Discover Top Posts Tagged with #avery willard

AVERY WILLARD

Gay Boys (1940) Dream Boy (1966) Leather Narcissus (1967) Rugged Men (1969) Clouds (1971)

#Avery Willard #Gay Boys #Dream Boy #Leather Narcissus #Rugged Men #Clouds #my caps #my edits #*averywillard #*directors

Richard Burton photographed by Avery Willard, 1951.

#richard burton #old hollywood #burton and taylor #black and white #love #vintage #Avery Willard #elizabeth taylor #photography

On second thought: Keep the Lights on (dir. Ira Sachs, 2012)

When I saw this film a decade ago, it fucked me up. I saw connections between the story of addiction and my recent relationship with a guy who used to be addicted to. It was shortly before I started therapy and still not so long after I entered another longer relationship with someone that I saw this film with for the first time. Seeing it recently, I was mesmerized at how physically similar Booth's character now seemed to my second ex, which I somehow never thought of while watching this film with his face next to mine. Not only that, Booth is great here at performing the sudden pangs of frosty detachment that his character does when not wanting to engage with his partner's needs. In the midst of all that, there's Lindhardt's protagonist, Sachs's alter ego that I kept trying to distance myself from, probably every time I saw this film. It's a painful story of emotional growth, of being vulnerable enough to embrace the prospect of being in a long-term relationship with someone who is hurtful and lacks empathy. That's one layer. Another one, of which I forget only occasionally, when feeling suffocated by the rawness of the on-screen relationship, is a fascinatingly rich entry into a queer archive of New York's art scene (punctuated, extradiegetically, with Russell's beautiful score), as well as a story of the laborious beginnings of one's budding film career. My only complaint about this film is that it tries to do so much within a scarce running time: while Sachs is a skilled storyteller, the relational poignancy that his protagonist experiences may have needed more minutes to reverberate more fully. But anyway, it's one of the most important films in my life.