Queer Panorama

Raphaël Vincent / Hans Scheirl & Ursula Pürrer / Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca /
LAS OTRAS FrauenLesbenFilmCollectif / James Diamond / Jack Walworth, David Bronstein & Dorothy Low

Friday, May 16, 2008 at 8:30pm
Maison Populaire de Montreuil
Free admission

Gender hybridization, machines, prostheses, cyborg identities, performative re-appropriations and pornography are the hallmarks of queer contemporary cinema, pushing back binary identifications and the boundaries of the body, the private and the obscene to the frontiers of artist video and experimental cinema. The new Queer cinema also documents the voguing subculture, anti-militarist and anti-G8 Queer politics and trans representations, from a position often claimed as collective, reflecting on the ethical framework within which to (self)represent or bear witness to “identities that escape the eye of the system”.

We know Hans Scheirl for his cult film Dandy Dust, but here are the beautiful super-8 preparatory sketches of the hermaphroditic, transgendered cinema of the Viennese duo Scheirl & Pürrer, somewhere between action cinema, trash film and lesbian porn, already showing the vitality of their fantastic corporeal imagination.

The rituals of Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca, musician, actor and performer and founder of the famous and convulsive Catalan group La Fura dels Baus, are steeped in a machinic, orgiastic cosmogony, and often involve a grotesque blend of computer, robot and biological material that questions begetting, cross-dressing and identity.

Ruins is the result of a long journey through Western Europe, visiting various autonomous queer communities. The encounters and the places were the occasion for realizing the five parts that make up this artistic project. Neither fiction nor documentary, Ruins delves into the systems of image production to uncover identities that escape the eye of the system. “It’s inside the ruins that we find our objects, fragments of gender, scattered pieces of our histories, bits of sex, blurred images. We had to invent scenes, attitudes and performances. To reappropriate.” (Raphaël Vincent)

This program also retraces the formidable inventiveness of the voguing subculture, a dance of reappropriation originating in gay black and Latino communities in the USA, with the cult heroines of Paris is Burning or Tongues Untied (Willi Ninja Field, David Depino, David Spada, Kenny, Kenny, etc.). ), but also the anti-militarist and anti-G8 queer struggles in Germany (Bombodrome), or the intimate poetry of James Diamond (Mars Womb-Man), which forcefully and melancholically questions identity metamorphoses and the binary body as a site of social alienation.

Raphaël Vincent & Ruins production, Let’s the sun shine, (2006, 8’)
Raphaël Vincent & Ruins production, Ruins (2004-2006, 23’)
Hans Scheirl & Ursula Pürrer, Body Building (1984, 3’)
Hans Scheirl & Ursula Pürrer, Gezacktes Rinnsal Schleight sich schamlos schenkel nässend an (1985, 4’)
Hans Scheirl & Ursula Pürrer, 1/2 Frösche Ficken Flink (1994-96, 17’)
Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca, Satèl•lits obscens. Comedia de los Excesos. (1996-1997, 16’)
LAS OTRAS FrauenLesbenFilmCollectif, Bombodrom (2007, 3′)
James Diamond, Mars Womb-Man (2006, 12’)
Jack Walworth, David Bronstein & Dorothy Low, Voguing : the message (1989, 13’)