Category: Video Vault

Calgary-born video artist David Tuff (b. 1959) died due to AIDS-related illness in 1992. A compilation of his video works was recently recovered from the personal collection of Montreal-based cinema studies scholar Tom Waugh. One of the video works on the tape is Tuff’s 1989 short titled Are We Going Backwards?. The video is an experimental activist documentary covering the BC Social Credit Party’s proposed (and eventually passed) Bill 34, a piece of legislation that legalized the quarantine and internment of people with HIV/AIDS. Tuff makes a comparison between this piece of legislation and the internment of Japanese Canadians in British Columbia during World War II. The ten-minute video was made from Tuff’s previous video installation at Emily Carr in 1987-88 that tackled the same themes.

You can learn more about the BC quarantine legislation and the Coalition for Responsible Health Legislation that organized against it in many of the Vancouver oral history transcripts, especially those from John Kozachenko, Dan Guinan, Richard Banner, and Cynthia Brooke.

Don’t miss these two upcoming Zoom-based events on HIV/AIDS video activism in Canada this month. They are both free and open to the public! See registration links below.

HIV on TV: A Panel on Early HIV/AIDS Activist Television in Canada | 10 June 2021 | 2pm EST
In the ‘80s and ‘90s HIV/AIDS activists in Canada used video cameras to organize, educate, agitate, and document their own rebellions. Before widespread use of the web-based video distribution platforms that we have today, artists and activists utilized community cable television channels to reach audiences near and far as tapes were also exchanged through the mail. This panel features video makers who either contributed to these community cable projects or are stewards of this archive. Notably, this panel will touch upon two community cable projects, Vancouver’s Gayblevision and Toronto’s Toronto Living With AIDS. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Ryan Conrad. Register here!

Dialogue on Women’s HIV/AIDS Video Activism Then & Now | 17 June 2021 | 2pm EST
Join an intimate conversation between esteemed HIV/AIDS activist Darien Taylor and award-winning independent film and video maker Alison Duke. Taylor’s groundbreaking documentary Voices of Positive Women (1993), which she made in collaboration with video artist Michael Balser, is one of the earliest examinations of the impact of HIV and AIDS upon women. Duke has been making documentaries about HIV/AIDS since 2007, most notably the pair of documentaries Positive Women: Exposing Injustice (2012) and Consent: HIV Non-disclosure and Sexual Assault Law (2015). The dialogue will be moderated by Dr. Ryan Conrad. Register here!

Ryan Conrad, a long-time member of the AAHP team, has recently published an article titled “Cable Access Queer: Revisiting Toronto Living With AIDS (1990-1991)” in the open-access media studies journal Jump Cut. The article analyzes the Canadian AIDS activist community television series Toronto Living With AIDS and provides insight into how this extraordinary program came to be, how it was received by various imagined publics, how it ended, and why revisiting this series is useful for today’s video activists. The article contains nearly 100 images and archival documents about the public access show and AIDS activist media in Canada. An excerpt is included below:

To continue reading, check out the full article on Jump Cut‘s website.

Médecins de coeur (1993) –  112 minutes, colour, french
by Tahani Rached

Médecins de Coeur [Doctors of the Heart] is a National Film Board-funded documentary that focuses largely on Dr. Réjan Thomas, one of the co-founders of the first STI clinic in Canada in 1984. This clinic would become what we know of today as Clinique médicale l’Actuel in Montreal, one of the leading STI and HIV prevention and treatment centres in Canada. While the film builds its central narrative following Dr. Thomas to and from classrooms, clinics, and international conferences where he educates the film’s viewers about HIV/AIDS, activists and protests provide a rowdy backdrop to what is otherwise a somewhat monotonous two hours of talking heads.

The film opens with scenes from numerous ACT UP Montreal actions at what is now an HIV/AIDS memorial park called Parc de l’Espoir (corner of Panet and Ste. Catherine streets). Many interviewees of the AAHP that were involved in ACT UP Montreal recall the fight to establish the AIDS memorial park in some detail.  Check out our interviews with Glenn Betteridge, Michael Hendrick and René Leboeuf, and Earl Pinchuk for the inside scoop.

Two other notable AIDS activist-related scenes in the film include: Douglas Buckley-Couvrette, who is remembered lovingly by many Montreal AAHP interviewees,  leading an ACT UP Montreal demonstration commemorating the murder of Joe Rose; the Amsterdam VIII International AIDS Conference where sex worker activists launched the Global Network of Sex Work Projects—and in fact you can see a young Andy Sorfleet amongst the picketing sex workers in the footage.

Lastly, of note, is the constant discussion of the cost of medications to treat HIV and opportunistic infections. That is because this 1993 documentary precedes the 1997 Quebec national pharmacare program brought in by the recently elected Parti Québécois in late 1994. ACT UP Montreal launched a multi-year campaign to include HIV-related treatments under the maladies sur pieds social welfare program to no success under the then-Liberal Party provincial government. This program was designed to provide funding for treatments in order to keep people with chronic illness medicated so they wouldn’t constantly be at the hospital or in a clinic. The push to add HIV/AIDS to the list of illness treated through the the maladies sur pieds program likely helped in the push for a national pharmacare plan in Quebec, claims Michael Hendricks in his interview with AAHP.

For the 2018 International Women’s Day we want to highlight the brilliant work of Canadian women who have challenged and informed audiences with their activist films and videos for nearly 30 years. The collection of videos featured below focus on many aspects at the intersection of HIV and women’s experience, from lesbians and sex workers to immigrants and women of colour. The variation in content is matched by variation in form: narratives, animations, documentaries, experimental shorts, public service announcements, featurettes, and features.

While we wish all of these videos were available for streaming online, some are not. All titles are linked to streaming video or information about distributors that carry these titles.

Debbie Douglas & Gabrielle Micallef (1960-2011)  – AnOther Love Story: Women and AIDS (1990)

Beginning with an opening scene that mirrors Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986), a lesbian interracial couple wake up in bed with one rushing to get up and out the door. In AnOther Love Story, the young woman rushing out the door is headed to a doctor’s appointment to do an HIV test. The narrative built around this couple’s relationship structures the video which aims to illustrate the issues facing women and HIV, and lesbians and racialized women in particular. Douglas & Micallef’s video appeared as part of the Toronto: Living With AIDS cable access series along with Glace Lawrence‘s The Colour of Immunity (1991) that we’ve written about previously. AnOther Love Story was also recently featured at an encore screening in Montreal for the 10th edition of Massimadi. Unfortunately, this video is not available streaming online, but it is available from Vtape.

Esther Valiquet (1962-1994) – Le Récit d’A (1990); Le Singe Bleu [The Measure of Your Passage] (1992)

Le Récit d’A, The Story of A, is an experimental travel diary. The video combines medical imaging, desert landscapes, and images from the author’s trip to visit a friend named Andrew in San Francisco. The accompanying voiceover track switches between philosophical musings about mortality and what we leave behind vis-a-vis Susan Sontag and Edmond Jabès, and an interview with Andrew, a gay friend struggling to survive with AIDS. Jumping between English and French, this very Montreal short is credited with reanimating the Quebec art scene to respond to the crisis.
Le Singe Bleu, retitled The Measure of  Your Passage in english, is a philosophical mediation on living in the face of assured death. The film is part historical research on the disappearance of Minoan civilization—similar in style to what one would see on the History Channel today—and part reflection on the mass scale of death from the AIDS crisis. Much like Le Récit d’A, Valiquette’s introspective and autobiographical approach to filmmaking renders the philosophical musings on mortality at the height of the AIDS epidemic all the more visceral. And not to be missed is the video footage from the ACT UP Montreal World AIDS Day Women’s March in 1990 towards the end of the film, as this event was often noted in our project’s oral history transcripts. This beautiful National Film Board funded featurette won a Genie award for best short documentary in 1993 and is available streaming online in french and english.

Gwendylon – Prowling By Night (1990)

This twelve-minute animation film was produced as part of the National Film Board’s Five Feminist Minutes program, a compilation of short films to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Studio D. Prowling By Night animates the true stories of sex workers in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood in the 1980s and highlights instances of police harassment, safe sex education, and sex worker’s rights. This film won the award for Best First Short Film at La Mondiale de films et vidéos réalisés par des femmes in April 1991. Unfortunately, the National Film Board has yet to make this video publicly available on their website.

Anne Golden –Les Autres/Women and AIDS (1991); Safe Soap (1994)

Les Autres begins with a scene reminiscent of Stuart Marshall’s Bright Eyes (1986), where viewers are schooled in media literacy, examining troubling mainstream media representations of HIV/AIDS. The video continues in vignettes:  women in a lesbian bar discussing condoms and safer sex; two high school girls talking about sex education in schools; a woman sitting on her bed demonstrating safe sex practices while discussing sex amongst women and lesbians; ACT UP Montreal protest footage;  two women from GAP-SIDA (precursor to GAP-VIES) discussing HIV prevention amongst racialized women; documentary footage from an HIV/AIDS art show. In this montage video you can also find a young Karen Herland from Réaction SIDA whose AAHP transcript can be read here.
Safe Soap  was produced as part of an artist residency hosted by Michael Balser at the Banff Centre and programmed as part of the Second Generation PSA compilation (along with nine other artists).  Two 30-second versions were created, one heterosexual, the other lesbian themed. More can be learned about both these two videos by checking out the AAHP transcript of Golden, available in both english and french here.

Darien Taylor (& Michael Balser) – Voices of Positive Women (1992)

This documentary features the voices of nine women living with HIV from across the globe. Based on her co-edited book with the same title, Taylor presents powerful first-person testimonials about the challenges of being an HIV+ woman in the early ’90s.  Importantly, this video highlights the medical negligence and bureaucratic denial that created such grave challenges for HIV+ women in the first place. Unfortunately, this video is not available streaming online, but you can check out Vtape for more information about getting your hands on a copy.

Alison Duke – The Woman I Have Become (2007); Positive Women: Exposing Injustice (2012); Consent: HIV Non-disclosure and Sexual Assault Law (2015)

One of the most important video makers working on HIV/AIDS today, Duke has produced three community-based documentaries focused on women and HIV over the last decade. Paying close attention to the intricacies of HIV criminalization in Canada, Duke’s two most recent works provide an important overview of the debates over sexual assault law and HIV non-disclosure—particularly as it affects women and people of colour.  Toronto-based Duke’s video collaborations with Women’s Health in Women’s Hands Community Health Centre and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network harken back to the artist-community organization collaborations at the heart of the short-lived Toronto: Living With AIDS cable access series from the early 1990s.

The Facts On A.I.D.S. (1983) – 30 minutes, colour, english
by Gablevision

While Nick Sheehan’s No Sad Songs (1985) is often cited as the first feature documentary about HIV/AIDS in Canada, it was predated by an interesting cable access program based in Vancouver, BC.  Running monthly from 1980-1986, Gayblevision was groundbreaking in many ways—most notably its role as Canada’s first television series by and for queer viewers.  Its period of operation also overlaps with the emergence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Canada, and HIV/AIDS-related content appears in numerous episodes. From public service announcements, to in-depth analysis of mainstream media coverage, to press conferences, to direct address by PLWAs to other HIV-positive people, Gablevision covered the early years of the epidemic in ways no one else did in Canada. All in all, Gayblevision produced over 3 hours of HIV/AIDS related content for distribution on cable television in Vancouver. The Facts On A.I.D.S., produced as a special by Gayblevision in 1983, is the most concerted effort by this group of queer media activists to produce HIV/AIDS content. Ranging in focus, the special primarily functions pedagogically, educating viewers about medical and societal understandings of the disease at a time when little information was available, let alone non-judgemental. This episode also outlines the need for and emergence of a community response to the health crisis via AIDS Vancouver. A full description of the special with timestamps is available here.

A full list of Gayblevisions episodes are available streaming online thanks to one of Canada’s oldest artist-run centres, VIVO Media Arts Centre. Special thanks to Karen Knights at VIVO for her insight into the Gaybelvision collection!

The Legacy of Jon Gates (1993) – 52 minutes, colour, english
by Peter Davis & Harvey McKinnon

Jon Gates moved from Vancouver to Ottawa in 1989 to push Canadian-based international development agencies to deal with the AIDS crisis in the global south—particularly sub-Saharan Africa. He worked for the International Committee for AIDS and Development (ICAD) where he would interface with the groups like Oxfam, the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, and the Red Cross. At the heart of Jon’s international solidarity activism was a call for people in the global north to refuse a therapeutic vaccine or cure for HIV until the pharmaceutical companies, who would no doubt control the supply and prices, made it accessible to the global south. His speech pre-dates the successful triple-combination therapy announced at the World AIDS Conference in Vancouver in 1996, but he had a clear view of the future to come and the challenges that would accompany it. Had Jon survived until triple-combination therapy had become a regular treatment regimen for HIV infection, undoubtedly he would have had much in common with renowned South African treatment activist Zackie Achmat, refusing treatment until it’s available to all.

Gates’ call for international solidarity was most clearly articulated in his keynote speech at the 1992 Canadian AIDS Society meeting shortly before his death and captured in the documentary from Villon Films posted above. To learn more about Jon Gates’ work, check out the video above and/or read our oral history interview with John Foster.

The Colour of Immunity (1991) – 22 minutes, colour, english
by Glace W. Lawrence and the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention
with original music by David Findlay

The work of the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention (Black CAP) in Toronto has been discussed in numerous oral history transcripts we’ve recorded at the AAHP. Douglas Stewart and Dionne Falconer, the first two Executive Directors of the organization, tell the origin and and history of Black CAP’s emergence from the AIDS Committee of Toronto and the Toronto African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) organizing milieu connected to Zami in the late 1980s. But in this instalment of “From the Video Vault” we have an early prevention video from Black CAP to share with you that was directed by Glace Lawrence with original music from David Findlay. According to its creators, this video was the first HIV/AIDS video produced for and by ACB communities in Canada. The video has been recovered, digitized, and preserved in full above thanks to the work and generosity of director Glace Lawrence, the current Executive Director of Black CAP Shannon Ryan, Wanda vanderStoop at Vtape, and the team at the AIDS Activist History Project. While the educational preview is streaming here at no cost—do consider an institutional purchase of the DVD to continue supporting the important work of both Vtape and Black CAP.

The Colour of Immunity was produced for the Toronto Living With AIDS (TLWA) cable access series. TLWA was distributed on Roger’s and MacLean Hunter cable networks in Toronto from 1990-1991. It was produced under the leadership of video artist Michael Balser (1952-2002) and well-known video artist John Greyson. The two worked out of the same artist run centre, Trinity Square Video, and were associated with the artist-run video distribution centre Vtape. Inspired by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ Living with AIDS television series in New York City (1988-1994), TLWA followed up two of Greyson’s previous AIDS video curation projects: the one-hour compilation tape Angry Initiatives, Defiant Strategies produced for Deep Dish TV in 1988 and the three-VHS tape program of over twenty international AIDS videos, Video Against AIDS (1989, co-curated with Bill Horrigan). Interestingly, the  TLWA series was funded, not by the Canada Council for the Arts, but by grants from the City of Toronto Board of Health, Health & Welfare Canada, and the Ontario Ministry of Health. The series featured eleven approximately thirty-minute videos created by a diverse array of video artists, activists, and community organizations in Toronto. While the series formally ended in 1991 after being censored by Roger’s Cable, some of the eleven original tapes continued to be shown in film festivals and organizations kept their tapes in circulation for educational purposes, including Glace Lawrence and Black CAP’s The Colour of Immunity.

Catching up with Glace by email in the fall of 2017, she recounts getting involved with The Colour of Immunity video project as a member of Trinity Square Video (TSV), the artist run centre Michael Balser and John Greyson were launching the TLWA series from. Although she noted her memory was a bit fuzzy, her presence at TSV and the fact that she completed her first film in 1989 made her a natural fit for the project.

In discussing the video’s life beyond the TLWA series and how Black CAP used the tape, she recalls, “Initially when it was made there were a few public screenings. One of them was at Harbourfront Centre, and at the Ontario Black History Society. I suspect that the latter was due to the fact that I used to work at the Society. Then it was used in HIV prevention workshops at Black CAP. It was geared to the ‘MTV’ audience. They wanted content that would engage youth of the MTV generation.”

Elaborating, Glace notes that while The Colour of Immunity was explicitly youth oriented, there was indeed another production that Black CAP was involved with after her video. She recalls, “Survivors (1992), was more family oriented. It was financed through Black CAP via private funding and director/producer Alfons Adetuyi helped develop the proposal. Prior to that time, there weren’t any Canadian based productions that focused on the Black and Caribbean experience locally.”

And while this post largely focuses on preserving and historicizing the critical early work of Glace Lawrence, Black CAP continues to use video to this day in helping promote its work, tell its own story, and fight the ongoing AIDS epidemic. Below, Black CAP’s twentieth anniversary video produced by Alison Duke—another powerhouse Black woman filmmaker whose contemporary work often deals with HIV/AIDS and ACB communities—reflects on twenty years of activism and services provided under the Black CAP banner.

ACT UP Montreal 1990-1993 (date unknown) – 120 minutes, colour, english
by Earl Pinchuk

This video was recovered from the home video collection of Montreal film studies scholar Thomas Waugh after the AIDS Activist History Project recently interviewed him. While the transcripts are forthcoming, we wanted to preserve and share this compilation tape of ACT UP/MTL news stories and raw event footage today in order to provide better context for AIDS activist organizing in Montreal in the early 1990s. This two hour video compiled by ACT UP/MTL member Earl Pinchuk is primarily an omnibus compilation of english and french broadcast news stories about ACT UP/MTL actions. Michael Hendricks, a founding member of ACT UP/MTL, notes that compilation tapes of news footage—like that of the Sex Garage kiss-in protest footage in front of police station 25 that this omnibus tape begins with—were often put together by members of ACT UP/MTL to share informally with other ACT UP chapters across North America. Hendricks also notes that the Sex Garage kiss-in protest footage in particular was used by an affinity group within ACT UP/MTL while presenting at the Québec Human Rights Commission hearings into discrimination and violence against gays and lesbians that took place in November 1993. Other content included in the video covers: Lesbians and Gays against Violence (LGV); Prisoner Justice Day protest; anti-violence and anti-police violence demonstrations; women and HIV/AIDS World AIDS Day march; the murder of Joe Rose; queer resilience and nightlife; condoms and sex education in schools; gay serial murders in downtown Montreal; Queer Nation Rose; and the fight to establish Parc l’Espoir (an AIDS memorial park).

Karen Herland, who appears in the video numerous times, also co-wrote an article in 2014 for the Journal of Canadian Studies about the events captured on Pinchuk’s video compilation tape. You can check that journal article out here.

 

Karate Kids (1990) – 21 minutes, colour, english
by Derek Lamb

This short animation film was funded by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in partnership with the non-profit charitable organization Street Kids International (now part of Save the Children), founded by Order of Canada recipients Peter Dalglish (World Health Organization) and Frank O’Dea (Second Cup). It was written and directed by Academy Award winner Derek Lamb, a British transplant whose now ex-wife Janet Perlman helped animate the film. Karate Kids has be translated into more than 25 languages, circulated in over one hundred countries, and was the recipient of the Peter F. Drucker Award for Canadian Nonprofit Innovation in 1993. With such accolades for both the film and its makers, it’s (un)surprising that the film’s content and message was met with anger and hostility from AIDS activists in Canada—notably ACT UP/Montréal.

Karate Kids takes as its premise that there are dangerous men lurking around densely populated markets in the global south who are there to rape your little boys and infect them with AIDS (no, not HIV, but AIDS, because a complex understanding of the disease isn’t relevant here). While the film is utilizing methods of visual instruction for HIV prevention—there’s brief discussion of condoms in the context of “making love” with your opposite-gender partner—the film’s message is muddied by rampant homophobia. Stranger danger is typified in the film by images of a feminine man with a pencil moustache and sun glasses riding around in a dark car with a driver looking for children to entice with money and gifts (ie. rich faggots who want to fuck your children). It just so happens that this “smiling man” in the dark car ensnares a young boy Mario, rapes him, and at the end of the film Mario dies of AIDS. The lesson to be learned: stay away from rich faggots, even if they offer you money or gifts, because they only want to rape you and give you AIDS.

ACT UP/Montréal responded by producing a bilingual pamphlet condemning the film and outlining a number of problems.  ACT UP complains that the animation and the attendant comic book based on the same characters and storyline, peddle bigoted stereotypes and middle class morality. Furthermore they note the film trades action and violence—the “Smiling Man” is killed fleeing a lynch mob—while failing to show the realities of how HIV transmission occurs and is prevented in everyday contexts. You can find the full flyer in english and french in our digital Montréal ephemera archive here.

The film can be watched in full on the NFB website, as it continues to circulate today as an AIDS education video—believe it or not.  You can also check out the factually suspect (“AIDS virus”) study guide meant to be used by community educators to help supply the factual information missing from the short animation. And if you haven’t had enough already, you can continue watching the misadventures of Karate and his street kid friends in the follow up animation Goldtooth (1994) or watch the promotional video Brave Ideas (1993) celebrating the animation short and Street Kids International .