Expand Your Mind at the MadCat Women's Film Festival

Bay Area BusinessWoman

By Julia Hawkins, Oct 01, 2001

MadCat is the brainchild of Ariella Ben-Dov - founder, director, film maker and producer - who studied film at Hampshire College and coordinates conferences at Sundance. Ben-Dov launched this all-volunteer, labor-of-love- supported festival because she noticed women were not getting curated in film festivals.

"Women are doing incredible experimental work - old and young, [but] they are not getting a fair hearing." By giving women film makers a forum, she hopes to get them their deserved recognition. Although she requires that the festival movies be made by women there is no requirement for particular topics.

The festival's thematic impartiality reflects a toughness that underlies the festival's name. The term MadCat seeks to take back the weakness implied in the patronizing and belittling euphemisms for women: pussy, kitten, catty. The movies' subjects may be controversial but they must be artistically remarkable and strong.

"I want the film maker's ideas to be cinematically justified," said Ben-Dov in a recent interview. "I choose films (this year 53 out of over 500 submitted) that are challenging and that justify the use of sound and image. It's definitely my goal to entice people to watch experimental film and gain access to more complex ways of visual storytelling."

By "experimental," Ben-Dov does not mean the clumsy sound and visuals of amateurs and unskilled innovators; she demands polished work which may nonetheless be hard to watch for reasons other than experimental technique.

"I've been to screenings of experimental films that had problems with sound and image - that's not what it's about," said Ben-Dov. "Movies use an uncommon language of convention - deliberately engaging the viewer in conversation; movies offer a new use of language." And the series is for the general, not an elite, audience. The movies are not made for women but for everyone; the issues cover common experience.

It was from seeing the innovative movies in her college classes, particularly Leontine Sagan's 1931 Maedchen in Uniform (which will be shown Sept. 4 at the El Rio venue and is arguably either an allegory of facism or a lesbian romance or both), that hooked her and launched her movie-making and producing career.

Ben-Dov has become curator par excellence; that is, she organizes the festivals into thematic evenings as a way of helping the movie goer understand the move-maker's ideas, and she shows old movies as explicators of the new which in turn elaborate on the older movies' techniques and ideas.

For example, on the theme of rebels, on Sept. 7, two films depict political action. Lynn Sachs's Investigation of a Flame looks at the nine Vietnam protesters who burned draft board files with homemade napalm on May 17, 1968, and is an example of radical action. Its companion piece, Greta Snider's The Magic of Radio, offers another form of citizens' political participation, here on the air waves on free-speech radio.

Other topics include love and desire, horror, beauty, sexual objectification, writer's block, toys, Robert Altman, Valentine's Day, the renowned librarian Hedwig Page, home, family, nymphets who run amok in a shopping mall, for example, and the film makers employ video, animation, puppets and other cinematic techniques that expand movie language.

Ben-Dov's focus on cinematic justification for a particular story places her in the artistic mainstream that would have this art form reclaim its poetic imaginative roots. When the first jerky and simple movies left the peepshows over 80 years ago and film makers started connecting scenes to create story line, it was necessary in some theaters to hire an explicator, a man with a pointer who told the audience what was going on scene by scene.

We know, today, that the juxtapositions of images imply that the images are connected in meaning. There was a time not long ago when prisoners, for example, released after 10 years and cut off from movies and television, could not follow movie plots because the techniques for visual storytelling had changed so radically over time and required knowledge of new visual codes.

Viewers have had to learn how to decipher the reasons for and meaning of artists' use of sound and image. It has been said that movies now fulfill the ancient dream of a universal language, but for this language to be communicative it must be alive and grow. Festivals like MadCat keep this language vital by expanding its vocabulary.

What director Peter Brook said about the theater as an attempt to make the invisible visible can be applied to movie making. Movies' role and challenge are to explore connections that otherwise are not perceived and understood. Movies can enlarge our, the viewers', understanding and sympathies about the world we live in and our relationships to others in a way that other art forms cannot. The standards of the movie critic for Esquire Magazine, Dwight McDonald, reflect movies' potential for unique, formative experience: Does the movie change our perception of the world? and Do we remember the movie with pleasure long after we've seen it?

Ben-Dov agrees with these criteria, but above all asks that movies be visually and acoustically creative, expressing feelings and ideas that cannot be expressed by print or sound alone. In fact, Ben-Dov hopes to introduce experimental and innovative movies to new viewers as well as to challenge the movie buff.

MadCat will be showing movies at neighborhoods easily accessible to the general public, and will show movies at night and over a longer period than other festivals do. They will also provide free barbecue (at El Rio) and live music (at Artists Television Access), and showcase superb films.

"This is not a rah rah woman's festival," Ben-Dov said. The festival is for those who like interesting and challenging film. "Everyone is encouraged," said Ben-Dov.

Virginia Woolf poses the central question in an essay on movies and reality: "Is there some secret language which we feel and see but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?" She answers, "The likeness of thought is, for some reason, more beautiful, more comprehensible, more available than thought itself." Good movies provide images that are the likeness of thought, and this is one reason why we need film festivals like MadCat.