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      in Movies

      Overlooked No More: Chick Strand, Pioneering Experimental Filmmaker

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      Often turning her lens on women, she emerged as one of independent cinema’s fiercest proponents on the West Coast.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In Chick Strand’s 1979 film “Soft Fiction,” five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories, including one who describes being molested by her grandfather. As she talks, images of her performing household activities like cooking breakfast appear in splintered frames and enigmatic shapes.“It is a film about women who win,” Strand explained in a 1998 interview with the conceptual artist Kate Haug for the journal Wide Angle. “It is not about women who were victims or who had survived.”“They carry on,” she added, and by doing so they become “more potent, more powerful, more of themselves.”In “Femme Experimentale,” a research paper based on her interviews with several pioneering female filmmakers, Haug wrote that Strand’s “experimental techniques” in that 55-minute film disrupted “the visual codes of documentary film” with its “poetic transitions between narrators.”“Soft Fiction,” which is regularly screened in university film programs, retrospectives and museums around the world, was one of dozens of movies made by Strand, an experimental filmmaker who often trained her lens on women. Among the others were “Anselmo and the Women” and “Fake Fruit Factory,” both from 1986.Strand was a late bloomer by the standards of her day: She didn’t make her first film until she was 34. But she would go on to have momentous impact on the West Coast’s experimental film movement.A still from Strand’s film “Fake Fruit Factory” (1986), about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.Canyon Cinema Foundation“She rejects the classification of ‘feminist artist,’” the film scholar Gene Youngblood told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1999, when some of Strand’s films were being shown at the College of Santa Fe. “And yet she has produced some of the most memorable portraits of female characters in the history of cinema.”Though she never achieved the same level of fame as contemporaries like Barbara Hammer and Shirley Clarke, scholars say her work was just as groundbreaking.Chick Strand was born Mildred Totman on Dec. 3, 1931, in Berkeley, Calif., to Russel and Eleanor Totman. Her father was a bank teller, her mother a homemaker. (Chick was a nickname given to her by her father).She first developed an interest in film while studying anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. By then she had already dabbled in photography.In the 1960s, inspired by the growing free speech movement, Strand began hosting makeshift screenings in her backyard with her first husband, Paul Anderson Strand, an artist, and the experimental film impresario Bruce Baillie. These “happenings,” as they called them, were intended to showcase highly personal, often esoteric audiovisual experiments among friends. As word spread, they quickly became carnivalesque productions, with Strand, Baillie and other regulars dressing in costumes and performing live while the films were shown to an increasingly large group of strangers.A still from Strand’s “Soft Fiction” (1979), in which five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories.Canyon Cinema FoundationIn 1961, she founded The Canyon Cinemanews, a journal for local filmmakers that Stanford University called “the main organ of the independent filmmaking community” when it purchased the journal’s archives in 2010. The journal offered what it described as “a cornucopia of announcements, letters, classifieds, how-to information, call-outs and more” for local filmmakers who lacked access to Hollywood.In 1966, the same year she began studying ethnography at the University of California, Los Angeles (and the same year her son, Eric, was born), Strand presented a three-minute short, “Angel Blue Sweet Wings,” at the New York Film Festival. The film captured the luminous, psychedelically colored landscape of Strand’s second home, in Mexico, through a roaming, almost dancing camera, with the faces of her friends collaged seamlessly over fuzzy bodies, plants and mountains. It was described as “an experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions” by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.In 1967, Strand helped start the Canyon Cinema collective with Baillie and the filmmakers Lawrence C. Jordan, Robert Nelson, Lenny Lipton and Ben Van Meter. The organization — part pop-up cinematheque, part artists’ cooperative — distributed experimental films by now-famous directors like Hammer, Clarke and Peggy Ahwesh. Canyon Cinema later became a full-time nonprofit, with many of its members’ works incorporated into the National Film Registry.By then Strand and her second husband, Neon Park, the artist known for his imaginative album covers, were splitting their time between California and Mexico. In Mexico, she began to explore assemblage and ethnography more formally in her art, resulting in several works now considered landmarks of West Coast cinema, including “Fake Fruit Factory,” about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.“I’d be tripping over the rocks and speaking this terrible Spanish,” Strand told L.A. Weekly in 2006. “But I was so incredibly interested, and people really responded.”Strand with her second husband, the artist Neon Park. They split their time between homes in California and Mexico.Canyon Cinema FoundationStrand then delved into what would become perhaps her best-known work: a 20-year trilogy of ethnographic films on the life of Anselmo Aguascalientes, a poor Mexican Indian tuba player. The first of these, “Anselmo” (1967), about his music, “represents an early example of Chick Strand’s abiding interest in documenting people, objects, animals and events through a heightened and poetic subjectivity, while at the same time using assemblage techniques that allow her to incorporate disparate, sometimes jarring elements,” Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of media studies at Maynooth University in Ireland, wrote in an essay, “Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography,” published in the book “Women’s Experimental Cinema” (2007).The techniques used in “Anselmo” — and later in “Cosas de Mi Vida” (1976), about Anselmo’s life, and “Anselmo and the Women,” about his wife and mistress — would, Pramaggiore noted, become hallmarks of Strand’s documentary practice.Another key work, “Kristallnacht” (1979), was more technical, using the whites and blacks of 16-millimeter film negatives to craft a luminous existential tribute to Anne Frank. In that film, reflections play across shots of women swimming in a pool of water, sparking glimmers in the chiaroscuro darkness of each inverted image.Throughout her filmmaking career, Strand taught at the film arts program at Occidental College in Los Angeles, ultimately becoming the program’s director. She retired in 1996 but continued to produce groundbreaking experiments in film in her twilight years. As she told L.A. Weekly a decade into retirement: “I’m very satisfied creating works of art. I can’t seem to keep my mind from doing this, from painting or planning new films. It’s just what I love to do.”Strand died of cancer on July 11, 2009, at 77. But she lived long enough to see 350 of her personal items permanently entered into the Motion Picture Academy’s Film Archive in 2007. More

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      in Theater

      Tina Howe, Playwright Best Known for ‘Coastal Disturbances,’ Dies at 85

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      She mixed insight and absurdity in a vast body of work that also included “Painting Churches” and “Pride’s Crossing,” both of which were Pulitzer finalists.Tina Howe, who in plays that could be extravagant productions or small-cast gems zeroed in on the humor, heartache and solidity of her characters’ lives, particularly the female ones, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 85.Her family said the cause was complications of a broken hip sustained in a recent fall.Ms. Howe was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, for “Painting Churches” in 1984 and “Pride’s Crossing” in 1997. Her “Coastal Disturbances” had a 350-performance run on Broadway in 1987 and was nominated for the Tony Award for best play.In the foreword to a 1984 collection of her plays “Museum,” “The Art of Dining” and “Painting Churches,” she described those three works this way, a summary that applies to much of her output:“They share an absorption with the making and consuming of art, a fascination with food, a tendency to veer off into the primitive and neurotic, and of course a hopeless infatuation with the sight gag.”Her plays also generally share another attribute: They have multidimensional female characters of a type that were not often seen when she started out in the 1970s. As she told an interviewer in 2004 on the CUNY TV program “Women in Theater,” in those years many artistic directors were men who were interested only in plays in which female characters were victims. It was harder, she said, to get support for a play that featured “a strong woman, a sexy woman, a smart woman.”A scene from a 2012 production of Ms. Howe’s play “Painting Churches,” with Kate Turnbull, left, and Kathleen Chalfant.Carol RoseggSome of her plays were sprawling creations, like “Museum,” which, set in the gallery of a major art museum, had a cast of almost 50 when it premiered in 1976 at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater. “Coastal Disturbances,” as Ms. Howe described it in the preface to a 1989 collection, takes place on “a beach complete with heaving ocean and 20 tons of sand.”“I seem to go out of my way to make putting them on as hard as possible,” she wrote of those types of play.But she also wrote more intimate works, one of which, “Painting Churches,” took her career to a new level when it had its premiere at Second Stage in Manhattan in 1983. The play has just three characters: a married couple and their artist daughter, who as the play progresses paints her parents’ portrait, with truths about the family revealed as she goes about the task. Ms. Howe described it as a sort of reverse image of “Museum,” in which characters talk about art; in “Painting Churches,” the characters become art.Frank Rich, reviewing the production in The New York Times, invoked a line spoken by the father late in the play.“‘The whole thing shimmers,’ he says, in a line of art criticism that can also serve as an apt description of Miss Howe’s lovely play,” Mr. Rich wrote.After its run at Second Stage, the production moved to another Midtown theater and ran for months more.Annette Bening in the central role of Ms. Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances,” which opened Off Broadway in 1986.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts“Coastal Disturbances” also opened at Second Stage, in 1986, and it, too, drew raves. That play is about four generations of vacationers gathered on a beach, though this is merely the premise.“It was really about the anguish of love and the ache of love and the exhilaration and the heartbreak and the joy,” Annette Bening, who played the central role, a photographer named Holly who has a relationship with a lifeguard, said in a phone interview.Ms. Bening, who earned a Tony nomination after the play moved to Broadway, was new to New York and largely unknown at the time. Holly, she said, was a thinly veiled version of Ms. Howe herself, which meant that she and Ms. Howe developed a bond.“She was incredibly incisive and hard-core intelligent,” Ms. Bening said, “and her plays reflected all of that.”Mr. Rich, reviewing “Coastal Disturbances,” called it “distinctly the creation of a female sensibility, but its beautiful, isolated private beach generously illuminates the intimate landscape that is shared by women and men.”“Coastal Disturbances” showed Ms. Howe’s flair for absurdity. In one scene, Ms. Bening was buried up to her neck in sand by the lifeguard (played by Tim Daly) while relating a somewhat erotic fantasy involving anthropomorphized dolphins.Cherry Jones, left, and Julia McIlvaine in a scene from Ms. Howe’s “Pride’s Crossing,” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in 1997.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the introduction to a 2010 collection of her plays, Ms. Howe explained her penchant for wacky scenes.“I came of age during the heyday of Absurdism when it was the fellas who were shaking up perceptions of what was stage worthy — Pirandello, Genet, Ionesco, Beckett and Albee,” she wrote. “Their artistry and daring were thrilling as they scrambled logic and language, but where were their female counterparts, shaking up what was stage worthy for us? Since I was a hopelessly unevolved feminist with no ax to grind, who better to take on the challenge than me?”Mabel Davis Howe was born on Nov. 21, 1937, in Manhattan to Quincy and Mary (Post) Howe. (She was called Tina from childhood and made it her legal name when she turned 18, her son, Eben Levy, said.) Her father, an author, journalist and broadcast commentator, worked for CBS radio and ABC television. Her mother was an amateur artist who exhibited on Long Island.Marx Brothers movies were among Ms. Howe’s childhood passions and influenced her playwriting.“The whole point was to keep piling excess upon excess,” she wrote in the 1989 collection. “Why shouldn’t it be the same in the theater?”While she was attending Sarah Lawrence College, the actress Jane Alexander, a friend and fellow student, directed one of Ms. Howe’s first plays, “Closing Time.” Ms. Howe graduated in 1959 and then spent a year in Paris.“The most profound thing that happened to me that year was seeing ‘The Bald Soprano’ by Ionesco,” she told The Times in 1983. “That exploded me all over the place.”Ms. Howe in 2017 with her husband, Norman Levy, in their home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe married Norman Levy, a teacher and writer, in 1961 and accompanied him to Maine and Wisconsin while he finished his degrees. In 1967, when Mr. Levy got a job teaching at the State University of New York at Albany (now the University at Albany), the couple moved to Kinderhook, N.Y., where Ms. Howe made a start working on plays in earnest.In 1970, her play “The Nest,” which she described as a “funny, erotic play about women and how fierce and pathetic they are when dealing with men,” received a production at the Mercury Theater on East 13th Street in Manhattan. That the first sentence of Clive Barnes’s review in The Times didn’t kill her fledgling career was something of a miracle.“It is always rash to use superlatives,” Mr. Barnes wrote, “but it does most forcibly occur to me that ‘The Nest,’ which boldly calls itself a play and even more boldly opened last night at the Mercury Theater, must be on any reasonable short list of the worst plays I have ever seen.”Ms. Howe, though, kept at it, drawing attention not only for “Museum” but also for “The Art of Dining” (staged at the Public Theater in 1979) and other plays. In 1983 she won an Obie Award for her recent works. Numerous other awards followed.Among her most successful plays after “Coastal Disturbances” was “Pride’s Crossing,” in which a 90-year-old swimmer looks back on her life. That piece was staged at Lincoln Center in 1997.“Old women have great power,’‘ Ms. Howe said at the time. “Magic is afoot with them. A lot of times they are not on this earth; their thoughts are in never-never land. But in with the magic and the dreaming is that anger that old women have. I wanted to put that voice, that fever, that sort of animal yelp of self-preservation on the stage.”André Bishop, producing artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater, recalled a playwright with a unique style.“Tina was a deliciously idiosyncratic writer whose playful wit and sense of the absurd infused all her work,” he said in a statement. “She was delightful, as were the plays written in her highly distinctive voice.”Ms. Howe and Mr. Levy settled in Manhattan in 1973 and had most recently lived in the Bronx. Mr. Levy died last year. In addition to her son, Ms. Howe is survived by a daughter, Dara Rebell, and three grandchildren.In an Instagram post yesterday, the playwright Sarah Ruhl called Ms. Howe both a friend and a mentor.“One of the last times I visited her,” Ms. Ruhl wrote, “she said: ‘I still want to write. Women are still an undiscovered country.’”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      in Theater

      Feminist Stories Are Being Set to a Pop Beat. But Are They Empowering?

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      Our critics debate how well shows like “Six,” “& Juliet” and “Once Upon a One More Time” engage with the inner worlds of women onstage.During the first act of “Once Upon a One More Time,” the Broadway jukebox musical that grooves to the Britney Spears oeuvre, a fairy godmother arrives with a present for Cinderella. A gown? No. Glass slippers? No. Cin has enough already. Instead, her godmother gifts her a copy of Betty Friedan’s 1963 best seller, “The Feminine Mystique.”It’s a clumsy gesture in the show, which plans to close next month. (Feminist thought has advanced in 60 years!) And arguably emblematic of a recent spate of Broadway musicals that set feminism to a pop beat, including “Six,” a zippy modern retelling of the lives of Henry VIII’s six wives; “& Juliet,” whose protagonist, miraculously alive, embarks on a girls’ trip of self-discovery; and “Bad Cinderella” (now closed), a chaotic rejiggering of the classic fairy tale. Aimed at girls and women (historically the majority of Broadway ticket buyers), these shows may be sincere attempts to engage with women’s issues — or they’re hollow efforts to capitalize on calls for change. Empty political gestures on Broadway? To quote a song used in two of these shows: “Oops! … I did it again.”On a recent morning, Laura Collins-Hughes, contributing theater critic and reporter; Salamishah Tillet, critic at large; and Lindsay Zoladz, pop music critic, gathered to debate facts and fairy tales. They discussed how narrowly these shows define empowerment, if they define it at all, and why Prince Charming gets the best song. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The recent musicals “Six,” “& Juliet,” “Bad Cinderella” and “Once Upon a One More Time” take female empowerment as their central theme. Are these shows actually empowering or legibly feminist?LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES I wouldn’t say any of them are feminist.SALAMISHAH TILLET Some are empowering, others are not. “Six” is partly feminist, because it shows the impact of King Henry VIII’s misogyny. With the exception of Anne Boleyn, most of his wives have been relegated to the margins. My 11-year-old daughter really loved that these women finally reclaimed their stories and did it with style! But I felt like I was at a fun pop concert rather than at a big Broadway musical.COLLINS-HUGHES “Six” drives me completely up the wall. It wants to have a good time in the neighborhood of spousal murder and abandonment, singing “I don’t need your love.” As if Henry’s love had anything to do with it. As if abuse is what a man’s love for a woman looks like.Lauren Zakrin, second from left, as Little Mermaid gets her voice back upon reading “The Feminine Mystique” in “Once Upon a One More Time.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLINDSAY ZOLADZ I like “Six,” but probably for the reason Salamishah doesn’t — it’s basically a pop concert. I do think the overarching problem with these musicals is the way they fail to define terms, presenting “empowerment” and “feminism” as given, unexamined virtues. Instead of the marriage proposal that supposedly leads to the happily ever after, it’s … empowerment ever after? “Once Upon a One More Time” provided the clearest distillation of the trend. Cinderella’s “feminist awakening” is spurred by her fairy godmother giving her “The Feminine Mystique.” Seriously. The book is treated like a magical talisman throughout the rest of the show, but its actual content is never engaged with. That seems beyond the show’s grasp. Though the book is on sale for $20 in the lobby gift shop.TILLET I gasped when she discovered the book.ZOLADZ Not in a good way, I’m guessing.Doesn’t Cinderella know that women’s studies syllabuses have moved on?TILLET Or that Friedan was heavily criticized for her bourgeois feminism back in the day? Is it weird that we are still locating the beginnings of feminism exclusively in the sexual liberation of straight, white, middle-class, stay-at-home 1950s wives? But that’s an ongoing problem, not just on Broadway.Why do you think we’re seeing these shows now? Is it a cynical attempt to appeal to female ticket buyers or something more organic?TILLET These shows, despite their best intentions, seem limited by their source material. There was a lot of Cinderella this year! The publicity appeal of anything Cinderella is obvious, so for Broadway theaters struggling to get audiences back into the theater, of course it is a ploy.From left: Justin David Sullivan, Melanie La Barrie, Lorna Courtney and Betsy Wolfe in “& Juliet.” With its thoughtful casting of a Black Juliet and the nonbinary character May, the show enables us to see Shakespeare differently, one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCOLLINS-HUGHES “Bad Cinderella” could have been so much more than it was. It is a messy show, it’s always been a messy show, but in London it was actually fun. It had a bit of substance to it. And magic. The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway.I took my daughter to “Bad Cinderella” and afterward we had a conversation about the show’s messaging, which was confused at best. Is it asking too much of a musical to also have great messages?COLLINS-HUGHES This question makes me think we all live in fear of that riposte that often greets girls and women who won’t laugh along at a joke that’s not funny: “Where’s your sense of humor?” It’s perfectly legitimate to recoil from a show whose message bugs you, and all the more if it’s at odds with its girl-power, you-be-you marketing.And yet if a show is successful enough in other ways, the messaging may not matter. That was my delighted experience of “& Juliet.”TILLET This was definitely my favorite pop feminist musical of the year. I was genuinely intrigued by the conceit of what happens if Juliet doesn’t die. What life does she make for herself beyond the formula prescribed for her? The musical opens up possibilities for her as a protagonist. And with its thoughtful casting of Lorna Courtney as a Black Juliet and Justin David Sullivan as the nonbinary character, May, it enables us to see Shakespeare differently, too.COLLINS-HUGHES When it has a top-notch cast, “& Juliet” is a blast. But I am baffled that people perceive it as feminist. It really is not.ZOLADZ Say more!COLLINS-HUGHES I don’t mean that it’s anti-feminist, but I don’t think it’s particularly female-centered — not on Juliet, nor on Anne Hathaway [Shakespeare’s wife], who gets one of the subplots.“Bad Cinderella,” starring Linedy Genao, had a brief run this spring. “The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway,” one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith the exception of “Six,” these shows are largely created by men. Does that explain anything?COLLINS-HUGHES Of course. It’s not that men can’t and don’t write women well or can’t imagine women’s lives. And it’s certainly not that artists should stick to writing only about people just like them. But they are writing from the outside. That can come with a lot of blind spots and a lot of misapprehensions.All of these musicals use a pop vernacular, “Bad Cinderella” somewhat less so. Is pop, particularly pop written and produced by men, a useful form for feminist discourse?ZOLADZ Something I’ve been thinking about regarding “Once Upon a One More Time” and especially “& Juliet,” which uses the songs of the massive millennial hitmaker Max Martin, is the lyrical limitation of a lot of modern pop music. Martin and the generation of pop architects who followed him treat lyrics almost as an afterthought. Martin has referred to his method of songwriting as “melodic math.” “& Juliet” was fun and more cleverly written than “Once Upon a One More Time,” but a lot of that had to do with the ironic distance between the lyrics themselves and the winking, metatextual way the characters employed them — like when “I Want It That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, becomes not so much a love song as a narration of an argument between Shakespeare and his wife, who have conflicting opinions about how his latest play should end.TILLET I hated a lot of those pop songs and found them anti-feminist when they originally came out, but when I sang along with the “& Juliet” audience and my tween daughter, I found that they aged better than I had expected. Or maybe, because I’m now middle-age, I’m mistaking nostalgia for progress.COLLINS-HUGHES Inattention to lyrics is a limitation of jukebox musicals, but it doesn’t hold for original pop songs, which can be whatever the writer makes them. It would help, though, if more of the songwriters getting musicals produced were women.ZOLADZ I generally pay more attention to pop music than Broadway musicals, so I found the sound of these shows to be quite striking. Modern pop’s influence is everywhere, especially in a show like “Six,” which is full of electronic beats, hip-hop cadences and direct nods to artists like Beyoncé and Ariana Grande. Is that a trend you have observed over time? And given that this is such a golden age for female pop stars, do you think that crossover appeal has something to do with the rise of these empowerment musicals?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically, “Hamilton” changed Broadway, but it is very much a guy story. Having proved the hunger for modern pop musicals, it left a lot of room for female artists to fill.Do these shows do that filling?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically? Sometimes. But in terms of storytelling, generally no. There are such blinders on imagination, and there’s such an aversion to nuance. It’s a question of whom you’re trying to please. The perception of risk is about displeasing men, not the women and girls who might want to see smart, muscular new musicals.Megan Hilty, left, and Shoshana Bean in “Wicked,” which is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDoes the success of the Barbie movie, directed and co-written by a woman, with its several song and dance numbers, point a way forward?COLLINS-HUGHES Absolutely, if the idea is to give the best numbers to the guys.ZOLADZ And the charisma! That’s what ultimately sank “Once Upon a One More Time” for me: Cinderella was often the least compelling character onstage. Juliet didn’t fare much better. I don’t know if blandly “empowered” female characters are the answer. Too often it just feels like a shortcut. Writing flawed, idiosyncratic and more interesting female characters seems like a worthier goal, but most of these shows don’t want to take the risk.TILLET If song choice in a musical is any indication of narrative priorities, “Once Upon a One More Time” had difficulty sustaining its attention on Cinderella and her awakening. Prince Charming got “Oops! … I Did It Again” and her stepmother had “Toxic.” When I watched “Barbie,” I realized how seductive patriarchy is onscreen or onstage, even when we say we are trying to smash it. Why do the Kens get that massive and amazing dance scene?COLLINS-HUGHES A story about or aimed at women is so seldom deemed interesting enough on its own. But Hollywood, like commercial theater, is often in the business of blandification. And who’s blander than Ken? I’d like to think audiences want more than that.These recent shows define empowerment narrowly, restricting it to questions of romantic and sexual relationships with men rather than any broader political awakenings. Why can’t these stories dream bigger or attempt something more intersectional?TILLET I do think a lot of these producers feel that they are being intersectional, simply through casting. But while I appreciate so much more diversity onstage, it is still not enough. The musicals would really have to try to dismantle various forms of oppression at once. That takes nuance, patience and a really radical imagination. An older musical, “The Color Purple,” was successful at this, which brings us back to the strength of the source material, Alice Walker’s novel, and then a sizable female team behind its Broadway staging. It is an understatement to say that the evolution of Celie, who endured such abuse and trauma, is far more compelling than Cinderella’s!ZOLADZ What I find missing from a lot of contemporary art about female empowerment is the way it focuses on the attainment of power and then stops there. What about stories about how easily power can corrupt those who have it? Yes, even women!COLLINS-HUGHES This is a thing that “Wicked” imagines. And two decades on, it’s still packing houses and making loads of money. That show is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.TILLET I’ve seen “Wicked” twice recently. The depth of the storytelling — when the villain and heroine aren’t what they seem — it is just so good. Is it feminist? Maybe. Does it reveal the power and heartbreak of female friendship as the ultimate love story? Very much so. For that alone, it provides a wonderful model for how to really revel in the inner worlds of women onstage. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Barbie’ Debuts in Saudi Arabia, Sparking Delight, and Anger

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      Denounced in some Middle Eastern countries for undermining traditional gender norms, the hit movie is finding an audience in Saudi Arabia, illustrating the region’s shifting political landscape.On Friday night, Mohammed al-Sayed donned a pale pink shirt and denim overalls to join a friend at a movie theater in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, where the men settled in to watch a film about a doll on a mission to dismantle the patriarchy.Similar scenes played out across the conservative Islamic kingdom last weekend, as women painted their nails pink, tied pink bows in their hair and draped pink floor-length abayas over their shoulders for the regional debut of the movie, “Barbie.” While critics across the Middle East have called for the film to be banned for undermining traditional gender norms, many Saudis ignored them.They watched as the movie imagined a matriarchal society of Barbie dolls where men are eye candy. They laughed when a male character asked, “I’m a man with no power; does that make me a woman?” They snapped their fingers in delight as a mother delivered a monologue about the strictures of stereotypical femininity. Then, they emerged from the darkened theaters to contemplate what it all meant.“The message is that you are enough — whatever you are,” said Mr. al-Sayed, 21, echoing the Ken doll’s revelation.“We saw ourselves,” said Mr. al-Sayed’s friend, Nawaf al-Dossary, 20, wearing a matching pink shirt.Watching Barbie’s search for identity and meaning, Mr. al-Sayed said he was reminded of the fraught period when he started college and wasn’t sure of his place in the world. He said he believed that the movie had important lessons for men as well as women.“I felt like my mom should see the film,” he said.“All of our families — all families,” Mr. al-Dossary said, laughing.That this was happening in Saudi Arabia — one of the most male-dominated countries in the world — was mind-boggling to many in the Middle East. When “Barbie” opened on Thursday in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, it arrived suddenly and overwhelmingly. Moviegoers rushed to prepare Barbie-pink outfits. Some theaters scheduled more than 15 showings a day.Moviegoers wore pink during a screening of “Barbie” in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Thursday.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockA snide headline in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat declared that Saudi cinemas had become “havens for Gulf citizens escaping from harsh restrictions” — a twist in a country whose people once had to drive to Bahrain to watch movies.Eight years ago, there were no movie theaters in the Saudi kingdom, let alone any showing films about patriarchy. Women were barred from driving. The religious police roamed the streets, enforcing gender segregation and shouting at women to cover up from head to toe in black.Since he rose to power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, has done away with many of those restrictions while simultaneously increasing political repression, imprisoning conservative religious clerics, leftist activists, critical businessmen and members of his own family.Even now, despite sweeping social changes, Saudi Arabia remains a state built around patriarchy. By law, the kingdom’s ruler must be a male member of the royal family, and while several women have ascended to high-ranking positions, all of Prince Mohammed’s cabinet members and closest advisers are men. Saudi women may be pouring into the work force and traveling to outer space, but they still need approval from a male guardian to marry. And gay and transgender Saudis face deep-seated discrimination, and sometimes arrest.So as word spread through the kingdom that “Barbie” would debut on a delayed schedule — a sign that government censors were most likely deliberating over it — many Saudis thought the movie would be banned, or at least heavily censored. Bolstering their expectations was the fact that neighboring Kuwait banned the film last week.Lebanon’s culture minister, Muhammad Al-Murtada, also called for the film to be banned, saying that it violated local values by “promoting homosexuality” and “raising doubts about the necessity of marriage and building a family.” It is unclear if the government will follow his recommendation.Even in Arab nations that have allowed the film to be shown, it has faced intense criticism. The Bahraini preacher Hassan al-Husseini shared a video with one million Instagram followers calling the movie a Trojan horse for “corrupt agendas.”Even while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has done away with many social restrictions in Saudi Arabia, he has increased political repression.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinAnd in Saudi Arabia, not everyone is receptive to the film. To the entrepreneur Wafa Alrushaid, who suggested that the film be banned in her country, its messages are a “distortion of feminism.”“I’m a liberal person who has called for freedom for 30 years, so this isn’t about customs and traditions, but the values of humanity and reason,” she told The New York Times. The film, she argued, excessively victimizes women and vilifies men, and she objected to the fact that a transgender actress had played one of the Barbies.“This film is a conspiracy against families and the world’s children,” Ms. Alrushaid, 48, declared.Many Arab critics of the movie expressed views similar to those of some American politicians and right-wing figures who have castigated the film as anti-male. The tussle in the Middle East over the movie illustrates how battles that sometimes echo the so-called U.S. culture wars are playing out on a different landscape.The animated film “Lightyear,” which showed two female characters kissing, was banned in several countries in the region last year. And six Gulf Arab countries issued an unusual statement last year demanding that Netflix remove content that violates “Islamic and societal values and principles,” threatening to take legal action.In Kuwait, religious conservatives have become more vocal in recent years, Gulf analysts say, broadcasting views that many Saudis would be hesitant to express in public now, fearing repercussions from the government.“Banning the movie ‘Barbie’ fits into a larger tilt to the right that’s increasingly felt in Kuwait,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University. “Islamist and conservative forces in Kuwait are relishing in these culture wars to prove their ascendancy.”Some Kuwaitis expressed astonishment that they would have to travel to the Saudi kingdom to watch the movie. Many pointed out the irony that Kuwait and Lebanon, despite objecting to the film, had long provided greater freedom of expression than many other Arab countries.Streaming out of movie theaters in Riyadh, people who watched “Barbie” seemed to leave with their own understanding.Lining up for “Barbie” in Dubai. Many Arab critics of the movie have expressed views similar to those of some American right-wing figures who have castigated the film as anti-male.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockYara Mohammed, 26, said that she had enjoyed the movie, dismissing the Kuwaiti ban as “drama.”“Even if kids saw it, it’s so normal,” she said.To Abrar Saad, 28, the message was simply that “the world doesn’t work without Ken or Barbie; they need to complete each other.”But to teenage girls like Aljohara and Ghada — who were accompanied by an adult and asked to be identified only by their first names because of their ages — the film felt deeper.“The idea was pretty realistic,” said Aljohara, 14, wearing a hot pink shirt underneath her black abaya. She said she liked that the film ended with a type of equality between men and women.“But it wasn’t nice that it ended with equality,” interjected Ghada, 16. “Because I feel like equality is a little bit wrong; I feel like it’s better for there to be equity because there are things a boy can’t do but you can do them.”Asked if they ever thought they would watch such a movie in Saudi Arabia, both exclaimed, with laughter: “No!”“I was expecting them to censor a lot of scenes,” Ghada said.In fact, it did not appear censors had cut anything major. A scene in which Barbie declares that she has no vagina and Ken no penis remained, as well as a scene with the transgender actress. The Arabic subtitles were rendered faithfully — including the word patriarchy.Hwaida Saad More

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      The Future of Rap Is Female

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      The Future of Rap Is Female As their male counterparts turn depressive and paranoid, it’s the women who are having all the fun. Aug. 9, 2023 Like American men in general, our top male rappers appear to be in crisis: overwhelmed, confused, struggling to embody so many contradictory ideals. As a result, the art is […] More

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      City in Mexico Bans Performances of Songs With Misogynistic Lyrics

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      The city of Chihuahua said it would impose hefty fines on bands that perform songs with lyrics that “promote violence against women.”Fed up with persistent violence, officials in the city of Chihuahua in northern Mexico approved a ban last week forbidding musical acts from performing songs with lyrics that degrade women.Mayor Marco Bonilla of Chihuahua said in an video update last week that the law banned the performance of songs that “promote violence against women” or encourage their discrimination, marginalization or exclusion.Mr. Bonilla said that those who violate the ban could face fines ranging from 674,000 pesos to 1.2 million pesos, or between about $39,000 and $71,000.The City Council approved the ban unanimously on Wednesday amid a rise in killings of women across Mexico in recent years, and as Chihuahua, a city of about 940,000 residents, is struggling with its own cases of violence against women. Recently, Mr. Bonilla said, about seven out of 10 calls to 911 in Chihuahua have involved cases of domestic violence, particularly against women.“Violence against women has reached levels that we could consider like a pandemic,” he said. “We can’t allow this to happen, and we also can’t allow this to be normalized.”It was unclear from his message who would impose the fines or how the ban on misogynistic lyrics would be enforced. Money raised from the fines will be channeled to a women’s institute in Chihuahua and a confidential women’s shelter, said Blanca Patricia Ulate Bernal, a Chihuahua city councilwoman who proposed the ban.Ms. Ulate Bernal said in a post on Facebook last week that the law will apply to concerts and events in the city that require a municipal permit. She added that the ban would help ensure that women have the right “to enjoy a life free of violence.”Mr. Bonilla, Ms. Ulate Bernal and other council members did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The lyrics ban was passed about a month after Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, criticized songs known as corridos tumbados, or trap ballads, whose lyrics glorify drug smugglers and violence.“We’re never going to censor anyone,” Mr. López Obrador said at a news conference in June. “They can sing what they want, but we’re not going to stay quiet.”The approval of the ban is not the first time the city of Chihuahua has taken a strong stance against the performance of certain songs. Citing high levels of drug violence, Chihuahua banned the long-running band Los Tigres del Norte in 2012 after a concert during which the group performed three songs known as narcocorridos, which celebrate the exploits of drug traffickers. The city also fined the concert organizers 20,000 pesos, or about $1,600, at the time. More

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      The Bald Power of Sinead O’Connor

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      The Irish singer’s shaved head was as much a part of her identity and allure as her sound.It was the bald head that became the avatar of a million dreamy rebellions; the shaved pate that bridged the gap between the angry and the sublime. It is almost impossible to think about Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singer whose death was reported on July 26, or her work, without thinking about her hair. Or lack of it.Without thinking about the striking curve of her shorn skull on the cover of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” her face below caught mid-scream; the nakedness it seemed to convey in the 1990 video of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” as her blue eyes brimmed with tears; the purity of the line on the cover of her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings.” Which contains an entire chapter entitled “Shaving My Head.”It was effectively her signature — in a 2014 story in Billboard Ms. O’Connor, 56 when she died, identified herself as “the bald woman from Ireland” — along with her Dr. Martens and torn jeans, and it followed her throughout her life, just as much as her ripping up the photo of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 did. Even in the few periods when she grew her hair back, she was often referred to as the “formerly bald” Sinead O’Connor. And as such, she was an integral part of the renegotiation of old stereotypes of gender, sexuality, rebellion and liberation that is still going on today.“I just don’t feel like me when I have hair,” she told The New York Times in 2021.Now that female baldness has become more common, has become a badge of identity for women such as Ayanna Pressley, the representative from Massachusetts who went public with her alopecia in 2020, and X González, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student (then known as Emma) who became a campaigner for gun control, not to mention the Dora Milaje of “Black Panther,” it can be hard to remember how extraordinary it was when Ms. O’Connor emerged. “Shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin in 1991. “I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.”Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesBut that seeming repudiation of her own porcelain beauty in the wake of a spate of teen pop queens, at a time when armoring yourself in a helmet of big hair was a big thing and shaving your head was still largely seen as a punishment, was as much of a statement of singularity as her sound. Perhaps, it was also the first sign of the controversial politics to come, including refusing to play the national anthem before her concerts and stenciling the logo of Public Enemy into the side of her head at the 1989 Grammys when the show’s organizers declined to televise the first-ever award for Best Rap Performance.She offered various explanations of the choice. All the stories come down to the same thing in any case, which was a refusal to cater to traditional definitions of “pretty” as established by the male gaze as long ago as Rapunzel and Lady Godiva.In shearing her head “she was literally shearing away a false narrative,” said Allyson McCabe, the author of “Why Sinead O’Connor Matters.” In 1991 Ms. O’Connor told Spin, “shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing. I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.” However, she also said, “The women who are admired are the ones that have blond hair and big lips and wear red lipstick and wear short skirts, because that’s an acceptable image of a woman.” And, “Because I have no hair, people think I’m angry.”In a 2017 TV interview she told Dr. Phil that it was because during her abusive childhood her mother had compared her with her sister, who had long red hair, unlike Sinead. “When I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter,” Ms. O’Connor said in the interview. “And that’s why I cut my hair off. I didn’t want to be pretty.”The cover of Ms. O’Connor’s memoir.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via Associated PressA still from her music video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.”In the interview she also said, “It’s dangerous to be pretty, too, because I kept getting raped and molested everywhere I went,” and “I did not want to dress like a girl. I did not want to be pretty.”In her memoir, she wrote that she was working on her first album in London, and had been told by a male music executive she should grow her (buzzed but not shorn) hair long and start to dress more like a girl. The next day she went to a barbershop and had it all shaved off.During the period after the “S.N.L.” appearance, when she was rejected by the music industry and revealed she had been diagnosed as bipolar, Ms. O’Connor’s bald head was taken as a sign of instability (just as it was later with Britney Spears). The fact that she continued shaving her skull for the rest of her life suggested it was, rather, a sign of selfhood.The first time she looked in the mirror after that visit to the barbershop, she wrote in the book, “I looked like an alien.” Another way to put it, however, is she looked like the woman she became. And in becoming that woman — in giving herself that permission — she helped extend it to us all. More

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      in Television

      ‘Minx’ and ‘Stiffed’: Dirty Pictures From a Revolution

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      Though “Minx” and “Stiffed” are set 50 years ago, the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.On a nightclub stage, a blond woman in a sensible skirt suit runs back and forth in T-strap heels, overwhelmed by her duties to her family, her boss, herself. She stumbles, then falls. “It’s so hard being a woman in 1973,” she pouts, still sprawled. “If only there was a way to make a change.” Then the shirtless men in breakaway pants appear behind her. Women can’t have it all, now or 50 years later. An eyeful of oiled torsos, however muscular, may not have been a perfect substitute for real social transformation.This playful scene, an imagined forerunner to a Chippendales-style revue, occurs in the second season of “Minx,” which began on Starz on Friday. A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.“Minx” has plenty of company. The 2023 podcast “Stiffed,” created by Jennifer Romolini, is a history of the actual, short-lived erotic magazine Viva, an inspiration for “Minx.” Other recent work dealing with the debates of this era include the 2022 film “Call Jane” and the 2022 documentary “The Janes,” both about an underground network for women seeking safe abortions, and the 2020 FX series “Mrs. America,” about the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.HBO MaxCultural evocations of the American past often invite a thank-God-we’re-beyond-all-that superiority. But these recent works, despite the paisley and the quaaludes, don’t encourage that same condescension. These pieces are set 50 years ago, but the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.“It all feels very fraught and it all feels interconnected,” said Ellen Rapoport, the creator of “Minx.” “And you can’t separate the issues.” When it comes to the sexual revolution, she said, “I’m not sure who won.”The 1970s saw significant advances in women’s rights. Abortion was legalized in all states; hormonal birth control became widely available. A woman could have a credit card in her own name, could apply for a mortgage. Title IX was passed. A concurrent sexual revolution encouraged a new openness around sex and sexuality, while also seeding a backlash still felt today.This was the environment that birthed Viva, an erotic magazine for women created by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse and related magazines. Guccione’s goal was both cynical and utopian. Capitalizing on this new sexual candor, Viva was designed as a distaff alternative to Guccione’s other publications. Playgirl, another magazine that began in 1973, had similar aspirations. Viva may have been a cash grab, but as Romolini’s reporting for the eight-episode podcast shows, many of the women journalists who staffed it also believed that it could become a savvy, brainy, feisty publication for women interested in sex and gender. Yet it was, from the first, a study in cognitive dissonance. Articles about rape and female circumcision jostled alongside beauty tips, soft-focus photo spreads and ads for diet pills.“It never really gelled or meshed,” Romolini said. “Bob Guccione thought he knew what women wanted and, not being a woman, he did not. So it was two magazines. One was this progressive, feminist, smart, fun culture magazine. The other had these soft, flaccid penises in a variety of outrageous poses.”Viva published its last issue in 1979, having run through a masthead’s worth of editors, Anna Wintour among them, and a throng of contributors including Nikki Giovanni, Simone de Beauvoir and Joyce Carol Oates. Playgirl, which appealed mostly to gay men, hung on in increasingly attenuated form until 2016. Neither approached the popularity of similar men’s magazines. But “Minx,” particularly in its second season, has allowed Rapoport to imagine a different fate, a truly successful women’s erotic magazine, edited and eventually published by women (and gay men) who believe — sometimes haltingly, sometimes fervently — in sexual freedom and women’s liberation.She likes to think a magazine like this might have succeeded.Lovibond of “Minx” says a show set in the 1970s like hers shouldn’t still resonate, but it does.HBO Max“If you truly combined well-written thoughtful articles about women’s issues and actually erotic content, not just a guy on a horse, I think people, at least at that time, would have enjoyed that,” Rapoport said.In both “Minx” and “Stiffed,” the erotic content ultimately functions as racy camouflage. They may seem like stories about sex, but they are both mainly about work. When she began researching “Stiffed,” Romolini assumed that the governing question of the series would be, Who gets to dictate female desire and why is it not women? But in interviewing the surviving alumnae of Viva, she discovered that the women who worked there had mostly given up on that question.“Ultimately, ‘Stiffed’ is about professional desire more than it is about sexual desire,” Romolini said. “And I think that’s what it was for these women.”Rapoport had structured Season 2 of “Minx,” which moved to Starz after HBO Max scrapped the series, around a similar premise. “In the first season, we really just wanted to normalize sexuality, nudity, male nudity, and to have the idea that women were erotic creatures,” she said. “This season is really about this societal drive for success.”Desire, it turned out, could provide only piecemeal liberation, especially once people — men, mostly — discovered how to monetize it, a shift that fostered the “porno chic” of the late 1970s and the mainstream distribution of sexually explicit films. In the second episode of Season 2 of “Minx,” the magazine hosts the West Coast premiere of the real pornographic film “Deep Throat.” The movie is billed as a celebration of female sexual empowerment. But it also looks a lot like exploitation.One character, Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), inspired by Viva’s publisher, Guccione, defends the film as feminist. “It’s about a woman searching for an orgasm,” he says.Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), the editor in chief of Minx, disagrees. “Which she finds with a clitoris conveniently located inside of her mouth?” Joyce says.Related debates within the feminist community (often referred to as the porn wars or the sex wars) fragmented the movement, making it vulnerable to attacks — attacks that “Minx” has dramatized, from both the political left and the right. As the ’80s dawned, Ronald Reagan was soon to be elected president, evangelical Christians held new sway and the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated, leaving many of the liberating promises of the 1970s unfulfilled.“I don’t think the sexual revolution ultimately happened. It started and then devolved,” Nona Willis Aronowitz, a cultural critic and the author of “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution,” said. “Ever since, we’ve tried to claw our way back to some of the most utopian ideas and we haven’t gotten there.”Sexual liberation has real political dimensions, as the personal is only rarely apolitical. But faced with the work still incomplete — a wage gap, though narrowed, remains, and protections against domestic and sexual violence are still lacking — a focus on female pleasure can seem frivolous. So can a show and a podcast centered on a skin magazine for women.Yet in examining this narrow slice of the sexual culture of the 1970s, “Stiffed” and “Minx” suggest parallels between then and now.“‘Minx’ felt like a way to think about things that were currently happening, but through this lens of 50 years ago,” Rapoport said. “Conversations about birth control, abortion, gay rights, every social issue is now back on the table again, in a way that I don’t love.”Lovibond, the star of “Minx,” agreed. “Go to marches, as I do, and you’ll see signs today that we were holding in the ’70s,” she said. A show set then shouldn’t still resonate, she argued. But it does.Lorna Bracewell, the author of “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era,” sees these backward-facing shows as offering counsel for the present. “This intense period of reaction that we are living through, it motivates people to look back and say, well, what did feminists do the last time this happened?”Viva had only a brief run. Minx never existed. But “Stiffed” and “Minx” allow a return to a moment of, as Bracewell described it, “really radical aspirations and fantasies and dreams and desires,” a moment when great social change seemed possible. If we look and listen closely enough, maybe we can learn what went wrong in the past and dream better for the future, with equality and an occasional hunky dance revue.“I just wonder if there’s a way for all of us to come together, agree on things and try to make progress,” Rapoport said.Maybe then, she implied, the woman in heels won’t have to fall. More