Starting this evening and continuing through the weekend, Anthology Film Archives screens the films, many newly preserved, of Bette Gordon, especially active in downtown Manhattan in the 70s and 80s. Her Kathy Acker-scripted 1983 feature Variety is a perfect film about New York and about narratives: when its peaches-and-cream-complexioned young protagonist takes a job selling tickets at a 42nd Street porno theater, she observes the regulars from her kiosk/cage until she becomes obsessed with one shady character. She shadows him, imagining his underworld ties and imagining herself into a noir, illustrating the messy world of self-created stories that city residents have to choose from: to jump into or out of, or to exist in in parallel without ever touching.
You used two different cinematographers (John Foster and Tom DiCillo) on Variety, with a break in between shooting, but the look is so seamless. Did you talk about the look with them a lot, and storyboard?
The look was set early on. I’ve always been a filmmaker first. You know, I can shoot, I can do sound, I can edit. When I was learning film you learned everything. Now things are a little more separated. With young people learning filmmaking now you write, or you direct, or you’re a producer. Since I always shot my own short films, in working with Tom and John we had a common language. And with Variety, which is a film about looking, it was very much set with frames within frames, with doorways and mirrors and windows, and that whole reflexive part of what it means to look. And neon was a big part of it: the bright neon colors of the Variety theater marquee guided the reds and the blues and way that we framed and used color and texture, so rich and so important. Primary, saturated colors.
Variety is such a great New York movie, with Times Square and the Fulton Fish market…
You know, I remember as a sort of urban explorer, which I felt like I was when I first moved here, anywhere where I wasn’t supposed to go—like when your mother or father says, “Don’t ever go… ”—that’s the first place you go!
Finding the Variety theater was great. Even though I set the Variety in the Times Square milieu, in fact Variety was on 13th St and Third Avenue. When uptown went only as far as 14th St, Variety was a vaudeville theater. And when that whole world changed, it became a porn theater. I got friendly with the projectionist there, and he would let me come up to the booth. And I just started thinking of how to tell this story of a ticket-taker at a porn theater. It came very much from that.
It just looked so good, that old freestanding marquee, it just looked good enough to eat, it was so delicious. And similarly, Times Square had that same brightly lit feeling. In the middle of the night you could go and it would seem like the middle of the day. It’s this constant energy of neon. It’s not like that anymore; it is neon, but it’s this commercialized Toys R Us neon, which I think is sad. I miss the grit. I miss the reality. I miss the back alley feel of the old Times Square. It’s always been touristy during the day, but at night it had this secret glow, this secret glimmer, and you could feel like you were participating in a more secret world.
Same thing with the Fulton Fish Market. We would be out late at clubs and hearing music, and one day coming home late we were driving underneath the FDR Drive and saw the brightest lights you’ve ever seen—it was the Fulton Fish Market. It was just this big pavilion of men selling fish. Amazing. It was just like this whole other world.
And you’ve unintentionally documented a New York that doesn’t exist. Fulton Fish Market…
Right. Yankee Stadium!
How did you end up collaborating with film’s writer, Kathy Acker?
I loved her work, like Empire of the Senseless. I just thought she was somebody who was doing the kind of work that intrigued me in reversing the polarities, in rewriting Don Quixote. And I knew her. There was a kind of merge or collaboration between writers and performers then, and she would get up and do these readings. She was a tough female, but underneath of course she was incredibly tender and loving and lovely. So we met, and I proposed this idea to her, and she said yes.
And it was not fraught with the commercial considerations of today; people just agreed to work together. John Foster, John Lurie, and Tom Dicillo, were all friends of mine. Luis Guzman, you know, I met him somewhere in the LES, and I said, “Oh you look great, will you be in my movie?” There was a kind of congeniality of people who were artists at that time. The commercialism hadn’t taken hold yet, so there was a kind of ease of working together. Everyone worked together, and no one was really looking for the big money. There was also so much crossover between musicians, performance artists, artists, filmmakers, that “the scene” was just full of this new energy of people thinking of how to make art differently.
Do you think that era that you’re speaking of can be repeated, that something like that could happen again in New York?
I don’t think it can ever be the same; it’ll just keep evolving and changing. But, you know, when I started making films it was a slightly weird thing to do: “Oh, you make movies?” Today it’s so common; everyone has an iPhone, so everyone is a filmmaker. So that’s going to change the culture and the way in which people I guess absorb images.
But I’m still a movie theater person. For me there’s nothing more exciting than the secretness of going to a movie theater and having the lights dim, and having this collective experience of everyone sitting in the theater. All movies are made in your head before they ever exist anywhere else, so the thrill for me, the challenge for me, is to see what existed only in my own imagination, inside my own head, up on the screen, in this magnified way, with other people witnessing. An iPhone wouldn’t do it. A computer screen doesn’t do it. I need the secretive, almost taboo-like experience of admitting there’s pleasure in looking at another person, or another image, and being surrounded by not only the image but the sound. And that moment when the lights go dim, just before the movie starts, is one of my favorite moments ever: You’re willing to suspend your life over to something else. You let it all go, nothing else distracts you. You can’t do that with an iPhone or a computer screen; there’s too much else going on.
That’s fascinating, both what you’re saying and how it seems to inform your approach to filmmaking. You seem to approach filmmaking through the filter of the film-watching experience. Which is interesting, because I read about Variety way before I ever saw it, in that piece you wrote in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, and I became obsessed with seeing it. In fact, I felt that I had seen it, just through your description of it.
Variety has been canonized in that culture of feminist filmmaking and writing, more than the mainstream. It is a strong culture but also a separate culture, for the most part.
I initially wrote the essay for the book Pleasure and Danger, which came from a conference which redefined ways of thinking about sexuality. And this was all coming, of course, after Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” On the other hand, while I fit in with what was happening with women and feminist critique at the time—and certainly that influenced me, because it was part of my generation and part of my thinking—I was always a different kind of filmmaker, because really I never wanted to redefine the terms. I was perfectly willing to work within the constructs of mainstream cinema, but just to play around, to play and subvert.
When Variety came out on DVD, a writer from Time Out wrote, “Listen to young filmmakers talk about the first time they saw Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, and you’ll hear them speak in hushed tones about the moment they realized that Scorsese’s movies—gritty, disturbing and explosive—gave them permission to tell their own stories, Variety, a 1983 feature by Bette Gordon that is now only officially being released on video, can also have the same effect on young writers and directors.”
Anyway, I think that’s right. It’s more like Taxi Driver or Mean Streets than those other films, or Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street was a big influence, more than the women that you’re speaking about. Chantal Akerman was always a part of the Art cinema. I was always much more interested in the mainstream. And I’ve gone more in that direction in my work. While feminist film criticism is always part of my thinking, I’ve never cared to be part of that redefining of the terms of a “feminist cinema.”
But it addresses those questions even better by having those questions in mind while approaching something that’s more like a gritty spy thriller. When she makes that transition, when she starts spying on her customer, you do such a good job with that genre. But at the same time you’re always aware as a viewer that we’re looking at something unusual, the woman placed in that role…
Right, that of a woman’s place as “looker” instead of “looked at”. What would happen if I reversed the polarity: the active female voyeur. Which brought up the question in pornography, which is about desire which is promised for the male viewer (for the most part): What happens when the female engages and comes underneath that, disturbing that sense of looking and being looked at?
So that interest comes partially out of that [feminist film] time period, but to recreate the world of Pickup on South Street or Naked City was much more interesting to me. Also I like female characters from film noir. I thought that their dangerous sexuality was something I was attracted to that the woman’s movement didn’t address at all, and in fact was repressive and kind of prescriptive. And I just thought that was kind of bullshit. That there had to be a way to address the unconscious of the woman.
And nothing happens to her. If it were a Hollywood movie she’d be putting herself in danger but, in fact, she’s not.
I also think Variety was synchronistic with that idea of performance, with people like Madonna and other women singers who began to take their sexuality and use it as part of their performance.
And the movie addresses the effects of that dangerous sexuality so well from her perspective. It freaks people out!
And nothing happens to her. If it were a Hollywood movie she’d be putting herself in danger but, in fact, she’s not.
I also think Variety was synchronistic with that idea of performance, with people like Madonna and other women singers who began to take their sexuality and use it as part of their performance.
I wanted to talk about the main character’s voice, which is very interesting… But first I wanted to ask you about something you wrote in that essay I was referring to, about a “process of construction.” Could you tell me a little bit more about that?
Well creating a viewer is sort of Brechtian, creating a viewer who is aware that film is a construction, presented from a point-of-view that engages the viewer in a more process-oriented way, not just identifying with the characters. So construction is: How is something put together? What do those images mean? How can I frame that in order to also suggest that this idea in the shift in looking and being looked at is not such a simple shift; sometimes you’re producing your own objectification, but is that different? So I guess in terms of construction I mean allowing for the viewer to be as active as the maker.
Right, so I wanted to talk to you about that in terms of her voice. There’s almost a naiveté in the filmmaking style, and in the main character as well, and so you make that all work as part of the film’s style. At first the lead actress has these almost flat, innocent line readings, while so many of the men around her seem to be really “acting.” But then that changes. When she starts reciting the porno stories out loud, her voice evolves, and becomes stronger and really interesting.
And she becomes more subsumed with her own unconscious, that she’s both a voyeur of and a participant in. And the question becomes how far will she go in her obsession, which is what it becomes for her. Also remember that Kathy Acker loved to write stories that would tempt and invert and subvert the way in which women were perceived sexually. So there’s an element of not only that, but of the obsession of a Hitchcock character. As Jimmy Stewart becomes more and more involved in Vertigo, he too loses sense of the world that he’s in.
And then Mark, the boyfriend, is calling and saying, “Wha?! Christine! What are you talking about?” and there’s a change in their relationship. And that came from my own boyfriend experiences of men who think they want a liberated woman, but actually they don’t, because really they’re afraid.
Oh, I understand.
It’s an interesting question. I’m not sure if it’s so much about the way she speaks, but it was important for me to have her speak her stories rather than to show them. In other words, the sound of what she was hearing but not seeing intersecting with the stories she was telling—which get more and more raunchy—was as though she was creating her own movies in her head.
And you see, at one point, that she even goes into the theater and imagines herself on the screen.
She has that power, the power to see how she’s viewed and then to control how she’s viewed, at that point.
Right, right. But I don’t ever assume, because I’m not that naive myself, that she can simply take control of her own image, because I understand that we live in a culture that is patriarchy, and that there is still a certain amount of consumption and production that exists within the culture that we live in. But I’m interested in subverting rather than recreating, posing “what would happen if…” Never assuming that I think it’s simply a matter of a reversal: “She’s now got the power to make her own image.”
It’s complicated, but I think positive. At the end there’s the empty street, which reminds me of Antonioni’s Eclipse. But at the end of Eclipse I’m like, “Ennui! The sad, modern world…” But when I see a similar situation in your film, I have this sense of liberation, of how they’ve reached equality through mutual fantasy.
That’s so true. And people were more disturbed by the ending than they were of the use of pornography, or the suggestion that pornography can be something that women want to use for themselves. I thought that would be so controversial, and cause so much uproar. But that didn’t as much as the ending of the film, which was open-ended, and people were upset. They wanted more of a conclusion. Which is to say that narrative is a very conventional form that, in some ways, sets up desire and wants that desire completed. She says, “Meet me on the corner of South St & Fulton.” She’s controlling the moment and she’s controlling the place, and then, there’s nobody there. (Sometimes people even imagine that they see two people in the background, because it’s so dark! Isn’t that funny?) But, so, there was more disturbance over the ending than I thought there would be, but it seemed like such a logical ending to me: She’s completed this journey, and set her terms, and says, “I know.” And that’s as far as we need to go.
But also, I was using the model of pornography, which sets up desire, forever promised but never found satisfaction, so that you have to keep coming back for more. And isn’t narrative the same. It sets up this desire and has to answer so that you continue wanting. Which is what pornography does, to set it up and not to satisfy. You can look but you can’t touch.
Like with Rivette, in The Duchess of Langeais, sets up this prolonged romance between a coquette and a soldier in which they never do it: Are they going to? Are they going to? Are they going to? And they never get together. Which works so well with his films, since he’s so obsessed with the basic constructs of narrative. I recently programmed it with Hitchcock’s Marnie in a sex mystery weekend, where the mystery and sex take the same form.
Yeah, desire, forever promised but never found.
I like the character of the boyfriend, too, the reporter who only talks to her about his job, about his writing. Even though we’re introduced to her as a struggling writer. But eventually it’s when he’s dismissing her stories about the pornos that she finally says, “This is my JOB.”
She goes to show him her work, and instead he shows her his own and talks about himself. It’s about how you struggle to define yourself, at one moment in time, and then when you finally do define yourself and take ownership and possession, it alienates… them. You know, the male world.
So it probably comes out of my experiences, my own voyage, in terms of being a maker of something, and forging my way through a world that is pretty male—the film world. How do you keep going and how to you keep telling stories…
And my most recent film, Handsome Harry, is really interesting, because it’s also about sexuality but it’s about male sexuality. So I’m turning my little female lens now on the world of men. While in Variety it’s her investigation of men and money in lower Manhattan, in Handsome Harry it’s about a group of guys, one of whom is investigating his past to connect with five other guys he was in the Navy with, to try to discover what happened in an event that turned really violent. So it’s another sleuth; in Variety it’s a woman investigating her own past and in Handsome Harry it’s a man investigating his own past to define his sexuality. I’m always fascinated by the question of masculinity, which is the opposite of the way in which female sexuality is constructed. So what about masculinity? That’s what the new film is about.
Well that’s interesting, because that’s so essential to feminism, to examine masculinity instead of just accepting it as the default.
Right, however men construct it… I looked at a lot of Clint Eastwood, who I adore, in preparing for this, and I think the men in my film are all raw men whose physicality guides them. And there’s been a change in sexuality, in male sexuality, since the end of the Vietnam War, and the masculinity aspect of being a man in this world has changed since then. You look at movies today, and there’s a kind of androgyny. There’s a very different kind of male sexuality than there was twenty-five/thirty years ago, and that’s what I was interested in exploring in the new movie.
