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Reviews

"Ron Peck's 'Strip Jack Naked' is an anomaly: an autobiographical film whose subject is visually absent except for an occasional fuzzy snapshot or group photo from a yearbook. Mr. Peck's physical remove from a project that includes many shots of other men, some of them naked, backhandedly underscores the themes of his film, which is a chronological narrative of growing up gay in England between 1962, when he was 14 years old, and 1990.

Until 1967, when homosexuality was decriminalized in England, being gay necessitated being invisible to the rest of society. Mr. Peck's physical absence pointedly suggests that his awakening to gay sexuality, culture and politics be taken as representing a collective experience shared by his generation.

Visually, "Strip Jack Naked" is a shadowy, impressionistic work that blends film clips, memorabilia and photographs (Dirk Bogarde's haunted face in "Victim," a film about homosexuality and blackmail, is one of the most memorable) into a moody chronicle that changes in tone from personal memoir into a generalized history of the gay movement. The film has its polemical moments. For Mr. Peck, Britain's war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982 symbolized a chilling of Britain's social climate, as an ethic of "make love not war" gave way to the reverse.

If "Strip Jack Naked" is a film about self-affirmation, it is also permeated with the sadness of the AIDS epidemic. An early sequence remembers a colleague who appeared in "Nighthawks" and who died in 1989. But even amid the catastrophe of AIDS, Mr. Peck finds solace in the gay movement's visibility and solidarity." - Stephen Holden, The New York Times