Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Though a smattering of films throughout the 1970s, mostly from Senegal and Tunisia, featured minor queer characters, Dakan, which should arrive as late as 1997, enjoys distinction as the first African film to explore same-sex intimacy.

The grieving man from Mumbai has the downward stare and stooped shoulders of the touch-starved, his back perpetually stiffened into a forbidding carapace. This is Anand, the recessive center of Cactus Pears, Rohan Kanawade's semi-autobiographical first feature.

Making a film about queerness just five years before the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada necessitated that Secter toe a line and avoid any overt displays of homoeroticism.

Much of the low-budget queer cinema of the 20th century has a documentary flavor; everything feels authentic and real even when fictionalized. In many of these films, a liberated, explicit representation of active queer spaces is still informed by the reality of the closet.

The notion that gay lifestyles are fundamentally lonely and perilous is, of course, absurd and antiquated, but this acutely provocative filmmaker meets such stereotypes head-on, exposing their roots, testing their limits, and probing their lasting impact on queer narratives past and present.

Madsen has images of different materialities play out in the same frame, collapsing temporality and distance. Photographs, both digital and magnetic video, and hand-processed 16mm film are used simultaneously, often overlaid and blended, using the grammar of optical printing techniques via a digital intermediate.

Revolutionary gestures in cinema have to be excavated from the rubble of film history, and an earnest engagement with this deeply flawed film unveils a reservoir of untapped revelations that can be harnessed in our contemporary queer imagination.