SCUM Manifesto

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.

In a small community of steel workers, truck drivers, and teachers on the South Side of Chicago, a musical group called the Popovich Brothers maintained the traditional music and rich culture of their Serbian homeland by performing in local venues. By the 1970s, when this documentary was made, the Popovich Brothers had been performing for almost 50 years, bringing this music to new generations.

Made entirely by women - a group of young men and women have a cinema verite confessional about their most bizarre sexual experiences in a strange modern day Decameron.

American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.

1974 documentary about symphony conductor Antonia Brico, including her struggle against gender bias in her profession.

Fictionalized portrait of one of history's great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, Guillaume Apollinaire, others; and Hemingway pops in.

A study of concert-artist Richard Dyer-Bennet at work on Homer's Odyssey - that is, developing a strategy for performing, in English, and in 1978, with harp in hand, this monumental 24 hour poem, which, in Homer's time and Homer's life, only existed in oral form - a long song, performed in public as entertainment and as tribal history.

Jill Godmilow's six-hour archive of The Mabou Mines ensemble's controversial 1990, gender-reversed production of William Shakespeare's King Lear documents the first two-week workshop on the play at the Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta. Director Lee Breuer and the cast are seen working on transposing the play to 1950's America in this intimate record of a master class in avant-garde performance work. Taken from over 100 hours of material, this condensed archive comes with a 32-page handbook with guides for tracking the production.