New Black Cinema

The low-budget commercial success of New Black independent filmmaking was undoubtedly as important in creating the economic conditions for the emergence of Queer cinema as was the economically successful recirculation of queer identities through mainstream advertising, publications, and TV. Lee's independently produced and aesthetically challenging She's Gotta Have It (1986) made more than a respectable return in an era of considerable economic insecurity in the film industry; proving anew that cheaply produced films aimed at young, black (males) could be very lucrative (Proctor, 1991). The film was criticised by black feminists for reproducing stereotypes of black female sexuality (Simmonds, 1992; Jones, 1991), but hailed in black and mainstream media as a cultural as well as economic breakthrough. 1991 was a "watershed" year (Proctor, 1991: 9) for black filmmaking which. initially, showed a new diversity of themes in films ranging from the genre-spoof A Rage in Harlem to The Five Heartbeats (about a doo-wop band, rather than gangsters). Those black directed films which made most significant returns, however, shared familiar themes and iconographies: rap, youth, and urban catharsis. Proctor regretfully saw "resuscitations of blaxploitation-era tendencies to urbanize and criminalize" (9) in what Jones (1991) dubbed the 'ghetto aesthetic' exemplified by New Jack City, and Boyz N the Hood. Phillips (1996) noted a negative aesthetic and thematic shift between blaxploitation and the 'new wave' of black film. Whilst both utilise a ghetto setting, the representation of "brotherhood" central to the earlier blaxploitation cycle had been replaced by internecine warfare.

Instead of pride, and love and success, its themes were murder, getting even, police harassment, drive-by shootings and the incessant violence of gang warfare [...] there is no moral vision [...] and no sense of a wider context. (Phillips, 1996: 26)

Whilst an insistence "on the exigency for collective memory and self-actualization" (Proctor, 1991: 9) in films informed by the feminist and black politicised film-aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Daughters of the Dust (1991), was critically respected, they did not make the same kind of money.

New Black Cinema's aesthetic was based on 'marginal attractiveness' (formerly known as 'exoticisation') and the celebrity personas of hip hop. Winokur (1995), arguing for more open reading practices and against the prioritisation of avant-garde over mainstream black film practice, nevertheless doubted the claims of 'multiculturalism' to an inclusive plurality of representation: "Marginal attractiveness does not mean cultural inclusion" (30). A number of critics noted that black directors working in the mainstream may have relatively limited control over their own representation of black people. Jones argued that representation of black culture in black-directed mainstream film may be as "uncharacteristic" as that by whites, and also noted the relative absence of women and women's agendas in this non-redemptive 'ghetto aesthetic.'

In fact, of the films scheduled for wide release, only three [...] do not concentrate on the contemporary urban ghetto. Only one [...] contains a valuable leading role for a Black female actor. And none are directed by Black women. (Jones, 1991: 31)

Whilst in the 'ghetto aesthetic' genre, women were occasionally raised to the relative equality of status as psychopathic killers in films such as New Jack City, such women remain "contextually impotent" (39). The economic and representational "ghettoization" of New Black cinema "ignores the existence of a Black community beyond these narrow confines — inclusive of women as valuable participants — as well as films that refuse to cater to these prescriptions" (43). Features directed by or foregrounding women such as Just Another Girl on the IRT (1992) and Mi Vida Loca (1993) were also read as subordinating women to the already problematic 'ghetto aesthetic' (Jones, 1991).

The British context produced few black directed features. In common with the rest of Europe (and the world) Britain has been unable to compete with the slick American product and US domination of distribution and exhibition infrastructures. "The public don't want British or other European films. What they want are American ones" (Petley, 1993: 29). Commercial success is confined more or less to romantic period dramas marketable as a commodified form of 'Englishness.' Black (and lesbian) production is particularly difficult to fund and is mainly in short form and supported through arts organisations and C4 projects. In 1991, of 23 British feature films, 15 were funded, but only 2 were black productions (Gould, 1993: 11). These statistics have not significantly improved. Terrordrome (1993) was black directed and financed on the US independent model but, in common with most British independent film, it was commercially unsuccessful (Gould, 1993: 11).

Perhaps as a result of differences in production context, black British film does not show the same aesthetic homogeneity as its US counterpart, however. Gilroy (1993b) described a difficulty in defining black aesthetic production in either film or TV in that "the growing diversity inside the black communities and the divergent patterns of their economic life make the easy assumption of racial or ethnic homogeneity look either foolish or dishonest" (31). This is no doubt equally true of the US but free-market production conditions in the US tend to efface such complex multiplicity in favour of marketable stereotypes. Financially, C4 productions had been the best hope. The commercial success of My Beautiful Launderette (1985) seemed to herald improving conditions for British Asian as well as potentially for gay filmmakers but commercial conditions remained recalcitrant. Isaac Julien's part-grant funded Young Soul Rebels (1991), the first British black gay feature, had a less successful reception both critically and financially. Gurinder Chadha's C4-supported Bhaji on the Beach (1993), the first British feature directed by an Asian woman, depicted a diversity resistant to stereotyping in an episodic, realist, mode and was well received. However, as with queer TV, whilst directors may attempt more diverse representations of British cultures, C4's productive context tends to condition a remarkable aesthetic homogeneity.

'Rationalising' lesbian film practice

The success of New Queer Cinema provoked lesbian complaints of the paucity of resources made available to lesbian filmmakers in this context. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the history of white lesbian filmmaking had been closely associated with that of feminist filmmaking (Florence, 1993: 133). Black feminist, lesbian or gay filmmakers, however, more usually worked within the nexus of black film production (Florence, 1993: 133). Feminism's fortunes fell in the 1990s and this has had a major effect on lesbian film practice. There was a general move away from a political emphasis on lesbian autonomy and on deconstructive experiment which characterised the 1960s and 1970s. At the Lesbian Filmmaking Versus Queer Cinema Conference at Goldsmiths College in 1994, a panel discussion on the future of lesbian filmmaking was swamped by complaints from the floor about the low quality of no-budget short films. Politicised, avant-garde lesbian filmmakers struggled to get across both their radical aesthetic aims and the effects of economic constraints on marginal filmmaking. But issues of who/what is being shown, how, by whom, for whom, and why it all matters, got lost in the simple insistence that lesbian films should approximate the production values and realist form of popular film as closely as possible. The younger lesbian audience saw marginal lesbian production as failing to reproduce dominant values adequately rather than as a deliberately resistant, politicised, aesthetic form.

In the feminist heyday, feminist production and distribution projects had been attractive to filmmakers and programmers wishing to access feminist audiences, as well as to funders keen to implement equal opportunities briefs. But even on the crest of this wave they could not survive commercially, not least because they put political before commercial considerations.

Although the founders of Circles [feminist distributors] had hoped that they would become self-sufficient, it quickly became apparent that the kind of work to which both [Circles and sister organisation COW] organizations were committed did not generate enough income to cover operating costs. In fact neither organisation put commercial viability among their primary aims. (Knight, 1992: 185)

As had been the case with print media, the demands of lesbian audiences for higher production values coincided with increasing difficulties in financing the production and distribution of lesbian films. In the context of a general loss of prestige for feminism, a specifically feminist audience was no longer identifiable as a marketing target. Lesbian filmmakers became chary of identification with an unfashionable feminist 'ghetto.'

Women filmmakers in particular often found that the inclusion of their films in a women's programme or a women's film festival only functioned to reinforce their marginalisation [...] At the Créteil festival [1987] a panel of successful women directors was asked if they would put their films with a feminist distributor if one existed in France. Apparently none of them would reply. (Knight, 1992: 186; citing Merz and Parmar, 1987: 68)

Economic, cultural, and funding climates underwent significant changes making the situation even more precarious. In 1990, as New Black and Queer commercial cinemas got underway, the BFI drastically cut funding and amalgamated Circles and COW, both of which carried a substantial body of lesbian work which otherwise had little chance of distribution or exhibition. At the same time, in a recession, commercial distributors wanted to be sure of returns and were unwilling to experiment. Repertory cinemas were closing, stifled by the growth of home video. Subsidies were being cut and the arts sector 'rationalised.' Funders succumbed to a safe cultural nostalgia, shifting priority from producing a critically challenging cinema to preserving and marketing a 'national film heritage;' and from politicised agendas to 'investment funding.' The ethos of lesbian-feminist film production thus found itself doubly at odds with 1990s enterprise culture.

Ironically, these two factors in COW's and Circles' success — their strong feminist image and their ability to attract funding — were also the prime reasons for their demise in the early nineties. Due to the high costs involved in film distribution, the relatively small audiences that exist for campaign or experimental films, and the enormous amount of work involved in generating specialist audiences, Circles and COW became heavily dependent on grant-aid for their continued existence. Their work ethic was at odds with the new enterprise culture and the development of incentive funding that emerged in the mid-late eighties. (Knight, 1992: 185)

In the circumstances, Lianne Harris of the new Cinenova company, stated the organisation's policy of "retrieving women's film distribution from its 'feminist' categorisation and placing it firmly within the film/video sector" and placing "a greater emphasis on commercial viability" by "'opening its doors' to work that has far stronger entertainment and commercial appeal" (Harris, quoted by Knight, 1992: 187).

In the early 1990s, a recent rush of queer activism in the US made Queer Cinema the funders' new toy. 'Sexuality' and 'lifestyle' were the marketable forms of lesbianism in this commercial ethos. Whilst feminism was seen as passé, lesbianism became unprecedentedly chic. But a harder-edged lesbian criticism of heterosexist culture may be less attractive to a market with a pronounced taste for the feelgood factor and widest possible appeal. It seems doubtful that 'the market' would spawn Born in Flames, A Question of Silence, or Privilege, for example — although these films still generate an energetically engaged response among lesbians and women. Furthermore, Cinenova's continued commitment to the work of black and Third World filmmakers (see Merz and Parmar, 1987, 68-9) is unlikely to be supported or furthered by commercial networks.

At the same time, however, distinctions between marginal and entertainment styles have become blurred since the 1960s and all but extinguished in the work of successful independent directors like Spike Lee, Jane Campion and Gus Van Sant. A similar narrowing of the gap between art and entertainment has taken place in marginal short-filmmaking, fostering change from experimental or campaigning films to a much lighter and quirkier style. Contemporary London lesbian audiences preferred sexy, and/or funny films, such as She Wanted Green Lawns (1989), Rosebud (1992); Sex Lies Religion (1993), and Fireworks Revisited (1994) (although British regional audiences still often find London taste offensive, preferring the more committed feminist style). But however entertaining, distribution of such films is still unlikely ever to become commercially viable. It remains a problem that commercial distributors and exhibitors, TV buyers and audiences themselves are rarely enthusiastic about 'shorts.' Marginalisation by funders, as well as aesthetic choices, mean that the overwhelming majority of lesbian-made material is in this 'short' form. Those few lesbian directors who have managed to fund features — even if they would like to place their films with a feminist distributor — need, in this new commercial environment, to place their films with mainstream distributors who are able to fund a higher-profile release for their features.

Trying to take on more 'accessible' work with more entertainment appeal means Cinenova will have to compete for work with numerous other, more commercial distributors, who may have more resources at their disposal [...] [and] even after Circles' and COW's efforts in the eighties, films by women [...] remain marginalized in Britain. (Knight, 1992: 188)

The lesbian film aesthetic had also differed markedly from that of male queers.

Lesbian film- and video-makers [...] show largely different concerns that are, for instance, more intimately linked with feminism and autobiography [...] Not only do all of the queer male filmmakers share an "out" gay identity, they have also all made feature length films which reflect a certain defiance of narrative conventions mixed with [...] camp — which is admittedly not a lesbian speciality. (Lebow, 1993: 19)

Again, as with print-media, lesbian filmmaking lost the initiative and became reactively overdetermined by a field of expectation opened out by male queer film practice. Lesbian-queer seemed a category "without a constituency" (Florence, 1994: 300). Lesbian short filmmaking associated (often not by the filmmaker but rather by critics) with Queer Cinema also registered a shift in aesthetic practice. Farthing's C4-funded Rosebud (1992) gently sends up classic art-house representational conventions for feminine sexuality (billowing lace curtains, flowing water) and replaces them with a raised eyebrow, gay-chic decor and fallen angels — all stalwart camp icons of the gay underground. Zalcock's Fireworks Revisited (1991), a spoof of Anger's underground classic, Fireworks, reworks a phallicised eroticism in terms of a humorously lesbian symbolic, metamorphosing the ejaculation of the roman candle to the dizzy gyration of a Catherine wheel.

The 1980s and 1990s have seen the setting up (with varying degrees of success) of several gay video distribution companies including the most well-known, Dangerous to Know. Home video might seem a convenient way of circulating less commercial lesbian film, and the queer companies do carry a number of lesbian shorts and features. But there are problems with home video because, unlike films shown in cinema-clubs, they have to be certificated which is both expensive and time-consuming. Over-reliance on the home-video market would restrict audiences to certificated films (and not much would be left many lesbian shorts after cutting by the censors!). This further tends towards the depoliticisation and homogenisation of the form and content of lesbian film. It is also a concern that home video bypasses public screening to lesbian audiences and cannot generate public debate in the same way. This fosters an ever-increasing distance between sites of production and consumption. Nevertheless, video's relative cheapness and ease of circulation has meant that both feminist and lesbian experimental work is now very often marketed in this format.

There is also still relatively little work by black British lesbians available. Funding organisations always tended to favour filmmakers whose work most nearly conforms to the 'high art' aesthetic values of middle-class white culture. This, effectively, favours male as well as white filmmakers. The free market has not, in Britain at least, seemed particularly effective in enabling black and/or lesbian filmmaking either. Much of the work made by black women is by lesbians but this has mainly been supported by grant-funding or by commission through 'minority' strands by Channel 4 and Film4. It was thought that Queer Cinema might open out a new recognition for lesbian work, but lesbian short films continued to be largely critically, academically, and commercially ignored. Parmar argued that the purported inclusivity of the category of queer does not represent the social reality of unequal access to resources (reported by Florence, 1994: 299). In the US, with its well-established marketplace for independent film, there has been a more "upbeat" attitude to commercialisation. Nevertheless, this context has also favoured male filmmakers. The doyenne of New Queer Cinema, Christine Vachon, came under considerable criticism for producing only "boys'" movies, and Livingstone had difficulty funding a second film even after the commercial success of Paris is Burning (Lebow, 1993: 18).

In 1993, New York magazine posited 'lesbian chic,' Roseanne cast Sandra Bernhardt in a lesbian role and even Madonna noticed lesbians (Lebow, 1993: 19). The proven commercial value of New Black and New Queer Cinemas, as well as of lesbian characters in TV sitcoms and soaps, gave producers greater confidence in the potential for the commercial success of lesbian features. To a certain extent, the mini-boom in lesbian feature production in the mid-1990s was sucked into a marketing vacuum of expectation.

The recent Queer Cinema hype has created the impression of a perceived lack of lesbian cinema. This, in turn, has created a top-down push by 'indie' producers, now in a desperate scramble to 'discover' the lesbian Todd Haynes or Tom Kalin. (Lebow, 1993: 19)

The virtually no-budget feature Claire of the Moon (1993) made nearly $1m. It was Vachon who found completion money for Go Fish (1994), the first lesbian feature to be associated with New Queer Cinema and to achieve a cultural visibility beyond lesbian audiences. Go Fish made $2.4m — nearly as much as Reservoir Dogs (Abramowitz, 1996: 84). But it was still almost ignored by mainstream media. The mainstream profitability of the 'lesbian romance' genre having already been established in the 1980s, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1995) was made with somewhat higher production values and a more mainstream aesthetic, with a realist narrative and colour format. Lesbian-queer Cinema had arrived.

New Queer Cinema

New Queer Cinema was a term coined in 1992, the year following the watershed of New Black Cinema, in which several independent films with gay themes were launched. Much verbiage has been devoted to trying to figure out what — besides a sudden upsurge in production and relative mainstream recognition — distinguished these films as a genre (or aesthetic type). Gay filmmaking, up until the 1990s, had been divided by critics into pre- and post-Stonewall periods. Pre-Stonewall depicted bravura camp quivering on the surface of tormented exile and bravely transcendent love. Post-Stonewall gay films depicted a new, positive-images, confidence in being gay. Two strands might be said now to distinguish queer from gay (or post-Stonewall) cinema: in its rush to distance itself from stereotypical, effeminate torment, the politicised gay aesthetic had ditched its pre-Stonewall past with a shudder. Part of queer's reaction to the gay-liberation politics of the 1970s was to seek a new rapprochement with this painful history.

Haynes' reworking of Genet in Poison (1991) won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize but was fed into right-wing reactionary campaigns against public funding being made available to openly homosexual projects (Abramowitz, 1996: 85). Queer politics, however, revelled in confrontation, where gay liberation had hoped to disarm it. Gay politics had suppressed any suggestion that homosexuals were in any way tortured, or experienced themselves as abjected, in order to achieve a culture of self-esteem for gay people. Gradually, an increasing confidence gained through these gay strategies fostered an acknowledgement that it was counter-intuitive to suggest that the oppression of homosexuality had produced no negative psychological effects at all. Films such as Kalin's Swoon (1992) worked a more complex articulation of a cause célébre of homophobic representation. The Leopold-Loeb child-murder case in the 1920s had spawned two Hollywood thrillers: Rope (1948) and Compulsion (1959), both of which represented homosexuality as homicidal perversion (see Okewole's interview with Kalin in the programme for ICA's New Queer Cinema conference, 1992:8). The success of queer and black cinemas facilitated, in turn, the financing of more diverse forms of queer cinema. In 1993, The Wedding Banquet, an Asian-American-directed queer feature, was the most profitable film of the year relative to its production cost (Murphy, 1994: 94).

The institutionalisation of queer cultural production has generated counter-discourses from within. Queercore, or homocore, fused the form of punky fanzines with gay pornographic imagery. LaBruce was involved in producing queercult pornographic magazines and no-budget 8mm films in Toronto. These are major determinants of both the style of his films and their ironical urge to èpater the bourgeois. LaBruce looked back with gleeful humour at queers' gay avant-garde predecessors, combining homage and satire on the influence of gay pornography in forming the gay film aesthetic in general and Warhol's underground filmmaking of the 1960s in particular. Warhol was known for, amongst other things, trashing the boundary between high-art and popular culture and for the manufacture of celebrity — with cynical irony turning himself and the bunch of disfunctional transsexuals and queers who hung around his Factory into 20th-century icons as well as highly marketable commodities. In Super 8½, LaBruce wickedly sends up Warhol's transubstantiation of the abject gay underground to art-world celebrity by fictionalising his own life as a queercore filmmaker. The exploitation of the dead-beat hustler by the rich and closeted art-world is reframed in contemporary terms. But La Bruce also exhibits a form of queer nostalgia for the camp exhibitionism of the mythical avant-garde:

I sometimes wish the homosexual world were still like this — the furtive signals, the hidden signs, the unanalysed affectations that suggest rather than proclaim deviation. I suppose I'm an anachronism, a throwback, but at times I imagine myself more at home in the thirties or forties, surreptitiously, or perhaps brazenly entering a movie theater with my special friend to watch a Cocteau movie, our flamboyant style alone causing people on the street outside to speak in hushed tones. (LaBruce, 1995: 191)

It would seem that it was actually a new readiness on the part of the mainstream to recirculate homosexual imagery which distinguished queer filmmaking, as much as its relatively upfront confrontation with 'repression' (after all, Anger's Fireworks and Genet's Un Chant D'Amour were both banned in the 1940s and 1950s for their 'explicitness' – as noted in Dyer, 1990: 47, 118). This was not merely a question of changing public sensibilities — Genet's film is pretty explicit by any standards. Of a conversation with a friend in the early 1990s, LaBruce remarked:

[H]e tells me I should direct the marketing for my new movie towards a 'regular' audience, and steer clear of the ghettoisation of the gay and lesbian film festival circuit. I'm at a bit at a loss to think how an explicit movie about a washed-up gay porno star who is shown sucking a lot of cocks and getting fucked up the ass could appeal to a heterosexual crowd, but I guess you can market anything these days. And you know, somehow I think he's right. (LaBruce, 1995: 191-2)

Lesbians and popular cinema: 'noirs' and 'lites'

The style of lesbian-made feature films was generally very different from that of male-directed queer films. The lesbian features were, on the whole, contemporary, upbeat and 'feelgood.' There was minimal exploration or re-evaluation of the past and minimal overtly politicised or critical content or deconstructive form. On a reverse trajectory from that of queer film, the commercialisation of lesbian filmmaking seemed to carry an acknowledged degree of re-presentation towards the uncritically positive. Turner observed that "angst is out" and "the feelgood factor is in" (quoted by Florence, 1994: 299).

Oh my God, if we did our normal lives, we would never sell this movie [...] Especially if you look at what was going on behind the scenes while Go Fish was being made — crazy shit compared to, like, what was in the movie. (Rose Troche quoted by Abramowitz, 1996: 84-5)

This seems reminiscent of black critical commentary on the limitations of authorial control in New Black cinema. And not all lesbian critics were celebratory about the incursions to the mainstream effected by queer.

By and large, strategies aimed at achieving social integration — or, more pointedly, assimilation in liberal society where the sexual orientations or 'lifestyles' of lesbians would be treated offhandly — accept without question the dictates of consumer culture, equating cultural value with economic success [...] This [middle-class] constituency fosters narratives of lesbian cultural identity reproduced in the image of consumer culture, a strategy that invariably feeds self-aggrandising myths of possession and control. (Gever, 1990: 200)

It certainly seems very clear that the rubicon of 'bums on seats' largely superseded any political or aesthetic considerations as a critical measure of cultural worth. This tendency was frequently justified on the grounds of 'pleasure.' Numbers of lesbian 'bums on seats' were often cited as evidence of this new lesbian 'pleasure' — effectively not so much even as visual pleasure or desire, but pleasure in the consumption of lesbianism as a commodity.

Again, this process of institutionalisation quickly produced contestation, often drawing on resistant black and Latin forms:

While a 'garbage esthetic' can at times produce junk, we have begun to create work that reflects our production circumstances while nonetheless challenging the limits of what can be done on the low end of the production scale [...] There is an entire crop of lesbian video-makers, [...] who have developed an elaborate defense of down and dirty video activism. (Lebow, 1993: 19)

The gay and lesbian film festivals, set up only in the previous decade, were already being seen as implicated in the assimilation of queer filmmaking to dominant praxis:

With the advent of 'The New Queer Cinema' which is a predominantly narrative, white, male, dominant culture approved category — it becomes increasingly important for community-based film festivals to maintain a vibrant oppositional position and refuse to let the mainstream media dominate the definitions of gay and lesbian cultural expression. Unfortunately the vast majority of gay and lesbian film festivals are in formal and demographic lockstep with the dominant trends. (Schulman, 1996: 134)

Increasingly, oppositional, experimental and culturally marginal film production is moving away from an ineffectual stratification of aesthetic and identificatory boundaries and towards emphasis on sites of production and consumption in networked 'localities.' The New York Mix festivals, for example, represented the intersecting boundaries of marginal cultural production in localised contexts of production:

With the gay community's lurch toward assimilation, 'obvious' notions of what it means to be experimental have evaporated, [...] something only marginally different is marginalized as experimental by the mainstream [...] [Furthermore] with the dominance of video, there seems less of a connection to the pillars of the film world [..] The community of people making film (celluloid), was so small, it was knowable [...] concentration on parties is a marked shift [...] The idea of polymorphousness was promulgated, while [...] standard notions of 'gay' and 'lesbian' were de-emphasised. (Jusick, 1996: 91)

It might be expected that such fundamental shifts in the nexus of queer, lesbian, and feminist, cultural production might also problematise lesbian spectatorship of both indie and mainstream commercial cinema.

I have previously addressed arguments that avoiding mainstream cinema and confining lesbian spectatorship to lesbian-controlled production and exhibition contexts would solve the ambiguities of resistant readings and identifications in mainstream film. Because lesbians imagine that the filmmaker shares in a lesbian order of meaning, there is a tendency for lesbian sub-cultures to adopt a more collusive reading strategy in relation to lesbian indie features such as Desert Hearts (1985), Go Fish (1994), Bar Girls (1995), Thin Ice (1995), and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1996). This seems to occur even though the lesbian identities of some of the filmmakers are, at the least, ambiguous, and the film's exhibition context is mainstream. The personalising focus on love and desire in the romance genre also omits many of the politically confrontational elements of 1970 and 1980s lesbian-feminist-made indie features such as Not a Love Story (1981), A Question of Silence (1982), or Born in Flames (1983), which were challenging in form and confrontational in content. Gay male filmmaking in the 1980s had consisted, on the other hand, mainly in 'safe' representations of identity politics. Whilst queer cinema radicalised male queer film practices in the 1990s, queer lesbian filmmaking moved in the opposite direction towards a more realist mode of identity politics. "The stories we want to tell should be assumed to be as normal as anyone else's story. That is an extraordinary political and historical shift" (Maggenti quoted by Abramowitz, 1996: 84).

This inconsistency between the political trajectories of lesbian and male queer work does not seem explicable entirely in terms of greater economic or cultural access for gay men. Even the 'catch-up' theory that lesbian indie has not yet had the opportunity to build up a 'safe' tradition to rebel against rather founders when the relative political and aesthetic riskiness of lesbian experimental features of the 1980s is taken into account. Obviously the literary respectability and commercial popularity of the 'coming out tale' or 'lesbian romance' genre makes it a relatively safe commercial bet for cinema. Nobody is threatened by women falling in love, besides the 'loony-right.' Thus, the commercialisation of lesbian cinema seems to have moved the line of lesbian contestation towards the right since the 1980s.

It also is interesting to note that the interracial couple which was characteristic of many of the 1980s revisionist buddy appears at the centre of just about every lesbian feature made in the late 1980s and the 1990s including She Must Be Seeing Things, Go Fish, Bar Girls, Thin Ice, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love and Watermelon Woman. Although Go Fish and True Adventures do, to some extent, situate black characters in or against cultural context, none of the other films made any effort to do so with the exception of Dunnye's Watermelon Woman (1997), produced by James Shamus (who also produced The Wedding Banquet).

Dunnye used complex anti-narrative technique to explore issues of history and identity surrounding representation of black lesbians. Avoiding inscription either in the 'ghetto aesthetic' of New Black cinema or the 'lite' form of new lesbian cinema, Dunnye produced a critically challenging text which resists over-collaborative reading, and is both re-evaluative towards black lesbian history and challenging to current configurations of identity and their material effects (as well as ironically comic). This more challenging film was both critically and commercially unsuccessful and sank like a stone commercially after its initial critical success on the festival circuit.

There are many arguments surrounding lesbian reclamation of popular film texts, versus a cinema of our own. To a certain extent, these arguments have already been overtaken by developments in the independent sector. In 1993, Philadelphia grossed $75m. By 1994, there were 50 mainstream film projects with lesbian or gay characters or themes in production (Murphy, 1994: 93). Three lesbian-themed film projects were in the pipeline at major studios and queer was big business. Murphy (1994) did not think the change in major studios' attitudes to gays and lesbians was due to economic factors alone, however, but partly resulted from the political response by queer activists to Basic Instinct. Following energetic protests, studio executives agreed to meet with activist groups to discuss representation of gay characters and themes:

In the '80s, women grouped together and formed such organisations as Women in Film and made it a point to get together and push their own agendas. Well now gays and lesbians are doing that. (Murphy, 1994, quoting 'Chad': 140)

GLAAD had gained considerable leverage from the increasingly lucrative popularity of gay storylines in US TV soaps. Nevertheless, the economic factor was the deciding one. "We now believe you can gross 20 to 30 million dollars per film on business just from [the lesbian and gay] community" (Murphy, 1994, quoting a Sony executive: 138).

Up until the 1980s, lesbianism had been stereotypically represented by Hollywood as evil, pathetic, exotic, or as a social-problem. Homoerotic subtext in popular film tended to be accounted for as an accidental by-product of the opening out of the heterosexual ordering of visual space in regressive fantasies effected by the dream-like qualities of the high-production Hollywood text. Reading a mainstream film as subtextually invoking lesbianism involved a subversively motivated resignifying process. What now seems to be happening in mainstream production is something more akin to 'window' advertising:

To be successful in Hollywood terms [...] movies will have to offer "marketable subjects that are provocative to straight audiences" and "women that men will really want to see." (B Ruby Rich, 1994, quoting Lauren Lloyd: 81)

Sophisticated contemporary audiences are able to access and manipulate genre codings as communicative signs in a way which might have been accessible only to students of semiotics thirty years ago. This has enabled a shift in the economic function of genre. Rather than producing generic copies of previously financially successful films, marketing analysts are now able to isolate narrative and iconic elements of previously successful movies from a range of genres and sub-genres (by now, the source films are usually also of mixed-genre). Genre codes and narrative elements can be mixed and matched at a self-reflexive level of ironised communication constituting a 'window' technique as well as utilising generic 'brand familiarity' for marketers. These marketing techniques also further problematised critical distinctions between mainstream and 'marginal' cinemas which had already been challenged by the absorbtion of experimental aesthetic practices into the mainstream in indie filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s.

Abramowitz (1996) distinguished two mainstream lesbian feature genres: 'lesbian noirs' and 'lesbian lites' (84), noting that the lite films were mainly female-produced and directed whilst the noirs were mainly male produced and directed. Lites were the positive, angst-free narratives of the romance genre kicked off by Desert Hearts and Claire of the Moon. In the noirs, lesbianism was represented as transgressive, criminal, outlaw, and with a 'fuck-you' attitude to society. Probably as a result of the relative cultural and economic privilege of their male directors, the latter type tends to have higher production values; for example, Single White Female (1992), Heavenly Creatures (1993), Fun, (1994), Butterfly Kiss (1995), and Bound (1996). However, there may be a further explanation. The lite films are niche marketed — that is they are produced in the knowledge and expectation that their appeal is limited to a specific marketing-demographic group. As such, niche filmmaking is limited to the low-budget end of the indie sector. If a window technique is employed instead, however, the resultant text can be expected to be marketable to a much wider audience sector. This means that a film which encodes the maximum multiplicity of points of entry will be more likely to command mainstream budgets.

Formally, lesbian noir is minimally distinguishable from other self-reflexive and deconstructive indie reworkings of the noir genre in the 1990s ranging from A Rage in Harlem (1991) to The Last Seduction (1993). Clearly, noir's representations of lesbianism encoded an address to film-literate white, heterosexuals as well as lesbians. Similarly, lesbian sub-texts which have apparently knowingly been inscribed in mainstream western-genre films such as and Bad Girls (1994) are minimally distinguishable from other revisionist texts in this genre which reflected cultural insecurities and conflicts in post-modern and 'multicultural' America. Lesbian reception of lesbian noir was variable. Many felt that such representations were negative and homophobic in aligning lesbianism with homicidal perversity (Galvin, 1994); whilst others felt that this actually made them much sexier and in many ways more enjoyable than the lite films (Tasker, 1994). The residual element of resistant activity in decoding the multiplicity of readings offered by male-produced films could, however, also be a major element of lesbian pleasure in the noirs. Lewis' remarks on print media might be illuminating here:

[I]n the case of a 'dominant' text like Vogue [...] the eroticization comes via the exercise of a subcultural competency. But this pleasure is heightened into a thrill by the sense of transgression that comes from constructing an alternative narrative. In the case of lesbian magazines, where the same subculturally recognisable codes are the denoted rather than the connoted of the text, they read differently and sometimes, I think, produce less visual pleasure. Context is all. (Lewis, 1997: 96)

Or perhaps It was a combination of these 'transgressive' features which produced a lesbian excitement in noirs such as Bound which appeared to go beyond mere pleasures of consumption.

But whatever happened to feminism amongst all this glamourous transgression? It seemed to find a rather unlikely refuge. The tomboy had stuck with the Western through its many liberal-revisionist phases. In the late 1980s and into the '90s, the Western and its sub-genres — the 'road' and 'buddy' movies — enjoyed another modest resurgence kicked off by the Brat-Pack opus Young Guns. The urban and space 'cowboy' actioners of the 1980s succumbed to ironical self-reflexion and were also looking for novelty. The tomboy found herself back in action and female rebellion seemed, once again, rather a lonely frontier.