For those in New York, Bette Gordon’s 1984 film Variety will be showing today at 5pm as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.

In Bette Gordon’s pioneering indie film about voyeurism from a female perspective, a young woman (played by Sandy McLeod) works as a ticket taker in a porn theater, and her curiosity leads her to shadow a male patron. Variety radically subverts the classic narrative mode of presenting stories from the perspective of the male gaze (exemplified by such films as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo), and in its place asserts the presence of female desire. Female director Bette Gordon subtly infuses the narrative with layers of ambiguity about the motives and movements of the female protagonist all the way through to the final image of the film.

Advance tickets are gone, but if you get there early, you might make it in.

April 29, 2009, 12:22pm