Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video

From One Place to Another: Emma Goldman Clinic Stories, 1996, video, 80 minutes, directed by LeAnn Erickson and Camille Seaman, produced/distributed by LeAnn Erickson. I remember my first clinic defense: I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa and had cut morning classes to stand on the grass outside the Emma Goldman Clinic, to link arms with my friends and trade loud insults with the pro-life demonstrators there. I remember watching two women from the clinic, in fluorescent orange safety vests, escorting young patients with downcast faces through the gauntlet of screaming protestors lining the sidewalk. I remember admiring the courage of those workers and wishing that I knew them. In From One Place to Another: Emma Goldman Clinic Stories, we are offered a portrait, at once intimate and anonymous, of the women who founded and run the feminist women's health care facility in Iowa City. More than a portrait of specific individuals, it is a document of a process, of individuals acting as part of a group, following the courage of their convictions, feeling their way. The story starts on a very specific date-January 22, 1973-when the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the hallmark case Roe v. Wade. A group of young, politically aware women-who had already been operating an abortion-referral service-formed a collective and eventually grew into a feminist women's health care clinic. Their vision was of a resource for all women, which would offer reproductive counseling and abortion services. The collective was made up of women of different ethnicities, college students and housewives, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers, who came together because, in the words of one founder: "It seemed so fair, after living in a world where we'd been bossed all our lives.... It was not easy, but it just felt right." From One Place to Another chronicles the long, arduous process of forming a feminist collective and several crises that befell the clinic along the way. The stories are pieced together using various means. There are many interviews of the members in personal spaces, such as kitchens and living rooms. The women who are interviewed are never identified by name. These sequences are mixed with extreme close-up shots of memos, clinic logs, the minutes of meetings, and herstory entries. Over these shots we hear the voice of a woman reading these written records. The use of a single narrator is significant. For a solitary voice to convey these disparate recollections creates a sense of the overarching desire of all the individuals for a true collective. It gives us a very personal sense of a group process. The interview footage is interspersed with three distinctly different kinds of cine-collages. There are highly impressionistic, fragmented shots of a woman's body, framed against the light. These are juxtaposed against close-up shots of different parts of the clinic: a teakettle in the kitchen, the view out the window of the waiting room, an examination table. There is an important link between these two collages, between the quiet privacy of the interior clinic space and the privacy of the space of the body. This parallel between the two spaces is an eloquent expression of the reason for all the talk, all the meetings, all the work: the sovereignty of a woman's body, her right to privacy, to respect, dignity, and control, which the collective struggled to provide through the clinic. The visual parallel suggests these ideas in a deep, powerful way and provides a foundation of immediacy and engagement on which the interviews unfold. …