Gary Indiana

“PLUTOT LA VIE is one of many ‘scratch films’ made specifically to be shown at Cabaret RAF, a vaudeville and variety show presented at irregular intervals at Passerby at Gavin Brown Space and Participant, Inc between 2004-05. PLUTOT LA VIE accompanied an evening of hypnosis demonstrations and performances by a fakir and a fire artist. Assembled from degraded prints of BLONDE VENUS, M, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, CRIMINAL LOVERS, DEAD OF NIGHT, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, PLUTOT LA VIE is a meditation on the society of the spectacle and mass hypnosis.” –PARTICIPANT INC

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“UNFINISHED STORY is an episodic video collaboration between Gary Indiana and the photographer Lynn Davis, a series of conversations and readings of works-in-progress shot in the artist’s apartment over the course of a difficult year.” –PARTICIPANT INC

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“Inspired by the prose poem by Francis Ponge, SOAP is a series of monologues and stories concerning an object to which everyone has a relationship. Through the vehicle of soap, the actors talk about a variety of other subjects: family relationships, childhood, AIDS, World War II, love. With Alex Melamid, Walter Steding, Laura Cottingham, Bill Rice, Leslie Singer, Stephen Prina, and others.” –PARTICIPANT INC

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In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.

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This short video portrait of the great East Village painter, writer, and actor Bill Rice – made by his friend and colleague Tom Jarmusch – also features a memorable appearance from Gary Indiana.

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“PLUTOT LA VIE is one of many ‘scratch films’ made specifically to be shown at Cabaret RAF, a vaudeville and variety show presented at irregular intervals at Passerby at Gavin Brown Space and Participant, Inc between 2004-05. PLUTOT LA VIE accompanied an evening of hypnosis demonstrations and performances by a fakir and a fire artist. Assembled from degraded prints of BLONDE VENUS, M, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, CRIMINAL LOVERS, DEAD OF NIGHT, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, PLUTOT LA VIE is a meditation on the society of the spectacle and mass hypnosis.” –PARTICIPANT INC

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A documentary on serial killer films.

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“NORTH [by artist John Boskovich] features Gary Indiana, exuding star power, reading from Céline’s novel ‘North,’ an account of Céline’s desperate flight from France to Germany in the waning days of World War II. […] With scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU projected behind Indiana, and a camera circling him like a shark, NORTH buzzes with turpitude, grandeur, and intelligence. It isn't a modern ‘Sentimental Education,’ but it twists the twistedness of that novel into a scary, sickening shape.” –Jerry Saltz, ARTNET

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When Jill Godmilow’s movie Roy Cohn/Jack Smith premiered at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival, the number of AIDS-related deaths was reaching an all-time high in the United States (over 270,000). In New York City, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, many artists and filmmakers were grappling with the disease. While Broadway was hosting the second part of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play Angels in America, downtown New Yorkers were fondly recalling another recent production, Ron Vawter’s one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, in which the actor, who died of AIDS in April 1994, performed two monologues, first as Cohn, the conservative lawyer, and secondly, as Smith, the flamboyant experimental filmmaker—both of whom died of AIDS-related causes in the late 1980s.

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New Cinema cofounder Becky Johnston recently described this little-seen feature as “an East Village reinvention of the Otto Preminger movie *Laura*” that plays “fast and loose with the noir detective genre.”

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