Images Festival 1992

eye Weekly magazine
April 23, 1992

Voices From The Front

Images, Toronto’s festival of independent film and video, should not be missed. Its diversity of programming, smart curatorial strategies and hipness make it the film and video event of the spring.

The programmers—there are about a dozen of them—have two guiding principles: show local work, both in conjunction with work from other places and standing alone; and engage audiences politically and intellectually. They succeed admirably on both counts.

Not everything they show is a masterpiece. But, oddly enough, that doesn’t matter. Each program is so meticulously constructed that you forgive the inclusion of weaker work. You end up feeling that everything—even a lousy 10-minute mediocrity—belongs.

Of course, that doesn’t excuse the crappy work itself: it just makes it considerably more palatable.

Several cross-currents run through the Images schedule. The most successful, for me, involve confessional video work and gay and lesbian documentaries.

By “confessional,” I mean work that bares its soul—where we get a glimpse of the filmmaker/videomaker, angered or saddened (or bored) by events that surround them. Through a kind of creative burp/shout/fart, they try to seize control of their own being in a predatory world. These tapes are both authoritative and wholly subjective; with their transparent emotional pleas, they jump-start feelings of alienation and betrayal within us all. They are also, on the whole, very funny.

Rap poem

The bulk of these treats is included in “Rants, Freefalls and (Im)pertinent Questions,” an 11-film program composed of very short work (most of it under 10 minutes).

The opening piece, Did You Do the Napkin Tops?!, by Vancouver’s Lisa Doyle, falls into the “rant” category. Repeated imagery of scraping and scrubbing of chrome and tile is its base. Color comes from Doyle’s monologue, a rap poem (or just “rant™) about gross jobs, stupid co-workers, sexist janitors and imperious bosses. It is astonishingly funny and very perceptive. Anyone who has worked—even for a summer—in the food service sector of the economy will empathize and chortle.

Other work in the program amplifies and broadens Doyle’s concerns. Penelope Buitenhuis’s A Dream of Naming also uses rap—specifically a confrontational Judy Radul poem/performance piece—to explore notions of identity. Stacey Friedrich in My Body Is a Metaphor couples an urgent monologue with images of her own body, in a desperate attempt to regain control of self and gender. Representation of body is extended further still in Thomas Allen Harris’s Splash, as a gay black man uses his physical self and a Barbie doll to reveal an internal world conflicted by issues of race and sexuality,

Although gay and lesbian work runs throughout the festival, two programs are specifically strong: “Don't Fence Me In” and “Voices from the Front.”

“Don't Fence Me In” presents four videos meant to confront and overthrow lesbian and AIDS stereotyping.

Lorna Boschman’s Drawing the Line documents a Vancouver photo exhibition of lesbian erotica—from pastoral kisses to bondage and torture. The show posed the question, Where do you draw the line between positive image and pornographic exploitation? The tape finds out how people answered. Boschman shows us the photographic images, but concentrates more on graffiti written around the pictures and oral responses from the voyeurs/participants who attended the show. Drawing the Line gets to the core of debates around pornography and erotica in a novel and intelligent manner.

(In)visible Women deals with the absence of women from the AIDS debate, overthrowing many of our cherished stereotypes. Shot as part of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis’s Fear of Disclosure project in New York, the tape interviews women who are HIV-positive or living with AIDS. Their anger is palpable: all medical specs, drug testing and medical bulletins ignore the fact that women suffer from different opportunistic infections than men, and that women tend to die much faster than men after they are first diagnosed with full-blown AIDS.

Noisy protests

AIDS is also at the centre of Voices from the Front, a moving and provocative work detailing the last three years of ACT-UP, the U.S. radical AIDS protest movement. This film (paired with Marlon Riggs’s continuing exploration of black-gay identity, Anthem) is a must-see for anyone who believes direct action is ineffective: all your tired liberal notions of compromise and hushed negotiation will be thrown out the window

Time and time again, AIDS activists are frustrated by govermment/business intransigence, which they break apart by staging huge, noisy and cunningly marketed protests. In so doing, they get results from the FDA (for faster drug approvals), the National Institute of Health (for more inclusionary and participant-controlled drug-testing experiments) and AZT pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome (to lower their exorbitant prices).

This is the first extended work of agitprop cinema I have seen come from the United States in recent years. It is a textbook for creating social change through civil disobedience. It shows, fundamentally, how angry and marginalized people can take matters into their own hands and fight back. Heady stuff indeed.

The continuing intransigence of government and industry, in the face of increasing death tolls and attacks on people living with AIDS, makes this film all the more important. The members of ACT-UP we hear speak (many of whom died during the filming) give hope that something can be done about this dreadful virus and its manifestations (gay bashers, right-wing tattoo freaks) before society implodes.
—Noah Cowan