Film Forum

Documentary filmmaker Nancy Buirski — director of A CRIME ON THE BAYOU (2020), THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR (2017), THE LOVING STORY (2011), AFTERNOON OF A FAUN (2013), among others — passed away in August, just weeks after Film Forum opened her latest film, DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY (2022). She was also a photographer, photo editor, and film festival director (she founded and ran the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival for 10 years). We dedicate this encore screening of DESPERATE SOULS to her memory. You can read her obituary in The New York Times here. 

“Rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory” (Owen Gleiberman, Variety). John Schlesinger’s legendary MIDNIGHT COWBOY, released in 1969 with an X rating, won three Oscars®, including Best Picture. The New York Times called Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo “something found under an old door in a vacant lot,” and Jon Voight as Joe Buck “a tall, handsome young man whose open face manages to register the fuzziest of conflicting emotions within a very dim mind.” The mean streets of New York (the hellscape that was Times Square before its family-friendly reinvention) never looked sleazier, or more sexually audacious. Schlesinger’s foray into the world of lost souls remains equal parts funny and tragic. Its homoerotic subtext is both tender and surprising, especially for having been realized more than 50 years ago. Nancy Buirski’s fascinating documentary essay — far from a conventional “making-of featurette” — posits this iconic film within the 1960s counterculture and explores how, with a once-in-a-generation convergence of talent and materials, MIDNIGHT COWBOY captured the zeitgeist of an era. With Bob Balaban, Brenda Vaccaro, Lucy Sante, Ian Buruma, Jennifer Salt, and Brian De Palma.
 
Presented with support from the R.G. Rifkind Foundation Endowment for Queer Cinema and the Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film
 
2022     101 MIN.     USA      ZEITGEIST FILMS IN ASSOCIATION WITH KINO LORBER

Reviews

“RAPT, INCISIVE, AND BEAUTIFULLY EXPLORATORY… As a documentary filmmaker, Nancy Buirski comes at you from a heady impressionistic angle. For all its tasty anecdotes, and there are lots of them, DESPERATE SOULS is less concerned with production war stories…than with the emotional metaphysics of how a movie about a blinkered hustler and a homeless loser came to embody what Hollywood was becoming. Buirski digs into the life of John Schlesinger, and reveals him to have been a courageous giant of a filmmaker…The film demonstrates how so many of the creative decisions that defined MIDNIGHT COWBOY sprung from Schlesinger’s revolutionary impulse to splash aspects of queer consciousness and experience all over the screen in the context of a major Hollywood production…Schlesinger invested these scenes with a passion, sleaze and terror that he ripped out of his own experience…DESPERATE SOULS captures what a disarmingly intimate film MIDNIGHT COWBOY was, but the documentary is also an essay on how the movie acted as a kind of portal: a passage from the old world
to the new one.”
– Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“Buirski wisely treats [MIDNIGHT COWBOY] not just as her ultimate topic, but as the center of a spider web for other, equally fascinating subjects. Part of what made COWBOY so potent was how it was about so much, even if much of what it was about was off-screen, or hinted at, or only legible in coded subtext. “
– Jason Bailey, The Playlist

“Buirski creates a living, breathing depiction of an unsanitized New York during a time of incredible, destabilizing change. With an adept fluidity, Buirski zooms in on and out from subjects big and small, from the social context of the Vietnam War to Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman’s brilliant performances, and from the blacklisting of screenwriter Waldo Salt to the near collapse of the grimy metropolis that is distinct in form and texture from the New York City that remains today. Importantly, Buirski also threads thought-provoking context around the personal and social histories of the cast and the worlds in which they grew, allowing the viewer to understand, empathetically, MIDNIGHT COWBOY’s role in symbolizing a widespread acceptance of homosexual subject matter that would have previously drawn censorship. The year 1969 was not only a year of moon landings and murder; it was the year of the Stonewall Riots and the birth of national gay liberation.”
– Conor Truax, In Review Online

“MIDNIGHT COWBOY is a terrific film to revisit, especially in the current climate. The 1969 production has achieved national-monument status in film history for a myriad of reasons which Nancy Buirski’s documentary explores. A snapshot of time but also a continuation of a conversation. A bracing, queer-themed, fiercely independent-spirited film written and directed by two closeted gay men (Schlesinger, and the writer of the book in which MIDNIGHT COWBOY was based, James Leo Herlihy). Impacted most as a profoundly moving and real film about two damaged loners.”
– Fionnuala Halligan, Screen

“Fascinating and hypnotic”
– Deadline

“Attempts to navigate the impact and cultural presence of the legendary film while also exploring the history of queer cinema, the death of the western, and the counterculture  of the ‘60s transforming into the nihilism of the 1970s.”
– The Film Stage

“[MIDNIGHT COWBOY] was perhaps the most explicit and emotionally intense film of the New Hollywood era... remains littered with contradictions. It’s nostalgic and hopeless; a celebration of the counterculture and, seemingly, an indictment of its decadence. All that makes Nancy Buirski’s new documentary about its production and legacy more interesting… [the film explains] why MIDNIGHT COWBOY became such a phenomenon, and why we’re still so fixated by it.”
– Adam Solomons, IndieWire