Movie Review: Fabulous! The Story Of Queer Cinema

The story of Queer Cinema, I'd feel fairly confident in pondering aloud, is a story not just of a section of society gaining a voice, but of filmmaking itself gaining the confidence and, crucially, the cultural weight, to explore and investigate its own possibilities. It's as much the story of a medium finding itself as it is a story of a group of people finding an identity.

T'is a story that dovetails gloriously with that of Independent American Cinema, since, although we all remember fondly the moment in Stagecoach when John Wayne reached off-camera for to bring John Ford onscreen and give him a right good rimming, for the most part, it was only with the collapse of the studio system and the first wails of the Independent variant that homosexual subject matter got anywhere near the script, let alone the screen.

Hitherto this, and to the abandoning of the nonsense that served as the Hays Code, homosexuality, if it did via some act of providence or other appear in the flickering light of the projector, was cloaked in innuendo and suggestion. There are whispers of it in the odd film noir, for sure (Double Indemnity being one example), or the occasional Garbo epic (Queen Christina, most notably) but whispers are all. A sort of effeminate gesture here, a suspicious slipper there, maybe an asexual touch or kiss of a rare occasion.

With the Cultural Revolution, however, came the Sexual Revolution and somewhere twixt those two gargantuan bastards Queer Cinema blinked and squinted and stumbled forth, thanking Kenneth Anger, amongst others, for laying the groundwork.

Fabulous! - The Story Of Queer Cinema, Lisa Ades and Lesli Klainberg's rather wonderful, if all too short, documentary, just released on DVD via The Independent Film Channel, sets out to explore this history, from the blistered celluloid of St. Anger's Fireworks (an altogether curious affair concerning itself with macho sailors presumably on loan from Eisenstein and featuring a most literal precursor to Morrissey's recent revelatory musings about the "explosive kegs between my legs") to the exploitation flicks of the seventies (lesbians, usually nuns or Nazis or prisoners, get it on for the benefit of the lads in the audience), right through to the success of Brokeback Mountain.

As is routine for these sorts of Cinema History type numbers (the recent documentary adaptations of Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls or Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's 1995 The Celluloid Closet, for example, the latter based on Vito Russo's book of the same name and serving as an excellent companion-piece to Fabulous!), little time is spent debating the artistic worth of any of the films mentioned. Rather, the majority of the commentary afforded the flicks themselves tends to revolve around riffs on a key phrase rises and falls again and again from the sundry mouths all a-flapping.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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