Queer Film Classics

A Queer Film Classic on Luchino Visconti's lyrical and controversial 1971 film based on Thomas Mann's novel about a middle-aged man (played by Dirk Bogarde) vacationing in Venice who becomes obsessed with a youth staying at the same hotel as a wave of cholera descends upon the city. The book analyzes its cultural impact and provides a vivid portrait of the director, an ardent Communist and grand provocateur. Will Aitken's novels include Realia and Terre Haute. Arsenal's Queer Film Classics series cover some of the most important and influential films about and by LGBTQ people.

lWhen a net is set, and that's the way you choose, you'll hit it. Hold, a Welsh fisherman, Grzegorz, a Polish migrant worker, and Stringer, an Irish gangster, all want the chance to make their lives better. One kilo of cocaine and the sea tie them together in a fatal series of decisions. Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron on the west coast of Wales in 1975. He is the author of four short novels, most recently The Dig (Coffee House Press, 2014), which won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2014 and the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015. His work has been translated into several languages, and short stories have aired on BBC Radio and appeared in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta. Everything I Found on the Beach is the second of three United States releases of his work by Coffee House Press.

A Queer Film Classic on Canadian director Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, her quirky and hopeful first feature film which made its premiere at Cannes and won its Prix de la jeunesse. Presented as a "videotaped confession," it tells the story of Polly Vandersma, an unpretentious and introverted young woman who takes photographs as a hobby and works as a personal assistant to an elegant and sophisticated, but unsatisfied, art gallery director, Gabrielle St. Peres, whom she worships. This book presents a new close textual analysis of Mermaids that places this complex yet teachable film unquestionably within the global queer film canon while uncovering many of its complexities. The film has appeared on the Maclean's "Top 10 Films of the 20th Century" and Toronto International Film Festival's Best 10 Canadian Films of All Time. Julia Mendenhall, a longtime fan of the film, places it in the context of the director's life experiences and her filmic oeuvre, the production and reception history of the film within the mid to late 1980s and the 1990s era of "outing," and the development of queer theory.

Gods and Monsters, one of three inaugural titles in Arsenal Pulp Press' new film book series Queer Film Classics, deals with the acclaimed 1998 film about openly gay film director James Whale, best known for the Frankenstein films of the 1930s. Written and directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls), Gods and Monsters stars Ian McKellen as Whale in the final days of his life during the 1950s. Moving from the slums of Britain in the early twentieth century to the new era of "talkies" in Hollywood and beyond, Gods and Monsters trains a gay eye on the historical events that helped shape Whale and his films. The result was widely acclaimed, winning an Oscar for Condon's screenplay and nominations for both McKellen and costar Lynn Redgrave. This book examines Gods and Monsters from a variety of perspectives, highlighting the complexity and significance of its achievements, including its fusion of fantasy and biography. It also delves into a history of gay Hollywood during this era, including both its homophobic surface and its queer underpinnings.

A Queer Film Classic: the 1996 film by Indian-born director Deepa Mehta, about the burgeoning relationship between the wives of two brothers; its unprecedented lesbian themes led to riots outside cinemas in India.

A Queer Film Classic on the 2005 film debut by French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée (best known for Dallas Buyers Club and Wild), about a young gay man who struggles to find his sense of self amidst a "crazy" family of four brothers and a homophobic father who seeks to cure him. The film won a best picture Genie Award (Canada's version of the Oscars) in 2006. Robert Schwartzwald in a professor at the Université de Montréal.

A Queer Film Classic on 1974's Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975. Already internationally distinguished as a poet, novelist, and outspoken social critic of the postwar period, Pasolini turned to filmmaking around 1960. In little more than a decade, he produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work in cinema history, beginning with his early film-portraits of the struggles of underclass youths and extending through his adaptations of such sacred or mythic narratives as the stories of Oedipus and Medea and the Gospel of St. Matthew. In what turned out to be the last years of his career, Pasolini turned to several classic works of chain-narrative, The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, as models for his own radical expansion of cinema's capacities for telling, showing, and enacting embodiment, nudity, and sexual desires and behaviors. This book explores the legacy and context of Arabian Nights, in many ways the most optimistic and appealing of Pasolini's late films, not only in the final explosive phase of Pasolini's career but also more broadly in the global history of film spectacle from Douglas Fairbanks to Maria Montez.

A Queer Film Classic on John Greyson's controversial 1993 film musical about the AIDS crisis which combines experimental, camp musical, and documentary aesthetics while refuting the legend of Patient Zero, the male flight attendant accused in Randy Shilts' book And the Band Played On of bringing the AIDS crisis to North America. Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe both teach in the women's studies and Feminist Research department at the University of Western Ontario. Arsenal's Queer Film Classics series cover some of the most important and influential films about and by LGBTQ people.

Trash, one of three inaugural titles in Arsenal Pulp Press' new film book series Queer Film Classics, delves into the legendary 1970 film that was arguably the greatest collaboration between director Paul Morrissey and producer Andy Warhol. The film Trash is a down-and-out domestic melodrama about a decidedly eccentric couple: Joe, an impotent junkie (played by Warhol film regular Joe Dallesandro), and Holly, Joe's feisty and sexually frustrated girlfriend (played by trans Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn). Joe is the hunky yet passive center around whom proud Holly orbits; while Morrissey intended to show that "there's no difference between a person using drugs and a piece of refuse," Woodlawn's incredible turn reverses his logic: she makes trash as precious as human beings. The book examines the film in the context of Morrissey and Warhol's legendary partnership, with a special focus on Woodlawn's acclaimed performance: a glorious embodiment of "trash" and glamour that was so stunning, director George Cukor led a campaign (albeit unsuccessful) to win her an Oscar nomination.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 thriller based on the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (author of The Talented Mr. Ripley) is about two men who meet on a train: one is a man of high social standing who wishes to divorce his unfaithful wife; the other is an enigmatic bachelor with an overbearing father. Together they enter into a murder plot that binds them to one another, with fatal consequences. This Queer Film Classic delves into the homoerotic energy of the film, especially between the two male characters (played by Farley Granger and Robert Walker). It builds on the question of the sexuality the film puts on view, not to ask whether either character is gay so much as to explore the queer relations between sexuality and murder and the strong antisocial impulses those relations represent. The book also includes a look at the making of the film and the critical controversies over Hitchcock's representations of male homosexuality. QUEER FILM CLASSICS is a critically acclaimed film book series that launched in 2009. It features twenty-one of the most important and influential films about and/or by LGBTQ people, made in eight different countries between 1950 and 2005, and written by leading LGBTQ film scholars and critics.

Maurice (1987), a British film based on the novel by E.M. Forster, follows an Edwardian man's journey to self-acceptance as someone who loves and desires men. Rebutting its critical reception, this volume champions the film as a sympathetic adaptation, making a case for its underappreciated positive depiction of gay love. Maurice, James Ivory's 1987 adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel, follows an Edwardian man's journey from the awakening of his desire for and love of men to self-acceptance. One of the most politically resistant films of the 1980s, Maurice dared to depict a young man's coming-out story and a happy ending for its lovers, Maurice and Alec. James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, a couple whose cinema is synonymous with period film adaptation, released Maurice during the first AIDS decade, a time of flagrant transatlantic homophobia. Criticism following its release described Ivory as a superficial and staid director, while the film was received as a regression to the uncinematic and overly faithful style that characterized the early adaptations by Merchant Ivory Productions. Offering a close reading of Forster's novel and an analysis of Ivory's distinctive visual style, Richard Robbins's indelible score, and the performances of James Wilby, Hugh Grant, and Rupert Graves, David Greven argues that the film is a model of sympathetic adaptation. This study champions the film as the finest of the Merchant Ivory works, making a case for Ivory's underappreciated talents as a director of great subtlety and intelligence, and for the film as one worth recuperating from its detractors. Understanding Maurice as a fully realized work of art and adaptation, this volume offers insight into how a stunning novel of gay love became a classic of queer film. "The writing is the greatest joy of this book – in its daring and originality, its clarity and avoidance of academic stuffiness, its freshness and nimble erudition, Greven's Maurice is witty, deeply moving, superbly literate, and erotically tactile, like the movie he praises. In naming Merchant Ivory's Maurice a classic, Greven has created a classic of his own. Long may it be read." Will Aitken, author of Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic "Greven succeeds in restoring Maurice to an honored place among significant movies that feature a gay protagonist. The concluding chapter is sophisticated yet accessible to a broad audience. Greven writes with a clarity that will likely appeal to general audiences and film scholars alike." Library Journal Exploring love, loss, and desire in Merchant Ivory's passionate adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel. David Greven is professor of English at the University of South Carolina.