Word: deitch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DONNA DEITCH'S Woman to Woman, a long, clamorous documentary of working women, is like good political rhetoric which sweeps one along on a tide of right-on sentiments and very real but always palatable insights, and leaves one at the end, exhausted from an orgy of head-nodding, feeling a little ripped off. Like Taking Our Bodies Back, it uses the interview technique to raise vital issues and to air well-founded complaints. But to anyone who is already conversant with the bottom-line tenets of women's liberation--that women's labor is exploited in the household...
...Deitch has woven a tapestry of wonderful footage of women talking about themselves. Prostitutes explain that they first turned tricks because they were starving. A clinical psychologist and lesbian talks about the discrimination she has suffered in her profession. An aging housewife sits on a park bench under a gray sky, and shows us the rag dolls she has made and sold for 25 years. Prostitutes in the San Francisco Women's Jail sit around a plastic table, smoke cigarettes, and say bitterly that they will have to turn another trick as soon as they get out, just to feed...
...outta there to come back here 'cause they know. They got you." Another woman, also a prostitute, ventures beyond the scope of the film when she says, "It's not really the men's fault; we're all victims. The almighty God of this country is the dollar bill." Deitch was not interested in pursuing either that thought or the politics of oppression in any broader context. The film closes with an exhortation to women to keep talking--to work together, educate one another, and overcome their mutual mistrust...
Again, a film based on the liberal faith in constructive discussion. In her vast panorama of American womanhood Deitch has given a lot of very different women a chance to speak their minds--everyone, in fact, but women further to the political left than she. It would be unfair to derogate her achievement just because she has left out socialist feminism. But there's something chilling about her choice of interviewees. When a whole group of prostitutes agree, tantalizingly, that "the system must be changed," and then explain that their idea of freedom from oppression is the freedom...
...What do they expect me to do?" complains one prostitute Deitch interviews in a San Francisco jail. "If they gave me some education or some job training, well maybe I could do something. But instead we sit here twiddling our thumbs or doing embroidery, with nothing to look forward...