documentaries about older women

‘Mission Blue’: “No Ocean, No Us”

Audiences have to look to documentaries like ‘Particle Fever,’ about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The Netflix documentary ‘Mission Blue’ focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

This (slightly edited) repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

When characters on TV shows or in feature films encounter “a scientist,” that person is usually a man. The rare times when actresses play scientists in mainstream films (besides the obvious recent example of Ghostbusters) they’re more likely to be a punchline than a real character, like Denise Richards in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. Audiences have to look to documentaries like Particle Fever, about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The Netflix documentary Mission Blue focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

If that last sentence seems like an exaggeration, you should probably see this film. Earle, (now 80, but 79 when the film was released nearly two years ago) has been scuba diving as part of her research for the past 60 years (where she got her undergrad degree was one of the first places to adopt this “new” technology) and has seen firsthand the destruction that pollution and overfishing have wrought — even in areas “in the middle of nowhere” we (and she) think might be unaffected. She points out plastic bags and bottles she encounters on the ocean floor along with long stretches of dead coral and hardly any fish in places where both previously flourished.

She asks, “How can we use the ocean and not use it up?” She’s not afraid to take on the fishing industry, describing her stint at NOAA: “I went to one meeting of the fisheries council. And I was never allowed to go again.” When she warned of the (still) impending extermination of bluefin tuna (because of overfishing) she earned the nickname, “The Sturgeon General.” She resigned from her government position so she could further ocean conservation without being tethered by politics.

The film isn’t all doom and gloom. We also see, in some stunning underwater cinematography (both reminiscent of the Jacques Cousteau documentaries and surpassing them) places where ocean life is plentiful: huge schools of fish that seem like shimmering silver walls along with harmless whale sharks and sea turtles touchingly unwary of divers. Earle is a great advocate of everyone exploring the ocean in this way, theorizing that people care more about wildlife and its environment if they can see it: if wildflowers, birds, trees and deer were hidden away from us we might not have many protections for them either. Earle points out that even though she’s not “big and muscly,” she’s been diving her entire adult life and was able to convince her own mother, at 81, to give it a try. She loved it.

The film shows us the deep sea animals that Earle first encountered over 30 years ago in a special atmospheric diving suit she, along with her third husband, helped design. The natural flashing luminescence of fish and other sea creature at these depths look like city neon signs and gaudy Christmas displays all at once.

We also hear of Earle’s own journey first as a child allowed to explore, alone and for hours at a time, the wild places around her home (as few children now get the chance to do) and later her career as a scientist. She is careful to include herself when she says repeatedly that no one foresaw the depletion of a resource — the ocean and its inhabitants — that seemed too vast for human beings to impact. But now Earle says, “No ocean, no life. No ocean, no us.”

Earle became a scientist before second-wave feminism, when hardly any women entered that profession and we see in the media coverage of her accomplishments (when she was often the first or only woman but usually called a “girl”), the sexism of the era, which she undoubtedly encountered on the job as well. But the film’s co-director and interviewer Fisher Stevens (yes, the same one who acted in films like Short Circuit — but more recently was a producer for The Cove) doesn’t ask about these instances, only gushes about how “beautiful” she was. Earle is polite to him, but, at 79, she might be wondering when she will finally be excused from the unofficial beauty pageant all women are subjected to.

This film could use more women. We barely see Earle interacting with other women scientists or divers in Blue (except very briefly in Australia and in vintage footage of her time as part of an all-woman team of researchers) though many more women are in the field now than when she started her career. Not enough women are behind the scenes either: the film was directed and written by men. When we consider Earle is not just a scientific pioneer, but also writes books about ocean conservation for the general public (including one released to coincide with this documentary — as well as children’s books) and is an effective enough speaker for lay audiences that she won a substantial monetary award as part of TED Talks, the omission of her from the film’s writing team is baffling. If her own writing had been included, some elements, like a casual mention of the acidification of the ocean (thanks to carbon dioxide emissions) might have been better explained.

I also would have appreciated more of Earle’s take on her personal life. She was married three times and had three children (with the addition, for about a decade, of stepchildren too) but as her daughter (who now runs the deep sea equipment company Earle founded) tells us she “wasn’t June Cleaver.” Earle was taking part in underwater expeditions halfway across the world from her family at a time when wives and mothers were expected to make their homes and their husbands (and their husbands’ careers) their first priority. Her marriages suffered because of her absences, even though each of the husbands shared her interests. In this era of Lean In and “having it all,” I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to hear in more detail about the experience of someone who attempted this balancing act before most of the so-called “experts” were born.

When we see the “Happiness is being in over your head.” sticker (illustrated with a scuba diver) in her office we think Earle may be a lot more interesting than the documentary makes her (an impression that Earle in interviews seems to confirm), but she’s still able to get in some good, informative quotes like, “What we’re doing to the ocean, what we’re doing to the planet as a whole comes back to us in bigger storms, more powerful storms, more frequent storms.”

A better film might have tied in Earle’s past status as an outsider (when she was one of the few women in her field) and rebel (in not conforming to the ’50s and ’60s cultural expectations of what a wife and mother should be) to her current role as an environmentalist. When we see (in graphic footage) gleeful fisherman cutting the fins off living sharks and then dumping their mutilated bodies into the ocean to die, we can’t help thinking that this boys’ club gives its members permission to behave badly — as most boys’ clubs do. Because she’s never been one of the boys, Earle can see their cruelty — and its consequences — more clearly: she even films a fishing boat “vacuuming” up its catch — from the vantage point of the fish.

In spite of its flaws, Blue is well worth seeing — and succeeded in making me want to try scuba diving. Some of the shots in the film seem more magical than the brightly colored, hologram illustrations in my childhood copy of The Little Mermaid. As Stevens accompanies Earle through storybook seascapes I thought, “This is the ‘beauty’ he should be gushing over.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wp2MQCsfQ”]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

A Joyful ‘Mavis!’ Plus Q & A with Director Jessica Edwards

Director Jessica Edwards includes plenty of the Staples’ less familiar music (which still sounds fresh and striking: I predict most people who see this documentary will quickly add a Staples Singer channel to their Spotify and Pandora selections) as well as photos and TV clips from their appearances stretching back to the 1950s. Although Pops had a smooth, clear voice, Mavis usually had the lead vocal even at the beginning. Like Amy Winehouse her style and virtuosity were already an adult’s when she was still a young teen.

Written by Ren Jender.

At one point during Mavis!, the new documentary about legendary soul singer Mavis Staples that is airing on HBO this month, we see an old clip of Staples’ father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples who founded The Staples Singers, the family group that brought fame to all of them. A host of a TV music show asks the tired question: how does he feel about performing secular music after years of performing at churches as a gospel group? With no malice or a second’s hesitation Pops answers that he thinks of the “freedom songs” they sing as exactly the same as gospel: simply “the truth.”

Watching Mavis Staples in the film, still touring at 75, after more than 60 years on the road (she remarks about one of their early records that no one could believe a petite 13-year-old girl was the lead singer: they thought her strong, low voice was a man’s) we can’t help noticing she seems to have inherited both Pops’ good nature (though band members tell us she lets them know when she finds their performances lacking) and his certainty. Her band, now made up of white musicians decades younger than she is, her older sister, Yvonne, and a woman in her late thirties/early forties with a nose ring in a T-shirt that reads “Black Weirdo,” still performs an a cappella gospel song to warm up before going onstage.

Director Jessica Edwards includes plenty of the Staples’ less familiar music — which still sounds fresh and striking: I predict most people who see this documentary will quickly add the Staples Singers to their music selections — as well as photos and TV clips from their appearances stretching back to the 1950s. Pops had a smooth, clear voice, but Mavis usually had the lead vocal even at the beginning. Like Amy Winehouse, her style and virtuosity were already an adult’s when she was a young teen.

Although the Staples family was based in Chicago, Pops had been part of the Great Migration from the South. He grew up in the same part of Mississippi as some of the great blues legends who influenced his own style of guitar playing, making it distinct from other gospel musicians. In the 1950s and 1960s, rock and roll radio stations played gospel music after midnight, which Bob Dylan explains, is how he discovered the Staples Singers, as did other white musicians of the era. Some of the songs we hear with Pops on lead have more than a passing resemblance to more familiar radio hits from white rock and roll bands in the 1960s. Levon Helm, of The Band, tells us their own harmonies were directly influenced by The Staples Singers.

When the Staples and Dylan appeared on the same stages (including on an early TV musical omnibus) Mavis and Dylan had a puppy-love romance — and Pops expanded their repertoire. After first hearing “Blowin’ in the Wind” he told Mavis and the rest of the family, “We can sing that song.” He was particularly struck by the lyric, “How many roads must a man walk down/ Before you can call him a man?” When Pops, a man who had fled the Jim Crow South when Black men were still called “boy” sang those words, they were especially poignant.

Pops also attached the group early on with the Civil Rights Movement, becoming an acolyte of Martin Luther King in 1955, at a time when one of the white experts interviewed tells us, “Very few gospel singers took an interest in Civil Rights.” Pops began to write songs inspired by the movement including “Why Am I Treated So Bad?” one of Dr. King’s favorites.

Like a lot of other performers with a similar background, Mavis traded an audience that was once nearly entirely Black (as in a terrific clip we see of the Staples Singers live performance in Watts Stax, a filmed all-star concert and fundraiser for the pre-gentrified Oakland of the early 1970s) to one that is now, we see at appearances like the Newport Folk Festival, nearly entirely white. Mavis still mentions Dr. King to them and seems to see her continued performing as a way of elevating those who hear her music. She tells them and us, “I’ve weathered the storms. I’ve fallen down and I’ve gotten back up.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-orbaWz5yRQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

When Mavis! was shown as part of the Athena Film Festival, the director of the film, Jessica Edwards, fielded questions from the audience. The following is a transcript of that Q and A, edited for concision and clarity.

What was it about this story that made you want to make this film?

Jessica Edwards: It was really Mavis that made me want to see this movie and therefore make this movie. I had seen her perform in Brooklyn, in Prospect Park a couple of years ago and I had known a little about this soul-era Stax stuff, but I went to the show that night and I left feeling rejuvenated. When I went home to watch the documentary, so I could learn more about her, there wasn’t one.

Can you tell us more about what you learned about her as you were making the movie?

JE: The incredible thing that I found about her was that her and her family really touched on almost every genre in the history of American music: anything that influenced the way that music is made now. She influenced all these makers that then became paramount in terms of what American music became, like Bob Dylan. And Dylan himself has influenced so many people. You think about him listening to the family late at night and then what he became, the idea that she was so part of this fabric of music in this country.

One of the things that impressed me is that you portrayed her and her music and kind of the intersection of music, culture and politics. Was that a conscious decision on your part or was it just an outgrowth of who Mavis was?

JE: You know the Civil Rights Movement didn’t end for Mavis in 1968. For her, the Civil Rights Movement is now. For me music is culture. I’m not a very religious person, but music is a spiritual experience for me and always has been. The idea that music can facilitate change in a way that some other things can’t, that was really solidified for me. The message of Dr. King was not completely mainstream in the mid-fifties and Mavis and her family were instrumental in terms of this grass-roots movement of going from church to church to church in the South and bringing these messages of equality.

How much was Mavis involved the making of this film?

JE: Mavis didn’t see the film until it was finished. In fact, it took her a while to get on board. She was like, “I’ve been talking to the press forever. I don’t need to do this. Like, nobody wants to hear about me.” But when we started to talk to her about the kind of film we wanted to make and how it really was not only her legacy, but the legacy of her family and the legacy of their music, she came around. She trusted us. I offered to come to Chicago and screen it for her before it was screened publicly. And she said, “Nah, I’m gonna watch it with the people.” Then she sat in the theater with a thousand people and watched it for the first time. That was a little nerve-wracking for some of us. But she loved it. The first time she watched it, she doesn’t really remember what it was. All these memories just kept flooding back. I sat directly behind her, and the first time Bob Dylan comes on the screen and he says all these wonderful things about the family, she just started giggling like she was 15 years old. She watched it more recently. We screened it in Chicago a week or so ago and she came up to me after and she was like, “I finally saw the movie, this time. It was really good!”

I have a question about process from the inspiration to okay, now how do I get this to really happen?

JE: This movie took about two and a half years to make which in documentary-land is incredibly fast. It’s like a snap of the fingers. And basically, once she agreed I went and visited her and we would drop in on her on the road. We would film the show. We would spend some time backstage. And then we would go back to Chicago when she was home. The way I structured the shooting was, we did it for her 75th year. Otherwise I would still be shooting. The woman is touring all the time and I’d never end the movie. The movie is also self-financed. Luckily, we have HBO as a broadcast partner. They’re like a fairy godmother of documentary films.

I almost like cried at the moment where Mavis is listening to the song Pops played and she’s getting choked up. How are you able to get such intimate, candid moments without feeling like you’re getting in the way?

JE: I think people who’ve made a hundred films will have the same question. This is my first feature length film and I always feel nervous in those situations, but my DP, he was, like, ruthless, so, as nervous as I was, he’d be like, “Just keep filming.” I hired people who have done this way more than I have, so I could learn so much. So the next time I do this, I won’t ever cut either. Whether you’re filming something that’s too intimate or not, ultimately you can make the decision of whether you’re going to use it later. It’s much better to have it, because you don’t know whether you’re going to need it. In that particular scene, I was sitting underneath the soundboard. I wanted them to talk to each other, not talk to me. I knew that I’d have to ask them questions at the same time to get them talking. I was crying my eyes out, bawling under the sound board like a baby. And as soon as we got that scene, I knew that we had a movie.

I just wondered if you could speak to the finances of the movie, how did it work out for you? And what’s next for you?

JE: I have a production company and the executive producer of this film is my partner, like my baby-daddy partner. We work together on a lot of stuff, so he raised a lot of money through commercial work basically while I was shooting. So he would work on commercial jobs which would pay for this film. It opens the question of sustainability especially if you live someplace expensive like Brooklyn. But I knew, if we felt this passionate about Mavis and because she has so many fans, people would want to see the movie. We’ve had such a wonderful response. I feel like we made the right decision to be late on our rent a couple of months. Now I’m doing a lot of work with 360 Video. I really am enjoying the challenge of making something really short and non-linear. There are a couple of documentaries in the pipe, but for every one you make you have to pitch ten, so I think I’m, like, at six. It’ll hit any minute.

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published inThe Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Iris’: One Older Icon’s Portrait of Another

The center of the film is Iris Apfel, who although she had a successful career as an interior and textile designer when she was younger (she and her husband/business partner, Carl, who turns 100 during the film, talk briefly about her work at the White House and he lets slip that “We had a problem with Jackie,”) became well known to a wider public when, as a last minute substitution for another exhibit, a collection of the distinctive outfits she put together for herself (always pants and a top often accessorized by trademark layers of big heavy necklaces which catch the eye like the iridescent breast plumage of exotic birds) became a surprise hit. The exhibit traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts–making her a star at 84.

In the exact same way that movie and TV actresses have become thinner as the rest of the population have become larger, characters in movies and TV are becoming younger as the population ages. Not just Harry Potter, but a plethora of underage protagonists (often from books in the young adult–YA–category) are onscreen, enough to make me want to never again watch a film in which all the main characters attend high school. Being very young isn’t usually interesting, even to those who are very young, a reality YA novels and films themselves seem to acknowledge with popular dystopic settings in which young teenagers fight for their lives instead of worrying whether they studied enough to get a decent grade on the history test.

Current mainstream and even “indie” narrative film portrayals of older women are pathetic: women graduate from being the girlfriend to the wife to the mother to the grandmother without ever accruing a personality; even those quirky, cranky grandmas who talk dirty for “comic” relief are a tired trope that should be retired immediately. Documentaries are the few films where older women are allowed the complexity they have in real life (like the grandmother we currently have running for the US presidency). Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me showed a woman toward the end of her career (and close to the end of her life) who, despite some serious health problems, wasn’t the mess our worst suspicions about older people, particularly older women, might make us think she would be. Instead she was a funny, frank woman who was trying to figure out each day–just as those of us who aren’t in our 80s try to do.

Iris, currently in theaters (which I saw as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston), is one of the last documentaries directed by Albert Maysles (who died in March at 88) a pioneer of cinéma vérité, which even those not familiar with the term recognize as the predominant style of documentaries today. The center of the film is Iris Apfel, who although she had a successful career as an interior and textile designer when she was younger (she and her husband/business partner, Carl, who turns 100 during the film, talk briefly about her work at the White House and he lets slip that “We had a problem with Jackie,”) became well known to a wider public when, as a last minute substitution for another exhibit, a collection of the distinctive outfits she put together for herself (always pants and a top often accessorized by trademark layers of big heavy necklaces which catch the eye like the iridescent breast plumage of exotic birds) became a surprise hit. The exhibit traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts–making her a star at 84.

IrisBW — Iris in her Park Avenue apartment

At 93 she continues to wear outfits that sometimes straddle the edge between “genius” and “over the top.” She also does work associated with fashion–debuting (and selling out) a collection on the Home Shopping Network, beautifully styling several career women (including three Black women with wildly different body types and style preferences) as part of a special event for the women’s clothing store (now online only), Loehmann’s (Apfel has her own memory of the original “Mrs. Loehmann” who told her when she was a young woman, “‘You’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter. You have something much better. You have style'”), attending fashion events and even making an appearance on a magazine cover (the outfit the stylists put her in is, of course, the least flattering one she wears in the film).

But she also has the concerns of an older person, telling us she feels the same as an older woman she knew when she was young who told her, “Everything I have two of, one hurts.” Her husband has also “not been feeling well” and is anxious about her well-being too, so she keeps from him that she has broken her hip (which she gets surgery for). Her nephew tells us that she’s told him that she keeps herself busy to stave off depression. She has begun sending away a lot of her outfits to be stored for posterity and to sell off the many items the couple have kept in storage which can’t fit into the Park Avenue apartment crowded with so many one-of-a-kind pieces (like a life-size wooden ostrich whose wing flips up to reveal a small built-in bar) it looks more like a specialty shop–or movie set–than a place where people live.

But none of these complications keep Iris from being delightful company–telling us how all the older women she socializes with have a crush on the filmmaker, her relish in haggling with a Harlem shopkeeper about items she wants to buy or a sudden intense alertness, like a cat stalking prey, when she sees a runway fashion that captures her fancy. Iris, in spite of interests many people consider superficial, is an incisive wit and not in the least flighty, hesitant or forgetful in conversation. When asked why she never had children she simply states that she wanted to work, to travel (her search for items that no other designer could provide led her all over the world), that she didn’t want her child to be raised by a nanny and concludes (in defiance of the paradigm of women “having it all”) “you can’t have everything.”

She and her husband, Carl, aren’t the cantankerous older couple we’re used to seeing onscreen but two people who complement one another (Iris buys the brightly colored and intricately patterned pants he wears with fairly conservative shirts and jackets) and after nearly seven decades together they still seem to enjoy each other’s company. She’s also not critical about what others choose to wear. At one point the photographer Bruce Weber tells her that he hasn’t once heard her badmouth anyone else’s fashion sense and she says, “I can’t judge… It’s better to be happy than well-dressed.”

Maysles, whose much lauded career included Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, doesn’t just coast on his reputation in Iris: he brings a perspective a younger filmmaker probably could not. We see a tinge of melancholy in the well-wishes, speeches and cake at Carl’s 100th birthday and that mood seems more in keeping for a man whose health isn’t great and may not make it to his next birthday than the relentlessly cheerful “Happy 100th to you” shout-outs of morning television, always delivered by people who aren’t close to that age themselves. Iris’s life is neither filled with loss nor one long, jaunt of constant happiness, but a combination, like the lives the rest of us will lead.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo8jwJ_2l0c” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘Mission Blue’: “No Ocean, No Us”

When characters on TV shows or in feature films encounter “a scientist,” that person is usually a man. The rare times when actresses play scientists in mainstream films, they’re more likely to be a punchline than a real character, like Denise Richards in the James Bond film ‘The World Is Not Enough.’ Audiences have to look to documentaries like ‘Particle Fever’ (released earlier this year) about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The new Netflix documentary ‘Mission Blue’ focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

When characters on TV shows or in feature films encounter “a scientist,” that person is usually a man. The rare times when actresses play scientists in mainstream films, they’re more likely to be a punchline than a real character, like Denise Richards in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. Audiences have to look to documentaries like Particle Fever (released earlier this year), about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The new Netflix documentary Mission Blue focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

If that last sentence seems like an exaggeration, you should probably see this film. Earle, now 79, has been scuba diving as part of her research for the past 60 years (where she got her undergrad degree was one of the first places to adopt this “new” technology) and has seen firsthand the destruction that pollution and overfishing have wrought–even in areas “in the middle of nowhere” we (and she) think might be unaffected. She points out plastic bags and bottles she encounters on the ocean floor along with long stretches of dead coral and hardly any fish in places where both previously flourished.

She asks, “”How can we use the ocean and not use it up?” She’s not afraid to take on the fishing industry, describing her stint at NOAA: “I went to one meeting of the fisheries council. And I was never allowed to go again.” When she warned of the (still) impending extermination of bluefin tuna (because of overfishing) she earned the nickname, “The Sturgeon General.” She resigned from her government position so she could further ocean conservation without being tethered by politics.

SylviaWhaleSharkBlue — Sylvia with a whale shark

We also hear of Earle’s own journey first as a child allowed to explore, alone and for hours at a time, the wild places around her home (as few children now get the chance to do) and later her career as a scientist. She is careful to include herself when she says repeatedly that no one foresaw the depletion of a resource–the ocean and its inhabitants–that seemed too vast for human beings to impact. But now Earle says, “No ocean, no life. No ocean, no us.”

MissionBlueFish — We see the ocean in this film as a living thing.

Earle became a scientist before second-wave feminism, when hardly any women entered that profession and we see in the media coverage of her accomplishments (when she was often the first or only woman but usually called a “girl”), the sexism of the era, which she undoubtedly encountered on the job as well. But the film’s co-director and interviewer Fisher Stevens (yes, the same one who acted in films like Short Circuit–but more recently was a producer for The Cove) doesn’t ask about these instances, only gushes about how “beautiful” she was. Earle is polite to him, but, at 79, she might be wondering when she will finally be excused from the unofficial beauty pageant all women are subjected to.

This film could use more women. We barely see Earle interacting with other women scientists or divers in Blue (except very briefly in Australia and in vintage footage of her time as part of an all-woman team of researchers) though many more women are in the field now than when she started her career. Not enough women are behind the scenes either: the film was directed and written by men. When we consider Earle is not just a scientific pioneer, but also writes books about ocean conservation for the general public (including one released to coincide with this documentary—as well as children’s books) and is an effective enough speaker for lay audiences that she won a substantial monetary award as part of TED Talks, the omission of her from the film’s writing team is baffling. If her own writing had been included some elements, like a casual mention of the acidification of the ocean (thanks to carbon dioxide emissions) might have been better explained.

A better film might have tied in Earle’s past status as an outsider (when she was one of the few women in her field) and rebel (in not conforming to the ’50s and ’60s cultural expectations of what a wife and mother should be) to her current role as an environmentalist. When we see (in graphic footage) gleeful fisherman cutting the fins off living sharks and then dumping their mutilated bodies into the ocean to die, we can’t help thinking that this boys’ club gives its members permission to behave badly–as most boys’ clubs do. Because she’s never been one of the boys, Earle can see their cruelty–and its consequences–more clearly: she even films a fishing boat “vacuuming” up its catch–from the vantage point of the fish.

In spite of its flaws, Blue is well worth seeing–and succeeded in making me want to try scuba diving. Some of the shots in the film seem more magical than the brightly colored, hologram illustrations in my childhood copy of The Little Mermaid. As Stevens accompanies Earle through storybook seascapes I thought, “This is the ‘beauty’ he should be gushing over.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wp2MQCsfQ”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Women Who Steal: ‘The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne’ and ‘Lift’

The eponymous center of Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond’s documentary ‘The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne’ (the opening night selection of the Roxbury International Film Festival) is an anomaly, a woman who steals and is not only unrepentant, but takes great pride in her skill. Doris is a slim, elegant, 80-something African American who has spent much of her life stealing jewelry, from a watch in the Jim Crow southern town where she grew up, to top-price diamonds she accrued while staying in luxury hotels throughout Europe.

In films and TV male characers are usually the ones who get to have all the fun, especially when their characters commit crimes. Women characters aren’t allowed the relish many male characters take in stealing–and getting away with it. Though some exceptions to the rule exist–Bridget/Wendy in The Last Seduction and Melina Mercouri’s character in Topkapi–more often women play party-pooper roles like Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight as the U.S. Marshall trying to capture George Clooney’s escaped, bon vivant bank robber.

The eponymous center of Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond’s documentary The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne (the opening night selection of the Roxbury International Film Festival) is an anomaly, a woman who steals and is not only unrepentant, but takes great pride in her skill. Doris is a slim, elegant, 80-something African American who has spent much of her life stealing jewelry, from a watch in the Jim Crow southern town where she grew up to top-price diamonds she accrued while staying in luxury hotels throughout Europe.

Part of Doris’s ability to steal undetected was, she explains, her creation of a persona, whether she played the “nurse” to a white accomplice or, while wearing impeccable clothes, she casually mentioned to the jewelry store staff the name of her famous (though not well known enough for anyone to know better) “husband.” We spend a lot of time hearing Doris’s stories and even see, when Doris meets with a jewelry store proprietor (who shares Doris’s obsession with gems: they seem to get along well), a security officer approach her to tell her that she can’t be in the store because of outstanding charges against her. She tells him that she didn’t know the restrictions applied to the whole mall and not just Macy’s and she leaves without an argument, explaining politely and meekly to him that she knows he’s just doing his job. Later she tells us, in a very different tone and stance, that she knew the best way to play the situation was to show the guard more respect than he deserved. As we hear from an academic, “Doris Payne for me is someone who manipulates people. I mean, that’s her job.”

Doris’s stories become more far-fetched: in Switzerland she sews a diamond into her girdle, dropping the setting into the sea, and later escapes “through cornfields” after she is taken to a hospital, eventually catching a cab to the airport where she boards a plane out of the country. So we begin to wonder whether she is playing us the same way she played the guard (though one of the directors confirmed in the Q and A afterward that records show Doris was indeed arrested in Switzerland–and did escape). The screenwriter who adapted Doris’s life story into a script (optioned by Halle Berry but progress on production seems to have stalled) says, “Doris is the protagonist and the antagonist in the screenplay Doris Payne writes herself every day.”

DorisPaynemugshot2 — Another vintage mugshot of Doris

We also wonder about the current charges against her. Doris has an excellent lawyer (whom the co-director explained in the Q and A, ended up working pro bono for Doris, which wasn’t the lawyer’s original intention) who exploits every angle to make the jury doubt Doris’s guilt. Doris herself interjects “facts” about the main witness/clerk’s testimony which make us think her identification of Doris is erroneous. With people of color more likely to be accused of stealing and white people (like the witness) more likely than people of color to mistake one Black woman for another, we go back and forth on ascertaining Doris’s guilt even as we see (or don’t see) her steal a ring in front of the camera, while she talks to an outdoor jewelry vendor with her friend from childhood, Jean.

Is Doris, like some older shoplifters, addicted to the thrill of stealing? We see, that, in spite of her expensive-looking clothes she shares a room–and a small closet–with another woman in a halfway house. So does she steal because she has no other means of support? The co-director mentioned during the Q and A that because Doris has spent her life as a jewel thief, she doesn’t have Social Security–and the estimated 2 million dollars worth of jewels she has stolen isn’t much when divided over her career of 60 years. Doris also takes obvious pleasure in recounting her adventures, so excitement and money are probably both factors in her continuing to steal.

The prosecutor at her trial says, “She has made a lifelong career out of stealing and taking advantage of people.” As the judge at the end wonders what to do with her, so do we. Prison seems even more of a waste of resources for Doris than it does for other nonviolent criminals: it doesn’t deter her (she has been imprisoned before, including the time when her white ex-boyfriend/accomplice turned her in as part of a plea deal) and because of her advanced age, even a truncated sentence could mean that she would die behind bars. The filmmakers, with their clumsy reenactments, don’t seem quite up to dissecting the complexities that Doris’s life presents, but we still think about them, even after the movie is over.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ5Cwax-aik”]

Lift, the closing selection from the festival, is a film which the festival originally premiered in 2001, when the star, Kerry Washington, was largely unknown. The movie, filmed on location in Boston and Roxbury offers a fictional counterpoint to Doris Payne. The protagonist, Niecy (Washington) is a chic window-dresser, who uses wire cutters, a big, bulky sweater and fake credit cards and identities to shoplift expensive designer clothing, which she either sells to people she knows in her neighborhood or keeps for herself or her family.

Washington isn’t quite the actress here that she was in the excellent Our Song (released shortly before Lift started filming), and the script by co-directors DeMane Davis and Khari Streeter has a muddled and clichéd it’s-all-Mom’s-fault subplot about Niecy’s relationship with her mother (Lonette McKee), but the scenes of Niecy trying to navigate between her criminal, personal, and family lives present questions that don’t have easy answers. Her extended family know (like everyone else in the neighborhood) that she steals, but are (except for her mother) glad for her gifts–since, except for her mother, they don’t have much money themselves. They also enjoy her company: we rarely see in films criminals who are “good” or even “normal” people when they aren’t breaking the law.

But unlike in Doris Payne, we see that Niecy’s “victimless” crimes do have consequences. Greed, revenge, and a distaste for leaving witnesses behind means people get hurt, and although Niecy isn’t directly responsible, she’s not blameless either. In spite of a “silver lining” ending that seems tacked on, when Niecy finally decides to stop stealing, she does so too late–for herself and for her loved ones.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.