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NEW QUEER CINEMA: The Director's Cut
New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut by B. Ruby Rich Duke University Press, 2013. 360 pages; $29.95.
Reviewed by Lokeilani Kaimana
Twenty-one years ago B. Ruby Rich wrote "A Queer Sensation" for the Village Voice describing a contemporary group of independent filmmakers and films as "New Queer Cinema." The term encompassed various films and videos made by lesbian and gay filmmakers and artists that drew critical acclaim at the 1991 Toronto Festival of Festivals (now called Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF), Amsterdam's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (1991), and Sundance (1992). Rich's initial article captured the excitement of a boom in cinema made by and for the LGBTQ community; her subsequent work shaped the new conversation about genre, politics, and aesthetics in independent cinema spurred by her earlier work. New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut (2013) is a collection of Rich's criticism that traces the emergence and maturation of an idea, a cultural map of independent LGBTQ film and video, and the history of a lineage of independent production practices.
The anthology divides Rich's previously published and unpublished work into five sections organized both historically and thematically. For most sections Rich introduces her earlier writings with a contemporary perspective. New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut traverses two decades of international representational politics, the aesthetics of video during the height of ACT-UP and AIDS activism, niche marketing that portrays chic lesbianism and clean-cut gay high-schoolers on television, and the importance of made-for-theweb storytelling and social networking. Although Rich writes, "From the beginning, New Queer Cinema was a term more successful for a moment than a movement," she soon abandons this static definition (131). When read as a collection, Rich's work reveals a historically inspired and haltingly critical passion for a multifaceted queer cinema. From her work as the director of the Film Program for the New York State Council on the Arts in the early 1980s, through her continued criticism and life as a scholar, Rich has guided the shape, formation, and maturation of New Queer Cinema from a nascent moment to an identifiable film genre.
Part 1, "Origins, Festivals, and Audiences," places imagination and aesthetics at...