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# Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia

Pierre Eugène, Kate Ince, Marc Siegel

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Pierre Eugène, Kate Ince, Marc Siegel. Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia. Meson Press., 2024, 978-3-95796-018-4. 10.14619/0184. hal-04465104

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QUEER

NEPHILIA

PIERRE EUGÈNE

KATE INCE

MARC SIEGEL

CONFIGURATIONS

OF FILM

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CIN

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Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia
"Don't miss the *and* in the title, for this valuable book has two objectives. On the one hand, it proposes a vital, much-needed analysis of Serge Daney's thought, of his work as a critic, media theorist, and founder of the essential film journal *Trafic*, topics which all remain woefully under-discussed in English. On the other, it considers the implications of this work for queer studies, initiating a productive, cross-disciplinary dialogue around topics like aesthetics and queer biography, film history and feminism, media archeology and festival programming. The broader frame moves past Daney in order to remain close to him: by abandoning the self-sufficiency of a single approach for the vulnerability of the encounter, the editors maintain the commitments to alterity, mediation, and impurity at the heart of his understanding of cinema."

—Sam Di Iorio, Hunter College, City University of New York

"This international anthology helps to construct a renewal of transatlantic discourses on cinema. The contributions not only attempt to read Serge Daney from a queer perspective today, but also to understand queer theory anew, stemming from the cinephilic image theory of one of the most influential French film critics, who saw the era of post-cinema dawning as early as the 1980s."

—Christa Blümlinger, Université Paris-8

"This invaluable book steps in to help fill a glaring void: the lack of English-language scholarship on the most respected French film and TV critic of the post-WWII era, Serge Daney. It trains a queer and feminist lens on Daney's writings, a task both fruitful and fugitive, Daney being a gay man who rarely wrote about homosexuality—either his own or in cinema. Given that he spent the majority of his career steeped in the masculinist-heterosexual culture of *Cahiers du cinéma*, this book, by imaginatively unearthing the "queer potential" of his vast oeuvre, has produced an exciting contribution to the study of film criticism that pulses with contemporary resonance."

—Girish Shambu, Canisius College, Buffalo, New York
Serge Daney and
Queer Cinephilia

Edited by Pierre Eugène,
Kate Ince and Marc Siegel

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meson press
KÖNFIGU
RATIONEN
DES
FILME

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Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft
German Research Foundation

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GOETHE-
UNIVERSITÄT
FRANKFURT AM MAIN

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG, German Research Foundation)—GRK 2279

**Bibliographical Information of the**
**German National Library**

The German National Library lists this publication in the
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie (German National Bibli-
graphy); detailed bibliographic information is available
online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Published in 2024 by meson press, Lüneburg, Germany
www.meson.press

Design concept: Torsten Köchlin, Silke Krieg
Cover design: Mathias Bär, Thomas Köchlin
Cover image: Still from *Le Cinéphile et le village* (1993) by Pascal Kané. The editors thank Roman Kané for permission to use this image.
Copy editing: Daniel Hendrickson

The print edition of this book is printed by
Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom.

ISBN (print): 978-3-95796-018-4

ISBN (PDF): 978-3-95796-019-1

DOI: 10.14619/0184

The digital editions of this publication can be downloaded
freely at www.meson.press.

This publication is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International). To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

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# Contents

Configurations of Film: Series Foreword 7

A Queer Serge Daney? 9

Marc Siegel and Kate Ince

[1] **Serge Daney and Homosexuality: A Matter of Smuggling** 25

Pierre Eugène

[2] **Carte Postale à Serge Daney** 51

Andrea Inzerillo

[3] **Clip Reels and Community: Queer Cinephilia at the Queer Film Festival** 65

Theresa Heath

[4] **Revolt, She Said: Queer Feminist Film Curation and the Freedom to Revolt** 79

So Mayer and Selina Robertson, Club des Femmes

CHANGING AND EXCHANGING: SERGE DANey MIDSTREAM

[5] **Cinephilia Falls to Earth: Thinking the Image after Daney** 119

Garin Dowd

[6] **Thinking the Future of Cinema** 147

Bamchade Pourvali
[7] Showing Cinema Where It Happens: Serge Daney, a Global Cinema Critic 159
Claire Allouche

[8] Ping-ponging with Daney 177
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin

[9] A Few Diaries in the Early Volumes of *Trafic* 201
Simon Pageau

[10] Serge Daney and *Trafic*: Round Table with the Members of the Editorial Board 223
Raymond Bellour, Sylvie Pierre, Patrice Rollet, Marcos Uzal, Pierre Eugène

DIGITAL DANÉY

[11] Serge Daney and the Robots 245
Pierre Eugène

[12] A Video Exploration of a Viewer's Account: *L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Daney* 263
Chloé Galibert-Lainé

[13] Cinephilic Fandom 279
Philipp Dominik Keidl

Authors 305
## Configurations of Film: Series Foreword

Scalable across a variety of formats and standardized in view of global circulation, the moving image has always been both an image of movement and an image on the move. Over the last three decades, digital production technologies, communication networks and distribution platforms have taken the scalability and mobility of film to a new level. Beyond the classical *dispositif* of the cinema, new forms and knowledges of cinema and film have emerged, challenging the established approaches to the study of film. The conceptual framework of index, *dispositif* and canon, which defined cinema as photochemical image technology with a privileged bond to reality, a site of public projection, and a set of works from auteurs from specific national origins, can no longer account for the current multitude of moving images and the trajectories of their global movements. The term “post-cinema condition,” which was first proposed by film theorists more than a decade ago to describe the new cultural and technological order of moving images, retained an almost melancholic attachment to that which the cinema no longer was. Moving beyond such attachments, the concept of “configurations of film” aims to account for moving images in terms of their operations, forms and formats, locations and infrastructures, expanding the field of cinematic knowledges beyond the arts and the aesthetic, while retaining a focus on film as privileged site for the production of cultural meaning, for social action and for political conflict.

The series “Configurations of Film” presents pointed interventions in this field of debate by emerging and established international scholars associated with the DFG-funded Graduate Research Training Program (Graduiertenkolleg) “Konfigurationen des Films” at Goethe University Frankfurt. The contributions to the series aim to explore and expand our understanding of configurations of film in both a contemporary and historical perspective, combining film and media theory with media history to address key problems in the development of new analytical frameworks for the moving image on the move.
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# A Queer Serge Daney?

Marc Siegel and Kate Ince

Serge Daney is arguably the central figure in French film and television criticism of the post-war era. Starting in 1964 he wrote for the leading film journal *Cahiers du cinéma*, and was its chief editor from 1973 to 1981. He then went on to write for the daily newspaper *Libération* and to found the film magazine *Trafic*. He died of AIDS in 1992, just as the concept of queer cinema entered international film studies and just before the start of the digital era that has transformed film criticism and cinephilia. Daney's writings incorporated psychoanalytic, Marxist, post-structuralist, film, and media theory, and offer many points of connection with contemporary film and media studies. In France, Daney is acknowledged as a key influence by a broad range of philosophers, theorists, critics, and filmmakers. Despite this, his work has never been systematically translated into English, and has not received the international scholarly attention it deserves. This collection of new essays, including six contributions that have been translated from the French, investigates the contemporary relevance of Daney's work by situating critical analyses of his writings and thought alongside reflections on queer, feminist, and digital cinephilia.

It is not challenging to find generative resources in Daney's work for thinking through aesthetic and theoretical concerns in the age of digital film production, distribution, and exhibition. In the media criticism for *Libération* that formed the basis of the book *Le salaire du zappeur/The Zapper's Wage* (1988/1993), for example, Daney focused on the aesthetics and politics of television and the televisual organization and dissemination of images. Across these essays written for a daily column of the same name, he drew out both the continuities and ruptures within histories of audiovisual technologies and questions of spectatorship. Whereas the cinephile was subject to the temporal difference of the cinematic image, the television viewer (or telephile) subordinated the
televisual image to the temporal logic of zapping, a process of using the remote control to spring almost instantaneously from one image to the next. Attending to the viewing of films on television, Daney highlighted questions of scale and format while also thinking through the historical implications of the younger medium in relation both to histories and aesthetics of cinema and to the political pressures of the present and future.

If Daney's comparative analyses of film and television readily lend themselves to contemporary debates within studies of digital cinema, streaming, format histories and aesthetics, post-cinema, and media archaeology, among other areas, the relevance of his work to issues of feminist and queer cinephilia might not seem as immediately apparent. Openly gay throughout his lifetime but decisively private about his homosexuality, Daney rarely touched on the subject in his approximately one thousand five hundred published articles and interviews. This is perhaps no surprise if we take as exemplary Geneviève Sellier's assessment of the climate during the formative period of *Cahiers*. She argues that the journal functioned as "a band of boys" who, in the 1950s and early 1960s, helped establish film criticism as "an almost exclusively masculine activity" and advanced a "cinéphilic gaze" that is "necessarily male, heterosexual, and directed toward icons, fetishes, and female sexual objects" (Sellier 2008, 28–29). The journal, of course, went through numerous phases between these early years and the later period of Daney's involvement. Along the way, it did often address some work by gay male directors like Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, even if the implications of homosexuality for questions of cinephilia and cinematic aesthetics were not explicitly addressed. Besides Daney, there were also other gay male critics who remained significant to the journal and French cinephilia, including Jean Douchet (a particularly important early voice at *Cahiers*) and Jean-Claude Biette. Nevertheless, an unquestioned masculinist heteronormativity marked the core of the journal's
cinephilia throughout the years of Daney's involvement.¹ Under the influence of a militant Maoist ideological perspective in the late 1960s and throughout the first part of the 1970s, *Cahiers* furthermore afforded little space for the subjective personal expressions or systematic and structural analyses of gender and sexuality characteristic of a gay and feminist criticism.² The journalistic environment at *Libération* in the early 1980s could not have been more different. In the path-breaking essay that opens this collection, Pierre Eugène points out that Daney's writing style changed in the last decade of his life after he left *Cahiers* to work for *Libération*, where he adopted the subjective, first-person "je" ("I") and abandoned the generalized "nous" ("we") that had previously characterized his writing. *Libération* thus represented a liberation of sorts for Daney, a context that allowed for a public reckoning with the self that may also be as characteristic of the early neoliberal moment, which developed rather differently in France (where socialist party leader François Mitterand replaced the center-right Valéry Giscard d'Estaing as President in May 1981) than in the Republican-governed US under Ronald Reagan.³

1 In 1967, Sylvie Pierre, one of Daney's close colleagues and future collaborators at *Trafic*, became the first woman to regularly write for *Cahiers*, "a hitherto purely masculine grouping" (Fairfax 2021, 215). In the 1970s and 1980s, she was joined by a handful of other women, including Thérèse Giraud and Danièle Dubroux, but, as Bérénice Reynaud points out, "their witty, often acerbic, texts did not generate larger discussions on issues of feminism or sexual politics per se" (Reynaud 2000, 7). Among French film magazines from the 1950s to the 1980s, *Cahiers* was certainly not alone nor necessarily the most egregious with respect to a masculinist heteronormativity.

2 The journal and Daney in particular did, for example, devote attention to *Histoires d'A* (Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel, 1973), a militant film defending a women's right to abortion. The critical emphasis, however, lay more on "revolutionary mise en scène" than feminist perspectives (Reynaud 2000, 7; see also Fairfax 2021, 332). In a provocative 1978 article for *Cahiers*, "Contre la nouvelle cinéphilie," Louis Skorecki evokes the latent homophilic character of male cinephilia of the early years at *Cahiers* (Skorecki 1978). Thanks to Pierre Eugène for drawing our attention to this text.

3 Reynaud points out the pressures that both Maoist ideology and the quest for generational self-consciousness had on *Cahiers* critics in the first half of
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Libération was marked by the work of such activist-authors as Hélène Hazera, Guy Hocquenghem, and Michel Cressole, all of whom had previously been involved with the *Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire* (Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action) and were attentive in their writing to issues of sexuality, gender, and the developing AIDS epidemic. Although Daney maintained a distance from the sexual and AIDS activism of these colleagues and refrained from the extended public critical reflection on sexuality that distinguished their important work, he nevertheless benefitted from their proximity.⁴ As Eugène elab-orates, it was the queer context at the newspaper that seemed to inspire Daney to write the only article in his oeuvre explicitly reflecting on homosexuality and cinematic representation, a review of Frank Ripploh's 1981 film *Taxi zum Klo* (*Taxi to the Toilet*). Significantly, Daney did not publish the text in *Libération*, but instead in the *Cahiers*—as if to interrupt and perhaps mark a dis-tance from the heteronormative cinephilia that had shaped his intellectual development.

Since Daney almost entirely refrained from publicly addressing his homosexuality and its possible relevance to his cinephilia, his work has understandably not received much attention within queer film and media studies. There are simply too many other fascinating figures with work better primed to help us think queerly about culture, life, and sexual politics—Hocquenghem, for instance. Nevertheless, as a prominent gay critic in the predominantly heterosexual French male film culture, Daney's work contains the seductive lure of queer potential. As Andrea Inzerillo explains in his essay in this volume, it was exactly this

4

<footnote>the 1970s, leading them to avoid the first person "I" and gravitate instead to the collective "we" (Reynaud 2000, 4). Daney's shift to the first-person singular in the 1980s can therefore also be viewed in the context of a broader rejection of or critical disappointment with this earlier ideology of collectivism.</footnote>

<footnote>Hocquenghem, who continued writing for *Libération* until 1982, was no longer a member of the paper's editorial department at the time Daney joined the staff as editor in 1981.</footnote>
rich potential that motivated the organizers of Sicilia Queer Film Festival in 2012, the twentieth anniversary of Daney's death, to devote a section of their yearly event to the French critic: *Carte Postale à Serge Daney*. Their intentions were not directed at naively asserting the queerness of Daney's work as a mere result of the biographical fact of his homosexuality. Instead, they sought to use the framework of a queer film festival as a context for investigating how Daney's work could enable a rethinking of both their knowledge of cinema and their concept of queer cinema.

Beyond the queer film festival circuit, there is an academic precedent for turning to Daney to put pressure on heteronormative conceptions of cinema and cinephilia. Geneviève Sellier and Noel Burch, for instance, discussed some of Daney's texts as an "implicit critique of the heteronormativity of the dominant cinephilia, that of *Cahiers du cinéma*" (Sellier 2018). Sellier had also argued in 2005 that Daney was the first to put his finger on and distance himself from "the obsessive masculinist principle that underlies [*Cahiers*'] cinephilia" (Sellier 2005, 69). For her part, Karen Redrobe suggests that Daney's figure of the *cinéfils* (a term he coined to link cinephilia with kinship so as to produce himself as a son of cinema) might provide a path out of the largely straight boys' club of French cinephilia. "Some versions of the *cinéfils*, including those we find in the writing of Roland Barthes or Daney, have a distinctly queer potential, often troubling normative models of relationality: homosocial communities meeting in the dark for pleasure, men who identify the same object as both parent and lover, and so on" (Redrobe 2015, 5). Redrobe infuses Daney's *cinéfils* with the possibilities of the *passeur*, another term Daney used late in his life to describe his work as a film critic. *Passeur* is often translated as "smuggler," but can also more generally describe one who simply passes something on as an informant or mediator. Daney used the term to refer to those other figures—solely men—who initiated ever anew his entry into the erotically charged, homosocial space of
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cinephilia. "Being a cinephile meant simply devouring *another* education parallel to that of the *lycée*, with the yellow *Cahiers* as the common thread and a few 'adult' *passeurs* who, with conspiratorial discretion, showed us that indeed there was a world to discover, and maybe nothing other than *the* world to live in" (Daney 2007,19, italics in original). That is Daney in his fascinating autobiographical treatise on the development of his cinephilia, "The Travelling Shot in Kapo," where he describes a cinematic initiation ritual with the relish of one titillated by participation in a secret, all-male subculture. "As for me, I immediately despised those who were too normal and sneered at the 'cinémathèque rats' we were on the verge of becoming—guilty of living cinema passionately and life by proxy....it had all the charms of a *parallel* counterculture" (Daney 2007, 19, italics in original). Whether or not Daney's *passeurs* only passed along the love for cinema or the love for the world through cinema and not, say, the erotic love for one another, his words charge this cinephilia with the sweaty, heady, guilty pleasures of all-male sex spaces.

In the discussions with Serge Toubiana that formed the basis of the posthumous book *Persévérance (Postcards from the Cinema)*, Daney makes explicit this connection between male sex spaces and cinephilia when he suggests that cruising for sex with men and cinematic spectatorship can both function as activities that enable the production of an image.

As soon as you see a good-looking kid in the corner—the eye moves very quickly in this type of situation—there is immediately center and perimeter, hence shot, and that makes an image: the boy's presence makes an image. That, by the way, is all I could say about everything that is of the order of erotic investment or what we were saying about character. I never identified with Cary Grant in my life, but the films in which I liked Cary Grant are the ones where his presence made an image: all the rest was organized around him. That's definitely a principle of general erotic orientation
Knowing that Daney did not use the term "image" lightly, this passage is truly astounding. It encourages us to acknowledge the queer potential of what has become one of Daney's key conceptual distinctions, that between the image and the visual. He produces these concepts over the course of later essays focusing on the media representation of Palestinians, Arabs, and the first Gulf War, most significantly "Before and After the Image" (Daney 1999) and "Montage Obligatory: The War, the Gulf and the Small Screen" (Daney 2006). In the former text, Daney argues that the visual is "the optical verification of a procedure of power whatever this may be (technological, political, advertising, military), a procedure which only requires, as sole commentary, a 'receiving loud and clear.' Obviously, the visual concerns the optic nerve, but for all that it is not an image. The condition *sine qua non* for there to be an image is, I think, *alterity*" (Daney 1999, 181-82, italics in original). Daney links the visual to television and advertising and to the technically perfected, slick visualization of something intended to communicate and inform quickly and efficiently. He reserves the image, on the other hand, for photography and cinema and for a temporally dense encounter with a confounding and seductive otherness. As he puts it in the later article, "as for the image—this image we loved in cinema to the point of obscenity—it ... always takes place at the border of two force fields, it is meant to bear witness to a certain *otherness*; and although it always has a hard core, it always lacks something. The image is always *more and less than itself*" (Daney 2006, n.p., italics in original). As a figure of alterity, the image challenges us to contextualize it, to "*edit* it with another, with *the* other." Daney's image is both a perceptual image and the virtual image of desire produced in the face of it.

Whether or not we subscribe to Daney's distinction between the visual (of television and advertising) and the image (of cinema), it is undoubtedly the very conception of a revelatory encounter
with an image, when—to use Paul Willemen’s lovely formulation—“what is being seen is in excess of what is being shown” (Willemen 1994, 237), that underlies a whole tradition of French cinephilia. If we take into account Daney’s remarks about cruising for sex, we must therefore acknowledge that the revelatory cinephilic encounter with an image does not simply yield a general ethical or moral position with regard to the world. Daney’s image generated within and as a gay erotic encounter can reveal something quite specific about the possibilities for challenging heteronormativity, questioning gender norms, reorienting subjectivity, and stimulating unforeseen possibilities for sexual desire and pleasure.

If the *cinfils*, the *passeur*, and the image are figures with queer potential within Daney’s cinephilic trajectory, do they yield any critical value for a feminist cinephilia? What place can the *cinéfilles* claim within a cinephilia inspired by Daney? As we are unfortunately reminded time and again, gay men are not necessarily more inclined toward feminism than straight men. Indeed, as Redrobe cautions, “the *cinfils’* view of the screen can also be rather exclusive (even the queerest of *cinfils* tend to erase female filmmakers, spectators, and critics, if not female performers)” (Redrobe 2015, 5). Destabilizing heteronormativity and distancing oneself from dominant forms of masculinity are important critical moves that can further feminist goals, but they do not go far along the path towards a feminist cinephilia: what place do women filmmakers and female spectatorship have in Daney’s cinephilic trajectory? The weekly radio show *Microfilms*, which Daney began with Brigitte Ollier in 1985, included hour-long interviews with Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, Claire Denis, Juliet Berto, Chantal Akerman, Marcelin Loridan-Ivens, Patricia Mazuy, Catherine Breillat, Christine Laurent, Bulle Ogier, and Dalida, as well as single episodes about cinema for the sightless (“Odile Converset, non-voyante”) and the perspective of a movie theater employee (“Annick Timmermans, ouvreuse de cinema”). Daney may not have foregrounded female authorship in his
writings or made observable efforts to undo the canon of male
filmmakers that is all too obvious in his books' tables of contents,
but his interest in certain films directed by Duras, Akerman, and
Jackie Raynal is evident,<fnref n="5" /> and Raynal and Danièle Dubroux as well
as Duras wrote tributes in the special issue of *Cahiers* devoted
to him in the summer of 1992.<fnref n="6" /> A different instance of Daney's
regard for women filmmakers is offered by the article he wrote
for *Libération* in 1989 about the two-week old hunger strike
Bulgarian filmmaker Maria Koleva had begun in protest against
the failure of French TV stations to broadcast her documentaries.
(Koleva, whose acclaimed autobiographical documentary *L'Etat
de bonheur...permanent* (1982) and series of films about the actor
and theater director Antoine Vitez whom Daney praises highly
in his article, had lived and worked in France since 1971: her 1989
hunger strike lasted forty-five days.)

By combining reflections about Daney and his work with dis-
cussions of queer, feminist and digital cinephilia, we both stay
close to Daney and seemingly move away from him. In doing so,
our goal is to foster a dialogue between the singular, inspiring
work of a fascinating film critic and the powerful perspectives
in queer and feminist film and media studies. We are guided by
the speculative promise that their proximity can yield a mutual
enrichment. Thanks to a network grant by the United Kingdom's
Arts and Humanities Research Council, we were able to host

<footnote n="5">5 In the interview with Bill Krohn conducted in New York in 1977 and reprinted in French at the start of *La Maison cinema et le monde* 1, Daney names Raynal's *Deux fois* (1968), Akerman's *Je, tu, il, elle* (1974), and Duras's *Le Camion* (1977) as the three "films de femmes" that have most impressed him (Daney 2001, 28).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 In hers, Raynal, who ran the legendary Bleecker Street Cinema in New York with her husband Sid Geffen between 1973 and 1985 and continued running it after Geffen's death until forced out by its developer in 1990, recalls Daney dubbing himself an "acrobat" of the Great Circus of Cinema (*Grand Cirque du Cinéma*), and tells the story of *Cahiers du cinéma*'s first New York Week, which took place at the Bleecker Street Cinema in November 1977, and which Daney followed up with visits to four or five other US cities that Raynal had arranged for him (Raynal 1992, 17).</footnote>
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workshops over the course of three years in Paris (organized by Pierre Eugène), Mainz (organized by Marc Siegel), and Birmingham (organized by Kate Ince) that addressed contemporary scholarly, critical, and curatorial perspectives on Daney and queer and feminist cinephilia. At the third workshop in Birmingham, the last to take place, So Mayer and Selina Robertson, London-based core members of the queer feminist curatorial collective Club des Femmes, co-established by Robertson and Sarah Wood in 2007, presented their UK-wide touring program of feminist films "Revolt, She Said: Women and Film after '68," whose title features a quotation from Julia Kristeva to complement the French name of the collective itself. The nine feature films in the tour (accompanied by eight shorts) were Czech, Swedish, West German, French, British, and American, and spanned the period from 1966, the year of Vēra Chytilová's "proto-feminist classic" *Daisies* to 1991 and Prathiba Parmar's *A Place of Rage*, "on the role of queer black women in the civil rights movement and beyond, thus affirming the tour as addressing the full extent of second-wave feminist history from 1968 to the beginning of the third wave in 1992" (Mayer and Robertson 2020, 77). This tour, programmed by Club des Femmes with the UK's Independent Cinema Office and funded by the British Film Institute, was the most ambitious initiative yet undertaken by the collective, and over the spring and summer of 2019 comprised "ninety-nine screenings at thirty cinemas nationwide, totaling 2,346 overall admissions" (Mayer and Robertson 2020, 79), even though CdF had had little previous profile outside London. The direct engagements with queer film history made by the "Revolt, She Said" tour, indicated by the "The Q with the F" title of Mayer and Robertson's workshop presentation which appears here in essay form, were the programming of Parmar's *A Place of Rage* and of Greta Schiller's multi-award-winning documentary *Before Stonewall* (1984), which, unlike many of the tour's films, "had and has a transnational cinematic exhibition history thanks to the emergence
of queer film festivals" (Mayer and Robertson 2020, 79). *Before Stonewall* was screened in a collaboration with the Leeds Queer Film Festival where it was introduced by former ACT UP New York member and academic Monica Pearl.

Queer film festivals and the cinephilia inseparable from them were also reflected upon at the Birmingham workshop by Theresa Heath-Ellul, whose essay here offers a summary of literature on the short but crowded history of queer film festivals, arguing that they "have contributed to the development of communal, interactive, non-hierarchical modes of viewing." It also considers the role—both live and online—of the clip reel as an embodiment of queer cinephilic practices. Quoting Skadi Loist and Leanne Dawson's estimation "that there are currently around 270 queer film festivals operating globally" (Dawson and Loist 2018 in Heath-Ellul 2022) and adopting Chris Straayer's approach to cinephilia as a "material [practice] initiated and constituted in the space of the auditorium," Heath-Ellul maintains that since the first gay film festivals in the late 1970s:

> Queer film festivals [have] provided a space for a more visible, communal and public practice which [has] thrived on the extra-textual dissemination of subjective knowledge and the star-related gossip which Marc Siegel, Jackie Stacey and [Patricia] White have identified as integral to queer cinephilias.

The prominence of the AIDS epidemic in queer lives in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s—a greater number of gay male than lesbian artists and activists died from the disease (Cyril Collard, Guy Hocquenghem, and Hervé Guibert in France as well as Daney; Derek Jarman in the UK, and Jack Smith and Arthur J. Bressan Jr. in the US, among many others)—meant a visibility of gay male filmmaking that carried across, Heath-Ellul suggests, in the "over-presence" of such work and the associated cinephilic subjective knowledge and gossip in the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s. But as Heath-Ellul also points out, Patricia White
describes the significance of the lesbian clip reel as a form in the decade and argues that it “heralded a ‘coming out of the closet’ for lesbian cinephilia” (White 1999, 31, in Heath-Ellul 2023).

The final contributor to “Queer and Feminist Cinephilia” in Birm-
ingham was Girish Shambu, who as critic and blogger since 2004
has perhaps done more than any other to keep conversation
and debate about cinephilia going in the digital age, in concen-
trated form in his recently reissued 2014 book *The New Cinephilia*
(Shambu 2020). Speaking to the title of his manifesto, which had
just appeared in February 2019 in a “manifestoes” issue of *Film
Quarterly* assembled by B. Ruby Rich (72 (3)), “For a New Cine-
philia,” Shambu expanded on the ten features of the old and new
cinephilias he succinctly contrasts in the manifesto by focusing on
the “tactics of the everyday” that might break down the remaining
elements of the mythic, celebratorily aesthetic, white male
heterosexual old cinephilia. Auteurism was squarely in his sights.
Although he conceded that it can be benign and that “there is
nothing necessarily male essentialist about auteurism” (Shambu
2019, 33), he proposed that certain male auteur directors need
not be viewed at all by those supporting the new cinephilia—a
tactic of refusal—that its second tactic be to “repurpose” the
concept of the auteur, and its third to redirect that same con-
cept, since women filmmakers’ readier acknowledgement of the
collective and the collaborative is far more in tune with the new
cinephilia’s values.

Our goal with both the project's workshops and this collection
of essays has been to lay the groundwork for a network of
researchers interested in Daney and feminist and queer cine-
philia and open to considering the tension and potential that
emerge when these subjects are placed in relation to one
another. By uniting in one book a selection of contributions
from these events with new and related texts, we intend both
to document this exchange and to further a continued critical
engagement with Daney and with contemporary practices in fem-
inist and queer cinephilia.
Daney's death in 1992 occurred during the same summer that B. Ruby Rich's article introducing the concept of New Queer Cinema appeared in the *Village Voice* and *Sight and Sound*. The birth of queer studies in the academy in the US and UK found echoes in France later in the 1990s in seminar series such as the one run by Sam Bourcier,<fnref n="8" /> but never took hold to the same extent as in the US, and the translation—literal and cultural—of central queer studies texts (Bourcier, notably, translated key essays by Monique Wittig and Teresa de Lauretis) would be significantly delayed by the difficult encounter of gender theory and gender studies with the conceptualization of citizenship adhered to by French Republicanism.<fnref n="9" /> Despite never being involved with any form of gay or feminist activism, Daney wanted it to be known that his death was of AIDS, “so that we don’t get used to it,” as Serge Toubiana wrote in the first paragraph of the introduction to the issue of *Cahiers du cinéma* dedicated to him in July/August 1992.<fnref n="10" /> Even though it wasn’t expressed until the final weeks of his life, Daney’s desire to make it known for posterity that he had died of the syndrome that had taken the lives of so many others, including scores of gay men, is an acknowledgement of the necessity of agitating publicly against a homophobic status quo. This desire is just one further indicator of the tension and potential explored by *Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia* (as research project and collection of essays).

<footnote n="8">8 For information on the seminar series, see Sam Bourcier, ed., *Q comme queer: les séminaires Q du Zoo (1996-1997)*. Paris: Les Cahiers Gai Kitsch Camp, 1998.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Judith Butler's *Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity*, for example, only appeared in French in 2005, as *Trouble dans le genre: le fém-inisme et la subversion de l'identité*. Paris: Editions de l'Amsterdam. In secular French Republicanism, each individual citizen is equal in their abstract neutrality, and the state does not recognize or interact with communities or groups united by racial, gender, ethnic, religious, or linguistic identity. Identity politics of the kind familiar from the US and UK is referred to as *communautarisme* and is viewed as a threat to the Republican tradition actualized (since 1958) in the Fifth Republic. French resistance to gender studies and queer theory is charted by Bruno Perreau in *Queer Theory: The French Response*. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 *Cahiers du cinéma* 458: 4.</footnote>
We would like to thank Judith Mayne and Patricia White for their advice and comments over the course of this research project. We also thank Vinzenz Hediger, Verena Mund, and the members of the Configurations of Film Research Training Program at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main for their support of this publication project. Johanna Börther provided essential assistance with the formatting of the manuscript. Finally, we appreciate the productive comments by two anonymous peer reviewers.

## References

Bourcier, Sam, ed. 1998. *Q comme queer: les séminaires Q du Zoo (1996-1997)*. Paris: Les Cahiers Gai Kitsch Camp.

Butler, Judith. 1990. *Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity*. London and New York: Routledge.

———. 2005. *Trouble dans le genre: Le féminisme et la subversion de l'identité*. Paris: Editions de l'Amsterdam.

Daney, Serge. 1993. *Le salaire du zappeur*. Paris: P.O.L.

———. 1999. "Before and After the Image." Translated by Melissa McMahon. *Discourse* 21 (1): 181-90.

Daney, Serge. 2007. *Postcards from the Cinema*. Translated by Paul Douglas Grant. Oxford and New York: Berg.

———. 2006. "Montage Obligatory." Translated by Laurent Kretzschmar and *Rouge Rouge* 8. Accessed October 29, 2022. http://rouge.com.au/8/montage.html.

Dawson, Leanne, and Skadi Loist. 2018. "Queer/ing Film Festivals: History, Theory, Impact." *Studies in European Cinema* 15 (1): 1-24. Accessed October 29, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2018.1442901.

Fairfax, Daniel. 2021. *The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973): Volume 1: Ideology and Politics*. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Mayer, So, and Selina Robertson. 2020. "Revolt, She Said: Queer Feminist Film Curation and the Freedom to Revolt." *Film Studies* 22: 76-97.

Perreau, Bruno. 2016. *Queer Theory: The French Response*. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Redrobe [Beckman], Karen. 2015. "Animating the *Cinéfils*: Alain Resnais and the Cinema of Discovery." *Cinema Journal* 54 (4): 1-25.

Reynaud, Bérénice. 2000. "Introduction: *Cahiers du Cinéma*: 1973-1978." *Cahiers du Cinéma Volume 4: 1973-1978 History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle*, edited by David Wilson, 1-44. London and New York: Routledge.

Sellier, Geneviève. 2005. "Gender Studies et études filmiques." *Cahiers du Genre* 38: 63-85.

———. 2008. *Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema*. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

———. 2018. Email message to Marc Siegel, October 5, 2018.
Shambu, Girish. 2014 and 2020. *The New Cinephilia*, Montreal: Caboose Books.

———. 2019. "For a New Cinephilia." *Film Quarterly* 72 (3): 32–34.

Skorecki, Louis. 1978. "Contre la nouvelle cinéphilie." *Cahiers du cinéma* 293: 31–52.

Toubiana, Serge. 1992. "Preface." *Cahiers du cinéma* 458: 4.

White, Patricia. 1999. *Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinephilia and Lesbian Representability*. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Willemen, Paul. 1994. "Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered." In *Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory*, 223–57. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press and BFI.
HOMOSEXUALITY

MAOISM

QUEER

AIDS
# Serge Daney and Homosexuality: A Matter of Smuggling

Pierre Eugène

This essay retraces, in Serge Daney's private history (biography and personal texts) and public history (published texts), his relationship with his own homosexuality and that of others. Daney considered his sexuality a strictly private matter, even if he was able to evoke it publicly when speaking of the HIV disease which killed him. His personal history shows that homo-sexuality does not constitute a particular key of interpretation for him. During his (Maoist) political years, and even at his liberating arrival at the daily newspaper *Libération*, with homosexual militants, homosexuality stays secondary if not evacuated. Nevertheless, we can find in Daney's writings a defense of the
singularity of minority lifestyles, against group representation. Hence, there is a paradoxical defense of homosexuality in Daney's texts and declarations, which has to do with the experience of otherness in cinema, against any retranscription of it into the social.

This article will give a historical and biographical overview of the subject of homosexuality in Daney's life and work. I will rely extensively on private archives and more than seventeen private notebooks written by Daney during his life, which I was able to consult while doing my PhD research.<fnref n="1" />

The lack of Daney's private documents prior to 1964 and between 1965 and mid-1967 actually prevents us from knowing precisely when and how Daney experienced his first homosexual encounter. But, since Daney has—like all cinephiles—a strong passion for lists, he drew up a summary of his lovers in the 1970s. At the end of his life, in *Perséverance* (translated into English as *Postcards from the Cinema*), Daney traces his first love back to his first days at primary school, when he met Michel, a child of his age (whom he will not continue to see as an adult):

> I thought that I was perhaps completely in love only once in my life, and it was with Michel: we were about seven or eight years old. I would go play at his house on rue Keller, and we would play the most miserable games without toys, just codes that we made up. I never again had that feeling of time stopping, of a remaining abundance: there's just one person there who fulfills all the possible roles and horizons. As

<footnote n="1">1 The documents are not only unpublished, but unknown even by Daney's friends. Daney's cousin, Arlette Bonaud kindly let me consult them when I was doing my PhD on Daney's work and life, published under the title *Exercices de relectures, Serge Daney 1962-1982* (Éditions du Linteau, 2023). She died suddenly in February 2020, and I wish to dedicate this text to her memory, with all my friendship and gratitude.</footnote>
In 1964, in the first available private notebook in existence, when Daney is 19 to 20 years old, the only possible mention of homo-sexuality is in a parenthesis, that of an “unknown (cute) boy” in a group of cinephiles. His sexuality seems to have been more present in his travels than in his Parisian life. When Daney starts his “poor man’s travels” (in his own words) at the end of the 1960s, those of a young hippie globe-trotter, his notebooks recount without any ambiguity or expressing any shame—but rather with the curiosity of the traveler who sees them as equal to all the other details of the journey—his encounters with boys, some-times indulging in casual prostitution in the same way André Gide or William Burroughs could have mentioned in their works. Daney would speak of this to Serge Toubiana in 1992:

> When traveling poor it was easy to meet boys on the street, whether in the Arab world, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia. And since they had to sell themselves as half-prostitutes, they served as guides ... Arab boys are in general pretty bad lovers, but they are very touching because they have the same colonial culture as we do, and their relationship to knowledge is real ... We would read Coleridge together in bed. It's Gide-like in the sense that sexually it's a little over-whelming.<fnref n="2" /> (Daney 2007, 100)

After May '68, Daney, who was not a full member of the editorial board of *Cahiers du cinéma* (he was more a regular freelancer), would make a lot of trips. First a long one—which ends with tuberculosis—in India between July and December 1968, and then a long journey in Sub-Saharan Africa, where he would have some casual sexual encounters with men. We have to imagine

<footnote n="2">2 Daney's mention of his Arab lovers echoes the problematic—colonialist and racist—perspectives of French homosexuals and Left intellectuals about Arab men in the seventies (something that Daney was also critically aware of). It has notably been analyzed by Shepard, 2017, in particular 119-22.</footnote>
the context of these hippie-style travels: Daney and his friends have very little money; they take advantage of all the encounters available; they sleep and eat in the cheapest places possible; they barter clothes and objects. They feel closer to local people than to tourists. In these hippie-style journeys, the friends want to "carpe the diem" (as Daney says), get in touch with the people, try all the local foods and some of the local drugs (an important part of the trip experience), and do all this with the intention of recording it in writings and discussing it among themselves. Daney, a completely addictive writer, would collect his thoughts and experiences in many of his notebooks (for this Africa trip, he wrote more than 150 handwritten pages). The Africa trip is recorded in one notebook in the form of a big dictionary with various entries ("Chapeau," "Abdullahi," "Oran" etc.): the left page devoted to the text, right page to the footnotes, with footnotes to the footnotes! Daney's writings take the form of self-analysis (about himself) and "wild" psychoanalysis (about others), following the fresh discovery of Lacan's and Freud's writings. It is within this context that Daney describes his relationships with men, friendly and sexual relationships, whether he travels alone or with friends (in Africa a group of three heterosexual men and a girl), who are aware of all these relationships.

In his "travel dictionary," Daney takes note of the specular proximity with the boys he meets, in which homosexuality seems for him in harmony with research into himself:

> I have to question this recent fixation to see any teenager that I am seducing as an alter ego even if—quite naturally—a certain number of conditions, points in common always allow the same type of seduction (by words, by knowledge). Why? Regret at not having been seduced at their age, at having gone through puberty alone, and desire to simultaneously be me at 26 and me at 16 years old. A new turn of self-love,
Between narcissism and encounters with others, the encounter with the desired double that a boy personifies takes the path of a "detour," a kind of stroll, both a geographical and temporal journey as well as the search for a distance, an alterity at the heart of the desire for the same. In fact, men are described carefully in Daney's stories: singular beings with mysterious reactions, they are part of an entire landscape, discovered at the same time as their cultural, geographical, and social backgrounds. Meetings with men, experimenting with drugs, and eating local meals represent in Daney's travels many different ways to explore a country concretely. Of course, Daney's relationships with these men—and more generally with locals—remain somehow, in a certain respect, unequal and “colonialist.” Without expressing his otherworldliness to others, Daney questions himself about his own “European reflexes.” He measures the “distance” and the alterity between his status as a foreigner and his daily local life.

Even if age seems not to have been an obsession for Daney, the boys he met on his journeys were teenagers. It would be wrong, however, to say that Daney was a pedophile: his relationships sometimes included some teenagers and most of the time younger men. Around 1973, in Paris, Daney would meet (among others) two men in their twenties with whom he would start a serious relationship: Walter, an Afro-American man who was studying in France, and Victor, a Sino-Thai working in his uncle's restaurant. He met them both in "tearooms" (tasses in French). In 1988, Daney also tried to commit to a certain "Frédéric" and relates in the notes compiled in *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur:* "I started to doubt my enduring capacity to see movies a few years ago, at *Libération*. At a moment when, for the first time in my life, I considered (and tried) to live with someone. An
idea that had never crossed my mind before (maybe a little with
Dany)” (Daney 1993, 105).

If some of Daney's sexual acts are now, if not considered
reprehensible, at least disapproved of, we must look back to
a time when attraction to teenagers did not totally separate
sex acts with minors from those between adults, unlike today
when sex acts with minors are severely condemned while those
between adult men are slowly being accepted and normalized.
Until 1981, when the decrees punishing homosexuality were
abolished in France, political repression in fact put all "types" of
homosexuals in the same category. On the other hand, in the
1970s, the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR)
activists gave equal support to sexual liberation for women,
homosexuals, and young people, without any prejudice towards
the great range of "sexual perversions." The best example
probably remains the "Trois milliards de pervers" ("Three billion
perverts") issue of the review *Recherches* in March 1973. The
newspaper *Libération*, CERFI (a Centre for Psychoanalysis founded
by Félix Guattari), and a large number of intellectuals were in
solidarity with these revolutionaries of sexual liberation, and con-
sidered with goodwill and interest, for example, the philosophical
work of René Scherer (incidentally the brother of Éric Rohmer)
or Tony Duvert's novels. Daney read these works (among his
huge quantity of readings), as well as *Homosexual Desire* by Guy
Hocquenghem, co-founder of the FHAR; but never committed
himself to sexual activism, choosing rather to stay on the more
austere side of Marxist-Leninist Maoism, where sexuality was
never a subject. Nevertheless, he kept living in the climate of
freedom that emerged after May '68, benevolent and attentive to
all possible experiences (the experience of drugs was just one of
these).

In private, Daney constantly questioned his sexuality, analyzing
his homosexuality as well as his "obsessive neurosis." This last
issue was analyzed in several articles and associated with cine-
philia and some filmmakers, like Howard Hawks! (Daney 1983b).
On the other hand, the subject of homosexuality does not appear anywhere in the articles. But in private, Daney did not reject his homosexual sensibility. He recounts for instance his "squalido-comic" adventures (an expression of his own) when looking for a place outside to make love during a casual encounter. He also recounts his frequenting of "tasses" before meetings of the editorial board of *Cahiers* in the 1970s. When he sees Eisenstein's *Battleship Potemkin* again (which he had not seen since school), he notes in private "the sensuality of the repressed masses (especially the sailors under the tarpaulin)." He also invents, with his inimitable sense for puns, the delightful expression "tasse struggle" ("lutte des tasses"), parodying the "class struggle" ("luttes des classes"). Nevertheless, Daney stays at some distance from the "tasse struggle," and observes, delighted but without participating at all himself, the 1 May Labor march, in which the crazy FHAR and the Gazolines' group<fnref n="4" /> make a fuss.

## Politics and Privacy

Daney's private life generally has no echo in his published articles. The same goes for homosexuality: no personal mention, no sign that this type of sexuality concerns him personally, until the 1980s. In 1971, in one of his notebooks, Daney draws links between his own name (Daney), *The Damned (Les Damnés*, in French) by Luchino Visconti, as well as the condition of homo-sexuals. He writes about *Death in Venice* (Daney 1971-1972), which had been released, and also about *The Go-Between* by Joseph Losey (2022, 127-29)<fnref n="5" />: two films where a young teenager faces the

<footnote n="4">4 The Gazolines' group [1972-1974] emerged from the FHAR. Founded by Maud Molyneux, Patrick Bertaux, and Paquita Paquin, it was constituted by transvestites of both sexes. The Gazolines, during political demonstrations, shouted outrageous queer slogans such as "proletarians of all countries, caress yourselves!" or "makeup is a way of life," scandalizing the "serious" militants and even some of the FHAR's militants themselves.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 231, August-September 1971. If unspecified, the title of the article is the title of the film criticized.</footnote>
desires of adults and interferes with them. These films could have
been an opportunity to study and question (homo)sexuality. But
Daney (as well as Jean-Pierre Oudart, the co-author of the article
on *Death in Venice*) chose to attack the bourgeois presuppositions
of the films in a very hermetic text, with semiological and political
concepts influenced by Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida. Daney and
Oudart do question desire in Visconti's fiction, but to invoke the
"denial" of the bourgeoisie's desire toward the proletariat in order
to deconstruct the figure of authorship in modern cinema.

The first article in which Daney refers distinctly to homosexu-
ality dates back to 1969: an article about *The Staircase* by Stanley
Donen held in poor esteem by Daney, who explains that the film
does not break (stylistically or thematically) with Donen's pre-
vious works. Donen is only, says Daney "moving from the (already
ambivalent) theme of friendship to the more direct theme of
homosexuality" (Daney 2022, 111).⁶ This critique is part of a more
general attack against Hollywood cinema, which is accused of not
reconsidering its own conventional and outdated forms. Daney
ends this short article with these words:

That said, it may be that homosexuality is still a taboo sub-
ject. And so we see the *use* of such a film: to return the seen
to the already seen [*déjà-vu*], to say that a [gay] couple is
always a couple and that those people are indeed human
and unhappy. Didn't we know that? Any film that gives
such a feeling of regained security deserves to pass as a
masterpiece.

The homosexual issue thus appears here as if homosexu-
ality were absolutely unproblematic, a non-subject, nothing
relevant. In 1969, for Daney and the *Cahiers* team, a film must
be "revolutionary," must provoke the audience and shake its
certainties. In presenting homosexuality as something "already
known," Donen's film makes it acceptable and "safe" for his
public. Daney's critique is less concerned with homosexuality's representation than with how Donen's film comforts its audience.

Most of the time, Daney does not analyze the queer situations or queer themes shown in a film. For example, when he writes about Pasolini's *Theorem* (*Teorema*, 1968), Daney does not mention the son's homosexuality, but studies only the hermeneutic structure of the film (2022, 101-4).<fnref n="7" /> The same, later, goes for *Pigsty* (*Porcile*, 1969) (2022, 108-9).<fnref n="8" /> Similarly, several years later, when he chronicles Bill Daughton's *Corner of the Circle* (1975), a film that describes a "homosexual relationship which comes to a sudden end" (2022, 196-98)<fnref n="9" /> in its own words, Daney, after this short summary, displays interest only in the uncommon use of the voiceover. Writing about Jean Genet's *Un chant d'amour* (1975), Daney starts his article by saying that after this movie "most films with 'love' in the title are likely to be seen for what they are: a sham" (2022, 175).<fnref n="10" /> But his article is only concerned with the voyeuristic look of the spectator.

There is therefore no particular angle taken on homosexuality in Daney's film studies. The reason for this undoubtedly lies in the collective state of mind of the *Cahiers*. Daney has often referred to using the inclusive "we" (and not the first person singular) when writing his articles for the review. This "we" was an effect of the group dynamic. The *Cahiers* team was a kind of family, based exclusively upon male cinephilia. A similar but different "we" was also required by the political context of the 1970s and the engagement of the *Cahiers* in Maoïsm, which involved unity, a collective way of thinking and organizing, and the cardinal notion of the "masses," all of this opposed to any attempt at individualism or intimate introspection.

<footnote n="7">7 "Le desert rose", originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 212, May 1969.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 217, November 1969.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 273, January-February 1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 264, February 1976.</footnote>
The Cahiers Environment

If Daney's sexuality doesn't appear in his articles, it was never-
theless also not an obsession in private: as for his travels,
sexuality was a part of life that was crucial but not central. On
December 26, 1973, becoming aware that he will turn thirty in the
year ahead, Daney writes for himself in one of his notebooks:

This "start in life" requires that I grab the problems of SEX (homo) and MONEY (which is missing) by the horns (not just via verbose theorization) in such a way that my relationships with the few beings I know will not be able to change (around the age of 40).

At the same time that Daney wanted to tackle his so called “sex
problem” and as trying out a complicated personal life with his
boyfriends, the editorial board of the *Cahiers du cinéma* was going
through some very difficult times. After its period of extreme
politicization, the *Cahiers* took account in September 1973 of the
disastrous consequences of its militant strategy, including the
failure of the Revolutionary Cultural Front launched in August.
Economically, the magazine was spent. Only very long political
texts were printed in the last issues, without any images, with no
link to cinema. The print run was minimal, and subscribers had
deserted it. This morose assessment lead to the departure of
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni. They give the editorial lead
to Daney and Serge Toubiana. In order to get the *Cahiers* back on
its feet, but without wanting to abandon its political line com-
pletely, Daney and Toubiana would form alliances with politicized
Maoist groups. One common fight would be the "anti-retro"
campaign, against movies (like *The Night Porter*, 1974, by Liliana
Cavani or *Lacombe Lucien*, 1974, by Louis Malle) that were accused
of promoting a so-called "sexo-fascism" and falsifying history.
But the sexual issue itself was abandoned in favor of a Marxist-
Leninist revolutionary-style ideological attack. In this conflict, the
*Cahiers* allied with a subgroup of UCF-ML (of which Alain Badiou
was one of the leaders), which belonged to the "dogma" trend,
"dogma" meaning dogmatic and rather austere Marxist-Leninist theoreticians. They opposed another group they called the "Spontex Maos" (Spontex like the sponge brand), which was trying to provoke a "spontaneous" and provocative liberation of bodies and minds coming from the masses themselves. The "Spontex Mao" would create the newspaper *Tout* (meaning "everything": its slogan was "What we want: everything!") and would rally to the defense of minorities (feminists, immigrants, gendered minorities...)<fnref n="11" />. Guy Hocquenghem would be close to them at times.

Oddly, the *Cahiers* chose the "dogma" route, which completely obstructed the individual expression of desires. Partly because of their love of Jacques Lacan and Karl Marx, partly because of their political schisms, the *Cahiers* team would remain opposed for some time (between 1973 and 1976) to the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, including the *Anti-Oedipus*, that manifesto for the liberation of desire. On that matter, they were following Jacques Rancière, who broke with Althusserism at the beginning of the 1970s on account of his Maoism and would continuously attack Deleuze from then on. On Daney's part, it was only at the end of 1977, after reading Deleuze and Claire Parnet's *Dialogues*, that he would totally break with his Maoist convictions and reconsider his past, writing in his diary:

> Extraordinary liberation after reading the Deleuze-Parnet *Dialogues* (as previously, on an overcast afternoon in the Jardin des Plantes, *Rhizome*—except that no pink panther did follow then). I really want to forget—without too much drama—these last five or six years and their endless resentment and bitterness. And this time I've done it, under duress (I tried to write without the verb 'to be' and without the

<footnote n="11">11 Manus McGrogan submitted in the University of Portsmouth, in August 2010, a PhD thesis on this subject, titled: "*Tout!* in context 1968-1973: French radical press at the crossroads of far left, new movements and counterculture".</footnote>
asphyxiating little letter 'l,' but didn't manage more than five lines).

This personal liberation really took effect (at least for a while) when Daney joined the editorial board of *Libération* in 1981. The main explanation for the discrepancy between Daney's public and private life (his articles on the one hand and his private writings and sex life on another) is therefore linked to the political positioning of the *Cahiers*, as well to the relationships of the members of the *Cahiers* team.

If we go back in time to the 1960s, Jean Douchet was the only out homosexual on the *Cahiers* board (in 1964, Daney mentions in one notebook a group discussion where Douchet recounts "his homo-sexual experiences" to him and some friends). Greatly appreciated among the cinephiles and by Daney and his friends in 1964, Douchet had also been the "official" recruiter of young critics (only men, of course) for the *Cahiers*. Jean-Claude Biette and Louis Skorecki, but also Jean Narboni and Jean-Louis Comolli were all initially approached by Douchet, who recounts inviting Daney to write in the *Cahiers* when he was 18 (Daney declined, not feeling ready yet<fnref n="12" />). The situation of Daney in the 1960s-1970s *Cahiers* is actually quite comparable to Douchet's, who recalls this in 2013 when he is interviewed on the subject of his own homosexuality:

> I never hid my homosexuality, which at the time was unusual. Everyone knew it and I even made sure everyone knew it so that they could leave me alone ... Of course, I had some reservations about homosexuality, quite logical at the time, but no hostility to it ... The *Cahiers* cinephilia was a group cinephilia with its own coherence, the "politics of *Cahiers*." Our "auteur theory" exempted us from looking at each

<footnote n="12">12 Daney would start to write in the *Cahiers* in 1964, after Rivette's famous "putsch" at a moment when Douchet had left with Rohmer.</footnote>
other's private lives, since they had nothing to do with the cinema.<fnref n="13" /> (Douchet 2013)

I don't know how much the *Cahiers* team knew of Daney's sexuality. Many of his friends seem to have discovered it by chance, long after knowing him. In 1974, in one of his notebooks, Daney refers to the "brand image of his double life" in the *Cahiers*, and remarks: "I need a Tadzio to positively pass on my homosexuality to the public." In the review, the only other homosexual with whom Daney would be really close was Jean-Claude Biette [1942-2003]. The two met in 1964 but really became friends in the early 1970s. A reserved filmmaker and brilliant, extraordinary critic, Biette, like Daney, was also very discreet about his sexuality. Some of Daney's and Biette's epistolary exchanges reveal them to be "accomplices in homosexuality."

## Liberation at *Libération*

In May 1981, Daney left the *Cahiers* for the newspaper *Libération*, invited by its editor-in-chief Serge July. Daney started to write in *Libération* just as July relaunched the newspaper after the election of the new French President François Mitterrand, promoting Daney to director of the newspaper's new cinema section (Daney would then make a reluctant departure from the cinema section to become an editorial writer from 1986 to 1991). His arrival at *Libération* was felt as a "liberation," as he himself put it. In his writings, Daney abandons the collective and familial "we" he used in the *Cahiers* for the first person singular, as he later related to Toubiana in *Persévérance*:

> I quickly realized that it was easier to write "I" at *Libération*, and above all that I had an enormous backlog of writing.

<footnote n="13">13 He also recounts: "I never have had a problem facing up to my homosexuality. It always seems to me obvious and natural. ... [when I was a teenager] I kept 'my' secret without feeling any culpability. I accepted my homosexuality; better, I needed it. It was not in me, it was me."</footnote>
Everything I should have written in the previous ten years finally came out. I should also say that the film department I managed to create was 80% homosexual, which made a huge difference... —[Toubiana speaking of "Prudish Cahiers..."]— Yes, disembodied. There was a sort of coming out. ... But there was no longer any ideal fraternity, it was way too uncontrollable because the people were really very peculiar. (Daney 2007, 116–17)

If arriving at *Liberation* was for Daney a "liberation," it is because *Libération* was at first a new, blank space for him, which wasn't linked to a tradition or a legacy (unlike the *Cahiers*' theoretical and cinematic legacy, quite a heavy superego to deal with). Secondly, the history of *Libération* itself has a part in Daney's "liberation." Daney said to Toubiana that he brought together an 80% homo-sexual cinema team, but in fact, when he arrived at the news-paper, the team was partly constituted by the former "television department," created some years prior to Daney's arrival. This television department was led by a great bunch of nonconformist homosexuals and transsexuals, coming from or linked to the "Spontex Mao" groups, Situationists, FHAR, the Gazolines... They were indeed too singular to make a coherent group at *Libération*, or to accept Daney easily (the testimonies agree about the "heck-ling" Daney underwent from the team on his arrival). They are evoked in *Persévérance*:

> It was a lively place for people like Michel Cressole, Hélène Hazera, or Guy Hocquenghem, who fearlessly carried out work of cultural agitation, furiously and provocatively. The newspaper was theirs by right. I added to that a serious cine-philia, but written less seriously. (Daney 2007, 117)

If Daney describes his "coming out" in *Persévérance*, it is mostly because *Libération's* team allowed him to assume a subjectivity: to regain his own singularity, meaning also to become visible. Daney always claimed personal discretion, and described in *Persévérance* the way he vanished into the landscape. If one
observes Daney's body in film and photographic images,<fnref n="14" /> it is undeniable that his relationship to his own image, his own visibility, was not simple. We can notice this, for example, in an old photograph taken by his mother at the beach when he was a child, a photograph showed by him to Elias Sanbar in a filmed dialogue about photography (Conversation Nord-Sud: Daney/Sanbar, Simone Bitton et Catherine Poitevin, 1993). Here is a very short excerpt of the dialogue where Daney describes this image:

> All the family photos of my childhood, taken by my mother with a camera she did not know how to use at all, are shaky photos, lopsided and so on. I think that she herself had a very big problem about being in front of a camera, which she passed on to me; this picture is our common origin in relation to images, for her and myself.

*Libération* is therefore for Daney a way to appear, and to do so in front of a new audience. In this new context, his relationship to homosexuality changed for sure. And when a good part of the editorial team of *Libération* was sent to Los Angeles in 1984 to follow the Olympic Games, Daney would chronicle them from a gay bar, describing the reactions of the consumers in front of the television while ABC broadcast the games (Daney 2002, 930–31)<fnref n="15" />. But he does it *from the outside*, without mentioning his own belonging to this community. On the contrary, he qualifies the "gays" at Greg's to be television "viewers" [*téléspectateurs*], opposing them to himself as a "cinephile." Daney seems so far from the people he describes—a real stranger—that an average reader can even ask himself why he went into this particular bar!

<footnote n="14">14 I analyzed Daney and his image in Eugene 2012.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 "Les 'Gays' fêtent l'ouverture sans cérémonie", originally published in *Libération*, July 30, 1984.</footnote>
An Average but Singular Way of Life

Beginning at *Libération*, Daney would write the single article in his output explicitly interrogating the issue of homosexual identity and lifestyle. Although he wrote in *Liberation* almost every day for two years after his arrival in May 1981, Daney did not totally break with the *Cahiers*. He was still mentioned in the editorial board, writing from time to time. The Cannes Film Festival, in 1982 and 1983, would combine the teams of the review and the newspaper, and Louella Interim from *Libération* (Marc Raynal, also using the pseudonyms "Maud Molineux" for fashion and "Dora Forbes" for literature) would even write some articles for the *Cahiers*. In this context, where Daney wrote full-time at *Libération* but stayed in touch with the *Cahiers*, he would publish in the 336 issue (May 1982) an article that to me seems like an open letter addressed to his former comrades.

Daney's article is about *Taxi zum Klo* (1981) by Frank Ripploh. A milestone in the history of queer cinema, *Taxi zum Klo* was written, produced, directed, and performed by Ripploh, who fictionalized as well as documented in a precise manner his everyday life as a primary school teacher and a lover of "tasses" and short-lived encounters. Funnily, the main character announces a separation between his public life and his private life in voice-over in the prologue to the film. In parallel, one of the most used stylistic devices in the film is the use of rather clumsy cross-cutting, putting separate parts of the hero's life in contact with one another, like rubbing two flints together. This separation breaks up and Ripploh's character ends up showing off in front of his pupils in his morning class, dressed like an exotic princess.

Daney thinks Ripploh's film is important because it avoids two pitfalls: "A leveled up idealization (the star is a sublime marginal) or a middling sociological approach (the character disappears, becoming an example or a typical case)" (2002, 113).
Ripploh avoids the "election" of marginality first of all, using a concrete, kind of documentary style, showing trivial aspects of his character's life, and de-sublimating the situations experienced by his character. Doing this, Ripploh does not lift his film into an imaginary space where fantasy, icon, idol, and emblem would rule the fiction and lose their concrete implications. But on the other hand, Ripploh also avoids generalizing homosexuality; he does not choose homosexual marginality as a sociological "topic" that would be exemplified with representative characters. His characters are average and singular at the same time.

Of William Friedkin's *Cruising* (1980), Daney observed that the director was respectful and tolerant towards the homosexual world, but also observed: "Friedkin is very cool. Problem is, he doesn't show [anything]. Not really. His well-intentioned and vaguely sociological tolerance doesn't go very far because his subject (scandalous as it is) interests not cinematically but ideologically [...]" (2022, 276–77).<fnref n="16" /> Daney attacked the movie Christiane F. – *Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo* (Ulli Edel, 1981) in the same way, summarizing: "The real Christiane F. was a drug victim, the false one ... has been a victim of the sociological gaze" (Daney 1998, 34).<fnref n="17" />

Ripploh does *show*: he exhibits himself, and preserves his singularity by keeping "the equation 'I equals I'" active as well by presenting a "desperately average" way of life. This ordinary and un-fantasmatic story, this kind of documentary filming avoids the promotion of marginality. On the other hand, the body of Ripploh himself and the pornographic scenes of the film prevent, Daney explains, a sociological approach that could be called for by these "average situations." What is important is not the fact that these situations are shocking, but that they exhibit in a way that

<footnote n="16">16 "Ripploh s'amuse", originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 317, November 1980.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 "Moi, Christiane F, droguée, prostituée", originally published in *Libération*, August 14, 1981.</footnote>
exceeds straightforward representation. These "stripped bare" situations preserve the scenes to be viewed only as a general illustration of "gay sexuality." The explicit sexual scenes make the spectator "participate," in a way, in what he is looking at. He is involved, even reluctantly. The showing of Ripploh's body, the exhibiting of his sexuality is what best preserves Ripploh's character to be a "statistical sample". Neither "sample" nor "star," Ripploh exhibits himself and his body *speaks for him*, prevents him from being spoken by someone else.

Daney describes the aesthetic of Ripploh's film as a "cooling machine." The gay aesthetic Ripploh invents is not flamboyant, fierce, and proud, but "grey" (average) and serious (precise). "Cool" but so "serious" and so "grey" that it leads to a dry-witted humor,<fnref n="18" /> funny and disturbing, which also highlights his own singularity.

Daney himself is using discreet humor in his article. At the very beginning of it, he starts writing from the point of view of the *Cahiers* (reminding them and us of their group debate), and then switches immediately to the first person singular: "Here is a movie suitable for restarting a debate the *Cahiers* are right to be fond of and that relates to the status of singular objects in the cinema. I summarize it." In the first sentence, Daney remains in the *Cahiers'* group. In the second, he steps outside it, and will stay outside throughout his article. Maintaining a relationship with his former comrades, keeping a kind of dialogue going, he seems to discreetly request what he writes about Ripploh: "that we can watch him exist, quite simply, without holding any discourse on his existence."

Here is what Daney expects for the visibility of homosexuality on screen: not that it would be defended, or even understood, but simply recognized as singular. Highlighted by a body, made

<footnote n="18">18 Daney conceives humor very close to the definition in Deleuze's *Présentation de Sacher Masoch*: "twist the law by excessive zeal" by "deepening the consequences."</footnote>
visible in a singular way. For Daney, homosexuality can only be
a matter of practice, not a social identity. Identity is a matter of
words; and every time a body appears, what it shows exceeds all
the qualifiers.

The Paradoxical Experience of
Homosexuality

Many other things could be said about Daney and the topic of homosexuality (his relation to AIDS, for example), but I wanted, in this last part of this essay, to question a paradox that Daney himself remarks on at the end of his life. During Cannes 1982, a month after the publication of his article on *Taxi Zum Klo*, Daney writes about modern cinema in one of his notebooks:

Personally, I imposed this [modern] cinema on myself, I
didn't like it spontaneously. I resorted to the heroism of the
artist-man, severing the history of Cinema. But I did not look
so much at the pretext for his heroism: Woman. For moral
reasons, I elected as my greatest filmmakers those who are
incapable of *representing* homosexuality: Mizoguchi, Ros-
sellini, Godard.

Subsequently, this reflection can be found in the notes collected
in *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur*:

With O.[livier] S.[éguret]. ... For him, Rossellini is an enemy. In
the sense that we are homosexual and that it is clear (almost
threateningly so) that Rossellini is the most "normal" of men.
When he says "the Man" [L'Homme], it is the human, statis-
tical, heteronormative species, the species that must be
led towards ever more humanity. The fags in Rossellini are
those who take advantage of the turbulences in history to
act (the Nazi teacher in *Germany Year Zero*; a woman—which
one?—in *Rome, Open City*); my vague memory of a sentence
in an interview on the shocking, because sterile, side of love
between men ... Perhaps it is this idea of transmission that
is so essential to him that it needs transitive people. (1993, 233-34)

Roberto Rossellini, whose homophobia is well known, is nevertheless the filmmaker Daney interests himself in the most at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s. Rossellini's lifelong questioning of pedagogy and communication echoes Daney's interrogations, at this moment, about the concept of *experience* (found mostly in Giorgio Agamben's works): the experience given by the cinema associated with the didacticism inherent in cinema's recording of reality. Daney tries to conceptualize this definition of a cinema *supporting* and *supplying experiences* at the end of its life, noting however that it is strangely to the detriment of the representation of homosexuals by the cinema. This is what he explains in an interview published in 1991:

> I have always been grateful to the cinema for giving me the chance to live in the world of the real Marilyn Monroe. ... I liked the cinema for giving me first-hand information about the lives of those human beings. I was such a bad advocate for myself that I did not even mind the cinema not giving me information about people like me, for example homosexuals, whose films were not spoken about before the 1970s. (2015, 195)<fnref n="19" />

In *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur*, Daney develops this idea:

> I remember an old debate with M[ichel] C[ressole] about an old Bolognini that I of course found over-indulgent, but which indulged in the subject of boys on screen and their beauty. It is precisely because they are beautiful (I must have said) that it is important that they also be offered to an audience untouched by this beauty. Proselytism or a crazy belief on my part that cinema can “convert” us. In so saying, I defined in my own way what I expected from the cinema: that it should

<footnote n="19">19 "Les Cahiers à Spirale." Interview by Arnaud Viviant originally published in *Les Inrockuptibles*, March-April 1982.</footnote>
allow me to participate in those areas of life that “do not concern me.” I want these boys not to be just the narcissistic objects of the filmmaker for the same reason that I do not want women to be filmically forbidden to me. A desperate belief that cinema transcends personal “tastes” and that I will prefer a hetero-hetero film by Rossellini to a homo-but-indulgent film by Reichenbach. ... The cinema does not give me another world, it gives me *this one*: which is quite enough, quite beautiful and sufficiently interesting (“one world at a time” [in English]). (1993, 246)

Jean-Claude Biette said something similar in one of his articles:

> Loving a man and a woman is a capital test for a filmmaker: it consists of going behind the mirror of his sexual tastes. This criterion ... may be the only one that allows us to establish the authenticity and the greatness of a filmmaker. (Biette 1998, 119)

Daney presumes that a filmmaker should never try to limit the curiosity and desire of his audience. Cinema is for everyone, even those who aren't concerned by what they are shown. A second point is that Daney is persuaded that filmmakers can “convert” people: a good film could “realize” every kind of *desire*, making it perceptible by his audience. In order to do that, filmmakers have to *convince, prove, and show* (which is not a straightforward representation, but a way of showing things). In a 1976 article Daney says something that I find very accurate: “We should know by now that it is not people who communicate, but objects (statements, images) that *are being communicated and communicate by themselves*” (Daney 1976). A distance is needed in the film, for the filmmaker, and for the audience, that transcends their own ideas, desires or emotions. This distance is what *constructs a look at beings and things, and that allows them to be seen in a certain way and to exist*. All this was already summarized in an essential sentence of Daney's article on Ripploh's film: “Cinema is not made to promise, but to keep [“*tenir*”].” “Keep” understood
cinematographically as "record" ("retenir"), politically as "keep going" ("tenir bon") and concretely as "hold up" ("tenir debout").

To "keep" the representation going against pressures of all kinds means to give it a consistency, to embody characters and situations, to make them exist on screen and to surpass the simple level of representation: to make them exist out of the screen, the way a true character can continue to live on in our minds after a film is finished. This explains Daney's reluctance to promote a "gay point of view" on films, as well as the following vilification in *L'Exercice était profitable, Monsieur*:

> A protected minority, with its rights and its fads ["lubies"] (a lobby), which uses a film to commune with—and—to consolidate itself as a group, not to "see itself" as if it was becoming exterior to itself. (1993, 246)

This cinema, which thinks of its audience as a limited, peculiar group of people animated by a cause (be it homosexuality or something else), is wrong, says Daney, because it doesn't attend to the fact that every experience exceeds interpretation. The cinema cannot be *useful*, it can only ever be experienced. For Daney, if a film becomes just a way for a group to recognize itself in it, just a way to "communicate, commune, and consolidate" the group—no matter what minority the group is—these objects are not films, but something else. Films have Daney's priority above any utilitarianism. The quote mentioned above ("We should know by now that it is not people who communicate, but objects (statements, images) that *are being communicated and communicate by themselves*) implies that cinema is an *external* object facing us, that we cannot assimilate totally. This is why Daney will always consider that *fantasies* and cinema are slightly antithetical to one another. Cinema vouches for the heterogeneity of interpretations: it has to fabricate otherness, unfamiliarity (and the uncanny, *Unheimlich*): a kind of queerness, in a way? The experience of otherness is for Daney the only virtue of cinema and defines all its virtualities.
## Dispossession

The cinema experience is therefore for Daney not a form of possession but of dispossession (which includes the meaning given by the images). When Daney compares himself to Douchet in *Perséverance*, he says he is not “hedonistic” like him, but is

> Someone who would never own anything, who detested the idea of ownership, who truly owned nothing in the world except for books and records, in short someone who could only own himself and experience the simple pleasures ... or simple happiness. (2007, 54–55)

A cinephile is someone that finds everything in films. He doesn't need to possess things, just his look, memory, and emotions. I very much like this quote where Daney, in *Perséverance*, distances himself from Henri Langlois on this precise subject of possession:

> There is *Psycho's* mummy at the Museum of Cinema [in Paris], and I find pitiful the exhibition of that poor model that scared me so much the first time I saw Hitchcock's film, and which exists only inside the film and during the time of the screening! All true cinephiles are like me, but this screen memory of the shot of *Psycho* has a big defect: it generates no market, it is only deposited in the memory (or the speech) of griots like me who exhaust themselves to celebrate it. On the other side, the real mummy, it's an entrance fee, it's money. (2015, 17)<fnref n="20" />

In this quote, Daney opposes true objects (in museums, in the shops) and the “free of charge” world of the movies, which takes place in an uncommercial and very intimate space: memory. The cinema experience is an intimate experience that can be only experienced “within the time of the screening,” lived with the spectator's own body, emotions, and memory. If cinema is a

<footnote n="20">20 “L’amour du cinema.” Interview by Olivier Mongin, originally published in *Esprit*, August–September 1992.</footnote>
shared experience of the same representation, this experience
is made by one individual, not in a group mediation. That is the
reason why for Daney, cinephilia is quite similar to smuggling. It
is the encounter with a form of otherness (if the film is good) that
allows someone to escape from all group dynamics and rules. A
priceless (in every sense of the word) experience, that can only
be felt through films and that offers a world full of divergences of
interpretation from which cinema gets its real value. If Daney has
not promoted "queer films" in the sense we consider them today,
this seems nevertheless like the idea of a queer cinema, which
dispossessively gives its spectator a new world full of desire: a
look onto the one he is already living in.

*Translated into English by Pierre Eugène and Kate Ince*

References

Biette, Jean-Claude. 1988. *Poétique des auteurs*. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma & Éditions de l'Étoile.

Daney, Serge. 1971-1972. "Mort à Venise: le Nom-de-l'auteur" (with Jean-Pierre Oudart). *Cahiers du Cinéma* 234-35: 79-93.

——. 1976. "La re-mise en scene (Notes)." *Cahiers du cinéma* 268-69, July-August 1976: 20-26. Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (modified) in https://www.diagonal-thoughts.com/?p=2022.

——. 1993. *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur.* Paris: P.O.L.

——. 1998. *Ciné journal. Vol. 1: 1981-1982*. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma. (first edition 1986. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma)

——. 2002. *La Maison cinéma et le monde : Les années Libé* (1981-1985). Paris: P.O.L.

——. 2015. *La Maison cinéma et le monde : Le moment Trafic* (1991-1992). Paris: P.O.L.

——. 2007. *Postcards from the cinema*. Translated by Paul Grant. Oxford/New York: Berg.

——. 2022. *The Cinema House & the World, Vol. 1, The Cahiers du cinéma Years, 1962-1981*. Translated by Christine Pichini. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Douchet, Jean. 2013. *L'homme cinéma, entretien avec Joel Magny*. Paris: Éditions Écriture.

Eugène, Pierre. 2012. "Apparitions de Serge Daney." *Trafic* 82: 94-102.

Shepard, Todd. 2017. *Sex, France, and Arab Men*. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>
SICILIA QUEER FILMFEST

RAÚL RUIZ

HISTORY OF CINEMA

FILM FESTIVAL
# Carte Postale à Serge Daney

Andrea Inzerillo

Why does a queer film festival dedicate a
whole section to Serge Daney? The Sicilia
Queer filmfest forges a bond between film
critics, film theory, and film programming and
tries to explore the hidden links between the
thought of Serge Daney and the concept of
"queer" in cinema. Maybe this concept should
be thought of as a mobile vector? Can we use
Daney's writings in order to ask questions of
contemporary queer cinema? Here we explore
three possible uses of Daney in the context of
an international queer film festival.
La fatica di rientrare nella media e la felicità di non riuscirci. (The effort to be part of the average and the happiness at failing to do so.)

—Nino Gennaro

At first, I thought of dividing my text into two parts: a first (let's say) of testimony, and a second, more theoretical one. Then, while writing this essay, I've come to understand that these two aspects are not easily distinguishable. They are intertwined in the theory and practice that characterizes the work I am about to present to you.

The festival I am the artistic director of, the Sicilia Queer film-fest, has a section dedicated to Serge Daney. How come a queer festival dedicates a whole section (the History of Cinema section) to Serge Daney? I will try to answer by telling you a bit about the story of this section and above all about the ambition it has. I hope that in doing so I will be able to offer some possible ideas regarding the crucial question about what relationships can exist, or can be created, between Daney and the concept of queer.

It seems to me that Serge Daney put special emphasis on the relationship between cinema and ethics, showing how the seventh art is nothing—that is, it ignores the deeper value of what can be found in the images and turns into that “visual” about which Daney writes in his last writings—if it does not care about humanity. That’s why I’d like to begin by telling you that the History of Cinema section was born when three friends met. Three people of different ages and backgrounds, but all of them readers of Daney. Three people who wanted to remember him on the twentieth anniversary of his death, and did that at a newborn festival, sending him—from Palermo—one of those *cartes postales* (postcards) he used to love so much, thus bringing him back into public discussion: this was the original idea. Daney’s writings have virtually disappeared from circulation in Italy, and we wanted to
get them back, to read them again, to translate them, and start to
spread them—even in collaboration with some journals, like the
Italian *Filmcritica* (a historical periodical founded by Galvano Della
Volpe, Roberto Rossellini, and the recently deceased Edoardo
Bruno). We wanted to create opportunities for discussion in the
name of Daney. During Sicilia Queer 2012, as part of the homage
to Daney, a round table dedicated to the transformations of film
criticism in the age of the internet was a nice opportunity for a
comparison between industry players. Here's what we wrote in
the catalog that year:

The challenge is, obviously, trying to share a passion—
which is actually vital more than intellectual—with a larger
audience. To do this, we need to start from cinema: the
films Daney loved, for the simple reason that sometimes the
classics are more contemporary than our contemporaries
(for instance Laughton, Fassbinder); the films Daney "made,"
since the video-interview by Régis Debray or the *Histoire(s)
du cinéma* by Godard not only star him as a character but
they also show a strong moral influence from the great
critic; and finally the writings on cinema that Daney kin-
dled, since it is undeniable that some of the most important
philosophers of the twentieth century have begun to take
an interest in cinema because of him. Few things can explain
such an unusual figure as a *passeur* as the writings in which
philosophers talk about him, like the text Jacques Rancière
gave us, where he reconstructs the strange alchemy he
shared with the founder of *Trafic*.

Quickly retracing the path taken in recent years within the section
*Carte postale à Serge Daney* will show how it will always be a
question of ties, connections, deviations, and detours, which
all start from Daney, and intertwine at several levels in a pro-
grammatically unorthodox way. In fact, I wanted to title this essay
*Postcard to Serge Daney, or How I learned to Start Programming and
Love Queerness (Never Merely as an End, but Always as a Means to*
an End) to give the exact sense of how little orthodoxy character-
izes our work (and I will do nothing but address only that).

I will focus on three operations that seem significant to me for
the meeting between Daney and (Sicilia) Queer, with the idea that
this may not just be a lesson, but an attempt, an example among
many.

A first, quite canonical possible use of Daney tries to give him
back what he offered to his readers. Reading Daney's works is
exciting because it is a constant discovery, an unlimited source
of ideas. Thanks to him we have discovered (or rediscovered)
films and authors that we had not watched carefully, or that we
had not watched at all. Consequently, we should use his writings
as a real mine. When Patrice Chéreau died in 2013, it was natural
for us to check if and what Daney wrote about Chéreau. We thus
found an article published in *Libération* on May, 19th 1983, and
imagined paying Chéreau homage by projecting *L'Homme blessé*.
A canonical film for a queer festival, a less canonical reading by
Daney: all in all, a rather ordinary operation, I would say.

As ordinary as the operation may be, at least on paper, to pay
tribute to a director like Chantal Akerman, who died in 2015, by
screening a film that has as much to do with queerness (and
feminism) as *Je, Tu, Il, Elle*, a series of events and coincidences led
us to make this tribute less predictable and perhaps much more
interesting than it might have been. In fact, in 2015 the fourth
volume of *La Maison cinéma et le monde* was published including
a text titled "Laissons passer les barbares," which contains three
conversations between Daney and a young man named Philippe
Roux. In the introduction, Roux writes that between 1989 and
1992 he used to meet Serge Daney regularly and had some con-
versations with him.

Roux was more or less my age when I started looking for him, to
find out that he now works at the Museum of Modern Art in Saint-
Étienne. I got in touch with him, told him about our project, asked
if there were any unpublished conversations. He answered with
a “no” (if I remember correctly) and asked me to tell him more
about what we were about to do that year. I told him about the
idea of celebrating Chantal Akerman and that I didn’t think Daney
(who had conversations with Akerman in his radio show *Micro-films*) wrote anything specific about the film we wanted to screen.
Roux told me that in *De(s)generations*, the magazine he is Chief
Editor of, and that owes so much to Daney, two philosophers
(Alexandre and Daniel Costanzo) had dedicated an article to the
politics of Chantal Akerman’s gestures. It seemed clear to me that
the tribute to Chantal Akerman by Sicilia Queer 2016 could only
be this: an article we managed to find thanks to an indication
given to me twenty-five years earlier by Daney himself, through a
bizarre détour.

A second possible use: classics of the history of cinema, which
although not queer in the proper sense of this word, can be
read this way, and about which Daney has provided some hints.
I strongly believe that a queer festival should shun any kind of
didacticism. That’s why presenting films seemingly distant from
LGBTQ themes within a queer festival always looks to me like an
operation of particular interest. Indeed, over the years I’ve come
to realize that this is one of the things that seem to be among the
most anomalous from the outside, but all the more original within
the proposal of Sicilia Queer. And this is surprising for me: films
such as *The Celluloid Closet* by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
showed how, throughout the twentieth century, cinema had to
say without saying, to show without showing, through real com-
promise formations. There are films, such as *Le Trou (The Hole)* by
Jacques Becker, which are exemplary from this point of view. The
story of a jailbreak, an all-male film in which a group of prisoners,
half-naked for virtually the entire duration of the film, dig a hole
in the cell and plan their break out. A claustrophobic film made up
of bodies, sweat, and matter, which is literally a film about coming
out, and which, from this specific point of view, possibly takes on
further possible meanings. In *L’exercice a été profitable, Monsieur*,
Daney writes that for him Gaspard, the protagonist of the film, is
homosexual and that the reading he (Daney) gives of the film is
affected by this intuition. And he adds:

Homosexuality is at the center of this film, but in a very
strange way, something between Hawks and Melville,
between the ideal of brotherhood and the simplicity of
intact bodies. What to me and to Jean-Claude Biette seems
to be extraordinary is that Becker's eyes, at the end of the
Sixties, were as open as possible, the most attentive, the
least didactic. *Le trou* is not a film about the prison-breakout
paradigm, it's not Bresson, it's a film that works (I cannot
find a better word) with the idea of freedom. (Daney 1993,
356-57)

In 2018 we decided to screen another classic that stands in the
wake of Becker's film: *The Servant* by Joseph Losey, a British mas-
terpiece by the American director written by Harold Pinter. Here,
the story of the relationship between servant and master has a
clear subtext of homosexuality. We were looking for something to
go along with the screening (besides an article on Losey's cinema
that Daney wrote in *Libération*, June 23 and 24, 1984), and while
dialoguing with one of our guests (Luciano Barisone) during the
early phase of the making of the festival, we came to learn about
an extraordinary film on another servant, a butler actually, clearly
homosexual. (The story of the film is about something else: it's
a conversation the director has with a man who used to be the
butler in his house, and at the same time a reflection on time,
memory, and cinema.) By choosing to screen *Santiago* by João
Moreira Salles as well, we therefore set up a cinematic diptych
that seemed to us to be a way of exploring homosexuality in the
cinema in a way that can dialogue with the way Daney himself
talked and wrote about cinema.

I am fairly aware that the third possible use is the most ques-
tionable of all. Yet, I am also convinced that the first two move
exactly on this very line of thought, and that the third is only
a little more audacious. It is about extending (some might say
improperly) the concept of queer to works that, according to
most people, have nothing to do with it. However, perhaps, it is
also thanks to Daney, to the rigor and the necessity he fostered
in order to establish a dialogue with moving images—as any
critic, spectator, or cultural operator who proposes to think with
images should do—that it is possible to rethink such a com-
plex and not so clear-cut definition as that of queer. In 2015 we
decided to invite the French actor Melvil Poupaud as special guest
of the festival. Poupaud is, among other things, the protagonist
of two important films of contemporary gay cinema, *Le temps qui
reste (Time to Leave)* by François Ozon and *Laurence Anyways* by
Xavier Dolan. Thanks to these roles, he is therefore a well-known
figure in the imagery of gay cinema. His book *Quel est Mon noM?*,
published a few years earlier, tells among other things about
his childhood, and his relationship with Serge Daney, who was a
friend to him and almost a spiritual father. We also knew—and
that was one of the strongest reasons why we wanted to invite
him to the festival—that Poupaud was the actor in ten films
by Raúl Ruiz, whom we thought to be representative of a spirit
that had a lot to do with the concept of queer in the sense of
insubordination, anti-conformism, opening up of new spaces,
difficulties in framing, and overcoming rules and categories.

Poupaud was therefore the perfect link between several things
that were important for us, and we talk about all this in the inter-
view published in the catalog, where we also get him to tackle
his relationship with Daney and Ruiz. Ruiz’s cinema was for us
exemplary of a work that is kind of forgotten, and which it was
necessary to rediscover. We believed a queer festival could not be
free from trying to constantly rethink the concepts of the center
and periphery of cinema itself, looking to what deviates from
the norm not only in terms of content but also in terms of form
(productive, distributive, artistic) and of position in the world
film scene. Such an attitude more generally characterizes our
whole approach, although we are aware of the fact that not all the
movies we present during the festival—indeed, just a minority of them—work in this direction.

By dedicating the *Carte Postale à Serge Daney* to Raúl Ruiz, and by inviting Poupaud as special guest of the *Presenze/Presences* section, we had the possibility to present to our audience some works that Ruiz had made in Sicily; to retrieve and digitize some old archives from the Sicilian Regional Film Library (a cycle of splendid lectures that Ruiz held in Palermo in the 1990s, together with Enrico Ghezzi, Pascal Bonitzer, Alberto Farassino, and Alessandro Rais, among others); and to present the work of Melvil Poupaud, which represents a cinematographic UFO, precisely due to the influences I just mentioned. We presented a series of short films that Poupaud made since his childhood (we chose three, one of which was a tribute to Eric Rohmer), and a feature film called *Melvil*, a movie the critic Olivier Père considered "the best secret in the alternative French cinema, one of the last movies to be truly underground." In the festival catalog (which is something we work a lot on from a graphic point of view, and which also wants to make a visual contribution to the festival's conceptual process), we also published some of the postcards that Daney had sent to Melvil Poupaud.

I'm not sure if I have sufficiently clarified this third point, which is essential for the explanation I am trying to provide, and which tries to hold several things together. Serge Daney's writings and journals are what led us to Ruiz (and Poupaud), and it is Ruiz (and Poupaud) who allow us to think that the risk of extending the concept of queer beyond the borders of sexuality may not be just a risk. Thus, the section dedicated to Serge Daney becomes crucial within the festival to help us understand that maybe the concept of queer should be thought of as a "mobile vector," a tool capable of taking on intrinsically political issues. Maybe we should acknowledge this as a device that becomes ineffective when it assumes a standardized form. Initially, as we know, the term was an insult, and became—as a result of a resemantization operation—a operator of liberation. Should people be careful not
to use it in a too narrow, stiffening sense, which might turn it into
"a model," making it "academic" and inevitably neutralizing it? If
such reasoning is accepted, if it is tolerable, then it can be easier
to understand what leads us to broadly extend the spectrum
of the term "queer" in this as in other sections of the festival.
This is what allows us, for example (and this is the last example
I will give), to pay tribute to an author like Buster Keaton on the
50th anniversary of his death, focusing our interest on his "odd-
ball glance" in the wake of the indications provided in an article
from July 2, 1982 where Daney reviewed a fine book by Robert
Benayoun entitled *Le regard de Buster Keaton*.

Three possible uses of Daney within a festival such as Sicilia
Queer. It is not difficult to imagine the outcomes: we could clearly
work on classic films like *Johnny Guitar*, *Suddenly Last Summer*,
or *Tea and Sympathy*, or dedicate the section to the discovery of
lesser known but not less important authors such as Margarida
Cordeiro and António Reis, whom Daney loved and who are not
very well known to the general public, to see if and how they can
interact with the concept of queer. On the other hand, we have
always considered the space of the festival as an open workshop,
as a place in which it is necessary to experiment, to make pro-
posals, to try something new. I think it is appropriate, however, to
stop here with the "patrolling" part and head towards a possible
conclusion, where I will try to propose some (maybe temporary)
working hypotheses. I examined Daney's writings to find some
ideas that could lead us towards the hypothesis of this book:
a relationship between Daney and queerness. I cannot even
remotely expect to have exhausted the reading (nor the under-
standing) of all of Daney's writings, but I've soon realized that
maybe that was not the direction in which to look. I might even
think I found something (for example, an article from August 5,
1982 where Daney talks about the role of the star in cinema, and
in particular of Marilyn), but I might have had to bend Daney's
writings in a direction that risked sounding too contrived. Or
I could have simply mentioned *Persévérance*, trying to draw
inspiration from what Daney says about himself and his homo-
sexuality in the dialogue with Serge Toubiana. But even in this
case I don't think I could have grasped anything essential. Even
trying to focus on the question of desire, which is perhaps one
of the characteristics bringing together several of the movies
we today ascribe to a queer gaze, I would have felt forced to
recognize that for Daney it is a question that characterizes all
cinema, and not just a specific part of it, which is the part we are
interested in here. I therefore asked myself if this relationship
should not be investigated by trying to adopt a different per-
spective, more focused on method than on content.

There is a beautiful line in *Persévérance* (Daney 1994, 78), which tries to define what cinema is:

Cinema is not a technique of displaying images, it is an art of
showing. And to show is a gesture, a gesture that forces us
to see, to look. Without this gesture, there is only an image
factory. Now, if something has been shown, someone needs
to answer back. Well, there may have been so many other
ways to spend your life with cinema, this was mine.

If Daney is part of the history of cinema, it's because he showed
us something about cinema itself. While telling the story of his
"baptism of cinema" where he went together with his mother and
aunt, he says that talking about a movie can be as beautiful as
seeing it. Following Bazin, we know Daney considered cinema an
impure art. From a certain point of view, I wonder whether the
question of impurity is connected with the concept of queer. We
could try to see where the hypothesis that impurity is another
way of saying queer leads us. What is queer cinema? If, for
example, we say that queer is that cinema that calls into ques-
tion a naturally presumed heteronormativity of the world, we
feel that the definition is incomplete. We're missing something
and we're not satisfied: queer cinema is not just that. If it is
difficult to fix something like a queer canon, we can try to make
the two concepts work together: impurities and queer, and see
if and how they can create something. The question of whether Daney's writings and the concept of queer can find a meeting point should therefore in my opinion be placed not so much in terms of acknowledgment (where can I find explicitly LGBTQ issues in Daney's writings?) or a coincidence (where is Daney's thought the interpreter of the LGBTQ demand?), but in terms of a working platform. Why Daney? Maybe the first answer is that in questioning the forms that queer cinema can take nowadays—in the impossible questioning about its defining, established, canonical essence—we immediately saw Daney as a traveling companion with the ability to question images. A spiritual son of André Bazin, founder of classical cinephilia, and at the same time a much closer son, a militant more than a theoretician. A traveling companion to be questioned more in the method than in the content, one we knew to be close to the issues we could have encountered, even if he had not explicitly treated them. It is not enough.

Why Daney? Second possible answer. For a festival like ours, to dedicate a whole section to Daney means to praise mediation. In an era when all forms of mediation are about to be dismissed in order to have a "direct grip on things"—as an Italian writer recently wrote in *The Game*, a book about the digital revolution— talking about Daney is a statement of intent: we need a *passeur* (a smuggler), the need for mediation is not exhausted. Festivals, catalogs, workshops, and conferences are attempts to understand the world around us, experiments to dialogue with the contemporary world and perhaps even more with the world of the future. Establishing a dialogue of this kind, beyond time, beyond the narrowness of the space in which we operate, seems to me to offer a necessary perspective on what a non-nostalgic form of cinephilia can create in a world totally dominated by the present.

There is a world within the history of cinema which has always been hidden, underground, secret, and that has been revealed since the 1990s (set free possibly by the AIDS crisis itself, first in the US, then in the rest of the world). Daney himself was
taken away by that very disease, which set one more country free in the chart of global cinema, and we can only imagine how he would have treated such a world: certainly with the same unbending sincerity—without any community solidarity, in short—through which he confronted other geographies of cinema. In the beautiful documentary Serge Le Péron dedicated to Daney, *Serge Daney le cinéma et le monde*, director Olivier Assayas says that for Daney films are only symptoms of cinema. This also is an interesting point for us: what are queer films? what is queer cinema? and what is the relationship of this with cinema *tout court*? is it possible to say that queer cinema in some way represents a renewal, an innovation, something beneficial not only for society but for cinema itself? These are some questions we can ask ourselves starting from Daney.

Daney asks questions to cinema, therefore also to what we today call queer cinema. In *Persévérance* he talks about boredom in front of images that are just beautiful and about interest in the "right" movies. I think this is an important question that can work as a guideline for the direction of queer cinema, especially when the borders of the LGBT film industry and the possibilities of queer cinema become blurred and risk getting off track. Can we say *Je, Tu, Il, Elle* is not just a beautiful film, but a "right" film? Can we use Daney as a guideline, as a source of criteria for judgment, as a call for rigor in our gaze as spectators—beyond what he is talking about? I think so. And this is something of no little value to me.

## References

- Daney, Serge. 1982. "Le regard du muet." *Libération* (July 2, 1982): 24.

- 1982. "Le dernier plan du star-system." *Libération* (August 5, 1982): 20.

- 1983. "L'effet de coulisses de *L'Homme Blessé*." *Libération* (May 19, 1983): 19.

- 1984. "Joe Losey : cinq paradoxes." *Libération* (June 23 & 24, 1984): 27.

- 1993. *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur.* Paris: P.O.L.

- 1994. *Persévérance*. Paris: P.O.L.
<footnote>———. 2015. *La Maison cinéma et le monde, Vol. 4, Le moment Trafic 1991-1992*. Paris: P.O.L.</footnote>

<footnote>Poupaud, Melvil. 2011. *Quel est mon nom?* Paris: Éditions Stock.</footnote>
QUEER FILM FESTIVAL

QUEER CINEPHILIA

SPECTATORSHIP

CLIP REEL
# Clip Reels and Community: Queer Cinephilia at the Queer Film Festival

Theresa Heath

Despite the current global proliferation of queer film festivals, the practices of queer cinema audiences are under-researched, and traditional models of cinephilia and spectatorship have centered the straight, white, western male. Nevertheless, queer audiences are among the most adept and committed of cinemagoers, developing highly active, creative ways of engaging with the film text. This chapter will briefly review the scholarship on feminist and queer cinephilia and spectatorial practices before examining the role of material space and, specifically, the queer film festival in the facilitation of queer cinephilias. Acknowledging extra-textual practices of gossip and fandom,
66

I argue that queer film festivals have contrib-
uted to the development of communal, inter-
active, non-hierarchical modes of viewing as
articulated by scholars such as Girish Shambu
and So Mayer. Finally, I examine the role of the
clip reel popular at queer film festivals, arguing
that this found-footage form embodies queer
cinephilic practices and is central to under-
standing the way in which queer audiences
engage with cinema.

According to film festival scholars Skadi Loist and Leanne Dawson, there are currently around 270 queer film festivals operating globally, a figure which attests to the centrality of cinema and cinemagoing to queer communities (Loist and Dawson 2018, 3). Nevertheless, the practices of queer cinema audiences are under-researched and, as Girish Shambu and Patricia White note, traditional models of cinephilia and spectatorship center the straight, white, western male (Shambu 2013; White 1999, xii). Underrepresentation in the annals of cinephilia is particularly apparent in the case of queer women who, as White argues, are often conflated with queer men in terms of their relationship to film (White 1999, 30). Furthermore, queers have not enjoyed the same sense of ‘ownership’ in film exhibition space as their straight counterparts. Cinephiles proprietorially describe how their viewing practices entail sitting in a favored spot in the auditorium, legs stretched out or draped over the chair in front (Keathley 2000, 42), a privileged mode of spatial occupation which may not be afforded those marked as visibly queer and/or female. Nevertheless, queer audiences are among the most adept and committed of cinemagoers, considering the level of engagement demanded of those for whom cinema has posed something of a conundrum. How to construct a relationship with a medium that has been an instrument of demonization
or erasure? How to articulate a queer love of cinema within an
apparatus which historically privileges straight white men? And,
for women – particularly those who inhabit additional vectors of
sexuality, race, ability, and class – how to construct a relationship
with the image that encompasses both agency and desire and is
not defined by narcissism or masochism?

Chris Straayer argues that “homosexual desire incites a critical disruption that uncovers radical viewing practices and generates momentous questions about textual flexibility” (Straayer 1993, 3). Building on this claim to the disruptive potential of non-heterosexual spectatorial positions, this article begins by briefly reviewing the scholarship on queer cinephilia and spectatorial practices, arguing that queer audiences have developed highly engaged, creative ways of engaging with the film text. Given that cinephilia is structured by both diegetic and material space, I next examine the role of the queer film festival in the facilitation of queer cinephilias. Acknowledging extra-textual practices of gossip and fandom, in addition to subjective knowledges, I argue that queer film festivals have contributed to the development of communal, interactive, non-hierarchical modes of viewing that undermine traditional renderings of cinephilia and are expansive and exclusive. Finally, I examine the significance of the clip reel, popular at queer film festivals, arguing that this found footage form is a crystallization of queer cinephilic practices, and central to understandings of the way in which queers audiences engage with cinema.

Queer Spectatorship

Cinephilia is bound to theories of spectatorship since our position
as spectator structures how and why we watch film, and the
affective experience produced by our relationship to the screen.
Queer cinephilia and spectatorial practices have developed along
complex lines, adapting to discursive and material exclusions as
well as the heterosexual bias of early models of spectatorship.
Queer audiences are, like all demographics, intersected by axes of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, and ability, and the relationship to the moving image is structured according to a variety of often highly contingent subject positions. For lesbians and bisexual women, the eroticization and fetishization of the woman on screen may be both pleasurable and problematic, and queer women have had to work particularly hard to seek out images and construct meanings that speak to them. Meanwhile, as Roger Hallas argues, the relationship between gay male audiences and cinema is heavily indebted to nostalgia and feelings of loss wrought by the AIDS epidemic, resulting in unique structures of feeling (Hallas 2003, 89).

Despite profound differences, it is possible to identify points of commonality within queer audiences, the lived experiences of whom have been historically written or censured out of film or buried in the subtext. Queer audiences have learned to read against the grain, deploying highly inter/active ways of seeing in order to produce meaning outside of the film text – as Daniel Harris notes, “film became a form of ‘found’ propaganda that the homosexual ransacked for inspiring messages, reconstituting the refuse of popular culture into an energizing force” (Harris 1997, 15). Queers have thus become adept at identifying what Christian Keathley terms “the cinephiliac moment,” a transient instance that produces scopic pleasure but is not necessarily memorable for the non-cinephile (Keathley 2000). For Paul Willemen, the cinephiliac moment performs a revelatory function, constituting a “momentary flash of recognition, or a moment when the look at something suddenly flares up with a particularly affective emotional intensity” (Willemen in Hallas 2003, 95). Within this moment lies the possibility of identification, of recognizing who one “is.”

Queer cinephilia, almost by definition, lies in fleeting glances, gestures, and coded references, gaps, or spaces in the film text where queer meaning can be found or inscribed. It is the moment when Greta Garbo's Queen Christina kisses her maid on the
lips, or when a cross-dressed Marlene Dietrich rakishly flicks the
brim of her top hat. Queer audiences have additionally learned
to isolate these moments from narrative developments such as
when, for example, Garbo's Christina falls in love with the (male)
Spanish envoy, or when lesbian characters predictably die at the
end of the film. Developing such reading practices is a high-stakes
game, since validation and subject constitution lies in the ability
to identify and piece together these moments. Hallas argues that
this active approach has resulted in a "fetishistic preoccupation
with the moment, the detail, the fragment; and the perfor-
mativity that contributes to identity formation" (Hallas 2003, 93).
Historically, the queer spectator has elevated this panoramic yet
forensic look to a kind of superpower, locating queerness in the
seemingly most barren situations, bypassing narrative linearity
and closure to find pleasure in "those great moments, those inter-
stices that were often, ironically, the source of a film's real power"
(Hallas 2003, 91).

These active reading practices stem from a desiring gaze that is
both erotic and constitutive of subject formation. However, the
heterosexual bias of classical models of spectatorship posits
a unidirectional flow of desire from male spectator to passive
woman-on-screen, which would appear to foreclose the pos-
sibility of queer and, specifically, lesbian pleasure or desire. As
Teresa de Lauretis writes in *Alice Doesn't*:

> the position of woman in language and in cinema is one of
> non-coherence; she finds herself only in a void of meaning,
> the empty space between signs - the place of women
> spectators in the cinema is between the look of the camera
> and the image on the screen, a place not represented,
> not symbolized, and thus pre-empted to subject (or self)
> representation. (de Lauretis 1984, 8)

In order to account for female visual pleasure, Mulvey famously
suggests the notion of trans-sex identification in which the
female spectator oscillates between both masculine and feminine
perspectives (Mulvey 1981, 14). Rather than bestow agency on the female spectator, however, this dual position offers only the occupation of positions of regressive, passive femininity on the one hand, and pre-Oedipal masculinity on the other. Later in *Alice Doesn't*, de Lauretis re-formulates Mulvey's construction arguing that, rather than oscillating between gendered poles, the female spectator inhabits both simultaneously. Yet again, however, this double identification has negative implications; it is a "surplus of pleasure" by which cinema seduces women into complicity with the production of cinematic and social hegemony (de Lauretis 1984, 143).

Opposing dyadic models based on binary constructions of sex and gender, Straayer deploys a queer approach to spectatorship, arguing that "a false sexual polarity *only ostensibly* governs subjectivity. This conclusion makes possible a radical assertion of multiple 'deviant' subjectivities outside the patriarchal and heterosexist confines of binary opposition" (Straayer 1996, 3). Complicating boundaries between the abstract spectator and the material woman in the audience, Straayer argues that the disciplinary look to which lesbians are subjected in the public space of the cinema marks them out as lesbian, perversely acknowledging the existence and possibility of the lesbian spectator. According to Straayer, queer women in fact deploy an active, desiring gaze, commensurate with queer reading practices in general, which requires exchange and sets up "two directional sexual activity" (Straayer 1996, 10). Straayer thus builds on traditional models of spectatorship, re-harnessing the power of the policing, homophobic gaze to leverage space for lesbian spectatorship, which disrupts binary understandings of masculine and feminine behavior and desire.

## The Queer Film Festival Context

As Straayer highlights, cinephilia and modes of spectatorship are material practices initiated and constituted in the space of
the auditorium. With the emergence of queer film festivals in the mid 1970s, queer audiences were able to view what queer images were available and to explore modes of spatial occupation previously denied to them. Prior to these events, queer cinephilia was a largely private experience conducted in the safety of one's home, private screening, or imagination. Queer film festivals provided a space for a more visible, communal, and public practice, which thrived on the extra-textual dissemination of subjective knowledge and the star-related gossip which Marc Siegel, Jackie Stacey, and White have identified as integral to queer cinephilias. Queer film festivals facilitated space for cinemagoers and functioned as a platform for queer filmmakers, thereby contributing to the development of queer film culture and community and providing impetus for the emergence of the New Queer Cinema in the 1990s. Shaped and informed by the AIDS epidemic and energetic political response of the community, New Queer Cinema was aesthetically and formally radical and rearticulated queer subjectivities as visible and active.

In the intersection of diegetic and material space mobilized by queer film festivals, spectatorial practices formed part of the community and identity-consolidating function of these events, facilitating an expansion of both the cinematic imaginary and material queer communities. In centering queer characters and subjectivities, NQC and the film festival context intervened in classical models of spectatorship, constructing alternative relationships which circumvented patriarchal spectatorial regimes. Straayer argues that "independently structured glances between women on the screen ... are outside convention and therefore threaten. The ultimate threat of eye contact between women ... is the elimination of the male" (Straayer 1996, 13). Despite the over-presence of male directors in the NQC, work by filmmakers such as Cheryl Dunye, Sadie Benning, and Maria Maggenti depicted queer women liberated from film configurations that privileged male characters and appealed to queer women and their shared experiences. Meanwhile, the
queer space of the festival auditorium ensured that the lesbian spectator was now constituted on her own terms, rather than as the result of a homophobic gaze.

While large, national film festivals perpetuate hierarchical structures that generally work to separate high profile film-makers, actors, and industry moguls from the general public, queer film festivals tend to dissolve boundaries between film-maker and attendee, not least because films are often a collaborative effort involving those in the community. Comparatively egalitarian and accessible social events, workshops, and panels demonstrate a shift from the auteurism of traditional models of cinephilia and a move towards more interactive, communal models. Furthermore, queer film festivals may center documentary, short, amateur, and/or experimental work, forms often ignored by cinephiles but that are more accessible to queer women, people of color, and/or the trans community. In this way, unique queer canons are constructed which further decenter notions of the auteur. Materially, too, queer film festivals undermine the sanctity of the cinephile temple. Festivals such as Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF), Leeds Queer Film Festival, Glitch QTIPOC Film Festival, and Wotever DIY Film Festival have all extensively engaged with queer crip subjectivities and politics on both representational and material levels. At SQIFF, this has resulted in the implementation of a comprehensive range of access measures, including captioning on all films, comfortable seating options, quiet spaces, gender neutral toilets, and relaxed viewings. Attendees are encouraged to move around, make noise when necessary, and generally develop more tolerant, compassionate viewing practices. The expectation that abled audience members will adapt to the needs of disabled attendees stands in marked contrast to the cinephilic entitlement that has led to reports of neurodiverse audience members being forced to leave screenings due to perceived inconsistent behavior (Marsh, 2015). SQIFF also programs a significant
proportion of queer crip cinema, thus politically aligning both
diegetic and material space.

Clip Reels

Since the New Queer Cinema, queer images have proliferated,
and with them a growing divide between representations of
assimilated, neoliberal gays and lesbians and radical, sub-
cultural queers. Predictably, it is cinema centering what Stuart
Richards defines as "homonormative" that is most likely to garner
commercial success and large scale distribution (Richards 2017,
156). The task of many well-established queer film festivals such
as London's BFI Flare is now to appeal to a range of increasingly
diverse stakeholders, balancing radical work alongside that
appealing to more mainstream tastes. Despite the breadth of
queer cinema today, however, the programs of queer film fes-
tivals highlight a persistent return to classical cinema. This nos-
talgia for classic forms and reading practices is best evidenced by
the continued popularity of clip reels, lectures, or presentations
at these events.

Clip reels are collections of curated queer moments – explicit,
implicit, or wishfully queer – edited together in creative ways,
usually to a soundtrack. Hallas argues that clip reels form a cen-
tral component to gay film spectatorship, constituting “perhaps
the most transparent instance of cinephilia” (Hallas 2003, 2).
White similarly describes the significance of this form, arguing
that the lesbian clip reel heralded a “coming out of the closet”
for lesbian cinephilia (White 1999, 31). Early examples of lesbian
clip films include Kaucyila Brooke’s and Jane Cottis’s *Dry Kisses
Only* (1990), an exploration of lesbian subtext in classic cinema;
Cecilia Barriga’s *Meeting of Two Queens* (1991), which casts dyke
icons Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich as lovers, and Pratibha
Parmar’s *Jodie: An Icon* (1996), an homage to Jodie Foster. Central
to this work is the reappropriation of the image and engagement
with the mechanics of stardom that relies on gossip, rumors, and
subjective knowledges for its erotic charge. Lesbian clip reels have played a central role in the constitution and consolidation of identity mobilized at queer film festivals; as White argues, "these texts ... build group identifications. The exhibition of such works in the context of lesbian and gay film festivals ... makes particularly clear how concrete audiences serve as contexts for such identifications" (White 1999, xx).

Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt posit the notion of hetero-synchronics to describe post-classical film structures in which heterosexual desire organizes apparently disparate strands into the delivery of the happy heterosexual ending. They argue that, in contrast, "queer structures of feeling simmer in less synchro-nous text" (Schoonover and Galt 2016, 272). In the clip reel, the linearity of classical cinema is fractured as images are detached spatially and temporally and reorganized according to queer desire. Apparently disparate images are wrought into sequences which may or may not possess narrative coherence, thus also rejecting the ultimately unifying impulses of post-classical cinematic forms. The queer clip reel therefore denaturalizes narrativity, emphasizing the role of editing in the construction of narrative. Classical linearity and post-classical heterosyn-chronics are mocked and parodied since the audience are aware of both the manipulation of the images in the context of the clip reel, and the constructedness of the original sequence. In a further twist, the gossip, fandom, and subjective knowledges associated with lesbian clip reels lend this form a type of veracity since everyone "knows" that these icons were "really queer" all along. The clip reel is therefore the crystallization of queer cine-philic practice, a series of found images constructed playfully and ironically through queer desire and shared knowledges to produce alternative queer meanings and, in the process, expose the inherent instability and artificiality of the image.

Queer clip reels remain a staple of queer film festivals, as with Daisy Asquith's 2017 *Queerama*, which mined the BFI's archive of early and classic cinema, newsreels, television, and contemporary
film set to a selection of John Grant tracks. The clip show or
lecture also remains popular on the queer film festival circuit,
as in the case of BFI Flare programmer Emma Smart's 'Lethal
Lesbians' talk at the 2018 edition of the festival. Moreover, the
clip reel no longer lurks in the realms of the queer film fes-
tival or independent cinema auditorium, and thousands of
independently produced queer clip reels are readily available
online. Although B. Ruby Rich, most famous of queer cinephiles,
has argued that VoD and other platforms encourage more indi-
vidualistic viewing practices (Rich 2014), the popularity of queer
film festivals has not diminished, and it is to be hoped that
individual production and private viewing of queer clip reels and
queer cinema in general is corollary to the communal festival
experience, rather than a harbinger of its obsolescence.

Conclusion

In the context of the queer film festival, queer cinephilia tends toward the communal rather than the solitary and relies on collaborative filmmaking and reading practices. Queer cinephilia revels in the porous boundary between filmmaker and audience, eschewing auteur worship in favor of interdependent, less hierarchical modes of film appreciation. While Susan Sontag and Thomas Elsaesser may sound the death knell for traditional forms of cinephilia (Sontag 1996; Elsaesser 2005), the queer film festival, with its emphasis on sociality, community, and pursuit of social justice is, I argue, the site of a new kind of socially aware and politically active form of cinephilia and feminist cinematic engagement, as articulated by Girish Shambu (Shambu 2013) and So Mayer (Mayer 2016, 8).

Although queer cinema has, in recent years, significantly
expanded and diversified, there remains a persistent nostalgia
for classical cinema, and the specific reading practices and
pleasures that this entails. In particular, the queer clip reel or
show has retained its popularity despite the current proliferation
of 'positive' queer images now widely available. Structured by historical modes of spectatorship and developed as a strategy against representational and cinematic erasure, the clip reel is a product of this engaged, queer, cinephilic gaze, a collection of moments shattered temporally and spatially and re-organized into a highly ironic, alternative queer narrative. Given current debates regarding the homogenization of queer culture and lifestyles, the clip reel may represent a yearning for, or return to, a more anarchic and disruptive form of politics and cinematic engagement.

## References

Dawson, Leanne, and Skadi Loist. 2018. "Queer/ing Film Festivals: History, Theory, Impact." *Studies in European Cinema* 15 (1): 1-24. Accessed October 29, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2018.1442901.

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. "Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment." In *Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory*, edited by Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, 27-44.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Hallas, Roger. 2003. "AIDS and Gay Cinephilia." *Camera Obscura* 18 (1 (52)): 85-126.

Karl Schoonover, and Rosalind Galt. 2016. *Queer Cinema in the World*. Durham: Duke University Press.

Keathley, Christian. 2000. "The Cinephiliac Moment." *Framework* 42. https://www.frameworknow.com/journal-archives-posts/42.

Lauretis, Teresa de. 1984. *Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema*.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Marsh, Sarah. 2018. "BFI Apologises after Woman with Asperger's Ejected from Cinema." *The Guardian*, April 30. Accessed April 30, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/30/woman-with-aspergers-ejected-from-cinema-for-laughing-at-western.

Mayer, Sophie. 2016. *Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema*. International Library of the Moving Image 33. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

Mulvey, Laura. 1981. "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by 'Duel in the Sun' (King Vidor, 1946)." *Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media* 15/17: 12-15.

Rich, B. Ruby. 2014. "The New Queer Cinema: Back to the Future." Lecture at University of Hamburg, October 15.

Shambu, Girish. 2013. *The New Cinephilia*. Montreal: Caboose Books.

Sontag, Susan. 1996. "The Decay of Cinema." *The New York Times Magazine*, 25 February.
Straayer, Chris. 1996. *Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Orientation in Film and Video*. New York and Chichester West Sussex: Colombia University Press.

Richards, Stuart James. 2017. *The Queer Film Festival: Popcorn and Politics*. Framing Film Festivals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

White, Patricia. 1999. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
FEMINISMS

CURATION

ETHICS

COLLECTIVE

REVOLUTION

AUDIENCE
# Revolt, She Said: Queer Feminist Film Curation and the Freedom to Revolt

So Mayer and Selina Robertson,
Club des Femmes

During summer 2018, Club Des Femmes (CDF), in collaboration with the Independent Cinema Office funded by the British Film Institute, curated a UK-wide touring season of films considering the aftermath of May 1968. "Revolt, She Said: Women and Film after '68" comprised nine feature films and eight accompanying shorts, exploring the legacy of '68 on contemporary feminisms, art, and activism transnationally. In this paper, two members of CDF unpack the queer feminist ethics and affects of the tour, through the voices of multiple participants, and framed conceptually by Sara Ahmed's "willful feminist" and Donna Haraway's "staying with the trouble."
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

[Fig. 1]: "Revolt, She Said" banner. Image courtesy of Club des Femmes and Independent Cinema Office.

Introducing “Revolt, She Said”

During the summer of 2018, Club Des Femmes (CDF), in collaboration with the Independent Cinema Office (ICO) funded by the British Film Institute (BFI), curated a UK-wide touring season of films that explored the aftermath of May 1968. “Revolt, She Said: Women and Film after ‘68” comprised nine feature films and eight accompanying shorts, exploring the legacy of ‘68 on contemporary feminism, art, and activism transnationally (fig. 1). This was the largest-scale project to date for CDF, a queer feminist film curation collective that includes the authors of this piece. Founded by Selina Robertson and Sarah Wood in 2007, at a time when there was an absence of independent and feminist film curation in London, CDF state on our website that we aim “to offer a freed up space for the re-examination of ideas through art. In the age of the sound-bite, Club des Femmes is a much-needed open platform for more radical contextualisation and forward-looking future vision: a chance to look beyond the mainstream.”

Until 2018, CDF had programmed predominantly in London, and as single events or single venue mini-seasons, often in collaboration with festivals or venues. “Revolt, She Said” was thus the most ambitious—and difficult—project we had undertaken on the scales of programming, geographical reach, and temporal extent. The tour ran for four months, and there were six national flagship events, each highlighting one of the feature films. These
events took place at independent cinemas across the UK's regions and nations that had a pre-existing relationship with the ICO, or where CDF had a relationship with the programmers: Glasgow Film Theatre (Scotland); Sheffield Showroom (North East); Broadway Nottingham (Midlands); Watershed, Bristol (South West); Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff (Wales); and the London Feminist Film Festival (London).<fnref n="1" /> We also collaborated with Leeds Queer Film Festival at the Hyde Park Picture House; Lexi Cinema's London Film School; Port Eliot Festival, Cornwall; and the BFI's Woman With a Movie Camera strand. In each case, CDF provided specialist speakers, in collaboration with the venue's wishes, who could contextualize the films within both cinematic and activist frameworks.<fnref n="2" />

Intellectually, the tour represented an extension of our manifesto into a larger conversation about radical histories. In our funding application, we framed our program as follows:

> One hundred years after women's suffrage was achieved in the UK, 50 years after the protests of May '68 triggered resistance across the world, where is the revolutionary woman now? ... My '68 [the original season title] will present an international package of films exploring the aftermath of May '68, in work by the women filmmakers who picked up their cameras in the name of activism, art and resistance. The touring programme aims to provide access to international films, spanning the second half of the 20th century,

<footnote n="1">1. Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast were keen to screen *Maeve*, but were unable to participate due to refurbishment works falling during the dates covered by the tour's funding. We also approached HOME in Manchester, with whom CDF have a pre-existing relationship, but they had their own '68 program in place. All of these relationships, and the nationwide programming for "Revolt, She Said," are tribute to an emerging wave of feminists of marginalized genders working as programmers and educators at independent regional venues.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Additionally, Mayer and Robertson travelled to several regional non-flagship venues to introduce screenings.</footnote>
to explore the legacy of ‘68 on contemporary feminism and activism around the world.

The program began before ‘68, with Věra Chytilová’s Czech new wave proto-feminist classic *Daisies* (Sedmikrášky, 1966), which was the tour’s best-known film. This was followed by two key films made in 1968 itself by prominent northern European women film-makers, but barely known outside their home countries: *The Girls* (Flickorna, Mai Zetterling, 1968) and *The Cat Has Nine Lives* (Neun Leben hat die Katze, Ula Stöckl, 1968). We celebrated a prominent European feminist auteur, who was marking her 90th birthday in 2018, by touring one of her favorites of her films: Agnès Varda’s *One Sings, the Other Doesn’t* (L’Une chante, l’autre pas, 1977). Subsequent films mapped the impact of feminism in the UK, with three films that combine elements of documentary and experiment in different measures: *Riddles of the Sphinx* (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977), *Maeve* (Pat Murphy and John Davies, 1981), and *Carry Greenham Home* (Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, 1983). Our most recent films were both American-made documentaries by British filmmakers that looked back at US civil rights history: Greta Schiller’s *Before Stonewall* (1984), on pre-‘68 LGBTQ+ lives, and Pratibha Parmar’s *A Place of Rage* (1991), on the role of queer Black women in the civil rights movement and beyond, thus affirming the tour as addressing the full extent of second-wave feminist history from ‘68 to the beginning of the third wave in 1992.

Today the public memory of May ‘68 is predominantly one of male revolt, heroism, and failure, traditionally emblematized by explosive masculinist cultural and political activism. The majority of 2018’s 50th anniversary film programming in the UK reflected only these histories. CDF wanted to revive the rich and under-acknowledged connections between feminisms, film, and the revolutions of May ‘68 and their aftermath. As Anna Coatman notes in her feature on the tour for *Sight & Sound*, "‘Revolt, She Said’ aims to shift the focus away from the riots in Paris to show how people were agitating for change across the world
throughout the late 20th century... challenging conventional
narratives about radical political movements, reminding us of
the women and queer artists, activists and filmmakers who have
been written out of them" (Coatman 2018, 14). We named the tour
after Julia Kristeva's book *Revolt, She Said*, and her recollections
acted as our manifesto:

May '68 in France expressed a fundamental version of free-
dom: not freedom to succeed, but freedom to revolt. Political
revolutions ultimately betray revolt because they cease to
question themselves. Revolt, as I understand it—psychic
revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt—refers to a permanent
state of questioning, of transformations, an endless probing
of appearances. (Kristeva 2002)

This reflected our intention to counter these cinematic histories
and public records with a curatorial response that re-framed
'68 within a narrative of women's film histories and feminist
activisms.

Conceptualizing the tour within this framework of continual
revolution liberated us from the pressure to program films from
'68 alone, when few women filmmakers were working, but cre-
ated its own challenges. The date of the work reached back to
1966, with original—and sometimes the only available—formats
that included super 8, 16mm, 35mm, DVD, and U-matic video.
Moreover, the omission of women's heritage cinema from the
canons of mainstream film histories has had a generational
impact on preservation, restoration, and digitization. Further
obstacles ensued because of the nature of the film season: a fem-
inist film tour by its very definition appeals to a niche audience.
As Pamela Hutchinson wrote in *The Guardian*, our summer tour
represented a perhaps-welcome challenge to normative pro-
gramming. "The summer season at the movies is traditionally
a time for tentpoles and blockbusters, but this year's wonder
women don't wear bulletproof bracelets. Independent cinemas
are offering a sizzling summer of radical, intersectional film as an
alternative to the franchise releases [... with a] revival of radical movies made by feminist and queer filmmakers from the 60s" (Hutchinson 2018). During one of the hottest summers since 1976, we achieved something quite remarkable with the ICO (not least due to Hutchinson's influential article which appeared in print and online); between May 6 and August 31, 2019, we programmed ninety-nine screenings at thirty cinemas nationwide, totaling 2,346 overall admissions, although CDF had had little previous profile outside London.

Within this expanded vision, we worked to maintain our commitment to creating open, non-hierarchical spaces in which to explore film, aesthetics, and actions. We wanted the tour to be about making connections around the UK with audiences, cinemas, and allies, creating conversations in the present that explore histories of transnational women's cinema. As we endeavored to take responsibility in our curatorial arguments regarding our relationships with communities, venue programmers, and audiences, Laura U. Marks's definitional article on the role of the ethical curator acted as a framework. She notes that ethics:

> might sound rather puritanical, as though making, programming, and watching cinema is our common moral duty. But ethics, or the exhortation to justice, is nothing without beauty, for beauty is the invitation to the soul... ethical relationships amongst artists, programmers, and audiences involve discourses of beauty, emotion and love. Politics, broadly understood, is hollow without these. (Marks 2004, 36-37)

Our trouble was how to hold onto these feminist curatorial strategies and commitments when we were working in unfamiliar spaces, on a national level, with a scale of budget that we had never worked with before.

This engaged us in an unprecedented level of outreach that became deeply informative and inspiring, as CDF collective
member Jenny Clarke describes of her online community-building for the tour (Clarke 2018). Yet, due to our ethical commitments, we also found that we encountered *ourselves* as “difficult women”—not with audiences, but when dealing with institutional gatekeepers in terms of accessing film material and clearing rights from national film archives, sales agents, and distributors, and then programming in institutional spaces with different policies and ethics to our own. At times we found the complexities of working in multi-partner collaborations—where everyone is functioning on tight budgets, with limited time and capacity—demanding, in the relationship between our collective ethics and practical delivery.

We were inspired to continue, however, thanks to the historical and enduring examples of the filmmakers themselves, who were often working counter to national and commercial structures and cultural imperatives (as we discuss below), although this has also contributed to the punitive neglect of their films. We also were following theorists Sara Ahmed and Donna Haraway, whose recent work is concerned with difficultness in different ways. In *Living a Feminist Life*, Ahmed centers the incendiary figure of the “willful feminist,” arguing that: “Willfulness is used to explain how subjects become the cause of their own unhappiness. Perhaps then feminism involves being willing to be willful. To claim to be willful or to describe oneself or one’s stance as willful is to claim the very word that historically has been used as a technique for dismissal” (Ahmed 2017, 77).

The filmmakers of “Revolt, She Said” and the protagonists, aesthetics, and subject positions they generated, were—and remain—willingly willful not only as an activist strategy but as the necessary precursor to action. As Rebecca Liu observes of the program for *Another Gaze*: “The films of ‘Revolt, She Said’ are more interested in depiction than prescription; we do not necessarily come out of them with a greater sense of how to emancipate ourselves from the patriarchy.... But an indirect kind of answer comes in the form of the films’ depiction of relationships between
women, in all their messy, liberating, frustrating glory" (Liu 2019).
Both messiness and connectivity are central to Haraway's con-
ceptualization of *Staying With the Trouble*, where "trouble" refers
both to the complex and often degraded ecologies in which we
move, and to the beings and networks that remain within these
ecologies and generate new and sustaining relationships, a
process she refers to by the willful metaphors of composting and
cat's cradles. Borrowing a key phrase from queer online culture
(Merriam Webster), "Revolt, She Said" was willfully conceived as a
"hot mess," a composting of films in order to regrow the seeds of
'68 into new forms capable of staying with the trouble. Willfully,
we worked in a cat's cradle of venues, speakers, critics, and
audiences, and we have woven as many of their voices as possible
into this account of our collective labor.

Growing Daisies

*Daisies* was where we started: it is one of the few feminist films
with a place in the international canon, as well as in our personal
(anti-)canons, because of its willful trouble. The protagonists
of the film, referred to as Marie 1 and Marie 2, could be cast as
the origin points of the contemporary "hot mess," such as the
willfully lost protagonists of London-based queer films such as
*Break My Fall* (Kanchi Wichmann, 2011) or *Stud Life* (Campbell X,
2013). In fact, *Daisies* bears out the origin of "hot mess" in the
class politics of food, as the Maries express their frustrations with
state control through food transgressions such as ordering vast
meals at the expense of sugar daddies, gleefully dismembering
sausages, and finally laying glorious waste to the wastefulness
of a state banquet with an epic food fight. The Soviet authorities
banned the film two years later on the grounds of food wastage,
a censorious irony that could not disguise the film's role as a seed
of the Prague Spring.

As film critic Carmen Gray wrote about *Daisies* for our *Revolt, She Said* zine (produced as a paper publication available at all the tour
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 2]: Still from Daisies (Sedmikrásky) by Věra Chytilová (Czechoslovakia, 1966)
© Filmové studio Barrandov/NFA, 1966. Courtesy of Second Run.</figcaption></figure>

venues, and online): “the antics of the Maries create and affirm
space for personal freedom—an act that confers dignity on their
audience, through methods of outrageous anarchy.... In pro-
fessing no coherent strategy but uncontainable energy for rule-
breaking and pure being, they don’t fight for systemic change. Yet
they inspire hope for it, by confirming that anything, even if just
for a moment, is possible” (Gray 2018) (fig. 2). Our zine was a key
strategy in planting the seeds of revolution and “confirming that
anything, even if just for a moment, is possible.” We used online
publishing to confront the difficulty of getting press coverage
(for touring programs, retrospective programming, and feminist
cinema *tout court*), as well as the temporal difficulties of academic
publishing.

With her "uncontainable energy for rule-breaking and pure
being," Chytilová represented the kind of trouble we wanted to
get into when resisting what Kristeva calls "political revolution":
the strict masculinist-Marxist (often militant and militarist)
model. Anti-state Czech director Chytilová famously referred to herself as an "individualist" rather than a feminist. Thus, to select her film for a feminist program was itself a willful act; the same was true of the short that we programmed to screen before *Daisies*, Chantal Akerman's debut *Saute Ma Ville* (*Blow My Town Up*, 1968), with its willful protagonist, played by Akerman herself. At the start of Anglo-American second-wave feminism, these two European directors explicitly set themselves against it. Akerman refused to screen her films in feminist and/or LGBTQ+ film festivals throughout her career, and the response to CDF's programming request was initially negative on that basis, when we approached the Belgian Cinematheque, with whom she had a close personal relationship and who control her estate. CDF continued the conversation by explaining our prior relationship with Akerman's work, having screened *Je tu il elle* (1974) as a collaboration with the radical Fringe! queer film festival in 2011. By staying with the trouble, we learned of Akerman's own love of *Daisies*, which helped us secure the rights and authenticated our intuitive montage pairing, affirming our willful feminist film genealogy.

## A Second Life for The Cat

Akerman and Chytilova have both sustained auteurist canonicity, although often at the expense of being tokenized and depoliticized. Writer/director Ula Stöckl is a cautionary example of an even more extreme erasure. Unlike her West German contemporary Margarethe von Trotta, who has an international film festival and European arthouse profile, Stöckl has little traction outside of Germany; yet her 1968 film *The Cat Has Nine Lives* is considered to be West Germany's first feminist film. The Deutsche Kinemathek's 2K restoration of *The Cat* was long overdue, screening at the Berlinale in 2015, and in the Feminist Film Classics sidebar at the Seoul International Women's Film Festival 2017. Based on Stöckl's lived experiences but combining disruptive, non-linear action and dream sequences that form an
episodic narrative, the film explores the relationships between four women. They creatively express their frustrations and desires as they experience their powerlessness to effect real change in their everyday lives. Shot in Technicolor and Cinema- scope, Stöckl's film offers a riveting premonition of the feminist film culture that was to emerge in West Germany in the seventies; at once visually stunning, fashion-forward, drily affectless, and bitingly witty about patriarchy, the film also seems premonitory of television shows such as *Girls* (Lena Dunham, 2012–17) and *Fleabag* (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, 2016–).

Even with these reference points, we knew it would be difficult to create a critical audience for a film that was invisible outside of its original production context. Although Stöckl, together with Danièle Huillet and May Spils, became West Germany's very first professional female directors, they were constantly being overshadowed by their male partners and collaborators, as Julia Knight elucidates: “Stöckl… suffered from trying to explore the concerns of women too soon. With the women's movement barely in its birth throes when she made her directorial debut, a critical audience had not yet emerged capable of appreciating her work” (Knight 1992, 11). Apart from an interview that Stöckl gave to ground-breaking feminist film magazine *Frauen and Film* in June 1977, there is very little critical writing on the film. Therein, Stöckl states that because her film received negative reviews at its festival premiere screening in Mannheim, the film failed to find a distributor—except one who suggested that she add some pornographic scenes to make it more marketable! (Hillier, Lenssen and Strempel 1977, 3–11).

We therefore commissioned Berlin based writer/director Kanchi Wichmann to respond to the film for our zine, and her comments spoke to the film's complicated nature as a time capsule.

In Stöckl's world women are comrades, soulmates, living and loving in glorious technicolour whilst men are bumbling fools, dressed in muted greys and browns and awkwardly
trying to hang on to their sense of entitlement. As gratifying
as it is to see this cinematic reversal of the cultural norms
of the era, there are times when the film falls into the trap
of reinforcing the very gender binary her characters seek to
escape. (Wichmann 2018)

We were conscious that *The Cat* needed careful handling, and
realized we were fortunate to have collaborated with Dr. Annie
Ring previously on a 35mm screening *The German Sisters* (1981)
by Margarethe von Trotta. We invited her to give a contextual
introduction to the film for a flagship screening at the BFI. She
later remarked: "Audience members told me afterward that my
introduction helped them to approach the film with knowledge
of its context, and that my suggestions of film-theoretical ways of
reading it make it easier to access a very experimental and myst-
terious work" (quoted in Pirkaalainen 2018).

Rather than explaining away the mystery, we expanded it by
programming it with Swedish experimental filmmaker Gunvor
Nelson's similarly dreamy short film *My Name is Oona* (1968), in
order to maintain the position that subjective, interior films have
a place in a radical/revolutionary program. A masculinist bias
within histories of films and film movements was palpable in our
discovery that *Oona's* composer was listed online as Steve Reich,
although (as the film's distributor FilmForum told us) the score
was the work of the filmmaker. Undertaking such detail-oriented
work seriously is part of the ethical complexity of queer fem-
inist film curation; so is admitting a mistake or ignorance, and
correcting it.

## Here Come The Girls

Sometimes learning that a film exists is the beginning of that
ethical work: none of us had seen *The Girls*, despite Simone
de Beauvoir calling Zetterling's riotous third feature "the best
movie ever made by a woman," and engaging the filmmaker
to adapt *Le Deuxième Sexe* for television (in Brison 2003, 197). A
feminist manifesto/re-working of the Greek comedy *Lysistrata* (Aristophanes, 411 BCE), *The Girls* should be better known, not least because of Zetterling's cinematic and theatrical collaborations with Ingmar Bergman. Zetterling also lived in the UK for many years, making work funded by the BBC and the BFI.<fnref n="3" /> A transnational film career presents its own difficulties: on the BFI Filmography, *Scrubbers* (1982) appears as her only directorial credit. We were, however, able to turn to her digital archives as an extensive resource; we watched filmed interviews from the 1960s, read recent scholarship on her work, and even perused her books on health, food, and cookery.

Despite its absence from the record, *The Girls* feels more contemporary than *The Cat*, because it frames its performers Liz (Bibi Andersson), Marianne (Harriet Andersson), and Gunnila (Gunnel Lindblom) as willful characters experiencing what Ahmed calls “feminist snap.” They are “difficult women” who engage in confrontations with their audiences, as well as with neglectful husbands and boyfriends at home. Their articulate rage offers an historical reminder that actors were using their visibility, intelligence, and creativity to challenge patriarchal hierarchies long before the Time’s Up movement. Through the women’s relationship with the play’s director, the film delivers an insightful and funny critique of Bergman, known for his intense and vexed relationships with the female performers whom he called “my actresses.” Zetterling’s sly analysis chimes with Jane Magnusson’s documentary *Bergman: A Year in the Life*, which premiered at Sundance 2018, and takes its own critical look at his domineering relationships with his female collaborators and family members.

*The Girls* follows the theater troupe through wintry rural Sweden, and we found parallels in our own experiences with the difficulties and rewards of travelling to regional cinemas

<footnote n="3">3 In 2017, the Edinburgh International Film Festival programmed Zetterling's 1982 prison drama *Scrubbers* as the only female-directed film in their Retro-spective program.</footnote>
and feminist communities with our curatorial work. Thanks to support from the Swedish Film Institute, the film was the first to be confirmed for our season, but its absence from the Anglophone feminist canon made it a challenging selection for our opening flagship screening event at the Glasgow Film Theatre as part of the Radical Film Network's "Mayday '68" weekend. We had had only six weeks to program and organize the tour after our funding was confirmed, and the task at hand felt immense. Then, when we arrived in Glasgow, we faced the first heatwave of the summer, with people wanting to find the beach beneath the pavement rather than in cinemas!

Even with these circumstances, we found great pleasure in working on building our feminist networks and making new friends, in particular our Glasgow speakers Samar Ziadat, founder of Darshidi, artist filmmaker Margaret Salmon, and Kathi Kamleitner and Lauren Clarke, founder-members of Femspectives. Like the women in *The Girls*, we had to take an improvisational approach to being where we found ourselves, albeit with the added advantage of fifty years of feminist consciousness. That is: we did not have to throw pies at the patriarchal screen, we just had to get the conversation started. As Anna Backman Rogers writes of *The Girls* for our zine: "The film is ripe with Zetterling's own excoriating sense of humour and feminist rage—and for this, she has been chastised as vulgar and lacking in subtlety. It is, indeed, an unruly and disobedient work of art and it must be experienced as such" (Backman Rogers 2018) (fig. 3).

As a choice to screen before *The Girls*, Ayoka Chenzira's satirical, bitingly relevant short animation *Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People* (1982) was our most ambitious attempt at montage programming, a term coined by Laura Mulvey (2015). Borrowing Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary concept for film editing, Mulvey describes how the juxtapositions between films in a program can engage an audience politically. We sought a conversation between two formally and contextually diverse films that shared
<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 3]: Still from *The Girls* by Mai Zetterling (*Flickorna*, Sweden, 1968). © AB Svensk Filmindustri, Photo: David Hughes, Stills Archive: The Swedish Film Institute.</figcaption></figure>

a focus on intergenerational dialogue and on fashion and textiles. We also wanted to confront the whiteness of feminist cinema before the 1980s, and the way in which the canon has been shaped by access to materials, digital restorations, and dominant concepts of political relevance. Programming *Hair Piece* acted as a feminist remembrance of our frustration at not being able to access the feature-length work of women filmmakers from the Global South. Filmmakers whose work we tried to access for the tour included: Franco-Guadaloupean "matriarch of African cinema" Sarah Maldoror, whose epic *Sambizanga* (1972) existed only in a single archive print that was touring elsewhere; and Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gomez, whose singular fiction feature *De Cierta Manera* (*One Way or Another*, 1974) we screened at the Barbican in 2017, but could not tour on 35mm. As our tour came to a close, it was with huge satisfaction that we discovered Chenzira's *Hair Piece* has been acceded to the Library of Congress (Cannady 2018).
One Sings for Reproductive Justice

There were further resonances between CDF's counter-programming and currents of attention to feminist film in wider film culture. Over the twelve years of CDF's curating, we have seen neglected films that we have championed find a place in the archives; for example, Lizzie Borden's *Born in Flames* (1983), which CDF screened in our inaugural Dykesploitation program in 2007 from a heavily-worn 16mm print, received a restoration and 35mm transfer in 2016 by Anthology Film Archives in New York, in collaboration with the filmmaker. Borden contributed to "Revolt, She Said" with a personal reflection on *Maeve*, a coeval film directed by one of *Born in Flames's* key cast members, Pat Murphy. In particular, Borden draws attention to the need to re-screen *Maeve* in 2018, the year of the campaign to #RepealThe8th, and subsequently the #NowForNI campaign to extend the United Kingdom's abortion laws to Northern Ireland.

While *Maeve* does not address reproductive rights directly, another of our features put abortion front and center. We chose Varda's *One Sings, the Other Doesn't* for its political timeliness. A heartfelt introduction by a speaker from Pro-Choice Nottingham introducing our flagship screening at Broadway Nottingham meant that the planned panel discussion became an inter-generational consciousness-raising group, with testimonial about experiences of abortion, single motherhood, marriage, divorce, adolescence, and finding feminism. The panel, including critic Christina Newland and programmer Sophia Ramcharan, had to find a feminist form to hold the difficult and necessary weight of this revelatory discussion in the time allotted.

*One Sings* produced the most personal responses of any film on the tour; as Jemma Desai noted for our zine, "*One Sings, The Other Doesn't* opens with an inscription [*pour Rosalie*]. Rosalie is Rosalie Demy: Agnès Varda's daughter" (Desai 2018). Desai notes that it is this intense intimacy that engages the viewer, as Varda shows her understanding that the "act of watching is a
form of correspondence. This time I watch *One Sings, The Other Doesn't* as a form of correspondence with my daughter." This intergenerational continuum subtends from the film's central relationship between two women friends whose trajectories tally with one of the central arguments of the #RepealThe8th campaign: that access to abortion is an issue of economic class. One, Pomme, can afford to travel outside France to access a termination; while the other, Suzanne, cannot. It is Suzanne who becomes first an activist and then a healthcare provider to ensure that other women do not face the same experience, while Pomme shares the broader message of feminist autonomy and revolution through street theater and folk song.

Despite this personal-political consonance, we faced the difficulty of attuning audiences to a film infused with Marxism (including a song quoting Friedrich Engels) and Brechtian devices (such as the street theater) that fit neither with expectations of Francophone avant-garde work such as Jean-Luc Godard's more aggressive filmmaking, nor with Varda's recent auteurial reputation that had seen her refigured in (and for) the mainstream media as a grandmotherly figurehead of the Nouvelle Vague. We wanted to honor Varda's own willful critique of the ways in which older female artists are depoliticized and marketed as non-threatening. This is particularly dismissive as Varda insisted on her own difficulty; for example, by choosing to screen a new 4K restoration of *One Sings* at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018—on the beach!

## Posing Riddles

1977 was a willful year: it was only in formulating the "Revolt, She Said" program that we realized *One Sings* was coeval with a found-ational British feminist film, one whose difficulty is signaled in its very title: *Riddles of the Sphinx*. Connected by its co-directors Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen to the height of film theory and theory film, *Riddles* experienced a similar split critique to *One Sings*, typed as too abstruse by feminists, and as too feminist
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 4] Still from *Riddles of the Sphinx* by Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen (UK, 1977).
*Riddles of the Sphinx* is released on DVD/Blu-ray by the BFI. Image courtesy BFI.</figcaption></figure>

by avant-gardists. Yet our flagship screening at the Watershed Bristol, which we chose for the city's long association with alternative politics and experimental electronic music, ended with a cinema full of warm, supportive laughter at the final self-reflexive riddle, as an old mercury-ball toy maze is tilted over and over: an analogy for filmmaking, feminism, and the difficulty of situating the film itself.

As our panelist, scholar and curator Kim Knowles, said,

> The idea has always been that Laura Mulvey is a theorist, primarily a theorist and not a filmmaker, and I guess that’s how, for me, initially I approach the film. When I came to it as a film student, having encountered [her essay] “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” I thought, okay, *Riddles of the Sphinx* is going to be a quite dense, a politically and theoretically dense film, and what’s surprising is that it isn’t. It has that accessibility. I find it striking how accessible it is, but surprising how absent it is from the histories. (quoted in Judah 2018b)
Despite the BFI's distribution of *Riddles* on DVD, it proved difficult to obtain digital materials to screen on our tour, exemplifying a general lack of access. Yet, as Grace Barber-Plentie pointed out for our zine, perhaps this difficulty generates a useful encounter because of its complexity:

> It's disheartening to think that in 2018, *Riddles* can still feel fresh and unique and new.... But maybe this is the problem of being the first, or at least a pioneer of something.... With renewed interest in the film in 2018, the Sphinx is re-emerging. It was never defeated, never fully gone, just lying dormant. It is resurrected. (Barber-Plentie 2018)

That sense of resurrection was apparent in the energy that our panelists brought to their fresh readings of the film. As film-maker Esther May Campbell said at Watershed, "it's really clear—[Mulvey's] understanding of what she's communicating to the audience and how she's asking the audience to think and put a narrative together. Sometimes it shifts from being illustrative and then it becomes narrative and then it goes meditative and then it goes narrative again, but I was bowled over" (in Judah 2018b).

Our third panelist, programmer and critic Lorena Pino Montilla, noted that, for her as an immigrant from Venezuela, the film resonated most strongly as a documentary of the changing Britain of the late 1970s, from the freshness of its concerns with divorce, working motherhood, mixed-race and queer relationships, and union politics, to its textural details of cigarette packets, kitchen colorways, and vibrant clothing (fig. 4). For all three panelists, these accessible elements were connected to, and shaped by, the film's political and theoretical arguments. *Riddles* emerged from our discussion as, in fact, a film with nothing to hide but rather one that has been hidden. The laughter that greeted and celebrated what remains freshly recognizable in the film, as it speaks to intersectional politics of labor, racialization, and sexuality within the feminist movement, was a delight that should not have surprised us, but was a welcome surprise.
Remembering *Maeve*

On 8th August, 2018 we were no less surprised and delighted to read that possibly our most "willful" title on the tour was featured in the London *Evening Standard* as a highlight of the London Feminist Film Festival, with a prominent still from the film in the print edition (Paskett 2018). *Maeve's* "willfulness" meant that, due to complications over territory rights and materials, the film was not able to join the tour until 1 August. Our difficulties in exhibition reflected, in minor key, the acute difficulties of the film's production history. As Borden points out: "While we played with fake guns and planted fake bombs in downtown Manhattan [for *Born in Flames*], Pat travelled in and out of a real war zone. I don't think that we really understood that or how major it was that *Maeve* had opened the Edinburgh Film Festival [in 2018]" (Borden 2018). Although *Maeve* was only able to tour for one month, we secured nine screenings of the film; Filmhouse Edinburgh tweeted their original festival program note to mark this thirty-seventh anniversary screening!

When co-director Murphy contacted us to let us know of her availability to present the film at the Rio Cinema, we had to act fast to re-arrange the panel. The final difficulty came on the day of the screening, as festival scheduling inevitably led to over-running. We did not have enough time to unpack the film fully with our multigenerational audience of feminists of all genders, particularly from the London Irish Women's Network, in conversation with our post-screening panel. We were, however, delighted to hear production and reception stories from Murphy, her co-director John Davies, the film's director of photography and producer Robert Smith, and Irish artist filmmaker Michelle Deignan. Not only did the screening act as a reunion for the production team, who hadn't seen each other since the release, but also Murphy connected with old friends such as Felicity Sparrow (founder member of feminist film distributor Circles), after many decades away from London.
As is the case with so many women filmmakers on our tour, Murphy's career was cut short due to the lack of institutional support. On the film's release, Claire Johnston offered a Marxist feminist analysis of *Maeve* in *Screen*, wherein she read the film as a search for a positive imaginary for women outside of a nationalist culture, thereby enabling women to enter language and history on their own terms—but beyond this, *Maeve's* feminist reception is sparse, and the film has not entered national film histories (Johnston 1981, 54–71). *Maeve* is a critique of supposedly “radical” (nationalist, liberationist, leftist) politics that remain cis male-led today. Programming it within a post-’68 season was an important discursive intervention: reminding audiences that May ’68 (when the Troubles began) also meant revolt against the rule of patriarchy as well as political occupation and colonial rape culture. The gaps within our program show that the full history of post-suffrage women’s and feminist protest in the UK remains to be documented.

## Carrying *Greenham Home*

"The women of Greenham Common taught a generation how to protest," noted Beeban Kidron, who made *Carry Greenham Home*, her first film, while living on-site with co-director Amanda Richardson during their final year at the National Film and Television School (Kidron 2013). Prior to CDF's theatrical screenings, *Carry Greenham Home* had previously only been available to women's and community groups: first on video (its shooting format), then DVD, and now streaming. This allowed the film to reach the "large potential audience for feminist films" described by Annette Kuhn in the 1980s, which "exists among women who rarely visit film theatres, and who certainly do not normally consider going to see films in non-commercial cinemas" (Kuhn 1994, 187). Grassroots circulation, however, meant there was no academic writing about *Carry Greenham Home* as a film prior to So Mayer's 2017 article, which followed on from CDF's screening of the film at the Rio Cinema in Hackney (Mayer 2017, 67–76).
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 5] Still from *Carry Greenham Home* by Beeban Kidron & Amanda Richardson (UK, 1983). Image courtesy of Contemporary Films.</figcaption></figure>

Programming the film within “Revolt, She Said” was a willful act that drew on the film’s grassroots history while arguing for its aesthetic and theoretical place in our anti-canon (fig. 5).

Ahmed speaks of willful objects carrying affects: we feel this when carrying a feminist film, collective or community out of its grassroots “home” into institutional spaces. There was a difficulty in managing and mediating audience expectations concerning this film because of the closely guarded history of Greenham. Recent years have seen richly textured academic studies from Sasha Roseneil and Anna Reading (both speakers at CDF’s 2016 screening) that cover the diversity of Greenham women, including trans women (Roseneil 2000; Reading 2015, 147–65). There remains a significant overlap, however, between traditional “ownership” of Greenham, and the historical radical-feminist community, which in recent years has become transphobic by definition in its organizing and self-constitution. This produced a number of difficult face-to-face encounters during a summer of rising tensions in 2018, fueled by social media disinformation and intense discussions around the Gender Recognition Act consultation (Finlayson, Jenkins and Worsdale 2018). This points to
the difficulty of feminist community as reflected in the film. As documentary critic and programmer Sophie Brown writes for our zine: "The film observes women trying out alternative systems to exist together. There are clashes, dissonances and varying scales of radical beliefs, but they work hard to upload their shared goal of peace" (Brown 2018). We tried to learn from the film how to handle these fractures in our community as programmers committed to trans inclusion.

Placing feminist collective Sheffield Film Co-op's short film *A Question of Choice* (1982) with *Carry Greenham Home* acted as a reminder of the difficulties that have always been inherent in telling feminism as a single story. Workers' rights were at the heart of '68 politics, but little attention was paid (as *Riddles* also points out) to working mothers with caring commitments. The short observational documentary explores the lack of job prospects for Sheffield women with families to support. Shot one year after *Carry Greenham Home*, the film shows that there were multiple feminisms and women's experiences operating in the UK at the same time, drawing attention to the often-forgotten axis of class, which remains under-discussed in feminist film theory and history. Margaret Dickinson's and Angela Martin's oral history projects with the founding members of the Sheffield Film Co-op are vital contributions to unpacking these feminist theory and activist practice histories (Dickinson 1999; Martin 2014). Part of the difficulty, in multiple senses, of CDF's work, lies in maintaining the connections between feminist film scholarship in print, and print traffic of films, as theoretically-informed programming is viewed as willful in an anti-intellectual mainstream. Our programs, however, often pay tribute to scholars such as Dickinson who have kept films alive through their writing, even when they are hard to see.
Going Back *Before Stonewall*

"We needed to write ourselves as queer people into the history books," said Greta Schiller, the director of *Before Stonewall* (1984), about her multi-award winning documentary.<fnref n="4" /> *Before Stonewall* is a cinematic journey into the archive that unearths queer lives before the Stonewall Riots in New York City, 1969. Unlike many of our films on the tour, *Before Stonewall* had and has a transnational cinematic exhibition history thanks to the emergence of queer film festivals. Now available online through UK distribution by Peccadillo Pictures, it has become part of LGBTQI+ social and film history and popular culture. We had to find a way to re-contextualize the film for contemporary audiences, including situating it within and against Donald Trump's extremist homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, which feels like a 1980s revival. On a panel, Schiller noted that the film was made in the climate of homophobia intensified by the Reagan administration, which ignored and exacerbated the AIDS crisis.

For our zine, writer-director and programmer Jason Barker remembers watching the film for the first time when he was 28 years old:

> I remember thinking the early part of the 20th century seemed like a very, very long time ago. I probably had a patronising attitude about the people in the film—bless them! I’m pretty certain I would have watched the film marvelling at just how far gay and lesbian rights had come since then. I’m older now. Nearly 50 and it feels like time has sort of folded in on itself. Now when I watch *Before Stonewall* I don’t think that we have come so far at all. Queerness feels as precarious and as precious as ever. (Barker 2018)

<footnote n="4">4 Schiller was speaking at the 2018 Berlinale, on the panel "40 years of queer programming" to mark 40 years of Panorama, the section of the festival historically closely associated with the Teddy, the festival-wide award for best LGBTQI+ film.</footnote>
Queer cinema itself remains precarious and precious: in particular, the histories of queer archival production. Pre-digitization, archive documentary filmmaking was immensely labor-intensive for researchers and film historians such as Schiller, including the emotional labor of bringing the previously hidden and taboo into view. This affective and intellectual labor was celebrated within the emerging network of queer film festivals, which supported a golden era of painstakingly researched LGBTQI+ history documentaries including *The Times of Harvey Milk* (Rob Epstein, 1984), *The Celluloid Closet* (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman 1995), and *A Bit of Scarlet* (Andrea Weiss, 1997). Today's mainstreaming of New Queer Cinema, which arguably has diluted much of the political potency of many queer film festivals, has erased a certain queer urgency of earlier work.

In an era of cinematic and archival abundance within the total saturation of the military-entertainment complex, CDF's difficulty was to remind audiences that attending a film screening can be political act. This was memorably enacted at the Hyde Park Picture House, in collaboration with Leeds Queer Film Festival, when we invited former ACT UP New York member and lecturer Monica Pearl to introduce *Before Stonewall*. Her words, quoting civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis, were live-streamed on the cinema's Facebook page; audiences then stayed afterwards to ask questions about a history taking place before many of them were born. As Pearl remarked later on:

> This is precisely why it is so important to share these kinds of stories in cinemas. It creates a gathering of like- or similar-minded people who may nevertheless be very different in attitude, age, demographic, or experience who are eager for intelligent discussion outside of an academic arena. I am not sure if it brought new audiences to that cinema, but it created a gathering that, without that screening, would not have happened. We could easily call it, therefore, a political event. (in Pirkaalainen, 2018)
104 Recognizing a screening as a political event both pays tribute to the canonical film history of May '68, specifically the precursor protests against changes to the management of the Cinémathèque Français. Both the documentary method of *Before Stonewall* and our programming strategy align more closely with Kristeva's continuously transformative psychic and artistic "revolt" as an unfolding, rather than contained, political event.

## Holding A Place of Rage

*Before Stonewall's* gathering strategies—in terms of its interviewees and its original release—link it intimately to *A Place of Rage*. Like Schiller's film, Parmar's draws on archival footage, but embeds it within living conversations with Black lesbian feminist leaders, Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. Although focused on the US, the film is also a testament to a transatlantic feminist anti-racist decolonial consciousness, although one that is less visible on-screen. At our flagship screening at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, in August 2018, panelist Yasmin Begum, a writer and activist, noted that: "Watching the film made me think of activists who have gone before me, like Betty Campbell, the first Black head teacher in Cardiff. Growing up I didn't see many Welsh women of colour."<fnref n="5" />

As Nazmia Jamal notes in her piece for our zine (fig. 6), Parmar was a key contributor to 1980s documentation and creative practice by, for, and about women of color in the UK, and particularly queer women of color. Noting also that Parmar's work was difficult to access only twenty years later, Jamal writes that:

> By the time I started working at LLGFF (London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, now Flare) in 2008 I'd seen *A Place of Rage* and perhaps one or two other films by Pratibha. I used my new "film job" to watch every tape of her work I could lay my

<footnote n="5">5 Tweeted by Chapter Arts: https://twitter.com/chaptertweets/status/1025095104703483907</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>

[Fig. 6] "Revolt, She Said" zine. Image courtesy of Club des Femmes and Independent Cinema Office.

hands on. At the time I was particularly keen on her queer desi work, like *Khush* (1991), or the work she made about being a woman in Britain. (Jamal 2018)

While Kali Films, Parmar's production company with her producing and life partner Shaheen Haq, has distributed *A Place of Rage* on DVD in the US, they have only recently made the film available for international streaming on Vimeo. Thus, even though it is a more recent film, we faced the same challenges of access to physical materials and to building an audience as with the older films in our program.

We therefore faced a dual challenge: we needed to care for a film that has been neglected and decontextualized in what remains a violently homophobic and racist environment, without smoothing out or excusing the film's willingly willful rage; while simultaneously working to reach beyond the entrenched white, middle-class dominant audience for cultural cinema. We thus
106 programmed the film in Cardiff with three speakers of color with personal and political connections in the city.⁶ As Jamal noted, “the audience was clearly very different to Chapter’s usual crowd and several were Black women or women of colour who were involved in local organisations working with [Black, Asian and minority ethnic] women or children” (in Pirkaalainen 2018). Screening the film in 2018 and 2019 drew on and drew attention to how the queer feminist leadership and practices of Black Lives Matter have centered Davis, Jordan, and Walker, retaining their nuance, their radical self-care, and their individuality as part of their exceptional political and cultural intelligence; precisely, their willfulness.

## (In)Conclusion: “A Permanent State of Questioning”

Characterizing willfulness, Ahmed in fact turns to a definition of womanist by Walker, as referring to “outrageous, audacious, courageous or *willful* behavior... responsible. In charge. *Serious*” (Walker 2005, xi, quoted Ahmed 2017, 78; emphasis in the original). Ahmed’s invocation of Walker’s work in 2017 signals the ways in which the willful feminist’s responsible, serious archival behavior must act, continuously, as a counter to dominant culture’s repeated dismissal of feminist work, and especially work by women and feminists of color. Given the complexity and vulnerability of *A Place of Rage*, we were particularly outrageous and audacious in pairing it with another film that challenges the complacencies of a white-dominated feminist film canon and spectatorship.

*Nice Colored Girls* (1990) by First Nations Australian filmmaker and photographer Tracey Moffatt is described by Tara Judah for our zine as
umami: Moffatt gives us sweet tang in the “nice” girls of the title, cut in contrast with the “nasty” girls of the 1982 number one pop song she employs, Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girl.” Far from being about sex, the film reveals how sexualized bodies have historically been used as items for white pleasure and how they are now contested spaces, their owners expected to seize leverage for agency and survival. (Judah 2018a)

In an umami echo of our oldest film, *Daisies* (1966), the most recent also shows young women on a night out in the city, rolling an older man for food, drink, and money, but the stakes here are higher. As Judah says, the young First Nations women's "existence relies on their successfully navigating the rules of a game called postcolonial inequality." The final screen marks the young women's revolution as exceeding the frame. It requires activation by audiences, willing us to willful action. It is a difficult sensation. As Marks concludes her thoughts on ethical curation, suggesting that critical times call for critical curatorial measures: her project "was so successful precisely because its political stakes were so high.... In a country where political crisis is relatively explicit, where artists and curators operate in an environment of evident social and political injustice, clear and compelling arguments are more obviously called for" (Marks 2004, 46).

"Revolt, She Said" reflects the emergent political crises in the UK, and learns its necessity for argument from filmmakers in times and places where "evident social and political injustice" had called for "clear and compelling argument." We are, once again, in a place of rage, and the riddles of the sphinx still call for answers; we return to the difficulties of articulation and action that have confronted subsequent generations recognizing the crisis of capitalist colonial heteropatriarchy. As Coatman writes of *The Cat Has Nine Lives*, "it feels insurrectionary [... because t]he 'natural' order is starting to break down" (Coatman 2018, 15). To compost; to be willingly willful in the destruction of our happiness, Club des Femmes started to break it down in 2018 with the films of "Revolt, She Said." With this paper, we continue "probing... appearances."
Club des Femmes is a queer feminist film curation collective whose members include Jenny Clarke, So Mayer, Selina Robertson, Alex Thiele, and Sarah Wood. “Revolt, She Said” was programmed collectively by CDF with the support of the Independent Cinema Office and BFI, awarding funds from The National Lottery. Thank you also to all at the ICO, and to all of our venue partners, speakers and panelists, zine contributors, and audience members throughout the summer of 2018. Special thanks to our programming focus group participants Marta Genova (London Feminist Film Festival), Melissa Gueneau (Broadway), Tara Judah (Watershed), Mikaela Smith (Showroom), and Claire Vaughan (Chapter Arts Centre) for their insights, which helped inform this essay.

Films for the tour were provided by Cinematek ( Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique ); British Film Institute; Cinenova; Contemporary Films; Czech Film Institute; Curzon/ Artificial Eye; Deutsche Kinemathek; Filmforum; Kali Films and Pratibha Parmar; Peccadillo Pictures; Second Run DVD; sixpack films; Svenska Filminstitutet; and Women Make Movies.

References

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Backman Rogers, Anna. 2018. "The Girls." *Club des Femmes*. Accessed October 23, 2023. https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/culture-club/anna-backman-rogers-on-the-girls/.

Barber-Plentie, Grace. 2018. "Riddles of the Sphinx." *Club des Femmes*. Accessed October 23, 2023. https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/culture-club/grace-barber-plentie-on-riddles-of-the-sphinx/.

Barker, Jason. 2018. "Before Stonewall." *Club des Femmes*. Accessed October 23, 2023. https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/culture-club/jason-barker-on-before-stonewall/.

Borden, Lizzie. 2018. "Maeve." *Club des Femmes*. Accessed October 23, 2023. https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/culture-club/lizzie-borden-on-maeve/.

Brison, Susan J. 2003. "Beauvoir and Feminism: Interview and Reflections." In *The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir*, ed. Claudia Card, 189–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, Sophie. 2018. "Carry Greenham Home." *Club des Femmes*. Accessed October 23, 2023. https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/culture-club/sophie-brown-on-carry-greenham-home/.
Cannady, Sheryl. 2018. "National Film Registry Turns 30." *Library of Congress*. Accessed October 23, 2023. www.loc.gov/item/prn-18-144/library-of-congress-national-film-registry-turns-30/2018-12-12/.

Clarke, Jenny. 2018. "Revolt, She Searched." *Club des Femmes*. Accessed October 23, 2023. https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/culture-club/revolt-she-searched-by-jenny-clarke/.

Coatman, Anna. 2018. "Kicking Against the Pricks." *Sight & Sound* 28 (9): 14.

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Haraway, Donna. 2016. *Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulhuene*. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

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———. 2018b. "The Riddles of Film History in 360 Degrees." *Watershed*. Accessed October 23, 2023. www.watershed.co.uk/articles/the-riddles-of-film-history-in-360-degrees.

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<figure><img src="image_19.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>
CHANGING AND EXCHANGING:
SERGE DANey MIDSTREAM
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /></figure>
This section presents some of the contributions from the first
workshop in the *Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia* project, which
took place in Paris in 2018 and addressed Serge Daney and his
legacy. The main topic of the event was the dimension of other-
ness in Daney's writings: cinema considered as the "other" as
well as a means of perceiving otherness; criticism considered
as a median position, a mediation—or, to put it like Lacan: the
"other of the Other." Over these two days, which brought together
academics, young researchers, film critics, and independent
scholars', an important part of the exchanges (not transcribed
here) focused—not fortuitously—on translation. Daney is still
very little translated into English, and the question of exchanges
between the French cinephilic spirit and more culturalist English-
language film studies has to be investigated, as well as the
differences between film cultures. Each of the following authors
sheds light on a dimension in Daney's work that opens itself to
an elsewhere, a form of otherness, a future. Garin Dowd and
Bamchade Pourvali show how Daney's ideas trace important
paths for rethinking a new cinephilia, one that he had not experi-
enced, as well as entire cinematographies that will bloom after
his death. Claire Allouche evokes Daney's unflagging curiosity for
world cinema, a topic he significantly brought to the attention of
his French readers. While Daney wrote numerous texts on tennis,
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin studies his sole article on table tennis
(its miniature twin), and the entanglement between television
and sports precisely analyzed by Daney. This section ends with
two contributions about *Trafic*, the critic's final project, a journal
he founded shortly before his death, which was continued after-
wards by his friends from the editorial board. A text by Simon
Pageau revisits the spirit that animated the journal's first issues
during Daney's lifetime. A round table with the editorial board
revisits the history of this journal and its evolution after Daney,

<footnote n="1">1 Claire Allouche, Raymond Bellour, Christa Blümlinger, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Laurent Kretschmar, Simon Pageau, Sylvie Pierre, Bamchade Pourvali, Patrice Rollet, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Marcos Uzal, Dork Zabunyan.</footnote>