Introduction

The title of this section harbors, of course, a double suggestion, of desires in motion (the abstraction, “desires,” meaning something like “sexualities,” changing over time and across space) and also of desires that are moving, in the sense of producing emotional response. As it happens, there are further senses: of the illusion of movement that is fundamentally the precondition of cinema in the sense of “moving pictures,” and, as one of our students remarked in a noir reading of the phrase, a picture of a guy with a porkpie hat and a trenchcoat hurrying down an alley. All the better: discussions of sexuality and popular cinema ought, we think, to traverse the resolutely concrete and the realm of fantasy, the requirements and specificities of national film industries, and the real but difficult to grasp transnational affinities of what we might in a too-confident Anglophone certainty call queer desires.