It’s tempting to say that photographer George Platt Lynes was ahead of his time. Between the 1930s and his untimely death at age 48, he produced a body of work—elegant fashion photography, sleek images of nude men—that feel fresh today. But Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, a recently released documentary by Sam Shahid, argues that, in fact, Lynes was very much of his time. The ’30s and ’40s in New York saw a bustling scene of gay men who threw fabulous cocktail parties, created art, and, of course, had sex with each other. Hidden Master is quick to remind viewers that plenty of gay men were out in their own way, decades before Stonewall. At the center of this milieu, which is largely understudied, was Lynes. “We see this world that’s gone… through George’s eyes,” says Steven Haas, an art historian and the director of Lynes’s foundation, at the beginning of the documentary.

Toward the end of Hidden Master, Shahid asks several interviewees—including Vince Aletti, Nick Mauss, Mary Panzar, and Bruce Weber—why Lynes isn’t part of the canon. The resounding answer seems to be that they don’t know. It is surprising that Lynes’s images aren’t as prominent as those of his artistic successors like Andy Warhol or Robert Mapplethorpe. But then again, many of Lynes’s best works went unshown during his lifetime: when he was creating his male nudes, it would have been taboo, if not illegal, to exhibit them. What he did show, in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, was his fashion photography: dreamy images of women in the latest couture. His innovations in that genre include an early form of the now-ubiquitous ring light, which are reflected in his models’ eyes.

Though Lynes wasn’t publicly showing his nudes, he wasn’t exactly in the closet either. His nephew, George Platt Lynes II, says he was one of those people who never needed to come out; his minister father and high society mother did not disown him. In the 1920s, he traveled to Paris and befriended Gertrude Stein and her circle; Stein would eventually appoint him as her official photographer. During one steamship voyage across the Atlantic, he met Julien Levy, who exhibited his work. Through Stein, he met Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler; they would essentially form a throuple for three decades. (Their circle included another famous throuple, artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French, who often collaborated as PaJaMa.) The three lived together on the Upper East Side, at times attempting to pass for roommates. At the height of his fame, Lynes would befriend Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet, who also made Lynes the company’s official photographer. Through it all, Lynes made his nudes, gently convincing men—athletes, dancers, sailors, lovers—to disrobe before his camera.

A lover’s death in World War II, the throuple’s dissolution, and another bad breakup led Lynes to move to Hollywood for two years, where he worked for Vogue; there, he lived beyond his means and quickly derailed his career. When he returned to New York in 1948, he had been supplanted in the fashion magazines by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, who had rented out Lynes’s former studio. (Lynes did not mince words about Penn and Avedon, whose work he called “spinsterish” and “the all-time low in formula-dreariness,” respectively.) He declared bankruptcy at least twice. Much of his equipment was repossessed by the IRS (his brother bought it back then loaned it to him), and he used a Picasso as collateral for another loan.

Lynes destroyed much of his early work and entrusted the rest to sexologist Alfred Kinsey and painter Bernard Perlin. They live on in various archives, and much of it still has not been exhibited. As dealer Peter Hay Halpert points out, they have been regulated back to the closet. Perhaps they will find new life once again.

A drone from above slowly spins as it sets its focus on an abstract emanation from the ground. A tessellated pattern is small enough at the start to barely merit attention, but its design takes shape as the camera zooms in on what reveals itself to be a public address system for emergency management. More visceral than the visual, however, is the sound: a tense, tangled mass of microtonal music made with (as the credits later divulge) “astronomical planetary data” and “electronics.”

The sound by composer Laurie Spiegel, an important early figure in computer music who made her name at Bell Labs, opens Preemptive Listening, a new documentary about sirens and the state of the world in which they resonate. A voiceover sets up the premise near the start: “The siren is an interruption, a jolt, a wakeup call that points to the possibility of escape, a threat that has erupted into the present.” Some more: “These are vibrations at the edge of danger.” And still more: “Each siren is a tombstone for a past trauma.”

Preemptive Listening—premiering Friday at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival—is less a didactic documentary than an essay film that follows poetic cues. The soundtrack is full of full of notable names from the realms of music and sound art: in addition to Spiegel, contributors include Moor Mother (poet and member of the fiery free-jazz band Irreversible Entanglements), Debit (who will be part of this year’s Whitney Biennial), Raven Chacon (Pulitzer and MacArthur winner with a show up now at the Swiss Institute), and Kode9 (DJ/producer and author of the 2012 book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear). All of the 19 artists involved were invited to “reimagine the sound of the siren, to think of it as a prompt: a call to attention, a call to action, an instruction towards the possibility of the future.”

The sounds created for the film accompany director Aura Satz, who, in voiceover narration, thinks out loud about sirens in discursive ways. Over impressionistic footage from a siren factory and sites full of flashing lights (strobe warning!), she nods toward the history of sirens as industrial-age warning systems and traces their genealogy back to such things as church bells, shepherd’s horns, and town criers blowing bugles to capture the attention of the masses. The sounds of sirens accompany all manner of crises, from accidents that call for immediate alert to disasters that play out at planetary scale. Earthquakes, floods, and catastrophes related to climate change count as points of focus in the film, which includes travelogue footage from ominous locales such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan and a volcano-monitoring station in Chile.

Sirens’ presence in social disorder figures prominently too. Passages in the film are given over to meditations by Khalid Abdalla, an actor and activist in the Arab Spring; two co-creators of Mental Health First, a non-police-response initiative for mental health intervention; organizer and police-sound-weapons scholar Daphne Carr; Maori law scholar Erin Matariki Carr; and anthropologist and environmental philosopher Arturo Escobar. Each speaks about sonic warning signs and states of disquiet that often follow in their wake.

Preemptive Listening is a heavy film, but it also makes space for hope. One of the Mental Health First founders flips the foreboding mood of the script when, thinking about conflict resolution, she wonders what could happen “if we saw the siren as an opportunity instead of a crisis.” And Escobar, the anthropologist and philosopher, connects the notion of emergency with the chance for different kinds of emergence it allows. He posits, intriguingly, that “when there is a breakdown, possibility also arises.”

Astou, the scene-stealing seductress played by Fatou Seck, is one of many female characters making spellbinding mischief in the festival’s seventy short and feature-length films, which this year highlighted the perspectives of African women, whether as directors or protagonists. The program included four short films by Nacro: her earliest work, Un Certain Matin, which in 1991 made her the first woman from Burkina Faso to direct a fiction film, as well as Puk Nini, Le Truc de Konaté (Konaté’s Gift, 1997), and Bintou (2001).

The thirty-minute Puk Nini is the raucous standout. Salif (Étienne Minoungou) and Isa (Georgette Paré) are a married pair of working professionals. In addition to her day job, Isa also does the domestic chores and helps their young daughter with her homework. When Isa is busy with these tasks, Salif, frustrated by what he perceives as his wife’s sexual unavailability, prowls off to grab drinks with a friend. Enter the gliding, glimmering Astou. In the aforementioned afternoon scene, she catches Salif’s eye, and the two quickly commence a precise and transactional relationship. Astou offers him saccharine sweetness, a submissive manner, and, not least, sex. Salif gives her money when she winkingly mentions “her debts.”

Puk Nini’s humor is gleefully crude. The scenes of Astou pleasuring Salif are not coy—the camera zooms in, unblinking, on Salif’s sighs, grunts, and grimaces—and the financial expectations of their relationship are not subtle. “Salif, my neighbor Mamou lent me 2,000 francs this morning to buy some fish,” Astou coos while sliding her hand up Salif’s thigh, “and 15,000 for the new loincloth. . . .” Where Salif is concerned, the mood is sexual but not sexy, and Nacro wastes no time spinning his lust into foolery. Skulking back home from his first tryst, the unfaithful husband is seen from behind, picking a wedgie and practically tripping over his own clothes. The second time, he is caught by his wife: when she turns on the light, they see that in his haste he put on his mistress’s lace panties instead of his own briefs.

In the film’s most sexually explicit scene, Salif, in bed with Astou, is reduced to slobbering excitement, his rapture grotesque. Astou laughs all the while, as delicately mocking yet indulgent as when she was first introduced. Astou’s lingering giggle is pivotal. To be the wielder rather than the subject of levity is a grace, one that reveals Astou as a central narrator instead of the butt of the joke.

Fanta Régina Nacro: Puk Nini, 1996, film, 30 minutes.

Because Astou is a sex worker, her status in the community remains undoubtedly vulnerable—at one point, a crowd of mostly men attack her in the marketplace, and the spectacle inspires more laughter than outrage from bystanders—but in the narrative hierarchy, she embodies the prestigious role of the storyteller. After the attack, she returns home and finds Isa there waiting for her. Isa, at wit’s end, has come not to fight but to learn from the woman who has entranced her husband. Astou shares her rigorous rules of seduction, and when she speaks, not only Isa but also the woman who lives next door and the children who play nearby lean in to listen attentively. HIV/AIDS prevention is a persistent theme in Nacro’s films, and Astou becomes a mouthpiece for the director’s advocacy when she informs Isa (and the audience) that she always uses a condom to protect against the virus. Astou has been made a repository of wisdoms both specialized and foundational, a freshly fashioned griot figure refusing the marginalization of sexual taboo and instead cultivating a new center in her community.

Puk Nini is not the only film in the festival that repositions an outcast woman as the protagonist. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s feature film This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019), which this past fall became Lesotho’s first Oscar entry, is a spectral and symphonic portrait of an elderly widow who is first called mad, then hailed as mythic.

To mold this new fable, Mosese assigns the narration to a griot character, an old man playing a lesiba, a stringed flutelike instrument, in a dawn-tinted nightclub that seems removed from the landscape of the rest of the film. Between haunting trills, he recounts the widow’s tale. Upon burying the last of her kin, the eighty-year-old Mantoa, played with a resounding prowess by the late Mary Twala Mhlongo, looks forward only to her own death. She hovers, already ghostlike, at the edges of her village’s public gatherings, trying to entice a young man to start digging her grave preemptively. But her plans are derailed when she learns that developers will soon flood her village and resettle her community in order to build a dam. This act will mean not only the destruction of her home but also the desecration of all the village’s graves, an affront she cannot bear.

Like Astou, Mantoa is a vulnerable figure in the community she disrupts. A solitary, elderly widow, short on political capital, grief-addled and eccentric, she is rendered an outcast even before she challenges the local authorities, all of whom are men. “Take off your cloak for mourning, for your mourning period has long ended,” advises our griot in a low, hoarse voice in the film’s first thirty minutes, “lest they confuse you for a sorceress who is struck by madness.” Nonetheless, Mantoa refuses to distance herself from the dead, and eventually, her community begins to see her resolve as neither mad nor witchy, but rather wisely protective of their spiritual inheritance. Just as her stand against the resettlement is threatening to gain greater legitimacy, someone hidden by night and assumed to be working on behalf of the developers sets her home on fire. Continued looming, faceless violence makes any option other than resettlement untenable for the village.

Laughter, in This Is Not a Burial, comes sparse, strained, or shadowed by foreboding. When Mantoa marches past a group of children at play, their carefree cheer only underscores her marked stoicism. Where Astou’s mischief-making is always accompanied by a twinkle in the eye, a wry twist of the mouth, Mantoa’s acts carry the weight of somber martyrdom. At Puk Nini’s end, all the women—the cuckolded wife, the outcast sex worker, and a beleaguered sister-in-law—are laughing. It is a throaty laughter, at the expense of the men who have vexed or violated them. When This Is Not a Burial nears its end, the village goes silent. Mantoa, refusing displacement, slowly disrobes and walks back toward home. For a moment, all that is heard is the wind. Then, a chilling, thready sound, a mystic’s music. It drowns out the shouts of the men who would dare to forget the grace of her body, her land.

Kahn has frequently portrayed contemporary civilization as a wasteland of images and objects in her work—which includes performances and photographs in addition to films—but No Go Backs may be her starkest, most atmospheric treatment of the theme to date. Her earlier films tended toward a humorous, even slapstick, feel. In them, loquacious characters, usually played by the artist herself, often wander the margins of LA, delivering monologues prompted by the abandoned or abject things they encounter. In a 2008 film Kahn made in collaboration with Harry Dodge, All Together Now, her character discovers a pair of dead kittens in an alley. She buries them, carrying out a tender ritual that alludes to the larger human project of making meaning out of the senseless. In the 2006 Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, also made with Dodge, Kahn’s character happens upon a pile of ash sitting against a singed stucco wall. “Look, a person burned. Zoom in on that, man,” she says, addressing the camera. “It’s like some guy was just standing there, and then he burned. That kind of stuff happens.” It does—and the greater truth, as Kahn suggests throughout her body of work, is that all of civilization consists of the singed remains of obscure past events.

Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs, 2020, super 16 mm film transferred to video, 33 minutes, 30 seconds.

In No Go Backs, the adults who made whatever mess the protagonists have found themselves in are gone, along with their ambitions, and the boys are too stunned, wary, or ill-equipped to pick up the plot that got aborted. Halfway through the film, other teenagers emerge, apparently following the same path as the boys. Their movement out of the city, along the Los Angeles River, against its flow, counters the expectation of progress their forebears had. Their escape route recalls the young misfits’ path in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), moving from civilization’s discontents toward the dirty, splendid freedom of nature. In Kahn’s film, however, the landscape is presented in a deadpan manner, unidealized and just there—a monotonous desert or tedious forest that you simply move through.

In fact, while a strong sense of nostalgia runs through No Go Backs, the longing does not appear to be for some vague return to nature. Flashbacks pepper the film: the boys skateboarding in a driveway, visiting a food truck. One of the protagonists is played by Kahn’s son, and in one flashback we see this character sitting in his bedroom, with a photo on the wall of Kahn holding him as a child. The film’s nostalgia, in the end, is for the world that we live in today, the one we seem determined to destroy.

The Museum of Modern Art’s “Virtual Views: Home Movies,” the first in a series of online exhibitions organized by the museum in the wake of COVID-19, challenges this perspective.  The exhibition is an adaptation of “Private Lives, Public Spaces,” a sprawling survey that opened at the museum in October and that featured over two hundred digitized reels of amateur films from MoMA’s collection, nine of which are included in this virtual sampler. Positioning these films as a body of work worthy of critical reflection and appreciation, these exhibitions lend MoMA’s institutional ballast to a small but growing movement in film scholarship to do for home movies what historians of photography have done for the snapshot. As curators Ron Magliozzi and Brittany Shaw explain in an accompanying video, “How to See: Home Movies,” the genre accounts for most moving images made in the twentieth century, constituting a vast “people’s cinema” capable of providing a rich and poignant visual history from below.

The show’s premise is compelling, but the delivery is imperfect—understandable for an exhibition assembled quickly and under difficult circumstances. It is not entirely clear how the curators selected the nine films included in the online exhibition, and whether they are being highlighted as exceptional, or representative, examples of the form. The opening section, “Celebrities, ”featuring movies by Salvador Dalí, composer Aaron Copland, and cinematographer Henry Sharp, is a perplexing beginning for an exhibition dedicated to celebrating an expressly popular form. Though technically a home movie, Dalí’s 1954 film reads more as an extension of his formal artistic practice, consisting of a series of surreal self-portraits. Sharp’s “Spanish People at Pickfair” (1929), meanwhile, resembles a Hollywood casting call, featuring Sharp’s famous friends Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford playacting for the camera.

Still from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s “Spanish People at Pickfair,” with cinematography by Henry Sharp, 1929, 35mm film.

There are enjoyable moments to be had here: who can resist Dalí’s impish smiles or Chaplin’s slapstick? But in opening with “Celebrities,” the exhibition risks suggesting that home movies should be evaluated by the standards of fine art or Hollywood, a framework that seems at odds with the show’s mission to evaluate a vernacular form on its own terms. The theme is also somewhat unimaginative: it is not surprising to learn that professional artists took to home movies and did so with above-average skill and care. Similarly predictable is our capacity to be drawn in by amateur films featuring professional stars. What is Instagram, or Warhol’s Factory films (themselves a sort of home movie) if not proof that banal activities can become captivating when carried out by the beautiful or charismatic.

Discovering the pull of nondescript films is of much greater interest here. The exhibition picks up in part two, “The Experience of Place.” While two of the films are unattributed travelogues—a 1927 reel capturing a group of friends camping in Canada, and a sequence of vignettes shot in New Jersey’s Liberty State Park in 1981—the standout piece, “Sixth Avenue—Subway—Post” (1944/45), comes from a professional filmmaker, Charles L. Turner. His credentials are hinted at in the movie itself, which documents his commute from Manhattan to the Army Pictorial Service in Astoria, Queens, where he served during World War II before resuming his career in commercial film.

This pedigree raises the question of whether “Sixth Avenue—Subway—Post” can be truly considered “amateur”—a term the curators would do well to define—even if it is far plainer than the typical professional production, with few frills and zero celebrity cameos. A straightforward account of a basic routine, the film shows how even the most ordinary subjects can grow remarkable over time. Viewed today, it offers a rare glimpse of life during World War II, and a vivid time capsule of 1940s New York City. Here are portraits of young soldiers and secretaries, now elderly or deceased. Here are pencil mustaches and Rita Hayworth hairstyles. Here are open tracts of land in what is now a dense part of Queens. Watching the film in the midst of today’s health crisis, it also takes on a cathartic quality, gifting us with a vicarious, carefree trip on New York’s streets and sidewalks.

Still from “Jarret Family Home Movies,” 1958–67, 8mm film.

The show’s third section, “Family,” is its strongest. If part two establishes that ordinary subjects can be affecting, this part challenges the very idea of ordinariness, displaying three films with different variations on its standard theme, each more complex than they appear at first glance. Beneath its Hallmark surface, a movie of a wealthy, white nuclear family titled “Father & Kid NYC” (ca. 1940s), for example, subtly upends gender conventions. Showing a father doting on his daughter, the movie is a forceful testament to paternal affection—and an example of female directing. (With dad in front of the camera, mom was likely the person behind the lens.) By contrast, the protagonists of “Jarret Family Home Movies” (1958–67), a three-hour compilation of home movies by Pittsburgh firefighter David H. Jarret, are African American and working-class—demographics underrepresented in twentieth-century popular culture. This ensemble of films could easily double as a portrait of the Hill District, the historic black area where the Jarrets resided, and whose streets and residents David H. Jarret prolifically recorded, broadening the definition of “family” to encompass neighbors and the larger urban community.

Left unattended after Jarret’s death, the reels in “Jarret Family Home Movies” grew moldy and their emulsions decomposed. Far from reducing their appeal, however, the damage has enhanced them, generating marbled splotches of blue and white that dance across the frame and might be at home in a Stan Brakhage work—a fact that blurs the line between error and invention, and points to overlaps between amateur and avant-garde filmmaking. The enigmatic “Jarret Home Moves” provides a thoughtful end to a show too focused on skilled amateurs, demonstrating that even people with no artistic training can create moving images of lasting beauty. It shows that there is not only historical but also aesthetic merit to be found in even the most inexpert of productions.

The Mason family has more than enough psychosexual drama to fill the film’s eighty-six-minute running time. The imperturbably affable Barry takes his cues (sometimes quite literally) from the strong-willed Karen, a more complex and less consistently sympathetic figure. While Barry is not religious, Karen is a practicing Conservative Jew, and seems to have dealt with her shame about working in the adult industry by attempting to make her family as picture-perfect as possible. Their three children responded to this pressure in different ways: Micah, about whom we learn the least, says that the force of his mother’s expectations made him quiet; Rachel rebelled by becoming an artist and embracing all things countercultural; and Josh, who is gay, suffered from a textbook case of “Best Little Boy in the World” syndrome, sublimating his anxiety about his sexuality into academic and athletic achievement. When he came out to his parents in college—after several failed attempts—Karen told him, as she herself recalls in the film, that God must be punishing her.

Still from Circus of Books, 2019.

Circus of Books is at its best when it lets itself be a film about the complicated character that is Karen Mason, a woman whose business acumen is matched by—and perhaps predicated on—profound self-delusion. Although it was Karen who suggested that Barry become a distributor of Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine in the first place—a move that catalyzed their eventual entry into the world of gay porn—she displays a rather impressive amount of cognitive dissonance concerning their chosen profession, while Barry seems to have never had any qualms about it. Even when they expanded their business and began producing hardcore films of their own, Karen says, “It never felt like we were getting into pornography. We were just getting into a different business that was related to the business we were already in.” Besides, she protests (a bit too much), they never watched the movies they made.

The documentary has less to say about the community of which the Circus of Books stores were ostensible centers. Though the former employees make for an entertaining Greek chorus of talking heads, and there are a few fun stories about the bookstores’ (secondary?) function as cruising sites, most of the gay people in this film about gay bookstores are peripheral to the story of the nuclear family at its heart. While crafting a moving and quite watchable narrative, Circus of Books never really examines the delicate symbiosis between that family and the community whose patronage—and labor—supported them for decades.

The movie’s last act interweaves the final days of the original West Hollywood location in early 2019 (the other store, in Silverlake, closed in 2016) with Karen’s transformation decades earlier into a proud PFLAG parent who speaks at meetings and marches in the local Pride parade with Barry. While I found myself tearing up at Karen’s admission that “parents are only smart for a small window of time”—and moved by her dedication to helping others accept their LGBTQ children—the film, in its hurry to a half-happy ending, glosses over how, exactly, her transformation came to be, and doesn’t delve into how Karen squares her celebration of gay people with her continued discomfort with gay sex.

Still from Circus of Books, 2019.

In the end, I found myself wanting Mason’s charming, well-composed film to probe a little deeper. Her dynamic with her mother never comes into focus the way Josh’s does, for instance, though it makes for some of the most compelling scenes—when out in the world, or at the store, Karen addresses her daughter behind the camera, usually to criticize or complain about Mason’s direction and occasionally to suggest she make her documentary about something else. (The movie opens with footage from a grainy home video in which a younger Karen tells her, “Rachel, this is going to be such a boring tape.”) These moments are compelling precisely because of how real and revealing they are, but the tension between Mason and the primary subject of her film, her mother, is never explicitly addressed (nor, notably, is Mason’s own queer identity or her relationship with a porn actor, Buck Angel). Early in the film, Karen, gesturing toward a wall of dildos at an adult novelty expo, remarks that she’s able to notice what would sell well at her bookstores without having to really look at it. That seems an equally fitting description of Mason’s approach to the questions her documentary brings up but leaves unanswered.