PIONEERS IN REVOLT:
LESBIAN AND GAY AVANT-GARDE FILM RETROSPECTIVE
Curated by Gordon Nelson of Jefferson Presents …
This program is designed to serve as an introduction to a selection of essential gay and lesbian artists working in the area of experimental film and video. All of the short films and videos included in this screening are considered significant revolutionary milestones in the history of film and represent a wide array of approaches to personal expression through cinema.
(1947, 16mm, b&w/so, 15 min.)
A landmark of both experimental and gay cinema, Kenneth Anger's film is a bizarre, disturbing dreamscape of violation, rape, and homoerotic sadomasochism. The film opens with Anger awaking from a troubled dream and leaving his house to go on a stroll. He is confronted by a band of buff sailors who proceed to beat, manhandle, and molest him. Fireworks ends with the amazing image of a sailor unzipping his fly and pulling out a lit roman candle. Recalling other surrealist masterpieces such as Un Chien Andalou and Meshes in the Afternoon, this film uses elliptical narrative structure and dream-like visual metaphors and puns.
"A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a 'light' and is drawn through the needle's eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to a bed less empty than before." - KA
(1959-1962, 16mm, color/so, 3 min. )
With Jerry Sims, Ken Jacobs and Reese Haire. Scotch Tape was shot on the rubble strewn site of the future Lincoln Center. The title arises from the piece of scotch tape which had become wedged in the camera gate.
By all accounts, Jack Smith was one of the most volatile, exhausting and creative of the original members of the New American Cinema group of the early 1960s. Best known for his controversial featurette Flaming Creatures (1963), Smith devoted his life not only to filmmaking but to acting, writing, photography and performance art. -Constantine Verevis, Senses of Cinema
(1966, 16mm, color/so, 15 min.)
"A very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness. In its economy and cogency of imaging, HOLD ME surpasses any of Kuchar's previous work. The odd blend of Hollywood glamour and drama with all-too-real life creates and inspires counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality." - Ken Kelman
"This film could cheer an arthritic gorilla, and audiences, apparently sensitized by its blithely accurate representation of feelings few among them can have escaped, rise from their general stupor to cheer it back." - James Stoller, The Village Voice
(1980, 16mm, b&w/so, 22 min.)
A comedy about a troop of shield-bearing Amazons who take over city institutions before relaxing in the country.
"SUPERDYKE took women into the streets when Barbara armed a platoon of vagina warriors with Amazon shields in an attempt to overthrow San Francisco. They marched through City Hall, usurped the bus lines, demythologized the consumer mentality at Macy's (to the recorded astonishment of casual shoppers), and wandered through the erotic art museum. Barbara's frenetic handheld lens caught the startled reactions and the glee of the participants. SUPERDYKE has a home-movie quality to it, but its committed and loose moments in the playground confirm its comic rationale."
- P. Gregory Springer
(1994, 16mm, color/so, 15 min.)
"ALPSEE is a brilliant autobiographical essay on childhood, family and memory. It is an exceedingly complex work revealing new layers every time you watch it. In Alpsee, terror has taken on a harder-edged shape compared to previous films by Matthias Müller; this nightmare has something alluring about it. I could not take my eyes off the mellow colors of this film. In the end, the blue of the skies is falling down and turning into red. This part appears almost Dionysian to me, sensuous and liberating, as if the cyclical structure of ALPSEE had to be blown up in the end by a final intimate moment." - Christian Cargnelli
(1994, 16mm, color/so, 15 min.)
"ALPSEE is a brilliant autobiographical essay on childhood, family and memory.
It is an exceedingly complex work revealing new layers every time you watch
it. In Alpsee, terror has taken on a harder-edged shape compared to previous
films by Matthias Müller; this nightmare has something alluring about it. I
could not take my eyes off the mellow colors of this film. In the end, the
blue of the skies is falling down and turning into red. This part appears
almost Dionysian to me, sensuous and liberating, as if the cyclical structure
of ALPSEE had to be blown up in the end by a final intimate moment."
-
Christian Cargnelli
"This tidy doll's house is filled with the fetid air of the Fifties and
Sixties. But Müller does not play the indictor's part: ALPSEE has a mellow,
refined humor and keeps an ironical distance to its subject matter."
-
Alexandra Jacobson
Awards and Exhibition: Distinction, "Recommended" by the German Commission of
Valuation; Berlin Film Festival; Main Prize, 41st Oberhausen Short Film
Festival; Wellington Film Festival; First Prize, Filmothek of Youth.
(1990, video, 11 min.)
Intensely personal and revealing, Jollies details Benning's early sexual experiences and experimentation with both boys and girls until, eventually losing her virginity to a girl, she embraces her coming-out and her queer identity. Benning takes us through typical pre-teen and adolescent experiences as she attempts to sort through and understand both her feelings and her sexuality. She is quick to note that although her feelings are perfectly normal for any adolescent, it is the object of her affections that makes her not only different but, as she will soon come to realize, invisible in the larger culture that expends its time, energy, and advertising on heterosexual love. -Melissa Rigney, Senses of Cinema
… is Pittsburgh’s home for experimental film. Screenings happen on the last Saturday of each month at Garfield Artworks located at 4931 Penn Ave. |
