Re:Vision: The Waiting Room

Co-presented by BAVC Media, Canyon Cinema, and San Francisco Cinematheque

Introduced by director Karen Sperling

Filmmaker Karen Sperling writes, directs, produces, and stars in The Waiting Room (1973), a groundbreaking film created by a 35-woman film crew working in the deserted wing of a psychiatric facility on Manhattan’s Ward Island. This renegade psychodrama captures the depths of feminine ambivalence in the shadow of a looming specter — compulsory domesticity. The ‘waiting room’ manifests as quotidian and institutional anterooms in which a young woman mulls over a marriage proposal. Belonging squarely to the quasi Brechtian feminist avant-garde forged by Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, and Cecelia Condit, The Waiting Room has remarkably gone unseen for 50 years.

A masterclass in off-kilter existentialism, the film moves in constant flux through elliptical camerawork, tonal ambiguity, and genre-agnosticism. Against drab interiors, women share profound dreams with blasé serenity, dissecting the chameleon processes by which they protect or share their energies with men. Contemplating the many relational prerequisites for life fulfillment, The Waiting Room accumulates dread in murmurs and non sequiturs on a path toward non-arrival. The film is punctuated by ringing phones, disquieting tableaus, and abiding humor. — Elise Schierbeek

Digitally preserved in 2025 by Block Cinema at The Block Museum of Art. Digital transfers of first-generation ¾” U-matic and a small sequence of second-generation VHS were performed by Bay Area Video Coalition and The Block Museum of Art. Shot on 35mm film in 1973 and transferred to ¾” U-matic video in the early 1980s from a 35mm release print.

The Waiting Room will screen with the following short:

ROSEBLOOD (Sharon Couzin, United States, 1974) 7m, DCP
In Roseblood (1974), legendary Chicago experimental filmmaker Sharon Couzin superimposes dancer Carolyn Chave Kaplan in a cresting wave of cities, gardens, and beachcomber treasure. Roseblood is a choppy symphony of exposure and knifework, a run with scissors toward feminine epiphany. Drama plays out as sliced interiority, stabbed worlds, and the frenzied suture of filmmaking. The film image convulses as fish-eye expansion and kaleidoscopic crushing while the music of Stockhausen and Enesco soundtracks glimmering gestures. — Elise Schierbeek

2025 digitization initiated by Gradiva Couzin and Odilon Couzin and undertaken by Negativeland from the original 1974 color reversal print. DCP courtesy of Canyon Cinema.