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The article notes a trend towards low-key naturalism in twenty-first-century independent queer cinema. Focusing on work by Andrew Haigh, Travis Mathews and Ira Sachs, it argues that this observational style is welded to a highly meta-cinematic engagement with traditions of representing non-straight people. The article coins the term ‘New Gay Sincerity’ to account for this style, relating it to Jim Collins’s and Warren Buckland’s writing on post-postmodern ‘new sincerity’. At its crux, this new style centres itself in realism to record non-metropolitan, intimate and quotidian gay lives, while acknowledging the high-style postmodernism of oppositional 1990s New Queer Cinema.
This article examines how the ironic construction of queer masculinity from biker culture, a realm of consumer fetishism and hetero-masculinity, in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), influences Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive. As Anger’s film appropriates pop-culture images and icons of biker culture, fetishes of post-Second World War American masculinity, Refn uses overt references to Anger’s film to wage a similar reappropriation of muscle car culture, in the process challenging contemporary images of heterosexual masculinity in Drive. Like Anger, Refn relies upon the dynamics of fetishism and postmodernism’s illumination of the distance between sign and object to subvert muscle cars’ associations with masculine violence and rivalry, mobilising them instead to exploit the inherent multivocality of the fetishised object, seizing the car (and its mobility) as a getaway vehicle to escape prescriptions of identity and limiting definitions of gender and sexuality.
Moving images of the British monarchy, in fact and fiction, are almost as old as the moving image itself, dating back to an 1895 dramatic vignette, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Led by Queen Victoria, British monarchs themselves appeared in the new 'animated photography' from 1896. Half a century later, the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II was a milestone in the adoption of television, watched by 20 million Britons and 100 million North Americans. At the century's end, Princess Diana's funeral was viewed by 2.5 billion worldwide. Seventeen essays by international commentators examine the portrayal of royalty in the 'actuality' picture, the early extended feature, amateur cinema, the movie melodrama, the Commonwealth documentary, New Queer Cinema, TV current affairs, the big screen ceremonial and the post-historical boxed set. These contributors include Ian Christie, Elisabeth Bronfen, Andrew Higson, Steven Fielding, Karen Lury, Glyn Davis, Ann Gray, Jane Landman, Victoria Duckett, Jude Cowan Montague, James Downs, Barbara Straumann, Deirdre Gilfedder, Jo Stephenson, Ruth Adams, Erin Bell, Basil Glynn and Nicola Rehling.
Luminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing is the first book to analyse the prolific writing of queer icon Derek Jarman. He blended visionary queer politics with experimental self-representation and consistently created art with material drawn from his own life, using it as a generative activist force. Although he is well known for his avant-garde filmmaking, his garden and his AIDS activism, he is also the author of over a dozen books, many of which are autobiographical. Much of Jarmanʹs exploration of post-war queer identity and imaginative response to HIV/AIDS can be found in his books, such as the lyrical AIDS diaries Modern Nature and Smiling in Slow Motion, the associative book of colour Chroma, the critique of homophobia At Your Own Risk, and the activist text published alongside the film Edward II. The remarkable range and depth of his writing has yet to be fully explored by critics. Luminous Presence fills this gap. Spanning his career, Alexandra Parsons shows that Jarman’s self-reflexive response to the HIV/AIDS crisis was critical in changing the cultural terms of queer representation from the 1980s onwards. She reads Jarman's self-representations across his literary and visual works as a queer utopian project that places emphasis not on the finished product, but on the process of its production. Luminous Presence examines Jarmanʹs books in broadly chronological order so as to tell the story of his developing experimentation with self-representation. The book is aimed at students, scholars and general readers interested in queer history, literature, art and film.
’s ‘queenliness’ and his roles as Elizabeth I and II are examined. Do aspects of the persona and life story of this ‘stately homo’ (a term Crisp used in reference to himself) make him an appropriate choice for either impersonation? Next, attention is turned to debates about queer cinema that circulated in the early 1990s, and the complicated position that Potter’s Orlando and Quentin Crisp occupy in relation to
think of the cinema of Cocteau, Pasolini, Kenneth Anger, or Derek Jarman. The two contemporary filmmakers who have decided to call the entirety of their collaborative œuvre, ‘le cinéma corporel’, Maria Klonaris and Katherina Thomadaki, are lesbians (Klonaris and Thomadaki, 2006). Epstein belongs to discussions of the role of embodied experiencing in queer cinema that should extend to both silent movies and films that are not obviously queer. In view of the fact that Epstein’s closet was a result of censorship – that is, of the legal and cultural opprobrium against
confrontational queer activism. With it came a ‘new queer cinema’ which transgressed received history in a pointedly artificial mise-en-scène (Isaac Julien’s 1989 Looking for Langston , Derek Jarman’s 1991 Edward II , Tom Kalin’s 1992 Swoon ). Orlando can be seen as a prime example of queer cinema, given its play with gender and sexuality and the choice of Jarman collaborator Tilda Swinton for the title role. In casting the
). Similarly, Medhurst notes, ‘the camp aesthetic can easily be confused with a postmodern one’, acknowledging that in the earlier 1990s he himself had publicly (and, he says, camply) declared that ‘postmodernism is only heterosexuals catching up with camp’ (Medhurst, 1997: 290). In 1997, however, he makes the distinction that, while camp grows from a specific subcultural identity, ‘postmodern discourse peddles the arrogant fiction that specific cultural identities have ceased to exist’ (290). Equally, Arroyo distinguishes the ‘new Queer Cinema’ from a general postmodern one
options, such concerns show significant thematic affinities with New Queer Cinema. This trend emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, across the festival circuits (such as Sundance), as a challenge to fixed gender representations and the binary ‘normality’ of heterosexuality and homosexuality. According to Aaron this cinema provided an outlet to some of the more marginal voices within the field of nonstraight sexual
straddle the cerebral, the sensual and the sexual. As a lecherous aristocrat who utilises his privilege to exploit men and women beneath him, Girodet stands outside of Demy’s class ethics. And yet, he elicits a queer pleasure. Coming well over a decade before the inception of the New Queer Cinema coined by B. Ruby Rich (1992), Girodet epitomises that movement’s defiance of what Michele Aaron summarises as the ‘tasteful and tolerated’ gay culture co-opted by the mainstream (2004: 7–9). He is playfully depraved and a welcome antidote to Oscar and André’s worthiness.14 By