Beating transcript

(In bold are texts printed on film, the rest, unless otherwise identified, is voice-over from interviews with former mental hospital residents in "Women and Madness" by Phyllis Chesler and from "Children of the Holocaust" by Helen Epstein)

S.O.B. SOB

You don't understand something - in my house people didn't talk to each other.

He was not sure of his memory of when he had heard about the war as a child. He felt his parents had sheltered him from it and yet he could not remember a time when he had not known about the war.

There's still Nazis in America. I think people are afraid to see them. It's the old attitude: if you pretend you don't see them, if you keep quiet, they'll maybe go away.

I don't trust the world. I always have the fear of sitting by and watching.

The fact was that beneath my facade of activity was a person who questioned the value of doing anything at all. The more I busied myself, the less I felt engaged.

...That's the big one, if you're uncooperative you're crazy. I knew I wouldn't get medical treatment in a state looney bin so I asked the judge to have me killed if he wouldn't free me. Well, that did it. I begged the judge, "Don't do this," but he sent me to the state asylum.

...I was really aggressive. I knew my rights and I was fighting mad.. There I was in a human toilet bowl, a concentration camp, and I couldn't get out. They didn't like me and my college education.

I was aware I was Jewish, but when people asked me which religion I was I said I was Protestant.

Fix yourself up, they told me. So every morning I got the hot sweats (insulin therapy) and every afternoon I spent in the beauty parlour with the other women. Of course, you had to pay for it. ...You have to hide your feelings, pretend everything's wonderful, if you want to get out....You weren't supposed to be angry. Oh no. They lock you up and throw away the key, and you're supposed to smile at them, compliment the nurses, shuffle baby - so that's what you do to get out...

My parents spoke German with each other but Hebrew with us children. After my military service, my parents sent me to Germany so I would learn the language of the poets and thinkers and murderers.

Where are your scars?

Sometimes I don't know who despises us more, we ourselves or the others.

One of the reasons I never wanted to get married was that the last thing I wanted was intimate security and to be a place arrows shoot from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself... the trouble was that I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters... maybe marriage and children was like being brainwashed and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private totalitarian state... Sylvia Plath, "The Bell Jar"

...the exploited were not even 'workers' but, with racism's assistance, something worse - subhuman; and the universe could pretend to obey the 'natural' laws. War was on the horizon, partially concealed to me. I wasn't in France. I didn't see betrayal and collaboration with my own eyes. We were living under Vichy: I perceived its effects without knowing their causes. I had to guess why, as a little white girl informed me, 'all Jews are liars.' Helene Cixous

Why me?

What about me?

cunt bitch bastard motherfucker dickhead

ostie calice calvert tabernac crisse paterne

Life has become unreal, in this modern world, this gigantic octopus city; for everything has become public, tangible, materialistic. Even the most remote pastures of the Congo or the Caucasus-even they are only corners, little lamplit parks and squares in this vast city. Because after all, it is not what we see and know and love that unites us, but what we fear. And the instincts of fear are supernatural, they leap over oceans in the twinkling of an eye, they flash into hidden cellar, nothing can any longer be hid from them. They are the power that will guide our lives, you know. Frederick Prockosh, "Seven Who Fled"

We're not angry, I, yes, we're more than angry. Let me tell you. I was in Lodz, in Poland. Just on the main street, a man came up to me and asked for a cigarette. I said I'm sorry, I don't have any, I don't smoke. He called me a dirty Jew. So I took his hand. See this finger here, this one's straight and this one's crooked? Well, because I took his hand and I struck him so hard he fell down. And I ran. He chased after me and I was holding onto the ledge of a building like this and when he came I jumped and knocked him so hard I thought I would kill him. But I didn’t want to so I caught him up as he was falling. I didn't want to kill him. I never want to hurt anyone. We should never do that NO. But if he's going to call me a dirty Jew, I could kill him believe me. I love my people-that's all. 75 year old Polish man in conversation with Barbara Sternberg

"Je puis, donc je suis." (I can therefore I am)

Simone Weil 1929

She knows her part, but she won't play it. Her identity lies less in who she is, than who she refuses to be.

He was actually the architect of an ideology of oppression that used the model of patriarchal domestic tyranny as a basis for colonial imperialism... For it was he who coined the phrase 'the mother country'. It was he who made the policies that bound the British Colonies in a domestic metaphor that was to determine their relations for more than one hundred years, to yoke whole nations in a position from which to rebel was to insult motherhood.

If we accept the notion that women were one of the largest colonies under Victorian British imperial domain, we can understand the metaphor of enforced infantalization and how it oppressed women and colonial Africans and Indians. The unpaid labour of such women was as necessary to the functioning of the patriarchal family as was the slave labour of the colonies to the expansion of the British empire... I suggest that the master-slave relationship, enhanced by a domestic metaphor unassailable in its demands for loyalty and love is at the root of the problem. Virginia Woolf

I want revenge. I want you to know how it feels. I want you to pay for what you've done. I want you to be sorry. I want you to say you're sorry. I need you to say that. Say you're sorry so that I know we're the same, sane. Barbara Sternberg

What a history!-a fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. With a real rapture I think of these origins of mine and this whole nexus of destiny, through which the oldest memories of the human race stand side by side with the greatest developments. The greatest distances in time and space are bridged. The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame which was the misery and misfortune of my life-having been born a Jewess this I should on no account now wished to have missed... Everything was over; only life, stupid insensitive life went on. One did not die of grief, of unhappiness. Day after day, one awoke, behaved like other people, went to sleep. In these absurd regularities greater misfortunes had faded away to nothing. "Rachel Varnhagen" by Hannah Arendt

Who can blame them? Who can blame my father as he blithely stepped out to relieve the pressure on his sphincter. Who can blame my mother for retaliating to his blow. My father was engulfed with the acid, biting, choking, hacking spray of my mother’s raging glands. Out of the roar of laughter that went up from the assembled ghosts of my ancestors I was born. My father and mother were quick to leave the scene of my nativity. I have not seen them since. Jim MacSwain

I trust you to accept me.

Let yourself go! Let go of everything! Lose everything! Take to the air. Take to the open sea. Take to letters. Listen: nothing is found. Nothing is lost everything remains to be sought. Go, fly, swim, bound, descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, whom you are, whom you will be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, dare what you don't dare, it is there that you will take pleasure, never make your here anywhere but there, and rejoice in the terror, follow it where you're afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you're on the right trail. Listen you owe nothing to the past, you owe nothing to the law. Gain your freedom: get rid of anything, vomit up everything, give up everything. Give up absolutely everything, do you hear me? All of it! Give up your goods. Done? Don't keep anything whatever you value, give it up. Are you with me? Search yourself, seek out the shattered, the multiple I, that you will still be further on, and merge from one self, shed the old body, shake off the Law. Let it fall with all its weight, and you, take off, don't turn back: it's not worth it, there's nothing behind you, everything is yet to come.

One can emerge from death, I believe, only with an irrepressible burst of laughter. Helene Cixous

It is customary in these days for both sides to proclaim themselves victims. Frederick Prokosch

Joke told by male voice-over :

During WW II, when Hitler was in power, there were still a few Jews left in this town. One such fellow was walking down the street one day when a big limosine pulls over and the chauffeur gets out and Hitler gets out! Hitler has a gun and he says, 'I know you're a Jew and so I want you to bend over and eat that horse manure there.' And the fellow says, 'I can't eat that, Hitler, it's not kosher." And Hitler says, 'Eat it or I'm going to shoot you.' As the man bends over to eat it, Hitler and the chauffeur are laughing so hard that Hitler drops the gun. The Jew picks up the gun and says to Hitler, 'Now you eat it!' and then drops the gun and runs. When he gets home his wife says, 'Max did you have a good day?' 'Honey, you'll never guess who I had lunch with!'

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. (Sylvia Plath)

Why Me?

What about me?

All of your past, is it more than a dream to you right now?

I forgive myself. I forgive you.

What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Virginia Woolf