Filmmaker Jerry Tartaglia in Person Jerry Tartaglia's experimental films are concerned with gay sexuality and representation-media and institutional propaganda against AIDS, his own identification with strong female actresses, reactions to films which depict gay sex. His films seem to share an interest in exploring relationships between viewer and viewed, a relationship intrinsic to cinema and often examined in terms of gender, but rarely in terms of sexuality. He is concerned not only with the problematics of being a gay viewer and consumer of (primarily heterosexual) images, and with being gay and viewed by an often homophobic society, but with being a gay filmmaker creating images which engage gay issues on critical and aesthetic levels. Tonight's program includes A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. , a lament for friends lost to AIDS, but whose anger is directed toward institutional abuse of AIDS to "desexualize gay culture." Ecce Homo extends these ideas using optically printed footage from Un chant d'amour and gay sex films, in order to comment on how AIDS hysteria has led to the condemnation, not only of gay sex but also of images of it, as dangerous. Here the cycle of viewer and viewed undergoes multiple permutations from prison guard/voyeur to society's policing of gay sexuality. Both films focus on the medical community's treatment of AIDS; it is particularly timely to participate in this discussion as the Sixth International Conference on AIDS is held this June in San Francisco. We conclude with a screening of Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour, both because of its relationship to the images and concerns of Jerry Tartaglia's Ecce Homo, and to highlight that the struggle to represent gay sexuality is a historical one. Un chant d'amour was banned as pornography in Berkeley in l966. --Kathy Geritz Un chant d'amour (Jean Genet, France, l950): "Set in a Paris prison and having no sound track, Un chant d'amour is the celebrated French author Jean Genet's only film as director. Reflecting his experience in prison, the film centers on an affair between two men living in separate cells. Various shots of these and other homosexual inmates `contain some frontal nudity and some depiction of homosexual activity....' A California court, having viewed the film twice, found that it `explicitly and vividly revealed acts of masturbation, oral copulation, the infamous crime against nature (sodomy), voyeurism, nudity, sadism, masochism and sex....'A California appelate court, three justices dissenting, concluded it `is nothing more than hard-core pornography and should be banned.' This court's opinion contains an unusually elaborate description of the film."--DeGrazia and Newman, Banned Films.