QUEER CINEMAS

NEW QUEER CINEMAS BY RUBY RICH

SCHOOL GIRLS, VAMPIRES AND GAY COW BOYS BY BARBARA MENNEL
B RUBY RICH

B. Ruby Rich is an American scholar, critic of independent, Latin

American, documentary, feminist, and queer films, and a professor
of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation
‘NEW QUEER CINEMAS’

 Termed by B Ruby Rich in ‘Sight & Sound’ magazine in 1992.

 Movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s.
 Developed from the use of word ‘queer’ in academic writing as an inclusive for LGBT identity and experience.
 It defined sexuality that was fluid and subversive of traditional understandings of sexuality.
 Films of the New Queer Cinema movement shared themes like the rejection of heteronormativity and the lives of
LGBT protagonists living on the fringe of society.
 Independent films, made by and for queer-identified people, used radical aesthetics to combat homophobia, the
trauma of the AIDS epidemic, and complicate queer subjectivities, while importing much needed discussions of
race.
 Rich argues that although films dealing with these issues can be found in the previous decade, New Queer Cinema
broke with the gay liberation ethos that self-representation should remain positive and desirable.
 EVOLUTION

 From 2010s a number of LGBT filmmaker identified a newer trend in LGBT filmmaking, in which the influence
of New Queer Cinema is evolving toward more universal audience appeal.
 Emergence of LGBT-themed mainstream films such as ‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘Milk’, and ‘The Kids Are All
Right’ is identified as a key moment in the evolution of the genre.
 The French film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival
BARBARA MENNEL

Barbara Mennel is an associate professor of film

studies in the Departments of English and Languages,
Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida.
Her books include The Representation of Masochism
and Queer Desire in Film and Literature and Queer
Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys.
SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES, AND GAY COWBOYS

 Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys illustrates queer cinematic aesthetics by highlighting key films that
emerged at historical turning points throughout the twentieth century.
 Barbara Mennel traces the representation of gays and lesbians from the sexual liberation movements
 She explains early tropes of queerness, such as the boarding school or the vampire, and describes the development
of camp from 1950s Hollywood to underground art of the late 1960s in New York City.
 Mennel concludes with an exploration of the contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian films and global
queer cinema.
 Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires and Gay Cowboys also contributes to an academic discussion about queer
subversion of mainstream film.
 Schoolgirls, vampires, and gay cowboys

 Schoolgirls, vampires and gay cowboys are the heroes of this book.
 The former – schoolgirls and vampires – emerged in German films as ciphers of queer desire at the beginning of
the twentieth century, while the latter – Ang Lee’s gay cowboys – queer the most manly of men and symbolise the
presence of gays and lesbians in contemporary Hollywood.
SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES, AND GAY COWBOYS

 When in 1934 an agreement among the major studios in Hollywood to a system of self-censorship – the
production code – went into effect, it formalised the verdict that homosexuality could not be represented in acts or
words on the screen.
 Also named the Hays Code after its creator Will H. Hays, the production code was intended to uphold moral
standards, and was most strictly enforced under helm of Joseph I. Breen from 1934 to 1954.
 Throughout the 1950s filmmakers began contesting it, so that it weakened during the 1960s and was abandoned in
1968. The production code circumscribed notions of decency
 It portrays the two dominant developments of contemporary queer cinema: one, mainstreaming, particularly in the
US, and two, the global proliferation of queer films.
 The first and more extensive section describes the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian cinema in films that address
a general audience and the use of conventional genres for films geared at gays and lesbians.
 It surveys the international proliferation of queer cinema during the last decade in a cursory overview of queer
international cinema and few select readings of films to illustrate transnational queer cinema’s simultaneous
engagement with national film traditions.
SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES, AND GAY COWBOYS

 From the late twentieth century into the twenty-first, queer visual representation proliferated in unprecedented
ways in film, but also on television, and in emerging new media.
 Queer film increasingly includes cross-dressing, transgender, transsexual and intersex subjects as characters that
determine narratives in independent and mainstream films, and this, in a global queer context.
 The twin development of new media, often seen as one of the major factors in globalisation, and the
deconstruction of gender, is not coincidental, as digital networks allow both for disembodiment and alternative
forms of embodiment in cyberspace. With the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian figures.
THANK YOU