In a revelatory performance, Ally Sheedy stars in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s debut feature, a wry and incisive look at the politics of the New York art scene wrapped in the guise of an emotionally spiky queer romance. When Lucy Berliner (Sheedy), a once prominent photographer who has retreated into a life of heroin abuse with her faded-actress lover (Patricia Clarkson), is rediscovered by Syd (Radha Mitchell), an up-and-coming editor at a photography magazine, professional ambition and personal attraction become dangerously entwined. Stripping away art-world glamour to tell a seductive yet troubling story of complicated human connection, High Art stands as an essential work of both queer and 1990s independent cinema.
High Art was restored by the Academy Film Archive and the UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with the Sundance Institute. Funding provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Frameline, the Sundance Institute, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
FILM INFO
United States
1998
102 minutes
Color
1.85:1
English
Spine #1314
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Lisa Cholodenko, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
Audio commentary from 2004 featuring Cholodenko
New conversation between Cholodenko and filmmaker Karyn Kusama
New interviews with actors Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell and photographer JoJo Whilden
Dinner Party (1997), a short film by Cholodenko
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by critic B. Ruby Rich