LEGACIES OF RESISTANCE

Curators: Walter Crasshole, Jurgen Bruning

Explicitly queer cinema has always dealt with sexualities but through its decades-long history, these films have one other thing in common: they champion a culture of resistance. Resistance against normative sexualities, the patriarchal hegemony, capitalism… queer cinema has rebelled against many forms of oppression over the years and will continue to resist new forms in the future. Pornfilmfestival Berlin curators Jürgen Brüning and Walter Crasshole present a program of films from their own contexts that reflect this legacy.

In Michael Kalman’s 1972 comedy, the all-woman staff of a seedy San Francisco hotel uses the teachings of Karl Marx to rise up against the fascist hotel management – who take all the money while the girls do all the work – in a send-up and critique of the parasitic pimp/sex worker dynamic, as well as capitalism itself. Hilariously campy and low-budget, many of the ‘girls’ themselves were drag performers of the era and the film culminates in a burlesque show at the end featuring famous avant-garde drag troupe The Cockettes, making the film not only a battle cry against oppressive labor dynamics but also a portrait of a radical and subversive San Francisco that sadly no longer exists.