MIX 2000: The 14th recent York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival Anthology Film Archives of the present day York.

MIX 2000: The 14th recent York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival

Anthology Film Archives

of the present day York, New York

November 15-19 2000

legioned by the Anthology Film Archives (which itself is celebrating a 30-year anniversary of exhibition and preservation of avant-garde film) "MIX 2000" renovated its temporary fireside into a smorgasbord of the at hand and future of sexuality as communicated by the agency of cinema. Amid the standard camp and erotica, this year's festival proffered many programs that explored the broad tendency of identity-making, bringing sexual identity into correlation with national and regional identity, identifying individualism in a digital world and mapping the journeys taken within different ages.

through travelling down a plastic-encased corridor festival patrons enrolled the "Time Warp," a seven-monitor installation of 14 videos, ranging from documentary to video hallucination. "Rather than programming these works into a traditional formal exhibited screening," festival organizers stated, "we have decided...to current them in a new words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following that would challenge their assumed meaning." [1] for what reason these videos' meanings may have been "challenged" on being placed in a plasticized gallery is unclear, Undoubtedly their meanings would have been altered had they been drawed in either of the theaters, that system of presentation granting and garnering more attention and validation. The installation functioned more as an alternate activity, a distraction of sorts, between program screenings in the sum of two units theaters.

The "Time Warp" videos ran over the festival, and although this viewer could not distinguish a clear organizational mandate, based in succession content or quality, the exhibit did present another source of sensory input for the curious viewer. In inquiring surprise Woman: Battle with the Basher (2000 by the agency of Cary Curran and Brian Winkowski, 6 mins.) the favorite icon of the working woman get backs to avenge a gay bashing, pausing in her mission merely for shopping emergencies. This is camp that clan across the board could have intercourse with as Wonder Woman satisfies one as well as the other adolescent fantasy and the ne for a uncommon crusader. At the other finis of the spectrum, but and nothing else one monitor away, Lashambi Britton's I am Your Sister (2000 33 mins.) takes a documentary approach to presenting the coming abroad stories of nine male-to-female transgendered women A conscious undoing of talk-show schematics, the filmmaker uses captions from one extremity to the other of the documentary, naming each woman, and her general role in the community. by the agency of excluding such biographical tag lines as the subject's general relation to the family members being discussed, or the quality to which the subject has undergone surgical operations to alter her physical sexual characteristics, each of the nine women inhabited her admit space of social value. What each woman single outs to tell about her personal experiences, the on a level of her transgendered existence (whether pre- post- or having no desire for an "op") is her choice, not the filmmaker's. The filmmaker made a conscious decision to omit her voice--her questions are in fact edited out--to allow the nuncupatory words to be entirely possessed by the subjects of the documentary. A single voice-over at the fall of the curtain of the video asks, "What does it mean to be a woman--to be your sister?" This questions the space within curious culture that has been left for/claimed by way of transgendered people, pointing to the tangible boundaries maintained within as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but hetero-and homosexual communities. Several of the nine women describe a constant and mounting frustration with being accepted as drag queen however not as women, whether straight, bisexual or lesbian. This effective documentary is a reminder that neither sexed action nor gender preferences--not steady gender itself--can be biologically determined, and to continue discrimination [i]or[/i] part of to the other an unexamined aversion to difference undermines the remarkably foundation of queerness.

Another "Time Warp" video, Christopher Westfall's Gay Marriage, A the same Man Show ... (2000, 15 mins.), proffers nine distinct opinions on the make liable of gay marriage, personified in characters as it was as the university student who mumbles to articulate his version of human rights, while fidgeting in this way profoundly that his true sentiment is aptly communicated. Sitting at a bar, no doubt recovering from the previous evening's incidents a middle-aged "clubber" claims that he does not have time for marriage with his busy schedule of cruising the bars for tasty young men The straight briefcase-carrying yuppie, scrambling to earn into his shiny black import exclaims, "marriage is hell onward earth...why would they want imprisonment?" Finally, a man in leather dud sitting in succession a stool against a simple black backdrop discusses the fact that marriage is "a right that heterosexuals have and gay persons don't, and that bothers me if it were not that I don't know if I want it...it take rises from the heterosexual world and it's about ownership of women It 's ironic that I will be denied something I don't want." This one-man indicate offers a plethora of common opinions on the matter in a somewhat comical manner, appropriate to Westfall's flagrant use of stereotype like the redneck farmer who, holding his axe, snorts in general confusion about in what way exactly, the particulars of a gay marriage might work. Between the lines and the laughs, however, Westfall's directive point is that marriage is a matter of individual desire, not based within the assumed boundaries put in mind ofed by these type characters, on the contrary ultimately on an individual's universal of the institution of marriage.