Bonnie Sherr Klein's 'Not a Love Story' 9781442621718

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Bonnie Sherr Klein and the National Film Board
2. Making Not a Love Story
3. Polyvocality in Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography
4. Not a Love Story and the Porn Wars
Epilogue: Two Filmmakers – A Love Story
Production Credits
Further Viewing
Further Reading
Notes

Citation preview

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S NOT A LOVE STORY

Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story” provocatively examines the first Canadian film to explore pornography’s role in society from a feminist perspective. Directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein for Studio D, the National Film Board’s women’s unit, the film featured both Klein and Lindalee Tracey, an activist, performance artist, and stripper, as they toured the seamier fringes of pornography and sex work in Montreal, Toronto, New York, and San Francisco. Censored in Ontario upon its release in 1981, Not a Love Story collided with the escalating “Porn Wars” that contributed to the tearing apart of the second-wave feminist movement. Using interviews with members of the crew and extensive archival research into the production process, Rebecca Sullivan delves into the creation and reception of Not a Love Story to explore the issues of censorship, sexual labour and performance, and documentary practice that the film raised. An insightful analysis not just of the film itself but of the issues which surround feminist analyses of pornography as a genre, Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story” offers a fresh assessment of Canada’s women’s movement and the politics of feminist filmmaking during a volatile era. (Canadian Cinema) rebecca sullivan is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

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CANADIAN CINEMA 12

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S NOT A LOVE STORY REBECCA SULLIVAN

UNIVERSITY OF TO R O N TO P R ES S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2014 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. isbn 978-1-4426-4988-0 (cloth) isbn 978-1-4426-2724-6 (paper)

Printed on acid-free and 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Publication cataloguing information is available from Library and Archives Canada.

Mitch Kern (Alberta College of Art and Design) selected and edited all images from Not a Love Story that appear in this book. TIFF and the University of Toronto Press acknowledge the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the government of Ontario.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

To Sebastian, my own great love story

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

3

1 Bonnie Sherr Klein and the National Film Board

15

2 Making Not a Love Story

23

3 Polyvocality in Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography

35

4 Not a Love Story and the Porn Wars

91

Epilogue: Two Filmmakers – A Love Story

109

Production Credits Further Viewing Further Reading Notes

117 119 121 123

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Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank the editors of the Canadian Cinema Series, Bart Beaty and Will Straw, and Siobhan McMenemy, Frances Mundy, and Judy Williams of the University of Toronto Press. Thanks to all the individuals who graciously agreed to be interviewed and share their thoughts on the film, including Varda Burstyn, Susan Cole, Megan Ellis, Ellen Frank, Anne Henderson, Dorothy Hénaut, Bonnie Sherr Klein, Pierre Letarte, and Peter Raymont. A special thank you to Bonnie and Michael Klein for welcoming me into their home and their lives. My colleagues Alison Beale, Zoe Druick, Alan McKee, Catherine Murray, and Katharine Sarikakis, as well as my two anonymous reviewers, provided support, encouragement, and thoughtful critique. Research assistance from Sebastian Buzzalino and Daria Smeh made possible the rich archival and interview material gathered for this project. My photo editor, Mitch Kern, from Alberta College of Art and Design, worked closely with me on photo selection and taught me valuable lessons on the importance of images to analysis. Thanks also to Susan Trow for her assistance in identifying the provenance of the photos. I am extremely fortunate to have at the University of Calgary an amazing group of gender and sexuality activist students who have enriched and challenged my thinking. Sincere appreciation to all the members of the Women’s Studies and Feminist Group, Women in Leadership, Consent Awareness

Acknowledgments

and Sexual Education, the Q Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity, Queers on Campus, “Yeah, What She Said” (CJSW), and the Women’s Resource Centre. A special shout-out to Tiffany Sostar and Sasha Krioutchkova for always keeping me on my toes. This book could not have been possible without the unwavering love of my family. To bart and Sebastian, thank you for always believing in me. I had many long and inquisitive conversations about Not a Love Story with my mother, and my two oldest sisters, Cara and Kate, who remembered the film and the sexual ferment of the time. I would give anything to have just one more conversation with my mom, but I remain grateful that I was raised in a family that asked questions, challenged ideas, and was always prepared to grow into new ways of thinking.

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Introduction

It has been hailed as revolutionary, and denounced as reactionary. It is arguably the most controversial and certainly one of the most commercially successful documentaries in the history of the National Film Board. Over thirty years since its making, Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography remains a touchstone in debates about sexuality and gender, and about the politics of feminist activist filmmaking. The film was produced in 1981 by the NFB’s Women’s Unit, more colloquially known as “Studio D,” and directed by resident filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein. It features Klein exploring the seamier edges of pornography and sex work accompanied by a charismatic performance artist and stripper, Lindalee Tracey. Together this “Madonna and Whore” duo enter the world of pornography and its opposition. The picture it paints is bleak and relentless, its message overwhelming: pornography destroys love, destroys eros, destroys the soul. When the film first debuted at the Toronto Festival of Festivals on 11 September 1981, pornography was fast becoming a key issue for the Canadian women’s movement. Growing networks of activists and artists across the country protested the sexist values inherent in much pornography, including the stigmatization of homosexuality and the glamorization of sexual violence against women. They did so from very different, often clashing, perspectives, encouraged (some might even say goaded) by the more hyperbolic rhetoric of their American coun-

Not a Love Story poster. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein.

Introduction

terparts. While many tried to argue for nuance and context, the debate hardened between those who defined themselves as anti-pornography and those who defined themselves as anti-censorship. Partly as a result, the women’s movement spiralled into an untenable state of turmoil. The 1980s and into the 1990s have gone down in history as the era of the Sex Crisis in Canada, marked especially by the so-called Porn Wars.1 Not a Love Story is central to that history. It is almost impossible to find an analysis of the film that doesn’t hold it up as emblematic of everything that went wrong with feminism and feminist filmmaking in the 1980s. In the first scholarly assessment of feminist filmmaking in Canada, Gendering the Nation (1999), Not a Love Story is represented by a 1982 reprint of B. Ruby Rich’s devastating review of the film in the Village Voice. The editors of the anthology add in their introduction that the film was produced within an insular institutional matrix that parroted “a standard meta-narrative of women’s oppression” borne out of the privileges of being white, middle-class heterosexual women, and offers nothing more than a “pro-censorship feminist morality play.”2 More damning, however, were the accusations levelled by the film’s collaborator and central subject, Lindalee Tracey. In her 1997 autobiography, she claims that the film left her feeling “betrayed and sickened,” and that she was reduced to a “cheap cliché.”3 Later in life, Tracey herself became a well-regarded documentary filmmaker and author, but the hurt over the film only grew stronger. In her last interview, published posthumously in POV magazine, she accuses Klein and the producer, Dorothy Hénaut, of exploitation and intimidation.4 As the Porn Wars subsided, and more sophisticated theories of queer culture, sexual citizenship, and feminist pornography gained traction, assessments of the film were almost exclusively negative and frequently aligned it with the radical feminist anti-porn activism of the 1970s and 1980s. This, I contend, is an overly simplistic approach, but also one which I originally shared.

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When I first saw Not a Love Story, in 1992, I hated almost everything about it. I rolled my eyes at the smug righteousness of the American activists and the irritating sensitivity of the penitent men. Most of all, though, I hated what I thought the film did to Tracey, frog-marching her through the (porno) valley of abjection. However, I also felt uneasy with the way that feminism was often used as a dirty word to dismiss the film. Even Tracey, whose own film work was noteworthy for its attention to women’s rights, contemptuously referred to Klein and Hénaut as “the feminists” in her final interview.5 Meanwhile, the more times I watched the film, the less didactic, censorious, and moralizing it seemed to be. There were just too many contradictory moments to insist on a completely one-sided perspective. I still grit my teeth every time Kathleen Barry shows up on screen, but I began to believe that the film deserved a closer reading, unencumbered by memories of the vicious bloodletting of the Porn Wars. Thus, I approached my research into the film with two major tasks in mind. The first was to look more closely at the sex workers interviewed and shown performing in the film. Furthermore, I needed to assume that they knew what they were doing when they agreed to be filmed and were in command of their own on-screen performances. Scant attention has been granted them in the past, except to claim that they are patronized or even outright exploited by the pornographic lens of the film.6 There are distinct problems with their portrayal, to be sure. However, there are many instances where the integrity and agency of the sex workers is clear. It is also worth noting that Not a Love Story was one of the first attempts to actually give voice to the women and men who worked in the sex industry without expecting them to recant or testify to their own exploitation. Second, rather than using my initial interpretation of the film to assume specific attitudes and intentions by the director, I decided to ask Klein and others about the making of the film. This book is informed by

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Introduction

a series of interviews with the surviving principal members of the film crew: Bonnie Sherr Klein (director), Dorothy Hénaut (producer), Anne Henderson (editor and associate director), and Pierre Letarte (camera). Unless otherwise noted, all direct quotes come from our meetings. I devoted a considerable amount of time with Klein in her home. At the end of three days of interviews, we watched the film together. It took over five hours of debate, discussion, and disagreement to complete the sixty-nine-minute film. In the case of Lindalee Tracey, who died in 2006, I am relying on extant interviews, news reports written both by her and about her, and her autobiography, Growing Up Naked: My Years in Bump and Grind (1997), in which she discussed her involvement with the film and her evolving thoughts on both pornography and documentary filmmaking. I also sought to deepen my understanding of the Porn Wars by speaking with activists from Vancouver and Toronto, including Varda Burstyn, Susan G. Cole, Megan Ellis, and Ellen Frank. There are, of course, many more individuals I could have spoken to and wanted to speak to, but for various reasons did not. To complement my interviews and verify the different assertions, I made a number of requests for information to the NFB. Klein, Hénaut, and Burstyn also generously shared their personal papers with me. The archival documents include production notes, contracts, screening schedules, publicity, media clippings, and private correspondences. There is also an unfinished book manuscript written by Klein, Hénaut, and Tracey that was shelved around 1983, in which they reflect upon their experiences with the film. Because the project was abandoned and remains unpublished, I do not cite any of the material written by Tracey. Interestingly, requests to the NFB for documents pertaining to demands made by both Tracey and Klein that they cease using Tracey’s image to promote the film were refused because, according to their letter to me, “the records in question fall under section 23 of the [Freedom of Information] Act, which states: ‘The head of a gov-

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ernment institution may refuse to disclose any record requested under this Act that contains information that is subject to solicitor-client privilege.’” I believe it is possible to open up a new window on Not a Love Story, one that empowers Lindalee Tracey and the other sex workers, not against the film but along with it. In that way, the film can be seen to produce multiple, contradictory responses to a complicated issue that has no easy answers. Bill Nichols argues that the documentary viewer’s emotional engagement with cinematic subjects is far more intense and demanding than in representational fiction film. In short, the audience’s subjectivity is also at risk, as we are expected not simply to watch but to participate in a deep social exchange.7 The discomfort felt watching Not a Love Story has too often been explained away as the fault of the film in turning some of its subjects, most specifically the sex workers, into specularized objects. Yet, I claim that, if anything, the film gives such voice to those subjects that it overwhelms our own desire to reduce the arguments contained therein to a simple case of pro- versus anti-pornography. At stake in such a revisionist analysis of Not a Love Story is a reconsideration of its process in the context of documentary ethics then and now. Upon its release, the film was criticized for its “classic NFB cinévérité style” that was increasingly seen as insufficient for new demands made on documentary filmmakers and their working relationship with their subjects.8 The house style of the NFB was heavily influenced by a documentary tradition that evolved, as Brian Winston puts it, from “[Robert] Flaherty’s exotic individuals, through [John] Grierson’s romanticized and heroic workers to [Edgar] Antsey’s victims caught in [Robert] Drew’s crisis structures.”9 Yet, as Thomas Waugh notes, among the first to break free of that style were feminist and other critical activist filmmakers who saw in those techniques a continued marginalization of their own voices.10

8

Introduction

With Not a Love Story, Klein set new standards and protocols that were not necessarily well received by NFB administrators, nor recognized by her critics. In the first place, she insisted that all participants in the film be paid and that none of the sex workers should lose valuable working time to be interviewed. Second, she agreed to a significant level of input from Tracey both on location and during the editing. It did not extend to the final cut, and Tracey was not offered a co-director credit, but Klein has always insisted that “I agreed from the outset that [Tracey] had the right to say, and do, what she did or didn’t want in the film including the edit.”11 Furthermore, she decided that as much as possible she wanted to show the sex workers both in their performances and then talking about what those performances meant to them. That was her strategy for forcing a confrontation between the objectifying spectacle and the labouring subject who deserves to be heard.12 The clash of cinematic styles – one heavily institutionalized, the other hesitant and not yet sure of itself – drew charges of exploitation, voyeurism, and middle-class privilege. Such criticisms, I suggest, were tactics in a larger battle brewing within the women’s movement that erupted coincidentally with the film’s release. The 1980s were a period of severe conflict within the women’s movement, and pornography was a major stumbling block. The ideal of a sisterhood was crumbling under the weight of very real differences and inequalities. Pent-up anger and resentment crashed against defensiveness and victim politicking. Lines were drawn between generations, as well as between sexual, class, and racial identity politics.13 Not a Love Story was caught up in that uproar. Reviews of the film often assumed that it was squarely in the camp of radical anti-porn feminism, which was apparently enough to justify snide potshots at the filmmakers themselves. Their political sincerity in light of their privileged socio-economic position was questioned, and they were frequently accused of heteronormative bias. The Globe and Mail labelled the film

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a work of “bourgeois feminist fascism.”14 Rich also took them to task for a “self-righteous sense of otherness” that blithely ignored the social and economic inequalities which many sex workers face.15 Both reviews criticized the film for not including gay pornography as a positive counter-example. In a special section on the film published by the Canadian journal Cinétracts, the “privileged and educated middle-class” perspective of the film is claimed to have only “contempt and pity” for sex workers.16 It can be readily conceded that most of the leaders in the women’s movement, as well as those inside Studio D, were white, straight, and middle-class. At times, this privilege overwhelmed debate as recognitions of racial, class, and sexual inequities within the women’s movement were taken as personal accusations. Ellen Frank recalls, “Then, by 1983, that was such a horrible time. It was a growth that had to happen within the women’s movement, but it happened ugly.” Eventually, the heated rhetoric tore the movement apart, and took the only publicly supported women’s filmmaking unit in the world down with it. By the end of the 1980s, most of the resident filmmakers were released from their contracts (largely against their will), and Studio D itself was shut down in 1996.17 Thus, I was prepared for the fact that my requests for interviews would open old wounds that had never quite healed. It placed a heavier burden on me to express the original desires and intents of the individuals involved in the film while still verifying differing versions of events and placing contradictory perspectives in context. The film does speak for itself, but the people who made the film never wanted it to be the final word. It was intended to ask questions, probe inequalities in society, and spark public debate. To ignore that is to miss a large chunk of the film’s life cycle. Anti-porn activism during the late 1970s and early 1980s tended to treat the voices of sex workers within the context of consciousness raising, focusing on tales of victimization, abuse, and a desire to

10

Bonnie Sherr Klein in the studio of Kate Millett, one of the best-known leaders of the women’s movement. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Susan Trow, photographer. Mitch Kern, image editor.

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

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be rescued.18 The most celebrated survivor was Linda Lovelace, whose 1980 autobiography Ordeal, about her experiences working on the canonical porn film Deep Throat, detailed a life filled with both sexual violence and economic exploitation. Championed by such high-profile anti-porn feminists as Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, and Catherine McKinnon, Lovelace was catapulted to the front lines of the Porn Wars. Interestingly, Tracey is often mistaken for Lovelace, in part perhaps because Lovelace was Steinem’s guest of honour at Not a Love Story’s New York premiere in June 1982, which was a benefit for Ms Magazine. Paula Rabinowitz claims that the film “features Linda Lovelace, recently converted from porn star to demure and outraged feminist, taking viewers on a tour of the explicit sex industry.”19 There persists, therefore, a longstanding critique of the film that it purports to rescue Tracey from her stripper past. Rich’s review of the film, based on the New York premiere screening, calls the film a “religious parable,” where “As if Christ had come back as a latter-day Mary Magdalene, [Tracey] literally offers up her body for our, and her, salvation.”20 Rich is correct that Tracey puts her body on the line for this film in ways that both authorize and objectify her presence – and it is not always quite clear which. I would counter, however, that her performance presents a powerful statement on the complexity and multivalences of pornography from the position of the labouring subject. This was a distinctive turn in pornography discourse of the 1980s, which relied too heavily on consumer-based arguments from either side of the debate. More important, Tracey’s self-consciously performative relationship to the film invokes a different ethical approach to documentary filmmaking and its aspirations to authenticity and honesty. Tracey’s deliberate enactments “to carry on the storyline of the film” – as she herself states plainly toward the film’s dénouement – break apart the apparent seamlessness of the documentary structure and offer up instead a new kind of documentary honesty based on contradiction, instability, confusion,

12

Introduction

and anxiety.21 Rather than impose the oft-cited interpretation of the film that claims Tracey repudiates her past as a stripper – something, I contend, she never does either in the film or in any interview she ever gave – I insist that Tracey remains integral and authentic within the film. Her authoritative presence, as well as that of the sex workers, is precisely what makes the film far more open-ended and questioning than is generally believed. Thus, I seek to honour both the harm felt by Tracey and the pioneer efforts of Klein, Hénaut, and others from Studio D who struggled to formulate new cinematic vocabularies for articulating women’s sexuality in a deeply patriarchal and heteronormative society. One of my goals here is not to choose sides between “pro-sex” and “anti-porn,” between “feminists” and “sex workers,” as if by being one you cannot be the other. I feel urgently that we need to be able to say, “It’s complicated,” without triggering a second round of Porn Wars. Thus, I return to one of the opening salvos in the first Porn Wars to see if maybe the conversation could have begun differently. The heated controversy that engulfed Not a Love Story overwhelmed the three principals involved in the film: Klein, Hénaut, and Tracey. After years of intensive touring and speaking engagements and the attempted book project, they were exhausted and burned out. None of them could be called leaders in the anti-pornography movement, nor did any of them remain committed to the cause. Klein has often expressed surprise and concern at being labelled pro-censorship or anti-sex, although she readily concedes that she is uncomfortable with much of the pornography she sees. Hénaut recalls with regret that in English Canada, at least, the ability to have a dialogue about sexuality and sexual relationships between men and women was quickly derailed by the censorship debate. She states, “[Not a Love Story,] a film which used to get accused of asking for censorship, doesn’t mention censorship in any way, and was censored itself. But the dialogue was aborted in English Canada.”

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This book briefly forays into the role of women filmmakers at the NFB in order to understand the political and aesthetic philosophies of Klein and the production process for Not a Love Story. Following a detailed account of the film itself, I then turn to the reception of the film, media reviews and interviews, its use by anti-pornography activists, and the backlash promulgated by pro-sex and anti-censorship activists, using case studies of its release in Canada and the United States. Finally, I conclude with an assessment of the legacies not only of the film but also of Klein and Tracey to activist documentary filmmaking in Canada. I see them both as artists and activists passionately committed to social justice who once shared a platform that ultimately collapsed. The demise of their relationship speaks to larger divides in Canadian sexual and gender politics that Not a Love Story helped expose.

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1

Bonnie Sherr Klein and the National Film Board Not a Love Story is as much a product of an institutional culture as it is of a particular filmmaker’s vision. Both Klein and Hénaut, as well as Studio D’s founder, Kathleen Shannon, were original members and early collaborators in the National Film Board’s Challenge for Change/ Société Nouvelle program (1966–78), an ambitious venture launched by the Canadian government to empower isolated and impoverished communities through film.1 In 1974, when Shannon launched Studio D, Klein and Hénaut were among its first members. Their passionate commitment to activist filmmaking was forged in the crucible of Montreal’s Quiet Revolution, first under the mentorship of the legendary American documentarian George Stoney, then with Shannon and a new wave of feminist activist ideas. By 1980, Klein was a well-established and articulate spokesperson for Studio D who had undertaken a number of significant film projects within the NFB, including VTR-St. Jacques (1969) and Patricia’s Moving Picture (1978). Anne Henderson, then a freelance editor who frequently worked with NFB and especially Studio D directors, recalls her as a “powerhouse” within the NFB: a woman with deft diplomatic and media skills who helped secure Studio D’s standing in the film community. The 1970s were heady days for activist filmmakers, especially those in the bosom of the NFB. It was an era filled with idealism for the power

Bonnie Sherr Klein on location for Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Photographer unknown. Mitch Kern, image editor.

Bonnie Sherr Klein and the National Film Board

of cinema to effect social change. The work of Challenge for Change and Studio D is noteworthy for some of Canada’s most significant non-fiction films and brought the NFB global recognition as a leader in activist documentary. Too often, however, Studio D is treated as an afterthought in the NFB’s history, at best, or, worse, as a tether that held back the other studios from gaining recognition for their more artistically daring work. For example, D.B. Jones singles out Studio D in general and Not a Love Story in particular for putting politics ahead of “art or truth-seeking” in their filmmaking.2 Similarly, Challenge for Change has been criticized for its naïve liberalism even as it is hailed as a precursor to contemporary forms of media democracy and social justice filmmaking.3 I am not suggesting that such critiques are unfounded or unfair, but I am concerned about their ahistoricism. In our haste to condemn the very real mistakes of the past – the victim politicking, the defensiveness, the refusal of difference, the all-or-nothing approach to social change – we judge the past from what we now know of the present. Part of the aim of this book is to bring some historical and biographical context back into the analysis. Bonnie Sherr was born in 1941 to a working-class family in Philadelphia. She remembers joining sit-ins at segregated lunch counters while still in high school, and participating in other actions within the civil rights and anti-war movements of her university years. She took American Studies at Barnard College and later went to Stanford University to do her Masters in Theater, while gaining experience in teaching and acting. At Stanford, she was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements, and sought ways to merge her creative, educational, and political endeavours. She found that path after attending a guest presentation by Claude Jutra and Marcel Carrière of the NFB and seeing the films Pour la suite du monde (1963), Jour après jour (1962), Lonely Boy (1962), and City of Gold (1962). Sherr was amazed to realize that film could be used to critique society, explore the past, express feelings of

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alienation, and offer hope for change. She recalls, “I had never seen social documentary films. These films had all the artistry of theatre but juxtaposed with a commitment to politics that was already a key part of my life.”4 Inspired by these works, Sherr switched into the tiny degree program in Film. When George Stoney arrived as a visiting professor, she became his student and later assistant and editor. Her thesis film, under Stoney’s supervision, was about her experience teaching African American high school students. Entitled For All My Students, the film received funding from the US Department of Education and secured for her a position on Stoney’s next project in New York. Sherr married Michael Klein, a doctor and fellow peace activist, and changed her name to Bonnie Sherr Klein. In 1967, faced with the Vietnam War draft, the two decided to immigrate to Montreal, where she began knocking on the doors of the NFB, her “Mecca.” John Kemeny, one of the founders of Challenge for Change, hired Bonnie to work with him. One year later, her mentor, George Stoney, was recruited to run the program. She was now at the epicentre of activist documentary filmmaking. One of her first projects, with Dorothy Hénaut, was inspired by the work of the St Jacques community, one of the poorest in Montreal. Her husband was a volunteer physician in a free medical clinic operated by the community. She wanted to document their work, but also contribute something to their activism. Together, they conceived of “Operation Boule de Neige,” a project whereby residents of St Jacques would be trained in the new technology of video recording, which seemed more accessible than film. Klein and Hénaut assisted in editing their footage and organizing a one-week festival where the videos were shown on closed-circuit television screenings followed by discussion groups around the neighbourhood. It was Stoney who insisted that there also be a documentary film component to the project, so Klein directed VTR St-Jacques (1969), a twenty-six-minute tribute to the community and to the power of video to transform

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Bonnie Sherr Klein and the National Film Board

lives. This experience of merging activism and art was instrumental to Klein’s growing identity as a filmmaker. In their report to the NFB, Klein and Hénaut readily acknowledged some key problems with their approach, including the difficulty of overcoming time and mobility issues of already economically disenfranchised individuals and inadvertently establishing new hierarchies within the community by training only a few.5 Nonetheless, the project stands out as an early effort to integrate and reflect upon documentary filmmaking as a tool of community organizing.6 Two influential series within Challenge for Change helped give voice to feminist consciousness: the French-language En tant que femmes, launched by Anne-Claire Poirier and Jeanne Morazain, and the Englishlanguage Working Mothers, produced by Kathleen Shannon. En tant que femmes debuted in 1973 with a series of five short films chronicling women’s lives and women’s issues in Québec. The Working Mothers series comprised ten short films that each profiled some of the issues facing working mothers in Canadian society. Although admittedly coming from a largely heteronormative and middle-class perspective, the films in these series were the first to challenge the NFB’s overtly patriarchal culture and to insert women’s experiences and artistic practices into its films. Furthermore, the subjects of the films were not only or even mostly women from similar backgrounds to the NFB filmmakers, but included single mothers, immigrant women, Aboriginal and Métis women, and welfare recipients. These two series set the stage for the founding of Studio D, a unit dedicated to mentoring and training women filmmakers, and more importantly, advancing the causes of the women’s movement and attending to the specificity of women’s voices. By the time Studio D was founded, Klein had already left the NFB and moved to Rochester, New York, where she ran a community access television station. Shannon convinced her to return and help bring leadership to the fledgling unit. One of Klein’s best-known pieces for Studio

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D prior to Not a Love Story was the short documentary Patricia’s Moving Picture (1978), about a woman facing personal and social transformations to the role of wife and mother. With this work, Klein was able to declare, “I have finally accepted that I am an artist, to accept that word instead of fighting it or insisting that I am merely a communicator.”7 The film is an intimate portrait, shot sparsely mostly in mid close-up as Patricia narrates her grappling with depression and her desire to “find me” and live more independently within her family. Klein argued that the simple act of letting Patricia speak on camera – to her husband, to friends around the kitchen table, to the camera that keeps its respectful distance – was both a political and aesthetic act to confound the power of the male documentary lens: “We [at Studio D] reject the voice of authority, the voice of the expert which is the traditional approach of the NFB. Patricia is proof that the experts on women’s lives are the women themselves and not those we usually treat as specialists.”8 Many critics contend that what Klein and Studio D saw as a direct statement against a masculinist ethic within the NFB was a lack of artistic accomplishment and a shrill commitment to a bourgeois politics of the personal. One of their harshest critics, D.B. Jones, argues that the purpose of Studio D “was not to make films in the round but to promulgate a cause.” It spoke only for one half of Canadians, he complains, and “expresses no interest in the art of documentary.”9 Other criticisms note that the institutional structure of Studio D, nestled in the suburbs of Montreal, inculcated a sense of insularity and resulted in a “validative” filmmaking aesthetic. Elizabeth Anderson contends that the contradictory impulses of attempting activist filmmaking within a government-protected bureaucracy separated Studio D from the Canadian women’s movement and other independent film collectives. That, in turn, instilled a non-experimental, didactic approach to filmmaking that began and ended with its own unquestioned arguments about the conditions of women’s oppression.10 Her assessment of Studio D’s

20

Bonnie Sherr Klein and the National Film Board

legacy helps explain one reason for its downfall, but it fails to recognize that the women inside the Studio were aware of and grappling with that privileged isolation. On working at Studio D, Klein recalls, “We really weren’t a part of anything except for our world.” That world was on the outskirts of Montreal, a city in the throes of political and artistic upheaval that seemed like an exotic other to the rest of Canada. Hénaut thinks about Studio D being “an island within an island within an island within an island” as the NFB was split along language as well as gender lines, its offices cut off from the centres of artistic vibrancy, and with the political concerns in Montreal playing out very differently from the rest of Canada. Yet, as activists they could not be exclusively concerned with the conditions of their own artistic work. The members of Studio D considered themselves very much a part of the Canadian women’s movement, and took that responsibility seriously. Studio D produced some of the first cinematic investigations of abortion (Abortion Stories: North and South, 1984), sexual and domestic violence (Loved, Honoured and Bruised, 1980; To a Safer Place, 1987), and immigrant and indigenous women (Great Grand Mother, 1975; My Name Is Susan Yee, 1975; Our Dear Sisters 1975), as well as a few experimental shorts (Rusting World/Déclin, 1980). Other women working with the NFB were also pushing the boundaries. Winnipeg-based filmmaker Norma Bailey made the 1980 documentary Nose and Tina, about a prostitute and her railway worker boyfriend. Klein notes that AnneClaire Poirier’s full-length fiction film about rape, Mourir à tue-tête (1979), was particularly influential and helped inspire the project that became Not a Love Story. Always key to the Studio D filmmaking process was the education program to tour the film and meet with other activists and women’s groups across the country. Hénaut recounts, “Whenever I went anywhere I took a whole package of Studio D films and not just the ones that I had been involved with. We worked with women and we led

21

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

discussions and we helped them use the films as tools without them needing us there. It was so much our aim and modus operandi. It was everything.” Furthermore, Klein felt that as an activist filmmaker, her role was not to be a front-line leader but rather to position herself at the borders of issues. As she described herself, “I certainly consider myself a social change activist but I consider that, as a filmmaker first and foremost, my work is a little removed from the front so that I have the freedom to see a bigger picture, and to act from a position of ‘I’ more than ‘we.’ Film is a medium of questions, ultimately.” It was from that perspective that Klein set out to explore new frontiers of women’s consciousness raising: sexuality and pornography.

22

2

Making Not a Love Story

Not a Love Story had its roots as a project independent of the NFB. In 1979, Klein joined a group of sexually diverse women filmmakers in Montreal who called themselves Foreplay and set out to make an erotic film for and by women. The project was intended to “be fun. It was a chance to be together and talk about what we loved about sex. It turned out to be a real challenge because we kept ending up with images that seemed banal, like kotex advertising. We just couldn’t get very far.” Klein continued to observe and question the sexual media she was seeing, and to raise questions with her filmmaker colleagues at Studio D. They began to share stories about their experiences with pornography, most of which were unarousing or downright coercive. They also discussed what sex meant to them, what they did find exciting, and what they wanted from sexual media. Then, early in 1980, as so often happens in publicly funded bureaucracies, a small pot of money opened up with a very strict fiscal deadline. The only project ready to go was Klein’s idea to explore pornography and sexuality. At this time she insists they had “an honest – it’s hard to believe now – but an honest openness on our part about pornography. Maybe it was titillating and maybe we were missing something.” A new film project developed by Klein for Studio D was called Celebration, “because it would be a film that celebrated our sexuality. Our impulse was to see how sexuality fit

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

into this whole new way of looking at the world, being in the world, as feminists.” Money was released to send Klein and Hénaut on an “investigate,” a preliminary research trip that Klein dubbed “Bonnie and Dorothy in Pornoland.” After encountering little enthusiasm for their project from within Canadian feminist circles, they decided to travel to New York City and meet with some of the leading anti-porn activists there. While touring Times Square, they met a porn producer, Ron Martin, who took them under his wing and helped them make the contacts they would need to shoot the film. Back in Montreal, a proposal was quickly packaged and sent to the NFB programming committee. “The distribution people on the committee said ‘No way. We cannot make a film with pornographic images. It’s undistributable.’ The male filmmakers were offended, guilty, uncomfortable. It seemed as if no one wanted it. Eventually it squeaked by, it passed by one vote.” They now had only six weeks to shoot the film, three of those on location in the United States. While Klein readily admits that she was already extremely critical of the pornography she saw in New York, her goal at first was to offer a balancing portrait of explicit sex that was woman-positive. A friend recommended that she talk to Lindalee Tracey, a stripper, performance artist, and poet in Montreal who organized an annual fundraiser for the Montreal Children’s Hospital, “Tits for Tots.” Klein’s memories of those first meetings are warmly positive: “I have to admit that I fell in love with her. She was funny, she was brilliant and she was already questioning pornography, that was the fabulous thing. She had such a different take on it from me. She was going to defy everyone’s stereotype of a stripper, we were going to break free of the ‘us and them.’” Tracey was already a local celebrity for her outspoken advocacy on behalf of strippers while critiquing the clubs and challenging attitudes of people not in the business. Her arguments were in many ways ahead of their time, and therefore often met with resistance. As she writes in

24

Lindalee Tracey on location for Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Photographer unknown. Mitch Kern, image editor.

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

her autobiography, Growing Up Naked, “When I try explaining the working conditions in the clubs or the power of the agents and our need to organize, the guys get restless and disconnect from me. The girls home in on the moral stuff … I can tell by their tone they think I’m exploited. I can’t interest them in our complexities, our wounds and accomplishments.”1 Yet, at the same time, she notes that the timbre of the clubs was changing. The stage was no longer a performance vehicle but a panopticon, set in the centre of the room so that the audience could get a 360-degree view. Table dancers, working for tips, distracted the audience, which seemed increasingly fixated on fetishes and quick strips. The women were pressured by club owners to speed up their routines and spread their legs to show more than they wanted. “Star quality, performance, imagination, are dying in the hard light of voyeurism,” she laments.2 It took some effort to convince Tracey to join the film, since she told Klein presciently that “film freezes you in a moment in time.” She rightly insisted that she be paid to participate, especially if they were asking her to travel. This was a rarely heard idea in documentary filmmaking at the time, but Klein had already determined that everyone who participated in the film would be paid. Tracey negotiated a rate of $100 a day, not to exceed $3000, plus travel and living expenses, for work between 20 February and 31 March 1980. This averaged out to approximately $545 a week, far less than the $1000 a week she could earn stripping. By that time Tracey acknowledges she was only stripping once every two months to subsidize her growing art practice.3 The honorarium did exceed minimum wage standards by nearly 400 per cent and approximated slightly more than 1.75 times the median income in Quebec. According to the 1980 collective agreement, salaries for NFB resident filmmakers ranged from $28,000 to $36,000. Thus the honorarium placed Tracey at the low end of the pay scale, minus any pensions and benefits.

26

Making Not a Love Story

This careful scrutiny of Tracey’s contractual earnings is worthwhile, since she later claimed that Klein and Hénaut financially exploited her and stated musingly in her memoir that the $3000 “doesn’t seem like much. I wonder how big their salaries are.”4 Klein does recall frustrating battles with the NFB to include honoraria in their budget and the usual bureaucratic red tape to get a cheque cut. Henderson, however, believes that Klein was the first to insist that the people in her films be paid. “To my knowledge, up until Lindalee’s involvement in Not a Love Story, people didn’t get paid to appear with the films they were in. A lot of the films had social issue contexts, and people were interested in talking about those issues, and film subjects were often generous with their time.” Beyond the money, Tracey insisted, “I want all my parts included, the poetry, the home, the performance art. I want to be whole so people know that strippers are complicated and not just bodies.”5 Already in 1980, Tracey was experimenting with forms of artistry and activism that placed emphasis on the body and kinesthetic experience. Her sense of wholeness did not proceed from a goal of epistemological closure that was so often a part of the classic NFB documentary style. Rather, and in keeping with some of the feminist experimentation of Studio D, it seems more related to the consciousness-raising techniques of the women’s movement that moved fluidly between individual and collective recognition of women’s place in the world and opened up creative and political space for the articulation of experience and embodied knowledge.6 Tracey was given rights to request certain staging and scenes while on location, and to view the film during the editing phase so that she could participate in any decisions concerning footage of her. Klein thought that maybe Tracey could be the sole guide in the film, to see pornography through her eyes, but Hénaut insisted that they continue with the plan for Klein to go on camera so that audiences could see two different types of women with different attitudes and

27

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

experiences with sexuality. Klein asked Pierre Letarte, a resident member of the NFB who had worked with Klein at Challenge for Change and on two of her Studio D projects, to join the crew and help advance a new woman cameraperson, Susan Trow. With their soundman, Yves Gendron, the crew set out to explore pornography. Location filming was intense and emotionally draining. Time was more the issue than money, since they had to wrap things up by the end of March, just four weeks away. There was some footage from a visit to Toronto in January, before Tracey signed on. Now, with Tracey’s assistance, they were able to film at Montreal’s Club Super-Sexe on 28 February. Two days later, they were in New York City for two weeks. Afterward, they flew to Wisconsin to meet with anti-porn effects scholar Ed Donnerstein. Then on 18 March they flew to Los Angeles to meet with Suze Randall, the resident photographer for Hustler. Their final stop was in San Francisco to meet with Susan Griffin, as well as other porn activists, both “pro” and “anti,” before returning home to Canada. Tracey’s contract was extended for some final filming in Toronto during April and then as a consultant from 16 April to 23 May while Klein and Henderson prepared for the editing phase. Pierre Letarte reflected on his time on location with Klein and Tracey as a very difficult and challenging experience but one that was also very open and questioning. He and Klein would have long conversations about what they had seen and filmed that day and their own complicated feelings. “We were put into situations where you can’t deny that we were excited, you can’t repress the fact that, maybe for a good or a bad reason, I don’t know, but something was triggered … We would talk about ‘where does it start, where does it stop.’ How did it affect our relationship? I was a heterosexual man working with almost all women, and so we talked about it.” Klein did rely heavily on Letarte to help provide a different perspective while filming, not only training Trow and advising Klein but also occasionally appearing on camera. Letarte states

28

Making Not a Love Story

that “we worked together very nicely because there was a sense of, I’ll call it morality, I guess it has to do with integrity also, with the integrity of the subject, the integrity of the people and what they’re doing, the integrity with our own personal lives. I think we all ended up with this process working very very nicely.” Letarte was acutely aware that the filming was much harder on Tracey, who he recognized “was trotting a line where she was in danger. She accepted doing that and I have a lot of respect for her because of it.” Ironically, he felt that it was Tracey more than Klein who was seeking to “intellectualize” her experiences and not reveal her feelings with the rest of the tight-knit crew. For Tracey, so much more was at stake. Her work as a stripper was extremely rewarding and very important to her. The experience of Tits for Tots had created a sense of solidarity and possibility for what stripping could be. “We are bodiless, pure light dancing and braiding together, extinguishing the darkness at our edges,” she wrote in her autobiography. There needed to be a way to express that on camera, to make the women who perform in the clubs “whole and acceptable.”7 This was a major reason for her agreeing to join the film. Another was a more personal quest. “I want to see what lies at the edges of striptease, to stop flinching from the porn films and table dancing. I need to understand their wider meaning, to connect the dots and see what patterns emerge.”8 The New York porn supermarket felt like “a horror house” to Tracey. Yet she bonded with the women working there. “The girls are afraid of me, too, thinking I’m straight and powerful, and that my opinion counts. I tell them I’m a stripper and they relax. We fall into an abbreviated talk about money and management.” Tracey provided a crucial bridge between them and the bustling, foreign film crew as she realized that “their hurt is harder. We’re not completely the same and I’m relieved.”9 That parsing out of subtle differences, varying levels of empowerment and exploitation, the camaraderie of knowing how it feels

29

Pierre Letarte on location for Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Susan Trow, photographer. Mitch Kern, image editor.

Making Not a Love Story

to be on a stage performing your sexuality for a grim audience, and how to claim one’s bodily authority in an environment that seems bent on snatching it away – Tracey understood that and was grappling for a language to express it. In 1980, it was nearly impossible to find. Little wonder, then, that she felt somewhat estranged from the crew even as she bonded deeply with Klein. There is no doubt that the two women were becoming close friends. Tracey wrote a poem for Klein’s birthday while they were on location that spoke of them as sisters, and how they were learning together from each other. A scene where Tracey encourages a giggling Klein to purchase some crotchless panties was filmed. The intention was for them to play up their obvious stereotypical archetypes in order to reveal that a part of those stereotypes resides in each of them and thus break down that Madonna/Whore dialectic. Yet Klein could not get comfortable on film. “I failed in my part to express what my feelings and views about sexuality were, both the Madonna and the whore in me. I tried in those scenes but never relaxed enough to pull it off. I just wasn’t a natural performer the way Lindalee was.” The footage, along with them goofing around with penis cookies at an erotic bakery, ended up on the cutting room floor. Klein struggled to strike a balance in her depiction of the sex workers. She didn’t want to ask to film them at home because she felt it was invasive, inadvertently setting up an imbalance between them and the antiporn feminists filmed in their comfortable studios and living rooms. That decision frustrated Tracey. At the same time, some of the women who gave their consent to be interviewed at work were not filmed because it was clear to Klein that they were on drugs and “their consent was not what I considered consent.” Playboy and Penthouse, the best-known and most mainstream pornography companies at that time, rebuffed any requests for access. Only Hustler responded and allowed them to visit a photo shoot by Suze Randall, the celebrated photographer and porn

31

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

director, and interview Althea Flynt, who was running the magazine at the time. They also met with members of the pro-porn sex radical group National Sex Forum, who, Klein recalls, told her, “If some poor lonely guy out there in Kansas who can’t have any other relations, gets off by watching a pig fuck a woman, I say God bless him!” Hénaut had been in steady contact with Klein on the telephone and was aware that Klein was pulling away from her original intentions to provide a balanced view that celebrated explicit sexuality while criticizing pornography. Yet she saw no reason to be alarmed. A documentary’s focus frequently changed course in the midst of filming, and Klein was clearly shaken by a lot of what she saw. “Bonnie is so intense and gets so close to things, and I just had to remind her what the context was and help pull her back, just a little bit, so she could keep going.” For Klein, however, the goal now was to reveal to Studio D audiences what pornography looked like “because we were talking about something that a lot of women purposely didn’t look at, we averted our eyes, because we didn’t want to know.” This impulse was key to the anti-pornography movement of the time, as many women were admittedly ignorant of what was on the shelves. It was also central to the Griersonian ethic of activist documentary filmmaking which sincerely believed in the camera’s obligation to reveal actual conditions of oppression at the margins of society. Yet, the faultlines of such good intentions were not clearly grasped at the time, especially in the cinematic context where the life of film extends beyond the experiences and interpretations of its subjects.10 The need to reveal the degradations of pornography thus came more from a concern for the innocent viewer than from a concern for the on-screen worker. Tracey was growing impatient with the amount of time spent at the seediest fringes of sex work and the obvious power imbalance between the people there and the eloquent and charming anti-porn feminists. She continued to look for ways for the film to elucidate that distinction,

32

Making Not a Love Story

to point out how pornography steals from sexuality.11 She felt she could trust Klein to live up to their agreement if she could help find them the material they needed to represent that point of view. For Klein, however, exposure to some of the worst excesses of pornography was starting to undo her resolve to present the fun, sexual stuff alongside it. She reflected on that tension building inside of her. “Would it have been worse to have included those scenes of us being silly after showing the women from Show World? I don’t know, but there was no hint in the film of the initial impulse to explore positive sexuality. The pornography just started to overshadow the sexuality.” What began as a project about the parallels between pornography and sexuality was turning into a project about pornography as “sexism undressed.” Once back in Montreal, they began to sift through mountains of footage and shape it into a film. Tracey’s contract was now as a consultant, and Anne Henderson was brought in as editor (later, Klein added the credit of associate director). The editing process was expected to take at least nine months if not a whole year, and Klein was scheduled to move to England in July with her family, where her husband had accepted a sabbatical residency. It was clear from the available footage that Tracey was to be a central part of the narrative. Not only did Klein and Hénaut want it, but Henderson also felt that Tracey provided a necessary balance against the footage of the anti-porn feminists, who, said Henderson, “bored me to tears.” Klein had also managed to secure confiscated footage of child pornography from the Ontario Provincial Police’s “Project P” squad, so Henderson had to contend occasionally with police officers in her cramped editing suite, monitoring her work to ensure that the footage wasn’t used inappropriately. “I would say the whole project was very stressful, because I was dealing with subject matter that was a total turnoff. I had an enormous amount of material. From time to time I would have a cop in the editing room. It was many many months of this, so no wonder it burned me out.”

33

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

Klein also recalls struggling heavily with the project as she flew back and forth across the Atlantic. However, Henderson notes that Klein remained very collegial and collaborative, and that Tracey continued to participate closely in the film. She would not be in the editing suite with Henderson, but she was invited to screenings of the film as it went from assembly to final cut. The NFB had a tradition of screening early cuts of their films for their colleagues, to receive feedback and critique. Studio D participated in that as well as having their own private screenings and screenings with representatives from women’s groups. Hénaut recalls that it was from those screenings that they realized the film needed to be an awkward length – too short for a feature film but too long for a television slot. The final cut was sixty-nine minutes, a frustrating length for the distribution office, which begged for it to be extended. Nonetheless, François Macerola, the film commissioner and head of the NFB, gave the filmmakers his full support to complete the film according to their vision. The film was scheduled to debut at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, the most important film festival in Canada, on 11 September 1981.

34

3

Polyvocality in Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography In order to draw attention to the different perspectives represented in Not a Love Story, I have chosen not to review the film in sequential order but according to the different voices at stake in it. Klein insists that she wanted the film to provoke questions, represent multiple voices, and open up debate. Indeed, the media release announcing the film’s premiere states, “Not a Love Story does not attempt to provide solutions to the questions it raises. Rather, it is intended to act as a catalyst for personal reflection and discussion.”1 My intention here is to tease out those different voices and see how they fit together provocatively if imperfectly. Part of my process was determining the order of voices. I examine first the pornographers, then the grassroots activists, followed by the sex workers, with the feminist experts after them, and finishing with Lindalee Tracey. This order is neither accidental, unconscious, nor coincidental, but is part of a deliberate effort on my part to rebalance the power relationships embedded in the film. I begin from the position that all subjects in the film exert some measure of authority over the camera and are not simply objectified to serve one overwhelming anti-pornography perspective. In the case of the first two sections, it is a way of starting off slowly by looking at those subjects who parrot the standard pro/anti positions of the pornography debates at that time: fantasy versus violence against women;

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

sex education versus desensitizing men from intimacy; behaviouralist escape hatch versus prison. I place the sex workers centrally and prior to the experts in order to better critique the voices of the experts and show how early anti-porn activism paid disturbingly scant attention to the reality of sex workers’ lives. It is also a strategy of giving new emphasis to the articulate reflections offered by the sex workers and forwarding those moments as one of the distinctive and underappreciated contributions of Not a Love Story. Finally, it was always my intention that Lindalee Tracey should have the last word in my analysis of the film. Tracey serves a challenging role as both guide and subject. Sometimes these roles mesh, other times they provoke conflict and contradiction that open the film up to alternative readings. As part of my efforts to honour Tracey’s work, I chose to highlight her most self-conscious performances in the film in order to make clear that we are not watching a semi-retired stripper on the road to “recovery,” but, rather, a documentary and performance artist in the making. Furthermore, I contest readings of those performances that try to reimpose a controlling cinematic framework and deny her authority. In his groundbreaking study of documentary performance, Thomas Waugh argues that Tracey’s performances are undermined by a conventional “representational frame” that insists on a contrived nonawareness of the camera and therefore denies her own intentions.2 Yet it seems to me that even in the most excruciating moments involving her, Tracey makes clear her engagement with the documentary and her awareness that she is performing a role. Tracey used this film to explore her critical and creative understanding of her work as a stripper as well as to ask larger questions about gender and sexual relations in a highly classed and inequitable society. Her role in the film blends uncomfortably at times with Klein’s traditional NFB techniques and is not always well defined even when Klein attempts to bring different cinematic strategies to the fore. However, I argue that her presence pro-

36

Polyvocality in Not a Love Story

duces a greater elasticity in the film, deepening its own conflicted voice and complicating attempts to place the film firmly in any one political camp. I do not want to use my particular analytical structure to gloss over some of the more problematic elements in the film. There are too many cinematic tics – including a preponderance of emotional cue cutaways, and an over-reliance on expert talking heads and voice-over narration – to overlook. Nonetheless, I argue that it is not only possible but necessary to disrupt the apparently seamless nature of the film’s narrative in order to focus on the very real people discussing their varying experiences with pornography. To that end, before moving to the five voices I have identified, analysis begins with a brief explanation of the narrative structure of the film. One issue that I have chosen not to engage with in depth is the veracity or viability of Klein’s definition of pornography. Much criticism has been lobbed against the film for relying too heavily on marginal and excessively violent sexual imagery. Others have complained that the film fails to distinguish between straight porn and gay porn. Still more criticize the film for not really being about pornography at all, but focusing more on sex work and live sexual performance. Certainly, the film’s definition of pornography is loosely crafted and the examples are exclusively heterosexual. Yet, semantic debates about Klein’s definition of pornography can end up shutting down useful discussions about heterosexism and misogyny in some pornography, which was clearly her concern. I also argue that the presence of Tracey and certain other performers does offer countervailing examples which, far from being discounted or overpowered in the film, resonate deeply and reveal the contrapuntal voices at stake. Thus, I approach Not a Love Story according to what I understand was the intent of both Klein and Tracey: to test the boundaries between the erotic and the pornographic. The film’s failures, flaws,

37

BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

and lapses in judgment do not just speak to the difficulty in navigating a clear path between the two, but raise questions about even treating those two categories as dialectically related. Thus, instead of looking for neat narrative closure, I am more interested in discovering the spaces of contradiction and confusion that make documentary film an openended genre. The Film’s Structure Not a Love Story was Klein’s first full-length feature documentary film. As such, she was able to expand her scope and test new techniques. Both Klein and Tracey had read John Berger’s groundbreaking book, Ways of Seeing (1972), and were interested in testing its theories about the idealization of women and the way the media subjugated their bodies to the desiring gaze of men.3 They also sought to reflect on the personal experience of encountering pornography, which seemed to have erupted into the public sphere simultaneously with the women’s movement’s attempts to draw attention to systemic forms of sexual violence and oppression. Performances by sex workers, discussions among those in the pornography business and with those determined to fight against it, and moments of feminist poetry are juxtaposed with recurring still images from pornography magazines and from feminist photo-essays of sex work. Klein provides authoritative narration for the first half-hour of the film, giving statistics about the pornography industry’s growth and the working conditions of women. That narration soon subsides as the sex workers and anti-porn authors vie for attention. Her opening statement sets the stage for a politics of the personal: “A woman’s contortions, a woman who could be me. I need to understand what is going on behind these doors, and how it affects my own life.” The film is bookended by two performances by Tracey. The first is a self-choreographed theatrical striptease at Club Super-Sexe where she is

38

Polyvocality in Not a Love Story

given a roaring standing ovation and chats happily with the patrons as they hand over tips. The last performance is nearly unbearable to watch when she decides to pose for Suze Randall as if for a Hustler spread and is bulldozed into positions she finds distasteful and embarrassing. Antiporn eco-feminist author Susan Griffin both opens and closes the film, having the first and last say. The rather too neat mirroring structure from beginning to end is responsible in part for criticisms that the film only pretends to ask questions which it has already answered. Susan Barrowclough claims, “The undisguised point of view and personalized storyline present a polemic akin to investigative journalism rather than the ‘balanced’ account one has come to expect from the NFB’s housestyle and history. Yet, at the same time, the film is faithful to the Board’s 40 year old traditions: realist narrative, cinéma vérité, and underlying moral didactism, claim and counter-claim all sewn up and closed with a reassuring voice-over.”4 Table 1 offers some proof of Barrowclough’s criticism, showing how the film is broken down, with most scenes lasting two to three minutes, none lasting more than four. Table 1

Scene breakdown

Scene

Time

Description

1 2 3

0:00–1:29 1:30–1:44 1:45–3:14

4

3:15–4:09

5

4:10–6:29

6 7 8 9

6:30–7:09 7:10–8:05 8:06–10:14 10:15–11:20

Credit sequence; still images with heart motif. Susan Griffin interview; still image from Hustler. Strip performance to “Piece of My Heart”; Klein voice-over narration; external of Club Super-Sexe; go-go girls on stage to “Bad Girls”; reaction shots of audience. Lindalee Tracey introduced in dressing room; Klein voiceover narration; Tracey interview. Tracey strip performance; Tracey voice-over narration; Tracey speaking about pornography. Klein discussing the film project in Tracey’s apartment. Drugstore porn; S/M leather workshop; Klein voice-over. Klein and Tracey interviewing Suze Randall in her office. Suze Randall’s studio for the pirate porn photo shoot.

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BONNIE SHERR KLEIN’S

NOT A LOVE STORY

Table 1

(Continued)

Scene

Time

Description

10 11

11:21–13:24 13:25–17:16

12

17:17–19:15

13

19:16–23:31

14

23:32–25:36

15

25:37–26:44

16

26:45–27:05

17

27:06–29:55

18

29:56–33:28

19 20

33:29–34:39 34:40–37:23

21

37:24–39:44

22

39:45–41:25

23

41:26–42:27

Klein and Kate Millett in her studio. Still image of magazine subscription to Elite; Klein and David S. Wells in booth discussing his magazines; still image of Rustler subscription overtop Wells’s speaking. Videocassette hotel rental; Klein voice-over narration; unexplicit scenes from “Little Girl, Big Tease” and “The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann.” Marc Stevens, Ron Martin, “Robin,” Klein, and Tracey in hotel room. Consciousness-raising session for Men Against Male Violence, run by Richard Snowdon. Exterior shots scanning down from government and banking buildings to sex stores; Blue Sky walking to work; Klein voice-over narration. Tracey discussing Show World business with manager (unnamed). Patrice and Rick live sex show; Patrice voice-over then interview in their dressing room; Klein off-camera asking questions. Tracey and Show World manager looking over the porn loops; Tracey watching “Beat the Bitch”; close-up of film; Tracey watching a “straight” film, arguing with the manager. Klein confronts Tracey about stripping. Extreme close-up of visibly upset Tracey; Robin Morgan and Kenneth Pitchford interview in their apartment; Tracey, Klein, and Letarte on floor. Exterior shots of street drummer and sex store signs; Show World peep show of three women; Procol Harum–like organ music; shots of men watching as screens lower and reopen; shots of women working; camera pans through darkened hallway and up stairs to the street; Tracey’s voice grows louder. Tracey in front of Show World, reciting poem; Tracey surrounded by the crowd, debating her performance. Susan Griffin interview; Tracey looking sombre; still images of women gagged.

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Polyvocality in Not a Love Story

Table 1

(Concluded)

Scene

Time

Description

24

42:28–45:59

25

46:00–49:27

26

49:28–51:04

27 28 29

51:05–52:28 52:29–54:00 54:01–56:09

30

56:10–58:25

31

58:26–61:47

32

61:48–62:34

33

62:35–64:30

34 35 36

64:31–66:15 66:16–66:36 66:37– 69:00

Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, San Francisco protest in front of porn supermarket; doorman and customers mock and criticize them; Tracey and Klein listening to WAV explain their protest. Ed Donnerstein interview in his lab; violent porn loops and still images; Klein and Tracey sitting together, listening intently. Driving through Times Square, heartbeat; Blue Sky in phone booth, stripped naked; customer in shadow, only hear his voice. Klein speaking to Kathleen Barry. Klein interviewing Blue Sky then Raven in phone booth. Kathleen Barry interview; silent pause with heartbeat to show extremely violent porn loop and two clips from child porn films (20 sec); return to Barry interview; Klein and Tracey together, listening intently. Margaret Atwood poetry reading; still images from Susan Meiselas’s Carnival Strippers. Robin Morgan interview; extreme close-up of Tracey wiping away tears. Exterior shot of jeans billboards, first men’s then pan down to women’s; voice of Susan Griffin; return to Suze Randall’s studio, Tracey dressing up and preparing to pose. Tracey photo shoot for Randall; Tracey voice-over; Tracey and Klein discussing the shoot; Griffin voice-over; Griffin interview; two shots of Tracey, the first looking very sombre, the other smiling gently. Tracey and Klein on beach, discussing photo shoot. Griffin interview. Tracey on beach, no talking; music swells; camera freezes on her; credits roll.

Unlike in her previous work, where Klein sought a sparse, unobtrusive camera style, the camera in Not a Love Story moves dynamically to capture the feelings of claustrophobia and exposure that the crew

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felt on location. Incidental music is sparse, usually in a minor key. An ominous heartbeat is often the only sound played over images of violent and, in one fleeting instance, child pornography. The heartbeat is also used for exterior shots of porn districts and sexist billboards to connote the loneliness of the hypersexualized streetscape. The film does often fall back on the motif of the heart to emphasize love, relationships, and intimacy as appropriate guiding principles for a positive sexuality. Even the title and opening credit sequence relies heavily on themes of love and the heart. Hénaut still insists, “I think that a human truth is that our hearts and our bodies want to function together.” It was, again, a common argument within anti-porn discourse of the era, one not particularly well challenged until Gayle Rubin published her landmark essay “Thinking Sex” in 1984. Rubin calls this emphasis on intimate sexuality a form of “sexual essentialism” that severs it from its historical and social context. Asserting that “love” is psychically innate to sexuality makes it possible to claim that certain forms of sexual expression are natural and healthy, while others are abnormal and require correction.5 The film relies too much on cutaways of Klein and Tracey to direct our emotional responses. As Janis Dale points out, “By inserting their nods of agreement and shakes of disbelief, and making these reactions look as though they are part of the live action with other participants … [Klein] discredits their use entirely. Nothing demeans a doc faster for me than employing an unauthentic voice of authority or inserting cutaways meant to tell me how to think. Klein does both.”6 Klein agrees that the cutaways – then a function to avoid jump cuts – now make her cringe. They operate both to undermine the statements of those who insist pornography does no harm and to emphasize the supposedly unassailable truth of the experts. While the former have their interviews cut short to overlay images that make what they’re saying seem foolish and arrogant, the latter receive a lavish number of nods, smiles, fur-

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rowed brows, and even a few tears, alongside pornographic images that illustrate their criticisms, not contradict them. Importantly, however, Klein’s interviews with sex workers offer few such authoritative insertions. Nor does her introduction of Tracey at the beginning of the film. At best we see Klein as a slight silhouette on the edges of the camera and hear a soft-spoken voice asking questions. When filming the sex workers on the job, the camera does not flinch from what it sees, even though the audience often might. It is for that reason that the film has been accused of adopting a pornographic lens. I suggest, however, that by giving voice to the performers, showing their most exuberant performances and most dismal, asking them to describe what it is like to perform, to explain what is good about it as well as what they dislike, the film undercuts the conventional anti-porn argument that knowledge of pornography, knowledge of the women working in pornography, will help to stop pornography from existing. Similarly, the different portraits of men engaged in pornography – as performers, producers, viewers, and “recoverers” – complicate a critique that the film is “attacking the penis”7 and suggesting that “all men are damned to a Godforsaken loneliness.”8 These critiques set the film up as a series of oppositional pairings – sex workers versus feminists, men versus women, men versus men, etc. – designed to move the audience dialectically into a unified perspective whereby knowledge of pornography can only lead to its denunciation and eventual eradication. I prefer a different reading. After multiple viewings and with the benefit of historical hindsight, I am able to suggest that the film offers a very early and incomplete assessment of how sex work is negotiated by the individuals engaged in it alongside a strong critique of the misogynistic bias inherent in much heterosexist pornography. It gives too much attention to anti-porn activism, but it also examines differing conditions of sex work, and the need to recognize the labour involved and the integrity of the person

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Bonnie Sherr Klein and Lindalee Tracey being filmed for Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Photographer unknown. Mitch Kern, image editor.

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who does it. It further elucidates one of the most problematic disconnects in the early anti-pornography movement: the emphasis on porn consumption and the harm it causes to people’s intimate relationships. That viewpoint is over-represented in Not a Love Story, especially by the anti-porn feminists. However, the workers challenge that viewpoint at every turn by emphasizing their pride in their performance, their desire to be respected for what they do, and their ambivalent relationship to their audience. As Nichols and Belinda Smaill point out, the effect of seeing pornography in a documentary context triggers complex emotional responses.9 Yet, it would be going too far to say that the film is sensationalist or dangerously titillating, as many critics did at the time. Paula Rabinowitz argues that the film was designed purely to “persuade its viewers of the dangers and degradations pornography poses for women” but fails since “audiences in a nation with restrictions on the public display of pornography are not necessarily seeing a tale of mourning and outrage; many are watching for the crotch shots which are meant to horrify, not titillate.”10 I find this argument elitist and presumptive, suggesting that Canadian audiences are captive to their ignorant and immature lasciviousness. Furthermore, such criticisms hold only if we assume that the one possible reading of the film is that Tracey is humiliated, the women at Super-Sexe and Show World are ignorant, and the various men represented – pornographers or apologists – are not all grappling with the insecurities of their sexuality. It assumes that only the anti-porn experts and certainly not the sex workers have any sense of authority or integrity over their own performance in the film. I argue instead that the performers in Not a Love Story appear in ways that contest even the filmmaker’s own politics. They help guide the film toward ways to frame the discussion that are different from the good sex/bad porn dichotomy, the mainstay of the anti-porn feminists in the film. In her memoir, Tracey discusses the way the women at

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Show World reacted to the film crew: “I can feel their twitchiness, how scared they are of being looked down on. Every one of them hurries to tell us how they’re working through college, or supporting their kids, or have appeared on some TV show. I know their ache so deeply, their urge to be decent.”11 Klein also felt that these women were not to be displayed as artefacts of the shame of pornography. “I felt their resilience. I wouldn’t use the word sympathetic because that doesn’t sound right, it was more like I was convinced by their argument and wanted to help make that argument for them. What they did makes sense if you can stand it, and really, what were their alternatives?” Nichols et al. recognize the fraught entwinements between documentary and pornography in that both purport to offer some kind of truth to representations of either social or sexual performance.12 Smaill agrees but qualifies that the former is far more concerned with the subject’s ability to articulate something of that authenticity. Thus the boundary spaces between pornography and documentary become some of the most contentious and fraught of cinematic subjectivity. Too often, she claims, these disruptions are resolved through the overpowering of pornography’s embodied knowledge by the visual ethnography of documentary knowledge and what Nichols calls “an economy of otherness.”13 Criticisms of Not a Love Story have thus often regarded it as a kind of travelogue into another, foreign world that treats the people who live there as less civilized.14 Yet, Susanna Paasonen argues that Not a Love Story “speaks of pornography in a wider emotional range than its title would suggest and certainly the experiences voiced in the film are more diverse than it has often been given credit for.”15 It is a difficult balance in any documentary to depict the lives of marginalized subjects without turning them into objectified spectacles, especially given documentary’s tendency to appeal to more educated and culturally sophisticated audiences. Smaill calls this “epistephilia,” the unique mixture of emotionalism and social conscience that drives

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documentary pleasure.16 It is even more intense when the subject of the documentary is in fact pornography, as it intermingles a form of excessive bodily pleasure.17 However, given the choice between these two opposing claims of the film – that it treats its sex worker subjects as alienated objects, or that it gives voice to a wide range of experiences articulated by those sex workers – I feel strongly that we must agree with the latter or else remain complicit in the same acts of voyeurism and objectification that we try to critique. To that end, I reassemble the film as a concatenation of competing, conflicting voices in order to suggest that those who have been privileged as the authorities and experts in previous critiques are in fact deeply troubled within the film by the individuals who actually work in the sex industry. Voices I: The Pornographers Perhaps the least sympathetic people in the film are those earning a living from the sexual performance of others. At first, they are introduced in a light-hearted, almost flirtatious manner. Suze Randall is interviewed approximately eight minutes into the film, looking like an elderly Shirley Temple, with bleached blonde ringlets, bright blue eyes, and bee-stung lips. The interview is awkwardly framed, with Tracey standing beside a seated Klein and Randall sitting across from them. She giggles throughout the interview but gets serious for a moment to lean forward and say, “It’s all play-play-fantasy, I don’t think you should take it too seriously. I certainly don’t look for a deep meaning in this.” A peal of giggles rings out again as she asks Tracey, “Do you want to be a fluff girl?” and Tracey has to explain what that means to Klein. The film cuts to showing Randall at work, directing two women and one man posing for a pirate scene. Randall continues to be playful and bouncy as she directs the models, calling out for “a snippet of pussy” and “go for her tittie.” The models arch and stretch to her command but their 47

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faces writhe with fatigue and frustration. Randall’s version of eroticism seems not playful as much as infantile. She deploys a practised feminine silliness to help push the boundaries for her models, to tease them into giving more than they want without it appearing as coercive as it is. A similarly flirtatious mood surrounds Klein’s interview with David S. Wells, a Canadian publisher of what he calls men’s entertainment magazines. In viewing the film with me, Klein remarked, “It’s interesting that I dressed up for him … I liked him, I liked listening to him.” Klein wears a glittering shirt and make-up. They sit together comfortably in a blue velvet booth of a cocktail lounge and have a lively conversation. He is articulate and thoughtful; she pushes but could hardly be called strident. As Klein said, “I’m so mousy and mild-mannered … I seem totally inarticulate.” That self-assessment of her performance is much too critical, as she quite articulately presses for clarification of Wells’s assertion that “men don’t want to be equal to women, simple as that” and that women’s liberation has helped to spur the porn magazine trade into depicting “rougher” sexual images. Like Randall, Wells insists that the magazines are merely fantasy. “We call them head-fucking,” he says as he tries to argue that the magazines serve as a form of sex education. Somewhat exasperated by the end, Wells summarizes his position by stating, “We are producing a product that is fulfilling a need in today’s society.” However, as he says that, the film shows a subscription ad for his marquee magazine, Rustler. It is a blonde white woman lying on her back, her head tilted to one side and her eyes closed, her legs splayed wide open. His voice continues as he asks Klein, “Got it?” Klein is heard to remark meekly, “Yes,” as he retorts, “Hope so.” The meekness in Klein’s voice betrays her directorial authority over the scene as she undermines his statement with an image that it is hard to argue fulfils any need in society. The only other pornographer to be interviewed at length about his work is the manager at Show World. This time Tracey conducts the inter-

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Suze Randall being interviewed for Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Susan Trow, photographer. Mitch Kern, image editor.

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view. Klein commented that the responsibility for the interview fell to Tracey because “she had the ability to talk to people to whom I couldn’t talk, I was very uncomfortable with him.” He is almost stereotypical in his sleaziness, with his open shirt and medallion, his gravelly voice and greasy demeanour. While Klein may have found him intimidating, he is clearly no match for the intelligent and quick-thinking Tracey. She stands with her hands on her hips, peppering him with questions to which he only mumbles incomplete answers. He offers Tracey a free porn loop viewing, and she chooses “Beat the Bitch.” Like Randall and Wells, he insists that it’s all fantasy and the woman in the film is not really being hurt. However, after they watch a film of a woman giving a man a blow job, he argues, “If she’s doing it then she’s enjoying it. It looks like she’s enjoying it.” The exchange leaves Tracey shaken, and the scene changes to her and Klein embracing. Then, something surprising happens as Klein seems to turn on Tracey and accuse her of being “a part of it.” Tracey clutches uncomfortably at her throat and says, “Wow, I feel like I have to make justifications all of a sudden.” Klein apologizes and says under her breath, “I was being harsh,” and tries to pull back a bit. The camera, however, does not pull back. Rather, it zooms in to capture Tracey’s struggle to articulate the obvious differences between her work and Show World. She concludes thoughtfully but still anxiously, “I know that what I do is decent for myself.” In conversation with Klein, we debated the intent behind this scene. Klein saw it as demonstrating how Tracey was feeling the silencing of pornography. However, I argue that she is feeling an aggression coming not only from the sordidness of 42nd Street but also from Klein. The film cuts immediately to an extreme close-up of Tracey looking pained as an interview with Robin Morgan begins. The shot seems to suggest that Tracey, rather than being confident in her work as a stripper, is now less sure of her position as Klein has become more assured of her own. Nonetheless, the power of Tracey’s response to Klein mere

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seconds before continues to resonate in such a way that the cutaway to her, if intended to signal a growing doubt, is difficult to accept. This is another important moment in delineating between what some argue is clear cinematic manipulation but what I suggest can also be recognized as a moment when the film itself records its own confusion and seeks refuge in an inauthentic moment. Sympathy falls to Tracey trying to hold onto herself against assaults from both the shocks of Show World and the seductive simplicity of Klein and Morgan. Interviews with pornographers are all in the first half of the film. Randall does return near the end but not to speak to the camera in a position of authority. She is a supporting player in Tracey’s decision to pose, and does not address her role in pushing Tracey beyond her comfort zone. The last depiction of pornographers comes during a protest by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, where they speak briefly to the women protesters but not directly to the NFB crew. Thus, the pornographers seem to be only part of the set-up of the film, not there on a par with the feminist experts but more as ethnographic encounters. The often defensive posture of the pornographers raises some interesting points about how pornography was being articulated at a critical juncture in the history of the women’s movement. They insist somewhat contradictorily that what they do is harmless because it lacks deep meaning or simply acts out fantasy, while at the same time claiming that it expresses a truth or need about sexuality and gender relationships. Wells is not asked about the working conditions for his models or any other questions about the business; the conversation is mostly about his target audience. Randall is more exposed on this issue, as scenes of her working in her studio belie her insistence that it’s all for fun and giggles. The Show World manager offers perhaps the best understanding of the performers by his glib “They don’t want to walk the streets.” Of course, the pat behaviouralist argument offered up by

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Wells and Randall was influenced by early anti-pornography claims that pornography equals violence against women, or that pornography represents damaging and oppressive lies about sexuality. That consumerbased approach is highlighted by the presence of grassroots activists opposing pornography. Only two very narrow perspectives are shown – that of reformed male consumers, and that of women who claim harm from male consumption. Voices II: The Activists For a film that was highly criticized as being nothing more than a tool for the radical anti-porn movement, Not a Love Story gives very little attention to grassroots activism. Only two brief scenes are offered: a session with the consciousness-raising group Men Against Male Violence just prior to the Show World sequence, and a protest by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media soon after it. Both these groups were based in San Francisco, the epicentre of the porn debates. Although Klein also interviewed members from the National Sex Forum, their footage did not make it into the final cut. Klein claims that their way of phrasing the issues in the context of the violent pornography that the film highlighted “did them no justice. To this day, despite all of their criticism I still think they would thank me for it because they really did come off like pigs.” Interestingly, the men of MAMV also caused Klein some consternation because “they come across as wimps.” Always hoping that the audience for this film would include men as well as women, Klein was keen to show that pornography was also implicated in men’s sexuality. However, she is right that the scene of uniformly bland men gathered in a dreary community space discussing their need for intimacy is one of the low points of the film. Tedious, earnest, and bleakly shot, their statements feel too studied and fail to resonate. The scene is brief, barely two minutes long, and comes fairly

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early in the film before the scenes of Show World. That also serves to minimize its impact, as neither the audience nor, it feels, the men on screen have a grasp on what is meant by pornography in this film. They are easily forgotten. Far more lively and theatrical is the filming of a protest by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media along a San Franscisco porn strip. Coming soon after a poem performance by Tracey outside Show World, their protest appears as an extension of that same act of claiming sexual space in public, arguing for a more authentic version of women’s sexuality. The women march back and forth in front of a porn supermarket; the doormen and managers leer and sneer before chasing them away. Like the film, their primary tactic is to show images of violent pornography on placards they carry. It’s a strange tactic, to show the people heading into the clubs titillating images, but the intent is clearly to shame them by suggesting that anyone attending a peep show will also enjoy BDSM and other forms of “bad sex.” Some of the one-liners the doormen get off are actually quite funny, such as responding to the chant “Pornography teaches lies about women” with “And we’re doing it tonight, folks! This is the last bastion of male dominance in the city.” The manager agrees to come out and talk with the protesters while the NFB cameras roll, insisting that it’s just “the average American male” who attends their shows. As if on cue, a slight, bespectacled man enters the club. He looks as if he would fit right in with the Men Against Male Violence group. He later offers his opinion that the club is “over-rated, over-priced, and it stinks” before happily sauntering away. There are more aggressive encounters with men who call the women “bitches” and say that they have no right to protest something they’ve never seen. It is telling to see how silenced these men are when the women explain that they have been in the clubs. Onscreen, Klein looks uncomfortable with the focus of the protest, and recalls feeling that way too. She did not see the inclusion of the pro-

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Bonnie Sherr Klein and Lindalee Tracey in San Francisco. Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Photographer unknown. Mitch Kern, image editor.

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testers as evidence of her point of view anymore than the inclusion of David Wells. “My memory of that Women Against Pornography scene was that they were much more strident back then than they appear today. I certainly didn’t think they were appealing. If anything, they made me cringe, I really didn’t like the way they were too aggressive.” Tracey offers that same criticism when she is introduced in the film, describing an earlier encounter with WAP in New York. “They were very condescending, and when you get anyone who’s condescending, they’ve already passed a judgment on you. It’s like this party line is that I’m stupid and I’m being used, and I really have no choice whatsoever.” Her words cannot help but cast the protesters in the glare of their own unquestioned privilege. The protesters seem fixated not on the women working in the clubs but on the women customers: “A lot of times these women don’t have any support at all to say, ‘That offends me, that’s my body being abused.’” It reverts discussion to a different us/them dynamic, from the one of men and women to one of good, authentic women and bad, pornographic women. It is a longstanding and valid critique of antipornography movements that the women working in pornography or in sex clubs were rarely brought into the discussion except as victims and recanters, as in the case of Linda Lovelace. After hearing the arguments of the WAP protestors, it would have been a strong moment for the film to return to the sex workers in the club and ask for their response. Unfortunately, instead it cuts to Dr Ed Donnerstein to discuss the effects of violent pornography on its viewers, abruptly ending a conversation before it could start. Nonetheless, the workers are there, throughout the film, discussing their experiences and challenging a pitying or othering perspective. Some can speak eloquently, others struggle to explain the mechanics of their work. Yet all manage to articulate their integrity even when they discuss their feelings of abuse and exploitation.

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Voices III: The Sex Workers Certainly there is something of the ethnographic travelogue to Klein’s filming of strip routines and live sex shows. Still, the conversations with the workers – conducted by Klein – bring into the film a different dynamic from the merely voyeuristic. The workers are able to express their experiences of putting their bodies on the line while holding onto their own subjectivity. Klein interviewed porn legend Marc Stevens, filmed and interviewed three women at Show World, and filmed performances at Super-Sexe. For the most part, Klein does not interrupt or challenge them the way she does Wells, nor does the film intercut any images other than those of the performers performing their routines, mostly deferring to them to authorize any corresponding commentary. Thus, Not a Love Story was an early effort to give successful, innovative performers such as Tracey and Stevens a voice, as well as to speak directly with women working at some of the lowest levels of the sex industry. In their unpublished manuscript on the making of the film, Klein explains, “I could never bring myself to film people when they’re down. That’s desperation, not consent. The women we filmed … are the survivors, people with enough self-esteem to look at our camera, and have it look at them.” Their presence in the film offers a distinctly contrasting perspective to an otherwise consumer-oriented approach that emphasizes porn’s effect on heterosexual relationships. Ironically, the sex workers’ refusal to fit the standard narrative of the Porn Wars led to both sides painting them as pathetic victims – of either pornography or the film. My position is that they are in fact a strong counter-voice to the entire framing of the debate, offering a nuanced perspective on pornography and sex work based on the experience of actually doing it. As Paasonen argues, “Not a Love Story seems to depart from this fixed gender binary by presenting both women and men as agents in the sex

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industry and by addressing commercial sex as both a social phenomenon and personally mediated experiences.”18 To deny the centrality of the sex workers in the film or claim that the film views them only pornographically is, as I have argued already, to engage in the practices of silencing for which this film has been critiqued. There are six sequences in which sex workers are either interviewed or filmed on the job. The first introduction to live pornographic performance is in Club Super-Sexe. A primal scream from Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” breaks into Susan Griffin’s meditation that pornography renders “the heart imprisoned, the heart on its knees, and if necessary the heart rendered silent.” A dancer is on her knees, but she is far from silent or imprisoned. Wearing heavy theatrical face paint, her sweaty hair swirling around her, she dances wildly and aggressively, turning cartwheels and spinning dizzily, only one breast revealed. Her performance is the only one undercut by Klein, who narrates sombrely toward the end, “A woman’s contortions. A woman who could be me.” The narration ends as the film changes to a performance of three naked women dancing but not interacting together. These are the go-go girls about whom Tracey voiced her ambivalence in her autobiography. “They don’t possess the definiteness of the older girls, or the femaleness and individual personalities. They prance around, looking away vaguely, or contemplating their own bodies, separated from their experience, suspended.”19 There are multiple cuts to the audience, blank-faced men staring up as the dancers squat and bend at the front of the stage. A woman makes eye contact with one patron, squats down for him and checks to make sure she’s in position. A close-up of a writhing bum and spread vagina is excessive and confrontational, but more disturbing is the camera moving from there to the woman’s face, upside down and grinning mischievously between her thighs, as she has caught us in the act of looking. The camera cuts to the dressing room, crowded with women

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The go-go girls of Club Super-Sexe. Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Photographer unknown. Mitch Kern, image editor.

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applying make-up and putting on costumes. Tracey is introduced there, naked except for a g-string, which she is inspecting to make sure it is properly placed. This four-minute sequence establishes pornography as work requiring thoughtful body management and self-definition, a theme that runs through all the encounters with sex workers. It is further reinforced by the introduction of Marc Stevens fifteen minutes after the Super-Sexe scenes. At the time, but unbeknownst to Klein, Stevens was one of the most recognizable porn performers, a co-star in the classic The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and famously photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe for “Mr. 10½” (1976). In 1975 and 1977, he published two celebratory autobiographies, 10½ and Making It Big, and was an icon in the New York porn scene, known for doing both straight and gay porn, films, and live sex shows with his erotic dance troupe. He also toured college campuses, appeared on major network news shows, and held public debates with legislators to defend pornography and sex performers. However, in 1978, he decided to quit the business and appeared in Not a Love Story to address problems he experienced in heterosexual pornography. Tall, muscular, attractive, and charismatic, Stevens frankly describes his experiences. He jousts with his friend Ron Martin, Klein’s contact in the New York porn scene, as Tracey and another woman who asked to be identified by the pseudonym “Robin” occasionally chime in. The scene is awkwardly set up in a cramped hotel room, almost mimicking a consciousness-raising session. Unlike the Men Against Male Violence scene which directly follows it, though, this is a very dynamic scene where everyone speaks overtop one another, voices rise, and tempers are heated. There is a candour coming from these people who make their living from doing pornography that comes the closest in the film to explicating the messiness of the business. Indeed, as one critic remarks, “The most conscious guy in the film is ex-porn star Marc Stevens.”20

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Stevens is charming and heartfelt about both the sense of power that came when “everything was focused around the tip of my dick” and also the onus to appear constantly virile and the toll it was taking on his personal relationships. “Because of my reputation, I had to leave porn. I just couldn’t keep it up anymore.” After everyone laughs at the unintended pun, Stevens complains that despite the love that he sometimes felt for the women with whom he worked, pornography obliterated it. Gesturing angrily to the documentary camera, he exclaims, “The camera never got it, it couldn’t feel that love. Why? It just can’t happen, I don’t know.” Martin interjects at this point to suggest that if there is a problem with porn interfering with an intimate sexual relationship, it may be because the two have been wrongly treated as interchangeable. In response to Tracey’s query, “Doesn’t pornography define some of our feelings about self and others, and couldn’t some of those feelings be harmful?” he argues, “Look, there’s just been so much emphasis on pornography. You see the sex in the film and it’s just a bang so you go home and you bang. And the woman is going, ‘What the fuck is going on here? I’m being banged by this guy and I’m in love with him and he’s in love with me. What the hell did he do, see some stupid movie?’ Well, don’t ask if he saw some stupid movie, just say, ‘You’re banging me, and I want to talk about this.’” Martin makes a very important point that the effort to connect pornography to love-based sexual relationships seems too forced and arbitrary to be used to condemn one for harming the other. “It’s not pornography’s responsibility to say, ‘Hello, this is banging, and this is making love. If you want to go out with this girl you’re in love with, don’t bang her. If on the other hand, all you want to do is trip out, this is banging – trip out.’ To my mind that’s what pornography is all about. Pornography is about tripping out.” As if to flee the implications of Martin’s challenge, the film cuts to the Men Against Male Violence discussion, so we can watch “nice guys feel sorry for themselves.”21 The sud-

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den drop in energy and the tired clichés about intimacy almost seem to prove Martin’s point. The debate between Martin and Stevens cuts close to the heart of one of Klein’s major thematic arguments, that pornography has some insidious power to destroy sexual intimacy. The film cannot seem to adequately contend with Martin’s clear and compelling counter-argument, and instead chooses the safer path of the pornography/intimacy trope that shaped much of the activism of the era. This forced link between pornography and sexual intimacy is also the focus of the interviews with the performers at Show World, but just like with Martin, their responses don’t quite fit. The most dynamic of the interviews is with Patrice Lucas. She is a young, petite white woman who performs a live sex show with her husband, Rick, who is black and much bigger than her. Patrice is candid about her work and how it gives her the freedom to use her sexuality for both love and financial gain. She is introduced in a long-shot of her live sex performance, straddling Rick’s face as he performs cunnilingus on her, but she displays no ecstatic pleasure. Instead, she casually braids her hair out of her face while gesturing off stage to a technician before leaning over to perform fellatio. A voice-over by her rings out confidently, “I don’t feel that what I am doing is wrong. I’m not harming anyone, I’m not pulling anybody in here. I’m not making them see anything they don’t want to see.” The camera cuts to the interview with the Lucases in their dressing room. Patrice is centrally framed, dressed casually in a velour track suit, while Rick stands to the side. Patrice matter-of-factly explains that growing up with a mother who was a prostitute and being initiated into sex when she was six means that “this is nothing for me to be nude in front of people, I feel perfectly comfortable.” Despite any audience anxiety over her less than idyllic childhood, there is nothing in Patrice’s demeanour that suggests a victim who needs to be rescued from her plight. It is a clear example of what Klein called the “resilience” she felt when interviewing the sex workers at

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Show World. It is not sympathy, Klein rightly notes, because Patrice is not asking for that – she knows that it would feel too close to pity. The film returns to the sex show, this time a much tighter shot that nearly obliterates the presence of the live audience and leaves only the cinematic one. Patrice offers a similar argument to that of Wells and Randall, one that mingles a defence of fantasy with a claim of truth-seeking. “I know we’re making a lot of people feel good about themselves by letting them know that what they fantasize about doing is OK.” The film cuts back to their dressing room; Patrice and Rick are casual and relaxed. Klein’s voice can be heard off-camera but she doesn’t appear in the scene. Rick is a bit camera-shy, but Patrice speaks confidently about her decision to choose this line of work. She points out that while she could make more money as a call girl, she still makes $900 a week working twelve shows a day, three days a week. Moreover, she has a lot more control and trust over her performance since “I’m with the man that I love.” Pointedly, she is more interested in contrasting her work in the clubs with her experiences as a low-level office employee. “When I’ve had 9-to-5 jobs, I had bosses on my back all day long, telling me what to do, telling me when to answer the phone, when I’m allowed to go to the bathroom, when I’m allowed to drink coffee and when I’m not allowed to, just like I was a child. So I naturally rebelled. With this job, they tell me I’m supposed to be on for twenty-five minutes and that’s all I’m told. I can do anything I want. I feel like a big girl.” Her defiance in the face of any impetus to treat her choice of sex work as no choice is striking. It undermines a key tactic of the anti-porn movement, which is to claim to rescue women like Patrice and have them bear witness to their own degradation. Patrice and Rick’s ability to distinguish between their intimate sexual relationship and their on-stage performance clashes openly with the film’s effort to claim that pornography obliterates the possibility of loving sexuality. When Klein asks, “What’s the biggest frustration

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Rick and Patrice Lucas. Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Photographer unknown. Mitch Kern, image editor.

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because I get the sense you feel put down a lot?” Patrice’s answer is unexpected: she doesn’t talk about any problems in her relationship, an argument which Marc Stevens uses, but passionately defends the artfulness of her performance against the way it is framed by both the clubs and the anti-porn movement. “You look at the sign outside and it says, ‘Raunchy Live Sex Show.’ I’m not raunchy.” At the same time, she and Rick acknowledge that their biracialism is a large part of the appeal of their act and express a shrugging contempt for the white men in the audience who expect Rick to overpower Patrice. This suggestion that her audience looks for ways to take control over her performance problematizes and resituates the documentary audience. They can no longer be detached from and intellectually superior to Patrice, but must contend with their own “epistephilia.” Klein recalls her encounter with Patrice and Rick as both challenging and illuminating. “I was very grateful to them that they agreed to be in the film. They were a real couple and they challenged my ideas about working in pornography. It’s still, I think, a really shitty life, but she makes it work for her. This was another attempt to put the pro-porn viewpoint into the film, but people didn’t see it that way.” By confronting some of the ugliness of sex work and indicting her white and middle-class audience for the nastiest effects, Patrice turns the tables on the (presumed white and middle-class) documentary audience’s command over the film. Refusing both the survivor-victim role and the “play-play fantasy” role, Patrice reveals the inadequate frameworks of an already calcified debate on pornography. She confidently articulates how her decision to engage in sex work is based on limited options pertaining to her life experiences, and clearly enunciates the trade-offs while not necessarily capitulating to them as natural consequences of the job. Patrice, born into the sex trade and living on the margins of societal acceptance, introduces a different logic to the pornography debate. Her tone is matter of fact; she carefully distinguishes

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between, as Martin put it, “banging and making love” even when with the same person, and demands respect from the audience for her decision to do sex work, and to take pride in that work. Similarly, but far less articulately, Blue Sky and Raven speak briefly about their own work in Show World. Shot in one of the phone booths, with the metal screen occasionally lowering as Klein scrambles to put another quarter in the slot, they are the last and by far the most diffident of all the sex workers to speak on camera. The fact that they speak last in the film, and are sandwiched between Kathleen Barry and Robin Morgan, makes their appearance more complicated and ideologically over-determined than that of Stevens or Patrice. At the same time, however, like the responses of Patrice, their answers are often unexpected and appear to operate from a different standpoint altogether, contrasting more than underscoring the condescending comments of the antiporn experts who interrupt them from a safe distance. Blue Sky, shown first walking to work and giving a lighthearted wave to the police lined up on 42nd Street, is brought back near the end of the film immediately following a spate of hideously violent images and Donnerstein’s ominous warning, “Where it goes from that, who knows?” Blue Sky is shown in a booth about to entertain a customer. The camera remains trained on her from behind the man’s back, and the screen occasionally lowers to hide her from view until another quarter is inserted. She gets to work fast, removing her leotard while coaxing her customer to undress and masturbate with her. To her entreaties to get into the performance with her, he is first hesitant and then defensive. “I bet you say that to all the guys.” When Blue Sky insists, “Oh no, baby, just you,” he retorts sarcastically, “Oh yeah, I’m special,” and then insists that she “has to prove you’re woman enough for me.” As if to help her with this demand, the camera pans down from her face to an extreme close up of her vagina. When she asks if he likes what he sees, he responds petulantly, “I’ve seen better.”

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The whole scene feels excessive and unnecessary, whereby we participate in Blue Sky’s misery from a place of documentary privilege. It is a clear example of the ethnographic lens of the film engaged in an economy of otherness, particularly since the scene cuts to Klein asking Kathleen Barry to explain it all. Barry insists that “it is much more painful, it is much more difficult to live not knowing. In knowing, we get much closer to a kind of condition of liberation, however awful that knowing may be for us.” In other words, we are forgiven our prurient gaze on Blue Sky because it’s better for “us,” an us that clearly does not mean Blue Sky, who already knows what it feels like. As if granted permission, we return to Blue Sky to question her on the experience. It is a difficult sequence to separate out from Barry’s patronizing and exclusionary attitude precisely because it is so tightly intertwined. However, it is my contention that we can and must grant Blue Sky authority over Barry, to recognize that her understanding of her work is not merely in defiance of Barry’s ethnographic othering but operates according to a very different logic of embodied experience. Vivian Sobchack calls embodiment “a radically material condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble.”22 As such, while she may not be as articulate and confident as Patrice or Stevens, and therefore not as comfortable to watch, Blue Sky’s delicate, cautious performance nonetheless constitutes a form of authorship.23 For their interview, Klein sits in the booth, plugging in quarters (because she didn’t want to keep them away from their work or cost them any money), and asks Blue Sky gently, “How was that for you?” Blue Sky is polite, generous, and thoughtful as she explains the mechanics of her job and the expertise required to convince the customer to masturbate. The aura of near-gothic horror explicated by Donnerstein and Barry is countered by the banality of what Blue Sky describes and her obvious pride in her ability to entice her customers to “take it out,” not

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only because she earns a cut but also because, as she states, “Most girls like to see the men really pleased.” Klein returns the conversation back to the problem of love and sexual intimacy, including for the workers. Blue Sky readily admits that is a problem, especially for the girls who go home alone and “don’t have no sexual intercourse at all.” There is something to Blue Sky’s Runyonesque effort to carefully choose her words, to be as articulate and formal as she can, that indicates her desire to perform as well for the documentary as she did for her customer, without losing a sense of herself. Her refusal to be patronized or pitied demands an ethical reflection from the viewer before any easy judgments can be passed. Less successful in that endeavour is Raven, who appears fleetingly only to say she feels “disgusting” when she performs and casts her eyes down as the screen lowers and Barry’s voice takes over. No sex worker speaks again in the film, which quickly turns itself over to the experts who speak in rapid succession and are ultimately given the last word. It is as if the film mirrors Klein’s personal journey through pornography, beginning more openly and playfully but succumbing to a sense of despair that offers hope only to those women removed from the industry. It makes it all the more necessary that we pause to give greater attention to the sex workers as they try to hold onto themselves against the inexorable force of the experts who ultimately overwhelm the film. Voices IV: The Experts The main reason why I sought a non-linear analysis of this film is to alter the balance of power in the film between sex workers and anti-porn feminist experts. Interestingly, both Klein and Hénaut protested my calling Susan Griffin, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, and Kathleen Barry experts. Klein preferred to acknowledge them as women like her, engaged in feminist activism, who were asking similar questions, and she was

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drawing on their wisdom. Hénaut similarly insisted that treating them as experts was contrary to the political and aesthetic aims of Studio D. “Experts is a distancing word, keeping them out of the range of ordinary women. We considered them activists who had got a head start on us and were helping us think about these issues. They were sisters on the path. We loved them as people, as fighters for a cause. They nourished our thinking.” Despite the filmmakers’ explanations of their thought process, I still insist that, given that these commentators are framed in flattering environs far from the ravaging sites of pornography, their frequent voice-of-Goddess narration over scenes in which they do not actually participate, their confident expositions on knowledge and “mystical truth,” their occasional appeals to an us/them stance within feminist politics, and their already established reputations as leaders in the antiporn movement, it is impossible to explain them as anything other than experts who have been called upon to explain the film to the audience. The interviews of sex workers and pornographers invoked the possibility of new ways of thinking about pornography from the position of labour and performance. However, the film’s failure to sustain that trajectory is predominantly due to its retreat into the paradigms of behaviouralism, consumerism, and sexual essentialism. These were the most dominant arguments of the anti-pornography movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The inclusion of behavioural psychologist Ed Donnerstein to provide scientific veracity to such claims is not balanced with any other study that countered the effects model, although many already existed. I cannot help but wonder what the film might have been like without the dominating presence of anti-porn feminists, yet recognize that they bespeak the film’s moment in time. Thus, they are examined here for their historical specificity within the increasingly inflammatory Porn Wars. Griffin is the very first to speak in the film, following a sixty-second sequence of pornographic images of women in heart motifs, offering

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the opening salvo against pornography as antithetical to love. She is not identified at first but appears as a kind of everywoman, in front of a sun-drenched window, with tall grasses bending against a gentle breeze just outside. She returns forty minutes later following Tracey’s poem performance outside Show World, this time identified as the author of Pornography and Silence. There is one cutaway image to Tracey, looking sombre with no make-up and her hair pulled carelessly back in a ponytail. Griffin makes a number of poetic comments about pornography’s ability to silence women and turn them into objects. She calls it the “absolute mirror opposite of a religious worship, it is a desecration of a woman’s body … because the power that body has to the psyche has to be destroyed.” Later in the film, she insists, “We all know what Eros is, that’s why we long for it so much. It’s the body that knows that spirit and matter go together, and that emotional feeling and physical sensation go together.” Griffin’s absolute surety of her position is rooted in an unwavering position that sexuality without some kind of relational intimacy is a destructive force. “This then may be a mystical truth we can gain from pornography. You can’t suppress the feelings of the heart. You can’t suppress the spirit in the flesh without ending up hating life, hating what you are. Because these things aren’t separable.” This statement, made toward the end of the film and juxtaposed with shots of Tracey looking humbled and childlike in Griffin’s presence, feels too much as if Griffin is chastising her, cautioning her that sex work cannot be justified without grave psychic damage. It is little wonder, therefore, that many saw the film as a salvation rally, rescuing Tracey and sex workers from themselves. Morgan and Barry offer similar insights, largely concerned with protecting a family circle of love against the encroachments of bad sexuality. Morgan appears immediately after the Show World sequence and Klein accusing Tracey of being complicit in pornography. At Morgan’s

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request, her husband, Kenneth Pitchford, a gay rights activist and founder of the Effeminist Movement, and their young son are also present in their comfortable living room. Klein, Tracey, and Letarte sit on the floor, sipping wine. A leading figure in the radical women’s movement, known for her groundbreaking anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), Morgan coined the maxim “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice” in 1974. Here, she is only identified as “poet/writer,” another problematic “everywoman” marker, considering her high profile over the past decade. Morgan warns about “the proliferation of superficial sex, kinky sex, impertinences and toys to first benumb the sexuality, the normal human sexuality. And then, once it is comatose, you need greater and greater stimuli to supposedly wake it into life.” This process she likens to Herbert Marcuse’s theory of “repressive tolerance” and Nazi propaganda strategies. She continues, “None of this has anything to do with the subtleties of eroticism, of love, of affection, of amiable communication.” There are frequent cutaways to members of the film crew and to her husband listening intently and occasionally nodding. Morgan returns late in the film, just prior to the scenes of Tracey’s Hustler shoot, as Klein asks, “The knowledge is so painful, what does a woman do with the knowledge of misogyny?” As Morgan says, “She lives in a state of enormous pain,” the camera cuts to an extreme close-up of Tracey herself looking deeply pained. Morgan concludes, “Which is better than dying in a state of enormous pain. That’s the only choice.” A cutaway to a serious but more composed Klein sets up a problematic contrast between the “Madonna/Magdalene” duo, whereby Tracey’s pain is registered much higher than Klein’s. Morgan, herself, bursts into tears as Pitchford strokes her hand, and her son returns to the couch to hug his mother. Morgan’s insistence that she be framed in a family unit and her expression of the struggles she endures raising her son “in a state of grace” and maintaining a loving relationship with her husband parrots

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a standard argument that porn consumption by men constitutes an act of violence against those women who otherwise would have no connection to pornography. It is a theme that runs through the film, alongside the argument that pornography damages a person’s ability to love and respect another. Barry makes the most explicit case that pornography constitutes an act of violence against women, disturbingly intercut with Blue Sky’s scenes. Filmed in Klein’s hotel room in New York City, Barry is identified as the author of Female Sexual Slavery (1970). She is the only expert to speak directly about the experiences of women working in the sex industry, referring to them as victims who are forced into it “because it may seem a little easier than turning eight tricks a night,” never considering for a moment the option Patrice laid out of working nine-to-five with “bosses on my back.” The film cuts to an extremely violent pornographic loop as Barry’s voice rises over the film, “Those sitting in porn theatres are getting off on real brutality against real women, many of whom are totally enslaved.” Her voice breaks and a heartbeat throbs over two short clips of child pornography. Barry makes an important and valid critique about the working conditions for many women in pornography, but backs off from it to return to a consumer-behaviouralist model that unconvincingly places responsibility for the porn consumer onto the porn performer. “You should want to turn around and ask these women, ‘Should any population of women be assigned to take all of the violence, all of the ugliness, all the perversion, all the really creepy sexuality of tricks and johns, in order to protect the rest of us?’ It doesn’t in fact protect the rest of us. It’s a basic rule of behaviorism. The image is going to stay with you and going to be transferred into later behavior. It may be just how your treat your secretary four weeks from now. It may be what you decide you want your wife to do because she isn’t as interesting as what you see in the films, but somehow it gets translated back. And that’s why all of us remain as potential if not real victims of what goes on in those theatres.”

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Barry could have stayed with her concern for the performers, but instead blames them – inadvertently or not – for putting presumably good women, like wives and secretaries, at risk. It is a necessary task of feminist pornography critics and scholars to create awareness of forcible sex work (violent or otherwise), and to grapple with the difficulties of delineating between consensual and coerced pornography, especially when acts of violence are depicted. However, it is a leap in logic to insist that potential psychic harm is as bad as real physical harm, to claim that the procreative family unit needs to be rescued from its misogynist origins, and to then blame pornography for all these social ills because it decouples eros from sex. Certainly, this was not the major concern of the sex workers who spoke instead about working conditions, respect for their skills, and relationships with their colleagues. With the footage available to them, the filmmakers had the ability to allow the sex workers to comment upon the experts rather than the other way around, and to challenge the experts’ claims about experiences they haven’t lived. There are two other feminist experts included in the film who do provide greater nuance than the strident voices of Griffin, Morgan, and Barry. The first, Kate Millett, appears after the pirate photo shoot at Hustler, displaying and describing her own erotic art. Although described only as a writer/artist, Millett was one of the most recognizable leaders of the feminist movement and one of the first to publicly come out as bisexual (in 1970). Klein sits with her on the floor of her studio as Millett advocates for more public sexual explicitness but not necessarily the kind available in pornography: “What we got was pornography when what we needed was eroticism.” Crucially, however, she does not define eroticism in terms of loving, intimate, relational sexuality. She explains, “Eroticism is for it, pornography is against it. Instead of ending a situation of long repression, maybe it is creating a whole new set of negative values toward sex. We don’t need that.” Her tone is gentle and

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her attitude toward sex is not tied up with concerns over the sanctity of wives and secretaries, mothers and girlfriends. Eroticism remains ill defined, to be sure, but is at least secured within paradigms of bodily pleasure, not love. Millett does not reappear in the film, unlike her associates in the American feminist movement, all of whom are seen at least twice. Her appearance occurs so early, just over ten minutes in, when there is still a lightness and optimism toward pornography. Toward the end, the film has become much darker. Yet, interestingly, Klein does not revert to the motifs of hearts, love, intimacy, and family which have been fallback positions throughout most of the film. Instead, she presents Margaret Atwood reading her poem “A Woman’s Issue” and intercuts it with images from Susan Meiselas’s photo-essay Carnival Strippers (1976). The poem presents four graphic scenarios of women’s global sexual oppression, ending with the line, “Who invented the word love?” Rather than seeing love as an antidote, Atwood offers a blistering critique of the misogynist bonds of romantic love that makes possible sadistic and exploitative sexual acts against women.24 The stark black-and-white images of women working the “girl shows” in rural New England give new emphasis to the poem by suggesting that a better paradigm of sex/work can replace the problematic dialectics of sex/love. This is, I argue, one of the most hopeful moments in the film, despite or even because of the excruciating imagery in the poem and the stark banality of the photos. It is another opportunity to move beyond behaviouralism and sexual essentialism. Unfortunately, that opportunity is again squandered. The film returns to Morgan and her family triptych as she advocates for the centrality of domestic love to combat pornography. The constant push-and-pull between Klein’s desire to give voice to those working in the pornography industry and her personal disgust at what she sees is somewhat akin to Meiselas’s preface to her book. “Like the [girl shows], the book represents coexistent aspects of a phenom-

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Susan Meiselas/Magnum from Carnival Strippers (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976). Reprinted with permission from the artist.

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enon, one which horrifies, one which honors. If the viewer is appalled by what follows, that reaction is not so different from the alienation of those who participate in the shows.”25 Thus Klein’s decision to make Tracey central to the film can be seen as an effort to provide a connecting thread to the multilayered fabric of publicly mediated sexuality. Tracey offers countervailing positions to almost all the other voices at play: the pornographers, the sex workers, the activists, and especially the experts. In contrast to complaints that Tracey becomes too present in the film, that it becomes too much about her, I would suggest that it would have been better had the film been more about her and allowed her interpretations, rather than those of the experts, to guide the audience. Voices V: Lindalee Tracey Tracey’s renunciation of Not a Love Story began in 1997 with her autobiography and continued right up until her death in 2006. “I can’t believe what they’ve turned me into. There’s nothing of my studio or my performance art, nothing of me outside my function … The film takes credit for my supposed conversion, as if I had no intellectual context before.”26 It’s a curious complaint because it implies that she had neither been involved in the lengthy editorial process nor had editorial control over the scenes featuring her. Tracey’s contention that she felt silenced upon seeing the film must be treated seriously, but to say that the film offers nothing of her, or that it constructed a performance of which she was unaware, is difficult to accept. She is a forceful, dynamic presence throughout the film, and offers important insight into a different position from Klein’s. It is not so simple a relationship as pro-sex stripper vs. anti-porn feminist, because both women knew it was more complicated than that. Tracey’s desire is to “distinguish between the shades and grades, to know the subtleties and where the real menace lies … I know

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the difference, I’ve lived it.”27 It is my contention that Tracey illustrates this difference very clearly in a way that does not repudiate her identity as a stripper but authorizes it when she insists in the film, “I know that what I do is decent for myself.” Furthermore, Tracey’s performance is supported in many more ways by the film than it is undercut, reflecting Klein’s own desire to give voice to the women working in pornography even as she became increasingly opposed to its proliferation. This section focuses on Tracey’s three major performances in the film: her striptease at Club Super-Sexe, her poetry reading in front of Show World, and her photo shoot at Hustler. Although the use of cutaways seems to define Tracey as “a snappy, happy, born-again feminist penitent,”28 Tracey’s self-narrativization in this film demonstrates her acute awareness that she is engaged in a social performance to explicate her work in sexual performance. In a recent reappraisal of the film, Janis Dale notes that both Klein and Tracey are obviously playing roles that are signalled noisily and unconvincingly to the audience. “When Tracey finally converts to Klein’s view, she loses all credibility as the (s)expert.” In the same article, however, Noëlle Elia charges that Dale is taking for granted a narrative framework rooted in 1980s anti-porn activism and counters that, because of her different historical context, “my response to the core issues doesn’t hinge on her so-called transformation.”29 I concur with Elia and argue moreover that the insistence on treating the film only as a contrived redemption parable is not only historically dependent on outmoded paradigms from the Porn Wars but also negates Tracey’s self-directed performances. I agree with Dale that the cutaways ring false, as cutaways almost always do. Yet, the cutaways do not tell the only story of Tracey in the film. Three generous sequences prominently located at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the film give Tracey ample opportunity to illuminate her ideas about the complexities and confusions of pornography as it crossed over into the mainstream.

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In the opening of the film, Tracey speaks passionately about her questioning of pornography but also of the condescending tactics of the Women Against Pornography movement for the way they judge sex workers. As if to prove them wrong, she performs one of her signature strip routines for the camera. Dressed in a flouncy nursery rhyme costume, Tracey approaches the stage like an awkward, gawky child, yelling at the audience as she dances ungracefully, occasionally lifting her skirt and tugging at her buttons. She narrates her own performance: “What I do is neither erotic nor pornographic but is a parody of what I’m supposed to be. I use comedy as my vehicle, as my way of communicating.” A man from the audience calls out to her; they engage in some playful wrestling and banter. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” Tracey laughs as she wiggles her leg free of his grasp. The film cuts to Tracey in her apartment. A poster featuring her as a headlining stripper, with her stage name Fonda Peters, is on the wall. She is casual, confident, and in command of her ideas. “I’ve gone through a lot of pain with stripping and it’s taught me a lot about the divisions between men and women. But I think, in a sex club, with everything that’s wrong about it there’s one thing that’s right, and that is that it’s a very honest arena.” The film returns to Tracey on stage, now near the end of her routine. We hear her roar as the last piece of clothing is removed. She bends over with her hands strategically covering her vagina as she teases the audience, “Sorta like a box of Cracker Jack with a prize in it, eh?” A few more playful moves to draw attention to the absurdity of her nudity and then a triumphant “God bless the working woman” as Tracey twirls about the stage, the sweat pouring off her back, and takes her final bow. She chats happily with the uproarious audience, who offer up dollars and jokes in equal measure. As we watched the film together, Klein remained enthralled by her performance: “I think it’s brilliant, I loved it. I love the fact that she celebrates the working woman and just

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undercuts the fantasy every time.” The performance by Tracey, coming after the scene of go-go girls, illustrates how sexual performance is not necessarily pornographic, in the sense of being sadistic and voyeuristic, but can also be exhilarating, creative, and rewarding. With her own explanations of why she strips, and her conflicted feelings about both the changing direction of the clubs and the anti-porn movement that treats her condescendingly, Tracey defies any attempt to turn her into a penitent survivor. Forty minutes into the film, after Tracey is shaken by her experiences in Show World and called to explain herself by Klein, she seems knocked off her own sense of self. The scene with Morgan only exacerbates a growing concern that Tracey is to be turned into a cinematic experiment in feminist consciousness raising. Forcefully, Tracey redirects the film back to her point of view with a poetry performance in front of Show World. The film bleeds into her performance, beginning in the darkened space of the club and showing the men watching a three-way girl sex show, the metal shutters lowering as they crane their necks for one last view. The camera pans away and up the stairs where we hear Tracey’s voice, faint at first, growing louder and more forceful by the moment. from the tedium of prosperity They come like sinners – they come to worship woman in her Nakedness to address their god they come each night to beg from her success. Stationed, sinking in their chairs

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the Corporate Men confess … undying love and piety they offer gold; prostrate themselves pleading for affection from a nameless woman – a holiness that they invent to fill some nameless hole. These finest men in finest tweed sink lower in their chairs. They fall in love; deny it … pour liquor down their wretched souls, and leave so self-respecting.

The poem gives voice to the experiences of sex workers, articulating and denouncing the hypocrisy of the men and women who seek to define and denigrate them. Following the performance of her poem, Tracey wades out into the crowd to ask them what they thought. Klein recalls being a little frightened as the discussion heated up and the crowd pressed closer, but she was also impressed with Tracey’s ability to more than hold her own, and stayed back with the camera. Tracey is confronted by one man who accuses her of “hurting other women. You’re downing them.” She fires back, “I know these women, these are women I work with every day. I’m one of these women. I take my clothes off too. What I’m saying is that the way these people represent sex is as a very brutal, violent thing. They’re the ones that shut their mouths and are silent while you put in your quarters and go off on your trip. They don’t have a place

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out there, they don’t get paid out there, so they come in here and they show off their cunt and their tits and that’s how women make money.” The discussion ends there as the camera pulls back to a long shot of the crowd, Tracey lost somewhere in the middle, and then a shot of an XXX billboard promising Fantasy. Tracey’s argument with the people in the crowd is not as articulate as she might have hoped – how could it be under the circumstances? – yet it hinges on the brutal economic conditions that many sex workers face. It elucidates a key meaning of her poem: that to deny the economic inequalities between audience and performer is to ignore the power relationships that too often play out on moral grounds and treat the sex worker as a fallen woman and not a working woman. The Fantasy billboard reminds us how some pornography operates to mask the labour behind the performance, to insist on a fantasy that the woman is the one asking for it and therefore does not deserve respect on either moral or economic terms. What is particularly telling is that that man with whom she argues, a working-class African American, is demanding the right of the women to do their work and be respected, not “downed” by women on the outside. It says something about the degree to which the anti-porn arguments were already being felt as elitist and moralizing. Thus, the immediate return to Susan Griffin after this scene drops the energy of the film precipitously as we are asked to learn at her feet, not debate on the street. Griffin returns once more late in the film to dominate the scenes of Tracey posing for Suze Randall. She is given priority to explain what we are watching, and what Tracey is feeling, by way of a voice-over narration that begins first over billboards and bus shelter advertisements and then moves to the dressing room where Hustler models prepare for their shoot. Without warning, the film cuts to Tracey, dolled up in too much make-up, teased hair, and flirty Victorian lingerie, laughing and joking with Randall. Griffin concludes, almost as a chastisement of

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Susan Griffin, filmed in her home for Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Susan Trow, photographer. Mitch Kern, image editor.

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Tracey’s new and unexplained get-up: “We have been at pains to make ourselves into pornographic images when we aren’t that.” As Randall calls out for “pussy juice” and promises to put Tracey “through the number,” it becomes uncomfortably clear that Tracey is going to pose for Randall and we are going to watch. Tracey is visibly nervous but tries, unsuccessfully, to get into the spirit of the experience. As Randall returns with her assistant and begins moulding Tracey’s vagina, the camera catches the smile draining from her face as she shakes her head and looks down. A brief voice-over from Tracey alerts us to what is about to unfold. “I asked to pose for Suze because it’s the only way that I knew how to find out how it would be like to be turned into an object and that’s how I learn, by putting myself on the line.” Randall moves in closer and begins to coax Tracey to spread her legs wider. She reluctantly capitulates, her voice weak and her face tense. Klein calls out from behind the camera to ask what’s going on. By this point Tracey is clearly seething and responds with anger and sarcasm, “She’s tucking my lips under and making it like a flower.” Klein comes over to see this process, and the camera catches an extreme close-up of Tracey’s vagina being swabbed and prodded by Randall. A brief close-up of an unsmiling, blank-stared Tracey before the camera pulls back to show her in full pose, her vagina weirdly mutated. Tracey is staring away from the camera, grimacing and shaking her head. When Randall begins to snap photos, she tries to recover and pose provocatively, but without any of her usual playfulness or cheery banter. Having witnessed her silencing by Randall, the film makes what I believe is its greatest misstep by handing authority back to Griffin to explain to us what Tracey is feeling. “One cannot objectify the world without starting to destroy it. Otherwise, if a woman were made into an object then she would be content to be an object. But in fact, somewhere in her is a protest. Somewhere in her, she knows. She has this other vision inside her.” As this smug narration concludes, the film cuts

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away from the photo shoot to show Tracey once again at Griffin’s feet, deglamorized and humbled. The Hustler photo shoot is by far the most controversial and damning moment for the film. Jill McGreal calls it “a shameful sequence at the end which should never have been thought fit for filming let alone inclusion in the final edited version.”30 Tracey’s insistence that she pose for Randall as part of the film and Klein’s decision to give the sequence prominence in the final cut speak to the film’s belief that “if you see [the kinds of pornography around us], and you read about them, and you notice them, then you will do something about them,” as Morgan states earlier in the film. Yet, the artificiality and self-consciousness of the scene signal too obviously that it is a constructed performance, with its lesson already predetermined. Thus, the outrage felt by the audience is not directed at Randall, who is clearly manipulating and bullying Tracey, but at Klein and the film for making us unwilling participants. Several issues arise in determining how and why this scene even happened. Tracey did insist that she pose, against Klein’s objections. “I want to get to the feeling of it, to the seam between fake and real. I need to know if the creation of this image is all external or if it gets inside.”31 Klein remembers her sense of dread and that she was “as freaked out as I looked in the film … I did it because I agreed that she could control her own performance, she insisted and I promised.” She wonders if she should have intervened and at least stopped filming it, but she felt that she had to let Tracey guide the moment and trust her to do what she wanted. It is a crisis of documentary consent, and one that demonstrates the severe limitations of the film’s competing frameworks. Waugh suggests that Klein denies Tracey the “presentational” frame of performance and places her instead into the “representational” frame of vérité. The difference, he claims, is that the former relinquishes the authority of the film to the subject on screen whereas the latter over-

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determines the subject in order that her performance appears to naturally coincide with the film’s message.32 I think it’s more complicated in that the two frames are intertwined uncomfortably and incompatibly throughout the film, crashing violently against each other at this point. Klein writes in their collaborative book project, “Did you think we should have stopped it? We would have been robbing you of your responsibility. I can’t imagine treating you that way.” Tracey had been able to insist upon the street poetry and that Klein film her strip routine, and that these elements be included in the film so that she would appear whole. These performances mark the film as telling other, important stories about sex workers. Yet, with the Hustler shoot, Tracey was placed in an untenable situation where she could not admit that it had gone too far and that she no longer wanted it to be happening. It was an excruciating experience for the whole crew, especially Tracey. She acknowledges in the film that “to fall off of what you know you are, and hit rock bottom, and have everybody watching – it was really embarrassing. But more than embarrassing, it was a really sick feeling. I really felt sick about it.” What happened next was, due to an unfortunate technical glitch, lost to the film. Tracey confronted Randall and told her she felt “humiliated and violated.” One of the models on set also blurted out that she felt awful and hated doing it. Randall fled the room in tears. “It was like a whole unravelling of the façade,” said Klein, who then did “the best interview of my life” as Randall spoke more honestly about the demands of working in pornography. Unbeknownst to anyone, the sound equipment had broken, and nothing of the interview or the confrontation that preceded it was usable.33 In discussion about the filming of this scene and how it appears in the final cut, Letarte recalls his own disturbed feelings but offers insight into how he perceives it now. “The issue is not seeing labia, the issue is her discomfort with the situation that has taken over her body, her sexuality, against her will, and that her sensitivity has not been

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respected. That’s what I see … The disturbing aspect of pornography for me has nothing to do with eroticism or sexuality, it has to do with something that is not consensual.” Therein lies a new and complicated question. Is it possible to give consent to one camera filming your lack of consent to another? Tracey expresses horror at discovering that the scene was included in the film. “It’s all there in long, lingering colour – God, there’s even a zoom-in. I’d never have done it if I’d known it would be used that way.”34 Yet, she was involved in the editing of the film, saw how it would be included, and even provides the voice-over to explain why she did it. This is not to suggest that she deserves the humiliation she felt – the exact opposite, in fact. If we listen to her words, she offers a more nuanced explanation of how “putting her body on the line” confronts complex and distressing emotions, and a powerful reminder that sometimes bodies are violated. In all her critiques of the film, Tracey never flinched from the humiliation she experienced, or from her anger at Klein and the crew for being there. For my part, I think it was incredibly brave of her to allow that scene to remain in the film, as it pushes hard against the fault line of the pro-/anti-pornography debate. This scene hurts even more than the similar scene with Blue Sky precisely because Tracey is a better-known and more fully realized subject in the film. Watching a woman who roared with joy over her sexual performance now hang her head and wait silently for a sexual degradation to be over does not negate the prior performance but amplifies her cry for respect. The greatest problem in the scene is, by far, Griffin’s voice-over. It seems to imply that the film has some kind of moral obligation to push Tracey beyond her limits so that both she and the audience can be saved by the knowledge of objectification. Griffin heightens the voyeurism and sadism of the scene, and unconsciously mimics the smug authority of the pornographic gaze that seeks to obliterate the subjectivity of the woman being watched. Lisa DiCaprio argues that the juxtaposition

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of Tracey performing and Griffin intoning creates conditions whereby “Tracey assumes all the ‘risks’ in the film. She must reveal herself both emotionally and physically, not like the expert feminists who, although they may speak with passion on the subject, nonetheless, retain an air of reserved authority.”35 That critique is often used not only to invalidate the experts but also to ignore the voice of Tracey herself. In the next scene, she offers an exceptionally articulate and thoughtful interpretation of what happened to her. In effect, she addresses the question posed to her by Klein in Show World – “Does it make you worry about your own perception of yourself in stripping?” – with renewed conviction that her sense of her own integrity as a stripper cannot be compromised. Throughout the film, and during the years that she toured and promoted it, Tracey never wavered in her own sense that what she was doing was far away from Show World or Suze Randall’s world, and she hoped to elucidate that distinction through her participation. Now, with the whole crew “going off the deep end,” as Klein remembers, they cancelled their interview with Althea Flynt to regroup and assess what happened. The next scene is at a beach with Tracey in a delicate white bikini and t-shirt being cradled by Klein, who kneels beside her with her arm around her. The camera work is shaky here, fidgeting about as it tries to get a shot that is not too invasively close but brings some intimacy and support to Tracey. Unfortunately, it pauses on a medium shot that has Tracey in a similar pose to the one she did for Randall, legs splayed and inadvertently drawing attention to her vagina, this time discreetly enrobed in a thin white triangle. The contrast between Tracey’s natural whiteness on the beach and the objectified purity of her virginal whore photo shoot is glaringly obvious to all but the film. In its haste to redeem Tracey from a moment everyone regrets, the film collapses back on the easy truisms of good sexuality being natural, healing, intimate, and innocent.

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As Tracey begins to reflect on the Randall photo shoot, she calls attention to the fact that she and Klein are developing a storyline for the film as it unfurls. Staged events like the photo shoot are part of her highly self-conscious performance to visualize what it means to actually do pornography for an otherwise uninitiated documentary audience. This is an important distinction from the experts’ claims about seeing the visual proof of pornography as an object of consumption. It was not the spreading of her legs or the “usual teasing, brainless, empty looking outward” in her poses that made the experience so awful, but the way that Tracey lost control. “I let myself be directed by her. I let myself be moulded into sexlessness, into an object. A common, rehearsed, just-add-water sex goddess.” Here, Tracey is explicating the problem of consent in an environment that sought to pry more out of her than she wanted to give. Yet, in the midst of her “really sick feeling,” she says, “I’m glad that I did it in a way because at least I can feel sick. At least I can know what the difference is.” Had Tracey’s words been the conclusion, the film might well have launched a new trajectory in discussions about pornography and sexuality, one about the possibility of finding integrity in sex work and “knowing the difference” when it is not there. However, the final word goes to Susan Griffin and her prognosticating about a mystical truth in which “you can’t suppress the feelings of the heart.” She is not talking about the need for sex workers to define their own boundaries or their need to claim decency for themselves, but insisting that any form of commoditized sex is necessarily debasing. A return to Tracey, as a dirgelike song begins to play, has her dancing on the beach before the final frame freezes her, as she feared, in a moment of time that she would sooner forget. Tracey’s decision, ultimately, to keep the scene in the film may very well have been pressured by the authority of the NFB, and by her desire to remain a part of the film. She claims, “I try telling the women what

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Bonnie Sherr Klein and Lindalee Tracey filmed on the beach for Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Susan Trow, photographer. Mitch Kern, image editor.

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I feel, they can see it in my face, but I’m not forceful enough, I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t even know if I should trust my instincts. Maybe I’m being too self-protective.”36 For her part, Klein felt the ambivalence of having a scene that so clearly elucidated her own position, but at the cost of her collaborator and friend’s dignity. Yet, she felt that to take the scene out would be break the promise she made to Tracey. Klein realizes now that much more discussion needed to happen at that time, that each was waiting for the other to say something, but that it just wasn’t said. She writes in the unpublished manuscript that she had hoped the moments on the beach would help contextualize and counter the image of Tracey posing for Randall, but they brought their own problematic images. Tracey began to dance on the beach, the camera filmed her from a long distance, and Klein was confident that this would be the conclusion of the film. Yet, in the process of editing she realized that “the authenticity of the image became suspect … Linda’s dance at the beach looks like an advertisement for soap, or winter holidays, or feminine hygiene. And she is wearing a bathing suit, an ironic and awkward testimony to the tyranny of pornography.” Klein was never satisfied with the ending of the film, as it just seems to exhaust itself and give its voice over to Griffin, who, Klein said to me, was able to articulate something “better than the film or I could have said it.” Yet, by doing so, the film steps over Tracey’s words and her ability to articulate a different kind of claim about pornography. It also seals a narrative that abruptly ends a conversation that was barely getting started: one about very real, labouring subjects, and the right to demand respect and integrity for their work. Not a Love Story offers some ways to recognize and challenge the relations of power embedded in pornography debates, the way that economic exploitation is explained on moral grounds that problematically delineate between women in and out of pornography. The filmmakers thought they had brought a balance to the film that would invite conversation. Instead, they inad-

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vertently invited controversy and bitter vitriol. As the film gained notoriety and international attention, far surpassing anything the National Film Board had ever experienced, Klein, Hénaut, and Tracey were called to speak publicly on pornography as the new Canadian experts. Public engagement suddenly turned into public disapprobation, as they found themselves more and more on the defensive, answering to arguments they neither made in the film nor agreed with personally. The Porn Wars had taken over.

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Susan G. Cole recalls watching Not a Love Story the first time and thinking what a powerful and overwhelming film it was. “You saw Klein and Tracey shaken by what they saw but audiences, especially women, were also sharing that experience. They came in with one idea about pornography but once they saw the violence they became understandably upset. For some, that meant rethinking their politics.” Cole was already a well-known feminist activist in Toronto who had led protests against the screening of the film Snuff, which advertised itself as documenting the rape and murder of a woman. Across the protest line from her was Varda Burstyn, also a well-known Canadian activist and author. While she and her colleagues were highly critical of the values inherent in much pornography, they also feared increased censorship in a province that was already under the iron fist of the Ontario Censorship Board. Those fears were ignited by the arrest of filmmaker Al Razutis and members of the Canadian Images Festival board following the screening of Razutis’s short film And Now a Message from Our Sponsor on 31 March 1981. The charges of obscenity against a film that used pornographic images to critique media stereotypes of women both galvanized and polarized the feminist and film communities. Debates about censorship and harm, artistic expression and political commentary, patriarchal privilege and sexual autonomy became entwined and overwrought.

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Burstyn was also in the audience watching Not a Love Story. While she found it a rather interesting if problematic take on the issue, other members of Canadian Images were “horrified.” She recalls, “The fear was that this film would reinforce a pro-censorship agenda, by providing a feminist cover for that agenda, and legitimizing the shutting down of important work that was trying to talk publicly and openly about sex as a feminist issue.” In many ways both Cole and Burstyn were right: the film had appeared on the Canadian landscape at such a volatile moment that public debate about pornography was nearly impossible. Canada’s regulatory system for sexually explicit films in the 1980s was a hodge-podge of provincial review boards intermingled with Canadian Customs patrols and governmental committees. With the signing of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, and the first appointments of women to the Supreme Court of Canada, pornography later became a topic of interest for the judicial system. The impact of Not a Love Story, therefore, was not only regionally specific but also deeply enmeshed in a myriad of other actions and issues relating to both artistic expression and women’s liberation. Klein and Hénaut assumed that it would be like any other Studio D film, screened for small audiences of women’s groups with open discussion periods to follow, but the NFB had other plans. Realizing the potential of the subject to garner huge attention, the NFB secured major billing at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1981 and made plans for commercial release in the United States. Studio D agreed to have both the English and the French-dubbed version of the film, C’est surtout pas de l’amour, shown in commercial cinemas in downtown Montreal as long as these screenings included regular discussion groups. Women’s groups from across the country, particularly those aligned with the Women Against Violence Against Women movement and with rape crisis centres, tried to prevent the film from being

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released commercially. They offered instead to mount screenings and discussions through their networks. Klein, Hénaut, and Tracey were in high demand, invited across the country to lead those discussions at both film festivals and women’s centres alike. Public debate about the film intersected the issues of artistic expression and women’s sexual oppression. Despite a robust community of feminist filmmaking in the country, a divide was deepening among artists and activists, and porn was a line in the sand. Efforts to articulate the complex dynamics between sexuality and gender, class and identity politics, art and exploitation were compromised by increasing media attention to pornography that tended to caricature feminist positions. As a result, an oversimplified and often hysterical portrayal of what was actually being discussed at the grassroots level proliferated in the mainstream news media. Reviewers of Not a Love Story frequently assumed rather than explored the film’s politics based on the pre-existing frameworks they had devised to report on pornography, further exacerbating the divide. This section will focus on the immediate reaction to the film upon its release in September 1981 in Canada, and June 1982 in the United States. It examines the preparatory work by the NFB and Studio D to provide an educational and social advocacy framework for the film, key screenings for major film audiences at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, the Canadian Images Festival, and the New York premiere, its reception by film scholars and critics, controversies relating to the film’s distribution and marketing, and its adoption by feminist anti-pornography activists across the country. It will also examine the explosive accusations made by Tracey beginning in 1997 that have dogged both the film and the filmmaker to this day. Before the film was even released, it was already controversial because of a decision by the Ontario Censorship Board to reject it for public exhibition. Some down-to-the-minute negotiations between festival

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administration and the board spared Not a Love Story for one screening only, exclusive to passholders. Subsequent groups wanting to screen the film had to file requests with the board that detailed their audience policy in order to receive exemption permits allowing it to be shown uncut. No public screenings open to a general audience were allowed, even though NFB libraries across the country could loan the film to any individual. The National Film Board protested loudly against any cuts, and Klein and Hénaut both spoke out against censorship. What was especially frustrating to them was the arbitrary prurience of the censor’s direction. It did not ask for any scenes of bondage or brutality, or of child pornography, to be excised. Instead, the board required cuts to a shot of a fellatio loop and one of vaginal penetration. The controversy received ample media attention, garnering interest in the film before it was released, but also colouring its reception. Klein noted in their unpublished manuscript, “Censorship was a red herring: our purpose had been short-circuited … To us, pornography and censorship were two sides of the same double-headed hammer which, for lack of a better word, we call patriarchy.” Certainly, many members of the film community regarded the film as a dangerous weapon in the growing war between artists and censors, and deplored its voyeuristic take on pornography. As Burstyn said to me, “The film is a visual exploration of something that it wants closed down, to disappear in a new and expurgated visual universe. Implicitly, anti-censorship feminists thought the film set up a call for censorship.” Those fears turned out to be well founded, but they also fuelled a vitriolic backlash against feminist anti-porn activism, which made possible a sneering dismissal not only of the film but of the filmmakers themselves. In a condescending review, complete with an image of Tracey from the Hustler photo shoot, Jay Scott of the Globe and Mail called the film “another salvo of the strange alliance between radical feminism and the Moral Majority.” He dismissed the film as a work of “whining naïveté”

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and “a childish, dangerous attempt to police reality and censor fantasy.” Most aggressively, he accused the film of being in cahoots with the Ontario Censorship Board and claimed that its acknowledgments include both Project P (which was thanked for providing footage of confiscated child pornography and not for any collaborative role), and Nancy Pollock of Canadians for Decency, who does not appear anywhere in the credits and was not consulted during the making of the film.1 The combination of derogatory and condescending language to describe the filmmakers and link their purported childishness and naïveté to feminism in general generated a few angry letters to the editor, including one co-authored by Kay Armatage. Interestingly, the letter insists that the film suggests “no call for censorship” but rather dialogue from a woman-centred perspective.2 Yet, Armatage is one of the editors of Gendering the Nation, who, in their introduction, seem to agree with all of Scott’s criticisms. It suggests something of the way that the Canadian film community, including feminists, slowly lined up to redefine the film so that it could be contemptuously dismissed. Scott’s influence on other film critics was clearly evident. On 4 September, the Toronto Star’s lead movie critic, Sid Adilman, wrote passionately in favour of the film. Calling it the “frankest movie ever produced by the film board’s resilient and often underpublicized women’s studio,” Adilman acknowledges that the film can be “skin deep and somewhat preachy,” but that it ultimately “packs a punch.” One week later, after Scott’s review was published, Adilman called the film “an offensive belch” and lamented its one-sidedness by asking, “if women are ‘abused,’ aren’t men, too?”3 In response, feminist journalists Michele Landsberg and Micheline Carrier and filmmaker Bonnie Kreps accused their male counterparts of deliberately misrepresenting the film, especially its stand on censorship.4 By November, with the film itself now a cause célèbre in the fight against censorship, some reviewers warmed to the film and called out

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their colleagues for their knee-jerk dismissals a mere two months before. Maurice Yacowar, writing in a leading art cinema journal, devoted ample space to roasting Scott before pronouncing Not a Love Story a “sober and reflective film. It achieves a balance and restraint that seem positively saintly, considering the enemy.”5 Marshall Delaney (aka Robert Fulford) called the film “devastingly effective” and praised the NFB for mounting public discussions and inviting members of women’s and educational groups to the screening.6 Even the Globe and Mail had a change of heart, quoting Hénaut that “censorship does for pornography what prohibition does for alcohol.”7 Yet many remained unconvinced. Much of the criticism was levelled at the film’s imperative that pornography needed to be exposed, and at the ethnographic othering that derives from such an imperative. Furthermore, criticism began to mount against the way that Tracey and Klein were portrayed in the film, their performances seeming too rehearsed and stereotypical to be believable. In a special section of Cinétracts devoted to the film, Hart Cohen critiqued the film’s “social phenomenology that leads far too easily to an acceptance of the actor’s/actress’s point of view.”8 In the same issue, Martha Aspler-Burnett drew particular attention to the problematic relationship between the two women. “[Tracey] becomes a surrogate in the film for Bonnie Klein’s purposes: a subject to be worked upon and transformed into the image of liberal feminism.”9 The controversy over the film only seemed to grow, fuelled by simmering debates within the women’s movement around sexual politics and a growing frustration with state interventions on artistic works dealing with sexuality. All sides were represented at the special screening for the Canadian Images Festival. Held 11–13 March 1982, the festival incorporated a series of panels with the theme “A New Look: Women and Film” that featured a panel on Feminism and Pornography. Varda Burstyn and Barbara Martineau were the mediators, and Bonnie Klein and Susan G. Cole were among

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the panellists, along with many others engaged in the censorship debate. Indeed, the real topic of the panel seemed more censorship than pornography. Ironically, because festival organizers were still embroiled in the Al Razutis case, they could neither afford to acquire special status to screen the uncut version of the film nor risk showing it uncut in defiance of the board. Klein anticipated being received as a fellow artist struggling against arbitrary and draconian censorship rules. Instead, the crowd booed and hissed and insisted the film was itself pro-censorship. Burstyn attempted to bring order by imposing a two-minute rule for speakers, requiring that they come to the microphone to speak and that the audience refrain from heckling. For that, she was criticized as censoring debate in a report of the event published in the Globe and Mail.10 While those opposed to the film denounced its naïveté and the inadequacy of pornography to frame a debate about women’s sexuality, the foregrounding of censorship was equally if not more inadequate, and often dependent on selective interpretations and deliberate misrepresentations. With each side shouting down the other, discussion went nowhere. In part, the media’s desire for a feminist catfight can be blamed, but the sheer emotional volatility of sexuality, its deeply personal and at that point extremely unstable footing in Canadian society made it difficult and even near impossible for the different sides to hear each other. By the time the film debuted in the United States, the Porn Wars had taken a very decisive turn away from the viewpoint of radicals such as Morgan, Barry, and Griffin. In April 1982, the Barnard Conference on Sexuality heralded a new era of scholarship that was pro-sex, pro-kink, and dismissive of violence as a suitable framing device for sexuality studies. Led by Carol Vance, the conference excluded anyone from the Women Against Pornography or Women Against Violence movements while inviting members of sadomasochistic sex radical groups such as No More Nice Girls, SAMOIS, and the Lesbian Sex Mafia. WAP respond-

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ed by picketing the conference and distributing inflammatory leaflets that were rife with misconstructions and half-truths. In return, Ellen Willis, a member of NMNG and of the conference organizing committee, called them “witchhunting creeps.”11 Dialogue went downhill from there. Thus, by the time Not a Love Story debuted in New York on 25 June 1982, it had become an unwitting casuality in an all-out battle. The divide was not exactly the same as the violence/censorship frame that shaped the Canadian response. Instead, it was even more rigid between pro-sex and anti-porn, as if the two were mutually exclusive. B. Ruby Rich, decidedly on the pro-sex side, used her review in the Village Voice as a call to arms in the Porn Wars. Although flawed and preachy in its own way, the review is nonetheless an erudite denouncement of anti-porn movement tactics and a sophisticated dismissal of the film as anything other than an already dated piece of radical feminist propaganda. Klein recalls, “We anticipated the kind of hostility we got from male critics in Canada, and even the whole censorship debate, but the Rich review was not only shocking, it was really upsetting to us. We hadn’t anticipated those kinds of arguments when we were making the film. They happened after the film was made so we didn’t know them.” Accusations that the film exploited Tracey and underplayed problems of race, class, and homosexuality caused Klein much distress. She and Tracey were still close friends and collaborators. Meanwhile, Klein had tried to find Patrice Lucas and the other performers to invite them to the screening, but they had all disappeared. The NFB gave ample ammunition to anyone seeking to criticize the film by the way it handled distribution and advertising, especially in the United States, where distribution was mandated to follow a more commercial model and generate some revenue. Studio D protested vehemently against using any stills from the Suze Randall sequence, to no avail. The poster Klein and Hénaut approved, a line drawing of a naked woman lying on a bed made from the film title, was redesigned to in-

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clude a still of Tracey in her pirate wench costume smiling vacantly with a pull quote from the New York Post stating that the film “strips bare the porn world.” The whole thing was saturated in a feminine pink to look as if it was itself a porn film. Adding to the insult, the commercial distributor contracted by the NFB advertised the film in the back pages of newspapers along with the XXX cinemas, strip clubs, and escort services. In some cities, the film was even booked in XXX cinemas. Klein went to the film commissioner to insist that the NFB cancel any advertising or exhibition contracts associated with pornography at an expensive penalty, but the damage had already been done and these actions were rightfully mentioned in any accusations that the film was exploitative.12 The art cinema circuit was largely new territory to Studio D, who focused their own efforts on distributing the film through their established educational networks and ensuring that representatives from the film – Klein, Hénaut, Tracey, or Shannon in a pinch – were at screenings to help facilitate discussion. While film scholars and critics raged on in the background, Studio D was delighted by the unprecedented levels of feedback they received from community screenings. Letters poured in to Studio D, as viewers wanted to continue the conversation. Some were openly hostile, some called the film itself smut, but most of them were thoughtful responses that highlighted criticisms of the film in order to address personal explorations of sexuality. Hénaut recounts that the dialogues that happened in the community screenings were of a much more personal nature, and “while there was always a guy or two who was pissed off at us,” there were many more ready to talk about how pornography related to their own sexual experiences and their struggles to articulate desire and pleasure. These ongoing engagements were part of Studio D’s mission to change the relationship of film to its audiences and create persistent feedback loops that would assist in “building self-awareness, developing self-actualization, self-assertion, the development of women’s centres etc.”13

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The intense response to and major media attention on Not a Love Story offered a fantastic opportunity to investigate Studio D’s model of feminist film activism and learn how to replicate that success. The studio produced position papers, discussion topics, and an audience evaluation report to ensure not only the educative value of the film but also the long-term development of the women’s film program. The Audience Response Evaluation for the film notes that censorship rarely was raised as an issue in community settings. Rather, women and men spoke more about the limits of sexual expression imposed on them, blaming religious morality, capitalist exploitation, and media sensationalism. Confusion and frustration often led to angry or tearful outbursts, as participants spoke about the complexity of pornography in their own explorations of their sexual identity. For women, the experience of the film seemed more positive, leading from personal to political discussions about how social structures of sexuality could be changed. Men were less supportive, with many arguing that the film was antimale and designed to make them feel guilty about the way they used pornography. When audiences were invited to break out into gender groups, many men would leave rather than take part in the discussion. Those who stayed often inserted “distancing” questions about censorship, gay porn, and the victimization of men by feminist ideology.14 Yet there were those who claimed they were deeply moved by the film. This tension between men’s reactions can be seen in two competing columns that report on two different community screenings soon after the film’s Toronto debut. In Winnipeg, Gordon Sinclair, a columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press, attended an October 1981 screening with a deliberate intention to be as disruptive as possible. Shouting from the back of the theatre against what he called “grads of the Amazon Military Academy,” Sinclair egged on the audience by gesturing as if to start a fight while shouting, “Come on, girls!”15 By contrast, Peter Benesh of the Ottawa Citizen appeared humbled to the point of self-flagellat-

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ing after attending a double bill of Not a Love Story and Loved, Honoured, and Bruised mounted by then status of women minister Judy Erola for the House of Commons Social Affairs Committee in March 1982. “I left Room 308 of the West Block with self-loathing. No, with self-revulsion. I was brought to remember, not in detail, but in shadowy impressions, how my behavior toward women had been unjust, manipulative, exploitative – in ways I could never have recognized before.”16 The extended life of the film, its high demand in both women’s centres and film festivals, was generating much conflicting information, as discussion appeared divided along gender, artistic, and political lines. Thus, in an effort to document everything they were learning while touring the film, Klein, Hénaut, and Tracey began to write a book exploring their experiences and the ways their attitudes toward pornography were evolving. Importantly, for Klein, the book was a way to move beyond the role of expert that had been thrust upon her and place them all back into the role of questioners. “The thing about being a filmmaker is that you’re an expert on your subject for a while and then you move on to your next subject. But pornography became such a huge issue. It wasn’t just the film audiences, it was parliamentary committees and legislators asking us what to do. We were very aware that we hadn’t prepared for that and that we were far from experts on the topic. I think it was a real maturing experience for me to be put in that position because I always liked to think of the filmmaker as being somewhat on the margins of the experience. Yet here I was being asked to take a central role and I really wasn’t prepared to do that.” However, with the rhetoric of the Porn Wars heating up, and legislative battles on the horizon, the book project became less a release and more of a burden. Both Klein and Hénaut readily admitted to me that they were burnt out from their immersion into pornography. The three principals started new projects, and the book was never completed. Hénaut went on to direct Firewords, portraits of leaders in the Quebec feminist move-

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ment. Klein returned to her major interest, peace activism, with Speaking Our Peace, a film showcasing international women leaders. Tracey began a new career in radio and print journalism. All of them continued to support Not a Love Story, but after about three years of intense promotion and touring, the film began to recede from the spotlight. Meanwhile, Studio D was facing tremendous pressure both from governmental funders and from the women’s movement. By 1985, there was a growing chorus of voices seeking to disband the centralized model of the NFB. It was seen by many as a relic of a different time, unable to respond to social, artistic, and technological change.17 Issues of racial inequity and identity politics were tearing at the heart of many feminist organizations, and Studio D was not immune to these clashes. Criticisms of its largely white, heterosexual, middle-class membership mounted. Shannon’s vision of feminism was seen as too dogmatic and out of touch with the times. She stepped down as executive producer in 1986, in the midst of devastating budget cuts. Prior to her departure, she had refused to fund Klein’s new film project, Mile Zero, about a youth caravan travelling across the country promoting peace, because it did not deal exclusively with women. Thus, even Klein, the most celebrated and successful filmmaker of Studio D, was caught in the crossfires of budgetary and ideological battles. Eventually she secured external funding, and the NFB agreed to support the film as a co-producer. In 1987, after filming of Mile Zero was complete, Klein suffered a series of cataclysmic strokes which she was not expected to survive. Years of rehabilitation followed, including a move to the more disability-accessible city of Vancouver. It seemed that her filmmaking career was over. Hénaut was released from her contract with the NFB along with virtually all other Studio D filmmakers in 1988. It was an effort to appease critics and show that Studio D was open to new voices. She continues to work as an artist and activist in Montreal, but remembers that time with regret. “It was awful, just awful. It was done quite brutally,

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we were told that we were too old and not feminist enough … When the permanent filmmakers were turfed out of Studio D, it left nothing there.” By 1996, just over twenty years after its launch, Studio D folded. As late as 1986, Tracey was still supporting Not a Love Story and remarking on the troubles afflicting Studio D. At an event in Ottawa sponsored by the Sexual Assault Support Centre, she made the provocative suggestion that the NFB should produce “good, healthy sex films” to combat the brutality and sexism in pornography. Continuing to seek out ways to have her perspective and her experiences of the film relayed to audiences, she offered perceptive critiques, including arguing that pornography is a human rights issue, and that cinematic depictions of sexual violence and coercion were issues separate from sexual explicitness.18 Throughout this time, Tracey’s reputation as a courageous and passionate journalist continued to grow. A 1991 article for Toronto Life entitled “Rethinking Abortion” was singled out by the Globe and Mail as a must-read. In 1992, she was given an Investigative Journalism award by the Canadian Association of Journalists for her article “The Uncounted Canadians,” about undocumented foreign workers, also published in Toronto Life. With her partner and husband, Peter Raymont, Tracey became one of the country’s best-known anti-poverty and immigration advocates. She co-produced the documentary Voices from the Shadows in 1992 and wrote On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada one year later. In 1995, Tracey made her first solo-effort film, a raw memoir of her alcoholic father, Abby, I Hardly Knew Ya. She was very clearly leaving Not a Love Story behind. Yet the film dogged her as the NFB continued to distribute promotional materials with her image – most noxiously, pictures of her photo shoot with Suze Randall – and reviews of her work always seemed to bring up her role in that film. She and Klein had fallen out of touch years before, and there had been no contact since Klein’s stroke. In 1995, Klein reached out to Tracey to congratulate her on her filmmaking debut. Recovered sufficiently from her strokes, Klein was now

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mobile with the help of her motorized scooter, Gladys, and redirecting her energies toward disability rights. Yet, she felt some unfinished business with Not a Love Story. Although it was long out of the public eye, she asked Tracey if there was any interest in rekindling the book project. She received a warm response from Tracey, but was also told that the film had become too painful to revisit. Instead, Tracey wrote her own memoir, Growing Up Naked: My Years in Bump and Grind (1997), an account of her time as a stripper that culminated in a scathing depiction of the making of the film and the betrayal she felt by Klein and Hénaut. Caught off guard, Klein sent a letter to the Globe and Mail in response to its glowing review of the book. She called Tracey “a tough, witty, sexy, independent-thinking woman. Not a Love Story makes no claim to have ‘rescued’ or ‘converted’ her.” After detailing their collaborative relationship, Klein concluded, “It’s sorry and scary if we cannot give each other space to evolve. The discourse about pornography, barely begun when we initiated Not a Love Story, has become more sophisticated, complex and interesting. I would certainly make the film differently today. Despite criticism from pornography enthusiasts and some postmodern feminists, I am proud of the role played by the film in opening so many eyes. I also value my collaboration with Lindalee Tracey, imperfect as it was, and am satisfied that Not a Love Story is not exploitative.”19 Klein’s own memoir, Slow Dance: A Story of Stroke, Love, and Disability, was released one year later, also to strong reviews. Yet neither she nor Tracey reached out to one another again. Not a Love Story took on a mythic veneer of everything that was wrong with the women’s movement that had by then all but collapsed. Klein, a retired filmmaker from a reviled era, had little contact with the documentary film sector anymore, and even less contact with a zealously transformed sexual culture that was embracing pornography as a political tool. Any kind of nuance or critique in the film was harder to see in light of these new contexts and a full-scale rejection of the old.

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In 2003, Tracey released The Anatomy of Burlesque, a joyous cultural history of striptease, and pilloried Not a Love Story in the promotion of her film. In an interview, she bitterly dismissed the experience. “It was a pretentious middle-class strike against porno … I was doing quite well before they aimed a camera at me.”20 Also around that time, at a panel on documentary ethics for the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, Tracey stood up in the audience to lambast Hénaut, also in the audience, and declared that she and Klein had robbed her of any voice in the film. In her final interview with POV, Marc Glassman called Tracey’s denunciation at Hot Docs “one of the most vivid and courageous things I’ve seen in my life.” Tracey insisted that she had been exploited by “those two clucks,” who never understood what they did to her and never apologized. “Hénaut needed to be told in front of her peers that her way of filmmaking was completely wrong … I’m sure they feel a great deal of shame about some of the things that they did.”21 Tragically, Tracey died one month before the article was published, having never reconciled with Klein. It was a struggle for Klein to sort through her own anger as well as her grief over the lost relationship. In our interviews, she said that the backlash against her left her “less courageous, less willing to stick out my neck. I’m angry about that because I would like to be braver but I just don’t want to be shit on again.” After Klein wrote a private letter to Glassman, who was also the editor of the magazine, trying to clarify her position, he decided to publish a retrospective on Klein. It was published two issues after the Tracey cover, in summer 2007, and recognized the release of Klein’s return to filmmaking, SHAMELESS: The ART of Disability, in May 2006. The article was co-authored by Janis Dale, a contemporary of Klein’s who had always been troubled by the Studio D model, and Noëlle Elia, a younger artist with no memories of the battles in the women’s movement, but it did not include an interview with Klein. Together, the authors place Not a Love Story in the context of Klein’s forty-year career, and of her

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first film in nearly twenty years. It was Dale who struck at the heart of the longstanding and now unresolvable feud. Klein had written to the magazine, “I do not disagree with Lindalee’s heartfelt feelings like shame and humiliation.” Dale countered, “But that’s not what Tracey conveyed, she expressed anger about untruths, and that’s how she left this earth.”22 The untruths Tracey felt were about how her identity was taken up and recast in ways that felt completely foreign and utterly disrespectful of everything she believed she was. She was not so much ashamed of the sequence with Suze Randall as she was angry that her embarrassment became such a pivotal moment in the film. She had hoped to disarm the power of shame in sexuality with this film, and somehow turned into the embodiment of it. Yet that anger, I suggest, righteous as it was, fuelled a different form of victimization and perpetuated the very interpretation of the film that haunted her life. It is a realization that has also come to Klein. She said wistfully, “I know I’m not good with conflict, but I wish I had just reached out to her when I had the chance. Why didn’t I just pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m sorry you were so hurt, I didn’t realize, I didn’t want this to happen to you.’ My response now really isn’t anger, I don’t know if it ever was. It was just a feeling that ‘I’m not understanding’ and sadness. A real sense of sadness.” What I hope this book has accomplished is to dismantle that devastating portrait of Tracey which caused her and Klein so much pain, and reignite a vision of the film that they both shared at one point. Dale calls for a posthumous recrediting of the film to give Tracey equal credit with Klein. Her argument rests on the claim that they shared in the anti-pornography message of the film from distinct perspectives that can be recovered by recognizing Tracey’s significant contribution. I never had the privilege of meeting Tracey, and question whether it would be appropriate to put her name on a film that she died disowning, yet I

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Bonnie Sherr Klein, Pierre Letarte, and Lindalee Tracey on location for Not a Love Story. From the personal collections of Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein. Susan Trow, photographer. Mitch Kern, image editor.

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agree with Dale that Tracey’s voice is imprinted indelibly on this film, and that it is easily possible to grant her power within it. She offers an ebullient contrapuntal tone to the grimness of the feminist experts and the griminess of Times Square. When Klein asks Morgan and Barry for hope, it feels as if she has forgotten momentarily that the film gives us hope in the persona of Tracey, who is both critical of much of the pornography she sees and confident in the knowledge that sex work can be done with integrity. Now, as the Porn Wars seem to be heating up once again, it is worth revisiting Not a Love Story to remember the mistakes of the past and how this film did point toward a different future.

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This book opened with a generous account of Klein’s early days in the NFB as a historical snapshot of activist and feminist filmmaking in this country. It should end, therefore, with an appreciation of the two filmmakers who encountered each other at a critical juncture in this history and went on to reimagine its potential. Tracey always claimed that she learned a lot from Klein about how not to be a filmmaker. In viewing her first film, Abby, I Hardly Knew Ya (1995), about a father who abandoned her while she was still a baby, I would argue that there is also much that she learned about how to approach sensitive personal material and make it resonate. Klein’s most recent film, SHAMELESS: The ART of Disability (2006), released almost twenty years after her last, also owes tremendously to Not a Love Story in its collaborative approach, distinctive voices, and, most important, her willingness to put herself into the film in a way that she couldn’t before. Both films eschew the Griersonian commitment to social observation and objective knowledgeseeking, offering instead highly emotional and self-conscious forays not only into the filmmakers themselves but also into the very idea of journeying into one’s self. At stake in both films is the recognition that objectivity can be unseated from the centrality of the documentary genre, and that affect and emotion can provide greater subtlety and complexity to its analysis.

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Tracey’s decision to make a film about her father was spurred by her young son’s questions about her family. Abby, I Hardly Knew Ya confronts an emotional struggle between experiencing and forgetting and offers no resolution. “The right not to remember belongs to everyone,” she wrote in On the Edge. “Some of us choose to forget, others want to rewrite.”1 Abby is a continuation of her own journey of remembering the pain of poverty and seeking to rewrite the shame she once felt into a form of both poetic and social justice. It was the premiere film of The View from Here, an inventive new series from Ontario’s public television station, offering new works that departed from what Tracey called the “current affairs” approach to documentary. Instead, it showed lowbudget, highly personal reflections whose social comment came only indirectly. Tracey enthused that Canada “is now in the process of reinventing [the documentary] … we’re allowed to own our stories and tell them the way we want to. It’s real voices without experts.”2 In the film, Tracey embarks on a quest to learn all she can about the man who abandoned his family, ended up living on the streets, and died at the age of thirty-six, ravaged by alcoholism. She possesses only a couple of photographs of him, one with her as a baby cradled in his arms, and has no memories, since he was gone from her life before her second birthday. Tracey visits cousins she never met before who tell stories of a doting uncle whom they loved dearly even as alcoholism destroyed him. She looks for his old friends among the homeless drunks scattered about his favourite haunts. She learns of his desperate, failed attempts to sober up. She visits the mission and the charity hospital that took him in as his life came to an end. And in the closing scene, she visits his grave and pours out her anger in a fit of cathartic screaming. There are many intensely personal moments in the film, which perversely serve to create a distance from Tracey as the subject of the documentary. She closely guards against revealing too much of herself, and

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there is very little reflection on how her life went from deep poverty to bourgeois fairytale. Yet, the film comes directly from her point of view as she is now, a middle-aged, middle-class woman secure in professional and personal success. Many questions about Abby’s family go unanswered, leaving an incomplete picture that centres only on Tracey’s loss. We watch as she curls up in a hospital room and reads the excruciating details of his agonizing death, or lies down on a mission cot and tries to imagine him at his lowest. These are moments of her signature “learning by feeling,” which left her so vulnerable and exposed in Not a Love Story. Yet, here, in a film directed only by her, the same techniques protect her from any objectifying scrutiny. We are asked to follow her on a deeply personal journey, but prevented from getting too close. We can’t help but notice how highly constructed each scene is, how selfconscious Tracey is in extracting difficult emotions from both herself and her audience, and how not every emotional moment works. The process is never far from the product, and as such Tracey offers a subtle commentary on the instability of documentary subjects and their right to privacy even as they invite the camera into the deepest recesses of their emotional lives. What appears at first to be a frustratingly arch and inauthentic performance subverts a voyeuristic expectation of intimacy and closure and demands that we ask why we ever expected it in the first place. Many of the techniques Tracey uses in Abby were first tested in Not a Love Story. Furthermore, they are techniques that opened both her and Klein to charges of emotional manipulation and a departure from the so-called objectivity that is often presumed to be a hallmark of good documentary practice. In so doing, both films suggest that the power of documentary lies more in its emotional affect than in the presentation of any kind of objective truth-seeking. The danger lies in that tension of how much emotion can be released before it overwhelms both the documentary subject and the viewer. As a result, Abby was criticized

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for overwrought, melodramatic posturing and emotional withholding. Some even pointed out Tracey’s more privileged socio-economic status to suggest that her venturing into her father’s street haunts was exploitative because the emotional response came more from her than from the homeless men with whom she speaks.3 Yet these complaints seem resentful of the film’s intensity and suggest – wrongly, I believe – that social documentary must remain emotionally distant to be politically effective. The attempt to discredit a documentary by calling out the filmmaker’s privilege is harder to accomplish in Klein’s SHAMELESS: The ART of Disability. We are denied that escape route by her presence as a disabled person, on the same footing as her other cinematic subjects. In SHAMELESS, Klein puts herself on the line not only as a person with disability but also as an artist reclaiming her legacy after two arduous decades of personal and creative upheaval. It was a decision made very late in the film, when she realized that without her story, the film seemed too voyeuristic. Mindful of those criticisms from Not a Love Story, Klein recognized that she had to overcome her own shyness and step in front of the camera. Thus, she invited her filmmaker colleague Anne Wheeler to film her in her home with her family and interview her with her husband, Michael. The film is a series of portraits of five individuals all with very different physical and psychological disabilities: humorist David Roche, poet Catherine Frazee, writer and visual artist Persimmon Blackbridge, sculptor and choreographer Geoff McMurchy, and filmmaker Bonnie Klein, as they launch the KickstART festival of disability art. It very explicitly references Not a Love Story as it also implicitly shows the lessons learned from decades of criticism. Klein positions herself alongside her collaborators, documenting the process of launching KickstART, which she and Frazee co-founded and for which McMurchy was the artistic director. There are no experts in the film except those living with dis-

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abilities who are politically and artistically engaged in ensuring their human rights. Very early on in the film, while the cast is brainstorming a name for the film, Frazee argues forcefully for Not a Crip Story against a wincing Klein. Frazee says, “It’s our film but you’re the filmmaker, that’s your art form, and it seems to me that we want people to understand that Bonnie Klein the filmmaker is still Bonnie Klein the filmmaker.” Later, Klein and Blackbridge discuss their earlier collaboration on Klein’s disability memoir Slow Dance and the surprise some expressed that a member of Vancouver’s Kiss & Tell Collective, one of the first lesbian feminist pornography groups in Canada, would work with a notorious anti-porn activist. Blackbridge says, “I didn’t feel as if we were on different sides, I felt like we were of different generations and we were part of the same process of questioning.” Klein responds, “I think we both recognized that these were labels and that neither of us were the stereotype that we were labelled with. And we enjoyed shocking people with our collaboration.” The two discuss the process of their collaboration, a recurring theme for Klein to show on screen how her documentary subjects contributed to the filmmaking process. She also addresses the crew behind the camera, showing scenes of them setting up and steadying her as she stands on crutches to check the shot. We are given access to intimate moments, some lovely, such as Roche’s wife, Marlena, massaging his deformed and discoloured face or Frazee being winched by her partner, Patricia, into a bubble bath that they both share. Others are more distressing, such as when Frazee is rushed to the hospital with a life-threatening illness or when Klein suddenly falls to the floor and cries out to Michael to come get her. On camera and in the promotion of the film, Klein candidly assessed what it meant for her to go back to filmmaking and to tackle the subject of disability. “When I first had the stroke, people used to say, ‘Some day you’ll make a film about this.’ I got really, really mad. I used to

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think, ‘This is my life, buddy. This isn’t raw material for a film.’”4 But of course, Klein made a career of using other people’s lives as raw material for films to draw out complex social critiques and initiate activism. Now, for her, it was a matter of confronting the idea that it was her life that stood outside the mainstream and demanded new forms of understanding. What is interesting is that this film exposes Klein so that she can come to terms not only with her disability but also with her identity as an artist whose career was interrupted by illness at a critical moment when feminist filmmaking was being redefined in this country. The film opens with Klein applying make-up and talking about how something as frivolous and unfeminist as looking nice is a key part of her post-stroke identity. She acknowledges the role that money and her husband’s medical expertise played in her recovery, and shows stock footage of her rehabilitation therapy and initial forays into disability activism. She concludes the film with a confessional statement about how making it “brought me back to my full self … I was a filmmaker without disability, then I was a disabled person without filmmaking. And now I’m a filmmaker with disability. I in fact made a film with disabilities.” She says this not triumphantly but choked with emotion, holding back any effort to simplify the act into a sentimental narrative of overcoming adversity by sheer force of will. Klein’s recovery as a disabled person and as an artist was a collaborative venture, underscored by the final shot of all the people in the film – artists, caregivers, spouses – walking or rolling along a country road. In a final wink to Not a Love Story, Blackbridge dances along the waves of the Pacific Ocean over the final credits. The controversy of Not a Love Story had threatened Klein’s belief in herself as a collaborative artist, something that was at the very core of her artistic identity. SHAMELESS is, in many ways, a story not only of her recovery from the strokes but also of the recovery of her identity as a filmmaker and activist who contributed greatly to Canada’s cinematic history. It serves us well to recall that legacy by revisiting Not a Love Story

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and other films that dared to cross boundaries and challenge taboos. It is the critic’s responsibility to place such films in a fuller historical and sociological context that they may remain important and multi-faceted learning tools. Not a Love Story was far from perfect and by no means the final word on pornography. But it was a provocative first attempt to grapple with this deeply personal and complicated issue. It is therefore worthwhile to take up this film again in order to engage with the questions and arguments it presents, which have reached new levels of urgency thirty years later.

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Production Credits

Director Bonnie Sherr Klein With the participation of Lindalee Tracey Associate Director and Editor Anne Henderson Producer Dorothy Todd Hénaut Associate Producer Micheline Le Guillou Camera Pierre Letarte Second Camera and Assistant Susan Trow Location Sound Yves Gendron

Production Credits

Sound Editor Jackie Newell Assistant Picture and Sound Editor Micheline Le Guillou Original Music and Musical Director Ginette Bellavance Executive Producer Kathleen Shannon Produced and distributed by the National Film Board of Canada (Studio D) 16mm colour 68 min 40 sec

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Further Viewing

Bubbles Galore. Cynthia Roberts. 1996 (CA) Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real. Carol Leigh and Annie Sprinkle. 1999 (US) Give Me Your Soul. Paul Cowan. 2000 (CA) My Tango with Porn. Siobhan Devine. 2003 (CA) The Anatomy of Burlesque. Lindalee Tracey. 2003 (CA) Inside Deep Throat. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. 2005 (US) The Price of Pleasure. Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun. 2008 (US) Mutantes: Punk Porn Feminism. Virginie Despentes. 2009 (FR) Inside Lara Roxx. Mia Donovan. 2011 (CA)

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Further Reading

On Pornography Burstyn, Varda, ed. Women against Censorship. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1985. Bronstein, Carolyn. Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement 1976–1986. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Cole, Susan G. Pornography and the Sex Crisis. Toronto: Second Storey Press, 1992. Friedman, Jaclyn, and Jessica Valenti. Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008. Johnson, Kirsten. Undressing the Canadian State: The Politics of Pornography from Hicklin to Butler. Winnipeg: Fernwood Press, 1995. Taormino, Tristan, et al. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. On the Second-Wave Feminist Movement in Canada Freeman, Barbara. The Satellite Sex: The Media and Women’s Issues in English-Speaking Canada, 1966–1971. Kitchener-Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001. Hamilton, Roberta. Gendering the Vertical Mosaic: Feminist Perspectives on Canadian Society. 2nd edition. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. Rebick, Judy. Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005. Strong-Boag, Veronica, et al. Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History. 6th edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010. The Broadside Digital Project. www.broadsidefeminist.com

Further Reading

On Documentary Leach, Jim, and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds. Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Smaill, Belinda. The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Waldman, Diane, and Janet Walker, eds. Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II – Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. On the National Film Board Druick, Zoë. Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Vanstone, Gail. D Is for Daring: The Women behind the Films of Studio D. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2007. Waugh, Thomas, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ezra Winton, eds. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. On Bonnie Klein and Lindalee Tracey Dale, Janis, and Noelle Elia. “Bonnie Sherr Klein: Two Perspectives.” POV 66 (Summer 2007). Glassman, Marc. “Lindalee Tracey: The POV Interview.” POV 63 (Fall 2006). Klein, Bonnie Sherr. Slow Dance: A Story of Stroke, Love and Disability. Palo Alto, CA: Pagemill Press, 1998. Martin, Sandra. “Lindalee Tracey, Filmmaker and Writer 1957–2006.” Globe and Mail, 20 October 2006, S9. Tracey, Lindalee. Growing Up Naked: My Years in Bump and Grind. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Susan G. Cole, Pornography and the Sex Crisis (Toronto: Second Storey Press, 1992). 2 Kay Armatage et al., Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 6. 3 Lindalee Tracey, Growing Up Naked: My Years in Bump and Grind (Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997), 201. 4 Marc Glassman, “Lindalee Tracey: The POV Interview,” POV 63 (Fall 2006): 6. 5 Ibid., 5. 6 Susan Barrowclough, “Not a Love Story,” Screen 23:5 (1982): 30; Jill McGreal, “Feminism and Pornography: ‘Not a Love Story,’” in The Undercut Reader, ed. Nina Danino and Michael Mazière (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 216. Joan Nicks, “Not a Love Story: Tabloid Rhetoric in Interventionist Documentary,” in Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries, ed. Jim Leach and Jeannette Sloniowski (University of Toronto Press, 2003), 131. Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented (London: Verso Press, 1994), 2. B. Ruby Rich, “Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World,” in Gendering the Nation, 66. 7 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 194. 8 McGreal, “Feminism and Pornography,” 218. 9 Brian Winston, “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary,” in Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television,

Notes to pages 3–17

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

ed. Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 43. Thomas Waugh, The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 86. David Goldsmith, The Documentary Makers: Interviews with Fifteen of the Best in the Business (Mies, Switzerland: Rotovision Press, 2003), 73. Jacqueline Levitin, “Contrechamp sur les demarches de quelques réalisatrices,” in Femmes et Cinéma Québécois, ed. Louise Carrière (Ville St-Laurent: Boréal Express, 1983), 235. Judy Rebick, Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005). Jay Scott, “Not a Love Story: A Sleazy Peek at Women and Porn,” Globe and Mail, 7 September 1981, 13–15. Rich, “Anti-Porn,” 70. Phil Vitone, “Communications and Journalism: The National Film Board and ‘Not a Love Story,’’ Cinétracts 4:4 (Winter 1982): 15. Gail Vanstone, D is for Daring: The Women behind the Films of Studio D (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2007). Karen Boyle, “Producing Abuse: Selling the Harms of Pornography,” Women’s Studies International Forum 34 (2011): 595. Rabinowitz, They Must, 2. Rich, “Anti-Porn,” 63. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2006), 187.

1. Bonnie Sherr Klein and the National Film Board 1 Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ezra Winton, eds., Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. 2 D.B. Jones, “Brave New Film Board,” in North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, ed. William Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002), 23. 3 Janine Marchessault, “Amateur Video and Challenge for Change,” in Challenge for Change, 355.

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Notes to pages 18–39

4 Jacqueline Levitin, “Contrechamp sur les demarches de quelques réalisatrices,” in Femmes et Cinéma Québécois, ed. Louise Carrière (Ville St-Laurent: Boréal Express, 1983), 230. 5 In Challenge for Change, 32. 6 Brian Rusted, “Portapak as Performance: VTR St-Jacques and VTR Rosedale,” in Challenge for Change, 222. 7 Levitin, “Contrechamp,” 236. 8 Alexandra McHugh, “Une ex-cinéaste américaine au Québec: Bonnie Sherr Klein,” Copie Zero 6 (1979): 29 9 Jones, “Brave,” 23–4 10 Elizabeth Anderson, “Studio D’s Imagined Community,” in Gendering the Nation, 47. 2. Making Not a Love Story 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Tracey, Growing Up, 176. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 191. Ibid. Susan Paasonen, “Strange Bedfellows: Pornography, Affect and Feminist Reading,” Feminist Theory 8:1 (2007): 48 Tracey, Growing Up, 172. Ibid., 190. Ibid., 192–3. Winston, “The Tradition of the Victim,” 46. Tracey, Growing Up, 194–7.

3. Polyvocality in Not a Love Story 1 Karen Marginson, “NFB Documentary on Pornography Premieres at Toronto Film Festival,” NFB News Release, 5 August 1981, 2. 2 Waugh, The Right to Play Oneself, 76. 3 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books), 1972. 4 Barrowclough, “Not a Love Story,” 28.

125

Notes to pages 40–75

5 Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader, ed. Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton (London: UCL Press, 1999), 149. 6 Janis Dale and Noelle Elia, “Bonnie Sherr Klein: Two Perspectives,” POV 66 (Summer 2007): 34. 7 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley: University of California Press,1989), 266. 8 Bruce Elder, “Two Journeys: A Review of Not a Love Story,” in Take Two, ed. Seth Feldman (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), 240. 9 Nichols, Representing Reality, 201; Belinda Smaill, The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 26. 10 Rabinowitz, They Must, 2. 11 Tracey, Growing Up, 192. 12 Nichols, Representing Reality, 201. The chapter on pornography and documentary is co-authored. 13 Ibid.; Smaill, The Documentary, 43. 14 Feldman, Take Two, 236. 15 Paasonen, “Strange Bedfellows,” 48. 16 Smaill, The Documentary, 32. 17 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44:1 (Summer 1991): 2–13. 18 Paasonen, “Strange Bedfellows,” 48. 19 Tracey, Growing Up, 181. 20 Jennifer Stone, Mind over Media: Essays on Film and Television (New York: Cayuse Press, 1988), 45. 21 Ibid. 22 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4. 23 Bruzzi, New Documentary, 12. 24 Raja Sekhar Patteti, “Mini Narratives: A Reading of Margaret Atwood’s ‘A Woman’s Issue’ and ‘The Animals in That Country,’” in Studies in Women Writers in English, vol. 6, ed. Mohit K. Ray and Rama Kundu (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2007), 54. 25 Susan Meiseles, Carnival Strippers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), preface.

126

Notes to pages 75–96

Tracey, Growing Up, 201. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 202 Dale and Elia, “Bonnie Sherr Klein,” 66–7. McGreal, “Feminism and Pornography,” 219. Tracey, Growing Up, 198. Waugh, The Right to Play Oneself, 79. Tracey, Growing Up, 199; Klein remembers it the same way. Ibid., 201. Lisa DiCaprio, “Not a Love Story: The Film and the Debate,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 30 (March 1985), retrieved online 24 July 2013 at http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC30folder/NotLoveStory .html. 36 Tracey, Growing Up, 201.

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

4. Not a Love Story and the Porn Wars 1 Scott, “Not a Love Story,” 13–15. 2 Kay Armatage and Susan Feldman, letter to the editor, Globe and Mail, 22 September 1981, 7. 3 Sid Adilman, “Movie about Porn Trade Packs a Punch,” Toronto Star, 4 September 1981, D3; “Pornography Film an Offensive Belch,” Toronto Star, 11 September 1981, D3. 4 Michele Landsberg, “Male Bile Sullies Film about Porn,” Toronto Star, 15 September 1981, F1; Micheline Carrier, “Le bal des hypocrites,” Le Devoir, 12 November 1981, 26; Bonnie Kreps, “The Case against Pornography,” Homemakers Magazine, June 1982, 7–22. 5 Maurice Yacowar, “Not a Love Story,” Cinema Canada (November 1981): 36. 6 Marshall Delaney, “Hard-Core Dilemma,” Saturday Night (November 1981): 79. 7 Judy Steed, “NFB Film Ignites Heated Controversy,” Globe and Mail, 14 November 1981, 22. 8 Hart Cohen, “‘Not a Love Story’: Knowledge, Power and Pornography,” Cinétracts 4:4 (Winter 1982): 6.

127

Notes to pages 96–115

9 Martha Aspler-Burnett, “‘Not a Love Story’: Notes on the Film,” Cinétracts 4:4 (Winter 1982): 2. 10 Carole Corbeil, “Pornography and Censorship,” Globe and Mail, 15 March 1982, 17. 11 Tacie Dejanikus, “Charges of Exclusion & McCarthyism at Barnard Conference,” Off Our Backs 12:6 (June 1982): 5, 19–20. 12 DiCaprio, “Not a Love Story,” 1985; “Bonnie Sherr Klein: Asshole of the Month,” Hustler (December 1982): 17. 13 Audience Response Evaluation of Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography, Studio D, National Film Board of Canada, n.d., 2. 14 Ibid., 25, 28. 15 Gordon Sinclair, “Anti Porn or Anti-Men?” Winnipeg Free Press, 30 October 1981, 36. 16 Peter Benesh, “Not a Love Story Shatters Male Assumptions,” Ottawa Citizen, 28 January 1982, 9. 17 Salem Alaton, “The NFB’s Last Stand?” Globe and Mail, 16 February 1985, E1. 18 Pat Bell, “Filmmaker Advocates Wholesome Sex Films,” Ottawa Citizen, 7 March 1986, B4. 19 Bonnie Klein, “No Love Story,” Globe and Mail, 22 November 1997, D18. 20 Bill Brownstein, “Tracey’s Past Helps Her Filming Present,” Montreal Gazette, 7 September 2003, B1. 21 Marc Glassman, “Lindalee Tracey,” POV 63 (Fall 2006): 7. 22 Dale and Elia, “Bonnie Sherr Klein,” 36. Epilogue: Two Filmmakers – A Love Story 1 Lindalee Tracey, On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada (Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1993), 1. 2 Shirley Knott, “Abby’s Road: Can a Film Be Too Personal for Its, and Its Creator’s, Own Good?” Globe and Mail, 29 April 1995, P9. 3 Liam Lacey, “In Her Father’s Footsteps,” Globe and Mail, 3 May 1995, C5. 4 Yvonne Zacharias, “Disabled Filmmaker Focuses on Challenges,” Vancouver Sun, 12 May 2007, F9.

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CANADIAN CINEMA Edited by Bart Beaty and Will Straw 1 Bart Beaty. David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” 2 André Loiselle. Denys Arcand’s “Le Déclin de l’empire américain” and “Les Invasions barbares” 3 Tom McSorley. Atom Egoyan’s “The Adjuster” 4 Johanne Sloan. Joyce Wieland’s “The Far Shore” 5 Zoë Druick. Allan King’s “A Married Couple” 6 Darren Wershler. Guy Maddin’s “My Winnipeg” 7 Paul McEwan. Bruce McDonald’s “Hard Core Logo” 8 9 10 11 12

Geoff Pevere. Don Shebib’s “Goin’ Down the Road” Darrell Varga. John Walker’s “Passage” Ernest Mathijs. John Fawcett’s “Ginger Snaps” Jonathan Ball. John Paizs’s “Crime Wave” Rebecca Sullivan, Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story”