High Art: Photo Finish

Essays—

Jun 16, 2026

The debut in 1998 of Lisa Cholodenko’s first feature film, High Art, was a triumph. The intense mastery of its form and the freshness of its narrative created waves of excitement—from the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, to its appearance in the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. By the time it opened the Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco, in June, its fame was assured. The screening in the grand Castro Theatre, with more than a thousand seats full of cheering lesbian viewers, merely confirmed what was already known: High Art was something special, groundbreaking in the issues it took up and the confidence with which it created its universe, as well as utterly unexpected in its mix of romance and darkness. Today, it feels equally classic and brand-new, a testament to an East Village demimonde that shaped a generation of artists and writers—and photographers, as it happens.

High Art arrived at an interesting cultural moment. Throughout the nineties, the movement known as the New Queer Cinema had been delivering genre-defying films filled with daring camera work and story lines that defied political correctness. Initially shaped by the shock of AIDS and the fury over governmental inaction and punishment of gay and lesbian communities, the field broadened over the decade, with successive “generations” responding with new hybrids that attracted wider audiences. Once made possible simply by technological advances (camcorders, cable TV), friendship networks, and big cities’ temporarily low cost of living, the NQC began to grow up—and get bigger budgets—as filmmakers started playing with traditional film narratives that had previously been rejected.

As creative filmmaking was fomented, queer storytelling expanded into new nooks and crannies—and sexiness. The rise of Sundance as tastemaker and deal-broker was not incidental, for it had been there that the movement was announced, in 1992, with the legendary Barbed Wire Kisses panel (chaired by this writer). Soon, Sundance was the marketplace where the next steps would be taken: previously unthinkable sales and bidding wars for queer films. However improbably, Park City became a hotbed of a new queer cinema that was integral to the new American independent cinema being fashioned there.

Initially dominated by gay men, the field of the New Queer Cinema progressed to include a clutch of features by lesbian directors. Early entries were low-budget, scruffy, full of heart, and sometimes not as audience-friendly as other NQC films, since their directors had less access to big-ticket performers, instead casting friends, lovers, or even themselves. Such films as Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996)—shot on tiny budgets in Chicago and Philadelphia—created out of necessity, in the Andy Warhol tradition, their own stars. But as with the rest of the independent film movement, eventually these films, too, would get bigger.

Enter Lisa Cholodenko. She had grown up in Los Angeles, surrounded by the film industry and its standards, working briefly on its fringes before migrating to New York City in the early nineties for graduate school at Columbia. There, Miloš Forman was her screenwriting mentor, and producer James Schamus was supportive. With their advice, the new market for NQC films, and producer Dolly Hall on board, Cholodenko was able to cast her film with professional actors. With a polished script, a terrific cast, expert camera work, and fine-tuned editing, High Art was the first of the “lesbian NQC” to cross over in a big way to mainstream audiences, still commanding attention to this day.

No wonder: it was nothing short of a revelation, a view into a heroin-addled subculture of artists, strivers, and hangers-on, making pacts with the devil and each other. Filled with piercing looks at the price of fame and the social mores of its art-world arbiters, High Art is incredibly attuned to the subtleties of a particular moment in New York. Cholodenko came by her fascination with the scene honestly: after landing in New York, she quickly became mesmerized by the “heroin chic” lesbian milieu she encountered in the East Village (though she has said that she hadn’t had the nerve to try heroin herself). The film never for a second reads as dated: drugs and fame have not yet gone out of fashion. The art-photography magazine Frame—where Syd (Radha Mitchell) works and where Lucy (Ally Sheedy) was once a subject of great interest, before exiling herself to Berlin—may be fictitious, but its tastemakers and style are very much on point for anyone familiar with Interview, Aperture, Paper, or other journals of the period.

Syd is a young assistant editor determined to carve out a career in the art and publishing world of New York City, where she lives in a scene-suitable loft with an annoying boyfriend—until the ceiling starts leaking. She becomes entranced by the cloistered world she finds in the loft upstairs, a latter-day Alice stumbling into Wonderland. It’s there that Lucy; her girlfriend, Greta (Patricia Clarkson); and a coterie of junkie hangers-on spend time snorting heroin and listening to Greta reminisce about her bad old days with Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The source of the leak is the bathroom, which doubles as Lucy’s darkroom and is filled with photographs hung up to dry. Syd may be a lowly assistant editor, but she knows her aesthetics and is dumbstruck by the genius of what she sees, raining praise on a visibly amused (and visibly delighted) Lucy. While it was widely assumed that Nan Goldin was the model for Lucy—with her photographs of a world-weary inner circle full of drugs and lovers and cigarettes, up close and uncensored—Cholodenko has credited JoJo Whilden, who took the photographs presented as Lucy’s work in the film, as well as the Boston School of photography as a whole, including Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and others known for capturing transgressive images of friends in states of euphoria, from sex, drugs, and other pastimes not always documented so intimately. In imagining the character of Lucy, Cholodenko also borrowed liberally from the life of Diane Arbus, who came from a world of great wealth but was drawn to darkness.

It’s Lucy’s money that seems to be bankrolling the scene at her loft and the piles of heroin that Greta (and sometimes Lucy) manages to consume. Her pedigree is revealed in visits to her wealthy mother, Vera (deliciously embodied by the great Tammy Grimes), who seems as rich as she is emotionally unavailable and mentally absent, carelessly forgetting how she could have just spent six thousand dollars at Henri Bendel’s, the prestige fashion address of the era.

There are only two scenes of Lucy visiting Vera, but they are indelible. Protective of their Jewishness, Vera sneeringly refers to Greta as “that German.” She refuses anything that might disrupt her hazy fantasies of her daughter, to the point of walking out of the room when Lucy wants to share the facts about an “issue” that might be a “problem.” Addiction can’t be spoken. Vera’s world of fantasy can’t be disrupted.

Meanwhile, Syd has realized that her neighbor Lucy is a famous photographer whose rediscovery could be her own ticket to editorial advancement at the office, where she’s disrespected. Syd is dazzled by Lucy, who in turn is flattered and revived by Syd’s admiration. From such connivance will a romance bloom, unsettling all expectations and wreaking havoc in lives and lofts both upstairs and downstairs. What fun Cholodenko has lampooning the art and editorial worlds adjacent to the East Village poseurs. She reconstructs likely realities just enough to construct a plot, though not enough to allow the audience to become comfortable.

The subtexts with which Cholodenko is playing remain both legible and intriguing. At the time, her film was deeply transgressive for lesbian audiences. Heroin was the least of it! The depictions of lesbian infidelity, bisexuality, careerism, and death that some viewers found thrilling were seen by others as violations of all the rules of propriety that had long governed this community’s protective self-image. Arguments had been raging for years over lesbian sexuality. Many members of lesbian America wanted to vote vanilla, to present their sexuality as the wholesome corollary to granola or organic farms. But the times they were a-changing. In one fell swoop, High Art disrupted a range of no-go subjects for lesbian audiences long attuned to coming-out romances, positive images, and cloistered meet-cutes. (The pervasive joke, greeted with indulgent chuckles, had been: “What do lesbians do on the second date? Rent a U-Haul.”) With her choices, Cholodenko created a landscape that was the opposite yet was so deeply vibrant that it resonates convincingly today.

It’s a world set in specific secluded locations. Primary are the two lofts, representing two kinds of aspiration, one focused on the future, the other fixated on the past. There is Vera’s apartment, barely glimpsed yet smelling of old wealth. There’s the family vacation home, somewhere upstate, that Lucy and Syd drive away to. Their attraction, significantly, cannot be consummated in the gritty city but, rather, must be fulfilled in traditional lesbian-film terms: in a dreamy otherworld of nature and simplicity, birds chirping, furniture chipped, a diaphanous curtain blowing innocently in the window. And finally, there’s the recurring office scene, Frame framed, where Syd’s future will be determined (and where an ambitious receptionist is studying her every move).

Notably, up until the penultimate scene, Cholodenko does not descend to street level, does not move her camera outdoors into the world of New York. As in the photographs that inspired this story, life unfolds indoors. Gay men, back in the day, may have been cruising at the Greenwich Village piers or in the Central Park Ramble, but the ladies were indoors, tempting lovers to bed with the charm of interiority, through seductions that needed private space to thrive.

If Cholodenko’s screenplay knowingly violated the rules of engagement governing lesbian representation in her time, it’s undeniable that she thrilled new audiences with her transgressions. For every angry dyke who stormed out cursing the ending, there were hundreds who were thrilled with its outlaw sensibility and sexiness. Arguably, though, what made the film truly convincing, what made it work then and what enables it to remain enticing today, are the performances.

Patricia Clarkson’s tiny but memorable role as Greta—with her insane German accent and hilarious languor—would turbocharge her career. The film marked a comeback for the legendary Ally Sheedy (she read the script and demanded an audition). And it introduced Australian actress Radha Mitchell in what may well be her greatest role to date. Cholodenko chose her offscreen collaborators well too: there’s impeccable editing by Amy E. Duddleston, who cut her teeth on early Gus Van Sant films, and finely detailed camera work by Tami Reiker (who had a few years earlier shot The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love) that resists the temptation to borrow the style of Lucy’s photography.

The narrative hinges on subtle emotions, from the alternating play of anguish and seduction on Lucy’s face as she realizes she’s falling into a major life decision to the inscrutable gaze of Syd, taking it all in and tearfully processing the implications. The film may have elements of nostalgia, but its moral tale has not gone out of style: ambition, heartbreak, the ruthlessness of emotion. The equal risks of love, fame, sex, and addiction are all present, but the film is smart enough to take its viewers below the surface into the eternity of risk. With a style that’s loyal to the emotional registers of character and narrative, High Art is a film of moods that charms its viewers into lowering their guard—until the finale delivers a heartbreaking, lethal blow. The final scenes constitute the film’s ultimate transgression: revealing that being a lesbian is no guarantee of a happy ending.

Cholodenko would go on to create a series of films that broke new ground in terms of narrative, representation, and modes of unsettling lesbian viewers. She examined the nature of sexual experimentation and betrayal in Los Angeles in Laurel Canyon (2002); adapted the acclaimed radical lesbian novelist Dorothy Allison’s Cavedweller for Showtime in 2004; transfixed viewers with the masterful HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014), casting Frances McDormand as an isolated woman cut off from community; directed the first three episodes of Unbelievable (2019), a series based on true cases of rape, victim reports, and police responses; and reportedly spun The Kids Are All Right (2010) out of her own experience of getting pregnant and having a child. She has gone from strength to strength, relying on fine scripts and brilliant casting to draw audiences into the worlds she invents. As High Art proved long ago, Cholodenko has a knack for finding a confident, sure-footed way into our imaginations and our broken hearts.

High Art: Photo Finish

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