CAGED (1950) + CAGED HEAT (1974)

The Women in Pr*son subgenre is essential to lesbian film history, as it exposes how institutions police women's bodies and desires while paradoxically creating spaces where solidarity is emboldened thorugh struggle and queer intimacies can emerge free from the expectations of wider society.

CAGED by John Cromwell

A naive, pregnant 19 year old called Marie is sent to Pr*son for being accomplice to a minor robbery where her husband died. Over time, under the harsh sadistic hand of the Matron and trapped in a vicious penal system, Marie loses her innocence and ultimately embraces a life of crime to survive.

CAGED HEAT by Jonathan Demme

Jacqueline arrives at the Connerville Institute for Women on a narcotics charge. The facility is run with an iron fist by the oppressive, wheelchair-bound Superintendent McQueen and a sadistic Pr*son doctor who performs illegal electroshock experiments. Tired of the rampant abuse and degradation, the inmates put aside their differences.

Released at the height of the Hays Code, Caged couldn't depict lesbianism explicity, yet the desire is there, lingering in glances. Paired with the unapologetically lurid Caged Heat, this evening of exploitation traces how the women-in-Pr*son genre evolved from coded suggestion to overt spectacle!

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This is the second screening in our season called:

Betty Friedman called lesbians in the womens movement ‘lavender menaces', as if to suggest their lack of attraction to men was threatening enough to derail second wave feminism. The optics of including lesbians in the movement was unappealing for Friedman, who wanted to maintain a certain middle class respectablility.

A year later, lesbian feminists reclaimed the phrase, printing it on t shirts and badges, transforming the insult into a bold declaration of political solidarity. This season traces a similar transformation in western cinema across the latter half of the 20th century—from moral panic, where lesbian desire is as predatory and monsterous, to the filmmakers reclaiming that image as a source of solidairty and strength in resistance to patriarchal hegemony.

This season is for all the queer folk who refuse to assimilate, finding power in being menaces to a deeply corrupt society <3