The AIDS Information Film

AIDS: What Every Kid Should Know, Colman Communications for Barr Films, 1987, 16mm, 15 mins

AIDS: What Everyone Needs to Know, Sheldon Renan for Churchill Films, 1987, 16mm, 19 mins

We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by AIDS, WAVE (Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise), 1990, digital projection, 32 mins

In the first decade of the AIDS crisis, a primary challenge was the wide dissemination of correct and up-to-date information about a novel and deadly disease that both science and society still struggled to understand. This already monumental task became even more difficult given the reactionary political program of the Reagan administration and its support of Christian fundamentalist ideology, which inhibited mass media from addressing the core populations affected by the crisis—gay men, intravenous drug users, Black and Latin communities, and transgender women—in a timely, accessible, and straightforward manner. Tonight’s program looks at three very different attempts to address this challenge, using the audio-visual instructional media of the time.

A 16mm educational film intended for middle-school-aged students, AIDS: What Every Kid Should Know attempts to use the typically anodyne conventions of its genre to address young teens, and lays bare the limits of such a project given the cultural and political pressures of the moment. In its attempts to dispel prevalent rumors and promote abstinence, the film never mentions homosexuality and illustrates drug use with fictionalized scenes of urban crime. The most explicit information on sexual activity, including contraception methods, appears in the final third of the film, following a title card cautioning instructors to preview this section before sharing with students. This warning is one of the film’s selling points: in the accompanying teaching guide, Barr Films stresses that the film “gives each school or community a choice of messages based on their values.”

AIDS: What Everyone Needs to Know presents a more sophisticated and mature approach. The film was produced and directed by Sheldon Renan, better known as the author of An Introduction to the American Underground Film (1966), founder of UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive, and maker of mondo documentary The Killing of America (1982). Renan had produced successful educational films before, and approached Churchill Films after learning more about the disease from his gay colleagues and a relative who worked at AIDS Project Los Angeles. “Everyone was dying,” Renan recalls. “I thought it was a film that had to be done.” Initially hesitant, Churchill eventually took on the project and Renan’s film became one of the more widely distributed resources of its kind, used for many years in the American armed forces, among other institutions. What distinguishes Renan’s film from others of a similar kind are its intimate and honest interviews with people living with AIDS, made at a time when such images remained rare (his approach recalls the humanizing program of early gay liberation films like Word Is Out [1977]). These emotional portraits, Renan says, effectively convey “the sense of alienation it created for the people who were infected.”

As the crisis deepened, We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by AIDS was created by Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise, or WAVE, a support group and educational collective founded by Alexandra Juhasz in 1989. Juhasz and WAVE members Marcia Edwards, Aida Matta, Sharon Penceal, Carmen Perez, Glenda Smith-Hasty, and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski created We Care with the goal of informing other low-income women of color at risk of contracting HIV, using the portable and accessible format of consumer video to create and distribute the tape. Thanks to the convenience of VHS, the tape was shown not just on cable access and in classrooms, but also in shelters, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and private residences. Rejecting the conventions of educational media and embracing a DIY home-video vernacular, We Care remains a potent and immediate artifact of the era’s grassroots community response, part of a larger phenomenon of AIDS video activism, chronicled in Juhasz’s 1995 book AIDS TV. Then-new technologies were used, she notes, “to form a local response to AIDS, to articulate a rebuttal to or a revision of the mainstream media's definitions and representations of AIDS, and to form community around a new identity forced into existence by the fact of AIDS.”

Followed by a discussion with WAVE members Juhasz and Edwards, as well as Szczepanski’s granddaughter Pharah Diaz.

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Light Industry is supported by our members and, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as the Mellon Foundation through the Coalition of Small Arts New York. Public assistance is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.