WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
GILDA
With David Thomson, and his new book, Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire
Sunday, March 10 at 6 pm | Members $11 | Public $16
Join David Thomson on a retrospective of perhaps the darkest noir, Gilda, in relation to his new book, Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire. The subtext reads, Male Supremacy, Gay Resistance, and Real Women (At Last) in the Movies. See Gilda like never before in this fascinating, and frustrating, tour of gay subversion and female oppression in American movies.
"Gilda, are you decent?” Rita Hayworth tosses her hair back and slyly responds, “Me?” in one of the great star entrances in movie history. Gilda, directed by Charles Vidor, features a sultry Hayworth in her most iconic role, as the much-lusted-after wife of a criminal kingpin (George Macready), as well as the former flame of his bitter henchman (Glenn Ford), and she drives them both mad with desire and jealousy. An ever-shifting battle of the sexes set on a Buenos Aires casino’s glittering floor and in its shadowy back rooms, Gilda is among the most sensual of all Hollywood noirs. (USA, 1946, 110 min., NR, English | Dir. Charles Vidor)
Film can make us want things we can not have. But, while sometimes rapturous, the interaction of onscreen beauty and private desire speaks to a crisis in American culture, one that pits delusions of male supremacy against feminist awakening and the spirit of gay resistance. Combining criticism, his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, and memoir, David Thomson examines how film has found the fault lines in traditional masculinity and helped to point the way past it toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person desiring others. Ranging from advertising to pornography, Rudolph Valentino to Moonlight, Rock Hudson to Call Me By Your Name, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant to Phantom Thread, Thomson shows us the art and the artists we love under a new light. He illuminates the way in which film as art, entertainment, and business has been a polite cover for a kind of erotic séance. And he makes us see how the way we watch our movies is a kind of training for how we try to live.
