Is it easy to be blue? Referring to Vito Russo’s (1948-1990) book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981), the author of which became one of the many victims of AIDS, two well-known American documentarians, Rob Epstein and Jerry Friedman, made a unique attempt to explore one of the most closed and sensitive topics - the history of the assertion of homosexual relations in cinema. Cinema for many years pretended that he did not know such a problem, and, therefore, did not see a reason to talk.
The authors offered an impressive scope and at the same time quite scrupulous analytical study of the piquant issue, avoiding sensational revelations and unpleasant assessments. To do this, they had to use a lot of fragments from both very famous paintings and almost forgotten ones. They accompanied them with comments from both those who tolerate unconventional love (and among them were very famous personalities - Tony Curtis, Shirley MacLaine, Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Hanks, Susan Sarandon...), and open homosexuals (John Schlesigner, Harvey Fierstein...), who not only shared their experience of participating in the creation of gay images, but also did not hide their sexual preferences.
As a result, it was possible to trace in detail the metamorphoses of the development of the homosexual theme on the American and partly European screen during the first hundred years of cinema. So in the 1920s, homosexuality provoked mainly laughter, at least in this way this topic was presented on the screen. And already in the 1940s and 1950s, largely due to the introduction of censorship (the result of the activities of the notorious Will Hayes) and the attacks of the church (which called for treating same-sex love as a disease), non-traditional sex orientation began to cause exclusively fear and regret.
Over the years, the “blue characters” have undergone a noticeable evolution: from cold-blooded villains, vampires and fetishists, gay men gradually turned into unhappy and ultimately desperate people, who were waiting for the same end with constant consistency. All of them had to suffer on the screen and pay with their lives for their wrong life choices. Proving this thesis, the authors used an impressive montage phrase, mounting in one piece many terrible deaths that overtook both gays and lesbians. And only in the 1970s, homophobia on the screen began to slowly press tolerance and a more loyal attitude to representatives of unconventional love.
In this sense, a landmark picture was the musical comedy “Guys from the Orchestra” (1970) by William Friedkin, where gays were first shown not as sufferers and martyrs, but as people enjoying life. And just a couple of years later, such a famous film as “Cabaret” (1972), according to one commentator, was already openly singing same-sex relationships. However, it took another decade before in the American mainstream cinema, namely in the film by Arthur Hiller “Make Love” (1982), for the first time unambiguously showed “in all its glory” homosexual love.
At the same time, the inclusion in this context of a number of famous tapes, in which homo-motifs do not seem to be the main ones, or are deeply hidden in subtext (confining themselves to very long hints in films), forces a completely new look at textbook works. Suddenly, you discover that the killers in Hitchcock’s Rope were sexual partners, Rebel Without a Cause was a latent gay man, and Ben Gur, as it turns out, had very unambiguous feelings for Mesala in his youth. Therefore, do not be surprised if at some point it suddenly begins to seem that all classical cinema has long and thoroughly homoerotic.
Detecting homosexual connotations in the relationship of screen characters, adherents of same-sex love, considered this to be nothing but support for their carefully hidden from prying eyes orientation and nothing more than a coded sign of attention sent by the authors of the films personally to them. Today, these (often too free) interpretations and assumptions of the sexual minority can be regarded by straight people as a kind of complex, to get rid of which many gay men devoted their lives.
And in that sense, a picture of Rob Epstein and Jerry Friedman could play an important rehabilitation role for someone. But for sinophiles much more significant is the cinematic analysis, which makes "Celluloid cabinet" one of the best non-fiction films among the many anniversary projects, the appearance of which was timed to the centenary of cinema.