Part one of BFMAF Focus programme looking at the work of artist, educator and activist Stuart Marshall. Stuart’s work challenged misrepresentations of homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, subverting and critiquing the prevailing language of television and news media.
Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) is a 1983 artist’s video on the subject of AIDS, by the LGBTQ+ and AIDS video artist and TV documentarian Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). Presumed lost and unseen for almost 40 years, this 25-minute video (of the original 28 minutes) is likely to be the first AIDS activist video in the global archive.
Stuart Marshall made the video in response to the appearance of the 1981 article “Kaposi’s Sarcoma in Homosexual Men— a Report of Eight Cases” in The Lancet, a leading UK medical journal. This followed the New York Times article “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” earlier that year. The title Kaposi’s Sarcoma refers to a type of cancer which became one of the first and most visible signs of a new disease effecting young gay men in the urban centres of the United States; with AIDS quickly described as the “gay plague” in media reports. Using appropriated texts, critical cultural analysis and collaboration with the AIDS clinician Richard Wells, Marshall’s video constructs a compelling counter narrative to the “homosexuals=AIDS=death” logic of print journalism.
Dir. Stuart Marshall | Canada, United Kingdom | 2024 | 25’ | English with English Subtitles
Robert Marshall is structured in two movements. Through the memories of his father, fragments of the son’s youth are revealed, forming both a biographical portrait of Robert and an autobiographical portrait of Stuart Marshall. The second sequence stages Marshall’s AIDS alternative health regimen of herbal and acupuncture treatments with a recording of a telephone conversation between Stuart and an HIV physician in San Francisco. The pros and cons of the drug AZT are discussed long-distance. The video offers a poignant yet politicised meditation on memory and trauma, community knowledge and medical ethics.
Dir. Stuart Marshall | Canada, United Kingdom | 1991 | 10’ | English with English Subtitles