Surprise Me

I teach U.S. studies at the University of Murcia, a state university in southeast Spain, and my involvement in LGBTQ film festivals has been largely as a spectator. My earliest exposures were at the Boston Film Festival in the early 1990s, and after years in the States I moved back to Spain in 1994, where I have become familiar with Spanish film festivals. The first one was started in Barcelona in October 1995, Madrid had its own two years later, and Valencia followed suit in 2004. Many other moderately sized cities—such as Murcia, where I live—do not have fully fledged festivals, but the local cinematheques run LGBTQ special programs around Gay Pride time. As I spend part of the year in New York, I am also familiar with MIX-NY.

I am not sure there should be a role for academic critics/scholars like me in relation to community festivals. I see myself more as an interpreter-observer than a programmer, even though I have occasionally done the latter. I like to be surprised by the choices of others and to dip into the tastes of curators who might be scoping LGBTQ work from perspectives very different from mine. Even when the programming does little to titillate me—as is the case with the commercial fare since the late 1990s—it still has the interest of topicality. Following the old dictum of classical hermeneutics, every text is an answer to a question or an imaginary resolution to a conflict; even Jim Fall's bland 1999 title Trick tells us something about currents of sensibility out there that might be worth pondering—with horrified fascination, perhaps?

But even if the scholar may not have a role in the film festival, I think that scholarship has had an undeniable impact on festivals—and festivals on scholarship. After all, programmers are not innocent of scholarship, and one can often deduce the influence of particular academic and critical studies on programming choices. Academic work has often highlighted neglected films that festivals have subsequently revived, and, conversely, festivals have put on the map films and filmmakers that have later drawn academic attention. Scholars have also responded to issues that were already being hashed out in the street and on festival screens (e.g., debates around the appropriation of mainstream iconography, S/M, sexual roles, identity models, drag queen/king subcultures), and scholarly ideas and opinions have, in turn, flowed back into the community. I think this has been the case with the writings of Richard Dyer and Vito Russo early on, with Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam more recently, or with the manner in which postcolonial theory has explored the crossings of ethnicity and nationality with queerness.

I am at a loss to identify new voices, themes, narrative formulas, and so on because the fest phenomenon is vast and my exposure limited. As I see it, one obvious (and worrisome) trend since the late 1980s and early 1990s is the scarcity of AIDS work, with a few great exceptions such as the work of Gregg Bordowitz or Richard Fung. Another obvious trend in the last few years has been the increase of rather inane commercial fare—Trick, Get Real (Simon Shore, UK, 1998), or Circuit (Dirk Shafer, United States, 2001). But still, I would not say that queer festivals are going mainstream wholesale, and there is enough provocative, inventive work to counterbalance this tendency—João Pedro Rodrigues's O Fantasma (Portugal, 2000) or John Greyson's Proteus (Canada/South Africa, 2003), to cite just two examples. There is widespread interest in nonnormative perspectives, though the now-classic exploration of nonvanilla sex has become rather hackneyed in recent years, more "can you top this?" than thorough conceptual-social-historical exploration of alterity. I am more interested in attempts to explore queerness globally. In the case of Spanish festivals, there has been some (although perhaps not enough) interest in Latin America, particularly in Cuba, and abundant non-Western programming. In fact, the best-received films in the last few years include Maryan Shahriar's Daughters of the Sun (Iran, 2000), Asoka Handagama's Flying...