Out of the Celluloid Closet, into the Theatres! Towards a Genealogy of Queer Film Festivals and Gay and Lesbian Film Studies

Chapter 3 revisits traditional historical accounts of the development of both gay and lesbian film studies and festivals. In particular, I trace the emergence and mutation of the concept ‘gay and lesbian cinema(s)’ – a relatively recent notion shaped through an interplay between film criticism, festival organizing, and scholarship. I detail the careers and works of various critics and scholars as they intersect with LGBTQ festival organizing. In so doing, I nuance the divide between scholars, critics, and practitioners that has been instrumental in asserting the legitimacy of festival studies and describe various uses of the festival format as a praxis of academic knowledge production. In so doing, Chapter 3 is offered as a criticism of festival studies’ emphasis on stakeholders: it highlights the networks of friendship, fucking, and collaboration that informed the development of LGBTQ cinema. Keywords: gay and lesbian film studies; film criticism; academic labour; curation; stakeholders; film cultures; film history ‘No accident either that, after Stonewall, we queer film critics instinctively found the movies so life-and-death and that queer film and video festivals are among our most thriving community institutions twenty-five years later. Even the other generalized film festivals (like the Montreal monstrosity I endlessly had to write about in these pages), artificial hothouses of offbeat films rejected by Cannes and distributors, often look like carnivals of queer cinephilia.’ As Chapter 1 argues, festival studies is obsessed with asserting its legitimacy: the field largely relies on justifying why and which festivals matter, in so doing further defining the position of scholars as creating knowledge on festivals. In uncovering ephemeral events generally erased by festival studies’ methodologies, I positioned ‘critical festival studies’ as a project tuned in to how our attachment to our object of research shapes the scholarship we produce. To that end, Chapter 3 traces the role played by festival-going and organizing in enabling a knowledge of cinema. While several scholars claim that festivals shape gay and lesbian cinema, they mostly focus on the establishment of a queer cinematic canon: a festival’s programming practices would determine which films are seen or ignored by its audience – and therefore by scholars. These accounts often rely on the notion of stakeholders, which conceptualizes festivals through the diverging performances of various groups of people (programmers, policy-makers, audience members, filmmakers).

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