In the US, the 1995 documentary film
The Celluloid Closet
by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, about the history of homosexuality in motion pictures (based on the nonfiction book by Vito Russo), is an impressive retrospective on
heterosexist
modifications that were regularly imposed on screenwriters and their scripts. A few examples: in Robert Mulligan’s
Inside Daisy Clover
(1965), with a screenplay by Englishman Gavin Lambert based on his novel, the main character was homosexual. However, after pressure from the actor playing the role, Robert Redford, as well as by the producer, Lambert made the character bisexual. In the 1947 film
Crossfire
, based on Richard Brooks’ novel
The Brick Foxhole
, the subject matter was supposed to be about homophobia in the
army
, but in the end it was made to be about anti-Semitism. Scenes that were deemed too suggestive of homosexuality were cut from three adaptations of plays by Tennessee Williams: Joseph Mankiewicz’s
Suddenly, Last Summer
(1959), Elia Kazan’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951, though a restored version is now available), and Richard Brooks’
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1958). And in a scene cut from Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film
Spartacus
, Laurence Olivier (Crassus) approaches Tony Curtis (Antoninus) in a bath to confide that he likes snails just as much as oysters (the scene was restored in a 1992 video release).
Production Obstacles, Cabals, Bans, Destructions
The first film about homosexuality in the history of cinema to be banned was Richard Oswald’s
Anders als die Andern
(1919) (
Different from the Others
), about a violin virtuoso and an aspiring violinist, both of whom are gay. The German censorship authorities stated on August 18, 1920, that the film could not be exhibited “except to certain categories of people, such as doctors and medical personnel in educational establishments and institutes of research.” It was thus possible to see it at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, established by Magnus
Hirschfeld
(1868–1935), the physician and ardent gay activist in the Weimar Republic.
Despite its censorship, parts of this film are still around thanks to a documentary filmed in 1927 by Hirschfeld entitled
Gesetze der Liebe
(
The Laws of Love
), which included an abridged version of
Anders als die Andern
. This film was itself banned, but was miraculously saved thanks to a copy that was supposed to have been shipped to the Ukraine; it was discovered in East Berlin in 1976.
In France in 1964, Jean Delannoy filmed
Les Amitiés particulières
(
This Special Friendship
) at the Royaumont Abbey in Val-d’Oise, based on the eponymous novel by Roger Peyrefitte about a relationship between a twelve-year-old boy and an upperclassman. The film drew the ire of French writer François Mauriac who, in the
Le Figaro
, exclaimed: “I cannot believe that a film could cause me such sadness, such disgust, almost to the point of despair. How, I ask myself, could parents consent to this, could a director debase himself in this way?” Two years later, Jacques Rivette directed
Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Diderot
(released as
The Nun
in English), about a young girl forced against her will to take vows as a nun. During production, French Minister of Justice Jean Foyer forbade Rivette from filming in the abbey at Fontevrault due to its subject matter. The resulting film was banned despite multiple protests and against the recommendation of the French film review board, Commission de contrôle cinématographique; in 1966, the ban was overturned through a decision of the administrative tribunal of Paris, and the censorship board subsequently approved its showing to viewers eighteen years and older.
Meanwhile, gay filmmakers around the world were subject to violent homophobic acts. In the Soviet Union, seminal Russian director Sergei Eisenstein was a regular victim of extortion, and in 1974, filmmaker Sergei Parajanov was convicted of homosexuality (specifically, “the rape of a Communist Party member”) and sentenced to a
gulag
. The next year, Italian director Pier Paolo
Pasolini
was brutally murdered at the beach of Ostia by a teenaged hustler (although he later retracted his confession, the exact circumstances of Pasolini’s death remain a mystery).
Meanwhile, Western cinema was being liberated: in Bernardo Bertolucci’s
Last Tango in Paris
(1973), Marlon Brando offers his anus to the skilled fingers of Maria Schneider. Homosexuality was also considered a worthy subject:
The Boys in the Band
(1970),
Death in Venice
(1971, based on the Thomas Mann novel), the French films
La Meilleure façon de marcher
(
The Best Way to Walk
) (1976) and
La Cage aux folles
(1978), and
Making Love
(1982). Pasolini’s 1975 film
Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom
set the tone for a sadomasochistic esthetic (as an allegory for fascism), while Jean Genet’s 1950 film
Un Chant d’amour
(
A Song of Love
), banned in France for twenty-five years, was finally rediscovered in 1975 thanks to the Collectif jeune cinéma (Youth Cinema Collective), which organized a public viewing at the American Cultural Centre on Boulevard Raspail in Paris. Not long after, the ban was lifted. In 1980, the sexually explicit film
Caligula
, directed by Tinto Brass, produced by
Penthouse
publisher Bob Guccione, and written by Gore Vidal (who later disavowed it), was first refused a rating classification in the US, but later received an R-18 rating (meaning viewers eighteen years and older could see it) but only after twenty minutes from the film were cut.
The influx of positive cinematic portrayals of homosexuality in the 1990s was often met by violent homophobic reactions. In 1995, the release of the British film
Priest,
directed by Antonia Bird, in the week before Easter was denounced as a provocation by the Catholic Church. This film about a homosexual priest living in a poor Liverpool neighborhood also shocked Catholics in Poland, who immediately called for a boycott and threatened to burn down any theater where it was shown and even sued the filmmakers for the “propagation of pornography.” Catholic organizations in Britain also demanded it be pulled from theaters, while in the United States, the fundamentalist faithful of the
far right
picketed cinemas in protest, and religious conservatives called for a boycott of Disney, which distributed the film. In 1998, screenings of the Canadian film
Fire
, directed by Deepa Mehta (a love story between two openly lesbian women), in New Delhi and Mumbai were interrupted by radical Hindus, who took offense at the subject. However, the Indian government reacted in favor of the film’s distribution, citing that “the obligation of the state is to protect the lives, the liberty, and the goods of its citizens.”
Filmmakers and governments are nonetheless susceptible to homophobic influences. In 1996, the widow of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who had refused to allow her husband’s name to be associated with works of a homosexual nature, obtained an agreement from the producers of the 1968 Japanese film
Black Lizard
(directed by Kinji Fukasaku), which featured a screenplay by Mishima, that all existing copies would be destroyed; the lead role had been played by Akihiro Maruyama, Japan’s most famous female impersonator. And in 2001, the French government, after pressure from Vice-Minister of
Family
and Childhood Ségolène Royal, decided against broadcasting a television public service announcement on
AIDS
prevention that featured snippets of homoerotic scenes from films.
Resistance
It has been noted that international film festivals like Cannes are influential when it comes to responding to the issue of homophobic censorship, but mention should also be made of the role played by special-interest festivals (i.e. gay and lesbian), which are not always taken into account in the historiography of homosexual movements. These festivals were started in response to the difficulties encountered in screening films that featured openly gay subject matter. In France in April 1977, the Groupe de libération homosexuelle politique et quotidien (GLHPQ; Group for Political and Everyday Homosexual Liberation) instigated a week of gay-themed films at the Olympic Theatre in Paris; the seven-day festival was declared a huge success by the newspaper
Libération
. Two months later in July, the La Rochelle film festival took place; however, the original theme of “Ciné, pédé, gouine, et les autres” (Films, Fags, Lesbos, and More) was rejected by the municipality. In September 1977, the Hyères and Belfort festivals took their turn welcoming young gay directors, but this trend was struck a blow with the brutal police crackdown at La Quinzaine du cinéma homosexuel (The Fifteenth Annual Festival of Homosexual Cinema) put on by the GLHPQ in January 1978 in Paris; Michel d’Ornano, then Minister of Culture, banned some seventeen films from being screened at the festival.
The first lesbian film festival in France appeared in 1992: Quand les lesbiennes se font du cinéma (When Lesbians Make Movies), launched by the organization Cineffable. The same year saw the debut of the Question de genre festival in Lille; in association with this, Paris’s own version was launched in 1994. Since then, gay and lesbian film festivals have blossomed all over the world; many take into account the increasing visibility of the bisexual, the transgender, and the queer. The website
planetout
.
com
lists no fewer than 140; notable among these are the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival of Brussels, Berlin’s Teddy Awards (part of the Berlin International Film Festival, which awards to the best queer films of the year), Montreal’s image + nation festival, and Amsterdam’s Roze Film Dagen festival. The pioneer of gay and lesbian film festivals, Frameline in San Francisco, celebrated its thirty-second anniversary in 2008. And in a promising development for both gay rights and progressive cinema, the very first gay film festival in India occurred in 2003, in a college auditorium on the outskirts of Mumbai.
—Patrick Cardon
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