From the Archives: Magnum On Set - Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight

In 1951, photographer W. Eugene Smith travelled to Los Angeles on a five-week assignment for LIFE Magazine: to document Charlie Chaplin during the filming of his movie Limelight. Smith, who, according to photography journalist Sean O’Hagan, “was perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay,” was the ideal photographer to capture Chaplin’s most personal project.

The photographer had come to his craft shortly after his father’s suicide. Smith was still a young man just out of high school, yet he made a personal vow that he would uphold throughout his career: “to hold himself to the highest standards of truth no matter the cost.” It is no surprise, therefore, that Smith’s on-set photographs made during the production of Limelight depict an often harried Chaplin bearing the weight of both filmmaking and troubles in his personal life.

Smith depicts Chaplin directing, performing, and behind the scenes with his family. Sometimes he even appears off-guard, almost in a state of reflection as he possibly contemplates his life up to this point. At this time in his life, Chaplin was striving to retain his relevance in an fast-changing industry. After fighting back against the introduction of sound with the critically acclaimed City Lights in 1931, his satirical turn as Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940) had left a sour taste. Concurrently, accusations were circulating of Chaplin’s involvement in anti-American activities, and his U.S. visa was voided after he left the country for Limelight’s London premiere. Furthermore, a paternity suit with up-and-coming actress Joan Barry had resulted in a loss of audience faith. Yet rather than bow to the pressure and make another political film, in 1952 Chaplin made Limelight, his most reflective and personal piece of work.

Based on his novella, Footlights, Limelight centres on Thereza “Terry” Ambrose, a dancer whose attempt to commit suicide is prevented by Calvero, a down on his luck drunk who was once a celebrated clown. Through caring for Terry, Calvero regains his self-confidence and sense of self-worth and eventually returns to the stage for one final, fatal, show. Throughout the film, there are nods to Chaplin’s personal life: his fall from grace, his relationship with a younger woman, and even a turn from the iconic Buster Keaton as his old partner. In one photograph, they stand side-by-side as Keaton gestures to the violin Chaplin is playing in a behind the scenes moment.

A few years before filming, Chaplin had married his protege Oona O’ Neill. At 18 years of age, their thirty six-year age gap only increased the snowballing speculation and controversy surrounding the once lauded actor. However, this would prove to be Chaplin’s most stable, contented union. Of the eight children the pair had together, many became actors, including Geraldine and Michael, while Victoria became a circus performer, fulfilling her father’s long-abandoned professional desire. We see a paternal side of Chaplin in one photo when he holds daughter Josephine, two years old at the time, in his arms: her brow is fuddled, slightly perplexed by the environment, while he only beams with pride at his toddler.

Despite the overall positive reviews, some critics regarded Limelight as an a attempt at a redemption story, evidence of Chaplin striving to make amends. Europe’s reaction was receptive and positive, while America was the most critical. Yet there was no doubting the sincerity Chaplin was striving to achieve. “What Mr. Chaplin is telling in this film” said Bosley Crowther in a 1952 edition of The New York Times, “is simply a tale of a great comedian of the English music halls who has gone to seed, yet who passes on to a young ballet dancer his vast abundance of courage and hope. That is what he is telling as the author, producer and director of the film—and also as the composer of the music, of one ballet and the comedy routines. But as its principal performer, he is not only playing the role; he is feeling it in its essence and projecting it from the screen.” Smith would be key in capturing the internality of Chaplin’s performance as he worked to project this sincerity onto the screen, and the physical and mental toll this took on Chaplin as a filmmaker and performer. His on-set expressions can be seen veering between intense, almost crazed determination in some photos and silent resignation in others. In some photographs, he can be seen sleeping on-set while still wearing full makeup and costume.

Smith’s photographs are, above all, moving, and perfectly highlight the passing of time. Chaplin is no longer the youthful, rambunctious street urchin twirling his cane, but cuts an almost sombre figure. Sitting at the mirror, we see him duck into his oversized collar, tilt his head and frown, and looked resignedly at his own reflection. Maybe it is a moment of contemplation for his life up to this point, all of his troubles and tribulations, the slight smirk on his face interpreted as either resignation or self victory. Perhaps it is Calvero who is staring back at him—the merging of fact and fiction. It reminds us of Smith’s intention to document to the truth of the image and reveal what was hidden. Is this the real Chaplin we are seeing? Only he himself would ever know the real answer.

This post was written for Magnum Photos and first appeared on their website on Feb 1 2020. The original piece can be found here.

Film Season: Bad Mums

For those in Birmingham and the West Midlands - as well as those interested - the Midlands Arts Centre has programmed an incredible season of films titled 'Bad Mums: Motherhood In Cinema.' Kicking off in late June, I am fortunate to be presenting four of the ten films screening over the summer. Head over to the MAC's Cinema page for more information—and I hope to see some of you there. 

Newsletter: Emmy

My poor Substack (as well as this page, granted) has been abandoned recently due to my attention being elsewhere, but it's back. This week, I wrote a short piece about the Birmingham Surrealist Emmy Bridgwater. What's that you say, you've never heard of her? You've never heard of the Birmingham Surrealists? Head over to my page to see for yourself.

Review: Late Night with the Devil

Late Night with the Devil, a found footage horror in which a live late-night talk show goes horribly awry, is 1992’s Ghostwatch for the Shudder generation.

As the host of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, Delroy (an excellent David Dastmalchian) is a modestly successful host who “five nights a week helps an anxious nation forget its troubles.” Although happily married and a member of a powerful all-male secret society called The Grove, Delroy still can’t compete with the popularity and accolades of Johnny Carson.

But with wife’s death comes dwindling fortunes and figures, and bids at television sensationalism prove unsuccessful. That is until the night of 31 October 1977, when a disastrous Halloween episode of Night Owls with its spiritually connected guests – including a psychic, a parapsychologist, and a possessed young woman — made Jack Delroy infamous.

With its meticulous 70s aesthetic, horror references, and satirical nature that refuses to verge into parody, the third film from Australian siblings Colin and Cameron Cairnes offers a contemporary twist on the live TV meets found footage formula. Darkly funny yet refusing to verge fully into parody and coming it at 86 minutes, Late Night does enough to keep audiences on their toes. As is said at one point “join us for a live television broadcast as we attempt to communicate with the devil. But first, a word from our sponsors...”

*This review first appeared on ichoosebirmingham.com. 'Late Night With The Devil' received a Birmingham preview screening thanks to the hard work of The Mockingbird, who are showing the movie from tomorrow. You can book tickets here.

Newsletter: Cut and Tear

I've lagged on the newsletter of late (I spent a chunk of time in January temping which put an end to most of my creativity) - but it's the beginning of February and I have a new dispatch out. Please sign up to Love Letters During a Nightmare and read the new instalment here.

Film intro: Beth B.’s ‘Salvation!’ (1987) [MAC Birmingham, 28/01/2024]

*The screening was cancelled due to tech problems, but here’s my intro*

 

Beth B. has been a vital figure of the New York underground scene since the late 1970s, with a body of film work including documentary, experimental, and narrative - and sometimes a combination of all three.
 
In a conversation with Interview Magazine last year, she said, 
 

‘filmmaking has always been about power and control, and confronting the oppression of the patriarch. It’s definitely from a female point of view, it’s about the female gaze, and that’s why most of my films have very powerful women.’ 

 
Beth B.’s breakthrough films, which include Black Box (1978), Vortex (1981), and The Offenders (1980) - all co-directed with her then-husband Scott B. - have been screened at such famed New York venues as Max’s Kansas City, CBGB’s, the New York Film Festival, and Film Forum, and have since been shown at - and acquired by - the Whitney Museum and MoMA. Her early work appeared in Celine Danhier’s 2009 documentary film Blank City, alongside work by Jim Jarmusch and Amos Poe, and more recently produced and directed 2019’s The War Is Never Over, a documentary about iconic performance artist and frequent collaborator Lydia Lunch. Speaking to Hyperallergic about Vortex’s status as the last new wave film made, she said:
 

‘What I’m doing is still No Wave. It’s a rejection of what is, and it’s embracing what is not: what we don’t see, what we don’t hear. My mode is to really bring those things to the fore.’

 
Salvation!  - with the secondary title Have You Said Your Prayers Today? (1987) -  was Beth B.’s first solo feature (she has made two solo features) and features a distinctive soundtrack featuring Cabaret Voltaire, Arthur Baker, and New Order (who did the theme) - the sort of film you will find on cult or restoration strands of festival circuits or television in the small hours. 
 
In Beth B.’s glossy 80s parody of televangelism, unemployed, non-religious factory worker Jerome Stample (Viggo Mortensen) ropes in his sister-in-law (Dominique Davalos), to abduct and blackmail a sex-obsessed TV minister, Rev Randall (Stephen McHattie). Events take a bonkers turn when Randall meets Jerome’s religious wife, Rhonda (played by Exene Cervenka of the punk band X), and is immediately convinced she is an evangelical rock star in the making. 
 
Salvation! is wild, scathing, and oddly prophetic because it was made before - but released after - the real-life scandals of televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart (Jim Bakker was portrayed by Andrew Garfield in Michael Showalter 2021’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye opposite Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker). 
 

In her chat with Interview, Beth B. said,

 

'In the eighties, when suddenly these fucking televangelists were taking over America, and nobody seemed to know it except the evangelists. I was like, “I’m going to do some investigating.” I went to Jerry Falwell’s church, the Super Conference, and I found myself so frightened that when he said, “Get down on your knees,” I got down on my knees. I was afraid someone was going to shoot me! Because I’m the enemy. So that film, Salvation! is based on that experience.'

Indeed, Salvation! is a crazy experience, made without apology, but there is a kernel of truth when you get beyond the madness that feels oddly unsettling and accurate. As Beth B. herself admits:
 

‘Salvation! is a wild film. I mean, just the pace of it. I watched it a few months ago. I hadn’t watched it in decades. I was like, “Wow, holy shit! How did I make this fucking wild film?” Because it’s really insane. It is. It’s also just so hilariously funny. Well, actually not funny, sadly, because it was so prescient that the same shit is still happening now. And worse.’

 
With a career spanning forty-five-years and exploring themes and exploring themes surrounding transphobia, domestic violence, and religious overreach, Beth B. continues to make politically charged and provocative films. And she has no desire to stop.
 
As she said last year:
 

‘I just can’t stop. It’s like my addiction. It’s a really phenomenal way of charting my journey through life. My films are, in some ways, very autobiographical. Even though they are not about me, they usually have some intense questions that I’m trying to work out in my life that the films somehow evolve from. And half the time, I don’t even know that when I’m starting to make a film, I just know I have a burning desire.’ 

Film Intro: Juliet Bashore’s ‘Kamikaze Hearts’ (1986) [MAC Birmingham, 13/01/24]

Juliet Bashore’s groundbreaking docu-fiction Kamikaze Hearts is very much a product of a very specific period of the late 80s - not only in content, but also cinematic and cultural legacy. Released just prior to the more marketable and popular New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, Kamikaze Hearts’s taboo subject matter (pornography, graphic sex, and drug use), not to mention unstable genre categorisation and potted release history, scuppered the film’s from achieving canon status. But a 2022 release from Kino Lorber and rounds on various festivals’ restoration circuits courtesy of such organisations as Cinema Rediscovered (also known as CineRedis) have brought the film a new audience - and deserving so, because it’s a film that should be seen by a wider audience. 
 
In Kamikaze Hearts, Sharon ‘Mitch’ Mitchell and Tigr Mennett navigate their relationship as two active participants in the adult entertainment industry while filming a porn parody of Bizet’s opera ‘Carmen’. The production is riddled with set backs and problems, and we see how the filming impacts the couple’s relationship alongside the manipulation, abuse, and the excesses of the underground porn world during the 1980s. 
 
Bashore conceived the idea for the 1986 American quasi-documentary film as a filmmaking student working as an assistant director on a documentary about the porn industry in San Francisco, which is where she met Tigr. Tigr was head over heels in love with Mitchell, and in Bashore’s words, Tigr’s ‘idea of doing this homage to this woman that she was in love with—just came together perfectly. And that’s how it started.’
 
While multiple elements of Kamikaze Hearts are genuine, the ‘Carmen’ parody and the leading couple's arguments were scripted and storyboarded, which assists to blur the line between truth and reality. The film straddles a fine line between fact and fiction - its alternative title is ‘Fact or Fiction’ - and this remains a thorough line throughout the film. Plus, Mitchell never appears to be “off” and is constantly performing. At one point she says, ‘I get paid to wait around between shots. I don't get paid to act. I do that all the time.’
 
Bashore spoke to ScreenSlate in 2022 about the film’s fluctuating perceptions, and it’s tease between documentary and fiction, saying, 
 

‘I've learned to describe it differently depending on who the audience is because, from the very beginning, it was totally misunderstood. And I finally just gave in and said, Okay, it's a documentary. I mean, people wouldn't understand that it wasn't really a documentary. When it first got picked up on the festival circuit it was stuck in the documentary section, and there was nothing I could do. They insisted that it was a documentary. So, I've learned to describe it in a way that I think the audience is gonna be able to understand, but that’s transformed. The audience is so different now and, in a way, I'm not used to talking to an audience that totally gets the way in which it is a documentary and isn't a documentary. That's not confusing at all to audiences now.’

 
The initial critical response for Kamikaze Hearts was varied, but Bashore’s filmmaking was consistently lauded, and the film has achieved something of a reappraisal in recent years. Some of the positive reviews included Kevin Thomas for the Los Angeles Times, who praised Bashore for ‘wisely’ allowing individual viewers to decide which portions are true. Liz Galst of Boston's Gay Community News called Kamikaze Hearts “amazingly powerful,” notably Mitch and Tigr's relationship and how pornographic performers navigate the lines between fiction and reality and went on to herald Bashore for being “at the forefront of U.S. non-fiction filmmaking”. But even the less favourable reviews could not deny the indelible images and people who linger long after the closing credits role.
 
As Bashore told ScreenSlate, ‘my film is about the layers of fantasy that surround that. It's not about the the pornographic image so much as it is [about] all the layers, this other kind of striptease that's going on, this psychic striptease.’
 
Aside from being an time capsule of a very specific time and an insightful depiction of the porn industry, part of Kamikaze Heart’s enduring nature - aside from Bashore’s lens - is due to Sharon Mitchell, who is one of the most charismatic screen presences you’ll encounter: glamourous, uninhibited, charming, cosmopolitan, a woman in command of her power who knows how to use her power. Mitchell made approximately 1,000 pornographic films over a 20-year career, including 38 as a director, but in 1996 she quit drugs, became a certified addiction counsellor, and obtained a MA and a PhD from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Now a credited sexologist, in 1998 Mitchell founded the adult industry’s first mass testing service, which served practically every working performer in the US for 15 years, testing over 1000 performers per month (before being shut down due to data leak in 2011). That’s a film in itself.

From the archives: Ana and ‘Antichrist’

‘I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (Nature). My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.’ - Ana Mendieta.  

Above image: Untitled (from the Silueta series) (1973-1977).

I’ve spent a few nights introducing Lars Von Trier films to a few audience attendees at my local arts cinema this past week. As I was rewatching Antichrist and writing my notes, I kept thinking about the scene when a grief-stricken Charlotte Gainsbourg, being counselled for atypical grief by her therapist husband, lies down in the forest, or Eden as it is known in the film, surrounded by grass. At that moment, my brain went to an Ana Mendieta Silueta Series and the tragic connection between the murdered artist and the movie. And then I realised today is the anniversary of her death.

[SPOILER WARNING: I will be referring to something that occurs in the very first scene of Antichrist, so if you have not seen the film, and while this is not a spoiler per se and is the reason what happens in the film, does, I just thought I’d give you a heads up].

Antichrist (Dir: Lars von Trier, 2009).

Antichrist is a 2009 film by the controversial Danish director Lars von Trier. The film begins with a couple, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, having sex as their toddler son, Nic, leaves his cot, walks to an open window, and tragically falls to his death. In the throes of atypical grief, “She” (they are credited as “He” and “She”) collapses at Nic’s funeral; her husband — a therapist with a distrust of psychoanalysis — has her discharged from the hospital and takes it upon himself to counsel her. The outcome, a merging of both the professional and personal, overlaps into some wild and dangerous territory. 

His means of counsel is exposure therapy or having her confront her greatest fears to overcome her grief. As her second greatest fear is nature, they hike to the cabin in the woods where she had spent the previous summer with their son, writing her, since abandoned, thesis criticising Gynocide. But through this journey of grief, something wild and sinister unleashes, and the film powerfully explores themes of grief, sexual violence, sadomasochism, the untamed power of nature, and the violence that resides in all of us.

In a tragic line from the film to Gainsbourg’s personal life. Gainsbourg’s sister, the British fashion photographer Jane Barry, whose work appeared in numerous commercial magazines and newspapers (including Vogue and The Sunday Times Magazine), as well as collaborations with her mother (the late Jane Birkin) and sisters, died as a result of a fall from her fourth-floor apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris on 11 December 2013. Gainsbourg has said it’s impossible to know the reasons for the fall, but it remains a profoundly tragic connection to the film.

Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was a Cuban-born artist best known for her Silueta series, a succession of works where she created imprints of her body in nature to become part of the earth and embody the process of rituals. As she progressed with the series, which saw her body pressed in mud, sand, and ice, she used a range of organic matter (twigs, leaves, even blood), making body prints in landscapes or painting her outline or silhouette onto walls.

While other artists during the 1970s were already experimenting with land, body, and performance art, Mendieta was the first to create “earth-body sculptures,” often using her naked body to explore and connect with the earth. Such examples of this include Imagen de Yagul, from the series Silueta Works, Mexico, 1973–1977, while in Corazon de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood) (1975), Mendieta kneels next to an impression of her body that has sluiced into the soft, muddy riverbank. 

Ana Mendieta, Corazón de roca con sangre (Heart of Rock with Blood) (1975).

As the series progressed, Mendieta created a template to replace her need to lie down, which she achieved by laying on a foam board and having her outline traced and then cut out. She would then take this cut-out with her into the landscape and use it to either trace her silhouette in the earth, imprint her image on a surface, or sometimes to directly stand in for her body. Between 1973-1980, Mendieta created over 100 Silueta in various materials, including organic materials ranging from earth to wood, grass to flowers, leaves and moss, algae, mushrooms, pebbles, fire, ice and stone. 

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) (1976).

Of the series, in 1981 Mendieta said:

‘I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (Nature). My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.’

I was fortunate to see the series close-up at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last autumn. The paintings are small, but seeing them on the wall in succession is an incredibly potent experience - the fusing of woman and earth, fire and blood, life and death, peace and violence. 

On 8 September 1985, Mendieta died after ‘falling’ from her 34th floor Apartment. Before her fall, neighbours had overheard a violent argument between Mendieta and her husband of 8 months, the sculptor Carl Andre. While there were no witnesses before the event, neighbours had overheard Mendieta screaming “no” before the fatality while scratches covered Andre’s face. In his call to 911, Andre said, “My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” 

Following three years of legal proceedings, Andre's lawyer described Mendieta's death as a possible accident or a suicide. In February 1988, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder by a nontribal jury. 

I’m pretty sure you can still purchase sweaters stating otherwise.

P.S. There is a very good podcast called Death of an Artist if you want to learn more.

This piece originally appeared on my Substack newsletter, Love Letters During a Nightmare, on 8th September 2023.

From the archives: Love Live the New Flesh

‘If you speak a new language of your own that others have yet to learn, you may have to wait a very long time for a positive echo.’ 

- Meret Oppenheim.

Whether or not it's because I am casting off the persistent dregs of a bad cold, I am thinking even more than usual about the incredibly complex mechanism of the human body, and the Surrealist body presented by Meret Oppenheim. 

There is a well-known photograph by Man Ray (1933’s Erotique Voilée) where Oppenheim stands at a printing press, covered in ink . In some ways the photograph contributed to the Swiss artist’s perception (by men) as a femme-enfant, an archetype of femininity seen through the eyes of male Surrealists; yet Oppenheim was never about tradition and female conformity — she despised the term “feminist art.” Interested in the psychological teachings of Carl Jung from a young age, she adopted his theory of androgynous creativity, favouring an approach to art that was not ‘male’ or ‘female’ but of indeterminate sex.

Man Ray, Erotique Voilée (1933).

In 1932, aged 18, Oppenheim moved to Paris and started sporadic art classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, an institution directed to painting and sculpture. In 1933, she met German-French painter, sculptor and poet Hans Arp and the Swiss sculptor, artist, and printmaker Alberto Giacometti, who became her artistic mentor. In 1933, Oppenheim created her first sculptural piece, a small gold ear appropriately titled Giocometti’s Ear, and invited her to participate in a Surrealist art exhibition in the “Salon des Surindépendants”. It was not long before André Breton asked Oppenheim, who impressed all with her uninhibited demeanour, to the group’s meetings at Café de la Place Blanche. 

Through her daring, unabashed art, Oppenheim took preconceived expectations of femininity, the female body, and presumptions about her own body and subverted them into works of deviance and resistance. A considerable part of Oppenheim’s legacy was toying with the body, external and internal, anatomical and physical, corporeal and mortal, and in doing so, she produced some of the most daring art of the twentieth century. 1936’s famous Object (or ‘Breakfast in Fur’ as André Breton called it) — a fur-lined teacup, cup and saucer — is an excellent example of toying with familiarity. Of the work, the American artist Jenny Holzer noted that Oppenheim transformed an everyday object into an otherworldly thing. ‘It's sinister,’ says Holzer, ‘it seems like a cup that could fight back. I suppose it implies teeth and so the cup could bite you, and I also like that it's repulsive.’

Meret Oppenheim, Objet (1936).

Holzer talks about the unpleasant thought of eating or drinking with a mouthful of hair, akin to the grotesque discovery of hair in a meal. ‘When you're eating,’ she says, ‘there is nothing more disgusting than when you get hair in your mouth,’ yet in teacup form, the artwork retains an element of practicality, gains a level of mischief and salaciousness, and thwarts social etiquette. 'I like that the fur would be a way to muffle sound,’ Holzer continues. ‘It's like she [Oppenheim] killed off the chit chat part of the tea ceremony. I think that it basically tells you that life is not what it seems.’ During the 1970s, Oppenheim told an interviewer: “I have been asked so often, ‘How did you have the idea of the fur cup?’ It bores me.”

Oppenheim’s playfulness with ideas surrounding her body and physicality included x-raying her skull. The self-portrait appears as a black-and-white negative complete with large hoop earrings: the most unusual addition to her internal cranial structure. To quote Whitney Chadwick, women Surrealist artists ‘increasingly deploy the body as a site of resistance and a locus for expressions of death, disintegration, horror, and presymbolic forms of expression.’ 

It’s compelling to chart how women artists explored their mortal bodies, considered their bodies’ limits, their bodies' animalism, their transient bodies, and the eternity of bodies in their art — Frida Kahlo, Leonor Fini, even Remedio Varo — as I wrote in a previous newsletter). Oppenheim’s Parkett no. 4 (1985) is another of these examples.

Meret Oppenheim, Gloves (for Parkett no. 4) (1985).

While Parkett no. 4 might not be as obliquely danger-red or as sexually charged as other artworks, the design still targets the body’s anatomy and blood in a very particular way. Here, Oppenheim’s goat blue suede gloves, detailed with the delicate webbing of the hands’ veins, depict an external bloodline for all to see. 

Like her friend and occasional collaborator Elsa Schiaparelli, Oppenheim did not adhere to the idea that what garments conceal needed to be de-emphasised or hidden—even something as sartorially on the nose and haute couture as Elsa Schiaparelli’s Skeleton Dress (1938) play with these ideas. Oppenheim's use of fur, an elegant pair of gloves displaying rather than concealing veins, and an extremely cool self-portrait of her skull, to name but three. The body — in all its guises — on display. To quote from David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982), ‘long live the new flesh.’

Meret Oppenheim, Gloves (for Parkett no. 4) (1985).

This piece originally appeared on my Substack newsletter, Love Letters During a Nightmare, on 13th October 2023.

Film Intro: Bette Gordon's ‘Variety’ (1983) [MAC Birmingham, 06/01/24]

‘The intense desire - and the fulfilment of that desire - experienced through looking.’

 - “Scopophilia," as defined by the artist Nan Goldin.

In a July 2023 interview with the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine — 'Entering the forbidden zone: Bette Gordon’s Variety at 40' by Rachel Pronger — Variety’s director Bette Gordon said, “When you move to New York, one of the first things your family says is, ‘Don’t ever go out alone at night. But of course all I did was go out alone at night!” It was during this time, as a new resident of the city, that Gordon stumbled across the Variety, a dilapidated vaudeville theatre turned porn cinema. She was immediately transfixed, reminiscing: “Its neon marquee [was] right out of the past, right out of a movie. It looked delicious,” she said. “I couldn’t stop looking, the lights. It was like candy, it was just calling me.”

 

In her landmark text, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ the film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote, ‘It’s the place of the look that defines cinema. The possibility of varying it, exposing it.” Mulvey’s explicitly feminist and groundbreaking thesis provoked enduring discussions about how women are presented and perceived - or looked at - in the arts. Using psychoanalysis and Freudian theory, Mulvey notes that the traditional on-screen gaze positions ‘woman as object, man as bearer of the look.’

 

As soon as she started making films, Gordon became obsessed with what she described as “the seduction of the image.” In her 2011 article for Artforum titled ‘Look Both Ways’: Amy Taubin on Bette Gordon, the critic and writer Taubin writes, 'Bette Gordon’s films have always put women first. The sense of adventure in Gordon’s movies springs from her depiction of women’s psyches and bodies, desires and fears.’

 

Gordon began making short films in the mid-1970s in the Midwestern United States, all experimental works dealing with movement through place, sexuality, culture, and structure. Although her early work was more in line with structuralist filmmaking, she soon became involved with issues combining film and feminism, and rather than pander to the voyeurism of the male gaze, Gordon, as Taubin writes, ‘insisted on training her camera on women, often unclothed.’ She continues, ‘Gordon realised that the problem of the objectification of women in film has less to do with the display of the body than with who has control of the narrative—of the desire that motors it and of how that desire is resolved, or left as an opening into the unknown. She also understood, psychologically and pragmatically, that for a woman to become a filmmaker or to simply enjoy movies, she had to take pleasure in her own voyeurism.’

 

As Gordon told Sight & Sound. Variety is 'a story about looking.' The film centres on Christine, a young Midwestern woman (played by Sandy McLeod), who finds liberation working at a New York City pornographic theatre and becomes increasingly obsessed with a patron who is potentially involved with organised crime.

 

Based on a (loosely autobiographical) story by Gordon, Variety boasts a screenplay by Kathy Acker, a dynamic writer associated with and influenced by the New York Punk Scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Acker was at the forefront of postmodernism before postmodernism was popular and heavily influenced by experimental writers, including William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras, formulating a body of work combining cut-ups of passages and pastiche alongside biography, power, sex and violence.

Variety co-stars the photographer, activist, and the 2023 most influential art figure of the year recipient, Nan Goldin, as Christine’s friend Nan. The Tin Pan Alley bar where Nan works on screen was the Bowery bar where Goldin worked at the time, and which featured alongside the bar’s regulars - friends and sex workers - in her renowned photographic Slide Show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Goldin also documented the film via various gorgeous on-set images. 

Gordon has described Variety as a “part-document, part-narrative, part-desire-filled-landscape of New York at that moment in time”. A Hitchcock fan, Gordon presents Variety as an inverted noir, drawing inspiration from Vertigo (1958) and the idea of what would have transpired if Kim Novak had stalked James Stewart: woman as ‘Investigator’, man as ‘Enigma’. As Gordon reflects, 'With Variety, I said, let me see if I can have the female as subject. [Christine] transgresses the limits of the situation. She’s the voyeur.'

 

Variety is a presentation of politics, cinephilia, art, and feminism. The film claims the gaze while disrupting the boundaries of male and female spaces. Early in the movie, while on break, Christine sneaks into the cinema at Variety, as equally fascinated by the men in the theatre as she is by the women - and images - on the cinema's screen. As Christine's obsession increases so does her confidence, and she starts boldly entering traditionally thought-of 'male-dominated spaces’ or once 'off-limits' to women: a baseball game, a sex shop, a nocturnal market, all places where ‘man’s business’ is done. 

 

As an independent art film, and to contrast so much Hollywood mainstream fare or even the porn watched by Christine in the film, Gordon refuses to offer narrative catharsis and tie the ending in a neat bow. While contentious to some audience members who seek closure before the end credits roll, Gordon admits, ‘the ending didn’t offer what the audience wanted,’ and is keen to stress curiosity and the grey area — or “empty space” — of desire. Susanna Moore’s book In the Cut also does this very well. Moore’s 1995 book, adapted for the screen by Jane Campion in 2003 (Campion also directed the film), has a divisive ending that differed drastically from the book. Still, fundamentally, it is another crucial New York film about, among various things, women’s desire, sexual power, and risk.

 

Yet this “empty space,” this ambiguity, is part of Variety’s enduring appeal, prompting discussions, interpretations, and evolving opinions that only occur over time and with the audience’s shifting perceptions. Gordon told Sight & Sound that recent audiences, whether watching the film for the first time or due to their evolving politics over the years, appear increasingly receptive to the film’s provocations. As Gordon said, 'For me, I want to enter the forbidden zone. Variety forces the spectator, the viewer, to recognise [their] own complicity, [their] own voyeurism… I don’t want to suppress the imagination. And maybe Variety is open to the imagination.'

[Image: Nan Goldin, ‘Variety’ booth, NYC, 1983].