dir. Monika Treut
1998 // 1 hr 20 mins // Digital Projection
Eva Norvind was born Eva Johanne Chegodaieva Sakonskaja in 1944, the daughter of a Russian prince and a Finnish sculptor in Trondheim, Norway. Monika Treut’s Didn’t Do It for Love traces the many stages of her unbelievable life story: from her early success as a showgirl in Paris to her transformation into Mexico’s Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s, her subsequent career as a journalist in the 1970s, and culminating in her establishing herself as New York’s most famous and business savvy dominatrix in the 1980s. Didn’t Do It for Love is an odyssey through the wilderness of sexuality, capturing Eva’s search for the wellspring of her obsessive drive to dominate.
“Treut has always aimed her camera at the front lines of the sexual avant-garde. But with her latest documentary she’s managed to leap across the socio-sexual battlefield as never before … Armed with more present lives than Shirley MacLaine has past ones, Norvind is as eloquent as she is paradoxical.” –David Ehrenstein, New Times
FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR: THE FILMS OF MONIKA TREUT
Ever since the release of her debut feature Seduction: The Cruel Woman (made in collaboration with filmmaker and longtime cinematographer Elfi Mikesch) in 1985, Hamburg-based filmmaker Monika Treut has devoted herself to depicting and documenting queer lives on screen, exploring the mysteries and ambiguities of gender, and transgressing repressive sexual mores and ideas. Fiercely controversial in her native Germany—where Die Zeit once proclaimed that “films like Monika Treut’s are destroying cinema”—Treut found much more acceptance for her work in the burgeoning queer film festival and independent film scenes in America, leading to several decadeslong collaborations with queer icons like trans poet Max Wolf Valerio and “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle.
FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR brings the core of the first half of Treut’s career together in the form of recent restorations by the Hamburg Kinemathek. Encompassing both narratives (Virgin Machine, My Father is Coming) and documentaries (Didn’t Do It for Love, Gendernauts), these seven films are fearless explorations of sex and gender that trace the more taboo and less-documented arcs of queer history of the late 20th century.