Seduction: The Cruel Woman (West Germany, 1985, Monika Treut, Elfi Mikesch) - Wanda, the heroine ofSeduction: The Cruel Woman, goes around smashing sexual stereotypes and social taboos with icy self-possession and a mysteriously satisfied smile. She has flowing dark hair, the glamorous, brightly made-up face of a Barbie doll, and a Tallulah Bankhead voice with which she growls orders at her several female lovers. A businesswoman as well as a dominatrix, Wanda purrs at a male journalist who has come to interview her about the opening of her new 'gallery,' where flesh is whipped in public performances and where private, slavish fantasies are fulfilled. 'It is my profession, being cruel,' Wanda tells the reporter. 'Your profession is writing. That is not exactly harmless, is it?'
Written and directed by the West German film makers Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut, Seduction is very loosely inspired by Venus in Furs, the 1869 novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the very man for whom masochism was named. The setting is transferred to the present, and the novel's theme of see-sawing male-female domination is transmuted to the power plays among Wanda and her jealous lesbian lovers...
(from the New York Times)
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The fall series will showcase rarely exhibited films that took art-house audiences of New York City and West Berlin by storm during the period of 1968-1989. Based on archival research, this series looks at what audiences at the time were watching and how it formed their thinking on the politics of sex and gender. Program notes based on the films' exhibition histories in NYC and West Berlin will be provided at each screening.
Free and open to the public
Parking $3 in Core West Parking Structure