Tossed Into The Mix - Mix 2000 film festival

Afterimage, March, 2001 by Erin Ward

MIX 2000: The 14th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival

Anthology Film Archives

New York, New York

November 15-19, 2000

Hosted by the Anthology Film Archives (which itself is celebrating a 30-year anniversary of exhibition and preservation of avant-garde film) "MIX 2000" renovated its temporary home into a smorgasbord of the present and future of sexuality as communicated through cinema. Amid the standard camp and erotica, this year's festival offered many programs that explored the broad scope of identity-making, bringing sexual identity into correlation with national and regional identity, identifying individualism in a digital world and mapping the journeys taken through different ages.

By travelling down a plastic-encased corridor festival patrons entered the "Time Warp," a seven-monitor installation of 14 videos, ranging from documentary to video hallucination. "Rather than programming these works into a traditional formal projected screening," festival organizers stated, "we have decided...to present them in a new context that would challenge their assumed meaning." [1] How these videos' meanings may have been "challenged" by being placed in a plasticized gallery is unclear, Undoubtedly their meanings would have been altered had they been projected in either of the theaters, that method of presentation granting and garnering more attention and validation. The installation functioned more as an alternate activity, a distraction of sorts, between program screenings in the two theaters.

The "Time Warp" videos ran throughout the festival, and although this viewer could not distinguish a clear organizational mandate, based on content or quality, the exhibit did offer another source of sensory input for the curious viewer. In Wonder Woman: Battle with the Basher (2000, by Cary Curran and Brian Winkowski, 6 mins.) the favorite icon of the working woman returns to avenge a gay bashing, pausing in her mission only for shopping emergencies. This is camp that people across the board could enjoy, as Wonder Woman satisfies both adolescent fantasy and the need for a queer crusader. At the other end of the spectrum, but only one monitor away, Lashambi Britton's I am Your Sister (2000, 33 mins.) takes a documentary approach to presenting the coming out stories of nine male-to-female transgendered women. A conscious undoing of talk-show schematics, the filmmaker uses captions throughout the documentary, naming each woman, and her current role in the community. By excluding such biographical tag lines as the subject's current relation to the family members being discussed, or the degree to which the subject has undergone surgical procedures to alter her physical sexual characteristics, each of the nine women inhabited her own space of social value. What each woman chooses to tell about her personal experiences, the level of her transgendered existence (whether pre-, post- or having no desire for an "op"), is her choice, not the filmmaker's. The filmmaker made a conscious decision to omit her voice--her questions are in fact edited out--to allow the spoken words to be entirely owned by the subjects of the documentary. A single voice-over at the end of the video asks, "What does it mean to be a woman--to be your sister?" This questions the space within queer culture that has been left for/claimed by transgendered people, pointing to the tangible boundaries maintained within both hetero-and homosexual communities. Several of the nine women describe a constant and mounting frustration with being accepted as drag queens but not as women, whether straight, bisexual or lesbian. This effective documentary is a reminder that neither gendered action nor gender preferences--not even gender itself--can be biologically determined, and to continue discrimination through an unexamined aversion to difference undermines the very foundation of queerness.

Another "Time Warp" video, Christopher Westfall's Gay Marriage, A One Man Show ... (2000, 15 mins.), offers nine distinct opinions on the subject of gay marriage, personified in characters such as the university student who fumbles to articulate his version of human rights, while fidgeting so profoundly that his true sentiment is aptly communicated. Sitting at a bar, no doubt recovering from the previous evening's events, a middle-aged "clubber" claims that he does not have time for marriage with his busy schedule of cruising the bars for tasty young men. The straight briefcase-carrying yuppie, scrambling to get into his shiny black import exclaims, "marriage is hell on earth...why would they want imprisonment?" Finally, a man in leather duds, sitting on a stool against a simple black backdrop discusses the fact that marriage is "a right that heterosexuals have and gay people don't, and that bothers me. But I don't know if I want it...it comes from the heterosexual world and it's about ownership of women. It 's ironic that I will be denied something I don't want." This one-man show offers a plethora of current opinions on the matter in a somewhat comical manner, due to Westfall's flagrant use of stereotypes like the redneck farmer who, holding his axe, snorts in general confusion about how, exactly, the particulars of a gay marriage might work. Between the lines and the laughs, however, Westfall's directive point is that marriage is a matter of individual desire, not based within the assumed boundaries suggested by these type characters, but ultimately on an individual's concept of the institution of marriage.