Stephanie Rothman double post: STUDENT NURSES (1970) and GROUP MARRIAGE (1973)
Posted by Daniel Metz
This past week, we were very fortunate indeed to have exploitation auteur Stephanie Rothman visiting our fair cinema for a double feature of her two films, Student Nurses and Group Marriage. Rothman was witty, charming, and, pardon me for saying this, a stone cold fox. She was one of the most gracious guests I have seen at the Alamo, and the only complaint I have about her visit is that she didn’t stay longer.
As some of you may remember, Weird Wednesday recently featured her Terminal Island. While I wasn’t crazy about that film, and while it gave me the opportunity to remember my grievances against the only other film of hers that I did see, Velvet Vampire, the two films we saw last Wednesday were far greater, and actually helped me to see her other films, and especially VV, in a new light.
Rothman and writing/producing partner Charles Schwartz back in the day. Look at that beauty!
Rothman came prepared with statements about each of the films she was showing, bits of anecdotes and production history. They seemed that they could have been from a memoir, but I have been told in fact that she prepared them just for us. Either way, they were funny, well crafted pieces of writing that captured brilliantly her role as a young filmmaker working for New World Pictures under Roger Corman and, to some extent, alongside other Corman proteges Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Peter Bogdanovich. It was a pleasure to hear those stories, and I do wish she would compile these stories and publish. If you’re reading this, Ms. Rothman, I’d be happy to be your ghost writer.
The most insightful thing I took out of her appearance was her admission that she started, out of film school, as an aspiring art film director. She said to us that she wanted to make movies “like the Europeans.” Hmm, I thought, very interesting…Unfortunately, the story doesn’t go the way it might have for Marty or his friends, as Rothman was only able to find work in exploitation. That said, it gives me a new perspective on her work, forcing me to look for clues of the tortured artist struggling to express angst and aesthetics behind bouncing breasts and brawny beefcake.
Maybe there's something more going on here than meets the eye, as this shot from Velvet Vampire suggests...
Student Nurses – Dir. Stephanie Rothman
Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 4/14/10, 9:45pm
And that is exactly what I found, especially in the first feature on the bill, Student Nurses. What Rothman characterized as being born from a simple suggestion from Corman to make a movie out of girl nurses, the film turns out to be a radical journey into the life of four sexually liberated, semi-ambitious and bright girls who deal with guerrilla gang members, abortions and death in a very non-traditional little exploitation picture.
Yes, it is clearly shot on a shoestring budget and in probably a two-week period. Yes, there are too many sex and changing scenes (including one preposterous scene where two girls exchange blouses so they can accessories with semi-communal scarves). But these are merely the restrictions forced on a filmmaker who had too few opportunities.
The obvious comparison is the Japanese Pink films, the sexploitation pictures that often contained radical and philosophical expression framed within obligatory/budgetary nude scenes. More abstractly, Rothman’s films bring to mind the subversive Spanish films of Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga made under fascist rule, which work on a symbolic level but maintain a surface populism.
Student Nurses is definitely my favorite Rothman film. It is gritty, it is sexy, and it is also very well made and works on a number of levels: it is at times both light and dark, and it never forgets to have a sense of humor.
Of particular notes is the storyline featuring the abortion; it seems to me that this was Rothman’s pet narrative, as she used this arc to test out art film style. She uses jump cuts very well in an interview scene in which the girl tries to explain why she needs a legal operation. The lovemaking/acid taking scene is beautiful in its abstraction. The abortion sequence is presented through a dream, a mixture of Fellini and Buñuel, as crowds gather and watch her mental projection of the abortion on a beach, and the imagery turns sinister at times, as when a liquid (acid?) is taken out of her in reverse.
I might be able to get into this...
Group Marriage – Dir. Stephanie Rothman
Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 4/14/10, 11:59pm
Group Marriage is also a fine film, showcasing a lighter and more humorous side of Rothman’s filmmaking style. It lacks some of the ideological sting of the previous film, felt both in its plot (concerning the construction of a plural marriage) and the aesthetic style and technical proficiency; while Nurses reached an almost verite realism at times and very much conveys an urgency in its imagery, Marriage is more laid back, breathing in its moments of sunshine and domestic complexities.
That is not to say that the film is not culturally probing, as it certainly asks many more questions than the typical sex film of the day. Here, as the title suggests, the topic is the question of plural marriage: How does it work? What kind of jealousies form? How does society respond? Rothman seeks to raise these types of questions in the film, although I don’t think she does enough to problematize them or to try to find answers. This may be the product of the Corman factory, I don’t know; all I do know is that I think the film could have gone further. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as sexy if it was.
Group Marriage star Aimée Eccles with a dynamite look
For me, though, the name of the game of this film is Aimée Eccles. She plays lead in this film as the matriarch, a free-spirited girl who is very confident in herself and her desires. Her strength as a woman shines in this film, and god damn is she charming. She is beautiful, but more importantly she exudes a quality of poise and boldness, and I am disappointed that she didn’t have more of a career than she did. It is a mystery to me, because she is unique and possess great comic timing.
I was so glad to have Rothman come and share her films with us. The prints were wretched and at times had severe sound problems, but what are you going to do? I was able to search through these quickie gems and encounter a very political filmmaker that aspired to make art films. It is unfortunate that she didn’t get the chance to pursue her aspirations more fully, but at least we have these films. And we should remember, sometimes its the subversive material within seemingly-harmless fluff that can be the most deadly.
