Bette Gordon
A young woman grapples with the aftermath of reporting sexual harassment in the workplace
A psychiatrist faces his past, present and future when he finds himself involved in the treatment of a young man recently released from prison for a murder committed when the boy was just 11 years old.
In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.
An ex-Navy man carrying out the last wish of a dying shipmate renews contact with old friends to break the code of silence around a mysterious, long-buried crime.
A mom and her 10 year son motor around the country as she makes ends meet by turning tricks until her car breaks down. She then temporarily takes up with a hardware store owner until she gets her own place. Then the kid's father shows up to try to take the two over.
Monsters is a syndicated horror anthology series which originally ran from 1988 to 1991 and reran on the Sci-Fi Channel during the 1990s. As of 2011, Monsters airs on NBC Universal's horror/suspense-themed cable channel Chiller in sporadic weekday marathons. In a similar vein to Tales from the Darkside, Monsters shared the same producer, and in some ways succeeded the show. It differed in some respects nonetheless. While Tales sometimes dabbled in stories of science fiction and fantasy, this series was more strictly horror. As the name implies, each episode of Monsters featured a different monster which the story concerned, from the animatronic puppet of a fictional children's television program to mutated, weapon-wielding lab rats. Similar to Tales, however, the stories in Monsters were rarely very straightforward action plots and often contained some ironic twist in which a character's conceit or greed would do him in, often with gruesome results. Adding to this was a sense of comedy often lost on horror productions which might in some instances lighten the audience's mood but in many cases added to the overall eeriness of the production.
Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.
The goings-on around a porn theater in New York’s East Village, interspersed with actors recounting experiences with extreme sexualities and a description of a scene from the pre-code Dorothy Arzner film of the same name.
Bette Gordon describes her first feature film as “a narrative derived from film’s own material and my concern for exploring issues of representation and identification in cinema."
A visually stunning kinetic rhythm produced by looped footage (mathematical curves) in and out of phase with each other.
a time-lapse glimpse of the Madison, WI skyline from dusk to dark. Shot from within a hotel room, the street traffic and the reflected interior interpenetrate in gradually shifting superimposition.
A single action seen from alternative left and right perspectives, accentuating reversals, repetitions and persistence of vision. Rather than uniting opposites, rhythm is set up by the struggling eye, varying as the image is moved closer to and further from the screen's center. The sound, with its fragmentations and its implications of incompleteness, focuses attention on the impossibility of a resolution in the film's dichotomy. "Rather than crediting the camera with objectivity according to the usual convention in film, the viewer is confronted with the relativity of simultaneous multiple perspectives. The soundtrack underlines the arbitrary relationship between a sign and its signifier, as does Magritte's painting, Ceci n'est pas une pipe." – The Art Examiner
A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal relationships between two travelers, their car, and the geographic, political, and social changes from NY to Los Angeles.
A meditation on the American rustic. Various objects within the composition are re-presented in unnatural colors and unusual spatial arrangements, emphasizing the illusion of movement while exploring film grain and graphic nature. The image of foreground and background becomes reversed, and through that process we lose sight of three-dimensional space representation.
A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.
