Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

In my continuing quest for movies where women kick ass, I recently discovered Zeiram and its sequels.

Zeiram (1991) is a low-budget Japanese live action SF film, in which Iria, an extra-terrestrial (but human-looking) woman bounty hunter, comes to Earth to capture an unkillable interstellar monster (the Zeiram of the title). She is hindered more than assisted in her quest by two male Japanese electricians who stumble upon her temporary base in a warehouse and spend most of the film screaming in terror when the monster goes after them, and she is assisted by a computer named Bob and a very large collection of advanced SF guns, grenades, transporters, and powered armour. Lots of stuff goes boom.

I think the movie sets some kind of record for the number of times the seemingly defeated bad guy gets back up and resumes attacking.

The good news is that Iria is definitely the protagonist and the story remains centred on her. There are bits where the electricians act like sexist males, but they're brief. For the most part, the camera does not objectify Iria and there's none of that hideous fanservice that tarnishes so many anime with heroine protagonists.

Miraculously enough, this movie is not based on a novel or manga or anime - it's entirely original. Naturally, there was a 6 episode anime prequel spin off. There is also a live action sequel, both from 1994.

The sequel (Zeiram II) is basically just more of the same. The two male electicians are not quite as useless as in the first film, but they still need a lot of rescuing. The anime prequel does an origin story for Iria.

The first couple episodes of the anime have a few seconds of mild fanservice, but the rest are entirely clear of that shit. The anime gives a little more time to various male characters than I'd like, but it's still Iria's story - no goat boy hijacking.

I'd recommend both the movies and the anime. A rip of the first movie is up on Archive.org, and the DVDs have literate English subtitles.

Inspired by Marissa's rant about the removal of women warriors from documentaries about World War II over on her "This is Hysteria" blog, I recently re-read "A Girl Called Judith Strick" by Judith Strick Dribben (originally published in 1970 and now out of print, although Amazon currently has used inexpensive used copies available).

This is an unusual Holocaust memoir, in that only a fraction of it is concerned with the author's ordeal in the Nazi extermination machine. The book has 4 parts of roughly equal length. Part 1 ("Hardening Steel") follows Judith's career in the Polish/Ukrainian partisan resistance following the German invasion of Eastern Poland. Part 2 ("The Big Joke") covers her arrest and time as a prisoner of the Gestapo; in part 3 ("In the Shadow of the Chimneys"), she is sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and then eventually to a munitions factory as a slave. Part 4 ("The Homecoming") deals with her post-war career, first in the Soviet army, and then in Palestine, first as a member of the Negev (guerrilla fighters against the British colonial regime), then as a soldier in the Israeli army, and finally as a member of a kibbutz. And she did all of that in a space of only about 12 years. ( she had an eventful life, to say the least )

Once Israel became a state, she joined the Israeli army. At this point, the last 60 pages of the book, I found myself reading with a deeply divided mind, because I know that the war against the Arabs that she talks about was a war of conquest and an exercise in ethnic cleansing. Her racism, her inability to see how she was applying a double standard, and so forth were quite frustrating.

On the other hand, it was very interesting to read about her career in the Israeli army, how she constantly had to push back against attempts to assign her to gender-appropriate non-combat roles. Because her brother had been in the artillery, she demanded admission to artillery training, becoming the first woman to do so. Then, when she passed the course successfully and joined an artillery unit, they assigned her to administrative duties, and so she enrolled in intelligence training, because that would ensure that she would be assigned to combat duties.

The final chapters deals with her life after the army, on the kibbutz, where she met her future husband. All in all, it's a fascinating read, and very much recommended if you are interested in biographies of woman warriors or of Holocaust survivors.