sixteen films on aids: the second wave
by Douglas Messerli
Quite by accident, yesterday I watched three
short films from the early 1990s that dealt, in various, ways with the issue of
AIDS. What is particularly interesting to find such a cluster of films from
1992 through 1994 is that this came several years after the intense
commentaries of the 1980s, including, in the US, the groundbreaking works
including Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies and John Erman’s An Early Frost, and the Canadian
documentary No Sad Songs directed by Nik Sheehan, all in 1985; Bill
Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986); and Norman René’s Longtime
Companion and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, both of 1989. In musical
theater William Finn and James Lupine’s March of the Falsettos of 1981
must be mentioned in this context, and their 1990 second episode Falsettoland
might be seen as a link between the later works I describe below (a film
version of Falsettos appeared in 2017).
Other,
smaller films and numerous documentaries continued to be produced in the
intervening years. But the next significant group of films concerned with AIDS,
along with the 1991 theater premier of part 1 of Tony Kushner’s Angels in
America represent what has been described by some as the “second wave” of
such films which began appearing from 1993-1996 with the release of Jonathan
Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) and the other fifteen films I review below,
along with the Broadway premier of Kushner’s Angels (finally brought to
the screen by Mike Nichols in 2003).
In
these films there are perhaps three major issues regarding AIDS. First the
films, particularly Kushner’s great work, are, a summary of the entire subject,
the period itself and what led to it. The vast scope of a works like And the
Band Played On, Zero Patience, Days of Desperation, and Angels in
America separates both the plays and the film apart from others, some of
the best written in the very worst days of the pandemic, when not all the facts
had yet been sorted out.
These “second wave” films also reveal a great sense of nostalgia for a
time before AIDS, and a sort of guilt for not having spoken up as others did
earlier. Jeffrey, Chocolate Babies, and Alive and Kicking all betray
a great deal of guilt and nostalgia, as well as, in particular, Demme’s Philadelphia,
despite the latter’s rightful claim as being the first truly commercial representation
of the issues. Yet, in its being so late to the cannibal feast one might
describe Philadelphia as one of the least interesting of the dozens of
notable movies about queer AIDS.
Finally, these works begin to point to a time beyond AIDS, a time when
drugs have been discovered that, despite their cost and sometimes painful counter-reactions
in their patients, begin to extend the lives of HIV-positive individuals and
signify a kind of return to normality. Although one must be careful in stating
this concept since being HIV-positive will perhaps never been “normal,” even if
today’s TV ads suggest that one can go about living an actively everyday life.
And with the recent cuts—a terrible repeat of history—of funding for those
redemptive medicines in poor countries and the research to actually find a complete
cure (particularly when such a cure is so very close) I am afraid that such a
future world without this disease must be postponed. That there are still
numerous AIDS films in the new century speaks to the endless disaster of this
killer. And there has yet to be a film that adequately deals with the major
changes in gay life that AIDS has resulted in—not only because of all the
brilliant and talented individuals who died, along with many of their
supporters and audiences, but on account of the radical changes it has meant
socially for the gay community which perhaps can never again reset its
collective mind to the pre-1980s attitudes that sex is an innocent pleasure to
be openly explored while youth endures. The gay community lost its innocence
with the spectre of AIDS, a sense of freedom that may never be fully reclaimed.
Los Angeles, March 19, 2021; revised and
expanded on August 12, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(August 2025).
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