LEAVE IT to director John Waters to succinctly capture why film scholar and critic B. Ruby Rich is such a pleasure to read: “Ruby Rich has to be the friendliest yet toughest voice of international Queerdom writing today. She’s sane, funny, well-traveled, and her æsthetics go beyond dyke correctness into a whole new world of fag-friendly feminist film fanaticism.”
In an influential 1992 essay in The Village Voice, Rich coined the term “New Queer Cinema” to label what she saw as a new cinematic phenomenon, arising in the mid-1980s as a result of a technological advance, affordable high-quality camcorders, along with widespread outrage over the AIDS epidemic and the government’s disastrous response to that crisis. Soon the term expanded to encompass a whole generation of queer filmmakers, artists, and even like-minded political activists.
Ms. Rich’s most recent book, titled New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Duke University Press, 2013), reflects her interest in this phenomenon. It’s a collection of her writings from her initial piece in the Voice to the present. Reading it is like binge-watching your way through a history of modern gay cinema. Throughout the essays, Rich implores avant-garde filmmakers to cultivate an audience and then challenge its expectations: “I was troubled by a pronounced audience tendency: the desire for something predictable and familiar up there on-screen, a sort of Classic Coke for the queer generation, not the boundary-busting work that I cared about and wanted to see proliferate.”
Ruby Rich is a professor of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has also taught documentary film and queer studies at UC-Berkeley. Rich has been a regular contributor to The Village Voice and the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound. She currently serves as the editor of the magazine Film Quarterly. Her 1998 book Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke) is considered a definitive collection of essays on the origins and development of feminist films.
I spoke with Rich in San Francisco on Pride Sunday in late June—which is also the final day of the City’s Frameline lgbtq film festival—about current trends in queer cinema. Mark James: You’ve been a presence at LGBT film festivals for many years, and you just returned from the Provincetown International Film Festival, correct? Ruby Rich: Yes, I go every year, and I do the on-stage tribute. This year they were honoring Jennifer Coolidge. I don’t know if you know her from the Christopher Guest movies. She does wacky characters; she was in Legally Blonde and in Two Broke Girls. I guess she has a big gay boy following, so she received a lifetime award in Provincetown [the Faith Hubley Career Achievement Award]. MJ: I can attest to her having a big gay following! You travel the global film festival circuit extensively. Do you see a changing audience? BRR: Lately I’ve been going to a lot of festivals in Europe, and it’s like going back in a wonderful time machine for the queer community. They still have audiences that I recognize from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. There are still big lesbian populations, and there are still people of all ages, both men and women. They’re coming out for these events. I was recently in Zurich and Hamburg, and I was captivated by what a vibrant sector queer film festivals still are in Europe. MJ: How would you contrast that with North America? BRR: Well, frankly, film festival audiences here are graying. All film festivals, with the possible exception of Asian-American ones, are following this trend. In the U.S., going out to a theater seems to be a foreign thing for young people. They watch at home, streaming with a few close friends or, increasingly, alone. I still teach college students, and I ask them, “What about the audience experience with the public?” And they look at me with complete puzzlement. There are exceptions, but for undergrads that’s the response I get. So we have a crisis—not specific to festivals or even to cinema—that in general public spaces are disappearing. Apart from farmer’s markets! But do younger people still go to film festivals in the age of Grindr? I do not know. MJ: With that in mind, do you think LGBT festivals need to alter their mission? BRR: They have always had to defend their right to exist. Right from the start, people questioned what purpose they served, or predicted their demise due to changes in demographics, or whatever. So people have been too eager to announce the funerals of these events, which puts an extra burden on them taking place. MJ: Yet Frameline attendance seems strong. BRR: Well, I was there yesterday morning for the Yvonne Rainer film [Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer], and I was surprised that there was quite a large audience. Also, I was really pleased with the film, which was wonderful. MJ: So you do see a lot of queer films. What stands out in recent years? BRR: The film I keep missing but am eager to see is Tangerine. I want to find out if that is as wonderful as people are saying. And I really liked this new French-Lithuanian film The Summer of Sangaile. MJ: I haven’t seen it, but from the trailer it looks visually beautiful. I always have faith in the team at Strand Releasing, which picked up The Summer of Sangaile. Another of their acquisitions was the new Peter Greenaway film Eisenstein in Guanajuato, which is a look at Sergei Eisenstein’s sexual awaking in Mexico. Greenaway revels in using computer-generated imagery or CGI and split screen triptychs—it’s classic Greenaway. BRR: I’m always looking for something different. I am watching Transparent (Amazon Prime) and Orange is the New Black (Netflix). I think Transparent is terrific television. Hats off to Jill Soloway for writing, producing, and directing it. This is a giant landmark. And I love that she’s hiring trans directors and writers, and that she’s inspired by her own father’s transition. It will really make a difference in how people see trans women—but like Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair, trans women have to be portrayed outside of the new narrow window of wealthy fabulousness. MJ: Did it remind you of An American Family? BRR: No, not at all. More like All in the Family, actually. MJ: I see the show being as much about Jewish identity and family as it is about Maura’s transition. BRR: I agree with you. It’s as much about rich Jewish life in L.A. as it is about transitioning. I think it’s a hilarious send-up of Jewish upper-middle-class privilege, mores, and neuroses, and a great portrait of Jewish life in modern luxe L.A. Really updates the old farmers-market-style Jewish L.A. This is the “post-deli” universe. It might even make being Jewish sexy again! MJ: You’re interested in the rise of streaming on TV— BRR: One of the things I’ve been talking about with various people is this trend of young people streaming and watching work by themselves. What I’ve noticed is that the style of a lot of queer film is changing: it’s becoming much more focused on individuals rather than groups, which were an integral part of New Queer Cinema, which often touched on political action and political involvement. I’ve noticed when people want to do that now they have to set the films in the past. I was intrigued by Pride, the British film that came out last year. Here is the most upbeat film about organizing, love, and politics we’ve had in years, but to do that it had to be set quite a ways back in history [in 1985, during the UK’s Thatcher era]. MJ: What are some films that you think are individualistic in this sense? BRR: I suppose an example would be Love is Strange, where “the group” is actually demonized. The individuals are in peril. One is taken in by the queer cops downstairs, who are always partying, and the group becomes something negative. In the past, queer cops hosting a party would be a real celebratory scene, but here it stands in for everything wrong in their world. MJ: There seems to be a wider trend away from celebrating sexuality in gay films. I just returned from the main men’s shorts program at Frameline, and it was devoid of any overt sexuality. BRR: Well, I didn’t see them, but I will say that over the past few years shorts have changed—from being the place where you would find the really radical work to being a place where the film school graduates are auditioning for their first feature. So that’s a shift in the field and in the profession. You know, the people I wrote about [in New Queer Cinema]—very few of them had gone to film school. They were people who were just picking up the camera—and that has changed. Another film to be on the lookout for is a work from Switzerland called The Circle. While I thought it was workmanlike as a film, I loved learning about that history [of the Swiss organization Der Kreis, “The Circle,” widely credited as Europe’s first gay rights organization]. And the queerest thing is that I saw it on an airplane! I can’t believe European airlines offer up films like that! I just want to mention a film, Valencia, that’s an example of a current film made in the spirit of another time. It’s based on the Michelle Tea novel of that name and made by a whole lot of filmmakers, each of whom made a chapter. The character of Michelle is very unstable and is played by different people in the film, and it’s really quite wonderful. It’s very much about a group, a gang of friends who want to change the world if only by partying and having sex with each other. MJ: Frameline boasts that 64 films exhibited this year are made by women, but clearly we still have work to do even here. BRR: It’s tough for queer women filmmakers overall because men are still men. Lesbians are not only women but “lesbians.” So we are just at the beginning; there’s still a huge imbalance. MJ: What other projects are you currently working on? BRR: My book New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut was published by Duke University Press two years ago and has gone into a second printing. My latest update is an article translated into German and published by Der Spiegel in October 2014. I am now the editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly, the oldest film journal in the U.S., where I’m trying to bring together voices from throughout the field. Check it out! Mark James lives in San Francisco where he writes about film and culture. He has contributed to The Advocate, Hello Mr., Film International, and other publications.
