JOINING FORCES.

Feminism and Documentary edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 372 pp./$49.95 (hb), $19.95 (sb).

In the concluding essay of this collection, Julia Lesage refers to feminist video artists who "create new connections among established discourses." This also pertains to the work in Feminism and Documentay), an exciting and provocative new collection of essays edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker that incorporates feminist studies' emphasis on race, gender and class with the tradition of documentary criticism. The volume moves the debate on several well-covered feminist and documentary issues such as realism and identity onto new 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 by emphasizing the value of analyzing gender, class and race in documentaries--even those films that have not attracted much feminist critical attention.

The relevance of applying feminist analysis to documentary emerges in Paula Rabinowitz's examination of labor documentaries, "Sentimental Contracts: Dreams and Documents of American Labor." Her work reveals the importance of gender analysis to social documentaries, even those that lie outside the identifiably feminist domain. Her discussion of Roger and Me (1989, by Michael Moore) and American Dream (1990, by Barbara Kopple) analyzes the films' differing use of gender stereotypes in the representation of labor conflicts. Roger and Me reverts to the stock gender type of the nineteenth-century heroic male worker, depicted as a hypermasculinized figure. By contrast, American Dream uses sentimentality to feminize male workers who crossed the union picket lines during the Hormel strike. The scene of tearful men explaining why they became scabs represents them through "sentimentality . . . [which] has served 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 strong, virile class figured against a feminized decadent bourgeosie. By pointing out the role of gender in the representation of labor, Rabinowitz exposes the way that profound shifts in gendered configurations of class alter our perceptions of class identities.

The introduction provides a clear, jargon-free historical background of the volume's project. It summarizes feminist theory's and documentary studies' mutual exclusion by citing histories of both disciplines. When feminist theory emerged in the 1970s, documentary histories excluded women's work in the field as Patricia R. Zimmermann discusses in her essay "Flaherty's Midwives." Though early feminist documentaries did warrant "feminist chapters" in documentary histories, feminist critical theory was limited to women's documentary film only. Further, the editors point out that much of feminist media studies emerged as countercinema studies, aiming to deconstruct the dominant Hollywood model. This isolated documentary studies from the theoretical work of feminism and the separation worked both ways. Feminist theory's initial neglect of the documentary and emphasis on representing issues of class, race and sexuality contributed to feminist film theory's loss of engagement with those issues in favor of an exclusi ve focus on gender. But in Feminism and Documentary, none of the essays isolate gender; the volume includes work by and representing African Americans, gays and lesbians, ethnic and immigrant cultures 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 both feminism and documentary histories. The articles in this section rewrite parts of these histories, restoring or constructing genealogies of feminist documentarians overlooked 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 subject. "Going Back (With a Camera): Gender, Nation and Documentary Returns" explores questions of gender 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, but they in no way exhaust the to pics within the essays. These titles leap theoretical categories, revealing the hidden but powerful discourses of race, gender and class within documentaries and enrich the reader's understanding of important concepts threaded through the essays, such as identity and power.

Video artist Ann Kaneko's essay "CrossCultural Filmmaking, Japanese style" considers how she deals with the power relationship between videomaker and subject. She reflects upon how gender and national identity are linked within her as the American-born granddaughter of Japanese immigrants by returning to their homeland to document immigrant labor there. Consideration of identity, power and difference inform her discussion of her work in progress. 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 structure in terms of the artist's self-understanding when working with her family in the experimental autobiographical mode. Gloria J. Gibson's essay "Identities Unmasked/Empowerment Unleashed: The Documentary Style of Michelle Parkerson" demonstrates another type of artist-subject relationship. She discusses how an African American film maker and her subject can merge in ways that escape the well-known Oedipal model of narrative structure and can work together toward the raising of social consciousness. The political necessity for such relationships in filmmaking is great, and Gibson's essay points us toward a black documentary style that "seeks a holistic approach to African American life." Gibson's work, like much of the work in the volume, aims at placing theory in the service of cultural transformation.

The final essay in the volume, Lesage's "Women's Fragmented Consciousness in Feminist Experimental Autobiographical Video," offers a clear typology of an enduring feminist video genre, the avant-garde autobiography. Lesage details the use of experimental audio-visual techniques to produce "epistemological investigations into the components of selfhood." Lesage notes that the different structures she identifies construct a sense of women's fragmented consciousness that allows for complex and multiple social identities. As traditional realist documentary films often gloss over such complexity, Lesage's essay reveals the stylistics and thematics of the avant-garde approach to autobiographical documentary video and makes our consideration of how documentary might reveal identity more complex and concrete.

The mutually enriching approaches to the essays allow readers to compare and contrast authorial points of view on similar issues. Issues like identity become threads linking essays across categories. We see how identity works with the filmmaker-subject relationship considered not only in personal autobiographical terms but also in political, racial and cross-cultural national terms.

Another powerful idea to emerge from this collection is the numerous ways in which documentary studies inflected with feminist theory can produce a multivalent position for viewing personal, social and political truths. Readers are encouraged to formulate further questions about the interplay between these discourses. The editors' creative juxtapositioning of essays reminds readers that the apparently solid boundaries of disciplines within film studies are themselves cultural constructions that require constant questioning and rethinking in order to produce useful knowledge about the field. The volume truly lives up to its claim to "illuminate feminism and documentary as one unbounded and mostly uncharted universe." This book has the potential to impact ways of thinking about documentary and its constructions of identity, self and the boundaries of feminist thought, and could generate both responses and exchanges that will push forward the limits of the continuing debate on feminism and documentary.

DEBORAH TUDOR, author of Hollywood's Vision of Team Sports: Gender Race and Heroes (1997), teaches media studies in the Department of Communication at DePaul University.