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Explore the history and practice of queer cinema through this new short essay and the linked free-to-view content below.
Gay and lesbian representation has been a feature of cinema ever since its inception, but before homosexuality was legalised in some countries, filmmakers found other ways to signal gay characters and queer desire. In this chapter on representations of gay men in early German and Swedish cinema, Shane Brown traces how directors including Dreyer and Stiller used sympathetic gay characters to argue against laws that criminalised homosexuality. In classical Hollywood cinema, forbidden sexualities were often implicit, and queer desire displaced into manifestations of the monstrous or the supernatural. In Patricia White’s study of Robert Wise’s 1963 horror classic The Haunting, she explores the representation of lesbian desire and its implications for the lesbian spectator. In more recent times, despite changing attitudes and liberalising legislation, homophobia and transphobia have continued to impact the lives of gay and trans people. This is powerfully shown in Ang Lee’s 2005 Brokeback Mountain and Kimberley Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry of 1999, a fictionalisation of the short life of the trans man Brandon Lewis, discussed by Rona Murray in this chapter from Studying American Independent Cinema.
Empowered by the arrival of cheaper and portable video cameras, filmmakers, often working within radical or experimental film networks, began from the early 1970s to document gay and lesbian lives and key moments in gay and lesbian history. In this chapter from A New History of Documentary Film, Betsy A. McClane describes a history of queer documentary from Word is Out: Some Stories of Our Lives (1977) by the Mariposa Film Collective to Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) about the gay San Francisco politician murdered by a homophobic colleague, and 1989’s Common Threads; Stories from the Quilt by Bill Couturié, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, about the AIDS crisis.
In the BFI Screen Guide 100 Documentary Films, Barry Keith Grant discusses two films of 1990 that portray Black and Latinx queer subcultures and sexualities. Grant explores Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied in this chapter, which celebrates Black gay culture at the same time as it acknowledges the impact of racism, homophobia and the AIDS crisis, and Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning in this chapter which chronicles New York City’s performative ball subculture and the street life of its Black and Latinx gay male and transgender communities.
The 1990s saw the development of a new movement of gay and lesbian filmmakers, heralded by the film critic B. Ruby Rich as ‘the New Queer Cinema’. This article by Jackie Stacey in The Cinema Book explains that the ‘New Queer Cinema’ was defined by a deconstructive cinematic style, a fierce and vocal political protest and a focus on the dark ‘underbelly’ of sexual desire. Films such as She Must Be Seeing Things (Sheila McLaughlin, 1987) and Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) examined questions of violence, jealousy, power imbalances, possessiveness and betrayal within gay and lesbian relationships. In this chapter from International Film Festivals, Ragan Rhyne examines the importance of lesbian and gay film festivals for the New Queer Cinema movement, providing a space for queer filmmakers to exhibit and gain wider distribution for their work, as well as an opportunity for gay and lesbian audiences to see consciously ‘queer’ movies.
In this article from the film journal Projections, two leading lights of Queer cinema, the British director Derek Jarman and the American Gus Van Sant, discuss their movies including The Last of England, Edward II, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho in relation to gay sexuality and politics. In this interview with the film writer Geoffrey Macnab, Isaac Julien, another artist-filmmaker who came to prominence in the 1990s, describes how his filmmaking practice has been informed by his experience as a Black British gay artist.
The figure of the vampire has haunted the history of cinema from its very early days. In his BFI Film Classic on F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie der Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror), Kevin Jackson invokes the links between cinema and vampirism: like vampires, cinema is peopled by the half living, actors reanimated by the magic of the projector, coming to life only in the darkness. Horror fiction provides a way for us to confront our deepest fears, or to address our collective mourning, trauma or anxiety about political, social or environmental upheaval. In this chapter from Nosferatu (1922): Eine Symphonie des Grauens, Kevin Jackson writes that the film expresses the traumatic aftermath of the First World War. In the words of the film’s producer and designer Albin Grau, Nosferatu was “unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions and millions of men”, but it also expressed the aftershock of the terrifying Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more people than all the guns and bombs of the war. In this chapter on Let the Right One In (2008), Anne Billson explores the vampire’s cinematic meanings in relation to religion, sexuality and gender identities.
Vampires have long been associated with the crumbling ‘old world’ of the European aristocracy. But what happens when vampires come to America? In another cinematic analogy, some critics have likened the American vampire to the filmmakers and stars of early Hollywood, many of them émigrés from a Europe in turmoil. In this chapter from New Vampire Cinema, Ken Gelder discusses modern American vampire cinema, from Michael Almereyda’s New York vampire movie Nadja (1994) to the Tex Mex vampire trilogy John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998-2005).
Feminist and queer readings of the vampire have focused on vampire narratives as an expression of anxieties about sexuality and sexual desire. In the Introduction to Queer Horror Film and Television, Darren Elliott-Smith traces queer readings of the vampire from Nosferatu to the TV series American Horror Story (2011-present).
The zombie, the vampire’s undead cousin, has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade, which brought West African concepts of soul capture to Haiti, where the figure of the zombie developed in Haitian folklore, entering American consciousness as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Haiti from 1915-34. In this chapter from Otherness in Hollywood Cinema, Michael Richardson traces changing manifestations and meanings of the zombie in Hollywood cinema, from White Zombie (1932) through to George A. Romero’s cult movie Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its four sequels. Zombies enjoyed a resurgence in popular culture at the turn of the millennium, and in her overview article 'Zombie Films Since 9/11', Sarah Lauro explores how recent movies such as the Korean film Last Train to Busan (2010) place their zombie origin stories in the excesses of global capitalism, such as environmental abuse and reckless scientific experimentation.
Horror can be an appealing genre for first-time filmmakers. It has an engaged fan community, and provides opportunities for filmmakers to create impactful movies on a low budget. Shot on a micro-budget by novice directors, both The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) were hugely successful in their own right, leading to a series of prequels, sequels and spin-offs. In this chapter from the book The Filmmaker’s Book of the Dead: A Mortal’s Guide to Making Horror Movies, Danny Draven takes aspiring filmmakers through a range of horror sub genres, from the supernatural thriller to the monster movie, with case studies of key movies and guides to further viewing. In this chapter from his book on The Blair Witch Project, Peter Turner traces the film’s script development, funding and production history as “an inspiring example of inventive independent filmmaking”. Tips and strategies for writing and, importantly, selling a script for a low-budget horror movie are provided by Marc Blake and Sara Bailey in this chapter from their book Writing the Horror Movie.
Screen Studies’ Filmmaking collection fills an important gap in the curriculum by bringing practical film experience to the forefront, marrying it with insightful theoretical understanding and bridging the gap between material on critical film studies and material focused only on film production.
Dip into the collection below to learn more about screenwriting, lighting, visual effects, distribution and film programming, which are just a few of the key areas of filmmaking covered in this collection.
The linked chapters are available to view throughout this Fall 2021 term.
Jack Epps Jr., screenwriter for such films as Top Gun, Dick Tracy, and Turner & Hooch, and author of Screenwriting is Rewriting, writes on the art of rewriting as a necessary tool in the screenwriting process. He also interviews Academy-Award-winning screenwriters Robert Towne (Chinatown) and Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) about their craft.
Access to expensive equipment isn’t always possible. Lighting for Cinematography guides readers to use household items, in lieu of expensive equipment, in order to light a scene engagingly. Every chapter includes stills, lighting diagrams and key advice from professionals in the field, as well as lighting exercises to help the reader put into practice what was covered. Get started with the basics in this chapter on The Magic of Light: What Lighting Does and What We Can Make It Do.
The Filmmaker’s Guide to Visual Effects proves that you don’t have to be an expert to include stunning visuals in your film. Award-winning special effects supervisor Eran Dinur guides the reader through conceiving, designing, budgeting, planning, shooting, and reviewing visual effects, from pre-production through post-production. Test your knowledge on key subjects, such as the difference between “special effects’ and ‘visual effects’, in this chapter on Core Concepts.
It’s vitally important to consider the business side of filmmaking, including marketing and distribution. Top executive Scott Kirkpatrick shares his wisdom in Introduction to Media Distribution, a straightforward, clear, and insightful approach to understanding the basics of how the global distribution marketplace works. This chapter on Practical Approaches for Kick-Starting Your Career offers tips to help you on your journey into the film industry.
Tasked with choosing a mix of films that will both cater to current audiences and attract new business, a film programmer needs specific skills in order to be a success. Knowledge of film is key, along with insight into the audience, negotiation skills and an understanding of finance. Here you can read an interview with Clare Binns who reflects on film programming and her 25 years in the industry.
This month we explore Orson Welles’ 1941 multi-faceted cinematic puzzle, Citizen Kane. The movie presents the life story of Kane, a media baron and politician based on the press magnate William Randolph Hearst. Described by Barry Keith Grant as a ‘cubist portrait’, Welles’ film follows the journalist Jerry Thompson (William Alland), on a quest to discover the meaning of Kane’s dying word, “rosebud.” Thompson speaks to those who encountered Kane in his personal and professional life – his second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore); his late banker and financial advisor, Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris); his business manager, Bernstein (Everett Sloan); his boyhood friend Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten), and Raymond, his butler (Paul Stewart).
Citizen Kane has inspired criticism and analysis from a range of perspectives, including Laura Mulvey’s discussion of the film from a feminist psychoanalytic standpoint in her BFI book ‘Fetishism and Curiosity’. Mulvey situates the film in its historical context – it was released six months before Pearl Harbor, in an America split between isolationists such as Hearst, backed by his press empire, and ardent anti-fascists such as Welles, who was deeply engaged and influenced by European cultural forms such as German Expressionism. She goes on to consider how reading the film through a Freudian lens (despite Welles’ own claim that it represented mere ‘dollar-book Freud’) reveals a wealth of psychoanalytic reference and a narrative structure informed by psychoanalytic theory.
Read Fetishism and Curiosity: From Log Cabin to Xanadu: Psychoanalysis and History in Citizen Kane
The story of the Kane screenplay, co-credited to Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, is told in the Academy Award™-nominated movie Mank (2020), directed by David Fincher. In his chapter on Citizen Kane in ‘Constructing Dialogue’ Mark Axelrod takes a deep dive into the film’s opening sequences and shows how the screenplay sets up the QBA, or Question to be Answered – ‘what is “rosebud”?’.
The artistic triumph that Kane represents arose from the coming together of a group of expert creatives – not only the director, actors and screenwriter but editor Robert Wise and composer Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann composed not only the film’s non-diegetic music but also created an aria from a fictional opera, Salammbo, to be performed (disastrously) by Kane’s wife Susan Alexander, whom Kane encourages to pursue an operatic career far beyond her capabilities. Commenting on the scene, Herrmann wrote “Our problem was to create something that would give the audience the feeling of the quicksand into which this simple little girl, having a charming but small voice, is suddenly thrown.” In this chapter from his book ‘Cinema’s Illusions, Opera’s Allure’, David Schroeder explores the role opera plays in Citizen Kane, both to signal the pretensions of the high society to which Kane aspires to gain entry, but also to signal the tragic mismatch between Susan’s talents and the great stage onto which Kane’s ambitions have thrust her.
Read Cinema's Illusions, Opera's Allure: Deflated and Flat: Opera in Citizen Kane
A film such as Citizen Kane does not exist in isolation, and in their discussion of the film in their book ‘The Language of Film’ Robert Edgar, John Marland and Steven Rawle show how its meanings are imparted through the audience’s prior knowledge of other cinematic, literary and media texts and genres to which the film refers. They explore how Kane continues to resonate in contemporary culture, most recently in controversies around ‘Fake News’ and the power of the media in the run up to and aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election.
Screen Studies brings together a wealth of content addressing the many forms of filmmaking in national and regional cinema contexts as well as cinemas of migration and diaspora. In the introduction to her book World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, Lúcia Nagib addresses the term ‘world cinema,’ arguing that it should not be seen as the ‘other’ of ‘mainstream’ or Hollywood cinema, but when approached from “a positive, democratic and inclusive” perspective, as a diverse phenomenon with “peaks of creation in different places and periods.”
Cecília Mello builds on Nagib’s idea of world cinema as enjoying “peaks of creation” in her study of the contemporary Chinese director Jia Zhangke. Mello explores how Jia tackles questions of realism and memory in films made from the 1990s onwards, identifying his recurrent aesthetic and thematic preoccupations. Returning to the question of national identity and cinema, she considers the contexts of Jia’s creative practice in China’s political and artistic history, but also how he has been influenced by other traditions of making, writing and thinking about cinema.
Many national cinemas developed in the 20th century alongside their country’s path to a modern nation state. Sarah Barrow considers the part played by cinema in forging a Peruvian national identity in Chapter 1 of her book Contemporary Peruvian Cinema. She draws attention to the tension between the state’s desire to use cinema to tell a unifying story about national history, and the desire of filmmakers and thinkers to represent difference and minority voices – for example, the Third Cinema movement which emerged after the Cuban Revolution, which was committed to social and cultural emancipation.
Filmmakers in Africa have often charted a path between a pan-African cinema, asserting an ‘African’ fellowship across national borders, and the desire to create a national cinema as part of the development of a post-colonial national identity. In a conversation with Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen for their book Theorising National Cinema, the filmmaker John Akomfrah discusses this tension in post-war African cinema and cultural politics, with reference to directors such as Ousmane Sembène and Suleymane Cissé.
The responsibility of cinema to foster political and cultural change is explored by James S. Williams in his Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema. Williams discusses how the 1960s generation of black African filmmakers and critics, wrestling with the legacies of European colonialism, believed that cinema had an urgent imperative to create idealizing myths of nationhood, modernity and cultural revolution. Williams shows how, in representing subjects such as the eroticised male body, the new African metropolis, and questions of migration and transculturalism, more recent filmmakers such as Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Katy Lena Ndiaye and Mati Diop are helping to redefine ‘African cinema’ in ways that are no longer tied to the ideals of pan-Africanism.
In one of our original overview articles, Daisuke Miyao traces the development of cinema in Japan in the early 20th century, highlighting how Japanese film-making grew out of kabuki theater traditions.
The 1930s, 1940s and 1950s saw the flourishing of talents of the great directors Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and Akira Kurosawa. In the opening chapter of Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited, Catherine Russell considers the industrial, cultural and aesthetic features of classical Japanese cinema, its relationship to Hollywood and to Japanese national identity. In a similar vein, Robert N. Watson’s study of Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s epic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the BFI Film Classics series, considers how the film highlights “analogies between British and Japanese medieval history, and between Shakespeare as an epitome of high western civilisation and Noh drama as an epitome of high Japanese civilisation.”
Hit by the rise of television and home video, theatrical cinema in Japan declined in the second half of the 20th century. But the late 1990s onwards has seen a resurgence of a lively national cinema with directors such as Kitano Takeshi and Hirokazu Kore-eda releasing films that are both critically and commercially successful, and the popularity of genres such as the yakuza (gangster) film, horror, and anime. In this chapter from Contemporary Asian Cinema, Darrell William Davis provides an overview of the Japanese cinematic landscape, and Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell’s BFI Film Classic considers one of the most memorable examples of anime: 1998’s post-apocalyptic cyberpunk feature Akira.
Peter Wollen’s writing was hugely influential for the development of film studies. While working at the British Film Institute, Wollen wrote the seminal film theory text, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, introducing ideas from semiotics and post-structuralism to the analysis of film. First published in 1969, Signs and Meaning was published in a new edition in 2013, with a foreword by D.N. Rodowick in which Rodowick considers the importance of the book in its various editions in changing the way we understand film as an art form.
In this chapter, Wollen considers the auteur theory developed by critics at the Cahiers du cinéma in relation to the films of directors including Howard Hawks and John Ford.
Wollen was to return to the auteur theory in his masterly analysis of Gene Kelly’s role as co-director, choreographer and performer of the eponymous dance sequence in Singin’ in the Rain, the subject of Wollen’s contribution to the BFI Film Classics series.
The film philosopher and historian Thomas Elsaesser played a key part in the development of the academic study of film. Elsaesser was based for much of his career in the UK, at the University of East Anglia, and latterly at the University of Amsterdam. Like Wollen, Elsaesser engaged with both classical Hollywood and European cinema, and with questions of film authorship. In his study of the 1925 science fiction classic Metropolis, Elsaesser situates the film as an example of ‘UFA style’ – its technical complexity and attention to detail not attributable solely to the vision of director Fritz Lang, but the result of a collaboration “between set designers, cameramen, art directors and countless other, highly skilled specialists” employed by the film studio, UFA.
In his contribution to Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, Elsaesser explores what he terms the ‘dandyism’ of Hitchcock’s unique persona, a quality that also informed his filmmaking style. Elsaesser suggests that Hitchcock’s life and art alike represent “a determined protest, the triumph of artifice over accident, a kind of daily victory over chance, in the name of a spirituality dedicating itself to making life imitate art.”
In a contemporary globalised cinema landscape, is the concept of the director-as-author still valid? In this chapter from his Limina Award-winning book European Cinema and Contintental Philosophy, Elsaesser outlines some of the defining features and industrial forces shaping 21st century authorship.
“I had a world. I don't think I had a career. I made films.”
- Agnès Varda, 2009
Agnès Varda was not only a pioneering film-maker in her own right, but a key figure in the French New Wave movement, characterised by its realist style, influenced by Italian neorealism and Hollywood, its subject matter of intrigue and crime and its questioning of bourgeois social norms. Hilary Neroni’s study of Varda’s classic Cléo de 5 à 7 situates Varda as part of the French New Wave and as an avowedly feminist film maker.
In an article for the French film journal Positif, Varda herself looks back on forty years of film-making since the release of her first feature La Pointe Courte (1955) and her artistic debt to the great director Luis Buñuel. As Kate Ince describes in her book The Body and the Screen, Varda’s documentary Les plages d’Agnès (2008) mixes autobiographical narration with installation art and filmic and photographic montage in an evocative journey through her life and film-making career.
Film festivals have changed hugely since the first festival, Venice, opened in August 1932 with a screening of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The biggest, such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance, and Toronto, function variously as global film marketplaces, the chance for a ‘first look’ at new releases before they make it to theaters, and for audience engagement beyond the screen, with personal appearances by film-makers and stars. In the film journal Projections, Gus Van Sant recalls a memorable encounter with Derek Jarman at the Berlin Film Festival and, in The Guerilla Film Makers Movie Blueprint, Chris Jones provides a how-to guide to launching your film on a global stage.
The 21st century has witnessed an ever-increasing multiplicity of festivals: local and regional, genre or identity based, even digital festivals. Film festivals can provide an opportunity for audiences to engage with films in a very different way to a standard cinematic experience – explored by Lesley-Ann Dickson in her case study of programming and exhibition practices at the Glasgow Film Festival, and Rosana Vivar in her research with fan communities at the San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival. Geli Madelmi surveys the emergence of online festival platforms that enable the viewer to program their own personal film festival from amongst thousands of new releases.
Stanley Kubrick's impact on cinema goes far beyond the fourteen films he directed though, each meticulously-executed artwork, from his early non-fiction short The Day of the Fight (1953) to his late masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut (1999), is testament to his holistic, perfectionist approach to film-making. In one of our new overview articles, Maria Pramagiorre dubs Kubrick’s oeuvre ‘a cinema of failure’: his anti-heroes, despite inhabiting hyper-masculine milieus, embodying a troubled masculinity beset by anxiety and weakness.
In his study of Kubrick’s ‘Total Cinema’, Philip Kuberski describes how the director, who in his early career had worked as a photographer, used both natural and artificial light ‘as a means of illumination’, to create visual effect and impart meaning. In addition to their formal innovations, Kubrick’s films reached beyond the conventions of genre. In ‘The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick’, Norman Kagan explores how Kubrick consistently tested genre boundaries, whether in the science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or the claustrophobic horror The Shining (1980). Discussing Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick’s foray into period drama, Ryan Gilbey argues that, by avoiding “the fusty clichés of tour-guide film-making”, Kubrick achieves an emotional authenticity that allows contemporary audiences to connect with its 18th century characters.
