Queer cinema

Queer cinema. Queer cinema has been in existence for decades although it lacked a label. Films of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet in France in the 1930s and 1950s (such as Le Sang d'un poète, Jean Cocteau, 1934, and Le Chant d’amour, Jean Genet, 1950) are cited as the forefathers (sic). It is a cinema that is identified with avant-garde or underground movements (for example Kenneth Anger’s and Andy Warhol’s 1960s films in the USA). In the avant-garde world of cinema, lesbian film-makers' presence is quite strong too (for example Ulrike Ottinger, Chantal Akerman, Pratibha Parmar). Although we could go on listing names for this heritage of Queer cinema, another of the greats has to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder (working in the 1970s and early 1980s) - even in his seemingly mainstream (European art) films he was taking genres to task and re-interpreting them through a gay and queer sensibility (see: Fear eats the Soul, 1974; The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979). And it is fitting perhaps that his last film, Querelle (1982) - based on Genet's 1947 novel - is fully about gay and queer desire. And, finally on this list, what could be queerer and braver than the Brazilian film-maker Hector Babenco's 1985 film The Kiss of the Spiderwoman in which the macho arch-revolutionary succumbs to the charms of the flamboyant queen in his prison cell?

Queer cinema itself was introduced as a concept in 1991 at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, to refer to a spate of films (beginning in the late 1980s) that re-examined and reviewed histories of the image of gays. These films proposed renegotiated subjectivities, men looking at men, gazes exchanged, and so on. They also took over genres previously considered mainstream, subverting them by bringing the question of pleasure on to the screen and the celebration of excess. In certain cases these films reinscribed the homosexual text where previously it had been elided. See, for example, Derek Jarman’s historical film Edward II, (1991), or Tom Kalin’s murder/crime thriller Swoon (1992) (the latter is a ‘remake or retake’, setting the record straight (!) of two earlier versions of the true story of a murder committed by two young men of a 14-year-old boy in Chicago in 1924. The first version was the Alfred Hitchcock film, Rope (1948), and the second a Richard Fleischer film, Compulsion (1959). Both films completely elide the homosexual dimension to the two killers’ relationship.

Always a cinema of the margins, only now in the 1990s, in the light of the tragedy of AIDS, has queer cinema become a more visible cinema. Indeed, the New Queer Cinema, as this cinema is also labelled, has presently become a marketable commodity if not an identifiable movement. One of the leaders of the Amercian queer cinema is Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, 1991; Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1993). New Queer Cinema was a term coined in a 1992 Village Voice article by B. Ruby Rich to describe the renaissance in gay and lesbian film-making represented by the Americans Todd Haynes, Jennie Livingstone, Gus Van Sant, Gregg Araki, Laurie Lynd, Tom Kalin and the British film-makers Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien. Queer cinema is not a single aesthetic but a collection of different aesthetics – what Rich delightfully refers to as ‘Homo-Pomo’. It is a cinema that takes pride in difference. Queer cinema is above all a male homosexual cinema and focuses on the construction of male desire. Some lesbian film-makers have made films that come under this label and it is instructive that they have made films that address not just their sexuality (as in Go Fish!, Rose Troche, 1994) but that of their male counterparts (Paris is Burning, Jennie Livingstone, 1991).

Queer as a politics has not resolved lesbian invisibility. There exists still (as within the heterosexual world of the film industry) an inequality of funding for lesbian film-makers as opposed to gay film-makers. Gay is perhaps more cool than lesbian at present, and one does wonder - cynically perhaps - if Philadelphia (Demme, 1993) would ever have been financed by Hollywood if the New Queer Cinema had not come along at the beginning of the 1990s and enjoyed the success it did with mainstream as well as gay audiences. Having said that , there are some lesbian feature films, although for the most part, they pre-date New Queer Cinema - an exception being Patricia Rozema's beguiling When Night is Falling (1995). Of the 1980s' films we can count Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden, 1983, Desert Hearts, Donna Deitch, 1985, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Patricia Rozema, 1987. Due to lack of financing, most lesbian film-makers have opted for video to develop their counter-cinema in an unfettered way much as other marginal cinemas before them have done - such as women's cinema, and cinema nôvo as it developed into garbage cinema (see Sadie Benning, Jollies, 1990, Pratibha Parmar, Khush, 1991, Shu Lea Cheang, Fresh Kill, 1994).

It is quite probable that Queer cinema as a term came about by identification with trends in critical theory begun in the mid-1980s, namely, Queer theory. Queer theory can be seen as a desire to challenge and push further debates on gender and sexuality put in place by feminist theory (amongst others) and also a critical response to the numerous discourses surrounding AIDS and homosexuality. Queer theory is, arguably one of the first truly postmodern theories to be born in the age of postmodernism. In its practice it is extremely broad. It is a concept that embraces all 'non-straight' approaches to living practice - including, within our context, film and popular culture. As a politics, it seeks to confuse binary essentialisms around gender and sexual identity, expose their limitations and suggest that things are far more blurred (for example, think of the spectator pleasure derived from watching Robbie Williams wearing a dress and singing one of his many hit songs - as he did in one of his video promos). It is more than a subversion of straightness, it is also more than an exposing of the fact of hegemonic homosociality and the hypocrisy of denial. It is in fact far more celebrative than that. In a sense it challenges everyone's assumptions about gender and sexuality. It shows how you can queer-read ('queried') virtually everything as just one other, equal not subordinate, way of reading the texts. Queer readings go 'against the groin' (Verhoeven, 1997, 25). Queer theory examines queer at work, that is, the making or writing about gayness by authors and film-makers. Doing queer work can be done by all sexualities. Thus, straights, bisexuals, transexuals, transgenders, gays and lesbians who are writing or making texts about gayness are performing, enacting Queer[ly]. Queer theory can open up texts and lead us to read texts that seem straight, differently - or view them from a new and different angle. Thus a queer reading can reveal that you are watching (reading) something far more complex than you originally thought you were (think of buddy films for example). The actor or film-maker does not have to be queer, but the text or performance may offer itself up for a queer reading (Joan Crawford as the cross-dressing gun-toting but butchly feminine Vienna in Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray, 1954).

New Queer Cinema is unconcerned with positive images of queerness, gayness or lesbianism, but is very clearly assertive about its politics - starting with the expression of sexuality as multiplicity and not as fixed or essentialized. Thus stereotypes of queerness get reappropriated and played with. True camp (not the appropriated camp of straight cinema) priviliges form over content but with a purpose. Queer camp is about trashing stereotypes with flash and flounce anddress in excess. It is about ridiculing consumer passitivity through delibrate vulgarity. It is about (as in the original French sense of the word camper: to play one's role) assuming fully and properly one's performative role. In terms of stereotypes, camp itself and narcissism get some royal send-ups in The Adventure of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Stephan Elliott (1994) and in Go Fish! Queer Cinema challenges the view that homosexuality and lesbianism must have value ascribed to it (as good or bad) - it just is. There are political implications about homosexuality and lesbianism, but so too are there about race - as indeed black gay and lesbian film-makers make clear (Looking for Langston, Isaac Julien, 1988). In Queer cinema and theory, the gaze as well as questions of visual pleasure come under scrutiny. Since the relays of looking are different within the screen, so too must they be outside the xcreen and in the spectator's eyes. More pleasures can be experienced by the spectator as he or she adopts different positionalities within the narrative. In some ways this is not so new if we think of pornography and the pleasure in viewing for the spectator (male of female) of the typical tried aset-up which includes a lesbian scene or two to get things warmed/hotted up. But it may be that Queer theory makes us feel more comfortable speaking about it. Interestingly pornography as a critical debate within film studies has only truly emerged in the 1990s - perhaps coming on the heels of the effects of Queer theory.

Queer Cinema has crossed over into mainstream and not all of it is made by gay or lesbian film-makers. And this in a way is the point. It is not that it has been co-opted, although some critics' responses to Wachowski's lesbian neo-noir Bound (1996) warn us how difficult it is to be clear on this. However, I would argue that this crossover is more a case of queerness being a recognized state-of-being amongst others. In 1998-9 alone, there were six very ostensibly queer films (at the very least), two of which were made by women and all of which were box-office successes: Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999), Boys Don't Cry (Pierce, 1999), Gods and Monsters (Condon, 1999), High Art (Cholodenko, 1998), Love is the Devil (Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon) (Maybury, 1998), The Talented Mr Ripley (Minghella, 1999). None of these films gloss over on what it means to have a queer identity, nor indeed the difficulties this can represent in terms of social acceptability. Only the first film has a light outcome with a lesbian relationship asserting itself after a series of fun-filled adventures entering into the mind and eye's view of John Malkovich. Gods and Monsters' study of the career of the gay film-maker James Whale (he directed the 1930s Frankenstein movies) gives us a sense of what it was like to be queer in Hollywood at a time when hetero-normativity was very big. The other four films, it has to be said, however, are quite dark, either because death is the outcome of the intolerance of others (Boys Don't Cry; The Talented Mr Ripley), or because they unflinchingly show the harder side of lesbian and gay society (High Art; Love is the Devil).

Queer Cinema advocates multiplicity: of voices and of sexualities. Multiplicity in a generic sense also: vampire films and comedy. thrillers and musicals. Unstick the queer from the moribund representation to which much of mainstream cinema has confined 'it'. Queers are neither the depressed anomics nor the serial killers some film-makers would have us believe (see Winterbottom's offensive Butterfly Kiss, 1994). To rewrite Foucault: 'Queer is everywhere'. The signs of queer globalization are there to see. Almodovar's work is an obvious first citation in terms of Europe. But Asian queer is also on the scene (Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, 1993, Zhang Yuan's East Palace/West Palace, 1996, Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together, 1997). It is no longer a case of having to find it, but 'to connect'.

For further reading see Bad Object-Choices, 1991; Bristow, 1997; Burston and Richardson, 1995; Creekmur and Dory, 1995; Dorenkamp and Henke, 1995; Dyer, 1977b, 1990; Fuss, 1992; Gever et al., 1993; Gill, 1995; Grossman (2000); Hanson (1999); Horne and Lewis, 1996; Jackson and Tapp, 1997; Kuzniar (2000). Mell-Metereau, 1993; Russo, 1981 and 1987; Weiss, 1990; Whisman, 1995; For a documentary film of Queer, see The Celluloid Closet, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1995.

from Susan Hayward (2006). Key concepts in Cinema Studies (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.