THE strong representation of films with gay and lesbian themes in the Dublin Film Festival amounted to an impressive mini programme, which gained wide audience exposure by its freedom from special categorisation. While the documentary The Celluloid Closet provided a context for the evaluation of screen images of homosexuality, other films scattered throughout the 10 days - including Eve Morrison's sensitive short film, Summertime, Ballot Measure 9, Stonewall, Hollow Reed and the short Australian documentary L'Attraction - extended the debate.
Of these, Angela Pope's Hollow Reed, with its television drama direction, was the most predictable, but the others demonstrated, to varying degrees, the increasing erosion of sexual stereotypes - in non mainstream, independent film making at least.
The basis for The Celluloid Closet is Vito Russo's book of the same title, which provided a comprehensive history of Hollywood's portrayal of gay characters on screen. Russo, who died of AIDS in 1990, did not live to see the development of his work by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman into a witty and thoroughly researched documentary. A battery of film clips catalogues Hollywood's earliest portrayals of mincing, sissy male characters, demonstrating the long history of the popular equation of homosexuality and effeminacy.
Interviews with actors, directors and screen writers are, linked by Armistead Maupin's narrative. He points out how rarely, in 100 years of film making, homosexuality has been acknowledged without a pejorative agenda, or the intention of provoking laughs, and how instrumental these screen images have been in the conditioning of heterosexual ideas about gay people and gay people's ideas about themselves.
While the narrative of The Celluloid Closet is deliberately upbeat in its tracing of a positive, progressive trajectory from ignorance to enlightenment, it was counterpoised by Heather McDonald's documentary, Ballot Measure 9. This illustrated that, however restrictive some people may find it, the world of film making and of the arts in general, where camp humour, and style is widely appreciated, is a liberal paradise in comparison to the social fabric of an American state such as Oregon. Here, an attempt to repeal progay legislation in 1992 exposed irreconcilable divisions and unleashed a visceral hate campaign, complete with death threats and intimidation from anti gay groups modelled on the Ku Klux Klan. It was a reminder of the fragility of the breakthroughs that have been so recently achieved and the extent to which a celebratory film such as The Celluloid Closet is preaching to the converted.
