This September, Spectacle is proud to present a retrospective of the luminary American experimental filmmaker SCOTT BARTLETT in collaboration with The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Thank you to the generosity of the Co-Op and joint programmer Robert Schneider, the films in this program will be projected on 16mm.

Scott Barlett (1943 – 1990) was a traveling man with a fancy for strobing lights and fast motion. His films are pure psychedelia. Patching together philosophical ramblings on mystic traditions, hit songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and wobbly light patterns, Bartlett creates pithy works of genius. To this day, he remains best known for 1968’s OFFON, a gleaming vision of the cosmos that tested the limits of early video technology and set Bartlett down a path of stalwart experimentation within the cinematic tradition.

After OFFON’s success, Bartlett relocated to San Francisco where he became a light-show pioneer, creating flicker films for concerts and art shows all over the city. His films caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick (who took inspiration from OFFON for 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), Ken Russell, and Movie Brats George Lucas and Francis Coppola who tried but failed to get his science fiction epic INTERFACE off the ground. Nonetheless, his keen graphic sensibilities are sprinkled throughout many Hollywood films, including ALTERED STATES and MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI. But his true talent is best displayed throughout his unbridled directorial ventures which combine his fascinations with psychedelics, mysticism, and outer space into visual portals that open gateways into unseen dimensions of cinematic splendor.

PROGRAM ONE: To the Moon and Beyond

MAKING OFFON. 1981. 10 mins.
METANOMEN. 1966. 8 mins.
SERPENT. 1971. 14 mins.
MOON 1969. 1969. 10 mins.
OFFON. 1968. 9 mins.

Total runtime approx 50 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Scott Bartlett was haunted by outer space throughout his life. In a lecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art, he said he wanted to express “the meaning of the universe” by depicting visions of the cosmos that surpassed the limits of human consciousness. His crowning achievement, OFFON, might represent the zenith of these ambitions, but Bartlett’s intense curiosity in space is shared across many of his short films.

Made in 1981, while Bartlett was teaching in Los Angeles, MAKING OFFON dives back into his origins as a filmmaker and sets the scene for his artistic mission. His first film, METANOMEN, still sees him stuck on Earth. Collaging images of skyscrapers into a rollicking city tour, the film foretells Bartlett’s consuming interest with worlds beyond our own. SERPENT — a magic mushroom-inspired retelling of the Eden myth — finds Bartlett playing with recycled imagery in an attempt to link various historical narratives into a short parable about humanity’s destructive tendencies. MOON 1969 and OFFON take Bartlett elsewhere and are best described by film critic Gene Youngblood as “the cosmos in continual transformation” and explorations of the “fundamental realities below the surface of normal perception” respectively.

PROGRAM TWO: It was the ‘70s

1970. 1972. 30 min.
A TRIP TO THE MOON. 1968. 32 min.

Total runtime approx. 62 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Bartlett’s longest works are also the most emblematic of his era. The tragicomic 1970 is a city symphony unlike any other. Moving between personal documentary and city portrait, 1970 displays Bartlett’s incredible ability to shift between the world’s micro and macro elements in his artistic practice. In A TRIP TO THE MOON, he films a conversation between seven artists discussing astrology and I Ching. Bartlett’s effortless control of the edit complements the artists’ metaphysical conversation, as he superimposes talking heads and cuts away to abstract images that illustrate their heady ideas.

PROGRAM THREE: Cultural Studies

LOVEMAKING. 1970. 13 min. (Not on 16mm; New Restoration from BAMPFA)
GREENFIELD. 1977. 13 min.
HEAVY METAL. 1979. 13 min.
MEDINA. 1976. 15 min.
SOUND OF ONE. 1976. 11 min.

Total runtime approx 65 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Always absorbed by his surroundings, Bartlett made exceptional ethnographic works and personal portraits throughout his life. In LOVEMAKING, he tackled his eponymous subject matter head on, creating an anti-sexploitation film that luxuriates in its romantic imaging of sex. GREENFIELD sees him venture to a commune in Northern California where he becomes absorbed in the free rhythms of its residents’ work and leisure. For HEAVY METAL, Bartlett used elaborate optical techniques to explore early gangster films. MEDINA and SOUND OF ONE both center Bartlett’s interests in non-Western traditions. Here, Bartlett surrenders himself to his environs, letting their patterns and actions guide his camera’s movement.

>Special thanks to Robert Schneider at The Film-Makers’ Co-Op.

“If the desire of the Nouvelle Vague’s protagonists was to take over the industry and make it more pliable (notably by creating independent economic structures, in the manner of Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut), then the Lettrists’ strategy, by contrast, entailed resisting the least compromise with the film industry, just as with the art market” —Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Lettrist Cinema

Beginning in 1951, Lettrist filmmakers set out to destroy all of cinema’s existing rules. The art movement which sought out chiseled, infinitesimal, and imagined cinema, was short-lived and remains under-researched barring a few key texts by art historians Nicole Brenez and Kaira M. Cabañas. Among its members were Jean Isidore Isou, whose unfinished 9-hour cut of TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ caused a ruckus at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival. Isou’s scratched images and complimentary discordant soundtrack set the tone for future experiments in Lettrist Cinema: Guy Debord weaponized the black-screen in his feature debut HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE (1952), Gil Wolman created a flickering and vanishing film with L’ANTICONCEPT (1952), and François Dufrêne abandoned images altogether by projecting an imaginary film, TAMBOURS DU JUDGEMENT PREMIER (1952).

This September, Spectacle Theater is thrilled to present a small selection of Lettrist films as they were originally intended to be screened. As noted above, Isidore Isou’s TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ remains the most well-known film to come out of the Lettrist Movement, as its sustained lashing out against cinema’s conventions in all manner of offensive aesthetic and narrative gestures have made it a lodestar for filmmakers looking to reimagine the seventh art. Released around the same time is Maurice Lemaître’s LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ?, a self-destructive instructional film that the director cheekily described as “a boring jumble of commonplace ideas.” HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE and L’ANTICONCEPT continue the Lettrist investigation into a counter-cinema, engaging a negative image that bestows creative authority to the audience. In counterpoint, Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin’s (aka Marc’O) CLOSED VISION (1954) brings together an excess of images in a Joycean attempt at creating a stream-of-consciousness film. In GRIMACE (1967), Gudmundur Gudmundsson Ferro (aka Erró) returns to the Lettrist mission to separate cinema from its stars, stitching together amusing portraits of artists including Andy Warhol and Marguerite Duras into a playful visual poem.

TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ
(VENOM AND ETERNITY)
dir. Isidore Isou, 1951
France. 123 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM

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“Isou turns pictures upside down, scratches on them arbitrarily and does everything he can think of to spit upon and destroy the film image” —Stan Brakhage

To invoke Lettrism is to call on VENOM AND ETERNITY. Also known as SLIME AND ETERNITY, Isidore Isou’s sole feature is a film full of scratches that chisels its way to the beating heart of cinema. “If we can’t get past the photographic screen and reach something deeper, then cinema just doesn’t interest me,” he said. Looking to break away from the regressive sanctification of representation upheld by theorists like André Bazin, Isou’s film revels in its obscene and destructive character, tearing up the traditions of the medium to dream up a new alternative.

After premiering at Cannes Film Festival in 1951 and causing a scandal among festival attendees, VENOM AND ETERNITY was awarded the “Prix des spectateurs d’avant-garde” by Jean Cocteau. The award placed it in the same category as Maya Deren’s similarly lauded MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), marking it an essential text in the canon of experimental cinema that would have a lasting influence on filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Stan Brakhage. Isou would later remark that Godard and Debord ripped him off.

LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ?
(HAS THE FILM ALREADY STARTED?)
dir. Maurice Lemaître, 1951
France. 62 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM, this event is $10

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After working on Isou’s VENOM AND ETERNITY as an assistant director, Maurice Lemaître set out to make a film that not only attacked the conventions of filmmaking, but of filmgoing too. LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? is a film that spills from the screen, as instructed by its script which expands upon the body of the film to include what should occur in the viewing room as it’s projected. Hellbent on provocation, Lemaître thought up LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? as a way to shake up the moviegoing experience. Throughout the film, he directly addresses the audience with questions such as “Why are you here?” while they sit in the dark watching the movie also subject to the insults of “extras” taunting their ability to watch the whole thing through.

The film is made up of a series of kaleidoscopic images. Unlike Debord and Wolman, Lemaître stresses the visual quality of his cinema. LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? is colorful, fun, and wholly unruly, reflecting the spirit of a passionate young filmmaker meddling with the rules of his craft.

HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE
(HOWLINGS IN FAVOR OF DE SADE)
dir. Guy Debord, 1952
France. 64 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 10 PM

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In his first film, Guy Debord abandons the photographic image. Over the course of HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE, Debord along with fellow Lettrists Isou, Gil Wolman, Serge Berna, and Barbara Rosenthal speak over each other in aphorisms. The screen is white when they talk and black whenever there is silence. The film’s refusal to represent foretells Debord’s future critiques of image-culture, most notably the text from which this theater derives its name: SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (1967). Eventually, Debord and Wolman would break away from the Lettrist Movement to carry out new acts of detournement as Situationsists. As such, their goals were more directly aligned with a Communist agenda. Yet, in their early works resides a conceptual spark that they would build upon throughout their careers as artists. This would become clearer in a Lettrist bulletin from 1956, in which Wolman declared their objective to be the creation of “a unitary urbanism” that synthesizes “arts and technology” in accordance “with new values of life.”

L’ANTICONCEPT
(The Anticoncept)
dir. Gil J. Wolman, 1952
France. 60 minutes
In French. An English Transcript will be provided.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 7:30 PM, this event is $10

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“Wolman is one of the great inventors of negative forms after Hegel” —Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Lettrist Cinema

L’ANTICONCEPT is a sound film that alternates between black and white flickers. The film is projected on a helium-inflated balloon approximately two meters in diameter. A year after the film premiered at the Ciné-Club Avant-Garde 52, Debord declared L’ANTICONCEPT was “more offensive… than the images of Eisenstein, which frightened Europe for so long.” Although the Lettrists shared a proclivity for hyperbole, Debord’s statement accounts for Wolman’s incredible ability to leave behind all of cinema’s precepts and create a frightening alternative to the medium with his film.

CLOSED VISION
dir. Marc’O, 1954
France. 65 mins.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 01 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 03 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 09 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 10:00 PM

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Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin aka Marc’O played a major role in the history of Lettrism. With close ties to Jean Cocteau, Marc’O convinced the Cannes Film Festival in 1951 to screen Isidore Isou’s VENOM AND ETERNITY. He similarly organized screenings for his colleagues’ work, encouraging them to adopt new approaches to cinema and agitate audiences in viewing rooms to create more visceral encounters with the medium. Many of his suggestions—aquarium-cinema, aquatic-sports cinema, carousel cinema—were never actualized, yet his genius pervades in the work of his contemporaries.

Funnily enough, his own feature debut CLOSED VISION might be the film with the clearest narrative to come out of the Lettrist Movement. A consciousness collage in the style of James Joyce, CLOSED VISION works its way from a series of disparate images into a straightforward denouncement of cinema’s calcified classical form. At the time of its release, the film was praised by Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau, who called it “the most important experimental work since his own BLOOD OF THE POET.”

GRIMACE
dir. Erró, 1967
France. 45 mins.
Gibberish.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 5 PM, this event is $10

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“GRIMACES is just what it says: grimaces. You see 180 internationally known artists making faces. The soundtrack is Lettrist poetry.” –Jonas Mekas

The Icelandic artist Erró’s GRIMACE was made over several years as he toured the globe snapping vignettes of famous artists. Edited together with a Lettrist poem in which Erró phonetically plays around with each artist’s name as its soundtrack, the film becomes a meditation on stardom and identity. Warping and renegotiating the relationship between the viewer and the celebrities on screen, GRIMACE’s simple premise proves effective.

Special thanks to RE:VOIR, Light Cone, Barbara Wolman and Hedy Wolman, Cristina Bertelli, Marc’O, Ed Halter and Thomas Beard at Light Industry, Julia Curl and Robert Schneider at the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, Connor Keep, Steve Macfarlane, and Isaac Hoff.

This September, Spectacle is thrilled to welcome avant-garde filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Maximilien Luc Proctor for two consecutive nights of films and discussion, including the first-ever NYC screening of Proctor’s 16mm works. This program was organized in collaboration with Phil Coldiron, who prefaces Proctor’s work as follows:

Lately, it can feel like a bleak joke to apply the adjective “independent” to anything related to the movies. Criticism mostly exists as content marketing for VC-backed corporations. The world of the indie narrative film is a dispiriting swamp of calling cards, and the spaces that once housed the historical avant-garde are clotted with interlopers from the blue-chip art world making work that often feels like sitting through a grant proposal. Still, there are scattered reasons for hope, chief among them the new small-scale lyricism that’s recently blossomed across Europe: films shot on 8- and 16mm with Bolexes passed between friends, processed on the cheap in cooperative labs, and shown in venues that make no promise of anything besides an audience that actually cares.

This is the context from which the Oklahoma-born, Berlin-based Maximilien Luc Proctor has emerged. Over the last few years, beyond running Ultra Dogme, a gratifyingly scrappy platform for criticism and streaming, and playing in the decidedly algorithm-unfriendly band Two Nice Catholic Boys (alongside UD editor Ruairí McCann), Proctor has produced a few dozen films, most of them single rolls of celluloid edited in camera. Ranging from the Arcadian village of Raftis to the American Southwest, he records oblique impressions with a sharp eye for composition and an intuitive sense of rhythm, gently arguing in favor of the minor and the fleeting. This early-career survey brings together a selection of his shorts along with the digital feature, SREĆAN PUT, and offers a rare opportunity to chart the ongoing refinement of a young artist’s craft in real time.

PROGRAM ONE: NESTED FOCUS
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM with Maximilien Luc Proctor in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)

ONE NIGHT ONLY! ADVANCE TICKETS

ALL THE BEST
2022. 3 min. 16mm.

CRUCES
2023. 6 min. 16mm.

WASHINGTON (UNTITLED)
2022. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID DYNAMICS: STEADY FLOW
2022. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID DYNAMICS: UNSTEADY FLOW
2022. 2 min. 16mm.

RAFTI(S)
2022. 2 min. 16mm.

(against interpretation)
2023. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID FRAGMENTS
2023. 4 min. 16mm.

PROGRAM TWO: HAPPY TRAILS
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM with Maximilien Luc Proctor in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)

ONE NIGHT ONLY! ADVANCE TICKETS

the sound of the sky reflected in water
2021. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

summercycle iii
2022. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

summercycle iv
2023. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

SREĆAN PUT
(HAPPY TRAILS)
2021. 93 min. Digital.

MAXIMILIEN LUC PROCTOR is a French-American filmmaker, critic and curator. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma with honors in Film and Media Studies in 2014 before moving to Heidelberg, where he shot his first feature film, FRAGMENTS OF A MEMORY OF A FILM, while working as a barista and karaoke host. In 2017 he moved to Berlin and completed his second feature film, SREĆAN PUT, in 2021. He records music in the band Two Nice Catholic Boys and co-hosts a monthly analog screening salon with Christian Flemm. He is the founder and co-editor of Ultra Dogme, and the avant-garde instructor for Berlin’s Art-on-the-Run film school.

The filmmaker would like to give special thanks to the people who helped make these films possible: phili c, Christian Flemm, Ruairí McCann, Martin Bremer, Malkah Manouel, Florian Weigl, Nicholas Christenson, Tijana Perović, Oath, Valentin Duceac, Bali Govindarajan, Big Waves of Pretty, Bobi, and my families

This September, Spectacle Theater is honored to present this once-in-a-lifetime retrospective of the work of renowned independent filmmaker, Stephanie Rothman. Though often labeled as an exploitation filmmaker, Rothman’s work stands as some of the most politically and socially astute works documenting the period of transition between 1960s and 70s America.

Rothman got her start in the early 1960s working as an assistant to Roger Corman, tasked with performing a variety of odd jobs on his productions that ranged from casting and location scouting to re-writing and editing scenes. This experience would eventually land Rothman in the director’s chair on a couple of mid-60s Corman releases: Conducting reshoots on BLOOD BATH (for which she shares directorial credit with Jack Hill), and making her solo directorial debut with the beach party film, IT’S A BIKINI WORLD.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s, though, that Rothman would break out with her work on THE STUDENT NURSES (1970) and THE VELVET VAMPIRE (1972) for Corman’s newly-established production and distribution company, New World Pictures. With few opportunities available to woman directors at the time, Rothman was relegated to making exploitation films with a high volume of sexual content. Despite this, and with the creative freedom afforded to her at New World, Rothman was able to suffuse these works with her own ideological positions and ethics, incorporating plots— and by extension, her own commentary— that openly tackled issues of abortion, drug use, immigration, policing, and sexual empowerment; issues directly relevant to contemporary audiences but that largely absent from major studio productions.

Rothman and her husband, fellow Corman alum, Charles S. Swartz, would eventually leave New World to establish Dimension Pictures alongside Lawrence Woolner, where she continued her streak of progressively-minded productions with GROUP MARRIAGE (1973), TERMINAL ISLAND (1973), and THE WORKING GIRLS (1974). Each of these works expanded the scope of her films’ social politics further, now incorporating topics of queerness, sex work, polyamory, domestic abuse, incarceration, and capital punishment.

Rothman struggled to find work with major studios after leaving Dimension Pictures in 1975, discovering, rather ironically, that she had been stigmatized by her earlier exploitation-adjacent work, despite the obvious filmmaking talent behind them. Regrettably, Rothman wound up leaving the industry less than a decade later, though the legacy of her filmmaking career, its cultural relevance and its importance in the history of women’s filmmaking labor, endures to this day.

Join us on Sunday, 9/17 for a remote Q&A with Stephanie Rothman following a special screening of her final film, THE WORKING GIRLS.

THE STUDENT NURSES
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1970
United States. 82 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – MIDNIGHT

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Chronicles the romantic and comedic adventures of four young women living together in California and studying to become nurses. Each forges their own wild path through their final year of nursing school: Sharon falls in love with a dying patient, Lynn becomes involved with a Chicano revolutionary, Phred falls into trouble with a young doctor, and Priscilla has an affair with a drug addict. All the while, graduation and the beginning of life in the Real World lie just around the corner.

Rothman’s second solo directorial effort was a landmark release for New World Pictures. The film was only the company’s second release, but would go on to become a box office hit, grossing upwards of a million dollars on a $120,000 budget, and establish New World’s extensive “nurses” cycle of releases (PRIVATE DUTY NURSES, NIGHT CALL NURSES).

For her part, Rothman turned what was originally envisioned by Corman and Larry Woolner as a tawdry sexploitation cash-in into a work of incisive social commentary. With Corman out of the country for most of its production, Rothman was given free reign over the tone, style, and content of the film, so long as it maintained the studio-mandated quotas of nudity and violence.

THE VELVET VAMPIRE
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1971
United States. 80 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 10 PM

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Lee and his wife, Susan, accept the invitation of the mysterious vixen, Diane LeFanu, to join her at her secluded desert estate. Tensions begin to arise when the couple, unaware at first that Diane is really a centuries-old vampire, realize that they’ve both become the object of the temptress’ seductions.

Following the success of THE STUDENT NURSES, Rothman and Swartz reteamed with Larry Woolner on this unorthodox modern-day vampire tale. Rather than approach it as a straightforward horror story, Rothman used the film as an opportunity to subvert common vampire tropes by making the vampire figure a woman, equally deadly and desirous, and painting Susan’s character as a protagonist rather than a victim.

Visually, the film is Rothman’s most surreal, drawing inspiration from works of Cocteau and Franju as much as it did the adjacent European erotic vampire scene (DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, VAMPYROS LESBOS). Rothman’s vampire is less a horror icon than a totem of limitless pleasure, one who eschews a coffin for a lush king-size bed, large enough for three.

TERMINAL ISLAND
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1973
United States. 88 min.
In English.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 7:30 PM

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In the wake of a Supreme Court decision that deemed the death penalty unconstitutional, California passes an initiative that designates San Bruno Island as a dumping ground for dangerous convicts, free to do whatever they want except leave. When a new group of women convicts is taken to the island prison they must fight to protect themselves against the iron-fisted rule of the tyrannical Bobby and take control of the island for themselves.

Ironically, the film that seems like it would be most outside of Rothman’s wheelhouse— a provocative action-thriller with touches of women-in-prison and blaxploitation fare— wound up arguably being her most explicitly feminist film: It’s plot centering around a group of women’s literal fight for agency within a sado-patriarchal dystopia.

THE WORKING GIRLS
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1974
United States. 81 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 5 PM with filmmaker Q&A (This event is $10.)

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

Honey arrives in Los Angeles in search of a new life, and soon moves in with Denise and Jill. Honey is broke, but resourceful, eventually convincing an eccentric millionaire to hire her as his companion and confidant. Meanwhile, Denise falls in love with a shady musician while nightclub waitress, Jill, winds up in over her head when pressured by her boss to take on other responsibilities. All three women become endangered by the activities of the men in their lives, before realizing that they have to take matters into their own hands.

Rothman’s final film, and the only one for which she is the sole credited writer (or as she puts it, “means I take all the blame for it.”), may just be her masterpiece. By the end of her tenure in the film industry, the political subtext that had colored her earlier works had become the outright text, with sex work, equity in the workplace, and abuse becoming the focal points to each of her characters’ conflicts. What the film may lack in production values compared to her New World productions, it more than makes up for in the sophistication of Rothman’s compositions. While still undoubtedly a sex comedy, Rothman finds subtle ways of visually expressing the film’s themes. Case-in-point: With Jill being a nightclub waitress-cum-manager, of course the film includes gratuitous sequences of women stripping on stage (including a pre-“Elvira” Cassandra Peterson), but before Rothman makes a point of including POV inserts of the hideous men in the club’s audience, their presence lingering over what, in another director’s hands, would have been a lustful rather than dangerously leery affair.

Special thanks to Vinegar Syndrome and to Dr. Alicia Kozma of Indiana University, author of The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, without whom this program would not be possible.