Translating Silences: A Cinematic Encounter with Incommensurable Difference

Abstract

In her introductory overview to “women’s cinema,” Alison Butler looks at feminism’s “work of recovering the history of women’s creativity in cinema” since the 1960s and 1970s (Alison Butler 2002, 3). Her rhetorical trajectory reproduces a teleology that perpetuates a problem her analysis seeks to mitigate. To accommodate its plural “forms, concerns and constituencies,” Butler productively defines “women’s cinema” as a “minor cinema” rather than a “counter-cinema” (in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense of a “minor literature” exiled and minoritized by the very language it inhabits), and analyzes U.S. women directors who redefine the grammar of film genre, narrative, and authorship while using cinema’s lexicon (Alison Butler 2002, 19). In distinction from these films, Butler argues that “the politics of location” central to all films, “and perhaps to Hollywood above all,” are “most fully addressed in relation to particular practices where national and cultural identity have been consciously considered rather than taken for granted: in national film movements, post-colonial cinemas and exilic and diasporic practices”(Alison Butler 2002, 23). 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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