1. Thanks to the heat, I've beat a retreat into the Vizio room. I've done a search of what documentaries from the 1970s and 80s are available on the Criterion Channel. Many of these are short documentaries, often under a half an hour long, and many of them are what I call, without derision (I really enjoy Ken Burns' work), not Ken Burns movies. Most do not have a narrator. Most are shot in real time, not making use of archival footage. They do not have musical accompaniment, although music sometimes arises out of the footage the filmmaker has shot. I don't know much about film, if something is shot in 8 mm or 16mm, etc., but these movies lack the clean (sometimes sterile?) look of digital filmmaking. I enjoy them a lot.
The first movie I watched today was I Am Somebody (1970), the work of filmmaking pioneer, Madeline Anderson. The movie focuses on black women working in two hospitals in Charleston, South Carolina who went on strike in 1969 and demanded not only higher wages (they were making $1.30 an hour; white workers made more), but improved working conditions, including figuring out ways to address being belittled on the job by being called names and enduring other forms of discrimination. The strike developed into a national civil rights cause. Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke at rallies, led prayer vigils, marched with the strikers, and joined scores of fellow marchers in jail. Coretta Scott King and Andrew Young also spoke at rallies and marched with the strikers and their supporters. Local union 1199 of New York supported the strike with money and personnel.
bbbbbbUnarmed and non-violent, the strikers were repeatedly confronted and sometimes manhandled by law enforcement officers and National Guardsmen, armed with clubs and rifles. They were herded onto busses and put in jail for disobeying orders prohibiting them from assembling.
The strikers and their supporters rallied around the chant, "I am somebody". It was their version of the proclamation, "Black lives matter". They boycotted Charleston businesses, buying only food and medicine, and, in the end, this financial pressure succeeded and, after a hundred days, a collectively bargained contract was signed by the hospitals and employees' union.
This documentary, like so many others, reinforces my view of history. I don't think history repeats itself. I think what we see happening in the past continues. I saw this movie as a part of a continuing story. It's not as if the struggles portrayed here ended sometime after 1969 and then sprang back again and history repeated itself. No. These struggles continue, repression persists, demonstrations of state power and force persist, denials that there are racial problems persist, and what happened over fifty years ago continues to happen as time moves forward. What happened in Charleston in 1969 was not a repeat of past racial and labor conflicts of the earlier days of the 20th century. It was a continuation of those conflicts.
2. Speaking of continuation, the second documentary I watched, also less than thirty minutes long, is entitled, Betty Tells Her Story (1972), directed by Liane Brandon.
It's a simple movie. Without introduction, the film presents us with Betty, seated in a chair. She tells a story about a dress she purchased to wear at the Governor's Ball. I think she lives in Connecticut.
After Betty tells her story, Liane Brandon asks her to tell it again.
She does.
In the second telling, Betty spontaneously and naturally -- I'd say unconsciously -- reveals more of her feelings about the dress and suddenly her story unfolds as a meditation on beauty, body image, self-confidence, and loss.
Once again, as I listen to Betty tell her story fifty years ago, I'm struck not by how history, attitudes, self-regard, and so on repeat themselves, but how the same, in this case, women's issues continue. Betty inherited her sense of beauty, body image, and social standing and what she says in her story would be said right through the rest of the 20th century and on into 2021 by any number of women who continue to share the sense of self and beauty that Betty reveals.
Until subscribing to the Criterion Channel, I'd never hear of this documentary. After watching it, I've learned that it's considered an iconic film, a ground breaking film, that Betty's candor in telling her story and examining her feelings about herself and this dress was unprecedented in 1972.
3. Ever since I began watching movies more seriously, starting, I'd say, when I was a student at Whitworth, I've read and heard many, many mentions of John Cassavetes and his work as in independent filmmaker.
Until this evening, though, I'd never watched any of his movies.
Tonight I watched Minnie and Moscowitz.
I experienced a wide range of discomfort throughout the movie. In particular, I found the male characters in this movie to be abhorrent.
I didn't try to count, but if I had, I would have lost count of how many time Minnie, played by Gina Rowlands, gets punched, grabbed, blocked, forcibly moved from one place to another, yelled at, insulted, taunted, and controlled by men in this movie, by a guy on a nightmare lunch date, by her secret lover, and by Seymour Moscowitz, her new lover.
The men also punch, wrestle, and yell at each other. Seymour gets in at least three fights (I might have lost track). He's belligerent with any number of other people in the movie. He's emotionally erratic, self-pitying, a stalker, and suffers from an advanced case of arrested development. He's a fourteen year old in the body of a man in his mid-thirties.
Did I mention that Minnie and Moscowitz is a love story?
I experienced it as a bleak love story, a portrayal of two characters (expertly played, by the way, by Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel) who are desperately broken. I found it painful to watch Minnie and Moscowitz flail around. Moscowitz is emotionally unmoored, deeply insecure, emotionally very needy, and frighteningly possessive and controlling. Minnie is lonely, fragmented, fragile, intellectually gifted, and prone to fall into the arms of one man, her former lover, after he beat her up, and into the arms of Seymour Moscowitz after his fits of rage, including one when he threatens to kill himself and, possibly, her.
Both characters struck me as lost at sea, in search of a lifeboat or a life preserver, and ready to grab onto whatever (or whomever) came their way that might keep them afloat.
So I've seen one John Cassavetes directed movie. My impressions?
This movie thrives on rawness, expressed in verbal and physical assault, carried out by disordered characters.
This movie thrives on misogyny. My hope is that the portrayal of misogyny reveals the horror of misogyny and so becomes anti-misogynisitc. My experience, though, is that it doesn't always (often?) work this way. In Raging Bull, the portrayal of Jake LaMotta's misogyny and his brutality toward his wife Vikki nearly made me throw up. But, when I saw the movie in Eugene in 1981, men in the audience cheered his wife beating. I was appalled by the cries of "Get her, Jake! That's it! Let her have it!" So, it's like war movies. The violence in war movies deepens my anti-war sentiments. For many, though, the violence is exciting, inspiring, even arousing.
John Cassavetes portrayal of misogyny sickened me. He might have been critiquing it while creating it -- I don't know -- but I hated watching it.
The movie thrived on extremes. Many of the scenes in this movie portrayed strongly felt emotions, often way out of control. Characters with, to me, extreme personality disorders kept popping up, like the guy Minnie has lunch with or the unhinged poetry reciting Welshman at a New York diner early in the movie. Minnie's despair, her loneliness, her fragmented inward life is extreme. The movie featured very few balanced or sane people. When they did pop up, it was for a brief appearance.
So, I experienced John Cassavetes as a confrontational director, always pushing his viewers to endure discomfort, as if pushing to the edge of human emotion and expression is where compelling drama and moviemaking exist.
I'll watch a couple more Cassavetes movies and then decide if I'm interested enough in experiencing his place in the history of movie making to watch any more. If Minnie and Moscowitz is any indication, I think Cassavetes confrontational style is one that might have stimulated me when I was younger, but that I might not wish to endure now that I'm older and my sensibilities have changed.
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