The Personal is Political
25 October 2021
Throughout history, there have always been two sides to a story. There is what happened and there is what an individual attests happened, taking into account their perspective, obstacles, biases, personal history, et cetera. No one other than the person telling the story will be able to recreate via words, text, or imagery their exact experiences or those of another. However, as filmmaking progressed into a vessel for storytelling and the spreading of information rather than the simple moving images from the turn of the century, amateur filmmakers became mesmerized with the power of showing audiences environments and culture they had never seen before, and that meant travelling to communities where previous filmmakers had never been. Ethnography, as a subsection of the documentary, showcases a culture, offering representation in the media and overall society in a way that they were not seen before. Author Shilyh Warren writes that this inclination to explore what was once unknown is rooted in the “colonial desire to visualize, fix, and know otherness” (Warren, 6). In her 2019 book Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary Film, Warren tracks how the “cross pollination” (4) of “women in anthropology, academic film studies, and political feminism” (4) has assisted the transformation of the dramatized ethnography into today’s documentary.
Subject to Reality splits the history of women in the documentary scene into four distinct chapters: “Filming Among Others” presents the beginnings of documentary film, and follows two filmmaking couples as they popularize the pseudo-ethnography, “Anthropological Visions” focuses in on anthropologists Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston and how their education affected their film, “Strangely Familiar” shows the beginning of the first-person documentary and focuses in on white women liberation movement, and “Native Ethnographers” displays how women of color modernized the ethnography and played a role in feminism as it is known today. In addition, Warren chooses to focus on solely the 1920s-1940s and the 1970s, which she refers to as the “key periods” (1) of womens’ documentary filmmaking. In the 1920s, as the popularity and public allure of informational documentaries grew, wealthy people saw the film industry as just another way to cash in, and with the privilege of having access, resources, and overall affluence, the production of contact films began. A mentionable example is Nanook of the North (1922), where husband and wife duo Robert and Frances Flaherty “manipulat[e] audiences into believing that the dramatic story of an indigenous man against the brutal forces of nature is a faithful representation of Inuit life near the Hudson Bay in the early 1920s” (23). Contact films, Warren describes, are “ethnographic fictions about their encounters with racial and cultural difference” (21). In these films and the ethnographies to come, the subject of the film, which Warren refers to throughout the book as “the racialized Other,” (6) is put on display in front of the camera as their life and culture are filmed like wildlife. The belittlement of the subject by the zoo animal-like treatment coupled with the presence of an outsider in the community creates tension between the subject and the filmmaker. This assumed stranger within the community (the filmmaker), with presumably no knowledge of the subject matter other than what they have experienced, can distort and dramatize the subject in order to have a more substantial story (leading to more profit). This exploitative relationship where the filmmaker has complete power over the subject and how their culture is perceived by media, especially during the time of 1920-1940s. While at the time, audiences watching Nanook of the North had no reason not to see it is as the true happenings of life in this Inuit community, but behind the scenes, and unbeknownst to the public, “Robert Flaherty contrived virtually every element of the story… from the names of the actors to their familial relationships, down to their clothing, modes of travel and hunting, and the domestic scenes he offered to viewers as ‘life and love in the actual Arctic’” (23-24). The early beginnings of the documentary were rooted in and accelerated by the racist and xenophobic ideals held by such filmmakers at the time, with Nanook being one of the first of many similar films based on the manipulation of a community of minorities.
Another white ethnographer of the time was Margaret Mead, a Columbia-educated lesbian anthropologist. Mead filmed culture and happenings in exotic locations, such as Samoa, where Frances Flaherty had done work a few years prior for her film Moana (27). Oddly, Warren pairs Mead in the second chapter with anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston. Both women were well educated, but other than their filmmaking interests, the similarity ends there. Warren’s choice of pairing Mead and Hurston in the chapter as similar filmmakers seems to minimize Hurston’s own addition to documentary. Mead’s addition to ethnographical film was her insertion of a condescending and authoritative voiceover breaking down each scene, an over-explanation of even the simplest actions such as “‘she nurses the baby’” (62) which further establishes the hierarchy of the Other/the subject being lower class or even uneducated compared to the filmmaker and therefore the audience. Filmmakers and anthropologists of the time were also reluctant to accept Mead’s inclusions due to her sanctioning of “problematic voyeurism” (59) with anthropological author Ruth Behar stating that Mead is “the most famous anthropologist of the century… but in reality many of us are embarrassed by her” (58). While Mead did in fact play a role in shifting the ethnography away from contact films and into today’s documentaries, her being paired with Hurston, a woman well-known for her insightful novels but also her passionate and experimental films on black culture, makes an effort to tone Hurston’s own image and success. Hurston, a black woman from a small town in rural Florida, was one of the first non-white filmmakers. Considering herself an “insider” (51) to the communities she filmed due to living her own youth in similar areas, Hurston brought a unique turn to ethnographics through her combination of quirky camerawork (50) and portrayal of emotion and tension, creating a “comfortable, even playful intimacy between the filmmaker and her subject” (51).
As camera equipment became more accessible for the wealthier end of the general public, the first person documentary began gaining popularity with women “‘on the young side of middle age, mostly white and mostly middle class’” (71). Focused on “birthing, mothering, managing affect, and maintaining cultural values within the nuclear family” (69) from a woman's perspective, these films were mostly created and compiled by one person, therefore allowing full creative rights to the individual. Warren claims that these films, about women and by women, should be under the umbrella of “feminist films” but fails to state exactly why. In fact, Warren’s opening of the third chapter with a passage on white women and how gender affects 1970’s social power dynamics (67-8) is the first time in the novel that Warren begins to connect feminism to the content she discusses. Warren segregates the women documentarians of the 1970s between the film accomplishments of white Jewish women and then those of women of color, finally focusing on race and class differences between nonwhites in the fourth chapter. In The Women’s Film, three white women from Newsreel set out to create a film on “revolutionary and aesthetic ambitions in the service of radical feminism or, in Kristen Hogan’s terms, ‘feminist accountability’ around race and class” (102). While they interview physically diverse women, searching for a theme about solidarity of all women, the film silently (and maybe even accidentally) exhibits how being female and the ramifications that come along with it are not the primary causes of strife or inequality for every woman (105).
For a book claiming to “reintegrate lost and sidelined work into the entwined historiographies of documentary, feminism, and film theory” (4), Warren never seems to get around to either explaining her personal definition of feminism or fully following through with her thesis. Within the introduction of this book, Warren speaks in first person, continually preparing the reader for an “investig[ation into] the political and aesthetic legacy” (3) of film and insisting that the content will be given a more focused look further within the book. However, she refrains at every opportunity from sharing her opinion on a topic, often mentioning heavily divisive topics but leaving her own thoughts as a cliffhanger, such as ending her discussion of classification feminist films (which is one of the central themes of her book) with “I have always wondered about her reluctance to call the film properly ‘feminist’” (71). This would have been an excellent point for Warren to state why she sees this project as a distinctly feminist film (or any of the films mentioned throughout the novel, for that matter), but she instead moves on to her next topic. In The Women’s Film, as the filmmakers are desperately trying to prove a point about society, the only concept that can truly be seen is the disheartening reality that womankind, with the inclusion disparities regarding race, class, financial status, and overall choices, will never all be equal individuals. For a book published in 2019, during what is arguably the most widespread movement of global social change and also the peak of feminism, the diversions of her own beliefs behind spliced assortments of quotes from outwardly random individuals demonstrates an uneasiness about the topic and its discussion rather than a feeling of neutrality.
Midsommar and the Overkill of Feminism
December 17, 2021
After her parents and sister die in a murder-suicide, protagonist Dani has is her dismissive boyfriend Christian - an anthropology student who finds himself unable to deal with Dani’s grief. After Dani is inadvertently invited to a summer trip to Christian’s friend’s native rural Swedish commune to witness the Midsommar festival, where the violent and cult-like actions of the Hårga community begin to play out, culminating in Christian’s grotesque death. Midsommar (2019) is Ari Aster’s second feature-length film and centers on the journey of frail and dependent Dani to find unconditional affection. Throughout the film, Dani explores her own identity, overcomes the toxicity of her relationship with Christian, and becomes more independent and self-loving, flourishing in this women-led community. But is Midsommar a feminist film?
At the beginning of the film, Dani’s familial trauma is fresh in the audiences’ mind, and, in scenes following, Christian’s use of a condescending tone and subtle gaslighting towards Dani concrete her being viewed by the audience as a victim, which continues through the entirety of the film. On the other hand, Christian’s unemotive and monotonous treatment of Dani immediately following the deaths despite her already visibly emotionally raw state slaps Christian with the label of an antagonist. And as Dani’s misery builds, Christian continues to fail to acknowledge her or give her the stable affection she craves. Even though his microaggressions against his girlfriend pale in comparison to the murderous rituals of the Hårga, his actions solidify him in the eyes of the audience as the aggressor - a title which he never manages to lose. While there is an obvious uncommunicative and possibly dysfunctional relationship between the two, from what is shown in the film, it is not outright abusive.
As she spends more and more time apart from Christian, while he begins to become enchanted by Maja, one of the younger girls of the commune, Dani is allowed to work with the Hårga women on their daily tasks as if she was one of their own. The Hårga is a seemingly female-led group where women support each other, and the combination of the physical beauty of the women (who are inherently sexualized, playing into the stereotypical pureness of the white dress-clad blond hair blue eyed female) but also the way the women work together as one for the sake of the commune captivates Dani.
Aster shows the Hårga and the idea of Sweden alike using the concept of light and dark imagery. The portion of the film set in the United States is crowded by darkness and noise, so dimly lit that the early scenes are almost unrenderable. A single droning tone plays for the entire scene as the camera slowly carries out a sweep of the house. In between shots showing pitch black body bags containing Dani’s relatives, the only light in the scene is the illumination emitting from her sister’s laptop, open to a single email from Dani. The dark set continues to follow Dani, with windows revealing the dark sky outside while she is in bed grieving and again at a party with Christian’s friends. A similar hum plays as Dani enters the plane bathroom, sobbing, however, she is this time bathed in the fluorescent lighting, foreshadowing the brightness that Sweden has to offer her.
Once she arrives in Sweden, where the sun is out for about twenty hours every day, almost nothing can be hidden in the darkness of the night. As the group exits the extensive vines of the forest, they pass through a large physical diorama of a sun, with yellow wooden beams, into the ceremonial grounds. The area where the community lives is truly beautiful - surrounded by lush trees, the greenest grass, and beautiful flowerbeds. The aesthetically pleasing scenery is coupled with the immediate generosity and nurture from the locals, a mask over the hellish realness of the cult that is to come soon after. In her piece ‘Pretty Little Cults,’ writer Katherine Connell explores how the aestheticization (and therefore inherent feminization) of cults aids in drawing in followers. She says “the allure of the woman cult member or leader is coordinated with the palatable, if not idealised, attractiveness of the femme fatale: although boxed in by her objectification, her instrumentalisation of beauty as a leader is meant to be understood as a betrayal of patriarchal normativity.” By the leader of the cult exhibiting excess physical beauty and or femininity, people would misconstrue the scenario as safe, therefore giving into the cult. The wound of losing her mom and sister still searing, Dani is unknowingly seeking out a maternal figure in the Hårga - not to replace her mother, but to aid the grief as she accepts the loss.
Christian, under the influence of a mystery liquid from the dinner table, is lulled into a ritualistic sex ceremony and forced to impregnate Maja, who has been poisoning him with drugs to make him desire with her. During this scene, the two are on the ground, surrounded by the elder women of the commune, who are mocking and laughing at the sounds Maja makes. Christian bubbles in and out of true consciousness - at the end, running completely naked out of the barn where Maja led him. This is the first time in the film that we see Christian truly in distress - however, the emotional reaction the audience has is focused around Dani, who just watched her boyfriend cheat on her, rather than Christian, who was just forced into seemingly non-consensual sex with a fifteen-year-old. He stumbles around the buildings, emasculated, finding the dead bodies of all of the friends he came with, each mangled in its own way. The hope visibly drains from his body as he realizes his own fate will soon set in - yet the audience is still taking pity on Dani, who has just been crowned May Queen. Not that she does not deserve pity, but as bad things are happening to others as well, Aster decidedly does not focus on them. Houses away, freshly brokenhearted Dani has fallen into a panic attack, surrounded by women. Like how the group mocked Maja, these women kneel in Dani’s position and cry and sob as loudly as she is, as if they are experiencing her same agony. As the women mold around her and comfort her, even though she does not know them well, Dani can finally experience the familial love that she had been seeking so desperately from Christian and was never able to receive. Regarding this, Connell says “On the surface, Midsommar constructs a simple binary around the treatment of its protagonist: in contrast to the Hårga, who are attentive to Dani’s emotional vulnerability and crown her queen, her boyfriend and his misogynistic friends treat her very existence as inconvenient. Who wouldn’t choose to stay?” Dani finds the affection and praise that she craves in the Hårga, even though they are responsible for killing off all of her so-called friends. The only one of the original group that showed her kindness was Pelle, the native of Hårga, who remembered Dani’s birthday when Christian did not, kept her safe while she was having a bad drug trip, and comforted her after her family died.
As the May Queen, Dani makes the decision to sacrifice Christian, his burning death representing putting a physical match to their relationship and losing it forever. After Dani has shed Christian, this burden that she has been tied to for so long, she feels instantly liberated and even smiles as she watches him incinerate. While this is a story of female empowerment and overcoming struggles, is it feminist?
At a first glance, the film contains many overtly feminist scenes. From a Freudian standpoint, it is a goldmine of yonic symbolism, from the wooden structure that resembles the sun that begins their journey in the Hårga to the temple that Christian is burned alive in. Midsommar goes to extremes in order to display how the Hårga ‘liberates’ women. In the community, women are allowed to pick their mate, but it is by poisoning their food over time, alluding to the exploitative and even non-consensuality of this tradition. Rather than a typical cheat-and-get-caught scene, Christian participates in a ceremonial sex scene where the man is encircled by women cheering him on to impregnate a fifteen-year-old girl, which triggers Dani’s want for revenge, and she burns him alive. As these scenes begin to play out, in this land where everything seems too beautiful to be true, an idea that on the outside seems very pro-woman, such as letting women pick their mates, begins to twist to the unpleasant truth as it is taken to the most extreme case, revealing the true terror of the capabilities of the individual that goes along with the concept of pro-femininity in the eyes of the Hårga. In this cult, the woman is both not liberated and not below man: in the Hårga, no one’s individual life truly matters as each person, gender unspecified, is simply a pawn in continuing tradition. As Connell says “Dani may be a queen, but she’s also an instrument.”