The heart of Lori Marso’s new book, Feminism and the Center of Experience, lies in the claim that feminist film helps us to feel our feelings. This might sound like a benign claim (isn’t that the point of movies? To make us feel things? Sometimes in emotionally manipulative ways?). Yet, if you have ever read Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” in Sister Outsider (2007), you will know that people feeling their feelings is one of the seedbeds of revolutionary politics. Lorde calls the spectrum of real feeling “the erotic” and argues that our society shames and punishes women for experiencing their feelings; they are only socially rewarded for feeling, when it is in the service of men. We are warned away from our “nonrational knowledge,” she warns, while also being called on to “exercise it in the service of men” (p. 54). For Lorde, accessing our true feelings is powerful because it reveals the bankruptcy of patriarchal ideals of happiness. But it is also powerful because—on Lorde’s account—we are rarely able to get in touch with our real selves without the help of other people who are also seeking their true desires. It is only through affirming each other that we learn to affirm ourselves. Finding our true feelings underneath all the heteronormative bullshit, in other words, pulls us into community with others; and talking and acting with others always contains, as Hannah Arendt has taught us, the potential of political power.

Marso’s argument in Feminism and the Cinema of Experience is that feminist cinema is one medium through which we are invited to experience Lorde’s erotic. But Marso foregrounds more than Lorde does how difficult this experience—this entry into real feeling—often is. Indeed, one of Marso’s key claims is that feminist cinema displays women’s experiences in ways that make us feel uncomfortable. This solicitation is feminist, Marso argues, because it reveals the gap between “the feelings woman-identified subjects think we are supposed to have and those we may actually have” (p. 20). The revelation of this disjuncture has been, for a very long time, a major politicizing experience for women, one of the major ways in which we become feminists. Marso’s book argues that feminist cinema often solicits feelings that render us more open to such politicization.

Feminist filmmakers do this work, Marso argues, by using distinct techniques of filmmaking and editing to display women’s experiences in a way that is more real than we are usually able to experience them in our everyday lives. I found this to be one of the most interesting claims Marso makes. As she notes, when we watch these films, we are absorbing them “through senses that are themselves the product of a dominant male sensorium” (p. 160). In other words, as Lorde also argues, our senses—the way we see, hear, and feel the world—are themselves shaped by heternormativity and patriarchy. While Marso does not go into depth about how this happens, I assume that she means that we are instructed from a very young age (nay, from when we are in the womb!) that certain things feel and look and sound “good” and others feel and look and sound shameful or disgusting or gross or just bad. We absorb this viscerally: for example, when boys make fun of a girl for laughing too loudly or when parents talk about how ugly lesbians are or when we learn in all kinds of ways that male desire is important and powerful and female desire is gross and shameful.

We bring these senses cultivated by years of patriarchal instruction into the theatre or to our laptop when we watch one of the feminist films Marso is writing about. And what happens, she says, is that these filmmakers work to present women’s experience in a way that is real. Marso suggests that distinct techniques—camerawork, the use of sound, genre innovation, montage, and camp—disorient the viewer in ways that allow them to be more viscerally hit with what is actually happening on the screen. Filmmakers tell stories and use techniques that may sometime appear to be unreal—for example, when a young woman blows up herself and her building in Chantal Akerman’s Blow Up My Town. Yet, what may feel sometimes like the hyperbolization of experience actually works to unsettle our everyday sensorium. It jolts us into contact with our real feelings. Or, to put it in Lorde’s terms, these cinematic techniques invite us into the realm of the “erotic,” our true feelings, even as we may find them uncomfortable or distasteful.

For example, in the first chapter, Marso shows how the films of Akerman and Alice Diop solicit feelings of ambivalence about motherhood while also themselves practicing a kind of mothering (camerawork as “motherwork”) by creating what Marso calls a “holding environment” for us. Drawing on Donald Winnicott, she shows how this holding environment offers a virtual space where we can feel our feelings without being judged and also (ideally) will feel safe enough to share our feelings about the film with others. The films Marso focuses on highlight the intense labor of maternal life (especially Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman), as well as its pleasures and discomforts. But they also showcase motherhood’s violence: both Jeanne Dielman in Akerman’s film and the main character in Diop’s Saint Omer commit murder. The two filmmakers solicit ambivalent feelings in their viewers. “The range of feeling generated by the film (boredom, anxiety, cringe, confusion, and so on) are not Jeanne’s but ours,” Marso writes, “these feelings tap into ambivalence about mothers, mothering, motherwork, femininity, autonomy, and home” (p. 35). Marso’s point, I think, is that by treating their protagonists with love and care, even when they commit acts of violence, the filmmakers perform a kind of mothering for them, and in doing so, also for us. They give us the space to feel confusing feelings about motherhood, or about people who have mothered us, that might feel scary or shameful.

Marso’s other chapters highlight similarly difficult topics and feelings involving female experience. In chapter 2, for example, Marso examines how filmmakers use sound to reshape how we experience female trauma. The first two films Marso surveys in chapter 2 show traumatized women continuing the cycle of violence by seeking violent revenge. But the third (I May Destroy You) explores the different paths that a woman might take in response to her trauma and ends with the possibility of repair—opened up by the protagonist (Arabella) listening to a bird call. I think Marso sees all three films as helping us feel our difficult feelings about how trauma shapes and traps us, but she seems to see I May Destroy You as helping us feel the possibility of transformation through connection. The alternative ending of repair is made possible, Marso suggests, because of Arabella’s connection to a friend: “I cannot help but think what might have been different for Akerman’s young woman and for Cassie had they, like Arabella, had friends to whom they might turn to ask, ‘Do you hear what I hear?’” (p. 76).

In chapter 4 (perhaps my favorite of the book), Marso focuses on cringe comedy. In Joey Solloway’s I Love Dick and Catherine Breillat’s Romance, Marso finds cinematic attempts to lean into the cringe that can invite viewers to feel the ebullience and vibrancy of female desire. It might make us cringe to see Katherine Hahn (playing Chris Krauss in I Love Dick) plastering her letters of desire all over town, but we also feel its exhilaration and share the affective recognition of the other women in the movie whose own experimentation with their desires is sparked by reading her letters. Chapter 4, in key respects, encapsulates the whole book’s intervention: feminist cinema can show us the reality of women’s lives in ways that solicit our own feelings, however uncomfortable they might make us feel. In everyday life, we are constantly encouraged to cringe at women wanting something, at women figuring out their desires or asking for what they want. When I Love Dick invites us to cringe, it invites us to lean into the cringyness of our own desires so as to access their power, as Chris does in the television series.

Marso’s book is a gorgeous tour of how feminist cinema offers visceral invitations into feminist feeling, and the book pluralizes our understanding of the settings and platforms through which Lorde’s erotic can be reached. In Lorde’s writings, both nature and interpersonal interactions appear as sources of authenticity that can bring us into the erotic, as opposed to the artificial culture of patriarchy. In her 1981 interview with Adrienne Rich, for example, Lorde talks about hearing a bird call in Mexico that led her to feel, viscerally, that everything was possible. Marso’s book unsettles this opposition between the artificial (culture) and the authentic (the heart, nature). Not only nature and other people, but the representative technology of cinema can lead us toward the experience of true feelings in ourselves—which is itself a never-ending practice, rather than an end point or a final achievement.

Marso’s book is also an important argument about what it means to practice feminism in film, namely, that it involves more than simply seeking representation on the screen and in the director’s chair, but instead the creation of art that invites us into a space of uncomfortable feeling, that space between how we are supposed to feel and how we (might) actually feel. Marso imagines that these feelings could lead us into connection with other women, but I would have liked to hear more about the ways in which that might happen, even speculatively. Also, given my sense of the media most consumed by my students, I would have liked to hear about whether and how these kinds of experiences could be transposed to media consumption outside of feminist art house films. Some of the films and series Marso discusses—like I Love Dick and Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You—are in fact consumed in a more mass-media fashion. It would have been interesting to hear whether and how this matters, to perhaps have been shown how Akermanian filmmaking is seeping, even a little bit, into the world of mass consumption. Marso does this a bit at the end of the book through a discussion of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but I wondered: does Barbie’s mass audience differentiate it in any way from Akerman’s work? I also would have liked to know how these filmic techniques might (or might not!) translate to politics. Could we describe these cinematic techniques as feminist political techniques in general, as a way of presenting experience that is promising for feminist politics outside of film?