Cinematic Pleasures: An Interview with Carl Bogner
In life, we’re lucky if we find one good teacher who broadens our mind and inspires us. I’ve been fortunate enough to have several. One of mine was definitely Carl Bogner, who passed away recently after a long battle with cancer. Carl was one of my first professors when I started at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He was brilliant and funny, insightful and generous. He was soft-spoken but deliberate with his words. At a recent memorial service, one of my former classmates beautifully stated that Carl, “taught us to see,” and it’s true. He expanded my perceptions of what filmmaking is and could be.
Carl was the organizer of the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival, which gave my films their first local screenings, when Milwaukee’s main film festival wouldn’t. Through Carl I met indie filmmaker Jennifer Reeder and trans historian Susan Stryker. I made several trailers for the Tool Shed that played before certain in the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video festival. Carl even makes a small cameo in one. Long after graduating, I would often see him around some of his favorite spots on Milwaukee’s East Side. It was at one of these that I interviewed him in 2016 about the 31st Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival. That was the same year he let me curate a selection of trans short films for the program. We spoke for over well over an hour.
I hope in sharing this interview, Carl’s passion for films, the insightfulness that he shared with his students, his wit, his snark, his kindness, and the care he had for his community are obvious. He was an incredible teacher and individual, and he will be dearly missed.
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CB: Thanks for having the time to talk about the 31st Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival.
AA: My pleasure. My first question is how long have you been running the festival?
CB: Is this a criticism?
AA: Ha! No.
CB: This is my eighteenth festival that I’ve worked on. We've always tried to…and when I say we, I mean, the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres…we've always tried to mount this with as little overhead as possible. Which is to say, that it's a lot of it has always been on me. I don't say that with any kind of bravado, it's just an operational model that we've always tried to achieve. Anyway, as this will be the 18th festival that I've mounted.
AA: What do you see has changed with the festival from when you started?
CB: I mean, lots of things both for good, and for curious. As a programmer it’s gotten easier because of something called the internet, which has allowed greater access to work to consider for the festival. Filmmakers are easier to reach. It’s just a lot more ecological to share materials for inspections. You get to do research into what other festivals are showing. I don’t know what it’s rooted in specifically, if it’s technology, or the culture that started around the independent cinema boom if you will, but it’s just the idea that there’s more people making features. So that has benefited all of us. There’s a greater array of representation that we get to select from. In some ways that makes for more work, but that’s a good thing because there’s more work to see.
What’s interesting about working on the festival is that when I started it was called the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and then we changed the name to the LGBT Film Festival, which was just the trend, but the work has gotten more interesting. Easily, the work around the trans community, initially there wasn’t as much, and it tended to be sort of explanatory in its mode. We don’t have any narratives this year, but the documentaries are great. The way present people non-defensively, living their lives. And so that’s become a category since the festival started. That has got to be the richest pleasure to get to work with, I feel like for me as a cisgendered gay guy. Trans film is the richest thread I get to meet.
It's interesting to thing of the festival’s mission. When the festival started, our mission was to bring representations to local screens that were otherwise unavailable. There are more representations of gays and lesbians and increasingly trans people available to Milwaukeeans, mostly on TV. So, it’s interesting to reflect upon what the mission of the festival is going forward. What I think is clear is one of missions is to always be a space for the community to gather and that remains true, but I don’t know if there is always the same kind of urgency that we used to assign to the films that we selected.
Something else that has changed is that moviegoing is different than when I started 18 years ago. I don’t think a movie is as an exotic enticement for people as it once was. I think people have a greater access to media, and a film festival has to work harder to let people know that they need to be in a theater to see this film. That’s one thing I’ve noticed just looking at attendance. Those are just some of the things I reflect about.
AA: It seems like with a lot of the films in the festival, that there’s a lot more representation as far as race, class, and immigration, and how that intersectionality comes in context with sexual orientation and gender.
CB: I think you raise a really good point. I think the festival needs to evolve towards a more thorough intersectionality. I like that we’re doing intersectionality. It’s not quite a buzzword yet that fatigues me, but I do think those tend to be the more interesting films we get to show, that expand the definition of what an LGBT film is. When the LGBT part of the central subject or character’s identity is as important as another aspect or identity, or maybe secondary to another aspect of their identity, it’s still not as automatic that we find or get those films.
I’m thrilled we get to open with “Kiki”, this documentary about African American queer youth in New York City, because opening night is a curious kind of burden. It’s a spotlight that needs to be filled by certain kind of film, and it isn’t always an opportunity that we have such an automatic opening night film that centers on African American people. One of the other films that we’re showing is “Major!” about Miss Major Griffin Gracie, this remarkable activist who’s an elder in the trans community and has been an activist for people of color, since the 1960s. I think it’s really important that the festival reflects the texture of our lives, and therefore having stories that would intersect with other concerns, they not only tend to be better films, but they reveal the dynamism or relevance.
A film we’re showing that has garnered a lot of interest is this documentary called “Forbidden: Undocumented and Queer in Rural America”. It’s a real honor for the festival to be able to show a film that gets to be in conversation with a topic that’s of great importance to a lot of people. It follows this really dazzling young man in his early 20s named Moises Serrano, who is undocumented. His parents are undocumented, and he spends a great deal of his time traveling around North Carolina working as an advocate for undocumented people. The movie also shows his struggles to get into college and the dilemmas that undocumented people have applying for student loans. The festival needs to be better about finding more of those films.
A film we tried to get at the last minute is a new film called “Moonlight”. It’s a very artful beautiful looking movie about the experience of an African American gay man. It’s a narrative. It’s artfully made, so in other words it’s a movie that a lot of us have been waiting for, with the representation that we don’t always get to see. Your question is striking, because it’s still a decided pleasure to see people on the screen that we don’t normally get to see. I mean, the fantasies that we all have in going to the movies is that we all kind of want to see ourselves. Whether we’re LGBT or straight, we all want to find ourselves in movies. It’s something we hold for the movies to do, and I think that testifies to the potency for a lot of people of seeing the same sex kiss on the screen. That representation, it doesn’t just matter politically, it matters emotionally.
AA: There’s been a lot of debate in Hollywood about authentic representations, specifically about trans characters being portrayed by cisgender actors. What are your thoughts?
CB: Authentic is hard when you’re talking about movies to begin with. It speaks to the laziness or the timidity of producers that they have to have names in certain parts. You don’t want them just to be trafficking in a kind of tokenism, but it does seem like they could work harder to cast appropriately. I get for actors, that they should have the freedom to take on any part they want, and the pleasures and challenges of portraying an identity that’s foreign to them. But not unlike other artists they need to know the risk of appropriation or the presumption of appropriation.
I don’t they understand why they should work a little harder. I feel like they think it’s just some sort of quota system, or something like that. For instance, the way they’re so proud of themselves, or they think it was so daring for a straight actor to kiss another man. I remember hearing William Hurt, he was sort of insufferable in the way he talked about his process, but he won an Oscar for playing a gay feminine man in “Kiss of the Spider Woman”. And you could see why, they got to play somebody really theatrical.
But when they say they can’t cast gay actors in gay parts, or trans actors to play trans parts, they need to know they’re participating in certain phobias. That’s what seems to be at root when they’re talking about economic arguments or saying there isn’t anybody or something like that. So yeah, I’m all for more thoughtful casting. Did you see “Tangerine”?
AA: Yes.
CB: I have mixed feelings about that movie. Here’s a case where trans actors collaborated with the director, Sean Baker. It made sense that John Waters loved it so much, because it’s very funny. I loved how characters talked, and their insults for each other were really great. And it’s not like I’m saying that people of a certain class shouldn’t be represented, but there still seems to be something about certain types that were being exploited, possibly. I feel like it hardly played. I think I know of one LGBT film festival that showed it, and I don’t know if that was the distributor’s doing. It didn’t premiere at LGBT film festivals, and that’s not a criticism of the film, but a part of me wonders if they’re preoccupied with this idea of correctness. So, I don’t know.
For instance, I think Tilda Swinton should do anything. I wouldn’t mind if Tilda Swinton plays a gay man or trans person. I would also like to see trans actors playing non trans parts. I guess the ones I don’t have sympathy for are the productors. I feel more protective of the actors. I want them to get the work. Most of them are not in a position of economic power. You know, what I liked about Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There”, was it was done in this way where it didn’t stand out. Like, why don’t we have women playing men more often? It just seems like within the canvas of a movie you could just gently nudge thinking. You could populate movies with people you can’t automatically gender. Mainstream cinema could be more interesting.
An Italian film I like quite a bit is “Arianna”, about this young person’s realization of their intersexuality, and I’m confident that the part was not played by an intersex actor. It’s well made, and it describes an experience that a lot of people have gone through. Not that the character is used symbolically, but they convey this idea of, “Who the fuck am i?” or “This doesn’t feel right?”. It’s a successful coming of age film, that while specific to their history, reflects a dilemma that most of us have gone through to some degree…except for assholes!
I think that’s what makes people assholes, is that they’ve only had certainty. They were completely comfortable with how they were constructed at youth. They thrived on it. Everyone kept telling them, “You are this,” and they kept saying, “Yes, I am,”. I think that might be my definition of an asshole.
AA: I noticed the festival will include some new 16mm prints of work by Kurt McDowell. Can you talk a little about them?
CB: Yes, I’m very excited about those. Kurt McDowell was a film student in the 70s in San Francisco. He was a midwestern guy born in Indiana who moved to San Francisco to be as flamboyantly gay as he possibly could. He was in a world where he could readily do that, because it was San Francisco in the 70s. He had a beloved teacher named George Kuchar, who was one of the founding spirits of anything understood as American underground cinema. Not only was he his teacher, but the two were also lovers. They were also just San Franciscan scamps. They would go to bath houses together students. Nothing seems more fun than San Francisco in the 70s. But McDowell loved movies. He loved flamboyance, melodrama, grand gestures. He would work to approximate them in his own movies. He’s most famous for his horror porno called “Thunder Crack!”, but he’s a prolific filmmaker.
He often made memoirist type things about his sex life, and his lovers. So, there’s a really sweet, unabashed sharing about his films. His films have recently be preserved by the prestigious Academy Film Archive, this amazing institution that works to preserve lots of aspects of film culture. You know this is the same organization that puts on the Oscars every year, and now they’re working to preserve films that are a catalog of straight men’s cum shots. So that’s a triumph of culture, I think.
I’m thrilled to be showing them. They have a kind of outrageousness that has never gone away as being interesting and funny and attractive. I think they also speak to a lot of the queer work going on today, that sort of up-front flamboyance of the self.
AA: Are they Kuchar-esque?
CB: They’re different personas. McDowell could be seen as Kuchar’s id. Kuchar’s films are always about bodies, and Kuchar is always present in his work. But there’s just something more explicit sexually in McDowell’s work than Kuchar’s…maybe. I would say they both influence each other. I think the titles of McDowell’s films are indicative of the pleasures – “Peed into the Wind”, “Stinky Butt”, “Buns and Wieners: The Musical”. So, it’ll be a great time.
AA: What else are you excited about?
CB: I’m excited we have After School Special, a Milwaukee queer arts collective. Are they a queer arts collective? I call them that. They may just call themselves an arts collective. They’re a very enterprising group... When you call young people enterprising is that condescending? Regardless, they are enterprising group of Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design graduates who decided they want to keep making stuff and they’ve been very active, and they’re curating a program for us. So, I’m looking forward to that. Similarly, an undergrad from our program as curated a group of underground works from largely the 60s and 70s. What’s great about this, is that some titles people maybe have seen before, but it’s been really instructive to see how a younger queer person tries to shape queer film history. That’s going to include some 16mm prints including a double projection by Barbara Rubin. I call it the best film ever made by a teenager, because Sadie Benning shot on video.
She made it in 1963, when some of her friends are making out. There’s two reels of it, and one image is projected on the other, with the projectionist using color filters to activate this imagery even further. I’ve been working on this festival for 18 years, but the festival has been energized by other eyes curating some of these programs. The festival needs to be doing more of that.
There’s a film called “Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo”, by this collaborative duo Jacques Martineau and Oliver Ducastel. What I love about their films is they have a certain lightness or buoyancy no matter how grave the subject matter, which in their previous works have included teen suicide, HIV, the solitude of being elderly or marital infidelity. It’s something I don’t see a lot of people trying for. I think their model is the French filmmaker, Jacque Demy. Something about their films feels almost like a music in a way. Anyways, the film is meant to be a real time encounter between two young men who meet at a sex club. They actually first connect when they’re each having sex with somebody else. The time we spend in the sex club is kind of daring. The first twenty minutes of the film is rather unabashed in its representation of the activities of a nude sex club. But then it’s the conversation that the men have afterwards, sort of like Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise”.
I find it’s a really lovely film to inhabit because Martineau and Ducastel are interested in moviegoing pleasures. They’re romantics, but they also want to keep one foot in the real world. There’s a certain kind of crisis that bring the two men into an emergency room, where you get a fascinating portrait of the French medical system. It’s a real singular moviegoing experience. It’s been talked about as “Short Bus” crossed with “Weekend”.
Another film I quite like is this French film “Summertime” by Catherine Corsini. It’s a period piece set in the early 1970s about these two women who meet in a feminist political cell in Paris. The politics is the backdrop for the two women to meet each other. It’s not necessarily any kind of treatise on feminist politics except in the way that these two women hold fast to their convictions about how they want to be.
The most decorated film we’re showing is called “Spa Night”. It’s won awards at every LGBT film festival it has played and won awards at Sundance when it premiered in January. I think what people are responding to is that it’s an uncommonly told story about the experience of a first-generation American contending with his sexuality. The hero of this film is the only son of a Korean American family, who immigrated to the Los Angeles area and are having troubles getting an economic foothold. It’s pretty explicit about the pressures on him. It’s very smartly made, sort of coolly observational.
We have wonderfully made, and smartly edited film called “Helmet Berger, Actor”. It’s got some uncomfortable imagery of the central figure pleasuring himself, shall we say. I’m not sure who else would show it, but it deserves to be screened. Helmut Berger was one of the most beautiful men working in cinema. He was an arthouse movie star in the 1970s working principally with Luchino Visconti, who was his lover. The movie suggests he’s now an older man who still feels entitled to his sense of celebrity and who carries himself with great aristocratic airs, even though he lives in small cramped two room apartment that his heroic housekeeper works to keep in order. It has a similarity to “Grey Gardens”. Helmet Berger still sustains the delusions of celebrity or aristocracy that I think the women in that film portrayed. It’s really about the limits of stardom while also wondering about the limits of documentary. John Waters said it was the best film of last year.
AA: I’m wondering given the events of this past year…the shooting in Orlando, the current political atmosphere, etc., how does the festival hold space in this environment?
CB: I think the main thing that we try to do as festival organizers is to present work that is conversant with different issues as best we can, based on the films we receive. I think some films, more than others, can feel like bulletins from daily life. The festival works to be reflective of the moment. Also just making sure the doors are open, you know? I work to include other members of the community and allow the festival to be a platform for them. We have great allies in this regard to the ACLU of Wisconsin, which will enhance some of our screenings with talkbacks. These talkbacks help the films and discussions get into the community better.
I do think the election kind of weighs on the festival, and we have a lot of films about politics. We have a documentary, “Political Animals” which is how we all benefit when lesbians are in elected office, by which I mean these women wo were the first out legislators in California helped foment change in the 90s with their work on domestic partnerships, and bullying. They were really pioneers, and it’s shocking to see how they were treated by their colleagues on the legislative floor. The names that they would be called, or the openly faith-based homophobia with which they would be treated.
I feel like if the festival speaks to the moment, it’s based on the activity of the audience. That’s the pleasure of the festival – people gather, and the audience transforms the movies into something else. So, our job is to make sure that we can shape the experience in such a way that the audience has something to work with. Creating a space in which the community can come together, and I think it does that. When I met with the program committee after the Orlando shooting happened, I asked them how they thought we should work to address it, their concern was not wanting to be seen as exploiting it.
But it turns out there’s a documentary called “Jewel’s Catch One”, about this legendary bar in Los Angeles, which was run by this African American lesbian woman, Jewel. She took it over in the 1960s when it was very hard for a Black lesbian to own a bar, and she made it a place. It was sort or the first safe space for the African American and queer community in Los Angeles. It eventually became seen as the Studio 54 of the West Coast. Sharon Stone was a habitué, Madonna had a record release party there. It was a scene. In addition to being a great night spot, it was a de facto community center and a resource for people suffering from AIDS. The movie is very much a valentine to this woman, and to the idea of owning a business and the responsibilities of serving a community. So we’ve programmed this film not because of Orlando, but the film speaks to the value of spaces like that.
I hope the audience can find their way towards thinking about those things. That’s the pleasure of the movies, you get to make connections.
