Meet Me in the Powder Room

In the midcentury New York imagination, a man’s place was somewhere in the sky—ideally, at the top of an office skyscraper whose silhouette was thought to share something with his anatomy. And the woman’s place? Secretarial pools don’t figure in three short films that were recently screened as part of a joint program from Film at Lincoln Center and the Filmmakers’ Cooperative. Shirley Clarke’s Skyscraper (1959), about the construction of one skyscraper in particular—666 Fifth Avenue, now 660 Fifth Avenue—uses comedic voice over and jaunty tunes to rib the macho endeavor of architecture, from white-collar scenes of the drafting room to the ballet of muscled laborers balancing on I beams. By contrast, Holly Fisher’s From the Ladies (1978) and Bette Gordon’s Greed: Pay to Play (1987) are set in the windowless, claustrophobic corners found in every high-rise—the women’s restroom. Fisher exhaustingly tracks her reflection in the mirrored walls of the Manhattan Holiday Inn’s powder room, while Gordon, installed in a different hotel, concocts a perfect little crime thriller…