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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 37, No 24. September 18, 1974

Films

Films

Drawing of a woman holding a camera above her head

Feminist Movies: Women's Issues movies shown as part of the NZ Students' Arts Council 'Seminar with Film'.

The films ranged from the overtly political to simply movies that happened to be made by women. 'Reflections', for instance, a gentle play with natural images, was pleasant but only that. "Bread" was a really nice movie too — again, not really 'political', but a very happy erotic movie about making bread. It suggests all kinds of possibilities for female erotic art — sensual and groovy, but not sexually exploitive.

'Gretel', by Gillian Armstrong, I found a bit puzzling. The acting and photography was skilful and attractive, but I am not clear what the director's intentions were; perhaps this in itself says something about how successful it was. It could be seen as a simple story of a boy's encounter with a 'schizophrenic' little girl. However the form of her madness perhaps says something about the consciousness of many women; her immobility, her dead voice, her doll-like appearance, her attachment to the look-alike doll she nursed and the beads the boy gave her.

Another film, "Women in a House" by Sue Ford, used these same images to suggest what is called 'suburban neurosis" but is in fact just the deadening symptoms of female oppression. The woman in this movie, unlike 'Gretel' turns to alcohol rather than 'madness', but she too suffers from a crippling immobility (on the sound track a woman tells a talk show 'counsellor' about her inability to step outside her house), and also has a doll to keep her company. The sequences in which the woman explores her sexual attractiveness before the mirror, and feels herself to be stranded and left abandoned to the cruelty of external forces — the sea, a snowy waste-land — suggests painfully her self doubts and feelings of importance.

This feeling of self-hating helplessness is put across even more strongly in 'Homes', a documentary with re-enactment about the position of women in Child Welfare Homes. I was most strongly impressed by the collectively-made documentary-style movies included in the programme. This one for instance was made in conjunction with a political movement to abolish child welfare homes, so it is a "this is the way it is, what are you going to do about it?" movie. The nature of female oppression is clearly dilineated; as well as the indignities suffered by any prisoner, these women are also subject to the particular indignities reserved for women, such as the Virginity testing' of a thirteen-year-old woman by an obnoxiously sexist male doctor, the other important point the movie made was that the 'crime' of these women is usually "being exposed to moral danger". The experience of the two women featured in the movie was that basically they were forced to spend their adolescence in prison because the authorities wished to control their sexual activities — with men in one case, with women in the other. This kind of control is not extended to adolescent males. Where the patriachal family 'fails', the patriachal state takes over. As well as feelings of impotence, there was a movement in mood from sadness and helplessness to anger, solidarity and a feeling of 'we have to, we can, look after ourselves.'

My other favourites of these movies were also based on re-enactments of feelings and experiences, and I think their fidelity to common (collective and daily) experience made them politically as well as personally significant.

The first, 'Hearts and Spades' is probably relevant to a lot of university women, or any women who live with men but are not 'housewives' for a living. It showed the painful efforts of a woman to get the men she lived with to take their share of responsibility for the housework. Housework is the nitty-gritty, the share of housework he does is the true index of man's feelings about 'women's place'. In this movie we see again and again, the woman being brushed off with "I'm busy" (housework is 'trivial', men have more important things to do) and her growing anger at having to nag to get it done in the first place. This goes side by side with the empty attempts by the men to 'raise their consciousness'. Finally we see the woman stamping through town getting more and more angry as she recalls this daily oppression by the men she cares for, and who supposedly care for her. As she arrives where the men are sitting in a happy group chatting idly, she gets out a rifle and bang! bang! shoots them down as they try to flee in terror. This sequence fades into an alternate one where she walks up, and instead of shooting, everyone hugs everyone else. As the movie finishes, the two images alternate: shooting and hugging, hating and loving. A similar movie made by a black about racial relationships would be unthinkable: loving the white oppressor is merely to be an Uncle Tom. Why would a black brother spending so much thankless' emotional energy on creating a decent relationship with a while.? This movie suggests the tortuous complexities of female oppression, if your oppressor is the person you love best, what the hell can you do about it? As Mae West said, "men are all alike — except the one you've met who's different."

"Leonie's Movie" also deals with male-female relationships — in fact the relationship of the woman who made the movie. It is a very personal film, the sound-track using a tape-recording of the man expressing his feelings about the relationship, unaware that he is being recorded. The problem basically, for him 'work' comes before their relationship, for her the relationship is most important. This movie functions like a good consciousness-rousing group, to remind us that the personal is political, that where female oppression is concerned, "home, like war, is a continuation of politics by other means".

"Film for Discussion" against a collectively-made documentary-style movie, was definitely my favourite II was introduced by a collage of images of male and female — for instance a stripper, a body-builder, marching feminists — followed by a very simple day-in-the-life view of a woman office worker. The way this film achieved its strong impact was very interesting; unlike many of the others it used no extraneous imagery, but instead concentrated on the way in which the woman's every gesture and action in the course of her daily life-activity accumulates as a catalogue of her minute-by-minute oppression. The oppression of women is deeply ingrained into every aspect of our culture and our daily life — its just a mallei of opening your eyes. The title, "Film for Discussion" emphasises its makers' message: look closely at what actually happens in a woman's life — why is it this way? What does it mean? Like nineteenth century feminist Lucy Stone, it shows that disappointment is a woman's lot in life, and its task, like hers, is "to deepen this disappointment its every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer."

Black poet Ted Jones says that revolutionary art is successful when it presents "the correct word (or image) at the correct lime, calculated to explode, inside of the target's brain". Did these movies really achieve this? For me, in the whole, yes — but were they presented "at the correct time"? I would like to see some or any of these movies shown, say, in the afternoon so that they can really be "Film for Discussion". Perhaps then they will be in the best position to do what so often speeches and articles cannot: catch people under the surface of their rationalisations, hit their senses with the reality of female oppression, show them that it is not just a rather out-of-date conversation piece but a here and now obscenity: then maybe they'll do something about it.