Film

From scholar and filmmaker Dagmar Schultz, comes, Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992, a documentary about Lorde's years living in Berlin mentoring fellow feminists, attending speaking engagements, and performing readings on behalf of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freedom University, Berlin where Kennedy gave the "I am a Berliner" speech in 1963. There, Lorde co-founded the Afro-German movement.

February is Black History month and my editor gave me an assignment: see Pariah and discuss why, as it director (Dee Rees) seems to insist in interviews, that it is not a black film.  He even said, “Good Luck Answering This One.”  This is what I knew about Pariah: its poster has a young African-American woman on it, the film played the San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and Meryl Streep name checked the lead actress Adepero Oduye’s performance in her Golden Globes acceptance speech last month.  That last splash was enough to make me take the Pariah challenge.

Editor-in-Chief Sawyer J. Lahr reviews Tomboy, a transsexual coming-of-age story by up-and-coming French Writer/Director Celine Sciamma (Water Lillies), returning to Chicago for a one-week run at The Music Box Theatre, Friday, Jan 27 through Thursday, Feb 2nd.

Editor-in-Chief Sawyer J Lahr reviews Marriage Material, the free film released in celebration of Joe Swanberg: Collected Films of 2011 featuring Silver Bullets, Art History, as well as yet-to-be-released The Zone (Summer 2012) and Privacy Settings (Fall 2012).

In an imaginary post-gender world, social structures break down and sexual impulse prevails for many of David Cronenberg's socially estranged characters. Trauma radically becomes the source of pleasure, internal homophobia conflicts with a man's duty to the family mafia, and a drug-induced trip to South America lead to a pansexual encounters with buggy doppelgangers.

Jon Bastian goes back to the 1960s for a take on how audiences have learned to accept gay actors playing straight roles leading up to "college-hero" Neil Patrick Harris.

I was twelve when my friend Joel introduced my to Sybil Dorsett. Not only was her story of a woman afflicted with a psychological condition called multiple personality disorder printed on pulpy old paper and delivered in the same stay-up-all-night-with-the-flashlight gothic style as V.C. Andrews grotesque Flowers in the Attic, here was a heroine with which a gay tween in the eighties could unknowingly align: she was a wallflower whose many shades of fabulousness were so bright that not even the grisly sexual abuse of her schizophrenic mother would contain this girl's spirit. Her psyche had simply found a creative and beautiful way to escape torture and pain. Sybil was sold as the real story of how this young lady worked with a psychologist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, to discover, heal and unite her many selves into one.

Winter 2012 Chicago will be host to a number of lesbian-centric film screenings following the release of Pariah in theaters as well as one verite skateboarding documentary, Dragonslayer, Executive Produced by the backbone of The New Queer Cinema, Christine Vachon.

Proving that there is a sufficient number of films about being queer and religious, the first God & Gays Film Festival begins begins Fri, Jan 13 and every Friday through Feb 3 at Center on Halsted, Chicago. Sundance US Documentary Competition selection Love Free or Die closes out the screening with its Chicago premiere on Friday, Feb 3rd. GOTR Editor, Sawyer J Lahr interviews, David Fleer, the screening organizer and convener of the LGBT Episcopol advocacy organization, Integrity USA.

As any proclaimed auteur, Pedro Almodóvar works in tropes. His most recent film, The Skin I Live In (2011), employs many of the director's favorites: disenfranchised motherhood, male-female dynamics, their social consequences, and the desire for an unattainable perfection of beauty. This contemporary take on Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960) a self-reported favorite of Almodóvar's–by way of Cronenberg body-horror slickness and the director's own preoccupations encapsulates so much of what makes his work integral. And its depiction of the transgender body highlights the running theme through his work of dismantling the gender binary to arrive at deeper truths. Throughout his career, Almodóvar has used non-traditional gender behaviors and transgender characters in supporting and featured roles to develop a body of genderqueer cinema that is perhaps the most potent we have available to us.

I have seen Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) many times but a recent viewing was the first time I cried while watching it.  I wonder why it has taken so long.  I have always enjoyed it visually, nostalgically, and as a transcendent vehicle for film’s greatest musical performer, Judy Garland.  But when dateless Esther Smith (Judy Garland) is so low at a Christmas party, ballroom dancing with her grandfather (Harry Davenport) and then disappearing behind the Christmas tree, I got weepy at anticipation for the moment at which a beaming Garland reappears continuing the dance in the unexpected arms of her beloved “boy next door” John Truitt (Tom Drake).

A gay classic from 1956, as relevant and beautiful as it was a half-century ago.

Celebrated playwright and television writer, Mart Crowley survives to tell his artistic struggle leading up to the making of his best known work, The Boys in the Band, produced for the stage by Richard Barr (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and directed by Robert Moore. The opening nights of the groundbreaking 1967 play at the Playwrights Unit was attended by Jackie Kennedy, Barbara Walters, and Marlena Dietrich and other major public figures drawn by the brave new Off-Broadway production about how a group of gay men react to an uninvited guest at a birthday party. It is credited with being the first play to show gay men "as they are," which ironically become dated a few years after the Stonewall riots. Director Crayton Robey's behind the scenes story, Making the Boys, (now on DVD from First Run Features) is a continuation of the 1970 film and stage-play featuring exclusive interviews with the talent who brought the play and film to the screen.

Back in 1988, Julianne Moore won an Emmy for her roles as identical twins in the daytime CBS soap "As the World Turns" for the category of Outstanding Ingénue in A Drama Series. Six years later, she appeared bottomless in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) proving to the world that, in fact, her carpet matches her crimson curtains. Those two roles may be worlds apart. Yet, they not only show Moore’s range but also her foremost asset as an artist: she has a mean streak for taking risks. Other actresses are more beloved or more successful, but no other film performer has been willing to court failure as often as Moore, or be as much a hero to gay audiences and directors alike.