The Limits of Exceptional Women: the Cinema of Stephanie Rothman and the Trouble with Archives
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THE LIMITS OF EXCEPTIONAL WOMEN: THE CINEMA OF STEPHANIE ROTHMAN AND THE TROUBLE WITH ARCHIVES BY ALICIA KOZMA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications and Media in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Angharad Valdivia, Chair Professor Julie Turnock Professor Richard Rodriguez Professor James Hay ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the role of gendered authorship in the U.S. film industry and focuses on how women’s directorial labor is represented in film history and its accumulated archives. Specifically, the project evaluates women’s labor in the cinematic paradigm of second wave exploitation films—films produced under the exploitation style from 1960 to 1980—and utilizes a case study of director Stephanie Rothman to articulate the lack of industrial, disciplinary, and archival attention paid to women’s directorial labor and the reverberations of this absence on gendered labor parity in the contemporary film industry. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not be possible without the unfailing support of my doctoral committee. I have been incredibly fortunate in working with this group of amazing scholars. Prof. Valdivia has been a tireless advocate for me, my work, and for all graduate students in the Institute of Communications Research. We all owe her a great debt. Prof. Hay’s consistent intellectual stimulation has been critical in my development, and I will be forever grateful for the opportunity of being welcomed into the best restaurant in town. Prof. Rodriguez is a model of compassionate and unflinchingly progressive academic inquiry of which I can only hope to aspire. Lastly, Prof. Turnock’s mentorship, generosity, and camaraderie have been beyond invaluable. Her passion for her work and her voracious appetite for knowledge are inspirational. Thank you so much, Julie. To my phenomenal network of Illinois friends, all the beautiful weirdos, you have been the best intellectual support and care system anyone could ask for. To those who made Champaign-Urbana home—especially Emily (who hates acknowledgements) and Meghan— thank you does not begin to suffice. For the past five years I’ve said that this project would not have been possible without the aid of amazing staff of the Communications Library and I will say it again: Nick and Erik, you guys are the best. My gratitude to my parents is never-ending, who despite never being quite sure what I am talking about (except to know that I am doing it too loudly and quickly, which I am), support me unconditionally. Arnau and Martina: for life. That’s it BD, it’s done. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 2: NEITHER MARGIN NOR CENTER:………………………………………20 LOCATING SECOND WAVE EXPLOITATION IN U.S. FILM HISTORY CHAPTER 3: THE LIMITS OF EXCEPTIONAL WOMEN…………………………….....60 CHAPTER 4: STEPHANIE ROTHMAN DOES NOT EXIST…………………………......99 CHAPTER 5: THE FILMS OF STEPHANIE ROTHMAN:……………………………....128 THE CORMAN YEARS CHAPTER 6: THE FILMS OF STEPHANIE ROTHMAN:………………………………175 DIMENSION AND BEYOND CHAPTER 7: READING HISTORY IN THE PRESENT…………………………………216 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………...236 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “To ask why these women were forgotten is also to ask why we forgot them. For they were both overlooked by the first generation of traditional historians and not ‘recognized’ by the second generation of scholars.”i Standing in front a classroom full of undergraduate students, I ask a question: “Who is your favorite film director?” Shouts of “Tarantino,” “Scorsese,” “Anderson,” “Kubrick,” “The Wachowski’s,” and more volley back at me. The follow-up question—“Who is your favorite woman director?”—cultivates silence and confused looks. The less subjective question of “Can anyone name a woman director?” doesn’t fare much better. “The lady who did The Hurt Locker?” or “The Lost in Translation woman…I can’t remember her name” are the standard answers when one is hazarded. More representative, however, is the answer given to me by a student in 2014: “I never realized it before, but I can’t name a single woman director.” This is not a phenomenon relegated to undergraduate college students; most of the public would be hard pressed to name a woman film director, and I would wager, would also be surprised by their inability to do so. The position of ‘director’ in public conception is regularly attached to with creativity, control, authorship, and singular personalities. The disconnection of the concept of the director from the material subjects that occupy that role obscures the sad truth: the overwhelming majority of film directors embedded in past and present cultural memories are male. Unfortunately, the discipline of cinema studies has fallen into the same trap, as the history and contributions of women directors remains as elusive scholastically as it does popularly. To counteract that fact, and explore its origins and persistence, this dissertation examines the role of gendered authorship in the U.S. film industry and focuses on how women’s 1 directorial labor is represented in film history and its accumulated archives. Specifically, this project evaluates women’s labor in the cinematic paradigm of second wave exploitation films— films produced under the exploitation style from 1960-1980—and utilizes a case study of director Stephanie Rothman to articulate the lack of industrial, disciplinary, and archival attention paid to women’s directorial labor and the reverberations of this absence on gendered labor parity in the contemporary film industry. This introduction contextualizes the project’s approach to these issues by reviewing the gaps in knowledge it works to address, the scope and significance of its findings, the theory and methodology undertaken in the work, a definition of key concepts and terms used throughout, and finally, a brief review of the succeeding chapters. Investigations into women’s directorial labor in second wave exploitation films immediately raise a particular scholarly problematic: both are under-examined areas in cinema studies. Angela Martin notes that the discipline overall “[…] is still largely concerned with male filmmakers.”ii Kaja Silverman comments that within the discipline, feminist film theory and criticism has “[…] manifested only an intermittent and fleeting interest in the status of authorship within the classic text.”iii Judith Mayne also finds the lack of interest in women’s directorial labor in feminist film theory noteworthy when she opines, “Even though discussions of the works of women filmmakers have been central to the development of feminist film studies, theoretical discussions of female authorship in the cinema have been surprisingly sparse.”iv The discrepancy Mayne is pointing to here is a critical one: although films made by women have been significant and influential texts in the development of feminist film studies, the authorship position and embodied labor of the women who created them have been notably overlooked. The near invisibility around women’s directorial labor in feminist film study and criticism is attributable to a number of factors including “[…] theoretical frameworks in which 2 any discussions of ‘personhood’ are suspect [and] the peculiar status of authorship in the cinema,”v topics which will be addressed in detail in following chapters. The disparity in attention paid to women filmmakers across the breadth and depth of cinema studies has left a dearth of historical and archival information from which interested scholars can recirculate them into historical and industrial understanding.vi Scholars studying women’s historical participation in the industrial process of filmmaking are regularly confronted with “[…] the particular problem that many women have left few historical traces, their roles in film production or film culture obscured by more publicly visible or self-promotional male partners or concealed behind collective or collaborative practices.”vii This lack of archival and historical trace compounds their already precarious position as objects of study and analysis. Similar issues are raised when considering exploitation films generally and second wave exploitation films specifically; neither has ever occupied a comfortable space within the broader industrial film complex or the academic study of film. Exploitation, like all film industries, has a history constituted through a variety of actors, institutions, and cultural shifts. However, their industrial history, content, aesthetic, style, and reach are prone to academic marginalization. This makes it difficult find scholarly work that considers the exploitation industry as a whole. Rather most scholars have instead chosen a piecemeal focus on either the production and/or economic logics of the style or on the films removed from their industrial context. Although there is a small group of scholars who have produced work aimed at a holistic understanding of exploitation as strain of, rather than foil to, classical film history, most of this work does not center around second wave exploitation nor on women’s industrial labor. Eric Schaeffer’s germinal work on exploitation constrains itself from the mid-twentieth century until the late 1950s.viii Elena Gorfinkel’six excellent work temporally grounds itself in the second wave exploitation period, but 3 narrows its focus to the space and place of grindhouse cinemas and sexploitation