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CINEASTE magazine (excerpt)
vol. XX, no.4 (1994)
vol. XXI, nos. 1-2 (1995)
by Alexandra Juhasz
In the twelve years since AIDS was first identified with a
name, thousands of programs about the crisis have been produced
by videomakers who work outside of commercial television. Most
critics, viewers, and producers refer to this large and diverse
body of work as 'the alternative AIDS media.' The term distinguishes
the unique conjuctions of finance, ideology, artisanship, profit,
and style of independent video from the standardized, profit-oriented,
seemingly authorless, and unbiased network TV productions typically
called 'the mainstream media.'
Of course, the binary terms 'mainstream' and 'alternative' obscure
a great deal of cross-fertilization, mimicry, and hybridization:
actually, both media use experimental as well as conventional
forms; either format can espouse conservative ideology; 'alternative'
videos can have budgets larger than those of the 'mainstream,'
and can make a lot more money.
Nonetheless, those of us who make and use AIDS media have held
on to this sometimes obscuring terminalogy because while connoting
processes of production, it has equally served to signify production
ideology. The terms express our understanding that the 'mainstream'
media has consistently represented dominant (bigoted, distanced,
judgmental) ideology about AIDS for the 'general public,' while
the 'alternative' media represents a critique, reevaluation or
resistance to these 'bad' images for a smaller, more committed
audience. This simplistic understanding of the media has functioned
to describe what has proven to be a relatively straightforward
history of AIDS media. It has also contributed to a movement-wide
awareness of the power of representation, giving words to a recognition
of the negative con-sequences of mis- and under-representation
by dominant institutions as well as the immense significance of
resistant, critical, or alternative representations.
This terminology, however, does not allow us to see how the 'alternative'
AIDS media is itself composed of indivdual tapes which are conceived,
funded, produced, and distributed in an infinite variety of ways.
The eight case studies which follow are example of 'alternative'
projects based within the New York AIDS video community. They
range in budget from $2,000 to $1,300,000, and in form from art
tape to traditional documentary; they are shot on camcorders,
Betacam, and 16mm film by producers who are self-identified as
amateurs and professionals; and they range in distribution strategies
from screenings at high schools to airings on PBS.
But their similarities are also telling. Several agencies and
names involved in these projects appear in more than one case
study which indicates commitments broader than one distinct project,
and also point to the interrelation between alternative producers
who are highly aware of each other's work. While interaction within
the alternative community provides inspiration, however, all eight
of these projects explicitly position themselves in some relationship,
however diverse, to the form, reach, or agenda of the 'mainstream
media.' Equally crucial, each one of them would never have been
made without the highest level of passion and tenacity by their
respective producer or collective. Such media is based primarily
upon the urgency of politics and, according to Sean Cubbitt, the
notion of struggle: struggle to find funding and equipment,
struggle to learn skills, to organize distribution, and to invent
the best forms for new content; struggle for specific real-world
goals because the work is primarily and consistently motivated
by a shared commitment to altering the course of the crisis.
The Audio-Visual Department of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC)
The Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) hired Jean Carlomusto as an
audiovisual specialist in 1987. At that time, Carlomusto explains,
the organization had "a TV set and one VCR and a need for
information to get out." Today, the Audio/Visual Department
is staffed by two full-time employees (Chas Brack and Juanita
Mohammed) and several part-time staff (Alisa Lebow, Carlomusto,
and Gary Winter), has its own 3/4" production studio and
on-line editing equipment, and is responsible for the production
of over fifty tapes, including Doctors, Liars and Women, Seize
Control of the FDA, The Safer Sex Shorts, Thinking About Death,
Work Your Body, It Is What It Is, and my own Women and
AIDS and Prostitutes, Risk and AIDS (all of which are widely
distributed for low prices by GMHC's Publication Department).
GMHC also produces hundreds of "more volatile shows,"
maybe "good for a month," says Carlomusto, made for
cable broadcast and sometimes for limited distribution, including
Medical Update, Focus on Women, Caring, Mission Nutrition,
and HIV Portraits.
To generalize about a GMHC look, tone, or content is impossible
because work is made individually or in collaboration by members
of a staff who themselves have different styles and interests
(as well as by free-lancers, like myself, who are invited to produce
segments or shows on issues of importance to them). The department's
video production strategies haave continued to change, as does
the crisis they cover.
Women and AIDS, a tape I produced with Carlomusto in 1987,
utilizes a conventional documentary style to relay the then unconventional
information that women, too, suffer from AIDS. The tape consists
of talking-head interviews with female activists, educators, and
healthcare providers who articulately present the distinct issues
which affect women within the AIDS crisis: the potential dangers
of negotiating safer sex; safer sex as birth control; the effects
of racism, poverty, sexism, and homophobia upon HIV-infected women;
and the scapegoating of prostitutes as an attack upon all women.
The tape also includes detailed information about cleaning IV
drug works and safer sex.
It Is What It Is (Bordowitz, 1993) is a scripted, stylish,
educational tape made for and in association with teens. The hour-long
tape is divided into three sections which stand on their own so
as to be used in workshop settings: "Identity," "Homophobia,"
and "Safer Sex." It features a multiracial group of
lesbian, gay, and bisexual, HIV-positive and -negative teen performers.
In the tape's signature, direct-to camera scripted statements
(as well as in the teen' confident self-presentation) they express
the importance of self-respect both to acknowledge and embrace
a gay identity and as motivation for always engaging in safer
sex. The actors present challenging information about gay-bashing,
coming out, and negotiating safer sex in a forthright, intense,
sexy, and intimate manner. In this case MTV, not PBS, is the style
being cribbed.
Living with AIDS has performed a variety of functions in
a variety of formats because it is made to fill the gaps in the
media landscape. "So much of the stuff on TV was horrible,"
Carlomusto says. "There was a total exclusion of people living
with AIDS in its audience. Instead, everything was reported in
terms of a panicked public. I wanted to do a half-hour show devoted
to people living with AIDS. And that sent me out on the the streets."
Lacking staff and technical equipment, Carlomusto began covering
the rapidly escalating AIDS activist and PWA self-empowerment
movements. Shooting at ACT UP's first Wall Street demo, she met
David Meieran and Bordowitz, who were also documenting the event
for Testing The Limits, the activist video collective which she
joined soon after. In the following year, she became a founding
member of DIVA TV, ACT UP's video affinity group.
Six years and something like a hundred tapes later, Carlomusto
acknowledges that there is a different media landscape in 1994.
Nevertheless, GMHC's extensive and consistent production history
demonstrates that instiutional support (salaries, benefits, in-house
equipment, and distribution) is a most crucial factor for removing
many of the hurdles typical of the production of alternative AIDS
media. Even so, the Audio/Visual Department's infrastructure and
production style is nothing like that of the mainstream media.
The Department recieves a fraction of the funding of the nightly
news, and they remain connected and committed both to the issues
on which, and the community to which, they report. Along with
that comes burnout--Carlomusto is taking her first leave of absence
since 1987, and Bordowitz, new head of the department, is also
taking some time off--but also creativity, intensity, and anger.
The New York City Commission on Human Rights AIDS Discrimination Unit (The Heart of the Matter )
From 1983-1991, the AIDS Discrimination Unit of the New York
City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR) produced two AIDS educational
videotapes as part of a larger preventative campaign: The Second
Epidemic, an hour-long, made-for-public-television documentary
about AIDS discrimination (1987, Amber Hollibaugh) and Hard
to Get: AIDS Discrimination in the Workplace (1988, Alisa
Lebow), a short tape made for use in training workshops about
AIDS discrimination in the greatest cross-section of working environments.
The tapes utilize high-end documentary style to coat their more
radical messages about tolerance and justice, thereby attempting
to reach people who are not necessarily open to AIDS education
(not just people already affected by AIDS, but those people who
are not, and therefore most inclined to discriminate).
The Second Epidemic movingly covers actual discrimination
cases taken up by the Unit (a young boy who is forced from school,
a gay male couple who may lose their apartment), intercut with
interviews with Human Rights Commission staff. Hard to Get
uses faux newsreels to suggest the hysteria of much mainstream
AIDS coverage. The steady, wise, informative voice of Ruby Dee
counters this mis-information with the many reasons (medical,
legal, ethical) not to discriminate in the workplace.
Unlike most alternative AIDS media, these tapes were produced
slowly, and with relatively large budgets and a paid staff. They
look like what they are -- city-sponsored health education films
with a PBS flair -- but, while utilizing this traditional style,
their makers believe that they also espouse a "sophisticated
AIDS politics" grounded in years of struggle in radical cultural
politics.
The work of the Unit asks the difficult question of whether it
is possible to produce progressive media through a city- or state-funded
institution. In 1986, the Unit hired lesbian rights activist Amber
Hollibaugh, with the specific mandate of producing educational
video. She eventually worked with two assistants, Brack and Lebow,
who explains that "two white lesbians and a black gay man
with relatively radical politics were the force behind a video
from a city agency. This was state-funded propaganda by people
who are marginalized by that very state. We realized in what a
unique position we were and tried to make the most of it."
Although their videos were among the most successful endeavors
of the Unit and were fully funded by the Commission, city bureaucracy
and video production proved to be strange and difficult bedfellows.
Nevertheless, the benefits of this system lay in the real clout
and sanction given to work produced within the structure of a
New York City agency. Their tapes are considered official and
can go places where most 'alternative' work is not invited. On
the other hand, this manner of work turned out to be only as solid
as New York City politics. The AIDS Unit was shut down in 1990
because "we were making too much noise, we were too effective.
They couldn't control us."
The Unit's three video producers all continue to work in alternative
AIDS video: Lebow and Brack at GMHC's A/V Department, Hollibaugh
as the director of GMHC's Lesbian AIDS Project and as producer
of the recently completed documentary film The Heart of the
Matter (with Gini Retticker, an independent film editor).
The film is the first wide-release documentary about women and
AIDS. It premiered on this year's P.O.V. series on PBS, and was
the winner of the Freedom of Expression Award at the 1994 Sundance
Film Festival.
story continues on Cineaste part 2
Cineaste Magazine: Alternative
AIDS Videos
Case Studies Chapters
continue (parts 2 and 3):