Film distributors weren’t certain what to make of a young woman’s project on New York representative Shirley Chisholm and her bid for presidential nomination. “A film they couldn't kill about the revolution they couldn't stop." They assigned pithy tag lines to Year of the Woman. They hoped history would forgive what they deemed a passing, inflammatory remark experimental in its use of animation and theatre as documentary filmmaking interludes. Sandra Hochman doffs her papier mache crocodile cap, mid film, anticipating the fervor or ambivalence of future pundits with, “I’ve been crying crocodile tears for long enough. These are the people who are addressing the American public without giving women an opportunity to be dignified human beings.” She walks along a beach wearing a citron motorcycle helmet and narrates the film’s opening credits, “The poet is wearing a helmet because she has just come down to earth.... The poet plots against power, the lawyer plots against power, the poet spies and the lawyer plots. The life plot thickens.” She enlists an all-women crew to interview people at the convention. Norman Mailer, Florynce Kennedy, Warren Beatty, Gloria Steinem, Shirley MacLaine, Eugene Nickerson, Art Buchwald, Michele Clark, and Charles Evers are among her interviewees. At under an hour and a half the film, and Hochman, prove political discord is not made more palatable with curiosity and humor, but these vantages do annoy lawmakers to the point of disclosing certain truths, namely that the capacity for cruelty always centers on fear. Hochman calls herself a poet, before filmmaker or novelist in her decades of art making. All of her elocutions are unapologetically melodic. Prior to Year of the Woman she published her first novel Walking Papers (1971), encouraging a character named Diana Balooka, newly divorced mother of four, to return to past lives (real or imagined) so as to make peace with present life. I don’t presume that Hochman was the first to write of woman’s grave responsibility or the narrative arc in the fallout of mistakes made by two, but she feels a spearhead, giving poetic form to this in contemporary novels. She walked (in Walking Papers), so Kate Braverman, Diane Williams, Fanny Howe, and Lynne Tillman could run. Her tales are not meant to quiet, as they so frequently tell of decay through human action, but they do so with resounding wit and benevolence towards mutual incomprehension. In her poem “Futures,” she writes, “Time is money, time is exaggerated, time is nothing real except that what was once funny is now becoming ridiculous. And I am on call back and yield my tongue and eyes to whoever wants tongue and eyes.” Raise your hands, make it known, I’ve mic’d your lapel, I’ve darned the lace of your lapel, tell me, please, you are welcome, she says undeterred.
-Katie Calderon