BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES, AND SADOMASOCHISM
dir. Michelle Handelman, 1995
72 mins. United States.
In English.
SATURDAY, JUNE 04 – 7:00 PM (w/ Q&A)
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 08 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 17 – 11:55 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29 – 10:00 PM
In honor of Pride Month, Spectacle presents Michelle Handelman’s 1995 documentary BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES, AND SADOMASOCHISM. Amid the conflagration of obscenity trials that has come to characterize the artistic zeitgeist of the 1990s, BLOODSISTERS was the subject of a protest by the American Family Association for featuring “naked women beating each other with whips, blood dripping from bare breasts, and gross body piercings.”
BLOODSISTERS is in fact an inimitable historical document on a small lesbian niche ostracized by their own community. The San Francisco leather dyke scene represents a vanguard in the debate between pleasure and radical-feminist body politic. These women resist theoretical brooding, instead choosing to wax poetically and hedonistically on submission and domination. Their mettle is clearly of the gothic and romantic school, rather than the sobering naturalism of the second-wave. Whether this is a shocking or arousing proposition is for the uninitiated viewer to discover for themselves.
Handelman will be present on the Saturday June 4 screening for a post-screening Q&A, after which she will be giving away a copy of the film’s 2021 Kino Lorber rerelease. DVD extras include audio commentary, one hour of outtakes and deleted scenes, and more.
MICHELLE HANDELMAN is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, whose work has encompassed independent film, visual art, and performance. Her recent screen-based works – including DORIAN, A CINEMATIC PERFUME (2009) and IRMA VEP, THE LAST BREATH (2013) – have been exhibited at Georges Pompidou Centre, ICA London, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and American Film Institute. She is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City.