Hello, my name is Justin the Cluiter. I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And today, we're talking about Lena Vertmuller,

the director of swept away, love and anarchy, the seduction of Mimi, the female art house

filmmaker of the 70s. The first woman to ever be

nominated for Best Director Oscar. A foreign filmmaker who is impersonated not once but twice on Saturday

Night Live by Lorraine Newman. That's how well known she was in the 70s. And now pretty much

nothing.

No.

Kino recently put out like a Blu-ray box set, but as far as like critical writings about her work, not that much of it.

And I was very curious about that going in because you and I had never seen any of her movies before this week.

And there's so much hunger, there's so much appetite these days for female filmmakers and for kind of reclaiming the history of unacknowledged women directors.

Why not her?

Especially that swept away was not only super popular, but it prompted a Madonna Guy Richie remake in the 2000s.

And usually when you say swept away, most people go, oh, yeah, that Madonna movie. And you're

like, no, no, no, this is the original one that made such an uproar when it came out. I had never seen any of her movies. You had never seen any of her movies. And was there a reason for that? Like, I don't know. I mean, she's somebody who went into eclipse, I think. The film she was making in the 80s and 90s were, by most accounts,

not very good. And she just doesn't seem to have a lot of champions anymore. She's somebody whose

name is sort of mentioned kind of in passing, yeah, impassly, respectfully, but not much more.

And she's still alive. She's in her 90s. So at the same time, there hasn't been that reclamation

when someone has passed away, even though that there was like a documentary about her that came out a few still alive. She's in her 90s. So at the same time, there hasn't been that reclamation when

someone has passed away, even though that there was like a documentary about her that came out a few

years ago. And last year, the quad cinema when it reopened in New York, I think started with

Alina Vermuller retrospective. So there's a bit of movement in that direction. So I saw three of her best known movies this week. I had a bit of a

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