An avant-garde exploration of a woman's life.
EN
“Invoking the repressed facets of the collective history of the cinema and mobilising contemporary feminist theory, The Gold Diggers sets out to redress the balance – to create new stories and generate a space for new forms of female heroism, adventure and pleasure. For instance, in one of the central episodes in the film Ruby walks out of a theater performance of the psychoanalytic drama starring herself as ‘daughter’. [...] Later, in a revised version of the above mentioned scene (filmed from the vantage point of the star) Ruby refuses to play her part on stage. So, not only does The Gold Diggers focus on the desire of the female spectator, but the film refuses to privilege the controlling polarity between the ‘male gaze’ and its specular feminine object. Indeed, there is a sense in which the simultaneous evocation of the archive of the classic cinema and Ruby’s concomitant refusal to ‘love’ the camera, invokes Constance Penley’s suggestion that although the classic cinema may ‘[...] ‘aim’ to construct a transcendental subject [but] it must necessarily fail, subverted by the presence of desire in vision’.”
Louise Parsons1
“I see this film as a musical describing a female quest. Making it has demanded asking the same questions during the working process as the film endeavours to ask: about the connections between gold, money and women; about imagery in the unconscious and its relationship to the power of cinema; looking at childhood and memory and seeing the history of cinema itself as our collective memory of how we see ourselves and how we women are seen. Working with two female central roles meant continuously asking how can I build/find characters and images of women that will serve our intelligence and mirror the complexities of our struggles. The feature film format sets up its own expectations in terms of what it must offer, which made a useful discipline to work with and learn from and also to push against where it seemed necessary to create a tension with the genre.”
Sally Potter2
- 1Louise Parsons, “An analysis of The Gold Diggers by Sally Potter: Feminist Film, Julia Kristeva and Revolutionary Poetics” (doct. diss. The University of Leeds, 1994).
- 2Pam Cook, “The Gold Diggers,” Framework, no. 24 (1984).
