for conventional sex roles to be enacted, but also of the vulnerability of men's bodies and the childish obliviousness of the 'needs' that bring men to the brothel.
Despite the fact that
exposes men in a manner analogous to the way women have normally been exposed in film, it is anything but anti-male. Borden creates a sense that women and men are doomed to struggle through the world in relation to each other, but that, ironically, absurdly, the genders continue to exist at the expense of each otherdespite all the damage it does and all the time it wastes. Nevertheless, as is clear in the interchanges between the women in
and between some of the women and men, the possibility remains for a mutually rewarding synergy of the genders. Instead of spending our energies acting out cliched 'erotic' scenes in order to fulfill gender images relentlessly promoted by the commercial cinema and mass media marketing, we need to have a more effective sense of what the real experiences of the genders are. Borden seems to assume that if we develop a stronger empathy with what 'eroticism' is like for the women who do prostitution and for the men who use them, we might begin to see each other so clearly that abandoning our relentless cycle of mutual exploitation would seem like common sense.
In the following interview with Borden,
is the catalyst for a discussion of issues relating to the sex industry, including the depiction of prostitution and other forms of sexuality in cinema, and the ambiguities of female and male responses to pornographic films. When I first saw
at the 1986 Festival of Festivals in Toronto, I was simultaneously shocked and exhilarated; as a man, I felt exposedbut in a healthy, useful way. I also felt in tune with the sensibility of
enough to send Borden a copy of my 'Confessions of a Feminist Porn Watcher' (
36, Spring 1983: 1017) and to suggest we discuss the issues raised by her film and my article. She kindly agreed. We talked in January 1987.
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One of the interesting dimensions of recent independent film is that body of work, mostly by women, which attempts to interrupt the conventional way of looking at women in movies: Yvonne Rainer's
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films, Sally Potter's, the Laura Mulvey/Peter Wollen collaborations. I've come to admire and enjoy some of these films very much. And yet, for the most part, they're not widely accessible to audiences.
seems based on an awareness of how women have traditionally functioned in commercial film, but it seems to have the potential for communicating very widely, especially to men who need to reconsider how they think about gender. Is that a goal you had in mind?
Yes. After
I realized a lot about how the structure of a movie affects an audience. That movie was structured the way it was for various reasons: lack of money, having to shoot things over five years as opposed to being able to do it all at one time. A lot of the complaints I got about
I got complaints about everythinghad to do with the structure. People felt it should have been more of a story. They found it hard to understand. Also, I was trying to reach black women and various other groups of women. I think I accomplished that to a degree, but the film had limited access because of the structure: it got shown mostly in places where many of the people I wanted to reach don't go.
When I started
I wanted to begin with a whole different aesthetic that had to do with telling a story very simply. I didn't want to make a voyeuristic film, but I wanted to create curiosity in the viewer,
voyeurism, about what it's actually like to be in a house of prostitution. I wanted to convey that as directly as possible and not exclude the possibility of the male eye. I wanted to make a film that would not deny men visual access to anything and yet would not be an erotic stimulation for them.
There are all these famous stories about
[1982], the documentary on pornography, which I didn't like at all. Supposedly, it's an attack on pornography. It shows pornographic footage, then presents women and men talking about how bad the footage is. At the end of the film this one stripper is leaping around on the beach, completely 'unified in herself' again. But, in fact, the daytime audience for the filmfor all its political bullshitwould be single men, who obviously could ignore the bullshit and deal with the film on a voyeuristic level.
I disliked that film because it pretended that pornography and sex shows are simply exploitation
men
women. It seems obvious to me that these institutions are systems of
exploitation based on a whole set of cultural values and expectations.
See, that's exactly what
is about. Everyone assumes that the men have the power because they have the money. And that, therefore, the women are victimized. But it's really an equal exchange and a very parallel one. And in
I wanted to show that. Except for the session with Paul the musician and maybe a little bit
