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Cathy Cook
hat we didn't
earn indedmy
BY ELFRIEDA ABBE
WATCHING CATHY Cook’s FILM, The Match
That Started My Fire, is an exhilarating experience. Listening to women talk about / their first sexual feelings is a rush, but what nine this, dhicutttlm even more of a pleasure to watch is Cook's fun with the material. She’s having a great time, and one senses that the women telling their stories are, too. Some of the stories are familiar—like the woman who loved to climb ropes in her grade school gym class or the woman who remembers teasingly twirling in a full skirt in front of the boys on the playground. One woman described discovering the childhood pleasure of scratching a strategically located chigger bite.
The stories are humorous, high-spirited, irreverent, surprising and evocative. Cook couples them with impressionistic images that are wickedly fun.
She interweaves the sanitized images of 1950s girls’ sex education films and bathing-beauty contests with a collage of sensuous images—long limbs, exotic underwater creatures, dancing silhouettes. Some images of bondage suggest a darker, more dangerous side of sexual fantasy, but for the most part Cook's wry film evokes innocent sexual pleasures.
The real pleasure here, though, is listening to women tell their stories of sexual awakenings in their own words without the oppressive overlay of cultural expectations.
The Match That Started My Fire won the grand prize at the Ann Arbor Film Film Festival and first prize at the Baltimore International Film Festival.
Is The Match That Started My Fire the film you started out to make or did it evolve into something different? I became interested in the subject of female sexuality in college
when I did some work with a short educational film, Personal Health for Girls. It was a girls’ growing-up film. When I looked at other sex education films, I found the approaches to explaining sexuality to boys and girls were very different. These were from the 50s, 60s and ’70s. In most cases, sexual pleasure was explained to boys, and the girls were told what they could and could not do.
Sexuality was not discussed in the films for girls. There were some films for boys that actually talked about masturbation, but they did not talk about that with girls. So I realized there was a big void. Most people I know didn’t get any guidance. We were brought up to believe sex was a boys’ thing. Women didn’t talk about it openly.
I started out working generally on how women grow up and what kind of information on etiquette, socializing, dating, sexuality they were getting. But I began to focus on the sexual information. When I told women about what I was doing, they just started telling me these stories of discovering sexual feelings.
In the film, we never see the women who are telling the stories. Why did you record the conversations over the phone?
It reminds me how important phone conversations are, how private they are and how important they are to me because I have most
of my contact with other people over the phone. So the telephone has an importance to me. It reminds me, too, of girl talk. Like teenagers talking.
The Match That Started My Fire (above) won Best of Festival at the 30th annual Ann Arbor Film Festival and first place in experimental film at the Baltimore International Film Festival.
8 @ ANGLES