Revolverkino + critic.de at the Gropius Bau: Gay Panic!
Every month over three consecutive evenings, the film magazine Revolverkino at the Gropius Bau explore the limits of what cinema can be: focusing on film histories, formats and genres. This November the third series is titled Gay Panic! and is presented by Michael Kienzl, the film critic and editor of critic.de.
Wednesday 28.11.2018
19:30 Sleepaway Camp
Robert Hiltzik, USA 1984, 84 min
35 mm, English
Print courtesy of the Phil Blankenship Collection at the Academy Film Archive
21:00 Discussion with Michael Kienzl and Christoph Draxtra
Thursday 29.11.2018
19:30 Night Warning aka Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker
William Asher, USA 1982, 96 min
35 mm, English
21:10 Boys Beware
Sid Davis, USA 1961, 10 min
Digital File, English
21:20 The Hitcher
Robert Harmon, USA 1986, 97 min
35 mm, English with Finnish and Swedish subtitles
Friday 30.11.2018
19:30 Mystery Screening 1
Jack Sholder, USA 1985, 82 min
35 mm, German-language version
21:00 Mystery Screening 2
William Friedkin, USA 1980, 102 min
35 mm, English
In 1980s US horror cinema, time and again there are storylines, motifs and moments in which even the mere suspicion of homosexuality triggers great discomfort. The five films in the series Gay Panic! – all shown as 35 mm copies – tell stories that are sometimes told though diffuse subtexts and sometimes told very concretely as disconcerting tales of the invasion of the other, which for young men in particular seem to have terrifying, traumatising and contagious effects.
Yet instead of demonising gay men, the films focus instead on inner struggles and suppressed desired, questioning the tyranny of the supposedly natural, and together with their characters succumb to the fascination of the unknown. Last but not least, the series also pays tribute to a cinematic genre that constantly questions its own relationship to the norm, based as it is on established narrative patterns, but at the same time with its penchant for the eccentric, kooky and silly, it finds its own aesthetic far beyond the confines of bourgeois taste.