NEW QUEER CINEMA
By: Grey Daisies
"The term “New Queer Cinema” was coined by film critic B. Ruby Rich in several publications (including the British film journal Sight & Sound1 and her seminal Village Voice overview of the 1992 Sundance Film Festival) to describe the appearance of certain films at Sundance Film Festivals in the early 1990s that evinced a politicized stance towards queer culture.
These films were unapologetic in their frank look at sexuality and combined stylistic elements drawn from AIDS activist videos, avant-garde cinemas, and even Hollywood films. They eschewed “positive images” and “happy endings” in favor of more complexly queer musings on the nature of gender and sexuality. Critic Karl Soehnlein noted this trend in 1990, when he…
NEW QUEER CINEMA
By: Grey Daisies
"The term “New Queer Cinema” was coined by film critic B. Ruby Rich in several publications (including the British film journal Sight & Sound1 and her seminal Village Voice overview of the 1992 Sundance Film Festival) to describe the appearance of certain films at Sundance Film Festivals in the early 1990s that evinced a politicized stance towards queer culture.
These films were unapologetic in their frank look at sexuality and combined stylistic elements drawn from AIDS activist videos, avant-garde cinemas, and even Hollywood films. They eschewed “positive images” and “happy endings” in favor of more complexly queer musings on the nature of gender and sexuality. Critic Karl Soehnlein noted this trend in 1990, when he wrote that an “emerging flock of filmmakers is using provocative subject matter – transgression, gender-bending, and rude activism – to create challenging visions of sexual identity.”2
The 1990s opened with the arthouse release of such unapologetically queer films as Todd Haynes’ Poison, Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, and Norman Rene’s Longtime Companion, which paved the way for the 1992 phenomenon known as the New Queer Cinema.
While 1985/1986 had seen a mini-boom that was dubbed the “Gay New Wave”3 by Richard Goldstein, few of these films (Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts, Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances, Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, Arthur Bressan’s Buddies, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s Dona Herlinda and Her Son) were exhibited at the major gay film festivals of the time.
In 1991, Todd Haynes’ Poison won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Film; the next year saw the inclusion of Tom Kalin’s Swoon, Gregg Araki’s The Living End, and Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times.
These young directors, along with the producers Christine Vachon (who produced Poison and Swoon) and Andrea Sperling (who produced The Living End and Totally Fucked Up), were the vanguard of what seemed to be a movement, though it was never really an organized movement as such. There was no manifesto, no rules and no particular canon, making it in essence not a movement or a genre but, perhaps more accurately, a trend. Most films came from the independent scene, making them less answerable to corporate or mainstream interests.
Unfortunately, the New Queer Cinema was basically a gay male phenomenon. The real lesbian crossover did not happen until 1994. The Sundance Film Festival was once again the origin of mainstream legitimacy when the Samuel Goldwyn Company acquired worldwide rights for a lesbian feature out of Chicago, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner’s Go Fish.
Cheryl Duyne’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) was the first feature film to be directed by a lesbian of color and the first to specifically address the lives of her African American Sapphic sisters.
Note: Since there are already some lists concerning queer films around (check out the fab Fox and His (Queer) Friends and Queer Cinema: So Pretty, Witty and Gay), I shall limit myself for the most part to the New Queer Cinema canon, its immediate predecessors and successors, as well as its ongoing influence in the work of directors from all parts of the globe. "
web.archive.org/web/20130316030642/http://mubi.com/lists/new-queer-cinema
