Self-Possession in Janie’s Janie and Madeline’s Madeline

Josephine Decker, director of the 2018 experimental drama Madeline’s Madeline, said in an interview that while studying literature in college, she became “obsessed with this concept of the narrator.”[i] She was drawn to epic novels (like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) that toyed with the […]

“Something Happened”: Conversation and Connection in Butter on the Latch

Josephine Decker’s Butter on the Latch (2013) follows Sarah (Sarah Small) and Isolde (Isolde Chae-Lawrence), two old friends who reunite by chance at a Balkan music festival in the woods of Mendocino, California. The easy flow of their friendship seems intractable, until Steph (Charlie Hewson), a new male camper, arrives. As Sarah’s attraction to him becomes apparent, […]