For the British film critic Ryan Gilbey, “cinema and sexuality have always been as closely intertwined […] as the stripes on a barbershop pole”. His new book is a bricolage of memoir, criticism and interviews with film-makers that explores the personal and political dimensions of this coupling. It opens with the author in Venice, preparing to give a lecture on cinema; writing in the third person, Gilbey describes himself as the “Gustav von Aschenbach of easyJet”, a reference to the ageing, lustful composer from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice(played by a moustachioed Dirk Bogarde in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation). Gilbey identifies with Aschenbach only because he remembers how his own once-hidden sexuality devitalised him: the closet “render[ed] him elderly before he had so much as touched puberty”. He employs the third person off and on throughout the book. Thinking of yourself as a fictional character, he says, is an “occupational hazard” for any film enthusiast. It can also be a survival technique for anyone queer, creating a distance between yourself and a hostile world.
It Used to Be Witchesranges from the early 1980s – when “queerness in film started to become a commercial possibility” – to the present day. Its chapters centre on box office hits such as Call Me By Your Name,beloved independent films such as Chantal Ackerman’s Je Tu Il Elle, and less well-known releases. Thanks to Gilbey’s journalistic skills, his interviews with film-makers (François Ozon, Andrew Haigh and Peter Strickland among them) are engaging even if you are unfamiliar with the material. These conversations include illuminating observations on the art form (Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s remark that “film is a parallel life that keeps intersecting with real life”, for example) but Gilbey keeps the dialogue tethered to the book’s central questions: what is the history and future of queer cinema? How should queerness be represented on film? What, exactly, does “queerness” signify today? The voices he has assembled provide diverse answers, testimony that is valuable precisely because it is so often in disagreement.
This is particularly true of the book’s strongest chapter, during which film-maker Jessica Dunn Rovinelli presents a compelling case for an anti-aspirational queer cinema, one in which queer and trans characters are free to be “vile subjects”. “If we can only exist as the best versions of ourselves,” she says, “we will die”. Portraying queerness exclusively in a positive light, Rovinelli argues, has the effect of designating only some queer and trans persons “deserving of participation” while others are left out. Gilbey segues into a discussion of the 2023 psychological thriller Femme (in which a drag artist is subjected to a brutally violent homophobic attack). After a screening at the Berlinale, transgender director Harvey Rabbit lambasted the film’s directors during a Q&A; a moment that may have affected their ability to secure distribution. Rabbit’s agenda (“More trans joy, more queer joy”) ran counter to Femme’s portrayal of queer violence. Weighing up these competing politics of representation, Gilbey notes that “a well-meaning liberal aversion to the dramatisation of trauma” can coincide with “a rightwing tendency to police or nullify challenging queer material”.
He perceptively diagnoses the cinephile’s particular obsession (“sitting in the dark, staring secretly at strangers’ bodies on-screen”) and understands the chronic, vaguely paranoiac compulsion to keep watching, to collect and catalogue, as if some divine logic will become clear once you’ve seen everything there is to be seen. It Used to Be Witchesoccasionally overindulges in this stockpiling impulse, with some sections resembling a compendium of film titles and log lines – catnip for Letterboxd users, potentially onerous for the cinematic novice. This cataloguing mode fits with Gilbey’s commitment to blending different styles and forms across the book, a melange which confuses rather than facilitates his inquiry. As if to preempt such criticism, he expresses uncertainty in the book itself, a metatextual manoeuvre inspired by films which usemise en abyme(stories within stories) to acknowledge and thereby subvert their own artifice. He hopes his formal approach will push the book into “destabilised territory” – a natural place for “any queer work, an implicit acknowledgment that identities are not stable or fixed”.
It’s a nice idea, but the persistent self-referentiality (“What he intends to do in this book …”, “I explain where she fits into my book …”) is distracting. Gilbey’s concluding revelation seems hard-won (“my research into queer cinema has begun to teach me how to be queer myself […] the options are infinite: I can choose any of them, or none, or I can invent my own”) but he follows it up with “I need to channel that sensation into the book somehow”. This device places the author in opposition to the reader, keeping us at a cold distance. Emotional sincerity in writing is always, to some extent, illusory – the form demands artifice – but it is possible, and often worthwhile, to commit to the illusion sincerely.
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It Used to be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema by Ryan Gilbey is published by Faber & Faber (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.