Maybe I'll Get to Take Pictures of My Bread
+ the forgotten filmography of Joan Micklin Silver
Last week I wrote a guest newsletter for the Ann Friedman Weekly. If you would like to read about aquatic cinema and my mad descent into the Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums of All Time, you can check it out here.
In this issue: Hester Street (1975, 91 minutes, free on YouTube), Between the Lines (1977, 101 minutes, free on YouTube and Tubi), Crossing Delancey (1988, 97 minutes, available to rent)
Maybe I'll Get to Take Pictures of My Bread
The scant filmography of Joan Micklin Silver is one of my little film sadnesses. I think a lot of people didn’t hear about Silver until she died in 2020 because she didn’t make many films, and until recently they were somewhat hard to find. I only learned about her because, four years ago, the arthouse-y theater in my neighborhood was showing the restoration of Between the Lines (1977). I immediately fell in love with it, then went on to watch Silver’s other significant movies: Hester Street (1975) and Crossing Delancey (1988).
It seems wholly unfair that Silver didn’t get to make more movies and that there were so few directors like her — not just because we could have gotten so many wonderful films, but also because there are so many stories that were just never captured. There are millions of hours that detail how white American men experienced the 1970s. So much widely available, beautifully shot, and critically acclaimed proof of their time, their labor, their intelligence. That is a unique privilege unavailable to most other types of people, including Silver’s generation of women.
All of Silver’s movies deal very directly with the how women have sacrificed to maintain heterosexual relationships and create lives for themselves, both at home and in the workplace. In Hester Street, Gitl (played by Carol Kane!) has followed her husband to New York from Russia. Yankel, now going by Jake, has fully embraced a new American identity, and mocks both his wife’s attachment to tradition as well as her growing curiosity in American fashion and culture. In Crossing Delancey, set nearly a century later, Izzy works at a bookstore and falls for a poetry-spewing writer she hosts at an author reading, only for him to reveal he has no desire for a true partner, just an assistant. It’s easier to draw a line from Hester Street to Crossing Delancey: both are romances wrestling with Jewish ethnic identity in New York City.
Between the Lines takes place in Boston, with characters that have replaced ethnic identity and community with cynicism and work. When we meet the staff of the alternative newspaper The Backbay Mainline, it’s clear the paper’s heyday is over. Revenue is down, a media magnate is looking to purchase the paper to fill it with advertising, and the staff’s idealism has been fully eviscerated after years of bad pay and long hours. It’s an ensemble cast (the trailer for the restoration would have you believe Jeff Goldblum is the star but he’s mostly comic relief) but staff photographer Abbie is, at the very least, my main character.
Abbie is in an on-again, off-again relationship with editor Harry. Her relationship mirrors that of her friend and coworker Laura’s, whose partner, Michael, has just left the paper. Allegedly, it’s to pursue a writing career, but mostly he just talks about it while Laura works, cooks, cleans, and feeds his dog. The refrain we hear throughout the movie, not just from Abbie and Laura but from the entire staff, is how they’re all going to make major changes. Soon. If the paper gets bought, they promise each other, they’ll all quit together. They’ll pursue the ambitions they have sacrificed, and not be held back by a workplace increasingly at odds with their values. And both Abbie and Laura swear they’re going to also change their relationships, that they’re not going to sit under the thumbs of their boyfriends.
Neither boyfriend in Between the Lines is particularly evil — in fact Harry is incredibly likable. In another film he’d be the outright protagonist: a tortured artist whose star and idealism has faded, his talent and charm excusing his bouts of narcissism, his messy apartment and philandering just another sign of his untethered male genius. He and Michael are just selfish, and do not always want an equal partner but a #ThanksForTyping caretaker. As Abbie tells Harry, “You want me to follow you off to Woodstock, or wherever writers with hay fever go. You’ll be a great writer and I’ll make bread. Maybe I’ll get to take pictures of my bread. Maybe I’ll get to take pictures of you being a great writer.” Who the hell said we’re not soup, indeed.
There’s a hang-out quality to Between the Lines that makes it deeply rewatchable, aided by the strong cast. Each time I return to the film I’m increasingly moved by a scene where Lynn, the soft-spoken but nervy admin, stands up to the magnate who wants to buy the paper. You can see the exact moment on her face when she realizes her fellow reporters, despite their bravado, are not going to back her up. When the movie ends most of the cast is doing exactly what they were doing at the beginning — exactly what they said they’d never do again. It feels sad, but mostly it feels true. And I don’t know whether this is actually in the movie, or if this is just what I’m bringing to it, but there is some hope that eventually all of them (especially Abbie and Laura) will grow up and finally break out of their cycles.
Silver’s movies are a microhistory of the types of choices urban women have had to make. Gitl trying to shape her domestic life in a completely unfamiliar city, Abbie and Laura figuring out what they should have to sacrifice at work for their relationships, Izzy struggling to decide how much her work should be part of her identity and love life. We often see these stories but never from these perspectives. It’s very easy to imagine a Hester Street that is just about Yankel and his struggles to become an American man, and Gitl as the incessant hanger-on from the “old country” that represents everything Yankel hates (something between The Godfather Part II and John Williams’ Stoner). Same with Between the Lines — a genius male writer pursuing his left-brained female coworker amidst a declining leftist politic and the rise of 80s commercialism. How is that not already a Charlie Kaufman movie?
It’s true that there is unconventionality in these movies simply because they’re female stories from a female perspective, but there’s so much more going on in Silver’s work. Between the Lines has stuck with me for four years not because a woman directed it but because it captures the petty reality of office dynamics with a clarity that is both devastating and thrilling. There’s the brightness Bruno Kirby brings playing a new reporter who is convinced all his dreams are about to come true as his jaded coworkers become increasingly maniacal; the easygoing friendship that exists almost entirely in the background between Lynn and the character played by Joe Morton in his first film role. It’s an impressive feat of ensemble-making, especially in a 100-minute movie.
Silver’s work defies the popular narrative of 70s low-budget auteur filmmaking as a masculine endeavor, and perhaps that’s what’s made it particularly easy to exclude from the canon. I recently listened to Jamie Loftus’ “Aack Cast!,” a podcast about the “Cathy” comic strip and its creator Cathy Guisewite, and it really brought Silver’s work into focus for me. These are boomer women attempting to live out their politics at a time when gender roles were shifting dramatically. Although many women’s lives became better, few became easier. Silver’s films, and I expect her own professional life, are representative of this struggle. It is more than a shame that Silver’s filmography is so brief, that it is unsurprising that a woman of her talents and generation did not get to make more work. It’s a mistake that we’ve continued to make, and a phenomenon I’ll keep exploring here, until we stop making it.