From ground-breaking silent films to windswept romances and sci-fi-inflected feminist masterpieces, cinema has been a powerful vehicle for sapphic storytelling for over a century. And a new series at New York City’s Film Forum, titled Sapph-o-Rama, aims to pay tribute to that rich legacy with 30 titles that represent 10 decades of defining works by lesbian-loving filmmakers, creatives and screen stars.
For many attendees, the series, which runs Feb. 2 through Feb. 13, will also provide a rare opportunity to watch generations of formative titles with other theatergoers, bringing sapphic cinema out of the shadows and into the multiplex.
“That’s what’s the most exciting: imagining people in these seats, encountering these films for the first time or for the 1,000th time,” Emily Greenberg, one of the programmers of Sapph-o-Rama, told NBC News ahead of the series’ Friday opening. “I remember where I was the first time I saw all of these films — to the hour.”
Andrea Torres, the series co-programmer, echoed her colleague and said Sapph-O-Rama will be “a celebration of self — a celebration of sapphism.”
Greenberg and Torres said the year-and-a-half process of putting together the series — which was inspired by a 2000 Film Forum program that highlighted lesbian cult films — was a labor of love. In revisiting the original Sapph-o-Rama lineup, the pair wanted to offer an updated approach to curating the cannon, expanding their selections to include underseen works from the 2000s, like “Pariah” and “Saving Face,” as well as newer cult picks like 1999’s “But I’m a Cheerleader,” starring Natasha Lyonne and Clare DuVall. But they also wanted to make space for early films that laid the groundwork for contemporary sapphic cinema and might still be unfamiliar to younger audiences.
“It was important for us to take a look at every decade and see how the history and general attitude toward queerness played into the films,” Torres said of compiling the retooled lineup, which is bookended chronologically by the 1922 silent film “Salomé” and Leilah Weinraub’s 2018 debut documentary, “Shakedown.”
“Obviously, in some of the earlier films, it’s all kind of subtextual. Even into early Hollywood and Hollywood classics, there are some films that the unsuspecting eye maybe wouldn’t expect to see. But contextualized within this series, people will view them differently,” she said.
Along with “Caged,” John Cromwell’s 1950 women’s prison drama starring Eleanor Parker, one of the lineup’s standout classic Hollywood selections is David Butler’s “Calamity Jane.” The Western musical from 1953, starring a plucky Doris Day crooning about “Secret Love,” is a prime example of Hays Code-era filmmaking, which was heavily policed for mentions of homosexuality. But sitting next to selections like the 1954 Western melodrama “Johnny Guitar,” starring Joan Crawford, and Donna Deitch’s 1985 dusty romance “Desert Hearts,” “Calamity Jane” watches like a gay, gun-slinging romp.
“There are a handful of those kinds of films that are really satisfying and enjoyable to watch in a lesbian context,” film historian Jenni Olson said, citing “The Killing of Sister George,” Robert Aldrich’s divisive 1968 black comedy, as another example from the lineup. “They were not made for the lesbian community. But, sometimes, they shine through in ways that we see, ‘No, we do exist; we have existed. Here’s a representation of that — even if it’s not always complex or dignified.’”
Olson, who has been a major supporter of the series, added that the value of a queer film event like Sapph-o-Rama is in giving people a chance to celebrate seeing themselves on screen — whether it’s in titles from a bygone era or “lesbian movies, made by lesbian filmmakers, for lesbian audiences.”
“When we can see ourselves on screen and see ourselves together in the audience, it galvanizes us. It brings us together as a community,” Olson said. “It’s what’s always exciting about queer film festivals and series like this: We get to see the movie, but we also get to see each other.”
As Olson and the series’ co-programmers pointed out, there’s also the value of bringing attention to films that, despite their significance to sapphic cinema, are still at risk of being forgotten or have only just come back into circulation. One of those films is Lizzie Borden’s 1983 landmark feminist film, the dystopian sci-fi “Born in Flames” — which, along with its director, largely disappeared from the limelight until its 2021 restoration and re-release. And there’s also the much lesser known “She Must Be Seeing Things,” a 1987 downtown Manhattan psycho-thriller from director Sheila McLaughlin, which Greenberg discovered in New York’s Lesbian Herstory Archives.
“It was crazy to see how many special little indie films released in New York or L.A. that they had press notes for, that ostensibly are just gone,” Torres said of the duo’s time spent rifling through the archives, which along with Film Forum materials and the occasional porn site, were their primary sources for research. “We definitely wanted to include some discoveries; we wanted to give a voice to these films that have been unrightfully shelved.”
After months of digging and weighing their options, the final lineup boasts a healthy collection of both lesser-viewed works and familiar favorites that speak to sapphic cinema’s distinct legacy. From the lesbian vampires of “Daughters of Darkness” to the May-December romance of “Mädchen in Uniform,” the titles represent a wealth of tropes that continue to define the category. Many, like Celine Sciamma’s coming-of-age heartbreaker “Tomboy” and the extraterrestrial romance “Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same,” touch on the anxieties of queer life. But, most importantly, they collectively celebrate sapphic, lesbian love.
As Olson put it, “So many of these films have this kind of longing for connection and love. And how amazing and valuable is it for us to see that on screen?”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
