[EFF17P2] Prelude 2: Bette Gordon Programme
Cite as:
Temple, Michael and Barrington, Matthew
(2023):
[EFF17P2] Prelude 2: Bette Gordon Programme.
Birkbeck College, University of London.
Description
18 February 2017, 13:00, Birkbeck Cinema
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York-based filmmaker Bette Gordon produced a series of works that chart a major shift in experimental practice from the rigor of structural film to a theoretically informed interest in fragmented narrative and subjective experience that Noel Carroll would dub the “new talkies”. With her best-known work, 1983’s Variety, Gordon moves fully into the idiom of independent narrative cinema, but her concerns remain consistent: questions of sexuality, labour, and gentrification are pursued within a critical interrogation of filmic language. Hers is a cinema at once politically urgent, formally sophisticated, and emotionally compelling.
Films: An Algorithm, USA, 1977, 16mm, 10 minutes, English
The action of a woman jumping into a swimming pool is used as the basis of a structural exploration of rhythm, the loop, the analytics of motion, and the possibilities of optical printing.
Exchanges, USA, 1979, 16mm, 18 minutes, English
Here, Gordon’s practice stands at a turning point between the rigorous interrogation of filmic form that characterises her early work and the experimental narratives of female experience and desire found in Empty Suitcases and beyond. In this deeply semiotic enterprise, voice, image, and text are separated, combined, and recombined in a reflection on the production of meaning.
Empty Suitcases, USA, 1980, 16mm, 55 minutes, English
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. The film presents fragments of a woman’s life – her work (as a photographer), her friendship and relationships – in short, her economic, sexual, and artistic struggles. By deconstructing the fragments of text, speech, music, and picture, the film forces focus on the workings of narrative, as well as on the narrative itself. Central to Empty Suitcases is women’s inability to place and define themselves in language and politics, the location of radical struggle. This displacement leads to a definition of woman as other, and reveals problems of unresolved sexual relations, difference, and violence.”
This event was accompanied by a 35mm screening of Bette Gordon’s feature film Variety (1983), as part of a day two programme on Bette Gordon curated by Erika Balsom, King’s College London.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York-based filmmaker Bette Gordon produced a series of works that chart a major shift in experimental practice from the rigor of structural film to a theoretically informed interest in fragmented narrative and subjective experience that Noel Carroll would dub the “new talkies”. With her best-known work, 1983’s Variety, Gordon moves fully into the idiom of independent narrative cinema, but her concerns remain consistent: questions of sexuality, labour, and gentrification are pursued within a critical interrogation of filmic language. Hers is a cinema at once politically urgent, formally sophisticated, and emotionally compelling.
Films: An Algorithm, USA, 1977, 16mm, 10 minutes, English
The action of a woman jumping into a swimming pool is used as the basis of a structural exploration of rhythm, the loop, the analytics of motion, and the possibilities of optical printing.
Exchanges, USA, 1979, 16mm, 18 minutes, English
Here, Gordon’s practice stands at a turning point between the rigorous interrogation of filmic form that characterises her early work and the experimental narratives of female experience and desire found in Empty Suitcases and beyond. In this deeply semiotic enterprise, voice, image, and text are separated, combined, and recombined in a reflection on the production of meaning.
Empty Suitcases, USA, 1980, 16mm, 55 minutes, English
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. The film presents fragments of a woman’s life – her work (as a photographer), her friendship and relationships – in short, her economic, sexual, and artistic struggles. By deconstructing the fragments of text, speech, music, and picture, the film forces focus on the workings of narrative, as well as on the narrative itself. Central to Empty Suitcases is women’s inability to place and define themselves in language and politics, the location of radical struggle. This displacement leads to a definition of woman as other, and reveals problems of unresolved sexual relations, difference, and violence.”
This event was accompanied by a 35mm screening of Bette Gordon’s feature film Variety (1983), as part of a day two programme on Bette Gordon curated by Erika Balsom, King’s College London.
Previews
Collection Method
The Essay Film Festival ran between 2015 and 2023, and presented a global range of contemporary and restored essayistic works. The events are now archived here for research purposes.
Data Objects
Offline / Analogue Data Records
There are no offline / analogue datasets associated with this recordExternal Data Records
There are no external datasets associated with this recordDigital Data Downloads
To download and items from this dataset, you must agree to abide by the licence attached to the individual items. If you make use of any item you download, you must also cite it in any publication or outputs of your own.
If you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact us at researchdata@bbk.ac.uk.
Full Archive
Metadata
| Dataset Title: | [EFF17P2] Prelude 2: Bette Gordon Programme |
||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creators: | Temple, Michael and Barrington, Matthew |
||||||||||||
| Dataset Contributors: |
|
||||||||||||
| Subjects: | |||||||||||||
| Data collection method: | The Essay Film Festival ran between 2015 and 2023, and presented a global range of contemporary and restored essayistic works. The events are now archived here for research purposes. |
||||||||||||
| Statement on legal, ethical, and access issues: | All film stills were provided by participating artists. |
||||||||||||
| Depositing User: | Emma Yapp | ||||||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 11 Aug 2026 14:25 | ||||||||||||
| Last Modified: | 11 Aug 2026 14:25 | ||||||||||||
| Publisher: | Birkbeck College, University of London |
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2916-9876Impact & Reach
Downloads
Activity Overview
6 month trend
6 month trend
Additional statistics for this dataset are available via IRStats2.