Steeped in noir and suffused with paranoia, this season has been programmed to coincide with the rerelease of Bette Gordon’s subversive underground hit Variety (1983), screening here from 11 Aug. Variety follows Christine, an aspiring writer, who finds unexpected liberation when she takes a job selling tickets at a porn cinema in downtown NY.

Described by Gordon as ‘a story about looking’, the film offers a nuanced reflection on the nature of the cinematic gaze through challenging and inverting the conventions of noir – reversing the traditional gender roles of the stalker and the stalked, the watcher and the watched.

From Antonioni’s countercultural masterpiece on the act of seeing and image-making Blow-Up (1966), to the later De Palma neo-noir it inspired – Blow Out (1981), this season revisits pillars of the surveillance and thriller canon, in which voyeurism itself becomes the focus of perhaps the most naturally voyeuristic of the arts – cinema.

---