Showing papers in "Film Quarterly in 1991"

Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess

Abstract: Richard Abel, author of two distinguished works on French film and theory, teaches at Drake University. Carolyn Anderson teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Edward D. Castillo is a California Cahuilla Indian and chair of Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. Darius Cooper teaches at San Diego Mesa College. David Desser, our Book Review Editor, teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Videophilia: What Happens When You Wait for It on Video

Abstract: S ince the early 1980s, there has been a steady increase in the revenue generated by marketing of theatrical films on videocassette and disc. This mass dissemination has been a boon to those interested in close study of film texts as well as to those simply interested in owning a copy of their favorite films. However, this apparent windfall has usually been embraced with little attention to the technical issues raised by the movement of a text from one medium to another or to the consequences of film evaluation based on video copies. This discussion is meant as a broad overview of home video, and much of it is relevant to both videocassette and videodisc. However, I have concentrated on the latter, since it has evolved into the "quality" video medium, with a greater focus on duplicating the cinematic experience and an increased sensitivity to the technical requirements of film. (As a former producer for the Criterion Collection, including their edition of Lawrence of Arabia, I have some insight into the factors that go into disc production.) In particular, more attention to visual matters has popularized the transfer of wide-screen films at full horizontal width, with the resulting "letterbox" shape.' Videodisc publishers' attempted fidelity to film originals, the theoretical problems raised by such an attitude, and its relevance to film viewing and analysis are the focus of this paper.

Two Interviews. Demystifying the Female Body: Anne Severson: "Near the Big Chakra". Yvonne Rainer: "Privilege"

Abstract: During the past thirty years, women (and men) film-makers have devised a variety of tactics for confronting sexist dimensions of the commercial cinema, especially its depiction of the female body. The two films-Near the Big Chakra (1972) and Privilege (1990)-discussed in the following interviews with Anne Severson (now Alice Anne Parker) and Yvonne Rainer reveal tactics characteristic of two different eras. As different as the films are, however, both reflect the determination of many independent film-makers to work for healthier cinematic representations and responses to the female body and, more specifically, for an understanding and a relation to the body as an organism, an evolving process, rather than as a conventionally erotic, static icon. As a film-maker, 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 film-makers, the body was a territory in need of liberation from both the residue of Hays Office demands that it be hidden in film and the more general cultural assumption that sexuality was a moral issue rather than a natural process-an assumption that had been evident during much of conventional film history and that was equally evident in the early seventies' pornographic inversion of puritanism. Severson's earliest films confront these issues in several ways. In I Change I Am the Same (1969), a man and a woman stand before the camera in brief alternating shots (the entire film is 40 seconds long), dressed or partially dressed in each other's clothes. During the seven minutes of Riverbody (1970), 87 nude males and females are seen one by one, each dissolving into the next, to 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 Near the Big Chakra, 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 bodies, but as the strictures against nudity fell, women found themselves increasingly exposed. And more importantly, all dimensions of the female as organism continued to be routinely suppressed. For Severson, this pattern seemed increasingly problematic, and Near the Big Chakra was her response. The film presents, in extreme close-up, the vulvas of 37 women, ranging in age from three months to 56 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. Near the Big Chakra lasts 17 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: Tampax strings hang from some vaginas; some of