Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Looking after Lesbian Cinema
- 1 The Woman (Doubled): Mulholland Drive and the Figure of the Lesbian
- 2 Merely Queer: Translating Desire in Nathalie … and Chloe
- 3 Anywhere in the World: Circumstance, Space and the Desire for Outness
- 4 In-between Touch: Queer Potential in Water Lilies and She Monkeys
- 5 The Politics of the Image: Sex as Sexuality in Blue Is the Warmest Colour
- 6 Looking at Carol: The Drift of New Queer Pleasures
- Conclusion: The Queerness of Lesbian Cinema
- Notes
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Anywhere in the World: Circumstance, Space and the Desire for Outness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Looking after Lesbian Cinema
- 1 The Woman (Doubled): Mulholland Drive and the Figure of the Lesbian
- 2 Merely Queer: Translating Desire in Nathalie … and Chloe
- 3 Anywhere in the World: Circumstance, Space and the Desire for Outness
- 4 In-between Touch: Queer Potential in Water Lilies and She Monkeys
- 5 The Politics of the Image: Sex as Sexuality in Blue Is the Warmest Colour
- 6 Looking at Carol: The Drift of New Queer Pleasures
- Conclusion: The Queerness of Lesbian Cinema
- Notes
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The scene in Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011) that has become the most frequently cited ambassador for the film's blend of youthful frivol-ity, political commentary and uncompromising drama is one in which four young Iranians dub the gay rights biopic Milk (Gus van Sant, 2008) into Farsi in a screening room at the back of an illicit video store in Tehran. In this scene, which intervenes in Circumstance's ultimately tragic narrative, layers of comic incongruity unfold in the form of a bid to produce the dubbed Milk as a black-market double bill with the Sex and the City movie (Michael Patrick King, 2008). As the camera pans hesitantly left and right across three awkward faces staring beyond the frame at the sexual images whose sound effects they must translate, several fantasies overlap: of escape to the utopian USA of the movies they dub; of the radical potential (and humorous incompatibility) of the sexualities available through those two contrasting narratives; and of the film's own profession of cultural identity beyond the diegesis.
Circumstance was directed by Maryam Keshavarz, an American-Iranian graduate of New York University. It was filmed in Beirut as a stand-in for Tehran and co-produced in Iran, France and the USA. The dubbing scene gestures to the world beyond Tehran, creating the fantasy of a universal space linking nation states via the illusory and contradictory sexual politics of North American cinema. B. Ruby Rich's account of the ‘explosion of lesbian filmmaking’ at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival uses the scene in order to exemplify the film's expression of a ‘desire to be somewhere else’ (2011: 63). For Patricia White, whose essay on Circumstance also begins with this evidently irresistible scene, it ‘functions as a canny commentary on the film's position-ing within global cinema networks’ (2018: 159). White's chapter focuses on these feminist circuits and the film's positionality as a diasporan product of cross-cultural contemporary lesbian possibilities. And for Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, who use the dubbing scenario to set their world stage in their book Queer Cinema in the World, Circumstance offers a way in to thinking about the paradoxical and sometimes even uncomfortable tropes that deter-mine how we theorise the queerness of the world, the queerness of world cinema and the ‘worlding’ of queer cinema (2016: 5).
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- Information
- Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory , pp. 57 - 77Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2019