In Her Shadow

Where our series Among Friends, in the same calendar, focuses on the waxing and waning of female friend groups, the films collected in this program explore a very different dynamic between women: namely, the uneasy relationship between the one who is physically present and the lingering memory of another, gone but not forgotten. Rebecca, consigned to a watery grave but still head of household at the Manderley estate in Alfred Hitchcock’s Gothic romance bearing her name, is but one of a host of phantom presences of In Her Shadow. Haunting films by Brian De Palma, Robert Zemeckis, Kasi Lemmons, and Céline Sciamma, these are specters who prove to be some of the most tenacious “rivals” of all, ubiquitous in their absence and impossible to vanquish in their immateriality.