The last three days of a four-day festival, now in its tenth year, that highlights film and video shorts as well as features by women, including documentaries, ant, mation, narrative, and experimental works. Tickets for individual programs are $6, $5 for WIDC members, students, and senior citizens with a valid ID; Film Center programs are $5, $3 for Film Center members; festival passes are also available. Screenings will be held at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, and the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. For further information call 281-4988
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PRIVILEGE The sixth feature of experimental, intellectual filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, her most accessible work to date, stages a kind of shotgun marriage between two volatile issues, menopause and racism. A black filmmaker (Novella Nelson) experiencing menopause decides to make a film about it, and interviews a white friend named Jenny (Alice Spivak), a former dancer who recounts a long story involving her own unconscious racism when she was in her 20s. Rainer interrupts and interweaves this story with a great many other elements–archival footage, interviews with women about menopause, quotations from diverse sources, clips (including one of a Lenny Bruce stand-up routine), and fantasy interludes–and in many ways her film works more as a multifaceted essay than as a straightforward narrative. Cantankerous, witty, caustic, and often deliberately unsettling in its modernist structure, the film mounts a complex argument about the privileges and effects of being white, male, young, and well-to-do. It’s the sort of film that compels one to have a dialogue with it, and Rainer’s anger and courage in dealing with the taboo subject of menopause are never less than energizing. One may quarrel with certain aspects of this film, but one can’t deny the potency of the brew. With Blaire Baron, Rico Elias, Gabriella Farrar, Dan Berkey, and Rainer herself (1990). (Film Center, 6:15 and 8:00)
WOMEN RESIST Five films and videos: Michelle Crenshaw’s Skin Deep (1990), Carol Leigh and Dee Russell’s Yes Means Yes, No Means No (1990), Barbara Trent’s Invasion in Panama, Mitra Tabrizian’s The Third Woman (1990), and Nina Rosenblum’s powerful and disturbing documentary about the treatment of American political prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, Through the Wire (1990), to be shown on video. (Chicago Filmmakers, 9:00)
EXPERIMENTAL A program of experimental films and videos: Jeri Lawson’s Insight (1990), Jill Petzall’s November Nine (1990), Kate Mapes’s Performances (1990) from the United Kingdom, Marie-France Alderman’s Prayer Flags (1989), Diane Teramana’s Teramana’s Chin (1990), Steina’s In the Land of Elevator Girls (1989), Margot Starr Kernan’s Cold Stories (1990), Mary Ann Toman’s Island of Symmetry (1990), Meg Ojala’s Quickening (1990), and Sadie Benning’s If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990). (Chicago Filmmakers, 9:30)
MEDIA Four videos: Patricia Diaz’s My Filmmaking, My Life: Matilde Landeta (1990), Shu Lea Cheang’s How History Was Wounded (an analysis of the Taiwan media’s coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre, from Paper Tiger Television, 1989), Jyoti Jumani’s Video SEWA: A People’s Alternative (1990) from India, and Lisa Marie Russo’s Homegirl (1988). (Chicago Filmmakers, 5:00)
