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Michael Moon

A Queer Film Classic on 1974’s Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975.

Already internationally distinguished as a poet, novelist, and outspoken social critic of the postwar period, Pasolini turned to filmmaking around 1960. In little more than a decade, he produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work in cinema history, beginning with his early film-portraits of the struggles of underclass youths and extending through his adaptations of such sacred or mythic narratives as the stories of Oedipus and Medea and the Gospel of St. Matthew. In what turned out to be the last years of his career, Pasolini turned to several classic works of chain-narrative—The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom—as models for his own radical expansion of cinema’s capacities for telling, showing, and enacting embodiment, nudity, and sexual desires and behaviours.

This book explores the legacy and context of Arabian Nights, in many ways the most optimistic and appealing of Pasolini’s late films, not only in the final explosive phase of Pasolini’s career but also more broadly in the global history of film spectacle from Douglas Fairbanks to Maria Montez.

Michael Moon teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Arsenal Pulp Press

Queer Film Classics

Arabian Nights: A Queer Film Classic

Robert Schwartzwald

One of two new Queer Film Classics, the series started in 2009 dedicated to monographs on the most important and influential films about and by LGBTQ people. There are 13 titles currently in the series, including Death in Venice, Strangers on a Train, and Law of Desire.

C. R. A. Z. Y. (2005) is the film debut of French Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée, who went on to direct Emily Blunt in The Young Victoria (2009) and, more recently, directed Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto to Academy Awards in Dallas Buyers Club (2013). C. R. A. Z. Y. is an entertaining melodrama set in the 1960s and 70s, about a young gay man with four brothers and a conservative, homophobic father who tries to help “cure” his son when he discovers his penchant for other men. 

Schwartzwald’s narrative situates C. R. A. Z. Y. in the history of Quebecois cinema, and as an allegory of Quebec’s own struggle to discover its identity, situated as it is between European French and English Canadian culture, and as a Catholic society making way for the modern age.

C.R.A.Z.Y.: A Queer Film Classic

Jean Bruce

Gerda Cammaer

One of two new Queer Film Classics, the series started in 2009 dedicated to monographs on the most important and influential films about and by LGBT people. There are 13 titles currently in the series, including Death in Venice, Strangers on a Train, and Law of Desire.

Forbidden Love is a 1992 documentary on the experiences of lesbians from the 1940s to 1960s, especially as seen through the lens of lesbian pulp fiction. It features interviews with older lesbian women who speak frankly of their experiences during this repressive period, including author Ann Bannon, author of a classic lesbian pulp fiction series known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. The film is an important document of lesbian experience during these years – covert bars, police raids, feelings of shame and deceit. Directed by Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman, it won a GLAAD Media Award in 1994, and became the most successful documentary ever produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

This is the first documentary to be covered by the QFC series; the book includes a discussion of presenting LGBT non-fiction on screen, and also how this particular film is a crucial historical record of a community and a time rarely depicted.

Forbidden Love: A Queer Film Classic

Julia Mendenhall

Part of the Queer Film Classics series of monographs on films for LGBT audiences, launched in 2009.
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is a quirky, ethereal lesbian love story by Canadian director Patricia Rozema. (The title is from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”) The film’s lead character is Polly, a socially awkward secretary who takes photographs as a hobby; when her former lover Mary, an artist, comes back into her life, Polly alternates between the growing realization that she is too old for Mary, and an idyllic dream state in which plain-looking people like her lead passionate lives. 
The film has appeared on the Toronto International Film Festival’s Best 10 Canadian Films of All Time. Feminist writer Camille Pagilia praised the film for its “wonderful comedy and realism.”
Mendenhall situates the film in the context of the history of feminist films, written, directed and starring women. 
Academic interest in this title should come from LGBT, film, and women’s/gender studies.

I've Heard the Mermaids Singing: A Queer Film Classic

Cindy Patton

Part of the Queer Film Classics series of monographs on films for LGBT audiences, launched in 2009.
This title is the first to delve into the newly sexual liberal times of the early 1970s in post-Stonewall America. L.A. Plays Itself and Boys in the Sand were both gay arthouse porn films released within months of each other at a theater in 1972. Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself is an experimental film about hustlers, vagrants, and urban gentrification which reveals the City of Angels’ dark side; Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand is its sunny opposite, about a young man’s sexual adventures at a gay beach resort community. (Boys was the first gay porn film to have any kind of commercial crossover.) Both films are examples of the period’s “porno chic” as a result of the growing liberalization of social attitudes toward sex and homosexuality in which the new sexually liberated climate allowed for experimentation with cinematic morality codes. As polar opposites, Boys represents an assimilationist view view of gay sexuality, while L.A. takes a more outsider approach to its subject.

L.A. Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film Classic

Lucas Hilderbrand

The latest addition to the Queer Film Classic series, dedicated to monographs on classic LGBT films. Edited by Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays, there are now ten titles in the series, including Death in Venice, Law of Desire, and Gods and Monsters.

Paris Is Burning is a vital documentary about the colorful members of New York’s drag subculture (whose theatrical gestures were appropriated by Madonna in her video “Vogue”). What emerges is not only a snapshot of a genuine pop-culture movement (specifically, the end of the “Golden Age” of New York’s drag balls), but also an honest, moving portrait of gay and trans African-American and Latino men, and a compelling dialogue on race, class, sexuality, and gender.

The film explores the elaborately-structured drag ball competitions in which contestants, adhering to a very specific category or theme, must “walk” (much like a fashion model's runway) and subsequently be judged on criteria including the “realness” of their drag, the beauty of their clothing, and their dancing ability. Most of the film alternates between footage of balls and interviews with prominent members of the scene, including Pepper LaBeija, Anji Xtravaganza, and Willi Ninja. 

Non-traditional market: museums and galleries with film sections; LGBT; academic.

Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic

Jonathan Goldberg

The fourth batch of Queer Film Classic books on classic movies for LGBT audiences. Previous books in the series include Law of Desire and Death in Venice. This book is being concurrently published with Ma vie en rose.
The QFC series is gaining momentum and increased media attention, including an upcoming New York Times article on the preservation of LGBT films.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train is perhaps the most surprising title in the QFC series given its homoerotic interpretation came years after its initial release in 1951. The author argues that whether either character is gay is not as crucial as the film’s queer relations between sexuality and murder and the strong antisocial impulses it represents. The film’s stars were Farley Granger and Robert Walker.
Based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the similarly homoerotic The Talented Mr Ripley.
Author Goldberg is a well-known LGBT academic and author, with several books to his credit. 
There have been books on the Hitchcock films Psycho and Vertigo but not on this film.
Should be of interest to academics in the areas of film and LGBT studies, and to libraries with strong LGBT and film studies collections.
Non-traditional market: LGBT accounts.

Strangers on a Train: A Queer Film Classic

Helen Hok-Sze Leung

A Queer Film Classic: Chen Kaige’s 1992 film about two male Peking opera stars and the woman who comes between them; its treatment of gender performance and homosexuality was unprecedented in Chinese film. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic

Arsenal’s Queer Film Classics series was inaugurated in 2009 with monographs on the films Gods and Monsters, Law of Desire, and Trash, and will release three books annually until 2015. Based on the British Film Institute’s series of concise monographs on specific classic films, Queer Film Classics has received wide acclaim for bringing attention to the history of queer cinema, both well-known and obscure.

"This series will be a significant, valuable contribution to the history and literature of gay cinema. Each of these works will be valuable additions for academic and popular students of film and gay culture."
--Library Journal