Our Sisters, Ourselves: Understanding Cinematic Images of Sisters

Lisa R. Barry

Eva Rueschmann. Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000. x + 175 pages. Notes and index. $69.50 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

Many contemporary films depict sisters and sisterhood, but little scholarly attention has been devoted to their portrayal. Rueschmann seeks to provide a meaningful scholarly discussion about the depiction of what she believes to be the most significant relationship in a woman’s life. She examines several films "precisely because they concern themselves with the powerful emotional dynamics between biological sisters," all of which were released between 1960 and 1990 (2). And, although all are fiction films, she argues that their portrayal of sisterhood reveals the sometimes supportive, sometimes combative, but always essential emotional bond inherent in the relationship between and among sisters.

Rueschmann grounds her discussion in psychoanalytic theory, but does so in a manner very different from feminist film critics and theorists who use psychoanalytic theory to illuminate how women are subjugated, victimized, and objectified in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Instead, Rueschmann uses those psychoanalytic theories that attempt to explain the dynamics and emotional importance of sisterhood, as well as the social and emotional consequences of losing a sister. She thereby challenges feminist critics who argue that portrayals of feminine relationships in film and television typically center on heterosexual relationships and focus on women’s relationships with men, and demonstrates that many important films focus on the relationship between women whether they be between sisters, mothers and daughters, or best friends. In so doing, she demonstrates that the cinematic portrayal of women’s relationships with each other provide a glimpse into women’s inner lives in a way that traditional narratives do not. Her discussion is therefore more concerned with "a critique of the varied ways in which modern filmmakers have dramatized the sister bond . . . than with a theoretical treatise on women in cinema" (6). Rueschmann makes good on her promise. She offers insightful discussions about films that (a) portray sisters as artists, (b) portray sisters’ attempts to negotiate sameness and difference during adolescence, and (c) portray the impact of the childhood loss of a sister as it manifests itself in memory and recognition during adulthood.

Part 1 discusses "Sisters as Artists in the Cinematic Künstlerroman," and offers extended analyses of Little Women (1994) and An Angel at My Table (1990). She argues that both present female-centered accounts of "women’s self-definition and development, realizing in the cinema what feminist literary scholars have defined as a ‘rational self’ in women’s writing" (17). She believes that the ambivalent relationship between the sisters, all of whom are artists, creates an atmosphere that is simultaneously supportive and combative, empowering and discouraging. Both treat semi-autobiographical works and act as feminist texts precisely because they center on the relationship between the sisters rather than the relationship between children and parents or women and their lovers. Despite the combative environment that results from sisters who envy or are threatened by their siblings’ talent, the relationship between the sisters grounds them emotionally, socially, artistically, and intellectually, and provides them with a sororal community in which they can act out their fears and anxieties, and negotiate their expected social roles. The two films also portray the dramatic and potentially devastating impact of a sister’s death in adolescence. More important, though, they provide social commentaries about "the social constraints placed upon a woman’s growth toward creative self-expression" (35). Both films, then, provide meaningful interpretations of the constraints and conflicts that young women face as they grow up in a patriarchal culture.

Unlike Little Women, An Angel at My Table presents both the importance and the selectivity of memory. More autobiographical than Alcott’s tale, this film makes clear that memory is elusive, fragmentary, kaleidoscopic, and selective. The film’s story is kaleidoscopic and selective in its attempt to portray the importance of the sister relationship for a female artist as she struggles to define herself. This film treats the story from the perspective of the adult artist, unlike Little Women, in which the audience grows up with the sisters. An Angel at My Table focuses on the importance of an older sister as a role model, but problematizes this when the older sister drowns, leaving the artist to negotiate her adolescence and her emerging sexuality by herself. According to Rueschmann, "Female sexuality is potentially one of the most important and sensitive areas of sororal influence" (44). Younger siblings tend to carefully observe their older siblings for clues about what is and is not socially acceptable. Without her sister to model, the artist finds that she has difficulty negotiating her sexuality and, even into adulthood, has difficulty with it. At film’s end, though, she has reconciled her losses (another sister also dies during adolescence) and her memories, and finds her own identity that both embraces and resists that of her eldest sister.

Part 2, "Negotiating Sameness and Difference: Sisters in Adolescence," comprises the longest discussion in the book. This section provides analyses of several films per chapter, which simultaneously provides a breadth not offered elsewhere and a shallowness that results from Rueschmann’s attempt to demonstrate the similarities between the several films. The contradiction does not diminish her discussion, though. While she does not provide an in-depth analysis like those in Part 1, she demonstrates similarities across several cinematic narratives that more clearly illustrate her point: the female coming-of-age film presents a triangulated bond between sisters and mother that problematizes any simple identification between mother and daughter or between the sisters themselves, and that allows the viewer to enter the sister-narrator’s thoughts, perceptions and feelings and maintain an ironic distance from her. All films in this section are coming-of-age films. The chapters group films according to narrative similarity.

Chapter 3 discusses the films Gas Food Lodging (1992), Peppermint Soda (Diabolo menthe, 1977) and Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). Rueschmann claims, "In all three works the sister relationship serves as a medium for the quest for self-knowledge. However . . . the sister relationships they dramatize are far more contentious and ambivalent, highlighting the sisters’ vexed parental identifications with the mother, who in each film becomes a central figure or object in the constellation of the sisters’ desires" (57). Each of the three films tells the story from the perspective of the sister who feels that she is the outsider in the family. Two of the three films depict the sisters’ attempts to be the favorite daughter to a single mother, which creates a combative environment different from those discussed in earlier chapters.

Chapter 4 discusses the films Double Happiness (1995) and Eve’s Bayou (1997), both films that explore the role of the father in sisters’ relationships and female development. Each film presents an ethnically or racially specific family context that illuminates the effect of cultural influence on the sisters’ relationships. Both films call into question the treatment of women. Eve’s Bayou questions African American enslavement. Double Happiness questions Chinese women’s longstanding subjugation to their husbands. Although the father’s influence is different in each, the sisters nevertheless create their identities in opposition to him. The mother in each plays a role that both encourages the sisters to forge their own identities and reinforces our assumptions and expectations of what and how ethnic mothers should be. The triumph of the sisters, then, is their ability to support each other as they create their own identities and challenge societal assumptions within the constraints of their cultural heritage and their families.

Chapter 5 discusses the films Heavenly Creatures (1994) and Sister My Sister (1995). Both films explore a sororal relationship (either actual sisters or "sister-like" best friends) complicated by the tensions and conflicts between mothers and daughters, which results in matricide. According to Rueschmann, both films "feature extreme cases of sibling mirroring and psychological enmeshment, and this twinning effect between sisters is played out in two historical cases of matricide or murder of a symbolic mother substitute" (59). However, each film is less about the crime committed than about the relationship between the female characters whose fantasies of seduction and attachment lead to the murders. In each film, the young women have lost their individual identities and have become symbiotic mirror images of each other. These women are not monsters, claims Rueschmann, but are rather "complex victims of parental neglect, social prejudice, and class differences" (59).

Part 3, "Loss, Memory, Recognition: Sisters in Adulthood," comprises the only section of the book to portray women’s adult memories of their sororal relationships. This section’s films examine how adult women both remember and have been influenced by sororal relationships during their lives. Specifically, Rueschmann explores how two directors—Ingmar Bergman and Margarethe von Trotta—depict female subjectivity and "articulate in their work a strong appreciation of the shaping power of memory and the ways in which [adult] sisters engage with the past and [their] family history" (118-119). All of the films’ adult sisters revisit unresolved conflicts and deal with the emotional ghosts of the past through memories, dreams, and fantasies that reveal to both the sisters and to the viewer the important and sometimes unconscious roles sisters play in each other’s lives.

Chapter 6 discusses Bergman’s films The Silence (1963) and Cries and Whispers (1972), both of which situate the stories in similarly repressive environments. The Silence is concerned with Christian morality and the "spiritual meanings of faith and suffering in the modern world" where women are victims of Christian repression (129). The film "emphasizes the alienation that ensues from the sisters’ psychological internalization of their father’s authoritarian control" (129). Cries and Whispers addresses women’s repression in the Victorian world of the Swedish high bourgeoisie in which gender roles are influenced by Protestant morality and, in some cases, by class divisions. This film differs from The Silence because the father is absent and, although the other male characters are less prominent—even marginalized—they remind the viewer that male power still reigns supreme. According to Rueschmann, "In this microcosmic upper-class world, the ‘absent presence’ of patriarchal authority has profound impact on the sisters’ conflicts and on their self-involved and melancholy mother; all the women have internalized the era’s strictures on female identity" (130). The difference between the two films is that Cries and Whispers emphasizes the mother’s influence on the sisters’ identities whereas The Silence emphasizes the father’s influence. Both explore the unconscious and intra-psychic worlds of the sisters and their importance to each other.

Chapter 7 examines von Trotta’s films Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979); Marianne and Juliane (1982); and Three Sisters (Paura e Amore 1988), all of which explore the politics of intersubjectivity and the sisters’ psychic bonds through "dreams, visions, ambiguous flashbacks, and personal obsessions within a ‘reality’ framework of women struggling to negotiate their place in a patriarchal society" (148). Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness explores the relationships and intra-psychic bond between two sisters and a female friend and demonstrates how the loss of a sister can enable a woman to begin the process of critical self-evaluation and self-discovery. Mariane and Juliane also explores the process of remembering and mourning the loss of a sister, although in this film the sisters are more radical and political; one is a feminist journalist and the other a member of a leftist terrorist group in Germany who died under suspicious circumstances. Three Sisters (Paura e Amore) takes place in the academic world and focuses on the relationships between the sisters and their male lovers as the women "search for meaning in their personal and professional lives" (168). The film mirrors the Chekhov play on which its story is loosely based—except that it is set in a different era. It depicts the sadness the sisters experience as a result of the "politically conservative backlash against the progressive social changes initiated in the 1960s and 1970s" that emphasizes individual success and wealth, and scientific and technological progress more than personal happiness (168). Rueschmann claims that the film’s three sisters represent different facets of female identity, "the competent, duty-bound older sister; the melancholy middle sister, and the more ebullient, life-loving youngest sibling" (168). The sisters experience love and the loss of it. Rueschmann concludes that as a source of (sometimes tenuous) stability and continuity, "the sibling bond is the only relationship capable of surviving the turmoil of betrayal and loss" (172). The three films discussed in this chapter explore "the subject of bonds between sisters in a decentered modern society faced with self-destruction" (173).

In her conclusion, Rueschmann argues that, "In the absence of a systematic psychoanalytic or feminist theory of sisterhood, the films discussed in this book provide an intriguing and nuanced understanding of the sister relationship" (177). In fact it does, although the links among the films and the importance of the sororal relationship in women’s lives is sometimes lost in her discussion of the various components of the cinematic plots she presents. There are similarities among all the films, notably that a sister’s influence on identity formation and subjectivity is profound even if it is as the result of a sister’s death.

The films discussed in this book are not grouped chronologically, but rather according to how they portray the sisters—either as adolescents or as adults. Rueschmann examines a variety of films in order to understand more fully the impact sororal relationships have on female subjectivity and identity formation. Her study fills a gap in the literature concerning the cinematic depiction of families since so little scholarship about the portrayal of the sister relationship exists. She grounds her study in psychoanalytic theory, but not in the way most film scholars use it. Rather, she examines films using practical theoretical concepts about the importance of familial relationships in identity formation and then explicates how the films depict the nuances of those relationships. According to Rueschmann, "Sisterhood has long been an appealing metaphor for women’s power and solidarity; conversely, it has signified a convenient trope for the split female self as evil double. Cinema and popular culture at the end of the twentieth century have reimagined the sister relationship as both an important intersubjective bond in women’s lives and a marketable visual icon of postfeminist "girl power" (178). Certainly, the films she includes in her study provide sometimes radically different representations while they at the same time reveal the importance of sisters—biological or otherwise—in the lives of women. Her book thus acts as a sort of call to arms for women to embrace those "sisters" with whom we share our lives and who influence our identities, and to examine the nature of that influence. Doing so will enable us to more fully understand ourselves.