The Gays
Staff Picks
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12m
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Wayne Koestenbaum • 2022 • 13 minutes
This film is a flashy document of an improvised monologue by Koestenbaum’s alter ego, October Castelnuovo Spielhaus, who tragi-comically inveighs against the studio system and other passé networks of power. Spielhaus’s spiel includes a web of references that look back to the mode of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon and other star-struck relics, but that “sample” or “splice” these references into a poetic medley that speaks to the present moment, in which one resonant and oft-circulated line spoken by Jennifer Coolidge in the TV series The White Lotus (“Those gays are trying to murder me”), functions as the theme on which Koestenbaum spins his antic variations. This film, like many of Koestenbaum’s works, includes a complex series of chromatic superimpositions, which make of the film screen not a transparent window onto a drama, but a fluctuating, painted object that continually transforms itself, in counterpoint to Koestenbaum’s/Spielhaus’s obsessive verbal refrains, digressions, and detours.
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