Boxing Helena DVD 1993: Sex/longing/love

Boxing Helena 1993
Written and directed by
Jennifer Chambers Lynch


Plot:

A surgeon becomes obsessed with the seductive woman he once had an affair with. Refusing to accept that she has moved on, he amputates her limbs and holds her captive in his mansion. Is he crazy, or is this his fantasy based on a strong love and an inability to express it?

My Opinion:

Only a woman would be so brutally honest in the presentation of the basic sexual/self-worth fantasies and fears experienced by men and woman.

For a man it is his sexual performance that plagues his self-concept, and premature ejeculation is a potent hindrence to his self-concept. If not remedied it is certain to become a strong basis for bizarre fantasies and constant concern.

For a woman her basic fear is that she is only a sexual object rather than appreciated for being a woman with self-worth stronger than her appearance.

In Boxing Helena both of these fears get brought into prominence with a heavy dose of fantasy, nightmare and, ultimately, love that binds both of these fears together. In the end, mature love triumphs over all else.

I can’t imagine this film as it played on public television, denuded of its explicit sexually/sensually rich scenes. For me, watching an uncut version, the experience was funny at times, beautiful often and rewarding in its imaginative unfolding.

I strongly recommend the uncut version. If cut for a general television viewing audience, the film would be just so-so.

Linda Zises
WBAI RAdio
Ladisfilmclub

Angels and Innocents: By Sikivu Hutchinson

I have a vivid memory of the first time I became aware that children could die. It was early evening in the leisurely dusk of summer, and after eating with my mother at a local coffee shop, we passed by a newspaper vending machine outside. A child victim, kidnapped, murdered and disposed of like garbage, stared ominously out at me from the front page of the paper in grainy black and white. I remember my sense of horror when my mother told me that the child, who was approximately my age, would never see his parents again. Associating death with old people, I was stupefied by this seeming contradiction. Although raised heretically in a secular household, I had been corrupted by the prayer-saturated social universe of waxen blue-eyed Jesus’ plastered on my friends’ living room walls. Alone in my bed that night, I wondered how “God” could have countenanced such unspeakable evil.

Decades later there is an aching space where this child’s life would have been, his personhood “frozen” at abduction. Violent death by homicide at an early age is a grim reality for many youth of color. Gangsta rap romanticizes it and dishes it up for the voyeurism of white suburbia. Mainstream media ignores it or relegates it to social pathology. Every semester when I ask my students if they’ve had a young friend or relative die violently at least half will raise their hands. Their tattoos, notebooks and Sidekick phones are filled with vibrant mementoes for the dead. It is not necessary to go to Iraq, Afghanistan or some other theatre of American imperialism to experience the devastation that the killing fields of disposable youth inflicts. Yet, God takes care of children and fools, or so the shopworn saying goes. In the midst of sudden death there is refuge in the belief that the Cecil B. De Mille epic doomsayer of the Old Testament must have a special place in his heart for this tender constituency. Pied Piper religionists pat children on the head and whisper into their dewy ears that the murder of an innocent child is part of some grand design. They dish up the concept of divine providence like hard candy. They lure sweet-toothed youth with a ready “antidote” to the quandary of trying to make sense out of the senselessness and randomness of evil. The Wynken, Blynken and Nod bedtime story of grand design is chased down with the simple carrot of eternal reward for slain innocents. The inexplicable is assimilated. Senseless evil, evil that befalls the good and stalks the innocent, is legitimized as part of the divine’s hardscrabble boot camp for the living.

If it can be understood, it isn’t God, said Augustine. In ambiguity then, prayer is the great equalizer and potential redeemer. As American children we grow up with recurring images of kneeling girls and boys, hands clasped solemnly in prayer. These images propagandize faith as a normal, natural phenomenon. The magic bullet of prayer is trotted out as an escape hatch from the small indignity to the unspeakably cruel act of wild-oats-sewing youth. Bad kids pray obsessively for forgiveness. Good kids pray strategically in crisp starched pajamas for family members, friends, and Fido to be delivered to the top of God’s check list. Sinful thoughts can be defused by requesting a special audience with God. Good thoughts can be “deposited” into one’s virtual piggy bank of moral worth.. CONT. http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2010/08/angels-and-innocents.html

The Sicilian Girl; Director Marco Amenta, Altiplano; Writers / Directors BROSENS & WOODWORTH,

And Virgin Women

We haven’t traveled far from the ideology of the virginal woman with a fiery spirit who turns the world around to meet the moral imperative as she sees it. Although the setting of each film is radically different, the similarities are striking: societal evils are the villain; combatted by our hero, the young woman of marital age with love strong in her heart, thwarted on the precipice of marital fulfillment. With all their bottled up sexual energy demanding an outlet, these women come to the screen with a force that is compelling in its strength and intriguing in its source: the woman who has since time immemorial been prayed to, as she sits on high in our minds, our hearts; she is our fantasy companion, our helper, our conscience.

She is the Virgin Mother, The spiritual Mother of us all.

It helps to have had a juvenile acquaintance with this fantasy figure, that seemingly requisite brainwashing with all the appeal of glitter and funny looking men dressed in long skirted garments or masks to accent the separation of the real from the super-normal experience informed by our senses. But even with all of that religiosity put to the side, one can not help but be sympathetic to the cause these women champion. The Sicilian Girl goes after the Italian Mafia. In Altiplano, the evils of mercury exposure from drilling in Peru that destroys the indiginous population is the villain. In both films the women speak for the masses against the forces of evil and in both films the women give their lives and become Joan of Arc, the Virginal figure who promises hope in a hopeless world of needless, senseless destruction.

Both films are beautifully photographed, which is a delight. The music in Altiplano is breathtaking, thrilling, sending goosebumps up and down my spine; the plot was very confusing (even the short film synopsis is difficult to follow) but after a while it didn’t matter that there was little to hang on to. There was a dignity, an emotional force that informed on the sorrowful loss of times forever gone and painfully mourned.

Does this mean that like the suicide bombers, the terrorists of today, we should think of giving our lives for a cause we truly embrace?
I hope not. Youth is too precious to be wasted on the decadence and cruel immorality of elders.

THE SICILIAN GIRL Opens Wed, August 4 at Film Forum

ALTIPLANO Opens August 20 at Village East in N.Y.C.

Prospect Park Geese elimination: saga explored

As I sat on the lawn looking out over the all too quiet water amid all
too few people by the Prospect Park lake, I remembered a time not so
many years ago when there were plenty of Geese, although I didn't know
they were Geese, and plenty of children throwing bread into the water.

And there were boats, with turning blades in the water, cleaning up
the lake, it was said, of green algae.

I remember that scene. It played out over and over maybe for a year
and then I started to see the Geese coming out of the water to graze.
Graze on the grass (there were no algae anymore) until the grass was
gone and brown dirt took its place with nothing to impede its erosion
into the lake.

And then the tragic day when the solution to the Geese and their
"destructive" eating needs and ways came to the fore and the people
learned that the Geese were gone, exterminated which, given our not so
distant knowledge of peoples exterminated with the same gas, the same
lack of individuality respected, well................
this does not
make for good public relations and with the Audubon Society not
stepping up to the plate to say, "no, don't do it,"
well....................

It is all very ugly. Dare I say stupid; lacking in foresight?

Yes.

for more on this subject visit:
http://washingtonsquarepark.wordpress.com

PRINCETON HOLT'S Cookies & Cream and Uptown on DVD

Two films, Cookies & Cream, and Uptown were released on DVD July 21st. .Attached are the press releases. Links to stores, availability, theatrical screenings can be found at the official websites:
www.cookiesncreammovie.com and www.uptownfilm.com

Both films reviewed below. Again, I find these films compelling in their use of technics that brought scenes into a casual immediacy difficult to capture in larger than life films.

Paper Man (DVD) revisited: and Saturday night TV viewing

The banality of Saturday night television viewing even with the insertion of multiple cable programs seems designed to make the viewing audience forget what life is all about. Comedy with an edge, with a theme that in some way or other resonates with the daily experience of its viewers is far better than the slapstick on the edge of not funny but rather boring films that predominate the nightly selections.

Even the multiple scenes of blood splattered on faces or the transcendence of animals to escape the perils of earthy denizens as provided in HBO’s True Blood is an improvement over the English comedy films that I could never and still can’t laugh at or with.

I don’t know what would satisfy my need to feel connected. I seem to be getting more and more on the periphery of life’s experience that others appear to be part of but I think it’s more to the point that we are all sitting waiting for something to happen albeit, another deastrous hurricane, an abrupt change in the stock market, another bubble burst, a return to or a drastic deviation from what we once took for granted(both would be traumatic).

These are the chaotic times, not so unfamiliar to generations that came before us but no one taught us, prepared us for how to deal with these turbulent days. We are spoiled Americans who seem for the most part to assume food is there for us to eat, the weather will follow a predictable pattern, the seeds of life ever after are laid firmly for us and we assume their presence; but all of that serenity, all of the foundation of our security seems to be eroded and only on the ever expanding television screen does life go on as if there is nothing else except what we know, have known and expect to know regardless of the defiance of an inescapable reality.

Maybe the youth of today will teach us how to live without work, how to fill our days without feeling the emptiness that twins with idleness, how to make a film for general consumption that reflects the emptiness of our hands that have so little value in the creative process of our lives.

We make nothing, we do little, we wait to be called up for what we don’t want to know about or listen to, the sound of man-less drones as they further the cause that we don’t support and never will.

See Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney' Paper Man (DVD)
starring Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Lisa Kudrow, Hunter Parrish and be assured that the future of television viewing and film sellection might one day speak to you and me about us.

Commentary by
Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

The New York Philharmonic: Andrey Boreyo. conductor

The New York Philharmonic performed a free concert in Prospect Park's Long Meadow Ball fields where sheep once grazed.

The evenings program included

Tchaikovsky, Polonaise from "Eugene Onegin"

Bernstein, Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story"

Prokofiev, Selections from "Romeo and Juliet"

Each selection had the theme of love and violent death and the program ended on a similar note with colorful red, white, some green or almost blue fireworks projected in multiply patterns simulating the sound of gun shots in their assent to the heavens above.

The concert used a state-of-the-art sound system with a wireless broadcast network and 24 15-foot speaker towers that brought clarity and beauty to the professionally executed music heard by thousands of lounging spectators.

The sound quality was extraordinary!

Of course there was a reason for The New York Philharmonic' selection of love and violent vibrant death onto the serenity of domestic/environmentally rich Brooklyn park bliss but what inspired this program was not disclosed.

I sat in the midst of my YogaSole school friends
happy that in Brooklyn partying with yoga students and teachers is not an unusual event. At YogaSole there is an inclusion without rancor, a generosity that precludes the intellectual substance of the concert's theme.

We are friends, not lovers, not violent but Yogis getting together for a night in the park where trees are again the winners. The shade and lower temperatures they afford reaffirmed our commitment to think green while we cherish the extensive nature that exists in our backyards as much as we cherish the production of excellence in art; even in these violent times when War hovers over us.

It sure beats the sound of helicopters or jets or even subways underground that shake rattle and roll throughout the Borough.

Thank you to all the many sponsors for making this night possible and thank you YogaSole for making this evening another special moment to remember.

Linda Zises
criticalwomen.net

DNA and the Banality of Evil: By Sikivu Hutchinson

The intersection of Figueroa and Slauson in South Los Angeles is an unremarkable one, a mundane swath fronting a gas station, an old train right of way, and a Harbor freeway overpass. It is the site of a spate of serial murders committed during a ten year period by serial rapist and murderer Chester Dwayne Turner. Like the Grim Sleeper serial killer, Turner, aka the South Side Slayer, stalked South L.A. from 1987 to 1998 in pursuit of African American female victims. Until DNA evidence revealed Turner's identity in 2004, his background fit the banal profile of the misogynist sexual predator operating right under the nose of local law enforcement. He was a “cipher” who bounced in and out of menial jobs; unstable, irresponsible, abusive towards and financially dependent on the women in his life. While Turner was an obvious miscreant, Lonnie David Franklin, the recently arrested suspect in the Grim Sleeper murders, was a bit more complex. Neighbors have described him as a stable, congenial Mr. Fix-It type whose only known “quirks” were “issues” with women (including, apparently, showing off nude pictures he’d taken of and underwear he’d collected from various women) and a nebulous criminal record.

Franklin’s street was not far from my own, in a generally quiet well-kept area of single family homes that lazy mainstream media hacks are fond of dismissing as “gritty” and crime-ridden. Franklin’s arrest was made possible through the decades’ long struggle for visibility waged by the victims’ families and community activists like Margaret Prescod, who founded the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders in the 1980s. The LAPD’s identification of the serial murder pattern was first reported in a 2008 article by white LA.Weekly journalist Christine Pelisek, who dubbed the killer the “Grim Sleeper.” Shortly after Franklin’s arrest Pelisek stated that she'd been deluged with film and TV queries about the case. Pelisek’s comments on the budding media interest are telling. As of this date, there have been no TV movies on the South Side slayer case nor, for that matter, any mainstream dramatic treatment on serial murders of black women. Given this disparity it is not difficult to see a big budget Nancy Grace-style treatment with Pelisek at the center. Because Franklin and Turner are black male killers of black women it is safe to say that there will be no cable-ready film made psychoanalyzing their childhoods, no Lifetime channel melodrama on the lives and last days of their victims trumpeted in flashy national billboard campaigns, and no pathos inspiring media blitz chronicling the anguish that these murders elicited in South L.A. communities.

Rather, what has captivated much of the mainstream media is not the hide-in-plain-sight atrocity of a prolific killer of black women puttering innocuously about his well-maintained single family home, but the 21st century “marvel” of familial DNA . Without the familial DNA piece it’s doubtful there would be any continuing national coverage of the story. Sensing a national angle and an easy way of redeeming its image as a print relic repository for the white Westside, the L.A. Times has outdone itself with daily coverage on the case’s DNA trail. Mainstream media fixation on the DNA evidence has eclipsed focus on the victims’ families as well as consideration of the case’s double-edged implications for communities of color in the U.S.

According to Brandeis law professor Jeffrey Rosen, “African-Americans represent about 13 percent of the United States population but 40 percent of the people convicted of felonies every year.” The wholesale over-incarceration of African American communities means that many African Americans are related to someone who has been convicted of a felony. Right wing pundits and champions of unregulated familial DNA use would argue that since blacks are committing a disproportionate number of felonies they have every right to be subjected to the heightened scrutiny of DNA profiling. Yet national data on sentencing indicates African Americans are over six times more likely to be convicted of and harshly sentenced for felonies than are whites who commit similar crimes. The proposed expansion of California’s DNA database to include the DNA of arrestees—the database is currently comprised of DNA from convicted felons—would further criminalize blacks and Latinos. Unchecked law enforcement use of familial DNA is almost certain to be a bellwether of civil liberties infringement for innocent people of color.

The initial marginalization of both the South Side Slayer and the Grim Sleeper cases were brutal testimony to the devalued lives of women of color in the mainstream media regime. With the arrest of Franklin, the grieving families of Janecia Peters, Valerie McCorvey, Princess Berthomieux, Alicia Anderson, Lachrica Jefferson, Mary Lowe, Bernita Sparks, Barbara Ware, Thomas Steele, Henrietta Wright and Debra Jackson might be able to achieve some degree of closure. In the ultimate yet uniquely American irony, science has fleetingly “humanized” the lives of victims deemed expendable by the media regime. Yet uncritical embrace of familial DNA will potentially reinforce the very disenfranchising conditions that allow a vicious predator like the Grim Sleeper to “sleep” for two decades.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies.

Alamar: González-Rubio: Before BP Oil Destruction

"By photographing and developing a story based on the current relation between man and his habitat in Chinchorro (Mexico), I portray my love for this region and the admiration and respect I have towards the lives of its fishermen." (written before the BP oil spill)


Alamar is a rich compelling documentary film that captures life in the Gulf of Mexico before the modern day encroachment from tourists, (luxury hotels with all their destruction and a long pier for cruise ship docking that cut into the longest coral reef on the planet.) oil and the like.

The film takes us on the long trip from urban Mexico to this remote fishing town and onto the water, into the water via scuba diving and into the house built on stilts in the water where a seemingly normal life ensues. Normal, living on top of water, no land around and a little boy with his father and grandfather spending their time eating at a table, reading books, checking the weather, writing with paper and colored pencils while spending the majority of the day at sea; fishing, unloading the fish into another ship, watching the dismantling of the fish into eatible bits of what we call food, fit for a King or Queen.


and then it is night and the hammock is the only place to sleep, covered with netting to keep the bugs away; repose is full, relaxing, in tune with the movement of the stilt house and that is a way of life that will be removed from our earth, from the people who want nothing more than to join with nature and enjoy what is there to be enjoyed, cherished and complied with.

Alas this film will be a relic, a testimony to times past. Although there is no tragic moments in this film, the film itself reflect a tragedy of unknown proportion.

NOTE:
In 1996 UNESCO declared Banco Chinchorro, the main location where the documentary takes place, a National Reserve of the Biosphere.

How sad, How Poignant. How beautifully captured. Alamar!

González-Rubio’s , Alamar, will open theatrically in New York City at Film Forum on July 14th, courtesy of Film Movement.

Linda Zises
wbai radio
criticalwomen.net

FIRST ENCOUNTER : FICTION

I know. I know from the moment the door opens I will be entering a world and that fist impression will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I am twenty-two years old. I have met the man who i want to be my husband, the father of my children. Although I haven't told him this, there is a silent understanding, not yet officially breached.

He has invited me to his former home, the home of his parents. I will be entering their abode with all the foreboding of budding youth, hope, future, stretched out before me.

I am shaking, and the world is turning oh so slightly, spinning in time to the beating of my heart, the pounding in my temples from freight.

Richard stands seemingly disconcerted beside me. He is humming softly to himself as we wait for the answer to his incessant knocking, the sound of a man saying, open up, I belong here. This is my home.

He forgot his keys.

Of all days to forget his keys, the day he is bringing me, his maybe "intended" into the family fold for the first time.

That all-important meeting of the people, his people, them and me.

The door handle moves. Richard turns towards me, his eyes peering slightly over the top of my head.

"Nervous?" he asks.

I think I am about to faint. Am I nervous?

My mouth is dry, my lips feel as if they haven't moved in hours, or is it days.

I am standing next to Richard with his close proximity as my sole support. Am I nervous?

I smile slowly, letting the pull of my feelings force the opening of my lips as I am about to lie, to say "Oh no," in that nonchalant, almost coquettish gesture I've used so often. But I know this time I would never be believed.


Richard sees me struggle and laughs.

"Don't worry, ma petite," he says. "You'll get through it. After all, think of the many years I survived with them".

'That isn't the point,' my internal self rebels against his attempt to soften my edges, to calm me down. You might have survived them but what if... what if they hate me, what if they have no other intention for the rest of their lives than to devote themselves to my destruction, to our destruction, of rendering you and me asunder, finito, gone and done forever and ever...

Oh, can this be happening to me! I moan on and on, internally wishing, hoping this moment would end and somehow it would just be me and Richard alone and then


I hear a lock unlock and a second lock unlock and the door opens and two people, not one, but both of them stand before us.

They are in the doorway, we are still outside

and they said in unison

"Welcome to our home" and they kiss me, they kiss me "hello."

And Richard says, "I warned you."

Linda Zises