Hai cercato: Roy Cohn/Jack Smith

Roy Cohn/Jack Smith / 1995

When Jill Godmilow’s documentary 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.

Dove vedere in streaming Roy Cohn/Jack Smith

Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (Live Stage Recording) / 1992

Recorded during the initial run of the Obie Award-winning ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, this video documents the seminal performance piece as it was first seen by New York audiences. In its first half, Ron Vawter, following a script by Gary Indiana, conjures an after-dinner speech as it might have been delivered by notorious right wing political figure and closeted gay man Roy Cohn, as he addresses “The American Association for the Protection of the Family”. In its second half, Vawter re-emerges on stage in flamboyant costume as fiercely queer performance art pioneer, Jack Smith. Together, the two portraits present a complex, incisive, and discomforting view of queer identities as they collide with American culture. – Anthology Film Archives