Between Friday 27th February and Sunday Ist March 600 women from all classes and backgrounds met in Oxford to break their silence This was not an ordinary political conference. though many different groups were represented, sectarianısm was not tne cominant moment. tne most important poltics at tne conterence were the politics of experience, women came together to discuss a sharea isotanon, a commor frustration.
The conterence orginalea irom a nistory workshop in Ruskin College Oxford. It was planned as a fairiy small discussion weekend. A number of interested people met and circulated women s organisatons and individual women. From the start it was an attempt to reach women and get them together; not to lead them. The response to this. tentative and limited project was overwhelming. Bv Saturday morning 000 women had registered in what had become a stage for the womens Lloeranon movement At very short notice the conference had to move to mne exore enion owicine ie was too iaee for Ruskin. This change meant that it took place in wnat nas been a bastion or male supremacy The space of the Union is constructed for authoritarian debate. This imposed a mechanics of formal speaking, there had to be a microphone; people had to come up and speak from a platform. For these reasons the papers became more important than had been intended. Thev had been planned merly to provoke discussion; because of these restrictions they came to dominate it and imposed an artificial and supremicist STrUCLUTC. But despite these frustrations the urgency of the situation was always oresent ana DEOKG through these On Friday night the conference opened with report on the work of individual women's groups. About twenty of these were represented. They ranged from politically affiliated groups, such as IS, Socialist Woman, and women from _Unions to associations Cuch as Warwick group and Women on the Move (transport workers). Twenty women from the Paris "le Mouvement du Creche Sauvage" ETOUD. were also ther.
Despite the variety of positions there was an amazing degree of solidarity and commitment to the struggle for Women's Liberation. Women had come to tna out about caca OUCI S activities and not to indulge in infightingHowever, as tne conterence progressca certala important problems started to emerge. :.. Easy rider is a term for a whore's old man, not a pımp, bur the dude who lives with a chick. Because he's got the easy ride. Well, that s what s happenea to America, man. Liberty's become a whore, and we're all taking am easy ree reter ronea mt norme Dione. 6-9-69.
Lasy Kider is a phenomenon of our times. as much as a product of the media as the product of a life stvle. and so much oi what has been written about the film is stupid and bigoted, that it is hard to know where to begin to pick up the pieces.
Let's start with the commercial product now in its twenty-sixtn week at tne classic riccadilly. In Britain, the film operates on one sure level only as propaganda tor tne meala version of the Californian drop-out life style nis is woat commoa nave basea mem publicity campaign on, they have spent as much money advertising as Hopper raised to make the lilm and the results are all too evident - as fast as Columbia encourages kids to go and see the movie and turn on, it subsidises the nares through taxes to bust them.
The film is easy enough to assess in terms of its commercial qualities. The narrative construction follows the rules of a traditional Hollywood plot - introduce your characters, give them a motivation, enance tne internal tensions with externa lorces, ana resorve le au at the end either through escape or reconciliation. All genre films tall into this pattern, and Easy Rider can be identified as a western where the lonelv heroes ride motorbikes, and the songs celebrate pot instead of whisky. Its not too much to claim that it is in laci a remake tne accepted relationship between mother and children and called for radical changes in childrearing practices and tamily responsibilites. The paper was firmly set in a directly experiential framework. received immeciatery sympathetic response and generated confused and discordent discussions.
The Saturday afternoon session dealt with women and the economy. Papers covered equal With trade union competence, Audrey Wise and and women's role in industrial militancy. others got across a call for women's action in industrial milancy. but tnese papers causeu a certain frustration for they did not grapple with the experiential aspect of women's situation which, for the conference, was the primary concern. Their speeches generated abstract disputes about the positions of women's liberation in the class struggle. The subject became a basis for haranguing, rather than discussions. The real dIVISIon Derween reminIsL. socialist, Trade Unionist and revolutionary stances on the place of the womens struggle remains unresolved Saturday evening recaptured the mood of involvement and urgency. Small workshops oraonn bore s ine sesreners The slick propaganda of images combined witn tne neutranty or tne principar characters (Fonda, Hopper, Nicholson) is a standard technique - we colour unem in witn our own reactions, determined completely by the given setting. In this case the setting is one that includes all the elements of the hippy life style as interpreted by the media - pot, long hair, sex, communes, country rock, the songs and groups are the hits of 69, Steppenwolf, Electric Prunes, and the rest. The dominant motif is a facile contrasting of freedom against the racist fascism of the South. In fact the principal characters can be een as screens, abruptly superimposed agains nis backoroune orawie au toe caaacte istics from this given, static, opposition.
onucaly, tne tlim makes a violently antidemocratic statement. It preaches personal salvation at the expense of socia iustice. and elevates to narrative status the equation: bike + money + arcam - reedom. tne operative factor is of course dream - it is the suDecr or mie sim. wnose oorects are bikes and money. The movie rises to lyrical heights as me camera caresses unese meamne monsters.
bought with cocaine. More than death symbols, unese bikes are an amtirmadon wal you can buy your independence - you can exploit the system to achieve your own individual ends Responsibility is thus removed a generation — the children of middle class affluence can afford to be apolitical.
So we can say that where the propaganda ends, Dennis Hopper's film begins. It emerges as a prodoundly pessimistic work. Again the struggle to revolutionary movements.
SUnday opened with LWO Dabers which attempted womens revolutionary past, to discover their lost history. The third one, written by three women, consciously expressed the silent women of the present. The three housewives from Peckham described their daily lives in a way that made some earlier papers seem complacent about the sheer aruagery or most WONCH This collectively written paper, an experiment for the women who wrote it. demonstrated the fluency with Walca Wolen can express their immediate predicament. At this state such experimental papers were necessarily the most impressive. An organizator wnie duowcu cvevone Lo Dresoi! their own perspectives was essential. Only when evervone has had a chance to express their owr situation can we begin to see the possibilities of the Women's bulang a ponucal stalegy 1o1 Liberation movemenu and political organization that can impliment this strategy The conference was an essential start. Four Women Militants publicity acts to deliberately destroy this quality - "Two men set out to discover Ámerica. .. and can't find it anywhere.' But of course these two men are America, and can find no alternatives to their own self-destruction. Captain America is the portrait of a fucked-up guy - he thinks he only has to take off like a bird, and the sky is his. As a plastic propaganda vessel he is all virtue and charity, but as a flesh and blood victim of his own contradictions, his inarticulateness and innocence emerge as frighteningly realistic pointers to a culture gone crazy. By including all the elements of the new life style, Hopper is able to draw on this vast assemblage to ask the fundamental question: "Do your own thing, sure, but how is it going to affect others?" And on closer inspection, none of the pieces turn out successfully - the commune is a bummer, full of internal tensions, the road becomes a nightmare (no place to sleep, midnight violence), the House of Blue Lights is a cop-out, the acid trip a disaster - Captain America can't even screw anymore. And the ultimate degradation is that the two freemdom riders are still on the road after New Orleans - with nownete to do Whatever genuine criticisms of US life Hopper may have, he fails to make them in this film. By setting it in the South he displaces his heroes into a socia and political mbo; and then not even the South is real - there are hardly any Negroes in the film. The Easy Riders fill the vacuum and suffer the oppressIon - lynching and death. But not as part of the actual exploitation intrinsic to the South.
Thus the Southern violence is turned into an Photos: Sally Fraser.
image - irrational and arbitrary.
At the same time the enemy, from whom the heroes escape in order to be free, is also displaced out of recognition. What destroys the Easy Riders: the lumpen racialism and predjudice of the old slave states or the vicious contradictions which sent them spinning down to New Orleans? By making the killers men who are manifestly not the driving force which crushes the young, and the people, of America, Hopper's film blocks recognition of the system which must be overthrown. Easy Rider is racica out sale rundamenav ar never eucstions America and, this is intrinsic to its structure, it never questions its own nature as a illm For there is another level on which the film should be studied - as a pseudo-documentary. as a calculated reversal of the values it tends to propagate. Hopper and Fonda are not the careess, free-wheeling drop-outs they would like us to believe through their interviews — when shooting the film they were careful to include every selling point of the new culture, as well as make their own comment on it. And with al tne urore sameu uo, tcy ye oceu slugyde all the way to the bank. They tried to shoot the commune sequence on location - but weren't allowed on functioning communes. Keczuse toe commumarus knew uney wert going to be exploited commercially, and put down artistically - there was no scope tor their own statement. And this is the final verdict on Easy Rider - because all discussion centres around the film's content, and we are forced to accept its reactionary form, we are, thus excluded from any meaningful dialogue. John Mathews
Antonioni's new film ZABRISKIE POINT was The Black Dwarf March 7 1970 Page 12