The vibe that underscores I Want Your Sex hasn’t really been seen in a while and it perhaps does require some context to really appreciate. In the 1990s, there arose a movement on the American indie scene that has come to be known as the New Queer Cinema -born out of a wave of LGBTQ filmmakers coming into their own in tandem with a gradually more common social visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ themes, culture, politics, and people. Some of the creatives to burst forth from this movement managed to break into the mainstream, like Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. Others, like Gregg Araki, remained largely in the underground. Watching Araki’s early films it is easy to see why -he has a rambunctious sensibility, a very camp style of satire, and a cavalier attitude around sex. Hollywood wasn’t quite going to embrace his art. And it still hasn’t, elder statesman of queer cinema though he has now become. He dialed back these proclivities on some of his later films (his last, White Bird in a B...
Sergei Eisenstein made three sound films before his death in 1948 . Only one part of his duology Ivan the Terrible was released publicly in his lifetime -it’s second-half banned by Soviet censors. But his earlier film Alexander Nevsky from 1938 had no such issues -perhaps because while his take on Ivan was more complex, on Nevsky he aligned more strongly with the interests of Stalinist Russian propaganda -though this film was censored for a brief time during the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact due to its depictions of Germans. Most historical films of this era, especially those with a nationalist bent, were always more about the political climate they were made within rather than the setting much removed. Even by those standards though, Eisenstein is quite blunt in Alexander Nevsky . Not only are the somewhat anachronistic names of Russia (in lieu of Novgorod) and Germany (rather than the Holy Roman Empire) used, but the Germans are depicted with subtle swastikas in their apparel as are the ...