XX eye
Student Nurses aid the MadCat fest's strong lineup.

By Cheryl Eddy

WITH ITS SUGGESTIVE title and the distinction of being the first film released under Roger Corman's New World Pictures banner, The Student Nurses, a 1970 ode to sexually liberated women in white (and little starched hats) reeks of a soft-core variation on "playing doctor." But if it is, what the heck's it doing in this year's MadCat Women's International Film Festival?

As it turns out, MadCat – which kicks off Sept. 9 and runs through Oct. 5 at various Bay Area venues – hasn't converted to an all-porn format. Nurses, the only feature-length narrative in the fest, is quite shrewdly (and appropriately) programmed. Like all the MadCat selections, Nurses was directed by a woman: Stephanie Rothman, a University of Southern California grad who broke into the biz by working for Corman at American International Pictures and New World (her first film was 1966's inauspiciously titled It's a Bikini World). Plenty of now-recognizable names emerged from the Corman school, but almost all, including Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Joe Dante, Jack Hill, and Monte Hellman, were men. Rothman's female perspective, along with her technical skills, enabled her to raise Nurses a notch above standard drive-in fare.

Of course, this ain't art-house stuff; many standard exploitation elements (spotty acting, gratuitous boobs, clumsily post-dubbed dialogue) are firmly in place. There are also plenty of ridiculously bygone moments ("There's gonna be a love-in this weekend – you wanna go?") that, viewed today, play as pure comedy. But some dated plot points, in particular one girl's struggle to be "approved" for a legal abortion, are eye-opening. Overall, the film is surprisingly pro-female, with relatively well-developed characters.

Nurses revolves around the lives and loves of four Los Angeles roommates in their final months of nursing school: Sharon (Elaine Giftos), who forms a close bond with a terminally ill patient; Priscilla (Barbara Leigh), a free spirit who befriends an LSD-pushing hippie biker; Phred (Karen Carlson), who would be easy to stereotype as a blond bimbo if she didn't spout off lines like "What I do with my body is my business!"; and Lynn (Brioni Farrell), who lends her medical skills to a group of Mexican American revolutionaries frequently injured in skirmishes with "the pigs."

Nurses might be lowballed by B-movie connoisseurs for being too much like a soap opera and not enough like the many, many nurse-themed sexploitation films that followed in its wake (Private Duty Nurses, Candy Stripe Nurses, Night Call Nurses, etc.). But its inclusion in the MadCat fest is an inspired move by curator Ariella Ben-Dov – the film will reach an entirely new audience of feminist filmgoers who might never have given it a second look otherwise. And it's plenty entertaining to boot.

The bulk of the festival is composed of programs of thematically grouped short films – mostly documentaries and experimental works. The collection of obsessions in program one, "Gotta Get It," plays the festival's opening night at El Rio. Gems in this batch include Jennifer Drummond's wry "The F.E.D.S.," a colorful, startlingly lifelike animated doc about "Food Education Demo Specialists" who provide samples to hungry customers in an Austin, Texas, supermarket; and "Bingo Ladies," Tami Wilson's 16mm study of the agony and ecstasy of elderly women devoted to Canada's largest charitable gambling enterprise.

Fans of innovative animation should seek out program eight, "Cut Snip Ooze: Contemporary Animated Films by Women," which contains Celia Galan Julve's must-see "Historia del desierto." This wickedly funny mini-epic creates more atmosphere and intrigue in 6 minutes than most Hollywood films can manage in 90; it's the stop-motion tale of a fearsome Mexican fugitive nicknamed "La Mocha," whose thumbless existence leads her to crime, a prison break, masked wrestling, and eventually, the pursuit of pure evil. Program eight also features Nancy Andrews's 38-minute "Monkeys and Lumps," a weirdly involving experimental piece that uses puppets, drawings, and live action to link "chalk talk," Jane Goodall and her chimps, sled-dog attacks, and a string of mysteries involving giant lumps of decaying, hairy tissue that wash up on Tasmanian beaches, among other topics.

This year MadCat also gets historical with several programs highlighting women filmmakers from years past. Program seven, "Clear Visions: Silent Filmmakers I," screens works by Alice Guy-Blaché and Maya Deren, with live music by the Secrets of Family Happiness, San Andreas, and others. Program 11, "Clear Visions: Silent Filmmakers II," features live accompaniment by Epic [Abridged] and includes films from 1924 and before by early trailblazers Cleo Madison, Nell Shipman, and Lois Weber. And for devotees of bizarre old educational films, there's program 10, "Educated Ladies: Films from the PFA Collection," never-before-seen snippets, mostly from the 1950s, from the Pacific Film Archive vaults. The collection includes mountain-dwelling Arkansas folk singers, a UC Berkeley-made phys-ed film on springboard diving, the intriguingly titled "Making Theatrical Wigs," and sex-ed films about puberty and reproduction – just in case The Student Nurses whets your appetite for further medical study.

MadCat Women's International Film Festival runs Sept. 9-Oct. 2. Venues include El Rio, 3158 Mission, S.F.; Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia, S.F.; PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, S.F. For tickets (most shows $7-$20) and information, call (415) 436-9523 or go to www.madcatfilmfestival.org.