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SWOON
GAY/DRAMA/TRUE STORY,1992,90 Minutes,English,1.66:1,2.0 Dolby Digital,M (Adult themes, medium level sex scenes),Audio Commentary by director Tom Kalin, cinematographer Ellen Kuras, producer Christine Vachon and actor Craig Chester; Original Theatrical Trailer.,TOM KALIN,Daniel Schlachet
Craig Chester
Michael Kirby
Michael Stumm
Ron Vawter,"Kalin's experiment (shot on a shoestring over fourteen days) meets the test of a great film -- it lets us view the familiar in astonishing new ways. Ellen Kuras's stylized black-and-white cinematography offers one stunning image after another. The lovers' bed sweeps into the courtroom, incarnating the public's wildest imaginings. Previous Hollywood forays into the case -- Compulsion and Hitchcock's Rope -- seem timid by comparison. Kalin brings a searching mind and a poet's eye to Swoon. His haunting and visionary film is a stunning debut." PETER TRAVERS - ROLLING STONE
"Kalin's movie is particularly thoughtful, keeping ironic faith with 1920s Chicago society and refusing to dispute the common social edict regarding the killers' "abnormal" impulses, as if their actions were as unquestionable and natural as those of a monster in a horror movie. It's a daring strategy, and the film, finally out on DVD, still bristles with provocation." Michael Atkinson - VILLAGE VOICE,1992 Won Caligari Film Award
Tom Kalin
Teddy Best Feature Film
Tom Kalin,Tom Kalin’s SWOON gives the truest account yet of one of the 20th century’s most notorious crimes: the 1924 thrill-kill murder of a 13 year-old boy in south-side Chicago by "genius” college students and lovers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. It’s the same story that inspired Hitchock’s ROPE and Meyer Levin’s novel, COMPULSION, but SWOON forces its driving homoeroticism into the daylight (not to mention the Jewishness of both killers and victim). Featuring legendary Ron Vowter as the prosecuting state’s attorney, SWOON flexes its brainy elegance to question the "queerness” of the case, and even extends the story to reveal how each of the imprisoned duo met his eventual death. A former member of New York’s ACT UP and the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury, Kalin is bracingly indifferent to the tyranny of "positive images” where same-sex desire is concerned, and SWOON, in its defiance and its lyrical intelligence, stands peerless within the last century’s queerly-inclined cinema.
- Bill Horrigan, Curator, Media Arts, Wexner Centre for the Arts, The Ohio State University
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