Outrage in the 1980s and ’90s

Chronologically, the first feature in the series is The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel depicting Jesus of Nazareth as divine but also, crucially, human. “Scorsese’s sublime, radically character-driven film fearlessly and organically overpowered my lifelong confusion about Jesus’s message and mission,” wrote Bruce Bennett in 2012. “Not even Pasolini’s anti-epic The Gospel According to St. Matthew imbues Jesus with the life and feeling he possesses in The Last Temptation of Christ.”

In 1983, Scorsese launched the project at Paramount, which had given him a substantial budget to work with, but a letter-writing cam­paign engineered by fundamentalist Christian groups prompted the studio to call the whole thing off. Four years later, Scorsese started over at Universal with a much smaller budget. “All things considered, production went well,” writes David Ehrenstein. “Then the trouble really started.”

Ehrenstein introduces a cast of characters who will play antagonistic roles in the travails of several of the films in the BAM series: “Spearheaded by Tim Penland of Mastermedia and Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ, an ad hoc committee of self-styled fundamentalist leaders declared that a film none of them had actually seen depicted ‘a mentally deranged, lust-driven man who, in a dream sequence, comes down off the cross and has a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene.’ If Universal would not burn the negative, they offered to buy it and destroy it themselves. Right on cue, those TV-savvy right-wing reverends Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon joined the chorus of disapproval, along with the three Pats—Robertson, Buchanan, and Boone.”

These fire-breathers would find plenty to flare up over when a cluster of films B. Ruby Rich gathered under the label New Queer Cinema in a 1992 article for the Village Voice began winning plaudits and eager audiences. “Such films all but welcomed denunciation by intellectual Lilliputians on the right who latched on to the fact that they were partly funded through NEH government grants,” wrote Michael Koresky a few years ago. “Yet during this code-red moment in history, when gay people were succumbing to the ravages of AIDS in shocking numbers, and the U.S. government, under Republican control for more than a decade, was doing fuck-all about it, how could any serious artist or moral thinker respond to moral tsk-tsking with anything other than an erect middle finger?” The right was “frightened by difference, entrenched in its own bigotry—but gay men were also literally dying.”

One of them was Marlon Riggs, who died of complications from AIDS in 1994, when he was only thirty-seven. Riggs said that he made Tongues Untied (1989), an urgent exploration of Black gay identity, to “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” The airing of Tongues Untied on the PBS series POV in 1991 sparked another firestorm, but as K. Austin Collins points out, the “antagonists whose efforts to render Riggs and his work invisible were precisely what the films were conceived to chronicle and contest.”

Todd Haynes—who, as we’ve just learned today, will preside over the jury during the seventy-fifth Berlinale—won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Teddy Award in Berlin for his first feature, Poison (1981), which draws from the work of Jean Genet to tell three stories in three distinct styles. BAM will also screen Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), a thirty-minute short sparked by Haynes’s childhood fascination with I Love Lucy and other sitcoms from the 1950s.

Nathan Lee notes that Gregg Araki’s Totally F***ed Up (1993) “doesn’t so much tell a story as survey a mode of existence: being young and queer in the age of acid rain and AIDS, safe sex and serial killers, Jesse Helms and Morrissey.” Araki “has cited Godard’s Masculin féminin (1966) as a model for the fifteen-part structure of Totally F***ed Up, but the movie’s behavioral performances and depiction of wasted time feel equally indebted to the forms of stylized queer lassitude developed by Andy Warhol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.”

Multiple aspects of queer identity are explored in other films in the program, including Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses (1992), Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995), and even, in a roundabout way, Alek Keshishian’s Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991). Last year, Karina Longworth delved into the protests from all sides that met Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) in an episode of her podcast, You Must Remember This.

A snub from the Academy is about the worst Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb (1994) suffered, and this “portrait of the artist as a misanthrope, bad-boy, visionary, joker, sex maniac, and hero,” as BAM calls it, is still widely considered to be one of the best nonfiction films ever made. “An old friend of Robert Crumb’s,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Zwigoff shot the movie over six years and edited it over three, and the multifaceted density and sometimes disturbing nature of what he has to show and say in two hours seem partly a function of the amount of time he had to mull it all over.”

The Daily Mail and the Evening Standard tried to get Crash (1996), David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel, banned in the UK, but they didn’t get far. “Inevitably,” writes Jessica Kiang, “both book and film subsequently went through their badge-of-honor periods, each becoming a handy bellwether of broad-minded cool versus uptight, censorious conservatism. And eventually, Crash the novel and Crash the film (which Ballard, incidentally, adored) were rehabilitated to the point that each now occupies a central position in its creator’s body of work.”

In Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997), two young friends wander a small, tornado-ravaged Ohio town, sniffing glue and hunting stray cats. “What could be more defiant than portraying such pariahs not as reprehensible monsters but rather in all their beautiful fragility, among the rubble of their brutal environment, to hopefully complicate the feelings of any viewer who might be eager to write them off as scum?” asks Carlos Aguilar. “That’s why the transgressive potency of Gummo won’t fade.”