Topic

Subcultures

Groups that define themselves against the middle, until the middle catches up.

2: in film
13:00: average
26 min: in total
51: across the network

Subcultures across the network →

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13:00

Paris Is Burning

Jennie Livingston · 1990

Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary filmed over seven years in New York City, centring on Black and Latino gay and transgender participants in the city’s ball scene. Directed by Jennie Livingston and edited by Jonathan Oppenheim, it combines vérité footage of balls with intimate interviews, letting subjects define terms like ‘house’, ‘shade’, and ‘realness’ on their own terms. It documents voguing’s origins, the formation of chosen families, and the material realities of poverty, AIDS, and transphobic violence. Funded through ten separate sources and shot on 16mm, it was awarded the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary in 1991 and added to the US National Film Registry in 2016.

13:00

Smithereens

Susan Seidelman · 1982

Susan Seidelman’s 1982 debut follows Wren, a young woman from New Jersey adrift in New York’s fading punk scene, as she prints fliers, mugs strangers, and cycles through men in pursuit of a life she cannot name. Shot in stark black-and-white, it observes her not with judgement or irony, but with forensic calm — treating identity as a series of transactions, not revelations.

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13:00

20th Century Women

Mike Mills · 2016

Set in 1979 Santa Barbara, Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women follows 15-year-old Jamie as his single mother Dorothea enlists two younger women — photographer Abbie and teenage friend Julie — to help raise him. Anchored by Annette Bening’s restrained performance, the film observes their overlapping lives with warmth and precision, treating feminism, illness, ageing and adolescence as lived conditions rather than themes. Shot by Sean Porter and edited by Leslie Jones, it moves at the pace of real conversation, building meaning through accumulation rather than climax.

13:00

24 Frames

Abbas Kiarostami · 2017

Abbas Kiarostami’s final film, 24 Frames, comprises twenty-four uncut, static shots — each ninety seconds long — observing nature, animals, and thresholds between interior and exterior. Beginning with animated movement superimposed on Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, it proceeds into real-world stillness, testing how much meaning resides in time, attention, and unmediated presence. Released posthumously at Cannes 2017, it is a rigorous, unsentimental essay on perception and impermanence.

13:00

3:10 to Yuma

Delmer Daves · 1957

Delmer Daves’ 1957 Western 3:10 to Yuma adapts Elmore Leonard’s taut short story into a study of obligation under pressure. Rancher Dan Evans agrees to escort outlaw Ben Wade to the 3:10 train for Yuma, facing ambush, betrayal, and his own wavering resolve. Shot by Charles Lawton Jr. with sun-bleached realism and scored sparingly by George Duning, the film builds suspense through pacing, performance, and moral granularity — not spectacle. It was preserved by the Library of Congress in 2012 for its cultural and aesthetic significance.

13:00

3 Women

Robert Altman · 1977

Robert Altman’s 1977 film 3 Women follows the uncanny merging of identities among a timid young woman, her garrulous roommate and a silent, pregnant artist in a sun-scorched California town. Built from a dream and shot with deliberate, unhurried precision, it uses repetition, reflection and improvisation to explore how selves are borrowed, performed and abandoned.