The Times of Robert Mapplethorpe

Even a film curator will admit that motion pictures do not always have something to say about every aspect of our cultural history. Putting together a film series to accompany the exhibition of Polaroids: Mapplethorpe at the Block Museums is particularly tricky because there are many possible associations between film and photography that turn out to be dead ends. In that way, our film series The Times of Robert Mapplethorpe is meaningful for what it does and doesn’t include.

Mapplethorpe’s photography could dazzle and shock with images of striking classical beauty. It is a characteristic that doesn’t have a precise analogue in film. Instead of mirroring his aesthetic, we have chosen to situate Mapplethorpe within the context of queer cinema from the incomparable Kenneth Anger, who released his first film in 1947, to the New Queer Cinema movement that began in the early-1990s.

The Times of Robert Mapplethorpe also tries to give a feel for the 1960s New York City from which a young Mapplethorpe emerged. Although Mapplethorpe’s mature work was aesthetically nothing like Jack Smith’s sublime and difficult Flaming Creatures, you can see the influence of Smith’s aesthetic sense in Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids, which are smaller, more emotive, and less structured and refined than his later work. Likewise, Midnight Cowboy is a fascinating glimpse of a New York City that’s now gone. These films are couched within the larger context of the sexual revolution, represented by the daunting British gem Performance starring Mick Jagger and the biting political satire and infamous nudity of I Am Curious (Yellow). At the same time, the male body began to reemerge as an acceptable site for sexual objectification, a cultural shift seen in Derek Jarman’s beautiful and austere Sebastiane.

The politics of the sexual revolution were profoundly affected by the AIDS epidemic. On this topic, we have chosen two very aesthetically different films: Parting Glances and Fast Trip, Long Drop. By staying away from films like Philadelphia, which is largely about Denzel Washington’s growing sense of sympathy, Block Cinema is staying true to Mapplethorpe’s queer perspective. This holds true for the later films in the series—films that are able to be more mainstream, in part, because of what came before—such as Poison and Mala Noche, by out directors like Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant, who recently directed Milk.

Thursday, January 15, 9:00 PM
Mala Noche
(Gus Van Sant, 1985, US, 78 minutes, 35mm)
Shot for under $25,000, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature represents the apex of 1980s independent American filmmaking, a decade that saw the rise of iconoclastic voices like Van Sant, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch. It ranks among the most romantic depictions of homosexual desire on film, helped along by dreamy images of Portland, Oregon. Walt (Tim Streeter), a handsome liquor store clerk on Portland’s seedier side, falls in love with Juancito (Doug Cooeyate), a younger, illegal Mexican immigrant. Like Robert Mapplethorpe’s contemporary erotic photographs of black men, Walt’s desire for a Latino man takes the film into the slippery territory of ethnic stereotypes. Beautifully shot in black and white, Mala Noche anticipates much of the New Queer Cinema that followed it. Introduced by DePaul University professor Michael DeAngelis.

Friday, January 16, 8:00 PM
Midnight Cowboy
(John Schlesinger, 1969, U.S., 113 minutes, 35mm)
Sexually explicit and achingly sad, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy shocked audiences and still managed to win the Best Picture Oscar: in 1969, it seems, everything was up for grabs. John Wayne wannabe Joe Buck (Jon Voight) travels from small town Texas to the Big Apple where he tries to find work as a hustler servicing wealthy New York women. In New York, he teams up with the sickly Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who becomes his constant companion. Lonely and bleak and magnificently strange, Midnight Cowboy is a cultural touchstone. Introduced by Northwestern University English professor Nick Davis.

Friday, January 23, 8:00 PM
The Anger Magick Lantern Cycle
(Kenneth Anger, 1947-1980, U.S., 160 minutes, 16mm)
Kenneth Anger was queer cinema before the genre existed. Few depictions of queer desire have ever rivaled Anger’s; none are more influential. The Anger Magick Lantern Cycle includes all of Anger’s films, from the early Fireworks, which imagines a rape by U.S. sailors and got Anger arrested on obscenity charges, to Lucifier Rising with its soundtrack recorded in prison by Bobby Beausoliel, a former member of the Manson Family. All Anger’s stories are subsumed by his fantastical style, which has been called the true heir of Eisenstein’s theories about the cinema. He seems to intuitively tap into the essence of cinema. He released Fireworks, which was praised by everyone from Dr. Alfred Kinsey to artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, when he was only twenty. As the Time Out Film Guide writes, Anger’s films make up “the most coherent (and remarkable) body of work produced by any American ‘underground’ filmmaker.” Introduced by Northwestern University English professor Nick Davis.

Thursday, January 29, 8:00 PM
Poison
(Todd Haynes, 1991, U.S., 85 minutes, 35mm)
The National Endowment for the Arts was under a lot of fire in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, for the Ohio Contemporary Arts Center’s Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective and for Todd Haynes’s Poison, which depicts homosexual sex in prison. The NEA had given Haynes a grant for the film. The controversy may not have helped the NEA but it launched Haynes’s career and positioned Poison at the beginning of the New Queer Cinema movement. Adapted from Jean Genet’s writings, this dark and visionary film is structured in three parts: a lurid 1950s documentary about a boy who killed his father; a black and white short in which a scientist isolates the essence of human sexuality; and the final and most controversial section, in which a prisoner is sexually attracted to another inmate. With an introduction from University of Illinois-Chicago history professor Jennifer Brier.

Friday, January 30, 8:00 PM SOLD OUT
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
(Steven Sebring, 2008, U.S., 109 minutes, 35mm)
With Patti Smith, director Steven Sebring, and Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis in person!
THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT!
A word of caution: Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which takes its title from a Shelley poem, is not for those new to the punk icon. Eleven years in the making, the documentary, which gives nary a biographical detail, is a roving dreamscape—from New York to Tokyo to Rome—of punk’s great poet. It’s a fitting and appropriately impressionistic celebration of Patti Smith, who has been called “the only major surviving link from the beat era to the ‘70s Manhattan art scene to the birth of punk to the present.” After she moved from underground punk rocker to rock star—all the while maintaining a relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe that is inadequately described as a friendship and artistic collaboration—she left it all behind to raise a family in Michigan; after her husband’s death, she has returned to the spotlight, as fierce a punk poet and advocate as ever. Patti Smith and Steven Sebring will participate in a conversation with Jim DeRogatis, pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and co-host of Sound Opinions, after the screening. Block Cinema season pass holders must have purchased a ticket specifically for this event for admittance.

Thursday, February 5, 8:00 PM
Sebastiane
(Derek Jarman, 1976, U.K., 90 minutes, 35mm)
In 303 A.D. Sebastiane, a common Roman soldier, is banished from Rome for voicing his beliefs and sent to a barren coastal outpost where men freely explore their homosexual desires. But when Sebastiane rejects the advances of a commanding officer there, he’s condemned to death. With a script entirely in Latin and a beautiful, minimalist score by Brian Eno, experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman tells the story of the martyred saint with a veracity unmatched by conventional sword and sandal films. A groundbreaking historical film about a gay icon. Introduced by Loyola University Chicago English professor Allen Frantzen.

Thursday, February 19, 8:00 PM
Fast Trip, Long Drop
(Gregg Bordowitz, 1993, U.S., 54 minutes, DVD)
The AIDS epidemic decimated the New York City arts scene. Gregg Bordowitz, who was diagnosed with HIV at the age of 23, is a video artist whose work wrestles with the question of how to be an activist and artist in the age of an epidemic. A deeply personal work, Fast Trip, Long Drop asks how an artist can and should bear witness to a social tragedy on the scale of AIDS. The result, which transcends agitprop filmmaking, becomes a poetic statement, a la Frank O’Hara, on our universal struggle for human intimacy. It is also a profound aesthetic statement on the dirty, earthy nature of honesty and the possibility of an anti-aesthetic in the most glamorous of artist media. Artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Gregg Bordowitz will be in attendance to introduce the film and discuss art and AIDS in 1980s New York City.

Friday, February 20, 8:00 PM
Parting Glances
(Bill Sherwood, 1985, U.S., 90 minutes, 35mm)
Parting Glances, along with Mala Noche, is one of the first narrative American films to deal matter-of-factly with gay desire. Previous films had used double address, where ambiguous dialogue and situations have one meaning to one group and a different meaning to another (think of Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk), or were rife with self-hate (The Boys in the Band). Unlike Mala Noche, Parting Glances takes on the AIDS crisis and its effect on New York City, featuring Steve Buscemi (in his first major role) as a New Yorker suffering from AIDS. The director, Bill Sherwood, who later died of AIDS, imbued the film with genuine emotional pain and a controversial, magical ending. Introduced by Lane Fenrich of Northwestern University's history department.

Wednesday, February 25, 8:00 PM
DOUBLE FEATURE!
Freaks
(Tod Browning, 1932, U.S., 64 minutes, 16mm)
Tod Browning’s Freaks, based largely on the director’s own experience in the traveling circus, follows a beautiful but manipulative trapeze artist who pretends to fall in love with Hans, a wealthy sideshow midget. When Hans falls mysteriously ill the night of their marriage, his community of carnival “freaks”—including a bearded woman, conjoined twins, and the Human Torso—suspects foul play. To the outrage of audiences, Browning cast actors with actual physical deformities; the horrified reaction to the film arguably cost him his career.

Flaming Creatures
(Jack Smith, 1963, U.S., 45 minutes, 16mm)
Jack Smith is “one of the most volatile, exhausting and creative of the original members of the New American Cinema group of the early 1960s,” as academic critic Constantine Verevis has written. His gloriously surreal Flaming Creatures been called legendary, orgiastic, jubilant, and apocalyptic. A New York Criminal Court called it obscene and banned it. Susan Sontag called it “that rare modern work of art: it is about joy and innocence.” Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it a masterpiece. Tonight’s screening is a rare big-screen opportunity to decide for yourself.

Northwestern University English professor Nick Davis introduces both films.

Thursday, February 26, 8:00 PM
Performance
(Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg, 1970, U.S., 105 minutes, 35mm)
Aesthetically situated in the 1970s—long zooms, frenetic cross-cutting, modish colors—Performance is nonetheless a timeless film: Repudiated on its release for its violence, graphic sex, and homoeroticism, some critics now consider it among the most remarkable British films ever made. And it remains infamous as an artifact of the prodigious amount of drugs consumed at the time. Although it stars Mick Jagger, Performance was released reluctantly by its studio, Warner Bros, and then only two years after it was made. Its hectic narrative repeatedly folds back onto itself and then fragments, creating unexpected associations and visual rhymes. Relentlessly experimental, Performance remains a strange, daunting movie.

Friday, March 6, 8:00 PM
DOUBLE FEATURE!
Still Moving
(Robert Mapplethorpe, 1978, U.S., 11 minutes, DVD)
One of two films directed by Robert Mapplethorpe, Still Moving is, in the words of its creators, “a homage to William Blake.” Made in collaboration with Patti Smith. Courtesy of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Black, White + Grey
(James Crump, 2007, U.S., 76 minutes, BetaSP)
Black, White + Gray is a documentary about Sam Wagstaff, who was a formative influence on Robert Mapplethorpe. A Yale graduate and naval ensign in WWII, Wagstaff went on to work as an advertising man during the heyday of Madison Avenue and then as an art curator and photography collector. Perhaps best known as Mapplethorpe’s lover and patron, Wagstaff gave Mapplethorpe his first large format camera. This documentary traces Wagstaff's remarkable life from its conventional beginnings through his fascinating career in the arts to his death in 1987 of AIDS.

Block Museum of Art Senior Curator Debora Wood introduces both films.

Wednesday, March 11, 8:00 PM
I Am Curious (Yellow)
(Vilgot Sjöman, 1967, Sweden, 121 minutes, 35mm)
Filmed in black and white as a mock cinema verité documentary, I Am Curious (Yellow) follows the young sociologist Lena as she surveys Swedish citizens about their political and sexual preferences. Director Vilgot Sjöman emerges intermittently to coach the actors on their lines, and Lena makes love to her boyfriend in various public places, including atop “Europe’s oldest tree.” This film-within-a-film was seized at the border by U.S. Customs agents in 1968 as a dangerous pornographic import, but its sexual content couldn’t be less erotic. The first major film to show completely nude characters, its intimacy is frank, clumsy, and frequently very funny.