"Give me the cinema and I'll rule the world”
—Stalin
In the beginning, it was a matter of access. There were closed shops and closed minds. “Directing's no job for a lady,” said Lillian Gish, and a "woman's film" was one where your popcorn got soggy with tears as the heroine either married or died in the last reel.
There were a few women who squeezed through the gates of the major studios, but in the end their film seemed little different from others out of Hollywood. Women like Dorothy Arzner, who chronicled the flapper in the '20s for Paramount, or Ida Lupino, whose 1953 The Bigamist shows a man turning from his career-minded wife prone to suits to a fluff of a woman content to have his children. Besides blunted film careers, movies made myths, with women beatified or bitch, earth mother or accessory, and the audiences gobbled them with their popcorn.
But there's a new kind of woman’s film, made by, and, as often as not, for and about women, that's groping for new definitions. Last spring the First International Festival of Women's Films found 120 of them to show in New York, new and old, features, cartoons, documentaries, and proved there were talented women picking up those formidable, phallic cameras. The subjects were as varied as the quality, from gentle birth films (usually photographed looking up from the ankles) to cliched pornography (writhing bodies, frenzied ocean) to thoughtful explorations of Indian tribes. Subjects and treatments were such a motley that you couldn't point to anything specifically fingerprinted with the woman’s touch. It was enough to know they had their hands on the camera.
The crowd was full of feminists who hooted at any sign of an unraised consciousness and film freaks more intent on camera angles, and it was hard to tell who had more fun. There were surprises, like the sight of a woman, all neo-Dustbowl-refugee in jeans and patches, hoisting the shiny-modern monster of a videotape camera, or the wallposter of want ads that grew to reflect the number of women who did indeed have skills to offer a film crew. There were volatile clumps of women everywhere, counterculture young with aureoles of hair drifting over their India prints trading names and techniques with older women, whose relaxed chic and ladylike manners were like scars of old battles in her slow career climbs.
In many ways the Festival showed that the question may still be one access. Too often women, young mostly, rose in the audience of a panel discussion and quavered, "Yes, but how do I get that first job—find a crew—scrounge the cash," only to sit down unanswered. But then there are no simple answers: there were as many routes of access as panelers sitting on the stage.
Though some barriers have slipped a bit, there are new ones to stymie the would-be filmmaker. Like unions, traditionally as exclusive as country clubs. There was a time when women weren't welcome, except in the editors' union where they, with their "flair for detail" were accepted. No union card, no job in a union shop, like a major studio or ad agency. Attitudes change, the unions are a little more accessible to women, but the general economic torpor of the film industry makes competition for the few spaces stiff. (A statistical aside: Women & Film, a semi-underground magazine, lists 93 women members out of 3,764 in the Director's Guild. Also, of 800 applications to the N.Y. chapter each year many are culled, few are chosen—10 men and women survive the testing to become trainees.)
And proliferating film schools spew increasing waves of young filmmakers full of expertise and high hopes who make the bottle for a place in the film world more frenzied through sheer number. So many creative people who once burned To Write have tumbled out of their garrets To Film. Even the independent film scene—documentaries, low-budget features both underground and surfacing, educational or promotional films—is getting crowded.
Film has always been a hustle, owing as much to a bonanza of luck to talent, drive and connections, and to be a woman takes special contortions. To make a film on your own, there's the rub of scraping up the cash. All you need to write the Great American Novel is a pen and paper, but to put that dream on film takes a bigger investment. Convincing the moneymen to bankroll your project is always hard, but to be a woman with a bright idea—Sylvia Anderson, a Canadian filmmaker, says, "Getting past that initial charming encounter is like getting past enemy lines." Grappling with a crew, if you're lucky enough to afford one, can mean special power plays and self-examinations for a woman. “It was hard for me to assert myself. I was afraid of being called a bitch,” says Perry Miller Adato, a director at NET. And once you’ve made your film there’s the problem of distribution, of finding an audience so it doesn't end up a glossier version of a home movie, again often a matter of convincing a man of your abilities.
Many women filmmakers mentioned how hard it was to convince themselves that they do, in fact, have something important to say, wrongs to right, a special vision to share. Barbara Loden, whose first feature, Wanda, was well-received, has said: "It's a matter of having confidence in oneself. I thought it was just me, but it’s all women, that feeling that you can never say anything good, or clever or interesting."
A personal vision and a dose of hustle seem to be the only common trait in a group of successful women filmmakers. Some get part of that vision from close identification with the women's movement; others are simply spiritual fellow-travelers; others sniff that talent, like murder, will out whether the filmmaker is male or female. Examining a slice of women who participated in the Festival might discover a few alternate toeholds for climbing into a film career.
“I'm only interested in making films that mean something to me,” says Claudia Weill. And, often, the film that means something to her is a film about some portion of women’s experience.
Claudia began as a painter. “I was always encouraged to dabble in art, but I wasn't being encouraged to be an artist, but to be arty, one more thing to make me 'accomplished,’ to find a better man than I might have.” She studied still photography as part of her art course, but it was too still: she began to animate her pictures.
Not satisfied, she dropped out of school to work as a production assistant for a documentary of Haight-Ashbury. “I did all kinds of things, and finally helped edit the film."
She took her new knowledge back to Radcliffe and helped teach a film course—enrolled in it, too, so she could have access to cameras and film stock, and graduated with two films behind her. With Eli Noyes, she formed Cyclops Films and undertook projects like shorts for Sesame Street and an award-winning documentary, This Is the Home of Mrs. Levant Graham. Now their small office sits on Broadway near theatres showing women's films of a different type— a double bill of Coed Frolics and Mondo Whipo.
Sometimes she’ll pick up the cameras to shoot someone else’s production, like poet Sandra Hochman's film of women at the Democratic Convention. She's grown used to double takes and startled remarks from spectators surprised to see her lugging 25 pounds of camera.
“I had to conquer that old mystique about women and machinery, learning about cameras and such. It was hard because I looked around and saw so few successful independent women filmmakers."
So she thrashed it out for herself, encouraged by new developments in the women's movement. "I joined a consciousness-raising group where we were all in sort of similar fields: actresses, writers. We even wrote a feminist soap opera!" Her sensitivity to women's concerns affects her choice of subjects and her approach—before she films a yoga class of suburban dowagers, she’ll sit with them to talk about their lives.
"It's scary, the extent to which we get our models from entertainment. I want to do films about strong women. where they aren't victims." Her newest project is a film about a woman having a child and how it affects her life.
“I think we'll see a new kind of film as women move more into the film world. It’s been the woman’s role to embroider, to decorate, not to be the Doer with the grand conception. They always said at art school, ‘You have to have balls to paint.' We have to develop a point of view and learn to express it."
For some filmmakers that personal view is the pivot point of their work. Rosalind Schneider’s abstract films bubble up out of her own emotions, filled with barely identifiable shapes, like figures in a half-remembered dream. In short films like Orbitas or Dream Study she juggles the real twists and plays with images until you surrender to the sense of her vision. She'll take silvery plastic or vegetables or the human body and dissolve the bonds of reality.
The alchemy takes place in a modern sprawl of a house that’s all wood and glass and views of the Hudson, with a husband, two children, two cats, and a dog living there too. You can pick out her house from its suburban neighbors by the paintbrushes leaning against the window of one of her two studios. “I’ll paint for a while upstairs and then I’ll get an idea for y film and run downstairs to work on it.” Her film skills virtually self-taught, Rosalind too began as an artist.
She studied at Syracuse, then married, giving herself some respite from the artist's scrabble to keep a loft over her head. Successful with her painting, she turned to sculpture, inventing a new form along the way—"illuminated sculpture," bas reliefs carved in Styrofoam and lit behind until they shine like eerily glowing alabaster. The step to film was easy. "I wanted to document my sculpture—a frame or two of film for each day I carved. But then I decided films had their own reason for being, their own life force."
At first her films were closely linked to her art as she looked for forms similar to her paintings. But then she cut loose, superimposing shots spontaneously, often cued by her dreams. "I set up a situation and work within it, and I never structure a film so carefully that accidents can't happen." In the editing room she experiments some more. "I have no idea how a piece of film will turn out. If I don't like it. I throw it away.”
Her films now total about 41 dozen, and she uses money from her sculpture to finance much of the work. Experience with art and film has made her wonder why snippets of film can't be sold and shown as paintings are, or why, as she is doing, frames can't be blown up into a lithograph, to be sold along with the film.
Audiences aren't too hard to find. Besides working with distributors of art films, she’s gone the festival route, exhibiting at Yale and Ann Arbor as well as the Whitney Museum. Or she'll take a film to Millennium, a theatre sponsored by the N.Y. State Council of the Arts, where filmmakers gather, show their films, and let their critical hair down.
"I'm dealing in dreams that are so transitory. I want feedback," she says. "The first time I showed my films I was scared—the power is frightening. No one had ever given 30 minutes of such concentrated attention to nor of my paintings, yet here I was, taking my deepest thoughts and setting them up for entertainment. You wonder if anything is important or interesting enough to merit that attention."
Say you do have that interesting, important thing to say, and your fantasy world is a hushed set, actor, and stagehands poised, and you striding in to direct a feature. But when cold reality instead of klieg lights glares, a substitute daydream could be simply a more fulfilling job than waitressing. Alternate work within the film industry—like editing or scriptwriting—has always been a logical access point, a place to make contacts and learn skills. Madeline Anderson has the luxury of a satisfying job as an in-house filmmaker at Children's Television Workshop. She spends her days filming for The Electric Company and Sesame Street in offices as bright as the shows, but has plans for films of her own that will reflect her concern for black history.
"The hardest part of making a film is not getting the getting the money," she says, and counseled women at the Festival to make compromises, take any job in film, use the salary to make shorts, and prepare for bigger projects. “You're not always going to be doing what you want, but you have to work in the field."
“A lot of what I know I owe to friends who were good to me,” friends like NYU classmate Richard Leacock, one of the originators of cinema verité techniques, and Shirley Clarke, a veteran—and successful—director of documentaries. Madeline worked with Clarke on The Cool World, a grim film about drug addiction in New York. "I did everything—script clerk, assistant director, and finally assistant editor. I really learned film." Editing attracted her, but joining the union was a hurdle—"Of about a thousand members, there were only five or six white women, one black woman. and six black men." (As a black woman sensitized to discrimination, she says, "I'm not a heavy on Women's Liberation. I'm more interested in human liberation.") She edited for two more years, then joined NET as a producer/director for Black Journal. "Above all I wanted to make films about the black experience. I've been fortunate enough to find ways to do it."
One way is to be approached, as she was, by a group that wanted its struggles documented. In 1968 Hospital Workers Local 1199, almost all black and female, had just come through a tumultuous, successful strike in Charleston, S.C., when they asked her to compile a film record. Funded by the American Foundation for Nonviolence, she gathered TV news film and new footage to make a half-hour documentary. It's intense, emotional rather than didactic, and as stirring as the workers' chant that named it—"I Am Somebody!" Her first independent film (a 1960 portrait of the Civil Rights movement) languished without an audience when no distributor was interested in black history, but this time McGraw-Hill grabbed I Am Somebody, and the union uses it to organize new locals.
"Documentaries don't have to be dull: they ran be works of art, which means exploring, discovering, then letting the material speak for itself. You never know what you're going to find. If you go out with a set idea, you'll get propaganda."
Propaganda is often in the eye of the beholder, but film has always been a political tool. (Look at Hitler, those films of shouting Aryans awesome in their unity—filmed by a woman, too.) Radical politicos are also turning to film. Film collectives like Newsreel, with branches access the country, document the conditions they're trying to correct and use the films as a politicizing experience fur their audience. Many film-school graduates, veterans of the good old days of strikes and marches, have no desire to trade with the enemy and join the industry, so they tote their cameras for the Movement instead. (Other time, it's a search for the most effective communicator that draws a Movement person into film, learning as he goes. Either way, it’s a much more casual film scene, with experiments in communal film crews (to get away from the elitist ego trip of being a director) or setting up alternate distribution networks.
The women's movement reflects some of these impulses and is creating many varied films. Often they're shot with all-women crews--part consciousness-raising groups, part technicians—like Kate Millett's team for Three Lives that used theatre games and T-group techniques as they worked. Amalie R. Rothschild and Julia Reichert are united as much by their involvement in the women's movement as by their distribution company, New Day Films. With a third woman, Liane Brandon of Boston, they set up New Day to give the films they made the widest—and the best quality—exposure. "The commercial distribution system stinks. The filmmaker gets ripped off at every point. Besides, they're not concerned with the audience, with who gets reached and why," Amalie Rothschild says. By handling their own films, the three can form that audience, weigh the political value of a rental in addition to the money it brings in.
Amalie works in a rambling loft over the shuttered, silent Fillmore on Manhattan’s down-at-heels Lower East Side, while Juliet lives and works smack in the center of middle America, Dayton, Ohio, and their locales are as different as their approaches to film.
For Amalie, turning to film was a natural outgrowth of talent in graphic design and "being a movie freak since 9th grade." A Baltimore native, she went to Rhode Island School of Design where she learned still photography and darkroom techniques, and kept gobbling up movies (39 in 12 days is her record). She talked about her passion until someone said, “Amalie, I expect to see your name on the screen one day." She was struck, had never really dealt with the possibility, but realized it was in fact what she was after.
Graduate work at NYU's film school came next. "I'm a different person because of it. I knew my work was good, but I was uptight, insecure." She was accepted as an equal based on her talent, and saw her script picked to be produced by the school. A bonus of film school: "I never could have made it otherwise. Who would have given me the chance, the money or the equipment?" She produced an award-winning profile of artist May Wilson and learned directing, camera and editing skills in the doing.
After school she floated a bit, working with the Joshua Light Show and doing still photography of rock groups at the Fillmore. A lot was happening to her then, a lot of reading and thinking through. “The Women's Movement began developing, and reinforced the direction I was already taking.” Her identification with the movement and a searing experience with abortion prompted her to make It Happens to Us, a film about abortion. She compiled interviews with women who had had abortions, assembled statistics and doctor’s statements and put them together into a film that wounds with it, painful detail as it provokes discussion. Nonpolemical for all that, it's found a wide audience, from Planned Parenthood groups to training sessions of nurses who assist at the procedure.
The film is popular now but convincing someone to bankroll it was not so easy. It took five foundation grants to finance the $21,000 gamble she'd undertaken, grants that came only after she'd gone $8,000 into debt. She's in the process of scrounging money for her next project, an examination of woman and mental health.
Where Amalie's projects grew equally out of her involvement in the women's movement and her flair for film, Julia Reichert began with the desire to change her audience’s political consciousness and chose film as the most effective way. Intense, her words tumbling quickly with the force of her belief, she says, "Ideally, I'd like to change people at a very deep level.” So far, the most effective method has been film, and her talent for the medium and satisfactions from it have been bonuses.
“Films are just tools, not ends in themselves. It’s an experience the audience shares, can identify with, and learn new ways of looking at themselves. It's a matter of analyzing what audience you have, what goals are important for you to convey."
Working with Jim Klein, a fellow student at Antioch, she discovered film for a 1970 seminar project. Innocent of skills, they finagled a camera and cameraman from the U. of Cincinnati by calling themselves the Antioch Film Group and set to work making Growing Up Female, a primer of the women's movement. The film that resulted is a good introduction lesson on the movement, profiling six women, young and old, as they talk about their lives. No narrator intrudes: the message is there to be read in the oily advice of a high school counselor preaching marriage, and the flat deadened voice of a housewife as she paces through her cycle of chores. Julia describes one of the strong points of the film as "getting you to empathize with people you might otherwise never meet," but the force of Growing Up Female comes from recognizing that we have met these people in all their grit and groans—in fact, they’re us. “And when you recognize yourself in a film, but with a whole new emphasis, it forces you to examine your own life,” Julia says, and turns these self-scrutinies into discussions after a screening. Response has been phenomenal—she’s made 100 prints of the film, and it’s booked until April ’73.
Working with the male cameraman caused incidents that made Julia and Jim turn to using a woman crew for women’s subjects. The cameraman refused to take direction from a woman director; all messages had to be relayed through Jim. "And when we got the film back, we found he'd focused a good deal of the time on one woman’s breasts—he said that since she wasn't wearing a bra, it symbolized freedom."
Something else makes Julia unique among filmmakers besides living in Dayton and finding her identity more in politics than filmmaking. With no contacts, no foundation help, no bankroll to fall back on, she’s had to scrabble for every penny. Growing up Female cost only $2500, but often the choice for Julia and Jim was between shooting and eating: "So many filmmakers seem to come from a wealthy background. We started from zilch. We had to stop work once so I could be a waitress long enough to get the money to fly to Pittsburgh to hassle with the lab in person. The thought of making money for making a film blows my mind.” Every filmmaker has had her special difficulties but simply being a woman is no longer the deterrent it has been. As Eleanor Perry said recently, "What is there now but lack of will to keep women from assuming any creative role in film whatsoever?" The will is there and increasing numbers of women are finding the way.
[SIDEBAR]
Eleanor Perry: Is There a Female Film Aesthetic?
I think it's tiresome to divide everything up into male and female—especially on aesthetic in film or anything else. Anyway, it’s impossible. How can an aesthetic have a sexual gender?
Since one can barely name five women producers, directors or scriptwriters—and no women at all in top positions at the motor studios, it's obvious that men dominate the industry. They certainly select the films that get made and, among other things, dictate how women ore presented in those films—a lot of the time as whores, bitches, enjoyers of rape, ballcutters and drags (if married). Which is not to say that such women do not exist in life but that no other women seem to exist in Films.
Suppose women took over half the film industry. Would there be a complete difference in the kinds of films made? I don't really think so. Temporarily perhaps—but not for one minute longer than these, let us say, “honest” films sold tickets of the box office. Women are no less practical nor commercial-minded than men. (They'd better not be since the film industry is in the business of making money and even modest films cost a great deal of money.) Women have no genetic monopoly on compassion and gentleness any more than men have on venality and violence, (Think of the tenderest films you have ever seen: La Strada, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Les Jeux Interdits, Umberto D., Hoa-Binh—all made by men. European men, it is true, but that’s another subject.) If all women are against killing, why has there been no significant female mass movement against the war? If all women are nurturing creatures, what about those white females snarling and spitting at little black kids during the integration of the schools? If all women are against brutality, what about the heart-stopping statistics of cases of battered children? What we need in the film industry is more life-lovers than life-haters, of either sex, more human beings who ore not disconnected from their own humanity and thus open to the feelings we all share. Where films celebrate and enhance our condition on earth and deal truthfully with the anguish and joy that goes on among us—we will reach the largest audience of all. And it will have nothing to do with the sex of the filmmakers.
“The spirit that does not dare to soar is destined to grovel. Life is too short to be little.” A man said that.
(Ms. Perry, who wrote the screenplays for David and Lisa, Last Summer, and Diary of a Mad Housewife, is at work on the script for The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, a film she will co-produce.)
