| San Francisco Public Library

Director: Gillbergh, Gregory
Year: 1994
Synopsis: A New York short story for anyone who has ever experienced awkward moments between appetizers and entrées. Filmed in fake documentary-style flashback, six guests recount the fateful events leading up to one incident. Hugely enjoyable, dry as a martini, Assassination is light on gay calories but high in unsaturated style.

Director: Jopp, Vanessa
Year: 1994
Synopsis: In Aquavitae director Vanessa Jopp shows a transgender male-to-female self reflecting on the creative potential and limitations of gender.

Director: Stambrini, Monica
Year: 1994
Synopsis: Martino is practically a man when, during an eye test, the optometrist and his mother discover that he never saw things quite in the same way they have.

Director: Kim-Trang, Tran T.
Year: 1994
Synopsis: Blindness, sex, desire, and violence is examined in this stark video which foregrounds the practice of eyelid alteration among some Asian women.

Director: Jarman, Derek
Year: 1993
Synopsis: Derek Jarman's first film since Edward II is a humorous portrait of one of this century's most influential philosophers. Made for Britain's Channel Four TV, Wittgenstein reflects Jarman's distinctive sense of style. Inventive images and vibrantly colored costumes (most of them containing the extraordinary Tilda Swinton) are filmed against a pitch-black background; it's what Jarman calls "the eradication of all that flim-flam." The result is so striking it almost hurts the eye. It won the Teddy Award at the 1993 Berlin International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for Best Gay Feature. Young Ludwig (Clancy Chassay) was born in Vienna in 1889. His family was wealthy, though mysteriously ill-fated. During studies at Cambridge University, Wittgenstein (played as an adult by Karl Johnson), is seen as an intensely brilliant thinker, not without his erotic impulses. He is patronized by Bertrand Russell (the sublime Michael Gough) and Russell's imperious mistress, Lady Ottoline Morell (Swinton, of course). Ludwig's search for intellectual self-development results in some rather shabby treatment of Johnny (Kevin Collins), the working-class man he loves. Wittgenstein struggled with self-alienation throughout his years. He died of cancer in 1951. His final, mocking words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." Jarman's film captures this life with energy and imagination.