Content area
Full text
A Question of Variety: New Forms for Women in Movies
Variety
Directed by Bette Gordon, written by Kathy Acker, with Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Luis Guzman, Nan Goldin, Richard Davidson.
A Question of Silence
Written and directed by Marleen Gorris, with Cox Habbema, Edda Barends, Nelly Frijda, Henriette Tol, Edyy Brugman (in Dutch with English subtitles).
Two of the best post-feminist films explore the feminist discourse on language and silence in interesting, though different, ways. Bette Gordon's Variety is a finely crafted film noir revival. Shot in 16mm with flat, neutral tones, broken by studied splashes of color, Gordon gets as close as she can to the richly textured black and white of traditional film noir. The muted tones and understated but exquisite cinematography are a stunning relief from the monumental or special-effects camera work of contemporary Hollywood.
Gordon's heroine, Christine, is much like herself, a nice, middle-class WASP, trying to make a living in the big city. Gordon grew up in Newton, Mass., and left for college in 1968. Involved in SDS and then in the women's liberation movement, Gordon stayed in academia through one of the first sex-discrimination suits against a university. She now teaches film production and theory at Hofstra University. Her technical expertise, political acumen, and wizardry at choosing good production priorities on small budgets combine in Variety to produce a fine imitation of film noir: good cinematography backs up excellent acting, and superb editing ties the pieces together.
But the emulation of film noir is not just a technical choice. Gordon is acutely interested in the political implications of form. Though much less experimental than her earlier works, Empty Suitcases and Exchanges, Variety is no less political: it is an homage that attacks the premise of the style it venerates.
Film noir is about good and evil, or more precisely, about pure and situational evil. The black and white visual tone of classic film noir repeats the moral posture, the unusual camera angles and extreme changes in field composition (now you see a half-lit face close-up, now you see a shadowy figure approaching from over the shoulder) add the dimension of moral ambiguity.
Crimes comprise the plot-line of the linearly scripted film noir, and the»filmgoer becomes a voyeur who is...