Contemporary cinema: queer film culture

Text: Ulrike Scheffer   Illustrations: CasieGraphics

Germany’s position in the history of cinema is well-established. Expressionist silent films from the interwar period, such as Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” or “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, influenced cinema styles worldwide. In the 1970s and 1980s, films d’auteur such as “The Tin Drum” by Volker Schlöndorff or “Wings of Desire” by Wim Wenders became global hits. Germany also provided an important impetus for queer cinema. The British researchers Dr Leila Mukhida and Dr Hongwei Bao, who were both supported by a DAAD scholarship in Germany, consider Rainer Werner ­Fassbinder to be one of the leading pioneers of the genre in Germany. “Almost two decades before experts in the field declared queer cinema a genre, Fassbinder was already making queer films in the 1970s. He moved the boundaries of what one was allowed to say,” explains Leila Mukhida. Mukhida teaches Modern German Studies at the University of Cambridge and is Deputy Director of the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies. Mukhida’s research focuses among other things on visual culture in Germany and Austria, especially German cinema and German queer cinema.

Queer cinema celebrated its breakthrough in the USA in the 1990s. Films centred around protagonists with non-binary gender identities and sexual orientations who had to navigate beyond the confines of middle-class norms and battle against discrimination. The genre also influenced mainstream cinema: For example, Ang Lee’s 2005 neo-western “Brokeback Mountain” depicted the relationship between two cowboys. In more recent movies, queerness has also been used to highlight intersectionality – the interaction of different forms of discrimination – explains Leila Mukhida. Specifically, many queer people are exposed to multiple forms of discrimination, for example because they are homosexual and dark-skinned.

The first queer film that Leila Mukhida studied portrays the everyday difficulties experienced by a lesbian African German couple: “Everything Will Be Fine” is the title of the film by Angelina Maccarone. “What I found particularly fascinating was how social criticism was conveyed by a comedy,” says Mukhida, who believes that contemporary queer films such as “Everything Will Be Fine” also reflect the correlation between queer theory and other schools of thought like postcolonialism. Queer the­ory deconstructs gender and sexual identities and the power structures associated with them, according to Mukhida.

Queer cinema has secured a firm place for itself in the independent film scene in North America and Europe. Queer film festivals have also become successfully established in many Western countries. However, the freedom to produce and publicly screen queer movies cannot be taken for granted everywhere in the world. Hongwei Bao, who explores queer cinema in China, reports that Chinese queer activists and organisations can only act covertly. As a result, queer cinema in China serves as a medium of resistance, he explains. “Film was and remains an important form of expression for the ­LGBTQ movement.” Documentaries about queer life in China and short video clips are distributed in ­China via social media, private streaming platforms or as DVDs and are mostly screened in private homes, says Hongwei Bao. “However, many films and digital videos that are not explicitly queer and are shown on general streaming websites adopt queer perspectives.” That’s why filmmakers tend to work with subtexts, explains Hongwei Bao. “A film might for example portray two men or women who are in a relationship, without this being directly ­alluded to.” Hongwei Bao teaches Media Studies at the University of Nottingham and conducts research on the visual and performing culture of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer artists (LGBTQ) in today’s China.

The climate in China was once significantly more liberal, says Hongwei Bao. Back in 1993, the film “Farewell My Concubine” by Chen Kaige won several international film awards. One of the film’s main protagonists, played by Leslie Cheung, is a homosexual actor at Beijing Opera. “In 2001, just a few years after homosexuality had been decriminalised in China, the first queer film festival was held in Beijing,” explains Hongwei Bao, adding that LGBTQ activists were relatively free to organise themselves and pursue their cultural activities for a period of around ten years. After Xi Jinping assumed power, however, their activism became a political issue. LGBTQ organisations and institutions have been banned and queer art subjected to censorship. In the meantime, many queer Chinese filmmakers have opted to live in exile. The best-known of them, Fan Popo, has been living in Berlin since 2017. His works, as well as queer movies produced in China such as Stanley Kwan’s “Lan Yu”, attract a lot of interest at international film festivals. Just like Germany’s contributions to queer cinema, these films are now shaping the history of film. ―

Dr Leila Mukhida researches visual culture in Germany and Austria, focusing especially on German and queer cinema.
The visual and performing culture of LGBTQ artists in China is the research field of Dr Hongwei Bao.