Looking for LGBT+ History: Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses (1992) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film “For if one history is lost, all of us are less rich than before.” — Barbara Hammer Barbara Hammer’s first feature-length film, Nitrate Kisses (1992) is a landmark of LGBT+ cinema. After a lifetime of teaching...
Corona Experimental Film Culture Gwendolyn Audrey Foster July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID While it’s impossible to say when film theatres will reopen, on the bright side, it has been both exciting and humbling to be involved in the rapid evolution of streaming platforms to accommodate radical experi...
Resisting War and Patriarchy: Two Women (Vittorio De Sica, 1960) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster February 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Vittorio De Sica’s wartime drama La ciociara (Two Women, 1960) had a decidedly peculiar genesis. Adapted from a 1957 novel by Alberto Moravia, with a script by De Sica’s long-time collaborator Cesare Zavattini,...
Defeating the Sexual Predator: Beggars of Life (William A. Wellman, 1928) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster October 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film William A. Wellman was known throughout his career as a tough director who made grimy, realistic movies about tough people surviving desperate situations. Though he is perhaps best known for his films about des...
Sexy Smart Women in Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster July 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film One of the most sublime of all Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedies, Trouble in Paradise (1932) is a delicate and carefully balanced mixture of languorous romance, luxurious exoticism and sophisticated comedy, in...
Women as Prey: Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Claude Chabrol is often called the French Hitchcock, but, to my mind, Chabrol is the far more provocative director, because of his brutal honesty about the hopelessness of human behaviour in a patriarchal world...
Something Different (Věra Chytilová, 1963) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster June 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Though she is best known in the West for her widely celebrated anarchic experimental feminist classic Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966), Věra Chytilová has a large body of work. She was one of the members of the Czec...
Kinuyo Tanaka’s The Eternal Breasts (1955) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster March 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Based on the life story of tanka poet Fumiko Nakajo (1922–1954), Kinuyo Tanaka’s Chibusa yo eien nare (The Eternal Breasts, 1955) is a remarkably feminist film in many respects. The film’s director, Kinuyo Tana...
Akerman, Chantal Gwendolyn Audrey Foster February 2018 Great Directors b. 6 June 1950, Brussels, Belgium d. 5 October 2015, Paris, France “When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.” - Chantal Akerman Chantal Akerman was one o...
Girlhood in Reverse – Jane Campion’s 2 Friends (1986) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fearless, ruthlessly economical and deeply felt, 2 Friends (1986), Jane Campion’s first feature – actually made for Australian television, and clocking in at a spare 79 minutes – is a modest yet accomplished fi...
Pre-Code Women: Dorothy Arzner’s Working Girls (1931) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster February 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Nearly forty years after her death in 1979, Dorothy Arzner remains one of the most fascinating American filmmakers to work within the Hollywood studio system. While a few of her films, such as Dance, Girl, Danc...
Two Ordinary People; One Special Day Gwendolyn Audrey Foster January 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “From childhood, history was a subject that fascinated me, and what I kept wondering was how everyday life might have been different, if Caesar or Mussolini had changed course. My sympathy always went to those...