Slaves to the Underground

Hi all,

If anyone has a copy of this film in ANY format and is willing to help me out, could you please drop me a line at nancyamazon@gmail.com? There’s a good chance I’ll have something good to trade you that you might not have seen.

Thanks

Nancy

Dreaming of Barbara Hammer

I don’t know how many people have heard of Barbara Hammer. I guess it depends on which generation you were born in and how much time you’ve spent poring over old films.

Barbara Hammer (arguably) made the first lesbian film made by a lesbian. It was called “Dyketactics” (still a great name for a website!) and it was made in 1974, the year I was born. It featured a bunch of nubile women rolling about together in a park with some bizarre pipe music going on in the background. But it was one of the most sensual film watching experiences I can remember having.

Last night I had this weird dream that I was rolling around in the park naked with my girlfriend with this weird pipe music going on. I could still hear the music when I woke up.

It made me wish that film festivals who do retro screenings would seriously make an effort to dig up some of this old footage and show it to a new generation of lesbians. Surely there are a few out there who want to know this stuff, to feel the history of lesbian film making?

All I know is that there have been very few lesbian films made in my lifetime that have inspired my dreams.

And now we’re back

Well, we’re up and running again. Sorry for the temporary glitch.

Forgive me Google. I hope you’ll learn to love me again.

Film fatigue

I’ll admit it. For the first time in my life, I’m suffering film fatigue. When asked if I’d like to go to the movies, I reply with “No, I’d rather just watch television”. And not just any television – half hour sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother which – while perfectly diverting and full of Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders goodness – hardly classify as meaty. The idea of sitting in a cinema for more than two hours makes my butt twitch.

I put it down to my brief-yet-harrowing recent stint as a professional film reviewer. In June I moonlighted for the Sydney Morning Herald as part of their amateur writing team blogging the Sydney Film Festival. It was a fantastic experience, especially in the art of delivering film reviews to deadline under time constraints, and letting go of the “what if people hate me?” issues. But after two weeks of juggling film festival, plus full-time job, plus writing, I was plus-pooped.

Now I think of the new Brideshead Revisited with fear instead of my usual “I’d watch Emma Thompson read the phonebook” attitude. The thought of my usual December and January round of catching up on Oscar-worthy pics is daunting. Then there’s the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Film Festival just 2 months away! I’m not sure my nerves are coping.

How can I rise out of this funk and start reviewing again? Anyone got any suggestions out there for a film-loving freak with the movie blues?

Kimberley Peirce – the thinking woman’s director

I had the chance at the Sydney Film Festival to attend a Q&A session with Kimberley Peirce, the director of Boys Don’t Cry, about her new film Stop-Loss.

I guess the thing I love most about her filmmaking is that she’s so good at exploring raw human emotion, and her films have an authentic edge to them . She’s also excellent at getting the most from actors who have never shown their potential before. What Pierce did for Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevigny in Boys Don’t Cry I think she did for Ryan Phillipe and Abbie Cornish in Stop-Loss.

Peirce talked about the process of making the film, how it evolved from IM-ing her brother in Iraq, to a documentary featuring actual war footage filmed by soldiers, through to a fiction film.

She ultimately decided on making it a fiction film because documentaries are “then” and fiction films are “now”. It makes everything so much more immediate, and the story was an amalgamation of real-life stories and experiences.

This was the same approach she used in Boys Don’t Cry, where she took evidence from real-life but made a character-driven story, rather than just a re-hashing of facts and transcripts. What I got from Peirce was a sense of her being a very cerebral filmmaker, always thinking about the implications and effects of each shot or each story point.

So she’s got the ethics and research skills of a documentarian and the gift of a storyteller. It makes for damn powerful filmmaking. And she’s pretty cute too

Gaysploitation. Are we doing it to ourselves?

Reuters claim that gay films are doing worse than ever at the box office and with critics, despite the success of Brokeback Mountain and TV shows like Brothers & Sisters. They also claim that the rise of gay-themed cable channels like Logo and Here! are contributing to the proliferation of “gaysploitation” films, along the lines of the blaxploitation films of the 1970s.

As much as many people love the fact that there is now dedicated channels for gay content, it is true that the existence of them, and the need for more cheap, reusable gay content as a result, has probably contributed to lowering the bar.

This will continue as long as queer content is locked out of (or we don’t aspire to reach) mainstream distribution channels. Gay audiences are all too willing to download crappy video content for free on the web or watch gay schlock on cable TV.

It used to be that films were launched at festivals in the hope of securing mainstream distribution in cinemas. Now, according to Hollywood Reporter, film festivals are simply launching pads for DVD and cable distribution. Hence, standards are falling because the cable channels are clamouring for stuff they can get on the cheap and resell quickly to a salivating audience.

So, even if queer people ARE willing to get off their couches and support queer cinema at festivals, most of what we’re getting is nowhere near as good as it was ten years ago, because it doesn’t need to be. No matter how bad it is, it will get a run on cable, fund itself adequately and perpetuate this low-quality cycle.

There are of course two ways of looking at this. Some say that the fact that people are recognising the need for queer content – and just getting it made regardless of quality – is a huge leap forward for queer entertainment. I think that because we’re willing to settle for less it means that nobody will take that next step into developing gay projects with substance.

It takes real talent to produce films like Brokeback Mountain that attract new audiences but where queer content isn’t compromised. That kind of talent isn’t being nurtured in our community. Crossover success relies on established directors such as Ang Lee taking big risks and dipping their toes in gay waters.

We legitimise the scraps thrown at us over and over again. It’s either that or starve. Despite the occasional exception, we are headed down a slippery slope towards mediocrity in our entertainment. We’re a legitimate market, and we’re limiting ourselves.

Maybe we need to stop snacking on junk food, go a little hungry for a while, and really demand the good stuff whenever we choose to consume.