Bette Gordon in her home office. Photograph by the author.
The problem that I have dealt with in my whole career is that I essentially am not an American filmmaker. That I am anything but.
The first person to place a camera in Bette Gordon’s hands was her father, Kenneth. A photographer himself, he met Gordon’s mother at a mutual acquaintance’s wedding, where he discreetly swapped place cards in order to sit next to her. They would later welcome Bette into the world he had been vigilantly chronicling, and by the time she was twelve, he began to teach her how to look. He advised her to hold her breath when snapping a photograph, how to frame images, where to find beauty (often, she says, at the end of a pier, an eventual preoccupation in her films).
Since these teachings, Gordon has built a career upon images of eroticism and crime, arranging them into stories of a repressed woman working the box office at a porn theater (Variety, 1983), a sex worker caring for her sociopathic son (Luminous Motion, 1999), a New York transplant philosophizing on her femininity while building a bomb (Empty Suitcases, 1980), and a veteran coping with his mortality through a long-buried hate crime (Handsome Harry, 2009). Gordon’s thematic concerns have shifted and evolved, but they are firmly rooted in an American temperament—a desire to disrupt existing film codes in order to interrogate issues of national character, sex, war, and surveillance, in keeping with no wave and structural film practices. She feels not at all simpatico with the “quintessential American independent film codified and branded by festivals,” but American localities are embedded in her practice; they organize a career spent becoming—and resisting the title of—an “American filmmaker.”
Kenneth Gordon and his camera. Photograph courtesy of Bette Gordon.
Gordon came from a musical family: her grandmother and her father were pianists, her mother a piano teacher. The upright piano in her Tribeca loft was a gift from her grandmother. Her childhood home in Newtonville, Massachusetts, was only a few hours’ drive from Tanglewood, where Leonard Bernstein held monthly children’s concerts; these were frequented and revered by Gordon. Her family also had an ear for languages, and Gordon would begin French lessons in the fourth grade. By the time she was in high school, she had a strong grasp on the language, and would recite poems and monologues to her class.
Gordon’s interest in images, music, and language coalesced the day that her French teacher instructed the class that their homework was to attend a repertory screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. (In 1985, when Gordon interviewed Godard at the St. Regis hotel for NY Talk magazine, she made the audacious request that the interview be conducted in bed, which Godard obliged.)
“There’s nothing like losing your physical being to a dark space, like a dream, where images come and go and you have that transitory moment,” Gordon tells me when we speak at her loft in November 2023, our second of five meetings over two years. “I had it many, many times, probably before that, but it struck me in the world of Breathless. Wherever that world was, and whoever Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg were, and those streets, I had never seen anything like it. I felt I didn’t belong in America and that perhaps Paris was the right place for me.”
Bette Gordon and Jean-Luc Godard at the St. Regis in 1985. Photograph by Paula Court.
These feelings reemerged as Gordon became involved in anti-war activism through Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where the bloody “Dow Day” protests radicalized thousands of students, who took to burning their draft cards, attending teach-ins, and facing off against the National Guard. In the early 1970s, on the heels of this national disillusionment, Gordon spent a year living in Paris studying film and French. She found French society restrictive and formal—you had to pay to sit on a chair at the Jardin de Luxembourg rather than sprawl on the grass—especially when compared to the unbridled force of student movements in the United States. A long way from the Brattle Theatre, Gordon was now a patron of the Cinémathèque Française, where she encountered the films of Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Orson Welles, and Jacques Tati. Whenever she felt lonely, she found herself at the Cinémathèque.
Then came the moment in her program when she was given a Super 8 camera and instructed to make her own films for the first time. Fascinated by the open-air markets of Clignancourt—flush with color and texture, antipodal to the plasticky American supermarkets—she pointed her camera at vegetable stalls and bunches of carnations, later adding audiotape recordings overtop. Another film for her program depicted a nude woman who falls in love with a tree in the Bois de Boulogne. While these experiments were never released, the premise of the latter suggests Gordon’s eventual thematic preoccupations: women’s sexuality, taboo, and expressions of longing.
Madison, Wisconsin; Chicago, Illinois; Coast–to–Coast | 1970–79
I had no idea what I was doing, but I was learning.
Michigan Avenue (Bette Gordon and James Benning, 1974).
Upon her return to UW–Madison, Gordon enrolled in a film class which focused on American experimental cinema and the avant-garde. After graduating with a degree in French, she began working as a photographer in a passport office and eventually enrolled in the school’s MFA program, where she met James Benning, then a teaching assistant for an advanced filmmaking course. As she was learning to load a Bolex, Benning showed the class one of his short films, Time and a Half (1972), which surveys 24 hours in the life of a factory worker. Benning and Gordon would go on to pursue a working and romantic partnership, co-directing three short films: Michigan Avenue (1974), I-94 (1974), and The United States of America (1975).1
Gordon found that this early experimental work gave her agency through contact with the technology. Gordon appreciated the mathematical precision of Benning’s practice: “the physics of the image as narrative.” She describes the sensual feeling of holding film in her hands, giving her a language attained only through touch.
“We fell in love with each other, but we also fell in love with this form of cinema,” says Gordon. “I began to learn how to see differently, to see the world through his big Midwestern eyes.”
The idea for their first film, Michigan Avenue, came from a popular Godard quote: “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” The film is named after a highway running through Chicago, and situates the action in an urban atmosphere before absconding to the privacy of the bedroom. Gordon and Benning’s collaborations all hinge on how the eye sees relative to how the camera sees. Michigan Avenue is composed of three scenes: a busy city sidewalk from the eyes of two young women, the women indoors in medium close-up taking turns gazing into the camera, and the two women nude in bed—a beginning, middle, and end, but with each shot slowed down considerably, allowing the viewer to catch the minutiae lost in conventional narrative.
Gordon and Benning learned to use an optical printer to stretch the duration of the images, granting the illusion of slow motion; they reprinted each frame 60 times, and let them overlap in languid dissolves. In I-94, a similar technique is used: twin reels are broken down into individual frames and assigned alternating numbers (odd numbers on A roll, even numbers on B roll) before being stitched together for a fluttering effect. Gordon would go on to make several shorts—Still Life (1975), Noyes (1976), and An Algorithm (1977)—using the optical printer to re-frame, dissolve, and superimpose positive and negative images at a 1:1 ratio. Gordon says she still has a “counting disease,” developed at this time, which causes her to start counting steps on the street or staircases, each time beginning with a random number.
I-94 (Bette Gordon and James Benning, 1974).
I-94 is an illusory act of intercourse between a nude couple (Benning and Gordon) who never appear onscreen at the same time, with their likenesses seemingly superimposed in motion. The result is spectrophilic: two ghostly figures moving atop and inside each other. Benning and Gordon decided that they would shoot each other on a deserted stretch of railroad track under the highway, and that she would have her back to the camera to counter the expectation of full-frontal female nudity. In an unscripted voice-over, Gordon complains she is not taken seriously, perhaps because of the way she looks. “I was trying to exert myself as a person in the world,” Gordon tells me. The personal and the impersonal are wound up in the composited sex act and the fact that Benning’s body comes to consume the screen, while Gordon escapes, transcending the boundaries of the film by walking off into the distance.
Benning and Gordon’s most lauded collaboration is The United States of America, a 27-minute documentary confronting the political, social, and geographic shifts in the US on its bicentennial, as seen from the backseat of a car during a cross-country road trip.2 Benning built a wooden tripod in Gordon’s $300 VW station wagon to keep the camera static. Their route was planned: New York, Niagara Falls, Chicago, St. Louis, Archer City, Dallas, the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles. The pair even sped to Arkansas in the aftermath of a hurricane, whose devastation briefly appears in the film. Part structuralist travelog, part road movie, the film’s sociality emerges not from the two figures in the car, who do not speak to one another, but from the nonstop radio, which runs advertisements, prayers, music, and news (notably of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War).3 The film didn’t make much of an impact when screened in 1975 and ’76, and it took years to gain traction. According to Gordon, it took time for the history that the film records (both through the image and the sound) to find the cultural pulse.
The United States of America (Bette Gordon and James Benning, 1975).
Benning graduated in the mid-’70s, made 11 x 14 (1977), and took up a post at Northwestern University, while Gordon finished her MFA and directed short films between Madison and Milwaukee. Her work from this time displays a growing interest in female sexuality and in single takes made rhythmic or kinetic through editing. Go-Go (1974) is a narrative about a young woman applying for a job at a strip club; Still Life (1975) is a meditation on the American rustic featuring negatives of cows; Noyes (1976) features a woman smoking a cigarette, shot from alternating perspectives; Webbs (1976) uses footage from a 24-hour diner; An Algorithm (1977) presents a looping clip of a woman diving into a pool; Central Time (1977) is a time-lapse shot out of Gordon’s studio window in Madison; and Exchanges (1979) is a “striptease of cinema.” This last film would serve as a prototype for her debut feature, which subtextually reflected her less than amicable separation from Benning during this time.
New York, New York | 1980–86
What is cinema, if not a glance into private worlds?
Bette Gordon during the production of Empty Suitcases (1980).
After moving to New York City in the late ’70s, Gordon directed Empty Suitcases (1980), an oblique, furious story of a young woman who moves back and forth from Chicago to New York City, unable to decide where to stay. Unfolding alongside the migration narrative are tips and instructions for building a bomb; again, Gordon grapples with the tactility of film form and cinematic identification through a woman’s concomitant economic, sexual, and artistic struggles. The film, featuring voice-over by Karyn Kay, combines several storytelling techniques: experimental casting (several women, including Gordon, play the protagonist), direct address, intertitles, still photography, and agitprop. This fragmentary structure creates a disunity between the image of the idealistic young woman departing her hometown and the cynical, turbulent voice-over contending with her new position in the city.
The nameless protagonist is first seen packing a suitcase with garments before catching a train from Chicago to New York; scenes from the latter city were shot at Gordon’s Greenwich Street loft. Gordon recalls the scenery of Tribeca at that time: derelict storefronts with nowhere to buy produce, gorgeous old buildings and factories which left the smell of mint and cheese in the air, and one small meat shop. Empty Suitcases embodies the gritty anarcha-feminism which Lizzie Borden would soon recapture in Born in Flames [1983]. Later in the film, two women strut in and out of a room in formal wear, each photographing the other, in what appears to be a single take. The two women are Nan Goldin (a friend and frequent collaborator of Gordon’s) and No Wave filmmaker Vivienne Dick. Goldin later exhibited a photograph taken during the scene as Vivienne in the green dress, NYC, which can be seen hanging on the wall of Christine’s apartment in Variety.
The structure of the film ultimately poses questions of identification: What kind of social beings are women? Where do they hold their anger? What shape does their liberation take? The intertitles become a gloss for such ideas, audaciously mapping out gender crises, socialist rhetoric, and instructions and safety protocols for building a bomb. “The exploration of her sexuality was a crucial factor in the creation of her female consciousness,” one reads. “She felt, you can’t begin to find your power until you’ve recognized your lack (of power).” This is followed by a coy, euphemistic warning that “high static electricity or vibration may cause premature explosion.” Empty Suitcases ends with an intertitle revealing that after joining a political group which advocated random violence as a revolutionary tactic, the protagonist fled the country.
Empty Suitcases (Bette Gordon, 1980).
After Ronald Reagan was elected president, there was a financial crisis in arts funding in the United States, which resulted in a small movement of anarchic works. In 1981, Australian filmmaker Tim Burns, who would become Gordon’s husband, received money from Artists Space to stage a show called “Emergency” with thirteen other filmmakers, each of whom was given $75 to make a short film. The scant budget meant shooting on 8mm again, and Gordon was drawn to the nocturnal scenes of the East Village (Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, punk shows, porno theaters…) where Burns was then residing. One evening, she discovered Variety Photoplays, a historic cinema which programmed pornographic films, where she would set her “Emergency” film, Anybody’s Woman (1981), and later another feature, Variety.
“I found the Variety by chance and fell in love with it,” Gordon tells me. “Everything about it—its porn, its neon, its free-standing booth.… It was a real theater, not a shopping-mall theater. The marquee called to me, bright and beautiful. It looked like candy—I wanted to smell it, to eat it.”
Shot list for Anybody's Woman (Bette Gordon, 1981).
Gordon, who had devoured Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” was spellbound by the space’s sexual overtones and knew that she wanted to subvert its scopophilia. She returned the next afternoon to find the projectionist in the lobby, and he invited her up to the booth.4 Looking through a peephole at the screen, Gordon felt her film come together at the intersection of voyeurism and psychoanalytic theory. She immediately called up her friend Nancy Reilly (who would also appear in Born in Flames) and began plotting Anybody’s Woman, which took its name from the 1930 Dorothy Arzner film about a man’s drunken marriage to a burlesque dancer. In Gordon’s film, a woman working at a porn theater (Reilly) expresses her erotic fantasies to a man (Spalding Gray), who reciprocates with an outrageous recounting of a threesome which resulted in a fusion of semen, period blood, and excrement. The woman then goes home and receives lewd phone calls from a stranger.
Upon moving to New York, Gordon was invited to work at the Collective for Living Cinema by programmer Renée Shafransky, who was dating Gray at the time.5 Gordon, having admired Gray’s monologues, asked him to join her, Shafransky, and Reilly at the theater to improvise a scene about watching porn. Once finished, the film showed at Artists Space, in a hot and sweaty room with viewers crowded on the floor, alongside the other commissioned shorts. Nothing became of Anybody’s Woman, and as Gordon said, nothing was supposed to; the idea was to make it, exhibit it once, and move on. It was both liberating and limiting, a potent exercise for Gordon, who was not yet finished with this milieu.
Anybody’s Woman (Bette Gordon, 1981).
Empty Suitcases had been selected for the 1981 Whitney Biennial and Berlinale, where a German ZDF television producer fell in love with the film and offered to help finance Gordon’s next project, which was to be Variety. The film, co-written by Kathy Acker, is a neo-noir about a sexually repressed aspiring writer, Christine (Sandy McLeod), who happens upon a front-of-house ticketing gig at the Variety, where she fixates on Louie (Richard M. Davidson), an elusive patron who asks her on a date. In the film, the Variety exists near Times Square rather than in the East Village, a reorientation which ratchets up foot traffic and creates an urban intrigue: a porn theater as the footlight to the flashy, meretricious entertainment of the square. Gordon shot other scenes at the bar near Times Square where Goldin worked. In the film, Goldin plays a bartender and aspiring photographer who is Christine’s friend and confidante. The crew also shot at the Baby Doll Lounge and various locations on Tin Pan Alley, where Gordon’s friends worked either in the sex trade or bartending.
Scenes from Anybody’s Woman were modified and repeated: Christine peering at the pornographic action onscreen from the lobby; revealing her sexual fantasies to her disinterested, and increasingly disturbed, boyfriend in a diner; receiving salacious, threatening phone calls while alone at home. In this iteration, however, Christine stalks Louie after he abandons her on their date for “business,” and eventually happens upon a nondescript crime syndicate—like Empty Suitcases, Variety puts forth a kind of double life, where a female protagonist darts between the quotidian and the criminal.
In an essay for Framework, Gordon describes Variety as “a film about looking, seduction, and voyeurism” which uses “frames within frames, windows, doorways, and reflections in order to visually capture the idea of looking and being looked at.” This obverse landscape—where Christine occupies a position of authority in a psychosexually masculine space and casts her gaze back at the men—disrupts the traditional pathways of scopophilic pleasure. Variety became a site for rerouting what Karyn Kay termed “the illusory fixing of the female image, on display for the erotic fantasy of the viewer,” for Camera Obscura in 1981.6 In a 1982 interview for Bomb, Gordon asks Kay if she thought there was a tradition of women as voyeurs, to which she responds, “I can’t think of a tradition in cinema, but I know I’m a voyeur.”
Promotional photographs for Variety (Bette Gordon, 1984) by Nan Goldin. Scans courtesy of Paris McGarry.
Another major influence on Variety was the writer and conceptual artist Sophie Calle, whom Gordon met through the artist Joseph Kosuth in Paris in 1981. Calle soon came to live with Gordon at her loft on Greenwich Street. During that time, Calle was working on Suite vénitienne, written with Jean Baudrillard and published in 1982, about her experience following, photographing, and taking notes on strangers in Paris; when she has a chance encounter with a man she had previously stalked, who reveals he is about to leave for Venice, she decides to follow him and methodically track his movements.
Variety opened in 1984 at the Waverly Cinema (now the IFC Center), where it played on one screen and Blood Simple (1984) on the other. The film remains Gordon’s most celebrated work, a landmark feminist text which folds together film noir tropes, theories of semiotics and the image, and explorations of sexuality in 1980s New York. Today, Gordon finds herself befuddled by its success as she considers its piecemeal, handmade conception. She acknowledges that Variety remains subversive, not simply for its sexual politics but for its treatment of genre: it is a thriller that betrays how classic thrillers are supposed to end, leaving you breathing in rather than out. The film’s ending is elliptical: Christine leaves a voicemail for Louie, revealing that she has followed him and telling him to meet her at the corner of Fulton and South Street (Gordon’s own homage to Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street [1953]). No one appears in the final shot of that rain-glossed street corner, which is just long enough to speculate a dual absence and just short enough to anticipate presence.
Slide photographs from the opening night of Variety (Bette Gordon, 1984). Photograph by the author.
In 1986, Gordon contributed a short film to Seven Women, Seven Sins, an anthology of shorts by female filmmakers chosen to depict each of the deadly sins. The filmmakers included Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Ulrike Ottinger (Pride), Helke Sander (Gluttony), Valie Export (Lust), Maxi Cohen (Anger), and Laurence Gavron (Envy). Gordon directed Greed: Pay to Play, a twenty-minute film which observes vanity and strata in the ladies’ bathroom of a Manhattan hotel.7 The premise—a cleaning woman (Kate Valk from the Wooster Group) buys a lottery ticket daily for two years and then strangles an incompetent, well-to-do woman with her own diamond choker—presents wealth as a cycle of aspiration and mistreatment. At one point, the affluent woman puts forward a cruel adage: “You can’t do both things: dream and work.”
Gordon would not make another film for over a decade, though not for lack of trying. After Variety, she optioned the rights to Catherine Texier’s 1987 novel Love Me Tender, about a young French dancer who works at an Alphabet City strip club and falls in with various men. Gordon and Texier wrote a script and began casting (Judith Godrèche, John Leguizamo, and Dylan McDermott were attached) and New Line Cinema was interested, but the project was ultimately dropped by the producers.
Greed: Pay to Play (Bette Gordon, 1986), from Seven Women, Seven Sins.
Jersey City, New Jersey; Staten Island, New York | 1992–2000
What could be better than this sort of pure world of light and motion and movement?
Time barrels on. Gordon and Burns had a daughter, Lili, in 1990, and soon after, Gordon encountered the novel The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield, the story of a ten-year-old infatuated with his mother, who makes their living lifting credit cards off of the men she sleeps with. Gordon overheard a stranger praising it at Pat Hearn’s gallery and purchased a copy shortly afterward, overtaken by its lucid prose. Around this time, American producers Ted Hope and James Schamus were founding Good Machine Productions (which would eventually merge with Focus Features), and Hope and Gordon, along with the gallerist Elyse Goldberg, optioned the rights to the novel. Hope’s assistant, Robert Roth, a freshly minted NYU graduate, worked for Good Machine as a project reader and became highly interested in the film; he conjured up 30 pages of a script without being asked, which impressed Gordon enough to invite him on as screenwriter. Bradfield, however, had wanted to draft a screenplay first and was doing so simultaneously. After the film was finished, Bradfield went to the Writers Guild and lobbied successfully for a screenwriting credit, although Gordon maintains that they did not use a word of his version.
Gordon set about casting Luminous Motion in 1995, with composer Lesley Barber (a frequent collaborator of Patricia Rozema) and actress Deborah Kara Unger brought on early. Unger plays the unnamed single mother of eight-year-old Phillip (Eric Lloyd), whose subjective world is beginning to close in as he discovers his mother’s frailties, which compels him to hallucinate his absent father (Jamey Sheridan) and eventually to kill his mother’s boyfriend, who offers them a breezy, suburban life.
“The hyper-Oedipal world of the child was the draw for me,” Gordon remembers. “It was my Bonnie and Clyde [1967], the ultimate road movie where Mom lives off of her wits and free sexuality and Dad is a speck in the rearview mirror. It was also Paradise Lost, a projection of a mother from her son’s point of view, the beauty of crappy motels your parents can barely afford, and the deadening spirit of the suburbs.”
Luminous Motion (Bette Gordon, 1999).
Even with its phantom ambiguities—is Dad a hallucination, a memory, a physical presence?—Luminous Motion is lucid, conceiving prepubescent disillusionment with one’s circumstances amid overtones of incest and violence. As with all of Gordon’s work, Luminous Motion is also a road movie—a genre I consider American and Gordon considers European, though this is not dwelled on beyond my inclination toward David Lynch and hers toward Godard. The car functions as a kind of womb or “perfect world” for Phillip, who also occupies the vantage point of the camera in The United States of America, his eyes on the windshield and his mother in the driver’s seat. This attunement to everyday objects as extensions of the corporeal influences each character. Phillip, who is overly physically attached to his mother, at one point unconsciously parrots her suitors: “You really do have the most perfect breasts.” In another scene, she traces a map along a lover’s back—an effect achieved with a 35mm slide projector in a hotel room—revealing the wretched truth that her mobility and liberation depend on the bodies of men.
“That’s the idealization of childhood—Mom is a comet, hot and bright, and we’re attracted to her light,” Gordon adds. “But the comet eventually burns out and Mom crashes. Here, Mom’s crash is a retreat to normalcy and for Phillip, that’s an abandonment. He’s thrown out of the world of ideal motion and light.”
The shoot itself was suitably makeshift: the walls were repainted for every motel and the house in the Jersey City suburbs was condemned, rife with stray dogs and excrement, but the location manager was able to clear the site in time for filming. The role of the mother’s boyfriend was initially offered to Tom Waits, who did not answer until the first day of shooting, long after the role had been cast. Instead of pursuing the part, Waits sent Gordon a free song. His “Yesterday Is Here” plays over the end credits, a nod to the film’s structure: heaven, gravity and earth, and the reminiscence of it all.
Luminous Motion played the Toronto International Film Festival in 1999 and opened at New York’s Angelika Film Center in 2000 to what Gordon considers the best notices she has ever received, including glowing reviews from the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, the latter of which is now framed on her kitchen wall.
Hudson Valley, New York; Miami, Florida | 2008–09
There is a generation of men brought up into conquest and dominance who are wounded by who they are relative to who they thought they were. If you have strength, you also have its opposite.
Handsome Harry (Bette Gordon, 2009).
After Luminous Motion, Gordon directed a TV movie, Life on the Line (2003), and briefly hoped to direct an adaption of Sparkle Hayter’s murder mystery novel What’s a Girl Gotta Do? She was asked by Nicholas T. Proferes (a cinematographer who had worked with Barbara Loden, Elia Kazan, and Norman Mailer) to read a script he had written. Gordon could not put it down and was surprised when he asked if she wanted to direct the film. This would become Gordon’s favorite work of her own, Handsome Harry, which follows Harry (Jamey Sheridan, who had played the father in Luminous Motion), a veteran seeking forgiveness from an old Navy friend, Kagan (Campbell Scott), whom he had wronged years before. The transgression is at first unclear, but is eventually revealed to be a violent hate crime incited by Harry, who was caught in a sexually compromising position with Kagan but claimed to have been groped.
Gordon was taken by the bravado of these men and their rugged exteriors—the stoic, silent types—and wanted to pierce the facade and probe for their vulnerabilities. She also felt that Proferes, an older, ex–Navy man himself, was “every guy in Handsome Harry,”8 and that her detachment from that world might make for a fresh rendering. One night, she and Jamey Sheridan got drunk and chewed over the project and script for hours. Sheridan was sober by the time he finished reading and certain that he wanted to play Harry.
Amy Taubin, interviewing Gordon after the film’s 2009 Tribeca premiere, remarked that Handsome Harry “seems at the opposite end of the spectrum from her debut feature, Variety…and shows that Gordon is as fascinated as ever with genre filmmaking and just as empathic to the sexual confusions of her male characters as she was to those of her female characters.” Indeed, Gordon undertakes another road movie, visiting the five men who assaulted their former friend, and maintains the same curiosity with which she observed Christine in Variety or the mother in Luminous Motion. Her mode of observation and directorial temperament has certainly evolved by this point, becoming less avant-garde and more unvarnished. As she departed from a stylized approach, letting behavior guide her composition, she became more attuned to personal, character-based scenarios. Handsome Harry was her first digital film, a medium she finds generally “hideous,” and she was grateful when Nigel Bluck, her cinematographer, recommended an anamorphic lens. Though she is averse to the ubiquity of flashbacks, Gordon compromised in order to tease out Harry and Kagan’s romantic past. It was also an opportunity to set a scene at the Five Spot Café, where the Navy boys see Miles Davis—a musician who conveniently kept his back to the audience.
“I wanted the performances to guide me rather than finding my frame and filling it with actors—to let the camera be guided by faces and bodies and voices,” Gordon reflects. “It was important to me that I did not stand in judgment and allowed their vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and lies to themselves.”
Gordon pulls inspiration from the postwar disillusionment of William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) as she considers how the perceived failure in Vietnam, alongside the emergence of the women’s movement of the 1970s, engendered a wounded sensibility in a generation of American men, who discovered that conquest and domination are flimsy tools of progress. There is also a spectral dimension to this film, not unlike the father figure in Luminous Motion, as Kagan looms heavy over the men through retrospective editing, a sort of perverse longing for a forlorn unity and a spirit to quash.
“Some people are so powerful they exist even when they don’t,” Gordon remarks.
Handsome Harry (Bette Gordon, 2009).
Yonkers, New York; New London, Connecticut; Brooklyn, New York | 2015–16
The question I ask myself a lot is how do we rectify, justify, and balance our ideals with our disappointments?
The director’s next literary adaptation would emanate from tragedy. In 2012, Gordon’s friend and collaborator Karyn Kay was murdered by her nineteen-year-old son while he was in the midst of an epileptic seizure. Gordon struggled to make sense of any of it: the loss, the act of violence, the cognitive spell. Shafransky recommended she read Pat Barker’s Border Crossing, a psychological thriller about a child convicted of murder who serves his sentence and eventually encounters the psychologist who decisively testified against him. Gordon felt frustrated at the culture which venerates stories of true crime—“Why does Ryan Murphy get away with it?” she asks—vying instead to understand the nature behind evil behavior. Gordon’s distaste for sensationalism seems to also reflect her recent disposition behind the camera, of observing people as they are, not as we think they ought to be.
Gordon was transfixed by the first ten pages of Barker’s book, in which the psychologist saves a young man from an apparent suicide by drowning, and soon adapted the novel into The Drowning (2016), starring Josh Charles as Tom, the child psychologist, Julia Stiles as Lauren, his wife, and Avan Jogia as Danny, the convicted killer. The film begins faithfully to the novel with the rescue dive and discovery of Danny’s identity. Danny repeatedly manifests in their lives, charming Lauren, who is feeling neglected in her marriage and is unaware of the specifics of Tom’s history with the boy. Gradually, his presence eats away at the couple. Gordon looked to Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013), and Harold Pinter’s plays to conjure an atmosphere of pursuit and unease, a soft ceiling collapsing in on a relationship. Gordon grapples with the memory of Kay’s son’s “beautiful smile” and the enchanting qualities of violent youths, which she sought to capture when casting Danny.
The Drowning (Bette Gordon, 2016).
Gordon says the film is driven by certain opposing principles—the rational versus the libidinal, the social versus the asocial—and the question of moral failure—how much have we failed each other and how do we rectify, justify, and balance our ideals with our disappointments? The Drowning springs from the desire to understand and the impossibility of doing so, as evinced by the fact that Gordon shot two endings. The first resembles that of the book, which ambiguously leaves Tom stuck in a cycle of being hoodwinked by Danny. The second, the one that made the final cut, sees Tom drive Danny home and find some catharsis in breaking loose from his own past. Neither provides total relief for Tom, confined to his own memories, but such is the lot of so many of Gordon’s hapless characters.
New York, New York | 2024
America is a feel-good place, and I’m not a feel-good person, but I’m not disagreeing with your thinking of me as an American filmmaker. Pose it, commit to it, turn it around at the end if you have to.
I cannot say I am turning it around. To me, Gordon’s practices—from scrap celluloid in film school to nude roadside odysseys, to subverting a dominant gaze via porn and explosives, to assessing warfare, masculinity, and the legal system—are essential to American cinematic thought. Each work is its own careful perusal of the United States’ power structures, some via spatial relations, others through breakneck editing or bendy plots. This is to say little of the era in which Gordon was emerging as an artist and whether she would even be granted the epithet of “American filmmaker” as a woman who cut her teeth in avant-garde practices—all the more reason in my mind to insist on the distinction. I completely understand Gordon’s affinity for the inky European gloss which ennobles a film’s feel-bad sensibilities, but a truly American film should tangle your expectations, and a truly American filmmaker should complicate that very descriptor, both of which Gordon does with ease.
Bette Gordon’s Tribeca loft. Photograph by Saffron Maeve.
Today, Gordon is a film professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts, and her works are in heavy rotation Anthology Film Archives, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Cinémathèque Française, Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, and the British Film Institute. Her Tribeca loft boasts tall windows, wooden floorboards, and an impressive bookcase. The walls are decorated with film posters (her own, plus some Godard and Cassavetes), Nan Goldin photographs, Kathputli puppets, and paintings by her friends. There are neat piles of portfolios and papers all over her grand desk as she prepares for her next film, Lost Angels, an Iceland-set mystery about the disappearance of a young woman and the potential culpability of a group of friends, “accentuating the constraints of an overpowering and irresistible landscape.”
Gordon’s eyes light up when she talks about her friends or her daughter; she recalls the characters of her past without judgment; she still loathes the suburbs; most days, she wears black head-to-toe. When I am photographing her, she advises me to hold my breath. She is ever the industrious young cineaste hunched over an optical printer, counting to 60 under her breath over and over.
- Gordon also directed a “tiny” film in 1975 called An Erotic Film, featuring her, Benning, and a train. ↩
- Benning would remake the film solo in 2022 under the same title. ↩
- Gordon and Benning did not actually travel in silence but would pull over and record the radio for the film’s audio. ↩
- This projectionist, Lee Tucker, would go on to play the projectionist in Variety. ↩
- Gray also knew Reilly through the experimental theater company Wooster Group. ↩
- Karyn Kay, “The Incomplete Act as the Significant Act: Notes on the Films of Bette Gordon,” Camera Obscura 2, no. 2 (1980): 80. ↩
- Both the St. Regis and the Palladium were used as settings. ↩
- At a Tribeca Film Festival Q&A, Proferes was asked if the film was autobiographical and responded, “The only truth of it is I was handsome.” ↩