Film Forum’s Sapph-o-Rama Begins Today

Launching today in New York: Sapph-o-Rama, Film Forum’s 30 film series of movies “exploring the eccentric, enduring, and genre-encompassing history of the Lesbian image in cinema”. The most perverse thing about this series is that it ends the day BEFORE Valentine’s Day. What’s up with that? There’s like two dozen potential date movies in here! Anyway, I’m not quite certain I’d have plugged the series necessarily, but that I’m an active fan of about half the movies they’re showing and thus I do.

Some I’d recommend in particular include The Killing of Sister George (1968); the beautiful modern vampire classic Daughters of Darkness (1971); Nicholas Ray’s campy Joan Crawford western Johnny Guitar (1954, which I liked so much I once named a play after it; the Doris Day musical Calamity Jane (1953); John Waters’ Desperate Living (1977); and the women’s prison pictures Caged (1950) and Caged Heat (1974). (The latter one is early Jonathan Demme!)

I’m sorry, I know those are also directed by dudes, but I can also recommend Nazimova’s Salome (1922); The Wild Party (1929) with Clara Bow; Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader (1999); Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996); and the Barbara Hammer/Maya Deren pairings.

Allow me to virtue signal and declaim that only a couple of those movies are ones that I initially saw at my wife’s instigation! Of those I haven’t seen, I am particularly interested in Christa Winslow’s 1931 Mädchen in Uniform and Ulrike Ottinger’s 1978 Madame X: An Absolute Ruler. Whew, boy, those Germans.

I sure do wish they were including some Lola Rock’N’Rolla but you can’t have it all, I guess.

For the full Sapph-o-Rama schedule and tickets go here.