Marilyn Waring on Women and Economics Show Two
1996 · 30m · Canada
Directed by Terre Nash
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Marilyn Waring examines the vast, unrecorded work women perform worldwide and the disparity between their contributions to communities and how that labour is valued in national economies and legislatures.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a polemic on invisible labour to be righteous and hand-wringing; Waring just dismantles the entire accounting apparatus with glacial precision, which is somehow more radical than anger could ever be.
Nash's essay film inherits the rigorous tradition of Grierson and Godard—marrying economic argument to formal restraint, letting the structure of the edit itself become the proof of an invisible system made suddenly, irrefutably visible.
The film's strongest move is letting Waring's own voice—dry, legalistic, almost bemused—carry the ideological weight rather than overlaying it with orchestral concern; that tonal choice does the entire political work.