Going back in time a little.
My usual caveat: I am a cishet man. Also, I’m white, educated, middle-class, middle-aged and so forth. Even my disability is often socially advantageous and easily fixable (bad eyesight). So, this is an outsider’s look at the topic.
Also, any movie can be analyzed through a queer lens, so this only covers the obvious ones – the ones that wear it on their sleeves. I left out some entrants, like Magnolia and the Twin Peaks’, that have queer characters in the periphery. Of course, there are also movies that are very popular among LGBTQ+ crowds, such a The Wizard of Oz and Jacques Demy’s musicals. You could also argue that any movie with enough pushing back against gender roles, for example, is queer to an extent, like Wanda or Mad Max: Fury Road.
Now, you might be asking ‘why’, which is a legitimate approach. The reason is that there is a very specific way the whole list is built. Let’s take IMDb’s list. You have numerous people giving their opinion on a movie on a scale. A total of 1.7 million people have given The Shawshank Redemption a full 10. That’s 55% of all the people who rated it. It’s not even included on the Sight & Sound list. How did that happen? Because it’s a very high quality movie with an interesting story, which leads people to give a 10, but is it anyone’s favorite movie? Favorite movies are a much more personal thing. They are something that appeals to you on a different level. They don’t have to be perfect or even have a great story, as long as you can feel they are for you.
That makes the Sight & Sound list so interesting. It’s not about having the best actors or finding that great shot or building that perfect scene. It’s about people’s identities and personal histories. So, when you let in a bunch of people with different backgrounds and identities, you will have an interesting list. These seventeen movies below are among someone’s absolute favorites. Because everyone only gets 10 votes, these are among people’s personal top ten movies (assuming no strategic voting).
Finally, I should add that I have seen all of the movies on the list. However, I’m getting old and my memory is not as strong as it used to be, so I might have missed some or forgotten details about these movies. Here we go anyway.
=243. Born in Flames
A socialist-democratic revolution happened and it was peaceful. The problem is that the new utopia is a utopia for some only, so two distinct groups of feminists start their terror campaigns to fix the situation.
Sadly, the bisexual woman behind this movie got sucked into the Hollywood machine and by mid-90s, her career as a director had been pretty much sidelined and she became an uncredited script doctor.
=225. Blue
This is hardly a celebratory movie. The name comes from the director’s (Derek Jarman) inability to see other colors at this point in his life, as he was dying of complications from AIDS. The movie is him and some of his regular collaborators just recounting his life. This feels like a radioplay, but there is of course pathos from Jarman’s imminent death that gives this gravitas.
=225. Happy Together
Two Chinese men are stranded in Buenos Aires after their relationship falls apart during a holiday. This is me, as a cishet person, speaking, but they don’t seem to struggle with the homosexuality. At least not much. They struggle with the relationship, which has plenty of obstacles they build themselves.
It is nice to have point of view on the topic that is not completely western as most of these movies are.
=225. je, tu, il, elle
As I was watching this movie for the first time, my significant other walked into the room just as there was a lesbian sex scene starting. She thought I was pranking her when the scene just went on and on, until finally clocking in at about 20 minutes. It isn’t shy either. There’s just a few cuts in it, probably only when the camera ran out of film, and in between those cuts, it’s just a static camera sitting still, witnessing two women going at it.
One of the women is Chantal Akerman herself. This was her first feature and apparently she could not afford to hire anyone else to star, so she did it herself.
=211. Pink Flamningos
This, of course, stars Divine, but that isn’t necessarily queer. After all, the character Divine plays is a ciswoman, so in that regard, it doesn’t matter what the identity of the actor is. On the other hand, less than ten years ago from the release of this movie in 1972, a supreme court justice actually said that his test for obscenity was “I know it when I see it”. Well, when you see this movie, you’ll know that it is gloriously, gleefully obscene. While that doesn’t make anything queer in itself, the transgressions of this movie are often in that direction.
=196. Paris Is Burning
This is a documentary about the ball culture in New York during the latter part of the 80s. Well, that’s the conceit. In reality it’s about the struggles with not only homophobia and transphobia, but poverty and racism these people face with the balls being their way of surviving and maintaining their dignity.
=157. Orlando
Just learned, as I’m writing this, that this was inspired by a real person: Vita Sackville-West and her/their male persona, Julian, who was a lover and a friend of Virginia Woolf, who wrote the novel this movie is based on.
Orlando is a young man (played by Tilda Swinton in first of her many gender-bending roles) who is ordered by Queen Elizabeth (played by Quentin Crisp) to not grow older. Orlando does as he is told. Orlando, like his inspiration, does not really conform genderwise, so after some time and a tumultuous love affair with a Russian princess, he decides one day to become a woman. There is no explanation on this except a fourth-wall breaking statement by Orlando herself: “Same person. No difference at all… just a different sex” as she admires her new body in the mirror.
=157. All About My Mother
It is still hard to find positive depictions of transpeople in media and in 1999, when this movie came out, even The Matrix needed to hide it completely, so this is in that regard this was a very forward thinking movie. The only explicit transfolk from movies before this that I can remember were murderers (Dressed to Kill, Sleepaway Camp, and yes, Silence of the Lambs despite the attempt to dismiss this idea). While I’m not the biggest fan of Almodovar, this is an actual achievement for him.
=146. The Watermelon Woman
So, you are a black lesbian woman (I know, redundant) and you want to find good representation for your identity from movies only to find out that there just isn’t any. What do you do? You create it, in two ways. First, you make this movie, and second this movie is about discovering a (fictional) black actress who had a secret relationship with a white actress.
=122. The Matrix
If you weren’t clued in yet, it’s a transallegory.
=95. Tropical Malady
Another look at queer folk outside of the west.
Not that we can fully understand what’s going on, as the director’s (Apichatpong Weerasethakul and yes, I had to copy-paste that) movies have a tendency to be very specific to his own culture and thus hard for us from different cultures. On the other hand, most of the people who voted for this are from the west, so maybe it’s just me.
It is about the love between two men in a remote village in Thailand. There is nudity in the film, which is actually still so rare in the country that Wikipedia lists all occurrances of it on it’s page on Nudity on film.
=60. Moonlight
There’s only nine best picture Oscar winning movies on the Sight & Sound list. This is one of those. A beautifully told story of a young black man struggling with many things, but most importantly, for this context, his sexuality, which he has up to the finale of the movie kept hidden. Yes, there is one earlier scene, but he still feels like he needs to keep quiet about it to maintain his role as the macho drug kingpin.
38. Some Like It Hot
Billy Wilder never acknowledged any kind of queer theming. He just maintained that men in women’s clothing provided a lot of opportunities for jokes. Of course, we can’t really know what he was thinking, but what we do know is that if he had been open about any queer themes, his career would have been over in the Hollywood of the late 1950s. However, and this might be wishful thinking on my part, I do kind of get the feeling that in his own way Wilder gets it. Throughout his career, he was great at making all sorts of characters sympathetic and you can’t do that without feeling sympathy yourself, so why wouldn’t he feel sympathy for one of the many things Nazis tried to destroy, which is queer people.
Obviously, now, this movie has been reclaimed. And then there’s iconic ending where “Daphne” tells Osgood as they are leaving on boat that he is a man and Osgood just says “Well, nobody’s perfect”. According to Wilder, this was just a placeholder for an actual line, but no-one ever came up with anything to replace it.
30. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
As this was only three years old at the time, it is the second newest movie on the list with only Celine Sciamma’s other recent movie, Petite maman, being newer. Why not? This is a movie I’ve heard praise for this movie from people who generally only watch sci-fi or horror.
It’s about two women who are put into a position to spend time together on a remote island. They quickly find that they enjoy each other’s company and more very much, but there is the looming problem of their time together being very limited. But they understand that.
28. Daisies
I was kind of giddy to see this on the list, because it is weird. It is not very widely known, but considering that it’s 28th on this list, maybe there are a lot of people who should see this.
It’s about two women called Marie. They go out with men just to get them to pay for their meals. Otherwise they just spend time together, often in very intimate situations, including bathing together. The movie got shadowbanned in it’s native Czechoslovakia and prevented the director, Vera Chytilová, from working again for a while (she made commercials under her husband’s name for the remainder of the 60s). Might not have been worth it for her, but definitely worth it for us.
=21. The Passion of Jean D’Arc
Is this a queer movie? Let me ask you this: Is a movie about someone assumed to be a woman taking on a manly role and manly clothes being persecuted and prosecuted for this a queer movie? Should be. Sure, maybe we should be careful about how we discuss gender identities from a period when they were understood very differently or about an almost hundred year old movie’s understanding of those, but at the same time, it is difficult to disregard an assumed woman who wanted to wear armor and lead men into battle.
It’s also just great and due to it’s age, very easy to find on the Internet for free.
18. Persona
Someone called this movie the Mount Everest of analysis. You can see this in any way you want and there will be someone who is able to refute that. Still, lesbianism is one of the common interpretations of this movie. Whether it’s a positive depiction of that is completely different question.
8. Mulholland Dr.
Is this lesbian movie? Sure, there is a lesbian sex scene, but does it make this a movie about lesbians or just a movie with lesbians? So, I asked some those mythical lesbians and apparently, they see this as a movie specifically about a lesbian relationship falling apart. Of course, Lynch never told anyone what his movies are about, so we can’t know what he was thinking when making his movies as he wants to let us experience them on our own terms. Although, he wanted to leave out chapters from the DVD release, so that people couldn’t stop the movie and come back later (which is kind of an elitist position).
7. Beau Travail
I guess the gay themes of this movie are technically subtext, because no-one ever discusses or acts on their homosexuality, but it’s not much of a subtext as we spend around half of the running time just admiring half-naked bodies of young soldiers. Also, it is loosely based on Billy Budd, a novel often interpreted as being about the forbidden homosexual feelings on a ship.
It’s about not being able to act on your sexual desires and how that will come out in destructive ways. The most famous scene of the movie is, weirdly enough, the climax, which actually only happens after the end credits have already begun. It’s just Denis Levant dancing to Rhythm of the Night alone in a night club. At that point he knows he will likely be convicted in a court martial for trying to kill one of the men he was supposed to train. Yet, all that bent up energy just comes out all at once and it is wild.