Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1998)

criticism I have of the film is that it tends to read her life as a tragedy. Although she faced many difficulties and challenges, she lived a long productive life with a long list of accomplishments. After a dazzling career, her company and marriage crumbled. In the early ’20s, Guy-Blaché lost Solax, and she auctioned off her possessions for next to nothing after her husband left for Hollywood with one of his leading ladies. In 1922, she returned to France with her two American-born children. Despite her problems, Guy-Blaché certainly exhibited a resiliency that is underplayed in the film. Consider, for example, the fact that at age 49, Guy-Blaché moved to Nice, France, and under various male pen names, wrote stories for children, and tried her hand at film criticism. Though she would never again direct another film, Guy-Blaché tried to have her work acknowledged by reclaiming films wrongly attributed to others. She approached film historians with her revised filmography and tried to trace and locate her original prints. She wrote her autobiography and attempted to have it published. (Alice GuyBlaché by Alice Guy Blaché was eventually published.) Finally, in 1957, the French government awarded her the Legion of Honor for her important contribution to the development of French cinema. In 1964, she returned to the U.S. with her daughter, Simone, and lived out the last years of her life in Mahwah, N.]J. She died in 1968 at age 95. Though she had to overcome difficulties, it is important that she be represented as a survivor. As cinema begins its second century, it is fitting to honor the memory of one of its leading pioneers, a remarkable woman whose films influenced an entire art form. Lesbian stories Vomen Make Movies The following works with lesbian themes have been added to the Women Make Movies catalog. Shinjuku Boys (53 min., film, England, 1995), by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, takes the viewer to the world of Japanese female-to-male transvestites. We visit the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo—where the “hosts” are women cross-dressing as men, and the “clients” are women-and take an extraordinary look at gender and sexuality in Japan. Shinjuku Boys introduces Tatsu, Gaish and Kazuki, three annabes who work as hosts at the New Marilyn Club. Annabes are women who live as men and have girlfriends, although they don't always identify as lesbians. The film displays a neorealist flavor and the filmmakers avoid objectification of their subject by using extensive on-camera interviews in which these s/hes tell their stories. Shinjuku Boys alternates gender-bending interviews with hand-held sequences shot inside the Club, where the suave annabes drink beer in their natty threads and turn the heads of the women. The film is a fine example of cross-cultural contextualization of gender issues. Jodie: An Icon (24 min., film, England, 1996), produced and directed by Pratibha Parmar, demonstrates how and why Jodie Foster has become an international icon for many lesbians, confirming Foster's place within the world of lesbian desire. Parmar examines Foster’s stature as an icon for lesbians, shaped as much by her authentic and strong screen personas as by the media rumor mill which constantly speculates about her sexuality. The film combines interviews with short film clips of favorite scenes from Fosters’ films that demonstrate the manner — Shinjuku Boys in which the actress may be read as a hypothetical lesbian heroine and a feminist figure. Lesbian critics Claire Whatling and Terry Brown discuss many of the key iconic moments in Foster's films in relation to lesbian viewers, including the on screen lesbian relationship between Natassja Kinski and Foster in the film The Hotel New Hampshire-especially the steamy looks between the actresses. Naomi's Legacy (26 min., film, U.S., 1994), directed by Wendy Levy, is an autoethnographic film about three generations of women in Levi's Jewish family. Like Su Friedrich’s masterful film, The Ties That Bind, it incorporates text and image, testimony and evidence in ways that are both inviting and distancing to the viewer. In the film, Levy examines shared memories and family secrets and presents them as a young lesbian's legacy. She questions the veracity of the film image by repeatedly showing home move footage that features a happy-looking family accompanied by the testimony of loss, alcoholism, domestic abuse and, most importantly, the suppression of discomforting family stories. Levy examines the nature of identity and self as it is exhibited through the stories passed on among women. It is a cinematic history of an assimilated Jewish family's struggle. But it is not a film of easy resolutions or easy endings, in fact one of the most significant things about the film is its seeming use of multiple endings. Each time the viewer thinks that the film is about to announce a closure of emotion or an easy answer, it goes back to the three-tiered legacy. One of the most intriguing references is to a leather jacket brought home for Naomi, a jacket meant for a boy, and the metaphoric connection that Naomi makes with a similar black leather jacket. The film comes from the need to tell a woman's story as it unfolds through multiple voices and multiple generations. It is a story of women raising and nurturing each other despite formidable obstacles such as domestic abuse, immigrant exile status, language barriers, and the complexities of motherdaughter relationships. Levy acts as witness for several generations and gives voice to a contemporary Jewish woman's struggle to reckon with the men and women in her past, the inherited pain, the unspoken cycle of unuttered truths. Su Friedrich's brilliant new film, Hide and Seek, (film, 65 min., U.S., 1996), mixes re-creations, staged footage, interviews, and clips from ghastly, yet ironically funny 1950s instructional VOLUME 3 NUMBERS3&4 @ 21