Beyoncé Master Class

The pop star nine ways

acting professionally, but she started performing in her own filmmaking efforts and accumulated dozens of acting credits before she directed Sun Don’t Shine.

The combination of Sun Don’t Shine and 2013’s Upstream Color helped establish Seimetz as a kind of ultra-indie icon. The latter is a meditation on mortality and rebirth in which she starred opposite her then-boyfriend, the director and actor Shane Carruth. They were together on and off over six years. Recently, it surfaced that she now has a restraining order against Carruth because of repeated instances of domestic violence and harassment. When asked about the relationship, she says, understandably, “That’s a no comment.”

The next project she worked on as a filmmaker, the Starz drama The Girlfriend Experience, concerns the sort of paranoia that stems from being stalked by a tormentor. The show was produced and overseen by Steven Soderbergh and starred Riley Keough as a call girl who becomes increasingly paranoid after an anonymous individual starts trying to blackmail her.

Seimetz co-wrote and co-directed The Girlfriend Experience, a loose adaptation of Soderbergh’s 2009 semi-improvised indie film. She also played a supporting role as the heroine’s sister, cast her close friend Sheil in a key part, and convinced Soderbergh to hire Keitel as cinematographer on seven episodes. In what Soderbergh variously calls “a filmmaking experiment” and “a shotgun wedding,” Seimetz was paired with veteran independent filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan (Clean, Shaven), who is known for his terrifying explorations of disordered minds. They had to write the entire first season together and alternate directing duties.

The second season gave Seimetz and Kerrigan their own seven-episode minishows, also dealing with sexuality, psychology, and fear of harm and death. Her old FSU classmate Romanski executiveproduced. She and Seimetz first met at an FSU party, where they asked a friend to wander around with a disposable camera and take pictures while they photobombed in the background. “Amy’s brain is firing on so many cylinders that when she finally has the chance to stand on a set like the one on The Girlfriend Experience, the world is finally matching her interiority,” Romanski says.

Soderbergh, also a multi-hyphenate filmmaker, saw a version of himself in Seimetz but with a distinctive personality he wanted to encourage and reward. “I was struck by her presence on-camera,” he says. “She’s really arresting to look at, and she’s got a unique energy and seems incapable of doing something unbelievable. Then I find out she’s this gifted filmmaker in her own right. I haven’t found anything yet that she doesn’t do well. She’s a good writer, she’s a terrific director, she’s got a really good instinct for casting, and she knows what to do with a camera.”

That last quality impressed Soderbergh most: Seimetz never made the obvious choice for the show, always erring on the side of letting the audience intuit deeper meanings; it was clear from the way she wrote, staged, and shot a moment that there was more going on than people having conversations or sex in sleek hotel rooms. As an example, Soderbergh cites one scene, in which a john’s distraught wife meets the heroine, Christine Reade, in a bar and warns her to stay away from her husband, pouring on the resentment, threats of ruination, and intimations of violence. Christine absorbs it all, a pokerfaced immovable object, but after the wife leaves, her hand shakes slightly as she picks up her drink and then sets it down. The episode ends by cutting to black on the clink sound of the glass touching the tabletop. “I saw that and thought, What an interesting way to show that she doesn’t really have it together,” Soderbergh says.

Such choices involve figuring out how to talk about things while talking around them, which helps when you specialize in making films about death. This happens to be the narrative strategy for both of Seimetz’s films as writer-director— especially She Dies Tomorrow, which encourages the viewer to speculate on whether there is an actual threat against the characters or they simply pass the protagonist’s depression and paranoia around until they are all consumed by it.

This is Seimetz’s favorite way to communicate information onscreen. When offered a hypothetical scenario in which a financially strapped woman visits an ex and steals money from his wallet while he’s in the bathroom, she says she’d probably shoot the scene so the viewer has no idea whether the woman stole the money until the next scene, or maybe later. “Lodge and I used to talk about this,” she says. “Exposition becomes catnip for the audience.” But when a filmmaker or performer delivers information through actions and expressions, the audience has to “pay attention, because we’re not going to feed it all to you verbally. You just have to go with us.”

Or, as Barry Jenkins puts it, “When you watch an Amy Seimetz film, you never know what she’s gonna do next. And you never know when the end is gonna come.” ■

By Angelica Jade Bastién

Beyoncé’s performance here is incandescent and high energy in the ways we’ve come to expect from her. The lasting image arrives at the end of the show: The singing is over, the backup dancers are cast in shadow, and Beyoncé is in the spotlight. She drops her mic, unbuttons her glittering purple blazer, and rubs her pregnant belly, signaling to the world the next stage in her life. This moment marked a turning point in how Beyoncé chose to incorporate her family life into her art, which has in recent years been undergirded by her interest in creating a lasting legacy. This was the first time she presented the public with the image that has come to define her career: a

Beyoncé floats in a pool, surrounded by $100 bills. It’s an image of exorbitant wealth and power. It is also paired with moments of intimacy between Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the

film. The aesthetics evoke

Bonnie and Clyde,

communicating an

“us against the world” dynamic that aims to show they’ve traveled through the fire (the tour started not long after the infamous Met

Gala elevator incident between Jay-Z and Solange went public) and come out the other side stronger. Both and the tour film are windows into how Beyoncé wants people to view her marriage:

But the images she chooses to share often have the opposite effect, highlighting the ways this couple seems to be more like a meeting of two brands than a loving relationship.

Over the years, Beyoncé has increasingly centered her family in her work. In February 2017, she posted a photo of herself on Instagram, surrounded by lush flowers, to announce her pregnancy with twins. It spoke to the ways she has used her family to evolve her star image—framing

That latter point is evident in videos like the one for Jay-Z’s “Family Feud,” which tells a futuristic story about a great familial line that it suggests is composed of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s offspring—including an older Blue Ivy as an important “founding mother” who has a hand in revising the Constitution in 2050. It’s a doozy, but what’s important is how these images return to the idea of a powerful lineage in the making.