Pride Lightning Round
50 Years of Queer Cinema
Writing
For Athwart, I wrote about Quo Vadis, Aida?, the Bosnian film nominated for Best International Feature at the Oscars this year. I was especially interested in judging the movie against the goal that director Jasmila Žbanić set for herself of making a film about the Srebrenica massacre that would avoid familiar, shopworn depictions of the Bosnian war. For the most part, I believe she succeeded.
In my research for the piece, I rewatched the segments of Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson that were shot in Bosnia and Herzegovina for an episode of the PBS series Women, War & Peace. One scene in particular that I was hoping could find its way into my piece as a point of comparison (but didn’t) involves an older Bosnian woman at home making bread. Johnson’s director asks the woman a series of personal questions about the war. After the woman has gone on for a while recounting traumatic memories, Johnson interjects from out of frame: ask her about her sense of style! Indeed, she’s one stylish granny, obvious to the eye but easily overlooked in favor of what might seem like more important details of her life.
Watching
Cruising (1980)
Queer American cinematic history between Stonewall and AIDS is mostly a void in my mind, except now there’s this movie, a William Friedkin-directed police thriller where Al Pacino goes undercover in the New York leather bar scene to catch a serial killer of gay men. It’s Knife+Heart, a more stylish and absurd recent movie with shared genes, as made by straight people. I can’t get over the giant book about Simone Weil in the apartment of a young homosexual Pacino bursts in on toward the end of the film. I, too, am a young homosexual with books by Simone Weil on my shelves, so why my surprise that the set decorator had matching good taste? If we as a society have decided that representation doesn’t matter that much anymore, permit me at any rate one more minute to bask in this rare instance of it.
Portrait of Jason (1967)
If I had known that Ingmar Bergman once called Shirley Clarke’s audaciously confrontational interview-doc about hustler (?) / valet (?) / performer (?) / gossip (☑️) Jason Holliday “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life,” I might have paid better attention. Lacking any additional context for that quote, I don’t know if Bergman was wowed so much by the film’s subject or by the fact that Clarke and her partner Carl Lee spend the film instigating Jason from off camera and shuttling in drink refills to keep him spinning yarns. Portrait of Jason struck me for some reason as a good waiting room movie, something to idly fixate on while the dentist is running behind schedule or, as the case may be, while waiting for men to text you back on a Saturday night.
Being 17 (2016)
If a straight person were to get their education about gay people solely from the movies, I suppose I could see how they might walk away with the impression that the city makes people queer. Au contraire! In André Téchiné and Céline Sciamma’s Being 17, homoerotic desire knows no geographic bounds. Set in a town near the Pyrenees, far removed from the seedy influence of Parisian gays, the movie follows two high school-aged boys who for lack of knowing or wanting to know that they’re attracted to each other keep trying to beat each other up instead. Thankfully the screenwriters had the good sense to make the mother of one of the boys a doctor, so no wound goes untended for too long. I’ve never particularly cared if gay characters get a happy ending so long as the movie’s good, but for those for whom it matters, these ones do.
Señorita (2011)
The writer, director, producer, star, and sometimes editor of all her films, Isabel Sandoval is shaping up to be the Orson Welles of our era, or if she picks up composing then I guess she could be its Charlie Chaplin. Señorita, her first feature film, announces its influences proudly (the opening credits play over a sequence that was clearly directed by someone who’s watched In the Mood for Love at least half a dozen times). Sandoval, playing a transgender sex worker who spends most of the movie more caught up in noirish political intrigue around a local election than engaging in anything lurid, depicts herself as no more or less unusual than anyone else onscreen. Though her character hides the nature of her night work to family with fibs about entering beauty pageants, her transness is never treated as a point of fascination for the camera. She’s welcomed by her family and community exactly as she is, even by the Catholic church, where she uneventfully serves as a younger family member’s confirmation sponsor.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)
In the process of furnishing the apartment I moved into earlier this year, I’ve been perusing the house tours section of Apartment Therapy for inspiration and amusement. Without doubt the submissions from gay folks have been the most eye-catching, but none hold a candle to the one-room set of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Fassbinder wrote the script for the film on a 12-hour flight between Berlin and Los Angeles, but what I haven’t figured out is when he got the idea to wallpaper one of the sides of Petra’s bedroom with an enormous reproduction of the painter Nicolas Poussin’s Midas and Bacchus. Imagine this movie having any sort of reputation at all without the presence of those baroque figures looming over the histrionics. Petra, a fashion designer in pursuit of a younger woman, cycles through wigs like they’re SSRIs at the start of psychiatric treatment. Not finding comfort and relief in any of them, she alienates everyone in her life right down to the silent muse-slash-lover who exists to shuffle around the apartment in an all-black getup and bang on a typewriter when the sexual tension gets too thick.
Sauvage [Savage] (2018)
You can smell the number of days Félix Maritaud’s character has gone without a shower in this grim movie about a young gay hustler learning to love himself (it takes the whole film and he doesn’t make much progress). Despite including nearly every kind of gay sexual situation you can imagine (including one or two you really wish you would have never had to), Sauvage is a decidedly unsexy movie, save for two bookending strobe light-lit club scenes (because as we all know from watching Philippe Garrel movies, dancing is much sexier than sex). The director, Camille Vidal-Naquet, is fond of these schematic parallels. The beginning, midpoint, and end of the film all feature decisive doctor’s office scenes meant to earmark Maritaud’s character’s growth, an obvious but not ineffective framing device. I’m less certain what purpose the frequent zooms serve. Vidal-Naquet leans all the way into the zoom controls on his camera so often and so earnestly that you’d think he’s gunning for a chance to direct a Bravo reality series. It’s probably more lucrative than making sexually explicit art films, and definitely more likely to reach its intended audience.
The Watermelon Woman (1996)
The Philadelphia loft where Cheryl Dunye’s lover lives in The Watermelon Woman is a stunning work of lesbian interior design, brimming with loud prints, unhanged art, and decorative half-unpacked moving boxes ($79.99 from Bloomingdales). It could take Petra von Kant’s apartment in a fight—it would still lose, but it could take it. Dunye’s movie is often touted as important because it’s the first film directed by a Black lesbian. I’d add that it’s important because it’s a well-designed inquiry into how marginalized people find and make their histories. Dunye essentially plays herself, a video store clerk and videographer who in her spare time is researching a Black actress from Old Hollywood credited only as the Watermelon Woman. I knew in advance that the Watermelon Woman was an invention, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment of discovering how Dunye manages to keep the illusion going. Getting a hold of Camille Paglia, who could wax poetic on a dish towel if you asked her to, and asking her to record a mock interview segment certainly helped.
Affirmations (1990) and Anthem (1991)
Marlon Riggs, the Black filmmaker, poet, activist, etc., is enjoying some posthumous attention thanks to the Criterion re-release of his films. These two shorts are exuberant, unabashedly Black and unashamedly queer. I’m continually amazed at how full queer history is of artists pairing sexuality and faith together as parts of the self not necessarily in conflict (as we see in Affirmations); gotta talk to whoever has been assembling those syllabi for all those Queer History 101 classes I never had the option of taking .
Gohatto [Taboo] (1999)
The premise of Nagisa Oshima’s final film boils down to all the old queens at the gay bar wanting to fuck the hot new twink in town. At least one of them succeeds! The 19th-century samurai academy setting is not wanting for phallic imagery, though Oshima, who is perhaps best known for his movie where a woman [redacted redacted redacted redacted] goes surprisingly easy on the audience this time. The score by Ryuichi Sakamoto combines an ominous clock-ticking with gongs and strings that seek to summon the dead. It really puts you in the mind of premoderns fearing that sodomy would tear a hole in the fabric of the universe and unleash untold demons upon the land, an idea not entirely ruled out by the movie’s conclusion.
Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)
Thirty years before Oshima’s go at queer drama, Toshio Matsumoto produced a film so flabbergastingly bold and brilliant that I immediately went out and bought the poster commissioned for the film’s 2017 re-release, an honor reserved for only my favorite films or filmmakers. Funeral Parade of Roses queers the Sophoclean Oedipus cycle; it queers film editing; it queers western notions of queerness. Stanley Kubrick apparently took a lot of inspiration from it when making A Clockwork Orange, so you can go right ahead and move him down a notch in your estimation (or at least in the pure originality rankings). Many of the stars of Matsumoto’s film are self-described “gay boys,” transvestites who elude today’s conceptions of both gay male identity and transfeminine identity. Matsumoto inserts a few unexpected interviews with the cast at intervals throughout the film, though it isn’t even clear at first that they’re no longer in character. To hear them speak for themselves is to realize just how much more vast and varied queer experience has been throughout history than what we have access to readily. I’m thankful for what small part of it movies have preserved for us.
Coming Soon
The Cannes Film Festival returns in July, only a few months later than usual. In addition to hosting the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the 74th edition of the festival will feature new films by Sean Baker, Bruno Dumont, Mia Hansen-Løve, Asghar Farhadi, Paul Verhoeven, Jacques Audiard, Kogonada, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Todd Haynes, Andrea Arnold, and Gaspar Noé. Charlotte Gainsbourg will present a film about her mom, Jane Birkin; Hong Sang-soo and Ryuske Hamaguichi, who both premiered new films at the Berlin Film Festival this year, somehow already have new films ready for Cannes, too. I think I’m the only person who ever saw Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, but I am happy to see that its co-director Shlomi Elkabetz will be presenting a film about his sister Ronit (the writer/co-director/star of Gett), who died, too young, of lung cancer in 2016.
Going on vacation in July! The newsletter will be back in August.