White Columns
320 West 13th Street, Entrance on Horatio Street between 8th Avenue and Hudson Street, 212-924-4212
Chelsea
June 27 - June 27, 2012
Reception: Wednesday, June 27, 8:30 - 10 PM
Web Site
YESTERDAY ONCE MORE Wednesday, June 27, 8:30PM
Matt Wolf, I Remember: A film about Joe Brainard, video, 2012 Zackary Drucker, At Least You Know You Exist, 16mm on DV, 2011 Mariah Garnett, Encounters I May or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin, 16mm, 2012 Chris E. Vargas, Liberaceón, video, 2011
Program length: 69 minutes with filmmakers Mariah Garnett and Matt Wolf in attendance!
White Columns 320 West 13th Street (Enter on Horatio St. between Hudson and 8th Ave.) New York, NY 10014
Yesterday Once More is a program of queer moving image portraits from the last two years. Documenting four figures who helped to shape and define a public image of queer life (Peter Berlin, Joe Brainard, Liberace and Flawless Sabrina), each filmmaker in the program approaches their subject with the weight of their historical distance and a panache for contemporary performativity.
Filmmaker Matt Wolf returns to Joe Brainard’s iconic poem “I Remember” in his film I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard. His archival montage combines audio recordings of Brainard reading from the poem, as well as an interview with his lifelong friend and collaborator, the poet Ron Padgett. The result is an inventive biography of Joe Brainard, and an elliptical dialog about friendship, nostalgia, and the strange wonders of memory
Created inside an archeology of the Uptown apartment that legendary queen Mother Flawless Sabrina has inhabited since 1967, At Least You Know You Exist is a site-specific exploration of a fixed space where everything is in a state of change. Totemic mystical objects act as an index, a collection of mysterious sculptures in different states of mutation, and rich layers of feverish history interface with a new vision of transgender.
In Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin, Mariah Garnett moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 70’s gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden. The film guides the viewer through the process of making contact with a figure who exists only in his own photographs.
Liberaceón renarrates portions of the biography of Liberace—the flamboyant, yet closeted, apolitical pop pianist who died in 1987—in order to insert him into a queer history of radical AIDS/HIV activism. Narrative details from his life are reworked and embellished to tell a mythic origin story of the in/famous direct-action group, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).