Cindy Sherman: Retrospective
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Cindy Sherman is one of the leading American artists of our time, creating staged and manipulated photographs that draw upon popular culture and art history to explore female identity. By visually examining the ways in which gender is dressed, made up and culturally enforced, Sherman has for many become an icon of feminism and postmodernism. Provocative and engaging, the visceral physicality of her photographs is the key to their dramatic power. In this retrospective, essayists Amada Cruz, Elizabeth A.T. Smith and Amelia Jones offer key insights from several distinct vantage points, positioning Sherman's work within the trajectory of feminist art history as well as revealing her influence on the art of the last twenty years. More than 270 images show the breadth of Sherman's body of work, from the Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s to series such as Centrefolds, Fashion, Disasters, Fairy Tales and History Portraits, as well as photographs influenced by surreal artists. Also included are intriguing excerpts from Sherman's notebooks, selections from her contact sheets and numerous Polaroid studies, all of which shed light on the artist's process. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective is an essential reference and guide to the work and ideas of this extraordinary artist.
Role Models
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In today's image-conscious world, photography is one of the most powerful mediators of our sense of self. Exploring the ways in which female identity is constructed and mediated through the art of photography is the central theme of this fascinating, fully illustrated book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. This book features the work of two generations of artists whose portraiture, self-portraiture, and narrative photographs have indelibly inflected our understanding of gender and identity over the past thirty years. More specifically, it focuses on how role models and role-playing have been central to the art, meaning, and social function of contemporary photography. Role Models begins with the early 1980s, a time when many American women artists and photographers such as Eleanor Antin and Cindy Sherman realised that they could be both the creator and the subject of their work, while others such as Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Mary Ellen Mark sought to document the varied roles that women and girls try on in their struggle to find an identity that fits. Role Models also considers how, by the late 1990s, a generation of photographers including Anna Gaskell, Catherine Opie, and Nikki S. Lee had become exemplars for a new cadre of younger women artists by collapsing old boundaries between postmodern and documentary photography, establishing new post-feminist sensibilities and evolving more fluid concepts of female identity. AUTHOR: Susan Fisher Sterling is Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Kathryn A. Wat is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum. SELLING POINTS: *Photographers featured include Eleanor Antin, Tina Barney, Anna Gaskell, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Justine Kurland, Nikki S. Lee, Sharon Lockhart, Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Catherine Opie, Barbara Probst, Collier Schorr, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Angela Strassheim, Carrie Mae Weems *Full colour photography and essays by leaders in the field 92 colour & 34 b/w illustrations
Women of Abstract Expressionism
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The celebrated survey of female Abstract Expressionist artists revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work The artists Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and many other women played major roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in New York and San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s and has been recognized as the first fully American modern art movement. Though the contributions of these women were central to American art of the twentieth century, their work has not received the same critical attention as that of their male counterparts. Women of Abstract Expressionism is a long-overdue survey. Lavishly illustrated with full-color plates emphasizing the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of the movement, this book features biographies of more than forty artists, offering insight into their lives and work. Essays by noted scholars explore the techniques, concerns, and legacies of women in Abstract Expressionism, shedding light on their unique experiences. This groundbreaking book reveals the richness of the careers of these important artists and offers keen new reflections on their work and the movement as a whole. Published in association with the Denver Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C. (10/22/16-01/22/17) Palm Springs Art Museum (02/18/17-05/28/17)
Louise Bourgeois: an Unfolding Portrait
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The first publication to fully survey Louise Bourgeois's printmaking, a major component of her artistic practice. Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait explores the prints, books and creative process of the celebrated sculptor Louise Bourgeois whose printed oeuvre, while lesser known than other aspects of her work, is vast in scope and comprises some 1,400 printed compositions. Over the course of her career, Bourgeois constantly revisited the themes and motifs of her art - all of which emerged from troubling emotions she struggled with for a lifetime. This investigation reveals the creative process underlying her artistic practice through evolving states for print compositions, as well as through the juxtaposition of works in different mediums and from different periods of her long career. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, the book features over 250 prints organized thematically and placed within the context of the artist's sculpture, drawings and paintings. The book also sheds light on the collaborative relationships between Bourgeois and her printmaking associates who often came to her home studio to work with her there - sometimes on a daily basis - pulling trial proofs from printing presses she kept in her basement. Interviews with Bourgeois's primary assistant, with whom she worked for decades, as well as with a printer and a publisher, each of whom helped foster her creative engagement with the medium, provide insight into her working process.
Women House
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Inspired by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's landmark 1972 installation and performance space Womanhouse, and featuring work by 36 international artists, Women House challenges conventions about gender and the domestic space. Womanhouse was the first female-centered art installation to appear in the Western world. In Women House, women artists working from the 1960s to today examine the persistence of stereotypes about the house as a feminine space through photography, sculpture, installation and video works. In Walking House (1989), Laurie Simmons creates a playful yet disconcerting image of the female body being consumed by expectations. Laure Tixier's series Plaid House (Maquette) (2005-11) explores domestic architecture from worldwide cultures in felt sculptures that resemble miniature residential homes, tents, towers or high-rise buildings.
Groundswell: Women of Land Art
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A bold reappraisal of Land art through the pioneering work of 12 women sculptors Using materials such as earth, wind, water, fire, wood, salt, rocks, mirrors and explosives, American artists of the 1960s began to move beyond the white cube gallery space to work directly in the land. With ties to Minimal and Conceptual art, these artists placed less emphasis on the discrete object and turned their attention to the experience of the artwork--however fleeting or permanent that might be--foregrounding natural materials and the site itself to create large-scale works located outside of typical urban art-world circuits. Histories of Land art have long been dominated by men, but Groundswell: Women of Land Art shifts that focus to shed new light on the vast number of earthworks by women artists. While their careers ran parallel to those of their better-known male counterparts, they have received less recognition and representation in museum presentations--until now. This book includes five scholarly essays, as well as a detailed chronology, exhibition checklist and illustrated biographies of exhibition artists. Groundswell is a resource for readers interested in understanding the historical Land art movement and our own relationship to the earth. Artists include: Lita Albuquerque, Alice Aycock, Beverly Buchanan, Agnes Denes, Maren Hassinger, Nancy Holt, Patricia Johanson, Ana Mendieta, Mary Miss, Jody Pinto, Michelle Stuart and Meg Webster.
Judy Chicago
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The most comprehensive survey to date of the legendary feminist artist Judy Chicago One of the most important contemporary American artists, Judy Chicago is known for multimedia works that embrace an explicitly feminist methodology. Accompanying a major retrospective at the New Museum, this book showcases Chicago's tremendous impact on American art and presents the full breadth of her career across installation, sculpture, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, and printmaking. Featuring an extensive selection curated by Chicago of works by women artists across history, the book also highlights her critical role as an activist and cultural historian who has reshaped the canon. This dedicated section features Chicago's 'personal museum' of women artists and historical figures whom she has placed within her own alternative canon, including Hilma af Klint, Simone de Beauvoir, Leonora Carrington, Elizabeth Catlett, Emily Dickinson, Barbara Hepworth, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Virginia Woolf, and many others. The book presents works from across her sixty-year career, from her experiments with Minimalism to her revolutionary feminist artworks and her later works on themes of social inequity, environmentalism, and the construction of masculinity.
Code Girls
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The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the American women who secretly served as codebreakers during World War II--a "prodigiously researched and engrossing" (New York Times) book that "shines a light on a hidden chapter of American history" (Denver Post). Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.
Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Meet the little leaders. They're brave. They're bold. They changed the world. Featuring 40 trailblazing black women in history, this book educates and inspires as it relates true stories of women who broke boundaries and exceeded all expectations, including: Nurse Mary Seacole Politician Diane Abbott Mathematician Katherine Johnson Singer Shirley Bassey Bestselling author and artist Vashti Harrison pairs captivating text and beautiful illustrations as she tells the stories of both iconic and lesser-known female figures. Among these biographies, readers will find heroes, role models, and everyday women who did extraordinary things.
Becoming
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An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WATCH THE EMMY-NOMINATED NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER * ONE OF ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America--the first African American to serve in that role--she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her--from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it--in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations--and whose story inspires us to do the same.
This Woman's Work
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Edited by iconic musician Kim Gordon and esteemed writer Sinéad Gleeson, this powerful collection of award-winning female creators shares their writing about the female artists that matter most to them. This book is for and about the women who kicked in doors, as pioneers of their craft or making politics central to their sound: those who offer a new way of thinking about the vast spectrum of women in music. This Woman's Work: Essays on Music is edited by iconic musician Kim Gordon and esteemed writer Sinéad Gleeson and features an array of talented contributors, including: Anne Enright, Fatima Bhutto, Jenn Pelly, Rachel Kushner, Juliana Huxtable, Leslie Jamison, Liz Pelly, Maggie Nelson, Margo Jefferson, Megan Jasper, Ottessa Moshfegh, Simone White, Yiyun Li, and Zakia Sewell. In this radical departure from the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman's Work challenges the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space. Women have to speak up, to shout louder to tell their story--like the auteurs and ground-breakers featured in this collection, including: Anne Enright on Laurie Anderson; Megan Jasper on her ground-breaking work with Sub Pop; Margo Jefferson on Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald; and Fatima Bhutto on music and dictatorship. This Woman's Work also features writing on the experimentalists, women who blended music and activism, the genre-breakers, the vocal auteurs; stories of lost homelands and friends; of propaganda and dictatorships, the women of folk and country, the racialized tropes of jazz, the music of Trap and Carriacou; of mixtapes and violin lessons.
Women Artists
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A comprehensive guide to 20th century female artists. From painting, sulpture and photography to concept art, performance, body art, video, feminist actions, installations, and interactive projects - the book covers a diversity of themes and media and artists from O'Keeffe to Rachel Whiteread.
Women Artists in Midcentury America
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The untold story of women artists in the United States and the social impact of their work during the crucial decades of the 1950s to the 1970s. In Women Artists in Midcentury America, readers embark on a journey spanning two decades, delving into the evolving social and artistic landscapes through the lens of all-women exhibitions. These groundbreaking projects courageously confronted issues of sexual and racial discrimination, igniting profound discussions about women's roles within modernism and democracy. Looking closely at the inception and reception of these exhibitions by curators, artists, critics, and the public, the book sheds light on the remarkable contributions of numerous artists, from Ruth Asawa to Marguerite Zorach. By foregrounding the accomplishments of women artists during a conservative period overshadowed by the feminist movement of the 1970s, Daniel Belasco provides a fresh perspective on the complex history of women's art in America and its significance in the broader art world.
Women Artists Together
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A fresh perspective on collaboration, collectivity, and conflict in the women's art movement of the 1970s Women Artists Together is a thought-provoking study of how the women's liberation movement galvanized a generation of women artists. It offers a fresh perspective on the history of the women's art movement and considers how it was shaped by collaboration and togetherness. Retracing 1970s liberation politics, Amy Tobin emphasizes how artworks emerged from--and contested--feminist paradigms and contexts. Taking class, gender, race, and sexuality as central concerns, the book includes examples of inspirational feminist activism as well as fallings out, disagreements, and antagonism. Across four chapters, Tobin looks at the work of UK- and US-based artists including Judy Chicago, Mary Beth Edelson, Rose English, Harmony Hammond, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Claudette Johnson, Suzanne Lacy, Howardena Pindell, Ingrid Pollard, Carolee Schneemann, Cecilia Vicuña, and Kate Walker. Groups include the Feminist Art Programme at Cal Arts, Women's Workshop of the Artists' Union, Where We At, Black Women Artists Inc., and the South London Art Group, publications such as Heresies and Chrysalis, along with writers and curators including Lucy R. Lippard and Arlene Raven.
Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art
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Individuals:Women Artists in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art represents the first effort by a major North American museum to examine its collection in light of feminist scholarship of the past three decades. Featuring illustrated essays by nearly fifty writers, including both MoMA curators and outside scholars, among them many of the strongest voices in current research on art and gender, this groundbreaking publication presents a range of generational and cultural perspectives. Individuals focuses on a diverse range of artists active from the late nineteenth century to the present whose works span the spectrum of mediums and genres in the Museum's collection. Organized chronologically into three sections - Early Modernism, Mid-Century and Contemporary - the book comprises both long and short essays emphasizing new research on women artists within these historical time periods. Richly illustrated with objects from the collection, Individuals foregrounds a conversation between past considerations of MoMA's collection and current feminist narratives of art history, putting these varied modes of exploration in productive dialogue.
Ink and Paint
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In this glossy volume, featuring never-before-seen photos, artwork, and detailed accounts, the process, techniques, and contributions of the women - and men - who defined the Walt Disney Studio's legendary Ink & Paint Department over the years are carefully explored, preserved, and shared for future generations.
Kitchen Table Series
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Kitchen Table Series is the first publication dedicated solely to this early and important body of work by the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman's life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships--with lovers, children, friends--and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude. As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts "the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes." Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist's words, "unrequited love." Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) is considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists. In a career spanning over 30 years, she has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems and the consequences of power. Weems' complex body of art employs photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation and video. Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including the prestigious MacArthur "Genius" grant and the Prix de Roma. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
The Female Gaze
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Alicia Malone's Take on Influential Women in Film! "Once again Alicia Malone champions women filmmakers, opening the floodgates to a great new wave of female voices and creative vision."―Maria Giese, filmmaker and activist #1 Bestseller in Movies & Video Guides & Reviews With the success of the Wonder Woman movies and the results following the outcry of the #MeToo movement, now is the time to highlight the female influences in film history previously left unheard! The voices of powerful women in old Hollywood--told. You may have heard the term "male gaze," coined in the 1970s, about how art and entertainment have been influenced by the male's perspective. What about the opposite? Women have been making movies since the very beginning of cinema. In The Female Gaze, Alicia Malone explores the ideas, thoughts, and views we learn from women from behind the scenes. What does the world look like through the "female gaze"? Learn about women who changed the world. Discover brilliantly talented and accomplished women directors, both world renowned and obscure, who have shaped the film industry in ways rarely fully acknowledged. Find mini-essays written by women like Alicia Malone and other diverse female film critics. Featuring past and present films, this behind the scenes guidebook is perfect for the Hollywood history fan in your life. Inside, observe: How female directors' voices shaped films and the film industry The advancements and accomplishments of influential women in history and film The lives of these women and the struggles they faced throughout Hollywood history If you liked Women in Art or Camera Man, you'll adore the powerful women in history found in Alicia Malone's The Female Gaze.
Graphic Women
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Some of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century are autobiographical comics by women. Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a pioneer of the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis experiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home meticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present the author's past. These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions
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In this whip-smart study, Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective. Abstractions ranges widely and covers collaborations between poets and painters in the 1950s and 1960s; the complex role played by the true abstraction of the feminine in the work of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler; the intricate weave of verbal and visual arts throughout the postwar period, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to Conceptualism to feminist and queer performance art; and the unfolding, diverse careers of Mayer, Notley, and Myles from the 1970s to the present. Along the way, Nelson considers provocative questions of anonymity and publicity, the solitary and the communal, the enduring and the ephemeral, domesticity, boredom, sex, and politics. avant-gardes and eventually drawing our attention to larger, compelling questions about how and why we read - and how gender and sexuality inform that reading in the first place - Maggie Nelson not only fills an important gap in the history of American poetry and art but also gives an inspired performance of the kind of lively, audacious, and personally committed criticism that befits her subject.
Tough Enough
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This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a "cold eye" was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere "school of the unsentimental" offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.
Passionate Minds
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With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through their art. Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group, connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics that bound them to their times, even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness. "Pierpont['s] graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus." ?"The Boston Globe ""One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time." ?Lorrie Moore, "The New York Review of Books"
Women Writers Talking
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Interviews by critics and scholars with fifteen of today's foremost women writers, including Maya Angelou, A. S. Byatt, Luce Irigaray, Erica Jong, Jeanne Moreau, and Grace Paley.
Women Photographers
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Since the inception of photography as an art form nearly 200 years ago, women have played an important role in the development of the genre, often pushing boundaries and defying social convention. This comprehensive volume features sixty of the most important women photographers. Each artist is profiled in spreads featuring splendid reproductions of their key works and an in-depth overview of their careers and contributions to the art of photography. Biographical information for each subject and a contextual essay focusing on the impact of women in the history of the medium makes this an excellent illustrated reference.
A World History of Women Photographers
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A magnificently illustrated showcase of the work of 300 women photographers from all over the world, from the invention of the medium to the dawn of the 21st century. As in many fields of art history, the work of women photographers has often been overlooked, and few of their names are now widely recognized. However, women were closely involved in all major photography movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and have used the camera as an extraordinary tool for emancipation and experimentation. These are artists who never stopped documenting, questioning and transforming the world, breaking down social boundaries, challenging gender roles and expressing their imagination and sexuality. To capture the diversity of this global body of work, Luce Lebart and Marie Robert have invited 160 international women writers to contribute to this volume, which is a bold and beautifully illustrated manifesto as well as an invaluable work of reference.
Putting myself in the picture : a political, personal, and photographic autobiography
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Women
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The photographs by Annie Leibovitz in Women, taken especially for the book, encompass a broad spectrum of subjects: a rap artist, an astronaut, two Supreme Court justices, farmers, coal miners, movie stars, showgirls, rodeo riders, socialites, reporters, dancers, a maid, a general, a surgeon, the First Lady of the United States, the secretary of state, a senator, rock stars, prostitutes, teachers, singers, athletes, poets, writers, painters, musicians, theater directors, political activists, performance artists, and businesswomen. "Each of these pictures must stand on its own," Susan Sontag writes in the essay that accompanies the portraits. "But the ensemble says, So this what women are now -- as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this."
Daisies = Sedmikrásky
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Summary: If the entire world is bad, why shouldn't we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women, both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over?
All the beauty and the bloodshed
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Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras's career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival. Made in collaboration with renowned artist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed entwines the mission of P.A.I.N., an advocacy group she founded to raise awareness about the billionaire Sackler family's integral role in the ongoing crisis of opioid overdoses, with an intimate journey through Goldin's life, from her rebellious adolescence and immersion in New York City's thriving underground arts scene to her personal experiences of addiction and the AIDS epidemic. Through it all, her indelible photographs and candid reflections on memory and trauma reveal her unyielding solidarity with marginalized communities that refuse to remain silent.
Gloria
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Summary: An ex-gun moll and showgirl is suddenly forced to protect a child whose parents have been rubbed out by the mob.
Suffragette
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Summary: Inspired by true events, a moving drama exploring the passion and heartbreak of the women who risked everything in their fight for equality in early 20th century Britain. The story centers on Maud, a working wife and mother whose life is forever changed when she is secretly recruited to join the U.K.'s growing suffragette movement. Galvanized by the outlaw fugitive Emmeline Pankhurst, Maud becomes an activist for the cause alongside women from all walks of life.
Dancer in the Dark
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Summary: Selma, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, is a single mother working in a factory in rural America circa 1964. She is also afflicted by a hereditary disease, which will cost her her sight. Determined to protect her 10-year-old son from the same fate, Selma is saving her money to get him an operation. In the evenings, Selma escapes by rehearsing for a production of The Sound of Music with her best friend. When a neighbor betrays her trust, Selma's life spirals out of control and the lines between reality and fantasy blur.
Grey Gardens
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Summary: Portrait of the relationship between Edith Bouvier Beale and her grown daughter, Little Edie, once an aspiring actress in New York who left her career to care for her aging mother in their East Hampton home, and never left again. The aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis feed their cats and raccoons and rehash their pasts behind the walls of their decaying mansion, Grey Gardens.
Cleo from 5 to 7
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Summary: A girl waiting for the result of a medical examination wanders around Paris thinking she has cancer; the film focuses on her ever-changing moods, and her search for answers.
Offside
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During the 2006 Iran-Bahrain match, the Tehran soccer stadium roars with 100,000 cheering men and, officially, no women. According to Islamic custom, women are not permitted to watch or participate in men's sports. Many of the ambitious young female fans who manage to sneak into the arena are caught and sent to a holding pen, guarded by male soldiers their own age. Duty makes these young men and women adversaries, but duty can't overcome their shared dreams, their mutual attraction, and ultimately their overriding sense of national pride and humanity.
Persepolis
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In 1970s Iran, Marjane "Marji" Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family. Their long dream is realized when the hated Shah is defeated in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, Marji grows up to witness first hand how the new Iran has become a repressive tyranny on its own. With Marji dangerously refusing to remain silent at this injustice, her parents send her abroad to Vienna to study. This change proves an equally difficult trial for Marji as she finds herself in a different culture loaded with abrasive characters and profound disappointments that deeply trouble her. Even when she returns home, Marji finds that both she and her homeland have changed too much and the young woman and her loving family must decide where she truly belongs.
4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days
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Summary: 1987, Communist Romania. During the course of one day, Otilia helps her friend and roommate Gabita get a late-term abortion. With abortion, let alone any kind of contraceptive, being illegal, the women have to use illegal means to achieve their goal. This film shows the rough and gritty situation in which these college students, particularly Otilia, must make decisions and deal with their consequences.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
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Summary: Evokes a sense of impending doom, the daily domestic routine of a middle-aged widow. Her chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her grown son, and turning the occasional trick. Her life is beginning to break down.
Cameraperson
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A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film, a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career as a documentary cinematographer.
Saint Omer
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Bringing a documentarian's sense of open-ended inquiry to her first narrative feature, writer-director Alice Diop constructs a morally and emotionally layered courtroom drama unlike any other. When she travels to Saint-Omer, France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman accused of murdering her infant daughter, novelist Rama finds herself shaken to the core by a case that proves to have profound resonances with her own life. Interweaving complex themes of mother-daughter bonds, immigrant alienation, and postcolonial trauma into a piercing portrait of two mysteriously connected women, Diop forgoes mere questions of guilt and innocence to plumb the unsettling unknowability of the human soul.
