BlackmanVision Film Production

My top three that you have to see and if you cannot see them at the BFI London Film Festival make sure you see them at the cinema or snag a DVD with your very last pennies. These are in no particular order because they are all amazing.

1. Pariah – Stunning coming of age story about a middle class African American lesbian teenager. Dee Rees’ first feature shows a maturity and skill most of us take years to achieve. Book now to see Pariah.
   
2. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 – Powerful Swedish documentary using rare archive footage of the Black Power movements in the USA. White European filmmakers with an Afrocentric gaze! Whoa!  See The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 here.
   
3. Weekend – sencond feature by Andrew Haigh (Greek Pete). One of THE best gay films ever made. There is one exquisite moment in the sex scene which makes it the most authentic I have ever seen in cinema. See Weekend here.
   

Boys Don’t Cry is one of my favorite films, for the story but primarily for the way Hilary Swank totally nailed the genderqueer character of Brandon Teena.  I am presently casting for Stud Life which also has a genderqueer female lead. It is dawning on me that I am in for the long haul. It took THREE YEARS before Hilary Swank was cast!! BTW Shane from the L-Word also auditioned for the role.

According to Wikipedia. “Swank prepared for the role by dressing and living as a man for at least a month, including wrapping her chest in tension bandages and putting socks down the front of her pants in much the same way that Brandon Teena did. Her masquerade was so masterful that her neighbors believed that the young man (Swank in male character) coming and going from her home was Swank’s visiting brother.”  In the end the dedication earned her an Oscar.

I put out the casting call a month ago and have received an overwhelming positive response from actors for every part EXCEPT that of  JJ – the Black 20-something stud lesbian. This raises some issues around who goes for parts, but who is actually out there to play certain roles.

I don’t believe that you have to be genderqueer in your daily life to play a butch dyke, a transman or transwoman but you will need to take the risk to go outside your prescribed learned behaviour in terms of gender as Swank did for Boys Don’t Cry. But isn’t that what acting is about? Being able to live in someone else’s skin?

I would like Stud Life to taste and smell queer not look GAY as those BBC Dramas or Hollywood films. But do those productions cast normative people because they think that is more palatable for their audiences? Or could it be that if there was more diversity in casting then mainstream audiences would be more acceptable to variety?

Would it be easier if I had made JJ white? Are there more white actresses who are happy to play genderqueer and take the risk to do a butch lesbian role than Black actresses? So far I have had many handsome studs who are not actors wanting to be cast as JJ. Should I go down the route of casting an non-actor?

I have had many applications from men of colour who are quite happy to play gay so is this a woman thing?

My friends keep telling me that I am not going to get a woman, let alone a Black woman actress who is gender-queer as she would have given up long ago!  But isn’t there a newer generation of Black actresses who do not care and dress and look how they please. This is 2010 not 1980!

These are questions running around in my head.

STUD LIFE – CASTING CALL – LONDON ACTORS
Mates b4 Muff
Writer/Director: CampbellX
Producers – Stella Nwimo & Nadya Kassam

BD Women Clip from BlackmanVision on Vimeo. One of Campbell’s award-winning films

Stud Life is the new feature length film on queer street life in London written and directed by CampbellX. The film is a post-modern LGBT She’s Gotta Have It for the YouTube generation. Stud Life asks the perennial queer question, how do you choose between your lover and your best friend?

Stud Life is filmed over 10 days in London. Please note Stud Life contains lesbian, gay male and transgender content and scenes of a sexual nature and is a lo-budget independent film shot on HD video.

AUDITIONS
Dates of auditions will be 19, 21 22 July 2010 in London.
22 July will be the call back day.
Please email head shots and CVs to studlifethemovie@gmail.com stating what role you are auditioning for. Please include links to any videos of yourself online.
DEADLINE 16TH JULY 17:00 HOURS

CHARACTERS
JJ – 20 something Black butch masculine female, often mistaken for a guy.
Seb – JJ’s best friend and confidante and side-kick is a white ethnic 20 something emo gay man.
Smack Jack – 20-something Anglo English posh boy. He is smitten by Seb, who takes no notice of him.
Elle – 20-something lesbian hi-femme professional dominatrix. JJ falls for her but realises she is very hot to handle.
Manchester Joe – 30 something chavvy and thug sort of guy, Has anger issues and internalised homophobia.
White Man – 60 something
Thai Woman – 20 something
Bouncer – 30 something Black man
Iranian gay guy – 20 something
Older white boyfriend of Iranian guy – 50 something
Butch Boi – 20 something masculine woman
Hooded Youth 1 – 18-25
Hooded Youth 2 – 18-25
Flirty beautiful feminine woman – 20 – 60 something
1950’ s Bride – 30 something tattoed burlesque type woman
1950’s Groom – 30 something 1950’s style and vibe
Woman in Loo – 30-something
Barber 1 – 20 something – African
Barber 2 – 40 something – African
Hairdresser 1- 20 something Jamaican woman
Hairdresser 2 – 20 something – Black woman
Buppy woman – 30 something – Black aspirational woman
Buppy man – 40 something – Black aspirational type man
Old Skool Butch – 60 something woman
Chic Femme – 60 something woman
Hippy Femme - 30 something woman
Toi Boi – 30 something transman (FTM)
Asian bride – 20 something Asian woman
Bride’s Mother – 40 something Asian woman
Bride’s father – 40 something Asian man
Bridesmaid 1 – 20 something Asian woman
Bridesmaid 2 – 20 something Asian woman
Bridesmaid 3 – 20 something Asian woman

Vanity Fair - kd lang and Cindy Crawford

Stealing Beauty was a panel discussion chaired by Diva magazine Editor Jane Czyzselska. I was on the panel with Artist, DJ and performer Sadie Lee and fashion historian and cultural critic Elizabeth Wilson.

The event explored how LGBT culture plunders dominant straight culture and uses it to create something new and vibrant.

In my presentation I brought up three concepts. And here is a sample of my talk.

• The Guerilla Gaze
• Analog Duplication of Dominance
• Dominant Dilution

The Guerilla Gaze
My definition of The Guerilla Gaze is the ability of LGBT people to derive pleasure from images not intended for us. We queer the

Grace Jones - still looking fabulous

images in our imagination subverting the inherent (hetero)sexuality of the dominant narratives presented in movies, music videos, adverts and TV shows. In movies highly femininised women become objects of desire for women, as well as objects of identification. Butch lesbians may model their image according to the “thug style” as seen by hip hop stars like Fifty Cents or Flo Rida. They sometimes mimic the pose presented by the brute force of masculinity of Brad Pitt in Fight Club or Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire usually in a vest.

The Guerilla Gaze also throws light on people within film or TV narratives or within culture who are not considered objects of desire by mainstream heterosexual commodified desire. Our eyes are drawn to men and women who are “othered”. We elevate women in particular who defy the odds – who are older yet fierce, who bend gender, who are rebels. Do we do this because we feel they are the “Ugly Ducklings” of mainstream culture, and in our eyes they are transformed into Swans as we would hope to be perceived?

Analog Duplication of Dominance
The definition of analog duplication of dominance is that oppressed peoples often steal traditions from dominant cultures and with time the original meaning often changes or is subverted. I say this because with each generation our memories become increasingly more faint to the point that contemporary people often do not know the origins of particular behaviours, images, styles and traditions.  Our collective memories are thus analog.  If our memories were digital we would remember everything accurately all the time.

In the USA the system of the Houses eulogised in the movie Paris is Burning, recreates the notion of nuclear family with House Mothers and Fathers and children. Houses are made up of queer African American and Latina Americans rejected by mainstream LGBT cultures or their own bio-families. The Houses host balls in which people parody or mimic images of (WASP) power in the USA. For example one of the categories is Executive Realness. The participants perform “Business man” but always with flair. They cannot resist that extra flourish and transpose beauty and colour over the drabness of a grey suit. Popular gay slang now refers to LGBT people being “one of the children” or “family” possibly not realising their origins in Houses in the ghettos of the USA in the 1980s.

Fem - Eve relishes the apple

My work especially Fem is about stealing iconic images of femininity from dominant culture including fairy tales, religion, movies, fashion. I queer them with a particular lesbian sensibility – Eve does regret eating the apple and will not be punished. Eve is also a Black woman, reminding us that we all came from Africa and subverting the dominant Eurocentric Biblical image of Eve.

Dominant Dilution
Mainstream straight culture sucks off cultures of marginalised peoples, and regurgitates it back to everyone bleached and ironed out for mass capitalistic consumption.

August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair with k.d. lang and Cindy Crawford

Words like naff whose original meaning was dull, heterosexual, mundane or trade meaning same sex partner were from Polari the language spoken by LGBT people and people in the underworld in the past. Prince gained major popularity in the 1980s but how many people know that his style was very similar to Little Richard from the 1960s who sang songs with coded queer lyrics. Madonna appropriated vogueing a dance style created by queer African American and Latina Americans for her video Vogue, while not mentioning anyone of colour in her homage list.

Sometimes, very rarely, a queer image, created by a queer person, with a queer sensibility is used by a mainstream company to sell their product. This happened once with the Vanity Fair which had on their 1993 cover, kd lang and Cindy Crawford photographed by Annie Liebovitz. If you can think of any others please let me know. The image is particularly interesting because it is gender queer, and kd lang a butch woman is also being used to sell glamour to a straight audience.

People are saying butches are invisible in mainstream films. They have always been there, but we may have not liked what we saw like June ‘George’ Buckridge in The Killing of Sister George or Rosa Klebb, a butch Russian lesbian who has a dangerous shoe in the James Bond film from Russia with Love.

I will be in the panel at the Butch Voices Conference called – Is That Me on TV? – 22nd August 2009 – chaired by Cheryl Dunye (Stranger Inside, Watermelon Woman), Campbell X (Fem, BD Women), Kortney Ryan Ziegler (Still Black), Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) & Jack Halberstam (Female Masculinity).

You may disagree with the list and it would be interesting to hear if you think they are indeed butch or trans, just some girl in a suit, or just a tough broad. Ha!

1. Marlene Dietrich  in Morocco as Mademoiselle Amy Jolly. Dietrich is audacious, chivalrous and causes the woman to melt when she kisses her.
2. Katherine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett as Sylvia Scarlett. Here is a rather camp sequence with Cary Grant. But doesn’t Hepburn look handsome.
3. Queen Latifah in Set it Off as Cleo. I don’t mind she dies at the end. It is noble and heroic and explosive.
4. Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry as Brandon Teena. Painful to watch as it is a true story but Hilary Swank is gawky, red-neck and  sexy.
5. Gina Gershon in Bound as Corky. A butch who lives and gets the broad.
6. Yolanda Ross in Stranger Inside as Treasure.  Hot dark-skinned and Afrocentric.
7. Silas Howard in By Hook or By Crook as Shy.  Gender queer, avante-garde and complex.
8. Sonja Sohn in The Wire as Kima Greggs.  Is she butch or just a tough cop. One of the few flawed lesbian characters intelligently handled in mainstream television.
9. Josiane Balasko in Gazon Maudit as Marijo. A rare sighting of an older bulldagger, and in French cinema to boot.
10. Pamela Sneed in BD Women as Butch Daddy. Reclaiming the glory days of the Harlem Rennaissance.

Who are your hot butches on film or TV?

Nina’s Heavenly Delights was the first feature film in the UK by an out Asian lesbian. It is a miracle that this film got funded as no feature film about lesbians directed by lesbians gets funded anymore in the UK. Shocking but true. Usually the films are directed by men.

It is a major achievement and a testament to Pratibha Parmar‘s tenacity and sheer doggedness in the face of dragging feet by a major funding source in the UK that the film completed it’s journey from script to screen. The film has gone on to win international awards. It is really inspiring to me to see that Pratibha has managed to sustain a career sticking to her politics as well as still maintainng a committment to making films that include queer or Asian storylines.