Queer cinema needs to be redefined
The film industry is expanding to include more queer stories. This is longoverdue, but the fact that too many of these films are being made by straight filmmakers is having a negative impact. First, the viewing public — queer and straight — is seeing a co-opted facsimile of queer experience. Second, these films are stifling queer voices fighting tell their own stories.
I am a queer woman and a new filmmaker with two films in development. I’ve been a professional actor for two decades, and this shift to making my own films is thrilling. But, making movies is hard. And for me, the abundance of recent straight-made and male-made movies about lesbians makes it harder.
After wrapping my first project as director, I watched “The World To Come” — the latest tragic period piece about lesbians. Several media outlets — the New Yorker, the Cut, Out — have criticized the film’s participation in this tired trend: yet again, we watch beautiful women stare at each other in an open expanse; tragedy ensues.
I’m re-examining my work — inspired by my experiences — fearful of similarities to the straight-made “queer” content being rightfully criticized for lack of originality. I’m confronting two sad facts: There is still only a narrow space allotted to lesbian stories and the majority is taken up by non-lesbians.
This isn’t to say there aren’t thrilling queer filmmakers working right now. Consider Dee Rees, Alice Wu, Desiree Akhavan, Lauren Wolkstein. But too many “lesbian" films made with considerable industry support — “Carol,” “The Favourite,” “Ammonite,” “Colette,” “The World To Come” — have not been made by lesbians. And if non-lesbians — including non-lesbian filmmakers — are learning about lesbians through straight/male-made movies, it’s no wonder there’s repetition in these movies to the point of cliché.
Take, for example, what Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz calls the “furtive, hungry glances” that are irritatingly ubiquitous in contemporary mainstream “lesbian” romances by non- lesbians. As Dr. Cheryl Nicholas explores in her 2004 paper on the topic, the “eye-gaze” was used “as identity recognition … within the gay and lesbian culture.” For centuries, the sustained glance is what allowed queer people to out themselves to fellow queer people, wordlessly asking the questions: Do you see me? Is it safe to love you? It was vital and nuanced and now: it’s a punchline.
The absence of authentic experience turns significant gestures — the sustained gaze — into tropes. This is disheartening if you are a queer woman hoping to see yourself represented in cultural material. It is infuriating if you are a queer woman hoping to contribute to that cultural material, but you risk getting stymied because straight people have turned your real experience into a parody before you get to share it.
I want to feel excited by filmmaking. Right now, I feel frustrated. And I should mention: I’m white, cis and experienced in the film industry. It’s still frustrating. There are artists who have had considerably less access than me in what has been a woefully white, cis, straight industry since its beginnings. Everyone will benefit when this changes.
Narrative authority has been widely discussed in recent years. I don’t believe the issue is one of potential (i.e. whether it’s possible for a filmmaker to make valuable work about a person or demographic of which the filmmaker is not a part) but rather one of hegemony (i.e. the perspective offered in celebrated films of all types has overwhelmingly been white, male and straight, to the detriment of our canon).
When filmmakers on the margins are able to share their own stories and also direct a hefty share of conventional Hollywood blockbusters, I might be interested in what could be elucidated by a straight or male director taking on a lesbian story. Until then, I feel co-opted. (Mis)representing our experiences when, finally, there seems to be a proven appetite for our stories is not allyship.
We should not be crowded out of a woefully narrow space, nor have our stories filtered through a straight and/or male lens. It is time to redefine “queer cinema.” Is it enough for queer cinema to be about queer people? By queer people? With queer people? I don’t know the answers, but as I enter the field, I feel the questions bear consideration.