A FILM ABOUT JOE BRAINARD

Video by Matt Wolf
Text by Danny Calvi

Stop what you’re doing and head over to Vdrome where Matt Wolf’s ‘I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard’ is streaming in its entirety until 9 October. Wolf is the ingenious documentary filmmaker behind that Arthur Russell doc, ‘Wild Combination’. This film, about the gay-straight alliance of artist Joe Brainard and poet Ron Padgett, is a fitting tribute to Brainard’s unconventional memoir slash poem, ‘I Remember’.

Wolf thinks of the film as a kind of ‘gay-straight guy buddy movie… An interesting social dynamic, which hasn’t been explored much in film’. He contacted Padgett and interviewed him, then juxtaposed his recorded anecdotes with Brainard’s own readings of his famous poem. The footage, which echoes the loose logic of Brainard’s prose, is mostly made up of archival films from the National Archives in Washington, DC (government-produced newsreels and sex-ed films) spliced with Ron and Joe’s own 8-mm films and photos from their early twenties.

For more info about ‘I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard’ check out the website dedicated to the film here.