Doc Corner: S&M Lesbians, Oscar Winners and Queer Theater — classic restorations of 2020
Thursday, October 29, 2020 at 8:53AM By Glenn Dunks
We tend to focus on new release documentaries around here, covering the gamut of titles premiering in cinemas, on streaming and VOD, and occasionally—as you’ll see over the next few week—festivals. What I rarely have the pleasure of doing is review classic docs, which is probably rather silly since the boom in popularity for the form has meant distributors and exhibitors are getting more confident in not just re-releasing classics documentaries, but restoring them, too.
As I found when researching my top 100 docs of the decade list, even titles from as few as four or five years ago become increasingly hard to find. And if they never received a US release? Even harder. Hopefully that starts to change and all the more reason to celebrate when older works do appear. So, to celebrate the Film Society at Lincoln Centre’s season of films by gay icons Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (until November 5, so get on it!) I wanted to highlight some of the absolute rippers that have come along lately.
There’s everything from S&M lesbians, American cross-country road trips, nuclear bombs, and one Chantal Akerman masterpiece...
QUEER HISTORY
Let’s start with those films by Epstein and Friedman, shall we? Alongside the essential Oscar-winner The Life and Times of Harvey Milk from 1984, and 1995’s The Celluloid Closet, this rare season of queer docs features restorations and long-needed resurfacing of some truly underseen gems about the American gay experience. I, along with TFE contributor Daniel Walber (of the brilliant The Furniture series) discussed Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt six (!) years ago—as did Manuel Betancourt during his 2015 series on HBO’s queer history—so I won’t go into that any further.
My favourite of the collection that was new to me is probably 1992’s Where Are We?: Our Trip Through America in which the pair pack up and traverse the American south after the conclusion of the Gulf War. Interspersed between modestly comical sidebars to a model Graceland and a patriotic Vegas casino are poignant discussions with locals about happiness, regret, and hopes for the future of America.
And in one scary harbinger for what was to come with the weaponization of conservative American values, one older gentleman derides the leftist media “who want to take guns away from everybody”, bureaucratic politicians “who couldn’t get an honest job so they run for government”, and the lack of law and order:
“Turn America back an honest, god-fearing place.”
“Is there any hope of that happening?”
“Not without a revolution.”
Yikes.
Refreshingly sweet is The AIDS Show, a rare glimpse into the activist queer art being produced in San Francisco during the first wave of the epidemic in 1986. The film by Epstein, this time working alongside Peter Adair, goes behind the scenes of the provocative stage show named not after the virus, but an acronym for the Theatre Rhinoceros’ troupe of ‘Artists Involved with Death and Survival’. The very roughly shot 58-minute video doc features interviews with those involved in the show as well as segments that oscillate between hilarious and heart-breaking. It constantly feels like a mini-miracle that a product such as this has survived.
More recent was Epstein and Friedman’s 2000 holocaust doc Paragraph 175, which details in often disturbing detail the stories of just a few of the 100,000 men imprisoned and killed by the Nazis under the titular penal code. Some of the remaining few survivors choose not to be involved, but others are more forthcoming and their stories piece through the screen. Especially when paired with The AIDS Show, this Sundance and Berlin winner (and Emmy + Independent Spirit nominee!) narrated by Rupert Everett casts further tragic light on the experience of LGBTIQ people across history and does so with stark candor.
Even more potent are the works of Marlon Riggs that have recently been released first on OVID.tv and then subsequently on the Criterion Channel. Entirely by coincidence, I had watched Riggs' most famous film, Tongues Untied, earlier in my housebound isolation and found it a stunning work. A film of jagged frictions, a free-flowing sense of form mixing essay with language, poetry and visual art that even today feels revolutionary. I can only imagine what it was like to witness when it premiered to controversy in 1989. Do you think anybody who protested its PBS screening have thought about it once since then? The art has stood the test of time.
Maybe even more impressive is Riggs' Black Is… Black Ain’t completed and released in 1995 after his death, film that once again aches with the memories of queer, black and femme individuals. Loaded with critique on themes that are still with us today even beyond race, but deep into masculinity and patriarchy. Academic, maybe, but human and poetic, too. These two films have been released alongside other Riggs titles Ethnic Notions, Color Adjustment, Affirmation, Anthem and No Regret about black men living with HIV as they attempt to release themselves from the stigma. I recommend them all.
Lastly, and of a completely different variety of queer, is Michelle Handelman’s 1995 exploration of lesbian sexuality in Bloodsisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism. Made with a whole bag of low-budget indie documentary trends from the era (those tints and goofy edits; this is Hi-8 video after all), this is nonetheless a compelling watch. Especially if you’re sick to death of films about Mapplethorpe and Tom of Finland that are barely erotic let alone dangerously sexual. A bravely in-your-face film that played Outfest and Newfest and will be released through Kino Lorber in early 2021.
THE STATE OF AMERICA
I ‘attended’ the virtual AFI Docs festival back in… May? I want to say May. Who can tell, though? That was were I was able to watch Lee Grant’s (yes, the Lee Grant) Oscar-winning Down and Out in America from 1985. A deeply empathetic feature that presents the socio-economic disparity of America in simple and unadorned fashion. Grant ventures to the plains of Minnesota where farmers are greedily manipulated by banks in a short-sighted and swift destruction of America’s once thriving agriculture industry before moving to the bigger cities. There she finds homeless communities vilified and destroyed by callous governments as well as a fraying New York couple whose life was turned upside down and who now live in squalor. It can be rented through Hope Runs High (scroll to find which cinema/festival you wish to support).
Even earlier is William Greaves’ Nationtime about the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, which can now be rented on Kino Marquee in a restoration funded by none other than Jane Fonda and the HFPA. Predominantly a series of speeches by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Amiri Baraka and Harry Belafonte, with musical performances by Isaac Hayes and narration by Sidney Poitier. You could perhaps criticise Greaves (best known for 1968's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm) for doing little with the footage, but he was probably wise to understand that what's here was already breathtaking, full of explosive passion from speakers and cheering crowds who were beginning to understand their political worth to themselves and to the wider Democrat party.
I was so disappointed in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 for, among other things, so swiftly and conveniently forgetting about the Black Panthers’ Bobby Seale the moment he served no further narrative purpose (despite puffing up the likes of Eddie Redmayne’s Tom Hayden with invented flourishes of invented heroism). That 1968 convention is derisively mentioned several times and I found myself thrilled by how simply it captured the electricity of its moment. A film that holds immense relevance today.
AND BEFORE WE GO...
Two final titles that don’t fit quite as elegantly together. I had to look up the timeline for Judy Irving and Chris Beaver's Dark Circle, horrified to discover the events that take place are fully years before Chernobyl (one of my earlier lockdown watches). The doc that played virtual Metrograph in NY and the Laemmie in LA and is currently playing a variety of virtual cinemas via First Run Features. Terrifying in how casual nuclear weapons testing was left to future generations in the town of Rocky Flats, Colorado. Through rigorous investigative filmmaking and sly shifts in tone, this 1982 Emmy-winner is another great addition to '80s atomic cinema.
And leaving perhaps the best until last, Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece of slow postcard cinema From the East has been restored to 4K and is screening at BAM's online cinema. I have not had a chance to rewatch this one, but it was already such an incredibly visual feature that I can only imagine what it looks like now. Akerman’s camera glides and drifts through East Germany, Poland, the Balkans and finally to Russia in the dead of winter as people in heavy fur coats wait in the snow for rickety soviet busses. It’s an extraordinary film from the late Belgian director who sought to wordlessly capture the unique textures of the region before the collapse of the Soviet bloc. A must see for lovers of her more well-known News from Home.
Phew.
That's all!
Reader Comments (4)
I would like that "Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen" would be already in conversation for Oscar... I loved it, and I think it could be the next "The Celulloid Closet". A pity it is flying under the radar (also, is it ellegible?). It's being a good year for docs, also "Circus of Books" was great.
FROM THE EAST is also on Criterion channel.
oh, those girls on the train in 'where are we?' - all these years later i still use a fried "you don't want to know" when i don't have an interesting answer
Jesus, I am sure it'll be eligible but I imagine it'll have more hope with the Emmys next year.