more lengthy academic notes; disregard

Oh, also.

KH: I was just showing my work as part of a panel at UCLA. I attended another panel of women artists where the first audience question was, "Do you find working with your autobiography self-indulgent?" I was struck by that question. Why is it that the first question about this work is whether or not it's self-indulgent? Will women be making work about their experience always be accused of being self-indulgent and narcissistic? So it is interesting for me to now hear you say that people made the same comments to you in the early sixties. Could you speak to this? Do you think that this relates to your teacher's comment, "Don't put your heart into art [because you're 'just a girl']"?

CS: If a man crosses a threshold to depict or engage a lived reality, he becomes a hero. To deal with actual lived experience--that's a heroic position for a male and a trivial exposure for a woman. A woman exploring lived experience occupies an area that men want to denigrate as domestic, to encapsulate as erotic, arousing, or supporting their own position.

Culturally it has to do with the whole diminution of the feminine, what is female. Being so saturated with our own contradictory traditions and the degree of freedom that we have within these shifting traditions, it is hard for us to see where the deep hatred of the feminine still maintains its squirmy hostile boundaries.

This reminded me of two criticisms I read lately of Jane Austen. One is from Martin Amis (1996): "Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors--all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself." This is one of the great things to me, about Austen: in a weirdly pre-feminist way, she depicts the "feminine" side of English country life - society and relationships and the mercenary institution of marriage - and in sense, she does so with very little romance. She was high minded morally, and though her stories are often given stronger romantic overtones in contemporary adaptations, her work is deeply ironic. In the context of Schneemann's comments on the continuing denigration of all things feminine as trivial, Austen's triumph feels even greater to me.

The second criticism is, more broadly, an argument that the depiction of Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's 2005 Pride and Prejudice is a post-feminist Elizabeth, a postmodern one even. She isn't a middle-class English country girl fighting for her liberty and right to marry who she chooses - she's won that battle already, and she assumes her freedom carelessly. This is something that I suppose might be a negative criticism, but it's something that I really, really appreciate about this particular adaptation. Austen adaptations ride waves of popularity over the years, with filmmakers repurposing her stories and introducing them to new generations. I love that this latest incarnation of Elizabeth Bennet can be viewed as post-feminist. Though I know we aren't really in a place where the feminist fight is no longer relevant, we're still in a place where depicting a woman as possessed of her independence and liberty is a positive thing. It's subtle, in this adaptation, but it's still there. Lizzy roams the countryside at her leisure, oversees her own formal education, and forms her own opinions (or judgements) of people's characters regardless of their class. At the same time, she partakes in feminine pleasures with her sisters. She goes to town to shop for ribbons, she enjoys dancing, she takes pride in preparing and dressing for the ball, and she girl-talks with her sister under the covers at night. She's both strong-minded and independent, and feminine and girly. And don't contemporary women have the right to be both?

I would also just like to observe that it is 10:30 on a rainy Friday night and I am in pajamas in bed eating a bit of a baguette and drinking white zinfandel while watching Atonement and reading scholarly articles on feminist experimental filmmakers for fun. I can't decide if I am completely satisfied or if I think I need a life.

but you are an artist, and your mind don't work the way you want it tooooooooo

It's funny, every time I have a critical reading that interviews the filmmaker or discusses their intent or point of view or whatever, I always find myself reading in sympathy with them, as opposed to in sympathy of whatever view the author of the article is taking. Things like this sort of make me wish I'd taken some production courses and applied for MFA programs instead, but I've never been that kind of learner; I've always learned by exploring the abstract and then applying it in life, wherever it seems fitting. This is how I used to end up using my 20th Century American Foreign Policy notes to write papers for Literature and Film. Things like that. Besides, I like to think of theory and study kind of like the way I think of rules: you can follow the rules or break them, but you gotta know what they are, first.

Anyway, today I read an interview with this formalist avant garde filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, who made this film called Fuses between 1964 and 1967. It's now considered to be an "important" experimental film, but at the time, it was disregarded, to an extent, because it was an experimental film made by a female filmmaker and it dealt with sex on screen. She made it in a response to Stan Brakhage's brilliant Window Water Baby Moving (1959), which is an experimental film depicting the home birth of his first child. It's a fairly ungendered depiction of the birth, but as Brakhage did most of the filming, it still has that inescapable male lens. Schneemann was interested in showing a more equal partnership in sexual terms - "I really wanted to see what 'the fuck' is and locate that in terms of a lived sense of equity...we have to remind ourselves that throughout the sixties, only men maintained creative authority: women were muses, partners."

She continues, saying how as she was making it, no one stood by her except for her sexual/creative/intellectual partner Jim Tenney, who is in Fuses, and afterwards, virtually all feminist critics ignored it because it was a woman's film that showed a woman having sex. Primarily a performance artist and a painter, Schneemann was trying to liberate the female figure from the traditional, immobilizing framework of "the nude" in art. She had dealt in previous works with the questions, "Could I include myself as a formal aspect of my own materials? Could a nude woman artist be both image and image maker?" and she was tired of her work being qualified by her gender - "You're really good for a girl, but..." So she made a movie showing the equality and intimacy of her partnership with herself as image.

The interviewer, Kate Haug, a more contemporary experimental filmmaker and critic, asked Schneemann about her identity as an artist.

KH: On one hand, you have this desire to be an artist. On the other hand, you are producing work which you know is highly controversial. It seems you would feel like you are taking an incredible risk; you know you are in a very combative situation.

CS: It's not that I had a desire to be an artist. I'm in a very combative situation because I am an artist. Whatever an artist is or was, I was it. This wasn't a choice, and that's different. It means you have a certain character structure.

KH: How would you describe that character structure?

CS: You have to make images or you're going to die, basically. That is the most interesting, satisfying, compelling, necessary function--like love and sex and breathing. one hears people say "I don't know what great art is, but I know it when I see it." Somebody somewhere recently wrote a variation on this: "I can't tell what produces a great artist, but I know a real artist when I meet someone who has to create images or she'll expire."

By this definition, I think that someday, I would like to feel like I am an artist.

we're not real, anyway, right?

Jesse: What do you think were the chances of us ever meeting again?
Celine: After that December, I'd say almost zero. But we're not real, anyway, right? We're just, uh, characters in that old lady's dream. She's on her deathbed, fantasizing about her youth. So, of course we had to meet again.

before sunset

I hate that

when I'm talking to people ~online, whether it's in real time or in a message or email, it's really hard to convey sympathy or interest. I hate that when someone's telling me about something, I can't nod encouragingly and say "Mmm" and make eye contact to show that I'm interested in what they have to say. I have to spell it out, and it always rings false in my head, even though I mean it sincerely. And I hate that when someone's telling me something and I want to show them that I can relate to what they're saying, I can't nod emphatically and gesture and look at the person. I have to say "I get it" or "I feel that" or something equally as weak. And sometimes I feel like I have to give an example of a similar experience of my own to back that up. And I hate doing that, to me it always sounds like I'm trying to make whatever the person's talking about, about me, but I'm not! I just don't want them to think I'm just going along, or saying that I understand with no qualification for it, and ughhhh. It's really fucking hard to be a good listener online without seeming self-interested and I feel like I fail at it all the time and it makes me paranoid and self-conscious. I hate the internet sometimes. I like words and all but I hate having to rely on them so heavily for communication, because there's so much more to it than that, and I frequently feel like something important gets lost and I hate that. Hate hate hate.

/rant

~lifegoals

-- Write movie reviews for a newspaper or magazine.

-- Write film crit for a legitimate periodical or other publication.

(I think this needs to happen in this order.)

-- Write a full length feature screenplay that I don't hate.

-- Write a play that isn't terrible.

(This also needs to happen in this order, I think. I don't think I could write a play before finishing a screenplay.)

-- Bring back screwball comedy, goddamnit. IT CAN STILL BE RELEVANT.

-- Teach. Preferably university students.

-- Write a media literacy curriculum for elementary/secondary school students to teach them how to sort through and critically digest images/moving pictures/the stuff on the internet with actual content instead of just fucking consuming it mindlessly.

---- Make friends who will get this curriculum implemented for real in public schools.

------ Make other friends who will save public education.

------ Make other friends who will save liberal arts higher education.

------ Make other friends who will effectively reform the university admissions process.

-------- Find the patience and means to do all this myself should the friend-making fail, which it probably will.

In the mean time:

-- Write more letters.

-- Write more in general.

---- Write less about me and more about everything else.

---- Finish that goddamn screenplay adaptation.

-- Read more.

---- Books, I mean.

-- Consume less. Sort through the shit and critically read/view more.

-- Finish my masters without being a total failure.

-- Keep going. Lather, rinse, repeat.