The Carnal Screen: 9 Short Films for Pride - 16MM & Digital

Carnal Screen Part Six: Short Film Celebrating PRIDE month programmed with The Film-makers’ Co-op and Museum of Sex.

Double Your Pleasure (16mm, 4 mins, B&W, sound, 2002) by MM Serra
A homage to Andy Warhol’s Kiss (1963). Unlike Warhol, that had two men kissing and women and men kissing, this film presents two women kissing.

Black and White Study (16mm, 8 mins, B&W, silent, 1990) by Peter Cramer
An exploration of chiaroscuro, nudes, movement and film techniques in constantly shifting fields of perception. Eroticism and humor highlight an interracial couple engaged in a tableau vivant of opposites and attractions.

Spictacle II: La Tortillera (digital, 4:10 mins, color, sound, 2015) by Xandra Ibarra
Interdisciplinary artist Xandra Ibarra has performed under the alias La Chica Boom, a parodic persona made up of sexualized tropes of Mexicanidad for the last ten years. As La Chica Boom, Ibarra staged hundreds of “spictacles,” or “camp spectacles of Mexican and Mexican-American myths that render the colonial gaze laughable.” Spictacle II: Tortillera shows La Chica Boom as a tortillera, which is both the word for a woman who makes tortillas and a derogatory term in Mexican slang for a lesbian. In 2020, this piece was deemed obscene and removed from the group exhibition XiCanX: New Visions at the Centro de Artes in San Antonio, Texas for violating a state obscenity law, a decision contested by artists and groups such as the National Coalition Against Censorship.

This Is A Pornographic Film—or,goodbyetoArt (digital, 11 mins, color, sound, 2021) by cherry brice jr.
cherry brice jr. explores the psychology of longing, rage, and trauma in xyr work. brice’s investigation led xem to realize the extent to which xyr own personal shame around sexuality was embedded. This Is A Pornographic Film—or,goodbyetoArt was, in brice’s own words, “the first of a series of exorcisms to expulse that shame from my body.” The piece began with brice inviting men from Grindr over to xyr apartment, which was later discovered to have been a porn studio owned and run by the Mafia, to document sexual interactions. After filming began, the purpose of this exercise was clear to brice: “As a dark-skinned dreamer, I’ve spent a lot of time maneuvering the white gaze—and exploring how life might look outside of it.” This work subverts the white gaze by presenting erotic scenes of white and white-passing men engaging in self-play entirely from brice’s point of view.

Traces (digital, 4 mins, color, sound, 2020 ) by Carleen Maur
Retracing the space between human movements and climaxes through electric bills and coastal walks.

Naked Boys Cleaning (digital, 6.5 mins, color, sound, 2018) by Jack Waters
A meditation on conflicting values: How does sex work fit into a Marxist idealization of labor equity when the satisfaction of the client constitutes contradictions to the worker’s core politics?

A Valentine for Nelson (16mm, 5 mins, color, sound, 1990) by Jim Hubbard
“A long overdue love letter. A relationship is as hard to build as a cathedral — it takes more than one lifetime. A film in which virtually every shot is intended as a metaphor. Tender, loving and unsentimental. This five-minute charmer is a tribute to relationships, the ups and downs of being in love and living together.” – Jeff Lunger

I Was A Male Yvonne De Carlo (16mm, 28 mins, black and white, sound on CD, 1967) by Jack Smith
I Was A Male Yvonne Decarlo, which stars Smith himself, takes its title from one of his live performances: I Was a Male Yvonne DeCarlo for the Lucky Landlord Underground, staged in the early 1980s. Shot mainly during the late ’60s and edited a decade or more later, I Was A Male Yvonne Decarlo is one of several films and slide shows that feature the filmmaker as a mock celebrity. It opens with the excerpt from No President originally called ‘Marsh Gas of Flatulandia’ – several minutes of black and white footage of steam escaping from manholes segues to an interior scene of various creatures emerging from dry ice vapors – then shifts to show the filmmaker, clad in a leopard skin jump suit, attended by a nurse as he sits amidst the detritus of his duplex loft on Grand and Greene Street. Restored 16mm print by Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

Jack Smith’s Apartment (digital, 8 mins, color, sound, 1990) by MM Serra
“Jack Smith’s Apartment is a truly important work–-this is the sort of thing that needs to be preserved by art museums, yes, but I would argue Historical societies as well! You dared to preserve something beautiful which was at the risk of destruction and loss to time–-this is one of the highest purposes that cinema is capable of. Watching it on the big screen at MoMA welled up feelings in me that what we do is part of a legacy of art in this city that’s so unfathomably bigger than any of us and lives forever if we strive to keep it alive.” – Joe Wakeman, programmer of the New York City Symphonies of the Millennium Film Workshop, February 16 – 17, 2022