I approached them and asked if they'd produce the film and, in fact,
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From Severson's
(1972).
they did. They paid for it and sent people from their courses to be in it. Then I did a flyer with a red rosea good symbol for the vagina: spiritual unfolding, femininity, fecunditycoyly inviting women to be in a film about 'women's parts.'
I shot it at the San Francisco Art Institute, where I was teaching. A student of minea very maternal, comfortable, candid woman, met people in an anteroom near the room where I was filming. She described what I was doing and talked about the film. Also, there were women in the anteroom who had already been photographed. They would hang around and talk to other women who had come in to find out what was going on before they decided whether to be in the film or not. It was very relaxed, and I think almost everybody who came by that day was in the film. It turned out to be easy, although I had been a little nervous about itfearing that not enough people would show up. Altogether, thirty-eight women appeared in the film. The age range was from three months to sixty-three years. There were two black women, one half-oriental girl, two lesbians, one prostitute, two virgins (I think), a lot of mothers, three mothers-to-be, three grandmothers, four women menstruating, one girl who discovered a week later that she had gonorrhea, and one woman who learned a month later that she had uterine cancer. None of these characteristics is evident in the filmexcept the women who are menstruating: you can see their tampon strings.
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At that time in the Bay Area there was a certain willingness to experiment on every front, and I think most of the people in the film are people who were already known to me or who already knew my work. They had been my students at the Art Institute, or they were friends, or mothers of friends, or children of friends, or other artists. There was a certain level of trust. My films had been shown around town a lot, and at that point, independent filmmaking was an acknowledged art form in the Bay Area and received a lot of attention from the press. It was like going to a Be-in.
In general, that was of a time of casual nudity. There were often parties at the Art Institute where almost everybody was nude. Adam Bartlett was visiting us here in Hawaii last summer. He's the son of Scott Bartlett, who was one of the in the Bay Area in the sixties and seventies. Adam's twenty now, a student at Santa Cruz. I had taken him to a party given by some friends here, who recognized his name and were curious about what it was like to grow up in that milieu. He said, 'My folks would get together with their friends and everybody would take off their clothes and they'd make a movie.' He was right. Part of the process of social interaction at that point in history seemed to be casual nudity. Actually, at one point I had planned to make a film called 'Casual Nudity,' because the phenomenon was so widespread.
is also part of that phenomenon.
In your
article, you often use 'cunt.' Was the word more acceptable in that milieu than it is now?
Women
disturbed by my using 'cunt.' I was often questioned by feminists when I showed the film. My position at the time was that if a word was loaded for you, the best way to demystify it and disarm it was to make it your word and use it. So during that period I always referred to vaginas as 'cunts,' particularly when I was showing
and talking about it. Then at some point I stopped doing it. It's not a word I use very often now.
My current students find
the most shocking film I show them. I'm sure it shocks
more than it did the original audiences. But I'd be very interested to know what kinds of experiences you've had with the film.
There are a
of stories.
I had been invited to show the film in London at a college of engineers. Now usually I showed at film societies, women's groups, or art schools, but for some reason I was invited to a college of engineers! It turned out that people there were relatively comfortable and interested in the movie. By this time, my daughter was fifteen or sixteen years old and in a love relationship with a delightful man, a good friend, Barney Boatman, who had grown up in a radical political household in London
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and was very smart, very articulate, very well-read. He had come to the film showing, never having seen my films. At the end of the screening, when I asked people for their responses, he said that he had found it very disturbing. I asked, 'What was disturbing about it for you?' And he said, 'Well, I found myself unconsciously thinking that this wasn't feminine. And
I thought, well, how can this
