Fascinating Finds from the Bowels of Castle Carmichael
by Alden Nagle
The Daniel J. Evans Library is a welcoming space, with original furniture, carpeted floors, and collections that include classic literature, handmade books, and even laserdiscs. I go there on a regular basis to stock up on DVDs, both because of the consistency of the library’s film collection and how varied it is. Through my time there, I’ve discovered a number of inclusions in the collection that are rare, hyper-niche, intensely experimental, just plain odd, or a combination of all of these things. This column focuses on these often overlooked pieces of film, bringing to light what many would never even take out of the shelves to look at.
“Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America” (1992, dir. Craig Baldwin, 44 min.)
Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factually questionable chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate far-right conspiracy theory, combining various ideas about the JFK assassination, fruit companies’ militias, communist aliens, killer bees, and much, much more. As fast-paced, rambling, and fever dream-inducing as the film is, there’s something to be admired about its general aesthetic and reuse of older found footage, as well as it’s score, coagulating together for an acid test of an experience, reminiscent of late-night PBS programming from the 80s on speedball. It’s a bit like if your communist roommate woke you up at 3AM while on a bad trip and was shouting about how the Epstein-Scientology -Illuminati-Kubrick-Reptilian-Bezos conglomerate is out to perform psyops on squirrels to control acorn numbers and you can’t get them to calm down. Get with it and watch this immediately.
“Screaming Queens: The Riots At Compton’s Cafeteria” (2005, dir. Susan Stryker & Victor Silverman, 57 min.)
As an examination of the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco (a historically working class and LGBT place) in the 1960s, this film is a wonderful historical document, with compelling retelling of what life was like, as told through the lived experience of trans women. Yet, only a fraction of the film is focused on its titular subject matter, about the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (a space where drag queens, LGBT folk, and sex workers would congregate at all hours of the day and night), which erupted after a police raid on the establishment, as had been happening to other queer establishments in the neighborhood at the time. It occurred in 1966, three years before the much more known Stonewall Riots, which have since become understood incorrectly as the first example of queers rising up collectively against police brutality and societal oppression. It’s an important piece of queer history that’s worth learning about, but not necessarily through this documentary, as nothing about its technicality, structure, or general tone was that intriguing or noteworthy. It’s not bad, but it’s just not that great either.
“On A Phantom Limb” (2009, dir. Nancy Andrews, 35 min.)
This film examines the passage of a surgically created hybrid – part woman, part bird – on a perilous night that lasts months; through death, mutilation, purgatory, and the eventual return to the living, what lies beyond leaves her changed forever. The boundaries of reality and fantasy, documentary, and fiction are blurred in this reprise of the classic themes, dilemmas, and consequences of reanimation. It’s a sleepy, nocturnal experience, lacking much in the way of a coherent plot or arc in favor of a spiritual guide through the artist’s beliefs about these phantasmagorical experiences. It is a film that is both deeply surreal, approaching a stream-of-consciousness model, and gothic, bringing to mind a dream that is both very nonsensical and yet unspeakably personal, one that is a miracle that it was brought to life on film with such aesthetic clarity. To quote my friend I watched it with, waxing poetic, declared “it’s not a film. It’s an experience.” I couldn’t agree more.
