Adi Dohotaru: Prin ce difer poliamoria de monogamie, att timp ct convieuirea cu o

singur persoan implic i alte tipuri de relaii: camaraderii, prietenii, dragoste de tip
agape n familie i societate etc.?
Monica Barbovschi: Pornind exact de la descompunerea conceptului, neles ca mai multe
iubiri, poliamoria e o alternativ la monogamie, n primul rnd, dar nu numai, n ce
privete exclusivitatea sexual i emoional-romantic, avnd ca valori sau principii de
baz onestitatea i consimmntul informat al tuturor celor implicai. Accentul ns, sau
scopul celor care se identific drept poli, este pe formarea unor relaii sau parteneriate de
lung durat, cu mai mult de o singur persoan.
Prefer ns s vorbesc despre stiluri relaionale alternative, sau non-monogamie etic,
doar pentru c poliamoria e doar un stil din cele existente la rndul ei avnd o form
ierarhic (un cuplu central, cu cei doi formnd relaia principal i ali parteneri secundari)
sau una non-ierarhic, n care nici un partener nu are partea leului by default. A vrea s
amintesc aici unele forme de non-monogamie mai puin cunoscute anarhia relaional i
stilul solo-poly, de care eu m simt mai apropiat. Anarhia relaional, spre deosebire de
poliamorie, care plaseaz uneori oamenii n cutiue bine definite tu eti partenerul meu
principal, forever and ever, las o mai mare flexibilitate n schimbarea natural a
legturilor dintre oameni: un iubit poate deveni cel mai bun prieten platonic sau
un cuddling buddy (tradu-o pe asta!) sau, dup un timp, un partener de convieuire. n
plus, spre deosebire de poliamorie, anarhia relaional nu acord o importan mai mare
relaiilor sexual-romantice, un partener platonic putnd fi mai important pentru
ntemeierea unei familii sau structuri de convieuire-coabitare.
ns aspectele legate de convieuire sunt secundare, n opinia mea. La fel cum exist
mono-normativism (i.e. de tipul e normal s i doreti s ntemeiezi o relaie sexualromantic exclusiv pe termen lung, preferabil nsoit de coabitare, orice abatere e doar
o faz trectoare sau ceva sub-optim oricum), exist i poli-normativism, unul dintre
acestea fiind cel care dorete s legitimeze stilul poliamoros prezentndu-l dup modelul
de convieuire al structurii familiale tradiionale, nmulit cu N parteneri. E un deserviciu
extrem adus unui stil de via cu un potenial transformator formidabil, att la nivel
personal, ct i la nivelul relaiilor pe care le stabilim cu ceilali. M deranjeaz c n
viziunea stereotip-normativ despre poliamorie, accentul este pus pe cuplu sau pe
configuraia de tip V sau triunghi amoros, care sunt doar formele mai digerabile,
acceptabile din punct de vedere social.
n ultimul rnd, cred c practicile de auto-comunicare i introspecie, de negociere a
nevoilor i a unor forme personalizate de relaii i alegerea activ sunt explicit centrale
etosului de non-monogamie etic. Desigur, asta nu spune nimic despre abilitile
individuale ale celor care se definesc ca non-monogami sau poli, aa cum aceasta nu
spune nimic despre abilitile individuale ale indivizilor monogami. Alegerea activ, spre
deosebire de coerciie n formele ei cele mai subtile, este permanent n imediata
accesibilitate a cogniiei individuale de zi cu zi. Spre deosebire de o relaie monogam n
care un cuplu intr n automatisme de comportament, n gen vineri ieim n ora,
smbt e ziua de cumprturi uneori nsoite de reprouri dac partenerul se abate
de la program, n stilul de via poli aleg n permanen n mod contient s fiu cu o
persoan sau alta, i ncerc activ s depistez momentele n care apar expectanele legate
de modurile de a fi mpreun.
A.D: Din experiena personal, ce simi c este emancipator n relaiile poliamoroase?
M.B: Pentru mine, personal, e sentimentul de libertate de m exprima fa de alii n orice
form doresc. Dincolo de toate dificultile de a menine relaii multiple i crede-m, e
mult de lucru, de asta poliamoria nu e pentru toat lumea, c-i muuult de munc am
libertatea de a-mi crea, customiza relaiile n modul n care mi se potrivete, fr
constrngeri (dect cele legate de resursele de timp i energie, din pcate, limitate).

Un alt aspect transformator e c, mai devreme sau mai trziu, eti nevoit s i confruni
toi demonii interni; toate insecuritile poliamoria le scoate la iveal. Dar dac nu renuni,
e foarte probabil c vei parcurge un traseu de via personal foarte bogat, plin de revelaii
care nu i s-ar fi oferit n relaiile monogame. Exist o palet emoional care nu este
accesibil relaiilor monogame, pur i simplu pentru c nu au contextul pentru a le
experimenta. S-i dau un exemplu: un concept central relaiilor poli este cel
de compersie (engl. compersion), cu echivalentul buddhist de mudita - a te bucura de
fericirea celuilalt, chiar i atunci cnd aceast fericire nu este cauzat de tine. Asta
nseamn s te bucuri cnd partenerul tu s-a ndrgostit de o persoan nou, care i va
deschide noi orizonturi i i va mbogi grdina emoional (un termen care mi place
mie foarte mult). nseamn s descoperi legturi de intimitate, prietenie, camaraderie cu
partenerii partenerilor ti metamori (engl. metamours), care ntr-o paradigm a
competitivitii mono nu ar putea fi vzui niciodat dect ca adversari ce trebuie
nlturai, i niciodat ca resurse preioase de suport emoional, de exemplu. Mai mult,
ntr-o paradigm non-monogam ai oportunitatea de a confrunta modelul mono al
restrngerii iubirii, de a confrunta ideea att de adnc nrdcinat c relaiile amoroase
sunt inerent conflictuale ntre ele. De obicei, ntr-un mindset mono, n momentul n care
apare o persoan nou, aceasta e n conflict imediat cu partnerul deja existent. Pe cnd, n
stilul poli, poi s te miti din monolitismul emoional i s vezi c de fapt partenerul poate
s aib sentimente pentru o alt persoan, continund s preuiasc relaia cu tine.
Faptul c pot s mprtesc cu partenerii mei tot ce simt pentru ei i pentru alii ,
faptul c nu mai trebuie s mi compartimentalizez viaa emoional, s ascund ce simt
pentru altcineva, s reprim sau s m auto-limitez pentru a acomoda limitele altcuiva,
pentru mine este cu adevrat eliberator.
n mod oarecum paradoxal, libertatea sexual neleas ca abunden dei e frecvent
asociat poliamoriei cred c e mai degrab o caracteristic a relaiilor deschise de
tip swinging i nu neaprat a relaiilor poliamoroase (apropo, s nu uitm c exist relaii
poliamoroase ntre persoane asexuale). Asta nu nseamn c nu exist o mai mare
deschidere sexual n zona poli unele comuniti locale poli sunt aproape suprapuse
comunitilor BDSM, de exemplu.
Am simit libertatea i prin faptul c m-am putut detaa de ideea de cuplu ca modalitate
dezirabil de a practica relaii, eventual nsoit de modelul ascensorului relaional (engl.
relationship escalator), n care cei doi se ntlnesc i intr ntr-un model prescriptiv fr
cale de ntoarcere mutatul mpreun, obiceiurile de cuplu, favorizarea tuturor activitilor
mpreun, inclusiv petrecutul srbtorilor i a vacanelor, eventual mariaj, copii i happily
ever after. Dar de-cuplarea e specific doar anumitor stiluri alternative, cum ar fi anarhia
relaional, n timp ce poliamoria ierarhic pstreaz cuplul ca punct central.
A.D: Cnd documentam cartea despre anii 1960, citeam studii antropologice despre traiul
comunal aizecist i experimentele sexuale (dou capitole despre contracultur, aici).
Experimentele euau i pentru c, potrivit mrturiilor feminine, exista o diferen ntre
stabilitatea emoional cerut de femei i presiunea brbailor la adresa femeilor de a
schimba mai des partenerii. Crezi c exist o astfel de diferen de gen sau e una
cultural? Dac e cultural, cum i de ce ar trebui schimbat situaia?
M.B: Sunt de prere c aceast naraiune femeia care are nevoie de stabilitate
emoional i brbaii care au nevoie de diversitate e una care servete n mod evident
ideologiei sexist-patriarhale. Brbai i femei deopotriv au fost i sunt puternic afectai de
aceast paradigm, dar nu intru acum n vasta literatur feminist, e un subiect foarte
mare. Sigur c o mare parte din felul n care nelegem s ne raportm la alii e puternic
structurat social i cultural, iari nu spun nimic inovator cu asta. Inclusiv dorina de
stabilitate emoional e n foarte mare msur social nvat, la fel cum bieii i
brbaii nva comportamente stereotip-masculine, cum ar fi acela de fiine hiper-sexuale.
mi vin acum n minte exemplele unor prieteni brbai poli care au crescut n societatea
italian puternic macho-sexist i care s-au luptat mult timp cu aceast presiune de a fi
2

tot timpul activi, partea care vneaz, orice alt comportament fiind sancionat ca
nemasculin, n timp ce o prieten poli din Australia mi spunea sptmna trecut c i-a
dat seama recent c n perioada n care era foarte activ sexual i aborda brbai ntr-un
mod foarte deschis, de fapt foarte muli i acceptau avansurile nu pentru c efectiv i
doreau sex, ci doar pentru c ar fi fost nemasculin pentru cultura australian s refuze
oferte de sex. E foarte greu de delimitat biologicul de social-cultural.
Revenind la partea legat de femeile care i doresc stabilitate emoional, dac stm s
ne gndim o clip la toate felurile n care modurile n care fetele sunt socializate n a se
considera inferioare, incomplete fr un partener masculin (hai s amintim n treact i de
hetero-normativitate) de la felul n care sunt nvate s-i priveasc propriul corp din
punctul de vedere al atractivitii pentru privirea masculin, la felul n care nc sunt
nvate s l atepte pe ft-frumos pe cal alb, sau s alb comportamente feminine,
nicidecum bossy, autoritare sau auto-suficiente, de la carier pn la relaii, sunt convins
c n mare parte lucrurile stau i azi la fel, n special pentru societile cu roluri de sex
stereotipe i relaii majoritar tradiionale. i genul acesta de paradigm terge complet
ideea c femeile pot fi ageni sexuali activi i c pot avea dorine sexuale puternice. Dar n
paradigma non-monogam se pune mult accent pe autonomie i dezvoltare personal, n
defavoarea unui model n care partenerii doar sunt consumai ca resurse pentru
mplinirea nevoilor individuale.
Ct despre felul de a practica poliamoria, cel descris de tine, e doar una dintre posibiliti
(pentru mine, personal, nu e ceea ce prefer). Cred c e necesar s separm tipurile de
convieuire de tipurile de relaionare, pentru a discuta succesul sau eecul lor. A dori
s m refer doar la cel din urm i s precizez c n paradigma mono, tot ceea ce nu e i
au trit fericii pn la adnci batrnei e considerat eec. Din pcate, aceast
naraiune, c relaiile trebuie s dureze pentru totdeauna, e una foarte pguboas pe de
o parte ne creeaz o sumedenie de anxieti i sentimente de inferioritate cnd, invariabil,
relaiile ajung la un final, pe de alt parte ne priveaz de capacitatea de a aprecia relaiile
pentru tot ceea ce ele ne ofer, pentru atta timp ct le avem.
A.D: Din ce ai citit i experimentat, cum este rezolvat gelozia care apare n relaii
poliamoroase ca n cele monogame?
M.B: Dac citeti Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for
Modern Relationships, Christopher Ryan i Cacilda Jeth susin c societile pre-agrare
erau promiscue i c monogamia e o invenie care protejeaz acumularea i transmiterea
proprietii. Dac le accepi argumentul, o mare parte a ceea ce nelegem prin gelozie e o
invenie post-agrar, un tip de programare social legat de securitate economic i
transmiterea statusului.
Departe de mine de a nega componenta social a geloziei, dar tim c gelozia apare i la
copii foarte mici, i chiar n rndul animalelor. Ce poate oricine s citeasc n literatura poli
e c gelozia e o emoie complex, care de obicei e un simptom al unei insecuriti mai
adnci teama de a fi abandonat, de a fi nlocuit cu cineva mai grozav, mai frumos i mai
detept, teama de diminuare a interesului partenerului etc. Modalitatea de a o rezolva n
relaiile mono e de obicei nlturarea trigger-ului (nu a cauzei) geloziei a intrusului.
Cteodat i n relaiile poli. n relaiile mono, de cele mai multe ori gelozia e provocat
doar de posibilitatea ca partenerul s fie atras de altcineva, n timp ce n relaiile poli,
aceasta e o certitudine prin definiie.
Experiena geloziei pentru persoanele monogame e ceva marcat de fric, ca ceva ce le e
fric s simt. n mare msur, monogamia ncurajeaz ascunderea dorinelor fa de alte
persoane i asta amplific frica: cu ct ncerci s o mpingi n afar, cu att ea devine un
monstru pe care refuzm s l confruntm. Monogamia creeaz o structur care previne
confruntarea direct a sentimentelor neplcute de gelozie. De multe ori avem ncercri
futile de a crea ordine i o structur artificial rigid supraimpus vieii care e imprevizibil
i apoi rmnem suprini c partenerul ne-a nelat sau a gsit pe altcineva.
3

Presupunnd c cineva i dorete cu adevrat o relaie poli, acea persoan va trebui s

lucreze cu sentimentul de gelozie, s descopere ce e de fapt n spatele lui, s comunice cu
partenerul presupunnd c partenerul e dispus s ofere sprijin i resurse pentru
depirea limitelor. Recomand cu cldur pagina More Than Two a lui Franklin Veux, care
conine multe sfaturi de bun sim legate de managementul geloziei. Veux mai are o
distincie important aceea dintr ereguli i limite personale, n gestionarea geloziei. A
impune reguli, constrngnd astfel libertatea partenerului i transfernd asupra lui
responsabilitatea pentru propriile noastre insecuriti, e o idee n general foarte proast.

The personal and the political

Literature and feminism
By Megan Behrent
Issue #92: Features
Share
It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many
American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say.
For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the
right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. . . . The women who suffer
this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. . . . We can no longer ignore that voice
within women that says: I want something more than my husband and my children and
my home.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 19631
The year 2013 marked the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most important foundational
texts of second-wave feminism: Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique, which brought to
national attention the problem with no name plaguing millions of American women,
exposing it as a collective problem, not an individual one. The Feminine Mystique itself is
firmly rooted in the experiences and concerns of comparatively privileged white suburban
housewives who had greater access to education than most women. Working-class women
and women of color, the majority of whom by necessity already worked outside of the
home (often in the homes of other women) are entirely absent from Friedans
work.2 Nonetheless, while it focused on a limited group of women, white suburban
housewives, the ideological effect was much broader as it destroyed the myth of the
domestic bliss of the happy housewife. It almost instantly became a bestseller and
propelled Friedan into the leadership of one wing of the womens liberation movement as
president of the National Organization of Women formed in 1966.
The year 2013 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of Sylvia Plaths tragic death and the
publication of her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. The same year saw the publication
of Adrienne Richs Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law in the United States, forging new
ground in feminist poetry. Last year also marked the death of another giant of the feminist
literary world, Doris Lessing, whose groundbreaking novel The Golden
Notebook celebrated its fiftieth anniversary one year earlier.
All of these works gave expression to the political aspirations and rebellion of a generation
of women who found their voice in the womens liberation movement. While many of the
early writers who found a mass readership among movement women did not identify
themselves as feminists or even as political, they expressed the same hunger for
something more that gave birth to the second wave of feminism. Indeed, neither Plath nor
Lessing ever considered themselves feminists (Lessing vociferously rejected the label).
Nonetheless, their works became popular because they were widely read by women within
and without the movement and they helped to inspire later writers who consciously
identified as feminist, even if the meaning of the term itself was often contested.
4

In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky famously wrote about art, A work of art should, in the
first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can
explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in
other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another,
and why.3
That all the works cited above came out before there was an overt womens liberation
movement says something about the period and the material roots of the womens
liberation movement. While the suburban housewife smiled on the cover of magazines,
the reality was far different, as women increasingly entered the workplace in large
numbers. Just as the suffrage movement had its roots in abolitionism, second wave
feminism had its roots in the civil rights movement as well as in movements in support of
national liberation struggles. Women played leading roles in the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, gaining a sense of agency, confidence, and political education
and experience at the same time as they confronted sexism within the movement.
Discussions of womens liberation within the movement ultimately led to the creation of
explicitly feminist groups. The concerns of women of color were, however, too often
neglected or completely ignored in the predominately white, middle-class groups
associated with both liberal and radical feminism. Inspired by the Black Power movement
and building on a long tradition of organizing against sexual violence and oppression,
Black feminists increasingly organized their own groups, which emphasized the ways in
which multiple systems of oppressionrace, class, gender, sexualityintersect to create
systematic inequality. The early years of the New Left radicalized women of the period,
both showing them what was possible at the same time as they were forced to recognize
the sexism present in many of the most radical of movements.4 In discussing the
interconnectedness between these movements, Toni Morrison notes, One liberation
movement leads to anotheralways has. Abolition led to the suffragettes; civil rights to
womens lib, which led to a black womens movement. Groups say, what about me?5
Friedandespite portraying herself as just another unhappy housewifewas politically
influenced by her experience as a labor activist and writer among labor militants and the
revolutionary Left.6 Adrienne Rich was active in the civil rights movement. Doris Lessing
had been radicalized in her youth in Rhodesia fighting against racist colonial rule. While
Sylvia Plath was less political, she too was influenced by the 1953 execution of atomic
spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the protest movement against it, in addition to her
own experiences as a woman writer in a field dominated by men.
Their individual experiences were mirrored by millions of other women creating the
conditions for the emergence of a mass movement for womens liberation, but, the early
literature associated with the feminist movement played a crucial role in bringing the
concerns of millions of women out of the private realm and into the public. In doing so, the
personal was made political.
As writer Marge Piercy, an activist in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and in the
womens liberation movement, explains in discussing her own feminist consciousness in
the late fifties:
It feels nutty when its only you. Youre regarded as insane. It isnt until there exists some
kind of framework in which to hold onto the insights that it makes any sense. To be
concerned with these things by yourself was, in the 1950s, to be a little crazy. It was only
when other people became concerned with them that, suddenly, I wasnt crazy
anymore.7
It was for this reason that the slogan made famous by second-wave feminism, the
personal is political had such resonance.
The personal is political
This slogan has become one of the movements most ubiquitous legacies despite its
contested meanings. It encapsulated political tensions between two tendencies within the
5

movement: one that emphasizes the intensely personal nature of womens oppression
precisely in order to demolish the idea that female subjugation is an individual fault;
another that used those words as an injunction to emancipate oneself through purely
personal, everyday gestures.
At its best, this insistence on the idea that the personal is political transformed
consciousness by insisting on the need to understand the social, economic, cultural, and
political oppression of women as the basis for all personal problems that afflicted
individual women. At its most extreme, however, it could also lead to a rigid
understanding of feminism that insisted that no person could fight a form of oppression he
or she did not personally experience. In its later years, as the feminist movement itself
collapsed amid myriad internal divisions, increasingly the personal is political came to
represent an ideology that consciously advocated for individual or personal change as a
solution to collective problems. Thus, whether one shaved ones legs, wore makeup, or
spelled women with a y was political and determined ones relationship to feminism.
This caricatured understanding of feminisms legacy is part of the reason that subsequent
generations have distanced themselves from second-wave feminism, becoming what is
sometimes characterized as the Im not a feminist but generation.
The texts of the womens liberation movement, for the most part, provide a very different
interpretation and use of the slogan. The 1970 essay by Carol Hanisch entitled The
Personal is Political which helped to popularize the slogan was, in fact, an argument
about the impossibility of solving the problem of womens oppression by individual means.
Written as a response to critiques of consciousness-raising groups, the essay focuses on
their importance as a means of politicizing women and engaging them in collective
political action.
Consciousness-raising groups were central to the movement and provided women with the
space to develop a political understanding of their own oppression. Many women were
radicalized as a result of these group discussions in which every aspect of ones personal
experience as a woman was discussed, analyzed, and theorized. Nonetheless, there were
contradictions within the idea of consciousness-raising. For some, it was a strategy in the
fight for womens liberation: politicizing women and bringing them into collective action
and struggle. But there was also a tendency to see them as an end in and of themselves.
Carol Hanisch explains the dilemma at the heart of consciousness-raising as a political
strategy. She argues,
these analytic sessions are a form of political action. I do not go to these sessions because
I need or want to talk about my personal problems. . . . As a movement woman, Ive
been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing, and in general pretty
much in control of my life. . . . So I want to be a strong woman, in movement terms, and
not admit I have any real problems that I cant find a personal solution to (except those
directly related to the capitalist system). It is at this point a political action to tell it like it
is, to say what I believe about my life instead of what Ive always been told to say.8
On the other hand, Hanisch is clear that consciousness-raising alone is incapable of ending
the oppression of women in their personal lives. As she writes: There are no personal
solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.9 For
Hanisch, consciousness-raising groups could not solve nor provide alternatives to womens
oppression, nor were they intended to do so; rather they were a gateway to collective
political struggle.
As many feminists learned, consciousness-raising groups could also lead to internal
struggles within movement groups, which, at times, limited their liberatory potential. As
bell hooks argues, the ability to see and describe ones own reality is a significant step in
the long process of self-recovery; but it is only a beginning.10

Feminist literatures most important political contribution to the movement was that it
provided this first step for millions of women.
The emergence of a new feminist canon
Literaturetheory as well as fiction and poetrywas crucial to consciousness-raising.
Thus, many of the most famous works associated with the womens liberation movement
were read and discussed in these groups and played a role in radicalizing and politicizing a
new generation of activists. 11
The texts of the womens liberation movement emphasized the intensely personal nature
of womens oppression precisely to demolish the idea that female subjugation is an
individual problem, instead exposing it as a collective problem in need of a collective
solution. For a generation of women raised on the belief that the oppression they felt was
all in their headsan individual failing, not a social onethe insistence that womens
personal problems were not, in fact, just personal was radical and transformative.
To fully understand the profound impact these works had, it is important to situate these
novels historically and understand the conditions that imbued them with such power.
Millions of women entered the work force during World War II as the female labor force
increased 60 percent from 1941 to 1945.12 With the war over, however, women were
driven back into the home and encouraged to believe that there was no greater glory to
aspire to than the life of the suburban housewife. Between 1945 and 1947, three million
women were laid off from wartime jobs.13 The repressive atmosphere of the 1950s was
intensified by McCarthyism, which eradicated the space for any left-wing critiques of
oppression.
Women were routinely fired from jobs for being pregnant or getting married. The Help
Wanted section was divided into male and female jobs with the female section littered
with requests for pretty receptionists.14 Seventeen states restricted access to
contraceptives. In Massachusetts, it was still a misdemeanor for anyone, married or not, to
use birth control.15 Abortion was illegal everywhereexcept to save a womans life.
Violence against women was not only tolerated but officially sanctioned. Rape was legal
within a marriage. As historian Stephanie Coontz notes, Until 1981, Pennsylvania still had
a law against a husband beating his wife after 10 p.m. or on Sunday, implying that the rest
of the time she was fair game.16 One of the most egregious and nauseating examples of
the institutionalized violence against women was a 1964 article in the Archives of General
Psychiatry, which published a study of thirty-seven women whose husbands had abused
them. The report for the most part blamed the problems in such marriages on the wives
whom they described as aggressive, efficient, masculine, and sexually frigid.17 Thus,
Coontz explains, many psychiatrists argued that such violent episodes were periodic
corrections to the unhealthy family role reversal, allowing the wife to be punished for her
castrating activity and the husband to re-establish his masculine identity.18
These examples give a small glimpse into the daily lives of women for whom feminist
literature was potentially life saving. The latter example is a particularly horrific example
of the insidious effects of individualizing womens oppression. Not surprisingly, womens
treatment by medical professionals particularly in the field of mental health was a
central concern of the womens liberation movement. As Phyllis Chesler, a pioneer of the
feminist critique of psychiatry argues,
Female unhappiness is viewed and treated as a problem of individual pathology, no
matter how many other female patients (or non-patients) are similarly unhappyand this
by men who have studiously bypassed the objective fact of female oppression. Womens
inability to adjust to or to be contented by feminine roles has been considered as a
deviation from natural female psychology rather than as a criticism of such roles. . . .
Each woman as a patient thinks these symptoms are unique and are her own fault. She is
neurotic, rather than oppressed.19

Sylvia Plath
Perhaps no writer most exemplified the incredibly destructive effects of womens
oppression on the individual psyche than Sylvia Plath. After her death by suicide at the
age of thirty on February 11, 1963, Plath posthumously became an icon for the feminist
movement as she gave voice to the long suppressed anger, grievances, and hopes of the
incipient feminist movement.
By the time of her death, Plath was living in London during one of the coldest winters in
100 years. Recently separated from her husband, the (at the time more famous) poet Ted
Hughes, she lived alone with her two young children ages one and three. It was in these
conditions, writing early in the morning before her children woke up, that she feverishly
wrote the poems that would assure her fame.
For many of her readers, particularly women, Plaths life and death became a symbolic
narrative of the oppression of women. In her tragedy, many women saw their own. The
impact is almost unimaginable today. The misogyny apparent in critical responses to her
work only helped politicize her work. The infamous literary critic Harold Bloom, for
example, calls Plath an absurdly bad and hysterical verse writer.20 Describing some of
her poems as a tantrum, he ascribes her fame primarily to the growing School of
Resentment,(i.e., feminism).21
In Ariel, readers and writers of the 1960s found a powerful expression of the rage at
womens subjugation in society and in literature. It was a groundbreaking work both in
content and style, and solidified Plaths status as one of the most important American
poets. From the moment it appeared in print, it was a media sensation.
The intensity and anger of the poems written between 1962 and 1963 was both shocking
and refreshing for many of her later readers, particularly women. The formal innovations
and experimentations in her poetry allowed this voice to break through conventional
poetic modes and inspire millions. Her last poem, The Edge, written days before her
suicide, is haunting, describing the body of a dead woman as perfected.
Daddy one of the angriest and most famous of her poems is a powerful expression of
rage that is both personal and political. While it is ostensibly about her relationship with
her father and Hughes, for a new feminist movement breaking out of the chains of
womens oppression, the last line of the poem read like a declaration of independence that
had much wider political resonance. The poem concludes:
So daddy, Im finally through.
The black telephones off at the root,
The voices just cant worm through.
If Ive killed one man, Ive killed two
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
Theres a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through.22
It is hard to imagine the impact this poem had when it was published on the pages
of Time magazine. Plaths life and work became, for many, a concrete expression of the
slogan that the personal is political.
While The Bell Jar, Plaths autobiographical novel, was published one month prior to her
death in England under a pseudonym, its republication under her own name in the United
8

States in 1971 served to coalesce Plaths status as an icon of the feminist movement. An
immediate bestseller, it lasted seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, outsold
her poetry, and became for many the ultimate feminist coming-of-age story. In the midst
of the burgeoning US feminist movement, it quickly became a staple of consciousnessraising groups. It has sold well over 3 million copies since 1972a testament to its
enduring legacy.
Loosely based on her own experiences in New York City in 1953, the first half of the novel
traces Esther Greenwoods growing awareness of the contradictions between what, as a
woman, she is supposed to want and her increasing dissatisfaction with the options
available to her. Seeking sexual fulfillment, Esther instead finds violence, objectification, or
the fear of a lifetime of domestic imprisonment.
Esthers first step toward freedom after her suicide attempt occurs when Doctor Nolan, the
female psychiatrist who is crucial to her recovery, refers her to a clinic to buy a
diaphragm. This is crucial to her control over her own sexuality, her body, and thus her
life. By the time the novel was written and published, the pill had become legal; in the
1950s, however, when Esther gets fitted for a diaphragm, it was not. The fact that Esther
must break the law to gain control of her own body resonated with later feminists reading
the novel in the early 1970s as stories of illegal abortions were publicized at mass speakouts and consciousness-raising sessions.
Crucial to the novel is Esthers own breakdown, suicide attempt, and recovery. Her frank
discussion of mental illness, her own depression and suicide attempt was, on its own,
radical for the period. But Plath makes clear that mental illness is never only a personal
problem. In The Bell Jar, it is not just Esther who is illit is the entire world of 1950s
America. As Jeannette Wintersen notes in reflecting on Plaths legacy, Why wouldnt a
woman go mad in a world like this? Why wouldnt a woman as gifted as Plath become
terminally depressed and end in suicide? Pills dont change the world. Feminism did. The
Bell Jar was a call to action because it is a diary of despair.23
Plaths work, along with the work of Doris Lessing, Adrienne Rich, and other early feminist
writers, was indeed a call to action that had immense appeal to women who had been
radicalized by their own experiences in the social movements of the 1950s and early
1960s.
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, whose
novel The Golden Notebook was incredibly influential in the womens movement. She was
introduced to radical politics through her participation in antiracist struggles in colonial
Rhodesia, where she first joined the Communist Party. After her move to England, Lessing
continued to be politically active as a member of the Communist Party, but became
increasingly disillusioned by the partys Stalinism. In particular, she objected to the sexism
she found within the party, as well as the attempt to dictate forms of political art. The
breaking point for Lessing came in 1956 when, after the death of dictator Joseph Stalin,
Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous secret speech, outlining the crimes and horrors
of Stalins regime. The Soviet invasion of Hungary came in the same year, leading to the
death of 30,000 Hungarians.
The Golden Notebook is both a product of an incipient feminism, and of the political crisis
of 1956. The novel was radical in its depiction of Anna Wulf, a woman writer, struggling to
make sense of her life and the world in four notebooks representing fragmented parts of
herself.
Despite her impact on the feminist movement, though, Lessing consciously distanced
herself from the movement. In a famous interview in 1969 in the United States, she
declared, Im impatient with people who emphasize the sexual revolution. I say we should
all go to bed, shut up about sexual liberation, and go on with the important
matters.24 The irony, of course, is that this comment directly contradicts the narrative
9

impulse of her work. In The Golden Notebook, far from shutting up about sexual
liberation, Lessing puts it at center stagemaking female sexuality and the struggle to
achieve any kind of sexual liberation extremely public. As a narrative about free women,
issues of sexuality and relationships figure prominentlyand far from diminishing the
narrative to a tract about the sex war, as she would later argue, add to its complexity.
This distancing reflects Lessings more general rejection of politics after The Golden
Notebook. The novel itself represents a move away from organized politics into the
personal. It is dismissive of, if not outright condescending toward, the New Left. If for
many feminists the personal was a site of radicalization that opened the door to collective
political action, for Lessing it was a way out. Unable to imagine any liberation in the real
world, Lessing increasingly turns toward the fantastical, or to science fiction.
The Childen of Violence series reflects a broader political trajectory from her earlier
activism, disillusionment with Communismand then, all political struggleinto an
apocalyptic vision of the world and into mysticism. Like Lessing, the series protagonist
Martha Quest grows up in colonial Africa, marries and bears children, becomes politically
active and eventually moves to England, where she becomes increasingly disillusioned.
The last novel, in particular, paints a bleak picture of a dystopic world, torn apart by war
and violence, and veering toward destruction.
Toward 1970: Feminism, consciousness-raising, literature
Despite Lessings rejection of the feminist movement, her work had a huge impact
precisely because it resonated with experiences in the New Left. Lessings disillusionment
with sexism even in the midst of a radical milieu spoke to womens own disillusionment
with the sexism they experienced within the movements of the New Left. This
contradiction became evident at the 1967 SDS convention, when women who proposed
that SDS take up the demand for womens liberation were jeered at, although the
resolution was ultimately passed.
Both inspired by and provoked by the New Left, feminist activists brought the
revolutionary impulses of the movement into the realm of the personal by challenging
the subjugation of women through campaigns for equal pay, child-ins demanding daycare,
and the fight for abortion rights and battered womens shelters. In 1968 alone, as the
broader movement of the New Left peaked and began its long decline into oblivion, radical
women in New York protested the Miss America Pageant, the first national conference on
womens liberation was held in Chicago, and both the National Abortion Rights Action
League (NARAL) and the National Welfare Rights Organization were formed.
In 1969, WITCH (Womens International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) launched its
national attack on domesticity by storm[ing] a Madison Square Garden bridal fair
chanting Always a Bride, Never a Person!25 Another feminist group called for wages for
housework. Meanwhile in 1970, several hundred women staged a sit-in at the Ladies
Home Journal for eleven hours demanding that the magazine establish an on-site childcare
center for its employees, and forcing it to publish an eight-page insert with a housewives
bill of rights demanding paid maternity leave, paid vacation, free twenty-four-hour child
care centers, and social security benefits.26They also suggested retitling the magazines
famous monthly column, Can This Marriage Be Saved? to Can This Marriage.27 The
same year saw the persecution and arrest of Angela Davis by the FBI, the nationally
organized Womens Strike for Equality, and the zap action by the Lavender Menace at the
Second Congress to Unite Women.28
By 1970, womens liberation had become a dominant story in the media. The year saw the
publication of Kate Milletts Sexual Politics,which Life magazine referred to as the Das
Kapital of the womens movement,29 and Germaine Greers The Female Eunuch, which
were widely read both inside and outside academia. Other works published in 1970
included Robin Morgans anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, Shulamith Firestones The
Dialectic of Sex, and Toni Cades The Black Woman. In poetry and fiction, 1970 saw the
10

publication of Audre Lordes Cables to Rage, Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, and Alice
Walkers The Third Life of Grange Copeland,to name a few.
The impact of the feminist movement shook American society to its core, fundamentally
challenging the exclusion of the personal from the realm of political discourse, action,
and struggle. A 1970 cover story from Time magazine provided an unenthusiastic
testament to the movements reach, with an opening line that ominously declared:
These are the times that try mens souls, and they are likely to get much worse before
they get better. It was not so long ago that the battle of the sexes was fought in gentle,
rolling Thurber country. Now the din is in earnest, echoing from the streets where pickets
gather, the bars where women once were barred, and even connubial beds, where
ideology can intrude at the unconscious drop of a male chauvinist epithet.30
The movements encroachment on the previously off-limits personal space of the bedroom
was indeed one of its greatest threats: feminism challenged not only womens exclusion
from the public realm, but also the political foundations of the home, the family, and
womens subjugation within them.
Literature played an important role in this regard. Women writers of the period totally
redefined what aspects of the personal were deemed literary. They wrote about
depression and suicide attempts. They wrote with candor about sex and the lack of sexual
satisfaction experienced by most women. They described real experiences of childbirth
and the alienation women experienced in medical institutions where they were treated as
if they didnt know their own bodies. They wrote about rape, menstruation, vibrators, and
a whole host of previously off-limit topics in the literary canon.
Poetry played a crucial early role in the expression of the womens fight for liberation. In
addition to Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton and Adrienne Rich were widely read. For literary
historian Elaine Showalter, the 1971 publication of Richs The Will to Change marked a
broader shift in consciousness as women increasingly asserted their political will.31
Poetry also flourished among women involved in the civil rights and Black Power
movements. Gwendolyn Brookswho in 1950 became the first African American to win a
Pulitzer prizewas one of many writers for whom the 1960s was transformative, as her
work took on a new political power after being introduced to the Black Arts Movement and
becoming an activist. Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde emerged as two of the most
eloquent voices of the 1960s spirit of protest and radicalization. As Alice Walker, who
taught poetry to activists in the civil rights movement, argues, Poetry comes naturally
from that wellspring of resistance, passion, courage, dedication, belief in a future.32
A new genre of feminist fiction arose in this period which demolished the romantic ideal of
the nuclear family, beginning with Sue Kaufmans Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967) and
Alix Kates Shulmans Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1969), which inspired a rapid
succession of works, including Marge Piercys Small Changes (1972), Dorothy Bryants Ella
Prices Journal (1972), Rita Mae BrownsRubyfruit Jungle (1973), Lisa
Althers Kinflicks (1973), Erica Jongs The Fear of Flying, Marilyn Frenchs The Womens
Room (1977), and Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, to name a few.
Kinflicks by Lisa Alther employs a picaresque and at times comic narrative to trace the
development of Ginny Babcock, the daughter of a munitions supplier, as she begins life in
a small-town America. She wants to play football but is forced to quit once she hits
puberty and to cheer from the sidelines instead, while dating Joe Bob, the high school
football star. The narrative traces her development as she adopts and ultimately discards
a variety of identities as she learns to forge her own, independent of both her mother and
the men and women who attempt to fashion her in their own images. She describes with
candor and humor her evolving sexuality, from losing her virginity in her parents bomb
shelter, to a range of unsatisfying sexual experiences with men, before her first
relationship with a woman which leads her to leave college, ending her brief stint as an
11

apolitical academic philosopher to live on a radical commune in the woods of Vermont.

After a tragic accident involving a snowmobile, she returns to a more traditional domestic
life of marriage, motherhood, and Tupperware parties with a husband so intent on her
sexual pleasure that he insists, I dont care whatyou want. I want to make you
happy.33 This relationship also comes to a dramatic end when she is discovered having
tantric sex with a Vietnam vet and war resister, and is chased out of her house at
gunpoint, forever severing her relationship with her daughter. At the end of the novel, we
find her taking off on another journey with her mothers clock wrapped in a Sisterhood is
Powerful t-shirt.
Kinflicks is notable because it reflects a massive shift in popular consciousness. It was
(and continues to be) read because it broke new ground in terms of what could be written
and talked about. Within this work and other feminist narratives that emerged from this
period, critiques of marriage and the family were prominent as women began to recognize
their personal misery as a reflection of oppression, not an individual failing. This was
crucial in challenging not only the subject matter of what is literary but also the formal
conventions of literatureand particularly the genre of the novel.
Two of the earliest novels in the English language written by Samuel RichardsonPamela:
Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa: Or, the History of a Young Lady (1748)
exemplify the limited possibilities available for women in this literary form. To summarize
one of the longest novels in the English language: Clarissa disobeys her parents, refuses
to marry the man to whom she has been promised, and runs away. As a result she is raped
and dies. Pamela is persistently sexually harassed by her employer but virtuously resists,
despite abduction and attempted rape. As a result, she earns the novels ultimate reward:
marriage. These two novels are emblematic of the limited possibilities available to female
protagonists in literature: marriage or death.
Feminism turned the courtship plot on its head. The newly radicalizing housewife of the
feminist novel almost inevitably must escape from her marriage in her quest for freedom
and selfhood. In Ella Prices Journal by Dorothy Bryant, for example, the novel ends with
the protagonist, who has recently left her husband, waiting on a table for her abortion to
end on Christmas day, as she is symbolically reborn through her right to choose. As in
Plaths Bell Jar, reproductive freedom is central. As Lisa Marie Hogeland points out, by
1972, abortion had become such a commonplace of womens and feminist fiction that one
reviewer referred to the obligatory abortion episode, highlighting the proliferation of
abortion narratives and their importance to the struggle for reproductive freedom.34
In both content and form, the period saw a radicalization in literature that was intimately
tied to protest movements. In theater, poetry, and fiction, traditional forms were thrown
out and new forms created to participate in the revolutionary counterculture. All of these
literary works participated in a democratization of literature that left an indelible mark on
publishing, literary studies, and the canon.
Many feminist literary pioneers were themselves major players in the movement. Alice
Walker, a student of radical historian Howard Zinn, was radicalized by the civil rights
movement; Marge Piercy was an early activist in SDS; Alix Kates Shulman was an
important activist in the radical wing of the feminist movement in NYC who helped to
organize the 1968 Miss America protest; Kate Milletts political activism is well
documented in her memoirs, most notably 1974s Flying; Rita Mae Brown not only wrote
the movements first lesbian coming-of-age narrative but, as a veteran of SDS and NOW,
also led the charge against NOW for its exclusion of lesbians and, ultimately, formed the
Furies Collective; Barbara Smith, a prominent political and literary theorist and founder of
the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was also a member of the Combahee River
Collective, a radical group of Black lesbian feminists named after an 1863 action led by
Harriet Tubman at the Combahee River which freed 750 slaves.
Feminist literature was inextricably connected to the larger movement and a revolutionary
period that transformed art. As students participated in civil rights struggles and antiwar
12

protests, they ran up against the failure of mass media, popular art, and the academy to
give voice to the real experiences of oppressed people in the United States and abroad.
Sixties radicals thus sought to highlight the testimonies and narratives of the victims and
eyewitnesses of the horrors they struggled against. From the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement to the Winter Soldier hearings to speak-outs against abortion laws, they used
testimonial narratives to speak truth to power and give voice to the real experiences of
ordinary people.
There are also limits to the liberatory potential of these novels, as many of the
protagonists come to realize at the culmination of their quest for personal liberation.
Without a fundamental transformation of the material conditions that produce womens
oppression, there are objective and literary limits to the outcomes of such a quest.
The bildungsroman, a literary manifestation of bourgeois individualism and the triumph of
the self, is a formal limitation that can give voice to a transformation in consciousness
but not to the kind of radical social transformation that eludes the confines of realist
fiction.
These material limitations to personal liberation are all the more apparent in the work of
African American women writers of the period struggling against both racism and sexism.
Describing the experience of being a Black woman poet in the 1960s, Audre Lorde
explains, It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly
invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply invisible as a Black lesbian
and feminist.35
The early 1970s saw an outpouring of writing by African American women who had been
inspired by the radical movements of which they had been a part and sought to claim a
voice in the literary canon from which they had all too often been excluded. As Toni
Morrison explains about the origins of her writing, There was an attitude and a gaze that I
wanted to read through. So, since I wanted it so desperately, I created it.36
Along with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, Toni Morrison is one of the most important
writers to emerge from the period. The Nobel Prize-winning author was born Chloe
Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, and later attended Howard University. After earning an
M.A. at Cornell University, Morrison returned to Howard as a teacher, where among her
students were many civil rights leaders, including Stokely Carmichael. Before becoming a
published writer herself, Morrison worked as an editor for Random House, where she
played a vital role in publishing and editing the works of Black writers, including Toni Cade
Bambara, June Jordan, Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Muhammad Ali (whose autobiography she
edited), George Jackson, and Huey Newton. She also edited The Black Book (1974), a
landmark work that was an unvarnished scrapbook of African American history.37
Toni Morrisons first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The novel begins with a
passage from the Dick-and-Jane primer, repeated three times as the words increasingly
run together to become a meaningless mockery of the suburban family ideal, and a
reminder of its racist underpinnings. Telling the story of the Breedlove family, The Bluest
Eye provides a stark narrative of the brutal oppression of families of color who are
systematically denied entrance into the suburban elite, despite working in their homes. At
the same time it demonstrates the devastating impact of the ideal of the suburban
nuclear family. Morrison engages in a project of undermining and resisting the ideological
construction of the nuclear familywhile making it clear that the violence of American
domesticity was never equally felt but was always intertwined with race and class
divisions. This distinction was all the more important after the 1965 publication of the
Moynihan Report, which with cataclysmic rhetoric called for national action to address
the large number of female-dominated households in African American communities that
failed to conform to the 1950s ideal of the nuclear family. In language that was widely
condemned for its blame the victim rhetoric and for pathologizing African Americans,
Moynihans report crystallized the gap between the feminine mystique and the political
concerns and priorities of African American feminists, who challenged the racism and
13

sexism of Moynihans report and sought to reframe the debate while raising larger issues
of institutionalized racism and inequality.
Alice Walkers first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, also published in 1970,
powerfully exposes the way in which institutionalized racism destroys lives and distorts
relationships. The daughter of sharecroppers and an active participant in the civil rights
movement, Walker draws on her experiences in the pre-civil rights South for this moving
depiction of the life of a black tenant farmer from Georgia.
Notably both The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Bluest Eye focus on the roots of
domestic violenceportraying it as a systemic problem, not an individual one. In these
novels, violence is rooted in oppression, inequality, and the dehumanization of people by
racism, sexism, and exploitation. At the end of The Bluest Eye, Morrison reveals this
through the symbol of the marigolds which come to symbolize stunted human potential,
as Claudia, from whose point of view much of the novel is told, realizes that it is not her
fault that the marigolds she planted have failed to grow. She says,
I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This
soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will
not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had
no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesnt matter. Its too late. At least on the
edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, its much, much,
much too late.38
Literature by African American feminists of the 1960s and 70s went hand in hand with
theoretical inquiry that anticipated and fostered discussions of intersectionality as a way
of understanding the way multiple oppressions are experienced. It is notable that most of
the prominent writers of this period were also theorists: Alice Walker is well known for her
collection of essays In Search of our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose in which she
coined the term womanism to describe a political ideology that is opposed not only to
gender inequality but also race- and class-based oppressions. In addition to her poetry,
Audre Lorde is well known for her essays, particularly the influential The Masters Tools
Will Never Dismantle the Masters House. Meanwhile, Toni Morrison is the author
of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in which she analyzes the
role of race and the effects of living in a racialized society on the development of
American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The limits of the personal
Despite its radicalism, the feminist movement was born at the end of a period of mass
political struggle and, as the broader struggle subsided, the movement went into steep
decline. Within the womens liberation movement, consciousness-raising groups
increasingly fragmented on the basis of identity. The emphasis on identity politics was, in
large part, a reaction to the biases of liberal mainstream feminism, which focused
primarily on upper-class white women to the exclusion of women of color, working-class
women, and particularly lesbian women, whom Betty Friedan famously depicted as a
lavender menace to the movement. Liberal feminisms failure to take up the struggles of
marginalized women within the movement exacerbated the sense that only the victims of
oppression could organize to fight their own oppression
Responding to both the racism and sexism within and without the movement, many of the
most radical women of color began organizing their own groups, forming the Third World
Womens Alliance in 1968, the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973, and the
Combahee River Collective in 1974. Marginalized by feminist groups who failed to address
racial and class differences and to actively fight against all forms of oppression, groups
like the Combahee River Collective sought to develop a more inclusive political framework
aimed at fighting institutionalized oppression and the capitalist political and economic
system that produced it.39 The 1981 publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherre Moraga and Gloria Anzalda with a foreword
14

by Toni Cade Bambara, was influential in giving expression to the diverse voices of Third
World Feminism that emerged in this period.
Meanwhile, remnants of earlier consciousness-raising groups increasingly focused on
fighting biases within the womens movement itself. In other groups, particularly in the
radical feminist milieu, there developed a deep suspicion of all leaders, and organization.
This led to a phenomenon known as trashing in some circles as leaders of the womens
movement increasingly came under fire, with many expelled from groups they helped to
create.40 As the historian Alice Echols argues, More than ever, how one lived ones life,
not ones commitment to political struggle, became the salient factor . . . the focus shifted
from building a mass movement to sustaining an alternative womens culture and
community.41 These political shifts ultimately reinforced individualism and often
encouraged endless self-analysis, internal debate, and fragmentation. One critic notes,
feminism itself thus became individualized, psychologized, and apoliticized.42 By the
1970s and 80s, the personal is political increasingly referred to a politics in which
personal experiences, actions, and lifestyle choices substituted for collective political
struggle. By the 1990s, with the feminist movement all but dead, the idea that the
personal is political had been distorted beyond recognition, living on in power
feminism and self-help in which the accumulation of wealth and self-realization become
the only means of liberation. This shift is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in Gloria
Steinems preface to Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, whose title alone
gives expression to the profound retreat from the radical politics of the earlier feminist
movement. In the preface, Steinem argues that it is time turn the feminist adage
around, from The personal is political to The political is personal.43
The political unraveling of the feminist movement went hand in hand with a broader
political crisis, a decline in struggle, and the beginning of a massive backlash.
Nonetheless, some of the tensions that emerged in the later years of the feminist
movement were reflected from the beginning in feminist literature, particularly works
geared toward a primarily white, upper- and/or middle-class audience. Erica Jongs 1973
bestseller is a reflection both of the mass radicalization of the period and its limitations.
Loosely based on Erica Jongs own life, it tells the story of writer Isadora Wing, as she
travels through Europe in pursuit of independence and sexual liberation. It deserves
recognition as an explicitly feminist narrative that became a mass bestsellerit has sold
15 million copies worldwide, bringing feminism and the sexual revolution into mainstream
America and into the homes of millions of women who were not activists. At the same
time, it is a narrative which privileges the personal to the extreme, paving the way for a
feminism in which lifestyle choices are substitutes for political activism, struggle, or even
political awareness. Ultimately, Jongs critique of marriage, the nuclear family, and
womens subordination translates into a choice of men, and a choice of psychiatrists.
Since Isadoras lovers are also her psychiatrists, the choice is ultimately one and the
same. By the sequel, Jongs move from political and/or sexual revolution to personal
revolution is complete. In How to Save Your Own Life, as the title itself suggests, feminism
has become entirely individualized while the collective has been left behind.
As the movement in the streets declined, feminist writers who were also activists
increasingly turned toward fiction as their primaryand sometimes onlymeans of
enacting political change. While the early movement had consciously rejected the
possibility of personal solutions to collective problems, as collective struggle declined a
generation of newly radicalized women found themselves with a raised consciousness in a
world that was still sexist to its core.
Marge Piercy is a noteworthy writer and activist whose work in many ways mirrors the
broader trajectory of feminism. Born in Detroit, she was an important activist in SDS, the
New Left, and the womens liberation movement. Her first novel, Small Changes (1974),
shows both the potential and limitations of radical politics. It traces the lives of two
women, one of whom begins in a traditional marriage, runs away, discovers her love of
women, and lives in various womens communes. The other, more radical at the
15

beginning, living in open relationships, ultimately ends up confined by a stale marriage

and motherhooda shadow of the woman she once was. The novel reflects the limitations
of the movement but also some of its radicalizing potential. In Vida (1979), the title
character lives underground, still dedicated to the remnants of radical movements of the
1960s, yet trapped in an increasingly anachronistic lifestyle to avoid criminal prosecution
for her actions as a member of Piercys fictionalized depiction of the Weather
Underground. Unable to relive the vibrant days of the radical Left, she is also incapable of
reentering a present in which those movements have been demolished. Her own political
commitment to an unfulfilled vision of revolutionary change requires her to live the life of
a constant fugitive. While Piercy maintains some hope for a future renewal of the
revolutionary fervor of her generation, in Vida she provides a stark depiction of the cost of
failure for individual revolutionaries who devoted themselves to a revolutionary
perspective that failed to be realized.
In Three Women (1999), she tells the story of three generations of women: Beverly, an
activist and union organizer, symbol of the struggles of women in the 1930s; her daughter
Suzanne, an activist lawyer and symbol of the womens liberation movement; and her
daughter, Elena, who as a symbol of the post-feminist generation, seems lost for most of
the novel. At the end, she may go back to school, but her future is uncertainas is,
notably, the future of feminism. Suzanne, however, like Piercy, keeps up the fight and
vows to go on teaching and seeking justice, no matter how flawed and partial.44
In search of liberation, Piercy increasingly turns towards the past, with City of Darkness,
City of Light (1996) about the French Revolution or Sex Wars (2006), about first-wave
feminists in post-Civil War New York. But, her most interesting novel is Woman on the Edge
of Time (1976), which draws on a feminist utopian tradition to imagine genuine human
liberation. The novel tells the story of Connie, a woman confined to a mental hospital after
defending a woman from a forced, illegal, and life-threatening abortion. While
institutionalized, she is visited by representatives of Mattapoisett, a future utopian world
where gender differences have been all but eliminated (they use gender-neutral pronouns,
person and per), free love abounds, and children are raised collectively. It is a fascinating
novel, which shows an attempt of radicals to imagine a world beyond capitalism in which
people collectively run their own society in their own interests.
Marilyn Frenchs The Womens Room published in 1977 is, in contrast, a tragic narrative
about the demise of feminism. The protagonist, Mira, escapes an oppressive marriage, and
goes to Harvard where she discovers radical politics. The character Val functions as a
symbol of both the promise and the failures of the radical feminist movement. She is a
role model for Mira and functions as a teacher and a guide in the world of Harvards
radical student politics. A feminist and an antiwar activist who disavows capitalism and
devotes herself to the Movement, she has also lived in communes and raises her
daughter outside the confines of the nuclear family. She is the ultimate symbol of the
sexual revolution in the novel.
Vals political optimism and revolutionary zeal cannot, however, survive the rape of her
daughter. From this point on, Val devotes herself entirely to the cause of radical feminism
and an underground womens movement to combat violence against women. Not only
does she reject the politics of nonviolence, she also rejects the possibility of interracial
solidarity and political alliances between men and women. The radical possibilities
promised by the political movements of the 1960s die with her daughters rape, as Val
comes to the conclusion that all men are inherently violent and sexist. The most oftencited passage from the novel is Vals political conclusion that: Whatever they may be in
public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are
rapists, and thats all they are.45
Vals political transformation is made all the more dramatic by her discovery that her
daughters rapist was an African American male, which challenges her earlier antiracist
politics. Despite her initial sympathy with the Black men she sees in custody leading up to
16

her daughters trial and her recognition of the racism of the criminal justice system, she
nonetheless concludes that the political dividing line is gender and that all menno
matter their race or the oppression they themselves faceare the enemy. In Rape,
Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist, Angela Davis takes Susan Brownmiller to task
for a discussion on rape and race in Against Our Will, which evinces an unthinking
partisanship which borders on racism.46 She continues by arguing, Her failure to alert
white women about the urgency of combining a fierce challenge to racism with the
necessary battle against sexism is an important plus for the forces of racism today.47 The
same is true of Frenchs novel.
This incident and Vals repudiation of her earlier politics mark the ultimate defeat of the
revolutionary potential of the political period. Shortly after Vals turn to militant feminism,
she attempts to liberate an African American woman who has been convicted of murder
for defending herself against a rapist. In the resulting police mele, Val is murdered (along
with five women who participated in the action) and her body explodes through the force
of her own unused grenade. Written after the demise of the New Left and the feminist
movement, the novel reflects the failure of those movements to enact the social and
political changes necessary for liberation as well as the devastating consequences of the
failure of mainstream and radical feminist groups to make antiracism central to their
project and to build genuine solidarity with all oppressed groups. Mira, like many other
protagonists of these later novels, ends up with a radicalized consciousness and nowhere
to go.
After the backlash
Forty-five years later the picture is all the more bleak. In a 2013 New Yorker article written
after the death of Shulamith Firestonethe radical feminist activist and author of The
Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist RevolutionSusan Faludi eloquently describes the
devastating toll of the backlash of the 1980s and 90s on activists of the radical womens
movement. By the time Firestones body was found in the studio apartment on a fifth-floor
tenement walkup in the East Village, she had been dead for several days. She was sixtyseven years old, living on public assistance, and had spent decades battling
schizophrenia. Faludi describes her funeral as a radical-feminist revival. She describes
Kate Millett reading from Firestones Airless Spaces (1998), in which Firestone wrote of
herself in the third person: She could not read. She could not write. . . She sometimes
recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall
having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.48 Faludi
notes:
Clearly, something terrible had happened to Firestone, but it was not her despair alone
that led Millett to choose this passage. When she finished reading she said, I think we
should remember Shulie, because we are in the same place now. It was hard to say which
moment the mourners were there to mark: the passing of Firestone or that of a whole
generation of feminists who had been unable to thrive in the world they had done so much
to create.49
Nonetheless, the legacy of feminism is crucial. It opened up a space for women writers
that had not existed beforeand it continues to inspire readers today. Furthermore, many
of the writers of the period continue to be political activists, committed to social justice
and transforming the world. Alice Walker, for example, remains one of the most important
writers and activists in the United States. After her first novel in 1970, she
wrote Meridian, a novel of the civil rights movement which like other works of the period
reflects on some of the failures of the movement, but also maintains a clear commitment
to keeping up the fight. Her most famous work The Color Purple is a trailblazing work of
American literatureand one which provides an optimistic vision, even if the resolutions
she imagines push the boundaries of realism. Like Marge Piercy, she also continues to be
an activist. In 2003, she was arrested in protest of the war in Iraq along with author
Maxine Hong Kingston of The Woman Warrior. She has also actively supported Chelsea
Manning and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement.
17

While the demise of the womens movement was profoundly demoralizing to many
women, it forced others to reevaluate the limits of personal politics and come to
revolutionary conclusions. Adrienne Rich is an important example in this regard.
Adrienne Rich was a successful poet before the eruption of the womens liberation
movement, but it was the birth of that movement that gave force and vibrancy to the
formal ingenuity and aesthetic brilliance of her verse. In 1976, Adrienne Rich came out as
a lesbian with the publication of Twenty-one Love Poems, which celebrated her sexuality
and love for women.
It was in this time period that Rich also began to give voice to her radicalizing political
consciousness through more theoretical political essays which drew both on her personal
experience and her experience in the womens liberation movement. The result was Of
Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published in 1976, and perhaps
her most influential essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence,
published in 1980. Like many other feminist theorists of the time, Richs political
understanding of womens oppression was firmly rooted in patriarchy theory and identity
politics. For example, she ends Of Women Born by declaring:
The repossession by women of our own bodies will bring far more essential change to
human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers. . . . We need to
imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a
world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children (if and as we
choose) but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human
existencea new relationship to the universe.50
In this passage, Rich echoes many ideas of the radical feminist movement, counterposing
the struggle for womens liberation to workers struggles for economic justice, despite the
fact that, as she later acknowledges, the vast majority of women are workers. The
passage also reflects the dominance of identity politics in this period and, in particular, the
idea that since the personal was political, one needed only to change ones personal
life to bring about broader political change.
The demise of the womens liberation movement and the subsequent backlash against
women compelled Adrienne Rich to question the movements political underpinnings, and
her own political conclusions. One major influence in Richs changing political
consciousness was her introduction to Marx. In the 1986 reprint of Of Women Born, Rich
included a new introduction in which she writes that she would no longer end the book
with the passage quoted above. While she continued to be a tireless advocate for
womens reproductive freedom and control of their own bodies, she saw this fight as a
catalyst for broader social transformation, which she argues
can only happen hand in hand with, neither before nor after, other claims which women
and certain men have been denied for centuries: the claim to personhood, the claim to
share justly in the products of our labor, not to be used merely as an instrument, a role, a
womb, a pair of hands or a back or a set of fingers; to participate fully in the decisions of
our workplace, our community; to speak for ourselves, in our own right.51
Rich remained an activist until her death, protesting the first Gulf war, NATOs intervention
in Kosovo, and against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, like Walker, supported
the boycott of Israel. When she was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry (along
with Allen Ginsberg), she refused to accept it on her own. Instead, she accepted it
alongside Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. Together, they accepted the award on behalf of all
women. She also lent her voice to the movement against the prison injustice system,
against the war on the poor, and for the oppressed and the disenfranchised. Her 2009
poem, Ballade of the Poverties, is a moving tribute to the myriad poverties that afflict
working people around the world. She writes,

18

Theres the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the

rusted toilet bowl
The poverty of to steal food for the first time
The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck
The poverty of sweet charity ladling
Soup for the poor who must always be there for that
Theres poverty of theory poverty of swollen belly shamed
Poverty of the diploma or ballot that goes nowhere52
The poem concludes with an indictment of (and warning to) the 1% who travel by private
jet like a housefly/Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties.53
Rich, like many feminist writers, remained committed to a poetry from belowa poetry
which could be the literary expression of a revolutionary consciousness, of the struggles
and aspirations of millions, as well as the love and passion which make life worth living. As
she wrote in Dreamwood, poetry/ isnt revolution but a way of knowing/ why it must
come.54
By giving voice to the personal and political struggles and aspirations of the movement,
feminist writers transformed the consciousness of millions of women, and fundamentally
transformed the world of literature. The triumph of the womens liberation movement, in
particular in its artistic expression, was to fundamentally challenge the separation of
personal and political concerns. It transformed our understanding of what could be
deemed literary and opened the canon to many who had been marginalized and/or
excluded. Without fail, writers and activists of the feminist movement made the personal
very public, challenging the world to recognize the insidious nature of womens
oppression, demanding a public voice, and refusing to be swept back under the rugs of
domesticity from whence they had escaped. As Kate Millett explains in her reply to critics
who sought to demolish her work and herd her words back into the safe confines of the
private or personal spheres:
I think its too late for all that. Weve started and were getting up speed. . . . No more
silence. Gay or straight, women arent there any more. We refuse. We refused quite a long
while ago and we will not be cowed back into line. The shame is over.55

Why The Personal Is Political

By Emily Heist Moss
May 17, 2013
16
Emily Heist Moss discusses how the decisions at the top trickle down to affect our
everyday lives.
Nothing personal, but
Uh oh.
Nothing good ever comes from a statement that starts with Nothing personal.
Nothing personal, but I just think marriage should be between men and women.
Nothing personal, but I dont get whats wrong with a guy paying for dinner.
Nothing personal, but feminists are just somilitant!
Nothing personal, but I dont like women with short hair.
Nothing personal, but I dont see why I should pay for your birth control
19

Nothing personal.
In the late 60s and early 70s, The personal is political became a catchphrase of the
feminist movement. Origins unknown, it was popularized in a Carol Hanisch essay by that
name in Notes From a Second Year: Womens Liberation in 1970. Coupled with
consciousness-raising groupssessions during which women gathered to discuss and
dissect their own experiences with oppression, discrimination, sexism, and stereotyping
the personal is political encapsulated the relationships women were finding between
their individual experiences and the broader fight for equal treatment.
*****
Its been over 40 years since the personal is political became the embodying phrase of
my feminist ancestors and I still feel like I spend half my life explaining why personal
decisionsto change your name, to enlarge your breasts, to get married or not, to stay at
home or to work, to shave your legshave a role in conversations about policy and
politics. No one is suggesting that discussing hair removal is on par with conversations
about reproductive health, only that the aesthetic objectification of women is undeniably
related to the reduction of women to their reproductive parts by politicians from
Mississippi to North Dakota.
Theres a criminological philosophy called the Broken Windows theory that says that when
a building has one broken window, vandals are more likely to break in. More broken
windows leads to graffiti, then theft, then squatters, and before you know it, the building is
on fire. In How to Be a Woman,Caitlin Moran applies the Broken Windows theory to the
treatment of women in the media:
If we live in a climate where female pubic hair is considered distasteful, or famous and
powerful women are constantly pilloried for being too fat or too thin, or badly dressed,
then, eventually, people start breaking into women, and lighting fires in them.
When headlines begin with Hillary Clintons makeup regimen or Sarah Palins weight loss,
it signals what we think is important: a womans looks. When we begin an obituary of a
groundbreaking scientist with a discussion of her beef stroganoff, it is an indicator of what
we think makes a woman successful, and its not her work or her brains. The scrunchie
commentary is the broken window, but the unwillingness to view women as humans with
agency and brainpower and ambition and accomplishment is how the flames are fanned.
*****
The point of consciousness-raising groups was to connect the dots in both directions
between the personal decisions we make and the political realities that inform those
choices. How does a country that doesnt provide paid maternal leave (like virtually every
other developed nation in the world) value the work, the health, and the happiness of its
mothers? How are my relationships with my partner and my family related to the policies
that affected my choices? How does what was decided by the powers that be trickle down,
and how are my day-to-day experiences reflected by structures at the top?
Whether or not I can get married. Whether I have access to healthcare that I can afford.
Whether my healthcare choices are limited by someone elses vision of what I should or
shouldnt be doing. Whether I am at the whim of my employer regarding family leave. In
todays hyper-polarized climate, this stuff is quite political, but it is intensely personal.
Will my work be measured by the same standards as my male peers? Will my career
progression be impacted by bias or stereotype? Will I be judged for the way I look or dress
instead of the way I think and act? Will perceptions of my abilities be boxed in by my
gender? Personal struggles, you might say, but in our media-saturated culture we see
these issues wrestled with on a very public stage. Personal, yes, and political too.

20

The personal is political. The political is personal. Backwards, forwards, upside down or
right side up, it is not in the abstract that we lob bricks at women these days. Our bricks
are sexist photo spreads and victim-blaming and slut-shaming and protectionist bullshit
and we-know-better and legislative restrictions on our rights and the policing of our
choices and the criticism of our clothes and second-class status and fear of our
independence. Those are the bricks we are throwing and the building is on fire and
I will take it personally. You should too

I was sitting next to my seven-year-old, Louise, the other day, when she looked up
thoughtfully from sucking on her Chupa Chup. "Is it true, Daddy," she said, "that, as
Shulamith Firestone, Carol Hanisch and other second-wave feminist pioneers have
suggested, the personal is political, and that family structure is a form of oppression
underpinned by the patriarchal hegemony?"
I nodded and requested that she clarify. Was her question, "Is it really power rather than
love, that is the central dynamic of family life?" It was.
First, I informed her, it was important that we defined our terms. Power, as I understood
the word, simply means "the capacity and means to get what you want". Immediately,
therefore, we hit a complication because many people don't know what they want or
what they want is contradictory. That is to say they want, for instance, freedom at the
same time as security; or demand as if such a request could be complied with to be an
object of spontaneous love.
Putting that to one side, the way power plays out is much more subtle and psychological
than the "personal is political" analysis allows. A man may be physically stronger, but
psychologically weaker. A woman may complain that she is sexually objectified, but at the
same time, use her sexual power to gain advantage. Another woman may complain about
her burden of housework and childcare while clinging to a strong proprietary sense over
home and children. A man may earn more than his wife, but have little control over the
purse strings.
Then there are the powers of love and leaving. It is said that in every relationship there is
someone who loves and someone who allows themselves to be loved. This is a form of
power structure. Similarly, if one person seems independent enough to manage on their
own and is clearly capable of walking out on the relationship, that is also a form of power.
As for the children, the idea that they are powerless in the family context is the most
questionable analysis of all. Their ruthless use of their powers of cuteness means that they
can pretty much get away with whatever they want simply by simpering or inverting their
lower lip. Then there is adult guilt and peer pressure, which ensures that children exert
enormous force within the family structure.
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But why, inquired Louise, is power writ so large in an arena that is conventionally meant to
be defined by love? Because, I replied, people use relationships for "getting what they
want" or what they think they want and thus the personal becomes political, and will
have the same outcome as politics: strife, conflict and disharmony.
True family unity is not about getting what you want. It is about working for the good of
that unit. It is about a certain set of ideals faith if you will. Sadly, in this individualistic,
"give me what I want now" society, these ideals are almost an anachronism. Until the
personal transcends the political, no family can really claim to be functioning properly. And
at an individual level, real power lies in being an integrated, self-conscious human being.
No political act can prescribe that by law. And that is why, at another level, the personal is
not political at all.

21

"Fascinating," said Louise, as I completed my analysis. Then, as is her wont, she quoted
the Bard, nodding ruefully "Tis true, 'tis pity, / And pity 'tis, 'tis true."
"Now, Father," she concluded, "will please you fetch me a mug of hot chocolate with
marshmallows? And also I would like pyjamas warmed on the radiator for when I retire."
Naturally, I complied, caught as I was between the Scylla and Charybdis of sentimentality
and the false consciousness of paternal duty. I am sure the irony was not lost on Louise.
But she still got what she wanted.
The personal is political. Sound familiar? If youve ever taken a beginners Gender Studies
course, or read anything about the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s, it
probably does. It was the collective cry of women who wanted their feminism to be taken
seriously as a platform for acknowledgment of their lived experiences, but also one for
political resistance and transformation.
Ive abandoned most of what I learned about second wave feminism for the sheer
irrelevancy of it to any of my life, but if I retained one thing, it was the the personal is
political. As I reflect on what it means to be a 25 year old (as of today!) black (girl) woman
and feminist, I can only think of that phrase to sum up my journey. During a time when I
feel like everyone is inclined to fall on one side of the fence or the other (extremely
political or completely individualistic), remembering the larger implications of my personal
actions and beliefs is difficult; in the same way that seeing myself within larger political
institutions has become.
If I had to share what feminism has taught me to someone, it would be that although there
are thousands of ways to do it wrong, there is no right way to be a feminist. There are as
many kinds of feminism as there are feminists and not one of them is limited by definition.
Adversaries, and some supporters, say that the feminist movements lack of unified goal
is our weakness. This is simply not true. We dont lack a unified goal, we lack a defined
goal. And that is not our weakness, it is our work. Self-definition is our priority. Autonomy
and liberation are what all of us are looking for, across the human spectrum. And with its
focus on intersectionality, social justice, and human rights I whole heartedly believe that
feminism is the one movement that can truly liberate us all. You can quote me on that.
But it starts with a basic acceptance of the act that our personal is political: and in the
same way that is true for us, it is also the reality for others. Only a handful of other people
might understand why feminism, for me, means the freeing of black minds, the rights of
twerkers, and the redefining of the term bad bitch. And thats okay. But I cant police other
feminists who dont share those goals or have knowledge about my experiences, because
theyre mine.
As I prepare to explore 25 more years of feminism I hope that I can continue to humble
myself to the experiences of others.
Stan Brakhage
If Maya Deren invented the American avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage realized its
potential. Unquestionably the most important living avant-garde filmmaker, Brakhage
single-handedly transformed the schism separating the avant-garde from classical
filmmaking into a chasm. And the ultimate consequences have yet to be resolved; his
films appear nearly as radical today as the day he made them.
Brakhage was born in 1933, and made his first film, Interim (1952), at 19. Notably prolific,
he has completed several films most years since. To date, his filmography lists over 300
titles, ranging in length from a few seconds to several hours.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, attended high school in Central City, Colorado. He briefly
attended Dartmouth College then left for San Francisco, where he enrolled at the
California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He had hoped to study
22

under Sidney Peterson., but unfortunately, Peterson had left the school and the film
program was no more, so Brakhage moved on.
Like Deren, Brakhage came to understand film through poetry, and his earliest films do
resemble those of Deren and her contemporaries. The early American avant-garde
filmmakers tended to borrow liberally from the German Expressionists and Surrealists:
mannered acting, symbolism/non sequitur, non-naturalistic lighting and psychosexual
themes were common. Still fundamentally story-oriented, these films tend to use a loose,
non-linear narrative and dramatic situations to establish metaphorical relationships
between images. Derens films are closest to those of the Surrealists: though she rejects
their often cynical nihilism, her films are steeped in portentous Freudian symbolism.
Brakhages early films are more primal. There is no evidence of the Expressionist-inspired
preciousness of the pre-WWII American avant-garde filmmakers, and his invocation of
Freudian ideas, while omnipresent, is much blunter than Derens. For Derens cerebral
idealism, Brakhage substitutes a rawer, psychologized version of reality. Many of
Brakhages films from this period are very good, but they are overshadowed today by the
films they begat.
While Brakhages early films stress psychological themesthe conflict between wish-dream
and reality, for exampleand retain a strongly dramatic element, they provide frequent
glimpses of the formal leap that soon followed.
Despite a rapidly deepening reservoir of ideas, avant-garde film retained a strong
connection to the commercial cinema. European avant-garde filmmakers had long made
liberal use of photographic effects and trick photography. But nothing they did formally
was at all unfamiliar to the commercial cinema, which was quick to pick up on their ideas.
But if strange photographic effects are one thing, turning celluloid into a plastic medium
was something else altogether.
Brakhage was among the first filmmakers to physically alter the filmstrip itself for
metaphorical effect. The most striking example of this technique in his early films occurs
in Reflections on Black (1955), which imagines the dream-vision of a blind man as he
walks through a city, climbs the stairs of his apartment building and arrives home.
Brakhage signals the blindness of his protagonist by physically scratching out his eyes,
and splices in bits of film negative to convey the sense of experience the world as a blind
man might, not as something seen, but something pictured.
Shortly before making Reflections of Black, Brakhage moved to New York City. That same
year, the film critic Parker Tyler introduced Brakhage to Joseph Cornell, who commissioned
him to shoot a film of the soon to be dismantled Third Avenue El. Working for the first time
without actors or plot, Brakhage began to focus on the expressive qualities of the medium
itself. The film which resulted, Wonder Ring (1955), represents Brakhages first step
toward his radical reconception of the cinema. There is no story, no protagonist, no linear
narrative other than the train itself, traveling endlessly along its track. It is a perfect
expression of the world defined by the train, and a peculiarly apposite metaphor for the
bare logic of narrative itself.
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by
compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which
must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many
colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of Green? How many
rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves
can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering
with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a
world before the beginning was the word.
With this opening paragraph to his seminal manifesto Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage
called into being an entirely new kind of cinema, where none had existed previously.
23

Suddenly, an epistemological question loomed where none had before: What is the nature
of the relationship between the moving image and the world, and how might it be
represented? Brakhage intended to film not the world itself, but the act of seeing the
world. The vast majority of Brakhages films are entirely silent. When you watch his films,
you are asked to look, and look closely. Where his predecessors used metaphor as a
means of relating images to one another, Brakhages films were themselves expressions
of a single, great metaphor: visual perception.
These questions were by no means unique to Brakhagethey were in fact the catalyst for
modern artbut he was the first to realize their implications for the cinema in a body of
truly great works of art. In Anticipation of the Night(1958), one sees Brakhages first
clearly articulated expression of his concept of the vision of the untutored eye. While
retaining the barest elements of narrative, in this work Brakhage entirely dispenses with
the drama, in order to better capture raw experience. The shooting script for the 40
minute film consists of a list of 16 concepts, rather than specific shots. Where his earlier
films approximated dreams, Anticipation of the Night captures the dreamlike quality of raw
experience, the world as it happens and is taken in and understood, willy-nilly.
While making Anticipation of the Night, Brakhage married Jane Collum, who was to
become his muse, and the primary subject of his films for many years. Easily the best
known of these is Window, Water, Baby, Moving (1959), a document of Janes pregnancy
and the birth of their first child. Family, and the rituals of family life, became the
predominant themes of Brakhages films for many years. Birth, sex, and death are the
three touchstones of all of his films. In Thigh, Line, Lyre, Triangular (1961), Brakhage again
documents the birth of one of his children, and their passage through infancy and
childhood is a consistent theme. Several of Brakhages films focus on sexual relations, not
only between a man and wife, but among friends, and the proto-sexual aspects of
childhood. In other films he examines the rituals surrounding death and the body which
remains after the being has departed. Sirius Remembered (1959), which documents the
gradual dissolution of the corpse of the family dog, and The Dead (1960), made in Pre
Lachaise cemetery in Paris, prefigure several later films which return to this same theme.
Brakhages most ambitious projects of the early 60s were Dog Star Man (1961-64) andThe
Art of Vision (1961-64), essentially one film articulated two different ways. Dog Star
Man definitively marks the transition from a lyrical style, centered on individual
experience, to a more epic style, with a focus on broad metaphysical themes. Roughly
speaking, the film expresses a mythic conception of the struggle and fall of Man. Made in
four parts, with a prelude, Dog Star Man incorporates many layers of superimposition and
a dense, rapid editing pattern. The Art of Vision consists of exactly the same material
as Dog Star Man, but separates the superimposed reels of film in various combinations. As
the elements of the film gradually build and cascade into one another, one begins to see
the connections between the elements more and more clearly, how and why certain
themes are repeated, and the simultaneously epic and analytic quality of the film itself.
Since completing The Art of Vision, Brakhages films have become consistently more
metaphysical. Even his celebrated Pittsburgh trilogy, completed in 1971, which purported
to document three city institutions, at its core deals with metaphysical questions of Being.
The three films: Eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes, document the
police, a hospital and a morgue, respectively. All focus on the mechanics of the body: how
it is ordered in life, how it is repaired when broken, and what remains when the person
who animates it has perished. The key image of The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes is
quite likely the bluntest statement on the human condition ever filmed. In the course of an
autopsy, the skin around the scalp is slit with a scalpel, and in preparation for exposing
and examining the brain, the face of each cadaver is literally peeled off, like a mask,
revealing the raw meat beneath. That image, once seen, will never leave you.
The feature-length The Text of Light (1974) consists entirely of abstracted patterns of light
photographed through a thick, deep-green ashtray. Anticipating his non-photographic
24

abstract films of the 80s and 90s, it reduces photography to its ratio ultima, the influence
of light on photographic emulsion.
in photographing this ashtray for instance, Im sitting for hours to get 30 seconds of film.
Im sitting watching whats happening and clicking a frame, and sitting and watching, and
further than that, I had shot several hundred feet and they seemed dead. They didnt
reflect at all my excitement and emotion and feeling. They had no anima in them, except
for two or three shots where the lens which was on a tripod, pressed against the desk, had
jerked. Those were just random, but what gave me the clue. What I began doing was
always holding the camera in hand. For hours. Clicking. Waiting. Seeing what the sun did
to the scene. As I saw what was happening in the frame to these little particles of light,
changing, I would shoot the camera very slightly.
In recent years, Brakhage has focused largely on painting, scratching and drawing directly
on the surface of the film strip itself. In eschewing photography altogether he focuses
more directly on the bare act of perception. These films recall the paintings of abstract
expressionists like Pollock, Klein, Motherwell and Rothko, and pack the same visceral
punch. If youve ever stood in front of a great Rothko, and felt yourself falling in, the
experience of watching the best of Brakhages hand-painted films is very similar.
I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film essentially freeing
myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a music for the
eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be
said to work primarily with musical ideas, I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to
film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic closure apropos Primal
Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner earthe
primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to
achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but at one with the inner lights, the
Light, at source, of being human.
Stan Brakhage died of cancer on March 8, 2003, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The
Museum of Modern Art in New York City is in the process of preserving all of his films. His
last finished film, Stans Window, is a photographed self-portrait. Brakhage left behind the
beginning of another film, The Chinese Series, composed of 35mm black leader he had
scratched with his fingernails. The film was to end wherever he stopped scratching.
Window Water Baby Moving*
Quick shots of loving hands on a pregnant stomach, joyful eyes, smiles, and the silhouette
of an expecting woman give way to a raw, graphic, and visually stunning document of
Brakhages first child being born. 1959, 16mm, 13 minutes.
Sexual Meditation: Motel #1*
Part of the Sexual Meditation series, this film is a rhythmic and abstract exploration of
light, hand-painted textures, and the possibilities of two nudes in a room. 1970, 16mm,
6 minutes.
Sexual Meditation: Room with a View
This sequel to Sexual Meditation: Motel #1 is a playful film of three nudes in a room that
incorporates such techniques as jump cuts, double exposures, and hand-painting. 1970,
16mm, 4 minutes.
Stan Brakhage at Harvard
Although film is still trying to extricate itself from other art, I share an excitement with my
contemporaries that we are at the dawn of film being born as something completely
different in the world. --Stan Brakhage, 1973

25

AS COUNTER cutting-edges of creative forces defining film essence, Stan Brakhage and
Jean-Luc Godard have catalyzed complementary film movements. While Godard has
brought to bear the history of abstract intellection in vivisecting the codes and
conventions of bourgeois narrative film-making, Stan Brakhage has trans substantiated
the history of abstract expressionism in creating an answer to the basic question "What is
cinema?" Although academic film communities have identified with the analytical
"specular text" -- the examining, form-destroying discourses -- of Godard and
sentimentally embraced the "naive texts" of nostalgic cultural mythology, for example
formula movies of unrestricted genres, Brakhage and the New American Film Movement
he leads have been unappreciated by the academic eyes of verbal bigotry.
A pioneer among the American "film-as-art"-ists, Brakhage's goal is to make films which
will maintain lasting value and sustain an infinite number of screenings. As such his
medium is hardly the mass-age: Joyce and Picasso imply Brakhage far more directly than
do Warner Bros. or Warhol. In fact, Brakhage's relationship to the tidal wave of freeformimage-ination films is strikingly similar to Picasso's to cubism.
Subtly sophisticating the transmission of sensual information over the past two decades,
Stan Brakhage has projected an inner vision (what you do see when you turn out the
lights, when you close your eyes, when you change sight-thought relationships) through,
and worn his heart on, his films. Consequently, any audience wishing to enter the kingdom
of Brakhage must become as little children, must not wrongly expect "entertainment" but
meet each image, sequence, film on its own terms. It must concentrate on learning to see
how one sees -- how one comes to understand the worlds of fantasy and observation.
POUND is dead. Picasso is dead. Brakhage is alive and healthy in Hunt Hall tonight. He will
show films made within the past two years including The Act of Seeing With One's Own
Eyes, The Riddle of Lumen, The Myth of Phos, and his Sexual Meditation series. An
involving, often brilliant conversationalist, Brakhage successfully bridges the experiential
gap between his films and their audiences when he verbalizes those personal meanings
hiding between the layers of abstraction.
The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, shot in a morgue in Pittsburgh, poses a stunning
alternative to Hollywood Pavlovian manipulation of audience emotion. Rather than
suddenly swell the the musical theme under tragic characters, Brakhage, throughout a
thirty-five minute personal interaction with autopsies, permits each viewer of the film to
directly confront his own emotions, examine them, understand them. The Myth of
Phoscontinues Brakhage's list of statements about the elements of the film process: light,
darkness, projection, grain density, focus, and shadow movement. The Sexual
Meditationseries also extends established Brakhage pursuits: the tension of suggestion
and recognition, the psychological association of abstract image flow and filmconsciousness (flares, exposure, stocks, emulsions, and color).
Like ephemeral puffs of exhaust, current commercial movies are exhaled by a sidetracked
Hollywood locomotive caught in the cartoon loop of capitalist consumption. When we can
gain sufficient distance to see ourselves in the Hollywood mirror, we may hopefully give
due recognition to other filmic trains of thought which reflect light on the nature of film as
perception, and cultural utterance. Brakhage, as a metaphor for the exploding, embryonic,
experimental film ghetto of insight, is an opportunity for those interested in the potential
and future for film to discover a most human vehicle of introduction.
Beyond it's merits as a film, it was also important in that this kind of footage simply didn't
exist at the time. It was initially seized by the Kodak lab, and Brakhage had to get a note
from the doctor involved explaining it wasn't pornography (!). The film was part of the
beginning of the movement towards accepting childbirth as beautiful and without need to
be hidden, that fathers can and should be in the room to witness and take part, and that
big white hospitals aren't the only place to have a baby. So it had an impact on a social as
well as a cinematic level.
26

Quite a few years ago, I attended a secondary school excursion to the Melbourne Museum,
where we focused primarily upon the science of the human body. As part of the tour, we
also attended a screening for the IMAX film 'The Human Body (2001),' which used some
nifty film-making techniques to demonstrate the workings of our organs, bones and
muscles. The documentary even delved into the subject of reproduction, though I couldn't
help noticing that the newly-born infant emerged in an peculiar state of utter cleanliness.
Avant-garde Stan Brakhage apparently had no such inclinations towards prudishness.
Perhaps his most notorious film, 'Window Water Baby Moving (1959)' {filmed in November
1958} documents in unflinching detail the birth of his first-born daughter, Myrrena
Brakhage. Unlike the bewildering 'Mothlight (1963),' this is a Brakhage film that one
doesn't need to decipher; the editing and images tell the entire story, not just of a human
birth, but of the tender emotional bond between husband and wife, parent and child, and
the all-seeing lens of the movie camera.
As a warning to potential viewers, 'Window Water Baby Moving (1959)' doesn't recoil from
capturing the most intimate (and explicit) moments of the baby's delivery. Events that
would ordinarily be glossed over in other films, such as the cutting of the umbilical cord, or
the ejection of the placenta (which looks just as painful as getting the baby out), are
documented in detail, over a 13-minute running time that feels substantially longer. Being
a student of biology myself, I felt confident that I could manage well enough, though the
truth is that I'm a complete prude. In fact, I probably should have filmed myself watching
the film, because my facial expressions must have betrayed something akin to revulsion
on at least one occasion. However, as soon as that tiny head emerged from the necessary
orifice, I began to understand this "miracle of birth" that people talk about so frequently.
Even this term, however, is a misnomer, given that there's absolutely nothing miraculous
about reproduction in fact, it's perhaps the most natural phenomenon of all.
Brakhage's film surprised me in that I had expected a straightforward, literal
documentation of the childbirth process, filmed in that continuous hand-held manner that
characterises most modern home movies. However, his use of editing really breathes
emotion into every scene. Even throughout the most crucial moments of the delivery,
Brakhage cuts to shots of his wife, Jane, sharing an affectionate smile with the camera
(behind which stands her husband, of course), or the couple's tightly-clasped hands, the
husband offering his love and support during a time when the male was typically ejected
from the room. 'Window Water Baby Moving' is a movingly personal ode to the immortal
bond of family, and to cinema's ability to capture and bottle these emotions as best as it
can. Brakhage obviously found this documentary excursion to be a worthwhile endeavour,
because he repeated the effort several years later with 'Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961),'
to record the birth of one of Myrrena's siblings. Not for the faint-hearted, but an
unmissable avant-garde experience.
You ever see that clich happening, if not in TV or movies then in real life, of the husband
documenting every single excruciatingly painful but miraculous happening that is birth?
Apparently, according to Stan Brakhage on the DVD this film is on, this trend was at least
in part inspired by his original efforts. Shot on a minimal budget (save for what it must've
cost to have a birth in the Brakhage household as opposed to the hospital), this film IS the
difference between a simple 'home movie' and something close to the most personal art
possible. Documentary film-making has always been about a subject that compels the
filmmaker enough to get hours and hours of footage down. That here Brakhage, who often
does montage work of paintings and the like, is focusing his subject matter on his wife,
and his child just itching to get out, in all graphic detail, is astounding. For the 60's, when
this was first released, it was probably a lot more shocking than now.
Not to say that the film isn't shocking, but it is on a different level than what you might
see on one of those 'birth' shows on one of the Discovery channels. The way certain things
are presented in the film are surprising, and (if you're a guy like me) definitely unnerving.
But Brakhage somehow makes his film almost beautiful in a way by cutting the film's
27

subject matter in half, so to speak. The first half is just the mother of his child, in a
bathtub, feeling the baby kicking, et all. It's really just a great montage of the woman as a
whole, nothing unseen, with the belly getting the most screen-time aside from the
mother's face and genitals. Then comes the second part, the birth. Basically, if you still
wonder how it works, in near unflinching detail, watch the film. That it is presented in such
a grainy 16mm kind of filming, and still using the intense, mad montage of Brakhage's two
cameras on her (I think it was two, one more close to the 'action' than the other).
And when it ends, it is, like all (practically) successful births, a miracle in and of itself. So
much happens within these 13 minutes of film than, in a way, it feels longer. I loved how it
dealt with its subject matter, which could be very tricky, and messy (the latter of which is
very true), and was still a wonder for the eyes. It lacks music, which is sort of a pro and a
con for me- you could do with some music, make it even more home movie-like. As it is,
Brakhage has one of his most notorious- and possibly best- works here, and maybe the
only film that makes that bridge between a health class and film class in school.

Have you ever seen it? This short film by Stan Brakhage an art filmmaker who got his
start among the beat generation, and scratched, drew and painted directly onto the
medium of the film, on top of the recorded images, then playing the movies - in which he
videotapes his wife giving birth in his bathtub. He originated that idea of writing on the
film, or maybe he just popularized it (I am certainly no art historian, so dont look at me
here), but its a neat one, and one that even seems quaint now, when the idea of tangible
film that you can wind into a camera is a novelty. I dont really get art, per se, but Ive
never seen a human being being born before, and the sight, even 50 years later on a
computer screen from a DVD long removed from the physical film and the people it
portrays, is goddamn mind blowing. Maybe less so if youve seen life happen to a human
before, but I havent, and its really quite something.
Ill walk you through it.
First off, the whole thing is silent. All of Brakhages films are without sound, Im pretty
sure, which gives a dissociating and alienating feel to them. Especially this one, which
should be so domestic and so intimate, because of the subject matter, but it actually
comes off as kind of sterile. Neutered. Emotionless briefly, at least.
The first shot is a window above the bathtub and Stans wife, Jane, naked and sliding into
the water. The colors are warm, oranges and yellows with soft shadows and fuzzy edges.
We see the hair on her belly as it swells in and out in the water, and the softest, most
calming smile as Jane gives a chuckle. It looks like fall, I think, maybe mid-September. The
dry parts, when Brakhage cuts to shots of Jane lying in bed, or them kissing in sweaters,
feels like flannel. Its so inviting. Which is really kind of a trick to lure you in.
Because Ive got to warn you, it turns very violent very quickly. The splash of water
recedes down the sides of her belly and all of a sudden those warming reds tones are
threatening horrifying, even. Thats not light thats blood. Its raw in there, and as blood
and pre-birth seeps through Janes vagina, Jesus Christ its terrifying. Its all a mess and
its speeding up.
And then shes shouting silently with a washcloth over her eyes for god knows what
reason, but you could swear that shes being held captive, pinned down by something and
struggling to get free. And shes yelling and screaming and thrashing all about.
The baby is crowning then before you know it. It doesnt even seem like a head at first,
more like shes trying to push a giant pecan out her uterus. Then, slowly, it starts to take
the shape of a top of a head. Like theres hair there. Then a face appears, but its not
breathing, it is? How is it breathing? The mouth is not in a proper position outside of Janes
body to be taking in oxygen, and I have no idea whats happening anymore theres
28

white goo spread around the vagina and the cameras shaking and Janes abdomen is
turning purple and is being stretched way too much for it to stay intact,
One of the nice things about the lack of sound is the ability for you, as the audience, to
play music and affect the mood of the video. Or not to, and to let the sounds of your open
window on a late April day cars in the street, birds, passing strangers yelling to each
other wander in and color the birth of someone 50 years ago. Window Water Baby
Moving would be much different with a soundtrack of Metal Machine Music than it would
with Cat Stevenss Father and Son.
Oh, and a baby comes out. A little baby girl, I think, covered in mucus and muck and
screaming so loudly that you can almost still hear it.
They tie the umbilical cord off with a string. I had no idea they did that. Thats a weird
thing to do. I wonder if they still do that, nowadays, in hospitals in the developed world.
The best shot of the whole film is one at the end, of Stan, when he flips the camera and
we see his face, hand to forehead in stunned amazement at the thing that just happened
before him. It moves so quickly, I guess, and it all happened so fast, and now hes a father.
Now his daughter is middle-aged.
The afterbirth looks like a big sack of Hormel chili.
Thats how life happens.
-Julian Hattem
Re-conceiving Misconception:
birth as a site of filmic experimentation
By Roxanne Samer
How then can we define [cinema]? It is still embryonic. A new art must create its own
organs. All that we can do is to help to deliver them out of chaos. Elie Faure[1]
[open endnotes in new window]
Childbirth, procreation: the ever-ready metaphors for artistic creation, newness and
originality. In some cases, no other word play is more apt. Such is the case with U.S. avantgardist Stan Brakhage, who trained his camera throughout his prolific career, which
spanned the second half of the twentieth century, on his own family, including filming the
births of his first five children.[2] This, in and of itself, was a revolutionary act, as prior to
the 1950s childbirth was for the most part off limits as subject matter for filmmaking. As
Amos Vogel states in his well-recognized text Film as a Subversive Art, due to its
inextricable ties to sex and blood taboos,
The cinema has treated birth as a guilty secret of mankind, a mystery to be kept from the
impressionable young, a clandestine medical event reserved exclusively for
physicians.[3]
This all began to change in the 1950s when both documentary and experimental
filmmakers such as Brakhage began testing censorship laws and the publics tolerance by
making their own films of the event. Furthermore, Brakhages filming of his wife Jane
giving birth to their first child, which resulted in Window Water Baby Moving (1959), was
done at a time when he was experimenting with his filmmaking style as well as beginning
to theorize as to the significance of the medium as a whole in what would result as his first
book Metaphors on Vision.
It was a time of change and growth in Brakhages career, as he abandoned his earlier
psychodramas in favor of what has been described as a lyrical or personal filmmaking
aesthetic.[4] Window Water Baby Moving was one of four films he made in 1959, a
productivity level that has been seen as a sign of a major breakthrough in his art.[5]
This stylistic shift was also accompanied by his abandoning the use of sound in his films.
29

Seeking to distance himself from commercialized Hollywood cinema in all of its kitschiness
and to appeal to the more autonomous visual arts, Brakhages new filmmaking style
becamez for the most part devoid of sound and keenly attuned to the sense of sight.[6] As
the filmmaker himself stated in a letter of 1966:
The more informed I became with aesthetics of sound, the less I began to feel any need
for an audio accompaniment of the visuals I was making. I think it was seven/eight years
ago I began making intentionally silent filmsI now see/feel no more absolute necessity
for a sound track than a painter feels the need to exhibit a painting with a recorded
musical background.[7]
This lyrical mode of filmmaking had begun to show itself inAnticipation of the Night (1958)
but did not solidify until 1959. It accentuates visuality and is defined by its positing of the
filmmaker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist, whose vision is equated with
the images occurring on the screen. In order to convey himself looking, he uses an
emphasis on movement in the camerawork, editing or harmonization between the two,
and more often than not tends to accentuating the flatness of the screen rather than give
an illusionary depth.[8] While this filmmaking style was to become extremely prevalent in
experimental films of the late-sixties, P. Adams Sitney, a primary exegete of the U.S.
avant-garde, considers it to be single-handedly forged by Brakhage a decade prior to its
period of popularity.[9] Thus Window Water Baby Moving played a principle role not only in
registering the delivery of a newborn child into this world and making this taboo content
public but also in the conception of a new mode of filmmaking
Brakhages Metaphors on Vision, which was published as a special issue of Film Culture in
1963, echoed the attention to issues of the visual that he was simultaneously developing
in his films. [10] In the text, Brakhage posits the prelingual child as an ideal viewer of the
world, asking his adult readers to imagine what it might be like to mobilize a mode of
seeing based on an eye untutored by culture. He challenges Western rules of perspective
and color, postulating them as unnecessarily and messily bound to language. As an
alternative he advocates a return to seeing before the beginning was the word.[11]
Brakhage asks, How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby
unaware of 'Green'? He says it is the eye that reflects the loss of innocence more
eloquently than any other human feature. In such passages of Metaphors on Vision such
as these, Brakhage first develops his idealization of the child as visionary exemplar, which
would permeate his career. As film historian and filmmaker Marjorie Keller, who responded
to Brakhages work in both her writing and her films, has succinctly stated:
Simply put, the infant is a metaphor for the filmmaker at his best moments.[12]
Although Brakhages work dominated the U.S. avant-garde scene of the 1950s, throughout
the following decades he would encounter opposition from fellow filmmakers and critics. In
order to earn a living, he taught and lectured incessantly, which often brought him into
contact with those with alternative positions on the function and purpose of independent
filmmaking. The social movements of the 60s, in turn, led to an increasing interest in
identity politics both inside and outside the art world. Artists and filmmakers alike began
to rethink the conditions of perception and to challenge the autonomy cultural objects had
acquired in their theorization as neutral or disembodied. Mediamakers, artists and scholars
began to insist instead that the race, gender and sexuality of practitioners and viewers be
considered as integral to the understanding of aesthetics. Feminist film theory and praxis
developed a particularly strong base in the United States and Britain, and as David E.
James has concisely put it,
At exactly the time when the search for nonpatriarchal sex and family roles had greatest
cultural urgency, Brakhage, interchangeably bring[ing] forth films and children in the
Colorado wilderness, appeared to embody not the solution, but the problem itself.[13]
Feminists took particular issue with the manner in which Brakhage captured his wife and
problematically utilized her as an objectified muse in his films.[14] His intense close-ups,
30

hand-held camera movements and fast-paced editing seemed either to fetishize or

commit violence to Jane Brakhages body. In a 1978 interview, Amy Taubin stated:
In Brakhage what I think those formal aspects point to is that out of the unlimited access
he has to his subjects lives, an access that is given to him by law, these are the final
things that he culled, the final distillation of the myriads of footage which he could expose
of them and on which he exposed them. Its an ugly metaphor but I always think that Jane
has no right, even if she wanted to, and Im not claiming that she ever does, to close her
legs.[15]
Anne Friedberg, in a 1979 article for Millennium Film Journal, similarly wrote:
As a filmmaker making a film about the birth of his first child, Brakhage endows Jane with
a pregnancy both literal and figurative. Perhaps through his ownership rights as paternal
head of a nuclear family, her body becomes his artistic material: vagina, mouth and
window are intercut as comparative metaphoric apertures. In Brakhages film, Jane-aswoman is pregnant in a double senseshe is both bearer of his child and bearer of his
meaning. [16]
Feminist film critics, including Taubin and Friedberg, began to identify and champion
examples of womens films to counter the male-dominated avant-garde and womens
historical exclusion from the history of cultural objects and artistic practices. One such
example was Marjorie Keller, whose birth film Misconception (1977) would come to be
positioned as a feminist response to Brakhage. Rather than filming her partner or herself
giving birth, Keller was invited by her brother Lee and sister-in-law Chris to film the birth of
their second child. Feminist critics found it important that from the start Keller was further
removed from the process at hand and thus able to offer a more critical position on
childbirth, its divisions of labor and past mythologizing in the eyes of men.
And yet the manner in which Keller has been positioned and utilized as a political tool by
these same critics including alongside Taubin and Friedberg, B. Ruby Rich, Linda
Reisman and Kaja Silverman in the late-70s and early-80s, to a lesser extent Robin Blaetz
more recently is problematic in a number of ways. First of all, there has been little solid
formal analysis done in order to understand Misconceptions relation to Window Water
Baby Moving. Instead, critics tend to mention Brakhage and his film in passing or allude to
it vaguely, while noting briefly that Keller uses a few of the same formal techniques as
those working in the lyrical tradition.
Second, Kellers complex relationship to Brakhage is hardly, if ever, mentioned. In 1973,
the year in which she filmed the footage forMisconception, Keller was finishing her
undergraduate studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and taking courses with Brakhage.
[17] From 1974 through 1983, she was a graduate student in Cinema Studies at New York
University, her research culminating in a dissertation on Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell and
Stan Brakhage. In 1986, it was published as The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of
Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage by Associated University Presses. The third chapter of the
book, quoted earlier, focuses on Brakhage specifically, looking at four of his films from
1964 through 1980 as well asMetaphors on Vision in order to study the evolution of the
filmmakers treatment of childhood and its relation to his development as a filmmaker.[18]
Last, and perhaps most important, past critics writing aboutMisconception have largely
ignored the filmmakers own language. As a filmmaker and film historian, Keller produced
a number of essays, articles and reviews, as well as her book, within which she articulates
her position on a series of film-related issues, including the Brakhage tradition and the
development of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a methodological approach. Notably included
among these is her review of E. Ann Kaplans text Women and Film, which appeared in
theMillennium Film Journal in the winter of 1984-85. It is a brief and yet scorching critique,
panning the texts overdetermined nature and failure to provide the overview and
summation that the title suggests.[19] Keller states that Kaplans
semiological/psychoanalytic approach severely limits the range of films covered, glaringly
31

condensing Maya Derens influence to two paragraphs and not even mentioning some of
the other most influential female filmmakers such as Carolee Schneemann and Marie
Menken. Put most blatantly, Keller writes: By elevating the theory film over others in the
avant-garde, Kaplan obfuscates womens filmmaking in the name of feminism.[20] Here
as well as elsewhere, Keller appears hesitant or at times hostile to the academicizing of
artistic practices, postulating avant-garde films as having more to offer than that which
can be explicated by a particular theorynamely, a subjective and personal mode of
expression.
There also exist a couple of key interviews with Keller from the late seventies and early
eighties in which she most definitively states her own investment in the medium of film
and women-oriented subject matter. Two in particular are highly charged, the 1978
interview with Amy Taubin and the 1983 interview with Linda Reisman. In both cases,
Keller and the interviewer disagree on the extent to which and manner in which her films
function as critiques of patriarchal culture. Similarly, in both interviews, Keller expresses
the difficulties that have come with being appropriated by the feminist film community. To
Reisman, she states:
I am very grateful to the womens movement for taking up my work. But I have suffered
from it a little bit in that its very hard for me to think that the filmmakers whose
work I care about are less interested in these films than a whole lot of other people, some
of whom know almost nothing about film, but who care about them because of the subject
matter.[21][open endnotes in new window]
And to Taubin she states:
Certainly Brakhages world view is not mine, he has every right to acknowledge his own
view in his film and he does it spectacularly well. By treating my film differently, by
placing it in the tradition of feminism and outside the traditional modes of criticism of
avant-garde films, I feel somewhat like a displaced person.[22]
My essay is an attempt to respond to such pleas on the part of the filmmaker and to
approach Misconception with a broader mindset than writers have had about it so far. Put
more generally, past attempts at interpreting Misconception have been reliant on strict
dichotomies. Most notably, it is seen as either feminist or not and thus as belonging to the
tradition of the personal or lyrical avant-garde or not. In this paper, I seek to re-conceive
of Misconception in a manner that releases the film of such binds. I do so with the hope of
opening it up to further future interpretations, re-looking and better appreciation. In order
to achieve this goal, I will keep the filmmakers language in play as I conduct a close
formal analysis of the film attuned to its manipulation of sound and image, the feature
that not only most distinctly distinguishes it from Brakhages film but also contains its
greatest intricacies.
Misconception is forty-three minutes long and is divided into six sections of varying
lengths, each announced by a typed number on a brown notecard. Though the film is by
no means strictly chronological, it most generally progresses throughout the sections from
mid-pregnancy to labor to the postpartum period. Before the first section of the film is
announced, the films title, author and dates appear typed on similar paper cards
separated by brief sections of black leader. Keller has described her need to divide the film
in a way that related to the enormity of what she was representing. She has written in a
letter:
It allowed for a step back and a new point of view in my consideration of documentary
form.[23]
At the same time that the divisions provide the filmmaker distance, they do not diminish
the viewing experience for the spectator. Instead, they contribute to the tension and buildup that culminates in the birth. In this as well as other ways, Keller achieves her goal of

32

com[ing] up with a film that would be as strong as if [she] asked an audience to

experience a childbirth in person.[24]
I contend that the films strength lies largely in Kellers complex editing of sound and
image through juxtaposition and play. For this reason, as well as the general agreement
that Keller differentiates her film from Brakhages especially in her use of sound, it is
important to try to understand how sound is functioning in relation to image
inMisconception and the effect it hasas opposed to silence in Window Water Baby
Moving. In viewing Kellers film it becomes clear that sound and image are being played
off of one another and that their relation is in a constant state of flux throughout the
length of the film. At times the sounds and images sync-up, the words match the
movements of Lees and Chris mouths and the noises make sense within the scene at
hand, but more often than not, this is not the case. Sometimes the scenes dialogue or
diegetic sounds have been re-arranged, while other times sounds from a completely
alternate temporality accompany the depicted scene. As Keller herself has articulated:
The film, as it is present on the screen at any given time, is made up of past, present,
and future images and sounds.[25]
By rearranging the temporal sequence of the film, Keller is recalling the lyrical film
practice as established by Brakhage. Furthermore, Sitney has in fact claimed,
In no other film does Brakhage make as much of a reorganization of chronological time
[than in Window Water Baby Moving].[26]
Keller mobilizes this practice of rearranging time into the arena of the auditory,
complicates its effects, and creates disjunctures between what is seen and what is heard
with its myriad temporal variances. Such audioscapes create a state of confusion for the
viewer, who is unsettlingly made to work through the complications on her own.
From the start, the viewer is thrown into the mix. Without visual or aural introduction, the
number 1 section card disappears, the screen goes black, and a dialogue between
Kellers brother Lee and sister-in-law Chris mid-conversation accompanies the opening
shot. Lee is even mid-sentence. Furthermore, Chris and Lee, as well as their three year-old
son Alex, are never formally introduced. Instead, throughout the first section, which cuts
back and forth between two different scenes 1) the couple is painting their homes
interior and discussing myths of childbirth as well as who is going to get fixed after the
upcoming birth; and 2) the family is playing in the yard as they converse about the
difficulties and benefits of having children. In this section the viewer learns their names
and gathers their relation to one another.
At one point out in the yard, the camera zooms to close-up on Chris face as she expresses
how much the difficulty of parenting has surprised her, stating that if given the chance
over, she may not have chosen to have kids. Alex is seen running naked in the yard as Lee
responds, But youre not taking into consideration the joys The film cuts to Lees face,
but the sound and image do not match. Through Kellers manipulation of the sound in
editing, Lee has been cut-off, interrupted and essentially silenced. The viewer sees him
speaking but cannot hear what he is saying. The camera quickly returns to Chris in closeup, and she says, I know, I knowit just really is a shock to find out how much time it
takes. This time she is cut-off by Kellers editing of the sound, and some continuation of
the conversation on responsibility and children can be heard, but it does not match the
movement of the couples mouths. Alex joins his father, who picks him up and plays with
him, and as Lee lifts him above his head to reach for the branches of a tree, Chris
distinctly states, It sounds really corny and sentimental, but you just cant imagine how
much you love your kids you just cant image it. The viewer will be frustrated when
presented with just fragments of a seemingly important and relevant conversation, but it
is not the only function of these segments. Such structuring also works to suggest the
challenge of discursive expressivitythe difficulty of human subjects have in articulating
complex feelings through language.
33

The second section of the film tends to play with the image/sound relation in a much
different manner. The screen goes black both before and after announcing the second
section with the 2 note card. In the darkness sounds are heard: they seem to be birth
noises a woman moaning and then screaming while others coach her calmly. Once
visuals are presented, however, clearly Chris is in a bubble bath and not giving birth. The
sounds heard did not originally accompany the bath scene but instead have been
superimposed by Keller from Chris later delivery.
Friedberg has described this section as the most explicit homage to Brakhage within the
film, and I would agree.[27] Window Water Baby Moving opens with imagery of Jane
Brakhage, late in her pregnancy, climbing into a bath, and returns to imagery of her
bathing throughout the film. While the second section of Misconception seems to
echo Window Water Baby Moving in its extreme close-ups on the body of the pregnant
woman bathing, the alteration of the sound effects through the rest of the scene lessen
the voyeurism of such shots in making the viewer aware of the constructedness of the
scene at hand.
As soon as the film cuts to a position farther away, it becomes apparent that Alex is in the
bath with Chris. Here the sounds of the birth fade out and the diegetic bath sounds fade
in. The mother and son are playing. She puts bubbles on his chin and tells him to show
Marge, while asking him, Who are you? and him responding, Santa Claus! In hearing
this, the viewer is reminded that there is a specific, named filmmaker shooting the footage
and that it was she, Marjorie Keller, that bore original witness to the scene at hand. In
addition, the flow of the bath scene is not continuous from start to finish but instead has
been edited into a compilation of such moments between the mother and son. The
position of the camera changes throughout, often shooting closer up on their bodies and
other times moving a few feet away in the bathroom doorway. Sounds of panting
accompany some of these shots, while, at other times brief cuts show images of the future
delivery, accompanied by Chris and Alexs playful bath talk.
In addition, at other points in the bath scene, namely when the two are finished and climb
out of the tub, sounds that must have accompanied an earlier portion of the bath can be
heard. Chris sings a song, Everybody wash their and Alex fills in the blank first with
penis and then with hair. Each time, Chris sings the full sentence repeatedly as they
supposedly wash those body parts. The images that accompany such dialogue, however,
do not match. Instead close-ups of Chris body are provided, as she gets out of the bath or
the two of them towel off. As they continue to do so, the mother and son can be heard
singing in unison, Its raining, its pouring, the old man is snoring, as well as a mans
voice telling Chris shes three quarters of the way there, shes almost there. The section
ends with images of Chris and Alex finishing drying off accompanied by a deep silence,
one which could have only been accomplished through the removal of all sound in editing.
They open the bathroom door and exit. The screen goes black, and the film is silent and
dark for about fifteen seconds. In the first section, Chris delivery hovered over the scene,
still an unimaginable, distant event. Now the interference of brief visuals and more
extensive sounds from the future birth in this second section manifest its eventuality as
tangible and apparent. In addition, the concluding period of silent darkness allows for this
inevitability to resonate in the viewers psyche.
The third section is largely composed of a fast-paced visual montage. The film cuts
between Lee talking, Chris on the floor doing her Lamaze birthing exercises, Alex running
around in the yard, and imagery of construction workers tearing the neighboring house
down. As with the scene in the yard earlier, Chris and Lees conversation, which is largely
about the pains of giving birth in practice and in theory, is often stopped, muted, and
restarted again. Lee mentions Pavlov and his method of providing women with conditioned
responses to rehearse when in labor in order to mask the pain. Chris, in response, cites a
woman who wrote to Esquire magazine in criticism of a book on similar pain-free birth
techniques written by a male theorist. Mid-scene the words of a Lamaze class instructor
are introduced into the mix. Chris continues,
34

And I think its sort of a lot of difference between mens view of having a baby and a
womans view you know? A womans view is, I should make this as easy as possible
and mens view is, well it shouldnt hurt to begin with.
Keller has captured and re-choreographed a debate of theory versus praxis, and as the
intermittent sounds of the second section already seem to have suggested, in this film,
praxis wins out.
In her 1984 essay Disembodying the Female Voice Kaja Silverman
describes Misconception as
a film which is devoted to the exploration of the three-way relationship between the male
voice, the female voice, and the female body.[28]
After discussing the typical roles of gendered bodies and voices in narrative cinema, where
most generally the male subject is defined by immateriality and the female by
corporeality, Silverman utilizes Misconception as one of her examples of feminist avantgarde practice where nonsynchronization is used to divorce the female voice from the
female body and thus disrupt standard gender roles in films. She sees Keller specifically as
employing the strategy of aligning a female voice with a male body or a male voice with a
female body.[29] While this does happen on a series of occasions both in Chris and Lees
conversation on pain in the third section and in their earlier conversation on the difficulties
of childrearing, this does not account for the complexities of what is going on between
images and dialogue. Keller is not solely re-aligning the voices and bodies of the two
sexes. Instead, at times when a longer sentence is spoken by either Chris or Lee, the
accompanying visual montage is often cut so rapidly that within the time it takes for the
sentence to come out, the viewer has seen four or five different images. In many cases,
she has seen shots of both the speaking and non-speaking member of the couple as well
as other shots of their son Alex, the yard, the house next door, their dog, etc. At other
times, the audio has been cut down to short fragments, and the key terms Lamaze,
Pavlov, neurological are heard so fast and fleetingly that the viewer does not have
time to align them with a singular image.
The rapidity of the third section winds down as Chris is heard saying, I dont want to do
it! before the camera pulls back from its close-ups, and Chris is seen fully dressed on a
couch with her knees up and Lee at her feet. It appears to be the beginning of her
contractions. The shots begin cutting between the early birth and the construction work
next door. Chris mentions the perineum and the possibility of it tearing in labor as the film
cuts to a bulldozer pushing through the side of the house. Keller is drawing parallels
between the female body and the potential violence it faces in childbirth by juxtaposing it
against the man-made destruction next door. Furthermore, by concluding each section
with a more intense segment than concluded the preceding section, the tension becomes
paramount, building continually as the film progresses.
The fourth section of the film seems to serve a couple of specific functions providing the
last of the significant background, pre-birth material and isolating the parents for the
purpose of exploring their struggles as individuals with the upcoming event. Segregated
by Keller to separate spaces, Chris is seen bracing herself during early contractions in her
delivery room while Lee is seen with Alex, playing together near a river with a waterfall. As
compared to the water imagery in Window Water Baby Moving, where it seems to have a
soothing effect, in this section of Misconception, the loud rumbling water dominates the
soundtrack, its pressure making apparent the stress being felt by both of the parents as
they are uncontrollably rushed towards the impending birth. Despite having gotten
pregnant together, they face its difficulties psychologically apart as individuals and
differently positioned in relation to what is about to happen. At one point, in almost
complete silence, Alex and Lee can be seen walking in front of the waterfall, holding
hands, silhouetted against the pounding water. One might assume that such a silence
would present a feeling of calm but instead it is fraught with anxiety. And the section ends
with Lees voice blatantly stating, Ill tell ya Im really scared. It is true, as many of the
35

films critics have pointed out, thatMisconception tends to focus on the mothers bodily
experience, but in cases such as this, Keller provides space for the father, demonstrating
her interest in both of their responses to the event at hand. While there might not be an
equality in the distribution of work in labor, Keller renders so much apparent without
excluding and thus belittling either party.
With the start of the fifth section and the appearance of the 5 card, the viewer is once
again presented with a black screen accompanied by birthing noises. Chris is panting, and
the doctor is telling her to push through the pain. Once the section of black leader is over
and the film again provides the viewer with visuals, Chris can be seen on her side on the
delivery table with Lee seated at her head. Shots of the birth scene appear in a montage
containing clips of Chris earlier in the pregnancy coming out of the house and approaching
the camera. The difference in facial expressions is obvious. Outside she is smiling. On the
delivery table, her face is tense with pain. This segment is similar to another in Window
Water Baby Moving, where Brakhage brings together shots of Janes face in delivery and
shots of her face from earlier in the bath. As Friedberg has noted, however, the images of
Janes face stretched in agony which seems, in their silence, to be ecstasy in the throes of
labor.[30][open endnotes in new window] By including Chris verbal expressions of pain
heavy breathing, grunting and screaming Kellers film avoids such misinterpretation.
The pain is quite apparent.
Before long, the camerawork becomes more and more confusing. In and out of blackness,
the viewer is provided with fragmented images, distractedly joined by sounds of the nextdoor construction. The camera begins to scan Chris curled up body, at times getting so
close that her legs appear as out of focus pink blotches. As the camera re-arrives at her
upper-body in close-up, she turns her face into the pillow, scrunching it in obvious
discomfort. The camera scans the room wildly, as the nurse tells Chris to take a deep
breath, and we hear her gasp again. Long steady pushes, Chris, accompanies a long but
not so steady movement of the camera. The nurse continues her instruction as the
camera captures everything in mere color field blotches. Not completely disoriented, the
viewer knows the bright red to be Lees shirt, the light blue to be Chris gown, the pink her
naked skin. Her legs come more clearly into focus, and the viewer is provided with just a
glimpse of her crotch and inner thigh, which appear bloody. Eventually, the camera returns
to her face. Her lips are trembling, and one hears both the doctor and nurse encouraging,
warning her, not too fast, before the screen goes black. The wild, hand-held movements
of the camera in this section are direct references to the lyrical filmmaking tradition and
Brakhages part in its formation. As in his films circa 1960, here the viewer gets a sense of
viewing that which the filmmaker herself saw and experienced, and the cameras
particularly extreme gestures reflect the state of stress and excitement felt by those
witness to the biological act of creation.
The rapid editing of image and sound that occurs through the first five sections sets a
pace that is then broken in the sixth section when the actual birth occurs. The first two
minutes and forty seconds of the section appear as an unedited, single long take with insync audio. The camera moves about the scene, the image going in and out of focus, as
Chris pants and screams and Lee, the doctor, and the nurse tell her to push or take it slow.
Often all the camera captures is the fuzzy color-fields of the bodies and fabrics out of
focus, but it continually returns to both Lee and Chris mouths and faces, where the
synchronicity of the audio to the image is confirmed. At one point, however, as the camera
closely examines Chris face, the viewer becomes aware that the baby has been born,
hearing Lees voice say, Come on baby, cry![31] The camera then jerks quickly from
Chris face down her body, and we hear the nurse and Lee almost simultaneously
announce, Its a girl, as the camera arrives at the face of the newborn. The camera
moves wildly about as both Lee and Chris exclaim excitedly.
After Chris has been handed the baby, the screen goes black for a few seconds, and the
afterbirth fills the second half of the sixth section. Although the fast-paced editing and
disjuncture between image and sound of the first five sections does not completely return,
36

this second half is composed of a couple of shots, rather than just the one, and there are a
few edited silences. For the most part the camerawork continues in the wavering,
explorative nature of the first half. At one point, the camera moves in a fluid slow motion
from Chris face to the babys head to her vagina with the umbilical cord coming out. The
baby cries, and the film cuts to a shot of the mother and child from the side. Lees hands
find the umbilical cord, bring a set of medical scissors to it and cut it. A sound beep
accompanies the cut and a small pool of red blood gushes out.
The viewer hears the doctor speaking about the feeling of ecstasy often felt by successful
parents and the humanness felt by others, as she simultaneously sees Chris vagina about
to pass the afterbirth. Chris is on the phone, saying, We just had a little girl, and the
placenta emerges and slides out. The doctors hands take it away, and the viewer is
returned to Chris sitting up on the phone. A couple of the past articles on this film have
offered questionable and greatly differing interpretations of the role of afterbirth. Reisman,
for example, is confused as to why Keller would include the placenta at all, never mind
film it in a manner that make[s] the placenta look like an ugly, bloody mass, and asks
why was it photographed in such an unappealing and lingering way?[32] The fact that
the placenta is, by definition, [a] vascular membranous organ[33]and a natural part of
childbirth, which may on its own appear ugly and bloody, does not seem to occur to her or
matter. Taubin, on the other hand, finds the placentas place inMisconception to be
exemplar of Kellers willingness to interrupt the aesthetic distance, a choice that
Brakhage supposedly agonized over, despite his similar inclusion and rendering of
afterbirth in his own film.[34] For me, the reason Keller would choose to include a shot of
the placenta seems to have a much simpler explanation. First, it references Brakhages
own handling of the afterbirth in Window Water Baby Moving, and, second, Kellers
willingness to depict childbirths beauty, although that beauty is often not culturally
accepted, goes hand-in-hand with her willingness to depict its culturally repressed pain.
The film comes to an end as the camera continues to scan Chris face, the baby, and her
body. She joyously recounts the birth to the person at the other end of the line:
Yes, yes, we are, believe me. Did you know that Lee delivered the baby?...Oh, he was
fine! I did all the work!
The camera is zoomed in so close on Chris face that the viewer can see only her eyes and
the lines around them, which indicate that she is smiling. She laughs, and then the film
goes silent. Her happy eyes bounce back and forth, and then the camera follows the
phones cord down to the sleeping baby. Staying on the babys face, it pulls around to get
the two in the same shot. Chris lips move silently against the phone in the immediate
foreground, and the babys resting face appears just behind in the foreshortened distance.
The screen goes black for a second, and the film is over. Its concluding use of silence and
darkness finally does have a relieving effect, as despite the tension, stress and pain of the
process seen, the film culminates in health and happiness.
Upon closely examining Misconception, it is apparent that the relation between image and
sound is one of instability and unpredictability. Keller demonstrates her fascination with
images and sounds in the ways that they conduct meaning and how flexible they are in
the ways in which they lend themselves to comprehension. The film frequently relays an
interest in the limits of both images and sounds in articulating complex human emotions
and opinions. For example, when the viewer sees Chris and Lee in conversation and hears
them debating issues of parenting, and then, through editing, their words become
realigned with disparate images or they become silenced mid-sentence, the couples own
meaning becomes lost or conflated. And the opposite is true as well. In viewing this family,
their home and second birth, ones perception of them is altered by the sounds that their
images are joined with. In more specific cases, particularly in the earlier sections when the
viewer is presented with brief images and sounds from the future delivery, these brief
fragments suggest what inevitably lies ahead. Their disparity functions as a complexly

37

collaged foreshadowing, and as the technique is repeated, it builds a sense of tension that
is finally released upon birth.
Past critics have attempted to connect these techniques more specifically to a political
statement. They see Kellers manipulation of image and sound as linked to the films
feminism. However, what these critics mean by such a term seems to vary, but their
opinions also often overlap. In some cases, they locate the films feminism in the way it
has Chris speak. In comparison to Jane Brakhage, Chris is able to express the pain she
experiences in childbirth and the challenges she faces in mothering. For some critics, Lee
seems to be made a fool of or presented as a dominating patriarchal figure to be
criticized. And in general, they tend to emphasize the she said/he said, situating Chris and
Lee as opposing figures against one another. Reisman was perhaps the only feminist critic
who interviewed Keller and wrote about Misconception in the early eighties to come to the
conclusion that the film was not in fact feminist. Challenging Taubins reading as
essentialist and stating that the filmmakers gender [has been] confused with the films
themselves,[35] Reisman suggests that Misconceptions extreme ambiguity and
confusion lead to its failure as a political statement. She states:
The film continually switches voices between Chris and Lee, but by the montage and the
overlapping of image and sound, the point of view that Keller holds as filmmaker is
unclear. We can never be sure whose side, if anyones, she is on in relation to the couple.
And because of this confusion, the spectator doesnt get a clear sense of whether Keller
wants the film to be read as her own commentary on childbirth and marriage, or from the
perspective of Chris or of Lee.[36]
She draws a similar conclusion about Kellers following film Daughters of Chaos(1979):
The film is also unclear as it suggests a reluctance to negate traditional notions of
womanhood.[37] For Reisman, these uncertainties appear as a disappointment, and she
seems unable to draw significance from either film in the absence of an obvious political
statement. While I do not agree with the extent to which she takes her conclusions, I too
find significance in the ambiguity ofMisconceptions use of image and sound. Keller spent
over three years editing the film and the result is purposeful and prepared. Therefore, it is
my contention that ambiguity and uncertainty function as key structural tropes in the film.
This refusal to take sides is further reflected in the complex relationship between Keller
and Brakhage. Keller herself is always hesitant to describe the relationship in harsh or
polarizing terms. Despite attempts on Taubins part to categorize Keller as a feminist
filmmaker who sees male filmmakers as distinct as Joseph Cornell, Stan Brakhage, and
Michael Snow as shar[ing] a common central theme putting women in their
place,[38] [open endnotes in new window] or her film as clar[ying] some of the
overwhelming and inarticulate rage which many women have felt in relation to these and
other films by Stan Brakhage,[39] Keller has always been respectful and appreciative
when she speaks of him. In 1987, the Millennium Film Journal published part of a speech
she had given at a screening hosted by the journal that focused on her relation to
Brakhage. In the beginning of the quote, she states:
I dont know that there could be an avant-garde filmmaker in America that is not in some
way indebted to Stan Brakhage, has not studied his films, has not thought about them and
taken them seriously. And I certainly dont consider myself an exception. In fact, I consider
myself somebody who really knows his films well and looks at them a lot and really enjoys
them.[40]
I think we have different world views. I guess thats what I would say. I would say that I
am a student of [Brakhages] filmmaking, but once we apply ourselves to the content
something really different comes out.[41]
And this was far from the first time that she made such statements, simultaneously
distancing herself from him while aligning her filmmaking practices with his. In her 1978
interview with Taubin, Keller describes Misconception as a loving critique of Window
38

Water Baby Moving[42] and definitively states that its creation was only made possible
due to Brakhages previous experimentation with the subject. She also repeatedly insists
that the film was not meant to criticize the man in the film and valorize the woman[43]
but to capture the complications that come about when two people approach such a
difficult process together though from distinctly disparate positions.
But the differences between Kellers film and Brakhages do not lie solely in their
depictions of the sexes, their treatments of the female body and the functioning of sound
or the lack thereof therein. WhereasWindow Water Baby Moving was shot from the start on
16mm, Keller originally shot Misconception on sound Super-8, blowing it up to 16mm only
later for distribution purposes.[44] This technical choice accounts for the extra-grainy
quality of the image and the constant visibility of splice-marks throughout the film. By
choosing to shoot on Super-8, a low-budget system designed in the early-seventies for
amateur use, Keller created an aesthetic resembling that of a home-movie, which, as B.
Ruby Rich has noted, emphasizes the films sense of intimacy and sympathy.[45] This
effect goes hand in hand with Kellers insistence on including material of the everyday,
incorporating interviews with Chris and Lee weeks before the birth as well as shots from
their home life the painting of their houses interior, the mother and son bath, the
house next door being torn down by construction workers. While Brakhage also included
shots of the pregnant wife in the bath, they are much different in nature, serving to further
mythologize the birth rather than to establish setting or provide realistic documentary
evidence. In fact, in Brakhages film, the pregnancy and birth have been wholly decontextualized from the world at large. Other than a few shots of passionate kisses
between Brakhage and Jane taken earlier in the pregnancy, the viewer is not provided with
a glimpse into their life as a couple, where they live or what they do on a day-to-day basis.
Kellers de-romanticization of the birth event is further emphasized in her use of typed
note cards to introduce the title, filmmaker and sections. Its frequent repetition, with the
intermittent numbered section announcements, leaves no doubt that the simple, matterof-fact aesthetic was intended to counter Brakhages usage of the exact opposite the
romanticized hand-written scrawl. Prior to 1974, when Brakhage switched to copyrighting
his films, each film, no matter how short, included a title at the start and a signature, By
Brakhage, at the end. He created the title and signature by tediously scratching at the
film stock, frame by frame, a process that often took hours.[46] Since then, Brakhage has
stated that he did so in order to make a personal statement and in order to distinguish his
films from those of anyone else, especially those of Hollywood.[47] And it worked, By
Brakhage becoming a symbol for the touch of the artists hand. In the mid-70s, Keller was
well aware of this and chose to counter in a subtle but noticeable manner. Thus, Keller
would make such statements as,
I would say that I am a student of [Brakhages] filmmaking, but once we apply ourselves
to the content something really different comes out.[48]
She is correct but also seems to be understating the fact that such differences were often
direct results of a purposeful reaction on her part to his earlier content and aesthetic
choices.
While I do not care to endorse the general methodological strategy of privileging authorial
meaning or intent, in this particular case the filmmakers language appears particularly
apt. Keller was not only a filmmaker but a film historian as well, and she regularly rethought her opinions on and position in relation to Brakhage from her days as his student
in the early-seventies through her years as a professor at the University of Rhode Island,
where she wrote about and taught his films in the late-eighties and early-nineties.
Throughout the process of studying her films, returning to her extremely articulate and
poignant words has been of recurring benefit and delight. It is for these reasons that I find
it relevant to keep her language so at hand when conducting my own formal analysis. In
addition, the fact that past critics have for the most part ignored her own language, both

39

in written and spoken form, bodes ominously now that she is no longer living and capable
of defending her own intentions in person.
In February 1994, at the age of forty-three, Keller passed away, survived by her parents,
husband, twin daughters, two stepchildren and six siblings.[49] Since the time of her early
death, her films have unfortunately been written about even less than they were when she
was alive. Her work has, however, continued to be appreciated and loved by a close
community of filmmakers and historians with whom she had regularly associated with at
such organizations as Anthology Film Archives, where her films were frequently shown,
and the New York Filmmakers Cooperative, where she served as president from 1986
through 1989.[50] In 1981, Keller had been included in the exhibition Home Made Movies:
20 Years of American 8mm and Super-8 Films curated by J. Hoberman at Anthology Film
Archives, and in the winter of 1998-89, she would be included in the Museum of Modern
Arts retrospective Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films curated by Steve Anker
and Jytte Jensen.[51] The small but substantial file on her located at Anthology Film
Archives as well as the recent DVD compilation of her films by Canyon Cinema and the
restoration of three of her films by the New York Public Library of Performing Arts are
testimony to the continuing appreciation for her work.
In 2007, Robin Blaetzs edited text Womens Experimental Cinema: Critical
Frameworks was published by Duke University Press. Blaetzs essay, Amnesis Time: The
Films of Marjorie Keller, returns to Kellers films approximately twenty years after they
received regular public attention. The essay is extensive, informed by interviews with P.
Adams Sitney, Kellers husband, and Saul Levine, Kellers close friend and early film
teacher, as well as Kellers unpublished manuscript on womens films. Blaetz provides a
section of thorough biographical information before establishing her interest in Kellers
exemplar position as a woman who was raised with traditional notions of femininity in the
1950s and yet matured as a professional after the cultural changes of the sixties and
seventies. Due to this interest, the focus of Blaetzs analysis is on the functioning of what
she terms amnesis time in a few of Kellers films Ancient Parts, Foreign Parts, Private
Parts, Daughters of Chaos, Misconception and Herein spanning her oeuvre.
This article seeks to join Blaetzs essay in re-awakening attention to Kellers films. In
conducting a formal analysis of Misconceptionparticularly attuned to its complexly-edited
image/sound relationship, I have woven into my analysis the filmmakers own language as
well as past critics analyses and their comparisons to her predecessors film. I wish to
release the film from past binds to do so in a manner that opens it up for further inquiry.
As Kellers friend and fellow film historian Maria DiBattista wrote in an article for Film
Culture upon the filmmakers death, [Keller] was by all estimations a myriad-minded
woman a filmmaker and a film scholar, a teacher, a wife and mother, a daughter, sister
and friend,[52] and a similar range can be found in her films as well. I have focused on
the intricacies of a single Keller film but with knowledge of the breadth of her oeuvre.
While material for her films tended to come from within a tight radius surrounding her own
personal experience, the tone and texture of each piece range in their explorations of
familial relationships, old home movies, a death of a close pet and the pleasurable labor of
gardening. She made silent films and sound films. She made films on 8mm, Super-8 and
16mm; they range from three to fifty minutes in length. Unfortunately, critical reception of
her films has not yet been fully brought to term but has experienced an extended period
of gestation. If serious film historians, academics, critics and cinephiles begin to put in the
appropriate labor, films such as Misconception could experience the jubilant attention that
they deserve better late than never.
In Wedlock House: An Intercourse Stan Brakhage is showing us the hard path of accepting
a presence in your household outside of the intimate moments. The intimacy is what we
see first in fairly explicit shots of the man and woman having sex. But instead of the
normal black and white footage we get a polarized version of the visuals. This results in
this ghostly look at their love life that dulls the voyeuristic effect we might normally have
seeing two people engaged in a very private act. The film returns to their love in this
40

fashion a few times, and despite the ghostly look is reassuring compared to the paranoia
that fills the couples time in between their lovemaking spats.
When they aren't having sex the two are trying to get used to each others presence.
Brakhage's description of the film explains as much, but I loved the way he presented the
first, tense part of their acclimation. Compared to the ghostly bright sex the rest of the
home is dark save for the single spotlight that keeps flashing on the man and woman as
they wander around the house. Neither seems to have a grasp on the presence of the
other and the way that Brakhage cuts between locations in the home under the cover of
darkness gives the impression that both feel like they are being simultaneously watched
and abandoned by the other.
I haven't felt like this in a long time, but remember the weird alchemy of feeling
abandoned and suffocated when I started dating. Their unease with each other creates
these little pockets that they keep wandering to and find signs of their lover there when
before there was no one. It's disorienting learning to share the space you once held for
yourself with someone else and I love the way that Brakhage shows how their worlds
become less oppressive as they learn to share each others space.
The film becomes less of a guessing game about who is where as they learn to occupy the
home together. At first, Brakhage keeps them in separate frames from one another. The
first time they share the screen it is almost menacing. But eventually we see that they are
sharing the space together, first by seeing them pick up or manipulate something on the
same screen as the other, and finally by sitting in somewhat uncomfortable but mostly
happy silence with one another.
When the film ended I thought that the sentiment was actually pretty
sweet. Wedlock started more disorienting thanDesistfilm did but transitioned into an
affecting presentation of how someone you can share the most intimate moments with
can still feel like a stranger without some work. It's a sweet message, and one that
Brakhage conveys very well.
Brakhage '59 - #184
For my last entry here covering Criterion Collection films of the 1950s, I'm doing
something that cuts a little bit against the format I've used (one film per post) since
starting this series of chronological reviews in January 2009. I'm summarizing the three
available-on-DVD works of Stan Brakhage from 1959, and that's the approach that I plan
to take from this point forward in covering the films packaged in By Brakhage: An
Anthology, Volumes 1 and 2, one of the most unique and polarizing sets to be found
among the nearly (and soon to be over) 600 spine numbers that Criterion offers.
If you don't know the name, you can learn a lot about Brakhage here. I won't recap his
story too much, since I'd basically just be parroting what I've read from others who know
much more about him than I do. By way of quick summary though, Brakhage introduced a
lot of abstract expressionist elements into his filmmaking and established a reputation as
one of the most prolific and relentless explorers of the interplay between light, lens, film
and the human eye. He also radically expanded the limits of how film could be edited and
what it could show, and what makes him even more remarkable, at this point in my study
of his work, is just how far ahead of their time his fast cuts, scrambled sequencing and
non-linear mash-ups appear when watched alongside other filmmakers, even the greatest
of innovators, from that era. That doesn't mean his films are necessarily enjoyable or
entertaining; I appreciate the boldness of his vision but generally only watch these discs in
limited doses or put his later, more purely colorful stuff on in the background as video
wallpaper. Some of his works are harrowing, densely impenetrable or induce feelings of
discomfort. Sitting down to view Brakhage for an extended period requires me to be in a
certain mood, one of disciplined intentionality and even determination to avoid letting my
attention wander. To be honest, sometimes I even have to repress the nagging, irritating
query-to-self, "what the hell am I watching this for anyway?" But I find once I wrestle
41

through that, my dedication finds its reward.

Brakhage is easy to mock, not at all difficult to dismiss if one feels so inclined - and I'll also
add that much of the writing about his films that I've read over the past couple years is
the kind of stuff that tarnishes the reputation of "serious" film writers as overblown,
verbose, self-aggrandizing wordspinners who can trot out a robust vocabulary but not
really communicate all that much that sticks with the reader. My intention is to just watch
each film a few times, enough to let the images sink in, become comfortably familiar and
generate something to say. The last thing I want to do is try to convince you that Brakhage
is more brilliant, important or relevant than your own unmediated assessment of his work
would lead you to believe.
Given my penchant for watching these Criterion titles in the order they were made,
thereby tracking the career developments of various artists behind or in front of the
camera as well as the introduction of new styles and technologies into cinematic art, this
plan of attack makes the most sense to me as a way of grappling with the enigmatic flow
of visual stimuli that Brakhage produced over the course of several decades toiling on the
front lines of the avant-garde. How else am I to make adequately digest and hopefully
make some kind of sense of this tip of the celluloid iceberg that Brakhage left behind after
he parted ways with this world - a corpus of some 400 films ranging in length from nine
seconds to over four hours? I suppose I could just pick a point in my timeline and say "OK,
time to check By Brakhage off my list, here's my summary of three Blu-ray discs worth of
massively imaginative, occasionally pretentious but often beguiling experimentalism." But
that wouldn't quite do. So here I am, planning to wrap up my blogging for each year up
through 2003 with a recap of whatever works of Stan Brakhage happened to produce
during that particular anno Dei. And, where possible/practical, I'll include representative
clips from YouTube to show you what my feeble words are trying to grapple with.
Cat's Cradle

Years before either Kurt Vonnegut or Harry Chapin appropriated the phrase for their own
famous works (a novel and a song, respectively), Stan Brakhage wove his own Cat's
Cradle. The short film makes for a fine introduction to Brakhage's work. It's
autobiographical in that he and his wife Jane appear in it, along with a pair of friends,
another couple of creative bohemian types that Stan and Jane hung out with in those
days. It also has an early morning feel to it, with everyone appearing kind of groggy,
disheveled and in the process of getting their day underway. Dark silhouettes of what
appear to be gesticulating fingers, or maybe just hands rubbing together, open the film
with an incantatory flourish. The brooding Stan is having a smoke, Jane and her female
friend, adorned in an odd little white apron over her slacks, are washing dishes, maybe
preparing some food or pouring drinks and the other guy, the one with the little beatnik
goatee, seems to be shaking off the cobwebs from the night before. A black cat meanders
around, looking as felines do like they know a lot more than they can or would even bother
to say, if they could. Streaky white light streams in from low angles, especially in the
opening shots of this six-minute film, washing across the red-saturated hues of bed
sheets, bare feet, floral print wall paper and some vaguely sinister looking illustration of a
spider.
The excitement and creativity comes not so much from the scene captured on screen, but
the editing, a rapid whirlwind of slices and splices that certainly don't pack the kind of
novelty now that they once did, but still put the viewer on edge, throwing up flashes of
white that provide contrast from the otherwise murky red-black hues. The fourth minute is
my favorite part of the film, if you're interested. Whoop! what's that? Clothes are slipping
off, in soft focus, body parts and hair not on heads flash past in soft focus. This erotically
suggestive reveal happens very quickly early, barely registering, especially on first view,
42

before returning a bit more extensively and clearly at the end, with the barest hint of
some sort of caressing movement registering as the last flickering embers of illumination
disappear into blackness and the hand-scratched credits slither across the screen.

Wedlock House: An Intercourse

Building on the hints of sexuality filtered in through subtle imagery in Cat's Cradle,
Brakhage now drops any pretense of restraint with Wedlock House: An Intercourse. The
first images we see are of a naked woman laying on a bed, being mounted by a man
(again, it's Stan and Jane), with the only concession to late-50s notions of propriety
consisting of printing the film in negative, somehow rendering the nudity less
"pornographic" perhaps? Filmed in the early months of their marriage, I can understand
the impulse a young artist might have to capture such sweet intimate moments, though
this is far from being a straight-up homemade sex-movie. (I have no doubt that
somewhere in Brakhage's personal archives such footage exists, probably in abundance...)
This scene serves as a framework and punctuation for the interior portion of the film, an
experiment in light and shadow that casts a ghostly pall over the filmed encounter of a
now-clothed young husband and wife. They sip their coffee, draw on their cigarettes, stare
languidly just out of line with the camera lens, as if they see something lurking over our
shoulder. Kind of a spooky effect, especially the way the candle light (and some other
incandescent form of illumination) swings and swerves, sometimes in harmony and
sometimes in counterpoint to the similarly undulating camera. Is there a message here?
Perhaps it's the idea that even in the middle of mundane conversation and shared silence
with each other, as the young couple grapples with the reality of a shared life commitment
they entered into voluntarily but failed to fully comprehend, the sexual undercurrent, that
yearning for return and release, is a reliable constant.
Window Water Baby Moving
(Fair warning: before you click on this video, just be sure you're in a place where people
around you won't freak out over the sight of a naked woman giving birth to a child.)
With all the sex going on in these movies, especially in that 1950s pre-Pill era, it's
practically inevitable that a baby's going to come along sooner rather than later, and
that's exactly where Stan and Jane wound up. Of course, the young man with a camera
had big ideas about capturing the awe-inducing experience of child-birth on film, and of
course he went about it in his characteristically innovative way, capturing the splendors,
shapes and textures of his wife's pregnant body in the days leading up to the delivery (at
home, not in the hospital, due to objections from the medical staff of having a husband
equipped with movie camera on the scene as they went about their business.)Window
Water Baby Moving is one of Brakhage's most widely viewed and justly famous works,
simply on account of his willingness to show things that most people at the time strongly
believed should not be shown on film. The fact that this reel existed made it an obvious
choice in the decade or two that followed for natural childbirth advocates, Lamaze
coaches and others to show prospective parents just what to expect when it came time for
baby to be born. This was especially valuable for men planning to be present at the birth,
as the stereotype of the husband pacing nervously in the waiting room puffing on
cigarettes while the wife was in the Maternity Ward being attended to by the professionals
became less the norm and more of an archaic clich.
For all its practical value as a teaching tool (obscured only slightly by Brakhage's artistic
quirks, which even to a non-cinephile makes the film more effective and evocative than if
he'd taken a straight documentary approach), Window Water Baby Moving remains a very
intense movie-watching experience. And that's despite the fact that there's no sound
(though your mind's ear fills it in quite effectively when you see Jane gnashing her teeth in
pain and Stan gasping in wide-eyed astonishment at the spectacle he just witnessed),
43

images of childbirth are presumably familiar to all of us and we're not nearly as sheltered
from the kind of explicit display that shocked the film's original audience, almost leading
to the destruction of the footage when it was seized by Kodak's film lab upon exposure.
Brakhage had to provide a note from his wife's doctor to prove to the authorities that he
wasn't a pornographer; otherwise, Window Water Baby Moving would have been aborted
before delivery, never seeing the light of day.
Early Stan Brakhage seems primarily an exercise in rejecting ingratiation so completely
that one goes to the opposite extreme, deliberately antagonizing the viewer's senses. In
Desistfilm it was the ears that got the brunt of the abuse, as Brakhage treated us to a
bizarre, cochlea-splitting soundtrack produced by droning into a microphone in different
keys, all on behalf of seven minutes of some beatniks sitting in a room picking their bellybuttons, lighting matches, building stacks of books like bored pre-schoolers. In Wedlock
House, an Intercourse, Brakhage sets his sights on the eyes, eschewing sound entirely for
a full-on assault on the visual cortex.
The subject-matter is the early married life of two young people, played by Brakhage and
his charming wife Jane, but the visual approach is so far-out that we quickly forget this,
and become pre-occupied with the strange, swirling effect produced by filming actors in a
dark room while shining flashlights on their faces for a second at a time. What we see are
snatches of activity: the couple lighting cigarettes off a candle (which is often the only
fixed object in any of the shots), the Dead End Kid-looking Brakhage gazing into a mirror,
the woman standing at a window. The effect is some mysterious tension, the sense of
inexpressible anxieties. This slow-motion-strobe material is cut together with negativeimages of Brakhage and his wife having sex, the sex becoming as abstract as the rest of
the "action" but in a different way (the nervous separateness of the married couple in the
flash-lit/smoke-veiled obscurity vs. the merging of their bodies into a silvery-blue oneness,
or something like that).
Whatever Brakhage had in mind when he made the film, his ulterior motive is a rather
subversive one - the deliberate reduction of visual information to a bare minimum. With
typical cheek Brakhage forces us to glean what we can from his fleeting glimpses, his
abstract, purposely de-eroticized sex, goading us into a level of concentration that causes
our eyes to hurt and subsequently our brains. The result is an "experience," in the
"modern art is all about creating an experience" sense. In this case the experience
amounts to ten minutes of squinting your eyes trying to see what the director doesn't
want you to see, namely everything.
When Stan Brakhage made Wedlock House: An Intercourse in 1959 he had recently gotten
married. Evidently he felt quite trapped by this commitment and he turned to his work for
an outlet. The film starts with a detached yet graphic sex scene shown in negative. After a
brief shot of this the camera zooms in and the sexual movements quickly become
repetitive as the camera draws closer to the action until the body parts are no longer
recognizable. By starting this film with the act of intercourse Brakhage emphasizes the
sexual aspect of marriage. After the sex scene the screen goes almost entirely black; this
darkness is only broken up by occasional glimpses of the man and woman illuminated by a
roving light source like a flashlight. At this point the two look to be quite happy together.
The image of their smiling faces is obscured by a curtain drawing closed. In the rest of the
film the characters seem to be fairly grim as they move around the house closing and
covering all portals to the outside world.
The house the man and woman (played by none other than the Brakhages themselves)
are seen in represents their marriage and the way they close themselves off from the
outside world is a visual expression of their new codependence. Once they've barricaded
the house things begin to change. Both the man and the woman are often seen looking at
their own reflections in the mirror; they're still caught up in themselves and it isn't easy for
them to adjust to their new duties. Of course, the house continues to be dark for the most
44

part with only occasional moments of fleeting illumination. The sexual act is repeated in
much the same way as the first shots but it's no longer followed by an expression of bliss;
the action that follows it is much the same as the action that proceeds it as even this facet
of their relationships becomes as much a part of their banal routine as drinking coffee at
the table. Still, the film doesn't portray their relationship as completely hopeless:
occasionally the mirror gazing couple manages to catch sight of the other person in the
background of the reflection signifying some possibility of an authentic and positive
personal connection.
From a technical standpoint, the most important component of Wedlock House: An
Intercourse is the lighting. The various light sources include the aforementioned roving
flashlights, candles, and numerous reflecting surfaces including the mirrors and the metal
part of an alarm clock. The light is further emphasized when it's obscured by white
cigarette smoke and black candle smoke which are as often as not divorced from the
context of their source. Brakhage's experiments with light are used to excellent effect to
complement his depiction of the institution of marriage as a dark room with intermittent
flickers of edifying light.
Stan Brakhage: A Brief Introduction
by Fred Camper
This text is also available in a Portuguese translation
At some point in the future, when authoritative histories of twentieth century art begin to
be written with the wise judgment that only distance from the present time can confer, I
believe that Stan Brakhage will loom not only as one of the very greatest of filmmakers
but as one of the major figures in all the arts. The sheer virtuosity of his work, the sensual
beauty of his films' shapes and colors and textures, his creation of a unique and complex
kind of visual music (most of his films are silent because the music comes from the
screen), his appeal to the viewer as individual rather than as a member of a crowd, the
ecstatic unpredictability of his spaces and rhythms, all assure the monumental importance
of his close to 400 films, both individually and as a body of work.
his best known and most influential of all "experimental" or "avant-garde" filmmakers
took light as his great subject, and his interest in light itself was tied to his interest in
recovering that which he acknowledged no adult could ever recover, the pre-linguistic
seeing of children ("How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby
unaware of 'Green'?" he famously asked), an interest which transmuted itself into a desire
to free objects and light from structures based on language.
Brakhage's films vibrate between a series of opposing poles that are never quite as
opposite as they seem at first. Chief among them is the two senses that light and objects
have in his films. We see things for their recognizable and namable forms that is a
pregnant woman in Window Water Baby Moving and also, even in this most
documentary of Brakhage films, as a play of light and shape, for example his poetic stress
on the way light is refracted through water droplets on the woman's belly. Part of
Brakhage's goal is to enrich viewers' seeing of things in the ordinary world, to help each
viewer uncover unique and imaginative ways of seeing.
Brakhage made many films by painting directly onto the film strip, sometimes producing
suggestions of shapes or spaces: The Lion and the Zebra Make God's Raw
Jewels and Chartres Series are both stunningly effective evocations of their subjects, even
though they contain no "pictures." In others, such as the Arabics, Brakhage creates
shifting, out-of-focus abstract forms that seem to elude namability completely. And in the
found footage used in Murder Psalm, Brakhage explores the negation of his aesthetic as
found in mass culture: light seems imprisoned in objects that reduce active living and
thinking to static things the brain is seen as a shape that's visually rhymed with a ball
that children used to torment each other.
45

A narrative film creates an arc of expectation that sets up conflicts and tensions the
viewer expects to have resolved or at least, lead to some form of conclusion.
Brakhage's films are organized according to a precisely opposite principle. There is no
overarching or predictable form; his emphasis is on each instant of perception. One way
he achieves this emphasis is by organizing his films around unpredictable changes in
composition, subject-matter, and rhythm: each small pattern that a film sets up is violated
just at the moment when you think you have finally apprehended it. The process of
viewing a Brakhage film becomes part of the film's subject; in answer to the passivity
encouraged by a mainstream commercial narrative movie, Brakhage requests active
participation. Relaxing one's perceptions when the lights dim, as many movie viewers are
accustomed to doing, won't work here: one must learn to see faster, more precisely, and
more deeply.
Brakhage's work offers an eloquent and deeply affecting alternative to consumer culture
in the West. He abjures predigested emotions, predictable formulas, and "pretty pictures."
His films cannot be reduced to a simple summary or message, and each viewer's
experience of them will necessarily be somewhat different. The engaged viewer is
removed from the state of mind in which to look at a scene or sight is to desire it, covet it,
think you understand it, and wish to own it: instead, Brakhage asks for both much less and
much more he asks that you dance with it.
Percepia vizual dincolo de sine - Stan Brakhage
Andrei Luca
Avnd n vedere dimensiunea operei cinematografice a lui Stan Brakhage (n jur de 380 de
filme realizate n 51 de ani de activitate, asta nsemnnd la un calcul simplu cam 7 - 8
filme pe an) este dificil s vorbeti despre filmele sale potrivindu-le pe toate ca piese ale
unui puzzle care formeaz n final traiectoria unei evoluii estetice i teoretice bine
definite. Totui, eseul su manifest, Metaphors on Vision, descrie cu destul de mare
acuratee ncercrile cineastului american, iar experimentele sale cu limbajul filmului
reflect ntr-o proporie semnificativ ideile expuse n lucrarea din 1963, ncepnd chiar cu
prima fraz: "S ne imaginm un ochi care nu este guvernat de conveniile realizate de
om n legtur cu percepia, un ochi nealterat de compoziia logic, un ochi care nu
rspunde la nume desemnate lucrurilor din jur, dar care exploreaz fiecare obiect ntlnit
n via ca pe o noua aventur perceptiv".
Desconsidernd utilizarea convenional a sunetului al crui scop se identific n
cinematografulmainstream cu acela de a crea o anumit stare sau de a da iluzia
realismului, Brakhage a decis ca majoritatea filmelor sale s fie mute. ntr-un interviu cu
Surajan Ganguly, regizorul spune c filmul este n mod dominant o art vizual i c din
punct de vedere estetic necesitatea de a acompania cu muzic filmul este tot att de
stringent ca necesitatea de a acompania o pictur. Aceast intuiie a lui Brakhage despre
natura filmului anticipeaz studiul The Musical Analogy, al lui David Bordwell, care
consider cinematograful asemntor muzicii n ideea n care muzica, asemenea filmului,
sunt nite sisteme care ordoneaz ntr-un mod armonic o multitudine de elemente care, la
final, rezult ntr-un anume ritm. Urmrind aceast logic n care imaginea i sunetul sunt
dou sisteme integrate ntr-un sistem mai mare numit film, Bordwell remarc dezechilibrul
dintre cele dou pri. Astfel, renunarea la sunet din filmele lui Brakhage ar putea fi
vzut ca o rezolvare a unei probleme intuite de regizor, care ns nu merge att de
departe ca Bordwell n analiza mediumului cinematografic i a elementelor care l
compun.
n mod bizar, refuzul sunetului nu l mpiedic pe cineastul american s considere c
muzica este arta cea mai apropiat de film. Folosind deseori termenul de muzicalitate
referitor la filmele sale, Brakhage explic c "pe msur ce filozofiile mele creative erau
tot mai orientate spre cinematograful mut, estetica fotografic i editarea propriu-zis a
filmelor devenea i ea tot mai inspirat de muzic". Randolph Jordan explic n
46

articolul Brakhage\'s Silent Legacy for Sound Cinema aparentul paradox printr-un ocol prin
teoria despre ritm regsit n cartea Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, a teoreticianului de
film i cineastului Michel Chion: "Cnd un fenomen ritmic ajunge la noi via o anume cale
senzorial, aceast cale, fie ea vizual sau auditiv, nu reprezint dect un canal prin care
ritmul ajunge la noi. Odat ce este perceptut sezorial de ochi sau urechi, impulsul nervos
este transportat la o regiune a creierului conectat la funciile motorii, i abia la acest
nivel semnalul este decodat i interpretat ca ritm". Astfel, spectatorul reuete s
neleag muzica, dei nu o aude.
Revenind napoi pe firul argumentaiei la componenta vizual i la modalitatea n care
Brakhage ncearc s nvee din nou spectatorul s vad lumea, s extind cmpul
perceptiv dincolo de modul n care ochiul este antrenat de-a lungul maturizrii individului
s priveasc lucrurile nconjurtoare ntr-o cheie cultural, regizorul include n corolarul
percepiilor vizuale i imaginile care ne parvin n momentul n care ochii notri nu sunt
deschii. Practic, noi suntem nvai s numim percepii vizuale doar senzaiile produse n
urma acionrii asupra aparatului vizual a unor stimuli exteriori. ns pentru cineastul
american, cele mai bune imagini / filme sunt cele care apar n stri hipnagogice, cnd
pleoapa nchis peste globul ocular devine un fel de ecran pe care sunt proiectate puncte
nedefinite, culori care apar i dispar nainte c noi s le putem numi, cnd fluxul
contiinei aflate n stare de veghe aduce din memorie i proiecteaz pe un ecran mental
imagini care se succed att de rapid, nct pentru a documenta aceast realitate este
nevoie de "o camer care ar surprinde 1000 de cadre pe secund". Pentru a nelege mai
bine senzaia descris n rndurile de mai sus, cititorul articolului poate efectua un
exerciiu simplu care i va demonstra despre ce imagini e vorba: s nchid ochii i s
apese cu podul palmelor globul ocular sau pur i simplu s se frece la ochi. Stan Brakhage
recunoate c modalitatea sa de a picta direct pe pelicul (pelicul care n timpul
proieciei nu se deruleaz dect 24 de cadre pe secund!) nu reflect n mod fidel
imaginile pe care le vezi n starea de veghe cu ochii nchii, ns reprezint o reconstituire
simbolic, n limitele mediului cinematografic, a acestui moment. Mai mult, dup cum
nsui Brakhage susine, filmul pictat direct pe pelicul rezolv problema acurateii
reprezentrii ntruct referentul nu mai este unul exterior, ci se concentreaz direct pe
interioritatea autorului.
n ciuda faptului c filmele sale au la baz o ntreag filosofie despre actul percepiei, ele
nu sunt o simpl demonstraie, niciun moment al vizionrii lor nu pare mbcsit din punct
de vedere teoretic sau pretenios, ntruct n spatele filmului se ghicete o emoie
autentic. Astfel, dup o ncercare realizat la mijlocul anilor \'80 de a realiza filme pictate
direct pe pelicul (Night Music), Brakhage lucreaz n perioada anilor \'\'90 la o serie de
filme care trimit cu gndul la pictura expresionist abstract a anilor \'50.
Spre exemplu, Rage Net, un film de doar 39 de secunde realizat de Brakhage n anul 1988,
este un scurtmetraj profund autobiografic care prezint ntr-o form abstract
asemntoare tablourilor lui Jackson Pollock frustrarea i furia regizorului vizavi de divorul
de soia lui, Jane. Imaginile care conin culori calde precum rou aprins i galben, dar i
non-culori se succed ntr-un ritm din ce n ce mai rapid pn ating un climax, dup care
revin la ritmul iniial spre final. Exist ns i un risc n aceast reprezentare personal
asupra furiei; insuficient direcionat, spectatorul poate supune filmul unor interpretri
multiple, foarte variate, care pot s se ndeprteze cu uurin de sensul iniial pe care
regizorul l-a alocat imaginii. n antologia de la Criterion care cuprinde i acest
scurtmetraj, Rage Net este nsoit (ca toate filmele cuprinse n antologie) de un text scris
de Brakhage care poate ajuta spectatorul n pecesul decodrii. Contient de multitudinea
de interpretri posibile, citatul ales avertizeaz prin cuvintele regizorului american c
"multe dintre lucrurile care s-au spus despre acest film pot fi aici, cu excepia faptului c
<> este rezultatul unei meditaii asupra posibilitii omului de a deveni prizonierul furiei
din punct de vedere psihologic".
47

Glaze of Cathexis, un film din 1990, ilustreaz un concept cheie n psihologie care
desemneaz un ataament emoional fa de o persoan, un obiect sau o idee. Implicit n
lucrrile de nceput ale lui Freud, catexisul este procesul care fixeaz n memorie obiectele
psihice i mecanismele psihice printr-o anume cantitate de energie afectiv. n afara
acestui proces, obiectele psihice nu se fixeaz n memorie. Astfel, catexisul (adic
momentul n care sistemul nervos cristalizeaz obiectul perceput prin simuri, iar
reprezentarea lui este fixat prin faptul c de ea se leag un ataament emoional
puternic) este asemntor cinematografului din perspectiva faptului c pelicula la rndul
ei fixeaz forme i culori nainte inexistente, dar care din acest punct nainte nu mai pot fi
confundate cu nimic altceva, ci capt o existen n sine.
Mergnd napoi pe axa cronologic, gsim n filmografia lui Stan Brakhage filme care
mbin materialul filmat cu cel pictat, precum partea a doua a lui Dog Star Man (1964),
nregistrat nc din perioada n care s-a nscut cel de-al doilea copil al lui regizorului,
i Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961) care surprinde naterea celui de-al treilea copil.
Originea ideii de a picta i de a zgria pelicula care a surprins cele dou evenimente i are
punctul de pornire n scurtmetrajul despre naterea primului copil al lui Brakhage, Window
Water Baby Moving (1959).
Impulsul de a face filmul despre naterea primei fiice nu este consecina exhibiionismului
lui Brakhage, ci, dup cum nsui regizorul afirm, vine n urma constatrii c singura
modalitate prin care el ar fi putut s evite leinul n timpul naterii soiei era s filmeze
momentul. Prin faptul c aparatul i-a oferit o ocupaie care l distana ntr-o oarecare
msur de eveniment i i ddea sentimentul c ceea ce face este s-i pun n aplicare
meseria, imaginile fiind tot timpul filtrate prin lentile, Brakhage mrturisete c a fost apt
s asiste la naterea fiicei sale i s rmn n fiecare secund alturi de soie.
Conform spuselor regizorului, n timpul filmrilor lui Window Water Baby Moving acesta era
contient de viziunea lui hipnagogic de fiecare dat cnd clipea sau nchidea ochii pentru
cteva secunde, dar acele imagini nu au aprut n scurtmetraj. Astfel, ncepnd cu partea
a doua a lui Dog Star Man procesul de pictare i zgriere al peliculei a venit ca o
necesitate fireasc al crei scop era acela de a completa golurile filmului anterior care nu
reproducea sau amintea n vreun fel de percepiile hipnagogice pe care autorul le-a trit n
momentul desfurrii naterii. Rezultatul l-a surprins plcut pe regizor care mrturisete:
"Am fost foarte ncntat cnd am realizat c viziunile mele cnd in ochii nchii se apropie
de lucrrile pictorilor abstract-expresioniti pe care i-am admirat foarte mult - Pollock sau
Rothko."
Astfel ajungem, n logica propus mai sus, de la filme pictate direct pe pelicul, la
scurtmetraje n care pictura este mbinat cu imagini impresionate pe pelicul, la filme n
care imaginea capturat are valoare aproape documentaristic: The Act of Seeing With
One's Own Eyes. Aceast producie din 1971, al crei titlu reprezint traducerea literal a
semnificaiei cuvntului "autopsie" din greac a fost nregistrat ntr-o morg n timpul
disecrii efective a unor persoane decedate. Prezentat publicului n alb-negru,
scurtmetrajul de 32 de minute a fost filmat iniial color, ns pentru a diminua ocul
provocat de imagini, regizorul a ales s fac aceast modificare ulterioar.
Aceste nregistrri medical-documentaristice care surprind ipostaze ale corpului uman
lipsit de via ar putea fi considerate o celebrare a morii, ns micrile de aprat,
tremurul continuu, hacurile aparatului n momente care pot fi considerate cel puin
ocante fac din The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes o celebrare a vieii care se afl n
spatele camerei de filmat, via care reacioneaz puternic la vederea unui corp uman
lipsit de via.
n cartea The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Erza Pund, Gertrude
48

Stein and Charles Olson, de R. Bruce Elder, autorul identific anumite mecanisme ale
distanrii pe care Brakhage le utilizeaz n aa fel nct s diminueze efectul ocant al
imaginilor asupra spectatorului. Unul dintre ele este reprezentat de corelarea materialului
filmat cu ipostaze iconice ale corpului uman din cultura vizual a omenirii. Astfel, spune
Elder, una din imaginile de nceput ale filmului prezint corpul unui brbat ntins pe masa
de disecie, surprins ns dintr-un unghi foarte jos, fapt care apropie acest cadru de
tradiia renascentist a studiilor despre perspectiv. Un alt mecanism de distanare este
apelul constant la ncadraturi strnse. n loc s creeze un efect naturalist de mrire pn
la limita suportabilului, apropierea excesiv devine mai degrab o abstractizare a realitii.
Astfel, imaginea devine mai uor digerabil pentru spectator, care nu este nevoit s se
confrunte n fiecare minut cu realismul dur al camerei de autopsie.
ns pentru a nelege cu adevrat ncercarea regizorului american de a extinde percepia
vizual dincolo de sine i de interpretarea cultural pe care o dm realitii vzute,
regizorul spune c semntura by Brakhage, aflat spre sfritul filmelor realizate de el, nu
se refer doar la sine. Astfel, produsul artistic rezultat n urma eforturilor sale de a filma
trebuie s fie vzut drept un film adus pe pelicul "prin intermediul lui Stan i Jane
Brakhage", aa cum s-a ntmplat cu toate filmele regizorului ncepnd cu momentul
cstoriei. Continund n aceeai logic, la un anumit punct n biografia cineastului
expresia se va transforma n "prin intermediul lui Stan, Jane i al copiilor Brakhage",
"ntruct toate descoperirile pe care le-am realizat prin intermediul intrumentului
numit sine au fost filtrate de sensibilitile celor pe care i iubesc." Aadar, ntr-o zi,
extinznd cercul oamenilor pe care momentan nu-i cunoate, dar de care se va lega
emoional ntr-un la anumit punct al vieii lui, filtrrile se vor ramifica pn n momentul n
care expresia by Brakhage va fi neleas drept ceea ce reprezint ea n ultim instan:
"prin intermediul tuturor lucrurilor".

Jean-Luc Godard: The Political and the Personal

BY CALUM MARSH
Godard Forever: Part One, a 17-film retrospective of director Jean-Luc Godards early work,
begins this Friday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. To mark the occasion we look at the
politics and provocations that were the auteurs long-time trademark.
Film
If Youre Pretentious, Be Obviously Pretentious: An Interview with Frederick Wiseman
Early on in Jean-Luc Godards Une femme mariee, his underseen drama from 1964, the
protagonist, Charlotte (Macha Meril), drives to the airport to meet her husband, Pierre
(Philippe Leroy), who has just returned from observing the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. He
is accompanied by Roger Leenhardtthe well-known French critic and prolific
documentarian, appearing as himselfwho asks Charlotte if she is familiar with the
concentration camps and the purpose of the trial he just attended. Charlotte musters little
more than a shrug of vague recognition. Roger, in response, offers a macabre aphorism:
ROGER:
Today, in Germany, I said to someone, How about if tomorrow we kill all the Jews and the
hairdressers? He answered, Why the hairdressers?
CHARLOTTE:
Yes, why the hairdressers?
Now, Une femme mariee is not a film about the Holocaustindeed, its a romantic drama
about a middle-class woman conducting an affair, inspired by Francois Truffauts The Soft
Skin and largely based on Godards real-life relationship with Anna Karina, who had
49

recently left him for another man. But this exchange seems like more than a mere
digression. In fact the Holocaust seems to loom over the proceedings, as if its history were
a shadow in which the drama remained shrouded. When Charlotte, Pierre and Roger return
from the airport and dine together, they discuss the Holocaust and the difficulty inherent
in its commemoration; later, when Charlotte meets with her lover, Robert (Bernard Noel),
they retreat to a movie theater screening Night and Fog, Alain Resnais 30-minute
documentary about Auschwitz and Majdanek. The lovers ignore the film; Godard does not,
cutting to the screen to emphasize the juxtaposition.
From this we might conclude that Une femme mariee finds the political and the personal in
conversation: the married womans adultery and her rejection of history are products of
the same ignorance, and the film thus becomes as much about a corruption of personal
morality as of socio-political consciousness. (The films most famous sequence, a delirious
montage of magazine spreads that suggests Pop Art by way of structuralism, added the
indoctrinating effects of consumerism to the mix.) Not insignificantly, Godards original
title for the film was La femme mariee (The Married Woman); the French censorship board
demanded that it be changed to Une femme mariee (A Married Woman), so as to avoid the
impression that it was speaking universally. But for Godard, of course, universality was
precisely the point: this was to be a film about the deterioration of contemporary values,
and his married woman might well be anyonelike, say, Anna Karina, whose betrayal of
her jilted husband the film sought to excuse as culturally induced.
Hurriedly conceived and assembled in 1964, so that it could be completed in time for that
years Venice film festival, Une femme mariee marks the precise center of Godards sevenyear, 15-film first perioda period which spans fromBreathless in 1960 to Weekend in
1967 and which will screen, in its entirety, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox this month. The
directors early work is usually graphed as a line sloping gradually from the personal to the
political: the shift of interests evident from the freewheeling cinematic artifice of A Woman
is a Woman (1961) to the Maoist sloganeering of La Chinoise (1967) makes for a pretty
convenient narrative, and, unsurprisingly, its the one that most widely endures. But this
doesnt account for the somewhat erratic way the political is weaved into the fabric of so
many of his films, including those films whose subject matter isnt overtly political.
Perhaps we ought to consider a different axiom: For Godard, the personal and the political
are inextricableboth are essential to his engagement with the world.
Godards documentary-like approach to fiction filmmaking afforded him an unprecedented
degree of spontaneity during production, which meant that his films remained in thrall to
the often mercurial whims of their directora man whose intellectual restlessness is quite
evident in his work. In other words, Godards films are political to the degree that he was
possessed of political convictions at the time of their making, because his political
interests seep into the fabric of the films as inevitably as anything else he fancied. Its
hardly a coincidence that Godards most unified work of the period, Contempt, was also
the biggest and most conventional production: the demands of international financiers
and a bona fide super-star restricted his usual deviations from the material, and the result
is his most deliberate and cohesive feature. Filmmaking for Godard was supposed to be at
least partly unplanned, an intuitive art guided by urge and impulse. The personal and
political naturally follow because everything is contained by his vision.
Even projects whose funding depended on a certain adherence to expectations take
detours whenever possible: Band of Outsiders, his adaptation of the novelFools Gold and
the only film Godard made for a major studio, veers into improvisatory tangents, as when
the characters observe a minute of silence or, most famously, suddenly break into
choreographed dance. At his most heedlessly unrestrained, anything can (and often does)
happen: Pierrot le fou is structured like an episodic collage, as if unpredictability were its
very organizing principle; the early (and hugely underrated) Les Carabiniers, meanwhile,
swerves from comic farce to wartime newsreels and back again without the slightest
pretense of tonal or narrative consistency. This is the foundation of Godards sensibility: if

50

it occurs to him, it goes in the picture. His films are products of the indiscriminate sweep
of his proclivities. The only thing left out is whats least interesting.
Susan Sontag wrote that in Godards early films, ideas themselves are essentially formal
elementsunits of sensory and emotional stimulation no different than his snatches of
Beethovens string quartets or his penchant for primary colors. Even his most explicitly
political films, she argued, are not meant to be taken earnestly: they are not vehicles for
ideology so much as theyve been furnished by ideological rhetoric, quotations bracketed
as part of the fiction. His work wasnt meant to be didactic; it was meant to house an
interplay of references and ideas, from the deeply personal (his relationship issues) to the
pop-cultural (his love of cinema, and in particular the American genre films his work
emulated and played with), and, finally, the political (and here we get the gamut:
Marxism, the Algerian war, Mao, Vietnam, the Cold War, late capitalism, the absurdity of
war, and, of course, the Holocaust).
We can speculate a bit here about historical context. I suspect that, for audiences and
critics in the 1960s, Godards complicated relationship to contemporary politics entrained
a certain friction: the conflation of Godards aesthetic radicalism with his apparent political
radicalism doubtless made it hard to tell how seriously his ideas ought to be taken,
particularly as Maoism took hold with French youth in the lead up to the mass student
protests of 1968. Consider that Stanley Kauffmann, one of Godards harshest critics in the
United States, dismissed La Chinoise as irresponsible, faulty and reprehensible in terms
of what it does and eventually what it says; he wrote that Godards politics are too often
reduced to a gamemerely an occasion for style. He accused him, naturally, of lacking
the necessary interest and conviction in his own work, criticizing what he felt was a
tendency to bore of his films before they were completed.
Today Godards early films are cherished for precisely this quality: their omnivorous
approach to art and life, with which they seem to take in and take on everything. And so
far removed, historically, from the dangers of hardcore Maoism, a film like La
Chinoise could hardly seem irresponsible or reprehensible; its milieu now seems historical,
and therefore irrelevant, making it a product of its time and place rather than a film whose
ideas are trying to speak to us. Had Godards political ideas been intended from the outset
to be taken straightforwardly, I imagine they would seem hopelessly dated to audiences in
2014. But because they were designed with ironic distance in mindthe slogans and
iconography accoutrements of the fictionwe can embrace the films as collections of
sensory and emotional stimulation. The personal and the political can comfortably co-exist
in these films because both betray the fixations that seized their creator.

ris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound no. 16 (Spring 1993), with Kenneth
Ruoff, 115-126.
Filming at the Margins: The Documentaries of Hara Kazuo
I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society.
-Hara Kazuo.1
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Yukiyukite shingun, 1987), a highly original and
controversial film, introduced a major talent in international cinema, the Japanese
documentarist Hara Kazuo. With the release of this film, Hara was awarded the New
Director Prize from the Directors Guild of Japan. For a documentary, it drew unusually large
audiences in Japan, where it was also the object of significant critical commentary,
including a collection of articles by fifty-five critics from various publications.2
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On traces the efforts of Okuzaki Kenz to chronicle
war crimes, including murder and cannibalism, committed by Japanese soldiers in
occupied New Guinea during World War II. Okuzaki, who is infamous in Japan for having
51

slung marbles at Emperor Hirohito in 1969, repeatedly criticizes the emperor during the
course of the film, thus challenging one of the strongest taboos in Japan. For this reason
Hara's film has never been shown on Japanese television, and major movie studios were
afraid to distribute it.3 This provocative work was not Hara's first film, nor his first brush
with controversy.
Hara's first feature, Goodbye CP (Sayonara CP, 1972), made in collaboration with a group
of individuals with cerebral palsy, shocked audiences with its images of physical
disabilities; critics accused Hara of sadism for his stark portrayal of the handicapped. Two
years later, he was labeled a masochist forExtreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974,
(Kyokushiteki erosu koiuta 1974, 1974), a film about his stormy relationship with his exwife, a radical feminist. Hara's latest film, currently in production, explores the intimate
sexual relations of short story writer Inoue Mitsuharu.
By exploring taboo subjects, Hara's films deliberately raise ethical questions about
representation and responsibility. Unlike most documentary filmmakers,Hara collaborates extensively with the subjects on the making of his films. Hara prefers to make
"action documentaries," films that have strong narratives, dramatic encounters, and
characters who struggle against adversity. Hara cites such films
as Batman and Superman as his models.4 Like his compatriot, Imamura Shhei, for whom
he has worked as an assistant cameraman, Hara portrays contemporary Japanese society
and history through the lives of radicals, outcasts, and marginals.
A Civil Rights Agenda: Goodbye CP
Goodbye CP challenges taboos about representations of handicappedpeople, in particular
the shame associated with physical differences. In a street in downtown Yokohama the
main protagonist, Yokota Hiroshi, proudly displays his naked body. Hara emphasizes this
kind of scene, stating, "It is difficult to look at handicapped people's bodies so that's what I
wanted to show."5 Hara allows the disabled to speak for themselves as participants rather
than as victims; as Yokota says, "Pity, I can do without." Goodbye CPdoes not encourage a
facile empathy with the plight of people with disabilities but rather forces viewers to
confront their own fears and misgivings.
As would be the case with Hara's later films, the making of Goodbye CPgenerates
considerable controversy. Yokota's wife Yoshiko, also disabled, argues that the filming
undermines their attempts to join mainstream society. Yokota, however, wants to assert
his right to be different, to crawl around town on all fours rather than use a wheelchair.
Yoshiko threatens divorce if her husband continues his participation, contending that Hara
is portraying him as a freak. Hearing of Yokota's intention to drop out of the project, his
peers show up at their apartment and encourage him to stand up to his wife. A harsh
battle ensues between Yoshiko and her husband in which she also lashes out at the
filmmaker, stating, "This is an invasion of the home." Hara includes this argument in the
film itself, generating debate about the process, and the ethics, of representation.
Goodbye CP had a substantial impact in the arena of social services, redefining the ways
in which people with disabilities were treated and represented in Japan. Hara was
repeatedly invited to speak at conferences of social workers charged with the care of
handicapped people. After the film's release, both Hara and Kobayashi Sachiko, the
producer of Hara's three films, authored articles calling for changes in the treatment of the
handicapped, criticizing state interference in the question of whether disabled individuals
should bear children.6
The Personal is Political: Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
Hara's Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 explores issues of intimate family
relationships, privacy, gender roles, and sexuality, subjects that also became topical in

52

117
American documentary film in the 1970s. In the course of the film, Hara follows the
activities of his ex-wife Takeda Miyuki, a radical feminist who published numerous articles
on women's issues in the late 1960s and early 1970s.7 Takeda has an affair with a woman,
conceives a child with an African-American soldier stationed in Okinawa, (in a phone
conversation, her mother suggests that she kill the child), starts a daycare center for
prostitutes, distributes pamphlets to prostitutes (which leads to Hara being beaten by
gangsters), joins a feminist commune, and works as a stripper in a GI bar, all the while
arguing with Hara and his lover, Kobayashi, the sound recordist and producer of the film.
The confessional tone of Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 startled audiences in
Japan, just as similar experiments in American documentary film did in the United States.
Craig Gilbert's twelve-episode PBS series An American Family (1973) focused on the
controversial topics of divorce and sexuality.8 Early feminist films, such as Joyce
Chopra's Joyce at 34 (1972), Amalie Rothschild's Nana, Mom, and Me (1974), and Martha
Coolidge's Not a Pretty Picture (1975), explored issues of gender, abortion, and rape. In his
first-person Diaries, 1971-1976 (1981), Ed Pincus examined the politics of everyday life;
Jane Pincus, the star of Diaries, was one of the editors of Our Bodies Ourselves.
Like Pincus and other American documentarists influenced by the women's movement,
Hara, in Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, looks for signs of social change in his
personal life, stating, "At the time, there was much talk of family-imperialism [kazoku
teikokushugi]. One of the strong sentiments of the time was that family-imperialism should
be destroyed." Hara suggests that the Japanese family structure mirrors the structure of
Japanese society, that the "family system" [kazoku seido] and the "emperor system"
[tennsei] reinforce one another. "I thought that if I could put my own family under the
camera, all our emotions, our privacy," Hara explains, "I wondered if I might break taboos
about the family."9 Hara includes the year of the film's release in the title to accentuate
the historical context.
Hara states in voice-over that "the only way to keep the relationship was to make a film."
Here, as in Ross McElwee's Sherman's March (1985), the camera offers a bridge to
intimate contact with others, a pretext for interaction. The camera is not a passive
recorder of reality, but rather provokes certain encounters, a strategy that Hara explores
in all of his films. Hara states, "I am not the type of director to shoot something just
happening [like a demonstration], but rather I like to make something happen and then
shoot it."10 Hara's documentaries are virtual collaborations--along the lines of the
ethnographic fictions of Jean Rouch such as Me, a Black (Moi, un noir, 1957) and Little by
Little (Petit petit, 1969)--in which Hara encourages the subjects to act out their lives for
the camera.
Hara himself appears in Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974; in fact, when we first see
him, he is crying, obviously distressed by his conversation with his ex-wife.
Throughout the film, Takeda accuses the filmmaker of all kinds of personal shortcomings.
She comments to Kobayashi about Hara, "He's only after your body. He's certainly not
good in bed." Takeda even questions the viability of the film project, and Hara's
competence as a filmmaker, a common scene in Hara's oeuvre, "You can't make a good
film out of this squalor." The filmmaker confesses his own anxieties in voice-over during a
sequence of Takeda giving birth without medical assistance in his apartment, "I was struck
at how sudden it was. I was the one upset, soaked in sweat, I got the focus wrong." Few
Japanese films have ever shown a woman giving birth, another taboo that Hara willingly
transgresses.
Like many avant-garde films, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 ignores conventions
of cinematic style. The sound is never actually synchronous with the grainy black-andwhite scenes; in many instances there is a radical disjunction between the location53

recorded sound and the images. Like Jonas Mekas' Reminiscences of a Journey to
Lithuania (1972), Hara's film has a strong home movie flavor accentuated by jump cuts,
the lack of establishing shots, flash frames, first-person voice-over, and a handheld
camera, although Hara uses relatively long takes as opposed to Mekas' fragmentation of
time and space. The absence of synchronous sound creates a feeling of dislocation and
loss. Hara's voice-over has the same halting, emotional tone as Mekas' narration
in Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania.11 Mekas' film was commented on in Tokyo
when it was shown there in 1973 and critics discussed Extreme Private Eros: Love Song
1974 in relation to Mekas' autobiographical journey to his native land.
Shortly after Hara commences filming his ex-wife, she decides to move to Okinawa. During
the postwar era, the Japanese government, while maintaining its claim to sovereignty over
Okinawa, elaborated an unspoken policy of sacrificing the island to the U.S. military to
minimize American influence on the mainland. The economy of the island was dominated
by the American presence, which included some 50,000 troops at the height of the
Vietnam war. In 1972, the year that Hara began filming, Okinawa was officially returned to
Japan, but the large American military presence has continued through the present. Many
of the characters who appear in the film work as prostitutes and hostesses in GI bars.
While the U.S. presence is never addressed in a global perspective, it invades the
everyday lives of the characters in Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974. (Curiously, the
war in Vietnam is never mentioned, although many of the soldiers hanging out in bars and
apartments were not far from the combat zone.) Like Imamura's Pigs and Battleships (Buta
to gunkan, 1961), Hara's film paints a savage portrait of a port town corrupted by the
American naval presence.
After Takeda mentions her intention to move to Okinawa, the scene shifts to a bar
frequented by African-American soldiers. The soldiers dance to the music of James Brown
and pose for a portrait, giving the black power salute of the Black Panthers. Hara then
focuses on the character of "Chichi, a 14-year-old Okinawa girl," already a
prostitute, as an intertitle states. Later, we see her in bed with an American soldier. Hara
punctuates the narrative with letters he receives in Tokyo from Takeda in Okinawa. One
letter announces that she is pregnant and the next scene shows her struggling to speak
English with Paul, an African-American GI. Takeda seems particularly excited about the
possibility of giving birth to a mixed-race child, another controversial subject in Japan. Like
Imamura inHistory of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon sengoshi: Madamu Onboro no
seikatsu, 1970), Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute(Karayuki-san, 1973), and Matsuo
the Untamed Comes Home (Muh Matsu koky ni kaeru, 1974), Hara makes films about
outsiders who challenge the mainstream views of Japanese history and society.
The Memory of the War: The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On explores Japanese memories of WWII, forcing
repressed events into consciousness. Not since Ichikawa Kon'sFires on the Plains (Nobi,
1959) has a Japanese film dealt so frankly with the issues of cannibalism, the abuse of
Japanese soldiers by their officers, and desertion in the Imperial Army during the war in
the Pacific. No Japanese film has ever confronted the issue of the war responsibility of the
emperor so relentlessly, with the exception of The Tragedy of Japan (Nippon no higeki,
1946), a historical documentary banned by American occupation authorities shortly after
its release for suggesting that Emperor Hirohito be put on trial as a war criminal.12
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On focuses on a man who struggles almost singlehandedly to challenge the claim that Emperor Hirohito bears no war responsibility.
Immediately after the war, American occupying forces decided to retain the emperor, who
could easily have been put on trial for war crimes in Asia, as the "symbol of the state and
of the unity of the people." The image of the emperor was consciously managed to
present him as a man of peace who was the victim of a small group of militarist
adventurers. Imperial taboos prevented discussion of the emperor's role in the
54

militarization of Japan.13 Hara was intrigued by Okuzaki Kenz because, while Japanese
intellectuals debated the relevance of the emperor system and the morality of individual
and collective responsibility for war crimes, Okuzaki actually took direct action against the
emperor.
Okuzaki remains steadfastly attached to a series of particular events that occurred in New
Guinea at the end of the Second World War. He obstinately implicates Emperor Hirohito
whenever possible in the film, denouncing him as "the most cowardly man in Japan" and
"a symbol of ignorance and irresponsibility." As in Kurosawa Akira's Record of a Living
Being (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955), the main character's mad obsession with the war
disturbs the surface calm of the present. Okuzaki had already spent years
in prison, in one instance for throwing marbles at the emperor. In his fanatical pursuit of
the truth, Okuzaki represents a kind of comic anti-hero. He is a character without
psychological depth, completely animated by duty to a higher goal. Hara, for example,
doesn't explore the roots of Okuzaki's erratic behavior in his family history; we know
virtually nothing about him at the end of the film.
Okuzaki crisscrosses the Japanese mainland in search of his former comrades and their
stories of the war. Hara keeps the viewer aware of the national scope of the drama by
detailing the locations in the intertitles: Fukaya, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Hyogo, Okayama,
Yamanashi, Kobe, and Shimane. Okuzaki retains a healthy notion of individual
responsibility vis-a-vis the emperor and the soldiers who committed war crimes in New
Guinea. When Seo Yukio claims that "In the army orders always came first," Okuzaki beats
him to the ground. Takami Minoru reiterates this line of reasoning, "An order is an order,
we had to obey." Okuzaki brushes aside the veterans' appeals to military hierarchy, while
at the same time recognizing that superior officers bear special responsibilities for actions
taken in their names, "I'm accusing the emperor for the same reason. He was responsible
as the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Army. But he didn't assume responsibility."
When Okuzaki makes a similar accusation against uniformed guards outside the Hiroshima
prison, whom he calls "robots" for their attachment to regulations, one cannot help but
recall the equivocations of Nazi officials at the Nuremberg trials.
A radical empiricist, Okuzaki remains fixated on the circumstances of specific war crimes
in New Guinea, hoping to make the central facts of what happened public knowledge. In
particular, he seeks to unearth the facts of two different cases involving the killing of
Japanese soldiers for desertion twenty-three days after the end of the war. The exsergeant Hara Toshio hesitates when Okuzaki asks him about the events of forty years
ago, claiming "My memories have faded after many years." In the course of Okuzaki's
investigation, the veterans reveal enough evidence to convince the viewer that three
Japanese privates were actually executed, on trumped up charges, to be cannibalized by
their superiors. Okuzaki pieces together the traces of the illegal executions by an
obstinate attention to the exact details of how many bullets were fired, where the
principals were standing, and the direction in which the bodies fell. Like the woman in
Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Okuzaki refuses to live in the present, to
forget, to get on with his life as so many of the other veterans have done. He remains
resolutely, even courageously, stuck in the past.
Although The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On might be called a historical
documentary, the film clings tenaciously to the present, rather than the past. Hara
explores the memory of the war, the resonance of the war years in the present, rather
than the past per se, "What I wanted to do was to trace how the war survives in Japanese
society today."14 Most historical documentaries, such as Henry Hampton's Eyes on the
Prize (1988) on the American civil rights movement, use extensive archival footage,
interviews with eyewitnesses, and authoritative voice-over commentary; many also
include interviews with scholars and journalists.

55

Hara resists the temptations of this didactic form, focusing his story on the present day
activities of Okuzaki and the reactions that he provokes in others. Although Okuzaki
frequently refers to the emperor, Hara never cuts to footage or photographs of him. Nor is
there any reference whatsoever to the atomic bomb, an unusual omission for a Japanese
film about World War II, especially since Okuzaki visits Hiroshima repeatedly. Occasional
photographs of soldiers appear, but they are found in the homes of the families of the
victims whom Okuzaki visits. Like Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-and-a-half-hour
epic Shoah (1985) chronicles the history of the Holocaust in Europe, Hara focuses on the
living memory of the war, not in the past as history. Through synchronous sound
interviews and images of the concentration camps as they exist forty years after the war,
Lanzmann anchors his film in the present, the here and now, to redeem the past and give
the dead "an everlasting name."15
In The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Okuzaki transgresses social norms in ways that
are simultaneously disturbing and amusing. The film opens with a wedding in which
Okuzaki serves as the go-between. Hara shoots from the level of the seated participants in
a parody of the film style of Ozu Yasujir. Okuzaki's anti-establishment discourse sounds
oddly out of place in the solemn context of a wedding ritual, "Maybe this country means a
lot to you but judging from my experience not only Japan but any other country is a wall
between men. It stops them from joining each other. It's a big wall. I think a family is
another wall. It isolates human beings from each other. It cuts ties. It's against divine law.
So I attack it." Hara initially conceived of shooting the film in a static, contemplative, style,
as a contrast to his earlier works, but his plans changed as he struggled to keep up with
his energetic protagonist.
Okuzaki's actions are so outrageous, so far beyond conventional expectations, that they
are often humorous. Many of the veterans have chosen lives of relative obscurity, some
have even changed their names. Okuzaki shows up at their houses uninvited, in one
instance yelling "Happy New Year" as he enters. Okuzaki says to Takami, "Your wife seems
to dislike making a film like this. I understand how she feels but does she know what it's all
about?" The former member of the 36th Engineering Corps admits that his wife knows
nothing about his war-time experiences. During the first interrogation that Okuzaki
conducts in the film, with the ex-sergeant Hara Toshio, the police arrive, harboring the
impression that the veteran is sequestered against his will. Okuzaki invites them in, "You
may arrest me. Come in. Who are you? You should learn more about life, about the war as
a real story." Okuzaki remains in control throughout this scene, imploring one of the
officers to get out of the way of the camera. In two instances, Okuzaki attacks elderly
veterans who refuse to disclose their actions during the war. Having already spent over
ten years in prison, Okuzaki doesn't fear the consequences
of his actions. In the last encounter, he actually telephones the police, in a scene that
reaches tragicomic proportions.
Throughout The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, the viewer questions Okuzaki's
sanity, although the filmmaker withholds judgment. Hara allows Okuzaki to state his case
with conviction, even if he is insane. After Okuzaki has wrestled Seo Yukio, another WWII
veteran, to the ground, he implores him to speak openly of the past. Seo responds that
he's never even met him before, to which Okuzaki replies, "I gave you my card," as if that
action justifies his violent and insistent behavior. In Kobe, Okuzaki bursts into a restaurant
owned by the family of another veteran of the New Guinea campaign. When the owners
quite reasonably request that he leave, Okuzaki shouts, "All you want is money! These
people lost their brothers. Which is more important? Forget about money!" Clearly, from
Okuzaki's point of view, the commercialism of modern Japan is no compensation for the
sins of the past.
Okuzaki also visits several relatives of the victims, some of whom accompany him on his
quest for confessions from the veterans. When the relatives decline to participate further,
56

Okuzaki actually casts others in their roles. He enlists the help of friends to impersonate
the relatives of the soldiers who were murdered, telling them, "Today you'll be acting not
as my wife but as Yoshizawa's sister. You're the relatives of the two victims. Act well. Let
me do the talking." Whereas Okuzaki seems almost religiously attached to literal facts in
his investigation of the past, he reveals himself as an opportunist in his search, willing to
stage certain actions in his pursuit of the truth. Later, Okuzaki gets support from another
opponent of the emperor system, stating, "I asked Mr. Oshima to act as the victim's
brother. I think his appearance will make the ex-sergeant talk." These scenes mirror Hara's
interactive method of documentary filmmaking, in which characters perform their lives for
the camera. Our knowledge that the "relatives" are merely stand-ins complicates our
reactions to the encounters that follow, blurring the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction.
Okuzaki's involvement in the making of the film was so substantial that he, in fact,
considers himself to be the director as well as the star of the film. He approached
Imamura Shhei about directing a film about his life. Imamura suggested the project to
Hara and arranged for the two men to meet. Okuzaki eventually provided some of the
production funds for the movie. Throughout the production, Hara discussed possible
scenes with his protagonist. At one point, Okuzaki disclosed his intentions to murder one
of the veterans, hoping that Hara would consent to filming the homicide. When Hara
mentioned his misgivings, Okuzaki told him, "You're no good." From prison, Okuzaki even
wrote his own review of the movie, explaining the motivations of his actions.16
Although Hara takes no direct editorial stand on the events that occur in The Emperor's
Naked Army Marches On, there is no pretense that the camera is not there, as in the
documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. On the contrary, throughout the film, the characters
address the camera directly, refer to the camera in passing, bow to the
filmmakers, take pictures of the camera, and yell at the camera. At the Hiroshima prison,
one of the guards places his hand over the camera lens, insisting that Hara stop filming.
When Okuzaki presents Takami with a gift, Takami also bows in thanks to the camera crew
in the room. When a policeman inadvertently blocks the camera's view of Okuzaki's
encounter with Hara Toshio, Okuzaki asks him to move, "I want the camera. We came here
to shoot." Trying to evade Okuzaki's relentless line of questioning, the ex-sergeant says, "If
people knew they were executed for desertion, you'd have to bear the shame as their
families. The camera's rolling. People will see the film and look down on you." Okuzaki
refuses this gambit and retorts, motioning to the camera, "They'll think you're hiding the
truth." In the encounter with Captain Koshimizu, who gave the order for the illegal
execution--the only interview in which Okuzaki fails to obtain even a partial admission of
guilt--Koshimizu's wife glides across the background and takes a picture of the scene,
including Hara's camera.
In the last encounter in the film, Okuzaki articulates his rationale for making the film, "To
reveal the misery of the war will keep the world free from war. They killed a man but
reported that he died from disease. The world doesn't know the real face of war." In the
ensuing melee, Okuzaki kicks ex-sergeant Yamada Kichitar repeatedly. Yamada says
angrily to the camera, "You forgot I helped you," to which his wife replies, "Don't blame
them." We are reminded of the precarious nature of documentary filmmaking in an
intertitle, "March, 1983, Okuzaki went to New Guinea. The film that recorded his activities
on location was confiscated there." Many reviewers questioned Hara's ethics, for while the
presence of the camera is fully acknowledged, the filmmaker fails to intervene in those
scenes in which some restraint on Okuzaki's actions seems necessary. At those instances
in which Okuzaki beats his interviewees, Hara holds back and observes the interaction
with detachment, a voyeuristic posture that makes the viewer an inadvertent witness to
violence.
The Sorrow and The Emperor: The Reception of Yukiyukite shingun
57

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On provoked substantial controversy in Japan when it
was released in a small theater in Tokyo. Commercial distributors refused to handle the
film, which raised disconcerting issues of imperial war-time responsibility and historical
memory, fearing it would trigger right-wing attacks. Viewers from the war generation were
generally stunned by the film, shocked by the audacity of Okuzaki's actions. Whereas the
mass media had treated Okuzaki as a lunatic whose actions were beyond
comprehension, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On forced viewers to evaluate
Okuzaki's motives without a priori condemnation. For many younger viewers, born after
the war, Okuzaki emerged as a hero, a man who refuses to compromise his ideals.
Younger Japanese have been less supportive of official attempts
124
to regulate the dignity of the imperial house, so Okuzaki's attacks on the figure of the
emperor didn't offend them. The reception of the film bears some comparison to the
reactions to Marcel Ophuls' documentary about France during the German occupation, The
Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la piti).
In 1971, The Sorrow and the Pity opened in a small art theater in the Latin quarter in Paris,
gradually reaching a sizable audience of students and intellectuals in the capital. The film
offended almost all of the established power blocs in France; the Communist Party
complained that their contribution to the resistance was under-emphasized while the
Gaullists felt that simply raising the issue of collaboration was "unpatriotic."17 In the
aftermath of 1968, however, a substantial audience of disaffected students, workers, and
intellectuals went to see Ophuls' film precisely because it subverted official versions of
French history. The Sorrow and the Pityshattered the myth of a united French resistance,
fighting to the last against the German occupation, while raising the issue of French
complicity in the Holocaust. As Henry Rousso has shown in The Vichy Syndrome: History
and Memory in France since 1944, Ophuls' film had a tremendous impact on the historical
image of France during the occupation, influencing fiction films of the 1970s to look back
on the dark years of the war.18
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On may play a role in opening a breach in
representations of WWII Japan. When Emperor Hirohito fell sick in 1988, the issue of his
war responsibility resurfaced and was hotly debated.19Japanese fiction films about the
war era typically portray the Japanese as helpless victims, especially as victims of the
atomic bombing, as though the Pacific War began in August 1945 instead of in the 1930s
when Japan waged a brutal imperialist war against China. In popular historical memory,
those responsible for the war are the militarists, a small group of individuals at the top of
Japan's wartime hierarchy, but excluding the emperor. Many Japanese believe the
militarists victimized the country by having started, waged, and lost the war.
Hara's movie indicts the emperor, and both he and Kobayashi, the producer, have
expressed their desire to tell a different history of the war years. Kobayashi stated to The
Japan Times after The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On was released, "I feel angry that
we are not informed what exactly happened in the war. And the ministries and those
concerned are reluctant to give information. When I think of the feelings of the people of
Asia, I regret very much to see too many movies which praise the war."20 Hara has
expressed interest in making a film about the brutal treatment of Asian workers who built
the Burma-Siam railroad during the war.
Recent films by Kurosawa and, uncharacteristically, Imamura focus on the image of
Japanese as victims of the war, in particular those lives lost in the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both Rhapsody in August(Hachigatsu no kyshikyoku, 1991)
and Black Rain (Kuroi ame, 1988), respectively, tell of the lingering effects of the bomb on
families in the post-war period. Rhapsody in August, in particular, was
58

criticized for reinforcing the "victim's consciousness" (higai-ishiki). Hara worked as an

assistant director on one of the few recent films to look at atrocities committed by
Japanese authorities in the course of the war, Kumai Kei's Sea and Poison (Umi to
dokuyaku, 1986). Sea and Poison details medical experiments on human beings
undertaken with military supervision at the University of Kyushu in the spring of 1945.
There is a reluctance on the part of Japanese directors, producers, and audiences to
confront the more accurate historical image of the brutality of Japan's endeavors
throughout Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. By chronicling the activities of a protester who
challenges the status quo, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On remains one of the lone
voices breaking the silence on the war years. The current crisis in Japanese feature
filmmaking may conspire to keep others from looking at the war in light of recent
revelations about atrocities and war crimes. Like Ophuls' landmark documentary, however,
Hara Kazuo's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On may embolden some writers and
filmmakers to come to terms with "the sorrow and the pity" of Japan's activities during the
Second World War.
EXTREME PRIVATE EROS: LOVE SONG 1974 [Gokushiteki Erosu: Renka 1974] (1974).
=Director Kazuo Hara has made a handful of controversial documentaries, including
GOODBYE CP (1972), a shockingly personal look at people with cerebral palsy, and
THE EMPEROR'S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON (1987), a profile of Okuzaki Kenzo, who
reported on war crimes committed by Japanese troops during WWII and publicly
criticized Emperor Hirohito. But EXTREME PRIVATE EROS is, without question, his most
outrageous, personal and masochistic work. Shot over several years, mostly in
handheld b&w and often with out-of-synch sound, this raw confessional has Hara
following his ex-wife, 26-year-old radical feminist Miyuki Takeda. The two lived
together for three years and share a child, and this 93-minute documentary captures
their post-break-up relationship and her new life without him. This was a brutal dose
of reality for notoriously-private Japanese viewers to swallow, as it matter-of-factly
tackles heartache, sex, insecurities, gender politics, and even on-camera childbirth.
Beginning in 1972, Miyuki and her child have moved to Okinawa, and Hara stays with
her for a few turbulent days. During Miyuki's travels, her barfly girlfriends provide a
bleak peek into Okinawa's skankiest nightclubs and their resident sluts, such as 14year-old Chichi, who prefers funkadelic-dressed American G.I.'s to junior high. Later
Miyuki shacks up with a black G.I. who can barely speak Japanese, but has no trouble
getting her pregnant (and in a touching family-phone-call moment, Miyuki's mother
urges her to dispose of it). And when she misguidedly tries to distribute pamphlets to
the local prostitutes, she's nearly beaten up. On top of that, Hara continually
interrogates his ex, he begins crying on camera, and if he can add to the on-screen
tension, he does -- like recruiting his current (much cuter) girlfriend Sachiko to
interview increasingly-bitter Miyuki. Moving back to Tokyo in '73, Miyuki works at a
"birth commune" for new mothers. And when she has her baby, Hara is there with his
trusty camera, as she delivers it at home without any help whatsoever. Although the
entire sequence is out-of-focus, it's quite a sight; one long, uncut shot of Miyuki laying
on the floor, spread-legged, squeezing out her "mixed blood" child onto the ground.
This insanely intimate document never flinches, as Miyuki verbally shames her infant
son for looking and acting like his father, and Hara's narration continually criticizes
Miyuki's screwed-up lifestyle. Sneaky Hara also captures some dialogue without
Miyuki's apparent knowledge, such as a nasty conversation with Sachiko, as she
insults everything about her ex, including his lousy bedroom prowess. Hara was
blasted by critics when this was released and I can understand why. I've dealt with exgirlfriends and it can be a tense scene -- but I'd never dream of filming it for posterity!
This LOVE SONG is an emotionally scalding yet absorbing cinematic open wound.
Extreme Private Eros: Interview with Kazuo Hara
59

Although the Japanese director Kazuo Hara has insisted that he is anything but a political
filmmaker, his 1974 documentary Extreme Private Eros (Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974)
remains a fascinating snapshot of Japanese society at a time of transition. An account of
the life of Haras ex-lover, Miyuki Takeda a feminist who relocated to Okinawa and
entered into a lesbian relationship with a bar hostess before becoming pregnant following
a fling with an African-American soldier Haras film directly addresses such issues as
sexual liberation and racial discrimination. Extreme Private Eros was potentially
inflammatory when first shown in Haras homeland and strict censorship laws regarding
on-screen genitalia forced the director to recoup his production budget over an extended
period by charging admission for private screenings. He would not complete another film
until 1987: The Emperors Naked Army Marches On won awards at major festivals such as
Berlin and Rotterdam, and earned the admiration of Errol Morris, the American director
of The Thin Blue Line. Hara is now firmly ensconced in academia, teaching documentary
filmmaking at the University of Osaka, but he recently attended the Sheffield DocFest to
introduce a screening of Extreme Private Eros. John Berra met with him to discuss his
landmark work and the fascinating female personality at its centre.
John Berra: You witnessed the explosion of the Japanese New Wave in the 1960s; were you
influenced or inspired by the films of Shohei Imamura and Nagisa shima?
Kazuo Hara: At that time in Japan, after the war, lots of young people tried to achieve
power by rebelling against the government. I grew up in that era and I went to see those
films to support that ideology and contribute to changing the government. Nagisa shima
and Shohei Imamura had made documentary films before me, but all their films showed
how normal Japanese people did not have power, that they were struggling and controlled
by the government. I thought that there must be a way to change that view, the idea that
normal people are weak; I didnt want to show the weakness, I wanted to show the
strength of the people.
JB: Miyuki exhibits a powerful personality but also a very vulnerable side. She is
contradictory in that she does not need anybody but also needs to be with someone in
order to feel special. Did you see her as being particularly representative of a certain
generation of Japanese women?
KH: She was very representative of Japanese women at that time, especially those who
were involved in student activities. But she had more charisma than other women, she
was stranger, you could not say she was normal, although she does represent a time of
change for Japanese women.
JB: There is a disturbing moment after the birth of Miyukis child when she gives the news
to her mother over the telephone, and her mother asks how dark the baby is, and if she
is going to keep it. Was her relationship with the African-American solider a political act?
KH: Miyuki was always interested in the power of lower-class people, which is why she
went to Okinawa and lived in the prostitution area. There were army camps there, and
black soldiers would come into that area, but she did not intend to have a black boyfriend
at that point. One day, she became ill, and one soldier was really kind to her, so she spent
the night with him. Their relationship only lasted three weeks, and she did not think she
would have a baby with him, she just wanted an experience. Miyuki was very nervous
when she spoke to her mother after giving birth. Her family were not very supportive but
Miyuki was very much against racial discrimination in Japan and wanted to fight that
aspect of society.
JB: When was the film first shown in Japan and did you experience any censorship
problems?
KH: It was first shown in 1974. It was a big film in Japan that year because it was a
shocking, self-portrait film, so a lot of people came to see it. At that time, the Japanese
censorship law was that if you filmed someones private area, you would be arrested if you
60

tried to show that film in the theatre. But because I had made the film myself, I could hire
a venue and show it privately, which was not illegal. Thats how I was able to get past the
censors. Some of the money for the film came from university research departments and
friends, but we did get into debt making it. We were able to gradually pay back the money
we had spent making the film by charging admission for these private showings, but it
took three to five years to pay back the debt.
JB: When the child is born, there are a few minutes when it seems that he could be
stillborn. How were you able to continue filming during what must have been a very
distressing experience?
KH: The way the birth is presented in the film makes it seem very quick, but it actually
took 12 hours. My mind became very cold, I was just a director, I was thinking about the
film and nothing else.
JB: Before Miyuki leaves Okinawa, she makes a pamphlet and hands it out. What kind of
statement was she trying to make with this material?
KH: In the film, it seems that she does not like Okinawa, but actually she loves Okinawa;
like me, she is from the mainland and Okinawa is very different, with a lot of
discrimination. When mainland people go to Okinawa, we cant get into that society, even
if we try, and its the same for people from Okinawa who go to the mainland, even more
so in that era. Even though Miyuki loved Okinawa, she could not be in perfect harmony
there, so the pamphlet was her love song to Okinawa, she wanted to leave something.
JB: What has happened to Miyuki and her son in the past 30 years?
KH: For about five years after I finished filming, Miyuki stayed in a commune, living with
other women and their children; but Japan was still very conservative and mixed race kids,
especially half-black, half-Japanese kids, were not accepted. The boy wasnt happy at all
so they decided to put him up for adoption and now he is very happy in America.
JB: Extreme Private Eros captures a very particular period of your life. How did you
respond to the film when watching it at todays screening?
KH: I did not watch the film today. I cant watch it anymore; its too embarrassing, I was
too young.
Interview by John Berra

Get Your Reps: Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

by Mark Asch |
The Japanese documentarian Kazuo Haras first film, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song
1974, begins with a black-and-white photograph of Haras ex-lover, Takeda Miyuki. The
camera zooms in on the photograph, so that we make out individual pores, individual
pixels. Then the title. This film which screens tomorrow night at Light Industry, with
Hara making a very rare U.S. appearance is about the camera as a tool of obsession
and possession. Fascinating and questionably appropriate, what follows is something of a
necessary staking-out of the limits of the documentary form were not, I dont
think, supposed to feel comfortable with the movies intimacy; the privacy implied by
the title exists to be violated, with the subjects obvious consent. (Hara couldnt possibly
anticipate the contemporary parallels; I hope somebody asks him about it
Saturday.)Following the title card, Hara narrates the brief history of his and Takedas
relationship over a montage of photographs of her vacation slides and candids, with and
without their infant son. He explains that he still sees her, though shes left him. As Hara
explains that Takeda has announced her plans to move to Okinawa, his voice-over
accompanies a series of portraits of Takeda, naked and very pregnant with their child,
61

facing the camera and in profile. And just as youre thinking about that juxtaposition, and
how creepy it is, to flaunt this intimacy just as shes leaving, Hara admits, over photos of
Miyuki not quite lost in a blurry crowd, The only way to stay connected to her was to
make this film. To make a documentary of her life, so that he still has a reason to witness
it, to be involved in it.
Unguarded, indecorous, transparent and impulsive to the extreme, Takeda is perhaps the
ideal subject for a film like this. So Hara follows her through two years of impulsive
decision-making and furious rationalization: her tempestuous platonic cohabitation with a
blank-faced fellow single mother; her impregnation by an American servicemen; her
fellow-feeling friendships with bar girls; her work and life at feminist mother-and-child
communes. Constant is Takeda and Haras son, who toddles in and out of the frame and,
seemingly, their awareness; and the edgy, overfamiliar camera and unsynced interviews
and conversations (the sound set-up requires a second technician, eventually Haras new
girlfriend, but before that he chooses video over audio when filming what seems to be a
manic-depressive bout of make-up sex).
In the centerpiece of the film, a single eight-minute Takeda delivers her out-of-wedlock
daughter on the floor of Haras Tokyo apartment, squared up to the camera. For Takeda
the delivery becomes a source of earth-mother pride at her self-sufficiency; for Hara it
seems to be a moment of cinecatharsis, though the shot is out of focus perhaps he was
subconsciously trying not to look at his ex having someone elses baby? (Indeed,
throughout the film, Hara uses the camera to try to gain entry to the perplexing world of
women, permitting digressions into the lives of other women go-go dancers, Takedas
fellow single mothers and bar girls that they, like Takeda at different moments, find
variously empowering and intrusive.) For us in the audience, though, the movie, never
more so than in the birth scene, is a moral confrontation, demanding that we judge
whether the filming of an event could ever be as remotely as important as the event itself.
KAZUO HARA: EXTREME PRIVATE EROS LOVE SONG 1974
With a title like that, you barely need a movie, but Kazuo Hara made one. Though it
precedes The Emperors Naked Army Marches On by over a decade, its equally a product
of the documentarians compulsion to follow eccentrics around. This time, the eccentric is
not a combative middle-aged veteran but a twentysomething woman specifically,
Haras ex-girlfriend Miyuki.
If this sounds banal, rest assured that Miyuki isnt saner and indeed, may be less sane
than Kenzo Okuzaki. Certainly shes just as determined to live live on her own terms,
her minds cloudy list of which apparently dictates that she run away from Hara with their
baby, move in with another woman, take off to Okinawa, hook up with a hostile-seeming
black G.I. for a few weeks; dance in strip clubs, hang out with prostitutes, and run an allwoman commune. Yet most inexplicable act might actually be her submission to starring
in this very documentary, which demands exposure including but not limited to fullfrontally giving birth on film.
To the extent that people still talk about Extreme Private Eros, etc., they talk about that
childbirth scene. Its shot out of focus, and Hara blames his lack of camera expertise in the
narration, but I wouldnt want it any other way. As if watching Miyuki laboriously as it
were push out the G.I.s baby werent enough for us, Hara also gets footage, in greater
clarity, of his lover/producer Sachiko delivering his own kid. (And what do you know,
theyre still together.) The second baby has a more harrowing emergence, appearing at
first to be a dead alien, but its the firsts thatll stick with me.
Focus issues constitute only one of the limitations absolute poverty of production imposes
on this film, but by determination or by accident, most of these limitations become wonky
strengths. Hara appears to have used exactly two pieces of equipment: a hand-wound
camera and a tape recorder. Lacking any means to synchronize these forces him to craft
62

the sound and the imagery as two independent entities that must nonetheless work
together. If Miyukis lips happen to match the words she speaks on the soundtrack, for
instance, its the only moment that will happen in a scene. But the experience hearing one
set of words from someone and watching them speak another or laugh, or pause, or
listen, or change a diaper has a way of separating their words from their manner.
Countless were the moments that felt like glimpses of an unusually nuanced portrait
simply because I could process what I heard the person say and what I saw them do
simultaneously but separately.
I dont want to oversell the power of the movies ramshackleness, prone as I am to get
ridiculously jazzed by all things microbudget, but its hard to imagine it done any other
way. To its core, this is a far-under-the-radar project. Were talking about a documentary
where the directors current lady and former one lean against a wall and interview each
other and tumble into a discussion of how weird it is that theyve both contained semen of
the man holding the camera. Were talking about a documentary where the director,
reduced to tears by his subjects callousness, near-silently weeps on camera for a few
minutes while still holding up the microphone. Were talking about a documentary
which the director himself cant bear to watch. Thats what I call a selling point.
Kazuo Hara sau violena apropierii
de Andrei Rus
n Japonia exist multe restricii: nu poi face aia, nu poi face cealalt. Dar cea mai mare
restricie o constituie spaiul privat al fiecruia. Ceea ce mi-am dorit s fac a fost nu s
intru n spaiul intim al altora, ci s l dezvlui pe al meu, i s vd ct de departe pot
merge n aceast direcie. Vreau s trsc audiena n mijlocul vieii mele, ntr-un mod
agresiv, i s creez confuzie. Sunt foarte speriat de lucrurile pe care le filmez, dar tocmai
din acest motiv simt nevoia s realizez astfel de filme. (1) Cuvintele de mai sus i aparin
cineastului japonez Kazuo Hara, cel care intra la nceputul anilor 70 n miezul relaiei cu
fosta lui iubit, Takeda Miyuki, pentru a realiza Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974 (Extrem.
Intim. Eros: cntec de dragoste 1974).
Filmul debuteaz cu o fotografie reprezentnd-o pe Miyuki, peste care e suprapus un
comentariu al autorului, informndu-ne c cei doi au format un cuplu timp de 3 ani, c au
un copil mpreun, c ulterior naterii copilului ea a decis c vrea un spaiu al ei i l-a
prsit. Ulterior, peste o succesiune de fotografii cu aceasta i cu bebeluul fostului cuplu,
Kazuo Hara mrturisete c motivul pentru care i-a dorit s nceap un astfel de proiect
cinematografic a fost dorina de a se obinui cu sentimentul despririi de Miyuki.
Comentariile lui Hara vor rmne, pe tot parcursul filmului, informative urmnd modelul
protagonistului din Jurnalele (Diaries, 1980) lui Ed Pincus -, ns interveniile lui din
spatele aparatului de filmat pe care l manevreaz se vor dovedi mult mai nuanate dect
ale americanului. O comparaie ntre demersul celor doi cineati nu este irelevant,
ntruct ambii sondeaz propria relaie cu o femeie (Pincus cu actuala soie, Hara cu fosta
iubit), ambii aduc n vizorul camerei alte femei, pe care le confrunt cu protagonistele
jurnalelor (Pincus i le prezint lui Jane pe amantele sale, Hara o implic de la un punct
ncolo n realizarea filmului, ca asistent de regie, pe actuala iubit Sachiko Kobayashi)
i, mai ales, niciunul nu ine cont de solicitrile personajelor de a nceta, ntr-un moment
sau altul, s le filmeze. Hara merge ceva mai departe dect Pincus n acest sens, cutnd
cu obstinaie s redea exclusiv momente ct mai tulburtoare ale relaiei lui cu Miyuki o
filmeaz din unghiul su subiectiv n timpul unui act sexual, nregistreaz un lung discurs
al femeii plin de injurii la adresa lui, sau surprinde in extenso naterea celui de-al doilea
copil al acesteia. Dei apare o singur dat fizic n cadrul jurnalului, Hara i face simit
prezena n diferite alte moduri n cadrul diegezei filmului: prin replici adresate din off
celorlalte personaje, prin comentarii, i (de cele mai multe ori) prin diverse micri
trepidate ale aparatului sau prin lipsa sharfului n unele cadre ambele situaii trdndu-i
emoiile i mutnd accentul n respectivele momente dinspre diegez spre realitatea
imediat. Cea mai extrem reacie auditiv a lui Hara survine n timpul celei de-a doua
63

cltorii la Okinawa (insula unde se mutase Miyuki dup desprire): izbucnete n plns
atunci cnd aceasta i vorbete despre Paul, soldatul afro-american cu care rmsese
nsrcinat de curnd. Este un tip de exteriorizare emoional pe care protagonistul
Jurnalelor lui Pincus nu i-a permis-o i e un gest cu semnificaii social-politice, atta
vreme ct n mod tradiional, n Japonia brbaii nu plng. Uzual, nici mcar nu trecea
cuiva prin minte c ar putea fi artai plngnd pe ecran. Cnd se consolida micarea
studeneasc n anii 70, a aprut i micarea feminist, iar ca rspuns la aceasta din
urm din ce n ce mai multe voci susineau c dac femeile pot deveni libere, atunci i
brbailor ar trebui s li se permit s i exprime sentimentele i, deci, s plng. Nu
jucam un rol cnd am plns pe ecran n Extrem. Intim. Eros: cntec de dragoste 1974, ci
ncercam s fiu parte a acelui nou mod de a tri, iar actul de a plnge reflecta acest
lucru. (2)
n toate cele patru lungmetraje non-ficionale pe care le-a realizat Sayonara CP (La
revedere CP, 1972), Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974 (Extrem. Intim. Eros: cntec de
dragoste 1974), Yuki Yukite shingun (Armata lui Dumnezeu mrluiete nainte,
1987) i Zenshin shosetsuka (O via dedicat, 1994) -, Hara se arat n primul rnd
preocupat de chestionarea raportului dintre realitate i ficiune.
n Sayonara CP (La revedere CP, 1972) urmrete un grup de oameni care, din cauza
unor diverse probleme cerebrale, sufer de handicap grav al unei pri nsemnate a
corpului. Nu se sfiete s i imortalizeze n ipostaze pentru care ar putea fi incriminat pe
criterii etice: i filmeaz n repetate rnduri trndu-se pe strzi, n lipsa scaunelor cu rotile
pe care le utilizeaz n mod normal n scop locomotor, i provoac la o discuie despre
viaa lor sexual i, n chiar ultima secven a documentarului, l surprinde pe unul dintre
ei gol n mijlocul unei strzi, iar apoi n timp ce se trte cu greu spre o int
nedeterminat. Aa cum observ muli dintre analitii care s-au oprit asupra operei lui
Kazuo Hara, alegerea de a revela n mod brutal o realitate are un efect potenial de trezire
a contiinei privitorului asupra naturii ambigue a acesteia. n acelai timp, ns, extremele
ncercate de ctre cineast duc experiena vizionrii unora dintre secvenele filmelor sale
ntr-o zon apropiat de grania cu neverosimilul: aproape c nu-i vine s crezi c ceea ce
vezi nu este nscenat. Hara se apr astfel: Niciun documentar nu este real n totalitate.
Cnd o persoan se afl n faa camerei, ea este contient de existena acesteia acolo.
Dar chiar i atunci cnd oamenii nu se afl n faa unei camere de filmat, n viaa real
adic, ei joac roluri. () Un documentar ar trebui s exploreze chestiuni pe care oamenii
nu le doresc explorate, ar trebui s scoat secrete la iveal, i s examineze motivele
pentru care respectivii vor s ascund anumite lucruri. Cnd oamenii vorbesc despre ei
nii, interpun limitri i tabuuri ntre subiectul abordat i restul lumii, iar aceste tabuuri i
limitri personale reflect tabuurile i limitrile sociale ale epocii. Vreau s ajung exact la
acele lucruri despre care refuz s discute, la intimitatea lor. (3) Similar ideilor lui Jean
Rouch despre cinematograful non-ficional este concepia participativ a lui Hara, pentru
care realizarea unui film presupune c subiectul i cineastul stau mpreun, i insufl
unul altuia energie, i dezvolt un proces. Niciodat nu intenionez s ies din acel proces i
s filmez obiectiv. Nu filmez doar ceea ce se ntmpl, ci ncerc s provoc situaii n care
tensiunea dintre cineast i subieci s fie energetic. () Devenim parte a vieii i
dezvoltrii celuilalt. (4)
Cu aceste scopuri n minte i realizeaz Hara filmele, trecnd peste restricii morale n
care ali cineati s-ar crampona. Pentru a revela n cel mai brutal mod cu putin condiia
oamenilor cu handicap locomotor grav n Sayonara CP (La revedere CP, 1972),
refuznd astfel s atrag simpatia spectatorilor pentru ei, acesta apeleaz la nscenri
evidente, neexplicitate ns n cadrul diegezei. i convinge s ias n strad i s renune la
scaunele cu rotile n timpul turnrii cadrelor, pentru a conferi o mai mare directee
micrilor lor i a crea un peisaj dezolant i aproape de neprivit pentru spectatorii obinuii
cu ideea c oamenii cu dizabiliti motorii stau izolai n centre medicale speciale i c se
folosesc oricum exclusiv de diverse instrumente care le fluidizeaz locomoia, fcnd-o s
semene cu cea a persoanelor normale. Hara declara n cadrul interviului acordat lui Scott
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MacDonald c () pn la finalul anilor 60 era de neauzit ca n Japonia oamenii cu

handicap s ias din casele lor. Nu exista nicio oportunitate pentru aceti oameni de a se
integra n societate. Dac nu erau limitai la a sta n casele lor, atunci cel mult i
petreceau tot timpul n cadrul unor centre mai mari create cu scopul de a-i ngriji pe
oamenii cu dizabiliti. Vitalitatea oamenilor cu handicap, viaa lor n orice sens, erau
limitate. (5 ) Apoi, pe unii dintre ei i filmeaz n intimitate, alturi de soii i de copii, n
timpul unor jocuri sau discuii evident provocate de prezena camerei de filmat n locul
respectiv, ceea ce are rolul de a-i oca suplimentar pe privitorii obinuii s se raporteze
comptimitor la persoanele cu handicap, creznd c acestea nu pot tri o via de cuplu i
chiar procrea. i nu n ultimul rnd, secvena de final n care Hiroshi Yokota, unul dintre
protagoniti, st dezbrcat n mijlocul strzii, poznd pentru aparatul de filmat, este n
mod clar rodul unei provocri lansate de ctre cineast (de altfel, o i recunoate ntr-un
interviu: ultimul cadru a fost filmat ntr-o diminea de duminic, ntr-o zon industrial
pustie. Am intrat ntr-o discuie cu Hiroshi. El voia s opreasc filmarea, dar eu voiam s
continum. Discuia a devenit din ce n ce mai tensionat, aa c Sachiko (n.n. Kobayashi,
asistent de regie i viitoare partener de via a lui Kazuo Hara) i-a spus: Dac sta e
finalul, mcar f un ultim lucru dezbrac-te n faa camerei i stai n mini sau ceva de
genul sta. Iar Hiroshi a urmat literal propunerea ei. (6). Toate aceste nscenri au loc aici
n afara diegezei filmului (i constituie o caracteristic timpurie a stilului japonezului nici
n Extrem. Intim. Eros: cntec de dragoste 1974 nu e ilustrat vreo intervenie n
mizanscen a cineastului sau a protagonitilor), ns ncepnd cu Yuki Yukite shingun
(Armata lui Dumnezeu mrluiete nainte, 1987) lucrurile se vor schimba.
n acest celebru documentar al crui protagonist Okuzaki refuz s uite ororile celui deal Doilea Rzboi Mondial, rmnnd, spre deosebire de fotii lui tovari de front, prins
mental ntr-un trecut neelucidat, Hara expliciteaz la un moment dat un truc la care
apeleaz personajul su pentru a-i continua traseul spre descoperirea adevrului n
legtur cu moartea a doi soldai din divizia sa. Dup ce i viziteaz pe civa dintre cei
cinci soldai care fcuser parte din plutonul de execuie al celor doi colegi ucii, fiind
nsoit n ultima parte a cltoriei de sora i fratele unuia dintre acetia ceea ce punea
presiune emoional suplimentar pe contiina anchetailor lui -, protagonistul rmne
din nou singur, n urma retragerii celor doi din cadrul demersului. Okuzaki refuz s
accepte situaia, aa c apeleaz la alte dou persoane pentru a se substitui fratelui i,
respectiv, surorii decedatului. i va continua, din acel punct, traseul n compania acestora.
Este un episod pe care Hara l filmeaz i l reveleaz n cadrul documentarului, insistnd
ulterior asupra indiferenei celor doi actori (la un moment dat, n cadrul unei discuii
tensionate dintre Okuzaki i unul dintre ucigai, femeia chiar adoarme) i semnalnd astfel
nu doar diferenele comportamentale dintre realii frai ai soldatului i acetia.
Ce l intereseaz n permanen pe cineastul japonez este s ridice ntrebri cu privire la
natura realitii n mintea spectatorilor, la care cei din urm se raporteaz de prea multe
ori exclusiv empiric, considernd-o o noiune de la sine neleas. Ce s-ar fi ntmplat, spre
exemplu, dac de la bun nceput cei doi actori ar fi interpretat rolurile frailor soldatului
ucis, comportndu-se exact la fel precum n varianta actual a filmului? Neavnd un
termen de comparaie n persoanele celor doi frai reali ai victimei, am fi crezut n
adevrul lor? Am fi chestionat oare gradul de verosimilitate al acestora? Adevrul este c,
indiferent cte ntrebri i rspunsuri ne-am fi oferit singuri n legtur cu aceste
chestiuni, nu am fi avut suficiente date obiective care s ne sprijine argumentele. Este
viclean intenia lui Hara de a ne bulversa i mai puternic concepiile despre realitate i
adevr prin asemenea revelaii: pui n faa unui comportament insolit al protagonistului
(care i agreseaz fizic n repetate rnduri pe interlocutori, neinnd cont de vrsta sau de
starea lor de sntate), nu aveam oricum certitudinea c tot ceea ce este reprezentat
naintea noastr nu este contrafcut. Cuprinderea n discurs a episodului substituirii
frailor are rolul de a ambiguiza i mai mult gradul de potenial adevr al realitii
surprinse n film, interognd i natura celeilalte pri a constructului. Kazuo Hara este
contient ns de confuziile pe care le declaneaz apelul la astfel de mecanisme, fapt
demonstrat i de urmtoarele observaii ale sale: n limba japonez exist o expresie
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celebr: a descoji usturoiul murat (un fel de mncare tradiional). Descojeti o bucat de
usturoi murat foi dup foi, i pe msur ce continui s o descojeti descoperi c acesta
nu are un miez unic. Atunci cnd avem o relaie cu realitatea i ne propunem s o
explorm, dm la o parte un strat al acesteia i deja credem c avem acces la o alt lume.
Problema cu acest alt nivel al realitii este c, dac l mai descojim un pic, vom descoperi
un alt nivel i mai adnc. Al treilea i al patrulea nivel nu reprezint nici ele miezul
realitii. (7)
Zenshin shosetsuka (O via dedicat, 1994) urmrete ultima parte a vieii scriitorului
Inoue Mitsuharu, surprinznd n aparen fascinaia pe care oamenii din preajma lui o
resimt vizavi de carisma acestuia. Hara intervieveaz numeroasele personaje care
graviteaz n jurul protagonistului, toate repetnd pn la exasperare aceeai plac: Inoue
e un om minunat, care le-a fcut s se simt altfel, s triasc mai intens etc. Este un
procedeu la care cineastul nu mai apelase n filmele anterioare acela al restituirii
complexitii unui om prin prezentarea direct a comportamentului su, dar i prin
chestionarea apropiailor asupra acestuia. Demersul lui Hara difer de cele din
documentarele realizate nainte i prin gradul ridicat de didacticism al constructului de
aici. Folosindu-se de armele filmului non-ficional tradiional, cineastul nu face dect s
dejoace retorica specific acestora. n primul rnd, aa cum am vzut deja, toate
personajele care intervin pentru a-i exprima opiniile asupra subiectului principal din
Zenshin shosetsuka (O via dedicat) spun acelai lucru, dar n alte cuvinte (spre
deosebire de cele aparinnd documentarelor clasice, care sunt selectate pentru a recrea
mpreun senzaia unei ct mai mari complexiti a protagonistului). Apoi, n cea de-a
doua parte a filmului, dup ce revelase un numr de trsturi definitorii pentru Inoue, le
deconstruiete pornind de la cteva mituri pe care acesta le inoculase de-a lungul timpului
n legtur cu tinereea sa. Hara intervieveaz n acest sens diverse rude ale
protagonistului, care spulber rnd pe rnd adevrul informaiilor oferite de ctre scriitor.
Bineneles c dezvoltnd un asemenea mecanism didactic (mai nti dezvolt o premis,
pentru a o ataca ulterior) cineastul nu face dect s ridice ntrebri n mintea spectatorilor
cu privire la gradul de adevr al unei realiti individuale pe care toi cei din jurul
protagonistului nu par a-l fi chestionat vreodat. Exist, de altfel, n cadrul filmului un
pasaj relevant pentru preocuparea cineastului japonez fa de adevr, atunci cnd Inoue
susine urmtoarele idei ntr-o prelegere: S presupunem c am terge trei pri dintr-o
spiral care ar reprezenta perioada dintre vara i iarna anului n care aveam 21 de ani.
Descrierea parcursului ntregii spirale ar fi ceea ce se nelege prin conceptul de adevr. S
notm acum cele trei pri pe care le-am ters la nceput cu A, B i, respectiv, cu C.
A+B+C = adevr. Dar ele sunt n acelai timp i ficiuni, pentru c am ales s scriem
despre ele. Dac notm prile neterse ale spiralei cu R, respectiv cu X, R+X reprezint
aadar toate detaliile despre care alegem s nu scriem la un moment dat. A+B+C+ R+X
constituie ceea ce numim via. Dar noi niciodat nu folosim, de fapt, ambele formule.
Oamenii au secrete pe care prefer s le in pentru ei. Ceea ce alegem s abordm din
totalitatea adevrului reprezint o ficiune. Putem alege doar o fraciune a adevrului.
ntre aceti parametri caut adevrul Kazuo Hara. De aceea, nu este de mirare c
Extrem. Intim. Eros: cntec de dragoste 1974 este o experien extrem n primul rnd
pentru cineastul aflat n spatele camerei de filmat, i abia apoi pentru protagonist. Dac
n Sayonara CP (La revedere CP, 1972) alegea varianta ocului vizual cu scopul de a-i
provoca audiena s se repoziioneze, sub influena energiei i a idiosincraziei
comportamentului protagonitilor, fa de o problem social pe care era obinuit s o
reprime sau, n cel mai bun caz, s o edulcoreze, n Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974
(Extrem. Intim. Eros: cntec de dragoste 1974) se folosete de procedeu pentru a
ajunge n primul rnd el nsui la o rezoluie n privina relaiei intense pe care o avusese
cu o femeie. Prezentarea unor nuane brute ale vieii sale intime se constituie ns,
concomitent, i ntr-o atitudine politic, din cel puin dou motive: 1. deoarece personalul
este politic, revelarea ct mai necosmetizat a acestuia avnd rolul de a distruge mituri i
tabuuri nocive exprimrii individualitii umane; 2. deoarece, avnd n prim-plan o femeie
modern i voluntar, rstoarn principiile unei societi bazate pe o atitudine de
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supunere a acesteia n faa brbatului. ntreg procesul de realizare a jurnalului reprezint o

terapie pentru Kazuo Hara, ns una la captul creia nu pare a ajunge la eliberarea
scontat.
Mai nti, o surprinde pe Takeda Miyuki ntr-o succesiune de discuii tensionate cu Sugaku,
alturi de care locuiete n Okinawa. Miyuki i-ar dori s ntrein i relaii sexuale cu
aceasta, ns se lovete n permanen de blocajele celeilalte femei. Apoi, n cadrul celei
de-a doua vizite n portul japonez, Hara o gsete pe fosta iubit ntr-o alt relaie, cu un
soldat de culoare din marina american pe nume Paul, pentru ca ulterior s o nsoeasc
n timpul ctorva seri petrecute n barul unde lucreaz ca animatoare, apoi la Tokyo, unde
d natere copilului conceput cu Paul, pentru a ncheia periplul ntr-o comunitate a
mamelor care i creteau copiii singure n Tokyo-ul emancipat al anilor 70 i unde Miyuki
va locui temporar. Cineastul trieaz regulile nescrise ale jurnalului, selectnd exclusiv
momente extreme din traiectoria protagonistei i eludnd, n consecin, detaliile
cotidiene menite s confere concretee realitii imediate. Hara e interesat s realizeze un
filmjurnal atipic, n care personajele s fie n permanen surprinse n situaii limit, iar nu
n unele cu caracter general, n care spectatorii s-ar putea recunoate aprioric. Nu este
important pentru el s confirme audienei ceea ce deja cunoate sau are impresia c ar
cunoate din spirala realitii, ci cu adevrat relevant este s le tulbure confortul i s
reveleze straturi ct mai apropiate de miezul acesteia. n aceeai direcie funcioneaz i
banda sonor a filmului, care nu este niciodat sincronizat cu imaginea. Dac o explicaie
la prima mn pentru situaie este bugetul minimal pe care Hara l-a avut la dispoziie n
vederea realizrii lui Extrem. Intim. Eros: cntec de dragoste 1974, nu este mai puin
adevrat c cineastul se folosete de aceast caren tehnic n scopul desvririi
demersului su estetic. Jeffrey Ruoff consider c absena sincronicitii ntre imagine i
sunet creeaz o senzaie de dislocare i de pierdere a direciei. Tonul ezitant i emoional
al voice-over-ului lui Hara e similar cu cel al naratorului din Reminiscences of a Journey to
Lithuania (Reminiscene ale unei cltorii n Lituania, 1971) al lui Jonas Mekas. (8) De
fapt, exist mai multe diferene dect asemnri ntre felul n care cei doi utilizeaz
asincronismul sunet-imagine, deoarece, n afara efectului comun de dislocare a binomului
spaiu-timp pe care procedeul l indic n ambele filme menionate de Ruoff, nu pot fi
ntrevzute alte elemente care s apropie demersurile acestora. Principala diferen o
constituie modul n care Hara filmeaz cadrele jurnalului, de cele mai multe ori rednd
situaiile n bloc, cu foarte puine tieturi de montaj, n timp ce Mekas fragmenteaz
imaginile pn la a le conferi o calitate abstract, simulnd fluxul memoriei, demersul su
fiind imposibil de asociat aadar realitii imediate. Or, dac la Mekas lipsa de sincron ntre
sunet i imagine funcioneaz mpreun n sensul recrerii unui timp i a unui spaiu
disjuncte n raport cu imediatul, n cazul lui Hara aceasta nu face dect s adauge un alt
nivel al realitii peste cel deja revelat n cadrul imaginilor i s ambiguizeze i mai mult
natura ei.
ntr-adevr, dup cum just observ i Ruoff, n multe momente apare o disjuncie radical
ntre locaia n care a fost nregistrat banda sonor i cea n care a fost imortalizat
imaginea peste care e suprapus. (9) Din acest motiv, demersul lui Hara i frustreaz i
violenteaz suplimentar privitorii, presupunnd o atenie sporit la detalii din partea
acestora. ns astfel reuete cineastul japonez s sporeasc propriul sentiment de uimire
n faa aciunilor unui alt om (a lui Takeda Miyuki) i s l transmit mai departe celorlali.
Era vital pentru constructul lui Extrem. Intim. Eros: cntec de dragoste 1974 s fie ct
mai sincopat cu putin, dar s rmn n limite realiste. Doar simulnd parcursul unui
studiu de caz antropologic, dar sfidnd regulile procedeului refuznd psihologizarea n
favoarea aciunii i urmrind doar gesturi i alegeri extreme ale persoanei supuse analizei,
n detrimentul analizrii pattern-urilor comportamentale ale acesteia putea Kazuo Hara
s incite la descoperirea particularitilor inerente existenei unei alte fiine umane; fiindc
doar n acest mod putea s se apropie violent de o alt persoan i, n acelai timp, s
rmn la o distan care s-i permit s-i conserve uimirea naintea unicitii ei.

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Tarachime
KAWASE Naomi. 2006. 43 min. Color. Digibeta.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
Bearing her own child for the first time, filmmaker Kawase reflects on the themes of
motherhood, family, and the cycle of life as she films the great aunt who adopted and
raised her. Called Grandma by the filmmaker, Uno is 90 years old and ailing, evident in the
uncompromising exposure of her fragile body. The documentary shows the two women
fighting, as Kawase complains about her lonely childhood, and their subsequent
reconciliation. At once brutal and tender, the film reveals a complex mother-daughter
relationship. "Tarachime" refers to "birth mother" in Japanese. (A Kumie, Inc. film.)
"[Tarachime is] a beautiful and breathtaking work of artof the most marvelous
simplicity." Natalia Ames, Nisimazine
"[Her films] are about life Kawase just took your hands and led you to her garden. It is
an intimate journey, a generous gesture." Apichatpong Weerasethakul, filmmaker
(Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010)
After graduating in 1989, Naomi Kawase soon turned her attention to making
documentaries, a genre she is very fond of and that still influences the way she creates
her fictions today. Working with modest means, she very soon achieved international
recognition for her films. In Cannes in 1997, she became the youngest director to win the
Camra dor for her film Suzaku, and ten years later she won the Grand Prix for Mogari
(The Mourning Forest). She talks about her relationship to cinema.
When was your earliest memory of cinema that really left its mark on you?
I was eighteen years old and I had just started attending film school. It was there that I
first had access to films from the French and American Nouvelle Vague. That's when I
discovered the difference between commercial films and auteur films, but also the idea
that a filmmaker has the possibility of free expression, if he or she wants.
Didn't you go to the cinema when you were a child?
I lived in a small town where there was no cinema. My daily life was summed up by
spending time with my adoptive parents. It was at that time that the universe that is found
in my films was forged.
You mentioned Nouvelle Vague. How did it inspire you?
Godard's way of filming life really influenced my style, my way of depicting reality. I am
talking about Godard, but I could just as well have mentioned Tarkovsky, Erice these
filmmakers constructed a very personal and very free way of rendering reality. Their work
contains a very large measure of their own life experience.
What are the stages in your creative process?
My desire to make a film always starts with a personal event that leaves its mark on me
and that I want to translate into images. I create fictions from very personal things. For
example, for The Mourning Forest, it was the illness of my adoptive mother, who had
Alzheimer's. For me, family and human relationships are very important. They represent a
connection between the past and the future. And I like to make this vertical connection
with nature.
You have made many documentaries. What does this format represent for you?
Before being a filmmaker, I am a human being, a person. It is as a human being that I
approach my fictions. Documentaries are turned towards reality, whereas fiction is created
by actors. This is why I feel closer to the documentary. It can reveal certain difficult
situations and change them into something positive. I can only imagine a fiction after
having made a documentary.

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Even in your fictions, you usually use non-professional actors. Why is that?
Working with non-professional actors, who have never learned how to act, enables me to
bring an aspect of authenticity to my films. They let me express things in a more lively
way, more real and more authentic.
What do you think of Japanese film today?
I have had the privilege of seeing all the films in Competition and they are all very
different. I think that this is what is missing from Japanese film. It needs more diversity.
Many scripts for Japanese films are based on mangas or fictions written for television. I
don't know if this is the case in other countries, but I attach particular importance to
original scripts for films. We don't have many very original films in Japan. Perhaps this is
due to the fact that it is a country with a very marked and very specific culture.
Given this culture, is it complicated to be a female director in Japan?
Its difficult but I am determined.

Would you describe Still the Water as a continuation of the themes explored in your
previous films?
Yes, for sure. The themes such as life and death, symbiosis between humans and nature,
the memories of a place, the cycle of life that comes and goes one generation ater
another; these are present in my previous films as well as in this film. However, speaking
of this film particularly, it was different in the sense that I found myself having almost no
desire to force or control over something during the production. I never felt like this has
to be this way or I want this no matter what. For some reason, this peaceful state of
mind came down to me, calmly assuring me what we need will come down to us naturally
as well.
On April 24, 2004, Kawase Naomi had a son, Mitsuki. Following Japanese tradition, she
gave birth on a tatami mat, assisted by a midwife and surrounded by all her family. As
soon as the umbilical cord was cut, she tools up her camera and films every day her child
and her ninety-year-old grandmother. With this highly emotionally affecting docu-diary
the filmmaker continues to reflect on the world around her, her origins and the future.
Although she initially wanted to describe only the life she carried within her for nine
months, Kawase Naomi eventually extended the scope of her film to include Mitsuki's
interaction with those around him. By deliberately breaking with any notion of linear
temporarily, she creates, with gentleness but also with harshness and violence, a
pendulum like movement between moments, past and present feelings.
On 24 April 2004 the Japanese director Naomi Kawase gave birth to a son, Mitsumi. In
accordance with tradition, she gave birth to her child on a mat with the aid of an assistant
and surrounded by her loved ones. Although she had originally wanted to record only the
experience of life emerging within her body, she continued to film for over a year after the
birth. _ The docu-journal form of the film allows the director to reflect on the world with
confiding whispers. The film is an emotional pendulum that swings between moments in
life and past and present feelings. At the same time it works with the powerful images of a
warm and bloody human body. _ Even the birth itself is filmed with an open approach. We
see her body opening up preparing to bring new life into the world. We see the mat soak
with amniotic fluid. We witness the umbilical cord being cut. _ Tarachime is the word for
mother in old Japanese. The director never knew her mother and was raised by her
grandmother. Pregnant, she returns to the ninety-year-old woman: her naked, lined
breasts symbolising the director's future motherhood. _ The grandmother's death is part of
the river of time, but the documentary sets out against its current. Shots of the pulsating
ultrasound of the unborn child and of the stark grave bind the film to form an intersection
between the paths of the living and what the dead leave behind.
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Extreme Private Ethos: Embracing & Tarachime

Film has clearly been a form of therapy for Naomi Kawase. Though experimental in nature,
her documentaries have addressed some highly personal and painful family issues. While
her themes are universal, the treatment and wincing pain of the search for her birth father
and her complicated relationship with her adopted mother make the double bill of
Kawases Embracing and Tarachime(roughly translated as Birth Mother, trailer here)
arguably the least accessible program of Extreme Private Ethos, the Asia Society current
series of acutely intimate Japanese documentaries.
Kawase has also made several acclaimed narrative features, including the quiet but
deeply moving Cannes award winning Mourning Forest, but her reputation was forged with
her documentary work. Essentially abandoned by both her long missing father and the
birth mother who relinquished Kawase to her great aunt Uno (whom she calls Grandma),
the filmmaker struggles with a sense of rootlessness in Embracing. Having traced her
fathers whereabouts, she would like to re-establish contact, but her great auntgrandmother-mother is against it. Somewhat conflicted, Kawase reconstructs her early
childhood, but all she really has are a few old photographs and official census
registrations. Ultimately, such evidence makes notions of family seem rather arbitrary,
especially through Kawases warped lens.
Following the birth of her own child, Kawase examines her relationship with her adopted
mother, directly rebuking the elderly womans emotional distance on-camera at critical
juncture in Tarachime. Indeed, Kawase turns her focus away from nothing, including her
sons delivery, scenes of her great aunt in the ambulance and emergency room during a
health scare, as well as brutally up-close shots of the ninety year old womans naked body.
Whereas Embracing exhibits some intriguing avant-garde stylistic devices, Tarachime is
more visceral and discomfiting. It is a hard film to watch on several levels. In contrast to
her later narrative work, which might be deliberately paced but have a stately beauty
deserving a considerably wider audience, these short docs should probably be reserved
for cineastes whose tastes run towards non-narrative experimentalism. Brutally honest,
they are still quite appropriate selections for Extreme Private Ethos. About forty minutes
each, Embracing and Tarachime screen together this Sunday (3/18) at the Asia Society on
New Yorks fashionable Upper Eastside.
DIARIES (1971-76)
ED PINCUS , 1980
It was a time of upheaval in people's personal relations. Everything was on the table.
Feminism had a slogan: The personal is political. Filmmaking technology was rapidly
evolving. It became possible for the first time to shoot single-person sync. A crew of one
meant that intimate relations could be filmed in a documentary. Films could be shot over a
long duration without skyrocketing costs. I decided to do an experiment. I would film for
five years, not look at the footage, leave it in the can for five more years and then edit.
Editing would mimic what came out of the camera ("the rushes"). David Hume had called
the self no more than a bundle of perceptions. How much of individual personhood could
be recreated in such a film? I wanted to test the personal is political in this brave new
world of relationships.
Jane Pincus isnt yet sure how she feels about all this . . . exposure. By now, hundreds of
people have watched her take showers, undergo gynecological examinations, argue
bitterly with her husband, curse and whine. Soon, I think, thousands will. Already, people
recognize her on the streets of Cambridge, Mass., people who know what she looks like
with no clothes on, people who know the history of her adulteries and her conflicts with
her father. Naturally, its a little disquieting. Jane isnt a movie star, exactly; shes a movie
characterthe main character in an extraordinary new documentary by her husband, Ed.
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I must warn you: Eds film is three hours and twenty minutes long. Worse still, its
calledDiaries (1971-1976). I know, I know: the whole idea makes me yawn, too. Who
hasnt suffered through many a cinma-vrit study of somebodys uncles funeral or
somebodys cousins wedding or somebodys meditative walks down sundry rural lanes?
Such movies may shed new light on American rituals; they may force us to examine the
hitherto unexamined corners of our lives; but most of them are pretty damned boring.
Not Diaries. In fact, thats whats most mysterious and fascinating about it. Its hold on our
interest raises all sorts of questions about how movies and narrative and characterizations
work. In filming, as best he could, five years of his life, and then editing twenty-seven
hours of footage into an evenings viewing, Ed Pincus has created a comic melodrama of
family life in the Seventies thats as engrossing, saddening, maddening, and haunting as
any fiction. He has taken a magical leap, vaulting over the heads of cinma-vrit and
cinematic storytelling into a dazzling new realm.
Not that Diaries ever leaves the realm of the ordinary. The first thing one must deal with in
this film is the question: Why look at this stuff? Who cares about Ed Pincuss life, or yours
or mine, for that matter? Even though it is faith in the ordinary that has sustained so much
contemporary domestic melodramaand so much cinma-vritno one really wants to
watch someone elses home movies. Nor is Ed Pincuss life exactly brimful of incident. A
42-year-old resident of Cambridge and rural Vermont, Pincus is the author ofGuide to
Filmmaking (1968), probably the best-selling film-technique manual; and in 1969, he
created the Film Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Currently a Visiting
Lecturer at Harvard, he has made six other films, chief among them Black Natchez (1965),
a study of impecunious blacks in a Mississippi town; Panola (1970), a fierce and startling
portrait of the Natchez town drunk; One Step Away (1967), a vrit look at a sleazy,
struggling Haight-Ashbury commune; and Life and Other Anxieties(1979), a potpourri of
footage shot after Diaries but edited before it. Life and Other Anxieties, incidentally,
possesses none of Diaries magnetism; in fact, although the other films have their virtues,
they would scarcely rate Pincus a footnote in the history of the documentary. No, Pincus is
best regarded as a sort of Seventies Samuel Pepys, a diarist who gets at the decade of
navel-watching and narcissism of his own tiny life.
We meet Eds wife, Jane, who is 34 as the film opens, their six-year-old daughter, Sami,
and their two-year-old son, Ben. Their world looks cozy and funky and sweet (The happy
family, proclaims Jane, by way of introduction). Very quickly, we realize it is falling apart.
The sudden intrusion of the camera may have something to do with that. Like the
unwanted guest in a Pinter play, its always around when things are getting dicey, and
though people try for a while to be polite in front of it, camera manners are soon thrown to
the winds.
It seems Ed is having affairs, and Jane, a feminist and a batik artist (and also the co-author
of the successful book Our Bodies, Our Selves), is miserable about it. Upstairs lives Ann, a
provocative, flirtatious woman who appears to be the object of Eds ardor (we later
discover that she and Ed have never managed to consummate their little adultery). The
tension mountssoars. Ed and Jane take a trip to California, where Jane weeps by a river
and Ed, with unwitting cruelty, tells her she should see Godards Contempt. She returns to
Massachusetts and Ed takes a frightful mescaline trip, which he doesnt film (though some
of his spaced-out musings find their way onto tape). Back in Cambridge, Jane decides to
get a tubal ligation, changes her mind, gets pregnant, and has an abortion. There is a
peaceful anti-Vietnam demonstration and shortly thereafter a violent one.
Relations between Ed and Jane deteriorate. He moves into a loft in his MIT office, and
returns. There are horrendous, hilarious discussions, the sort of discussions that
intellectuals everywhere had in the early Seventies: intricate dissections of what men
should be and what women should be, of how relationships should work, of constrictions
and, especially, space. Not the least of Diaries virtues is that its a documentary of
ethics, a record of the queasy moral soul-searching that for many years turned every
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sexual act, every flirtation and peccadillo into a socio-political statement. Typically, Jane
analyzesanalyzes everything: her body, her reactions, Eds sexuality, even the reasons
she sneezes. And typically, Ed tries to hide behind his camera, behind manly ratiocination
and manly shrugs. Meanwhile, the children play and grow, and so does a dog named
Tapper.
Ed and Jane rent a home in Vermont and decide to move there, and when Ann visits them,
they attempt a mnage trois. In one funny, squirmy scene, Ann and Jane sit across from
each other like opposing queens, analyzing Eds sexual performance of the night before
(not, of course, on the basis of its skill; rather on the basis of its political implications);
meanwhile, Ed sits on the floor, the third point in this uncomfortable little triangle, and
accuses his wife of being incredibly critical. Before long, Ed and Jane are seeing a
woefully inept marriage counselor, and Jane has an affair with a fellow named Bob. Not to
be outdone, Ed takes up with a lissome filmmaker named Christina. As for Annwell, she
disappears from the film altogether, and with her a good deal of strife. We see more of
Vermont, of contentment, of children. Jane and Ed look better together. They like each
other moreyou can see it. The endless, earnest discussions give way to a winking
playfulness; the camera often seems to be caressing Jane. And life and the stories it
generates plod on. A friend of Eds goes mad. Another dies of cancer. The dog grows.
It all sounds desultory and rather vague. Yet, watching Diaries, one is struck by two
interdependent sensations: that Pincuss film is at once exactly like home movies and
much, much more exciting than home movies; and that Eds life on-screen is limited in a
way that real lives seldom are. No one has as few friends and acquaintances as the Ed we
see on-screen, nor as little professional life. In fact, only fictional heroes do, because
coherent fiction is more easily achieved when the cast of characters is limited and the
amount of workaday detail minimized. This, then, is a diary thats compressed like a
fiction: it gives us five years in one sitting.
In stretching so little material over such a wide expanse, Pincus has made the skin of his
film feel taut and resilient. Jumping from one half-sketched incident to another, the viewer
begins to fill in the gaps, and the feeling that imparts is rather like suspense. Its as
though Diaries were eliciting some unconscious narrative impulsea blurring, connecting
power not unlike the persistence of vision that turns still photos into moving film when
they are flashed twenty-four times a second. Refreshingly, Diaries doesnt insist on its
narrative. The story simply forms, coalesces, as mysteriously as frost on a windowpane.
Whats astonishing is that there is a story, that when looked at in pieces like this,
life doesyield narrative, replete with its own motifs and twists and sequences of suspense.
You can see it happen.
One is reminded, of course, of the Louds, that ruddy-cheeked American clan who, on the
PBS cinma-vrit series An American Family, crumbled before the cameras eyes. But this
is different. The difference is that Ed is the camera and the camera Ed. And so the camera
or rather a new creature one might call the camera manbecomes the films main
character.
This, of course, breaks all the rules of cinma-vrit. Ever since Jean Rouchs first
experiments in the late Fifties, vrit has held as its holy of holies the dictum that cinema,
in Pincuss words, must capture the flow of reality independently of presence of the
camera. One neednt invoke the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to demonstrate that
the cinma-vrit attempt, so defined, is well-nigh impossible, and that the more one
hews to it, the more one is creating a dishonest cinema and passing it off as the truth. Far
better that the camera not pretend to be invisible, that it admit to its own rather smug
personality and presence.
Ive been talking lately with people whom I think of as techno-deterministswho like to
believe that, say, Star Wars was caused by the development of computerized specialeffects techniques, or that film noir resulted from new portable equipment that made it
possible to shoot amid the gloom and claustrophobia of real city streets. I sympathize with
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that viewpointits always seemed to me that the completion of the Empire State Building
in 1931 somehow made King Kong not only feasible but inevitable in 1933but I cant buy
it completely. Admittedly, the Diaries would not have been possible without the
development, in 1971, of the miniaturized Nagra tape recorder that could fit into a pocket,
allowing one person to shoot footage with synchronous sound, yet achieve easy mobility
and relative intimacy. One could say, with Christopher Isherwood, I am a camera
except that Isherwood, a diarist himself, goes on to talk about being quite passive,
recording, not thinking. And that is something no man can hope to be or do.
Fortunately or not, any portrait we make is a double portrait: of the subject and of its
observer. The existentialists have known this, and have understood man as ontologically
distinct that way: he is, and simultaneously hes aware of it. Moviemakers too have long
comprehended their roles as observed observers; witness the work of Hitchcock, Welles,
Bergman, Michael Powell, Brian De Palma, et al. But these gentlemen have been forced to
express that awareness through their representatives on-screenthrough the characters.
Fiction is restrictive in that way. Characters can stand for a filmmakers self-consciousness,
can even discuss it, but they cant convey it in all its complexity, because theyre made
up. Theyre filtered through the filmmakers artistry.
In 1970, Pincus decided that the synch-sound filming of people directly from life had
come to a dead end. The style had been established over the previous decade and it
seemed to portray people as static in time, with a peculiar distance between filmmaker
and subject. It all seemed to me to be a betrayal of what I thought people were really all
about. Diaries had been attempted before, by Miriam Weinstein, Joyce Chopra, Jonas
Mekas, and Stan Brakhage, but never in a way that seemed a useful analogue of the
literary diary, never in a way that acknowledged both the events as they happen and the
personality of the diarist. Weinstein, for instance, interviews people in her life. Chopra
hires a cinematographer, a device which honors the recording of events but not the
subjectivity of the diarist experiencing them. Mekas and Brakhage work without synch
sound, so that their records of life are very remote from the way events actually feel;
moreover, Brakhage pretends that life and memory are a series of still, uninflected visions,
visions that never seem to have touched human consciousness.
Why, after all, do we read a diary? Not for a simple record of events, or an
acknowledgment of times passage, or mere interpretation, either. We want both, the
record and the sensibility. But if a literary diarist sits down at the end of a day and records
and interprets what has happened, a cinematic diarist has many options. I emphasize this
because I think Pincus has chosen the best. If he is truly to record, truly to capture lifes
flow, the cinematic diarist must turn on the camera before he knows what it is going to
see; no interviews or planned scenes will do. And if he is truly to interpret, he can do so
only in the editing room. Ed Pincus may be the first filmmaker brave enough to have seen
that to create a rewarding cinematic diary you must not only bring the camera into your
lifeyou must, at times, become the camera, let the camera live your life with you, and
for you.
With a Nagra in his pocket and a 16mm camera on his shoulder, Ed Pincus shows us his
worldthe observedand, advertently or not, he shows us who he is as well. There are
those who have seen the film and accused Ed of leaving himself out of it, of being evasive,
of letting himself off various moral hooks. But this is to look only at Ed the character, not
at Ed the camera. Standing behind his Eclair, being yelled at by his wife, being taunted by
his mistress, being delighted by his kids, and replying or laughing or agonizing in a voice
that begins to sound as though its coming from the back of our own heads, Pincus
becomes an astonishingly full-bodied presence. His life and soul are on display as those of
Hitchcock and Welles, or even such baldly autobiographical filmmakers as Fellini and
Woody Allen, never are. To be sure, the life and soul of Ed Pincus may not be as rich or as
fascinating as theirs. But what surprises me is how thrilling it is to see so deeply into
anybody, even into such an ordinary, mixed-up man. Watching Diaries, one encounters a
new astonishment at the art of cinema itself, at its world-redeeming poweran
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astonishment that must be rather like what the viewers of the Lumire films felt, looking in
awe at a picture of trees in which they could actually see the leaves move. In the Diaries,
you can see relationships move, and psychologies; you can see the dance of time itself.
How do we discover Ed Pincus through his film? The answer lies partly in that gap between
the act of recording and the act of editing. The Ed who records is a different man from the
Ed who edits, and the latter has the luxury of time and distance. That time and distance
lend the film its moral authority; Pincus the filmmaker can judge and even condemn
Pincus the character. The situation resembles the one in fiction, where we judge
characters as their creator does. But Diaries offers a freedom that good fiction doesnt: the
freedom to disagree.
When Gary Cooper tells Jean Arthur shes beautiful, who will not concur? The director has
seen to it that the make-up artist and the backlighting and the focus and the position of
her face make Jean Arthur as beautiful as she can beand casting her in the first place
ensures our agreement. But at the beginning of Diaries, when Ed tries to reassure his
nervous wife that being on camera is OK, he tells her shes very beautiful, and though Jane
is certainly attractive enough, I am struck by the sensation that I can disagree, that in
recording his life through his own subjectivity, Pincus has abdicated the filmmakers
traditional control over our perceptions. The scene goes on. Jane admits to feeling judged.
From behind the lens, Ed tells her shes not being judgedand somewhere in that
statement, we feel a lie. When we do, and when we refuse to agree that Jane is beautiful,
we are also judging the filmmaker; we are discovering who Ed Pincus is in how his views
and perceptions differ from our own.
Another example. There is a boisterous, funny short story within the film called South by
Southwest, a twenty-minute segment during which Ed visits his pal David Neuman (who
co-directed Black Natchez, Panola, and One Step Away), and the two of them drive from
Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon to Santa Fe to Las Vegas. Neuman is a raffish, antic,
hippie-ish sort, and a crafty manipulator of the camera. Joking and mugging and telling tall
tales about his sexual exploits, he turns himself into a great comic character, one the
viewer realizes is a composite of lies, postures, and distortions. I love this sequence, partly
because I find David engaging and partly because Pincus has allowed his friend to become
something of an alter-ego. David reflects a side of Ed that cant come through in the
earnest Cantabridgian discussions with his wife and other liberated women: the nasty,
boyish, jubilantly macho side. David plays off the filmmaker, squeezes delighted giggles
from the voice behind the camera, even cleverly draws Ed into the film by suddenly
treating the camera as though it were a man instead of a recording machine. South by
Southwest is one of the brightest, most ebullient sections of the film, and much of that
brightness is in the way the camera moves, in its choice of what to look at, in its mood.
The first-person cinema is nothing new, of course; one recalls a moment in Dziga
Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera when the camera itself comes to seem a man taunted
by ladies in a taxi. And there is that mammoth folly, Robert Montgomerys Lady in the
Lake, in which we are supposedly observing everything through the eyes of the detective
hero (seen only in mirrors), who is subjected to a wide array of onrushing fists and faces
and puckered lips. The silliness in Montgomerys experiment, and in all the subjectivecamera work in such recent horror pictures as Halloween, lies in the fact that the camera
doesnt act like a person, doesnt see like one or move like one. Pincuss camera cant help
moving like a person and seeing like one; it practically is one.
The late phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty believed that a man expresses the
whole of his being not just in what he says and does but in the minutiae of his
movements, in the way he gestures, the way he travels through the space of a room, even
the way he throws his glance upon a distant object. The movements of Pincuss camera
convey who he is as surely as any intentional action, and by watching them, we discover
him as an auteur in a way that we never could discover Hitchcock or Welles or Ophuls.
This is a mysterious process, but it neednt seem so obscure. Pincuss skill at frame
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composition, for instance, fluctuates throughout the film, depending not only on his
subject (its harder to compose a violent fight with your wife than a portrait of her taking a
shower) but also on his state of mind. The calmer and more confident Pincus is, the
prettier his shots. The film ranges from raw, jagged footage, shot mostly in raw, jagged
Cambridge, to the careful, painterly, contemplative views he gives us of his Vermont
home. As he and Jane mature, as their troubles subside, the cinematic style grows more
precise and even picturesque. (Also a bit duller, though audiences seem more relieved
than bored.)
In one scene, Eds son, Ben, tries to use the Vermont outhouse on a particularly chilly day.
Its cold, Dad, he complains to the camera, and we hear Ed adjuring him to sit on it
anyway. In the midst of this scene, a fascinating thing happens. Ben becomes distracted
by something; he keeps looking up beyond the upper right-hand corner of the frame. Very
quickly, we become curious about what it is he sees therewere conditioned, no doubt,
by the traditional three-shot syntax: the shot of the characters looking at something, the
shot of that something, and then the shot of the characters reacting to what weve seen.
Here, any fiction filmmaker would immediately cut to the object of Bens interest. But the
camera stays on Ben, because the camera is not a story-telling device, its Edand Ed, at
that moment, is feeling tough and paternal and refusing to be taken in by his sons cute
evasions. Finally, Ed relents, and the camera pans to show us what Bens been looking at,
anticlimactic though it is: a little bird perch. Then quickly, almost sternly, it whips back to
Ben, the boy who wont go to the bathroom. That little sequence says more about
fatherhood than all of Kramer vs. Kramer.
In fact, theres a lot that the makers of fiction could learn from Diaries. They should note,
for instance, the way the characters behave perfectly plausibly, yet without that timehonored device known as motivationthat motivations are never as present or as clear in
real life as they are in fiction. They should also note the way moral questions are worked
out through the characterizations; in this, Diaries is as skillful as any Western or gangster
film.
Actors ought to see the film too, to examine the subtle gestures and shifts of tone by
which Jane manipulates Ed or makes herself attractive to him or defuses her childrens
anger and rambunctiousness. They ought to study the portrait of an erotic feminist
concocted by Ann, and they ought to see the funky New York chic of Christina. (Pincus
manages to bring a real glamour and allure to each of his women. He may be the Von
Sternberg of the documentaryor at least the Charles Vidor.) Bruce Dern, Anthony
Perkins, and other actors accustomed to playing psychotics ought to take a gander at
Dennis Sweeney, whose appearance in Diaries summons a chill that deepens as the film
progresses. Sweeney had been a Civil Rights organizer who appeared in Pincuss Black
Natchez, and when he shows up in Eds kitchen in 1972, talking quietly about the dreadful
voices he hears in his teeth, I recognized him at once from newspaper stories: this is the
man who would later, in 1980, kill Allard Lowenstein. Nothing I know of in fiction or
documentary feels the way that moment feels; no foreboding is so palpable.
Of course, a certain amount of narrative structure seems born in the editing room. The
film begins when Ed is about to attend his uncles funeral; it nearly ends with the death by
cancer of his friend, filmmaker David Hancock; in between there are several
contemplations of death. Indeed, almost everything in this movie begins to comment on
everything else. A game of freeze tag among the kids becomes a metaphor for being
caught in the cinematic frame; a scene in which Christina eavesdrops on her neighbors
marital strife becomes a metaphor for the films eavesdropping on Eds; Ben, who cuts his
finger shortly after his father does, comes to seem a metaphor for Ed, reflecting his fears
and hesitations and depressions. And so on.
What is exhilarating in Diaries is not the way it creates such felicities but the way it finds
them. There is an argument between Ed and Jane in a car on a drizzly day; the windshield
wipers flap back and forth, intruding on the sound, deadening the atmosphere (an
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apposite alienating device). Jane is very upset, and the conversation bursts with that
anger-cum-analysis so redolent of the Seventies. Youre sitting placidly on your
defenses, Jane says. You run away from intimacy. Then, surprisingly, she launches into
an explanation of why she sometimes sneezes during their discussions. It comes from
absolutely not being able to say I need you . . . Im being hostile in some way and at that
point, I sneeze. The insight is accepted and forgotten. But several scenes later, Jane is
sitting naked and blithely telling Ed about her new lover, and suddenly she sneezes. That
sneeze is motivic, fiction-like but real; it shatters the barriers between story-telling and
life.
I make great claims for Diaries, and yet I rather wish that others wouldnt try to imitate it.
Ed Pincus has created a marvelous film, and I hope its an influential onebut not as the
spearhead of a new genre. That genre would only repeat itself, would quickly overrun and
settle the lush border country between truth and fiction, posture and persona. And it
would surely erode the force of its progenitor. Better that Diaries be seen, and seen
widely, that it be taught and studied and cherishedand then let go, like the past it so
perfectly evokes.
FILM: ED PINCUS MAKES 'DIARIES' OF HIS OWN LIFE
By VINCENT CANBY
''DIARIES,'' which opens today in the Agee Room at the Bleecker Street Cinema, is Ed
Pincus's filmed record of his own life and times from 1971 through 1976. It's a nearly 3
1/2-hour memoir about Ed, his wife Jane, their two children, Sami and Ben, their dog
Tapper, some of the women Ed had affairs with, several colleagues, as well as Ed's travels
to and from Vermont, California, Arizona and New York City.
Though it's long, it's surprisingly easy to endure. It's entertaining, but it's also troubling
both for esthetic and for moral reasons, which may be the same things.
The concept of the film belongs very much to the movie-mad 1960's and early 1970's, the
time of Jean-Luc Godard, who forever changed the look and sound of cinema, and the time
when newly portable camera and sound equipment made possible the cinema verite
revolution. Truth, which had been eluding mankind for several millenia, was now at hand,
or so many young film makers believed. All one had to do was to go out and point a
camera at it.
Some fascinating films came out of that era - films by Albert and David Maysles, Frederick
Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, Jonas and Adolfas Mekas and Richard Leacock. Mr. Leacock, a
film-teaching colleague of Mr. Pincus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, appears
in ''Diaries'' from time to time.
The most poignant film of that time was - and remains - Jim McBride's brilliant 1967 satire,
''David Holzman's Diary,'' a hilarious mock-cinema-verite fiction about a solemn young film
maker who, rather like Ed Pincus, decides to find the truth of his life by filming it in minute
detail.
Actually I'm not at all sure that Mr. Pincus, a Boston-based maker of documentaries (''Black
Natchez,'' ''One Step Away'') who has taught at M.I.T. and Harvard, was looking for truth
more than he was simply interested in recording some of the looks and sounds of his time.
Whatever his goal, ''Diaries'' inevitably reveals a lot more and a lot less than meets the
eye and the ear. (Though ''Diaries'' covers some of the same events explored in ''Life and
Other Anxieties,'' an earlier film made by Mr. Pincus and Steven Ascher, the new film is not
a repetition.)
It's difficult to understand why anyone would want to make a movie of his own life, unless
one were a film maker in search of a subject. It's not the same thing as writing about one's
life. The camera is not a pen or even a typewriter. Unlike writing, filming has nothing to do

76

with repose and reflection, except when the filmed material is subsequently shaped in the
editing room.
The camera takes over any space it inhabits in much the same way that a stranger does.
It destroys all privacy. At the beginning of ''Diaries,'' Jane Pincus grumbles that she feels as
if she should be acting and she doesn't like the idea. The camera may record everything
but it understands nothing. It's a mechanical extension of the person holding it, whom it
transforms into an alien. The camera can go beneath the skin only to the extent that the
person being photographed welcomes it or becomes oblivious to its presense.
On the surface, ''Diaries'' is five years in the history of the Pincus family, during which Ed
and Jane raise their children, attend funerals and weddings, break up briefly, watch antiVietnam demonstrations and the rise and fall of former President Richard M. Nixon, and
talk. Ed, Jane and their friends talk endlessly. They don't talk about Vietnam much, at least
when the camera is on them. They talk mostly about themselves, about their relationships
and their feelings. When Ed admits to having an affair, it's Jane who suffers the guilt,
which seems to be one of the burdens of their enlightened age.
The talk is not great, but it sounds absolutely accurate and painfully authentic. Says Ann,
one of Ed's lovers, long after their affair is over, ''Like I think in our present lives any
interaction we have is heavier for me than for you.'' One listens to this and cringes. Is
there any hope for a middle class that talks such nonsense?
Among other things, ''Diaries'' is about a group of comparatively affluent, well-educated
Americans attempting to think and, instead, becoming fatally entangled in their own
jargon.
Ed, we learn, is afraid of his feelings, which may be why he puts a camera between
himself and his life. Making a movie thus becomes a substitute for dealing coherently with
the world around him. Jane, who spends a lot of her time working out the hostility she
feels toward Ed, his girl friends and the film itself, discovers in the course of ''Diaries'' that
she frequently sneezes to avoid - I think the phrase would be - verbalizing a need.
In that Ed, Jane and their friends often sound much more foolish than they probably are,
''Diaries'' does not tell the truth. As a docuementary, it records only the superficial
evidence of their lives. It takes fiction, something like John Sayles's ''The Return of the
Secaucus Seven,'' to get the truth. For reasons of his own, Mr. Pincus shows us very little
of Ed, Jane and their friends being aware of the world around them, or even making their
livings, which is what most of us spend most of our lives doing.
It's no accident that the film's most riveting moments have nothing to do with wobbly selfanalysis but with the chance appearance of Dennis Sweeney, the young civil rights activist
Ed met and worked with in the 1960's. Mr. Sweeney comes to see Ed and Jane in Boston to
discus his problem: he's receiving threatening messages through his teeth.
Ed and Jane try to talk rationally to Dennis, They suggest that he seek what's
euphemistically called ''help.'' Later they learn that Deenis is blaming them for those
messages and is threatening them and their children. Not long afterward, they hear that
Dennis Sweeney has murdered former Representative Allard Lowenstein.
These brief sequences illuminate the film. They are real drama. They have the effect of
shutting off, if only temporarily, the obsessive self-absorption that is otherwise built into
this kind of movie making. According to ''Diaries,'' Ed and Jane remain largely unaffected
by Vietnam, Watergate, the cost of living and almost everything else relating to real life.
Having said that, however, I should add that ''Diaries'' is also a fascinating, technically
expert recollection of the not-so-far-off 70's. It's not only about the generation once
labeled ''me''; it's a demonstration of it. Me, Me, Me! DIARIES, documentary directed by Ed
Pincus; edited by Mr. Pincus, Moe Shore and Ann Schaetzel. Running time: 200 minutes.
This film is not rated. At the Agee Room, Bleecker Street Cinema, 144 Bleecker Street.
77

The unassuming title of this documentary belies what is, I think, one of the most
remarkable non-fiction films ever made. From 1971 through 1976, Ed Pincus recorded, on
16mm film, episodes of his life with his wife, Jane Pincus, their two young children, and the
several women with whom Ed had love affairs. Its also a portrait of a particular era - the
early 1970s, or perhaps,more accurately, the post-1960s - a time in which a willingness to
experiment in life, love, and political expression, was still present, but, in the culture at
large, was on the wane. That title - Diaries is as unadorned, direct, and honest as is the
film itself. Appropriate, too, is the titles inference that the films content would normally
not be intended for the eyes of outsiders. However, what I experienced when I first saw
Diaries was not a sense of voyeurism, but of privileged intimacy/ Despite Eds liaisons,
and the anguish they sometimes cause his wife, there is absolutely nothing lurid or
sensationalistic about this film. Ed films Jane lying on their bed and looking very unhappy.
Its a weird shot, a kind of horizontal monologue, in which her face fills the screen, but
sideways. She confesses to her husband: I get angry and I build up this layer of selfconsciousness and it hurts me sometimes... I feel my privacy has been invaded... I feel like
I cant be myself. I feel like Im sacrificing myself for your film. This is a painful
indictment. It makes us squirm. We feel alienated from the filmmaker, who seems
merciless in his determination to keep filming. Ed could easily have edited this scene out
of his film. But moments like this are part of the reason the film has such emotional
complexity and honesty. In the long run (and the film is long - 3 1/2 hours), we become
bonded to Ed and his his vision, partially because of his willingness to show his own dark
side. This is not to say the film is dark. In fact, its luminous in its depiction of the beautiful
and profound weave of every day life. Meals are prepared, a child is taken to the doctor to
have stitches removed, a puppy is acquired, Janes father comes to visit, Ed attends a
wedding, the puppy becomes a full grown dog. Mundanity becomes transcendent. This
unending stream of activities with friends and family is the evanescent backdrop for Ed
and Janes willingness to experiment with redefining what it means to be married, what it
means to create a family, and what it means to expose the whole messy enterprise to a
camera. I first saw rushes from Diaries when I was a graduate student in MITs
documentary

The Pincus Experiment

Posted on November 7, 2013 by interventionsjournal in Texts, Vol. 3, Issue 1: Mediascapes
and Connectivity.
by Giampaolo Bianconi*
On November 17, 1982 Ed Pincus Diaries (1971-1976) opened at the Bleecker Street
Cinema in downtown Manhattan. It was greeted by a lukewarm review by Vincent Canby
of The New York Times, who, before wondering whether there was any hope for a middle
class that talks such nonsense, expounded on what he felt to be the films foundational
flaw. He wrote:
The camera takes over any space it inhabits in much the same way that a stranger does.
It destroys all privacy. [] The camera may record everything but it understands nothing.
Its a mechanical extension of the person holding it, whom it transforms into an alien. The
camera can go beneath the skin only to the extent that the person being photographed
welcomes it or becomes oblivious to its presense [sic].[1]
Here, Canby noticed the films status between past modes of vrit documentary, in which
the camera was considered an instrument that could be ignored by real people or played
to by media personalities. Yet his conclusions on the act of bringing a camera intimately
into ones own life were, in fact, primary concerns for Pincus himself. The film became not
a record of their daily lives as captured by the omnipresent camera, but instead a trace of
the attempt by Ed Pincus and his wife, Jane,[2] to utilize the camera for the purposes of
self-investigation and to facilitate the process of opening their marriage. This becomes
78

more recognizable considering the trajectory of Pincus previous works and writings, which
this paper will attempt to reconstruct.
Settling into a characterization of the 1970s as indicative of a shift away from the eventful
political landscape of the 1960s, Canby takes note of how the characters didnt discuss
politics or the Vietnam War very much, preferring to focus on themselves.[3] The films
most potentially diaristic elementsevents culled from the daily lives of Ed and Jane
Pincus from 1971 to 1976is secondary to the discussions which occur between Pincus
and participants in the film about the nature of the project and how it affects them. Jane
describes the process early on: its like being in therapy, very self-centered, always made
to look inwards. She feels, to a certain extent, like she should be acting. She concludes,
despite her clearly emotionally exhausted state, that she must go through the experience
herselfwith the hopes of coming out somehow improved.
Ed and Jane Pincus, filming themselves in a mirror at their home before they depart for a
funeral. Diaries (1971-1976) (200 min. color, sound), 1982. Video Still.
In another instance, returning home after an evening with Ann Popkin, his girlfriend for
much of the film, Ed and Ann take apart their selves and actions. I didnt feel I was
acting, she tells him, But well now dissect the evening if you like. They film each other
discussing their night, in which Ann seems to have had a little too much to drink. The
camera here is anything but an object to be overlooked. It must be contended with, and its
presence in daily life is felt uneasily.
Ed and Jane travel to California to visit David Neuman, Eds documentary partner from the
60s. Immediately following the scene in which Jane, bedridden, expresses her deepest
discomforts over the cameras intrusions, their trip begins as Ed films her in the shower of
their motel room. Over dinner with David, Jane further describes the project and its
impact. Its a lot of agony for the wife, she says, But its lessening because shes
getting more open minded.[4] Finally, she describes herself as finally finding her own
identity. Ed hands the camera over to David, who films him. How will this camera-driven
self examination open her, help her solidify an identity that is her own? Why did these
desires cluster around 16mm film in 1971?
It is important to note that these numerous conversations never have a strategic function.
Their purpose is not to help Ed design a better process, or to optimize the comforts of his
participants before the camera. The nature of their self-improvement is neither the labor
of maintaining a smoothly functional open marriage, nor the successful completion of the
documentary project. Eds anxieties over Anns possible overacting, or Janes unease
faced by Eds camera, underscore a more general apprehension over the very possibility
of presence between these characters at all. The problem is no longer that the camera will
capture too much of you, or judge you too harshly. Cause for concern is instead how the
camera changes your potential interaction with others. Youre not all here anyway, I
dont know whether to look at you or the camera, people tell Ed. Youre not really present
all the time. How could one want more than love and presence? Jane Pincus says. Eds
anxieties revolve around who is really present, with him. He asks his son Ben: Do you like
being here, with me? If presence drives their anxieties, Diaries might have been a way of
articulating their uneasiness within institutional power structure. What drives them: their
self or their determined-subjectivities? Diaries would attempt to resolve this through a
project that was not a retreat from the political arena, but instead a continuation of radical
politics in the theater of the self, taking the form of a self-examination and purification.
Jane Pincus looks on as Ben tells her he is sick. Diaries (1971-1976) (200 min. color,
sound), 1982. Video Still.
After beginning the project, Pincus would write: There are many problems involved in
bringing a camera into your private life, but Id rather not write about them at this time
since many of them are unresolved and form part of the subject matter of the film
itself.[5]
79


Before beginning work on Diaries in 1971, Ed Pincus tinkered with some footage he had
excluded from his previous collaboration with David Neuman, Black Natchez (1967). The
decision to make Natchez came while Pincus was studying philosophy at Harvard. At the
time, he explained, he was leading a kind of very dried up academic life, while also
becoming interested in politics of all kinds.[6] In 1965, Pincus and Neuman followed
political organizers(mainly Dennis Sweeney) to Natchez, MS, where they filmed for a
period of three months, focusing on attempts by Northerners to register voters and raise
political consciousness among black communities in the region.[7]
The ethos behind that film relied on what Pincus called an early SDS [Students for a
Democratic Society] political philosophy of let the people decide, dont manipulate
people.[8] It was doubtless also influenced by the aesthetic and techniques of
cinma vrit to which he had been exposed at Harvard, which deferred the directors
subjective control to the cameras objectivity, so long as its presence before the subject
was adequately controlled. At the time, this was the style Pincus and Neuman decided
they could utilize to make the greatest contribution to the Movement. Describing both
his aesthetic axiom and political goals of the time, Pincus later expressed:
I had this notion of cinma-vrit as a kind of flow, and what this cinma-vrit film-maker
wanted to do was capture this flow and editing was an unfortunate necessity, but ideally
real time and film time would be the exact same thinga Warhol kind of ideaand
somehow that would demand on the part of the audience this real self-attuning to the
minutest detail, that they would really become more active participants in the viewing. I
dont think that anymore.[9]
Black Natchez relied on an objective investment in the camera, presenting un-manipulated
events that could politically activate its viewers. Consciousness-raising, then, was the
films contribution to the radical political movements of the period. In conjunction with
direct action, direct cinema would help to incite social and political transformations. Their
thinking here seems closer to efforts by Newsreel, the radical documentary group with
offices that operated across the country, than the vrit of D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles,
or Frederick Wiseman.[10]
Though filmed in the summer of 1965, Pincus and Neuman didnt finish
editing Natchez until 1967. The editing process involved an intensive search for the
moments in which they felt their presence hadnt affected the action, as Pincus
describes.[11] In one instance, they were faced with footage for which they had no doubt
that the camera had affected their subject:, Panolaan alcoholic, accused police
informant, and follower of Malcolm X. This was the footage to which Pincus returned in
1970. Panola presented a challenge to the filmmakers at the time due to his uninhibited
recognition of the camera, his emphatic return of its gaze. Writing in 1977, Pincus
mentions: I remember meeting one subject in a film I was editing, and I was angry at his
autonomy.[12] This was likely Panola.
With Panola, Pincus found the presence of the camera impossible to nullify. He refused to
ignore the apparatus and actively performed for it. It became clear that this footage was
unsuitable for the purposes of Black Natchez, which couldnt allow for an intrusion that
actively contradicted the cameras claims to affect no one but its audience. That
objectivity, though, involved fixing a subject in space, time, and type: it didnt have room
for Panolas always transforming, dynamic performance. The realization that
previous vrit practices could only create ossified subjects became key to the
development of Diaries, which looked instead to capture people as becomings.[13]As
noted by Jim Lane, Pincus changing conception of the relationship between the camera
and the subject before it hinged on Panolas racial status as African American, inflected
by his performance and the documentarists inability to contain such a
performance.[14] Through Panola, Pincus could begin to accept the inherent
performativity that didnt prohibit the camera-subjects identity, but rather, formed it. He
80

use the previously discarded footage of Panola from Black Natchez to create a new film
titled Panola.
In his interview with G. Roy Levin conducted weeks after the completion of Panola, Pincus
described the manner in which he felt the film was now able to function. If it could be
deployed, the material would no longer be within thevrit paradigm that had
produced Natchez. He explained:
Of course he was relating to the camera and he would put on everything from a real
performance for us, to his just being very, very drunk and working out his aggression or
his sadness in relationship to us and the camera. Panola as performer also matched the
kind of face Panola felt he had to put out to the world as a black man, and those two
things just worked very nicely[15]
With regard to documentary form, this presented a realization that the modes of reality
affected by cinma vritcould themselves be changed. It was not merely that
performativity and, more important, explicit engagement with the camera could now have
radical political potential. Manipulating Panola to ignore the camera would have
contradicted political and aesthetic claims to the writing of reality. Pincus would later
describe the mode of 60svrit as a cinematographic approach to the world. What was
important, he continued, could be achieved through surfaces, the world of public
spacesPrivate space, radical subjectivity, was inaccessible to the camera and was either
nonexistent or unimportant.[16] With Panola, the cameras claim on fixing others in space
and in time had crumbled.
Politically, Pincus outlook at the time of Panola was moving away from the SDS-inflected
attitudes that had informed Natchez. Again, to Levin in 1970, Pincus described:
Ive changedright now, I have a very cynical attitude toward the possibilities of political
revolution. What I want to do is make films that say what I want to say and in some way
relate to political institutions. Not only political institutions, but institutions that determine
peoples politics and the quality of their lives, be it family, being a male, being female
[17]
It was precisely to the family institution that Pincus would shift his focus in the making
of Diaries. But it would not be the family as an external institution that Pincus would
investigate, as in the contemporaneous pop-culture media event An American Family, the
documentary series that would air on PBS in 1973. Instead, Pincus chose to subject his
own family to his camera, including himself.[18] Some people say there is a pig in all of
us and we have to learn what that pig is, Pincus told Levin, echoing contemporaneous
slogans by the Weather Underground.[19]
Film Poster for Diaries (1971-1976).
The increasing politicization of the personal in the late 60s is frequently associated with
70s practices of dropping out, in terms of a retreat from the public arena of politics
caused by the dissipation of the energies that surrounded the events of 1968. Here, the
influence of the womens movement and rising feminist consciousness are said to have
played a key role. As discussed by Frederic Jameson, the emphasis on private life was a
tactical and rhetorical shift that opened a whole new political space, a spacearticulated
by the slogan, the personal is political, and into which the womens movement will
triumphantly move at the end of the decade.[20] An engagement with feminism proved
key for Pincus himself, especially as encountered through his wife, Jane Pincus.
By the late 60s, Jane has become involved with the Bread and Roses collective in
Cambridge, one of the most active consciousness-raising groups in the area. As she has
explained:
Wed had our children and started to talk together and because there were other groups
beginning to meet and to gel, there began to be these huge womens meetings at MIT.
81

And it was at that time that we decided that we wanted to learn about ourselves and our
bodiesWe just knew that there were things that werent quite right and could be set
right.[21]
From there, she became one of the founding members of the Boston Womens Health Book
Collective, which released Women and Their Bodies: A Course as an inexpensive booklet in
1970.[22] By 1973, an expanded version was released by Simon & Shuster as Our Bodies,
Ourselves.
The textual production of these organizations, epitomized by Our Bodies, Ourselves and its
success on a national scale, indicates that their consciousness-raising was rooted just as
much in bodily as political concerns. Engagements with medical institutional practices that
precluded womens knowledge of their own bodies incited them to organize and
disseminate information they had been denied. Again, from Jane Pincus:
We didnt interview the doctorsWe basically talked amongst ourselves. And we had to
see doctors because we were either pregnant or trying not to get pregnant, and so dealing
with birth control methodsBut we didnt interview doctors so much as we were living
through experiences with doctors, and talking about those experiences, and gaining
knowledge about both ourselves and what was happening to us, and then developing a
critique of what was happening.[23]
Here, concern with the body and the self marks not a withdrawal from politics as Jane
Pincus had practiced it in the 60swhen she was involved with SDS, the NAACP, and
worked counseling returning Vietnam veteransbut rather its continuation on the level of
the body itself.
I dont think the importance of these ideas can be overstated in regard to the dual form-oflife experiments the Pincuses began in 1971.[24] While expanding a marriage in 1971 may
be less remarkable than the experiment of bringing a camera into ones private life, the
Pincus open marriage still predated the immense popularization of the lifestyle incited by
Nena and George ONeils book Open Marriage, which appeared in 1972.
[25] Diaries doesnt show the Pincuses engaged in a swinging good time: instead, the
process is portrayed as difficult, painful, and rigorous. The achievement of sexual
liberation may have been a secondary to the goal of self-knowledge.
Speaking at Columbia University in 1975, Flix Guattari framed the political effects of the
decade: The question is neither of innocence or guilt but of finding the microfascism one
harbors in oneself, particularly when one does not see it.[26] Acknowledging his
ambivalence towards the term microfascism, Guattari expounded on its implications:
There is a microfascism of ones own body, of ones own organs, the kind of bulimia that
leads to anorexia, a perceptual bulimia that blinds one to the value of things, except for
their exchange value, their use value, to the expense of the values of desire.[27]
For Jane Pincus, the presence of something else within her body was all too material, as
indicated by her interactions with medicinal institutions. In Diaries, these institutions
cannot be avoided; throughout, Jane considers having a tubectomy, and at one point Ed
accompanies her to an abortion (all the film shows is Ed picking up some sandwiches with
other waiting husbands and boyfriends). Aside from a medical apparatus installing itself
within the body, there is also the presence of the marriage institution within Ed and Jane
both. In this sense, the combination of an open marriage and the cameras inclusion into
their lives was an attempt to identify and possibly purge the presence of power, the
microfascisms, the pigs within themselves; just as Women and Their Bodies: A
Course had attempted to reclaim knowledge of the self for the improvement of the
experience of women in the prevailing medical system.[28]

82

In the development of Diaries, Ed Pincus own intellectual engagements with video and
television at the time must also be acknowledged. Television and mediation are woven
throughout Diaries: on a short road trip, Ed and David pull into a motel not to rest, but to
watch the Richard Nixons 1972 reelection, and television is frequently consumed by the
Pincus children. Scenes showing substantial protests against the Vietnam War at MIT
further correspond to the wars increasing media presence.
Between shooting Natchez and revisiting the Panola footage, Pincus and Neuman had
remained active political documentarians. One Step Away (1968), their first film
following Natchez, was made for television. It investigated a rural hippie commune in
California, but the filmmakers were dispirited to findin Pincus wordsa bizarre
replication of bourgeois society.[29] The experience of working with television producers
and networks appears to have been equally dispiriting.[30]
Before beginning shooting for Diaries, Pincus shared some of his thinking on television and
contemporaneous guerilla television developments:
TV obviously has a lot to do with molding peoples minds, their whole conception of what
they think of themselves, what they think life is about. The relationship between TV and
consumerism, all that shit. So thats a much more insidious system to prop up and
participate in.[31]
Participating as propping uphere Pincus targets are the countercultural video collectives
Raindance and Videofreex. At the time, Videofreex were working to create content for CBS,
with Raindance serving as the movements research and development arm.[32] Writing
in 1971 of what he termed cybernetic guerilla warfare, Paul Ryan wrote in favor of the
real possibilities of portable videos, maverick data banks, acid metaprogramming, Cable
TV, satellites, cybernetic craft industries, and alternate life styles.[33] It was precisely
herethe utopian video currentthat Pincus located his opposition to television and video
and formed a system to set film against it. For Pincus, there were limitations to the
televisions political potential. In a sense, you can sell Excedrin or you can sell menthol
cigarettes by repeating something that people hate. But the question is, suppose you
wanted to unsell Excedrin, suppose you wanted to unsell commercialism, consumerism.
Maybe thats not possible because of something intrinsic to the nature of TV.[34] The
mediums utopian promise as expressed by Ryan was matched by Pincus disdain.
Now that the prevalence of digital video has become an altogether unremarkable element
of daily life, the radicalism of these early 70s gestures may be more difficult to recover.
Writing in 1976 and attempting to define the video medium, Rosalind Krauss described the
feedback that characterized the relationship between the video camera and the television
screen as mirror-reflection, implying the vanquishing of separateness.[35] In 1974,
Hollis Frampton called the video frame a degenerate amoeboid shape passing for a
rectangle to accommodate the cheap programming of late-night movies.[36] Referring to
a 1967 Esquire cover in which a boy watches Jack Ruby on TV, Coca-Cola and hot dog in
hand, Pincus said: Hell write a book called I Lost It Watching the Tube[TV isnt] just an
interpretation of experience; it becomes part of the experience. Thats true with kids
looking at TV.[37] Further, Pincus felt the concrete effect of media and TV on potentially
revolutionary consciousness to be entirely detrimental, explaining, Everything, be it
revolution or what have you, turns into a commodity in this societythe media can hype
revolution and not worry about it, and we all look at ourselves as products and objects in
the way we look at other people.[38]

Combatting televisions corrective procedures by utilizing its same tools wasnt attractive
to Pincus. He describes the work of Videofreex as unresponsive,[39] further emphasizing
his viewpoint that an attempt at cultural reprogramming wouldnt be different enough
from the normal operations of television. Someone like Paul Ryan would describe portable
video as a cybernetic extension of man and its feedback function as the only language
83

of intelligence and power that is ecologically viable.[40] Here, there is a sense in which
the formal operation of feedback, because of its control function, allows for a greater level
of resistancewhereas for Pincus the operational proximity required resisting video
altogether.
His critique of Videofreex was that a cultural revolution is illegible without its political
equivalent (which was the same charge he leveled against underground film). Explaining
his own filmmaking, Pincus stated:
The Videofreex, and in general the people who are in underground video tape that Ive
talked to, have the same kind of mentality as people in underground film. They think that
you can bring about a revolution in peoples consciousness, that there can be a cultural
revolution without there being a political oneThe films I make have to be tied in very
strong ways to the consciousness that people presently have. That is, to try to transform
that consciousness as opposed to assuming it is already transformed, which is what I think
[Stan] Brakhage assumes in his films, or like a lot of people in video tape assume.[41]
His comments here may account for his distance from both earlier and contemporaneous
experimental practices that brought the camera into private lifenot only by Brakhage,
but by Carolee Schneemann, who by 1971 would have just completed Plumb
Line (Fuses was finished in 1967). Yet his comments here also hint at the importance, for
Pincus, of operating somehow within a form of bourgeois life, especially following his
cynicism of the hippie commune from One Step Away. He said:
I think that a very important part of the political revolution is the cultural revolution, but
you cannot transform peoples consciousness for the better just on a cultural level. It will
also have to effect institutional change, and I dont think you can do that by going off and
living a good life and being a kind of imitation of Christwhich used to be one of the ways
to salvation in the Middle agesand that other people will then follow you.[42]
The counter-conduct of the Pincus open-marriage experiment remained, in many ways,
solidly within the acceptable realm of middle class life. For the Diaries project, there was
never a level of presumed autonomy, but instead an attempt to achieve a kind of purified
version of oneself, while still remaining within the structure of the family.[43] Instead of
what we might think of today as more radical communal living experiments, the Pincuses
remained centered on the self and the body situated within the structures of
contemporary life.[44]
Attempting a wholly intimate and transformative relationship to the camera, then, Pincus
shunned the technology that would seem to have better suited his experiment. The
conversations with and through the camera that characterize Diaries perhaps dont seem
so far off from Paul Ryans attempts to envision a kind of video therapy. Further, Ryan
describes the feedback experience of video as, at the time, cosmic,[45] noting videos
ability to instantiate a more primal and even spiritual connection with the subject. This
would appear to indicate its potential for the rigorous self-examinations that would be
attempted in Diaries and possibly Pincus political goals.
Instead of this, Pincus decided to utilize a combination of 16mm film and new sync-sound
equipment that eliminated the technical need for a collaborator, as had been required of
his films with David Neuman. In a 1972 article published in the Filmmakers
Newsletter titled One Person Sync-Sound: A New Approach to Cinema Verite, Pincus
outlined the potential allowed by the development of the Nagra SN recordera 1/8 tape
recorder capable of recording dialogue of adequate quality that was small enough to be
placed on the subject being filmed.[46]Previously, Pincus had written A Guide to
Filmmaking, the most popular book on technical filmmaking at the time,[47] so his interest
in the technological apparatuses for his project is to be expected. Yet here Pincus borders
on a kind of filmic technological determinism, claiming that the Nagra SN overcomes
many of the limitations I have encountered with cinma vrit,[48] and, further, that it

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has allowed for the entrance of the camera into private life with a level of intimacy that
was previously impossible.[49]
At the end of the piece, Pincus describes more strongly the political importance of the
technological developments he discusses. The sticky questions of exploiting people and
ripping them off in traditional cinma vrit become minimized when the filmmaker enters
the space of the film as an equal, he writes. This entrance was only possiblein a
substantial waybased on the ability to cheaply and reliably shoot sync-sound without a
crew. Pincus investment in sync-sound may be another reason for his rejection of
underground film techniques of the 60s.
As much as these new technologies allowed for greater access, Pincus became aware that
too much access would ultimately harm the film. As a direct resistance to the infolding
experience of feedback,[50] Pincus agreed to a provisional ten-year plan with the
participants in Diaries: filming would last five years (1971-1976), and then the footage
would sit for another five years, until 1981.[51] This five-year delay was designed to lower
inhibitions of the subjects, including himself, and resist the media effects of presence as
evidenced by television. By forcing a waiting period (in contrast to videos instant closed
circuit), Pincus pittedfilms trace of the absent against videos illusory-summoned self.

Of 1970s performance and video, Anne Wagner has written that artists courted effects of
presence, in the endless presentthe absolute publicitythat their medium too ably
provides. TV functions through instantaneityabsolute, self-renewing presence[which]
is its overall golden ruleand its illusion. Wagners text emphasizes how video and its
mediated performances, through the non-site of t.v., showed that arts summoning of
selfhood is comprised of what we might call a media effect. Media, in fact, can keep the
gears of selfhood from being able to engage.[52] In 2011, Paul Ryan suggested: Perhaps
personal video feedback simply falsifies intimacy with the numinous.[53] While Ed Pincus
undoubtedly recognized something close to the insidiousness of televisions claim on selfpresence, his engagement resisted showing its effects on the self, creating instead an
experiment to resist these effects through another media. That experiment was Diaries.
I think the Diaries experiment exceeds the limits of the resulting film. It was a five-year
experiment documented on film, but as a project, its concerns and strategies indicate
much more than the film itself. Combined with their decision to open their marriage,
the Diaries project allowed the Pincuses to shift the productive strands of their 60s
radicalism. It came from a questioning of those political ideals and the ways in which they
sought to organize otherness for functional purposes, which led to an imperative to
investigate the locus of political power within the self.

The resulting film has been read as an illustration of the return to order identified with the
decade, noting that the films emphasis shifts from the negotiation of an open marriage to
a greater focus on family life, and particularly the Pincus children, by the end.[54] Yet the
initial radicalism of the Diaries project cannot be so hastily ascribed to this narrative. The
amount of footage actually filmed over the five-year period amounts to, by Pincus count,
something like 32 hours,[55] (relatively little by todays standards, but an unusually high
volume at the time).Combined with the extreme degree of intrusion and difficulty of the
process, this high volume indicates how novel the project was for Pincus milieu.
After shooting had finished, Ed Pincus mentioned it as a work in progress and listed it
among other films that he felt had attempted to explore questions about the act of
filmmaking.[56] The completed filmthe film Pincus would edit at the end of 1980was
not necessarily an attempt to capture the intricacies of the experience ofDiaries, nor even
to illustrate the success of the experiment and the new, fuller sense of self and identity it
had granted the Pincuses. The film became something else.
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In the summer of 1975, Ed and Jane Pincus and their children moved from Cambridge to
Vermont. Dennis Sweeney, one of the activists who was involved in Black Natchez, had
come to believe that Pincus, New York congressman Allard Lowenstein, and Black Panther
Angela Davis were at the center of a plot against him, and that they were sending him
radio transmissions that he received through his teeth. He threatened the family, and their
children. Ed began commuting from Vermont to MIT, leading a paranoid life.[57] In 1980,
Sweeney shot and killed Lowenstein in his New York office. In Diaries, Lowensteins death
marks the only occasion in which the time passed between the films shooting and its
editing and subsequent release. Pincus informs the audience of Lowensteins death with
his narration as the screen turns black.
Within the film, too, the threat of Dennis Sweeney corresponds to a greater emphasis on
Pincus family and children, which has been utilized to explain the films correspondence
to the decades trajectory as, ultimately, a swing to the right.[58] Whether these
elements within the film correspond to the Pincus form-of-life experiment is harder to
parse.
Interviewed by Scott MacDonald, Ed Pincus explains the disparity between the shot
footage and the completed film, saying:
I made Jane the heroine in the film, and I made myself the villain, though villain is a bit
of an exaggeration. Lets say I prettied Jane up a bit to make this distinction work. Thats
the most serious distortion in the filmand its notthat serious. If you looked at the
unedited rushes, I think I would have come off a little better and Jane would have come off
a little worse. Not a whole lot. The film was meant to be uncompromising, but it did have
small compromises.[59]
Downplaying the significance of his editing, Pincus claims that its effects on the film itself
were minimal. Yet the structure imposed on the footagethus the structure that was
imposed on the experiment itselfresulted in a kind of illegibility of the projects
radicalism. The five-year delay, designed to recuperate the potential of film in opposition
to the instantaneity of video, also lessened the centrality of projects initial aspirations to
the completed film. By the end of the film, Jane has clearly become more comfortable with
the camera, and Ed appears more invested in their relationship, perhaps providing the
sense of change Ed had sought all along. The Pincus open marriage, though, continued
into the 90s.[60]

Moments throughout the film offer indications of the attempts to forge a potentially new
kind of lifecharacterized by an evolution into fuller selveswithin the institutional
structures of everyday life. That the open marriage itself was a kind of counter-conduct or
soft subversion speaks to this as well. At one point Ed trips on mescaline, during which he
tape-records his thoughts, an event that intensifies the interaction between the subject
and the apparatus (in this case not a camera) in order to hasten the effects of selfpurification such a process could bring about.[61] Former collaborator David Neuman, who
appears throughout the film, has the roving qualities of a beatnik. They are all engaged in
the small experiments that sought to make daily life different from its dominant forms.
One long sequence, from the summer of 1972, shows Jane, the Pincus children, Ann
Popkin, and her girlfriend Trudy Barnett. Ed, though mostly filming, appears as well.
Everyone is naked; they lounge in the sun, sitting in an inflatable swimming pool. Their
nudity is a nudity that reasserts itself throughout the filmnot just Jane and Ann, but Ed,
too is frequently naked before the camera. Jane in the shower, Jane playing the flute. Ed
and Ann climbing into his loft bed in the darkness. Their nudity, I think, is not just the
nudity that chases an ever-elusive presence; its also the nudity of the informant who
strips down to show theyre not wearing a wire, to make sure its just them.

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While the film offers traces of the kinds of experimentations that characterized the project,
it also shows far more problematic instances of the experiments failures, already
indicated by Pincus rejection of Jane as a collaborator on the film.[62] Among these are a
scene in which Jane reproaches Ed for his inability to acknowledge her domestic labor, to
which he responds curtly: How much do you do in the way of breadwinning? Moments
like these indicate that the Diaries experiment didnt go far enough in the construction of
a radical form-of-life within contemporary society.
Towards the end of the film, Ed is visiting a friends apartment. She looks at the camera
and asks how he can still interact with the worldwith peoplefrom behind it. Ed
responds that it doesnt get in the way that much; the cameras are smaller than they used
to be, its just him, and the sound isnt a problem. Youre giving technical answers, she
responds, to philosophical questions.[63] The distance between the Diaries experiment
and the completed film is owed, perhaps, to Ed Pincus foundational conflation of these
strategies.
*Giampaolo Bianconi is a masters student in the Film Studies Program at Columbia
University.

Sadly, Ed Pincus passed away this past Tuesday, November 5th in Vermont, where he had
lived with his wife Jane for the past two decades. He had been battling a terminal blood
disease and documenting his struggle with the help of a collaborator, Lucia
Small. Diaries remains one of the most important works of documentary filmmaking of the
last 40 years, and the influence of Pincus oeuvre is seen throughout the last generation of
filmmakers. He taught at MIT, served as a visiting filmmaker at Minneapolis College of Art
and Design and Harvard University, and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
[1] Vincent Canby, Ed Pincus Makes Diaries of His Own Life, The New York Times 17 Nov.
1982: The New York Times, Web, 08 May 2013,
<http://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/17/movies/film-ed-pincus-makes-diaries-of-his-ownlife.html&gt;.
[2] At least not in any supposedly complete or designated dramatic sense, as was
attempted by the PBS series An American Family (1973). An American Family claimed to
chronicle the day-to-day lives of the Santa Barbara, California Loud family and followed
dramatic arcs including the divorce of parents Bill and Pat Loud, as well as coming out of
son Lance Loud.
[4] After Jane says the process involves a lot of agony for the wife, Neuman can be
heard exclaiming, But shell live through it. And if she doesnt its gonna be a really great
movie!
[5] Ed Pincus, One Person Sync-Sound: A New Approach to Cinema Verite, Filmmakers
Newsletter, December 1972, 24-30, 30.
[6] G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-Makers, New York:
Doubleday & Co, 1971, 331.
[7] Molly Nesbit also mentions that Foucault passed through Natchez on one of his visits to
the United States in
[10] Newsreel was more explicitly engaged in acts of political consciousness-raising
through the use of documentary film than these other vrit makers, who, as Pincus notes,
focused on people as fixed types or characters. His critiques of those filmmakers are
discussed at length throughout Levin, 1971.
.

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[13] This is the term Pincus uses in his 1972 article One Person Sync-Sound: A New
Approach to Cinema Verite.
[14] Jim Lane, The Career and Influence of Ed Pincus: Shifts in Documentary
Epistemology, Journal of Film and Video Vol. 49 No. 4 (Winter 1997), 3-17, 8. This article
also features useful and detailed readings of specific scenes from the film.
[18] Regardless of the fact that Ed Pincus own appearances in the completed Diaries can
be considered minimal (as Vincent Canby suggested upon the films initial release), the
degree of his own involvement in the project is just as important here.
[19] Levin, 1971, 369. Also note that pig was a slang term used to refer to police officers
in the 1960s and 70s.
[20] Fredric Jameson, Periodizing the 60s, Social Text No. 9/10 (Spring/Summer 1984),
178-209, 189. He continues, describing the womens movement as a Yenan of a new and
unpredictable kind which is still impregnable at the present moment.
[21] Jane Pincus, interviewed by Katelyn Lucy, transcript of digital video recording, 29
November 2008, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA, 8.
[22] Its designation as a course likely derives from its existence as a class at MIT.
[23] Jane Pincus, 2008, 8.
[24] In a more recent interview with Scott MacDonald, Ed Pincus says: I sometimes think
a better title would have been What Happened When the Winds of the Womens
Movement Blew Open My Front Door. Ed and Jane Pincus, Personal Effects: Ed Pincus on
His Magnum Opus Diaries (1971-1976), Interview by Scott MacDonald, Moving Image
Source, Museum of the Moving Image, 21 June 2012, 9 May 2013,
<http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/personal-effects-20120621&gt;.
[25] An ambivalent obituary for Nena ONeill appeared in the New York Times in 2006:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/books/25oneill.html?_r=1&&gt;.
[26] Flix Guattari, Molecular Revolutions, in Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 19721977, New York: Semiotext(e), 2009, 275-281, 280.
[28] The idea is that you would get knowledge. Knowledge is power. And you share the
power andand you let the doctors know what you want, and theyll see what you want,
and world will be changedtheyll change it according to what you want. And it was really
optimistic, really nave, really exciting. And thats how we began. Jane Pincus, 2008, 8.
[29] From Ed Pincus program notes for his own films, available here:
<http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?
_collection=oasis&uniqueId=hfa00023>.
[32] Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerilla Television Revisited, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997, 27.
[35] Rosalind Krauss, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism, October Vol. 1 (Spring, 1976),
50-64, 56.
[36] Hollis Frampton, The Withering Away of the State of Art, On the Camera Arts and
Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009,
261-268, 264.
[38] Ibid. Pincus thoughts here are also interesting in relation to Frazer Wards thinking
about Chris Burdens Shoot, in which he emphasizes the increasing centrality
of watching in the early 70s, and further of Burdens performance as having revealed the
public, not as an empirical category, but as a gray zone, defined by the suspension of

88

judgment and choice. Frazer Ward, Gray Zone: Watching Shoot, October vol. 95
(Winter, 2001), 114-130, 130.
[43] Discussing revolts of conduct including those from the Middle Ages, Foucault says:
These revolts of conduct may well be specific in their form and objective, but whatever
the identifiable character of their specificity, they are never autonomous, they never
remain autonomous. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
College de France 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Picador, 2007, 197.
[44] See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism, available here:http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html.
[45] Paul Ryan, Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare Revisited: From Klein Worms to Relational
Circuits, Interview by Felicity D. Scott and Mark Wasiuta, Grey Room 44 (Summer, 2011),
114-133, 124, 126.
[47] As claimed by Pincus short biography in the Filmmakers Newsletter.
[49] As to how personal documentary was borna lot of it had to do with technology.
clair had come out with a new camera which was relatively smallit weighed 10 pounds
rather than 18 poundsand just as important was this little tape recorder (the Nagra SN)
that you could fit into a pocket or a purse. I had Stuart Cody design a wireless connection
so I could turn the tape recorder on and off from the camera. Without this equipment, I
couldnt have done Diaries. When the possibility of shooting intimately and making a film
that looked and sounded good arrived, so did the option of making Diaries. Ed and Jane
Pincus, 2012.
[50] Back in the day, when we called it infolding, the feedback experience of video was
thought of as cosmic.Infolding is a term taken from the cosmological thinker Teilhard de
Chardin, says Paul Ryan, in Ryan, 2011, 124.
[51] While the film opened to theatrical engagement in New York in 1982, whether or not
it was completed in 1980 or 1981 is unclear. In an interview with Scott MacDonald, Pincus
explained: It sat in the can for four or five years; I edited it during part of that last year.
The editing wasnt that difficult. Recently, the Pompidou Center in Paris did a show on
early cinma vrit, which ended with Diaries. I told them I thought that the film was
finished in 1981, and they said, No, it says 1980 on the film, and its important for us that
it be 1980. So I said, okay. But Im not sureI think actually it was finished in 1981. Ed
and Jane Pincus, 2012. It is here, also, that Ed Pincus states: The deal I made with all my
subjects was that I would be filming for five years and then would wait five years more
before releasing a finished film.
[52] Anne E. Wagner, Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence, October 91
(Winter, 2000), 59-80, 80.
[57] Basically I created the life of a paranoidfor six years. Ed and Jane Pincus, 2012.
[61] This was likely influenced by footage from One Step Ahead in which Harry, leader of
the hippie commune, was filmed tripping on LSD. That footage was made into its own
short film, Harrys Trip.
[62] Explicit and innovative collaborative practices were among those with which Carolee
Schneemann had already engaged extensively during the 1960s.
[63] Towards the end of Cinema 1, which appeared in France in 1983, Deleuze writes that
We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is
capable of modifying itno more than we believe that an action can force a situation to
disclose itself, even partially. Perhaps Deleuzes comments here seem more apt for
Pincus move from direct cinema/direct action towards Diaries, but I think the reception of
the film in 1982 indicates something reminiscent of Deleuzes thinking here.

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Share this:
Personal Effects
Ed Pincus on his magnum opus Diaries (1971-1976)
by Scott MacDonald posted June 21, 2012
I don't remember precisely when or where I first saw Ed Pincus's Diaries (19711976) (1980), but I do remember being astonished by the filmby its openness, its
honestyand simultaneously envious and frightened of the open marriage that is the
focus of at least the first half of the film. The willingness of Ed and Jane Pincus to work at
re-thinking their marriageand it did seem work to do thiswas impressive, and the fiveyear-long experience the film documents seemed full of surprises, both in terms of the
personal relationships that are the ostensible focus of the film and in terms of how the
footage was shot and edited. Indeed, my fascination with the film was so much a function
of the melodrama of the Pincuses' personal lives that it was not until much later that I
realized that Diaries is also a beautiful film, both in its sense of family life and in its
inventive sense of composition and its subtle editingand, along with Ross
McElwee's Time Indefinite(1994) and Robb Moss's The Same River Twice (2003), one of the
three masterworks of Cambridge personal documentary.
During the decades since my first seeing DiariesI assume on the film's initial release in
1981, in New York CityI wondered about Pincus and the film, which had made something
of a splash and then, along with its maker, seemed to disappear. Of course, Pincus's
colleagues at MIT, where he had taught since 1968, and his friends and family were aware
of what had happened to Pincus, which is one of the stranger episodes in the annals of
American independent cinema. As Pincus was beginning to consider himself a filmmaker
(he was a philosophy student at Brown University, then at Harvard), a neighbor of his,
Dennis Sweeney, suggested that he go to Natchez, Mississippi, to film the civil rights
struggle going on there; and Pincus and his friend David Neuman jumped at the
suggestion. As the years went by, Sweeney, who appears in Pincus and Neuman's direct
cinema film, Black Natchez (1967), became increasingly delusional and by the 1970s was
threatening the lives of both the Pincus family and civil rights activist Allard Lowenstein
(who had been Sweeney's mentor at Stanford). The Pincuses moved to rural Vermont,
where Ed Pincus began a flower-raising business, which he still runs, and struggled to
maintain a low profile at MIT and as a filmmaker. On March 14, 1980, Sweeney killed thenUnited States Congressman Lowenstein in his New York office, turned himself into police,
and was sent to prison. Pincus would not return to filmmaking in earnest for a quartercentury, until he teamed up with Lucia Small in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina
disaster to shoot what became The Axe in the Attic (2007).
This interview began in April 2009, when Pincus was a guest in my class at Harvard in the
history of documentary, and was expanded first in a personal interview session, and later
online. (The final question is from the film scholar Dominique Bluher, who was visiting my
class.)
When Jane and Ed Pincus presented Diaries at Hamilton College in October 2010, I was
interested, for all the obvious reasons, in getting Jane's take on the experience of making
the film. The interview with her follows the one with Ed below.
Diaries (1971-1976) is being shown at Light Industry in Brooklyn on Saturday, June 23, at 6
p.m.
Interview With Ed Pincus
Diaries is your magnum opus, not just in the sense that it's your longest film, and I think
your best film, but because of the nature of the project. I was surprised to learn that in
setting out to make Diaries, you gave yourself five years to shoot and five years to edit.

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The deal I made with all my subjects was that I would be filming for five years and then
would wait five years more before releasing a finished film. "Magnum opus"that's
exactly what it was. It was meant to be epic, though in retrospect, I wish the result could
have been epic in under two hours!
It's not a stretch to watch the film.
You're older so you're part of a generation that's more patient, but the three-plus-hours
length limited theatrical distribution; Diaries was a tough film to sell.
Did you shoot for the five years and edit from 1976 to 1980?
No, it sat in the can for four or five years; I edited it during part of that last year. The
editing wasn't that difficult. Recently, the Pompidou Center in Paris did a show on early
cinema vrit, which ended with Diaries. I told them I thought that the film was finished in
1981, and they said, "No, it says 1980 on the film, and it's important for us that
it be 1980." So I said, okay. But I'm not sureI think actually it was finished in 1981.
You must have looked at the material as you shot it, just to see what you had.
I looked at a minimal amount; Steve Ascher did the syncing up. I'd ask if the exposure was
okay and that's about it.
I played a trick on the class the first night of the course; I showed David Holzman's
Diary. Though the McBride film is a fiction, the character of David Holzman is, in a general
way, quite close to your persona in Diaries. Like you, David wants to use filmmaking as a
way to understand his personal life. I was surprised to see that Jim McBride actually has a
credit on Diaries, and is mentioned in it. Did you know him, and did that film have any
influence onDiaries?
David Holzman's Diary didn't have any influence on me, so far as I know. Jim was a friend
of David's.
How well did you know McBride?
I stayed with Jim for a week or so in Northern California. He filmed the sequence with his
wife Clarissa on an undulating waterbed with a cow's skull above.
Basically, Diaries chronicles your marriage with Jane. How long were you married when
you started Diaries?
We were married in 1960, and I started Diaries in 1971, so it was 11 years, but it felt like
6,000.
In a way there are two projects that seem to be getting started around 1971: your film and
your open marriage. Whose idea was the open marriage, and does what we see in the film
accurately represent its trajectory?
The notion that no one person could fulfill another's needs (whatever that meant) was in
the air. Most of our friends split upwe stayed together.
Were you in fact the first to have an affair?
No.
And did Jane's involvement with the Our Bodies, Ourselves collective play into the open
marriage?
I sometimes think a better title would have been "What Happened When the Winds of the
Women's Movement Blew Open My Front Door."
Because of the expense in the early years of putting a crew out in the field, films had to be
shot in a week or two or maybe a month, which was a long time. So when something
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meaningful happened during a shoot, the filmmakers would feel the equivalent of
"gotcha!" That kind of shooting created a vision of people that was not my vision of how
people change or try to change, so a very important part of the Diaries project was
wanting to see what changes happened over a five-year period in people's lives, in the
tenor of their politics, and perhaps in the way a filmmaker shoots.
Especially at the beginning I wanted to film what Jane was doing with the Our Bodies,
Ourselves collective. I asked if I could film the collective, and they said, "No way!" Now
they all regret it.
During the first half of the film, the focus is the open marriage, but in the second half, you
focus more on your kids, and the film is more conventionally domestic. The dog is a
fantastic clock in the second half; we watch it grow up.
Yes.
In a way Diaries is a film about Jane. The opening is her talking about how she feels
manipulated by the camera, how she's afraid of how the camera will reveal her; by the
end of Diaries she's grown accustomed to the camera, and all the distractions from earlier
in the marriage seem to have faded. The film charts the emergence, or re-emergence, I
guess, since it starts 11 years into the marriage, of your respect for Jane and for your
relationship.
You're correct. Diaries is really a love story. In fact, the structuring you've described wasn't
entirely true to the rushes. I made Jane the heroine in the film, and I made myself the
villain, though "villain" is a bit of an exaggeration. Let's say I prettied Jane up a bit to make
this distinction work. That's the most serious distortion in the filmand it's
not that serious. If you looked at the unedited rushes, I think I would have come off a little
better and Jane would have come off a little worse. Not a whole lot. The film was meant to
be uncompromising, but it did have small compromises.
I did think it was important to get Diaries down to a single sitting. When I looked at it the
last time, I thought I could probably get 20 minutes out of it, or 30 minutes. But I do love
the different pacings in the film; they embody the way time changes and the way different
episodes of your life go quickly or slowly. The film becomes about memory too and how
sometimes you have intense memories about something and then blanks, then semiintense memories, and so on. To shorten the film definitely would have been to give up
something.
Have Sami and Ben watched the movie, and what were their reactions? And have their
reactions evolved through time?
A wonderful question. Sami has a hard time with the movie, and I don't really know why.
When Ben went off to college, one of his college chums said, "How does it feel to be in one
of the most important movies ever made?" [laughter]. I think that predisposed him to
like Diaries. I think he still likes it (right now, he runs a martial arts studio in Burlington,
Vermont). His wife looked at the first 45 minutes ofDiaries, cried, and didn't want to see
anymore.
You see the seeds of Sami's reaction to the film in the film; you almost never see her
except when she's performing. In some sense she always wanted to keep control. Ben
didn't care.
Sami has a poignant scene at the end, where she tries her hand at conflict resolution
when Ben is upset. She tells you to quit filming him because it makes him worse.
That's one of my favorite parts of the film.
Did you feel that documenting your experiences changed the way you dealt with things?

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Well, when I first started the film, I was hoping it wouldn't. When I began, I didn't think I
was going to be in the film at allwhat a naive thought that was!
To put some of this in historical perspective, the women's movement had come and there
was this notion that the personal is the political, and there was also this feeling that you
shouldn't be filming the Other. It was important to examine yourown life. Also, previous to
the women's movement, there was a branch of SDS, the Weathermen, whose slogan was
"The pig is in us." We were supposed to look inside.
So all of a sudden I found I had to be a subject. Up until Diaries, I had never talkedwhile I
filmed, and I had to start talking. I had to relearn how to be both a filmmaker and a human
being. Ideally you learn to work with the camera in such a way that it becomes part of
you. You have good days, you have bad days, but on a good day you're not thinking of
color balance or whatever, you just do stuff. For this film I had to reclaim that
ability and be able to talk as a human being and interact with my friends while filming.
That was a struggle. At the beginning of Diaries you can hear a kind of strangeness in my
voice that later disappears (you wouldn't pick it up if you didn't know me, but I can hear
the changes).
I didn't think at all about a finished film while I was shooting. I had no idea what I was
doing beyond shooting; the shooting itself was the experiment. At the beginning filming
was easier, then it became a burden. There's a section called "Small Events of Days at
Home" in which I make a commitment to shoot something for 30 days in a row. I think half
of what's in that section was shot at 11:59 at night, because I'd forget to shoot or couldn't
find anything I wanted to shoot.
It may seem that I was shooting all the time, but in fact there was relatively little footage
shot for Diaries. In five years I shot something like 32 hours; for The Axe in the Attic Lucia
and I shot 180 hours in 60 days.
When I edited Diaries, I was trying to keep that feeling of rushes, of dailies, of unedited
footage, and be true to the footage while shortening the film. In the end I thought that
I was true to the footage, not that the viewer cares about that, but it mattered to me as
part of the experiment I was doing.
Amazing things happen in the editing room when you look at rushes, things that couldn't
have been preconceived, natural juxtapositions that end up having meaning. Of course,
it's in the nature of human consciousness to see connections and there are many amazing
connections in Diaries that are totally happenstance.
You found a way to have a voice in the film without being a conventional narrator, in two
different ways. One is that you periodically say something, usually as a transition from one
sequence to the next or as a setup for the passage that follows. And in other instances
you use text, which we first see in your work in One Step Away. Had you seen Jonas
Mekas's diary films? He found intertitles very useful.
I might have seen his diaries, but Godard was probably the influence on my use of text.
In One Step Away David and I wanted to structure the film as a series of anecdotes. And
we thought titles were the perfect way to do that. In Diaries the chapter titles are meant
to be a fun way of distancing the intimacy a bit. That's the way I saw Godard using titles:
as a distancing device. I think it's in Rousseau's letter to D'Alembert, where he talks about
how the problem with art is that people go to the theater and feel all the right emotions,
and then they go home and they're the same old sons of bitches they've always been. To
me that's always been the dominating question for me in documentary on social and
personal issues: How do you close the gap between what you feel in the theater and what
you do when you've left the theater? Godard tried to cope with that gap through the use of
titles, and by having people talk to the camera, his ways of breaking out of the
conventional narrative experience.

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Have you ever seen Lucia's film, My Father the Genius? The first time I saw it, I told her,
"You used everything but the kitchen sink." Lucia says I said it sarcastically, and maybe I
did. In my films I was always trying for a kind of purism; I was trying to get by with as little
as possible, but after One Step Away text did become part of my vocabulary, though I've
always used text minimally.
Diaries is a very beautiful film, wonderful to look at. And the shots near the end of your
family in Vermont winter are stunning. You seem to always have had great confidence in
your shooting.
Thank you. But when you say I have confidence in my shooting, it's really more that I have
confidence in the world. I trust that if I'm prepared and have good equipment, the world
will provide me with something interesting to record and something good to look at.
Between 1981 and 2005, so far as I know, you didn't make a film. Why did you disappear
from filmmaking for so long?
Well, part of the story is in Diaries. Basically, this guy Dennis Sweeney, who I knew during
my Black Natchez days, had begun to threaten my life, Jane's life, and my son's life.
Dennis had become delusional, paranoid, and dangerous. To do the kind of film I was
doing, you had to make personal appearances, and that put my family at risk. Once
Dennis began to threaten us, we moved to Vermont in order to hide from him. We de-listed
our telephone number and told everybody we knew not to tell anyone where we were. A
psychologist who had seen Dennis suggested that I use a different route to work every day
(I was still teaching at MIT, but commuting from Vermont), and that I avoid being alone.
Basically I created the life of a paranoidfor six years.
Dennis was not only stalking us, but other people, including the civil rights and antiwar
lawyer Allard Lowenstein, who Dennis shot and killed in his Manhattan office in 1980.
Afterward, Dennis was put away in a mental institution. [Sweeney served eight years in
the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center, New York State's maximum-security mental hospital,
and later was moved to a lower-security facility.]
Though Dennis was the main reason why I stopped making films, there were other
reasons. Diaries took a lot out of me, and it accomplished everything I wanted to do in film
at that time, especially in seeing how far you could go with observational cinema when
you had good access to the people you filmed over a long periodand what the
limitations were.
But since these people were my family and friends, Diaries revealed a great deal about all
of us. Believe it or not I'm a very private person. In order to make the film, I had told
myself a little fib: that after 10 years I wouldn't care what was revealed in the footage. I
expected to be pilloried for having done the film, but in fact, the press reaction was
incredibly favorable. I was totally surprised, and pleased on one hand, but it was also very
difficult for me, and still is, to be so visible.
I did feel privileged to make Diaries. I had a teaching job and didn't have to worry about
income; I got a series of grants; I didn't have to release the film for 10 years. At the time, I
was committed to the idea that part of the payback was that I had to be absolutely honest
in the film. That was what I owed society for allowing me the rare privilege of 10 years of
not having to produce anything.
Actually, your pointing out earlier that the film is beautifulthat's really what I cared most
about. Diaries was meant to be beautiful, in a tactile sense, and that's why I never wanted
to show it on television. It was always meant for large-screen projection.
Dominique Bluher: I have a twofold question. How did this idea of diary film develop? To
my knowledge Diaries is one of the very first personal documentaries, and it has given
birth to so many others, not just in Cambridge, but all over the world. Second, is there any

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connection between this documentary approach and the experimental film approach to
the personal that developed a little bit earlier?
Well, at the time that I made Diaries, I would say that there was zero connection. Looking
back, there was this notion of the camera stylo and the idea of the filmmaker as a kind of
creator; that certainly was shared. But to me the possibility of capturing life had to do with
sound, and all these early experimental filmmakers, what used to be called the New York
Underground, made silent films.
I remember getting into this big argument with Stan Brakhage at a conference on
autobiographical film that Gerry O'Grady organized in Buffalo. It was actually a pretty
interesting event. Robert Frank was there and a group of New York experimental
filmmakers. I felt totally out of place. Brakhage had said, "Everything you see on the
screen is exactly what happened"; I think he was talking aboutScenes From Under
Childhood. I argued that understanding the world has to do with other senses, and in
particular sound. Most of the things that people say are stupid. During the editing
of Diaries, I would think, "God, did I really say that? Didshe really say that?" But stupid or
not, what we say is an essential part of who we are, and to pretend that you're capturing
reality in a silent film is a fantasy.
As to how personal documentary was borna lot of it had to do with technology. clair had
come out with a new camera which was relatively smallit weighed 10 pounds rather
than 18 poundsand just as important was this little tape recorder (the Nagra SN) that
you could fit into a pocket or a purse. I had Stuart Cody design a wireless connection so I
could turn the tape recorder on and off from the camera. Without this equipment, I
couldn't have done Diaries. When the possibility of shooting intimately and making a film
that looked and sounded good arrived, so did the option of making Diaries.
Interview With Jane Pincus
At the beginning of Diaries, it's clear that you're uneasy about being filmed...
I hated it.
Did you ever not hate it?
Yeah, toward the middle I began to think I was a really interesting woman and why didn't
Ed film me more [laughter]! I got used to it, and as you may remember, at a certain point
in the film I turn the camera on Ed, which was great fun.
Ed looks as embarrassed in that shot as you look early on.
At the beginning I was very self-conscious, and being filmed made me more self-conscious,
and I hated feeling so insecure. Early in the film, Ann Popkin talks directly into the camera.
I saw her as being much braver than me, at least in relationship to being filmed: she did
what I couldn't.
Had you agreed to let Ed film you?
That was the thing. I felt he had made the decision to film five years of our lives without
consulting with me. He may have felt we did discuss it, I don't know, but I felt that we
hadn't, and I didn't feel prepared for it. He continued to make decisions like that. For
example, he informed me out of the blue that he was going to go to Minneapolis for four
months to film Life and Other Anxieties [shot in 1976-77, completed in 1977].
Not much has changed in that regard: it was the same when he made the recent trip down
south with Lucia Small to shoot The Axe in the Attic [filmed in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina, completed in 2007]. I don't feel that we discussed any of these film projects
beforehand. And, or course, earlier on, he had gone to Mississippi to film Black
Natchez [shot in 1965, completed in 1967] when I was pregnant with Sammy. I felt
abandoned, which had a lot to do with my ownpsychology.
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Whose idea was the open marriage?

I don't remember whose idea it was. I think what happened is that each of us became
attracted to other people, and then at a certain point in the midst of the ferment that
developed after 1965, we made what we thought was a conscious decision to open our
marriage. Right now, I'm not sure how conscious it was, and I'm not sure how smart it was
but I remember it as a mutual decision.
It was a complicated life. I was a young mother, bringing up our kids. I would be in love
with other men and still be functioning as Ed's wife and as Sami and Ben's mother; and Ed
would be involved with other womenI didn't know about some of his dalliances until I
saw the finished film! I struggled through jealousy and at times wished I weren't tied down
with kids and a marriage. If I could do it all over, I would do things differently.
What would you do differently?
In those years, in my thirties, I was going through the adolescence that I'd never had. If I
could do it over, I would hope to be more mature before my thirties so I could pay more
dedicated attention to my children from the beginning.
When people watch Diaries, they often assume that Ed was filming all the time.
He always says he shot 27 hours of material.
That's not a lot, over five years.
It seems like practically zero now. But at the beginning it did feel like a lot. And there were
struggles about when he should be filming and when he should be involved with the
family. When Ben got his finger smashed in the door, I think at first Ed was going to get his
camera, but then decided not to. He had to make decisions like that all the time, which I'm
sure made him uncomfortable. After awhile, I was happy to see him film. I even remember
asking him if he would film certain things, but Ed had his own agendaand he was shy
too, and hesitant to ask people if he could film them.
There's a startling sequence, shot during the summer of 1972, where you and Ann and
another woman are lying in the kiddie pool nude...
[Laughter] Ann Popkin was lovers with Trudy Barnett, the third woman. That was an
amazing summer; it felt so free and easy going. We would run water from the washing
machine through a hose into the kid's swimming pool, and lie in the sun; it was all very
happy.
In the film you seem to have a big struggle with your father. He doesn't take you seriously
as an artist.
Oh yeah. That footage when we're in the country and I make him sit and listen to me was
one of the most startling experiences of my life with him; when I looked at the footage of
that visit on the Steenbeckparts were cut out for DiariesI could see that he actually
listened to me, for the first time. Up until then, when he would visit, he'd say, "How are
you?" and then just talk about himself. My stepmother would say, "Paul, you asked them
about themselves, now be quiet and listen to their answers!" That was the first time I ever
made him look at the kinds of things he was saying, and I'm glad Ed got that on film.
By the end of Diaries, Ed's other relationships have moved to the background and you and
the kids, and your domestic life in Vermont, have emerged as the foreground of Ed's
attention; the film becomes a kind of love letter to you.
People say that to me, but I don't feel that. Actually, when I watch the film (and I don't
look at it often, except for the "Freeze Tag" section with the kids), I get soupset with myself
for rambling on and on.

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I remember that one time when Ed was asking me questions and filming me at the kitchen
table, I was thinking, "Everything I'm saying here is not exactly true." I can't remember
now what I was thinking aboutit might have been about Bob, this man I love, who I wish
had appeared in the film somehowbut I remember thinking, "I'm not being completely
honest. I can't be completely honest with Ed, because he's my husband and because I
have such a passionate attachment to this other person."
My marriage was a possible love, but for a long time I also needed some kind of
impossible love. Maybe our marriage has survived because each of us had passionate
attachments to other people at different times. We've survived for 51 years! And I'm not
sorry. I'm glad I got to know other men; I was so nave growing up in the '50s. I didn't know
how to love. I didn't know how to be married well, or how to be a mother.
Sami is fascinating to watch because as the film evolves, she becomes a performer; it's
clear that she doesn't like being on film when she's not performing.
She made that very clear, almost from the start. I don't know if something had happened
in Sami's short life that had spooked her, but she was very cautious. Ben went right along
with everything.
Do they know the film? How do they feel about it?
When she last looked at it, Sami found it interesting; finally she could take it in and not
feel threatened by it. Ben's fine with it, but Ben's wife finds it threatening. She hasn't seen
it straight through.
Was the open marriage experiment something that ended during the period when the film
was made?
It's complicated, because up until 1990, there were a few men in my life, men I'd loved
from the 1980s on. In the mid-1980s Ed asked me not to see one of these men, and I
didn't for awhile. Since 1987 there's not been anyone else for me: I put myself in the
middle of my marriage, and it's been only Ed. Sometime after that, Ed had an affair with
one of our best friends in town, which felt to me like a double betrayal, but that's in the
past now too.
I think one of the things that's kept our lives together in spite of all of these outside affairs
and allegiances is some wonderful, incredible bond that Ed and I share. The other thing is
that throughout our marriage, I would have considered our separating as a failure, my own
failure. We did sort of separate, as you see at the beginning ofDiaries, and I remember
going to Vermont when he had moved out for a few weeks, to look for a place to live; but it
didn't feel real in a way. As agonizing as it was, it felt like play.
I do wish that more of my life and the women's movement, which was very important to
my art, could have been included in Diaries. But, of course, Diariesisn't my film; it's Ed's.
Some people have been hostile to Diaries and that always surprises me. Two of my oldest
friendsI've known them almost 60 yearssaw Diaries not long ago, and during the time
when Ed was down South doing The Axe in the Attic, my friend Ruthie wrote to tell me how
she hated Diaries, hated it, and finished with, "And if you think that's something, you
should see what Peter thinks!" I was so shocked. Ed no longer speaks to them. It's a pity
they couldn't see the beauty in the film.
The Filmmakers:
David Sutherland
has established a reputation for intimate documentary portraits of unconventional
subjects. Davids impressive body of work has almost entirely aired nationally on PBS and
earned him over 100 international film and video awards. Among his many titles, he is
probably best known for his films The Farmers Wife and Country Boys. The Harvard Film
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Archive honored Davids work with a ten-day retrospective of his films and, in 2007, The
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) honored him as the "featured director" at their annual
Documentary Fortnight series. His current film Kind-Hearted Woman will be airing as a
Frontline/PBS co-presentation in April 2013.
Ed Pincus began filmmaking in 1964, developing a direct cinema approach to social and
political problems and events. He has credits as producer, director and DP on eight of his
films and has been cinematographer on over twelve additional films. His projects include
the seminal Diaries: 1971-1976 (1981), about the filmmakers marriage, family and
friends; Black Natchez (1967), a one-hour documentary about a Southern town during the
Civil Rights Movement; as well as Panola (1965, 1969), and One Step Away (1967). Ed
started the Film Section at MIT where he taught for ten years and is the author of Guide
to Filmmaking and co-author of Filmmakers Handbook.
Lucia Small joined forces with Ed Pincus in 2005 to form Pincus & Small Films. Their first
collaborative effort was 2007s The Axe in the Attic, and they are currently working on
their next project The Elephant in the Room.
The Conversation:
Pincus: The scene that weve chosen is an hour and a half into part two, of a three-part
film. Its a scene when Chriss mother is chiding him for not having gotten out of bed in
time for school. It includes a car chase scene with the two of them. It ends with voiceover
and walking along the railroad track. In this scene, theres an interesting use of syncsound, voiceover, and interview to create an emotional power and rawness. In particular,
the voiceover track has a special intimacy, almost as though the viewer is hearing
thoughts in Chriss head. In fact, the voiceover is one of the aspects of the film we found
most compelling. When was it done in relationship to the scene and can you describe your
process of creating the voiceover throughout the film?
Sutherland: I always try to interview my subjects as close to when something happens.
After that particular scene, I interviewed him about a half hour later. I had to go and look
for him, and I interviewed him in the van after I found him in town. So, its very fresh. Its
harder for me when it isnt fresh because, as you know, occasionally in post-production
you can do a re-record, or bring someone in and show them something, but theyre often
in another head space.
Ive changed approaches over my whole career. Early on, I would storyboard
documentaries, and then I went the other way. I wanted to get as close up to my
characters in vrit as I could. So, I started using more mics and sometimes Ill shoot with
three or four radio mics, sometimes five. I want you to feel like youre living in their skin,
going through it with them. Sometimes you cant capture it well, even if you do hear them
breathing and sighing, It can be easier, for example, in rural places because there isnt as
much interference, but then theres the issue of bandwidths and all of that. Sometimes Ill
integrate narration in with it. The question I always ask myself when I do a scene close up
is and I tell my interns this --You can use narration or you can use vrit. The question is
what makes something imprint?" Sometimes something happens before your eyes and it
makes an imprint. Youre done. And sometimes when editing a scene, you feel what still
needs to be done. I have a lot of friends that are musicians. And Im a terrible dancer. I
cant keep a beat. But Im great at placing music. Its always better when I trust what I feel
and then intellectualize it, when making choices.
Things also change when youre shooting. Like in this scene, I hadnt put Chriss mother on
camera much. You get used to people being a certain way, but then you have to adapt. I
showed up and could tell something was different with her.
She was all dressed up, and Id never seen her like that in my life! (laughter in audience)
So, I decided to interview her. I mean, I worked on that film for over seven years. And it
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changed my life for better and for much worse. (laughter in audience) But its the type of
thing that I knew something was different.
If you hang around long enough, you watch characters gradually change. Sometimes they
learn something, sometimes they dont. But it was really quite shocking in this scene that
his mother, who hid things, came right out in the open with everything, for whatever
reason. You know, her husband was dying. He was a drunk. And she had a hard life; Im
not defending her, but no ones ever all good or all bad.
Sometimes youll look at someone on the surface and say, Oh my god, what a horrible
person or whatever. But theres a lot of truth in everything around you and nothing is
exactly what it seems. Sometimes the people who cant read or write are the smartest
ones in the room. But, I ramble. When I pose my question about your film, Im going to
have to read it because itll take me five minutes to get it out. (laughter in audience)
Pincus: Let me add one more thing. As the film progresses, and we listen to Chriss voice
over, we come to realize that Chris is a bit of a sweet talker. As you know, voiceover has a
certain authority; and one of the things I liked about your film is we have enough
information to take everything with a grain of salt. If you see just this one scene, then the
tendency is to take Chris literally. On the other hand, if youve watched him over the
course of the film, you see his ability to sweet talk himself and people in authority around
him.
Sutherland: Chis also has an uncanny ability to mimic. I lost a two hundred dollar bet with
him once. We were in the editing room and I said his father had said something, and it
turned out it was Chris. (laughter) His father speaks, as you know, beautifully; hes very
articulate. When hes with his father, Chris quite naturally mimics his fathers voice. Hes
like a parrot. In the scene that you chose, it probably all happened within about ten
minutes. Not everythings like that, but with that particular scene, god, I dont think I had
much footage. And in other places, Ive got tons of footage, you know, and nothings
there. (laugher) But, anyhow, I like your choice. I havent seen that scene in a long time
Pincus: Well, thank you.
Sutherland: Thank you. (clapping)
Clip 2: From Ed Pincus & Lucia Small's The Axe in the Attic
Sutherland: Well, given your decision to put yourselves in the film and the fact that you
show yourselves being challenged by your subjects sometimes, and sometimes being
challenged by each other, what do you think the film gains and loses by doing this? And I
want to say that personally I thoroughly enjoyed your doing this and liked the film very
much. At one time I lived in Louisiana along with my closest friends from college. Ive seen
a lot of films about Katrina, and I also went down there. I wasnt looking forward to seeing
this film, but I liked it very much (laughter)
Pincus: What interested us, and bothered us, as filmmakers making a social issue
documentary, is the ability of both the filmmaker and the audience to take the moral high
ground by knowing what is right and wrong. Filmmakers themselves come with a lot of
baggage, and there are always a lot of arguments in the field. We wanted to take this
baggage and unpack it; to look at the nature of doing the right thing when it comes to
filmmaking.
The idea of the film was to look at the Katrina diaspora, to see what happened to the
people who were scattered around the United States by the hurricane. And to see the
impact as they tried to recreate new lives in a different place, however temporary. We also
decided to film everything that happened to us as filmmakers. Part of the underlying
reason for this or at least my underlying motivation is that you, and the audience, find
out more about the subject, and how that subject was filmed, if you know the limitations
and the possibilities of the filmmaker.
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Sutherland: I thought there were several places where confrontations between filmmaker
and subject happened. There a great scene with a husband, and his ex-wife, whos living
in a tent separate from him. They fight about their relationship on camera, and then turn
and ask the confrontational question, Are you both sleeping together? (laughter) Its a
great scene, with lots of humor. What Im trying to say for anyone who hasnt seen the
film, is that when you decided to do this, you definitely did it, whether it was embarrassing
or not. I could never do this, so its totally foreign to my nature. But the way it was edited
and put together, I thought it worked extremely well.
Pincus: Lucia and I feel that being a filmmaker is a very privileged position. You have a
voice; your subjects dont. Lucia primarily did sound and she has a very engaging
personality. She wouldnt interview people, but create conversations with them instead,
which was totally new to me. Im from the tradition of fly-on-the-wall filmmaker. Part of the
humor comes out of this give and take between filmmaker and subject -- and its meant to
have a lot of laughs. But also, by asking people difficult questions, people could confront
us with difficult questions.Its a way to say, were no different than you. We might not be
under the same pressure you are, but were also vulnerable.
Sutherland: You definitely do this and also explore the ethical dilemmas involved in
filmmaking.
Pincus: Thanks.

Masculin Fminin
BY ED GONZALEZ ON DECEMBER 29, 2003 GO TO COMMENTS (0)
The title of Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin, Fminin saw many incarnations after the film's
release in 1966. Some wanted to drop the comma, allowing the empty space
between Masculin andFminin to literalize the men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus
gender gap. Maybe some thought the comma was a symbol of second-class citizenship
indeed, women do not follow men in Godard's film, they're inextricably bound to them.
Hence a third variation, Masculin-Fminin, which put the Masculin and Fminin on a more
even keel (spin the title around 180 degrees and the woman comes firstshe's now
upside down but first nonetheless). Then there isMasculin/Fminin, not because men sit on
top of women, but because masculinity is more easily divisible than femininity, or so
Godard would have us believe.
Masculin, Fminin was somewhat of a turning point for Godard, allowing the Novelle Vague
auteur to address for the first time the current political climate of the world in one of his
films. In many ways, this is the perfect Godard filmcomplex but accessible, snide but
unpretentious, critical but sympatheticand in many ways anticipates his 1967
masterpiece Weekend, arguably his finest achievement. The film is a provocative and
deliriously funny examination of sexual politics in Paris during the height of the Vietnam
War, and its genius is the way Godard seamlessly encodes his complex philosophy of the
world into a deceptively simple love story between an ex-army recruit, Paul (Jean-Pierre
Laud), and a would-be pop singer, the beautiful Madeleine (Chantal Goya). This is firstclass "Freudemocracy," a term Godard coined to describe the sexual-political potential of
film.
Not only does Paul's battle with Madeleine represent a war between the sexes, but a clash
between disparate philosophical and moral beliefs. Godard claimed never to have read
Karl Marx but he coined the word "Cinemarx" to describe a Marxist form of cinema
that Masculin, Fminintruly, madly, deeply espouses. Call the film "The Cinemarx
Manifesto." Paul is anti-bourgeois and resents America's involvement in Vietnam, but his
gripes aren't anti-American per se. Godard considers pop culture a dangerous American
export and he questions the political apathy of images and music that don't incite people
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to revolution (this is the impetus of the director's provocative but heavy and off-putitng
Rolling Stones documentary Sympathy for the Devil).
"A philosopher is a man who pits his awareness against opinion. To be aware is to be open
to the world." How sad, then, that Paul's posters (provocations encouraging the politically
unwashed tovotez) are ignored (unseen even) by Godard's "children of Marx and CocaCola" (the film's own contribution to the pop-culture vernacular of the world). Popular
culture essentially creates a party line between Paul and Madeleine and Godard's use of
montage and off-screen space suggests this separation. In Masculin, Fminin, men and
women spar. But so do the film's imagesthey slip and slide against each other as if
Godard were shuffling a paradoxical set of cards, and every image has the urgency of a
vote cast into a ballot box that can no longer be retrieved.
It's telling that people have tried to change the syntax between Masculin and Fminin. The
battle of the sexes wages on and we're still trying to figure out how to navigate the
interzone. A man is a man and a woman is a woman and Masculin, Fminin is what it is: a
philosophical theory in the shape of an elaborate algebraic equation15 contrapuntal
vignettes (ludicrous and gross political and sexual confrontations) separated by signs
(Godard's signature intertitles) that add, divide, multiply, or subtract the meaning of
individual or collective vignettesthat stresses the everlasting, unexplainable complexity
(the joy and frustration) of the war between man and woman.
Masculin, Fminin is very much the Cinemarxist embodiment of Marx and
Engels's Communist Manifesto. Both are morally, politically, and philosophically
inquisitive, and as long as the proletariat fights the bourgeois and men fight women,
people will continue to return to Marx andMasculin, Fminin. Unlike Marx and Engels (and
his protagonist Paul), a more self-aware Godard seems to understand that pop culture, like
wage labor and capital, is not going to go away. Which is why Godard doesn't ask for the
eradication of pop culture. Instead, he champions a marriage between image and action,
both personal and political. If American pop culture is the devil, Godard not only has
sympathy for it, but he tries to navigate it and empower it as well.
Even though Godard likens Madeleine to a consumer product (she and Paul talk to each
other as if they were recording and cutting their conversation inside a studio), she is less a
slave to her pop-cultural consciousness than Paul is to his communist agenda. Godard
understands that music (not to mention the threat of a "clothes rod" abortion) implies
Madeleine's freedom of expression, but this is an implication that Paul fails to gauge. Is it
possible that Godard recognizes a little bit of himself in Paul, a man whose active
proletariat consciousness gets in way of his having fun?
In the film, Godard poses a theory that "masculin" can be divided into two words:
"masque" (mask) and "cul" (ass). Because Paul is a sexual being, he naturally chases after
Madeleine's ass and, in effect, makes an ass of himself. As for the "masque" in the word,
one could argue that this is the arterial political and moral motive masked by the sex drive
(call this untapped or unseen potential). Paul and his equally arrogant friend seem to claim
dominance over the female sex because "feminin" can't be divided into. Oh, but it can
they just haven't figured out a way to do so. Naturally, then, the last shot of the film acts
as a female-empowering solution to Godard's philosophical algorithm of the sexual politic.
FIN.
Obsessively Self-Filming His Vicissitudes. Shooting Love and Anger from Berlin
to Tel Aviv
BERLIN In February 2006, Israeli documentary filmmaker Tomer Heymann traveled to
Berlin to present his film, Paper Dolls, at the Berlin International Film Festival. One
evening, he went in pursuit of the nightlife for which the city is justly famous, and met
Andreas Merk, a German choreographer, at the electronic music mecca, Berghain. What
started as a 48-hour fling turned into a four-year-long relationship that moves between
Europe and Israel.
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Such is the premise of Heymanns new documentary, I Shot my Love. The film made its
world premiere at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival, which ended on February 21.
Told with raw honesty and unremitting scrutiny, the film examines the relationship
between Heymann and Merk against the backdrop of Heymanns family. More than a plea
for tolerance, I Shot my Love looks at Israeli-German relations and at generational
conflicts within contemporary Israeli life through the prism of this highly intimate love
story.
At times uncomfortably personal, I Shot My Love is a departure for Heymann, 39, who is
best known for the 2006 documentary Paper Dolls, about transgendered Filipino
caregivers who attend to elderly Orthodox Jews by day and perform in a drag group at a
Tel Aviv club by night.
Heymann obsessively documents his life, and I Shot My Love is assembled from video
footage that he shot over the past four years (including, bizarrely enough, a tape of Merk
from the morning after their first encounter). But while Heymanns gaze often lingers
worshipfully on Merks eyes and lips, the real anchor in the film is Noa Heymann, the
directors intensely Israeli mother.
Indeed, this tough, weathered woman who watched four of her five sons leave for the
Diaspora often seems to be the love of the films title. Some of the films main drama is
presented in her frank and open relationship to the one son who remains in Israel, and the
influence she tries to exert over his life. She dispenses relationship advice and talks about
sex with surprising (and at times brutal) candor.
At one point, she suggests that the gap between Israeli and German cultures is simply too
great, and she questions whether Merk even belongs in Israel. The admission is jarring,
especially since it comes from a woman who otherwise seems to tolerate all aspects of her
sons lifestyle. In the context of the film, however, it seems that Ms. Heymann is really
voicing her anxiety that Merk might take her son away from her. Time and again, she
insists that nationality should not be an issue. Not all Germans are Nazis, and not all Jews
are nice, she says, delivering the films most memorable line.
One learns considerably less about Merk, 31, who responds to Heymanns omnipresent
(and often intrusive) camera by seeming alternatively flattered or irritated. In one
frustrated moment, he lashes out at Heymann for treating him like a story rather than like
his partner, and even laments that the two of them are unable to have good conversations
when the camera isnt rolling. For the audience, many such scenes are both difficult to sit
through and disconcertingly confessional. Heymann, for his part, remains safely hidden
behind his intrusive camera; one imagines a more satisfying film if the director had stood
in front of the lens as emotionally naked as his lover and mother do.
Some humor and pathos come from the contrast between a loud family Seder, in which
Merk takes part by reading the German translation of a prewar Haggadah that Heymanns
grandfather brought from Berlin, and from the directors awkward visit to the Merk
household for Christmas, which is the first time that Merks staunchly Catholic family
meets his Israeli boyfriend.
At the question-and-answer session after the screening, Heymann said he grew up on his
grandfathers stories of Berlin before the war. Its so easy to be so cultural that you lose
your humanity. Berlin was the cool place to be. And then not many years after, it
completely changed, he said.
Merk, who admits in the film that he was too afraid to ask his grandparents about their
experiences during World War II, said after the screening that he finds that living in Israel
somehow makes being German somehow less complicated. The Israeli-German thing
became present and daily and simple somehow, and there is no complexity there, he
explained.
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Andreas and Tomer, on this basic level, are two people who met and decided to share the
light, Heymann said, adding that the couple is now deciding whether to build a life
together in Israel or elsewhere. The choice, it seems, would have to be made purely with
an eye to their respective careers. Ideology and the weight of the history will not factor
into what they finally decide. The movie says its time to see each other not with all the
complexes from the past, Heymann explained.
A.J. Goldmann is an arts writer based in Berlin. His most recent article for the Forward was
about choreographer Nir de Volff.
Shooting a German-Israeli relationship
BERLIN (JTA) Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann almost never stops shooting. He shoots
his mother. He shoots his relatives. And, most of all, he shoots his German boyfriend.
Heymanns latest documentary, I Shot My Love, tells the sometimes painful story about
how his love affair with his German boyfriend, Andreas Merk, is complicated by the
tortured German-Jewish past.
The film, which debuted last Saturday, is one of several Israeli offerings at the 60th Berlin
International Film Festival, which runs through Feb. 21.
What does it mean that more than 60 years after the Shoah, we are in love? Heymann
said in an interview, describing his film. And what do we solve by being together?
The two men met in 2006 following the screening of Heymanns film Paper Dolls at the
2006 Berlin film fest, where the movie won several awards.
Heymann, whose grandparents fled from Berlin to Palestine in the 1930s, started filming
his new boyfriend almost immediately, providing the footage for this unusual
documentary. The film follows Merk after his first date with Heymann, who can be heard
from behind the camera and throughout their relationship as it evolves and the couple
moves to Tel Aviv.
German-Israeli love affairs are not uncommon. Many Germans of the first postwar
generation visited Israel, fell in love and settled down with Israelis.
Heymann, 39, and Merk, 31, are different because they are of the second generation, and
they are gay.
When Merk says on camera that he never asked his grandparents about their past during
the Nazi era, Heymann wants to know why.
I was afraid, Merk answers. Maybe thats why I didnt ask.
Merk ultimately finds a surprising connection with Heymanns family, whose German roots
are very apparent. Merk talks with Heymanns older relatives in German, and on Passover
he reads aloud from a prewar German Haggadah that had been stowed away for decades.
Through my relationship with Andreas, the German side that was sleeping so long in my
family came out, Heymann told JTA.
The film juxtaposes Heymanns open, emotional Israeli family with Merks reserved yet
equally emotional German Catholic family. It also explores the theme of victimhood, and
not just on Heymanns side.
Merk talks about the sexual abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of a Catholic priest.
Victimhood is a state of mind, he tells Heymann. For me, giving myself to you, its like a
big thing because I give it out of freedom and out of choice.

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Merk doesnt always have an easy time of it. Two years into the relationship, he stares
down the camera and says, Its like, hello? I am not just a story. Im your partner and this
story is alive. In me.
Today the couple lives in Israel. Merk said he mostly feels welcome, though he
occasionally finds himself the subject of off-color remarks about the Holocaust.
When they are in Germany, the two do not visit Holocaust memorials.
I dont like these rituals; they seem fake, Heymann said.
But when Merk recently showed him a stumbling block memorial a small brass plaque
embedded in the pavement in front of a building noting the name of a former Jewish
tenant who was deported Heymann is moved.
This touched me, and created something very close between me and Andreas, Heymann
said. Hey, something happened between our nations, but today, most Israelis open
themselves to create something new.

erban Oliver Ttaru on Anatomy of a Departure

Your film mostly speaks about going away what was it like to return to Romania for your
film?
Well, returning for the film had already been anticipated by our return four months after
the revolution. Thats when we faced alienation for the first time. I returned to a different
country due to the newly-gained independence, people began looking at life in a
completely different way. Life wasnt about surviving anymore or being glad for what one
had, but about having as much as possible a lot of money and material possessions. I
returned to a country which I didnt recognize: this is what the ending of the film is about.
The project was motivated by my desire to find places that are still the same as before,
which is why I retreated to roof tops. When I was a kid, me and my friend would smoke on
our roof top once my father would leave home we were 14 or 15 then -, so the roof top
was something of an island, there it was just us and the cigarettes. My location scout in
Romania helped me find places that fitted this theme. This is the tension in the film: I wish
nothing had happened not that I dont wish that the revolution hadnt happened but for
the purpose of memory.
But the way you describe it, one could see a material continuity in peoples priorities:
people always tried to get more money and more possessions, only that after 1989 there
seemed to be more opportunities to get rich.
Well, you have to differentiate between social classes. There were always classes which
tried to have more and who wished for cars, but the ordinary people and the
intelligentsia which is the class in which I grew up -, werent dominated by the desire of
becoming wealthier. The priority was to be oneself and survive make the best out of it.
After 1989, friends around us suddenly started thinking about where they could get nice
things, it was a completely different feeling.
The theme of your film is very similar to German stories of families torn apart by the Berlin
Wall. Did you try to distance yourself from such narratives, or was this reference irrelevant
for your project?
I didnt really think about such an association. Evidently, there is a connection to the
German East-West division and there were some people who recommended to search for
parallels to GDR to please German viewers, but I wasnt really going for this.
Do you think its justified that your film was screening as a Romanian contribution at the
film festival of Romanian film in Munich?
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I think this is a very Romanian film. There were some people who criticized that I always
show Ceaucescu and the pioneers etc. instead of going for some original material, but if
you used something different it would be a wholly different story which would have to do
less with our history. Besides, it wasnt done for a Romanian audience only, and its good
to have some contextualization for German viewers. I also realised how many older people
came to the screenings, viewers who can relate to the story. Nearly all of the
Transylvanian Saxons are now here, and the question of going away is one that they all
ask themselves.
Q&As and feedback from viewers proved that many Romanians young and old really
care about this story. A lot of young people told me they were happy I showed them the
way life was, not just demonisation. I think this is a problem in West German films about
East Germany too. Many directors seem to go for what audiences and festivals ask for, not
for what everyday life might really have been like. When you watch films set in the
Eastern bloc, you get the idea that this was a dark time when everyone was unhappy.
Do you think Why go away is not a rhetorical question for Romanian viewers, then?
Would a Romanian intellectual answer such a question?
I think there were people who didnt want to leave just as today there are young people
who dont want to leave. Most of them may, but there is also a trend of saying I will stay
because I can change something here. I think not asking yourself this question because
life in your country is hard is near-sighted.
But in countries of the Eastern bloc, many people didnt even have the hope of being able
to change something
Sure, and Romania was much worse than a lot of countries in Eastern Europe. But still I
wouldnt say that most people wanted to leave. And there were counterarguments: people
were saying that Germans were cold, you couldnt return to see your family or your
friends that would have been an unswallowable prize for many
Was there a moment when your family was disillusioned about Germany? Theres this
scene when your father says that it only occurred to him in Germany how people treated
you as a foreigner.
My father didnt decide to Germany because he thought it was idyllic, but simply because
he couldnt stand the difficulty, the restrictedness, the sad atmosphere. Many people in
Eastern Europe still think life in Germany is perfect. When I travel there and tell them that
I live in Munich, they immediately change their attitude towards me suddenly its clear
why youre happy, optimistic, dressed well etc. But of course, there are also people who
realise after some time that they would be happier at home, and many return, even once
theyve already retired. I think home as a place of happiness shouldnt be underestimated.
And in your case, that would be Germany or Romania?
Its really difficult to destroy home, but I suppose my parents have succeeded in doing it
theyve settled here, even if they enjoy spending time in Romania. Im in Germany, too,
now, but its difficult for me to say where my home is.
But your film was no search for home?
No. I find such films a little hypocritical I think everybody knows where their home is.
Pretending as if you looked for it might be amusing for the audience, but I dont think its
really insightful from the perspective of a filmmaker.
Isnt that always a problem where is the line between narrative interest and genuine
interest? Was your film a process of facing leaving, or was the conflict recast for the
audience?
This might be hard to believe, but it really was the first time we dealt with this question so
explicitly. I tried to make the film as personal as possible. You can tell that my parents find
some of the questions I ask stupid, because they thought Why now?. It appeared as if
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we had silently agreed we wouldnt speak about these matters, and here I was making a
film about them. I think its interesting how there are things that are left untold between
people even between parents and their children. In fact, the drama of the film grows out
of the relationship between me and my parents.
I categorically did not want to stage this film. I recorded the voice-over at my place during
evenings and nights and then handed them to my editor. It may come off as slightly
poetic, but I did my best to keep the text as real and personal as possible.
But you say things differently in front of a camera then when youre alone
Of course, but its still me. I said it as I felt it, and since it is my film this is justified. I cant
censor myself thats when the film would become artifical.
Did you have the impression that your parents enjoyed going back in time?
No, not at all. They didnt enjoy the making of this film and we hardly speak of it even
today. They think its partially untrue what I say in it, but dont want to bother talking
about it because its my film and because the discussion went so in-depth.
Do you think its problematic that RNW films want to present an objective reality where
your film speaks about the subjectivity of remembering?
No, I think these are genuine bits from Romanias former collective memory. That is really
how people remember that time. I know the films dont do that well at box offices because
theyre long and its all dialogues. Many people dont want to see these films because they
think they already know that reality. I dont want to belittle these films, but the approach is
straightforward: you take an anecdote or story from Romanias past and film it through
this Romanian reality lens. I think its a good wave that Romanian filmmakers are riding
on, also because its easy to make them: you focus on actors and dialogues, which is
convenient for a country which doesnt invest much money into cinema.
Do you think its helpful to have a national identity in art? It seems that at the moment
Romania has a much stronger one than Germany, even if most RNW directors would
probably deny this.
I think its to good to have a national identity in cinema and I dont understand why
Romanian filmmakers would deny a national identity. If you wanted to make a Romanian
vs. a German film, itd be much easier to go about making the former than the latter. In
Germanys case, youd start by bringing in a series of editors and bureaucrats to see what
they say, and then you could try Constantin Film so that maybe your project can be
succesful. In Romania, its all about language, games, the camera that aspires to be
unimpressive no large cinema. I think that Romanian filmmakers know what theyre
doing, and that theyre doing it consciously. Besides, in Germany there seems to be a false
consensus that there are objectively right or rong ways to approach cinema (hence the
bureaucracy), whereas Romanian filmmakers usually just try to show you the way they
make films and how great they are theres more Ego involved.
It would be nice to make some documentaries in Romania. There are certain topics which
are probably easier to address when you go there with a foreign eye, which I have,
although I also have some of that inside perspective. I think I could make films in Romania
that people would care about. Its interesting that if you compare uncommercial
documentaries from Germany and Romania, Germany probably has the better films.
Why do you think that there are so few renowned Romanian documentaries if the RNWpremise is inherently realistic?
That may precisely be the reason, that the naturalistic Romanian features seem like
documentaries with actors. So the question becomes, what could you show differently,
what more is there to say? There is so much reality in Romanian fiction films that they
seem to take the wind out of the sails of documentary filmmaking. Im not sure whether
thats all that bad.

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But do we even need documentaries in Romania, then?

Well, a difference remains. I think that regardless of its quality fiction film is an
entertaining discipline, so that real emotions communicated through a documentary have
a completely different effect on the viewer. It may simply be more convenient and efficient
to tell certain stories from Ceaucescus time through fiction films, while in other cases, the
appeal of documentaries remains.

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