Thirza Wakefield

CPH:DOX 2021 ran 21 April to 12 May. You open the front door to a man standing on your door step. A film camera sits on his shoulder, with a fluffy oversized microphone attached. Have you won a prize? Has some murky part of your past come back to bite you? Are you about to get killed by a Peeping Tom copycat murderer? Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom comes to mind because a man with a camera shows up on women’s doorsteps and kills them. My sixth-form film tutor screened it to us.

►Halston is streaming on Netflix. The rise and fall of the American designer Halston touches so many of the cultural pressure-points of the 70s and 80s it was bound to get miniseries treatment sooner or later. His fashion skills wrested the attention of American consumers away from the European names that dominated the field, to create a brand allure that expanded into perfumes and homeware to make him a household name.

In 1968 Ida Lupino was the sole female director to merit an entry in Andrew Sarris’s auteur bible The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. Lupino’s films were dismissed in a sentence; the rest of Sarris’s pithy capsule drew attention to a “ladies’ auxiliary” in cinema, listing notable female directors of the silent era and later, as well as those “the jury is still out on” (Shirley Clarke, Vera Chytilová and Agnès Varda among them).