In ‘Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema’ ([1973] 2000a) – one of the founding documents of feminist film studies – Claire Johnston suggests, assuming the political ‘we’ typical of the 1970s, that ‘in order to counter our objectification in the cinema, our collective fantasies must be released’ (2000a: 32). The word ‘counter’ – also very much of its moment – clearly announces her oppositional stance; yet, in contrast to Mulvey's model of negative aesthetics, which precipitated the later frequent privileging of ‘counter’ (namely, art-house or experimental) cinema, Johnston insists that women filmmakers should work on film language in mainstream narratives. At the same time that Johnston makes a powerful argument for looking back on the work of women directors in studio-era Hollywood, in particular Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino – raising the issue of ‘authorship versus genre’ in films made by women and anticipating the later debates on contradictions displayed by classical Hollywood cinema – her project is also future-oriented. As Patricia White observes in her useful account of the status of this essay in the genealogy of feminist film studies, Johnston's category of women's cinema is an emergent one, ‘to be illuminated and shaped by critical and curatorial as much as by artistic/activist practice’ (White 2015: 9; see also White 2006).

In retrospect, it is perhaps not surprising that Johnston's model was overshadowed by that of Mulvey’s, which turned out to be much more influential in shaping critical frameworks for thinking about women's cinema and feminist film practice, and was probably more appropriate with regards to the directions that women's filmmaking has often taken in the intervening years. However, the overwhelming diversity of forms and concerns in films made by women today exceeds even the most flexible conceptualisations of counter-cinema (Butler 2002: 21). In the first decade of the twenty-first century, multiple factors came together that force us to theorise about genre, authorship and women's cinema in new ways. Due to the expansion of training possibilities, transnational financing and the reduction of film production costs thanks to digital technologies, many more women have access to the tools of narrative filmmaking, which defines the format of entertainment film.