#cinema
Barbara Caspar
Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? (2007), Jessica Andres and Brenna McGuire
Film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon.
A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice.
And with her appearance in several conceptual art videos in the ’70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos and her piercings, Acker was also performance artist, proto riot grrl, and living link to the transgressive authors of the ’50s and ’60s U.S. and French experimental fiction scenes.
Acker died of breast cancer in 1997 and now, just over ten years later, Caspar has made a film that captures the essence of both Acker the writer and Acker the person while arguing convincingly for the continuing relevance of her work today.
(Scott Macaulay)
At the beginning it was the idea of building a small arts library. Then, little by little, the commitment to share it.
Choice, preference, ignorance, evidence, all assumed.
A desire to discover, an encouragement to remember. Sometimes.
︎ ︎ ︎
Subscribe to our newsletter here to get the last updates.
If you’d like to be featured on shotnlust.com or to add/modify credit, please use this contact form or send us an Email.
All rights for materials presented on shotnlust.com belong to the artists and are for non-commercial and/or educational use only.
Video La Salamandre (1971) Alain Tanner, Bulle Ogier
shotnlust copyright © All rights reserved.