Topic for Spring 2023: American Queer Cinema History
Prerequisites: FIST 100
In this course, we will look at the history of queer cinema in America, from early depictions of homosexuality and gender play in the silent era, through the breakthroughs of the New Queer Cinema directors in the nineties, and up to the work of contemporary queer filmmakers. We’ll look at films by James Whale, Dee Rees, Marlon Riggs, Gregg Araki, Donna Deitch and others. We’ll examine the aesthetics and narrative strategies of the films, and lay out the shifting cultural and industrial contexts that closed down or opened up the possibilities for queer filmmaking across the past 100 years.