70s Classics at Rainbow Visions with MediaQueer.ca

  • Event

70s Classics at Rainbow Visions with MediaQueer.ca

Thu, 11/03/2016 - 21:00 to Fri, 11/04/2016 - 22:45

MediaQueer.ca returns to Rainbow Visions for the the festival 2nd edition to present two fabulously underground works from the 1970s!

Thursday, Nov. 3, 7pm at Metro Cinema (Garneau Theatre) 8712, 109 St NW, Edmonton, AB

http://rainbowvisions.ca/

Outrageous!
Check out our trailer here: https://vimeo.com/184739921

1977, 96 minutes, 35 mm, CANADA. Directed by Richard Benner

“You and me are here to love and look after each other.” – Robin

An upbeat friendship melodrama about Robin, a queer hairdresser (played by beloved drag artist Craig Russell), and his roommate Liza, who suffers from schizophrenia, Outrageous! deals with the theme of drag (then referred to as “female impersonation”) with a sincere authenticity, unlike many films on the subject that focus on the fictional nature of the act and on its performance. A look inside Robin’s day-to-day struggle to find his place in society, Outrageous!, even with its wild collection of costumes and its vivid colours, is more interested in the interiority of its characters than with their outside appearance. One of the rare Canadian film of the era to have a theatrical run (in New York), Outrageous! received many good reviews in trade journals during the late seventies and will now come to Rainbow Visions as part of the queer Canadian canon.

MediaQueer.ca is the online home of the Queer Media Database Canada-Quebec, a non-profit organization committed to the study, presentation, and preservation of queer Canadian film and video art.

Presented with:

Minimum Charge no Cover

1976, 11 min, 16mm, CANADA. Directed by Janis Cole & Holly Dale. Courtesy of the CFMDC

The film unfolds to reveal some of the filmmaker’s friends who lead alternative lifestyles. We meet transsexuals, homosexuals, hookers, transvestites and female impersonators.

Check out our trailer here: https://vimeo.com/184739921

More about Outrageous!:

Outrageous! the Canadian sleeper success story of the 1970s, merited three pieces in Cinema Canada, a rave, a pan, and a production story. John Locke’s rave (1977) began with an anecdote about a New York moviegoer’s praise for its non-national generic spectacle value and then led in to a dissection of its un-Canadian Canadianness:

“It’s the best show you’ve ever seen.” This is not a typical reaction to Canadian films … Outrageous! … is the best Canadian narrative film I have seen, and forgetting about nationalism for a moment, it is a very good film indeed in 1977 international terms … The acting is so uniformly excellent that it is positively “un-Canadian” … Outrageous! is un-Canadian in this specific sense: all the performers say their lines in a believable fashion … Canadian films often seem to disguise their nationality. Actors and actresses never say “aye.” Canadian artifacts like money and license plates never appear … Outrageous! breaks these conventions usually followed by Canadian films looking for United States distribution, and it makes the broken conventions work in its favour… Thank you Richard Benner whoever you are, I have been waiting for years to see a really good Canadian narrative film.

From Thomas Waugh’s The Romance of Transgression (McGill-Queens, 2006).