Ease In: Queer Experimental Film

In this selection of poetic short films from the first two decades of the twenty-first century, holes serve as both a visual frame and a potent metaphor—for the loss and longing endemic to all life, but also for the endless potential of queer existence. Using found footage and other collage techniques, the films collected here delve into the porousness of embodiment and transcend time and space, peeking at the future and the past through the camera’s transformative aperture.

White Sands Crystal Foxes (2021)
Dir. Liz Rosenfeld
34min, Digital

Initially developed as a work for a planetarium’s domed screen, the dizzying kaleidoscope of White Sands Crystal Foxes envisions a speculative future where procreation is left to polyamorous foxes, and human secretions solidify into crystals that supply renewable energy. Drawing together climate collapse, the queer erotics of nature, and a vision of the planetarium as a possible cruising site, Rosenfeld crafts a dreamlike investigation of holes that act “as portals, pores, thresholds, and physical manifestations of unfillable desire.”

Music Might Have Deceived Us (2000)
Dir. Chris Chong
6min, Digital

Clouds, cars, and speaking mouths appear through thin apertures, alluding to all that is seen through limited frames, whether landscapes out of train windows or dramas through a crack in a door. Chong’s hand-processed emulsion flickers with scratches, dust, and scars, assembling a story from glimpses.

Only Two Words (2018)
Dir. Masha Godovannaya
9min, Digital

After the poet Eileen Myles visited St. Petersburg, Russia, in May 2017, Godovannaya crafted Only Two Words as a dialogue linking the two queer artists across continents. Godovannahya intercuts two poems by Myles (“Holes” and “Bones”) with collages of contemporary and archival footage in an exploration of memory, separation, loss, and desire.

The Source is a Hole (2017)
Dir. Angelo Madsen Minax
24min, DCP

“The hole in the o of love is the best part of the word,” the film’s narrator intones, as he weaves together a story of raw longing. Punctuated by recounted dreams and personal invocations to Greek gods, goddesses, and muses, The Source is a Hole mourns a lost love while exploring death, personal origin stories, trans embodiment, and “what it means to time travel through memory.”

My Rectum Is Not a Grave (Notes to a Film Industry in Crisis) (2007)
Dir. Steve Reinke
7min. Digital

Children, skeptical and smiling, and rodents, dead and alive, populate a cache of haunting footage shot originally by Ivan Besse in the late 1930s in Britton, South Dakota. Besse opened his own small theater to show his “own little movies of [his] own little town,” which Reinke repurposes to craft this defiant rebuke—to Leo Bersani’s canonical inquiry, to the film industry, and to any boundaries of genre.