LGBTQ+ Films and Filmmakers

Queer means anything can happen. It's about openness to possibilities. —Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Beginning in the 1980s, Queer Studies became popular in academic curricula and has resulted, over the ensuing decades, in a body of literature about films and filmmakers viewed through this lens. In honor of LGBTQ+ History Month, GME highlights an array of moving image works that we distribute (both classic and contemporary) by LGBTQ+ artists and/or about topics and themes relevant to the LGBTQ+ community. These works are available to academic institutions in North America, and are distributed in collaboration with Index Edition, Re:Voir Video, Flicker Alley, MētisPresses, Kino Lorber, and Edition Filmmuseum.

Working across various genres (and sub-genres) of filmmaking (including experimental, documentary and narrative modalities), these artists offer diverse perspectives, through their films' texts and subtexts, about this global community. Many of these moving image works foreground such issues as the body, gender, and sexuality, as well as concepts of marginalization, transgression, otherness, and open-endedness — i.e., identity writ large.

W A R R E N S O N B E R T

Art is disrupt. —Warren Sonbert

Warren Sonbert was a star filmmaker of the New American Cinema movement of the 1960s. He made his first film AMPHETAMINE in 1966, while studying film at New York University, and at 20 years old he had his first career retrospective at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. That event drew the attention of the film critic for Variety who wrote: “Probably not since Andy Warhol’s THE CHELSEA GIRLS had its first showing at the Cinematheque... almost a year and a half ago has an ‘underground’ film event caused as much curiosity and interest in N.Y.’s non-underground world as did four days of showings of the complete films of Warren Sonbert at the Cinematheque’s new location on Wooster St.”

In the 1970s, Sonbert relocated to San Francisco and, with friends and colleagues Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler pioneered the filmmaking technique known as “polyvalent montage.” This technique comprised much of CARRIAGE TRADE (1973), a colorful travelogue of the artist’s journeys through Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States. Sonbert considered the film his “magnum opus,” and it was later included in Anthology Film Archives’ renowned Essential Cinema repertory series.

While many of Sonbert’s films deal with themes of travel, art, and love among couples, he did not shy away from controversial or political subject matters. His debut AMPHETAMINE, made three years before the 1969 Stonewall uprising (and therefore, the beginning of gay liberation), was groundbreaking for featuring a 360-degree shot of two men kissing, as well as images of young gay men taking intravenous drugs. His 1981 montage film NOBLESSE OBLIGE deals with the riots in San Francisco following the murder of gay politician Harvey Milk; 11 years later, Sonbert made SHORT FUSE (1992) as an impassioned response to his AIDS diagnosis. WHIPLASH (1995/97), Sonbert’s final film, finds him externalizing his interior awareness of his own mortality, and was finalized after his death by his former student, filmmaker Jeff Scher. These films screened together in June 2024 in a program curated by GME President Jon Gartenberg for the National Gallery of Art’s annual Pride Month event We Have Always Been Here.

Since 1995, Gartenberg has worked to further Sonbert’s legacy through a comprehensive program of preservation, distribution, programming, and publishing. In 2015, Gartenberg was Guest Editor of a special issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media that comprised a dossier of writings by Sonbert himself on film, music, art, poetry, and travel. GME has recently re-teamed with Framework to release a second dossier, featuring contemporaneous writings about Sonbert’s early films; as well, a project has been underway to make Sonbert’s films available in digital formats, so as to make this artist’s films available to a wider international audience.

Sonbert’s art does not unlock secrets, but discovers new ways of preserving them. And yet this endless movement along the paths of evasion reflects and illuminates the movements of the heart in whose secret places it begins. —James Stoller

WORKS BY SONBERT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• AMPHETAMINE (1966)

• WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? (1966)

• HALL OF MIRRORS (1966)

• THE TENTH LEGION (1967)

• THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1967)

V A L I E E X P O R T

The female body has always been a construction. Even feminist art of the 1970s fashioned a body in accordance with its own ideas, and in this regard it was a form of manipulation too. —Valie Export

Valie Export is an Austrian avant-garde artist whose work encompasses film, video, text, photography, sculpture, and public performance. As noted by Electronic Arts Intermix: “Confront[ing] a complex feminist critique of the social and political body, her works achieve a compelling fusion of the visceral and the conceptual.”

Export began her career in the 1960s, during which time the feminist movement in Austria was still contending with remnants of conservative Nazi ideology that was shaping attitudes toward women and women’s bodies. Export, who was born Waltraud Lehner, changed her name to Valie Export, often stylized “VALIE EXPORT,” in an act of self-determination and affirmation. She later explained: “My idea was to export from my 'outside' (heraus) and also export, from that port.”

Export’s work often grapples with gender roles and sexuality and how these elements of a person’s identity factor into broader political considerations. Her three-part photographic work Identitätstransfer from 1968 anticipated, in the words of Artforum’s Brigitte Huck, “not only Cindy Sherman’s performance of a multiple self but also today’s debates over LGBT issues, gender fluidity, and queer theory. Staging herself as a woman in men’s attire — the pictures show her wearing a nylon jacket, heavy gold chains, and a magnificent head of fake curls — EXPORT deftly pointed up that there are more than two genders.”

WORKS BY EXPORT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• THREE EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILMS, available as both a DVD and DVD/DSL bundle, brings together works Export created between 1970 and 1984: MANN & FRAU & ANIMAL (1970—73), …REMOTE…REMOTE… (1973), and SYNTAGMA (1984)

• INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES (1976), Export’s first attempt at a feature-length narrative in collaboration with Peter Weibel, available as both a DVD and DVD/DSL bundle. Author Gene Youngblood has written that INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES is:

A tour de force of cinematic invention…and it reveals a prodigious talent at work. The title refers to extraterrestrial aliens called 'Hyksos,' malevolent forces that enter human bodies like incubi and initiate the decline of civilization. Not to be taken literally, the Hyksos are a poetic metaphor for the modern Zeitgeist, the apocalyptic mood of the times. Ms. Export uses this theme as a framework for some of the most audacious and amazing experiments since Jean Cocteau. The comparison is appropriate, for on one level INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES  is about art and the artist, a modern BLOOD OF THE POET. To this, Export brings a fresh and intelligent sensibility, characteristically self-referential. Her visual resources include mirrors, still photography, video, dance, and films within the film, all employed with a bold and surprising inventiveness.

M A R K R A P P A P O R T

I get my ideas while watching movies. It’s very relaxing and very stressful at the same time. Gives me a lot of space to think. The worse the movie, the more I think. —Mark Rappaport

Dubbed “the father of the video essay” by critic Matt Zoller Seitz and lauded by the likes of Roger Ebert, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman, and Dave Kehr, film and video artist Mark Rappaport has had a long and prolific career — first as a low-budget narrative filmmaker beginning in the 1960s, and later as a clever and incisive video essayist.

In revelatory and subversive fashion, Rappaport has tackled the careers and complicated legacies of such show business legends as Jean Seberg, Anita Ekberg, Debra Paget, Max Ophuls, and Douglas Sirk. Most notably, Rappaport dove deep into Tinseltown’s queer underbelly in his 1997 doc THE SILVER SCREEN / COLOR ME LAVENDER, which “focuses on gay undertones in Hollywood classics,” and his seminal 1992 video essay ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES. In the latter, Rappaport combines archival footage of Hudson and excerpts from his movies to re-engage with the actor’s image and body of work in the light of what everyone knows about him now: that he was gay and died of AIDS. As Rappaport notes:

Hudson is a unique paradox — the paradigm of manhood on the screen that happens to be a homosexual. The fictional construction of Hudson turns into a text to be read or re-read in many different ways — but all roads lead to Rome. Rock Hudson was a prisoner as well as provider of a strategy and sexual stereotypes. It is a prism through which one can explore the questions of sexuality, the coding of the genre, the sexual role-play in Hollywood movies and, by extension, America in the fifties and sixties.

Hudson remains a fascinating figure in Hollywood and queer history. As someone who was closeted his entire life, he proves an antidote to openly gay figures and activists working in the film world; yet, his AIDS diagnosis brought the disease into the public consciousness in a way it had never been before.

It was a shock that a major celebrity like Hudson, who wasn’t openly gay, and who was the embodiment of “strength” and “manhood” in so many major films, could be susceptible to this disease. While Hudson kept his sexuality a secret for much of his life, there was no concealing his diagnosis and subsequent passing — a reality Rappaport confronts in ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES. In one particularly moving scene, actor Eric Farr, playing Hudson post-mortem, tells the audience: “When I died of AIDS in 1985, everyone was so shocked that the lesser shock, that I was gay, was more easily absorbed.”

J. Hoberman, writing for Village Voice, praised ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES as “first-rate film criticism, as well as a reanimation that invests ‘Rock Hudson’ with a passion and pathos barely evident the first time around.” Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader was similarly praiseworthy: “[With this film, Rappaport] suggests that we don’t have to be million-aires or commandeer a television network to enter into a dialogue with the crushing Hollywood machine.”

Hudson isn’t the only queer icon Rappaport has explored in his work. Included on our DVD release of ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES is Rappaport’s 2016 short SERGEI / SIR GAY, which examines the gay identity of famed filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. (GME also distributes films by Eisenstein; see below).

WORKS BY RAPPAPORT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES (1992), available as a DVD or DSL file. This DVD publication includes Rappaport’s short films BLUE STREAK (1971), JOHN GARFIELD (2003), and SERGEI / SIR GAY (2016).

• FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG (1995), available as a DVD or DSL file. This DVD publication includes Rappaport’s short films BECOMING ANITA EKBERG (2014) and DEBRA PAGET, FOR EXAMPLE (2016)

A B I G A I L C H I L D

I’m not an artist who does the exact same thing every time. Although I will say I think I usually do work exploring the margins, whether it’s the margins of culture, the margins of people, the margins of cinema, of genres and how they can be transformed. I realized at a certain point that I was interested in issues and didn’t need to put somebody in front of the camera to discuss the issues — that I could do it just directly. And that set me on a more experimental course. —Abigail Child

Active as a filmmaker, poet, and activist since the 1970s, with over thirty film and video works and six books to her name, Abigail Child remains one of the most accomplished and prolific artists of her generation. Lauded by writers at Queer Forty (on the occasion of her 2023 career retrospective at Anthology Film Archives) as a “legendary experimental and documentary filmmaker” and “trailblazer for LGBTQIA+ artists alongside fellow game-changers like Barbara Hammer and Yvonne Rainer,” Child’s “queer underground cinema… has been a cornerstone of the American avant-garde film movement” for over 50 years.

A Yale graduate, Child began her career as a producer-director for NBC before transitioning to non-narrative and experimental forms of filmmaking. Her work has tackled everything from capitalist exploitation and homelessness (1995’s B/SIDE), to covert bisexuality among Black men (2007’s ON THE DOWNLOW), to the diaries of famed FRANKENSTEIN scribe Mary Shelley (2012’s SHAPE OF ERROR). Child was also a friend and contemporary of filmmaker Warren Sonbert, a fellow trailblazer among queer filmmakers whose body of work and legacy GME represents (see above). Her 2000 short film SURFACE NOISE is a found footage tribute to Sonbert’s polyvalent montage filmmaking style.

The existential and exhilarating seven-part series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?, filmed and edited over a nine-year period, is arguably Child’s finest hour, described by P. Adams Sitney as “the strongest manifestation in film of the poetic sensibility of language poetry and one of its most impressive achievements.” Borrowing strategies from found footage, Appropriation Art, Language Poetry, and experimental music, and reactivating the stakes of montage by focusing on the processing of interruption and fragmentation, IS THIS WAHT YOU WERE BORN FOR? stands as a landmark of 1980s experimental cinema.

Mark McElhatten, former Associate Curator of Film and Video at the Museum of the Moving Image, describes Child’s suite of seven films as:

…archeological digs into the very stuff, the conceptions, we are born into. Child decomposes the materials and gestures that would compose us. The films are charged with a startling and playful musicality and poetic and rigorous compression. Each image and sound cuts deep and works over time containing hidden and unhidden detonations working against the manufactured ambush that images have in store. Agile dances through treacherous debris, they negotiate an obstacle course of polar anatomies zig-zagging with corkscrew twists and nuclear splits — a gambol against the hazards.

WORKS BY CHILD CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? (1981—89). Included in this DVD publication are the texts: Strategies of Appropriation in IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? by François Bovier, Abigail Child: the Pulse of the Last Machine by Tom Gunning, Abigail Child's Audition: Sound in the BORN FOR series by Melissa Ragona, IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?: Abigail Child and a Poetics of the Swoon by Redell Olsen, (explosion) by Thomas Zummer, Conversation with a "Maximalist" Filmmaker: Child with Bovier and Ricardo da Silva; and a transcription of the BORN FOR soundtracks.

F . W . M U R N A U

Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture. —F.W. Murnau

German director, screenwriter, and producer F.W. Murnau remains one of the most influential filmmakers who ever lived. A major figure in German Expressionism, his 1922 silent feature NOSFERATU — one of the earliest and most famous adaptations of Bram Stoker’s DRACULA — has proven one of the most influential horror films of all time.

Murnau found success as a cineaste in his native Germany, particularly with THE LAST LAUGH, his 1924 Kammerspielfilm (or “chamber-drama,” a genre in German cinema focused on the plights of lower-middle class life), which follows an aging hotel doorman whose happiness crumbles when he is relieved of the duties and uniform which had for years been the foundation of his happiness and pride.

THE LAST LAUGH — innovative for its adventurous cinematography and lack of intertitles (despite being a silent film) — was so successful that Murnau was able to land a contract at Fox Studios and, in 1926, he relocated to Hollywood. As noted by critic Roger Ebert:

[THE LAST LAUGH is] one of the most famous of silent films, and one of the most truly silent, because it does not even use printed intertitles. Silent directors were proud of their ability to tell a story through pantomime and the language of the camera, but no one before Murnau had ever entirely done away with all written words on the screen… He tells his story through shots, angles, moves, facial expressions and easily read visual cues… both [lead actor] Emil Jannings and Murnau were offered Hollywood contracts and moved to America at the dawn of sound. But THE LAST LAUGH is remarkable also for its moving camera. It is often described as the first film to make great use of a moving point of view… with shots that track down an elevator and out through a hotel lobby, or seemingly move through the plate-glass window of a hotel manager's office (influencing the famous shot in CITIZEN KANE that swoops down through the skylight of a nightclub).

In the wake of THE LAST LAUGH’s success, Murnau cemented his status as a cinematic heavyweight in Hollywood with the romantic drama SUNRISE (1927), which won the Oscar for “Unique and Artistic Picture” at the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony, and earned its star, Janet Gaynor, the first Academy Award for Best Actress. Widely considered one of the greatest films to come out of the silent era, SUNRISE was groundbreaking for its exhibition with a synchronized musical score and sound effects using the Movietone “sound-on-film” process.

Murnau was gay, and while the subject of homosexuality is never overt in his films, the grief he experienced following the loss of his partner in World War I, writer Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, informed the drama and melancholy in much of his work. Murnau himself died in 1931, at the age of 42, from injuries sustained in a car accident. Due to poor preservation practices during the silent era, eight of his films are believed to be lost, while only 12 of his films remain extant in their entirety.

WORKS BY MURNAU CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• THE LAST LAUGH (DER LETZTE MANN) (1924), available as a DSL file, two-disc DVD, and Blu-Ray, featuring an unrestored export version of the film and a 40-minute “making of” documentary as bonus features.

• PHANTOM (1922), one of Murnau’s early Expressionistic films, available on DVD.

M A R A M A T T U S C H K A

Working on art is like becoming a tunnel, it’s like channelling. Film is also channelling. —Mara Mattuschka

Born in Bulgaria in 1959, multimedia artist and filmmaker Mara Mattuschka moved to Vienna in the late 1970s and soon became a student and collaborator of famed visual artist, filmmaker, and animator Maria Lassnig.

Appearing as her alter ego “Mimi Minus” and a variety of other characters in her work, Mattuschka made her first avant-garde film in 1984 and her first feature film in 2012. Her work is notable for mixing various filmmaking styles — narrative, experimental, documentary, poetic — and for integrating everything from animation to theatre, performance, music, and fine arts.

As noted by staff at LUX Moving Image in London: “Mattuschka has made her body both a medium and a site in her tenebrous and theatrical short films since the early ‘80s. Through her alter-ego Mimi Minus, she has herself shaved, wrapped in fabric, deformed via manipulated effects, or as in the case of KAISER SCHNITT, operated on.” Sixpackfilm further elaborates:

The polymorphously designed, theatrical worlds of filmmaker, painter, and performance artist Mara Mattuschka are filled with characters whose sexual desires point in all directions… In a queer sense, the categorical transgressions and displacements so typical of Mattuschka emerge most clearly in her film BURNING PALACE (2009), realized together with Chris Haring and the performance group Liquid Loft… [the film chronicles] five characters in a hotel, asleep, who are awakened by the Greek shepherd god Pan to confront their (sexual) fantasies.

WORKS BY MATTUSCHKA CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• BURNING DOWN THE PALACE, available as both a DVD and DVD/DSL bundle, combines Mattuschka and Haring’s BURNING PALACE with their two other 2009 collaborations: RUNNING SUSHI and PART TIME HEROES.

• IRIS SCAN, available as both a DVD and DVD/DSL bundle, offers 12 short films spanning 1984 to 2003 in which Mattuschka “playfully moves through motherhood to monster flicks — where an alien, out on the town, wreaks havoc of epic proportions. Androgynous star Mimi Minus infuses mischievous humor and strange wisdom into the existence of Mattuschka’s characters.”

S E R G E I E I S E N S T E I N

The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being. —Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein was a pioneering Soviet filmmaker and film theorist who revolutionized film editing with the notion of “the montage of attractions,” in which “arbitrarily chosen images, independent of the action, would be presented not in chronological sequence but in whatever way would create the maximum psychological impact.” This approach is manifest in films like BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1926/1930), widely regarded as a masterpiece of international cinema, which is based on the revolt of Russian sailors against their superiors aboard the battleship Potemkin during the Revolution of 1905. In 2012, Sight & Sound named BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN the 11th-greatest film ever made in their decennial poll.

Eisenstein’s sexuality was subject to conjecture for much of his life, though the general consensus — based on his own admissions over the years — is that he was either gay or asexual. A 2020 documentary exploring Eisenstein’s purported homosexuality was subject to much controversy and struggled to find distribution in Eisenstein’s native Russia.

Nevertheless, Eisenstein remains a towering figure in film history whose proponent of montage filmmaking forever changed the art form. In addition to BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, his silent propaganda films STRIKE (1925) and OCTOBER (1928), as well as his historical epics ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1928) and IVAN THE TERRIBLE (made in two parts: the first in 1944, the second in 1958) remain classics of world cinema. As noted by staff at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive:

Eisenstein is regarded as one of the world’s most creative, pioneering, and influential filmmakers and is among the most lauded figures in Russia’s cultural history… his films, as well as his writings and his theory of montage, have shaped how cinema is made and understood. Seen today, films like BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, OCTOBER (also known as TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD), and ALEXANDER NEVSKY still shock with their extraordinary beauty and invention.

WORKS BY EISENSTEIN CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1926/1930), THE LITTLE SCREW (1927), and OCTOBER (1928) are available as DSL/DVD bundles, and together as a single DVD publication.

• OLD AND NEW (1929) is available in the 8-film DVD collection LANDMARKS OF EARLY SOVIET FILM.

V I V I A N O S T R O V S K Y

“Home” is wherever I feel at home — and that might be in a hotel or on a plane or on my way to an unknown destination with a camera and recorder in my bag. —Vivian Ostrovsky

As noted by writer and film scholar Bérénice Reynaud, “the cinema of Vivian Ostrovsky is a gesture, implying the filmmaker’s entire body — as she travels around the world, carrying the gear, framing with a camera-eye.” Born in New York and raised in Brazil, Ostrovsky attended Paris’ Institut de Psychologie where, in her words, “to make life less tedious, I ended up seeing an inordinate amount of films of all kinds next to the Sorbonne where I occasionally attended classes.” Ostrovsky went on to major in Film Studies at the Sorbonne — Paris 3 at the Institut d’Art et Archeologie, where she was a student of Eric Rohmer.

Ostrovsky’s debut work, 1980’s CAROLYN 2, was a multimedia film and slide installation. Its multimodal nature set the tone for Ostrovsky’s career, as for the next four decades she would work across countless formats (Super 8mm, 16mm, video, digital), mediums (filmmaking, performance, installation), and subject matters, often combining these disparate apparatuses and approaches within a single project. Beyond the mere moving image, Ostrovsky incorporates sound into her work in ways intentional and highly innovative, noting: “sound has been and is always a vital part of my work.” As noted by eminent critic and filmmaker Amy Taubin:

Like the diary film, the found footage collage film is a major genre of experimental filmmaking. Ostrovsky is an expert collagist of both image and sound. In almost all her films, she juxtaposes bits of music with images to transform feeling and meaning. Favoring dance beats, she mixes classical and pop music, often combining familiar tunes with concrete sound. As her work developed, her selection of sequences from films she loves became bolder, even as her own images became richer in texture, color and movement.

As a proponent of found footage collage filmmaking, Ostrovsky has incorporated the work of her influences — particularly queer and women filmmakers — into her own films; notably Jack Smith’s transgressive masterwork FLAMING CREATURES (1963) and Věra Chytilová’s delightfully anarchic, feminist classic DAISIES (1966).

WORKS BY OSTROVSKY CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• PLUNGE (1982—2013), available as a DVD and DSL, combines 16 of Ostrovsky’s films into a single, two-disc publication.

A P I C H A T P O N G W E E R A S E T H A K U L

To me, queer means anything can happen. It’s about openness to possibilities. I’m in debt to [experimental film]. Living in Thailand, it’s quite a liberating action to make this in a cinema culture that is tightly censored and controlled. —Apichatpong Weerasethakul

As noted by Conor Williams in Interview Magazine, “Apichatpong Weerasethakul may not be a household name in the United States, but the 51 year-old Thai filmmaker is responsible for some of the most captivating and inventive works of cinema made in the last twenty years.”

Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Weerasethakul is the director of nine critically-acclaimed feature films and countless shorts that he made while working outside of the strict confines of the Thai studio system. Influenced by surrealism, Dadaism, and animist and Hindu rituals from his Buddhist upbringing, Weerasethakul has been called the “David Lynch of Thailand” and cites such early avant-garde filmmakers as Maya Deren, Bruce Baillie, and Joseph Cornell as major influences.

Weerasethakul’s films have won jury prizes at major festivals like Cannes and Venice, with his 2010 feature-length drama UNCLE BONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES winning the Palme d’Or. His debut feature, the experimental documentary MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON (2000), expertly blends cinematic fact and fiction in a manner that fifteen years later continues to defy both easy categorization and comparison. A low-fi "genre bender," independently produced on a shoestring budget and subsequently endangered by neglect, the film is based upon the “exquisite corpse” game invented by Surrealists, and finds Weerasethakul and his crew traveling across Thailand, interviewing ordinary people and asking them to add their own words to a story. As noted by writer James Quant:

The title of Apichatpong’s debut feature was its first gift to critics; his films have been called “mysterious objects” countless times since, in a manner less glib than proleptic. Invoking a work’s enigma at the outset anticipates impenetrability, thereby excusing any critical inability to analyze or describe. That tactic proves most tempting with this compact but omnifarious “whatzit?”, with its source in Thai popular culture and American documentary and experimental cinema, its perplexing, and exhilarating conflation of genre (fairy tale, road movie, documentary, horror, science fiction, folk anthropology, musical) and tone (by turn sad, surreal, exuberant, teasing, harsh). Its style manages to be both ramshackle and concatenated: the film’s structure is linear and convoluted at the same time, its title a telling convergence of the unknowable (mysterious object) and the temporally exact (noon). If the precision of the latter turns out to be misleading — time in the film is largely unfixed, in flux, employing historical anachronism and refusing to mark either diurnal specifics or the three-year span it took to make the film — OBJECT’s modus, as is often the case in Apichatpong’s subsequent work, depends on surprise and unreliability, a knowing errancy not only of narrative progression and coherency but also of such formal constituents as sound source and signature, succession of shots, and identification of setting and performer.

Weerasethakul has continued to work steadily since his innovative 2000 debut, with genre-defying films that contend, in some form or fashion, with nature, queer sexuality, and dreams. On the subject of dreams — and its affinity with the cinematic art form — Weerasethakul has astutely noted: “the sleep cycle is 90 minutes. That’s the length of a normal movie. And now we have VR that can make things feel closer to a dream, where we can really navigate and look around. Cinema is really evolving toward biology.”

WORKS BY WEERASETHAKUL CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON (2000) is currently available on DVD and as a DSL/DVD bundle, with Weerasethakul’s short films THIRDWORLD (1997), WORLDLY DESIRES (2005), and MONSOON (2011) included as bonus features.

C U R T I S H A R R I N G T O N

I usually go by instinct. I know what will affect me, but I don't have a formula… I still think the Val Lewton approach is the best one, and that is the power of suggestion. What you don't see is more unsettling than what you do see. —Curtis Harrington

Widely considered a forerunner of the New Queer Cinema movement, film and TV director, and B-level horror movie mainstay Curtis Harrington was born in Los Angeles and went on to earn a degree in Film Studies at UCLA — but his filmmaking career predates his college days. In 1942, at the age of 16, he made his first movie: a short adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.

The next two decades saw a young Harrington become a popular figure in the American avant-garde. In addition to making his own experimental and documentary shorts (like 1948’s PICNIC and 1956’s THE WORMWOOD STAR), he also became a close friend and collaborator of fellow gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger, appearing in the avant-garde legend’s 1954 occult classic INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME and operating the camera for his glitzy cult favorite PUCE MOMENT (1949).

In the 1960s, Harrington made a successful transition to narrative and feature-length filmmaking — rare for avant-garde filmmakers of the time. Working closely with famed B-movie producer Roger Corman, Harrington helmed campy horror fare like 1961’s NIGHT TIDE, 1965’s VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET, 1966’s QUEEN OF BLOOD, and the “hag horror” classics WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? and WHO SLEW AUNTIE ROO? (both 1971), which gave him the opportunity to work with such Hollywood legends as Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters. Perhaps his most critically-acclaimed feature was the 1967 Simone Signoret thriller GAMES, which Vincent Canby lauded in The New York Times as “top quality” and “a most diverting pastime.”

Harrington went on to direct numerous television movies and episodes in the 1970s and ‘80s, and even had a cameo role in Orson Welles’ infamous, long-unfinished experimental feature THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (1976). Harrington was also instrumental in the rediscovery and salvaging of the James Whale-directed version of THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932).

Being a personal friend of Whale’s near the end of his life, Harrington was hired as a consultant (and asked to appear in) the 1998 Oscar-winning Whale biopic GODS AND MONSTERS. Many of Harrington’s early avant-garde works are now preserved in the Academy Film Archive.

While still a smooth-faced, curly-maned teenager, he emerged as a key player in the postwar avant-garde. Greatly influenced by Maya Deren… he completed a cycle of 16mm shorts, several of which… are now regarded as prime examples of West Coast experimental filmmaking. His friendship with Kenneth Anger… fueled an appreciation for the mystical and provided occasion to participate, if only peripherally, in the Southern California occult explosion… The dense visual and thematic textures of his early features challenge the notion that Harrington was a mere purveyor of cheap thrills. —Nathaniel Bell, Los Angeles Review of Books

WORKS BY HARRINGTON CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GME:

• NIGHT TIDE (1961), available as a DVD or Blu-Ray.

• THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1942), FRAGMENT OF SEEKING (1946), PICNIC (1948), ON THE EDGE (1949), THE ASSIGNATION (1953), THE WORMWOOD STAR (1956), THE FOUR ELEMENTS (1966), and USHER (2002) are available in the Blu-Ray and DVD combo pack THE CURTIS HARRINGTON SHORT FILM COLLECTION.

JIM HUBBARD

In 1974, when I was first deciding that I actually could become a filmmaker, experimental filmmakers provided the only role models available for being an openly gay filmmaker. In fact, it seemed that gay filmmakers formed the very foundation of experimental filmmaking, at least in the United States. —Jim Hubbard

Jim Hubbard has been making films since 1974. His feature length documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, exploring ACT UP, the AIDS activist group, won Best Documentary at MIX Milano and Reel Q Pittsburgh LGBT Film Festival, and has played at over 150 museums, universities, and film festivals worldwide.  

Hubbard and Sarah Schulman co-founded MIX: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival in 1987, and completed 187 interviews as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project. 102 of those interviews were on view in a 14-monitor installation at the Carpenter Center for the Arts, Harvard University, as part of the exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993, October 15 – December 23, 2009. He, along with James Wentzy, created a 9-part cable access television series based on the Project.

Among Hubbard’s 19 other films are TWO MARCHES (1991), THE DANCE (1992), MEMENTO MORI (1995), and ELEGY IN THE STREETS (1989), which GME distributes on DSL for international institutional acquistion. His films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and have been shown at the Warhol Museum, ICA Boston, the Harvard Film Archive, Tokyo University, der Zürcher Museen, mumok (Vienna), the Berlin Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Torino, and numerous other Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals.