Journal Issue 3.1
Spring 2011
Edited by Agatha Beins, Deanna Utroske, Julie Ann Salthouse, Jillian Hernandez, and
Karen Alexander
Editorial Assistant: Mimi Zander

Carol Jacobsen, activist, scholar, and social documentary artist,
in conversation with Films for the Feminist Classroom

continued

Introduction and Interview by Deanna Utroske

Utroske: Who do you consider your primary audiences, and what effects do you expect or hope your films will have on them?

Jacobsen: My primary aim is toward a feminist audience, although my work is accessible to a broad audience as well. Some people ask about “preaching to the choir,” but I believe the choir needs booster shots of courage to keep up the struggle against the oppressive structures that resist and constrain women’s freedom. I know that I’m emboldened by the work of other feminists: artists, writers, activists, scholars. I need to see it, read about it, know about it. Together, we are a movement for feminist global change.

Utroske: How your might your grassroots style of filmmaking, filmmaking with less Hollywood polish and more verité quality, bring your audience closer to the women in your films?

Jacobsen: I’m dedicated to a grassroots approach that means a certain intimacy with the faces and voices on the screen. I care very much about the women I document and have built many lasting relationships. I’m after greater accessibility and immediacy for the audience to identify with these women who narrate my films. I’m not interested in traditional “voices of authority” giving information.

Utroske: How do you see that your films reach audiences; how do you distribute your films?

Jacobsen: I distribute them free to activists, educators, lawyers, and students worldwide. I mail or hand out from three to ten films a week from e-mail and lecture requests. There have been so few films available that are narrated by women prisoners that my films are in demand. The films are also screened at festivals and professional conferences worldwide, and shown in galleries and museums. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, civil rights groups, domestic violence shelters, lawyers’ groups, students, community groups, and nonprofits also screen them and use them in various ways for fundraising, education, programming, etcetera.

Utroske: Has any of your films seemed to have a more significant impact than the others? If so, can you talk about its impacts and why you think that particular film provoked such a reaction?

Jacobsen: From One Prison… (1994; 70 mins.) has probably had the widest distribution. It toured worldwide with Human Rights Watch and won many awards. It is an in-depth social critique narrated by four women prisoners who give compelling and powerful analyses of the criminal justice and prison systems. Clemency (1997; 15 mins) has perhaps been shown most often since it’s a shorter film and so many activists and domestic violence centers and educators have it and repeatedly show it. Segregation Unit was the most painful film to make, and painful to watch, and I still wonder why I didn’t cut it shorter. It’s thirty minutes, and that’s too long. But I felt strongly about wanting the audience to know about the torture that goes on inside the deepest cells of the women’s prisons and to feel as outraged as I did. Jamie Whitcomb, who narrated the film, and I have protested together at the state capitol against the ongoing torture in Michigan prisons. A number of women in my films have continued to work with the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project after their release.

A very different film from the others is Censorious! (2005; 30 mins.) It’s a satirical piece narrated by women artists about their experiences with censorship. Shaun Bangert and Marilyn Zimmerman coproduced it with me. It was based on my 1991 article, “Redefining Censorship: A Feminist View,” in the Art Journal.1 Censorship has been an abiding issue in my work because of its proximity to women’s criminalization and because I’ve had to resist censors ever since I began documenting women in jails and prisons. In 1992-93, I fought a year-long battle against censors at the University of Michigan Law School for closing an exhibition of seven artists’ works, including mine (Street Sex 1989; 30 mins.), on prostitutes’ rights. We were represented by Marjorie Heins, of the American Civil Liberties Union Arts Censorship Project, and we won. The law school reinstalled the entire exhibit a year later (see Carole Vance, “Feminist Fundamentalism – Women Against Images,” Art in America, September 1993).

Utroske: How might (documentary) film, as a text or technique, be taught to further prevent what you’ve called elsewhere (Signs 2008) the tendency that “mainstream news and documentaries have [to demonize] human beings who are in prison”?2

Jacobsen: I’ve found that students are hungry to learn about human rights and to develop their own political critiques of issues such as women’s criminalization and institutionalized violence, misinformation, and corporate culture. Films are powerful vehicles for generating discussions. Now there are so many films/videos available, it’s hard, but important, to make critical selections.

Utroske: In your 2008 Signs article, you also wrote, “I have found other ways to document the stories…inside, which remain largely invisible to the general public.”3 Please share how distinct from and invisible to the public culture prison culture is.

Jacobsen: Instead of critiquing the concept of punishment and the toxic prison industry as a whole, the corporate media demonizes human beings in prison. The Arts and Entertainment channel, Law and Order, and other television programs give a prejudiced, uneducated picture of the human beings inside. The mainstream news media focuses on pumping up stories of violence, when in actuality violent crime has not increased. Such fear tactics by the media collude with politicians’ election campaigns, and both the media and elected officials profit.

Prison culture is harsh and cruel because the state produces it. U.S. prisons infantilize women and retaliate against them illegitimately (especially if they file grievances or lawsuits) through petty tickets, invasive surveillance, discrimination (often against lesbians), psychological abuse, denial of self-development (programs are few and have long wait lists), refusal of human dignity (the “N” word, the “B” word, and other epithets are favorite insults hurled by guards), and subjection to harsh and filthy conditions, to starchy, revolting food, and to overcrowded cells. For those who suffer mental illness, the inhumanity is difficult to describe. Currently, there has been an epidemic of suicides and suicide attempts at Huron Valley Women’s Prison in Michigan as a result of the abuse by guards and the administration’s mishandling of the problem. Many young lesbians are being targeted for mistreatment by guards. Women have been confined to segregation, taunted and goaded, and chained down for hours or days at a time. I have written complaints to the Justice Department, Amnesty International, the governor, legislators, judges, and other policy makers to protest the inhumane treatment. There are investigations underway. I’m with Angela Davis: a system that is so broken, so corrupt, so obsolete must one day give way to the power of compassion and humane alternatives. But we have to keep pushing hard for it.