Arousal meets art in the films of Arthur J. Bressan Jr.

We’ve all heard the jokes: “I read it for the articles.” “I watched it for the plot.” They echo a recognizable dissonance: the desire to engage with so-called dirty material cloaked in a gesture of respectability, claiming artistic interest rather than arousal. That very tension between arousal and art is where Arthur J. Bressan Jr. […] The post Arousal meets art in the films of Arthur J. Bressan Jr. appeared first on Chicago Reader.

We’ve all heard the jokes: “I read it for the articles.” “I watched it for the plot.” They echo a recognizable dissonance: the desire to engage with so-called dirty material cloaked in a gesture of respectability, claiming artistic interest rather than arousal. That very tension between arousal and art is where Arthur J. Bressan Jr. built his career. A pioneer of gay adult cinema alongside figures like Fred Halsted and Wakefield Poole, Bressan didn’t just make pornographic films; he made films that demanded to be seen as cinema, worthy of appreciation, interpretation, and serious study. Born in New York City—on the street where West Side Story (1961) was shot, as he liked to remind people—Bressan began his film career in earnest while living in San Francisco, despite having no formal film education. (Although he did make a short film, Boys, while living and teaching in New York City in 1969.) Among his initial endeavors were a short documentary, Coming Out (1972), and a feature documentary, Gay USA (1977), both centered on pride celebrations; the latter is also the first American feature-length documentary by a queer person about queer people. Between making these two films, he began a serious foray into porn with Passing Strangers in 1974, which kicks off the series Sex, Love, & Liberation: The Films of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., programmed by Zack Paslay, at the Music Box Theatre on Friday, July 18. I should disclose here that I programmed a double feature of Passing Strangers and Forbidden Letters (1979) at the Music Box several years ago, with introductions by filmmakers and queer film historians Jenni Olson and Elizabeth Purchell. Olson, along with Bressan’s sister, Roe, had started the Bressan Project, devoted to preserving and promoting the work of the late filmmaker. Because of them, these films have enjoyed a resurgence, complete with 2K restorations and DVD and Blu-ray releases by distributors Altered Innocence and Vinegar Syndrome. Their advocacy and its resultant output—as well as the work of Caden Mark Gardner, K.J. Shepherd, and Tyler Thomas, all of whom, with Purchell, did audio commentaries for the DVDs and Blu-rays—have been instrumental to this renaissance. Sex, Love, & Liberation: The Films of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.Fri 7/18–Sat 7/26, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, $11 general admission, $8 Music Box members, most screenings 18+, musicboxtheatre.com/series-and-festivals/sex-love-liberation-the-films-of-arthur-j-bressan-jr The upcoming screenings are not just great opportunities for people to see the aforementioned films, but three others as well: the X-rated Daddy Dearest (1984) and Juice (1984), and his nonpornographic narrative Buddies (1985), the first feature-length film about AIDS. (Bressan himself died from complications of the disease in 1987.) What distinguishes Bressan as a filmmaker is the preternatural quality he brought to adult cinema, employing undeniable craftsmanship and passion to an area in which it’s often either underrealized or underappreciated. Passing Strangers (which screens on Friday, July 18, at 9:30 PM) was shot in grainy black-and-white and opens in a porn theater, with beautiful silhouetted shots of people watching an adult film shifting to similarly beguiling shots of a projection booth, where the story takes hold. A projectionist calls his friend, Tom (Robert Carnagey), who’s placed a personal ad in a paper looking for a lover. It quotes Walt Whitman’s poem “To a Stranger.” It begins: “Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you, / You must be he I was seeking”; it’s a poem about the search for a meaningful connection with another person, which also alludes to Whitman’s queer tendencies. This encapsulates the beauty of Bressan’s films, rooted as they are in an appreciation for classical art—and even mainstream American pop culture (he was particularly obsessed with musical film star Jeanette MacDonald)—and also in genuine and oftentimes tender stories about people looking not just for sex or love, but connection. A closeted gay teenager, Robert (Robert Adams), answers the man’s ad, and the two begin exchanging letters. (Age-gap relationships are a common theme in Bressan’s films, resulting in problematic effects in his 1983 film Abuse.) In the scene to which we’re introduced to Robert, he masturbates while watching D.W. Griffith’s 1919 film Broken Blossoms, an impetus unlikely to occur in a porn film. In another scene, he looks in a mirror and observes his youthful acne, the vulnerability of which is also unusual. This gives way to an extended orgy between Robert and several men who help him appreciate his body and the pleasure he derives from it. (There are also stunning shots of an engorged penis in silhouette, which is a throughline in Bressan’s films.) When Tom and Robert finally meet in the wooded beaches of San Francisco and consummate their relationship, the film switches to color. This cinematography is as exquisitely lush as the black-and-white cinematography is stark; the sex is accordingly exuberant and playful, as romantic as it is sexual. Forbidden Letters, screening on Saturday, July 19, at 9:30 PM, is similarly epistolary—though less happily so, as it was dangerous for queer people to send love letters to and from prison—and centers on the relationship between a young man, Larry (Adams again), and his older lover, Richard (Richard Locke), who’s going to jail. (Locke is the original “daddy” figure and a fascinating person in his own right; he started a small microcinema in San Francisco and later became a passionate advocate for safe sex.) The black-and-white cinematography is grittier and more forlorn than that of Passing Strangers. In one sequence, Larry goes to a porn theater and seems to transport into the film, observing the goings-on while wearing the shearling denim jacket he’s donning in chilly San Francisco. We then see a flashback of the couple, in color and in happier times. The film’s pièce de résistance is an extended sequence that was shot on Alcatraz, wherein the two lovers stand in separate cells, masturbating. Dream sequences such as these are common in Bressan’s films. They expand the ability for creativity while keeping the sexual interludes connected to the central plot. In contrast to that which takes place in the jail, there’s a brilliant color scene of the characters at a drag party, perfectly exhibiting the way Bressan handles tonal fluctuations between the maudlin and the joyful. It’s especially noticeable in this film because, as Purchell and Mark Gardner discussed in their commentary, between Forbidden Letters and Passing Strangers, Robert Hillsborough was murdered and Anita Bryant emerged as an antigay crusader. The former event, Purchell has explained, was the impetus for Bressan’s Gay USA, a reflection of joy and resistance. Bressan ends Forbidden Letters on an audacious note, reading the names of the cast and crew aloud like Orson Welles at the end of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), finally concluding with, “My name is Arthur J. Bressan Jr., and I made this motion picture.” Bressan loved classic Hollywood, especially Frank Capra; he wrote his college thesis on Capra and even interviewed the director for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. (Bressan had also written to Capra telling him about Passing Strangers, and even though Capra was a formidable conservative, Capra replied saying that if it’s truly about two people in love, he can support it.) Bressan was a consummate cinephile and filmmaker, so it thus makes sense that the act of creation would play a role in his films. Daddy Dearest, screening on Monday, July 21, at 9:30 PM, is about an adult filmmaker, Edward (Daniel Holt), who’s making a new film about some college boys and their dalliance with a “daddy” figure (Locke again). The concept is very meta—at times an industry send-up—and aside from the sex scenes, the most interesting are those in which the film-within-a-film is being shot. It takes place in New York City, and there’s a Scorsese-like grittiness to some scenes that complement the self-reflective tone of Edward, who recollects happier (and sexier) times with a former lover. He also spies on a couple across the way (à la Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window) while seeming to dislike the direction of his filmmaking and resenting the notion that perhaps some of his lovers only want him for the opportunity to appear in a film. This and Juice, which screens on Friday, July 25, and Saturday, July 26, at 11:45 PM, are more naturalistic than Passing Strangers or Forbidden Letters, but there are still some of Bressan’s through lines, such as the use of red lighting during sex scenes and people passing through doorways and waving at one another. Red, of course, connotes love, passion, and sex, and it serves such sequences well in distinguishing them from the nonsex scenes. This is contrasted by the waving, which is a humanizing and even somewhat vulnerable action. Edward is seen directing one of the young men who appears in his films to wave more slowly; the actor, Dean Johnson, was a mainstay of gay New York, a six-feet-six-inch-tall “glam-punk drag queen” who here is stripped down (literally and figuratively), evocative of how Bressan depicted identity through embodied physical presence. Juice was Bressan’s final adult film and penultimate film altogether. Similar to Daddy Dearest, it’s about another creative type, a photographer (proto-himbo Michael Christopher) for a gay magazine who wanders around the city looking for people to photograph all while fantasizing about someone he’d previously met. Again, there’s an element of yearning that adds pathos to the passion. The formal construct is also interesting, as it’s not one sex scene after another, necessarily, but intercutting between several sex scenes supposedly taking place at the same time over one long, steamy night. Perhaps his best-known film, Buddies, which screens on Tuesday, July 22, at 7 PM, centers on the relationship between an AIDS patient, Robert (Geoff Edholm), and David (David Schachter), a volunteer “buddy” who keeps him company. The two are opposites in most every way and at first seem also to be oppositional toward one another. David is a typesetter who’s been in a monogamous relationship for five years, while Robert, having been diagnosed with HIV, has been abandoned by his lover and friends. Robert is also more politically involved, while David is woefully sheltered from the harsher realities of gay life. Tertiary characters such as nurses and David’s lover are only heard offscreen, compacting the film to truly just these two people, these “buddies” whose bond ends up evolving far past their original, tenuous connection. Edholm died from AIDS-related complications two years after Bressan, in 1989. An obvious deviation from his earlier fare, Bressan, as quoted by Michael Koresky in his Queer & Now & Then column on the film, proclaimed, “We had a decade of parade films and coming-out films, and I made a lot of those movies. But when something like AIDS comes up, it is important for our artists to deal with what is going on.” Bressan’s was a life cut short, but his legacy, with the help of advocates, lives on, not just as a formidable queer or adult filmmaker, but as one worthy of recognition across the various stratospheres of film history. As Bressan said in an interview, “A lot of critics claim it shouldn’t be done. That bringing in technique and emotion will destroy the hard-on factor. . . . I’ve always tried to bridge the gap between the commercial and the artistic. . . . I want to see porn not get decent, but get credited as being movies.”