Films That Fuck: Re-uses of Pornography in Moving Image Practices During the HIV/AIDS Crisis and the Present

Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS,Barbara Hammer, 1986, 8 min
They Are Lost to Vision Altogether, Tom Kalin, 1989, 13 min
Fear of Disclosure | Psycho-Social Implications of HIV Revelation, Phil Zwickler & David Wojnarowicz, 1989, 5 min
Frank’s Cock, Mike Hoolboom, 1993, 8 min
Please Relax Now, Vika Kirchenbauer, 2014, 12 min
False Wife, Jamie Crewe, 2022, 15 min
A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M, Jerry Tartaglia, 1988, 7 min, 16mm
Depollute, P Staff, 2019, 2 min, 16mm

During the initial years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, homophobia from outside the queer community and a fear of infection from within led to a growing erotophobia and stigma around queer sex or pleasure. To combat the existential threat posed both socio-politically and medically, queer artists understood the inadequacies of existing media and developed new strategies for activist moving image. This programme highlights one such strategy, namely pornography, either manipulated or presented as found footage, which was used to celebrate queer sex as a source of pleasure rather than shame. The pornographic also served as a tool with which artists were able to foreground the embodied, their work communicating with a viewer’s body as much as their intellect. Doing so provided an opportunity to document the pain AIDS was inflicting on individual bodies (often those of the artists or those close to them) in opposition to a dominant media narrative which dehumanised the seropositive.

Whilst the works from the AIDS crisis in this programme predominantly focus on cis gay male experiences, their use of the pornographic as an embodied media has influenced contemporary practitioners exploring a wider breadth of queer identity. Also presented in this programme are artistic uses of new forms of pornography that have emerged in the internet age such as popperbate or masturbation instruction videos, which remain a technology through which artists can engage a viewer with corporeality through queer, trans and feminist perspectives.

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Showing as part of Open City Documentary Festival