Project Detail

Variety

Synopsis

New York. Desperate for work, Christine takes a job selling tickets at the Variety, a sex cinema. This somewhat alienates her boyfriend Mark, who is investigating a story about union links with the Mob at the wholesale fish market. Christine finds herself drawn towards events on-screen, and also follows one of the customers, Louie, when he enters a sex shop, apparently on business. Louie, who is clearly both wealthy and powerful as a result of his shady activities, takes her to a ball game at Yankee Stadium. When he is suddenly called away, she again follows him and observes him at work.
Variety inverts the traditional narrative structure of cinema – whereby a man watches and a woman is watched – without showing, and thus flaunting, the object of female desire. Creating a counter-narrative to Hollywood, Bette Gordon asks the same question formulated by Teresa de Lauretis in “Oedipus Interruptus”: “How did Medusa feel upon seeing herself in Perseus' mirror just before being slain?”
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum Archival Constellations

Details

Year: 1983
Type of project: Features
Running time: 100 mins
Director: Bette Gordon
Producer: Renée Shafransky
Editor: Ila von Hasperg
Screenwriter: Kathy Acker (script), Bette Gordon (original story)
Director of Photography: Tom Dicillo, John Foster
Sound: Helene Kaplan; Sound Design: Ila von Hasperg
Composer: John Lurie
Principal cast: Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Luis Guzman, Nan Goldin, Richard Davidson
Digital restoration: New York Women in Film and Television's Women's Film Preservation Fund, DuArt Film and Video
Film Image: © Bette Gordon, Nan Goldin

Genre

Woman Director Drama

Production Status

Complete

Production Company

US, Germany, UK co-production

Channel 4 Films (UK), Variety Motion Pictures (US), Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen/ ZDF (DE)

Bette Gordon

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