Lesbian minor cinema

As both programmers of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) film festivals and a certain percentage of their attendees will acknowledge, the lesbian feature film is the most persistently elusive of programming elements. Of course curators have other urgent desiderata: formally challenging work, work by people of colour and from underrepresented nations, transgender films. But the lesbian feature ‘problem’ goes to the very structure and philosophy of such events. It is a size thing. There is always ‘another gay movie’ to consider for the prime, feature-film-driven programming slots, and plenty of opening and closing night and centrepiece contenders, but the number of feature films by and about lesbians, though increasing, still lags behind, in correlation with the minority percentage of women feature filmmakers. Indeed, since B. Ruby Rich’s designation of New Queer Cinema in 1991, critics have noted that restricted access to feature filmmaking, and thus theatrical exhibition, along gender, race, class and language lines, significantly skewed the sample and even neutralized the concept. If lesbians are rarely either subjects or authors of major motion picture events, we have nevertheless deployed the minor in a range of culturally successful ways. If major is to minor as film is to video, feature to short, cinema to television, fiction to documentary, women – and thus lesbians and often transpeople – tend to labour in the latter category of each of these pairs. Certainly, plenty of work by lesbian, bisexual and trans filmmakers with no pretensions to mainstreaming is featured at festivals. A great deal of it is minor in the sense of ephemeral – made expressly for the festival networks – and this includes the rapidly rising number of cases in which digital video technology has enabled filmmakers to extend 1 Patricia White, B. Ruby Rich, Eric O. Clarke, and Richard Fung, ‘Queer publicity: a dossier on lesbian and gay film festivals’, GLQ 5 (1999), pp. 73–93; ‘Queer film and video festival forum, take one: curators speak out’, GLQ, vol. 11, no. 4 (2005), pp. 579–603; ‘Queer film and video festival forum, take two: critics speak out’, GLQ, vol. 12, no. 4 (2006), pp. 605–7.