Gay, Lesbian Film Festival: Wider Range

The 1988 Los Angeles International Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival offers its most ambitious program since its 1982 founding and also moves to a new venue, the Directors Guild Theater, 7950 Sunset Blvd.

Between Friday and July 20 the festival will present more than 35 films from more than a dozen nations. It will be highlighted by various panel discussions, an Andy Warhol retrospective and a special showing of Mauritz Stiller’s “The Wings” (1916), believed to be the first film with a gay theme.

An initial sampling of the films available for preview suggests an impressive range and vitality; clearly, a number of the films have an appeal not restricted to gay audiences.

Opening the festival at 8 p.m. Friday is “The Outsiders” (1986), said to be the first film licensed by the government of Taiwan that deals with homosexuality. Working from Suen Jeung Gwo’s adaptation of Kenneth Pai’s novel, director Yu Kan-Ping has made an old-fashioned all-stops-out heart-tugger, alternately sentimental and lurid but always entertaining. Fortunately, the director has the courage of his material and unflagging energy.

As flamboyant as it gets, “The Outsiders” does offer a highly personal and compassionate vision, not unlike a vintage Douglas Sirk film. Its young hero, Ah-ching, becomes part of a band of street hustlers given shelter by a kindly middle-aged photographer who shares a large apartment with an aging, still-glamorous ex-movie star with a heart of gold beneath a blunt manner. There’s much emphasis on the youths’ painful affairs of the heart, but there’s an underlying seriousness in the photographers’ insistence that Ah-ching try to forgive the abusive alcoholic father who drove him away from home.

Ayelet Menahemi’s 50-minute “Crows,” which was shown at the recent Israeli festival, screens Saturday at 4 p.m. As seen through the widened eyes of a runaway farm girl, it offers a vivid portrait of a group of desperately impoverished gay punkers holed up in a messy Tel Aviv communal apartment. Some are transvestites, who live exceedingly close to the edge. Like them or not, they are real and compelling.

West German lesbian/feminist experimental film maker Ulrike Ottinger’s “The Mirror Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press” (1984) is a taxing but constantly imaginative 150-minute adventure into the surreal. A multinational newspaper magnate significantly named Frau Dr. Mabuse (Delphine Seyrig, at her wittiest) lures a naive, indolent young man named Dorian Gray (played by fashion model Veruschka von Lehndorff) into becoming the subject of an ongoing series of sensational tabloid stories. Ottinger may be criticizing the manipulative and exploitative media, but she seems more interested in exploring the possibilities of post-modern design in a series of boldly inventive tableaux. Her film becomes an odyssey, involving a journey through a Dante-esque underworld and even includes an avant-garde opera. Tough going but venturesome. It can be seen Saturday at 7 p.m.

A scholarly dispute continues over whether Stiller’s 40-minute 1916 film “The Wings” (Sunday at 10 p.m.) invokes the legend of Ganymede or Icarus. The first interpretation would imply a gay theme, the second, a straight one. It is not hard to see homosexual implications in this recently rediscovered film. Based on a novel by Herman Bang, it is a love triangle between a famed elderly artist (Egil Eide), his young model, Eugene Mikael (Lars Hanson) and a frivolous aristocrat (Lili Bech) who captivates Mikael, much to the anguish of the artist. Those who have seen the work of Stiller, the discoverer of Garbo, in the recent Swedish retrospective at UCLA, will not be surprised at the subtlety and sophistication of this landmark work. “The Wings” will be accompanied on the organ by Robert Israel and introduced and translated by Gunnar Almer, film curator at the Swedish Film Institute. It will be followed by a 40-minute documentary on Stiller, “Garbo, Stiller and I.”

For full schedule and more information: (213) 665-0830.