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SERIOUS UNDERTAKINGS
Year: 1983
Classification: G
Runtime: 28 min
Produced In: Australia
Directed By: Erika Addis, Helen Grace
Produced By: Erika Addis, Helen Grace
Language: English
The film explores montage techniques with playful complex effects. The collision of images of child care and terror is stunningly effective: a pram is used as the device which stops the industrialist's car to enable the kidnap; the pram recurs in the famous scene from Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN where it goes careering down the Odessa Steps, and is pulled laboriously back up by a contemporary mother in a modern city.
In spite of the desire to 'see ourselves as we really are' there is no single identity to be discovered, only the risk of a dangerous nationalism, forever looking inwards.
SERIOUS UNDERTAKINGS takes up these themes of culture, language and politics in a questioning and innovative way.
"I have the impression [some feminists] are relying too much on an existentialist concept of woman, a concept that attaches a guilt complex to the maternal function. Either one has children, but that means one is not good for anything else, or one does not, and then it becomes possible to devote oneself to serious undertakings."