Scene 5: Unearthing queer past
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Is queerness a disruption of the past or a reminder that history isn't as straight as we’ve been told?
Penda’s Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974) is like a history glitch; the rural landscape is more than just the backdrop, it becomes the scene of revelation for Steven’s awakening, as if it were speaking to us and to him. The hills and the fields become a space where everything Steven has ever known - his beliefs about his country, his religion, and his sexuality - begin to unravel. He has visions of Angels and demons, and the ancient King, which destabilise the orderly history he grew up learning, liberating him from the notion that everything should be confined to knowledge. We see the blurring of boundaries between good and evil, sex and religion, gender, sexuality, and dreams and reality, and the instability underneath ideas of purity of tradition. Halberstam’s (2005) notion of “queer time”, a temporality that refuses straight progress, represents Steven’s journey, as it doesn't follow a linear path but instead, like I said before, is a glitch of revelations; it erupts and reforms through visions that collapse the past and the present.
Watching Ammonite (Francis Lee, 2020) shortly after reinforced these ideas. Instead of approaching queer history through political statements, Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison's relationship unfolds in a world where there is no physical evidence of queer Women existing. The landscape - the sea, cliffs, and the fossils serves as a metaphor for all the lives that were erased, and the film uses this as a tool to unearth this hidden history, by using extreme close ups of fossils you get to see them revealed in fragments, much like queer history, while on the other hand, the wide shots of the vast landscape show how history overwhelms individuals, especially the queer ones who leave no written trace. Heather Love (2007) argues that queer history is shaped by loss, erasure, and the fragments left behind. Ammonite portrays this by creating an emotional space where queer desire can exist among the gaps instead of claiming to recover hidden truths. These two films help us understand how queering the past isn't about imposing something new onto history but acknowledging what has always been there, even if it wasn't recognized or accepted at the time.
We are reminded that the past was never straight in the first place it was simply written by who was allowed to speak