12/13/18 // Stinky Wieners and Dreamy Beavers: Curt McDowell Restorations
Posted November 27th, 2018 in Co-Presentations, Events and Screenings, News / Events
Stinky Wieners and Dreamy Beavers: Curt McDowell Restorations
Thursday, December 13th, 2018 // 6:30 PM
Minnesota Street Project // 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco
Facebook Event
Presented in association with the UNTITLED, Cinema and Minnesota Street Project. With Jon Davies and Melinda McDowell in person.
free and open to the public
“Curt McDowell worked in San Francisco from the late 1960s until his death in 1987- a period that witnessed the Summer of Love, gay liberation, and the onset of AIDS, to which he succumbed at the age of forty-two. The author of numerous films that recast the American dream of plenty in pansexual terms, McDowell, like so many artists of his generation, indulged in the era’s carnal abundance, and his appetites and experiences are reflected in the work, which alternates between the revealing and the puerile. His short films, such as Wieners and Buns Musical (1972) and Loads (1980), celebrate sex as well as genre riffing and autobiographical narratives (McDowell’s insatiable desire for seducing straight men is explicitly documented in his 16-mm works), and bear the influences of Jack Smith’s lush, DIY camp aesthetic, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s explosive melodrama, and Nan Goldin’s glimpses of countercultural bohemia.” – Glen Helfand, ArtForum
“…Life for [McDowell] was a fast track to fast times that included devilish detours into forbidden erogenous zones. He explored all those zones with a zealous zeal: painter, pornographer, poet of the plebeian and the perverse…” – George Kuchar
Canyon Cinema is pleased to present Stinky Wieners and Dreamy Beavers, a film program of short works by trailblazing queer filmmaker and artist Curt McDowell. All films are recently restored by the Academy Film Archive, shown on newly created 16mm prints screening for the first time in the Bay Area — Curt McDowell’s adopted home and the site of much of his raunchy, autobiographical, comic, playful and unabashed work. Standing as essential portraits of Curt’s milieu and one of San Francisco’s many vanishing cultures, these films possess a life and vibrance that continues to endure. The program is introduced by Jon Davies, PhD student in Art History at Stanford focusing on queer and cinematic scenes, and is followed by a conversation between Davies and Melinda McDowell, Curt’s sister and longtime collaborator and star.
Program features:
Ainslie Trailer (1972)
Confessions (1971)
Wieners and Buns Musical (1972)
True Blue and Dreamy (1973)
Ronnie (1973)
The Mean Brothers “Get Stood Up” (1973)
Stinky-Butt (1974)
Beaver Fever (1974)
