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seconds long), dressed or partially dressed in each others' clothes, or nude.
Riverbody
(1970) is a longer film (seven minutes) during which we see eighty-seven nude males and females, one by one, each dissolving into the next, to the accompaniment of the sound of lapping water. The two films; implicitly polemicize the naturalness of the body and satirize the social control of the body by means of the gender (and other) roles encoded in dress.
By the time she made
Near the Big Chakra
(1972), Severson had come to realize that the politics of the body as image were different for the two genders. Of course, film had always marketed young, shapely female (and male) bodies, but as the strictures against nudity fell, women found themselves increasingly exposed. And more importantly, they continued to find themselves exposed as objects, icons, rather than as bodies in process: all dimensions of the female body as organism were routinely suppressed. For Severson, this pattern seemed increasingly problematic, and
Near the Big Chakra
was her response.
Near the Big Chakra
presents, in extreme close-up, the vulvas of thirty-seven women ranging in age from three months to fifty-six years. Each vulva is presented in a single continuous shot, though from time to time Severson adjusts the zoom lens; the shots are of varying lengths. The film lasts seventeen minutes and seems to most viewers substantially longer, especially since it's silent. The tradition of transforming female bodies into lifeless, conventionally "erotic" icons is continually subverted: from time to time tampon strings hang from vaginas; some of the women contract muscles; hands reach into the image to reveal the baby's vulva more clearly; and from time to time, there's evidence of an infection or of semen.
I've seen few films that demonstrate an audience's investment in the conventional imaging of women more dramatically than
Near the Big Chakra
. Indeed, the film is a way of measuring the degree to which our experiences with conventional film (and with the depiction of women's bodies in other media) have caused us to romanticize women. The extent of a viewer's shock or disgust at the filmand these are the standard reactions, even nowis a gauge of that viewer's investment in woman as beautiful (inorganic) object. Of course, one might argue that the enlargement of the vulvas affected by filming and projecting them is the cause of much of this response, and that any part of any real body, magnified to this extent, might shock viewers. But this only confirms Severson's essential quest: to liberate the body as part of a larger process of putting us in touch with reality. After all, the romanticized "perfect" bodies visually polemicized by the Hollywood industry are enlarged as well. Severson's shock tactic is simply a means for producing a more sensible view of reality unenlarged, human-scale.