VISIONS OF L.A. IN THE AGE OF AIDS

Since long before the advent of AIDS as we know it, Los Angeles has been a complex, sometimes unwieldy checkerboard of communities and histories. Famously multicultural and polyglot -- in effect, awash in cultural riches -- the city has faced historic and recurrent challenges in achieving cohesiveness as a community that wants to offer security and rewards to all its citizens. This is evident in the manner, sometimes hectic, often heroic, in which the community at large has responded to the grim challenge of HIV and AIDS in its midst. While contributing top-flight medical research to the world, along with sterling models of caregiving, education, philanthropy, service and volunteerism, Los Angeles has nevertheless strained at times to understand AIDS as a matter of community concern and conscience. But by magnifying the disjunctions of class privilege and racial division, and by underlining the preciousness and fragility of life, the AIDS crisis has brought about a transformative re-examination of the ideal of a regenerative, common society, in which modernity and its comforts might be thought to have replaced compassion as the connective tissue of humanity.

Fortunately, these complexities and the everyday struggles and occasional triumphs that accompany them have been given voice and shape over time by activists, community organizers, and artists. Los Angeles-based media artists working in various modes and formats have certainly helped to give the phantasm of AIDS a firm foothold in history. While their films and videos constitute a smaller and less coherent “body of work” than the independent AIDS media of other cities such as New York and San Francisco (where independent media-making in general receives more support), individually the works are provocative and groundbreaking, filling a vacuum left by mass media and officialdom.

It is worth noting that the five films being presented as part of “Visions of LA in the Age of AIDS” focus primarily on the experiences of the gay community in its confrontation with HIV-AIDS as opposed to the AIDS stories of other communities. This may be partly due to my own personal story. For some years I was Director of Year-Round Programming for Outfest: the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and had for two years worked with the Westside Clinic of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles, whose patients were largely (though by no means entirely) gay men. Also the early, disproportionate suffering and loss sustained by the gay community (more or less ignored by political leaders) necessitated a concerted and vociferous response from that community as a matter of survival. This may arguably, in some measure, have set up a feedback loop in which gay people were assumed to be, and certainly became, a primary audience for AIDS media -- stimulating more production in turn, fashioned for the same audience. Still, this is a story of leadership worth celebrating, as it has constituted a large portion of the edifice representing Los Angeles’ contribution to the global conversation on AIDS. Nonetheless, we might still hope that creative and politically committed people would throw their weight behind stories and explorations of the lives of women, youth, and people of color, whose own confrontations with AIDS now span decades and deserve cinematic monuments of their own.

This assessment partially qualifies the particular example of Los Angeles as a site of AIDS media. In a cautionary way, it also addresses LA’s arguably limited role as a world communications center. By and large, the city which tolerates expressions of almost every kind, actively supports only a narrow range of voices and in fact mainly succeeds with a mass audience by offering messages of reassurance and escapism (notwithstanding commendable exceptions in prime-time and cable TV that have dealt with “difficult” subjects such as HIV). The daring, alternative visions and messages of independent media makers in LA are impressive by virtue of being genuinely countercultural and even quixotic; with impact not on such a broad scale as a “Queer As Folk,” but often with a depth and authority unmatched by mass media. This rare precision, whether offering perspectives from the gay community or other minority communities, renders the work all the more crucial, both socially and historically.

The above observations aside, the works represented in this collection offer valuable and indelible perspectives on AIDS in Los Angeles. Like shards of a broken mirror, they reflect distinct and decisive contributions made by communities and individuals to understanding and confronting the disease, whether as a spiritual or intellectual puzzle, or as a blood enemy. Peter Friedman’s and Tom Joslin’s SILVERLAKE LIFE: THE VIEW FROM HERE is a landmark not only in storytelling about AIDS, but among stories about Los Angeles itself. Its poignant and uncompromising portrait of the final days of co-director Joslin and his lover Mark Massi, traces their navigation of an LA that seems to change with their disease to a place of mystery and hidden meanings, and in which, indeed, life itself fills with new meaning even as it is compromised. The spontaneous and reflective passages selected from the film reveal its wonder: Tom’s outburst of utter frustration about the difficulty of doing simple, small tasks; Mark’s celebratory dance in defiance of death and despair, and the remarkable epilogue that explains the film’s conception and the extraordinary circumstances that led to its completion.

PAUL MONETTE: THE BRINK OF SUMMER’S END, by Monte Bramer, is an appreciation of late writer Monette, whose lifelong struggles with gay identity, AIDS, and the challenge of writing about the disease, culminated through courage in a sort of spiritual and artistic apotheosis. Monette’s twin paths: his slow deterioration in the grip of AIDS (tragically, in the penultimate period before the development of several revolutionary drugs), and his sudden rise to artistic excellence and recognition, are well-traced in the excerpts that are offered here. They illustrate his embrace of AIDS as a theme after the loss of his first lover, his triumph as winner of the National Book Award for the autobiographical BECOMING A MAN, and finally his devotional acts of writing and reflections on humanity in the final days of his life.

The urgency and power of history infuses these works. Alex Juhasz’ VIDEO REMAINS, which built on Juhasz’ video records of her late friend, the actor James Lamb, powerfully evokes one of the unique contributions of AIDS activism: the creation of lasting visions when forces seem aligned to actively ignore or suppress AIDS into invisibility. In Juhasz’ work, ephemeral impressions are encoded and enfolded within media time capsules as acts of love and defiance. The excerpts chosen for this presentation frame the pained beauty of Juhasz’ central questions, principally “how do you miss someone enough?” In a positively exquisite layering of images of herself and Lamb from the recent past, commented upon by voices from the present, the film achieves a palpable illustration of the quandaries of our responsibility to the history we shared (and share) with those loved ones we have lost.

Similarly, though with very different means, Charley Lang’s and Eric Schiff’s BATTLE FOR THE TIARA documents the titular, epic, LA-based AIDS benefit, a drag revue whose behind-the-scenes mini-dramas and deliriously high spirits valiantly confront and quell the somberness and mythic enormity of AIDS. In these clips, we get to know the history of the pageant, from its humble beginnings to the height of its success as a fundraiser and one of the hottest tickets in town – as well as the courage and fortitude of its founder and others who have contributed to its success.

Finally, Tomas Aguilar’s stylish, atmospheric video nightclub reel developed in collaboration with ReachLA, speaks forcefully to at-risk youth (largely, youth of color) about the risks of HIV-AIDS, suggesting ways of taking control of their sexuality and sexual health. Possibly the most future-oriented work among the five, this relative miniature bulges with heart and urgency, and a sense that tomorrow is still a place of hope.

It is creativity such as this, defiant and yet affirmative, that Angelenos would do well to support in redefining the battle against the disease that has itself redefined the social and spiritual landscape of the city. It is already old-hat to observe that the crisis is not over: not everyone benefits equally from the almost miraculous new therapies, nor is everyone adequately exposed to messages about prevention and protection. It is time to acknowledge as well that those communities facing the most dire incursions of AIDS (including the very young and people of color) also, typically, have the least access to sanctioned media resources (film school, the Hollywood establishment) and ready audiences. The city of the future has much to gain by embracing the promise of its intricate cultural pattern. Happily, as the works in this collection demonstrate, the artists yet to be heard from join a cultural legacy of LA-based media production offering works of profundity, great beauty, and deep humanity.

Bio

Shannon Kelley is Associate Director of the Documentary Film Program of the Sundance Institute, where he served previously as Associate Short Film Programmer and Senior Programming Consultant to the Documentary Film Program of the Sundance Film Festival. He is the former Director of Programming of Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and of the Morelia International Film Festival in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico.

He has been a film festival juror at NewFest (New York), the Worldwide Shorts Film Festival (Toronto), the Huesca Film Festival (Spain) and Vidarte (Mexico City) among others, and has been a panelist at festivals including South By Southwest, Silverdocs, LA Shorts Festival, The San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. He has presented curations of short film at festivals and programs including MIX/NY, The International Short Film Festival of Mexico City, and Cornell Cinema. He has served as a freelance advisor to independent filmmakers, and to organizations including Cinematexas (Austin), the Tallgrass Film Festival (Wichita), the Artivist Film Festival, and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. His film criticism appears nationally in The Advocate. He resides in Los Angeles.