Novo Dextro: Purity & Danger (2024 Preservation Print)

Novo Dextro: Purity and Danger is a Super-8 documentary focusing on an “anti-queer, pro-life” rally by the American Nazi Party during Chicago’s 1982 Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. Bill Stamets tracks the movements of the far-Right contingent of about 25 as they travel to Lincoln Park, where they are met by roughly 2000 protesters. Stamets interviews several young neo-Nazis as well as a handful of anti-Nazi protesters and confused passersby, juxtaposing the day’s events with a collage of images of pollution, television screens, and animals going about their day in the park.; Novo Dextro is among Stamets’ most widely-exhibited films; the Super-8 original showed locally at the 1982 Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and later traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and Los Angeles Filmforum. Art critic Lucy R. Lippard wrote, “Novo Dextro is disarmingly straightforward. It captures the repellent undercurrents of ‘fascinating facism’ with grim tenacity, set off by unexpected sight gags, intercuts of Psycho, the harmless recreation of those in Lincoln Park not indulging in political theater, and menacing shots of jets over a churning lake.” The Los Angeles Times called it “a raw, vital record” when it showed at Filmforum in 1992. Film scholar Chuck Kleinhans wrote of the film, “Thus while [Novo Dextro] falls outside the typical boundaries of the social-political documentary, it illuminates something else which is not dealt with very well, if at all, in other modes. It shows the emotional bonding of declaring that one is part of a rule-bound group. It depicts the need to demonstrate belief in a public theatrical event. It represents the special state of community or threshold experience gained in collective public behavior.”