Re: Filmming a Birth - additional

From: Sandra Maliga (email suppressed)
Date: Thu May 28 2009 - 12:56:42 PDT


Other birth films (there are many):

  Kirsa Nicholina
"That Gunvor Nelson is indeed one of the most gifted of our poetic
film humanists is revealed in KIRSA NICHOLINA, her masterpiece. This
deceptively simple film of a child being born to a couple in their
home is an almost classic manifesto of the new sensibility, a proud
affirmation of man amidst technology, genocide, and ecological
destruction. Birth is presented not as an antiseptic, 'medical'
experience (the usual birth film focuses on an anonymous vagina
appropriately surrounded by a white shroud) but as a living-through
of a primitive mystery, a spiritual celebration, a rite of passage.
True to the newest sensibility, it does not aggressively proselytize
but conveys its ideology by force of example. With husband and
friends quietly present, the strikingly pretty young woman, in
fetching terrycloth and red socks, is practically nude throughout;
her whole body is seen at times, and for once the continuity between
lovepartner and birth-giver is maintained; she remains 'erotic.' We
never once forget that she is a woman and that the new life came from
sexual desire ...." - Amos Vogel, The Village Voice 1969, 16mm, color/
so, 16m, $45

Thigh, Line, Lyre, Triangular (1961), Brakhage
Song 5 (1965), Brakhage

Misconception, Margie Keller

--Sandy

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