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?
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
TUESDAY March 17, 2009
First Blog Post by Joyce Marcel
If you are a woman and you can't find yourself -- or at least some part of yourself, your deepest self -- reflected on one of the screens of the Women's Film Festival, then I don't really know what to say to you. I find myself in all of them.
And if you're a man, why wouldn't it be the same? Women's stories are above all human stories -- it's almost embarrassing to have to write those words, you'd think everyone would know that by now -- and these stories of extraordinary and quite ordinary women are lessons in being human.
A little housekeeping first. I was out of town this weekend, but I was told that the first showing of "Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm," was well attended Saturday evening, and that many men came (heh, heh) as well as women. The film tells a fascinating story, which I covered in my Brattleboro Reformer column "Getting a Buzz," which is posted on this site.
I'm introducing a new feature this year. It's called "Think and Discuss." The first topic is from "Passion and Power."
Discuss: Are there really two different female orgasms, a clitoral one and a vaginal one? Is there really a G spot, or was that idea invented to return heterosexual women to the penis, after they'd discovered vibrators and were spending a lot of money on batteries? Does the movie confuse the masturbatory with the intercoursal, if that's a word? After all, vibrators are great, but they aren't everything. Or are they?
20 SECONDS OF JOY
I still don't know what to make of the film "20 Seconds of Joy" by Jens Hoffman.
The film tells the story of Karina Hollekim, a stunning blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, superbly fit Norwegian blonde who enjoys throwing herself off (very) high cliffs and free-falling -- or flying, really -- until the very last minute before she has to open her parachute.
Every time she throws herself off another cliff I scream.
The sport is called BASE jumping (Building, Antenna, Span or Earth - the four categories of jumping).
Needless to say, the sport is extremely dangerous. And sponsored. Karina's clothing was covered with -- no great surprise here -- Red Bull logos.
Karina knows how dangerous it is.
"It's insane watching your your best buddies die," she says. "You have to ask yourself, is it worth it?"
And her father agrees. "There's a lot of statistics against her."
Yet when you watch her in her flight suit, soaring against the cliffs like a butterfly, it's breaktakingly beautiful. It lifts your spirits and elevates your comprehension of human capability. Isn't it all of our dreams -- and our nightmares -- to fly?
We can' even imagine the rush of adrenaline that shoots through her, the vistas she sees, the emotions she feels.
BASE jumping is Karina's joy, her passion and her obsession. Like jockeys and other thrill-seeking athletes, she's hooked on it. "If I don't do it, I'm not a complete person," she says. "I'm not a happy person."
Of course her friends are terrified for her safety. But Karina isn't concerned. She frankly says that the only thing that would stop her would be becoming a paraplegic or a mother. Odd choices, come to think of it.
But when she crashes into rock at 100 miles an hour and shatters both her legs, you're along for the ride because she's filming the jump.
The result? Twenty-one fractures in one leg. The doctor says she won't ever walk again. After myriad operations, she speaks from a wheelchair, and her biggest concern? "I can do everything right and it still can go wrong."
Then, subdued, she asks, "Is it really important to jump off a cliff for 20 seconds of joy?"
Think and discuss: Is Karina crazy, or does her obsession make sense to you? Or both?
THE POET'S VIEW: KAY RYAN: CHICKENS AND THE FUNNIES
This was just an absolute smashing film. By Mel Stuart, it's part of a wonderful series on the lives and work of both male and female poets. Kay Ryan was absolutely unknown to me -- she's the U.S. Poet Laureate for 2008-2009, which shows you how little I know about poetry -- so it was a special pleasure hearing her read, seeing her home and watching her work.
She write short poems with internal rhymes and wise thoughts that strike you in the heart as truths. In "Theft," for example, she compares the loss of the mind through diseases like Alzheimer's to a fox sucking out the insides of stolen eggs. The poem went by so fast -- my thanks to Stuart for showing us the words as Ryan reads, which makes it infinitely easier to comprehend -- that I can't quote it.
And oddly, since I'm writing this in the library, I can't find any of Ryan's poems on the shelves.
As a writer, though, Ryan's thoughts about work were especially interesting to me. And again, they struck as truths that I would have told myself, had I thought of them. For example, she said that she writes "from my desire to stop doing nothing." Exactly.
And, "A writer needs not seek suffering. Enough suffering will come to her."
And, she said, she writes in longhand on yellow legal pads because "you can't save mistakes in the computer." You never know whether, in an hour or so, something that you erased will be exactly what you need, while what you saved should be erased.
Think and Discuss: This comes from Ryan herself: "Is it worth it to be a poet?"
If you are a woman and you can't find yourself -- or at least some part of yourself, your deepest self -- reflected on one of the screens of the Women's Film Festival, then I don't really know what to say to you. I find myself in all of them.
And if you're a man, why wouldn't it be the same? Women's stories are above all human stories -- it's almost embarrassing to have to write those words, you'd think everyone would know that by now -- and these stories of extraordinary and quite ordinary women are lessons in being human.
A little housekeeping first. I was out of town this weekend, but I was told that the first showing of "Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm," was well attended Saturday evening, and that many men came (heh, heh) as well as women. The film tells a fascinating story, which I covered in my Brattleboro Reformer column "Getting a Buzz," which is posted on this site.
I'm introducing a new feature this year. It's called "Think and Discuss." The first topic is from "Passion and Power."
Discuss: Are there really two different female orgasms, a clitoral one and a vaginal one? Is there really a G spot, or was that idea invented to return heterosexual women to the penis, after they'd discovered vibrators and were spending a lot of money on batteries? Does the movie confuse the masturbatory with the intercoursal, if that's a word? After all, vibrators are great, but they aren't everything. Or are they?
20 SECONDS OF JOY
I still don't know what to make of the film "20 Seconds of Joy" by Jens Hoffman.
The film tells the story of Karina Hollekim, a stunning blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, superbly fit Norwegian blonde who enjoys throwing herself off (very) high cliffs and free-falling -- or flying, really -- until the very last minute before she has to open her parachute.
Every time she throws herself off another cliff I scream.
The sport is called BASE jumping (Building, Antenna, Span or Earth - the four categories of jumping).
Needless to say, the sport is extremely dangerous. And sponsored. Karina's clothing was covered with -- no great surprise here -- Red Bull logos.
Karina knows how dangerous it is.
"It's insane watching your your best buddies die," she says. "You have to ask yourself, is it worth it?"
And her father agrees. "There's a lot of statistics against her."
Yet when you watch her in her flight suit, soaring against the cliffs like a butterfly, it's breaktakingly beautiful. It lifts your spirits and elevates your comprehension of human capability. Isn't it all of our dreams -- and our nightmares -- to fly?
We can' even imagine the rush of adrenaline that shoots through her, the vistas she sees, the emotions she feels.
BASE jumping is Karina's joy, her passion and her obsession. Like jockeys and other thrill-seeking athletes, she's hooked on it. "If I don't do it, I'm not a complete person," she says. "I'm not a happy person."
Of course her friends are terrified for her safety. But Karina isn't concerned. She frankly says that the only thing that would stop her would be becoming a paraplegic or a mother. Odd choices, come to think of it.
But when she crashes into rock at 100 miles an hour and shatters both her legs, you're along for the ride because she's filming the jump.
The result? Twenty-one fractures in one leg. The doctor says she won't ever walk again. After myriad operations, she speaks from a wheelchair, and her biggest concern? "I can do everything right and it still can go wrong."
Then, subdued, she asks, "Is it really important to jump off a cliff for 20 seconds of joy?"
Think and discuss: Is Karina crazy, or does her obsession make sense to you? Or both?
THE POET'S VIEW: KAY RYAN: CHICKENS AND THE FUNNIES
This was just an absolute smashing film. By Mel Stuart, it's part of a wonderful series on the lives and work of both male and female poets. Kay Ryan was absolutely unknown to me -- she's the U.S. Poet Laureate for 2008-2009, which shows you how little I know about poetry -- so it was a special pleasure hearing her read, seeing her home and watching her work.
She write short poems with internal rhymes and wise thoughts that strike you in the heart as truths. In "Theft," for example, she compares the loss of the mind through diseases like Alzheimer's to a fox sucking out the insides of stolen eggs. The poem went by so fast -- my thanks to Stuart for showing us the words as Ryan reads, which makes it infinitely easier to comprehend -- that I can't quote it.
And oddly, since I'm writing this in the library, I can't find any of Ryan's poems on the shelves.
As a writer, though, Ryan's thoughts about work were especially interesting to me. And again, they struck as truths that I would have told myself, had I thought of them. For example, she said that she writes "from my desire to stop doing nothing." Exactly.
And, "A writer needs not seek suffering. Enough suffering will come to her."
And, she said, she writes in longhand on yellow legal pads because "you can't save mistakes in the computer." You never know whether, in an hour or so, something that you erased will be exactly what you need, while what you saved should be erased.
Think and Discuss: This comes from Ryan herself: "Is it worth it to be a poet?"
GETTING A BUZZ by Joyce Marcel
How timely is it that the Women's Film Festival is showing "Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm," a 2007 film by Wendy Slick & Emiko Omorias?
Very timely. Vibrators have become big news here in Vermont.
On February 15, the Associated Press burned up the wires with a story that the Vermont Country Store's catalog, "The Voice of the Mountains" -- that repository for everything warm, fuzzy, sassafrassy, rural and old-timey -- is devoting a section to vibrators, creams, penis rings, DVDs and other sex aids.
The outrage was quick and vituperative. Many of the angry letters began with, "I'm not a prude, but..." It seems that people were shocked, shocked, to learn that sexual aids not only exist, but are sold on the open market.
Maybe they were also shocked, shocked, because these aids are being targeted to older folks? And who likes to think of old folks having sex? "Ew!," as the young ones say.
Or maybe they were grabbing at the last cultural taboo? Black people? Oh, one is president of the United States. Gay couples? Oh, Vermont led the way to acceptance with civil unions, and now they can marry in several states. What is left for people with the worst kind of closed minds, the kinds filled with conventional wisdom, to rant and rail against? Well, obviously, it's got to be sex.
And not just sex, but females enjoying sex. We're used to thinking about men enjoying sex -- we don't blink an eyelash anymore at those erectile disfunction commercials on television. It's the female orgasm that is so disturbing.
In the film, we learn some interesting things about the history of vibrators. We learn that in the shape of dildoes, they seem to have to have been known since early antiquity. That in Victorian times, women went to medical doctors for "treatments" that involved orgasms. The disease? It was called "hysteria," and a good treatment seemed to calm a woman down -- at least until the next appointment.
When vibrators -- and rural electrification -- became more easily available, porn movies began to feature women masturbating with them. That ended the doctor's visit for good -- it made vibrators unsavory.
But who needed a doctor for something you could do it in the privacy of your own home?
Then came the 1970s and the feminist movement. Artist and author Betty Dodson -- who is featured in the film -- almost single-handedly brought the vibrator back into women’s lives. She began a crusade to teach women how to have orgasms with vibrators – alone and with partners. Soon women were taking classes in "down there," In groups, they looked at their cervixes in mirrors. A battle raged over whether there actually was a vaginal orgasm, anyway, or if they weren't all clitoral. And if they were all clitoral, then who needed a man?
If I remember correctly, the "G Spot" was discovered around this time in order to even up the playing field once again.
Things calmed down until George W. Bush rallied the right-wing conservative Christians, who still believe that a woman should be barefoot, pregnant, tied to the kitchen and subservient to a man. For a while, things were (pardon) touch and go about whether even sex would survive.
Then, in 2004, former fifth grade teacher Joanne Webb was arrested for selling vibrators (in the South they have sex toy parties, like Tupperware parties) to two undercover cops in a small Texas town. "She had broken a state law that prohibits the sale of devices that stimulate the genitals," says the film's Web site. "Texas and three other states have enacted these laws as a backlash to feminism. In these states, however, it is legal to advertise and sell Viagra. This double standard for women has far-reaching contemporary implications for sexual freedom, civil liberties and the right to privacy."
As documentaries go, this is not a particularly good film. It features uncomfortable camera angles and cheesy historical reenactment. But as a part of women's history, it's riveting.
Getting back to the Vermont Country Store for a minute, owner Lyman Orton defended selling sex toys (it seems to have become a lucrative part of his business) by saying he was trying to defeat "the negative image of older folks held by younger ones and to demonstrate the tremendous mutual benefit to both groups of changing that outlook."
He was also looking for ways, he said, to move away "from the image of narrowing-down life as we age to one of expanding life."
Rip that page out of the catalog if you don’t care to look at it, Orton said.
And I'd add, let your assistant sell that birth control prescription if it goes against your religion. And if you don't like abortions, don't have one.
But, again, it’s not about sex. "It’s about more deeply understanding the changing culture around aging well through a conversation with those who know a thing or two about the subject," Orton said. "If, along the way, we bump into taboo subjects that make some uncomfortable, we will take them on in our characteristic no-nonsense, practical Vermont way."
Very timely. Vibrators have become big news here in Vermont.
On February 15, the Associated Press burned up the wires with a story that the Vermont Country Store's catalog, "The Voice of the Mountains" -- that repository for everything warm, fuzzy, sassafrassy, rural and old-timey -- is devoting a section to vibrators, creams, penis rings, DVDs and other sex aids.
The outrage was quick and vituperative. Many of the angry letters began with, "I'm not a prude, but..." It seems that people were shocked, shocked, to learn that sexual aids not only exist, but are sold on the open market.
Maybe they were also shocked, shocked, because these aids are being targeted to older folks? And who likes to think of old folks having sex? "Ew!," as the young ones say.
Or maybe they were grabbing at the last cultural taboo? Black people? Oh, one is president of the United States. Gay couples? Oh, Vermont led the way to acceptance with civil unions, and now they can marry in several states. What is left for people with the worst kind of closed minds, the kinds filled with conventional wisdom, to rant and rail against? Well, obviously, it's got to be sex.
And not just sex, but females enjoying sex. We're used to thinking about men enjoying sex -- we don't blink an eyelash anymore at those erectile disfunction commercials on television. It's the female orgasm that is so disturbing.
In the film, we learn some interesting things about the history of vibrators. We learn that in the shape of dildoes, they seem to have to have been known since early antiquity. That in Victorian times, women went to medical doctors for "treatments" that involved orgasms. The disease? It was called "hysteria," and a good treatment seemed to calm a woman down -- at least until the next appointment.
When vibrators -- and rural electrification -- became more easily available, porn movies began to feature women masturbating with them. That ended the doctor's visit for good -- it made vibrators unsavory.
But who needed a doctor for something you could do it in the privacy of your own home?
Then came the 1970s and the feminist movement. Artist and author Betty Dodson -- who is featured in the film -- almost single-handedly brought the vibrator back into women’s lives. She began a crusade to teach women how to have orgasms with vibrators – alone and with partners. Soon women were taking classes in "down there," In groups, they looked at their cervixes in mirrors. A battle raged over whether there actually was a vaginal orgasm, anyway, or if they weren't all clitoral. And if they were all clitoral, then who needed a man?
If I remember correctly, the "G Spot" was discovered around this time in order to even up the playing field once again.
Things calmed down until George W. Bush rallied the right-wing conservative Christians, who still believe that a woman should be barefoot, pregnant, tied to the kitchen and subservient to a man. For a while, things were (pardon) touch and go about whether even sex would survive.
Then, in 2004, former fifth grade teacher Joanne Webb was arrested for selling vibrators (in the South they have sex toy parties, like Tupperware parties) to two undercover cops in a small Texas town. "She had broken a state law that prohibits the sale of devices that stimulate the genitals," says the film's Web site. "Texas and three other states have enacted these laws as a backlash to feminism. In these states, however, it is legal to advertise and sell Viagra. This double standard for women has far-reaching contemporary implications for sexual freedom, civil liberties and the right to privacy."
As documentaries go, this is not a particularly good film. It features uncomfortable camera angles and cheesy historical reenactment. But as a part of women's history, it's riveting.
Getting back to the Vermont Country Store for a minute, owner Lyman Orton defended selling sex toys (it seems to have become a lucrative part of his business) by saying he was trying to defeat "the negative image of older folks held by younger ones and to demonstrate the tremendous mutual benefit to both groups of changing that outlook."
He was also looking for ways, he said, to move away "from the image of narrowing-down life as we age to one of expanding life."
Rip that page out of the catalog if you don’t care to look at it, Orton said.
And I'd add, let your assistant sell that birth control prescription if it goes against your religion. And if you don't like abortions, don't have one.
But, again, it’s not about sex. "It’s about more deeply understanding the changing culture around aging well through a conversation with those who know a thing or two about the subject," Orton said. "If, along the way, we bump into taboo subjects that make some uncomfortable, we will take them on in our characteristic no-nonsense, practical Vermont way."
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