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Professor, Dept. of Sociology
Associate Professor, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies Virginia Tech Univ. Blacksburg, VA 24061-0137

Gracious Curves
Video/1997/52 min. A film by Kiti Luostarinen. Produced by Mikael Wahlforss. Distributed by Filmmakers, Inc., 124 East 40th Street, NY, NY 10016. 212-808-4980. Online: www.filmakers.com. E-mail: info{at}filmakers.com. Purchase $295, Rental $95.

The Making of the Crystal Quilt
Video/1998/40 min. No distributor. For information contact the filmmaker: Suzanne Lacy, Chair, Fine Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, 9045 Lincoln Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90045. E-mail: slacy{at}otis.edu. More information on related projects is available at the following website: http://www.suzannelacy.com/1980swhisper_minnesota.htm

Two videos from the late 1990s explore the lives of old women. Both are handsomely made and moving. The first, Gracious Curves, is one filmmaker's artistic meditation on the appearance of Finnish women and would work as a provocative intervention into taken-for-granted judgments about the beauty of women's bodies. The second, Making the Crystal Quilt, documents a communal art project mounted in Minneapolis in 1987, which featured hundreds of old women from the community. It could encourage viewers to reevaluate the contributions of old women to their communities.

Gracious Curves is a beautifully filmed and carefully edited montage of narration, footage of women going about their daily lives, and images of them posed—often nude. It features visual inventions designed both to highlight the beauty of women's non-ideal bodies and also to comment on our uses of such imagery. For instance, the video combines, with other footage of women posing for the camera and going about their days, images of nude torsos with images of flora projected on them. In the context of filmmaker Kiti Luostarinen's analytic and autobiographical narration, the effect is always provocative. The video explores all ages and types of women's bodies, often unclothed, and often accompanied by a soundtrack of jaunty music that lends the footage a celebratory feel. Given popular taboos against women's nakedness (especially for old and fat women), these images might jar some viewers. This challenge to conventional aesthetics is the video's strength. It presents such women as attractive, and does so out of a heterosexual context. Close-ups of a very old, nude woman with leathery skin are particularly striking. Her skin might remind one of tree bark and the pleasures of long life. The video could have a pronounced impact on notions of beauty that are taken for granted and imposed upon women from the outside.

In addition to being sharply analytic, Gracious Curves is also humorous. Visual puns achieved through editing and composition invite viewers to laugh at the mutilations women undergo to try and achieve beauty ideals. The soundtrack also features the voices of women who discuss their own body trials, and the stories range from sad to very funny. Luostarinen's narration sometimes distracts, however. For instance, she refers to the body as "it," working against her own wish that women become less alienated from their bodies. She also seems ambivalent about the women's jokes about their bodies, usually treating humor as liberatory—but at one point critiquing it as "internalized hatred." Overall, the video encourages the former impression. The filmmaker's narration is usually more didactic and negative than the stories and images that the video features. The video might work better for advanced audiences ready to discuss the spoken claims as well as powerful imagery.

Deliberately paced and running more than 50 minutes, the video might be too long for some audiences, particularly undergraduate classes. Groups interested in aging could focus on the last several minutes, a segment that features old women talking about themselves, expressing joy and feeling free, as well as posing silently for the camera. Luostarinen claims during this sequence that fears of death underlie social fear of aging. Although many people might accept this assertion, gerontologists should supplement the viewing with historical evidence that ageism exists even in contexts where death occurs unpredictably across the life course. Ageism is less closely tied to fear of death than Luostarinen claims.

While it does not provide the same reflection on sexism and ageism embedded in our visions of old women's bodies, The Making of the Crystal Quilt offers powerful images of diverse old women gathered to share their stories as well as a multilayered view of old women's lives regardless of their bodies. The video is based upon a performance piece—the "Crystal Quilt," designed by Suzanne Lacy as a part of the Whisper Minnesota project to highlight old women's contributions to society. The video uses conventional documentary technique (nicely executed) to sketch this planning and execution of the one-day performance with brief clips and voice-overs to describe details of the organization and philosophy of the project. For those unfamiliar with community-based performance art, this video provides a fascinating glimpse into the process and the power of such theater.

The event itself involves more than 400 women, as old as 100 years, dressed in black, seated at tables colored as a large quilt, performing synchronized hand movements resonant of quilt-making as their prerecorded voices tell their stories. An audience of thousands observes from the large galleries of the cavernous Crystal Court in the symbolic heart of Minneapolis on Mother's Day 1987. Voice-overs from the organizer-artists tell us that they chose a quilt to symbolize all aspects of women's lives and the location of the performance to emphasize old women's contributions to the center of social life. They tell us that organizers recruited as diverse a population of old women as they could, visiting senior centers and other locations that allowed them to talk with Ojibwe women, Asian American immigrants, women in wheelchairs, and many others. One of the community women performers notes that, while the women were quite diverse, "all were equal" in the performance.

The video joins images of women performing the quilt to the "audio quilt" of their music and their voices telling their life stories. We sample images and sounds in a nonlinear but emotionally satisfying manner. The video climaxes with the performance, during which we hear women talk of their sexuality without shame; death without fear, and the challenges of aging (money, dependency, the temptation to deny it). We see their hands on the quilt tables, joined together, as voices tell us what they mean. The effect is powerful and should stimulate any group to consider the value of old women's contributions, whether as activists (several of the old women involved moved on to leadership training programs in Minnesota), community mainstays, or storytellers. Both the shorter length and overall content make this video useful in all levels of classes as well as in community settings.

Both of these videos avoid the trap of "successful aging." They counter stereotypes about old women but not by lavishing attention on women who "don't look their age," are incredibly active, or who otherwise emulate the middle-aged. Instead, the videos present diverse women, who live up to no particular standards yet who appear to be doing fine. Both videos, in their very different ways, offer intriguing spectacles of old women in their diversity enjoying themselves and should stimulate discussion and a rethinking of stereotypes. We would choose The Making the Crystal Quilt over Gracious Curves for most audiences; it is more concise, and the voice-overs do not make untenable claims.

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