A Woman's Place

By J.C.

ANTONIA: A PORTRAIT OF THE WOMAN

Directed by JUDY COLLINS and JILL GODMILOW

In 1930, when she was 28, Antonia Brico became the first woman ever to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic. Today, at age 73, she is dedicated to an orchestra of skillful semi-professionals in Denver. This wonderful documentary tells the story of an extraordinary musician's life--how she survived with spirit ind intelligence, how she was scarred out not humbled by the problem of being both a woman and an artist in America. The result is a film that is both a testament and a tribute. Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman is much the best example so far of a new feminist consciousness in movies, a statement that is clear and direct, fiercely calm and moving. There is not a moment of rhetoric or self-pity in it. Rather, Antonia is history shaped into a subtle and perfect metaphor.

The idea for the movie originated with Judy Collins, best known as a folk singer, who had been taught music by Antonia in Denver. Collins enlisted the aid of Jill Godmilow, a superb film editor. Both women traveled to Denver with a small crew, talked to Antonia, looked through her scrapbooks and her clippings, attended to her memories and pieced together a remarkable life.

Invigorating Talent. What is immediately noticeable, if not most remarkable about Antonia Brico is that she savors equally the headiness of her successes and the ironies of her reversals.

She is also a wonderful storyteller--quite a worthy and necessary talent for the subject of a documentary--and she has tales to tell that match her effortless animation: of studying intermittently but intensely with Albert Schweitzer, her spiritual mentor, in Africa during the 1950s; of Artur Rubinstein and Bruno Walter, who were patrons when she was searching for an orchestra to lead; of a fight with Tenor John Charles Thomas, who refused to perform in concert with a woman as a conductor. In the 1930s Antonia organized an all-woman orchestra in New York. Later she brought men into it, because, as she says quite reasonably, "women and men are together in life." Along with her various orchestras, sheponducted a running feud with Pianist Jose Iturbi, who allowed lhat he thought the female gender made for a certain frailty of musician ship. Antonia is modest only in aspect, not in intention. Collins and Godmilow mean to show that a musician of invigorating talent was shunted aside because of a prejudice against her sex that still prevails. The Brico abilities are strong and bracing, much like the woman herself. Some of the most moving moments of the film lie in the record of her talent: in newspaper headlines (GIRL GENIUS,

THE FIRST LADY OF MUSIC) and on a scratchy 78 of conducting her own Brico Symphony Orchestra.

A mood of frustration gradually prevails, brought to focus during a kitchen conversation in which Antonia Brico speaks angrily, nearly crying, about opportunities denied, chances diverted.

But there is no feeling of waste. In an extraordinary sequence, Brico conducts and presides over the debut of a talented young student, a girl whose promise may be better fulfilled because of the example her teacher has already set. The girl's face, alive with pleasure and a pride guarded carefully by modesty, looks to a future that may be more open, in part because of her teacher, and in part because of films like Antonia. a lovely and urgent document. -J .c.

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