Find­ing a def­i­n­i­tion for queer cinema

We can­not give a def­i­n­i­tion of Queer Cin­e­ma locked inside a sin­gle for­mat or lan­guage – it cuts across fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary, ani­ma­tion and exper­i­men­tal film. Were we to con­sid­er fram­ing it as an iso­lat­ed genre, with its own for­mal and nar­ra­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics, we would also large­ly fail – Queer Cin­e­ma spans melo­dra­ma, com­e­dy, neo-noir, and even west­erns. And what about nar­ra­tive? If that were so, we would suc­cumb to the canon­i­cal and overused expla­na­tion that Queer Cin­e­ma is any film whose main sto­ry­line rep­re­sents LGBT characters.

More: these char­ac­ters are sup­posed to be rep­re­sent­ed in a ​“pos­i­tive” man­ner. This def­i­n­i­tion of ​“Queer Cin­e­ma” tied to nar­ra­tive might have been use­ful in the process of dis­en­gag­ing from a long his­to­ry of dis­tort­ed images of queer char­ac­ters in film his­to­ry, and in the affir­ma­tion of a com­mu­ni­ty. Nowa­days it sounds extreme­ly nar­row in the legit­imi­sa­tion of Queer Cin­e­ma as a genre.

The 1980s was a high­ly politi­cised decade, in which a clear attempt was made to project a ​“pos­i­tive” image of LGBT indi­vid­u­als to main­stream audi­ences, while at the same time look­ing for sto­ries and char­ac­ters for homo­sex­u­al audi­ences to iden­ti­fy with. Most of these films were set against an urban, white and afflu­ent back­ground – a clear ploy to reach a more main­stream audi­ence. In terms of their rep­re­sen­ta­tion, char­ac­ters were large­ly devoid of sex­u­al desire, and aspired to a het­ero­nor­ma­tive fam­i­ly life. How­ev­er, the most rel­e­vant aspect – against which reac­tion was swift – was the con­struc­tion of the gay char­ac­ter as ​“vic­tim”. Not only of the AIDS epi­demics, but also of their sur­round­ing social and polit­i­cal sys­tem, there was a return to the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of gay char­ac­ters imposed by the Hays code. These films were defined as ​“LGBT Cinema”.

While this ​“vic­tim­i­sa­tion” mod­el devel­oped in the ​’80s, a num­ber of film­mak­ers were already seek­ing alter­na­tive mod­els. In 1985, Gus Van Sant’s first fea­ture Mala Noche point­ed towards what was to come. Queer Cin­e­ma would only find its new shape in 1991, how­ev­er, with the appear­ance of Van Sant’s My Own Pri­vate Ida­ho and Todd Haynes’ Poi­son. The ​’90s saw the emer­gence of new film aes­thet­ics and nar­ra­tive styles, all of which sug­gest new nego­ti­a­tions of sub­jec­tiv­i­ties con­nect­ed to sex­u­al and gen­der iden­ti­ties, labelled as ​“New Queer Cin­e­ma” (NQC).

The sub­ver­sive log­ic of the NQC mak­ers how­ev­er did not sim­ply break with the ​“vic­tim­i­sa­tion” mod­el of the LGBT Cin­e­ma of the ​’80s. On the one hand, NQC once again placed the sex­u­al charge and desire of its char­ac­ters and their bod­ies on screen, also hark­ing back to the aes­thet­ics of exper­i­men­tal cin­e­ma and gay pornog­ra­phy of the ​’60s and ​’70s. On the oth­er – and this is espe­cial­ly sym­bol­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant – the mak­ers of NQC revived the mod­els of gay and les­bian rep­re­sen­ta­tion under the Hays code. That is, these char­ac­ters and these bod­ies, who desire and are the objects of desire, are not nec­es­sar­i­ly nice guys, they don’t just do good, they do not seek recog­ni­tion and inte­gra­tion in main­stream soci­ety, and are not par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in repeat­ing het­ero­nor­ma­tive mod­els. Queer char­ac­ters are no more, no less than any oth­er char­ac­ter. Queer Cin­e­ma is an expres­sion of freedom.

Sub­vert­ing and queer­ing a sem­i­nal quote by Susan Son­tag (who hap­pened to be the first essay­ist to define ​“camp”, back in 1964): ​“queer” is the oppo­site of everything.

João Fer­reira is the Artis­tic Direc­tor of Queer Lis­boa Film Fes­ti­val.