Public Pride

 

It's Pride Month, so I'll take the opportunity to talk about a project I've been working on for a while, a Queer cinema playlist. There's still work to be done, but fret not, unlike the corporate media the playlist and the films on it won't be privated on the 1st of July, to hibernate until next year. No, I'll be adding to the list of projects I chip away at in my spare time all year round.

Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot of material in the public domain that subverts and even rips apart conventional attitudes regarding gender, sexuality and identity. The terminology was different back then, Homophiles, Uranians, and so on, but the intent and content is there. It can be difficult to find the material in the wild, though. This is for a number of reasons that for the sake of brevity I'll quickly list them.

1. Censorship: Many of these films and shorts were the victims of conservative authorities and reactionary movements. These meant that some important early works were cut up or physically seized and partially or completely destroyed. Infamously the German movie Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern) a very early movie about homosexuality made with the explicit intent of appealing for tolerance from the audience was nearly destroyed by the Nazi party, though it survives in an incomplete form.
2. Terminology: Times change and so does language, this can be a problem for an archivist as lots of content that should be included gets missed since none of the contemporary information uses any of the easy to locate keywords in a search. I've seen multiple 1910s-20s American films that depict a gay or at least non-conformist male character, where the only giveaway before you watch it is the usage of the word sissy. And did you know that in the USA in the 19th and early 20th century the preferred term for homosexual was homophilia? It largely died out amongst queer folk after WWII, but you'll still come across the odd usage into the 1970s. 
3. Lack of Interest: By which I mean lack of interest from the big, established archives and reference works. I know some people think it's rather odd that there are so many specialised archives, collection of "Black American Lesbian filmmakers" and lists of "Gay Russian Composers" and sure in a perfect world where everyone is equal the information in them would be included in the main archives. But, that's the point of things like Pride, isn't it. We don't live in a world where everyone is valued equally. The reason for these fragmented archives and collections is that you simply couldn't find any information in the larger archives because the people and subjects they cover weren't considered important enough to preserve and document. 
4. Discrimination: In addition to legal issues, we have to take into account societal opinion. Being queer in much of the world has been illegal for many years, and even in whens and wheres, that didn't have strong legal instruments against self-expression and behaviour that wasn't proper, society has its own courts and sanctions. So, this meant that works celebrating or just exploring these taboo topics were often done in a manner that provided as much privacy as possible for the creators. Pseudonyms, no registration information and limited production of works and public viewings. Think about the circulation of banned books in a dictatorship, these works still exist, and some few can access them, but until the regime collapses they're going to be scarce commodities, and sadly some regimes can live for quite a long time.
5. Copyright: At least how copyright works now. I discussed some of the ways that copyright law can cause issues for the sharing of and engagement with certain works in my essay on pornographic works. Well, the headaches of Intellectual Property as a concept is the reason this blog exists, but I think the issues with pornography are relevant here. Not that I'm equating pornography with being Trans or Gay, it's just that similar problems arise. In my country, anonymous works are protected for 70 years after release, so if you find some material that for one reason or another was released with no identifiers like a post card with two male models kissing as an example, you aren't supposed to do anything with it until you're sure 70 years have passed. Which has a lot of issues, but for the purposes of this blog a major headache is that works that have been discovered in an archive or private collection then there's a question mark over whether it is legal to take actions to make it more accessible like digitisation of photographs and film reel. Usually this will eventually be worked out after a lengthy process of legal consultation, but that is a slow process and the archive or museum has to be invested in the material to bother. That isn't a unique problem for queer studies either, lots of very interesting and important stuff is in this gray area, it's just one where the institutional biases can exacerbate the issue.

Still, there is some good news, things are slowly improving in an uneven fashion. Institutional programs are starting to care about minorities and are starting to sift through their massive collections. In 2018 I attended a screening of Queer films made in the United Kingdom organised by the BFI (British Film Institute) and shown in libraries across the country. If you've been to a BFI screening in a library, town hall or community centre then you'll know that isn't a mass audience, but it is a step on the road. Atleast they know they have material and are willing to show them to the public, or at least the public who bother to read coming soon boards in municipal service buildings. 

More, and more, relics are being discovered and slowly filtering to the masses. One of the reasons for the delay in making a public playlist was that I had assumed there would be several large master list of fictional films at least, which I could work through and check copyright status, but that didn't pan out. I did find many lists, but they're of the top 10 best style, not very useful for what I'm doing. It's a bit like films that are public domain in the United Kingdom, where I ended up making my own. I don't think I'm capable of doing something like that for this, at least not yet, but there are some fragments of information that I can track some work down, and I'm going to keep plugging a way at it. I think the list will grow and make it easier for others to find some of these works and take what they need from them.