Seven queer filmmakers on the artwork that shaped them
Featuring Ira Sachs, Jeremy O. Harris, Harry Lighton, Alice Wu, Isabel Sandoval, Emma Seligman and Vera Drew
In honour of Pride month, here is the art inspiring some of our favourite contemporary queer filmmakers—spanning film, photography, literature and music.
Ira Sachs (director of Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day)— Joe Brainard, I Remember (1975)
“Ode to Joe Brainard’s I Remember:
I remember the first time I saw Pasolini’s Salo or 120 Days of Sodom and thought it was real.
I remember seeing Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and thinking that pain was just like what I felt when my college boyfriend broke up with me.
I remember seeing Jacques Nolot Before I forget and thinking I wanted to make a movie as honest about my own life.
I remember reading Proust and thinking how surprised I was that a book that old could be so queer.
I remember spending too many afternoons to count at the Adonis porno theater in Times Square.
I remember my father walking out of Norman René’s Longtime Companion when the two men kiss in the opening scene.
I remember seeing Grease when I was 12 and wishing I could watch it over and over again.
I remember my sister asking if I could ever listen to any records other than Broadway musicals.
I remember performing Sondheim's ‘Everybody Ought To Have A Maid’ wearing a hula skirt in my parent’s living room.”
Jeremy O. Harris (writer of Slave Play) — Shirley Clarke, Portrait of Jason (1967)
"There’s the great Black subject in Portrait of Jason, about Jason Holliday. So many of these things are a part of my foundation, from seeking a part of myself inside the canon. Where am I situated, as both a Black body, and a queer body?"
Isabel Sandoval (director of Lingua Franca)— Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tropical Malady (2004)
"A profoundly spiritual and achingly sensual film. Inspired by Thai mysticism, Weerasethakul conjures a primordial meditation on desire--forbidden or unrequited--in all its savagery, danger, transcendence and ineffable power. The queer desire at the heart of Tropical Malady, unconsummated in the physical world, transports to the realm of the spirits, its fiery incarnation overwhelming and ultimately unyielding. Desire is most ravishing in its elusiveness and mystery, and that has stayed with me since."
Emma Seligman (director of Bottoms)— Angela Robinson, D.E.B.S (2004)
"I had seen D.E.B.S when I was a kid but not from beginning to end. I remember catching it on TV and not really understanding what it was—and probably being a little scared of it? A gay movie…and they’re fighting…and they’re spies? I wasn’t as advanced of a viewer when I watched it. The only other movies that we knew existed...were the Love, Simon’s of the world. I’m so glad we’ve got to a point where we have non-depressing teen queer films. It’s such a win to have gay teens in a movie that aren’t being sent to conversion-therapy camp [laughs], though those movies have their place.
Harry Lighton (director of Pillion)— Wolfgang Tillmans, Dunst I (2004)
"There's a Wolfgang Tillmans photo, Dunst I. It's a worm's eye shot looking right up the skirt of a man dancing in a club. He's commando, and his limp cock and balls are caught mid-swing. I saw a print of it at a mate's house and was struck by how it felt both playful, political and very sexy. That's a cocktail I've tried to carry into my own films."
Vera Drew (director of The People’s Joker)—Carta Monir, Lara Croft Was My Family (2017) and the music of Devi McCallion
"When I was starting to figure out that I was trans, I couldn't find reflections of myself and what I was realizing in film or TV. Transparent was helpful, so was Hedwig & The Angry Inch, but it required a lot of setting aside differences and looking for similarities. The art that was instrumental to me embracing who I was were comics and music, particularly Carta Monir’s book Lara Croft Was My Family and The Pervert by Remy Boydel & Michelle Perez. The former helped me understand my ancestral trauma and my gender’s relationship to art/pop culture, and the latter, that queer relationships, transness, and what my body was about to go through were never going to be, nor had to be, perfect. on the music front, Devi McCallion’s music helped me finally be angry, horny, sad, and joyful over my emerging identity."
Alice Wu (director of Saving Face and The Half of It)— Jeannette Winterson, The Passion (1987)
"For years the lines, 'you play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.' felt like some sort of mantra for my newly-out-and-unbearably-cautious self stumbling through love in the wild west of early 90s lesbian culture. Did the hypnotic prose thrill my tightly wound soul with the promise of grand romance in improbable circumstances? Yes. Did recommending said book (at the bookstore I worked at on weekends) inadvertently net me my first girlfriend? Also, yes.
