Great Moments in Gayness: Smells Like "Gardenia"

Team Experience is celebrating Gay Pride with their favorite moments in gay cinema... although since it's the cinema sometimes it's Gay Shame! Here's Michael going wayback for some devious fey villanry in a noir classic... Happy Gay Pride Week Everyone!

Sam Spade’s secretary tells him there is a Joel Cairo to see him. She hands Spade a business card. He sniffs it and shoots Effie a look.

“Gardenia,” she says, identifying the scent. [more...]

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An interview with Nick Davis, on "The Desiring-Image"

Tim here. Just in time for Gay Pride Month, sometime Film Experience contributor and generally terrific film writer Nick Davis had his very first book published, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema. After having torn through my copy a little bit faster than the densely academic arguments necessarily deserved, I sat down with Nick to chat about some aspects of the book.

(Disclosure: not only are Nick and I friends, I make an appearance in the acknowledgements, as does Nathaniel, our host. But that’s why this isn’t a “review”)

Tim Brayton: Just to clarify: for you and for the book, “queer theory” and “queer cinema” is complementary to, but not necessarily the same as, gay and lesbian cinema.

Nick Davis: Yes. “Queer” both as a scholarly term, and a term that filmmakers are using for their work, is sort of bringing a more political edge to gay or lesbian or bisexual storylines, and doing so in such a way that it’s hard to talk about sexuality without also talking about other forces and other aspects of your social situation that impact who you relate to, how, what you know about yourself, whether you think you have a sexuality, or whether it’s something that changes or goes by another name.

TB: The book is an investigation into queer theory and the writing of Gilles Deleuze, using them to comment on each other. I gather that Deleuze is not somebody who crops up often in queer discussion very much, so what started you on this line of thought?

ND: Probably two moments...

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Great Moments in Gayness: "Waiting for Omar"

Team Experience is celebrating Gay Pride Week with their favorite moments in gay cinema. Here's David on a 1986 classic introducing a certain 3 time Oscar winner... Happy Gay Pride Week Everyone!

In my experience, it’s always worth waiting for Omar.”

One of my favourite LGBT movies will always be Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, one of the most important and political British films of the 1980s, but also one that was important to the development of my own sexual identity in the calmer climbs of the mid-2000s. It was the first Film Studies class my school had ever taught, I’d just fallen in love with cinema over the summer, and I was a sixteen-year-old struggling with his ‘different’ sexual feelings – there was basically a lot of late blooming going on. [more]

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Great Moments in Gayness: Dietrich in Morocco

[Editor's Note: Please welcome Anne Marie to the blog! You've probably read her Golden Age Cinema musings before if you've been playing along with Hit Me With Your Best Shot (returning July 3rd!) but here is her first piece for the Film Experience! - Nathaniel]

Happy Gay Pride Week Everyone!

This is Anne Marie, writing to you directly for the first time. Today we have three things to celebrate: Pride Week, the Supreme Court's historic decision against DOMA, and my first chance to write for The Film Experience. If you followed me at all on Hit Me With Your Best Shot, you know that I always love to relate current themes to Old Hollywood. And guess what? I'm going to do it again, this time for Pride Week!

Looking for lesbian icons in Classic Hollywood is not always pleasant... [more]

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Great Moments in Gayness: "Fasten Your Seatbelts"

Happy Gay Pride Week Everyone!

The best screenplay I’ve ever come across is from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950). It tells a deceptively simple story in a straightforward manner, but does it in such a gloriously telling, bitchy manner that it remains to this day, one of the only films I can’t stop watching once it’s started.

Its most iconic moment is when its leading lady, Margo Channing (played by ours, Bette Davis) literally ascends the stairs in her New York apartment. A party is about to take place that changes the direction of the narrative and the relationships between its characters; a climax that comes only halfway through the picture, which manages to sustain its level of suspense and biting humor thereafter. 

Margo, putting on the facade of genteel, warm host is instead preparing her plan for the evening; to oust the titular Eve Harrington (a wonderful turn from Anne Baxter), and reveal her deceptions to their friends. This is, of course, a plan that goes awry once Davis becomes intoxicated and spends the rest of the party moping about, making her pianist play Liebestraume by Franz Litze and effectively dampening the mood of the entire occasion. But for one brief moment, as her partner and closest friends inquire whether or not the storm has passed or if it’s just about to begin, she gives a beautiful telling look, sashays over to the steps in a way that would make Tyra Banks weep with envy, and like a betrayed Cassandra, intones that classic line:

Margo Channing Portrait © Trevor Heath. Read about it here!

Fasten your seatbelts.
It's going to be a bumpy night.

Her prediction holds true.

All About Eve is a hallmark in gay cinema, not just because of the sexual ambiguities of Eve Harrington or the effervescent, snakelike charm of Addison DeWitt, but because of its diva, Margo Channing. A light that shines from a tower Joe Mankiewicz built that, like any great architect of the cinema, is at once inimitable and forever desired.

We all want that entrance, and we all want such an exit.