But I got really worn out from the experience of having to speak after
and I approach the prospect of doing it with this film with a lot of dread, for two reasons. Making a film that evokes such painful memories is risky; people sometimes look at me afterward as if I have a solution to all the problems, as if I know some way to cope with the pain one feels. I'm afraid I don't really have any answers to give. All I know right now is the importance of acknowledging those childhood expectations.
The other reason is more general: I think the whole setup of having a personal appearance by the filmmaker after the screening is obsolete. I
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think this structure grew in part out of a feeling in the sixties and seventies that, while there was an audience out there for avant-garde film, it wasn't big enough, and one way to make the film more accessible was to have the filmmaker there. If people were frustrated or confused during the viewing of the film, they would be relieved of their frustrations afterward by having the whole thing explained to them.
Avant'garde film is in a period of crisis. Many independent filmmakers are moving into feature narratives, and there's a feeling that the process of making ''smaller' films is dying out. That might make some people think it's still important to go out and proselytize and educate, but I think that's a misguided response to the situation. The idea that I would go to a performance by John Zorn or whomeversome composer or musicianand he would have to get up afterward and explain how to hear his music, as opposed to how to hear Schonberg or Beethoven, is absurd. I think the film community is much too paranoid about the audience's alleged inability to understand avant-garde films.
My experience with
proved this to me. Since it was about an older woman, I often had older people in the audience, people in their fifties and sixties who had never seen an experimental film. Sometimes they told me afterward that they were intimidated at the outset, but by the end of the film they were fine, they understood and enjoyed it. They're adults; they've got minds. There has to be more respect for the audience, and more trust.
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Anne Severson (On Near the Big Chakra)
Laura Mulvey (On Riddles of the Sphinx)
Yvonne Rainer (On Privilege)
Probably the most important film critical development since 1970 has been fueled by the larger feminist revaluation of Western culture. Of course, there have been feminist films as long as there has been critical filmmaking: Germaine Dulac's
(1925) was a feminist response to
; her
(1923) prefigures Chantal Akerman's
. . . (1975); and Maya Deren's
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
(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.
(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
(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
was her response.
