Joni Mitchell, in blackface, as Art Nouveau on the cover of ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’
 
Love, released in 1982, is a Canadian anthology movie written and directed by women. Producer Barry Levinson told the Los Angeles Times he was thinking of the success of Emmanuelle when he set about making an erotic movie from a female point of view. His pitch:

Write a 10-minute script on the subject of love, preferably from a sexual point of view. Whatever you write, I’ll produce.

Barry aimed high: after he was turned down by Simone de Beauvoir, Jackie O, Jeanne Moreau, Rebecca West and Gloria Steinem, he got scripts from Lady Antonia Fraser and Germaine Greer, neither of which made it into the finished picture. Ultimately, Love comprised six short films written by Nancy Dowd, Gael Greene, Edna O’Brien, Liv Ullmann, Mai Zetterling, and Joni Mitchell. (Zetterling, Ullmann, Dowd and Annette Cohen directed, and Renee Perlmutter produced.) The New York Times called Love “the biggest thing to come along for women in the movie industry since 1933, when Dorothy Arzner directed Katharine Hepburn in ‘Christopher Strong.’”
 

 
Levinson approached Mitchell about writing the music for Love, the LA Times reported, but she opted to write and star in her own segment instead. Fans will recognize her drag in “The Black Cat in the Black Mouse Socks” as one of her personae on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, a hot young black man named Art Nouveau. That image led to her collaboration with Charles Mingus, as she told Greg Tate:

At a certain point in my career, only Blacks and women understood what I was doing. The white male rock ‘n’ roll press really didn’t get it. They’d go, ‘There’s no rhythm here!’ When in fact there was a lot. Or they’d say that it was too ‘jazzy.’ That fear of jazz thing…. And the harmony eluded them from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter on. The album got reviewed in a Black magazine—accidentally, I think, because I was dressed like a brother on the cover—and they got everything about it, from the cover on. Whereas the white press said, ‘What’s she trying to say, that Black people have more fun?’ When Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter came out, Charles Mingus found out about it somehow. I think, for one thing, that he was intrigued that I dressed up as a brother on the cover ... so he was curious about me.

Here, she plays Paula, who dresses as a “black cat” to dance at a Halloween party where DEVO is on the turntable. This slightly dark, fuzzy video—the same version embedded at Joni Mitchell’s site—might be the only way to see “The Black Cat in the Black Mouse Socks,” since Love doesn’t appear to have had a proper DVD (or VHS?) release. I wonder if that has anything to do with Hollywood’s contempt for women.