THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK
Rob Epstein
1984 Appeared in the journal Sequences
The gay power
The output of the biopic that managed to achieve Gus Van Sant on the gay activist Harvey Milk after twenty years of effort has to rediscover a figure larger than life 30 years after his assassination. To fully deserved all the praise that gets fiction today, we must not forget all the spadework has made The Times of Harvey Milk , the famous documentary by Rob Epstein realized 25 years ago, less than five years after the brutal destruction of the first elected openly gay American.
Considered one of the most important documentaries of the 1980s with The Thin Blue Line, Stop Making Sense and Roger & Me , The Times of Harvey Milk has all the classic chronological biography interspersed with testimonials close captured retrospectively. If the film is so easily - just like his successor in 2008 - is largely due to fate and the charisma of the main question, sort of Norma Rae fringe homosexual, coupled with a martyr figure to humor intelligent, calm tone and sense of justice all colors.
It also remains terrifying to remember that not so long ago, the forces of the political right of the first free nation in the world were taking all necessary steps to stigmatize homosexuals spheres of influence, the education for the exercise of power. Milk, Dan White as his lady-killer, are the archetypes of a flamboyant era where the podium was never far from the pyre.
Epstein, who made his name with The Celluloid Closet 15 years later, shows considerable deference to evoke a period explosive, like the narrative of the inimitable Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy ), marked by a sobriety almost funeral, giving rise to the tunes of Milk homily .
himself aware of his probable murder, Milk had recorded 'confessions' on audio tape, baring his ambitions, his lucidity and his contemporaries faced in his last battle against the hostility of consent. With hindsight, it now seems impossible to separate the man from his quest, the San Francisco disco years, California's Proposition 6 (which prohibits gays from teaching in public schools) and the beginnings of the politicization of the gay movement in the United States. The timing of Milk has also seen his fate that his personality or his propensity to capture media opportunities, because beyond his sexual orientation, Milk is a great presenter, a charismatic rallying twice a smart strategist and an incorrigible optimist. If
use its influence to advance the economic weight of gays, Milk will do the same to defend human rights as minority claims economic, and in this regard the film Epstein and van Sant come to complement each other to enrich the portrait of a figure margin nevertheless address the archetypal American activist dedicated to the cause of human Street. While The Times of Harvey Milk never puts into question the means used by the Mayor of Castro Street to get hold of power outside its strict political purposes, Milk shade some flights of the orator, who asked his faithful to come out wherever they go while he himself has long maintained his privacy protected Judgement masses.
Although Epstein's documentary makes the lion's share archives and original images, Van Sant to con his biopic degreasing modern setting instead of before the real work of seduction which Milk had to bend to get both credible face to retirees, union members, most elected to its municipality, blacks, Latinos and hippies like, somehow, to his detractors.
other hand, the film Epstein came two years before Dan White, murderer of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, was released from prison and running his suicide, failed to close the loop on this paradoxical character, that Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black will open up suspect in their fiction the likelihood of homosexuality Milk colleague despite his conservative moral and his public pronouncements against the indecency of the gay pride parade.
We can shun the movie because of its tendency to let the views of relatives about the subject of White's trial take precedence over objectivity that such an award called, but at the risk of missing a real history lesson and U.S. policy, coupled with the portrait Mechanical conscientious but a simple man to grind almost trite, but the injustices of the time convinced him to devote his life to inclusion and to reach the front.
© 2009 Charles-Stéphane Roy
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