Bette Gordon

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.

In NORTH ON EVERS James Benning takes the road movie seriously, making his circular trip across the U.S. a marvelously photographed, intensely felt, and disturbing portrait of contemporary America. In many ways, this recent film is a departure of Benning’s earlier films which are characterized, at times, by extremely long, carefully planned takes and a minimal narrative approach. In NORTH ON EVERS, the shots are kept short with a narrative that is direct and detailed, like a diary or a long series of postcards to a friend. What this work shares with the other films is a dry wit and a deep interest in the American social landscape.

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."

65 shots making up a cryptically alluded-to narrative: a lesbian couple's Midwest travels, a hitchhiking young man's journeys, the story of a man who may be having an affair.

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 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.

A young woman becomes obsessed with pornography and the mysterious rich patrons of the Times Square porn theater where she works selling tickets.

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.

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 single mother and her 10-year-old son motor around the country as she makes ends meet and enters various relationships that her son has yet to understand.

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.

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."

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 narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.

Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.

Three women have a strange claustraphobic encounter in the ladies lounge of a luxurious manhattan hotel. Set in a timeless "twilight zone" where objects bear a menacing aura and seemingly harmless conversation carries a threatening subtext.

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 couple and a train.

Exchanges investigates mechanisms by which meaning is produced in film, through the interaction of the process of construction of a text and the social context which determines and is represented by that text.

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 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.

Made to celebrate Anthology Film Archives’ 50th Anniversary.

This recently unearthed and newly digitized work is a richly minimalist, single-camera-setup portrait of the sights and sounds at a late-night diner in Madison, WI.