Chick Flicks : Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement

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Summary: Review in The San Francisco Bay Guardian by Josh Kun
Review: Perhaps Chick Flicks' greatest strength is the number of ways in which it can be read: as a professional retrospective strewn with delicious gossip, a personal diary of hindsight recollection and revision, a copious document of 70s and 80s feminist film culture, a historical memoir and a memoir of history. But more than anything, it is a textbook for the very reeducation Rich has so enthusiastically championed. ... Chick Flicks is a model of polically rooted, socially coonscious, intellectually challenging--but not intellectually alienting -- cultural criticism. ... The interplay of Rich's personal reconstructions and past and present criticism turns Chick Flicks into Rich's own proactive feminarrative, her own contribution to feminist history that propels itself forward by remembering the past in empowering detail, naming names, giving voice, claiming experiences.

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Summary: History lesson
Review: Rich is a major figure in recent feminist film history, so it's great to see her book out. Still, I'm not sure that the combo (old essays + autobio narrative) works. Like a lot of people, I just read the personal/dishy stuff. The essays on their own didn't seem to hold up, or maybe they get lost in the flow.

Of course, I appreciated learning the context for the texts, but I felt they could have been better as two separate books (since Rich clearly has a lot to say about her past).

The only flaw was that the author sometimes seemed to have so many axes to grind, even 20+ years later. She's so committed to her view of herself as an outsider/underdog that, when you realize she's been the head of a major funding agency, you get a little suspicious. She's so aware (often justly) of the flaws of other people's positions, but you wonder what she leaves out.

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Summary: Review from WOMENS REVIEW OF BOOKS
Review: Writing about women as spectators of Hollywood cinema, B. Ruby Rich once protested that the choices have been "to identify either with Marilyn Monroe or with the man behind me hitting the back of my seat with his knees." I love that description not just for its immediacy and visceral thump, but because it originally appeared in the New German Critique, a formidable academic journal. Since B. Ruby Rich is neither a Ph.D. nor a full-time academic, her appearance in this journal and her respectability in film scholarship are reasons for optimism about the inclusion of multiple voices in and about feminist film criticism. Rich introduces her book Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement with a heartening invitation for such inclusion. "I sincerely believe," she says, "that the people who read GLO: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (the academic journal where I have edited film and video reviews) and the people who mob the Sundance Film Festival (where I serve on the selection committee) have something to say to each other." This statement reveals Rich's facilitating voice and her remarkable comfort in very different cultural locations. Rich has earned the right to reminisce about the feminist film movement because she has "been there," from Sundance to academic editorial boards, but has not camped permanently in any chic or safe spot. Rich's reviews and essays have appeared in widely-used film theory anthologies and in popular media, including public radio, the Village Voice, Sight and Sound, the Advocate, and Elle. For nearly three decades, she has worked with both filmmakers and theorists, with arts-council bureaucrats and radical culture workers, at consciousness-raising women's film "happenings" and at prestigious academic conferences--that is, not solely with film or film theory, but with the larger feminist movement she names in her title. Chick Flicks is a selection of her essays from 1974 to 1991, each introduced with a prologue situating it in several histories: the independent women's film movement, feminist film criticism, American politics, and the author's own personal history of changes in scenes, careers, lovers, and friends. The latter strategy affiliates this book with recent autobiographical feminist criticism which, at its best, illuminates the continuum of life and scholarship, intellectual and emotional passion; Patricia J. Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991) comes to mind, as well as Patricia Mellencamp's A Fine Romance: Five Ages of Film Feminism (1995) and Jane Tompkins' A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (1996).