Film Screenings / Programs / Series
WANDERING WOMEN
January 24 – February 9
January 24-February 9, 2025
“I think a lot of people are that way. I think millions of people are that way. Not just women, but men too. They don’t know why they exist and they have no direction in their life. They have no reason for existing. (You see these people like Wanda and Mr. Dennis are not – they are not aware of their condition as maybe better educated people would be. They’re not aware of the situation they’re in.)” –Barbara Loden, on WANDA
“WANDA is a movie about ‘someone’. […] ‘When I say someone, I mean someone who has been isolated, someone who has been considered on himself, separated from social conditions where he is. Like extracted from society and observed by you. I think there is always something in the self, in you, that society cannot reach, something insurmountable, impenetrable and decisive.” –Marguerite Duras, on WANDA
Barbara Loden’s WANDA explores the phenomenon of wandering, which is both the movement of an anonymous identity, without purpose, aimless, seeking something abstract, but which also represents a kind of questioning – not actively critical, but rather a form of existential interrogation of oneself through the environment being traversed. The gender dimension amplifies this questioning. It’s no wonder that the image of a wandering woman should emerge as a major metaphor within the cinema of the 1960s and 70s: in the midst of a cultural and sexual revolution, this figure comes to embody the question of what to do with this newfound “freedom” when women’s role in society remained unresolved and undefined outside of the domestic sphere.
The films in this series track the development of this motif in global cinema from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. The protagonists of these films rupture the usual ambivalence between feminine/passive and masculine/active roles. Whether helmed by women (Loden, Chantal Akerman, Ulrike Ottinger, etc) or men (Ken Loach, Ousmane Sembène, Masao Adachi, and so on), their trajectories complicate the “male gaze,” as we as viewers feel intimately connected to them, constantly wondering about their wandering: What do they want? Where would that take them? How do they feel?
These roving women are largely unburdened by possessions, carrying only their child, a hotel room key, a backpack, a handbag that will soon be stolen, or a mask – a relic of a stolen identity. They have too many drinks and meet strangers who they will fall for or forget, fight or befriend, hitch a ride from, or make love with for the sake of the sexual revolution. Yet, they glide like oil on water, sometimes drawing attention but without altering the space, without making history. It’s through this drifting, like a quiet cry for help, that they open a space to reflect on the situation of women, on the experience of inhabiting an indifferent environment – built by men, for men. They testify to our contemporary time of uncertainty, underscoring – like an echo – the mobility of those who have no choice but to be in movement.
“Wandering Women” is guest-programmed by Nina Verneret, who also wrote the introduction and, unless otherwise noted, the individual film descriptions.
Special thanks to Carmen Accaputo (Cineteca di Bologna); Linda Bastide; Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Bret Berg (AGFA); Annie Bozzola; Chris Chouinard (Park Circus); Eric Di Bernardo (Rialto Pictures); Sam Di Iorio; Reinhild Feldhaus (Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduktion); Carolyn Funk; Julien Gester; Elena Gorfinkel; Ivan Grifi; Jake Perlin (The Film Desk); Nuno Pimentel (Rapid Eye Movies); Gina Telaroli; Todd Wiener & Steven Hill (UCLA Film & Television Archive); and Carsten Zimmer (Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst).
Barbara Loden
WANDA
1970, 103 min, 35mm. Restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and GUCCI.
One of the opening shots of WANDA features a small silhouette in a white outfit – blonde hair, a white purse – walking across a vast black coal field. The feelings of inadequacy and self-denigration are perhaps what cause Wanda (Barbara Loden) to wander in rural Pennsylvania. She deserts her family and roams local bars with curlers in her hair and a small handbag, and clings to a man who, finding her useful for a brief period, drags her into his criminal schemes. Filmed in a vérité style, and inspired by a real-life news item that deeply affected Loden, WANDA is a compassionate meditation on marginalization, as its protagonist navigates a world that has no place carved out for her.
Fri, Jan 24 at 6:30, Wed, Jan 29 at 9:00, and Sat, Feb 1 at 4:45.
Paula Delsol
LA DÉRIVE
1964, 90 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
According to its director, Paula Delsol – who was, alongside Agnès Varda, one of the few female French New Wave filmmakers, and who remains virtually unknown today – LA DÉRIVE could have been entitled “Castles in Spain”. It’s a portrait of Jacquie, a young woman living hand-to-mouth as she hitchhikes to Camargue. Estranged from her family, thanks to her rejection of the domestic life her mother wants for her, and disillusioned after a romance with a guitarist (Pierre Barouh), Jacquie sleeps around, becoming something of a kept woman. Depicting a free young woman of the 1960s, LA DÉRIVE paints a vivid portrait of a character who encompasses aspects drawn from both Delsol and her remarkable lead actress, Jacqueline Vandal.
“In a certain way, Jacquie is a forerunner of film characters like…Mona in Varda’s VAGABOND: self-determined, non-conformist, free of illusions. François Truffaut compared the film’s boldness to Ingmar Bergman’s first works.” –Sabine Schöbel & Florian Widegger, AUSTRIAN FILM ARCHIVE
Fri, Jan 24 at 9:00 and Sun, Feb 9 at 5:45. The screening on Sun, Feb 9 will be followed by a discussion between series curator Nina Verneret and Jamie Berthe, from The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU.
Ousmane Sembène
BLACK GIRL / LA NOIRE DE…
1966, 59 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French and Wolof with English subtitles.
“For me France is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom and my bedroom.” The first feature by the great Ousmane Sembène, BLACK GIRL depicts the broken dream of Diouana, from the streets of Dakar in search of a job to her isolation within the suffocating domesticity of her employers, “Monsieur” and “Madame”, on the French Riviera. Through repetitive gestures, imposed orders, and humiliations, it is in this confined space that colonial violence resonates most strongly. The French title, LA NOIRE DE… (THE BLACK GIRL OF…), suggests Diouana’s fading identity, as part of the colonial enterprise of dehumanization of which we become, as film spectators, eternal witnesses.
Sat, Jan 25 at 5:00, Fri, Jan 31 at 7:15, and Tues, Feb 4 at 9:00.
Ken Loach
POOR COW
1967, 101 min, 35mm-to-DCP
“My name is Joy. I’m about 5’3, measurements 36-24-36, and English. My little baby’s name is Jonny… Things I like most: plenty of clothes and money.” POOR COW centers on Joy, a single 18-year-old mother who moves from place to place with her son under her arm, from an abusive boyfriend to her prostitute aunt to another bad-news boyfriend, engaging in promiscuous relationships with older men who spoil her. The story could be an inverted gender version of the Kitchen sink realist film – a genre that has typically focused on angry young men disillusioned with modern society. Joy, however, has no big dreams and consequently no big disappointments. POOR COW hinges on the contradiction between the wish to drift away from middle-class stability, infused with a new spirit of female freedom, and the desire for small material comforts and a measure of domestic happiness.
“[A scene featuring a] deflated hair-piece which Joy despairingly ‘can’t go out without!’ and cost her ‘five and eleven’ demarks Joy’s status in the narrative; a single, working-class mother with no way to get by but her looks. It is a scene literal yet beguiling. This ornamental hair-piece, abstract and banal, is the coveted commodity yet also embodies the source of Joy’s income. In its abject state the promises of this object – the ability to pay rent and buy food, the dreamworld of another life, the valuation of her gender, the possibility of beauty – are untenable, unstable, and lacking.” –Carolyn Funk, MUBI NOTEBOOK
Sat, Jan 25 at 6:45, Thurs, Jan 30 at 9:15, and Sun, Feb 2 at 9:00.
Masao Adachi
GUSHING PRAYER / FUNSHUTSU KIGAN: JÛGO-SAI NO BAISHUNFU
1971, 74 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Japanese with English subtitles.
“Yasuko, Yoko, Koichi, and Bill are high school freshmen who engage in group sex to find out the reasons for their dissatisfaction and desensitization. They want to discover how they can ‘beat’ sex and therefore win against adult society. When 15-year-old Yasuko, who has become pregnant, tells her classmates that she has slept with their teacher, she is accused of betrayal and of breaking their vow not to have sex just for pleasure. Yasuko declares that she has felt something only because she prostituted herself. In order to confirm whether this is true, and encouraged by her peers, Yasuko becomes a prostitute and sets out on a journey of self-exploration. […] Interspersed with actual suicide notes and employing several alienation effects, GUSHING PRAYER is a penetrative allegory of the political dissatisfaction and spiritual void that came in the wake of the failed 1960s student movement.” –INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM
Sat, Jan 25 at 9:15, Fri, Jan 31 at 9:00, Mon, Feb 3 at 6:45, and Sat, Feb 8 at 9:00.
Márta Mészáros
DON’T CRY, PRETTY GIRLS! / SZÉP LÁNYOK, NE SÍRJATOK!
1970, 84 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Hungarian with English subtitles.
DON’T CRY, PRETTY GIRLS! depicts the odyssey of a young woman (Jaroslava Schallerová, star of the Czech New Wave classic VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS) through the streets of Budapest on the eve of her marriage to a factory worker (Mark Zala). The film captures a precise moment of social change when young people were caught in the historical, cultural, and economic contradictions between the rigidity of the Eastern bloc – work, factory life, and family expectations – and a beat-influenced generation inspired by love, music, and freedom. The almost pamphlet-like song lyrics rhyme with the editing, and the camera captures – reflected on a young girl’s face – this moment of hesitation between two models of existence.
Sun, Jan 26 at 4:45, Sun, Feb 2 at 6:45, and Wed, Feb 5 at 9:15.
Alberto Grifi & Massimo Sarchielli
ANNA
1972-75, 225 min, DCP. In Italian with English subtitles. Restored by Cineteca Nazionale and Cineteca di Bologna with Associazione Alberto Grifi.
“ANNA is an astonishing, nearly four-hour documentary about a 16-year-old homeless junkie, eight months pregnant, whom the filmmakers discovered in Rome’s Piazza Navona. Mainly shot on then-newfangled video (which at times gives the black-and-white images a ghostly translucence), it documents the interactions between the beautiful, clearly damaged, often dazed teenager and the directors, who take her in partly out of compassion and partly because she’s a fascinating subject for a film. Far from straightforward vérité, this self-implicating chronicle includes reenactments of the first meeting, explicit attempts to direct its subject, and frequent intrusions from behind the camera…. ANNA cuts between long, often discomfiting domestic scenes (including an interminable delousing in the shower) and equally protracted café discussions back in the square, where the unruly cross talk among hippies, bums, bourgeoisie, and angry young men touches on the movie’s key themes of obligation and intervention: between filmmakers and their subjects, the state and its citizens, fellow members of society.” –Dennis Lim, ARTFORUM
“With Anna, as with certain of Warhol’s subjects we never heard from again…the electrifying presence of filmed beauty and the obsessive gaze itself form a vivid and mysterious historical record: of ‘stars’ who exist purely as stars, leaving no trace of lives continued offscreen, outside their moment of celluloid fame. Their only record is their record on film. Almost unknown for the past thirty-six years outside the country where it was made, ANNA contains within it, as if under lock and key, seemingly every seed and secret component of that mythical and explosive era, the 1970s in Italy.” –Rachel Kushner, ARTFORUM
Sun, Jan 26 at 7:00 and Sat, Feb 1 at 7:15.
Ulrike Ottinger
TICKET OF NO RETURN / BILDNIS EINER TRINKERIN
1979, 108 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In German with English subtitles.
The first part of Ulrike Ottinger’s “Berlin Trilogy” – it would be followed by FREAK ORLANDO (1981) and DORIAN GRAY IN THE MIRROR OF THE YELLOW PRESS (1984) – TICKET OF NO RETURN tells the story of a rich young woman who buys a one-way ticket to Berlin in order to define her destiny on her own terms, specifically through her passion for alcohol: “her passion to drink, live to drink, a drunken life. Life of a drunkard.” Alcohol becomes both a site of social commentary on the condition of women (where female drunkenness is seen as degrading and repulsive) and the vehicle for wandering through spaces, social classes, and chance encounters – always in high heels, often on steep stairs.
Mon, Jan 27 at 6:30 and Tues, Feb 4 at 6:30.
Niki de Saint Phalle
UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT / A DREAM LONGER THAN THE NIGHT
1976, 82 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French and Swiss German with English subtitles. Restored in 4K by Niki Charitable Art Foundation, under the supervision of Arielle de Saint Phalle, with funding provided by Dior at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.
A recently rediscovered gem of 1970s French avant-garde cinema by renowned artist Niki de Saint Phalle. UN RÊVE is a dark, Alice in Wonderland-like coming-of-age tale, in which young Camelia’s wish to grow up results in a journey through the adult world. In search of treasure, she instead encounters a chaos of metallic structures, wars, sexual obsessions, and giant prop phalluses in the form of cannons and feather dusters – all realized through Saint Phalle’s inimitable craft and humor.
Preceded by:
Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943, 14 min, 16mm. Music by Teiji Ito from 1959.)
Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Mon, Jan 27 at 9:00 and Fri, Feb 7 at 9:15.
Abel Ferrara
THE ADDICTION
1995, 82 min, 35mm
Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), an NYU philosophy graduate student, is assaulted by a woman on the streets of New York. Deeply shaken by this unmotivated aggression, she soon finds herself grappling with a new identity. In many ways, the vampire’s addiction to human blood mirrors the New York cosmopolitan experience. Ferrara, filming in bloody black and white, plays with genre ambiguity: set in 1990s New York, in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, the film follows anemic students pondering concepts of free will and determinism – ultimately becoming a reflection on existence stripped bare by a more urgent force: addiction. The question emerges: how to face existence when chained to a self that is itself an absence?
Tues, Jan 28 at 6:30, Thurs, Feb 6 at 9:00, and Sat, Feb 8 at 6:45.
Chantal Akerman
LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA
1978, 127 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Anna, a filmmaker in her thirties, returns to her native Belgium to present a film. During her stay, she meets family members, acquaintances, and strangers with whom she spends a night. She moves through urban spaces, trains, hotels, train station halls, and restaurants with the strangeness and curiosity characteristic of those who return home. LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA is a film about such a return, the passage of time, the notion of movement, and the space that interweaves with those who stay behind.
Tues, Jan 28 at 8:45, Sun, Feb 2 at 4:00, and Wed, Feb 5 at 6:30.
Agnès Varda
VAGABOND / SANS TOIT NI LOI
1985, 105 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
VAGABOND is a work of “documenteur” (mock-documentary), to use Varda’s term, operating at the crossroads of documentary and fiction. Following the wanderings of a young woman who undergoes a radical experience of freedom, from summer swims in the Mediterranean to becoming a mere news item, the film offers a sociological analysis of rural France while building an inexorable tension of impending doom. It explores the strength and vitality of an uncompromising freedom while showing the fragility and vulnerability of marginal lives.
Wed, Jan 29 at 6:30, Mon, Feb 3 at 8:45, and Thurs, Feb 6 at 6:30.
Antonio Pietrangeli
I KNEW HER WELL / IO LA CONOSCEVO BENE
1965, 115 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Italian with English subtitles.
“Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of LA DOLCE VITA, I KNEW HER WELL is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the 1960s and a biting critique of its sexual politics and culture of celebrity. Over a series of intimate episodes, just about every one featuring a different man, a new hairstyle, and an outfit to match, the unsung Italian master Antonio Pietrangeli, working from a script he cowrote with Ettore Scola, composes a deft, seriocomic character study that never strays from its complicated central figure.” –JANUS FILMS
Thurs, Jan 30 at 6:30, Fri, Feb 7 at 6:30, and Sun, Feb 9 at 8:00.
