Common Threads – Stories From The Quilt
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B- Film: B
One of
the earliest films that successfully dealt with the AIDS crisis that made it to
a wide audience was the Rob Epstein/Jeffrey Friedman film Common Threads - Tales From The Quilt (1989), which deservedly got
the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
This was at a time when the now-famous mega-blanket of cloth could
actually be unrolled in a large area. It
is now so huge, that will never be possible again, though it is now on the
internet.
Like the
blanket itself, the film has been an undeniable reminder that this was and is a
crisis that has not been solves and is not solved by a longshot. For a film that is on its 15th
Anniversary, it is actually a terrible thing that the film is holding up well,
too well for our own good. It did a
phenomenal job of breaking in valid awareness, but the crisis is still
unresolved and worse, with the virus having transmuted quite a bit in the time
span since. Newer drugs have only
prolonged life and cut down on suffering.
Dustin
Hoffman narrates the program which starts on the specific stories of some of
those sewn into the actual quilt, then starts going into news footage about how
the crisis arrived and too few cared enough to try and stop it. The loss of people is a reminder of the loss
of too many of the early battles that will cost tens of millions of lives to
come, if not more. When all is said and
done, this will be seen as a sad marker of an uglier nightmare to come,
especially on how the Religious Right did everything they could to destroy the
Gay Community with it. After watching
this film, you will see how that was the seed for Gays to become more
mainstream.
The full
frame image is from a good video master of the original film footage, but has
limits. Depth and detail are not the
best for such an image on DVD, but it is better than most. It is color correct. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is good for its
age and is clear enough to hear all of the dialogue. Extras include a recent audio commentary by
the directors that updates things nicely, a new short (shot on tape) from them
about AIDS by today and how activists and doctors dealt with it to date, a
photo gallery, and activist Vito Russo’s speech with the ACT UP organization
that lasts about nine minutes. This is a
solid set of extras to enhance an important documentary work that is overdue to
reach a new audience.
- Nicholas Sheffo
