Film Screening
Off to take Care: Programme 3 - Care Fictions, Nursing Realities

Assisted Living | Iranian Women's Liberation Movement, Year Zero | Running out of Patience | The Student Nurses

Fri, 17.11.2023
6:00 PM

Films about nurses as heroines of the everyday could constitute their own genre complete with a wide range of cliché and counter-cliché images. We find both in the two feature films in this programme, The Student Nurses (1970), in which four chic young nurses struggle in different ways with making care their future profession, and Assisted Living (2003), which has a carer upend accepted forms of care. Images representing nurses comment each other ironically juxtaposed in the collage-like Running Out of Patience (1987), on nurses’ strikes in Victoria, Australia. While in Iranian Women’s Liberation Movement, Year Zero (1979), nurses are waving solidarity from the balconies towards a wider protest.
We are pleased that Selina Robertson of Club des Femmes as well as filmmaker and film scholar Bev Zalcock will join us to introduce The Student Nurses.

 6.00pm: Welcome + Introduction  to Assisted Living
 6.15pm: Assisted Living, Elliot Greenebaum, USA 2003, 77 min
 7.45pm: Introduction to the following films
 8.00pm: Iranian Women's Liberation Movement, Year Zero, Iran/France, 1979, 13 min
 8.15pm: Running Out of Patience, Serena Everill & Chris Brown, Australia, 1987, 40 min
 9.00pm: Introduction to The Student Nurses by S. Robertson & Bev Zalcock
 9.15pm: The Student Nurses, Stephanie Rothman, USA, 1970, 81 min
10.40pm  Discussion

Please scroll down for more information about the speakers and the films.

We are pleased that throughout the festival, participants of the Waiting Times Project will share their responses and take part in our discussions about the films.
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Waiting Times Project opens up the relationship between time and care, exploring how lived experiences, representations and histories of delayed and impeded time shape and create experiences of care, including healthcare.

Please note that we do not show any adverts and the programme will start on time. Start times throughout the programme may slightly shift. All films that are not in English are shown with English subtitles. You need just one ticket for the whole programme.
 

Assisted Living, Elliot Greenebaum, USA, 2003, 77 min

Todd works as a cleaner in a nursing home. He takes care by fabricating stories. Who wants to be reminded of being needy, dependent, frail, forgetful, doddering, left alone with the fear of death. Realism rarely helps to cope with reality. In the morning before work Todd smokes pot. He seems unreliable, but develops successful, creative, fictional strategies to respond in his own way to the demands of the care responsibilities ascribed to him.
Elliot Greenebaum, came to film from philosophy, and now works as a psychoanalyst in Brooklyn. Assisted Living was his graduation film at NYU. The film is intentionally confusing, making fiction look like documentary in the midst of a nonfictional setting, turning the longing of the inhabitants into a plot, making them acting characters. The filming location, the old people's home in Louisville, Kentucky looks very real.

We’d like to thank Elliot Greenebaum for his generous gesture of leaving us his film at no charge.

Mouvement de libération des femmes iraniennes, Année Zéro (Iranian Women's Liberation Movement, Year Zero), Sylvina Boissonnas, Michelle Muller, Sylviane Rey, Claudine Mulard, Iran/France, 1979, 13 min
The film shows one of those moments tempting us to set time to zero. A moment of reboot. A transition that liberates forces, opening up a potential for a few short weeks at the beginning of the year 1979. Between the Shah’s fleeing into exile and Ayatollah Khomeini’s implementation of his brutal regime. The moment culminates on 8 March, International Women's Day: women in Iran take to the streets demanding equal rights and self-determination. For at the moment of taking power, Khomeini had already begun to reverse his promises to women. "All kinds of women, whether they were leftists or communists or Fadaian guerrillas, intellectuals, peasants, factory workers, labourers, students, highschoolers – they all participated." (Negar Mottahedeh, "Soundscapes of the Iranian Revolution", Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, July 2020)

Care, seen as solidarity: a team from France spent a week filming and recording this feminist street festival and successfully smuggled the footage to Paris. For a long time, the edited short film was considered lost and only surfaced as a digitised online copy in 2009, in the wake of the "Green Movement" through exiled Iranians. Since then, it has circulated as a document of a moment of freedom, exuberance and potential. Most recently, Claudine Moulart, one of the filmmakers, started a new initiative, also as a gesture of solidarity towards the current women's protests in Iran that have been ongoing for more than a year. On the process of the filming, she writes: “Wednesday March 14, 1979, Hospital roof, 10am. We film nurses we met at the march on the roof of their hospital, with the majestic snowy peaks in the background. Elizabet, with her beautiful black hair, took care of the wounded during the ‘revolution’ and is very articulate and poignant: ‘Since last Thursday, we are having a problem with the religious leaders, and we have taken to the streets to say that we do not want to go under the veil. If this is what they planned all along, they should have told us before the revolution that men and women are not equal! We, as women, want to continue to fight.’  What has become of Elizabet and her friends?” (See link on the side of this page for more information and how to donate to the campaign to save the film.)


Running Out of Patience, Serena Everill and Chris Brown, Australia, 1987, 40 min

Chris Brown and Serena Everill are two filmmaking nurses who accompanied and amplified the rise of the nurses’ strikes in Victoria, Australia. Knowing the care-business inside out, they pick up on the nurses’ subjectivity and claims while deconstructing clichés. They show nurses becoming confident, using their own voice to describe their work, but not showing them at work. The image and narrative of the gentle caring nurse, or the frivolous student nurses, or the rigorous, tough senior nurse have dominated since the beginning of filmmaking. Whatever the variety of realistic, fantasy or heroic images these films have produced, the care work itself resists being captured and represented through images. This has to do with time, duration, the repetitiveness of the work and a narrative without suspense. Only when things fall apart, does one notice the stabilising power of the care work — overwhelmingly carried out by women.


The Student Nurses, Stephanie Rothman, USA, 1970, 81 min

Stephanie Rothman smuggled care into a business that usually doesn’t care. Making her way into film via director Roger Corman’s New World Production, she needed special wisdom to go with and against expectations. The Student Nurses is a case in point.  Critic Pam Cook acknowledged Rothman’s challenging task and the film’s fine line of double subversion early on. In an article published in Screen in 1976 (Vol 17/2), Cook wrote: “The stress on film as commodity, the need to produce films as quickly and cheaply as possible has led to the exclusion in exploitation films of those production values which give mainstream Hollywood cinema its’ continuity: star actors, psychological realism and narrative complexity. The hall-marks of ‘trash movies’ are bad acting, crude stereotypes and schematic narrative: it is precisely these elements which give the exploitation film its subversive potential. […]  Any argument about the differences between Rothman's films and other films in the exploitation field must ultimately be sorted out by close analysis of the films themselves. Nevertheless, her films have a polemical value in relation to feminist film criticism: while they cannot in any sense be described as feminist films, they work on the forms of the exploitation genres to produce contradictions, shifts in meaning which disturb the patriarchal myths of women on which the exploitation film itself rests. It is this strategy of displacement, of struggle within the forms of the film, which is of vital use to us in our struggle to find our own language, rather than the attempt to express our oppression in a coherent feminist metalanguage.”
Care as turning towards and away from stabilising and destabilising a system; perhaps this is a good starting point for thinking differently about the state of health systems and the notorious disregard for care work.