Tribute Tom Kalin
Tom Kalin is a video-artist, LGBT rights, and AIDS activist (founding member of the Gran Fury and ACTUP collectives). He is a professor of film at Columbia University in New York and a film director, writer, and producer, whose work was and is grounded in the New Queer Cinema’s subversive and groundbreaking features.
Both of his feature films tell stories of fascinating human monsters in a provocative and expressive manner - turning scandalous cases of recent history into (also scandalous) cinema, which explores with a chilling insight and stylistic grandeur the darkest passions.
“My work is a lot about the seeming relationship between sex and power. It is definitely a big part of what I’m trying to get at. I’m very interested in the idea of how class in American society is one of the most important conduits of how we relate to each other and how invisible it’s made in our culture. … The content of the work I’ve made is extremely provocative; but formally I’m kind of a classicist and in a funny way, very aesthetically conservative. The attention in my work is between the content and the form, which is actually quite formal, quite old-fashioned in a lot of ways.”