Now Available: Jack Walsh’s Dear Rock and The Lost Generation

Posted February 6th, 2025 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, News / Events

Dear Rock (Jack Walsh, 1993, 18 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

Dear Rock is a posthumous fan letter to Rock Hudson that uses Hudson as a springboard for an exploration of AIDS and homophobia. Using the contrived form of the fan letter, Dear Rock employees digression as its structure, beginning with elements of Hudson’s life that open onto larger contemporary issues about gay male identity. Dear Rock builds on the dichotomy facing gay men: it moves between the private and the public, the myth and the reality using Hudson’s life as a metaphor for gay male issues. The often contradictory relationship between gay male desire is explored using images from men’s swim meets and underwear advertisements. Tension is constructed between the homophobic and the homoerotic, the forbidden and the desired. Dear Rock is a reflection on a victim of Hollywood’s enforced homophobia, but ultimately the film attempts to map the landscape of AIDS since Hudson’s death in 1985 up through 1993 the year it was made.

The Lost Generation (2004, 63 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

The Lost Generation is a personal essay documentary that explores aging, memory, loss and love. Interweaving three distinct narrative points of view with dynamic landscape imagery, still photographs, and S8mm footage, the film looks at the many universal questions, unresolved issues, and milestones in the filmmaker’s life and that of the 1970s generation.