Critic's Notebook

Frameline's new lesson plan

Marriage changes everything. At least, this is what the disgruntled often say in movies and sitcoms regarding the ball-and-chain effect. Whether this ominous notion entered the heads of the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival programmers back in the planning stages of early 2008, same-sex marriage’s recent change of status in California has certainly provoked far-ranging discussions about queer folks’ own change of status in the world at large, a transformation in which the right to wed has, for better and for worse, taken center stage. As was only fitting, there was ample opportunity for filmgoers flipping through the Frameline 32 catalog to seek out glimpses of where the LGBT community is at today as well as how it got there.

topics: documentary, film festivals, frameline, gay lesbian cinema

Experience

The world of "Derek" at Frameline32

It goes without saying that sexuality is never far from the surface of Derek Jarman’s films, something he himself is clear enough accounting for in the lengthy 1990 interview which forms the backbone of Isaac Julien’s documentary portrait Derek. Over the sepia, postwar home movies that Jarman worked into films like The Last of England (1988), the artist recounts getting caught in bed with a boy during prep school and being "raked over the coals" for it—something which caused him to redirect any sexual energy he had into painting and collecting into his twenties, and later persisted in the vacuum-sealed air of solitary fixation in which his films seemed to play out. Later, accompanying shots of nubile lads and Scorpio Rising (1964) leather, Jarman emphasizes his desire to have sex in public as a kind of a revenge on the society which would repress his desires—a neat enough corollary for the let-it-blurt axiom of his serviceable film style. This contrast between amour fou and a rigid sense of self-preservation rivets Jarman’s collected works, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from Derek, a documentary tribute which does not seek to enlarge or complicate the filmmaker’s legacy so much as succor its loss.

topics: art film, directors, documentary, experimental film, film festivals, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema

Critic's Notebook

Frameline32: Hot and handled

Opening weekend at the SF International LGBT Film Festival was hot—particularly in that, if you didn’t notice, we had a heatwave goin’ on. Frameline’s current three venues for the annual event are all old movie palaces (OK, I’m not sure how old the Roxie is, but it sure ain’t palacial), none air-conditioned.

Of course it was hot in a good way, too, from the audience members (memo to self: Stop playing hooky from gym immediately) to what was onscreen. Starting with opening night’s selection—what could be hotter than repressed Victorians perspiring lust through their corsets?

topics: directors, documentary, film festivals, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, independent film, queer cinema

Experience

Frameline rides Argentina's new wave

Last year’s Frameline First Feature Award winner was Alexis Dos Santos’ debut Glue (2006), an overall festival favorite, and one that SF Bay Guardian Arts and Entertainment Editor Johnny Ray Huston wryly observed as "yet another example of how new Argentine cinema […] continues to stretch the time and space dimensions of the word new." It had already been a half decade since 2001, Argentine film’s watershed year at film festivals abroad and the year the entire industry—and country—suffered through a catastrophic economic collapse. The state-subsidized film schools that had nurtured members of the ’90s new wave were forced to close and many in the film industry fretted over what seemed like a foreclosed future.

topics: argentine cinema, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema