The Celluloid Closet (1995)

The Celluloid Closet, a ground-breaking documentary released in 1995, reveals many of the queerest moments from the first 100 years of the cinematic art form.

The Celluloid ClosetUSA
5*

Directors:
Rob Epstein

Jeffrey Friedman
Screenwriters:
Rob Epstein

Jeffrey Friedman
Director of Photography:
Nancy Schreiber

Running time: 105 minutes

Just like the people they portray, films with LGBT characters have always been around. In 1995, at the 100-year mark of the birth of cinema, an expansive documentary rounded up a century of (mostly, but not always, implicitly) homosexual or queer characters and narrative trends to show how, even in the darkest days of the moralistic Hollywood Production “Hays” Code, the closet door was often ajar.

Based on the exhaustive overview provided by Vito Russo’s 1981 landmark book of the same name, The Celluloid Closet was made by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, two openly gay documentary filmmakers who had already won Academy Awards for tackling subjects close to LGBT viewers’ lives in The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

Their 1995 documentary features a treasure trove of film clips, as well as interviews with numerous industry professionals who talk about how they perceived certain movies while they were growing up, how they had to work within and around the Code and what the challenges were in producing an authentic representation of gay life. Among the best-known interviewees are playwright Armistead Maupin, actor-director Harvey Fierstein and writer-provocateur Quentin Crisp, with mainstream actors like Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg and Susan Sarandon (all of whom portrayed gay characters during their careers) also contributing their impressions.

The opening clip crystallises the early years’ depiction of same-sex activity: In the 1934 film Wonder Bar, a man and woman are dancing at a ball when another man approaches to ask whether he can “cut in”. The woman moves towards him, assuming the request is directed towards her, only to be rebuffed when the two men grab each other’s hands and start dancing. A few steps behind them, singer Al Jolson’s eyes are big as plates. He throws a limp wrist into the air and exclaims, “Boys will be boys!”

But such tolerance, even if mocking or condescending in tone, was soon torpedoed by the Hays Code, which sought to clamp down on films’ generally permissive attitude with regard to sexuality – by then, big-name filmmakers like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille had already made blockbuster films showing full-fledged (heterosexual) orgies. Starting in the early 1930s, the Code curtailed depictions of rape, abortion, sex perversion (i.e. any positive representation of LGBT life), prostitution, nudity, white slavery and the use of profanity, among others.

Thus, gay characters were driven into the background, their stories were made to look straight, or it was made clear that their lifestyle was abominable. And they were almost always killed off by the final act. But while some viewers were happy to see characters similar to themselves, the representation was terribly one-sided, even tragic.

For most of the 20th century, films consistently presented gay characters as outcasts who were to be made fun of, judged as degenerates or pitied for the miserable lives they lead. Generally speaking, the characters were trapped and unable or unwilling to effect change, which made them powerless and frequently led to them committing suicide or dying in various ways. In one eye-opening sequence, The Celluloid Closet shows us one death after another of these films’ gay characters: by gunshot, by stabbing, by hanging, by fire, by crossbow… even by having a tree fall on them.

Narrator Lily Tomlin correctly points out that “Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people, and gay people what to think about themselves.” When all you see of gay life is a one-dimensional depiction of melancholy ending in tragedy, there is inevitably an effect on all viewers irrespective of their sexuality. Of course, there are people identifying as one or more of the letters in LGBT who are sad or suicidal, just like their straight counterparts, but representations need to reflect the diversity of real life, which only comes from telling more stories and treating all characters as full human beings with real agency.

But even when characters, especially those based on real-life individuals, were mostly stripped of their sexuality, traces remained. Perhaps it is because many filmmakers remained committed to reflecting real life. Or perhaps the reason is that, throughout the filmmaking process, some screenwriters were gay, some directors were gay, some actors and actresses were gay, and so on, and they wanted to include part of themselves and what they knew in the product they were creating.

This is a documentary that adds depth and nuance to characters and narratives we thought we knew. We see how affection between men – approached with surprising sensitivity – was often there if we looked a little more closely. An excerpt from Their First Mistake, in which Laurel and Hardy share a bed, help each other take care of a baby and confess their bond to each other, makes this plain for all to see. So, too, does a scene from Wings, the first-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, which features two men stroking each other’s hair, with one planting a kiss on the other’s lips.

Cabaret scribe Jay Presson Allen laments the fact that the 1950s were an era of such “towering dullness” because the stories being told were all terribly safe and uninspiring, but the ever-irreverent Gore Vidal lets us in on a juicy gay angle in the biblical epic Ben-Hur, released in 1959, which he had a hand in writing.

It is said that sunlight is the best of disinfectants. Films with LGBT characters or storylines provide sunlight by highlighting people and plots that are not as well-established as the decades of straight storylines, thus washing away the veneer of grime that had built up over decades of misrepresentation. And while this documentary certainly does not pretend that every classic film falls somewhere on the Kinsey scale, it does encourage us to examine them more critically and potentially to discover the rainbow in the black and white.

Although its focus is squarely on the U.S. film industry, The Celluloid Closet makes little mention of the broader historical context, namely that the advent of the modern gay rights movement (the 1969 Stonewall riots) coincided with the downfall of the dreadful Code, and that the subsequent AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s pushed LGBT stories out of the metaphorical closet and into the limelight.

It would be fascinating to see an updated account of LGBT representation in film, as a great deal has changed since 1995. The number of films built around gay characters who do not fold under pressure but stand up for themselves or, better yet, are simply part of a story other than their sexuality, has risen sharply over the past few years.

As witty and entertaining as it is informative, The Celluloid Closet remains the gold standard for information about and insight into the traces of homosexuality in films during the first 100 years of cinematic history. Over the ensuing quarter of a century, films like Brokeback Mountain, Milk, Blue is the Warmest Colour and Moonlight would all make a big splash on the global circuit. Myriad more, from those of Sebastián Lelio, João Pedro Rodrigues, Marco Berger and Kimberly Peirce to the ones of Dee Rees, Todd Haynes, Xavier Dolan and Pedro Almodóvar, have already given a firm indication that the next 100 years will produce an infinitely greater variety of movies than before – in whatever way their storytellers choose.

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

USA
4*

Director:
Rob Epstein
Screenwriters:
Rob Epstein
Carter Wilson
Judith Coburn
Director of Photography: 
Frances Reid

Running time: 91 minutes

This film, which won the Best Documentary Oscar, has always been considered the No. 1 document that condenses the life of Harvey Milk and reminds viewers around the world of his importance in the gay rights struggle. In 2008, Milk, Gus van Sant’s fictional account of Milk’s life, with Sean Penn as the gay rights icon, heavily relied on information gleaned from this documentary by Rob Epstein, who would go on to direct an outstanding documentary on gay representation in the cinema, The Celluloid Closet.

Watching The Times of Harvey Milk, it is very clear that Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the screenplay for Van Sant’s film, was inspired not only by the content of the documentary but also by its structure; the two films have exactly the same book-ends – a tape recording of Milk’s will in case of assassination, the announcement by Dianne Feinstein that Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone had been assassinated, and Milk’s famous “Hope” speech. I was a little disappointed by Black’s stencilled duplication of these parts in his screenplay for Milk instead of integrating them into the fictional quilt in some other way.

In touching interviews with many of the people in Harvey Milk’s life – though, unfortunately, many of the important ones, such as Cleve Jones, Dianne Feinstein and Scott Smith, are not included – we get a sense of Milk’s achievements and his perseverance against great resistance, especially during the debacle of Proposition 6, in his first year in office, which would have allowed the Department of Education to fire teachers who self-identified as homosexual. Here, I learned about Sally Gearhart, a gay rights activist with an intimidating intelligence, who debated Jon Briggs in a very factual manner during their televised debates, and I believe her collaboration with Milk helped to defeat the proposed anti-gay initiative. Her words on the role of fear in the campaign explain the central issue very succinctly and are still relevant to anti-gay movements today.

The film provides a lot of detail about the political co-operation between Milk and Moscone, and we can easily understand how it came to be that Harvey Milk was given the opportunity to be elected city supervisor (redistricting provided the city with a much more representative combination of politicians than had ever previously been the case).

However, the film focuses too much on the role of Dan White, who had served on the board with Milk and, after certain disagreements between him, Milk and Moscone, killed the two men. The film spends its final 20 minutes going over perceived discrimination in the trial, the jury selection and the verdict. Of course, one has to keep in mind that the film was made five years after the death of Milk and shortly before White’s release from prison (he would commit suicide a year later, in 1985). But all the talk of White, his conservative values and the lenient sentence that he was given after killing two men in a very obviously premeditated act of violence should not have taken up so much time in this documentary.