Gary Needham wrote me a few days ago saying ‘Jose, have you seen ALL OF US STRANGERS yet? I saw it at the weekend and wasn’t expecting to be absolutely devastated by it. I cried throughout, when I got home, and still can’t shake off its affect and resonance days later’. I felt very similarly and have been wanting to talk to friends about the film ever since I saw it as part of the London Film Festival tour at the Midlands Arts Centre a few months ago.
Gary is a knowledgeable and celebrated queer scholar; the author of Brokeback Mountain (2010); co-author with Glyn Davis of Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics (2008) and Warhol in Ten Takes (2013); co-editor of Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (with Dimitris Eleftheriotis, 2006); United Artists (with Peter Krämer, Tino Balio, Yannis Tzioumakis), and many more. He is currently finishing Sex, Gays and Videotape: American Independent Cinema and the AIDS Crisis and another on Arthur Bressan’s Buddies (1985) for the QUEER FILM CLASSICS series. In other words, an ideal person to talk to about this film.
The conversation takes as a starting point the following:
a)a quote from director Andrew Haigh in The Guardian: ‘A generation of queer people are grieving the childhood they never had’.
b)Cüneit Çarkirlar’s observation at the end of his thoughtful piece on the film in The Conversation that, ‘I watched it with a friend who afterwards said something that really resonated with me: “It felt like one of the truest depictions of growing up gay in the 1980s and 1990s”.’
c) Gary’s own school report from 1987 (see below):
In the podcast we try to mix very personal responses with various historical contexts and speak of the film’s setting in relation to queer childhoods in that period, section 28, trauma, erasure; the film’s formal and stylistic achievements; Andrew Haigh’s career; how the film speaks to psychoanalytic pain, a generational pain, grief, AIDS. The personal grounded in historical contexts as a platform for politics. It’s all in there.
It may be listened to below:
The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT
and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546
We referenced the Section 28 Book which is this one: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/outrageous; and the dates of the introduction are 1988 with a repeal in 2003, which is quite some time for such a homophobic legislation to be in place. The wikipedia page is actually very good on it with infographics too (like the Tories anti-labour billboards) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28
The Weekend/Theo and Hugo piece with Cüneyt for academic reference is this https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17400309.2020.1800329.
If you don’t have institutional access feel free to contact José here or Gary on gneedham@liverpool.ac.uk. He is also on instagram as gary.needham.
The queer British cinema survey is up online here: https://www.academia.edu/104194486/Queer_Relay_in_Post_Millennial_British_Cinema
José Arroyo.