ABSTRACT
The late architectural theorist, Katherine Shonfi eld, has argued that all fi lms tell their story spatially.1 This is perhaps most true of fi lms that tell the story of homosexuality, since one of the ongoing legacies of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) Production Code is that the homosexual story, in comparison to its heterosexual counterpart, continues to be less vested in character and more vested in scene. The capacity of classical fi lm texts to connote gay and lesbian material visually while making it disappear narratively has been documented in both popular and theoretical accounts of Hollywood cinema, though few of these accounts have specifi cally linked the chimerical appearance of homosexuality on screen (everywhere seen but nowhere understood or nowhere seen but everywhere understood) to the formal grammar of fi lm and, in particular, its illusionist expansions and compressions of projected space.2 It is not by chance that some of the most compelling lesbian-themed fi lms from the post-Code era distribute their homosexual effects across the primarily spatial components of the fi lm text rather than concentrating those effects in character. As counterintuitive as it seems, the sexual perversity represented in these fi lm texts is carried by cinematographic details that are often cast into shadow by the overexposed presence of the lesbian and gay characters who, post the censorship repeals of 1968, are dramatically licensed to appear in mainstream American fi lm for the fi rst time. Decked out in their post-Stonewall colors, new Hollywood’s gay dramatis personae variously project as hysterical, suicidal, pathological, and depraved but are frankly less interesting than the old-school visual devices and editing techniques that anachronistically frame them the better to persuade us of their homosexual profi le.
