In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.2 (2006) 338-340



[Access article in PDF]

The Creature from the Queer Lagoon

New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader; Edited by Michele Aaron; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. xiii + 204 pp.

Poor Ruby Rich. Like Laura Mulvey, she has christened something—in this case the New Queer Cinema—and now it won't go away. This creature from the queer lagoon has been acronymized into the NQC. It's been eulogized into a period. It's been anatomized, taxonomized, scrutinized, its contents and contours defined and debated. It's been the topic for academic conferences and panels. What's missing, though, in the critical attention some academics have devoted to the wonderful, edgy, exciting, innovative, disturbing films Rich sought to collect under the rubric of a movement or a moment called the New Queer Cinema is this: the very sense of being urgently located within it that sparks the coinage in the first place. This book collection perhaps necessarily feels distant; after all, more than a decade has passed since Tom Kalin's Swoon (1992) or Todd Haynes's Poison (1991) or Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1990) lit up our film festival screens. But I think that there's something much bigger at stake in thinking about this film movement, namely, how we historicize, how we set our current political, critical, and aesthetic projects in relation to those of the past. For the questions that most preoccupied the makers associated with the New Queer Cinema were, as they are today, matters of life and death; it matters, then, whether we choose to embalm those questions or to resuscitate them, transformed.

The anthology foregrounds its retrospective point of view in its organization, targeted for the classroom. Aaron's brief introduction stresses the defiant character of the films of the early 1990s: in their subject matter, in their refusal of the demands for positive images of queer lives, in their contempt for sanctimonious relations to the (homophobic) past, in their innovation in terms of form (as well as genre and content), and, finally, in their defiance of death itself insofar as the films are linked historically, politically, and aesthetically to struggles over HIV/AIDS. Rich's 1992 essay "New Queer Cinema" follows, and Monica Pearl's piece "AIDS and the New Queer Cinema" rounds out the first of the book's four sections, "New [End Page 338] Queer Cinema in Context." The choice to set Rich's essay next to Pearl's is a good strategic one: where Rich files on-the-ground reports from the festival circuit, with her trademark wit and keen sense of contradiction and ambivalence, Pearl restores for readers (especially undergraduates born in the 1980s) the context of HIV/AIDS devastation and activism in which those "festivals" took place. The joy of rereading Rich lies, as always, in her feel for what she sees: "Early [Gregg] Araki films are often too garage-band, too boychick, too far into visual noise, but this one [The Living End (1992)] is different" (21). Pearl's examination of the politics and forms of representation associated with HIV and AIDS insists, in the strongest possible terms, on an equivalence: "New Queer Cinema is," she says, "AIDS cinema" (23). What Rich reports upon, then, is retrospectively understood as a cinema literally made by AIDS: as Pearl puts it, it's how AIDS "makes movies" (23).

It's an innovative way to begin the reader, emphasizing the connections among, as Aaron says, "critical intervention, cultural product and political strategy" (6). If this emphasis on New Queer Cinema as linked to the time of AIDS, and to North American activist and critical traditions, has a downside, it's to delimit the archive so as to spotlight Anglophone cinema of the 1990s. The volume nonetheless actively resists this delimitation in its selection of several exemplary essays that enlarge that key focus. For example, the second section, "New Queer Filmmaking," brings together two case studies (Haynes, Araki) that reflect on the most contained version...

pdf

Share