Monday September 27 – Sunday October 3, 11pm PT
ACT UP, A Sonnet
Screening and Discussion (In person & online)
In person: Jim Hubbard and members of WWHIVDD collective
Organized by Devon Narine-Singh
Q&A follows the screening in-person and online at 9pm ET
Microscope is very pleased to present ACT UP, A Sonnet, an evening of films and discussions around HIV/AIDS — 40 years after the first diagnosis in the US — and the critical, unrelenting action of the ACT UP movement with Jim Hubbard, Ted Kerr, Sur Rodney (Sur), and members of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? community. The night is curated in collaboration with Devon Narine-Singh.
The evening includes the screening of two historical films by Jim Hubbard, “Two Marches” (1991) and “Kiss-In” (1988), selections from the “ACT UP Oral History Project” from 2003-2014 by Hubbard and Sarah Schulman among others; as well as newly recorded Zoom discussions between members of the What would an HIV doula do? (WWHIVDD) collective orchestrated by Devon Narine-Singh.
An in-person conversation with Jim Hubbard, Ted Kerr, Sur Rodney (Sur) around topics of illness, community, documentation and survival follows the screening. Other members of the What would an HIV doula do? (WWHIVDD) collective and online audience will able to partake in the discussion as well via live chat.
From Devon Narine-Singh:
“Formed by Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, the ACT UP Oral History Project was designed to “present comprehensive, complex, human, collective, and individual pictures of the people who have made up ACT UP/New York. These men and women of all races and classes have transformed entrenched cultural ideas about homosexuality, sexuality, illness, health care, civil rights, art, media, and the rights of patients.” This program is designed to both examine the many narratives within the Oral History Project and to have a modern day intervention with it.
WHAT WOULD AN HIV DOULA DO? (WWHIVDD) is “collective is a community of artists, activist, academics, chaplains, doulas, health care practitioners, nurses, filmmakers, AIDS Service Organization employees, dancers, community educators, and others from across the movement joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis.” Inspired by their project AIDS IS/AIDS AIN’T 40 which acknowledges that 2021 is “40 years since the US public health enterprise and media first reported on a set of conditions that would come to be known as AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)”, this evening has members of the collective responding to the Oral History Project interviews. From this engagement new connections are found and challenged.“
Online General Admission $9
Online Member Admission $7
In-person general admission: $10
In-person member admission: $8
Please note: The event has a limited capacity of 30 on-site, with proof of vaccination for Covid-19 and masks required.
Online tickets and the link to watch the livestream will go live at 7:30pm ET on the day of the show on this page.
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Jim Hubbard has been making films since 1974. He made United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, a feature length documentary on ACT UP, the AIDS activist group, which won Best Documentary at MIX Milano and Reel Q Pittsburgh LGBT Film Festival and has played at over 150 museums, universities and film festivals worldwide. Sarah Schulman and he completed 187 interviews as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project. One hundred and two of those interviews were on view in a 14-monitor installation at the Carpenter Center for the Arts, Harvard University as part of the exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993, October 15 – December 23, 2009. A version with 114 interviews showed at the White Columns Gallery in New York, September 8 – October 23, 2010. He, along with James Wentzy, created a 9-part cable access television series based on the Project. Among his 19 other films are Elegy in the Streets (1989), Two Marches (1991), The Dance (1992) and Memento Mori (1995). His films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and have been shown at the Warhol Museum, ICA Boston, the Harvard Film Archive, Tokyo University, der Zürcher Museen, mumok (Vienna), the Berlin Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Torino and many other Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals. His film Memento Mori won the Ursula for Best Short Film at the Hamburg Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 1995. He co-founded MIX – the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Under the auspices of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, he created the AIDS Activist Video Collection at the New York Public Library. He curated the series Fever in the Archive: AIDS Activist Videotapes from the Royal S. Marks Collection for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The 8-program series took place December 1-9, 2000. He also co-curated the series, Another Wave: Recent Global Queer Cinema at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, July and September 2006. In 2013-14, he curated an 8-program series of AIDS activist video from the collection of the New York Public Library to accompany their landmark exhibition Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism. In 2018, he received a grant from the Al Larvick Conservation Fund to digitize over 2 hours of his Lesbian & Gay Pride March and other Queer demonstration footage and Queer home movies.
What Would an HIV Doula Do? is a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis. We understand a doula as someone who holds space during times of transition. We understand HIV as a series of transitions that begins long before being tested, continues after treatment and beyond. We know that since no one gets HIV alone, no one should have to deal with HIV alone. We doula ourselves, each other, institutions and culture. Foundational to our process is asking questions.
Program:
Two Marches
By Jim Hubbard, 1991, 16mm film, 9 minutes 38 seconds
“In [Jim Hubbard’s] latest work, scenes shot at two national gay marches on Washington, DC are juxtaposed to reveal some of the devastating changes in the gay movement from 1979 to 1987, as hope is replaced by frustration and mourning. In Hubbard’s roving footage we follow the shifts in spirit, age and racial composition of the demonstrators and witness the growing organization of the protest spectacle, as ragtag bunches of rebellious marchers give way to marching bands and the unfurling of the Names Project AIDS Quilt. … Yet his touch is always gentle, and deeply, if elusively, personal, from the opening shots of Hubbard embracing the late filmmaker Roger Jacoby to the beautifully choreographed hands of deaf people signing. Always working within a small scale and tightly focused format, Hubbard has developed an astonishingly varied and emotionally complex body of work over the years, a series of personal film essays of intertwined loss and liberation.” — Liz Kotz, Afterimage
ACT UP ORAL HISTORY (Excerpts)
By Jim Hubbard, Sarah Schulman, James Wentzy, S. Leo Chiang, Tracy Wares, digital video, 2003-2014, 27 minutes
“The ACT UP Oral History archive provides one of the most direct accounts of the onset of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic. Recent scholarship (such as Let The Record Show by Sarah Schulman) have illustrated the contracted and conflicted views of the organization. Instead of choosing “standard” narratives, I have tried to look at the underheard parts of the Oral History Project while also still giving context to the actions of ACT UP.” — DNS
Kiss-In
By Jim Hubbard, 1988, 16mm film, b&w, 3 minutes 36 seconds
This Kiss-In took place the evening of April 29,1988. It was cold and pouring rain, but the demonstrators soldiered on. The Kiss-In was a favorite tactic of ACT UP because it defied the homophobia of the larger society, demonstrated a lack of fear and stigma around AIDS and fostered camaraderie among the demonstrators and within the group as a whole. It was also a whole lot of fun, which is evident from the footage. The night was dark and rainy so the footage had to be pushed, thus it is often difficult to see and very grainy.
ACT UP, A Sonnet
HD video, 2021, 47 minutes
“This Summer, What Would an HIV Doula Do? watched the chosen excerpts and recorded their own responses, creating a new oral history. Some are zoom calls, others spoken word responses in total darkness. AIDS is not over and the Doulas push us to understand the urgency of that in a matter of poetics and politics.” — DNS
With: Abdul-Aliy A Muhammad, Alexandra Juhasz, Ben Evans, Jennie Brier, Cea (Constantine Jones), David Harvey, Nick Melloan-Ruiz, Sur Rondey (Sur), Tamara Oyola-Santiago
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Microscope’s Event Series 2021 is sponsored by Re:Voir, a home video label for classic and contemporary experimental film in Paris, France.
