THE WORKING GIRLS

After Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal came out, Stephanie Rothman understood that her life was going to be all about cinema, and that she was going to take up filmmaking. Rothman is known for her Exploitation Films, a choice made out of necessity: on one side, her language was going to be female and nonconformist, on the other, she had very small budgets.
To illustrate and understand this and other films by Stephanie Rothman, we’ll look at words from the filmmaker herself: “I’m very tired of the whole tradition in western art in which women are always presented nude and men aren’t. I’m not going to dress women and undress men — that would be a form of tortured vengeance. But I am certainly going to undress men, and the result is probably a more healthy environment because one group of people presenting another in a vulnerable, weaker, more servile position is always distorted.”