Black, white, and blue

Queer '70s shorts look at sex.

By Johnny Ray Huston

STRETCHED OUT ON a patchwork quilt, a macramé pillow beneath his head, Curt McDowell begins his pre-Thundercrack! 1971 short "Confessions" by looking directly at his mom and dad (i.e., the lens of his 16mm camera) and confessing. The s at the end of the film's title is crucial. McDowell has plenty to unload: he's had three-ways, he's had four-ways, he's taken part in circle jerks, and he's even fallen in love – an admittance that causes him to close his eyes before tears can spill out. Mock-sincerity implodes, and "Confessions" becomes an interview-interspersed sexuality and personality party. Billie Holiday and Ray Charles fight for control of the soundtrack as McDowell's mentor and peer George Kuchar navigates a flesh-furnished noir maze that resembles an S.F. apartment.

McDowell's antic sensibility is unique. But he certainly wasn't alone in exploring sex and self during the '70s. That decade – the current stopping point in San Francisco Cinematheque's ongoing "40 Years in Focus" retrospective – saw explorations and representations of gay and lesbian sex merge in celebration. Roles were bent, and rules were broken, parts not played to fetishistic perfection.

Michael Wallin's 1975 "The Place Between Our Bodies" could also be titled "Confessions," though it offers an earnest color counterpart to McDowell's black-and-white frolic. "The film is stridently pre-AIDS, much more than any mid-'70s porn," Todd Haynes observes in the journal Afterimage, describing Wallin's 33-minute narrative-of-sorts: "sexual love overcomes gay alienation and sexual hunger." Two decades after "Place," Wallin made "Black Sheep Boy," and his approach – first-person voice-over and a gaze that leaps from one stiff cock or tight pair of jeans to another – hadn't changed. But "Black Sheep Boy" remains locked in solitude and fickle devotion, whereas the comparatively fearless "Place" leaves the streets and adult bookstores of '70s San Francisco (shot in vivid color) for greener nature-boyfriend territory.

Other shorts in Saturday's "Queer Avant-Garde" program possess single-minded formal rigor. Barbara Hammer's 1977 "Multiple Orgasm" and James Broughton's 1979 "Hermes Bird" celebrate cunt and cock respectively. Hammer's silent 10-minute movie matches clit close-ups with rock and cave overlays to create an orgy of orifices. (Canyon Cinema indeed.) Filming the slo-mo, no-hands ascension of a hard-on – in sideways profile – Broughton transcends porno presentation of skin, but he can't resist indulging in voice-over lyricism. Su Friedrich's 1981 "Gently down the Stream" shuffles dream text and dream imagery – the ominous allure of night waters – to generate a more deft and evocative form of poetry.

'Obscure Love': Great Rodriguez

Cinematheque begins its spring program with "Obscure Love and Death," a sweet and bloody selection of celluloid valentines gathered by Stom Sogo. The standouts among the handful I viewed were by Jose Rodriguez, a recent San Francisco Art Institute graduate of some notoriety (he was expelled and reinstated). Rodriguez's talent more than matches his provocation. One of his "anonymous films" is a handsome Lewis Klahr-like collage in which bodies and knives perform a cannibalistic dance, with religious icons cast as voyeurs; another trumps Harmony Korine's and Larry Clark's visions of boy sexuality, and a third discovers the deteriorating remains of a cat within a chilling snow white void.

San Francisco Cinematheque presents 'Obscure Love and Death' Thurs/14, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, S.F., and 'Forty Years in Focus: The Queer Avant-Garde' Sat/16, San Francisco Art Institute, S.F. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times.