A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The Smiling Madame Beudet

(1923) prefigures Chantal Akerman's

Jeanne Dielman

 . . . (1975); and Maya Deren's

Meshes of the Afternoon

can easily be understood as a feminist response to marriage. But the renaissance of pop and theoretical feminist writing in the sixties and seventies inspired, and was inspired by, a significant increase in the production of films that had as their central agenda a critique of the conventional cinema's imaging of women. During the past twenty years women (and men) have devised a variety of feminist tactics for confronting sexist dimensions of the commercial cinema, especially its depiction of the female body. The three films discussed in the following mini-interviews with Anne Severson (now Alice Anne Parker), Laura Mulvey, and Yvonne Rainer reveal a variety of these tactics.

As a filmmaker, Anne Severson was (she has not made films since 1974) a product of the sixties, especially the sixties' reaction to an earlier puritanism about the human body. For many sixties artists the body was a territory in need of liberation, both from the residue of Hays Office demands that it be hidden in film (more recently known as the Motion Picture Association of America, the Hays Office was the Hollywood censorship organization from 1922 on), and from the more general cultural assumption that sexuality was a moral issue, rather than a natural processan assumption that had been evident during much of conventional film history and that was equally evident in the new pornographic inversion of puritanism. Severson's earliest films confront these issues in several ways. In

I Change I Am the Same

(1969) a man and woman stand before the camera in brief alternating shots (the entire film is forty

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seconds long), dressed or partially dressed in each others' clothes, or nude.

Riverbody

(1970) is a longer film (seven minutes) during which we see eighty-seven nude males and females, one by one, each dissolving into the next, to the accompaniment of the sound of lapping water. The two films; implicitly polemicize the naturalness of the body and satirize the social control of the body by means of the gender (and other) roles encoded in dress.

By the time she made

Near the Big Chakra

(1972), Severson had come to realize that the politics of the body as image were different for the two genders. Of course, film had always marketed young, shapely female (and male) bodies, but as the strictures against nudity fell, women found themselves increasingly exposed. And more importantly, they continued to find themselves exposed as objects, icons, rather than as bodies in process: all dimensions of the female body as organism were routinely suppressed. For Severson, this pattern seemed increasingly problematic, and

Near the Big Chakra

was her response.

Near the Big Chakra

presents, in extreme close-up, the vulvas of thirty-seven women ranging in age from three months to fifty-six years. Each vulva is presented in a single continuous shot, though from time to time Severson adjusts the zoom lens; the shots are of varying lengths. The film lasts seventeen minutes and seems to most viewers substantially longer, especially since it's silent. The tradition of transforming female bodies into lifeless, conventionally "erotic" icons is continually subverted: from time to time tampon strings hang from vaginas; some of the women contract muscles; hands reach into the image to reveal the baby's vulva more clearly; and from time to time, there's evidence of an infection or of semen.

I've seen few films that demonstrate an audience's investment in the conventional imaging of women more dramatically than

Near the Big Chakra

. Indeed, the film is a way of measuring the degree to which our experiences with conventional film (and with the depiction of women's bodies in other media) have caused us to romanticize women. The extent of a viewer's shock or disgust at the filmand these are the standard reactions, even nowis a gauge of that viewer's investment in woman as beautiful (inorganic) object. Of course, one might argue that the enlargement of the vulvas affected by filming and projecting them is the cause of much of this response, and that any part of any real body, magnified to this extent, might shock viewers. But this only confirms Severson's essential quest: to liberate the body as part of a larger process of putting us in touch with reality. After all, the romanticized "perfect" bodies visually polemicized by the Hollywood industry are enlarged as well. Severson's shock tactic is simply a means for producing a more sensible view of reality unenlarged, human-scale.

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