SHIFT Blog Never Not Thinking About Film: A Conversation with Matt Wolf

Less than a mile from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City sits the Stonewall Inn, ground zero of the riots that preceded the gay liberation movement and current fight for LGBTQIA rights. The erasure and preservation of that history animate Invisible Monuments, a selection of works organized by documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf, one of three guest curators overseeing the Whitney Biennial’s film program this year. Later this week, he’ll showcase newly commissioned and historic works from Sam Green, Barbara Hammer, and film collectives FIERCE and Paper Tiger Television. The themes that Invisible Monuments address are unlikely to surprise anyone who knows Wolf well. As a teenager growing up in San Jose, California, he was heavily involved in gay activism and figured it was his life work. “I thought that was my path — to do politics and to be involved in gay activism the rest of my life,” Wolf recalled for producer Sophie Finkelstein last month. But his teenage years also coincided with the rise of New Queer Cinema, and movies by Todd Haynes, Derek Jarman, and Tom Kalin steered Wolf towards film school at NYU. While uninspired by courses that emphasized conventional filmmaking, Wolf began developing a network of collaborators with whom he’s still close. Indeed, in his last year at NYU, Wolf took a class from filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, the director behind Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Certain Women (2016), and First Cow, which will  be released this fall. She became an important mentor to Wolf, who describes Reichardt as more than “just a teacher. [She] was someone who lived and breathed film in a way that resonated with me.”