Looking Back at AIDS

Comments (0) By David Cotner Thursday, Nov 24 2011

Location Info

Map

Hammer Museum, Billy Wilder Theater

10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Westwood, CA 90024

Category: Museums

Region: West L.A.

0 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

More About

It was 30 years ago this June 5 that the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published a report of five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among previously healthy young men in L.A. World AIDS Day, occurring every Dec. 1 since 1988, is solemnly observed with this morning's screening of Untitled (World AIDS Day). Directed this year by the trio of Jim Hodges, Carlos Marques da Cruz and Encke King, it's a documentary blending an hour's worth of media from 30 years' worth of awareness of the disease. Archival activist footage, broadcasts and editorials, and AIDS presented in movies-of-the-week converge to commemorate a time during which the personal and the political were inextricably linked, when decisions of policy at the highest levels literally made life-or-death decisions for people at home. Yet the footage you see cannot realistically re-create the level of fear that shot through the world because of AIDS. It was proportionate to an unheard-of level of uncertainty and ignorance. It was a time when fear made people temporarily insane at the merest hint of the presence of AIDS — when even the barest accidental touch was accompanied with recoil and recrimination. Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Wstwd.; Thurs., Dec. 1, 11 a.m.; free. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.
Thu., Dec. 1, 11 a.m., 2011