My Perspective

The cinema I’m most passionate about works to confront us with those things we are otherwise unwilling to consciously acknowledge. These traumatic truths can be psychological, social, or metaphysical– the importance is in taking us to those places we do not want to go. This frequently can only happen in the arthouse. However, another of my greatest passions is removing all prohibitions on where we look for this great art. Notions of respectability serve only to blind us– a great deal of the most important American queer films of the 1960’s and 70’s had to bubble up under the commercial auspices of sexploitation and pornography. Will the stink of a “base” medium really stop us from fully avowing our history? Real, vital art can be found on all the most disreputable cinematic margins. The films of Robert Bresson and Andy Milligan are brimming with just as lucid and just as much Life and Truth, but only one of these artists has received his rightful flowers. Therefore, one of my areas of film-studies focus is in fighting for the recognition of the psychological potency, uninhibited vitality, and necessary confrontations with the traumatic that are to be found in “low” cinema. As such, I find myself with a unique familiarity with queer-, B-, underground-, and trash cinema. I work for a unified, universalist avant garde.