Synopsis
A kaleidoscopic snapshot of urban gay life during the gay liberation era — or at least how it looked in the movies.
2019 Directed by Elizabeth Purchell
A kaleidoscopic snapshot of urban gay life during the gay liberation era — or at least how it looked in the movies.
Hi, this thing I made is now available for theatrical booking through the American Genre Film Archive. If you're a programmer or just want to see it play somewhere cool near you, why not take a look?
www.americangenrefilm.com/theatrical-film-catalog/ask-any-buddy/
This historical document of gay life before it got sanitized for straights with movies like Love, Simon (ugh) and Call Me by Your Name (kill me) throbs with both a love of cinema and the culture it captures. Evan Purchell spent months masterfully splicing together footage from dozens of gay porn films from the ‘60s to ‘80s that showcase real cruising locations: bars, theaters, clubs, bathouses, corners, and piers lost to time. What a shame tough-on-crime mayors purged most major American metropolises of these anything goes spaces ‘cause a few moneyed pearl clutchers complained too loud.
Don’t let Ask Any Buddy’s XXX moniker intimidate you, either. Don’t be a prude! As a straightish dude, I see my own dick every…
Honestly probably one of the best queer films in recent years—certainly one of the best docs, or documentary-adjacent works, anyway. Purchell has access to a truly impressive array of material, and she’s cut it pretty superbly to bring out the humor, poignance, reality, and occasionally the real artistry of the works she’s compiled. In a weird unplanned stroke of fate I saw this right after Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, another movie about Time, Desire, and the Cinema, and it is now impossible for me to separate that film’s meditation on the moviegoing space and the cinema reel as a sort of haunting with this film’s dazzling megamontage of bygone bodies and ephemeral erections. I’m not just talking about AIDS here,…
Fellow cinema freaks in Sydney this weekend: Static Vision’s three-day Goodbye Pink Flamingo festival of groundbreaking queer, punk, feminist and DIY art and film is bringing the goods at the titular beloved venue. Saturday night (tomorrow) is an awe-inspiring, surely unforgettable, and frankly just cool XXX Triple Feature of Elizabeth Purchell’s joyous Ask Any Buddy + William E Jones’s disconcerting The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, Fred Halsted’s nightmare of ecstasy Sextool, and JC Cricket’s legendary Sex Demon. I’ll be introducing the films, and I can’t wait to travel back in time to 1970s Time Square for an evening. Tickets are cheap, so there’s no excuse not to experience true beauty and horror in the cinema.
I believe that last Friday New Yorkers had the choice between seeing this and Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight, which is a very funny pair of movies to have to choose between seeing. Both are archival collages, but unlike The Afterlight - to my eyes, at least - Ask Any Buddy has far more of an interest in physical material. Purchell has done, like, actual archival work, serious digging - when we see degraded film transferred to video shot through low quality video compression, these are often the only ways these images (and in many cases, people) survive. That visual texture might as well be the decades between the era profiled here and ours - needless to say, “during a pandemic,…
Footage from 126 gay adult films from 1968-1986, spliced together to form a semi-narrative. Any movie that is made up of clips from other movies is going to be paradise for me. There have been similar experiments that use this form (Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Clock, a thing that I wanna make), and part of the fun is identifying the movies. In this case, it was mostly all new to me, which was its own pleasure because it freed me to enjoy it as a singular entity. Partly due to that, but primarily due to the subject matter having historical significance, this ends up feeling bigger than an experiment, and more of an actual documentary. There’s no narration,…
Off-the-wall dialogue, marlboro mustaches, davy-jones bangs, thrift-store drag, come-hither glances and fuck-me leers, bad dancing, and a pervasive air of admirable shamelessness — all that and more in Elizabeth Purchell’s collage of vintage 16mm gay porn.
All ludicrousness aside, it’s a sweet portrait of the free-sex, post-Stonewall era. When you see three guys at a glory hole while a fourth “stranger” stays on lookout, it’s clearly staged. But as in all of these films, the location was real, and it feels like their spirit of camaraderie was too.
Truly one of the seminal films of the last few years, an astonishing work by Elizabeth Purchell that feels truly medium advancing while carrying an ardent emotional journey. Transgressive in its ability to cast a personal portrait out of found footage, nothing has hit these heights of the cinematic sublime since Decasia. A sincere masterpiece.
LA Plays With Itself (Well, Mostly SF and NY)
In a way, every movie is an accidental documentary. Little time capsules of people, days, and places; fashions, societal norms, and body types. The first Weird Wednesday I ever went to was a nudie cutie from 1968 called “All The Way Down” and my first real observation from it was that female body types had changed a lot since back then. I had similar thoughts mentally interacting with “Ask Any Buddy” the other night. I thought a lot about time and sexuality in America. I thought about how we’re morally more progressive these days when it comes to sexuality, but so much more closeted when it comes to displaying and even…
Digital
Anthology Film Archives
Shame that straight couple left even before the double [redacted]