92YTribeca film series Queer/Art/Film is wrapping up Jul 30 with a screening of Je, Tu, Il, Elle presented by Sarah Schulman. After interviews with presenters Ira Sachs, Matt Wolf, Jennie Livingston and Kenny Mellman, today we bring you an interview with Sarah Schulman, author of 14 books including the forthcoming novel The Mere Future. With Jim Hubbard she is co-founder of MIX: NY LGBT Experimental Film Festival and The ACT UP Oral History Project. Sarah is a Professor of English at CUNY and a Fellow of the NY Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

What is it about Ackerman’s 1974 Je, Tu, Il, Elle that resonates with you?
That’s a huge question. She’s the generation before me of Jewish lesbian artists- born within memory of the Holocaust and organically contributing to the artistic revolutions of the 60’s and 70’s. Many of these women made great contributions but few were overtly out in their work. Although she took that step from time to time, she also knew that it would cause marginalization and tried to mitigate that in successful and unsuccessful ways. Her formal innovations are exciting, her point of view is invigorating, the emotionality of the work and the way that the form comes organically from the emotions at the core of the piece are expansive. She’s one of the artists I have followed all my life and who has never disappointed me. I recently watched a tape of a recent lecture she gave at MIT about her work on the cruelty the US shows toward Mexican immigrants. I found her to be as interesting now as when I first started looking at her work.

Read more below, including Sarah’s answer to the same question we’ve asked all interviewees in this series, “...What does “Queer” mean to you?”

Early novels of yours were set in the bohemian, lesbian subculture of the LES.  Does that culture still exist there, and how has it changed?

Authentic lesbian experience is still entirely underground when one considers the contemporary product of the commerical arts and entertainment industry. That some of it continues to take place in my neighborhood is not surprising. Lesbians have always had to give each other meaning in “private” ie in person and subculturally. Myself and a number of others are trying every single day to get authentic lesbian representation made with artistry and gravitas onto the American stage, into major American publications, on screen and on television. So far, the systems of containment are viciously resisting, but this will change. I am sure of that.

What role do you see film series like Queer/Art/Film fulfilling for people not familiar with the themes?

You know, Jim Hubbard and I co-founded MIX; the NY LGBT Experimental Film Festival in 1986 and the thing is still kicking 23 years later. Nowadays young artists are showing at MIX who were not even born when we got started. It is so hard to see important works in the history of our cinema projected on a big screen, where you can’t pause, and you are sitting shoulder to shoulder with other living people who have also consecrated their time to this experience. There is a relationship between movies and loneliness - but there is something sordid about the “watching dvd’s” on the couch thing as a way to disguise pain. Aesthetically, as a film cheerleader for three decades, it hurts me to think of people watching great films on their laptops. Film can be a uniting experience for an audience, and when it is constructed as a community defining experience, it nurtures the soul and produces new artists. This is the lesson of MIX anyway.

The use of the term Queer seems wide reaching nowadays, not restricted to “gay” individuals. For instance, we have heard it used by heterosexual people who identify as Queer, which implies definitions aside from sexual. Do you agree? What does “Queer” mean to you?

Ideologically, my use of it shifts based on who I am talking to and where I am. Personally, I am old-school so I think of myself as “old gay.” That means that I help and support other people in my community regardless of what they can do for me. That’s how I was trained when I first came out, and I abide by those values.

[Je, Tu, Il, Elle ]

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