Film Festival-Tillie Olsen

The event that I choose to go to for the Fim Festival was a documentary on Tillie Olsen. Tillie Olsen whom was born in 1912, was a writer, poet, activist and was part of the first feminist movement. Her stories epicted the lives of the working woman during the times of the 1930's. She wanted to be able to relate to the working mother, because she herself was one. One of her first short stories was " I Stand Here Ironing", which was a story about a mother trying to work on her relationship with her daughter, while maintaing a working lifestyle. Olsen's writing have encouraged many people to become feminist, or to show other's what women actually go through.

I think that the best form of criticism that we have learned in class should be Ideological Criticism to analyze this film. Ideological Criticism is the idea that multiple ideologies, multiple patterns of belief-exist in any culture and have the potential to be manifest in rhetorical artifacts. In watching the film I saw that there were a lot of deeper meanings to the reasons of Tillie's writings. There were many ideologies on the reasons for her being a poet, writer, activist etc. With the main ideology being everyone being treated equal.

One example that comes to mind is when the film showed Tillie amongst other women (of all races) holding up a sign that said women against Apartheid. This has two ideologies to me,the first being that even though they were in the years where racism was present they were able to come together, and the second being people from different races standing up for the same idea to help others. In another part of the film where her daughters were telling of people thinking her mother had less of a life because she couldn't do much because she had five children. With that being said it shows how people could look at the negative aspects of being a mother, and a mother can not enjoy her life having many children. Which is why Tillie wanted to write in the first place, to show people the deeper meaning behind what is on the surface.