Lavender Limelight; The Couple in The Cage; (The) Perfect Film

Lavender Limelight; The Couple in The Cage; (The) Perfect Film

African-American, Latin/x, experimental video, performance; experimental, montage, gay and lesbian, documentary, lesbian, queer film, ethnography

Compilation of dubs for teaching. Lavender Limelight is a documentary about queer film history. The Couple in a Cage is by Coco Fusco, a friend and colleague who supported me in the beginning of my career by helping me get a large grant for We Care when she worked at the NY State Council on the Humanities. Perfect Film (1986), a found footage film of eyewitness accounts of the assassination of Malcolm X, is a perfect allegory for Jacobs' notion of "the movies that make up our minds, are our minds in large part".

I'd warrant this is one of the weirder compilations of 3 dubs put onto one VHS tape in my collection. I like it!

Marc Mauceri, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez- Peña, Ken Jacobs

1998/ 1993/1986

From Go Fish to Paris is Burning to The Watermelon Woman, this festival favorite goes behind the scenes to reveal seven successful lesbian directors. These talented movie-makers enlighten and entertain as they explore their sexual identity, growing up gay, inspirations and techniques, Hollywood vs. Indie, and of course, love and sex, onscreen and off. The conversations are intimate, the topics unlimited, and the clips from their work enthralling! Featuring Cheryl Dunye, Rose Troche, Jennie Livingston, Monika Treut, Maria Maggenti, Su Friedrich and Heather MacDonald. --Kanopy

The Couple in the Cage documents the travelling performance of Guillermo Gómez -Peña and Coco Fusco, in which they exhibited themselves as caged Amerindians from an imaginary island. While the artists’ intent was to create a satirical commentary on the notion of discovery, they soon realized that many of their viewers believed the fiction, and thought the artists were real “savages”. The record of their interactions with audiences in four coun tries dramatizes the dilemma of cross-cultural misunderstanding we continue to live with today. Their experiences are interwoven with archival footage of ethnographic displays from the past, giving an historical dimension to the artists’ social experiment. The Couple in the Cage is a powerful blend of comic fiction and poignant reflection on the morality of treating human beings as exotic curiousities. --Coco Fusco

"PERFECT FILM presents some out-takes of history, in this instance of the assassination of Malcolm X. This is a record of events literally preserved as found from the cutting room floor. Carelessly strung on a reel, I bought it for $5 on Canal Street. Malcolm X was murdered by Elijah Muhammid and Louis Farrakhan through agents in New Jersey and we all knew it but they were never prosecuted because the FBI was too implicated, and Louis Farrakhan controls the cult to this day. The murderers were allowed to continue while new news tore our attention away. After all, both the Black Muslims and US government wanted Malcolm on ice. The "news" – the worldwide events of the day – is a daily tidal sweep and very little of what we learn can stick, and move us to take action towards the control of events. Anything may be revealed for a day and then it must clear the stage immediately. Question: are we real? or scattered, and unable to retain and construct a consecutive history for ourselves. Adrift, shards among the shards, our amnesia is exactly the enemy of the art that matters to me, having to do with the making of mind and the ongoing gathering of mindfulness." – Ken Jacobs

56 mins; 30 mins; 23 mins

March Mauceri/Coco Fusco/Ken Jacobs

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