the sense of an ending; Brazen Hussies

As has been pointed out to me recently, I once considered myself a fluent and informed reader in the language and concepts of eschatology and apocalypticism, and therefore I had imagined that when the endings began I would not experience them as qualitatively strange. But what has actually happened is so remarkable to me: I recognise the forms of world-ending cataclysm, unfolding in exactly the ordinary, drab, weird but unspectacular ways they have been shown to do in the great political imaginations of people like Lessing and Ballard and PKD and le Guin and KS Robinson - but I still find it mind-breakingly strange to see it and experience it as it happens. I feel like I go on about this all the time. It is one thing, it turns out, to grasp the truth and inevitability of modernism for the modernists, and quite another to know that the basis on which you live your life, you conduct your practice of reality, you experience your sense of self and world, is a series of hollowed-out forms that will now mostly serve only to amplify alienation and surreality. Don't get me wrong, I don't fear this scenario. I know the artists will find the new forms. But I know too that I'll have to wait till they do to understand what's going on; I can't figure it out by myself. I just see the puncture, the shape of the hole.

Timelines run side by side like lanes of a swimming pool and the currents in them move at different speeds. You can flow across from one lane to another and travel at different speeds yourself. Here I sit, cross-legged on my couch, looking up at the sky outside and listening to the wind pick up speed; I'm in the quiet, still, present, introspective but aware state I think of as lava-lamp mode. I know I'm in a slow lane, a backwater continuum, right at this minute, but also that my life, what remains of it, is going to be lived in this way, drifting in a stream grandfathered from a past reality, largely in my head, watching the world, enjoying it or being distressed by it, being connected to it, but never having to stay out there in the psychological thick of things if I don't want to. It is not at all bad. I have to do what I can to prepare my son for his independent life and at times this is a very frightening, saddening prospect. But that's what having a child is, when you get right down to it. You can't look after them forever.

Perversely I sat down to write something intentionally not at all in that vein: a reflection on Brazen Hussies, a documentary about Australian women in feminist movements in the 1970s. David and I went to see it the day before yesterday and I really enjoyed it, as did he I think. I used to go to the movies a lot and write about them with conviction and unselfconsciousness (for eg) whatever they happened to be like. Every so often I wheel the blog around and point it outwards rather than inwards, for a while, and I think that mode is coming into the ascendant now. The surreality of the present moment envelops everything and must be acknowledged though; cinemas have only just reopened in Melbourne with strict occupancy limits of 20 per space. When I booked tickets there was the usual type of diagram showing the available seats but they were dispersed in paranoiac blocks and groupings around the seating bank. In the event, of course, there was just one other pair of spectators one -- sitting in the row in front and immediately to the right -- thus four intermittently masked people in a cinema for about 60 - and we had ended up sitting probably closer to each other than we would have done if left to our own devices and not having to think tediously about plague. I'm not saying 'oh the people who set up online ticket sales are so stupid', it's just the everyday kabuki of dealing with our situation.

Well, ok, the movie. We didn't see the start, but of what I did see, the only thing that didn't work for me is the name of the film, which is generic, and thereby does a disservice to the marvellously personal and particular nature of the women's stories canvassed in the film. There is no more relevant example of the power and impact of finding the right name for a project than the name Michelle Arrow gave to her very fine book about this era in Australian history viewed through the lens of the Royal Commission into Human Relationships, which is called The Seventies - not some name limiting the scope of the narrative to changing conceptions of gender or sex roles, or even to changing conceptions of what constitutes the political - just, The Seventies. But that's really my only gripe. This is a great film for the present moment and I'm really looking forward to discussing it with lots of people. I hope it's widely seen, sooner or later. 

There are a few household names among the interviewees - Anne Summers, Eva Cox, Elizabeth Reid - but mostly the women are people who were very well known in the interlocking circles of the women's movement but not personally famous outside of it. This amplifies the effect when we are shown a woman talking to camera now about what she did in the 1970s and proximately shown photos or film and sometimes sound recordings of her actually doing it. So two women who made and performed in dadaist agitprop films - which we see, with them strong and beautifully naked on camera in a self-possessed way that calls to mind John Berger's distinction between fully inhabited human nakedness and the deracinated 'nude' of western painting and, I fear, of most of the undressed women on screen which you come across these days - we see sitting in inner-urban terrace-house kitchens, talking about the jolt of electricity of finding each other, and the dimensions of joyous rebellion their friendship had enabled them to unleash. We see a group of young single mothers who refused to give up their babies and supported each other to demand a social safety net and even more importantly an acknowledgement of their humanity, and we see them now, still not really very old women, remembering the appalling institutionalised cruelty of efforts to separate them from their children. We see young Aboriginal women impatiently taking white women to task for the unconscious racism of their feminism, and we see the same women as elders now, drawing attention to how much of the work of decolonising itself feminism still has yet to do. This historical double-tracking effect is used with consistent unobtrusive intelligence in the film and speaks of a very disciplined approach to the proper use of archival materials - the story you tell has to grow out of what you discover in the resources and not the other way around. The man sitting in front of us used his phone to video the credits, I have no idea why but if it was so he could go and track down the sources, great; the credits listed sources in generous and unusual detail; you almost did feel invited to pursue your awakened interests and encouraged to use the work done by the film as something to build on. In many ways the film practiced the central insights of second wave feminism; dialogue matters; the personal is political; if your story isn't being told then you must try to tell it and that includes finding out where you came from.

In a recent and excellent LRB review essay dealing with a number of books and films about the women's liberation movement, Jenny Turner notes that for major figures in the movement, 'the story of what she did or didn't do within the movement is going to be "precious" and most likely painful, possibly the most painful and precious story of her life' and this brings with it attendant complications and challenges for oral history interviewers. You see something of this in Brazen Hussies to an extent with Anne Summers's contributions but definitively with Elizabeth Reid who occupied and extraordinary, almost transcendent or mystical position as the figurehead of the women's movement, the sole voice in government of women, and the punishing and ultimately thankless task of policy watchdog. A whole other film about her is implied by what we see in this one. 

On a personal level the material I found most engaging came in the series of variations on the theme of dismantling the internalised structures of oppression which got in the way of forming free and equal relationships with other women. Over and over women spoke about how they had to listen to each other, trust, negotiate, respect each other, learn to like each other and not become entrapped in the meshes of jealousy and suspicion. I understand this so deeply. The practice of consciousness-raising is a fascinating historical moment, and it's over but the traces and echoes of CR hang on in many of the ways women gather and connect and the ways they talk to each other when they do. Again, the liberatory nature of these post WLM practices is something I understand from the most valued experiences of my own life. I felt inspired by the film to do more to connect freely and equally with other women. 

Also, I found the faces and voices extremely beautiful to watch and listen to, both the young women a long time ago and the older women now. I acknowledge that of course, for me there is an irresistible element of coming home in the encounter with any depiction of this milieu - this is my mother in about 1976, sitting on one of the same chairs that have a place in my own house today - but still, I 'm considering asking for a mid-70s shag cut next time I go to the hairdresser.