Programmed June 2021

Fragments of Seeking: Short Films by Curtis Harrington

One of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of the 1940s and ’50s, trailblazing queer director Curtis Harrington began making films as a teenager and would go on to carve out a unique career specializing in offbeat cult horror films like Night Tide and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? Deeply surreal, intuitive, and owing much to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, these remarkable short films—made by Harrington between the ages of fourteen and seventy-six—employ striking compositions and dreamlike imagery to explore themes of queer alienation, death, and the occult. Awash in a mood of macabre decadence, they are key forerunners of the movement that would come to be known as the New Queer Cinema.

No longer streaming