"Female Trouble" Explores the Flipside of Masculinity via Film

A still from Zackary Drucker's Fish

​The monthlong series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Bros Before Hos," explores "masculinity and its discontent" via avenues such as vintage stag movies, the bonding experience between men in Finnish saunas, and the life of strongman Stanley "Stanless Steel" Pleskun. Sunday's short-film program "Female Trouble" navigates the twisting prism of feminine roles.

In Every Woman, lissome New York performance artist Narcissister does a reverse striptease to Chaka Khan music, donning clothes removed from her own orifices. (The always-masked Narcissister made a splash on last season's America's Got Talent with cartwheels that revealed a third head under her petticoats, but she is a longtime favorite within the downtown art world.)

Mario Montez Screen Test

​Mario Montez Screen Test reintroduces us to the long-lost star of numerous Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and Jose Rodriguez-Soltero projects. In 1977, the beloved Puerto Rican drag queen hung up his wig, hopped a bus, and dissolved into the ether. Thirty years later Conrad Ventur began collaborating with Montez, loyally re-creating films shot during Warhol's Factory heyday. Montez has aged beautifully, and Ventur's version of Screen Test has a poignancy and depth neither could have foreseen. Brooklyn-based curator Bradford Nordeen also brings us Steven Arnold's Cannes-winning 1968 short Messages, Messages and an excerpt from Vaginal Davis' ridiculous Barbi Twins.

"Female Trouble" starts at 2 p.m. at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission (at Third St.), S.F. Admission is $8.