Relax, it's just film - the 6th annual Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1999 by Jill St. Jacques

ImageOut: 6th Annual Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival Rochester, New York October 16-24, 1998

With subzero winter temperatures, a total of two gay bars and a baby-boom emphasis on the nuclear family and material gain, Rochester, New York is not a hot travel ticket for most gay movie aficionados. Yet, Rochester's Kodak/Xerox/Bausch & Lomb industrial base spells enough capital overflow for a consistent patronage of the arts. It's the kind of patronage that not only provides endowments for a premiere music conservatory and an internationally lauded symphony - in this case, it also supports the ImageOut Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival.

Since the festival's inception six years ago, the seven-person ImageOut curatorial board and more than 35 volunteers have persevered in bringing more and better quality gay films to the community. ImageOut has expanded from 18 original screenings in 1993 to 36 programs of both feature and short films in 1998. Films were screened this year at the alternative Little Theatre and the historic Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography and Film. One benefit of sharing proximity with Eastman Kodak has been access to the film archive at the Eastman House which allows curators to exhume and reclaim gay classics for the Archive Night such as this year's Caged (1950) by John Cromwell and German filmmaker Leontine Sagan's 1931 epic Madchen in Uniform, screened at the festival in 1997.

A continuing issue that has arisen at recent national gay and lesbian festivals also proved to be problematic for ImageOut: curatorial selections influenced by ticket sales. Due to Hollywood mainstreaming of gay culture in such films as Philadelphia (1993, by Jonathan Demme) and In and Out (1997, by Frank Oz), gay and lesbian film festivals are no longer the only alternative for gay audiences. If a festival includes too many obscure or experimental films, audience members with less artistic sentiments will stop buying tickets in favor of catching high-production-value presentations at their local 16-screen megaplex. In a worst-case scenario, the audience controls the programming - an all-too-real danger when a substantial section of your audience consists of well-heeled gay urban professionals from Xerox and Kodak. (ImageOut curators deny ever hearing the word "guppie.") Conversely, it is the benevolent wallets of guppies and their ilk that provide the financial backing for festivals such as ImageOut. On the other hand, if a festival turns tame for the sake of protecting the sensibilities of more conservative audience members, it will lose the enthusiasm of university students who supply the volunteer flesh and blood needed to tackle the festival's labor and logistical requirements. Once festival selection boards get past the nagging reality of exposure (any gay exposure in a predominantly straight community is better than no exposure at all), curators must grapple with the fact that dialogue between various tentacles of "the gay community" is perennially renegotiating and redefining its political territory. The ensuing demographic arbitration inevitably leads to the issue of authorship: not only who authors the films and why, but who authors the film festival and who calculates its agenda.

So what do festival curators blend into their gay and lesbian film festival to account for these issues: a little camp, some lesbian documentaries, gay male porno, experimental videos, multicultural themes? It is impossible to deny that the praxis of curating a gay and lesbian film festival has become a veritable glass onion, the "correct" peeling of which is still very much in contention.

As the ImageOut festival illustrates, conflicting audience demands can lead to a mixed curatorial bag of tricks. If total audience capacity is any relevant gauge of customer demand, the biggest ImageOut ticket seller continues to be male vanilla porn - typified by lingering close-ups of oily boys in white shorts. This year's ImageOut curators harnessed the masculine libidinal vehicle to drive home several important political messages. "Bare Chests," a collection of nine short films, was a case in point. "As promised, there's plenty of naked flesh on display in this diverse collection of boys' shorts to please just about everyone," touted the ImageOut program. Once inside the theater, however, viewers in search of naked naughties were confronted by films such as Johnny Symons's documentary Beauty Before Age (1997), an analysis of the consequences of gay culture's obsession with beauty and youth. Yet, if Beauty Before Age left flesh-hungry moviegoers craving more, they were not left unsated: films such as Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe (1998, by Steve Kokker) is a video montage of Andy Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro that ensured everybody got their fill of beefcake.

ImageOut curators also went beyond a simple juxtaposition of porn with politics, as evidenced in the screening of "Lovebirds," a selection of six short films and videos by international artists. "Lovebirds" took up the recent critical battle cry that eroticism and politics can often be found in the same film at the same time. One such hybrid example was Fish Belly White (1998, by Michael Burke). In this feature-style narrative, a young southern boy whose best friend is a scruffy white chicken has an unexpected underwear experience beneath a rickety railroad trestle with his studly neighbor. As Burke's film draws to its bloody climax, the neighbor coaxes the protagonist to prove his manliness by biting the head off his favorite hen. By driving a sexual stake into the heart of a pastoral Faulkneresque narrative, Burke interrogates both the danger and the thrill of sexuality on the periphery of established order. Now, substituting politics for pornography in the context of box office draw might normally be considered a sexual bait and switch - especially if narrative alone is the element that challenges the hegemony of gay film festivals, and gay culture at large - but such was not the case at ImageOut. "We are conscious of the fact that bare-chested white boys will sell out a show," said Joe Wlodarz, ImageOut film selection co-chair. "Yet we are also aware of the exclusions of that erotic investment." These politics of exclusion serve to underscore more subtle issues of the aforementioned question of authorship, resulting in a complicated impasse that is only resolved by screening as many types of films as possible.