Candace Mettle

mettleca@grinnell.edu

Each Spring, students gather in the Harris Center for Grinnell’s own student film festival, Titular Head. And while the event has been a time-honored tradition, this year, several students are starting to question the festival’s ethics. As the April 29 date of the event draws near, Halley Freger ’17 and Hanky Song ’17 want students who enjoy Tit Head to consider what they find entertaining about its content: sex positivity and daring filmography or derogatory displays of their peers’ bodies?

Tit Head has been known for its risqué content, often featuring pseudo pornographic content that both Freger and Song find particularly off-putting and objectifying. Additionally, Tit Head audiences are infamously rowdy and reckless, and it’s widely acknowledged that audiences are likely to boo at films they dislike. While the pornographic imagery and audience dynamic at Tit Head is Freger’s and Song’s pointed area of critique, they believe it to be emblematic of the patriarchal society at large.

“Tit Head is supposed to be funny, but comedy is also such an important tool and such an important thing and an art form in and of itself. I think Tit Head is disrespectful to both film and comedy because I think that to create an effective comedic film is like a chore, and to even make comedy that has a purpose that says something at all is really difficult. [Tit Head videos are] just like objectified images and that’s considered comedy… what’s happening there when women’s bodies are considered funny?”

Despite this critique, Tit Head selection committee member Luc Moisan ’17 insists that Tit Head is an important part of film culture at Grinnell.

“I think some of the art may be off-putting to some people [and] they may be considered offensive, and for some of the pieces I would say those claims are sometimes justified. But for the most part I think Grinnell benefits from this type of a film scene on campus,” he said.

To push the dialogue on Tit Head, Freger and Song have submitted a film highlighting the sexual objectification of women in the media. Although they created the video for the event, Freger and Song admit that it has been a personal project as well considering their careers as filmmakers.

“We’ve been thinking a lot about how women are portrayed in the media and how we see images of women being objectified everywhere,” Song said, “How do we turn that [objectification of women in the media] around, how do we subvert that image … so that women are women who do stuff … not just there to be looked at,” Song said.

And while the two filmmakers want to start a dialogue about the festival’s pitfalls, they believe that events such as these, albeit insufficient, are an important addition to campus, especially given the lack of a film studies major.

“It’s not our goal to stop Tit Head,” said Song. “[Making a film] is our way of coping with the fact that Tit Head exists and thinking about how women are objectified in media and to subvert that on our own. Objectifying women for the sake of a laugh is really insulting. Festivals like Tit Head reinforce these dynamics.”

Freger and Song believe that students and some faculty members have perpetuated the culture surrounding Tit Head and the lack of criticisms against the event. Some College community members do not know the real nature of the event, while others, as everyone else in the world, find it hard to separate themselves from the patriarchy.

“I think some people are just totally unaware [of the nature of the event] because when I was telling [a] professor about it he had no idea. I also think that there is something seemingly innocent about college students partying… something about college students who are critically engaged and are actually creating some kind of counter culture that’s threatening. I actually do think that I think there is something more frightening to people on this campus about people critiquing porn than people watching it,” Freger said.

To further counter the lack of film appreciation on campus, Freger and Song have dedicated part of their last year as students to creating another space for non-Tit Head type films. As part of her art collective Anacha, Song plans to host a film festival of her own at the end of the year. Song and Freger hope that it will become institutionalized after they graduate.

“We can create communities in which there is a film culture and which film is a powerful political tool and I think those communities do exist they’re just on a smaller scale,” Freger said.

Moisan maintains that the selection committee will take special care this year to select films that do not contain offensive content.

“We have some kind of editorial control of what goes [in Tit Head],” Moisan said. “We may do this differently than how people have done in the past. We encourage people to show films that are generally of a better ethical stance than some that have been shown in the past, but ultimately it’s a film festival that is taken from what the id of the student body has to push forward onto the rest of the student body. [But] the films that we selected will have gone through a more strict vetting process than any Soviet filmmaker ever had to deal with.”