CONTEMPLATION AND URGENCY: DIFFERING STRATEGIES OF FILMMAKERS AND VIDEO MAKERS CONFRONTING AIDS
by Jim Hubbard
For a long time, I believed that inherent differences between film and video fos- tered divergent responses tothe AIDS crisis. Film takes longer to make, and the films about AIDS made in the late 1980s tended to bemore contemplative and personal. When they dealt with political issues, they tended to be ideological or theoretical. The videos of this era, however, tended to be more of the moment and directly political; that is, theyanalyzed specific political situations and insisted on specific solutions.
I can best explain my view of the differences between film and video by recounting my ownexperiences. I first began filming the lesbian and gay move- ment in 1979. I went to a national meeting in Philadelphia to organize the first Lesbian and Gay March on Washington. At the beginning of the meeting,there was a vociferous forty-five-minute debate about whether there should be cameras allowed at all. Somepeople felt that this was a historic event that should be doc- umented. Others believed that they would lose their jobs or their children if it became known that they were homosexual. It was decided that people who didn’t want to be photographed would sit on the right side of the meeting hall and those who didn’t mind would sit onthe left. By the end of the weekend, no one was sit- ting on the right side of the hall.
Over the next eight years, I filmed many lesbian and gay demonstrations and meetings — first in Super-8 and later in 16-mm film. I was often the only per- son in attendance with a camera. From time to time, I wasalso accused of being a spy from the FBI. While I remained aware of the historical nature of the events I filmed,I never succumbed to a reportorial approach. I always processed my own film and continued to transform andplay around with color. I was more interested in expressionistic and metaphorical uses of the footage than insimply document- ing what went on.
When I began making a film about AIDS around 1983, I certainly didn’t want to portray AIDS in the manner of the mainstream media, by representing it as a shameful disease or by representing people with AIDS as victims dying of a horrible, disfiguring, humanity-sapping disease. It was difficult, however, to find alternative visual material. I tried filming a friend of mine with AIDS, but he quickly tired of having my camera in his life.
Two events fundamentally affected my approach. First, in 1984 my ex- lover, Roger Jacoby, wasdiagnosed. As a filmmaker himself, Roger understood what it was like to be the subject of an experimental film, and he wanted to be filmed. I continued to film him until he died in November 1985. Then, in 1987,ACT UP suddenly appeared with an exciting, media-savvy visual style and began expressing its anger throughpublic demonstrations. I knew how to film demonstra- tions. These two subjects entwined to form the public andprivate aspects of my film Elegy in the Streets (1989), a film that attempted to find a filmic equivalent of theelegiac form (fig. 1). It seemed to me that the elegy, the intent of which was to use the occasion of mourning thedeath of a friend to meditate on larger, often political issues, was the perfect form for dealing with the AIDScrisis.
However, I was also highly invested in exploring the material, chemical nature of film and genuinelyenjoyed processing my own film and discovering the alchemical metamorphoses of color I could produce.Furthermore, I was deeply dedicated to the experimental practice of working alone. This method made the process slow, and I liked it that way. I do not have easy access to my emotions, and this slow processing gave me time to consider what I was creating and allowed my complicated feelings aboutAIDS to percolate through me and ultimately be reflected in the films.
Of course, I wasn’t the only artist dealing with the AIDS crisis. A number of filmmakers were grapplingwith the epidemic, and, most important, a cadre of young video makers was earnestly and urgentlydocumenting the crisis. At ACT UP demonstrations I may have been the only person with a film camera, butthere were sometimes dozens of young people with video cameras recording the action.
The films that I think most typify this early period of burning struggle with the crisis includeA.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. (1988) and Final Solutions (1990) by Jerry Tartaglia, An Individual Desires Solution (1986)by Larry Brose, Decodings (1988) by Michael Wallin, and my films Elegy in the Streets (1989), Two Marches (1991), The Dance (1992), and Memento Mori (1995). There are many videos, but they are epitomized byTesting the Limits (1987) by the collective of the same name, Like a Prayer (1990) and Target City Hall (1989)by DIVA TV, We Care (1990) by WAVE (Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise), and The Ashes Action (1995) byJames Wentzy. Let me contrast certain aspects of these pieces that illuminate the differing approaches offilmmakers and video makers. The following discus- sion reduces each of these works, which are complex andmultifaceted, to a single aspect and may, in this way, prove a little unfair to all of them.
A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. and Testing the Limits both attack the mainstream belief that gay male sex was the root problem of AIDS. A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. assails the notion in a wholly emotional manner, using anangry voice-over (“Four out of five doctors agree: no sex for gay men!”) in combination with the sound of a European police siren and images of a naked, leather-masked man with a number tattooed on his side. Subtlety isnot the point. Testing the Limits employs footage of a panel discussion with Simon Watney discussing in hisproper English accent the policing of gay male desire. A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. might be overwrought and Testingthe Limits too decorous, but both effectively attack the pathologization of gay sex.
An Individual Desires Solution and We Care are both about taking care of lovers with AIDS, yet theseworks could not be more different. An Individual begins with an extensive text taken from phone messages leftby a former lover coping with AIDS. The second part consists of slow-motion footage of the lover playing the piano, doing various mundane things, and taking a train trip, all chemically treated so that they are verygrainy, almost devoid of color, evoking memory and distance. The soundtrack consists of the phone messagesdistorted such that it is possible to discern words only after repeated viewings.
We Care, made by a collective of seven women caregivers for people with AIDS, sets out various rules for humanely dealing with people with AIDS and quashes prejudicial myths about transmission (fig. 2). It contains an interview with a heterosexual couple — the wife plump and healthy and incredibly support- ive; thehusband, thin, undoubtedly sick, yet still handsome — clearly articulat- ing their experience with the disease.It also contains an incredibly touching and remarkable section with a middle-aged African American womanidentified only as Marie. She is HIV-positive and provides a tour of her apartment, showing what has changedand what has not. Her true courage in the face of evident vulnerabil- ity is immensely moving, even after manyviewings. We Care is direct, technically crude, yet emotionally sophisticated. An Individual Desires Solution isindirect, sometimes obscure, but equally affecting and enlightening.
Target City Hall is an interesting hybrid. It was made by DIVA TV (Damned Interfering VideoActivist Television), an affinity group of ACT UP. DIVA TV consisted of as many as forty people, with a coregroup of about twelve. Having large groups of people taping at demonstrations yielded large quantities of videofootage. But having large groups of people editing and collectively deciding on each cut was time consuming, soTarget City Hall was divided into sections edited by different groups. There is an extended look at the affinitygroup CHER (which stands for Cute Hunks Examining Reality, Cathy Has Extra Rollers, and a dozen other things). The cameraperson interviews members as they walk and skip toward City Hall. The camera then captures the discussion and vote about entering the street to stop traffic — a remarkable record ofgrassroots democracy in action. The affinity group joins hands and walks into the street. At first they chant,scream, and jump up and down. Then something formally unexpected hap- pens. The images switch to slowmotion, to still images, and eventually become black-and-white super-8 footage transferred to video. Thesoundtrack plays the late-1960s song “White Bird” by the group It’s a Beautiful Day, a surprisingly anachronistic choice for a group of twenty-two-year-olds usually more taken by contemporary rap songs. Theblack-and-white footage was shot by Zoe Leonard and Catherine (Saalfield) Gund and was primarily producedfor their piece Keep Your Laws Off My Body (1990), a meditation on lesbian desire and government attempts to criminalize sexual behavior.
The production of this video would not have been possible if done in Super-8 or 16-mm film, whichhad to be sent to the lab or laboriously hand pro- cessed and then edited on rewinds or a Steenbeck. Perhaps I’m projecting, but, it seems to me, the necessity of physically cutting and taping each splice would haveslowed down the editing process even more and hindered the ability of the group to experiment with different editing strategies. Rather, Target City Hall became the product of a group of energetic young people who sawthemselves as grassroots activists more than artists, who benefited from the collection of moving images frommultiple video cameras and the ability to quickly review, edit, and manipulate those images. The films made byfilmmakers ten or fifteen years older, working in a much slower medium, maintaining a practice that encouragedindi- viduals to shoot and edit pieces alone, created a more poetic, philosophical set of moving images.
The divide is not so vast when viewed from the present, some twenty years later. There are numerousfilms and videos that resist tidy classification. DHPG Mon Amour (1989) is a super-8 film that embodied manyof the characteristics of AIDS activist videos and had an enormous influence on those video makers. Mar- lonRiggs had spent his entire career making television, yet Tongues Untied (1989) is thoughtful and precise in ways that AIDS video makers usually sacrificed in exchange for speed and immediacy. Furthermore, a fair numberof AIDS activist video makers went on to make work that was more poetic and philosophical and yet still onvideotape. Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) by Gregg Bordowitz, Schatzi Is Dying (2000) by Jean Carlomusto,and Video Remains (2005) by Alexandra Juhasz are examples that come readily to mind. Gregg and Jean were members of Testing the Limits and DIVA TV, and worked in the Audio Visual Department of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). Alex made tapes for GMHC’s cable access program Living with AIDS (1987–ca.1995) and worked on We Care. They were at the very heart of the AIDS activist video movement. All have continued to deal with AIDS-related issues in their subsequent work. All of those tapes deal with mortality and memory in complexways. It is hard to imagine that they would have been more meditative had they been working in film.