Page 327
From Severson's
Near the Big Chakra
(1972).
they did. They paid for it and sent people from their courses to be in it. Then I did a flyer with a red rosea good symbol for the vagina: spiritual unfolding, femininity, fecunditycoyly inviting women to be in a film about "women's parts."
I shot it at the San Francisco Art Institute, where I was teaching. A student of minea very maternal, comfortable, candid woman, met people in an anteroom near the room where I was filming. She described what I was doing and talked about the film. Also, there were women in the anteroom who had already been photographed. They would hang around and talk to other women who had come in to find out what was going on before they decided whether to be in the film or not. It was very relaxed, and I think almost everybody who came by that day was in the film. It turned out to be easy, although I had been a little nervous about itfearing that not enough people would show up. Altogether, thirty-eight women appeared in the film. The age range was from three months to sixty-three years. There were two black women, one half-oriental girl, two lesbians, one prostitute, two virgins (I think), a lot of mothers, three mothers-to-be, three grandmothers, four women menstruating, one girl who discovered a week later that she had gonorrhea, and one woman who learned a month later that she had uterine cancer. None of these characteristics is evident in the filmexcept the women who are menstruating: you can see their tampon strings.