Category Archives: calling Out

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Arrival and the Translator

Ted Chiang wrote this character, Amy Adams acted her out in the film Arrival.  She’s a quiet, solitary academic.  A translator.  A de-coder of languages that are not her own.  She is tapped to decipher the non-verbal, pictographic language of alien visitors.

The metaphors here are just so good.  The female translator, Louise Banks, beats her male competition to become the translator of aliens by correctly translating the Sanskrit term for ‘war’ as meaning ‘a desire for more cows.’  Not bulls, but cows.  Not male beef, but female fecundity and nurturance.

At the crucial moment, when governments worldwide are misunderstanding the aliens and shutting down communications in order to aim munitions, Banks speaks up.  She shouts, “we need to be talking to one another!”  She knows that cooperation is necessary.  The men in the room aren’t listening.  So she walks out to have a private, nonverbal conference with alien beings.

Louise learns an alien language, sees and hears echos from the future, and then she saves the world.  The pivotal message is spoken over a stolen telephone, in Chinese without subtitles.  She speaks aloud, just as she receives the same message in her ear from the future, from the person she is speaking to.  Louise is echoing the words of a man’s dead wife over the telephone.  This echo of female voices alters the fate of humanity.  The voice of the woman heralds arrival and survival.

all stills from Arrival, Dir: Denis Villeneuve, Paramount Pictures, 2016
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Colette: Echos of Silenced Artists

Tapping into the magical zeitgeist can be an under-the-radar activity for many artist/alchemists.  And then there are these blips on the radar when they get seen or heard.

I went to a talk at the Brooklyn Museum Sackler Center called “Fashioning Personae: Collage, Gender, and Feminism.”

One of the presenters was the performance artist Colette, who is sensitive and lovely, like all visionary healers.  Her strong work wasn’t received as positively as the work of other women artists of her time.  Not that she is marginal, but she hasn’t been canonized or refashioned by the feminist artist literature.  She suspects this is because she is so girly, frilly and feminine.  She was lamenting her situation to the audience.

In a Brooklyn Museum elevator after the event I overheard two young women talking about Colette.  ‘She was so insecure,’  they both agreed,  ‘Why was she talking about other artists being more famous than she is and using her ideas?’

Because Colette didn’t have her voice stolen, she had her visions stolen.  But she can still sign her name:

And who else?  Women artists who’ve had visions stolen or echos silenced?

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9 to 5 Grrrl Talk

At their best, conversations between female friends start worlds.  We may not know quite what we’re thinking until the words start to form as we talk.  We sense our friend listening in a way that changes how we hear our own speech, changes how we speak, changes what we feel capable of making happen.

Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lilly Tomlin in “9 to 5”, 1980

 

Post some world-making conversation starters here.

 

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The Defiance of the Shrew

It was refreshing to see an article on the front page of The New York Times on the sexist culture of academia, in this case philosophy departments.  Not that any one area of our culture deserves to be singled-out or assumed immune.  Men assert their superiority everywhere.  Women enable them in taking it.

We try to train our sons to think differently, but they absorb what surrounds them.   We all collude and we’re all equally trapped and implicated, even those of us who can argue eloquently otherwise.  Or maybe I should have stopped myself yesterday from reading all the way through the article about ‘rape culture’ in Steubenville, OH and our Twittering appetites in this week’s New Yorker.

I remember when I was a kid seeing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the film The Taming of the Shrew and wondering what made Liz Taylor shrink and diminish her wild child.  She did not appear to me to be in any way ‘lacking’.  Even (or maybe especially) at 8-years-old I felt the desperation of capitulation and yearned for the freedom of bonny Kate.

 

 

All abundant survivors, please speak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rashomon: La Vache Qui Rit

Where there are conflicting motivations, there are multiple narratives.  The wife in Kurosawa’s Rashomon tells her story as though she is ashamed, projecting that shame into her husband’s eyes (‘Don’t look at me like that!) until she stabs him in a sort of self-defense, defending her belief in her own virtue and victimhood.

But the last perspective on the crime, told by the woodsman who we see find the body of the husband in the beginning of the film, shows us a wife who’s wild and wiley.  This wife laughs an hysterical threat, a castrating cackle.  Beware the mirth of woman, it may be neither truth nor lie.

 

Below is an edited excerpt from that final perspective on the crime from Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in celebration of the wife who laughs.

from Kurosawa’s Rashomon

 

All howls, shreiks and chortles are welcome.

 

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Soviet Silence

I had been deriving nourishment from playing with color triads when a friend posted a Russian film poster on Fb that had the exact same colors.  I asked her what it was and she told me it said, “The Third Wife of Mullah.” I searched and found references to a lost, silent film from 1928.  The fact of being lost and silent while also being so bright and bold spoke to me of Echo.

 

Looking further I found the name of the designer, Iosif Gerasimovich, in a blog post by Rosie Milton from 2009.

She goes on to recount:

“The story of the film, following the misadventure of a young woman in a man’s world was meant as a criticism of the lack of freedom for women in the East. Sadly the same was true of Soviet Russia, even though those in power seemed unaware of this. The Soviet woman was granted the ‘freedom’ to work alongside Soviet man, yet the inequality arose when man, coming home from work demanded to be fed and cared for, refusing to aid in other chores such as cleaning the house and caring for children and the elderly. These the Soviet woman had to manage, without complaint, because of this gift of ‘freedom’ that a life of communism had blessed her with.”

 

Our theme is Bold Silence, perhaps lost and found.

 

 

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Strangelove: Pussyfooting and Posing

Women play different female roles for different people.  There’s a sort of tap-dance of translation as our listening and speaking shifts to accomodate the relationships we juggle.

… this is a portion of audio from Dr. Stangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1964), spoken by Tracy Reed playing Miss Scott, with George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson.  Miss Scott’s mirrored body throws her voice and mediates the terrible truth.  She gets to play Echo and Narcissus!

 

 

 

Other instances of verbal gymnastics or posing are welcome…..

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