activism

Chocolate Babies (1996)

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Would it be too redundant to call a movie “the ACT UP version of Born in Flames“? Born in Flames was already a pro-queer, pro-safe-sex, pro-sex-worker activism piece made in New York City when ACT UP was at its most loudly active — so radical in its politics that it climaxes with a celebratory act of terrorism blowing up the World Trade Center. Still, the political themes of Lizzie Borden’s D.I.Y. No Wave provocation was more focused on feminist issues than the AIDS crisis in particular, as it was made early in the still-worsening epidemic. Over a decade later, another microbudget NYC indie picked up where Born in Flames left off, redirecting its exact brand of political fury at the smiling politicians who left AIDS-suffering citizens to die in droves without lifting a systemic finger to help. Stephen Winter’s 1996 rabblerouser Chocolate Babies may have been made well after ACT UP’s loudest, headline-earning protests, but it’s directly informed by those political actions, exaggerated for shock value & be-gay-do-crimes inspo. It opens with a closeted Councilman being confronted on the front steps of his NYC apartment by a group of protestors, who cut themselves with a switchblade and smear HIV+ blood on the shocked man’s face, who then likens the act to “murder” in the press. Nothing is said of the mass murder he is committing by downplaying & exacerbating the AIDS crisis among his local constituents, of course, which is exactly why that kind of violent public confrontation was necessary to save lives.

The taboo of exposing the public to HIV+ blood becomes a core shock-value tactic for Chocolate Babies, which climaxes with a living-room surgery in a cramped apartment wherein a group of friends dislodge a bullet from their star protestor’s shoulder with bloody tweezers. It’s an excruciatingly long, drawn-out scene shot as if it were a live birth, complete with moaning screams of pain. Between all that bloody violence & shouting, you might miss that the movie is structurally a low-budget romcom. Like Born in Flames, Chocolate Babies is a collection of standalone vignettes musing on a core political theme, loosely stitched together by a propulsive, repetitive soundtrack (in this case, abrasive tribal drums). The story that holds that scatterbrained edit together is an unlikely love triangle between an HIV+ political activist (Max, Claude E. Sloan), the closeted homophobe politician he most often targets (Councilman Melvin Freeman, Bryan Webster), and that politician’s naively idealistic staff member (Sam, Jon Kit Lee). The youngest of the three is caught between two worlds, acting as a subversive employee of the exact government official his friends are protesting, while accidentally falling in love with the men in charge on both sides of that divide. The drag queens, rooftop hedonists, and political dissidents who escalate that conflict to a bloody climax are all lovely people and his closest friends. It’s all very wholesome & sweet, even if it’s politically furious.

The dramatic themes of Chocolate Babies can be sincerely heavy, touching on the loneliness, addiction, and familial bigotry that weigh down its queer community. However, the overall tone of the film is flippantly joyous, with characters complaining that their political actions aren’t accomplishing enough in quips like “I have better things to do with my time. I could be sucking dick!” They self-describe as “raging, atheist, meat-eating, HIV+, colored terrorists,” or “Black faggots with a political agenda” for short. Their politics are shouted in the horrified faces of politicians & businessmen who’d rather peacefully ignore the AIDS epidemic on NYC streets, but they’re just as often delivered as open-mic standup in out-of-context interstitials. The movie ultimately ends on a calming note, with crashing waves and familial love eroding the nonstop barrage of belligerent shouting that preceded. The moment is earned, given the film’s tender love-triangle conflict and sincere internal wrestling with loving someone who’s already given up on surviving their illness. The majority of the runtime is loud, celebratory, and energizing, though, mostly working as a political catalyst for the audience to get in their representatives’ faces instead of just getting high to manage the pain of living.

Chocolate Babies has been available to stream for free on director Stephen Winter’s Vimeo page for years now, seemingly ripped directly from a 1990s VHS tape. Recently, however, the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema screened the film at The Broadside in a much nicer, cleaner digital scan that suggests a better future for the film’s home presentation. It belongs to a company of low-budget, queer communal provocations that have finally gotten their full due in cinephile circles over the past decade — titles like Tongues Untied, Fresh Kill, Buddies, Paris is Burning, The Watermelon Woman and, of course, Born in Flames. The only thing it’s missing is a spiffy new Blu-ray release with a crisp, collectible slipcover to cement that status.

-Brandon Ledet

Fresh Kill (1994)

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Taiwanese-born director Shu Lea Cheang has never stopped making experimental cinema since she first made a splash on the 1990s New York indie scene.  You just wouldn’t know it based on the scope of her reputation & distribution.  Just last year, Cheang directed a video game-inspired animated sequel to her early-2000s cyberpunk porno I.K.U., the very first pornographic film to screen at Sundance.  That kind of provocation should be making indie publication headlines, but she doesn’t get the same festival-coverage attention as other post-cinema shockteurs like Gaspar Noe or Harmony Korine.  At least, she hasn’t since her 1994 breakout Fresh Kill, which got positive reviews out of TIFF and has lived on as an early-internet cult classic, reaching Cheang’s widest audience to date.  Even so, it’s a challenging work with niche appeal, and as far as I can tell it never landed any form of official distribution on tape, disc, or streaming.  Smartly, Cheang is currently taking a break from continuing to push her art in current work to instead return to that early-career triumph, touring the country with newly restored 35mm prints of Fresh Kill for a 30th Anniversary victory lap.  The only legal way to watch the film in 2024 is to meet Cheang herself at the cinema, so that you can see with your own eyes that she is still active, engaged, and ready to share her Digital Age outsider art with the public.

The title “Fresh Kill” refers to a massive landfill that was located near Staten Island when Cheang made the film in the early 90s but has since closed.  At the time, Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world, which Cheang extrapolates to imagine a world that’s all one big landfill where half the waste is televised media babble.  The movie has characters and events but no real narrative to speak of.  It’s mostly a simulation of channel-surfing through our post-modern apocalypse, sandwiched between hipster lesbian hackers and dipshit Wall Street bros on the couch.  The lesbian couple get by salvaging and reselling junk from the landfill and working waitress shifts at an upscale sushi restaurant.  They go from politically aware to politically active when their daughter eats a can of contaminated fish from the evil, global GX Corporation, which causes her to glow green and then mysteriously disappear.  In retaliation, they recruit fellow sushi shop employees to hack GX’s databases over dial-up connection and expose their food-supply pollution to the world via public access TV editorials (in one of the earliest onscreen depictions of “hacktivism”).  The Wall Street bros are also poisoned with GX’s green-glow pollution via their trendy love of sushi, but they react in a different way; they try to rebrand as eco-friendly businessmen so they can make a quick profit off the public’s newfound interest in environmentalism (in an early onscreen depictions of corporate “greenwashing”).

One of the first images in Fresh Kill is a TV art-installation piece erected at the titular landfill – a wall of cathode-ray screens that seemingly only receive broadcasts of infomercials and public access call-in shows.  It’s easy to reimagine the entire film as a video-art installation piece, as its narrative doesn’t progress so much as it alternates perspectives.  The central couple’s home & sex life vaguely adheres to typical 90s indie drama structure, but it’s frequently interrupted by nonsense chatter from the sushi restaurant that keeps their lights on as well as the TV broadcasts that keep them addled, including friendly, heartfelt commercials from GX.  There’s a total breakdown of language across these alternating, post-modern windows into 1990s NYC living, recalling William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups experiments and subsequent declarations that “Language is a virus from outer space.”  Lizzie Borden’s no-wave classic Born in Flames took a similarly kaleidoscopic approach in its editing, and I was happy to hear Cheang mention it is a contemporary work in her post-film Q&A.  Fresh Kill is just as politically enraged as Born in Flames, but it’s also not nearly as serious, allowing its characters to goof off in go-nowhere skits about lipsticked fish lips, orgasmic accordionists, and supermarket dance parties without worrying about diluting the seriousness of its messaging.  Cheang tries something new every scene, confident that it’ll all amount to something meaningful when considered in total.

The political activism angle of Fresh Kill made it a no-brainer programming choice for Patois Film Fest, who thankfully booked a Shu Lea Cheang tour stop in New Orleans.  The venue choice of The Broad makes a little less sense, since they do not have the capability to project celluloid like The Prytania.  The newly restored print of the film was shown as a digital scan, then, which occasionally led to unintended freezing as the laptop struggled to process the video file without lag.  It was a fitting format choice in its own way, though, since the miscommunication of the machinery projecting the film matched the miscommunication of the multicultural characters who all speak in different languages and idioms throughout, often simultaneously.  Fresh Kill imagines a world overwhelmed by waste.  A lot of that waste is physical but just as much is cultural, calling into question what value there could possibly be in filling our world and brains with so much disposable media & jargon.  Since Cheang has since gone on to experiment with the visual textures of pornography & video games, I have to assume it’s a question that’s continued to occupy her own mind, and I’d love to see the result of that tinkering.  Hopefully this victory-lap restoration of Fresh Kill will lead to those works being more accessible for people who missed their festival runs, like the recent Criterion box sets celebrating the similarly overlooked, underdistributed, politically furious films of Greg Araki & Marlon Riggs.

-Brandon Ledet

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023)

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In Bertrand Bonello’s 2016 political provocation Nocturama, a group of young, hip domestic terrorists set off a disparate series of homemade bombs in modern Paris, then await the state’s violent military response in a shopping mall.  In Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a group of young, hip domestic terrorists set off two homemade bombs along a Texan desert pipeline, then await the state’s violent military response in the hot American sand.  The Parisian kids never fully explain the reasoning behind their explosives beyond a vague sense of economic unrest & cultural ennui.  The central point of Nocturama is making its teenage dissidents look cool—which it does—before they all meet a violent end.  By contrast, the American kids explain the ideology behind their explosive Direct Actions at length, intending to disrupt the economic viability of crude oil as a means to slow down Climate Change.  The point of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t to inform the audience how to replicate this violence ourselves, but to motivate us to get serious about Climate Change as a mass extinction event that needs to be directly, immediately combated.  Both films are structured as non-linear heist thrillers, joining their hip teen terrorists in the hours before their respective bombings before flashing back to the planning stages of those attacks.  They both function as feature-length Building the Team montages as a result, which is always the most satisfying sequence in heist movies anyway.  In contrast, the American version of Nocturama is less pretty & more explainy than the French one, but it’s also a much more useful political motivator, which counts for a lot in this context. 

Goldhaber & crew do their best to make this Lefty manifesto traditionally entertaining so that its incendiary politics ignite the widest audience possible. This was never a concern of Bonello’s, who made a provocative aesthetic object to be appreciated by a small audience of art nerds.  How to Blow Up a Pipeline uses retro synth scoring & 90s blockbuster fonts to disguise itself as a throwback to crowd-pleaser heist thrillers like Point Break, but its full-hearted advocacy of its climate activists’ property destruction is much more daring & modern than the genre’s cop-friendly past.  Most of the shocking plot twists are the exact kind of undercover, double-crossing character reveals we’re used to in that context, but the movie loudly endorses the titular bombing and the activists behind it every chance it gets.  The most Goldhaber & editor Daniel Garber shake up the traditional blockbuster heist film formula is by cutting away from explosions seconds before detonation to retreat into flashbacks, letting the tension ride for several minutes before returning to the Bruckheimerian balls of fire.  Otherwise, it works within a familiar, comforting Dad Movie story template that this time just happens to be populated by pissed-off crust punks & college campus leftists.  The tension of whether a homemade explosive will be jolted the wrong way by those nervous rioters before they reach their targeted pipeline is continuously effective in the moment, but it’s all in service of stringing the audience along to listen to the reason behind their planned property destruction in their downtime between backroom chemistry experiments.

It’s extremely shallow of me to compare Pipeline‘s cool-cred endorsement of violent political action to the much more nihilist, beauty-obsessed Nocturama, as if they’re the only two films of their kind.  There’s a wide range of uncivil unrest advocacy cinema in this movie’s lineage, from 2018’s Empty Metal to 1983’s Born in Flames to 1966’s Battle of Algiers.  It would also be shallow of me to assign an auteurist reading to its production, given that it’s officially credited as “a film by Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barar, Jordan Sjol, and Daniel Garber” (a list that includes the director’s co-writers and aforementioned editor).  I’m going to do it anyway, though, because I’m a shallow guy.  I appreciate that some of the paranoid technophobia from Goldhaber’s debut feature Cam bled through to this follow-up, represented in Pipeline by characters’ constant awareness of being surveilled via their smartphones, even when dormant.  Still, I miss the slick, fantastical aesthetics of that indoor sex-work cyberthriller, which are traded in here for the grit & sweat of the outdoor American West.  That cinematic preference for beauty & artifice over more practical, real-world concerns is likely why Nocturama was at the forefront of my mind throughout Pipeline.  I felt as if I had already seen my ideal version of this picture in Bonello’s puzzle-box terrorist thriller, so even when admiring the big-picture politics & scene-to-scene tension of Goldhaber’s version, I could never fully crossover into zealous love for it.  It’s a consistently entertaining, ideologically solid eco-activist thriller that never fully shook me out of my cowardly complacency as a passive political thinker & pop media consumer. Or, that’s at least what I want to convey to the FBI.

-Brandon Ledet