Of Film Festivals and Feminism

The Altin Portakali Film Festivali (Golden Orange International Film Festival), the largest film festival in Turkey, comes to Antalya for a week every October.  Films are shown with English and Turkish subtitles, in various venues around the city.  Yesterday I saw two excellent films which couldn't have been more different from each other.The first, “A Dangerous Method”, from Canadian director David Cronenberg, was about Freud, Jung, and the development of psychoanalysis.  Central to the film was Sabina, who at first was Jung's patient, then his lover, and then a pioneering psychoanalyst in her own right.The second film, “The Source” by Radu Mihaileanu, a Jewish Roumanian who lives in Paris, takes place in an arid village in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and is filmed in the local dialect. Women here are treated like donkeys; they are beasts of burden who must carry water on their backs through rugged terrain. Like the donkeys, they are beaten when they disobey. The number of miscarriages as a result of this task finally enrages the women, led by Leila, the teacher's wife, to demand that the men take action. Instead of sitting around all day drinking tea, the men should get a pipeline built for running water.The men refuse, arguing that they never ask women to go to war in their place. Women should continue the traditional women's work. Besides, who knows what trouble they'd get into with free time, especially now that Leila's husband has taught her to read.Realizing that their only power over men is sex, the women start a “sex strike” a la Lysistrata.In “ A Dangerous Method” a woman in 1910 Germany becomes a prominent physician. In “the Source”, taking place a century later, a woman is considered a trouble-maker for learning to read.  Yet as different as these two films are, one similarity struck me:  In both cases women are seen as female first, and as human second.Although Sabina is educated and ultimately a professional colleague of Jung's, it is primarily her sex that defines her to him.  Jung couldn't resist having an affair with Sabina, although he new that both as a married man and as her therapist it was wrong. Worse yet, he denied the affair when questioned by Freud, and portrayed Sabina as a neurotic seductress who only fantasized about him. Although he eventually revealed the truth to Freud, this indiscretion and his lying about it were instrumental in the demise of the relationship between the two men.  Alas, the destructive sexual power of women!It seems that no matter how “civilized” the society and how educated the woman, the second sex remains just that.