Church of Film
Church of Film is a weekly gathering for the reverence and worship of cinema programmed and hosted by local cinephile Muriel Lucas.
Magic, the Occult, supernatural folk tales, witchy witches, mutant melodramas, anarchy, communism & the subaltern, Queer texts/subtexts, signs & symbols, third meanings, oblique narrative strategies, visual formalism, LSD, imminent worlds, sailors, phantom crews, ships adrift, graveyards and ruins, feminism, uncanny valleys, decolonization, gender deconstruction, cosmic games, ghosts & goblins, third world, beauty and her beasts, psychogeography, national & independent cinemas, masks of all kinds, the baroque, genres destroyed, Thanatos, ancient worlds, interior maps, guys and dolls, transhumanism, lost worlds, layers of vision, candles and candelabras, cobwebs, love stories, uncharted landscapes, deep dreams & secrets, the foreign country of the past, psychic fractures, the underworld, ultima thule, de-institutionalization, pitiless traps, Greek Key patterns, fate circumscribed in celluloid, voyeurism & paranoia, corridors & paths, the watcher and the watched,antifascism, isolation in the labyrinth, doors unopened, counter-cultured romance, priests and nuns beneath their frocks and habits, warm gods, gods dethroned, sisters, charlatans, disintegrating social structures, nuclear families on fire, dissent and silenced voices, slapstick and the mechanized body, the visual gag, tragic jokes, distant voices from other rooms, dogs baying in the darkness, flashlights, the imprisoned, the vanquished, the trapped spirits, the Kingdom of Shadows, the twentieth century, c-i-n-e-m-a.
Showtimes
"It bears repeating that Rosa Von Paunheim cares about the gay movement. His film is disturbing, yet brilliant." -George Foster, Gay Community News Boston
More or less a political manifesto, Gay rights activist and prolific filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim's IT IS NOT THE HOMOSEXUAL WHO IS PERVERSE BUT THE SOCIETY IN WHICH HE LIVES captures in docudrama gay Berliners in the early 70s. It follows the young naif Daniel as he discovers the city's queer underground and the life of cruising, only to eventually be drawn into a group of revolutionary gay men who demand discourse and action. Praunheim's film examines, criticizes, and provokes in a striking and frank manner. A monumental classic of queer German New Cinema!