BORED DAY

by Joyce Marcel

First, I need to say that watching films at the New England Youth Theater was quite a different experience. First of all, it was freezing in there. Secondly, while the Hooker Dunham seats, hard as they are, envelope you once the lights go down, the NEYT seats leave you open and exposed.
Subtitles, however, which disappear at the Hooker-Dunham, are easy to read at the NEYT because of the high rake of the audience.
And the coffee is good. And they had vegetable plates as well as cookies.
But had to happen, right? The worst film at the festival? OK, maybe that's a little strong, but definitely the most boring film - at least among the ones I've seen - was "Women Behind the Camera."
It stands to reason, in a way. The film, by Alexis Krasilovsky, is a portrait of and homage to ground-breaking female camera operators in feature films, news reports and documentaries.
These aren't the directors of the films. They're the women behind the cameras who make the images.
This was an international film, and female camera operators from many countries all say the same thing: first it was a man's world, it was hard to break in, in the beginning the cameras were heavy, a female ground-breaker mentored her, she finally broke through and made films.
The women are from China (the footage, fascinating, is of early Mao in the countryside), India (Bollywood), France, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Russia and Mexico. But the story is the same.
Among the interesting bits:
- An American photography director talks about getting groped by Arnold Schwarzenegger while shooting "Pumping Iron."
- A woman in Afghanistan film a man with a rifle dragging a woman in a burka to a cliff and then shooting her in the head. No commentary, no explanation. Just the footage. Most startling image in the movie, and the movie passes it right by.
- A photographer named Estelle Kirsh says, "People do not see because they're blind between the ears." I like that quote.
The solution the women found? Organization. And forcing the unions to accept them.
But these were women with intense aesthetic abilities. Just watching them talk - for 90 minutes! - was dull. And insider-y. Too dull and insider-y for me.


The film that followed was "Let's Face It: Women Explore their Aging Faces" by Wendy Oser, Joan Levinson and Beverly Spencer. This is an example of a good film idea gone very quickly bad. The women, six of them, I believe, are old friends who meet frequently for interpretive dancing, dinners and conversation. Over a period of two years, they also meet to be filmed talking about their looks.
Yes, the culture worships youth. Yes, it's shocking when age lines first appear. Yes, we all think about plastic surgery at times. Yes, we're all insecure about our looks. Yes, they say that men have character in their faces as they get old, but women just have wrinkles. Nothing new there.
The close-ups show the women's wrinkles, wattles, age spots, lines, bags, chin hairs - it's hard to hide anything from the camera, which is very cold.
And they talk and talk and talk - I know, that's the point. But they rarely say anything interesting.
Among the gooid bits, one woman said that as she watched her face age, she realized how much of her inner self it showed. I found that to be insightful.
Another woman, the vainest of the lot - she had had eyeliner and lip liner tattooed on her face! - talked about her face lift and how glad she was to have gotten it. "It's a paradox that you have to cut a piece of yourself to like yourself," she said.
Luckily the film was short - only 26 minutes - but it seemed to go on for hours.
As a woman - and an aging woman, at that, I quickly started getting mad. Don't these women have anything else to think about, I started wondering. Don't they have to work? How much time can you spend thinking about your looks?
When, at the end, they showed the women's ages, they turned out to be all younger than me. Self-indulgent doesn't begin to describe this, and don't get me started about the interpretive dancing.
The honest truth about these women? When they smiled, and sooner or later they all did, they were all very, very beautiful.
They should have figured it out a long time ago - when you're fully present, you're always beautiful, no matter how you look.
Oh right - that's another thing the culture teaches us, if we're willing to listen and learn: beauty's only skin deep, and it's always in the eye of the beholder.