Women Filmmakers: Carrie Rickey and Susan Seidelman at B&N Philadelphia

We're very excited to welcome film critic Carrie Rickey, author of A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, and filmmaker Susan Seidelman, author of Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls into Barnes & Noble - Philadelphia in Philadelphia, PA on Monday, September 9th at 6pm for a discussion surrounding their books and women in film, touching on pioneers such as Elaine May and Barbara Streisand.

Carrie Rickey's A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda is the first major biography of the French filmmaker hailed by Martin Scorsese as “one of the Gods of cinema.”

Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls is a funny and insightful first-person look into the story of the trailblazing movie director of the 80s and 90s whose fearless punk drama, “Smithereens” became the first American indie film to compete at Cannes, and smash hit "Desperately Seeking Susan" led to a four-decade career in film.

We ask that all attendees register for a ticket through Eventbrite, and purchase their copy of the book at the Barnes and Noble Philadelphia location.

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For Seated Tickets: Limited quantity is available and will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis. Purchase of a ticket guarantees entrance to the event for the discussion and signing. However, this ticket may not necessarily guarantee a seat at the event, as later arrivals may be placed in a line behind the seated audience.

For Standing Room-Only Tickets: Limited quantity is available and will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis. Purchase of a ticket guarantees entrance to the event for the discussion and signing. Ticket holders will be granted a standing view from behind the seated audience -- some views may be more limited/obstructed than others.

GUIDELINES

• Please arrive on time according to your ticket in order to secure your seat in the event space. Late arrivals may only have access to standing room and may not have the opportunity to enter the event space.
• The exact time at which the event ends will be determined on the day. To avoid disappointment, we strongly advise you to arrive on time for the event.

• All event guidelines are subject to change.

• If you have any additional questions, please can call the store directly at: (267) 234-9790.

• Barnes & Noble may cancel this event at any time with or without notice to the ticket holders.

Please note that Eventbrite is the only authorized dealer for this event.

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About Carrie Rickey

Born in Los Angeles, Carrie Rickey is an award-winning film critic, art critic, and film historian. She was the film critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty-five years and has also written for Artforum, Art in America, Film Comment, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Politico. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia.

About A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda

Over the course of her sixty-five-year career, the longest of any female filmmaker, Agnès Varda (1928–2019) wrote and directed some of the most acclaimed films of her era, from her tour de force Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), a classic of modernist cinema, to the beloved documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) four decades later. She helped to define the French New Wave, inspired an entire generation of filmmakers, and was recognized with major awards at the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice Film Festivals, as well as an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards.

In this lively biography, former Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey explores the “complicated passions” that informed Varda’s charmed life and indelible work. Rickey traces Varda’s three remarkable careers—as still photographer, as filmmaker, and as installation artist. She explains how Varda was a pioneer in blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, using the latest digital technology and carving a path for women in the movie industry. She demonstrates how Varda was years ahead of her time in addressing sexism, abortion, labor exploitation, immigrant rights, and race relations with candor and incisiveness. She makes clear Varda’s impact on contemporary figures like Ava DuVernay, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, the Safdie brothers, and Martin Scorsese, who called her one of the Gods of cinema. And she delves into Varda’s incredibly rich social life with figures such as Harrison Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Andy Warhol, and her nearly forty-year marriage to the celebrated director Jacques Demy.

A Complicated Passion is the vibrant biography that Varda, regarded by many as the greatest female filmmaker of all time, has long deserved.

About Susan Seidelman

Susan Seidelman, a graduate of NYU Grad Film School, began her career in the 1980s when Smithereens became the first American Independent film to be accepted into the Cannes Film Festival. Her next movie, Desperately Seeking Susan, starring Madonna and Rosanna Arquette, was a critical and commercial success. She has directed dozens of other films starring actors such as Meryl Streep, Brooke Shields, and Sally Field, as well as the first four episodes of Sex and the City. She lives in New Jersey.

About Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls

Starting out in the mid-70s, a time when few women were directing movies, Susan was determined to become a filmmaker. She longed to tell stories about the unrepresented characters she wanted to see on screen: unconventional women in unusual circumstances, needing to express themselves and maintain their autonomy.

Her genre-blending films reflect a passion for classic Hollywood storytelling, mixed with a playful New Wave spirit, informed by her years living in downtown NYC.

Seidelman continued to shape American pop culture well into the nineties, directing the pilot of the iconic TV series “Sex And The City,” focusing her sharp lens on the changing place of women in American society and helping to fundamentally reshape our self-image in ways that are still felt today.

Raised in the safe cocoon of 1960s suburbia, Susan Seidelman wasn’t a misfit, an oddball, or an outlier. She was a “good-girl” with a little bit of “bad” hidden inside. A restless teenager, she dreamed of escape and reinvention, a theme that would play out in her films as well as in her own life. Because she loved stories, a high school guidance counselor suggested she become a librarian, but she had her sights set further afield. In 1973, she left the Philly suburbs, enrolled at NYU’s burgeoning graduate film school and moved to NYC’s Lower East Side. There, she found herself in the right place at the right time. New York City was falling apart, but out of that chaos came a burst of creative energy whose effects are still felt in American pop culture today. Downtown became a vibrant playground where film, music, performance and graffiti art cross-pollinated and where Seidelman chronicled the lives of the colorful misfits, oddballs, dreamers and schemers she met there.

It’s all in DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING. Seidelman not only has a keen perspective on the times she’s lived through — from her Twiggy-obsessed girlhood, through the Women’s Lib movement of the early 70s, the punk scene of the late 70s, Madonna-mania of the 80s, to the dot-com “greed is good” 90s, and beyond—she tells great stories.