The Show Must Go On

Some 300 years before the invention of cinema, a moderately well-known English playwright wrote that “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players”—and this observation is one that the movies, when their time finally came, have been especially keen to exploit. Each film in this series, in its own way, can be seen exploring the stagecraft of everyday life and the blurring boundaries between reality and roleplay, from the psychological power games of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to the hall of mirrors personae of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Underground to the downright Shakespearian imposture of Vincente Minnelli’s ebullient The Pirate. Elaborate charades, social masquerades, and faces conforming to the masks they wear, all as you like it.