Queer Cinema(s)

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Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) 1994- André Téchiné’s coming-of-age drama, set in a quiet provincial town in 1962, is the best French film in years. The young characters are all deeply confused about their political, intellectual, and sexual identities; the director sets up their conflicts with masterly ease, and, using smooth, complex tracking shots, carries them toward resolutions that are tentative but real. The movie flows like a river. Téchiné simply takes his characters from one point to another-from juvenile ignorance to a place where they can see themselves, and others, a little more clearly-and he makes that short journey look momentous. Few movies dealing with teen-agers have been so accurate about the moral and emotional urgency of adolescents’ attempts to understand their lives, or so forgiving of their failures. Gaël Morel, élodie Bouchez, Stéphane Rideau, and Frédéric Gorny play the main characters, and they’re all terrific.Read More »

A controversial look at the lives and conflicts of a group of homosexual men set during one evening in a New York bath house for menRead More »

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 »

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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 »

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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 »

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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 »

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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 »