Variety

Bette Gordon

Bette Gordon is an indie theatre pioneer and long-time Tribeca resident. She was part of a movement which also included people like Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie, Amos Poe and Nick Zedd — a generation of filmmakers that has come to be dubbed “No Wave.”She directed her first experimental film: “Empty Suitcases.” She got involved with the Collective for Living Cinema, the neighborhood’s first cinema, which was located in a loft on White Street. She did her part as ticket taker, projectionist, and educator, and got an NEH grant for a series of panels called “Towards a Living Cinema”. She also finished her 16mm experimental short “Empty Suitcases,” portions of which are excerpted in “Blank City.”Critical acclaim for this innovative film made possible what is (to date) her best known movie, the 1984 feature “Variety.” More “Taxi Driver” than Stan Brakhage, Gordon joins feminist critics like Laura Mulvey and others in extending that attraction to danger to the art of cinema itself. She is a faculty member from 1991 at Columbia University School of the Arts, and vice chair of the film division from 2000.