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of voice tapes in the summer of 1990. I interviewed Mulvey in November 1990 (the edited discussion was sent to Wollen; his additions are included within the text, in brackets), and Rainer in January 1991.
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Anne Severson (Alice Anne Parker)
MacDonald:
How did you originally conceive
Near the Big Chakra
?
Severson:
I've been thinking about that movie a lot as I've worked on my new book [
Understand Your Dreams: 1,001 Basic Dream Images and How to Interpret Them,
published by H. J. Kramer in 1991]. I knew when I made that film that I was taking a big chance, that it might scandalize and disturb people.
Near the Big Chakra
was made in 1971, at the end of that first great wave of feminism, which certainly opened the door to a lot of forbidden thoughts and issues. I think as a film it created a certain space.
Janis Joplin was a neighbor of mine. She used to sing with Big Brother and the Holding Company at a ratty little bar in Berkeley called the Blind Lemon. I was living with a man from Texas at the time; he had been a student at the University of Texas when Janis was there. She had been much maligned because she violated a lot of ideas about how women were supposed to behave. They weren't supposed to be sloppy, loud, drunk; they were supposed to comb their hair, shave under their arms . . . looking back now, it doesn't seem so radical or unconventional. But when she was first performing, she was on the edge, and I really appreciated that. By taking such an extreme position, she made all the space in between available.
Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers did a similar thing when they first started expressing that macho, potentially violent image of black men, holding big guns and wearing black leather. They created a much larger space for all black men, by taking an extreme position.
MacDonald:
The film certainly makes sense in that context, but how did you come to the idea of filming vulvas in extreme close-up?
Severson:
I told that story in the
Spare Rib
article ["Don't Get Too Near the Big Chakra,"
Spare Rib,
No. 20 (February 1974); reprinted in
Spare Rib Reader,
ed. Marsha Rowe (London: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 312318]. I got the idea to make the movie one day in California when my teenage daughter was lounging nude in the sun after a bath, casually exposing herself. I found myself staring at her vagina. When she