Queer Cinema(s)

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By 1965, Jack Smith was exhibiting versions of Normal Love, mixing his soundtracks live and often re-editing the film as it was being shown. After Smith’s death, Jerry Tartaglia prepared this restored 105-minute version, which premiered in 1997. Although shot on backdated color-film stock and paced more languidly than Flaming Creatures, Normal Love again features women and cross-dressed men in an idyll of sexual anarchy. Smith filmed almost entirely outdoors, emphasizing pinks and greens in the scenery, costumes, and props, and combining textural passages with allusions to film icons such as the Mummy and the Werewolf, Maria Montez, and Busby Berkeley. The inspired finale is set atop a massive pink cake (where the dancing Cake Cuties include Andy Warhol).Read More »

SYNOPSIS
This sexy and funny story of a fortysomething guy who wants to fall in love with a woman, but shares his bed with twentysomething guy just may open your mind.

Author, filmmaker and NYU film school graduate Ilan Duran Cohen’s second feature, Confusion of Genders, is both explicit and restrained, sexy and sublime, gay and straight, its appeal and theme of a man’s inability to grow up is unquestionable and broad. Pascal Greggory (an award winner for his performance in Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) plays Alain, a fortyish lawyer who was once an ugly duckling. Now he’s capable of charming anyone and, like a honeybee hovering over a garden of pretty flowers, can’t decide which to sup from first, next, or last. There’s Laurence (Nathalie Richard), a peer at his law firm, whom Alain recently got pregnant and reckons he should marry; Christophe, the frisky, gay younger brother of another ex-girlfriend; the obsessed, incarcerated, but sexy client, Marc; and Marc’s entrancing hairdresser girlfriend, Babette. “The only person he has yet to charm is himself,” Duran Cohen has remarked.Read More »

Short after facing the failure of an attempt to rescue a drowning man, Donato meets Konrad, friend of the victim. Motivated by the circumstances, Donato decides to begin a new life in Berlin, but pieces of his past are coming after him.Read More »

Joaquim Pinto, who has been living with HIV for more than two decades, looks back at his life in cinema, at his friendships and loves, at the mysteries of art and nature – while undergoing an experimental drug treatment.Read More »

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Dalibor Matanic directs the fast-paced Croatian film noir Fine Dead Girls. Looking for a small place to live together, medical student Iva (Olga Pakalovic) and her girlfriend Marija (Nina Violic) move into an apartment building in Zagreb filled with addicts, abusers, prostitutes, and other creepy characters. Landlords Olga (Inge Appelt) and Blaz (Ivica Vidovic) are no more friendly than the rest of their neighbors, and their delinquent son, Daniel (Kresimir Mikic), is overly attracted to Iva despite his homophobia. Eventually, Marija’s intolerant father tries to sabotage the two girls, leading to a violent conclusion.Read More »

Independent auteur Hal Hartley wrote and directed this satirical exercise in what he calls “fake science fiction.” In the near future, following a violent overthrow of the American government, the United States has come under the rule of the MMM, a Multi-Media Monopoly which runs the country as a business. Every citizen now has a personal bar code, which is used to monitor his or her consumption of practically everything, including sex, now that aphrodisiacs have become the nation’s biggest consumer product. Jack (Bill Sage) and Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd) are two MMM executives who are vying for the same level of advancement within the organization, while William (Leo Fitzpatrick) is a member of the Partisans, a cadre of anti-MMM activists who are attempting to bring down the corporation’s rule, though they are regarded as both dangerous and powerless by MMM’s leaders. In the midst of this situation comes a beautiful woman from the planet Monday (Tatiana Abracos), who knows about Jack’s little secret — he’s a fellow alien hiding out on Earth. The woman has come to Earth to bring Jack back to planet Monday, but given the currently miserable state of Jack’s life, he’s more interested in having a relationship with her than heading back home. The Girl From Monday has its world premiere at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. — Mark DemingRead More »

from Imdb, written by Su Friederich herself

Through a series of twenty six short stories, a girl describes the childhood events that shaped her ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play. As the stories unfold, a dual portrait emerges: that of a father who cared more for his career than for his family, and of a daughter who was deeply affected by his behavior. Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life. Together, they create a formally complex and emotionally intense film. Written by Su Friedrich

By Fred Camper
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As great as it is merciless, a film that inevitably precipitates violent disagreements, Fox and His Friends (the rhyming German title of which roughly translates as Fists of Freedom or, better, Might Makes Right) is the male mirror of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: a portrait of class exploitation and emotional sadomasochism amongst a group of homosexuals. Fassbinder plays Fox, a carnival entertainer who wins a lottery and thereby becomes an alluring object of desire for an antiques dealer who is on the verge of bankruptcy. The posh businessman takes the naïve carnie as his lover and introduces him to the world of Munich’s upper-crust gays, with tragic results.Read More »

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Jack Clayton’s celebrated screen adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a brilliant exercise in psychological horror. Impressionable and repressed governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) agrees to tutor two orphaned children, Miles and Flora. On arrival at Bly House, she becomes convinced that the children are possessed by the perverse spirits of former governess Miss Jessel and her Heathcliffe-like lover Quint (Peter Wyngarde), who both met with mysterious deaths.

The film’s sinister atmosphere is carefully created – not through shock tactics, but through its cinematography, soundtrack, and decor: Freddie Francis’ beautiful CinemaScope photography, with its eerily indistinct long shots and mysterious manifestations at the edges of the frame; an evocative and spooky soundtrack; and the grand yet decaying Bly House.

Deborah Kerr gives the performance of her career and makes The Innocents an intensely unsettling experience. Are the ghosts the products of Miss Giddens’s fevered imagination and emotional immaturity, or a displacement of her shock at the sexually precocious behaviour of ten-year-old Miles? Is she the protector or the corrupter?Read More »