Author: Flaming Classics

Still Burning

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,...

Don’t You Know Your Queen?

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...

The Club Jewel Box Collection

[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...

Barbarella: All You Need is Love

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...

Double-Cross-Dressing

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...

I Me Mein Herr: Cabaret, Queerness, and Gender

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...

The Florida Science Project

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...

Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!

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...