Queer Film Classics Film Book Series ed. by Thomas Waugh, Matthew Hays (review)

The conceptual power of Arsenal Pulp Press’s Queer Film Classics (QFC) film book series lives in its insistence that the truths of queer lives and the loftier words of film discourse are, in fact, made for each other. Edited by Canadian critics Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays, the book series was launched in 2009 and will offer a total of twenty-one titles, with three books coming out per year until 2015. Each of the first nine eponymous monographs reviewed here is dedicated to an influential film made by or about queer people. Together, the books aggregate the diverse histories and stories of queer filmmakers, artists, and writers who have contributed to a range of cinema made in eight different countries between 1950 and 2005. It is the series’ capacity to tackle aesthetic, social, sexual, and political issues outside of the normative frameworks of acceptable queer discourse that marks it as a significant contribution to film studies, queer studies, and cinematic images culture at large.

As a central tenet, the authors of the QFC series dare not to sanitize desire with discourse. Instead, the books show that textuality and sexuality are natural cousins. Will Aitken’s book on Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1971) speaks to this crucial idea. Discussing Aschenbach, who accesses the beauty of an adolescent boy via acts of “looking up” at him from a distance, Aitken depicts the perspective of being down on one’s knees with eyes fixed to heaven (a veiled image of fellatio) as giving meaning to queer experience in the world. It is this provocative inquiry into a viewpoint that opens the series toward a wider theorization of the homosexual gaze and a philosophical consideration of queer desire. Quite rightly, the texts supersede interests in positive or positivist issues of representations to offer up more fully embodied, often conflicted readings of queer identity. Like the characters discussed throughout the series who cross so many traditions, times, and places, the books have the guts to straddle the fringe and center at once, talking frankly about sexual realism in a critical way. Adult themes that are so often embargoed as queers strive to go mainstream are recuperated in these texts with thoughtful consideration. The project at its core, to paraphrase Jon Davies’s work on Trash (Paul Morrissey, United States, 1970), tenders love and attention on that which is so often discarded or deemed abject: intergenerational man-boy love, childhood sexuality, transsexuality, lesbian love in the developing world, the paradoxes and limitations of liberal activism, queer aging in Hollywood, social indifference to HIV/AIDS, polyamory, impotence, and prostitution.

Concentrating on textual analysis, each monograph invests in the specific history of the production and reception of a single film. Because the realities of living queerly differ geographically and change over decades, the texts establish their classic films as signposts along a continuum to show us how queer people have variably come to be in the world and be seen in the cinema. But though poly-vocal in nature, the series does maintain a centripetal force. The seminal text of the series is Waugh and Garrison’s book on Montreal Main (Frank Vitale, Canada, 1974), a film about an American photographer who falls in love with a twelve-year-old Canadian boy amid Montreal’s bohemian enclave, “The Main.” By deconstructing the film’s interlacing of story, space, and era, the book charts out broader shifts in the boundaries between older and newer attitudes about sex, sexual identity, and nationality. Theoretically, Waugh and Garrison mobilize the film’s feelings for an impossible love and marginal identities in terms of Deleuze’s theories of minor literature. The authors thus differentiate the histories of queer rights and artistic movements in Canada, the United States, and Europe as they run parallel to and diverge from each other.

Published in no particular chronological order, the book series constructs its constellation of texts, its stars, in a nebulous arrangement. There is an...