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Queer Cinema, Top to Bottom

May 19 — Jul 1, 2023

For much of cinema’s history, queerness was woven secretly into its fabric. As the decades wore on, and as queer artists wrestled with often inhospitable cultures and government or industry restrictions loosened, they began to assert their perspectives and sensibilities, playing with aesthetics to articulate a sense of queerness, decisively and cinematically. To mark the release of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTQIA+ Stories, out May 16 from Smith Street Books and Rizzoli, author and critic Kyle Turner has guest programmed a selection of films that epitomize the complex, contradictory, and compelling ways queerness finds itself as code, language, or point of view, and underline how cinema can look back at itself, disassembling notions of desire, selfhood, and identity. These ten films are separated into three categories for your viewing pleasure: vers (Mulholland Drive, The Watermelon Woman), bottom (Morocco, Rope, The Fly, Jennifer’s Body), and top (Nitrate Kisses, Querelle, O Fantasma, The Duke of Burgundy). 

Organized by guest curator Kyle Turner. 

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Past Films in Series

A woman looks at a woman—whom we see from behind—in a dark hallway

The Duke of Burgundy
A woman looks at a woman—whom we see from behind—in a dark hallway

The Duke of Burgundy
black and white image of a woman smoking, holding a cigarette holder, with her eyes closed and smoke out of her mouth like vapor

The Watermelon Woman
A man in a low cut tank top sits with his arms crossed, his back to another man wearing a leather cap and vest in a bar, with a bartender watching from behind them

Querelle
black and white image of a woman smoking, holding a cigarette holder, with her eyes closed and smoke out of her mouth like vapor

The Watermelon Woman
black and white image of a woman smoking, holding a cigarette holder, with her eyes closed and smoke out of her mouth like vapor

The Watermelon Woman
A dark haired woman in a red towel looks in a bathroom mirror at an image of a woman on a movie poster

Mulholland Drive
A woman sticks her tongue in another woman's ear in a grainy black and white image

Nitrate Kisses
A man in a low cut tank top sits with his arms crossed, his back to another man wearing a leather cap and vest in a bar, with a bartender watching from behind them

Querelle
Three men stand in a room by a large window during sunset, all three wear suits, while the older man in the middle looks intently at the man on the left, who looks away painfully

Rope
A naked man crouches on the ground near a rusted metal fence

O Fantasma
A woman sticks her tongue in another woman's ear in a grainy black and white image

Nitrate Kisses
Two young women sit at a bar, one blonde, one brunette, the blonde isn't smiling, the brunette is, as they look off camera

Jennifer’s Body
A naked man crouches in a futuristic machine pod, intensely looking at camera with one hand near his cheek

The Fly
a woman in a tuxedo backstage ties her necktie and looks in a hand mirror, next to a mustachioed man

Morocco
A naked man crouches in a futuristic machine pod, intensely looking at camera with one hand near his cheek

The Fly
Three men stand in a room by a large window during sunset, all three wear suits, while the older man in the middle looks intently at the man on the left, who looks away painfully

Rope
a woman in a tuxedo backstage ties her necktie and looks in a hand mirror, next to a mustachioed man

Morocco
Two young women sit at a bar, one blonde, one brunette, the blonde isn't smiling, the brunette is, as they look off camera

Jennifer’s Body