Chapter Two Mapping the Celluloid Journey of the Queer This Chapter
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Chapter Two Mapping the Celluloid Journey of the Queer This chapter focusesonthe celluloid engagement of Queer in the West and in India as it was essential to contextualize the central argument of the thesis and analysis of the selected films.The chapter maps the representation of the Queer and development of Queer Cinema as genre beginning with the Western Queer cinema, particularly American and European, then moves on to Indian Cinema. 2.1. Euro-American/Western Queer Cinema A conscious existence of the non-heteronormative subject under various guises has had a century long history on Western celluloid as both „homosexuality‟ and „cinema‟ were invented in the West roughly at same time. Various Western Film scholars have attempted a mapping of the Queer celluloid; prominent among them are Vito Russo (1981) Richard Dyer (1990), Patricia White (1999), Alexander Doty (2000) and Barbara Mennel (2012). All the scholars give very insightful accounts of queer traces in the WesternCinema; however, it is Barbara Mennel‟s account that highlights key films that emerged at historical turning points throughout the twentieth century.„Schoolgirls‟, „Vampires‟ and „Gay Cowboys‟ are the phrases in the title of Barbara‟s book that summarize the history of Western Queer Cinema. Barbara identifies five key historical moments in Western Queer Cinema. The trajectory of Western Queer cinema can be marked with the help of Mennel‟s model. 2.1.1. Films during the Weimar Republic (1918-33) in Germany Mennel‟s account brings to light the fact that queer figures from schoolgirls to vampires populated the films of Germany‟s Weimar Republic, a period that was inaugurated by the end of World War I in 1918 and was brought to an abrupt and violent end with Hitler‟s ascendance to power in 1933. It is during those fifteen years of Germany‟s first democracy that gay and lesbian political and social movements as well as movie industry prospered. The first film that explicitly depicts homosexual rights is Richard Oswald‟s 54 silent classic Anders als die Anderen (Different from the Others, 1919). It narrates a tragic story about homosexual lives ruined by extortion. The film advances the agenda of political gay rights movement in the Weimar Republic. As to shaping of conventions for queer cinema, this film created a blueprint for documentary realism that defines the gay activist documentary with equal-rights-claims. Leontine Sagan‟s Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, 1931) is a tale that is now considered a staple of lesbian film. Mennel maintains that the film constitutes foundationof the genre of all-female boarding school as the setting for lesbian desire. Other films from this period include gays or lesbians as main characters or as minor figures or create the possibility of a queer but indeterminate reading. Schunzel‟s Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria, 1933) exemplifies the trope of cross-dressing in the tension between narrative and camp, which enables pleasures of same-sex fantasies but narratively contains them in a happy ending of heterosexual couples. G.W. Pabst‟s Die Buchse der Pandora (Pandora‟s Box, 1929) marks the lesbian character with cinematic codes and narrative strategies, reflecting the understanding of lesbian desire at that historical moment and shaping cinematic conventions and audience expectations for some time to come. The politicization and social visibility of gays and lesbians in the Weimar Republic had its roots in the late 19th century where male homosexuality became both „extremely public‟ and, at the same time linked to secrets (Segwick 1990:164). 2.1.2. Films during Late 1940s to early 1970s in the US In 1934, the production code, known as Hays Code formalised the verdict that homosexuality could not be represented in acts or words on the screen. The production code circumscribed notions of decency and taste as heterosexuality without nudity, adultery, illicit sex, miscegenation and physical expression of passion including kissing and sex acts. The code was abandoned in 1968 as filmmakers contested it in the 50s and 60s. The production code‟s explicit forbidding of the depiction of explicit or inferred sex acts or perversion necessitated a veiled language to express sexual desire and activity. As homosexuality could not be mentioned on screen, its unspeakable nature mobilized narratives which made homosexuality readable through its effects. Vito Russo in Celluloid Closet, (1981), Richard Dyer in his book Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian & 55 Gay Film (1990) and Patricia White in UnIvited:Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability deconstruct the superficially heteronormative codes and bring out the queer story of Western cinema to the fore very convincingly. Films such as Alfred Hitchcock‟s Rope (1948), Joseph Mankiewicz‟s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and William Wyler‟s The Children‘s Hour (1961), illustrate how queerness created a narrative problem because it could not be made explicit, which in turn became a defining feature of Hollywood films about gays and lesbians until 1970s. Camp is one defining feature of queer aesthetics. Western cinematic camp has a special affinity to classic Hollywood of 1940s and 1950s, though the origins of camp point beyond film to earlier homosexual figures, such as dandy, which emerged in 18th century London and Paris and elevated aesthetics to a lifestyle and aesthetic practices, such as orientalism, which embraced Far and Middle Eastern styles, endowed with erotic decadence and excess. Jon Hall‟s Arabian Nights (1942) and Arthur Lubin‟s Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944) became the models for the flamboyant drag performer Mario Motez. Queer aesthetics links trash cinema and B movies to experimental films and high art. Mennel remarks, “[a] range of filmmakers, such as Edward Wood Jr., Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and John Waters created a queer aesthetic by embracing the abject and perversions in the form of trash, drag and camp”(38). Films such as Wood‟s Glen and Glenda (1964) integrated aspects of the horror film with a narrative about sexual deviance, thus suggesting the horror genre‟s cinematic language as sign system for sexual otherness. Sexploitation films, as a result of the weakened production code, regularly portrayed sexualized lesbians, such as the predatory butch and the sexy but child-like femme. Joseph P. Mawra‟s Chained Girls (1965) creates a voyeuristic gaze at „deviant desire‟. Two lesbian films Radley Metzger‟s Therese and Isabelle (1968) and Robert Aldrich‟s The Killing of Sister George (1968) serve as examples of relatively high-budget films that reveal certain aspects of lesbian life such as butch / femme relationships and bar culture, but create a titillating voyeuristic gaze, transforming the lesbian characters into spectacles of deviance. The portrayal of lesbian relationship is exaggerated to the degree of 56 pathology. These films show traces of the subcultural lives of lesbians but turn those into images of sexualised and monstrous deviants that titillate by breaking taboos. 2.1.3. Post Stonewall Cinema The two decades following the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 in New York‟s Greenwich Village as a symbolic turning point cast as a collective coming out in films that unapologetically showed gays and lesbians often as positive identification figure in realist settings. Documentary film titles such as Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg‟s Before Stonewall (1984) and John Scagliotti‟s After Stonewall (1999) signify the event as a watershed moment, separating gay and lesbian history into a „before and after‟. „Before‟ indicates the homosexual subculture, associated with bars, double life, coded language and role play and „after‟ implies contemporary politicized gay and lesbian identities, associated with „being out‟, pride and claims for equal rights. Mennel‟s comment is apt in this context: „1968‟ has become shorthand for the international political movements that included international student protest movement against the Vietnam War, anti-colonial liberation struggles and civil rights movements in the US… the second wave feminism that claimed lesbianism as a political choice to undo patriarchy (49). However, the new ways of thinking about relationship among politics and identity, ideology and desire did not immediately reflect on the big screen. Mennel notes that Queer cinema throughout the 1980s remained gendered phenomenon, mainly due to the feminist redefinition of lesbianism as a political identity and male homosexuality‟s confrontation with AIDS. The predominance of romance and a reflection of increasingly academic feminist concerns in representation of fantasy and desire shaped/ characterised lesbians on film. Female characters were shown exploring sex with other women without necessarily embracing lesbian identity or community. These films include Donna Deitch‟s Desert Hearts (1985), Robert Towne‟s Personal Best (1982) among others. Mennel observes: 57 Lesbian art-house films departed from traditional conventions of narrative film to engage with the possibility of the medium of film to connect politics and desire. Three lesbian/feminist films from the mid-1980s centrally feature fantasy, albeit in very different ways: Lizzie Borden‟s Born in Flames (1983), Monika Treut‟s Treut‘s Verfuhrung: Die grausame Frau (Seduction: The Cruel Woman) (1984) and Sheila McLaughlin‟s She Must be Seeing Things (1987)…These films search for a cinematic language to speak about psychic life outside of heteronormative assumptions by blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality in their narratives (57). Films about gay men, on the other hand, increasingly addressed loss and mourning whether reflecting the awareness of AIDS explicitly or implicitly. Paul Borgart‟s Torch Song Trilogy (1988) looks back melancholically at a formation of gay identity in the moment of its disappearance- the effeminate, cross-dressing female impersonator and Bill Sherwood‟s Parting Glances (1986) radically situates itself in the moment of mid-1980s capturing the ambivalence of gay normalcy. It inscribes homosexuality into the emerging popular mass culture of MTV, video and pop music.