This year's Queer Lisboa retrospective will be dedicated to William E. Jones, in collaboration with Cinemateca Portuguesa. Born in 1962, in the city of Canton, Ohio, living in Los Angeles for several decades, William E. Jones has worked with cinema, video, photography and painting, also standing out as an essayist and novelist. A main feature throughout his work is an archivist impulse, a phenomenon that gains enormous expression in this new century, particularly within queer culture.

Since the early nineties, Jones has made use of archival audiovisual and photographic materials to reinterpret and recontextualize some of the themes that fascinate him most: the decadent architecture and industrial urbanism of the American Midwest, military archives and the state propaganda machine during the Cold War or the Vietnam War, police surveillance and repression, communism and the Eastern Bloc, and, most notably, the production of pornography in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in the USA during the pre-AIDS years. Crossing art, politics and pornography, Jones offers a democratic and philosophical gaze at moving images and photography, bringing film and video, advertising and state film, secret service records and video surveillance into dialogue. These images allow him to reflect about the place and role of those who live in the margins.

The subject of several solo and retrospective exhibitions at internationally renowned institutions (Tate Modern in 2005, Anthology Film Archives in 2010, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2011), Jones' work now arrives in Lisbon with an extensive selection of his most emblematic cinema works. From the seminal “Tearoom”, crafted out of footage that the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department recorded in 1962 of several men in a public restroom, to the experimental noir thriller “Finished”, which follows the trail of a gay porn model through Hollywood, including a documentary about the Los Angeles Latino community of fans of Morrissey and The Smiths (“Is It Really so Strange?”), and “The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography”, based on images from gay adult videos produced in Eastern Europe after the introduction of capitalism, these are some of the highlights of the retrospective.

Also at Cinemateca, a Carte Blanche for which Jones selected experimental films by underground filmmakers such as Dietmar Brehm, Kurt Kren and his admired Fred Halsted, about whom he has written extensively. This program is formed by four short films, whose viewing times follow one another according to a geometric progression, with each film being twice the length of the previous one.

RETROSPECTIVE: William E. Jones

2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test, Kurt Kren (Austria, 1960, 4’)

A Great Way of Life, William E. Jones (USA, 2015, 7’)

Actual T.V. Picture, William E. Jones (USA, 2013, 7’)

All Male Mash Up, William E. Jones (USA, 2006, 30’)

Discrepancy, William E. Jones (USA, 2017, 10’)

Fall into Ruin, William E. Jones (USA, 2017, 30’)

The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, William E. Jones (USA, 1998, 19’)

Film Montages (for Peter Roehr), William E. Jones (USA, 2006, 11’)

Finished, William E. Jones (USA, 1997, 75’)

Is It Really so Strange?, William E. Jones (USA, 2004, 80’)

Jellyfish Sandwich, Luther Price (USA, 1994, 17’)

Killed, William E. Jones (USA, 2009, 2’)

Massillon, William E. Jones (USA, 1991, 70’)

Model Workers, William E. Jones (USA, 2014, 13’)

More British Sounds, William E. Jones (USA, 2006, 8’)

Psychic Driving, William E. Jones (USA, 2014, 15’)

Racine - 1 (1992 - 1999), Dietmar Brehm (Austria, 2002, 8’)

The Sex Garage, Fred Halsted (USA, 1972, 35’)

Shoot Don’t Shoot, William E. Jones (USA, 2012, 5’)

Tearoom, William E. Jones (USA, 1962-2007, 56’)

V.O., William E. Jones (USA, 2006, 59’)

Youngstown / Steel Town, William E. Jones (USA, 2016, 6’)