Scene 1: Hidden in the Frame
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Does queerness only exist in the stories it tells, or does it seep through the form itself?
Let's start from the beginning, with Victim, which, to my understanding, paved the way to British cinema, questioning what ‘normal’ (more like what was considered as normal, because what does ‘normal’ really mean, right?) looked like on screen. It was released in 1961 and is the first British film to address homosexuality openly; however, what makes this truly revolutionary is that it was released 6 years before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. Meaning it came out during a time of social taboo and bordering on illegal (badass) - this is portrayed in the way the film is framed; a crime thriller, where the crime is homosexuality itself. What I'm getting at is, what’s queer about Victim isn’t the fact that it is addressing homosexuality, but rather how it critiques Society and the law by showing, through the film's lighting and framing (shadows, mirrors, close-ups on half-lit faces) the violence of repression.
half lit faces
This very nicely contrasts with the film we watched this week, Performance (1970). Fast forward 9 years, and this film explodes all those boundaries, while Victim hides its queerness in coded glances and dark rooms, Performance flaunts it through style; its use of colour, fragmented editing, and sexual ambiguity are the complete opposite of Dearden’s restraint. The lack of clear lines between characters, genders, or moral positions breaks down boundaries in the way Sedgwick (1993) calls “the open mesh of possibilities” (p. 8). The film's structure takes on the role of a visual representation of queerness, not only by portraying desire but embodying it through form.
What’s “normal” begins to be blurred as they show the transition from hiding queerness to performing it.
