Pioneers of Queer Cinema

March 3–May 3, 2023

Pioneers of Queer Cinema celebrates the groundbreaking achievements born from visionary queer filmmakers, ranging from landmark to little-known works.

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Paris Is Burning
Confessions
Watermelon Woman

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

The Watermelon Woman
Cheryl Dunye
United States, 1996
New Restoration
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
Friday, March 3 7 PM
Introduced by Allegra Madsen
A Black lesbian video store clerk and would-be filmmaker becomes obsessed with an early “race film” star in Dunye’s pioneering “funky screwball comedy in the key of queer” (B. Ruby Rich).
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My Hustler
Andy Warhol, Chuck Wein
United States, 1965
Saturday, March 4 7 PM
Warhol’s brilliantly bitchy masterpiece of voyeurism, desire, and boredom on Fire Island. With shorts by Curt McDowell (Confessions), James Broughton (Testament), and José Rodriguez-Soltero (Jerovi).
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Parting Glances
Bill Sherwood
United States, 1986
New Restoration
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
Sunday, March 19 7 PM
Several friends and lovers navigate friendship and romance in this joyful, independent look at gay life and love. A snapshot of a funky, proud, defiantly gay 1986 New York City. With shorts by Jim Hubbard (Memento Mori) and Peggy Rajski (Trevor).
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Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives
Mariposa Film Group
United States, 1977
New Restoration
Sunday, April 2 4:30 PM
Members of the Mariposa Film Group in Person
Perhaps the first feature-length documentary on gay and lesbian identity, this film features interviews with a diverse group of individuals, including poet Elsa Gidlow, activist Sally Gearhart, inventor John Burnside, civil rights leader Harry Hay, and filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky.
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Blackstar: Autobiography of a Close Friend
Tom Joslin
United States, 1977
New Restoration
Thursday, April 13 7 PM
Mimi (Kim) Klausner In Person
Tom Joslin’s prequel to Silverlake Life: The View from Here is an experimental, “self-ethnographic” documentary on gay love. With Choosing Children (1984), one of the first documentaries to challenge the assumption that being a lesbian means you can’t be a mom.
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Hide and Seek
Su Friedrich
United States, 1996
Wednesday, April 19 7 PM
Introduced by Jenni Olson
“Hide and Seek is one of the most piquant memory films I know, at once roiling with the tenderness and cruelty of adolescence and marbled by the wisdom of age” (Scott Foundas). With shorts by Jan Oxenberg (Home Movie), Sadie Benning (If Every Girl Had a Diary), and Jenni Olson (Blue Diary).
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Paris Is Burning
Jennie Livingston
United States, 1990
Thursday, April 27 7 PM
Introduced by Allegra Madsen; Jenni Olson and Susan Stryker in Conversation
An influential documentary on New York City’s proudly queer and trans Black and Latinx Ballroom scene of the late 1980s. With shorts by Nikolai Ursin (Behind Every Good Man) and Pat Rocco (Changes).
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The Times of Harvey Milk
Rob Epstein
United States, 1984
New Restoration
Sunday, April 30 5 PM
Introduced by Jenni Olson
Rob Epstein’s powerful record of the beloved San Francisco activist/politician Harvey Milk’s inspirational life and work, from his improbable, heroic rise to his horrific murder. With shorts by Barbara Hammer (I Was/I Am) and Arthur J. Bressan Jr. (Coming Out).
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Tongues Untied
Marlon Riggs
United States, 1989
Wednesday, May 3 7 PM
Mike Kuchar in Person
Marlon Riggs’s riveting combination of interviews, performance, stock footage, autobiography, poetry, and dance reveals the revolutionary potential of Black men loving Black men. With shorts by Todd Haynes (Dottie Gets Spanked), Michael Wallin (Decodings), Kenneth Anger (Fireworks), and Mike Kuchar (Seascape).
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Pioneers of Queer Cinema

March 3–May 3, 2023

Cosponsored by Frameline

What’s driven most queer filmmakers who’ve made pointedly queer film for more than sixty years now hasn’t been the quest for fame or fortune (those weren’t really even options), or even the idea of making foundational and “important” work. It was simply the desire to bring into cinematic existence something of the world as they saw, lived, dreamed, and quite often defied it. Gay and lesbian and queer filmmakers (the terms aren’t necessarily synonymous or interchangeable) have historically been both custodians and makers of history, all at once. That so many of them have fallen through the cracks of history is both ironic—and not.

Pioneers of Queer Cinema is an attempt to recover some American queer films that are now little-known, and many rarely ever seen at all, and put them in conversation with a relative handful of works now deemed classics—with the latter group ranging from Kenneth Anger’s short Fireworks (1947) to some of the heady ’90s fare that made up the movement film scholar and historian B. Ruby Rich dubbed “New Queer Cinema” in 1992. The shorts and feature films in this program, both narrative and documentary, are just a sliver of the works that were at the forefront of slowly shifting perceptions of and conversations about the queer community, for both queer and non-queer audiences alike.

—Ernest Hardy, Pioneers of Queer Cinema catalog

BAMPFA's selections from the UCLA Film & Television Archive tour focus on locally made cinema; a number of local filmmakers, critics, and scholars will be in person. Three works from Pioneers of Queer Cinema were recognized by the National Film Registry in 2022: Behind Every Good Man (April 27), Tongues Untied (May 3), and Word Is Out (April 2). Of related interest, see Lizzie Borden’s New York Feminisms Trilogy.

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Pioneers of Queer Cinema is toured by UCLA Film & Television Archive, with thanks to Steven Hill and Todd Wiener. Coordinated at BAMPFA by Kathy Geritz, with generous assistance from filmmaker, author, and archivist Jenni Olson. Our series notes are drawn from UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Pioneers of Queer Cinema catalog, edited by K.J. Relth-Miller, with film notes composed collaboratively with Outfest and IndieCollect staff and affiliates.