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The Body Beautiful (1991)
Sweet, moving short film
An autobiographical, pseudo-documentary with re-enactments about director Ngozi Onwurah and her mother, Madge. The film is told from the perspective of Madge, and it examines her feelings about her own mastectomy and her feelings of inadequacy over her own body while at the same time exploring Ngozi's relationship with her mother. Examining such issues and body image (through Ngozi's mother's feelings about her own body and through Ngozi's job as a model) and racial identity (Ngozi was born to a Caucasian mother and African-American father), I thought it was a very sweet, beautiful film about the bond between a mother and her daughter as well as an examination of what it means to truly be a woman.
Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen (1983)
Interesting experimental documentary
I watched this film in my Woman & Film class. Filmmaker Trihn Mihn-ha's experimental documentary "Reassemblage" is for all intents and purposes a film about the people of Senegal. But Trihn has a higher purpose in mind. The film if self-reflexive in that as it is as much about documentaries themselves as it is about the people of Senegal. Trihn calls into question the conventions of the documentary and how such films have the power to manipulate the way in which the audience sees. She constantly reminds her audience that they are watching a movie through many filmic techniques. For example, at times she cuts sound completely to emphasize the fact that she has the ability to manipulate what we are feeling. By taking away the music (African drumming in this case), a tool filmmakers often rely on to tell us how we SHOULD be feeling, we are left to our own devices and must figure out on our own what we are seeing, what it means to us, and why. At times this makes viewing her film fairly difficult, but ultimately it's a rather interesting and thought-provoking experience.