Films By Women – Page 28

Portrait of a Thinker: A Review of ‘Hannah Arendt’

Directed by Margarethe von Trotta, ‘Hannah Arendt’ (2012) is not a comprehensive, A-Z biopic of the political philosopher. The veteran German director focuses, instead, on a remarkable, turbulent period in Arendt’s personal and professional life in the early sixties. Specifically, it chronicles the academic’s reporting of the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the mass deportation of Jews to the death camps during the Shoah. The film begins with the capture of Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. The war criminal had settled in South America in 1950 after escaping to Austria at the end of the war. But we are soon transported to New York and introduced to the woman who endeavored to examine the motivations of the man who implemented the “Final Solution.”

Written by Rachael Johnson

Hannah Arendt was one of the leading political theorists of the 20^th century. Her work encompassed political action, power, violence, totalitarianism, and the nature of human evil. A German Jewish academic, Arendt was forced to flee the land of her birth in 1933. She moved to France where she worked for Jewish refugee organizations before being interned as an “enemy alien” during the German occupation of the country. With her second husband, the left-wing philosopher and poet, Henrich Blucher, Arendt managed to secure safe passage to the United States in 1941. She became a naturalized citizen in 1950 and taught at several prestigious universities such as Princeton and The New School.

Directed by Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt (2012) is not a comprehensive, A-Z biopic of the political philosopher. The veteran German director focuses, instead, on a remarkable, turbulent period in Arendt’s personal and professional life in the early 60s. Specifically, it chronicles the academic’s reporting of the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the mass deportation of Jews to the death camps during the Shoah. The film begins with the capture of Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. The war criminal had settled in South America in 1950 after escaping to Austria at the end of the war. But we are soon transported to New York and introduced to the woman who endeavored to examine the motivations of the man who implemented the “Final Solution.”

Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker and wrote a series of articles for the magazine. Her observations would be brought together in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil (1963). Arendt’s Eichmann was not a mythic monster but a mediocre man who entirely adhered to the murderous oaths and laws of the genocidal Nazi state. “Eichmann is no Mephisto,” Arendt observes in a Jerusalem café. According to the theorist, the war criminal was neither mentally ill nor personally driven by extreme racial prejudice. He possessed, instead, the mindset of a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat. Crucially, for Arendt, the war criminal was a conformist without imagination and remorse. He followed orders and never exercised independent thought. In such ways, Eichmann exemplified “the banality of evil.” Von Trotta skillfully weaves in film footage from the trial with the live action and we witness the real Eichmann: an inconspicuous-looking, bespectacled, middle-aged man armed with files. Arendt is struck by the war criminal’s language. Particularly telling for the philosopher is the statement: “Whether people were killed or not, orders had to be executed in line with administrative procedure.” The historical footage serves to reinforce Arendt’s thesis that the man was a disconnected, pen-pushing bureaucrat devoid of independent thought and moral responsibility. Arendt is repelled by the man and astonished by his manner and defense. As she will later say to friends in a heated debate, “You can’t deny the huge difference between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the mediocrity of the man.”

The articles, understandably, proved deeply controversial and Von Trotta’s film chronicles the enraged responses and intense debate that followed their publication. As many in the Jewish community thought her interpretation served to minimize Eichmann’s evil, it was seen as a defense of the war criminal. Arendt’s criticism of certain Jewish council members during the Nazi era whom she accused of collusion was also read as victim-blaming. We see Arendt lose allies and receive hate mail from both strangers and neighbors. Old friends accuse her of being insensitive to Holocaust survivors and exhibiting a lack of empathy and love towards her own people. Arendt is not portrayed in von Trotta’s film as an unfeeling, unsympathetic character but as a truth-seeking intellectual. She is moved by harrowing testimony of Holocaust survivors (distressing footage from the trial is shown in the film) and haunted by their voices when she returns home to New York but she is also focused. Arendt is characterized as an independent thinker and a woman who did not define herself in terms of race and faith although she personally suffered persecution as a Jew in Nazi Germany. She tells Kurt Blumenfeld, a German-born Zionist friend now living in Israel, that she does not love peoples, only her friends.

Elchmann at his trial — Eichmann at his trial

At a lecture at The New School at the end of the film, Arendt defends her thesis. Eichmann embodied a terrible “thoughtlessness,” the political philosopher underlines. In relinquishing his personhood, his individuality, he relinquished independent thought and moral judgement. Arendt states, “This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before.” Thinking is essential, for the philosopher: “I hope thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.” Arendt was accused of being an apologist for Eichmann but she thought that he was responsible for his failure to think. During the lecture, she expresses disgust at the label “self-hating Jew,” calling it a character assassination, and angrily insists that she never blamed Jewish people for their own deaths. She contends that the role of the Jewish leaders whom she accused of cooperation with Eichmann ultimately illustrated “the totality of the moral collapse” that the Nazis brought to Europe. Arendt believed, too, in the uniqueness of the Holocaust and thought that the war criminal should be executed for his genocidal crimes (he was hanged in 1962). “Trying to understand is not the same as forgiveness,” she states at the close of the film.

It is, however, understandable that charges of insensitivity and arrogance were leveled against Arendt. Eichmann was responsible for the greatest crime–the murders of millions of innocent men, women and children–and many did not accept Arendt’s characterization of the man as a “clown” and “nobody.” They also thought her description of the man’s immeasurable evil as “banal” fantastical and offensive. Arendt’s words and tone were attacked. Her comments about certain Jewish council leaders wounded many. We may also question the philosopher’s reading of the historical figure. Was it really the case that the man who implemented the “Final Solution” was not primarily motivated by anti-Semitism? Pointing to recordings of Eichmann expressing hatred against Jews, there are historians today who underscore Eichmann’s anti-Semitism and Nazi fanaticism. The film does give voice to opposing arguments by Arendt’s contemporaries. Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen), a German-born friend and New School philosopher, is deeply disturbed by her “abstract” thesis and stresses his calculated evil and central role in implementing mass murder.

Arendt’s observations about people who commit crimes against humanity were, nevertheless, important and original. They have also proven influential. If you look at more historically recent crimes against humanity, such as those committed during the Rwandan genocide, her argument is arguably illuminating and persuasive. It is entirely clear that thoroughly ordinary human beings are capable of engineering and enacting the most terrible atrocities. It is an infinitely terrifying thought that people have the capacity to murder their friends, colleagues and neighbors but it is one that people today have come to intellectually “accept” with greater frequency. We understand that men in suits may plan mass murder behind their desks. In short, demystifying evil has become commonplace. Arendt’s essential conceptions about “the banality of evil” and horrifying bureaucratic “thoughtlessness” and remove have contributed to our intellectual understanding of crimes against humanity.

Because of the difficulties of representing the creative process on the screen, biopics about writers and artists can be decidedly dull and sterile but von Trotta’s film is never boring. It is a particularly difficult task capturing the thinking process on film but it is fascinating watching Barbara Sukowa’s Arendt observe, and listen to, Eichmann on the closed-circuit television in the press room in Jerusalem. The subject matter is both intellectually stimulating and important- examining evil is essential, ethical work for artists and thinkers- while the storm surrounding the publication makes for a deeply political and human drama. Sukowa is magnetic as Arendt. Although the philosopher was attacked for her dispassionate stance and tone as well as ironic manner, von Trotta’s Arendt is ultimately portrayed as a sharp-witted, warm and humane woman who enjoyed loving and supportive personal relationships. She is, incidentally, the antithesis of the stereotypical cold, sexless intellectual woman of misogynist writers and directors.

We are also given intimate insights into the academic’s private and professional life in America. Arendt’s New York circle, peopled by American bohemians and German-American intellectuals who had fled Nazism, is quite vividly depicted. Janet McTeer provides support as Mary McCarthy. McCarthy was a good friend of Arendt and McTeer gives the writer sensuality and spirit. Arendt’s affectionate but unconventional marriage to the errant Blucher (Axel Milberg), an engaging fellow academic, is tenderly portrayed. There are, also, shortcomings regarding performances and characterization. Arendt’s students are cheesily adoring and a couple of turns by the supporting players are quite embarrassing.

Hannah Arendt is an involving portrait of the personal and intellectual life of the political theorist. Whether you believe that it offers a persuasive or hagiographic portrait of the thinker, von Trotta’s biopic chronicles an important debate in the history of modern political thought. Hopefully, it will (re)start conversations. Watching Hannah Arendt, you are also struck by how uncommon an experience it all is. There are not many biopics about thinkers and there are even fewer about history-making female intellectuals. Margarethe von Trotta, has, however, made other films about fascinating, iconoclastic figures in history (Rosa Luxemburg (1986), also starring Sukowa in the titular role, is one such biopic) and I hope the film encourages viewers to review or discover the veteran feminist director’s work.

‘Short Term 12,’ ‘In A World,’ and Athena

Local film festivals have proliferated in recent years–every city and town seems to want its own Sundance and my city is no exception: every spring it has a well-respected, week-long independent film festival with celebrity appearances and panels. But well-publicized festivals focusing on women don’t seem to be part of this trend. In the 90s women in the arts, not just film, seemed to finally be given a chance to do their own work and tell their own stories. In the era of ‘Thelma and Louise,’ women taking up a more equitable piece of the pie in filmmaking (as well as in writing books and in the visual arts) seemed inevitable. In the 21st century we seem to be going backward: the percentage of women making films has dropped since 2012 so we’re overdue for a festival like Athena: “a celebration of women and leadership.”

In the 90s and early 00s women’s film festivals were more common than they are now: my local independent art house had one that lasted a week every year, complete with celebrity appearances and panels. Of course, some of the films were crap (or just not my taste) and I remember one panel in which successful women directors made the puzzling argument that so few women were allowed to direct films because movies were “a business.” I’m sure law firms, banks, publishers, and uh, businesses would be glad to know that all they had to do was declare, “Hey, we’re a business” and they magically wouldn’t have to put any more women in leadership positions either.

Local film festivals have proliferated in recent years–every city and town seems to want its own Sundance and my city is no exception: every spring it has a well-respected, week-long independent film festival with celebrity appearances and panels. But well-publicized festivals focusing on women don’t seem to be part of this trend. In the 90s women in the arts, not just film, seemed to finally be given a chance to do their own work and tell their own stories. In the era of Thelma and Louise women taking up a more equitable piece of the pie in filmmaking (as well as in writing books and in the visual arts) seemed inevitable. In the 21st century we seem to be going backward: the percentage of women making films has dropped since 2012 so we’re overdue for a festival like Athena: “a celebration of women and leadership.”

Athena afforded me the chance to see, among other films, two features I had missed when they had regular runs in theaters: Short Term 12 (written and directed by Destin Cretton, nominated for several Independent Spirit Awards and included on several best of 2013 lists) and In A World, written and directed by as well as starring Lake Bell.

Short_Term_12_GraceJayden — Grace and Jayden

Short Term 12 received excellent reviews when it opened this past fall, as it did during its premiere during last year’s SXSW, but suffered from a lackluster performance at the box office, perhaps in part because of the trailer, which makes the film seem like another rebel-goes-against-the system movie, an oversimplification of the many currents running through the film.

Grace (Brie Larson), the main character, works at a group home for kids who seem to range from middle-school-age to 18. Cretton himself worked at a similar facility and more than one scene has the counselors: Grace, Grace’s live-in boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), newcomer Nate (Rami Malek) and Jessica ( Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz who gets hardly any lines) first shooting the shit and joking with each other as coworkers in an office might and then having to leap into action in the face of a crisis: a sudden shift familiar to anyone who has worked in direct care.

Short Term 12 gets right for much of the film, what so many other films about human services get wrong. Larson’s Grace seems to be wearing hardly any, if any, makeup and what she wears to work consists of high top sneakers, skinny jeans and a loose shirt–clothes that can be thrown away if they get ripped or stained. When we see her dressed up later in the film, she doesn’t suddenly seem to have acquired a stylist (the one other “ordinary” women characters in mainstream movies have): she wears ankle boots that don’t really match her not-very-flattering dress and still eschews makeup. She rides a bike to the facility: most of these “counseling” jobs pay very little, so the character couldn’t afford the new car a more mainstream film would give her. She’s also the boss on the floor, the manager, and she’s not portrayed as manipulative or mean, as so many other women bosses are in films, just alternately (and appropriately) authoritative, playful and tender with the kids.

short-term-12GraceMason — Grace and Mason

Short Term 12 is based on a short film of the same name made by the writer-director in 2008, in which the protagonist was a man. Some aspects of the gender change go smoothly. We find out Grace has a history of her own much like the troubled kids she looks after, and the film contains the first instance I’ve seen where a woman commits (mild) self-injury in response to some very stressful news but avoids treating her like a headcase. Saintly Mason (impossibly patient and understanding with Grace; he even does all the cooking) also comes from an unstable background (though eventually he landed with a large, very close, Latino-headed, multiracial foster family). The film starts to strain credulity here: although some people working in human services are trying to give back to a system that helped them, those people are often not the most effective at their jobs (or if they are, stay for a limited time and then go on to other careers). Many of the people who end up doing the best work for the longest time in direct care are, like Nate, from relatively stable backgrounds that enable them to deal with the stress of the job without reliving their own trauma (they are also able to occasionally rely on their middle-class or wealthy families for rental deposits on apartments or used cars to make up for their very low salaries). In real life, the “Graces” of the world, no matter how kindly, or what inside knowledge they would bring to a care facility, would get a job in an office, retail, a restaurant, anywhere that wouldn’t dredge up the ghosts of the past (which Grace has avoided talking to even Mason about).

Grace also has an unplanned pregnancy and here the film really veers off into Fantasyland. What Cretton never seems to consider is: the job we’ve seen that Grace loves and is so good at is one she could never keep if she has the baby. The work is physically rough (adolescents kick at and strike out at counselors, certainly not ideal for a woman in the latter stages of pregnancy) and human services direct care jobs don’t typically offer paid maternity leave or childcare. Even if she were able to return to the care facility, her salary is probably barely enough to support one person, let alone two: Mason’s wages kicked in would barely make a difference.

Troubling too is the latter part of the film when Grace identifies deeply with Jayden, (Kaitlyn Dever) a sharply dressed, artistic, new girl in the facility who, we find out, shares not only Grace’s flair for pencil sketching, but also seems to give signs that she has been abused. Grace’s ensuing actions made me think Cretton has seen too many Bruce Willis and Jack Nicholson films. Her overinvolvement in Jayden’s home life includes breaking and entering and vandalism–and nearly involves assault and battery with a deadly weapon. All the while, Cretton seems not to realize that Grace’s behavior is endangering Jayden more than anyone else.

Of course it all works out in the end. Jayden tells authorities about her father’s abuse; Grace decides to go through with the pregnancy; even the kid turning 18 and aging out of the facility, the one who attempted suicide, gets a foxy, new girlfriend and a job afterward. Hollywood endings can’t help polluting even “realistic” independent films.

In a World is a much lighter film than Short Term 12 and a lot sloppier: many of the contrivances seem like placeholders in the script, meant to be replaced with better-thought out action later on, but the movie still contains some truths that don’t make their way into films directed and written by men. Bell plays Carol who is struggling to make a living as a vocal coach and a voice over artist. We see her midway in the film in a circumstance that male directors and writers rarely present, where a man who we’ve seen is somewhat repellent and seems to be feeding her a line to have sex with her succeeds, not because the Carol doesn’t realize he’s feeding her a line (and is perhaps not who he seems) but because he’s reasonably attractive and it’s only for one night. Bell presents the Irish guy (Jason O’Mara) who tempts Carol’s sister (Michaela Watkins) into cheating on her good-guy husband (Rob Corddry) as genuinely handsome and charming: too many straight male directors seem to not notice that the men who get all the ladies in their films would leave most women cold.

Bell isn’t above using men’s bodies as a kind of punch line either, the way women’s bodies (especially old or fat ones) are used in other films. When Carol’s Dad (Fred Melamed) is shirtless, as he is for more than one scene, we see him in all his hairy-backed, saggy-pecced glory.

When Carol and her real love interest (Demetri Martin) in the film first kiss, she’s the one who makes the first move. When they kiss a second time she first feeds him a line of her own (though unlike that of her one-night stand her line isn’t insincere). All these moments might seem like tiny victories in a film, but other women seem to want to support Bell’s vision: cameos in the film include Eva Longoria (trying to approximate cockney vowels with a cork in her mouth), Cameron Diaz and Geena Davis. Maybe they noticed, as many of the rest of us have, that the trajectory from performer to director that seems so easy and natural for men (both Jon Hamm and John Slattery from Mad Men have also directed more than one episode of the series) is not one that women can readily follow (neither Christina Hendricks nor Elisabeth Moss, nor any other actress on the series has directed a single episode of Mad Men–yet).

That reason is the crux at my argument that as good a film as Short Term 12 is (and as “strong” as its female protagonist may be) because it’s directed by a man, it doesn’t belong in Athena or any other women’s film festival. The producer of 12 told the audience in the Q & A after the film that the writer-director, as a result of this modestly budgeted, not very financially successful film (which won some minor awards) was now writing something for Jennifer Lawrence. In an earlier “master class” (really a Q & A) with Callie Khouri, the writer of the big-budget, huge hit Thelma and Louise (for which she won an Academy Award) informed us that she didn’t get to direct a feature film for ten years after Thelma came out–and hasn’t gotten to direct one since. Khouri isn’t the only one who is facing resistance: it’s a story other women who have made well-reviewed, theater-released films are still telling today–and won’t stop telling until they get the showcases they deserve.

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

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

‘Ukraine is Not a Brothel’: Intimate Storytelling and Complicated Feminism

Green’s intimate reporting and the incredible cinematography and editing that makes the film stand out accomplish the goal of respecting, questioning, and empowering these women activists. Green, in examining those fighting against the patriarchy, exposes and dismantles the patriarch who was running the show.

ukraine-is-not-a-brothel-il-poster-del-film-282951 — *Ukraine is Not a Brothel*

Written by Leigh Kolb.

“Ninety nine percent of Ukrainian girls don’t even know what feminism is.”

This is the sentence that opens Ukraine is Not a Brothel, which premiered in the US last weekend at the True/False Film Fest in Columbia, Mo. The film chronicles Femen and uncovers the patriarch behind the movement.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_AysixuBhQ”]

The aim of Femen–the topless feminist protest organization that began in Kiev four years ago–is to shock the masses and raise awareness for that 99 percent of girls who are growing up in a society that treats women as second-class citizens and to dismantle the fact that Ukraine is seen as a hub for prostitution and sex trafficking. Director Kitty Green (who makes her feature-length documentary debut with the film) was struck by the image of a Femen protestor holding a sign over her bare breasts that said, “Ukraine is Not a Brothel,” and Green embedded herself with the group for a year, serving as their videographer while collecting footage for the documentary.

ukraine-is-not-a-brothel-un-immagine-del-film-282961 — In one of the opening shots, one of the Femen activists has her body painted.

Femen says that they fight against the patriarchy and against sexism in all forms. In a Q&A after the film, Femen leader Inna Shevchenko (who was featured prominently in the film and has since moved to France) said that the goal of Femen is “fighting patriarchy and its global weight.”

Inna noted that the way Femen uses their sexuality–by running and screaming while naked, and not by posing or trying to attract the male gaze–is a core part of the protest. “We are trying to provoke,” she said, but in a different context.

Everything about Femen sounds pretty great, and their goals and messages are a shocking but valuable chapter of feminist protest.

But it’s more complex than that.

It's not that simple. — It’s not that simple.

Just as the feminist movement as a whole has its issues, Femen isn’t all that it seems.

During the pre-fest Based on a True Story Conference in conjunction with the Missouri School of Journalism, Green explained to an audience that while she was living with and filming the women of Femen (she was arrested eight times and was abducted by the KGB with them, as well), she started to realize that the movement was actually run by a man who no one knew about. She said that he was abusive to the women, and she had to “shift ideas and expose him,” instead of simply filming the women. She had to secretly film him, and admitted only after she was almost ready to leave the country admit to the women that she was going to expose him.

“They needed to break away from him,” she said, and it was a difficult moment in their relationship, and in Femen. (In an announcement that got cheers from the opening-night crowd, Inna said that it’s been a year since they’ve had contact with Victor.) Green considered the women she lived with to be friends and family, and her “heart broke” when she would hear Victor yelling at them, and the next morning they were holding signs that said “This is the new feminism.”

The film does a beautiful job of dealing with the complexities and paradoxes of Femen–and really, all of feminism. Ukraine is Not a Brothel highlights the Ukrainian protestors–their lives, their struggles, and their goals–while also shining a light on feminism as a whole. Green’s intimate reporting and the incredible cinematography and editing that makes the film stand out accomplish the goal of respecting, questioning, and empowering these women activists. Green, in examining those fighting against the patriarchy, exposes and dismantles the patriarch who was running the show.

The documentary also quietly examines the difficulties that feminism has with other aspects of its modern identity. Worldwide, prominent feminists are often conventionally attractive (white) women. Third-wave feminism grapples with its relationship with sex work. Women are not widely exposed to or immersed in feminist theory. Women’s bodies are still sexualized, even when we try to use that sexuality in protest. Men still think they have the power, even in progressive movements. And oftentimes they do.

It’s all complicated. And Ukraine is Not a Brothel doesn’t offer solutions–except that the women need to be free from the patriarchal influences that are pushing and abusing them.

Green said, “Victor never thought I was capable of this. I was the young blonde girl who sounded like a child when I spoke Ukrainian. I was not taken seriously, and this gave me power.” She pointed out that women in journalism have a perceived weakness that can give them great power. “I want to keep making films about young women,” she said, hoping that this power can help her tell more stories.

If Ukraine is Not a Brothel is any indication, we can be excited and hopeful for the stories that Kitty Green has yet to discover and tell.

Inna pointed out that in all of the unrest and revolution in Ukraine right now, she gets messages from people there who tell her “You were first!” and credit Femen for being a galvanizing force in Ukrainian protest.

In the same way that Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer purposefully vacillates between humor and intense seriousness, between laughing young women and the same smiling faces screaming and being dragged away by police, Ukraine is Not a Brothel highlights the serious and violent struggle women are fighting against worldwide. These are specific, localized fights that have spread their influence around the world.

Women’s power–especially when they break free from patriarchal forces–is on display in this remarkable documentary. From Green’s intimate storytelling to the protesters’ screams, we are reminded that feminism in all its forms needs to be stripped down and critiqued while we respect and humanize the women putting up the fight and figure out ways to fight with them.

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘Moms Mabley’ and The Hard Work of Show Business

People who don’t work in the arts don’t realize how much work goes into it. Writers write hundreds of pages before any reader (who isn’t a blood relative) loves their work. Musicians practice for countless hours and write a lot of shitty songs before they compose a tune that makes someone want to sing along. Moms Mabley, the Black, queer woman comedian born in 1894 in the Jim Crow south, ran away at age 14 to become a performer and spent much of the next 66 years onstage, performing and polishing her own comedy routines. Her long experience may be why her work, nearly 40 years after her death, still elicits laughs.

Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (original title, Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You) shown on HBO and also as part of the Athena Film Festival, is a remembrance of Mabley, who died in 1975 (at the age of 81). Moms (“Jackie” was the original first name she chose to perform under) was popular, at one time making $10,000 a week (in mid-20th century dollars) on the chitlin’ circuit and for years putting on five shows a day(!) at The Apollo in Harlem (she and the other performers would have their barbecues in The Apollo’s courtyard between sets). During the 60s and early 70s she released 18 comedy albums (albums were the equivalent of cable television specials for comedians in those days). Unlike Redd Foxx, another African American comedian who experienced some of the same strictures of segregation-era America (and who also put out a lot of popular comedy albums), Mabley never got her own late-in-life television show, so her name if largely forgotten–undoubtedly the reason Whoopi Goldberg’s name became part of the film’s title.

The project seems to be a labor of love for Goldberg, who, before writing and performing in her own one-woman show (the vehicle which first brought her to prominence in the 80s) performed a one-woman show as Mabley, working from Mabley’s own material. Goldberg directed the documentary as well as narrating it. This film is only the second directing credit in Goldberg’s long career and her inexperience shows. Goldberg tells us early on that we don’t know much about Mabley’s early life, but Mabley’s Wikipedia entry contains more coherent information than is in this disjointed documentary.

The reason to see the film is not for the interviews with bleary-eyed Famous People Who Saw Mabley Perform Live or even the interviews with comedians (including Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin) whose work she influenced, but to see Mabley’s work itself. She always played an old woman onstage, even when she was young, with the costume of a brightly patterned housedress, equally colorful, Gilligan-style bucket hat and kneesocks, ugly, big, flat shoes (almost like a clown’s) and for the crowning touch she removed her dentures, so as Eddie Murphy states she “was like someone in your family.” She (like other Black performers) wasn’t allowed to appear on television in variety, awards or talk shows until the 60s and 70s–when she had become old in real life, but was still a vital performer. The film also plays routines from her albums, delivered by a Flash-animated Moms.

For those who think queer identity began at Stonewall, or was for white people only, we see old black and white photos of Mabley in the men’s clothing she wore offstage. A dancer who shared a dressing room with Mabley at the old Apollo confirms that Mabley surrounded herself with young women, unlike her onstage persona who often talked about her preference for “young men.” The dancer says that in those days she didn’t think of Mabley as “gay” or “lesbian” but as “Mr. Moms.”

We see clips of Mabley on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and on Merv Griffin: she seems like she would be a better–and funnier–guest than most of the people we see on talk show couches today. As the documentary points out, performers who came from a vaudeville background (as Mabley did) had to know how to dance and sing as well as be funny. We see her in a ridiculously campy Playboy television special with centerfold models and their sideburned dates in formal wear, stiffly swaying to the music as she sings (in her usual onstage costume) a sincere version of “Abraham, Martin and John” (as is pointed out in the film, she actually knew two of the dead men she was singing about). That cover of the song originally sung by Dion became a top 40 hit making her the oldest person (she was then in her 70s) to be on the charts.

We also see clips from her last movie Amazing Grace (she had made her debut in 1933, in The Emperor Jones which starred Paul Robeson), but the film does not seem like the best use for her talents. This documentary made me wish she had done a concert film to preserve her work, the way Richard Pryor (who also counted her as one of his influences) was able to preserve his own routines.

Still we can laugh at the audio of her performances even as the animated Moms, like the white comics’ impressions of her in interviews, sometimes skates dangerously close to stereotype. What may be most remarkable about Mabley’s career is: even as she was playing a loudly dressed, toothless character, her work never descended into self-hatred, though for much of her career, women comedians, like Phyllis Diller, made themselves the butt of every joke, and racist images of Black people were what was “popular” in comedy. In the 50s before Mabley was allowed on television–even though she had an established career by then–Amos and Andy was a huge hit. Her influence also stretches beyond those who name her as one. As she said herself, “Every comedian has stolen from me except for Jack Benny. He was an original. The same for Redd Foxx. He’s a born comedian.”

We see a clip of her toward the end of her life at The Grammys co-presenting with a very young Kris Kristofferson and she seems just what that moribund show could use right now. Breaking up the inane cue-card patter, she takes out her teeth (on camera) and she and Kristofferson give each other a loud kiss on the lips.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4maAWskn1A” autohide=”0″]

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

The Quiet Love of Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in ‘The Savages’

Wendy has fantasies of setting up Lenny in bucolic quarters in the mountains of Vermont where he can live with independence and comfort. But given the level of Lenny’s dementia and their lack of resources, Wendy has to let go of those dreams and settle for the facility Jon selects, which is far more modest, in Buffalo, with costs covered by Medicare. Another director might have tried to seize the dramatic content of such a conflict, as there’s no downplaying the seriousness of what it means to provide comfort and care to the beloved elderly one’s family. Jenkins, however, brings the funny rather than the dour. When Wendy and Jon take Lenny to a high-end facility for an interview to see if his mental acuity meets their criteria for admission, Wendy attempts to coach her father into giving the correct answers to such questions as “What city are you in right now?” That Lenny doesn’t know is sad, but Wendy’s earnestness to help him cheat is, somehow, delightfully absurd. Jon gets annoyed at his sister, but recognizes the difficulty she’s having with the situation and gently lets her be.

I’ve loved Tamara Jenkins since the first time I saw her film The Slums of Beverly Hills, the 1998 coming-of-age story that put Natasha Lyonne on the map. In addition to being a great movie with top-notch performances by Lyonne, Alan Arkin, and Marisa Tomei, Jenkins shows off her talents as a writer/director willing to show the unsightly, awkward, deeply sad and at once hilarious parts of growing up on the economic margins. The funny moments are made even more so because you don’t seem them coming. As unlikely as you’d be to find a comedic film set in Los Angeles that explores what it means to be a lower-middle-class teenage girl, it would be even more of a rarity to encounter one that delves into what it means to be lower-middle-class adult siblings coping with an estranged parent’s descent into old age and dementia. But that’s just what Jenkins gave us in her 2007 follow-up, The Savages.

If you’re looking to catch up on any Philip Seymour Hoffman films since we lost him earlier this month then that’s reason enough to watch this film—but only one of many. Here’s another: Hoffman plays opposite Laura Linney, who’s always amazing to watch. The two are Jon and Wendy, brother and sister who must wearily confront the necessity of managing the last days of their father’s life. From the first scene we are faced with the reality of the ugliness that is mental and physical decline: we see their father, Lenny, played by Philip Bosco, being castigated by a home health aide, Eduardo, for not flushing the toilet. We then watch as Lenny walks to the bathroom, and then an uncomfortable amount of time passes until Eduardo goes to check on him, only to find that Lenny’s written the word “Prick” on the wall with his feces. From this point forward it is clear that Jenkins is going to put us front and center with the unrelenting intimacy created when family must deal with each other’s shit.

Shortly after the fecal incident we meet Wendy, a woman in her later 30s sitting in a drab office in Manhattan at what can only be a temp job. Like any aspiring artist stuck at a desk, she is surreptitiously pirating postage, photocopying, and miscellaneous office goodies to service her application process to win grant funding; Wendy’s a playwright shopping around a semi-autobiographical work about her childhood called Wake Me When It’s Over. A combination of her life’s accoutrements tells us she’s not where she wants to be: the temp job, Raisin Bran for dinner, a married man whose dog accompanies him to her apartment when he can steal away for a tryst. We very quickly learn that Wendy is not well-practiced at being honest with herself—or those closest to her. She knows the art of telling people the half-truth if it will earn her some sympathy and/or avoid being scrutinized. Wendy gets a call from Arizona to find that her father, Lenny, is “writing with his shit!” (as she exclaims on the phone to Jon), and her overly righteous response tells us even more about her: she wants to rise to the occasion and save the day by caring for her father who never cared for her.

Jon is far more pragmatic and less willing to give too much compassionate ground to a parent whose absence meant he had to step up and doing a lot of the emotional heavy-lifting for his younger sister. Like Wendy, Jon studies theater, but from an academic side as a professor in Buffalo, New York—a contrast that Jenkins beautifully maps onto their personalities, but with a light touch. Wendy and Jon are far from types, and their sibling dynamic is one marked by distant respect for each other without the pretense of fully understanding the other’s choices. They are not entirely free of judgment and resentment, but they demonstrate ease and kindness toward one another far more often than ire. At the core of their tense moments is the central issue they must reckon with: their father has dementia and they must put him in a nursing home and watch him die.

When the inevitable does happen, and Wendy and Jon are free of the obligation that brought them together in a shared purpose, they quietly return to their lives. As is often the case in real life, there is no redemption in their father’s death. Jenkins does give us a kind of postscript wherein Wendy and Jon are still themselves, still trying to do the work that defines them, but they are somehow lighter after having endured Lenny’s illness and death. For one thing, they both make progress moving ahead in ways they were previously stalled (I know that’s vague but I don’t want to spoil too much). Most importantly, though, they have arrived as siblings who want to stay connected even without the anchor of obligation; rather than need each other to fit an idea of family, they just want each other to be happy.

A Director To Watch: Celebrating The Rise of Clio Barnard

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards took place on Sunday night. One of the films nominated for “Best Outstanding British Film” was the critically-acclaimed ‘The Selfish Giant’ (2013). It lost out to the sci-fi juggernaut ‘Gravity’ but it is a powerful, low-budget film that deserves a greater audience. ‘The Selfish Giant’ was, also, the only nominated film in that category written and directed by a woman. The director’s name, of course, is Clio Barnard and my primary aim, this post-BAFTA Tuesday, is to appeal to readers to seek out her films, if you haven’t already done so.

The Selfish Giant (2013) — *The Selfish Giant* (2013)

Written by Rachael Johnson.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards took place on Sunday night. One of the films nominated for “Best Outstanding British Film” was the critically acclaimed The Selfish Giant (2013). It lost out to the sci-fi juggernaut Gravity, but it is a powerful, low-budget film that deserves a greater audience. The Selfish Giant was, also, the only nominated film in that category written and directed by a woman. The director’s name, of course, is Clio Barnard and my primary aim, this post-BAFTA Tuesday, is to appeal to readers to seek out her films, if you haven’t already done so.

The Selfish Giant is a beautifully made film about the friendship between excluded boys on the margins of British society but the director has also made another remarkable film about alienated, disadvantaged women. I’m talking about The Arbor (2010), Barnard’s innovative and involving documentary about the life and career of British playwright Andrea Dunbar. The Arbor was also critically acclaimed. Barnard won Best New Documentary Filmmaker at the Tribeca Film Festival of 2010 as well as a British Independent Film Award.

Andrea Dunbar was a teenaged, working-class literary star and mother of young children from a deprived area of Bradford in West Yorkshire. Her autobiographical plays were produced at The Royal Court Theatre in London in the early 80s. An important cultural voice of underprivileged youth in divided Thatcherite Britain, the playwright died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990 after collapsing in a pub. She was only 29 years old. But the documentary not only tells the story of the dramatist’s extraordinary short life; it also focuses on the tragic fate of her eldest daughter, Lorraine Dunbar. Let’s take a closer look at The Arbor before returning to the current success of The Selfish Giant.

Andrea Dunbar grew up on the run-down Butterworth Estate in Bradford, on a street called Brafferton Arbor. She wrote about the world around her and drew from her own life. Her thematic concerns included intergenerational and interracial relationships, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, and alcoholism. Dunbar’s play, The Arbor (1980) is about teenage pregnancy while Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) is about two teenaged girls who are having an affair with the same older, married man. For Dunbar, the role of the writer is to tell the truth about her world. In a featured TV interview, she observes, “Nowadays, people want to face up with what’s actually happening coz it’s actually what’s said. And you write what’s said. You don’t lie. If you’re writing about something that’s actually happening, you’re not going to lie and say it didn’t happen when it did all the time.”

Connor Chapman (Arbor) in The Selfish Giant — Connor Chapman (Arbor) in *The Selfish Giant*

Clips are shown of the film adaptation of Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987) but Barnard adopts a more original approach with The Arbor. The documentary features excerpts of an open-air performance of the play on the same estate today. The Arbor is, in fact, a deeply absorbing and stylistically adventurous documentary. Fiction and fact echo and combine. The film does offer interesting glimpses of the writer, and her family, in archival footage, but what makes it inventive is the sustained use of actors to voice the people who knew Dunbar. Their observations and memories of her are quite perfectly lip-synched and performed. Barnard is intrigued by verbatim theatre where actors speak the words of interviewees. Of particular interest to her was A State Affair, a verbatim play by Robin Soans that revisited Andrea Dunbar’s home in 2000. Barnard states in the production notes of The Arbor that her radical intention to apply verbatim techniques to film is to “make the audience aware they are watching a construct.” This makes for an artistically and intellectually stimulating viewing experience. The distancing effect encourages the viewer to question orthodoxies about documentary filmmaking, particularly questions regarding truth and representation.

Dunbar’s life was eventful and extraordinary. How many writers have been teenaged literary stars and mothers? She did not conform to culturally conservative, working and middle class norms of feminine behavior. She was a right-wing tabloid’s living nightmare: a young working-class mother with three children by three different fathers. Barnard’s approach does not serve to pass any judgment on the writer. Family members and former partners recall Dunbar and their reminiscences and attitudes towards the writer sometimes conflict; Dunbar herself is glimpsed in interviews and comes across as an intense, shy-looking figure. She was, it seems, a complicated character. Lip-synched voices of her family testify to child neglect and hard drinking but it is equally evident that Dunbar was a young woman with deep insecurities. A victim of male exploitation and violence, she spent time in women’s refuges. She, also, most likely suffered from depression and alcoholism.

The Arbor also examines the difficult relationship between Andrea and her biracial daughter, Lorraine. Lorraine’s father was of Pakistani heritage and she observes that her mother’s situation was very unusual on her “all-white, very racist estate.” Virulent racism was commonplace in Yorkshire in the 80s and Lorraine’s memories of the racism she experienced within her own family are disturbing to hear. She even recalls overhearing her own mother- back from the pub- make the sickening, soul-destroying confession to another that she did not love her as much as her other children because of her race. Her relatives, she maintains, also denied her Asian heritage. Lorraine further maintains that her mother was uncaring and unloving in general.

Playwright Andrea Dunbar with Daughter Lorraine — Playwright Andrea Dunbar with daughter Lorraine

Lorraine’s white half-sister, Lisa, disagrees with her characterization of their mother and claims it covers deep hurt over her loss. What is clear is that Lorraine simply unravelled after her mother’s death. Her life was blighted by bullying and drug addiction. She fell into sex work to pay for her habit and, like her mother, became a victim of domestic violence. Lorraine was imprisoned in 2007 for the manslaughter–through neglect–of her two-year-old son who died after ingesting methadone whilst in her care. It perhaps comes as no surprise to learn that she actually preferred prison life.

The Arbor is a unique, evocative portrait of creative talent and inter-generational pain. Both mother and daughter suffered from terrible demons but Barnard’s approach does not offer easy explanations. The young literary star from the streets of Bradford remains a mystery, in many ways, and we are encouraged to ask if we ever really know the truth about someone. The documentary is about an extraordinary woman from a particular place but it deals with the universal theme of family. Are we not all shaped by our families, if not haunted by them? The poet Philip Larkin wrote in This Be The Verse: “They fuck you up, you, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.” Whether you concur with his darkly amusing observation, The Arbor makes you think about what we inherit from our parents. Another theme is the nature of creative talent and I took away from the documentary an acknowledgement that creativity does not always come in clean, little packages. The film also makes the viewer reflect on the impact of poverty, class, and racism on the psyche of human beings.

The Arbor contributes to our understanding of the dramatist in a compelling, original ways. It is an important feminist work too in that it restores to the collective memory the story of a young, disadvantaged female cultural figure while drawing attention to the plight of young girls struggling to survive in societies where racism, lack of opportunity, and masculinist violence are all-pervasive.

In the narrative film, The Selfish Giant, inspired by the Oscar Wilde short story of the same name, Barnard addresses the troubles of two young boys growing up in the same economically deprived area of Bradford. It is, of course, important for female filmmakers to examine masculinity as well as femininity. The Selfish Giant sheds light on both the aggressiveness and vulnerability of boys. Barnard’s lads are lost and disadvantaged. Arbor (Conner Chapman) has a drug-addicted older brother and Swifty (Shaun Thomas) comes from an extremely large, needy family. Both have been excluded from school for discipline problems. Arbor is an angry, insecure lad with ADHD. Swifty is more unassuming. An animal lover, he is a natural with horses. Kicked out of school, the boys resort to scrap metal dealing and get involved in illegal “sulky” (or harness) racing. Arbor feels left out when Swifty is chosen to be the sulky rider of a scrap metal dealer called Kitten (Sean Gilder). He also steals from him. Punishment is a risky but potentially profitable mission that ends in tragedy.

The Boys of The Selfish Giant — The boys of *The Selfish Giant*

The Selfish Giant highlights the exploitation of children by adults but it is also a sensitive study of male friendship. Arbor can be belligerent but he can also be engaging, even affectionate. He loves his friend and the friendship moves the viewer because we realize that it is his only authentic relationship. Barnard understands that his bravado masks raw sensitivity. Arbor’s home, for Swifty, is a refuge from the insecurity and turmoil of his family life. Chapman and Thomas, it must be said, deliver persuasive, natural performances as the boys.

The Selfish Giant is a hard-hitting, sometimes harrowing, film. Of course, there are those who would charge Barnard with exploiting poverty as well as giving a too depressing picture of the lives of poor people in the UK. I would not, however, accuse the director of being a class tourist. Although the daughter of a university lecturer, she grew up in West Yorkshire and knows the area in question well. The Selfish Giant is not manipulative. It engages you emotionally but it is not sentimental. In fact, it grows more powerful and beautiful as the story unfolds. Stylistically, The Selfish Giant is a social realist tale with a modern, picaresque feel. The spiritual themes of Wilde’s story also become more apparent as the film develops. Barnard’s formidable sense of place is, again, manifest. The Selfish Giant’s post-industrial, semi-rural landscape is shot with skill and imagination. This world does not lack poetry but Barnard endows it with an austere power. In short, The Selfish Giant is a beautifully made film that that needed to be made, and needs to be seen. It critical successes–BAFTA nomination and Europa Cinemas prize at Cannes in 2013–are richly deserved.

Sulky Harness Racing (The Selfish Giant) — Sulky harness racing (*The Selfish Giant*)

Clio Barnard is not frightened of tackling tough subjects. She is concerned with the marginalized and the forgotten–untutored children, abused women, anguished addicts and wayward, natural-born artists. Both films explore the alienation of the English underclass and working class. They are not directly political but it is clear where the director’s ideological sympathies lie. The films show what poverty does to people psychologically. This is, in fact, what they are ultimately about. There is a sureness and artistry in Barnard’s directing and her work has been both aesthetically striking and intellectually engaging. Stylistically, her films so far have revealed experimental daring as well as strong social commitment. I hope she goes on to make many more beautiful, thought-provoking films. Let’s celebrate her rise.

What Happens After The Good Guys–And Gals–Win: ‘The Square’ and ‘Eufrosina’s Revolution’

But mainstream movies have so much asinine fakery in them, from CGI that looks as if it came off the side of a van in the 1970s to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, audiences hunger for the real. In a time when big American news media are shutting down their offices in other countries (to save money) and more and more Americans are getting their news through the Daily Show and the Colbert Report Jehane Noujaim’s ‘The Square,’ which is nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary and just won The Director’s Guild Award in the same category and Luciana Kaplan’s ‘Eufrosina’s Revolution,’ which was part of Hot Docs and was shown in New York’s 2014 Athena Film Festival follow up on international current events with a thoroughness that is anathema to our amnesia-prone mainstream news media.

Documentaries are the type of feature-length films much more likely to be directed by women: 39 percent of documentaries have women directors as opposed to 18 percent for narrative features. Perhaps not coincidentally documentaries are also some of the lowest-grossing films at the box office, the brussels sprouts of the film world–good for you, but not the first thing anyone orders off the menu.

But mainstream movies have so much asinine fakery in them, from CGI that looks as if it came off the side of a van in the 1970s to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, audiences hunger for the real. In a time when big American news media are shutting down their offices in other countries (to save money) and more and more Americans are getting their news through the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, which is nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary and just won The Director’s Guild Award in the same category, and Luciana Kaplan’s Eufrosina’s Revolution, which was part of Hot Docs and was shown in New York’s 2014 Athena Film Festival, follow up on international current events with a thoroughness that is anathema to our amnesia-prone mainstream news media.

The Square is Noujaim’s kickstarter-funded Netflix-distributed documentary of what happened in Egypt after the popular overthrow of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Noujaim, who previously directed Control Room (2004) and Startup.com (2001) has had a successful career in the US, but was born in Egypt and like a lot of people with roots there returned to the country after the massive protests in Tahrir Square.

What she finds in Tahrir is…confusing in ways which will be familiar to anyone who has taken part in large political protests, especially those that carry the possibility of police retaliation, like the Occupy protests that started later in 2011 (in part inspired by the Arab Spring). To try to make the movement coherent, Noujaim chooses to focus on individual protestors from diverse backgrounds. The documentary’s main “character” is photogenic, committed, twenty-something Ahmed, who comes from a poor family (he tells us he had to fund his own grade-school education by working as a street vendor). We also meet Khalid, a British-Egyptian movie actor (The Kite Runner, United 93 and Green Zone) who has come back to the country to join the revolution, Magdy, a member of The Muslim Brotherhood who was tortured under the Mubarak regime and Aida, a fillmmaker and actress in shocking pink, leopard-patterned, eyeglass frames who is, along with Khalid, a co-founder of a citizen journalism (including video) organization (an important component of activism all over the world). I had to look up a description for Aida, unlike the others, since we see much less of her and hear much less about her life in the film, a particularly maddening omission from a woman director.

The people who gathered in Tahrir were not only men: separate, long, security lines for men and women straggled from the square in the days leading up to Mubarak’s overthrow. A photo taken in the weeks before, which received world-wide circulation featured a rear shot of a woman throwing rocks at the police, her head wrapped (most likely to protect from tear gas) and one butt-cheek covered by flowery underpants (which looked like they could have come from Urban Outfitters) spilling out from her skinny jeans (a hazard all of us who have worn skinny jeans know too well). The too-brief scene with Aida wondering if, after fleeing the square, she should go back, even though doing so would risk arrest, torture and death, is as tense as a scene in a fictional thriller. When we also see the tireless human rights lawyer Ragia Omran, smart phone pressed to her ear, with her head down as she crouches on a bench, trying to get protestors out of jail (or dead protestors autopsied), we want to see more of her and hear more of her story, but we don’t.

In another scene we see Magdy’s wife and middle-school-aged daughter (unlike Aida and Omran, both wear hijab) talk about the stalled progress of the revolution, with the daughter bursting into tears of frustration and fear. The protests were full of women in hijab and this film could use more of their opinions, especially when members of The Muslim Brotherhood start talking about using The Koran as a basis for the new constitution.

The events depicted in the film will have everyone in the audience questioning mainstream American media coverage, as Ahmed and others are against the elections the American media applauded. The rapidly shifting alliances among Egyptian citizens are personified in Magdy’s son who, shortly after Mubarak’s ouster complains that the revolution is like a test that protestors had taken and done well on but didn’t put their name on, so nobody knows it’s theirs. Later in the film, after subsequent protests he confesses that, on instruction from The Brotherhood, he has helped in forcibly and violently evicting other protestors from the square.

Morsi, the Brotherhood leader who “won” the election was ousted himself this past summer (the fiilmmakers returned to add an update to the film, which had premiered in January of last year at Sundance) and journalists covering Egypt, including some from Al-Jazeera continue to be jailed with other innocent people. Egyptian protests aren’t the simple feel-good story from 2011 anymore and current international media coverage is minimal. The citizen journalism organization that Aida co-founded no longer has a website.

We in the United States shouldn’t be too quick to feel superior: protestors were chased off the Occupy sites too, sometimes violently . Whistleblowers here have gone to prison or into exile and the journalists who helped disseminate their info to the world are threatened with imprisonment themselves. When we see the smiling, lying, uniformed Egyptian officials in the film, I couldn’t help thinking of our own smiling, lying, suit-wearing politicians. We may be more like Egypt than we think.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twB2zAOzsKE” autohide=”0″]

In Eufrosina’s Revolution (directed by Luciana Kaplan), we see the fallout from another uprising, this time in a small town in one of Oaxaca, Mexico’s beautiful, lush, mountainous, and most poverty-stricken regions. Eufrosina Cruz is an indigenous (Zapotec) woman who grew up in Santa María Quiegolani and left to get an education. She returned to help the people she grew up with, founding community organizations and eventually running for mayor of the town. Because of a provision in the Oaxaca constitution that gives the indigenous people the right to run their communities according to their own traditions, even though she was elected, she wasn’t allowed to serve–because women are not traditionally in leadership positions in her community. She went on a publicity campaign to draw attention to this issue and eventually succeeded in getting the constitution changed so it honored the rights of indigenous women to vote and to run for local office.

Eufrosina’s trajectory, like that of the protestors in The Square, is an often confounding and disappointing one. Like The Square, a lot of the action takes place off camera (a problem elegantly solved in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, which shockingly was not nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar), and like political progress in general, Cruz’s path is full of stops and starts and seeming dead ends. Her office is broken into and a business that supported her community organization is robbed as well. We see an interview with an indigenous woman from the same area who questions Cruz’s motives and claims, and we see a poison-pen flyer circulated against her. Corrupt officials promise to build a bridge across a river, but give the municipality a big truck (!) instead.

In spite of her mistrust of state and federal politicians (she tells us that if she were dressed in the traditional shawls and skirts of the women of her hometown, instead of in a business suit, they would never bother speaking to her) she accepts a position with PAN, one of Mexico’s main political parties, a conservative one which opposes abortion rights and same-sex civil unions, in the hope that she can continue to get justice for her community. But she also wonders if she is the token indigenous feminist in the party. At the end she laments that even with all the opposition she faced in the past, she was never scared, “But now I’m scared.”

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfcAGDTXQZQ” autohide=”0″]

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

Diablo Cody’s ‘Paradise’: Manic Pixie and the Napkin of Sin

It probably says something about Diablo Cody’s directorial debut, ‘Paradise,’ that despite its creator’s celebrated career and feminist street-cred, it premiered and disappeared without me hearing a thing about it. And it’s easy to see why: ‘Paradise’ is cloying, tone-deaf and awkward, and such a perfect storm of awful and offensive that I’m kind of obsessed with figuring it out. How did Cody, who has written such memorable female characters fall so far off base with Lamb Mannerheim?

The survivor of a horrific plane crash, Lamb wears compression body stockings over her burns and constantly taking pain pills

It probably says something about Diablo Cody’s directorial debut, Paradise , that despite its creator’s celebrated career and feminist street-cred, it premiered and disappeared without me hearing a thing about it. And it’s easy to see why: Paradise is cloying, tone-deaf and awkward, and such a perfect storm of awful and offensive that I’m kind of obsessed with figuring it out.

How did Cody, who wrote such memorable female characters as quippy Juno McGruff (say what you want about Juno, but the film knew what it was and stuck to it), and antiheroine Mavis Gary in the much adored Young Adult, as well as deconstructing toxic female friendships in Jennifer’s Body, fall so far off base with Lamb Mannerheim?

As sugary sweet as the cotton candy on its title card, Paradise is the story of a young girl (Julianne Hough) raised in extreme Christian church who renounces her faith after she is scarred in a horrific plane crash. After giving a speech to her congregation about her newfound atheism, she uses the money from a massive settlement to jet off to Las Vegas, the fabled den of vice condemned in her pastor’s sermons, to complete a list of sins she believes she’s missed out on.

It’s an interesting enough set-up, fruitful ground for several interesting stories, that could delve easily into topics like survivor’s guilt, sex addiction, pain killer addiction (rumor has it an earlier draft went further down this road), white guilt, or a nuanced examination of modern day extreme christianity. As a young woman who grew up in a religion so extreme that she could only listen to Christian music, and wasn’t allowed to drink, wear pants, cut her hair or associate with Muslims or LGBT individuals, there’s certainly areas to explore in Lamb’s relation to herself as a woman, her opinion of her own vanity and how she feels looking back on how bigoted she used to be. But this is not that movie.
So what went wrong?

Loray gives Lamb a mini-makeover, converting her maxi-skirt to mini

To start with, Paradise never establishes its tone or its stance on religion. Though in some parts, it’s atheistic, attempting to make a point about problems and hypocrisy associated with religious belief in general, in some its taking on Lamb’s extreme christianity specifically, but throughout the film, Lamb is still presented as being better than everyone she encounters because for all her pretense, she maintains her christian values and fear of anything she was taught led to damnation. Lamb is a magical, pure unicorn whose quest to sin never goes very far, but who, just by being herself, fixes the lives of her new friends, womanizer William (Russell Brand) and Black stereotype Loray (Octavia Spencer). Rather than giving depth to her character, Lamb’s religious upbringing is used as a device to explain her social handicap and ignorance of anything in pop culture. She’s written like a time traveller or an escapee from an Amish cult, except every so often she stops to make one of Diablo Cody’s signature referential jokes. As the film ends without Lamb forming any stance on religion, nor deciding to compromise with her parents, the way it is stressed throughout the film makes no sense, for something that ultimately becomes a complete non-issue.

Over the course of the night, Lamb is trying to complete the sins written on this napkin

Even Lamb’s quest to sin is held back from getting to the darker places one would expect. Lamb takes a drink and spits it out, Lamb pees in an alleyway, Lamb bets a couple dollars on a slot machine, Lamb peeks through her finger at a dirty magazine, Lamb buys pot but doesn’t seem to use it, Lamb eats a dessert called a chocolate orgasm, but never has a real one. There are no anticipated scenes of Lamb playing for big money surrounded by a group at a blackjack table or ducking into a strip club. The most adult thing Lamb does is have a long conversation with Amber, a prostitute in a club bathroom, where again her mere presence seems to be enough to ‘save’ someone. There are no real stakes, so it never feels like an actual movie for adults, only the set-up for a sugary sitcom. Her new friends are roped into following Lamb around the city for no other real reason than that they find her innocence exotic, and the only real conflict is when they lose her, only to quickly find her again, having never been in any real danger.

Lamb, as her name implies, is written as an innocent who needs to be cared for, and is constantly infantilized. Her religion and the naiveté caused by it gives the other characters a reason to treat her this way and it’s shocking when midway through Lamb mentions being in college and that the man who died in the plane crash was her fiancé.

The one glimpse we are given of Lamb’s past is a video of her performance at a church talent show

Because viewers never get a solid sense of what Lamb’s life was like when she was faithful and are only given brief glimpses of a video of her singing gospel songs, the reveal that she was courting the boy who died seems unbelievable for the character who has neither before or after suggesting she is mourning a lost love or has ever cared for anyone romantically. Lamb doesn’t seem like a grown woman grappling with a challenge to her faith and the consequent rewriting of her system of values, but a sheltered child who has decided on something (atheism) without thinking about it and refuses to reconsider even though her heart doesn’t really seem to be in it, and the film treats her that way as well.

Paradise seems to adopt the disturbing stance that if Lamb were allowed a real descent into dens of vice, she would lose what supposedly makes her interesting as a character: her purity. She attempts to have sex with William but is rejected out of hand because he doesn’t want to ‘take her innocence’. And that is what this film really is, it gives the character enough autonomy to run around a bit and see things, to meet a prostitute to pay her for a conversation, but never to do anything that might risk her purity or the sugary foundation that is her personality just under the thin veneer of snark and acidity. Lamb is not allowed to grow and experiment and get to know herself on her own terms.

Nick Offerman and Holly Hunter are criminally underused as Lamb’s parents

Even in her own movie, her function is to fix William’s womanizing ways and teach him to “respect” women in only the most patronizing, virtue guarding way and to force Loray into abandoning her cynicism and reconnecting with the family she had said earlier on she felt uncomfortable around. Sassy nightclub singer, Loray also plays into the offensive magical negro trope, something the film acknowledges, attempting (and failing) to make it okay by having the character say she doesn’t like that she is treated as a magical negro and explain what it means.

Lamb is so thinly developed and grounded in reality that her ultimate decision to go home to her parents and make peace with her community cannot be viewed as the victorious end of her internal journey. She doesn’t change or grow as a person, instead her own journey as a character is to cause the journeys of her friends. It’s quite a feat to write a character who is both protagonist and narrator, yet still manages to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl , and especially sad for a film written and directed by a woman.

Paradise is not the journey of a young girl who’s lost her faith as it purports to be because Lamb continues to hold onto vestiges of it and be both constrained and defined by it, always pulling back before committing to sinning. Even her decision to use her settlement money to help Amber, William, and Loray isn’t the about face in character the film wants it to be.

Lamb, with Loray and William, consults her list

This could work if Lamb’s reaction to the plane crash had been to become a self-absorbed person, living only for herself and committed to living in luxury and at the end of film decided to spend her life and money helping others while living an ordinary life, however, even on her night of sinful abandon, Lamb is always sweet, always thinking of others and frankly, not concerned enough about herself and what she wants.

And it’s sad because it could have been an interesting and unique story. I felt Paradise had the potential to be great fun as a TV show and indeed, watching the movie felt like watching a repackaged pilot. On a network, Lamb could be checking off a list of sins while giving away money in her adventures, based in Las Vegas hotel and indulging in Vegas iconography. On cable, the events of Paradise would be only the pilot episode, after which Lamb would go home and function as an outsider/former insider commenting on religious culture and small-town life, while trying to start her own charitable foundation.

Also worthy of discussion is the film’s portrayal of Lamb as a burn victim, which is complicated by cultural beauty expectations. In an interview, Cody said there was a lot of discussion of the extent of Lamb’s burns. She wanted Lamb to have burns on her face, but the studio would not allow the film’s lead to look less then conventionally beautiful. Cody also acknowledges that Lamb’s hair would have burnt off in the crash and could not have grown back to its massive length in the year since, but again, Lamb was not allowed to be bald.

Lamb doesn’t quite enjoy her first sip of alcohol

A young female character grappling with the gulf between her extreme religious background and the forbidden things that interest her as a young modern woman is a narrative we don’t often see, and I wish Diablo Cody had done a better job with it.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

‘Oppressed Majority’ (‘Majorité Opprimée’)

Please take just 11 minutes out of your day to check out Eléonore Pourriat’s powerful short, ‘Oppressed Majority’ (‘Majorité Opprimée’). An inspired gender role reversal tale, it depicts the sexism, abuse and sexual violence women experience on a daily basis.

By Rachael Johnson

Please take just 11 minutes out of your day to check out Eléonore Pourriat’s powerful short, Oppressed Majority (Majorité Opprimée). An inspired gender role reversal tale, it depicts the sexism, abuse and sexual violence women experience on a daily basis. Released in 2010, Oppressed Majority only went global this year. It is destined to become one of the viral hits of 2014. Again, please take a look at this smart, insightful–and disturbing–short film. In French, with subtitles.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UWxlVvT1A”]

Nun Better: ‘Sewing Hope’ and ‘Radical Grace’

Nuns are the BEST. What’s so interesting about them is that they operate simultaneously within and against a hierarchy. Anyone who cares about social justice can relate to the frustrations of trying to change institutions from the inside, often wishing you could opt out, but never being able to. Recently I saw two documentaries about awesome nuns being awesome feminist warriors in very different circumstances.

I’m Episcopalian, which I like to tell people means I get the best parts of Catholicism and Protestantism – though it would probably be just as true to say we get the worst of both worlds. We do technically have nuns, but they don’t seem to be completely awesome the way Catholic nuns are.

Nuns are the BEST. What’s so interesting about them is that they operate simultaneously within and against a hierarchy. Anyone who cares about social justice can relate to the frustrations of trying to change institutions from the inside, often wishing you could opt out, but never being able to. Recently I saw two documentaries about awesome nuns being awesome feminist warriors in very different circumstances: Sewing Hope is about Sister Rosemary’s work to help women and girls in Uganda, while Radical Grace tells the story of three US nuns who fight for social justice.

The West does not have a very good image of Uganda. Hands up if you remember Kony 2012 and the associated controversy, not least of which was the issue of white saviorism. White people sure do love to swoop in and rescue brown people from themselves, completely eliding the history (and present) of western colonialism that is often the root of many of the problems in the Two-Thirds World. The cool thing about Sister Rosemary is that she is not a white savior. She’s a local Ugandan who runs a school for women and girls who were forced to be soldiers in Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. Many of these women were also sex-slaves, and bear the burden of social stigma on top of single parenthood and personal trauma.

Saint Monica’s, the school run by Sister Rosemary, trains the women in tailoring and baking, providing them with skills that are in demand both in the local hospitality industry and for the international sale of goods. The school not only helps them work toward economic independence, but it also provides a holistic, person-centered environment for healing.

What’s really extraordinary about Sister Rosemary’s work is that she’s not just providing skills from a brute economic bottom line – she’s helping trauma survivors recover. Early in the film, Sister Rosemary speaks about the importance of listening, and this is immediately followed by several women telling their own stories of horror and brutality. Sister Rosemary explains that her method is not to welcome girls by saying she knows what they have been through, but to provide a supportive environment. This includes both emotional support and very practical things like childcare.

Sister Rosemary is working within her context and making a difference from the ground up using the resources available to her and to women in her culture. The US context is very different, and so concomitantly are the methods and tactics of Sisters Simone, Jean, and Chris.

I saw a rough cut of Radical Grace at the Athena Film Festival. — I saw a rough cut of *Radical Grace* at the Athena Film Festival.

Being censured by the Vatican for “radical feminism” (no, not that kind of radical feminism) didn’t stop the sisters from fighting the injustices of their own society. As Nuns on the Bus, they traveled around assorted US cities and petitioned a number of politicians, campaigning for healthcare reform and now immigration reform.

The sisters are tackling issues both of wider society (poverty, the prison-industrial complex) and specific to the Catholic Church (women’s ordination). They are undeterred by the backlash they face, which ranges from the disapproval of the Church hierarchy to on-the-ground accusations of being “worse than pedophile priests” (yes, one protestor really says that).

The sisters are grounded in their commitment to the social gospel, which sees Jesus’ message as being primarily one of radical justice for the people on the margins of society. At the same time, the nuns are committed to thoughtful interrogation of their own faith, and to challenging the institution – which, as they say, is “always going to be ten years too late, if not a hundred” when it comes to social issues.

In some ways these nuns are an embarrassment to the hierarchy. They make the institutional Church look like a reactionary dinosaur; and yet it’s clear that they are working from a place of love. The Church is something they want to be better, and they’re taking matters into their own hands.

Vatican-approved picture of nun being badass

The filmmakers want us to see these stories and be moved by them to get involved. Whether it’s donating to Sister Rosemary and her women, or helping to get the final cut of Radical Grace finished so the story can get out there, they are hoping to motivate us to action. As Rebecca Parrish, director of Radical Grace, notes, there is potential for alliance between secular feminism and progressive religious movements, and we must overcome the divisions of ideology if we want to make the world a better place.

You can learn more about Sewing Hope here, or donate to the Radical Grace kickstarter here.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Bourgie White People Problems and Fat Shaming in ‘Enough Said’

To put it bluntly, I hated ‘Enough Said.’ The theme was trite, the characters were insufferable with their selfish pretensions, and there was a whole lot of fat shaming going on. Frankly, I’m surprised that Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been getting such high praise for starring in this turd, and I’m disappointed that I can’t be more supportive of a film written and directed by a woman: Nicole Holofcener.

"Enough Said" Movie Poster — *Enough Said* Movie Poster

Though guest writer Heather Brown wrote a Bitch Flicks review of Enough Said, I felt compelled to weigh in because my opinion of the film was the exact opposite. To put it bluntly, I hated this movie. The theme was trite, the characters were insufferable with their selfish pretensions, and there was a whole lot of fat shaming going on. Frankly, I’m surprised that Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been getting such high praise for starring in this turd, and I’m disappointed that I can’t be more supportive of a film written and directed by a woman: Nicole Holofcener.

Director Nicole Holofcener with stars Julie Louis-Dreyfus & Catherine Keener. — Director Nicole Holofcener with stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Catherine Keener.

Though I’d love to congratulate a female writer and director (especially one who employed kickass actresses like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Catherine Keener, and Toni Collette), the storyline itself fell flat. Enough Said is about a massage therapist who ends up dating a man while giving massages to his ex-wife. Once she learns of the connection, she continues to probe the ex for information about her new beau despite the moral ambiguity of building a false friendship and essentially spying on her new boyfriend. Doesn’t that sound like a snore-fest sitcom episode of misadventure where you know the guilty party will be found out in the end and then realize the error of their ways? Well, that’s pretty much what happens. The themes admirably touch on the desire to make smarter relationship choices, to understand why relationships fail, and to avoid committing to the wrong person. In the end, though, the film claims that relationships, human compatibility, and chemistry are all a mystery…that over-thinking it doesn’t do us any favors. Talk about making a really simple point seem complex enough to warrant an entire movie. It’s also a very privileged upper-crusty perspective. Breaking out of destructive or abusive relationship cycles does require a good deal of introspection, honest analysis of choices, and recognition of personal patterns as well as a willingness and commitment to change. This movie basically pisses on the reality of the lives of people who aren’t wealthy (or at least financially comfortable), straight, white people. It pisses on the people who’ve faced major life struggles, crises, and trauma.

Speaking of which, the cast of characters is astoundingly shallow and self-involved with boring upper class bored-people pseudo-problems. Main character Eva’s best friend, Sarah, obsessively rearranges the furniture in her house and can’t bring herself to fire her (of course) Latin maid. Sarah’s husband, Will, has the least interesting or complicated case of middle child syndrome ever; he is simply obsessed with fairness.

Eva probes Marianne for dirt on her new boyfriend (& Marianne's ex-husband) Albert. — Eva probes Marianne for dirt on her new boyfriend (and Marianne’s ex-husband) Albert.

Eva’s new friend, Marianne, reveals that her marriage failed because she was annoyed by her husband Albert’s (played by James Gandolfini) annoying little habits and his weight.

Is there such a thing as oblivious daughter replacement syndrome? Eva's got it. — Is there such a thing as oblivious daughter replacement syndrome? Eva’s got it.

Eva herself comes off as sweet at first, but we learn she hates most of her massage clients, is selfishly and obliviously trying to replace her daughter, Ellen, who is going off to college with one of Ellen’s friends. Plus, she cultivates a faux-friendship with Marianne just to get dirt on Albert, which she then uses to humiliate him at a dinner party.

Eva gets drunk and humiliates Albert, the only nice person in the film.

Eva’s behavior at that dinner party sealed the deal for me. I wanted her to get everything that was coming to her. I wanted the incredibly sweet, gentle, intelligent Albert to realize he was dating a horrible person and ditch her ass. Eva’s callous treatment of Albert doesn’t end with her general mockery of his inability to whisper or her distaste for the way he eats guacamole. No, she fat shames him in front of her friends. Fat shaming is never okay, but this seems particularly cruel because Albert sheepishly admitted to her beforehand that he has a complicated relationship with his weight and wants to lose some. She picked a very sensitive point of insecurity for Albert and exploited it because she was insecure about their relationship and about how people would think of her for dating a fat person. How is that ever okay or forgivable? If Eva had been a male character and Albert was female, would people be so quick to excuse that fat shaming? I hope not. Not only that, but Eva is ignorant. She is oblivious to the struggles of people who navigate the world with bodies different from her own, bodies of which the world doesn’t approve. How is her fat shaming any better than if she’d mocked Albert had he been a person of color, trans*, or differently abled? It is not different. She is an inexcusable bigot.

Eva is appalled by the way Albert eats popcorn when they go see a movie.

What it boils down to is that the character problems in Enough Said are a function of class. They say more about how much money and comfort these people have than about the state of the human condition. Movies that advocate for hateful bigots like Enough Said‘s fat shamers, even the ones who learn their lesson in the end (can you say Shallow Hal?), appeal to people who have “isms” of their own. Seeing a lead character bully another character due to their marginalized status (whatever it may be) allows the audience to vicariously indulge in that behavior and to vicariously feel solidarity in the character’s eventual contrition. It doesn’t necessarily help the audience inhabit the Othered, marginalized character.

Another important point that I’ve been dying to make for years is: Understated performances from people who’re typically in comedies…does not good acting make. I’m so tired of people “breaking out” of their comedy typecast to reap countless praise for roles that simply didn’t have them laughing or cracking jokes or…emoting. I’m thinking of Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl, almost every Jim Carrey, Bill Murray, or Adam Sandler “serious movie” ever made. Acting like a normal human being isn’t range. Don’t get me wrong, I think Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a stellar actress, but I don’t think bourgie, fat-shaming, linoleum Enough Said showed that.

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Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

A Study of a Singular Woman: A Review of ‘White Material’

‘White Material’ is about Maria Vial, a white Frenchwoman striving, in the face of mounting hostilities, to secure the coffee plantation she manages. French troops are assigned to evacuate their nationals but she refuses to leave the land she considers home. Superbly played by Isabelle Huppert, Maria is a profoundly complex character. Whether hanging on to the back of a bus heaving with humanity, or applying red lipstick as the world around her goes up in flames, her tenacity is shown to be incontestable and remarkable.

White Material, 2009 — *White Material*, 2009

Written by Rachael Johnson

Claire Denis has made remarkable films about both French colonial Africa and the immigrant experience in post-colonial France. In White Material (2009), Denis returns to the continent, to an unnamed, post-colonial, Francophone country in the throes of civil war. Interestingly, the script was co-written with French author Marie NDiaye. Although of different race, background and generation, both the writer and director have a close connection with French-speaking Africa and an intimate understanding of otherness: Parisian-born Denis grew up in colonial Senegal and Cameroon while Franco-Senegalese NDiaye was born and raised in France.

White Material is about Maria Vial, a white Frenchwoman striving, in the face of mounting hostilities, to secure the coffee plantation she manages. French troops are assigned to evacuate their nationals but she refuses to leave the land she considers home. Superbly played by Isabelle Huppert, Maria is a profoundly complex character. Whether hanging on to the back of a bus heaving with humanity, or applying red lipstick as the world around her goes up in flames, her tenacity is shown to be incontestable and remarkable. Maria is, however, a deluded single-minded woman. Her flaws are rooted in both her privileged white European background and singular personality. She may feel an attachment to African soil- indeed, she feels she belongs to the country- but we know that her struggle to save “her” coffee plantation shows supreme self-interest. She shows concern for a worker’s sick child but disregards the fears of those fleeing her plantation. Equally revealing is her willingness to let her employees stay in unpardonable living quarters.

Maria’s dismissal of the concerns of others, particularly those of her ex-husband, André (Christopher Lambert), and refusal to acknowledge the dangers encircling her adolescent son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), may strike the viewer as unrealistic. This capacity for denial is improbable but may also mask a racist assumption: namely, the belief that her white skin will protect her. The viewer is encouraged to read Maria’s commitment as a white fantasy of belonging and possession. This post-colonial white woman may have had a romantic relationship with the local mayor, and may be contemptuous of other whites, but her mindset is considerably colonial. Note that Denis does not judge her central character in an obvious way. Her approach is to observe rather than condemn. It is up to the individual viewer to interpret Maria.

The film is primarily about the position of white people in Africa. The expression “white material” refers both to white people and their possessions. It is wittily employed by the local radio DJ who provides sharp political comment on the conflict: “As for the white material, the party’s over. No more cocktails on shaded verandahs while we sweat water and blood. They’re deserting. They’re right to run scared.” Although Maria’s extraordinary energy and audacity are constantly highlighted, Denis appears to underline that her very presence on African soil is incongruous. This is accentuated by the striking image of her pale-skinned, red-haired character standing, all by herself, on a dirt road in a pale pink dress. Maria is presented as an idiosyncratic anachronism. As it did for the European colonial male in the past, Africa, for Maria, represents opportunity and romantic self-realization. She asks the Boxer, a wounded rebel leader holding up on the land (Isaach de Bankolé), “How could I show courage in France? It would be absurd…I’d slack off, get too comfortable.” Interestingly, it is the Frenchmen of White Material who embody white European decline. Her ex-husband is in debt to the mayor, Cherif, her father-in-law (Michel Subor) aged and ailing, and her son slothful and unstable. Degraded by child soldiers, the latter self-destructs in disturbing ways.

It is to both the child soldiers of the land–“the fearless young rascals”–and Marie that Denis dedicates her film. The former are portrayed as children. We see them play with toys in Maria’s home and we also see their throats slashed by government forces as they bathe and sleep. Although Maria’s commitment to the soil is emphasized, the director’s sympathies rest with the orphaned child soldiers. Their tragic fate is portrayed in an unsettling, heart-breaking manner.

The representation of African political unrest in White Material is troubling, however. The country in question is never named and nor is the viewer given a background to the war. This universalizes the African conflict experience and, unhelpfully, portrays the continent’s wars as incomprehensible, colossal nightmares. The filmmaker’s impressionistic, elliptical approach is problematic too. Africa still needs to be demystified in the Western popular imagination. The continent’s diversity is extraordinary–as the writer and filmmaker undoubtedly know–and, as any thoughtful student of modern African history knows, its wars are invariably politically engineered and highly calculated and organized.

The narrative approach of White Material also serves to generalize the contemporary European expatriate white experience in post-colonial Africa. It may seem obvious but the global audience needs to be reminded that there are many different kinds of expatriates across the continent–of all races and socio-economic backgrounds–as well as white expatriates–and citizens–who are not colonial in their mentality. White Material is specifically about privileged white people who still farm African land in a post-colonial French-speaking country. Further, one may question whether a family so singular can represent the French post-colonial mindset. Manuel’s fate is, to be honest, quite bizarre. The apocalyptic resolution befits a classical tragedy but it is frankly absurd. If it is meant as a searing condemnation of the colonial mentality–and I hope and trust it is- the message is lost in all the strangeness.

Razor-sharp remarks about European exploitation of black Africans ring true in White Material. The DJ mocks those “who rip us off and use our land to grow mediocre coffee that we’d never drink.” However, both the script and story lack clarity. What to make of Cherif’s remarks about Maria’s son, Manuel? He observes: “Extreme blondness brings bad luck. It cries out to be pillaged. Blue eyes are troublesome. This is his country. He was born here. But it doesn’t like him.” The remarks are striking but somewhat cryptic. They have political intent and resonance in the sense that they force Maria to confront her whiteness. She is reminded that her ancestors were not African. These somewhat obscure words also appear to indicate a belief that whiteness is somewhat demonized in the popular black African imagination. This is worrying as they arguably serve to reinforce Western associations of Africa with superstition. The character of the rebel leader, the Boxer, is, equally, opaque. Before finding refuge, The Boxer roams the scarred land on an abandoned horse like a kind of phantom. Suffering a stomach wound, he also appears to symbolize African stoicism. The portrait is, therefore, a somewhat mythic one.

White Material thankfully lacks the exoticism of Hollywood films about Africa. This is unsurprising, of course, considering the filmmaker’s background. Nor does it adopt a didactic approach. Although not without interesting ideas and striking images, it ultimately, though, does not provide great insight into African politics or conflict. Due perhaps to its obliqueness and opaqueness, White Material is neither sufficiently stirring nor powerful. It is an interesting rather than impressive work by the veteran director. What is unusual about White Material, however, is that it has a single-minded, risk-taking, ideologically dubious, deeply flawed complex female character at its center. What’s more, it elicits important discussions about white European femininity and entitlement.