Feminism and Documentary edited at Diane Waldman and Janet Walker Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres 1999 372 pp/$4995 (hb) $1995 (sb) In the concluding essay of this collection.

Feminism and Documentary edited at Diane Waldman and Janet Walker Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres 1999 372 pp/$4995 (hb) $1995 (sb)

In the concluding essay of this collection, Julia Lesage belongs to feminist video artists who "create of recent origin connections among established discourses." This also pertains to the work in Feminism and Documentay), an exciting and provocative recent collection of essays edited by way of Diane Waldman and Janet Walker that incorporates feminist studies' emphasis forward race, gender and class with the tradition of documentary criticism. The turn moves the debate on several well-covered feminist and documentary issues of the like kind as realism and identity onto novel ground by demonstrating how each of these discourses can enrich and expand the other. It reinvigorates and reconfirms feminist theory's critical position within film studies according to emphasizing the value of analyzing sex class and race in documentaries--even those films that have not attracted abundant feminist critical attention.

The relevance of applying feminist analysis to documentary come ups in Paula Rabinowitz's examination of labor documentaries, "Sentimental Contracts: Dreams and Documents of American Labor." Her work reveals the importance of sex analysis to social documentaries, smooth those that lie outside the identifiably feminist domain. Her discussion of Roger and Me (1989 by dint of Michael Moore) and American Dream (1990 by the agency of Barbara Kopple) analyzes the films' differing use of inflection for sex stereotypes in the representation of labor conflicts. Roger and Me repels to the stock gender impressed sign of the nineteenth-century heroic male worker, depicted as a hypermasculinized figure. through contrast, American Dream uses sentimentality to feminize male workers who christian doctrineed the union picket lines during the Hormel strike. The view of tearful men explaining for what purpose they became scabs represents them by the and of "sentimentality . . . [which] has serv as a 'theatrics of virtue' for feminized emotions; within the sentimental, the 'passive victim' is always f emale." This feminization disrupts the historical gendering of the workers as a healthy virile class figured against a feminized decadent bourgeosie. according to pointing out the role of sex in the representation of labor, Rabinowitz detects the way that profound shifts in sexed configurations of class alter our perceptions of class identities.

The introduction provides a clear, jargon-free historical background of the volume's shoot forward It summarizes feminist theory's and documentary studies' mutual exclusion from citing histories of both disciplines. When feminist theory emerg in the 1970 documentary histories exclud women's work in the field as Patricia R Zimmermann discusses in her essay "Flaherty's Midwives." although early feminist documentaries did warrant "feminist chapters" in documentary histories, feminist critical theory was limited to women's documentary film barely Further, the editors point without that much of feminist media studies emerg as countercinema studies, aiming to deconstruct the dominant Hollywood design This isolated documentary studies from the theoretical work of feminism and the separation worked the two ways. Feminist theory's initial overlook of the documentary and emphasis upon representing issues of class, race and sexuality contributed to feminist film theory's los of engagement with those issues in favor of an exclusi ve focus upon gender. But in Feminism and Documentary, none of the essays isolate gender; the contortion includes work by and representing African Americans, gays and lesbians, ethnic and immigrant tillages both in the United States and abroad and diverse socio-economic classes.

The essays are divided into four thematic categories. "Historicizing Documentary" acts as counterhistory to the two feminism and documentary histories. The articles in this section rewrite parts of these histories, restoring or constructing genealogies of feminist documentarians overtoped or forgotten in previous patriarchal and feminist histories, and exploring masculinization and feminization of social issue documentaries. "Filmmaker/Subject: Self/Other" examines issues of power relations and identity between filmmaker and control "Going Back (With a Camera): sex Nation and Documentary Returns" explores questions of form relative to sex and nationality in documentaries about returning to a former homeland. "Innovative (Auto)biographies" details ways in which feminist autobiographical documentaries have used experimental, non-realist approaches to explore questions of selfhood These categories guide the reader to important issues in this conjoining of documentary and feminist theory, however they in no way exhaust the to pics within the essays. These titles leap theoretical categories, revealing the hidden nevertheless powerful discourses of race, sex and class within documentaries and enrich the reader's understanding of important conceptions threaded through the essays, in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as identity and power.

Video artist Ann Kaneko's essay "CrossCultural Filmmaking, Japanese style" considers in what way she deals with the power relationship between videomaker and make liable She reflects upon how sex and national identity are linked within her as the American-born granddaughter of Japanese immigrants by the agency of returning to their homeland to document immigrant labor there. Consideration of identity, power and difference inform her discussion of her work in progres The issue of power relations that Kaneko discusses resonates with Michelle Citron's essay "Fleeing from Documentary: Autobiographical Film/Video and the 'Ethics of Responsibility'" which deals with similar questions about the power arrangement of parts in terms of the artist's self-understanding when working with her family in the experimental autobiographical way Gloria J. Gibson's essay "Identities Unmasked/Empowerment Unleashed: The Documentary method of Michelle Parkerson" demonstrates another exemplar of artist-subject relationship. She discusses in what way an African American film maker and her enslave can merge in ways that escape the well-known Oedipal pattern of narrative structure and can work together toward the raising of social consciousness. The political necessity for similar relationships in filmmaking is great, and Gibson's essay points us toward a black documentary phraseology that "seeks a holistic approach to African American life." Gibson's work, like earnestly of the work in the mass aims at placing theory in the service of cultural transformation.