ABSTRACT
In a March 2000 Sight and Sound essay entitled “Queer and Present Danger,” B. Ruby Rich argues that the “moment” for New Queer Cinema has passed. She states that queer filmmaking has succumbed to the logic of the marketplace, becoming “just another niche market, another product line pitched at one particular type of discerning consumer” (24). “New Queer Cinema” is the term Rich herself coined more than a decade ago to describe a variety of non-mainstream queer filmmaking practices; its terminology hearkens back to the experimental, anti-establishment “New American Cinema” movement of the early 1960s. According to Rich, a spate of late 1990s films including Being John Malkovich (1999), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Boys Don’t Cry (1999) offer proof that New Queer Cinema’s sensibility has infiltrated the mainstream, for better and for worse.
