Queering the Oscars: Bruce Davison in "Longtime Companion"

by Cláudio Alves

As nominees, presenters, and other attendees arrived on the red carpet for the 63rd Academy Awards, they were met with righteous commotion. ACT-UP members picketed the ceremony, holding banners decrying universal inaction when over 102,000 people had already died by the modern plague of AIDS. During the festivities proper, activist David Lacaillade, who had found his way to the audience, stood up and shouted invective against the proceedings, demanding action and calling those who do nothing hypocrites. AIDS Action Now! Sadly, there seemed to be very little in the way of open solidarity inside the Shrine Auditorium.

Earlier, protestors offered button pins emblazoned with "SILENCE = DEATH" to the folk walking the red carpet. Most people declined to wear them, but Bruce Davison was one of the few to don the message. He was also the rare example to wear it all ceremony – some people took them down before the opening monologue was through. Davison was present as the sole nominee from Longtime Companion, the first mainstream feature to depict the effects of AIDS in the gay community. Walking into the Oscars, he felt a heavy responsibility pressing down on his shoulders. In his own words, the actor was "carrying the torch for the people represented in this film"... 

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Queersighted: Breaking Taboos on the Criterion Channel

by Cláudio Alves

O FANTASMA (2000)

For the past few years, the Criterion Channel has highlighted taboo-breaking pictures in queer cinema with their series "Queersighted." For its fourth edition, programmer Michael Koresky invited film critic K. Austin Collins to select and discuss a series of works that look at film history through a decidedly queer lens. This year's installment features movies that go from 1930s Hollywood productions to 2000s Portuguese provocations. Controversial and wildly transgressive, these films run a gamut of genres and formalistic approaches, showcasing how it's possible to push the envelope both from within the Hays Code-abiding studio system and the vanguard of New German Cinema.

Before saying farewell to Pride Month 2021, join us in exploring ten films presented in this program...

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Almost There: River Phoenix in "My Own Private Idaho"

This article is dedicated to Mark, one of our subscribers (thank you!), who requested a piece on River Phoenix -Editor.

by Cláudio Alves

It's difficult to write, it's difficult to think, about River Phoenix without the tragedy of his premature death casting a dark shadow over all other considerations. His acting is often talked about in terms of wasted potential, another facet of the same mythos that James Dean inhabits in the public consciousness. Sure, his film work is important, but only as far as it adds to the narrative of a flame that burned too bright and died out too soon. That can be a blessing to one's legacy, a promise of cultural immortality. However, it's also a curse that makes a young actor's amazing career into a footnote of a Hollywood tale of doom and gloom. River Phoenix was and is more than the protagonist of a real-life story about dying young. He's a great actor, one whose performances still have the power to amaze and impress, to enlighten and hurt.

This piece is about such a feat of acting, one that takes my breath away every time I gaze upon its magnificence. It's about River Phoenix in Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho…

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Doc Corner: 'The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson'

by Glenn Dunks

It is sadly just a matter of fact that women of colour rarely get documentaries made about them without tragedy informing their very existence. “Death” is even right there at the start of the title for David France’s new film about one such pioneering person. And indeed, the mystery surrounding Marsha P. Johnson’s death is what acts as the central spine of his The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson as one activist, Victoria Cruz, sets about solving the mystery of the death of another activist 25 years ago.

But like the literal meaning behind the title of France’s last film, the Oscar-nominated masterwork How to Survive a Plague, this new film is also about “life” and surviving and ultimately acts as a testament to Johnson’s tenacity and pure force-of-nature attitude in the face of adversity – a tired cliché of a phrase that is nonetheless truly warranted here...

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Retro Sundance: 1991's Poison

Since we're not in Sundance this year, a look back at Sundance classics. Here's David on Poison...

Glenn kicked off our Sundance retrospective with a look at Desert Hearts, a film with more than a passing resemblance to Todd Haynes' Carol; a few years down the line, and we come to Haynes’ own appearance in the Utah festival, with his feature debut Poison. Winner of the 1991 festival’s Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic, Poison is considered a vital film in the ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the early 1990s, as coined by B. Ruby Rich the following year. Rich’s theory involved not just the presence of LGBT characters and themes, but the queering of filmmaking form itself. Haynes had already demonstrated his inventive, radical eye in the controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and Poison, with its triptych of homonymic narratives, consolidated the director’s manipulation of nostalgia and classic cinematic forms to produce a strikingly different approach to cinema.

Each segment is presented in an individual and vivid stylistic form. 'Hero', the story of a young boy who shoots his father and literally flies away, comes as an oversaturated tabloid news documentary, containing interviews with scandalised neighbours, incisively lurid narration and tremulous recreations of the event itself. [More...]

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