gendered, but also nativized, ethnicized, or anthropologized. Redirecting the Gaze makes visible unrepresented and underrepresented films and filmmakers and the world of existing differences, the nascent subjectivities, and the histories the making they explore. The ten chapters the book cover independent filmmakers Mexico, Cuba, the United States, Africa, Bolivia, Venezuela, China, India, and Argentina. In addition to analyzing the various films, almost all the essays provide a filmmaking history and tradition of the particular places of origin of the creators and their films. As the editors make clear the introduction, the essays the anthology explore the work of filmmakers who moved beyond the totalizing, gender neutral, and dehistoricized discourses of Third Their works foreground the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class the context of discourses on nation, postcoloniality, and globalization (2). The essays the book provide students and teachers of cinema studies and women's and gender studies with critical tools and ways of thinking. At the same time, the information that the essays contain on the cultural, political, national, and gender history of the places of filmmaking will be invaluable understanding the theory and praxis that gave birth to the filmmakers and their work. The comprehensive introduction by the editors gives a brief history of Third World filmmaking practices and the trend of oppositional cinema, which seems to have started Latin American films. As Robin and Jaffe suggest their introduction, the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation the Third World, produced Argentina 1968, and the1989 text Questions of Third Cinema, by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, are useful places from which to begin to understand the conceptual and theoretical frameworks of the Cinema. These sources also make it clear that the third wave of filmmaking seems to be perpetually open towards possibilities of change and movement. Starting with the conceptual framework of the phrase Third World, Jaffe and Robin point out that the essays the collection explore the windows to the world of these filmmakers. The first two chapters, by Diane Sippl and Catherine Benamou, provide the unique history of Mexican and Cuban filmmaking traditions. Critical of men's films about women (74) even those films with a postrevolutionary Benamou lets the subaltern speak by analyzing the works of Sara Gomez. Gomez is a documentarian whose only feature film, De cierta manera (One Way orAnother, 1974-1977), penetrated beneath the surface of the uniformly national and into the realm of the subcultural (76). Admiring Gomez's open treatment of race and gender, Benamou says, Unlike many of her male counterparts ... Gomez did not thematize gender at the expense of race and cultural identity, but instead sought to demonstrate how historically they have been intertwined (77). While Benamou's essay on women's filmmaking looks at Cuba's political, social, and cultural history to convey to us the spatiotemporal effects and moves Cuban women's filmmaking practices, Diane Sippl her essay, Al Cine de las Mexicans: Lola the Limelight, underscores women's participation in the production of Mexican cinema from its pre-Revolutionary inception (34). She puts Mexican cinema history into its cultural, political, and national context and also provides us with glimpses of the obstacles that come with being a Third World country. …