Women’s Happy Time Commune & Susan Through Corn & The Go-Blue Girl

Guns, cornfields, and cantatas. This program brings together improvised feature films of different genres. Sheila Paige’s WOMEN’S HAPPY TIME COMMUNE takes us into a twisted world of Western film in which the men-hating Roberta wants to establish a commune with other women. Only that the film has “the practical problem of proposing something no one wants to do”, as E. Ann Kaplan describes it (Jump Cut, No. 9/1975). Shot with a team of mostly white women who did not know each other beforehand, the conflicts resulting from this situation contribute to the film’s openness and humor. Yet for all its satire of the Western, the film nonetheless reproduces racist stereotypes of Indigenous representation. While this film was presented at the 1973 Women’s Film Seminar, the other two were shown 1997 at ... the point is to change it. The 1997 program text for Kathleen Laughin’s film reads: “In ‘SUSAN THROUGH CORN’, Susan walks through corn.” The experimental short film takes the program from a fake rural idyll to an urban world of intentional chaos: THE GO-BLUE GIRL was made by Bulgarian-born director Juliana Grigorova at the London National Film School. In this “late punk soap opera” Nina Hagen’s warbling and dancing sets the tone. (fe)

Program:
WOMEN’S HAPPY TIME COMMUNE Sheila Paige USA 1972 16 mm Original version with German subtitles 50 min. 
SUSAN THROUGH CORN Kathleen Laughlin USA 1974 16 mm without dialog 2 min. 
THE GO-BLUE GIRL Juliana Grigorova GB 1978 16 mm OV 23 min.