Tag: Leigh Kolb

‘Mad Men’: Gender, Race, and the Death Knell of White Patriarchy

Don is being closed in on this season.


Written by Leigh Kolb

At the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, Sojourner Truth said,

But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.
Over a hundred years later, the men of Mad Men are in a similar spot. It’s 1968, the peak of a decade marked by civil rights struggles. African Americans were fighting for their personal and economic rights after years of slavery followed by segregation and discrimination. Women were fighting for economic and reproductive rights.
The Don Drapers of the world are indeed in a “tight place.”
Season 6, which premiered on April 7, has focused tightly on Don as an anti-hero, if he’s even that. Don was largely a sympathetic protagonist from the beginning of the series, but he’s descending quickly into wholly loathsome territory. His obsession with death is symbolic of the death of a world around him that he’d become accustomed to–women have been quickly climbing up the corporate ladder and we are beginning to see conversations about racial tension in a more critical way.
At the beginning of Season 6, a montage of recent stories played, catching the audience up to speed. The focus was largely on the women in this montage: Joan’s rise to power, Joan’s relationship with her mother, Megan’s relationship with her mother, Megan’s pursuit of an acting career, Sally starting her period, Betty gaining weight and struggling with motherhood, Beth having electroshock therapy and Peggy advancing in her career.
Women’s experiences are not overlooked in Mad Men (although pregnancy is much maligned); of course, the feminism of the series has been pretty clear from the beginning.
As we move through the years with the characters, though, the women–especially in the work force–are beginning to surpass the men. At the ad awards in episode 5, Megan and Peggy were the only ones from SCDP who were up for an award. Both of them had moved on, though–Peggy to a more prestigious position and Megan to an acting career, which is what she desired.
Peggy’s ad was better-received than Don’s. She benefited from his mentorship (as was evident by her using the phrase “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation”), but she’s on her own now, succeeding.
Meanwhile, Don is having what appears to be a midlife crisis (perhaps his whole life is one long midlife crisis). He’s having an affair with Sylvia, who is married to Arnold, a doctor. Frequently, Arnold’s career is juxtaposed with Don’s. Arnold saves lives. Don sells lifestyles. In episode 5, Sylvia and Arnold are heading to Washington DC so Arnold can be a distinguished guest speaker. At the same time, Megan and Don are going to the ad awards ceremony, because Megan (not Don) is up for an award–which she wins. Don Draper’s grandeur seems less grand this season.
Don reading The Inferno. Dante’s journey though hell is not unlike Don’s perception of life this season.
Lane committed suicide. Roger is in therapy; his mother dies, and he seems lost. Don is reading The Inferno and is searching and self-destructing. Pete is kicked out of the house for his infidelity. Abe is supported financially by Peggy. Ginsberg struggles socially on a date that his father set up.
The men of the series are falling.
The fact that Don seems to be falling into an abyss is symbolic of the time in which he lives. Just a few years prior, women were secretaries. Period. He had a wife who stayed home with children. Quickly, his world changed, largely because women fought for that change.
What does his life mean if it’s no longer what he has always known?
The women aren’t “there” yet (nor are we now), as Joan laments to her friend Kate that she’s still treated like a secretary after Kate expresses her jealousy of Joan’s position. (Their hungover, mascara-smudged morning in bed is such an accurate portrayal of female friendship.) Don is jealous of Megan’s on-screen love scene, and shows up to her shoot, not to support her.
There’s resistance, but of course there should be–that’s reality.
Another painful reality in Mad Men is how the show doesn’t tackle race issues head-on. No, the show does not tackle the struggles of African Americans with the same precision and nuance as it does gender issues. There is room for growth, if the subject is dealt with well. However, I can’t help but acknowledge that my discomfort with the main characters’ responses to racism and, most recently, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., is due to the fact that their responses were so realistic. Fear of rioting and violence, the immediate reaction to go on with the advertising awards, awkward responses and half-hugs to their black secretaries, the “wes” and “thems”–of course those scenes made me uncomfortable.
Dawn briefly speaks to her friend about being a black woman in a very white area and industry.
I’m sure I would have been very uncomfortable with how many white people reacted on that day in 1968. But we can’t change history and pretend these characters would have become adept at handling conversations about race overnight (except for Pete, the lone social justice crusader, who was probably just thinking about his own mortality, because he’s Pete, right?).
When Megan and Don return home and watch the news about violence breaking out on television, Megan asks Don if he thinks his secretary is OK (Dawn, a black woman). Don absently responds, “Sylvia and Arnold are in DC.” That’s what he cares about.
If race isn’t ever handled on Mad Men as well as gender has been, it should make us criticize the society of the time–and even today. I was glad to see the main characters react so awkwardly and uncomfortably to King’s death, because it was authentic–authentic to a point that we rarely see in fiction (racial tension is either totally absent or dealt with idealistically). As much as Mad Men is a feminist show, we also know the feminist movement has fairly consistently been labeled–often accurately–as a middle-class white women’s movement.
I hope Mad Men continues evolving into these conversations as Don devolves. Don’s obsession with death this season is symbolic of the death knell of the white patriarchy that was sounding in the 1960s. Dealing with these issues will only make the show richer and more meaningful.
Besides, at this point, I think most of us are pretty eager for Don to be squarely between a hawk and a buzzard.
Something is missing, Don.
———-

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

Empty Wombs and Blank Screens: The Absence of Infertility and Pregnancy Loss in Media

Written by Leigh Kolb for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.



The students in my African American Literature class read Audre Lorde’s “Now That I Am Forever With Child” this week. I pointed out that although none of us had given birth, we could feel and understand the poem, and as a result even understand the experience on a deeper level.
I asked the one young man in the class his reaction to reading a poem about pregnancy and childbirth. He said that when he first read it, it seemed like something very foreign that he couldn’t imagine, but after reading it again and discussing it, “it felt familiar.” Familiar.
I write and talk often about how women’s stories are marginalized if they’re even told at all, and how that continuously degrades our experiences. I kept thinking about the word familiar, and how powerful it is when others’ lives and experiences are familiar to us. The role of media, in large part, is to familiarize us with life. Feature films and television series serve to entertain, but they play a larger role in normalizing and informing audiences of life–confirming our own lives and introducing us to the lives of others, even if those lives are fictional.
Representations of infertility and pregnancy loss in film and on television are greatly lacking. Neither of these life experiences is familiar to us, unless we go through it ourselves.
I try to rationalize why portrayals of infertility and pregnancy loss are so rare. Where is the action, a scriptwriting professor scribbled in my margins when I had too much internal dialogue or a conversation between female friends. There’s not much action in infertility. The struggle is literally and figuratively inside.
But then I realize I’m just making excuses for Hollywood. Infertility and pregnancy loss are rich with story-line possibilities. The very nature of these tragedies is in lock-step with literary conflicts and archetypes. (Wo)man vs. self? Check. (Wo)man vs. nature? Check. Journey/quest? Check. Unhealable wound? Check.
Hollywood has had some success recently with clips portraying the pain of infertility and pregnancy loss (Up and Julie and Julia, most notably). Why can’t an entire film take up the subject? (And by that I mean a film that doesn’t “solve” infertility through highly problematic magic.)
As a feminist, I’m glad that there isn’t an influx of films that focus solely on a woman’s desire to have a baby, reducing her role in life to just centered on motherhood. But as a feminist struggling with infertility and pregnancy loss, I desperately want to see this struggle faithfully mirrored back to me, both for myself and for everyone, so it becomes familiar. 
 
According to the CDC, almost 11 percent of women have impaired fertility, and 6 percent are infertile.  RESOLVE reports that 1 in 8 couples struggles with infertility. The miscarriage rate of known pregnancies is between 15 and 20 percent.
These experiences aren’t rare. So we shouldn’t be made to feel like they are and that we are so alone.
Journalist Mona Eltahawy wrote,

“Women’s stories are too often dismissed. A male editor I once worked with tried to dissuade me from the personal: ‘Who cares about what happened to you?’ The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really mattered.
It does.”

Our lives do matter. Seeing women’s stories reflected faithfully on-screen cannot only serve us emotionally, but it can practically affect men’s and women’s lives by making the lives of over half of our population familiar. The galvanizing effect of this familiarity is more conversation. For infertility and pregnancy loss, the conversation could lead to more medical studies, legislation regarding insurance coverage and defeating so-called “personhood” measures.
Infertility and pregnancy loss are still far too taboo in our culture, and that has very real consequences. Couples are faced with mental health challenges (certainly feeling as if one’s problems aren’t even on the radar of “real” problems due to lack of representation, and conversation affects people emotionally and mentally), and the majority of states’ insurance plans offer no coverage for anything to do with fertility.
It is human nature to look for ourselves and our own stories reflected back to us in media and in others’ stories. In the case of infertility and pregnancy loss, those representations are almost nonexistent. An already lonely struggle is made to feel even more so without those representations.
Women’s lives have drama. They have journeys and conflicts and tragic struggles. Hollywood should take note.
A moving still from Up.



———-
 
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. She wrote “How Not to Be a Dick to Your Infertile Friend” and “It Happened to Me: I Had an Ectopic Pregnancy” at xoJane.

‘Yerma’: The Pain, Heartbreak and Destruction of Infertility and Patriarchy

Movie poster for Yerma

 
Written by Leigh Kolb for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.

My womb is opening / without fear or dread / 
and on white sheets / I sketch my dream.
Let us sing / let us sing / let us sing.
For life is woven in the early morn,
For the silvery moon an infant will bring.

In 1934, Spanish writer Federico García Lorca wrote the play Yerma, and it has been performed regularly since its opening that year. In 1999, a Spanish film was released, directed by Pilar Távora.

Yerma, the title character, has been married to Juan for two years and she has not been able to get pregnant. (Yerma means “barren” in Spanish.)  As the film opens to folk songs with poetic lyrics that weave throughout the entire film, Yerma is taking care of him, trying to get him to drink milk and exercise more. It’s clear his work drives him–he works hard, and is tenacious in his work in the field, but not in love. 
Juan and Yerma appear happy on their wedding night
Yerma seems to just be starting to devolve into an incredibly unhappy mental and emotional place in regard to their inability to conceive. 
Her friend Maria visits, and she’s brought lace, ribbon and fabric. “It’s happened!” she says, and Yerma is excited for Maria’s pregnancy, asking her how she feels, and giving her loving advice. Yerma seems to have a deep understanding of pregnancy and motherhood, and displays wisdom with Maria. 
Maria asks about the fact that Yerma has no children, but assures her that she’s had friends who took longer to conceive. “Two years and 20 days is too long,” asserts Yerma. “It isn’t fair that I’m wasting away here.”
Before she leaves, Maria pulls out her new fabric and lace and asks Yerma to sew little dresses for her, since she “sews so well.” Yerma graciously complies. 
Yerma has tried for years to become pregnant, and her friend announces she’s gotten pregnant after just a few months of marriage.
The first scenes are familiar ones to infertile women–trying to watch after the health of her partner, tension over the desire to conceive, a friend getting pregnant after just a few months and the pain of knowing more about pregnancy than the pregnant friend herself. 
Sorrow wide as a field / a door closed on beauty
I beg the suffering of a child 
But the wind gives me dahlias / from under the sleeping moon
Sorrow wide as a field / I beg the suffering of a child

As time passes, it becomes clearer that Yerma’s marriage is an unhappy one. Her father arranged her marriage to Juan, but her true match seems to be Victor (who Juan runs off after he’s concerned that he and Yerma have been speaking too much). Indeed, Juan doesn’t even like Yerma going outside of the home at all.
Yerma meets an old woman on the path to the field, and she clings to her, begging her to answer questions about her childlessness since she assumes an older woman would have wisdom. Yerma says she’s been thinking about children since the moment she was engaged. “I was just the opposite,” the old woman says. “Maybe you’re thinking too much.”
Yerma says she still remains empty, but she’s “filling up with hate.” 
The old woman alludes to the fact that God has no part in this, and if there was one, there should be a god who “sends lightning bolts to men with spoiled seed.” This is the first real indication that perhaps Juan is the problem (the old woman tells Yerma later that it is Juan, and he’s from a long line of men with the same problem). 
Yerma goes back home and meets other women on the road who are hurrying to take their husbands lunch. One left her baby home alone, and the other talks about adamantly not wanting children and being bitter about spending her whole life cooking and washing–things that she doesn’t want to do. Yerma reacts harshly to the young mother who’s left her child at home, again reinforcing that sadness in infertile women of seeing others take parenting for granted.
Yerma changes after these encounters–Juan’s coldness and lack of desire for her or for children has become clearer to her, and the older woman’s warnings and sharp words start sinking in. When we see her again, she’s rocking back and forth in the dark, while we hear women gossip about her.
It’s a pity of the childless wife / It’s a pity of the woman whose breasts are dry

Time has passed, and a group of women is doing laundry and talking about Yerma. 
“They don’t like to make lace or jam,” one woman says about barren women. “They like walking barefoot on the river.”
“It isn’t her fault she doesn’t have children,” her friend interjects.
“Whoever wants children has them,” another says.
“It’s all his fault.”
“It’s all her fault.”

The women have largely turned against Yerma as she has turned inward and become increasingly full of grief over her desire to and inability to conceive.
She and Juan lash out at one another. He says, “You keep beating your head against a wall. I feel uneasy living with you, anxious. You have to resign yourself.”
She responds, “I want to drink water, and there’s no glade and no water. I want to climb a mountain and I’ve got no feet. I want to trim my petticoats and I can’t find the thread.”
Yerma’s words about the deep, miserable feelings surrounding infertility are poignant and heartbreakingly accurate. While much is going on in this film worth discussing–the patriarchal culture that arranges marriages and ties a woman’s worth solely to her ability to have children, obviously, and the immediate blame of the woman when a couple can’t conceive–Yerma’s struggle with infertility is one of the most accurate portrayals of that grief that I’ve ever seen. 
Yerma slips deeper into an obsessive depression as time goes on.
Yerma sees Maria walking quickly by her house, and asks her to stop. She wonders why she’s rushing by and Maria says, “Because you always cry.” Yerma holds the baby and kisses it.
“Women who’ve had children cannot imagine not having them,” she says. “My longing grows stronger and my hopes are fading.”
Yerma visits a group of older women who chant over her, praying to Sainte Anne, performing a ceremony in the cemetery in the middle of the night. Afterward, the older women gently criticize Yerma for “fretting” too much about not having a child and not taking shelter in her husband’s love. Yerma becomes defiant, and finally exclaims that she doesn’t love him. “But he’s my only hope,” she says. “For my honor and my family. My only hope.”
She seems relieved. “I needed to talk,” she tells the women. The female conversations in the film are both destructive and nourishing, but they are clearly good for Yerma when she is able to be a part of them.
Yerma continues to decline, though. Juan finally confronts her and tells her that he doesn’t like the idea, but he’s willing to take her himself to a pilgrimage where childless women go to be blessed with children. 
At the ceremony, the old woman finds Yerma and tells her she should leave Juan and marry her son, instead, who could give her children. “What about my honor?” Yerma says, and tells her to go away. Yerma’s inability to conceive and her miserable marriage seem to fall squarely on the shoulders of Juan, but she cannot escape due to the strict morality of her culture.
“My pain has gone far beyond my body,” Yerma says. 
The old woman calls her barren and Yerma repeats the word. “Since I’ve been married that word has been going around in my head,” she says, but “this is the first time I’ve said it out loud.”
Yerma runs through the woods and settles at her campsite, where Juan is drinking. She tells him to leave her alone, but he says he wants to speak.
“I won’t put up any longer for continual lament for things that aren’t real,” he says. “For things that haven’t happened, and that we can’t control. For things I don’t care about. I care about what I have in my hands.”
She says that’s what she’s been waiting to hear: that he doesn’t care. 
Yerma speaks of a son, and says, “You never thought of him when you saw me long for him?”
Juan coldly says, “Never.” 
After a few minutes, Juan moves over and tries to seduce Yerma. He’s forceful and rough. She starts to kiss him back, but she’s crying, and she snaps. She strangles him violently and kills him.
“Barren,” she says. “Barren for certain. Barren. And alone. Now I can rest without wakening in fright to see if my blood will tell me of new blood. My body is dry forever.” She begins to repeat, “My son.”
Maria walks up to her in horror, and Yerma keeps repeating that she has killed her son. “I’ve killed my own son. My son… my baby, my baby, my child.” 
The film ends, with the dedication “to my children” as a post script.
Yerma is a beautiful film, and Yerma’s descent into grief-stricken madness is haunting and powerful. We so rarely see female protagonists, and for a female protagonist to have such a visceral struggle with such a common, yet underrepresented, issue as infertility is moving and incredibly important.
Yerma killing Juan at the end of the film is symbolic of her overcoming not only the patriarchal culture that has defined her by her inability to mother, but also her infertility. She doesn’t see killing Juan as a way to marry someone else and try to have children; she sees killing him as freeing herself from the disappointment of not getting pregnant. Extinguishing him extinguishes her hopes. 
Infertility when one desperately wants to conceive is grief, obsession, emptiness and feeling completely powerless. Yerma lives in a time and place where she has nothing else except being a wife and a mother to define her, so the added pressure of being unable to conceive a child drives her to the breaking point. Juan has repeatedly kept Yerma inside of their house and away from the outside world. When he admits he doesn’t care about having a child and then tries to assault her, it’s all too much. She has to end the physical manifestation of her grief and disappointment.
Yerma proves that a film about a woman’s struggles can work, even if those struggles don’t produce the kind of action that Hollywood seems to think it needs. Yerma’s inner turmoil is palpable, and good writing and directing make her story real and compelling. The power of Yerma rests not only in its treatment of infertility, but also its larger commentary on what a culture that stifles women can lead to. Yerma’s infertility is tragic, and so is her world.
Oh woman, how great is your sorrow
A sorrow so piteous 
Your tears are like lemon juice
Sour as your hope and your lips
———-

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

The Power of Portrayal: Infertility, Reproductive Choice and Reproduction in ‘We Want a Child’

Movie poster for We Want a Child



Written by Leigh Kolb for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.

The 1949 Danish film We Want a Child (Vi vil ha’ et barn) deals with abortion, failed adoption, infertility, detailed fertility and prenatal care and childbirth.
Depictions of any of these subjects are few and far between in modern film and television, so the fact that a feature film was made so long ago is remarkable in itself. We Want a Child offers a frank portrayal of the emotions involved in trying to build a family.  
The film opens with Else and Lief’s wedding. The audience is introduced to a happy bride (who is just doing the church wedding–“veil and everything”–because her mother wants her to) and her playful new husband. 
At the celebratory dinner reception, Else’s Uncle Hans toasts the new couple and the unity of the family “up through a new generation.” 
Next the audience sees Uncle Hans–a bit of a buffoon–riding his bike over to Else’s house to check on her. “No news?” he says. “No news,” she says. “I don’t want you asking me each week.”
Clearly, the family is waiting for an announcement of Else and Lief’s pregnancy, and Else is already tiring of the requests.
“Two years have gone by…” is superimposed on the screen, and the uncle walks in again. Else is polishing silver, visibly upset, and Hans notes that it’s their two-year anniversary. A puppy walks into the room, and he’s shocked: “You got a dog?” 
“I know perfectly well you don’t like to discuss it,” he says, “but why don’t you have kids?”
Else says she wants to enjoy their youth, and that they don’t want children right now. She quickly breaks down, though, and says, “I’m beginning to think I can’t have a child.” Uncle Hans, without judgment, encourages her to see a doctor. 
Later Else asks Lief if he wants a baby. “Doesn’t every man?” he says, playfully. She cries and hugs him, saying “What if we can’t have a baby? Maybe I can’t have any.”  
Their relationship is portrayed as equitable and loving; they joke and laugh and seem to be deeply in love. When she expresses her fears, he doesn’t belittle her or act uncomfortable. Since the threat of infertility often wreaks havoc in relationships, the depiction of Lief and Else’s relationship throughout the film is refreshing.
Else does visit the doctor, and tells him she’s afraid she can’t have any babies. He asks about her menstruation and rattles off a list of other health questions. He says, “I suppose we don’t have to consider abortion.” Else answers, “Yes, we have to.”

Else confides in the doctor that she’s had an abortion. He judges, but quickly moves on to helping her.

The doctor takes his glasses off and pauses. She says that it had been an operation a few years ago, and he notes that it was “a criminal abortion.” (Abortion in Denmark was legalized in 1973.)
He stands up, and Else pleads with him, saying she knew it was wrong, but it was during the war and her fiance (now husband) had to go underground. The doctor is judgmental (saying that she “preferred to kill her child” instead of looking for help), but it’s not nearly as damning as one would expect from the time. He goes on to tell her that it might be the reason she hasn’t conceived, and that sometimes abortion causes scar tissue in the fallopian tubes. He tells her they will take x-rays and run some tests.
As Else is leaving the doctor’s office, her friend Jytte is coming in. She’s become pregnant by the married man she’s having an affair with, and he wants nothing to do with her or a baby. Jytte goes in to talk to the doctor, and is clearly upset and unsure of what she wants to do. The doctor urges her to not have an abortion, lest she “deny motherhood” and ruin her chances to have a child in the future after going to a “quack” to have her “body mutilated.” He promises her it’s not as hopeless as she thinks, and she promises to think over it–but not before snapping that a woman should be able to make her own decisions. 
After these scenes, the harsh judgment surrounding abortion–which at the time was a criminal act and wouldn’t have been a safe medical procedure, so conversations about it in a feature film could only go so far–ends.

As Else leaves the doctor’s office, a mother is struggling and Else offers to hold her baby for her. The way she looks at the child is full of love and deep longing.

Jytte decides against having an abortion (even though her lover wants her to).
The doctor shows Else her x-rays–one of her tubes is blocked, but the other side is open. “You have a chance, you can become pregnant,” he says. “You must hope.” He encourages her to tell her husband.
While Else is at the doctor, Lief has befriended a neighbor child, and their interactions are sweet. The bond shows that when a couple wants children but cannot have them, they often still “parent” in other ways, whether it’s a neighbor child, or a dog, or both, in their case.
Else comes home, resolved to tell Lief about her abortion.
“Lief, can you forgive me?” she cries.

He says it’s his fault, but she responds,

“It’s what we wanted, both of us. I should have told you long ago.”

“Don’t worry, darling, we’re together,” he says.

When Lief speaks with Uncle Hans about the fact that “we’ll have to get used to the idea that it’ll be only two” of them, alone, he adds that “the doctor gave her hope, but what else can he say?”
“It’s completely idiotic in a world like ours to want my own children… yet I want them,” Lief says.
Else soothes herself by thinking that they are enjoying their youth. They get a puppy. Lief befriends and mentors the neighbor child. Lief grapples with the fact that it feels selfish to desire biological children, but acknowledges the deep urge. The way the couple deals with and speaks about their infertility is truthful and realistic.
Uncle Hans sees an opportunity, and tells Jytte he knows of a young couple who would like to adopt a baby, and that she can stay with him (since if she becomes visibly pregnant she’ll lose her job and room).
Things seem to be falling in place. The next scene is Lief and the neighbor boy carrying a bassinet upstairs to the nursery. Else’s mother visits, and is rude and dismissive when Lief tells her that Else is visiting their new daughter. “Why on earth are you adopting?” she asks, and he tries to explain that they can’t have one themselves. 
Lief goes to the clinic, flowers in hand, to see Jytte and his new daughter. Else steps out of the room, visibly upset. “She said she couldn’t do it,” she says. “She can’t go through with the adoption.” 
While she’s upset, Else tells him that they shouldn’t be angry. Lief gives the flowers to the nurse to give Jytte. 
At this moment, we see the most tension between Else and Lief. He says he needs to go back to work, and he coldly leaves after saying goodbye. Else is left alone. The scene is harshly realistic.
Back at home, Else’s mother is condemning adoption and Jytte, but Else softly tells her, “You can’t blame her for not wanting to give up her baby.” She quickly runs from the room and gets sick.
Her mother smiles, knowing what the nausea signifies.
Else is excited when she puts the pieces together, but nervous: “I’m more afraid that it isn’t true, or if it is true, it won’t be a healthy child.” Her mother assures her that worrying is part of being a mother. The fear involved with becoming pregnant after infertility is palpable. 
Else goes back to the doctor, and he confirms her pregnancy. He asks her about rickets, scarlet fever, hereditary diseases, venereal diseases and he listens to her heart and checks her back.

Else weeps with joy when the doctor confirms her pregnancy.

“We have to be careful now that we have a responsibility for a new little citizen,” he says. When she asks if he thinks it’s a girl, he says, “Male? Female? It’s a human.”
This segment of the film feels a bit like an educational video for prenatal care–he explains all of the blood tests he’s taking (including testing her rhesus type so they can take care of her properly if it’s negative). Her scenes with the doctor are clearly meant to be instructional to viewers.
Else goes home, and coyly tells Lief that she is “expecting something.” They are both elated.

Else and Lief celebrate the news.

Her pregnancy progresses normally, and Else wakes up in the middle of the night feeling pain. (The dog, not forgotten, is fully grown in a bed by Else and Lief’s bed.) She and Lief rush to the clinic, and the midwife tells Lief, “Kiss your wife goodbye, we’ll call you when it’s over.” He begs to stay, but the midwife assures him that they’ve “no need” for him. They walk away, and Lief stands alone, staring. He walks home (where he continues to pace and call the clinic for updates). 
Else is given anesthesia via inhalation, and the doctor tells her that she’ll “go to sleep, wake up and it will be over and done with.” This is most likely ether, as the drugs that induced Twilight Sleep were intravenous. 
She wakes up, and a nurse hands her a beautiful girl, while Lief stands beside her. “Well, we made it,” he says. They are both beaming. 
The baby sneezes (baby human and baby animal sneezes are certainly evolution’s way of causing women to spontaneously ovulate), and the film is over.
While there are a couple of moments in the film that will undoubtedly make a pro-choice feminist cringe, the fact that Else is still fertile even though she had an abortion is what’s important. If the film had truly been wholly anti-abortion, she would not have been able to go on and conceive and have a happy ending. Aside from the doctor’s comments (and of course he was acting as a medical and moral authority of the time), Else and Lief are united–and both recognize that an abortion is what they both wanted at the time–and she is not punished. At the time the film was celebrated in some circles for its clear anti-abortion message, but the fact remains that Else is not infertile. Her husband isn’t angry that she had an abortion. Everything turns out just fine.
Jytte isn’t punished for her decisions, either. She seems to have a mutually beneficial life at Uncle Hans’s house. Else’s forgiving response to the adoption falling through assures the audience that we are not to be angry with Jytte, either.

Lief visits Else and their new daughter at the clinic.

The frank discussion about infertility, abortion, prenatal care and adoption make this film noteworthy. It feels quite remarkable to watch characters discuss the range of emotions surrounding these subjects. The film isn’t a masterpiece, and it moves quickly and relies on some common tropes surrounding the topic of infertility and adoption, but some of the dialogue is striking in its honesty and timelessness. 
The struggles that infertile couples face in 2013–the fear and guilt that you’ve done something wrong, the desire to have a biological child, the risk of adoption falling through, facing a marriage without children–are no different than they were almost 75 years ago. These struggles, however, are rarely represented on screen. The experience of viewing characters who deal with these life events feels meaningful and important. We shouldn’t have to dig so far and so hard to find them.
* * *
One of the reasons this film dealt so well with these subjects was no doubt its director, Alice O’Fredericks (she directed it with Lau Lauritzen). O’Fredericks was a prolific writer and producer–she wrote 38 screenplays and directed 72 films. Many of her films focused on women’s stories and women’s rights. The Copenhagen International Film Festival annually awards a female director with the Alice Award, named after O’Fredericks. 
Alice O’Fredericks, Danish writer, director and actor

———-

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

‘Alias Ruby Blade’: A Story of Love and Revolution, With Not Quite Enough Ruby Blade

Alias Ruby Blade poster


Written by Leigh Kolb

Alias Ruby Blade, which makes its North American debut this week at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, is a documentary about “love and revolution.”
The subject of the film, Kirsty Sword Gusmão, grew up in Australia. She had an “ordinary childhood,” but she says her “parents were very special in that they had their eyes open to the world.” 
When she was 4, her father studied Indonesian, and she would study the language with him. She studied Indonesian and began reading Inside Indonesia, which inspired her to get involved in political activism, especially in regard to East Timor.

Sword Gusmão’s story is remarkable, and her life’s work has been driven by her passion for human rights. When she started reading Inside Indonesia, she says “I tried to find out where it was published–how I could get involved.” So she did. She wrote and edited for the publication and met political leaders.
Sword Gusmão, alias Ruby Blade, looks out over East Timor.
She traveled to East Timor, posing as a tourist, and she worked to get messages sent abroad, translating texts into English, taking documentary footage and collecting photographs from the Timorese people. It was then that she was first given photographs of Kay Rala “Xanana” Gusmão, a rebel leader in East Timor who had a jungle hideout and who was “worshipped” by many Timorese people, including her friends. Sword Gusmão next traveled to East Timor as part of a documentary filmmaking team. The team’s footage was the first time worldwide media broadcasted the violence and human rights abuses in East Timor at the hands of their Indonesian occupiers. 
Sword Gusmão eventually became a spy and courier in Indonesia between freedom fighters and Timorese political prisoners. 
Xanana Gusmão was captured and sentenced to life in prison. “All of a sudden the leader was in the hands of the enemies,” Sword Gusmão remembers. Her alias through all of her covert work? Ruby Blade.
She began playing an active role in taking documents and interviews in and out of the prison. Xanana was still directing the resistance from prison. Sword Gusmão was a “critical link” during this time.
Eventually a relationship between the two grew. She says there was “a sense of shared life together,” although they were clearly in “unorthodox circumstances.” When they finally met face-to-face, she recalls a strong bond.
Through all of this, Sword Gusmão was risking her life for the sake of revolution and, eventually, love. 
The film captures these early days of resistance in East Timor and the relationship between Xanana and Sword Gusmão while he was in prison. Sword Gusmão herself had taken a great deal of documentary footage during her work, which provided a backdrop for the chronology of her story. 
Sword Gusmão received bonsai trees and tropical fish from Gusmão when he was a prisoner.
The film does an incredible job at documenting the East Timor’s fight for independence from Indonesia. The human rights abuses (almost 200,000 Timorese people died of famine or murder during Indonesia’s rule from 1975 – 1999) and struggle for independence happened just in the last few decades, yet this isn’t a story that is as well-known as it should be.
But Kirsty Sword Gusmão doesn’t seem to be the protagonist in the film, even though her alias is the title, and her photo is on the poster. Of course, director Alex Meillier acknowledged this: “We’re playing with genres in the film, spy story, love story, three-act structure. This isn’t about one hero coming to save the day, but people coming together and throwing their lot in together. There’s a lot to celebrate.” 
This is true–there is a lot to celebrate in this story. East Timor votes for independence. The UN helps them transition to be an independent state. Xanana Gusmão is elected president. He and Kirsty Sword get married and have three sons.
There is a happy ending, and the audience sees it all through collected and pieced-together footage.
However, it feels as if there is more to Sword Gusmão’s story. While much of the footage is hers, it makes sense that she reads letters aloud that she received from Xanana, and that she has pictures of herself over the years. Too often, it seems as if her beauty is the subject of her story. Male activists and leaders note how they “used” her for covert operations (they say she was “pretty” and “proper in her manners”; she was “very refined, elegant–who would think she can be mischievous?”). Film footage of her swimming doesn’t seem to fit, except in concert with commentary on her beauty. 
Her beauty and femininity likely were key in allowing her access to some of the situations she was able to navigate. True.
But she got there herself. Sword Gusmão begins the documentary speaking about how she’s taken opportunities in her life that have been risky, and how she wants to act with her conscience and truth–she enjoys the risks. This Kirsty seems to be swept away, though, by the revolution and Xanana, so that she’s absorbed by something much larger, and her agency and power in the story fades. The risk that drives her is muted.

Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to celebrate too much and lost some of Ruby Blade in the process.

Sword Gusmão’s activism didn’t end when she became the first lady. She started and runs Alola, a foundation to help women and children in the country, and is active in the educational system. The risks on her and her family’s lives have not ended. Her struggles and her triumphs were not as highlighted as they could have been.

Alias Ruby Blade is a stunning documentary that will do great work in educating people about not only the revolution in East Timor but also the powerful effect that individuals can have when they work toward justice–this, it seems, is definitely the filmmakers’ goal (husband and wife team Alex Meillier and Tanya Ager Meillier say, “… we are even more interested in the power of ordinary people to change the course of history. That’s what this film is really about”).

The film was featured in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in March and the IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam). Tribeca granted it the 2012 Spotlighting Women Documentary Award.

As a feminist film viewer, I would have loved to see “Ruby Blade” herself more–and perhaps this story has the potential to inspire a Hollywood blockbuster with a powerful female protagonist. Let’s hope, at least. It could be Eat, Pray, Love: Bitches Get Shit Done Edition. We need to see what we’re capable of, and Kirsty Sword Gusmão is one strong example. 

———-

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

‘The Yellow Room’ and the Timeless Locking Up of Women’s Experiences


Written by Leigh Kolb
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” on its surface, is about a woman in the late 1800s suffering from what we now understand is postpartum depression. Her physician husband locks her away in a room–employing the popular “rest cure” of the time (which Gilman had been forced to endure)–and she slips deeper into depression and eventual madness because of the isolation.
The story is also about the solitary nature of women’s experiences, and how so frequently how women are “dealt” with in society–the treatment–is much more harmful and devastating than the problem itself.
These themes propel Assal Ghawami’s short film,  The Yellow Room, which was inspired by Gilman’s story.
The Yellow Room takes place in a tenement house in an American city. Sanaz, the protagonist, is a young Pakistani immigrant who is seeking an illegal abortion from a Latina “medicine woman.” The woman gives her a baggie of four pills and instructs Sanaz to “take two the first hour. When it starts, you put the rest under your tongue.”
She shows her to her room, which is painted a muted shade of yellow. The young woman who appears to be staying in the room also is a foil to Sanaz–angry, loud and threatening. When she finally storms off, Sanaz is left alone, avoiding calls from her boyfriend (and pushing him away when he calls, hanging up when he promises to “help [her] with the baby”).
Teresa shows Sanaz to her room.
Much like the protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Sanaz is left alone. Her boyfriend doesn’t seem to understand the severity of the situation, or be concerned with what Sanaz wants and needs (just like the husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper”).
Ghawami’s film is beautiful, and I found myself aching for more than 10 minutes. In an interview with RH Reality Check, Ghawami goes in depth in discussing both the technical aspects of the film–it was shot with one lens, and the (perfect) music was composed by a female friend from film school–and the social aspects of it.
Sanaz must deal with the consequences alone.
Ghawami–who was born in Iran and grew up in Germany–was inspired to write the film after hearing a story of a woman who had ended her pregnancy with a medicinal herb and thrown the fetus away in the garbage. Instead of judging the woman, Ghawami condemns the society that forces women to choose these routes. She says,
“The Yellow Room, similar to ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ is an exploration of an old conundrum. Ultimately it’s the women who deal with the consequences, no matter if you are pro-choice or anti-choice. I just want people to look at the debate from a new angle—from the eyes of the woman who goes through with the experience itself.”
Because film so rarely explores women’s stories (especially about abortion) it’s difficult to find a chance to look through the “eyes of a woman,” tragically. If we had more exposure to those stories, certainly the dialogue surrounding these issues, and even legislation, would be affected.
In Gilman’s “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,'” she explains that the “best result” she had from writing the story is that the specialist who prescribed the harsh rest cure had changed his treatment practices since reading the story. Gilman’s story is fiction, although derived from her experiences, but it’s fiction with a social impact. Clearly, women weren’t allowed to tell their stories of isolation and further mental illness in the confines of the rest cure, because not writing or being mentally stimulated was a key part of the “cure.” Women’s stories, of course, are marginalized and often ignored.
In 2013, over a hundred years later, women’s stories about reproductive choice are typically excluded from the national dialogue. Sure, a record number of laws threatening women’s rights to abortion have been proposed and passed in the last few years, but women’s stories are largely absent.
And while we need those stories, we also need art to convey those stories.
Ghawami says:
“I don’t think art needs a cause, but every social cause, hell yeah, needs art! … Films can be a canvas in which we can find our own truth. Art encourages free thinking.”
What the antagonists in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The Yellow Room (the protagonists’ families, partners and societies) want is control over the women in the story. To shut a woman into a space, to back her into a corner so her choices are solitary and dangerous, is to, ultimately, control her.
There is hope and freedom at the end of The Yellow Room that we don’t see in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Ghawami doesn’t make Sanaz a tragic character; she makes her world tragic.
The aesthetics of The Yellow Room are haunting yet beautiful, and the lush strings that accompany Sanaz’s story are jarring yet gorgeous.
The Yellow Room will be screening at colleges and film festivals in the coming months, and at public venues in the New York/New Jersey area. The film’s Facebook page has updates.
Ghawami’s commentary on not only the power of film, but also how the historic literature of women’s struggles connects to the current crisis in women’s rights, gives me great hope that we will see more from her in the future.
The “social cause” of reproductive rights needs art–not just editorials or heavy handed propaganda, but stories. The Yellow Room is a lovely example of how to do the subject justice.
—–

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

It’s Our 5-Year Blogiversary!

BF co-founders Steph and Amber at the 2010 Athena Film Festival

We can’t believe it, but today marks five years since we started Bitch Flicks.
In March 2008, we started a blog with the wink-and-a-nudge name, Bitch Flicks. In that first year, we wrote a whopping seventeen posts, eight of which were actual film reviews.
In 2012 we published 557 posts–and “we” consisted of a dozen people, not to mention numerous guest writers.
We want to thank our Editor and Staff Writer Megan Kearns.
We want to thank our staff writers: Erin Fenner, Robin Hitchcock, Leigh Kolb, Carrie Nelson, Rachel Redfern, Amanda Rodriguez, Lady T, Max Thornton, and Myrna Waldron.
We want to thank everyone who has ever contributed to Bitch Flicks, whether by writing a post, designing a logo, donating, commenting, or sharing a piece you read with someone else.
Everyone mentioned here has been a part of what has made this project continue. 
Finally, we want to thank every one of you reading this–and we hope you’ll stay with us in years to come. 
–Steph and Amber

Foreign Film Week: The Disturbing, Terrorizing Feminism of Dušan Makavejev’s ‘WR: Mysteries of the Organism’ and ‘Sweet Movie’



Written by Leigh Kolb

[Trigger warning: references to graphic content.]


Sometimes feminist films succeed by showing just how awful a world without feminism is. Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974) provide that kind of jarring commentary. 
Both of these films critique fascism, communism, capitalism and sexual repression. His films are part of the Yugoslav Black Wave film era, which featured films that employed “antitraditional form, polemical approaches, socio-critical concerns, oppositional ideology and, a fatalistic conclusion.”
WR and Sweet Movie are difficult for audiences to handle due to some graphic scenes and political commentaries. However, the fatalism of the films–the disturbing, unpleasant endings with an overall bleak outlook on modern society–is perhaps the most unsettling, and the most important aspect of the films. While we could talk at length about the politics of the films (indeed many have, better than I could), looking at the films through a feminist lens provides a deeper understanding of Makavejev’s messages about the tragedy of sexual repression (especially for women). 
The Criterion Current‘s essay on Sweet Movie provides a backdrop for both films:

“Makavejev began his career by earning a psychology degree at a leading Serbian university, studying at Yugoslavia’s national film school, and making numerous shorts and documentaries… he set to work on the 1971 genre bender WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which anticipated Sweet Movie with its collagelike meditation on maverick psychologist Wilhelm Reich and his theories of sexual liberation.
“By this time, Makavejev was a leader of the so-called Black Cinema film­makers, as they were dubbed by Yugoslav officials who didn’t like their negative view of official ideologies. The sexual politics of WR was more than those officials could take: the film was banned, and Makavejev fled the country, not working there again until 1988. He made Sweet Movie in Canada, the Netherlands, and France, with additional Swedish and West German funding. It is banned in various countries to this day.”

WR: Mysteries of the Organism is somewhat a documentary, somewhat a work of fiction. The documentary footage that provides the context for the film examines Wilhelm Reich, an anti-fascist  Freud-trained psychoanalyst whose work–which focused on anti-fascism, sexual liberation and orgasmic energy–was censored and burned by the US government and he was imprisoned. Other documentary segments include interviews with sex-positive feminist Betty Dodson, a look into Screw magazine and how dildos are created and ideas of femininity and masculinity from the perspective of Jackie Curtis, who cross-dresses and challenges ideas of gender.
The fictional story cut into this documentary footage focuses on Milena, a young Yugoslav woman who is a radical feminist and revolutionary, focusing mainly on the importance of sexual liberation (and the fact that communism would fail because free love was repressed). She lectures the crowd of frustrated workers below her apartment balcony:

Milena lectures workers about the failure of communism.
“… Our road to the future must be life-positive. Comrades! Between socialism and physical love there can be no conflict. Socialism must not exclude human pleasure from its program. The October Revolution was ruined when it rejected free love. Frustrate the young sexually and they’ll recklessly take to other illicit thrills: Pilfering, burglary and assorted crimes, knifings, alcoholism, political riots with flags flying, battling the police like prewar communists! What we need is free youth in a crime-free world! If we are to achieve this, we must allow free love!…
“No excitement can ever equal the elemental force of the orgasm… Sweet oblivion is the masses’ demand! Deprive them of free love, and they’ll seize everything else! That led to revolution. It led to fascism and doomsday. How Man Became a Giant. Deutschland uber alles!… Deprive youth of their right to the sweet electricity of sex and you rob them of their mental health!… Restore to every individual the right to love!”


Milena’s fight for free love and the perfect orgasm leads her to a Soviet ice skater, Vladimir. He represents complete allegiance to Soviet rule and Stalin-esque communism. He speaks highly of his travels to the West, highlighting to the audience America’s class divide and sexual repression. Milena seduces him, encouraging him to accept his own freedom and sexuality. He succumbs, but his repressed lust and orgasm prove so overwhelming for him that he murders her (beheading her with his ice skate). Her decapitated head narrates the rest of the story as coroners discuss the huge amount of semen that was in her vagina.

Milena sees fascism as a masculine force that represses freedom and sexuality.
Milena’s fate exemplifies the passionate pro-love speech she gave to the workers. Sexual repression leads to violence. To further prove this point, Makavejev shows a man (performer Tuli Kupferberg, member of The Fugs) dressed in military regalia walking around Manhattan with a toy M-16 gun, stroking it as if masturbating, to The Fugs’ “Kill for Peace.” This idea that violence and sexual repression are connected leads to men glorifying guns and killing, and women being punished.

“Kill for Peace” excerpt from WR: Mysteries of the Organism. 
Milena is not punished for her own sexuality, she’s punished because of the sexually repressive world she lives in. She would argue that the men suffer from this repression, clearly, and turn to violence when they don’t know what to do with the frustration.

In Sweet Movie, two women’s stories are featured. The only documentary footage Makavejev uses in this feature film are some shots of mass graves in the Katyn Forest massacre (where Stalin had authorized the killing of 4,000 Polish prisoners). For the censorship authorities in many countries, however, that’s not what made the film ban-worthy (the official “rejection” status explanation from the British Board of Film Classification doesn’t even mention it). Instead, the scenes at a commune that feature all manners of human excretory byproducts and one scene where Anna Planeta seduces young boys made the film censored and banned in many countries. The film was almost impossible to find until Criterion released the DVD in 2007. 
In an excellent excerpt from the book Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev, Lorraine Mortimer analyzes Sweet Movie in depth and makes some of those most uncomfortable scenes much more understandable and meaningful. The vulgarity of the commune scenes remind us of how terrorized and sickened we are by bodily functions (and they are politically subversive, in that the people are not doing what they are supposed to), and the seduction scene reminds us–or should–how much “seduction” young people, especially boys, are subject to every day. This scene is also reminiscent of Reich’s ideas about sexual expression, even in youth. Anna Planeta’s scenes are important in their deadly intersections of politics, supposed sweetness and death after love. The giant Karl Marx head on her boat, and her lover (from a failed revolution) are symbolic of Makavejev’s recurrent themes of the tragic failing of Soviet communism and the anti-human, fascist results of such authoritarian systems. 
In Roger Ebert’s 1975 review, he asserts: 
“Makavejev doesn’t exploit this material — Sweet Movie is anything but a sex film — but uses it to confront us in a very unsettling way. The unasked questions behind his film seem to be: Well, we’re all human, aren’t we? This is what we are and what we do. What do you think of these people? You go to the movies to be entertained by scenes of people killing each other, you watch wars on TV — do the basic bodily processes of these people offend you?”

Most obvious–and still timely–to Western audiences, capitalism, commercialization and sexual repression are criticized in this film, especially through the story of Miss World 1984 (Miss Canada).
The film opens with a bright and cheery game show, and Martha, an older woman (the chairman of the Chastity Belt Foundation), accompanied by men dressed as priests, is standing by and helping judge while a gynecologist checks the virginity of various contenders for the grand prize–marrying her son, milk tycoon Mr. Kapital (a.k.a. Mr. Dollars), who is a wealthy bachelor.

The gynecologist examines the female contestants’ virginity.

Martha explains that at the Chastity Belt Foundation:
“Through the guidance of our sensational method, your own body kills the animal. We advocate simple triumph of the will. It is painless and ever so rewarding. No wild dreams. No – no peculiar behavior. Solid health and purposeful direction! … If not controlled and kept at bay, wild impulses will turn everyone into beastly animals, chaotic natural beings.”

We know from WR that this is the opposite of what Reich believed and what Makavejev reveals in his films.
The scene is wildly sexist, but clearly satirizes the value that society places on female virginity. When Miss Canada crawls into the examination chair and parts her legs, a light shines from her vagina, and she is declared the most virgin, the winner. And thus she is sold to the highest bidder.
She is an object, not a subject, and what she can offer to a man as a “prize” has nothing to do with her own sexuality. As they travel to their honeymoon location and fly over Niagara Falls, Mr. Kapital talks about how he is going to buy up Niagara Falls:
“I’m gonna buy it from the Canadian Government. I will renovate it, redecorate it. Get rid of the water, turn off the falls. … I’m gonna install an electric, synthetic, laser moving image in livin’ color. In livin’ color, honey! Yeah. And we’re gonna have a huge quadraphonic sound system. Yeah!”

(Mortimer notes that “…years later, it would be comforting if this wild caricature of acquisition and ignorance were further from our own reality.”)

Miss World and Mr. Kapital.

Miss World is an acquisition to Mr. Kapital, nothing more. He preaches on purity, money, sex and waste (marriage and business seem interchangeable, all driven by deeply capitalistic and puritanical ideologies). Martha and her brigade of priests stand outside a glass plate window as the marriage is about to be consummated. Mr. Kapital disinfects himself, and rubs Miss World down with alcohol–there is nothing sexual or sensual about the scene; it’s sterile and lifeless. When he takes out his penis, it’s covered in gold, and he procedes to urinate on Miss World as she screams.

When Miss World attempts to get out of the marriage, her mother-in-law attempts to drown her and they send her away.  She speaks out and tries to have some independence, only to be punished harshly. She represents this world where girls are prized for their virginity and derided for the outcomes of this anti-woman socialization. (“This is my only property, it’s my diamond!” she exclaims of her virginity when the tycoon’s bodyguard attempts to sexually assault her.)

She is now shipped off, just one of Mr. Kapital’s failed business ventures.

She’s damaged and broken–she attempts sex with a Latin pop star only to be confronted by nuns and stuck in “penis captivus.” She’s sent to the aforementioned Otto Muehl commune to “heal.”

Religious imagery surrounds Miss World when she attempts to have sex–another symbol of sexual oppression.

By the end of the film, she’s shown writhing around in a pool full of melted chocolate for a commercial.

The camera man directs her:

“Darling, this is going to be the highlight of your career. From now on, when people eat chocolate – I mean, the brand we advertise – they will not feel the same. I want them to feel as if they’re eating you!” 

Miss World, now just using her body to sell chocolate.

And here we are: the ultimate sexual objectification (she is naked, and attempting to seduce the camera) combined with commercialism–the indulgence of sweet chocolate (reminiscent of the toxic sugar on Anna Planeta’s boat) is confused with a kind of female sexuality that is supposed to be passive and proactive all at once, but certainly not for her. It’s supposed to be for the gold-encrusted penises, or the viewers, the consumers.

Miss World looks dead behind the eyes in this final scene. Her life was decided for her in a culture that prized her virginity and beauty above all else, and she couldn’t function when she attempts to be in another world.

She is punished, much like Milena is. However, Makavejev does not want us to think that they are at fault; instead, a society that represses and commodifies sexuality is the perpetrator of violence, masculine force and female suffering.

Makavejev’s films are representative of Black Wave sensibilities, especially in the critique of current society and the nihilism of the films’ endings. There are no clear answers here, just the reassertion that oppressive societies hurt everyone. In WR and Sweet Movie both, however, women are shown to suffer greatly at the hands of authoritarian, sexually repressive societies. 

At the end of WR and Sweet Movie, all of our main characters suffer. Milena dies; her killer is still repressed, and now a murderer; Reich dies in prison; Planeta is arrested, her victims lined up by the river; Miss World is broken and no longer has her “diamond,” so she has no self-worth. The characters have been created and persecuted by their societies. And we still haven’t seemed to move past the cult of masculinity and gun violence or puritanical views about sexuality.

However, if we are to find any bleak hope here, it’s this: at the end of WR, Milena’s head is speaking to the audience, as if her life isn’t really over. At the end of Sweet Movie, Planeta’s victims are resurrected and brought back to life. Maybe–just maybe–Makavejev is showing that it’s not too late to find life in repressive societies and giving us the answer to Sweet Movie‘s lyrical refrain, “Is there life on the earth?

Is there life after birth?” Makavejev would say yes, but only if we can break free from authoritarian  and repressive social ideals that have led to a cycle of repression, seduction and destruction.

—–

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

Foreign Film Week: Remembering, Forgetting and Breaking Through in the Female Narrative of ‘Hiroshima mon amour’



Written by Leigh Kolb


Hiroshima mon amour debuted in 1959, 14 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Alain Resnais’ first feature film explores memory, forgetting and tragedy on an individual and worldwide scale, largely through the lens of Elle (“Her”), played by Emmanuelle Riva.

While Resnais had signed on to do a documentary about the atomic bomb, he concluded that it should be fictional and “that the impact of Hiroshima would be refracted through the viewpoint of a foreign woman,” according to critic Kent Jones. Resnais wanted Marguerite Duras, a French writer and later film director, to write the screenplay. 
Duras’ command of literature, dialogue and feminist sensibilities resonate in the film (Duras was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay). Hiroshima mon amour, which grounds itself in the brief affair of a French woman and a Japanese man (Lui, “Him,” played by Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima, is as much about the growth and healing of an individual in a partnership as it is about nations healing after the second World War. 
Marguerite Duras wrote the screenplay, a stream-of-consciousness conversation with a focus on the feminine.

This juxtaposition of the feminine (love, emotion, peace) and the masculine (war, possession, destruction) shows that neither exists in a vacuum. 

The first section of the film shows Elle and Lui’s naked bodies intertwined, and their dialogue–dominated by her thoughts–is accompanied by increasingly awful footage of the aftermath of the bomb. She talks about how she visited the museum in Hiroshima: “… the reconstructions, for lack of anything else… the explanations, for lack of anything else.” She looked at the photographs and the scorched metal. She says, “What else can a tourist do but weep? I’ve always wept over Hiroshima’s fate.” As she “remembers,” Lui interjects that she remembers nothing, that she knows nothing and that there was nothing for her to weep over.

Elle was a young woman in occupied France (Nevers) when she learned the bomb dropped. Lui was fighting in the war, and his family was in Hiroshima. As the narrative unfolds and Elle comes to terms with her past, her youth and madness that she had in Nevers was due to her intense love with a German soldier–the enemy–who was killed right before they were set to leave together.

Lui’s story doesn’t seem as important as hers. We know he’s married (they both are), and that he’s a successful architect and involved in politics. His role in the film is that of a lover, of course, a pursuer and a listener. 

Elle, fighting Lui’s claims that she doesn’t know anything about Hiroshima, stresses that she does know. She says she knew that women risked giving birth to “monsters,” men risked becoming sterile, huge amounts of food had to be thrown away and that the “principle of inequality” kept advancing–between races and classes. He tells her she knows nothing, but we hear her concern with the traditionally feminine, even feminist, cultural and human ramifications of this new warfare. 

Her memory and knowledge, from a French perspective, also symbolizes the difficulties that others have in attempting to remember and to understand tragedies on foreign soil. 

When this introductory collage of words and images ends, the couple’s faces are shown, laughing in bed. They are individuals now, not just ideas. 

He asks, “What did Hiroshima mean to you in France?” 

She answers, “The end of war. I mean, completely.” She couldn’t believe they did it and that they succeeded. 

“The whole world rejoiced, and you rejoiced with it,” he says. 

Elle and Lui share passion and memory.

Their conversations, although heavy, are rooted in a desire and growing love for one another. The beginning conversation sounds uncomfortable since Lui is denying Elle’s memory and understanding, but they weave themselves together and her memories become lucid as the story unfolds. And Lui listens and falls deeper in love with her.

This prevailing theme of memory and understanding, and the limitations of both, are a product of a unique film production–Japanese and French companies and crews produced it, and the producers demanded that one star be French and the other Japanese. Even the production of the film highlights this partnership and what can be possible when cultures partner. Resnais and Duras, the creative team, show the great power of giving creative license to both the masculine and feminine.  
Elle is in Hiroshima acting in a film about “peace,” and when Lui finds her on set, they are filming actors protesting with signs about nuclear testing and photos from after Hiroshima. Much like the setting of Hiroshima itself, these scenes provide a backdrop to the individual love affair of a couple while reminding the audience of worldwide pain and tragedy.
Elle describes her memory of her past in Nevers (after Lui asks her about it). When she first asks why he asked about Nevers, Lui says he understands that she “was young, and didn’t belong to anyone in particular. I somehow understand that you began to be who you are today.”

She fell in love with a German soldier, and he was killed. She stayed by his cold body while the cathedral bells celebrated the liberation of Nevers (again, showing the complex perspectives of victory for some and tragedy for others). Her family is shunned since she was a “disgrace,” and her head is shaved. When she screams, she’s locked in the cellar until she becomes “reasonable,” and her mother sends her to Paris.

When she arrives in Paris, Hiroshima is “in all the papers.” She says, “Fourteen years have passed–I still remember the pain a little bit, but one day  I will no longer remember it. At all. Nothing.”

Lui asks if her husband knows this story, and she says no. “So I’m the only one?” he asks, and she replied that he is. He is elated, and embraces her. His possession of her memories signifies a deepening of their relationship and a new found trust. That, or he’s simply happy to have something of hers that only he possesses.
In an internal dialogue after leaving Lui (who begs her to stay), Elle speaks to her German lover, and says that she’s found another impossible love, and that she’s told her story. She is terrified of forgetting him.
Elle splashes water on her face and she is reborn after telling the story of her “youth” and “madness” in love.
When she and Lui walk the streets together and her thoughts dominate the narrative, scenery from France and Japan flash back and forth, confusing time and place. Elle says, “I meet you. I remember you. This city was tailor-made for love. You fit my body like a glove. Who are you? You’re destroying me. I was hungry. Hungry for infidelity, for adultery, for lies and for death. I always have been. I had no doubt you’d cross my path one day…”
She is attracted to and comforted by Lui, but her journey is much more introspective. He continuously chases after her, but she knows that “staying is more impossible than leaving.”
Her climactic thought is “Silly little girl who died of love in Nevers–I relinquish you into oblivion.”
She doesn’t really, though, nor should she.
They visit a cafe late at night (Casablanca, a clear nod to another film of “impossible love”), and the sun  begins to rise overhead. Lui follows Elle back to her hotel room. She cries, “I’ll forget you! I’m forgetting you already!” This is a threat and a mournful realization all at once. She says, slowly, “Hiroshima,” and he covers her mouth. “Hiroshima,” she repeats. “That’s your name.
“Yes, that’s my name,” he says. “And your name is Nevers. Nevers in France.”
The sweeping narrative begins with discussion of place, of warfare and mass casualties narrows in on a couple, and a woman’s struggle with remembering, forgetting and mourning her past. At the end, they are again representative of their places in the world, and a complex, difficult history.
Hiroshima mon amour, as a cornerstone film in the French New Wave movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, offers us no answers or prescriptions for life. Instead, we are left aching–both for the “impossible” romance and the pain and emptiness of modern war.
The beginning of the film inundates us with images from after the bomb. As we drift farther into the narrative and farther away from those horrifying images, we forget what we saw. We forget the horrors. Hiroshima mon amour forces us to reflect on the power of memory, and more so, the power of forgetting.
Throughout the film, the relationship between the masculine and the feminine, remembering and forgetting and dealing with war from different perspectives tugs and pulls at Elle and Lui and at the audience. At the end, the impossible is made penetrable by accepting and absorbing these complex relationships all at once.

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

#SheDocs Online Film Festival: Watch Acclaimed Documentaries for Free Throughout March

#SheDocs, an online film festival showcasing the “best independent documentaries that tell the stories of women and girls defying odds and rising to leadership positions throughout history,”will be streaming ten online documentaries for free throughout the month of March in celebration of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day.

The public media campaign Women and Girls Lead launched the film festival to educate and inspire audiences.

The following films will be available at #SheDocs through March 31 (synopses from #SheDocs):

MAKERS: Women Who Make America by Dyllan McGee
More than 1000 interviews chronicle the unforgettable women who have shaped America in the fields of arts, politics, business, sports and science over the last 50 years. 

Chahinaz: What Rights for Women? by Samia Chala and Patrice Barrat
Chahinaz, a 20-year-old Algerian student, embarks on a voyage of self-discovery as she investigates what life is like for women in other Muslim countries and around the world and why things are slow to change in Algeria. 

I Was Worth 50 Sheep by Nima Sarvestani
Sabere was just 10 years old when she was sold to a man in his fifties. For the next six years she was both slave and wife, miscarrying four times. Now 16, she is fighting for her freedom. 

Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority by Kimberlee Bassford
A look at the life of Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman and woman of color in the United States Congress. 

Solar Mamas by Mona Eldaief and Jehane Noujaim
Jordanian wife and mother Rafea is leaving home for the first time — to attend a college in India that is training rural women to become solar energy engineers. 

Strong! by Julie Wyman
Weightlifter Cheryl Haworth struggles to defend her champion status as her lifetime weightlifting career inches towards its inevitable end. 

We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân by Anne Makepeace
Indomitable linguist Jessie Little Doe spurs the return of the Wampanoag language, the first time a language with no native speakers for many generations has been revived in this country. 

Welcome to the World by Brian Hill
Welcome to the World asks: Is it worse to be born poor than to die poor? This film looks at child and maternal mortality as indicators of poverty in the U.S., Cambodia, and Sierra Leone. 

When I Rise by Mat Hames, James Moll, and Michael Rosen
When I Rise is about Barbara Smith Conrad, a gifted University of Texas music student who finds herself at the epicenter of racial controversy, struggling against the odds and ultimately ascending to the heights of international opera. 

Women, War & Peace by Abigail Disney, Gini Reticker, and Pamela Hogan
Women, War & Peace, a five-part PBS mini-series, is a global media initiative on the roles of women in peace and conflict.

Read more at Ms. blog, Women and Girls Lead and #SheDocs, where you can watch all of the films.

—

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

The Unfinished Legacy of Pam Grier

Pam Grier was the first black woman to be on the cover of Ms. Magazine (August 1975). Jamaica Kincaid wrote the article, “Pam Grier: The Mocha Mogul of Hollywood.” 



Written by Leigh Kolb

[Warning: spoilers ahead!]

The first time I saw Pam Grier in a film, I blurted out, “Why isn’t she in everything?”
I first saw Grier in Jackie Brown, and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t featured prominently in more films (and then I quickly remembered African American female protagonists are few and far between). It wasn’t always this way, though.
Grier’s legacy has lasted over four decades, but there’s something about her career that leaves me feeling unsettled, as if her filmography is indicative of larger (backward) social trends. She started out headlining action films–an amazing feat for a woman, much less a black woman in the early 1970s. A glance at a few of these films show incredibly feminist themes that are incredibly rare 40 years later. Her early films were groundbreaking, but nothing much was built after that ground was broken.
Coffy (Grier) is a nurse with a passion for bringing justice to those who keep drugs on the streets. The film opens with her posing as a seductive addict, and she gets herself in an apartment with a drug dealer and supplier. She brutally kills them, and then reports to her job as a nurse.
Coffy is a vigilante, trying to avenge those who made it possible for her 11-year-old sister to get hooked on drugs, causing her to wind up in a juvenile rehabilitation center. After her friend (a “good” cop, unlike many who are tied into the drug trade) is beaten brain dead after defending her, Coffy has an even deeper sense of purpose in retaliating against the machine that’s fostering corruption in her community.

“This is the end of your rotten life, you motherfuckin’ dope pusher!”
While Coffy uses her sexuality to position herself against her enemies, she does what she need to do to win. When a john is degrading her, she says, “You want to spit on me and make me crawl? I’m gonna piss on your grave tomorrow.” Racism, greed, corruption and masculine shows are evil, and a capable woman undoes it all. 
The overall quality of the film, the fashion, the music–it’s clearly dated. However, the strong female protagonist stands out as something that’s all too foreign in 2013.
Probably the most popular of Grier’s blaxploitation films, Foxy Brown follows its protagonist through another journey of violent revenge. Foxy sets out to seek justice for the murder of her boyfriend (a government agent who worked to get drugs off the streets–again, an anti-drug theme). She poses as a prostitute to infiltrate the drug/prostitution/sex slave network that’s responsible for the blight of her community. She outwits her enemies and captors at every turn, and ends victorious.

When she’s going to the neighborhood committee for help at the end, she pleads:

“It could be your brother too, or your sister, or your children. I want justice for all of them. And I want justice for all the people whose lives are bought and sold, so that a few big shots can climb up on their backs, and laugh at the law, and laugh at human decency. But most of all, I want justice for a man, this man had love in his heart, and he died because he went out of his neighborhood to do what he thought was right.” 
The group leader responds, “Sister, I think what you’re asking for is revenge.” 
She says, “You just take care of the justice, and I’ll handle the revenge by myself.”

“The party’s over, Oscar, let’s go.”
Grier’s body–from the opening bikini-clad sequence to close-up shots of her naked breasts–is objectified more frequently in this film than Coffy. She had become more of a star at this point, and producers decided against it being a sequel to Coffy (as the writer had intended), so her career wasn’t a part of the film. Foxy is still a strong, empowered woman–she seeks help from her peers (the new “anti-slavery” society), helps other women and punishes men who are cruel to women. Foxy’s role seems as revolutionary as Coffy’s (maybe more so, with the increased star power). 
The opening credits to Sheba Baby are set to Barbara Mason’s “Sheba, Baby,” boasting how Sheba Shayne is a “sensuous woman playing a man’s game,” “she’s kicking ass and taking names,” and “she’s a dangerous lady, who is well put together…” Sheba is a private investigator in Chicago (a no-nonsense businesswoman, as she yells at her partner for leaving the office a mess) who is called to her hometown of Louisville when her father is in danger. She’d been a cop in the town before leaving, and an old love interest is in business with her father, who owns a loan company. Themes of police ineffectiveness and corrupt white men at the top of a chain of violence are featured again, and Sheba takes justice into her own hands when the police only step up when it’s too late (after her father is killed). She uses her looks to gain access to a yacht party, where she struggles, fights and overcomes the men who are responsible for her father’s death (as well as shutting down many other black-run businesses in the neighborhood). 
“Now you tell your boss that he is not dealing with my father anymore. He is dealing with Sheba Shayne.”
While the themes in this film are similar–anti-racism, anti-white patriarchal corruption and pro-vigilante justice–Sheba, Baby is unique in Sheba’s even fiercer independence than the previous films. When Brick asks her if she “has anyone” in Chicago, she replies: “If you’re asking if I sleep alone every night, I’d have to say no. If you’re asking if I’m going steady with anyone, I’d have to say no. So what are you asking?” The next shot, they are in bed together. However, Sheba doesn’t rely on Brick’s help (she works without him), and leaves him at the end of the film because their separate careers are too valuable. In the final shot of the film, she’s walking the streets of Chicago, smiling and confident. 
The ending of Sheba, Baby should have been indicative of a future of Grier’s style of female protagonist. However, Grier wouldn’t again headline a film until Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film (he wrote it specifically for Grier, and she was nominated for numerous awards for it, including a Golden Globe). She certainly worked in the interim, and has since (including stage work and starring in The L Word). But nothing like the string of films she starred in in the 1970s.
When asked about being the first woman to play this type of powerful character, Grier responded: 
“I saw women share the platform with men in my personal world, and Hollywood just hadn’t wakened to it yet. Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn changed the way they saw women during the 1940s, but I saw it daily in the women’s movement that was emerging, because I was a child of the women’s movement. Everything I had learned was from my mother and my grandmother, who both had a very pioneering spirit. They had to, because they had to change flat tires and paint the house—because, you know, the men didn’t come home from the war or whatever else, so women had to do these things. So, out of economic necessity and the freedoms won, by the ’50s and ’60s, there was suddenly this opportunity and this invitation that was like, ‘Come out here with these men. Get out here. Show us what you got.'” 

She certainly did. But like so many cultural revolutions, the women’s movement saw backlash in the 1980s and beyond, as did this new kind of feminist, African American cinematic genre. 
Grier points out that she’s often criticized for the nudity and violence in her early films.

In regard to the nudity, she says,

“We’ve got $20 million actresses today who are nude in Vanilla Sky, nude in Swordfish. So what did I do different? I got paid less, but that’s it.”

To critics of the violence, she points out,
“I saw more violence in my neighborhood and in the war and on the newsreels than I did in my movies, so it didn’t bother me. Coming from the ’50s, things were very violent. We were still being lynched. If I drove down through the South with my mother, I might not make it through one state without being bullied or harassed. I feel like unless you’ve been black for a week, you don’t know. A lot of people were really up in arms about nothing, and if you challenge them, they go, ‘Well, maybe you’re right.'” 

She also notes that although some people objected to the term “blaxploitation,” she didn’t feel the films were demeaning:
“You know, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, they can all do shoot-’em-ups. Arnold Schwarzenegger can kill 10 people in one minute, and they don’t call it ‘white exploitation.’ They win awards and get into all the magazines. But if black people do it, suddenly it’s different than if a white person does it.”

Her poignant commentary on the double standards in Hollywood serve as a larger reminder of the double standards in society. The notion of a black protagonist fighting villainous white people is something that is still uncomfortable. Grier’s nudity in the early films, and her blatant sexiness, felt different than typical female objectification. Even when her cleavage was featured prominently, she had the power–she wasn’t passive, so her sexuality didn’t seem like a marker of weakness simply for the male gaze. It was jarring to feel so comfortable with what looked like female objectification, because it was so different than what we are used to now. Looking at the poster art from her earlier films, one would see her portrayed as an object. However, in the actual films, she is a sexual being, with agency, independence and strength. 
Jackie Brown
The Ms. article “In Praise of Baadasssss Supermamas” points out that “…Coffy and Foxy fought against systems that beat up on everyday folk. Imagine what they would do in the 21st century.” It’s a pretty great thought.

However, it’s more likely that we get Fighting Fuck Toys (FFTs) in modern cinema, and as Caroline Heldman writes:

“Hollywood rolls out FFTs every few years that generally don’t perform well at the box office (think Elektra, Catwoman, Sucker Punch), leading executives to wrongly conclude that women action leads aren’t bankable. In fact, the problem isn’t their sex; the problem is their portrayal as sex objects. Objects aren’t convincing protagonists. Subjects act while objects are acted upon, so reducing a woman action hero to an object, even sporadically, diminishes her ability to believably carry a storyline. The FFT might have an enviable swagger and do cool stunts, but she’s ultimately a bit of a joke.”

Grier’s heroes are never the joke, and that’s what works. She can carry a storyline, have sex when she wants it (or not) and end up victorious, with her complete agency intact. She’s a subject acting upon the injustices around her.

Pam Grier is an incredible actress, and her most iconic roles serve as a reminder that women can do it all on the big screen. It’s just been too long since they’ve been allowed to. 

—–

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

Women of Color in Film and TV: Quotes of the Day: Essence’s Black Women in Hollywood Awards

Last Thursday, Feb. 21, Essence magazine held its sixth annual Black Women in Hollywood awards luncheon.

The honorees were:

Breakthrough Performance – Quvenzhané Wallis

Lincoln Shining Star Award – Naomie Harris

Visionary Award – Mara Brock Akil

Fierce & Fearless Award – Gabrielle Union

Vanguard Award – Alfre Woodard

Power Award – Oprah Winfrey

Nine-year-old Wallis, star of Beasts of the Southern Wild, thanked God, director Behn Zeitlin, and her on-set babysitters.
Winfrey said, of power: 
“… for me is that it’s connected to a source that’s obviously greater than myself. Any time you can connect to the source and understand that that’s where all of your energy, your creativity, your joy and your triumph come from, I consider that to be authentic power.”
Union noted that she hadn’t always been “fierce and fearless,” and that she didn’t speak up against racism when she was younger and posed in photographs in ways that would “minimize” her “blackness.” However, she added:

“Real fearless and fierce women admit mistakes and work to correct them,” she said. “We stand up and we use our voices for things other than self-promotion. We don’t stand by and let racism and sexism and homophobia run rampant on our watch. Real fierce and fearless women celebrate and compliment other women and we recognize and embrace the notion that their shine in no way diminishes our light, and actually makes our light shine brighter.”

Brock Akil, writer and producer known for Moesha, Girlfriends, Cougar Town, The Game and Sparkle, delivered a tearful speech, saying:

“All I ever wanted to do was tell our story.”


The awards luncheon, held two days before the Academy Awards, celebrates the success of black women writers, producers, actresses and other Hollywood power-brokers. Actress Tracee Ellis Ross says, “It’s a beautiful afternoon where we’re celebrating each other and giving praise to women that don’t always get praised.”  

This event by, for and all about black women in Hollywood serves as a celebration of the successes these women have had and as inspiration to the women who will come after them.