SOURCE: "Approaching the Work of Dorothy Arzner," in The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema, edited by Claire Johnston, British Film Institute, 1975, pp. 9-18.

In the essay below, Cook discusses narrative structure in Arzner's films as it relates to a "critique of patriarchal ideology."

The films of Dorothy Arzner provide us with an opportunity to investigate a range of film texts made within a production system already in the late 20s and early 30s highly articulated in terms of the dominant ideology of classic Hollywood cinema. There is no doubt that Arzner made complex and interesting films of great relevance to women now in our struggle for our own culture; but the point is not to claim for her a place in a pantheon of 'best Hollywood directors', since the positing of any such pantheon would ignore the complexity of the relationship between ideology and the...