neglected occasions for feminist inquiry

De Lauretis’ discussion of a number of films near the end of her chewy chapter from Alice Doesn’t provoked for me the realization that whereas the poststructuralist psychoanalytic feminist critics of the ’70s and ’80s most frequently had recourse either to classical Hollywood film or to a sainted canon of five feminist filmmakers—Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, Sally Potter, Lizzie Borden and Bette Gordon—for evidence in their theoretical ventures, an entire cohort of films made by women from the late ’70s to the early ’80s, with ostensibly greater potential for reaching wide audiences than the often recondite work of Akerman, Rainer, et al., was, but for a few important exceptions, strangely disregarded by feminist scholars. In particular I am thinking of the films of Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street, 1975; Between the Lines, 1977; Chilly Scenes of Winter, 1979), Lee Grant (Tell Me A Riddle, 1980; The Willmar 8, 1980), Claudia Weill (Girl Friends, 1978) and Lynne Littman (Testament, 1983). With the exception of critical notice by B. Ruby Rich in the US and Robin Wood in Canada, this valuable yet neglected group of films seems to have been largely ignored by the very feminist scholars and critics from whom one might expect the most avid interest. Why these films have languished, unrecuperated for feminist theory, remains unclear.