“My Name is Andrea”: Film Review | Tribute 2022

The term “feminist icon” no doubt refers to Andrea Dvorkin, but like most descriptions of this type of capsule (especially those that use the word I), there is something constricting and frozen about it. Pratibha Parmar, a British writer and director working in both non-fiction and episodic television, breaks labels i am andrea, a portrait shaped by Dvorkin’s experience, some of it gruesome and saturated with his radical intellect and sharp words. As Gloria Steinme (one of the executive producers of the documentary) once said: “Every century there are several writers who help humanity to develop. Andrew was one of them. Parmar portrays a solidary profile that recognizes the complexity and fragmentation of his subject and affirms the constant relevance of his work.

Like many revolutionary thinkers, Dvorkin was often misrepresented, usually as a “man-hater”; Don’t think your partner of 30 years was a man (he’s not an openly gay man mentioned in the movie). Whether or not you agree with Dvorkin’s stance on pornography, which he saw as the “basis of male supremacy” and sought to explain with academic Catherine McKinnon as a violation of women’s civil rights, written in more than a dozen books . And countless speeches and articles, often persuasive and always provocative, that can change perceptions. More hyperbolically it can be alienating, but it is also more subtle for those who are not receptive to ideas of dismantling convention.

A clip featuring Parmar Dworkin at Phil Donahue’s concert after the publication of his 1987 book. sexual intercourse, is a revealing illustration of the line of confusion that has often acclaimed the author’s work. The presenter constantly tells Dvorkin what he means with his calm resistance to his reductive interpretation (“Sex is bad”). The viewers’ comments follow. One of the interlocutors called Dvorkin “very angry and lonely”. The other reads with a complacent mixture of compromise and judgment: “What tragic thing happened in your life that made you feel this way?” But even if your only concern is posture, there is also compassion in those words. my name is Andrea He points to pain and anger as inseparable defining forces in Dvorkin’s story.

With five actors playing the author-activist at key moments in his short, purposeful life (he died in 2005 at age 58), Parmar introduces a poignant sensory dimension to this story. At its center is a soul that is shocked and then crushed by the cruelty that women have waited to personally experience the worst.

Most of the dramatized moments involve Dvorkin being closed off by abusive men, as she opens her heart to new ways of life: the thrill of her first solo tour, with Dmankin as Amanla Stenberg; Her work as an organizer of the anti-war movement (here she plays Mushroom); The joy of a first marriage and then the horror (Andrea Raisborough); Constant activism and the sadness of years to come (Ashley Judd and Christine Laht). Jade’s involvement underscores Dvorkin’s clear understanding of the spread of sexual violence and the #MeToo movement, although sections of her, more directly focused on protests in the film, are the least provocative in terms of narrative influence. The other scenes enacted are tender, moving, overwhelming.

Dvorkin’s love of language was accompanied by a compulsion to write from an early age, “for the exiles, for the outcasts, for the martyrs”. As a boy in suburban New Jersey, he gave a speech at a Jewish school criticizing what he saw as an unfair distribution of wealth and calling for an upper-middle-class lifestyle as going too far with the ideals of Judaism. She’s not the typical girl who uses bats. As a teenager, he worked up the courage to approach one of his idols, Allen Ginsberg, and struck up a friendship. Its additional controversy over pornography and pedophilia is not explored in the documentary, but Mushroom expresses early admiration for its heady scope.

Parmar worries about how Dvorkin fulfilled his literary dreams, overcame the romantic literary notion – “words don’t fall apart for me” – and fought a good fight every day. He was seen typing on his dialer and also viewing the layout of the conference room before giving a speech, being threatened and attacked by men on stage protesting his philosophy. The film sees him as he sees himself: a warrior for a cause who pursues despite danger and pain.

It is not easy to hear Dvorkin’s description of what she suffered in the Women’s Detention Center in 1965. She was 18 years old and was arrested in a UN-led rally against the United States led by Martin Luther King. The bombing of Vietnam. His family doctor cried when he saw the damage done to him by two doctors who were supposedly doing an internal exam. And Dvorkin chose not to keep quiet about it. It’s unclear whether her jury testimony followed the prison doctors’ sentence, but it certainly helped close the eventual closure of the Manhattan prison.

One of the strong themes of Parmar’s film is Dvorkin’s realization that not all stories of violence can be described so clearly, let alone heard. So Andrea de Stenberg tries to explain to her mother how she was abused by a stranger in a dark movie theater when on-screen John Wayne dragged Maureen O’Hara down a hill into a field. quiet man (Good old sex war “romance”). “Nightmares don’t happen in a linear fashion,” Dvorkin pointed out, a common truth not yet understood when women talk about domestic violence. “I was heartbroken by what I had in words,” he writes of what he endured. And yet words were his medium, his weapon, his page of light, and the need for the thunder of his speeches.

In the United States, Dvorkin was a prophet and advocate of racism and caste; The intersection was not yet part of the general conversation about social justice. James Baldwin, Hui Newton and the anti-colonial philosopher Franz Fanon inspired him as much as Kate Millett. Include an interview with Georgia B. Jackson, father brother loneliness Author George Jackson (murdered in prison at age 29) is a stern rebuke to concerns about “American violence” as well as underclass and crime still in use today, 50 years ago: just replace any number of global critics with ” Vietnam”. ” On your first question: “How many people have died in Vietnam in the last 10 years and are you going to talk about violence?” Jackson talks about America’s political leaders. “Many black people are killed every day in this country and nobody knows and they don’t care and then you talk to me about the violence.”

In one of the radio interviews taken from the document, Dvorkin introduces the gender community. He would probably be pleased with the recent increase in trance visibility and rights. As she was one of the people who struggled to expand the notion of “humanity” to recognize that women are no less human than men, I wonder how she feels about the term “woman” being the institutional language for health, childbirth and the right to abortion. . Unafraid to go against the grain, she resumed her speech on sexual politics and women’s liberation. Perhaps it was because sex-positive feminists like Susie Bright had “such a tragic love for her”, even though she was among those condemned by Dvorkin, who made no exception to feminist pornographic work in terms of pornography. A form of human trafficking.

With its silent cruelty and recognizable difficulty, dramatic vignettes my name is Andrea He encounters each woman as a separate figure, and as a whole, the film connects Dvorkin’s preoccupation with class, race, and gender with the present moment. Dvorkin was a fighter, vulnerable and visionary, and for reasons Parmar’s film reveals, he was particularly prepared for cruelty and the social structures that support and allow it. He might not like all of his findings, but he asked the right questions: “Do we all share this violence that we hate, if we try to live differently and try to do a different kind of work?