FILM REVIEW – Who Does She Think She Is?

http://www.whodoesshethinksheis.net/

Directed and Produced by Pamela Tanner Boll

Edited and Co-directed by Nancy C. Kennedy

(In association with the Wellesley Association for Women)

It’s not every documentary that compels me to stay up writing most of the night and that weighs heavily on my mind for days. But then again Who Does She Think She Is? is not your average documentary. Directed by Pamela Tanner Boll, mother of three, writer and documentarian, the film looks at the under-representation of mothers in the arts and other creative fields.

But before you say, “ Oh, I’ve heard that one before”…. I ask you to keep on reading.

“It wasn’t until 1986, that HW Janson’s History of Art included 19 women artists, out of 2,300 illustrations.. That’s only 21 years ago,” points out Maura Reilly, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Exhibition, the first museum exhibition space of its kind in the world. Moreover, while most art students are female, 70-80% of artists featured in professional galleries are male. I mean 19 out of 2300 illustrations. What gives?

For all of its startling statistics and polls, Who Does She Think She Is doesn’t feel didactic or preachy. That’s because the film enters the personal lives of women who are real people. They just happen to be struggling to gain respect and recognition in places they are not always invited (or able) to attend. There are museums, yes, but also messy living rooms, backyards full of sculptures and nurseries scattered with toys.

“Art is the soul of any culture,” says featured artist Maye Torres. “The search for why we’re here.” Torres remembers being told that she’d never be taken seriously in the art world because she was a woman and a mother. But Torres points out, “ I think there is a direct link between mothering and art. Creation is an unstoppable force of the universe. But we’re not really taught to follow the heart.”

Or meet actress and singer Angela Williams, passionate on stage and in her love for her children, a woman who nursed her baby between the scenes of an early play. “One day I heard a call and I just woke up. The call just keeps getting louder and louder.”

Or Camille Musser, who, for most of her life, put her art on the backburner. “Painting has brought out another side of me,” she says of her colorful paintings full of memories of her native home, St. Vincent in the Caribbean. Every day she says she feels divided between being an artist and a mother.

To be fair, female or male, mother or not, the life of an artist can be a tough one. When your heart pounds to an inner drive that most people might not see or hear, at some point or another you may be the beneficiary of some strange looks. The urge to create can be an unbearably powerful one, a drive that requires inner contemplation, the vulnerability of self-expression and solitude. It can also be physically and mentally painful to ignore. People will doubt you. At some point or another you will doubt yourself.

Of course, art doesn’t usually pay the bills. So to be true to the force behind art is to be faithful to an inner call that defies “reasonable” explanation. And perhaps that’s the point. To live in that space beyond reason once in a while. Within the realm of passion.

One perfect day, I found out exactly what I wanted to do with my life. When words blend into paragraphs and pages, to me they become sculptures. I add here and chip away there until it feels so right my heart is on the edge of bursting. The satisfaction of writing can be so great that I can become lost for hours in that blissful concentration. But I’m also mother to my deeply loved six-year-old daughter, Isabel, and so, feel pulled into many different directions at once.

As one woman said, “It’s hard to push that urge down. I feel so divided.”

Me too. And I think many women (and maybe men too) are in the same boat.

So, to take my experience as a a writer back to Who Does She Think She Is? What struck me most about the artists portrayed in this documentary (many of whom felt guilty and selfish in pursuit of their art) is that they often ended up using their deep self-expression to heal themselves and others. Their stories make me wonder what might happen if the work of more women were permitted not just into museums and galleries but into an overarching point of view that valued the wide scope of the feminine perspective to the fullest of its expression –in all of its phases.

As one commentator in the film notes, the relegation of women to the sidelines in the creative arts is, “simply not just a woman’s issue.” Rather, it affects everything.

Read Kim Nagy’s interview with Pamela Tanner Boll.

To order the Special House Party Edition of Who Does She Think She Is? Click here

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Kimberly Nagy

Kimberly Nagy, Founder

In 2006, Kim Nagy founded Wild River Review with Joy E. Stocke; and in 2009, they founded Wild River Consulting & Publishing, LLC. With more than twenty years in the field of publishing, Nagy specializes in market outreach and digital media strategies as well as crafting timeless articles and interviews. She edits many of the writers who appear in the pages of Wild River Review, as well as clients from around the world.

Nagy is a poet, professional writer, and dedicated reader who has interviewed a number of leading thinkers, including Academy-Award winning filmmaker, Pamela Tanner Boll, MacArthur Genius Award-winning Edwidge Danticat, historian James McPherson, playwright Emily Mann, biologist and novelist, Sunetra Gupta and philosopher Alain de Botton.

Nagy received her BA in history at Rider University where she was influenced by professors who stressed works of literature alongside dates and historical facts–as well as the importance of including the perspectives of women and minorities in the historical record. During a period in which she fell in love with writing and research, Nagy wrote an award-winning paper about the suppression of free speech during World War I, and which featured early 20th century feminist and civil rights leader, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Nagy continued her graduate studies at University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she studied with Dr. Karen Kupperman, an expert in early contact between Native Americans and the first European settlers. Nagy wrote her Masters thesis, focusing on the work of the first woman to be accepted into the Connecticut Historical Society as well as literary descriptions of Native Americans in Connecticut during the 19th century. Nagy has extensive background and interest in anthropological, oral history and cultural research.

After graduate school, Nagy applied her academic expertise to a career in publishing, in which she worked for two of the world’s foremost publishers—-Princeton University Press and W.W. Norton—as well as at Thomson, Institutional Investor Magazine,Routledge UK, and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic.

In Nagy’s forthcoming book, Triple Quest, mythology and literary classics provide the map for her epic quest–to find a lineage of role models and thinkers that feed the author’s hunger to live deliberately and with dignity in the 21st century.

EMAIL: knagywrr@gmail.com
WEBSITE: www.KimNagy.com
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/iknagy?ref=profile
TWITTER: kimnagy

KIMBERLY NAGY IN THIS EDITION:

ART – INTERVIEW – Pamela Tanner Boll – Dangerous Women: Creativity, Motherhood, and the World of Art

ART – INTERVIEW – Suzanne Opton and Michael Fay – The Human Face of War

Controversial Marcellus Shale Gas Pipeline Threatens Delaware River Basin and Rural Communities in the Northeast

FILM REVIEW – Who Does She Think She Is?

INTERVIEW – Keeping Time: A Conversation with Historian James McPherson

INTERVIEW – Paul Holdengraber – The Afterlife of Conversation

LITERATURE – The New York Public Library at 100: From the Stacks to the Streets

MUSIC – INTERVIEW – Beata Palya – The Secret World of Songs

NEW FROM WILD RIVER BOOKS – Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines

PEN – First Editions/Second Thoughts – Defending Writers: PEN and Christie’s Raise One Million Dollars to Support Freedom of Expression

PEN WORLD VOICES – INTERVIEW – The Page is My Home: Giaconda Belli – Nicaraguan Poet, Writer and Public Intellectual

PEN WORLD VOICES – The Power of Conversation: David Grossman and Nadine Gordimer – The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture

PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL – ON AFRICA – May 4 to May 10 Behind the Scenes with Director László Jakab Orsós: Co-curated by Award-Winning Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

PHOTOGRAPHY – INTERVIEW – Christine Matthäi – The Light of Innocence: On Playfulness, Trees and Growing up in the former East Germany

PHOTOGRAPHY – INTERVIEW – Every Face Tells a Story: A Conversation with Photographer, Beowulf Sheehan

PRESS RELEASE- Wild River Books: Surprise Encounters by Scott McVay

PRESS RELEASE: Wild River Books Announces the Stoutsburg Cemetery Project: The Untold Stories of an African American Burial Ground in New Jersey

PRINCETON – INTERVIEW – Dorothea von Moltke and Cliff Simms: Why Independent Bookstores Matter, Part 1

PRINCETON – INTERVIEW: Boundless Theater: An Interview with Emily Mann

PRINCETON – INTERVIEW: Quarks, Parks, and Science in Everyday Life: Filmmaker Chris Allen’s Documentary where Art Meets Science in a Vacant Lot

ROLEX ARTS INITIATIVE – “That Email Changed My Life”: Pulitzer-Prize Winning Poet Tracy K. Smith Celebrates Rolex Arts Initiative & Publication of ORDINARY LIGHT at the Harvard Club

SCIENCE – INTERVIEW – Greg Olsen – Reaching for the Stars: Scientist, Entrepreneur, and Space Traveler

SCIENCE – INTERVIEW – Sunetra Gupta – The Elements of Style: The Novelist and Biologist discusses Metaphor and Science

SCIENCE – The New York Hall of Science Hosts 1001 Inventions – Muslim Heritage in Our World: A Conversation with Dr. Margaret Honey

What a Difference a Word Makes: A conversation with Pakistani Poet and Translator, Waqas Khwaja

Wild River Review and Minerva’s Bed & Breakfast Presents – “BITTER” Writing in a Weekend: How to Write About the Things We Can’t Change

» View all articles by Kimberly Nagy

Kimberly Nagy

Comments

Joe Glantz (not verified) Posted 02:12 AM on Mar 25, 2016

The County Theater in Doylestown run by John Toner would be a good place to target this movie. John has similar theaters in Ambler and Bryn Mawr. I know the film ran at a Bryn Mawr Theater (not sure if if was John’s).
http://www.countytheater.org/

Kimberly Nagy Posted 02:12 AM on Mar 25, 2016

Hi Judy,

Thanks so much for your note. In fact, I am publishing an interview with Pamela Tanner Boll in our next update and will let you know when its out. The DVD should be available in early 2010, I beieve.

Best to you,

Kim Nagy

Judy (not verified) Posted 02:12 AM on Mar 25, 2016

Hi Kim, Thank you so much for posting info about this movie. I would never have found out about it on my own. It seems to focus on women in visual art, but there is probably plenty in it that women writers can identify with. Any chance Wild River would host a screening? I am in Bucks County, and a quick scan of the web site shows it’s not being screened near here right now. Thanks again, Judy

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