Article titled "Film But What's the Story" from Pittsburgher Magazine
(01/01/1978)
One of Forum's most ardent leaders is western Pennsylvania chairman Mar-
jorie Provan, a middle-aged housewife and mother of four from Irwin. “1 am as liberated as I want to be,” Provan says. “The women in America are the most privileged in the history of the world.” She and other Forum members are fighting to maintain that privilege.
They are working hard to defeat ERA, which Provan maintains would “obliterate the family” by making women and their husbands equally responsible for the support of their families, thus forcing them out of the home and into the job market.
She lists a host of other things which she claims ERA would make inevitable: protective labor laws would be jeopardized; widows could lose preferential tax treatment in some states; alimony and property settlements might work against a woman making more money than her husband; custody of children would no longer be the assumed right of the mother. No matter that protective labor laws were struck down in 1964 by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, or that there is no alimony in Pennsylvania.
But Provan’s biggest worry about ERA, and the factor that has brought a large number of members to Eagle Forum, is the draft. Provan believes that mothers of small children would be drafted and sent to the front lines under ERA. That argument has been labeled a scare tactic by feminists, who point out that there is no draft, and that even if there were, ERA would guarantee women the same physical, psychological, and family exemptions as men.
Provan also insists the ERA would force women and men to share public bathrooms, even though the 1972 Senate Judiciary Committee Report on ERA states specifically that separate rest rooms would not be prohibited. And she warns against other things that have little or nothing to do with ERA, such as the right of homosexuals to marry, teach, and adopt children.
Whether or not these fears are grounded in the realm of possibility, Eagle Forum has done well with them. It was among the stop-ERA forces that convinced four state legislatures to vote no in 1977. Three more states are needed for ratification before the March 1979 deadline. Although Forum has failed so far in its attempts to reverse Pennsylvania’s affirmative vote, ERA proponents are worried enough nationwide that they are lobbying for an extension of the ratification period.
But stopping ERA is not Provan’s only concern. She is coming out strongly
against abortion, pornography, and violence on TV, all of which she thinks are indications of the deterioration of America’s moral fiber. She also wants voluntary prayer restored to the schools, and the “use of textbooks that honor the family, monogamous marriage, woman’s role as wife and mother, and man’s role as provider and protector.”
Provan and Schlafly met when the latter made a presentation to the Allegheny County League of Woman Voters in the early ’70s. Provan organized the North Huntingdon chapter of Eagle Forum in 1975, because she and her members “had gone the fashion show and card party route and wanted to do something significant to bring some morality back to America.” Since then, she has helped form several of the 10 other groups in the Pittsburgh area, whose total membership she puts at 200. (The national organization claims to have picked up 65,000 members, a scant 3,000 or so short of NOW’s numbers, in less than a fifth of the time.)
Now, instead of playing bridge, Provan speaks to church groups and women’s clubs, debates feminists on TV and radio shows, distributes Forum literature, and organizes anti-ERA rallies. She says her husband Charles, a physician, doesn’t mind her activities, "as long as I take care of the kids and the house.” And she says most Forum members are just like her, “plain, average women who are in the silent majority, who are alienated by libbers, and who still want the right to be wives and mothers.” Some are young, single women who are afraid of being drafted; some are divorcees who fear having to pay support to their ex-hus-bands; many work outside the home.
Eagle Forum members want to “leave a better world for their children, not one in which the privileges women presently have were taken away from their daughters,” Provan says. “We are equal under the sight of God, and we don’t need the ERA to prove it.”
Barb Slack
BUT WHAT’S THE STORY?
“When I was a kid I took a watch apart and busted it, and that was the first time I realized that there was a craft to this sort of thing.”
Independent film-maker Roger Jacoby’s reference to his work is tongue-
in-cheek, but appropriate. Walking into his Shadyside apartment is like stepping inside a discombobulated grandfather clock. Spools, reels, and cans of film are scattered about. A rackety 16mm projector stands aimed at a tiny cardboard screen taped to the wall. The corners are cluttered with light stands, cords, film splicers, and other utensils, and everywhere — everywhere — are tangled piles of unraveled film.
Jacoby is one of the half-dozen or so serious film artists in the Pittsburgh area, although you will never see one of his films in a downtown theater. Like most of his colleagues, he is relatively uninterested in commercial film. “I’m tired of people going to the movies to see stories," he says. To him and others like him, the possibilities of film — aesthetic, psychological, and technical — remain vast, unexplored territories. And Jacoby, a skilled cameraman and technician (he has been shooting film seven days a week for a year) who defines art
as “the reason the Jews refuse to give God a name,” is committed to exploration, even though it means forgoing popularity and paychecks.
“Being an independent film-maker is not a lucrative profession,” says the 33-year-old Jacoby. “It’s difficult to have your films circulate around the country to inform other artists and archivists what you’re up to, [and] income from shows and rentals tends to be sparse. It’s not easy. Fortunately. I have a very understanding landlord."
He rummages through a heap of footage. “You’ve got to be obsessed." he says. “Instead of buying new clothes, you buy new film.”
To save money on lab fees, Roger learned to process his own film about five years ago on a jerry-built machine he bought from a friend. The results astonished him. Various chemicals produced incredible (and unpredictable) transformations of color, texture, and grain on the screen. The more he experimented the more excited he became, for he was inadvertently discovering effects that were to become a significant part of his style.
Jacoby was originally trained as a painter. On graduating from high school in upstate New York, he moved to Manhattan and stayed for a time with his aunt, the art dealer Rose Fried, in her Park Avenue apartment. There, under the Picassos and Chagalls that hung on the walls between 30-foot French windows, he absorbed the conversation of such distinguished visitors as Marcel Duchamp and Edward Albee. Shortly thereafter, as a student he helped found the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, along with Mercedes Matter, Willem de Kooning, Senator Jacob Javits, and others.
In the late ’60s he was aspiring toward a future as an abstract expressionist-painter when his friend, the late poet
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and film-maker Willard Maas, convinced him that it would be easier to acquire a reputation as a film-maker than as a painter,
Roger spent the next three years working on an eight-minute film called Future Song. (“First films always take a long time.”) The following year he settled in Pittsburgh — to recuperate from a fractured skull, he says — and made another film, Dream Sphinx Opera. It was shot in Phipps Conservatory and starred Sally Dixon, then director of Carnegie Institute’s Film Section, as the Dream Sphinx.
In 1975, after several more films, he received a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce Kunst Life (“Art Life”), which has at last won him some degree of recognition among the film community. The film, with a cast that includes former Warhol star Ondine is scheduled to be shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this month (Monday, Jan. 9 at 6 p.m.).
Kunst Life consists of a series of separate scenes which deal, physically or metaphorically, with the frustrations of the artist. The film opens with a knight (Ondine) incapacitated by his armor and at the mercy of his squire. It moves on to an excerpt from a TV opera, to a slightly embarrassed matron modeling an evening gown, to a berobed rendition of the duet "Au Fond du Temple Saint" from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, to a woman’s flute lesson, and so on, culminating in
an elderly woman describing her apartment — a scene Jacoby printed startlingly in negative color.
Throughout the 55-minute film, the camera is continually circulating in long, relentless pans, carving its way through the rooms — sometimes at floor level — “like the knife of subjectivity slashing into bare truth," says Roger, “looking for beautiful things.” The disorienting camera movement takes away the viewer's ability to anticipate, and destroys even the most fundamental cinematic expectations.
"Dream Sphinx Opera"
Kunst Life is a difficult film to watch, but that fact doesn't bother Jacoby. “Certainly it makes demands on the audience," he says, “but for the viewer who stays with it, I think he learns something about the nature of film — indeed about the nature of all art.”
Jacoby admits that many people think movies without traditional “sto-
ries” are not demanding, but simply boring. But, he replies, “Sometimes what’s boring is the viewer himself. The boredom is internal and he’s got to work it out and come up with meaning."
Kunst Life has already been shown to a number of film groups in Pittsburgh and various other places around the country. “It’s peculiar,” Jacoby says. “The audiences don’t seem to like it — they’re somewhat outraged by it, in fact — but they keep wanting to see it. I guess that makes it something of a hit."
In spite of the aesthetic success of Kunst Life, Roger is still far from realizing any kind of financial success from it. nor does he expect any. He continues to support himself by teaching film processing at Pittsburgh Film-Makers Inc., by conducting workshops wherever he can, and by playing the piano for the Sunday night silent movie series at Carnegie Institute’s Lecture Hall.
Now he sits tranquilly amid the clutter of his apartment, pondering as Kunst Life rewinds on the projector. Suddenly, above the whirr and clack of the machine, he exclaims, in a voice that seems to leap out of him, “I’ve got big plans for this place — dozens of ideas — about everything!" Pressed to elaborate, he says almost distantly, “Well, for one, I’d like to create a permanent studio that moves . . .” Then, just as quickly, he stops himself. “But I don’t want to talk about it,” he says, “until I do it.”
Jay Suszynski
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