Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema

Johnston, Claire. (2006, reprinted). In S. Thornham (Ed.), Feminist Film Theory: a reader (pp. 31-40). New York: NY University Press. (Originally from Johnston, C. (1973). In Notes on Women's Cinema. London: Society for Education in Film and Television (pp.24-31))

Johnston criticizes that, despite changes in the image of man in cinema, the primitive stereotyping of women remained with little modification, which she relates to sexist ideology in cinema. As a result, she argues, the dominant ideology inscribes women as ahistoric/eternal/unchanging entity while placing men inside history. Therefore Johnston asserts that women as women are absent in cinema and their fetishistic images are only portrayed in relation to male narcissism. Further, she writes that the star system relies on the fetishisation of woman, arousing the collective fantasy of phallocentrism.

Within this context, Johnston proposes the concept of counter-cinema as an alternative strategic use of film as a means to disseminate feminist ideas. Looking at emerging feminist cinema, Johnston sharply notes that women's cinema has taken its aesthetics from television and cinema vérité techniques (e.g. Three Lives, Women Talking, Portrait of Jason), which is depicting images of women talking to camera about their experiences, with little intervention by the film-maker. [This approach is very similar to PV] Refuting the possibility of capturing the reality, Johnston emphasizes in expressing women's oppression that "It has to be constructed/manufactured. New meanings have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film (p.37)". In this way, she warns the danger of developing a non-intervention cinema. She argues such cinema promotes a passive subjectivity at the expense of analysis.

On the other hand, she writes, "[A] desire for change can only come about by drawing on fantasy" (p.37). With this respect, she delineates the counter-cinema as a collective work for a desire for change by sharing skills and developing sisterhood. Through the collective methods, she argues, one may truly come to understand how cinema works and demystify the workings of ideology.