From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, Listening to Variety by Theo Rollason is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Listening To Variety by Theo Rollason. <a href=" vimeo.com/875640865 ">Watch here on Vimeo.

Theo Rollason is a freelance film critic based in London. They are particularly interested in writing about capitalism, gender and queerness, found footage, sci-fi, and the materiality of film. They recently completed an MA in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths. When they're not writing, Theo works as an archivist for the estate of Paula Rego, where their current project involves preserving and digitising the artist’s film and photo archives. 
 
"My initial interest in Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) was the involvement of the experimental writer Kathy Acker. Watching the film at Cinema Rediscovered, I was fascinated by the ways in which Gordon, rather than merely drawing on her talents as a writer, imports Acker’s confrontational performance style into Variety’s narrative itself, through the three erotic monologues that punctuate the film. My video essay examines the role spoken language plays in Variety’s subversion of traditionally male spaces, looking to the origins of these monologues in Acker’s writing broadly and Gordon’s 1981 short Anybody’s Woman specifically." Theo Rollason