It’s Pride Month in South Africa, providing a good but unnecessary excuse to celebrate films from the archive of LGBTQ+ cinema that not only stand as courageous testaments to the realities, challenges, hopes and dreams of this community but also as bold, daring and aesthetically innovative films on any terms. Here are three from punky provocateurs who forged a vital path for queer cinema’s journey in eras and places when it was taboo and often dangerous to do so.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
Totally F***ed Up — Mubi.com
The first film in what has since become known as director Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, this seminal film of the New Queer Movement was, like many of the enfant terrible of American queer cinema’s films — shot for peanuts, by whatever means necessary and with unknown and non-professional actors.
Described by Araki as, “a kind of cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick”, it follows the fortunes of a group of six teenagers — four gay men and a lesbian couple — who have constructed a dysfunctional alternative family of their own and must learn to live with each other as best they can to provide a space for themselves on their own terms within a broader society that rejects them.
The film is framed over 15 episodes which unveil an increasingly tragic overall narrative, interspliced with home-video footage digressions from one of the characters’ budding filmmaker ambitions. Set to a gritty soundtrack of shoegaze guitar fuzz, it’s a film that, like it’s director, isn’t afraid to get in the face of its audience and give a defiant finger to conservative mores.
It’s premier at the Sundance Film Festival divided critics but over the decades it’s come to form a touchstone, along with the other two films in the trilogy — The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) — for a new generation of queer filmmakers and fans of experimental, DIY, sometimes nihilistic and confrontational but always ultimately celebratory of outsider resilience cinema. It’s central identity battles and brash defiance of ignorance and stubborn social conventions remain relevant in an America where fear, misunderstanding and silencing of voices that don’t conform to narrow ideologies are increasingly under attack.
THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
Born in Flames — Mubi.com
You can tell what kind of no-quarter given activist filmmaker the director of this seminal, prescient and angry political and queer cinema milestone is from her decision to change her name from Linda Borden to Lizzie Borden — in honour of the infamous woman who in 1898 was tried and acquitted of the axe murders of her father and stepmother.
A true “zero-budget” agitprop guerrilla filmmaking classic, Borden’s 1983 dystopian feminist narrative is set in an alternative future — the 10th anniversary of the revolution that has replaced Ronald Reagan’s conservative America with a socialist state. Feminist activist Adelaide, a member of the radical “Women’s Army” is fighting to reclaim the streets of New York from the scourges of rapists and patriarchy in opposition to feminist journalists who have been co-opted by the new male-dominated regime.
Adelaide and her comrades are unapologetically black and queer, and Borden’s narratives provides an early and pioneering investigation of issues of intersectionality in the feminist struggle while still offering a thrilling, slyly funny and engaging narrative of “damn the man”, antiheroism.
The film culminates with an all-too prescient sequence involving a plot to blow up the Twin Towers which, as Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw observed, is a possible reason it has only recently been physically and symbolically restored to its rightful place in cinema history.
THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
East Palace, West Palace — YouTube
Zhang Yuan’s quietly emotionally and social convention challenging two-hander was the first film produced in mainland China to openly deal with homosexuality in a country where, though it isn’t illegal, gays are routinely victimised by police for other crimes such as “hooliganism”.
Based on a short story by Wang Xiaobo the film takes it’s title from two parks near the legendary Forbidden City in Beijing, which after dark become well known places for the city’s homosexual community to hang out and hook up.
One night in one of the parks, a young gay writer A-Lan (Si Han) is attracted to Xiao Shi (Hu Jun), a young man whom he believes to be a fellow traveller but soon discovers is a policeman. A-Lan is arrested, and most of the film follows the increasingly complex and erotically charged relationship between the writer and the policeman over the course of his night of interrogation.
Censored by the Chinese government on its release in 1996, the film was smuggled out of the country and was screened at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. For his sins Zhang had his passport confiscated by authorities upon his return to Hong Kong later that year.
