Just for You Girls. 1998. USA. Directed by MM Serra. 2 min. 16mm
Lady. 1993. USA. Directed by Ira Sachs. 28 min. 16mm
Naughty Little Peeptoe. 2000. New Zealand. Directed by Garth Maxwell, Peter Wells. 35 min. Digital
Mayhem. 1987. USA. Directed by Abigail Child. 20 min. 16mm
Program run time: 85 min
What does it mean to be feminine? What does it mean to be a woman? Are those two concepts even related? These works explore how femininity is shaped through costume, makeup, and the act of dressing up. MM Serra’s Just for You Girls explores the ways in which the construction of femininity intertwines with fashion and commerce. Garth Maxwell and Peter Wells’s Naughty Little Peeptoe, a portrait of shoe designer Doug George, is a testament to the joy of fetishism and queer resilience. The program also includes an early film by Ira Sachs, Lady, which follows an enigmatic redhead as she lives her life in New York City. Moving as fluidly between color and B&W as the central protagonist moves through identities, the film invites us to question the performance of it all. As Sachs said, “Is she a woman playing a man playing a woman, or more specifically, a lesbian playing a gay man playing a heterosexual woman?” Finally, Abigail Child's Mayhem “portrays a social order in chaos, blending noir conventions with an atmosphere of sexual tension, danger, violence and glamour, creating an image bank that examines how we learn about and use our bodies through the history of image-making.”