Frame By Frame – Ms. 45 (1981)

Year – 1981
Decade – 1980s
Director – Abel Ferrara
Cinematographer – James Lemmo
Genre – Horror
Keywords – 1980s Horror; Vigilante
Filming Locations – New York City
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Format – 35mm with spherical lenses

The Movie
“In movie making, money is no f*ckin’ excuse. It doesn’t cost anything to set up a cool looking shot.” – Abel Ferrara

In Abel Ferrara’s variation on the 1970s/1980s urban hellscape vigilante film, a mute seamstress (Zoë Lund) takes the law into her own hands against New York City’s predatory men after she’s assaulted twice in the same afternoon.
The Bronx-born Ferrara was 29 when he directed the movie, his second feature following 1979’s Driller Killer. Here’s Ferrara on that formative period making genre films, from a 2013 interview with Forbes on the occasion of a Ms. 45 rerelease:

“Commercial is a funny word, you know what I mean? Am I interested in someone seeing my movie? I mean, does my movie mean anything if nobody sees it? Does a movie even exist if someone else doesn’t see it? I’m making films, but I’m not just making films for my own self-gratification. Filmmaking itself, you do it with a group of people. It’s not like I’m painting on a wall, or I’m painting on a canvas and when it’s done I’m going to burn it up. I’m not that kind of guy, you dig? We’re making a communal effort to reach into each other and make a movie. Someone else wrote Ms. 45, I didn’t. It was, well, not my brother, but my spiritual brother (Nicholas St. John), you dig, and we’re making these movies. But I’m the audience too, you know, and I’m making a movie for an audience, definitely, and in that audience, I’m sittin’ there….And I don’t see any difference with doing Driller Killer or Bad Lieutenant or The Funeral. But back in 1979, ’80, ’81, there was a period where there was a very specific audience for the kind of films we were willing to make, you dig?…You know, would you throw a hook in a river with no fish? I don’t know. If you’re a f*ckin’ platonic, purist fisherman, maybe you do.”

And lastly, before we get to the frames, here’s Ferrara on why he frequently works with the same collaborators, including the aforementioned St. John, who wrote nine of Ferrara’s early films.

“Well, what are you going to do—walk up 42nd Street and say, ‘Hey, who wants to make a movie today?’ I work with a lot of people. I fire a lot of people. We’ve dumped a lot of people. These are the people that are left, you dig? Everyone goes in the fire, and whoever really wants to make movies is still there. Everybody wants to make movies so they can talk about making movies. But get to the 23rd hour of the 19th day—no stopping, no food, no drinking, no money, no nothing—and then you see who wants to make movies.” (From Interview magazine).

Also check out the archive’s collection of frames sorted by category.