S ince the beginning of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s, theorists have recognized two kinds of contemporary feminist culture: Feminism Heavy and Feminism Lite. Heavy, or high, feminism includes art exhibits, academic books, PBS, foreign films by Dutch or Belgian women directors (such as Jeanne Dielmann, Chantal Akerman's interminable saga of a housewife's interminable day), the novels of Susan Sontag and Toni Morrison, and learned journals such as Signs, Genders, or Legacy. Lite, or low, feminism includes advertising, the fiction of Anita Shreve and Terry McMillan, the plays of Wendy Wasserstein, commercial television, women's magazines, and most Hollywood movies. Indeed, the central axiom of high-feminist film theory is that the on-screen woman, however liberated or radical in her actions, is nonetheless the object of the camera's gaze--a gaze that is predatory, controlling, and metaphorically male. But this theory depends on the formal and structural analysis of film,...