Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema
Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinemais constructed with interview snippets featuring a wide array of actors, directors, and festival organizers, to portray our last century's history of same-sex films. Dealing mostly with American film, minus acknowledgment of a couple European directors such as Chantal Ackerman,Fabulous!tells the story, by citing filmic examples from each decade, of post-war repression in the '40s and '50s, the gay civil rights struggle of the '60s and '70s, AIDS in the '80s and '90s, and the blossoming of new gender genres in a contemporary setting. With timelines to contextualize conversation,Fabulous!leads the viewer through discussions of Kenneth Anger's seminal 1947 work,Fireworks, to Warhol, through Derek Jarman, John Waters, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, all the way intoBrokeback Mountain'scurrent success. Interviews with independent film icons such as Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, critic B. Ruby Rich, and Outfest's Stephen Gutwillig, make this an enjoyable journey through the minds of Hollywood's auteurs. More actual film footage of some difficult-to-see underground pieces would be nice, but clearly this documentary is an introduction to the history of transgressive cinema, meant to urge people to investigate further.--Trinie Dalton