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Michelle Handelman (b. 1960)

Birthplace:
Chicago, Illinois, USA

Born:
August 5, 1960

Biography from TheMovieDB

Michelle Handelman (born August 5, 1960) is an American contemporary artist, filmmaker, and writer who works with live performance, multiscreen installation, photography and sound. Coming up through the years of the AIDS crisis and Culture Wars, Handelman has built a body of work that explores the dark and uncomfortable spaces of queer desire. She confronts the things that provoke collective fear and denial – sexuality, death, chaos. She directed the ground-breaking feature documentary on the 1990s San Francisco lesbian S/M scene BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism(1995), described by IndieWire as “a queer classic ahead of its time, a vital archive of queer history.” Her early work included 16mm black and white experimental films combined with performance. She is also known for her video installations Hustlers & Empires (2018), Irma Vep, The Last Breath (2013-2015), and Dorian, A Cinematic Perfume (2009-2011). In 2011, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for her film and video work.

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Additional information:

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Film Performances

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Film Production

Director:
1988  Safer Sexual Techniques in the-Age of Mechanical Reproduction
1991  Homophobia Is Known To Cause Nightmares
1992  A History of Pain
1992  Flesh Histories
1995  BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism
2000  La Suture
2002  I Hate You
2009  Dorian, a cinematic perfume
2014  Irma Vep, The Last Breath
2020  Candyland
2020  Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression
2020  These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves
2021  Claiming the Liminal Space

Director of Photography:
1988  Safer Sexual Techniques in the-Age of Mechanical Reproduction
1991  Homophobia Is Known To Cause Nightmares
1992  A History of Pain
1992  Flesh Histories
1995  BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism
2000  La Suture
2002  I Hate You
2009  Dorian, a cinematic perfume
2014  Irma Vep, The Last Breath
2020  Candyland
2020  Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression
2020  These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves
2021  Claiming the Liminal Space

Editor:
1988  Safer Sexual Techniques in the-Age of Mechanical Reproduction
1991  Homophobia Is Known To Cause Nightmares
1992  A History of Pain
1992  Flesh Histories
1995  BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism
2000  La Suture
2002  I Hate You
2009  Dorian, a cinematic perfume
2014  Irma Vep, The Last Breath
2020  Candyland
2020  Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression
2020  These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves
2021  Claiming the Liminal Space

Producer:
1988  Safer Sexual Techniques in the-Age of Mechanical Reproduction
1991  Homophobia Is Known To Cause Nightmares
1992  A History of Pain
1992  Flesh Histories
1995  BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism
2000  La Suture
2002  I Hate You
2009  Dorian, a cinematic perfume
2014  Irma Vep, The Last Breath
2020  Candyland
2020  Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression
2020  These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves
2021  Claiming the Liminal Space

Thanks:
1988  Safer Sexual Techniques in the-Age of Mechanical Reproduction
1991  Homophobia Is Known To Cause Nightmares
1992  A History of Pain
1992  Flesh Histories
1995  BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism
2000  La Suture
2002  I Hate You
2009  Dorian, a cinematic perfume
2014  Irma Vep, The Last Breath
2017  FIT Hives: Sustainability - The Secret to Survival
2020  Candyland
2020  Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression
2020  These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves
2021  Abigail
2021  Claiming the Liminal Space

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About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

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Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

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Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.