Video Fest's GLBT programming is an eclectic batch of good and bad

BOOBY PRIZE: “Viva” has all the class of a Russ Meyer film — without the element of kitschy enjoyment.

Screenings are either at the Angelika Film Center, 5321 E. Mockingbird Lane or in the Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd., Aug. 1-5.

"Viva," Angelika, Aug. 1 at 9 p.m. (2 hrs.)
John Waters and Russ Meyers made films during the sexual revolution of the '70s that reeked of bad taste and ersatz glamour. They were the chroniclers of cheesy raunch as it was happening, from the gay and straight perspective, making knowing garbage about a garbage era.

"Viva" seeks to recreate that appalling silliness with a campy retro approach, but it's mostly just bad, even if intentionally so. (A bad hamburger is still bad, even if the chef intended it that way.)

Bored housewives, swishy hairdressers, lecherous suburban husbands there's hardly a clich? overlooked. The auteur here writer, director, producer, film editor, star, and she designed the sets and costumes is Anna Biller. But she gives her co-stars plenty of opportunities to look foolish, with hammy overacting and bad haircuts. Its campy grotesquery is more annoying that funny. Grade C-

"Today, I Become a Man," Kalita Humphreys (Video Box), Aug. 3 at 10:15 p.m. (10 min.)

Remember the conceit of "Victor/Victoria"? A woman singer cannot make a career as a woman, so she pretends to be man in female drag and becomes a sensation? Ever wonder if someone could pull that off in reverse?

Me neither.

But Harmon Leon, a professional "infiltrator" (his own word), did. He decided to enter a drag king contest by deconstructing his own masculinity, then turning himself into a "woman" in male drag: creating a drag name, shaving then attaching fake whiskers, creating a bust then binding himself, getting his lesbian friends to teach him how to act like a woman pretending to be butch.

Art patron and curator Sam Wagstaff, left, with his most famous protege: Robert Mapplethorpe.

This short (under 10 minutes) documentary is precisely as long as it needs to be: just enough to set up the gag and let you work out for yourself how successful he is at it. Grade: B

"Jean Genet in Chicago," Kalita Humphreys, Aug. 3 at 10:15 p.m. (1 hr. 30 min.)

Frederic Moffet offers a queer rewriting of the events surrounding the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago from the point of view of French writer Jean Genet. (Not screened.)

"I Just Wanted To Be Somebody," Kalita Humphreys, Aug. 4 at noon (10 min.)
What do the religious right and the gay liberation movement have in common? Both were fortified by the efforts of one woman: Anita Bryant. Part document and part poem, this short reflects on Bryant's life and impact. (Not screened.)

"Black White & Gray," Kalita Humphreys (Videotheque), Aug. 4 at 4 p.m. (1 hr. 10 min.)

Sam Wagstaff came from money and privilege, but he made his name as the patron of underground New York artists. In the 1950s and '60s, when hardly anyone prominent was openly gay, Wagstaff flirted with the alternative scene in Greenwich Village and helped redefine black-and-white photography as an artist expression. By the '70s, he was romancing the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, and had become an aging club-hopper at places like CBGB and Studio 54.

Never heard of Danny Williams? Andy Warhol’s unheralded lover is profiled in “A Walk into the Sea.”

"Black White & Gray" putatively is a documentary about Wagstaff, but in a broader sense, it's a fascinating history of the late 20th century art scene as captured through one of its most important but least remembered collectors.
With remarkably cogent and lovely narration, and featuring frank interviews from Patti Smith, Dominick Dunne and others, it provides invaluable insight into the esoteric art movements that eventually helped define today's culture.

Grade: A-

"A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory," Kalita Humphreys (Videotheque), Aug. 4 at 5:30 p.m. (1 hr. 7 min.)

After Andy Warhol died, the filmmaking community seemed to realize collectively that it would be impossible to ever make a movie about Warhol because he was basically unknowable. Instead, they have made movies about the people around him his muses (Edie Sedgwick: "Factory Girl"), prot?g?s (Jean-Michel Basquiat: "Basquiat"), even would-be assassins (Valerie Solanas: "I Shot Andy Warhol"). He was such a bizarre cipher of a human being, Warhol is a figure best viewed through peripheral vision: Glimpses rather than stared at.

Like the feature films above, the documentary "A Walk into the Sea" concentrates on one of Warhol's satellites a photographer and film editor named Danny Williams, who was also one of Andy's lovers but rests its relevance as a story on Williams' proximity to the Factory, Warhol's New York creative enclave.

Unlike Sedgwick, Solanas and Basquiat, Williams is historically obscure, sometimes barely remembered by the other Factory leaches interviewed here. The only person who may have true feelings for Williams is his niece Esther Robinson, who directed this as an exploration into whatever became of her uncle, who disappeared one day and was presumed to have drowned himself in the ocean.

As a family history comprised of artsy, rare video footage, "Walk into the Sea" is a rare find. But as with all Warhol-adjacent films, it barely answers any of the questions it implicitly asks (due in large part to Paul Morrissey's insistence on perpetuating counter-myth to preserve the ambiguity of Warhol's artistic cache). But it's difficult to escape the feeling that Robinson has made a lot out of hay out of too-little straw. Grade: B

"Fat Girls," Kalita Humphreys (Video Cabaret), Aug. 5 at 5:30 p.m. (1 hr. 23 min.)

"AIDS, Inc.," Kalita Humphreys (Video Box), Aug. 5 at 7:30 p.m. (1 hr. 53 min.)
Do we really know the cause of AIDS? And if we don't, is that due to scientific limitations or intentional misinformation? "AIDS Inc." explores the business of AIDS, and posits that we may not have been old all there is to know about this disease. (Not screened.)




This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition July 27, 2007