Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema

Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema (2006, Lisa Ades, Lesli Klainberg)
Mostly affirms what we already know, but there are a handful of titles discussed that I was personally in the dark about, mainly lesbian ("Desert Hearts," "Go Fish," "All Over Me," "Watermelon Woman") or black titles ("Punks"). B. Ruby Rich makes the apt observation of how earlier in gay cinema men looked to beefcake physique films, and another commentator rightly laments the loss of the communal theater experience in favor of the DVD market, where going to the theater could sometimes be a gay bar for people who don't go to gay bars.

In the movie's chronological approach it feels as if the major gay films of the '60s and '70s (Warhol, Anger, Fassbinder, Visconti, Jarman, Pasolini, Akerman) are more substantial than what followed, at least until the New Queer Cinema of the likes of Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki, Gus Van Sant, et al. But John Waters makes the point of being interested in films that are more than just gay, as with his satirical idea about a mother who forces her straight son to be gay when he's not. The aims of gay films in the '90s may be to infiltrate the Hollywood mode and provide greater representation in mainstream media. But I don't feel that that has necessarily resulted in good films, and embracing the values of bland Hollywood formulas, even with those political aims, seems to me more like back-peddling from the already astonishing achievements in do-it-yourself, individual filmmaking that resulted from marginalized people creating their own modes of expression.