San Francisco Cinematheque Program Notes (1992)

1992 Program Notes Its elements are unprepossessing—in faet revolting. Random items from the public, sanitized, ad-glamorized American scene are thrown rapid-fire against homey shots of the unmentionable side of the Home: the guck in the kitchen sink, the dirty clothes mountain, the squalling infants, the filthy rump, the used kotex. Even Motherhood gets its knocks: after an organ prelude with shots of the moon, an incredibly distended belly and a funny problem with dressing, followed by doleful pregnancy exercises and recurrent urps in the toilet. A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface deserves to have such films as Schmeerguntz shown everywhere—in every PTA, every Rotary Club, every garden club in the land. For it is brash enough, brazen enough, and funny enough to purge the soul of every harried American married woman. —Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly, Summer 1966 Brenda Richardson: Were you ever especially conscious of being women making movies? Dorothy Wiley: Not the way you would be today, no, with women's liberation and all. Gunvor Nelson: But I remember with Schmeerguntz we wanted to make a 16mm movie, I think. But we had no subject. And one day I was looking at all the gunk in the sink and thought of the contrast between what we do, and what we see that we "should" be—in ads and things—and that was the idea right there, from the sink. DW: We always divided it up equally for some reason. We both filmed, we both edited, and we seemed to agree on things. BR: What do you think the advantages are of making movies together? DW: For me, up until lately, I was never highly motivated to do something for myself. But if I said to Gunvor I'd be there at eleven, to please her I'd be there at eleven, and do it. But if it had been up to me, I would probably have done more dishes or something. GN: Yes, for me too. It's like getting away from the fear of it or something. * * * BR: Was Schmeerguntz the first movie you showed publicly? GN: Yes. It was New Year's Eve in Sausalito. Everybody roared. DW: It was the last movie on a program with about five other films. I didn't think it was so great or anything, but people hooted and hollered and stood up and clapped. It was a good audience. GN: And then it won about five awards... * * * BR: Dorothy, you were the pregnant one in Schmeerguntz and therefore you were the subject matter of it in a way. Was that sense of the hostility to the pregnancy really a factual thing—Miss America and advertising on the one hand and, on the other, pregnancy and falling over to get your socks on? DW: I've thought about that, and at that time it was just factual. I just wanted people to see it, and I don't think I thought about the pregnancy very negatively from the more personal point of view. GN: For me, that was America. Of course, some of the things in it are pur accident, because we were pretty careless. DW: Like the soundtrack, we didn't know how that would fit in until we saw the copy of it. GN: Like when you threw up, and "he kissed her again" is on the soundtrack. We didn't plan that. BR: What did your husbands think about the movie? GN: I think they were very impressed. Bob [Nelson] was anyway. And I remember Bill Geis came over, and he had never spoken to us as human beings before, and it was as if he was seeing us for the first time or something. —Brenda Richardson, "Interview with Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley," Film Quarterly, Fall 1971 I would like to add a historical note concerning Schmeerguntz. Although Betty Friedan's book. The Feminine Mystique, was published, I believe, about 1963, Gunvor and I were not aware of the book nor had we ever heard anything about the women's liberation movement when we made this film. I read The Feminine Mystique a year or two after we had made the film and I understood much better what we had expressed from our own experience. Also, Schmeerguntz was finished in 1965 and it wasn't until 1968 that a group of women went down to Atlanta to protest the Miss America Pageant and it hit the headlines they had burnt their bras (even though they hadn't). Our footage and sound of the Miss America contest was filmed right off the TV in 1965... 87