Queersighted: Breaking Taboos on the Criterion Channel

by Cláudio Alves

O FANTASMA (2000)

For the past few years, the Criterion Channel has highlighted taboo-breaking pictures in queer cinema with their series "Queersighted." For its fourth edition, programmer Michael Koresky invited film critic K. Austin Collins to select and discuss a series of works that look at film history through a decidedly queer lens. This year's installment features movies that go from 1930s Hollywood productions to 2000s Portuguese provocations. Controversial and wildly transgressive, these films run a gamut of genres and formalistic approaches, showcasing how it's possible to push the envelope both from within the Hays Code-abiding studio system and the vanguard of New German Cinema.

Before saying farewell to Pride Month 2021, join us in exploring ten films presented in this program...

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Retro Sundance: 1991's Poison

Since we're not in Sundance this year, a look back at Sundance classics. Here's David on Poison...

Glenn kicked off our Sundance retrospective with a look at Desert Hearts, a film with more than a passing resemblance to Todd Haynes' Carol; a few years down the line, and we come to Haynes’ own appearance in the Utah festival, with his feature debut Poison. Winner of the 1991 festival’s Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic, Poison is considered a vital film in the ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the early 1990s, as coined by B. Ruby Rich the following year. Rich’s theory involved not just the presence of LGBT characters and themes, but the queering of filmmaking form itself. Haynes had already demonstrated his inventive, radical eye in the controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and Poison, with its triptych of homonymic narratives, consolidated the director’s manipulation of nostalgia and classic cinematic forms to produce a strikingly different approach to cinema.

Each segment is presented in an individual and vivid stylistic form. 'Hero', the story of a young boy who shoots his father and literally flies away, comes as an oversaturated tabloid news documentary, containing interviews with scandalised neighbours, incisively lurid narration and tremulous recreations of the event itself. [More...]

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Twins: "Drunk on brandywine... a thimbleful!"

While we're in Gemini, twins! Daily @ 2:22 pm

Don't be angry with me. When I saw them I knew they were for you. Drunk on brandywine... a thimbleful."

Kirsten Dunst is so thoughtful of her co-stars. She gave Vampire Tom Cruise little boy twins to drink as an apologia for stealing his 1994 would be franchise Interview with the Vampire right out from under his blue veined intensity. 

What a gift. Lestat (Tom) tells little Claudia (Kiki) that she's outdone herself but he doesn't know how right he is...

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