CONFESSIONS

In commemoration of World Aids Day, @FramesFilmSeries presents CONFESSIONS, a selection of works by the prolific American filmmaker Curt McDowell (1945-1987), whose provocative and endearingly irreverent short films embrace the outlandish in a salacious celebration of early 1970's queer underground cinema.

Featuring a recurring ensemble of family & friends, these outrageously bawdy and memorable low-brow delights depict an array of outcast degenerates in a series of subversive broken dream melodramas and campy musical routines.

Preceding the films will be a short presentation by Regional HIV/AIDS Connection (RHAC)(@hivaidsconnect) highlighting their educational outreach and community resources.

PROGRAM

AINSLIE TRAILER
1972 | colour | 16mm | sound | 2 minutes

A Musical Ad sung with gusto and sincerity by Miss Ainslie Pryor. A MUST for A.P. fans. (C.M.)

CONFESSIONS
1971 | B&W | 16mm | sound | 11 minutes

"Just as outrageous is Curt McDowell's CONFESSIONS. McDowell, a graduate student at San Francisco Art Institute, opens his film with a confession to his mother and father, listing in exhausting detail his sins of the flesh. Sort of a portait-of-a-young-film-maker-as-a-sexual-tool, CONFESSIONS is funny, vigorous, and remarkably frank. "

— Ron Epple

WIENERS & BUNS MUSICAL
1972 | B&W | 16mm | sound | 14 minutes 

"Wieners and Buns Musical really is a musical, a domestic musical, with songs, and with a housewife heroine named Trixie (Ainslie Pryor) who dresses like a Dorothy Lamour South-Sea islander and yearns for something better - specifically, her lover rather than her husband (George Kuchar) ... It earns its grades - pretty good grades - as much for depth of impudence as for range of invention." - The New York Times

TRUE BLUE & DREAMY
1973 | B&W | 16mm | sound | 12 minutes

A real and favorite dream of mine, preserved on film to be re-lived over and over. (C.M.)

DORA MYRTLE
1973 | B&W | 16mm | sound | 9 minutes

Ainslie Pryor in two miniature dramas, utilizing wind sound effects, canned laughter and "I Love Lucy" lighting.

THE MEAN BROTHERS "GET STOOD UP"
1973 | B&W | 16mm | sound | 3 minutes

Two brothers are stood up and lament through song.

STINKY-BUTT
1974 | B&W | 16mm | sound | 3 minutes

The film that caused Sheri Milbradt to lose 40 pounds. (C.M.)

"... a psychological comedy - a bizarre satire on works like Polanski's Repulsion." — Michigan Daily

BEAVER FEVER
1974 | B&W | 16mm | sound | 19 minutes

Starring George Kuchar as "Hunk", Mrs. Ruby B. David as "Aunt Ruth," and introducing Melinda McDowell as the much-abused, sex bomb "Goldenrod". (C.M.)

"... Fever at least attempted to tell a story..." — The Michigan Daily

Artist Bio

“…Life for [McDowell] was a fast track to fast times that included devilish detours into forbidden erogenous zones. He explored all those zones with a zealous zeal: painter, pornographer, poet of the plebeian and the perverse…” - George Kuchar

Curt McDowell worked in San Francisco from the late 1960s until his death in 1987- a period that witnessed the Summer of Love, gay liberation, and the onset of AIDS, to which he succumbed at the age of forty-two. The author of numerous films that recast the American dream of plenty in pansexual terms, McDowell, like so many artists of his generation, indulged in the era's carnal abundance, and his appetites and experiences are reflected in the work, which alternates between the revealing and the puerile. His short films, such as Weiners and Buns Musical (1972) and Loads (1980), celebrate sex as well as genre riffing and autobiographical narratives (McDowell's insatiable desire for seducing straight men is explicitly documented in his 16-mm works), and bear the influences of Jack Smith's lush, DIY camp aesthetic, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's explosive melodrama, and Nan Goldin's glimpses of countercultural bohemia.

- Glen Helfand, ArtForum

This program is supported in part by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.