From: Matt Teichman (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Feb 16 2004 - 15:35:45 PST
Shelly Silver wrote:
> > The point of asking it was that the question of how to interpret these
> > sorts of stats is a very deep one...the matter is an
> > inordinately complicated one, leading to labyrinth upon labyrinth of
> > chicken-egg regressions....
>
>I don't think what I'm talking about is so complicated.
You can pretend it isn't, but that will only lead you to easy answers like
"women aren't any good at math." (or affirmative action, which is just as
unacceptable)
I absolutely agree with what you've written about the invisibility of
biases, and about how gender issues are as relevant today as they ever were
(though I would question your use of terminology like "equality," as though
people were numerical quantities).
But I was serious when I asked if you could name particular filmmakers, and
I don't know why James thought of the query as "bait." It comes out of a
conversation I was having once, to the effect of something like "Why the
hell can't we think of more than a handful of great women
filmmakers? Isn't it depressing?" If we had decided then and there to put
together our own Essential Cinema collection, of course there would have
been a gender disproportion. Not because we "identify" with films by white
males (by the way, my interlocutor was female and Indian), but because we
have been able to see a great many more films by folks of this category.
It may be true that there is a tendency for people to curate work with
which they identify, but I think the phenomenon of identification is more
complicated than you suggest; gender, race, class, and sexuality are but
four among millions of other nameless registers on which identification, as
well as stereotyping, can take place. To reduce every case of
discrimation/bias to this kind of simple typology is to contribute to the
problem.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.