Cinema Canada (Aug-Sep 1973)

“Sambizanga”’ cipation by Women’s Groups. The lack of participation by groups was due to the timing of the Festival; by mid-May all organizations in the north have recessed until mid-September, in order to enjoy to the fullest the short summer, and no one is willing to re-organize for any specific project such as the Festival. Taking everything into consideration, the Whitehorse Women and Film Festival was most successful, in that it succeeded in generating a feeling of interest and excitement in local women. Joyce Hayden Co-Organizer Toronto The opening of the festival Friday night was the kind of success that threatens the rest of the week with anti-climax. Women’s films are good, often very good, and they are different. Four shorts began the programming. Sharon Hennessey’s (USA) What I Want was an ideal opener: the close-up of lips declaring personal desires drew back until at length the full woman ‘and the endless list from which she read was disclosed. This was followed by a textural treat, Orange by Karen Johnson (USA) in which the magnified shredding and ripping of the tissues of the fruit’s flesh, until, spurting and dripping, it was finally devoured, created strange sensations of empathy. The two Canadian shorts were Veronika Soul’s How the | Hell are You, an experimental work using a multiplicity of techniques to embellish the subject of communication between two people, and Sandy Wilson’s funny, touching, Bridal Shower an affectionate mockery of some of the mores of Canadian women. These four well-selected teasers prepared the audience for a festival in which they would be constantly amazed, delighted and occasionally overwhelmed by the diversity, the skill, the cleverness and depth, originality and capabilities of women’s work in the world of film. a, Scene from “La Vie Revée”’ The intention of the Festival was to create an awareness of what women could do, and what they have done, in film. Right from the beginning it became apparent they would succeed. Women’s films are full of subtlety, layers of awareness, complex. The piéce de resistance Friday night was Mireille Dansereau’s bright beauty of a film, her feature La Vie Revée. (See Cinema Canada issue no. 5 for a discussion of this film, and an interview). This film is Canadian (well, French Canadian) intellectually astute and sophisticated, well acted and directed, technically adept, and with just a little extra fillup of experimental flounces in technique. Its subject matter concerns the friendship of two girls whose work with the dream world of filmmaking is as prosaic as their real lives are compared to a dream world of what Romance and Men can offer. They discover the pleasures of friendship between adult females, and they evolve toward futures which may include males and babies, but will not have to. A bonus of the Festival, was the presence of many of the directors. Dansereau, in discussion later, revealed her present concern with the problems that hit the emancipated woman next: how to enjoy the full possibilities of being female, yet remain free; how, specifically, to bear children and use oneself fully as both a person and a woman, and not slip back into servitude in order to provide a child with security and male and female parental love. Her next film, a special project for the NFB studies four women who are each in some way tackling the complexities of the sustained free life. Of the many other directors present during the Festival, Agnés Varda also had noticeably passed the assertive stage of female awareness and was presently deeply involved in struggling with the practical means of managing a full womanly non-submissive creative life. Women’s films are open-ended, full of unanswered questions, unresolved problems. The week became a celebration. This was the first festival of women’s films in Canada, and by far the greatest showing of Canadian women’s films anywhere, anytime, and perhaps ever. The work of over 50 Canadian women was included. I’d love to go on and on about each | film, each showing, the shorts, the docu mentaries, the audience reactions, discussions, panels, and interviews, but since the films alone numbered 200 selections from the 450 considered, the writing would be endless. Therefore, briefly: Among the films that were impressive, and to indicate something of the great variety of styles and types of films shown, I'd like to note: Nelly Kaplan’s (France) A Very Curious Girl, a humorous hard farce in which Bernadette la Font manages to put down (literally) a whole village of men; Barbara Loden’s (USA) muted, honest and pathetic Wanda; the opaque and multilayered brilliance of Marguerite Duras’ (France) Nathalie Granger; the subtle sensitive and pained truth of Le Bonheur by Agnés Varda; the free-form, non-conformist Daisies by Czech “new-wave” director Vera Chytilova, a mad jig that becomes a jig-saw with the parts of the puzzle fitting together into a bizarre pattern. Women’s films are unusually beautiful and sensitive to beauty. It was fascinating to see the romantic Wagnerian Blue Light, an early film by Leni Riefenstahl, who later went on to notoriety as Hitler’s best film propagandist, as well as the seldom seen early Cinema Canada 17