Bette Gordon, USA: Michigan Avenue (1974), An Erotic Film (1975), I-94 (1974), Webbs (1976), An Algorithm (1977), The United States of America (1975), Variety (1983)

The Cinematheque, Feb. 21 2025

Six experimental shorts and an engrossing feature by American filmmaker Bette Gordon screen in this program, a tie-in to my extensive profile on Gordon for MUBI Notebook. Through a series of interviews conducted in the director’s Tribeca loft, the piece spans from Gordon’s childhood spent attending Leonard Bernstein concerts and learning how to hold a camera, to her string of 1970s film experiences and the creation of her various feature films (Variety, Luminous Motion, Handsome Harry, The Drowning)—all the while pondering the question: is Gordon a quintessentially ​“American” filmmaker or something else altogether? — Saffron Maeve

Liner notes: Filmed between 1974 and 1977, these structuralist shorts present Bette Gordon’s emerging thematic preoccupations—sexuality, mobility, liminality, and the American national character—as well as her collaborations with independent filmmaker James Benning, who co-directs three. From the busy streets of Chicago to the backseat of a vehicle travelling coast-to-coast, these works contort and relocate American cinematic traditions into corporeal experiences and nonconformist expressivity. Through the use of an optical printer, the films employ a mathematical precision that Gordon calls ​“the physics of the image as narrative,” creating manually decelerated, superimposed, and kinetic sequences—a protracted, avant-garde film language. Gordon and Benning’s perspectives on the political, social, geographic, and consumerist shifts in 1970s America were both revelatory and prescient, chronicling a nation constantly on the brink of turmoil.

In Bette Gordon’s landmark feminist noir, Christine (Sandy McLeod), a sexually repressed aspiring writer, happens upon a front-of-house ticketing gig at Variety Photoplays, a historic porn theatre in New York City. Loitering around the lobby and peering into the cinema at the pornographic action, Christine begins to tap into her unrealized desires, locating pleasure in the act of watching men watch. After she stalks an elusive patron and uncovers a crime syndicate, the film’s sexual intrigue becomes bound up with the transgressive and scopophilic—a kind of pronounced eroticism that perverts the male gaze and encourages a radical reimagining of sexuality and conquest. Drawing inspiration from the psychoanalytic writings of Laura Mulvey and Sophie Calle, and featuring appearances from cultural superstars Nan Goldin and Cookie Mueller, Variety toys with how women encounter voyeurism and the ways they wrangle the unrelenting act of looking to their benefit.

Films courtesy of Bette Gordon & Anthology Film Archives. Video introduction by curator Saffron Maeve.