CHAMPS D'AMOURS: 100 Years of Rainbow Cinema

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 28^th 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.