A Question of Silence
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

    Inspired by Mary Daly, you decide to go down to your
neighborhood video store and rent a radical feminist movie to see
tonight.  Impossible, you say?  Not at all.  There actually is an
unabashedly political feminist separatist film sitting on the
shelves of your local Blockbuster or Blockbuster clone.  It's
called A Question of Silence and you'll find it in the foreign
film section.  It is the first feature film of Dutch feminist
filmmaker Marlene Gorris.  It was made in 1981 and was shown in
international film festivals, including the New York Film
Festival, and had a very limited commercial run in this country
(though, through the efforts of a feminist film distribution
collective in England it ran there for many months).

     This is a film I'm very fond of, for its courage, its
honesty, and its power.  It reveals the oppressive nature of
gender relationships across class lines in contemporary Western
societies and goes on to suggest the direction women must move in
to discover their own voices and escape from patriarchal
domination of our very categories of thought.  What's more, it
manages to convey all this   intensely theoretical and political
content through a plot structure that creates riveting drama and
even a certain amount of suspense.  The story centers around
three very ordinary Dutch women, a housewife and mother, a
secretary and a waitress who, though strangers to each other,
happen by chance to be in the same boutique at the same time one
day when the combined pressures of their oppressive lives have
built to such a pitch that they take it out on the unctuous store
manager and beat him to death.  They are arrested and put in the
prison ward of a mental hospital for observation, and a Yuppified
female psychiatrist is assigned to report to the court at a
sanity hearing to determine whether they should stand trial for
their crime.   The male authorities cannot comprehend that three
sane women could have killed a man they didn't know (though men
kill unknown women on a daily basis), and assume the psychiatrist
will find them not responsible for their actions by reason of
insanity.

     To her credit she finds that it's not such a simple matter
to understand these three women.  Having been silenced throughout
their lives, they choose silence in the face of her probing--one,
literally does not speak, another talks incessantly but says
nothing, and the third toys with her and lies to her.  When the
psychiatrist, a woman who has ostensibly "made it" in a man's
world, finally begins to see that she is just as unheard and
unseen as the women are when she tries to say anything that
contradicts patriarchal reality, that is when she comes to see
them as full human beings and sisters, not just as clients.  And
that is when she begins to understand the power of the choice not
to speak in male terms.  Since the conclusion of this film is a
truly remarkable one, and one that would be hard to describe
adequately, I won't spoil it for you.

    There is absolutely no doubt about Marlene Gorris's political
stance and she uses this film as a means of trying to convince
viewers to think and feel likewise.  As a result the film is
highly controversial and polarizing.  Many men and some women
find its sympathetic portrayal of these murderous women morally
reprehensible. In Gorris's defense she does not suggest that
these women should not be punished for the murder--in fact the
conclusion she pushes for is that they are sane and should be
held morally and legally responsible for their crime.  Radical
feminists like it a lot, particularly for the way in which it
unmasks the tenuous position of the liberal feminists who think
they're liberated because they have superficially equal marriages
and are allowed token participation in patriarchal institutions.
It's a good film for a group of women to rent and then have a
good discussion about afterward.  Include men, too, if you want,
but be prepared for a fight if you do.

For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women
and Film.