Two Films by Joan Braderman, screening at Spectacle, Brooklyn (image via Spectacle)
If personal essays are hard to pull off, personal video essays are possibly even harder. They are also rarer to come by, which is what makes this screening of strikingly original video essays at Williamsburg’s Spectacle theater extra special. Ranging from the 1980s to the 2000s, these “queer and kitschy” films are all directed by women: Barbara Hammer, Joan Braderman, and Kayuclia Brooke and Jane Cottis. Their work makes for an excellent combination, and if you have time (or want an escape), it’s worth seeing all three films, which are screening for the last time this Thanksgiving weekend.
To start things off, on Thursday, catch Brooke and Cottis’s Dry Kisses Only (1990), which probes the hidden lesbian histories of the Golden Age of Hollywood, from All About Eve to butch icon Katherine Hepburn. On Friday, Braderman has a double feature: her hilarious feminist film, Joan Does Dynasty (1986), for which she green-screened herself into the canonic TV show Dynasty; and Joan Sees Stars (1993), in which Braderman imagines various intimate meetings with Liz Taylor. To round things off, you might want to see Hammer’s retrospective at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art before seeing her 2000 classic History Lessons, which cobbles together archival footage of lesbian figures and history while imagining “a world in which lesbians are as omnipresent as white heterosexual cis men.”
When: Friday, November 24–Sunday, November 26
Where: Spectacle (124 South 3rd Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
More info here.
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