Douglas Messerli | Five Gay Fantasies / 2021 [Note]

five gay fantasies

by Douglas Messerli

 

The wonderful thing about gay and lesbian short filmmaking is that it often allows beginning students the opportunity to learn how to put a film together. Because of the numerous genres available to LGBTQ individuals, and because much of what the narrative might express comes out of or has relevance to their own lives, it allows them a fairly easy access into the mysteries of film direction not always available, it seems to me, to young heterosexual would-be creators. Just the vast numbers of new films issued annually on LGBTQ subjects gives testimony to this wonderful phenomenon. And since it’s still a relatively new form, perhaps only four or five decades old, it

allows for a great amount of originality. Although the specific tensions and difficulties experienced by characters in these films may be evaporating, there is still enough of a cultural gap and a general lack of understanding so that interesting perceptions of gay love and sex are still available.

      And accordingly, when reviewing beginners’ films I have attempted to be rather sympathetic to their sometimes obvious narrative and visual flaws, attending to their use of genre and how they have worked to create an original viewpoint despite the sometimes limited strictures in forms that so many hundreds have already explored before them.

      But several times over the past few months, I have grown irritated by some of the new gay films that I’ve seen, and feel it’s important to be honest about what I have begun to see as a problematic shift that may certainly not serve LGBTQ interests or, more importantly, provide these young directors with the avenues that they might imagine for future filmmaking.

      My biggest pet peeve of late has been what I might describe as a newly-developing genre that certainly has its roots in many earlier gay works, but has now reached what I might describe as a kind of dead end. These films, instead of confronting issues of love, identity, transition, or even utter rejection in a focused and exploratory manner take the route of pure fantasy, which may be somewhat enjoyable while it lasts, but ultimately makes no serious attempt to actually deal with those issues and the sense of loneliness and displacement with which their character is still faced when the credits roll.

      As examples, I’ve just chosen five short films, three of which are English language productions from Canada and the USA, a third released in Afrikaans from South Africa, and the fourth a film without dialogue from India.

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2021).