Slideshow
SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS
U.S., 1987
Directed by Sheila McLaughlin
With Lois Weaver, Sheila Dabney, Ed Bowes, Peggy Shaw
Music by John Zorn
Approx. 94 min. DCP.
Agatha (Sheila Dabney) tends to her girlfriend Jo’s (Lois Weaver) apartment in 80s downtown Manhattan while Jo is away on business for her film. As she reorganizes the dusty bookshelves, Agatha discovers Jo’s old diaries, dishing the sordid details of her many (male) former love affairs and sending Agatha on a tailspin through streets soaked with Lynchian day suspense. Jo is walking awfully close to her producer, eating at diners and making out with strange men — or is she? John Zorn’s moody, energetic score keeps you on your toes. A Film Forum premiere in 1987.
Reviews
“SHEILA MCLAUGHLIN’S 1987 UNDERGROUND PSYCHO-THRILLER…DESERVES ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE AMONG THE FINER EROTIC THRILLERS OF THIS ERA...
A perfect synecdoche of downtown Manhattan in the 1980s; street art blooms on every brick wall and vacant lot, lofts are cheap and plentiful, and the Meatpacking District still lives up to its name... Even John Zorn’s jazzy score, recalling 1950s Bebop and detective shows, soars above the tired tropes of midnight saxophones over rain-slicked cobblestones.”
– Caroline Golum, Screen Slate
“Where Sheila McLaughlin’s 1987 lesbian-feminist film SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS goes, heated discussions follow. A film forged within political, social, and theoretical debates around feminism, women’s filmmaking, lesbian identity, and desire, SEEING THINGS tackles head-on issues that were animating lesbian-feminist thinking in its contemporary setting. The film doesn’t, however, provide simple answers to the questions of power, gender, desire, and paranoia that it raises. Instead, SEEING THINGS stays with the tensions and contradictions around these issues, giving form to them in ways that have proven, over time, both alluring and troubling.”
– Jacob Engelberg, Club des Femmes