LGBTQ Festivals: Curating Queerness (Web Exclusive)
by Antoine Damiens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 295 pp. Hardcover: $124.00.

Reviewed by Matthew Hays

There is almost something quaint about reading LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness, given that the current COVID-19 pandemic has thrown every film festival (or any festival, for that matter) into various states of harrowing existential crises. Smaller events are conceding they might not survive; even those with can’t miss status and bulletproof brands like the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) have responded with far-reaching staff layoffs and scaled-down events. 

But that lends even more weight to the significance of author Antoine Damiens’s extensive research and inquiry. LGBTQ film festivals have, beyond any reasonable doubt, had huge influence upon—and convergence with—the burgeoning canon of queer cinema, the field of queer film studies, and LGBTQ activism. Given queer cinema’s massive impact on LGBTQ visibility and public perceptions of who and what queer people are (he duly quotes British film scholar Richard Dyer, who as early as 1977 noted that “gays have had a special relationship to the cinema”), and the corresponding more progressive attitudes about queer people and subsequent advances in our rights, it seems a fitting moment to pause and take stock.

As Damiens clearly illustrates, mapping out the history and impact of LGBTQ film festivals is excruciatingly complicated. This history is marked by numerous tensions between various factions of those organizing/writing about LGBTQ cultural events, tensions familiar to anyone involved in activist and/or cultural organizations. Central among these fault lines is the one between academics and grass-roots activists, who often view each other with suspicion if not outright hostility. As Damiens states in his introduction, he was animated by “the belief that festival organizing and academic writing are not antithetical. Both of these activities offer a framework for understanding the stakes and material realities of knowledge production.”

Damiens is keenly aware that this area of academic inquiry is relatively new. Making things even more complex is the fact that a strain of festival studies already exists, but it largely ignores film festival studies, which is its own thing. If this sounds like a project of migraine proportions, Damiens is only too aware of it, and spends much of his first chapter concisely mapping out his analysis.  

As Damiens lays out the parameters of his book, he is careful to acknowledge where most of the legwork has already taken place, and that is in the new and often unpublished academic work of his peers. “My choice to rely on these dissertations thus reflects their centrality in the historical development of the field: although they have not been published, they shaped the political project of festival studies.” It’s a note of homage that reflects Damiens’s sound ethics, but also draws attention to the form of his book, which mainly reads like an only slightly adjusted doctoral dissertation (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

One of Damiens’s central dilemmas as a researcher is the very fact that if film festival studies are marginalized, LGBTQ cinema is also often sidelined. In other words, he is contending with what can perhaps best be described as a double marginalization. Histories like these are often told by the victors, and in this instance those victors are the ones with the backers armed with the biggest bank accounts—in other words, mainstream events affiliated with more established organizations. This in itself presents a problem, as Damiens rightly points out that many cultural events that received scant media attention and that lasted only a few years (or less) due to erratic funding and/or organizational infighting are the very events that have proven extremely influential. He refers to these gaping blind spots as “ghosts,” expressing the frustrations that many who set out to explore queer histories experience—that censorship combined with the very act of being marginal has made much of our sense of memory precarious, at best. Thus, the irony that in a movement bent on championing the marginalized, the mainstream often takes center stage, furthering the marginalization of certain groups, whether intentionally or not. The final chapter in his book works to correct this, focusing on smaller, lesser-known LGBTQ film festivals and how they manage to curate and reach out to audiences.  

The mainstream/marginal conflict is innate throughout queer film studies, given that much of the early work of queer film scholars and critics was to look at already existing mainstream work (especially from Hollywood) to interpret LGBTQ innuendo and subtext. Many queer filmmakers themselves have not tried to conceal their visions of “making it” in the “big time” mainstream, either through a major studio production or network TV. (A figure no less epic than John Waters stated, in his 2019 book Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, that he favors his later, bigger-budget studio work over his earlier, no-budget films from the Sixties and Seventies. While conceding that most of his fan base won’t agree, he says the later, more polished work is what he was always striving for. This is an astonishing statement from a radical queer filmmaker who in his early period worked defiantly from the trenches, creating films that remain transgressive to this day.)

This ongoing appropriation of the marginal by the mainstream is well documented (see J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1991 book Midnight Movies), but Damiens details how perilous and downright existential it is for LGBTQ film festivals. He quotes several articles written by scholars and critics who at various junctures have questioned the very need and/or efficacy of such events, given the growing spot for queer filmmakers at more mainstream fests. Damiens answers this question clearly with the vibrancy of his book, gently and subtly suggesting that with every seeming breakthrough in representation, there are others that remain unbroken. Any advance into the mainstream, he persuasively argues, could well further marginalize part of a community historically on the margins, a cruel and unwelcome outcome.

In terms of anecdote, Damiens describes one moment when the roles of activist, author, critic, scholar, and film festival curator intersected and crystallized—the 1980 release of two pivotal films, William Friedkin’s landmark gay serial-killer movie Cruising and the bizarre lesbian stalker/cautionary tale suspense film Windows. Both proved a final straw for queer cinephiles who had taken Vito Russo’s castigation of negative images to heart. Cruising in particular led to protests during production (efforts to sabotage the shoot didn’t work) and at cinemas that screened the film. All efforts congealed to surmise that more alternative film festivals were needed, to highlight work that presented queer characters in a different light. (A number of queer critics, scholars, and fanboys have since reclaimed Cruising, pointing to its noirish aspirations and its eerie anticipation of the AIDS epidemic; Friedkin has delighted in the irony that he has occasionally been invited to queer film festivals where he has introduced screenings and discussed Cruising’s complicated legacy.) 

The Cruising example serves as a reminder of several key facts to readers—there was a time when you could count the number of LGBTQ (then often simply referred to as gay or gay and lesbian) representations in movies on your fingers. When one did appear, played by an actor of no less star power than Al Pacino, it carried the weight of limited representation. (In a post-Glee cultural landscape, it’s almost impossible to imagine such a fuss being kicked up now.) When such representations did appear, they were often coming from the imagination of straight directors and screenwriters who may have been all but clueless. Thus the imperative for queer authorship and criticism but also film festival creation and curation, which meant film scholars (Thomas Waugh, Richard Dyer, Julia Lesage, Robin Wood) were in solidarity with more mainstream critics (especially Russo) in recognizing the need for a queer film festival circuit existing alongside pressure for change within mainstream film festival events—and all of this was meant to help bolster queer representation by queer artists on screens everywhere. While Damiens recounts their common cause, he doesn’t gloss over the ongoing differences, as some more mainstream critics—writing in the more public sphere of The Advocate and The Village Voice—disparaged the work of more theory-focused academics, and vice versa.

The idea of individuals working across roles was becoming harder in the Eighties and Nineties, as queer film studies became more established in academia and film festivals and other institutions became professionalized. This growing attention to credentials led to what Damiens argues was an inadvertent reification of “the boundaries between cinephilia, film criticism, scholarship, and curating,” while the reality is far more “messy: one might be a critic and/or festival organizer and/or policy-maker and-or a scholar.” As someone who has played musical chairs through these varied occupations, Damiens’s intent to do away with restrictive distinctions was especially refreshing.

Despite all of the rampant changes in the cultural landscape—viewers can now order films via VOD and Sundance has its own channel, to cite but two examples—Damiens makes the case for the ongoing importance of LGBTQ film festivals. With his exhaustive research and intricate attention to detail, Damiens has chronicled a vital history of LGBTQ film fests, adeptly capturing a doubly marginalized culture, ghosts and all. In this moment of pause, reflection and reinvention for film festivals, it’s a book we needed. 

Matthew Hays is co-editor (with Tom Waugh) of the Queer Film Classics series of books and teaches film studies at Concordia University and Marianopolis College in Montreal.

Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1