The Celluloid Closet - Emily Richards

 I thought that this documentary was very interesting and educational.  I learn knew things about the world of LGBT+ cinema.  One thing that I found very fascinating was how many films back in the day around the 30's, 40's, and 50's were showing gay content but in a very secretive and interesting way. Another part I found interesting was how they would have a queer character and the view would know but it was never talked about, I thought this concept and the concept of the "sissy" was very interesting to learn about because I never knew there was a stereotype character like that in these older movies.  One other things that fascinated me while watching the film was seeing how queer cinema changed over the years in the terms of the wording and slang that they used.  Film when from not saying or calling queer characters nothing to calling them all these different terms whether they be derogatory or not.  Another thing that I found interesting was that that talked about how when you see queer men it is usually shown in an intense and violent way and with queer women we see it in more of a sensitive and passionate way.  I both agree and disagree with this because whether its queer men or women they can both be shown in either passionate or violent intense ways.  Over all I really enjoyed this documentary.  It taught me new things about queer cinema that I probably would have never known about and it gave me other great films to look up and watch!! 

Comments

  1. Lauren ColloroneFebruary 10, 2021 at 5:22 PM

    Emily, I also found it interesting how queer characters were portrayed as "sissy"s". I knew from previous classes and learning about censorship and what not that Queer people weren't portrayed fairly but I never learned of that term so that was very eye opening to me. You also mention how slang evolved over time and it thought that was interesting as well. Cinema went from totally ignoring the gay community as a whole with the insert of sexual innuendos here and there to calling gay people sissy's to the escalation of calling someone either straight or gay a faggot as a form of disrespect. It's crazy to see the slang and timeline of events on how gay perception unfolded in cinema.

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  2. AnonymousFebruary 12, 2021 at 5:13 PM

    Follow Up Post- During our class discussion many things were brought up that I didn't really think about. For me when we talked about how social media impacts queer representation I totally understand where people were coming from. For me I just never really experienced many social media queer impacts and finding out that there were and are so many queer influences in social media. I also found it fascinated to find out more of the queer influences when it comes to animated characters. When I was growing up I wasn't a huge animated tv show person so learning that there were so many queer characters in animated shows was very interesting to find out. I really enjoyed our class discussion and I definitely learned new things from my piers.

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