I

Rock

Burden or weight / weapon or threat

/ A silent enclosure

/ An envelope

/ Foundation, placeholder or talisman

One day in this very spot -  this is less than 300 yards from my house, you know - I’d   bicycle down here, when I was around 14 or 15. And I came across a, I think it was right by this tree, a rock, right here, right by the street, and underneath this rock ….were notes … and the notes were between two gay lovers, and they were they were communicating when they were going to meet. So I wrote back to them (scared shitless of course) but I wrote back to them, telling them about it, and then came back and they left me a dirty magazine. Every every mother finds dirty magazines that the kids collected, you know that they hide under the mattress but not dirty male magazines, you know, being gay you develop this whole inner secretiveness where you learn not to tell people you know, and to hide things and to cover things up and it begins to change your personality. And you  learn how to socialise with women and pretend to follow the whole route that all your peers are following when in the end, it's kind of all a lie.

And you learn to lie pretty well. And I’m tired of lying, I don't want to lie anymore. So, I made this film.

The rock appears about fifteen minutes into Silverlake the View From Here, inside a clip from another film Black Star: Autobiography of a close friend (1977). The old story about the rock evokes steadfastness, but its positioning in this new story gestures to instability -  to the ways queer meaning-making has unmoored during and after AIDs. Before, silence, or being silent, the enclosure of secrets have a myriad of possibilities: now such shrouding becomes burdened with a linearity towards death.

The rock (and its story) becomes a placeholder for time - it holds and releases the passing of it: pulling us back to the past so we can look at the present and imagine the future anew. Placing the meaning held by the rock of the older film within the younger one is an act of nostos, an agonising one, which places our hero’s younger, healthier body into a film about an older, sicker one. Dimensions of time are marked by the tenses of bodies on screen;  at times bodies are young, spirited, healthy, others older, sicker, more listeless. As the bodies change, the film's colour palette, film stock and quality also shifts. In the older, healthier film, crisp black and white yields to the brightest colour, a crisp transition that allows ideas of protection and suppression, containment and transmutation to hold their edges and cohere narratively. The ‘sick’ body of Silverlake View the film however, is made up of intimately lit video marked with a kind of golden sepia, one that softens while also serving to document the changes in texture and luminosity of Tom and Mark’s paling skin. As the colours mute, so too does the dramatic possibility of hopefulness.

As the film records the linear time that AIDs forces up on it, hope’s meaning becomes less about a fixed expectation or desire for freedom, and more akin to a trust that acts of expression and witnessing are worthwhile, no matter what the outcome.

As the rock travels between these two realities, it holds all the possibilities of hope - a solid knot that needn’t (cannot) be disentangled.

*

Later Tom, ravaged by illness, writes a letter. 

The note  reads “I love you.”

Instead of hiding it under a rock, his lover takes it from his hand and passes it to his mother. Later, both these sets of hands lovingly wash and stroke Tom’s body, hold him and then wipe away each other’s tears.

II

Sky

/ region of the clouds or upper air / upper atmosphere of earth

/ heavens or firmament

/ great arch or vault

/  the supernal or celestial heaven

Mark sits by himself on a roof and  reads from a volume of essays called Out of the closet, voices of gay liberation (1972), a volume of consciousness raising texts, joyous self-affirmations, angry manifestos, and personal reflections. The blue sky that is behind him appears after Tom's story about the rock. The sky blasts an azure that seems almost impossible. As the sky blasts impossibility, Mark voices the clarity that emerges when one refuses misery and shame, when one imagines the luminosity of joy and pride:

As we begin to see who we are, we have got to see that little, seemingly unimportant details, such as words and labels tell a story, a Fairy Tale of sorts. So let me say a little about gay as opposed to homosexual. They are opposites. And not just two words expressing similar objects because only one talks about objects. In order to understand these words, we must understand that this society is a multi-cultured one, but in reality recognises only one culture, the others are under genocidal attack. So now for us, it is a beautiful thing to be blatant, where at one time it was looked down upon, we have come to see that  the fairies, faggots, Queens, etc. that were through their blatantness the first to challenge the system in essence, saying they had the right to be super gay, because blatant is beautiful. So he also knows that it will not be until what straights called blatant behaviour is accepted with respect that we are in any sense any of us free, the personal is the political, the economic and the cultural. Gay Is the revolution.

Mark is not singing but as he reads in my mind he is singing, because he is forming words that are not his, using his voice beyond resistance and confrontation using it to speak, but also to hear.

III

Ash

/ A symbol of grief,

/ repentance,

/ or humiliation

At the beginning of the film Mark’s voice tells us the thing he remembers most about his lover is the way that he felt.  As he speaks, the camera passes over Tom’s ashes and boxes of tape that are the film we are watching. The camera shows us we will never know Tom the way that Mark remembers him. The tape and our watching of it, just like the ashes sent to his lover can never amount to what has been lost.

In its production and development, Silverlake the View from Here embodies the simultaneity  of queer desire, grief and creative possibility. Instigated by Tom to document the impact of AIDs on his lover Mark, when Tom himself becomes seriously ill, Mark becomes our narrator. Later, the lovers realise that both of them will be gone before the film was made and the boxes of tape are gifted to Peter to make and assemble into a film, which he does after Mark has died.

Both the opening of the film, and the imprint of the practice of mutual witness that is left on it from its making, leave us with a longing for something that can only be glimpsed and never held.  This is not a shared nostalgia that consigns the past to the past as an artefact that can no longer demand anything of us, but like the rock that is a knot, this desire forms an entanglement of time, extending us into the reality of the present moment, and enfolding us backwards to savour the pain of yearning.

In an interview from 1993 to the LA times Friedman circles around what kind of hope is possible when assembling a film like Silverlake Life which “involves two things this society tries to keep out of view--death and homosexuality” Grappling with his loyalty to the integrity of his friends  - of getting people to engage with the work on the terms in which he knows Tom and Mark would want them to - he draws attention to the limitations of the vehicle (which must meet the outside world to find its audience) through which he memorialises them. He recounts unfeeling, unthinking responses from film festivals and exhibitors who would rather look away from the suffering on screen, deferring their discomfort by questioning whether such an intimate record was even a artistic work: “I was told that this was a film Tom and Mark would not want shown--that they were just making it for themselves. I was speechless when I heard that.” he says “Tom spent eight months working on the film and circulating proposals to every funding source he could think of, and he didn’t want it shown?”

Central to this reaction is something about the legacy or the inheritance of AIDs narratives on screen which might have permeated our consciousness through mainstream channels in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. In these films social behaviours were smoothed out historically or neutralised and located in a character flaw  - an uncaring mother, a mean best friend.  It is here that we might have metabolised the information that AIDs could not be passed on from skin to skin contact, from kissing or holding hands, but it is also here that we internalised that empathy towards those who contracted HIV and AIDs was predicated on a kind an assimilationist narrative where those who did not conform do not get to survive.

In its painstaking documentation of the ways that social relating forms and is formed by an atmosphere structured by state neglect - for example in the set of humiliating, heteronormative questions that a sick queer person who wishes to continue receiving medical care must answer at the point where they can barely keep their eyes open from pain - Silverlake View shows how the lived experience of AIDS was resolutely antithetical to conformity:  an enforced degradation of faith in, and alienation from, the state.

If Silverlake View departs from mainstream depictions of AIDs on screen, it also resists easy categorisation within experimental or ‘avant garde’ filmmaking, as it foregrounds its political commitments over its formal ones. It is at times unashamedly didactic whilst at the same time utilising a radical emotional honesty. When Tom dies, Mark’s first instinct is to pick up the camera, this impulse is beyond the genre of documentary or diary film, it is as Joshua Kaplan has described “filmmaking as a desperate, senseless act of love”. This act of love is inherently connected to the film’s political desire and its position within wider AIDs activism. By refusing social or cinematic norms to avert our gaze through respectability, discomfort or ‘discretion’, Mark echoes the radical actions of AIDs activists such as ACT UP who scattered the ashes of people with AIDS on the White House lawn to draw attention, literally, to the material reality of state indifference.

IV

Water

/ transparency and brilliance

/ A libation for growth

/ The fluid basis of living of each living body

/  to fill with tears

/ to ameliorate through omission

Perhaps there is another way to think of Silverlake View outside of the idea of film. Hidden in the way the inheritances of the camera, the tapes and the histories they contain is passed between lovers, friends, filmmakers, teachers, students is an expansion of filmic category into a deeply invested strategy of queer performance which offers another way to relate to the work and its possibilities to engage viewers.

I offer you the word performance and ask you to hold the multitudes of social relating and transformation that it can contain. I invite you to think about performance in the way that Russian-American and theatre practitioner Michael Chekhov did; as related to an atmosphere that doesn’t just change the performer but that permeates between performer and audience. One that reveals social relations, opening out the possibility of transforming them.

*

Mark expands into a body of water; a place where he finds time to rest and love the body which keeps him alive but is also slowly killing him. Later he folds that same body small as his limbs will allow, carefully, elegantly like a piece of origami. From these careful, deliberate folds, unfurls a story:

The woman who invited us here who owns the place is very nice,very nice to us, and she would like me to keep my shirt on so I don't freak out any other people. And I do that, but it also then feeds into that bad part of me that I don't you know, being self conscious and disliking my body and whatnot. Mostly, I worry about those things because I don't want to upset other people with having to look at “Ugly me”. So it ends up feeding into a bad part of me. Normally I’d be proud of it because normally I'm proud that I've been alive as long as I have been, you know just like” Screw you. I'm living, I’m not dead.

Speaking to the camera, his testimony becomes a performance that refuses the covert folding of a body into the straight lines of duty and conformity and instead bends and folds into engagements of pleasure and extroversion.

*

Later, in his living room, his body is neither open or closed; it is in movement.

Apart from the music he is silent. Apart from the camera he is alone.

As he dances, the camera struggles to locate the centre, seeming to draw attention to the way his performance exists without the camera, despite it. His motion clears space for him to come back to himself, to a self that was used not to being alone, but with others. His dancing reminds me of José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of the dance floor as a site that “increases our tolerance for embodied practices ….[demanding] in the openness and closeness of relations to others, an exchange and alteration of kinaesthetic experience through [which] we become, in a sense, less like ourselves and more like each other.”

As Mark dances, alone in his living room, we are with him. His eyes are closed, as the refrain “take my heart away” loops on the record. In this moment we see his body, like the rock, the sky, the ash, the water reach beyond state violence and social neglect;  towards the possibility of something else.