Swoon
Tom Kalin’s visually stunning, black and white feature film debut SWOON tells the well-known story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy Jewish college students who kidnapped and brutally murdered a 14-year neighbourhood boy in Chicago in 1924. Convinced of their intellectual superiority, Leopold and Loeb had set out to commit a “perfect crime,” but ended up instead arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in prison. Although this famous case inspired two earlier films, Alfred Hitchcock’s ROPE (1948) and Richard Fleischer’s COMPULSION (1959), it was SWOON that first brought to the screen a complex investigation of the discourses that not only informed the pathological act, but also constructed the murderous couple as pathological. Kalin’s film makes explicit both the homosexuality of its protagonists and the homophobia (and anti-semitism) of then contemporary criminal psychology. This stylish and politically provocative film remains – 20 years later – one of the best examples of the “New Queer Cinema” and of US independent filmmaking in the ’90s.
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details
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Runtime
88 min -
Country
United States -
Year of Presentation
1992 -
Year of Production
1991 -
Director
Tom Kalin -
Cast
Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester, Ron (Crowe Ron) Vawter, Michael Kirby, Michael Stumm, Valda Z. Drabla, Natalie Stanford, Paul Connor, Robert Read, Richard Elovich, Isabela Araujo, Jill 'Spanky' Buchanan, Nashom Benjamin, Nashom Wooden, Trash, Trasharama, Ryan Landry, Chris (Christopher) Hoover, Brent Charleton -
Production Company
Intolerance Productions -
Berlinale Section
Forum -
Berlinale Category
Feature Film -
Teddy Award Winner
Audience Award
pictures from the movie
Biography Tom Kalin
Tom Kalin was born in 1962 in Chicago. He earned a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois and an M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago, and studied in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. He has written for publications such as Art Forum, Aperture, and The Village Voice, and has taught at California Institute of the Arts, Brown University, and Yale University. He is currently Assistant Professor in Columbia University's Graduate Film Division. Kalin has received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, as well as grants and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Paul Robeson Fund, New York State Council for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Swoon (1992) received the Best Cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival and the Open Palm Award (recognizing outstanding first features) from the Independent Feature Project, among other awards. Kalin's work has been screened at the The Getty Research Institute and American Film Institute, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metrograph Cinema, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and at festivals in Hong Kong, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, and Barcelona, among others. He lives in New York.
Filmography Tom Kalin
1993 Nomads | 2003 The Robots of Sodom | 2007 Savage Grace