B-Girl Rhapsody

A recreation of a typical 1950s burlesque show, with lots of energetic stripping and formidably corny comedy skits – including one about Stalin. Choreographer-director Lillian Hunt had a particular interest in female viewers, whom she wanted to educate and empower with her work.

Not much has been written about choreographer-director-entrepreneur Lillian Hunt, not even in the more lurid tomes on exploitation cinema to which one would ascribe her burlesque films. Which is curious, considering the renaissance of interest in burlesque as a space for female self-assertion and subversion, as Hunt was among the very few women busy in that segment during its Golden Age.

Between 1949 and 1957, she directed almost a dozen films, most of which were connected to the theatres she ran, for which she also developed the dancers’ choreographies. In principle, Hunt’s shows and films were made for audiences consisting primarily of couples. But as many ads for her films show: Hunt was deeply invested in attracting a female audience, seeing her work partly as educational – as an invitation for women to discover femininity as something multifaceted, more complex than the prevalent image of housewife-mother. This screening of B-Girl Rhapsody offers the rare possibility to enjoy in the cinema a work by this almost unsung yet pioneering figure of postwar US American erotica and sex education!

– Olaf Möller

• 

• 

• 

•