Nighthawks. 1978. UK. Directed by Ron Peck. Screenplay by Peck, Paul Hallam. With Ken Robertson, Rachel Nicholas James, Clive Peters. DCP. 113 min.
A milestone in queer cinema, Ron Peck’s 1978 debut feature Nighthawks was billed as the first “real” gay film. Without shame, innuendo, or camp burlesque, it follows the double life of a mild-mannered English schoolteacher who searches for love and sex in London’s underground cruising scene. When the BFI refused to fund the film, donations began trickling in from Elton John and David Hockney, among others, and while Lindsay Anderson, Michael Powell, and Chantal Akerman championed the project, Derek Jarman lent his warehouse studio in Butler’s Wharf for a party scene while also making a cameo appearance at a disco. The critic Melissa Anderson, who introduces Nighthawks on January 23 in celebration of her latest collection, The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024 (2025), calls the film, together with “its stygian companion,” William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), “crucial artifacts of the pre-AIDS era.” Indeed, only a few years later in Thatcherite England, gay men would be demonized once again. On January 23 from 6:15-7pm in the Hess Lounge, Anderson will sign copies of her new book The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012-2024.
2K restoration by the British Film Institute.
Preceded by:
Ifé. 1993. USA. Written and directed by H. Lenn Keller. With Naomeka Gomes, Celine Allouchery, Mark Acuff, Sayeeda Clark, Laurie Collyer. World restoration premiere. DCP courtesy Frameline. 5 min.
A founder of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, the photographer and filmmaker H. Lenn Keller was a self-identified Black butch lesbian who both embodied and chronicled an influential generation of feminist activists living in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s. Her first short, shot on 16mm, imagines a Black lesbian, newly transplanted from Paris and as cool as Jean Seberg in Breathless, finding her way in the “very gay city” of San Francisco.
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive in collaboration with Frameline from 16mm A/B negatives and mag track. Preservation funded by Rachael Reiley and UCLA Film & Television Archive. Laboratory services by UCLA Film & Television Archive, Endpoint Audio Labs. Special thanks to Bay Area Lesbian Archives and Jenni Olson.