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Thursday, September 26, 2019

Beyond the Canon: Girlfriends + Husbands


It is no secret that the cinema canon has historically skewed toward lionizing the white, male auteur. Beyond the Canon is a monthly series that seeks to question that history and broaden horizons by pairing one much-loved, highly regarded, canonized classic with a thematically or stylistically-related—and equally brilliant—work by a filmmaker traditionally excluded from that discussion. This month’s double feature pairs Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) with John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).

By Chloe Lizotte

At the beginning of Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978), Susan (Melanie Mayron) bursts into a laundromat to tell her best friend Anne (Anita Skinner) that her photographs were selected for a gallery show. Riding on Susan’s high, Anne shares her own personal news: she’s engaged to her bland suburbanite boyfriend (Bob Balaban). “How can you be sure when you’re so unsure?” Susan asks Anne, as their mundane surroundings clash with the fragility of imminent change.

Friday, September 13, 2019

Beyond the Canon: Invisible Adversaries + Invasion of the Body Snatchers


It is no secret that the cinema canon has historically skewed toward lionizing the white, male auteur. Beyond the Canon is a monthly series that seeks to question that history and broaden horizons by pairing one much-loved, highly regarded, canonized classic with a thematically or stylistically-related—and equally brilliant—work by a filmmaker traditionally excluded from that discussion. This month’s double feature pairs Valie Export’s Invisible Adversaries (1977) with Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

By Courtney Duckworth

Women are always doppelgängers. Critic John Berger wrote that a woman is “almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself” through a prickly self-surveillance. Such double vision imbues the oeuvre of Austrian artist-agitator Valie Export—an alias she adopted to shed the encumbering surnames of father and ex-husband—who gummed up masculine voyeurism with her puckish, impertinent performances of the 1960s and ’70s. Export’s energetic experiments infuse Invisible Adversaries (1977), her debut feature, a brisk bricolage of improvised dialogue, sight gags, (re)staged performances, grainy documentary footage, and reenactments of her studio practice that together, she said, “put alternative artistic media into a discourse with conventional film.”