A series of afternoon underground queer cinema at The Horse Hospital. Buddies (1985), directed by Arthur Bressan Jr., was the first narrative film made about AIDS. Alongside Buddies, Bressan is known for the documentary Gay USA and a number of pornographic films. The screening will be proceeded by a selection of shorts directed by the video artist and AIDS activist Tom Rubnitz.
Doors 1pm, Screening 1:30pm
Tickets £8-10, NOTAFLOF
Series Pass: £15 (three weeks)
Arthur J. Bressan Jr. (Gay USA) created this indie masterpiece in 1985, which was the first feature-length drama about AIDS. When 25 year-old gay yuppie David (David Schachter) volunteers to be a "buddy" to an AIDS patient, the gay community center assigns him to Robert (Geoff Edholm), a 32 year-old politically impassioned gay California gardener abandoned by his friends and lovers. Revolving around the confines of Robert's Manhattan hospital room, Bressan skillfully unfolds this devastating two-hander (the rest of the cast is only heard offscreen). As David gazes out at the piers and rooftops of Manhattan, we hear his deftly scripted diary entries in voiceover. And as David is changed by knowing Robert, so, too, are we. In the simplicity of the story and the elegance of its unfolding, Buddies achieves a rare perfection. It's a timeless portrayal of an entire era in gay history.
Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, presented the film's original world premiere on September 12th, 1985 at the Castro Theatre as a benefit for the Shanti Project, with Bressan and his cast in attendance. Five days later, on September 17th 1985, President Ronald Reagan said the word "AIDS" in public for the first time. Sadly, Bressan and actor Geoff Edholm both died of AIDS, in 1987 and 1989 respectively.
Buddies was scripted in San Francisco in five days with input from friends with AIDS. It was shot independently in nine days in New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco with a budget of approximately $27,000. Bressan said "For me there is a real moral issue in going around and raising several hundred thousand dollars to make a movie about the pain and suffering and lives of people with AIDS who can't make rent and are living on food stamps. I really felt I'd better make Buddies small, low budget, and powerful... I did not want to spend a year or two doing an AIDS movie which should be made now."
Over the course of the 1980s and up until his untimely death from HIV/AIDS related complications in 1992, Tom Rubnitz captured the personalities and energy of the East Village scene in his loony, anarchic, and hallucigenically-colored short videos. Screwball TV broadcasts from an alternate reality, these videos take the form of cooking shows, music videos, or kids shows, featuring downtown artists like Ann Magnuson, and drag legends-in-the-making RuPaul, the Lady Bunny, and Hapi Phace. As Amy Taubin wrote, Rubnitz's "glitter-dusted videos distill the sensibility of a generation of TV babies whose venue of choice was the Pyramid Club rather than the Whitney Museum." Rubnitz and his demented TV takeoffs live on in the YouTube era, with the ever-popular Pickle Surprise racking up over two million views and inspiring fan remixes and remakes. Rubnitz maintained a fine art studio practice and in SoHo and was included in various exhibitions, including a three-person show at Artists’ Space in 1980.