MiX-DEFYING.

MIX Anthology Film Archive New York, NY November 10-20, 1994

Watch out! There's a motley assortment of queer film- and videomakers out there just itching to cajole, seduce, and threaten their way into your local theaters and onto your favorite screens. They are not eager to prove themselves as acceptable or ordinary. On the contrary, they are as likely to offer a good old-fashioned, "fuck you," to the charge of abnormality as to devote themselves to countless hours of "dialogue" and "intervention." Their aesthetic is one of play, desire, transgression, bravado, and hope. This, however, is where most of their similarities end.

It is this productive - if wildly varied - group of gay, lesbian, straight, bi, and otherwise producers who have been best served by the eight-year-old New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film and Video Festival, Mix. Directed for the second consecutive year by Shari Friloh, Mix joined forces this year with the New York-based Downtown Community Television Center's (DCTV) annual queer video festival, Lookout. Moreover, Mix 94 included programming from Mix Brasil: Segunda Festival das Manifestacoes da Sexualidade, which toured eight Brazilian cities between October and December of 1994.

Mix Brasil, curated by Andre Fischer and Suzy Capo, grew out of a program at the 1992 lesbian and gay experimental festival, organized by Brazilian filmmaker Tania Cypriano. When Mix Brasil officially opened in Sao Paulo last year, it was an immediate smash. Local organizers were not only able to produce this year's program completely within Brazil itself, but they also launched the eight-city tour, established the first Brazilian gay and lesbian computer bulletin board, produced Mix Magazine, a smart guide to restaurants, clubs, concerts and movies in Brazil, as well as marketed a festival t-shirt, postcards, underwear, buttons, and sex toys.

Mix Brasil's success is not an indicator that U.S.-defined queer identity has been exported wholesale to Brazil. As the title of the program (Festival of the Manifestations of Sexuality) indicates, the programmers of Mix Brasil have been clear that the issue of gay and lesbian sexuality is only one part of a large and fluid conversation regarding eros and desire as they are manifested in that country. As Cypriano pointed out during "World Clique?: Queer Festivals Go Global," a Mix-sponsored panel discussion that addressed the emergence of queer festivals outside of Europe and North America, questions of race and class are primary to the production of not only Mix Brasil, but Brazilian queer sensibility in general. Specifically, Cypriano was disturbed that many of the venues for Mix Brasil catered to white populations. She also suggested that the English-language works borrowed from other countries, principally the U.S., were by definition accessible to only the most privileged Brazilians.

Similar issues were addressed by the other "World Clique" panelists: Julie Dorf, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, who in 1991 helped to organize the first gay and lesbian film festival in St. Petersburg, Russia; Hima B, an Indian activist and filmmaker who is presently planning a queer tour and festival in India; and Yau Ching, the founder of the Hong Kong lesbian and gay film festival and visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego.

Mix officially opened with a special screening of Frances Negron-Mutaner's 1994 film, Brincando El Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican, a work that will undoubtedly be a pacesetter for both queer cinema and third cinema for years to come. The piece follows the story of a young lesbian photographer, played by Negron-Mutaner herself, who, born in Puerto Rico and living in Philadelphia, is forced to make sense of her various environments and geographies, even as she receives news of her virulently homophobic father's death. The young woman returns to Puerto Rico for the funeral with the support of a rather remarkable community, including a girlfriend who is also a community activist, and a black gay male friend with a Korean lover. The film demonstrates the difficulty that Puerto Ricans have trying to speak about colonialism and imperialism from within queer contexts, without presenting either a monolithic Puerto Rican community, or a monolithic Puerto Rican queer community.

While Negron-Mutaner tends to downplay, or fails to emphasize, the pleasures of irony and paradox in identity politics, Felix Rodriguez's One Moment in Time (1992) is destined to become a kitsch classic. This short video spoils our expectations repeatedly, turning desire back in on itself with humor and surreal wit. Rodriguez's simple, low-budget tale is that of another young Puerto Rican, a New York-based ball queen who, while in full "real woman" drag, meets and falls in love with a pizza delivery man, another Nuyorican. The two begin a relationship as man and woman, until the truth of the young heroine's gender is revealed. They agree to continue their relationship, complete with a vigorous and satisfying sex life, with the understanding that the "fact" of their dual masculinity will remain a heavily guarded secret. When the "young woman" realizes that her lover does not invite her to his family's home or to socialize with his friends, she panics and decides that if she were a real woman the two would have a better relationship. She drops out of her "normal" life long enough to have a sex-change operation, and then springs the good news on her adoring lover. He is disgusted and walks out. The distraught heroine staggers about in shock for a few days until she happens upon her former boyfriend and stabs him during an ensuing argument. The video ends as the camera pulls away from the face of the heroine to reveal the hunched over, bloody body of her lover tied to a chair in front of her. It is only then that we realize that the talking-head shots of the queen have not been addressing the audience directly, as we had thought, but rather her hapless lover.

The power of the work is not simply that it shows us the slippery nature of identity, an already rather trite theme. Instead, it infuses the whole project of identity politics with an element of danger while at the same time resisting the voyeurism that has become commonplace in much self-consciously "inclusive" and culturally sensitive cultural production. It is as if one of the fabulous queens in Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1990) was given a camera and asked to create a video that throws into confusion even the advanced cultural politics and style of Livingston herself.

The festival's "AIDS: Expression and States of Mind" was perhaps the most disappointing program. After a 12-year epidemic it is disturbing that none of us have any more incisive ways to examine death, illness, or the struggle for life. YlOnda Stevens's Hallowed (1994) and Steve Grandell and John Killacky's Unforgiven Fire (1993) are emblematic of the problem. Both present the audience with unrelieved despair and remorse without advancing our understanding about what is happening. Stevens's work is self-described as a video quilt. In Unforgiven Fire Grandell and Killacky repeat the names of men who have died, finally ending with the image of a naked hairless man covered in blood. This work inspires one to feel only useless, spent, and "unforgiven."

Liza Lauber and Natasha Maidoff's Is There a Cure For My Friend (1994) was, however, a charmingly lyrical short about the struggle of two female friends, one HIV-positive, the other not, to reclaim the power of their childhood games in their quest for a "cure." One of the women speaks eloquently about loving the HIV inside of her and the strength of loving that within yourself that frightens you. DIVA-TV's eight-minute video, By Any Means Necessary (1994) was, in contrast, anything but charming and lyrical. Its major elements are the face of a man, darkened beyond recognition, who speaks to the audience as images of Nazi soldiers bulldozing bodies into mass graves play in the background. The man says, "A wealthy, well-connected hetero friend recently said to me: 'I'm amazed you guys haven't turned to terrorism yet - everybody is afraid of you anyway." He then punctuates his monologue with searing indictments of not only the church, the state, and middle America, but the AIDS establishment itself, including the Gay Men's Health Crisis and AMFAR. The effect is marvelous. I finally saw my own everyday anger reflected on the screen, I question, however, the efficacy of this work. The audience may feel as if it has already done something radical and transgressive by watching the tape, but the context for AIDS remains unchanged.

A mixture of humor and pathos was repeated throughout the festival. In the program "Bitter Bitch" the audience was treated to a veritable smorgasbord of bitches (male and female), some butch, some femme, some young, some not so young, all eager to have things the way they like it. The program ranged from Nicci Farrell's Lawnbutch (1991), a hilarious one-minute video about an infinitely helpful lesbian who can't get enough of yard work, to Friloh's What's In a Line (1994), in which an artist recently betrayed by her lover furiously muses about infidelity as she travels, on board a train, on her successful national gallery tour. Eventually her anger and desire combine to produce a sort of self-willed orgasm at which point she bursts into laughter and releases a mental image of her guilty lover.

Kieran Turner's Romeo's Flavor (1994) also takes up the issues surrounding unrequited love, though this time with a touch more bitterness. We catch an unhappy young man as he attempts to return his former lover's Christmas gifts. Repelled by a harried salesperson, the young man returns home with the gifts and then proceeds to eat them, along with the various mementos of his former relationship. Throughout we are treated to touching flashbacks that reveal the depth of the men's love for each other. Finally, the young hero arrives at the apartment of his former lover's new lover where he quickly proceeds to bite a large chunk out of the new love interest's face and then vomits in a glorious epiphany all over his former boyfriend.

For sheer comedic delight nothing beats Patrick Snee's The Love Machine (1994). Programmed along with the other works in "Bitter Bitch," it was packaged as a trailer for a film about the fictional Robin Stone, "The Love Machine," whose classic good looks and "charm" give him ready access to the beds of many men. Stone turns out to be callous and self-centered, leading man after miserable man to ruin. Snee, whose previous work includes The Village Idiot (1993), does a masterful job at capturing a sort of '70s "movie of the week" style that is both charming and funny. In the process, we learn to laugh at our various communities' insatiable desire for romantic love.

Punctuating the festival organizers' very real commitment to presenting works both by and about people of color a special screening entitled "In Living Color: Africa and Beyond" was arranged by the Lookout curators consisting of Isaac Julien's The Darker Side of Black (1993) and Johnny Symons's Out In Africa (1994). The Darker Side of Black, co-produced by the Black Audio Film Collective, is a gritty, straightforward examination of the widespread homophobia in Jamaican dance hall culture, especially as it is represented by artists like Buju Banton. In a remarkable group of interviews with Cornel West, Michael Manley, Tricia Rose and Banton himself, to name a few, Julien creates a widely accessible narrative in which Jamaican homophobia is related to questions of religiosity, poverty, colonialism, and racism. Julien leaves unanswered, however, the question of why Jamaica would be so conspicuously homophobic when other countries, including other developing countries, are not.

Out in Africa, like Julien's work, is organized around a series of interviews made while Symons travelled through Zimbabwe and South Africa. In each case, the interviewee's story and style outshines the irritating clumsiness of the videomaker. In addition, there are no women among the five people interviewed. And while blacks discuss questions of race and sexuality constantly, ("These mean, racist people, they can be gay?!") the fact that Symons is white is never acknowledged or addressed.

Questions of race and sexuality were brilliantly addressed in the last program of the festival, a screening of John Maybury's feature-length video, Man to Man, produced in 1993 for British television. The piece follows the true story of Ella, a young German woman whose husband dies of cancer during the height of the depression, just prior to the worst of the Nazi atrocities. Ella, played by Tilda Swinton, then proceeds to take on the persona of her dead spouse in order to support herself. Forced to volunteer for the army in order to avoid the physical examination that would be her undoing, Ella is stationed first as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp and then in a rural supply depot where her fellow guards become insulted at her refusal to take part in an afternoon of swimming and group masturbation. She escapes, runs to the front, reveals herself to be a woman dressed in men's clothing, (her defense being that she would otherwise be raped by Russians), then guns down two soldiers as they attempt to rape her themselves. She continues to live as a man during the post-war boom years of the German economy, losing her well-paying German man's job to a group of low-paid Turkish women along the way. Finally, she ends up in a small cramped apartment, identifying herself as neither man nor woman, watching endless hours of television and raving about the past. Man to Man was one of the most sophisticated treatments that I have seen of the manner in which gender and sexuality were played out during the Nazi regime.

Oddly enough, Man to Man was poorly received by the audience at the festival. The demands of looking at a darkly lit one-woman performance for over an hour proved to be too much for many in the audience, a task made more difficult by the somewhat outdated facilities of the Anthology Film Archives where the festival was held.

Along with Cyberqueer, an ongoing installation of interactive queer multimedia, the Mix organizers, in conjunction with the organizers of DCTV's Lookout festival, produced more than 30 programs, including parties, panels and screenings. More importantly, the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Festival, the largest experimental festival in the world and the oldest queer festival in New York City, continues to be a primary outlet for larger and larger numbers of queer film- and videomakers. Watch out for John Lindell, whose The Blue Hour (1993) is at once soft, introspective, mournful and hot; Thomas Harris's Heaven, Earth and Hell (1993) which examines black identity through the lenses of myth and desire; Karim Ainouz's work in progress, Paixao Nacional, which forces us to hear the competing narratives of desire that make up Brazil; Luciana Moreira and Lily Marnell's claymation video, Lily and Lulu Go to the March (1994), which is hilariously funny and smart; and Jamika Ajalon's sexy, lesbian reading of the textures of black existence, Shades (1994), which made me squirm in my seat. The work of these emerging artists, along with more established makers at the festival represent some of the most exciting and innovative

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ROBERT REID-PHARR is a cultural critic who teaches in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University.