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<<back MONDAY, MAY 3 Part 2 Guest Curated Programs 1970's, 80's, 90's Film Theatre Lower Level Regina Public Library 2311 12th Ave. The act of looking back involves researching, investigating and, ultimately, analyzing, rethinking, and reflecting on what has been found and lost. Viewing historical film and video ö revealing queer eras, artistry, movements, passion, communities, courage, vision, and activism ö invokes a comparison to the present, in terms of the direction of current queer media arts production and how it is/how it isnât shaping and contributing to a contemporary queer cultural fabric. Some questions that may be posed as part of this series investigating our queer cinematic history include: What role do queer media arts have on queer communities now? What was the impact historically? How has its role changed? Why has it changed? Six individuals ö film makers, historians, academics, programmers ö were each invited to curate a program for this series and to provide their insight, opinion, and experience to assist in uncovering the past and, in doing so, helping to inform the present and the future of queer media art and queer culture. 7 PM 1970's Queer Cinema of the 1970s Curated by Thomas Waugh "The famine is over." Uttering these portentous words in 1980, I was looking forward to the start of a new era of visibility and productivity in lesbian and gay film, leaving behind my once-urgent dissections of the state of gay cinema, denunciations of various capitalist-homophobe conspiracies and celebrations of each new solitary Îbreakthrough.â The task of curating the 1970s for Queer City Cinema, reminds me of how desperate it felt in those days before Queer Film and Video Festivals and prolific twenty year old video queers in every city. 'Famine,' 'drought,' 'silence,' and 'invisibility' were indeed the words that self-styled cine-pinko-fags like myself used to describe the international audio-visual environment in the first decade after Stonewall. Perhaps my own frustration was exacerbated because the post-Stonewall famine had coincided, paradoxically, with an age of feasting for the 16mm social-issue documentary film. From Harlan County U.S.A. (Kopple, 1976) to The Battle of Chile (Guzman, 1977), what a thrilling trajectory it was for artists and audiences who wanted to change the world with images of reality! So where were all the lesbian and gay Harlan County's? Well there were many initiatives, efforts and tentative masterpieces from this decade of socio-politico-sexual discovery, ferment and mobilization, but they were often isolated. Queer cultures took a while to get their stride onscreen, partly because of institutional resistance and political censorship, but also because of a cross-cultural lag in establishing connection, momentum and continuity among artistic inspiration, audience and the onerous techno-institutional infra-structure that cinema and video production and distribution demand. Still there were enough Chantal Akermans, Colin Campbells, Rainer Werner Fassbinders, Barbara Hammers, Derek Jarmans, Mariposa Film Collectives, Ulrike Ottingers, Jan Oxenbergs, Pier Paolo Pasolinis, Wakefield Pooles, John Schlesingers, and Paul Wongs out there in the 1970s to make my job of assembling a two-hour taste of a momentous decade extremely difficult. I discuss a couple of dozen of international documentaries alone in my article on the work of the period, an odd harvest during an alleged famine! However Barbara has made my job a little easier by getting her selection in first, and I have tried to balance her wonderful program of all-American, all-lesbian shorts by focusing on all-non-American, all-gay male work: a Montreal straight-up documentary, a Vancouver experimental narrative short, and a Berlin feature-length experimental documentary by an artist who might be called the first filmmaker of international stature to wrestle with the challenges of post-Stonewall queer sexual culture and politics. One cultural realm where there was no famine was the European art cinema, for which the seventies were a kind of baroque golden age. Somehow Rosa von Praunheim (b. 1942) managed to tap into that framework and into supportive government funding in West Germany (and later the united Germany), and to continue working there over the last thirty-five years. His cantankerous anarchist and visionary epic It's not the Homosexual demonstrates not only the brilliance of a career to come from this twenty-something bad boy but also the relatively sumptuous means of which most Canadian and American independents of the period could only fantasize. However, my other two shorts, both from Canada, not surprisingly reflect the zero-budget improvisation which was more the norm than the exception throughout the seventies for those outside the art cinema. Harry Sutherland (b. 1948), trained in the social activist mode of the NFBâs Challenge for Change program, was the first Canadian artist to apply the ideals of the cinematic New Left to queer politics and the result is a wonderful capsule of the dreams and resistances of an era. Michael McGarry (1954-1989), trained at Simon Fraser fine arts program, brings something of von Praunheim's sexual radicalism to a very West Coast political context, and his prophetic film-video interface raises important issues around the social control of sexuality and the underground of dissent. Together I hope that my three choices bring flooding back ö for us baby boomers and subsequent generation X, Y, and Z-ers alike ö all of the utopias, wet dreams and contradictions of a formative age. Truxx (Harry Sutherland, Canada, 1978, video transfered to 16mm transfered to video, 20 min) An early example of agitprop video documentary featuring images from the historic Truxx raid of 1977 (Montreal's Stonewall), and interviews with survivors. In Black and White (Michael McGarry, Canada, 1979, 16mm, 10 min.) Public sex is a political issue and artistic obsession that is still vital a quarter century later, and McGarry's experimental narrative of two men caught redhanded thanks to video surveillance in the place of love and excrement, is the first ö and best? ö Canadian work to take it on. It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Situation in Which He Lives (Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt) (Rosa von Praunheim, 1970, West Germany, 85 min., 16mm transfer to video, English version) This full-colour Brechtian docudrama epic declaiming the first gay lib platform, West German 1970 anarchist style, includes street theatre about public sex and an earnest nude consciousness raising palaver in a Berlin commune about how our self hatred is derived from bourgeois capitalism. 9 PM 1970's Serious and Sexy: Lesbian Films of the Seventies Curated by Barbara Hammer These are the films that I remember, that playback in my mind's eye as we took up our cameras and felt we were making world history with our films (we were!). Documentaries and fiction about the Înewâ lesbian lifestyles including romance and sports and the bravo 'turn-the-camera-on-thyself' approach of Hammer and Almy. You know, looking back, one sees the seeds that were planted in the seventies bursting into full bloom today. And, I am not talking about 'the L word' but truly independent lesbian cinema that has earned a room of its own. Greta's Girls (Greta Schiller, USA, 1977, 16mm, 25 min.) A fictional day in the life of a young interracial lesbian couple, whose everyday trials of New York City life are presented as part of how lesbians 'really live', offset by the humor and affection the women share with one another. After the Game (Donna Gray , USA, 1979, 16mm, 19 min.) Two young women, close friends who met through a common boyfriend, wind up admitting their physical attraction to each other in this prelude to coming out story. Home Movie (Jan Oxenberg, USA, 1972, 16mm, 12 min.) Home Movie is exactly that: fast-edited found family footage with an added voice-over, which comments wryly on schoolgirl images: "I looked so normal but felt so different." Superdyke Meets Madame X (Barbara Hammer and Max Almy , USA, 1975, 16mm, 22 min.) Using the old 3/4" videotape recorder (before camcorders), Hammer and Almy taped their relationship (including 'the first kiss'). Promising never to meet without the third party, the camera, the ups and downs are explored in this youthful 'lesbian drama' and the serious aesthetic statements from the budding artists have been lived out if we review their work from the past 30 odd years. <<back
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| Design: Vary Garro Design/Rio Saxon Design - Programming: Rio Saxon | ||||||||
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