Comments on: BAD GIRLS

By: Celluloid Liberation Front

Celluloid Liberation Front — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:47:16 +0000

I would like to suggest an hidden gem to this list of Bad Girls.
The film I’m talking about is “Daises” (Sedmikrasky) by Czech woman director Vera Chytilova, a psychedelic mad-cap feminist farce which follows the (mis)adventures of two uninhibited young women, both named Marie, randomly wandering women’s life meanders.
The two Maries explore their sexuaity through subversive pranks, without though lacking an insightful look into female identity, at the expenses of rich men only able to take them out for dinner.
An outlandishs comedy that was immediately censored by the regime and still rarely seen outside Czech Rpublic; it features groundbreaking aesthetic and sonic devices by great cameraman Jaroslav Kucera as well as extraordinary set design by Ester Krumbachova.
Recently released with English subtitles “Daises” is a unknown masterpiece that demands to be seen!

Celluloid Liberation Front

By: Celluloid Liberation Front

Celluloid Liberation Front — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:32:25 +0000

…Liberation ideology had nothing to do with a revulsion with oppression but was fuelled by race envy. Black racism is displaced by female rage: Black women rage at betrayal and abandonment by family, community, and society.The false, Hobbesian depiction of the Black community, the procrustean social consciousness of its protagonists, the bluntly pathogenic and unrelievedly pure malevolence of its villains, the outrages perpetrated on the flesh of friend and foe alike, are all spun into credible artifices by the single truth of the Black woman’s body.
As the lone avenger against drug pushers, corrupt politicians and cops and Black and ethnich gangsters, Grier’s characters were estranged from community or political organizations and, when they infrequently required a posse, it was only for the ultimate dispatching of the villains ‘with prejudice’, as the CIA euphemistically had dubbed killing.
There were in real life examples of empowered Black women that strangely enough have not been depicted on the Blaxploitation screens.

Celluloid Liberation Front

By: Celluloid Liberation Front

Celluloid Liberation Front — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:33:17 +0000

“films such as Foxy Brown and Coffy offered a rare empowering view of African-American women”?!
I personally believe that ‘Foxy Brown’ is not only a mere misrepresentation of the empowered black-american woman of the time (eg. Angela Davis with whom Pam Grier bears a not casual resemblance), but that is also responsible of having transported film audiences of the mid-1970s into a counter-liberationist realm.
The explitative properties of the film centre on the female body and brutal violence and are established in the opening credits when, borrowing from the James Bond films, Grier dances in a kaledoiscope of colours and in various modes of undress to the funky beat of an eponymous song. In her next appearance on screen, we see her bare breast as she dresses in order to drive the rescue of her brother. Her naked or dressed body is constantly reprised as a source of titillation in the film as she is in bed with her lover, as she is attired for her disguise as a prostitute, as she lures the judge into his own compromise, as she is drugged and raped. etc.
Voyeuristic pleasure is also provided by the naked bodies of several white women: the four prostitutes lounging in the laps of the judge’s middle-aged cohorts, watching pornographic film; and, most disturbingly, the camera conspires with the mobster killers to expose the naked body of Foxy’s brother’s lover moments before her jugular is severed.
The film’s Blaxploitation elements are sometimes more oblique. By the time of the release of ‘Foxy Brown’, it had become obligatory in the form to portray the racial hierarchy of the ghetto criminality: Black street dealers in the employ of white mobsters and their corrupt partners drawn from seemingly legitimate society. It was also mandatory that there be a representation of urban chaos. As Foxy and her lover stand at a corner in a Black neighbourhood, they witness the playing out of the Black outlaw by community vigilantes. A lenghty fight takes place between the villain and his three pursuers during which a young Black woman pushing her baby’s carriage is mauled. The significance of the whole altercation, which takes place in broad daylight, is brought home by the total absence of the police, the society’s and the state emblem of order. Why then would Hollywood and independent film makers construct this densely jungled urban landscape inhabited principally by predators?
In ‘Foxy Brown’ the BODY of the Black FEMALE anoints this unreality as authentic. On the one hand, the undeniably erotic objectivity of the Black female body inscribes the mark of truth onto the social fantasy. And the narrative, filled with competing claimants for that body – lovers, rapists, and the merely obsessed (in ‘Foxy Brown’, the judge is characterized by his taste for ‘your kind’) – transports the credibility of their desires into an authentication of the world in which these denizens are imagined to exist. Unlike her white female counter-part of the jungle and plantation films, it is not the Black female who is an ambiguous figure negotiating the chasm between the white and the black worlds. It is the chasm which is ambiguous: MALE DESIRE and the resulting calumny of MALE DOMINATION erases the differences between white society and black society.
The presence of the body permits the Black female to decompose the omnipresent, vocalised, and cartoonish Black racism which inhabits the Blaxploitation films drawing on male characters. While actual Black and White subversives had recited the existence of a ruling elite, Blaxploitation films (Except few examples) instructed their audiences that the subtext of the attack on bourgeois society and imperialism was really a disguised racial complaint. To be continued…