Cinderella (Ericka Beckman, 1986) (Patreon)

On the web page for this film, there's a pullquote from P. Adams Sitney, who declares Beckman "the most self-confident and aggressive stylist of the younger generation." One has to smile at a statement like this, since coming from Sitney it could just as easily be a backhanded compliment. I'm reminded of other aesthetes, such as Arthur Danto and Hilton Kramer, being forced during the 1980s to grapple with the likes of Jack Goldstein and (gulp) Kenny Scharf.

But there's a reason why we are returning to Beckman's echt-80s films, why Anthology Film Archives restored them and the New York Film Festival opted to give them a prime showcase this year. They exemplify a rare combination of postmodern democratic leveling of source material with a continued respect for the rigors of modernist composition and design. 

Yes, Cinderella, much like Beckman's earlier film You the Better, draws many of its primary aesthetic traits from children's television and, especially, game shows. But because her wry irony is fused with a sense of feminist purpose, Beckman retains a kind of didacticism that is near-Brechtian in its songcraft and its spare architectonics. Who else would recognize a homology between the black-box procedures of the experimental theatre and the early video gaming design of Tron? 

Beckman's Cinderella (Gigi Kalweit) is trapped at the Forge, tending an industrial fire. Gone is the domestic scene, replaced with a more classically Marxist conception of labor. In its own way, this is Beckman's nod to the shortcomings of the academic leftism of the period -- the Jamesons and the Aronowitzes -- who thought that the class struggle would liberate women automatically. But, with Mike Kelley's accordion-playing taskmaster in the background, Cinderella demonstrates that women are ensnared in a very special game. The factory, after all, is making Barbie dolls, and "capturing the prince" (marrying up) is Cinderella's clearest way to "win the game."

In retrospect, it seems clear that Beckman's work is cinema's closest analogue to the theoretically-driven feminist media work that has proven to be the art world's most lasting contribution from the 1980s. The "Pictures" artists, as they are sometimes called (from the name of a key exhibition at Buffalo's Hallwalls Gallery), these artists include familiar names: Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Richard Prince. Experimental cinema and the art world have long been seen as separate strands of practice, despite the obvious personal and intellectual connections between the two, but history has a way of correcting this. (Consider the fact that minimalism and structural film are now seen as inextricably linked.) I think it's now fairly obvious that Beckman was making "Pictures" art by other means.