Film
Early Shorts Program
- 7PM
Dir. Penelope Spheeris
1972, 20min, 35mm
Penelope Spheeris (The Decline of Western Civilization) documents the relationship between her lesbian sister and her transgender lover in this intimate look at queer identity in 1970s Los Angeles.
Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive
Dirs. Bette Gordon & James Benning
1973, 7min, 16mm
Bette Gordon’s collaboration with James Benning is both a portrait of two women and a structuralist study of filmic composition.
Preserved by Anthology Film Archive with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow
1978, 17min, 35mm
The future Oscar-winner’s Columbia MFA thesis film is a simultaneously propulsive and cerebral dissection of cinematic violence.
Dir. Julie Dash
1975, 7min, 16mm
The breakthrough work by Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) is a dance film set to the music of Nina Simone.
Preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive
L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema is a project by UCLA Film & Television Archive developed as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.
Dir. Susan Seidelman
1976, 24min, 16mm
A woman has an extramarital affair on her thirtieth birthday in this award-winning student work by Smithereens director Susan Seidelman.
Courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Go to the movies just once a month and a BAM membership pays for itself.

Girlfriends director Claudia Weill explores the dilemma of “having it all.”

Elaine May’s black comedy masterpiece and an animated feminist fantasia by Faith Hubley.

Yvonne Rainer’s radical fusion of melodrama, performance art, and radical feminism.