Cinema Canada (Nov-Dec 1978)

Many women are still trying to prove that girls can make films. But Alice Guy, who made the world’s first fiction film in 1896, proved that by doing it over eighty years ago. And it’s been proved over and over, by Lois Weber, Mabel Normand, Germaine Dulac, Esther Shub, Lotte Reiniger, our own Nell Shipman — who once jumped thirty feet into an icy, rock-bordered stream to spare a pregnant stunt woman and insisted that the woman be paid her $10. anyway. These pioneer filmwomen, all important innovators in their fields, were followed in every decade in every country where film industries have existed by capable, often brilliant women filmmakers and television producers. Women have made feminist films and films you would never know a woman made if you weren’t told: scientific, educational, experimental films, even recently exploitation features, and a couple of bigbudget Hollywood films. These are all fuel for the argument that women are not biologically incapable of making films like men, a response to what I call the bi 0 logical phallacy but that argument is superficial, not key. The important questions and answers lie elsewhere, in a materialist analysis of history and in an ideological analysis of mass media. The example closest to home is the story of how Canadian women played a strong creative role in making films at the National Film Board under John Grierson during World War II. There was no doubt then that women such as Jane Marsh, Evelyn Spice Cherry, Gudrun Parker, Judith Crawley, Margaret Perry,and many more could produce, direct, photograph, take sound, write, edit, and do research for films still studied as powerful examples of propaganda and education. It was wartime and the men were overseas — women were needed on the home front; women could do anything: build planes, fly them, do heavy farm work and factory work, make films about it all. Jane Marsh made a film about what women were doing, for which her title was Work for Women. (The NFB changed it to Women Are Warriors.) Her research began with a scathing indictment of the way women have been suppressed over the centuries, and her commentary in the film suggests that women would stay in the salaried workforce if they could. But immediately after the war, as the troops returned looking for their old jobs and the country converted to a peacetime economy, women were laid off in great numbers. Films, magazines, all aspects of mass media including the films of the NFB joined in the praises of domestic life for women, the joys of unpaid work in the kitchen and nursery. Most of the women at the NFB left, for one reason or another — Jane Marsh was forced to resign for daring to argue with Grierson, who later told her she’d been right, but that he would never give in to a woman. She remarked about women’s attitudes in those early years: ‘““They were so grateful to be working in interesting jobs that they didn’t realize they were slaves.” 3 The lesson to be learned from that period of World War II, which had such a strong impact on both the content of the media and the position of women within the media, is that it is simply not enough to say, or even to prove, that girls can make films. What we now, as women and Canadians must ask, and answer, is how to use the tools of film as opposed to being tools of the users of film (the powers that be). This means having control of the means of production and understanding the potential of the media. 32/Cinema Canada A voice from now, south of the border: From what is the ‘independent’ filmmaker or artist independent? She is not independent from the need to make a living. She is not independent from the need for capital — money which gives the power to make her films and distribute her films within a tight commercial media monopoly. When a feminist wonders why capitalists won’t hand over the money to make anti-sexist films, she, like her ‘independent’ male counterpart, must face the terms of her dependence. She has begun to beg, borrow or steal (translated as win grants, go into debt, etc.) the capital to write herself into visual history making films about the experience of women; viz: the films of Julia Reichert, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Kopple, Chantal Ackerman and many others. But who actually sees these films? They are shown in women’s film festivals, in avant-garde and political forums in a few major cities. She is, in short, caught in that same economic trap. Cooperatives for pooling resources and sharing distributor efforts, such as New Day Films, are beginning to form; they are collectives like Heresies. But the absolute dependence on the inconsistent, discriminate charity of liberals is the underside of that ultimately romantic hope for ‘independence.’ The terms for independence, then, among artists and feminists, are the very terms of dependence. Yet another contradiction. — Joan Braderman, ‘Juggling Contradictions: Feminism, the Individual and What’s Left,’ ‘Heresies,’ no. 1, January, 1977. In the early days of film it was taken for granted that film was both a business and an art, and it was only when film became big business that film, as art, retreated to the sidelines of avant-garde, experimental, underground, sometimes political endeavor. There is a tendency to make sharp distinctions between ‘“‘commercial” films and “art” films, a tendency which has caused dissension in the women’s movement, and some polarization. Some feminist critics have claimed that only commercial features and contemporary radical films should be considered in a feminist context because they alone present the stereotypes and the analyses of the stereotypes (in the case of radical films) which have oppressed women in forms we can recognize and criticize. Other feminist critics argue that the language of commercial films and many “radical” films is a patriarchal language, developed by a patriarchal industry, and that only in experimental films can women find the new language appropriate to feminists. All these arguments are based on the understanding that there are film languages, ways of conveying meaning other than simply by words on the soundtrack or titles, for example, the way people are dressed conveys meaning, as do the ways they are lit, framed, presented. 4 Such dialogue can be very useful to the development of a new women’s aesthetic if carried on constructively, and it has important implications for the practice of filmmaking. Historical perspective can help to avoid polarization for instance, so studying the film The Smiling Madame Beudet by Germaine Dulac (France, 1923) shows how experimental techniques and popular melodramatic form were combined to express a powerful and accessible early vision of a married woman’s oppression. Understanding the context of French filmmaking at the time and the fact that it was a time of widespread unrest and activity among women, followed by heavy repression, helps to explain how such a film came to