All it took was for the repertoire sector to take a look at the buried history of women directors for a host of nuggets that had been put away until then to reappear, like, recently, the films of Kinuyo Tanaka, or, the latest find in date, Variety, a choice piece in the cine-mapping of New York. Shot in 1983, presented at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight the following year, this first feature film by Bette Gordon therefore took almost forty years to find its way to French cinemas.
Born in 1955 in Boston (Massachusetts), Gordon trained in the 1970s. A year of study spent in France at the Sorbonne, and especially at the Cinematheque of Henri Langlois, familiarized her with the momentum sprung from the New Wave. , Jean-Luc Godard in the lead. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, she shot her first shorts alongside James Benning, an experimental filmmaker with a structuralist tendency. In 1979, she moved to New York, melted into the artistic effervescence of downtown Manhattan (Lower East Side), where punk was then overwhelmed by its radical and noisy branch, contrary to any mythological posture, called “no wave”.
Gaze Adventure
This is precisely where it comes from Variety, transition to Gordon’s fiction, in which the fine flower of the movement collaborates: on the screenplay the feminist writer Kathy Acker (1947-1997), on the music the saxophonist John Lurie (member of the punk jazz group The Lounge Lizards), on the he image of cinematographer Tom DiCillo, from Jim Jarmusch’s first films, and, in a supporting role, photographer Nan Goldin, who was documenting all this little world in a series of slides on the verge of becoming famous, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
The film consists of an adventure of the gaze. Christine (Sandy McLeod), a broke young woman, finds a small job at the cash desk of a porn cinema in Times Square, the Variety, where a furtive fauna transits. During her breaks, Christine smokes in the hall, where the wet and hyperbolic groans of the tapes that take place next door rise. Sometimes, from the projectionist’s booth, she risks one eye on the screen. The place seems like a strange portal to who knows what world. The click occurs at the counter, in the person of a customer, Louie (Richard Davidson), three-piece suit, receding hairline and leather jacket. The attention of the usherette is fixed so well on him that she begins to follow him, taking him in spinning in a maze of shady places (sex shops, fish market, shabby hotel), which let her guess place of mafia activities. Like Alice through the mirror, Christine, following in her footsteps, falls into the nocturnal side of existence, where unconscious desires emerge.
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