Overview

Since the publication of Vito Russo's seminal study The Celluloid Closet in 1981, much has been written about the representation of queer characters on screen. Until now, however, relatively little attention has been paid to how queer sexualities were portrayed in films from the silent and early sound period. By looking in detail at a succession of recently-found films and revisiting others, Shane Brown examines images of male-male intimacy, buddy relationships and romantic friendships in European and American films made prior to 1934, including Different from the Others and All Quiet on the Western Front. He places these films within their socio-political and scientific context and sheds new light on how they were intended to be viewed and how they were actually perceived. In doing so, Brown offers his readers a unique insight into a little known area of early cinema, queer studies and social history.

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9781784536657

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Reviews

'Shane Brown offers a critical and much needed addition to the fields of film history and queer studies. He brings to light a range of films and reads them through their historical moment. In the process he gives definition and depth of understanding to the way that homosexuality and the homosocial have been perceived historically both in the European and American cinemas of the early twentieth century.' - Michael Hammond, Associate Professor of Film History, University of Southampton, 'Shane Brown's Queer Sexualities in Early Film : Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy is a fine addition to an expanding canon of volumes which explore the covert history of queer cinema. Brown is effectively a detective ... opening up commentary on the roots of non-traditional masculinity in film well beyond queer cinema.' - Lindsay Coleman, film and television academic at the University of Melbourne and Editor of Sex and Storytelling in Modern Cinema (I.B.Tauris, 2015).

Author Information

Shane Brown is Associate Lecturer in the School of Film, Media and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, where he received his PhD in 2013. He has published writing on personalities such as Jack Pickford, Boris Karloff and Elvis Presley.

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