Before each showing, the Women's Film Festival runs an absolutely kicky and delightful one-minute trailer featuring Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "I'm a Woman" (I don't know who is singing it) under a collage of shots taken from the various films. It's a wonderful piece of work, and I'm not sure who to credit it to. Anyone?
Last night, someone told me that she encourages people to read this blog because "Joyce always has strong opinions." I've thought about that, and I guess I feel that everyone has strong opinions. I may be more willing than most to express them, but this blog is not about what I think. It's about what everyone thinks who sees these films and is touched by them.
And if you were in the audience yesterday for "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," how could you be anything but moved? (More on this film tomorrow.)
I'm really just baiting you, the audience, the readers, with my "Think and Discuss" questions. I want to see if we can get a conversation going. Feel free to post comments. Tell me I'm arrogant. Tell me I'm a blithering idiot if you want, that I totally missed some important point or another. Don't leave me all alone out here. How can we see all these films about women and their voices without opening our own to scream, holler, praise and sing a little?
"THIS DUST OF WORDS" by Bill Rose.
This one almost pushed me off the rails.
It's billed as a "the biography of a writer and the town that sheltered her as mental illness closed in." The writer is Elizabeth Wiltsee, a girl with a brilliant mind - she taught herself to read and write Chinese and translated works into English from ancient Greek because she didn't trust translators - who disintegrated into homelessness and what the film calls "madness." She ultimately died what must have been a painful death - of starvation and with a broken leg - by the shores of the San Luis Reservoir in California. Her body wasn't found for days.
She supposedly had an IQ of 200. "This Dust of Words" was the title of her honors thesis at Stanford in 1969.
The "town that sheltered her" didn't really shelter her, and by then it was, anyway, far too late. She ended up sleeping on the steps of a church, and various church ladies left her food and clearly felt very good about themselves for doing so. The town tolerated her, although some admitted that Elizabeth challenged their Christian faith because they were so afraid of her that they ignored her on the street and in church.
Elizabeth was also cursed with a self-involved family full of pompous males who simply ignored her while she was going down the tubes. We meet one of her brothers, the one who is willing to talk to the camera (I believe there was another, who wouldn't). He's middle-class, comfortable and unimaginative, and he believes that he did everything he could for his sister because he occasionally sent her money.
Their father, he says, wonders every day why he didn't do more for her. Well, duh!
From Elizabeth's writings, we learn that she was too damned smart for her own good. She never felt comfortable in the world. She never felt that there was a place for her. She was beautiful, yet hated being called that. So something terrible must have happened to her along those lines, too.
In the end, she wanted only to be free - to sleep outdoors, to read in public libraries, to think. "All I want is to not be interrupted in my thoughts" she wrote when she was 23.
A woman of her period - she would be around my age if she had lived - would have been terribly conflicted about her role in society. She had been raised to be a wife and mother, yet was far more gifted than any of her siblings or fellow students. The world wasn't open to her yet, and it is no wonder that she went slightly, and then completely crazy.
The film left me wondering this - and I'll put it as a "Think and Discuss" question: If she had been a man, wouldn't she had found a place? Perhaps she would have found mentoring and guidance. Perhaps she would have won a Nobel Prize by now. How could a mind like this be allowed to be wasted?
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3 comments:
I believe Elizabeth had schizophrenia, which usually starts to become evident in early adulthood. It is often hard and even impossible for family or who ever cares to do much to help, because she probably rejected their help. Psychiatric help is also often out of reach unless the person is in imminent danger of hurting themselves or others since treatment is often rejected as well. It is a sad dilemma. Is it humane to force treatment in this kind of situation, or humane to let her life be destroyed by the illness?
I'll be happy to tell you who put the little pre-show promo together. Our own Merry Elder. She has the touch!
Come see for yourself. I'll be proudly showing it at the Hooker-Dunham before every film through this weekend.
- Suzanne
In the case of Elizabeth's illness, if it was in fact paranoid schizophrenia, it is extremely challenging to stay on the medications, and (and this may not reflect current medications) people I have known personally state the reason why they don't take their medications is often "I'm not myself when I take my medicine, I feel like someone else" and, although they are easier to deal with on medication, they certainly function at a much lower level.
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