CHAMPS
D'AMOURS 100 Ans de Cinéma Arc-en-ciel is a free
exhibition at Paris' Hôtel de Ville. In collaboration with La Cinématèque Française. From June 25 to September 28, 2019 Chief curator: Alain Burosse
1919
ORIGINS. The first allusions to gay and lesbian characters and
storylines to hit movie screens took the form of relatively ridiculous
transvestite caricatures in playful burlesque comedies. At one time or another,
every comic star of the 1910s (Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Fatty Arbuckle, Max
Linder and Charles Chaplin) adorned themselves in the opposite gender’s
finery to act out a storyline or a misunderstanding. The transvestite tradition
is still very much alive today and comedy remains one of the genres that
regularly welcomes LGBT characters. Other more serious work surfaced in the
subsequent decades, including tragedies (The
Wings, Mauritz Stiller, 1916; Michael,
Cari T. Dreyer, 1923; and Pandora’s Box,
Georg W. Pabst, 1928). These films created new hard-life stereotypes of gay
love that was doomed by its very nature to calamity and death. These forays
were quickly stifled and banned during the period that followed –a time marked
by the rise of fascism in Europe and the strict censorship rules of the Hays
Code, introduced in the United States in 1934. While French cinema remained an
exception to the rule, gay people almost vanished from the movies. Rare portrayals
were coded or hostile, and came from the fringes of an experimental, emerging
form of cinema. At long last, in the 1960s in Great Britain, where
homosexuality was still illegal, this situation was contested by the film Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961) and by Dirk
Bogard, who played the lead role and had the original idea for the film.
1969
STONEWALL: THE TIPPING POINT
On June 28th 1969, the same day
as Judy Garland’s funeral (the singer of the gay anthem Over the Rainbow) the
Stonewall riots broke out when a police raid sparked a rebellion from the
regulars of a gay bar in New York City, marking the beginning of a worldwide
militant gay movement. However, cinema had begun its transformation much
earlier: in Hollywood, the Hays Code had slowly crumbled away, and in Germany
angry young directors (Reiner Werner Fassbinder, Peter Fleishmann, and Rosa
von Praunheim) had begun to use gay themes to shake up movies made by the overly-conventional
middle-class Federal Republic from 1966 onwards. This period –which coincided with the sexual liberation
resulting from May 1968– led to the emergence of major works by great
moviemakers who no longer feared tackling gay issuse in their films, as
typified by the three masterful Italian directors: Pier Paolo Passolini (Teorema, 1968), Federico Fellini (Satyricon, 1969), Luchino Visconti (Death in Venice, 1971). The
post-Stonewall period also saw the first films emerge from directors who mixed
feminist and lesbian themes (eg. Chantal Akerman, Barbara Hammer and Ulrike
Ottinger). In mainstream cinema, there was a rise in the number of gay and
lesbian characters and they were often treated sympathetically. Famous
directors also affirmed their own sexuality (eg. Patrice Chéreau with L’Homme blessé, 1983, or André Techiné,
with Les roseaux sauvages, 1994) and
new plots tackled hitherto unexplored themes (bisexuality, adolescence, romance
and couples, etc.). New types of film-making opened up to portraying LGBT
lives: in Spain with la Movida movement and Pedro Almodóvar in the 1980s, in
Israel, South America, and several countries in Asia.
2019
THRIVING CONTEMPORARY SCENE
The burgeoning number of characters
and LGBT themes in film has grown continually over the last twenty years. As a
result, ground-breaking portrayals of gay and lesbian lives have flourished
across all genres and in almost all areas thanks to new approaches, in
particular those representing the queer viewpoint. The work and directors
belonging to this movement have received unprecedented recognition from the
general public and movie critics alike. This was clearly demonstrated in France
and abroad by the popular acclaim of La vie
d’Adèle (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2014), 120
battements par minute (Robin Campillo, 2017), and Una mujer fantástica, Sebastián Leili, 2017), and by the number of
prestigious awards those films have collected (Palm d’Or, César awards, Oscar
Award for best Foreign Film, etc.). Furthermore, a film with a gay theme –and
since the young man at the heart of the story was black he had double minority
status– was awarded with the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017: Moonlight, by Barry Jenkins. All this
goes to show just how far we have come in terms of recognition and visibility
since Different from the Others
(Richard Oswald, Germany) made its own, very solitary, militant contribution a
century ago.
CUT! Hollywood’s censors were not content
with merely thrusting gay and lesbian characters into the closet. They also
tried outright to eliminate any storylines deemed to portray same-sex desire
too blatantly. Thus, an overtly lesbian dance scene was retrospectively removed
from the epic The Sign of the Cross
(Cecil B. DeMille, 1932), while a suggestive dialogue between a senator and his
slave was cut out from Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus
(1960). All around the world, censors have clamped down in more ruthless ways,
imprisoning directors they deem scandalous in some places (Sergei Paradjanov in
the Soviet Union) and banning films elsewhere (Rafiki, Wanuri Kahui, 2018, in Kenya). In India, the film Fire (Deepa Metha, 1966), which tells a
lesbian love story was not suppressed by State censorship, instead nationalist
Hindus ransacked cinemas and forced the government to order the film to be
temporarily withdrawn from cinemas. In France itself, Zero for Conduct, by Jean
Vigo (1933), was banned from cinemas for twelve years because of its anarchist
leanings and the ambivalent relationship between the two students. Lionel
Soukaz toyed with the limits of censorship in Ixe (1982), a collage film that brings together an erect penis and
the pope in a whirlwind of images. But censorship often strikes in unexpected
forms: through family pressure (Mishima,
a Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader, 1984), through the rejection of
topics producers consider “too gay” (Behind
the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh, 2010), and through fear of displeasing a
political regime. A very recent example of this is the American film Boy Erased (Joël Edgerton, 2018), which tackles
the subject of “conversion therapies” –its producers decided not to distribute
the film in president Bolsonaro’s Brazil, where such practices are encouraged!
MASK! How can you show what you are banned
from portraying? Hollywood directors who wanted to include gay and lesbian
characters in their storylines faced this quandary from 1934 to the beginning
of the 1960s because the Hays Code that had been adopted by the major
production companies banned “sexual perversion” (amongst other things) from the
big screen. In 1981, Vito Russo’s seminal book and eponymous documentary The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and
Jeffrey Friedman, 1995) revealed the multitude of ruses that had been employed
to recycle codes and stereotypes entrenched in the collective subconscious:
mannered, overly-elegant characters with no sentimental attachment,
double-entendres, potent friendships, lingering glances, etc. It reveals traces
of comedy (the Laurel and Hardy “couple”), film noir, Western and epics. It was
about making the invisible visible, but often also involved using the images to
imply that these different characters, always inhabiting a shady world and
rubbing shoulders with criminals, posed a potential threat to the American
family and society. Alfred Hitchcock was a master of the art of blurring the
lines and managed to introduce intriguing, unsettling and seductive characters
to many of his plots, including Rebecca
(1940), North by Northwest (1958), Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951).
EVERY KIND OF LOVE
IN THE WORLD To Western cinema’s portrayal of gay, lesbian and trans people we
must add portrayals from other places, where long-silenced stories are now
finally emerging in increasing numbers of countries year on year: Kenya, Iran,
Guatemala, Nigeria, Chile, South Africa, South Korea, Guinea, India, China,
Taiwan, Cuba, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, Senegal, Japan, Argentina, the
Philippines, Egypt, etc. Even in the most hostile political contexts, LGBT
characters are being created and storylines with gay content are being written
in all languages, all around the globe. Ambitious films made by movie makers
residing at the heart of the system, such as Chinese director Chan Kaige (Farewell, my Concubine) or Israeli Eytan
Fox (The Bubble), are coexisting
alongside films produced secretly by activists who want their minority voices
to be heard. Far from contending themselves with simple on-screen portrayals
and a quest for visibility, these film directors from all corners of the world
are bringing us dissident representations, making no concessions, braving bans
and refusing self-censure to expand our field of vision. Is it just a
coincidence that one of the few films about intersex people came out of
Argentina: XXY (Lucía Puenzo, 2007)? Movies from around the world take all
forms and cover all angles: the denunciation of ambient homophobia, the comic
re-use of stereotypes, tragedies and, above all, romance. These love stories,
which may be light or dark, and do not always have an unhappy ending, tell
audiences that LGBT love is possible, even if it is difficult under regimes
that discriminate against or repress gay, lesbian and trans people. Cinema
offers role models, and gay and transgender people’s need to see portrayals of
themselves and of their love stories and sexual adventures are key in every
part of the globe. In the same way, it is still essential that we fight
prejudice by showing girls kissing girls and boys making out with boys (and
vice versa) on the big screen and that we broadcast these images to the broadest
possible audience as a way of asserting that minority love is part of every
kind of love in the world.
