call to action
by Douglas Messerli
Jerry Tartaglia (director) A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M
/ 1988
Jerry Tartaglia’s A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M (1988)
is the first of his The AIDS Trilogy, a raw, heartful
plea for gay men and the society at large to realize that in perceiving AIDS as
a gay disease, and more importantly, believing—and he keeps intoning throughout
this Brechtian-like incitement to action—that “Four of five doctors recommend
no sex for gays,” that gay men and the LGBTQ community have allowed AIDS to
desexualize the gay experience.
Unlike Ecce Homo where he cuts down the screen into peep-hole
like views of multiple sexual images, in the earlier work Tartaglia basically
moves in and out on bleached-out porno-like images or presents images in
bright-red abstractness as if they were warning signs or intimations of virus
in the blood while repeating phrases such as “Good gays are monogamous, bad
gays are not monogamous,” “Morality if now a medical issue,” and “AIDS proves
that homosexuality is contagious,” as he shouts the alarm that the heteronormative
society has taken over the AIDS crisis to once again attempt to tame,
naturalize, and erase LGBTQ sexuality by proving what it believed all along:
that queer sex is a destroyer rather than an agent of love.
Tartaglia has long argued that his films were the opposite of the
naturalist cinema which seeks to engage the viewer through hypnosis, inducing
him or her into the world of the image instead of forcing him to interact with
image and language simultaneously. And in this 1988 work, and the AIDS works
that follow, the director appears, like a prophet crying out in the wilderness,
to demand that those who see his work wake up and reclaim their sexualities.
AIDS he reminds us over and over again has become not just a disease but a
symbol that unfortunately warns gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender
individuals to deny their own existence, to rid themselves of the very
behaviors which define them and have allowed them to come into power and pride.
At
times, Tartaglia’s message seems so powerfully visceral that you can almost
hear beneath his screams his tears, particularly at one moment when the images
of primarily masturbatory sex are transformed into simple images of his many
friends, represented by smiling, wondering, engaging young men who have
suffered and died on the cross of AIDS. Were these innocents intent upon
killing others simply by taking pleasure in their bodies? he asks through the
seemingly random snapshots.
There
is something so raw in A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M, represented by the frail body
of a young male nude who face has been erased by an S&M-like mask, that the
viewer at moments is almost forced to turn away out of pain, but realizes that
in doing so he is himself denying the truths Tartaglia’s film is forcing us to
deal with.
Perhaps the film must be perceived as a kind of wake-up prologue for the
far more complex investigation of these same issues that follows in Ecce
Homo. But the trumpet sound of this film seems a necessary call to action
before we can even determine what actions we need to take.
Los Angeles, November 1, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November
2021).
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