What was queer cinema like before the ’70s hit? Does it have claims on the very beginnings of moving pictures? Is this part of our history only a tale of censorship and subtext? An Early Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall, a series from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is tackling this all head on.
We spoke with Thomas Beard, festival programmer at large, ahead of the series, which takes place from April 22 to May 1 in New York City. We talked lesbian classics at the festival, the amazingness of lesbian filmmaker Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood censorship, and more.
AfterEllen.com: When it comes to lesbian themed movies, what are some of the feature films women can look forward to watching during this series?
Thomas Beard: The opening film is Leontine Sagan‘s Mädchen in Uniform, which is an enduring classic of lesbian cinema. It will also be introduced by Su Friedrich, who’s a crucial figure of post-Stonewall lesbian cinema. The film was made in the early 1930s. It takes place in an all-girls boarding school. It’s, on the one hand, a stirring parable of authoritarianism, but it’s also in a way the first great film about lesbian love—a film about a sensitive new arrival to the school who falls hopelessly in love with her charismatic teacher, thus eliciting the wrath of the school’s pitiless headmistress.
AE: Censorship was an issue with this film, wasn’t it?
TB: Censorship definitely plays a significant role in many of these films. Jacqueline Audry‘s Olivia for instance, which, as it happens, is also set in an all-girls’ school, was definitely subject to a number of censorship reviews. Or rather, it was very pointedly censored.
AE: Another notable name playing during this series is The Wild Party. Talk to us about this film.
TB: Dorothy Arzner is a central figure for the series. Although she was officially closeted, she definitely endures as a kind of butch icon. There are many incredible photographs of her in very handsome suits and so forth. Her films themselves are extraordinary, and I think they’re some of the most keenly observed portraits of female friendship that we find in classic Hollywood cinema. She was also very successful commercially as a filmmaker and had a reputation as something of a star maker.
The Wild Party is of particular interest because it was the first sound film for Paramount starring the original it girl, Clara Bow. I believe Arzner was tasked with directing this version of The Wild Party because she had actually edited the silent version. The Wild Party is actually set at a women’s college.
AE: There’s a theme here. Is there something that stands out for you about The Wild Party in terms of timing? It might surprise some people to know that this American film actually came out before Mädchen in Uniform.
TB: I think what maybe makes Mädchen in Uniform stand out is that the lesbian desire is far, far less coded or subtextual. It’s sort of proclaimed outright in a way that it isn’t in The Wild Party. Of course, a filmmaker like Arzner, a butch lesbian director in the ’20s, was not able to make overtly lesbian films. Nevertheless, I think that there’s definitely Sapphic implication to be found in them.
AE: In America, what did the Hays Code mean in terms of the suppression of gay and lesbian cinema, particularly from the mid-’30s to the mid-’50s?
TB: I think the story isn’t one of censorship alone. It’s not a story of defeat at all. Say Hitchcock’s Rope, which is not an explicitly gay film. You see how screenwriters and actors and so forth can sort of quite gamely maneuver through being on this impasse that is set up by censorship. And also, if you look at, say, Mona’s Candle Light, which is a recently discovered home movie shot at a popular San Francisco lesbian bar in the early ’50s, here we have films of the everyday nightlife of lesbians in this moment being made outside of Hollywood and the censors altogether.
AE: How did you go about finding the films for this series?
TB: Scholarly accounts of the history of queer cinema definitely brought a number of the works that are in the series to my attention. Yet even so, if you look at a film like Mona’s Candle Light, this was only very recently rediscovered. This show is very much one I had to piece together from many different sources, from a decade of extensive searching.
The films themselves are coming from private collectors. They’re coming from museum collections. From film archives. From film distributors. And directly from the artists themselves.
AE: Screening a movie like Mona’s Candle Light at a film festival that also features celebrated works isn’t really typical, but it’s certainly important from a history point of view. Can you speak to that?
TB: One of the major goals of the series is to reveal queer cinema as being not a monolith but actually kind of manifesting itself in a variety of genres and forms. So, the program looks not simply to touchstones like Mädchen in Uniform, which is an example of film art, but also to educational films, to home movies, to genre pictures like lesbian vampire films let’s say, to pornography, as a way of putting forward a more inclusive and expansive conception of what queer cinema has been and hopefully, in turn, what it can still become.
AE: Why now? Why in 2016?
TB: There was a poll very recently that the BFI in London did about the greatest queer films of all time. I think the number one film was Carol, and I love Carol—it’s a great film. Out of all of these lists, the number of films before 1970 were astoundingly few and far between. So I think that poll sort of speaks to how many of these films kind of continue to be hidden from history, or hidden from our more general understanding of what queer cinema is. An interesting problem that I had organizing the series was trying to fit everything in. There are upwards of 30 programs and yet still so many great films had to be cut out. I found it quite remarkable that I was spoiled for choice on a subject that many people would draw a blank on. So I think that the series seems especially urgent now because I feel like this history remains too little known.
AE: How did you go about gathering the 25 short films for this program? I would think that a lot of these wouldn’t be on the radar of most film critics.
TB: A number of the shorter works in the series are experimental films. We see some of the most extraordinary moments in history of early queer cinema in avant-garde film. That fact is also a consequence because it suggests that queer cinema can be and indeed has been for so much of its history an incredibly formally adventurous genre. The move shouldn’t be simply towards gay versions of familiar popular forms. Queer cinema can, in fact, be so much more than that and has been so much more than that.
AE: The oldest film in this series dates back to 1895. If Dorothy Arzner’s The Wild Party could only get away with so much in 1929, what were we seeing before that?
TB: 1895 is the first film. It’s with W.K.L. Dickson‘s Dickson Experimental Sound Film. It’s about a minute long. It’s the only surviving film we have that was made specifically for the Kinetophone, which was the combination of the phonograph and the kinetoscope. So there was kind of a roughly synced soundtrack to the film. And what we see in the film is two men dancing while a third plays the violin. While there’s nothing about the original film that would suggest that it was made as a sort of overtly homoerotic work, nevertheless it’s one that for many decades queer artists and audiences have seized upon and have been drawn to. Because even if it’s through a productive bit of fantasy, it allowed gay viewers to see themselves in the movies from the very moment of its inception.
AE: Any special discussions in this series?
TB: There is a special event—a lecture by the film scholar Amy Villarejo. There’s a Joseph Mawra film called Chained Girls, which I first came to know about through Villarejo’s writing on the film. It’s a kind of lesbian pulp film that masquerades as a sort of serious documentary when clearly its aim is to show women in various states of undress. So it’s this kind of pseudo-documentary about the “life of the lesbian today.” It’s actually very amusing in a lot of ways to a contemporary audience. That’s also something going on in some of the films that are being shown, where they’re kind of being recuperated for a contemporary gay and lesbian audience who bring comedy to the experience of seeing it. But in any case, I wanted to show Chained Girls and have Amy introduce it, but there are actually no extant prints of the film. So as a way of both talking about exploitation cinema, lesbian pulp and have it be nevertheless part of the show, she’s going to give a lecture about Chained Girls.
AE: What do you hope the average moviegoer will get out of this series?
TB: Ideally, I think a general filmgoer will come away from the series understanding that they’ve always been in the pictures. That queer cinema is not a recent phenomenon and that the ways in which we might understand it as a genre are manifold and complex. That’s my hope.
AE: Lastly, what are some final lesbian recommendations for this series?
TB: Roger Vadim‘s Blood and Roses I think for anyone who has a special fondness for lesbian vampire films. It’s a very stylish early instance of the genre that I would recommend.
The Killing of Sister George is an extraordinary movie, and one of the things that’s interesting to me about it is that its goal is not to present a sort of well-scrubbed positive representation of queer characters. Indeed, that’s not the goal of many of the films in the series. Because people are complicated, and I feel like a lot of these movies reveal that, and also remind us that positive representation is in some cases a sort of dubious goal, or that it should not be our only goal.
An Early Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall kicks off on April 22nd in New York City.
