Longtime Companion? HIV/AIDS in thirty years of cinema, media and culture

Images from two 'AIDS film dramas': above, Longtime Companion (Norman René, 1989), a film which, as Emmanuel Levy puts it, carried "the burden of being the first [widely distributed] theatrical movie to deal directly with AIDS"; below, a frame grab from Yesterday (Darrell Roodt, 2004), about a Zulu woman living with AIDS. Read Jean Stuart's and Olaia Cores Calvo's articles on this film.

It was [30] years ago, in the summer of 1981, when society as a whole[, including] the scientific community[,] was faced with an unknown disease that came later to be known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Several films [...] reflected the initial fears and uncertainty, the responses of the different social groups, the fight against ignorance, the [demand for] access to treatment and the suffering of the infected individuals and their families [...] due to this disease. Taking into account that these movies were filmed when these epidemics took place they can actually be considered as [...] historical documents that deserve [to be] analysed by the generations to come. Films such as And The Band Played On; Longtime Companion; Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; Les Nuits Fauves; Angels in America; Yesterday and My Brother... Nikhil have marked [30] years of AIDS history that should not be forgotten by the world. [Adapted from António Pais de Lacerda, 'Cinema as an Historical Document: AIDS in 25 years of Cinema', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 102-113; hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Film Studies For Free today commemorates the twenty-third World AIDS Day in the thirtieth year since the identification of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. The Human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], the lentivirus which causes the syndrome, was identified two years later, in 1983.

FSFF marks this anniversary year with the below entry of links to scholarly resources on the figuration of AIDS/HIV in cinema and culture.

Today's posting was also inspired by a series of film screenings and discussions on 'AIDS and its Melodramas' that have been taking place at the University of Sussex, UK, organised by Michael Lawrence and John David Rhodes. These academic events will continue next term with screenings of Fatal Love (1991), And the Band Played On (1993), Philadelphia (1993) and, one of FSFF's favourites,  Boys on the Side (1995). Please email FSFF if you'd like more details.

• ACT UP NY Webcasts
• Elana D. Anderson, 'Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow: Socio-Cultural Evolution In African Literature and Film', Mosaic African Studies, 2010 
• Carole Blair and Neil Michel, 'The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration', Rhetoric and Public Affairs Vol. 10, No. 4, 2007, pp. 595–626
• Martin P. Botha, 'Post-Apartheid Cinema: A Thematic and Aesthetic Explorations of Selected Short and Feature Films', Ilha do Desterro, Florianópolis, nº 61 p. 225- 267 jul/dez 2011
• Cüneyt Çakirlar, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes's Cinema of Queer Pastiche', KÜLT: A Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1, April 2011
• Jean Carlomusto and Jane Rosett, 'AIDS: A LIVING ARCHIVE™', SandF Online, 2.1, Summer 2003
• Olaia Cores Calvo, 'Yesterday (2004)', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 5.4 (2009):125-130
• David Campbell, The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS: A report for the AIDS, Security and Conflict Initiative, May 2008 
• Brendan Curran, Singin’ in the Scourge: Two AIDS Musicals, Two Political and Cultural Contexts, MA Thesis, Concordia University, April 2011
• Juan Luis Cuesta Jiménez, 'The Constant Gardener or the development of new Therapies', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2.3 (2006): 96-101 
• Ann Cvetkovich, 'AIDS Activism and the Oral History Archive', SandF Online, Summer 2.1, Summer 2003
• Anthony Enns, '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction,7.3, 2007
• Kyle Frackman, 'Out of Time: "Allotemporality" in Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss’ Zurück auf los', queere (t)ex(t)perimente. Eds. Franziska Bergmann, Jennifer Moos, and Claudia Münzing. Freiburg: fwpf-Verlag, 2008
• J.E. García Sánchez, E. García Sánchez and M.L. Merino Marcos, 'Antiviral, antifungal and antiprotozoal agents in the cinema', Revista Española de Quimioterapia, Marzo 2007; Vol. 20 (No 1): 106-111
• Silvia Grassi, 'Like a Carsic River: Gay Independent Cinema from Underground Films to New Queer Cinema and Beyond', Altre modernità/ Otras modernidades/ Autres modernités/ Other Modernities, N. 2 – 10/2009
• Oliver Gruner, Public Politics/Personal Authenticity: A Tale of Two Sixties in Hollywood Cinema, 1986-1994, PhD Thesis, University of East Anglia, August, 2010
• Roger Hallas, 'The Witness in the Archive', SandF Online, 2.1, Summer 2003
• Lucas Hilderbrand, 'Retroactivism', glq, 12.2, 2006
• Jim Hubbard, 'A Report on the Archiving of Film and Video Work by Makers with AIDS', DIVA TV, [date unknown]
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'AIDS Video: To Dream and Dance with the Censor', Jump Cut, No. 52, summer 2010
• Alexandra Juhasz in exchange with Antoinette Burton, 'Feminist history making and Video Remains', Jump Cut, No. 48, winter 2006
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'Alternative AIDS Videos', Cineaste, vol.XXI, nos. 1-2, 1994/5
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'Interview with Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman: ACT UP Oral History Project', CORPUS, Spring 2006
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love,' originally published in The Cinema of Todd Haynes, ed. James Morrison (London:Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Dion Kagan, '[Review of] Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Duke University Press, 2009', Screening the Past, 28, 2010
• Tim Lawrence, ‘AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plurality in Derek Jarman's Blue’ Social Text, 52/53 (Autumn - Winter 1997): 241-264
• Timothy F. Murphy, 'Part One: The Meaning of AIDS', Ethics in an Epidemic: AIDS, Morality, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
• Christo Oberholzer, An Investigation Into Nationalism and National Allegory within South African Post-Apartheid Film, MA Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2006
• António Pais de Lacerda, 'Cinema as an Historical Document: AIDS in 25 years of Cinema', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 102-113
• Georgios Pappas, Savvas Seitaridis, Nikolaos Akritidis, and Epaminondas Tsianos, 'Infectious Diseases in Cinema: Virus Hunters and Killer Microbes', Clinical Infectious Diseases,
• Volume 37, Issue 7, 2003: 939-942
• Monica B. Pearl, 'The City of Brotherly Love: Sex, Race and AIDS in Philadelphia', EnterText 2.3, Summer 2003
• Monica B. Pearl, 'American Grief: The AIDS Quilt and Texts of Witness', Gramma, 08
• Lucia Pérez Ochoa López, 'Philadelphia (1993): View of AIDS when it began to be a treatable disease', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 21-28
• Jean Stuart, 'Yesterday, today … and tomorrow: The future of girlhood in the age of AIDS', AGENDA 79 2009
• Marita Sturken, 'The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions', in Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov, 1996
• Nicoletta Vallorani, 'Path(o)s of Mourning. Memory, Death and the Invisible Body in Derek Jarman’s Blue', Altre modernità/ Otras modernidades/ Autres modernités/ Other Modernities, N. 4 – 10/2010