This article appeared in the July 25, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Please Hold (Alexandra Juhasz, 2025)

Moving-image artist and scholar Alexandra Juhasz has been grappling with the past and present of AIDS on film, tape, and video and in print since she joined ACT UP’s media affinity group in 1987. That year, she began volunteering at the nonprofit Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and made her first video, Living with AIDS: Women and AIDS, co-directed with Jean Carlomusto. Throughout ACT UP’s heyday in the ’80s and ’90s, Juhasz was a prominent and prolific contributor to the burgeoning genre of queer video activism. These videos, disseminated via public-access television and VHS, served as an alternative source of potentially life-saving information for the national queer community. In 1989, Juhasz established the Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE), a group of working-class women from Bronx and Brooklyn who met regularly to discuss, document, and dissect the ways in which the AIDS crisis had impacted their lives. Among them was video activist Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, who was Juhasz’s collaborator and friend for decades before she succumbed to complications arising from several chronic illnesses, including COVID-19, in 2022.

More recently, Juhasz’s video work and scholarship has focused on the stewardship of memories from the AIDS crisis, and caring for the objects, people, and ideas left in its wake. Her collection of nearly 200 VHS tapes concerning AIDS and queer activism, all of which were made by various artists and activists outside of the mainstream film industry between 1980 and 2010, are currently housed in the library at Brooklyn College.

In her searingly personal new experimental documentary Please Hold, Juhasz—serving as camera operator as well as diegetic narrator—continually returns to a perambulatory circuit: the walk from Manhattan’s Delancey Street/Essex Street subway platform to the Parkside Lounge, the storied queer bar on East Houston Street. Throughout this commute, Juhasz’s memories of living on Houston and Attorney Street—right next to the Parkside Lounge—in the late 1980s come back to her, specifically her time with her roommate and best friend James Robert Lamb, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1993. She guides the viewer through these memories in real time, recalling the “roving party of friends and strangers and loved ones” who cohabitated with her and Lamb, their entrance into the AIDS activist community, and the parties they attended at the Parkside. These memories spark discussions that are interspersed with the footage of Juhasz’s recursive stroll, including video conversations and remembrances between Juhasz and fellow AIDS workers Ted Kerr, Ji-Feh Cheng, Marty Fink, and Pato Hebert.

Please Hold is ostensibly named after a flashing message on a screen inside the labyrinthine Delancey-Essex subway station. But the title also encompasses the weight and joys of what Juhasz calls “memory work,” exemplified here by the deathbed videos of Lamb and Szczepanski that Juhasz filmed at their requests, each using the prevailing video technology of its era. Putting nearly 40 years of multimedia formats in conversation with one another, the essay film illuminates the prescience of AIDS video activism and its lessons for our age of long COVID-19 and the Trump administration’s catastrophic defunding of AIDS research and preventative care. Please Hold serves as both a walking tour of AIDS activist history and a communion with the queer lovers, friends, and caretakers—living and ghostly—who reside there.

Following the documentary’s premiere on March 2nd at the Parkside Lounge, presented by Visual AIDS and the historic queer experimental film festival MIX NYC, Juhasz made Please Hold available for free viewing online, with the caveat that the video is meant to be viewed and discussed with other people, in keeping with its themes of communal memory. The video will also screen at Anthology Film Archives on August 7 as part of their recurring Cinema of Gender Transgression series programmed by Joey Carducci and Angelo Madsen. In anticipation, I interviewed Juhasz via video call about her work.

Your work as an archivist and media maker has been very focused on taking care of objects—personal possessions and videotapes—from the AIDS epidemic. This project seems less about objects than about what you term the “human technology of conversation.”

I’ve been an AIDS worker my entire adult life—since I was 23, attending the second-ever ACT UP meeting in New York in 1987—and I see all of that as one body of work. I’m one artist, and one thinker in the community. I puzzle out my concerns about the history and present of AIDS consistently. My conversations around objects—like videotapes, for example—are intended to promote further conversation in communities that want this relationship between the thinking and energy and dynamism and analysis of people in the past to what AIDS means now.

I’d like to ask you a question: where does your interest in AIDS video activism and archiving come from?

I’m not sure I have an articulate answer to that, beyond wanting to preserve my own queer prehistory. But currently, in my day job, I preserve experimental celluloid film from artists who are often in their eighties and not in great health. They’re thinking about their legacies, or how their bodies of work extend from their own bodies. So the twin concerns of caring for a media object and caring for a person are central to what I do and think about.

Thank you; that’s very helpful for me to know. In Please Hold, I am committed to revisiting two media objects that I made on the request of two people whom I loved in the last days of their lives—my friends Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski and Jim, aka James Robert Lamb. So it’s a video that’s very interested in thinking about video as a format of memory and reactivation, but it also holds Zoom conversations, like the one we’re having right now, which contemporarily become media objects when they are recorded and stopped.

Material objects—like Jim’s sweater, and videotape—are still very present in the film, but I am trying to think—analytically as a theorist and practically as a human in a community—how different formats, technologies, and materials hold memory. The sweater, city streets, and discrete media formats like videotape, Zoom, iPhone video, and Super-8mm film are all represented. They all help us with memory work, but they all do that differently.

Do all of these media formats carry the same affect for you? Or do you relate to magnetic tape and digital video in different ways?

One example I can give you is that I shot Jim [on the beach in 1993 before he died, as seen in Juhasz’s Video Remains (2005)] on VHS with a camcorder. It’s a very heavy machine—it’s cumbersome, and it runs out of batteries. In the hour of videotape that I shot with him, you can see that we both get more and more tired.

When Juanita invited me to film her, she was in the process of choosing to die; she wanted me to shoot her on her video camera, but we didn’t have the proper battery cord in the rehabilitation center, so I took out my iPhone. The heaviness of the camcorder [versus] the lightness of the iPhone is something I thought about in relation to what was evoked by each format. I was having to push against the lightness of the iPhone because it was a very heavy interaction. I’m interested in questioning the easy affect that adheres to different formats of media.

I think Zoom already conveys a certain affect, given its prominent use during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Nostalgia adheres to videotape, but it will also adhere to Zoom and iPhone video, because very quickly they will become expendable. That’s how media systems work.

The Super-8 footage of me and Jim in the Lower East Side might convey nostalgia, or seem steeped in it, but I’m interested in interrogating that because it also shows gentrification and the churning nature of the place.

I know I am guilty, as a media archivist, of having these direct associations with different formats, like equating magnetic videotape with intrinsically personal media, just because I’ve seen so many tapes of AIDS video activists documenting themselves—oral histories, confessionals, media made in bedrooms and hospital beds. Please Hold really challenges those associations by using video as a communal tool instead of a strictly personal one, both because of the extent of conversation and collaboration within it and in light of its end goal of sparking group discussion.

I’ve always thought that AIDS media work, as an educational tool, should come from the community. As a feminist media theorist and maker, I have always been extremely interested in challenging the objective power position of the person behind the camera and the less empowered “subjective” position of the subject on the other side.

That was also the mission of the Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise, where you met Juanita.

I have always considered myself an activist media maker, which is not to say I’m disinterested in the selfie or the vlog—I’m the one walking and talking to the camera in Please Hold—but it becomes activist when it is linked to the needs and experiences of others. I think of the projects with Jim and Juanita as activism because they had goals around health. In the case of Jim, that meant showing what it was to be a young person dying of AIDS before there was treatment, and for Juanita, what it is to be disabled by the fundamentally racist health system in America. We all entered into collaboration based on trust and intimacy and a shared set of values. I think DIY media becomes activist media when it becomes collective in production and reception.

I noticed the pointed lack of two words in Please Hold: grief and mourning. I believe the only time you use the word grief is when you’re speaking to the camera right before visiting Juanita’s widower, Henry, who is suffering. Do you consider this a work about grief, or is “memory work” something different?

This is why conversation is exciting. I didn’t know that I didn’t use those words, but now I see that’s true. I think Please Hold is about understanding that communities and conversations can continue after death. But for me the movie is autobiographical—I’m the “I” voice, I’m moving the camera—and the mourning is ancient. I’ve been alive longer without Jim than with. For Henry, that mourning is new; he is very close to that loss. Grief has its own tempo and I don’t want to tell anyone how to feel. I don’t use those words because they are the substratum of the project.

I wanted to ask about your instructions to watch Please Hold in a group setting. I confess, I did not, which is a whole other can of worms about how smaller screens, capitalism, and the way New York apartments are proportioned de-emphasize communal viewing habits.

Well, it’s a suggestion, not an instruction. Our viewing habits now don’t give heavy media the respect that it deserves: scenes of deaths in Palestine, for example. So part of that is pushing back against partial attention.

In the book We Are Having This Conversation Now, you and Ted Kerr have also written about “trigger tapes,” or media meant to be viewed with the intention of community discussion.

Yes, I now understand this as a trigger tape; its job is to produce communal discussion as a form of building. I don’t want to downplay my video, but it’s an activist video. And that means the conversation at the end is probably as important as the piece of media.

Mackenzie Lukenbill is an audiovisual archivist and documentary editor from Rochester, NY. They have contributed writing to The Baffler, BOMB Magazine, and frieze.