Wakefield Poole
The Anthology Film Archives in New York, an institution mainly devoted to preserving and exhibiting avant-garde films, recently acquired the oeuvre of gay art-porn pioneer Wakefield Poole. Starting tonight, Anthology is running a weeklong retrospective of Poole's films with the filmmaker in attendence. Ed Halter previews the screenings and reviews Poole's career.
For most of the 1960s, when Poole lived in New York doing musical theater and shooting industrials, underground films frequently portrayed homosexual themes, though never any real gay sex. By decade's end, true hardcore loops began screening at rundown art houses. Produced cheaply and anonymously, the sleazy stags propelled an aesthetically offended Poole into action. "I went to the Park Miller and I saw this horrible movie," remembers Poole, "and I said to my friend, 'This is the worst, ugliest movie I've ever seen! Somebody oughta be able to do something better than this.'" Poole's notion was to combine the lyrical moods of Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger with all-male hardcore action — a taboo that Andy Warhol, Pat Rocco, and Jean Genet had approached, asymptotically, but never quite breached.
