Lori Jo Marso’s Feminism and the Cinema of Experience is grounded in two cogent, well researched, and intersecting analyses. One is focused on feminist cinematic techniques with special attention to the work of Chantal Ackerman. The other draws on the writings of Simone de Beauvoir to detail the philosophical signature of feminist experience. Together they anchor Marso’s argument that feminist cinema is essentially political. Its cinematic techniques produce unique aesthetic objects and experiences that ferment a politics that is “antiracist, anticapitalist, and anti-extractive … [ where] the quest for women’s freedom must be collective … rather than focused on the individual” (2).

Marso calls Ackerman’s cinematic technique “mother work.” This mothering nurtures feelings about mothers, reproduction, violence, care, family, and loss that we’d rather ignore. Ackerman’s film Jeanne Dielman is a striking example of this “mother work.” Depicting three days in a widow’s life of unending housework, demanding mothering, mercenary prostitution, it ends with the murder of a John (6–10). Sitting through a three-hour movie where “nothing” seems to happen our bodies feel the numbing life depicted in the film. Our horror at the ending, where “something” finally happens, is ambivalent. Does it mark Dielman’s breakdown, rebellion, liberation? Do we celebrate the murder or pity the unsuspecting John? Do we cringe at Dielman’s imprisoned life or see it as an act of love for her son? These “unacceptable,” uncomfortable feelings, of boredom, anxiety, cringe, and confusion, elicit what Marso calls feminist experiences. These experiences, the effects of Ackerman’s attention to the details of Dielman’s moods and the space and time that define her life, create thoughts that ignite a politics of resistance (2, 5–6, 34, 49).

The chapter “Genre Trouble: Horror” details this connection between cinematic technique, feminist experience, and resistance politics. It opens by tying the term horror to the concept of horrific. It links both to the idea of humiliating (82). Pulling on this thread Marso argues that Mati Diop’s Atlantics, Audrey Diwan’s Happening, and Julia Ducournau’s Titane reinvent the horror genre “by focusing on what should really scare us,” the everyday experiences of girls and women (79). Though Ackerman is not a featured director in this chapter, her cinematic innovations are credited with influencing the films “gender-and genre-bending body horror” strategies, that in exaggerating, intensifying, and fabulating women’s lives expose the normalization of racist, patriarchal, and capitalist violence (81–83, 103).

The personal, dangerous, and discomforting feelings evoked by cinematic “mother work” reframes women’s lived experience. Finding themselves in the women on screen, individual women discover that they are neither deranged nor alone in feeling a disjunction between what they feel and what they are supposed to feel. Instead of resisting their feelings, they resist the demand to ignore/dismiss/repress them. This resistance, enabled by the cinematic techniques of visual ambivalence and sound with stasis (21), leads to two discoveries. One, the politics of individual empowerment alienate us from each other. Two, the promise of security and happiness offered to women who embody the feminine ideal is a disempowering illusion. Contesting the politics of patriarchal individualism and security, feminist cinema draws women together in feminist communities that face the vulnerabilities of freedom with laughter and joy (3).

The power of Marso’s position relies on her assertion that there is something unique about feminist experience, and that this experience grounds a politics at odds with current patriarchal, racist, capitalist ideologies of individualist liberalism. Where her discussions of feminist cinema assert that specific films elicit these experiences and legitimate this politics, Marso knows that, to make her case, she needs to establish that these experiences are uniquely suited to ground a feminist liberatory politics. She turns to Beauvoir to establish this grounding.

Marso’s Beauvoir is familiar, flawed, and cinematic. Marso puts the cinematic Beauvoir in conversation with Ackerman. As cinematic Beauvoir’s words, in their attention to detail, create images that blur the line between reading and seeing. Like Ackerman’s films they evoke feminist experiences. This Beauvoir finds that Lanzmann’s Shoah, like Ackerman’s “mother work,” moves viewers to experience in “minds, hearts and flesh” feelings that are otherwise “unspoken, unnamed, buried or not even our own” (15–16). They create communities of empathy among those who thought they had nothing in common. The cinematic Beauvoir pushes the boundaries of Marso’s cinematic feminist politics. Here a film’s evocation of buried feelings ferments anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-antisemitism politics.

Marso’s familiar Beauvoir of The Second Sex and Ethics of Ambiguity fleshes out the idea of feminist experience. This Beauvoir demonstrates the ways that the myth of woman that structures women’s lives corrupts their existential freedom. Dismantling this myth and detailing the disabling experiences of becoming a woman, Beauvoir’s resistance politics opened the way for other iterations of the sexual difference(s) to emerge. The idea of ambiguity as detailed in her Ethics of Ambiguity is central to Beauvoir’s phenomenological descriptions of women’s alienated lives. Here, the feelings that resist the script of femineity are grounded in an ontological ambiguity that marks the human condition. This ontological ground gives the politics of feminist experience standing as part of a broader liberatory movement waged in the name of the existential desire for and demands of freedom.

The ethics of this politics requires attention to Marso’s flawed Beauvoir, the Beauvoir who does not iterate the ways that the politics of racism, capitalism, and colonialism create distinct types of feminist oppression. This Beauvoir, insensitive to the impact of intersectionality, does not see that, though all women are demeaned as the second sex, their denigration will take different forms. White women will be humiliated. Other women will be criminalized. White women will be enclosed in a bubble of purity. Other women will be preyed on as whores. Marso turns to such feminist artists, writers, and theorists as Alice Walker, Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Hill Collins, Anne De Verney, and bell hooks to plug this hole in Beauvoir’s account of the violence embedded in the process of becoming a woman.

Like all important works, Feminism and the Cinema of Experience invites us to pursue its implications. Marso’s turn to Beauvoir’s writing as a source of feminist experience leads us to examine the politics of such other art forms as music, painting, and photography. Scrutinizing her attention to Ackerman directs us to complicate the idea of “mother work.” Seeing it as freeing women to feel and express the deadening realities of this work should not silence the experiences of women who find pleasure and purpose in it. Dismissing them as co-opted by patriarchal ideology ignores the possibilities of mother-work politics where women use their status as mothers to rebel. Argentina’s the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo who refused to submit to tyranny is one example. Emmett Till’s American mother who, demanding that her son’s casket be open, exposed the terror of a KKK ruled world is another. This resistance politics, like the politics advocated by Marso, is collective. It draws on the “mother work” of women nurturing each other as they reject the world as it is for one where there is no second sex.