Queer Cinema(s)

Suicide Kale is a dark comedy that finds Jasmine and Penn, a new couple with an uncertain future, struggling through a lunch party after they stumble upon an anonymous suicide note in the home of the hosts.Read More »

Enjoyably strange, The Owls is an ambitious mixture of lesbian noir, radically experimental filmmaking and community project; a piece of collective art about age, politics, race, desire and gender anxiety. At a house party hosted by a group of Older Wiser Lesbians a young queer is murdered and their disappearance covered up, but just as the group of women let down their guard, a mysterious stranger comes asking questions.Read More »

Quote:
A modern recreation of the legend of Hyppolytus subtly reveals homosexual and incestual motives among its three protagonists as it mingles reality and memory. Particularly noteworthy is the attempt to portray thoughts and flashes of memory by inserting bursts of single-frame, almost subliminal shots into the main sequence which proceeds in different time and space.Read More »

Quote:
It began life as La Vengenza del sexo, a cheap little melodrama shot in only two weeks by Emilio Vieyra, one of the few Argentinean directors to make fantastic films. The American rights for it and another Vieyra film, Placer sangriento (Bloody Pleasure, which became The Deadly Organ) were bought by Jerald Intrator, the director of movies like Striporama (yes, the one with Bettie Page). Intrator proceeded to insert almost twenty minutes of nude people into Vengenza, feeling, with it’s already liberal amount of nudity, its proper place was in the adult market.Read More »

Quote:
In this avant-garde drama, five main protagonists talk incessantly and occasionally scream at each other, while making it clear that verbal fights are going to lead to mayhem since they carry knives and guns to back up their angry outbursts. At the core of this emotional whirlpool are Carol (Maruschka Detmers) and Alma (Jane Birkin) whose relationship is under stress because of the others, especially Carol’s husband (Andrew Birkin). Laure Marsac received a 1984 Cesar award for Most Promising Young Actress for her unnamed, secondary role as a young girl in this film.Read More »

EXPLICIT CONTENT
It is the year 2060 and AIDS has been eradicated. However, in some, the HIV virus has now mutated into a gene from which a drug can be produced that has become the white powder of the twenty-first century. With a virtually supported scanning system, secret police are trying to identify anyone who carries this gene. Filmed in Berlin, Taiwan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s science fiction dystopia revolves around a struggle to gain control over the production and exploitation of bodily fluids. Her film is like an orgiastic opera; a breathless round of bodies, secretions, performances and sexual acts often performed in the service of an overriding economy. An unusual, largely experimental and deliberately parapornographic drama in which the borders between the sexes as well as homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans- or intersexual are constantly blurred.Read More »

Quote:
John Waters made bad taste perversely transcendent with the forever shocking counterculture sensation Pink Flamingos, his most infamous and daring cinematic transgression. Outré diva Divine is iconic as the wanted criminal hiding out with her family of degenerates in a trailer outside Baltimore while reveling in her tabloid notoriety as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” When a pair of sociopaths (Mink Stole and David Lochary) with a habit of kidnapping women in order to impregnate them attempt to challenge her title, Divine resolves to show them and the world the true meaning of the word “filth.” Incest, cannibalism, shrimping, and film history’s most legendary gross-out ending—Waters and his merry band of Dreamlanders leave no taboo unsmashed in this gleefully subversive ode to outsiderhood, in which camp spectacle and pitch-black satire are wielded in an all-out assault on respectability.Read More »

Ruthless hood Johnny Eager is pretending to his parole officer that he has chucked the rackets and is working as a taxi driver. In fact, he’s as deep into crime as he ever was and desperately needs official permission to open his new dog racing track. When he meets up with Lisbeth Bard, the step-daughter of the district attorney, he finds she is not only stunning but a possible way to get his permit.Read More »

Quote:
David Wojnarowicz is recognized as one of the most potent voices of his generation, and his singular artistic achievements place him firmly within a long-standing American tradition of the artist as visionary, rebel and public figure. Art historian and critic John Carlin likens Wojnarowicz to the great American 19th century poet Walt Whitman, the preeminent celebrator of individual freedom. Carlin likens Whitman’s verbal poetry, which was inspired by the rhythms of New York slang and the rhetoric of American journalism, to Wojnarowicz’s visual poetry, which emerged from social history, popular culture, and his own dreams and visions. …In his rebellious struggle against conformity, materialism and mechanization, one can see the formative influence of the 1950s Beat writers on Wojnarowicz’s art. Just as the Beats found America in the 1950s to be a dehumanized prison of exclusionary mainstream values, Wojnarowicz found America in the 1980s to be in a similar ethical state of emergency. His allegiance to the Beats, especially Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs also can be seen in his profound concern with spiritual matters.Read More »