‘Experimental’ Gay Film Festival Will Begin Tonight at LACE

“A Queer Kind of Film: Selections From the First Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival” will screen in two parts, tonight and next Monday night, at 8 at the Filmforum at LACE, 1804 Industrial St. As it turns out, the operative word is actually experimental rather than gay ; some of the films are of a personal intensity and vision that goes beyond gender or sexual orientation.

Opening the evening is “Homosexual Desire in Minnesota” (1980-85), a rambling, sweet-tempered Super-8 diary film by Jim Hubbard, who organized the festival with Sarah Schulman. The images are exceedingly blurry and wobbly yet they convey Hubbard’s enthusiasm and engagement with life and are accompanied on the sound track to Hubbard’s favorite pop and classical selections. (Nice moment: A simple, affectionate panning of a bespectacled young man in a park who’s called Lars--the perfect name for a citizen of a state with Scandinavian roots.)

All the films in the first program are new except for Jerry Tartaglia’s 1977 “Lawless,” a celebration of camp sensibility which consists of a conversation between actress Peggy Gormley and Ondine, the one-time Warhol superstar. As they chat with an aimless bitchiness in a plant-crammed setting, various people, mainly good-looking young men--most everyone is in some kind of costume and makeup--come briefly within camera range. In Leslie Kozloff’s very brief “Untitled,” the film maker turns the camera on herself as she spins around a room, creating a sensation of exhilarating giddiness--and a provocative self-portrait.

In contrast to these three casual and even ragged films is Leslie Lowe and Jack Waters’ deliciously stylized “Nocturnes,” a languid vignette taken from Huysmans’ “A Rebours” and focusing on an aristocratic and decadent dinner party created out of dime-store finery. An elegantly campy study in light and shadow, it captures the sensual glow of Champagne, pearls, candlelight and chiffon--set to Chopin.

Most affecting of the films is Larry Brose’s “An Individual Desires Solution,” which commences with brave remarks from Brose’s lover, who died of AIDS in 1985. Subsequently, we hear these printed words spoken in a highly distorted fashion. The central image is of a young man playing a piano, which is also reprocessed, sometimes to no more than a blur. We don’t know whether the piano player is Brose or his late lover; somehow it doesn’t matter, for the film communicates the pain of loss with a force unexpected for such abstracted images.

Information: (213) 276-7452, (714) 923-2441.