Spectacle and Women Make Movies, the celebrated non-profit organization and distributor of independent film and video by and about women, are proud to host a new series of collaboratively programmed screenings that will delve widely and deeply into WMM’s diverse catalog, showcasing noted classics and underscreened gems, including both works of radical feminism and documentary journalism by established and emerging filmmakers.

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 26th – 8PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

MADAME X: EINE ABSOLUTE HERRSCHEIN
(Madame X: An Absolute Ruler)
Dir. Ulrike Ottinger, 1977

Madame X, the cruelest and most successful pirate of the Far Eastern seas, puts out a call to all women seeking a world full of gold, love, and adventure to join her crew and become marauders on the high seas. But even after their first pitiless attack on a yacht carrying hilarious caricatures of bourgeois male hegemony leaves them awash in plunder, the increasing assertion of the new pirates’ identities and desires leads an already chaotic journey into absolute bedlam.

This first feature effort by Ottinger – whose work in both fiction and documentary has since won wide acclaim – is an exhilarating experience both for its righteous appropriation of a genre often rife with casual misogyny and for the director’s irresistible invitation to revel in the visual beauty and surreal discontinuity of her film’s world. An opportunity to see this rarely-screened work is not to be missed!