Works featuring "patriarchy" (26)

Ingeborg Holm

Patiently bear the first 10 minutes that establishes initial familial bliss and the reward is a stark drama of a mother split from her children by the state's response to her poverty and illness. Remarkably, the dramatic excesses of the era are avoided, and no race-to-the-rescue, instead relying on a quasi-documentary exposition paired with artful scene construction. Can't help but wonder if this was what Judith Of Bethulia was so unsuccessfully trying to achieve.

Max And The Lady Doctor (Max et la doctoresse)

In the first act, Max must overcome his shyness to declare his love for a lady doctor. Some funny stuff here. In the second act, he faces numerous obstacles on his wedding night. Not much Max here, just lots of strange medical practices. In the final act, he restores his privileged position of malehood, as in the Alice Guy-Blaché film “The Consequences of Feminism (1906)” - sans the profound irony. But the major shortcoming here is too much angry Max, not enough lovable hapless twit.

Fatty and Mabel's Simple Life

Modern science has yet to determine the precise sequence of events in the origin of the Loonyverse, but a general consensus has formed around this work. For the first 13 minutes of this remake of Those Country Kids, the humor stays around the level of Lumière's 1895 The Sprayer Sprayed (L'Arroseur arrosé): so slow and painfully corny that the cows protested that the stupidity was beneath their dignity. The only break in the drudgery is a rare glimpse at a dapper Al St. John (minus his clownish rube garb), who was surprisingly handsome beneath the makeup and mugging. But then, by some mysterious comic alchemy, the energy leaps exponentially as soon as Mabel dons a funny hat and cheerfully tosses a suitcase out one window, sending Roscoe crashing through another window, and the two of them steal Al's self-driving and self-willed car - starting a chase that pushes the silliness out of Keystone-realm into Comique-surreal. Clearly, this is such stuff as toons are made on.

The Aryan/La fiera domada

The title raised the excited hope of going beyond the usual stereotyping and slurs, instead delivering an explicit exposition of racial ideology - taking Birth Of A Nation out west. Unfortunately, this is just an incomplete reconstruction of a film considered lost until 2008. The introduction states that this version comes from an Argentine mid-1920s rerelease (dates within the film are given as 1923), with titles that “differ quite a bit from the original”. Most segments have not been digitally restored, and lost segments are replaced by photographs.

The original may have been more directly concerned with racial ideology, but here Cowboy's main conflict is with women: Cowboy is massively Madonna–whore complexed. This is immediately suggested in the very first scene, where Cowboy's sacred love for his distant mother is juxtaposed with images of him petting and kissing his bestial companion. Then after he deludes himself that a sleazy mining camp on the border is his ideal “town inhabited by men of iron heart”, and that his mother would love a girl he met in a bar there, he is of course vamped. But instead of dumping her, he takes her as his whore he loves to hate, as he does a No-More-Mister-Nice-Guy. Finally, he meets The Virgin Mary Jane and he again falls to his delusions as she cons him into believing his White Man's Duty is to give away his riches. He leaves behind his whore to return to his Brotherhood and replay the Heroic Defender role that first got him vamped, before riding off in the sunset to seek his next imagined Madonna to transform into an imagined whore. So goes the life of an iron-hearted Aryan.

Where Are My Children?

“All intelligent people know that birth control is a subject of serious public interest. Newspapers, magazines and books have treated different phases of this question. Can a subject thus dealt with on the printed page be denied careful dramatization on the motion picture screen?...In producing this picture the intention is to place a serious drama before adult audiences...”

This somber introduction is immediately followed by:

“Behind the great portals of Eternity, the souls of little children waited to be born.”

And on it goes like this, shifting between pretense of weighty social drama and wallowing in cabbage-patch airy-fairy fantasy, linked by hackneyed melodrama and annoying overuse of cross-cutting, while hammering its messages - abortion is murder, humanity's salvation is birth control (for the poor), becoming a submissive baby factory is the duty of every woman (if she's wealthy) - only approaching realism in its wonderfully dark and depressing ending. Movie in a nutshell: Living with a pompous, self-righteous, hypocritical Dickless Attorney leaves wife with no desire to breed more of his kind. There - 65 minutes saved.