Five highlights from BFI Flare 2015

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What’s not to like about BFI Southbank being filled with cinephilic fairies and their friends for a week? The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival might have been rebranded as BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival last year, but while the full name remains a mouthful, the event itself still slips down a treat. As I mentioned in my festival preview for Sight & Sound, 2015 falls between 2014’s rebranding and 2016’s 30th anniversary edition of the fest. Even if it didn’t have a high concept, there was plenty to get stuck into, notably a great tranche of meaty documentaries.

Queer performers on screen
This of course is a particular interest of mine, and it was well served at Flare 2015. Stand-out title was the world premiere of Dressed as a Girl, Colin Rothbart’s feature documentary about the hugely influential east London alternative drag scene spearheaded by Jonny Woo and also including Holestar, Scottee, John Sizzle, Amber Swallows and Pia Arber (plus a good dollop of Ma Butcher). Woo and Rothbart became partners during the six years of the film’s production but there’s no hagiography or triumphalism here: focusing more on the personal lives of its subjects than their creative output, it paints an often troubling picture in which the facilitators of fun deal with trauma, insecurity, the challenges of mental and physical health and gender transition. It’s still a right laugh – Holestar’s drag school is a knucklebiter for the ages – and highly moving without veering into sentimentality. Rothbart’s TV pedigree seems evident in some of the more obviously pre-arranged episodes, and there’s less of these artists’ actual work on show than their massive talents deserve. Overall, though, an invaluable document of a unique scene, by turns outrageous, eye-opening, funny and affecting.

There were plenty more queer performers on screen throughout the festival. At my own night, BURN: From Hackney to Vauxhall, I showcased some of Woo, Holestar and Scottee’s distinctive video work, along with pieces by David Hoyle and Figs in Wigs, from Thatcher drag in Brighton to heartfelt nocturnal performance poetry. (Runaway favourite was the Figs’ puntastic celebrity nosh anthem Cilla Black Bean Sauce.) Elsewhere were two complementary shorts by Silas Howard: the first, Sticks and Stones: Bambi Lake, was a bracing and bittersweet portrait of veteran San Francisco trans performer Bambi Lake; the second is a music video for Justin Vivian Bond’s achingly riveting version of Lake’s song The Golden Age of Hustlers. There were also chances to see young genderqueer London performers Oozing Gloop, JonBenet Blonde and Alexus De Luxe in Joseph Wilson’s swoony short doc Drag Is My Ecstasy, and UK cabaret legends David Hoyle and Sarah-Louise Young in dramatic roles in Nathan Evans’ spiky short Curtains. Not to mention the spectacular instance of congregational queerdom that was the one-off presentation of that most iconic stage-to-screen adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the BFI IMAX, the country’s biggest screen.

Defending queer spaces 
As the Rocky Horror screening, with its costumes and callbacks, made clear, queer spaces are important not only for their ostensible purpose – watching a film, having a drink, finding a shag – but also for all the other kinds of identity-, culture- and community-building they fertilise. That’s why I’ve been so exercised this year by the number of LGBT bars and clubs closing down in London. (See here, here, here etc etc etc.) But the same forces apply around the world. Kate Kunath’s documentary We Came To Sweat followed the battle to save the Starlite Lounge in Brooklyn, a bar which since 1962 had provided fun, security and community for a clientele of predominantly black LGBT New Yorkers. Insecure ownership and rising real-estate prices put paid to that, and Kunath’s film shows the real practical challenges of coordinating any kind of effective pushback against market forces even when community investment in a venue is high – and the devastating emotional consequences of those forces’ success. “You need these type of places just like you need churches,” one veteran patron observes.

I also took the chance to flag up the threat to queer spaces in the BURN programme and presented the world premiere of Tim Brunsden’s 50-minute documentary Save The Tavern – a portrait of another majestic redwood of the queer forest around which the loggers of capitalism are circling, chainsaws at the ready. A venue of queer socialising and performance since the post-war years, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern has recently been bought by property developers who refuse to disclose their intentions. Brunsden’s film makes clear the RVT’s rich and diverse contribution to the welfare and culture of the queer community in London and beyond. It was complemented at BURN by Cut To – the short film I made with Tricity Vogue based around a performance of hers at the Tavern during which she got her hair cut and crossed gender lines – and elsewhere in the festival by Female Masculinity Appreciation Society, another short shot at the RVT, this one by Jackie Nunns and Angie West during Bar Wotever’s arm-wrestling-heavy night of the same name.

The continued rise of trans visibility
The past few years have seen an explosion of film work broaching different aspects of trans experience – a quiet revolution that has developed largely under the umbrella of festival programming but is increasingly making inroads to the mainstream. There was plenty of evidence for this at Flare 2015, not least in one of the fest’s most buzzy titles, François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend. I went in without knowing much about the story so was genuinely surprised by the plot twist that sends a tale of middle-class mourning into uncharted waters. No spoilers here beyond appreciation for a terrific picture that evokes the bourgeois-subversive mode of Sirk, Almodóvar and Haynes to tell a story about transvestism that will have both queer and mainstream audiences intrigued, charmed and ultimately reaching for their hankies. It’s on UK general release next month.

Another trans Flare title went on general release this past weekend: Something Must Break, Swedish director Ester Martin Bergsmark’s feature follow-up to the experimental hybrid film She-Male Snails. Something Must Break is a tour de force, an aggressive adolescent punk howl compared to the gentle negotiations of The New Girlfriend’s reimagining of comfortably settled adult life. Both are tales of becoming but Bergsmark’s is told from a place of disenfranchisement, rooted in a powerhouse central performance from Saga Becker as Sebastian/Ellie, tentatively entering both adulthood and trans identity through a fractious relationship with Iggy Malmborg’s Andreas. Boasting fizzing, dynamic visuals and music, it’s a tale of outlaw romance that resolves into a case study in determined self-assurance.

Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini’s documentary Mala Mala, meanwhile, follows nine Puerto Ricans, some trans, some involved in drag performance. Personal histories are interwoven with economic observations and political activism to potent effect, with a spectrum of subjectivities explored. Only one of the subjects is a trans man, however, and indeed throughout this new boom in trans visibility, stories of male-to-female experience continue to outnumber female-to-male – though it’s worth noting that Peccadillo Pictures are planning a theatrical release for last year’s Flare closing film, 52 Tuesdays, a story of FTM transition shot over the course of a year.

Mmm… beefcake
The most emotional moment of the festival might just have been the spontaneous standing ovation that greeted 83-year-old Tab Hunter when he took to the stage after the screening of Tab Hunter Confidential, Jeffrey Schwarz’s affectionate and informative documentary portrait of one of 50s America’s quintessential slabs of beefcake. It was bizarre if not surprising to learn that he had to barricade himself in classrooms at high school to avoid hordes of hormonal girls; more revelatory were details about his relationship with Anthony Perkins; and most charming was how utterly decent and likeable Hunter seems to have remained throughout family strife, closeted stardom, career skids and horse-riding retirement. A sympathetic subject doesn’t always make for riveting viewing, however, and Schwarz shortchanges the really fascinating and much thornier subject right under his nose: the practical and emotional minefield of lavender Hollywood in the 50s and 60s.

The documentary made for a fab double bill with The Golden Age of the American Male, a collection of erotica from just that period made by Bob Mizer, aka the Athletic Model Guild. As Rupert Smith’s introduction made clear, Mizer’s work more or less defined many of the types of gay desire that remain potent to this day, from biker to surfer, cop to twink. Hot guys aside, the shorts are notable for several things: they often boast impressive props and costumes ‘shared’ with legit productions made elsewhere in Los Angeles at the same time; and there’s a consistent narrative pattern not of seduction but of conflict in the form of horseplay and roughhousing. More than anything, the appeal of the films lies in their surfeit of something almost entirely absent from today’s porn: a palpable sense of fun. To say that the guys before the camera are bad actors would be to miss the point; their dramatic incompetence serves as evidence of a conspiracy of pleasure between those making the movies and those watching them, an abandonment of any attempt to privilege text over subtext.

Something similar yet different takes place in Kent Lambert’s experimental short Reckoning 3, in which hypermacho gaming images – boxers, soldiers, gunmen – are repurposed to pseudo-erotic and homosocial ends. Pixelmade hardmen hump, the disembodied voices of online players are heard competing and commiserating and the business of devoting so many leisure hours to the simulation of violence begins to feel awfully queer.

54: The Director’s Cut
Directors’ cuts tend to be a mixed bag – like remakes, they are often little more than excuses to cash in on audience affection for an already-successful picture. New Queer Cinema filmmaker Mark Christopher’s 54 is an intriguing exception: it was shot in 1998 as the nuanced cautionary tale of a bisexual love triangle involving New Jersey teen Shane (Ryan Phillippe) and the young married couple (Salma Hayek and Breckin Meyer) he bonds with when all three are working at iconic 70s NYC nightclub Studio 54. Test audiences hated it and a full third was reshot to make it more conventional. It still flopped, arguably damaging both Christopher’s and Phillippe’s careers, but now the original material has been restored. The result is a far, far better movie, with a much queerer flavour and without the inconsistencies of narrative, character and indeed appearance introduced by the reshoots.

What really struck me about 54: The Director’s Cut were a couple of formal elements that give it a rare potency as a document suffused with dramatic irony – the compromised choices missed opportunities of its narrative are now imprinted in its very fabric. The first such element is the new introductory voiceover recorded for the director’s cut by Phillippe, now in his 40s. His voice is obviously that of an older man; one could be excused for identifying both his own and Christopher’s experiences beneath Shane’s words about becoming embroiled long ago in an industrial glamour machine that chewed him up and spat him out. The other element is in the texture of the image. Some of the original material cut before the 1998 release could be found only in degraded VHS format so there are numerous moments watching the new version of the film when the movie slips from clean celluloid to noisy video. I found a powerful poignancy in such slippage – for the way it acts a reminder of contingency and degradation, the way it makes 54: The Director’s Cut into a palimpsest of periods and technologies. In 1998, the film looked back a couple of decades, showing us a late-70s a world of naïve decadence, ignorant of Aids and the new puritanism. In 2015, the new version looks back a couple of decades, showing us a late-90s world of naïve liberalism, ignorant of 9/11 and the new conformity.

Further listening…
I also participated in an audio roundtable discussion of BFI Flare 2015 for Sight & Sound alongside Sophie Mayer and Frances Morgan, to which you can listen here. Sight & Sound and BFI Flare are both parts of the British Film Institute.