Film Screenings / Programs / Series
WORKING GIRL(S)
February 25 – March 2
Feburary 25 - March 2, 2023
This film series gathers together four films whose (very nearly) identical titles are, strangely enough, more than a quirk of fate. Though they span the early 1930s to the late 1980s, and emerged from distinctly different production contexts, all four are unusually perceptive, socially trenchant films. True to their title, they are united by a shared concern with the intersections of sex, money, labor, and class, weighty topics that each of the films manages to explore in vivid, always entertaining, and broadly accessible ways.
The series showcases the work of several pioneering female filmmakers: Dorothy Arzner, who was virtually the only female director active in Hollywood during the 1930s-40s, and one of the very few to make a viable career in the industry until much later; Stephanie Rothman, who held a similarly unique place in the realm of 1960s-70s low-budget exploitation films; and Lizzie Borden, whose first two films – the groundbreaking independent films REGROUPING and BORN IN FLAMES – Anthology has restored in recent years, and whose WORKING GIRLS (1986) remains one of the most perceptive and revealing films about sex work ever made.
The impetus for the series, Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS, will be introduced, on Saturday, February 25, by Borden herself, who will also be here at Anthology that weekend to present two films she’s guest-selected: Sheila McLaughlin’s SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS (1987) and Pat Murphy & John Davies’s MAEVE (1981).
Special thanks to Lizzie Borden; Stephanie Rothman; Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Amy Crismer (Disney); Brian Fox (Criterion Pictures); Jason Jackowski (Universal Pictures); Matt Jones (UNCSA Moving Image Archives); Justin LaLiberty (Vinegar Syndrome); and Jacob Perlin.
Lizzie Borden
WORKING GIRLS
1986, 93 min, 35mm
Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experiences of the sex workers Borden met while making BORN IN FLAMES, WORKING GIRLS reveals the textures of a day in the life of Molly (Louise Smith), a photographer working part-time in a Manhattan brothel, as she juggles a steady stream of clients, balances relationships with her coworkers with the demands of an ambitious madam, and above all fights to maintain her sense of self in a business in which the line between the personal and the professional is all too easily blurred. In viewing prostitution through the lens of labor, Borden boldly desensationalizes the subject, offering an empathetic, humanizing, often humorous depiction of women for whom this work is just another day at the office.
“Borden belongs to a group of filmmakers, including Kathryn Bigelow and Jim Jarmusch, who emerged from the downtown post-punk art-music scene of the late 1970s. Back then, BORN IN FLAMES and WORKING GIRLS seemed like professionalized versions of the incendiary work produced by scrappy Super-8 filmmakers like Vivienne Dick and the team of Scott B and Beth B. Revisited decades later, WORKING GIRLS appears closer to Chantal Akerman’s epochal JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES. The similarity between the films is not so much subject (Akerman’s eponymous protagonist is a housewife prostitute) as attitude. WORKING GIRLS is notable for its measured structure, analytical camera placement and straightforward cool.” –J. Hoberman, NEW YORK TIMES
Sat, Feb 25 at 9:15, Sun, Feb 26 at 9:00, and Tues, Feb 28 at 6:45. Lizzie Borden will be here in person for the screening on Sat, Feb 25!
Dorothy Arzner
WORKING GIRLS
1931, 77 min, 35mm
“[Arzner] was in the 1930s and 1940s the only woman directing in Hollywood, and her films offer a distinctively lesbian feminist view of American society. WORKING GIRLS is a brutally honest film, coming as it does at the height of the Depression, depicting precisely what it was like to be a young woman – far from home in a big city – trying to get ahead in a hostile world. Working from a screenplay by Zoë Akins…with razor sharp editing by Jane Loring, Arzner creates a fresh, compact, and decidedly female centered tale, which remains shockingly relevant even today. WORKING GIRLS is a feminist film that employs a queer camp sensibility also found in Arzner’s CRAIG’S WIFE (1936). Both films are sharp in their critique of the institution of marriage as one of the only potential avenues for female social mobility in Depression-era America. As I have written elsewhere, Arzner reveals heterosexual marriage as ‘an instrument to hold both women and men hostage to appearances and enforced roles, and perhaps most significantly, hostages to excessive consumption.’ Arzner exposes the crass fiscal relationship between class and heterosexual marriage, often employing jaw-dropping ironic feminist humor from a distinctly female point of view.”–Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, SENSES OF CINEMA
Sun, Feb 26 at 4:30, Mon, Feb 27 at 9:15, and Tues, Feb 28 at 9:00.
Stephanie Rothman
THE WORKING GIRLS
1974, 81 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the UNCSA Moving Image Archives.
“By 1973, [Rothman] had made a series of films indebted to the social, political, cultural, and sexual variations of women’s contemporary lives. While all of Rothman’s films deal, in some way, with economics and social class, she had yet to make a film organized around these indelible issues. This changed in 1974 with THE WORKING GIRLS, Rothman’s intimate and ultimately cynical dramatization of women’s un- and underemployment. The film stands as the capstone to Rothman’s career and her ideological ruminations. Whereas THE STUDENT NURSES and TERMINAL ISLAND used their filmic space to envision a world outside of patriarchal oppression, and THE VELVET VAMPIRE and GROUP MARRIAGE dove headlong into the shifting sexual mores of the 1970s to visualize women’s expansive desire, THE WORKING GIRLS does not share its predecessors’ penchant for solutional filmmaking. Indeed, it steadfastly avoids resolutions. Valuing persistence and realism over hopeful utopianism, the film offers a harsh reflection of Rothman’s professional struggle as a woman filmmaker in Hollywood. […] THE WORKING GIRLS stands out not only as Rothman’s most personal film and the one she prefers over others, but ultimately her most melancholic.” –Alicia Kozma, THE CINEMA OF STEPHANIE ROTHMAN: RADICAL ACTS IN FILMMAKING
Sun, Feb 26 at 6:45 and Wed, Mar 1 at 6:45.
Mike Nichols
WORKING GIRL
1988, 113 min, 35mm
“The continuing effects of second-wave feminism on the lives of men and women in American society are central to Nichols’ movies in the 1980s and 1990s. Like SILKWOOD, WORKING GIRL presents an ambitious, morally upright, and sexy heroine, one who proves to the men she encounters (and to the women aping men) that it was not only women that needed to change if their fragile place in the workforce was to be secured. The voice of Staten Island native Tess (Melanie Griffith) goes unheard in the corporate world of 1980s Manhattan, and so she conducts her own Eliza Doolittle transformation by listening to cassette recordings and dressing herself up in her boss’s finery. […] [The film was] Nichols’ first bona fide blockbuster since THE GRADUATE, and evinces a very Nicholsian narrative in which avowed gender and verbal performances are the catalysts for events.” –Kyle Stevens, MIKE NICHOLS: SEX, LANGUAGE, AND THE REINVENTION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM
Mon, Feb 27 at 6:30, Wed, Mar 1 at 9:00, and Thurs, Mar 2 at 9:00.
