Summary:

James Norton travels from Boston to Paris at his domineering mother's urging to bring home his fragile sister, Ellie, and their journalist brother, Rafael. He discovers Rafael devastated by the death of his Jewish lover, Olympe. Suicide, accident, or murder? Ellie is confined to a wheelchair owing to an unexplained paralysis. James is drawn into finding solutions to both problems and his investigations lead him to seedy brothels, the bureau of a hypnotist, the morgue of aspiring neurologists, and the wards of la Salpetrière, the famous neuropsychiatric hospital for women. The autopsy reveals that Olympe had been pregnant and the questions about her death multiply. The exoneration and return to France of Dreyfus plays as a backdrop.

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Meridian is set in the American South during the 1960s and early '70s. The heroine, Meridian, is a black woman from a southern town. She marries, has a child, gets a divorce, sends her child away, and ends up working in a voters' registration campaign, encouraging African-Americans to register. Meridian is different from her co-workers in that she interacts with people as individuals, rather than by stereotyping them. For example, while others lecture black families about the importance of voting, Meridian sits and talks with them, trying to address their basic needs of food, heat, and affection.

As years pass, her co-workers quit and move into comfortable houses. She moves deeper south, living in whatever housing the community can afford to give in exchange for her constant work on their behalf. Frequently, after staging a rally or other event, Meridian develops partial paralysis. She grows more and more ill. A halo-like light surrounds her head as she thinks of the history of her people and of her role in that history. She ultimately heals herself and moves to the next small town.

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Set in the 1950s Eisenhower era, this film creates an enlarged snapshot of a model suburban household in Connecticut as well as a companion negative of two suppressed social issues lurking beneath the painfully smooth surface. In his effort to portray dominant values, as well as the melodramatic look and feel of the period, Director Hayes appropriates visual effects and music associated with fifties films by Douglas Sirk such as "All That Heaven Allows" with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Colors are too vivid; music heavily underlines emotional elements; and stylistically designed sets reflect superficial ideals. Too perfect.

Moving from the margins and into the center two disruptive shadows gradually emerge, one dealing with race, the other with homosexuality. In the years preceding racial protests and riots and in a time when few could imagine public conversation about sexual orientations, use of condoms, or AIDS, the story reveals unspeakable abuses, intolerances, and injustices that have subsequently been addressed but not resolved.

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George, a strong introverted African-American man and Guilio, a delicate and flighty Italian man, have been lovers for many decades. Guilio's deteriorating heart condition strains their relationship. Guilio is haunted by childhood death fantasies and George becomes frustrated trying to help him to deal with his illness and his fears. In the end, however, George is comforted by Guilio, who has sensed his pain and grief over being the surviving partner.

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This AIDS play removes "the fourth wall" of a waiting room at an HIV clinic. Using numerous scenes the audience is able to sense how over a period of time a group of strangers thrown together by circumstance "travel the way to friendship, and, finally to family." (from author's note) Juxtaposed through the characters in this play are boundary issues dealing with differences and similarities among gay/straight, rich/poor, black/white, sick/healthy responses to HIV/AIDS.

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This documentary, narrated alternately by the daughter-filmmaker and mother whose stories it tells, focuses on how two women move apart and together while experiencing, respectively, adolescence and mid-life. The mother has cancer, a mastectomy, and then rheumatoid arthritis, and these experiences intertwine thematically and structurally with the narrative of the mother-daughter relationship.

Another provocative juxtaposition cross-cuts scenes from the daughter's modeling career (and the social and erotic body that context constructs for her) with scenes of the mother's illness, stigmatization, and erotic daydreams. Both women come to a new awareness of the social meaning of mastectomy within heterosexual and same-sex contexts by the documentary's end; they also come to a place of recognition of the mother's personal and social value and the nature of their relationship.

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This is the story of Shed, a boy growing up in Idaho at the turn of the century. Shed, who believes he has a Native-American mother, is berdache, the Native-American third sex. Though physically male, he has feminine attributes and is bisexual. For the first half of the novel, Shed is trying to figure out who he is. He lives in a whore house run by Ida Richilieu, a bossy but deeply caring woman who acts as his mother. His own mother disappeared, hunting down a man who raped Shed. Shed later finds her body in the mountains.

One day he leaves Ida's place to visit his mother's people. On the way, he meets Dellwood Barker, a white man, who talks to the moon. Shed discovers a photograph of his mother in Dellwood's things and assumes that Dellwood is his father. Nevertheless, they fall in love and begin a sexual relationship. Dellwood believes in Moves Moves, the substance in sperm that gives life. The two separate so that Shed can go to the Indian reservation. He gets shot while there, but an old Indian man saves his life by breathing his soul into him.

Shed returns to Ida's where Ida, Shed, Dellwood (who stumbles back into Shed's life), and a whore named Alma Hatch, form a new family. Together they fight the racism and bigotry of the Mormons who take over the town. Ida and Alma get lost in a snow storm. Alma dies and Shed and Dellwood have to amputate Ida's legs which are badly frostbitten. They help her to heal by giving her the energy of their Moves Moves. By the end of the novel, Shed is content with his identity.

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The narrator is an aging, male gynecologist who works in a small North Carolina town. The National Health Service sends a young doctor, Rachel, to work in the clinic. From Boston, she is unused to the town's racial politics. She learns slowly to understand the motivations and concerns of her patients. As she campaigns for condom distribution, she ends up insulting the white men who run the town by calling them racists.

The narrator protests that they have power in the town only because no blacks ever run for office and that their policies are meant to distribute wealth evenly. He encourages Rachel to be more gentle and womanly. She will get her way more easily if she smiles. But Rachel eventually turns her back on the narrator, too, when in order to get a violent black man out of the clinic's lobby he calls the man "boy" and threatens to call the police. Rachel moves in with a black man. The town has revenge when a hit and run driver kills her lover and Rachel is hounded out of town.

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We look into what appears to be a woman's bedroom with two human figures. The wallpaper design of pastel colored flowers and a delicate lampshade similarly decorated give the room a feminine appearance. A single-width bed covered in a white bedspread is set against the far corner of the right-hand wall, projecting almost at right angles to the viewer. The head of the bed abuts this wall, a pillow propped up against the bedstead.

At the foot of the bed, toward the right foreground of the painting, a coat is thrown over the metal bedpost frame. In the right foreground is a closed door against which leans a bearded man, his trouser legs spread apart, hands in his trouser pockets; he wears a dark jacket and a collared shirt. His shadow looms behind him, large against the door. The shadow is generated by the single small lamp set upon a small round table near the center of the room.

Also on the table is an open suitcase-like case, possibly a sewing box (p. 674 of reference below); a light colored cloth or piece of clothing hangs partially out of it. Small implements are strewn on the table -- a scissors is among them. On the floor next to the table lies another piece of cloth or clothing (said to be a corset, p. 674).

Turned bent away from the man, partially kneeling on the floor at the other side of the room, is the other human figure in the painting -- a young woman whose left shoulder and upper back are bare, the short sleeve of her white dress (nightgown?) hanging off her shoulder. She clutches to her body a blanket or drape. In contrast to the man, who stands in semidarkness, the woman's back is bathed in the light of the nearby lamp. The expression on the woman's face is difficult to discern.

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This film tells the story of Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson), the scientist who famously changed his focus in mid-career from the study of gall wasps to the study of human sexuality and through his publications on male and female sexuality (1948, 1953) revolutionized the way we think and talk about sex. Kinsey entered adult life with the classic Boy Scout's view of sex that it was best not to think about it. (He collected a million gall wasps instead.) But under the influence of one of his students, Clara McMillen (Laura Linney), who later became his wife, and listening to the questions some students were asking about sex, he decided to teach a course at Indiana University on human sexuality. "Sexual morality needs to be reformed," he proclaims, and "science will show the way."

He begins doing statistical research on individual sexual behavior, training his interviewers to be open and neutral as they encounter a very wide variety of behaviors. He also encourages them to experiment sexually among themselves, and later even to participate in sexual encounters filmed for research purposes. Naturally, not everyone accepts this readily, and there are problems between Alfred and Clara, among the research assistants, and eventually between the whole project and Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Rockefeller withdraws its support, complaining that Kinsey is preaching in public, and Clara tearfully complains that some social restraints are needed to keep people from hurting each other. The assistants struggle with the ties between sex, which is part of the experiment, and love, which is not. Kinsey continues striving, but with much reduced means. The film ends with video clips of interview subjects speaking strongly about the benefits that Kinsey's revolution has brought to them, one woman concluding: "You saved my life, sir!"

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