Ronald Chase: In Pursuit of Beauty

This month on AQUA Film Club: four experimental shorts by Ronald Chase.

by Zegan Doyle

“Every now and then I mention the word beauty. It has gone out of our vocabulary.”

U.S. artist and filmmaker Ronald Chase poses a simple question: What is beautiful? His experimental short films move between dream, memory, ritual, and desire. For Chase, beauty is a radical act of attention.

Emerging from the first wave of queer independent cinema, Chase forged a personal filmmaking practice that drew on his backgrounds in dance, photography, and design. He embraced DIY filmmaking by hiring skeleton crews, casting nonprofessional actors, and shooting on location without permits. Chase also took on many roles in his films including writer, director, cinematographer, producer, and editor.

Across selected films of his early career, Chase’s films embody the queer experience: fragmenting time, dissolving narrative certainty, and transforming the human body into a site of sensual and spiritual revelation. This search reaches its fullest expression in Cathedral (1971) which answers the question of what is most beautiful of all: the queer body.

Ronald Chase, ‘Fragments’, 10 min, 16mm shown as video, black and white, sound, 1964-69.)

Chase’s debut features key techniques that shape his later work: cross-cutting, asynchronous sound, and dreamy realism. The film follows a woman (Chanan Vafi) who remembers the love affairs with an artist (Ronald Chase) and a student fisherman (Chris Eggert) that led her husband (John Van Gonsic) to suicide.

Ronald Chase, ‘The Covenant’, 10 min, 16mm shown as video, black and white, sound, 1965.

Movement as devotion. Chase collaborated with Elizabeth Harris on the choreography in this dance film. Pauline Oliveros, an experimental composer, electronic music pioneer, and lesbian icon, delivers the live piano score. Shot in black and white, the film features a dancer (Elizabeth Harris) performing a ritual with a plain plank of wood.

Ronald Chase, ‘Clown’, 10 min, 16mm shown as video, color, sound, 1969.

'Clown' screened at the first ever Frameline Gay Film Festival (then dubbed The Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films). Chase uses fragmented imagery, balancing theatricality with intimacy. A woman (Elizabeth Harris) remembers the moments with her lover (Curtis Martin) and believes she’s made herself ridiculous. She has become a clown.

Ronald Chase, 'Cathedral', 10 min, 16mm shown as video, color, sound, 1971.

The queer body becomes architecture, monument, and sanctuary. Thought to be lost for almost fifty years, the film was re-discovered and restored in HD in 2019. Here, Chase imagines queer desire as a sacred act. The closing sequences were shot in Sainte-Chapelle, Paris.