What does it mean for a film addressing overtly political themes to remain apolitical?
Eileen G’Sell
Eileen G’Sell is a poet and critic with recent contributions to Jacobin, Poetry, The Baffler, and The Hopkins Review. Her second volume of poetry, Francofilaments, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books. In 2023, she received the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Posted inFilm
The Silencing of Female Sexuality Champion Shere Hite
Director Nicole Newnham chronicles the rise, fall, and disappearance of the iconic feminist sexologist.
Posted inFilm
The Commodification of American Motherhood
How to Have an American Baby exposes a Chinese business that cares only for the bottom line, and a private US hospital system more than happy to serve patients paying cash.
Posted inFilm
New Doc Updates Virginia Woolf’s Gender-Bending Orlando
Paul B. Preciado’s film prizes creative passion over pathology, and trades individual trauma for collective and individual transcendence.
Posted inArt
Crowning the Queens of Hip-Hop Culture
Women artists’ contributions shine in The Culture, an exhibition about hip hop at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Posted inFilm
The Trailblazing Black Model Who Changed the Fashion Industry
To say that Bethann Hardison has contributed to racial progress in one of the world’s most whitewashed realms is an understatement. But a new documentary about her life might have gone a step too far.
Posted inFilm
Kokomo City’s Bawdy, Unflinching Feminist Message
D. Scott’s documentary on Black trans sex workers is as sunny as it is sobering, a film that refuses to moralize.
Posted inFilm
Maybe Some Artists Don’t Make It For a Reason
Make Me Famous, a new documentary about East Village artist Edward Brezinski, does little to prove that its subject should have risen to the top.
Posted inFilm
If Only Lynch/Oz Had More of a Brain
Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary would seem a must-see for fans of the yellow brick road or the Great Northern Hotel of Twin Peaks. If only.
Posted inFilm
Netflix Documentary Exposes the Criminalization of Sexual Assault Victims
Victim/Suspect reveals the extent to which women are vulnerable to pressures to take the blame, and even serve time, for their own violent rapes.
Posted inFilm
The A-Lot-Ness of Little Richard
Little Richard: I Am Everything honors the a-lot-ness that made him a 20th-century pioneer, while acknowledging the bumps along the trail he blazed.
Posted inArt
Depravity and Delights in Nicole Eisenman’s Prints
If God (and the Devil) are in the details, the craft of printmaking proves a powerful outlet for exploring Eisenman’s most enduring themes.
