Shorts, 6/10.

Yesterday, indieWIRE launched a discussion with the question, "What is Queer Cinema?" Among the guests is B. Ruby Rich, widely credited with coining the term "New Queer Cinema," and she's quick to bring up a point that's so far getting made a few times over in a few different ways (more than once, interestingly enough, with reference to Six Feet Under):

Scarcity was an element in the success of the New Queer Cinema (NQC) eleven years ago (twelve years ago, if you go back to the 1991 Sundance, the preparatory year in which Poison and Paris Is Burning won the jury awards that first put everyone on notice). There were so few films that "everyone" turned out for them, critics were curious, festivals were eager, and a movement was created. A decade later, each film is not a circled date on the calendar of every queer household any longer.

For an in-depth reading of Poison, illustrated with clips, Norman Bryson's study in In Visible Culture is a heady place to start. A bit lighter would be this interview in Film Quarterly from 1992.

How did I miss this? Greg Allen interviews Christoffer Guldbrandsen, the Danish director of the doc The Road to Europe which caused quite a ruckus several weeks ago by capturing top-ranking EU officials (among them, German foreign minister Joschka Fischer) expressing sentiments in near-privacy that varied from their own public statements. Hmm... That might sound rather dry, but Guldbrandsen, who very evidently knows the tradition he's working in, is most definitely not.

Darren Hughes finally makes it through John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence, "the single most painful experience of my film-watching life," and wanders on to Cassavetes champion Ray Carney's site for a bit of reading pleasure, the best moments of which he readily shares.

"Steve Buscemi dressed as John Waters, Baltimore 1995."

Quiet, low-key congrats to Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes.

Online viewing tip: Gollum's MTV Awards acceptance speech, via Tagline, where the gents'll lead you to more clips. Also: The trailer for Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, via AICN, where there's a huge discussion going on about "That HULK Workprint You All Claim To Be 'Reviewing'..."



Posted by dwhudson at June 10, 2003 7:17 AM