Ron Peck’s Strip Jack Naked (UK, 1991): Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gay Man

• Main Author: Nicole Cloarec
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines 2014-02-01
• Series: Revue LISA
• Subjects: counter history; documentary; gay cultural identity; gay rights movements; filmic autobiography; making-of
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/5662

Shot some thirteen years after Nighthawks, Strip Jack Naked could be taken for a mere making-of documentary relating the difficulties that Ron Peck encountered in making his first feature film in 1978. Being one of the first British films to openly deal with the gay community, Nighthawks, which itself applies a documentary veneer to its subject, proved to be highly controversial. Strip Jack Naked, however, encompasses the experimental and the autobiographical. Through the editing of diverse archive materials, photographs, newsreel and film excerpts, the film evokes what it meant for a young man to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s while discovering his homosexual orientation. Thus, through the personal case of the film-maker, Strip Jack Naked develops into a personal history of gay culture in Great Britain. In Strip Jack Naked, Ron Peck adopts a double reflexive approach: as the subject of his own narrative as well as through the use of a voice-over that addresses the viewer with both directness and intimacy, the film-maker builds up a personal counter-history of Great Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s; as a film-maker, he raises the question of the representation of minorities in society and most specifically of the role an artist plays in this representation.