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Anita: Still Speaking Truth to Power
Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, a beautiful new documentary by Academy Award-winning director Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision), is a history lesson for some audiences and a site of memory for others.
Millennial girls and women who didn’t witness firsthand the spectacle of sex and race during the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court get to bear witness to Anita Hill’s testimony, an act that changed American perceptions of workplace sexual harassment. Even those of us who watched the drama unfold on our television sets–those for whom the blue-suited black woman seated alone and facing a panel of white men is imprinted in our memory–get a different perspective on the trial and its aftermath in Mock’s film. Significantly, Mock’s film reveals the woman behind the icon.
The film opens with the voicemail message Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife, left in 2010, advising Hill to “consider an apology” for what she’d done to Clarence Thomas. We watch Hill play that peculiar message in her office at Brandeis University (where she’s senior advisor to the provost and professor of social policy, law and women’s studies) before the film revisits the events that unfolded in 1991. That’s when Hill wanted to write a letter in “her own words” about Thomas’ inappropriate behavior when he was her boss. That letter, which was leaked to the media, rerouted Hill’s life on an unexpected course.
Millennial girls and women who didn’t witness firsthand the spectacle of sex and race during the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court get to bear witness to Anita Hill’s testimony, an act that changed American perceptions of workplace sexual harassment. Even those of us who watched the drama unfold on our television sets–those for whom the blue-suited black woman seated alone and facing a panel of white men is imprinted in our memory–get a different perspective on the trial and its aftermath in Mock’s film. Significantly, Mock’s film reveals the woman behind the icon.
The film opens with the voicemail message Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife, left in 2010, advising Hill to “consider an apology” for what she’d done to Clarence Thomas. We watch Hill play that peculiar message in her office at Brandeis University (where she’s senior advisor to the provost and professor of social policy, law and women’s studies) before the film revisits the events that unfolded in 1991. That’s when Hill wanted to write a letter in “her own words” about Thomas’ inappropriate behavior when he was her boss. That letter, which was leaked to the media, rerouted Hill’s life on an unexpected course.
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/03/23/anita-still-speaking-truth-to-power/
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