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  • When the Dyke is Done in by the Critic
  • Helen Hok-Sze Leung (bio)
New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. B. Ruby Rich. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. xxx + 322 pp.

There are many insightful books on New Queer Cinema (NQC) in print, but none comes close to offering so intimate a study as B. Ruby Rich’s sharply observed and richly researched collection of essays on the subject. Rich not only devotes meticulous and thorough attention to the films but also writes intimately about queer filmmakers, other critics, festival programmers, and, most valuable of all, a “queer public” of queer film fans whose investments and demands she appreciates but does not hesitate to question and challenge. Writing with characteristic candor and humor, Rich describes the torn feelings that she experiences during every queer film festival season when she sits in the cinema waiting for a film to start, “the dyke done in by the critic in her cerebellum . . . dreading another bad movie that the body in the next seat will cheer” (40). With this anecdote, Rich has effectively summed up the central conundrum facing the development of NQC. Is it a primarily queer cinema that has an obligation to audiences from LGBT communities who often uncritically want empowering images to validate their self-image? Or should NQC be thought of first and foremost as a cinema movement, committed to aesthetic experimentation and innovation without regard for “community standards”? New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut navigates through several decades of queer cinema to offer an eloquent, impassioned, and multifaceted exploration of this question.

Comprising an eclectic mix of essays, the book includes well-researched historical analyses and sharp critical provocations, as well as short film reviews originally published in newspapers and trade magazines. Despite the diversity of their focus, the essays are organized thoughtfully to parallel how Rich views the evolution of NQC. The historical essays delineate the various social and political factors during the 1980s and 1990s in the United States that fostered the emergence of NQC, a phenomenon first named as such by Rich herself. The critical provocations explore the decline of independent filmmaking in the United States, increased queer visibility and commercialization of queer film festivals, and the [End Page 387] formation of niche markets and generic audience tastes among queer audiences. Rich considers the consequences of these developments for NQC, leading to her provocative pronouncement that NQC may be in danger of dying. Despite Rich’s ambivalence about the mainstreaming of NQC, the film reviews remind us of her enduring passion for good queer cinema, wherever she can find it. The more recent reviews reflect a much more expansive global perspective. Her appreciation and knowledge of queer Asian and Latin American cinemas in particular are amply evident, not only in the thoughtful reviews of individual films from these regions, but also in the lively conversations she conducts with filmmakers as diverse as Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Cuba’s Héctor García Mesa.

Not only does Rich search for interesting queer works worldwide, she also inquires beyond the traditional confines of the cinematic medium. In the book’s conclusion, she identifies two sites where queer screen culture is thriving. The online world and the museum may seem to be at opposite ends of the contemporary mediascape, but Rich shows us that interesting queer experiments happen as much in YouTube fan videos as in experimental art installations. Her discussion of the “New Trans Cinema” signals that “trans is the new queer” (271), calling attention to the fact that some of the most exciting and controversial cinematic works in recent years have focused on gender rather than sexual nonconformity.

Rich ends her book by throwing down the gauntlet to us as queer audiences. Rich believes that the “biggest impediment to the creation of culture . . . is the receptivity of an audience” (281). The future of queer cinema thus depends on queer audiences’ capacity to both accept and demand works that are vital, challenging, and dynamic. It seems fitting that Rich’s own work contributes in no small measure toward the nurturing of just such an audience. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut is exemplary...

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