What's the beef?

Let Women Make Movies make movies

This week the Museum of Modern Art begins a six-week retrospective of women-directed films from among 400 distributed by New York's pioneering Women Make Movies. The group's 25-year longevity is truly remarkable, and so is its unwavering commitment to discovering, funding, and showcasing the most essential female-issue cinema. If you can't get down to New York, you can still see a number of WMM films -- they'll be a featured attraction at the Boston International Festival of Woman's Cinema, which starts this Friday at the Brattle (see opposite page).

Happy anniversary to an exemplary organization! There's no category that quite fits, but WMM deserves a Pulitzer Prize. That's what I think. These are dumb times, however, and instead WMM is under siege from a Michigan congressmen who's enraged that, over three years, it's been the recipient of $112,700 in NEA money.

Pete Hoekstra, a conservative Republican who heads the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, has been snooping through independent-distributor catalogues, including that of WMM. In a January 1997 letter, he warned NEA chairman Jane Alexander "that taxpayer money is being used to fund the production and distribution of patently offensive and possibly pornographic movies -- several of which appear to deal with the sexuality of children."

To prove his steamy point, Hoekstra quoted the WMM catalogue descriptions of seven videos. In each case, female (and sometimes lesbian) sexuality is mentioned. Two videos concern underage girls. A WMM Communist-like plot? Earlier, in June 1996, Hoekstra's subcommittee had requested a viewing copy, from First Run Features, of the somewhat WMM-financed The Watermelon Woman, after its chairman took seriously a hyperbolic review claiming the film had "the hottest dyke scene ever recorded on celluloid."

Hoekstra watched the film. He felt the heat. "There is no close call," he said. "This is obscene. This is pornographic." Since then he's been using The Watermelon Woman as evidence that WMM should receive no more government money, and that the NEA should be shut down.

It's all so exasperating. I watched "Seventeen Rooms," a WMM short singled out by Hoekstra, which is described in the catalogue as "a hilarious answer to the question: what lesbians do in bed?" It's very funny. The dykes filmed in their bedrooms play Scrabble, bounce their kids, eat snacks, and snooze. Obscene?

Another victim of Hoekstra's McCarthyist fingerpointing, Hide and Seek, is described in the notorious WMM catalogue as "a fascinating portrait of lesbian childhood. . . . It's about being at an age when sexual feelings are still vague."

Indeed, Su Friedrich's movie is beautiful, poetic, and very wise. She alternates documentary scenes, in which lesbian adults reminisce amusingly about their childhood crushes, with a mini-fiction story of the daily life of a charming 12-year-old girl named Lou.

Where's the kiddie porn? This is a sweet, humane film. Apparently Hoekstra has been so obsessed by the action in The Watermelon Woman that he hasn't managed to put his nose to Su Friedrich's work.

But you should when Hide and Seek plays Saturday (at 2) and Wednesday (at 5:15) at the Brattle. Its marvelous companion piece is Pratibha Parmar's Jodie: An Icon, in which lesbian filmmakers, comedians, and academics give their smart take -- sexual, seriocomic, semiotic -- on movie actress Jodie Foster.

Parmar has uncovered obscure Foster scenes (the most erotic is in Carny) with indisputable lesbian content. Is Jodie a lesbian in real life? Parmar doesn't "out" Foster, leaving The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane as a mystery to ponder, to savor.

Other Women Make Movies showings in the Brattle fest:

April 26 at 3:45 p.m.: Jane C. Wagner & Tina DiFeliciantonio's Girls like Us and Two or Three Things But Nothing for Sure. The first is a moving documentary following teens from South Philadelphia through four years of their oft-troubled lives. The second is an experimental short, with evocative imagery accompanying painful autobiography from Bastard out of Carolina author Dorothy Allison.

April 27 at noon, and May 1 at 4:30 p.m.: The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché. An important documentary celebration of the first woman to direct movies, in turn-of-the-century Paris, and, later, to run her own studio, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Fortunately, Guy-Blaché was interviewed on camera before her death, at age 93. Haven't heard of the first female "auteur"? Although associated with the production of 700 films, she isn't in a single film history.

May 1 at 6 p.m.: A Healthy Baby Girl, a ferocious, angering, muckraking work about DES, an artificial estrogen manufactured by American pharmaceutical companies and pushed on mothers until the '70s to ensure healthy pregnancies. Instead, DES proved carcinogenic in the next generation, causing hundreds of deaths and necessitating debilitating operations. The courageous filmmaker, Judith Helfand, who will be at the Brattle, had a complete hysterectomy at age 25. Her anti-DES battle for health and dignity is at the center of this unsettling, consequential work.