(Filmmaker in person)

Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori (Ripe For Change, MFF 2007) return to the Festival with a spirited and revelatory film which generates a decided vibe. Based on the book The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria,” The Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines, Passion and Power is the astonishing and hidden history of the electric vibrator. A consumer item from the late Victorian era, it was “there,” so to speak, at the very time when the political, civil, and sexual emancipation of women could still be discounted but no longer denied. Passion also brings us up to speed, as it were, on the manners and moralities attending the cultural evolution of this little device as they resonate in our vastly more enlightened times.

(with Rachel P. Maines, Betty Dodson, Dell Williams, Joanne Webb and Reno, 2007, 74 minutes.) – G.R.