on the pursuit of queer film
I think it's interesting that we decry a dearth of queer film generally when those movies do and have always existed and right now more than ever we have the tools to find and watch them
most of them are not mainstream, and of course a lot are going to be not good, as is the case for film generally, but there's also a separate post to make about what we define as "good" - do we mean easily palatable? do we mean "of a taste we've been raised on that's dictated by a mainstream culture of 20 or so white straight cis American dudes?" - some are almost impossible/completely impossible to find but
if I look at, say, this list on letterboxd for queer shorts there are over 1000 movies
or this list about lgbt woc with closing on 1000 movies
hell, I'm still early days in trying to curate some lists that have a little more direction, because I think it can be unhelpful to simply be thrown a list of 1000 movies with only "lgbt woc" in common, when what you're maybe looking for is, idk, coming-of-age movies, or movies that aren't about queer people in America/The UK, (of which someone else has a much longer list than mine, I still have a ways to go, but also I have a personal preference for movies sorted by release year and not fucking colour, I don't get why people on letterboxd do this, I want to watch things via release date!) or a documentary, or movies based on the lives of real people or what have you
I still have a watchlist of queer cinema that stretches into over 2000 movies that will likely never go down but only go up, and my curation isn't as refined yet as I want it to be but
the point is
we need to be supporting the making of movies like this by watching and talking about movies like this, and figuring out who's making/has been making these movies
engaging with these movies will give us a much better language for talking about queerness in visual storytelling, for creating a language that goes beyond heteronormative dictations of narrative and image and character and and and...
In engaging with these movies we realise this text has existed since... movies existed. We discover histories and communities we may not have known about, we create a connective language through the past, we don't consider ourselves isolated, we broaden our minds
I think people perhaps want to be pointed towards "these are the movies you have to watch" lists, and what I'm saying here is more complicated than that, yes. But communities of people documenting queer film also exist and we tend to be a nice bunch, I think, and beyond that if someone reaches out to someone looking for something -- especially in a time in which it's more than likely to know someone who's grown up anywhere in the world -- one can find treasure troves
I am continuously surprised by just how many beautiful films are out there that I've never heard about (literally only discovered the Filipino "Die Beautiful" through the wonderful @hunkydorkling I'd never consciously come across it before last week), never seen on approved "top 10 queer movies of all time" lists, never would have seen if I wasn't talking to people from all over the world
anyway here's a list of horror films written by, directed by, or featuring transgender, non binary, and genderqueer people (358 movies) which was curated by a person who also did a fascinating documentation of how horror has featured trans people throughout film history
