The original film was a bane to the existence of film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert when it was originally released. Late night horror movie host has since come to the film's defense. "
"I could make a pretty strong argument for it being a feminist tract," writes Joe Bob Briggs in a 2002 column promoting the Millennium Edition DVD release. "In fact, when it was first released in 1978, the title was Day of the Woman. If you took Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem, and asked them to come up with their worst-case version of the true nature of rape, it would probably look a lot like what happens to Jennifer Hill, the free-spirited New York magazine writer who rents a summer house in the country...and gets brutally attacked by the local pond scum."
Butler says the new film is "almost identical" to the original in terms of plot. "One of the biggest updates we've done to it is that instead of approaching her revenge by using her sexuality as a weapon, in our version I don't do that at all. I use my cunning and my brute force to capture and torture and kill these men. That's a big difference."
The original was criticized by Siskel and Ebert as identifying with the rapists. Briggs disagrees. "I've examined it shot-by-shot several times now, and (this charge) is just absolutely false. There's no question, from the opening shot of the movie through the closing shot, that the story is told from one point of view and one point of view only--the woman's. Not only that, but during the actual rape sequence, the point-of-view shots are VICTIM'S point-of-view shots."
The original director, Meir Zarchi, got the idea when he witnessed a battered nude woman emerging from a city park. He called for help and assisted her. The experience shook him and led to the 1978 film. His goal was to show how gruesome the experience is.
"At the film's end," wrote Roger Ebert, "I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed, and depressed."
Briggs claims that such a reaction could have only come from Ebert if he identified with the rapists. "This woman TRIUMPHS in the film," writes Briggs. "It's no different, really, than 'Death Wish' or 'Dirty Harry.'"
Butler insists that this new version scales back on gratuitous nudity, but is still very much in the cold and brutal tradition of the original. Upon viewing the new version for the first time, Butler says, "I definitely cried for a few minutes when I was being raped. I actually was able to disconnect from myself in the film and noticed that it really got to me."
SOURCE
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment