The Turkey War, after dragging on for five years, was finally concluded. "Fighting Over Fabric and Fowl" Michael T. Anderson, Government
A lot of Visual and Environmental Studies professors probably got a big shock when they got to the last four minutes of Eames Demetrios's 70-minute thesis film. After 66 minutes of what viewers called outstanding technical work, the movie shifts to a four-minute scene of two people having sex--in absolute silence and with an unmoving camera. Audiences that saw it reacted with shock and silence. "There was nothing erotic about it at all," said one viewer. "It was shocking, and its message seemed to be that sex is meaningless. It was part of an entire view of life in the 80s and things being empty." The film, called "Stories from Lobos Creek," has five parts, or stories, which are in turn part of a larger work of 10 short subjects. The stories were all written and filmed by Demetrios. They were filmed in San Francisco over six weeks at the end of August and edited through the year.
Most of the actors were professional actors whom Demetrios found in San Francisco through an open audition. Demetrios hopes to screen the complete work at film festivals around the country and hopes to go into the film business.
Demetrios's film sparked some controversy in the department, not because of the subject matter, but because some professors thought the connections of the themes in the film were not deliberate enough. Demetrios puts it this way: "Some liked them a lot and some liked them not at all; they didn't think I knew what I was doing." The five parts of the film deal first with Demetrios's father's sculpture, then a man talking to his dog, then a woman who goes into a fall-out shelter to seek refuge from nuclear war only to emerge 10 years later to discover it did not occur, a gang leader talking to the camera and finally a woman director shooting her lover about whom she has just made a film. The film within the film contains the sex scene. Admits Demetrios: "some of the content is a little bit unusual."
Janet W. Rich started her thesis research by exploring the breast-feeding and reproductive habits of primates in Kenya to examine the connection between breast-feeding and the return of ovulation in women. She ended up dropping the primate angle and spent two-and-a-half months on a small island off the northern coast of Australia studying breast-feeding in an aborigine tribe. The resulting thesis for the Anthropology Department proved that given certain breast-feeding habits, women can delay the return to ovulation by 14 to 15 months.
Rich's study of the Yolngu tribe in the Northern territory exposed her to a type of research and field work that helped convince her to go into the Peace Corps in Niger next year. While studying the area, Rich was witness to a few traditional ceremonies and was taken hunting once, in addition to eating live Mangrove worms once.
The thesis, which compared Yolngu breast-feeding habits with those of the !Kung of Africa and the La Leche League of Boston, a local advocacy group. The study, she says, has implications for the growing movement for the return to breast-feeding. "There are a lot of people calling for a return to breast-feeding. Breast-feeding is very good aside from these fertility-delaying effects. But with a greater number of women enter, the workforce, the debate is becoming more difficult and fewer women can breast-feed," she says.