New York seen through the unique compositional frame of Hutton’s 16mm camera. The pulse of street life finds no role in New York Portrait. The dense metropolitan population and imposing urban locale disappear before Hutton’s concern for the primal force of a universal presence. With an eye for the extraordinary in the ordinary (and as a filmmaker in possession of a rare patience who can wait for such moments to appear) Hutton points his camera toward the clouds to find flocks of birds, or turns it back to his apartment to capture frequently astonishing moments of transition and poetic stasis in everyday life.

Marlon Riggs expresses the hopes, dreams, and desires of gay Black men in this ode to queer African American empowerment. Built around outtakes of interview and protest footage from Tongues Untied, Affirmations begins as a candid, sex-positive confessional about first-time penetration and evolves into a rousing chorus of calls for freedom, recognition, and inclusion.

Combining low resolution footage, 16mm film and satellite imagery, Efforts of Nature considers the passage of time, processes of change and dissolution from two distant perspectives: the existential level of the body and the planetary level of shifting geological conditions.

Ecce Homo (“behold the man”) employs optically printed footage. In the 1980s, thanks to AIDS hysteria in the United States, all gay sexuality was once again considered to be essentially pornographic, politically incorrect, sinful or a public health hazard. Ecce Homo is a call to reclaim gay power.

A one take recording of a family’s visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.