The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
Describing herself as a 'street queen,' Johnson was a legendary fixture in New York City’s gay ghetto and a tireless voice for LGBT pride since the days of Stonewall, who along with fellow trans icon Sylvia Rivera, founded Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), a trans activist group based in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village. Her death in 1992 was declared a suicide by the NYPD, but friends never accepted that version of events. Structured as a whodunit, with activist Victoria Cruz cast as detective and audience surrogate, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson celebrates the lasting political legacy of Johnson, while seeking to finally solve the mystery of her unexplained death.
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- Cast：
- Marsha P. Johnson , Victoria Cruz , Sylvia Rivera , Taylor Mead , Pat Bumgardner , Vito Russo
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Reviews
A Masterpiece!
As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
This film is about the dismissive attitude of the police and prosecutors to the large number of murders of trans individuals. I learned a lot about the early transgender scene in New York from the 1960s forward, how their lives developed or ended in tragedies of drug overdoses, suicides and murders. At times I had difficulty understanding why we were tracing a particular investigative avenue, but in the end the various threads came together. The death took place 25 years ago with little forensic evidence and to resolve the mystery it now requires a candid death bed confession.I appreciate how the internal investigator carried herself through the film by not calling attention to her person and to her personal struggles.Definitely a must see for those interested in the GBLTYQ's history in New Yok.
10/13/17. A somewhat scattered documentary about the life and death of a transgender person named Marsha P. Johnson in NYC. Not sure if this really gets down to the allegations that s/he was murdered or the motives as to why anyone who do her in. It's a murder mystery that remains a mystery.
Spoiler I was feeling this doc until about halfway through. The story is enough, but the exploitative, awkward closeups of Sylvia are too much. Maybe help?? It's not foreshadowing, foreshadowing isn't so blatant. It's exploitative. It's a heavy subject I couldn't invest in further after that scene. 5 stars for effort.
A triangular shaped metal sign on a pole near where Marsha Johnson's body was found is titled Queer Spaces and explains who she was and how she died. This sign says a lot about this film--spaces. So many spaces exist where we learn nothing about Marsha's life or spaces where files about her case have gone missing, spaces where we get a glimpse of a person's life in her 20's and then only a glimpse again when she is in much older (true of Sylvia, Victoria, and many others). The compelling aspect of this documentary is the character study of the unflappable Victoria in her investigation and Sylvia Riviera, who hits the bottom and comes back to be a great activist. Both are more interesting than Marsha herself--at least what we learn of Marsha in this film. The scenes where Victoria shows us photos of herself when she was young on stage and Sylvia getting a job at a church are wonderful. One big space is the lack of resources put into investigating the violence against trans-gendered people--Victoria's boss notes this toward the end. The spaces are the questions always left unanswered when someone dies without reason.Basically, the movie's title is misleading. It's not really about Marsha, though she is a part of the larger story. It's about being trans-gendered in New York and how this has changed and not changed in the last 50 years.
