watchlist_extended

Two young men meet and fall in love in Disneyland.

Presented as loosely autobiographical, Hold Me While I’m Naked centres on the tribulations of an independent filmmaker, frustrated at every turn as he tries to make a film that pretends to artistic merit.

William K.L. Dickson plays the violin while two men dance. This is the oldest surviving sound film where sound is recorded on the phonograph.

When Algie Allmore asks to marry Clarice, the young woman's father gives him one year to prove that he's a man.

Based on Herman Bang's novel Mikael, Vingarne is a silent melodrama about an artist's love for his newfound male model. Radically, the film opens with director Stiller and his cinematographer coming across a sensual staue of Icarus in the gardens in Stockholm. Then the movie proper begins, with artist Claude Zoret struck by love at first sight for the young Mikael in a woodland; he adopts Mikael, who serves as inspiration for his latest sculpture. Inevitably Mikael gets his wings burnt when he starts courting Zoret's patron, the unscrupulous Lady Lucia; pained by Mikael's desertion, Zoret dies during a fierce storm before his staue of the naked boy.
Watching Vingarne 75 years after its production is an extraordinary experience. It's easy to get caught up in the fragmentary feel of the narrative, to work too hard at following the story instead of giving up to its original allusiveness. So, some tips to tap into that intended sense: First, bear in mind that both novelist Bang and director Stiller were known to be gay.
Second, it's interesting to compare Vingarne with Carl Dreyer's film of the same novel (also called Mikael). Many of the greatly sensual scenes from Dreyer's film are foreshadowed in the first version.
Finally, the most startling--and infuriatingly brief--thing about Vingarne is the framing device and the idea of a film-within-a-film. Confronted by the barest remains of his extraordinary conceit, we can only imagine what the original felt like.
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Set on Fire Island, My Hustler depicts competition over the affections of a young male hustler among a straight woman, a former male hustler, and the man who hired the boy's companionship via a "Dial-A-Hustler" service.

Filmmaker and artist Jack Smith described his own film as a “comedy set in a haunted movie studio.” Flaming Creatures begins humorously enough with several men and women, mostly of indeterminate gender, vamping it up in front of the camera and participating in a mock advertisement for an indelible, heart-shaped brand of lipstick. However, things take a dark, nightmarish turn when a transvestite chases, catches and begins molesting a woman. Soon, all of the titular “creatures” participate in a (mostly clothed) orgy that causes a massive earthquake. After the creatures are killed in the resulting chaos, a vampire dressed like an old Hollywood starlet rises from her coffin to resurrect the dead. All ends happily enough when the now undead creatures dance with each other, even though another orgy and earthquake loom over the end title card.

The film — a mix of music, colors, abstract scenes and little dialogue — is based loosely on the life and death of Mexican-American actress Lupe Velez. The music, far more than mere background, borders on serving as the film’s narrative and ranges from classical to contemporary pop music.

Lillian Travers, a New York heiress, pops down to Florida to surprise her fiance, Fred Cassadene, the house doctor at a prominent summer and winter hotel. The surprise, however, is Lillian's when she finds Fred in a series of compromising situations with a certain wealthy widow staying there. When she can take no more, Lillian discovers a box forgotten at an old curiosity shop in which lies a hundred year old secret: a vial of four rare and exotic African seeds that promises to transform whoever swallows one from a woman to a man or vice versa.

A young man desperately seeks out the fleeting image of a female companion, and though he never quite catches her, he discovers much more through the surreal explorations of his own sexuality. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

poetic and expressionist

In LOT IN SODOM, distortion is often used to keep reality, or rather its appearance, from disturbing the film's mood. And in the final scene distortion makes Lot's daughter seem not only different but formidable as she grasps the wine cup. - J.S. Watson, Jr.

Salomé (1923), a silent film directed by Charles Bryant and starring Alla Nazimova, is a film adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play of the same name. The play itself is a loose retelling of the biblical story of King Herod and his execution of John the Baptist (here, as in Wilde's play, called Jokaanan) at the request of his stepdaughter, Salomé, whom he lusts after.
Salomé is often called one of the first art films to be made in the U.S.[citation needed] The highly stylized costumes, exaggerated acting (even for the period), minimal sets, and absence of all but the most necessary props make for a screen image much more focused on atmosphere and on conveying a sense of the characters' individual heightened desires than on conventional plot development.
Despite the film being only a little over an hour in length and having no real action to speak of, it cost over $350,000 to make. All the sets were constructed indoors to be able to have complete control over the lighting. The film was shot completely in black and white, matching the illustrations done by Aubrey Beardsley in the printed edition of Wilde's play. The costumes, designed by Natacha Rambova, used material only from Maison Lewis of Paris, such as the real silver lamé loincloths worn by the guards.
No major studio would be associated with the film, and it was years after its completion before it was released, by a minor independent distributor. It was a complete failure at the time and marked the end of Nazimova's producing career.
A longstanding rumor, which seems to have started while the film was still in production, suggests that its cast is comprised entirely of gay and bisexual actors in an homage to Oscar Wilde, as per star and producer Nazimova's demand. It is, of course, impossible to say, but one of the extras in Salomé reported that a number of the cast members—both featured and extras—were indeed gay, but not an unusual percentage of them, and certainly not all of them. What can be said is that Nazimova herself was a lesbian, the two guard characters (who, next to Salomé, have the most screen time) are at least played very stereotypically gay, and several of the female courtiers are men in drag.
Salomé was screened in 1989 at the New York International Festival of Lesbian and Gay films and in 1990 at the New York Gay Experimental Film Festival.
In 2000, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Pier Paolo Pasolini sets out to interview Italians about sex, apparently their least favorite thing to talk about in public: he asks children if they know where do babies come from; asks old and young women if they support gender equality; asks both sexes if a woman's virginity still matters, what do they think of homosexuality, if divorce should be legal, or if they support the recent abolition of brothels. He interviews blue-collar workers, intellectuals, college students, rural farmers, the bourgeoisie, and every other kind of people, painting a vivid portrait of a rapidly-industrializing Italy, hanging between modernity and tradition — toward both of which Pasolini shows equal distrust.

1924 film by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Mona's Candle Light was discovered among reels of film that Geoff Alexander, of the Bay Area-based Academic Film Archive of North America, bought at a flea market in an unmarked box. There are no credits, so it is impossible to determine who shot it and for what purpose. The film is 1950s footage, probably amateur, of a well know lesbian club (which had opened in the 1930s), Mona's Candle Light, and it is an invaluable document of that underground scene. (archive.org)

Two scantily clad men pose, wrestle, and jokingly try to out-flex one another in what amounts to a beauty contest of its own.

In 1967, New York City is host to the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant. This documentary takes a look behind the scenes, transporting the viewer into rehearsals and dressing rooms as the drag queen subculture prepares for this big national beauty contest. Jack/Sabrina is the mistress of ceremonies, and their protégé, Miss Harlow, is in the competition. But, as the pageant approaches, the glamorous contestants veer from camaraderie to tension.

“Approximately thirty images comprise Oblivion. Most obsessively repeat themselves. Although the images appear to be solarized, the film was actually contact-printed, combining high contrast black and white negative with a colour positive of the same image. The high contrast accounts for the tendency of shots to flood. Images in the film swell and contrast, often disappearing into pure colour… Oblivion employs extremely rapid cutting. Some of the images last as briefly as two frames. The fact that we see so few frames, that a shot is representationally ambiguous, or shown upside down and sideways, often causes the viewer to project his/her own fantasies… When Jean Genet was asked to what end he was directing his life he responded, “To oblivion.” (J.J. Murphy, “Reaching for Oblivion”) (mikehoolboom.com)

“Twice A Man is a fragmented re-imagining of the Greek myth of Hippolytus, who was killed after rejecting the advances of his stepmother. Markopoulos’ vision transposes the legend to 1960s New York and has its main character abandon his mother for an elder man. Employing sensuous use of colour, the film radicalised narrative construction with its mosaic of ‘thought images’ that shift tenses and compress time. One of the touchstones of independent filmmaking, Twice A Man was made in the same remarkable milieu as Scorpio Rising and Flaming Creatures by a filmmaker named ‘the American avant-garde cinema’s supreme erotic poet’ by its key critic P. Adams Sitney.” —Mark Webber
Based on the story of Hippolytus. Featuring Paul Kilb, Olympia Dukakis, Albert Torgesen. Music: Excerpt from Manfred Symphony by Pyotr Tchaikovsky op. 58. Filmed in New York City, Staten Island, Long Island and Bear Mountain Park.