Queer Cinema(s)

This film is a sequel in name only to Valley of the Dolls (1967). An all-girl rock band goes to Hollywood to make it big. There they find success, but luckily for us, they sink into a cesspool of decadence. This film has a sleeping woman performing on a gun which is in her mouth. It has women posing as men. It has lesbian sex scenes. It is also written by Roger Ebert, who had become friends with Russ Meyer after writing favorable reviews of several of his films.

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It’s deadpan-droll throughout (with at least as many highly quotable lines as Rocky Horror), cod-moralistic, carefully balanced between satire and melodrama, gratuitously focused on women with outsize breasts, and shot and edited with astonishing mastery. Much of Meyer’s film language, as Ebert points out, is redolent of ‘pure’ silent cinema: to-the-point storytelling and earnestly expressive performances, plus montage sequences worthy of Slavko Vorkapich.

— Tony Ryans, Sight & SoundRead More »

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Have you ever met someone who made your body heat up, get a little nervous and sweaty, and made your crotch stir a bit? Sexual Tension: Volatile will reignite those lustful feelings as it weaves six scintillating experiences of men in various stages of nudity and many forms of erotic male bonding. A pulsating, sexually-charged thrill ride, the film begins as a young man feels the adrenaline rush of his sexy tattooist’s needle in “Ari” while in “The Cousin,” a geeky, cute boy finds a hot Summer afternoon triggering his taboo desire for his Speedo-clad cousin. Two straight buddies literally show each other how to make love to a woman in “The Other One,” while a man with ‘Broken Arms’ receives a sensual sponge bath from a male nurse. “Love” is questionable when a broken shower brings a married man and a hairy, innkeeper together when they least expect it and in “Workout” two muscular men, ‘sexting’ pictures to some hot chicks, begin to shed their clothes and inhibitions.Read More »

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Jesus an eighteen year old Cuban is lost and struggling to realize his true identity. Unsure of himself or his future direction, he works at a local Havana drag club where he entertains dreams of becoming a performer whilst earning his money through hustling. At home he finds solace listening to the records his mother and grandmother left him, (all torch songs and romance by the great names of Latin music), or else hanging around watching the boxers train next-door. Into his life, however, comes a force to challenge his direction and freedom, his long lost father, a celebrated boxer, released from a 15 year prison term having killed someone in a street brawl when Jesus was a child.

As father and son clash over their opposing expectations of each other, Viva becomes a love story as the men struggle to understand one another and become a family again.Read More »

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The film’s violence is the genuinely spiritual kind. A loud expression of the alienation that hums constantly in the elevator music to modern life. (John Farley, Full Stop)

The novels, writings and performance works created by prolific, transgressive and author Dennis Cooper describe a world in which desire, aggression, loneliness and power swirl, in which characters teeter on the brink of immolation and where love and violence fuse. In its first partnership with San Francisco’s new Alamo Draft House, Cinematheque is thrilled to welcome Cooper and co-director Zac Farley for the local premiere (and pre-DVD release screening) of Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015), a similarly visionary examination of these overwhelming obsessions.Read More »

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Two friends return to their apartment after a night out to find a stranger passed out on their stoop. Intrigued, they vie for his attention over the rest of the weekend.Read More »

Synopsis:
The story takes place in Yugoslavia at the end of the 19th century, in an isolated village near the Adriatic sea. Because of the extreme patriarchal culture there is a superstition that families without male heirs are cursed. When the wife of a farmer gives birth to their fourth daughter, father decides that the child will be brought up to become a so-called “Virgina” and that she will live as a man, so that she can work and be the family heir. This heartbreaking story of Virginas life is told with strong words, augmented with harsh inviroment.Read More »

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From the same desert, toward the same dark sky, my tired eyes open on the silver star, forever; but the Three Wise Men never stir, the Kings of life, the heart, the soul, the mind. When will we go, over mountains and shores, to hail the birth of new labor, new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition – to be the first to adore! – Christmas on Earth!
– Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (1873)Read More »

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Tam, a timid loner, is bullied regularly by his fellow pupils at school. He is met with similar rejection and suspicion within the narrow confines of his parents’ dingy home, where his father beats him. One day Tam arranges online to meet Phum at a derelict swimming pool. They are both looking for sex, but their encounter leaves them with a feeling of comfort and security. A close bond develops between the two boys and, before long, they are roaming the rubbish heaps and dark corners of the city together, day and night. Phum opens a door for Tam, revealing a fantastical parallel universe full of spirits and dangerous encounters. Although he feels safe and loved for the first time in his life, Tam can no longer differentiate between dream and reality and finds himself increasingly drawn into a spiral of paranoia and violence. In his feature debut Boonyawatana leads his protagonist into an ambiguous microcosm full of chasms, at the same time cleverly toying with the conventions of different genres.Read More »

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Kiss Of The Spider Woman takes place in an un-named, fascist country in South America. It is, essentially, a two-actor drama featuring two men, of vastly different demeanors and ideologies, who share the same cell in a brutal prison. Louis Molina (William Hurt) is a flamboyant homosexual window dresser who is imprisoned for corrupting a minor. His cellmate is Valentin Arregui (Raul Julia), a journalist jailed for his leftist political activities. To alleviate the day-to-day drudgery, Molina entertains Valentin by retelling the stories of his favorite movies.Read More »