The Insatiable Curt McDowell

Retrospective, 93 min.

By: Curt McDowell

Confessions, Curt McDowell, US 1971, 11 min., engl. OV
Ronnie, Curt McDowell, US 1972, 7 min., engl. OV
Loads, Curt McDowell, US 1980, 22 min., engl. OV
Taboo (The Single and the LP), Curt McDowell, US 1981, 53 min., engl. OV

Restored by the Academy Film Archive.

All recently restored, this evening’s films celebrate the radical, sexually explicit legacy of Curt McDowell (1945–1987), who epitomizes the libidinal spirit of San Francisco. From his early diaristic Confessions to Ronnie and Loads, which document his sexual obsession with macho trade, the program culminates with McDowell’s most ambitious, experimental and rarely seen featurette, Taboo (The Single and the LP). Based on an enigmatic piece of men’s-room graffiti, this dizzying narrative is partly an expression of McDowell’s amour fou for a muscular Palestinian-American teen named Fahed Martha. The film is about “rules, games and patriarchal manipulation. It’s everything my family brought me up with smashed into one movie.” Please note: the film ends with graphic documentary footage of an autopsy.

Jon Davies

About the retrospective: San Francisco Sexual Babylon

This year’s retrospective program celebrates the San Francisco Bay Area as the epicenter of postwar sexual liberation and a mecca of sexually explicit representation. In avant-garde film and performance, sex education and porn, San Francisco has long been the place not only to imagine but to boldly try out new social and sexual possibilities. In this deeply queer city, clear lines of generational influence can be drawn over the decades: people who created sexual images as part of a liberatory ethos or queer politic taught and inspired others to create in turn. The Bay Area is also where sex radicalism was able to challenge gender separatism, with gay male, lesbian and trans makers often working in the same ecosystem and influencing each other, and fixed identities took a back seat to polymorphous pleasure and libidinal solidarity. This series offers a hot-blooded history of San Francisco sex on film and video, while recognizing the enduring vitality of independent lesbian/queer/trans porn production in the region. It is a tradition invested in the belief that porn can liberate and teach as well as provide pleasure.

Guest-curated by Jon Davies and commissioned by Jürgen Brüning for Porn Film Festival Berlin

Jon Davies

Jon Davies is a curator and writer from Montreal, Canada. He received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University, where he wrote a dissertation titled “The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995.” From 2004 to 2016, he worked as a film and video programmer and contemporary art curator in Toronto. His writing has been published in many exhibition catalogs, magazines, academic journals, and anthologies. His book on Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s 1970 film Trash was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009 and his edited anthology More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings was published by Concordia University Press in 2021. He co-edited issues #5 and #6 of the cult “Little Joe” magazine (“about queers and cinema, mostly”) with British artist-designer Sam Ashby. More recently, he co-curated the 68th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, “Queer World-Mending,” with artist Steve Reinke, and is currently the General Idea Fellow conducting research on the artist trio at the National Gallery of Canada.