JUMP CUT
A
REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
by Wesley Harris
from Jump
Cut, no. 23, Oct. 1980, p. 39
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1980, 2005
Here are a few words to show my appreciation for the subscription to your informative paper. It has helped me understand relationships between ideology and art better and that bourgeois lie of the separation of politics and art. This was clearly shown to me in the picture WINDOWS, which they showed here over the weekend.
After reading about WINDOWS in your paper, I was undecided about whether or not I should go and see it. But if I didn't go and see it, how could I struggle with the rampant sexual chauvinism that dampens the atmosphere here?
What hit me hard about the film was the overtly fascist content that gushed out of it. The cop was the good guy — the male cop — while everyone else was subject to his wishes and desires. He just came in and took over, the picture personified of God, State and family. Every role in the picture reflected the state's agents of control. After all, were they not the ones who built the first gas chambers in Germany? Even now how do they seek to help a person? Only by making people adapt to the inhuman oppression that created their state originally.
Every woman in the picture had or was dominated in some way by a male. None of the women could think freely. They had to have their ideas and thoughts okayed by males. The women couldn't relate to each other. After Talia was raped, she could have no faith or trust in either one of the women. She could only find support in going to the police. That women are incapable of helping one another is shown all through the file. Even the woman who was Talia's neighbor was more concerned about how her husband felt about her than about what was happening. Only males are depicted as rational thinking beings.
The film's message is that women are to be abused if they step out of the parameters that males have created for then. And those women that are not devoted to males are demented, sick and out to destroy women at any cost and by any means necessary.
Overall, the film fit into the right-wing fascist thrust this nation is taking — with the courts supporting the KKK and with the FBI and other federal agencies acting as accomplices.
Before I forget, my number was changed, and my address is now, Wesley Harris, P-0682, Box 9901, Pittsburgh, PA 15233.