Jim Hubbard, Stop the Movie (Cruising), 1980, super8mm, silent

Luther Price, Sodom, 1989, Super8 on 16mm, color, sound.

Curated by Paul Dallas
Rockbar
8:30PM

Released after a tumultuous decade for gay politics and on the cusp of the AIDS crisis, William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) famously became a lightning rod for controversy within the gay community, its on-location shoot in the West Village plagued with protests. The two films in this program trace that trajectory, both aesthetically and historically. Stop the Movie (Cruising) represents a meditative response to heightened emotions: as Gregg Bordowitz notes, it “makes us think about our activism.” Sodom occupies the other end of the spectrum, presenting a mesmerizing landscape of desire and violence—and represents the embodiment of Middle America’s greatest fears. Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, this notorious film is an assemblage of 70s gay porn rescued from a dumpster, spliced with images of blood and bruises and accompanied by Gregorian chants and interspersed with crowd scenes from biblical epics.

Jim Hubbard is an activist and a prolific filmmaker. In 1987, he co-founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival with Sarah Schulman. His films have screened at the Berlin Film Festival International Festival and the London Film Festival and gay and lesbian festivals all over the world. His most recent work is United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, a feature length documentary that was selected to open the MoMA 2012 Documentary Fortnight.

Luther Price was born in 1962. Price works in film and performance and is best known for his erotic and disturbing Super-8 works. He often re-edits found footage and he subjects the film to any number of physical manipulations, from painting and scratching individual frames to burying the film underground and engaging entropic processes. His work has been shown at MoMA and twenty-six of his films as well as his slide works were exhibited in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Rockbar opened in 2009 with the goal of becoming the CBGB’s of New York’s GLBT music scene. They have played host to a Who’s Who of artists over the past two years, including Peaches, Oh Land, Jake Shears, Deluka and many others. Rockbar is located on Christopher Street, once the nucleus of the Village's gay scene, down the street from the former site of Badlands, one of the bars featured in Cruising, on the former site of the Dugout, one of the city's premier bear bars.