n her courageous and ingenious first feature, from 1975, the director Martha Coolidge dramatizes events from her own life that took place in 1962, when she was a sixteen-year-old prep-school student. She was raped by a friend at a party in New York, and the movie reconstructs the actions of that night as well as incidents leading up to and following the attack. It includes Coolidge’s onscreen discussions with Michele Manenti, who plays the character of Martha, and Jim Carrington, who plays the rapist. Manenti (as a title card states and as she herself says) was also a victim of rape; in working to reënact Coolidge’s experiences by way of agonizing psychodrama, she reëxamines her own. In the documentary framework, both women confront mores of the time that shamed and blamed victims. Scenes set at school and in the city evoke Hollywood melodramas, horror films, and comedies, as if correcting commercial distortions of women’s perspectives.
Shout by DeletedBlockedParent2020-01-20T17:03:43Z
n her courageous and ingenious first feature, from 1975, the director Martha Coolidge dramatizes events from her own life that took place in 1962, when she was a sixteen-year-old prep-school student. She was raped by a friend at a party in New York, and the movie reconstructs the actions of that night as well as incidents leading up to and following the attack. It includes Coolidge’s onscreen discussions with Michele Manenti, who plays the character of Martha, and Jim Carrington, who plays the rapist. Manenti (as a title card states and as she herself says) was also a victim of rape; in working to reënact Coolidge’s experiences by way of agonizing psychodrama, she reëxamines her own. In the documentary framework, both women confront mores of the time that shamed and blamed victims. Scenes set at school and in the city evoke Hollywood melodramas, horror films, and comedies, as if correcting commercial distortions of women’s perspectives.
— Richard Brody