ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that if lesbianism hadn't already existed, art cinema might have invented it. To a cinema which affects an attitude of high seriousness in matters sexual, the lesbian romance affords a double benefit. Narrative cinema has traditionally looked to the figure of the woman to signify sexual pleasure, sexual problems, sexuality itself — placing her 'as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium'. Lianna — as a product not only of the United States but of a writer-director with a considerable background in Hollywood exploitation — may seem a perverse example of a cinema which originated as an alternative to American dominance. Ironically, Lianna's story can signify everyone's experience only by remaining peculiarly ahistorical, unspecified, thus troubling art cinema's canons of realism. In art cinema, lesbianism has also been punished, often by death.
