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At that time in the Bay Area there was a certain willingness to experiment on every front, and I think most of the people in the film are people who were already known to me or who already knew my work. They had been my students at the Art Institute, or they were friends, or mothers of friends, or children of friends, or other artists. There was a certain level of trust. My films had been shown around town a lot, and at that point, independent filmmaking was an acknowledged art form in the Bay Area and received a lot of attention from the press. It was like going to a Be-in.
In general, that was of a time of casual nudity. There were often parties at the Art Institute where almost everybody was nude. Adam Bartlett was visiting us here in Hawaii last summer. He's the son of Scott Bartlett, who was one of the in the Bay Area in the sixties and seventies. Adam's twenty now, a student at Santa Cruz. I had taken him to a party given by some friends here, who recognized his name and were curious about what it was like to grow up in that milieu. He said, "My folks would get together with their friends and everybody would take off their clothes and they'd make a movie." He was right. Part of the process of social interaction at that point in history seemed to be casual nudity. Actually, at one point I had planned to make a film called "Casual Nudity," because the phenomenon was so widespread.
Chakra
is also part of that phenomenon.
MacDonald:
In your
Spare Rib
article, you often use "cunt." Was the word more acceptable in that milieu than it is now?
Severson:
Women
were
disturbed by my using "cunt." I was often questioned by feminists when I showed the film. My position at the time was that if a word was loaded for you, the best way to demystify it and disarm it was to make it your word and use it. So during that period I always referred to vaginas as "cunts," particularly when I was showing
Chakra
and talking about it. Then at some point I stopped doing it. It's not a word I use very often now.
MacDonald:
My current students find
Chakra
the most shocking film I show them. I'm sure it shocks
them
more than it did the original audiences. But I'd be very interested to know what kinds of experiences you've had with the film.
Severson:
There are a
lot
of stories.
I had been invited to show the film in London at a college of engineers. Now usually I showed at film societies, women's groups, or art schools, but for some reason I was invited to a college of engineers! It turned out that people there were relatively comfortable and interested in the movie. By this time, my daughter was fifteen or sixteen years old and in a love relationship with a delightful man, a good friend, Barney Boatman, who had grown up in a radical political household in London