Film-maker Bette Gordon is having her photo taken. It might be more accurate to say that she is directing the photo shoot. No smiling, she insists firmly, and instead gives her “don’t-mess-with-me” face. Halfway through the shoot, perched on a red velvet chair, looking stylish in a black leather jacket, she casts an envious eye at the camera. “I hate being photographed,” she tells the photographer. “I’d rather be where you are.”
Gordon would like to have directed more, in fact. Her 1983 movie Variety, a radical feminist piece about female desire shot partly in a real-life porn cinema, has recently been rediscovered as a cult classic – it still delivers a jolt of subversive electricity. In the four decades since it was released, Gordon has directed just a handful of features, while working as a professor of film at Columbia University. Over the years, films have got away “for various reasons”, she sighs. But at the end of the day she is proud of her body of work. “What I can say is that I made the films I wanted to make. I had final cut. Very few directors get that. I had creative control. That was really important to me. I didn’t compromise.”
Gordon is excellent company; warm, friendly, outspoken and provocative by nature (“even as a kid, I was pushing boundaries”), emerging in the New York underground downtown scene of the early 1980s. This was the impossibly cool era of artists living in freezing cold lofts in Tribeca, squatting or paying dirt-cheap rent. “It was great place to live. Easy to find your friends.” On any given night you might bump into film-maker Jim Jarmusch in a scuzzy bar hanging out with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon or painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. I ask her if she felt cool? She waves away the question. “No! Now people say: ‘Oh that was New York No Wave or DIY.’ But we didn’t call it that. I was just making films, having fun.”
Gordon had a 16mm projector in her apartment, where she threw parties. She hung out at Tin Pan Alley, the female-owned bar staffed with women where her friend, the photographer Nan Goldin, worked as a waitress; then they’d head out to nightspots such as the Mudd Club. The lifestyle permanently reset Gordon’s body clock; even now she rarely goes to bed before 2am. “My body comes alive at 11pm.”
It was in the wee hours that Gordon first clapped eyes on the Variety movie theatre, a result of her habit of walking around the city at night. “It took my breath away,” she remembers. “I just fell in love. And as I got closer, I realised: Oh my God, it’s a porn theatre! I was delighted by that, too.” She twinkles mischievously. This was the New York she fell in love with, growing up watching film noir movies: neon-lit, dark streets, sleazy. The Variety had once been a vaudeville theatre; it still had a standalone ticket booth on the street, and a marquee sign advertising smutty films. Gordon was hooked. She went back during the day, and got chatting to the projectionist.
The Variety felt like the perfect backdrop for the themes Gordon wanted to explore: female desire, the voyeuristic nature of cinema and the objectification of female characters. Like a lot of women directors at the time, she had been heavily influenced by film theorist Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze. What she did with Variety was to turn the tables on the classic Hitchcock thriller (one early review described it “a feminist Vertigo”). Sandy McLeod plays out-of-work writer Christine, who gets a job at porn cinema selling tickets. Christine looks like a Hitchcock blonde, the dead spit of Kim Novak in Vertigo. But here the roles are reversed: it’s Christine who is the voyeur and, turning detective, she obsessively follows one of the porn cinema’s customers around the city.
What’s so radical – even today – is that Christine dares to gaze right back. “And she takes control of her desire, which is also taking control over the story,” Gordon says. “Variety is as much about narrative as it is about desire. Because narrative is about desire.” Variety is a film about looking. Gordon co-wrote the script with punk feminist novelist Kathy Acker and cast Goldin as a waitress. Later, when Gordon gave birth to her daughter Lili, she snuck Goldin into the delivery room to take photos.
Gordon wrote a bland boyfriend into the script for Christine; he is appalled when she gets a job in the porn theatre. The character, she says, expressed her frustration with the attitudes of men she knew. “I grew up in a generation where sex was everywhere; birth-control pills opened up doors. We could have sex because we wanted to have sex, for the pleasure of exploring the body.” What Gordon started to notice was that the men who signed up for the sexual revolution suddenly balked when it came to their girlfriends. “They were getting a little more conservative. They said they wanted liberated, open women. But did they?”
While she was researching locations, Gordon would visit peep shows and porn stores around New York, infiltrating male-dominated spaces as Christine does in the movie. Often the owners would ask her to leave as she scared the male customers away from the girly mags. “They were fine with the woman on the page,” she says. Did she ever feel uncomfortable? She shakes her head. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt uncomfortable.”
When Variety was invited to the Cannes film festival, Gordon raised money to travel – “I didn’t even have a credit card” – by putting on a premiere at the Variety itself. First the cinema had to be cleaned (“it was sticky and smelly”) and a friend wafted incense around to banish the stench of disinfectant. In 2005, the Variety - by now an off-Broadway theatre – was torn down. “Like, what’s wrong with New York?” Gordon says, still outraged.
Gordon’s childhood was a world away from all this radical ferment. She grew up in Boston, in a musical family. Her mother had been a piano teacher before she had children. Her father, an accountant, also played piano and was a keen amateur photographer with his own darkroom. When Gordon was five, her dad put a camera in her hands, “He showed me the lens, and said: ‘Look.’ It was a formative moment; they were a cultural family, Jewish, liberal thinkers. “My parents were really middle-class. Like a lot of people at that time they wanted to fit in. You had to fit in, so you didn’t get noticed. But Gordon never felt like she fitted in. “Something inside you tells you if you’re an outsider, even if you don’t have the word for it. Looking around, I just knew there was more.”
As a teenager she rebelled. “Parking lots, fast cars, boys. There was definite trouble. Drugs came in.” She smiles knowingly across the table. In high school her “cool French teacher” set Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Breathless as homework. It changed her life. “How Godard used the camera. It was the first time the camera was really free.” She earned a degree in French at the University of Wisconsin, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year. (“One of the first things I did was find the street where Belmondo died at the end of Breathless.”) She took a film class, watching everything from Jacques Tati to French New Wave to German expressionism. “The world opened up.”
Back in the US, Gordon started making films. “A camera in my hands felt so natural to me,” and studied for an MFA in film (“it was all guys in my class. There were just two women.”) Later, in New York, she found her people.They made work for each other, she says. No one cared about getting an agent. No professionalism was required. “It was a labour of complete dedication, of love and fun.”
These days she’s a bit dismayed by her serious young students at Columbia, desperate to get their films into Sundance. “I ask them. Are you even having fun? I feel like they’re not having enough fun. You know? Are they even having sex? This is their time.” Like I say, she is a natural-born provocateur. She defends Hitchcock and Polanski to her students. She says she never wanted to be defined as a female film-maker when she made Variety. “I don’t understand why people want labels today. I am not interested in a women’s cinema,” she says, wrapping inverted commas around the word with her fingers. “I’m not interested in the other. Men don’t have to say: I’m a male film-maker.” Her voice gets louder. “I want be the thing. Without having to have a label on it.”
She is on a roll. Harold Pinter’s Nobel prize speech comes to her. “He talked about the mirror: you’ve gotta pierce it and get to the other side.” That’s what she wanted to do with Variety. “The patriarchy has been created. So, what can we do? Call attention to it. Subvert it. Change it. Problematise it. Don’t make it so easy. Punch a hole in it.”
• Variety is screening at the Edinburgh film festival on 20 August, with a Q&A with Bette Gordon, and is out now in UK cinemas.
