Clip from Celluloid Closet
Director: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Duration: 00:01:16; Aspect Ratio: 1.222:1; Hue: 237.380; Saturation: 0.011; Lightness: 0.169; Volume: 0.143; Cuts per Minute: 8.631; Words per Minute: 131.040
Summary: This is a clip from the film Celluloid Closet, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffery Friedman. More information about the film at:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112651/
This clip is an interview of noted film scholar Richard Dyer, who talks about how stereotypes about gay people, especially men, were already in place in early cinema. Even as far back as the Chaplin movies, the deployment of stereotypes of figures such as the pansy or the effeminate gay man were evident in cinema. The purpose of this clip is to see how what Dyer says, relates to Indian cinema and the stereotypes used there.
It is part of the Queering Bollywood database, an exhibition and demonstration of a collection of queer readings of Indian cinema. This open and collaborative database of articles, film clips, magazine stories, etc., has been compiled by Namita Malhotra, Lawrence Liang and many others at Alternative Law Forum and in Bangalore. For more, see
http://media.opencultures.net/queer/
Your ideas of who you are don't come from outside you, they come from the culture. And in this culture, they come especially from the movies.
We learn from the movies what it means to be a man or a woman, what it means to have sexuality.
Clarence, one of Nature's mistakes, in a country where men are men.
Richard Dyer (voiceover): The movies did provide us with some kind of history of how society thought about homosexuals.
Title card: I wonder if you're going out with the boys tonight.
Clip from Wanderer of the West (1927) with voice over by Richard Dyer talking about the impact of movies.
clarence
masculinity
movie clip
voice over
wanderer of the west
Behind the Screen
Charlie Chaplin
Clip from Behind the Screen.
Richard Dyer (voice over): A very good example is the Chaplin film, Behind the Screen. There is an extraordinary moment when Chaplin kisses someone who looks like a man, whom he knows is a woman.
And someone else comes along and sees it, and immediately starts swishing around in the most overt, effeminate way
black and white
Interview with Richard Dyer. Dyer talking to camera.
Its fascinating that those stereotypes were completely in place, that a mainstream popular film could assume that the audience would know what this swishy man was all about.
audience
mainstream
stereotypes
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