Institute History
Description
Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers, made with an all women crew, was as eagerly awaited as any recent British independent film. In it, two women search for their own kind of “gold”: the meaning of money and capital, symbols and exchange, their own identity and history. Julie Christie co-stars as a woman in search of her own memories, a past interwoven with the history of cinema itself. But in part the film is a musical adventure, drawing on elements of performance, dance and theater where spontaneity and play supersede structure and narrative. Potter has called The Gold Diggers “a musical describing a female quest” posing questions “about the connections between gold, money and woman; about the illusion of female powerlessness, about the actual search for gold and the inner search for gold; about imagery in the unconscious and its relationship to the power of cinema; looking at childhood and memory and seeing the history of cinema itself as our collective memory of how we see ourselves and how we as women are seen.”