Monozygote Productions | LGBTQ+ Videos

The Kinney brothers' work has shown in LGBTQ+ festivals, museums, and gallery spaces around the world. Below is a partial list of screenings, a full directory of videos by the twin producers, and clips from each piece. For full-screening information, please contact VTape at www.vtape.org.

Gallery and Museum Screenings
A-Space, Toronto, Canada	Harvard Film Archive, Cambride, MA
Artists Space, New York	New Langton Arts, San Franciso, CA
British Film Institute, London, UK	Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA
Collective For Living Cinema, New York, NY	Video-In, Vancouver, Canada
"Day Without Art" Deep Dish, New York, NY	Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY	Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY

International LGBTQ+ Film and Video Festivals
New York, NY	Stichting, Amersterdam
San Francisco, CA	Toronto, Canada
Los Angeles, CA	Melbourne, Australia
Chicago, IL	Bilba, Spain
London, England	Tokyo, Japan
Cork, Ireland	Turin, Italy

Transformer/AIDS

Paper Tiger Television SW, 28 minutes, 1988, VTape, View on Paper Tiger Television

Transformer/AIDS takes a speech by President Ronald Reagan to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFar) in 1987 as the point of departure for a critique of conservative policies regarding the epidemic. Produced by Paper Tiger Television Southwest in 1988, the tape uses an assortment of lively visual juxtapositions to explore the language and representations that have been produced to shape public perceptions of the disease. Designed for public access television, the tape operates as one counter representation to the "official" political and media construction of the epidemic. Produced and directed by Robert Kinney for Paper tiger Television with Jane Cottis, John Walden, and Margaret Difani.

Paper Tiger Television Silence That Silences

The Silence That Silences

Paper Tiger Television SW, 28 minutes, 1990, Vtape, Paper Tiger Television

The Silence That Silences is an exploration of the representation of people living with AIDS as seen in an exhibition of photographs by New York artists, Rosalind Solomon. Through fictional narrative, documentary footage, and analysis, the work investigates how representations of people living with AIDS are constructed in mainstream news reporting and art exhibitions; how these image constructions determine, in part, our responses to both people living with AIDS and the larger epidemic. Proposed in the work is the idea that photographs, contrary to popular opinion, rather than reflecting an objective document, are imbued with meaning by both the producer and their currency as images of meaning in the culture.

Paper Tiger Television - The Silence That Silences

Monozygote Productions Talk To Me Like The Rain

Talk To Me Like The Rain... by Tennessee Williams

Monozygote Productions, 17 minutes, 1989, VTape

Talk To Me Like The Rain... is the first tape by Robert and Donald Kinney on the subject of their own relationship as twins and gay men. Utilizing a Tennessee Williams play originally scripted with a heterosexual relationship, this production reorders the relationship as one between two brothers whose incestuous behavior feeds a disillusionment in the trust and faith with one another. Economically and emotionally marginalized and finding in one another the impoverished reflection of the other, the incestuous tie, rather than drawing them toward an even closer bond, creates the circumstance where the brothers emotionally consume one another in an attempt to secure stability in their individual lives.

The Maids by Jean Genet

Monozygote Productions, 53 minutes, 1990, VTape

Jean Genet's The Maids provides the text for the second tape by Robert and Donald Kinney exploring their relationship as twins and their gay sexualities. Robert and Donald play the title roles of sisters, Claire and Solonge; domestic workers in service to a wealthy mistress. While "Madam" is away, Claire and Solonge play out the fantasy and horror of their own lives. The "game" the maids play turns sour as their frustration and anger is confused and reinforced by the complex emotional relationships the two sisters have with one another and the woman who employs them. Woven into the convoluted dialogue, the sisters reveal how poverty and cultural marginalization breed a self-hatred that finds its locus in the image of one another; creating a misdirected seat of contempt that comes to replace any sense of hope or choice.

Stephen

Monozygote Productions, 28 minutes, 1991, VTape

Stephen is the final installment in a series of three productions by Robert and Donald Kinney. Broadly based on a chapter from Thornton Wilder's, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Stephen updates the Wilder text while holding to the basic narrative forces. The production focuses on the story of siblings, and in this case, twins locked in a complex emotional and sexual relationship. The twins define and redefine the parameters of their relationship in a setting of high modern lines and fundamentalist iconography. These elements come together in the second part as the signs and symbols of the culture that marginalizes them. The montage combines a fast-paced edit of images, music, and silence to create a densely constructed vocabulary of sound and visuals.

Agora

Monozygote Productions, 73 minutes, 1992, VTape

Agora focuses on the market place as seen through the eyes of a young, gay man suffering from agoraphobia and the oppressive circumstances of small-town life in the Midwest. The narrative opens with an idyllic representation of the Midwest and shifts into an expressive exploration of experiences within the narrow confines of a Midwestern moral code. The melodrama follows five main characters who find themselves together in a small motel; Crab, the motel employee who lives at home with his family; Swallow, a recently escaped con and his lover, Jack; Katch, a woman dishonorably discharged from the military and her lover, Joy. The market place is a central focus for all the main characters; as a place of potential employment, a site of crisis in representation, the public arena where the status quo is policed and, ultimately, a closed barrier whereby the "norm" is protected.

Pigs

Monozygote Productions, 98 minutes, 2007, VTape,

Pigs is a contemporary American folk tale set in the rural Midwest in the early 1960s. Allie is a widow struggling to operate a small hog farm with the support of her teenage son, Dip. Allie works to stave off the vulturous opportunism of corporate land prospectors and the debts her husband left behind. In the midst of her difficulties arrives her brother-in-law, Gray, returning to the farm he fled years earlier. A suspect individual with rumors of mental illness in his past, Gray's attempts to incorporate himself back on the farm are repeatedly thwarted by his sister-in-law. Circumstances begin to knot when Gray pursues Dip who reciprocates with the full passion of his burgeoning sexuality. Fearing that Dip will abandon her and the farm, Allie devises a plan to circumvent their desire.

Gallery and Museum Screenings