Queer, Period: Desire Through The Ages
Ongoing Series
Though nuanced representation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters in film has significantly increased since the 1990s, queer folks have always been here, seeking to find themselves reflected in history, literature, and the moving image. By excavating LGBTQIA+ identities and stories from times before our own, particularly in historical dramas and period pieces, a type of liberation can be possible. This collection of films illustrates subtle, powerful stories of betrayal, heartbreak, lust, and romance set between the 1550s to the 1950s.
Queer, Period: Desire Through The Ages
UPCOMING SCREENINGS
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Orlando
Academy Museum
Adapted from Virginia Woolfe's novel, this film follows Tilda Swinton as Orlando, an young nobleman who lives for centuries, and awakes one day to find himself transformed into a woman. Watch it, then check out last year's Teddy documentary winner Orlando: My Political Biography.
England, 1600. Queen Elizabeth I promises Orlando, a young nobleman obsessed with poetry, that she will grant him land and fortune if he agrees to satisfy a very particular request.
The Handmaiden
Academy Museum
Oldboy director Park Chan-Wook adapted the Victorian lesbian con artist psychological thriller Fingersmith into 2016's critically acclaimed The Handmaiden, moving the setting to Japanese-occupied Korea as our main characters set out to seduce and rob a Japanese heiress.
In 1930s Korea, a swindler and a young woman pose as a Japanese count and a handmaiden to seduce a Japanese heiress and steal her fortune.
Victor/Victoria
Academy Museum
Julie Andrews stars in this musical remake of the 1933 German film about a woman singer who takes a job as a female impersonator.
A struggling female soprano finds work playing a male female impersonator, but it complicates her personal life.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Academy Museum
This smoldering erotic drama from French auteur Céline Sciamma follows the desire that develops between a wealthy young woman and the painter who is charged to accompany her and paint her wedding portrait.
On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.
Maurice
Academy Museum
Gay director James Ivory won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1987 for this adaptation of gay author E. M. Forster's posthumously-published novel of the same name, about gay love and social class in Edwardian England (with a happy ending!)
After his lover rejects him, Maurice attempts to come to terms with his sexuality within the restrictiveness of Edwardian society.
Looking for Langston
Double Feature with The Sticky Fingers of Time
Academy Museum
A hypnotic experimental film that weaves between reality and a fantastic recreation of the Harlem Renaissance of Langston Hughes, exploring the lives and desires of Queer Black writers and artists throughout time.
A black and white, fantasy-like recreation of high-society gay men during the Harlem Renaissance, with archival footage and photographs intercut with a story. A wake is going on, with mourners gathered around a coffin. Downstairs is an elegant bar where tuxedoed men dance and talk. One of them has a dream in which he comes upon Beauty, who seems to reject him, although when he awakes, Beauty is sleeping beside him. His story and his visits to the jazz and dance club are framed by voices reading from the poetry and essays of Hughes and others. The text is rarely explicit, but the freedom of gay Black men in the 1920s in Harlem is suggested and celebrated visually.
Desert Hearts
Academy Museum
Donna Deitch’s swooning and sensual first film, DESERT HEARTS, was groundbreaking upon its 1986 release: a love story about two women, produced and directed by a woman. In the 1959-set film, an adaptation of a beloved novel by Jane Rule, straitlaced East Coast professor Vivian Bell (Shaver) arrives in Reno to file for divorce, but winds up catching the eye of someone new, the younger free spirit Cay (Charbonneau), touching off a slow seduction that unfolds against the breathtaking desert landscape. With smoldering chemistry between its two leads, an evocative jukebox soundtrack, and vivid cinematography by Robert Elswit, DESERT HEARTS beautifully exudes a sense of tender yearning and emotional candor.
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Queer, Period: Desire Through The Ages
PAST SCREENINGS
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