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films, Sally Potter's, the Laura Mulvey/Peter Wollen collaborations. I've come to admire and enjoy some of these films very much. And yet, for the most part, they're not widely accessible to audiences.
Working Girls
seems based on an awareness of how women have traditionally functioned in commercial film, but it seems to have the potential for communicating very widely, especially to men who need to reconsider how they think about gender. Is that a goal you had in mind?
Borden:
Yes. After
Born in Flames,
I realized a lot about how the structure of a movie affects an audience. That movie was structured the way it was for various reasons: lack of money, having to shoot things over five years as opposed to being able to do it all at one time. A lot of the complaints I got about
Born in Flames
I got complaints about everythinghad to do with the structure. People felt it should have been more of a story. They found it hard to understand. Also, I was trying to reach black women and various other groups of women. I think I accomplished that to a degree, but the film had limited access because of the structure: it got shown mostly in places where many of the people I wanted to reach don't go.
When I started
Working Girls,
I wanted to begin with a whole different aesthetic that had to do with telling a story very simply. I didn't want to make a voyeuristic film, but I wanted to create curiosity in the viewer,
almost
voyeurism, about what it's actually like to be in a house of prostitution. I wanted to convey that as directly as possible and not exclude the possibility of the male eye. I wanted to make a film that would not deny men visual access to anything and yet would not be an erotic stimulation for them.
There are all these famous stories about
Not a Love Story
[1982], the documentary on pornography, which I didn't like at all. Supposedly, it's an attack on pornography. It shows pornographic footage, then presents women and men talking about how bad the footage is. At the end of the film this one stripper is leaping around on the beach, completely "unified in herself" again. But, in fact, the daytime audience for the filmfor all its political bullshitwould be single men, who obviously could ignore the bullshit and deal with the film on a voyeuristic level.
MacDonald:
I disliked that film because it pretended that pornography and sex shows are simply exploitation
by
men
of
women. It seems obvious to me that these institutions are systems of
mutual
exploitation based on a whole set of cultural values and expectations.
Borden:
See, that's exactly what
Working Girls
is about. Everyone assumes that the men have the power because they have the money. And that, therefore, the women are victimized. But it's really an equal exchange and a very parallel one. And in
Working Girls
I wanted to show that. Except for the session with Paul the musician and maybe a little bit