Re:Vision: The Waiting Room

Filmmaker Karen Sperling writes, directs, produces, and stars in The Waiting Room (1973), a groundbreaking film created by a 35-woman film crew who took over a 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.

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