Just Out: Max Dashu's video, Woman Shaman:The Ancients

I got myself an early Mother's Day gift: "Woman Shaman: the Ancients," a 2-disk DVD produced by Max Dashu's Suppressed Histories Archives. I just opened it, haven't watched it yet, but just the box cover and art on the disks look so marvelous--and being acquainted with Dashu's extraordinary work in the history of women and its relevance to religion--and I wanted to tell you about it. You can see a trailer of about 4 minutes here or at the previous link.

GUEST REVIEW: Feminine Mysticism in Art (DVD)

Feminine Mysticism in Art: Artists Envisioning the Divine - “a collection of contemporary Visionary and Goddess Art synchronised to uplifting music with over 50 artists". (DVD, New Paradigm Publishing)

A review by Glenys Livingstone

Although this DVD is over an hour and a half of images – mostly of Goddess, and mostly very beautiful, together with some inspiring music, I find the con-text, the text within which it is set at the beginning and conclusion, to be very distracting and rendering the whole DVD barely useable for my Goddess purposes at least. I know that language is difficult in these times … especially perhaps the English language which does dominate the planet: so how does one express an essence in one’s heart, a feeling, without it coming unstuck in the dualistic frame of its conveyance? Or does the language used in the conveyancing of it reveal its true essential stuck nature – that the essence is actually yet unchanged?

I like very much the dedication at the beginning of this DVD: “to Earth Mother Creatrix and the ancient/future knowledges of indigenous cultures across the Globe", but my enthusiasm stops there. In my opinion, the text/story that follows this dedication, and is meant to serve as a preliminary to the images and music of the DVD blocks/locks the mind into “old paradigm". This blocking/locking is also true, perhaps especially so, of the text/story with which the whole DVD concludes. To speak of the feminine face of “God" is not sufficient for “new paradigm" thinking to my mind: Goddess of whom I speak is not a “part" of any god. I understand that some think this is unreasonable and unbalanced, but let me explain a little.

My work is to re-instate the Mother who is before all gender, who gave/gives birth to All including gender, who is the Source of All [1]. “Mother" is my word for “God" if you like. Some will say: but “Mother" is female, and I say: but “God" is male. If you think it isn’t, consider this: so often when the Divine is addressed as Mother, She is understood as Mother because there is a Father that makes Her Mother – She is “part"/half of an equation: but when we see the ubiquitous images of the Divine as Father as we do for instance on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is He Father because there is a Mother that makes Him Father? No I don’t think so! He can create it All by Himself with His pointer finger, and that is apparently no problem, but Mother birthing it All without His assistance is – even amongst some Goddess women. Imaginations do need to be stretched a little further on Her behalf I think.

And I am sorry to say that we are a long way from the story put forth in the preliminary text of this DVD that speaks of “consecrated union between masculine and feminine, God/Goddess" being at hand: we live on a planet wherein girls are still being systematically genitally mutilated, stoned for being raped, prevented from being educated, and by far the minority amongst elected decision-makers. “Union" is only realistic or desirable when a full self can be given and received. Huge amounts of work needs to be done to re-instate the Fullness of the Female – Her wholeness and integrity outside/inside All. This DVD is supposed to be about that, but it fails in my opinion with its opening and concluding statements. I am not interested in more images of the Father or in being “balanced", until She is comprehended as whole unto Herself, and He learns His place as participant. In my experience, the Father and the Goddess are not one and the same, as this DVD tells us. I am not speaking of a Goddess that holds “a position of power in the Godhead" - in my Cosmology, the brotherhood is within the Motherhood[2].

A prayer is made in the text for Her “role" in all of creation to be honored … well any good patriarch would agree – they think they all do honor her role, and that they know what that role is. Goddess is not just weaver and mender to be summoned forth when the Planet gets messy, as the text goes on: and apology is then made for Her apparently “scary" dark bits. The finishing with a quote from Jesus is an astute move I suppose, in terms of making the DVD appealing to those who need converting, but I feel that it may reveal or play further into the still-reigning Christian paradigm: until dominant andro-centric religions get their relativity, nothing will shift.

The saving grace of course is that once the viewer has made it through the con-text or perhaps manages to miss it, the images may speak for themselves, beyond any frame they are set within … and there are some beautiful images of Her: and hopefully the publicity may be good for the artists involved. Although there are also some images – of Father and of female and male together that I find far too stereotypical for my taste, the plethora of female images for the Divine remains enabling for the gentle changing of minds in the right kind of setting … a meditation space or some religious/spiritual events, particularly wherein She has previously not been admitted.

However this DVD is not the kind of resource that I would use at any of my events or in my work. I may on the other hand follow up on some of the artists represented. I do think images are very important; they are essential in fact to the re-imagining of ourselves. In my Goddess work I have always advocated surrounding one’s self with images of Her, from which one may learn and be in-formed … we learn far more in our bodyminds by mimicking the demeanour of the Deities, as some religious traditions are well aware. My favourite well-used book in this regard has been Hallie Iglehart Austin’s “The Heart of the Goddess" (1990) … it is still unbeatable: if only it were a DVD.

Notes
1. The Universe is One from the Beginning, not Two: meiotic sex did not occur until 1.5 billion years ago, thus apparently it was preceded by some 12 billion years of Creativity. That is, female plus male is not an essential equation to the Creativity of the Cosmos. See PaGaian Cosmology Chapter 2 for more.
2. "The brotherhood is within the Motherhood" is a quote from my beloved partner Taffy Seaborne.

Australian Glenys Livingstone is author of PaGaian Cosmology and holds a Ph.D. in Social Ecology from the University of Western Sydney, Australia. For more about her and her work, visit http://pagaian.org/

TAGS: news DVD reviews spiritual feminism Goddess Feminine Mysticism in Art Glenys Livingstone

REVIEW: 'Secret Life of Bees' DVD

Since it was first published in 2002, "The Secret Life of Bees," (Viking Penguin) by Sue Monk Kidd has sold over 5 million copies. The DVD version was released in February after the movie, produced by Twentieth Century Fox, debuted in October 2008. I read the book when it came out and decided to rent the DVD because I hadn’t seen the movie. I wanted to see how much of the sacred female imagery was retained in the film script and am happy to report that much of it remains. As you might expect from the cast credits, the acting is excellent–with Queen Latifah as August Boatwright, and Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo as her sisters, May and June, with Dakota Fanning as 14-year-old Lily Owens and Jennifer Hudson as the Owens’ housekeeper, Rosaleen. It was also worth at least the price of rental to see the visuals of the Boatwright sisters’ pink house, their honey-filled kitchen, August’s blue bedroom, and the parlor with its red velvet, doily-bedecked sofas and wooden ship masthead that the Boatwright sisters identify with Mary, Mother of Jesus. In addition, the DVD contains both the movie as shown in theaters and a director’s cut, along with a number of additional features, such as scenes that were cut from the final film, an interview with Sue Monk Kidd and commentary from others.

In case you’re not among the millions who have read the novel, let me mention that the setting of the book (and film) is the Southern USA during the often violent aftermath of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It is this aspect of the film, as well as the mother-daughter relationship, that most of the reviews focus on. Since these themes have been thoroughly covered in mass media reviews I'm not going to say much about them, but rather focus on aspects that are rarely mentioned in reviews – especially those in the mainstream media: the "Mary" in the parlor and the bee symbolism. (BTW, I usually don’t read other reviews before I review a book or DVD, but since I was trying to decide whether a review from me could add anything, I made an exception in this case.)

Lily and Rosaleen are led to Tiburon SC by a memento left by Lily’s mother who died when Lily was very young. The memento is a label from a jar of "Black Madonna" honey. In the movie, the label's Madonna and child are honey-colored with African facial features. On the reverse side of the label is written: "Tiburon, SC." When Lily and Rosaleen leave home, (Lily to escape an abusive father and Rosaleen to escape violence that occurs when she tries to register to vote) they head to Tiburon and there find the pink house and behind it, the Boatwright honey house and bee farm.

Before getting into the symbolism, let me mention what I feel is one drawback of the movie/DVD version: it sometimes seems to lack flow due to insufficient transitions. I wonder if people who haven’t read the book will be a bit lost because of this. For example, sitting in the kitchen, Lily asks for an explanation of the wood figure in the Boatwright’s parlor. Without further discussion, the film moves abruptly forward several days when the Boatwright sisters and their friends, who in the book call themselves the "Daughters of Mary," have gathered for a worship service.

And speaking of abrupt, let me bounce back to a description of that former ship’s masthead. Here’s how the figure is described in the book:

...a carving of a woman nearly three feet tall....She was as black as she could be, twisted like driftwood from being out in the weather, her face a map of all the storms and journeys she’d been through. Her right arm was raised , as if pointing the way, except her fingers were closed in a fist....She had a faded red heart painted on her breast, and a yellow crescent moon, worn down and crooked, painted where her body would have blended into the ship’s wood.
(p. 70)

The DVD shows the figure not black, but medium brown (at least on my TV), and the "driftwood" has been gussied up with a lavender dress. Her face has the look of a woman around 50, one of several ways in which this image is not consistent with the Christian Virgin. To those familiar with Goddess imagery, she may appear to be a Crone or an ancestor-goddess figure of the type once common among Africans (and others). The red heart doesn’t look all that faded and is slightly above her breast, not on it. The crescent moon (a Goddess symbol) appears neither worn down nor crooked to me. But I like Her! Most especially I like her raised clenched fist!

It’s clear to me that this clenched-fist, assertive Mary is not the same as the maiden who, at the Annunciation (Luke: 1:38) responds passively to the angel by saying: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord: Let it be done to me according to thy word."

This Mary in the parlor, she's no one's handmaid!

In the novel, following the lead of August, whose mother was Roman Catholic, the women worship "Mary" every night after watching the news of the civil rights struggle, by kneeling before her, using rosary beads and repeating the Hail Mary, then crossing themselves "from their foreheads to their navels." The film/DVD lessens the Catholicism: the women stand while praying (you can still catch a few words of the Hail Mary if you listen carefully) and they don’t cross themselves. I like this better. It makes "Mary" more of a Universal Mother figure and better prepares us for August’s and Lily’s conclusions about the nature of their Mary.

In the film/DVD, when the Daughters of Mary convene in the Boatright parlor, in response to Lily’s question about "Mary," the story August tells has been shortened to eliminate the explanation of why the figure is called "Our Lady of Chains" (in the book, August says she got that title not because "Our Lady" was chained, but because she broke the chains with which a slave-owner tried to restrain her, see p. 110); I don’t remember hearing the Chains title used in the film. To read how Kidd combined European Black Madonna imagery with two other figures – an actual boat masthead and another figure related to the title "Our Lady of Chains" – go here. During the "church" service, the Daughters show Rosaleen and Lily how to commune with "Mary" by placing their hands on her heart.

It seems to me that the Boatwright sisters and other "Daughters of Mary," identify the wood figure with the Christian Madonna because that is the only divine female figure they are familiar with. In the novel, in response to Lily’s fears about being parted from Mother Mary if she should ever leave the Boatwright house, she and August have this conversation:

"Listen to me now, Lily. I’m going to tell you something I want you always to remember, all right?"....
"All right," I said, and I felt something electric slide down my spine.
"Our Lady is not some magical being out there somewhere, like a fairy godmother. She’s not the statue in the parlor. She’s something inside of you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?"
"Our Lady is inside me," I repeated, not sure I did.....

I think the theatre version of the movie would have been better if it had included this scene, but it didn’t. However, the scene is included DVD's director’s cut and section of other cut scenes. Eliminating this scene has the effect of making it seem, when Lily repeats a similar statement near the end of the film, that she came to this conclusion on her own, when this concept of divine immanence was something she learned from August, who is not just playing the traditional African American woman’s role of white girl's caretaker, which a number of reviewers objected to, but rather shows that August is Lily’s spiritual mentor and guide; some might even see August as high priestess of the bee goddess.

And speaking of bees, none of the reviews I could find in a web search got the spiritual significance of the bees (the real secret life of the bees?). Bees have a long history of being associated with goddesses including those of Minoan Crete, Egypt, and Greece, to name a few. Melissae, the Latin word for bees, refers to both these goddesses and to their priestesses. Some of the specific connections of Goddesses and bees are: Aphrodite has been called the Queen Bee, Demeter the Mother Bee. In the African Yoruba tradition, Oshun heals the sick with magic honey, is mythologically associated with bees, especially the Queen, and one of her titles is "Owner of Honey."

The Boatwright sisters can be seen as melissae, priestesses of the Bee Goddess, and August, so grandly played by Queen Latifah, as high priestess. She initiates Lily into the priestesshood by showing her how to control the bees with love and how bereft a hive is without a Queen Bee. You think my association of the bees with Goddess symbolism in this book/movie is too much of a stretch? Hah!

If there is any doubt whether Kidd intended this symbolism, let me just mention that she has given Lily the middle name, Melissa. Unfortunately, mention of this was dropped from the film/DVD. But in the book it first appears (p.41) when Lily experiences what may be considered "a call" related to leaving her abusive father:

I heard a voice say, Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open.
[Italics Kidd’s]

This middle name, Melissa, is used again, sparingly but at times of intensified spirituality in the book (see pp. 64 and 288).

Blessed bees!

TAGS: news DVD reviews spiritual feminism Bee Goddess Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd

REVIEW: Signs Out of Time

Signs Out Of Time: the story of archeologist Marija Gimbutas (DVD)
Narrated by Olympia Dukakis; directed & edited by Donna Read; written by Starhawk; music by Stellamara with Sonja Drakulich. Belili Productions. 60 minutes.

The combination of inspiration and scholarship that many of us have come to know through the previous Read/Starhawk collaboration, Women and Spirituality:The Goddess Trilogy, continues in the 2008 DVD version of the 2003 film/video Signs Out of Time.

Signs Out of Time focuses on the work and life of Lithuanian-born archeologist Marija Gimbutas (pron. Mar-i-a Gim-boo-tas), perhaps best known among non-academics and Goddessians for her 1989 book, The Language of the Goddess, in which a mythology emerges from her decoding of the repetition of symbols in Neolithic artifacts unearthed from Old Europe.

The first thing that grabbed me watching the DVD was the opening music. Though Lithuanian, it is close in style – especially the strong-throated women’s singing – to music I’m very familiar with from more than 40 years of dancing folk dances from Eastern Europe – for instance, from Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and countries and areas (such as Serbia and Macedonia) of the former Yugoslavia. This is essentially the same area Gimbutas refers to as "Old Europe." I love this music, love the dances from these regions, some of which are very ancient women’s dances, and wonder if dancing the older dances for so many years (and from a young age) unaware of their relationship to Goddess traditions helped bring me to Goddess.

Visually, Signs Out of Time opens with dancing similar to dances I've danced. The film then intersperses footage from a 1989 interview of Gimbutas conducted by Riane Eisler (whose 1988 book, The Chalice and the Blade, applies Gimbutas’s archeological findings to anthropology and other social sciences) with both still and film footage of Neolithic Goddess artifacts going back to 21,000-24,000 BCE, and quotes from well-known scholars. For example, Prehistorian James Harrod says, "She [Gimbutas] opened up the diversity of Neolithic religious imagery...probably as old as human evolution."

In the Eisler interview, Gimbutas points out that the 3 great inventions of the Neolithic – agriculture, weaving, and pottery – are inventions of women. She tells how her research led her to conclude that "Old Europe is a peaceful culture, without weapons." Brian Swimme, mathematical cosmologist, tells how at first he thought that Gimbutas’ conclusions were "all fantasy," because he couldn’t imagine a time that was free from war. Upon reflection and closer investigation, Swimme came to understand that Gimbutas was onto something valid. Naming the places Gimbutas’ work focused on, narrator and well-known actress Olympia Dukakis observes, "our history books never told us these names."

Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University, who supported Gimbutas' earlier work involving the Bronze Age, became a critic of her Goddess work. He appears in this film criticizing Gimbutas’ work from what I suppose is a strict academic point of view. But I didn’t find his arguments particularly convincing.

Also appearing in the film are Joan Marler, Carol Christ, Patricia Reis, Miriam Robbins Dexter, Vicki Noble, Elinor Gadon, and others. The credits at the DVD’s end list loads of other people and organizations who participated in making the film. If you’re like me, you may recognize there names of Internet friends.

The second half of the film gives us a closer look at Gimbutas’ personal life. She and her family hid from and fled from both the Nazis and the Soviets. She married, gave birth to 3 daughters, and attended university. She was deeply involved in collecting Lithuanian folk songs. She and her family emigrated to the U.S. in 1949 and she found a non-paying position at Harvard University, which allowed her to do research. She tells of the discrimination she faced at Harvard, which at that time admitted only men as undergraduates and apparently also had restrictions on hiring women instructors. In 1963 she found a post at UCLA, ended her marriage, and began what she describes as a happier time in her life. She tells how at the beginning of her academic career as an archeologist she had no trouble getting grants and other funding. But once she started specializing in archeology related to Goddess, she was unable to get funding.

The film then comes what might be called full circle, as we learn about Gimbutas’ excavating of Kilian in Greece and how she came to decode the symbols she found on the artifacts there. And we are treated to more pictures of artifacts.

Marija Gimbutas died on February 2, 1994, in Los Angeles. At her request, her ashes were taken back to Lithuania.

Reis sees the the "backlash" again Gimbutas’ work as "part of the backlash against feminism."

A quote I found on the Gimbutas/Belili website demonstrates dramatically the need for us to take seriously Gimbutas' findings:

Starhawk and Donna were together, editing and writing commentary, on September 11, 2001. Starhawk has vivid memories of playing bits of the film on Donna’s VCR, which would revert back to the news every time she paused too long to think. The Goddess images and beautiful scenes of life in the film were constantly interrupted by scenes of the twin towers falling, the airplanes crashing and the anguish of survivors and relatives. The juxtaposition of the ancient images of peace and regeneration with the current reality of war and destruction deepened our commitment to get this information out to the world.

What I’m hoping is that with the new Administration in the US and possibly with other worldwide changes, the years of trouncing on feminism, both political and spiritual, as well as the disregard for environmental concerns, will end. For it is clear to me that the knowledge revealed by Gimbutas’ work — that human history is not just a saga of wars, that in fact the warring times are far shorter than the times preceding it in which peace and social equality were accompanied by honoring the Earth and females, both human and divine — can give us the courage to reinstitute peaceful, equitable sociopolitical systems as our true heritage, and to do the work necessary to save our planet both from war and from environmental threats such as global warming. Yes, this DVD clearly shows through its exploration of Gimbutas’ work, these things are all interwoven.

TAGS:life DVD reviews spiritual feminism Goddess archeology Marija Gimbutas

GUEST POST:Making 'Women's Power'

Note from Medusa: We are proud to have this guest post by Max Dashu, in which she shares the inside story of the challenges of putting together the newly released DVD, Woman's Power, which now makes available to a wider audience the information that Max has been including in her famous slide shows for years.

by Max Dashu, Suppressed Histories Archives

I've been doing slideshows on global women's history and Goddess veneration since 1973. That was when Donna Deitch asked me to be historical consultant for one of the earliest feminist documentaries. We went through various university libraries in Los Angeles and photographed several hundred slides. This is how I got started using images to teach women's history, doing slideshows at women's bookstores and coffeehouses. Those first 300 photos became the seedlings of the Suppressed Histories Archives, a collection that now contains some 15,000 slides and one hundred slideshows.

In 1976 I created a show called Women of Power. It was a very international look at cultures that honored public female leadership and professions--what I call female spheres of power--and also showed women who overcame the multiple barriers thrown up by patriarchal society. It became the most-requested and most-performed of all my presentations. It was also the most comprehensive.

Before long, there was a magazine called Women of Power, and that phrase began popping up everywhere, to the point where it was becoming a cliché. So I decided to shift the emphasis a little farther and renamed the show Women in Power. Over twenty-five years of presenting it at women's bookstores and coffeehouses, universities and public schools, I kept refining its contents, adding and changing images and stories. New shows hived off from it and grew: "Female Rebels and Mavericks" and "Rebel Shamans: Indigenous Women Confront Empire," among others. Finally, because so much of the original show covered women dealing with patriarchy and empire, I wound up changing the title one last time, to Women's Power. Simple, basic--and yet still so problematic in this world.

About two years ago I decided to take advantage of new computer technology, namely the iMovie program on my Mac, and make a DVD of Women's Power. A techie friend told me, "It's simple; just scan the images and format them to 640 by 480 at 72 ppi." My slide scanner was broken, so he scanned the images for me, and I spent weeks formatting them. Then I imported them to iMovie and started editing. I didn't get very far. Turned out that 72 ppi is for the web, and not high-enough resolution for the video. So I reformatted everything again at 300 ppi. This was still no good. It so happens that iMovie has its own quirky aspect ratio, which is 2880 x 2112. Anything else results in black banding, which was undesirable. For a third time, I reformatted everything. We're talking weeks.

This time things were looking good. But there was a new problem: I couldn't get the pan and zoom function to work. (This is where the "camera" passes across the image or draws in close or pulls back.) For months I was practically banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what could I be doing wrong. I asked everyone who might know about iMovie or computer video what could be causing the problem. No one had an answer. Finally, the explanation was revealed when I tried the same operation on a Mac laptop. Now the pans and zooms worked fine. It was my old, donated G4 that was the problem; it had no video card and lacked enough RAM to run those operations. And that was why all my savvy advisers hadn't been able to diagnose the problem; they couldn't imagine anyone working on such minimal, outdated equipment.

Long story short, I had to get a new computer with sufficient power and storage space for video production. Thanks to a generous donations from a supporter of the Archives, this was accomplished. All that remained was to go deeper into the quirky ways of iMovie and progressively solve the various tech problems that appeared along the way, in editing, sound recording, and other arcane digital mysteries.

By now I had passed several deadlines by which I'd hoped to have the movie finished. Ah, the innocent optimism of the unwary. There were more deadlines to be missed, and more programs to be tussled with: Garageband for sound and the real dragon, iDVD, for disc formatting. No matter: I kept plodding along, cleaning up muddy images, colorizing dull monochromes, adapting vertically-oriented images for a horizontal screen format, editing in transitions, creating title stills.

Actually, tech problems aside, I had a lot of fun designing the movie and creating custom graphics where no suitable images could be found. For the Alexandrian astronomer and philosopher Hypatía, for instance: I ransacked the Web looking for a decent picture, and all the sites featured the same insipid drawing of a fashionable Hellenistic lady. Finally I found a somewhat usable picture, a Renaissance painting showing Hypatía as the lone female amidst a crowd of male philosophers. But it was too low-res, and it also made the Egyptian look rather pallid, with an expression lacking depth. So I imported the image into Photoshop and painted overlayers to make it look good at 300 ppi. The red hair went to black, her eyes became dark and penetrating, and I placed her against a backdrop of Ptolemaic astronomical figures. Voilà: a Hypatía I could believe in. Another image needed to be created for the section on female chieftains in North America. I wanted to talk about how the Shawnee, Miami, and Illinois peoples had parallel tracks of chieftainship for males and females. Yet the European conquest had decimated these peoples and suppressed their culture and history. Finally I located a beautifully painted buffalo hide of the Illinois, which may well have been created by a female artist, and created a still combining this image with text.

Once the basic sequence of images was lined up, it was time to craft a final version of the script and record the voice-overs. Problem was, I had no access to a sound studio. I went to the basement where it was quieter, and recorded a bunch of tracks on my laptop, crouching close to its built-in mic. But this method added unacceptable levels of white noise. I got a USB mic, but it didn't work well with the laptop. So it was back upstairs to the desk computer. There I sat, recording voice tracks--until a car drove by, or someone started talking on the street 8 feet from my window, or a door slammed. Do over. Do over. It was a slow process.

With two months to go before my absolute, final deadline, I scrambled to finalize contributions from the various musicians who had offered to donate their work. The very gifted Terri Rivera Piatt composed and sang a special recording, "The Calling," for the theme music, and contributed other music from her CD, Contemporary Native American Music. Julie Hammond, my talented sister, recorded several songs on Irish harp, some a capella vocals, and the beautiful Sofrimento track that underlays a passage on female liberators. Laney Goodman recorded a haunting passage on Double Native Flute, as well as chimes and bells. The redoubtable rumbera Matú Feliciano assembled her drummers, Rumba Mezclao, and I recorded them on my laptop. Their congas potentize several of the chapter transitions in the movie, and Matu's drumming and singing accompanies the African queens and female shamans.

All this had to be edited into the video, which led to further struggles with iMovie and the Garageband program. At this point, I was working with an extremely complex document: over 200 stills, each with its own voiceover track, and a large number of them with added pan and zoom edits, and on top of all that, dissolves or fades that connected one image to another in a fluid sequence. This is a lot of data, and things can go wrong at that level of complexity. (Yet more RAM would have definitely helped, but I had already exceeded the boundaries of contemplatable debt.) And things did go wrong.

Most movies are made up video recorded with a camera, with sound automatically linked to picture. Mine was like a mosaic made up of many tiny facets. At a certain point, the sound I had so carefully pegged to each picture began to slip, throwing the whole sequence off. I kept lining them back up, but further edits and additions would cause it all to get jumbled up. So I had to carefully calculate the length (in frames, not seconds) of anything that got added or cut, and then compensate accordingly.

Suffice it to say that the whole experience of making the movie was an exercise in tech problem solving. Hardest of all was pouring the movie into a DVD-formatting program, which behaved in incomprehensible ways. I will spare you the details, except to note that it was necessary to burn six master copies before it came out right. The same went for learning enough about the InDesign program to produce the cover graphics.

It was a moment of pure joy to hand over the completed disc for replication. Even better was receiving a shipment of 1000 DVDs in perfectly printed covers, just two days before the release party here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Women in other places, including Britain and Australia, convened showings of the DVD. These were planned as Women's Empowerment Councils, so that after seeing the video women could discuss the issues raised.

For decades, whenever I presented this slideshow, someone would always ask the same questions at the end: How did this happen to women? How did we end up in this severely patriarchal and colonial society? How come we don't know about these female spheres of power, these women and their deeds, their influence, their courage? So Gariné Roubinian, an editor of the feminist journal Rain and Thunder, and I dreamed up this idea of having community screenings of Women's Power as a catalyst for discussion, and for strategizing about what needs to be done now. You are invited to convene more showings and councils, whether women-only or multiple gendered, and to expand the conversation, and the push for change.

For more information about Women's Power, placing orders, and to view video clips from the DVD online, see
www.suppressedhistories.net/womenspowerdvd.html
For articles, see
www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/articles.html