Dirty Looks selects: The First 25 Years of MIX NYC

Dirty Looks Selects: The First 25 years of MIX NYC
As part of MIX 25, the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival

Part One: Fertile Feelings
Thursday, November 15, 7pm

(1987) Barbara Hammer, Dyketactics, 4mins
(1988) Jim Hubbard, Stop the Movie (Cruising), 1980 14mins
(1989) Jerry Tartaglia, Ecce Homo, 6.5mins
(1990) Phil Zwickler and David Wojnarowicz, Fear of Disclosure, 5mins
(1991) Carl Michael George, The Star Spangled Basher, 8mins
(1992) Glenn Belverio, Equal Rights To Unborn Drag Queens, 7mins
(1993) Jill Reiter, Frenzy, 11mins
(1994) Tom Kalin, Confirmed Bachelor, 2.45mins
(1995) John "Quasi" O'Shea, That Fertile Feeling, 7mins
(1996) Charles Lofton, O Happy Day, 6mins
(1997) Candy Pauker, Interview with a Zombie, 7mins
(1998) K8 Hardy, Ants in her Pants, 5mins
(1999) Nguyen Tan Hoang, Forever Bottom, 4mins
(87mins)

1987. What a strange place to start. Video as a tool for artists had grown from its early port-a-pack days to a viable consumer medium, slowly replacing the functionality of 16mm film production and somehow conversely renewing interest in the "small gauge" Super8 form. The famed punk hey day of the Lower East Side had come and gone, allowing for a decidedly queerer core to spring up. 1987 also saw over 70,000 cases of HIV/AIDS reported, world wide, and the establishment of ACT UP. The political voices that swelled from the streets to our screens rang on for years. Still ring to this day. Assembled in Fertile Feelings are selections from the first thirteen years of MIX NYC. They cover the historic grounds laid by visionary filmmakers and our queer community, marching for equal rights, fighting for their/our lives. Many of the titles are angry and reactionary, but also, often, playfully tongue in cheek. Interchangeably, super8 and video collide in hilarious, distressing and poignant assemblage works and portraits, reenactments and new narratives, showing this fertile decade and a half, racked by plague, ruled by MTV. History still doesn't know what hit it.

Part Two: Living Through Oblivion
Friday, November 16th, 6PM

(2000) Tom Chomont, Oblivion, 6mins
(2001) Peter Cramer and Jack Waters, Black and White Study, 10mins
(2002) Cody Critcheloe, Ssion, 3mins
(2003) Cecilia Dougherty, Eileen, 10mins
(2005) Matt Wolf, I Feel Love, 14:30mins
(2006) Nao Bustamante and Matt Johnstone, Perfect Ones, 8mins
(2007) William E. Jones, Film Montages (for Peter Roehr), 11mins
(2008) Samara Halperin, Sorry, Brenda, 2mins
(2009) Gina Carducci and Matilda Bernstein Sycamore, All that Sheltering Emptiness, 8mins
(2010) Glen Fogel, Untitled, 5mins
(2011) Jonesy, Wildblood, 5mins
(82mins)

Through the eye of the storm, filmmaking in the naughts and the teens seemed to reflect upon the furious decade-and-a-half which preceded it, solemnly redressing formal principles in the wake or calamity and chaos. Consumer home editing systems became commonplace and film labs shuttered like the saloon doors in Hollywood ghost towns. Online platforms reinterpreted sociality in binaristic and networking languages, drafting a digital sense of order on the otherwise messy construct of the social. In Living Through Oblivion the past and present become muddled and frayed through the repurposing of historical images and narratives. Outmoded technologies, found footage and revisionary editing reimagine and reconstruct a past that is errant, alien or simply gone. Many of the filmmakers assembled here embrace film as a precious or fetishistic format, video as calculating or interpretive tool. Concepts of the archive emerge, be it an image bank of GLBTQ representation, a literary library, or a porn store bargain bin, sorting our pasts, collecting our visions, arranging our histories. But such a loaded and fraught history cannot sustain such organization. And here is where the breakdown begins…