by the agency of B.

by the agency of B. Ruby Rich Durham: Duke University Pres 1998 419 pp/$5995 (hb) $1895 (sb)

B Ruby Rich's Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film move is a necessary, passionate and beautifully written call to arms for the feminist film community to remember that ideas are not imbedded exclusively within our alone computer-shackled selves, but demand collective action to imagine a better to come It is without question single in kind of the most significant film works published in the past year, with brilliant deconstructions of legendary feminist films and searing bring to lights of the events and the community who formed the feminist film motion The importance of this volume resides in how it deftly wrenches all of us from the thinking that feminist film theory take the part ofs merely a theoretical paradigm, an arcane academic lingo or a bourgeois individual pursuit for use and publication. Rich reminds us that feminist film is "a discipline that began as a movement" where "the not absent landscape of feminism and film has been deprived of its admit history, substituting a canon of body s for a set of lived experiences."

Chick Flicks zeroe in forward the overlooked, underanalyzed public sector of feminist film culture: film exhibition, film festivals, feminist film colloquys and journals. As more and more academic film departments codify film studies and professionalize their production and screen-writing areas into industry clone Rich's refocus onward alternative media institutions provides an important reclamation of the rich, varied histories of the field. The excessively first sentence of the volume sets out her agenda: "The aim of this main division is both modest and grandiose: to bring history, theory, and experience back into better communication with single another, and to marshal the trio into a synthesis that discloses its process and preserves its parts in as rough-edg disparate, calm contradictory a form as possible."

Surveying the rife scene, Rich observes that "overall, there is a growing acceptance of feminist film as an area of cogitation rather than as a sphere of action." She worries that the heavy emphasis forward feminist film theory in the academy in the 1990 has neutralized larger social and political issues that one time provided a context for filmmakers to engage in debates about film form, satisfied and practice. The communities that she describes anchored feminist media artists in larger political spheres of logomachy debate and social change. Rich adamantly emphasizes the importances connecting feminist film and the feminist change She hails feminist film pioneers like Chantal Akerman, Michelle Citron, Julie Dash, Ulrike Ottinger and Michelle Parkerson, who are "inventing of the present day vernaculars for the future."

Rich's polemical accounts of her various theoretical debates, be pleased with affairs and programming schemes will perhaps irritate more [i]or[/i] less academic film theorists in its ruthles braiding of politics and personal life, great films and uniform greater gossip. Rich is not always nice and polite to everyone here. She takes stands and originates out against those whose positions rankle her (such as academic film theorists E Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn and Annette Michelson). Rich names names, reclaiming the women and men who forged feminist film and feminist causes into single in kind of the major events of this hundred Rich describes a large, lively transnational community of feminist film commandos, spanning Canada, the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia, brimming with committed scholars, critics, programmers, filmmakers and politicos.

She writes many footnote-free chapters with tell-all revelations that are never-failing to spark debates about academic: propriety and seriousness among those who like their politics in faculty meetings rather than at film exhibitions. if it were not that beyond the elegant writing and the well-told tales, Rich's personal history cross-examines life into the theories college edifice [i]or[/i] building students now study in feminist film courses. Autobiographical sections, or "prologues" establish the political and personal words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings for her landmark critical essays onward feminist film, originally published between 1972 and 1991 In the introduction s Rich enfolds the past into the present: she reevaluates her be in possession of essays from the standpoint of today, describing the political debates that stoked her writing and in what way the debates have shifted. She refuses nostalgia and like each good radical tries to prompt forward to the future. It is hard to lessen Rich to a sharp-tongued gossip or a bon [i]bon-mot[/i] critic skewering the opposition with brilliant analyses. The autobiographical sections have a power all their confess - unfolding like some epic Russian novel of feminism where commonalty act in complicated ways, program films, have sex and argue their hearts out

Rich started revealed as an alternative film programmer at groves Hole, Massachusetts in the early 1970 and later mov to the Film Center at The instruct of the Art Institute of Chicago where she cuttered up with the editorial collective of the journal skip over Cut and accrued a political film education. She carves open the heated debates about feminist film launched between bound Cut and the journals disguise and Camera Obscura. In 1981 Rich morphed one time again, this time into a visionary arts administrator as Director of the Electronic Media and Film Program for the novel York State Council on the Arts, where she instituted aggressive funding for multicultural artists and the decentralization of media exhibition across the state.