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
. 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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For Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen the conventional cinematic depiction of women (and its exploitation of the female body) required a very different tactic, a tactic that no one could construe as participating in the gender- problematic patterns they meant to confront. As Severson makes clear in her interview, the ideology that produced
did not necessarily determine the way in which audiences responded to it. She discusses more than one instance where men, seeing the film in what they assumed was a private situation, responded to the film in a manner counterproductive to what she had in mind. For Mulvey and Wollen, the issue was not the body itselfthough
certainly avoids conventionally erotic imagery of the female bodybut the many central dimensions of women's lives that are routinely ignored in the commercial cinema's dedication to women as the objects of romantic/erotic, heterosexual quests. For their second collaboration (their first was
[1974], a feature on Amazons currently out of distribution), they decided to focus on motherhood and daughterhood as it is experienced just before and during the interruption of what has been a thoroughly symbiotic relationship, without at any point requiring that either mother or daughter appeal to the erotic desires of the man in the film or of the 'male' in the audience.
The mother-daughter story is explored in the film's central narrative, entitled 'Louise's Story Told in Thirteen Shots.' This narrative is framed by three beginning sections (a close-up of hands paging through a book of mythic images of women; 'Laura Speaking,' a passage that intercuts between images of the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes and Mulvey reading a paper on the history of the sphinx; and 'Stones,' a montage of rephotographed imagery of the Egyptian Sphinx) and three ending sections, each of which 'mirrors' the corresponding opening section (''Acrobats,' a montage of optically printed images of a juggler, a tumbler, and a trapeze artistall women; 'Laura Listening,' where Mulvey rewinds and listens to a tape of her comments in 'Laura Speaking'; and 'Puzzle Ending,' a long single-shot close-up of hands solving a maze game: it 'mirrors' the maze of imagery of women revealed in the film's opening section). Louise's story is presented sequentially, in long continuous shots (the shortest is one minute, forty-two seconds; the longest, ten minutes, eight seconds), each is a 360-degree pan. Between each pair of 360- degree pans is a bit of intertext that expands on the story revealed in the pans. At the beginning we see Louise preparing breakfast for Anna, then in Anna's bedroom as Anna is going to sleep; in shot three, Chris, Louise's husband, moves out (his good-bye to her and Anna are the story's first synch sound); in shot four, Louise leaves Anna at day-care for the first time; in shot five, we see Louise at work at a telephone switchboard, and in shot six, at lunch with the other work-
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ers; in shot seven, she talks with other workers about child care as a union issue; in shot eight, we see Louise (with Anna) and her friend Maxine whom she met at the day-care center; in shot nine, Louise is at a playground with Anna; in shot ten, in Louise's mother's garden where her mother is looking after Anna while she and Maxine look at old photographs; in shot eleven, Louise and Maxine are at Chris's studio where he shows them his recent film and tapes (about artist Mary Kelly) and Louise tells him she wants to sell the houseshe's moving in with Maxine; in shot twelve, Louise and Maxine talk about one of Maxine's dreams at Maxine's apartment; and in shot thirteen, Louise and Anna visit the Egyptian Room at the British Museum.
The activities revealed in 'Louise's Story Told in Thirteen Shots' are the polar opposite of the activities that would be the focus of any conventional narrative film. Each shot focuses on a dimension of Louise's life that would be, at most, the background for erotic (and/or violent) adventures in a commercial movie. The film doesn't entirely eliminate the possibility of the erotic from Louise's life (her relationship with Maxine may be an erotic one, though we never see any direct evidence of erotic engagement between the two women), but at no point is the erotic the 'hook' for viewer interest. The pleasures of this cinematic text are formal and intellectual: the brilliant and often exhilarating 360-degree pans that define a new kind of cinematic space and an entirely original narrative structure; the densely suggestive mise-en-scene, which in every instance elaborates the implications of Louise's story; and the intricate mirror structureitself a reference to the 'mirror' phase of childhood developmentthat informs the sections that frame 'Louise's Story.'' For Mulvey and Wollen, the antidote to the conventional cinema's, depiction of women's bodies and its narrow sense of women's lives is not shock, not a reductio ad absurdum of its tendency to fetishize particular sectors of the body as in
but a thoroughly imaginative and accomplished alternative to traditional cinematic narrative, and perhaps, a catalyst for a new, progressively feminist genre.
(1990) is Yvonne Rainer's most recent addition to a filmmaking career of twenty years that has produced six feature films, a career that itself followed an influential career in dance/choreography/performance that began in the early sixties (see Rainer's
[New York and Halifax: New York University Press and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974]). Throughout her feature filmmaking, Rainer has attempted to respond to her audience's interest in melodrama without relying on the forms of cinematic pleasure that characterize industry films
