Showing papers in "Film & History in 2004"

The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader

Abstract: Christoph Lindner, editor. The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. Manchester University Press, 2OO3. 268 pages, $74.95. Hero as Globetrotter When Ursula Andress arose from the waves, like a discreet Venus, in Dr. No in 1962, she became, for all time, the quintessence of the James Bond style, so much so that Halle Berry's similar star entrance in Die Another Day (2002), was a sign that the old formula still intended to weave its magic in changed times. Never mind that in the intervening forty years 007 had been played by five different actors, or that the Cold War had been and gone along with Swinging London and Scan Connery's hairline. This new version announced the longevity of Bond, the fact that he was a spy for all seasons. According to Variety, over half the world's population has seen a Bond film, and this is not, perhaps, as surprising as it might seem. For these outrageously popular fantasy adventures tap into two general concerns that have been a worldwide constant ever since 1945. The first is an anxiety surrounding the international situation, whether it relates to potential nuclear holocaust, or to terrorism. The second rises out of the first: it is the deep, necessarily deluded need to believe that these problems are less complex than they appear, and that they can be solved by the courage and moral righteousness of an individual hero. James Bond is that hero. This collection, written by a range of scholars from different disciplines and countries, tackles numerous issues surrounding fiction's most famous secret agent, both on screen and on the page. all the essays are, in essence, variations on the theme of the hero as globetrotter, an empire warrior sent from M's clubby office to exotic locations where he slugs it out with the Blofelds and the Largos, who, in turn, represent all the malevolent forces that whisper to us out of the headlines. A certain amount of ideological baggage goes with this idea: as many contributors point out, Bond is an imperialist, other races are not quite pukkah, and the energy of conquest extends to some pretty dodgy dealings in the sex war. Yet Christoph Lindner and his team show that these issues do not remain constant. To borrow Tony Bennett's and Janet Woollacott's phrase, the character some countries call "Mister Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" is "a moving signifier". This means that the nature of Bond's heroism slips and slides according to the particular historical period, or to the writer's point of view. For example, in "Licensed to Look: James Bond and the Heroism of Consumption", Michael Denning paints the spy of the books as a response to the growing Fifties phenomenon of tourism; he sees him as a super-consumer of other cultures, who gives the banality of modern travel an added excitement: "Fleming's adventures are really tales of leisure, tales where leisure is not a packaged, commodified 'holiday'.. .but is an adventure, a meaningful time, a time of life and death." By contrast, Jim Leach views Pierce Brosnan's film Bond as a reconciler of current tensions surrounding the dominance of technology. The agent connects the impersonality of his gadgetry to the human cunning that can make it effective. In the midst of these multiple views, one issue remains constant. …

Piracy in the Motion Picture Industry

Abstract: Kerry Segrave Piracy In The Motion Picture Industry McFarland, 2003 $3650; 222 pages Another Crisis The FBI warning which appears at the beginning of copyrighted videos and DVD's should not be taken lightly Jack Valenti and The Motion Picture Association of America he represents would be delighted to have the FBI enter your house, confiscate your purloined movies, and hold your duping equipment as evidence In 1979, Valenti (always a colorful speaker) told 60 Minutes ' Harry Reasoner that film piracy "is a cancer in the belly of the film business" Kerry Segrave's history of piracy in the motion picture industry was published in 2003 and states in the conclusion that, "Hollywood hit its roughest spot as the VCR and video cassette arrived and became ubiquitous" Now Valenti and the Motion Picture Association of America have another crisis-a really, really rough spot-digital piracy-pirates who sail Cyberspace As Tom Spring of PCWorldcom states, "If you think copying a movie and downloading The Matrix from Kaza is okay, Jack Valenti wants a word with you" In Piracy In The Motion Picture Industry, Segrave has comprehensively researched film theft history The author defines film piracy "as the unauthorized reproduction or use of motion pictures" He, of course, acknowledges that there is nothing new under the sun, and begins his research (There is a footnote at the end of every paragraph, and in the preface, Segrave credits Variety as a major source of information) by recounting the offenses of vaudevillian appropriators who incorporated parts of another entertainer's acts or simply replicated the entire act Georgie Jessel, WC Fields, Harry Houdini, George Burns, Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Fred Alien are the more familiar names of those who either stole, were stolen from, or both In an open letter to Variety, Bert Lahr once accused Joe E Brown of having stolen the Lahr character The book's first chapter discusses many of these transgressions and the entertainers' attempts, employing legal means as well as peer pressure, to force the imitators to cease and desist Songs and entire acts were stolen from British entertainers and brought across the Atlantic to enjoy great success in the United States American audiences were usually unaware that what they were seeing and hearing was not entirely original material Also, vaudeville theaters often hired lesser-known and less expensive entertainers to perform the acts of more famous and more expensive performers According to Segrave, these cases, many of them legal, are reported in detail in Variety As soon as motion pictures appeared, thieves devised a variety of ways to make money illegally from the new form of entertainment During the silent era, "bicycling" was a popular form of film larceny: "An exhibitor who had rented a film legitimately for a period of time, say, one week at a fixed sum of dollars, would try to screen the print for an extra day or two at the beginning or end of his run Or the cinema owner would rent the movie for one of his theatres and then screen it illegally at another theater he owned" Also common was the practice of two different theater owners trading and sharing legally rented movies for illegal screenings …

The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. Second Edition

Abstract: Richard Dyer The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. Second edition. Routledge, 2003. 183 pages; $75.00. The Invisible Visible Back in the days when music hall was the staple diet of British entertainment, most artists had a tag line, which neatly summed up the nature of their act; there were slogans such as "He Of The Funny Ways", or "Always Applauded". If Richard Dyer ever trod the boards, he could be accurately summed up by the name of one of his previous books, Now You see It, a study of gay-identified, non-commercial films first published in the 1980s. For much of his writing, both there and here, has all the drama of the conjurer pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. It makes the invisible visible; it drags something previously obscure into the full glare of the spotlight. Dyer does this, moreover, with such clarity and vigour that it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that he is compulsory reading for anyone interested in gay issues, in the nature and function of stardom, and in the host of knotted questions surrounding what the late Edward Said called the "Other". The Matter of Images is a collection of essays that investigate the wide range of this otherness. A revised version of a book first published ten years ago, its new material is a logical extension of the reprinted work on gay and lesbian sexualities, and, above all, on race. This area is whiteness itself, a state so central and so apparently unquestioned that, for Dyer, it has an "every-thing-and-nothing quality", and therefore can be made visible only by a very particular conjuring trick. In the fresh articles on serial killers, the stardom of Lilian Gish, and the structure and images of The Birth of a Nation, he mutates the rabbit, turns it into something alien and strange. In his hands, whiteness is not assumed blandly to be a "dominant ideology", but is seen, rather, as a conglomeration of contradictions and anxieties, held together by little more than obstinate self-delusion and smoke and mirrors. This is most clearly seen in the two essays featuring Gish. Here, Dyer breaks down Griffith's most famous star into her component parts: he shows how the essence of film itself, the manipulation of light, is used to create a morally exemplary saint, whose reserve, purity and wisdom are embodiments (rather spooky ones, it should be said) of the white ideal. Yet, as the Birth of a Nation essay reveals, this ideal is not a simple, monolithic white supremacy: it covertly undermines itself by acknowledging the contradictions in its own position. In a bravura piece of writing, he argues that, although Southern whiteness appears to triumph in the big KIu Klux Klan procession at the end of the film, it is Gish's Elsie Stoneman, a Northerner, who has, in effect, rescued southern whiteness from its debilitation and corruption; for the film, both of these have been brought about by southerners consorting with black women, and, hence, creating the dreaded "mulattos" of Griffith's imagination. The general implication is that whiteness is a pathological state, which normalises itself by using especially cunning narrative sleights of hand. …

Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History with Illustrations

Abstract: William B. Jones, Jr. Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History with Illustrations. McFarland, 2002. 287 pages; $55.00. Postwar Period From approximately 1945 until 1955 another generation of American teenagers emerged onto the adolescent stage. Here, during these formative years, the youngsters played fast-moving neighborhood games such as Johnny-rides-a-pony, ringalevio, and spud, helped their mothers operate those ringer washing machines, while off to the side, eyed their fathers slap another patch on a tire's inner tube. In the schoolroom, they sang "The Arkansas Traveler," "Stout-Hearted Men," and "Tit Willow" while their teachers reminded them that "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" or warned about the dangers of being "out of kilter." Back in the house, these kids screwed flashbulbs into cameras, threw coal into the furnace (later, they would remove the ashes), and, when feeling mischievous, listened to some neighbor "chew the fat" on those party line telephone connections. Sometimes, they watched an older sister (or an unmarried aunt) get "dolled up" for a Saturday night dance or envied an older brother who strolled into a diner and ordered a blue plate special. In their kitchens, these adolescents wolfed down bowls of Kellogg's Pep (Superman's official cereal), gulped glasses of Ovaltine (Captain Midnight's favorite drink), and watched their mothers toss a generous spoonful of Crisco into a frying pan, while in the background the radio adventures of Boston Blackie ("friend to those who had no friends"), The Fat Man ("Weight: 237 pounds; fortune: danger"), The Shadow ("Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"), We the People (Gabriel Heatter's reassuring "Ah, there's good news tonight"), and, of course, The Lone Ranger ("Who was that masked man?") emanated from the front room. At the neighborhood shows, the youngsters cheered their favorite cowboy heroes-Johnny Mack Brown, Lash LaRue, Red Barry, Hopalong Cassidy-galloping across the plains blasting those unsavory, mustachioed villains trying to steal some widow's ranch while over in the combat zone John Wayne, Dennis Morgan, and John Garfield repeatedly routed America's Axis foes. Since the postwar period was in its incipient stages, many of the youngsters remembered those blackout shades their parents installed, the postage-stamp-sized points necessary to buy rationed food, the backyard victory gardens, those war bonds sold almost everywhere, and the Memorial Day parades, where polite spectators quietly demurred when the Gold Star mothers-sitting collectively in their convertible automobiles-passed in review. For literary pursuits, every teenager stocked his own stash of comic books, those ten-cent purchases that provided untold enjoyment and faraway dreaming. Here in the fantasy world of Red Ryder, Little Lulu, Mandrake the Magician, Bucky Bug, L'il Abner, Smilin ' Jack, Terry and the Pirates, The Little King, and Dick Tracy, these adolescents reveled in the fun and fancy these monthly publications provided. Blackhawk, Plastic Man, Batman, Archie, The Phantom, Wonder Woman, Superman-these comic book characters provided a visual education and, coupled with pride in ownership, formed the basis of a youngster's first library. But what comic books stood out? …

Hollywood Comedians, the Film Reader

Abstract: Frank Krutnik, editor. Hollywood Comedians, The Film Reader. Routledge, 2003. $22.95; 224 pages. Captivating and Enlightening Proposing to fill a twenty-year void of books examining the comedian film, editor Frank Krutnik has amassed thirteen scholarly works for The Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader. This compilation is both captivating and enlightening. The book is divided into five parts: Part One-Genre, Narrative and Performance; Part Two-Approaches to Silent Comedy; Part Three-Sound Comedy, The Vaudeville Aesthetic and Ethnicity; Part Four-Comedian Comedy and Gender; Part Five -Post Classical Comedian Comedy. In the essay "Buster Keaton, or the work of Comedy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Tom Gunning focuses his discussion on the oft-made comparisons between Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Gunning does a nice job of highlighting the differences between the two, making reference to the overt social commentary often seen in Chaplin's films (this is discussed in further detail in William Paul's "Charlie Chaplin and the Annals of Anality") and how this differed from the approach Keaton took in his work. Gunning also speaks to the way each performer used the camera to relate to their audience, stating "[wjhereas Chaplin used film to create a startling intimacy with his audience, allowing them insight into his most private moments of romantic longing and disappointment . . . Keaton's relation to the audience remained distanced" (74). Joanna Rapf's fascinating piece entitled "Comic Theory from a Feminist Perspective-A Look at Jerry Lewis" begins with a look at femininity, as well as masculinity, in the comedie world: "If women are indeed primal earth mothers, sources of life and order, comfort and reassurance, apple pie, chicken soup, and everything that builds a foundation to give others the strength to grow, the comedy ... is anathema to the feminin" (146). Rapf then transitions to examining how Jerry Lewis, through his film work, interprets not only male patriarchy, but "idealized" masculinity in general. According to Rapf, "[Lewis'] flagrant rejection of conventional standards of realistic and narrative expectation, and his ambiguous approach to gender and sexuality all put him in what can only be called an unexpected and surprisingly revolutionary camp" (152). Part Five of the book, entitled "Post-Classical Comedian Comedy" may have the most resonance for modern-day movie-goers. Bambi Haggins, in her piece "Laughing Mad-The black comedian's place in American comedy of the post-Civil Rights era" effectively traces the history of black comedians since the 1960s. Beginning with Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, Haggins outlines the rise of each of these performers and the adaptations each made during their careers to either conform to the mainstream, or reject it. …

The House of Yes

Abstract: In The House of Yes (1997) Parker Posey puts on one of her most glamorous performances as "Jackie-O." Based on a costume for an Ides of March party that she attended as an adolescent with her twin brother Marty (Josh Hamilton), Jackie-O has adopted her moniker and her style of dress from the former first lady. The opening credits are set to the 8mm home movie footage, shot when Marty and Jackie were 13, of Jackie playfully imitating (and interspersed with actual footage of) the famous tour of the White House given by Jackie Kennedy in 1962 for CBS. The character proves so fascinating because of the significant connection it draws between identity and loss. The fact that Jackie-O remains "in costume" throughout the film troubles the notion that those rights of passage which initiate the adolescent into being an adult represent the solidification of a self and a self-identity-her deferment to a party costume as her identity during her teenage years calls into question any such thing as a "real" or "true" identity (after all, we never know her real name in the film). This is not unfamiliar territory to queer theory or culture, both of which are well aware of how hard mainstream culture must work to reinforce the assumptions of identity that we all are supposed to take for granted. Though it is a term gaining popularity in mainstream culture, for queer theorists the term queer signals a challenge to normative identities and behaviors. The House of Yes queers the ritual of home and the family narrative, by suggesting that identity itself is an imitation, and one which often results in violence by closing off possibilities for ways of "being" and behaving-all because one is always expected to live up to that which he or she is already. The film takes place on the night of Thanksgiving during a severe thunderstorm. Jackie is eager for Marty to arrive, but when he shows up with his fiancee Leslie (Tori Spelling), the house becomes as threatened by a dangerous internal tension as it does by the hurricane that rages outside. The family dynamic grows more complicated when the truth about Marty and Jackie-O comes out: Marty and Jackie were lovers as children, tying their obsession with the JFK assassination into ritualized sex. Their incestuous relationship is a secret of Marty's past that he wanted to leave behind when he moved away in search of a more normal relationship. Despite the tension with Leslie, Marty and Jackie are clearly enjoying each other's company, and using the holiday as a time to reminisce. They both decide to "come out" to their little brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.). Appalled, he exits the stage and the conversation turns. Jackie asks if it is true that Leslie is a waitress in a donut shop, and Marty admits that she works for a chain called "Donut King". "It's a chain," he explains, "There are women like her all over the city." "My point exactly." "No, my point Jackie! I have chosen to love her. It wasn't thrust upon me..." Marty later tells Jackie, in a scene that resonates powerfully with queer culture, that he wants her to love someone that she is allowed to love. Jackie and Marty are at odds with one another over the "normal" itself. Marty refuses a position of marginality in society and vigilantly seeks normalcy in Leslie-even hoping through his engagement to participate in the quintessential ritual of normalized heterosexuality, marriage. Jackie insists that the she and Marty are "above" society, not merely at its margins. Jackie may not win the argument, but Marty cannot resist when Jackie pulls out the pink Chanel suit and stockings. In the unlit living room, while the family sleeps, they begin their performance. "You be him," Jackie whispers, "and I'll be her." "I'm him," Marty says, almost trancelike, "and I'm her..." Jackie repeats. Marty sits and waves in slow motion while the lightning simulates the flashbulbs of a crowd full of cameras, and Jackie raises the gun at him. …

No Dumb Questions

Abstract: No Dumb Questions centers on a topic that necessarily interrogates "traditional family values." The film follows a white middle-class family of five closely as mother, father and in turn, their three children, digest the challenging news: their loved one has decided to live as Aunt Barbara, instead of as Uncle Bill. While the film does not explicitly address "family values" rhetoric, Melissa Regan's documentary shows its viewers one family's values and the process by which they are cultivated. As a family, they cultivate the values of love and acceptance throughout the film by employing the principles of openness, love, and humor in dealing with the new knowledge about Aunt Barbara/Uncle Bill. As the title of the film suggests, both the parents and Aunt Barbara encourage questioning and respect the children's perspectives. When Chelsea, age 11, wants to ask a question using the word penis she first says, "Can I say it? It won't be inappropriate?" By involving questions in the process of cultivating their children's values, the parents avoid stifling the learning process with prescriptions that would close down or limit discussion. They thereby demonstrate meaningful value-making through their interactions. Olivia, the 9 year-old niece, initially expresses fear when she meets Aunt Barbara, but later says that she "calmed down" after talking with her. Chelsea, the oldest daughter, feels proud that she stood up in class and provided the terms her classmate requested rather than simply allowing the class to snicker about a "man who wants to become a woman" without a direct response from the teacher. The family's approach to interaction with their children is consistent: they present a topic, sometimes by asking questions, then they allow their children to think about the topic, reflect, interact with one another and answer each other's questions. Then, the parents respond to their children's inquiries and spark further discussion. Each of the sisters have very different reactions from one another as well as very different ways of coping, reflecting, and processing information, so each of them learns to employ the values that their parents encourage in their own way. When the children learn that their Uncle Steve decided not to meet Barbara because he is not handling the news very well, the mother says that her daughter was mad saying, "I do not understand! This is his brother, his sister! If that was my sister and she had something going on, I would always love her!" The children demonstrate lhal lhcy have learned the values their family encourages. The means used to cultivate family values in the film stands in stark contrast to the "traditional family values" rhetoric that demonizes groups of people. Aunt Barbara's family refuses simply to ostracize her; instead they consider the difficulties she experiences. As viewers, we learn about some of the struggles she will face as a transgender individual through the eyes of those who love her including her six year-old niece, Abby. …

Lagaan: Once upon a Time in India (Dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001)

Abstract: On the surface, the Hollywood film Lagaan offers a story of resistance. Set in the traditional musical mode of films coming out of the prolific Mumbai (Bombay) studios, Lagaan tells/sings/dances the story of the resistance of Indian villagers against their British colonial oppressors. Smaller resistances within the village shore up this larger unfolding of tension, as the hero Bhuvan (played by Aamir Khan) defends the village untouchable, welcomes the token Muslim, Ismail (Raj Zutshi) and token Sikh, Ram Singh (Javed Khan), and stops the villagers from violently killing the turncoat spy for the British, Lakha (Yashpal Sharma). We watch as the villagers conquer the clear evil of British Captain Andrew Russell (Paul Blackthorne), whose smirks send simultaneous chills and giggles down ones spine and whose capricious wielding of power irks even his superiors at colonial central command. However, this message of resistance rides on the back of other, more problematic assumptions regarding our understanding of the historical colonial relationship-and it does so in order to serve contemporary Indian political realities. just as architectural, archaeological, and textual history is often rewritten or ignored in order to support the notion of a Hindu India oppressed by Muslim or British outsiders,1 Lagaan presents a colonial past in which resistance to the colonizer "unifies" the villagers, but only under the banner of Hinduism. From the conservatism of the film's depiction of the village to its token inclusion of Muslims, Sikhs, and untouchables, Lagaan unwittingly reasserts the primacy of Hinduism in India, and does so through the two-pronged approach of recasting both Indian history and Hindu gods. Some have suggested that Lagaan might serve as a way to begin a discussion of colonialism, or even nineteenth-century subaltern resistance to colonial power.2 The film's whitewashed-yetaccurate depiction of village life, Indian-style British cantonment headquarters and dusty cricket grounds suggest an historical precision that viewers may also extend to the relationships among the characters in the film. We are given the message that Gujarati villages of the late-nineteenth century had only one Muslim man (and his silent wife) rather than a larger community of Muslims, that those same villagers can be convinced within the span of one scene that untouchability and caste difference are wrong (never mind that caste itself has been argued to be a colonial construction3 and that it took Gandhi years to shift, and only partially, the place of the untouchable in India), and that despite all of these anachronistic socially progressive attitudes the lone Sikh is indeed stereotyped as a consummate warrior, fighting the British whether with "sword or bat." Each move of inclusion, tokenism, or stereotyping in the film results in a reification of the Hindu-Indian identity as the norm, both then and now. By bringing these outliers in, the film enables a reading of historical Indian resistance as unified under a Hindu banner, a banner that has material effects on today's minority populations in India, whether Muslim or Sikh. The unwitting irony of filming in Gujarat, site of the terrible Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002, which left hundreds of thousands of Muslims as refugees, makes this conservatism more poignant. This Hindutva (lit. Hinduness, describing the Hindu right's political movement) unity relies on a selective notion of what "Hindu" might mean, largely dependent upon late-nineteenth century Victorianizations of Hinduism, and often figured through selected iconography of Hindu gods. It has been remarked elsewhere that the main love story of Lagaan, between Gauri (Gracy Singh) and Bhuvan, echoes the stories and imagery surrounding the Krishna-Radha narratives as told in various puranas and illustrated in Indian painting.4 In the iconography of the rasalila dance, the gopis (maidens) dance in a circle (each with their own Krishna), while Krishna and Radha dance in the center as the ideal couple. …

The Moviegoing Experience, 1968-2001

Abstract: Richard W. Haines. The Moviegoing Experience, 1968-2001. McFarland, 2OO3. 270 pages; $32.00 paper. Decline and Fall According to filmmaker Richard Haines, the motion picture industry has gone through a radical transformation-and deformation over the last third of the twentieth century. In his book, The Moviegoing Experience, 1968-2001, he takes the reader through a detailed, yet world wind tour, of the events that he argues led to the decline and fall of the American Motion Picture Industry (film and movie house). Indeed, it is his stated intention to provide both a historical and analytical chronology of the events, which led to cinema's demise as a focal point of American entertainment. During the period 1934 to 1968, Hollywood filmmaking operated under the auspices of the Production Code that marked films with a Seal of Approval. According to Haines, the Code, although it restricted certain subject matter, nonetheless did not prevent producers and directors from exercising creative freedom. Haines points to David O. Selznick as a prime example of such a director who took advantage of this climate to create the great American film classic, Gone With the Wind. Following World War II, the author claims that the middle class wanted a conformity that "was necessary for the economic stability and a civil society" (19). For the time being then, the cinema would remain mainstream in its appeal. However, Haines states that while the more conservative elements of society had won this round of the cultural wars, their victory would soon be upended in the late 1960s. By 1968, the author argues that the counterculture movement won their greatest victory when Valenti dismantled the Production Code and Seal. According to Haines, Jack Valenti, who became president of the MPAA in 1966, took the position that "any form of industrial self-regulation was censorship" (32). This was to send shock waves throughout the entire industry. Restrictions of film production were out, but the ratings system was in. Mainstream cinema was eroding fast as Sexploitation, Blacksploitation, and general exploitation films now came into full-scale production. Finally, the film palaces were suddenly in financial trouble; they no longer saw families coming to the theatre as they did prior to the end of the Code and Seal. It was now a cinema of segmented audiences, divided along the new ratings system. The palaces were now transforming themselves. While they tried to target certain audiences for a while, twinning and multiplexes soon replaced them. Haines argues forcefully that the new multiplexes were "the cinematic equivalent of fast food restaurants in suburban malls" (92). The book then shifts the focus to discuss the technical changes that paralleled the decline in cinema attendance and in film quality. Reel to reel projectors, operated by union technicians, were replaced by the platter system, which did not even require a qualified projectionist. From this point onward, Haines states that machines were no longer cleaned nor maintained and presentation of the films on the platter projectors became poor, and the overall moviegoing experience declined rapidly. There was yet, waiting in the wings, another set of developments that would further undermine the commercial cinema-those of the home entertainment revolution. During the late seventies and early eighties, the video revolution, cable TV, and later satellite technology would all serve to snuff the life out of many cinemas still trying to survive. …

Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film, Second Edition

Abstract: Richard Dyer with Julianne Pudduck. Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film, Second Edition. Routledge, 2O03. 339 pages; $75.00. How You see It At first glance, Now You see It is the most straightforward film book imaginable, a chronological survey of gay and lesbian films from the First World War to the present day, with contexts and themes highlighted as they emerge. Among many other things, Richard Dyer discusses the early films of the Weimar period in relation to the prevailing screen conventions and attitudes towards male and female homosexuality; elsewhere, he studies the underground cinema of Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol, delves into what he calls "lesbian cultural feminist film," and sniffs around post-Stonewall, "affirmation" cinema. Hundreds of films are cited or discussed, from Jean Genet's Un Chant d'amour to the prolific output of Barbara Hammer. All lesbian/gay cinematic life is here. The book's real interest lies as much in its overarching themes as in its investigation into particular films or historical periods. At the top of the list is the central problem of definition; this journey through films past and present is not a clear run towards a predetermined point. For "now you see it" is heavily dependent on how you see it. As Dyer's final pages make clear, the very nature of homosexuality is a complex question and, indeed, may not exist in the ways that are commonly supposed. There are, very roughly, two schools of thought. The first argues that, throughout the ages, same sex desire has been a fixed entity, although it has manifested itself in different forms according to the mores of the particular time. By contrast, the second school believes that "gay" and "lesbian" are merely linguistic forms imposed by society on something that is far more fluid and elusive. Hence, there is no essential "gayness"; what you do in bed, or desire to do, has no inevitable connection to what you are, or believe yourself to be. Some readers may feel that these critical issues should have been laid out right at the beginning; without them, the book is like the hall of mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai, a kaleidoscope of reality and appearance. These shifting patterns are vividly illustrated in the two new chapters that open and close this revised and updated edition. Dyer kicks off with a study of Vingarne ("Wings"), Mauritz Stiller's gay(ish) film of 1916. It tells the story of the intense relationship between a sculptor and his male model, but it is set within a heterosexual framing story, which concerns the making of the drama itself. This method, the author argues, allows Stiller simultaneously to assert and deny the gay content: "By framing its homosexual story within a desultory heterosexual one, Vingarne can signal homosexuality even as it apparently withdraws from it." Naming and yet not naming is a standard technique of that time, a way of asserting gay identity by slipping through the heterosexual gaps, but, in the new, closing chapter, Julianne Pudduck surveys developments since the 198Os and reveals how the space between "gay/lesbian" and "straight" is now merging into the more amorphous term, "queer." In this brave new world, hetero and homo are not mutually exclusive, and, perhaps as a result, some of the evangelical tone of the post-Stonewall affirmation tradition has been overtaken by new queer cinema, with its emphasis on ambiguity, difficulty, and the darker side of the sexual force. …