Swoon: Ten Years of Killer Films
September 22–October 8, 2005

Killer Films and its triumvirate of partners, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, and Katie Roumel, have created some of the most singular and daring work of the past decade. The New York–based production company is one of the few left in the United States that is truly independent—never compromising, never shrinking from controversy. It is interesting to recall that the landmarks of so-called New Queer Cinema produced by Killer Films—Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992), Steve McLean’s Postcards from America (1994), and Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994)—were pilloried at the time of their release for purportedly endorsing negative or reductive gay images. Moreover, the sexual politics of Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) managed at once to unsettle traditional family values and "alternative lifestyles," which was no less true of Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), Haynes’s Safe (1995) and Far from Heaven (2002), and John Waters’s A Dirty Shame (2004). Although the films in this tribute defy easy labels, they share a commitment to surprising, intimate, honest, and exquisitely crafted storytelling. On September 22, Mary Harron introduces the New York premiere of her new film, The Notorious Bettie Page (2005); Todd Haynes, Tom Kalin, John Cameron Mitchell, Cindy Sherman, and John Waters will also introduce their screenings.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media. Special thanks to Charles Pugliese.

Safe. 1995. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. With Julianne Moore, Peter Friedman, Xander Berkeley. A San Fernando Valley homemaker finds her life slowly but inexorably falling apart when environmental threats, real or imagined, begin insinuating themselves into her mind and body, and the New Age health retreat where she takes refuge proves no refuge at all. Brilliant visual and aural conceits like the dissolving of interior and exterior space; a pervasive antiseptic sterility; and even the maddening hums of refrigerators and air conditioners evoke the insidious banality of a woman’s Stepford life and her own psychic disintegration—themes that Haynes and Moore would later revisit in Far from Heaven. 119 min.
Thursday, September 22, 5:45 (introduced by Haynes); Sunday, September 25, 2:00. T1

The Notorious Bettie Page. 2005. USA. Directed by Mary Harron. Screenplay by Harron, Guinevere Turner. With Gretchen Mol, Lili Taylor, David Strathairn. Bettie Page was the most successful pin-up of the 1950s. Her legendary photographs made her the target of a Senate investigation into pornography, turning her into one of the first sex icons. New York premiere. 92 min.
Thursday, September 22, 8:30 (introduced by Harron). T1

Apparatus Productions: He Was Once. 1989. USA. Written and directed by Mary Hestand. With Todd Haynes, Melissa Gardner, Todd Adams. A grotesque send-up of Davey and Goliath, the claymation Christian morality show. Who’d have guessed that Davey’s father has a sadomasochistic streak and a leather fetish? 15 min.
Dottie Gets Spanked. 1993. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. A Freudian case study of a prepubescent boy who has wild dreams about his favorite television comedienne, the Lucille Ball–like star of The Dottie Show. 27 min.
Don’t Look up My Skirt Unless You Mean It. 1994. USA. Directed by Marlene McCarty, Christine Vachon. A music video that asks, "Are You Experienced?" 3 min.
Anemone Me. 1990. USA. Directed by Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog), Bruce Hainley. A reverie about the romance between a blind black bodybuilder and a white "mer-boy." 35 min. Program 80 min.
Friday, September 23, 6:30; Saturday, October 1, 2:00. T1

Go Fish. 1994. USA. Directed by Rose Troche. Screenplay by Troche, Guinevere Turner. With Turner, V. S. Brodie, T. Wendy McMillan. A hip romantic comedy with charm, wit, sensuality, and visual flair to spare, Troche’s debut film was one of the first to depict the lesbian community in all its subtle shadings and contradictions. With its superlative all-female cast, a cleverly observational script, and gorgeously stylized black-and-white cinematography, Go Fish remains as fresh as ever. 85 min.
Friday, September 23, 8:30. T1; Thursday, October 6, 8:30. T2

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Nomads. 1993. USA. Directed by Tom Kalin. Music by Brian Eno. A founding member of the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury, Kalin made a series of witty and elegiac “video diaries” throughout the 1990s, of which this delirious music video is a prime example. 5 min.
Postcards from America. 1994. USA. Written and directed by Steve McLean. With James Lyons, Michael Imperioli, Michael Ringer. Drawing on the autobiographical writings of artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, McLean evokes a man filled with fierce rage, inchoate longing, and prodigious creativity. The film interweaves three chapters from Wojnarowicz’s brief but copious life: the grim suburban childhood made unbearable by his alcoholic father’s brutal beatings; the precarious teenage years spent as a Times Square hustler; and the timeless present, in which he becomes a young man wandering lost in the desert. 89 min.
Saturday, September 24, 2:00 (introduced by Kalin and producer Craig Paull). T1; Thursday, October 6, 6:30 (introduced by Kalin). T2

Swoon. 1992. USA. Directed by Tom Kalin. Screenplay by Kalin, Hilton Als. With Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester, Ron Vawter. By making the killers’ homosexuality the essential issue, Kalin’s radically stylized account of the notorious 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case is truer to historical record than previous dramatizations like Hitchcock’s Rope and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion. With the intoxicatingly romantic look of a vintage Warner Bros. crime melodrama, Swoon tells the sensational story of two wealthy, brilliant Jewish lovers whose thrill-seeking crime spree culminates in the senseless murder of a Chicago schoolboy. 90 min.
Saturday, September 24, 4:00 (introduced by Kalin); Saturday, October 8, 6:30. T1

Office Killer. 1997. USA. Directed by Cindy Sherman. Screenplay by Elise MacAdam, Tom Kalin. With Carol Kane, Molly Ringwald, Jeanne Tripplehorn. Sherman brings the B-movie aesthetic and black humor of her celebrated Film Stills photographic series to this low-budget, Grand Guignol horror film about a down-at-the-heels New York magazine company where office backstabbing and stifling monotony lead to a torrent of murder and mayhem. 83 min.
Saturday, September 24, 6:30 (introduced by Sherman); Monday, October 3, 6:30. T1

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A Dirty Shame. 2004. USA. Written and directed by John Waters. With Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Selma Blair. Only Waters could have turned a piece of scientific obscurata—the bizarre fact that severe concussion victims have been known to suffer the side effect of uncontrollable carnal lust—into a raunchy, orgiastic farce about sex addicts let loose on the streets of a button-down, blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood. Celebrating the sexual education and sexploitation pictures of his youth, Waters calls A Dirty Shame "a comedy based on what would happen if your mother or your aunt turned into a ho in your own neighborhood." 89 min.
Saturday, September 24, 8:30. T1; Thursday, September 29, 6:00 (introduced by Waters). T2

Far from Heaven. 2002. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. With Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Patricia Clarkson, Dennis Haysbert. The love that dare not speak its name, even in Sirkian and Ophulsian melodramas. Haynes exposes the toxic underbelly of a 1950s ViewMaster America in this sad and glorious portrait of a marriage crumbling under the weight of too many secrets and lies. With its quietly wrenching performances and exquisitely crafted mise-en-scène, this is one of the Department of Film and Media’s most treasured new acquisitions. 107 min.
Sunday, September 25, 5:00; Saturday, October 1, 4:00. T1

Kids. 1995. USA. Directed by Larry Clark. Screenplay by Harmony Korine. With Leo Fitzpatrick, Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson. "A nightmare of depravity," was how one critic, former senator Bob Dole, described Kids…. Clark brings the sober (and sobering) documentary feel of his photographic essays Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983) to this portrait of New York City skateboarding teens engaging in what seems to be a typical Walpurgisnacht of sexual deflowering, drug taking, gay bashing, thieving, and brawling. Terrence Rafferty observes in The New Yorker that "the obsessive, ardent gaze [Clark] turns on his subjects as they stumble toward oblivion has a strangely aestheticizing effect; he can’t help turning these wasted, aimless kids into icons of the beautiful and damned." 90 min.
Wednesday, September 28, 8:00; Sunday, October 2, 5:00. T1

Happiness. 1998. USA. Written and directed by Todd Solondz. With Jane Adams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Baker. "The film is a dark and deadpan comedy of dysfunctional manners meant to skewer the facade of suburban family life—a description that makes it sound all too trendy and contemporary [.… But] Solondz’s art has something in common with the novels of William Gaddis, or the songs of Bob Dylan: Like those towering American artists, his vision is surpassingly caustic—even, at times, vindictive. We can certainly yearn for magnificently accusatory artists like these to grow to find a greater sympathy in their work, a greater forgiveness" (Jonathan Lethem). 134 min.
Thursday, September 29, 8:15; Sunday, October 2, 2:00. T2

Hedwig and the Angry Inch. 2001. USA. Directed by John Cameron Mitchell. Screenplay by Mitchell, based on the musical play by Mitchell and Stephen Trask. Animation by Emily Hubley. With Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor. A wickedly funny rebuke to Rent and other anodyne rock musicals, and a poignant homage to the camp-drag stage productions of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company, Hedwig tells the tragic story of a never-was glam rock star who rails against the botched sex-change operation that has left her with "an angry inch," and an ungrateful ex-lover who is now topping the charts with the songs they wrote together. 95 min.
Friday, September 30, 8:45; Saturday, October 8, 4:00 (both screenings introduced by Mitchell). T1

Poison. 1991. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. With Edith Meeks, Larry Maxwell. Haynes draws upon the writings of Jean Genet to tell three stories of transgression in three strikingly different styles. A top prizewinner at Sundance, Haynes’s breakthrough film was made in a climate of fear and hostility toward homosexuals during the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. 85 min.

Saturday, October 1, 6:30. T1; Friday, October 7, 8:45. T2

Velvet Goldmine. 1998. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. With Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Christian Bale. Haynes’s intoxicating fantasy about a 1970s glam rock star who fakes his death boldly combines the ironic melancholy of Roxy Music, the haunting androgyny of early David Bowie, the languid dandy posturing of Nicholas Roeg’s Performance, and the trippy futuristic aesthetic of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 123 min.

Saturday, October 1, 8:30. T1; Friday, October 7, 6:15. T2

Boys Don’t Cry. 1999. USA. Directed by Kimberly Peirce. Screen-play by Peirce, Andy Bienen. With Hilary Swank, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard. In 1993, twenty-one-year-old Teena Brandon was raped and murdered in Falls City, Nebraska, for impersonating a man. Swank’s lacerating performance evokes the fiercely independent vision of a girl who transformed herself into her fantasy of a boy, and then fell in love with another girl. 114 min.

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