CINEASTE magazine__ part 2
"So Many Alternatives"
The Alternative AIDS Video Movement
by Alexandra Juhasz
(continues..) The Heart
of the Matter addresses a range of feminist issues including
the connections between HIV and the sexual double standard faced
by women, racial stereotypes, and women's desire to please others.
It focuses upon the life, family, and political transformations
of Janice Jirau, an HIV-positive black AIDS activist who contracted
the virus from her husband who refused to practice safer sex.
Jirau acknowledges how the burdens of racism, sexism, poverty,
and violence made her endeangering, consensual behavior seem at
first like an expression of love rather than a lack of self-respect.
In private interviews and public statements to The National Commission
on AIDS and to her church and family, Jirau cautions other women
to struggle with the personal and cultural barriers which keep
women from taking care of themselves.
The film intercuts this portrait with shorter interviews with
diverse HIV-positive women. In this way, the filmmakers attempt
to reach an audience of American women who need to understand
AIDS, yet are unlikely to feel they are part of the smaller, usually
already politicized communities typically addressed by alternative
video. Hollibaugh and Retticker initially felt that they needed
to produce in film to get outside the formal and distribution
limitations of alternative video. This meant a large budget, a
large crew, and, ultimately, what has proven to be the kind of
wide-scale release one can never hope for with a low-end educational
or documentary video. But the efforts necessary to raise the money
for completing this valuaable task did not match their other urgency
-- to get the project completed so as to educate as many American
women as possible about the risk of HIV-transmission and the politics
of the AIDS crisis.
The history of this project is a story of money. "This is
a film about fundraising," says Hollibaugh, "and not
about AIDS. About a culture that doesn't value women, PWAs, or
filmmakers committed to social issues." Although the project
received a good deal of funding in the first years, the producers
quickly moved through the limited instiutions that fund progressive
arts production. When the $500,000 necessary for a feature-length
project couldn't be raised, the project was completed as a sixty-minute
video. The production history of The Heart of the Matter,
the first attempt to make a feature film about women and AIDS,
reveals as much about the production of alternative AIDS video:
it is cheap; it can be make without the sanction of capital; and
it can espouse radical politics.
The Heart of the Matter is distributed by First Run Features:
153 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10014 phone 212-243-0600
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Testing The Limits
Originally a group of six artists and AIDS activists who knew
each other from The Whitney Independent Studio Program and/or
ACT UP, the Testing the Limits Collective (TTL) has produced five
videos since their formation in 1987: Testing the Limits Pilot
(1987); Testing the Limits Safer Sex Video (1987);
Egg Lipids (1987); Testing the Limits: NYC (1987);
and Voices From The Front (1992). Part of the collective's
struggle has been to strike a balance between the desires to reach
a mass audience, remain true to their art-school training, and
to their commitment to the movement which they document and in
which they also participate. Currently in production on four hour-long
documentaries about the gay and lesbian liberation movement, the
collective's transition away from AIDS-specific video marks a
significant change in their work as does this project's million-dollar-plus
budget.
In 1986, David Meieran and Gregg Bordowitz
conceived of a video project which would represent the resurgence
of lesbian/gay/AIDS militancy in New York City. Bill Olander's
Homo Video show at the New Museum served as an inspiration, bringing
together for the first time a developing movement of art and activist
video centered upon the politics of AIDS, homophobia, and gay
identity. In the meantime, ACT UP was forming. It was a heady,
exuberant, dynamic time; anything and everything was happening
in the just-forming AIDS activist community, and it all needed
to be documented. "ACT UP drove us, galvanized us, gave us
a focus. There was a direct alignment between the group's history
and our own. We were caught up in it--documenting daily...constantly."
In early 1987, Sandra Elgear, Robyn Hutt, and Hilary Joy Kipnis
joined Meieran and Bordowitz in the production of the first documentary
video about the fledgling AIDS activist movement. Their intention
was to produce the first mass-release AIDS documentary for middle
America, so they set their sights on PBS.
The organizing principle for the pilot they were producing to
help raise funds for their thirty-minute PBS-style documentary
was "document everything." The group taped coutless
domonstrations, ACT UP meeting, public round tables, and interviews
with AIDS activists. This documenting occurred however it could,
which most typically meant "down and dirty footage"
shot by whomever had a camera. This is what Meieran calls "alternative
media": media production motivated by a commitment to a social
issue where production occurs because it has to, by an
unpaid staff who themselves are insiders to what they document.
Testing The Limits immediately began "to distribute
itself" to AIDS service organizations as well as within the
art and activist scene. Although the tape used a hybrid of conventional
if roughly produced forms (talking head interviews with AIDS activists
interspersed with sexy footage of AIDS domonstrations which is,
in best MTV manner, rapidly cut to music), its content, the early
history of ACT UP New York, was even less conventional. Testing
the Limits never had its PBS airing: the style was too rough,
the politics were too explicit. Thus, the group make its first
steps towards professionalization, which, among other things,
resulted in ideologically-bound splits within the collective.
The group's next project, Voices From the Front, took two-and-a-half
intense years to complete and began where Testing the Limits ended--the
1988 March on Washington for gay and lesbian rights. The great
diversity of issues, organizations, and activist strategies covered
in this ninety-minute tape demonstrate how the AIDS activist movement
and agenda had expanded and diversified since 1988. Transferred
to film, Voices From the Front went on to play at art and
independent theaters across the country and, with even greater
success, on the international film market. In October 1992, it
aired on HBO for a $15,000 fee. Nevertheless, the tape ran up
a $40,000 deficit, and never aired on PBS, perhaps because of
the group's continued reliance on "guerrilla coverage footage."
But Hutt and Elgear think there is another reason: "We were
too close to the material. Our friends, our lives, were in that
tape. If we didn't have the type of intimacy, it wouldn't have
been made. We wouldn't have gotten those interviews."
1992 also brought about an escalation in antigay violence, and
lesbian and gay militancy. TTL began documenting the birth of
Queer Nation, and the response of gays and lesbians to antigay
initiatives across the country. Now consisting of Elgear, Hutt,
and Meieran, the group continued their attempt to professionalize,
working on the transition from "alternative" to "independent"
media production: work that, they explain, requires funding before
production; work that is job- rather than issue-driven; work that
is organized, structured, and neat in its form and production
strategies; work that answers first to its funders; work that
is paid; work that is viewed by millions. After recieving a $1.3
million grant from ITVS in 1993, TTL is currently producing Rights
and Reactions, a four-part series of hour-long documentaries
about the history of the gay liberation movement. In this case,
their political commitments will be marked by the process and
professionalism that only money can buy.
Testing The Limits videos are distributed by Frameline: 346
Ninth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 phone 415-703-8654
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DIVA TV (first incarnation)
In 1989, DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television)
was formed as an affinity group of ACT UP, "organized to
be there, document, provide protection and countersurveillance,
and participate." Catherine Saalfield, who co-founded DIVA
TV along with Ray Navarro, Jean Carlomusto, Gregg Bordowitz, Bob
Beck, Coasta Papas, Ellen Spiro, George Plaggianos, and Rob Kurilla,
points out that DIVA "targeted ACT UP members as its primary
audience and made videos by, about, and, most importantly, for
the movement." The group produced three tapes in its first
phase: Target City Hall, which chronicles ACT UP's March
28, 1989 demo against Ed Koch's administration; Pride,
about the twentieth anniversary of NY's gay and lesbian pride
movement; and Like A Prayer, five seven-minute perspectives
on the ACT UP/WHAM demo "Stop the Church" at St. Patrick's
Cathedral on December 10, 1989.
Testing the Limits and DIVA often shared footage, covered the
same actions, and were committed to AIDS activism, as was also
true of GMHC. But the AIDS video scene itself was diversifying
and expanding along with the AIDS crisis. As their production
histories reflect, by 1989 none of these groups necessarily shared
ideological assumptions about AIDS video.
While Testing the Limits and DIVA TV had a close affinity in membership,
content, and political commitment, the groups also differed significantly.
With PBS as their goal, Testing the Limits always attempted to
professionalize. DIVA, on the other hand, was remaining staunchly
antiprofessional. As Saalfield explains, "Watching Testing
the Limits evolve into an institutionalized organization reinforced
DIVA's commitment to working as a collective. We remain fluid,
make decisions with whomever comes to a meeting, and resist assigning
a treasurer by dedicating any income to buying tape stock."
According to Saalfiedd, DIVA's commitment to "the quick and
dirty approach" of alternative production led to a "limited
audience, inconsistent participation by collective members, and
more process than product." But at the same time there remained
"the essential goal of inclusivity, with open lines of communication
among collective members for expressing opinions and offering
analyses. Here protest is the process, communication is our form
of resistance, and everyone has a say."
Tom Kalin
The film and video artist Tom Kalin has made at least eight
videotapes and films about AIDS since 1985, although he believes
that all of his work (including, for instance, his feature film,
Swoon--see Cineaste, Vol. XIX, No.3) is impacted by the
crisis. His AIDS work has been financed, produced, and distributed
in a variety of ways -- from peronally funded, individually produced
montage-based experimental "art tapes" to collectively
produced, glossy television. Kalin believes that he combines two
models of the artist-as-producer: the "heroic artist,"
who give form to the issues and feelings of his own personal/political
landscape, and the "collaborative activist" whose work
reflects a collective interpretation of experience and ideology.
Kalin's first AIDS tape, Like Little Soldiers (made while
completing his MFA at the Institute for the Arts in Chicago),
marks his initial response to AIDS -- a personal and profound
fear untempered by any interest in organizing or politicizing
with others. The tape intercuts the brutal image of a pair of
hands washing and picking off the white and then brown paint which
color them, with the image of a burning shirt. In 1987, Kalin
together with Stathis Lagoudikis produced News From Home,
which renders the anxiety of disclosure of sero-status within
a relationship and the society at large.
Kalin's search for and move towards a community represents a second
stage in his AIDS work. His 1988 production, they are lost
to vision altogether, reflects his move to New York and exposure
to the activist politics of ACT UP. The tape strings together
found and stolen footage from TV, movies, re-shot television,
and Kalin's own images of sexuality, history, and activism, into
a rapid and disorienting montage juxtaposing mass media hysteria
with individual fixation, desire, and fear.
Until 1991 Kalin also produced work with the ACT UP artists' affinity
group, GranFury. In 1990 the group produced Kissing Doesn't
Kill, which consists of four thirty-second public service
announcements for racial and sexual diversity in the face of AIDS
all emphasize the group's belief that, although culture is made
in a lot of places, the mainstream media sets the global and national
agenda about AIDS. Therefore, to reach people and to reach for
change, it is necessary to speak to people where they listen and
in a language they understand. Kalin insists that "the ideal
distribution" for even alternative AIDS video is television,
"plop in the middle of the market place. You need to work
to engage in the politics of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Benneton.
There is no outside the market place in relation to art production
-- the best you can do is to tease its margins."
Kalin makes tapes for ghosts -- the people he's lost to AIDS,
the faces he's seen on city streets or at AIDS demonstrations.
"I don't have anything more to say about AIDS than the proverbial
Latina mother of two infected babies who is also sick herself.
But I do have cultural access, entitlement, privilege." Kalin
used his privilege like an artist, like an AIDS activist. He represents
what he knows and how he lives in a mass-mediated society which
is unaware that it is dripping with infection, and unaware of
Kalin's grief and anger unless he represents it.
Tom Kalin's early videos are distributed by Drift Releasing, 611
Broadway, New York, NY 10012 phone 212-254-4118
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Cineaste Magazine: Alternative
AIDS Videos
Case
Studies Chapters continue (part 3):