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film. Here, I pop up with this smeared lipstick and drawn, pallid face and talk about desirability to men! The same kind of irony comes with putting 'My Funny Valentine' over my middle-aged face. Of course, it prefigures what is going to be discussed at much greater length in the film. When Novella came in, she actually thought she was going to be handling the camera and be filmed as she was shooting. I wasn't about to go that far in developing her as a literal alter ego. It suffices for me to say in the credits that she is the filmmaker, and to have said she's making a documentary film. You either take it or leave it.
I deliberately put Yvonne Washington on the edge of the frame until that key Marxist speech when the camera comes around the couch and finally frames her in close-up. That has a very specific metaphorical meaning about marginalization, as does the shot of the black signer, center screen, signing for the white speaker in the oval on the side.
It had never occurred to me how ludicrous the normal way of including a signer on the TV screen is: the person
is in the small hard-to-see space at the corner of the image and the person
who we can hear without any image at all, in the big space.
When it's important to
the signer!
It's like the moment in
where you reposition the slicing of the eyeball from
so that we realize its violence against
. After decades of teaching that film, the gender implications of that shot had never occurred to me!
Really! Wow. It's always been thought of as the 'eye' of the camera, hasn't it?
I'm a little puzzled about the dream where there are two black men looking at the
want ads and two black women in the bed underneath them.
Well, Jenny and Yvonne Washington have just been talking about REM sleep. Jenny mentions that she's heard that older people don't have REM sleep anymore, and Yvonne Washington protests: 'I don't believe that, I still dream. Just the other night I had the weirdest dream . . . ' and we're into the dreamor actually it's preceded by another dream image, of Jenny running in terror from something
screen. Then we see the two black men looking at the
help-wanted ads. The camera pulls away and there's a sign beneath the
that you really can't read: it says, 'Lost: memories, muscles, husbands, friends'all the things that are lost in the aging process or
like possible losses. And then you see these two women entwined in bed. It happens too fast (and there's also a voice-over that doesn't quite jibe with what you see), but the two
in bed are a reference to lesbians not
men: the men are looking for work!
[Laughter] Hmmm. I missed it.
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I don't think it's that obvious. But
there's a reverse shot of Jenny looking down, suggesting a racial thing, the threat of the white woman coming between the black women. It's a dream within a dream.
The title 'Privilege' was used by Peter Watkins in a 1967 film about rock musicians receiving privilege as a means of siphoning off the political energy of young people into the rock concert phenomenon.
I don't remember that film.
How did you decide to use, that title?
It had to do with Jenny's status in the flashback event. She had privilege and didn't know it, and was also lacking privilege and didn't know it. To her neighbors the Jenny character represents a white norm and a privileged life-style. The aging process has put her in a different relationship to privilege.
Every character in the film can be seen as either having or not having privilege, depending on race, sex, class, age. If they didn't have it, I gave it
them. I privileged Digna to be the commentator, to be more omniscient than Jenny, and to be able to follow
