WHEN: Friday 3rd February
TIME: 6:30PM
WHERE: Birmingham LGBT
WHAT: LGBT Film Appreciation Evening: GAYS IN FILM NOIR
Jose Arroyo returns to Birmingham LGBT for the next in our ever-popular series of LGBT Film Appreication Evenings: Gays In Film Noir.
The world of film noir — a shadowy underbelly with wet pavements and hot dreams – is a cinematic world where homosexuality was permitted by the powers that be, if only at an angle, preferably skewed, to add to the confusion and perversity of the characters and what they desired. Moreover, the stories and themes of film noir, revolving as they often do on men driven to their doom by sex and romantic disillusionment, is one homosexuals of all stripes would have been familiar and perhaps even have a particular affinity with. Noir spoke to LGBT people in particular ways and it was one of the few classic genres in which we found ourselves represented, however problematically.
Gilda is one of the most famous and seductive of noirs. ‘There never was a woman like Gilda’ said the posters for the film. Feminists of several generations have since have emphatically agreed. Yet it was one of the few films written and produced by women in the immediate post-war period. And certainly its two sets of competing romantic triangles, one homosexual, one not, is unique in films of this period. The sex the film presents is so perverse, potent and glamorous that it led to one of the nuclear bombs tested on the Bikini Atoll being named after the film.
In this session, we’ll begin by showing a series of clips of glbt representations in film noir, screen Gilda and open up a discussion on gays, Gilda and film noir.
José Arroyo
