LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness 9789048543892

Citation preview

LGBTQ Film Festivals

LGBTQ Film Festivals Curating Queerness

Antoine Damiens

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Still. History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself / Rien n’oblige à répéter l’histoire. Directed by Stéphane Gérard (2014). Courtesy of Stéphane Gérard. Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 840 9 e-isbn 978 90 4854 389 2 doi 10.5117/9789463728409 nur 670 © A. Damiens / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Dedication

7

Acknowledgements

9

List of abbreviations

15

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut: Queering Film Festival Studies, Curating LGBTQ Film Festivals

17

1. Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies

39

2. The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals, and Queer Cinema’s Legs

77

3. Out of the Celluloid Closet, into the Theatres!Towards a Genealogy of Queer Film Festivals and Gay and Lesbian Film Studies

115

4. Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory and LGBTQ Festivals’ Temporality

157

5. Images+Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Homoscapes

185

Conclusion. The Impossibility of Festival Studies?On the Temporalities of Field Intervention and the Queering of Festival Studies

233

Appendix

239

Bibliography

247

Filmography

279

About the Author

285

Index

287

Dedication To Craig Burns Eberhardt and Sylvain Duguay. Craig passed away in August 2018 at the age of 61. Craig was a healer, a home builder, and a fixture of many queer communities. Above all, Craig was a father to many chosen families. I have yet to meet anyone from his vast circle who hasn’t been impacted by Craig’s courage, generosity, and resilience. A true role model, Craig represents the best of who a queer person can be: tremendously compassionate, eager to foster an intergenerational solidarity, and resolutely unapologetic. Sylvain, whose dissertation focused on filmic adaptations of Canadian queer plays, passed away in 2017 at the age of 42. While I never met Sylvain, his generosity, free spirit, and sheer sexiness are truly legendary. If this book largely explores queer memory – the specific ways in which we pay homage to our ancestors and create history outside of the structures of heteropatriarchy, it is also an effort to create a dialogue with friends and lovers I have never met. I would like to pretend that, through archival/historical research, I stand in a lineage of fierce gay men – sustaining relationships with ghosts and traces, enacting a form of queer friendship that trumps death itself. As a justice project, I can only hope this book will honour Sylvain and Craig’s memory.

Acknowledgements As such, academic writing is quite similar to festival organizing: this book reflects my own networks of friends and colleagues – the ‘stakeholders’ and ‘networks’ without whom it wouldn’t exist. I am particularly grateful for my mentors, for their encouragement to persevere as well as for being role models I can look up to. In particular, I cannot thank enough my PhD advisor, Thomas Waugh – someone whose scholarship, activism, and generosity I admire; a colleague and a friend whose feedback and nurturing in times of doubts made this book possible. Be it at the baths, on the conference trail, or at Concordia, I wouldn’t trade this transgressive academic romance for anything else: a better friend and advisor is indeed something hard to imagine. Similarly, I cannot thank enough Lucas Hilderbrand – for his dedication to helping me grow as a queer man and reconnect with my history (despite my initial reluctance toward archival research!), for his constant mentoring and support during my year at the University of California, in Irvine, and above all for pushing me to apply to Concordia. Lucas Hilderbrand’s scholarship is a source of inspiration matched only by his generosity. My co-supervisors, Kay Dickinson and Masha Salazkina, stepped in and encouraged me throughout graduate school. Their enthusiasm gave me much-needed confidence. I am particularly grateful for their always abundant feedback – be it during the various steps and defenses of the PhD programme or at academic conferences. Parts of this book were originally drafted as final papers for their seminars. At Concordia, I also want to thank Haidee Wasson, who kindly accepted to sit on my thesis proposal defense and whose insightful comments truly helped me think through some of this book’s theoretical frameworks, Luca Caminati, Martin Lefebvre, Joshua Neves, Catherine Russel, Marc Steinberg, May Chew, and Elena Razlogova. I am grateful to be currently working with Rosanna Maule – a role model in feminist and festival scholarship – on several research projects, including the preservation of queer and feminist films and videos in the archives of the Cinémathèque Québécoise (financed in part through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Engage grant). Several teachers shaped, unknowingly, this book. At the University of California, in Riverside, Lan Duong is the reason why I betrayed the social sciences: I will never forget her introduction to feminist film theory (my first film course!), the list of books she made me read, and the encouragement

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she provided me with during our semi-regular coffee meetings. I blame Keith Harris for encouraging me to be a bad queer, one that consciously refuses a politics of respectability and takes pleasure in the incorrect praxis of academic critique. Jane Ward tuned me in to feminist pedagogy and philosophy, and above all explains my fascination with the resolutely queer lives of straight people. Last but not least, Mike Atienza – at the time my academic advisor, now a bright scholar – enabled me to compose my own curriculum, lifting every prerequisite, perverting me with anything but sociology. At the University of California, in Irvine: Jennifer Terry is largely responsible for the feminist epistemology and historiography this book is infused with, and more globally for my fascination with the politics of academic knowledge production. Tom Boellstorff’s graduate seminar in post-colonial anthropology (a field and a discipline I knew nothing of!) explains my focus on gay linguistics. Kristen Hatch guided me and help me transition from sociology to film studies. At ‘Sciences Po’ Lyon, I want to thank my two M.A. advisors, Max Sanier and Sarah Cordonnier – the only teachers crazy enough to supervise me. Thank you for letting me do the research I was interested in – even if it did not fit neatly with Sciences Po’s politics – and for encouraging me to pursue a PhD degree in the Humanities. I was lucky enough to count on the constant care and support of various cohorts of friends. At ‘Sciences Po’ Lyon, my partners in crime were Lionel Cordier and Carole Kerduel. At UC Riverside: Jennifer Bird, Alexa Oliphant, Janki Patel, Anna Zhu, Danica Lusser, and Han Phan. At UC Irvine: Valente Ayala, Maxzene Alixandria, Mika Mori, Colin Cahill, Karen Jallatyan, Sarah Kessler, Sarah Valdez, Annie Yaniga, Martabel Wasserman. Shane Breitenstein is a constant source of inspiration, and someone I look forward to collaborating with. At Concordia: Viviane Saglier, Papagena Robbins, Dominic Leppla, Sophie Cook, Desiree de Jesus, Brandon Arroyo, Mao Lei, Nikola Stepic, Sima Kokotovic, Jordan Arseneault, D.J. Fraser, Ian BradleyPerrin, Brad Warren, Teresa Lobos, Kristopher Woofter, Mara Forloine, Clinton Glenn, Giampaolo Marzi, Andrée Lafontaine, Yuriy Zikratyy, Gregory Rodriguez Jr, Svetla Turnin, Mark Barber, Patricia Ciccone, Masoumeh Hashemi, Kyla Rose Smith, Joaquin Serpe, Dan Leberg, Rachel Webb Jekanowski, Meredith Slifkin, Fulvia Massimi, Lola Remy, Cho Rock-Park, Gabriel Salamé-Pichette, Charlie Ellbé, Charlotte Orzel, Julia Huggins, Léa Lavoie, Charles Lavoie, Frédérick Pelletier, Joshua Harold Wiebe, Ylenia Olibet, and Emma Flavian. Special thanks to Ryan Conrad, Ezra Winton, and Remy Attig – who, over the years, became friends and mentors (may

Acknowledgements

11

we survive immigration and academic precarity!) and to my students, who made me realize that teaching was a privilege. I recently joined McGill University as a Fonds de recherche Québec société et culture (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the Department of English and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF). My deepest gratitude to the granting agency for seeing the value of my scholarship and enabling me to be a (precarious but) professional scholar. I am honoured to be working with Alanna Thain and Bobby Benedicto: I am constantly inspired by the ways in which Alanna and Bobby articulate academic practice and activism, by their constant effort to build coalitions and their willingness to navigate, queer, and survive the academic institution. I also want to thank Brian Lewis, Miranda Hickman, Michael David Miller, Kim Reany, and Andrew Folco. I cannot wait to participate in the life of the Department and to build upon our common research interests. This book reflects many conversations held as part of the Film Festival Research Network, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), and Visible Evidence. My colleagues not only encouraged me but also were kind enough to argue against me when I truly needed it. I was lucky enough to present my research for the first time at NECS Milan. Despite it being on a 9am panel, I met my academic heroes (now dear friends): Skadi Loist, Marijke de Valck, and Ger Zielinski. I hope this book will do justice to our shared interests and conversations. I had the privilege of serving as graduate representative and co-chair for the Film and Media Festivals Scholarly Interest Group within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies: my colleagues (Beth Tsai, Jon Petrychyn, Tamara Falicov, and Michael Talbott) truly inspired me and helped me become a better scholar. I am looking forward to continuing this transnational dialogue within the Feminist and Queer Research Workgroup (NECS), a group I recently co-created with Anamarija Horvat and Inmaculada Sanchez-Garcia. On the conference circuit, several colleagues and friends shaped this book: Dina Iordanova, David Richler, Stuart Richards, Dorota Ostrowska, Patricia Caillé, Olivier Thevenin, Kirsten Stevens, Jaap Kooijman, Brendan Kredell, Katherine Laurie Van de Ven, Harry Karahalios, Malte Hagener, Leanne Dawson, Laura Horak, Sarah Atkinson, Dagmar Brunow, Aida Vallejo, Diane Burgess, Patricia Zimmerman, Claudia Sicondolfo, Theresa Heath, Daniel Kulle, Tessa Dwyer, Jennifer O’Meara, Rosalind Galt, Monia Acciari, Lydia Papadimitriou, Ran Ma, David Archibald, Cindy Wong, Maria Paz-Peirano, Sasha Crawford-Holland, Tess Van Hemert, Caroline Moine, Nanna Heidenreich, Katharina Lindner (may you rest in peace), Katharina

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Kamleitner, Melis Behlil, Eren Odabasi, Lesley-Ann Dickson, Sonia M. Tascón, Dunja Jelenkovic, Philippe Meers, Ann Breidenbach, Konstantinos Tzouflas, Frederik Dhaenens, Aleksandra Milovanovic, Denis Provencher, John Lessard, Kristine Kotecki, Aimée Mitchell, Brian Hu, Kyler Chittick, Heshen Xie, Clarissa Jacob, Tilottama Karlekar, and Michelle Latimer. This book examines the precarious labour performed by scholars and festival organizers. To some extent, it reflects my personal experience: as a junior scholar, I do not hold a tenure-track appointment. Several scholars and friends helped me face job insecurity, doubts, and anxiety – during job interviews, between panels, in airport waiting rooms, or at gay bars: Robin Curtis, Karl Schoonover, Janine Marchesseault, Susan Lord, Brenda Longfellow, Julianne Pidduck, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Patrick Keilty, Liz Czach, Michael Brynntrup, Wayne Yung, Liz Miller, John Greyson, Marc Siegel, and Jane Gaines. This book wouldn’t exist without the advice of many people met on the festival circuit. As a film professional liaison officer for Cannes’s Queer Palm, I worked with the following filmmakers, curators, producers, distributors, and critics: Franck Finance-Madureira, Christopher Landais, Ava Cahen, Bruce LaBruce, Anna Margarita Albelo, Philippe Tasca, Désirée Akhavan, Ricky Mastro, Richard Wolff, Alex Schmidt, Angelo Acerbi, Flavio Armone, Arshad Khan, Olivier Bachelard, Olivier Leculier, Thomas Oudin, Benoit Arnulf, Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, Isabelle Mouveaux, Daniel Chabannes, David Ninh, Patrick Cardon, Marc Smolowitz, Daniel Van Hoogstraten, M-Appeal, Michael Shoel, Anna Feder, Yvonne Andreas, George Dare, Nicolas Gilson, Yves Le Franc, Adam Kersh, Nicolas Maille, Arnaud Jalbert, Jack Benjamin Toye, Nigel M. Smith, Todd Verow, Ailton Franco, Tom Abell, Loke Kahloon, and Jason Ishikawa. At Écrans Mixtes Lyon: Ivan Mitifiot, Olivier Leculier, and Philippe Grandjean; at the Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival: Katja Briesemeister, Simon Schultz, Maik Hoppe, Joachim Post, Michael Dreier, and Missy Lopes; at Image+Nation: Katharine Setzer and Charlie Boudreau; in Paris: Didier Roth-Bettoni and Anne Delabre; at Queer Lisboa: João Ferreira; at MIX New York: Stephen Kent, Jim Hubbard, and all of the resolutely sexy attendees/ friends who constantly make New York feel like home. Various archivists stepped me and enabled me to complete this research: in Montreal, Ross Higgins (Archives gaies du Québec); in New York, Brent Phillips (Fales), Rich Wandels (LGBT Center Historical Archives), and the more than lovely staff at the NYPL (in particular the archivist who lent me his handkerchief; the Vito Russo Collection made me cry!).

Acknowledgements

13

My chosen family was kind enough to take me out for drinks when I most needed it and listened to my complaints on a quasi-daily basis. In Montréal: Paul, Raffaella, Oliver, Umah, Rodrigo, Jean-François, Gabriel, Lucas, Brian, Louis, José, Dan, Bruno, Guillaume, Nadège, Hubert, Santiago, Mathilde, Miguel, Mike, Laurence, Derek, Merk, Keko, Laurent, Costas, Stephen, Vincent, Philip, Darke, Noé, Hugo, Alejandro, Autumn, Hugues, Jonathan, J-P, Armel, Ryan, Habbib, Nadim, Honoré, Kaustav, Sean, – and everyone at the baths. In Toronto: Peter, Daniel, Darren, Kevin. In France: Antoine, Roméo, Paul, Elisa, Lucie, Maxime, Olivier, Clément. In the rest of Europe: Jost, Christoph, Tait, Didine. In California: Brian, Chris, Amanda, Mark, Nua. In New York: Sam, Erik, Jeff, Scott, Ace, Blew, Kyle, Chris, and Julian. Elsewhere: Marc. Deepest gratitude to my biological family (Nathalie, Sylvain, and Marie) – a constant source of inspiration. I am particularly grateful to publish this book with Amsterdam University Press, one of my favourite publisher! Maryse Elliott and Thomas Elsaesser provided me with much needed feedback. Their patience was truly remarkable. For their assistance in clearing copyrights: Thomas Waugh; Joshua Grannell; Brian Benson; Pau de la Sierra; Fuel Agency; João Ferreira; Ana Grillo, Christina Magdalinou, Silvia Torneden; Aye Aye Production; Charlie Boudreau; Katharine Setzer; and Stéphane Gérard (a brilliant filmmaker!). My deepest gratitude to my blind reviewers for their insightful feedback. Last but not least, to my partner, Ferrin. This book reflects our story; it would simply not be possible without you. I have thousands of reasons to thank you – for your patience, for your dorky smiles in the mornings, and above all for helping me grow and making me look forward to the future. A preliminary version of Chapter 2 has been published as ‘The queer film ecosystem: symbolic economy, festivals, and queer cinema’s legs’ in Studies in European Cinema 15, no.1 (2018). It has been significantly reworked in the context of this book, thanks to the precious advice and support of editors Leanne Dawson and Skadi Loist, as well as to the feedback provided by their very perceptive blind reviewers. This research was partly financed through a Fond de recherche du Québec société et culture postdoctoral fellowship.



List of abbreviations

AIVF GAA GAU IGLHRC LSF NALGF NEA NGLTF NQC NYLGEFF NYPL NYSCA NYU

Association for Independent Video and Film Gay Activists Alliance Gay Academic Union International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers National Endowment for the Arts National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce New Queer Cinema New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival New York Public Library New York State Council for the Arts New York University



Introduction. Festivals, Uncut: Queering Film Festival Studies, Curating LGBTQ Film Festivals ‘Fearless, Shameless, Timeless.’1

This book is born out of a paradox: while scholars have increasingly legitimated festivals as a semi-independent field of research within film and media studies, critics and arts organizers have long questioned the cultural relevancy of LGBTQ festivals. As early as 1982, Thomas Waugh wondered why (and whether) a new gay and lesbian film festival should be organized in Montreal.2 Similarly, B. Ruby Rich famously observed that queer festivals have simultaneously been ‘outlasting their mandate and invited to cease and desist’.3 In focusing on LGBTQ festivals’ conflicted temporalities and historiography, this book examines the disciplinary assumptions that structure festival studies: it questions the theoretical and political narratives implied in current festival scholarship. In particular, this book is concerned with festival studies’ quest for legitimacy: as a relatively recent field of academic research, festival studies has been burdened with justifying its object of research. Symptomatically, most books and dissertations on the topic start with a numbered description of the festival phenomenon. It is customary to highlight that thousands and thousands of festivals are organized each year. 4 LGBTQ festivals are 1 Inside Out (Toronto, 1991-ongoing), 2011 tagline. 2 Waugh, ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’. 3 Rich, ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’, 620. 4 While it is almost impossible to estimate the number of festivals being organized each year, the festival submission platform Withoutabox claims it serves over 5,000 festivals. See: Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 18n7. In France alone, between 350 and 600 festivals are alleged to have been organized in 2006. See: Iordanova and Rhyne, Film Festival Yearbook I, 1; Taillibert, Tribulations festivalières, 10.

Damiens, A., LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728409_intro

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LGBTQ Film Festivals

not an exception: for instance, Ger Zielinski asserts that queer festivals are ‘often second largest only to the IFF [International Film Festivals] in their respective city’.5 Similarly, Skadi Loist argues that ‘the LGBT/Q film festival scene has grown exponentially, covering most regions of the globe with about 230 active events on the circuit today’.6 The tendency to rely on statistics and to map out what has been coined as the festival circuit can difficultly be avoided: it justifies the relevancy of festival scholarship and is symptomatic of an academic climate in which scholars are constantly asked to evaluate the social impact of their research. It does, however, encode a set of assumptions about which festivals matter, take hard numbers as self-evident, and foreclose an examination of what constitutes a festival. Instead of participating in this collective effort to describe and justify the festival phenomenon, this book is concerned with analyzing the effects of festival studies’ theoretical and methodological frameworks – frameworks that tacitly structure our scholarship but are never fully acknowledged. To that end, it is guided by the belief that festival studies is currently at an impasse: as a self-referential field, it not only constantly reproduces a particular type of scholarship, but also drastically limits our understanding of what festivals are and thus of what their uses can be within film studies.

Pre-screening: constituting festival studies ‘Where films come out.’7

Festival studies largely draws on the historical and theoretical framework established by Marijke de Valck.8According to her, film festivals started out as a European phenomenon: Venice (1932), Cannes (1946), and Berlin (1951) 5 Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 116. Scholars generally argue that around 280 yearly events would be dedicated to the screening of queer cinema. They systematically reference ‘The Big Queer Film Festival List’ (http://www.queerfilmfestivals.org/). The number of LGBTQ festivals being organized each year is probably underestimated: as this book argues, scholars often rely on a strict definition of what a festival is, thereby ignoring events which are ephemeral by design, which do not name themselves ‘festivals’, or which adopt a slightly different format. 6 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 12. 7 New Fest (New York City, 1988-ongoing), 2011 tagline. 8 de Valck, Film Festivals. Marijke de Valck is not the first scholar focusing on film festivals. She is, however, the first to publish a monograph on the topic. Earlier articles and theses, such as Julian Stringer’s 2003 PhD dissertation, have largely been (re)discovered after the publication of de Valck’s foundational opus.

Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut

19

simultaneously attempted to energize a European film industry damaged by two world wars, increasingly suffering from Hollywood’s competition, and to expand their country’s influence in the context of the Cold War. Cannes, for instance, was founded on a joint French and American initiative as a way of countering the influence of Mussolini’s Mostra. Significantly, festivals did not select films: cultural embassies were responsible for submitting a national entry. Thomas Elsaesser thus argues that festivals served as a sort of ‘parliament of national cinemas’, at once promoting films which were supposed to reflect the character of a nation and replaying or pacifying conflicts through celluloid.9 In the 1960s, new cinemas and social movements forced international festivals to adapt their organizational structure. Confronted with the creation of new political festivals (such as Pesaro in 1964), international festivals started curating films. According to de Valck, this area corresponds to the ‘age of the programmers’, best symbolized by the creation of side-sections for innovative and political films (Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight and Berlin’s International Forum of New Cinema). The 1960s also mark a shift from film as instrument of cultural diplomacy to a discourse in terms of cinema as art. With the popularization of the festival format in the 1970s, festivals increasingly searched to distinguish themselves from one another, notably through the discovery of new talents. It was the ‘age of the directors’, a shift accompanied by a new focus on film markets. With the apparition of video and a boom in independent filmmaking, festivals became legitimized as key nodes in the circulation of films by the 1990s.10 In that context, de Valck’s opus is largely concerned with festivals’ role as tastemakers and cultural gatekeepers. Mobilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, de Valck analyzes the role played by festivals in legitimizing and circulating art cinema. Her description of festivals as a network composed of ‘sites and rites of passages’ relies on three inter-related arguments: 1. that international festivals constitute a network through which films circulate (an alternative circuit of exhibition), 2. that festivals, through their selections and awards, add a certain amount of cultural capital which may then be transformed into profit, and 3. that festivals structure the economy of film.11 Julian Stringer similarly argues that festivals constitute a ‘multi-functional phenomenon’ that cannot be reduced to film exhibition. They mark the 9 Elsaesser, ‘Film Festivals Networks’, 88. 10 de Valck, Film Festivals. 11 Ibid., 36-37; See also: de Valck and Soeteman, ‘“And the Winner is…”“.

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coming together of various stakeholders whose agendas diverge from one another. Journalists, filmmakers, producers, lawyers, buyers, distributors, tourists, curators, audience members, and policymakers do not have the same investment in a festival. Film festivals both rely on and are realized through an assemblage of sometimes competing performances.12 Since de Valck’s foundational opus, scholarship has largely been dedicated to determining the shape taken by the ‘festival network’. Some festivals matter more than others, both economically and culturally: Stringer’s definition of the circuit as ‘a socially produced space unto itself, a unique cultural arena that acts as a contact zone for the working through of unevenly differentiated power relationships’ and Dina Iordanova’s description of the network as a ‘two-tiered system’ effectively capture this inequality.13 While some festivals add cultural capital, others are mostly concerned with exhibition: they merely re-screen films (therefore paying rental fees). For these reasons, the term network, which implies unity and circulation, has been seen as too monolithic by festival scholars. Festivals are varied and cannot be reduced to a single entity. As Iordanova puts it: There is a strict task division between festivals; a small number of major festivals have leading positions as marketplace and media event and the remaining majority may perform a variety of tasks ranging from launching young talent to supporting identity groups.14

In that context, festival scholars have sought to conceptualize various forms of circuits, coexisting and largely overlapping. This often results in an ever-growing typological impulse in a scholarship body that distinguishes A-list festivals from identity-based ones, thematic from generalist, buyers from players.15 Significantly, Iordanova’s Film Festival Yearbook series focused successively on the notion of a circuit, films festivals in Asia, activist 12 Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 9. See also: Rhyne, ‘Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders’. A similar argument is made by: Dayan, ‘Looking for Sundance’. The discrepancies between Stringer’s use of Howard S. Becker’s ‘art world theory’ and de Valck’s emphasis on ‘cultural capital’ typically reflect different conceptions of the relationship between the cultural and the economic. On the one hand, Becker’s ‘art world theory’ insists on the cultural as composed of a network of people whose connections shape artistic discourses: the cultural is marked and regulated by a cooperative logic. On the other hand, Bourdieu conceptualizes the cultural as a ‘field of struggle’: the meanings we ascribe to work of arts emerge from competing definitions of ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ capital. 13 Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 109; Iordanova, ‘Film Festivals and Dissent’, 17. 14 Iordanova, ‘The Film Festival Circuit’, 29. 15 Among others: Wong, Film Festivals; Cheung, ‘Funding Models of Themed Film Festivals’.

Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut

21

or archival festivals, and festivals in the Middle East.16 Similarly, de Valck’s Framing Festivals series covered Australian, Chinese, and queer festivals.17 This separation between various types of festivals may at times have unintended consequences: it forces scholars to present themselves as working on ‘queer film festivals’ or ‘diasporic film festivals’ as if one’s object of study was more important than the theoretical arguments or methods used in our analyses. Furthermore, festivals with a similar curatorial focus are often understood to belong to a single circuit and to be fundamentally alike. In that context, festival studies’ typological impulse emphasizes the differences among various circuits, conceptualized through theoretical tools and historical narratives devised for A-list events: it may foreclose a critical examination of the diversity of the festival phenomenon. Here, I do not aim to discount the knowledge gained through festival studies’ typological impulse but rather to draw attention to the institutional and disciplinary logics that condition and shape our work as scholars. As such, festival studies’ reliance on typologies is partly a consequence of the mechanisms through which academic knowledge is produced and disseminated: it enables scholars to be legible and to speak to colleagues working on a similar historical period, identity, or geographic area outside of festival studies. Furthermore, the field’s typological impulse often refracts festival studies’ complex institutional location – between the Humanities and Social Sciences, film and media studies. Significantly, scholars analyzing general international festivals and those writing on thematic or identitybased ones often build upon different disciplinary traditions. While the former generally draw from media industry studies, the latter rely mainly on cultural studies and ethnographic observations – focusing on festivals’ role in community-building and identity politics. The literature on LGBTQ film festivals is here particularly instructive. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, several articles and dossiers on LGBTQ festivals were published in Jump Cut and GLQ. They not only predate festival studies proper but also provide us with an alternative theoretical framework. For instance, Patricia White’s 1999 GLQ dossier centres on a tension between the ‘real, truly live place’ of festivals and the idea of festivals as a theoretical tool. According to her, LGBTQ festivals simultaneously entail a collective 16 Iordanova and Rhyne, Film Festival Yearbook I; Iordanova and Cheung, Film Festival Yearbook 3; Iordanova and Torchin, Film Festival Yearbook 4; Marlow-Mann, Film Festival Yearbook 5; Iordanova and Van de Peer, Film Festival Yearbook 6. For a non-festival studies analysis of festivals as they intersect (or do not intersect) with Arab cinema, see: Dickinson, Arab Cinema Travels. 17 Stevens, Australian Film Festivals; Berry, Chinese Film Festivals; Richards, The Queer Film Festival.

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experience of queer cinema and constitute an ideal site for reconceptualizing LGBTQ people’s relationship to film.18 They ‘manufacture’ queerness and/ or authenticate what counts as queer.19 Waugh and Straayer’s GLQ dossiers, although conceived as follow-ups to White’s, adopt the format of the roundtable.20 In creating a virtual conversation between festival organizers, curators, and filmmakers, they simultaneously emphasize the diversity of the LGBTQ festival phenomenon, nuancing and even questioning the idea of a unified circuit, and point to the interplay between curation and academic knowledge production. Significantly, these dossiers have tended to be interpreted as documentation of LGBTQ festivals in the early 2000s. Seeing as they do not adopt familiar academic lingo, they are not immediately legible as important acts of scholarship. Most of the festival studies scholarship on LGBTQ film festivals is in the form of unpublished dissertations. Written and/or defended over a decade ago, they could not have anticipated major developments in queer filmmaking and cultural organizing. Crucially, these dissertations also correspond to the beginning of festival studies, understood here as an independent f ield of academic research. As such, they both built upon festival studies’ foundational concepts and helped define new methodological and theoretical approaches. My choice to rely on these dissertations thus reflects their centrality in the historical development of the field: although they have not been published, they shaped the political project of festival studies. Scholars focusing on LGBTQ film festivals generally examine the relationships between festival organizing and queer film cultures. Rhyne analyzes major shifts in the organizational structures of a few US-based LGBTQ festivals as symptomatic of the advent of a ‘pink dollar’ economy.21 Zielinski theorizes LGBTQ festivals’ relationship to identity and community politics through Foucault’s heterotopia.22 Loist argues that LGBTQ festivals enact and crystallize a ‘queer film culture’: they reflect and participate in the evolution of queer cinema.23 In the only monograph on LGBTQ festivals, Richards defines queer film festivals as social enterprises that both reflect the rationality of the creative industry and constantly renegotiate their 18 White, ‘Introduction: On Exhibitionism’, 73. 19 Clark, ‘Queer Publicity at the Limits of Inclusion’. 20 Waugh and Straayer, eds., ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One’; ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two’; ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Three’. 21 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’. 22 Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’. 23 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’.

Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut

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relationship to community organizing.24 All of these pioneering texts rely on a few case studies: as their focus is on the emergence of a transnational queer film culture, they analyze some of the largest, oldest, and most important international LGBTQ film festivals. In contrast, this book examines forgotten, minor LGBTQ f ilm festivals. In so doing, it echoes a growing number of scholars who argue that festival studies’ conceptual apparatus does not adequately apply to the vast majority of festivals: its theoretical and methodological tools, devised for international festivals, do not necessarily account for smaller events. For instance, Papagena Robbins and Viviane Saglier call for a critical examination of ‘“other” f ilm festival networks, […] driven not only by curiosity and the need to always look further, but also by the very desire to stretch what counts as being part of the festival networks in order to open its branches and reveal its porosity’.25 Similarly, Lindiwe Dovey, Joshua McNamara, and Federico Olivieri note that the Slum Film Festival (Nairobi) ‘does not attract widespread global attention; it is not a glittering showcase for films and people; it is not a vital node for global film industries, businesses, institutions, and information’. Consequently, they argue that there is a danger in assuming that the channels through which films circulate – such as film festivals, and other ‘media events’ – are in themselves coherent entities that can be easily understood and unpacked by individual scholars. While we welcome the new field of film festival studies as a major advance in film studies, we feel that this field will benefit from an openness of approach that remains attuned to alternative definitions of ‘film festivals’.26

Several scholars have explored how festival studies’ theoretical concepts presuppose a particular type of festival. For instance, Ezra Winton’s critiques of festival studies aim at correcting the field’s bias toward fiction films, thereby insisting on the specif icities of documentary f ilm festivals.27 Similarly, Tascón and Wils develop a theory of activist film festivals.28 In questioning and/or deconstructing some of festival studies’ main theoretical 24 Richards, The Queer Film Festival. 25 Robbins and Saglier, ‘Introduction’, 4. 26 Dovey, McNamara, and Olivieri, ‘“From, By, For” Nairobi’s Slum Film Festival, Film Festival Studies, and the Practices of Development’. 27 Winton, ‘Good for the Heart and Soul, Good for Business’, 32-33. 28 Tascón, ‘Opening Thoughts’, 3.

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concepts, these scholars often adopt a reparative practice that both relies on and aims at recognizing an understudied type of festival, sometimes inadvertently replaying the field’s typological impulse. In contrast, this book builds upon festival studies’ main theoretical contributions: instead of arguing for the specificity of LGBTQ festivals, it seeks to uncut, or expand, festival studies’ concepts and methods. To that end, I do not aim to criticize my colleagues for their insightful and foundational work. My focus is not on individual texts or scholars but on the institutional production of knowledge and its effects on festival scholarship. Similarly, this book does not aim at providing the reader with an exhaustive survey of the literature on film festivals. As with any scholarly project, this book is a partial, ‘curated’ intervention. If my framing of ‘film festival studies’ may at times seem a bit too monolithic, it is done so with the intention of mapping the constitution of an academic field of research – that is, to identify festival studies’ key debates and methodological frameworks and to present an alternative approach. In particular, this monograph does not account for the development of a new set of literature on festivals that do not screen f ilms (ranging from international exhibitions to music festivals to anime conventions). This new literature, published among others in the new Journal of Festive Studies, is curiously disconnected from film festival scholarship: as such, the two fields operate independently, largely ignoring each other. While future research will benefit from connecting these two independent fields, my analysis is limited to the emergence and institutional location of film festival studies. Throughout this book, I thus use ‘festival studies’ as a shorthand for the development of a field of research concerned with film and media festivals.

Queering festival studies: critical (film) festival studies and the festival as a method This book attempts to navigate the fine line between being about LGBTQ festivals and queering festival studies. In theorizing LGBTQ festivals, I aim to reveal the political project and axiological coordinates of festival studies. As White’s and Waugh and Straayer’s dossiers suggest, LGBTQ festivals offer a productive framework for reconceptualizing festivals because and in spite of identity: LGBTQ festivals’ focus on identity makes visible the power dynamics

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at the heart of both festival organizing and academic knowledge production.29 In ‘queering festival studies’, this book attends to both the knowledge created by festivals (queering festivals) and the ways in which scholars create knowledge of and on festivals (queering festival studies). While the lexicon ‘uncut’ clearly points to my own position and biases as a gay man – the gendered imbalance this book suffers from as well as the desires, fantasies, and imagined encounters it is born out of – this project is informed by feminist historiographies and epistemologies.30 My use of Women’s Studies might seem anachronistic as the discipline (if it ever cohesively existed) has been incorporated (both figuratively and administratively) within gender studies and queer theory departments. In recuperating some of Women’s Studies’ theoretical debates, in particular as it relates to the regimes that regulate academic knowledge production, this book hopes to, as Elizabeth Freeman elegantly states, ‘min[e] the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions’.31 In particular, feminist historiography attempts to counter the erasure of women from archives/academia and to account for the absence of ontology of the entity known as women. Schematically, scholars such as Denise Riley and Joan Wallach Scott seek to simultaneously question the disciplinary assumptions underlying the writing of linear (some would say heteronormative) history and resist trans-historical essentializing narratives.32 In this book, I use feminist historiography both as a method for examining the political project of festival scholarship and as a model for thinking about queer subjects throughout history. Feminist historiography urges us to simultaneously attend to the politics of history-writing and find productive

29 To that end, I am not interested in countering the widespread and problematic assumption according to which gay and lesbian festivals would be of a lesser quality because of identity. Taking LGBTQ festivals as symptomatic of festivals’ role in knowledge production, my inquiry seeks to bypass the question of legitimacy altogether. 30 While this book strives not to participate in the erasure of lesbians from queer film history, it certainly reflects both my own position as a gay man and the gender imbalance at the heart of queer f ilm history. As I will argue in Chapters 2 and 3, this erasure is partly an effect of the uneasy positioning of lesbian f ilmmaking / scholarship between feminist and LGBTQ movements. Similarly, trans filmmaking is relatively recent – and can be seen as being at times erased by the type of historiographical narrative I propose. Future research will address the complex relationships between trans and gay and lesbian cinemas at festivals, as well as the recent development of trans film festivals. 31 Freeman, Time Binds, 16. 32 Riley, ‘Does a Sex Have a History? “Women” and Feminism’, 122; Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’; Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History.

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ways of accounting for the similitudes and differences among queer subjects separated in time and space. To that end, my use of Women’s Studies echoes recent discussions on queer temporalities. Drawing on Michel Foucault, scholars have argued that the notion ‘gays and lesbians’ is a relatively recent (Western) construct.33 In that framework, queerness entails a particular relationship to time: LGBTQ people have been simultaneously erased from official histories and archives and positioned outside of the linear temporality of heterosexuality.34 In that context, scholars have tried to find ways of accounting for the separation of queer subjects in time, attempting to negotiate the fine line between the historical specificity of LGBTQ identities and the transhistorical constant of same-sex desire.35 Film offers here a productive framework for understanding LGBTQ history and identities. As Richard Dyer rightly notes in what may be considered as the first academic book on homosexuality and film, ‘gays have had a special relationship to the cinema’.36 Indeed, photographs and films played a major role in the constitution of gay and lesbian subjectivities: the development of imaging technologies parallels Foucault’s description of the proliferation of a modern discourse on (homo)sexuality in the 19th century.37 In that context, photographs and films constitute what Waugh calls a ‘communal currency’38 as they ‘manage not only to resemble the living flesh of everyday sexual experience (iconic) but also to testify to the existence of that flesh (indexical)’.39 LGBTQ festivals refract the temporalities of the cinematic apparatus: in curating a wide assortment of gay and lesbian films, they fundamentally join queer subjects in and through time, visualize (or evidence) queerness, and entail a specific relationship to temporality. In addition to feminist historiography, this book is inspired by the debates over the shift from Women’s Studies to Gender and Sexuality Studies in the 1990s. This period provoked a definitional crisis, forcing scholars to describe 33 Halperin, ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?’, 257. 34 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Edelman, No Future. 35 See among others: Carolyn Dinshaw et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, 178. This debate is largely indebted to 1980s feminist historiography. 36 Dyer, Gays and Film, 2nd edition. Dyer’s use of the word ‘gays’ includes lesbians. 37 Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol.1 : La volonté de savoir. For an analysis of the role played by these new imaging technologies in shaping medical and scientific discourses on the queer body, see: Terry, ‘The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity’; Terry, ‘Lesbians under the Medical Gaze’. These imaging technologies were also are the core of Hirschfeld’s scientific treatises. See: Dyer, Now You See It, 1st edition, 34. 38 Waugh, ‘Cultivated Colonies’. 39 Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 21. [Emphasis in the original]

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the differences between the interdisciplinary discipline Women’s Studies, the political project of Women’s Studies as a f ield committed to social justice, and the constitution of Women’s Studies as a method of research slowly adopted in various non-identity-based departments and disciplines (including film studies). 40 My use of these debates is (1) historical, as they are emblematic of the advent of neoliberal universities and the evolution of identity politics, and (2) epistemological, for what they offer is an analytics of the power dynamics at the heart of academic knowledge production (one particularly tuned in to how our attachments to our objects of study shape the scholarship we write). These debates are consequently refracted in the two theoretical concepts around which this book is organized: ‘critical festival studies’ and ‘the festival as a method’. 41 ‘Critical festival studies’ operates as an epistemological critique, an analysis of the methodological conundrums and political projects that structure the field of film festival studies. It reveals the assumptions built into festival studies – how our quest for academic legitimacy orients our research toward particular ‘festivals that matter’. Conversely, ‘the festival as a method’ mobilizes festivals not solely as objects of research but as ideal sites for understanding cinematic cultures. ‘The festival as a method’ tunes us in to the regimes of knowledge production presupposed in the festival format itself. As curated juxtapositions of moving images, festivals exemplify many of film studies’ theoretical conundrums, such as spectatorship, film cultures, and representational queries. To that end, LGBTQ Film Festivals operates simultaneously as a critique (or queering) of festival studies and as a method for expanding – or uncutting – the field.

Labour of love: desiring scholars/festivals ‘Love! Drama! Sex! Politics!’42

As it will become clear, this book foregrounds my own positionality and draws a parallel between the act of doing queer academic research and that 40 Among others: Boxer, ‘For and About Women’; Brown, ‘The Impossibility of Women’s Studies’; Scott, ‘Women’s Studies on the Edge’; Stacey, ‘Is Academic Feminism an Oxymoron?’; Wiegman, ed., Women’s Studies on Its Own; Wiegman, Object Lessons. 41 I borrow the concept ‘critical festival studies’ from Ezra Winton, see: Robbins, Saglier, and Winton, ‘Interview with Ezra Winton, Director of Programming at Cinema Politica’. 42 Inside Out Toronto, 2009 tagline.

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of festival organizing. It is animated by the belief that festival organizing and academic writing are not antithetical. Both of these activities offer a framework for understanding the stakes and material realities of knowledge production. To that end, LGBTQ Film Festivals refuses to separate, or cut, the author from both its object of study and the people it pays homage to. This book is, as festival organizers put it, ‘a labour of love’ – one that is offered to the reader yet that cannot be disentangled from my own experiences. While the insider/outsider binary (which I deconstruct in Chapters 1 and 3) has structured the field of festival studies, I cannot claim the objective position of the scholar-as-observer – doing research on rather than with and at festivals. As such, LGBTQ Film Festivals reflects my own ‘circuits’ and ‘networks’. This book is the result of numerous conversations and arguments. I draw inspiration and knowledge from my experiences, as a volunteer and curator at Écrans Mixtes Lyon, MIX NYC, and Image+Nation Montréal, a film professional liaison officer at Cannes’s Queer Palm, a festival liaison officer at the Queer Media Database Canada/Québec, and above all as an avid festival-goer. I do not pretend full authorship and cannot separate myself from the events this book focuses on and/or the people who have frequented them – some of whom I have loved. My tendency to adopt the personal will not surprise queer scholars: early gay and lesbian film studies notoriously refused to separate academic labour and community-based politics. From crying in the New York Public Library archives, especially while reading the last letters sent to Vito Russo, to sustaining friendships through historical research, my positionality as researcher and my scholarship refract the role of queer sociality within academic knowledge production. 43 As Foucault famously argues: The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are.

43 I consulted the Vito Russo Archives exactly 25 years after Russo’s death – and was thus the first scholar able to access several boxes of personal letters and documents which were previously restricted. I was overwhelmed by Russo’s love letters to his long-term partner Jeffrey Sevcik, as well as by the farewell notes sent by his students at the University of California, in Santa Cruz. I am forever grateful to the New York Public Library staff who, despite asking me to leave the room, offered me their moral support (and handkerchief!).

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The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship. 44

Some readers will, between the lines, notice sticky strings and traces of past and present encounters – my own as well as those of the friends and colleagues this book analyzes. Friendship and fucking, be it in an academic context or at festivals, structure artistic and intellectual productions. The separation of the personal from the intellectual, often held as a cornerstone of so-called objective research, erases not only how queer people sustain communities but also how our artistic and scholarly endeavours are always the result of collaborations and chosen networks of friends. 45 In the context of this book, I do not want to pretend I have not gained (literal and figurative) insider knowledge, for instance, in living with someone who has volunteered at and curated for one of the festivals I examine. Similarly, this book would not be possible without my PhD advisor, Thomas Waugh, someone whose scholarship and curatorial practices are analyzed in various chapters. Friendship/fucking, gossip, and ‘insider’ knowledge structure both queer scholars’ and festival organizers’ experiences. To that end, LGBTQ Film Festivals is fully aligned with B. Ruby Rich’s use of the retrospective gaze of the autobiography as a method: her book Chick Flicks, which has curiously been overlooked by festival scholars, may be the only full-length monograph on sustaining friendships, collaborations, and sexual encounters at and through festivals / academic conferences. As Rich eloquently puts it, Knowledge can be acquired and exhibited in a variety of ways. To read and then to write: that’s the standard intellectual route. In the years of my own formation, though, there were many other options. Journals and journeys, conferences and conversations, partying and politicking, going to movies and going to bed. 46 44 Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’; originally published as: Foucault, ‘De l’amitié comme mode de vie’. 45 The title of this introduction was inspired by John Greyson’s 1997 Un©ut, a f ilm about intellectual property, censorship, and queer collaborations. In addition to featuring some of the people this book pays homage to, Un©ut is an exercise in artistic collaborations through networks of friendship. On this film, see: Zeilinger and Coombe, ‘Three Peters and an Obsession with Pierre’. On the role played by festivals in sustaining friendships: Damiens, ‘Incestuous Festivals’. 46 Rich, Chick Flicks, 3. While B. Ruby Rich’s writings on queer cinema are abundantly quoted by festival scholars, her earlier articles on feminist filmmaking (and women’s film festivals!) have

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In foregrounding my own experience at LGBTQ festivals, I do not mean to replay the stereotypes that ‘queer people would be obsessed with sexuality’ and that ‘people attending LGBTQ festivals would not care about film’. 47 If this book runs the risk of being too personal, it reveals how my attachments to festivals (and the boys who frequent them) have shaped this research.

The cut: a note on methodology As I implied earlier, festival studies has largely relied on case studies. In analyzing particular festivals, scholars may inadvertently replay festivals studies’ quest for legitimacy: as such, scholars are asked to simultaneously justify why a particular festival matters and to cast this event as emblematic of the festival phenomenon as a whole. Put another way, case studies entail paradigmatic readings. 48 They encode particular assumptions about what festivals are and refract the disciplinary assumptions embedded in the field. This book attempts to resist the imperative of case studies. It adopts an eclectic corpus composed of established festivals, ephemeral events that only exist as traces in archival collections, and festivals which are generally ignored in our scholarship. My analysis is, however, limited to LGBTQ festivals in Western Europe, the US, and Canada. While I run the risk of replaying a Western-centred description of the festival phenomenon, this book cannot account for forms of same-sex sexualities that do not fit with American or European gayness. As Foucault reminds us, ‘sexuality’ is a relatively recent concept, tied to and emerging through particular discursive regimes. 49 There is little evidence that ‘homosexuality’ adequately describes non-Western same-sex subjectivities. Any consideration of non-Western festivals requires both a deep ethnographic knowledge of the country in which an event is organized and an understanding of foreign languages. Applying the same been relatively ignored. As such this conundrum illustrates quite well the uneasy positioning of lesbians within ‘gay and lesbian cinema’. 47 Queer scholars are constantly asked to justify their focus on queer cinema as cinema. My experience at the 2015 NECS Conference is here quite instructive: as I was presenting on the parts of Chapter 1 that pay homage to festival-goers I have known and loved, someone accused me of insisting too much on the festival as a space of sociality – of prioritizing queerness over cinema. 48 Wiegman, Object Lessons, 32. 49 Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol.1.; Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité; vol.2 : L’Usage des plaisirs.

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monolithic frame of analysis might submerge these subjectivities under the umbrella of a global gayness, thus replaying the imperialism of Western frameworks. Although my focus in on LGBTQ festivals organized in the West, I do not want to suggest that ‘homosexuality’ and ‘queer cinema’ are concepts that can be applied unilaterally to describe the realities of LGBTQ people in various European countries, Canada, and the US. In resituating festivals within the larger context of geographically specific understandings of queerness, I partly aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the West – one that does not take US identity politics as the only way of expressing same-sex desire.

Curating the book As this book suggests, LGBTQ festivals’ curatorial practices oftentimes operate through a juxtaposition of films, a collage that encompasses very different films (in terms of format, temporality, and geographic origin) yet creates the illusion of a whole. Festivals produce knowledge through a sedimentation of discourses and representations. The organization of this book reflects the act of curation. Each chapter pays attention to a specific theoretical conundrum. Taken together, these five chapters illustrate both the regimes of knowledge production at the heart of the festival phenomenon and the epistemological conundrums of festival studies. Chapter 1, ‘Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies’ explores the historiographical and political project of festival studies. In considering both queer film festivals’ investment in preserving their own history (or lack thereof) and the state of various French, Canadian, and American archives, I am interested in two inter-related issues. 1. How do institutional settings, professionalization, and sexual politics shape festivals’ archival practices and/or the very existence of archives on film festivals? 2. How might we understand the gaps in the archives, the presence of documents that attest to the existence of yet do not describe ephemeral festivals? In rescuing or recovering festivals which have been erased from traditional histories, Chapter 1 operates a critique of festival studies’ disciplinary unconscious. It reveals the set of theoretical and axiological coordinates which have conditioned the development of the field: as such, festival studies is a project dedicated to making (some) festivals matter within film studies. In uncovering ephemeral festivals, I thus advocate for a ‘critical festival studies’.

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Centring on some of festival studies’ theoretical conundrums, Chapter 2 and 3 expand on what a ‘critical festival studies’ could entail. In analyzing the regimes of taste and films cultures that condition the circulation and cultural currency of queer cinemas, Chapter 2, ‘The Queer Film Ecosystem’, aims to reconceptualize the notion of festival circuits. It locates queer cinema at the intersection of two regimes of cultural value – identity and cinephilia. Through a Bourdieusian approach to taste-making and cultural production, I highlight how both festivals and scholars negotiate these conflicting cultural values. Film traff ic relies on a symbolic economy that is based on and fosters differentiated cultural discourses on queer cinema. In analyzing the strategies of both European and American film distributors, I underscore how this interplay between queerness and cinephilia is strategically mobilized so as to assert a f ilm’s legitimacy and authenticity. Chapter 3, ‘Out of the Celluloid Closet, Into the Theatres!’ revisits traditional historical accounts of the development of both gay and lesbian cinema and festivals. In particular, I trace the emergence and mutation of the concept ‘gay and lesbian cinema(s)’ – a relatively recent notion shaped through an interplay between film criticism, festival organizing, and scholarship. I detail the careers and works of various critics and scholars as they intersect with LGBTQ festival organizing. In highlighting the networks of friendship, fucking, and collaboration that informed the development of LGBTQ cinema, I nuance the divide between scholars, critics, and practitioners that has been instrumental in asserting the legitimacy of festival studies and describe various uses of the festival format as a praxis of academic knowledge production. Chapters 4 and 5 shift the focus from ‘critical festival studies’ to ‘the festival as a method’. Chapter 4, ‘Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory and LGBTQ Festivals’ Temporality’ pays attention to LGBTQ festivals’ visual productions and curatorial practices. As events dedicated to the screening of sexual images, LGBTQ festivals are enmeshed with the accumulation of temporalities and affects. As such, their f ilm selection is akin to a collage or a juxtaposition of f ilms, each with a peculiar relationship to history. Through their selections and visual productions, festivals make time ‘matter’: they constitute a virtual archive and entail a particular type of relationship with gay and lesbian visual history. In positing that festivals constitute an ideal space for theorizing gay and lesbian spectatorship, Chapter 4 argues that LGBTQ festivals exemplify some of the modalities through which we access, visually, gay and lesbian cultural memory.

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Chapter 5, ‘Images + Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Homoscapes’ focuses on the geographic imaginaries embedded in festival programming. In screening films from various countries, festivals participate in the circulation of various geographically specific representations of queerness. I argue that festivals provide us with a model for thinking through the globalization of queerness. Borrowing from gay linguists’ focus on the interplay between geography and subjectivities, I pay attention to the language used to describe various films and contend that catalogues perform the task of cultural translation. They reinterpret films from a foreign context for a nationally situated audience. As institutions screening films from all around the world, they simultaneously localize films from other geographical contexts and provide us with various discourses on the globalization of queerness. While this book can be understood as an epistemological intervention in festival studies, it should not be taken as a totalizing critique of the field. As such, it is not exempt from the conundrums it seeks to analyze. I address these issues in my conclusion, a meditation on the nature of field interventions that posits critical f ilm festival studies and ‘the festivals that did not matter’ as already enmeshed in the search for scholarly legitimacy.

Speaking in queer tongues: a note on terminology The words we use matter, especially so when it comes to sexuality. They refract various forms of articulation between desires, subjectivities and social movements. Concepts such as ‘gays and lesbians’, ‘LGBTQ’, and ‘queer’ reflect historically situated conceptualizations of sexual desires. The difference between gay and lesbian, LGBTQ, and queer festivals is however not so clear-cut. The name a festival ‘gives itself’ is not necessarily indicative of its sexual politics.50 A self-proclaimed queer festival might adhere to a quite classical gay and lesbian programming. As Zielinski puts it, these festivals have gone through a number of important name changes over the years that reflect, to various degrees of success, changes in their structure and policies regarding content, effectively revealing their selfunderstanding and how they want to been [sic] understood […] In fact, to discuss these festivals in general quickly becomes quite a semantic 50 As explored in: Gever, ‘“The Names We Give Ourselves”’.

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challenge. Does the use of ‘lesbian and gay’ negate the broadened LGBTQ claim of most festival today? When or under what conditions might an LGBTQ film festival ever be queer? Not only have their names changed, but also the meaning of the words comprising them.51

For these reasons, I adopt the following conventions: – When discussing a specific event, I respect the terminology adopted by the festival – the name it gave itself within its historical context. – In order to avoid anachronism and to emphasize historical specificity, I mobilize the term best fitted with a festival’s context. For instance: when discussing 1970s festivals, I use the terminology ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’, – When my inquiry is not limited by historical specificity, I mobilize ‘gay and lesbian’, ‘LGBTQ’, and ‘queer’ interchangeably.

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51 Zielinski, ‘Furtive Steady Glances’, 224-225.

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de Valck, Marijke, and Mimi Soeteman. ‘“And the Winner is…” What Happens Behind the Scenes of Film Festival Competitions’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (2010): 290–307. Dickinson, Kay. Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond. New York City, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher S. Nealon, and Tan Hoang Nguyen. ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2 (2007): 177–195. Dovey, Lindiwe, Joshua McNamara, and Federico Olivieri. ‘“From, by, for”: Nairobi’s Slum Film Festival, Film Festival Studies, and the Practices of Development’. Jump Cut 55 (2013). Dyer, Richard. Gays and Film. 1st edition. London, UK: BFI, 1977. ———. Gays and Film. 2nd edition. New York City, NY: Zoetrope, 1980. ———. Now You See It. 1st edition. London, UK: Routledge, 1990. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Film Festivals Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe’. In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 83–107. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Foucault, Michel. ‘De l’amitié comme mode de vie’. Gai Pied, no. 25 (1981): 8–20. ———. ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley, 135–140. New York City, NY: The New Press, 1982. ———. Histoire de la sexualité, vol.1: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. ———. Histoire de la sexualité, vol.2: L’usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Gever, Martha. ‘“The Names We Give Ourselves”’. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson and Martha Gever, 191–201. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992 Halperin, David M. ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?’ History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989): 257–274. Iordanova, Dina. ‘The Film Festival Circuit’. In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 23-39. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. ———. ‘Film Festivals and Dissent: Can Film Change the World?’ In Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism, edited by Cheung Ruby and Dina Iordanova, 13–30. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. Iordanova, Dina and Ruby Cheung, eds. Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2010.

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———. eds. Film Festival Yearbook 3: Film Festivals in Asia. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2011. Iordanova, Dina, and Ragan Rhyne, eds. Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. Iordanova, Dina, and Leshu Torchin, eds. Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. Iordanova, Dina, and Stefanie Van de Peer, eds. Film Festival Yearbook 6: Film Festivals and the Middle East. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2014. Loist, Skadi. ‘Queer Film Culture: Performative Aspects of LGBT/Q Film Festivals’. PhD Diss., University of Hamburg, 2015. Marlow-Mann, Alex, ed. Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2013. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York City, NY: NYU Press, 2009. Rhyne, Ragan. ‘Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders’. In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 9–22. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. ———. ‘Pink Dollars: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals and the Economy of Visibility’. PhD diss., New York University, 2007. Rich, B. Ruby. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. ———. ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 620–625. Richards, Stuart. The Queer Film Festival: Popcorn and Politics. New York City, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. New York City, NY: Macmillan, 1988. ———. ‘Does a Sex Have a History? “Women” and Feminism’. New Formations 1, no. 35 (1987). Robbins, Papagena, and Viviane Saglier. ‘Interview with Ezra Winton, Director of Programming at Cinema Politica’. Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 3, no. 2 (2015): 68–85. ———. ‘Introduction’. Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 3, no. 2 (2015): 1–8. Scott, Joan W. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. ———. ‘Women’s Studies on the Edge’. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (1997). Stacey, Janet. ‘Is Academic Feminism an Oxymoron?’ Signs 25, no. 4 (2000): 1189–1194. Stevens, Kirsten. Australian Film Festivals: Audience, Place, and Exhibition Culture. New York City, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

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Stringer, Julian. ‘Regarding Film Festivals’. PhD diss., Indiana University, 2003. Taillibert, Christel. Tribulations festivalières : les festivals de cinéma et audiovisuel en France. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2009. Tascón, Sonia. ‘Opening Thoughts’. In Activist Film Festivals: Towards a Political Subject, edited by Sonia Tascón and Tyson Wils, 3–4. London, UK: Intellect Books, 2016. Terry, Jennifer. ‘Lesbians under the Medical Gaze: Scientists Search for Remarkable Differences’. Journal of Sex Research 27, no. 3 (1990): 317–339. ———. ‘The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity’. In Posthuman Bodies, edited by Judith M. Halberstam and Ira Livingston, 135–161. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. Waugh, Thomas. ‘Cultivated Colonies: Notes on Queer Nationhood and the Erotic Image’. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2, no. 2–3 (1993): 145–178. ———. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York City, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996. ———. ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’ Le Berdache 30 (1982): 7–9. Waugh, Thomas, and Chris Straayer, eds. ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 4 (2005): 579–603. ———. eds.. ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 599–625. ———. eds. ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Three: Artists Speak Out’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 1 (2008): 121–137. Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. ———. ed. Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. White, Patricia. ‘Introduction: On Exhibitionism’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 1 (1999): 73–78. ———. ed. ‘Queer Publicity: A Dossier on Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals Essays’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 1 (1999): 73–93. Winton, Ezra. ‘Good for the Heart and Soul, Good for Business: The Cultural Politics of Documentary at the Hot Docs Film Festival’. PhD diss., Carleton University, Ottawa, 2013. Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk. Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Zeilinger, Martin, and Rosemary J. Coombe. ‘Three Peters and an Obsession with Pierre: Intellectual Property in John Greyson’s Un©ut’. In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie, and Thomas Waugh, 438–449. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2013.

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Zielinski, Ger. ‘Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals’. PhD diss., McGill, 2008.

Filmography Un©ut. Directed by John Greyson. 1997. 97 min. Canada. PROD: Grey Zone. DIST: Domino Film & Television International.

1.

Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies Abstract Chapter 1 explores the historiographical and political project of festival studies. In considering queer film festivals’ investment in preserving their own history (or lack thereof) and the state of various archives, I am interested in two inter-related issues. 1. How do institutional settings, professionalization, and sexual politics shape festivals’ archival practices and/or the very existence of archives on film festivals? 2. How might we understand the gaps in the archives, the presence of documents that attest to the existence of yet do not describe ephemeral festivals? In recovering festivals which have been erased from traditional histories, Chapter 1 operates a critique of festival studies’ disciplinary unconscious. It reveals the set of theoretical coordinates which conditioned the development of the field. Keywords: festivals; archives; epistemology; ephemera; methods; festival studies

‘But then, perhaps we are taking our pleasure a bit too seriously? It is, after all, rather difficult in an academic discourse to avoid the pleasures of seriousness […]. Indeed, to divorce ourselves from serious pleasure would immediately involve us in another marriage with it, the very gesture of exclusion reinscribing us in its hierarchical structure. Once again, the radical pleasure of abandoning seriousness becomes a serious pleasure.’1

1

Rutsky and Wyatt, ‘Serious Pleasures’, 10.

Damiens, A., LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728409_ch01

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In this introductory chapter, I turn to the question of LGBTQ festivals’ physical archives and festival studies’ disciplinary apparatus.2 I pay particular attention to festivals which have been forgotten: some of the events I describe only exist as neglected traces within archival collections. Symptomatically, these ephemeral events are also ignored in the academic literature as the field is typically concerned with festivals’ longevity and the role they play in the economy of film. In defining festivals as ephemeral events, this chapter thus sets out to interrogate festival studies’ historiographical project: it argues that our focus on major, established events simultaneously justifies festival studies’ theoretical apparatus and reasserts the legitimacy of festival research within film studies. In centring festivals that failed or that happened only once, this chapter hopes to carve a space for a reimagining of festival studies itself. While this chapter sets to detail some of the conundrums of historical research (which I develop further in Chapter 2 and 3) through what I call a ‘critical festival studies’, it also can be taken as an homage to the ephemeral nature of queer cinematic life: these traces act as a testament to the remarkable work of an army of anonymous festival organizers and film lovers whose existence may never be evidenced or proven through so-called objective methods. Centred specifically on queer film festivals, its conclusions largely apply to postcolonial and activist cinemas – to genres that are usually relegated to the margins and whose archives are always under erasure.

Cruising the archives This chapter is deeply indebted to my numerous, sometimes unsuccessful, trips to the archives. Needless to say, festivals’ records have been unevenly kept and preserved – a fact which conditions the very parameters of any historical inquiry. This chapter is thus a meditation on what gets to be historicized and on what is missing from the archives. It is an ethnographic description of my own struggle to get access to specific collections, of the desires invested in my encounters with archives, and of my relationship with history-writing – a practice Simon Ofield associates with cruising: 2 While several scholars have extended the notion to include the virtual archives created by scholars (the archival turn), this chapter deals with physical institutional collections (archives in the traditional sense of the word). I analyze festivals as archives in Chapter 4. For an analysis of festivals’ use of archival material, see: Marlow-Mann, ed., Film Festival Yearbook 5.

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Cruising is not represented as the alternative to more professional forms of investigation, but understood as a form of practice always already caught up in the disciplines that it attempts to dodge and the understandings that it seeks to displace. […] [You] can never be quite sure if you will find what you are looking for, or if you will come across something you never knew you wanted, or even knew existed. In this way, cruising is a productive rather than reductive process, and has an in-built potential for diversion, irregular connections, and disorderly encounters.3

Cruising, as a metaphor for a hazardous encounter with historical documents, points to the affective longings invested in historical research and to the productive nature of archival failures and mismatches. Sometimes, one f inds only traces and ghosts; the labour of searching and courting archives may be more exciting and productive than any eventual archival pay-dirt moment. 4 As an oftentimes illegal investment of space with desire, cruising further draws our attention to the institutionalization/ legitimation of archival materials (or lack thereof) as well as to the productive nature of furtive, ephemeral, encounters with the unexpected traces of queer cinematic life contained within established collections. It resituates historical research within intergenerational desire, defined as an unexpected erotic relationship with history that has the potential to disrupt or at least suspend linear, heteronormative temporality – a conundrum best summed up in Lucas Hilderbrand’s play on Derrida: ‘archive fever and other STDs’.5 In that context, this chapter does not aim to establish a reparative or an alternative history of LGBTQ festivals. Far from providing any sort of happy ending or closure, it hopes to suspend the temptation of linear history and to take seriously these compromising yet ephemeral traces and ghosts. This chapter is an elegy, one that resuscitates the traces of a utopian past in the hope they might energize contemporary festival research and organizing.

Compromising evidences: ephemeral traces in the archives Over the past few years, I have conducted several research trips to the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California 3 4 5

Ofield, ‘Cruising the Archive’, 351;7. Dever, ‘Papered Over’, 70. Hilderbrand, ‘Historical Fantasies’, 329.

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(Los Angeles), the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, the Fales Special Collections (New York University), the Archives gaies du Québec (Montreal), and the LGBT Community Center National History Archive (NYC). I have also consulted several private collections, in France and Canada. Other field trips have remained unsuccessful, either because the documents collected by volunteers and archivists were not publicly accessible or catalogued (Cherry Grove Historical Archives on Fire Island) or because of quarrels and community-based struggles over the very constitution of archives (Paris’s Conservatoire des archives et mémoires LGBT and the Fonds Chomarat at Lyon’s public library). Throughout my research, I stumbled upon various ephemeral traces of events which have been forgotten in historical accounts of LGBTQ festivals. Some of them predate San Francisco’s 1977 Gay Film Fest, oftentimes held to be the oldest and/or first LGBTQ festival. From 1975 to the mid-1980s for instance, the French gay liberation movement organized over a dozen of festivals in small cities outside of Paris. Others were held in larger cities, such as the 1976 l’Autre amour (Lyon) or the 1978 Mémoire des sexualités (Marseille). It is almost impossible to determine how many festivals happened in the decade, as official archives at best only mention these events. Nevertheless, these events uniquely express a commitment to a radical homosexuality that aimed at visually and politically disrupting 1970s French society.6 Similarly, several US-based adult theatres organized, as early as the late 1960s, gay film festivals, oftentimes intermixing pornographic and softcore features – a topic I develop in Chapter 2 and whose neglected history points to the marginalization of so-called adult cinemas within film historiography. The phenomenon was furthermore not limited to adult businesses: for instance, the Janus Theatre advertised a 1973 First American Gay Film Festival (in collaboration with the Washington D.C. Area Gay Community Council), not to be confused with the 1978 First Gay Film Festival (organized this time by the American Film Institute in D.C.).7 In New York, I found traces of a lesbian film festival that may have happened in 1976, organized in partnership with the Cultural council formation.8 6 Most of these events were not called ‘film festival’ but semaine du cinema (‘film week’). This partly explains their marginalization in the literature around LGBTQ film festivals. These events are documented in: Jablonski, ‘De l’ouverture du ghetto à la dépolitisation’; Fleckinger, ‘Nous sommes un fléau social’; Isarte, ‘Silence ! On parle.’ 7 The 1973 First American Gay Film Festival is documented in: Janus Theater, ‘Press Release: First American Gay Film Festival, in DC’. The 1976 First Gay Film Festival is mentioned in: Dicks, ‘Memo from Homer Dicks on the Celluloid Closet’. 8 ‘Lesbian Film Festival’.

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These events were quite eclectic and do not readily correspond to classic definitions of what a film festival is. Some of them were put on by universities, such as UCLA’s 1977 Gay Awareness Week Film Festival and 1979 Projecting Stereotypes; Concordia University’s 1977 Images of Homosexuality on the Screen; New York University’s 1983 Abuse; University of Minnesota’s Lavender Images (1987-1989); or Université de Nanterre’s Ciné-Rebelle (2014-2015).9 Others were organized by cinematheques and museums (among them: Baltimore’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1988, New York’s Donnell Library Center in 1993, and Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive in 1995).10 Film distributors and producers have also held festivals, such as Women Make Movies’s 1979 or 1980 In Our Own Image, organized in collaboration with the National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers and the Chelsea Gay Association (NYC).11 These festivals mostly exist as traces within the archives – as sole flyers, sometimes even undated. This poses a serious methodological issue for historical research as it is often impossible to determine whether these events actually took place. Zielinski’s description of Toronto’s 1980 First International Gay Film Festival is here particularly instructive: I found a piece of ephemera, a simple flyer that announced the 1980 ‘First International Gay Film Festival’ in Toronto, but could not find any source to confirm that the event ever took place. There is no record of it in any newspapers of the period. Its postal address is now a parking lot at the south end of the village. This of course does not mean that it did not take place, but rather that as an event it is left indeterminate, namely it may have taken place.12 9 The 1977 Gay Awareness Week Film Festival is documented in: Gay Student Union, ‘UCLA Gay Awareness Week Film Festival’. On the 1979 Projecting Stereotypes: Gay Student Union, ‘Proposal for PROJECTING STEREOTYPES’; Coordinators of Projecting Gay Stereotypes, ‘Evaluation’. On Concordia’s Images of Homosexuality on the Screen, see: Waugh, Romance of Transgression in Canada, 474. On Abuse: National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘NALGF & NYU Lesbian/Gay Film Festival Present Abuse’. On Lavender Images: ‘Lavender Images – A Lesbian and Gay Film Retrospective’; ‘Lavender Images II’; ‘Lavender Images III’. Screenings were also organized in 1977 by the University of Melbourne’s GaySoc. See: Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 63. 10 The Baltimore series is mentioned in: Jusick, ‘MIX Is HELL’, 93. On Viewpoint: Donnell Library Center, ‘Viewpoint: A Film Series on the Crucial Political and Social Issues of Our Times’. In a Different Light: Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), ‘In a Different Light Film & Video Series’. 11 ‘Women Make Movies & Chelsea Gay Association Present In Our Own Image – Five Film Programs of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Feminist Consciousness’. 12 Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 144n114 [emphasis in the original]. See also: Zielinski, ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera’.

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Establishing a complete survey of minor LGBTQ festivals might well be an impossible task. Nevertheless, these traces remind us of what seems to be missing from the archives: not only do archival collections abound with such traces, they also do not include festivals that were never archived in the first place. Importantly, this type of ephemeral festival still exists today. While my focus is here on festivals organized from the 1970s to the 1990s, ephemeral festivals are still marginalized and will not be archived. In 2015 for instance, three LGBTQ festivals were held in Montreal. One of them, the Festival de films LGBT de Montréal, was organized by a local porn star. It was not renewed the following year, because of its modest size and its absence of support from the local LGBTQ community. It will likely be forgotten.

Unpacking the archives: (dis)ordering ephemeral traces While it is impossible to correct the historical record, one may ponder the role played by archives in forgetting or remembering ephemeral festivals. This situation is not unique to LGBTQ festivals: as scholars working on or with alternative or activist histories know all too well, archives at best only partially record the cultural life of minoritized groups. They reflect a dominant ordering of knowledge which erases or conceals the bodies, cultural practices, and remains of people who do not fit neatly within official histories.13 Kate Eichhorn thus insightfully argues that archives consist of ‘repositories of not only affect but also order’.14 The organization of archival collections conditions our relationship to historiography: archives do many things, but they do not necessarily stage encounters with the past. Following Foucault’s premise that the archive not be understood as something that ‘safeguards’ or ‘preserves’ past statements – not be understood as something that ‘collects the dust of statements that have become inert once more’ – contemporary theorising on the archive has emphasized the archive’s status as a historiographic rather than a preservationist technology.15

As an unexpected exploration of traces and ghosts, cruising tunes us in to the role played by archival institutions in both legitimizing and concealing 13 See among others: Beins, ‘Making a Place for Lesbian Life at the Lesbian Herstory Archives’, 27. 14 Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism, 3. [Emphasis in the original] 15 Ibid, 7. [Emphasis in the original]

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queer history. These traces of gay and lesbian cinematic life constitute what Ann Cvetkovich aptly calls a ‘problem archive’: they act not only as rare indexical proofs of a forgotten past but also as paradoxical reminders that something is missing from the archives. Queer people’s investment in the moving image, assembled only by happenstance, cannot be fully evidenced – despite and because of the archives.16 In that context, problem archives urge us to attend to the very constitution of archival collections and their ordering principles: we are forced to wonder why and how a document ended up in the archives in the first place. A document’s location within the archives, the history of a particular collection, and the principles of classification and cataloguing (or the absence thereof) used by the institution are as significant as the actual vestiges of a forgotten past. Unsurprisingly, gay and lesbian lives have historically been either forgotten or erased from institutional archives. Indeed, archival institutions operate on an epistemology of visibility: they emphasize the disciplinary apparatus of history whereby, as Joan W. Scott reminds us, ‘seeing [a document] is the origin of knowing’.17 This epistemology of visibility is not particularly suited to an exploration of queer cultural productions. As José Esteban Muñoz argues, gay and lesbian history cannot be evidenced through traditional historical methods: This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.18

In casting documents as evidences that would simply need to be rediscovered, archives obscure both queerness and their own legitimizing principles – the set of representations and ideologies that dictate their mission. Historicizing the relationship between archives and queer lives (paying attention to how it constitutes and makes visible queer subjects as well as to the material realities of document preservation) thus enables us to read traces for what they are: ephemeral ghosts whose presence cannot always be seen and taken as evidence. 16 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 133. See also: DeVun and McClure, ‘Archives Behaving Badly’, 122. 17 Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, 776-778. 18 Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence’, 6.

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The will to record gay and lesbian history is quite recent: institutional archives were, up until the mid-1980s, about ‘something’ rather than about ‘the people’ or ‘somebody’.19 The 1970s gay liberation movement fostered a new interest in gay and lesbian history: the first archives containing materials of interest to gay and lesbian history were personal collections, often hosted within the confines of people’s homes. These community-based archives both recorded the achievements of gay-liberation activists and documented pre-Stonewall same-sex subjectivities. These collections cannot be disentangled from activism: preserving (and making) history was an integral mission of the gay liberation movement.20 Two of the collections I consulted typically fit within the archival ethos of the gay liberation movement, which partly explains my focus on 1970s festivals. The International Gay Information Center Collection was dedicated to preserving the history of New York’s newly formed gay activist scene. While adopting the more classic format of a collection of personal papers, the Vito Russo Collection was donated to the NYPL by Arnie Kantrowitz, who participated in both the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (two groups Vito Russo was particularly active in). It consists in letters from and documents assembled by Russo himself – from the mid 1970s to his AIDS-related death in 1990 at the age of 44. In both cases, the bulk of the collections document politically active organizations from the 1970s to the early 1980s and abound with ephemera. This emphasis on recording gay and lesbian history took on a new importance in the 1990s as the HIV/AIDS epidemic entailed an urgent need to document the lives of gay men and activists who were dying. With the parallel development of gay and lesbian studies in academia and a renewed interest in identity politics and social/local history, gay and lesbian history entered ‘legitimate’ archives.21 For instance, the Fales Library and Special Collection at New York University was created in 1993, as its director Marvin Taylor realized the need to document the lives and cultural production of New York’s recently deceased artists.22 Similarly, the New York Public Library Gay and Lesbian and HIV/AIDS Collections were founded in 1994 as a consequence of both the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the library’s new focus on social history. The same bureaucratic powers that let gay men die of 19 Flinn, ‘Community Histories, Community Archives’, 155. 20 James Fraser, quoted in: Brown, ‘How Queer “Pack Rats” and Activist Archivists Saved Our History’, 123. 21 Flinn, ‘Community Histories, Community Archives’, 156–157. 22 Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism, 101.

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HIV/AIDS ironically participated in the legitimization and preservation of LGBT history: for the first time, gay and lesbian history benefited from the resources associated with professional institutions and archivists, notably in terms of the preservation and cataloging of documents. In the 1990s, archiving became a contentious issue within the LGBTQ community: it encapsulated the increasingly important debate around the institutionalization and political direction taken by the LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS movements and reflected the schism between assimilationist and separatist modes of activism. In particular, activists criticized institutional archives for their lack of involvement in LGBTQ struggles and for refusing to acknowledge the role they played in erasing queer histories. As Cvetkovich argues, activists ‘fear[ed] that [official archives might] falsely represent [themselves] as having an extensive history of collecting gay and lesbian materials, when in fact [their] holdings were not until recently cataloged or publicized as such’.23 Indeed, institutional and community-based collections are not led by the same ethos of preservation and archival politics. This is particularly significant as the principle of ordering, the resources, and the politics of archives not only condition the type of document they collect, but also determine which traces are deemed worthy of being preserved. Gay and lesbian collections within institutional archives can be an asset to the researcher, be it only because of their accessibility. They usually contain both organizational collections (documents that pertain to a specific association or institution) and subject files (grouping documents thematically, using the headings fixed by the Library of Congress). These two ways of ordering are mechanisms of knowledge production in and of themselves, already shaping which type of documents will be visible and preserved. Organizational collections are fundamentally about legitimate and established institutions; they are not particularly suited to an exploration of minor festivals. Furthermore, subject files collections depend on how archivists define what a festival is: while the Library of Congress headings do contain a ‘film festival’ entry, they have not defined the term; minor events are often catalogued under a less accurate heading. Quite typically, the bulk of my discoveries at the NYPL’s International Gay Information Center and the Vito Russo Collections stemmed not from the subject files ‘film festivals’ but rather from headings such as ‘ephemera – diverse’ or personal agendas. Community-based archives might thus be better suited to an analysis of festivals that were forgotten. Because of their commitment to collecting 23 Cvetkovich, Archive of feeling, 245-248.

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ephemeral traces of queer lives, such collections tend to be quite eclectic and to preserve documents that do not necessarily correspond to the rather narrow criteria mobilized by professional archivists. 24 Furthermore, community-based archives oftentimes resist the urge to classify and order their collections, thereby not necessarily prioritizing already legitimated events. However, some documents/collections might simply be unavailable, as these archives are often run by volunteers who may not have fully catalogued their holdings. For instance, I could not consult the vast collection of ephemera acquired by the New York LGBT Center Archives, as these documents are unclassif ied and the institution did not have the necessary resources to call back several dozen boxes of unordered f lyers and posters stored in New Jersey. Similarly, I could not get access to the Cherry Grove Archival Collection on Fire Island, a collection entirely managed by volunteers who are unable to be there on a regular basis and who have not (yet) catalogued their holdings. Most documents are thus inaccessible to researchers. This situation can at times be paradoxical: for instance, while the Arts Project of Cherry Grove and the Cherry Grove Archives Committee regularly organize a festival dealing specif ically with archival queer moving images (OUTTAKES, 2016-ongoing), I could not access several documents contained in the archive (in particular the programmes of the Fire Island Film & Video Festival). 25 Community-based archives have also suffered from censorship legislation: their collections have historically been the target of anti-obscenity laws. In Canada and in the USA, gay and lesbian archives have been surveyed and raided. Documents deemed obscene by State officials were tragically ‘lost’ or destroyed.26 In other cases, tensions with the local LGBTQ community might prevent access to the archives. For instance, despite several attempts to create a unified and accessible LGBTQ archival centre in Paris, collections remain scattered in several private apartments.27

24 Flinn, ‘Community Histories, Community Archives’, 167. 25 On Outtakes: ‘Cherry Grove’s First-Ever Outtakes Film Festival Kicks off Friday Night ‒ Fire Island and Beyond.’ In the archival collection of the New York LGBT Center, I found a 2004 flyer advertising the ‘3rd Fire Island Film and Video Festival’. Other events may have been organized prior to 2001. See: ‘Fire Island Film and Video Festival’. 26 Titkemeyer, ‘Assembling the Fragments and Accessing the Silenced’, 5. 27 This issue may be solved in the near future. With the success of 120 Battements par minutes (directed by Robin Campillo, 2017) – a fiction film on the HIV/AIDS association Act Up Paris, Paris’s city council has voted to finance the creation of an ‘official’ LGBT archival centre.

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In detailing some of the issues associated with the praxis of historical research, I do not aim at criticizing the labour of professional or amateur archivists, but rather to simply expose some of the methodological conundrums associated with cruising these eclectic collections. Archives are never neutral; they already produce and order knowledge, thereby bringing visibility to particular types of festivals while ignoring others. In pondering the ordering principle of particular collections, it becomes clear that the experience of researching traces of forgotten festivals simultaneously entails both frustration and unexpected bliss – because and in spite of the archives. Crucially, it urges us to think carefully about why particular documents ended up in archival collections while others were left out or are inaccessible, and to wonder what we are missing in the absence of records which were either left unpreserved or cannot be consulted.

Festivals that did not matter: festivals’ archival practices and historiography Archives are not the only institutions enmeshed with historiography. As Julian Stringer reminds us, festivals constantly narrate their own history. They both define their audience and position themselves as important players within their respective fields or circuits.28 Consequently, de Valck, in an introduction to festival studies, describes the privileged methods of the field as being based on both ethnographic observation and textual analysis: a solid scholarly account of festivals ‘includes fieldwork and interviews […] [as well as] critical analysis of the variety of texts that is churned out with each festival edition’.29 While archival institutions partly account for why some festivals have been forgotten or are excluded from the literature, we need to take into consideration both the effects of festival studies’ methodologies and festivals’ own relationship to archiving and knowledge production. In particular, festival studies’ reliance on readily available textual productions may inadvertently participate in the marginalization of smaller festivals. As Loist rightly notes, LGBTQ festivals are often organized by precarious cultural workers who may simply not have the time or resources to preserve their own history.30 Past catalogues, flyers, and press releases become useless once the festival 28 Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 112;244. 29 de Valck, ‘Introduction’, 8. 30 Loist, ‘Precarious Cultural Work’.

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is over and are often discarded.31 Kay Armatage exemplifies quite well this conflict between archiving and the material realities of festival organizing: With a few exceptions, women’s film festivals have usually existed on intermittent or volunteer labour, government grants and community centre venues and without permanent institutional homes. Like Toronto Women & Film 1973, often they have been one-off events. Thus they have come and gone, with their erstwhile founders caching old catalogues in their basements (if they had basements) or not at all.32

It is thus necessary to distinguish festivals which have the resources, expertise, and will to preserve their own history from amateur or less legitimate events which never attempted to safeguard their historical records in the first place. Some of the events I described earlier exemplify quite well this distinction. For instance, 1970s French film festivals were organized by local gay liberation groups as a way to circumvent censorship legislation and to energize in-group debates about the direction of the movement. While over a dozen of gay film festivals were held in small cities such as Hyères (36 000 inhabitants at the time), they were never fully archived. They are mentioned only in a few texts, in passing. Their history is largely lost. This situation is not unique to France: activist festivals were for instance organized in Melbourne (1974 and 1975), Amsterdam (1978), and Vienna (1988).33 It is probable that other events were held, as these festivals are triply marginalized in archival collections: as radical festivals which were not necessarily open to outsiders and therefore more likely not to be remembered; as happening outside of the United States and its archival institutions; and as non-English speaking events whose gay character might not be noticed by Anglophone scholars. While we don’t know much about these smaller events, two French gay liberation festivals are well documented. These events, organized in Paris in 1977 and 1978, were the targets of both State censorship and homophobic violence. Waugh recalls that five people, including the event’s chairperson and one of the participating f ilmmakers, had to be hospitalised after an attack on the theatre by 31 Zielinski, ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera’, 141. 32 Armatage, ‘Toronto Women & Film International 1973’, 83. 33 On the festivals organized in Melbourne: Richards, The LGBT Film Festival, 63. On Amsterdam: ‘Gluren in’t Donker Flicker Filmfestival’. On Gay Filmfestival (Vienna): ‘Gay Filmfestival, Vienna’.

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members of the French neo-fascist group, Jeune Nation. The thugs, wearing motorcycle helmets and armed with iron bars, helped themselves to the day’s take of $1000 in addition to smashing things up in general. All of this took place under the benign observation of Paris police officers, who were in the theatre at the time to see if the films were offensive. Later, a demonstration against the ban on the films was forcibly disbanded by police. Gay leaders presenting a petition to the Minister of Culture were carted off for four-hour identity checks. The petition had been signed by Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Arrabal.34

These unfortunate events led to the creation of the gay journal Masques. They were covered in mainstream newspapers. Significantly, newspaper articles systematically describe the 1977 and 1978 Paris festivals as being ‘the first ones’ in France, therefore participating in the erasure of earlier cinematic events put on by the same gay liberation movement.35 As often, newspapers and cultural institutions only document queer people’s impossible or failed history; LGBTQ cultural production is paradoxically legitimized by homophobic violence or death. The question of whether all festivals create and preserve documentation equally applies to events organized by theatre owners. The economic and political realities of film exhibition partly explain the loss of this history and theatre owners’ reluctance to participate in history writing. As part of a theatre’s daily operation, these festivals were not conceived as separate events whose ephemera needed to be documented or preserved. The few documents that could have been preserved might have been lost with the closing of the organizing venue.36 The situation is similar for festivals organized by and within adult theatres. Already marked as potentially obscene and prone to State censorship, they were below the radar, announced only through advertisements in adult magazines. Their ephemera would not have been preserved by any respectable institution. Festivals organized within universities also illustrate the discrimination at the heart of archiving. They were organized for a vast array of reasons, ranging from a questioning or countering of negative representations to starting a conversation on gay and lesbian cinema within film studies 34 Waugh, ‘The Gay Cultural Front’, 36. 35 Masques, ‘Les habits neufs de l’oppression: La reine Victoria frappe toujours’, 32–33 ; Rémès, ‘Dates, chiffres et définitions’. 36 Some made it into archival collections. See for instance: Laemmle Theater, ‘Gay Cinema Invades Beverly Hills!’; Tiffany Theater, ‘The Tiffany Theater in West Los Angeles Will Present a Series of Films Dealing with Homosexuality’.

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departments.37 While festivals that were held as part of f ield-def ining conferences are quite well documented (such as UCLA’s 1983 Gay & Lesbian Media Festival and New York’s 1989 How Do I Look?), others only exist through traces (for instance: Southhampton College’s 1983 Eggo or Cornell’s 1993 festival).38 These three examples – festivals organized by activist organizations, by theatre owners, and by universities – are symptomatic of both the diversity of the LGBTQ festival phenomenon and the precariousness of cultural workers. While festival studies usually relies on textual productions, some festivals may participate less in the preservation of their own histories than others. Taken together, these festivals testify to what Armatage characterizes as an ‘underdeveloped sense of the historical significance of such ephemeral events coupled with the real-world economics of document storage, the social agendas of women’s film festivals, the constraints of the media marketplace, and the scholarly agendas of film studies’.39 Solely examining festivals’ textual productions might lead us to erasing a rich array of events whose format, institutional location, and politics have yet to be fleshed out. While some festivals only exist as traces, others are highly conscious of the importance of archiving and narrating their own history: preserving and representing one’s history can reinforce one’s position as a legitimate event. The Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival (LSF, 1989-ongoing) not only has a volunteer archivist (a position that was held by festival scholar Skadi Loist), it has also recently released a book and a film on its history. 40 This practice is not unique to the LSF: at least five LGBTQ festivals have edited films documenting their own history.41 MIX New York (formerly New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival/NYLGEFF, 1987-ongoing) is here an interesting example. The festival was created in 1988 by New York-based experimental filmmaker Jim Hubbard and author Sarah Schulman, both of whom were instrumental in the HIV/AIDS political movement. As such, Hubbard’s films and Schulman’s 37 ‘Eggo Film Festival 1983 ‒ Southampton College, Fine Arts’. I develop this issue in Chap 3. 38 On the 1983 UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival, see: UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival, ‘UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival’; Waugh, ‘Notes on Greyzone’, 22; Horne and Ramirez, ‘Conference Report: The UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference’. On the How Do I Look? conference/festival, see: Bad Object-Choices, How Do I Look?; Chin, ‘Super-8 Films and the Aesthetics of Intimacy’. On Cornell: Rubin, ‘Film Threat’. 39 Armatage, ‘Toronto Women & Film International 1973’, 83. 40 Querbild e.V, Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg; Acting Out (directed by Ana Grillo, Christina Magdalinou, and Silvia Torneden, 2014). 41 I analyze these films in Chap. 4.

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involvement with the Act Up Oral History Project reflect a commitment to documenting an impossible history, to preserving the lives of those who were dying. 42 The NYLGEFF was highly influenced by this preservationist ethos: Schulman and Hubbard kept everything, from catalogues and press releases to lunch receipts, rejection letters, and meeting minutes. This preservation of festival ephemera can also be explained through the contentious debates over Act Up New York’s legacy. The question of where Act Up’s records should be preserved divided profoundly the HIV/ AIDS community in the mid 1990s. 43 While some followed Lesbian Herstory Archives founder Joan Nestle’s claim that ‘the archives should be housed within the community’ because they ‘collect the prints of all of our lives, not just preserve the records of the famous or the published’, others insisted on the visibility and legitimacy offered by newly institutionalized collections.44 Both Schulman and Hubbard opted for the second option: Hubbard argued that the Royal S. Marks Collection of AIDS Activist Videotapes, currently hosted at the NYPL, required material conditions (in terms of storage, preservation of the medium, and exhibition facilities) that communitybased archives could not provide. The same principles of accessibility and legitimacy explain why MIX NYC decided to bequeath its archives to the Fales Archives and Special Collections (NYU) in 2006, an institution created in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 45 While the MIX Collection at the Fales Archives and Special Collections is a consequence of and a testament to the debates around the legacy of HIV/AIDS social movements, this commitment to preserving and making accessible the festival’s history structures the very experience of the event. Tellingly, the festival has continuously emphasized the effects of the epidemic on both filmmaking and the loss of community history. It manifests in its very programming a commitment to AIDS history and historiography. 46 MIX NYC frames the festival’s visual and political legacy as an integral part of its identity. For instance, MIX NYC systematically opens with a screening entirely dedicated to its past trailers. Furthermore, the festival’s team is particularly proactive in recruiting amateur historians 42 Jim Hubbard’s HIV/AIDS films include, for instance, Elegy in the Streets (1989). Cvetkovich dedicates several chapters to the Act Up Oral History Project. See: Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings. 43 Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings, 247. 44 Nestle, ‘Notes on Radical Archiving from a Lesbian Feminist Standpoint’. 45 Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings, 249; Kirste, ‘Collective Effort: Archiving LGBT Moving Images’, 137; Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism, 101. 46 This is particularly clear in: New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, ‘Statement from the Curators’.

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– myself included. I attended MIX NYC for the first time in November 2015, as a simple, anonymous, film enthusiast. As I moved towards the bar in a post-screening effort to not only gossip about the beauty and sheer sexiness of some festival-goers but also gain in-depth ethnographic knowledge, I mentioned in passing my research project – not knowing that (then) festival director Stephen Kent Jusick was among my audience. Before the end of the festival, I received a full set of the festival’s catalogues – documents that have highly informed this present book, but which I had not even requested. As MIX NYC’s example makes clear, some festivals are highly conscious of the need to record their history and to facilitate scholarly inquiry. Some have even partnered with archives, such as Outfest (Los Angeles, 1982-ongoing) and its UCLA Legacy Project (a collaboration with the UCLA Film & Television Archive). 47 These same events are often at the centre of our historical narratives – a fact reinforced by their location in major urban centres, their long legacy, and the political ethos they emerged from. 48 Other festivals did simply not attempt to preserve anything.

Making history: on queer festival studies’ historical project The historical narratives we write are always partial – a consequence of both the material realities of archival institutions and major differences in festivals’ archival practices. In that context, it seems necessary to turn the gaze inward, towards the historical project of queer festival studies. Most historical accounts of LGBTQ festivals rely on the pioneering work of Rhyne and/or Loist and Zielinski. According to them, the development of the LGBTQ film festival phenomenon can be divided in four phases. The first (1977-1990) represents the transition from community-based series of screenings to the establishment of non-profit organizations that required a certain degree of professionalization. 49 San Francisco’s Gay Film Festival (renamed Frameline, 1977-ongoing) is often held to be the oldest LGBTQ festival, with subsequent festivals emerging in America (Reeling Chicago in 1981, the UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival in 1982 [renamed Out On 47 For a discussion of the relationship between Outfest and the UCLA Legacy Project, see: Pilcher, ‘Querying Queerness in the Film Archive, Tracing the Ephemeral’. 48 For more on the affinities between researcher and particular organizations (and its consequences in terms of historical inquiry), see: Stein, ‘Canonizing Homophile Sexual Respectability Archives, History, and Memory’, 64. 49 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 4. I give a more detailed account of the development of LGBTQ festivals as it relates to the economy of film in Chapter 2.

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the Screen and Outfest]) and in Europe (Milan’s Festival internazionale di cinema gaylesbico in 1986 [now known as MIX Milan]). Often started by filmmakers or community activists, these festivals essentially operated on a visibility-based mandate and aimed at correcting negative representations of homosexuality. According to Loist, Film was used as a tool to make gay and lesbian lives visible, to provide images where gays and lesbians could see themselves on the screen and help create a local community. However, these f ilm events also created visibility for society in general and provided information on issues concerning homosexuality and social discrimination.50

The situation started changing in the mid-1980s with the culture wars, which resulted in massive budget cuts. Festivals became increasingly professionalized. In the context of the AIDS crisis, festivals maintained a community-based mandate and benefited from the increasing visibility of gay and lesbians within traditional media. In this decade, many festivals were created in North America (among others: Atlanta in 1987, Montreal in 1988, New York in 1989). The second phase (1991-1995) corresponds to the boom in independent f ilmmaking, and more specif ically to New Queer Cinema – a genre or movement which premiered and was discovered at international festivals.51 With the development of a ‘gay (marketing and distribution) niche’, queer festivals became increasingly commercially oriented.52 In Europe and Australia, a new wave of queer film festivals was organized, oftentimes partnering with local art-house theatres and educational centres.53 The third phase (1996 to 2001) corresponds to the internationalization of the LGBTQ festival phenomenon and the increasing role played by corporate sponsors. The spectre of the gay-citizen-as-consumer54 brought major companies to the table, including American Airlines and Absolut Vodka.55 At the same time, festivals attempted to capitalize on the independent boom. They tried to expand their activity from sites of exhibition to full-fledged 50 Loist, ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s2000s)’, 111. 51 Rich, ‘New Queer Cinema’. 52 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’. 53 Loist, ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s2000s)’, 113. 54 Chasin, Selling Out; Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’. 55 Brooke, ‘Dividers and Doorways’.

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f ilm markets – most of the time unsuccessfully.56 In the same decade, festivals were organized for the first time in Eastern Europe and Asia. In the West, the development of the queer niche resulted in a new focus on world cinema. Since 2001, several technological shifts have occurred, among which the popularization of gay cable channels and the Internet.57 This period is characteristic of what Rich identifies as a double bind: festivals, in the West, have been simultaneously ‘outlasting their mandate and invited to cease and desist’.58 In the last decade, however, festivals have proliferated. This is especially true for non-Western countries – with what Loist describes as the globalization of both queerness and LGBTQ festivals.59 As this short survey makes clear, most accounts of the LGBTQ phenomenon rely on developmentalist history. Loist, Zielinski, and Rhyne are mostly concerned with the development and transformation of established festivals within an ever shifting political and economic context. Similarly, Richards analyzes the growth of three international film festivals as symptomatic of the advent of the ‘creative industry’, a neoliberal framework that forces festivals to change their relationship to their constituency.60 While this type of historical project is particularly helpful for understanding global trends in queer filmmaking and cultural economy, it may have unintended consequences. In particular, developmentalist history tends to smooth over differences among festivals: rather than tracing out the specificities of various festivals, it seeks to theorize the relationship between (major) festivals and the socio-economic realities of queer filmmaking and/or community organizing. In other words, this type of historical project is not concerned with and often excludes the ephemeral festivals I analyze in this chapter. It typically does not consider festivals which happened only once 56 Loist, ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s2000s)’; Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 151. 57 Gay channels have existed on public access TV as early as the 1980s (New York City’s Gay Cable Network was created in 1982). They were generally not competing with LGBTQ festivals. This situation changed in the 2000s, with the creation of Logo TV (2005) and PrideVision TV (2001, renamed OUTtv) and the popularization of gay-themed programming on subscriptionbased channels (among which Showtime). As the festival organizers interviewed by Waugh and Straayer make clear, LGBTQ festivals’ relationship with these new channels was at best ambiguous. See Waugh and Straayer, ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Three’, 593-598. 58 Rich, ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’, 620. 59 Loist, ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s2000s)’, 116. 60 Richards, The Queer Film Festival.

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or which failed. Furthermore, it may also erase festivals that do not fit with their times or which are organized outside of the circuit.61 In tracing the development of festivals that (for the most part) still exist today, this type of historical project also puts a prime emphasis on longevity: festivals that matter historically are the ones that have not disappeared, or at least which were held for several years. This discourse may thus erase the existence, in any given city, of (ephemeral) events prior to the creation of festivals that still exist today. For instance, there is surprisingly little written on the festivals that were organized in Amsterdam (such as the 1978 Gluren in’t donker flicker filmfestival [Peeking in the Dark International Film Festival]) before the International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Holland (1986-1991) and Roze Filmdagen [Pink Film Festival] (1996-ongoing); in Montreal (such as the 1980 Semaine du cinéma gai à Montréal, the 1982 Sans popcorn: images lesbiennes et gaies, and the 1986 Gais à l’écran) before Image&Nation, or in Berlin (the 1993 and 1994 Internationales Schwul/ Lesbisches Filmfestival Berlin). Toronto’s vibrant festival scene is here another good example: while Inside Out is often discussed as a case study, the 1986 Inverted Image, the Queer West Film Festival (from 2006 to 2016), and the Toronto Queer Film Festival (2017-ongoing) are rarely mentioned in the academic and popular literature.62 In emphasizing longevity and continuity, this form of developmentalist may also smooth over the ruptures contained in a festival’s lineage. The NYLGEFF/MIX NYC is here an interesting case study: the festival changed its name in 1993 in an effort emphasize the difficult transition between Schulman/Hubbard and subsequent directors, its new commitment to diversity, and the opening up of the festival to the video format.63 Furthermore, the shift from the NYLGEFF to MIX NYC participated in the creation of a unified brand that could be easily identifiable and mobilized in the context of both increasing corporate sponsorships and newly created sister events (such as 61 For instance, the list of LGBTQ festivals Loist includes in her dissertation reinforces this narrative in terms of waves and phases: presented as a table, it lists festivals according to their year of creation, only encompassing a handful of one-off festivals. Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 281–295. 62 On the Semaine du cinema gai: Waugh, ‘Gay Cinema, Slick vs. Real’. On Sans popcorn : Waugh, ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’ On the Internationales Schwul/ Lesbisches Filmfestival Berlin: Lesbisch Schwules Büro Film. ‘Internationales Schwul/Lesbisches Filmfestival Berlin’. On Inverted Image: Warner, Never Going Back, 333. 63 The festival had been criticized for its lack of non-white queer content. The transition between Schulman/Hubbard and Shari Frilot and Karim Aïnouz partly aimed at centring queer people of colour. Similarly, the NYLGEFF had been notoriously opposed to the video format. See: MIX NYC, ‘MIX: The 7th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival’.

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MIX Brazil, 1993-ongoing).64 MIX NYC is, however, more than just the new name of the NYLGEFF: in the midst of a financial crisis, the newly created MIX merged with another event, LOOKOUT! (Downtown Community Television Center’s queer video festival, created in 1990).65 MIX NYC’s 1994 catalogue clearly distinguishes the two entities: This year, we are pleased to announce the merging of two of the biggest lesbian and gay film festivals in New York City. This year, November 10th through 20th at the Anthology Film Archives, MIX 94 will present the 8th New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival along with Downtown Community Television’s Lesbian & Gay LOOKOUT Video Festival.66

While both former festival directors and scholars usually use MIX NYC as a shorthand for the NYLGEFF, establishing a linear continuity between the two entities may be misleading.67 It participates in the erasure of LOOKOUT!, a festival that was doomed to be forgotten when it merged with the NYLGEFF. Furthermore, it presupposes that MIX is the NYLGEFF – thus inadvertently smoothing over the ruptures that were instrumental in shaping the festival in its modern-day incarnations. 64 For the first time, the festival attempted to sell advertisements and sponsorships. Significantly, the new team led by Frilot and Aïnouz also planned on capitalizing on festival tours to bring in more revenue, complementing the festival with a distribution division. Unfortunately, these plans did not succeed (see Chap 5). See: MIX NYC, ‘Distribution Plan’. On advertisement and marketing, the following materials may be of interest: Box 4, Folder 411 ‘MIX 93 advertisement notes’; Folder 413 ‘Fundraising notes’; Folder 414 ‘Gay marketing research’, The MIX Collection. Fales Special Collections & Archives. New York University. 65 As made clear in the numerous transition plans established in 1992 by members of the board – which led to an organizational crisis. See among others: Schulman, ‘New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival – Transition plan’. Folder 310-1 contains various responses to Schulman’s plan. On LOOKOUT!, see: Downtown Community Television Center, ‘LOOKOUT! Lesbian and Gay Video Festival’. 66 MIX New York, ‘A Brief History of MIX’. [Emphasis in the original] The 1994 programme clearly identified whether a film was selected as part of the NYLGEFF or LOOKOUT!. 67 This sense of continuity is partly maintained by former festival directors Hubbard and Schulman’s use of ‘MIX NYC’ as a shorthand for both MIX and the NYLGEFF. In the academic literature, see: Zielinski ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 237; Gamson, ‘The Organizational Shaping of Collective Identity’. For instance, Zielinski’s pioneering study of the festival refers to the first edition of the NYLGEFF as ‘MIX 87’. The transition between NYLGEFF/MIX NYC was a the core of an earlier (unpublished) version of Gamson’s article; see: Gamson, ‘Show Me Yours’. For Sarah Schulman’s reaction to this first version, see (in the same folder) the also unpublished Schulman, ‘A Samoan Talks Back to Margaret Mead – A Response to Josh Gamson’s Study of Gay Film Festivals’.

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In detailing some of the conundrums associated with historiography, I do not aim at condemning my friends and colleagues for their otherwise insightful and pioneering accounts of the LGBT festival phenomenon. To some extent, what Loist, Rhyne, and Zielinski offer is a history of the LGBT festival circuit. They account for the development of a particular network of festivals (interconnected and guided by a similar ethos) through the lenses of cultural economy, highlighting major shifts within the financing and exhibition of queer cinema. This focus certainly enables us to consider the effects of neoliberalism and identity politics on (major) film festivals (and arguably LGBT community cultural organizations in general). In so doing, developmentalist history may, however, obscures or smooths over other types of festivals. Similarly, it may at time cast modern-days US/European LGBTQ festivals as an international benchmark, obscure the existence of ephemeral festivals outside of the festival circuit, and erase the differences between various geographically located modes of queer organizing.68

Festivals that matter: festival studies’ field imaginary, methods, and political project This focus on ‘festivals that matter’ is partly a consequence of both the methodological tools and the political project of festival studies: this type of developmentalist history is symptomatic of the institutional location of the field. In analyzing the constitution of the object festival within film studies, this section seeks to uncover what Robyn Wiegman calls the ‘disciplinary unconscious’ of festival studies, the ‘domain of critical interpellation through which practitioners learn to pursue particular objects, protocols, methods of study, and interpretative vocabularies as the means for expressing and inhabiting their belonging to the field’.69 As a relatively recent field, festival studies has struggled (and still strives) to establish its legitimacy. Because festival scholars typically define the field as interdisciplinary (borrowing from anthropology, cultural studies, and the social sciences) and do not read individual films, they occupy an uneasy position within film studies.70 In that context, scholars have had to explain not only why festivals matter within film studies but also which festivals 68 See Chapter 5. 69 Wiegman, Object Lessons, 14. The notion of a ‘disciplinary unconscious’ was first used in: Pease, Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon, 11. 70 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 22-23.

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matter. They have been justifying their object of study, performatively establishing the field’s legitimacy. Significantly, festival studies emerged through and imagines itself as part of the shift from film studies to the broader rubric of media studies.71 The field cohered around the European academic conference NECS, a professional organization that highly emphasizes media industries.72 Festival studies generally foregrounds cinematic circulation and institutions. This focus is particularly clear in the first anthologies on film festivals. Dina Iordanova, for instance, establishes a parallel between the project of festival studies and museum studies: ‘[just] as the study of museums and galleries has become crucial to our understanding of the institutionalization of arts and heritage, so too must the study of festivals be central to understanding the socio-cultural dynamics of global cinema and international cultural exchanges at large.’73 Similarly, founders of the Film Festival Research Network de Valck and Loist define the field as ‘acknowledg[ing] above all the political and economic context of film production and distribution and understand[ing] film festivals as players in the film industry and, conversely, as events in which various stakeholders are involved’.74 In that context, festival scholars have strived to distinguish themselves from the para-academic labour of film critics. In their attempt to define the field of festival studies, de Valck and Loist insist that If it is the task of film critics to visit festivals in order to report on recent trend, point the public to great new films and write thoughtful reviews, film festival scholars instead work out-of-sync with the imposing festival rhythm and offer meta-views and frameworks for understanding festivals in broader and more specific context.75

The criticism-scholarship dichotomy is replayed within the field’s obsession with legitimacy. While this distinction may seem at first quite benign, it 71 de Valck and Loist, ‘Film Festival Studies: An Overview of a Burgeoning Field’, 180. 72 For an overview of the development of the field, see Chan, ‘The International Film Festival and the Making of a National Cinema’, 250. Festival studies benefited from its strong connections with the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception Network (HoMER), particularly active at NECS. 73 Iordanova, ‘Introduction’, 1. 74 de Valck and Loist, ‘Film Festival Studies: An Overview of a Burgeoning Field’, 180. [Emphasis in the original] Tellingly, de Valck and Loist divide the field into six areas of research (cultural value and capital, f ilm production and distribution, festivals as institutions, reception and exhibition, cities, and the festival circuit), all of which speak to film circulation/institutions. 75 Ibid, 180. [Emphasis in the original]

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presupposes a set of axiological coordinates, assigning to scholars the task of theorizing festivals (plural) at large. As ethnographic observation has been a constitutive method in festival studies, scholars have heavily insisted on their own positionality, oftentimes borrowing from anthropology’s disciplinary ethos.76 For instance, de Valck’s seminal book Film Festivals starts with a description of the author’s relationship to her object of study.77 This enables her to oppose her first experiences at international festivals to the theory she is proposing, contrasting surface observations (as a festival-goer) with her theoretical apparatus (as a scholar). Similarly, Stringer’s dissertation ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, one of the first scholarly accounts of festivals, explicitly opposes his project to film criticism, claiming the outsider-within position.78 This dichotomy might seem paradoxical, as festival-related anthologies abundantly feature practitioners and curators, partly as a consequence of grant and institutional policies. As Diane Burgess and Brendan Kredell note, ‘there […] always been professional overlap between the festival circuit and academia’.79 This is especially true for queer film festivals, as the entity gay and lesbian cinema(s) emerged through a blurring of the boundaries between scholarship, criticism, and festival organizing. To that end, these insider/outsider and scholar/critic binaries are quite malleable: they are strategically mobilized so as to justify the relevance of festival research. Positionality is instrumental in establishing the field’s legitimacy. While scholars have developed tools to guarantee their objectivity and locate their claims, I am here more concerned with our choice of object. Our focus on particular types of festivals is never innocent: it is already aligned with both the project of film/media studies and our own longings for what a field of festival studies could be. What deserves critical attention is thus not so much the insider/outsider divide, but rather the processes through which scholars are oriented towards particular festivals. Festival scholars have been confronted with an additional difficulty: the diversity of the festival phenomenon precludes any clear definition of the object festival. As David Archibald and Mitchell Miller put it in the introduction of one of the first festival dossiers, ‘the question of what a film 76 See for instance: Lee, ‘Being There, Taking Place’. See also: Burgess and Kredell, ‘Positionality and Film Festival Research’, 160. 77 de Valck, Film Festivals. 78 Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 4–5. 79 Burgess and Kredell, ‘Positionality and Film Festival Research’, 159. See also: Robbins and Saglier, ‘Introduction’, 8. I am here specifically referring to festival studies anthologies – not to the LGBT festival dossiers edited by White or by Waugh and Straayer, which included film professionals as part of an effort to define the festival phenomenon (see Chap. 3)

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festival is – and thus what film festival scholarship purports to describe and understand – will not be answered definitively any time soon.’80 In order to resolve this issue, scholars have resorted to a typological impulse. If defining what a festival is may be an impossible task, they could at least focus on particular genres of festival. In so doing, scholars both moved beyond case studies (a practice that oftentimes reifies differences among festivals) and proposed a hermeneutic framework designed so as to capture the resemblances among various types festivals. Festival studies’ typological impulse cohered around a particular set of notions put forth in de Valck’s foundational opus. In analyzing A-list events, de Valck describes her ‘research [as] specifically build[ing] on the few works that do try to make a more universal argument regarding international film festivals’.81 It is not my intention to criticize de Valck’s major contribution to the field – which, while attempting to make a universal claim upon the workings of festivals, focuses on a delimited set of events (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam). Rather, I am interested in how de Valck’s import of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘cultural capital’ and Bruno Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’ became universalized as the main theoretical framework of festival studies, constantly readapted so as to account for particular types of festivals. As the subtitle of the first festival studies anthology The Festival Circuit makes clear, scholars have benefited from actor-network theory’s emphasis on mapping and interconnectedness, heavily relying on de Valck’s framework to characterize the differences between networks and circuits.82 Papagena Robbins and Viviane Saglier thus note that the metaphor of the circuit has become a prescriptive assumption within festival studies: Studies on film festivals have from the start questioned the way they exist as and within networks […] Despite criticisms of their reliance on hegemonic paradigms, systematic endeavors to understand how film festivals are connected have persisted and become constitutive of the first steps towards a field of film festival studies […] [The notion of the festival circuit as an alternative to traditional modes of exhibition and distribution] has […] been included within the very conceptualization of film festivals as a given, and has remained largely unquestioned.83 80 Archibald and Miller, ‘The Film Festivals Dossier: Introduction’, 252. 81 de Valck, Film Festivals, 17. [Emphasis: mine] 82 Iordanova and Rhyne, Film Festival Yearbook I. For an overview of the network/circuit debate, see: Loist, ‘The Film Festival Circuit: Networks, Hierarchies, and Circulation’. 83 Robbins and Saglier, ‘Introduction’, 2–3.

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Scholars’ insistence on festivals as an ‘alternative circuit’ clearly demarcates and performatively establishes the relevance of festival research within f ilm studies. As a meta-theory, the circuit further legitimizes the f ield as a domain of scholarly inquiry and bypasses the absence of def inition of the object festival. Rather than focusing on individual festivals or on what Robbins and Saglier call the ‘porosity’ of networks and circuit, scholars’ insistence on interconnectedness emphasizes complementarity and interdependence among, as well as competition between, festivals. This leads to a paradoxical situation: while the f ield refuses to def ine what a festival is, its theoretical apparatus presupposes a particular type of festival – one that belongs to a circuit, that is not ephemeral, and that partakes in the economy of f ilm. In turn, this orientation towards festivals that matter assumes particular regimes of value against which the success or relevance of an event is measured – be it size, cultural inf luence, or position within the circuit. Circuit as a meta-theory simultaneously justif ies a focus on festivals (why festivals matter within f ilm studies) and orients us towards particular events (which festivals matter). Scholars have also benefited from case studies, in particular through the genre of the festival review. This practice is, however, not exempt from the effects of the field’s quest for legitimacy: case studies already presuppose that one is analyzing a festival that matters – one that is well enough documented to sustain a critical inquiry on its own. More importantly, case studies often rely on paradigmatic readings.84 Scholars focusing on a specific festival are asked not only to justify the relevance of their object to the discipline but also to cast this event as emblematic of some aspect of the festival phenomenon. This quest for legitimacy takes on a particular importance for scholars working on LGBTQ festivals, as the rubric of identity tends to complicate festival knowledge as well as cinephilia itself. As I highlight in Chapter 2, queer cinema and their festivals lie at the intersection of various f ilm cultures and regimes of taste: LGBTQ cinema occupies a complex position within regimes of cultural value. Filmmakers, festivals, and scholars must constantly negotiate the interplay between identity and (legitimate) art. Scholars are asked to not only explain why LGBTQ festivals matter but also to account for their focus on queer cinema as cinema – as deserving a critical attention of its own. Furthermore, research on queer festivals is a

84 Wiegman, Object Lessons, 32.

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form of ‘identity knowledge’.85 It implies not only a positioning as part of a community but also a commitment to honour the people we study. Read in this light, scholars’ focus on major festivals fundamentally aims at making LGBTQ festivals matter – despite and because of identity. This short overview of the field’s disciplinary unconscious shouldn’t be taken as a critique of festival studies’ scholarly project. After all, these projects are fueled by love and desire. Establishing the legitimacy of our object of inquiry is nothing more than a way of paying homage to the people we actively study and communities to which we belong; elevating the festivals and films we cherish as scholars; and utilizing our own cinephilia as a potential site of critical activity. In analyzing the disciplinary unconscious of festival studies, I thus do not aim to undermine the legitimacy of the field: field formation necessarily entails an epistemological double bind. It simultaneously expands the discipline of film studies, legitimizing and thus performatively carving a space for festival scholarship, and sets the parameters through which festival studies operates. As my conclusion will argue, this book is not exempt from the epistemological issues it seeks to raise. In analyzing the effects of festival studies’ theoretical apparatus, I hope to simultaneously honour the scholars (and festivals) I love and cherish and propose an alternative framework for future scholarship. In the process however, this book necessarily rearticulates the field’s quest for legitimacy. We cannot escape the effects of field formation. After all, as Wiegman reminds us, ‘there can be no outside perspective unencumbered by disciplinary obligations and field-forming injunctions of its own. […] In other words, the scholar in pursuit of discerning a field’s imaginary has unconscious disciplinary attachment too’.86 As a sometimespainful labour of love, this book cannot fully resist the temptation to do justice to its objects of study – to, in some way, establish their legitimacy.

‘Doing justice’ to ghosts: critical festival studies While I cannot resist the will to make festivals that did not matter, matter, my project does not aim at rewriting the field’s powerful historical narratives and theoretical apparatus. Rather, I want to turn the gaze inward, towards how our desire for our object has formed the field and how it shapes the 85 Ibid, 1n1. Wiegman’s ‘identity knowledges’ refers to ‘the many projects of academic study that were institutionalized in the US university […] for the study of identity’. 86 Ibid, 14–15.

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type of theories we propose. To that end, this book echoes Ezra Winton’s call for a ‘critical [film] festival studies’: we should be looking at […] festival[s] diagnostically as well – that is, we should infuse some critical insight among the heaps of praise bestowed upon [festivals] (such an analysis is sorely missing in the academic realm, leading [us] to think we should do well with the creation of a ‘critical festival studies’ strand).87

As a project attentive to the effects of the field’s disciplinary unconscious, critical festival studies foregrounds the epistemological conundrums at the heart of festival research as an integral part of scholarly inquiry. In so doing, it operates a double move: it resituates the object festival within the larger social forces that shape cinematic culture and refuses the imperative to legitimize our choice of object, thereby questioning the very nature of festivals. To some extent, it is thus guided by the conviction that festival studies’ theoretical apparatus reveals the hopes scholars invest in their object of study. The type of ephemeral festival I have described in this chapter is particularly well suited to questioning festival studies’ normative and definitional impulses. As I made clear earlier, festival studies refuses to define its object of study, albeit focusing mostly on festivals that matter (thereby fixing the meaning of festivals within our scholarship). Ephemeral events urge us to decentre traditional festivals: they resist any definitive claim to evidence and proof. As traces that cannot easily be pinpointed or analyzed, these festivals force us to take into account the disciplinary assumptions on which the field rests. They correspond to what Muñoz identifies as a praxis of utopian (re)imagination, operating ‘through the surplus they represent [as] they seem to tell us something is missing’.88 For instance, these ephemeral events do not necessarily correspond to festival scholars’ description of the temporality of cultural institutions. Festivals are usually defined as annual events: they are understood as institutions that are solidified with each successive iteration.89 This focus on annual events erases festivals which may happen several times a year or on 87 Robbins and Saglier, ‘Interview with Ezra Winton, Director of Programming at Cinema Politica’, 73. ‘Critical festival studies’ is f irst mentioned in: Winton, ‘Good for the Heart and Soul, Good for Business’, 31. 88 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 45. 89 See for instance: Harbord, ‘Contingency, Time and Event’, 70.

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a less formal basis, as well as the mini festivals put on by some organizations as a prelude to the main event.90 More importantly, ephemeral events reveal the exceptional nature of established, recurring, and long-lasting festivals: as events relying mostly on volunteer cultural workers, festivals are by definition a precarious labour of love. Ephemeral events resituate ‘failure’ as an integral part of festival organizing. While the field’s implied definition assumes a particular relationship to time, it also often separates festivals from events put on by various other institutions. For instance, Paolo Cherchi Usai argues that a festival ‘is not an on-going program, not an emanation of a venue where f ilms are exhibited on a regular basis’.91 This separation between ‘festivals’ and ‘events that adopt the format of a festival but are organized by other types of cultural institution’ typically excludes festivals that were organized by theatres, cinematheques, film studies departments, or as part of gay pride celebrations. Festival studies’ reluctance to define what a festival is paradoxically ends up foreclosing any critical examination of events which adopt a structure akin to a festival but do not adhere to the assumptions built in the field. Lastly, our focus on film festival might preclude us from considering events which, although abundantly featuring moving images, encompass several forms of artistic and cultural expressions – such as the American Gay Festival whose 3rd edition was held in 1982 in Chicago in conjunction with the Gay Academic Union and Chicago Filmmakers; the South Asian queer festival Desh-Pardesh (Toronto, from 1990 to 2000); or the Queer Culture Festival of Toronto (starting in 1990).92 The same rationale can further explain the marginalization of video festivals within the literature – a topic which would deserve a more in-depth inquiry. These are only a few avenues for a reconsideration of the field’s disciplinary unconscious – a topic I explore further in chapters 2 and 3. In ‘doing justice’ to ephemeral traces of queer cinematic life, this chapter hopes to 90 For instance, the Gay & Lesbian Media Coalition organized not only the UCLA Lesbian and Gay Media Festival but also the Out on the Screen mini festival – an event that was held several times a year. I found traces of this event for the years 1990-1993. Gay & Lesbian Media Coalition, ‘Out on the Screen Mini Festival’; Gay and Lesbian Media Coalition, ‘History and Purpose of the Gay and Lesbian Media Coalition’. 91 Cherchi Usai, ‘The Archival Film Festival as a Special Event’, 21–22. 92 On the American Gay Festival: The Gay-Lesbian Arts Alliance, ‘The Third Gay American Arts Festival’; The Gay-Lesbian Arts Alliance, ‘Third Gay American Festival to Take Place in Chicago’.On Desh-Pardesh: Warner, Never Going Back, 326. On the Queer Culture Festival of Toronto: Dowler, ‘In the Bedrooms of the Nation’, 34.

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participate in a queering of festival studies.93 In that context, I do not aim at resuscitating the ghosts of a long gone past but rather to pay homage to festival organizers whose politics do not necessarily fit with neoliberalism and the so-called experience economy.94 These festivals may never be fully theorized: they constitute an eclectic corpus, an impossible history. At minima, they force us to confront festivals as ephemeral events, thereby disrupting the field’s institutional bent. While subsequent chapters explore what ‘a critical film festival studies’ could entail, my efforts here do not aim at proposing a meta-theory of ephemerality, but rather at inhabiting uncertainty: instead of fixing the object festival, this book builds on the discovery of past and othered festivals as containing the potentialities of an ephemeral and fleeting, yet always timely, critique. To that end, I hope to infuse what Muñoz calls a ‘hermeneutics of hope’ within festival studies.95 Queerness is, after all, ‘a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present […] Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.’96

Bibliography Archibald, David, and Mitchell Miller. ‘The Film Festivals Dossier: Introduction’. Screen 52, no. 2 (2011): 249–252. Armatage, Kay. ‘Toronto Women & Film International 1973’. In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 82–98. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. Bad Object-Choices. How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video. San Francisco, CA: Bay Press, 1991. Beins, Agatha. ‘Making a Place for Lesbian Life at the Lesbian Herstory Archives’. In Out of the Closet, Into the Archives, edited by Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell, 25-50. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015. 93 Wiegman argues that identity knowledges entail a unique interplay between academic praxis and a justice imaginary: ‘the institutionalized object of study is the political referent it stands for, which is why identity knowledges so often seek to explicate their referent’s historical and social itineraries in order to practice doing justice to and for them’. Wiegman, Object Lessons, 37. 94 On festivals and neoliberalism: Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’; Richards, The Queer Film Festival. On festivals and experience economy: de Valck, Film Festivals, 194. This also corresponds to what Olivier Neveux calls the ‘festivalization of the cultural’: Neveux, Politiques du spectateur, 26. 95 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 4 – a project diametrically opposed to ‘strong theory’. 96 Ibid, 1.

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Brooke, Kaucyila. ‘Dividers and Doorways’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 42 (1998): 50–57. Brown, Aimee. ‘How Queer “Pack Rats” and Activist Archivists Saved Our History: An Overview of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Archives, 1970-2008’. In Serving LGBTIQ Library and Archives Users: Essays on Outreach, Service, Collections and Access, edited by Ellen Greenblatt, 121–135. Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland & Co Inc Pub, 2010. Burgess, Diane, and Brendan Kredell. ‘Positionality and Film Festival Research: A Conversation’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 159–176. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. Chan, Felicia. ‘The International Film Festival and the Making of a National Cinema’. Screen 52, no. 2 (2011): 253–260. Chasin, Alexandra. Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market. New York City, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. ‘Cherry Grove’s First-Ever Outtakes Film Festival Kicks off Friday Night ‒ Fire Island and Beyond’. Accessed 17 January 2017. http://fireislandandbeyond.com/ cherry-groves-first-ever-outtakes-film-festival-kicks-off-friday-night/ Chin, Daryl. ‘Super-8 Films and the Aesthetics of Intimacy’. Jump Cut, no. 37 (1992): 78–81. Coordinators of Projecting Gay Stereotypes. ‘Evaluation’. 30 November 1979. Folder Film festivals--UCLA--1979 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. ———. ‘Introduction: What Is a Film Festival? How to Study Festivals and Why You Should’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 1–11. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. de Valck, Marijke, and Skadi Loist. ‘Film Festival Studies: An Overview of a Burgeoning Field’. In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 179–215. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. Dever, Maryanne. ‘Papered Over: Or, Some Observations on Materiality and Archival Method’. In Out of the Closet into The Archive: Researching Sexual Histories, edited by Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell, 65–98. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015. DeVun, Leah, and Michael Jay McClure. ‘Archives Behaving Badly’. Radical History Review 2014, no. 120 (2014): 121–130.

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Dicks, Homer. ‘Memo from Homer Dicks on the Celluloid Closet’. 3 March 1978. Box 5, Folder Letters Celluloid Closet. The Vito Russo Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Donnell Library Center. ‘Viewpoint: A Film Series on the Crucial Political and Social Issues of Our Times. Homosexuality: Stories of Some Lives’. 1993. Box 7, Folder Film Diverse. International Gay Information Center Subject Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Dowler, Kevin. ‘In the Bedrooms of the Nation: State Scrutiny and the Funding of Dirty Art’. In Money, Value, Art: State Funding, Free Markets, Big Pictures, edited by Sally McKay and Andrew J. Paterson, 29–49. Toronto, ON: Y YZ Books, 2001. Downtown Community Television Center. ‘LOOKOUT! Lesbian and Gay Video Festival’. 1990. Box 324. Folder Lookout. The LGBT Center’s Archives. New York City. ‘Eggo Film Festival 1983 ‒ Southampton College, Fine Arts’. 1983. Folder Film festivals 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. Eichhorn, Kate. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013. ‘Fire Island Film and Video Festival’. 2004. Box 324, Folder Fire Island Film & Video Festival. The LGBT Center’s Archives. New York City. Fleckinger, Hélène. ‘Nous sommes un fléau social: Cinéma, vidéo et luttes homosexuelles’. French Literature Series 34, no. 1 (2007): 145–161. Flinn, Andrew. ‘Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges’. Journal of the Society of Archivists 28, no. 2 (2007): 151–176. Gamson, Joshua.’The Organizational Shaping of Collective Identity: The Case of Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals in New York’. Sociological Forum 11 (1996): 231–261. ———. ‘Show Me Yours: Negotiating Collective Identity in Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals’. unpublished, 1995. Box 8, Folder ‘Joshua Gamson – Sociology Paper on MIX + Correspondence with Sarah Schulman’. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. ‘Gay Filmfestival, Vienna’. 1988. Box 9, Folder Film Festivals. International Gay Information Center collection. Ephemera ‒ Subjects, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Gay-Lesbian Arts Alliance. ‘The Third Gay American Arts Festival’. 1982. Folder Film festivals 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. ———. ‘Third Gay American Festival to Take Place in Chicago’. 1982. Folder Film festivals 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles.

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Gay & Lesbian Media Coalition. ‘History and Purpose of the Gay and Lesbian Media Coalition’. 1993. Folder Film Festivals -- Outfest, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. ———. ‘Out on the Screen Mini Festival’. 1990. Folder Film Festivals -- Outfest, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. Gay Student Union. ‘Proposal for PROJECTING STEREOTYPES: An Evaluation of Images of Lesbians and Gays in the American Cinema ‒ November 15-19, 1979’. 7 October 1979. Folder Film festivals--UCLA--1979 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. ———. ‘UCLA Gay Awareness Week Film Festival’. 1977. UCLA Gay Awareness Week Records, 1974-1976, Coll2013.054. The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. ‘Gluren in’t Donker Flicker Filmfestival [Peeking in the Dark International Film Festival]’. 1978. Box 9, Folder Film Festivals. International Gay Information Center collection. Ephemera ‒ Subjects, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Harbord, Janet. ‘Contingency, Time and Event: An Archaeological Approach to the Film Festival’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 69–82. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. Hilderbrand, Lucas. ‘Historical Fantasies: Gay Porn in the Archives’. In Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s, edited by Carolyn Bronstein and Whitney Strub, 327–348. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. Horne, Larry, and John Ramirez. ‘Conference Report: The UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 29 (1984). Iordanova, Dina. ‘Introduction’. In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 1–8. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. Iordanova, Dina, and Ragan Rhyne, eds. Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. Isarte, Roméo. ‘Silence ! On parle. Projections, ciné-clubs et festivals militants : Montrer les films de femmes et les cinémas homosexuels (1968-1986)’. MA thesis, Université Lyon 2 Lumière, 2017. Jablonski, Olivier. ‘De l’ouverture du ghetto à la dépolitisation: Les festivals de films gais et lesbiens en France en questions’. Revue H 5/6 (1997).

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Janus Theater (The). ‘Press Release: First American Gay Film Festival, in DC – Organized by the Washington Area Gay Community Council and the Janus Theater’. 1973. Box 9, Folder Film Festivals. International Gay Information Center Subject Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Jusick, Stephan Kent. ‘MIX Is HELL’. MIX Zine, 88–97, 1996. Folder New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The LGBT Center’s Archives. New York City. Kirste, Lynne. ‘Collective Effort: Archiving LGBT Moving Images’. Cinema Journal 46, no. 3 (2007): 134–140. Laemmle Theatres. ‘Gay Cinema Invades Beverly Hills!’. 1997. Folder Film festivals 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. ‘Lavender Images – A Lesbian and Gay Film Retrospective’. 1987. Box 20, Folder Programs 1987-1988. The Vito Russo Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. ‘Lavender Images II’. 1988. Box 20, Folder Programs 1987-1988. The Vito Russo Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. ‘Lavender Images III’. 1989. Box 20, Folder Programs 1989. The Vito Russo Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Lee, Toby. ‘Being There, Taking Place: Ethnography at the Film Festival’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 122-137. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. ‘Lesbian Film Festival’. n.d. Box 7, Folder Film Diverse. International Gay Information Center Subject Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Lesbisch Schwules Büro Film. ‘Internationales Schwul/Lesbisches Filmfestival Berlin’. 1994. Box 31, Folder 1365 ‘Germany ‒ Berlin ‒ Internationales Schwul/ Lesbisches Filmfestival Berlin ‒ correspondence’. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Loist, Skadi. ‘A Complicated Queerness: LGBT Film Festivals and Queer Programming Strategies’. In Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff, 157–172. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. ———. ‘The Film Festival Circuit: Networks, Hierarchies, and Circulation’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 49–63. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. ———. ‘Precarious Cultural Work: About the Organization of (Queer) Film Festivals’. Screen 52, no. 2 (2011): 268–273.

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———. ‘Queer Film Culture: Performative Aspects of LGBT/Q Film Festivals’. PhD Diss., University of Hamburg, 2015. ———. ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s-2000s)’. In Une Histoire des festivals XXe-XXIe siècle, edited by Anaïs Fléchet, Pascale Goetschel, Patricia Hidiroglou et alii., 109–121. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013. Marlow-Mann, Alex, ed. Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2013. Masques. ‘Les habits neufs de l’oppression: La reine Victoria frappe toujours’. Masques, no. 1 (1979): 32–33. MIX NYC. ‘A Brief History of MIX’. 1994. Box 5, Folder 527. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. ———. Box 4, Folder 414 ‘Gay Marketing Research’. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. ———. ‘Distribution Plan’. 1993. Box 4, Folder 387. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections. The New York University Libraries. ———. ‘MIX: The 7th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival’. 1993. Box 4, Folder 401 ‘Mission statements’. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections. The New York University Libraries. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York City, NY: NYU Press, 2009. ———. ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts’. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 5–16. National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. ‘NALGF & NYU Lesbian/ Gay Film Festival Present Abuse’. Zoom Out 2 (Winter/Spring 1983). Box 119, Folder Zoom Out. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Periodical Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Nestle, Joan. ‘Notes on Radical Archiving from a Lesbian Feminist Standpoint’. Gay Insurgent, no. 4–5 (1979): 10–11. Neveux, Olivier. Politiques du spectateur : Les enjeux du théâtre politique aujourd’hui. Paris: La Découverte, 2013. New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival. ‘Statement from the Curators’. 1991. Box 3, Folder 229. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections. The New York University Libraries. Of ield, Simon. ‘Cruising the Archive’. Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 3 (2005): 351–364. Pacific Cinematheque Pacifique. ‘Film’. Programme. October 1977. Folder Film Festivals. Subject files collection. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles.

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Pacific Film Archive. ‘In a Different Light Film & Video Series’. 1995. Box 7, Folder Film Diverse. International Gay Information Center Subject Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Pease, Donald E. Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Pilcher, Lauren Elizabeth. ‘Querying Queerness in the Film Archive, Tracing the Ephemeral Anders Als Die Andern (Different from the Others) (1919)’. Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 4, no. 1 (2015): 35–60. Querbild e.V. Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg. Hamburg: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2009. Rémès, Erick. ‘Dates, chiffres et déf initions’. Libération, 15 December 1994. Accessed 10 March 2014. http://www.liberation.fr/culture/1994/12/15/ dates-chiffres-et-definitions_117360. Richards, Stuart. The Queer Film Festival: Popcorn and Politics. New York City, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Rhyne, Ragan. ‘Pink Dollars: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals and the Economy of Visibility’. PhD diss., New York University, 2007. Rich, B. Ruby. ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 620–625. ———. ‘New Queer Cinema’. Sight & Sound, 5, no. 2 (1992). Robbins, Papagena, and Viviane Saglier. ‘Introduction’. Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 3, no. 2 (2015): 1–8. ———. ‘Interview with Ezra Winton, Director of Programming at Cinema Politica’. Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 3, no. 2 (2015): 68–85. Rubin, Mike. ‘Film Threat: The Demise of Campus Film Societies’. Voice Film Special, 25 May 1993. Rutsky, R. L., and Justin Wyatt. ‘Serious Pleasures: Cinematic Pleasure and the Notion of Fun’. Cinema Journal 30, no. 1 (1990): 3-19. Schulman, Sarah. ‘New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival – Transition plan’. 1992. Box 3, Folder 309 ‘Transition plan for MIX’. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. ———. ‘A Samoan Talks Back to Margaret Mead – A Response to Josh Gamson’s Study of Gay Film Festivals’. April 1995. Unpublished. Box 8, Folder ‘Joshua Gamson – Sociology Paper on MIX + Correspondence with Sarah Schulman’. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Scott, Joan W. ‘The Evidence of Experience’. Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–797. Stein, Marc. ‘Canonizing Homophile Sexual Respectability: Archives, History, and Memory’. Radical History Review 2014, no. 120 (2014): 53–73. Stringer, Julian. ‘Regarding Film Festivals’. PhD diss., Indiana University, 2003.

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Tiffany Theater. ‘The Tiffany Theater in West Los Angeles Will Present a Series of Films Dealing with Homosexuality’. 1978. Folder Tiffany Theater (Los Angeles, Calif.), ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001 The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. Titkemeyer, Erica. ‘Assembling the Fragments and Accessing the Silenced’. Unpublished Paper, New York University. 14 May 2012. Accessed 18 January 2017. http:// www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/program/student_work/2012spring/12s_3049_ Titkemeyer_FINAL%20PAPER.doc UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival. ‘UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival’. 1983. Folder Film Festivals -- Outfest, ONE Subject Files Collection. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. Usai, Paolo Cherchi. ‘The Archival Film Festival as a Special Event: A Framework for Analysis’. In Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals, edited by Alex Marlow-Mann, 21–40. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2013. Warner, Tom. Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Waugh, Thomas. ‘Gay Cinema: Best Films Not Slick but Real’. The Body Politic, no. 66 (1980). ———. ‘The Gay Cultural Front’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 18 (1978): 36–37. ———. ‘Notes on Greyzone’. In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh, 19–42. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2013. ———. ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’ Le Berdache 30 (1982): 7–9. ———. The Romance of Transgression in Canada Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Waugh, Thomas and Chris Straayer, eds. ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Three: Artists Speak Out’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 1 (2008): 121–137. Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Winton, Ezra. ‘Good for the Heart and Soul, Good for Business: The Cultural Politics of Documentary at the Hot Docs Film Festival’. PhD diss., Carleton University, Ottawa, 2013. ‘Women Make Movies & Chelsea Gay Association Present In Our Own Image – Five Film Programs of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Feminist Consciousness’. nd. Box 19, Folder Women Make Movies. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

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Zielinski, Ger. ‘Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals’. PhD diss., McGill, 2008. ———. ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera: The Case of Queer Film Festivals and Archives of Feelings’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 138–158. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016.

Filmography 120 Battements par minutes [BPM]. Directed by Robin Campillo. 2017. 143 min. France. PROD: Les Films de Pierre / France 3 Cinéma / Page 114 / Memento Films Production / FD Production / Playtime Production (co-production). DIST (FR) : Memento Films. Acting Out: 25 Jahre Queerer Film und Community in Hamburg [Acting Out: 25 Years of Queer Film & Community in Hamburg]. Directed by Ana Grillo, Christina Magdalinou, and Silvia Torneden. 2014. 86 min. Germany. PROD: Aye Aye Film. DVD. Elegy in the Streets. Directed by Jim Hubbard. 1989. 30 min. USA. PROD: Jim Hubbard.

2.

The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals, and Queer Cinema’s Legs1 Abstract In analyzing the regimes of taste and films cultures that condition the circulation and cultural currency of queer cinemas, Chapter 2 aims to reconceptualize the notion of festival circuits. It locates queer cinema at the intersection of two regimes of cultural value – identity and cinephilia. Through a Bourdieusian approach to taste-making and cultural production, I highlight how both festivals and scholars negotiate these conflicting cultural values. Film traffic relies on a symbolic economy that is based on and fosters differentiated cultural discourses on queer cinema. In analyzing the strategies of both European and American film distributors, I underscore how this interplay between queerness and cinephilia is strategically mobilized so as to assert a film’s legitimacy and authenticity. Keywords: queer cinema; Bourdieu; distribution; symbolic capital; queer relays; film traffic

‘Meanwhile, straight critics actively stifled gay discourses around these films, either through homophobic panic, liberal tolerance (“I’m so matter-of-fact and cool that sexual orientation doesn’t have to be mentioned”), or allegorical exegesis (“This film is not about gayness, it’s about fill-in-the-blank”).’2

1 A preliminary version of this Chapter has been published as ‘The queer film ecosystem: symbolic economy, festivals, and queer cinema’s legs’ in Studies in European Cinema 15, no.1 (2018). 2 Waugh, ‘The Third Body’, 156.


Damiens, A., LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728409_ch02

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‘[A] comment Richard Dyer made in Amsterdam echoed in my memory. There are two ways to dismiss gay film, he pronounced. One is to say, “oh, it’s just a gay film”, while the other is to proclaim, “Oh, it’s a great film, it just happens to be gay.”‘3

What do the following films have in common: Tomboy – a French art-house feature about a boyish ten-year-old girl (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2011); Going Down in La-La Land – a typical boy-meets-boy-in-West-Hollywood niche production (dir. Casper Andreas, 2011); Miwa – a French experimental documentary about a 1960s Japanese movie star (dir. Pascal-Alex Vincent, 2010); and Barbara Hammer’s 2010 short Generations? Certainly not their aesthetics, politics, format, or cultural currency! Yet, they were all screened at the 2011 Frameline San Francisco, one of the oldest LGBTQ film festivals. In itself, this is not surprising: the concept of ‘gay and lesbian cinema’, largely invented, operates at the juncture of various film cultures, each shaped by their own peculiar history and obeying specif ic regimes of cultural value. In that context, LGBTQ festivals’ programming strategies are symptomatic of the polymorphous or heterogeneous nature of gay and lesbian cinema. LGBTQ festivals curate a very diverse array of films, whose only common point might be topical.4 Conversely, LGBTQ films often circulate simultaneously in various circuits, queer and non-queer. The same film might premiere at the Berlinale, be picked up by a documentary film series, before being screened at queer festivals. LGBTQ cinema lies at the intersection of various regimes of cultural value. While several scholars have highlighted how queer f ilms cross over various festival circuits, the economics of LGBTQ cinema has been largely left unaddressed.5 In focusing on distribution, characterized by Toby Miller, Freya Schiwy, and Marta Hernández Salván as ‘the forgotten element in transnational cinema’, this chapter attempts to understand how queer films move from one circuit to another.6 In particular, it illustrates the regimes of 3 Rich, ‘New Queer Cinema’. 4 On the heterogeneity of queer cinema: Benshoff, Queer Cinema, 1. See also: June, ‘Defining Queer’. Jamie June analyzes the programme of various North American LGBTQ film festivals in order to understand how they define queer cinema. This perspective constitutes an interesting attempt to specify how LGBTQ organizations understand queer moving images. This chapter aims to understand the circulation and legitimation of queer films beyond North American LGBTQ film festivals: it is concerned with the flexibility of queer cinema – understood here as a concept moving across (and being redefined depending on) national contexts and film circuits. 5 For an analysis of crossovers, see: Loist, ‘Rêves transversaux’; Henderson, Love and Money. 6 Miller, Schiwy, and Salván, ‘Distribution, the Forgotten Element in Transnational Cinema’.

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taste and cultural contexts through which LGBTQ cinema and its festivals are valued. Indeed, according to Ramon Lobato, [t]he circuits through which texts move are of paramount importance to the processes of reception so rigorously theorized by a generation of film scholars, and each can tell us something new about the social, cultural, and economic functions of cinema in the twenty-first century.7

Queer cinema’s paradoxical position between various film cultures and distribution circuits presupposes and entails a kaleidoscopic understanding of cultural currency. Paying close attention to the discourses and regimes of taste embedded in what Jenni Olson calls the ‘queer film (festival) ecosystem’, I examine the movement of films between various festival circuits and across geographic markets.8 Indeed, queer films do not necessarily obey the same regimes of taste in Europe and in the US, a consequence of both the differentiated discourses on cinema that circulate within each country and the specific institutional and economic position of LGBTQ festivals.9 In Europe for instance, festivals are often affiliated with legitimate institutions (London Flare and the BFI, Écrans Mixtes Lyon and the Institut Lumière, the Festival internacional de cine gay y lesbico de Barcelona and the Filmoteca de Catalunya). Instead of being organized (only) by and for queer people, they attempt to serve a broader constituency.10 To that end, I provide a heuristic framework for understanding queer films’ patterns of distribution and valuation at the intersection of what Harbord identifies as various film cultures that ‘become manifest in particular sites of exhibition and circuits of distribution’.11 While they cannot account for individual films’ circulation and box office figures, discourses sustained by and sustaining the film business have material effects. They not only shape how audiences understand particular films but also largely inform film professionals’ strategies.12 In that context, this chapter focuses on 7 Lobato, ‘Subcinema: Theorizing Marginal Film Distribution’, 114. 8 Olson, ‘Film Festivals’. 9 Not to mention the countries and continents not covered in this chapter. See: Loist, ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s-2000s)’. On the transnational movement of films at LGBTQ festivals, see Chapter 5. 10 European LGBTQ film festivals tend to accommodate more readily straight festival-goers, a consequence of public funding policies. See: Damiens, ‘Queer Cannes’; Perriam and Waldron, French and Spanish Queer Film, 52; Suarez, ‘Surprise Me’, 602. 11 Harbord, Film Cultures, 33. 12 Acland, Screen Traffic, 14; Lobato, ‘Subcinema’, 116.

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the interplay between the symbolic economy of LGBTQ cinema and that of film festivals. This focus on film traffic might seem paradoxical in light of the criticisms of festival studies I have highlighted in the previous chapter. In mobilizing the metaphor of the circuit, I do not attempt to replay festival studies’ obsession with ‘festivals that matter’. Rather, this chapter displaces festival studies’ use of Bourdieu onto film traffic itself, thereby analyzing the regimes of taste that permeate queer cinema’s and LGBTQ festivals’ symbolic economy. ‘Gay and lesbian cinema’ is a relatively new concept, embedded in specific film cultures, each with their own regimes of legitimation and valuation. Conversely, LGBTQ festivals often combine various regimes of cultural value, among which popular taste, gay cinephilia, and experimental filmmaking.13 My goal here is thus not to legitimize a focus on queer festivals as participating in the economy of film but to account for the messy reality of LGBTQ cinema, a kaleidoscopic ‘genre’ whose uneasy positionality largely refracts the epistemological conundrums highlighted in Chapter 1.14

Now you can see it… early gay and lesbian festivals, film cultures, and film distribution In detailing the distribution of early queer cinema, this section describes the various film cultures through which LGBTQ films operate. In particular, I trace out a number of concrete initiatives emerging from or capitalizing on festivals, uniquely interweaving film exhibition and distribution. These events have attempted to make LGBTQ films economically viable, have helped bring more patrons into the theatres, or have simply sought to circumvent censorship legislation: the festival format has been mobilized so as to remedy the thorny issue of film distribution. As these examples make clear, gay and lesbian cinema’s uneasy positionality largely refracts its historical development at the intersection of various filmic traditions and cinematic genres. 13 Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 266. 14 In this chapter, I use the word ‘genre’ loosely. I do not suggest that ‘gay and lesbian cinema’ constitutes a coherent cinematic genre as defined within film studies, but rather that LGBTQ festivals participate in promoting a somewhat diluted idea of a ‘gay and lesbian film genre’. My use of the word ‘genre’ reflects Stringer’s emphasis on ‘generic mutation [that] occurs on the festival circuit through the promotion at certain events of umbrella labels underneath which a diverse range of titles may be gathered together […] as well as reconstructing existing generic identities, film festivals also generate new classificatory systems’. See: Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 136.

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Most notoriously, a (somewhat anachronistic) notion of ‘gay and lesbian cinema’ emerged through the critical work performed by film critics and scholars. From the late 1970s to the mid 1980s, several film critics advocated for a recognition of the centrality of (homo)sexuality in both European art-house cinema and Hollywood films. Highly indebted to 1970s feminist scholarship, critics such as Parker Tyler, Robin Wood, Vito Russo, Richard Dyer, and Thomas Waugh both rediscovered the gay subtext of canonical and forgotten films and analyzed the representations of homosexuality contained in mostly straight films. In so doing, they simultaneously affirmed the cultural legitimacy of (homo)sexuality and articulated a discourse in terms of art cinema with a community-based hunger for gay and lesbian images, paving the way for a form of queer cinephilia. Importantly, early scholars often organized several touring programmes or full-fledged festivals in an effort to both disseminate their own research and further develop a cinematic canon. LGBTQ cinema also emerged from its roots in adult theatres, which provided a temporary relief from 1960s and 1970s censorship legislation and opened up the possibility for a niche market. Jack Stevenson’s history of gay adult theatres and obscenity laws makes clear that ‘little separated the Underground “art” film-makers from the commercial sexploitationist pornographers’.15 The sometimes already porous lines between avant-garde art cinema and gay erotica were blurred under the banner of ‘obscenity’. This is particularly the case for films made by gay men, which often played on the codes and convention of avant-garde cinema. As Caroline Sheldon argues, [Avant-garde filmmaking] has long been claimed by gay men as legitimate territory: […] the male homosexual has found the means to pass by identifying as artistic/romantic rather than simply as gay […] The social rejection on the basis of sexuality is refocused by the justification of art. Alternatively, sexual illegality leads to a heightened sensibility about the world.16

In that context, a few adult theatres (such as the Park-Miller in New York) organized thematic screening cycles or festivals, oftentimes programming a mix of softcore and hardcore features.17 They typically capitalized on the 15 Stevenson, ‘From the Bedroom to the Bijou’, 27. See also: Osterweil, ‘Andy Warhol’s Blow Job’; Special Man, ‘La production X française’. 16 Sheldon, ‘Lesbians and Film’, 10. 17 Park-Miller Adult Theater, ‘New York, Thank You … Is All We Can Say for the Wonderful Response to Our Homosexual Film Festival’.

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festival format as a marketing tool, hoping to bring in more patrons. For instance, Los Angeles’s Park Theatre organized A Most Unusual Film Festival in June 1968, screening both avant-garde filmmakers and softcore fares. This event was particularly successful: identifying gay men as a potential lucrative market, the theatre thereafter decided to capitalize on the festival format, further pushing the boundaries of censorship legislation (among them: The Original Pat Rocco Male Film Festival in July 1968, A Festival of New Male Nude Films by Pat Rocco! in August 1968, and Pat Rocco Presents in 1969).18 With the legalization of pornography in the 1970s and the increasing popularity of art-house cinema, several theatres similarly attempted to tap into the festival format, thereby attracting new patrons. Los Angeles’s Tiffany, which partly targeted a gay audience, put together ‘A Series of Films Dealing with Homosexuality’ in 1978.19 Similarly, New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema and Washington DC.’s Janus theatre organized several screening cycles and festivals in the late 1970s and early 1980s.20 This use of gay-themed programming was not limited to independent theatres: in 1977, Vancouver’s Pacific Cinematheque organized a special focus on ‘homosexual films’.21 Other venues, such as New York’s 8th Street Playhouse, offered mixed programming of lectures and films, often based on and sometimes organized as part of Russo’s Celluloid Closet tour.22 While these North American festivals were mostly organized by theatreowners and film exhibitors hoping to capitalize on a gay audience, French festivals aimed at circumventing censorship legislation.23 As a 1977 special issue of the French gay magazine Special men makes clear, gay ‘films [in the 1970s] constitute[d] a specialized market and [were] secluded in theatres, districts, and festivals marked as deviant’.24 At best rated X, sometimes 18 Wuest, ‘Defining Homosexual Love Stories’; Strub, ‘Mondo Rocco’; Slide. Nitrate Won’t Wait, 94. These events are further documented: ‘Park motion picture theater marquee – “Male Nude Film Festival” and “Pat Rocco Presents” Joe Adair in “Someone” circa 1969’. 19 Tiffany Theater, ‘The Tiffany Theater in West Los Angeles Will Present a Series of Films Dealing with Homosexuality’. 20 Janus Theater, ‘First American Gay Film Festival, in DC’; Bleecker Street Cinema, ‘Bleecker Press Release – Retrospective of Gay and Lesbian Films’. At the time, the Bleecker Street Cinema mostly showed art-house fares (it re-opened as an adult theatre in 1990). 21 Pacific Cinematheque Pacifique, ‘Film’. 22 ‘Vito Russo and 8th Street Playhouse Present the Celluloid Closet’. 23 On the development of gay and lesbian (experimental) cinema in France, see: Worth, ‘Toward Alternative Film Histories’; Fleckinger, ‘Nous sommes un fléau social’. 24 Special Man, ‘Pink Narcissus développe jusqu’à l’écoeurement le thème de l’homme poupée’, 40. [I translate]

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unable to obtain an exploitation visa, gay films were heavily taxed and could not benefit from traditional state-sponsored film financing mechanisms. They were limited to a few theatres specializing in so-called adult cinema (such as the Hollywood Boulevard, the Brady, or the Latin).25 In that context, filmmakers affiliated with the groupes de libération homosexuelle (‘gay liberation groups’) organized more than a dozen of festivals in the 1970s, precisely aimed at bypassing censorship legislation. Filmmaker and festival organizer Lionel Soukaz recalls that ‘90% of the films [at the 1977 Paris festival] [were] screened under the legal category “festival”, which [did] not require the censorship commission’s approval – thus avoiding the threat of a X rating, censorship, or ban’.26 As these examples make clear, the festival format constituted a temporary palliative to the economic marginalization of gay and lesbian cinemas and their theatres. Clearly, these festivals did not aim at creating an alternative circuit of distribution. Rather, in using the festival format to curate the emerging concept gay and lesbian cinema, they point to a form of articulation between film exhibition and distribution that has yet to be theorized by festival studies. In the 1980s, a few queer f ilms adopted another format: social issue and committed documentaries. According to Waugh, this corpus was quite eclectic: it ‘aim[ed] simply at filling the representation vacuum left by the dominant media, [or at] political reform or integration or […] at fundamental societal transformation.’27 While some films were directed at a broad audience and strictly adhered to the traditional conventions of documentary filmmaking, others testified to the importance of performance and performativity in queer image making.28 Between 1970 and 1980, over 40 documentaries were produced by the gay liberation movement.29 In the same decade, the Super 8 format enabled the development of LGBTQ experimental cinema. In France, experimental festivals started curating gay and lesbian Super 8 experimental side-sections as early as 1975 (notably at the Festival du film de La Rochelle).30 In the United States, the National 25 Vallois, La Passion selon Vallois, 115-116; Thorens, Le Brady : Cinéma des damnés. 26 Soukaz, ‘Le nouveau mouvement’, 51–52. [I translate] 27 Waugh, ‘Lesbian and Gay Documentary’, 249. 28 Waugh, ‘Walking on Tippy Toes’. 29 Smelik, ‘Gay and Lesbian Criticism’, 144. Gays and lesbians have long used the documentary format, understood to record and document the realities of our social movements. Richard Dyer notes that gays and lesbians mobilized documentary filmmaking as activism as early as 1949 (In dit teken, produced by the Dutch organization COC). Dyer, Now You See It, 2nd ed., 211. 30 Jablonski, ‘De l’ouverture du ghetto à la dépolitisation’.

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Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers tried to establish alternative circuits of distribution for experimental films in 1979.31 This experimental culture usually operated under the assumption that ‘a radical content […] deserves a radical form’, as stated in the title of a panel held during the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival’s first edition (1988): we [founders of the NYLGEFF Hubbard and Schulman] believe that lesbian and gay people can have an especially rich relationship to experimental film. Both avant-garde films and gay consciousness must be resolutely created in a world that insists on homogeneous sexuality and narrowly defined aesthetics […]. The point is not that radical content requires radical forms, but that our lives demand it. […] Avant-garde and experimental is the true form for cinema. […] A radical life as a gay man or lesbian and as an artist demands a radical vision and a radical art.32

As Hubbard makes clear, gay and lesbian experimental cinema was linked to a discourse on medium specificity. Queerness was inscribed onto, originated through, and rerouted formal experimentation – opening up the door for self-representation.33 In the mid-1980s, gay and lesbian cinema emerged from another cinematic culture: video. Artist-run centres and film cooperatives favoured the emergence of a queer-friendly circuit that emphasized community empowerment and access.34 Video and film then constituted two largely separate circuits, supported by specific institutions and obeying distinct regimes of taste. While experimental filmmakers were often inscribed within a legitimate discourse on cinema, videomakers situated themselves within community-based ‘acts of intervention’.35 They often started from the personal and aimed at grassroots or alternative distribution (notably through public access television). While film and video festivals often constituted two distinct circuits, I do not want to over-emphasize the differences between the two: they both stemmed from the need for self-representation and community access in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.36 Furthermore, 31 Forgione, ‘Organizing on the Left’, 74–75. 32 Jim Hubbard, in: ‘New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival 1988. Panel Discussion with Su Friedrich, Tom Chomont, Abigail Child, Jim Hubbard, and Barbara Hammer. Recording’. 33 Worth, ‘Toward Alternative Film Histories’, 65. 34 In the US, see: Saalfield, ‘On the Make: Activist Video Collectives’. In France, see: Worth, ‘Toward Alternative Film Histories’, 63. In Toronto, see: Damiens, ‘Incestuous Festivals’. 35 A concept I borrow from: Román, ‘Remembering AIDS’. 36 Chin, ‘Super-8 Films and the Aesthetics of Intimacy’.

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some 1980s LGBTQ festivals did programme both videos and films, such as the Montreal 1982 Sans Popcorn.37 As these various traditions make clear, gay and lesbian cinemas occupy a paradoxical position. Queer films move between and across the highbrow of art cinema and the abject genre of pornography, between film and video, between community-based search for new images and already institutionalized regimes of taste. Gay and lesbian cinemas resist any easy fit with a single regime of taste; they operate at the juncture of particular film cultures. In the United States, the use of the festival format as a potential alternative circuit of distribution can be traced back to the post-Cruisingcontroversy era. Attempting both to counter the negative representations of homosexuality depicted in Hollywood f ilms and to create or sustain viable economic opportunities for the production and distribution of films and videos centred on and made by gays and lesbians, organizations such as the National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers edited several publications, carefully compiling lists of venues and festivals.38 Similarly, Women Make Movies (created in 1972, became a full-fledged distribution company in the early 1980s) organized several ephemeral festivals such In Our Own Image: Five Film Programs of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Feminist Consciousness (1979 or 1980, in partnership with Chelsea Gay Association).39 Peter Lowy’s New York Gay Film Festival (1979 to 1987) tried to emulate the models put in place by the National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers and Women Make Movies.40 Its parent organization Altermedia LTD was a ‘for profit corporation created to encourage the production, distribution and exhibition of films, videos and works in other media that treat the lives and experiences of gay people as valid and worthy of artistic exploration’. It aimed at using the festival format to establish ‘a media production center, co-productions with independent filmmakers, regular television programming, and […] a theatre specializing in gay-oriented [cinema]’. 41 With tensions over the New York Gay Film Festival and Peter Lowy being accused of embezzling the festival’s budget, Altermedia LTD 37 Waugh, ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’. 38 National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘Dear Friends…’. See also: Forgione, ‘Organizing on the Left’. 39 ‘Women Make Movies & Chelsea Gay Association Present ‘In Our Own Image – Five Film Programs of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Feminist Consciousness’. 40 Not to be confused with the NYLGEFF or New York’s New Fest (starting in 1989). 41 Altermedia LTD, ‘Altermedia Presents “Homo Cinematicus – the Gay Man on Film”‘.

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did not reach its goals. 42 Its last incarnation, the 1988 American Gay Film Tour, was symptomatic of early festivals’ attempts to mobilize the festival format as an alternative circuit of distribution: it aimed at creating a network of venues in which gay films could, each year, circulate. 43 Other festivals similarly attempted to create their own circuit of exhibition and distribution. For instance, Hubbard and Schulman’s NYLGEFF organized a yearly tour of ‘the best of the fest’, oftentimes partnering with universities, art centres, or independently owned theatres (sometimes even internationally).44 The NYLGEFF also collaborated with several distribution companies, conveniently offering a yearly package of the best films screened at the festival. 45 These programmes not only intended to publicize gay and lesbian experimental films, but also to provide additional revenue for both the festival and filmmakers. 46 The NYLGEFF thus envisioned festival tours as a sort of alternative distribution network financing experimental cinema, partly inspired by a cooperative ethos. San Francisco’s gay and lesbian film festival (1977-present, renamed Frameline) chose a different option. It launched its own distribution division as early as 1981, first targeting the gay and lesbian festival circuit before moving into the educational and home video / DVD market. The festival also initiated a completion fund in 1990. 47 Frameline both financed and distributed the films it screened, further blurring the lines between production, distribution, and exhibition. Distribution (or the lack thereof) has thus been a central concern of early LGBTQ festivals. While the festival format first emerged as a solution to bring more patrons inside the theatres, it quickly helped remunerating filmmakers and circulating their films – sometimes through the creation of full-fledged distribution divisions. This is not surprising: early LGBTQ festivals struggled 42 Zielinski, ‘Furtive Steady Glances’, 245n197. 43 Altermedia LTD. ‘Say Goodbye to the New York Gay Film Festival…’. 44 At the University of California, in Santa Cruz: LaCroix, ‘Gay Film Festival Off the Straight and Narrow’; At Johns Hopkins University: Kramer, ‘Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Serious Challenge to Status Quo’; Buffalo’s Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center: ‘Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center – “A Queer Kind of Film” Showcase Flyer’; New England’s Brattle Theater: Rasanen, ‘A Laying on of Images – “A Queer Kind of Film” The Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film Festival Disorients at the Brattle’; Paris: Scratch Projection, ‘SCRATCH PROJECTION. Programme’; London’s National Film Theatre: National Film Theatre, ‘Dangerous to Know ‒ A Queerer Kind of Film’. 45 Drift Distribution. ‘Drift Distribution will distribute a package of 16 mm and super 8 films selected from the first three years of the Gay Lesbian Experimental Film Festival’. 46 The share given to filmmakers changed tremendously from 1987 to the late 1990s, but usually revolved around a 40% filmmakers / 60% festival split. 47 Loist and Zielinski, ‘On the Development of Queer Film Festivals and Their Media Activism’.

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to find films; their catalogues often included a list detailing the name and address of the distributor for each film.

Soon at a theatre near you… Towards LGBTQ distribution With the ‘indie boom’ of the mid-1980s, gay and lesbian cinema acquired a new legitimacy and visibility, epitomized by a short new wave of queer products in the 1980s.48 The Berlin International Film Festival played a major role in the establishing of a viable film circuit. As early as 1984, gay and lesbian directors and distributors congregated at the festival: David Mark Thomas recalls that Manfred Salzgeber posted ‘a list of films made by/for and about gays in gay bars [which were] discussed in gay groups before the festival began’.49 In the following years, Salzgeber and Wieland Speck created the Teddy Award (1987), further accentuating the visibility of LGBTQ cinema through a A-list generalist festival and enabling the development of a queer film circuit. Although (or because) the Berlinale cannot be thought of as a queer film festival, it established itself as a prime node in the queer film festival ecosystem.50 As such, the 1980s were marked by the rise of independent distributors tapping into platform releasing: gay and lesbian films benefited from the new distribution strategies offered by the VHS format and cable TV (ancillary markets), as well as from the emerging gay and lesbian festival circuit. Both major and independent producers and distributors realized the potential of the ‘gay niche’ in terms of VHS sales/rentals, cable TV royalties, and screening fees. This certainly explains the emergence of what Rich would shortly coin as New Queer Cinema (NQC) – independent films that were politically and aesthetically challenging, screened at both A-list and queer festivals.51 While I do not want to overplay the opportunities offered by NQC and the screening of queer products at generalist festivals, this new climate did open up the door for a cinema that was previously deemed economically 48 Waugh, ‘Walking on Tippy Toes’. 49 Thomas, ‘A New Generation of Gay Cinema at the Berlin Film Festival’. 50 Loist and Zielinski, ‘On the Development of Queer Film Festivals and Their Media Activism’, 53. 51 Rich, ‘New Queer Cinema’. While, in her 1992 article, Rich defines NQC as starting in 1991, the notion has been expanded by Rich herself to include late 1980s queer filmmaking (see: Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut) In that context, the concept ‘New Queer Cinema’ has been criticized for being historically dubious: politically and aesthetically challenging films were made in the 1980s. In this chapter, I am not interested in determining whether or not NQC constitutes a cinematic movement or in dating NQC. Rather, I take the proliferation of discourses around NQC as symptomatic of a new economic interest in independent LGBTQ filmmaking.

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unviable.52 For instance, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner’s 1994 lesbian f ilm Go Fish, shot for US$68,000, was sold at Sundance for $400,000 to distributor Samuel Goldwyn. It brought in $2,405,285 at the North American box office.53 Similarly, the 1999 comedy But I’m a Cheerleader (dir. Jamie Babbit)– a campy and resolutely queer film with iconic superstars RuPaul, Mink Stole and Julie Delpy – was released by Lions Gate; it grossed $2,199,853. This new interest in queer cinema was not limited to major companies or blockbuster independents: it included several newly created distributors specializing in gay and lesbian fares, most notoriously Strand Releasing (US, created in 1989), Dangerous to Know (UK, 1992), Pro-Fun (Germany, 1993) and Epicentre Films (France, 1994).54 LGBTQ festivals were thus increasingly able to rely on commercial features, whose success at the box office nevertheless helped finance the exhibition of experimental films.55 In North America, the situation started changing in the 2000s with the rise of what some have termed ‘indiewood’.56 The building of multiplexes that favoured big productions, the incorporation of boutique distributors within media conglomerates, and the diminishing of cable revenues contributed to a new divide between what Peter Knegt identifies as ‘gay indiewood’ and increasingly independent companies without access to theatrical releases57 In this context, distributors relied on flexible strategies, prioritizing ancillary and niche markets.58 The situation was slightly different in Europe. In France and Spain for instance, queer cinema was (and still is) supported by public policies and by art-house theatres: discourses in terms of art cinema still shape queer products, thus locating LGBTQ films in a different economic context and genealogy.59 52 For a critique of the ‘revolution’ New Queer Cinema and cross-over dreaming, see: Chin, ‘Multiculturalism and Its Masks. 53 Figures drawn from: Knegt, ‘Forging a Gay Mainstream’, 8. 54 Strand Releasing is documented in: Knight, ‘DVD, Video and Reaching Audiences Experiments in Moving-Image Distribution’, 32; Vaillancourt, ‘Strand and Deliver’, 52. Dangerous to Know was launched by Tom Abell, who now works for the London-based LGBTQ distribution company Peccadillo Pictures. The expression ‘Dangerous to Know’ was also used as a nickname/tagline for the fourth edition of the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival organized by the National Film Theatre (1989). The two are, however, unrelated: the name Dangerous to Know underscored the pervasiveness of censorship legislation in the UK. It was parodied in several articles of the tabloid The Sun. See: Pink Paper, ‘Dangerous to Know’. 55 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 139. 56 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures. 57 Tzioumakis, ‘Reclaiming Independence’, 3; Acland, Screen Traffic, chap. 5; Knegt, ‘Forging a Gay Mainstream’. 58 Tzioumakis, ‘Reclaiming Independence’, 17. 59 See for instance: Rees-Roberts, French Queer Cinema; Perriam, Spanish Queer Cinema.

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The last decade has thus been one of diversification and polarization: the divide between indiewood and independent products has clearly deepened. Few post-2000s LGBTQ f ilms have made money at the box off ice.60 Distribution companies have thus increasingly tailored their releasing strategies so as to efficiently promote each of their films, often building upon alternative circuits of distribution, relying on gay-friendly cable TV (Showtime, HBO, Logo TV), pay-per-view, and Video On Demand (VOD). Furthermore, LGBTQ festivals have increasingly played the role of an alternative circuit of exhibition, both internationally (as many events are now organized outside of the West) and locally (with the creation of festivals specialized on f ilms on/by trans people or queer people of colour).61 Several technological shifts have occurred recently, reconfiguring the role played by distributors and potentially nuancing some of the differences I have highlighted. In particular, the diminishing of DVD sales and cable royalties have created a difficult environment for LGBTQ companies. Furthermore, the advent of the Internet has been a double-edged sword. On one hand, it has enabled distributors to sell their DVDs directly to the consumers and to target new constituencies through fan-based distribution and social media.62 As Hilderbrand notes, ‘VOD has become an important distribution platform, not only for minimizing the costs of a distribution and promotion, but also for more immediate revenue-sharing’.63 On the other hand, LGBTQ distributors have been particularly affected by piracy as they mostly rely on ancillary markets.64 In this environment, companies are going global. Specialized distributors are increasingly buying international rights, which enables them to both capitalize on worldwide festival screenings and to resell a film in secondary markets. Some companies have expanded their operations so as to cover several territories at once.65 VOD certainly participates in this trend: although geo-blocking imitates DVD region coding and is supposed to protect 60 Knegt, ‘Why Don’t LGBT Movies Make Money at the Box Office Anymore?’. 61 Loist, ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s2000s)’, 119. 62 Moore, ‘Distribution Is Queen’, 140. 63 Hilderbrand, ‘The Art of Distribution’, 26. 64 Beirne, ‘New Queer Cinema 2.0?’, 129. 65 For instance, The Open Reel is a distributor and an international sales company based in both Italy and Latin America. Its VOD platform capitalizes on the company’s position as sales agent: films can be seen outside of the territories and markets covered by the company’s distribution branch.

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domestic rights-holders, they are easy to bypass.66 LGBTQ distributors, who were early adopters of VOD, are conscious of the porousness of geo-blocking and hope to unofficially capitalize at least in part on viewers outside of their domestic market.67 While these changes may result in a globalization of distribution strategies, nuancing the differences between geographic markets, VOD has not proven to compensate for lost revenues.68 Indeed, the discussions around the ‘revolutionary’ potential of the Internet recall elements of the technological utopia that briefly surrounded cable TV and narrowcasting.69 Some festival organizers have worried that the advent of VOD might translate into a diminishing of attendance figures, sometimes even forestalling the phenomenon by organizing ‘online festivals’.70 Others feared that pay-per-view and cable TV would hinder LGBTQ festivals.71 This hasn’t proven to be the case: LGBTQ festivals are striving. The proliferation of LGBTQ festivals can be understood as a testament to the resilience and vitality of the queer film (festival) ecosystem. As this short historical survey makes clear, LGBTQ films circulate simultaneously in various parallel festival circuits, queer and non-queer. While late 1970s and early 1980s LGBTQ festivals attempted to develop circuits of distribution through film exhibition, the globalization of the queer film (festival) ecosystem and the diversification of circuits of distribution and exhibition have resulted in a new and complex economic context. LGBTQ festivals’ role in the economy of queer film cannot be easily assessed: while most festivals merely screen films, others influence film production through completion funds and cash awards. Moreover, international film festivals have increasingly selected LGBTQ films, sometimes even creating queer awards (Venice’s Queer Lion in 2007, Cannes’s Queer Palm in 2012).72 Gay and lesbian cinemas thus resist any easy fit with a single legitimated regime of taste: they operate at the intersection of various circuits, each with their own regimes of cultural valuation and cultural imaginary.

66 Beirne, ‘New Queer Cinema 2.0? Lesbian-Focused Films and the Internet’, 137. 67 Wolfe, ‘Movie File “Sharing” Goes Legit’. 68 Hilderbrand, ‘The Art of Distribution’; Miller, Schiwy, and Salván, ‘Distribution, the Forgotten Element in Transnational Cinema’. 69 Banet-Weiser, ‘The Success Story: Nickelodeon and the Cable Industry’. 70 As early as 1997, MIX NYC launched an online festival in partnership with Jenni Olson’s PopcornQ. See: MIX New York, ‘The First Online Queer Digital Film Festival’. 71 Rich, ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’, 620. 72 See Damiens, ‘Queer Cannes’.

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Cultural fields: regimes of taste, queer relays, and the queer film ecosystem If gay and lesbian cinemas are located at the intersection of various discourses and circuits, how can we understand the ‘legs’ of queer films – the breadth of a film’s circulation, both in terms of potential theatrical releases and of crossover between circuits? In turning to the discourses sustaining and sustained by film distribution, this section illustrates the regimes through which the cultural value of queer films is determined. As Daryl Chin rightly notes, ‘these debates on culture are not about […] aesthetics […]. They are about politics, they are about power, they are about the ways in which “culture” is embedded in the societal matrix’.73 Bourdieu’s field theory, which understands artistic production as ‘a site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition’ of cultural value, might be particularly well suited to this task.74 According to Bourdieu, it is through the differences and antagonisms between various discourses on art and types of cultural products that actors define themselves and their work. Bourdieu combines materialist and discursive approaches. In ‘constructing the space of positions and the space of the position-takings’,75 he attempts to map out the set of ‘dispositions’ assimilated by art professionals (habitus) which regulate ‘the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work’.76 To that end, Bourdieu’s field theory does not offer a prescriptive model but rather seeks to describe processes of valuation and legitimation – the ingrained discourses through which we understand art and which have material consequences. Applying Bourdieu’s writings on the cultural field to cinema is problematic. Indeed, Bourdieu posits the primacy of the homology between the field of production and taste-making.77 Legitimate art would be marked by a refusal of anything related to economic capital – what he also calls ‘collective bad faith’.78 Hence a major difficulty when it comes to cinema: as a capital intensive cultural form, films can hardly be created outside of economic considerations. Film relies heavily on cultural intermediaries (including producers, distributors or exhibitors). Because of the cost of making films, questions of profitability are often foregrounded within the field itself. De Valck thus 73 74 75 76 77 78

Chin, ‘Multiculturalism and Its Masks’, 1. Bourdieu, ‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed’, 312. Ibid, 312. Ibid, 317. Ibid, 311-313. Ibid, 331.

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insightfully concludes that ‘[Bourdieu’s] characterization of the art world as a loser-takes-all game does not apply to global art cinema and festivals.’79 In order to solve this conundrum, de Valck turns to the field of cultural reproduction.80 In analyzing festivals’ role as cultural gatekeepers and as legitimated and legitimating institutions, de Valck further describes the contradiction at the heart of art cinema. Indeed, festivals ‘have a vested interest in sustaining the discourse of autonomous art, because their position of power depends on it’, yet they are deeply invested in fostering economic growth.81 This is not surprising: the field of cultural reproduction is also a site of struggle and competing agendas. As de Valck’s emphasis on specialized intermediaries and legitimating institutions makes clear, legitimacy is not opposed to profitability in the field of cinematic production. Importantly, de Valck’s turn to the field of cultural reproduction refracts festival studies’ theoretical apparatus: classically, scholars posit that festivals participate in legitimizing various cinemas. As curating institutions, they help define cinematic genres and canons.82 Festivals simultaneously act as gatekeepers and legitimating institutions: they ascribe cultural capital to films. They, however, do so unevenly: various festival circuits may not obey the same regimes of taste and may not have the same cultural currency.83 In that context, scholars have argued that general international festivals would assert the legitimacy of art cinema, while LGBTQ events would at best simply screen films, at worst mark those films as being solely about identity. This art/identity divide, mapped onto festival studies’ theoretical apparatus, further participates in the field’s quest for legitimacy: it defines which festivals matter within film studies, and why. This emphasis, however, presupposes a particular set of assumptions. Most importantly, scholars locate festivals as assigning cultural value: they posit a homology between films and festivals, naming festivals as the most important institution in the field of cultural reproduction. In prioritizing the field of cultural reproduction over the field of cultural production, festival scholars offer a prescriptive model for understanding a film’s circulation through festivals. Equating the cultural value of a film with that of the festivals in which they circulate is potentially misleading: according to Bourdieu, festivals do not 79 de Valck, ‘Film Festivals, Bourdieu, and the Economization of Culture’, 81. See also: de Valck, ‘Fostering Art, Adding Value, Cultivating Taste’. 80 Bourdieu, ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’, 67. 81 de Valck, ‘Film Festivals, Bourdieu, and the Economization of Culture’, 78. 82 Czach, ‘Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National Cinema’, 78. 83 Iordanova, ‘Film Festivals and Dissent’, 17.

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produce but reproduce the cultural value associated with particular films; they select films that already correspond to particular regimes of cultural value. In other words, festivals only accentuate or amplify the cultural currency of a film. While festival scholars aptly describe the field of cultural reproduction, they do not particularly account for individual films’ patterns of circulation and valuation: not only do films with gay and lesbian content circulate in various circuits, they can also belong simultaneously to various genres and regimes of cultural value. The field’s typological impulse thus replays here an organization of knowledge that not only separates art and sexuality but also conceals the different regimes of cultural values through which LGBTQ cinema operates. A focus on festivals’ role as legitimating institution must therefore be complemented by a clear analysis of the symbolic economy of cinema itself (that is, the field of production). Adapting Bourdieu’s field theory to the cinematic field of production, one could therefore posit the existence of two poles, understood as extreme cases, as well as one intermediary position: – 1a. ‘Restricted production’ or art for art’s sake. This pole is highly selfreferential and obeys an ‘interest in disinterestedness’.84 The value of a film is determined not by its success or cultural authority, but through its relative position-taking: value depends on a film’s position vis-à-vis the ensemble of films in the field of restricted production. Such creations are not meant to be viewed by non-producers: legitimacy is derived from the field itself. Directors do not aim at accumulating economic capital. They gain symbolic capital through their denigration of the economics. Canonization might eventually occur through the field of reproduction (academic consecration or festival selections). This pole corresponds loosely to experimental cinema. – 2a. On the other side of the spectrum, a pole ‘production at large’. Here, producers aim at distributing their work as widely as possible. Their main goal is not legitimacy, but economic capital – hence a homology between products and potential audiences/buyers. Art is made for, with an audience in mind. Blockbusters and niche markets are typical of this pole: they prioritize economic capital over aesthetic considerations. – 3a. Most professionals fall into an intermediary position: according to Bourdieu, the poles ‘restricted production’ and ‘production at large’ serve as negative discourses. It is through their relationship with these two positions that producers define themselves. Most producers both maintain a disbelief in the economy (primacy of art) and attempt to 84 Bourdieu, ‘The Field of Cultural Production’, 320.

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distribute their f ilms as widely as possible. Legitimacy is attained through cultural institutions and a film’s circulation within legitimate networks. This position is not self-referential: it depends on legitimization and on the field of reproduction. Filmmakers in this pole seek to accumulate symbolic capital through a film’s legitimization at festivals, which they hope to turn into economic capital. As this simplified rendering makes clear, Bourdieu’s theory posits the primacy of the ‘opposition between commercial and non-commercial, [which is] the general matrix upon which most judgements and tastes are inscribed’.85 While this discursive play between commerce and art clearly structures film professionals’ dispositions (how they understand not only their position but also the position-taking of their films), it is not the only regime of taste embedded in the queer film ecosystem: queer cinema operates at the juncture of particular film cultures, each with their own legitimating criteria and regime of taste. Alone, the field of cinematic production cannot explain queer films’ patterns of circulation and cultural legitimacy. While a full scope analysis of the fields in which each of these cultures operate clearly exceeds the scope of this chapter, I posit the existence of a diachronic, overlapping – yet not isomorphic – field of queer cultural production, one which takes into account identity and community. As with the general field of cinematic production, the field of queer production is structured around two poles, understood as extreme cases: – 1b. The ‘queer pole of restricted production’ holds together a relative denial of the economy (just as in the general restricted field) and a community-based identity politics. While producers create self-referential art, they also aim at challenging aesthetic and sexual conventions. Politics is here important: filmmakers address both other producers and a non-initiated audience. Queerness itself is turned into a symbolic capital. 1980s and 1990s gay and lesbian video art would be emblematic of this position: it used the formal properties of the medium in order to comment on sexual politics and aesthetics, to intervene in a community. Occasionally, a producer can belong to both the queer and the general pole of restricted production. It is, however, not necessarily the case as the two fields are not isomorphic: the criteria of legitimacy of the queer pole of restricted production (politics, identity, community) can be devalourized in the general pole of restricted production (‘art for art’s sake’). 85 Bourdieu, ‘La Production de la croyance’, 10. [I translate]

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– 2b. A subset of the cinematic pole production at large. This pole loosely corresponds to the gay niche market, to products that explicitly target the LGBTQ community and aim at immediate profitability. Queerness is seen and understood as economic capital. Since these works are made for the audience and attempt to maximize their economic capital, they do not challenge the viewers. The series Eating Out is emblematic of this use of queerness as economic capital. The first film (dir. Q. Allan Brocka, 2004), shot for $43,000, grossed over $2,000,000 in the US.86 It efficiently used the queer festival network as a circuit of exhibition (screening fees) and as a marketing tool for future DVD sales through platform releasing. Eating Out became a sequel – a concept which already plays on branding and recognizable/consumable image. Tellingly, it is also the first film distributed and produced by the LGBTQ-specialized company Ariztical Entertainment released in theatres.87 The five films composing the Eating Out series are distributed in the U.K. by TLA Releasing, Ariztical’s main competitor in the US. In France, they were picked up by Optimale, a straight-to-DVD distributor often partnering with (and bought in 2011 by) TLA.88 Taken together, these two fields should be understood as a heuristic description which considers the discourses sustaining film business, operating at the intersection of socially-determined regimes of taste and legitimating institutions. LGBTQ festivals are particularly well suited to accommodating several poles at once: festivals always address different types of audiences simultaneously, a diversity reflected in the additive or balanced nature of their programming.89 LGBTQ festivals’ focus on both art and identity uniquely locates them at the intersection of these two fields of reproduction. Conversely, queer cinema can be produced in very different fields, whose structure partly determines a film’s circulation. For instance, 1990s NQC was clearly a product of the intermediary pole (3a). Aesthetically and politically challenging, these films often spoke beyond gay representational politics and its search for positive representations: as such, their more ‘radical’ depiction of queer sexualities enabled them to tap into the circuits associated with independent and art cinemas. They were screened and legitimized first 86 Brocka, ‘A Theater Full of Queer People’. 87 ‘Ariztical Entertainment | About Us’. 88 Hazelton, ‘TLA’s Curl Buys Optimale’. 89 On festivals’ discourses: Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 244. Additive programming: Loist, ‘A Complicated Queerness’. Balanced programming: Ruoff, ‘Programming Film Festivals’, 7.

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Field of cinematic (re)production Restricted. Experimental. Denial of the economics. Primacy of cultural capital

Restricted. Experimental. Denial of the economics. Primacy of queer and cultural capital

Intermediary position. Art-house cinema. Economic and cultural capital. Role of legitimating institutions

Compatibility with the queer circuit: - queer cinema with production value (crossovers) - Gay cinephilia

Production at large. Goal: Immediate profitability

The ‘gay niche’. Presence of gayrelated materials that do not challenge the viewer. Queer as economic capital

Queer field of cinematic (re)production

Figure 1. General and queer fields of (re)production.

through the (regular) festival circuit, before being canonized through film criticism.90 Derek Jarman’s 1991 Edward II is here a good example: produced by the BBC and distributed in the U.K. by the then independent Working Title Films, the film premiered at Venice and was subsequently picked up by art-house distributors in Europe (for instance: Arthaus Filmverleih in Germany). In the US and Canada, it was bought in 1993 by The Film Sales Company – a boutique independent specializing in genre (including LGBTQ) cinema. The film received critical acclaim and Criterion acquired laserdisc rights in 1994, while the newly created BBC Video retained VHS rights in its domestic market. As the film circulated in both queer and non-queer circuits, it became part of the canon. A few years later, several LGBTQ distributors acquired VHS/DVD rights, hoping to capitalize on an already-proven product – this time through niche marketing (for instance: the German Salzgeber in 2004). Films akin to Edward II can easily cross over from one circuit to another; they are compatible with the criteria of legitimacy of both the general and queer field of cinematic production. A film’s legs depend on its position within and vis-à-vis these two fields (see Figure 1).

90 Rich, ‘New Queer Cinema’.

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Distribution: queer film cultures, relays, and cultural fields A film’s circulation partly depends on its distribution strategy – on the ‘positiontaking’ (or branding) of a film’s distributor and on the way it positions a given film. Distributors have to decide which routes will maximize a film’s circulation, to imagine which criteria of legitimacy will benefit a film the most and will be best aligned with existing discourses in terms of sexuality and cinema. Lesbian cinema is here quite instructive. The historical emphasis of Women’s Studies on alternative regimes of knowledge production and feminist circuits of exhibition (such as the Centre Simone de Beauvoir, Cineffable, and Women Make Movies) has favoured the development of lesbian experimental cinema, typically inscribed within the queer restricted field (1b) and confined to niche festivals.91 In the 1990s, NQC created a short-lived window of opportunity for feature-length films. The indie boom and the speculations associated with the queer circuit enabled the making of lesbian films in the intermediate pole (3a), such as Go Fish and The Watermelon Woman (dir. Cheryl Dunye, 1997). These films were not only released theatrically, they were also screened at both queer and non-queer festivals. With the restructuring of the film industry in the following decade, lesbian products have at best been relegated to the niche market (2b), often deemed too small. Because of the recent diminishing of filming costs, a renewed production in the intermediate pole has occurred – but one that is fundamentally hybrid. For instance, Anna Margarita Albelo’s 2014 Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf successfully interweaves elements referencing 1990s indie lesbian culture (e.g. Guinevere Turner, Go Fish, The Watermelon Woman) and experimental videomaking aesthetics (i.e. first-person account, selfreflexivity). It mobilizes elements that could facilitate crossover. Distributed by Wolfe Video in the US, Outplay in France, and Pro-Fun in Germany, it circulated mostly through LGBTQ festivals and Video On Demand. The position-takings of its distributors and the position-granting of the film were deemed not to enable a wide circulation outside of the queer niche. Similarly, this emphasis on regimes of cultural value partly accounts for the skewed circulation of films centring on or made by queer people of colour. In the mid-1980s and the 1990s, the popularization of video and the indie boom opened up new possibilities for queer artists of colour, typically inscribed within the queer restricted field (1b) or the intermediate pole

91 Worth, ‘Toward Alternative Film Histories’; Rollet, ‘Femmes cinéastes en France: l’après-mai 68’.

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(3a).92 This wave of films was further enabled by LGBTQ festivals’ new focus on diversity.93 There haven’t been a lot of films produced for the gay niche (2b), as the market for non-white gay and lesbian features is often deemed too small. Tellingly, ‘gay indiewood’ production companies have tended to prioritize narratives centring on white men – with the recent exceptions of Pariah (dir. Dee Rees, 2011), Tangerine (dir. Sean Baker, 2015), and Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2016). A distributor’s perception of both its films and itself is thus key. Quite famously, some gay and lesbian directors (and their distributors) refused to have their f ilm screened at queer festivals.94 Their distancing from the queer f ield of production aims at strengthening their legitimation through already legitimated and legitimating cultural institutions. This refusal stems from a fear of what Zielinski calls ‘negative capital’95 – that the film might be read by a general audience with the criteria associated with the queer f ield of production (identity, aesthetics, politics) thus potentially offsetting the symbolic capital gained through the general field of production. Queer festivals’ uneasy positioning within the field of cinematic reproduction is read as potentially detrimental to a f ilm’s success. While the fear of negative capital might prevent some filmmakers from screening their works at LGBTQ festivals, others have used the interplay between queer and general fields in a more productive and strategic manner. This trade-off or strategic mobilizing of both queer and general fields is at the heart of Lisa Henderson’s ‘queer relay’, a concept that attends to the circulation of 92 These videos include for instance: Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians, directed by Richard Fung (Canada, 1986); Chinese Characters, directed by Richard Fung, (Canada, 1986); Water into Fire, directed by Zachary Longboy (Canada, 1994). The indie boom also favoured a short wave of Black queer films, such as: Tongues Untied, directed by Marlon Riggs (USA, 1989); Looking for Langston, directed by Isaac Julien (UK, 1989); The Watermelon Woman, directed by Cheryl Dunye (USA, 1997); Storme: The Lady of the Jewel Box, directed by Michelle Parkerson (USA, 1987). On this short new wave, see: Wallenberg, ‘New Black Queer Cinema’; Parkerson, ‘Birth of a Notion: Towards Black Gay and Lesbian Imagery in Film and Video’. 93 LGBTQ festivals start hiring non-white curators in the early 1990s. On the specificity of curating films by/for non-white LGBTQ people, see: Rastegar, ‘Seeing Differently’; Rastegar, ‘The De-Fusion of Good Intentions’. I develop the intersection of curation, academic knowledge production, and diversity in Chap 3. 94 The controversy around Chantal Akerman, analyzed by Martha Gever, is here quite typical: Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1975) was programmed at the 1984 New York Gay Film Festival. Its distributor decided at the last minute not to screen the film. See: Gever, ‘The Names We Give Ourselves’; Stein, ‘Lizard and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails’. 95 Zielinski, ‘Furtive Steady Glances’, 260.

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queer cultural production at the crossroads of industrial and queer independent sectors – that figurative port of entry for much queer work that is later taken up in mainstream form and whose mainstream expressions flow back to queer cultures… Relay is a term designed to capture the movement of cultural producers and production practices across such zones of imagined and theorized opposition [between queerness and art cinema], ‘recalibrat[ing] cultural political possibility beyond the claims and counterclaims of the queer-mass culture critique.96

Queer relays attend to the interplay between general and queer fields of production, the messy realities of film distribution and production. Queer relays are particularly evident in the recent wave of ‘gay indiewood’ films. For instance, Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee, 2006) inscribed itself within legitimate art-house circuits while strategically mobilizing queerness.97 Focus Pictures’s use of platform releasing (starting with only five screens) aimed at slowly building an audience while its ambivalent communication alternately borrowed from (‘revolutionary’, a ‘landmark’) and rejected (‘not a gay film’) the criteria of legitimacy associated with the queer field. Focus Pictures enacted a form of queer relay, both reinforcing the film’s authenticity as a queer product and strengthening its legitimacy through the general field of cinematic production.

Geographic relays: cultural fields in Europe and in America While Henderson’s queer relay enables us to tackle the interface between queer and general fields of cultural (re)production, it is not particularly tuned into the differences between various geographic markets and festival cultures. The controversy around Xavier Dolan is here particularly instructive. In 2012, Dolan received the Queer Palm, Cannes’s non-official LGBTQ award, for his film Laurence Anyways, produced and distributed in France by the art-house MK2. MK2’s strategy, which included an extensive theatrical release, played on both Cannes’s symbolic capital and the popular framing of Dolan as an auteur in the making. While it did not attempt to tap into the small French gay niche market per se, MK2 organized a series of premieres at LGBTQ cinéclubs, partnering up for instance with the festival Écrans Mixtes.98 In 96 Henderson, Love and Money, 19-20. [Emphasis in the original] 97 Knegt, ‘Forging a Gay Mainstream’. 98 Gay in Lyon, ‘Le film Laurence Anyways en avant première à l’UGC confluence’.

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doing so, it garnered a strong audience while both minimizing the effects of negative capital and ensuring a gay following. It enacted a form of queer relay. While Lawrence Anyways was mostly distributed in Europe as an art-house film, it was marked as a queer film in several Anglophone countries. In the U.K., it was sold to the independent Network Releasing, a company with an extensive LGBTQ catalogue. In the United States, Lawrence Anyways was bought by Breaking Glass Pictures, an LGBTQ distribution company. Breaking Glass Pictures’s use of queer relay differs significantly from MK2’s strategy: it included a mix between platform and flexible releasing, screening the film at LGBTQ festivals and making it available through Netflix to ­(re)cover its investment. The film’s US poster significantly capitalizes on both general and queer fields of production: it centres on the film’s selection at Cannes, mentions executive producer Gus Van Sant (a queer and cinephile reference), and includes the caption, ‘Will the woman he wants love the woman he wants to be?’ Two years later, Dolan returned to Cannes, this time in official selection with Mommy (2014). Asked about the Queer Palm, Dolan declared in the rather elitist French magazine Télérama: ‘the existence of this type of awards disgusts me. How can it be progressive to award ghettoizing, ostracizing prizes, prizes that signify that films directed by gays are gay films?’ – increasingly legitimizing or performing his position as auteur within the Cannes art-house canon through a fear of negative capital.99 Several articles condemned Dolan’s words, who soon nuanced his position.100 In order to diffuse the controversy and to further capitalize on queer relays, MK2 premiered Mommy, a film that is not particularly gay, in partnership with the LGBTQ webzine Yagg.101 As the strategy behind the releasing of some of Dolan’s films makes clear, queer relays take on different forms; they are strategically mobilized in order to correspond to particular geographic markets. Queer relays thus enable us to think about which films are available to LGBTQ festivals in a given geographic market. Sciamma’s Tomboy is here a fascinating example. The film has been understood either as depicting the crisis of a 10-year-old girl on the verge of puberty or as representing a young trans or genderqueer man. Produced by the prestigious art-house Hold-Up Films / Arte France Cinema and distributed by Pyramide, Tomboy was a success in France, drawing in 99 Marques, ‘Xavier Dolan “dégoûté” par les prix pour les films gays’ [I translate]. 100 Vallet, ‘Queer Palm: les propos de Xavier Dolan sont consternants’; Gebreyes, ‘Why This Queer Filmmaker Takes Issue with Labeling Films As “Gay”’. 101 Martet, ‘Découvrez en avant-première “Mommy”, le nouveau film de Xavier Dolan’.

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248,605 moviegoers in six weeks.102 The film garnered impressive reviews, all insisting on the cruelty of childhood and passage to adulthood: according to these reviews, the film would depict the crisis engendered by puberty (i.e. it would not be a trans narrative).103 In most of Europe, it was widely released by art-house distributors (Cinéart in Belgium and Netherlands, Alamode Films in Germany). These distributors often bypassed the LGBTQ festival circuit: for instance, the Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival lost the premiere to Hamburg’s French film festival, despite being a much bigger event.104 In the United Kingdom and in the United States, however, the film was bought by LGBTQ distribution companies – respectively Peccadillo Pictures (with TV rights remaining with the BBC Two) and Wolfe Video.105 In the U.K., it benefited from a flexible release, both targeting the LGBTQ circuit and getting an extended theatrical run. While some established critics insisted on the mutability of gender and sexual experimentations, others highlighted its trans undertones.106 Peccadillo capitalized on this ambiguity, alternatively describing the film as about ‘the confused sexuality of a little girl’ and relating it to real young transmen.107 In the US, the film premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It subsequently toured the LGBTQ circuit and won several LGBTQ awards. It was largely interpreted and categorized as a trans or gay film.108 Thereafter, the film was sold to Netflix, where it was categorized as LGBTQ. I do not want to insinuate that the United States only relies on niche marketing or that Europe only targets art-house cinema. The British film Weekend (dir. Andrew Haigh, 2011) constitutes here an interesting case study. Formally close to American independent cinema, it was picked up in the US by IFC and the Sundance Channel. It benefited from a strong theatrical release, with additional screenings at both queer and non-queer festivals. While it was framed in the US as a European art-house gay-themed film, it has tended 102 Pyramide is of the most successful art-house independent company, with filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, Catherine Breillat, and Claire Denis. Figures drawn from: AlloCine, ‘Box Office du film Tomboy’. 103 Caillard, ‘Tomboy de Céline Sciamma[critikat.com]’. 104 Loist, ‘Rêves transversaux’, 93. 105 It was first sold to the independent distribution company Rocket Releasing. 106 The Mirror, ‘Tomboy Film Review: Thought-Provoking Gender Swap Drama’; Front Row Reviews, ‘Interview: Tomboy Director Celine Sciamma | Front Row Reviews’. 107 Peccadillo Pictures, ‘Tomboy Wins Top Prize at the Odessa International Film Festival!’; Peccadillo Pictures, ‘A Real Life Tomboy?’. 108 Frosch, ‘10 Upcoming Foreign Films’; Peary, ‘Review: Tomboy’; LaSalle, ‘“Tomboy” Review: New Girl Takes on Boy’s Identity’.

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to be described in Europe as just ‘another gay film’. It was bought by LGBTQ distribution companies (Pro-Fun in Germany, Outplay in France, Peccadillo in the U.K.) and released mostly through LGBTQ festivals. In Italy, the film was released four years afterwards (2015) by Teodora. While the Conference of Bishops’s Film Evaluation Commission effectively limited its release to only 10 screens, it boosted the film’s notoriety. It became highly profitable.109 The unique forms taken by queer relays in each geographic market thus condition a film’s framing and circulation as well as its availability to LGBTQ festivals. The composition of the cinematic field both enables and disables particular films from finding extensive distribution. For instance, Dolan’s Tom à la ferme did not find US distribution until 2015, two years after its initial release.110 Similarly, Desiree Akhavan’s 2015 Appropriate Behavior has yet to be distributed in France – despite (or because of?) its success on the LGBTQ festival circuit. In both cases, the f ilms were identified in their respective markets as niche products. Their circulation was limited to a few premieres within the festival circuit, as they were not deemed profitable. Throughout this chapter, I have provided a heuristic framework for understanding queer films’ potential crossovers, paying particular attention to the differences between European and American markets, films, and festivals. In so doing, I have argued that LGBTQ cinemas lie at the intersection of various film cultures and regimes of taste which condition not only their circulation between film circuits and geographic markets but also their availability to LGBTQ festivals. As such, this chapter hopes to bypass the binary identity/art that has too often been centred as the cornerstone of queer films’ circulation. In focusing on the inter-relation between queer and general fields of (re)production, I have argued that the queer film (festival) ecosystem depends on an interplay between various regimes of taste. Queer cinemas’ and festivals’ unique positionings are manifested in different forms of queer relays, which reflect and sustain the discourses embedded in film distribution and ultimately shape the cultural currency of films. This focus on film economics might seem paradoxical in light of the criticism of festival studies I highlighted in Chapter 1. In using festival studies’ theoretical framework (Bourdieu and circuits), my inquiry displaces the focus from festival networks to the regimes of legitimation that permeate film cultures: festivals are only one of many institutions regulating the 109 Child, ‘Andrew Haigh’s Gay Romance Weekend Triumphs in Italy Despite Vatican Ban’. 110 Bramesco, ‘Xavier Dolan’s Tom At The Farm Receives U.S. Distribution, and Only Two Years behind Schedule’.

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circulation and valuation of films. As their position in the field of cultural reproduction indicates, they only amplify or accentuate cultural currency. This chapter can thus be taken as a reconceptualization of festival studies’ use of Bourdieu’s field theory. In positing a homology between the films being valued (the field of cultural production) and the festivals in which they circulate (the field of cultural reproduction), scholars mobilize Bourdieu’s hermeneutics of taste as a prescriptive model, taking a description of the regimes of taste through which we understand artistic products as proof of festival’s role as cultural gatekeepers. This emphasis on festivals as being the prime institutions through which we understand the value of cinema cannot be understood outside of festival studies’ quest for legitimacy. As a conceptual framework, circuits justify the relevancy of festival scholarship. They constitute festivals not only as one of the main actors in f ilm traff ic, uniquely combining exhibition and distribution, but also as ideal case study for the globalization of f ilm cultures. Importantly, the notion of a circuit presupposes a particular regime of cultural value, one that hierarchizes festivals based on their perceived addition of symbolic capital and relies on strict centres and peripheries. Ironically, the same regime of cultural value often structure academic research: gay f ilm scholarship is often relegated as being solely about identity. This is not surprising: Bourdieu situates academia as the main institution in the field of cultural reproduction. Festival scholars’ use of Bourdieu largely applies to the praxis of knowledge production itself.

Bibliography Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. AlloCine. ‘Box office du film Tomboy’. n/d. Accessed 18 August 2017. http://www. allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-188840/box-office /. Altermedia LTD. ‘Altermedia Presents Homo Cinematicus – the Gay Man on Film’. Flyer. September 1980. Box 7, Folder Film Diverse. International Gay Information Center Subject Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. ———. ‘Say Goodbye to the New York Gay Film Festival…’. 1988. Box 9, Folder New York Gay Film Fest. International Gay Information Center collection. Ephemera ‒ Subjects, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

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‘Ariztical Entertainment | About Us’. Accessed 15 August 2016. http://www.ariztical. com/corporate/about.html. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. ‘The Success Story: Nickelodeon and the Cable Industry’. In Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, 38–69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Beirne, Rebecca. ‘New Queer Cinema 2.0? Lesbian-Focused Films and the Internet’. Screen 55, no. 1 (2014): 129–138. Benshoff, Harry. Queer Cinema: The Film Reader. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2004. Biskind, Peter. Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film. New York City, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Bleecker Street Cinema. ‘Bleecker Press Release – Retrospective of Gay and Lesbian Films’. Press release, nd. Box 7, Folder Film Diverse. International Gay Information Center Subject Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979. ———. ‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed’. Translated by Richard Nice. Poetics 12, no. 4–5 (1983): 311–356. ———. ‘Le Marché des biens symboliques’. L’Année sociologique 22 (1971), 49–126. ———. ‘La Production de la croyance [contribution à une économie des biens symboliques]’. Actes de la recherche en Sciences Sociales 13, no. 1 (1977): 3–43. Bramesco, Charles. ‘Xavier Dolan’s Tom At The Farm Receives U.S. Distribution, and Only Two Years behind Schedule’. The Dissolve, 3 June 2015. Accessed 17 July 2016 https:// thedissolve.com/news/5859-xavier-dolans-tom-at-the-farm-receives-us-distribu/. Brocka, Allan Q. ‘A Theater Full of Queer People’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 1 (2008): 124–126. Caillard, Frédérique. ‘Tomboy de Céline Sciamma[critikat.com]’. Critikat, 19 April 2011. Accessed 17 July 2016. http://www.critikat.com/actualite-cine/ critique/tomboy.html. Child, Ben. ‘Andrew Haigh’s Gay Romance Weekend Triumphs in Italy despite Vatican Ban’. The Guardian, 15 March 2016, sec. Film. Accessed 16 Aug ust 2016. ht tps://w w w.t heg uardian.com/f ilm/2016/mar/15/ andrew-haigh-gay-romance-weekend-triumphs-italy-vatican-ban. Chin, Daryl. ‘Multiculturalism and Its Masks: The Art of Identity Politics’. Performing Arts Journal 14, no. 1 (1992): 1–15. ———. ‘Super-8 Films and the Aesthetics of Intimacy’. Jump Cut, no. 37 (1992): 78–81. Czach, Liz. ‘Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National Cinema’. The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 76–88. Damiens, Antoine. ‘Incestuous Festivals: Friendships, John Greyson, and the Toronto Scene’. Frames 13 (2018).

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———. ‘Queer Cannes: On the Development of LGBTQ Awards at A-List Festivals’. Synoptique ‒ An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 3, no. 2 (2014): 93–100. de Valck, Marijke. ‘Film Festivals, Bourdieu, and the Economization of Culture’. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 74–89. ———. ‘Finding Audiences for Films: Festival Programming in Historical Perspective’. In Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff, 25-40. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. ———. ‘Fostering Art, Adding Value, Cultivating Taste: Film Festivals as Sites of Cultural Legitimization’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 100–116. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. Drift Distribution. ‘Drift Distribution will distribute a package of 16 mm and super 8 films selected from the first three years of the Gay Lesbian Experimental Film Festival’. Press release. 18 December 1989. Box 2, Folder 168. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Dyer Richard. Now You See It. 2nd edition. London, UK: Routledge, 2002. Fleckinger, Hélène. ‘Nous sommes un fléau social: Cinéma, vidéo et luttes homosexuelles’. French Literature Series 34, no. 1 (2007): 145–161. Forgione, Steve. ‘Organizing on the Left: Some Thoughts on the Lesbian/gay Struggle’. New Political Science 1, no. 4 (1980): 74–75. Front Row Reviews. ‘Interview: Tomboy Director Celine Sciamma | Front Row Reviews’. n/d. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://www.frontrowreviews.co.uk/ features/interview-tomboy-director-celine-sciamma/11040. Frosch, Jon. ‘10 Upcoming Foreign Films: What to Watch, What to Skip’. The Atlantic, 11 October 2011. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://www.theatlantic. com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/10-upcoming-foreign-films-what-to-watchwhat-to-skip/246448/#slide6. Gay in Lyon. ‘Le film Laurence Anyways en avant première à l’UGC Confluence’. Gay in Lyon, 3 July 2012. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://www.gayinlyon.com/ culture/le-film-laurence-anyways-en-avant-premiere-a-lugc-confluence/. Gever, Martha. ‘“The Names We Give Ourselves”’. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson and Martha Gever, 191–201. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992 ‘Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center – “A Queer Kind of Film” Showcase Flyer’. 1988. Box 1, Folder 73. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Harbord, Janet. Film Cultures. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002.

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Hazelton, John. ‘TLA’s Curl Buys Optimale’. 9 February 2012. Screen Daily. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://www.screendaily.com/news/distribution/tlas-curl-buysoptimale/5037759.article. Henderson, Lisa. Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production. New York City, NY: NYU Press, 2013. Hilderbrand, Lucas. ‘The Art of Distribution: Video on Demand’. Film Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2010): 24–28. Iordanova, Dina. ‘Film Festivals and Dissent: Can Film Change the World?’ In Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism, edited by Cheung Ruby and Dina Iordanova, 13–30. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. Jablonski, Olivier. ‘De l’ouverture du ghetto à la dépolitisation: Les festivals de films gais et lesbiens en France en questions’. Revue H 5/6 (1997). Janus Theater (The). ‘Press Release: First American Gay Film Festival, in DC – Organized by the Washington Area Gay Community Council and the Janus Theater’. 1973. Box 9, Folder Film Festivals. International Gay Information Center Subject Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. June, Jamie. ‘Defining Queer: The Criteria and Selection Process for Programming Queer Film Festivals’. CultureWork 8, no. 2 (2004). Knegt, Peter. ‘Forging a Gay Mainstream: Negotiating Gay Cinema in the American Hegemony’. M.A. thesis, Concordia University, 2008. ———. ‘Why Don’t LGBT Movies Make Money At The Box Off ice Anymore?’ Indiewire, 5 August 2014. Accessed 6 September 2014. http://blogs.indiewire.com/ bent/why-dont-lgbt-movies-make-money-at-the-box-office-anymore-20140803. Knight, Julia. ‘DVD, Video and Reaching Audiences Experiments in Moving-Image Distribution’. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 13, no. 1 (2007): 19–41. Kramer, Paul. ‘Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Serious Challenge to Status Quo’. Johns Hopkins University Newspaper, 9 March 1990. Box 2, Folder 200. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. LaCroix, Susan. ‘Gay Film Festival Off the Straight and Narrow’. City on a Hill, 5 May 1988. Box 1, Folder 75. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. LaSalle, Mick. ‘“Tomboy” Review: New Girl Takes on Boy’s Identity’. SFGate, 23 November 2011. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/ Tomboy-review-New-girl-takes-on-boy-s-identity-2290415.php. Lobato, Ramon. ‘Subcinema: Theorizing Marginal Film Distribution’. Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 13 (2007). Loist, Skadi. ‘A Complicated Queerness: LGBT Film Festivals and Queer Programming Strategies’. In Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film

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Festivals, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff, 157–172. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. ———. ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s-2000s)’. In Une Histoire des festivals XXe-XXIe siècle, edited by Anaïs Fléchet, Pascale Goetschel, Patricia Hidiroglou et alii., 109–121. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013. ———. ‘Rêves transversaux. La circulation des films queer dans le réseau des festivals’. Translated by Brigitte Rollet. Diogène, no. 1 (2015): 80–103. Loist, Skadi, and Ger Zielinski. ‘On the Development of Queer Film Festivals and Their Media Activism’. In Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism, edited by Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, 49–62. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012 Marques, Sandrine. ‘Xavier Dolan « dégoûté » par les prix pour les films gays’. Le Monde.fr, 20 September 2014, sec. Culture. Accessed 16 August 2016. http:// www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2014/09/20/xavier-dolan-degoute-par-les-prixrecompensant-les-films-gays_4490979_3246.html. Martet, Christophe. ‘Découvrez en avant-première «Mommy», le nouveau film de Xavier Dolan | Yagg’. Yagg, 23 September 2014. Accessed 16 August 2016. http://yagg. com/decouvrez-en-avant-premiere-mommy-le-nouveau-film-de-xavier-dolan/. Miller, Toby, Freya Schiwy, and Marta Hernández Salván. ‘Distribution, the Forgotten Element in Transnational Cinema’. Transnational Cinemas 2, no. 2 (2012): 197–215. The Mirror. ‘Tomboy Film Review: Thought-Provoking Gender Swap Drama’. The Mirror, 16 September 2011. Accessed 16 August 2016. http://www.mirror.co.uk/ lifestyle/going-out/film/tomboy-film-review-thought-provoking-gender-153864. MIX New York. ‘The First Online Queer Digital Film Festival’. 1997. Box 11, Folder 996 ‘Press Releases’. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Moore, Candace. ‘Distribution Is Queen: LGBTQ Media on Demand’. Cinema Journal 53, no. 1 (2013): 137–144. National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. ‘Dear Friends…’. Letter. Winter 1981. Box 13, Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. National Film Theatre. ‘Dangerous to Know ‒ A Queerer Kind of Film’. Programme notes. 1990. Box 2, Folder 201. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. ‘New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival 1988. Panel Discussion with Su Friedrich, Tom Chomont, Abigail Child, Jim Hubbard, and Barbara Hammer.

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Recording’. 1988, The Vito Russo Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Olson, Jenni. ‘Film Festivals’. Gbltq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, 7 July 2001. Accessed 19 August 2014. http:// www.glbtq.com/arts/film_festivals.html. Osterweil, Ara. ‘Andy Warhol’s Blow Job: Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avant-Garde’. In Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams, 431–460. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Pacific Cinematheque Pacifique. ‘Film’. Programme. October 1977. Folder Film Festivals. Subject files collection. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. Parkerson, Michelle. ‘Birth of a Notion: Towards Black Gay and Lesbian Imagery in Film and Video’. In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar, 234-238. New York City, NY: Routledge, 1993. Park-Miller Adult Theater (NYC). ‘New York, Thank You … Is All We Can Say for the Wonderful Response to Our Homosexual Film Festival’. Advertisement. In MIX ZINE, 1996. Folder New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The LGBT Center’s Archives. New York City. Park-Miller Adult Theater (Los Angeles). ‘Park motion picture theater marquee – “Male Nude Film Festival” and “Pat Rocco Presents” Joe Adair in “Someone” circa 1969’. Box 54, Folder 5. Pat Rocco Papers, Coll 2007-006, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. Peary, Gerald. ‘Review: Tomboy’. Boston Phoenix, 29 November 2011. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://thephoenix.com/boston/movies/130513-tomboy/. Peccadillo Pictures. ‘A Real Life Tomboy?’ Peccadillo Pictures, 11 September 2011. Accessed 17 August 2016.http://peccapics.blogspot.ca/2011/09/real-life-tomboy. html?q=tomboy. ———. ‘Tomboy Wins Top Prize at the Odessa International Film Festival!’ Peccadillo Pictures, 28 July 2011. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://peccapics.blogspot. ca/2011/07/tomboy-wins-top-prize-at-odessa.html?q=tomboy. Perriam, Chris. Spanish Queer Cinema. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Perriam, Chris, and Darren Waldron. French and Spanish Queer Film. Audiences, Communities and Cultural Exchange. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Pink Paper. ‘Dangerous to Know: The World’s Largest Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Takes Place at the NFT’. Pink Paper, July 29, 1989. Box 20, Folder Programs 1989. The Vito Russo Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

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Rasanen, Andrew. ‘A Laying on of Images – “A Queer Kind of Film”: The Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film Festival Disorients at the Brattle’. Bay Windows 5, no. 44 (1987): 1;6. Box 1, Folder 27. The MIX Collection. MSS 143. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Rastegar, Roya. ‘The de-Fusion of Good intentions: Outfest’s Fusion Film Festival’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 3 (2009): 481–497. ———. ‘Seeing Differently: The Curatorial Potential of Film Festival Programming’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 181–195. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. Rees-Roberts, Nick. French Queer Cinema. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Rhyne, Ragan. ‘Pink Dollars: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals and the Economy of Visibility’. PhD diss., New York University, 2007. Rich, B. Ruby. ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 620–625. ———. ‘New Queer Cinema’. Sight & Sound, 5, no. 2 (1992). ———. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Rollet, Brigitte. ‘Femmes cinéastes en France: l’après-mai 68’. Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire, no. 10 (1999). Román, David. ‘Remembering AIDS: A Reconsideration of the Film Longtime Companion’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 281–301. Ruoff, Jeffrey. ‘Programming Film Festivals’. In Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff, 1–21. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. Saalfield, Catherine. ‘On the Make: Activist Video Collectives’. In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar, 21–37. New York City, NY: Routledge, 1993. Scratch projection. ‘SCRATCH PROJECTION. Programme’. 1990. Box 2, Folder 202. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Sheldon, Caroline. ‘Lesbians and Film: Some Thoughts’. In Gays and Film, 2nd edition, edited by Richard Dyer, 5–25. New York City, NY: Zoetrope, 1977. Slide, Anthony. Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. Smelik, Anneke. ‘Gay and Lesbian Criticism’. In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, 135–147. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998. Soukaz, Lionel. ‘Le nouveau mouvement’. Special Man: L’homosexualité au cinéma 1 (1978): 52–55.

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Special Man. ‘Pink Narcissus développe jusqu’à l’écoeurement le thème de l’homme poupée’ Special Man: L’homosexualité au cinéma 1 (1978): 39–40. ———. ‘La production X française’. Special Man: L’homosexualité au cinéma 1 (1978): 47–51. Stein, Elliott. ‘Lizard and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails’. The Voice, 4 December 1984. Box 9, Folder New York Gay Film Festival. International Gay Information Center collection. Ephemera ‒ Subjects, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Stevenson, Jack. ‘From the Bedroom to the Bijou: A Secret History of American Gay Sex Cinema’. Film Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1997): 24–31. Stringer, Julian. ‘Regarding Film Festivals’. PhD diss., Indiana University, 2003. Strub, Whitney. ‘Mondo Rocco: Mapping Gay Los Angeles Sexual Geography in the Late-1960s Films of Pat Rocco’. Radical History Review 2012, no. 113 (2012): 13–34. Suarez, Juan Antonio. ‘Surprise Me’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 600–602. Thomas, David Mark. ‘A New Generation of Gay Cinema at the Berlin Film Festival’. The Advocate, 29 May 1984. Thorens, Jacques. Le Brady : cinéma des damnés. Paris: Verticales, 2015. Tiffany Theater. ‘The Tiffany Theater in West Los Angeles Will Present a Series of Films Dealing with Homosexuality’. 1978. Folder Tiffany Theater (Los Angeles, Calif.), ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001 The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Los Angeles. Tzioumakis, Yannis. ‘Reclaiming Independence: American Independent Cinema Distribution and Exhibition Practices beyond Indiewood’. Mise au point. Cahiers de l’association française des enseignants et chercheurs en cinéma et audiovisuel, no. 4 (2012). Vaillancourt, Daniel. ‘Strand and Deliver’. Advocate, no. 787 (8 June 1999): 52. Vallet, Romain. ‘«Queer Palm: Les propos de Xavier Dolan sont consternants», Par Romain Vallet’. Yagg, 9 September 2014. Accessed 17 Vallois, Philippe. La passion selon Vallois : Le cinéaste qui aimait les hommes. Edited by Ivan Mitifiot. Paris: ErosOnyx, 2013. ‘Vito Russo and 8th Street Playhouse Present The Celluloid Closet’. June 1982. Box 20, Folder Flyers and announcements. The Vito Russo Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Wallenberg, Louise. ‘New Black Queer Cinema’. In New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, edited by Michele Aaron, 128-143. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Waugh, Thomas. ‘Lesbian and Gay Documentary: Minority Self-Imaging, Oppositional Film Practice, and the Question of Image Ethics’. In Image Ethics, edited by Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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———. ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’ Le Berdache 30 (1982): 7–9. ———. ‘The Third Body: Patterns in the Construction of the Subject in Gay Male Narrative Film’. In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, 141–161. Durham, NC: Routledge, 1993. ———. ‘Walking on Tippy Toes: Lesbian and Gay Liberation Documentary of the Post Stonewall Period 1969–84’. In Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, edited by Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs, 107–124. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Wolfe, Kathy. ‘Movie File “Sharing” Goes Legit’. The Huffington Post, 7 June 2012. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-wolfe/moviefile-sharing-goes-l_b_1575233.html. ‘Women Make Movies & Chelsea Gay Association Present In Our Own Image – Five Film Programs of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Feminist Consciousness’. nd. Box 19, Folder Women Make Movies. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Worth, Fabienne. ‘Toward Alternative Film Histories: Lesbian Films, Spectators, Filmmakers and the French Cinematic/cultural Apparatus’. Quarterly Review of Film & Video 15, no. 1 (1993): 55–77. Wuest, Bryan. ‘Defining Homosexual Love Stories: Pat Rocco, Categorization, and the Legitimation of Gay Narrative Film’. Film History 29, no. 4 (2017): 59–88. Zielinski, Ger. ‘Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals’. PhD diss., McGill, 2008.

Filmography Appropriate Behavior. Directed by Desiree Akhavan. 2015. 86 min. UK. PROD: Parkville Pictures. DIST (UK): Pecadillo. DIST (US): Gravitas Venture. Brokeback Mountain. Directed by Ang Lee. 2006. 134 min. USA/Canada. PROD and DIST (US): Focus Features. But I’m a Cheerleader… Directed by Jamie Babbit. 1999. 85 min. USA. DIST (US): Lions Gate. Chinese Characters. Directed by Richard Fung. 1986. 21 min. Canada. PROD: Richard Fung. 21 min. Video. Cruising. Directed by William Friedkin. 1980. 102 min. USA. PROD: Lorimar Film Entertainment. DIST (US): United Artists. Eating Out. Directed by Q. Allan Brocka. 2004. 90 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment.

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Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. Directed by Philip J. Bartell. 2007. 79 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment Eating Out: All You Can Eat. Directed by Glenn Gaylord. 2009. 80 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment. Eating Out: Drama Camp. Directed by Q. Allan Brocka. 2011. 91 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment. Eating Out: The Open Weekend. Directed by Q. Allan Brocka. 2012. 88 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment. Edward II. Directed by Derek Jarman. 1991. 87 min. UK. PROD: BBC Films. Generations. Directed by Barbara Hammer. 2010. 30 min. USA. DIST: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. 16 mm. Go Fish. Directed by Rose Troche. 1994. 83 min. USA. PROD: Can I Watch / Islet / KPVI / Killer Films / Samuel Goldwyn. DIST (US): Samuel Goldwyn. Going Down in LA-LA Land. Directed by Casper Andreas. 2011. 104 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Embrem Entertainment. In dit teken [In this sign – I translate]. Directed by Jan Lemstra. 1949. 13 min. Netherlands. PROD: the Cultuur-en OntspanningsCentrum [COC: Cultural Recreation Centre Laurence Anyways. Directed by Xavier Dolan. 2012. 168 min. Canada/France. PROD: Lyla Films / MK2. DIST (France): MK2. DIST (US): Breaking Glass Pictures. Looking for Langston. Directed by Isaac Julien. 1989. 41 min. UK. PROD: Sankofa Collective. Miwa, à la recherche du lézard noir [Miwa: Looking for Black Lizard]. Directed by Pascal-Alex Vincent. 65 min. 2010. France. PROD: Local Films. Mommy. Directed by Xavier Dolan. 2014. 139 min. Canada. PROD: Les Films Séville / Metafilms / Sons of Manual. DIST (Canada): Les Films Séville. Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins. 2016. 111 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): A24. Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians. Directed by Richard Fung. 1986. 56 min. Canada. PROD: Richard Fung. Video. Pariah. Directed by Dee Rees. 2011. 86 min. USA. PROD: Chicken and Egg Pictures / MBK Entertainment. DIST (US): Focus Pictures. Storme: The Lady of the Jewel Box. Directed by Michelle Parkerson. 1987. 21 min. USA. PROD: Women Make Movies. Tangerine. Directed by Sean Baker. 2015. 88 min. USA. PROD: Duplass Brothers Productions / Through Films. DIST (US): Magnolia Pictures. Tom à la ferme [Tom at the Farm]. Directed by Xavier Dolan. 2013. 102 min. France/ Canada. PROD: MK2 Productions / Sons of Manual. DIST (Canada): Les Films Séville. DIST (France): Diaphana Films.

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Tomboy. Directed by Céline Sciamma. 2011. 82 min. France. PROD: Hold Up Films. DIST (France): Pyramide. DIST (US): Rocket Releasing / Wolfe Video. DIST (UK): Pecadillo. Tongues Untied. Directed by Marlon Riggs. 1989. 55 min. USA. PROD: Signifyin’ Works. DIST: Frameline Distribution [1989] / Strand Releasing [DVD: 2008]. Water into Fire. Directed by Zachary Longboy. 1994. 11 min. Canada. Video. The Watermelon Woman. Directed by Cheryl Dunye. 1997. 90 min. USA. PROD: Dancing Girl. DIST (US): First Run Pictures. Weekend. Directed by Andrew Haigh. 2011. 97 min. UK. PROD: The Bureau / Glendale Picture Company. DIST (US): IFC Films / Sundance Selects. DIST (France): Outplay. DIST (UK): Pecadillo. Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf? Directed by Anna Margarita Albelo. 2014. 83 min. USA. PROD: Burning Bra Productions / Local Films / Steakhaus Productions. DIST (US): Wolfe. DIST (France): Outplay.

3.

Out of the Celluloid Closet, into the Theatres!Towards a Genealogy of Queer Film Festivals and Gay and Lesbian Film Studies Abstract Chapter 3 revisits traditional historical accounts of the development of both gay and lesbian film studies and festivals. In particular, I trace the emergence and mutation of the concept ‘gay and lesbian cinema(s)’ – a relatively recent notion shaped through an interplay between f ilm criticism, festival organizing, and scholarship. I detail the careers and works of various critics and scholars as they intersect with LGBTQ festival organizing. In so doing, I nuance the divide between scholars, critics, and practitioners that has been instrumental in asserting the legitimacy of festival studies and describe various uses of the festival format as a praxis of academic knowledge production. In so doing, Chapter 3 is offered as a criticism of festival studies’ emphasis on stakeholders: it highlights the networks of friendship, fucking, and collaboration that informed the development of LGBTQ cinema. Keywords: gay and lesbian film studies; film criticism; academic labour; curation; stakeholders; film cultures; film history

‘No accident either that, after Stonewall, we queer film critics instinctively found the movies so life-and-death and that queer film and video festivals are among our most thriving community institutions twenty-five years later. Even the other generalized film festivals (like the Montreal monstrosity I endlessly had to write about in these pages), artificial hothouses of offbeat films rejected by Cannes and distributors, often look like carnivals of queer cinephilia.’1 1 Waugh, The Fruit Machine, 6–7.

Damiens, A., LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728409_ch03

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As Chapter 1 argues, festival studies is obsessed with asserting its legitimacy: the field largely relies on justifying why and which festivals matter, in so doing further defining the position of scholars as creating knowledge on festivals. In uncovering ephemeral events generally erased by festival studies’ methodologies, I positioned ‘critical festival studies’ as a project tuned in to how our attachment to our object of research shapes the scholarship we produce. To that end, Chapter 3 traces the role played by festival-going and organizing in enabling a knowledge of cinema. While several scholars claim that festivals shape gay and lesbian cinema, they mostly focus on the establishment of a queer cinematic canon: a festival’s programming practices would determine which films are seen or ignored by its audience – and therefore by scholars.2 These accounts often rely on the notion of stakeholders, which conceptualizes festivals through the diverging performances of various groups of people (programmers, policy-makers, audience members, filmmakers). The notion of festival stakeholders, however, tends to reify the boundaries between scholars, critics, curators, and festival-goers: it often presupposes that critics, scholars, policy makers, and festival organizers are hermetic categories in and of themselves.3 In focusing on the careers of a few key actors at the intersection of film criticism, scholarship, activism, and festival organizing, this chapter argues for a reconceptualization of festival stakeholders – ultimately nuancing or deconstructing the insider/outsider binary that has been central in the legitimization of festival studies. 4 As a genealogy of gay and lesbian film studies, this chapter documents a shift from festivals as methods for building a cinematic canon and creating knowledge on gay and lesbian cinema to festivals as an object of research in and of itself – as a subfield of film studies. I argue that the queer relays and symbolic economy outlined in Chapter 2 largely apply to academic knowledge production: while the field of academic production oftentimes urges us to perform as scholars – to adopt a particular set of rules that regulates academic knowledge production – it is rarely the only role we inhabit. From the syllabi we devise (teaching is, after all, a form of curation) to the conferences organized within film festivals or the screenings held as part of academic conferences, the labour of film scholars cannot be solely understood as academic research. As Waugh and Straayer rightly note, ‘the 2 See for instance: Czach, ‘Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National Cinema’; Wong, Film Festivals, 1. 3 Rhyne, ‘Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders’. 4 See Chapter 1.

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existence of the pure critic/scholar who has not tried curating or film/video making is as rare as the curator who has not directed a film or written film criticism (though both animals do exist, of course)’.5 Film studies offers here a particular entry point into scholars’ para-academic activities, as the discipline has historically relied on the intellectual and cultural labour of practitioners: future research will have to address the role played by the festival format in shaping film studies.6 This chapter traces out some of the intersections between criticism, gay and lesbian film studies, and the festival format. It should not be taken as a strict or comprehensive historical survey, but rather as a description of the networks of friendship and collaboration which inform our understanding of gay and lesbian cinema.7 In other words, it is fundamentally about the transmission of historical discourses – a process already imbued with affect. In documenting the role played by critics and scholars in shaping gay and lesbian film studies, my goal is thus twofold: firstly, paying homage to the people whose precarious and largely invisible cultural work has preceded me and, secondly, analyzing how our attachments to (some) festivals have conditioned the development of gay and lesbian film studies.8 If this chapter is a meditation on the intertwined history of LGBTQ festivals and film studies, it is also a product of its time – one that hopes to, through history, sustain friendships and start a dialogue between various generations of queer/festival scholarship. 5 Waugh and Straayer, ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two’, 599. 6 To some extent, the institutionalization of the discipline relied not only on critics-turnedscholars but also on its links with screening cycles and the film council movements. Among the few scholars addressing this issue, see for instance Masha Salazkina’s analysis of the migration of critics/scholars and ideas through (both ephemeral and established) festivals. Salazkina, ‘Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map’. On the role played by f ilm councils and practitioners in shaping film studies: Acland, ‘Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits’. 7 Admittedly, this inquiry is centred on the institutionalization of gay and lesbian film studies in anglophone universities. Future research will address the constitution of gay and lesbian cinema as an object of knowledge in non-anglophone countries. In France for instance, the institutionalization of film studies seems to be quite different. In particular, French academia hasn’t been keen on promoting interdisciplinarity – thereby preventing the type of interplay between cultural studies, film studies, and gender and sexuality studies this chapters largely describes. Symptomatically, the only comprehensive books on homosexuality and cinema have been written outside of academia by film critics Didier Roth-Bettoni and Anne Delabre. See: Roth-Bettoni, L’Homosexualité au cinéma; Delabre and Roth-Bettoni, Le Cinéma français et l’homosexualité. 8 To that end, I extend Skadi Loist’s argument about festival organizing as a precarious cultural work to the realms of film criticism and academic knowledge production. See: Loist, ‘Precarious Cultural Work’.

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1970s: critics/scholars, curation as a praxis of canon-building, and gay and lesbian cinemas In the 1970s, several critics and scholars informed by the gay liberation movement analyzed the relationship between homosexuality and cinema. In the process, they created a genealogy of queer moving images and mobilized the festival format as a praxis of canon building. Largely dedicated to unearthing films dealing with homosexuality, this form of early scholarship and criticism relentlessly questions the possibility of a ‘coherent’ gay and lesbian f ilm culture.9 This ambivalence is best exemplified in Robin Wood’s 1978 description of the ‘responsibilities of a gay film critic’, a three-term equation that plays on the ambiguity or impossibility of gay cinema.10 Dyer’s 1977 Gays and Film similarly plays on the coordinating conjunction ‘and’: it does not seek to establish a singular gay and lesbian film culture, but rather purports to explore the relationships between homosexuality and cinema. This early scholarship and criticism was thus faced with a paradox: positing various cinematic genres as speaking to the issue of queer representation while simultaneously undermining the existence of a trans-historical gay and lesbian cinema.11 Quite typically, Andy Medhurst condemns the will to ‘construct [a] single, seamless narrative, a linear “story” of representations of homosexuality [as if] within this story homosexuality remains a fixed, given, essential quality which is unchanged by shifts in social, historical and ideological formations’.12 Instead of conceptualizing gay and lesbian cinema, early scholarship thus pays attention to the interplay between emerging gay and lesbian subcultures and various cinematic genres – between the highbrow of European art cinema, the obscene of the pornographic genres, the experimentation of the avant-garde, and the representational politics of socially-committed documentaries.13 The first book on the subject, Parker Tyler’s 1972 Screening the Sexes, focuses mostly on European art-house cinema.14 Interested in revealing and dismantling the aesthetic and political construction of heterosexuality in 9 Waugh, ‘The Third Body’, 154. 10 Wood, ‘Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic’. 11 Waugh, ‘The Third Body’, 159. 12 Medhurst, ‘Notes on Recent Gay Film Criticism’, 59. 13 Dyer, Now You See It, 1st edition, 2. See also Caroline Sheldon’s piece in Dyer’s Gays and Film, which further analyzing the material conditions enabling lesbian representability in various cinematic genres. Sheldon, ‘Lesbians and Film’. 14 Tyler, Screening the Sexes.

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a variety of canonical films, Tyler borrows heavily from psychoanalysis, proposing Eros and the libido as powerful alternatives to compulsory heterosexuality. Screening the Sexes is largely dedicated to justifying sexuality as a legitimate frame of analysis. It has, however, been condemned – perhaps too harshly – for its rather obvious misogyny and its rejection of gay liberation politics. Medhurst, for instance, argues that Tyler’s opus is ‘always far too eager to sacrifice analysis for artifice, ending up as little more than a series of meandering fragments held together only by its author’s tiresome penchant for the linguistically baroque’.15 In the mid-1970s, activists and critics started theorizing homosexuality. They published their analyses in the gay press and presented their research through newly constituted academic associations or caucuses (such as the Gay Academic Union [GAU], created in 1973). These projects emerged from and cannot be understood outside of the theoretical and political endeavours of both the gay liberation movement and second wave feminism.16 They simultaneously unearthed representations of homosexuality in various cinematic genres and revealed the material regimes that concealed or enabled depictions of queerness. For instance, Russo’s film criticism was largely shaped by his experiences with the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) and the National Gay Task Force (NGTF). As head of the GAA Arts Committee, Russo organized the weekly screening series Firehouse Flicks.17 As early as 1979, he held screenings at various community centres throughout the United States.18 Russo’s film criticism, published in the gay (After Dark, The Advocate) and mainstream (New York Magazine) press and presented as part of various GAU conferences, largely prefigured The Celluloid Closet.19 Wood’s criticism adopts a different strategy, one that brings together ‘legitimate’ film criticism with the gay liberation project. Known for his books on auteurs and his articles in Cahiers du cinema, Wood started in the mid-1970s reading films through his own positionality as an out gayliberation-influenced man.20 Wood’s criticism combined political critique with aesthetic considerations, starting from his own experience in order to 15 Medhurst, ‘Notes on Recent Gay Film Criticism’, 58. 16 Bronski, ‘From The Celluloid Closet to Brokeback Mountain’, 23. 17 Schiavi, Celluloid Activist, 4. 18 These screenings are documented in Russo’s personal agenda. See for instance: Russo, ‘February 5th, 1979’. 19 Schiavi, Celluloid Activist, 89; 160. Russo, The Celluloid Closet. 20 On Wood’s f ilm criticism prior to his involvement in the gay liberation movement, see: Wood, ‘Psychanalyse de “Psycho”‘; Wood, Hitchcock’s Films.

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reveal the ideology of the films he analyzed.21 His criticism was increasingly articulated with a radical commitment to Marxist and psychoanalytic frameworks, using films in order to deconstruct sexuality itself. Taken together, Wood and Russo thus illustrate two different interpretations of gay liberation politics as it relates to film: an analysis in terms of representation based on a visibility ethos (Russo) and a deconstruction of the ideology at the heart of both the film apparatus and heterosexuality (Wood). Through the deciphering of queer subtexts and a deconstruction of the ideology of film/society, Wood and Russo echoed key debates in the formation of film studies.22 Indeed, this period corresponds to the beginnings of film studies as an independent academic discipline: several established film critics were hired as part of newly formed film studies departments. Wood started lecturing at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom) in 1973. He was quickly joined by Dyer, who was first appointed at Keele.23 Waugh was hired at Concordia University in 1976. These critics-turned-scholars were often opposed to 1970s Screen theory. They used ‘plain language’ – testifying to the crossovers between criticism and scholarship. Dyer frames this hostility toward Screen’s linguistic apparatus as a ‘political choice’ that enabled scholars to actively engage in non-academic gay liberation debates: ‘just imagine how the queens in Gay Liberation would have responded to [us]’.24 As such, these critics-turnedscholars were emblematic of what Waugh identifies as ‘a refusal to separate the academic from the topical community stuff […], a basic principle of film studies and queer studies in their founding movements that we have too easily forgotten’.25 As these examples make clear, the boundaries between criticism, scholarship, and activism were particularly malleable in the 1970s. Gay and lesbian studies largely emerged through an interplay between para-academic publications, activism, and scholarship.26 Russo’s position is here particularly instructive: he was skeptical of academia, worrying that his Celluloid Closet might be ‘too serious and academic for my taste’. 27 Russo nonetheless 21 Wood, ‘Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic’, 22; Geller, ‘Is Film Theory Queer Theory?’, 160-162. 22 Smelik, ‘Gay and Lesbian Criticism’, 137. 23 King, ‘“You Can’t Have an Academic Discipline Unless There’s Something That Can Be Represented as a Proper Body of Knowledge”‘, 377. 24 Grant and Kooijman, ‘Pleasure, Obvious, Queer: A Conversation with Richard Dyer’. 25 Waugh, The Fruit Machine, 6. 26 Gross, ‘The Past and the Future of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies’, 511. 27 Russo, quoted in: Schiavi, ‘Looking for Vito’, 52.

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abundantly toured the university circuit: from 1977 to 1979, he presented his research at Amherst Massachusetts (Gay Rites of Spring conference), Berkeley, Fullerton (Gaythink conference), Hampshire College, Oberlin, New York University (NYSCO conference), Hunter College, Indiana (Gay Awareness conference), Penn State, Rutgers, Trenton State University, and UCLA (Gay Awareness Week conference).28 These conference presentations not only enabled Russo to make ends meet, but also participated in the diffusion and legitimation of his oeuvre. As an internal memo written by his publisher makes clear, Russo was ‘his own best publicist [as] he lecture[d] across the country at colleges and universities’.29 This unique combination of academic, community-based, and cinephile publications equally applies to the early careers of Dyer and Waugh, two actors who may retrospectively be categorized as scholars. Dyer published in both the academic and gay press (notably through the Gay Left Collective).30 His writing style, although nodding to Foucault and delving into film theory, remains highly accessible, enabling a form of crossover between the nonacademic gay press and scholarship.31 Waugh published in the gay press (The Body Politic, Le Berdache), non-academic film magazines (Cinema Canada, the Cinémathèque Québécoise’s Copie Zéro) and scholarly journals (in particular Jump Cut).32 The 1977 special dossier ‘Gays and Film’ articulates Waugh’s position as a committed scholar: conceived as a response to Peter Biskind’s 1974 ‘Tightass and Cocksucker’, Waugh’s essays adopt the confessional so as to call for a radical gay film scholarship.33 In focusing on Waugh, Dyer, and Russo’s early careers, I do not want to suggest that the critic/scholar binary was nonexistent in the 1970s. Russo’s quarrels with Dyer, Medhurst, and Waugh largely replayed differing 28 Russo, ‘Agenda’; Russo, ‘February 5th, 1979’; Gay Student Union, ‘Proposal for Projecting Stereotypes’. 29 Dicks, ‘Memo from Homer Dicks on the Celluloid Closet’. Russo provides here an interesting historical precedent for contemporary discussions on academic precariousness and the ‘gig economy’. 30 Dyer, ‘In Defence of Disco’; Cohen and Dyer, ‘The Politics of Gay Culture’. 31 Dyer mobilizes Foucault as early as 1980. See the postscript to the introduction of the second edition of Gays and Film; Dyer, Gays and Film, 2nd edition, 4. See also: Grant and Kooijman, ‘Pleasure, Obvious, Queer’. 32 Between 1977 and 1980, Waugh publishes 12 articles in The Body Politic. Among others: ‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder’; ‘A Fag-Spotter’s Guide to Eisenstein’; ‘The Montreal World Film Festival 1979’; ‘Gay Cinema: Best Films Not Slick but Real’. He also published regularly in Le Berdache. See: ‘Cités de la nuit’; ‘Samedi soir une surprise’. 33 Biskind, ‘Sexual Politics in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: Tightass and Cocksucker’. Waugh and Kleinhans, ‘Gays, Straights, Film and the Left’; Waugh, ‘Films by Gays for Gays’. Waugh further develops his praxis as a ‘committed scholar’ in: Waugh, ‘The Gay Cultural Front’.

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interpretations of the gay liberation project, oftentimes mapped onto the critic/scholar divide. In his biography of Russo, Schiavi mentions that some ‘faulted Vito for theoretical naïveté. Wood consigned The Celluloid Closet […] to the “coffee tables” of “friendly liberals”’.34 Similarly, Waugh, recalls that ‘some of us in academia may have wondered about aspects of Vito’s work: his cranky resistance to theory, left politics, and alternative film/ video production, his American-centred cultural framework, his omission from Closet of the history and dynamics of gay fandom’.35 Despite these differences however, critics and scholars collaborated regularly. Waugh, for instance, largely helped compiling some of the references analyzed in Russo’s Celluloid Closet.36 While I have focused on a few key critics and scholars, other figures would deserve inclusion, among them: Wood’s partner Richard Lippe (who wrote for the Body Politic, taught at Queen’s University and published several articles on the subject)37; Wood’s mentee Andrew Britton (who taught at Essex and wrote for The Body Politic, The Gay Left and Movies)38; Stuart Byron (whose criticism appeared in publications as diverse as The Village Voice, Gay, and The New York Times)39; and Doug Edwards (at some point the Los Angeles editor for The Advocate and a special coordinator for the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Science). 40 My focus on Dyer, Russo, and Waugh betrays the weight of history and discipline formations – the ways in which the institutionalization of film studies as an independent discipline prioritizes people whose work falls more neatly under the category of scholarship. Similarly, this erasure of para-academic labour – a result of the recent separation between criticism and scholarship – obscures the historical importance of festival reviews as a praxis of canon building. For instance, Waugh’s articles for The Body Politic draw on Montreal’s yearly Festivals des films du monde so as to unearth and theorize films of interest to a queer audience, in particular those made outside of the United States. The importance of festival-going and festival reviews is best exemplified in 34 Schiavi, Celluloid Activist, 192. 35 Waugh, ‘In Memoriam: Vito Russo, 1946-1990’. 36 At the New York Public Library, I found a list of lesbian films, mostly from Canada, sent to Vito Russo. The document is undated and uncredited. However, the handwriting (and subject matter) clearly corresponds to Waugh. See: ‘List: Films about Lesbians’. 37 Among others: Lippe and Wood, ‘Victor/Victoria’; Lippe, ‘Gay Visibility: Contemporary Images’. 38 See notably: Britton, ‘For Interpretation: Notes against Camp’. 39 Stuart Byron was the first critic to come out in the press, in Byron, ‘The Statue’. For additional publications, see: ‘The Closet Syndrome [1972]’; ‘Rules of the Game’; ‘Truffaut and Gays’. 40 LaValley, ‘Deep Focus: Out of the Closet and onto the Screen’.

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early critics/scholars’ tendency to establish and compile comprehensive lists of films with queer content. 41 In turn, these films were screened at several ephemeral festivals, such as Los Angeles’s 1977 and 1978 Out of the Closet and on to the Screen series at the Tiffany Theater (thirty films over the course of three weeks!). 42 Critics/scholars’ use of festival reviews also reflects the larger role played by curation as a praxis of canon formation. Unsurprisingly, these critics/ scholars curated several festivals and/or screening series. In addition to the weekly Firehouse Flicks, Russo organized in 1971 an ‘all-night pride marathon’ in the form of a festival, featuring La battaglia di Algeri (Battle of Algiers, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965), The Women (dir. George Cukor, 1939), Funny Girl (dir. William Wyler, 1968), and Rock Around the Clock (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1956).43 Criticized by lesbians for the male-centredness of his programme, Russo planned a festival dedicated to Hollywood’s powerful women (Great Love Goddesses of the Screen, also in 1971).44 Importantly, these festivals prefigure the semi-regular screenings Russo organized at St Peter’s Church (starting in 1977). 45 Dyer curated in 1977 Images of Homosexuality on the Screen, an extensive screening series at London’s National Film Theatre leading to the publication of the companion book Gays and Film. Particularly successful, Dyer’s festival was repeated at Montreal’s Concordia University, which was just opening a film studies programme. 46 Waugh, who had just been hired at Concordia, curated various programmes in the late 1970s. 47 From 1978 to 1980, he organized several screenings within the confines of the university (in partnership with the Gay Friends of Concordia). In 1982, he curated the Montreal gay and lesbian film festival Sans Popcorn.48 Several academic conferences, notably those organized by the GAU, similarly included an extensive screening programme, akin to a festival. For 41 See for instance: Waugh, ‘Annotated Listing of Thirty Non-Commercial Films About or by Lesbians and Gay Men Available in Canada’. 42 Gilgamesh Killian and ONE Incorporated, ‘Out of the Closet and on to the Screen’. 43 Schiavi, Celluloid Activist, 99–101. 44 Ibid. 45 Russo, ‘Agenda’. 46 Waugh, The Romance of Transgression, 474. This screening was organized by Serge Losique, the head of Montreal’s Festivals des films du monde. 47 For instance, Waugh wrote, in 1976, a letter to Robin Russel (The National Film Theatre in Kingston, Ontario) detailing a potential programme of gay films. I could not determine whether this programme was ever screened. Waugh, ‘Letter to Robin Russel’. 48 Gay Friends of Concordia, ‘Gay Images’; Gay Friends of Concordia, ‘Three Films’; Lesbian and Gay Friends of Concordia, ‘Gay/lesbian Films’; Waugh, ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’.

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Figure 2. Poster. Gay Images, Montréal (1978). Organized by Gay Friends of Concordia. Thomas Waugh’s personal archive. Courtesy of Thomas Waugh.

instance, UCLA’s 1979 Projecting Stereotypes not only featured several panels and interventions by keynotes speakers (among them Russo), but also a full-fledge festival (with several short programmes – among them ‘Whitewashed Gays’ or ‘The False Crisis of Gay Parents’ – and feature-length films).49 49 Gay Student Union, ‘Proposal for Projecting Stereotypes’.

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As this short survey makes clear, the critic/scholar divide was particularly malleable in the 1970s. In that context, the object ‘homosexuality and cinema’ emerged through an interplay between criticism, festival organizing, and scholarly production. Scholars and critics enacted a particular form of queer relay: in doing close analyses of ‘legitimate’ features (films that were already part of the cinematic canon), they not only established a history of sexual representation, but also conceptualized sexuality as a form of social discourse that permeates cinematic production. This is particularly significant: as I argue in Chapter 1, queer film scholarship is a form of identity knowledge. Queer f ilm scholarship generally hinges upon a disciplinary assumption: that we will be able to represent queer cinematic lives through academic modes of knowledge production, in effect translating them into the legitimate domain of film scholarship. As Wiegman would argue, the ‘political desire [invested in gay and lesbian film scholarship is] a representational practice, using [our] object and analytic relations as the institutionalized means for performing [a] commitment to justice’.50 Scholars’ and critics’ position, at the intersection of queer and general fields of cultural reproduction, thus reflects an ethical and epistemological conundrum. On the one hand, ‘to legitimately speak for an identity object of study one must be able to speak as it’. On the other hand, knowledge is inscribed onto particular regimes of truth that ‘threaten to strip subjects of epistemological authority over everything they are not’.51 Early gay film scholarship and criticism trouble this narrative: as such, the then-emerging discipline of film studies provided a space for a rather hybrid scholarship – one that adopts the personal dimension of gay liberation politics, strategically mobilizes both academic modes of knowledge production and film criticism, and uses curation and festival organizing as a resource through which knowledge can be created and disseminated. As the reader will have noticed, these first queer film scholars/critics were mostly men. In the 1970s, lesbian critics/scholars often privileged the rubrics of feminist film criticism – analyzing films in terms of gender rather than sexuality. Feminist film criticism famously emerged through collective debates held as part of the Edinburgh Film Festival’s 1972 ‘Women’s Event’, organized by Lynda Myles, Laura Mulvey, and Claire Johnston. Just as with gay f ilm criticism, these festival screenings and debates led to the publication of several articles and books – most notoriously Notes on 50 Wiegman, Object Lessons, 40. [Emphasis: mine] 51 Ibid, 7.

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Women’s Cinema, a forty-pages volume edited by Johnston.52 The book’s structure – combining interviews, theoretical articles, film criticisms, and interviews with directors – reflects Johnston’s own position: she was then a filmmaker, activist, and curator who was actively participating in the London Women’s Film Group, the British Film Institute, and the Society for Education in Film and Television.53 Here, I do not aim to fully sketch a linear history of British feminist film criticism, a project that far exceeds the scope of this book. Rather, I am interested in Johnston and Mulvey’s position – as filmmakers, critics, theorists, and festival organizers. Perhaps because of their theoretical lingo, Mulvey and Johnston’s scholarship/criticism have often been described as somewhat disconnected from the social movements they emerged from – as creating a gap between feminist practice and theory. Crucially, these texts were inspired by their respective authors’ curatorial and artistic practice. They were envisioned as portable manifestos for the emergence of new feminist film works. Rachel Fabian, for instance, argues that the title Notes on Women’s Cinema ‘frames the pamphlet’s contents as “notes”, reflecting its spartan quality and suggesting that the volume is primarily an informal tool for discussion which [sought to] develop theoretical models and production strategies to advance the political goals of the women’s liberation movement’.54 Mulvey’s call to dismantle cinematic pleasure similarly originated from the margins of academia: ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’ was explicitly conceived as a manifesto written by a filmmaker – one that built on earlier issues of Screen (and notably its republication of modernist manifestos in 1971-1972, also based on an Edinburgh retrospective) and captured the collective energies of its time.55 Mulvey wasn’t (then) recognized as a scholar: as Mandy Merck notes, she was a curator, ‘feminist activist, part-time filmmaker, occasional bookshop worker, housewife, and mother who had never attended graduate school or held a teaching post’.56 While it also relies on an interplay between festival organizing and para-academic endeavours, this type of scholarship exemplif ies a different articulation between theory and criticism – one that built on psychoanalysis in order to establish Women’s cinema beyond the 52 Johnston, ed., Notes on Women’s Cinema. 53 Fabian, ‘Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston’, 256 54 Ibid, 244. 55 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. For an analysis of Mulvey’s work in its historical context, see: Merck, ‘Mulvey’s Manifesto’, 9. 56 Merck, ‘Mulvey’s Manifesto’, 4.

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level of representation.57 Feminist f ilm criticism was here understood as theoretical: although this form of intellectual labour emerged from festival organizing, its primary goal wasn’t the uncovering a new cinematic canon. This genealogy of feminist f ilm criticism partly explains the marginalization of lesbian voices: f irst, because it reflects a gendered division of labour that relegated women outside of academia; second, because its modes of expression prioritized a theoretical discourse that largely erased differences among women.58 As Patricia White rightly notes, ‘the impasse regarding female spectatorship is related to the blind spot of lesbianism’.59

1980s: Cruising the protest, organizing gay and lesbian cinema In the 1980s, critics, scholars, festival curators, and film/video-makers collaborated in various organizations. In this section, I trace a trajectory from the summer of 1979 to the publication of two major anthologies on queer cinema in the early 1990s. In so doing, I underscore the constitution of a network of friends and colleagues mobilizing against homophobia, censorship, and AIDS; collaborating despite an increasing separation between criticism, scholarship, filmmaking, and festival planning. As such, the Alternative Cinema conference held at Bard College and the protests against the films Cruising (dir. William Friedkin, 1980) and Windows (dir. Gordon Willis, 1980) served as catalysts for the development of a gay and lesbian film culture. In June 1979, over four hundred critics, scholars, activists, and/or film and video makers met at Bard College (New York State) for the Alternative Cinema conference.60 The conference, organized by, among others, Biskind with the support of Jump Cut, aimed at ‘bring[ing] together people actively involved in the production, distribution use or criticism of films, videotapes and slideshows whose primary purpose is to address social issues and concerns’.61 It featured workshops, panel discussions, as well as an extensive screening programme – akin to a festival. Participants soon criticized the organizing 57 Mulvey, ‘Feminism, Film and the Avant-Garde’, 5. 58 Several feminist scholars criticized psychoanalytic film theory for its negation of race/class. They, however, rarely mentioned sexuality. See, among others: Gledhill, ‘Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism’. 59 White, ‘Madame X of the China Seas’, 81. 60 Jump Cut, ‘Alternative Cinema Conference’. 61 US Conference for an Alternative Cinema, ‘Prospectus’. [Emphasis in the original]

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committee for prioritizing white, male New York-based critics/scholars/ media makers: panels/screenings about/for marginalized communities were relegated to evening sessions.62 Waugh recalls that [the] wors[t] was that our struggle seemed relegated once again to a kind of second priority. We didn’t want to have to convince the conference of anything about our cause, or to have to compete for audiences for our screenings […] But the competitiveness seemed built into the conference organization: I projected TRUXX, an important Montreal film showing gay resistance against the police, for only a half-dozen people at 1 a.m. the second night…63

The decision to programme marginalized communities in evening sessions was largely understood as contradicting the organizing committee’s emphasis on solidarity and collaboration. As a result, several participants describe a confrontation between ‘the real conference (of the third world, gays, lesbians, and feminists) […] and the official conference’.64 Filmmakers, critics, and scholars formed various caucuses, establishing a list of demands directed at the organizing committee. The Lesbian and Gay Male Caucus (which included Jan Oxenberg, Rich, and Waugh) called for an exchange of information between gay and lesbian media workers and scholars, as well as for the creation of ‘[a]lternative distribution centers which must seek out, distribute, and encourage the production of media made by lesbians and gay men’.65 A month later, a coalition of gay filmmakers, critics, scholars, and activists crystallized around two films distributed by United Artists: William Friedkin’s Cruising and Gordon Willis’s Windows. Importantly, United Artists’s parent company Transamerica had, through two of its subsidiaries, financed the campaign of John Briggs, a Californian politician who had tried to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.66 Furthermore, Friedkin had already been criticized by the gay liberation movement. His 1972 film The Boys in the Band, which notoriously included the line ‘the only happy homosexual is a gay corpse’, was seen as depicting a stereotypical and negative representation of male homosexuality.67 Additionally, Friedkin had publicly discussed his preliminary research on Fire Island in a 1975 62 63 64 65 66 67

Jump Cut, ‘Alternative Cinema Conference’. Thomas Waugh in: Biskind et al., ‘Alternative Cinema Conference Times Seven’. Michelle Citron, in: Ibid. Jump Cut, ‘Alternative Cinema Conference’. beverley Philadelphia and wendy stevens, ‘Why Protest Windows?’, 9. Guthmann, ‘The Cruising Controversy’, 4.

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lecture at the New School, recalling with disdain being confused at the touristic attractions the gay vacation spot offers – namely ‘200 to 300 guys in daisy-chain [sic], balling each other in the ass [in the Meat Rack]’.68 In the spring of 1979, Village Voice critic Arthur Bell managed to get his hands on the script of Cruising.69 Considering that the film was ‘the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen’, he urged readers ‘to give Friedkin and his production crew a terrible time’.70 Several groups composed of filmmakers, critics, scholars, and activists mobilized against the film, among them the NGTF and the National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers (NALGF). These groups sought to educate the public about the film’s problematic representations, to disrupt location shooting, and to get Friedkin’s film permit revoked. Several demonstrations, heavily repressed by the police and documented in Hubbard’s 1980 short Stop the Movie, were also organized. On July 23rd, for instance, over 600 activists gathered for an emergency meeting, responding to a flyer jointly issued by the NALGF and the NGTF.71 Three days later, over 8,000 people packed Sheridan Square to protest the film.72 While this mobilization did manage to disrupt the shooting of Cruising, the film was released in February.73 In order to diffuse the controversy, the sexual orientation of the killer was supposedly changed and a disclaimer was added at the beginning of the film, announcing that it ‘is not meant to be representative of the whole [homosexual world]’.74 These changes were largely deemed insufficient: gay groups picketed the screenings and protested in front of the headquarters of the Transamerica Corporation, at some point guarded by the police.75 By May 1980, the film was considered as an economic and critical failure.76 68 Quoted in: Ibid., 2. 69 Wilson, ‘Friedkin’s Cruising, Ghetto Politics, and Gay Sexuality’, 99. 70 Quoted in: Tucker, ‘Sex, Death, and Free Speech: The Fight to Stop Friedkin’s Cruising’. 71 Tucker, ‘Sex, Death, and Free Speech: The Fight to Stop Friedkin’s Cruising’; ‘Stop the Movie Cruising’. 72 Wilson, ‘Friedkin’s Cruising, Ghetto Politics, and Gay Sexuality’, 103. 73 Wilson notes that Friedkin went ‘approximately 60% over budget as a result of the disruption’. Ibid., 98. 74 Friedkin publicly announced he had modified the script of Cruising to diffuse the controversy. In particular, he claimed that the sexual identities of the two main protagonists (the killer and the undercover police officer) were changed to heterosexual. This doesn’t explain why the film spends a great amount of time making clear that semen, belonging to the killer, is found in one of the victims’ rectum… 75 Wilson, ‘Friedkin’s Cruising, Ghetto Politics, and Gay Sexuality’, 98. 76 Stuart Byron, quoted in Guthmann, ‘The Cruising Controversy’, 3.

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Although less documented, the protests against United Artists’s Windows are also significant – be it only because they fostered a coalition between LGBTQ activists and feminist organizations such as the Coalition Against Violence Against Women.77 The film was withdrawn from two theatres in Madison, Wisconsin. Its run was delayed in Boston. United Artists decided not to release Windows in the Bay Area and New York City.78 The Alternative Cinema conference and the protests against Windows and Cruising partly explain the development of a form of lesbian film criticism grounded in activism and defined in opposition to psychoanalytic film theory. Tellingly, the first special dossier on ‘Lesbians and Film’ was published in a 1981 issue of Jump Cut.79 Written as a manifesto calling for a new type of scholarship, editors Edith Becker, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, and B. Ruby Rich link the development of lesbian film activism to organizations, like the Gay Liberation Front and later the National Gay Task Force, or […] the specific media organization that was formed at last year’s Alternative Cinema Conference, the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers; […] actions, like those against the exhibition of WINDOWS and the filming and opening of CRUISING; […] national demonstrations, like the October 14, 1979, mass mobilization in Washington in defense of gay rights against the homophobic backlash and increasingly repressive legislation, like the Briggs initiative.80

Building upon the friendships and collaborations that emerged from their participation in both the protests against Cruising and Windows and the Alternative Cinema conference, the editors argue for a lesbian film scholarship harnessed onto newly released lesbian film works and activist organizations. This project was explicitly conceived in opposition to psychoanalytic film theory and as articulated with recent developments in gay film criticism: The intellectual and political groundwork has been established, within the lesbian movement, which we can now draw upon for its application to film […] The creation of a lesbian film criticism is particularly urgent, 77 Charbonneau and Winer, ‘Lesbians in “Nice” Films’. This is particularly significant in the context of the sex wars and the (sometimes difficult) relationships between (some) feminist organizations and (some) LGBTQ activists. 78 For more on the demonstrations and their success, see: Philadelphia and stevens, ‘Why Protest Windows?’ 79 Becker, Citron, Lesage, and Rich. ‘Lesbians and Film’. 80 Ibid.

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given the intensified use of the lesbian as a negative sign in Hollywood movies and the continuing space assigned to lesbians as gratification of male fantasy in pornography and a distressing number of male avant-garde films […] lesbian film theory […] must begin to dismantle some of the structures of current feminist film theory and film history in order to build a more inclusive foundation.81

The Alternative Cinema conference and the protests against Windows and Cruising were also emblematic of a new political movement symbolized by an alliance between critics, scholars, festival organizers, and video/ film-makers. In particular, the NALGF – a group which was instrumental in organizing against Cruising and Windows, hoped to tackle the recommendations made at Bard by the Gay Male and Lesbian caucus.82 Headed by producer Richard Schmiechen83, John Greyson, and Oxenberg, the group described its membership as ‘includ[ing] producers, directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, video artists, film exhibitors, film organization administrators, critics, and film and video students’.84 Its mandate revolved around two axes: to lobby against homophobic media and the erasure of LGBTQ people from Hollywood, and to develop independent circuits of distribution for gay and lesbian film and video makers.85 Members were quite divided on how to achieve these goals. In several meetings, they discussed whether the NALGF should act as a ‘service organization with a distribution base [akin to Women Make Movies], [a] professional lobbying association for lesbian and gays working both as independents and in the industry, [a] trade association representing and supporting independent gay and lesbian media [modeled after the Association for Independent Video and Film – AIVF]’, or a loose informal network dedicated to connecting f ilmmakers with LGBTQ festivals. 86 These quarrels are best exemplified in Zoom Out, a magazine published by the NALGF from 1982 to 1984 in an attempt to constitute more than a club.87 81 Ibid. 82 Forgione, ‘Organizing on the Left’. 83 Schmiechen also produced Rob Epstein’s 1984 The Times of Harvey Milk (see Chap 4). 84 National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘Dear Friends…’ 85 In 1981, the NALGF successfully ‘reverse[d] a WNET/TV [New York’s PBS affiliate] decision to exclude a lesbian film [Jan Oxenberg’s Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts] from Independent Focus’. National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘Dear Friends…’ 86 National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘Meeting Minutes, June 28th’. 87 National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘Edito’.

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In the early 1980s, the NALGF positioned itself as an interface between filmmakers and festivals. The organization operated as a relay between Peter Lowy’s and Michael Lumpkin’s gay film festivals (in New York and San Francisco, respectively).88 It not only curated programmes for both events, but also organized a cross-pollination of sorts. In New York, the NALGF screened a selection of the best work from the San Francisco festival, and vice versa. There programmes were usually followed by a panel with filmmakers, festival organizers, and critics.89 The NALGF also provided assistance in organizing several ephemeral LGBTQ festivals, such as Southampton College’s Eggo and New York University’s Abuse (both in 1983).90 Zoom Out relayed calls for submission, notably for Waugh’s 1982 festival Sans Popcorn.91 Furthermore, the NALGF benefited from its connections with the AIVF and the Association of Independent Television and Filmmakers.92 Its actions testified to the incestuous nature of the New York queer video and film scene, best exemplified by Greyson himself – at the time serving as a programme coordinator at the NALGF and the AIVF. In March 1982 for instance, the NALGF and the AIVF collaboratively organized the roundtable/screening series ‘Independent Closets: Gay & Lesbian Filmmakers Open Doors’, which featured both film/video-makers and scholars-critics (among which Mark Berger, Oxenberg, Russo, and Waugh).93 Despite being highly divided, the NALGF’s commitment to developing independent queer cinema was emblematic of a new relationship between critics, scholars, filmmakers, and festival organizers. Furthermore, it exemplifies a new type of queer relay: with the development of the independent film and video sector in the early 1980s and the rapid institutionalization 88 Peter Lowy occasionally served as a special advisor for the NALGF. See: Pevnik, ‘Gay Filmmakers Confront Media Homophobia in the US’. 89 National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers and Gay Activists Alliance, ‘The National Association of Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers and the Gay Activists Alliance Present a One Night Presentation of the San Francisco Gay Film Festival’. 90 ‘Eggo Film Festival 1983 ‒ Southampton College, Fine Arts’; National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘NALGF & NYU Lesbian/Gay Film Festival Present Abuse’. Abuse was planned as a three days long festival. Its steering committee was composed of – among others – Greyson, Lowy, Epstein, and Berger. 91 National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘Announcements’. 92 Schmiechen is elected on the board of the Association of Independent Television and Filmmakers in 1981. Pevnik, ‘Gay Filmmakers Confront Media Homophobia in the US’. 93 Foundation for Independent Film and Video, ‘Agenda’, 24. Also known as ‘prognosis for gay and lesbian independent film’; see: Waugh, ‘Notes on Greyzone’, 37. On the role played by Greyson, see: Damiens, ‘Incestuous Festivals’.

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of film studies, the boundaries between scholars, critics, filmmakers, and festival organizers were less permeable than in the 1970s. Festivals and activist groups provided a space for the articulation of a gay and lesbian film culture marked by a commitment to self-representation and sustained by networks of friendship. This new ethics of collaboration was at the core of several conferences held as part of LGBTQ festivals. Most famously, the 1983 UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Festival juxtaposed various screenings with panels intermixing scholars (Dennis Altman, Dyer, Martha Fleming, Bill Nichols, John Ramirez, Waugh and Andrea Weiss), critics (Russo and Wood), filmmakers (Barbara Hammer, Paul Leaf and Oxenberg), and activists (Gay Media Task Force’s Newt Deiter, Alliance for Gay Artists in the Entertainment Industry’s Phillip Gerson, Greyson).94 San Francisco’s gay film festival similarly organized several panels in the early 1980s – including a conference on ‘Lesbian and Gay Aging’ in 1983.95 In 1984, the First Annual Washington, D.C. International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival programmed a conference featuring Russo and Weiss.96 In Montreal, a roundtable ‘Cinema, Representation and the Gay Imaginary’ was held as part of the 1986 Gais à l’écran.97 Quite clearly, LGBTQ festivals in the early 1980s constituted a para-academic circuit in which scholars could present their research to the community – a circuit largely akin to the role played by the gay press in the 1970s.98 This new ethos of collaboration opened up new opportunities for film critics. Russo, for instance, partnered with several film theatres, museums, and activist organizations. From 16 May to 1 July 1982, he organized the Celluloid Closet screening series at New York’s 8th Street Playhouse theatre: about thirty of the films analyzed in Russo’s book were screened in less than two months.99 The same year, he organized ‘Camping Out!’, a benefit lecture/screening 94 Horne and Ramirez, ‘Conference Report’; UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival, ‘UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival’. 95 San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, ‘Program’. 96 Not to be confused with the 1973 First American Gay Film Festival and the 1978 First Gay Film Festival, also organized in Washington, D.C (see Chapter 1) or Reel Affirmations (from 1991 to nowadays). ‘The Washington Blade Presents … the First Annual Washington, D.C. International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival’. 97 Gais à l’écran, ‘Programme’ [I translate]. 98 Several papers presented at conferences organized as part of queer f ilm festivals were published in the gay press. See for instance: Waugh, ‘Photography: Passion and Power’ (originally given as a lecture and slide presentation, entitled ‘Pornography as Cultural History,’ at the 1983 Gay and Lesbian Media Festival and Conference). 99 ‘Vito Russo and 8th Street Playhouse Present The Celluloid Closet’.

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that aimed to fund a film on Proposition 5 and Harvey Milk.100 In 1984, he collaborated with the New York Council on Social Work Education’s Lesbian and Gay Task Force and published an ‘annotated filmography with gay and lesbian content’ directed towards educators and students.101 Conversely, several scholars continued to publish in the gay press: the genre of the festival review – as a praxis of canon building – was particularly popular in the period.102 While they both collaborated with festival organizers, filmmakers, and activist organizations, scholars and critics were nonetheless increasingly differentiated. Russo repeatedly attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to enter the academic world – hoping, for instance, to get hired at Yale.103 This increasing separation between the labour of critics and scholars cannot be understood outside of the legitimization of gay and lesbian cinema in academia. In 1981, a roundtable ‘Images of Homosexuality’ was held as part of Trent University’s Canadian Images Film Festival (Peterborough, from 1978 to 1984). Similarly, a workshop on film was organized at the 1982 Barnard Conference and a panel on ‘Research Issues in the Visual Communication of Sexual Subcultures’ (featuring Waugh, Dyer, and Kleinhans) was held as part of the University of Pennsylvania’s 1985 International Conference on Visual Communication.104 The most important conferences and festivals happened outside of academia, however, in reaction to the sex wars and the AIDS crisis. In 1986, a group of film and video makers, students, and scholars at Boston’s Collective for Living Cinema decided to read and discuss texts related to the construction and representation of lesbian and gay subjects […] mov[ing] more or less at random from the writings of Michel Foucault to lesbian-feminist philosophy, from Freud to Freud’s commentators and critics […] read[ing] recent work on identity, homophobia, AIDS, sex work, and lesbian sadomasochism, […] [bringing] 100 Ultimately resulting in The Times of Harvey Milk, a film produced by Epstein and Schmiechen. See: The Film Fund, ‘January 15th, 1982 Press Release’. 101 Council on Social Work Education Lesbian and Gay Task Force, ‘Annotated Filmography with Gay and Lesbian Content’. 102 For instance, Waugh publishes three festival reviews in 1981. See: Waugh, ‘Montreal: One Bright Light’; ‘The Montreal Festival: Taxis and Toilets (includes Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo)’; ‘Tom Waugh: à propos du festival (des films du monde, Montréal)’. 103 Russo, ‘Letter to Laura Kaminsky’. Russo is hired in 1990 as a part-time lecturer at the University of California, in Santa Cruz. 104 Wilson, ‘The Context of “Between Pleasure and Danger”: The Barnard Conference on Sexuality’, 39.

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video-tapes to meetings to view and discuss – videos by lesbian and gay media makers and tapes about AIDS.105

In an effort to further intertwine screenings and theory, the group asked Hubbard (who had just founded the NYLGEFF) to curate a short programme of queer experimental films in 1988.106 Since Hubbard was unable to collaborate on this project, Bill Horrigan and Gever started planning a series of screenings, which evolved in 1989 into the conference and festival ‘How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video’, held by the Bad Object-Choices collective at the Anthology Film Archives and sponsored by the journal October.107 The event featured an eclectic mix of artists/activists (Gregg Bordowitz, Jean Carlomusto, Greyson, Richard Fung, Isaac Julien, Tom Kalin, Stuart Marshall, and Ray Navarro) and scholars/critics (Altman, José Arroyo, Douglas Crimp, Theresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss, Gever, Cora Kaplan, Kobena Mercer, Judith Mayne, Rich, and Waugh).108 Its proceedings were published in 1991. In the aftermath of the How Do I Look? conference/festival, Gever, Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar started working on the anthology Queer Looks, published four years later (1993).109 It features many of the same filmmakers (Bordowitz, Carlomusto, Crimp, Nick Deocampo, John DiStefano, Fung, Hammer, Navarro, Parmar, Catherine Saalfield, and Jerry Tartaglia), and scholars/critics (Alison Butler, Chin, Gever, Mercer, Rich, Waugh and White).110 As these two examples make clear, festivals and activist groups constituted spaces where scholars, critics, filmmakers, and festival organizers could meet and collaborate, but also where scholars could present their research and build alliances with activists.

1990s: Professionalizing queer cinema, disciplining scholars. This situation changed rapidly in the 1990s with the professionalization of queer cinema and the disciplinarization of academia. With the culture 105 Bad Object-Choices, How Do I Look?, 11. 106 Walsh, ‘Pre-Mix Memories (and Then Some)’, 43–45. 107 In itself, the fact that How Do I Look? is mostly remembered as a conference (and not a festival) exemplifies quite well the erasure of para-academic labour I described earlier. For more on the three festivals held in New York in 1989 (the New Fest, the NYLGEFF, and How Do I Look?) see: Russo, ‘The Shock of the New Experimental Gay Films’. 108 Bad Object-Choices, How Do I Look? 109 Gever, Parmar, and Greyson, Queer Looks. 110 As such, this lineup reflects the growing importance of diversity politics within both queer film culture and gay and lesbian studies.

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wars and the controversies around the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), festivals increasingly relied on private funding and the commercial industry.111 In 1988, the New York Post condemned the New York State Council for the Arts’ decision to fund Mariette Pathy Allen’s photographs of cross-dressers.112 Several art exhibitions (including the ones dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe) and NEA-funded filmmakers (such as Marlon Riggs) were publicly attacked. In 1993, the NEA withdrew funding for three LGBTQ festivals.113 The situation was not unique to the United States: in 1992, Toronto’s Metro Council rescinded a $3000 grant to the Inside/OUT Festival.114 Forced to adapt their organizational and funding structures, LGBTQ festivals increasingly relied on corporate sponsorship and philanthropy. For instance, grants for Schulman and Hubbard’s NYLGEFF were cut by 47% in 1991.115 Faced with a financial crisis, the festival decided in 1992 to forgo in-house programming – enlisting instead guest curators. Ultimately, the NYLGEFF was forced to rescind the honorarium and screening fees it had promised curators and filmmakers ($150 per curator, $50 per filmmaker).116 Several artists protested this decision, including Schulman and Hubbard’s friends and collaborators Jack Waters and Peter Cramer.117 This financial crisis led to an institutional crisis. Two transitions plans were proposed, both of which called for the nomination of people with ‘substantial roots in the people of color communities and in the art world’ and ‘relationships with organizations (such as PBS, the New York Film Festival, the Whitney Program) that we have never been able to develop and [who] therefore have much more access to funding than we have had’.118 In 1993, the festival elected a new board (comprised of Shari Frilot, Karim Aïnouz and Hubbard), 111 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 4. 112 Rich, ‘Reflections on a Queer Screen’, 83–84. 113 Ibid., 89. 114 Adams, ‘Gay Clout Turns inside out’, 14. 115 New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, ‘Statement from the Curators’. 116 New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, ‘6th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival September 10-13 and 17-20, 1992. Announcement!’; New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, ‘Compensation Letter to Filmmakers’. 117 Jack Waters to New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, ‘My Two Cents for the Festival’. 118 Schulman, ‘Transition Plan’, 2; Tartaglia, ‘A Modest Proposal’. The NYLGEFF had been criticized for being too white. In her transition plan, Schulman argues heavily that MIX should become ‘one of the few general institutions in the world to be run by gay and lesbian people of color – this festival has an opportunity to be a source of power and energy towards the full expression of gay life’.

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ordered marketing research on the sponsoring of gay cultural events, and started its transition from the NYLGEFF to MIX.119 The NYLGEFF wasn’t the only festival restructuring its organization. For instance, the UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Festival was renamed Out on the Screen in 1988, cutting its link with the university and moving to the Director’s Guild of America in the process. As Kaucyila Brooke’s short history of the festival makes clear, its board was ‘stacked with industry executives, producers and writers’, shifting from a ‘founder driven organization to a shared leadership organization’. In 1994, it became Outfest and received an increasing share of private sponsorship. This structural transformation was fully completed in 1996, when ‘“Smirnoff presents OUTFEST” […] announce[d] itself from banners up and down Sunset Boulevard and throughout West Hollywood. The opening night reception feature[d] free Smirnoff vodka martinis’.120 As these examples suggest, LGBTQ festivals’ internal structures started to adopt the format of non-profit organizations: they not only hired professional staff but also adapted to third-sector technologies of governance. LGBTQ festivals typically introduced awards and membership benefits in the decade.121 This corresponds to what Rhyne identifies as a shift from festivals as a bottom-up space for community-building to a ‘homoeconomy’ marked by one’s ‘individual economic investment in image production […] [as] community membership and political action’.122 More importantly, this professionalization entailed a form of specification: while some festival organizers might also be scholars, critics, or filmmakers, they must be clearly identifiable as administrators and obey the codes, conventions, and logics of the non-profit sector.123 Tellingly, several books published in the decade consist in comprehensive lists of queer films. Steve Stewart’s 1993 Gay Hollywood Film & Video Guide, Raymond Murray’s 1994 Images in the Dark, Olson’s 1996 Ultimate Guide to Lesbian & Gay Film and Video, and Claire Jackson and Peter Tapp’s 1997 The Bent Lens aim at helping festival administrators curate their events.124 119 Diverse documents, 1993, Box 4, Folder 414 ‘Gay Marketing Research’, The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections. The New York University Libraries. 120 Brooke, ‘Dividers and Doorways’. 121 New York’s New Fest introduces a membership system in 1990 through a letter written by Russo himself. See: Russo, ‘Dear Friends’. Rhyne doubts the letter was actually written by Russo. See: Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 124. 122 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 31. 123 For a more developed account of this new organizational logics, see Richards, The Queer Film Festival. 124 Stewart, Gay Hollywood Film & Video Guide; Murray, Images in the Dark; Olson, The Ultimate Guide to Lesbian & Gay Film and Video; Jackson and Tapp, The Bent Lens.

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They contain, for each film, detailed information about distribution. Olson’s Ultimate Guide includes a few essays written by established film scholars – however geared towards framing the evolution of queer cinematic productions in terms of new possibilities for festival curators and administrators. Similarly, Murray’s Images in the Dark references Tyler’s Screening the Sexes, Dyer’s Gays and Film, and Russo’s Celluloid Closet as inspirations – however shifting the emphasis towards films ‘available on home video in the United States’.125 Recalling 1970s critics’ obsession with establishing a queer cinematic canon, these books clearly targeted emerging film professionals. Overall, they are emblematic of the importance of establishing one’s credentials. For instance, Murray was then the owner of the TLA Entertainment Group, a Philadelphia video store specializing in LGBTQ fares. In 1994 (the year Images in the Dark was released), Murray organized the first edition of the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and launched TLA into video distribution. Olson started her career with film festivals: first, as the founder of Lavender Images (Minneapolis, from 1986 to 1988); then, as a curator (1992) and co-director of Frameline (1993 and 1994).126 As she started working on The Ultimate Guide, Olson left Frameline to create PopcornQ and PlanetOut (1995), the first websites dedicated to queer cinema – further shifting from curating to helping film professionals.127 Two years later, Olson organized the first gathering dedicated to queer film professionals at Sundance.128 A similar shift towards professionalization can be observed in academia: in the 1990s, the publishing industry took notice of this new interest in queer cinema, with the rapid release of major books (among them: Dyer’s 1990 Now You See It; Weiss’s 1992 Vampires and Violets; Alexander Doty’s 1993 Making Things Perfectly Queer; Mayne’s 1993 Cinema and Spectatorship and 1994 Directed by Dorothy Arzner; and Waugh’s 1996 Hard to Imagine).129 These books were largely presented at and prepared through the various conferences organized within LGBTQ festivals in the 1980s. They are emblematic of major shifts within film studies, including the turn towards Michel

125 Murray, Images in the Dark, xii–ix. 126 ‘Lavender Images – A Lesbian and Gay Film Retrospective’; Frameline, ‘Catalogue’, 1992. Olson started dating Julie Dorf in 1994. For more on Julie Dorf, see Chap. 5. 127 Helfand, ‘The Celluloid Web: PopcornQ Presented by PlanetOut’. 128 Bowen, ‘Update: Something Queer This Year’. 129 Dyer, Now You See It. A revised edition is published in 2002. Weiss, Vampires and Violets; Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer; Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship; Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner; Waugh, Hard to Imagine.

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Foucault’s post-structuralist theory, the death of the auteur, and the import of cultural studies.130 This boom in the publishing industry cannot be understood outside of both the institutionalization of gay and lesbian studies as an academic discipline and the uneasy shift from Women’s Studies to Gender and Sexuality departments.131 As Jean C. Robinson remarks, gay and lesbian studies ‘adapted to the forms with which we are all familiar: powerful chairs, junior faculty anxious about tenure, research questions chosen because they can get published’.132 While scholars had long studied gay and lesbian topics, the institutional location, politics, and administrative structure of the university changed tremendously in the mid-1980s.133 Tellingly, feminist and queer scholarship in the 1990s started to describe a division between academics and activists. The difference – at times characterized as a form of incompatibility – between practice and theory, either celebrated or condemned, was a core component of the establishment of a feminist and queer scholarly canon.134 Furthermore, the constitution of fields and disciplines explicitly geared toward identity knowledge presupposed a redefinition of the labour of scholars. While 1970s gay and lesbian critics draw upon the gay liberation movement and community activism, 1990s scholars’ legitimacy built upon the rubrics of (post-structuralist) theoretical critique. As Wiegman argues, these new fields and disciplines arise[d] from our institutional location as experts in identity knowledges […] the claim for being political in the process that everywhere underwrites left identity critique is the most heavily invested sign of our professionalization in identity domains. You can’t get to Yale without it, which means, Dorothy, we are really not in Kansas anymore.135

The shift from gay and lesbian studies to queer theory exemplifies quite well this new professionalization and institutionalization of academic knowledge. 130 Smelik, ‘Gay and Lesbian Criticism’, 137; Lugowski, ‘Ginger Rogers and Gay Men? Queer Film Studies, Richard Dyer, and Diva Worship’, 97–98. 131 On the crisis of Women’s Studies, see: Scott, ‘Women’s Studies on the Edge’. On the institutional shift from Women’s Studies to Gender and Sexuality Studies departments, see: Auslander, ‘Do Women’s+ Feminist+ Men’s+ Lesbian and Gay+ Queer Studies= Gender Studies?’. 132 Robinson, ‘From Politics to Professionalism: Cultural Change in Women’s Studies’, 208. 133 Ibid., 203; Joseph, ‘Analogy and Complicity: Women’s Studies, Lesbian/Gay Studies, and Capitalism’. 134 Zimmerman, ‘The Past in Our Present: Theorizing the Activist Project of Women’s Studies’, 186. 135 Wiegman, Object Lessons, 125. [Emphasis in the original]

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It reveals a new regime of academic knowledge production – theorizing queerness not through identity or as speaking to communities but as an object of knowledge and as a theoretical critique. According to Wiegman, the shift towards queer studies thus simultaneously presupposed the ‘dissimulation of the institutional struggles [of Women’s Studies and gay and lesbian studies] over disciplinary expertise, critical authority and modes of interpretation’ and relegated gay and lesbian studies to the past.136 In the process, queer theory was defined as a progress that explicitly sought to address the shortcomings gay and lesbian criticism.137 This mobilization of queerness as both a temporal device and a marker of the differences between critics, scholars, and activists is particularly clear in the inaugural issue of the journal GLQ (1993): Critics such as Teresa de Lauretis, Richard Dyer, Martha Fleming, Kobena Mercer, Judith Mayne, Mandy Merck, Jackie Stacey, Simon Watney and Thomas Waugh have contributed over the years to the field’s theoretical structure. Yet, indisputably, something has changed of late. […] As a quarterly, GLQ cannot respond with the alacrity of the Village Voice or the Advocate to political battles or box-office news. Nor does it want to.138

Ellis Hanson’s 1999 anthology Out Takes is also indicative of this new context. Hanson not only relegates Dyer, Russo, and Waugh to the ranks of films critics but also calls for a queer film theory that would constitute a moment of relief from feminist and gay film criticism itself. For purely ideological reasons, such criticism [Dyer, Waugh, and Russo] has sought to alienate spectators from Hollywood’s fetishism and voyeurism and from the stereotypes of queer sexuality as inherently perverse or monstrous. In so doing, however, we have come to subordinate every discussion of the aesthetic or the erotic to surprisingly simplistic conceptions of the political, and this practice promotes a certain blindness of its own.139`

This particular blend of queer film theory was not exempt from ‘simplistic conceptions of the political’. Hanson’s definition of what a queer film theory should be explicitly negates the cultural and intellectual work performed by 136 Ibid, 124. 137 Ibid, 52. A similar argument is made in Freeman, ‘Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations’. 138 Rich, ‘Reflections on a Queer Screen’, 85–87. [Emphasis: mine] 139 Hanson Out Takes, 2.

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para-academic actors. In particular, Hanson criticizes early 1990s anthologies both for their eclectic mix of scholars, critics, activists, and filmmakers and for their diversity politics – for not being purely academic and for being grounded in real, lived community concerns: many of the writers [of Queer Looks] call for positive images of lesbian and gay men as queer subjects with impeccable multicultural credentials… In the question ‘How do I look?’ I do not hear a political call for visibility, honesty, and integrity. I hear, rather, an anxious request for a compliment, or perhaps I should say a narcissistic call for compliments.140

In describing a widening of the critic/scholar divide in the 1990s, I do not want to imply that the two were necessarily mutually exclusive: several people continued to inhabit both positions, publishing in community-based papers and academic journals. They mobilized a different type of queer relay: they built on their experience as scholar and critic, locating their claim through the proper academic or journalistic credentials. The evolution of Rich’s career is here particularly instructive. Rich founded Chicago’s Films by Women Festival in 1974 – at a time when organizing a women’s film festival meant painfully uncovering a disregarded cinematic canon.141 There, she met major feminist critics (including Lesage and Mulvey), before joining the Jump Cut collective as editor (a journal for which she attended the Alternative Cinema conference in 1979). Two years later, Rich participated, among others, in the special issue ‘Lesbians and Film’, based on a panel held at the Purdue University Conference.142 Rich’s contribution to Jump Cut never employs the first person singular, as she was still in the closet in the 1970s.143 In the decade, she wrote reviews of feminist films for the Chicago Reader, presented her research at several academic and activist conferences, and published in scholarly journals.144 Her career in the 1970s was emblematic of both the permeability of the scholar/critic binary and the role played by festivals in canon-building.

140 Ibid., 10–11. 141 Rich, Chick Flicks, 29. 142 Becker et al., ‘Lesbians and Film’, 20. 143 Rich, ‘Maedchen in Uniform: From Repressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation’. Rich’s decision to come out in the mid-1980s certainly reflects the tension around the place of lesbians within the feminist movement. 144 Citron et al., ‘Women and Film’.

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Rich moved to New York in 1980. She wrote reviews for The Village Voice and became an administrator at the NYSCA.145 In this period, she def ined herself as ‘a professional committed to cultural exchange and scholarly research […] mov[ing] from film exhibition to criticism, theory, administration and funding, teaching, lecturing’.146 As a critic and an arts administrator, Rich moved seamlessly between activist networks, film criticism, and academic journals.147 She organized and participated in many conferences and festivals in the 1980s. In addition to the How Do I Look? conference, she curated with Horrigan ‘Only Human: Sex, Gender, and other Misrepresentations’ at the 1987 American Film Institute National Video Festival – a programme that included not only films but also several panels.148 As such, Rich describes her experience at festivals in the 1980s as a fertile terrain for collaboration. Rich was hired at Berkeley in 1992.149 Moving away from festival organizing, she ‘rededicated [herself] to writing, lecturing, radio commentary, and even teaching’, being ‘encouraged by the newly insurgent unorthodoxies of a new generation of junior faculty, graduate students, and even the undergraduates’.150 She published in the popular (Elle, San Francisco Bay Guardian), cinephile (Sight and Sound), and academic (GLQ) press, in each cases building on her experience as a curator (Sundance) and a festivalgoer.151 Rich positioned herself as a participant observer in the 1990s: festivals became a space ‘for tracking new cinematic trends’.152 Her scholarship/ criticism increasingly adopted the format of the festival review. Tellingly, the 1992 article ‘A Queer Sensation’, in which Rich coined the term ‘new queer cinema’, is structured around her itinerary on the festival circuit.153 Several of her academic articles of the decade expand on ‘new queer cinema’ through the genre of the festival review: if festivals constituted a space for tracking new cinematic trends, festival reviews not only revealed the evolution of queer cinema but also opened up a space for reconceptualizing gay and 145 Rich, Chick Flicks, 233. 146 Ibid., 4. [Emphasis: mine] 147 See among others: Rich, ‘Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World’; Arguelles and Rich, ‘Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution’; Rich, ‘Feminism and Sexuality in the 1980s’. 148 Crimp, ‘Introduction’; Atkinson, ‘Videos: Art With no Place to Call Home’. 149 B. Ruby Rich does not have a PhD. As such, her hiring at Berkeley reflects the type of blurring of boundaries between scholars and critics this chapter purports to examine. 150 Rich, Chick Flicks, 5. 151 Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut, 29. 152 Ibid., 16. 153 Rich, ‘A Queer Sensation’; reprinted in: B. Ruby Rich, ‘New Queer Cinema’.

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lesbian film studies.154 Rich’s scholarship in the 1990s thus embodied a particular type of queer relay – building on her experience as a participant observer, reinvigorating the genre of the festival review as a legitimate academic method, and theorizing the interplay between curation and knowledge production. As the evolution of Rich’s career makes clear, LGBTQ festivals became an object of academic knowledge in the 1990s. The festival reviews published in the decade differ significantly from those of the 1970s and 1980s: instead of describing the films screened in a given year (building the cinematic canon), they are interested in conceptualizing the relationship between festivals and queer cultural life. For instance, Halberstam discusses their quasi-erotic experience watching lesbian bodies watching, in the dark, lesbians on and off screen.155 Similarly, Samantha Searle and Marc Siegel draw on their festival-going experience, arguing that LGBTQ festivals are emblematic of the management of collective identity.156 While these reviews are by definition based on participant research, they are clearly written from an academic standpoint: their author is presented as a scholar, not as a film critic or a festival organizer. This is most visible in Gamson’s 1996 ‘Organizational Shaping of Collective Identity’, a sociologicallyinflected analysis of the evolution of two queer film festivals held in New York City (MIX and New Fest).157 Gamson, who was involved in organizing MIX, presents himself as an objective scholar whose research results from ‘information gathered during fieldwork on New York lesbian and gay film festival[s]’.158 This tendency to present oneself as a scholarly observer is not innocent and can at times be a source of tension between festival organizers and researchers: Schulman, disappointed with Gamson’s analysis of MIX, casts him in an open letter as ‘a sociologist from Yale University who did an observational study on the state of The New Festival and Mix [demonstrating] a lack of understanding of the context in which gay film festivals take place’.159 154 A claim she articulates in the inaugural issue of GLQ. Rich, ‘Reflections on a Queer Screen’. The festival reviews published in the decade include: Rich, ‘Collision, Catastrophe, Celebration’; ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’; ‘Brokering Brokeback’. Rich is still particularly attached to the genre of the festival review. See, among others: ‘Park City Remix’; ‘Sundance’; ‘Sundance At Thirty’. 155 Halberstam, ‘Some Like It Hot. The New Sapphic Cinema’. 156 Searle, ‘Film and Video Festivals; Queer Politics and Exhibition’; Siegel, ‘Spilling out onto Castro Street’. 157 Gamson, ‘The Organizational Shaping of Collective Identity’. 158 Ibid. Gamson notably organized MIX’s 1995 panel New Wave Queer Festivals, see: Gamson, ‘Letter to Julie Dorf’; Joshua Gamson to Shari Frilot, ‘Re: New Wave Queer Festival Panel’. 159 Schulman, ‘A Samoan Talks Back to Margaret Mead’. To my knowledge, this letter was not published.

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The first academic dossier on LGBTQ festivals was published in GLQ in 1999.160 Edited by White and based on a panel held at the New Fest, it exemplifies not only the constituting of LGBTQ festivals as an object of knowledge but also the disciplinarization of academia. Each intervention discusses ‘publicness’ as a theoretical tool for understanding queer cinematic culture. The dossier is framed as an academic endeavour: out of the five participants, only one is a filmmaker (Fung).161 His paper – half the length of the others – concludes the dossier. Waugh and Straayer’s 2005, 2006, and 2008 dossiers adopt the format of the roundtable.162 Waugh and Straayer explain that they initially set out to explore ‘the role of the scholarly and critical community in festivals’.163 Indeed, most of the people interviewed do not fit neatly in a single professional occupation: their individual careers testify to the crossovers between film criticism, curation, scholarship, and filmmaking. However, they are reluctant to frame their expertise as benefiting from the interplays between academia, festival organizing, and film criticism. Liza Johnson focusses, for instance, on her role as a curator for MIX NYC – without expanding on her experience as a f ilmmaker, author, and critic. Similarly, Nanna Heidenreich specifically discusses Berlin’s LesbenFilmFestival – without really mentioning she had published several academic articles on feminist and queer films or had been teaching a seminar on queer film and video. M.R. Daniel, Joel David, and José Gatti mention their roles as university teachers and professors, but only so as to reassert their credentials as critics or curators.

Festival as object / field of research: insider/outsider and critical festival studies Throughout this chapter, I have underscored the permeability of the critic/ scholar binary, arguing that festival organizing and curating have been instrumental in shaping gay and lesbian cinema as an object of knowledge. In documenting various uses of the festival format, corresponding to different articulations between academia and criticism, I have described a gradual 160 White, ‘Queer Publicity’. 161 Richard Fung was hired at OCAD University (Toronto, Ontario) four years later – in 2003. 162 Waugh and Straayer, ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One’; ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out’; ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Three: Artists Speak Out’. 163 Waugh and Straayer, ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One’, 580.

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shift from curating as a praxis of canon building (or festivals as methods for thinking about the relationships between gays and film) to the studying of festivals as a legitimate object of research within film studies (a field of research whose internal structure presupposes a separation between the critical activity of scholars and the events being studied). In exploring various intersections between LGBTQ festivals and film scholarship, this chapter contradicts some of the core methodologies of festival studies: Rhyne’s description of festival stakeholders and Dayan’s anthropological approach to the competing performances of various groups of people attending a festival presuppose that one is a festival-goer, or a critic, or an organizer, or a policy-maker, or a scholar.164 In arguing that festivals come to be through the competing performances of various professional groups and that one’s investment or use of a festival is predicated upon his or her credentials, Rhyne and Dayan tend to inadvertently reify the boundaries between cinephilia, film criticism, scholarship, and curating. While this model might be sound on a theoretical level, the reality is – as always – messy: one might be a critic and/or a festival organizer and/or a policy-maker and/or a scholar. One might even move from one of these professional occupations to any other(s). In centring on the permeability of the critic/scholar binary (one among many other possible axes!), this chapter reveals what festival studies’ usual methods otherwise conceal: networks of collaborations and friendships sustained at and through festivals, the parallel histories of LGBTQ festivals and film studies, and the interplay between curating and knowledge production. In that context, the fact that the critic/scholar and insider/outsider binaries have been constitutive in defining festival studies is quite paradoxical. As this chapter makes clear, scholars/critics have long participated in organizing festivals, sometimes within academic conferences. Furthermore, scholars studying queer film festivals have always been involved in festivals.165 The rigidity of the distinctions between scholarly inquiry, film criticism, and festival organizing is not only recent but also an result of the very professionalization and disciplinarization of academia festival studies emerged from. The position of the scholar-as-observer is an effect of the disciplinary apparatus of festival studies, concealing our attachments to our object of study – the reasons why we study festivals in the first place. 164 Rhyne, ‘Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders’; Dayan, ‘Looking for Sundance’. 165 Loist, for instance, has served as an archivist for the Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival. Zielinski has been a jury member on several LGBTQ festivals. Richards has been a curator for Frameline San Francisco.

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Rather than replaying the insider/outsider divide, a critical festival studies should thus turn the gaze inward – theorizing how our disciplinary, affective, and personal attachments to festivals shape our scholarship. If, as Chapter 1 argues, festival studies has constituted itself as a field obsessed with asserting its legitimacy, our choice to focus on ‘festivals that matter’ is never innocent. It is an effect of the symbolic economy we are necessarily implicated in and which defines our position as scholars. To adopt the theoretical lingo of festival studies, our scholarship largely reveals our own networks – the festivals we love and cherish, the people we have met, loved (sometimes carnally), and collaborated with.

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‘The Washington Blade Presents … the First Annual Washington, D.C. International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival’. 1984. Box 929, Folder International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. The LGBT Center’s Archives. New York City. Waters, Jack. Letter to New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival. ‘My Two Cents for the Festival’. 1992. Box 3, Folder 318. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Waugh, Thomas. ‘Annotated Listing of Thirty Non-Commercial Films About or by Lesbians and Gay Men Available in Canada’. The Body Politic, no. 58–59 (1979). ———. ‘A Fag-Spotter’s Guide to Eisenstein’. The Body Politic, no. 35 (1977): 15–17. ———. ‘Cités de la nuit (Nighthawks)’. Le Berdache, no. 13 (1980). ———. The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. ‘Gay Cinema: Best Films Not Slick but Real’. The Body Politic, no. 66 (1980). ———. ‘The Gay Cultural Front’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 18 (1978): 36–37. ———. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York City, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996. ———. ‘In Memoriam: Vito Russo, 1946-1990’. Xtra 162 (January 1991): 8. ———. ‘Letter to Robin Russel’. 9 October 1978. Thomas Waugh’s personal archives, Montreal. ———. ‘List: Films about Lesbians’. undated. Box 20, Folder ‘Programs for Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals, no date’. The Vito Russo Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. ———. ‘The Montreal Festival: Taxis and Toilets (includes Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo)’. The Body Politic 77 (1981). ———. ‘The Montreal World Film Festival 1979: The Gay 90s, The Gay 70s’. The Body Politic, no. 58 (1979). ———. ‘Montreal: One Bright Light (on the 1981 Festival international du nouveau cinéma)’. The Body Politic 79 (1981). ———. ‘Notes on Greyzone’. In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh, 19–42. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2013. ———. ‘Photography, Passion and Power’. The Body Politic 101 (1984): 29–33. ———. ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’ Le Berdache 30 (1982): 7–9. ———. ‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder’. The Body Politic, no. 29 (1977). ———. The Romance of Transgression in Canada Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. ———. ‘Samedi soir une surprise’. Le Berdache, no. 15 (1980).

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———. ‘Tom Waugh: à propos du festival’. Le Berdache 24 (1981). ———. ‘The Third Body: Patterns in the Construction of the Subject in Gay Male Narrative Film’. In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, 141–161. Durham, NC: Routledge, 1993. Waugh, Thomas, and Chuck Kleinhans. ‘Gays, Straights, Film and the Left’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 16 (1977): 27–28. Waugh, Thomas, and Chris Straayer, eds. ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 4 (2005): 579–603. ———. eds.. ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 599–625. ———. eds. ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Three: Artists Speak Out’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 1 (2008): 121–137. Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film. New York City, NY: Penguin Books, 1992. White, Patricia. ‘Madame X of the China Seas’. Screen 28, no. 4 (1987). ———. ed. ‘Queer Publicity: A Dossier on Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals Essays’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 1 (1999): 73–93. Wilson, Alexander. ‘Friedkin’s Cruising, Ghetto Politics, and Gay Sexuality’. Social Text, no. 4 (1981): 98–109. Wilson, Elizabeth. ‘The Context of “Between Pleasure and Danger”: The Barnard Conference on Sexuality’. Feminist Review, no. 13 (1983): 35–41. Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films. ‎New York City, NY: Snippet View, 1965. ———. ‘Psychanalyse de “Psycho”‘. Cahiers du cinéma 19, no. 13 (1960). ———. ‘Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic’. Film Comment 14, no. 1 (1978): 12–17. Zimmerman, Bonnie. ‘The Past in Our Present: Theorizing the Activist Project of Women’s Studies’. In Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change, edited by Robyn Wiegman, 183–190. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Filmography La battaglia di Algeri [The Battle of Algiers]. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. 1965. 121 min. Algeria/Italy. PROD: Casbah Film / Igor Film. The Boys in the Band. Directed by William Friedkin. 1972. 118 min. USA. PROD: Cinema Center Films / Leo Films. DIST (US): National General Pictures. Cruising. Directed by William Friedkin. 1980. 102 min. USA. PROD: Lorimar Film Entertainment. DIST (US): United Artists.

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Funny Girl. Directed by William Wyler. 1968. 151 min. USA. PROD: Columbia Pictures / Rastar Pictures. DIST (US): Columbia Pictures. Rock Around the Clock. Directed by Fred F. Sears. 1956. 77 min. USA. PROD: Clover Productions. Stop the Movie. Directed by Jim Hubbard. 1980. 14 min. USA. PROD: Jim Hubbard. Super 8. Windows. Directed by Gordon Willis. 1980. 96 min. USA. PROD: Mike Lobell Productions. DIST (US): United Artists. The Women. Directed by George Cukor. 1939. 133 min. USA. PROD: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

4. Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory and LGBTQ Festivals’ Temporality Abstract Chapter 4 pays attention to LGBTQ festivals’ visual productions and curatorial practices. As events dedicated to the screening of sexual images, LGBTQ festivals are enmeshed with the accumulation of temporality and affects. As such, their film selection is akin to a collage or a juxtaposition of films, each with a peculiar relationship to history. Through their selections and visual productions, festivals make time ‘matter’: they constitute a virtual archive and entail a particular type of relationship with gay and lesbian visual history. In positing that festivals constitute an ideal space for theorizing gay and lesbian spectatorship, Chapter 4 argues that LGBTQ festivals exemplify some of the modalities through which we access, visually, gay and lesbian cultural memory. Keywords: temporality; festivals; curation; identity; visual architectures; virtual archives; queer historiography

‘Culture requires memory. Memory requires archives.’1 ‘Every genealogy is a fiction […] It is a queer imaging that traverses friendship and gossip, strolls through the archives on a Sunday afternoon, and so much more. The archives is a fiction. Nobody knows that better than queers – people who have had to cope with the fiction of a socially prescribed straightness. Queers make up genealogies and worlds.’2

1 Stone and Cantrell, ‘Something Queer at the Archive’, 3. 2 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 121.

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In the previous chapters, I drew the contours of what could be called ‘critical festival studies’. Turning the gaze inward, I analyzed the epistemological conundrums at the heart of film festival studies, carefully highlighting how the constitution of the field and its obsession with legitimacy orient us towards particular methodologies and objects. Festival studies’ institutional project fundamentally defines which and why festivals matter within film studies. In contrast, Chapters 4 and 5 shift the discussion towards ‘the festival as a method’. While critical festival studies urges us to attend to the assumptions embedded within the field, ‘the festival as a method’ tunes us in to the regimes of knowledge production presupposed by the festival format. As curated juxtapositions of moving images, film festivals offer a productive framework for understanding cinematic cultures. While Chapter 1 described festivals’ archival practices as symptomatic of the epistemological conundrums at the heart of festival research, Chapter 4 takes on festivals as archives – as a visual historiographical device that uniquely refracts queer cultural memory and affects.3 In thinking about festivals as an ideal site for conceptualizing queer people’s relationship with cinema, this chapter echoes early gay and lesbian film scholarship’s use of the festival format as a praxis of canon building. To that extent, this exploration of festivals as archives strives to complement 1970s critics’ description of the relationship between homosexuality and film: Dyer, Russo, Tyler, and Waugh largely describe their affective experience watching images of homosexuality on the silver screen; film represents (and thus evidences) the queer body.

‘I like to watch…’: queer festivals’ visual architectures As Frameline’s 2008 tagline ‘I like to watch’ cleverly makes clear, festivals are institutions dedicated to seeing. Paradoxically, scholars have mostly paid attention to what Dayan calls festivals’ ‘verbal architecture’.4 Each year, festivals release a plethora of written documents, thereby simultaneously managing the divergent and sometimes competing performances of their stakeholders and participating in an expansive self-definitional impulse. Unsurprisingly,

3 The notion of festivals as archives is also explored in: Zielinski, ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera’. Zielinski analyzes how festivals’ ephemera capitalize upon and refract queer history. Taking this argument further, I am here interested in how the festival format, as a structured experience of seeing, enables us to reconceptualize queer people’s relationship to history. 4 Dayan, ‘Looking for Sundance’.

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scholars heavily rely on festivals’ programmes and press releases. Textual analysis has become the de facto methodology of festival studies. Importantly, festivals also produce and circulate images: they not only screen films but also create trailers and posters, design accreditations, decorate screening rooms and lobbies, and establish the sometimes enigmatic patterns of waiting lines. Marc Siegel’s elegant description of his experience at Frameline makes clear that seeing or watching structures ‘every level of festival activity, from purchasing tickets to attending parties to cruising the lines to milling about in the lobby to spilling out onto [the street]’.5 Festival studies’ prioritizing of textual productions may thus seem quite paradoxical. After all, Dayan’s analysis, entitled ‘Looking for Sundance’, aims at revealing the existence of a ‘written festival’ – a semiotic system which, following Barthes, exceeds the ‘visual festival of films’. Although it has often been misinterpreted as designating only festivals’ textual productions, Dayan’s ‘written festival’ pays attention to festivals as exceeding their film selection.6 Festivals’ verbal architecture is mirrored in and sustained by the omnipresence of visual elements – what I would like to call a ‘visual architecture’. The question of visuality is particularly important for gays and lesbians, a group often characterized as an invisible minority. As Fung rightly notes, LGBTQ festivals rely on an ‘economy of visibility’. As queerness ‘reveals itself, even to other queers, only through acts of queerness […] or sites of community’, they constitute a vital ‘kind of double representation on and in front of the screen’.7 LGBTQ festivals both reveal and visualize queerness: as crucial forums for self-representation and sites of queer sociality, they entail a visual experience that can at times be cathartic and quasi-erotic. Halberstam recalls their experience at Frameline: Pressed together in dark rooms watching all kinds of lesbian bodies do all kinds of things to other lesbian bodies, one had the feeling of being at a kind of mass orgy. The audience was always a part of the show; never an idle group of zoned out spectators, these female gazers were constantly caught looking, enjoying, identifying, and generally getting off on an astounding array of new lesbian cinema.8 5 Siegel, ‘Spilling out onto Castro Street’. For an analysis of the experience of seeing at various British and American LGBTQ festivals, see: Heath, ‘Saving Space’. 6 Dayan, ‘Looking for Sundance’, 52. 7 Fung, ‘Programming the Public’, 90. The fact that B. Ruby Rich compares LGBTQ festivals to gyms, saunas, and bars (community-based places where queerness reveals itself) is here particularly striking. See: Rich, ‘Collision, Catastrophe, Celebration’. 8 Halberstam, ‘Some Like It Hot. The New Sapphic Cinema’, 26.

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Significantly, early dossiers on LGBTQ festivals emphasize the role played by publicness and visibility in enabling alternative modes of engagement with both film and queer politics. As institutions visualizing queerness off and on screen, LGBTQ festivals help define new ways of seeing. Samantha Searle thus argues that LGBTQ festivals not only ‘escape the imperatives of “educating” straight audiences about non-heterosexual identities, practices, and politics’ but also ‘shift the range of ways in which films and videos can be read’.9 LGBTQ festivals’ visual architecture often refract these alternative ways of seeing: posters and trailers generally play on queer readings of popular films or genres.10 For instance, Frameline’s 2015 trailer (dir. Joshua Grannell) parodies what may well be the most iconic gay film of the 20th century, The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939).11 A Dorothy-turned-drag (played by San Francisco legend Peaches Christ), first shot in sepia, is taken by a storm to the magical and colourful land of San Francisco: she ‘is not in America anymore’. Roaming the very gay streets of the Castro, Dorothy encounters several phantasmagorical creatures – including a sex robot in need of lubricant and a rather shy BDSM lion. Her adventure leads her to the opening night of Frameline. As she enters the Castro theatre and defeats the bad, ugly (and somewhat straight) witch, Dorothy finally discovers that ‘there is no place like here’, thereby voicing Frameline’s 2015 tagline. If, as the legend has it, gay men repeatedly cried in the Castro when Dorothy goes back ‘home’ (in Kansas), Frameline’s 2015 version bypasses Fleming’s somewhat tragic ending: she is after all ‘here’, in the Castro, among her friends. Other festival trailers similarly play on campy readings of gay genres and canonical films. For instance, Miami Gay and Lesbian Festival’s 2005 trailer (dir. Michael Donnel) parodies romantic comedies. Two straight couples, presumably on a double date, park their car, at night, on the waterfront. As they start kissing, the lovers are quickly interrupted by non-diegetic voice-overs standing in for the festival’s own audience members who ‘can’t relate to this [film]’. A drag queen magically appears and promises she will fix the situation. After a glittery fadeout, the lovers are replaced with same-sex couples about to get married. These trailers ultimately point to queer strategies of reading and to the historical importance of gay and lesbian spectatorship.12 As Queer Lisboa’s 2011 trailer (dir. Pau De la Sierra), 9 Searle, ‘Film and Video Festivals’, 51–52. 10 A concept I borrow from: Doty, Flaming Classics. 11 On the importance of The Wizard of Oz for gay men, see: Davis, ‘What WOZ’. 12 Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 166.

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Figure 3. Still. Frameline 39, trailer. Written and Directed by Joshua Grannell (2015). Produced by Brian Benson. Courtesy of Frameline.

an alternative take on Thelma and Louise, wittily remarks, ‘you may not know it, but you’ve seen a lot of gay films’.13 As Zielinski argues, trailers may also reference key moments in the history of LGBTQ movement – most often the HIV/AIDS epidemics, the culture wars, and the increasing visibility of sexual minorities. For instance, Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival’s 2007 trailer (dir. Onix Padron) draws a short history of queer activism in Florida: starting with Anita Bryant – a former orange saleswoman and Miss Oklahoma who quickly became an outspoken opponent of gay rights, the trailer ends with footage of the festival, cast as a site of resistance and as a proof of queer resilience.14 Festivals’ visual architectures do not necessarily entail the representation of the queer body. For instance, Image&Nation’s 1988 poster depicts a map of the newly created gay village, thereby visualizing a queer presence without having to assume the burden of representing actual bodies.15 This focus on non-human queer representation often aims at including various members of the LGBTQ community in a single and simple image. As Karl Schoonover’s analysis of LGBTQ festivals’ posters makes clear, non-human queer iconography is often mobilized as a (problematic) symbol of the diversity 13 I translate. For a queer reading of Thelma and Louise, see: Griggers, ‘Thelma and Louise and the Cultural Generation of the New Butch-Femme’. 14 A point made by and an example drawn from: Zielinski, ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera’, 149. 15 Waugh, ‘Cultivated Colonies’, 145–147.

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Figure 4. Still. Queer Lisboa 15, trailer. Directed by Pau de la Sierra (2011). Produced by Fuel Agency. Courtesy of Fuel Agency.

of the LGBTQ community.16 This use of the non-human as exemplifying non-normative and non-white queer bodies thus points the regimes of in/ visibility embedded in queer festivals’ visual architectures: while posters and trailers evidence queerness, visibility is unevenly distributed and often prioritizes white cisgendered, conventionally attractive male gayness. Intertwining key moments in the history of LGBTQ social movements with queer cultural references, LGBTQ film festivals’ visual architectures articulate a discourse on LGBTQ culture. This shared iconography corresponds to what Marita Sturken defines as a form of cultural memory ‘shared outside of the avenues of formal historical discourses yet […] entangled with cultural products and imbedded with cultural meaning’.17 Cultural memory cuts across generations: in constituting a shared iconography, it enables the representation of queerness – despite and because of its status as an invisible minority. Queer cultural memory is s a ‘process of politicized history-making in which the [queer] nation[hood] uses representation in order to work through trauma’.18 16 Schoonover, ‘Queer or Human? LGBT Film Festivals, Human Rights and Global Film Culture’. 17 Sturken, Tangled Memories, 3. Sturken defines cultural memory as a mechanism dealing with the trauma of national history. In the context of this chapter, I use ‘cultural memory’ in relation to queer subjects, understood here as an imagined community whose collective history is traumatic. As Waugh makes clear, the metaphorical concept ‘queer nationhood’ proves to be a particularly productive exploration of the relationships between in/visibility, image as cultural currency, and cultural memories. See: Waugh, ‘Cultivated Colonies’. 18 Sturken, Tangled Memories, 161. [Emphasis: mine]

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Festivals’ visual architectures, temporality, and cultural memory If festivals are institutions dedicated to seeing, they also presuppose a particular experience of time. LGBTQ festivals are special events. They entail a sense of ‘being there’ which sets them apart from both regular theatrical screenings and our everyday experiences; they constitute a time outside of the oppressive linear temporality of capitalistic labour and the heteronormative demands of domesticity. As recurring events, LGBTQ festivals also entail a sense of cyclical time: they are akin to rituals, folding with each passing year queer subjects into structures of belonging.19 This interplay between festivals as interruption of capitalistic time and festivals as cyclical events further conditions the festival-going experience. Festival-going is often constrained by screening schedules: films succeed one another according to a linear segmentation of time. As Janet Harbord elegantly argues, festivals’ fixed, prearranged, structures of time further bolster up their status as live events: while cinema traditionally ‘allows the scene to be witnessed elsewhere at a later date as a recording’, festivals constitute a ‘performance witnessed but not reproducible […]. [They] make time matter, […] give urgency to the viewing of film’.20 Festivals’ unique combination of tight scheduling and liveness consecrates film viewing as a specific experience, often marked or disrupted by protests, technical bugs, and fleeting encounters with friends or lovers. This complex experience of time is structured by and conveyed through festivals’ visual architectures. Accreditations, for instance, constitute a sign of cultural distinction. They not only name a festival-goer but also regulate their experience of the festival and determine which films one will be able to see. They further demarcate the festival experience from everyday life, create a sense of belonging, and imply one’s participation in an ephemeral community.21 Posters similarly foster a sense of eventness. Typically plastered on the walls of a venue, they indicate that a festival is taking place – that the regular operations of a theatre have been suspended. As they need to be immediately recognizable, they often play on a festival’s graphic conventions. Posters both reference earlier editions, refracting 19 Harbord, ‘Film Festivals ‒ Time ‒ Event’, 4; Bazin, ‘Du festival considéré comme un ordre’. Ger Zielinski links festivals’ temporalities to the carnivalesque. See: Zielinski, ‘On the Production of Heterotopia, and Other Spaces, in and around Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals’. 20 Harbord, ‘Film Festivals ‒ Time ‒ Event’, 44. See also: Atkinson and Kennedy, eds., Live Cinema. 21 de Valck, Film Festivals, 76–79.

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the evolution of a festival’s visual history, and convey a sense of newness, implying some sense of cyclical time. LGBTQ festivals’ relationship to temporality is best exemplified in the under-studied genre of festival trailers. Trailers are by definition a temporal device. Usually released several weeks before a festival, they aim at building anticipation: they entice potential festival-goers. Trailers often provide a short preview of the festivities to come: they both reveal some of the films that will be screened that year and emphasize a festival’s status as a special event. Symptomatically, trailers often reference a festival’s past editions, thereby emphasizing the recurring nature of an event and playing on festival-goers’ memories. As a temporal device, they both enable a festival-goer to remember a festival’s past and to await its next iteration.22 Furthermore, trailers are usually screened just before a film: they indicate that the show is about to start, thus delimiting the time of the festival as a duration set apart from the demands of the outside world. Festival-goers’ ovations after a trailer both symbolize their appreciation of the event and foster a sense of belonging and community. Trailers thus emphasize the festival as a live performance that cannot be reproduced. Tellingly, these films are often uncredited and are not commercially available: up until recently, they could only be experienced as part of a festival. While visual architectures typically play on festivals’ complex temporalities, they can adopt a wide variety of format. Trailers, for instance, constitute an heteroclite genre: their lengths range from a few seconds to several minutes; they can be composed of a combination of found footage, archival images, and film excerpts or can constitute a standalone fiction or documentary short commissioned by a festival; they can operate as a specific promotion of a festival or can be formally and thematically unrelated to the event they seek to announce. Some festivals have been particularly inventive. For instance, Frameline released three different versions of its 2008 trailer (dir. Cheryl Rosenthal), probably in an effort to avoid pre-screening monotony. Each of these trailers parodies the game show Jeopardy. On a pink set, LGBTQ candidates are asked to answer a riddle. Whose ‘sharp eye, acid tongue, and remarkable longevity have brought Hollywood to tears, kept America on the edge of its seat, and left his mark on modern cinema for over a quarter of a century?’ Where 22 A point also made in: Zielinski, ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera’, 141. MIX New York offers here an interesting counterpoint: the festival systematically screens all of its previous trailers as part of its opening nights, thereby participating in the memorialization of its own history.

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was ‘an Idaho senator […] arrested for attempting to entice an undercover police officer?’ After a first round of campy yet wrong answers, a candidate succeeds in solving the enigma. The answer was, of course, Frameline itself. In 2010, the festival went a step further: it created four short parodies of a telenovela, featuring three drag queens and a very hunky stud. Although each of the 35 seconds films (dir. Chico’s Angels) depicts a standalone crisis, they constitute a single story – one that can be pieced together only by diligent festival-goers.

Festivals as archives: temporality and festivals’ curatorial practices LGBTQ festivals’ conflicted temporalities refract the conundrum of identity. Indeed, LGBTQ festivals both fixate and continuously reshape the meaning we ascribe to sexual identities. On the one hand, festivals have long been accused of ‘ghettoizing’ gay and lesbian cinema, of relegating particular films to a reified and immutable notion of identity. Gever rightly notes that just as the institutionalization of Black History Month has produced what painter Emma Amos has described as ‘ghetto month shows that fulfill the funding needs of white institutions,’ […] the collective response to the severe censorship exercised by powerful cultural apparatuses has taken the institutional form of lesbian and gay film festivals, another kind of special event. This makes any festival organized according to thematic criteria, including the slippery concept of ‘lesbian and gay cinema’, potentially a defense of absolute, ineffable identity.23

On the other hand, film cannot simply fixate identities. While LGBTQ festivals typically group together films along identity lines, they entail a sense of the historical: their film selections reveal both the state of queer cinematic production and the evolution of LGBTQ identity politics, bringing visibility to previously under-represented segments of the community. Furthermore, films do not simply represent queerness. As Stuart Hall famously argues: Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking about identity as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discourses then represent, we should

23 Gever, ‘“The Names We Give Ourselves”‘, 198.

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think, instead, of identity as production, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation.24

LGBTQ festivals’ constant fixing and reshaping of sexual identities is a consequence of the conundrum of identity. As feminist historian Denise Riley argues, the meaning we ascribe to identities is relational: ‘women’ (or in that case homosexuality) is ‘both synchronically and diachronically erratic as a collectivity’.25 Grappling with the impossibility yet necessity of a transcendental category ‘women’, Joan Wallach Scott further describes the temporality of identity: there’s an illusory sameness established by referring to a category of person (women, workers, African Americans, homosexuals) as if it never changed, as if not the category, but only its historical circumstances, varied over time. […] identifications, after all, are imagined repetitions and repetitions of imagined resemblance.26

Displacing Judith Butler’s iterative repetitions onto a historical terrain, Scott argues that subjects are already enmeshed within the disjunctive temporality of identities: identity is formed through repetitions, thereby revealing a play of similarity (historical transcendence) and differences (historical specificity). If subjects are formed through retroactive identifications, identity accommodates differences through an impossible (imagined) similitude. It is a ‘fantasy’ that ‘at once reproduces and masks conflict, antagonisms, or contradiction’, ‘a formal mechanism for the articulation of scenarios that are at once historically specific in their representation and detail and transcendent of historical specificity’.27 LGBTQ festivals’ programming practices perfectly correspond to Scott’s description of the suture of fantasy. While each of the films selected by a festival entails a specific relationship to (queer) history, their programmes articulate a scenario that imagines queerness through juxtaposition and collage. LGBTQ festivals’ programmes ‘re-member’ queer subjects/films – a concept used by Denise Riley to emphasize the always shifting articulation between sexuality and socio-political discourses and to foreground identity

24 Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’, 68. 25 Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’, 2. 26 Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo’, 285. 27 Ibid, 288.

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categories as an impossible yet ineffable suture, or juncture, of temporalities, spaces and bodies.28 This tension between historical specificity and transcendence, or between cyclical and delimited temporalities, is at the core of festivals’ visual architectures. Most commonly, festival trailers are structured around juxtaposed excerpts of the films programmed in a given year: they act as a preview that reflects the temporal structure of the festival. For instance, Massimadi Montreal’s trailers, typically five minutes long, simply juxtapose excerpts of the festival’s film selection. Each film is presented separately and clearly identified; a voice-over narrates a film’s synopsis while the name, time, and venue of a screening are indicated in a subtitle. Massimadi’s trailers are constructed as the visual equivalent of a festival guide: their structure replicates the segmented, delimited, temporality of the festival’s schedule. Played before each screening, these trailers both inform festival-goers of the films yet to come and fold back each successive screening within the temporal structure of the festival. While trailers built around film excerpts might seem quite formulaic, collage offers some flexibility. For instance, Outfest Los Angeles’s promotional films are typically modelled after Hollywood trailers. Film excerpts, often focusing on acts of affection between LGBTQ people, are kept fairly short and are edited so as to provide some sense of continuity. These trailers do not establish a distinction between the various films selected by the festival: excerpts are sutured together through the soundtrack – usually a well-known gay-oriented song such as Macklemore’s ‘Same Love’ or Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I am what I am’. While Outfest’s trailers establish a continuity between distinct films at the visual level, some excerpts are not fully muted: campy lines such as ‘so your name is Dorothy?’, ‘I mean … really?’ and ‘you boys are having some fun?’ (2015) emphasize the festival’s commitment to identity politics and create comic relief. This combination of suture and humour is also conveyed through a few intertitles that glorify Outfest’s programming (in 2015, ‘3 Teddy winners’, ‘166 films’) and parody the self-congratulatory reviews usually featured in Hollywood teasers (in 2012: ‘something so big and terrifyingly fabulous from all over the world is coming’). Outfest’s strategy, which blurs together the distinction between various films while emphasizing the festival’s commitment to queer politics, is not unique: other festivals, such as Fusion, similarly use intertitles – albeit displacing the focus towards the event’s community-based politics (in 2016, ‘inspiration’, ‘vision’, ‘passion’, ‘respect’).29 28 Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’, 19. 29 Fusion is a festival dedicated to queer people of colour, organized by Outfest.

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Collage can also be mobilized to emphasize a festival’s curatorial politics. For instance, MIX New York’s 2006 trailer juxtaposes muted excerpts of animation, Super 8, and digital filmmaking. Alternating between colour, black-and-white, and sepia, the film emphasizes the variety of formats presented at the festival, thereby thematizing MIX NYC’s commitment to the diversity of experimental filmmaking. Furthermore, some festivals mobilize a collage aesthetics without using any film excerpt. For instance, Écrans Mixtes’s 2014 trailer (dir. Rémi Lange) operates as a re-enactment of Scorpio Rising (dir. Kenneth Anger, 1964), thereby announcing the festival’s Kenneth Anger retrospective. Shot in one of the festival’s venues, the film depicts a fetishistic yet campy biker licking various props that symbolize the films selected that year – a denture, for instance, stands in for Gerontophilia (dir. Bruce LaBruce, 2013). Écrans Mixtes’s 2015 trailer (dir. Ludovic Mercier) similarly pays homage to Greek director Panos Koutras: flying onions and eggplants are drawn over recolourized shots of Lyon’s cultural landscapes, as if the city itself was the victim of another Attack of the Giant Moussaka (dir. Panos Koutras, 1999). Écrans Mixtes offers here a visual representation of the festival’s programme that both parodies traditional collages and pays homage to a queer filmmaker. These festival trailers further exemplify LGBTQ festivals’ complicated relationship to the temporalities of both identity and curation. While LGBTQ festivals’ curatorial strategies ultimately articulate a discourse on queer representation, they operate through a juxtaposition or a collage of films. Each of these films maintains a specific relationship to history: LGBTQ festivals’ selections contain films made (retrospectives, special focus, or homages) or set in earlier times. Festivals are heterochronic by design.30 This interplay between historical specificity and transcendence corresponds to what Halberstam identifies as a (virtual) archive: LGBTQ festivals act as ‘a resource, a productive narrative, a set of representations, a history, a memorial, a time capsule […], [one] that allows a narrative of a queerly gendered life to emerge from its fragments’.31 If LGBTQ festivals’ curatorial practices rely on the suture of fantasy and act as collages of films and temporalities, festival-going necessarily entails particular modes of engagement with queer history. Scott’s fantasy-echo, 30 Zielinski, ‘On the Production of Heterotopia, and Other Spaces, in and around Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals’; Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’. This article was initially developed in a 1967 conference at the Cercle d’études architecturales (Paris), reproduced for the first time as Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’. 31 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 23–24.

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a concept developed to describe the affect and temporal disjuncture at the heart of historical research, effectively captures festival-going as an experience with the disjunctive temporalities of identity. Combining a sensual metaphor (an imperfect return of sound, a distorted and incomplete repetition) with a psychoanalytical construct, fantasy-echoes constitute a delayed and distorted sign whose origin cannot always be traced back. They presuppose an experience of historical specificity and an always incomplete and transient definition of identity: Identity as a continuous, coherent, historical phenomenon is revealed to be a fantasy, a fantasy that erases the divisions and discontinuities, the absences and differences, that separates subjects in time. Echo provides a gloss on fantasy and destabilizes any effort to limit the possibilities of ‘sustained metaphoricity’ by reminding us that identity […] is constructed in complex and diffracted relation to others […] The word [homosexuality] becomes a series of fragmented sounds, rendered intelligible only by the listener, who (in specifying its object) is predisposed to listen in a certain way.32

While LGBTQ festivals entail an encounter with historically situated representations, festival-goers do not experience a sense of linear, chronological history. Festival-going is an experience of time that simultaneously reads past representations as echoes rippling on the silver screen and sutures queer temporalities, bodies, and representations through an impossible re-membered queerness. As a virtual archive of fragmented queer representations, LGBTQ festivals’ suture corresponds to what Cvetkovich describes as ‘a practice of fantasy made material […] that challenge[s] traditional conceptions of history and understand[s] the quest for history as a psychic need rather than science’.33 Stéphane Gérard’s 2014 bilingual experimental documentary History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself / Rien n’oblige à répéter l’histoire exemplifies quite well the complex temporalities of both queerness and LGBTQ festivals. Largely supported by and dedicating a fair amount of screen time to MIX New York, Gérard’s film purports to explore the affect of queer politics and community building. Formally, the film consists of interviews with various New York-based queer activists, interwoven with both superimposed, recolourized, and undated footage of demonstrations, and archival images 32 Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo’, 292. 33 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 268–9. [Emphasis: mine]

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from the New York Public Library Gay and Lesbian and HIV/AIDS Collections and the Lesbian Herstory Archives. While interviewees discuss specific organizations, thereby dating and historicizing queer social movements, the film’s formal qualities resist any linear historiographical project. For the most part, the film’s superimposition of visual documents does not necessarily correspond to the organizations discussed in the interviews. Furthermore, the faces of the interviewees are almost never shown, thereby refusing identification or starification. Superimposition acts here as a collage of fragments. These fragments are only intelligible as echoes of past social movements, each resembling one another and forming a collective fantasy – an incomplete and necessarily disjointed visual history of queerness. To that end, Gérard builds on specific social movements only so as to illustrate the concept of community: it locates politics as a collective, affective relationship to history. In focusing abundantly on MIX NYC, the film thus not only illustrates the communities and temporalities through which the festival operates, but also acts as a collage of historically-situated images that activate our collective memories. In other words, History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself adopts the format of a curation not unlike that of LGBTQ festivals themselves.

Festivals as archivists: documenting, representing and historicizing festivals. In addition to playing on the temporalities of the festival format and/or identity, visual architectures often mobilize footage drawn from a festival’s own archives and/or comment on a festival’s history. This practice corresponds to what Lucy Mazdon calls ‘festivals as archivists’, as ‘active agent[s] in the production of [their] audio-visual archive’.34 Frameline’s 2009 trailer (dir. Christy Schraefer and Greg Sirota) is here a good example: set on ‘February 9, 1977 [at the] Gay Community Center, San Francisco’, the film juxtaposes close-up shots of the projector used for the first San Francisco Gay Film Fest, edited onto an operatic soundtrack. Recalling a space odyssey, this trailer pays homage to the festival’s modest roots and mythicizes the inception of what will become Frameline. Other trailers mobilize queer iconography so as to characterize the political project of a festival, inserting the event in a particular artistic genealogy. Built around shots of historical landmarks painted in neon and rainbow 34 Mazdon, ‘Festival de Cannes: Archive or Archivist?’, 123–124.

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undertones and superimposed with childish drawings of cameras, Écrans Mixtes Lyon’s 2017 trailer (dir. Ludovic Mercier) queers the city itself. Queer cinephilia is revealed through and emerges from the détournement of the city’s heritage, thereby echoing both the festival’s positioning of queerness as an aesthetic praxis and its emphasis on film history. MIX NYC’s 2011 trailer centres on a mysterious gender-ambiguous hand suggestively inserted in a bottle full of celluloid strips. As the soundtrack, which alternates between sexual moans and sounds of old projectors, makes clear, MIX NYC pays homage to the materiality and eroticism of (celluloid) film: this trailer harnesses the festival back to MIX NYC’s roots as an experimental queer film festival. These two trailers, although not specifically mobilizing archival footage, position their respective festivals as part of a specific genealogy, relating the events back to historically situated cinematic cultures. Festivals’ relationship to their own history and archives is, however, best exemplified in another understudied genre: documentaries made by and about LGBTQ film festivals. In particular, three festivals have released documentaries on their own history: 25! (on Frameline, dir. Marc Huestis, 2001), Bending the Lens (on the London [Ontario] Lesbian Film Festival, dir. Mary J. Daniel, 2012) and Acting Out (on the Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival [LSF], dir. Ana Grillo, Christina Magdalinou, and Silvia Torneden, 2014) are anniversary films.35 Mobilizing archival footage, film clips or stills, and talking-head interviews, each of these films emphasizes the role a festival plays in broader cultural and cinematic history: they simultaneously celebrate and look back at a festival’s history. Their mode of address targets both a festival’s own audience and the larger community: they not only make visible festivals’ divergent temporalities and visual architectures, but also constitute powerful self-definitional narratives. All of these films adopt a similar narrative structure. They typically start with a festival’s anniversary, thereby anchoring the film in the present, before immediately proceeding with a chronological description of its development, rendered through talking-head interviews and archival footage. Most screen time revolve around a festival’s early editions: the films insist on the social context in which the festival was created, positing it as a cultural landmark or as the first of its kinds. Later editions are typically framed around festival-goers’ personal memories: interviews of audience members are juxtaposed with stills (Bending the Lens) or excerpts (25) of 35 My deepest gratitude to Ger Zielinski for introducing me to 25! and to Skadi Loist, for inviting me to the premiere of Acting Out.

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their favourite films. This narrative structure combines chronological and cyclical time: the films’ linear descriptions of a festival’s early editions serve as origin myths; their insistence on sexual politics is then folded back into cyclical time through festival-goers’ experiences. Bending the Lens is structured around the question of lesbian visibility. This commitment is best articulated in the film’s opening sequence – a juxtaposition of talking-head interviews with festival organizers, each detailing their professional occupation. These interviews, intercut with shots of London, Ontario, insist on the domination of gay men within the local LGBTQ community. Interviews with audience members then resituate the festival as a site of lesbian sociability – a fact visually evidenced through various archival photographs. The boundary between attendees and organizers is, however, quickly blurred. Most team members are later framed as former audience members: interviews detail how and why these spectators got involved in the festival’s organizing committee. Bending the Lens addresses both potential festival-goers and the larger lesbian community: it historicizes the festival and involves its audience members as part of a project of lesbian visibility. Acting Out goes a step further: in addition to making its audience visible, the film depicts the precarious labour of festival organizers.36 As such, the film exemplifies the festival’s commitment to preserving its precarious history: it not only mobilizes the festival’s own filmed archives but also documents its successive organizing committees through campy montages of staff photographs. Throughout the film, talking-head interviews with staff members, both inside the festival’s office and in front of its screening venues, are intercut with footage of various meetings. Time-lapses of people decorating screening venues similarly illustrate the invisible labour of volunteers. While both Bending the Lens and 25 feature only a handful of staff members, Acting Out multiplies interviews, thereby reflecting the non-hierarchical organization of the LSF collective. This insistence on labour both politicizes the festival and posits programming as a praxis of solidarity: images of several programming meetings are juxtaposed with the festival’s 2013 opening statement on the European refugee crisis or with interviews dealing with the repression of the Russian festival Bok-o-Bok (also known as Side by Side, St Petersburg, 2008-ongoing). Acting Out equates the material realities of festival organizing with the politics of the LSF: it represents the

36 Thereby echoing former LSF archivist Skadi Loist’s article on the subject; see: Loist, ‘Precarious Cultural Work’.

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Figure 5. Still. Acting Out. Directed by Ana Grillo, Christina Magdalinou, Silvia Torneden (2014). Produced by Aye Aye Film. Courtesy of Aye Aye Film.

festival off-screen through labour and insists on community involvement as an ongoing project of solidarity. 25’s historical project adopts another format: rather than depicting Frameline’s audience (which only appears towards the end), the f ilm represents the festival off-screen through the evolution of queer cinema. The community depicted in 25 is one populated by major directors and programmers. Frameline is presented, in former festival co-director Olson’s words, as ‘our Cannes film festival’.37 Tellingly, the film’s first half consists in interviews with both former staff members and major LGBTQ filmmakers (often framed as ‘alumni’), intercut with films excerpts that thematize the festival’s history. The first interviewee, director Rob Epstein, chronicles the inaugural edition of the San Francisco Gay Film Festival (1977), illustrated on screen through an excerpt of his 1985 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.38 Hammer then describes Frameline as one of the first venues for 37 Olson was then leading the website PopcornQ. She released The Ultimate Guide to Lesbian & Gay Film and Video in 1997 and was instrumental in promoting queer cinema at Sundance. When 25 was made, she was not working for Wolfe Video. I trace Olson’s professional career as it relates to queer cinema and festivals in Chap 3. 38 This is particularly significant, for several reasons: (1°) The first San Francisco Gay Film Festival is a project largely imagined at Harvey Milk’s camera shop. (2°) The Times of Harvey Milk is the first gay film to receive an Academy Award for best documentary feature (1985). (3°) In depicting San Francisco’s Gay Film Festival through excerpts of a film about Harvey Milk, 25 largely aligns Frameline with the history of queer social movements and the mythological figure of Milk.

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lesbian cinema, an interview juxtaposed with a clip from her 1976 Women I love. Philippe Vallois’s 1978 Nous étions un seul homme is used to recount the creation of Frameline distribution (1981).39 Epstein’s 1986 The AIDS Show and Mark Christopher’s 1993 The Dead Boys’ Club illustrate the challenges posed by the HIV/AIDS crisis. Strand Releasing’s iconic producer Marcus Hu discusses the rise of New Queer Cinema, illustrated through excerpts of his f ilms The Living End (dir. Gregg Araki, 1991) and Swoon (dir. Tom Kalin, 1991). In its second half, starting roughly in 1995, 25 identifies specific films which marked the history of both queer cinema and Frameline. Intertitles indicating each passing year are intercut with interviewees detailing their favourite memory of the festival. The films discussed in 25 (Paris is Burning, Frisk, Out at Work, and Trick) largely coincide with the queer cinematic canon. 40 Furthermore, most of the excerpted f ilms are distributed by either Frameline Distribution or Strand Releasing, thereby reinforcing the film’s insistence on Frameline’s role in the economy of queer cinema. Significantly, 25’s second half abundantly features excerpts of films on or by queer people of colour, thereby both illustrating the diversity of the festival and pre-emptively replying to those who criticized the festival for being too white. 41 While 25, Acting Out, and Bending the Lens strategically mobilize excerpts and archival footage in order to bolster up their festivals’ historiographical narratives, the 2013 Queer Artivism (dir. Masa Zia Lenardic and Anja Wutej) examines the diversity of the queer film festival phenomenon. Focusing on and shot at five very different European events (Omovies [Naples, 2008-ongoing], Zinegoak [Bilbao, 2004-ongoing], Queer Zagreb [Croatia, 2003-2012], Entzaubert [Berlin, 2011-ongoing] and Queer Lisboa [1997-ongoing]), the film purports to explore what Rich identifies as a double bind: as queer films are increasingly produced in mainstream circuits, LGBTQ festivals are simultaneously ‘outlasting their mandate and invited to cease and desist’.42 Queer Artivism’s opening intertitle asserts the relevance of LGBTQ festivals in the 2010s: 39 It is the first film distributed by Frameline, in 1981. 40 Paris Is Burning, directed by Jamie Livingston (USA, 1990); Frisk, directed by Todd Verow (USA, 1995); Out at Work, directed by Kelly Anderson and Tami Gold (USA, 1997); Trick, directed by Jim Fall (USA, 1999). 41 In the mid-1990s, Frameline was heavily criticized for being too white and for relegating films made by and on queer people of colour to peripheral theatres. See Siegel, ‘Spilling out onto Castro Street’. 42 Rich, ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’, 620.

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In 1977, the first gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender film festival was staged in San Francisco under the name of Gay Film Festival of Super 8 Films. Today, more than 30 years later, in the era of internet [sic], fast life and normalizing queerness in society, it is time to reflect on the importance of queer film and queer film festivals. Are they still necessary?

Instead of detailing each festival’s history and casting them as ideal case studies that would testify to the relevance and/or diversity of LGBTQ festivals, Queer Artivism creates a virtual conversation between various festival organizers and film directors. While the film contains intertitles with the names of the five festivals, its editing makes it difficult to know exactly which event is being discussed. The film doesn’t follow a linear structure: it simply juxtaposes talking-head interviews, intercut with various shots of unspecified city landscapes and opening or closing nights. As such, Queer Artivism draws a general portrait of the European festival phenomenon – one that contains ephemeral forays into history but that is firmly located in the present. While festival posters and shots of screening venues serve as a framing and localizing device, interviewees are quite diverse. They do not always correspond to the five festivals the film purports to examine, nor do they necessarily speak about the event whose poster lies in the background. Furthermore, Queer Artivism features several non-European interviewees, such as MIX Brasil’s João Federici and Canadian filmmaker Alec Butler. To that end, the film is one shot at (rather than about) five European festivals, seeking to understand the affective and temporal dimensions of the festival-going experience itself. Its format undermines the notion of a unified queer festival circuit, insisting instead on the affective links constituted by and through individual experiences. The film’s credit sequence is here particularly interesting as it mitigates the expertise of the interviewees: each of them is asked to estimate the number of LGBTQ festivals being organized each year, with answers ranging from 16 to 5,000. Queer Artivism’s archive makes visible the festival-going experience. Documenting events that did not take place, three films on canceled festivals strive to both inform on State-sponsored homophobia and create international solidarity. While Acting Out, 25, and Bending the Lens commemorate a festival’s anniversary, thereby manifesting both chronological and cyclical time, these films make festivals’ failures visible. Recording history as it unfolds and documenting failed collective efforts, they simultaneously attempt to represent a missing time and to energize activist movements. They create an impossible archive.

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Valérie Bah’s 2017 Le festival restera au placard documents the controversy surrounding the organization of Massimadi Haiti (2016) – a festival that was publicly accused of promoting homosexuality, received several death threats, and was subsequently canceled. 43 Directed by and for the queer Afro-Caribbean festival Massimadi Montreal (where it premiered in 2017), the film consists in talking-head interviews with local organizers and state officials, carefully highlighting the emergence of a new homophobic political climate in Haiti. While Le festival restera au placard testifies to the resilience of Massimadi Haiti’s organizers (whose faces are clearly shown), the film is first and foremost aimed at a diasporic audience: it mobilizes both international French and local dialect and insists on the positionality of the interviewers, all from Massimadi Montreal. As such, the film carves a space for a specifically diasporic praxis of solidarity, one that seeks to both inform Afro-Caribbean French Canadians and to create links between two activist communities. Cazim Dervišević and Maša Hilčišin’s 2009 Queer Sarajevo Festival similarly documents the obstacles faced by festival organizers. Scheduled to take place in September 2008, the Queer Sarajevo Festival was canceled midway, due to death threats and physical violence enacted against festivalgoers. The documentary juxtaposes interviews with festival organizers and footage of the physical and verbal violence directed against the festival. In so doing, it both explains and visually re-creates the context in which the event took place. Importantly, the film was not screened at international festivals. Instead, it was posted on the social platform YouTube, whose sharing capabilities enable a form of digital activism both within and outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Intertwining talking-head interviews, images of dead birds, musical covers gleaned from YouTube, and a fake Susan Sontag essay, Greyson’s 2009 Covered focuses on the same event, albeit with a slightly different politics of solidarity. While Queer Sarajevo Festival and Le festival restera au placard rely on interviews with festival organizers as the means to inform their audience, Covered foregrounds Greyson’s position as a foreign director. As Chris E. Gittings argues, the film bears witness to the homophobic violence Greyson experienced as a participant in the Queer Sarajevo Festival […] The interruptions of the organizers’ witnessing narratives militate against passive viewing and any possibility of a seamless continuous metanarrative of the past, impressing upon the 43 While three Afro-Caribbean LGBTQ film festivals are named Massimadi (Montreal, Brussels, Haiti), each of them is independent.

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viewers that they must become collaborators and invest some intellectual and analytical work to produce meaning(s) from what they are watching.44

Emblematically, subtitles do not seem to match the audio track; talking-head interviews are then repeated in Bosnian by Greyson himself. These mechanisms enable Greyson to locate his film as an effort to build a transnational queer solidarity that would not negate cultural differences. Furthermore, Greyson establishes a parallel between the Queer Sarajevo Festival and other types of queer social movements. For instance, the film begins with intertitles detailing Greyson’s decision to pull the film out of the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, linking the Queer Sarajevo Festival to anti-pinkwashing campaigns. 45

‘Films bring us together’: archives of feeling, affect, and queer cultural memory These films not only illustrate various facets of the LGBTQ festival phenomenon but also participate in the writing of a festival’s history. While they cannot be taken as objective historical sources, they testify to the affective nature of the festival experience. Not only do LGBTQ festivals screen films and videos which were never distributed and cannot be seen at another time, they also present themselves as live events. Festivals are by definition ephemeral: festival-going presupposes an experience of time, a ‘here’ and ‘now’, that cannot be reproduced at a later date. Festivals thus, in Muñoz’s words, ‘exist as a perpetual vanishing point, disappearing in the very act of materializing […]. After the gesture expires, [festivals’] materiality [is] transformed into ephemera’. 46 As repositories of historically-situated artifacts, queer festivals rely on a specifically visual and affective access to queerness – one that is fostered by and refracts festivals’ divergent temporalities. In other words, festivals participate in a sedimentation of representations, each located in a different historical context yet screened at a given time, each with a peculiar relationship to queer history yet subsumed under the trans-historical category ‘gay and lesbian cinema’. Screening gay and lesbian films entails an experience of history that is both 44 Gittings, ‘Parsing the Transnational in John Greyson’s Queer Cinema’, 126–127. 45 Fung, ‘John Greyson’s Queer Internationalism’, 101–102. 46 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 81.

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transcendental and historically specific: LGBTQ festivals suture representations, memories, and bodies through an impossible re-membered queerness. In shifting the focus from a festival’s sexual politics to the disjunctive temporalities of the festival format itself, this chapter hopes to illustrate what could be gained in taking seriously the festival as a method. As an experience of time, festivals form a virtual archive of queer representation, described by Cvetkovich as an ‘affective experience [that] can provide the basis for new cultures […] an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the text themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception’.47 In conceptualizing LGBTQ festivals as archives that can only be experienced and as sites of memory, I thus do not argue that these events constitute a neutral, objective, access to the history of queer representations. Festivals’ visual architectures do not seek to establish a definitive historical truth, nor do they entail a linear, heteronormative relationship with/of history. Adopting the mode of an affective experience with/of history, they forge points of connections that rely on the suture of fantasy.48 This queer experience with/of history corresponds to what Elizabeth Freeman describes as ‘nonsequential forms of time [that] can fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eyes’. It constitutes ‘points of resistance to [the] temporal order that, in turn, propose other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present and future others: that is, of living historically’.49 In that context, documentaries by and about LGBTQ festivals represent an attempt to safeguard – or rather to reconstitute and rematerialize – ephemeral traces of an event already passed. In representing festivals’ visual architectures, these films operate as an unlikely archive of past performances. As records that can only be witnessed, they both thematize the ephemerality of the festival-going experience and help us reminisce on our own encounters with the event. Quite tellingly, at both the premiere of Acting Out during the Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage and MIX NYC’s screening of History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself, audience members cheered every time someone they knew was on screen. One could hear whispers – memories of a particular festival-going experience, of a film screened that year, or simply 47 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 7. 48 As Scott argues, experiences often present themselves as visual (historical) evidence. The notion of evidence masks the discursive and political conditions which made it possible in the first place: subjects do not exist prior to experience; they are constituted by and through it. Rather than providing any ‘objective’ access to history, experience is an epistemological project in and of itself. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, 780. 49 Freeman, Time Binds, xxii.

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of gossip that had long been forgotten. Younger spectators, during the Q&A session, reframed their own experience at the festival through images of a past they couldn’t have lived, inserting themselves in the legacy of an event they haven’t attended but in which they retrospectively belong. Festivals create memories – of one’s friends and lovers, of films, of community. As Frameline’s 2013 tagline puts it, festivals ‘bring us together’.

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Scott, Joan W. ‘The Evidence of Experience’. Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–797. ———. ‘Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity’. Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 284–304. Searle, Samantha. ‘Film and Video Festivals; Queer Politics and Exhibition’. Meanjin 55, no. 1 (1996): 47–59. Siegel, Marc. ‘Spilling out onto Castro Street’. Jump Cut 41 (1997): 131–136. Stone, Amy L., and Jaime Cantrell. ‘Something Queer at the Archive’. In Out of the Closet, Into the Archives, 1–26. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Waugh, Thomas. ‘Cultivated Colonies: Notes on Queer Nationhood and the Erotic Image’. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2, no. 2–3 (1993): 145–178. Zielinski, Ger. ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera: The Case of Queer Film Festivals and Archives of Feelings’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 138–158. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. ———. ‘On the Production of Heterotopia, and Other Spaces, in and around Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 54 (2012).

Filmography 25! A Brief History of the Festival. Directed by Marc Huestis. 2001. 60 min. USA. PROD: Marc Huestis. DIST (international): Frameline Distribution. Video. Acting Out: 25 Jahre Queerer Film und Community in Hamburg [Acting Out: 25 Years of Queer Film & Community in Hamburg]. Directed by Ana Grillo, Christina Magdalinou, and Silvia Torneden. 2014. 86 min. Germany. PROD: Aye Aye Film. DVD. The Attack of the Giant Moussaka. Directed by Panos H. Koutras. 1999. Greece. 99 min. PROD: 100% Synthetic Films. DIST (France): Ad Vitam Pictures. The AIDS Show. Directed by Peter Adair and Rob Epstein. 1986. USA. 58 min. PROD: PBS. DIST (USA): Direct Cinema Limited. Bande-annonce officielle du 4ème festival Écrans Mixtes. Directed by Rémi Lange. 2014. 2 min. France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftk9ABs54TQ. Bande annonce 5e Festival Écrans Mixtes. Directed by Ludovic Mercier. 2015. 50 sec. France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9_y3uwrbKE. Bande annonce 7ème édition festival Écrans Mixtes. Directed by Ludovic Mercier. 2017. 30 sec. France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9_y3uwrbKE

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Bending the Lens: 20 Years of the London Lesbian Film Festival. Directed by Mary J. Daniel. 2012. 33 min. Canada. PROD and DIST (Canada): London Lesbian Film Festival. Covered. Directed by John Greyson. 2009. 15 min. Canada. PROD: Greyzone. DIST (international): V-Tape. Video. The Dead Boys’ Club. Directed by Mark Christopher. 1992. 26 min. USA. PROD and DIST: Frameline Distribution. Le Festival restera au placard [The Festival Will Stay in the Closet – I translate]. Directed by Valérie Bah. 2017. Canada. PROD: Massimadi Montreal. Frameline32. Directed by Cheryl Rosenthal. 2008. 3 x 40 sec. USA. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-GKAavZRU; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Cm4KbgM3UEc; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iHi-YgP1Gw. Frameline33. Directed by Christy Schraefer and Greg Sirota. 2009. 2 min. USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckq3x33RUvQ Frameline34. Directed by Chico’s Angels. 2010. 4 x 50 seconds. USA. PROD: Dotfilmz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvjgkINv-SY. Frameline39. Directed by Joshua Grannell. 2015. 2 min. USA. https://youtu.be/ V6qtRgn-mwI. Frisk. Directed by Todd Verow. 1995. 88 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Strand Releasing. Gerontophilia. Directed by Bruce LaBruce. 2013. 86 min. Canada. PROD: 1976 Productions / New Real Films. DIST (US): Strand Releasing. History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself / Rien n’oblige à répéter l’histoire. Directed by Stéphane Gérard. 2014. 83 min. France. PROD: Stéphane Gérard. DIST: Centre Simone de Beauvoir. The Living End. Directed by Gregg Araki. 1992. 81 min. USA. PROD: Desperate Pictures / October Films. DIST (US): Strand Releasing. Massimadi 2012: Bande-annonce officielle. 2012. 6 min. Canada. PROD: Kadory Medias. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlAXcTIL6tk. Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival 2005. Directed by Michael Donnel. 2005. 1 min 50. USA. https://youtu.be/Iyivwx8z7o4. Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival ‒ Trailer 2007. Directed by Onix Padron. 2007. USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeHQRRUt46E MIX 24 Trailer. 2011. Nous étions un seul homme [We Were One Man]. Directed by Philippe Vallois. 1979. 91 min. France. PROD: Philippe Vallois. DIST (US): Frameline Distribution [1981]. Out at Work. Directed by Kelly Anderson and Tami Gold. 1987. 56 min. USA. PROD and DIST: Frameline Distribution. Outfest 2012. 2012. 6 min. USA. PROD: Outfest. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zn6n_Dh4UOs.

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Outfest 2015. 2015. 40 sec. USA. PROD: Outfest. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2kmiprlqYP8. Outfest Fusion Festival Trailer. 2016. 45 sec. USA. PROD: Outfest. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=VZCo60mxQdo. Paris Is Burning. Directed by Jennie Livingston. 1990. 71 min. USA. PROD: Miramax. Queer Artivism. Directed by Masa Zia Lenardic, and Anja Wutej. 2013. 93 min. Slovenia. PROD: White Balance. Queer Lisboa 15. Directed by Pau De la Sierra. 2011. 16 sec. Portugal. PROD: Fuel Lisbon. https://youtu.be/WZDZtOzhHlw. Queer Sarajevo Festival. Directed by Cazim Dervišević and Maša Hilčišin. 2009. 32 min. Bosnia and Herzegovina. PROD: Organization Q. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=PiDVdiuX2Yc Swoon. Directed by Tom Kalin. 1992. 92 min. USA. PROD: Killer Films. DIST (USA): Fine Line Features / Strand Releasing. Thelma & Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott. 1991. 130 min. USA / France. PROD: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Pathé Entertainment. The Times of Harvey Milk. Directed by Rob Epstein. 1984. 90 min. USA. PROD: Black Sand Productions / Pacific Arts. DIST (US): TC Films International. Trick. Directed by Jim Fall. 1999. 89 min. USA. PROD: Good Machine / Roadside Attractions. DIST (US): Fine Line Features. The Wizard of Oz. Directed by Victor Fleming. 1939. 101 min. USA. PROD: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Women I Love. Directed by Barbara Hammer. 1976. USA.

5.

Images+Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Homoscapes Abstract Chapter 5 focuses on the geopolitical imaginings embedded in festival programming. In screening films from various countries, festivals participate in the circulation of various discourses on the globalization of queerness. Borrowing from gay linguists’ focus on the interplay between geography and subjectivities, I pay attention to the language used to describe various films and contend that catalogues perform the task of cultural translation. They reinterpret films from a foreign context for a nationally situated audience. As institutions screening f ilms from all around the world, they simultaneously localize films from other geographical contexts and accentuate geopolitical imaginings of queerness. As a method, festivals’ curatorial practices provide us with a model for reconceptualizing the globalization of sexuality. Keywords: transnational; festivals; translation; globalization of sexuality; gay languages; queer worldlings

‘A window into the queer film world.’1 ‘the ethnoscape and the homoscape, their overlaps and convergences, cannot properly be understood without reference to their rootedness in the metropolitan and the national, dynamic places not only of hybridity and dislocatedness, but also of rootedness, coalition, and intervention.’2

1 Image+Nation’s festival director Katharine Setzer, quoted in: Sachet, ‘Image+Nation LGBT Festival’. 2 Waugh, ‘Good Clean Fung’.

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In the previous chapter, I argued that LGBTQ festivals presuppose and promote particular types of engagement with history and memory. As a juxtaposition or collage of historically situated representations, LGBTQ festivals illustrate some of the ways in which we access a visual history of queerness. Chapter 5 displaces this interrogation onto the geopolitical terrain: it seeks to reconcile festival studies’ emphasis on film traffic with the growing debates on the globalization of sexuality. In particular, scholars have argued that festivals constitute an ideal space for thinking about transnational cinemas. According to Iordanova: Film festivals are inherently transnational in that no matter what the intention of the festival is […] the diverse content that is being showcased effectively undermines and counter-balances nationalist tendencies. […] There is no better place than a film festival to witness the transnational dynamics of cinema coming into full light.3

While several scholars have described how the interplay between local and global at the heart of the festival phenomenon shapes f ilm traff ic, promotes a problematic tourist gaze, is intertwined with urban planning and city branding, or more generally conditions the ways we understand national cinemas, there is surprisingly little written on the relationship between sexual politics and the geopolitics of festival organizing and programming. 4 Schematically, scholars’ description of the relationship between globalization and festivals either focuses on the notion of the circuit as an alternative distribution platform (festivals screen f ilms from all over the world, thereby publicizing national cinemas – a rather optimistic narrative I criticize in Chapter 2) or analyzes the inequalities and power dynamics built in film traffic (the festival circuit prioritizes f ilms which are f inanced by and/or reflect the regimes of taste of the West). Scholars similarly argue that non-Western queer festivals either indicate newly acquired sexual freedoms (the organization of a festival points to the emergence of or progress made by queer activism in a given country) or reflect the imposition of American forms of sexual identities on local cinematic cultures (LGBTQ festivals participate in the pre-eminence 3 Iordanova, ‘Foreword’, xiv. 4 With the exception of Schoonover and Galt, Queer Cinema in the World. On the interplay between local and global, see: de Valck, ‘Finding Audiences for Films’; Iordanova, ‘The Film Festival Circuit’; Rhyne, ‘Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders’. On the tourist gaze: Nichols, ‘Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning’. On city planning and urban branding: Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’; Gupta and Marchessault, ‘Film Festivals as Urban Encounter and Cultural Traffic’.

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and globalization of US-based forms of sexual subjectivities and identity politics).5 Importantly, these two narratives rely on the notion of a circuit or network which connects local festivals to an abstract global queerness: they presuppose the type of diffusionist and developmentalist theoretical framework I criticized in Chapter 1 and 2. They fundamentally rely on a centre/peripheries binary, constituting US-based festivals as the model that is globalized, adopted, and eventually adapted in countries deemed less progressive. This chapter seeks to shift the discussion from the notion of the festival circuit to the festival format itself. I argue that festivals constitute an ideal space for revisiting some of the debates surrounding the globalization of sexual images. As a juxtaposition or collage of films, festivals can be thought of as a multi-layered space that often refracts contradictory discourses, interpretations, or representations of the globalization of queerness. In that context, ‘the festival as a method’ enables us to think about the coexistence of seemingly disjunctive or oppositional narratives.

Centre/periphery, festival tours, and festivals’ geopolitical imaginary In displacing festival studies’ emphasis on the role played by festivals in globalizing cinema to our experience of globalization at festivals, I do not mean to negate the very real material effects of the inequalities built in film traffic and/or of Western imperialism. Significantly, festivals’ programmes are typically divided in three sections: local, national, and international films. This rather practical principle of classification encodes a particular representation of space: it relies on a centre/periphery binary, framing a film through its proximity to or distance from a festival’s locale. This centre/periphery binary, pointing to the imagined geography of LGBTQ f ilm cultures, is also particularly clear in an understudied practice: festival tours. Festival tours were quite common in the 1980s and 1990s. As early as 1981, Persistence of Vision, the collective organizing San Francisco’s Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, advertised itself as touring the films it selected in ‘several cities’.6 Altermedia LTD’s 1988 American 5 Respectively: Zielinski, ‘On the Production of Heterotopia, and Other Spaces, in and around Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals’; Gretsch, ‘San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and Its Global Discourse’. 6 Persistence of Vision, ‘Press Release: Call for Entries!’.

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Gay Film Tour similarly planned to reach 50 cities in the US, presenting itself as ‘an alternative distribution/exhibition network that will support independent gay f ilm productions’.7 The NYLGEFF toured their f ilms in ‘several cities’, relying on university screenings (Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University), f ilm centres (Paris’s l’Entrepôt, Berlin’s Arsenal) and other festivals (the Berlinale, London’s National Film Theatre Gay and Lesbian Film Festival). 8 The New Festival similarly ‘prepar[ed] a national, multi-city tour with the best of ‘89 & ‘90’.9 In each of these cases, promotional materials heavily emphasize the shortfalls of queer film distribution: they cast a festival as a leader in the queer cinematic circuit. This narrative presupposes a centre/periphery model in which 1. the existence of an LGBTQ festival is seen as indicative of a city’s sexual and cultural openness and that 2. justifies festivals’ interventions in cities that are deemed less progressive.10 The practice of festival tours is not limited to North America. London’s National Film Theatre Gay and Lesbian Film Festival reached 10 regional theatres in 1989.11 In Eastern Europe, Mezipatra (Brno and Prague, 2000-ongoing) organizes what it calls ‘festival echoes’ in Český Těšín, Olomouc, and Bratislava. Outside of the West, Q! Film Festival (Jakarta, 2002-2017) regularly held side-festivals in Jogjakarta, Surabaya, Makassar, and Medan.12 Similarly, the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival takes place in Taipei, Taichung, 7 Altermedia LTD, ‘Say Goodbye to the New York Gay Film Festival…’. See also: Altermedia LTD, ‘American Gay Film Tour (1988) – organized by Altermedia’. I could not locate any document attesting of the American Gay Film Tour’s success (or probable lack thereof). For a more detailed account of Altermedia LTD, Peter Lowy, and the transition from the New York Gay Fest to the American Gay Film Tour, see Chap 2. 8 The screenings at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University (1990-1992) were organized by future MIX Executive Director Stephen Kent, then a student at Johns Hopkins. See: ‘Films from the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival – Saturday March 3 1990, Johns Hopkins University’. Two screenings were organized at l’Entrepot (1988 and 1990). See: Yann Beauvais, Letter to Jim Hubbard, July 28th 1988; Scratch Projection, ‘SCRATCH PROJECTION’. The screenings at l’Arsenal were organized in collaboration with legendary queer porn producer Jurgen Brüning. See: Jurgen Brüning, Letter to Jim Hubbard, 12 September 1990. On the screening at the Berlinale: Berlin International Film Festival, ‘A Tribute to the New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film Festival’. On the screenings at the National Film Theatre Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (1988 to 1990, also known as Dangerous to Know): New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival; ‘Post-festival summary statement’. In 1991 The NYLGEFF attempted to organize a screening at London’s Filmmakers Coop. I could not determine whether this screening happened. 9 New Fest, ‘Dear Vito…’; New Fest, ‘A Newsletter from the New Festival, Inc.’. 10 Verzaubert (1991-2009) constitutes here an interesting counterexample: it was conceived as a festival touring various German cities, without any fixed locale. 11 Gay Times, ‘“Dangerous” Films Go on Tour’. 12 Maimunah, ‘Understanding Queer Theory in Indonesian Popular Culture’, 63

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and Kaohsiung (2014-ongoing).13 In some countries, festival tours constitute a way of resisting a rather oppressive political context. For instance, going on tour enables the organizers of the Beijing Queer Film Festival (various locations in China, 2001-ongoing) to simultaneously withhold the location of their event (thereby avoiding censorship) and reach a broader audience.14 In going on tour, festivals reinforce both their own cultural currency (insisting on their role as purveyor of sexual images) and pre-existing discourses in terms of sexual openness (casting particular cities as gay-friendly). This centre/periphery model presupposes a geographic imaginary that fuses together cultural centres with assumptions about (sexual) openness: the existence (or lack thereof) of an LGBTQ festival is understood as indicative of sexual freedom. This rhetoric may be misleading: in some cases, minor LGBTQ festivals were organized in the same small cities festival tours attempted to ‘do outreach’ in. More importantly, this geopolitical imaginary fundamentally relies on geographically situated modes of identity politics and visibility. In harnessing ‘progress’ and ‘sexual openness’ to the visible production of queer subjectivities or identities, it negates the modalities through which queer desire might be expressed outside of the West. While festival tours aim at bringing queer films to cities deemed ‘less progressive’, the absence of an LGBTQ festival should not be taken as proof of sexual repression. This geopolitical imaginary is particularly clear in the festivals organized, in the 1990s, by Western NGOs in former Soviet countries or in South Asia. Often referred to as ‘the mother of the gay and lesbian movement in Russia’, International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission’s Julie Dorf (IGLHRC) partnered with Frameline and organized several festivals outside of the United States – among them Moscow’s and Leningrad’s The Soviet Stonewall (1991), Tomsk’s Pink Flamingos (1996), and India: The Queer View (1994).15 While these festivals were first and foremost conceived as a potentially misguided and interventionist praxis of queer solidarity, they 13 On Mezipatra: ‘Mezipatra Queer Film Festival ‒ History’. On the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival: Xi, ‘First Openly Gay Chinese Film Critic Joins LGBT Parade’. 14 For a description of the censorship faced by Asian LGBT festivals, see: Berry, ‘Bangkok’s Alternative Love Film Festival Raided’ and ‘My Queer Korea’; Rollet, ‘Tribulations d’une Française en Chine’, 217. 15 Julie Dorf started dating Olson – then co-director of Frameline – in 1994. On Julie Dorf’s activism in Eastern Europe: Essig, Queer in Russia, 134. The 1991 Leningrad festival was also known as the St Petersburg Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. See: MIX NYC, ‘8th New York Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film Festival, Downtown Community Television Center’s Lookout Video Festival and MIX Brazil present MIX’94’. On Pink Flamingos: Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 247. On India: The Queer View: MIX New York, ‘World Clique? Queer Festivals Go Global’.

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were also connected to the rise of the global gay tourist. San Francisco’s gays and lesbians, for instance, were offered the possibility to not only attend India: The Queer View, but also to tour the country. An IGLHRC pamphlet for this event exemplifies this combination of tourism and interventionist politics: You want to go to India, but see more than just the Taj Mahal. You want to visit places which are off the beaten track – places of interest to a gay or lesbian traveler. You want to meet Indian gays and lesbians and learn about their lives. You want a very special trip, one which caters to your needs, one you will remember for life. This is for you. The International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission in conjunction with Frameline and Trikone is proud to present INDIA: THE QUEER VIEW – the first ever gay & lesbian film festival in India & parallel queer tour. So fill in the application form on the reverse … join us – and make history.16

Other NGOs similarly organized LGBTQ festivals in former Soviet and South Asian countries. Loist notes that ‘German activists from Berlin organized [in 1994] a gay & lesbian film event in St. Petersburg under the banner of “The Edge of Love. Another look” […] mainly showing German films’.17 These events testified to a belief in the power of the festival format as a way of opening up a dialogue on sexual cultures. The language used by these festivals was emblematic of the context of the Cold War: it reflected a will to ‘educate’ people seen as ‘oppressed’ and promote the ‘free world’.18 The organization of non-Western LGBTQ festivals by Western NGOs continued well after the end of the Cold War. For instance, the IGLHRC and the Open Society Foundation helped organize several non-Western festivals, including St Petersburg’s Bok o Bok (also known as Side by Side, 2008-ongoing) and Yangon’s &Proud (2014-ongoing). Similarly, Nairobi’s 2012 Out Festival was heavily financed by the German and Swiss embassies.19 This use of the festival format as an instrument of soft-power is not limited to developing countries: several European festivals were initiated by and/ or have benefited from the support of NGOs and cultural embassies. For instance, the 1994 Festival de films gays et lesbiens de Paris (thereafter 16 International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, ‘The First Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and Tour of India – India The Queer View – Dec 94- Jan 95 – Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta’. [emphases in the original] 17 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 128. 18 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 234. 19 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 139.

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renamed Chéries-Chéris) was organized and heavily supported by the American Center.20 Overall, this practice is symptomatic of the proliferation of a Human Rights discourse that simultaneously mobilizes the idea of sexual freedom as an instrument of soft power and further seeks to capitalize on gay tourism.21 It also reflects non-LGBTQ festivals’ longstanding interventionist practices, exemplified in the establishment of festival funds supposed to help financing film production in non-Western countries.22 Rhyne consequently argues that: International gay and lesbian film festivals might be understood as a kind of ethnographic practice designed to retroactively construct a ‘queer Diaspora’ and to create for it a geographical teleology that culminates in the proliferation of the modern, Western, gay and lesbian identity movement. […] Film festivals thus construct the geography of a global queer Diaspora through its [sic] programming practices, offering festival-goers a means of ‘virtual tourism’ through which to travel through queer history and space.23

Festivals, gay languages, and the globalization of sexuality Quite clearly, the development of the LGBTQ festival circuit relies on particular geopolitical imaginings of space. Rhyne’s criticism, which powerfully articulates cultural policies within a postcolonial framework, is justified. However, in centring on the material development of the circuit, it might miss several other elements that would call for a more nuanced understanding of the LGBTQ festival phenomenon. As such, Rhyne’s emphasis on non-Western festivals as they relate to tourist economies and to the NGOization of the gay and lesbian movement tends to obscure other complex forms of international cooperation. To be fair, Rhyne’s PhD thesis was written in 2007 and could not have anticipated the more recent expansions of the festival network. In particular, some non-Western festivals do not attempt to address Western gays and lesbians and/or manifest a different conception of sexuality. These events generally rely on a different understanding of the ‘queer diaspora’, one that does not necessarily culminate in a teleological narrative but that reflects the realities of migration and diasporic subjectivities. Aks, 20 21 22 23

Séguret, ‘Le ciné gay et lesbien fait son “outing” à Paris’. Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 237. For an advanced discussion of festival funds, see Falicov, ‘The “Festival Film”’. Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’, 246-247. [Emphasis in the original]

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a festival organized in both Copenhagen and Lahore, exemplifies how the experience of diaspora can lead to a different type of programming and festival organizing. Its 2014 edition, held in Lahore and Islamabad, was the result of a cooperation between local artistic institutions and diasporic Danish-Pakistani curators. Films from the West were framed as speaking to the Pakistani context and as enabling discussions on a wide range of issues.24 Aks is not an exception: LGBTQ festivals that centre on migration and diaspora are increasingly common, with for instance the International Queer & Migrant Film Festival (Amsterdam, 2015-ongoing) and Kooz (Haifa, 2015-ongoing) – a festival dedicated to Palestinian queer cinema.25 In that context, the international development of the queer film festival phenomenon cannot be reduced to a simple proliferation of North American modes of sexual subjectivity. While some festivals are financed by NGOs and hope to capitalize on global tourism, others attempt to speak to the complexity of a globalized world as it relates to the circulation of sexual images and to diasporic subjectivities. Rhyne’s argument also exemplif ies one of the major diff iculties in describing non-Western (or rather non-anglophone) festivals: language. Festivals often address simultaneously international tourists and their local audience. While most non-Western festivals attempt to benefit from the pink dollar economy and abundantly reference Western-based modes of identity politics in English, they often avoid identity-related terminology in their first language – using instead words such as ‘diversity’ or ‘alternative’. This strategic use or avoidance of identity-related terminology plays on both localized understandings of sexual subjectivities and international, marketable queer tropes.26 In that context, any analysis of the geopolitical discourses embedded in non-anglophone festivals must take into account both English and non-English versions of their catalogues. Focusing solely on English texts or on the presence of identity-related terminology might obscure the specificities of (local) queer subjectivities. Furthermore, the use of English terms in another language cannot be reduced to the adoption of North American modalities of sexual subjectivities.27 For instance, Q! Film Festival (Jakarta, 2002-2017) has largely participated in the diffusion of the 24 Aks, ‘Aks Film Fest Lahore Screenings 2014’. 25 Kamin, ‘New Kooz Queer Festival Shines Light on Movies About LGBT Palestinians’. 26 Loist, ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s2000s)’, 117. 27 Lavender linguistic scholars (also known as gay language scholars) have highlighted how terms such as gay do not necessarily signify the imposition of a Western model of sexuality. See in particular: Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago; Boellstorff and Leap, ‘Introduction’.

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word queer in Indonesia. It has, however, done so through the idea of queer cinema (rather than sexuality).28 In arguing that festivals present themselves differently to their international (anglophone) and local audience, I do not mean to posit that catalogues written in a festival’s first language would, somehow, represent ‘authentic’ local subjectivities or that English texts necessarily reflect a ‘global’ gay subjectivity/consumer. Indeed, any analysis of the globalization of LGBTQ festivals must resist assigning authenticity to non-English (con)texts or defining the local as a site of resistance to an abstract (imagined) global queerness. As Grewal Inderpal and Caren Kaplan remind us, the binary local/global encodes assumptions about the nature of globalization and of cultural flows, seen as unidirectional: ‘the parameters of the local and global are often indefinable or indistinct – they are permeable constructs. How one separates the local from the global is difficult to decide when each thoroughly infiltrates the other.’29 To that extent, the ways a festival presents itself in English and in its native language cannot be taken as indicative of a global queerness opposed to ‘authentic’ local subjectivities. Both English and first language texts articulate various modes of queer world-making, already shaped by and reflecting the globalization of sexuality. In other words, the differences between English and first language texts do not enable us to recover ‘authentic’ local subjectivities or to criticize an abstract ‘global’ queerness. Rather they indicate the processes through which queer subjectivities are shaped – the cultural logics that define notions such as ‘authenticity’, ‘local’, or ‘global’ in a given context.30

Image+Mistranslation: festival catalogues and gay languages An approach in terms of ‘gay language’ can thus open up the question of festivals’ geographic imaginary.31 Image+Nation (Montreal, 1988-ongoing) 28 Maimunah, ‘Understanding Queer Theory in Indonesian Popular Culture’. This is quite unsurprising: Boellstorff, in The Gay Archipelago, contends that the apparition of gay and lesbi subjectivities in Indonesia cannot be understood as a Western construct. Rather, gay and lesbi subject positions epitomize the national ideas embedded in present-days postcolonial Indonesian society. 29 Grewal and Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies, 11. See also: Grewal and Kaplan, ‘Global Identities’. 30 Boellstorff and Leap, ‘Introduction’, 7. 31 See among others: Leap, Word’s Out. Several scholars have argued that Leap’s framework homogenizes and reifies gay experiences. Most famously, Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick

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constitutes here an ideal case study: located in a bilingual city, the festival constantly negotiates the discrepancies between French Québécois and American sexual subjectivities. In itself, Image+Nation’s bilingualism is not surprising: Québec sexual subjectivities are historically inflected by a multilingual context, influenced by both Québec nationalism and American identity politics. While overlaps between the two linguistic communities clearly exist at the level of interpersonal relationships (in particular in the bar scene), Québécois gay and lesbian social movements have tended to be historically defined by language.32 In analyzing the difference between French and English texts in Image+Nation’s catalogues, this section argues that the festival presents itself slightly differently to francophone and anglophone festival-goers: Image+Nation tailors its discourses through a strategic use of various gay languages.33 Image+Nation is not Montreal’s first LGBTQ festival. It may, however, have been the first to not only be fully bilingual, but also to explicitly address both francophone and anglophone gay communities. Earlier festivals were indeed clearly situated in a single linguistic context. For instance, the 1977 series Images of Homosexuality on the Screen was organized at Concordia, an English-speaking university.34 The 1980 Semaine du cinéma gai à Montréal (organized by the business consortium Sortir), the 1982 Sans popcorn: images lesbiennes et gaies, and the 1986 Gais à l’écran all originated in francophone organizations. While these festivals’ programmes rightly note that 1. not all gay men use gay languages and that 2. straight people occasionally mobilize elements borrowed from gay languages. While these critiques are justified, Cameron and Kulick’s overall project largely aims to move away from the notions of identity and community (i.e. gayness), replacing them instead with a focus on (non-identarian, diffuse) desire and performance. See: Cameron and Kulick, Language and Sexuality. In contrast, this chapter is interested in recuperating two elements put forth by Leap: codeswitching (how queer people present themselves to one another vs. articulating queerness for and within dominant modes of discourse) and the cultural/contextual specificity of gay languages. For an identity-centred response to Cameron and Kulick’s argument, see: Morrish and Leap, ‘Sex Talk: Language, Desire, Identity and Beyond’. 32 On this issue, see: Demczuk and Remiggi, ‘Conclusion’; Masques, ‘Les Gaies et les Lesbiennes du Québec’; Higgins, ‘Des lieux d’appartenance: les bars gais des années 1950’; Higgins, ‘French, English, and the Idea of Gay Language in Montreal’; Sylvestre, Les homosexuels s’organisent. 33 This focus on mistranslation might seem quite paradoxical, as translation presupposes an original from which meaning is transposed. I am not interested in the act of translation itself, but rather in the failures of translation – in mismatches that exemplify the discrepancies between various gay languages. Importantly, Image+Nation’s catalogues do not specify whether a text was originally written in English or in French. 34 Waugh, The Romance of Transgression in Canada, 474. The festival was organized by Serge Losique, who addressed both francophone and anglophone audiences.

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were entirely written in French, they nevertheless featured films in English as films about gays and lesbians made in French were quite tough to find. Furthermore, f ilms were often screened without (French) subtitles, as festival organizers did not have the financial resources to translate Englishlanguage features.35 Image&Nation’s first edition was held in 1988 at the National Film Board and the Cinémathèque québécoise. Its bilingual name ‘Image&Nation gai et lesbienne’ problematizes a double articulation: gay and lesbian can be seen as referring either to images (cinema) or to nation (commenting on both the Quebec/Canada situation and the political imaginary of gay movements). The festival’s first catalogue plays on this ambiguity: superimposing a map of Montreal’s newly constituted gay village and various LGBTQ symbols (Fig. 6), it conveniently blurs or at least refuses to define the meaning behind ‘Image&Nation’.36 In its first two years (1988-1989), Image&Nation insisted on the festival’s cultural legitimacy and emphasized its allegiance to francophone cultural institutions. Its catalogues were then entirely written in French. This project is made clear in an introduction to the festival’s second edition (1989), published in French in the magazine of the Cinémathèque québécoise: Image&Nation is resituated within Québécois social history; the festival is cast as ‘the celebration of difference and of desire’.37 From 1990 to 1994, Image&Nation’s catalogues testified to a skewed bilingualism. Typically, descriptions in English were shorter but remained more political and campier than their French counterparts. Conversely, French texts often avoided identity-related terminology, mobilizing the more neutral ‘orientation sexuelle’ (‘sexual orientation’) or ‘différence’. This is particularly clear in the introduction of Image&Nation’s 1990 catalogue (Fig. 7): whereas the English text (campily entitled ‘Girls! Freaks! Chopper Chicks! Cycle Sluts! Ghosts! Bulldykes! Oh, My!’) insists on the political and sexual nature of the festival, the French text (‘disrupting, stimulating, and inspirational films and videos’) situates Image&Nation within Québécois cultural institutions and casts the festival as a step towards the ‘respect of differences in difference’.38 35 On the marginalization of gays and lesbians within the Quebecois film industry, see: Waugh and Festival du nouveau cinéma, ‘Section d’information: un regard sur les films gais’. On early festivals’ lack of resource and translation: Waugh, ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’ 36 Waugh, ‘Cultivated Colonies’, 149. 37 Waugh, ‘Billet’, 14. Translated in Waugh, The Fruit Machine, 214-217. 38 Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1990: 11. [I translate]

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Figure 6. Poster. Image&Nation, 1988. Courtesy of Image+Nation.

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Figure 7. Catalogue. Image&Nation, 1990 (p.11). Courtesy of Image+Nation. The film stills contained in Image+Nation’s catalogues have been removed in order to avoid any potential copyright infringement.

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Throughout Yves Lafontaine’s leadership (from 1994 to 1996), catalogues constantly defined Image&Nation as a film festival. Instead of gay identity, the festival used expressions such as ‘gay cinema’, ‘gay culture’, ‘gay sensibility’, ‘against gay stereotypes’, or ‘a gay version of’. Identity-related terms were used as adjectives (qualifying cinema) rather than as nouns (designating a group of people). In addition to downplaying identity, Image&Nation insisted on its relationship with ‘legitimate’ festivals – quoting the Berlinale or Sundance. They also referenced major filmmakers so as to justify the festival’s selection. Yves Lafontaine’s insistence on cinephilia largely reflected Image&Nation’s uneasy position within Québec.39 As an event associated with homosexuality, the festival had been denied funding on the basis that its curatorial practices would be ‘sociological’. 40 Lafontaine’s downplaying of sexuality attempted to cast Image&Nation as a film festival that happened to screen gay films (adjective) – a wording that might be better aligned with Québécois sexual subjectivities. In 1995 for instance, the festival presented itself as l’unique manière d’offrir une grande variété d’images – et qu’il offre plus que la production d’Hollywood […] la tenue d’un festival comme Image & Nation permet de découvrir de nombreuses œuvres autrement inaccessibles, de rencontrer des cinéastes et des vidéastes dans une atmosphère détendue […] d’échanger avec d’autres cinéphiles èa (sic) propos des films visionnés. [a unique opportunity to sample a variety of film and video productions that depict realities which the folks in Hollywood wouldn’t dare touch, even with a ten foot pole. We can look forward to seeing new and exciting work from around the world. The festival’s relaxed and intimate atmosphere makes it easy to approach film and video makers who are in attendance. Festival-goers engage in spirited debates or simply share their impressions of the programming.]41

Elsewhere, I argued that festivals organized outside of North America often avoid casting themselves as by and for the queer community. For instance, 39 Lafontaine, ‘City of Festivals’. 40 Mentioned in: Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1995. For more on Québec funding and Image&Nation, see: Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 284-289; MacDonald, ‘Who Designed These Boxes Anyway?’. 41 Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1995: 7 [translation in the original]. The English version of this text uses the first-person plural ‘we’, whereas the French adopts a more neutral third person singular. Campiness is also added in the English version, through the gay-coded expression ‘wouldn’t dare touch, even with a ten foot (sic) pole’ [the French simply implies that the films screened at Image&Nation offer a variety of images often unmatched by Hollywood].

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French LGBTQ festivals and distributors insist more readily on their cultural legitimacy and their affiliation with art cinema. They often use the word ‘queer’ as a synonym for aesthetic and artistic transgression and/or avoid mentioning sexual identity altogether. 42 In Spain, festivals tend to play on their links with culturally legitimated institutions in an attempt to appeal to a large audience. 43 Image&Nation’s downplaying of sexual identity can thus be understood as reflecting Québécois modes of sexual subjectivities, partly influenced by European gay languages. Since 1997, Image+Nation has been co-directed by Charlie Boudreau and Katharine Setzer – a bilingual duo. The festival’s team has been increasingly composed of both French and English speakers. Catalogues insist much more on sexual identity and correspond more readily to American paradigms of sexual subjectivity. This interplay between and strategic use of Québécois and North American gay languages is particularly clear in the synopses written by the festival. In general, French and English versions of the catalogues are almost identical. The slight differences between the two are often marginal: in most cases, a word is simply substituted for another and/or added in English. For instance, synopses generally use the words ‘différence’, ‘marginalité’, or ‘communautaire’ (‘community-based’) in French, in lieu of ‘identity’ in English. The synopsis for Tim Miller: Loud & Queer (dir. Richard L. Harrison, 1992) is here quite typical: Miller fait valoir l’importance des performances autobiographiques pour toute communauté dite marginale, mettant en contexte les aspects controversés de son travail communautaire d’affirmation. Miller discusses the value of autobiographical performance for ‘marginalized’ communities, putting into context the controversial elements of his identity affirmation work. 44

Oftentimes, English synopses specify the sexual identity of the main protagonist(s), whereas the French texts do not mention gayness. In 1993 for instance, the English synopsis for Die blaue Stunde (dir. Marcel Gisler, 1992) notes that Théo is ‘a cute gay hustler’, whereas the French version of the same text only describes him as a ‘prostitute’. 45 Catalogues might 42 Damiens, ‘Queer Cannes’. For more on French ways of talking about LGBTQ-sexualities, see: Provencher, Queer French. 43 Perriam, Spanish Queer Cinema, 112-115; Suárez, ‘Surprise Me’, 602. On European’s festivals rather mixed audiences, see also: Marum and Palma Saleiro, ‘Queer Lisboa’s Audience in Research’. 44 Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1992: 25. [Emphasis: mine] 45 Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1992: 13.

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also address differently their French and English readers. While English synopses mobilize the first-personal plural ‘we’ and ‘us’, which imply a sense of belonging, the French version of the same text prefers a more neutral third person singular. It is oftentimes rather subtle, such as in the synopsis for Frank Krom’s 1991 To Play or To Die: Ce psycho-drame en milieu étudiant évoque la solitude et la victimisation que plusieurs adolescents gais ont pu connaître [that several gay teenagers might have experienced]. This powerful school-set psycho-drama recalls the memories of loneliness and victimization familiar to any gay teen. 46

Image+Nation also plays on the position of particular sentences within the narrative. Whereas identity-related keywords such as ‘homosexuality’ usually arrive in the first third of the English version of a synopsis, they tend to be relegated at the end of their French counterparts. For instance, whereas the word ‘homosexualité’ appears at the end of the French synopsis for Lan Yu (dir. Stanley Kwan, 2001), the English version of the same text starts with ‘a frank look at gay love’. 47 English descriptions may also contain more sexual or campy vocabulary. In 1993 for instance, Image+Nation describes the protagonists of Prinz in Hölleland (dir. Michael Stock, 1993) as ‘trois jeunes gais désabusés’ (‘three disillusioned gay teens’) in French. In English, they are characterized as a ‘youthful, disenchanted queer trio fuck[ing] each other, then fuck[ing] each other over again’.48 This campiness may be conveyed through a few added sentences, such as ‘just don’t bring the kids!’ in 1997 or ‘you know how it is, Queers have to bring new ideas to people’ in 1992.49 Accordingly, the only sentences added in French pertain to a film’s mise-en-scène or cultural legitimacy. Here, I do not aim to develop a side-by-side comparison between French and English versions of the catalogues (a project that exceeds the scope of this chapter), nor to imply that the festival’s team intentionally decided to add or withdraw particular expressions depending on the language they were using. Most of the differences I highlighted have to do with linguisticallysituated ways of discussing sexuality. Regardless, Image+Nation’s catalogues 46 47 48 49

Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1992: 25. [Emphasis: mine] Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2002: 74. Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1993: 17. Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1997: 35; Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1992: 11.

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mobilize queerness slightly differently depending on the addressed linguistic community. The cumulative effect of such inexact translations ultimately provides the audience with linguistically-situated versions of the same festival. Image+Nation effectively mobilizes both French Québécois and English gay languages. Its work of translation both reflects and attempts to bridge the linguistic differences encoded in Montreal’s queer communities.

Film as gay language Throughout the course of this chapter, I have described festivals through their verbal architecture, therefore bypassing or diminishing festivals’ role in circulating images. While festivals’ strategic use of gay languages enables them to tailor their discourses for a local audience, they also screen films – each of them clearly located in a national context and containing particular geographically situated representations of sexual subjectivities. As I argued in Chapters 1 and 4, this insistence on the textual reflects some of festival studies’ methodological issues. Perhaps crucially, it also points to gay linguistics’ ambivalence towards the visual: William Leap defines gay languages as ‘oral, written, and signed text-making’, emphasizing the primacy of the textual.50 Similarly, while Leap and Boellstorff contend that ‘the linguistic commodity in question includes the conceptual frameworks, images, and textual products emerging from gay men’s experiences’, they simply bypass the specificity of the visual and centre their analysis on language as text.51 In diminishing or at least ignoring the importance of the visual as it partakes in gay languages, Leap and Boellstorff miss a prime opportunity to theorize the role played by images in both mechanisms of recognition / subjectification and the globalization of sexuality. As film scholars know all too well, film is a transnational medium, containing geographically-situated representations and circulating in other contexts.52 Film, as a transnational medium composed of both sounds and moving images, constitutes a powerful regime of representation that activates 50 Leap, Word’s Out, xii. 51 Boellstorff and Leap, ‘Introduction’, 3. 52 To some extent, the question of the role played by f ilms in shaping subjectivities and ‘revealing’ national ways of being in the world has structured the development of film studies. It is here not my intention to settle the quarrels between those who read national cinemas as allegorical (Jameson) and those who attend to the effects of globalization upon the circulation and valuation of national cinemas.

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and sustains subjectivities, as well as relies on and largely conveys signs of belonging, myths, and iconographies. Sexual subjectivities are not only shaped by the type of textual elements and grammars put forth by Leap and Boellstorff; they are also dependent on and emerge from the visual. Two French features illustrate quite well how gay languages – or geographically-situated ways of envisioning sexual subjectivities – can be applied to the textual and visual elements of film. Stéphane Gérard’s History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself is a bilingual experimental French documentary which seeks to illustrate the concept of community through various USbased queer organizations.53 Formally, it interweaves superimposed and recolourized images of unspecif ied and undated demonstrations with archival footage drawn mostly from the New York Public Library Gay and Lesbian and HIV/AIDS collections and the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The audio track, which is systematically translated in French at the bottom of the screen, is mostly composed of interviews (in English) with some of the leaders of the organizations discussed in the film. The faces of the people being interviewed are almost never shown. In Chapter 4, I concluded that Gérard’s use of colourization and superimposition bypasses any simplistic focus on specific social movements (notably those discussed in the interviews) in order to illustrate or to depict the very concept of community, therefore both fitting with and enlarging the notions put forth by MIX New York. The superimposition of undated demonstrations prevents any singular political narrative: it locates politics as a relationship with a common activist history and as the basis for community building. Importantly, the interviews conducted by Gérard also reflect the diversity of New York’s queer scene – in terms of both the intergenerational dialogue the film operates (Lesbian Herstory Archives’s Deb Edel, Gay Liberation Front’s Perry Brass) and its insistence on social movements led by and for queer people of colour (Queerocracy, The Audre Lorde Project). The use of recolourized archival footage emphasizes this diversity: it simultaneously prevents us from reading the protagonists as white by default and blurs the lines between various ethnicities. Gérard literally recolourizes a history all too often whitewashed, emphasizing instead ‘queer people of colour’ as a collective relationship with history and social movements.54 53 See also Chap 4. 54 Gérard’s use of recolourization thus takes a particular importance within the French context. One the one hand, it makes visible what republicanism otherwise conceals (race). One the other hand, it promotes a definition of ‘queer people of colour’ as a somewhat coherent activist group, one that can potentially be aligned with France’s rejection of identity politics.

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This use of a visual gay language is further complicated by the selfreflexivity of the oeuvre. The constant presence of a sometimes unfaithful translation literalizes Gérard’s French accent and acts as a reminder of the film’s other political project: an intercultural negotiation of sexual and political subjectivities. While the faces of the interviewees are rarely shown (since it is a documentary about social movements, and not about the people leading them), Gérard’s positionality is constantly acknowledged (he is the one conducting the interviews, after all). The constant visual presence of a subtitled translation further re-affirms Gérard’s location, as a Black Frenchman fascinated with US-based identity politics. Necessarily unfaithful, these subtitles exemplify the impossibility of fully translating American modes of identity politics and subjectivities. Superimposition, in that context, not only thematizes the idea of community and of its temporalities; it also literalizes the uneasy fits between French and American understandings of sexuality. This project is made clear on the audio track, notably in his rather precious conversation with Schulman – one of the founders of the NYLGEFF: (Gérard): Actually, what my film is also about … this idea of ‘community’. Like what does ‘community’ mean. I know that in English … for a North American culture it’s something strong but it’s something that in France we almost never use – and when it is used it’s almost always in a negative way. Like ‘communautarisme’ rather than community spirit. (Schulman) Let me think about that. I really think that people should talk to each other. That’s really important to me, right? So every person that is willing to have conversation with that is honest then I consider … I guess that’s the community. (Gérard): Alright… (pause). So that’s really the language? [….] (Gérard) The idea I got from what you think is ‘community’ is the one about ‘accountability’ and the book [you wrote] is all about it. First, I wouldn’t really know how to translate it into French. So when I was reading it – when I was reading the book – I could tell that it was close to being ‘responsible’ and all this. But then it’s still something that I can feel is really powerful but then I can’t really define. (Schulman) Well that’s interesting (Gérard) Could you help me understand? (Schulman) Accountability in French. It’s like French, you don’t have a word for fun either …

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Figure 8. Still. History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself / Rien n’oblige à répéter l’histoire. Directed by Stéphane Gérard (2014). Courtesy of Stéphane Gérard.

As a bilingual project, History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself negotiates the discrepancies between American identity politics and French republicanism. The subtitles, which constantly acknowledge Gérard’s position, visualize the translation the film must operate: History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself forces French viewers to attend to concepts and groups of people that are erased by France’s universalist doctrine while attempting to find a common vocabulary and grammar susceptible to activate transgenerational, transnational, and intercultural social movements.55 Conceived as a history of homosexuality, Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem’s 1979 experimental episode film Race d’Ep [The Homosexual Century] further illustrates the tension between different modalities of sexual subjectivity.56 The film’s fourth and last segment (entitled ‘Royal Opera’) centres on the late 1970s, a period of transition between the ideals of the French gay liberation movement and the reinforcement of commercial gay districts. Built around images of the Parisian gay scene intercut with sepia or black-and-white photographs, the f ilm takes us on a stroll among Paris’s disappearing 55 On French universalism/republicanism as it relates to race, colonialism, and so-called colour-blind citizenship, see: Jugé and Perez, ‘The Modern Colonial Politics of Citizenship and Whiteness in France’. On the specificity of French universalism for non-white sexual minorities, see: Fassin, ‘(Sexual) Whiteness and National Identity’. 56 For more on Soukaz, see Chap 1 and 2. Guy Hocquenghem was instrumental in the French gay liberation movement, both as an activist and as a theorist. See among others: Hocquenghem, Le Désir homosexuel). He publishes a book complementing Race d’Ep (the film) in 1979: Hocquenghem, Race d’Ep! Un siècle d’images de l’homosexualité.

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gay landscapes as two characters, an effeminate French folle (played by Hocquenghem himself) and a straight American businessman (played by porn star Piotr Stanislas), walk through gay bars, cruising parks, public restrooms, and underground tunnels. The soundtrack is largely non-diegetic: each character retells his version of this one-night adventure through out-of-sync first person voice-overs that never interact. The two characters are unable to communicate with one another. The American, oftentimes speaking over French songs, criticizes the Frenchman’s choice to position himself on the margins and to refuse a politics of visibility – which he associates with New York City’s gay village. The Frenchman abundantly describes, over American gay-themed songs, Paris’s cruising landscape, refusing any form of legitimation and rejecting the label ‘gay’.57 The audio track thus emphasizes two different modalities of sexual subjectivity. The Frenchman’s desperate attempts to cruise his straight American counterpart refract their different understandings of sexuality. As such, this non-dialogue conveys the similitude of, yet impossible merging between, a sexuality articulated through and in the cracks of both French Republicanism and US identity politics – an impossible fusion of bodies. Race d’Ep’s political stance takes another turn when one considers the visual depiction of the two protagonists’ one-night stroll. Fabienne Worth notes how the conjunction of irony and the film’s refusal of suture ‘prevents identification and denunciation’.58 Unable to identify with either protagonist, the viewer is simply invited to participate in or to witness the characters’ movement in Paris. This quasi-pilgrimage, intercut with sepia or black-and-white photographs, documents a cruising ground that is slowly vanishing. As the two protagonists walk through the film’s final underground pathway and emerge in broad daylight (visibility), these same photographs sink into the Seine and disappear. Resolutely nostalgic, the film’s fourth segment chronicles the shift from the heydays of the French gay liberation movement (reclaiming political marginality) to its slow disappearance. Taken together, the audio and the visual thus comment on the evolution of French society. The impossible dialogue between French and American models of sexual subjectivity echoes the film’s play on light and darkness. Ultimately, the film documents the shift from a politics of marginality to 57 This is quite unsurprising: 1970s French gay liberation movements often condemned sexual identity – seen as bourgeois and ghettoizing. 58 Worth, ‘Le Sacré et le Sida (AIDS)’, 103

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one of visibility.59 To that extent, Race d’Ep is indicative of both the changing geographic and commercial organization of Parisian gay life and the growing influence of American paradigms of identity politics (reinterpreted through French universalism) on the local queer scene.60 As such, these two films thematize, from two very different historical junctures, the idea of gay languages. They exemplify the discrepancies between French and American ways of discussing sexuality and address cinematically the role played by images in the transnational circulation of subjectivities. More importantly, films travel. As Bill Marshall’s analysis of the differentiated reception of Les Nuits fauves (dir. Cyril Collard, 1992) indicates, French ways of discussing and representing queerness might be lost in another context. We are thus forced to interrogate the differentiated reception of various films across national borders, ‘investigating the relationship between national cultural and political traditions and those recently emerged and emerging transnational categories of “gay”, or “person with HIV/AIDS.”‘61 The reception of History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself and Race d’Ep further illustrates Marshall’s point. In Chapter 4, I described my experience at the US premiere of History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself: the audience of MIX NYC was particularly enthusiastic. Spectators discussed seeing friends and lovers on screen, remembering their own experiences within New York’s queer communities: films can solidify communities around and at festivals. Importantly, spectators did not discuss the presence of subtitles and the intercultural dialogue the film operates. In France however, the film premiered at Chéries-Chéris (where it won the Documentary Award). Audience members described their relationship with US-based social movements and forms of identity politics, either criticizing or glorifying the perceived differences between French and American queerness. The film subsequently toured LGBTQ festivals in France (where it was presented as an essay on queer memory and transatlantic cooperation) and in the US (oftentimes sponsored by the Alliances françaises or French embassies). In France, Race d’Ep was first rated X.62 Following a petition (signed among others by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre and Marguerite Duras), the film was released in a censored version 59 Angelotti and Minella, Générations Gay. 60 Provencher, Queer French, 155. 61 Marshall, ‘The National-Popular and Comparative Gay Identities’, 87 62 This is quite unexceptional: several films and events organized by Soukaz were forbidden or censored in the decade, among which the 1978 Quinzaine du cinéma homosexuel (see Chapters 1 and 2). Similarly, films made about gay men were often rated X and confined to specialized theatres. See notably: Vallois, La Passion selon Vallois.

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and was subsequently screened at several gay liberation f ilm festivals (notably at Paris’s 1981 Amours masculines).63 It was also programmed at several European festivals, including at the Berlinale (1980), Amsterdam’s Film & Theater Arts Festival (1980), and London’s First Festival of Gay Film and Video (1981).64 While the film benefited from a short commercial run in North America, it did not perform well (with the notable exception of Québec).65 American critics mostly discussed the film as a prime example of censorship.66 While some reviews described the film’s first two segments in a positive light, ‘Royal Opera’ was characterized in the New York Times as ‘far less convincing either as social-psychology or as film making’.67 As Worth argues, the film was too different from Anglo-Saxon productions of that time because gay identity remain[ed] problematic, from both a subjective and historical point of view. Unlike Word Is Out: Stories from Some of Our Lives (1977), for instance, or Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (1986), Race d’Ep is neither a record of friendly coming-out stories, nor a positive re-tracing of a subculture back to its founding moment.68

Catalogues, gay languages, and world-making: LGBTQ festivals and the globalization of sexuality As the circulation of History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself and Race d’Ep makes clear, queer films often contain nationally-situated ways of articulating sexual desire. Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt thus argue that ‘cinema [is] 63 Amours masculines was organized by the Centre pour les Initiatives Culturelles et Artistiques. Jablonski, ‘De l’ouverture du ghetto à la dépolitisation’, 4-5 ; Fleckinger, ‘Nous sommes un fléau social’, 150n7. Waugh, ‘Lesbian and Gay Documentary’, 255. 64 Vito Russo discusses the Amsterdam screening in his journal (he slept through part of the film!). See: Russo, ‘April 14th, 1980’. The London’s First Festival of Gay Film and Video was organized by the London Filmmakers Cooperative and should not to be confused with the London Gay and Lesbian Festival (organized by the NFT/BFI after 1986). See: Clews, ‘1981. London’s First Festival of Gay Film and Video’ 65 It was released in two separate versions, one subtitled and one dubbed. In New York, it screened at the Bleecker. See: Altman, ‘Witches and Faggots – Dykes and Poofters’. The film played regularly in Montréal. It was notably included in the 1980 Semaine du cinéma gai à Montréal and in the first edition of Image+Nation in 1988. See: Schupp, ‘Un regard sur le cinéma gai’. 66 JRT and AW, ‘Aesthetera’, 33 67 Canby, ‘“Race d’Ep” Links Photography and Sexuality’. None of the American film reviews I consulted mention the intercultural dialogue Race d’Ep operates. 68 Worth, ‘‘Le Sacré et le Sida (AIDS)’, 101.

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a place where the politics of globalization are articulated and disarticulated. Cinema is a critical means by which queerness worlds itself, a means by which queers negotiate local and global subjectivities’.69 In that context, LGBTQ festivals constitute a unique site for experiencing the worldmaking potentials of queer cinema: in juxtaposing or dis/articulating films that express various modalities of sexual subjectivities, festivals fundamentally position themselves as a virtual experience of worldmaking. In Schoonover and Galt’s own words: Queer film festivals seem particularly eager to proclaim both that queers make films more worldly and that films make the world more queer. […] Cinema as an institution and a medium appears to open the queer local to the world. The screen is the threshold between the limits of the national and the expansive promises of the global. […] The queer film festival is uniquely alive to the tensions between the global forces that exert themselves on cultural institutions and the potential for local practices to negotiate worlding. In other words, the queer film festival not only reflects the world but actively makes and remakes worlds.70

Schoonover and Galt’s emphasis on the queer worlds articulated by festivals largely relies on Michel Foucault’s description of the theatre as a liminal, heterotopic site where various geographic scales mirror one another.71 Indeed, festivals presuppose cultural specificity and cultural translation: in addition to insisting on their local context (the physical site of the theatre), they frame foreign films as speaking to their audience. Furthermore, festivals also articulate various claims on what counts as gay and lesbian cinema and identities on an international scale: through their film selection and textual productions, they urge spectators to imagine the worlds of queer cinema. Playing simultaneously on cultural translation, an imagined global queerness, and their own national or local context, LGBTQ festivals cannot escape the conundrums of the globalization of queerness. This interplay between cultural specificity and queer worldmakings is particularly clear in festivals’ textual productions: as such, catalogues often work to (re)articulate a festival’s relationship to both local and global queer worlds. Image+Nation’s catalogues are once again instructive: the evolution 69 Schoonover and Galt, Queer Cinema in the World, 29. [Emphasis in the original] 70 Ibid, 80-81. 71 See also: Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 166-205.

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of the festival’s use of the word ‘international’ largely refracts Image+Nation’s relationship to the globalization of queerness. From the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, Image&Nation insisted on the festival’s international position – as the first queer festival in Canada and one of the earliest ones in the West. At the time, the term international was mostly used as shorthand for the West.72 This insistence on the ‘international’ further enabled Image&Nation to reconcile a Western gay solidarity with Québécois subjectivities: because of a lack of Québécois product, a focus on the international could be presented both as a necessary evil and as fostering the idea of a Western gay community in which Québec would demarcate itself because of its early pro-gay legislation. The scarcity of Québécois product was paradoxically used so as to emphasize Image&Nation’s ‘international’ position and to condemn Quebec cultural institutions for their refusal to fund the festival. As Image&Nation’s 1993 catalogue puts it: This year, you have the possibility to see yourselves and our cultures through more than 180 works from 18 different countries. […] As in the previous years, our resources continue to be extremely limited, and we have yet to receive any of the grants available for film festivals from cultural institutions. In spite of this we have emerged as a community based International (sic) cultural event.73

In the mid-1990s, tapping into local gay languages while appealing to a global queer sensibility became more complicated. Image&Nation suffered from the creation and/or competition of other festivals, queer and non-queer – in particular Toronto’s Inside Out (1991) and Montréal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma. More importantly, films about non-Western contexts became quite common in the 1990s. The term international thus started being problematic: selecting films from non-Western countries meant that they had to be related to the mandate of the festival. Image&Nation’s catalogues have mobilized various strategies to harmonize global and local queer worldings. In the mid-1990s, Image&Nation’s catalogues played on the new notoriety of queer cinema – as a legitimate genre of cinema. The festival abundantly referenced non-queer cinematic institutions (Sundance, Cannes, Venice, and Berlin). Words such as gay 72 From 1989 to 1994, a list of countries was usually included in the catalogue’s opening remarks – further emphasizing Image&Nation’s ‘international’ (or rather Western) scope. 73 Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1993: 3. The French version of this text uses the third person singular.

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and lesbian were used mostly as adjectives, qualifying cinema. Synopses described the quality and the geographic origin of a film – not the type of sexual representations it contained. This strategy aimed at downplaying sexual identity: in insisting on the geographic variety of its programme, the festival presented itself as just screening gay and lesbian films. This variation on the idea of world cinema further enabled Image&Nation to avoid relating non-Western queer people to North American modes of identity politics. Quite typically, the festival described itself in 1996 as having a surprising number of feature films from around the globe[.] The ‘96 Festival will present eleven days of ground-breaking works by established and emerging filmmakers […] [Y]ou will experience and witness the rich diversity of image-making created by today’s sophisticated lesbian and gay filmmakers.74

Since 1997, Image+Nation’s strategy has held together two seemingly contradictory logics. On the one hand, catalogues have insisted on Image+Nation’s status as a major Québécois festival, thus playing on cultural legitimacy: drawing on the register of world cinema, they describe Image+Nation’s film selection as geographically diverse. The cover of Image+Nation’s 2010 catalogue (Fig. 9) is here particularly instructive: adopting visual codes traditionally associated with airports, the festival invites its audience to take a virtual trip ‘around the world’. On the other hand, Image+Nation has presented itself as a queer, community-based, festival – especially in English. The festival has often claimed that it would represent ‘our’ realities in various countries: it has articulated a discourse on the state of and forms taken by same-sex sexualities in non-Western countries. In 2001 for instance, Image+Nation’s opening statement played on the opposition between the West and the Third World, proposing to take us on a stroll from the harsh and violent reality from which was forged the very first lesbian production in Zimbabwe to the now common and pleasure mirror images we find in Hollywood productions[.] This year’s programming reminds us that filmmaking is a tool: a tool of freedom, of identification and of recognition. […] We begin our journey with the brutal reality of the Columbian drug wars in La Vierge des tueurs and conclude this year’s 74 Image&Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 1996: 3.

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Figure 9. Poster. Image+Nation, 2010. Courtesy of Charlie Boudreau / Image+Nation.

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cinematic odyssey with the transsexual musical extravaganza, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, taking in a multiplicity of experiences, perspectives, and of course beautiful images […]. From comfortable light-hearted romantic comedies to challenging and eye-opening stories sometimes worlds very far away from our own, we bring these celluloid tales together to co-exist on the screens of image+nation 2001.75

Image+Nation thus simultaneously mobilizes two distinct discourses: it both attempts to explain the realities of LGBTQ people abroad through films and claims it just screens great films from all over the world. These two discourses are further refracted in festival’s use of generic categories: its catalogues are divided in two sections, ‘eyes on the world’ (fiction films, a name underscoring geographic diversity) and ‘lived lives’ (documentaries, foregrounding a diversity of sexual subjectivities). As such, this double mode of address combines elements specific to French Québécois sexual subjectivities with the gay cosmopolitan imaginary promoted by American LGBTQ festivals. It also interweaves the two modalities of Canadian queer collectivity identified by Waugh, ‘a minoritizing cosmopolitan iconography built on utopian dynamics of difference […] and an ideological agenda of universalizing sameness’.76 LGBTQ festivals such as Image+Nation thus accommodate different visions of what ‘international’ queer cinema is. Their film selections not only depend on but also further complicate the interplay between local and global sexual subjectivities. This is most visible in synopses: depending on the film considered, synopses do not mobilize the same type of vocabulary. In Image+Nation’s catalogues, the closer a film is to (Western) regimes of taste and cultural value, the more a synopsis insists on the mise-en-scène or plays on its audience’s cultural capital. Typically, the festival describes La Robe du soir (dir. Myriam Aziza, 2009), a French feature, as ‘a contemporary classic reminiscent of François Truffaut’. The synopsis insists on director Myriam Aziza’s technique, not on the sexuality depicted in the film. The accompanying still foregrounds the film as a cinephile oeuvre (Fig.10).77 At the other end of the spectrum, films which appeal to popular taste, which originate in the so-called gay niche, or which do not readily correspond to the Western paradigms of art cinema are described through camp humour and identity-loaded terminology. Catalogues 75 Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2001: 5. The French text uses the word ‘dénoncer’ (‘to denounce’) instead of ‘freedom’. 76 Waugh ‘Cultivated Colonies’, 151. 77 Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2011: 77.

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Figure 10. Catalogue. Image+Nation, 2011. Synopsis for La robe du soir (directed by Myriam Aziza, 2009), p.77. Courtesy of Image+Nation.

often mobilize stills that depict queerness (same-sex couples showing signs of affection, LGBTQ flags, barely clothed studs). The distinction between popular taste and cinephilic aspirations is further refracted onto both the geographic origin of a film and its generic classification. For instance, Image+Nation’s synopses for Québécois or French features prioritize symbolic over sexual capital. Queerness is almost absent from these texts. Written in an indeterminate third person singular, they heavily discuss a film’s mise-en-scène and do not insist on gay identity or on the LGBTQ community. At the other end of the spectrum, non-Western films (documentary and fiction) are often framed in terms of the discovery of another culture: these synopses contain up to three times more identity-related terminology. Image+Nation’s description of non-Western films through the rubrics of identity is quite unsurprising: festivals oftentimes manifest elements of what

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Stringer calls a ‘language of revelation’. They require the discovery of ‘new cinemas’ and rely on a ‘projection and management of cultural otherness’.78 In the specific case of LGBTQ festivals, this language of revelation is, however, not limited to aesthetic forms: foreign films are typically understood both as being emblematic of national cinemas and as documenting the situation of homosexuals abroad. While synopses for non-Western (and more generally non-American) films tend to insist more readily on identity, they also refract various ways of understanding the globalization of queerness. In most cases, they relate non-Western subjectivities to American understandings of sexuality. Foreign modalities of same-sex desire are framed through and compared to Québécois or American subjectivities. Image+Nation’s synopses often characterize non-Western films as recounting ‘a universal story’ or imply that ‘gay’ would be an adequate term to account for non-Western sexual subjectivities.79 They lengthily describe the similitudes (and more rarely differences) between same-sex desire in Canada and abroad – carefully attempting to render non-Western queerness intelligible for Québécois festival-goers. Because synopses seek to perform a form of cultural translation, non-Western films thus tend to be framed as being ‘about the situation of the LGBTQ community in’, ‘documenting the hardship of gays and lesbians in’, or ‘present[ing] the reality of being gay in’.80 They relate the situation and subjectivities of the subjects on screen to Québécois and Canadian modalities of identity, even in the cases of films which do not centre on homosexuality. This cultural translation can take on different forms. In some cases, synopses do not even address the specificities of same-sex desire abroad. They simply imply that Canadian and foreign modalities of sexual subjectivities are alike, that they are both recognizable through the single lexicon ‘gay and lesbian’. This type of geographic discourse is quite similar to Altman’s description of the globalization of Western gay identity – which he understands as the imposition of (Western) gay and lesbian identities as an ever-growing hegemonic framework for understanding same-sex desire.81 In other cases, synopses tap into Canadian exceptionalism. These texts systematically condemn the ‘oppressive regimes’ that would affect non-Western ‘gays and lesbians’ – thus participating in a different type of cultural translation. Instead of focusing on the different articulations between (various) states 78 79 80 81

Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 65-73. Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2006: 79. Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2003: 57. Altman, ‘Rupture or Continuity?’.

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and discursive forms of desire, these synopses perversely establish a continuity between homosexuality in Québec and same-sex desire in non-Western contexts. The (particular) situation of ‘gays and lesbians’ in a non-Western country would be defined first and foremost by repression. In these cases, Image+Nation does not question the (Western) cultural specificity of sexual ‘identity’. Rather, it establishes a link between non-Western subjectivities and Québécois realities through cultural (mis)translation. While it does not specifically mention (or rather name) sexuality, the French synopsis for Daughters of the Sun (dir. Miriam Shahriar, 2000) exemplifies quite well Image+Nation’s insistence on the ‘oppressive nature’ of some non-Canadian regimes (Fig. 11). Every sentences of the synopsis insist on the discrimination faced by women in Iran. Significantly, the still chosen by Image+Nation corresponds to the synopsis’ introductory statement, a description of the violence enacted against the film’s main protagonist read as an allegory of the situation of women in Iran.82 This type of cultural translation is particularly perverse. In focusing on oppressive regimes abroad, some of Image+Nation’s non-Western synopses praise Québec for its progressiveness and describe the oppression non-Western queers would supposedly endure.83 As Jaspir K. Puar notes, ‘we see the trenchant replay of what Foucault termed the repressive hypothesis: the notion that a lack of discussion or openness regarding sexuality reflects a repressive, censorship-driven apparatus of deflated sexual desire’.84 These synopses further promote a form of legitimated Canadian sexual citizenship, defined in contrast with an imagined yet unspecific Other. They simplify non-Western subject positions: rather than describing the shape taken by same-sex desire and subjectivities abroad, they borrow a frame of analysis akin to humanitarian discourses. They not only relegate non-Western forms of same-sex subject position to their perceived repression but also negate the local assemblages through which same-sex subjectivities are shaped and understood.85 Non-Canadian synopses might also be emblematic of what Harbord identifies as ‘a convergence of the tourist and consumer gaze’.86 While this type of discourse is attentive to the differences among nationally situated same-sex assemblages, it does so through the lexicon of an imagined queer diaspora that could be authentically experienced through cinematic tourism. In other words, it doesn’t attend to the specific forms taken by local subject positions. 82 Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2002: 45. 83 See for instance Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2009: 32. 84 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 93. 85 We see here the replay of what Tascón identifies as the humanitarian gaze promoted by activist festivals. See: Tascón, Human Rights Film Festivals 86 Harbord, Film Cultures, 46. See also: Urry, The Tourist Gaze.

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Rather, it takes the differences between American and non-American subject positions as a kind of flavour: gay subjects and identity would exist throughout the world; the forms taken by LGBTQ subjectivities would simply be inflected or accented by the local culture they are inscribed onto. To that end, these texts posit the primacy of homosexuality as identity. Foreign queer subjects are understood to be distant cousins who just grew apart. This tourist gaze is at times linked to the exoticizing of the subjects represented in the films. Particularly prevalent in synopses describing films that centre on non-Canadian or non-white men, this trend recalls Western gay communities’ oscillations between the eroticizing or fetishizing of racial and geographic differences and the idealizing of white bodies.87 Muñoz describes this uneasy equation between race and gay erotic imaginary: The Latino body, like other racialized bodies, functions as an exotic kink for dominant gay male culture. For such bodies to register as exceptional or exotic, a ‘normal’ gay male body needs to be posited elsewhere, and its normativity needs to be reiterated continually. That normative ideal is what I call the normative imprint, an image of ideality and normativity that structures gay male desires and communities.88

For instance, Image+Nation’s synopsis for the Senegalese film Karmen Gei (dir. Joseph Gai Ramaka, 2001) replays some orientalist tropes: it insists primarily on the ‘rhythm’ and ‘sensuality’ that would characterize ‘contemporary African culture’. Significantly, the chosen still foregrounds a Westernized vision of traditional Senegalese culture, centring on the act of dancing (Fig.12).89 Some of these choices are strategic: in performing a cultural (mis)translation or in reflecting and capitalizing on gays and lesbians’ racialized erotics, they aim at increasing a screening’s appeal. Image+Nation’s description of Mixed Kebab (dir. Guy Lee Thys, 2012), a film partly set in Turkey, is quite typical of this trend: Mother and son duo Marina (Karlijn Sileghem) and Kevin (Simon Van Buyten) run a quaint pub in Belgium. When Marina notices one of the regulars, a handsome young man named Ibrahim (Cem Akkanat), eyeing Kevin’s assets, she suggests the two go out for a drink. […] Hunky Ibrahim admits he embodies contradiction; he’s an openly gay Muslim man who’s 87 On fetishization and gay men’s racialized erotics, see: Mercer, ’Skin Head Sex Thing’; Fung, ‘Looking for My Penis’; Nguyen, A View from the Bottom. On the difference between gay men and lesbians as it relates to exoticization, see: Goldsby, ‘What It Means to Be Colored Me’, 11. 88 Muñoz, ‘Dead White’, 129. 89 Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2002: 65. [I translate. Emphasis: mine]

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closeted to his family and committed to marrying a woman; a distant cousin who lives in Turkey. When he must travel to Turkey and visit his fiancée, he brings Kevin along for the ride. Their trip through Ibrahim’s homeland is a sensual journey, filled with carefree drunken nights and communal showers, and their desire for one another finally coalesces in the hotel steam room.90

Figure 11. Catalogue. Image+Nation, 2002. Synopsis for Daughters of the Sun (directed by Miriam Shahriar, 2000), p. 44. Courtesy of Image+Nation.

90 Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2012: 55. [Emphasis: mine]

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Fung notes that LGBTQ festivals often use dedicated programming as a way to both signal (and thus capitalize on) and contain non-whiteness.91 The same logics might also account for the dedicated programming of ‘exotic’ non-Canadian films: Image+Nation has a long history of organizing dedicated screenings of shorts from selected countries (Latin America in 2014 and Israel in 2015). Synopses and programmer notes usually capitalize on national and racial differences, replaying the exoticization of non-white bodies onto an international geographical grid. Typically, Image+Nation’s 2014 New Latin Cinema programme was advertised on social media as ‘Caliente! Latin America / Image+Nation’.92 While I have thus far underscored some of the issues associated with LGBTQ festivals’ description of non-Western queerness, it is worth noting that some synopses do address the complexity of the globalization of sexuality. They carefully replace non-Western assemblages within their proper context and avoid any sort of teleological narrative that would define non-Western queerness through North American models of identity. In some rare cases, synopses even question the pre-eminence of American gay and lesbian assemblages. For instance, the synopsis for Anak-Anak Srikandi (dir. The Children of Srikandi Collective), a 2012 film on the controversy around international gay and lesbian cultural events in Indonesia, thematizes the influence of American sexual assemblages and problematizes the globalization of sexuality: After the cancellation of the IV Regional Conference of ILGA Asia in Surabaya, Indonesia and intense pressure to cancel the 2011 Q! Film Festival […] from the Islamic People’s Forum (FUI) and the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), Children of Srikandi presents an innovative riposte to negative assumptions and stereotypes about Islam and Muslim women. The clever and creative opening credits set the stage for an unusual documentary about the lives of Indonesian gender-queer women and lesbians. Each of the moving segments is linked by an exquisite and ethereal wayang kulit (a traditional Indonesian art form) depicting the gender-bending tale of Srikandi, a famous character from the Hindu epic, The Mahabharata. […] they underscore the commonality of their struggles, and their commitment to solidarity. Children of Srikandi […] demonstrate[s] how politicized Western notions of gender expression and sexual orientation inform, without overwhelming, their own rich cultural, religious and social conventions.93 91 Fung, ‘Programming the Public’, 92. 92 Image+Nation, on Facebook, November 2014. This message has been deleted. 93 Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2012: 28.

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Figure 12. Catalogue. Image+Nation, 2002 Synopsis for Karmen Gei (directed by Joseph Gai Ramaka, 2001), p.73. Courtesy of Image+Nation.

Image+Nation’s catalogues thus include contradictory discourses on nonWestern subjectivities. LGBTQ festivals’ catalogues manifest various understandings of the globalization of sexuality. Furthermore, several discourses on the globalization of sexuality might be intertwined in the same synopsis. For instance, Image+Nation’s description of ke kulana he mahu (dir. Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe, 2001) simultaneously plays on the exoticization of Hawaiian people (discussing Hawaiian culture through a somewhat simplified version of ‘traditional culture’, featuring a still that echoes preexisting stereotypes) and situates the film as a response to colonization/assimilation (Fig.13).94 94 Image+Nation, ‘Catalogue’, 2002: 59.

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Festivals as homoscapes: LGBTQ festivals, reverberations, and the disjunctive nature of globalization As Image+Nation’s catalogues make clear, LGBTQ festivals often embody several contradictory discourses on the globalization of sexuality. They simultaneously def ine what counts as queer, localize foreign f ilms for their audience, and reflect various ways of understanding non-Western queerness. As such, this coexistence of contradictory discourses is partly the consequence of what Stringer identifies as the ‘global festival space economy’. Indeed, festivals must operate in two directions at once. As local differences are everywhere being erased through globalization, festivals need to be similar to one another, but as novelty is also at a premium, the local and the particular also become very valuable. As a result, film festivals market both conceptual similarity and cultural difference.95

This interplay between difference and similarity has several consequences, and notably in terms of the festival-going experience. Bill Nichols describes a paradox: in attending a (foreign) f ilm screening at a festival, we simultaneously recognize something familiar (a festival f ilm, global gayness) and get a sense of the aesthetics and specif icities of a culture which is not ours. According to Nichols, ‘new meanings’ would thus be ‘layered’ onto a f ilm: the knowledge gained would be ‘discovered’ (his word) by the viewer. Festival-goers, then, would perform a quite classical hermeneutic operation: ‘by amassing a representative corpus of texts, [they would] understand the whole from its parts. Both the parts and the whole, though, are constructs – imaginary identities and virtual cultures’.96 While I certainly agree with this description of the play of similitude and difference at festivals, I want to invert Nichols’s proposition: instead of constructing the viewer as ‘discovering’ meanings layered onto the text, this chapter argues that festival-going entails a particular engagement with the globalization of queerness. An LGBTQ festival performs a sort of cultural translation, one that simultaneously underscores the similitude between various subjects separated in space and markets or emphasizes 95 Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 111. 96 Nichols, ‘Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning’, 37.

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their differences: LGBTQ festivals re-member queer subjects separated in space and time.97 Waugh’s homoscapes, def ined as the ‘transnational scene of sexual spaces, commodities, communications, and identity performance’, more adequately characterizes LGBTQ festivals’ worldings of queerness.98 Building upon Arjun Appadurai’s metaphor -scapes, the concept presupposes ‘fluid, irregular shapes’ which constitute ‘deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’.99 Put another way, LGBTQ festivals are site-specific panoramas of gay and lesbian films. They necessarily combine contradictory discourses and representations of queerness, standing in for the flows along which cultural concepts and products move across and beyond national contexts. Festivals’ queer worldings, or homoscapes, operate at the intersection of oftentimes disjunctive yet overlapping economic, cultural, ideological, and sexual flows.100 In that context, LGBTQ festivals’ catalogues at once signal the similitudes between various same-sexed subjectivities and attest to the impossibility of a singular narrative on globalization: in positing uneven flows that testify to the resemblance between queer subjects, they simultaneously articulate geographically specific subjectivities filtered through cultural translation (cultural differences) and attempt to transcend the impossibility of ontological foundation (similitude). Put another way, LGBTQ film festivals operate through a sedimentation or juxtaposition of geographically situated sexual representations: they simultaneously entail a provisional definition of ‘queer cinema’ and reflect the disjunctive nature of globalization. In arguing that LGBTQ festivals illustrate the disjunctive nature of the globalization of queerness, I do not want to negate the differences that 97 A concept used by: Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’. See Chap 4. 98 Waugh, ‘Good Clean Fung’, 168. The term queerscape, has also been proposed in: Ingram, ‘Marginality and the Landscapes of Erotic Alien(nations)’. It specifically designates spaces that challenge heteronormativity. 99 Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, 33. 100 Ibid, 45-46. Appadurai has been criticized for his refusal to prioritize some flows over others. In particular, several scholars argue that that Appadurai’s model tends to erase or diminish the role played by economic capital in shaping various -scapes. See for instance: Heyman and Campbell, ‘The Anthropology of Global Flows’. In using Appadurai’s -scapes as reworked by Waugh, my aim here is not to negate the material effects of globalization and/or the role played by film economies in shaping LGBTQ film festivals’ programming, but rather to account for the ways in which queer festival programming functions as contradictory panoramas of global queerness.

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Figure 13. Catalogue. Image+Nation, 2002. Synopsis for ke kulana he mahu (directed by Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe, 2001), p. 59. Courtesy of Image+Nation.

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exist among festivals or to downplay the role played by economics flows in shaping global queer filmmaking. Indeed, several scholars have recently highlighted a relative homogenization of LGBTQ festivals’ programming. In particular, Richards argues that major LGBTQ festivals tend to rely on the same few centrepieces. According to him, festivals act as social enterprises that must programme homonormative features (‘putting bums on seats’) in order screen more experimental, local, and/or innovative films.101 In that context, similarities between geographically-distant LGBTQ festivals are partly a consequence the economic realities of queer cinema: the number of features that can be programmed at queer festivals is quite limited. Furthermore, programmers often attend the same few international festivals and are thus exposed to the same films. The fact that very similar films may be programmed at different festivals does not, however, mean that festival-goers have the same experience of the globalization of queerness. As the example of Image+Nation makes clear, LGBTQ festivals not only participate in and refract the globalization of queerness but also enact a necessarily failed cultural translation. Globalization is here understood not as the imposition of Western modes of identity politics or as the struggle for authentic, local modes of queer subjectivities, but rather as a constant redefinition of what counts as local/ global. As Boellstorff argues, it is not enough to ask if globalization is ‘making the world more the same’ or ‘making the world more different’, because how we decide when two things are ‘the same’ or ‘different’ is itself part of what is being globalized. Our rubrics for determining similitude and difference are not exterior to the object of study – globalization itself. […] The issue is not the world’s becoming more the same or more different under globalization […]; but the transformation of the very yardsticks by which one decides whether something is the same or different in the first place; that is, reconfigurations of the grid of similitude and difference.102

The experience of this interplay between globalization and the impossibility of translating queer worldings corresponds to what Joan W. Scott aptly names reverberation – a concept she develops so as to understand the geographic movement of and similitude taken by the entity known as women:

101 Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 143. 102 Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago, 25.

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[Fantasy-echoes] may be better metaphor than translation for designating the mutability of words or concepts because it’s more mobile, connoting not just a distorted repetition, but also movement in space and time-history. […] it would be better still to talk about reverberations. […] The word reverberation carries with it a sense both of causes of infinite regression – reverberations are re-echoes, successions of echoes – and of effect – reverberations are also repercussions.103

As a non-linear and non-causal metaphor, reverberation emphasizes the disjunctive nature of globalization: instead of positing an identifiable source from which meaning is derived, reverberation insists on a constantly evolving series of echoes, deformations, and similarities. While notions such as hybridity, diaspora, or translation rely on the idea of diffusion or origin, reverberation operates through collage, dis/articulation, and juxtaposition. Crucially, reverberation puts the emphasis on one’s experience of a particular sound: concepts such as (cultural or spatial) proximity and distance do not adequately account for how one understands a reverberated sound. Indeed, the exact shape of a reverberated sound depends on its itinerary through space and time: one’s experience of such a sound reflects both the very material flows through which it moved and the listener’s position. While echoes and re-echoes may almost sound the same, they correspond to and can only be understood in the context of specific (land)scapes. In juxtaposing and collaging various geographically and historically situated representations, LGBTQ festivals constitute unique spaces for experiencing these reverberations of queerness. As such, festivals’ curatorial practices rely on various grids of similitude that attempt to bring together diverse, oftentimes contradictory representations of queerness. While the programmes of two LGBTQ festivals may be quite similar, they do not necessarily entail the same experience of the globalization of queerness: the shape of a reverberation is conditioned not only by material, economic, and cultural flows but also by the physical and discursive spaces where a listener stands. Thinking about the festival as a method – as a format that both symbolizes and opens up questions about our relationship to film – thus forces us to work through some of the issues associated with the globalization of queerness. LGBTQ festivals’ curatorial practices, through a collage of geographically situated representations, refract contradictory discourses on what count as queer and/ or global. In attempting to make sense of various forms of same-sex desire through programming, they posit similitude as a productive epistemological framework for thinking through the globalization of sexuality. 103 Scott, ‘Feminist Reverberations’, 12.

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Gay Times. ‘“Dangerous” Films Go on Tour’. Gay Times, October 1989. Box 20, Folder 1989. The Vito Russo Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Goldsby, Jackie. ‘What It Means to Be Colored Me’. In Outlook: National Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 9 (1990): 8-17. Gretsch, Jenna. ‘San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and Its Global Discourse’. M.A. thesis, San Francisco State University, 1997. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. ‘Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 663-679. ———. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Gupta, Dipti and Janine Marchessault. ‘Film Festivals as Urban Encounter and Cultural Traff ic’. In Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities, edited by Johanne Sloan, 239-254. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2007. Harbord, Janet. Film Cultures. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002. Heyman, Josiah McC, and Howard Campbell. ‘The Anthropology of Global Flows: A Critical Reading of Appadurai’s “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”.’ Anthropological Theory 9, no. 2 (2009): 131–148. Higgins, Ross. ‘Des lieux d’appartenance: les bars gais des années 1950’. In Sortir de l’ombre : Histoires des communautés lesbienne et gaie de Montréal, edited by Irène Demczuk et Frank William Remiggi, 103-128. Montreal, QC: VLB, 1998. ———. ‘French, English, and the Idea of Gay Language in Montreal’. In Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language, edited by William Leap and Tom Boellstorff, 72-104. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Hocquenghem, Guy. Le Désir homosexuel. Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1972. ———. Race d’Ep! Un siècle d’images de l’homosexualité. Paris: Michel Albin, 1979. Image&Nation [Image+Nation]. Catalogues. 1988-2013. Ingram, Gordon B. ‘Marginality and the Landscapes of Erotic Alien(nations)’. in Queers in Space, edited by Anne Marie Bouthillette, Yolanda Retter and Gordon B. Ingram, 27-52. San Francisco, CA: Bay Press, 1997. International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. ‘The First Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and Tour of India – India The Queer View – Dec 94- Jan 95 – Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta’. Flyer. Box 929, Folder International Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals. The LGBT Center’s Archives. New York City. Iordanova, Dina. ‘The Film Festival Circuit’. In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 23-39. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009.

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———. ‘Foreword: The Film Festival and Film Culture’s Transnational Essence’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, xi – xvii. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. Jablonski, Olivier. ‘De l’ouverture du ghetto à la dépolitisation: Les festivals de films gais et lesbiens en France en questions’. Revue H 5/6 (1997). JRT and AW. ‘Aesthetera’. The Body Politic, no. 59 (1979): 33 Jugé, Tony S., and Michael P. Perez. ‘The Modern Colonial Politics of Citizenship and Whiteness in France’. Social Identities 12, no. 2 (2006): 187–212. Kamin, Debra. ‘New Kooz Queer Festival Shines Light on Movies About LGBT Palestinians’. Variety. 4 December 2015. Accessed 9 December 2015. http://variety.com/2015/ film/global/palestinian-kooz-queer-festival- opens-new-borders-1201652356/. Lafontaine, Yves. ‘City of Festivals’. Translated by Thomas Waugh. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 603–605. Leap, William. Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Loist, Skadi. ‘Queer Film Culture: Performative Aspects of LGBT/Q Film Festivals’. PhD Diss., University of Hamburg, 2015. ———. ‘The Queer Film Festival Phenomenon in a Global Historical Perspective (the 1970s-2000s)’. In Une Histoire des festivals XXe-XXIe siècle, edited by Anaïs Fléchet, Pascale Goetschel, Patricia Hidiroglou et alii., 109–121. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013. MacDonald, Janelle. ‘Who Designed These Boxes Anyway? Queer Film Festivals in Canada: The Economics and Politics of Queer Space’. M.A. thesis, Carleton University, 2011. Maimunah, Munir. ‘Understanding Queer Theory in Indonesian Popular Culture: Problems and Possibilities’. Lakon 1, no. 3 (2014): 43-69. Marum, Pedro and Sandra Palma Saleiro. ‘Queer Lisboa’s Audience in Research: How Queer is the Queer Audience?’ Presentation. Hamburg, Germany : Queer Film Culture Conference. 14-15 October 2014. Marshall, Bill. ‘The National-Popular and Comparative Gay Identities: Cyril Collard’s Les nuits fauves’. In Territories of Desire in Queer Culture, edited by David Alderson, 84-95. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Masques. ‘Les Gaies et les Lesbiennes du Québec’. Masques, no. 2 (1979): 40–48. Mercer, Kobena. ‘Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary’. In How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, edited by Bad ObjectChoices, 169-210. San Francisco, CA: Bay Press, 1991. ‘Mezipatra Queer Film Festival ‒ History’. Accessed December 5, 2015. http://www. mezipatra.cz/en/2012-10-01-16-23-20/history.html. MIX New York. ‘8th New York Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film Festival, Downtown Community Television Center’s Lookout Video Festival and MIX Brazil

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present MIX ‘94’. 1994. Box 9, Folder MIX NYC. International Gay Information Center collection, Ephemera ‒ Subjects, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. ———. ‘World Clique? Queer Festivals Go Global’. 1994. Box 5, Folder 527. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. Morrish, Liz, and William Leap. ‘Sex Talk: Language, Desire, Identity and Beyond.’ In Language, Sexualities and Desires: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Helen Sauntson and Sakis Kyratzis, 17–40. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Muñoz, José Esteban. ‘Dead White: Notes on the Whiteness of New Queer Cinema’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 1 (1998). New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival. ‘Post-festival Summary Statement’. 1988. Box 1, Folder 48. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. New Fest. ‘A newsletter from the New Festival, Inc.’. Positive Projection 1, no. 1 (1990). Folder NYC International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Films. Organizations collection. The LGBT Center’s Archives, New York City. ———. ‘Dear Vito…’.1990. Letter. Box 20, Folder 1990 (2). The Vito Russo Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Nguyen Tan Hoang. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Nichols, Bill. ‘Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit’. Film Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1994): 16–30. Perriam, Chris. Spanish Queer Cinema. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Persistence of Vision. ‘Press Release: Call for Entries!’ 1981. Box 10, Folder Frameline. International Gay Information Center collection. Ephemera ‒ Subjects, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Provencher, Denis M. Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007. Puar, Jaspir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Rhyne, Ragan. ‘Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders’. In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 9–22. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. ———. ‘Pink Dollars: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals and the Economy of Visibility’. PhD diss., New York University, 2007. Richards, Stuart. The Queer Film Festival: Popcorn and Politics. New York City, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. New York City, NY: Macmillan, 1988.

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Rollet, Brigitte. ‘Tribulations d’une française en Chine: Un entretien avec Mariana Otero’. Diogène, no. 1 (2014). Russo, Vito. ‘April 14th, 1980’. 1980. Box 6, Folder 2 ‘Journal 1980 Closet’. The Vito Russo Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library Sachet, Ambre. ‘Image+Nation LGBT Festival: A Window into the Queer Film World’. The Concordian, 1 December 2015. Schoonover, Karl, and Rosalind Galt. Queer Cinema in the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Schupp, Patrick. ‘Un Regard sur le cinéma gai: deux manifestations’. Séquences, no. 103 (1981): 29–30. Scott, Joan W. ‘Feminist Reverberations’. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (2002): 1–23. Scratch projection. ‘SCRATCH PROJECTION. Programme’. 1990. Box 2, Folder 202. The MIX Collection. Fales Library and Special Collections, The New York University Libraries. Séguret, Olivier. ‘Le ciné gay et lesbien fait son “outing” à Paris’. Libération, 15 December 1994. Stringer, Julian. ‘Regarding Film Festivals’. PhD diss., Indiana University, 2003. Suarez, Juan Antonio. ‘Surprise Me’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 600–602. Sylvestre, Paul-François. Les homosexuels s’organisent. Montreal, QC: Editions Homeureux, 1979. Tascón, Sonia. Human Rights Film Festivals: Activism in Context. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1990. Vallois, Philippe. La passion selon Vallois : Le cinéaste qui aimait les hommes. Edited by Ivan Mitifiot. Paris: ErosOnyx, 2013. Waugh, Thomas. ‘Billet’. La Revue de la cinémathèque (October-November 1989): 14. ———. ‘Cultivated Colonies: Notes on Queer Nationhood and the Erotic Image’. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2, no. 2–3 (1993): 145–178. ———. The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. ‘Good Clean Fung’. Wide Angle 20, no. 2 (1998): 164-175. ———. ‘Lesbian and Gay Documentary: Minority Self-Imaging, Oppositional Film Practice, and the Question of Image Ethics’. In Image Ethics, edited by Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’ Le Berdache 30 (1982): 7–9. ———. The Romance of Transgression in Canada Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.

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Waugh, Thomas and Festival du nouveau cinéma. ‘Section d’information : un regard sur les films gais’. 1980. Press release. Thomas Waugh’s personal archives, Montreal. Wei Xi, ‘First Openly Gay Chinese Film Critic Joins LGBT Parade’. The Global Times, 1 November 2015. Worth, Fabienne. ‘Le Sacré et le Sida (AIDS): Sexuality and its Contradictions in France, 1971-1996’. Discourse 19, no. 3 (1997). Zielinski, Ger. ‘Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals’. PhD diss., McGill, 2008. ———. ‘On the Production of Heterotopia, and Other Spaces, in and around Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 54 (2012).

Filmography Anak-Anak Srikandi. Directed by The Children of Srikandi Collective. 2012. 73 min. Germany/Indonesia. PROD: Srikandi Films. Die blaue Stunde [The Blue Hour]. Directed by Marcel Gisler. 1992. 87 min. Germany. PROD: Marcel Gisler Filmproduktion. Daughters of the Sun [‫]دخرتان خورشید‬. Directed by Miriam Shahriar. 2000. 105 min. Iran. PROD: Farabi Cinema. History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself / Rien n’oblige à répéter l’histoire. Directed by Stéphane Gérard. 2014. 83 min. France. PROD: Stéphane Gérard. DIST: Centre Simone de Beauvoir. Karmen Gei. Directed by Joseph Gai Ramaka. 2001. 86 min. Senegal/France/Canada. PROD: Arte France Cinéma / Canal+ / Euripide Productions / Film Tonic / Les Ateliers de l’Arche / Sofica Sofinergie 5 / Téléfilm Canada / UGC International  / Zagarianka Productions. Ke kulana he mahu [Remembering a Sense of Place]. Directed by Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe. 2001. 67 min. Hawaii. PROD: Kathryn Xian, Jaymee Carvajal, Brent Anbe, and Connie M Florez. VHS. Lan Yu. Directed by Stanley Kwan. 2001. 86 min. Hong Kong / China. PROD: Kwan’s Creation Workshop / Yongning Creation Workshop. Les nuits fauves [Savage Nights]. Directed by Cyril Collard. 1992. 126 min. France. PROD: Banfilm / La Sept Cinéma / Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie. Mixed Kebab. Directed by Guy Lee Thys. 2012. 98 min. Belgium. PROD: Fact & Fiction. DIST (UK/USA): TLA Releasing. Prinz in Hölleland [The Prince in Hell]. Directed by Michael Stock. 1993. 94 min. Germany. PROD: Michael Stock Filmproduktion. Race d’Ep [The Homosexual Century]. Directed by Guy Hocquenghem and Lionel Soukaz. 1979. 95 min. France. PROD: Little Sisters Production.

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La Robe du soir [The Evening Dress]. Directed by Myriam Aziza. 2009. 95 min. France. 95 min. PROD: Mille et Une Productions. Tim Miller: Loud & Queer. Directed by Richard L. Harrison. 1992. 30 min. Quebec/ USA. DIST: Vtape. Video. To Play or To Die. Directed by Frank Krom. 1991. 50 min. Netherlands. PROD: Shooting Star Filmcompany.



Conclusion. The Impossibility of Festival Studies?On the Temporalities of Field Intervention and the Queering of Festival Studies

This book is explicitly conceived as a field intervention. In focusing on LGBTQ festivals’ conflicted temporalities and historiography, my aim was twofold: revealing the axiological coordinates and field imaginary of festival studies – exploring the debates and conventions that structure and define festival research as well as scholars’ relationship to their object of study – and, through a focus on minoritized festivals, expanding, uncutting, or reimagining the field itself. To that end, this book is articulated around two operative concepts, each with their own relationship to the temporality of academic knowledge production. ‘Critical festival studies’ pays attention to the constitution of the field and its quest for legitimacy, revealing the disciplinary assumptions and theoretical framework that structure scholarship. ‘The festival as a method’ is largely inspired by early film studies’ productive uses of the festival format as a praxis of canon building: it mobilizes the theoretical tools of festival studies in order to rethink some of the debates that have animated the discipline.1 LGBTQ Film Festivals inhabits these conflicting temporalities. 1 The concept of ‘the festival as a method’ can easily be applied to pedagogy as well. In 2016 and 2017, I taught a large undergraduate course on sexuality and cinema. Within the context of the class, I did not do a ‘festival week’, but rather used the idea of festivals as a way of illustrating some theoretical concepts. For instance, I organized an in-class discussion on orientalism and Third Cinema, using my students’ festival experiences to think through the tourist gaze and our position as Westerners. Similarly, I created an extra-credit self-reflexive assignment, designed to capture the importance of analyzing film exhibition and format: students were asked to attend a community-based festival screening and write a report emphasize how this particular screening shaped their understanding of the film. While courses on festivals often end up reinforcing festival studies’ theoretical apparatus and field imaginary (creating a canonical idea of what festivals and festival studies are), using the idea of festivals as a pedagogical tool in

Damiens, A., LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728409_concl

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It does not aim at providing a general direction for future research or at reconceptualizing festival studies’ field imaginary through yet another meta-theoretical approach. Rather, this queering of festival studies testifies to the productive messiness of academic knowledge production: instead of providing definitive answers, it presents itself as a constant questioning of both our role as scholars and the effects of the institutionalization of the field. If this book analyzes the temporalities of queer festivals, it is also clearly a product of its time, as festival studies is being simultaneously critiqued (most of the time, rightly so) and institutionalized within academic Curricula through courses and seminars that replicate its field imaginary and political project.2 To some extent, festival studies reflects the changing nature of universities: our willingness to market ourselves as festival scholars and to devise textbooks and syllabi on festivals testifies to the realities of both the job market and grant/institutional policies. In particular, festival scholars’ adoption of social sciences methodologies and theoretical frameworks corresponds to new guidelines in grant policies – to criteria of evaluation that seek to ‘quantify’ the ‘impact’ of research and to funding schemes that prioritize public-private partnerships. The field’s focus on festivals’ relationship to ‘the industry’ exemplifies a context in which academic research is supposed to be translatable to and useful for real world economic development. Here, my position may seem paradoxical. While I was trained in sociology, this book can be read as an attempt to harness festival studies back to the Humanities – to sidestep the field’s constant flight towards maps and statistics.3 To that end, this book can be understood as a double movement that seeks to temporarily suspend the field’s race toward institutional legitimacy. One the one hand, ‘critical festival studies’ questions the coherence of – and non-festival-related courses can offer a productive way of tackling some of film studies’ basic concepts. 2 On teaching film festivals, see: Ger Zielinski et al., ‘Film Festival Pedagogy’. 3 Signif icantly, 5 (out of 7) festival panels at the 2017 NECS conference focused either on statistics or on mapping the festival circuit. There are currently 5 international projects dedicated to mapping festivals in a given country or continent (including: Europe, Germany, France, and Switzerland), most of which are financed by the European Union. See for instance: Loist, ‘Film Circulation on the International Film Festival Network and the Impact on Global Film Culture’; Barrette, ‘Mapping the Current Offer of Audiovisual Festivals and Their Audiences in Montreal’; Moeschler, ‘Reconstructing the Body, Augmenting the Senses. Integrating Film Festivals into Swiss Cultural Statistics’. It is not here my intention here to criticize these fascinating projects (they clearly articulate new forms of knowledge and often aim to intervene in the non-academic festival world and/or to provide guidance for public policies). Rather, I take these projects as symptomatic of the evolution of the discipline of media studies – of its move away from Humanities-based methods and forms of knowledge.

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therefore the possibility of a field dedicated to – festival studies. On the other hand, ‘the festival as a method’ conceptualizes festivals not only as objects to do research on but also as ideal sites for thinking through film studies’ theoretical debates. My position is here somewhat hypocritical as I clearly position (or market) myself as a festival scholar criticizing festival studies, thereby participating in the type of institutional dynamics described in this conclusion. Given the realities of the academic job market and of the publishing industry (the necessity of being located in and readable as a scholar of one or several subfields of film studies), this book can only adopt the paradoxical position of the skeptic within – simultaneously complicit in and criticizing the field’s quest for legitimacy. 4

The paradoxes of identity: doing justice to LGBTQ festivals While LGBTQ Film Festivals sustains conversations that apply beyond the mere realm of LGBTQ festivals, it is guided by a strong commitment to doing justice to gay and lesbian subjects. This ambivalence reflects my position and relationship with cinema: I grew up in the countryside of northern France – in a 100-inhabitants swamp. I did not have access to images of gays and lesbians, as the only discourses circulating at the time pertained to institutional debates over the Civil Solidarity Pact (better known as PACS) – over whether or not gays and lesbians should be able to engage in civil unions. As often in France, gays and lesbians were absent from these debates: the tropes of republicanism and universalism preclude any public statement articulated from a minoritized perspective.5 I largely did my education within the narrow basement of the Parisian gay bookshop Les Mots à la bouche, browsing each Saturday its collection of imported DVDs. As a gay man, my teachers were Gregg Araki, Tom Kalin, and Todd Haynes: cinema was a matter of surviving. 4 As Robyn Wiegman and Wendy Brown make clear, f ield interventions are necessarily articulated from within the field they seek to criticize, in so doing participating in the very dynamics they analyze. See: Wiegman, Object Lessons; Brown, ‘The Impossibility of Women’s Studies’. 5 For an analysis of the specific positionality of French gays and lesbians vis-à-vis republicanism, see: Provencher, Queer French; for an analysis of the PACS debates, the notion of LGBTQ people as minoritized, and their intersection with republicanism, see: Johnston, ‘The Pacs and (post-) Queer Citizenship in Contemporary Republican France’; Perreau, Queer Theory: The French Response. For a history of French gay and lesbian social movements articulated from a pro-republican perspective see: Martel, Le Rose et le noir.

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This book attempts to speak beyond identity politics – to articulate a criticism of festival studies through queer festivals. I am however all too aware that it cannot escape the conundrums of identity. Festival studies classifies scholars along objects of study, not methods or theoretical arguments: the field’s typological impulse separates queer and non-queer scholars. In positing that LGBTQ festivals’ diversity enables a reconceptualization of festival studies, this book paradoxically runs the risk of being accused of being about gay and lesbian festivals. My experience on festival studies panels is particularly instructive: despite presenting on the parts of this book that articulate a critique of festival studies, my papers were systematically understood as applying only to and describing queer festivals. I found myself having to justify my object of study. This is a risk I am willing to take – or rather, a conundrum I cannot escape from: queering is always a paradoxical position, one that attempts to transcend yet depends on and replicates the epistemic separation between art and sexuality, identity and knowledge.6 I can only hope, perhaps naively, that this book provides temporary points of convergence – that, through its criticisms of festival studies, it sustains conversations beyond the mere realm of queer politics. This is also a risk I want to take: while the field generally subsumes LGBTQ festivals under the monolithic category ‘identity-based festivals’ – presupposing that such events constitute a coherent phenomenon or circuit, my analysis pays homage to the creativity of queer people. LGBTQ festivals are as – if not more – diverse as international festivals. LGBTQ Film Festivals thus refuses to focus only on a few established LGBTQ festivals: instead of attending to film traffic, thereby replaying festival studies’ quest for legitimacy, it illustrates the messy realities of queer film exhibition. Taken in their diversity, queer film festivals constitute a productive framework –not only revealing festival studies’ political project but also enabling us to go beyond the field’s focus on a meta-theoretical account of the festival phenomenon. As a justice project dedicated to ephemeral festivals and traces in the archives, this book refuses to make definitive claims on ‘the LGBTQ festival phenomenon’. As such, these events are too diverse to sustain or to articulate any meta-theory of festivals. Instead, they largely document my own investments in academic knowledge production – the circuits and networks through which my academic career and personal life operate, the affective relays and hopes it is invested in. As a project of love, LGBTQ 6 Eve Sedgwick famously describes the double-bind of queer academic research. See: Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.

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Film Festivals foregrounds my attachments to (some) festivals, defined not so much as objects to do research on but rather as events already shaping the act of research. LGBTQ festivals matter, not because they participate in the economy of films but simply because they illustrate how queer people relate, through film, to the world and to one another. It is thus no surprise that this book takes the form of an intergenerational dialogue –documenting my encounters with 1970s gay and lesbian film criticism, attempting to resuscitate archival traces and ghosts of a forgotten past, and testifying to the collective energies of festival organizers. As an identity category outside of the realm of heteronormativity, queerness entails a particular relationship to history, to the erasure of gays and lesbians from archives as well as to the ways in which queer subjects relate to one another. As Muñoz argue, ‘queer cultural production is both an acknowledgement of the lack that is endemic to any heteronormative rendering of the world and a building, a world making, in the face of that lack’.7 LGBTQ Film Festivals pays homage not only to the first generation of queer film scholars, slowly retiring, but also to a legion of anonymous festival-goers and organizers constantly re-inventing queer cinema.

Bibliography Barrette, Pierre. ‘Mapping the Current Offer of Audiovisual Festivals and Their Audiences in Montreal: Re-Thinking the Movie-Going Experience’. Presentation. Paris, France: 2017 NECS Conference. 30 June 2017. Brown, Wendy. ‘The Impossibility of Women’s Studies’. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (1997): 79–101. Johnston, Cristina. ‘The Pacs and (post-) Queer Citizenship in Contemporary Republican France’. Sexualities 11, no. 6 (2008): 688–705 Loist, Skadi. ‘Film Circulation on the International Film Festival Network and the Impact on Global Film Culture’. Grant of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), 2017-2020. Martel, Frederic. Le Rose et le noir : Les homosexuels en France depuis 1968. Paris: Seuil, 1996. Moeschler, Olivier. ‘Reconstructing the Body, Augmenting the Senses. Integrating Film Festivals into Swiss Cultural Statistics’. Presentation. Paris, France: 2017 NECS Conference. 30 June 2017.

7 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 118.

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Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York City, NY: NYU Press, 2009. Perreau, Bruno. Queer Theory: The French Response. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2016. Provencher, Denis M. Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Zielinski, Ger, Eric Pierson, Roger Pace, Lindiwe Dovey, Dorota Ostrowska, Skadi Loist, and Logan Walker. ‘Film Festival Pedagogy: Using the Film Festival in or as a Film Course’. Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, no. 26 (2014): 1–21.

Appendix Table 1. Festivals Referenced Country

City

Event

Date

Australia

Sydney

Mardi Gras Film Festival

1993-ongoing

Notes

Austria

Vienna

Gayfilmfestival

1988

Belgium

Brussels

Massimadi

Starts in 2012 Black queer film festival – independent from Massimadi Haiti & Massimadi Montreal

Bosnia and Sarajevo Herzegovina

Sarajevo Queer Film Festival

2008

Brazil

Various locations

MIX Brazil

Starts in 1993 Independent from MIX NYC

Canada

London, ON

London Lesbian Film Festival

Starts in 1992

Montreal, QC

Images of Homosexu- 1977 ality on the Screen Festival des films du monde

Starts in 1977

Semaine du cinema gai à Montréal

1980

Organised at Concordia, based on the NFT screening

Sans popcorn: images 1982 lesbiennes et gaies Gais à l’écran

1986

Image&Nation

Starts in 1988 Becomes Image+Nation

Massimadi

Starts in 2009 Black queer film festival – independent from Massimadi Haiti & Massimadi Brussels

Festival de films LGBT 2015 de Montréal Peterborough, Canadian Images Film 1978-1984 ON Festival Toronto, ON

Toronto Festival of Festivals

Trent University, not LGBT

Starts in 1976 Renamed Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)

Toronto First 1980 International Gay Film Festival Inverted Image

1986

Queer Festival of Toronto

Starts in 1990 End date unknown.

240  Country

LGBTQ Film Festivals

City

Event

Date

Desh Pardesh

1990-2000

Notes

Inside Out

Starts in 1991

Queer West Film Festival

2008-2016

Toronto Queer Film Festival

Starts in 2016

Beijing

Beijing Queer Film Festival

Starts in 2001

Croatia

Zagreb

Queer Zagreb

2003-2012

Czech Republic

Various cities

Mezipatra

Starts in 2000

Denmark

Copenhagen

Aks

Starts 2014

France

Cannes

Cannes International Film Festival: Queer Palm

Starts in 2012

Hyères

Name unknown

1977

La Rochelle

Festival du film de La Rochelle

Gay and lesbian experimental side-sections in 1975

Lyon

L’autre amour

1976

Écrans Mixtes

Starts in 2011

Marseille

Mémoire des sexualités

1978

Nanterre

Ciné-rebelle

2014-ongoing Université de Nanterre

Paris

Semaine homosexuelle

1977

Quinzaine du cinema homosexual

1978

Amours masculines

1981

Festival de films gays et lesbiens de Paris

Starts in 1989 Renamed Chéries-Chéris

Rennes

Ecrans roses et nuits bleues

1977 or 1978

Berlin

Berlin International Film Festival: Teddy Awards

Starts in 1987

China

Germany

LesbenFilmFestival

Starts in 1985 End date unknown

Internationales Schwul/Lesbisches Filmfestival

1993

Entzaubert

Starts in 2007

241

Appendix

Country

City

Event

Date

Hamburg

Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival

Starts in 1989

Various cities

Verzaubert

1991-2009

Notes

Haiti

Port-au-Prince Massimadi

India

Various cities

India: The Queer View 1994

Indonesia

Jakarta

Q! Film Festival

2002-2017

Israel

Haifa

Kooz

Starts in 2015

Italy

Milan

Il festival internazionale di cinema GayLesbico

Starts in 1986 Renamed MIX Milan

2016

Naples

Omovies

Starts in 2008

Venice

Mostra: Queer Lion

Starts in 2007

Kenya

Nairobi

Out Festival

2012

Myanmar

Yangon

&Proud

Starts in 2014

Gluren in’t Donker Flicker Filmfestival

1978

Netherlands Amsterdam

International Gay and 1986-1991 Lesbian Film Festival Holland Roze Filmdagen

Starts in 1996

International Queer & Starts in 2015 Migrant Film Festival Pakistan

Lahore

Aks

Portugal

Lisbon

Queer Lisboa

Starts in 2014 Starts in 1997

Russia

Moscow

The Soviet Stonewall

1991

St Petersburg / Leningrad

The Soviet Stonewall 1991 (also known as St Petersburg Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) The Edge of Love. Another Look

1994

Bok-o-bok [Side by Side]

Starts in 2008 1996

Tomsk

Pink Flamingos

Spain

Barcelona

Festival Internacional Starts in 2001 de Cine Gay y Lesbico de Barcelona

Bilbao

Zinegoak

Starts in 2004

Taiwan

Taipei

Taiwan International Queer Film Festival

Starts in 2014

Was canceled beforehand.

242 

LGBTQ Film Festivals

Country

City

Event

United Kingdom

London

Images of Homosexu- 1977 ality on the Screen

United States

Date

Notes National Film Theatre

First Festival of Gay Film and Video

1981

London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

Starts in 1986 Becomes BFI Flare

Baltimore, MD Viewpoint: A Film Series on the Crucial Political and Social Issues of Our Times. Homosexuality: Stories of Some Lives

1988

Museum of Fine Arts

Berkeley, CA

In a Different Light

1988

Pacific Film Archive

Chicago, IL

Films by Women

1974

Los Angeles, CA

Reeling

Starts in 1981

The Original Pat Rocco Male Film Festival

1968

Park-Miller Theater

Pat Rocco Presents

1969

Park-Miller Theater

Gay Awareness Week Film Festival

1977

UCLA Gay Student Union

A Series of Films Dealing with Homosexuality

1977 and 1978 Tiffany Theatre

Projecting Stereotypes

1979

Gay & Lesbian Media Festival

Starts in 1983 First organised at UCLA by the Gay and Lesbian Media Coalition, renamed Out on the Screen, becomes Outfest

Gay Cinema Invades Beverly Hills!

1997

UCLA Gay Student Union

Laemmle Theater

Fusion

Starts in 2004 Organised by Outfest

Miami, FL

Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

Starts in 1998 Renamed OUTshine

Minneapolis, MN

Lavender Images

1987-1989

University of Minnesota

Late 60s

Park-Miller Adult Film Theater

1971

Gay Activists Alliance

Great Love Goddesses 1971 of the Screen

Gay Activists Alliance

New York City, Homosexual Film NY Festival All-night pride marathon

Lesbian Film Festival

c.1976

New York Gay Film Festival

1979-1987

Altermedia, inc.

243

Appendix

Country

City

Event

Date

Notes

In Our Own Image

1979 or 1980

Women Make Movies

Russo’s Celluloid Closet Festival

1982

8th Street Playhouse Theater

Abuse

1983

NYU / NALGF

New York Lesbian and Starts in 1987 Becomes MIX NYC in Gay Experimental 1993/1994 Film Festival American Gay Film Tour

1988

Altermedia, inc.

New Fest

Starts in 1988

LOOKOUT!

1990-1994

Video festival, becomes a part of MIX NYC in 1994. DCTV.

How Do I Look?

1989

Bad-Object Choices Collective / Collective for Living Cinema.

Park City, UT

Sundance

Starts in 1978

Philadelphia, PA

Philadelphia Starts in 1994 Started by TLA. International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

San Francisco, Gay Film Fest CA

Starts in 1977 Renamed Frameline

Sayville (Fire Island), NY

2002-2004?

Fire Island Film & Video Festival Outtakes

Starts in 2016

Southampton, Eggo NY

1993

Washington, D.C.

1973

First American Gay Film Festival

First Gay Film Festival 1978 First Annual Washing- 1984 ton, D.C International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

Southampton College (SUNY)

244 

LGBTQ Film Festivals

Table 2. List of Historical Figures Note: * indicates this person died of AIDS-related complications

Name

Occupation

Born in

Aïnouz, Karim

Curator, filmmaker

Bell, Arthur

1966, Fortaleza (Brazil) 1939, Brooklyn (NY)

Biskind, Peter Britton, Andrew

Journalist, activist (GAA) Scholar, critic 1940, USA Critic, scholar, activist 1952, U.K.

Byron, Stuart

Journalist, activist

1941, The Bronx (NY)

Crimp, Douglas Dyer, Richard

Scholar, critic, activist, artist Scholar, critic

1944, Coeur d’Alene (ID) 1945, Leeds (UK)

Edwards, Doug

Critic, arts organiser

1949, USA

Epstein, Rob

Filmmaker, activist

Frilot, Shari Fung, Richard

Filmmaker, curator Filmmaker, activist, curator

Greyson, John

Filmmaker, activist, scholar Filmmaker, curator

1955, New Brunswick (NJ) 1965, Oceanside (CA) 1954, Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago) 1960, Nelson (BC)

Hammer, Barbara Hocquenghem, Guy Hubbard, Jim Johnston, Claire

Filmmaker, activist Filmmaker, activist, festival organiser Filmmaker, scholar, activist, curator

Died in

1984, New York (NY) – at the age of 51 1994, Toronto (ON) – at the age of 42∗ 1991, Los Angeles (CA) – at the age of 50 ∗ 2019, New York (NY) – at the age of 74

1993, Los Angeles (CA) – at the age of 44 ∗

1939, Hollywood (CA) 2019, New York (NY) – at the age of 79 1946, Boulogne1988, Paris (France) – at Billancourt (France) the age of 42∗ 1951, Brooklyn (NY) 1940, United Kingdom

Mercer, Kobena

Scholar, critic

1960, London (UK)

Navarro, Ray

Activist, artist

1964, USA

Nestle, Joan

Archivist, critic, activist, writer

1940, The Bronx (NY)

Olson, Jenni

Distributor, curator, critic

1962, Falcon Heights (MN)

1987, United Kingdom – at the age of 47

1990, New York (NY) – at the age of 26 ∗

245

Appendix

Name

Occupation

Rich, B. Ruby

Critic, curator, festival organiser, scholar, public planner Russo, Vito Activist, critic, arts organiser Salzgeber, Manfred Filmmaker, producer, curator Schmiechen, Producer, activist, art Richard organiser Schulman, Sarah Essayist, novelist, festival organiser, activist, archivist Sevcik, Jeffrey Activist. Soukaz, Lionel

Tyler, Parker

Filmmaker, activist, curator Festival organiser, filmmaker Critic, author, poet

Vallois, Philippe

Filmmaker, activist

Waugh, Thomas

Critic, scholar, activist, curator Critic, scholar

Speck, Wieland

Wood, Robin

Born in

Died in

1948, Boston (MA)

1946, New York (NY) 1943, Łódź (Poland) 1947, St. Louis (MI)

1990, New York (NY) – at the age of 44 ∗ 1994, Berlin (Germany) – at the age of 51∗ 1993, Los Angeles (CA) – at the age of 45

1958, New York (NY)

1955, San Francisco (CA) 1953, Paris (France) 1951, Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany) 1904, New Orleans (LA) 1948, Bordeaux (France 1948, London (ON) 1931, Richmond (UK)

1986, San Francisco (CA) – at the age of 30 ∗

1974, New York (NY) – at the age of 65

2009, Toronto (ON) – at the age of 78

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Wolfe, Kathy. ‘Movie File “Sharing” Goes Legit’. The Huffington Post, 7 June 2012. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-wolfe/moviefile-sharing-goes-l_b_1575233.html. ‘Women Make Movies & Chelsea Gay Association Present In Our Own Image – Five Film Programs of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Feminist Consciousness’. n/d. Box 19, Folder Women Make Movies. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk. Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films. ‎New York City, NY: Snippet View, 1965. ———. ‘Psychanalyse de “Psycho”‘. Cahiers du cinéma 19, no. 13 (1960). ———. ‘Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic’. Film Comment 14, no. 1 (1978): 12–17. Worth, Fabienne. ‘Le Sacré et le Sida (AIDS): Sexuality and its Contradictions in France, 1971-1996’. Discourse 19, no. 3 (1997). ———. ‘Toward Alternative Film Histories: Lesbian Films, Spectators, Filmmakers and the French Cinematic/cultural Apparatus’. Quarterly Review of Film & Video 15, no. 1 (1993): 55–77. Wuest, Bryan. ‘Defining Homosexual Love Stories: Pat Rocco, Categorization, and the Legitimation of Gay Narrative Film’. Film History 29, no. 4 (2017): 59–88. Zeilinger, Martin, and Rosemary J. Coombe. ‘Three Peters and an Obsession with Pierre: Intellectual Property in John Greyson’s Un©ut’. In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie, and Thomas Waugh, 438–449. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2013. Zielinski, Ger. ‘Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals’. PhD diss., McGill, 2008. ———. ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera: The Case of Queer Film Festivals and Archives of Feelings’. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 138–158. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016. ———. ‘On the Production of Heterotopia, and Other Spaces, in and around Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 54 (2012). Zielinski, Ger, Eric Pierson, Roger Pace, Lindiwe Dovey, Dorota Ostrowska, Skadi Loist, and Logan Walker. ‘Film Festival Pedagogy: Using the Film Festival in or as a Film Course’. Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, no. 26 (2014): 1–21. Zimmerman, Bonnie. ‘The Past in Our Present: Theorizing the Activist Project of Women’s Studies’. In Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in

Institutional Change, edited by Robyn Wiegman, 183–190. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Filmography Code: PROD = producer; DIST (country) = distributor (country). 25! A Brief History of the Festival. Directed by Marc Huestis. 2001. 60 min. USA. PROD: Marc Huestis. DIST (international): Frameline Distribution. Video. 120 Battements par minutes [BPM]. Directed by Robin Campillo. 2017. 143 min. France. PROD: Les Films de Pierre / France 3 Cinéma / Page 114 / Memento Films Production / FD Production / Playtime Production (co-production). DIST (FR) : Memento Films. Acting Out: 25 Jahre Queerer Film und Community in Hamburg [Acting Out: 25 Years of Queer Film & Community in Hamburg]. Directed by Ana Grillo, Christina Magdalinou, and Silvia Torneden. 2014. 86 min. Germany. PROD: Aye Aye Film. DVD. The AIDS Show. Directed by Peter Adair and Rob Epstein. 1986. USA. 58 min. PROD: PBS. DIST (USA): Direct Cinema Limited. Anak-Anak Srikandi. Directed by The Children of Srikandi Collective. 2012. 73 min. Germany/Indonesia. PROD: Srikandi Films. Appropriate Behavior. Directed by Desiree Akhavan. 2015. 86 min. UK. PROD: Parkville Pictures. DIST (UK): Pecadillo. DIST (US): Gravitas Venture. The Attack of the Giant Moussaka. Directed by Panos H. Koutras. 1999. Greece. 99 min. PROD: 100% Synthetic Films. DIST (France): Ad Vitam Pictures. Bande-annonce officielle du 4ème festival Écrans Mixtes. Directed by Rémi Lange. 2014. 2 min. France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftk9ABs54TQ. Bande annonce 5e Festival Écrans Mixtes. Directed by Ludovic Mercier. 2015. 50 sec. France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9_y3uwrbKE. Bande annonce 7ème édition festival Écrans Mixtes. Directed by Ludovic Mercier. 2017. 30 sec. France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9_y3uwrbKE Bande-annonce Rebelle/Rebel : 2ème édition Festival É crans Mixtes. Directed by Ludovic Mercier. 2012. 40 sec. France. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KWJo8d_jnaY La battaglia di Algeri [The Battle of Algiers]. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. 1965. 121 min. Algeria/Italy. PROD: Casbah Film / Igor Film. Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community. Directed by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg. 1984. 87 min. USA. PROD: Before Stonewall Inc. / Center for the Study of Filmed History / Alternative Media Information Center. DIST (US): David Whitten [theatrical: 1984], PBS [1986], Frameline Distribution [DVD]. Bending the Lens: 20 Years of the London Lesbian Film Festival. Directed by Mary J. Daniel. 2012. 33 min. Canada. PROD and DIST (Canada): London Lesbian Film Festival.

280 

LGBTQ Film Festivals

Die blaue Stunde [The Blue Hour]. Directed by Marcel Gisler. 1992. 87 min. Germany. PROD: Marcel Gisler Filmproduktion. The Boys in the Band. Directed by William Friedkin. 1972. 118 min. USA. PROD: Cinema Center Films / Leo Films. DIST (US): National General Pictures. Brokeback Mountain. Directed by Ang Lee. 2006. 134 min. USA/Canada. PROD and DIST (US): Focus Features. But I’m a Cheerleader… Directed by Jamie Babbit. 1999. 85 min. USA. DIST (US): Lions Gate. La Cage aux folles. Directed by Édouard Molinaro. 1978. 91 min. France. PROD: Les Productions Artistes Associées. DIST (US): United Artists. Chinese Characters. Directed by Richard Fung. 1986. 21 min. Canada. PROD: Richard Fung. 21 min. Video. Covered. Directed by John Greyson. 2009. 15 min. Canada. PROD: Greyzone. DIST (international): V-Tape. Video. Cruising. Directed by William Friedkin. 1980. 102 min. USA. PROD: Lorimar Film Entertainment. DIST (US): United Artists. Daughters of the Sun [‫]دخرتان خورشید‬. Directed by Miriam Shahriar. 2000. 105 min. Iran. PROD: Farabi Cinema. The Dead Boys’ Club. Directed by Mark Christopher. 1992. 26 min. USA. PROD and DIST: Frameline Distribution. Eating Out. Directed by Q. Allan Brocka. 2004. 90 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment. Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. Directed by Philip J. Bartell. 2007. 79 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment Eating Out: All You Can Eat. Directed by Glenn Gaylord. 2009. 80 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment. Eating Out: Drama Camp. Directed by Q. Allan Brocka. 2011. 91 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment. Eating Out: The Open Weekend. Directed by Q. Allan Brocka. 2012. 88 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Ariztical Entertainment. Edward II. Directed by Derek Jarman. 1991. 87 min. UK. PROD: BBC Films. Elegy in the Streets. Directed by Jim Hubbard. 1989. 30 min. USA. PROD: Jim Hubbard. Le Festival restera au placard [The Festival Will Stay in the Closet – I translate]. Directed by Valérie Bah. 2017. Canada. PROD: Massimadi Montreal. Frameline28. Directed by Cheryl Rosenthal. 2004. 45 sec. USA. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=U02wfpvo4Ss Frameline32. Directed by Cheryl Rosenthal. 2008. 3 x 40 sec. USA. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-GKAavZRU; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Cm4KbgM3UEc; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iHi-YgP1Gw.

Filmogr aphy

281

Frameline33. Directed by Christy Schraefer and Greg Sirota. 2009. 2 min. USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckq3x33RUvQ Frameline34. Directed by Chico’s Angels. 2010. 4 x 50 seconds. USA. PROD: Dotfilmz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvjgkINv-SY. Frameline39. Directed by Joshua Grannell. 2015. 2 min. USA. https://youtu.be/ V6qtRgn-mwI. Frisk. Directed by Todd Verow. 1995. 88 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Strand Releasing. Funny Girl. Directed by William Wyler. 1968. 151 min. USA. PROD: Columbia Pictures / Rastar Pictures. DIST (US): Columbia Pictures. Generations. Directed by Barbara Hammer. 2010. 30 min. USA. DIST: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. 16 mm. Gerontophilia. Directed by Bruce LaBruce. 2013. 86 min. Canada. PROD: 1976 Productions / New Real Films. DIST (US): Strand Releasing. Go Fish. Directed by Rose Troche. 1994. 83 min. USA. PROD: Can I Watch / Islet / KPVI / Killer Films / Samuel Goldwyn. DIST (US): Samuel Goldwyn. Going Down in LA-LA Land. Directed by Casper Andreas. 2011. 104 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): Embrem Entertainment. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Directed by John Cameron Mitchell. 2001. 94 min. USA. PROD: Killer Films / New Line. History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself / Rien n’oblige à répéter l’histoire. Directed by Stéphane Gérard. 2014. 83 min. France. PROD: Stéphane Gérard. DIST: Centre Simone de Beauvoir. In dit teken [In this sign – I translate]. Directed by Jan Lemstra. 1949. 13 min. Netherlands. PROD: the Cultuur-en OntspanningsCentrum [COC: Cultural Recreation Centre]. Karmen Gei. Directed by Joseph Gai Ramaka. 2001. 86 min. Senegal/France/Canada. PROD: Arte France Cinéma / Canal+ / Euripide Productions / Film Tonic / Les Ateliers de l’Arche / Sofica Sofinergie 5 / Téléfilm Canada / UGC International / Zagarianka Productions. Ke kulana he mahu [Remembering a Sense of Place]. Directed by Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe. 2001. 67 min. Hawaii. PROD: Kathryn Xian, Jaymee Carvajal, Brent Anbe, and Connie M Florez. VHS. Lan Yu. Directed by Stanley Kwan. 2001. 86 min. Hong Kong / China. PROD: Kwan’s Creation Workshop / Yongning Creation Workshop. Laurence Anyways. Directed by Xavier Dolan. 2012. 168 min. Canada/France. PROD: Lyla Films / MK2. DIST (France): MK2. DIST (US): Breaking Glass Pictures. The Living End. Directed by Gregg Araki. 1992. 81 min. USA. PROD: Desperate Pictures / October Films. DIST (US): Strand Releasing.

282 

LGBTQ Film Festivals

Looking for Langston. Directed by Isaac Julien. 1989. 41 min. UK. PROD: Sankofa Collective. Massimadi 2012: Bande-annonce officielle. 2012. 6 min. Canada. PROD: Kadory Medias. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlAXcTIL6tk. Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival 2005. Directed by Michael Donnel. 2005. 1 min 50. USA. https://youtu.be/Iyivwx8z7o4. Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival ‒ Trailer 2007. Directed by Onix Padron. 2007. USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeHQRRUt46E Miwa, à la recherche du lézard noir [Miwa: Looking for Black Lizard]. Directed by Pascal-Alex Vincent. 65 min. 2010. France. PROD: Local Films. MIX 19 Trailer. 2006. MIX 24 Trailer. 2011. Mixed Kebab. Directed by Guy Lee Thys. 2012. 98 min. Belgium. PROD: Fact & Fiction. DIST (UK/USA): TLA Releasing. Mommy. Directed by Xavier Dolan. 2014. 139 min. Canada. PROD: Les Films Séville / Metafilms / Sons of Manual. DIST (Canada): Les Films Séville. Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins. 2016. 111 min. USA. PROD and DIST (US): A24. Nous étions un seul homme [We Were One Man]. Directed by Philippe Vallois. 1979. 91 min. France. PROD: Philippe Vallois. DIST (US): Frameline Distribution [1981]. Les nuits fauves [Savage Nights]. Directed by Cyril Collard. 1992. 126 min. France. PROD: Banfilm / La Sept Cinéma / Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie. Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians. Directed by Richard Fung. 1986. 56 min. Canada. PROD: Richard Fung. Video. Out at Work. Directed by Kelly Anderson and Tami Gold. 1987. 56 min. USA. PROD and DIST: Frameline Distribution. Outfest 2012. 2012. 6 min. USA. PROD: Outfest. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zn6n_Dh4UOs. Outfest 2015. 2015. 40 sec. USA. PROD: Outfest. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2kmiprlqYP8. Outfest Fusion Festival Trailer. 2016. 45 sec. USA. PROD: Outfest. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=VZCo60mxQdo. Pariah. Directed by Dee Rees. 2011. 86 min. USA. PROD: Chicken and Egg Pictures / MBK Entertainment. DIST (US): Focus Pictures. Paris Is Burning. Directed by Jennie Livingston. 1990. 71 min. USA. PROD: Miramax. Prinz in Hölleland [The Prince in Hell]. Directed by Michael Stock. 1993. 94 min. Germany. PROD: Michael Stock Filmproduktion. Queer Artivism. Directed by Masa Zia Lenardic, and Anja Wutej. 2013. 93 min. Slovenia. PROD: White Balance. Queer Lisboa 15. Directed by Pau De la Sierra. 2011. 16 sec. Portugal. PROD: Fuel Lisbon. https://youtu.be/WZDZtOzhHlw.

Filmogr aphy

283

Queer Sarajevo Festival. Directed by Cazim Dervišević and Maša Hilčišin. 2009. 32 min. Bosnia and Herzegovina. PROD: Organization Q. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=PiDVdiuX2Yc Race d’Ep [The Homosexual Century]. Directed by Guy Hocquenghem and Lionel Soukaz. 1979. 95 min. France. PROD: Little Sisters Production. La Robe du soir [The Evening Dress]. Directed by Myriam Aziza. 2009. 95 min. France. 95 min. PROD: Mille et Une Productions. Rock Around the Clock. Directed by Fred F. Sears. 1956. 77 min. USA. PROD: Clover Productions. Scorpio Rising. Directed by Kenneth Anger. 1965. 28 min. USA. PROD: Puck Films Production. Stop the Movie. Directed by Jim Hubbard. 1980. 14 min. USA. PROD: Jim Hubbard. Super 8. Storme: The Lady of the Jewel Box. Directed by Michelle Parkerson. 1987. 21 min. USA. PROD: Women Make Movies. Swoon. Directed by Tom Kalin. 1992. 92 min. USA. PROD: Killer Films. DIST (USA): Fine Line Features / Strand Releasing. Tangerine. Directed by Sean Baker. 2015. 88 min. USA. PROD: Duplass Brothers Productions / Through Films. DIST (US): Magnolia Pictures. Thelma & Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott. 1991. 130 min. USA / France. PROD: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Pathé Entertainment. The Times of Harvey Milk. Directed by Rob Epstein. 1984. 90 min. USA. PROD: Black Sand Productions / Pacific Arts. DIST (US): TC Films International. Tim Miller: Loud & Queer. Directed by Richard L. Harrison. 1992. 30 min. Quebec/ USA. DIST: Vtape. Video. Tom à la ferme [Tom at the Farm]. Directed by Xavier Dolan. 2013. 102 min. France/ Canada. PROD: MK2 Productions / Sons of Manual. DIST (Canada): Les Films Séville. DIST (France): Diaphana Films. Tomboy. Directed by Céline Sciamma. 2011. 82 min. France. PROD: Hold Up Films. DIST (France): Pyramide. DIST (US): Rocket Releasing / Wolfe Video. DIST (UK): Pecadillo. Tongues Untied. Directed by Marlon Riggs. 1989. 55 min. USA. PROD: Signifyin’ Works. DIST: Frameline Distribution [1989] / Strand Releasing [DVD: 2008]. To Play or To Die. Directed by Frank Krom. 1991. 50 min. Netherlands. PROD: Shooting Star Filmcompany. Trick. Directed by Jim Fall. 1999. 89 min. USA. PROD: Good Machine / Roadside Attractions. DIST (US): Fine Line Features. Un©ut. Directed by John Greyson. 1997. 97 min. Canada. PROD: Grey Zone. DIST: Domino Film & Television International. Water into Fire. Directed by Zachary Longboy. 1994. 11 min. Canada. Video.

284 

LGBTQ Film Festivals

The Watermelon Woman. Directed by Cheryl Dunye. 1997. 90 min. USA. PROD: Dancing Girl. DIST (US): First Run Pictures. Weekend. Directed by Andrew Haigh. 2011. 97 min. UK. PROD: The Bureau / Glendale Picture Company. DIST (US): IFC Films / Sundance Selects. DIST (France): Outplay. DIST (UK): Pecadillo. Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf? Directed by Anna Margarita Albelo. 2014. 83 min. USA. PROD: Burning Bra Productions / Local Films / Steakhaus Productions. DIST (US): Wolfe. DIST (France): Outplay. Windows. Directed by Gordon Willis. 1980. 96 min. USA. PROD: Mike Lobell Productions. DIST (US): United Artists. The Wizard of Oz. Directed by Victor Fleming. 1939. 101 min. USA. PROD: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Women. Directed by George Cukor. 1939. 133 min. USA. PROD: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Women I Love. Directed by Barbara Hammer. 1976. USA. The Word is Out. Directed by Nancy Adair, Andrew Brownand Rob Epstein. 1977. 133 min. USA. PROD: Mariposa Film Group.



About the Author

Antoine Damiens is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University (Montreal).

Index &Proud (Yangon) 190 25! (film) 171-75 8th Street Playhouse 82, 133 Abell, Tom 12, 88 n.54 Accreditations 159, 163 Acting Out (film) 52 n.40, 171-75, 178 Actor network theory 19, 20 n.12, 62 Act Up 48 n.27, 53 Additive programming strategies 95 Adult theatres 42, 51, 81-83, 131 Advocate, The 119, 122, 140 Affect and festival-going 32, 117, 157-58, 175-78 of research 41, 44, 146, 169-170, 175-78, 236 Age of the directors 19 Age of the programmers 19 AIDS see HIV/AIDS AIDS Show, The (film) 174 Aïnouz, Karim 57 n.63, 58 n.64, 136 Akhavan, Desiree 12, 102 Aks (Copenhagen and Lahore) 191-92 Alamode Film 101 Albelo, Anna Margarita 12, 97 Allen, Pathy 136 A-list festivals see International film festivals Altermedia LTD 85-86, 187, 188 Alternative Cinema conference 127-28, 130-31, 141 Altman, Dennis 133, 207, 214 American Center (Paris) 191 American Film Institute National Video Festival 142 American Gay Festival (Chicago) 66 American Gay Film Tour see Altermedia LTD Amours masculines (Paris) 207 Amsterdam Film & Theater Arts Festival 207 Gluren in’t Donker Flicker Filmmfestival 50, 57 International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Holland 57 International Queer and Migrant Film Festival 192 Roze Filmdage 57 Anak-Anak Srikandi (film) 218 Ancillary markets 87-89 Anger, Kenneth 168 Anthology Film Archives 58, 135 Anthropology see Ethnographic observations Appadurai, Arjun 221-25 Appropriate Behavior (film) 102 Araki, Gregg 174, 235 Architecture visual architecture 157-164, 170-71,178 verbal architecture 157-59, 201

Archival footage 164, 169, 171-74, 202 Archives festival as archives 157-58, 165 festival as archivists 170 history of archives 25, 28, 31, 40-49 principle of classification of archives 40-49 problem archives 45 virtual archives 32, 40, 157, 169, 178 Archives gaies du Québec 12, 42 Ariztical Entertainment 95 Arroyo, José 135 Arsenal (Berlin) 168 Art cinema 19, 81, 85, 88, 92-94, 118, 199, 212 Arte France 100 Art for art’s sake 93-94 Arthaus Filmverleih 96 Association for Independent Video and Film 131-32 Association of Independent Television and Filmmakers 132 Attack of the Giant Moussaka (film) 168 Audiences 20, 33, 49, 79, 82-83, 93-100, 116, 122, 159-160, 171-73, 176-78, 189, 192-94, 199 Audre Lorde Project 202 Auteur 99-100, 119, 139 Authenticity 32, 99, 193 Avant-garde 81-82, 84, 118, 131 Awards 19, 87, 90, 99-101, 137, 173, 206 Bad object-choices see How Do I Look? Bah, Valérie 176 Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts 43, 188 Bard College see Alternative Cinema conference Barnard Conference 134 Barthes, Roland 159, 206 BBC 96, 101 Before Stonewall (film) 207 Beijing Queer Film Festival 189 Bell, Arthur 129-130 Bending the Lens (film) 171-72, 174-75 Bent Lens, The (book) 137-38 Berdache, le 121 Berger, Mark 132 Berkeley 43, 121, 142 Berlin Arsenal 168 Berlin International Film Festival 18, 19, 57, 62, 78, 87, 198, 207, 209 Entzaubert 174 Internationales Schwul/Lesbisches Filmfestival Berlin 57 Biskind, Peter 88 n.56, 121, 127 Blaue Stunde, die (film) 199 Bleecker Street cinema 82, 207 n.65

288  Body Politic, the 121-22 Boellstroff, Tom 10, 192, 193 n.28, 201-02, 223 Bok-o-Bok (St Petersburg) 172, 190 Bordowitz, Gregg 135 Boudreau, Charlie 12, 199 Bourdieu, Pierre 19-20, 62, 80, 91-95, 102-03 Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) 177 Boys in the Band, The (film) 128 Brady Theatre 83 Brass, Perry 202 Brattle Theater (New England) 86 n.44 Breaking Glass Pictures 100 Briggs, John 128, 130 British Film Institute 79, 126, see also National Film Theatre Britton, Andrew 122 Brocka, Allan Q. 94 Brokeback Mountain (film) 99 Brooke, Kaucyila 65, 137 Bryant, Anita 161 But I’m a Cheerleader (film) 88 Butler, Alec 175 Butler, Judith 166 Byron, Stuart 122, 129 Cable TV 56, 87-90 Cahiers du cinéma, les 119 Camping Out (film programme) 133-34 Canadian Images Film Festival 134 Cannes Film Festival 12, 18, 19, 27, 62, 90, 99, 100, 115, 173, 209 Canon 81, 92, 93, 96, 116, 118, 122-23, 125, 134, 138-39, 145, 175 Capital cultural 19, 20, 62, 92, 96, 212 economic 91, 93-96, 221 negative 98, 100 symbolic 93-94, 98-99, 103 Carlomusto, Jean 135 Case studies 23, 57, 62-63, 175 Catalogues 33, 49, 50, 87, 192-200, 207-212, 220-21 Celluloid Closet Book 119, 121-22 Tour 82, 133 Censorship legislation 29 n.45, 48, 50-51, 80-83, 88 n.54, 127, 206-07 of festivals/films 175-77, 189, 206-07 Centre/periphery 103, 174, 187-89 Centre Simone de Beauvoir 97 Chéries-Chéris (Paris) 191, 206 Cherry Grove Cherry Grove Historical Archives 42, 49 Fire Island Film & Video Festival 48 Outtakes 48 Chicago American Gay Festival 66 Films by Women 141 Reeling 54

LGBTQ Film Festivals

Chin, Daryl 84 n.36, 88 n.52, 91, 135 Christopher, Mark 174 Chronological time 169, 171-72, 175 Cinéart 101 Cineffable 97 Cinemathèque Québécoise 9, 121, 195 Cinematic cultures see film cultures Cinephilia 32, 63-64, 77, 80-81, 96, 145, 171, 198, 214 Circuits 18, 19-22, 28, 32, 49, 57, 59, 61-63, 77-80, 83-103, 121, 131, 133, 174-75, 186-87 Coalition Against Violence Against Women 130 Cold War 19, 190 Collage 31, 32, 157, 166-68, 170, 186-87, 224 Collective bad faith 91 Collective for Living Cinema 134-35 Compulsory heterosexuality 119 Concordia University 9-10, 120, 123-24 Images of Homosexuality on the Screen 43, 123, 194 Conferences 9, 11, 29, 30 n.47, 52, 60, 116, 119, 121, 123, 127-28, 130-31, 133-35, 141-43, 145, 234 Conundrum of identity 27, 29-30 n.46, 125, 165-66, 236 Cornell 52 Covered (film) 176-77 Cramer, Peter 136 Crimp, Douglas 135 Criterion 96 Critical festival studies 27, 31-32, 64-65, 144-46, 233-34 Critics see film critics Critics/scholars binary 117-18, 123-28 Crossover 78-99, 102-03 Cruising cruising the archives 40-41, 44, 49 Cruising (film) 85, 127-131 Cultural currency 77-79, 93, 102-03, 162, 189 Cultural memory 157-58, 162-63, 177 Cultural intermediaries 91-92 Cultural translation 208, 214-15, 220-23 Culture wars 65, 161 Curation and canon formation 118, 123-26, 143-44 festivals’ curatorial practices 21, 31, 98 n.93, 143-44, 165, 168, 185, 198 festivals as curation 157, 166, 168, 170, 224 Cvetkovich, Ann 45, 47, 53, 169, 178 Cyclical time 163-64, 167, 172 Dangerous to know (London) Distribution 88 Festival 86 n.44, 88. 54, 188 n.8 Daniel, Mary J. see Bending the Lens Daughters of the Sun (film) 215, 217 Dayan, Daniel 20 n.12, 145-46, 158-59 Dead Boys’ Club, The (film) 174 Dedicated programming 218 De Lauretis, Theresa 135, 140 Deocampo, Nick 135

Index

Dervišević, Cazim 176 Deiter, Newt 133 De Valck, Marijke 11, 18-21, 49, 60-62, 92, 186 n.4 Developmentalist history 56-59 Diaspora 176, 191-92, 215, 224 Director’s Fortnight 19 Director’s Guild of America 137 Disciplinary unconscious 31, 39, 59, 64-66 Disjunctive nature of globalization 220-24 Dispositions 91, 94 Distefano, John 135 Distributors 12, 20, 43, 55, 58 n.64, 60, 62, 77-103, 127-131, 138, 174, 188, 199 Diversity politics 57, 98, 135 n.110, 141, 161, 174-75, 192 of the festival phenomenon 21-22, 52, 61, 236 Documentary about festivals 171-78 filmmaking 83, 118, 164, 169, 202-03, 206, 212, 213 festivals 23 Dolan, Xavier 99-102 Donnell Library Center 43 Dorf, Julie 138 n.126, 189-190 Doty, Alexander 138 Downtown Community Television Center see Lookout Drift distribution 86 n.45 Dunye, Cheryl 97-98 Dyer, Richard 26, 78, 81, 83 n.29, 118, 120-23, 133-34, 140, 158 Eating Out (film series) 95 Economy of film 77-102 of visibility see visibility Ecosystem (queer film) 79, 90-91 Écrans Mixtes 12, 28, 79, 99, 158, 171, 181 Edel, Deb 202 Edge of Love, The (St Petersburg) 190 Edinburgh Film Festival 125-26 Edward II (film) 98 Edwards, Doug 122 Eichhorn, Kate 44, 46 n.22, 53 n.45 Eggo Film Festival 52, 132 Entrepot (Paris) 188 Entzaubert (Berlin) 174 Ephemera 43, 45-49, 51, 53, 177 Ephemerality 18, 30, 31, 39-48, 52, 56-59, 65-67, 116-17, 236 Epicentre Films 88 Epstein, Rob 131 n.83, 132 n.90, 134 n.100, 173, 174 Ethnoscape 185, 221, 224 Ethnographic observations 21, 30, 40, 54, 61 Event eventness 163-64 live event 163-64, 177 recurring event 66, 163-64 special event 163-65 Exoticism 216-19

289 Experience see festival-going experience Experimental festivals 52-53, 57-58, 86, 135, 168 filmmaking 78, 90, 82-84, 86, 88, 93, 96, 97,135, 168, 169-170, 202-04 Fales Special Collections 12, 42, 46, 53 Fantasy 166-170, 178, 223-24 Fantasy-echoes 166-170, 223-24 Federici, João 175 Feminist film criticism 125-27, 131 Feminist film festivals 125-27, 131 Festival as a method 24-25, 158, 178, 187, 224, 233-35 Festival de films gays et lesbiens de Paris see Chéries-Chéris Festival des films du monde (Montréal) 122, 123 n.46 Festival du nouveau cinéma (Montréal) 195 n.35, 209 Festival restera au placard, le (film) 176 Field imaginary 59-64 intervention 24, 33, 233 of cultural production 91-94, 99-103 of cultural reproduction 92-93, 103, 125 theory see Bourdieu, Pierre queer field of cultural production 94-96 Festival-going experience 143, 158-65, 168-69, 175-79 Film critics 12, 60, 81, 115-145 Film cultures 79, 158 Film Festival Yearbook Series 20-21 Film Sales Company 96 Film & Theater Arts Festival (Amsterdam) 207 Films by Women Festival (Chicago) 141 Firehouse Flicks 119, 123 Fire Island see Cherry Grove First American Gay Film Festival see Janus Theater First Annual Washington, D.C., International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival 133 First Festival of Gay Film and Video (London) 207 First Gay Film Festival (Washington, DC) 42, 133 n.96 Flare (London) 79 Fleming Martha 133, 140 Fleming, Victor 160 Focus Pictures 99 Format festival 27, 32, 80-83, 85-86, 117, 144, 158, 170, 178, 233 film 19, 57, 58, 66, 84-89, 168, 171 Foucault, Michel 22, 26, 28-30, 44, 51, 134, 139, 206, 208 Frameline distribution 86, 173-74 film festival 54, 78, 86, 138, 145 n.165, 158, 159-161, 164-65, 170-71, 173-74, 179, 189-190

290  Framing Festivals 21 French universalism / republicanism 202 n.54, 204-06, 235 Friedkin, William 127-29 Frilot, Shari 57 n.63, 58 n.64, 136 Frisk (film) 174 Fusion (Los Angeles) 167 Fung, Richard 98 n.92, 144, 159, 218 Fuss, Diana 135 Gais à l’écran (Montréal) 57, 133, 194 Galt, Rosalind 11, 186 n.4, 207-08 Gamson, Josha 58 n.67, 143 Gatekeeper 19, 92, 103 Gay Academic Union 66, 119, 123 Gay Activists Alliance 46, 119 Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation 46 Gay and Lesbian Media Coalition see Outfest Gay Artists in the Entertainment Industry 133 Gay Awareness conference (Indiana) 121 Gay Awareness Film Festival (Los Angeles) 43, 121 Gay Film Festival (New York) 85-86, 98, 132, 188 Gay Film Fest (San Francisco) 54, 132, 173-74, 175 Gay Friends of Concordia 123-24 Gay Hollywood Film & Video Guide (book) 137 Gay Left collective 121, 122 Gay liberation festivals organized by the gay liberation movement 42, 59-51, 83, 207 politics 42, 46, 83, 118-122, 125-26, 130, 139, 202, 204-07 Gay Media Task Force 133 Gay Rites of Spring conference 121 Gays and Film (book) 26, 118, 121, 123, 138 Gay Student Union see UCLA Gaythink conference 121 Generations (film) 78 Genre 55, 80, 96 Gérard, Stéphane 4, 13, 169-170, 202-04 Gerontophilia (film) 168 Gerson, Phillip 133 Gever, Martha 98 n.94, 134-35, 165 Geo-blocking 89-90 Geopolitical imaginary 184-195, 212, 215 Ghetto 100, 165, 205 n.57 Gittings, Chris E. 176-77 Globalization global gay 190 of the festival phenomenon 54-56, 90, 103, 193 of sexuality 33, 56, 185-87, 207-224 Gluren in’t Donker Flicker Filmmfestival (Amsterdam) 50 n.33, 57 GLQ 21-22, 140, 142-44 Go Fish (film) 88, 97 Going Down in La-La Land (film) 78

LGBTQ Film Festivals

Grannell, Joshua 13, 160-61 Great Love Goddesses of the Screen 123 Greyson, John 12, 29 n.45, 131-33, 135, 176-77 Grillo, Ana 13, 171, 173 Habitus 91; see also Bourdieu, Pierre Halberstam, Jack J. 143, 159, 168 Hall, Stuart 165-66 Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo) 86 n.44 Hammer, Barbara 78, 84 n.32, 133, 135, 173 Hampshire College; 121 Hanson, Ellis 140-41 Harbord, Janet 65 n.89, 79, 163-64, 215 HBO 89 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (film) 212 Henderson, Lisa 78, 98-99 Heterotopia 22, 208 Hilčišin, Maša 176 Hilderbrand, Lucas 9, 41, 89-90 Historiography developmentalist 56-59 feminist 25-26 History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself (film) 4, 169-170, 178, 202-04, 206-07 HIV/AIDS 46-48, 52-53, 55, 84, 127, 134-35, 161, 174, 206 Hocquenghem, Guy 204-05 Hold-Up Films 100 Hollywood 19, 81, 85, 123, 131, 164, 167, 198, 210 Hollywood Boulevard (theatre) 83 Homoeconomy 137 Homophobia 50-51, 77, 127, 130-34, 175-77 Homoscapes 185, 221 Horrigan, Bill 135, 142 How Do I Look? 52, 135, 141-42 Hu, Marcus 174 Hubbard, Jim 12, 52-53, 57-58, 84, 86, 129, 135-36 Huestis, Marc 171 Human rights 191 Hybridity 185, 224 Iconography 161-62, 170, 202, 212 Identity knowledge 63-64, 125, 139 conundrum of 30, 125, 165-66, 236 Images in the Dark (book) 137-38 Image+Nation 12, 28, 43, 57, 161, 185, 193-201, 207-239 Images of Homosexuality (Trent University) 134 Images of Homosexuality on the Screen London 123 Concordia 43, 123. 194 Independent blockbuster independent 88-90, 93 independent boom 19, 55, 87, 97-98 independent film channel (IFC) 101

Index

Independent Closets Gay & Lesbian Filmmakers Open Doors 132 Inderpal, Grewal 193 India The Queer View 189-190 Indiewood 88-89, 98-99 In our own image 43, 85 Inside Out 17 n.1, 27 n.42, 57, 136, 209 Insider knowledge 28-29, 61, Insider/outsider binary 28, 61, 116, 144-46 Intercultural 203-07 Interest in disinterestedness 93 Intergenerationality 7, 41, 202, 237 Intermediary pole 93-97 International film festivals Berlin International Film Festival 18, 19, 57, 62, 78, 87, 198, 207, 209 Cannes film festival 12, 18, 19, 27, 62, 90, 99, 100, 115, 173, 209 Sundance 88, 138, 142-43, 173 n.37, 198, 209 Toronto International Film Festival 177 Venice 18, 62, 90, 96, 209 International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) 189-190 International Gay Information Center see New York Public Library International Queer and Migrant Film Festival (Amsterdam):192 Intertitles 167, 174-77 Interventionist politics 189-191 Iordanova, Dina 11, 20-21, 60, 186 Iterative repetition 166 Jackson, Claire 137 Janus Theatre 42, 82 Jarman, Derek 96 Johns Hopkins University 86 n.44, 188 Johnston, Claire 125-26 Julian, Isaac 98 n.92, 135 Jump Cut 21, 121, 127-28, 130, 141 Jusick, Stephen Kent 43 n.10, 54 Juxtaposition 27, 31-32, 157-58, 155-176, 186-87, 208, 221, 224 Kalin, Tom 135, 174, 235 Kaplan, Caren 193 Kaplan, Cora 135 Karmen Gei (film) 216, 219 Keele 120 Ke kulana he mahu (film) 219, 222 Kleinhans, Chuck 134 Knegt, Peter 88, 99 Kooz (Haifa) 192 Koutras, Panos 168 Labour of festival organizing 12, 27-28, 66, 172-73 academic labour 12, 27-28, 41, 49-50, 60, 116-17, 122, 127, 134-35, 139 LaBruce, Bruce 12, 168

291 Lafontaine, Yves 198 Languages gay languages 191-95, 199-209 language of revelation 214 Lan Yu (film) 200 Latin (theatre) 83 Laurence Anyways (film) 99-100 Lavender Lavender Images 43, 138 lavender languages 191-95, 199-209 Leap, William 193-94, 201-02 Legs 91, 96 Lenardic, Masa Zia 174 Lesage, Julie 130, 141 Lesbian and Gay Male Caucus 128, 131 Lesbian Herstory Archives 53 Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival 12, 52, 101, 145 n.165, 171-73 LGBT Community Center National History Archive 42, 48 Lions Gate 88 Lippe, Richard 122 Lisboa 12, 160, 162, 174 Liveness 163-64, 177 Living End, The (film) 174 Livingston, Jamie 174 n.40 Local/global 186-87, 193, 201, 208-09 Logo TV 56 n.57, 89 Loist, Skadi 11, 13, 18, 22, 49, 52, 54-62, 145 n.165, 190 London British Film Institute 79, 126 First Festival of Gay Film and Video 207 Flare 79 Images of Homosexuality on the Screen 123 National Film Theatre; 86 n.44, 88 n.54, 123, 188 National Film Theatre Gay and Lesbian Film Festival 188 London (Ontario) Lesbian Film Festival 171-72 Lookout (New York); 58-59 Los Angeles Fusion 167 Gay and Lesbian Media Festival 52 n.38, 54, 66 n.90, 133, 137 Laemmle Theater 51 n.36 One National Gay and Lesbian Archives 41 Outfest 54, 55, 137, 167 Out of the Closet and on to the Screen see Tiffany Theatre Out on the Screen see Outfest Park-Miller Theater 82 Projecting Stereotypes 43, 121, 124 Tiffany Theatre 51 n.36, 82, 123 UCLA Gay Awareness Film Festival 43, 121 Lowy, Peter 85, 132, 188

292  Lumpkin, Michael 132 n.7 Lyon Autre Amour 42 Écrans Mixtes 12, 28, 79, 99, 158, 171, 181 Fonds Chomarat 42 Magdalinou, Christina 13, 52, 171, 173 Mapplethorpe, Robert 136 Market ancillary markets 87-89 film markets 19, 56, geographic markets 79, 90, 99-102 Marshall, Bill 206 Marshall, Stuart 135 Massimadi Bruxelles 176 n.43 Haiti 176 Montréal 167, 176 Masques 51 Mayne, Judith 135, 138, 140 Mazdon, Lucy 170 Medhurst, Andy 118-19, 121 Melbourne 43 n.9, 50 Mercer, Kobena 135,140, 216 n.87 Mezipatra (Brno and Prague) 188-89 Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival 160-61 Milk, Harvey 131 n.83, 134, 173 MIX Brasil 175 Milan 55 NYC 12, 28, 52-58, 135-36, 143-44, 168-69, 170-71, 178, 188 Mixed Kebab (film) 216 Miwa (film) 78 MK2 99-100 Mommy (film) 100 Moonlight (film) 98 Montréal Archives gaies du Québec 12, 42 Cinémathèque québécoise 9, 121, 195 Concordia University 9-10, 43, 120, 123-24, 194 Festival de films LGBT de Montréal 44 Festival des films du monde; 122, 123 n.46 Festival du nouveau cinéma 195 n.35, 209 Gais à l’écrans 57, 133, 194 Image+Nation 12, 28, 43, 57, 161, 185, 193-201, 207-239 Massimadi 167, 176 National Film Board 195 Sans popcorn 57, 85, 123, 132, 194 Semaine du cinéma gai à Montréal 57, 194, 207 n.65 Mulvey, Laura 125-27, 141 Muñoz, José Esteban 45, 65, 67, 177, 216, 237 Murray, Raymond 137-38 Narrowcasting 90 National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers 43, 84-85, 129-32

LGBTQ Film Festivals

National cinemas 19, 186, 201 n.52, 214 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 136 National Film Board (Canada) 195 National Film Theatre (London) 86 n.44, 88 n.54, 123, 188 National Film Theatre Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (London) 188 National Gay Task Force 119, 129-130 Navarro, Ray 135 NECS 11, 30 n.47, 60, 234 n.3 Negative capital 98, 100 Nestle, Joan 53 Netflix 100-01 Networks 20, 23, 28, 29, 32, 59, 60, 62-63, 94-95, 102, 115, 117, 127, 145-46, 187-88 Network releasing (distribution:) 100 New Fest (New York) 18 n.7, 85 n.40, 135 n.107, 143, 144 New Queer Cinema 55, 87-88, 95, 97, 142, 174 New York 8th Street Playhouse 82, 133 Bleecker Street Cinema 82, 207 n.65 Donnell Library Center 43 Gay Film Festival 85-86, 98, 132, 188 How do I Look? 52, 135, 141-42 LGBT Community Center National History Archive 42-48 Lookout 58-59, 189 MIX NYC 12, 28, 52-58, 135-36, 143-44, 168-69, 170-71, 178, 188 New Fest 18 n.7, 85 n.40, 135 n.107, 143, 144 New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival 52-53, 57-58, 84-86, 135-37, 188, 203 Lesbian Herstory Archives 53 New York Public Library 12, 46-47, 53 New York University 43 n.9, 53, 132 n.90 NYSCO conference 121 Park-Miller 81 New York Council on Social Work Education 134 New York State Council for the Arts 136 New York Times; 122, 207 Niche marketing 55, 56, 78, 81, 87-88, 93, 95-99, 101-02, 212 Nichols, Bill 133, 186 n.4, 220 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 189-192 Nous étions un seul homme (film) 174 Nuits fauves, les (film) 206 Oberlin 121 Olson, Jenni 70, 90 n.70, 137-38, 173, 189 n.15 Omovies (Naples) 174 ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives 41 Opening nights 137, 140, 164 n.22, 175 Open Reel 89 Open Society Foundation 190 Optimale 95

293

Index

Out at Work (film) 174 Outfest (Los Angeles) 54, 55, 137, 167 Out Festival (Nairobi) 190 Out of the Closet and on to the Screen 122-23 Out on the Screen see Outfest Outplay 97, 102 Out Takes (book) 140-41 Oxenberg, Jan 128, 131, 132, 133 Pacific Cinematheque (Vancouver) 43, 82 Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley) 43 Pariah (film) 98 Paris American Center 191 Amours masculines 207 Brady 83 Chéries-Chéris 191, 206 Cineffable 97 Conservatoire des archives et mémoires LGBT 42 Entrepot 188 Festival de films gays et lesbiens de Paris see Chéries-Chéris Hollywood Boulevard 83 Latin 83 Paris is Burning (film) 174 Park-Miller Theater Park-Miller Los Angeles 82 Park-Miller New York 81 Parmar, Pratibha 135 Pay-per-view 89-90 Peccadillo Pictures 88, 101, 102 Pedagogy 233 n.1, 234 Penn State University 121 Persistence of Vision see Frameline Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival 138 Pink dollar economy 22, 191 Pink Flamingos (Tomsk) 189 Pinkwashing 177 PlanetOut 138 Play or to Die, to (film) 200 PopcornQ 90 n.70, 138, 173 n.37 Positing-taking 91, 97 Pornography pornographic cinema see adult theatres pornography and the culture wars see cultural wars Postcolonial 191-93 Posters 100, 159-160, 161-63, 175 Precariousness see labour Prinz in Hölleland (film) 200 Production at large 93-94, 95, 06 Pro-fun 88, 97, 102 Programming see curation Projecting Stereotypes 43, 121, 124 Psychoanalysis 119-120, 126-27, 130, 169 Puar, Jaspir K. 215 Publicness 144, 160 Pyramide 100, 101 n.102

Q! Film Festival (Jakarta) 188, 192-93, 218 Quebec 194-95, 198-201, 207-215; see also Montréal Queer Artivism (film) 174-75 Queer film ecosystem 79, 90-91 Queer Lisboa 12, 160, 162, 174 Queer Looks (book) 135, 141 Queerocracy 207 Queer Palm see Cannes Queer relays see relays Queer Sarajevo Festival (film) 176 Queer Sarajevo Festival (event) 176-77 Queer strategies of reading 160-61 Queer theory 25, 139-140 Queer Zagreb (Croatia) 174 Race d’ep (film) 204-07 Ramirez, John 52, 133 Reading see queer strategies of reading Reception 79, 178, 208 Recurring events 66, 163-64 Reeling (Chicago) 54 Regimes of cultural value 63, 77-80, 90-96 of knowledge production 25, 27, 97, 125, 158 of taste 63, 77-80, 84-85, 90-96, 102-03, 186, 212 Relays 99-103 Re-member 186, 221 Repetitions 166-69, 224 Repressive hypothesis 215 Republicanism see universalism Restricted production 93-94, 96-97 Retroactive identifications 166, 191 Retrospectives 29, 126, 168 Reverberations 220-24 Reviews 60, 63, 122-23, 134, 141-43 Rhyne, Ragan 22, 54-56, 59, 137, 145, 191-92 Rich, B. Ruby 17, 29, 55-56, 87, 90, 128, 130-31, 135, 141-43, 159, 174 Riley, Denise 25, 166-67, 221 Rituals 163 Robe du soir, la (film) 212-13 Rocco, Pat 82, 108 Russo, Vito 28, 46-47, 81-82, 119-125, 134-140, 158, 207 Vito Russo collection 12, 28, 46-47 Rutgers University 121 Saafield, Catherine 84, 135 San Francisco Gay Film Fest 54, 132, 173-74, 175 Frameline 54, 78, 86, 138, 145 n.165, 158, 159-161, 164-65, 170-71, 173-74, 179, 189-190 Salzgeber, Manfred 87 Salzgeber (distribution) 96 Samuel Goldwyn 86 Sans popcorn (Montréal) popcorn 57, 85, 123, 132, 194

294  Schedule 163, 167 Schoonover, Karl 12, 161, 162 n.16, 186 n.4, 207-08 Schulman, Sarah 52-53, 57 n.63, 58 n.64-67, 84, 86, 136, 143, 203 Sciamma, Céline 78, 100-01 Scott, Joan W. 25, 45, 139 n.131, 166, 168-69, 178 n.48, 223-24 Scratch projection 86 n.44, 188 n.8 Screen (journal/theory) 120, 126 Scorpio Rising (film) 168 Semaine du cinéma gai à Montréal 57, 194, 207 Setzer, Katharine 12, 13, 185, 199 Sex wars see culture wars Showtime (channel) 56 n.57, 89 Side by Side (St Petersburg) see Bok-o-Bok Siegel, Marc 12, 143, 159 Sight and Sound (journal) 142 Similitude 26, 186-205, 214, 220-21, 223-24 Soukaz, Lionel 83, 204-07 Sortir (organization) 194 Southampton College 52 Soviet Stonewall (Moscow and Leningrad) 189-190 Special Man 81-82 Speck, Wieland 87 Spectatorship 26, 127, 138, 160 Sponsorship 55, 57, 58, 83, 136-37, 206 Stakeholders 20, 60, 116, 145, 158 Stanislas, Piotr 205 Stewart, Steve 137 Stonewall 46, 115 St. Peter’s Church 123 Strand Releasing 88, 174 Stringer, Julian 18, 19-20, 49, 61, 80, 186, 214, 220 Sturken, Marita 162 Subtitles 167, 177, 195, 203-04, 206, 207 n.65 Sundance film festival 88, 138, 142-43, 173 n.37, 198, 209 channel 101 Superimposition 169-171, 195, 202-03 Suture 166-69, 178, 205 Swoon (film) 174 Synopses 167, 188-200, 210-222 Taiwan International Queer Film Festival 188-89 Talking-heads 171-72, 175-77 Tangerine (film) 98 Tapp, Peter 137 Tartaglia, Jerry 135, 136 n.118 Taste 63, 77-80, 84-85, 90-96, 102-03, 186, 212 Teddy Award 87, 167 Thelma and Louise (film) 161 Tiffany Theater (Los Angeles) 51 n.36, 82, 123 Times of Harvey Milk, The (film) 131 n.83, 173 Tim Miller Loud & Queer (film) 199 TLA Releasing 95, 138 Tom at the Farm (film) 102 Tomboy (film) 78, 100-01 Torneden, Silvia 13, 152, 171, 173

LGBTQ Film Festivals

Toronto Desh Pardesh 66 First International Gay Film Festival 43 Inside Out 17 n.1, 27 n.42, 57, 136, 209 Inverted Image 57 Queer Culture Festival of Toronto 66 Queer West Film Festival 57 Toronto International Film Festival 177 Toronto Queer Film Festival 57 Toronto Women & Film 50 Tours 58, 86, 187-190 Tourism 190-92, 215-16 Tourist gaze 186, 216 Trailers 53, 159-164, 167-68, 170-71 Transamerica (corporation) 128-29 Trenton State University 121 Trent University 134 Trick (film) 174 Troche, Rose 88 Turner, Guinevere 88, 97 Tyler, Parker 81, 118-19, 138, 158 Typological impulse 20-21, 24, 62, 93, 238 UCLA Gay Awareness Week Film Festival 43, 121 Gay and Lesbian Media Festival 52 n.38, 54, 66 n.90, 133, 137 Projecting Stereotypes 43, 121, 124 Ultimate Guide to Lesbian & Gay Film and Video (book) 137-38, 173 n.37 United Artists 128-130 Universalism 202 n.54, 204-06, 235 University of California Santa Cruz 28 n.43, 86 n.44, 134 n.103 University of Pennsylvania 134 Urban planning 186 Vallois, Philippe 83 n.25, 174 Venues 50, 51, 58, 55, 82, 85-86, 163, 167, 168, 172, 175 Verbal architecture 157-59, 201 Verow, Todd 12, 174 VHS 87, 96 Video on Demand 89-90 Vienna (Gay Filmfestival) 50 Vierge des tueurs, la (film) 210 Viewpoint see Donnell Library Center Village Voice (The) 122, 129, 140, 142 Visibility (politics of) 45, 120, 141, 159-162, 165, 172, 189, 205-06 Visual architecture 157-164, 170-71,178 Warwick 120 Washington, DC First American Gay Film Festival see Janus Theater First Annual Washington, D.C., International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival 133 First Gay Film Festival 42, 133 n.96

295

Index

Watermelon Woman, The (film) 97, 98 n.92 Waters, Jack 136 Waugh, Thomas 9, 13, 17, 22, 24, 26, 29, 50, 56, 61, 81, 83, 116-128, 133, 134-35, 138, 140, 144, 158, 162, 185, 212, 221 Weekend (film) 101-02 Weiss, Andrea 133, 138 White, Patricia 21-22, 24, 127, 135, 144 Who is Afraid of Vagina Wolf? (film) 97 Wiegman, Robyn 27 n.40, 30 n.48, 59, 63-64, 67 n.93, 125, 139-140, 235 n.4 Windows (film) 127-28, 130-31 Winton, Ezra 10, 23, 27 n.41, 65 Wizard of Oz, The (film) 160 Wolfe Video 97, 101, 173 n.37 Women I Love (film) 174 Women Make Movies 43, 85, 97, 131 Women’s Event 125

Women’s Studies 25-27, 52, 97, 139-140 Wood, Robin 81, 119-120, 122, 133 Word is Out, The ( film) 207 Working Title Films 96 World cinema 56, 210 Worlding see World-making World-making 193, 207-09, 221-23 Worth, Fabienne 205, 207 Written festival 158-59 Wutej, Anja 174 Yagg 100 Zielinski, Ger 11, 18, 22, 33, 34, 43, 54-56, 59, 98, 145, 158, 161, 163-64, 171, 187 Zinegoak (Bilbao) 174 Zoom Out 131-32