Bette Gordon

Stylized, black and white biography of Frances Farmer by author Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLauglin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Agatha is an international lawyer, Jo a filmmaker. The two women are lovers. While Jo is on the road showing her films, Agatha discovers and reads her diaries. Problems ensue as Agatha's transgressions lead to jealousy and a spiraling cycle of sexual obsession.

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.

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."

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

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

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 young woman grapples with the aftermath of reporting sexual harassment in the workplace

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.

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.

Made to celebrate Anthology Film Archives’ 50th Anniversary.

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 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

Monsters is a syndicated horror anthology series which originally ran from 1988 to 1991 and reran on the Sci-Fi Channel during the 1990s. Similarly to Tales from the Darkside, Monsters shared the same producer, and in some ways succeeded the show. It differed in some respects nonetheless. While Tales sometimes dabbled in stories of science fiction and fantasy, this series was more strictly horror. As the name implies, each episode features a different monster, from the animatronic puppet of a fictional children's television program to mutated, weapon-wielding lab rats.