"Each of my films portrays some aspect of gay consciousness, sexual representation, or self-identity. At the same time, each film utilizes the medium's unique potential as visual metaphor. I am not very interested in creating narrative forms, which generally are used to show how gay people are supposed to become lavender carbon copies of straight people. Instead, I work with short, personal, experimental forms which explore and celebrate another kind of conscious human identity." - Jerry Tartaglia, NYC 1995
- Filmography
- See For Yourself
- A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M.
- ECCE HOMO
- FINAL SOLUTIONS
- 1969
- REMEMBRANCE
- HOLY MARY
- Interpretations of Dreams
- Vocation
- Lambda Man
- Excerpt from Lawless
- Distribution and email
The 17 minute film is an intimate document of a person as he is dying from an infection associated with HIV. It has been edited to create the illusion that the viewer is looking at camera "rushes" or unedited "dailies" of a movie. This editorial choice, Tartaglia says, affords the viewers an unencumbered emotional response to what they are seeing on the screen.
See For Yourself is a silent film, shot largely in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Autumn of 1993. This film's subject is Tartaglia's friend, David Kline, who requested that this film be made in order for "people to see for themselves what A.I.D.S. looks like." David Kline died in September 1993.
A.I.D.S. has become a convenient excuse to desexualize gay men and thereby destroy gay liberation. This experimentally processed film expresses Queer anger and rage at the no-win constructs of straight culture's refusal to acknowledge the political impact of the disease.
Selected by the Whitney Museum of American Art for: A.I.D.S. Counter-representations,1989
"Perhaps the most gut wrenching is A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M...the kind of movie we have a right to expect from a gay film festival..." Joseph Lanza, New York Native
"It brings us to what Art About A.I.D.S should be about: telling the truth about A.I.D.S." Michael Hunt Stolbach, SocialText
Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) interweaves images form Jean Genet's masterpiece, Un Chant d'Amour with images from gay male sex films. It forces the viewer to question the point of view in looking at "pornographic" images. A.I.D.S. hysteria portrays gay sex as pornographic, politically incorrect, sinful, or, at best, a public health hazard. Ecce Homo asks whether the taboo is against gay sex or against seeing gay sex.
1990 Atlanta International Film Festival Best Experimental Film
"Ecce Homo makes it all worthwhile. It reclaims desire in the age of A.I.D.S. Tartaglia is an artist at the peak of his powers." Vito Russo, The Advocate
Queer imagination has no place in the death-dealing consumerist culture. For, in it, the final solution is management of all situations through enforced assimilation using death-terror as the weapon. This film explores the Teleculture's treatment of A.I.D.S. as a consumer image.
Golden Gate Award Honorable Mention
San Francisco International Film Festival, 1991
''Tartaglia raises hell in this unrelenting analysis of A.I.D.S.
consumerism.''
Robert Hilferty, Outweek
''Strong and innovative..''
Kate Bornstein, Bay Area Reporter
A personal recollection of a time past, when gay identity was a source of joy rather than of mourning. The film explores the fictional nature of personal history and the unreliability of memory.
Golden Gate Award, Honorable Mention, San Francisco International Film Festival 1992
"A memorable short which explores personal and political values, idealism, and radical freedom of expression..." Roy Grundman, Cineaste
"A refreshingly tart memory film..." Stuart Klawans, The Nation
"A fearless, aggressive film. A barbed critique of political amnesia." Manohla Dargis, Village Voice
A short remembrance of growing up gay, searching for an identifiable image on the movie screen. This character chose Bette Davis in All About Eve. The film includes clips from Davis' performance and the narrator's childhood home movies.
"Tartaglia plays with a stereotype as old as cinema itself: the connection between movie going and coming out." Jonathan Mandell, New York Newsday
A collage film which intercuts images of Pope J. P. 2, Fashion Experts, and a sex-change medical specialist. The result: an outrageously funny look at gender, fashion, and the head of the world's largest gay sex club.
" A witty, immodest proposal about sex, clothes, the single girl and Pope John Paul II." Manhola Dargis, Village Voice
"Hilarious. I haven't laughed so much at a video in years." James Broughton
A dream-like film study which takes the viewer through a series of sketches examining the creative drive as expressed in the languages of cinema, the fears of life threatened by homophobic violence and A.I.D.S., and the hope engendered in the possibility of internal vision.
Black Maria Film Festival, Jurors Citation, 1994
A pastoral hymn to the God Pan; filmed at the Short Mountain Collective in Tennessee; adapted from a text by Aleister Crowley.
A personal experimental film exploration of gay identity in the pre-A.I.D.S. era.
Pope Ondine rages and pontificates on Queer life, the hopelessness of heterosexualism, and the importance of having a good hairdo.
All work is available on 16mm from Canyon Cinema, San Francisco. Some work is available on video from Franklin Media. Email to Franklinny@usa.pipeline.com for info.
Jerry Tartaglia can be reached at jerry501@usa.pipeline.com.