A ‘First Look’ at new queer films at the Museum of the Moving Image
Following MOMA’s “Documentary Fortnight” and overlapping with Lincoln Center’s “Rendezvous with French Cinema,” the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” program livens up the first quarter of the year by offering New Yorkers our earliest opportunity to see a variety of international films from 2024 and 2025. Trying to take the world’s pulse through … Read More
Following MOMA’s “Documentary Fortnight” and overlapping with Lincoln Center’s “Rendezvous with French Cinema,” the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” program livens up the first quarter of the year by offering New Yorkers our earliest opportunity to see a variety of international films from 2024 and 2025. Trying to take the world’s pulse through its selection may be futile, but Miguel Coyula’s “Chronicles of the Absurd,” about the Cuban government’s censorship of its director, seems less foreign after the Trump administration’s takeover of the Kennedy Center. Even in authoritarian societies, the arts have been a means to speak about undercurrents of unease and rebellion. “First Look” glances to the past with “Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989,” a lengthy documentary surveying coverage of the conflict, and “When the Phone Rang,” set in Serbia during 1992. The series ranges as far as Lebanon, Taiwan, mainland China, Moldova, and Bulgaria. Several films made by LGBTQ filmmakers or addressing queer themes are reviewed below.
Charles Shackleton’s plan to adapt a true crime book by ex-cop Lyndon Lafferty failed (at least in any direct matter), but in the long run, that turned out to be a gift. The queer director’s "Zodiac Killer Project” uses his unproduced film as a means of examining the genre’s clichés and manipulation. Lafferty’s book, “The Zodiac Killer Close-Up,” espoused a theory that a man he met in 1971 was the still-uncaught Zodiac Killer, following his investigation of the case for years. Shackleton’s images are peaceful and patient, with lush cinematography. He aims his gaze at institutions like libraries, churches and box offices, with inserts of close-ups of guns, crime scene tape, blood, and shell casings against a black background. The film is dominated by his giggly voice-over.
Shackleton demonstrates the tropes that dominate true crime, using clips from such series’ credit sequences to show how they repeat the same kind of sinister yet ambiguous images. Over his shots of the streets of Vallejo, California, Shackleton recites his plans for the film he would have made. As he deconstructs true crime, his version analyzes other films rather than speaking about violence and its victims. (It seems very far removed from the damage caused by the Zodiac Killer, who used letters to the press to psychologically terrorize the entire Bay Area.) Despite Shackleton’s wit and accuracy of his criticisms, the final minutes of “Zodiac Killer Project” become too absorbed by their own cleverness, with his unmade film lining up with this one.
Luke Fowler’s short “Being Blue” pays tribute to gay director Derek Jarman, who died in 1994, with a spectral mesh of Jarman’s words, the objects in the cottage where he used to live, and the garden outside it. Jarman viewed his work with flowers and stones as another facet of his art, and so does Fowler. Shot in 16mm during harsh spring spotlight, the film’s colors are pale yet bright. New life miraculously springs up from a bed of rocks, flashing bursts of blue, yellow and green. Jarman devoted his final book and a 1990 film to his garden; in turn, Fowler has picked up the torch. (“Being Blue” was produced for a Glasgow art gallery’s Jarman exhibit, as one of six works by contemporary artists made in response.)
Through the use of Jarman’s taped voice, ‘Being Blue” becomes a ghost story, evoking the director’s presence without turning to direct biography or copying his style. It finds a lingering human presence in nature.
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“100,100,100,100,100” remixes Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘60s films about the empty lives of the wealthy, speaking this time from the position of a worker in their milieu.Petit Films and Deuxieme Ligne Films[/caption]
In “100,100,100,100,100,” Virgil Vernier films the coastal streets of Monaco (during the Christmas season of 2022) with an overwhelming, harsh sadness. Tourists have gone away, so the streets are mostly empty. The director, who began as a documentarian, keeps returning to the wealthy cities of the French Riviera. Afine (Zakaria Bouti), a queer sex worker, spends the holidays by himself when his circle of friends travels to Dubai. (Despite his job, the film leaves sex entirely offscreen.) He befriends 12-year-old Julia (Victoire Kong), the daughter of Chinese billionaires who have abandoned her in their mansion, and her babysitter Vesna (Mina Gavojic). A middle-aged woman hires him as an escort, looking mostly to him for companionship.
Class conflict is the motor behind “100,100,100,100,100.” Sex, love, and even friendship are transactional. Wealthy people are just as lonely as Afine. They’re trapped in huge houses decorated with gaudy lights, unable to feel much pleasure. Instead of celebrating the holidays, they spend them dancing alone. Vernier introduces a degree of non-fiction by filming the expansion of Monaco, a phallic excess of architecture soon to dominate the sea. “100,100,100,100,100” remixes Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘60s films about the empty lives of the wealthy, speaking this time from the position of a worker in their milieu.
Deniz Eroglu’s “The Shipwrecked Triptych” is an anthology of shorts set during 1982, the ‘90s and the medieval past, respectively, in Germany. Each one changes style and format, but all were shot on analog film. Eroglu is a visual artist who prefers working with non-professional actors. “Lost at Sea” presents a group of gay men working at a nursing home, who put their charges to bed and then hold a party on New Year’s Eve. (It’s full of close-ups of repulsive food.) News about AIDS, overheard on a radio, casts a pall over one man’s report of his recent trip to New York’s sex clubs, while unbeknownst to the nurses, a woman with dementia is wandering around. In “Boarding,” a middle-aged white man who claims to be a civil servant barges into a Congolese family’s home and will not leave. In the silent “Adrift,” a group of wandering fortune tellers cast out one of their own into a phallically charged landscape.
“The Shipwrecked Triptych” lands upon several points of crisis, both personal and political, but it’s too enamored of its penchant for pastiche to hit very hard. Its opacity turns sour in the third section. It indulges anachronisms, with electronic music and heavy use of CGI, but the result is rather generic folk horror that’s overly impressed with its own wit and weirdness.
“First Look” | March 12th-16th | Museum of the Moving Image | Go to https://movingimage.org/series/firstlook2025/ for schedule and details.
“100,100,100,100,100” remixes Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘60s films about the empty lives of the wealthy, speaking this time from the position of a worker in their milieu.Petit Films and Deuxieme Ligne Films[/caption]
In “100,100,100,100,100,” Virgil Vernier films the coastal streets of Monaco (during the Christmas season of 2022) with an overwhelming, harsh sadness. Tourists have gone away, so the streets are mostly empty. The director, who began as a documentarian, keeps returning to the wealthy cities of the French Riviera. Afine (Zakaria Bouti), a queer sex worker, spends the holidays by himself when his circle of friends travels to Dubai. (Despite his job, the film leaves sex entirely offscreen.) He befriends 12-year-old Julia (Victoire Kong), the daughter of Chinese billionaires who have abandoned her in their mansion, and her babysitter Vesna (Mina Gavojic). A middle-aged woman hires him as an escort, looking mostly to him for companionship.
Class conflict is the motor behind “100,100,100,100,100.” Sex, love, and even friendship are transactional. Wealthy people are just as lonely as Afine. They’re trapped in huge houses decorated with gaudy lights, unable to feel much pleasure. Instead of celebrating the holidays, they spend them dancing alone. Vernier introduces a degree of non-fiction by filming the expansion of Monaco, a phallic excess of architecture soon to dominate the sea. “100,100,100,100,100” remixes Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘60s films about the empty lives of the wealthy, speaking this time from the position of a worker in their milieu.
Deniz Eroglu’s “The Shipwrecked Triptych” is an anthology of shorts set during 1982, the ‘90s and the medieval past, respectively, in Germany. Each one changes style and format, but all were shot on analog film. Eroglu is a visual artist who prefers working with non-professional actors. “Lost at Sea” presents a group of gay men working at a nursing home, who put their charges to bed and then hold a party on New Year’s Eve. (It’s full of close-ups of repulsive food.) News about AIDS, overheard on a radio, casts a pall over one man’s report of his recent trip to New York’s sex clubs, while unbeknownst to the nurses, a woman with dementia is wandering around. In “Boarding,” a middle-aged white man who claims to be a civil servant barges into a Congolese family’s home and will not leave. In the silent “Adrift,” a group of wandering fortune tellers cast out one of their own into a phallically charged landscape.
“The Shipwrecked Triptych” lands upon several points of crisis, both personal and political, but it’s too enamored of its penchant for pastiche to hit very hard. Its opacity turns sour in the third section. It indulges anachronisms, with electronic music and heavy use of CGI, but the result is rather generic folk horror that’s overly impressed with its own wit and weirdness.
“First Look” | March 12th-16th | Museum of the Moving Image | Go to https://movingimage.org/series/firstlook2025/ for schedule and details. What's Your Reaction?
