May 6, 2004
YOU CAN GET A FREE COPY OF THIS EXCELLENT VIDEO BY BECOMING A SUSTAINING MEMBER OF WOMEN FOR A BETTER WORLD AT THE $100 LEVEL!
Signs Out of Time
A video on the life and work of Marija Gimbutas
Reviewed by Leslene della Madre
Several years ago, a Canadian filmmaker, Donna Read, completed a trilogy of films about women's spirituality -- Goddess Remembered, The Burning Times and Full Circle. These films are a must-see for anyone interested in herstorical perspectives. They are a combination of deep inspiration, painful reality about the women's holocaust during the witch-burning times and intelligent conversation about women's ways, herstory and spirituality. In my opinion, they should be in every history curriculum.
Donna Read collaborated with Starhawk in her most recent endeavor, Signs Out of Time, narrated by Olympia Dukakis. This video is a biographical glimpse of the Lithuanian-born, late, eminent archeologist, historian, scientist and linguist, Marija Gimbutas, whose work on Old European Neolithic cultures (6500-3500 BCE) will one day be seen as brilliant, when the current backlash against her washes away in the cleansing waters of time. Indeed, the current misaligning of her work can only be happening now because her work is threatening to the status quo of patriarchy -- that which insists on domination and power-over.
Marija Gimbutas, an expert on Bronze-age weaponry for many years, came to the conclusion that she no longer wanted to study implements of war. Ill with lymphoma, she felt her illness was related to the energy of the weapons she had been studying for so long. She changed the course of her work. She decided to find out, without preconceptions, what happened in Europe before the Bronze Age. She eventually named the area of her focused study -- southeastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy -- "Old Europe." She did not identify herself as a feminist when she set out on her exploration, yet she blazed a powerful feminist trail, literally unearthing the evidence of the Goddess of great and profound antiquity -- She who predates all world-religions and rests at the dawn of human emergence. From evidence of 3,000 sites and tens of thousands of sculptures and figurines, she pieced together the patterns of a primordial, self-generating female deity. The theme of unity of all life with nature was undeniable to her -- something we must surely remember lest we destroy ourselves at this juncture in our collective experience on this planet.
Sings Out of Time tells not only the story of her life; it also reveals Marija Gimbutas' theories of pre-Bronze Age cultures which she claims were characterized by peace, woman-honoring, Goddess-worshipping and egalitarianism -- civilizations that existed for thousands of years without war. For her claims about the Goddess and woman-centered cultures, she suffered ridicule by those who had previously held her in high esteem as long as she focused on weaponry research.
In her bold and courageous approach, using her intuition to read and see the legacy of the Goddess, Gimbutas invented her own field of study, archeomythology, to embrace her experience and vision. As her one-time colleague-turned opponent, Colin Renfrew, said in the video, "everything became the Goddess for Marija." Yes, exactly. Renfrew was saying this as a criticism, and followed it with a reference to her using a rather feminine way of looking at things. Yes, exactly. Not to his liking, however. It was a particularly poignant and rather humorous (though unintentional on Renfrew's part) moment in the video because it revealed the true essence of the patriarchal mind and its fear of women's ways of knowing.
The film chronicles her journey as a young woman and mother fleeing Soviet and Nazi invasions of her beloved Lithuania, eventually emigrating to the United States in 1949 with her husband and daughters. Marija candidly admits that her marriage was not a very good one. Though there is a very short piece with her daughters, I would have liked to have seen more of them and heard more from their perspective about their mother. It was not an easy life for them, and I think it would be valuable to know more about their feelings and experiences as children of a well-known figure such as their mother was. There are also interviews with scholars, feminists and colleagues who have all been profoundly influenced by her extraordinary work.
If you are interested in learning about the truth of human origins and culture, this video essentially sets the record straight, since what we have been taught as history is criminally negligent of the truth. Not only does it show us about the life and work of a remarkable woman, it also encourages us to see that what Marija Gimbutas uncovered in her work is exactly the medicine we need for the deeply woeful and sorrowful times in which we live. Knowing that we have the cellular memory of peaceful, woman-honoring cultures from our earliest ancestors in our bones gives us the wisdom to know what we must do to change the world.
Thank you, Marija.
Signs Out of Time is
produced by Belili Productions. You can order a copy by
going to their web site, www.belili.org/ OR you can get a
free copy by becoming a sustaining member of
Women for a
Better World.
Running time: approximately 1 hour