Tag: Brigit McCone

Vintage Viewing: Marion E. Wong, Energetic Entrepreneur

What is certain is that, while ultimately upholding the value of family and of traditional culture, ‘The Curse of Quon Gwon’ gives vivid expression to the frustrations of women within those rigid norms, doing so with a cinematic language of the female gaze that centers female perspectives.

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Written by Brigit McCone, this post is part of Vintage Viewing, our series exploring the work of women filmmaking pioneers. It also appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors, Part 2.

When considering the ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston, as one of the few surviving remnants of early cinema to be directed by a woman of color, I discussed the doubly distorted image of themselves that such women confronted, in a culture without their authorship. At the same time, the article surveyed the significant numbers who were recorded as making films that have not survived, with the intersection of racism and sexism placing obstacles in their path at every stage from financing to distribution to preservation. One of the most energetic women to struggle to fully author her own uncompromising vision, the first Chinese American director, as well as among the earliest female directors, was Marion E. Wong.

Wong founded the Mandarin Film Company (the first Chinese American film company) with ambitious plans to create non-stereotypical images of Chinese Americans, assuming, perhaps naively, that the American appetite for exoticized images of East Asia would make them even more eager to see authentic content. She shared with the Oakland Tribune that she wanted to “introduce to the world Chinese motion pictures with ‘some of the customs and manners of China.’” Mandarin Film Company was practically a one-woman show, with Wong serving as screenwriter, director, supporting actress, and costume designer on their only feature film, 1916’s The Curse of Quon Gwon: Where the Far East Mingles with the West. It’s “the earliest known Chinese American feature” film and “the first and only film made by an all-Chinese cast and an all-Chinese company.” 1917’s Oakland Tribune describes Wong as “energy personified,” with “imagination, executive ability, wit and beauty.” An article in Moving Picture World indicates that Wong traveled as far as New York and China in search of distributors for her film, but none were forthcoming. The film would have likely been as lost as the 1922 film, A Woman’s Error, by pioneering African American filmmaker Tressie Souders, had not two reels of it been unearthed in a basement in 2005. Watching Wong’s film now, we can catch a glimpse of what early cinema might have been, if the viewpoints represented had been more diverse.

Curse of Quon Gwon

The Curse of Quon Gwon: Where the Far East Mingles with the West – 1916

Opening with a statue to the household god Quon Gwon (Guan Gong or “Lord Guan,” a deity based on Guan Yu, a historical general immortalized in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese Literature). Worshiped in Chinese folk religion, popular Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese Buddhism, Guan Gong represents the principles of loyalty and righteousness. Though the recovered reels of The Curse of Quon Gwon were lacking intertitles, they have been added to this version to enhance the viewing experience, with Guan Gong speaking the words of the Three Brothers’ Oath in the Peach Tree Garden, from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in translation by Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor. We are then shown the heroine’s formal introduction to the family of her groom. Wong stretched her budget by filming with an amateur cast: the heroine was played by Wong’s sister-in-law, Violet Wong, the villainess by herself, the mother-in-law by her own mother, Chin See, and the child by her niece. However, her sets are lavish and her camera moves gently back and forth to prevent the scene from being static. In general, Wong’s shot composition and editing compare very well with the industry standard of 1916.

Mixing Western and Chinese costume, Wong raises the cultural tensions and transnational identity of Chinese Americans at the time, resisting the tendency of mainstream cinema to portray “Oriental” characters as static stereotypes, instead imagining them in a state of fluid cultural transformation. As the heroine resists her maid’s efforts to transform her hair into a traditional Chinese style, her aspirations toward Western fashion are clear. An over-the-shoulder shot of her face in the mirror encourages the audience to identify with the heroine’s gaze, one of several moments by which the film establishes an aesthetic of female gaze and subjectivity.

One of the film’s central showpieces is its depiction of a traditional Chinese wedding ceremony, complete with regalia and gifts, reflecting Wong’s desire to showcase Chinese culture to her imagined Western audience. The beauty of these scenes make it difficult to imagine that a lack of quality was the reason for her film being rejected by distributors. Perhaps its centering of a Chinese American woman’s experience was judged unrelatable to viewers, though the struggle of a restless woman to accommodate herself to the strict rules of her culture is a universal theme. The heroine struggles to walk in her high shoes and laugh with her groom at his regalia, showing their unserious attitude toward Chinese traditions, even as Wong’s film celebrates them. After the wedding, Wong utilizes dissolves to show her heroine hallucinating that she is shackled with chains, anticipating Germaine Dulac’s dramatizing of the interior perceptions of women.

When comparing with Dulac, it is worth remembering that Dulac’s revolutionary impressionist and surrealist aesthetics evolved over the course of many films, from a beginning making conventional narrative cinema. Considering how impressive the cinematic imagination of her debut is, if Marion Wong had received support and distribution, there is no telling how experimental she might have become.

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After her husband’s departure, the heroine finds herself rejected and driven from the family home, following a false accusation by the villainess, played by Wong herself. She seeks to take her child with her but is prevented, despite pleading for her child to be returned. Stripped of jewelry, she seizes a knife and contemplates committing suicide to purge her dishonor, before throwing it aside and resolving to live on without shelter, friends, or support. Her befriending a lamb may represent her innocence, or the contrast between compassionate nature and cruel culture.

As the heroine wanders off, grief-stricken, across a windswept wilderness, I was reminded of chapter 28 of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which Jane strikes out alone and spends the night on the moors, confronting her place in the universe and testing her endurance. In depicting the heroine’s confrontation with nature, her right to be seen as a self-sufficient being and independent of her bonds with others, is affirmed. It occurred to me that I had never seen an Asian woman in an American film in this way, a different form of empowerment from martial arts (kung fu, wuxia, etc.) heroics – the right to be self-sufficient and to seek existential meaning. Zhang Ziyi’s leap from the mountain at the conclusion of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the only other example that springs to mind. In 100 years, depiction of Asian women in Hollywood has not matured in its nuance to the level that Marion Wong achieved in 1916. To celebrate the connection of Wong’s heroine with Jane Eyre’s psychological journey as rebellious woman in restrictive society, and acknowledge the Western leanings of Wong’s heroine, extracts from Jane Eyre have been used as intertitles to illustrate the heroine’s thoughts throughout the film.

As a guilt-stricken maid resolves to confess to the heroine’s husband, who has returned and is heartbroken to discover his wife banished, the villainess attempts to choke the maid into silence. Instead, the husband bursts in on them and learns the whole truth (without the original intertitles, it is impossible to determine exactly what the false accusation was, though it possibly involved the heroine’s adorable child). As her husband sets out to find her, the heroine stumbles home, weary from her wanderings. The triumphant reunion of the family, and the despairing suicide of the villainess, conclude the film.

As the heroine adopts Chinese dress, dabs her eyes sorrowfully then gazes on the idol of Guan Gong, bowing solemnly to it, before flashing forward to a scene of the happy family with an older child, the final message of the film is ambiguous. Was the heroine justly punished for her Westernized disrespect of tradition, repenting and learning better by embracing her duty to family? What is the curse of Guan Gong? In the Three Brothers’ Oath, Guan Yu vows, “If we turn aside from righteousness and forget kindliness, may Heaven and Human smite us!” Did the curse then apply to the villainess, who turned aside from righteousness by making the false accusation? Or was it the heroine who was cursed for her rebellious impulses and disrespect of tradition, but redeemed by divine mercy? Are we, finally, to see her Western attitude as transgression or simply as individuality? What is certain is that, while ultimately upholding the value of family and of traditional culture, The Curse of Quon Gwon gives vivid expression to the frustrations of women within those rigid norms, doing so with a cinematic language of the female gaze that centers female perspectives.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ5dbcFjXhQ”]

Photo of Marion E. Wong via Wikipedia in the public domain in the U.S.

 

Brigit McCone keeps trying to learn Chinese but can’t tell the tones apart, though she is happy the ‘Ireland’ is apparently written as ‘love you orchid’. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and writing posts like this one.

The Ironically Iconic ‘Wonder Woman’

With D.C. superheroine Wonder Woman recently named UN honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls and her forthcoming feature film building hype, her profile could hardly be higher as a feminist symbol. Yet Wonder Woman, who the U.N. hopes will focus attention on women’s “participation and leadership,” is an image entirely created by men. She represents, ironically enough, male domination of the struggle against male domination. … Far from a step forward, ‘Wonder Woman’ is worse than more simply offensive chauvinism, because it insidiously exploits the female audience’s desire to identify with Wonder Woman’s empowerment.

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Written by staff writer Brigit McCone, this post appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

With D.C. superheroine Wonder Woman recently named UN honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls and her forthcoming feature film building hype, her profile could hardly be higher as a feminist symbol. Yet Wonder Woman, who the U.N. hopes will focus attention on women’s “participation and leadership,” is an image entirely created by men. She represents, ironically enough, male domination of the struggle against male domination.

William Moulton Marston, who created the ironically iconic Wonder Woman, was an outspoken male feminist who seduced his own student, Olive Byrne, and used her as unpaid domestic labor while living off his feminist wife’s (Elizabeth Holloway Marston) wages. Though feminist cartoonist Lou Rogers has been identified as an inspiration for Wonder Woman’s imagery, it was the male cartoonist Harry G. Peter that Marston selected to draw her adventures. Marston’s disconnect, between the theory and practice of female autonomy, seems reflected in his comic strip’s disconnect between its ideal woman of “Paradise Island” and the real world; it was left to Alice Marble to write a “Wonder Women of History” feature that linked Wonder Woman to the historical achievements of women.

After Marston’s death, a takeover bid by his widow Elizabeth Holloway Marston was snubbed by D.C. Comics, and the strip was handed instead to the sexist stewardship of writer Robert Kanigher, who demoted Wonder Woman from warrior and presidential candidate to babysitter and love advice columnist. Following journalist/activist Gloria Steinem’s promotion of the “Original Wonder Woman” as a feminist icon, a television series — The New Original Wonder Woman (later shortened to Wonder Woman) — was developed by writer Stanley Ralph Ross and producer Douglas S. Cramer (Dynasty).

On his DVD commentary to the pilot, Cramer seems defensively aware of the disconnect between Wonder Woman’s fictional autonomy and her lack of actual female authorship:

“There were very, very few women on the set. The hair, the make-up and the clothes were all done by men… we never had a woman director. There weren’t many women directors out there in those days.”

Yet, back in 1916, Grace Cunard wrote, directed, and starred in the popular adventure serial The Purple Mask, as the swashbuckling Purple Mask who “robbed from the greedy to give to the needy.” Though producer Cramer presents Wonder Woman as progress, claiming, “There really were not a lot of women that were carrying their own shows, and after Bionic Woman and Wonder Woman, that’s when Charlie’s Angels was cast,” it is important to recognize that it is a step backward from a time when Grace Cunard and Alice Guy wrote and directed female action heroes. Are the subtly undermining distortions of a pacifying male-authored feminism not more harmful than an open chauvinism that provokes resistance? Though D.C. courted women directors for their Wonder Woman movie and hired Patty Jenkins, the departure of Michelle MacLaren over “creative differences” suggests that the female director has only limited control. Certainly, she is working within an established legacy that women have not created. Should such semi-liberated sex symbols really be celebrated as ambassadors and stepping-stones to female authorship?

“All Our Hopes Are Pinned Upon You” — Symbolism of the Super-Smurfette

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The opening season of Wonder Woman — starring Lynda Carter in the superhero role — is set during World War II, an era of immense importance for women’s rights. While men fought on the frontlines, the women exemplified by Rosie the Riveter proved that they were capable of excelling even in heavy industry, and that factories could accommodate their childcare needs if motivated to do so, with women also serving in military units such as WAVES and WACS. World War II, then, offers Wonder Woman an unparalleled opportunity to ally her efforts with the ongoing triumphs of women across America. Instead, the show is at pains to reduce all other female characters to idiots (the ableist slur “idiot” here describes characters who are themselves stereotypical, ableist caricatures) or deviousness.

In the pilot episode, the on-screen representative of WACS is Marcia (Stella Stevens), depicted as a stereotypically vacant blonde and openly sexual flirt, who reacts to the news that Nazis are planning to bomb the continental U.S. with: “Will that be all, Steve? I have a chiropodist’s appointment this afternoon.” The revelation that Marcia is a Nazi double-agent seems calculated to authorize the beating of this stereotype of brainless blonde sluttishness (again, “slut” here refers to characters negatively depicted as caricatures of devious promiscuity). Cramer hails the pilot’s extended catfight as “a historic moment on television, ’cause I can’t remember any other moments with women fighting women,” citing it as inspiration for equally popular catfights on Dynasty. Other antagonists in the pilot include an older lady with a machine gun and a female taxi driver, while there are no female allies. In later episodes, WACS will be represented by Etta Candy (a feisty ally in the source comics), now a rolling-eyed fool whose incompetence and eating habits are presented as comic relief. Meanwhile, Steve Trevor’s continuous sexist quips are endorsed by Diana’s sighing that he is a “perfect gentleman.”

Wonder Woman constantly struggles to “balance” their positive portrayal of Wonder Woman by viciously misogynistic portraits of all remaining women. The result implies that women have failed to achieve equality only because of their own deviousness or foolishness. Wonder Woman’s heroism is also marked by unattainably extreme perfection, which Lynda Carter admits in her commentary to being concerned by: “People want to be her and they want to be able to identify, and if she’s too perfect…” All women who fail to meet Wonder Woman’s punishing standards are reduced to the level of the catty and unlikable chorus of girls dismissed as “a herd of sheep” in “Miss G.I. Dreamgirl.” Wonder Woman is therefore the ultimate Super-Smurfette, a living embodiment of the Smurfette Principle‘s urge to isolate female achievement. The fact that a television show which encourages girls to feel mocking contempt for all of its female characters, apart from a literal Amazonian goddess, should be hailed as a feminist milestone is as ludicrous as it is tragic.

Margaret Armen, the only woman credited with writing an episode in the first season, introduced the coolly intelligent, highly competent, and villainous Baroness von Gunther as Nazi antagonist. Though she too has a climactic catfight with Wonder Woman, she is notable for not embodying a stereotype of female incompetence or sexual promiscuity. Compare the male-authored episode “Fausta: the Nazi Wonder Woman,” who is yet another evil blonde without detectable personality. Fausta (Lynda Day George) is finally converted to Wonder Woman’s cause, which arguably shows superficial sisterhood but also implies that Fausta has been serving the Third Reich simply because the concept of female bonding had never, ever occurred to her, until she was exposed to the revolutionary banalities of Wonder Woman. The only other female authorship on the show’s first season is that of Barbara Avedon and Barbara Corday, credited with devising the story for Jimmy Sangster’s script of “The Feminum Mystique,” the two-part episode which introduces Wonder Girl (played by a young Debra Winger) to showcase genuine female mentorship. Comparing its female and male authors thus reveals that the male-authored feminism of Wonder Woman is consistently, farcically compromised by its compulsion to isolate its heroine and undermine her female allies.

“In Your Satin Tights, Fighting for Your Rights” — Suffering Sexualized Suffragettes!

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman is not only a Super-Smurfette, she is the original Fighting Fuck Toy (FFT). The essence of the Fighting Fuck Toy is her superficial empowerment through “kicking ass,” while being deprived of deeper agency and continually serving as a sexual object for the Male Gaze. Nowhere is this tendency more clearly shown than with Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman (Diana Prince), a character defined by her hypersexualization from bullet breasts to hot-pants, yet rendered unthreatening to male viewers by her total absence of sexual agency.

The titillation begins with Diana’s introduction, running along the beach with a female friend, giggling in extremely short and gauzy negligees. As Diana later declares to her mother, the Amazon Queen Hippolyta (Cloris Leachman), “There’s something missing, mother. When I look at Steve Trevor, I feel things. Things I’ve never known before,” it is made clear that lesbianism is an unknown pleasure on Paradise Island. It’s wonderful that a Latina woman played the role of a superhero, yet this is an unfortunate missed opportunity for LGBTQ representation, especially with the recent confirmation of Wonder Woman as a queer character in the comics. This means that these women and girls are running around in a state of hypersexualization, not as an expression of any personal sexuality, but in permanent readiness for the arrival of a male viewer. For whom, then, is Paradise Island a paradise? Certainly, male viewers are amply served by the Amazons’ tournament to determine who will accompany Steve to America, an alleged athletic spectacle filmed almost entirely through upskirt shots.

Producer Cramer makes clear not only that Wonder Woman’s sexy appearance was integral to her role, but that the Fighting Fuck Toy’s “ass-kicking” should not be convincing: “If they were a wonderful actress, they approached the job like a lady truck driver.” By “lady truck driver,” he surely refers to the actresses’ ability to appear credibly violent, ruining their titillation by making their empowerment uncomfortably real. The Queen Hippolyta rants against the “barbaric, masculine behavior” of men with comical lust. Yet, Diana’s own lust for Steve will remain demurely unvoiced, as she waits entirely passively for him to take the sexual initiative. This suggests that women’s traditionally presumed passive sexuality is natural and not socially enforced, if even a super-powered and invulnerable woman would never openly express her desires. Furthermore, Diana actively corrects Drusilla (Wonder Girl) when Drusilla comments on a man’s attractiveness. That is, Diana is pointedly shown schooling a younger, sexually outspoken girl into proper passivity and self-suppression, which is enforced by the show as hallmarks of the “good” femininity that distinguishes Wonder Woman from blonde Nazi “sluts.” Lynda Carter expresses regret over Wonder Woman’s lack of sexual fulfillment in the DVD extras: “She didn’t have love in her life and she didn’t have children. I would hope that that story would be told. That’s such a huge part of womanhood.”

“Make a Hawk a Dove, Stop a War with Love” — Make Love, Not Legislation

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At the heart of Wonder Woman is the concept that women are essentially different from men, and that female power resides in their essential qualities of love and pacifism. William Moulton Marston went further, and posited submission itself as an integral feminine virtue. In the words of Diana: “On Paradise Island there are only women. Because of this pure environment, we are able to develop our minds and our physical skills, unhampered by masculine destructiveness.” That is, the superpowers of the women of Paradise Island are suggested to be the direct result of their total absence of heteronormative sexuality, and to be incompatible with the presence of men, rooted as they are in a traditional concept of femininity that has historically facilitated male domination. After centuries of disenfranchisement, segregation into the domestic sphere, and being traded as property, male-authored feminism suggests that women can empower themselves by being traditionally feminine harder.

Actual women’s liberation, however, involved riots, incarceration, hunger strikes, occupation movements, clenched fists and even, on occasion, an unattractive shrillness resembling that of a lady truck-driver. Actual liberation involved the collective organization that the Super-Smurfette pointedly avoids. Far from a step forward, Wonder Woman is worse than more simply offensive chauvinism, because it insidiously exploits the female audience’s desire to identify with Wonder Woman’s empowerment. As Lynda Carter puts it: “There’s something about the goddess within, that secret part that resides in every woman, that is a Wonder Woman, that yearns for that independence and strength.” That “secret part” is harnessed by Wonder Woman to push female viewers into aspiring to a failed model of womanhood, one characterized by its hostility to other women, its punishing perfectionism, its sexual passivity and its self-sacrificing submission. Our goddesses within deserve so much better.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_blOQEu9ws”]

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Wonder Woman Short Fan Film Reminds Us to Want This Blockbuster

Wonder Women and Why We Need Superheroines

Top 10 Superheroines Who Deserve Their Own Movies

Brigit McCone‘s campy superheroine of choice remains Xena until further notice. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and defending her unpopular opinion that Bloodhound Gang are a witty pastiche of masculinity.

Tanya Tagaq Voices Inuit Womanhood in ‘Nanook of the North’

Director Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting.

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This post written by staff writer Brigit McCone originally appeared at Bitch Flicks and is reposted here as part of our theme week on Indigenous Women.

Nanook of the North is an iconic 1922 drama that recreates traditional Inuit lifeways through the representative struggles of Nanook (“Polar Bear,” played by Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (“The Smiling One,” played by Maggie Nujarluktuk), another woman identified only as “Cunayou,” Nanook’s young son “Allee,” and baby “Rainbow.” However, we are shown older boys, described as “some of Nanook’s children,” eating sea-biscuits and lard at the trading post, adding to the film’s casual, hand-waving vagueness about Nanook’s family relationships. Male helpers pop up for group hunts, as though from nowhere, but Nanook’s family is never placed in a wider community context. Despite describing Nanook as band leader, he is never depicted leading, and is frequently infantilized by director Robert Flaherty. By framing his drama as “documentary,” Flaherty converts Allakariallak and Nujarluktuk from active collaborators into passive subjects.

Flaherty erased the fact that both Maggie Nujarluktuk and, reportedly, the woman playing Cunayou, were his own wives (or “mistresses,” from Flaherty’s cultural perspective). The “morning” scene, in which Nanook, his two women and his son awake naked inside the igloo, therefore closely resembles Flaherty’s own polyamorous living arrangement, exoticized into a symptom of Nanook’s cultural Otherness. The domestic warmth that Flaherty captured in Nanook of the North, through his access to both women, is key to his “documentary’s” charm, but his pretended objectivity converts this intensely personal intimacy into an image of the women’s indiscriminate availability to outsiders. Maggie Nujarluktuk smiles self-consciously and playfully flirts with the camera, because the camera is being operated by her husband, but that husband disowns her smiles and essentializes them as a permanent characteristic of “Nyla the smiling one.”

In her thesis, “Neither Indian Princesses Nor Squaw Drudges,” Janice Acoose examines the pervasive stereotype of the “loose squaw” in literature about Indigenous women, which constructs the Indigenous woman as a disposable sexual convenience. Flaherty’s own concept of Inuit disposability was demonstrated when he abandoned Nujarluktuk after filming, who then bore him a son, Josephie, that he never saw, acknowledged, or materially supported. This adds sinister resonance to Nanook of the North‘s description of Nyla’s baby Rainbow as “her young husky,” jokingly implying that Inuit women view their own children as equivalent to animals. In Acoose’s view, “loose squaw” images “foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other similar kinds of violence against Indigenous women,” whose disappearances often go uninvestigated in Canada, particularly if they are also sex workers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEzGouiy2Q”]

Josephie Flaherty’s family was caught up in the “High Arctic Relocation,” the forced transfer of a community of Inuit to the High Arctic, as “human flagpoles” to support Canada’s territorial claim to the Northwest Passage. It was masterminded by the Department of Northern Affairs, who wished to remove the Inuit from white civilization to free them from “a toxic culture of dependence.” In other words, like Nanook of the North, the “High Arctic Relocation” was an artificially staged, Euro-American vision of uncorrupted Inuit innocence. It is impossible to draw a neat line between Flaherty’s fictional vision and the Department of Northern Affairs’ imposed reality; each was inspired by a toxic culture, not of dependence but of colonial entitlement and the romanticizing of “noble savages”; the Department’s resident romantics may even have been directly inspired by Nanook of the North. The High Arctic Exiles were denied material support from the Canadian government, though that same government intervened to prevent them from hunting on its designated “wildlife preserve.” The Inuit, identified by numbered tags, were taken from a community with a school and nursing station, and transported on a boat with infectious tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis was also the disease that had previously claimed the life of Flaherty’s star, Allakariallak, a fact that Flaherty covered up by telling audiences that “Nanook” had “starved to death” while hunting deer, yet again erasing Euro-American influence. Several of the High Arctic Exiles’ children were taken from their parents for medical treatment and “misplaced for several years” by bureaucrats, a chilling indifference that echoes Flaherty’s casual attitude to Nanook’s fluctuating number of “young huskies.” For his monument symbolizing victims of the “Relocation,” Inuk sculptor Looty Pijamini chose a life-size Inuk woman and child, carved from a block of granite tinted red like blood.

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Her international recording career has made “Inuk punk” Tanya Tagaq into one of the most recognizable cultural ambassadors of the Inuit people. Tagaq’s own mother hailed from Nanook of the North‘s Quebec location before falling victim to the High Arctic “relocation,” informing Tagaq’s complex response to the film’s mixture of colonial ideology and preserved history. In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to provide an original soundtrack to the film, drawing from the Inuit art of throat-singing, katajjaq. Discussing the film, Tagaq spotlights Flaherty’s staged scene of Nanook biting a gramophone record, as though unaware of what it is. “Inuit are running the cameras a lot of the time,” Tagaq laughs. Watching this scene closely is revealing. As the gramophone starts up, neither Nanook nor Nyla appears surprised by it, while Nyla rocks her baby to the music. There is an awkward jump cut, Nyla has been removed from the shot, and Nanook is laughing and biting the record. In such scenes, Allakariallak demonstrates the comic ability which gives the film its charm, but is harnessed to create a demeaning image of Inuit childishness, which Flaherty frames as generally representative of “the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo,” rather than individually representative of the talented comedian, Allakariallak. However, Tanya Tagaq’s soundtrack rejects Flaherty’s impulse to isolate, essentialize, and fossilize Inuit culture into artificial purity. As a confident inheritor of her own culture, she engages with the musical traditions of other nations, harnessing non-Native technology and instruments to enrich her evolving practice of katajjaq.

When the show came to the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival, I eagerly checked it out, having experienced the masculine tradition of Tuvan khöömei throat-singing in Siberia. Unlike khöömei, katajjaq evolved as a female tradition. Two women, facing each other, would improvise rhythmic motifs, the loser being the first to laugh or run out of breath. These throat-singing games tended to last between one and three minutes. Tagaq’s live performance to Nanook of the North lasts over an hour, an extraordinarily demanding tour-de-force of physical strength and passion.

Katajjaq blends mood, rhythm and the imitation of natural sounds, from wind to howling dogs to crying birds, weaving them into a spiritual whole. By blending the sounds of the natural world with the mind’s vibrations, katajjaq reflects the worldview of animism, the traditional Inuit conception that all objects and beings are endowed with spirit. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Christian missionaries banned throat-singing as a demonic and sexual act. Certainly, Tagaq’s version of katajjaq is strikingly sexual. Her hyperventilations build in intensity and peak with shrieking cries, inducing ecstatic trance. Where “Nyla the smiling one” was crafted as a submissive image of availability, the throat-singer powerfully (perhaps threateningly) voices her own desire. Nina Segalowitz, a survivor of coerced adoption and forced assimilation, found katajjaq an empowering tool for reconnecting to her heritage. Her story recalls the Australian Aboriginal experience of forced assimilation portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence: “My father thought he was signing hospital admission forms. The next day, he came to take me back, but I was gone. They told him that he had signed release papers and couldn’t get me back.” Evie Mark, raised Inuk but with a white father, also describes the craving for something that will make your identity stronger as a major motivator for katajjaq revival, indicating its importance to national self-esteem. Placed against the imagery of Nanook of the North, katajjaq collapses the distance between spectator and subject, dismantling the subject’s perceived quaintness and giving voice to Inuit experience and perception, from the shrieking killing of a walrus to the grunting effort of igloo construction.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV-YQSQ1_FE”]

Tanya Tagaq’s reclaiming of Nanook of the North, with music that fuses tradition and modernity, may be compared with the work of A Tribe Called Red, a collective of First Nations DJs who have collaborated with Tagaq, that remix traditional chanting and drumming with electronica, dubstep, and spoken word, rejecting the impulse to isolate, essentialize, and fossilize. A Tribe Called Red’s visuals (start two minutes in) remix stereotypes of “Red Indians” from pop culture, with witty juxtapositions that subvert their original associations and assert A Tribe Called Red’s authorship. Genocidal policies of forced assimilation, from prohibitions by Christian missionaries to coerced adoptions and residential schools (whose painful legacy is depicted in Cree director Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, among other Indigenous filmmakers), interrupt the line of cultural transmission in oral cultures, so that the imperial culture’s anthropological records can become the only source of preserved heritage. In reframing a colonial record of Inuit life into an expression of Inuit experience, Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North can be compared to the art of Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), which reframes anthropological photographs by symbolically visualizing the subject’s own perspective. One of her Inuit artworks, “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit,” offers multiple symbolic frames for her young Inuk subject. First, he is surrounded with the syllabic writing of his own language, inuktitut, whose flowing edges are contained by a rigid frame bearing the imposed Euro-American label “Copper Eskimo.” The outer frame is looped with blood, suggesting interior flesh, while the Arctic exterior, with ghostly inukshuk, is placed inside this flesh, the body experiencing the environment rather than the environment defining the body. On the lower left, an elder represents connection to cultural tradition through role models, an experience stolen from the victims (and survivors) of Canada’s policy of coerced adoption, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.

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Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting. In reality, Inuit women were hunters, including polar bear hunters, and played strong roles as educators and storytellers, while today’s Inuit women are also lawyers, government ministers, and activists.

Nanook of the North established the Inuk man as the sole icon of Inuit life. It was followed by 1934’s Wedding of Palo, a portrait of Greenland Inuit by Danish filmmakers, in which the Inuk woman is a love object fought over by two rivals. Though brilliantly filmed, and preserving authentic Inuit traditions, the film reinforces perceptions of Indigenous women as natural spoils of war, submissively accepting their role as the victor’s rightful property. The Inuit-made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) does portray the frustration of its heroine, Atuat, at being promised to villain Oki rather than her beloved Atanarjuat. Nevertheless, the story centers Atanarjuat’s experiences, and it is he must find a way to marry the heroine. The short film Kajutaijuq, co-written and produced by Nyla Innuksuk, also centers a male hunter but, hopefully, the rise of promising female filmmakers like Innuksuk will lead to more representations of Inuit women’s perspectives in future. In the meantime, Tanya Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North is a powerful start.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4kOIzMqso0″]

Brigit McCone is still decolonizing her mind. She writes and directs short films, radio dramas, and “The Erotic Adventures of Vivica” (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and telling people to check out the carvings of Susan Point.

The Unvoiced Indigenous Feminism of ‘Frida’

Frida Kahlo’s sense of kyriarchy, in which the tension between Indigenous culture and European imperialism is a core aspect of her multi-faceted narratives of oppression and resistance, is simplified in Julie Taymor’s film ‘Frida’ towards a more Euro-American feminism, focused on Kahlo’s struggle for artistic recognition and romantic fulfillment as a woman, to the exclusion of her ethnic struggle.

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Written by Brigit McCone as part of our theme week on Indigenous Women.

The Tzotzil Mayan activist Comandanta Ramona has become an iconic figure in the struggle for Indigenous women’s rights, as an officer of Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which was one-third comprised of women, and as a drafter of the Revolutionary Women’s Law which set out an uncompromisingly feminist agenda for self-determination, equality, and reproductive rights on behalf of the Indigenous women of Chiapas. Comandanta Ramona was also a founder of the National Indigenous Congress of Mexico, and led an EZLN delegation to the First National Congress of Indigenous Women in Oaxaca. In San Cristóbal, dolls of Comandanta Ramona are sold, while posters of her are a shorthand for revolutionary Indigenous feminism, comparable to the use of Che Guevara as the shorthand for wider revolution.

The iconic image of Ramona seems, from a Euro-American perspective, unusual: the combination of a revolutionary’s balaclava with a long, floral, traditional dress. In Euro-American culture, the floral dress tends to be viewed as a symbol of traditional femininity, alluding to female submission and domestic dependence. To find a long, floral dress combined with a militant image like a balaclava, representing a feminist ideology like the Revolutionary Women’s Law, may seem contradictory from other cultural perspectives. It declares that Indigenous feminism is an evolution and reclamation of Indigenous culture, not a revolution against it. Ramona’s floral dress expresses the traditions of a specific Mayan culture whose women had their extensive agency undermined by Spanish colonization. The costume is political; it is the visual shorthand and physical embodiment of Ramona’s Indigenous feminism.

If that is true of the iconic image of Comandanta Ramona, it is equally true of the even more iconic image of another famous wearer of Indigenous clothing: Frida Kahlo.

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Granddaughter of the Indigenous Purépecha photographer Antonio Calderón Sandoval, daughter of a mother who befriended and aided Zapatista rebels, Frida Kahlo joined with her husband Diego Rivera in the Mexicanismo movement, which sought to reintegrate Indigenous culture and pre-Columbian heritage into the national identity of Mexico. Kahlo, probably the most significant female representative of Mexicanismo, focused on embodying the philosophy through her wearing of Indigenous clothing, particularly Tehuana dress, and its celebration in her painting. This was not merely an aesthetic choice or desire to be “exotic”: writers such as Brasseur de Bourbourg, and the Mexican educator José Vasconcelos had declared Tehuantepec to be a matriarchal society, and Frida’s choice of dress thus serves as a visual shorthand for her support of the matriarchal values that the Tehuana were famed for. Although Tehuantepec is no longer considered a true matriarchy, as its women were traditionally excluded from political power, Tehuana women did achieve a large degree of economic independence as market-traders, and were celebrated for their outspoken and sexually liberated manner. At the start of the 20th century, the Tehuana Juana Cata Romero became a revered power broker, entrepreneur, landowner, and a sexually liberated woman known for her affair with the Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, all while promoting traditional Tehuana costume.

With such precedents, Frida Kahlo’s decision to wear Tehuana dress makes a political statement of Indigenous feminism: the embodiment of female emancipation as a natural evolution of reclaimed Indigenous culture, rather than as a colonial import. It is a gesture stripped of its vital meaning if removed from the context of Tehuana (Zapotec) culture, reduced to flowery exoticism when interpreted from a Euro-American viewpoint.

For that reason, it is unfortunate that the most famous and Oscar-nominated cinematic account of Frida’s life, 2002’s Frida by the Euro-American director Julie Taymor, revels in the colorful Tehuana costumes of Salma Hayek’s Frida without providing a single line of dialogue to address their significance or the matriarchal values that they represent.

Frida

Kahlo’s Mexico was a culture of assumed hierarchies: the superiority of the European over the Indigenous, of the rich over the poor, of the masculine over the feminine. In her specific choice of peasant garb from a matriarchal Indigenous culture, Kahlo wordlessly resists each of these hierarchies simultaneously. She is, as Andre Breton described her, “a ribbon around a bomb” against a complicated, interconnected kyriarchy of oppressions.

Kahlo’s sense of kyriarchy permeates her work. “Two Nudes in the Forest” is a queer-positive work that visualizes nature as a space of lesbian eroticism, but it is equally and simultaneously a representation of solidarity between Indigenous people and cultures and European people and cultures. In “Portrait of Lucha Maria, a Girl from Tehuacan,” an Indigenous Tehuacan girl, whose very name means “struggle” in Spanish, clutches a military plane as her toy, suggesting she must be raised in preparation for battle rather than domesticated with dolls. By her military plane’s juxtaposition with her traditional costume, Kahlo’s “Lucha Maria” resembles the iconic image of Comandanta Ramona. In “My Dress Hangs There,” a chaotic collage of the decadence of Euro-American civilization is dominated by Kahlo’s Tehuana dress, hanging as a flag of mute resistance. In her most famous work, “The Two Fridas,” Kahlo celebrates the strength and wholeness of her Tehuana self, in contrast to an alternate self in colonial dress who is bleeding and has her heart torn open, associating European values with romantic weakness and dependence. The image of the empowered Tehuana, either as a disembodied dress or as an aspect of Kahlo’s dual self, continued to evolve throughout her art.

Kahlo’s sense of kyriarchy, in which the tension between Indigenous culture and European imperialism is a core aspect of her multi-faceted narratives of oppression and resistance, is simplified in Taymor’s film towards a more Euro-American feminism, focused on Kahlo’s struggle for artistic recognition and romantic fulfillment as a woman, to the exclusion of her ethnic struggle. Frida’s communism is acknowledged, but not her admiration for Stalin’s cultural nationalism, which formed the subject of several of her paintings. The political beliefs of Kahlo, and of Mexican communists generally, are left largely unexplored by Taymor’s film, or reduced to a naive admiration for the imported ideals of foreign revolutionaries such as Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush).

Frida

Another major Indigenous aspect of Kahlo’s work is its integration of Aztec and Mayan cosmology into artistic landscapes defined by the mythic Aztec struggle between light and dark, and peopled by a pantheon of pre-Columbian gods and heroes. Here again, feminism plays a key role in the emphasis that Kahlo lays on the pre-Columbian female divinities, in contrast to the wholly masculine trinity of the Christian worldview. The snake-headed Aztec goddess of birth and death, Coatlicue, sits atop the pantheon of heroes and deities in “Moses,” while in “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl” the motherhood and fertility goddess Cihuacoatl cradles Kahlo, mirroring Kahlo’s own maternal pose like a universal alter-ego.

Indigenous mythology serves as a source of strength and inspiration to Kahlo, through which she envisions a distinct feminine life-force within a complementary parity of male and female energies. This aspect of Kahlo’s art is entirely absent from Taymor’s film, though it does depict a visit by Kahlo and Trotsky to pre-Columbian pyramids. For a filmmaker with Taymor’s brilliant visual sense and gift for surreal sequences, this is surely a missed opportunity. What might Taymor not have achieved with a vision of a scarred earth transforming into the heaving bosom of Cihuacoatl, or a moon that shelters a sacrificial Mayan hare, or a writhing and devouring goddess of skulls and snakes who embodies the fearful ordeal of birthing life from death? There is no doubt that Taymor’s film is vivid and captivating, but could it not have been more so, if it had delved deeper into the brutally beautiful mytho-poetry of Kahlo’s painted world and the richness of the Indigenous heritage that informs it?

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Paul LeDuc’s 1983 film Frida Naturaleza Viva, starring Ofelia Medina, is slow in pace and bleak in tone, more a collage of impressions and immaculately posed images than a coherent account of the artist’s life or work. Nevertheless, it does place Kahlo and Rivera at gatherings of Indigenous Mexicans, commemorating Emiliano Zapata through folk song and celebration, and thereby representing the political roots and ideological leanings of the artists themselves.

Julie Taymor’s 2002 work is a far more satisfying film, dramatizing a coherent account of Kahlo’s life, and a vibrant portrait of her will to succeed as a bisexual woman with a disability. Frida is saturated in Mexican music and the beauty of Mexican culture, and filled with visual references to Kahlo’s art that are a treat for fans to spot. It fails, however, to provide any context for Kahlo’s political convictions as a Mexican cultural nationalist, her identification with folk art, or her profound interest in pre-Columbian culture. Surely, the purpose of an artist’s biopic is to explore the beliefs and experiences which have shaped their work, to give voice to what was silent on the canvas? Kahlo’s images live in Taymor’s film, but the animating beliefs and Indigenous feminism behind them remain unspoken. In the opening sequence, Kahlo with a mobility disability is carried to her final exhibition in her bed and she’s accompanied by her sister Cristina and an Indigenous peasant woman, who smiles at Kahlo in affection but whose relationship with her will never be explored, and who will never even utter a line of dialogue. Her voicelessness seems to sadly typify the film’s continual use of the Indigenous as silenced accessory.

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On one of the film’s posters, Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas” is restaged with dual Salma Hayeks clasping hands, one in a male suit and one in a Tehuana costume. The duality is now between her masculine and feminine selves, a tension of gender identity and sexuality, rather than the original painting’s tension between European and Indigenous models of womanhood, that is a distinctly Mexican cultural tension. The alteration appears to reflect the film’s wider purpose of universalizing Kahlo’s story of love and physical suffering. Are Mexican struggles to decolonize really so threatening or so difficult for international audiences to relate to? By reinforcing the impression that a “universal” and relatable story of a woman’s struggle must be a story in which specifically Indigenous concerns are silenced, Frida perhaps unwittingly contributes to the marginalization of Indigenous feminism, depriving it of a potent international icon. While an excellent film in many aspects, it could have been much more. It remains to us as viewers to put back the meanings that are left unsaid.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Biopic and Documentary Week: Frida

Brigit McCone has a passion for all things Frida Kahlo and Salma Hayek. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and memorizing lists of underrated female artists. Brigit McCone is an extremely boring dinner party guest.

Bisexuality in ‘Kissing Jessica Stein’ and ‘I Love You Phillip Morris’

Both films, then, arguably fit a wider cultural pattern of bi erasure, suggesting that bisexual characters must “resolve” themselves as either gay or straight. I would argue, however, that what marks ‘I Love You Phillip Morris’ and ‘Kissing Jessica Stein’ as something more nuanced and interesting than another tale of “inauthentic” bisexuality, is the subtlety with which they examine all sexual orientations as limited by our internalized need to socially perform.

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This post written by staff writer Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation. | Spoilers ahead.

How is bisexuality defined? If it is defined by sexual performance, then all the protagonists of the romantic comedies I Love You Phillip Morris and Kissing Jessica Stein must qualify: Steven Russell fathers a child with his wife while taking male lovers, while Jessica Stein and Helen Cooper are heterosexually active women who embark on a sexual relationship with each other. Yet, if bisexuality is defined by self-identification or by profound desire for both genders, then arguably none of these characters qualify: Steven Russell identifies exclusively as gay and appears passionless in his marriage; Jessica Stein is identified as straight even by her female lover, and cannot sustain sexual desire in her lesbian relationship; Helen Cooper, while attracted to men and women, appears emotionally detached and utilitarian towards all her male lovers, finding desire for romantic commitment only with women.

Both films, then, arguably fit a wider cultural pattern of bi erasure, suggesting that bisexual characters must “resolve” themselves as either gay or straight. I would argue, however, that what marks I Love You Phillip Morris and Kissing Jessica Stein as something more nuanced and interesting than another tale of “inauthentic” bisexuality, is the subtlety with which they examine all sexual orientations as limited by our internalized need to socially perform.

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In I Love You Phillip Morris, Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) is introduced as a pillar of the community, a proud family man, an active member of his church and a policeman. The film suggests that Steven’s discovery that he was adopted, and the trauma of rejection by his birth mother, are the psychological triggers driving his powerful need for social approval, which includes suppressing the fact that he is gay. When driving back from a rendezvous with a male lover, a collision destroys his sports car and puts him in a neck-brace. Shorn of his status symbol and physically restrained, Stephen is mentally released and resolves to come out of the closet — the first of many moments when the physical restraint of jail or hospitalization triggers emotional liberation.

It may be controversial even to consider Steven as a potentially bisexual character, when his marriage is dictated by the demands of a closeted life, in a conservative culture of compulsory heterosexuality. Yet his coming out of the closet does not instantly transform him from “living a lie” to authenticity. Rather, he plays another social role, sporting extravagant status symbols and elaborate grooming to win the approval of the gay community, discovering that “being gay is really expensive.” As Steven turns to fraud to finance his extravagances, the film has fun with the idea that he has been psychologically prepared for the socially unacceptable role of con man by the socially demanded con of compulsory heterosexuality. As both wife Debbie (Leslie Mann) and boyfriend Jimmy (Rodrigo Santoro) unite to chase Steven and hold him accountable, we see that Steven’s compulsion to perform socially has been the driving force shaping both relationships, gay and straight.

Once in jail, I Love You Phillip Morris plays out like a rom-com spin on The Shawshank Redemption. Like The Shawshank Redemption‘s Andy Dufresne, Steven finds purification and transcendence by the power of his human will to cling to hope of escape, resisting the mental pressures of institutionalization. But where Andy’s sexual aspirations were represented only by a Rita Hayworth poster on his wall, Steven finds true love behind bars in Ewan McGregor’s winsome Phillip Morris. The famous Shawshank Redemption scene where Andy snatches an illicit moment to play Mozart over the PA system, is paralleled by a slow dance between Steven and Phillip to the strains of “Chances Are,” against a background of escalating prison brutality. Yet after emerging from prison, Steven’s lying and con-artistry rapidly resume, eventually alienating Phillip. Steven has been more deeply institutionalized by the society around him than he ever was by jail. As the film ends, he runs for freedom yet again, the dream of a perfectly realized love hanging over him as clear and yet elusive as a penis-shaped cloud.

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As a representation of a bisexual woman, Kissing Jessica Stein‘s Jessica Stein (Jennifer Westfeldt) is a disappointment. Even after enjoyably consummating her relationship with Helen (Heather Juergensen), Jessica confesses to finding sex with a woman “all wrong.” However, if we accept Jessica as straight, made no more bisexual by her ability to perform sexually with a woman than Steven Russell is by his, then Kissing Jessica Stein (written by Westfeldt and Juergensen) changes from a bisexual rom-com into something else: a portrait of the price that the social institution of compulsory heterosexuality takes on a straight woman. Jessica is drawn to Helen by a Rilke quotation in her personal ad: “Only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live their relation to another as something alive.” It is Jessica’s heterosexuality that is characterized by the film as a space of deadness, inertia, and monotonous repetition, urgently in need of radical renewal and dismantled preconceptions.

The film opens with Jessica’s mother busily matchmaking her daughter in a synagogue. The men around her are reduced to a list of “suitable” qualities, from physical appearance to wealth and availability; Jessica is urged to force her feelings into finding their suitability attractive. Later, we see her endure a round of dates, each following the same formula of dinner and interrogation, and even taking place in the same restaurant. Jessica’s love life has become institutionalized. We also learn that she has already had a serious relationship with Josh (Scott Cohen), who will emerge as her final love interest. This earlier relationship failed because of Jessica’s intolerance over Josh’s perceived lack of ambition. Everything that we learn about Jessica’s loyalty in friendship indicates that she would be unfailingly supportive to a friend who was struggling in their career. But Jessica’s fixed, socialized preconceptions about the role of boyfriends or “husband material” mean that her lover must perform success, to become the expression of her own ambitions and perfectionism. It is heterosexual connection, not bisexuality, that Josh sees Jessica as “clearly not open to.” In a brilliantly acted and moving scene, Jessica’s mother (Tovah Feldshuh) reveals that it is this perfectionism that made her fear for her daughter’s happiness, while surprising her by accepting her lesbian lover.

This, then, is the role that bisexuality plays in Kissing Jessica Stein: the renewal of Jessica’s heterosexuality through the radical elimination of her romantic preconceptions, and through the thought experiment of reimagining female friendship as romance. Only in the ethics of female friendship, with its emphasis on unconditional loyalty, openness, and mutual support, does Jessica find the proper mental attitude from which to approach relationships, to live them in Rilke’s words as “something alive.” In a comic scene, Jessica pushes Helen towards a male lover because “he’s a sure thing” and Jessica would feel guilty if she was unable to perform. While this may be taken as yet additional proof that Jessica does not take Helen seriously as a romantic partner, it equally shows a classic female friendship’s ideals of unselfish support, that could even encompass a polyamorous relationship. Where are Jessica’s limits, once she releases herself from the narrow, social roles of compulsory heterosexuality? Is it ethical to reduce bisexuality to a plot device for exploring heterosexual frustrations? But, how else could those frustrations have been tackled?

Kissing Jessica Stein

Helen Cooper is introduced to us juggling male lovers: a married man whom she can call if she’s “hungry,” an intellectual she can call if she’s “bored,” and a younger, sexually enthusiastic messenger boy to call if she’s “horny.” This utilitarian attitude to her lovers is matched by a consistent emotional detachment in her dealings with them. Yet her gay friend Martin (Michael Mastro) uses the fact of her promiscuity alone to define her as straight, denying that she could feel lesbian attraction “because you have had more cock than I have, and I was a big whore in the 80s.” His denial of the possibility of bisexuality seems to stem from his need to assert his gay identity; bi erasure and biphobia are damaging and negatively impact and ignore bisexual people’s realities.

As Helen advertises for a lesbian lover, the women whose phone messages she receives seem trapped in fixed preconceptions of their own, as narrow as the expectations of the men that Jessica dates. They seek Helen as an emotional savior or to mother a child with them, rather than expressing openness to Rilke’s exploration of “something alive.” It is, perhaps, precisely Jessica Stein’s straightness that forces Helen to seduce her gradually and through the medium of friendship. In this combination of friendship with sexual allure, Helen seems to find committed romance for the first time. After she and Jessica break up, Helen moves into an apparently committed relationship with another woman, bickering good-naturedly over their sleeping arrangements before going for a friendly brunch with Jessica. Does this indicate that Helen has discovered her orientation as a lesbian? Is she a bisexual woman (since the gender of a person’s current romantic partner doesn’t determine their sexual orientation)? Or is she a bisexual woman who, like Jessica, was limited in her romantic satisfaction with men by her inability to see them as friends? Does it matter?

Surely, if there is a message to Kissing Jessica Stein and I Love You Phillip Morris, it is that social pressures and imposed roles must be unlearned before romantic fulfillment can be achieved. So then, at what point does a label become a limitation?

See also at Bitch Flicks:

LGBTQI Week: Kissing Jessica Stein

Brigit McCone is worried that her dating life may be becoming indescribably monotonous and unrenewed. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and staring at nature documentaries.

‘Meera’: The Satyagrahi as Social Rebel

In the two most famous films based on Meera’s life, 1945’s ‘Meera,’ starring the legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi, and 1979’s ‘Meera,’ starring Hema Malini, Meera’s social rebellion is made less threatening by her characterization through an Indian ideal of the devoted and submissive wife, albeit devoted to Krishna rather than to her earthly husband. Nevertheless, each film offers an interpretation of Meera’s resistance that represents its own philosophy of female emancipation.

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Written by Brigit McCone.

“Mirabai is said to have offended her husband by following her own conscience, was content to live in separation from him and bore with quiet dignity and resignation all the injuries that are said to have been done to her … Mirabai practised Satyagraha.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Meera, or Mirabai, was a 16th century mystic poet from Rajasthan, North India. Over 1000 poems are attributed to her, which speak of her renunciation of worldly wealth, her devotion to Krishna, her surviving attempts to poison her, and her defiance of family and society. In her willingness to suffer for her beliefs, resisting social pressures, and convincing others through the power of words and example, Mirabai was cited by Mahatma Gandhi as an embodiment of satyagraha (truth force), his philosophy of non-violent resistance. While our culture offers us female martial artists and superheroines as icons of unreal empowerment, it is worth remembering that social orders built on violence inherently disadvantage women, while the philosophy of satyagraha offers women a potentially level playing field in its emphasis on moral courage rather than physical strength.

In expressing her devotion to the divine by calling herself slave or bride to Krishna, Meera may be compared to Christian nuns who conceived of their religious vocation through the feminine role of “bride of Christ,”, even while rejecting dependence on men and often becoming the most educated women of their time. Yet, unlike Christian nuns whose social impact was usually limited by their entering a cloistered, regulated community, Meera roamed freely across the countryside and interacted with people of all castes and genders, making herself a powerfully subversive icon of popular resistance to the dominant social order.

In the two most famous films based on Meera’s life, 1945’s Meera, starring the legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi, and 1979’s Meera, starring Hema Malini, Meera’s social rebellion is made less threatening by her characterization through an Indian ideal of the devoted and submissive wife, albeit devoted to Krishna rather than to her earthly husband. Nevertheless, each film offers an interpretation of Meera’s resistance that represents its own philosophy of female emancipation.

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“My eyes have their own life; they laugh at rules” – Mirabai

Made as a Tamil film in 1945, remade in Hindi in 1947, and regarded as a milestone in the development of Indian cinema, Meera is one of only a handful of films to star the Carnatic singer M. S. Subbulakshmi, whose iconic status as the “Nightingale of India” led her to perform for the United Nations in 1966, to be awarded the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in 1990, and India’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India), in 1998. Subbulakshmi plays Meera as a “simple, untutored” girl, but one with fervent belief and musical talent. After protecting Krishna’s temple bodily, against a cannon sent to demolish it on her husband’s orders, Meera is inspired to leave her husband’s protection and go to Brindhavan (where Krishna is said to have lived as a mortal), renouncing her wealth and royal title “in search of Him who grew up in the humble dwellings of the Ayar clan, of him who is the kinsman of the poor.” Her resistance to caste prejudice and solidarity with people in poverty is one of the core characteristics of this interpretation of Meera. Meera wanders alone among rocks, singing hymns, demonstrating her endurance and independence, before being revived with water by a peasant boy embodying Krishna.

The film cuts to a follower of the guru Rupa Goswami explaining, to an all-male ashram, a chain of authority from mother to father, from father to guru, and from guru to Lord, placing women at the lowest rung of this hierarchy, and a woman’s husband as her intermediary to God. When Meera comes to the ashram of Rupa Goswami, singing of Krishna dwelling in her heart, she is told that the “divine guru will not so much as set eyes upon one born a woman.” Meera asks, “Who in this holy place of Brindhavan can be called a woman, and who a man?” reminding the devotees that they all aspire to emulate the gopikas, cow herding girls famous for their unconditional devotion (bhakti) to Krishna, and therefore that Krishna’s male devotees consider themselves symbolically ‘womankind’ while ironically rejecting fellowship with actual women. The guru (Serukalathur Sama) emerges at her words and professes, “Mother, it is you who are my supreme guru. You have driven out my ignorance.” Woman thus becomes the spiritual equal of man in their shared devotion to Krishna, and Meera becomes the equal of Rupa Goswami in her right to interpret religion.

A similar argument to Meera’s could also be made about Gandhi’s satyagraha as a social philosophy, in that it urges men to renounce traditionally masculine traits of aggression and violence, and to find power in traditionally feminine virtues of patience and self-sacrifice. Where feminism is popularly, if inaccurately, represented only as a campaign for women to adopt stereotypically male roles, satyagraha proposes the equality of male and female through the transformation of both, and as a natural consequence of society’s rejection of all forms of violence and domination. The full film is available on YouTube, subtitled.

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“What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels” – Mirabai

The 1979 Bollywood film Meera replaces the 1945 film’s visionary mysticism with a portrait more focused on Meera’s satyagraha against the patriarchal social order. The film begins with Meera’s sister (Vidya Sinha) being induced to drink poison because she has been promised to two husbands and must preserve her father’s honor. It climaxes as Meera confronts the head priest, Kool Guru (Om Shivpuri), and is publicly condemned to drink poison because she defied her husband’s authority. Whether sacrificed with her dutiful submission or punished for her resistance, the woman is the victim either way.

Meera’s journey from a theoretical religion of romantic dreaming among books and statues, to the fully embodied beliefs of a satyagrahi, is gradual, and the film slow-paced. She sheds her “inherited jewels” as her dress grows progressively plainer, from bright red to intense saffron to pale yellow to ascetic white. She abandons her “family body” by defying her husband’s family, refusing to cook sacrificial meat and insisting on her vegetarian beliefs, with the same mental independence shown by Subbulakshmi’s Meera. When a temple to Krishna is shut, Meera fasts outside it until it is reopened, a self-suffering protest for religious freedom that recalls the political fasts of Gandhi. Abandoning her husband’s protection and going on pilgrimage to Brindhavan, Meera sheds her “town body” as a wanderer in the wilderness. Finally, she sheds her “social body” as she publicly renounces her family and society before a court of scornful men. As she completes this journey, she is regarded with hostility and fear, not only by the men of her family but by the women, whose rationale for their own lives is threatened by Meera’s freedom.

Through the shedding of “bodies,” or externally imposed identities, Meera achieves a state of selflessness in bleached white costume. Meera’s renunciation of self allows her to publicly voice socially unacceptable beliefs, fearless of death or punishment. The climactic courtroom scene begins with a wide shot of an echoing royal chamber, with a large audience of men rising in unison as the high priest Kool Guru enters, wielding a majestic staff of power. The crowd sits at his command, amplifying his authority, as women watch from the gallery. A gong sounds and the doors pull back to reveal Meera in a martyr’s robe of simple white, isolated and flanked by guards. She steps forward with downcast eyes and modest bearing. The guru proclaims that although a man cannot judge another, “religion and society follow some norms, and anybody violating them is a sinner in the eyes of religion, society and God”.

By choosing to portray Meera’s attempted poisoning as a sentence imposed by a crowded courtroom, rather than a secret conspiracy as in the 1945 film, the 1979 film crushes its heroine beneath the full weight of religion and society’s norms, as represented by ornately enthroned religious patriarchy. The first charge — “scriptures and society decrees that a wife should adopt her husband’s religion” — effectively negates woman’s conscience, once more positioning her husband as her intermediary with the divine. Meera replies, “My religion is only devotion to the Lord,” insisting on her right to a direct relationship. The charge “by interacting with people of low-caste, she persecuted the royal honor” requires her support of the injustices of the caste system, in the name of religion and society’s norms. Meera is asked to acknowledge that her “duties to her husband” are to bear him a child, while male onlookers nod in agreement. She replies, “I’m the soul, not the body. I’m an emotion, not a statue of society norms,” demonstrating that she has fully renounced the “social body” in favor of her spiritual self. This version of Meera’s tale also features a compelling performance by Vinod Khanna as Meera’s husband, a man himself torn by the painful contradiction between his conscience and the social role he feels forced to play, squirming in his seat as Kool Guru condemns Meera.

“Don’t forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.” – Mirabai

Meera is framed in close-up, drenched in a golden glow as she calmly stares into the eyes of Kool Guru and declares, in measured tones, “I’m the epitome of love and am not tied in the shackles of family bonds.” In this moment, Meera represents the ideal of a satyagrahi, resisting all external authority in the assertion of her own loving conscience. Hema Malini’s Meera equally represents an ideal of traditional femininity in her soft-spoken delivery and classical beauty, but the radicalism of her message of female emancipation cannot be denied, with its total rejection of society’s concept of woman as a dependent defined by her family bonds. As Meera’s resistance enrages Kool Guru, she calmly declares to the priest, “Anger leads to destruction, so don’t get angry,” denying the legitimacy of violence as the basis of social power, before defending her decision to associate with the Muslim sultan by rejecting sectarianism and xenophobia: “I don’t accept your parameters as my country.” If this courtroom confrontation were edited to replace Kool Guru with many of today’s politicians, Meera’s stand would sadly be as relevant as ever. The film ends after Meera drinks the poison, miraculously survives and roams the countryside, leading devotees in song and establishing an indelible portrait of her beliefs through her poetry. Through this image of Meera, satyagraha emerges as a quintessentially feminine form of social rebellion, one whose power we ignore at our peril.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPW25vLQY84″]

Brigit McCone is not the epitome of love, and is occasionally tied in the shackles of family bonds. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and terrible dancing in the privacy of her own home.

‘Artemisia’: The Romantic Roots of Rape Culture

The impulse to erase a woman’s testimony, to deny her agency and perception of the crime, while denying society’s victim blaming and bias against survivors of rape — this is the basis of what feminism describes as rape culture. Yet here it is practiced not by a misogynist man, nor by a loyal friend of the alleged rapist, but by a female director aiming to create “emphatically a feminist film.”

Artemisia

Written by Brigit McCone.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape]

Is it possible to admire a woman’s art while denying its meaning? Certainly, a feminist viewer wants to admire 1997’s Artemisia, a ravishingly beautiful film about a young girl seizing control of her talent and sexuality in the face of a sexist society, filmed by a female director, Agnès Merlet. It tells the story of the first woman to become an official member of Florence’s Academy of Art and Design, the most famous female artist of the Renaissance, Artemisia Gentileschi. Merlet’s Artemisia is a director before her time in the seventeenth century. She oversees the setting up of her studio with minute detail and assertive power, frames her paintings like movie shots, orders men to strip and model for her, and poses their naked bodies with intense interest. Even as a girl in the repressive environment of a convent school, Gentileschi is studying and sketching her naked body with a mirror, with a heroic immunity to social pressures. She has a lively sexual curiosity, spying on a couple having sex on the beach before fitting herself into the imprint their bodies have made in the sand, and watching the older painter Agostino Tassi’s orgies with fascination. It is she who pursues Tassi to be her teacher, who strips and poses him as a model, who dictates the terms of their relationship. The film begins with a close-up of Artemisia’s rolling eyeball and it is shaped by her gaze. To see the beautiful, youthful Valentina Cervi cast as the artist instead of the muse, stripping and studying men for her own pleasure rather than being stripped, should mark Artemisia as a refreshing feminist delight. If only Artemisia herself were a fictional character.

But Artemisia is a historical figure, and transcripts from her grueling, seven-month-long rape trial have survived and are the major source for the film. It is a historical fact that Artemisia Gentileschi accused Agostino Tassi of breaking into her bedchamber and raping her. Merlet’s film follows the rough outline of what the real Gentileschi described, but reimagines it as clumsy seduction. Artemisia’s refusals are a murmured reluctance, not strong or fearful denials. She returns kisses and submits, before gasping in pain and pushing Tassi away, as he mumbles in apologetic confusion at the misunderstanding over her virginity. Not that virginity is a particularly great concern for the unbelievably socially immune Artemisia. The whole event is miscommunication more than violation. Later, the youthful Artemisia will take the controlling and guiding role in their love-making, posing the submissive and adoring Tassi for her signature portrait of “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” straddling him in seduction rather than attempted murder. For the masterful Tassi, who is accustomed to ordering around his naked female models like pieces of meat, to find himself awed and overcome by the strength of Artemisia’s personality is an interesting role reversal. When her father, the painter Orazio Gentileschi, discovers their affair, he tries to force Tassi to marry Artemisia and initiates the rape trial, despite Artemisia telling him that Tassi didn’t rape her but “gave me pleasure.”

Artemisia

Again, one can see a feminist message here, criticizing a society that refuses to acknowledge a woman’s sexual agency or pleasure, yet Merlet is not only twisting the facts but ignoring them, in her need to reinterpret rape testimony as romance. Her Artemisia never accuses Tassi of rape. The fingers of her artist’s hands are bound with chords and torturously squeezed, to force her to confess that she was raped, while Tassi watches in loving agony and confesses himself, merely to spare her pain. In the harsh world of historical fact, Gentileschi was indeed tortured, but it was to force her to withdraw her detailed accusations. Her society pressured women, not to make false accusations but to deny rape. Tassi, meanwhile, defended himself by alleging that Gentileschi was promiscuous and “an insatiable whore.” Whatever their relationship was, it was hardly an epic romance. Why, then, does Merlet, or her intended audience, feel such a need to reimagine it as one? Art historian Mary Garrard and feminist journalist/activist Gloria Steinem protested the film’s inaccuracies at the time of its release. But watching the film, I was struck by more than historical untruth.

I thought about the transformations Merlet had performed on the historical sources: she silenced Artemisia’s testimony, by denying it was ever given; she painstakingly reimagined the circumstances described in the rape transcripts, in such a way that they could have been romantic misunderstanding or clumsy seduction; finally, she reversed an entire society’s values, to imagine a woman pressured by law enforcement to make false accusations, rather than punished for daring to allege rape. The impulse to erase a woman’s testimony, to deny her agency and perception of the crime, while denying society’s victim blaming and bias against survivors of rape — this is the basis of what feminism describes as rape culture. Yet here it is practiced not by a misogynist man, nor by a loyal friend of the alleged rapist, but by a female director aiming to create “emphatically a feminist film.” Why does Merlet feel such a strong compulsion to defend a man who has been dead for over 400 years? Or, is it the image of a vulnerable and exploited Artemisia that she cannot tolerate? What do her rewrites tell us about the mental roots of rape culture?

In an interview by Merlet with the UK’s Independent, two possible reasons are given for Artemisia‘s portrayal. Merlet wanted Artemisia to represent “a more modern kind of feminism, fighting alongside men, not against them,” and she claims that the evidence of the trial can be read in many ways, because there is a “mass of contradictory evidence.” These suggestions need to be considered in more detail. Firstly, what is the contradictory evidence? Perhaps Merlet refers to Artemisia’s testimony that, following her painful rape, she continued to have sex with, and even love, Tassi because he promised her marriage. Regarding this as “contradictory evidence” shows an immaturity in our culture’s understanding of rape, that it must always be the isolated act of a monster, rather than a violation that can take place within a complex relationship. More than that, though, it is a denial of historical context. Deuteronomy 22:28, which claims that a man who rapes a virgin “must marry the girl, for he has violated her,” would have been generally accepted in Gentileschi’s time. To admit that Artemisia could be terrified by the thought of becoming a “fallen” or ruined woman, and could rely on Tassi’s promise to marry her as her only salvation, is to see her as an uncomfortably vulnerable human rather than Merlet’s dominant superheroine. It was during this period, before the trial (not afterwards, as Merlet’s film suggests), that Gentileschi painted her famous portrait of “Susanna and the Elders,” depicting Susanna’s naked body contorted in horror and writhing away from the staring, whispering judgments of the elders looming over her. It is a powerful portrait of female vulnerability under patriarchal scrutiny, but that is precisely the vulnerability that Merlet does not allow Artemisia to feel. So, we return to the question that opened this post: is it possible to admire a woman’s art while denying its meaning?

Gentileschi_Judith

Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” which she painted directly after her humiliating rape trial, is one of the most violent expressions of female rage in art. In contrast to the timid Judith that Caravaggio portrayed, Gentileschi’s women are filled with strength, solidarity and resolution, dominating Holofernes (whose face resembles Agostino Tassi’s) as the male elders had dominated Susanna. Merlet actually cites the power of this painting, and her shock at its female authorship, as the trigger that began her fascination with Gentileschi. Yet she strives to tame the image, presenting it as a loving collaboration between Artemisia and Tassi. By such painstaking reimagining, Merlet reveals the key feature of the 1990s’ “more modern kind of feminism” (or “girl power”): not its willingness to “fight alongside men” (and why should one rapist be representative of “men”?), but its discomfort with female anger and vulnerability. Like Merlet’s film, “girl power” celebrates the positive sexual freedom of women to desire and seduce, but not their negative sexual freedom to refuse and define boundaries; their positive freedom to take charge, not their negative freedom to protest poor treatment. In that, it resembles the freedoms promised to women by the “free love” culture of the 1960s, whose abuses and exploitations prompted second-wave feminism.

Artemisia’s art is certainly celebrated by Merlet’s film through luscious costumes and Caravaggesque lighting, but without its meaning, the art seems hollow and disconnected from the painter herself. When we see Tassi’s image in the real Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings, as the sleeping man whose head is about to be chiseled open by a smiling woman in “Jael and Sisera,” as the leering satyr in “Corisca and the Satyr,” and in numerous variations on the Judith theme, are we to ignore the repeated violence, to allow it to communicate nothing about the feelings and intentions of the woman behind the brush? Women threatened by voyeurs, like Corisca, Susanna and Bathsheba; women escaping male clutches through heroic suicide, like Cleopatra and Lucretia; women murdering men, like Judith and Sisera — these are the figures that populate the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi. To deny her rage and vulnerability is to deny the passion and power of her art. Agnès Merlet’s film Artemisia is a beautiful celebration of the positive freedoms of women, that forms a kind of feminist ideal. But without the willingness to explore suffering, or to express anger, it is only half-alive, and a disservice to the full-blooded achievement of Artemisia Gentileschi.

Brigit McCone is still mad she wasn’t taught more about Artemisia in art class. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and getting lost in Vieira da Silva paintings.

Vintage Viewing: Alice Guy-Blaché, Gender-Bending Pioneer

When was the last time we watched vintage female-authored films and discussed their art or meaning? Bitch Flicks presents Vintage Viewing — a monthly feature for viewing and discussing the films of cinema’s female pioneers. Where better to start than history’s first film director, Alice Guy-Blaché?

Alice Guy-Blaché

This repost written by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors and Vintage Viewing, our series exploring the work of women filmmaking pioneers..

When discussing opportunities for women and minorities created by new media, Kathleen Wallace highlighted the explosion of female directors at the birth of cinema, later squeezed out by the studio system. The list of vintage female directors is long, varied, and multinational. Yet, theorists like Laura Mulvey define feminist cinema by its resistance to the Male Gaze™, virtually ignoring the precedent of the female gaze. When was the last time we watched vintage female-authored films and discussed their art or meaning? Where better to start than history’s first fiction film director, Alice Guy-Blaché?

Alice Guy-Blaché may be compared to Ada Lovelace, who published the original computer program and  first predicted the wider applications of computing. Like Lovelace, Guy-Blaché was the pioneer who envisioned the future of her field. Like Lovelace, her legacy is only now being reappraised after decades of neglect. Though Guy-Blaché’s memoirs indicate she may have directed the world’s first fiction film, her massive output, estimated at almost 1,000 films, is really more remarkable for its overall grasp of film’s potential, both technical (hand-painting color film, pioneering the close-up, synchronized sound, and special effects such as superimposition) and in establishing tropes from melodrama to comedy to action to suspense.

Click here to watch an excellent youtube documentary.

Boss.

Alfred Hitchcock once cited two thrilling early influences: D. W. Griffith and Alice Guy-Blaché. But Guy-Blaché wasn’t simply an influential pioneer who happened to be female; she repeatedly challenged gender stereotypes in her work. Though sexologist John Money only coined the concept of a “gender role” in 1955, Alice Guy-Blaché’s cross-dressing films were interrogating gender’s socially constructed nature 50 years earlier.

 Pierrette’s Escapades – 1900

 “We have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.” – Audre Lorde

Pierrette’s Escapades is one of the hand-painted demonstration films that Alice Guy-Blaché produced for Gaumont in France, before her move to America. This film is particularly interesting for probably containing cinema’s first lesbian kiss. Guy-Blaché recognized the power of representation, not only for queer visibility, but with 1912’s affirmative Jewish narrative A Man’s A Man, and cinema’s first Black cast in that same year’s A Fool and His Money, a story of hustling and hard luck inspired by blues narratives. Within a lushly tinted, escapist sensuality, the women of Pierrette’s Escapades play roles from anarchic Commedia dell’Arte and carnival traditions. As such, their flirtations and kisses can be explained by the established relationships between these stock characters, but Guy-Blaché has taken conventionally heterosexual love scenes and reimagined them with an all-female cast.

The femme Pierrette, in her throbbing pink dress, resembles a coquettish Columbine, the trickster wife of sad clown Pierrot, and mistress of witty Harlequin (the 16th century’s Bugs Bunny). As rivals, Harlequin and Pierrot represent the two faces of love, its triumphs and disappointments. The film opens with Pierrette reveling in her costume and powdering herself for Harlequin. A figure sidles into frame, in the traditional costume of Pierrot. Pierrot’s baggy clothes and white-powdered face make it difficult to identify the figure’s sex, who clumsily moves to embrace Pierrette, while she dodges impatiently, before Pierrot steals a kiss on her bare shoulder. Pierrette angrily orders her husband/wife to bed and primps for Harlequin. In the skintight, checkered costume and hat that identify the character, Harlequin is unmistakably feminine. In contrast to her coerced affection with Pierrot, Pierrette blossoms with female Harlequin, swooning and spinning before melting into her arms. Guy-Blaché cuts the film at the moment of their kiss, leaving it open-ended and suggestive.

Pierrette’s low-cut bodice and the raising of her skirts mark this film as teasingly erotic for the time. Records indicate that Guy-Blaché filmed cinema’s first striptease three years before Pierrette’s Escapades. Since the forced hypersexuality of women on film has become an expression of male control, modern feminists often read such images as objectifying. It’s worth remembering that a female director, Lois Weber, filmed the first female full-frontal, while Mae West provoked the paternalist Hays Code with her sexual frankness. The eroticism of Pierrette’s Escapades is a reminder of the liberating power of playful, sexual self-representation. Like the suffragettes, who wore lipstick as a symbol of defiance, it challenges sexless definitions of feminist orthodoxy. Isn’t viewing female bodies only from the imaginary perspective of an objectifying Male Gaze™ itself oppressive? Soundtrack suggestion: Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun“  [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeByzgJFLMs”]

Walk in the sun 

 The Consequences of Feminism – 1906

“Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.” – Betty Friedan

Alice Guy-Blaché’s work regularly explored the status of women. She moulded Vinnie Burns into cinema’s first action heroine, and depicted women in traditionally male professions such as magicians and dog-trainers. In 1912’s Making an American, “Ivan Orloff and his unhappy wife” represent a caricature of East-European cultures of wife-beating – Orloff’s wife is yoked to his wagon as a beast of burden. When the couple emigrate to America, Guy-Blaché shows Americans constantly intervening to correct Orloff’s treatment of his wife, presenting resistance to domestic abuse as an American value  fundamental to the “Land of the Free.” 1914’s The Lure was a sympathetic examination of the forces pressuring women into prostitution. Nevertheless, many feminist viewers struggle with Guy-Blaché’s 1906 farce, The Consequences of Feminism, an apparently reactionary nightmare in which feminism creates a world of “sissified” men, who rebel by reclaiming their clubhouse and toasting the restoration of patriarchy. Discussing Pamela Green’s Guy-Blaché documentary Be Natural, Kristen Lopez concludes this film depicts “the bad side” of feminism, before apologetically suggesting “the very idea that a woman was exploring social issues in a time when women weren’t allowed to vote is astounding”. Is this really all that can be said? That it’s cool to see a woman having enough of a voice to argue against women having more of a voice?

The Consequences of Feminism does not depict a society on the verge of collapse, it depicts  straightforward role reversal. In her lost 1912 film In The Year 2000, Guy-Blaché also reverses gender roles, with Darwin Karr playing the objectified “Ravishing Robert”. This anticipates later female authors who used sci-fi to interrogate gender, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman with 1915’s Herland, or Ursula LeGuin with 1969 Hugo and Nebula prize-winner The Left Hand of Darkness (off topic: am I the only one shipping the Wachowski siblings to adapt?). Compare “Turnabout Intruder,” the genuinely reactionary 1969 finale of the original Star Trek series, which used role reversal to attempt to discredit second-wave feminism. In “Turnabout Intruder,” Dr. Janice Lester voices feminist grievances: “your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women,” before swapping bodies with Captain Kirk and attempting to command. Kirk shows calm authority in Lester’s body, while Lester is emotionally incapable of handling Kirk’s command and “red-faced with hysteria.” As “Turnabout Intruder” shows, discrediting feminism through role reversal requires a demonstration that women are incapable of performing male roles.

The Consequences of Feminism, by contrast, uses a farcical depiction of feminist rule to demonstrate that, while women thrive in male roles, men could not endure Friedan’s “sexual sell” of trading desirability for loss of power. Male viewers are confronted with a vision of themselves as passive “Ravishing Roberts” who must feign sexual resistance to preserve their reputation, laboring in domestic servitude while women supervise at their leisure. Society’s devaluing of domestic labor is shown by the women ridiculing their clubhouse’s sole washerman and pelting him with linens. If male viewers are relieved by the ending, in which a father revolts against a woman who disowns her child, and leads the men in storming the women’s clubhouse, they must acknowledge that collective rebellion against oppressive female roles is justified. Guy-Blaché’s tongue-in-cheek film is the opposite of stereotypical, humorless feminism, but it demolishes the illusory power of “feminine mystique” just as effectively, as relevant for today’s MRA as for the chivalry of Guy-Blaché’s own era. Soundtrack suggestion: Missy Elliott, “Work It”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPMbkHQO3w”]

Put my thang down, flip it and reverse it 

 Algie The Miner – 1912

“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” – Gloria Steinem

 As a subversive populist, Guy-Blaché was a master of the bait-n-switch. In 1913’s Officer Henderson, she offers audiences macho police officers dressing as women to catch crooks, the joke being the ridiculous juxtaposition of their fighting skills and feminine image. Then, at the end of the film, Guy-Blaché substitutes the police officer with his wife, who reveals equal skill in tackling the crook. Officers watch and laugh at their supposed crony brawling in drag, but Guy-Blaché’s real joke is revealed to be on the men themselves, for assuming that women are incapable of violence or self-defense.

Algie the Miner‘s IMDb entry lists Guy-Blaché as “directing supervisor” and producer to Edward Warren’s director, at a time when the distinction between producer and director was ill-defined. Her fingerprints are all over the film, however, which she’s often credited as directing. Algie the Miner offers the joke of a flamboyant “sissy” man, contractually obliged by his future father-in-law to “prove himself a man” in rugged Western pursuits, but this is only the bait-n-switch for Guy-Blaché’s critique of toxic masculinity and homophobia. Rugged pioneer Big Jim gives Algie directions to a frontier town and Algie kisses him in gratitude, leading to an explosion of violent insecurity from Jim. After discovering how non-threateningly puny Algie’s gun is, Jim thaws and agrees to become his mentor in manhood, settling into a cohabiting relationship whose separate beds recall Sesame Street‘s Bert and Ernie. Despite Algie’s female fiancé/beard, Algie the Miner is celebrated as a milestone in the history of gay cinema. When shown his separate bed in Big Jim’s cabin, Algie appears to lean into Jim suggestively before being rebuffed, giving grounds to view him as bisexual. As such, Algie’s final empowerment is gay-affirmative, as well as vindicating feminine values.

Though the rugged pioneers howl with laughter and ridicule Algie’s tiny gun, his willingness to kiss larger men demonstrates an effortless physical courage greater than that of his sexually insecure cowboy hosts, anticipating Marvel’s Rawhide Kid. Over the course of their relationship, Big Jim will teach Algie manly skills, but Algie will rescue Jim from ruinous machismo, nursing the alcoholic through his delirium tremens, saving Jim’s life from robbers and bravely defying the macho peers who pressure Jim to drink. Algie’s resistance to peer pressure, as well as his self-sacrificing nurturing instinct, vindicate feminine courage in the face of macho weakness. When Algie plans to return and claim his bride, Jim is visibly downcast until offered the chance to accompany him. Every Big Jim needs an Algie. The film ends with Algie “proving himself a man” by forcing his future father-in-law to bless his marriage at gunpoint. Closing with the father-in-law’s terror, the viewer must question whether such stereotypical masculinity is truly superior. In all, Alice Guy-Blaché’s Algie the Miner offers cinema’s most affirmative portrait of male femininity until Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. Soundtrack suggestion: Hole, “Be A Man”

 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCYYa0WxLXA”]

I’m potent, yeah 

Brigit McCone may now officially be an Alice Guy fangirl (Guynocentric?) She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and making bad puns.

“Get Back In Your Kennels, Both of You”: The Bitchy Diversity of ‘The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’

The traditional family is marked as a hostile space of enforced hypocrisy.

 Bus

This post by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Depictions of Trans Women.

 

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, is a family on wheels. The bright, pink bus that carries three drag queens across the Australian Outback becomes a homely, domestic space, not because of the harmony between the central trio, but because of their acceptance of friction. In their bickering intimacy, the trio model an ideal of accepting surrogate family, all of whose members are allowed to express themselves fully. Bickering and bitchy humour become the symbol of that freedom of self-expression, as much as the trio’s flamboyant, Oscar-winning costumes. There is no toning down to cater to the offended sensibilities of homophobic or transphobic onlookers. Hugo Weaving’s Tic/Mitzi and Terence Stamp’s trans woman Bernadette play the long-suffering parents to Guy Pearce’s abrasive and bratty Adam/Felicia. In the cramped interior of the bus, there is no escape, only a slow journey toward accommodating each other. The fact that there is never a question of romance between the central trio adds to the family vibe of their camaraderie.

The film also openly acknowledges tensions along the transfeminine spectrum. The tension between Felicia and Mitzi’s feminine personas as theatrical performance, and Bernadette’s feminine identity as an integral part of herself, fuels a running feud between Bernadette and Felicia. Bernadette disdains Felicia’s artificiality as “a bloody good little performer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” while Felicia torments Bernadette with her “real” name, Ralph, and teases Tic about his marriage to a woman. In their sexuality and gender expression, the group defies easy categorization and perhaps this is the point. To define is to limit. Each of the trio is a work in progress. While tensions between transfemininity as authentic self-realization and as artificial performance simmer between Bernadette and Felicia, Felicia’s own dualities are neatly summed up by Tic: “There are two things I don’t like about you, Felicia: your face.” This conflict is never neatly resolved with an easy moral, but instead accommodated within the broader philosophy of bitchy diversity and tolerated friction that makes the surrogate family work. In the role of Bernadette, meanwhile, Terence Stamp inaugurated the dubious tradition of big name, cismasculine stars playing trans women as a novelty, a demonstration of acting prowess and a marketing gimmick. Stamp’s performance, however, surely ranks among the finest in this genre: restrained, sensitive and toughened at the same time, with an innate dignity and waspish wit that plays well off Bernadette’s more theatrical companions. Casting a cismasculine performer suits the role of Bernadette particularly, since her difficulty in passing as visually female is a part of her character’s ongoing struggle to be recognized for her authentic self.

Stamp-Priscilla

The contrast between the Paradise of wish fulfillment and infinite self-realization, represented by the flamboyantly decorated bus and the flamboyantly decorated bodies of its occupants, and the harsh desert landscape with its equally harsh standards of small-town conformity and heteronormativity, is the central conflict of the film. Invited to perform for four weeks in Alice Springs, in the middle of the conservative Outback, Tic finds himself returning to face the wife and son he abandoned. Bernadette, by contrast, is fleeing the tragedy of her lover Trumpet’s death. The manner of his death, asphyxiating on his home peroxide, walks the tight-rope between farce and tragedy that the film so excels at. The bittersweet, clashing tone is established by Hugo Weaving’s opening performance, in full drag: “You’re a discontented mother and a regimented wife… I’ve been to Paradise, but I’ve never been to me.” Butch customers play pool and ignore the performance, while Weaving’s drag alter-ego Mitzi gets a can to the back of the head as she walks offstage.  Dressed as brightly throughout as birds of paradise, the friction between Paradise and reality is ever present. The trio stifle in the narrow confines of their wheeled refuge, but the outside is a space of danger. As a forfeit in a game of Snap, Mitzi and Felicia wear full multi-colored drag in rural Australia – being hassled in bars by transphobic patrons is a reminder that the element of daring is never far away from unrestrained self-expression. The trio wake to find their bus spray-painted with the slogan “AIDS fuckers go home!” with Tic admitting that “it’s funny you know. No matter how tough I think I’m getting, it still hurts.”

Transfemininity is a protective badge of defiance and toughness, while its wish fulfillment is as hard-earned in a hostile world as Adam’s dream of climbing the hostile terrain of Australia’s King’s Canyon in full drag. As Adam/Felicia is held down and threatened with violence by a transphobic/homophobic crowd, she breaks down in tears and is told by Bernadette to “let it toughen you up.” Her fellow queens have rescued her when she needed it most, showing the caring and solidarity that underpins their bitchy surfaces. The queens will fulfill their dream to conquer King’s Canyon, ceremonially owning the Outback both by this feat of endurance, and by a flamboyant reinterpretation of Outback nature as drag costumes in their Alice Springs performance. The film itself can be read as a similarly flamboyant reimagining of the traditionally macho genre of the road movie, playfully proposing drag as the ultimate journey to self-realization. Breaking down in the desert and practising their drag performance, they are invited to join an Aboriginal Corroboree. Performing a full drag act for the Aborigines, the possibility of an intersectional solidarity between different categories of outsiders and marginalized minorities is suggested, with the didgeridoo accompanying “I will survive.”

Priscilla1

The nuclear family is a space of tension and enforced performance for each of the trio. Adam’s abusive uncle tries to swear him to secrecy, while his mother helps him to get the bus Priscilla in the hopes that a trip to the Outback will help him to overcome the “phase” of his gayness and meet a nice country woman. Bernadette is denied the dolls she really wants by parents who insist that she play with traditionally masculine cement mixers, rejecting her and never speaking to her again after she has “the chop.” The traditional family is marked as a hostile space of enforced hypocrisy. Having internalized this vision of nuclear family, Tic cannot reconcile the flamboyance of alter-ego Mitzi with his own narrow ideas about the butch role of husband and father: “Do you think an old queen’s capable of raising a child?” The bus Priscilla’s bitchy diversity serves as a more authentic space of family, because freedom of expression is its watchword. The outside world’s appearance of tradition and conventionality can be deceptive however, covering hidden depths of flexibility and souls who are “starved for entertainment,” like the rural rescuer-mechanic Bob who loves the transfeminine “Le Girls” revue and whose acceptance of unconventional femininity is modelled in his relationship to his Asian “mail-order bride,” Cynthia, as well as his trans-attraction. Cynthia is perhaps the broadest caricature in the film, an exotic dancer who speaks in broken English, and makes “a complete fool of herself” with her compulsive exhibitionism. Bob’s gentlemanly urge to shelter and protect her, however misguided, cannot be separated from his chivalrous urge to protect Bernadette in the pair’s tentatively blossoming romance. The film has no time for respectability politics. Acceptance must be universal, even for the broadest stereotype or most confrontational caricature, otherwise it is worthless. That is the credo of bitchy diversity.

As Tic faints after being watched by his son performing in wild drag as Mitzi, he is told by his bracingly no-nonsense estranged wife that “assumption is the mother of all fuck ups. Don’t bitch to me, bitch to him.” The nuclear family is thus proposed as a potential space of bitchy diversity, where Tic could bitch freely to his son and become a positive role model through the very fact of his freedom. His son accepts his father fully, warmly applauding his drag performance and asking if he has a boyfriend at the moment, while matter-of-factly announcing that his mother used to have a girlfriend. After owning the Outback and reimagining the traditional family, the queens go home, no longer cowering in the city as a defence against the country, but positively choosing it as a homeland of their own, just as Bernadette positively chooses Bob as a home for her heart. The road movie comes to a jubilant all-singing, all-dancing climax to the strains of ABBA’s “Mamma Mia.”

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAshNAfOHTg”]

See also on Bitch Flicks: “Cinderella II”: The Gender Identity Romcom of Some Like It Hot

Brigit McCone wants to roam the Australian Outback in a dilapidated bus. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas.

“I’m the Bad Guy”: Flipping the Romcom Script in ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’

From the GBF to the pretty-ugly conformist-nonconformist girl, from positional superiority to “Hubble,” ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ expertly raises every clichéd plot twist and trope in the romcom playbook, before stripping them bare in favor of honesty, moral courage and the belief that life really does go on without a man. Surely that’s a message we can get behind?

Following on from “Why Pretty Woman Should Be Considered a Feminist Classic,” comes the eagerly awaited second installation of my thrilling series: “Julia Roberts Films That Other Writers On Bitch Flicks Hated But That I Actually Really Liked And Here’s Why” (currently seeking suggestions for a snappier title). So, is My Best Friend’s Wedding really a “Right-wing Nightmare Interpretation of Women”? Must every portrait of women be positive? Isn’t there room to satirize the negative? Watch that sugary opening with its singing bride and chorus of bridesmaids again. See the bridesmaids literally making the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” pose? If P. J. “Muriel’s Wedding” Hogan’s tongue gets any farther into his cheek, he’s going to bite it off. Julia Roberts’ demented and devious Julianne Potter is not a role model. My Best Friend’s Wedding is, rather, a brilliantly acid, deadly accurate takedown of narcissistic and destructive tendencies in the romcom genre. Such as…

 

Positional Superiority

 

Positional superiority refers to a superiority that is assumed, not because of superior ethics or behavior, but because of a character’s position in the film. In practice, it means that we will endlessly justify the behavior of protagonists, because we are conditioned to identify a film’s protagonists with ourselves. In a traditionally male genre like an action movie, this narcissism of positional superiority asks us to sympathize and justify our hero in all his casual slaughter of enemy goons. As Austin Powers reminded us, nobody thinks of the families of the henchmen. In a traditionally female genre like romcom, positional superiority means that any attraction felt by the heroine will be “true love,” justifying her in going to any lengths to defeat her deluded and conveniently obnoxious love rivals, to win her trophy man.

In My Best Friend’s Wedding, all the positional superiority is on the side of Julianne Potter. We are set up to believe that Julianne Potter will be successful in winning her best friend’s love for several reasons. Firstly, she is our heroine. Secondly, she is played by America’s sweetheart, Julia Roberts, whose star power tilts us in her favor. Thirdly, she is in a romcom, a genre that conventionally sets up weddings to be interrupted by “true love.” In everything but ethics, Julianne is the clear favorite. Any normal romcom should reward her “wacky” exploits. But My Best Friend’s Wedding is different. The film takes gleeful delight in testing exactly how many “underhand, despicable, not even terribly imaginative” schemes Julianne can undertake before losing our sympathy. Can she force her gay best friend into a humiliating charade of fake engagement? Can she forge a letter that risks her true love’s job? Can she steal a bread van? How far does wackiness have to go before it becomes conniving delusion? Finally, the film forces Julianne to admit that she is not only “the bad guy” rather than the heroine, but the lowest of the low, “the pus that infects the mucus that cruds up the fungus that feeds on the pond scum.” Her redemption lies in regaining her self-respect through the moral courage of total honesty, not rewarding her narcissism by the convenient prize of a trophy man. It’s a sharp reminder that “bad guy” status should depend on a character’s action and not their position in the story. Our narcissism makes it hard for us to accept such an even-handed justice for the character we identify with ourselves. As Julianne puts it, “Getting what you deserve isn’t fair!”

 

 The Pretty-Ugly Girl

Consider, if you will, romcom The Truth About Cats And Dogs. By shutting one’s eyes and listening to Audrey Wells’ sharp script, it is possible to see that this is a smart updating of Cyrano de Bergerac for women. But the role of the physically unattractive girl with a face for radio is played by a bloomingly youthful Janeane Garofalo in a rather unflattering cardigan. A staple of the romcom genre is the “pretty-ugly girl,” usually a conventionally attractive brunette in faintly unflattering clothing, who is set up as the underdog in a rivalry with a conventionally attractive blonde that we are allowed to perceive as “pretty.” Pitting our heroine Julianne, a brunette with quirkily masculine tailoring, against rival Kimmy, a blonde who wears pink, is a classic use of the “pretty-ugly girl” as supposed underdog. Aside from contributing to society’s rampant body dysmorphia, the pretty-ugly girl fuels female rivalry. It gives women permission to hate or disdain love rivals for their conventional beauty while, at the same time, assuring us that conventional beauty is required of our heroine, even if she is a brunette. Encouraging women to strive to be conventionally beautiful while hating rivals for their own beauty is a recipe for permanent catfight.

A close relative of the pretty-ugly girl is the nonconformist-conformist girl. We tend to approve of Julianne Potter, because she is independent, quirkily cynical, career-oriented and doesn’t let herself be defined by a man. We tend to despise Kimmy, because she is prepared to sacrifice her education and her ambitions to settle down. So, we cheer for our Julianne to be rewarded… by settling down with Kimmy’s man. When you think about it, that would be more ironic than both rain on your wedding day and a free ride when you’ve already paid. The resentful ego of the pretty-ugly girl is revealed when Julianne calls herself the jello to Kimmy’s creme brulee. Though apparently self-deprecating, Julianne is actually citing her underdog status as the reason why she will win out in the end, because Michael feels “comfortable” with her. As Kimmy desperately hopes that she can become jello to win his love, Julianne snaps, “You’re never gonna be jello!” It is no coincidence that women of other body types, races and ages appear as spectators at the climactic bathroom showdown, as Julianne is finally forced to see her actions as they appear to others, outside her comforting bubble of pretty-ugly aggrieved entitlement.

“Hubble”

 

Sex And The City famously used the single word “Hubble” to explain Mr. Big’s marriage to a woman who was not Carrie. Referencing romcom tradition through the classic The Way We Were, the gang conclude that Big simply couldn’t handle the quirkiness and intelligence of Carrie, and was forced to settle on a safer, more boringly predictable bride. Her faith in “Hubble” may play a role in Carrie’s embarking on an affair with Big, one that the show paid lip service to criticizing but finally vindicated through Carrie’s own eventual happy ending with Big. If the pretty-ugly girl justifies aggrieved entitlement, body dysmorphia and resentment of more conventionally attractive rivals, then “Hubble” discredits and diminishes the man’s own right to choose. Julianne Potter is close to Carrie Bradshaw in many ways – she is newspaper columnist with a mass of curly hair and a cynical take on romance, who nevertheless winds up wanting the fairy tale. Over the course of the film, she will do anything to win Michael’s love – anything apart from telling him the truth and allowing him to make an informed choice. Her deluded assumption that she is justified in making his choice for him reaches a climax as she steals a bread van to chase him, leaving best friend George to remind her that no-one is actually chasing her. In a romcom genre where interrupted weddings have been traditional since the screwball climax of 1934’s Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, leading our heroes to regularly agree to marry incompatible and obnoxious partners for the flimsiest of manufactured reasons, My Best Friend’s Wedding reminds us that marriage is a commitment rarely undertaken without sincere love, however painful it may be to acknowledge and accept that fact. When all is said and done, “Hubble” is only a cowardly excuse to avoid accepting a man’s right to choose elsewhere, or the possibility that he may have good and valid reasons for doing so.

 

 

The GBF

 Rupert Everett

Stanford of Sex And The City has a thankless role. Never invited to brunch with the girls, his role seems confined to the repeated assurances that Carrie is “fabulous.” Their relationship is so one-sided that one suspects that the gay male authors of the show are satirizing the narcissism of their female friends. If so, it was a satire that was lost on a large segment of the target audience. The GBF, the Gay Best Friend as fashion accessory and ego prop, was born. Superficially, Rupert Everett’s George appears to be a classic GBF. His role is a supporting one, offering emotional support and finally playing Julianne’s date and consolation prize at the wedding dinner. However, George is a very different animal from the usual GBF. Notice how all of Julianne’s calls are inconvenient interruptions to George’s full, satisfying life that emphatically does not revolve around his friend. We are given glimpses of his dinner parties with his long-term partner and his enjoyment of book readings. When he is dragged into a pretended engagement with Julianne, as part of her hair-brained scheme to provoke Michael’s jealousy, he protests loudly, mocks the engagement as “against God’s plan” and humiliates Julianne as his revenge. George’s comparing of their pairing to “Rock Hudson and Doris Day” evokes Hollywood’s long history of gay men forced into the closet for the convenience of female admirers. Though his life beyond Julianne is only briefly sketched, it paints her as the needy hanger-on in the relationship, making his final appearance at the wedding into an act of mercy and true friendship.

From the GBF to the pretty-ugly conformist-nonconformist girl, from positional superiority to “Hubble,” My Best Friend’s Wedding is superbly knowing as it expertly raises every clichéd plot twist and trope in the romcom playbook, before stripping them bare in favor of honesty, moral courage and the belief that life really does go on without a man. Surely that’s a message we can get behind?

 

 

Brigit McCone is shameless in her love of a good romcom (including Fight Club), writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and singing terrible karaoke.

Vintage Viewing: Elizaveta Svilova, Mastering Montage

Born Elizaveta Schnitt in 1900, she became an editing assistant for Pathe in Moscow at the age of just 14. By 1918, she was editing feature films at Goskino, the Soviet state cinema, and from 1922 to 1924 she was their chief editor. Thrilled by Vertov’s dynamic early documentary reels with the agit-propaganda trains, she would be his most vigorous champion toward mainstream support and feature documentaries. In 1922 she joined the Kinoglaz group, serving as chief editor and later assistant director on Vertov’s films.

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Elizaveta Svilova

Who gets the credit for a collaborative art-form? When the makers are a husband and wife team, the answer seems to be the husband. We are only now beginning to give credit to Marcia Lucas for her major creative input into the original Star Wars, as both Oscar-winning editor and source of feedback and ideas. A similar fate has met Elizaveta Svilova. Though Sergei Eisenstein is the best-known theorist of film montage, the most striking Soviet documentaries of the 1920s to use kinetic and dialectic montages were made by Kinoglaz (Cinema-Eye), who issued their manifesto in the name of a ‘Council of Three’ – futurist poet and agit-prop director Dziga Vertov, Vertov’s brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, and Vertov’s wife and editor, Elizaveta Svilova. In June 1923’s LEF magazine, the Council of Three, published “Kinoks: A Revolution” which was a call to arms for cinema verite that could record real life “caught unawares,” while lambasting the falsity and backwardness of fiction film. This manifesto is usually studied by students of Vertov’s art, but what of the woman who was one third of the Council of Three? Who was Elizaveta Svilova?

Born Elizaveta Schnitt in 1900, she became an editing assistant for Pathe in Moscow at the age of just 14. By 1918, she was editing feature films at Goskino, the Soviet state cinema, and from 1922 to 1924 she was their chief editor. Thrilled by Vertov’s dynamic early documentary reels with the agit-propaganda trains, she would be his most vigorous champion toward mainstream support and feature documentaries. In 1922 she joined the Kinoglaz group, serving as chief editor and later assistant director on Vertov’s films.

Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova were married in 1924, the year they produced the film Kino Eye: Life Caught Unawares. In 1927, Dziga Vertov fell out of favor of the regime and was fired from Sovkino studio (the Soviet cinema studio), with his avant garde and Futurist ideas clashing with the new style of Socialist Realism and the demands of Soviet propaganda. VUFKU, the All-Ukrainian Photo-Film Directorate, which was staffed at the time by administrators sympathetic to Ukrainian Futurism, hired Vertov and Man With A Movie Camera was the sensational result, screened in Germany, France, England, and the United States, and regarded as the most formally experimental film of the silent era. It was followed by an experimental “Symphony of Noises” in Vertov and Svilova’s first sound film, 1930’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass. After releasing Three Songs About Lenin in 1934, Vertov was awarded the Order of the Red Star for his most popular film. Though physically unscathed by the Stalinist purges, Vertov’s health began to fail in the 1930s and he and Svilova struggled to find new patronage from the state-monopolized studio system. Since 1938, virtually all Vertov’s many script ideas went unproduced. He had fallen from favour.

During World War II, Vertov’s Jewish family was destroyed by the Nazis and he suffered a nervous breakdown. It would be Svilova who would edit the first film about Auschwitz in 1945. Svilova’s own skills as an editor and filmmaker saw her strike out to direct feature documentaries, including combat documentaries of the Second World War, showing a keen eye for sweeping crowd scenes and the rhythm of military action, taming the avant-garde aesthetics of Kino-Eye into something more palatable to mainstream Soviet audiences. In 1946, she was awarded a Stalin Prize for her work co-directing The Fall Of Berlin, while another film, The Atrocities of the Fascists (Zverstva Fashistov) supplied visual evidence of death camps to the Nuremberg Trials. Vertov died of stomach cancer in 1954, and Svilova retired from the industry to faithfully catalogue his manuscripts, overseeing the publication of many of his theoretical writings and cementing the recovery of his reputation. She passed on herself in 1975, and was buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.

 

 

Man With A Movie Camera – 1929

 

One of the most influential silent films ever made, Man With A Movie Camera passes in a blizzard of dynamic montage, illustrating an impressionist portrait of a day’s life in the USSR. By a trick of superimposition, the cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman sets up his camera on top of a giant camera. Clouds race over the streets in speeded time. An empty cinema awaits, the chairs magically springing open for the crowds that stream in as the film is loaded. Light ignites and the frozen orchestra springs to life. A girl sleeps, representing the sleeping city, in a film that offers us Everyman’s little used colleague, Everywoman, as an equal representative of the human race. Shots of homeless children sleeping rough suggest why this film was not universally admired by the authorities as Soviet propaganda.

From storefront dummies to machines, the city is frozen. Only the cinematographer’s car is in motion. Pigeons fly backwards, in a film that revels in the power of editing to alter, flip and juxtapose, with the camera editing a suggested collision between man and train, suggestively framing it as the sleeping woman’s nightmare. Tramps awaken and react playfully or defensively to being filmed. Rather than manipulating with invisible editing, the film systematically draws attention to the cinematic gaze’s power to manipulate. The attractive woman’s morning wash is mapped onto the washing of streets and windows, while her eyes opening is intercut with shutters snapping open, disarming voyeurism. Later, the voyeuristic impulse itself is explored as a man’s ogling eyeball is superimposed onto the camera lens when giving a close-up of a napping woman’s legs on a park bench. Women and their labour are often the focus of the film, from seamstresses to older women working as street vendors. We see the woman’s eye creating the film as frozen shots of rolls of film capturing women young and old become sped up, reviewed and spliced by Elizaveta Svilova herself, filmed at work at her editing desk. With the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media highlighting the fact that only 17 percent of cinematic crowds are women, Person With A Movie Camera portrays a refreshingly gender-balanced world simply by allowing women of all ages to take up half the space on screen, while highlighting the gender balance of the film’s own authorship through Svilova’s visible role as editor. Women give birth, marry, divorce, mourn, play sport and work long hours, and their dramas are the film’s, as much as that of male laborers. The film is fascinated by mechanics and industry, but not to the exclusion of humanity. Women are half the audience onscreen at the film’s end, watching and commenting on the action.

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zeCdQJcA88″]

  

 

Enthusiasm: Symphony on the Donbass – 1930

 

Everywoman returns in earphones as the onscreen listener to Vertov’s symphony of noises, which applies collage and dialectic principles of montage to the accumulation of noises, in one of the first feature documentaries of the era of sound. The majestic tolling of a church bell becomes the bourgeois sound of a cuckoo clock, undermining the majesty and intimidating power of the church. The camera staggers with drinkers outside, intercut with the prayers of the faithful to associate both as opiates of the masses, before Soviets swarm the church, demolish its towers and carry away its icons as part of the “struggle against religion.” A female sculptor moulds a bust of Lenin, icon of the liberated “Soviet New Woman.” Model tractors and tools illustrate the first Five Year Plan of collectivization, industrialization and increased production (at least theoretically). The models meld into the real factories of the Donbass mines. Industrial sounds replace the orchestra, including discordant squeals and whistles. Vertov defended his use of discordant “noise” as a feature of proletarian cinema opposed to bourgeois ideas of music: “We really are domestic, and for us these sounds are ‘noise’—but for the worker in the Donbass every sound has a specific meaning; for him there are no ‘noises.'” Made before the cruelest years of collectivization, Vertov’s film is a hymn to the industrial laborers of the first Five Year Plan and to the optimism of early Stalinism. Speakers lays out the need for mass mobilization. A triumphal march plays as the workers exit the mines to cheering, low angle shots amplifying their heroism. In its experimental loopings of industrial noise, Vertov and Svilova’s film anticipates the musique concrete movement, setting up elaborate call and responses between chugging heavy machinery and squealing whistles, before the machines and laborers themselves are made to play the soundtrack’s triumphal march with their synchronized hammering. Women singing in the fields and threshing grain are given equally triumphalist framing, before a workers’ brass band plays the film out.

 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUInm2dC6Ug”]

 

 

 Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and learning new things.

“It is not fitting for her to be so manly and terrifying”: Catharsis and Female Chaos in Pasolini’s ‘Medea’

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film ‘Medea’ was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match.

Strand-medea

This post by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Discussing Greek tragedy, the philosopher Aristotle calls for women, being “of lesser character,” to be given a fitting representations on stage that conform to his society’s ideas of typical womanliness, “for it is possible for a woman to be manly in character, but it is not fitting for her to be so manly or terrifying” (Poetics, 1454a). Ancient Athens was a democracy of free men, where slaves and women were silenced. Its epic tragedies were written and acted by men alone, though they might wear the mask of women. Why then, in a society that considered women to be lesser in character and unfitting of “manliness,” should there be so many examples of fierce and violent womanhood on its stage? Aeschylus had the murderous Clytemnestra, Sophocles the pitiless Elektra, and Euripides produced the infanticidal Medea as well as hoards of murderous Bacchae, female followers of Dionysos who tore The Bacchae‘s hero limb from limb. The answer, perhaps, lies in the role of men in Ancient Athens, who were expected to reject emotionalism in favor of logic, and sacrifice their personal interests in favor of the state. The women of Greek tragedy are powerful, therefore, not because women were powerful in real life, but because these fictionalized characters were powerfully and cathartically voicing the emotional and personal causes that the male spectators had been encouraged to suppress in themselves. Female chaos is male catharsis. To our eyes, the violent uprisings of women like Clytemnestra, Elektra or Medea might well seem “manly and terrifying,” but they equally rise up against the self-sacrificing duty to the state and the rationalizing art of “reason” that Athenian men had been trained to consider manly. The male spectator gets cathartic release through the woman’s chaotic voicing of emotional rage and personal vendetta, but can disown it as a feature of her femininity. The woman, in turn, becomes the negative space of male self-image, not an image in her own right.

sacrifice

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match. Killing his hopes of heirs by murdering her own sons to spite their father, as well as killing his bride and her father, the King of Corinth, Medea murders Jason’s future in punishment for his disregard of her feminine powers as high priestess of a barbarian nature cult. In Euripides’ original, a chorus of women who identified with Medea’s pain, while being horrified by the bloodiness of her revenge, helped to give her context as an emblem of the rage of suppressed and discarded women under Ancient Athenian patriarchy. Pasolini instead delves into the original myth to offer a portrait of Medea’s barbarian homeland and its values as an agricultural society close to the old gods. Opening with the boy Jason being told that he is not the son of Chiron, his centaur foster father, Jason by is initiated by the centaur into a tangled mythology that defines his destiny to recover the golden fleece from distant lands, as a symbol of eternal nature of “power and order.” The centaur gives an enigmatic warning: “The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end.” A warning to curb his own natural impulses, or to avoid taking the “natural submissiveness” of woman for granted? Jason is alerted that the word is not “naturally” so, but the creation of fickle gods who hate as much as love. With his training by the mythical Old Centaur in the isolation of nature, he is more equipped to negotiate the wild values of Medea than men raised in the city. Yet he is guided in adulthood by a desecrated New Centaur, who takes the form of an clothed man and preaches that the gods are dead. It is when he seeks to assume his place in the city, upon his return, that he will lose his respect for Medea’s primeval power, earning the hate of the high priestess and, perhaps, of her gods.

centaurs

The two Chirons

Medea is introduced in close-up, face enigmatically blank, as she is surrounded both by cricket-chirping nature and by the droning chant of ritual human sacrifice. Her willingness to sacrifice human life is therefore linked to the pitilessness of Nature, that is the flipside of its nurture. Embodying values of nature and barbarism in woman, and political ambition in man, is a rather traditional gendering, but the Medea myth is unusual in showing the woman triumphant as cruel Nature reigning supreme, rather than destroyed as punishment for her “unnatural” violence. The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end. Feeding corn with the blood of the sacrificial victim and bidding him be “reborn with the seed” can also be read as Pasolini’s allowing his barbarians to echo the symbolically cannibal sacrament and resurrection narrative by which the faithful wed themselves to the Roman Catholic church. Medea’s hands are ritually chained before she prays, representing her weddedness to the order of her society. She collapses at the sight of Jason. In this highly stylized interpretation, not a word needs to pass between them to convince Medea to rob the fleece, or to brutally dismember her own brother with an axe to distract her pursuers. Her violence is unmotivated, except by the logic of myth or ritual human sacrifice, for that is the binding logic of her world.

Maria Callas

Crossing the water to the world of Greece, where the gods are dead, Medea wanders wildly in a state of spiritual catastrophe such as Jason had experienced when swapping the magical Old Centaur for the desecrated New. Medea vainly seeks “foundation” in this new world, pleading to hear the voices of Earth, Sun, grass and stone, just as Jason recognizes that the golden fleece has been drained of its power when taken to a foreign land without true faith, where promises are broken. In some degree, the ritual sacrifice of her sons is therefore Medea’s only way to restore her sacrificial power as priestess, more than a simple act of petty vengeance against her unfaithful husband. Imagining herself restored to her faith as granddaughter of the sun, Medea performs her violence in her old priestess robes with a smile of exultation at her empowerment, mingled with tears because “woman is a weak creature who cries easily.” She thus uses society’s expectations of woman’s weeping weakness as a mask to hide the gruesome seriousness of her real purpose. Medea’s power recalls those societies where the masculine power of kings and warlords existed in balance with the feminine power of a priestess class, such as the Akkadian state which gave us the world’s first recorded author, Sumeria’s high priestess Enheduanna. Women like Enheduanna are examples that can be cited to argue that the “ancient world” of a woman like Medea had channels of specifically feminine spiritual power lost in Judaeo-Christian traditions. In these older traditions, according to Pasolini’s vision, nurture and sacrifice are integrally linked, joined in the figure of the loving yet murderous woman who embraces with her eyes open and her knife ready. Medea’s violence may disturb us, but she serves as a warning that woman’s nature should not be coded by man’s convenience, nor ever taken for granted. The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end.

[youtube_sc url=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATQ_Qi5Pzrw”]

 

Brigit McCone loves Maria Callas but isn’t that into opera. Go figure. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and wondering what was so great about that Onassis guy.