The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 10-16
Loads (1980)
Directed by Curt McDowell
McDowell was a creator of bad fictions and great documentaries. The largely San Francisco-based artist (who was born in Indiana in 1945 and passed away from AIDS in California in 1987) reveled in making playful confessional films that combined the two modes of storytelling to spectacular effect. The promiscuous gay director chronicled his personal experiences at length in private diaries and then turned the illicit public in microbudgeted black-and-white 16mm fashion with the help of lovers and friends. Among his best-known works is this 20-minute-long short, which is bookended by scenes of Curt staring out a window at an urban “Parking” sign. In between, he recalls in pained and enthralled voiceover recent erotic encounters had with six ostensibly straight men who he paid and/or seduced into appearing onscreen. The film’s first half longingly introduces images of the men, with foci placed on certain body parts; its second half recapitulates the meetings with frenetic intensity, as McDowell dives deeper and deeper into his ecstasy with them and makes us viewers part of the action. Loads will screen at Anthology Film Archives in a program with four other McDowell films. Those who wish to imagine the film in advance can read its voiceover text here. Aaron Cutler (August 12, 9pm; August 16, 6:45pm at Anthology Film Archives’s McDowell retrospective)