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Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 19. July 31 1978

Film Women in Film

page 14

Film Women in Film

I want to be Joan

I Want to be Joan was made last year at the United Women's Convention in Christchurch. It largely consists of six interviews with participants at the Conference. These women did not have a long involvement with women's rights organisations but had come to recognise particular aspects of their oppression and fight against it.

One woman's husband used to beat her if he found she went out at night when he was out, even though she arranged a babysitter. Another had a breakdown just before her daughter's wedding. Looking back she said, "I tried to be a super wife and mum, now I just want to be Joan."

The simplicity of her statement, and the basic awakening of self-awareness was the message of this film. Director Stephanie Beth had managed to catch all six women at a fundamental time in their lives: a time of new-found confidence and strength. Her aim, and the film's success, was the straightforward transmission of this feeling to the audience.

The film festival audience was not Beth's intended public, and not all sections of that audience were able to appreciate what she was trying to do. Many people openly scoffed at the film, and its end was greeted with a competing mixture of applause and hissing.

To be sure, the film did not even begin to analyse the conditions of its subjects, or the broader nature of their oppression. Nor did it suggest any methodological approach to the oppression of women or ways of developing individual and collective struggle.

Yet as Beth explained, her intention was to take the film into private living-rooms, small community halls: to take it out to groups of housewives and use it as a basis for discussion. It's not so much what's in the film as what happens afterwards, she stated.

In this sense, while I Want to be Joan does not go very far it will serve as an invaluable statement, by women, of their ability and determination to recognise that their position in life is wrong and that something can be done about it. It is a starting point, and a very necessary one. The intellegensia who scoffed at the apparent triteness of its content may not have been able to appreciate that; but I suggest Stephanie Beth's film will have more social value than most of the other festival offerings put together.

Simon Wilson

Kali Berek as Anna in Adoption

Kali Berek as Anna in Adoption

Adoption

One feature of Marta Meszaros' Adoption was especially impressive: its treatment of the relationship between two women. We have heard a lot about the breakthrough in Julia, where this same feature is said to be used in a more open and exploratory way than nearly all films that came before it.

Yet in Julia a crucial reliance is placed on the childhood memories of one of the women only. In a sense, Julia is less about a relationship than about the way the past can infiltrate and still be left standing by the present, The fact that the story involves two women is almost incidental subject matter, and has little to do with theme.

Adoption, on the other hand, analyses the problems of its female protagonists directly, facing up to them as the problems of women. The story concerns Kata, a 42 year old unmarried woman who develops a wish to have a child by her lover. He is married, wants to stay married, and certainly doesn't want such an immense complication in his life.

The couple are drifting apart, their expectations and feelings for each other assuming a radically different perspective. Then, into Kata's life comes Anna, a teenager living in a state home for unwanted children. The two are attracted to each other, and Kata conceives of the idea of "adopting" Anna as her daughter. However Anna has a boyfriend whom she wants to marry. Eventually Kata adapts her plan and proposes to adopt a baby from the orphanage.

The wishes of the two women come into conflict with their feelings for each other. Anna will not agree to Kata's proposal even though she uses Kata's home as a rendezvous with her lover, and deliberately affronts Kata with her sexuality. Nevertheless, Kata does her best for Anna and even manages to arrange the marriage. Anna, for her part, displays true friendship and support when Kata is rejected by her own lover.

The developing, living relationship between the two is beautifully and sensitively evoked, and lays the groundwork for the film's exploration of the mutually recognised and accepted desires of the two women.

Each woman perceives in the other's scheme the same fundamental characteristic: that whatever its limitations, however much it could mean later sorrow and regret, each is acting from a deep-felt impulse without the guidelines of others or the sanction of propriety. Put simply, each has made an independent choice to accept responsibility and is about to act on it.

Near the end we see Anna crying in the corner at her wedding breakfast. Does this mean a mistake has been made? Probably not. We are being reminded of the weight of responsibility, not told the protagonists shouldn't accept it. The parting shot, of Kata running along a deserted country road to catch a bus home, baby in her arms, is a gentler reminder of this same idea.

Simon Wilson