In 1995 the Berlin Film Festival premiered the documentary A Litany For Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde by filmmakers Ada Gray Griffin and Michelle Parkerson. The film is a portrait of poet and feminist activist Audre Lorde, who shaped both the women’s movement, the Black liberation movement and the LGTB movement of the 70s and 80s by making the links between them visible and fighting for the recognition of the differences between the marginalized. In her work the lesbian woman and mother of two children dealt with the intersections of discrimination and oppression in Western societies, especially by giving black women and women of color a strong and passionate voice, seeking to empower them and building new communities and secure spaces. How this happend on a very practical level and how much Lorde’s work is still relevant and important today is made visible in the new documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 by filmmaker and activist Dagmar Schultz. The film premiered at last year’s Berlinale and assembles video- and audio recordings and footage of Lorde’s various stays in Berlin, where she worked as a guest professor at the John F. Kennedy institute for North American. It is one of the lesser known chapters of her life. The recordings and interviews with friends and colleagues reveal, on how many different levels Lorde left her footprints here – be it by empowering German black women and women of color to build their own community, or by addressing racism and structures of exclusion within the German women’s movement and the German society as a whole (especially after the racist attacks after the wall came down). The Berlin Years is really worth watching, especially at a time where the question of intersectional discrimination and the post-colonial heritage of Western societies is more virulent than ever, both in the academic field and in political activism. The documentary is out on DVD with a distribution in German (via Edition Salzgeber) and North America. More more details check out www.audrelorde-theberlinyears.com.
It is great to see how the Berlin based XPOSED queer film festival is climbing to new hights with every year of its existence. After a focus on films from the Middle East last year, this year’s event will investigate Austrian queer avantgarde cinema and show new and old films by artists such as Mara Mattuschka, VALIE EXPORT, Peter Tscherkassky, Dietmar Brehm, Maria Lassnig, Albert Sackl or Kathrina Daschner. I’m especially happy to finally get the chance to see Vienna based artist Hans Scheierl’s legendary trans sci-fi movie Dandy Dust (June 1, the artist will be present), as well as the short films by American artist and underground filmmaker Avery Willard. Willard was just recently rediscovered by director Ira Sachs (Keep The Lights On), who produced a new documentary about the artists entitled In Search of Avery Willard (2012).
The event will start on Thursday evening May 30 with a screening of the film Burning Palance at Mindpirates (Facebook event) and end on Saturday night with the presentation of the festival’s Lolly Award, followed by an official closing party (Facebook event). For more film recommendations, a detailed overview on the program and an interview with festival maker Bartholomew Sammut, please visit the Expatriarch blog by our contributor Joey Hansom, who will DJ at the opening night. Here’s the XPOSED trailer:
We proudly present our first real-world event MOVEMENT!, which will take place on the May 24 at SHIFT, the new project space of Tresor Club on Köpenicker Straße between Berlin-Kreuzberg and Mitte. The event, with which we’ll celebrate our 4th birthday, aims to show different ways in which contemporary artists use music and sound in combination with dance and other body practices in order to investigate and express queer identification or dis-identification.
We will show 10 different works by artists who identify as queer, trans* and feminist, each of them working with different points of departure such as race, class, and gender. All approaches explore the intersection of the individual and the community, combining a critique towards the normalizing institutions of modern capitalistic society with utopian spirit and practice. The evening’s program ranges from short documentaries and music videos to recordings of live performances. Most of the projects were created and released within the last two years and will be screened with the kind permission of the artists.
How many films have changed your life? What at first glance seems to be a tough question, becomes something pretty clear to me when I remember the first time I saw Arrebato by Spanish director Ivan Zulueta. Unfortunately, it wasn’t at the original première in 1980 – I was born four years later -, but at least I had the chance to see a special screening in an old Madrilenian porn cinema as part of the promotional events that came along with the release of the deluxe DVD edition.
Anyway, far from a porn movie, what you get for nearly two hours is a raw and deeply emotional experience through Zulueta’s inner obsessions, such as childhood memories subtly showing the so-called Peter Pan complex or his self-destructive love for the cinema itself, taken up until the very last consequences. In fact, the relationship depicted among the main characters and the cinema proves to be even more addictive and dangerous than the heroin openly injected by themselves. MORE >>>
“Pay It No Mind” by filmmaker Michael Kasino pays tribute to legendary New York queen and activist Marsha P. Johnson, who was one of the founders of the US gay and trans rights movement of the 60s and 70s and a central figure in the NYC gay and art scene until the early 90s. The documentary based on a late interview with Marsha and interviews with many of her friends and fellow activists recaptures different stages of her exciting (and often difficult) live such as the Stonewall Riots (which she initiated), the creation of the S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and her role as a performer as part of the drag performance group Hot Peaches.
The interview with Marsha was recorded shortly before her mysterious death in 1992, which until today has remained an unsolved case and was just recently re-opend for investigation by the New York police (who had refused to investigate it in the last 20 years). Co-featured are gay activist Randy Wicker, former Cockettes performer Agosto Machado, Author Michael Musto, Hot Peaches founder/performer Jimmy Camicia, and Stonewall activists such as Bob Kohler, Danny Garvin, Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt and Martin Boyce. In addition to the countless number of beautiful photos the film is also accompanied by the music of Antony, whose band “The Johnsons” were named after Marsha and whose song “River of Sorrow” references her death.
“Pay It No Mind” was the screened in places such as the IFC theater in New York, the British Film Institute in London and La Mutinerie in Paris in 2012 and can now be fully streamed online. Thanks Mr. Kasino!
London hosts again its 27th queer film festival and to open the show the BFI will premier I am Divine in Europe, a documentary on the life of legendary cultural terrorist, actor, drag queen, performer and singer Haris Glen Milshead, best known as Divine.
Director: Jeffrey Schwarz
Across 11 days over 100 titles will be screened including a rare screening of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. In fact there is even an even dedicated to the bisexual genius called We Love David Bowie. The program is divided into three categories: Hearts, for emotional and romantic films; Bodies, for films focusing on sex, identity and transformation; and Minds, celebrating films reflecting on community, politics and the arts. We delved into the list and picked our favourite films form from each category:
In one of his most famous works from 1998 Los Angles based artist, filmmaker and writer William E. Jones takes a close look at Eastern European gay porn movies and displays the asymmetric power structures under which they are produced. All images used for the movie are scenes from films shot between 1993 – 1998, the time when production companies like Bel Ami became powerful new players in the industry. ”The Fall of Communism” analyzes the various ways in which symbols of the former Soviet Union are depicted in the films and shows how unexperienced young men from countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic are ruthlessly swallowed by the emerging new market.
A full-lenght version of “The Fall of Communism” can also be found on williamejones.com, where you find a complete overview on Jones work.
John Cameron Mitchell might not have a new film out at the moment, but he’s in Berlin for the film festival with plenty of other activities keeping him busy. On a break from writing the stage sequel to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Mitchell was invited by the Berlinale Talent Campus to speak about cinematic depiction of sex for Thursday’s “Some Like It Hot” panel at HAU1. Later that night, he and I will join Shortbus stars PJ DeBoy and Paul Dawson for MATTACHINE Berlin, the first European edition of their semi-legendary NYC dance party, taking place at Monster Ronson’s.
The tickets for the 63. Berlinale are now on sale. We’ve taken a closer look on this year’s program and put together a list of the film screenings we’re looking forward to the most. For the individual screening dates please check out the film’s pages on the Berlinale website linked below the trailers.
Hélio Oiticica
Director: Cesar Oiticica Filho
Short synopsis: Found-footage documentary about Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), the filmmaker’s uncle.
“a doubling, a haunting, a generational negotiation”
– Elisabeth Subrin on Shulie
The brilliant radical feminist Shulamith Firestone died this past year at the age of 67, though she essentially withdrew from public life four decades ago, as if let down by the movement she helped build. I first heard of her work via feminist band Le Tigre, and promptly read her bestselling book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970). Years later, I found out about the 1997 film Shulie by American experimental filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin, which has become a classic of the avant-garde and an object of passionate study for scholars interested in non-fiction cinema, memory and historical re-enactment; and queer and feminist temporalities. Queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman calls Shulie “feminist history’s outtakes.”
In 1967, as a BFA student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Firestone was featured in a short documentary made by four male film students: a portrait of an emerging female artist of the so-called “Now” generation. Discovering the long-forgotten short in the 1990s, Subrin decided to remake Shulie shot by shot with an actor playing Firestone and with the thirty years of hindsight that knows this unremarkable young woman featured on film would go on to become one of the most articulate and boldly original voices of 20th-century feminism, soon moving to New York and then completing The Dialectic of Sex a mere three years later. (At the time of the shooting, Firestone was already a part of the radical feminist organizing in Chicago, though this remains unspoken in the film.) Shulie asks us to scrutinize Firestone in art school for the traces of who she would soon become, and the radical theories she would evolve. (And not only this, but to do so at a remove – through an actor, in a remake.)
Subrin wanted to investigate the “residue” of the late 1960s and, identifying strongly with Shulie, she asks, “Why, if we had reaped the benefits of second-wave feminism, should Shulie’s life seem so contemporary?” Part of the contemporary power of the film is the awkwardness of the 22-year-old woman as she goes through the painfully familiar machinations of art school – including a torturous critique by her male painting professors – and the other small indignities that attend a life on the margins (which have not changed much), as well as having to unwillingly articulate her place in a “generation.” It is precisely these “minor” historical forces – and not just great political events and movements – that compel individuals to take on certain identifications and positions in the world. MORE >>>
My first time I came upon the work of Los Angeles artist Margaret Haines was when I found her beautiful video she made for her friend Dan Bodan‘s single “Nudity and Atrocity”, which was released in spring last year. The video is one of her artistic “trailers” anticipating her feature movie “Coco”, which will be released later this year. For the film Haines invented “Coco”, a female character, who she characterises as “very girly, hysteric and into horses” and who tries to deal with her delusions of making it in the pop business.
After a performance at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), a sound installation at the Cirrus Gallery, and a sculptural presentation at Commonwealth and Council Gallery, Haines has just recently finished another two studies of the Coco character. The first one is the book “Coco x Love With Stranger”, which was launched with an event at the LA book stork Ooga Booga in December. The publication references the style of Eigthies’ fanzines and teen pulp novels and like the film is loosely based on motives of the story of Don Quixote, exploring different facets of female identity. It is published by New Byzantium in an edition of 500.
The second new “trailer” is a collection of silk scarfs, which are printed with stills from the “Coco” films and which you can discover on the pictures below. For more information about the film and her work please visit Margaret Haines website.
How this happend on a very practical level and how much Lorde’s work is still relevant and important today is made visible in the new documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 by filmmaker and activist Dagmar Schultz. The film premiered at last year’s Berlinale and assembles video- and audio recordings and footage of Lorde’s various stays in Berlin, where she worked as a guest professor at the John F. Kennedy institute for North American. It is one of the lesser known chapters of her life. The recordings and interviews with friends and colleagues reveal, on how many different levels Lorde left her footprints here – be it by empowering German black women and women of color to build their own community, or by addressing racism and structures of exclusion within the German women’s movement and the German society as a whole (especially after the racist attacks after the wall came down).
