The Golden Age of black and white cinema doesn’t seem like the likeliest of places to find a film with overt bisexual themes, but there are a handful of examples that are required viewing for any wannabe queer movie buff. Don’t expect anything original here; each of these films follows the same basic plot, the classic bi love triangle in which an existing relationship is threatened by bisexual urges. Just like in modern bi films like Basic Instinct (1992), Pretty Persuasion (2005) and Y Tu Mamá También (2001) bisexuals here are depraved Casanovas or tortured souls, destroying lives. Here’s where those cinematic tropes began.
Adapted from a 1902 novel, it’s rumoured that the married director Carl Theodore Dreyer’s drew on experience of his own same-sex affairs when making Michael, the story of an acclaimed artist known as The Master who struggles with his relationship… Continue reading
Patricia Silva’s short Self and Others is set to be shown at queer experimental film festival, MIX NYC, which runs from 10th to 15th November in (you guessed it) New York. The film is about female sexual fluidity and uses only use clips of bi+ characters or BY bi+ characters.
BISCUIT: What inspired you to make a film on this topic?
Patricia: Now that Queer Studies is becoming an institutionalized movement in the Western academy, we need to be far more specific and demanding of who and how that term is serving. Bisexuality has required a very different codification of how we relate, different from how lesbians and gays read each other, which of course becomes the dominant queer language at the core of what people now study as queer. That, and other experiences, provided momentum for me to give visual form to the cultures of sexual fluidity… Continue reading
You didn't hear it from us (27/02/15)