An Evening with Melissa Anderson
Tuesday, December 2, 2025 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Gay USA, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., digital projection, 1977, 73 mins

To celebrate the publication of The Hunger, Melissa Anderson’s new book of essays, Light Industry will be hosting a screening of Gay USA. Her piece on Arthur Bressan’s groundbreaking documentary is among the many lavender offerings in this collection, a volume that cements Anderson’s reputation as one of our most distinctive film critics.

“This dense, exhilarating collage of sights (throngs of Pride revelers primarily in San Francisco but also in New York and Chicago, among other metropolises) and sounds (so much spirited talk, both on-screen and off-, and—trigger warning—some of the gooiest gay/lez folk love songs I’ve ever heard) reflects the liberationist fervor of the ’70s, utopian hopes not yet extinguished. Or, at the very least, not yet co-opted and marketed: no ghastly rainbow-hued merchandise, no corporate slogans soil these festivities. A typical gay-power banner in ’77 carries a message unlikely to be emblazoned on any Starbucks commemorative Pride tumbler in 2019: DOWN WITH THE NUCLEAR FAMILY—ROOT OF ALL SEXUAL OPPRESSION.

And yet, for all the furiously, ecstatically alive people in Gay USA, the film is inescapably haunted by death. The great Black lesbian poet Pat Parker appears here, reciting some puckish verse about the hypocrisy of squeamish heterosexuals; by 1989, she would die, at age 45, of breast cancer. Arthur J. Bressan Jr. perished, also in his mid-40s, from AIDS-related illness a decade after Gay USA was shot. Watching the documentary, I was consumed with morbid thoughts, wondering how many other young guys seen and/or interviewed (but never named) in Bressan’s documentary—the chevron-mustached clones, the nursery school teacher, the ballet-trained dancer, the twink who fled Kansas for the hedonistic promise of California—would also not live beyond early middle age.”

- MA

Followed by a conversation between Anderson and writer Wayne Koestenbaum.

Copies of The Hunger will be available for sale at the event.

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Two Films by Jean-Claude Biette

Presented by Narrow Margin
Sunday, December 14 at 4 and 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407 Brooklyn

4pm: Far from Manhattan, Jean-Claude Biette, 16mm, 1982, 80 mins

6pm: Reception

7pm: The Complex of Toulon, Jean-Claude Biette, digital projection, 1995, 81 mins

To mark the release of the second issue of Narrow Margin, a new quarterly film magazine, its editors will present two rarely-screened films by Jean-Claude Biette at Light Industry: Far from Manhattan and The Complex of Toulon. Narrow Margin’s latest edition features the first dossier, in any language, on the complete roster of production company Diagonale et Co., complemented by texts on and by its filmmakers, including a new interview between Claudine Bories and Pascale Bodet, as well as translated exchanges with Biette, fellow directors Jean-Claude Guiguet and Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Diagonale’s founder, Paul Vecchiali.

A critic at Cahiers du cinéma and later co-founder, with Serge Daney, of the journal Trafic, Biette made seven feature films and several short works between 1968 and 2003, with an impenetrable mystery at their heart. His sensibilities are informed by a confluence of important chapters beyond his writing—a brief foray as a “bad student” of Mac-Mahonism; a fruitful cluster of experiences as an actor (Straub-Huillet’s Othon is his first credited role); his long labor as Pasolini’s French tutor.

Far from Manhattan, Biette’s second and final outing with Diagonale, is staged across exteriors that anyone else would have shot indoors. The film’s characters—a gaggle of art writers, buyers, and patrons—are surrounded by Paris’ greenery, yet pay it no attention. Most resent each other, or otherwise attach themselves to successful members of their cohort. More than this, they abhor mystery. They play detective, attempting to answer what caused a period of aesthetic inactivity for the painter René Dimanche (Howard Vernon). They become ensnared in the traps they’ve constructed their lives around; the questions they ask seek solely the clarification necessary to confirm what they already presuppose. There is a woman, engaged with this world, who only writes poems for herself. When she meets the artist under dubious circumstances, everything collapses.

The Complex of Toulon circles around another present-absent figure, Charles Toulon, a Shakespearean actor and former scholar (however, not a painter), also played by Howard Vernon, also chased by a coterie of admirers, also avoiding everyone. Toulon had a psychological “complex” named after him, we are told, that identifies an aggressive-paranoid line of argument in the wake of May 68. If Far from Manhattan is all exterior, The Complex of Toulon burrows its way back into Biette’s faintly-lit spaces of performance, secrecy, and coupledom: the theater, the dining table, the bed. Jean-Christophe Bouvet (of Far from Manhattan) delivers his signature, hilarious facial contortions and outbursts, adrift between jobs, cities, lovers old and new.

Program notes by Hicham Awad and Joshua Peinado.

Copies of the print edition of the second issue of Narrow Margin will be for sale at the event.

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 3:30.

Light Industry is supported by our members and, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as the Mellon Foundation through the Coalition of Small Arts New York. Public assistance is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.