TV Reviews : How Fleet Street Treats Problems of Gay People

Even though “Bright Eyes,” a British Channel 4 production made in 1984, is a slightly dated look at the gay dimensions of the AIDS epidemic, it is refreshing on its own terms (tonight on Channel 28, 11:30 p.m.). Surreal shifts between dramatic stagings and interviews, and odd cinematic blendings of past and present produce a displacing effect--as if writer Stuart Marshall and director Tony Harrild had to resort to new techniques to explore this new disease.

They don’t always work; the dramatic bits in particular are very stiff. But the film’s ambitions to connect ill-intended 19th-Century homophobic medical techniques and Nazi terror with the British media’s gay bashing and fierce police tactics are more than justified. Indeed, the sweeps of thought in “Bright Eyes” recall nothing less than Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s grand and personal film epics on German history.

The jumping-off point is Fleet Street’s tabloid sensationalism about the disease and how, through placement on a page, the press can twist the meaning of a simple photo. The Nazi prison camps for gay men lead, in a disturbing course of logic, to the burning by British police of confiscated books from a gay and lesbian bookstore.

A conventional documentary might have reported the same facts, but in a matter-of-fact style. Here, when the concentration camps are discussed, it’s by a man riding in a car traveling down the German Autobahn . Only at the end of the scene do we realize the deeper purpose of the location: The granite bridges over the Autobahn are made from the stones cut by the Nazis’ gay prisoners. This is topical reportage with a sense of resonant, historical depth.