Queer Cinema(s)

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Jessica’s extraordinarily strong will and heart enables her to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing. From seven to seventeen Jess is brainwashed to be one of the ‘saved’, to devote her life to Jesus, to follow the discriminatory teachings of Pastor Finch and his understanding of Revelations. As her warm personality dictates she succeeds in fitting into this regime and spreads the word of Jesus in a fairly content manner. But when her friendship with Melanie develops into something a little more ‘unnatural’ she easily realizes the error of the Pastors teachings. The girls are subjected to terrible treatment to convince them to repent.Read More »

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This brooding, operatic movie about Nazism makes Cabaret look like wholesome family fare. The family in The Damned is a symbol of German society circa 1934. The Krupp-like steel magnate Baron von Essenbeck represents the spineless establishment. The Nazis kill the baron, then frame one heir apparent, a socialist (married to the stunning Charlotte Rampling). A bearish, boorish Essenbeck representing the SA, the Nazis’ early goon squad, takes the reins. But Hitler murdered the SA in the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” providing The Damned with its bravura action scene, a Nazi massacre at a gay SA orgy. The winning Essenbeck is the murderous, pedophilic, transvestite, mother-rapist Martin (sharp-featured Helmut Berger), who represents Nazism. Though he’s better in director Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice, Dirk Bogarde is classy as Martin’s stepdad. The Damned got an Oscar screenplay nomination, and Vincent Canby called Berger’s Martin “the performance of the year.”Read More »

One of America’s finest filmmakers tackles “lovemaking” in its many varieties (hetrosexual, homosexual as well as various animals having sex). Without a soundtrack (as the artist always thought that sound was an aesthetic error in filmmaking), the film is shot with Brakhage’s characteristic visual rhythmns.Read More »

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High school can be horrible, especially when your classmates make you feel like a freak. But sometimes that pain only means that finding the person who gets you is all the sweeter. Loner Sara is in her last year of high school and is miserable. She is shunned by the girls in her class for being “weird” and spends her lunches smoking in a hiding place behind the school. That is, until the new girl, Andrea, invades her hideout one day. Andrea and Sara fall for each other instantly, bonding over their love of books and solitude. Things might actually start to look up for Sara, but then the world intrudes and threatens their happiness. Can their love survive homophobic classmates and parents?Read More »

Despite harsh condemnation and denunciation from society, a heterosexual female pastor founded Taiwan’s first LGBT-affirming church in May 1996. For LGBT Christians, who had been rejected by the Christian community for a long time, they finally have a church that offers them a safe haven. Though the founder has passed away, the church members continue to make their voice heard, confronting the unjust social institutions while struggling with religious conflict at the same time. Come hell or high water, they strive to make a difference in the lives of others by telling their own life stories, in hope that love will eventually trump hate and solve misunderstanding someday.Read More »

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The film, depicting life in working-class Liverpool from the 1940s into the 50s, is already a modern classic.

Now that Eileen, Maisie, and Tony are adults, their childhood memories – and in particular those associated with their father – are inconsistent. While Eileen clings to happier times, her siblings remember his brutal violent nature, which has been a major influence on their growth and development. This troubled family must deal with the day-to-day alongside their past. Terence Davies creates a loving portrait with this partly autobiographical tale (shot in two sections), and it was voted one of the greatest British films by Sight & Sound.Read More »

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‘LAUNDRETTE,’ SOCIAL COMEDY SLEEPER
DON’T be put off by the title, which makes it sound like a failed French farce. ”My Beautiful Laundrette,” written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, is the first real sleeper of the year.

The film, which opens today at the Embassy 72d Street Theater, is a rude, wise, vivid social comedy about Pakistani immigrants in London, , particularly about the initially naive, university-age Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Omar’s extended family of wheeler-dealers and unassimilated layabouts.Read More »

Synopsis
“Criterion” wrote:
In his last film, legendary writer/artist/filmmaker Jean Cocteau portrays an 18th-century poet who travels through time on a quest for divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he meets several symbolic phantoms that bring about his death and resurrection. With an eclectic cast that includes Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leáud, Jean Marais and Yul Brynner, Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament de Orphée) brings full circle the journey Cocteau began in The Blood of a Poet, an exploration of the torturous relationship between the artist and his creations.Read More »

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In early spring of 1966, in anticipation of his eventual departure from the Greenwich Village apartment in which he had been living for a number of years, [Markopoulos] filmed the revelatory seven-minute interior portrait Ming Green , titled for the deep spruce color of the apartment’s walls. Ming Green was edited entirely in-camera, and its precise rhythmic blossoming is based on overlapping dissolves and longer flashes, rather than single-frame clusters. The film’s complex harmonic structure, however — as well as its incorporation of often static, “single” images that may be comprised of more than one frame — echoes the montage techniques developed in Twice a Man (1963). Interweaving mementos with foliage, color, and light, Ming Green suggests the inextricability of past and present: despite its exquisite lightness, it could represent the passage of hours and days rather than minutes. -Kristin Jones, Millennium Film Journal, 1998Read More »