Revolution!

What if Tommy and Annika hadn't been such goody two-shoes, but as fun loving and anarchic as Pippi Longstocking? And here's something else to ponder over: What would Pippi be like as a young woman?

Daisies (1966), the most iconic movie of the Czech New Wave, might give you an idea. Věra Chytilová's wild and funny movie is about two rebellious young women (both called Marie) who go on unprompted adventures and engage in silly games involving food, scissors and older gentlemen.

Though nowadays we may view Daisies as a fun sixties flick, back in the days of communist Czechoslovakia the movie screamed "revolution", years before the Prague Spring would actually ignite a revolution. Daisies was therefore banned, and so was director Chytilová, who wasn't allowed to work in here homeland until the mid-1970s.

But apart from its historical meaning, Daisies is a must see classic that clearly inspired a whole chain of modern directors. Imaginative, hilarious and provocative, this movie really is one of a kind.

The highly recommendable Second Run dvd label put out a nice edition of the movie. Read more about it on their website.

Here's to the Belle of the Yukon

Bet you’re wondering who that gorgeous curvy turn of the century brunette is, right there by our motto. Her name was Kathleen Eloise Rockwell (1873-1957), but she became known as Klondike Kate, the Belle of the Yukon. This Kansas born daughter of a railroad man and a waitress went up north in the Alaska gold rush to find fame and fortune as a dance hall girl.

Was she a lady? Hell no. She definitely chose not to be, unless you think dancing in front of a crowd of rowdy miners in a tin foil hat lit with fifty candles is a particularly well bred thing to do. What she lacked in gentility, though, she made up for in coolness, we feel. And by that we don’t mean the tin hat so much as the fact that she made it up to the last frontier all alone, tap dancing along the way to support herself, and prospered in that lonely, harsh territory where life was hard and only the toughest men survived. Tough men who would then melt at the sight of pretty Klondike Kate and shower her with their newfound gold nuggets to show their appreciation when she performed.

Did she break the rules? Hell yeah. She made the most of her post performance dancing-with-the miners-earning-commission-on-drinks duties by getting the men drunk and reselling them their champagne empties, filled with water. Okay, so while that’s an inventive way of making money, it’s not exactly making trouble on behalf of women. But it’s hard to overestimate how groundbreaking (no mining pun intended there) her mere presence in Alaska was. She had flown in the face of convention to get there. Rumour has it she even had to dress as a boy because women weren’t allowed on a boat that rode the Yukon River rapids. Klondike Kate and all the other women adventurous enough to join the gold rush were true sisters doin’ it for themselves.

And while other dance hall girls preferred to forget their colourful past, Klondike Kate remained very proud of her early exploits. She handed out postcards of herself, like this one, for the rest of her life. So this is us helping her keep up that tradition and handing out her postcard to you. Cause we’re proud of her too.

Scorsese for girls

Martin Scorsese built a glittering career out of the portrayal of machismo and male violence in the mean streets of New York City. But in the early seventies he took a short break from that to portray a 35 year old widow as she journeys to self realization across the southern States, bantering with her lippy kid along the way.

Martin Scorsese, feminist filmmaker, who'd have thought it? To be fair, it wasn't really his idea. He was hired by actress Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn felt inspired by the woman's movement, and Alice doesn't live here anymore was a project she really wanted to do. She was the one to suggest the script and the director to Warner bros. A pretty smart move on her part, too, cause her portrayal of Alice won her an Oscar, and it gave us a real and complex woman to watch, one who is the star of her own real and complex story.

Alice has been criticized by feminists at the time for being not feminist enough. The problem being that Alice, in the midst of redefining her life and her relationship with her son, living in a seedy motel and working as a waitress in a hellhole diner in Tucson, at one point sighs that she finds she really can't live without a man. And that she liked having a husband because, even though she was afraid of him, he made her feel like he took care of her. (Even though he didn't, really, she adds.) In the end, because she falls for a Tucson farmer, Alice abandons her original plan of going back to Monterey, the town of her happy childhood, and becoming a singer there. After all, a girl can sing anywhere, she reasons, so she might as well stay in Tucson and make a go of it with that cute farmer.

While it is understandable that the seventies feminists needed their independent women on screen to shake off their traditional roles and follow their own dreams in a more ruthless and radical way than Alice does, it's exactly Alice's ambivalent attitude towards these kind of dilemma's that makes her character still so interesting and believable today. Actually I kind of like her choice. After all (warning, cliche ahead) life is all about compromises, and mainly: aren't we all suckers for the girl getting the guy, especially one who can pull off a beard, and who throws in a nice ranch and a couple of horses. Please check out Alice, she really deserves to be more than 'that one Scorsese movie you have never seen'. And Scorsese-traditionalists, don't worry, you won't be disappointed. Harvey Keitel  is in it too. And he has a knife.