Not a Pretty Picture

Nearly fifty years after its original release, Not a Pretty Picture has lost none of its disturbing power. Made in 1976, the first feature directed by Martha Coolidge returns to the sexual assault she endured as a sixteen-year-old boarding-school student in 1962. Yet describing the film merely as an autobiographical drama would overlook everything that makes it so singular. Rather than offering a polished reconstruction, Martha Coolidge exposes the machinery of filmmaking itself: rehearsals interrupt scenes, performers question their characters, memories are corrected in front of the camera, and the director openly admits uncertainty about how the past should be represented. The result exists in a tense space between documentary, psychodrama and artistic investigation. It is not simply a film about trauma, but a record of one woman attempting to reclaim an experience that had deprived her of control.

The narrative follows the events surrounding a trip to New York, where the teenage protagonist is assaulted by a male acquaintance after he persuades a group of students to stop at a dilapidated apartment on their way to a party. Michele Manenti, cast as the young version of the filmmaker, had herself survived a similar assault, a fact that gives the production’s behind-the-scenes conversations an emotional gravity no conventional performance could manufacture. Anne Mundstuk, who was Martha Coolidge’s roommate at the time, plays herself, collapsing the distance between recollection and reconstruction even further. Her presence may occasionally feel awkward beside performers playing teenagers, but that visible discrepancy is also meaningful: the film never allows the audience to forget that the past is being revisited by adults who have carried it with them for years. Memory here is neither neutral nor frozen. It has aged, changed shape and accumulated consequences.

The most difficult material involves Jim Carrington, who portrays the assailant. During the filmed discussions, he tries to understand the character’s behaviour and introduces arguments about male desire, blurred intentions and the supposed failure to recognise refusal. His comments are profoundly uncomfortable, particularly when he describes the anger generated within him during the reconstruction. Yet Martha Coolidge does not protect either him or the audience by removing these exchanges. Their inclusion reveals how easily violence could be disguised by the language of seduction and how readily responsibility was redirected toward the victim. At one point, she stops a rehearsal because Jim Carrington is playing the aggressor too gently. He is interested in the indistinct boundary between persuasion and coercion; she insists that her own experience was unmistakably violent. This disagreement becomes one of the film’s central tensions: a survivor has the absolute right to define what happened to her, while the filmmaking process inevitably brings other interpretations into the room.

The assault itself is harrowing, but the aftermath may be even more revealing. Cruel gossip from other students and the condescending response of a school authority show that the original violence was compounded by an environment determined to minimise it. The film understands that shame is socially manufactured. Its protagonist is not only attacked; she is subsequently encouraged to view herself as the source of the scandal. In this respect, Not a Pretty Picture acts as a necessary counterweight to nostalgic portraits of early-1960s youth. The car journey that precedes the assault might initially resemble a scene from an innocent coming-of-age story, yet the viewer’s knowledge transforms casual conversation and youthful excitement into something ominous. Every ordinary detail seems contaminated by the destination awaiting them. What should have been a night out becomes a corridor toward an event that will be replayed, scrutinised and questioned for decades.

Formally, the film’s roughness is essential to its effect. Handheld images, imperfect sound and direct-to-camera conversations prevent the reconstructions from acquiring the reassuring finish of fiction. Whenever spectators begin to surrender to the dramatic narrative, Martha Coolidge pulls them back to the set and asks them to consider who is performing, who is remembering and what emotional price is being paid. These Brechtian interruptions are not intellectual decoration. They reflect the fractured nature of traumatic memory, in which an event can feel simultaneously immediate and remote, painfully real and impossible to comprehend. The performers sometimes lack the vocabulary to articulate what they have experienced during a scene, so gestures, silences and hesitations become as significant as their words. The film captures a historical moment when public language surrounding consent and sexual violence remained woefully inadequate.

Seen today, the production also raises complicated ethical questions. A contemporary filmmaker would probably employ mental-health professionals and an intimacy coordinator, especially when asking a survivor such as Michele Manenti to embody another woman’s assault. Such safeguards might reduce spontaneity, but they could also provide a clearer framework for exploring difficult material without reproducing its harm. That tension does not invalidate the film; it demonstrates how far working practices and conversations about consent have developed since 1976. Modern audiences may also resist some of Jim Carrington’s suggestions that aggressors simply fail to realise consent is absent. Nevertheless, the fact that these arguments remain recognisable is precisely why the film has not become a historical curiosity. Its vocabulary belongs to the 1970s, but the evasions and rationalisations it uncovers have certainly not disappeared.

There is something extraordinarily courageous in the decision by Martha Coolidge to place herself before the camera while still trying to understand what the film should become. She does not present artistic creation as an instant cure, nor does she pretend that reconstructing the assault can resolve every contradiction. Instead, filmmaking becomes a form of repossession: sets can be stopped, actions repeated, motivations challenged and the final account shaped by the person whose agency was once taken from her. That approach anticipates decades of hybrid documentary and autobiographical cinema. It also adds an important foundation to a career that would later include Valley Girl, Real Genius and Rambling Rose, as well as her historic tenure as the first woman president of the Directors Guild of America.

Not a Pretty Picture is occasionally unwieldy, and some of its discussions now seem limited by the concepts available when it was made. Those imperfections, however, are inseparable from its honesty. This is cinema thinking aloud—searching, stumbling and exposing assumptions that a smoother film might have concealed. Its achievement lies not in delivering a definitive statement about sexual assault, but in showing how testimony is built from memory, disagreement, performance and silence. Difficult to watch yet impossible to dismiss, it remains both a landmark of feminist filmmaking and a brave act of personal reclamation. 

Not a Pretty Picture
Written and directed by Martha Coolidge
Produced by Martha Coolidge
Starring: Michele Manenti, Jim Carrington, Anne Mundstuk, John Fedinatz, Amy Wright, Stephen Laurier, Hal Studer, Janet Morrison, Reed Birney, Diana Gold, Lillah McCarthy and Martha Coolidge
Cinematography: Don Lenzer and Fred Murphy
Edited by: Suzanne Pettit and Martha Coolidge
Music by Tom Griffith
Production company: Coolidge Productions
Distributed by Films Inc (United States)
Release dates: March 31, 1976 (United States)
Running time: 83 minutes

Seen on 12 September 2026 at the Deauville International Centre