Queer Cinema Underground #1

We are delighted to invite you to an free event An evening dedicated to International Queer underground cinema on Sunday 12 November at 21:00 at B-Lage, Neukölln where will screen contemporary works from Micha Couell (Australia), Antoine Heraly (FR- Berlin), Nicky Miller (FR-Berlin) and James Bidgood's 1971 super 8 classic Pink Narcissus (USA). Movies will be shown in English without subtitles.

Ultra Reel Dir. Micha Couell 10:56 min, HD Video (2015) Australia

My films consist of series of idealism reflected in the idea of beauty. Now beauty can be a terrible thing, beauty can be twisted and abused. – KENNETH ANGER

I think each shoot has a different personality. – KIM KARDASHIAN

Ultra Reel is a short film recreating audience relationships with reality stars, I found Rowan Oliver on instagram and was drawn by her persona and wanted to discover the character behind the image. Working with her was divine, and Ultra Reel documents her views and essence. This homage to glamour, image and hyper-reality looks into ones inability to differentiate between simulation and truth; luxuriating in the intimacy of the camera’s view. Underground filmmaking from the 60’s to today informs my process and aesthetic as a filmmaker and Rowan as a muse and collaborator activates these nostalgic idealisms into a contemporary awareness.

Furniture Porn Project Dir. Antonine Heraly 10:30 min, HD Video (2017) France/Germany

+++the hottest Louis Philippe wardrobes in a 10km radius around yours — this kinky little bed side table open for a one night stand — Central_Island_Unit sent you a private message+++

And It Shall Not Stand Dir. Nicky Miller 38 min, HD Video (2016) France/Germany

Albert, Arthur, Bobby and Ben are living in a flat. One day they heard on the radio-computer that the 3rd World War would happen soon. Their common life derives while the Ugly family (their neighbor) are making uglies constructions. “And it shall not stand “ is an undefined space-time, a metaphor of what a community and its drifts could give.

Pink Narcissus Dir. James Bidgood 65 min, Super 8 (1971) USA

An erotic poem set in the fantasies of a young male sexworker.

Distortions and fragments and dreams of queer bodies and queer masters and queer servants, queer icons and queer scavengers, queer lovers and queer love all collide through a grainy pink veil in non-chronological, non-narrative noise. Instead of discretion shots to mask the queerness or queer coding to hide it in plain sight, the film obliterates the narrative itself and lets the queerness erupt (…ejaculate) into the lens. A few years after Stonewall, a few decades before queer sex was legalized, a radical piece of poetry visualized in the early years of Pride, when it was still okay to be radical, this film worships (presumably) cis male bodies, draping them in finery and stripping them and gazing upon them in repose, in pleasure, in ecstasy, in pain, always finding their aesthetics rather than their anatomies.