Jennifer Fox’s Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman opens at the Film Forum on Wednesday!

Flying is a six hour series that is screening theatrically in 2 parts. I saw the first episode of Flying at Sundance earlier in the year and wasn’t really sure what it was I was watching. It was only when I sat down to watch the whole series that I understood the power of what Fox has done – with all of its messy anger, thoughtfulness, hope and despair. It is a film about women, from the personal to the political, in New York City and around the world. And the length of the series is connected to its subject matter. As Fox explained to John Anderson in The New York Times: “Honestly, I can’t explore what I want to explore in 90 minutes. And the older I get, the more the feature form seems almost male – very conclusive, very ‘here it is’ all summed up. The serial is more like life, with multiple stories, multiple conclusions. It’s a fabric, or a layer cake.”

Her series embraces all the messiness of life and mixes her personal story with testimony from women around the world, from Cambodia and Pakistan to South Africa, Russia and beyond. Fox uses a technique she calls “passing the camera” as she talks to women, an approach that captures the organic nature of conversation and serves to go some way to undermining the subject/object dichotomy, allowing all the women a voice. It is sobering to be reminded of just how un-free women still are in many countries, how they are owned by their fathers and brothers and then by their husbands. Many of these women do not even have a language to talk about their sexuality because they have never been able to embrace it, or in fact to even think about such a possibility. Flying is also about Fox’s own personal dramas (she is torn between two lovers for most of the series) but she meshes these with the wider perspective in a way that makes sense of the big picture rather than becoming merely narcissistic. There is definitely an addictive soap opera aspect to the series but it is always intelligent and thought-provoking and so doesn’t leave you with the sick, empty-calorie feeling of genuinely soapy fare.

Another aspect of the film that really struck me was Fox’s ambivalence about having children and her explorations of the difficult choices that women have to make as they navigate the tightrope between kids, careers, domesticity and adventure. It was so wonderful to hear her friend admit that having children doesn’t make this ambivalence go away. You can love your kids dearly and still mourn for the freedom you have lost.

To all those men and women out there who think that there is no longer a need for feminism watch this film and shut yer gobs! I for one am going to crank up Kathleen Hanna on the stereo and shout from the rooftops.

Here’s the trailer:

Agnes Varnum has written an interesting article about the making of Flying for indieWIRE which also serves as a pithy exploration of the possibilities of co-production.

Oh bondage up yours!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 12:39 am and is filed under Documentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.