Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

The View from Here: Conversations With Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers
by Matthew Hays
Arsenal Pulp Press
How to order All that Heaven Allows: The Cinema of Todd Haynes
edited by James Morrison
Wallflower Press
How to order

There was a time -- in the 1970s and early 1980s -- when writing about movies was as exciting as watching the movies themselves. This was when millions of people awaited not only the opening of a new film by Ingmar Bergman or Sidney Lumet but the new weekly column by Pauline Kael in the New Yorker or Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice. Aside from Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet and some writings by B. Ruby Rich and Richard Dyer, the 1980s marked the beginning of an exciting time for queer films, but not queer film writing.

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here is none of the excitement now for film-writing, whe- ther mainstream or queer, that there was then. Of course some pretty good things are still being published. Harry Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997), Patricia White's The Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability, and Richard Barrios's Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2003) hit on new ideas and could change readers' opinions of movies they'd seen numerous times before. White's discussion of the relatively unknown 1944 ghost story The Uninvited was a revelation, and Barrio's discovery of a multitude of queer film themes -- especially in minor film noir -- was terrific.

Queer films are bigger then ever: just look at a TLA catalog to see how many are being released, and at the buzz over Brokeback Mountain to see how far queer themes have come in mainstream culture. But writing on queer film is less popular. These two books -- each with some flaws -- give a sense of where queer criticism is today and leaves one pining just a little for the heyday of the 1970s.

The View From Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers, by Matthew Hays (Arsenal Pulp Press, 383 pages, $22.95), is a compendium of interviews with directors ranging from the very famous Kenneth Anger, Bill Condon, Gus Van Sant, and Pedro Almodovar to the more on-the-edge Bruce LaBruce, Gregg Araki, Rose Trouch, and John Greyson. Interviewer Matthew Hays is interesting and interested, though he's a bit deferential and hesitates to breach comfort zones. Still the material here is usually illuminating. Craig Lucas speaks about writing and directing The Dying Gaul (2005) and what he learned from the late Norman René (who directed the 1990 Longtime Companion). We also hear from Don Roos -- who directed The Opposite of Sex (1998) -- on why he chose to have the killer use her high-heel shoe as the murder weapon in his 1992 Single White Female (it was because after her vagina, a shoe is considered the second most dangerous thing a woman has).

Interviewing Israeli director Eytan Fox and his partner Gal Uchovsky (who gave us 2002's Yossi and Jagger and in 2007 The Bubble), Hays gets into important political material that we get to read nowhere else. It makes you wish that Hays had taken other interviews in a similar direction. In the end The View From Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers is both entertaining and informative. A cross between a fan journal and serious criticism, it gives us enough of what we are looking for, even if it sometimes leaves us wanting more.

Pondering Haynes

Now that Todd Haynes's multi-charactered Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not Here has been recently released -- to reviews that range from praise to indignation and confusion -- it looks as if the director is finally getting the attention (if not exactly the plaudits) he deserves.

Haynes's first hit was the underground Karen Carpenter Story (1987), which was told with Barbie dolls. He proceeded on to Poison (1991), Safe (1995), and The Velvet Goldmine (1998), proving himself endlessly innovative along the way. But Haynes's fondness for camp, parody, Jean Genet, and the glitter rock of David Bowie has pegged him as a queer -- i.e. minor -- director. He broke out from this mold with Far From Heaven (2002), a glossy retelling of Douglas Sirk's 1959 All That Heaven Allows. But even that for many critics was too tinged with a clearly gay subplot and a really big queer subtext.

All that Heaven Allows: The Cinema of Todd Haynes, edited by James Morrison (Wallflower Press, 224 pages, $25), is a collection of 14 essays. They are of consistently high quality, fascinating, and provocative. Haynes does not have a large body of work -- four big feature films, a very successful independent film, and two famous shorts (The Karen Carpenter Story and Dottie Gets Spanked). But he's become not only a cinematic but an intellectual force to reckon with.

Many of the pieces here may be a little too academic for the casual reader -- although all are quite readable. That's so even with Scott Higgins's "Orange and Blue, Desire and Loss: The Color Score in Far From Heaven," which explores how that film relates to the traditional color codes of Hollywood melodrama -- and tells the reader perhaps more than he or she wanted to know.

But even with the occasional lapse into obscurity, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in contemporary queer cinema. Lucas Hildebrand's examination of queer childhood in Dottie Gets Spanked is terrific, as is Sam Ishii-Gonzales's take on how Haynes uses and adapts Jean Genet's work in Poison.

With the gay movie market glutted with films like the aptly-named Another Gay Movie, more attention of the work of Todd Haynes is not just refreshing but a reminder that queer film can be both vitally important and enormously entertaining.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com