Original subtitles

(Percussion)

(Music fades)

(Percussion resumes, vocals added)

(Music stops)

(Percussion resumes)

(Tempo speeds up)

(Vocals)

(Vocals crescendo and stop)

(Percussion resumes)

(Vocals)

(Silence)

(Percussion resumes intermittently)

(Vocals resume intermittently)

(Percussion builds to crescendo)

(Silence)

This film consists of five sequences.

Each sequence, two takes. Each take, one core of film.

A normal narrative film tells its story through editing.

Each cut indicates a gap in time or a change of angle and point of view.

But on another level, it's editing which produces the alternative world

which we imagine behind the screen.

It's because there are gaps and differences of point of view

that we lend this imaginary world extension in time and space.

It's the act of bridging over gaps and linking together differences

which creates the sense of another world

into which we are given a series of privileged glimpses.

Each cut articulates this world,

and by articulating it, it creates it.

It's for this reason we wanted to make a film without editing.

We wanted to call this imaginary world into question,

not to reject fiction or fantasy,

but to situate it and to locate it.

Film theorists have tended to argue

that a film without editing would be a purely natural film

with the artifice of film-making reduced to zero.

But in this sense our film is unnatural.

It's a film which avoids conventional cuts but not discontinuities or breaks.

It's a montage film.

It doesn't follow a single unbroken thread,

the thread of a story from beginning to end.

It's about something else,

the space between a story which is never told

and a history which has never been made.

In the first sequence, which we have already seen,

there's the performance of a mime drama

based on a play by the German playwright Kleist,

Heinrich von Kleist,

called "Penthesilea".

In it, we see the Greeks and Amazons in battle

during the time of the Trojan War.

We see how the Amazons seize a prisoner

and rape him in their Festival of Roses.

We see how the Amazon war queen, Penthesilea,

falls in love with the Greek hero, Achilles,

and how Achilles falls in love with her.

We see them torn between their loyalty and their love

and how Achilles surrenders to his enemy.

Finally, we see Penthesilea kill Achilles.

We see her fury, her rapture and her grief.

We see her own death,

a strange act of suicide through sheer strength of passion.

The story enacted in the mime

is not at all the same story told in the legends and epics of antiquity.

In these ancient legends,

it is Penthesilea who is killed.

Achilles lives, to be killed later by Paris.

This is the legend of the Achilles heel.

In most versions of the story

Achilles falls in love with Penthesilea,

either as he kills her, thrusting into her the spear of Pelian ash,

or after she has fallen when he removes the helmet from her face.

It is this moment which has most often been commemorated.

In an elegy by Propertius, the Roman poet, we read:

"The victor vanquished by the radiant face revealed."

So to begin with,

we have two broad versions of the story:

the version of antiquity and the version of Kleist

written during the period of the Napoleonic Wars

and the consolidation of Romanticism.

Each version has very different implications,

very different senses,

while there are also constant themes:

love, death,

amour fou, fatal passion,

love concealed under the cloak of aggression,

the war of the sexes, the society of women,

grief, mourning at a loss, perhaps at a difference.

The fulcrum of all these stories is the image of the Amazon,

the woman who is independent, aggressive and destructive,

perhaps superior to man, perhaps his equal,

perhaps, despite all, his inferior.

For both the ancient Greeks and for Kleist,

the image of the Amazon was both fascinating and frightening.

It still has the same power today.

In the third sequence of this movie, the one right after this,

we see a series of images of Amazons,

almost all of them produced by men,

all in fact.

The fourth sequence shows the images and words of women,

suffragettes from the early years of this century

before the First World War.

This was the first period when women themselves united in struggle,

fighting for political rights.

The reality of their struggle brings myth into contact with history.

The image of the Amazon is still projected onto the woman militant,

both by men and by women themselves from within or outside the movement,

but it is invested now with a new political meaning.

To my knowledge,

there has only been one other attempt to make a film of "Penthesilea".

For years, it was the dream project of Leni Riefenstahl,

director of "Triumph of the Will", Hitler's protégée,

ever since she read Kleist's play in the '20s.

She identified herself deeply, both with Penthesilea and with Kleist.

And then the future of Penthesilea:

"If there is a transmigration of souls,

"then I must have lived her life at some previous time.

"Every word that she speaks is spoken from the very depths of my soul.

"At no time could I act differently from Penthesilea."

She sees Penthesilea as a superheroine,

half human, half divine.

In fact, she restores the sexual duality

to Nietzsche's vision of the Übermensch.

Again, following Nietzsche,

the superheroine is more Dionysiac than Apollonian.

The project is saturated with Nietzsche's return to Hellenism from the other side,

his discovery in Ancient Greece

of a counter doctrine which would reinvigorate the German people,

a monstrous mixture of tragic gloom with manic laughter.

Her film was very nearly made.

Serious preparations got underway for filming,

detailed work on script and art direction,

searching out locations in Libya, casting.

She was going to play the main part herself as well as directing.

Then the war broke out and the project was abandoned.

All that remains are her notes,

notes which vividly convey the movie Leni Riefenstahl saw

as she read Kleist's pages.

Leni Riefenstahl was not the only woman

in the aftermath of Nietzsche

to identify herself with the Amazon.

In the Futurist Manifesto for women written in March 1912,

Valentine de Saint-Point replies

to Marinetti's absolute derogation and rejection of women.

We find the same themes, this time within a Futurist perspective.

"Women are Furies and Amazons.

"Semiramis, Joan of Arc, Jeanne Hachette,

"Judith and Charlotte Corday,

"Cleopatra and Messalina,

"warriors who fight more ferociously than men,

"agents of destruction who contribute to natural selection

"by wasting the weak out of pride and desperation."

The superheroine joins the superhero,

set apart from the mediocre, the masses.

The image of the Amazon loses all its resonance of solidarity,

membership of a society of women.

In Kleist's play, Penthesilea rejects her comrades.

Even beyond that, the army of Amazons is set apart

from the mass of other women.

The Amazon warriors are the gold who set off the diamond of Penthesilea.

They are splendid and glamorous,

fascinating to other women for the fear which they arouse in men,

but impossible to emulate except in fantasy.

Their weapons and their strategy are men's weapons and strategy.

They offer an alternative which is magical, not political.

This division between ordinary women and Amazons

is found in ancient literature too.

Quintus of Smyrna wrote an epic about the Trojan War,

probably in the third or fourth century after Christ.

He includes a scene in his narrative

where the women of Troy watch from the city walls

the Amazons fighting the Greeks.

Greek heroes are falling like autumn leaves

before the Amazon onslaught.

One of the Trojan women proposes they should join the battle too.

"We ourselves should share the battle.

"We are not much different from vigorous men.

"We have the same courage. Eyes and limbs are alike.

"Light and air are common to all.

"Our food is not different.

"So why do we run away from fighting?"

They are all about to join in,

when they are restrained by the priestess of Athena.

She argues they should stay at home weaving

and avoid the tumult and misery of war.

It's true that all human beings are from the same stock,

but different persons practise different jobs,

and that job is best where a person works with knowledge in their head.

The argument is one that has been used over the centuries

to keep women in their place.

It's based on the idea that the division of labour is virtually irreversible.

The Amazons appear as exceptional women

who have broken down the division of labour for themselves,

but whose example is not relevant to other women.

Of course, ultimately, there is still the physical division of labour

involved in reproduction.

It's this which brings the Amazons to Troy in the first place,

in Kleist's version at least,

in order to take prisoners

who will breed with the Amazons during the Festival of Roses.

Otherwise, the Amazons would be a society completely apart.

The myth would no longer be about sexual division and conflict.

It would lose the erotic meaning which keeps it alive.

By a roundabout route, this brings us back to Kleist.

The fascination and revulsion caused by sexual difference

runs like a red thread through Kleist's work.

Like Leni Riefenstahl, he identified himself intimately

with Penthesilea, both as woman and as warrior.

She combined in one character two fantasies

which Kleist could never combine in real life:

the dream of dying together with a lover

and the dream of dying on the battlefield.

In the end, Kleist chose dying together, joint suicide.

Kleist was born into an aristocratic family

which traditionally sent its sons into the Prussian army.

His father was an army officer,

and after his death, Kleist was sent away from home by his mother,

first to study and then, when he was 14,

to join the Regiment of Guards as a cadet.

He served in the Guards seven years

in the great wars against France which dominated his lifetime.

Even after he left the army when he was 21,

he tried several times to rejoin,

usually times of psychological crisis.

The last attempt was just before his death.

The fatal project of joint suicide reoccurs several times in Kleist's life.

He proposed double suicide to at least five people of both sexes,

probably even more.

Two of them were friends with whom he had been a cadet in adolescence,

Ernst Pfuel and Rühle von Lilienstern.

Pfuel, in particular, he proposed joint suicide to more than once.

He also read "Penthesilea" for him.

It was not a play for women, Kleist said, but for men,

and even then only for the strongest and most virile men

such as his friend.

The most important woman in his life was his half-sister Ulrike.

He told her that if it had not been for the ban on incest

he would've been glad to join his life with hers.

It was her masculine appearance which fascinated him.

"She has nothing of her sex but the hips.

"Masculine yet maternal."

On a trip they took together to Paris,

Ulrike wore men's clothes.

But finally, she rejected Kleist.

She felt he disgraced the family name.

Psychoanalysts have concentrated on Kleist's relationship with his mother,

the equation of womb and tomb,

and the travelling significance of death,

dying as the last of the many fugue-like journeys

Kleist undertook during his life.

In this context, the Amazon queen appears as the powerful mother

to whom the disarmed and childlike hero wishes to surrender.

But she is also the hostile, vengeful mother.

In the play, Achilles is shocked

to find that Penthesilea has cut off her left breast

according to Amazon custom.

Finally, the mother devours the child.

She takes the metaphor of devouring love

and turns it into reality.

"I did what I had spoken,

"word for word."

Devoured by the woman, dying with the woman,

a double fantasy of sexual union.

Kleist's final depression followed his rejection by Ulrike

when he tried to borrow money from her to buy military equipment

in order to rejoin the army.

His only solace was his friendship with Henriette von Vogel

who herself was dying of cancer.

She was one of the few people he still saw in society.

On 20th November, 1811,

Kleist was now just 34 years old,

the couple set out on a trip from Berlin to Potsdam.

In the afternoon they stopped at an inn by a small lake

and sent their coach back to the city.

They sat in their room all night, drinking coffee

and composing letters of farewell.

At nine the next morning, they walked down to the edge of the lake.

The innkeeper heard two shots but thought nothing of it.

Later, their two bodies were found in a hollow.

Kleist had shot Henriette von Vogel in the left breast

and then himself in the mouth.

The bodies were buried together in one grave.

One biographer writes

that the only period of happiness during Kleist's life

was the time he spent in a prison camp.

He was arrested by French Occupation forces

after the defeat of Prussia at the Battle of Jena.

In fact, it was in the camp that he wrote and rewrote much of "Penthesilea".

The play is full of echoes of Kleist's life

as well as anticipations of his death.

Happiness and captivity, military ambition, sexual confusion.

Kleist found in the cycle of Greek legend

the constellation of his own fears and fantasies,

a world as full of loss, violence and contradiction as his own.

Myths are stories which repeat themselves

in an endless sequence of variations.

Myths can never conclude anything.

They can only die when the problems they express are superseded,

problems such as the meaning of sexual difference.

As the terms of the problem vary, so do those of the myth.

The story of Penthesilea has survived for nearly three millennia,

changing with the demands of different epochs and societies.

At times it was almost lost completely.

The chain can be traced back to the post-Homeric epic of Arctinus,

"The Aethiopid",

which takes up the story of Troy where Homer left off.

We only know this version of Arctinus because it was summarised by Proclus

in a fragment of his chrestomathy,

only a few brief lines.

"The Amazon Penthesilea arrived to fight with the Trojans.

"She was the daughter of Ares and came from Thrace.

"Achilles killed her in full glory and the Trojans buried her.

"Achilles killed Thersites

"who taunted him for his profession of love for her.

"A quarrel broke out among the Greeks over Thersites' death."

Different chains of illusion and memory surface at different points.

By the time it reached Kleist,

the story had passed through the Trojan cycles of medieval authors,

the Renaissance rediscovery of Greece and Rome,

the Neoclassicism of Weimar.

Goethe features an Amazon in "Wilhelm Meister",

a lady on a white horse wearing a man's cloak,

who rescues the hero when he is left wounded by robbers.

He falls in love with her the moment she takes off her cloak

to cover him.

Then came Kleist,

who talked badly, stammering,

muttering to himself, falling silent,

living in the realm of the written word.

What he wrote forms another level of the entire tortuous palimpsest.

If Leni Riefenstahl had made her film of Penthesilea,

it would have appeared as the culmination of a process,

the fusion of Greek and German culture

in a final union of the arts,

a great film opera which tied all the strands together.

In the ideal world of art,

difference, domination, conflict and death

take on an ideal meaning called beauty.

But history will go on regenerating the story.

If we can understand it,

retelling it with its gaps and its spaces,

absences as well as presences,

then perhaps one day we will be able to end it in history

rather than in words or images.

When Kleist first published Penthesilea

in his magazine, "Phoebus", which he started with a friend,

he sent a copy to Goethe, anxious to hear his judgment,

"on the knees of my heart".

A strange moment, Goethe in Weimar,

his garden adorned by a perfect sphere,

a symbol of universal reason,

confronted by the printed page

whose words shattered that sphere in fantasy.

Goethe did not like what he read,

and he sent Kleist a cold letter,

a letter which was hard and hurtful for Kleist to read.

Goethe found the play strange and fabulous.

He could not respond to it.

He compares Kleist to a Jew awaiting the Messiah,

a Christian awaiting the new Jerusalem,

a Portuguese awaiting the return of Saint Sebastian.

Goethe saw in Kleist's play a flight from the world.

In one sense, he was right.

Kleist's play, with its elephants and its scythed chariots,

has hardly ever been performed.

But in another sense, he was wrong.

Goethe's flight was from the world of the unconscious psychic reality.

It is only through the detours of fantasy and dream

that we can return to history and act there,

in the knowledge that the unconscious is always running through us.

It's in this sense that we should take

Goethe's characteristic injunction to Kleist,

"Hic Rhodus, hic salta."

(Vocals, words indistinct)

(Clash of weaponry)

(Woman crying)

(Vocals resume)

(Instrumentals added)

Is it impossible for all women to work together

to uproot an injustice common to all?

Is there no way to bring this about?

Surely there should be.

We must be rid of mere ladylikeness.

We must succeed in making the oppressed class of women

the most urgent in the demand for what we all must have.

When we have brought this about,

we women shall be irresistibly strong.

For the most part the handsome ladies are well satisfied with their personal lot,

but they want the vote as a matter of justice,

while the fluttering, jammed-in, subway girls are terribly blind

to the whole question of class oppression and sex oppression.

Only the women of the working class are really oppressed,

but it is not only the working class to whom injustice is done.

Women of the leisure class need freedom too.

All women of whatever class

must become conscious of their position in the world.

All must be made to stand erect,

to become self-reliant, free human beings.

If we could but see our possible strength

and our existing weaknesses,

should we not become such a mighty, marching crowd

that the ladylike parade would be swept away

and engulfed in masses of aroused womanhood?

What, then, are we doing to reach working women?

In reality, suffragists come to the working class as outsiders.

They do not show any knowledge whatsoever of working-class interests.

And aside from futile argument, what do they do?

Do they ever come forward with vigorous backing

of purely working-class legislation?

Has there been a single protest anywhere

against the Mexican situation?

Have they taken pains to point out to working women

the trend of our court decisions?

What are the arguments the working-class girl hears

when she stops to listen

to the impassioned soap-box orator from the suffrage ranks?

"The right to vote is the natural, inherent, unalienable right

"of every human being."

She turns away.

She knows as a matter of fact she has no right to vote

and she doesn't care.

But before she is out of earshot comes the plea,

"Women must have the ballot to protect their homes and children."

She has no home nor any children,

and no, she couldn't do much to protect either on $3 a week.

So the disappointed orator wonders what is wrong.

There must be something wrong in a method

that fails to enlist the sympathy

of the very women who need the ballot most.

Yet in the main, suffragists simply have an ever-present consciousness

of what the middle-class average person will think about this question or that.

They make expediency the guiding star of suffrage conduct

and dread the prospect of mixing suffrage up with outside interests.

An incident during the impressive march of workers

after the Triangle Fire

pointed out this attitude.

A girl from the marching crowd ran out to join me, calling me by name.

After marching for a few moments, she spoke of the protest meeting

held by the College Equal Suffrage League a few nights before

and said expressively,

"I thought you suffragists weren't any good.

"But if you're that sort, I'll change my mind."

She voiced the feeling of the majority of working-class girls.

And yet some suffragists had tried to persuade the College League

not to hold the meeting

as it would hurt suffrage by mixing it up with outside interests.

(Machinery whirring)

(Women conversing)

In the past, strikes were almost wholly the affairs of men,

while women have always shared the sacrifice and responsibility

and often, by their bravery, helped the men to victory,

or, by their lack of sympathy, brought defeat.

They have themselves been outside the strike.

Today, however, some of the most remarkable strikes are those of women.

When once the idea of union is accepted by working women,

they hold to it with an unquestioning loyalty and pluck.

They have the fervour of their sex and an unconquerable devotion.

They have shown the beginning of solidarity

which is one of the most remarkable things

in the whole history of the women's movement.

If in the beginning of women's industrial struggle

women can show such an unswerving determination

to stick together and win,

what may we not look for in the future

when women have political power and more confidence in themselves?

Every struggle is an object lesson

in the need for solidarity.

For ages, men have been sex-conscious.

Men are always loyal to men.

But in the industrial struggle,

the competition for mastery has been between men workers on the one hand

and men employers on the other hand.

It has not been a sex struggle but a class struggle.

But with women the case is different.

They have had to struggle against sex privilege as well as class privilege.

Working men have bitterly opposed

and resent the entry of women into industry

and still treat them with scant justice in their unions

and in their various schemes for self-protection.

It is only recently that men have begun to see

the necessity and the justice of women's suffrage.

And so women have had to fight men as competitors in work,

as well as against men employers.

And for this reason, the struggle has never been clear-cut along class lines

but is still complicated with the struggle across sex lines.

One curious difference to be observed

between the records of recent strikes by men and those by women

is the attitude toward the strikers

of women who are not themselves workers,

women who belong to the non-gainful class,

college women, professional women,

women of leisure and those who control money.

In large numbers, they have thrown themselves

into the very ranks of the working girls.

They have given them their wholehearted sympathy.

They have done picket duty

and they have not shrunk from the attendant arrests by the police.

In several instances, they have passed the night in the cells.

They have given money as well as raised it.

And they have worked in many ways,

showing a splendid sex-conscious spirit

that foretells great victories for the future.

This, of course, is what gives the vital force to the women's movement

and it counts for the strange phenomenon

of wealthy women joining hands with the poorest of working girls.

It is this sense of sexual oppression

that has brought women all over the world

to the banners of radical advanced movements.

Consciously or unconsciously,

women have a great bond of sympathy.

They see in the great struggle going on in all parts of the world

the signs of a brighter day

and a better life.

There is something always inspiring about a strike.

It may be ill-timed, ill-advised and foredoomed to failure,

yet it always stands for sacrifice, heroism and hope.

Back of this voluntary acceptance by the workers

of their great dread, unemployment,

lie long years of patient suffering,

of self-repression and of uncomplaining useful work.

At last, the worker has a faint gleam of hope

that better days may dawn for her

and through her for her entire class.

But we must not be socialistic.

That would be outrageous.

So in come the protests, and, oh, very violent ones.

And what about, pray?

About nothing more serious than my poor words.

Really?

Just what is wrong with them, I don't know.

But someone muttered something about socialism.

This being the case, what shall I do?

How can I cure what my critics say is wrong

if I can't see how it is wrong?

I refuse to contemplate the ballot through a magnifying glass,

for suffrage is only a part, though an important one,

of the worldwide movement for a real democracy

and to give women their true inheritance.

To concentrate on votes alone

is like freeing one wing of the eagle while leaving the other tied.

One wing will not suffice to carry him up to the heavens blue.

Besides, I would not if I could

write with my finger upon the pulse of our great genteel ones,

seeking to please them,

picking my words and shaping my thoughts

to meet their beautiful, delicate sensibilities.

My sympathies are not with these,

but rather are with the great, simple working class.

With these I would gladly take my stand,

if they would have me.

But, oh, you great genteel ones,

you who resent the words of such as I,

could you but feel the scorn in which our class is held

by the class you fear so much,

could you but be for one hour

in the midst of real wage-earning girls as one of them

and read their souls through their clear, fierce, young eyes,

could you but understand what they think of us

and all our privileges,

you would not perhaps respect so much the opinions of our politicians,

of our sleek respectables,

of our kid-gloved gentlemen

from whom we beg the ballot on bended, trembling knee.

Could you but feel the tingle in the blood

that comes when a mass of them together,

the young working people,

shout out clearly and triumphantly,

"March on,

"march on to victory or death,"

you would know that no real freedom will ever come to women

that does not come through those same women of the working class.

What to them is our buzzing about their battles?

What do they care for our twitterings,

however revolutionary, radical, dangerous or whatnot we may call them?

If I could write for them,

if I could but reach their ears.

But they judge us by our deeds,

and words ring hollow when they come from the ranks of the privileged ones.

Those who stand by the wayside while we speed by,

those who are hidden from our sight by the dust we raise,

these dare to know the present as it is, fearlessly,

because through their brooding eyes, thank God, they see the future.

(Whir of machinery)

But these never hear my words.

And so I sing my swansong.

It only seems fair to tell my friends,

and I have a few, you know,

why there will be no more of my outrageous utterances

spread before the helpless readers of the official organ.

I don't want to ruin the movement,

nor do I pine to kill the cause.

That would really be too bad.

Though it is delightfully flattering to think how easily, according to some,

I could accomplish more inflammatory words.

The official board, with all its weight of suffrage authority,

has not formally requested silence of me.

(Indistinct words repeated)

(Man) ...called Penthesilea.

In it, we see the Greeks and Amazons in battle

during the time of the Trojan War.

We see how the Amazons seize a prisoner

and rape him in their Festival of Roses.

We see how the Amazon war queen, Penthesilea,

falls in love with the Greek hero, Achilles,

and how Achilles falls in love with her.

We see them torn between their loyalty and their love

and how Achilles surrenders to his enemy.

Finally, we see Penthesilea kill Achilles.

We see her fury, her rapture and her grief.

We see her own death,

a strange act of suicide through sheer strength of passion.

The story enacted in the mime

is not at all the same story told in the legends and epics of antiquity.

In these ancient legends,

it is Penthesilea who is killed.

Achilles lives, to be killed later by Paris.

This is the legend of the Achilles heel.

In most versions of the story, Achilles falls in love with Penthesilea,

either as he kills her, thrusting into her the spear of Pelian ash,

or after she has fallen

when he removes the helmet from her face.

It's this moment which has most often been commemorated.

In an elegy by Propertius, the Roman poet, we read:

"The victor vanquished by the radiant face revealed."

So to begin with,

we have two broad versions of the story:

the version of antiquity and the version of Kleist

written during the period of the Napoleonic Wars

and the consolidation of Romanticism.

Each version has very different implications,

very different senses,

while there are also constant themes:

love, death,

amour fou, fatal passion,

love concealed under the cloak of aggression,

the war of the sexes, the society of women,

grief, mourning at a loss, perhaps at a difference.

The fulcrum of all these stories is the image of the Amazon,

the woman who is independent, aggressive and destructive,

perhaps superior to man.

(Soundtrack from mime sequence repeated)

(Man) "They are splendid and glamorous,

"fascinating to other women for the fear which they arouse in men,

"but impossible to emulate except in fantasy.

"Their weapons and their strategy are men's weapons and strategy.

"They offer an alternative which is magical, not political."

This division between ordinary women and Amazons

is found in ancient literature too.

Quintus of Smyrna wrote an epic about the Trojan War,

probably in the third or fourth century after Christ.

He includes a scene in his narrative

where the women of Troy watch from the city walls

the Amazons fighting the Greeks.

Greek heroes are falling like autumn leaves

before the Amazon onslaught.

One of the Trojan women proposes they should join the battle too.

"We ourselves should share the battle.

"We are not much different from vigorous men.

"We have the same courage. Eyes and limbs are alike.

"Light and air are common to all.

"Our food is not different.

"So why do we run away from fighting?"

They are all about to join in,

when they are restrained by the priestess of Athena.

She argues they should stay at home weaving

and avoid the tumult and misery of war.

It's true that all human beings are from the same stock,

but different persons practise different jobs,

and that job is best where a person works with knowledge in their head.

The argument is one that has been used over the centuries

to keep women in their place...

(Soundtrack from previous section repeated)

(Soundtrack form mime sequence repeated)

(Woman) ...what may we not look for in the future,

when women have political power and more confidence in themselves.

Every struggle is an object lesson in the need for solidarity.

For ages, men have been sex-conscious.

Men are always loyal to men.

But in the industrial struggle,

the competition for mastery has been between men workers on the one hand

and men employers on the other hand.

It has not been a sex struggle, but a class struggle.

But with women the case is different.

They have had to struggle against sex privilege as well as class privilege.

Working men have bitterly opposed

and resent the entry of women into industry,

and still treat them with scant justice in their unions

and in their various schemes for self-protection.

It is only recently that men have begun to see

the necessity and the justice of women's suffrage.

And so women have had to fight men as competitors in work,

as well as against men employers.

And for this reason, the struggle has never been clear-cut along class lines,

but is still complicated with the struggle across sex lines.

One curious difference to be observed

between the records of recent strikes by men and those by women

is the attitude towards the strikers

of women who are not themselves workers,

women who belong to the non-gainful class,

college women, professional women,

women of leisure and those who control money.

In large numbers they have thrown themselves

into the very ranks of the working girls

and they have given them their wholehearted sympathy.

They have done picket duty

and they have not shrunk from the attendant arrests by the police.

In several instances, they have passed the night in the cells.

They have given money as well as raised it.

And they have worked in many ways,

showing a splendid sex-conscious spirit

that foretells great victories for the future.

This is what gives the vital force to the women's movement

and it counts for the strange phenomenon

of wealthy women joining hands with the poorest of working girls.

It is this sense of sexual oppression

that has brought women all over the world

to the banners of radical advanced movements.

Consciously or unconsciously,

women have a great bond of sympathy.

They see in the great struggle going on in all parts of the world...

(♪ LUCIANO BERIO: "Visage", sung by Cathy Berberian)

Women looked at each other through the eyes of men.

Women spoke to each other through the words of men.

An alien look.

An alien language.

We can speak with our own words.

We can look with our own eyes.

And we can fight with our own weapons.

(Man) Stop.

Women looked at each other through the eyes of men.

- That's terrible. - (Man) Stop.

Women looked at each other through the eyes of men.

Women spoke to each other through the words of men.

An alien look.

An alien language.

We can speak with our own words.

We can look with our own eyes.

And we can fight with our own weapons.