"My Feminism" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL May 2, 1998 It's final exam time at the University of South Florida, or, to be more precise, it's final exam/term paper grading time--the students are finished with their work, by and large, now it's hell week for faculty struggling to keep alert as they start to read the 40th term paper or take home exam. At this time of the semester I don't have time to go to the movies. But I was able, last night, to take a break from my work for an hour or so to watch a new documentary film called "My Feminism" that the nice folks up at Women Make Movies sent me for review. As you may know, Women Make Movies is a now practically venerable distributor of feminist films, celebrating their 25th anniversay this past year. I generally don't review their films on radio because listeners wouldn't have any way of seeing them. They are distributed in the educational film market and so rental or purchase of them by individuals is usually prohibitively expensive. I agreed to review this one because I think there is a chance it will play here in Tampa in the Fall, either through the Pride Film Festival or at USF, and because, after I do these reviews on the radio, they are also distributed over the Internet and World Wide Web to hundreds of women's studies teachers and students, and it's one they'll definitely want to hear about. The title of the film is "My Feminism" and it was made last year by two Canadian feminist filmmakers, Dominique Cardona and Laurie Colbert, whose earlier work includes "Thank God I'm a Lesbian" that you may indeed have seen at the Pride Festival. "My Feminism" is a documentary that presents a current view of what feminism is, or, to put it more accurately, what the various different versions of feminism today are; one of its points being that there is no one monolithic thing called feminism. It also touches, briefly but quite astutely, on a whole host of different feminist issues, concerns, theories, activist movements, for example, equality, gender, race, reproductive rights, sexualities, women's health, abortion, parenting, breast cancer, poverty, and power. And these are addressed from a variety of standpoints not just that of U.S. or even Western feminism--in fact another of its points is to decry the tendency toward hegemony and imperialism that U.S. feminism is always in danger of falling into. Of course, it's always a challenge for documentary filmmakers to present the material they want to present in some way or other that won't bore the audience to death with an hour's worth of "talking heads"--a problem that really intensifies when the subject matter includes some theoretical notions and subtle distinctions. While Cardona and Colbert have not entirely solved the talking heads problem, they do make a very good effort to solve it and the film is edited in such a manner that it moves right along and I found it held my attention very well. I think there are two main reasons for that. First of all, the "heads" doing the talking here are extremely well chosen. Some will probably be familiar to you, e.g., Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, Urvashi Vaid. Others will be women you may not have heard of: a feminist activist from Dublin, the editor of a feminist journal in India, a law professor, a Canadian women's studies professor. What they all have in common is a very compelling way of speaking with clarity and passion. The filmmakers enhance this by the way the speakers are filmed. Each of the many sequences in which the film cuts to one of these presenters is shot in a kind of sepia tone with heavy shadows in close up. The images of their faces are really compelling. It's not like you or I turned on the videocam and shot a close-up; it's more like a moving version of the work of some enormously gifted portrait photographer. (I wish Women Make Movies would issue a set of stills from this film with those faces in the sepia tones; they'd make a great set of photographs to hang in your women's studies office). The other thing the filmmakers do is intercut some quite remarkable footage between the talking heads segments. Sometimes it directly represents what the speaker is talking about in a voice over while at other times it is more remote and evocative rather than a literal depiction. These images are often very beautiful, sometimes very disturbing, occasionally funny, and always interesting. In my view Cardona and Colbert have made an outstanding film about feminism in 1997, something much needed because a lot of the older films on this subject are outdated and because young men and women today tend not to have much of a clue what feminism is. They learn about it largely through distorted media images (my old Nemesis Rush Limbaugh even makes a "cameo" appearance here as Cardona and Colbert make that point. If you want a quick refresher course in the state of feminism today, do be on the lookout for a chance to see this film. I'm in the midst of planning the program for an international conference of women philosophers to be held in Boston in August. Being the film buff that I am, I've included a little mini film festival of films about women philosophers. (I'll bet you didn't know there were any!). I'm going to ask Women Make Movies if I can screen "My Feminism" as part of that series, maybe on a double bill with "Beauvoir's Daughters"--another fine documentary about feminism. If you're going to be in Boston on August 10, come by Boston University and see "My Feminism." Copyright Linda Lopez McAlister, 1998. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduce this review without the permission of the author, mcalister@chuma1.cas.usf.edu Linda Lopez McAlister, Chair (813) 974-0982 Dept. of Women's Studies, HMS 413 Fax. (813) 974-0336 University of South Florida e-mail: mcalister@chuma1.cas.usf.edu Tampa, FL 33620