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eye WEEKLY                                            November 24 1994
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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ON SCREEN                                                    ON SCREEN
                                preview

                           THE FRUIT MACHINE

     A retrospective of film and video by Canadian lesbians, gays
                       and bisexuals (1957-1994).
                            Nov. 25-Dec. 8.
 Cinematheque Ontario, AGO's Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas St. W. 923-FILM.
     (See eye's Independent & Repertory film listings for times.)


                         STORMIN' THE SCREENS
   Celebrating 25 years of gay, lesbian and bisexual film and video
                              in Canada

                                  by
                             GEMMA FILES


Back in the '50s and early '60s, the RCMP tried to "pin down" closeted
homosexuals with devices designed to measure their involuntary
physiological reactions -- pulse rate, ocular dilation, etc. -- to
suspect words and images. They called these Clockwork Orange-esque
instruments of orientative inequity "fruit machines" _ a term both
subsequently (and shamefully) lost in the mists of unspoken gay
history, and ripe for the co-opting.

To fill the gap, then, comes Cinematheque Ontario's newest
retrospective, The Fruit Machine, a selection of hip, fun and
thought-provoking film and video by Canadian lesbians, gays and
bisexuals that celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Omnibus Bill --
which kicked the state (partly) out of Canadian bedrooms -- and that
proves beyond a shadow of a cinematic doubt that, as Jimmy Somerville
once sang, "there's more to love than boy meets girl."

"What really amazed me," says retrospective curator Thomas Waugh, "was
just how big the body of work I had to pick and choose from turned out
to be, and that most of it had been made over the last 10 years. From
the few, brave voices at the beginning to our current crop of loud,
brash, routinely out kids, it was a real educative overview of how far
we've all come."

Waugh, who has taught film and gay studies at Montreal's Concordia
University since 1976 -- where he also recently inaugurated Canada's
first interdisciplinary graduate credit course on AIDS -- attributes
this upswing in independent non- hetero creativity to the growing
accessibility of video technology. The much- predicted technological
trickle-down has, it seems, birthed a veritable flood of screen-ready
product.

"It's utterly accessible now," Waugh agrees, "almost a disposable
medium -- and for artists just getting started it's fantastic, because
it almost completely cuts out the middleman. No more waiting for
grants, no more self-censorship."

The ease and inventiveness of video has certainly been good indeed to
many of The Fruit Machine's younger entrants -- arch essayists like
Maureen Bradley, who compressed the fallout from her tour of duty as
one of CBC's Road Movies' two "national TV dykes" into a cultural
travelogue called Queer Across Canada in 1993 (screened Nov. 25, 8:45
p.m.); guerrilla documentarians like Gwendolyn, whose Prowling By Night
from '90 (Nov. 25, 8:45 p.m.) calmly upends a typical nocturnal tour of
Toronto's underbelly and takes a good look at what comes crawling out;
even 16mm holdouts like Midi Onodera, whose '85 rule-buster Ten Cents A
Dance (Parallax) (Nov. 28, 8:45 p.m.) once caused enraged audience
members to rush the projection booth.

Also featured will be early works by all the usual suspects: Jeremy
Podeswa , Patricia Rozema (I've Heard The Mermaids Singing) and John
Greyson (Zero Patience). But from the "sensitive drag queen" antics of
formative lone examples like Richard Benner's Outrageous! from '77
(Dec. 1, 9:15 p.m.) to the graphic parallels drawn between
self-acceptance and gay pornography by Richard Fung's Chinese
Characters from '86 (Nov. 26, 8:45 p.m.) and Steve Reinke's Lonely Boy
from last year (Dec. 5, 6:30 p.m.), it's inter-generational contrast
that really gives The Fruit Machine much of its oomph -- a duality most
obvious in the pairing on Nov. 30, 8:45 p.m. of Claude Jutra's A Tout
Prendre ('63), hailed as Canada's first explicitly gay film, with Shani
Mootoo's The Wild Woman In The Woods ('93), a video mini-meditation on
one East Indian dyke's identity problems that plays like Masala with no
money.

"I've taught art for 18 years," says Waugh, "and the increase in people
who are out and doing art based largely around their own sexuality is
inexpressibly heartening. Our losses have been hard, and continue to be
so; one of the most moving aspects about assembling The Fruit Machine
was realizing how many more people than the few we chose to highlight
have been taken by AIDS. All that wasted creativity. But the inspiring
and hopeful thing remains just how many people are still here -- happy,
healthy, producing. That's a victory."


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