E. Ann Kaplan Editor of Film and Fashion

JUMP Cut
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

Women'due south Happytime Commune
New departures in women's films

by E. Ann Kaplan

from Jump Cut, no. 9, 1975, pp. 9-11
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1975, 2004

A study of Sheila Paige's WOMEN'Due south HAPPYTIME District provides an opportunity to survey the kinds of films women have been making since the resurgence of the women'due south motion in the belatedly 60s. People are now ready for analysis of the applied, theoretical and methodological problems of making feminist films and of developing a concept of feminist cinema. As a contribution to discussion nigh women'due south films and in order to identify Paige'due south film in its proper context, I volition explore the various sorts of movies women accept made and analyze the assumptions underlying their work.

The present women's motion is unique historically in the accent that has been placed on women'southward art and women's civilization by and large. Interest in films past and about women began in 1969 every bit part of the larger focus on women's creative activity, and on analysis of women in art and specifically in the media. The reasons for this emphasis need thorough analysis, but probably they have to exercise with the forms the women's movement took in general, particularly consciousness raising with its accent on personal expression, and with the influence of the 60s counterculture.

The same reasons that lead to the interest in women's fine art may in role business relationship for the grade that has predominated in women'southward films. Nearly all are what we may loosely call movie theater verité.(1) Subjects are selected and so, sometimes with prompting from interviewers off camera, talk about their feel, looking directly at the camera or speaking equally they nigh tasks in their home or work. Photographic camera piece of work, sound and editing are aimed at rendering everything in as realistic a light every bit possible. Cameras are set up in people's homes or in their local communities so that we get the feeling of the natural environment. Sometimes the sound rails from an interview is played over shots of the women going about their tasks: occasionally, there is a commentary past the filmmakers every bit vocalization over. The bones form is women describing their personal experiences, their conflicts (both growing upward and in their daily lives) and their understanding of how their situation all came about (JANIE'S JANIE, GROWING Upward Female person, THE WOMEN'Due south Motion picture).

In this form, the filmmaker is in the background. Obviously, her perspective enters in the option of subjects in the first identify (i.e., middle class or working course women, politically involved women or non-political women, women with conflicts betwixt work and home/ children, those with conflicts in spousal relationship/ beloved, those with specific identity problems or organizing other women whose main struggle is around women), and in the editing of her material. The pick of what to testify, out of all the possible aspects of whatever woman's life, is determined by the film's overall purpose every bit the director conceives it. Women who are political, in the sense of having a class analysis of society and believing that organizing working women is a strategy for social change, view their films as propaganda or organizing tools. They hope to raise the consciousness of middle class women seeing films about working women, and to bear witness working women, hesitant nigh joining a struggle, images of the possibilities for alter. Geri Ashur'southward JANIE'S JANIE is a practiced instance of this kind of film. Made in the Ironbound district of Newark, the film focuses on the personal history of Janie and the mode that she came to come across the need for organizing against a system that oppressed her at every turn—because she was poor, divorced and a adult female. The analysis of women's oppression in capitalism all comes from Janie herself, although 1 has a sense of her involvement in the larger working class project in the Ironbound district in the sometimes too pat explanations that she gives (the project is non referred to explicitly in the flick). Newsreel'southward THE WOMEN'S Motion-picture show, Madeline Anderson'due south I AM SOMEBODY (about a infirmary workers' strike), and ANGELA: LIKE It IS would all fall into the same category of explicitly political films in the picture palace verité style.

Women who come to the feminist movement from a position other than a grade analysis of guild in the traditional sense, select middle class women like themselves (their friends equally in Kate Millet's THREE LIVES and the Twin City Media Collective's CONTINUOUS WOMAN)(ii) or make films of their own struggles (e.g., HOME MOVIE, JOYCE AT 34, MAMA, MOM AND ME).(3) The focus is on the detail conflicts these women faced, whatever they might be. The underlying supposition is that the conflicts are office of the mode society views women, the roles society forces on women, the difficulty for women to exist fulfilled in this kind of guild with its particular ideas of the nuclear family and the subordinate position of women. The directors of these films differ from those of the starting time group in that they do not see their films as "organizing tools." They certainly want to speak to women with similar conflicts and problems, to show them that they are not alone in their struggles, give them the courage to combat their sense of inferiority and find fulfillment. But their master end is description rather than evoking feelings of solidarity for social alter.

Both groups of films serve important although differing functions, and reverberate in their diverseness of orientation too as in their similarity of form the stage of the women's movement over the by 4 years. All the films, in varying degrees, function as culling or counter-movie theatre, both in terms of the economic base and of formal intervention. To begin with the economic base: the movies' form is partly conditioned past the exclusion of women from commercial filmmaking and from learning the skills required in motion-picture show product. Women have set up flick collectives, where the few women who already take the skills teach others who would otherwise have no opportunity to acquire them. Films are often collectively made, with all the compromises and time delays that this method of working involves. Women'south movies are thus often as valuable in terms of the procedure of making them as for the products that result. Their sometimes non-professional attribute follows from the conditions of their production.

In add-on, women's movies fall outside the commercial network of movie making. Since their themes are, in terms of mass audition, not popular, women cannot get funding for their work. For the same reasons, the films cannot be shown in the regular circuits. The cinema verité style is appropriate for these conditions. Information technology is a relatively inexpensive course of filmmaking, requiring minimum equipment, no sets, no actors, and a small-scale coiffure who are not paid, but volunteer their services out of commitment to the crusade.

The form is besides a result of a deliberate attempt at cinematic intervention. Firstly, showing real women on the screen is, itself, revolutionary, conditioned as we are to the idealized, fantasy images of the commercial cinema. (Ane could argue that this kind of intervention is more than radical in a pic like JANIE'S JANIE than in JOYCE AT 34, since Janie goes against all our media images of women in her style of living and goals in life. Joyce and her husband in both looks, goals, attitudes and values are thoroughly conservative, admitting that their attempt at a new domestic state of affairs does involve struggle with the conventional thought of the nuclear family.(4)

Secondly, the kind of documentary women are making is the antithesis of those awful "educational" films people saw in loftier school, where a condescending narrator takes usa through a pattern where the teenager does something "incorrect" (i.e., confronting the social norms), and gradually "reformed" (i.e., made to accommodate to expected behavior). In the cinema verité films, the women speak for themselves, out of their own feel, without the mediation of commercial interests or patriarchal ideology.

British feminist filmmakers view intervention rather differently. Intervention to them means interrogating the whole notion of realism in the cinema. They do non believe that one can

"really auscultate the message ... in some directly way. This idea is what nosotros're deliberately trying to work confronting."(five)

They consider picture palace verité films to encourage passivity and to accept niggling outcome on audiences. Such films "don't do any piece of work in terms of presenting ideas or actually engaging with the audience at whatsoever level." They are interested in moving in the management of entertainment films of a Brechtian kind, believing that "the idea that amusement and politics don't go together is absurd."(6) Claire Johnston claims that "the 'truth' of our oppression cannot exist 'captured' on celluloid with the 'innocence' of the photographic camera."(7) She calls movie house verite or documentary films "the cinema of non-intervention," and argues that they are dangerous because they "promote a passive subjectivity at the expense of analysis." (viii) In a potent statement, Claire Johnston asserts,

"Whatsoever revolutionary must challenge the depiction of reality; it is not plenty to talk over oppression of women within the text of the picture show: the linguistic communication of the cinema/ depiction of reality must besides be interrogated, so that a break betwixt ideology and text is effected."(9)

In their later critical essays on Raoul Walsh and Dorothy Arzner, (10) Johnston and Pam Cook take tried to develop a critical methodology for showing how women accept been treated inside patriarchal Hollywood cinema. The London Women's Moving-picture show Grouping (to which Johnston belongs) have attempted in their film, THE AMAZING EQUAL PAY Testify to raise the problem of realism within the film itself and to evidence the processes by which women are manipulated into doing what is against their interests in capitalism. They reworked a very Brechtian script written and performed before by a theater group, and come across their determination to use information technology as significant. The script is

"based on notions of an ballsy theater and is an extraordinarily didactic parody of male chauvinist notions in unions and male chauvinism in the media."(11)

The position of the British group reflects basic characteristics of a radical (and minority) element in British political and intellectual life, which in turn take affected the form and style of the British women's movement. The influences include British leftist thinking about culture, and recently certain strands in French, German and Russian intellectual life—in France, Roland Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, the Cahiers du cinéma group, and, in terms of film practice, the contempo Godard; in Federal republic of germany, Brecht; and in Russia the formalists, especially Todorov and Shlovsky. There is in improver a strong Freudian influence, especially as Freud has been re-interpreted by a French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, whose work has been propagated in England by Anthony Wilden. In a similar way, the grade and style of U.Southward. women's films reflect U.S. intellectual and political traditions that influenced the shape of the women's motion here. British feminists tend to be organized into small, sectarian groups, each with a closely reasoned political position that is linked to leftist traditions in England that existed long before the women's movement. As Juliet Mitchell has shown,(12) the U.S. women's movement was strongly influenced by the educatee and black movements of the 60s and by the trends of the counterculture.

The consciousness raising construction that was and then widespread here dramatically influenced the U.S. struggle to integrate personal lives with political beliefs. This stress on "the personal is political" pb to a redefinition of politics, rendering the traditional leftist categories and systems inadequate. When women talk well-nigh their oppression and personal conflicts, they are, from an U.Southward. signal of view, discussing issues with implicit political implications and dimensions. U.Southward. women tried to generate their politics out of their personal experience. There is, thus, emphasis on personal reality in our films, in dissimilarity to taking an already divers political form—Marxism, Maoism, various forms of socialism—and giving these systems a feminist dimension. This is ane reason why the U.Southward. movement and most of the women's films here have dealt with middle class rather than working class women. Since the motility was a center course miracle to brainstorm with, and since women were start with themselves, the centre class became the focus. In Europe, where women's movements took identify within defined leftist groups, working class women were generally focused on both in actions and in movies.(13)

Both approaches to filmmaking and to developing a women'southward movement take their advantages and disadvantages. One danger of the U.S. cinema verité movies is that they only speak to the already committed. Working course women are often not moved past films that detail lives they know but too well, and they respond more to a movie like Francine Winham'south PUT YOURSELF IN MY Place, which is a comic parody of sex roles. But the cinema verité films have been useful in the classroom. Students are often moved by learning about the plight of working class women whose lives they take never actually tried to imagine. The cinema verité films about heart class women provoke lively discussion about issues that middle class students confront in their futures, particularly in relation to marriage, family unit end careers. The abstract advanced or experimental films like PENTHESILEA often leave students dislocated, despite the works' value as new departures in filmmaking and as against basic aspects of cinema that are of import for women (e.g., voyeurism, identification). It remains to exist seen what response films like THE Astonishing EQUAL PAY SHOW, Michelle Citron'southward SELF-Defence force and the Berwick Commonage'due south CLEANING WOMEN, which combine avant-garde and innovative attitudes to cinema with a specifically political orientation, will evoke. What is certainly truthful is that we need ways of reaching women heavily saturated with mass media plots, styles, values and images, to the extent that they have accepted this pseudo-reality every bit "public and official 'reality.'"(14)

With this background, we are ready to look at Sheila Paige's WOMEN'Due south HAPPYTIME District. Her pic belongs in none of the categories so far outlined. It is not movie theatre verité of either the explicitly or implicitly political kind; nor is it an abstruse or fine art flick in the mode of Maya Deren, Laura Mulvey, Susan Stockman or Mildred Iatrou. In being non-naturalist and non-abstract, Paige's picture show marks a new deviation in women's films.(15) While it draws on elements mutual to the movies described then far, it makes something unique out of them.

Some information almost the conditions of the film's making and of Paige'due south aims in doing the film may be useful before going on to a more thorough analysis.(sixteen) The film was shot in Virginia in four days, with women who had non all worked together earlier. This fact of their not existence a grouping who knew each other meant that a number of deep conflicts emerged while the film was beingness made. Since at that place was just time and money for the four days' shooting, Paige had to piece of work with what she had when she returned to New York. The discontinuous material shot with one camera was very difficult to edit and took some fourth dimension. From this distance, the film looks flawed to Paige. In a class discussion of her film, she commented that she would take scripted such more of WOMEN'S HAPPYTIME District had she to exercise information technology over once again.

As it was, she started out only with the idea of doing a women'due south Western. She was attracted to the genre because of the employ of wide open up spaces and because the Western, as a genre, excludes women from the action (to all intents and purposes, anyhow). Having stated that she wanted to make a Western, Paige let the actors (who were friends or women people involved knew) create the moving-picture show. Cartoon on her teaching experience, where she had had success getting children to think through their personal "stories," Paige wanted to allow women to enact dreams and fantasies that interested them. The idea of the district was the contribution of ane actress, Roberta Nodes. Paige knew most of the stories, although ane adult female kept hers secret until the very end.

This sort of structure is a dramatic divergence from the usual narrative film where the story is laid down from the start in its entirety. It is an improvisational fantasy. It takes the shape it has, presents what it does, equally a result of the people Paige was working with. Its basic theme, every bit Paige sees it, is discussion effectually the proposition of women living in a commune, with the result being that almost do not want to live this way. Possibly, Paige says, the film has the practical trouble of proposing something no one wants to do. Basically, Paige was merely excited about what people had to say. She apparently played it by ear a lot of the fourth dimension. Some scenes were worked on and scripted (e.g., Roberta's dreams of the future), while others were quite spontaneous.

The main problem of the film and of this fashion of working, according to Paige, is that the film lacks a clear framework. While audiences (students, women'due south groups, people at film conferences) now quite similar the film (this was not true earlier when the problems the film raises were still very sensitive ones), people frequently do not know what to brand of certain scenes. For case, there is ane scene, in a woman's fantasy, where she is seen going crazy. People don't know how to evaluate this, how to judge information technology, because it is non placed in any perspective within the film itself. Paige evidently would have liked the film to accept a more articulate bespeak of view.

Paige's comments almost her moving-picture show go some way toward explaining the special kind of quality it has. Her interest in what women have to say and in their fantasies reflects a wide kind of tolerance and acceptance that is refreshing. An open, humorous attitude prevails. Whether consciously or not, the people in the film, and Paige, in her fantabulous editing, parody bones sexist institutions in our culture also every bit stock, familiar, male/female person stereotypes and classic situations in the Western film genre. In that location is also a tolerant, accepting laughter at aspects of the women'due south movement itself.

The gentle ironic tone of most of the movie is ready in the opening sequence which is a marvelous parody of a church service and of typical religiosity, consummate with the sexism that entails. The credits emerge over a center altitude shot of a pinkish brick church on bright light-green grass. It looks similar one from a fairy tale, with its blackness shutters and white door. Prudence's daughter, Marilyn Landers, comes skipping into the frame, the folk music on the track undercutting the religious context. She has a saucy, impudent skip, moving arbitrarily from side to side. Deliquesce to a government minister, a woman in clerical robes, leading a group in singing "Nearer My God to Thee." The one-act of the woman minister (later the cowboy) is reinforced past the shut-up shots of the congregation, all women, a mixture of foreign faces in odd disguises. The shots of people continue as the government minister reads a choice from the Bible about women'south junior status. Her words are undercut past shots of a lady comatose, of Marilyn'south saucy, impish looks, with the camera panning over the grouping to rest on a huge bonnet. Then Roberta Nodes, mocking the proper stance of people at a funeral, gets upward to say a few words mourning the death of Hannah Prudence and bemoaning the departure of Hannah'southward daughter, Marilyn "leaving where her mother was born and bred."

This scene nicely establishes a conventional community'southward gear up of values and attitudes, the old world, as it were, that Marilyn and many women in the film volition be seen breaking abroad from or struggling with. Although the perspective is a comic one, the viewer understands only also well the reality of the conventional forms being mocked. The camera at present cuts to a longshot of a boat with two women in information technology, pulling lazily away from the shore, drifting off down the river with soft dulcimer music on the rails. The image is peaceful, rural and conveys feelings of liberty and carefreeness.

Cutting to a close-upwards shot of a woman in blackness feathers (Frances Cima) leaning on her side, talking about this being the real West, the existent life. We sympathise that the 2 women in the boat have met upward with her, and that she is telling them her story. Her blackness clothes and feathers symbolize mourning, but as well have night-club connotations that contrast with the content of her tale. The dress reflect a despair and a giving up. She is apparently weary, feeling that her business organization on earth is done.

This next sequence, through the adult female's story, follows the parody of religious institutions with a comment on marriage. It is rather difficult to-gauge the adult female's own attitude to her story, although the underlying intensity with which it is told reveals real hurting and the adult female'southward narrative way is and then brilliant that one enters the tale completely. She tells of conventional marital feelings (being married to her married man felt like being married to God), her feeling that the idea of going to a retreat was similar a second honeymoon, and of her terrible disillusionment in that location. Symbolically, of course, the tale of hideous mistreatment by the alcoholic husband-priest, complete with the beating of the woman and murder of the child, is true for the woman telling it. Nevertheless, at the end, when her listeners question her, she declares she doesn't hate all men—just this item one. The camera piece of work in this sequence underscores its essential seriousness, the face being in close up all the fourth dimension. Women'south vulnerability and suffering is here dramatized excellently.

Cut to a contrasting scene of a large woman (Judy March) in bonnet and brilliant red brim, feeding chickens in a sunlit k by a huge barn. Her dress symbolize traditional virginal womanhood and provide a striking contrast to the woman in blackness. It is amazing how Paige has managed to brand thematic connections betwixt narratively completely discontinuous scenes. The repressive and hypocritical aspects of religion, introduced in the opening scene, were echoed in the second scene with the feathered woman, along with the introduction of a second theme—the repressive aspects of conventional spousal relationship. The chicken lady, in the third sequence—it'southward what everyone does, what a dutiful daughter should practice. Meanwhile, she is dutifully taking care of her mother and father, and feeding the chickens, despite her utter colorlessness with her life.

All this is elicited through a conversation the craven lady has with Roberta, who now comes down from the hills, consummate with cowboy lid, gun and breeches (symbolizing independence) trying to detect women to bring together her in a women'due south commune. This theme of the district, once introduced, provides the loose structure for the balance of the moving-picture show, which centers effectually Robert's endeavor to convince women she meets to join her in the hills. Each woman, confronted in this mode, responds to the challenge past revealing her consciousness  —her aims in life, her dreams for herself, her fantasies about her time to come, the ties to her present life, etc..

In the chicken lady sequence, Roberta and the lady are joined by the cowboy (Kathryn McHargue), who evokes a lot of response because of the male-like wearing apparel. Her image is the typically liberated one of the early 70s—jeans, shorthair, shirt, heavy shoes. She's attractive and charming, and neatly fields the challenges. This conversation, notwithstanding, goes on besides long. It is plainly improvised, and while many comments are witty, at times it drags. It ends humorously, with country music on the track once more, the chicken lady in a new image with the gun. She is shooting wildly, and most trips as she goes off with Roberta.

The 4th sequence opens with a marvelous cowboy prototype. The adult female from the chicken lady scene is seen atop a horse on a hill, parodying numerous like shots in Westerns, but at the same time symbolizing this woman's force and independence. The principal themes of this sequence—whose highpoint is Roberta's dream—is the dissimilarity between independent womanhood, symbolized by both Roberta and the cowboy, and dependent or more traditional womanhood, symbolized primarily by the woman who wants to prepare up a trip the light fantastic toe hall in California or run off with "her" cowboy. Paige cuts from the shot of the cowboy on the hill to the trip the light fantastic hall adult female, dressed appropriately in traditionally feminine wearing apparel, long flowing skirt and flattering blouse. She is seen fighting with her friend (Frances Jones) over her wish to depart with her cowboy. This scene dissolves to the cowboy again. Her image punctuates the sequence, most performance like a refrain as an epitome of peace, solitude and strength.

Fade out, to open on Roberta, asleep, hat over face, stretched out on the footing. The photographic camera moves in on her and then cuts to her dream which is told with Roberta'due south standing, trance-like, in middle altitude in the open field. Her dream in some ways parallels the feathered lady'due south story at the start of the film. That bitter story of failure and thwarting revealed the inadequacies of social conventions and institutions. Roberta's dream, in contrast, suggests an alternative vision of peace and harmony in a customs of women. But there is a double-edged quality to Roberta's dream as there had been to the feathered lady'due south story. An intensity that suggests real interest with the vision on a symbolic level is balanced by an ironic commentary on aspects of the women's movement in the early 70s-going back to nature, doing without men, and organic food. The dream paradoxically has traditional mythic elements in the clarification of women in organdy coming downwardly to eat, songs flowing from their feet. Visions by Dante or Blake, of heavenly hosts of angels floating through the clouds, come to mind. The presumably deliberate analogy provides a annotate on the utopian thinking that often characterized the early phase of the women's motility. Existent sincerity emerges, however, in the statement,

"All women there volition be revered, and always ... e'er ... whatever they want. If I tin can tell them that, maybe I can get more people to come up to the commune."

The dream ends, and Sheila cuts to a close up of the cowboy once more, this fourth dimension happily yodeling to herself. It is a touching, existent moment. We then cut to the quarrelling group around the trip the light fantastic hall adult female, who are seen walking through the trees. Roberta stops them in a mock holdup, and they all sit down together to picnic, complete with guns and rifles. This scene is rather unsatisfactory. There is a lot of confusion considering the women lose track of their fantasies and roles, and seem to exist straining too hard for effect. Particularly bad-mannered is an Indian (Dorothy Stensland) on a horse who keeps floating in and out of the scene, but no 1 seems to know how to bring her into the drama. Only there'due south a lot of fun at the expense of Westerns, with a mock tying up of the woman jealous of the cowboy, and so on. The scene ends with Roberta asking if they'll join her commune, and some discussion of this.

This leads into the final sequence of the film, which is the most complex and was probably the most hard to edit. The pace of the pic upward to now has been slow and easy. The atmosphere mostly has been relaxed and humorous, with pleasant country music and slow conversations. The footstep and tone of the last sequence are in contrast to all this. Editing is more rapid, and there are quick montage series of shots that add to the overall sense of tension and urgency. The actors are more themselves here, every bit the women brainstorm to face the bodily conflicts and differences amidst themselves. The style accordingly reflects the urgency and sensitivity of the bug raised.

The women are grouped effectually a bivouac at night, and are deciding whether or not they will join Roberta. The darkness is suitable for the changed tone of things, and heightens the feeling of imminent separation. Important issues are raised, such as what women need men for. One woman asks, "What'southward then terrific about men?" and is told by the feathered woman (Frances Cima) that she wouldn't exist hither if it weren't for men, and furthermore that it isn't correct to bring a child into an unnatural situation like a women's commune. Women who disagree with her desire to know what she wants with men, and they get into the issues of sexual activity, beloved, friendship, etc.. The camera slowly circles the grouping equally the conversation goes on, catching faces and expressions, and the seriousness of it all, in sudden contrast to the previous humorous treatment of essentially the aforementioned bug.

Interspersed in this chat are some of the women's fantasies virtually how the district would have turned out had they tried. The chicken woman is seen in long lines of corn, bemoaning the insect-ridden corn and noting how anybody has changed for the worse. Cut back to the campfire group, and the Indian'southward bitter annotate that she'due south deplorable these are the kinds of attitudes people take. Back to the craven lady'south fantasy and her comment that Susie Starlet should have been allowed to take her dance hall. Paige then cuts to Susie, who is seen coming into the corn field, all dressed in white with a white chalked face up, reminiscent of tribal dancers.

We cut beck to the tree and the campfire, Roberta at present in close upwards, colors rich and varied, the tone softened. Paige intercuts shots from Roberta's original dream sequence, reminding us of the positive vision along with these negative ones emerging now. The camera closes in on Susie Starlet'south face up around the campfire, and we then cutting to her fantasy in the corn field, where she is again all dressed in white with white face makeup. In long distance, she begins to talk about her misery, and so goes completely crazy, jumping up and down and actualization like a delicate rag doll. Back at the campfire, the cowboy talks of going to San Francisco, to become away from information technology all. The movie ends with Susie Starlet's friend, dressed in horse riding clothes, miming riding abroad, to the audio of "Camptown Races" on the track.

The catastrophe of the picture thus is somewhat negative, and students in a class always want to know why Paige didn't show the commune working out. Isn't Paige conforming to the stereotype that women volition neglect at anything they undertake? Paige, however, feels that the motion picture shows women acting in real means rather than every bit we might wish women would act. I think her picture show is specially valuable in bringing to consciousness the kinds of images women in fact do take of themselves and that are a result of having been socialized in a patriarchal system. Fifty-fifty the images of freedom and independence have a masculine form: nosotros only do not have other natural images, since in our organization men practice symbolize autonomy and self-motivation.

In allowing the women to develop their own "stories," Paige has captured diverse and of import unconscious self-definitions that apply to many women. In letting women'due south unconscious minds surface through the fantasies, Paige has arrived at some truths that we may non like just need to know. Implicit in the fantasies is the influence of the media—especially movies—in shaping women's ideas of themselves. Instead of focusing explicitly on social and political arenas, as in the cinema verité films discussed previously, Paige focuses on some women's struggle with unconscious wishes, desires and goals in life as they have been shaped in this club, and on other women'southward fantasies for alternative ways of living.

Part of the value of Paige'south cinematic intervention lies in her sincere appreciation of the women she was working with and of whatever they had to say. This is the kind of caring and attention that women rarely get on the screen. In the commercial cinema, no 1 listens to women or cares what they really recollect. Paige's accepting and genuinely humorous attitude is about welcome. Women are seen in all their different mixtures of weakness and forcefulness, their capacities for togetherness and their leaning toward separateness; their ability to change and their clinging to conventional roles. But none of them is judged. Because of this the viewer also accepts them, regardless of their differences from her.

Besides being funny, enjoyable and visually interesting, the moving picture is useful in revealing to women the kind of mental world many of us live in. The narrative discontinuities, the careful juxtapositions of contrasting images, the judicious employ of sound for satiric annotate -- all these create the feeling of a earth in transition. Not located within whatever specific place or fourth dimension, merely apparently trying to break from an oppressive past, with their futures uncertain, these women perfectly represent the dislocated, transitional situation of many women today. The unresolved catastrophe was fitting for Paige's overall intentions in the picture: she wanted to help u.s.a. understand the reality of our situation as women in a patriarchal culture, an understanding that is a necessary precondition for discovering strategies for change. She did non intend to conceptualize answers, leaving this rather for people watching the film to speculate about.

In introducing to women's films the world of imagination and of fantasy, Sheila Paige has indicated a valuable surface area for women to work with. We demand more films like this 1; non, of course, to supervene upon the straight political and psychological ones that I discussed at the start, but to compliment those literal kinds of explorations and consciousness raising with a different and often neglected mode.(17)

Notes

1. The term "movie theater verite," adjusted from a phrase of Dziga Vertov's, refers to the French film style that evolved during the late 50s, in reaction to conventional, big-studio kinds of movie where staging, post-production dubbing, and other devices interfere with the so-called "cinema truth." The term is at present loosely used for documentary films made with handheld camera, shot on location and non using actors.

2. Kate Millett's Flying refers to the conditions of the film'southward making. For information regarding CONTINUOUS WOMAN, I talked to Darlene Marvey from the Twin Cities Film Collective.

three. Other films in this category are ROSELAND, which stimulates give-and-take around female media stereotypes, so drastically and confidently does Rose depart from them; SYLVIA, FRAN AND JOY, which follows three dissimilar styles of marriage: ane that ended in divorce and an contained life for the woman, one a traditional marriage, and the third a counterculture sort of matrimony; GROWING Upward Female person, which explores the diverse lives of half dozen contrasting women of different ages, classes and backgrounds; and SWEET BANANAS, which traces the contrasting lives of some working class and upper course women, who end up all getting along.

4. ROSELAND, as mentioned in annotation three, is an extreme kind of intervention of this blazon on the simple level of critiquing the usual cinematic image of women.

5. See "Dialogues with British Feminist Filmmakers and Critics," by East. Ann Kaplan (Women and Flick, forthcoming).

6. Ibid, p. v.

vii. "Women'due south Cinema as Counter-Movie theatre," in Notes on Women'south Cinema, edited by Claire Johnston (London, SEFT Pamphlet, 1973), p. 29

8. Ibid., p. 20.

9. Ibid., p. 29, In connection with cinema verité every bit a film mode, meet Eileen McGarry, "Documentary, Realism and Women's Cinema," in Women and Picture show, ii:vii (Summer, 1975), pp. l-59.

10. Cook and Johnston, "The Place of Women in the Picture palace of Raoul Walsh," in Raoul Walsh, Phil Hardy, ed. (Colchester, England, 1974. An Edinburgh Movie Festival Pamphlet); and The Piece of work of Dorothy Arzner, ed. Claire Johnston (London, 1975; a British Film Plant Pamphlet), with essays by Cook and Johnston.

11. "Dialogues."

12. Juliet Mitchell, Women'due south Estate (London, 1972), Chapter I.

13. In England, the offset women's films were about working women, due east.g., Esther Ronay's WOMEN OF THE RHONDDA; BETTSHANGER, KENT 1972, made by the London Women'due south Film Group; WOMEN AND THE BILL, made past Esther Ronay and the Notting Hill Women's Liberation Group.

xiv. Norm Fruchter, "Games in the Arena: Propaganda of the Spectacle," in Liberation Magazine, May, 1971.

15. Laura Mulvey has recently made an avant-garde film, PENTHESILEA (with Peter Wollen), that attempts to interrogate the notion of identification in the cinema; Susan Stockman's films consist of beautiful simply abstract images; Mildred Iatrou, presently a student at Metropolis College of New York, has fabricated a striking short moving picture in a Maya Deren style, with its unique ideas likewise.

sixteen. Sheila Paige visited my class twice post-obit a showing of her pic. This fabric was obtained in class discussion.

17. I wish to thank Julia Lesage for her thoughtful reading of the manuscript and the useful suggestions she made.

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