UWM Union Theater
3pm
Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe
(James Crump, USA, video, 71 min., 2007)
Community Co-Presenters: Milwaukee Gay Arts Center & Milwaukee Art Museum
A portrait of influential curator and collector Sam Wagstaff—patron, mentor, and lover to Robert Mapplethorpe.
Sam Wagstaff, a blue blood ad man turned curator of minimalism and earth art, was always in the process of refining the image and performance of himself. If his avid collecting of photographs transformed the then-neglected medium into an art commodity—his photo collection would sell to the Getty Museum for five million dollars—his most legendary performance began at the age of 51, when he “collaborated” with Patti Smith's roommate (she is a principal narrator here), the 26-year-old Robert Mapplethorpe. Black White + Gray offers both a history of photography and a fascinating, insider-y tour of the New York art world through a tumble of increasingly rowdy and radical decades, crashing into the era of AIDS, the disease which took both Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe.
5pm
Red Without Blue
(Brooke Sebold, Benita Sills & Todd Sills, USA, video, 74 min., 2006)
Community Co-Presenters: PFLAG-Milwaukee & Project Q
Winner - 2007 Jury Award, Best Documentary - San Francisco LGBT Film/Video Festival
Red Without Blue follows a pair of identical twins as one transitions from male to female and their family redefines itself.
Alex and Mark Farley's early lives were quintessentially American: picture-perfect holidays, cheerful home movies and caring parents. But by the time they were 14, their parents had divorced, Mark and Alex had come out as gay and a joint suicide attempt precipitated a forced separation of two and half years. Through candid and extensive interviews with the twins and their family over a period of three years, Red Without Blue recounts these troubled times, interweaving the twins' difficult past with their efforts to establish themselves in the present.
shown with:
Whatever Suits You (Ashley Altadonna, USA , video, 7 min., 2007)
Local filmmaker Altadonna crafts a new outfit as she recounts her transition.
7pm
Glue
(Glue – Historia Adolescente en Medio de la Nada, Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina/United Kingdom, in Spanish with English subtitles, video & Super8 on video, 110 min., 2006)
Co-Sponsor: Picture This! Entertainment
Campus Co-Sponsor: Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Winner - Jury Award, Best First Feature - Frameline SF International LGBT Film Festival 2007
A visually striking and empathetic picture of one adolescent boy, replete with the tensions—the impatience, the horniness, the questioning—that mark the age.
Set in the open, unadorned spaces of rural Argentina, Glue has the unforced feel of time spent just hanging out with the three young people on whom the film dwells. Shot with great agility and fluidity in digital video and in Super8, Glue exudes a casual, improvisational feel, laid back and candid, befitting Lucas, the amiable central character who doesn't think of much more than music and sex and, now and then, his parents' impending divorce. His—and the film's—breeziness extends to his sexual questioning: his gropings with his best friend Nacho, or with Nacho and his other friend Andrea, are no-big-deal efflorescences of their intoxications, just moments of hanging more intense than most. (This movie recalls Y Tu Mama Tambien, only here no one vomits after same sex kissing.) The best looking and most critically acclaimed film of this year's Festival, Glue remains true to its subjects while casually re-energizing the coming-of-age genre that normally contains them. Motored by anthems and angst from the Violent Femmes.
9pm
Itty Bitty Titty Committee (Jamie Babbit, USA, video, 90 min., 2007)
Community Co-Presenters: Miltown Kings, Broad Vocabulary & Lesbian Alliance
Winner - Best Narrative Feature Jury Award Winner - South by Southwest Film Festival 2007
A rowdy romantic comedy set among the would-be revolutionaries of a cell of radical guerilla grrrls.
Shy Anna has been dumped by her girlfriend, rejected from college and the sandwiches she gets delivered to her at work at the West Beverly Plastic Surgery Clinic always come with the wrong condiments . Leaving work one night she encounters the spray paint nozzle of Sadie, the charismatic, bombshell leader of Clits in Action, who recruits her for the radical Guerilla Girls-esque group – and perhaps for more. Anna is introduced to other CIA members Shulie, hardcore feminist/hipster; Meat, the artist responsible for engineering the CIA's protests; and the gentle FTM Aggie; as well as their punk-femme brand of protests against phallocentrism, the beauty-industrial complex and marriage – all marriage. But not only this: with the CIA agents, there is also plenty of record shopping, dancing, sex and, inevitably, fighting, with the CIA threatening to implode over Sadie's treatment of Anna. Eventually, Sadie's disloyalty brings the group close to fracture, until Anna comes up with a fierce public act that will unite the group – and maybe even her and Sadie. Babbit (But I'm a Cheerleader) and her crew of almost entirely female talent create a radical film, in both the political and slang-y senses, a film that that refuses to take itself – or its premise – too seriously, but doesn't dismiss aspirations of revolution either. Did we mention the film also stars The L Word 's Daniela Sea of The L Word and has Le Tigre all over the soundtrack?
Immediately after the screening
join the Miltown Kings at the Miramar Theatre
2844 N. Oakland Ave., for their season kick-off show:
Slumber Party! (Wear your pjs!)
For more info see: http://www.myspace.com/miltownkings
join the Miltown Kings at the Miramar Theatre
2844 N. Oakland Ave., for their season kick-off show:
Slumber Party! (Wear your pjs!)
For more info see: http://www.myspace.com/miltownkings
11pm – FREE!!
Funeral Parade of Roses
(Bara no Soretsu, Toshio Matsumoto, Japan, in Japanese with English subtitles, 16mm, 105 min., 1969)
A wild, mayhem-laden drag queen free-for-all and a retelling of the Oedipus legend,
reputed to be an influence on Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.
A pioneering, influential Molotov cocktail of the Japanese New Wave, Toshio Matsumoto's provocative assemblage uses a cross-dressed love-triangle melodrama (set in a gay bar named after Jean Genet) as a springboard for a daring, experimental look at economics, sexuality and gender politics in late-'60s Tokyo. Print courtesy of Japan Foundation, with permission from Image Forum.
