This is Hollywood baby! The promise of finding fame under the lights of one of its sound stages, finding a good night out in West Hollywood, and finding a ripped vers surfer on a Santa Monica beach has lured many a gay man. Just as in mainstream culture, California has long been dominant in the production and dissemination of gay pornography, selling the state not just as the site of beautiful bodies, but promising a lifestyle of liberation and community.

But where do you go when that utopian image you’ve been sold doesn’t come true, whether you’re consuming those images or hoping to be featured in them? What happens when you’re spent and tossed aside, like a tissue in a teenage bedroom? The films in this programme both draw on the hold California has had over gay media, in particular gay porn, and use this to create a critical discourse around how this media is created and consumed.

Victim of Circumstance sees Scott and Brandon meet in the 1980s at an orphanage. Lured by a magazine, they make their way, some months apart, to the California they see depicted in its pages.Told through a hi-intensity assemblage of found material from gay porn videos and magazines of the period, some things altogether more unsettling come to emerge from amongst the images of the Sunshine State’s sun-kissed twinks.

William E Jones’ essay film Finished is a detective story and a love story, a film noir bathed in the sunlight of tapes. An unseen narrator looks into what happened to Alan Lambert, a porn performer who he’s taken rather a liking to. A proto-parasocial relationship forms as they discover Lambert’s suicide shortly after being told he was finished in the industry, aged 25. Through clips of Lambert’s appearances and footage related to his life, a portrait of two obsessions emerges: Lambert’s almost messianic visions of grandeur and Jones’ searching desire to re-animate his subject.

Films that Fuck is an irregular screening series organised by Siavash Minoukadeh exploring uses of pornographic material in moving image practices. Taking place in cinemas and away from the restrictions of the Online Safety Act, the series creates a space for critical discussions around pornography as artistic medium.

Thanks to: Ana Lopez Masek, María Palacios Cruz, Tony Nguyen, Mark Webber

Victim of Circumstance | Kalil Haddad | Canada | 2024 | 22’ | Digital | Courtesy of the filmmaker
Finished | William E. Jones | USA | 1997 | 75’ | 16mm, transferred to digital | courtesy of the filmmaker and David Kordansky Gallery

Content warning: This programme contains intense, sustained strobe lighting and flashing images. Contains full-frontal nudity and sexual scenes.