From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
New Queer Cinema is the seemingly simultaneous
appearance on the independent film circuit of movies dealing openly and even
aggressively with queer culture,
politics, and identity that began in the early 1990s.
In 1992, Sight & Sound magazine
printed an article by North American Feminist and critic, B. Ruby Rich. The
article, which gathered together Rich’s experiences of, and
reflections upon, the strong gay
presence on the previous year’s film festival circuit, effectively
coined the phrase "New Queer Cinema".[1]
As B. Ruby Rich also wrote in the Village Voice, she
described films that were radical in form and aggressive in their
espousal of sexual identities which challenged both the heteronormative status quo and the
promotion of positive images of lesbians and gay
men that had been advocated by the gay liberation movement for more than ten
years: films such as Todd Haynes's Poison (1991), Isaac Julien's Young Soul
Rebels (1991), Derek Jarman's Edward
II, Tom Kalin's
Swoon
(1992), and Gregg
Araki's ground breaking The Living End
These directors were making their films at a time when the gay
community was still reeling from the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and the conservative (and sometimes neo-conservative) political wave brought on
by the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and later George H.W. Bush in the United States of
America (US) and Margaret Thatcher in the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) during the same
decade. Jarman himself had been diagnosed with AIDS in 1986.
Simultaneously, queer theory and politics had begun to
take hold in academic circles. Queer contends that "gay," and the concepts of
"homosexuality"
and "heterosexuality," are pre-constructed
identities. Queer theory asserts that as these are the products of
a specific era of social history, they are arbitrary and that there
will come a time when they are no longer relevant categorizations.
When Rich noted that many films were beginning to represent
sexualities which were unashamedly neither fixed nor conventional,
the phrase "New Queer Cinema" was coined.
New
Queer Cinema figures
Directors
Producers
Actors
Notes
- ^ Aaron, Michelle (2004), New Queer Cinema: A
Critical Reader, Rutgers University Press, p. 3, ISBN
9780813534862, http://books.google.com/books?id=PGd4-qtfyzIC&pg=PA3
Further
Reference
- B. Ruby Rich
“New Queer Cinema”: Sight & Sound, Volume 2, Issue 5
(September 1992)
- B. Ruby Rich “Queer and present danger”: Sight &
Sound, Volume 10, Issue 3 (March 2000): http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/80/
- Joseph Bristow: Sexuality (1997) ISBN
0-415-08494-6
- Cante, Richard C. (March 2009).
Gay Men and the Forms of Contemporary US Culture. London:
Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 0 7546 7230 1.
- Derek Jarman:
Queer Edward II (1991) ISBN 0-85170-316-X
- Martin Frey. Derek Jarman - Bewegte Bilder eines
Malers. BoD 2008, ISBN 978-3-8370-1217-0
- Nick Rees-Roberts: French Queer Cinema (2008)
- Mark Simpson (journalist)
(ed.): Anti-Gay (1996) ISBN 0-304-33144-9
- Tamsin Spargo: Foucault and Queer theory (1999) ISBN
1-84046-092-X
- Colin Spencer: Homosexuality: A History (1995) ISBN
1-85702-447-8
- Richard Dyer:
The Culture of Queers (2002). ISBN 0-415-22376-8
- Axel Schock /
Manuela Kay: Out im Kino. Das lesbisch-schwule Filmlexikon
(2004). ISBN 978-3-89656-090-2
See also
External
links
Wikis
Quiz
Search