Through the Looking Glass: The Gold Diggers

Sally Potter characterised her first feature, The Gold Diggers (1983), as “a musical describing a female quest.”¹ A labyrinthine, post-punk exploration of “the connections between gold, money and women,” Potter’s film is a mischievous, magic, anti-realist countercinema.²  It was poorly received in some quarters. “By any reasonable earthly standard,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times, “this thing – a 1983 oddity, sort of a feminist, deconstructionist, riddle-filled anti-musical, much of it set on the Icelandic tundra – is pure torture.”³ Indeed Potter’s film evinced a “promiscuous cross-breeding of avant-garde and mainstream” styles, mixing anti-capitalist satire with film theory about the male gaze, and Marxist conceptions of class and labour.⁴ “Perhaps,” as Sophie Mayer writes, it was the “determination to laugh in the face of power [that] upset those critics more than anything that the film says explicitly.”⁵ The Gold Diggers is challenging and erudite, a witty, ambiguous experiment resourced by inventive plans, schemes, and dreams.

The film begins with wide panning shots of a sub-arctic, volcanic plateau. A husky voiceover spits riddles and questions, while a heaving soundtrack trails discordant lyrics – “I want to put my feet up, please give me back my pleasure!” – over a montage of wind-whipped figures and dirty boots. Shot in luminous black and white by the French cinematographer and director Babette Mangolte – a collaborator of Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman – The Gold Diggers follows two female protagonists across an icy landscape glowing silver with snow, an industrial terrain with heaving shipyards, and into shadowy alleyways and office buildings. As a work that seeks to disrupt the classic linearity of narrative film, it is unsatisfactory to summarise or synthesise The Gold Diggers through plot. Celeste (played by French non-actor Colette Laffont) is a Black intellectual and office worker, while Ruby (Julie Christie) is a shapeshifting white starlet. Celeste and Ruby quest to solve the riddle that opens the film: “I’m born in the light and move continuously, yet I’m still… What am I?” In a series of Brechtian episodes and dreamy vignettes, with plenty of dance, music and song, they search for a new feminine subjectivity and way of living. 

The Gold Diggers is very much a product of its time. Made during Thatcher’s reign, it was funded by the British Film Institute (BFI) and Channel 4, which stepped in to support independent filmmakers during a period of reduced government support for the arts. Thatcher’s government had stripped funding for film and promoted the privatisation of the industry. Small-budget, but commercially viable, films – like Looks and Smiles (Ken Loach, 1981), Meantime (Mike Leigh, 1983), and My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) – reacted to the harsh economic policies of the Conservative government, focusing on urban poverty and industrial decline. Potter’s early cinema was part of the avant-garde and theoretical ferment surrounding the BFI and its educational department, which also included filmmakers Derek Jarman and the duo of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. As early as 1968, Potter joined the London Film-Makers’ Co-op (LFMC) where she began to make short 8mm films. The LFMC was responsible for screening and funding experimental films in Britain, taking inspiration from the avant-garde Film-Makers’ Cooperative established by Jonas Mekas in New York. Potter’s first long film, at 35 minutes, was Thriller (1979), a feminist reworking of Giacomo Puccini’s opera, La Boheme. Critics praised the film for its practical response to Mulvey’s influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), and its exploration of psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist discourses.⁶ Mulvey herself reflected on this era of feminist filmmaking as having a “progressive optimism” that subsided in the 1980s, as money dried up and the “loss of the necessary conditions for an avant-garde film movement brought any such aspiration to an abrupt end.”⁷

Potter’s creative pursuits were many. She trained in contemporary movement and choreography, and staged plays as both director and performer. With the choreographer Jacky Lansley, she formed Limited Dance Company. Potter also worked musically, singing and composing for several experimental groups in the 1970s, including the Feminist Improvising Group, where she played the alto saxophone. Building a cross-disciplinary collective of female friends and artists, she would draw on this network to make The Gold Diggers.

The film had an all-women crew, from direction and screenwriting, to design, shooting and editing. Grappling with how to represent and redefine female sexuality and subjectivity, Potter likewise advocated for feminist methods of collaboration in a collective, non-hierarchical production. She worked with Lindsay Cooper and Rose English on the script and outline. Cooper was a prominent composer known for her work in avant-rock and experimental music, whose score for the film mixes chamber music with cabaret in long, plonking sequences of discordant bassoon, drums and piano. English also prepared the film’s costumes and art design, and was recognised more broadly as a conceptual dancer and successful performance artist who “collaborated with horses, magicians and acrobats.”⁸ Non-linear and dreamlike, The Gold Diggers incorporates many scenes of artistry and performance which celebrate Potter’s milieu. Lansley makes a tap-dancing cameo, while the percussionist Marilyn Mazur, who worked with Miles Davis, plays an empty set of bookshelves in a striking solo.

Potter’s film, like her later Orlando (1992), riffs off a Lewis Carroll logic, following her characters down psychic rabbit-holes and presenting confused riddles as a warped form of reasoning. It takes inspiration from the expressive intensity of Victorian melodrama and the dizzying paranoia of Gothic noir. The references are expansive and suggestive, enfolded in cinematic and art history. There are obvious nods to the early Surrealist films of Luis Buñuel, to Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) and to Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation, The Trial (1962). The Gold Diggers’ title is a reference to Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933), an American pre-Code musical choreographed by Busby Berkeley, which focuses on a group of hard-up showgirls scheming their way to easy financial gain through heterosexual romance. In Potter’s film, “gold-digging” takes on this suggestive metaphorical valence to stretch its meanings. While gold nuggets and golden bars literally populate the film as forms of treasure, suited men become the fortune hunters tap-dancing after women in acts of sinister plunder. 

There are other inferences too, enigmatic and metaphoric connections between women, money, and gold. “The activity of gold-digging […] alludes to a specifically feminist search for new structures of knowledge, agency, and pleasure.”⁹ Jonathan Rosenbaum underlines The Gold Diggers’ frenetic pacing, choreography and costume changes as a deeper suggestion of “the ‘movement’ of gold and money and blood, the exchange value of women, and the delight of breaking free from the usual habits and practices.”¹⁰ Potter notes that alchemical texts reason that the celestial-ruby – the names of her two protagonists – could transform base metals into gold.¹¹ Together, Celeste and Ruby are like Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie, amateur sleuths going undercover to root out the patriarchy and escape the men who chase after them. Potter described these men as emblems of “bureaucratic anxiety, academic stasis […] and of anonymous pursuers and street terrorisers.”¹² Celeste and Ruby are traced by a sinister, ambient soundscape of leather shoes on wet cobblestones: these men seek pleasure through exploitation and surveillance.

Christie was cast for the iconic power of her face, her certain brand of “glamour and blondeness and beauty” that was part ideal, part disguise.¹³ Her star rose with British New Wave cinema in John Schlesinger’s modish films Billy Liar (1963) and Darling (1965), becoming an emblem of sexually free, adventure-seeking independence. In the 1970s, she took dramatic roles as a jaded madam in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), a beautiful young aristocrat in The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971), and as a stricken mother in Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973). Like many British cinephiles and film theorists, Potter was interested in the representation of women in Hollywood cinema as a symptom of patriarchal order. Attentive to the “financial […] metaphysical, spiritual and psychological investment” in the phenomenon of stardom,¹⁴ Potter was interested in the currency and circulation of Christie’s image as a celebrity who represented both the trappings and performance of specifically fragile, white femininity. 

Indeed, The Gold Diggers is a film trading in symbolic systems, systems of representation. The images of Ruby and Celeste relate to the history of heroines on screen. “I search for the secret of transformations,” says Ruby. She whirls on the ballroom floor of a plantation mansion, dressed as a hoop-skirted Southern Belle. In other scenes she is a crowned fairy queen in satins, carried on a litter. She becomes the impish wanderer and vamp of silent film, eyes ringed with kohl and cheeks pasted white. Celeste’s roles are more subtle; she is the cerebral core of the film. She works as a computer clerk in an office or bank: “In my job, money flows through my body. But every day I get less than I give.” She becomes the detective, questioning her boss and slipping into the night-time streets to consult and expert and his assistant about the relationships between labour and the body. Seeking knowledge and signs to innovate and undo grand narratives and hierarchies, Celeste finds few answers from the men in charge, who respond to her investigations with hollow dismissal from preposterously outsized desks. Celeste also questions Ruby: “I am concerned with redressing the balance. Are you reconciled with your own history? Do you know what it is?” She is the female voyeur, the renovator, the thinker, the dreamer. Celeste and Ruby are knowingly presented in troubling, racialised configurations: as Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Laure, as Cathy and Heathcliff riding on the Yorkshire moors. The limiting tropes and sustaining myths of mainstream cinema, literature, and art are ideologically contested as Celeste and Ruby attempt to escape these mutual oppressions. Separated by representational conventions, the forces of culture and history, they attempt something like a sensuous, sustaining partnership, conveyed though intimate caresses, scenes of rescue, shared secrets and dreams. The final scene is one of fantasy, with the pair swimming through a choppy sea to reach a ship being welded together by a woman in goggles and gloves. 

 A stringently allegorical and extravagant piece of political filmmaking, The Gold Diggers follows a winding, chimerical path. Part detective noir, part fairytale, it’s a transgressive, collective attempt to rewrite women’s subjectivity and sociality with gestures of magic and satire. It pitches into the terrains of the unconscious and the dark depths of collective memory to untangle the historical power of the image. 

The Gold Diggers (1983 United Kingdom 89 mins)

Prod: Nita Amy, Donna Grey Dir, Ed: Sally Potter Scr: Lindsay Cooper, Rose English, Sally Potter Phot: Babette Mangolte Mus: Lindsay Cooper Art Dir: Rose English

Cast: Julie Christie, Colette Laffont, Hilary Westlake, David Gale, Thom Osborn, Jacky Lansley, George Antoni, Trevor Stuart

Endnotes