Take One (Nov 1977)

which Ben Hecht had in mind when he concluded his withering “Prayer to his Bosses” with: Oh let me grow one leaf of grass One breath of truth, one cry of man’s Travail and quest, one peal of brass To drive Art from its crapping cans— One tale that doesn’t kiss the ass Of ninety million movie fans. To which | will conclude with Kafka’s “Swearing destroys man’s greatest invention—language. It is an insult to the soul and a murderous offense against race. An offense against language is always an offense against feeling and against the mind, a darkening of the world. Words involve a decision between life and death.” © WOMEN IN FILM KAY ARMATAGE Dialectical Blisters I've seen a great many films by women this past year, almost as many as in 1972-73, when we had the first batch of women’s film festivals. In 1976 the Cannes and Edinburgh festivals and Toronto’s Festival of Festivals had a good contingent of women’s films and women filmmakers, and there was of course the second New York Women’s Film Festival with two weeks of presentations of major works. As a result, | had originally intended to write a round-up of new women’s films—another installment of the We Do Exist saga. But for the present | can only write what’s most on my mind, and that’s the state of feminist film criticism. As usual there was lots of talk, and that’s what I’m on about for this piece. | was often uneasy, sometimes agitated and occasionally horrified at the critical tendencies among these groups in both New York and Toronto. My distress is best exemplified by two of the sessions in New York. One session was called Viva Las Mujeres, featuring Karen and David Crommie’s 1966 documentary, The Life and Death of Frida Kahlo; Chick Strand’s 1976 short, Mujer de Milfuegos (Woman of a Thousand Fires); and Helena Solberg Ladd’s 1975 documentary about Latin American working class women, The Double Day. The Life and Death of Frida Kahlo is a lovely film about a Mexican painter whose work deserves resurrection: it consists of photographs of the artist and her magical paintings, which are mostly of herself or of her fantasies of her miscarried child. Voiceover comments come from people who knew her intimately. A remarkably discreet film, the only motion footage is of her house and the dripping fountain in her garden. The film was greeted with stunned appreciation for the woman and her work. The next film wasn’t so well-liked. Chick Strand’s usual wonderfully expressionistic ethnography seemed to be just too abstract, too poetic, even though the programme notes carefully directed us to see that it indeed was a film about women’s daily lives and the repetitive tasks of household and farm responsibilities. Oh yes, that’s what the sweeping scene was about, right on. But there were horrified murmurs at the swinging the chicken around by the neck scene—not very nice. The audience point of view was clarified with the final film in the programme, The Double Day. At fifty minutes (about twenty too long to my mind), the film exhaustively charts the new map of South America, city and country, mining town and farm, sweeping barren plain, factory and market: making shaky figure eights on the holy ice of—yes sisters—the Raised Consciousness. Of course a cons Kay Armatage is a Toronto writer, teacher and filmmaker. She recently co-directed Ji// Johnston, October ’75. 34 ciousness raising session (secretaries and students) is included, as well as the mandatory middle-class coiffed villain sitting just all right in a swanky café. Cut to the colourful native women in the market place, and then to the tough mining wife. All the feminist points are made, over and over, and from the very lips of the Latin American women themselves. And each point was greeted with raised fist ecstasy from the audience. Feminism rules the waves. Now | don’t want to say that such films shouldn’t be made or that they're not useful; on the contrary. But | was dismayed by the kneejerk reactions of this New York audience. Their response reminded me of the scene in the Hummer Sisters’ Toronto production of the Patty Hearst Story, when Patty emerges from the SLA training camp to sing, “Sisters, sisters, |’ve got dialectical blisters.” My dialectical blisters became running sores the next day at the press conference following Liliane Dreyfus’ Femmes au soleil . Producer, writer, and director (after a career as actor in films by Godard and others), Dreyfus made this first film on a budget of $40,000. Beautifully shot by Nestor Almendros, it’s about tragedy in the life of the Beautiful People one momentous day at a luxurious country house in France. Tragedy in this context means going on the same, the misery of wealthy husbands, beautiful children, gorgeous clothes, breakfasts in bed, maids serving lunch by the pool and the young-love adventurer being killed as he’s on his way to take the heroine away from it all. Called Rohmeresque, apparently because the film has lots of talk and a credit to Eric Rohmer as Technical Advisor (aT.A. is required on a first film by the French authorities), the film was roundly denounced as bourgeois and reactionary—criteria I’ve never heard applied to Rohmer’s own films. There was a distinctly unsisterly. split in the audience that day, as the middle-class coiffed villains who loved the film were shouted down by such feminist criticisms as “Why did you show the women exploiting their maids?” Dreyfus, skinny and shaken in her jeans, red sweater, and dirty hair, insisted that she was telling the truth about these women’s lives, that she didn’t need to make the The middle-class coiffed villains who loved the film were shouted down by such feminist criticisms as “Why did you show the women exploiting their maids?”’ feminist points because they were there to be seen and felt and not to be underlined, that the tragedy here was isolation and boredom and the unquestioning passing of that heritage from mother to daughter because they didn’t know any better. Well sure the film is bourgeois and reactionary, but there are still solid things for women to learn from this film, like tight scripting which still allows for meditation and gentleness, or about making a first feature for $40,000, or about the fact that Dreyfus is distributing it herself. Interesting too that the class struggle didn’t occur around Liliane de Kermedec’s Aloise, a film with equally sumptuous production values, also about the frustrations of a bourgeois woman. But in Aloise the woman's frustrations are different: they’re artistic. Prevented by her middle-class upbringing from going on the stage, Aloise becomes a frustrated governess, goes insane at the outbreak of World War | to remain in an asylum for forty years of despair and anger, finally emerging as a recognized painter of rather cute Picasso-esque pictures. Featuring brilliant acting by woman-of-athousand-faces Delphine Seyrig (Last Year At Marienbad, Muriel, Accident, Stolen Kisses, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Black Windmill, India Song, and Jeanne Dielman), the film hits a feminist home-run, touching all the bases of frustration, insanity, confinement, and finally—home plate without sliding— artistic achievement. It’s agood film, rivetingly dramatic, rebelliously foul-mouthed (in the ‘insane’ parts), classically fragmented in structure and admirably plain with emphasis on character—no wonder the audience liked it. But does all that explain the violent polarities of their responses to these two films? Kay Armatage’s article on feminist film criticism will continue in the column section of the next two issues of Take One. 8