Yale’s “Student Body” On Film
April 19, 2010
In the year of the 40th anniversaries of coeducation and African American studies, and the 30th anniversary of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies at Yale College, The Student Body tries to render the history of gender and sexuality at Yale in a film with a running time of 70 minutes. The Student Body is successful in acknowledging a series of histories throughout Yale’s long history. Opening with a discussion of men and their prostitutes on the late 19th century Old Campus, and ending with a series of vignettes pertaining to early 21st century hook-up culture, The Student Body covers all its bases.
The running time, however, prevented this serious project from attending to all that it took on. Each of the pieces were in place for an effective undressing of the standard Yale history lesson of gender and sexuality and its evolution. This occurred to the film’s best advantage in the scene in which Raphael Shapiro plays a freshman forced to be photographed naked, in keeping with a Yale policy that documented student’s bodies for the school’s “files.” Shapiro is a stand-in for the thousands of Yale students (and those at peer universities) who had their nude bodies photographed in this way between the 1940’s and the 1960’s. I was not aware of this practice, called the “Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal” by the New York Times in the first article on the subject in 1995.
Sections pertaining to some periods of history ran too long, while other sections only acknowledged a historical moment. This most surprisingly happened in The Student Body’s discussion of coeducation at Yale. This historical milestone was portrayed only through a documentary montage, whereas most milestone moments were addressed with both historical and fictional footage. There have been at least two excellent documentaries on the subject: Coeducation: The Year They Liberated Yale and Boola Boola … Yale Goes Coed. So I was somewhat disappointed that there was no fictional component to the re-hashing of documentary footage of which this film made use. It would have been wonderful to watch actors Cordelia Istel and Liz Sutton-Stone discuss classroom politics circa 1970.
Considering that it was a swiftly filmed student production, The Student Body was technically fabulous. Editors Simon Swartzman and Sophia Janowitz did a remarkable job fusing the documentary and fiction excerpts into a cohesive style. The cast members should be commended for their ability to commit to such a breadth of performances; each were charged with loaded roles and scenes to act, and did so very well. The adaptation from stage to screen was similarly successful. The film leaves its audience, however, with little more than a run-down of sexual movements and histories at Yale. While discussing sex workers and bused-in women from Smith, The Student Body has seemingly forgotten bodies of color, a non-parodied representation of transgendered bodies, and the body of the openly gay man. It is a lovely picture nonetheless, but one that doesn’t quite match reality.
Hannah Zeavin is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.
