Reseñas de la crítica

The Disappearance of Shere Hite notes that the author surveyed more than 15,000 anonymous women in her lifetime. Each study was a collective project, and the ire she attracted reflected a discontent with all women’s testimonies and social progress, not just with her book sales. Her legacy, the documentary suggests, is inextricable from how the world sees all of those unnamed women, too.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an illuminating, haunting, and ruminative documentary worth watching, if not for crystalizing the history of Hite’s work on film then for a look at how much and how little things have changed for women.

Maybe we know Hite only slightly better when The Disappearance of Shere Hite ends than when it starts, but because of Newnham’s rigor, we certainly understand her better.

As a follow-up to her Oscar-nominated “Crip Camp,” Newnham shows once again how compelling she is chronicling the people behind establishment-busting movements.

The approach undertaken by Newnham is, on the whole, remarkably effective; for while The Disappearance of Shere Hite has all the trappings of conventional biography, its wealth of archival footage provides a scintillating immediacy to the resurrection of a name and face largely forgotten.

Newnham’s documentary mourns and celebrates this impressive figure so that future generations will understand why she—and the work she pioneered—still matter.

Newnham weaves deftly between biography and history, damningly situating the backlash to Hite’s taboo-breaking work alongside Anita Bryant’s anti-gay activism and Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. Yet the film also shimmers with hope.

With its determination to retrace the largely forgotten steps of a feminist trailblazer, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an essential work of archival savvy, blending popular and academic conversations with ease and precision.

"The Disappearance of Shere Hite" deftly captures a fascinating intersection in American history between the Summer of Love and the Conservation backlash of the '80s.

“The Disappearance of Shere Hite” is put together with such visual verve and creativity that even its most prickly passages are compulsively enjoyable to watch.

Newnham’s film ably conveys the rise and fall of Hite’s reputation in the US... Still, the film could’ve stood to press a little harder into Hite’s methodology and complicated reputation without discrediting her work.

It’s a shame the doc hedges towards hagiography in the last act, with almost no space given over to an assessment of what might have been problematic about her research — questions that could be raised without diluting the significance of the work overall. But maybe they’ll get around to those issues in the biopic.