MARCH 13, 2015

TYLER MATTHEW OYER:
Where did the idea for this project come from?

CLARA LÓPEZ MENÉNDEZ:
We were talking about coming to Los Angeles and different ideas for programming. Bradford had lined up REDCAT and was in conversations with David Frantz from ONE Archive for the MOTHA screening…

BRADFORD NORDEEN:
Yes, and we were thinking about potential venues for Dirty Looks events. One of the important things about coming to Los Angeles is our interest in getting to know the space, the audiences in LA, and how they want to engage with space. I was thinking about the basement theatre at Machine Project and ways we could animate that… a way in which that could have a charge.

CLARA:
I had an idea for a Sesión Continua. It’s how porn theatres used to work everywhere but the idea came from activating the last porn theatre existing in Madrid. It is very much a social space, a homosocial space that has unfortunately always been screening heterosexual porn but the constituency that actually goes to the theatre is mostly gay men who go there to cruise.

BRADFORD:
There is a documentary about this theatre…

CLARA:
Yes, it is called Paradiso (2013) by Omar A. Razzak. I was researching how porn theatres had existed in Madrid and throughout Spain after the dictatorship and thought of organizing a twelve-hour program of early gay pornography as a reparative act for the homosocial space that existed but was absolutely lacking homosexual pornography. Early porn, as a genre, is something important to Bradford and I so we thought activating the Machine Project basement theatre would be perfect.

BRADFORD:
A screening that was influential on me was of Community Action Center (2010) by A.L. Steiner and A.K. Burns that took place at Issue Project Room. I was one of three or four cisgender males in the audience… it was completely sold out and midway through the screening I realized that everyone around me was turned on. It was a palpable experience… you could smell it… feel it in the air. That was really exciting as a spectator because that was probably one of the first times I can think back to of not being surrounded by turned on men in a theatre but I was surrounded by turned on women, in a shared space of people watching something. There’s a relationship between the spectator and the image but it was more community based, more exciting, which is built into that film’s mission. Clara and I, in some ways, started working together because Dirty Looks predominantly screens experimental moving image work but the earliest forms of self-representation that exist in cinema of gay and lesbian and queer subjectivities are found in porn. For experimental film you’ve got Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) and Fred Halsted’s LA Plays Itself (1972). These were the only places queers would see themselves onscreen.

CLARA:
And Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963).

BRADFORD:
Yes. These early films are screened and discussed in porn contexts when they were being made, although with a contemporary eye we recognize these are not porn. The explicit nature of representation alone within those films flagged them as pornographic, being screened alongside nudies at gay porn theatres in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

CLARA:
And they were often censored as if they were explicit pornography.

BRADFORD:
Flaming Creatures was censored. When were researching at the ONE Archive there was an interesting run-down of a court case against Fireworks stating they couldn’t find a single image that was objectionable… it was really just the tone and mere fact of certain representations that flagged the film as being too explicit.

CLARA:
It’s funny you mention Community Action Center because I was screening that film when I was in Europe. It was the first time many people were watching explicit queer sexuality on film with the idea that it would be screened in a social context, not in privacy. It raised questions of what that means and how it is a conscious political act.

TYLER:
Which brings me to my next question. Why a marathon? You hinted at the reparative acts of taking back and queering a certain space and format…

CLARA:
We had originally thought of twelve hours and the organizers at Machine Project recommended we just go for a full twenty-four hour screening. It becomes more like a durational, endurance performance. Many porn theatres would let ticketed individuals stay inside from 10AM to 2AM… people could go spend the whole day. People who were on the streets could use the toilets, hang out, cruise, make money…

BRADFORD:
Right. An aspect of Dirty Looks that Los Angeles hasn’t seen is our experimental exhibition component. We have worked with many great and exciting institutions here but almost every event we’ve done has been a proper screening. We are very excited about the Sesión Continua format because it differs from what Los Angeles has experienced from us thus far. For me it’s important to shake up subjectivity and spectatorship when presenting and looking at film. I’m not interested in straight up institutional screenings necessarily. When DL did the project with MoMA the first thing I told them was that I was not interested in their screens. Sesión Continua is interesting because it asks a viewer to go into a space where they don’t know what will be one the screen, staying as long or short as they like. That completely recalibrates the way someone is going to engage with the images on screen. We typically book films through distributors… one thing that is challenging about screening porn work is the obscurity of the rights holders… some dead… prints are in archives and are unable to be screened for the public… it’s something that Casey Scott deals with in his porn series at Anthology Film Archives. There’s a lot of digging to get these films… finding ways in which to run under the radar a bit in order to take them back and celebrate in a certain way.

CLARA:
I’m very interested in the performance of having to screen works for twenty-four hours. It’s an idea, we talk about it, but we actually have to figure out the practicalities of how this thing will happen.

There is a lot of early gay pornography that is extremely interesting cinematographically. We are trying to figure out a language… thematically… a moving image language to show certain sexualities that have been censored and forbidden… there can be really imaginative methods to present and disrupt the ways in which homosexuality has predominantly been presented.

BRADFORD:
Porn was one of the first amateur filmmaking platforms that was commercially viable in terms of cinema-going. Particularly for a two-ish year span when porn really exploded on the market… when intellectuals in New York were going to see Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat (1972). There was this moment. Wakefield Poole and Fred Halsted were figureheads of the movement. You see a transition from Boys in the Sand (1971) to Bijou (1972) to LA Plays Itself to Sextool (1975). Ironically, in the case of Halsted, that span took too long… it ruined Sextool because he created it for that context but it was too explicit and he shot it on 35mm so it could be screened in cinemas but porn theatres couldn’t do 35mm, they did 16mm, so they couldn’t show it and it was too raunchy for the mainstream. Also, mainstream tastes had changed at that point… So there are different narratives as to how these films played out both in regard to production and consumption.

TYLER:
One of the things you mentioned about coming to Los Angeles was about exploring the cultural, artistic landscape… which brings to mind the geographic landscape of the city… specifically of the east side neighborhoods of Silverlake and Echo Park and their histories of gay clubs and cruising and bath houses… Can you speak to how Sesión Continua relates to that history?

CLARA:
We were just talking to Jonesy the other day about this… how the gentrification of these neighborhoods is so visible… we were wondering what is disappearing. We’ve been going to ONE Archive and researching where different adult theatres were located…

BRADFORD:
What they looked liked, how they functioned…

TYLER:
Where were some of those?

CLARA:
The Park Theatre in Westlake is where Pat Rocco started to show his softcore gay porn movies. They were some of the earliest gay public screenings. The theatre is still there but it’s now a swap meet. Another was the Coronet Theatre on La Cienega…

BRADFORD:
The Coronet was like the LA Film Forum of the 1940’s. That’s where Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos and Curtis Harrington would go to watch films. I remember a story, not sure if it was at the Coronet but… there was a screening where Anger and Harrington were sitting next to Josef von Sternberg… this was the context that people would watch work in, the same context where Anger’s print of Fireworks was seized. The venues would switch from theater to theatre when it was screening porn. The Coronet became a nudie theatre for a while until it was shut down.

CLARA:
Pat Rocco put a nerdy care into his programs. He would make everything himself, these collages of films he promoted for himself… he basically made most of the films that were shown at the Park Theatre. He presented films until around 1971 and by then the possibilities for screening explicit sex was more open… it didn’t need to be so underground. So he became disinterested and turned to activism and joined the Gay Liberation Front.

BRADFORD:
It was like the transition from silent to talkies. You watch Bob Mizer go through the same transition where he’s like “oh, fuck, I can’t just show a dude in a loincloth wrestling, I need to show fucking now”… there is an interesting tension in his films that Billy Miller has screened around a lot. It went from being cute to being hard.

CLARA:
But going back to your question, we are very aware of where we are situating this project in the shifting cultural and social landscape… and asking what does it mean to bring a new cultural project into this neighborhood and how to do it in a way that is responsible and thinking about the kinds of impact it will have. Machine Project has been in Echo Park for many years, doing specific cultural work and artistic projects… it is a small-scale space…

BRADFORD:
Fringe, maybe?

CLARA:
In New York there’s a platform called Common Practice… artistic spaces that want to maintain a certain scale, not interested in becoming huge institutions, but also don’t want to disappear so they have to find a sustainable model.

Machine Project already had this perfect theatre for this project, so it made sense to present there.

BRADFORD:
I lived in Los Angeles from 2003 to 2008 and I remember what Silverlake was then and what Silverlake has become… of course the Silverlake that people like to celebrate is way before my tenure here but I think it’s important to keep the project open. We’re not making an accurate recreation of a specific porn theatre but rather suggesting to the past. This seems to be a project that can be re-creatable. It’s an experiment in attempting to engage a wide array of local film-goers as well as people outside of that spectrum…

CLARA:
We want this event to spread out into the queer community as much as possible, not something we are doing for the usual cinephiles, film nerds, art crowd… We want this to bring people from The Eagle…

BRADFORD:
We want people to fuck in it.

CLARA:
Yes, for it to be a sex space. Porn, cinema, explicit sexuality… for diverse crowds.

BRADFORD:
Sam said we should put it on Craigslist.

CLARA:
Yea, we should put an ad in the LA Weekly classifieds.

TYLER:
So for people who aren’t familiar with Dirty Looks and happen to be interested in attending Sesión Continua, what kinds of porn will you be screening?

CLARA:
We cannot say titles!

BRADFORD:
Haha! They will be early porns. Essentially, we looked back at the works that were being screened in these theatres… We aren’t going to screen Portrait of Jason (1967), but I find it interesting that in the programs you’ve got a series of skin flicks and then you’ve got a sexy illustration of a guy announcing a new film by Shirley Clarke. The works that we now acknowledge as making important cultural strides in the understanding of queer subjectivities were being positioned alongside Sticks and Stones (1970), a far more nefarious take on gay life that exploited a single dick shot for Boys in the Band (1970) style dialogue and self hatred…

So, there will be east and west coast, vintage, gay, lesbian, explicit, porn, experimental moving-image work…

If you look at Wakefield Poole and Fred Halsted, they’re like the fucking yin and yang of this project… you’ve got Poole making picturesque, sun kissed dunes and then there’s Halsted kicking Joey in the face and throwing him down the stairs…

CLARA:
And fucking a motorcycle.

BRADFORD:
And fucking a motorcycle, yea… and fisting.

CLARA:
Halsted’s one of the earliest to be collected by the MoMA film collection, since the 1970’s. His work has been cohabiting with Buñuel, and those guys… further blurring the historical classifications, censorship, degradation…

BRADFORD:
Unlike some people, we aren’t interested in towing the line between what is porn and what is art… but actually just creating a space where that question isn’t begged.

CLARA:
We want to present queer sexuality on film… a wider range of desires. We want that space of representation, which is not reality, to generate a queer space for us to go wild with what are desires are, experimenting in a consensual way… that in most spaces we cannot.

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DIRTY LOOKS is a roaming screening series, a salon of influences, an open platform for inquiry, discussion and debate. Over the course of four years, Dirty Looks NYC has staged local screening initiatives at The Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, Participant Inc, White Columns, Artists Space and Judson Memorial Church, with a Roadshow touring the West Coast yearly. Dirty Looks: On Location, a month of queer interventions in New York City spaces, was founded in 2012, installing moving image work in significant queer spaces – both contemporary and shuttered – throughout the city. A biennial initiative, On Location will return in 2015.
dirtylooksnyc.org

CLARA LÓPEZ MENÉNDEZ is an art worker, practicing in the curatorial field, art criticism, performance and other writings. She holds a MA in Curatorial Studies from CCS, is the co-director and curator of the experimental queer film and performance platform DL: Los Angeles and has realized projects in Berlin, Detroit, New York and São Paulo and written for GLU, Disruptive Laughter, Randy, and Mousse.

BRADFORD NORDEEN is the founder of Dirty Looks, a bi-coastal platform for queer experimental film and video. Nordeen has organized screenings internationally and has programmed for Outfest, MIX NYC and the Milwaukee Underground Film festivals. His writing has been published in Art In America, the Huffington Post, Afterimage, Lambda Literary, Little Joe and Butt Magazine, among others. He lives in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, NY.

MACHINE PROJECT