.
New Queer Cinema and Third Cinema
Late Capitalism and a Tale of Two Cinemas
At first sight, New Queer Cinema and Third Cinema seem to have very little in common, except for the doubts concerned critics have recently expressed about their continued viability. New Queer Cinema owes its roots to the independent work of British and American filmmakers like Derek Jarman, Tom Kalin, Gus Van Sant, and Issac Julien, who pioneered in the making of an ‘outsider cinema’ of gay-themed films that broke with both the aesthetic conventions of realism and the philosophical sensibility of humanism during the early 1990s. In the ensuing decade, its themes and concerns—though arguably not its politics—have successfully found their way into mainstream Hollywood productions. While the originary moment of New Queer Cinema was inseparable from the then emergent politics of AIDS activism and Queer Nation, the current incarnation of its legacy appears less associated with radical politics than with commercial trends and commodity culture. B. Ruby Rich, who first identified the phenomenon and coined the term ‘New Queer Cinema’ in 1992, expresses skepticism about the continual survival of the ‘movement’ which Rich, in retrospect, suggests should more rightly be thought of as a ‘moment’ when queer work, marginalized by Hollywood, was still driven by an independent spirit and radical impulse. The successful integration of queer films into what Rich calls a ‘niche market’, accompanied by Hollywood stars’ unprecedented interest in playing queer roles, has tamed the aesthetic experimentation, political edge, and community-driven production method characteristic of the formative films of New Queer Cinema. More recently, in an article written on the tenth anniversary of New Queer Cinema, Rich draws attention to the diminishing quality and waning tide of queer cinema in Hollywood and calls for a renewal of radical queer expressions.
Conceived as an intimate part of the anti-colonial independence struggles in the Third World in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Third Cinema was first and foremost an engaged and oppositional political cinema. It aimed to formulate both an aesthetic and a production method that would reflect the economic situation and the political aspirations of Third World peoples. The philosophy of Third Cinema, documented in the now famous manifestoes of Latin American filmmakers Glauber Rocha, Julio Espinosa, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, was inspired by the anti-colonial thought and activism of Third World intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire. Opposed to both the commercial cinema of Hollywood and the auteurist tradition of the European avant-garde, Third Cinema envisioned an independent, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist cinema that would contribute to socialist political struggles.3 By the 1980s, however, the euphoric period of decolonization and revolution in the Third World had given way to an era of disillusionment. Political upheavals, economic devastation, and social contradictions continue to plague most Third World societies while the neo-colonial world order becomes virtually a globalized empire where capital traverses across national borders with unprecedented impunity, threatening older paradigms of political organizing and crushing the Third Worldist aspiration of economic delinking from the First World. Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in the Third World emerged at this critical juncture. This important study theorizes the practice of Third Cinema while placing it on the landscape of academic film theory. Yet, despite the immense influence of Gabriel’s work, many have voiced doubts about the continual relevance of Third Cinema under such an inauspicious economic and political context, especially when popular commercial genres, rather than the radical practice of Third Cinema, have begun to flourish in many of the most successful film industries in the Third World. Mike Wayne notes that when a filmmaker declared Third Cinema to be dead at a BFI-sponsored conference on African cinema in 1996, the pronouncement was met without a single voice of dissent. Wayne himself would later respond passionately against such a judgment in a book-length study arguing for a new understanding of Third Cinema’s role in the current global order.
Late Capitalism and a Tale of Two Cinemas
At first sight, New Queer Cinema and Third Cinema seem to have very little in common, except for the doubts concerned critics have recently expressed about their continued viability. New Queer Cinema owes its roots to the independent work of British and American filmmakers like Derek Jarman, Tom Kalin, Gus Van Sant, and Issac Julien, who pioneered in the making of an ‘outsider cinema’ of gay-themed films that broke with both the aesthetic conventions of realism and the philosophical sensibility of humanism during the early 1990s. In the ensuing decade, its themes and concerns—though arguably not its politics—have successfully found their way into mainstream Hollywood productions. While the originary moment of New Queer Cinema was inseparable from the then emergent politics of AIDS activism and Queer Nation, the current incarnation of its legacy appears less associated with radical politics than with commercial trends and commodity culture. B. Ruby Rich, who first identified the phenomenon and coined the term ‘New Queer Cinema’ in 1992, expresses skepticism about the continual survival of the ‘movement’ which Rich, in retrospect, suggests should more rightly be thought of as a ‘moment’ when queer work, marginalized by Hollywood, was still driven by an independent spirit and radical impulse. The successful integration of queer films into what Rich calls a ‘niche market’, accompanied by Hollywood stars’ unprecedented interest in playing queer roles, has tamed the aesthetic experimentation, political edge, and community-driven production method characteristic of the formative films of New Queer Cinema. More recently, in an article written on the tenth anniversary of New Queer Cinema, Rich draws attention to the diminishing quality and waning tide of queer cinema in Hollywood and calls for a renewal of radical queer expressions.
Conceived as an intimate part of the anti-colonial independence struggles in the Third World in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Third Cinema was first and foremost an engaged and oppositional political cinema. It aimed to formulate both an aesthetic and a production method that would reflect the economic situation and the political aspirations of Third World peoples. The philosophy of Third Cinema, documented in the now famous manifestoes of Latin American filmmakers Glauber Rocha, Julio Espinosa, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, was inspired by the anti-colonial thought and activism of Third World intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire. Opposed to both the commercial cinema of Hollywood and the auteurist tradition of the European avant-garde, Third Cinema envisioned an independent, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist cinema that would contribute to socialist political struggles.3 By the 1980s, however, the euphoric period of decolonization and revolution in the Third World had given way to an era of disillusionment. Political upheavals, economic devastation, and social contradictions continue to plague most Third World societies while the neo-colonial world order becomes virtually a globalized empire where capital traverses across national borders with unprecedented impunity, threatening older paradigms of political organizing and crushing the Third Worldist aspiration of economic delinking from the First World. Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in the Third World emerged at this critical juncture. This important study theorizes the practice of Third Cinema while placing it on the landscape of academic film theory. Yet, despite the immense influence of Gabriel’s work, many have voiced doubts about the continual relevance of Third Cinema under such an inauspicious economic and political context, especially when popular commercial genres, rather than the radical practice of Third Cinema, have begun to flourish in many of the most successful film industries in the Third World. Mike Wayne notes that when a filmmaker declared Third Cinema to be dead at a BFI-sponsored conference on African cinema in 1996, the pronouncement was met without a single voice of dissent. Wayne himself would later respond passionately against such a judgment in a book-length study arguing for a new understanding of Third Cinema’s role in the current global order.
Given the dystopian political climate and the seemingly inexhaustible capacity of late capitalism to remake any outlawed aesthetic into its own image, New Queer Cinema and Third Cinema actually have much to learn from each other. The mainstreaming of New Queer Cinema is in part a reflection of a more general trend within American independent filmmaking. As Maria Prammagiore suggests in an article that situates New Queer Cinema within the independent tradition of the New American Cinema that emerged in the 1960s, the indie circuit has become a highly profitable sector on which Hollywood is only too keen to capitalize. For Prammagiore, New Queer Cinema is now an inadequate rubric because it no longer identifies a body of work that is distinguishable from Hollywood productions, whether in terms of genre innovation, formal devices, production methods, or distribution channels. Yet, aside from the commodification of American independent cinema, there are also specific reasons why the queer politics of New Queer Cinema is particularly vulnerable to mainstream recuperation. Urvashi Vaid argues in her 1995 study, Virtual Equality, that the ‘mainstreaming strategy’ of the gay and lesbian movement in North America has prioritized the attainment of civil rights at the expense of securing genuine equality in political, social, and economic terms. The apparent increase in tolerance for and visibility of queer communities merely reflects a ‘virtual equality’ that masks the absence of genuine and fundamental systemic changes. It is precisely under this climate of ‘virtual equality’ that New Queer Cinema’s once outlawed and marginalized representations of sexuality become transformed into palatable, even marketable, commodities. In a more recent study Profit and Pleasure, Rosemary Hennessy provocatively argues that the queer movement’s fervent concern with visibility has led to a commodification of queer culture and politics, to the extent that queer liberation has come to mean equal participation in late capitalist consumption. Hennessy’s reading of The Crying Game, which is perhaps one of the earliest examples of a profitable marketing of dissident sexuality, points to the film’s mythical displacement of historical contradictions (the unequal political and economic relation between Northern Ireland and England) onto the bodies and desire of queer subjects (the relationship between the black transgender English hairdresser and the IRA insurgent). For Hennessy, the visibility of queer love in this film serves to obscure the historical relations of racialized and colonized subjects, thus rendering invisible the structure of global power:
Mythologizing a more flexible heterogender system in films like The Crying Game empties the ambivalent, desiring subject of its history, obscures the contradictory relation between ideology and labour, and forestalls inquiry into why more fluid pleasures and sexualities have become the signature claim of a postmodern common sense.
The fundamental premise of Hennessy’s critique is that neither postmodern aesthetic experimentation nor visible expressions of queer identities undermine the global structure of unequal power. In fact, the façade of queer liberation (understood as consumption) obscures the underlying relations of inequality that enables our ‘liberation’ in the first place. A new New Queer Cinema—i.e., a more radical queer cinema that aspires towards more than creating a new niche market in Hollywood—would have to address the complex relation between late capitalism and sexuality, or in the terms of Hennessy’s book title, between ‘profit and pleasure’. Such a cinema necessarily intersects with the legacy of Third Cinema, which has not only pioneered the critique of colonial history and of capitalism, but also developed cinematic forms and production methods that mobilize audience’s critical awareness of the material circumstances of their own spectatorship. At the same time, such an intersection would create an important space of renewal for Third Cinema by attending to one of its major blind spots: the suppression of queer sexualities in the history of anti-colonial nationalist resistance and the future role of sexuality in socialist politics. In ‘The changing geography of Third Cinema’, an article that tries to locate the contemporary terrain of Third Cinema, Michael Chanan suggests that the change in media technology and the intensification of global capitalist expansion have moved both the existence of, and the need for, Third Cinema outside of the Third World and ‘into a new space akin to what Teshome Gabriel has recently called nomadic cinema’. Such a cinema would tap into the potential of new video (and digital) technology, draw its resources from while serving communities that struggle against oppression and, most importantly, engage with and resist the decentered and dispersed forms of late capitalist domination that operate transnationally and across different identity formations. There are signs that a new wave of queer films, emerging from diverse locales, are moving in precisely such a direction. It is too early to tell if they will form a coherent rubric of work (a Queer Third Cinema?) but they certainly offer important lessons for anyone concerned with the unfinished projects—both cinematic and political—started by Third Cinema and New Queer Cinema. In the rest of the chapter, I will outline two major directions—one thematic, the other aesthetic—in which recent queer films deploy (though not necessarily consciously) some of the fundamental tenets of Third Cinema. I hope that a reading that situates such films within the traditions of Third Cinema and New Queer Cinema will provoke more future efforts to theorize the intersections of these important cinematic legacies.Queer Sexuality, Community, and the Critique of Colonialism
In Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, Mike Wayne attempts to construct a ‘dialectical relationship’ between Third Cinema ‘then and now’ by recognising ‘the threads of continuity that connect us with the past as well as the transformations in theory and practice provoked by new historical contexts’. I would like to extend Wayne’s analysis to construct alongside his account a dialectical relationship between his vision of contemporary Third Cinema and recent queer cinema. There are numerous threads of continuities between the thematics identified by Wayne in current practices of Third Cinema and the strategies of recent queer films. At the same time, the centrality of queer sexuality in these films sheds new light on and transforms the critique of colonialism and capitalism.
Mythologizing a more flexible heterogender system in films like The Crying Game empties the ambivalent, desiring subject of its history, obscures the contradictory relation between ideology and labour, and forestalls inquiry into why more fluid pleasures and sexualities have become the signature claim of a postmodern common sense.
The fundamental premise of Hennessy’s critique is that neither postmodern aesthetic experimentation nor visible expressions of queer identities undermine the global structure of unequal power. In fact, the façade of queer liberation (understood as consumption) obscures the underlying relations of inequality that enables our ‘liberation’ in the first place. A new New Queer Cinema—i.e., a more radical queer cinema that aspires towards more than creating a new niche market in Hollywood—would have to address the complex relation between late capitalism and sexuality, or in the terms of Hennessy’s book title, between ‘profit and pleasure’. Such a cinema necessarily intersects with the legacy of Third Cinema, which has not only pioneered the critique of colonial history and of capitalism, but also developed cinematic forms and production methods that mobilize audience’s critical awareness of the material circumstances of their own spectatorship. At the same time, such an intersection would create an important space of renewal for Third Cinema by attending to one of its major blind spots: the suppression of queer sexualities in the history of anti-colonial nationalist resistance and the future role of sexuality in socialist politics. In ‘The changing geography of Third Cinema’, an article that tries to locate the contemporary terrain of Third Cinema, Michael Chanan suggests that the change in media technology and the intensification of global capitalist expansion have moved both the existence of, and the need for, Third Cinema outside of the Third World and ‘into a new space akin to what Teshome Gabriel has recently called nomadic cinema’. Such a cinema would tap into the potential of new video (and digital) technology, draw its resources from while serving communities that struggle against oppression and, most importantly, engage with and resist the decentered and dispersed forms of late capitalist domination that operate transnationally and across different identity formations. There are signs that a new wave of queer films, emerging from diverse locales, are moving in precisely such a direction. It is too early to tell if they will form a coherent rubric of work (a Queer Third Cinema?) but they certainly offer important lessons for anyone concerned with the unfinished projects—both cinematic and political—started by Third Cinema and New Queer Cinema. In the rest of the chapter, I will outline two major directions—one thematic, the other aesthetic—in which recent queer films deploy (though not necessarily consciously) some of the fundamental tenets of Third Cinema. I hope that a reading that situates such films within the traditions of Third Cinema and New Queer Cinema will provoke more future efforts to theorize the intersections of these important cinematic legacies.Queer Sexuality, Community, and the Critique of Colonialism
In Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, Mike Wayne attempts to construct a ‘dialectical relationship’ between Third Cinema ‘then and now’ by recognising ‘the threads of continuity that connect us with the past as well as the transformations in theory and practice provoked by new historical contexts’. I would like to extend Wayne’s analysis to construct alongside his account a dialectical relationship between his vision of contemporary Third Cinema and recent queer cinema. There are numerous threads of continuities between the thematics identified by Wayne in current practices of Third Cinema and the strategies of recent queer films. At the same time, the centrality of queer sexuality in these films sheds new light on and transforms the critique of colonialism and capitalism.
The question of sexuality has long been present in the politicized cinemas that emerge in the wake of the Third Cinema tradition. It is one of the most important allegorical vehicles for the representation of power and its abuses. Wayne argues that allegory becomes a crucial strategy in Third Cinema in the post-revolutionary era, when the major force of oppression is no longer readily discernible in the form of a foreign ruling power, but lurks behind the ‘normality’ or even ‘inevitability’ of the current social order. In such a context, allegory gives a concrete face to the relatively invisible systemic reality. Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1974) is one of the most famous examples of the way in which sexuality—in this case, sexual impotence—is deployed as a metaphor for the predicament of the corrupt and dependent postcolonial state. In her study of post-Third Wordist cinemas, Ella Shohat documents an extensive array of examples where feminist heirs of Third Cinema critiques both anti-colonial nationalism and First World feminism by reinterpreting the relation between the public domain of radical politics and the private domain of sexuality and desire. These works show how female sexuality serves often as a figure for what has been suppressed, sacrificed, or side-stepped by nationalist struggles and the subsequent formation of the national state. It is thus no surprise that when queer sexuality appears in films influenced by a politicized cinematic tradition, it also becomes linked to questions of colonialism and nationalism. Yet, these films also move sexuality beyond its allegorical function. At the same time that queer sexuality alludes to the larger question of the predicament of postcolonial nationalism, its literal place in the social and political order is clearly of central importance as well. One recurrent concern is the vexed relation between queer sexuality, nativist/ nationalist traditions, and the revolutionary legacy. Cuban director Gutierrez Alea’s Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), for instance, discloses the history of homophobic persecution in the Cuban Revolution at the same time that it considers the possibility of change. The gay character Diego’s eventual departure from Cuba vies with his friend’s claim that a new revolutionary credo is possible and that there is a place for queer communities in Cuba. Similarly, the documentary by Lucinda Broadbent Sex and the Sandinistas (1991) illustrates the difficulty of being out as queer during the revolutionary struggle in Nicaragua. Yet, the film also emphasizes the pre-colonial existence of queer love in indigenous mythologies. Both films suggest, if only implicitly, that despite the histories of homophobic repression in Third World revolutions, queer desire has a possible and legitimate place in the post-revolutionary order. Guinean director Mohamed Camera’s Dakan (1997), a film that is is often hailed as the first queer feature from sub-Saharan Africa, more pessimistically situates male homosexuality categorically outside of ‘traditional society’, at least as it is conceived by the various characters in positions of authority in the film. Dakan is most interesting when it draws a parallel between gay love and other relationships that have no place in the postcolonial social order. The film raises the anxious question of where these outsiders belong.
By contrast, the documentary Woubi Chéri (1998), co-produced in France and the Ivory Coast and directed by Philip Brooks and Laurent Bocahut, shows exactly to where such outsiders may turn by locating queer and transgender communities that are already in existence in West Africa, though they may be known in other names. This strategy is an important response to the ‘no way out’ pessimism of Dakan. Woubi Chéri shows that there are culturally specific ways of conceiving of queer politics and communities: it is not a matter of either embracing the West or be abandoned by one’s own culture and community.
Such a strategy is also found in a recent wave of powerful documentaries by and for queer communities of colour in North America. These films confront the legacy of colonialism from the perspective of diaspora communities by linking experiences of racism to the history of colonial domination. At the same time, they explore culturally specific experiences of queerness that resist a universalist narrative of gay liberation. Moreover, these films are often produced with labour and resources from the sectors they set out to serve, thus creating and sustaining community in the very process of filmmaking. The video Rewriting the Script: A Love Letter to Our Families (2001), directed by the Friday Night Collective in Toronto, documents the coming out stories of queer South Asians and the responses of their families. I Exist: Voices from the Lesbian and Gay Middle Eastern Community (2001), directed by two Puerto Rican directors Peter Barbosa and Garret Lenoir who made the film as a result of their involvement in different queer communities of colour, explores the diversity of the Middle Eastern diaspora and the various ways in which queerness is lived, negotiated, and received in the community. Both video works can serve as a powerful educational tool and weapon against racism and homophobia. Their very creation thus provide part of the solution to the problems they portray. Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place (2001), directed by Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe, is a thoughtful anti-colonial critique that gives centrality to the issue of queer sexuality.
One of the directors Kathryn Xian is an Asian-American filmmaker who made the film in solidarity with the native Hawaiians’ struggle for self-determination. Xian co-founded Zang Pictures, an all-volunteer-run production company that aims to promote the concerns and interests of Asian-Pacific Islander communities in Hawaii through the medium of film. A high degree of community involvement is encouraged in all their projects, as is evident in Ke Kulana, which draws most of its resources—funding, crew members as well as the performers, activists, and scholars interviewed in the documentary—from the community the film aims to serve. In contrast to the earlier examples mentioned, where queer sexuality is perceived to be at least partly at odds with nativist or revolutionary discourses, thus occupying an ambivalent role in the struggle against colonial and/or capitalist domination, Ke Kulana provocatively suggests that it is precisely the colonial displacement of, and capitalist incursions in, the native communities in Hawaii that form the bedrock of discrimination against queer and transgender people. The film looks backward into native historical records to find evidence of a diverse range of queer practices at the same time that it explores contemporary expressions, such as that of choreographer Sami Akuna (a.k.a. Cocoa Chandelier) who merges movements from indigenous dance forms with the queer aesthetics of drag. The film also alludes to the 1998 referendum on the legislature’s right to outlaw same-sex marriages, suggesting that the mainstream gay and lesbian movement lost support from native communities because their understanding of queer relationships was uncritically homogeneous and Eurocentric. The film’s own interrogation of native Hawaiian notions of queerness and community is thus in part an effort to redress that failed campaign.
These films are but the tip of the iceberg of an emergent cinema that is capable of resisting the commercialization of New Queer Cinema and revitalizing the vision of Third Cinema. By intersecting the expressions of queer sexuality and queer gender practices with the concerns of Third Cinema, these films have radicalized both cinematic traditions. Difficult and timely questions are raised: What is the role of colonialism in the dissemination of homophobic and transphobic ideologies? What is the place of queer people in revolutionary history? How to envision queer liberation and queer community outside of capitalist relations? Creative answers to such questions can potentially transform not only filmmaking practices but also the future of queer and socialist politics.An Imperfect Cinema: the Queer Underground
Aside from thematic concerns, there is another aspect of Third Cinema that is relevant to our understanding of the new directions in queer cinema. One of the central tenets of Third Cinema is that the production method of a film should resist the hierarchical and technocentric process typical of First Cinema. The Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinoza’s 1969 manifesto ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’ directs specific criticism against the credo of technical perfection. For García Espinoza, the ‘perfect’ cinema offers a beautiful façade that tames viewers into passive consumers of idealized images. The ideology of ‘perfection’ also privileges commercial filmmaking while marginalizing filmmakers who have to work in poor economic conditions. The notion of an ‘imperfect cinema’ democratizes the filmmaking process by replacing hierarchy and technical expertise with collectivity and amateur participation. Such a production method also forges a particular kind of aesthetic expression, which the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha calls ‘the esthetic of hunger’. For Rocha, the conditions of scarcity foster, rather than hinder, aesthetic expressions. Shohat and Stam characterise this synthesis of idealism and necessity succinctly: ‘the lack of technical resources was metaphorically transmorgrified into an expressive force’.
As the dynamics of global power and resistance movements change, the strategy of imperfection also takes on different significance. In an article that tries to map out the future directions of Third Cinema, Michael Chanan calls our attention to two crucial factors affecting the continual survival of Third Cinema practices. First, Chanan points out that the philosophy of imperfection was itself enabled by the development of cheaper and more accessible filmmaking technology. Without the development of the 16mm film at the beginning of the 1960s, Third Cinema would not even have been possible. Chanan himself credits the advances in video technology and the expansion of reception through cable and satellite transmission in the 1980s as the breeding ground of a new kind of media activism. By the same token, the rapid development of digital technology since the 1990s has opened unprecedented avenues for the democratic filmmaking methods once championed by Third Cinema. Second, as the mass revolutionary movements envisioned by radicals in the 1960s did not materialize and as more and more of the world become thoroughly absorbed or bypassed by the pathways of global capital, the forms of resistance exemplified by the original Third Cinema also need to adapt to the changing locus of power. For Chanan, Third Cinema can no longer depend on a fixed geography of resistance (the Third World). It must locate itself in the margins and interstices of global power:
The original Third Cinema was premised on militant mass political movements of a kind which in many places no longer exist, and upon ideologies which have taken a decisive historical beating ... The survival of Third Cinema depends on its origins within the margins and the interstices.
These twin factors — the development of accessible technology and the turn from mass political movements to localized resistance — have nurtured a new cinema that uses imperfection as a weapon of subversion: what film critic and programmer Tony Rayns recently calls ‘a new queer cinema in China’.
This new wave in Chinese filmmaking has produced a queer cinema with an aesthetic style and production credo that are fostered by oppressive conditions. Ironically, these oppressive conditions are not the result of underdevelopment but are caused by homophobic and transphobic repression within a society increasingly integrated into the global economy. While alienation from the global economy has left China uniformly destitute during the Maoist era, the country’s insertion into global capitalism has created a wealthy elite alongside a disenfranchised and disaffected majority that is persistently baited into desiring more. The post-1989 milieu, which boasts of economic openness at the same time that it cultivates stringent ideological control and censorship, has created ample opportunities for marketable filmmaking. A film that fits into domestically approved ideological parameters while remaining attractive to foreign investment is a profitable commodity. In defiance of this doubly domesticated cinema, a wayward underground cinema has emerged. Unlike the previous generation of filmmakers who made abstract, philosophical masterpieces meditating on the plight of the peasant, the nation’s cultural roots, and the revolutionary heritage, this new wave of Chinese filmmakers turn to a radically different source of inspiration: what director Zhang Yuan calls the ‘controversial minorities’. Zhang Yuan, a filmmaker who has been blacklisted by the Film Bureau numerous times, was famous for making films about those living on the edge of legitimate society. It was no coincidence that it was this filmmaker who made one of the earliest attempts to film queer lives in Beijing in the 1996 film, East Palace, West Palace.
For underground filmmakers, queer spaces — as yet unassimilated by mainstream cinema — are affiliated with other outlawed and marginalized pockets of a society that has left its revolutionary history behind. As China veers away from the political path of Third Worldist radicalism, thus eclipsing the climate once favourable to Third Cinema practices, queer cinema arrives on the scene to become the new icon of rebellion.
While the stylized and performative visuality of East Palace, West Palace portrays gay desire as an allegory of power, the queer films that follow in its wake favour a more down-to-earth documentary realism that combines unpretentious humour with astute social commentary. Virtually all of such films were shot without the official approval of the National Film Bureau, which means that both the filming and the post-production process would have to stay more or less underground. The finished film could not be shown in legitimate channels and would often encounter obstacles when travelling to film festivals abroad. As a result, the filmmakers usually film on smaller and less expensive formats such as 16mm, BetaSP and, increasingly more popular now, DigiBeta. Because of the lack of legal distribution channels, underground circulation of VCD and DVD copies becomes the films’ the main line of dissemination within China. The films often make use of interesting guerrilla tactics such as undercover location shooting and improvisation. The participation of members of the local queer communities are evident at different areas of the production process, from directing to screenwriting to acting, as they are often the only ones willing to risk harassment or legal trouble to be included in the films. Liu Bingjian’s Men and Women (1999) tells the story of ordinary people in Beijing who find themselves exploring their queer sexuality. The film’s untheatrical pace (reviewer Shelly Kraucer has observed that the film ‘lopes along, at virtually one shot per scene’) and detached perspective reflect queer passion as an everyday reality on screen, in ironic contrast to its ‘unnatural’ repression in real life. The film also takes a whimsical look at an imagined queer public space, comically featuring a magazine that publishes ‘found art’ from public toilets and a queer-themed radio show broadcast from the gay host’s home. Most of the characters are played by non-professional actors while Gui Gui, the radio show host, is played by out gay writer, activist, and filmmaker Cui Zi’en, who is also responsible for the screenplay. Cui himself has directed two recent features filmed on DVD: Enter The Clowns (2001), which is one of the first Chinese films to feature characters from the transgender community; and The Old Testament (2002), which looks at the contemporary reality of homosexuality in China and the experience of people living with HIV/AIDS. Similarly, Li Yu’s Fish and Elephant (2001), a film about a zoo keeper and the women in her life: girlfriend, ex-girlfriend and mother.
The lead actresses are in fact ex-lovers, both active in the Beijing lesbian scene and have never acted before. The film capitalizes on the actresses’ real-life connection to create an understated, documentary-like style, marked by long takes and straightforward editing. In a scene where the zoo keeper is pressured by her mother to meet prospective suitors, the director recruits actors through placing fake marriage ads in the newspapers and then filming respondents’ improvised reactions to the actress’ revelation that she is a lesbian. Such ‘guerrilla’ realism is pushed to a further extreme in The Box (2001), an experimental documentary by Echo Y. Windy. Windy met a lesbian couple virtually on the internet and was invited to plant her mini-DV camcorder into their house, recording the intimate and self-contained box-like world of their passion. Devoid of market-driven tendencies to produce slick and seamless productions, these recent queer films from China strive instead for a spontaneous and participatory cinema that is honest and daring in its very imperfection. Such films resist assimilation into the mainstream film industry precisely because they do not appeal to the consumption taste of the average viewer. Their survival depends on innovative filming and distribution strategies and, above all, the support of the outlawed communities they set out to represent. Towards a Queer Third Cinema
Whether or not we can talk meaningfully of a ‘Queer Third Cinema’ in the near future still remains to be seen. However, it is clear that many new queer cinemas are emerging, from the ‘margins and interstices’ of global power. These films are ‘queer’ not only in the sense that they explore sexual and gender practices outside of normative heterosexuality and the dichotomous gender system. They are queer – indeed more than a little strange — because they unsettle current notions of history and politics while going against conventional paradigms of filmmaking. Most of all, they answer to the legacies of Third Cinema by remaining on the side of the disaffected and disenfranchised. Whether these films are rewriting the grand narratives of progressive causes from queer perspectives or creating innovative production and distribution methods to beat a hostile system, they will warrant our critical attention for a long time to come.
(Απόσπασμα από το βιβλίο New Queer Cinema: A critical Reader, Ed. Michelle Aaron. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2004. σελ. 155-167.)
By contrast, the documentary Woubi Chéri (1998), co-produced in France and the Ivory Coast and directed by Philip Brooks and Laurent Bocahut, shows exactly to where such outsiders may turn by locating queer and transgender communities that are already in existence in West Africa, though they may be known in other names. This strategy is an important response to the ‘no way out’ pessimism of Dakan. Woubi Chéri shows that there are culturally specific ways of conceiving of queer politics and communities: it is not a matter of either embracing the West or be abandoned by one’s own culture and community.
Such a strategy is also found in a recent wave of powerful documentaries by and for queer communities of colour in North America. These films confront the legacy of colonialism from the perspective of diaspora communities by linking experiences of racism to the history of colonial domination. At the same time, they explore culturally specific experiences of queerness that resist a universalist narrative of gay liberation. Moreover, these films are often produced with labour and resources from the sectors they set out to serve, thus creating and sustaining community in the very process of filmmaking. The video Rewriting the Script: A Love Letter to Our Families (2001), directed by the Friday Night Collective in Toronto, documents the coming out stories of queer South Asians and the responses of their families. I Exist: Voices from the Lesbian and Gay Middle Eastern Community (2001), directed by two Puerto Rican directors Peter Barbosa and Garret Lenoir who made the film as a result of their involvement in different queer communities of colour, explores the diversity of the Middle Eastern diaspora and the various ways in which queerness is lived, negotiated, and received in the community. Both video works can serve as a powerful educational tool and weapon against racism and homophobia. Their very creation thus provide part of the solution to the problems they portray. Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place (2001), directed by Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe, is a thoughtful anti-colonial critique that gives centrality to the issue of queer sexuality.
One of the directors Kathryn Xian is an Asian-American filmmaker who made the film in solidarity with the native Hawaiians’ struggle for self-determination. Xian co-founded Zang Pictures, an all-volunteer-run production company that aims to promote the concerns and interests of Asian-Pacific Islander communities in Hawaii through the medium of film. A high degree of community involvement is encouraged in all their projects, as is evident in Ke Kulana, which draws most of its resources—funding, crew members as well as the performers, activists, and scholars interviewed in the documentary—from the community the film aims to serve. In contrast to the earlier examples mentioned, where queer sexuality is perceived to be at least partly at odds with nativist or revolutionary discourses, thus occupying an ambivalent role in the struggle against colonial and/or capitalist domination, Ke Kulana provocatively suggests that it is precisely the colonial displacement of, and capitalist incursions in, the native communities in Hawaii that form the bedrock of discrimination against queer and transgender people. The film looks backward into native historical records to find evidence of a diverse range of queer practices at the same time that it explores contemporary expressions, such as that of choreographer Sami Akuna (a.k.a. Cocoa Chandelier) who merges movements from indigenous dance forms with the queer aesthetics of drag. The film also alludes to the 1998 referendum on the legislature’s right to outlaw same-sex marriages, suggesting that the mainstream gay and lesbian movement lost support from native communities because their understanding of queer relationships was uncritically homogeneous and Eurocentric. The film’s own interrogation of native Hawaiian notions of queerness and community is thus in part an effort to redress that failed campaign.
These films are but the tip of the iceberg of an emergent cinema that is capable of resisting the commercialization of New Queer Cinema and revitalizing the vision of Third Cinema. By intersecting the expressions of queer sexuality and queer gender practices with the concerns of Third Cinema, these films have radicalized both cinematic traditions. Difficult and timely questions are raised: What is the role of colonialism in the dissemination of homophobic and transphobic ideologies? What is the place of queer people in revolutionary history? How to envision queer liberation and queer community outside of capitalist relations? Creative answers to such questions can potentially transform not only filmmaking practices but also the future of queer and socialist politics.An Imperfect Cinema: the Queer Underground
Aside from thematic concerns, there is another aspect of Third Cinema that is relevant to our understanding of the new directions in queer cinema. One of the central tenets of Third Cinema is that the production method of a film should resist the hierarchical and technocentric process typical of First Cinema. The Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinoza’s 1969 manifesto ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’ directs specific criticism against the credo of technical perfection. For García Espinoza, the ‘perfect’ cinema offers a beautiful façade that tames viewers into passive consumers of idealized images. The ideology of ‘perfection’ also privileges commercial filmmaking while marginalizing filmmakers who have to work in poor economic conditions. The notion of an ‘imperfect cinema’ democratizes the filmmaking process by replacing hierarchy and technical expertise with collectivity and amateur participation. Such a production method also forges a particular kind of aesthetic expression, which the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha calls ‘the esthetic of hunger’. For Rocha, the conditions of scarcity foster, rather than hinder, aesthetic expressions. Shohat and Stam characterise this synthesis of idealism and necessity succinctly: ‘the lack of technical resources was metaphorically transmorgrified into an expressive force’.
As the dynamics of global power and resistance movements change, the strategy of imperfection also takes on different significance. In an article that tries to map out the future directions of Third Cinema, Michael Chanan calls our attention to two crucial factors affecting the continual survival of Third Cinema practices. First, Chanan points out that the philosophy of imperfection was itself enabled by the development of cheaper and more accessible filmmaking technology. Without the development of the 16mm film at the beginning of the 1960s, Third Cinema would not even have been possible. Chanan himself credits the advances in video technology and the expansion of reception through cable and satellite transmission in the 1980s as the breeding ground of a new kind of media activism. By the same token, the rapid development of digital technology since the 1990s has opened unprecedented avenues for the democratic filmmaking methods once championed by Third Cinema. Second, as the mass revolutionary movements envisioned by radicals in the 1960s did not materialize and as more and more of the world become thoroughly absorbed or bypassed by the pathways of global capital, the forms of resistance exemplified by the original Third Cinema also need to adapt to the changing locus of power. For Chanan, Third Cinema can no longer depend on a fixed geography of resistance (the Third World). It must locate itself in the margins and interstices of global power:
The original Third Cinema was premised on militant mass political movements of a kind which in many places no longer exist, and upon ideologies which have taken a decisive historical beating ... The survival of Third Cinema depends on its origins within the margins and the interstices.
These twin factors — the development of accessible technology and the turn from mass political movements to localized resistance — have nurtured a new cinema that uses imperfection as a weapon of subversion: what film critic and programmer Tony Rayns recently calls ‘a new queer cinema in China’.
This new wave in Chinese filmmaking has produced a queer cinema with an aesthetic style and production credo that are fostered by oppressive conditions. Ironically, these oppressive conditions are not the result of underdevelopment but are caused by homophobic and transphobic repression within a society increasingly integrated into the global economy. While alienation from the global economy has left China uniformly destitute during the Maoist era, the country’s insertion into global capitalism has created a wealthy elite alongside a disenfranchised and disaffected majority that is persistently baited into desiring more. The post-1989 milieu, which boasts of economic openness at the same time that it cultivates stringent ideological control and censorship, has created ample opportunities for marketable filmmaking. A film that fits into domestically approved ideological parameters while remaining attractive to foreign investment is a profitable commodity. In defiance of this doubly domesticated cinema, a wayward underground cinema has emerged. Unlike the previous generation of filmmakers who made abstract, philosophical masterpieces meditating on the plight of the peasant, the nation’s cultural roots, and the revolutionary heritage, this new wave of Chinese filmmakers turn to a radically different source of inspiration: what director Zhang Yuan calls the ‘controversial minorities’. Zhang Yuan, a filmmaker who has been blacklisted by the Film Bureau numerous times, was famous for making films about those living on the edge of legitimate society. It was no coincidence that it was this filmmaker who made one of the earliest attempts to film queer lives in Beijing in the 1996 film, East Palace, West Palace.
For underground filmmakers, queer spaces — as yet unassimilated by mainstream cinema — are affiliated with other outlawed and marginalized pockets of a society that has left its revolutionary history behind. As China veers away from the political path of Third Worldist radicalism, thus eclipsing the climate once favourable to Third Cinema practices, queer cinema arrives on the scene to become the new icon of rebellion.
While the stylized and performative visuality of East Palace, West Palace portrays gay desire as an allegory of power, the queer films that follow in its wake favour a more down-to-earth documentary realism that combines unpretentious humour with astute social commentary. Virtually all of such films were shot without the official approval of the National Film Bureau, which means that both the filming and the post-production process would have to stay more or less underground. The finished film could not be shown in legitimate channels and would often encounter obstacles when travelling to film festivals abroad. As a result, the filmmakers usually film on smaller and less expensive formats such as 16mm, BetaSP and, increasingly more popular now, DigiBeta. Because of the lack of legal distribution channels, underground circulation of VCD and DVD copies becomes the films’ the main line of dissemination within China. The films often make use of interesting guerrilla tactics such as undercover location shooting and improvisation. The participation of members of the local queer communities are evident at different areas of the production process, from directing to screenwriting to acting, as they are often the only ones willing to risk harassment or legal trouble to be included in the films. Liu Bingjian’s Men and Women (1999) tells the story of ordinary people in Beijing who find themselves exploring their queer sexuality. The film’s untheatrical pace (reviewer Shelly Kraucer has observed that the film ‘lopes along, at virtually one shot per scene’) and detached perspective reflect queer passion as an everyday reality on screen, in ironic contrast to its ‘unnatural’ repression in real life. The film also takes a whimsical look at an imagined queer public space, comically featuring a magazine that publishes ‘found art’ from public toilets and a queer-themed radio show broadcast from the gay host’s home. Most of the characters are played by non-professional actors while Gui Gui, the radio show host, is played by out gay writer, activist, and filmmaker Cui Zi’en, who is also responsible for the screenplay. Cui himself has directed two recent features filmed on DVD: Enter The Clowns (2001), which is one of the first Chinese films to feature characters from the transgender community; and The Old Testament (2002), which looks at the contemporary reality of homosexuality in China and the experience of people living with HIV/AIDS. Similarly, Li Yu’s Fish and Elephant (2001), a film about a zoo keeper and the women in her life: girlfriend, ex-girlfriend and mother.
The lead actresses are in fact ex-lovers, both active in the Beijing lesbian scene and have never acted before. The film capitalizes on the actresses’ real-life connection to create an understated, documentary-like style, marked by long takes and straightforward editing. In a scene where the zoo keeper is pressured by her mother to meet prospective suitors, the director recruits actors through placing fake marriage ads in the newspapers and then filming respondents’ improvised reactions to the actress’ revelation that she is a lesbian. Such ‘guerrilla’ realism is pushed to a further extreme in The Box (2001), an experimental documentary by Echo Y. Windy. Windy met a lesbian couple virtually on the internet and was invited to plant her mini-DV camcorder into their house, recording the intimate and self-contained box-like world of their passion. Devoid of market-driven tendencies to produce slick and seamless productions, these recent queer films from China strive instead for a spontaneous and participatory cinema that is honest and daring in its very imperfection. Such films resist assimilation into the mainstream film industry precisely because they do not appeal to the consumption taste of the average viewer. Their survival depends on innovative filming and distribution strategies and, above all, the support of the outlawed communities they set out to represent. Towards a Queer Third Cinema
Whether or not we can talk meaningfully of a ‘Queer Third Cinema’ in the near future still remains to be seen. However, it is clear that many new queer cinemas are emerging, from the ‘margins and interstices’ of global power. These films are ‘queer’ not only in the sense that they explore sexual and gender practices outside of normative heterosexuality and the dichotomous gender system. They are queer – indeed more than a little strange — because they unsettle current notions of history and politics while going against conventional paradigms of filmmaking. Most of all, they answer to the legacies of Third Cinema by remaining on the side of the disaffected and disenfranchised. Whether these films are rewriting the grand narratives of progressive causes from queer perspectives or creating innovative production and distribution methods to beat a hostile system, they will warrant our critical attention for a long time to come.
(Απόσπασμα από το βιβλίο New Queer Cinema: A critical Reader, Ed. Michelle Aaron. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2004. σελ. 155-167.)
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