When Joan Micklin Silver died in 2020, she was justly celebrated as a pioneering figure in American cinema. Born in 1935 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Silver was one of a number of female directors – among them Elaine May, Claudia Weill and Barbara Loden – who worked contemporaneously with the vaunted New Hollywood movement, but never enjoyed the studio largesse of their male peers. They received a different kind of bequest: the lacunae that blight their filmographies. After the early-career triumphs of Girlfriends (1978) and Wanda (1970), Weill and Loden were unable to break into Hollywood; May was driven from the industry following the box office disaster of Ishtar (1987); and Silver, too, found her career unceremoniously truncated after Crossing Delancey (1988), and she was relegated to forgettable comedies and hired-gun TV gigs. Prior to this, however, she managed to eke out a number of remarkable films, each a triumph in the face of a misogynistic industry. Yet these works sit uneasily with any straightforward portrayal of Silver as a feminist. The latent strain of conservatism that courses through her films was perhaps difficult to detect for the same reason that it continues to be peculiar: it cuts across familiar political fault lines. A keen awareness of the corrosive effects of liberalization is at the core of her cinema, which seems at times to be pushing against the cultural currents that made her own career as a director possible.

In their broad outlines, Silver’s feature films follow the template of the unbalanced or one-sided romance. Her debut, Hester Street (1975), recently released on Blu-Ray in a new restoration, transplants this emotional dynamic into the Lower East Side of the late 19^th Century. Jake is a Jewish sweatshop worker, eager to assimilate and shed the trappings of his ethnic background. His wife’s unexpected arrival in New York proves to be an unwelcome intrusion, as Jake has started an affair with a more cosmopolitan woman, Mamie. As the film unfolds, its centre of gravity shifts towards his spurned wife, Gitl, and her attempts to render herself acceptable to Jake’s new standards. The tension between Jake’s zeal for modernization and Gitl’s clinging to tradition is channelled through the question of how she wears her hair. Jake wants her to abandon the wigs and kerchiefs that she uses in accordance with orthodox Judaism; she resists at first, but eventually the pressure of sexual competition pushes her to compromise on her piety. Throughout her other films, Silver would continue to convert portraits of dyadic intimacy into vehicles for exploring the tensions of historical progress. In the same way that Jake is torn between the two women, and between the worlds they represent, Silver’s films share in his indecision; they can’t quite make up their mind whether the new ways are better than the old.

Another early effort, Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1976), adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, also portrays a woman’s decision to change her hairstyle as a vessel for the Hegelian world-spirit’s ineluctable forward movement. Shelley Duvall plays a shy transplant from Eau Claire named Bernice, visiting her sophisticated cousin in St. Paul and struggling to fit in. (In an indication of Silver’s focus on the ways that race intersects with social ostracization, the cousin attributes Bernice’s awkwardness to ‘that crazy Indian blood in her.’) Trying to make herself more popular with the boys, Bernice undertakes a full-scale renovation of her personality, which climaxes in cutting her hair into a bob even though she views it as ‘immoral’. Silver doesn’t depict the haircut directly; instead, she gives us the horrified reactions of the onlookers in the barber shop, who evidently believe themselves to be witnessing some kind of ritual slaughter. Which, from the retrograde perspective the film encourages us to inhabit, they are – the sacrifice of a girl’s virtue on the altar of sexual liberation.

Things start to get more properly Hegelian (which is to say, more dialectical) by the time Silver makes Between the Lines (1977), which centres on a Boston newspaper called The Back Bay Mainline, a stand-in for legendary counter-cultural weeklies like The Village Voice. John Heard plays a burned-out investigative reporter named Harry, stuck in an on-again off-again relationship with a staff photographer, Abbie. These days, Harry produces barely any writing at all, an affliction that he shares with several other staffers, such as Jeff Goldblum’s music critic Max, who skulks around the office trawling for LPs to resell. All things considered, the paper’s editor is remarkably tolerant of these layabouts. But from the start, it is clear that this more forgiving era is already over. Suffused with an elegiac atmosphere, the film abounds with wistful reminiscences about ‘what the Mainline used to be.’ The staff all agree that the paper’s best days are behind it, with one of them trying to sell a book about ‘the death of the counterculture’.

The final blow comes when the paper is bought by a new publisher who makes advertising the top priority and fires Harry for asking impertinent questions. This imposition of fiscal discipline sends convulsions through the lumbering institution of the Mainline. Ominously, Max appears in the film’s closing scene without his signature red jacket, having swapped it for a more understated houndstooth blazer – a casualty of the paper’s new era of buttoned-up professionalism. But, as the credits roll, he is still not above squeezing a couple of drinks out of an admiring fan. His exacting of this tribute is a little sleazy, but it is also a holdover from that older age of journalism, and a variation on one of Silver’s persistent motifs: the way that institutional structures facilitate interpersonal encounters and forge enduring bonds as a result. When Harry and Abbie leave the bar arm-in-arm (as Max pleads with them to buy him a drink), it seems like their relationship has finally settled into an equilibrium. What outlasts an institution after it has been washed away by the inexorable tide of the market, Silver suggests, are the relationships that it made possible. And insofar as this kind of conservatism is rooted in an urge to protect the beautiful things of the past from the forward march of progress, it seems broadly amenable to a leftist sensibility.

What is perhaps more difficult to metabolize is Silver’s nostalgia for an older model of organising sexual relations, grounded in the specific customs and lifeways of a contained social world. In her most widely celebrated film, Crossing Delancey, Silver returns to the modern-day landscape of Hester Street. Isabelle (Amy Irving) lives on the Upper West Side and works in an indie bookstore where she coordinates, as she puts it, ‘the most prestigious reading series in New York’. The film follows her half-hearted attempts to fend off a suitor whom she in fact seems to be falling for. Her resistance stems from the fact that the match was set up by her grandmother through a Jewish marriage broker; she furiously exclaims, ‘This is not how I live. This is a hundred years ago!’ The film projects that cleavage between tradition and modernity onto the landscape of the city. Isabelle somewhat snobbishly points out to the man she’s been set up with, a Lower East Side pickle vendor named Sam (Paul Riegert), that ‘I don’t live down here. I live uptown’. The contrast is vividly illustrated in a scene depicting her journey to her grandmother’s apartment. When she emerges from the Delancey Street subway station, the proliferation of Hebrew shop signs and sidewalk vendors indicates that she’s now in foreign territory, where the codes of the modern world don’t apply. To cross Delancey Street is not only to traverse a physical boundary, but a temporal one. Isabelle clutches a book by the sophisticated writer she has a crush on, as if it’s a lucky charm warding off the ghosts of her past.

Those ghosts are also of a city that has long since disappeared. The film’s Lower East Side is still a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, populated by family-run businesses that exemplify an older model of exchange not yet colonised by neoliberalism’s ruthless logic. Especially striking is the way these businesses simultaneously operate as a kind of social infrastructure, routing intimacy through the pathways carved by commercial transactions. This network encompasses both Sam’s pickle shop and the marriage broker, who is, of course, running a business, one that works to forge the kinship relations sustaining the community. This marks a shift in how Silver pictures the relationship between society and the economy from Between the Lines. Here, the free market does not subsume and destroy interpersonal relations in order to remake them in its own image, but is rather ‘embedded’ within them, to use Polanyi’s term; these two spheres fit together in an interlocking, mutually constitutive relation, comprising a locally rooted network of giving and receiving. But if this all appears rather quaint and benign when counterposed to the rapacious financialization portrayed in Between the Lines, it is still a societal model that relies on racially policed boundaries to maintain its integrity.

Serving as a kind of emissary for this alternative political economy is Isabelle’s grandmother, whom she calls Bubbie, played by a legend of the Yiddish theatre named Reizl Bozyk in her only film role. The archetypal meddling relative, her most audacious effort comes in the film’s last scene, as she makes a final gambit to get Isabelle and Sam together by feigning dementia. The path she sees from point A to point B is not entirely clear. It seems to involve forcing Isabelle to articulate the role she sees Sam playing in her life: ‘Who is this man?’ Bubbie asks, deviously. If there’s a way to interpret this as just another instance of her charming quirkiness, there’s also a morbid undercurrent to it: what ultimately pushes the couple together is the spectre of memory loss, or the possibility of cultural erasure made frighteningly concrete. Seen in this light, Bubbie’s behaviour looks almost like a threat: that’s a nice cultural heritage you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it. She thereby does her part to preserve the racially delimited neighbourhood, in which commercial exchange and social reproduction are bound together in a synchronous loop.

Throughout her career, Silver was preoccupied with the myriad ways in which social worlds could be tethered to physical settings, and the question of what kinds of intimacies could flower in these habitats. In the absence of a neighbourhood like Crossing Delancey’s, that nurturing role is often played by the workplace, and one way to understand Between the Lines is as a paean to the fragile possibilities to be found there. Silver would again take up this setting in another collaboration with Heard titled Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979). But if Between the Lines ran on the fumes of a prelapsarian world, Chilly Scenes takes place long after the fall. Heard plays an alienated government functionary, drinking on the clock in an office geared towards maximizing productivity – what the Mainline might look like if it was bought out by Alden Global Capital. The tone is almost apocalyptic, as characters struggle to get by in a bleak Salt Lake City on the cusp of Reaganism. The living arrangements of these characters differ from those in Silver’s previous films – single-family homes, rather than communal neighbourhoods – which seems to suggest a link between this film’s atmosphere of spiritual malaise and the social atomisation of suburban sprawl. It is important too that the characters play a direct role in creating this environment: Heard’s civil servant works in the city’s ‘Department of Development’, while his lover’s husband sells A-frame houses. Their emotional desolation is in this sense a self-inflicted wound, something they’ve done to themselves, just as it’s Heard’s own narcissism that drives away his lover. The built environment parodies his sins – reflecting his isolation back at him – at the same time as it exacts payment for them.  

Whether it is the immigrant enclave or the alt-weekly’s office, what these settings share is the degree of protection they offer from the ravages of liberalization. Notably, Hester Street was financed by Silver’s husband, a real estate developer, after being turned down by multiple studios on account of her gender – ‘women directors are one more problem we don’t need’, one executive told her – which may partly account for her nostalgic view of the shelter traditional structures can provide from an inhospitable economy. But when she alchemized these circumstances into her films, Silver saw both sides of the issue. If a gendered relation of dependence was the condition of possibility for her own career, that same dynamic is reproduced in Between the Lines in the form of staff writer Laura and her boyfriend Michael, who tries to convince her to move to New York with him when he gets a book deal. She refuses at first but eventually gives in, and Silver sees the tragedy of the situation that forces her to reluctantly accept her subordination. In Hester Street, Mamie stresses the importance of financial autonomy for a woman – ‘I don’t want no man to say, “I had to take her just as she was, without a penny.”’ – which makes it all the more surprising when she blows her hard-won savings to pay for Jake’s divorce so that they can get married. When abstract principles collide with messy reality, the allure of tradition often proves irresistibly strong.

Silver, though, never moralized in either direction. Even Gitl, a seemingly archetypal embodiment of tradition, finds it within herself to welcome the benefits of progress when she leaves Jake for his roommate, a devout Talmudic scholar. Insofar as marrying for love is a modern invention, this pairing is an uneasy amalgamation of past and present. If there is anything in Silver’s worldview approaching the rigidity of dogma, it is her conviction that the clock can never be turned back. At one point, Gitl marvels at the self-enclosed homogeneity of the Lower East Side: ‘Rivington Street, Delancey Street – everywhere Jews!’ Even in 1975, the line would have carried the frisson of dramatic irony, and one need only walk down those streets today, taking in the odd mixture of Chinese restaurants and soaring high-rises, to see how much things have continued to change. Silver’s nostalgia might be intense, even to the point of being reactionary – but it will never be irrelevant.  

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘Hollywood’s New Wave’, NLR 121.