11 June 2008
c is for cup
I purloined this rather dainty little coffee receptacle from St Hilda's College, Oxford, whilst attending a Zizek conference (of all things) there a couple of years ago. There was one woman there who writhed around like a cat at the back of the room. Psychoanalysis seems to attract a lot of mad, rich women.
St Hilda's is apparently letting men in this year for the first time, and its alumni include Jacqueline and Gillian Rose as well as Sheila Rowbotham, whose Women, Resistance and Revolution I am currently reading. Rowbotham is currently being kicked out at sixty-five, despite massive support from her students and offering to take a pay-cut (and the fact that they're paying that pompous lard-brain Martin Amis a ton to do nothing, despite the university pleading poverty). Rowbotham wrote an essay recited in Godard's British Sounds which is very good and quite right still (which is temporally depressing, but hardly her fault). In fact, what she says about British Sounds and Godard is so intriguing I'm typing it up:
'His idea was to film me with nothing on reciting words of emancipation as I walked up and down a flight of stairs - the supposition being that eventually the voice would override the images of the body. This made me uneasy for two reasons. I was a 36C and considered my breasts too floppy for the sixties fashion. Being photographed lying down with nothing on was fine, but walking downstairs could be embarrassing. Moreover, while I didn't think nudity was a problem in itself, the early women's groups were against what we called 'objectification'...Why on earth did the pesky male mind jump so quickly from talk of liberation to nudity, I wondered...
Godard came out to Hackney to convince me. He sat on the sandied floor of my bedroom, a slight man, his body coiled in persuasive knots [Ed - like the ammonite on the cup!]. Neither Godard the man nor Godard the mythical creator of Breathless were easy to contend with. I perched in discomfort on the end of my bed an announced 'I think if there's a woman with nothing on appearing on the screen no one's going to listen to the words', suggesting perhaps he could film our 'This Exploits Women' stickers on the tube. Godard gave me a baleful look, his lip curled. 'Don't you think I am able to make a c*** boring?', he exclaimed. We were locked in a conflict over a fleeting ethnographic moment.
In the end a compromise was settled. The Electric Cinema had recently opened in Notting Hill and needed money. A young women (with small breasts) from there agreed to walk up and down the stairs and I did the voice over. When British Sounds was shown in France...the audience cheered as I declared 'They tell us what we are...One is simply not conscious of "men" writers, of "men" film makers. They are just "writers", just "film-makers". The reflected image for women they create will be taken straight by women themselves. These characters "are" women.' As for Godard's intention of making a c*** boring, I cannot say except that a friend in International Socialism told me that his first thought had been 'crumpet' - until the shot went on and on and on, and he started to listen.' (From Shelia Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, quoted in Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy)
The ammonite design, according to the college website, was 'once supposed to be coiled snakes petrified'. There is something about virgins defeating snakes in some legends about women saints (St Hilda is a patron saint of learning and culture, as well as some nun from Whitby). Anyway, whatever the weird little coiled-up snake things mean (loud psychoanalytic cough), they're pretty neat. Unfortunately I tend to drink more coffee than this cup would allow, which is why I am neither a particularly careful scholar, nor the kind of lass they would have ever let into to an elite Oxford college. Still, it looks quite nice on the little glass shelf above the dirty oven next to the Bosch model.
