“Be made in his image and likeness": the US AIDS movies (1980s)

Abstract

This is a brief survey and categorization of films released by the American cinema in the initial period of the AIDS pandemic in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. We carried out an exploratory research which resulted in the mapping and rescue of works whose distribution and commercial potential were neglected by the interest of the distributors; many of these works were not even released in DVD in Brazil.  The interest in the AIDS pandemic and the eventual divulgation of these works in movie theaters and VHS and DVD rental stores at the time was a phenomenon restricted to the period studied, despite the pandemic having continued until the present day. The current interest in American cinema seems to be to rescue these early years in a contemporary critical review. As our dissertative analysis focuses on the period established between the decades already mentioned, we immediately noticed a relevant sequence of changes in the sociological profile of the protagonists of the film plots. In this article we will briefly present some central aspects of our perception in two emblematic cinematographic works of the period.