Bette Gordon grew up watching New York City in black-and-white movies. When she moved there in the late ’70s, she was a visual artist and filmmaker at one of the worst and best times to do those things in the city. Reaganite politics had just led to major slashes in arts funding. Landlords kept buildings empty waiting for big-money buyers. Gordon, who grew up in Boston and had studied in Paris after she fell in love with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, would walk around the city looking for the underworld she had seen in films like Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948). “This city is a city of film noir,” she recalls when thinking back to that initial love for New York. “It’s a city with streets that you’ve seen and imagined, and now I inhabit those streets.”
Artists, musicians, photographers, filmmakers (Gordon included),, her 1983 neon-noir feature about a woman who takes a job as a ticket seller at a porn theatre, equal parts repelled and fascinated by the milieu in which she is enveloped. Written by punk author Kathy Acker, shot by future director Tom DiCillo, with music by composer John Lurie, and starring Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Luis Guzmán and Nan Goldin, is a who’s-who of 1980s avant-garde cool.
