Moving On / Coming Out: GLBT Film Journeys

Session Coordinator: Daniel A. MacLeay
Southeast Missouri State Univ.

Abracadabra! You’re a Lesbian: Sex and Magick in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The success of the cult show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) can be attributed to much more than witty quips and well-choreographed fight scenes. Living over the hellmouth in Sunnydale does not deter the Scooby Gang from experiencing young adult issues like employment, college and sex. Brainy and shy Willow Rosenburg truly develops in Season Four when she enters college and immerses herself not only in university life but also in witchcraft. Willow’s sexual coming out journey occurs simultaneously with her coming out as a powerful witch.

Through the final four seasons of BtVS, a reciprocal relationship develops between Willow’s sexuality and her supernatural power. Depending upon a given circumstance, her magickal power may trigger or deny a sexual experience, or magicks are used as a metaphor for sex. Similarly, this same-sex desire can serve to prevent Willow from engaging in magicks. The parallel coming out journey of Willow as a lesbian and a witch ends, I argue, with Willow, not the Slayer, saving the world, and her relationship with Potential Slayer Kennedy is the only coupling to remain intact at the end of the show, suggesting perhaps a privileging of the non-normative. Much like the show itself, Willow’s coming out journey does not offer a clear illustration of same-sex desire or power dynamics. The meditation on a sexual coming out journey, paralleled with a burgeoning supernatural power, illuminates the complexities involved with a young woman’s sexual awakening.

Michelle Parke
Michigan State University

Masochism in Gay Media Representation: The Role of O Fantasma in Reductionist Film

This paper examines the role of O Fantasma in world cinema and as an indicator of Portuguese cinematic voice. In its use of reductionism, O Fantasma uses visual and aural violence to allow insight into an otherwise unempathetic main character. This film ultimately emerges as the Portuguese voice of gay reductionism, and is to Portugal’s what Noir et Blanc, Salo, and Taxi Zum Klo were for their countries over the decades.

The film’s focus is Sergio, a Lisbon garbage collector, who descends deep into an animal state via a series of masochistic homosexual acts and encounters. The film is the first major work of director Joao Pedro Rodrigues, and created controversy with its explicit sex scenes, most notably an uncensored depiction of oral sex between men. It also roused the ire of gay activists in the discourse community who objected to its “depraved view of homosexuality.” Reductionist film endeavors have been used to portray psychic turmoil and sexual confusion as well as sex violence in gay film for decades. In a diachronic analysis of these films, it becomes clear that reductionist editing – in its effort to break down a character’s journey into small, visceral moments – can be a very effective means of communicating the anguish of featured gay characters. The results of these cinematic pursuits are nearly always controversial in terms of critical success, and as a matter of visibility politics for the gay community. This paper uses O Fantasma as a compass by which to navigate and examine the perceived threats that violence in gay films pose to the community.

Gregory Carter Mitchell
Chicago Board of Education

Identities in Ducastel and Martineau’s Drôle de Félix

The second film by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, Drôle de Félix/The Adventures of Félix ( France, 2000) is a multi-layered, often funny, up-beat road-movie that deals with the identity crisis experienced by the eponymous character (subtly interpreted by the formidable Sami Bouajila). Despite its meagre takings at the French box office, Drôle de Félix has become a classic of contemporary French (gay) cinema and a regular feature at international gay and lesbian film festivals.

The road-movie genre usually establishes a parallel between physical journey, and shifting/unfixed identity and inner discovery. Drôle de Félix is no exception: Félix is a young HIV+ gay man who happily lives with his partner Daniel (Pierre-Loup Rajot). After being made redundant, Félix decides to hitchhike through a highly idealised provincial France in order to meet his biological father for the first time. During his journey, Félix makes several symbolic encounters that hail, challenge and/or assert different aspects of his identity.

My contribution will be constructed around three main axes: first, I propose to discuss the way(s) that Félix’s sexual identity is represented onscreen. I will argue that Ducastel and Martineau do not aim to question this aspect of Félix’s identity but, rather, flag and assert it. In the second section, I will explain that it is his ethnicity th at Félix seems unable to accept. Indeed, the coming out experienced by Félix has less to do with his sexuality than his ethnicity. Finally, I will show that the resolution of this conflict allows Ducastel and Martineau to anchor their protagonist in his relationship with his partner.

Florian Grandena
Nottingham Trent University

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My paper analyzes one of the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s (1945-82) later films, In the Year of Thirteen Moons (1978). The film explores the intersection of sex and gender identity understood as a life-long process full of obstacles, reversals and paradoxes. The story follows a transsexual Elvira during the last five days of her life during which she revisits the crucial stations and people of her “previous” self as a man. At the end of the fifth day Elvira, born Edwin, comes to a conclusion that her life obtained “the contours of a circularity” (Thomas Elsaesser). Stuck in her life as a vicious circle, Elvira decides to end her life journey.

Both on the level of content and form the film exemplifies Fassbinder’s notion of subjectivity in history as a socially determined trip with many stops and the acts of exchange that transform both the travel and the traveler. The point is in this continuous movement that Fassbinder takes as a synonym for identity itself. When this movement starts repeating itself by circling, the journey is over and/or has to be terminated. Reflecting this both in the Fassbinder’s narrative strategies (the use of medieval drama’s stationary structure which perceived life on earth as a journey, and of the repetitions, parallelisms and inversions) and in his style of directing (the exchange of the tracking shots with the static shots culminating in a mad-like circling camera moves that create a feeling of dizziness and nausea forcing the viewer to empathize with the characters’ despair), In a Year of Thirteen Moons offers its tragic hero/ine’s life story as a cautionary tale of postmodern sexuality’s trials and tribulations.

Milan Pribisic
Millikin University