How does one write about Agnès Varda? How does one describe an artist whose work feels so inseparable from the medium of cinema, and who regularly reflected on her own work with fluency and insight that could hardly be matched by the most astute critic?...
By Caden Mark Gardner Paris is Burning was a years-in-the-making endeavor. It distilled a moment before Manhattan completely pivoted from a gritty Metropolis to an unrecognizable tourist destination built on corporations from McDonald’s to Disney. These rapid changes to what the city had to offer everybody,...
By Caden Mark Gardner Frank Simon has never been a household name nor cinema verite icon with documentary film. His most well-known works for a while were on a filmmaker with much more of a legacy than him; Simon covered notorious film director Roman Polanski on...
[embed]https://vimeo.com/268053332[/embed] Inspired by one of Miami’s earliest queer spaces, CLUB JEWEL BOX presented the intersection of cinema, performance, and poetry by mimicking the way that queer people cruises through spaces, embracing looks and longing glances over touch and conversation. Below is a collection of pieces written by...
By Caden Mark Gardner “I think it is significant that, despite the fact that I knew that I was gay myself, it never occurred to me for a moment that the characters in the film might be; it was, at the time, literally unthinkable.”- Robin Wood...
by Willow Maclay Barbarella defies all logic. A softcore pornographic (for its time) feature starring Hollywood royalty (Jane Fonda) at the height of flower power before the idealism of that movement was crushed under the wheels of the hell’s angels at Altamont. It’s a movie that...
by Caden Mark Gardner Victor/Victoria is a grand farce where the tensions of identity, fame, and power could easily have been twisted into something more dramatic in its 1930s Paris, France setting. But Blake Edwards instead has the confusion, anxieties, and subversive nature at the center...
by Kyle Turner There is little difference between Helmet Berger’s sexually deviant, amoral political strategist Martin (Helmut Burger), dressed up as Marlene Dietrich in stockings and pencil thin eyebrows drawn on, in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned and Joel Grey’s implicitly sadistic harlequin Master of Ceremonies in...
by Willow Maclay Sidney Drew's 1914 landmark silent gender bender comedy, A Florida Enchantment, is likely only canonized due to it being one of the first of its kind, but that, in and of itself, is nothing to minimize. Over one hundred years old, it would...
by Kyle Turner As playful and slick, as smart and self-possessed as its subject, the genius of Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page is dolled consistently throughout the film, but first appears, albeit faux-coyly, in its first scene. Jostling the audience back to New York in...