Movies

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry

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She's Beautiful When She's Angry

She's Beautiful When She's AngryThis documentary showed the development of the feminist movement in the 60’s, starting essentially as a splinter from anti-war protests.  The movie started with contemporary footage from Texas, where women were protesting the restrictions on abortion.  Thus rights thought firmly entrenched must be continually defended.

It was especially interesting to see the footage of the young women from 50 years ago, and then recent interviews, as they reflected back.

I also didn’t realize that Our Bodies Our Selves started back then, essentially as a group of women each taking a topic and researching, as they didn’t have access to good information.

Some other aspects that came into play were groups for black women and lesbians, as they formed parallel groups to address their concerns.

Woman with banner
“Woman with banner” Photo credit: Virginia Blaisdell

We should watch this to remember that so much of women’s right is only too recent, and all too fragile in this conservative environment.

Tanya Tagaq with Nanook of the North

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This was an unusual performance in Nanook of the NorthLoews Theater, with the classic silent movie Nanook of the North playing on the movie screen, accompanied by Tanya Tagaq and band in the front.

From the talk afterwards, we learned that the performance is improvised as they follow the movie on monitors.  Known as a throat singer, I expected Tanya to be following that tradition.  However, a too much of the “singing” seemed like incoherent screaming and muttering.  A lot of it was really loud and unpleasant, particularly with the storm scenes in the movie.

Tanya Tagaq
Tanya wore this unusual outfit for the performance

The film itself has a checkered past.  The filmmaker Robert Flaherty did make the film in the Arctic, living and working up there for a number of years.  There is controversy about how things were staged, with the Inuit using harpoons in the movie, while they were actually using rifles at the time.  But I suppose the point is that at that time, they still remembered how to use harpoons.  Among other interesting points, Flaherty’s mistress is shown as one of Nanook’s “wives” in the movie, and Flaherty also abandoned a son Josephie, the subject of a book The Long Exile.

The discussion afterward was very interesting, as Tanya is a passionate and committed advocate for Inuit and First Nation issues, in particular the many missing women in Canada (No More Stolen Sisters).

Program Notes