Gregg Araki's THREE BEWILDERED PEOPLE IN THE NIGHT

Gregg Araki, Three Bewildered People in the Night, 92min., B&W 16mm on HD digital video, 1987

Gregg Araki’s first, unreleased feature is a moody chamber drama about friendship, apathy and sexual fluidity. David (Mark Howell) is a performance artist, navigating the poseur factions of the L.A. underground, with his video artist gal pal, Alicia (Darcy Marta) and her photographer boyfriend, Craig (John Lacques). They tramp the urban wasteland at night, from arcade to diner to another sad club scene, and soon sparks fly between the boys, too. Araki’s early debt to Jean Luc Goddard is palpable in this aching black and white movie that moves like a Smiths song. HD 16mm scan by Outfest Legacy Project, courtesy of Strand Releasing. Thanks to Marcus Hu.

Born in Los Angeles to Japanese American parents in 1959, Gregg Araki entered high school concurrently with the emergence of punk rock and a cultural moment well-suited to his teenage angst. Araki enrolled in USC film school in the early ’80s, where his student projects were inspired by new wave music, the DIY culture of underground art, and filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jim Jarmusch, and John Waters. Considered an integral part of the New Queer Cinema movement in part established at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, where his breakout feature The Living End presented unfiltered gay male identities on screen, Araki and contemporaries Isaac Julien, Todd Haynes, Sadie Benning, and Marlon Riggs would shape a new, rebellious language for queer cinema. Araki’s three subsequent features, which comprise his wildly influential Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, would inspire an entire generation of outcasts and queer folks to embrace themselves and throw a middle finger to anyone who dared judge them. (bio by K.J. Relth-Miller, Academy Museum)