The Dead Center

IT ISN'T surprising that when the Welles finally gets it together to screen some feminist films, it chooses good, solid, nationally-acclaimed documentaries whose ideological perspectives place them just about at dead center in the feminist movement. The three films--one a portrait of an elderly single woman, one a cheerful instruction on women's health issues, and one a survey of working women of all kinds (from housewives to whores)--are all excellent: blunt, thoughtful, witty, and instructive without being preachy. They stand well to the left of Gloria Steinem, Ms. magazine and introductory consciousnessraising, and will convince anyone who still needs convincing that there is more to the women's movement than just the drive to procure a meatier piece of the capitalist pie.

Mirra Bank's Yudie takes us gently back to the lower East Side, where one woman grew up, married, divorced, and survived alone. Anyone who has a Jewish grandmother will find Yudie universal--sweet, a little shy, proud, opiniated, talkative. Although she's less obsessed with her Jewishness and much more self-reliant than most women of her background (she has been single and self-supporting for fifty years), her conversation plows with the delicate determination of a Sherman tank to the inevitable topics: food, family, marriage, and money. "Other people take pills when they get nervous, but I eat. All I need is a little piece of fruit."

Yudie says, "All girls were expected to get married then. I met a guy, and decided to marry him--he seemed like a nice guy." This last statement is said with a wistful smile. As it turned out, he wasn't. After a divorce Yudie went to work as a real estate broker and could never bring herself to marry again--not for fear of losing her independence, but because the Right Man never came along. Her voice is cheerful but it speaks her loneliness, and her smile is one of regret. "When you're alone, sometimes you feel you'd done the wrong thing, not having a family..."Bank's sensitive documentary, combining direct interviewing with shots of old sepia photographs, is just right for the subject--short and bittersweet.

Most people have seen babies being born on TV specials, but few have ever seen a cervix or watched a suction abortion being performed. Taking Our Bodies Back, produced by Cambridge Documentary Films, demystifies such gynocologia as it raises issues in women's health care which have largely gone unnoticed by women themselves. The discussion ranges from home birth and midwifery to cancer, birth and midwifery to cancer, birth control, hormone drugs, and abortion; even women who thought they knew all about this will be surprised at what they don't know.

The film's chief complaint is that the male-dominated medical profession has always treated female patients like children or half-wits--diagnosing them summarily, making critical decisions without consulting them, and refusing to explain the risks and medical alternatives to such radical surgery as breast removal and hysterectomy. The women who made the film offer the solution of enlightenment; they clearly believe--and many of the women interviewed say this too--that when women are educated about their bodies, their physicians, and what they have a right to demand for their own medical safety, they can effectively challenge their doctors' indifference and monopolistic control.

This has a certain J.S Millian ring to it. The theory that knowledge equals freedom, and that free discussion inevitably leads to social progress, is applied in this film only on an individual basis--it's each woman for herself. This is a valid approach for most of the issues the movie deals with. Women who object to the assembly-line impersonality of hospital births should know that they can give birth at home, assisted by a trained midwife. They should know that sometimes doctors order hysterectomies for convenience and that if a patient insists on it, sometimes her uterus can be saved. They should think twice before signing a blanket consent form before breast surgery.

But "more information and more choice"--the film's motto--is not a real remedy for women who lack the luxury of a one-to-one, doctor-patient relationship. Only one of the film's sections addresses the concerns of black and minority women who are too poor to obtain health care anywhere but at an underequipped understaffed clinic. The black women interviewed complain that many of their friends have had their "tubes tied" without being told that the operation was irreversible, and that when black women appear in hospital clinics, no matter how diverse their medical symptoms, they are usually assumed to be prostitutes and packed off to the VD clinic without examination. These women don't need more information; they know that a pain in the abdomen is not a symptom of venereal disease. They don't have the choice to consult "another doctor." What choices do they have? Taking Our Bodies Back is right to urge women to overcome the victimization of "passive consumership and doctor worship." But its directors were wrong to assume that a lot of enlightened talk and no organized action will make social change possible, despite class barriers.

DONNA DEITCH'S Woman to Woman, a long, clamorous documentary of working women, is like good political rhetoric which sweeps one along on a tide of right-on sentiments and very real but always palatable insights, and leaves one at the end, exhausted from an orgy of head-nodding, feeling a little ripped off. Like Taking Our Bodies Back, it uses the interview technique to raise vital issues and to air well-founded complaints. But to anyone who is already conversant with the bottom-line tenets of women's liberation--that women's labor is exploited in the household, the brothel, and the working professions--the litany of oppression will be so familiar as to seem almost soothing, and at the same time politically unsatisfying. When all the talk is over, is it enough to conclude--as this film does--that what's needed is for women to "get together"?

Deitch has woven a tapestry of wonderful footage of women talking about themselves. Prostitutes explain that they first turned tricks because they were starving. A clinical psychologist and lesbian talks about the discrimination she has suffered in her profession. An aging housewife sits on a park bench under a gray sky, and shows us the rag dolls she has made and sold for 25 years. Prostitutes in the San Francisco Women's Jail sit around a plastic table, smoke cigarettes, and say bitterly that they will have to turn another trick as soon as they get out, just to feed their children.

Much of the women's talk is descriptive--they explain their jobs, their families, and what they do all day. Only the prostitutes actually analyze their predicaments, but even their conclusions have, at times, an odd ring. One hooker traces society's intolerance of prostitution to the Bible. "It's the whole Puritan trip," she insists. "The Bible, which insists on chastity and monogamy, is for women the most oppressive book ever written." She smiles almost proudly then and says, "Hookers escape the double standard," adding simply, "and they get punished for it." The prostitutes sitting around the jailhouse coffee table know all about the pro-male bias of the prostitution laws; "the trick is never prosecuted," they point out, but one of them adds that she doesn't see anything illegal in an exchange between two consenting adults. Oppression has not made revolutionaries out of these women. They are not asking to overhaul the system, but to be allowed to ply their trade within it.

Woman to Woman delivers what its title promised--an honest, intimate discussion between women about the problems they face in trying to redefine the ways in which society views and treats them. But the women in the film, and the director herself, have only illuminated part of the problem; they have named the victims--themselves--and they have labelled the instruments of torture--the economic, legal, and cultural means by which women are kept subservient to men. Nowhere in the film is there any attempt to discover who, or what, is responsible for the injustice, why it exists, or what women ought to do to combat it.

ONLY ONE BLACK woman, sitting on a delapidated front stoop in an unnamed ghetto, comes close to an indictment. "Out here's a jail too. They let you outta there to come back here 'cause they know. They got you." Another woman, also a prostitute, ventures beyond the scope of the film when she says, "It's not really the men's fault; we're all victims. The almighty God of this country is the dollar bill." Deitch was not interested in pursuing either that thought or the politics of oppression in any broader context. The film closes with an exhortation to women to keep talking--to work together, educate one another, and overcome their mutual mistrust.

Again, a film based on the liberal faith in constructive discussion. In her vast panorama of American womanhood Deitch has given a lot of very different women a chance to speak their minds--everyone, in fact, but women further to the political left than she. It would be unfair to derogate her achievement just because she has left out socialist feminism. But there's something chilling about her choice of interviewees. When a whole group of prostitutes agree, tantalizingly, that "the system must be changed," and then explain that their idea of freedom from oppression is the freedom to be unmolested, legal whores, one can only wonder why Deitch stopped there--and hope that other women will go further.