As the 20th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival opens its doors, Stephen Collings takes a look at the rise of New Queer Cinema
Hot on the spurred and leathery heels of Brokeback Mountain’s award season haul, the annual London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival celebrates its 20th birthday this year with a typically eclectic programme. But while “that gay cowboy film” and other Hollywood big guns like Transamerica and all-star festival opener Happy Endings represent one end of the commercial spectrum, what kind of prospects can the other films on offer expect outside of the festival circuit?
Fourteen years on from the initial proclamation by B. Ruby Rich of the rise of New Queer Cinema, a first look at the programme for the 20th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival suggests that, despite the occasional crossover hit, most films fail to find any gold at the end of the celluloid rainbow. Take the highlight of last year’s event, Mysterious Skin, for instance; the return of one of the prominent exponents of New Queer Cinema, director Gregg Araki, was a big festival draw but the film itself, a lurid tale of child abuse and teenage hustlers, went nowhere. Tellingly, although critical responses were mixed, nearly all drew upon the New Queer glossary of adjectives; “brave”, “violent”, “uncompromising” and “mundane” were words that could equally describe Araki’s 1992 indie breakthrough, The Living End. If all this sounded a little familiar, it nevertheless raised an important question: is the festival still a political forum for a marginalised community, or a celebration of queer’s coming out to the mainstream?
Certainly, queer cinema was for a long time the reserve of the avant-garde, from Andy Warhol in the US to Kenneth Anger and Derek Jarman in the UK, but the availability of small-format video in the early 90s opened the door to a brave new world of queer filmdom, not just genres, but audiences, distributors and venues. From the saturated gay iconography of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho to the Jean Genet-inspired Poison by Todd Haynes, New Queer Cinema straddled both the mainstream and the arthouse, and while the movement lacked a defining aesthetic, the films re-evaluated and re-constructed queer representation in cinema. Championed by the LLGFF and similar events, the films assumed a queer audience and were not concerned with presenting a ‘politically correct’ image of homosexuality.
According to author Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet, Hollywood was always “gay”, but a patriarchal sensibility ensured that any queer readings were more leaps of association than the marginal (and often negative) portrayal of homosexuality. They weren’t all flights of fancy, however, and the release of Brokeback Mountain has elicited various comments around queer readings of the Western genre, an idea that this year’s LLGFF is keen to exploit using Ang Lee’s film as the centrepiece of a Western strand also featuring whip-crackaway femme Doris Day in Calamity Jane and Johnny Guitar‘s butchie-in-britches, Joan Crawford.
By the early 90s, queer was out and proud and the hitherto unspoken became the celebrated with films such as Bruce LaBruce’s No Skin Off My Ass and Rose Troche’s Go Fish that unashamedly explored promiscuous homosexuality (either in defiance of, or as an indictment of the associations between homosexuality and AIDS) and the unspoken extremes of human sexuality. As a consequence, the films were radically transgressive, subversive and delightfully depraved, defying any preconceptions of their commercial prospects. For while their content surely limited their crossover potential, a dedicated audience of gay men and women maintained their popularity, empowered by this new wave of queer. The term ‘queer’ itself was useful in uniting all forms of non-straight sexual identity, and the rise of New Queer Cinema appeared to be a unified political strategy, aligning all subgroups of homosexual identity from Latino drag queens in Paris Is Burning to Khush’s South Asian lesbians.
New Queer Cinema was never an exclusively underground movement, however, and major studios were happy to paint themselves pink when they saw the modest successes that these films were enjoying, especially when many were unashamedly low budget. Camp was always the acceptable face of homosexuality, so it was no surprise when Hollywood attempted to re-create the success of the riotous Australian film, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, with To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. Despite the cocks-in-frocks fun of Snipes and Swayze in drag, it failed to replicate the emotional heart of its prototype, but its commercial success further proved that queer was lucrative.
Even if the perception of New Queer Cinema was gay directors making gay films for gay audiences, the move into the mainstream saw resolutely heterosexual directors such as Peter Jackson and Kevin Smith take on tales of lesbian love with Heavenly Creatures and Chasing Amy, respectively. While Chasing Amy perpetuated the straight man’s fantasy that all lesbians secretly crave straight dick (and Ben Affleck’s, of all people), Heavenly Creatures, putting the homo back in homicide, was seen as a sensitive portrayal of genuine lesbian sexuality. Claims that only gay directors could represent a modern homosexual dynamic were finally scuppered by Wong Kar-Wai’s urban fairytale of same-sex intimacy and the dissolution of a relationship in 1997’s nuanced Happy Together.
Despite criticism in the gay press that he was an essentially sexless creation, Tom Hanks’ move from comedy everyman to Academy darling was cemented by his portrayal of a gay man’s dignified decline at the cruel hands of AIDS in Philadelphia. Since then, ‘playing it queer’ has secured Academy wins for Nicole Kidman as sexually ambiguous novelist Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Charlize Theron as lesbian serial killer Aileen Wournos in Monster, and Hilary Swank as a transsexual in Boys Don’t Cry. Buoyed by Academy kudos, each of these films performed well at the UK box office, with Philadelphia taking more than £10 million alone. But while these films were certainly born out of the New Queer movement, the martyrdom of their central characters bore little resemblance to the irreverence and energy that made New Queer Cinema so invitingly radical. As was essentially replayed at last year’s Oscars, Swank’s classical femininity on the red carpet highlighted the transformative skill of her performance in Boys Don’t Cry, raising concerns that the exercise was entirely cosmetic, re-affirming the standard order by centralising the ‘otherness’ of non-straight sexuality.
But what of the New Queer directors? While key filmmakers such as Tom Kalin (Swoon, 1992) and Jennie Livingston (Paris Is Burning, 1990) didn’t produce substantial follow-ups, New Queer darlings Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes have found continued critical and commercial success. Yet whilst Van Sant still flirts with gay iconography, he persistently frustrates those who wish to claim him as a mainstream gay voice, commenting, “I don’t want to propagandise being gay to the straight world.” Similarly concerned with queer as a structure and aesthetic rather than content, Haynes opposes conventional narrative structures, and while both Safe and Velvet Goldmine achieved critical acclaim, it was his Douglas Sirk-saturated melodrama Far From Heaven that ensured his cultural and commercial bankability, taking almost £2 million at the UK box office.
Whether or not restraining from explicit queer politic has ensured commercial success for Haynes and Van Sant, the festival circuit is still faithful to all denominations of contemporary queer. Low-end successes are found in films made specifically for a gay market, where ‘coming out’ narratives (although sometimes sensitively handled) provide the perfect foil for soft-core entertainment. From British films Like It Is and Beautiful Thing to Euro-flicks Presque Rien, Ma Vie and Krampack, independent cinema is equally exploitative of the pink pound, although the modest theatrical returns do not reflect their smaller-format successes. As B. Ruby Rich has recently suggested, the exciting blend of politics and aesthetics that defined the movement (or “moment” as she has since revised) has devolved into a bland niche market, where the increased commercial viability of gay-themed films and gay and lesbian film festivals removed a sense of individuality from queer independent film culture during the remainder of the 90s. Perhaps this is not so surprising. As much as the term homosexuality itself steadfastly denies the shifting and amorphous nature of human sexuality, the films are starting to reflect all that comes between. The divergence in queer cinema ensures that it does not assume a singular populist identity that is both fixed and easily contained.
Neither Pedro Almodóvar nor John Waters, two of world cinema’s premier queer auteurs, have always resisted concessions to the mainstream, and surprisingly, their efforts have existed beyond the New Queer radar. Like Haynes, Almodóvar projects his queer sensibilities through strong females (and faux-females), doubles, opposites and secret identities. Waters’ absence from New Queer discussion can perhaps be accounted for by his high-camp, low-rent sensibilities. Although by his own standards he courted mainstream success in the 90s with Cry Baby, Serial Mom and Pecker, his films are still perversely political, incarnating the homophobe’s nightmare through a strategy of defensive offensiveness.
So where does that leave New Queer Cinema today? Certainly in the UK it’s hard to imagine what political imperative queer film-making can have given the equalisation of the age of consent, abolition of Section 28 and the introduction of civil partnerships. Russell T Davies’ Queer As Folk was the small screen realisation of the promise of New Queer Cinema, encompassing all the variations and deviations of modern homosexual life, while this year’s festival provides a teasing glimpse at Tipping The Velvet adaptee Andrew Davies’ BBC2 drama, The Line of Beauty, which broadcasts later this spring.
In the US, however, the Bush Administration exists on the back of the religious right and polls still count overwhelming opposition to gay marriage. Was the commercial failure of Oliver Stone’s biopic Alexander the result of an audience unprepared for a homo-hero? It may have been inevitable that a Utah cinema banned Brokeback Mountain for reasons of propagandising immorality, but certainly the representations that we see today were inconceivable before New Queer Cinema. Whether this was a cynical manipulation of the pink pound, homosexuals have enjoyed a period of sympathetic (if not entirely accurate) representation on screen, with homosexuality even becoming something of a cultural phenomenon. Typified by the cartoon camp of the Queer Eye For The Straight Guy series, gay sexuality is rendered safe for mainstream consumption and stereotypes are more revised than wholly rejected; dilute to taste, if you will. If all this represents a Pyrrhic victory for New Queer Cinema, it is at least important that queer still has a mainstream voice.
This year’s crop of new films, such as Gypo, the first Dogme95 certified film to be made in the UK, should serve as a reminder of what made New Queer Cinema so exciting, while François Ozon’s Time To Leave (Le Temps Qui Reste) is a more measured, reflective film that questions the empty materialism of an urban gay lifestyle. What Time To Leave, Brokeback Mountain and Neil Jordan’s recent Breakfast On Pluto have shown is that film can eschew queer politics yet still further the cause. 2006 may yet be a landmark year for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender-inclusive films, and while radical queer filmmaking may lose its political potency in the mainstream, as long as the antagonistic, critical impulse still thrives, then all variations can be embraced.
The 20th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival runs from 29 March to 12 April 2006.
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