TONIGHT: Queer Avant-Garde Films Screen at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, co-curated by Jon Gartenberg and Elena Rossi-Snook

Tonight, October 7th, at 5:30pm in the Bruno Walter Auditorium, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will screen experimental works from the Reserve Film and Video Collection that explores the history of queer filmmakers. The program, titled What’s Happening? Affirmations: A Celebration of the LGBTQ+ Gaze, includes 16mm prints from Jack Smith and Gregory Markopoulos as well as an important selection of films by women filmmakers (such as Barbara Hammer and Sadie Benning) and a seminal work by African-American artist Marlon Riggs.

This event is being held in recognition of LGBTQ+ History Month and is part of a larger series that looks at “deep cuts” from the Reserve Film and Video Collection's historic 16mm film and video holdings. Co-curated by GME President Jon Gartenberg and RFVC Film Collection Specialist Elena Rossi-Snook, this screening features films that carve out creative queer identities from an historically heteronormative society in celebratory fashion. A number of the films featured represent flights of fancy, in both the imagination and in dreams, as well as their individual filmmaking styles.

What’s Happening? will be followed by a Q&A with the curators. This event is free and open to the public. Click here to register to attend.

Below, read Gartenberg’s program note:

In honor of LGBTQ+ History Month, and to counter these politically and culturally fraught times in the United States, this program of films and videos (drawn exclusively from the NYPL’s Reserve Film and Video Collection [RFVC]) carves out queer identities in celebratory fashion from an historically heteronormative society. The films in this program comprise rarely screened works from filmmakers Gregory Markopoulos, Jack Smith, Barbara Hammer, Warren Sonbert, Marlon Riggs, Sadie Benning, and Jerry Tartaglia. The major themes and subjects of their films include protest and activism (Riggs’ Affirmations, Sonbert’s Noblesse Oblige, and Tartaglia’s Amnesia), feminism and lesbian desire (Benning’s Jollies and Hammer’s Pools), and portraiture coupled with flights of fancy (Markopoulos’ Through a lens brightly: Mark Turbyfill and Smith’s Reefers of Technicolor Island). These moving image artists employ an array of tools and techniques to express their uniquely creative visions:  small gauge film and video, b/w and color, documentary and fiction, live action and found footage, in-camera editing and associative montage, text and image, and hand-coloring and superimposition.

Marlon Riggs emerged as the pre-eminent African-American moving image artist in the 1980s during the Reagan / Bush era (1980—1992), a period when AIDS was widely ignored and national funding agencies capitulated to right-wing Congressional assaults on the freedom of expression. (Isaac Julien was Riggs’ British counterpart during the Thatcher years). In a trilogy of successive films: Tongues Untied (1989), Affirmations (1990), and Anthem (1991), Riggs brings to the fore the segregation of gay Black men from both queer white men and heterosexual Black men.

Affirmations opens with Riggs filming a young, Black gay man (Reginald T. Jackson) speaking about his first night of lovemaking, thereby discovering his queer sexuality.  Riggs then turns to filming an African-American Freedom Parade. In this section, he creates a compelling collage of double-exposures of individual faces over banners of MLK and Malcolm X, together with text, voiceover and gospel hymns, in order to merge the fight for acceptance of Black gay men within the larger historic struggle for Black equality and human rights.

Gregory Markopoulos is one of the major figures in the history of experimental cinema. The RFVC holds a significant collection of films by Markopoulos, including his best-known work, Twice a Man (1963). Therefore, we are fortunate to present here the rarely screened film, Through a lens brightly: Mark Turbyfill (1967).

Markopoulos’ early films were primarily based on literary works and Greek mythology (e.g., Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honoré de Balzac, Plato, Hippolytus). In the mid-1960s, with Galaxie (1966), he shifted from making narrative montage films to movies about landscape and portraiture that he edited in-camera.

Through a lens brightly: Mark Turbryfill is a densely layered portrait of the dancer, poet and painter Mark Turbyfill in his home environment. Markopoulos’ camera focuses primarily on the artist’s face and hands before revealing glimpses of the landscape of his apartment – family photos, a flower, cloth, a glass vase, and a page from a literary journal (The Little Review) in which his poem was published.

By letting the rapid collage of images wash over the viewer, Markopoulos’s stated goal was:

A – Do not attempt to single out any one film frame or series of film fames passing across the screen and thus neglect others.  Such abstraction would lead to a total misunderstanding of either film.

B – To view the film as image composed to image, regardless if it is only a single frame.  It is the Invisible that the film spectator must seek.  This Invisible will lead him forwards and backwards and ultimately towards the Future: the future in this case is the understanding of the films.

Warren Sonbert was Gregory Markopoulos’ protégé.  Whereas Markopoulos’ cinematic technique was built upon the film frame, for Sonbert, the construction of his movies was based on the individual shot. Noblesse Oblige (1981) is most noteworthy for the way in which Sonbert constructs a film on two narrative levels: on one level, it is a document of the protests and violence in San Francisco following the murder of Harvey Milk. On another level, Noblesse Oblige is structured as an homage to Douglas Sirk’s Tarnished Angels (1957). Sonbert’s film focuses on the overarching theme of Tarnished Angels, that of media reportage of the events that are transpiring; Noblesse Oblige features shots of news reporters interviewing activists.  Following the pattern of imagery from Tarnished Angels, Sonbert includes in Noblesse Oblige shots of planes flying and falling, a bridge blowing up, costumed parades, a row of video monitors showing Tarnished Angels on their screens, and scenes of Sirk himself sitting with experimental filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler during the San Francisco Film Festival.

At age 15, Sadie Benning (daughter of landscape filmmaker James Benning) was given a Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera by her father; this camera generated pixelated b/w video images on audio cassette tapes.  Benning was soon making short films.  Still a teenager in the early 1990s, she emerged as a tour-de-force; her movies were shown in the exhibitions Fact/Fiction at MoMA, the Whitney Biennial, and at the British Film Institute.

Jollies (1990) is an autobiographical experimental documentary depicting the filmmaker’s evolution from a tomboy to coming out as a lesbian.  Created from a sophisticated yet childlike perspective, the film combines images of the filmmaker’s face with Hershey Kisses, dolls, Mr. Bubbles, and other objects, together with voiceover narration, text, and pop music songs that provide ironic contrast to the grainy imagery.

Barbara Hammer was an intrepid and fearless filmmaker.  She took ownership of her feminist and lesbian identity early on in her career by making Dyketactics (1974), often considered the first movie about lesbian lovemaking. Hammer’s Pools (1981) and Pond and Waterfall (1982) represent a shift in her filmmaking style from representing human figures as subjects of her films to an interiorized physiological experience of the body through landscape.

Pools (1981, made with fellow woman filmmaker Barbara Klutinis) is one of Hammer’s lesser known but equally feminist and transgressive films.  Hammer gained access to the swimming pools sitting below the statues at Hearst Castle (San Simeon). The film pays homage to Julia Morgan, the female architect of William Randolph Hearst’s expansive home on the California Coast. As Hammer has written:

The reason I swam and filmed in those pools was to break a taboo. No visitors are allowed to swim in these gorgeous examples of Morgan’s work. At least by getting permission to swim there myself with an underwater camera I could extend through vision this extraordinary physical experience.

As Hammer also has stated, “The woman was out of the frame but very physically behind the camera below and above water.”

By filming with an underwater camera in the pools, Hammer allows the viewer to experience architectural spaces from a forbidden perspective, as she focuses her camera lens on the contours of the architectural space, the play of light, camera movement (the filmmaker wore flippers to propel herself throughout the pool), and shots both below and above the water level in the pool.  This film, therefore, explores how Hammer’s body perceives and moves through this unique environment, focusing on the formal beauty in her field of vision.  In the final sequence of her movie, Hammer overlays the filmed images with colored brushstrokes, thereby further emphasizing her physical hand in creating this moving image work.

No program on queer filmmaking would be complete without showing a film by Jack Smith, another major figure (along with Gregory Markopulos) of the burgeoning American experimental cinema movement of the 1960s. Fortunately, the RFVC also contains an extensive collection of the artist’s work. Smith is renowned for his camp aesthetic, drag performances, and “no-budget” filmmaking; his films are not political so much as personal expressions.  His most famous film, Flaming Creatures (1963) was confiscated by the police when it was screened at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in 1964, and was subsequently deemed “obscene”; the case famously made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Like the Kuchar Brothers, many of Smith’s films were shot in his apartment with elaborately constructed, homemade sets. As part of his DIY aesthetic, Smith was constantly re-editing his footage, and varying their titles, content, and length in subsequent screenings. It is therefore difficult to construct an accurate filmography of his work.

Smith’s long compilation program Horror and Fantasy at Midnight was first shown in November 1967 at the New Cinema Playhouse on West 42nd Street (where Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls had an extended run the year before).  Among the films listed on Smith’s poster was Reefers of Technicolor Island (a.k.a. Jungle Island).  In Smith’s Estate, this film was found as a stand-alone movie.  Jonas Mekas wrote in the Village Voice that the film starred a “most beautiful marijuana plant” and “a gorgeous blooming white queen with her crown reaching toward the sky.”  According to historian and critic J. Hoberman, at some point Smith added footage of Mario Montez, evidently shot on a beach in Florida. Smith’s water-filled bathtub represented the South Seas, and Montez a South Seas siren. Montez in drag was Smith’s homage to movie star Maria Montez, who starred in campy Universal Studios movies that were shot in Technicolor, such as White Savage (1943) and Cobra Woman (1944); she was known as “the Queen of Technicolor.”

Accompanied by Hawaiian pop songs on the soundtrack, Smith’s film is a dense filmic collage, replete with superimpositions, scratches, and glitches, extreme closeups that denature human figures, “orchidaceous creatures”, and detritus from consumer culture — plastic containers, dolls, food packaging, and creatures from the sea. This kind of camouflaging technique, according to writer Magda Szeześniak, can be seen as a model for queering visibility.

A fitting closure to this program is Jerry Tartaglia’s Amnesia (1999).  Following Smith’s passing in the early 1990s, Tartaglia began the project of restoring Jack Smith’s films, and for this reason the two artists are inextricably linked. Yet, if Smith’s films are imbued with a kind of opaqueness, Tartaglia’s films are all about making queer culture visible.  He brought the AIDS epidemic to the fore in a trilogy of films:  A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. (1988), ECCE HOMO (1989) and Final Solutions (1990).  

Tartaglia’s film Amnesia (2000) is all about remembrance. He has written that “the artifact and images of Queer lives are the only evidence of our existences.  If we allow our Queer culture to be eradicated or lost, then our link to one another, our past, and our future are also lost.” The filmmaker employs found footage (opening with an erotic scene of a bevy of sailors slow dancing together), turn of the century photographs of men expressing affection for each other, gay ephemera, digital video imagery, voiceover, and onscreen text. Tartaglia proposes that recovering this past history will enable queer culture to move forward in more visible fashion by, according to the filmmaker, “preserving a hidden-in-plain-sight history and lighting a way forward without remorse.”

In terms of reclaiming the story of LGBTQ+ filmmaking, it is shocking to realize that nearly half of the filmmakers in this program passed away due to complications from AIDS related illnesses: Marlon Riggs (1957—1994, age 37), Warren Sonbert (1947—1995, age 47), and Jack Smith (1932—1989, age 56).  Furthermore, other maladies brought the demise of Gregory Markopoulos (1928—1992, age 64), Jerry Tartaglia (1950—2022, age 72), and Barbara Hammer (1939—2019, age 79).  Perhaps the most fitting homage that we audience members can pay to their artistry is to employ our own cinematic flights of fancy to imagine other profoundly resonant moving image works they might have created.

© Jon Gartenberg 2025