Lives of Female Prisoners Unlocked

Author: Alison Damick

On Monday, Dana Auditorium was abuzz as students filed in, laughing and shaking the spring rainfall out of their hair and off of their jackets. The screening scheduled that night was, "Five Short Films on Women and Prison," with an introduction before and discussion after by producer Alexandra Juhasz, associate professor of media history and theory, Video Production/post-production and Women's Studies at Pitzer College. The general ease in the room, the carefree lounging and laughing and simple chatter that filled the room in the minutes before the screening began were a stark and telling contrast to the lives of the women about to be viewed. Nor was the poignancy lost on the audience - when the lights came up after the film, the silence and perhaps confusion, in the air was palpable.
Juhasz, self-described "activist video-maker," was a soft-spoken woman, at ease with her subject on an academic and artistic level. She said very little to introduce her film, describing briefly how she contacted five of her former students and/or colleagues, who then contacted their colleagues and eventually came up with a team of 15 people who created five short (approximately three-five minute) films about their visions on women's prison rights. She said, "I use television to make anti-television. I tap into its power, but I use it in different ways."
She offered a few cautionary words regarding the viewing of her film: "Be equally as engaged in the poetic, artistic collaborative project as with the content ... Think about why this doesn't look like normal documentaries and how we wanted to communicate this issue to you ... and how we didn't want to communicate it." She then took her seat, allowing the film to speak primarily for itself.
And speak it did, at times loudly, at times softly and in many languages that were not always easy to translate. The first segment of the film was titled "A Gram o' Pussy," by Scarlot Harlot, and detailed the representation of Duran Ruiz by a 20/20 show featuring her and her connection to drugs and prostitution, in addition to her experiences since being released from prison for those same offenses. Ruiz was loud, articulate and very frank about her anger with a system that she believes not only does not work, but also does not leave options for women after they are released from prison, except the same conditions that led to their incarceration. She also attacks the way the media portrayed her and continues to portray women in her position, a misrepresentation that she finds offensive, inaccurate, and dangerous.
Next was "Sheltered" by Enid Baxter Blader. This film explored the effects of the cycle of continuously recurring incarceration when there is nowhere safe to go after release, using the case study of a childhood friend from a seemingly safe and innocent background.
After this came "Unyielding Conditioning" by Sylvain White and Tamika Miller, an interview/candid observation study of former woman inmates that sketched portraits of the women behind the sentences.
The fourth segment of the film was the only animated segment, the only segment with no speech and the only segment wherein the inside of a prison was actually depicted. By animator Joseph Saito and titled "Breathe," Juhasz described this film as "the break a regular documentary doesn't give you in the flow of information," a "space to think" and reflect on what you are seeing.
"Breathe" was followed by the final segment, a piece by Irwin Swirnoff and Cheryl Dunye titled "Making the Invisible Invincible: A Look at Cheryl Dunye's 'Stranger Inside,'" creating a diary-like portrayal of her experiences directing her own film about a mother and daughter who meet in prison. It was everything you'd never expect from a conventional documentary. It was not straightforward, it didn't provide clarity or give direct facts and it certainly didn't have any discernable flow or congruity. And that, she told an inquiring audience afterwards, was exactly as intended. Most documentaries are made to reveal specific information about a subject, about bringing the intellectual distance between subject matter and audience closer. "This documentary is about affirming distance," Juhasz said. "It says you can't have this information - it's private, it's traumatic, it's mine."
Discussion after the screening revolved primarily around the format of the films and its effectiveness, and while happy to help clarify certain aspects of the film, Juhasz seemed reluctant to put words into the subjects' mouths that weren't there in the film. "How do you portray something you've never experienced?" Juhasz returned to the audience, "Something that you know is wrong, that you'd like to change, but that you've never participated in? It's an important question for any socially progressive person." She explained that the film was meant to give these women, some of the women most rarely heard from in popular media, a chance to portray themselves and their experiences. "To have self-control and to choose which images of you are portrayed and how is a very great power few of us have and certainly most of these women rarely have," Juhasz asserted. She summed up the overall message of the film as, "These women are neither as you perhaps imagined them nor voiceless," and that "as long as we have a society that thinks the right idea is to punish, then the idea of a place that's more of a social service after prison will be hard to initiate."