New Queer Cinema

"New Queer Cinema" is a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s. It is also referred to as the "Queer New Wave". The term developed from use of the word queer in academic writing in the 1980s and 1990s as an inclusive way of describing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity and experience, and also defining a form of sexuality that was fluid and subversive of traditional understandings of sexuality. The major film studio to discuss these issues was aptly named New Line Cinema with its Fine Line Features division. Since 1992, the phenomenon has also been described by various other academics and has been used to describe several other films released since the 1990s. Films of the New Queer Cinema movement typically share certain themes, such as the rejection of heteronormativity and the lives of LGBT protagonists living on the fringe of society. Susan Hayward states that Queer cinema existed for decades before it was given its official label, such as, with the films of French creators Jean Cocteau (Le sang d'un poète in 1934) and Jean Genet (Un chant d'amour in 1950). Queer cinema is associated with avant-garde and underground film (e.g., Andy Warhol's 1960s films). In avant-garde film, there are lesbian filmmakers, who laid the heritage for Queer cinema, notably Ulrike Ottinger, Chantal Akerman and Pratibha Parmar. An important influence on the development of Queer cinema was Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1970s and 1980s European art films, which added a "gay and queer sensibility" to film (e.g., Querelle from 1982, based on Genet's novel). Like Rosa von Praunheim, who has made more than 100 films on queer topics since the late 1960s, many of them have been shown and rated internationally. Some of the director's films are considered milestones in Queer cinema. Von Praunheim became an international icon of Queer cinema.