Passing Fad or Cutting Edge

Xtra Magazine
April 1992

The Living End

Lesbian and gay filmmakers dominate Sundance Film Festival

The Sundance Film Festival, held in Park City, Utah, was founded in 1983 by Robert Redford. Eight years later, due to gutsy programming and proximity to Hollywood, it’s become the most important launching pad for independent film in the US.

Last year many people were surprised (and some dismayed) when the festival awarded its grand prizes to two films by queer directors: Poison, directed by Todd Haynes; and Paris Is Burning, directed by Jennie Livingston.

Both films can unquestionably be described as “gay,” a label that didn’t limit the importance of their contribution to world cinema. Regardless, Sundance organizers reported, off the record, that Hollywood film buyers complained the films were “marginal” and unmarketable.

Such comments might have prompted programmers to reconsider their commitment to lesbian and gay directors. Quite the opposite happened. Sundance 1992 contained 10 features and five shorts by out directors, from a total of some 70 features and 60 shorts.

More than half of this material was shown earlier at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, the Vancouver Film Festival and Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma et de la Video. Derek Jarman’s Edward II and Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels were as popular in Utah as in Canada. The shorts—Resonance, by Australian filmmaker Stephen Cummings, Thanksgiving Prayer, by Gus van Sant and RSVP, by Toronto filmmaker Laurie Lynd—were also well received.

Christopher March’s The Hours and the Times, which languidly tracks the latent affair between John Lennon and Brian Epstein in Barcelona, won the Special Jury Prize. With a screening scheduled for New York’s Film Forum this summer, the film appears destined to become a celluloid classic of gay gossip.

Two films by gay directors, both programmed in the festival’s prestigious competition, stood out: Tom Kallin’s Swoon and Gregg Araki’s The Living End. No two films could be more different. Or more controversial. Swoon will likely be released in the US in August, with Canadian dates to follow. The Living End has not been picked up by a distributor yet, but should make the festival rounds next fall.

Swoon recounts the infamous case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two young Chicago dandies who were arrested and imprisoned for abducting and murdering a young boy in 1924. When it was revealed they had “engaged in homosexual relations,” the story hit the front pages. Since then, Leopold and Loeb have been regularly exhumed by neo-conservatives as examples of how homosexuality inevitably leads to pathological murder.

The case has already inspired two films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion. Rope, though saturated with homoerotic subtext, never really comes clean about the pair’s sex life. It has them kill a close friend instead of a child. Compulsion sticks closer to the facts, but reduces the men to gay psychopaths. But in Swoon, Kallin, a New York video artist and AIDS activist, brings these subjects to light through queer eyes.

Full of sumptuous black and white photography and cool, deadpan performances, the film effectively draws us into their heads. In Kallin’s detailed portrait, Leopold and Loeb are by turns tender, evil (in a disarmingly attractive way) and naive. Saints, however, they are not. Those who insist on positive images of gay men won’t be happy.

The Living End is sure to ruffle feathers, too. Shot on a shoestring, it tells the story of two HIV-positive men—one an intense writer, the other a way-sexy drifter. After much angst and violence in hometown LA, they hit the road to have amazing sex in cheap motels and shoot stuff. They blame society for their infection and insist that society must pay. Nothing must hinder them from living life to its fullest. Nothing does.

Director Araki has little time for community-based politics, mourning or emotional complexity. Instead, he opts for visceral anger and energy. Balanced against sentimental cinematic responses to the AIDS crisis, The Living End is a timely intervention from an anarchistic spirit.

Another highlight of the festival was Barbed Wire Kisses, a panel of gay and lesbian filmmakers which dealt with issues: gay history on film; the lack of lesbian filmmakers; the gay esthetic; and the desirability of positive gay images on screen.

In her Sundance catalogue article, New York media critic B. Ruby Rich sounded the theme of the panel’s debate: “A gay and lesbian cinema has built up over the years, enriched by a number of art-film traditions, celebrated by anetwork of community—specific festivals worldwide, fed by the stardom of directors from Fassbinder to Almodóvar.... But will this enterprise, this emergent gay aesthetic, continue to grow,” Rich asked the panelists, “or is this going to be a quickly receding fad?”

Responses were mixed, but most agreed that if the quality and quantity of the work continues to proceed at the pace of 1991 and 1992, we are in for a very queer decade at the movies.
—Noah Cowan