Bette Gordon

The director of the underground classics Variety and Luminous Motion speaks with Evangeline Morphos. Those and other films by Gordon are screening this weekend at Anthology Film Archives.

When I first got to know Christine Vachon we both sort of bonded over our mutual love of terrible paperback true crime books that usually had photographs in the middle, sort of appalling photographs.

Documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim invites viewers into both Al Jazeera, Arab-language satellite television, and CentCom, the US military news center, for two very different media portrayals of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

Forget Batman and Spider-man. If you’ve heard of R. Crumb, you may also be aware of Harvey Pekar. Before camcorders, before webcams, before nonstop reality TV there was Pekar and his homegrown autobiographical comic-book series American Splendor. 

“The more you put yourself out there, the more hurt you can become, but the rewards grow exponentially. Why not live on the edge a bit? For all we know, this is our only time out.”

Bette Gordon discusses all of the ways that East is East succeeds as a great work of cinema: it’s funny, warm, fresh and complex, with a outstanding performances to boot.

The recent works of Bette Gordon and Catherine Texier both draw from similar themes, primarily women as heroines and the sexuality of mothers.

Who among us doesn’t harbor pipe dreams? You don’t have to be a down-and-out drunk at Harry’s bar, aka “The No Chance Saloon,” to hang onto the kind of delusions that keep us going day-to-day. 

Zoë Wanamaker’s performance in Sophocles’s Electra brought New York audiences to their feet every night in 1999. Catharsis never had it so good. Film director Bette Gordon talks to the legend.

We all want unconditional love in our lives, but no one wants it more than Vincent Gallo, who plays Billy Brown in his emotionally fraught film Buffalo 66.

In Breaking the Waves, von Trier’s style is more like reportage, but equally as relentless.

Director Mike Figgis composed his film, Leaving Las Vegas, like a jazz score. It soars and crashes, and soars again.

“I never give them archetypes. I’m totally anti-Jungian, symbols are intellectual. Emotions are universal, not symbolic. So that’s where I try and keep it, with the emotions.”

Filmmaker and BOMB contributing editor Bette Gordon speaks to acclaimed director Mike Leigh upon the release of his award-winning 1993 film, Naked.

Tom DiCillo speaks with Bette Gordon on directing his first film, Johnny Suede, and being one of the first to discover Brad Pitt and Catherine Keneer.

Cinematic legend Al Pacino discusses Heathcote Williams’s The Local Stigmatic, commercialism, and rehearsal techniques.

Upon the release of Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder’s film about Claus and Sonny Von Bulow, he speaks to Bette Gordon about the many meanings and incarnations of evil, and the “dramatic possibilities” of fiction.

Cronenberg talks to Bette Gordon about the supernatural and horrific qualities of his filmography.

Filmmaker Diane Kurys, a French woman directing in English, discusses the unsexiness of onscreen sex, the possibility of loving two people at the same time, and other improbabilities.

In conversation, filmmakers Bette Gordon and Karyn Kay pinpoint women’s desire and experience in and out of film.