FILM

My Country Occupied Newsreel 1971

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FEEDBACK

My Country Occupied is a documentary about the men and women of Guatemala whose lives are controlled by the presence of huge American corporations such as Coca-Cola, Goodyear and United Fruit. We are vividly shown the wretched housing and working conditions; we are made to feel the meaning of subsistence-level income, the displacement felt by rural people in the city, what oppression by the church and the military is like-in short, what it means to have your country occupied.

Women come to an understanding of the exploitation of Guatemala and fight beside the men as guerillas in this film. In fact, the narrator is a woman who begins the film by identifying herself as a Guatemalan, "my country occupied", and concludes the documentary by declaring herself to be all the colonized people of the world: "I am mestizo, I am India, Africa, I am a guerilla!" However, the special oppression women face in the Third World is not dealt with fully. The kind of restrictions holding women down are touched upon in another woman's narrative about the Church: "We had lived together for five years but the priest would not marry us until we could pay to be married in the church.... the first year we had so little money the baby died...." Since the main thrust of My Country Occupied is the effect of US economic interests on peoples' lives, maybe the Newsreel Collective thought it sufficient to show women as thinking, participating individuals in a struggle for liberation.

The narrator describes the all-too-typical events of her life: Her husband, who works on a United-Fruit-owned banana plantation, is layed off, they move to Guatemala City where they find thousands of people just like them without jobs or places to live, Miguel is arrested as a result of organizing his co-workers in a slaughterhouse. The woman returns to the county alone and meets with a group of women who are determined to fight the conditions which makes their lives so hard. They have each other for support and they are not afraid.

The editing of the film always makes a point, never just an effect. Sudden violence committed against people is conveyed by the soundtrack and by the use of stills and film clips.

The scene in the cattle slaughterhouse is very plain and very hard to watch. Maybe we have become too accustomed to the sight of war, and disaster on TV, in the newspaper etc; and it takes the inside of a slaughterhouse to give us a jolt.

Make Out and Betty Tells Her Story, Liane Branden 1972, are two short films which could be used to spark discussion among women in Consciousness Raising groups. Each film deals with an experience common to many women.

In Make Out, a five minute film, we see a teen-age guy paw at his date in the front seat of a car. We hear everything she is thinking but does not dare say: "...I wonder if he'll ask me to go all the way... he doesn't know what he's doing... Why do we have to go through this... my father will be furious... what if he doesn't ask me out again?..." It's a very uncomfortable five minutes. Although Make Out reminds us of the high school dating game where all the restraints and all the blame were placed on the female, it is somehow comic.

Betty Tells Her Story has a more melancholy tone because it raises so many unanswered questions. This film would be an excellent catalyst for discussion about physical appearance, clothes and "femininity" versus identity. Betty speaks directly into the camera and tells the story of how she lost an expensive dress which she planned to wear to the Governor's ball. She suspects the episode and her feelings about it have some significance but she is not sure what. She tells the same story twice. She is nervous the second time, takes less pleasure in the telling, and changes certain details, but doesn't get any closer to realizing what her feelings mean to her. The last scene shows her laughing.

On May 28th the films centered on women, rather than on the broader political questions. A woman's struggle with having a child and a career is discussed in Joyce at 34. It dealt with the feelings of Joyce Chopra, who was the central character and film maker, about having a child and a career. The film also tried to present the people affecting her life, such as her mother. Because it dealt with women of differing beliefs, just about any woman could relate to the film.

At the beginning of the movie, Joyce was shown in her pregnant condition, while on the over-voice, she discussed her feelings about her pregnancy. Then, of course, came the birth of her daughter, Sarah.

While on a plane flight with Sarah to New York, to visit her parents and do a filming job, Joyce talked about the women her age at her sweet sixteen party. The listing of the marital statuses of her girl friends led smoothly into a discussion by Joyce of her mother.

Like many other mothers, Joyce's was "just" a teacher. A wonderful comic, but serious, scene of a luncheon that Joyce's mother gave for her friends, showed the women discussing their feelings about having been both a teacher and a mother, especially their sense of guilt for trying to do both.

Other spots of comic relief occured when Sarah was filmed with other children. The baby's view of the world was effectively simulated by shooting from a low position. Another humorous situation showed the father feeding and caring for Sarah, while trying to discuss with a co-worker a script to what sounded like a suspense television show, quite a strange combination.

Unlike her mother, Joyce did not feel guilty about having a career and children. Because of the extra responsibility of breastfeeding Sarah, Joyce's husband, who was a writer, took on a larger portion of the housework. How large this portion of housework was varied with the amount of fight Joyce put up. An example of the problem with the division of housework was with the shopping. Eventually, he found it was easier to do the shopping, than to fight with her about it. This shopping arrangement produced a funny scene where the husband vented his anger on the vegetables by tossing them viciously into the cart.

Part of Joyce's struggle with having a career, as well as a child, was the amount of time that Sarah demanded. This was a common problem of the women in her consciousness raising group. Because of the demands on her time by Sarah, Joyce decided that she did not want to have another child.

The relationship between the husband and wife was sometimes tense while other times harmonious. Because their marriage was "real" instead of a "utopian" one, the movie

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was more successful at speaking to more people.

The other political film of the afternoon was Break and Enter, a documentary on Operation Move-In in New York City. The film followed chronologically the development of a neighborhood association, that eventually organized a squatter move-in campaign.

The film introduced the battle between residents of Brooklyn, who are usually poor, and urban renewal projects by showing a Puerto Rican family being displaced from their home by the city.

The soundtrack music, be it a drum solo or a voice accompanied by a guitar, was effectively utilized in order to set an environment for action. The only complaint was that, periodically, the lyrics accompanying the music were in Spanish, and hence relatively lost to those of us who do not understand the language.

The narrator and occasional translator was a women, as were most of the people in position of leadership; thus explaining why the film was in the women's newsreel list. She worked her way into a feminist's heart with her monologue, where she told of her awakening. She found she could be a good mother, and active politically at the same time.

The first Move-In, where a boarded up building was taken over, was after the funeral march of a boy who had died of asphyxiation, because of poor housing. The building occupa tions got a bit repetitive, confusing and dull after a while. One was left wondering whether the building being occupied was the same one, or a new one. The movie's step-by-step progress often left the viewer feeling the film was over when it was really only the middle. These factors added up to a documentary which was not clear.

Still, the film did move and finally climaxed with a police confrontation, which the squatters won, for those who were interested. The police got into the picture in these confrontations, and previously when they destroy an occupied building. Even with all these conflicts, few broken heads were shown. Equally remarkable was the ability of the squatters to continue to stand tall against the constant presence of the armed police.

Comic relief was supplied by a conversation among some squatters, on what our taxes go for. The last scene of the film was that of a woman organizer predicting the day when squatters would occupy the new buildings not the old. The objective of the last speech was to fill the viewer with a sense of hope, or fear, depending on one's political leanings.

page 5/What She Wants/July 1974