LGBT+ History Month: Home

Gay Directors, Gay Films?

Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream cinema. Since the 1970s, however, a new generation of openly gay directors has turned the closet inside out, bringing a poignant immediacy to modern cinema and popular culture.

Combining his experienced critique with in-depth interviews, Emanuel Levy draws a clear timeline of gay filmmaking over the past four decades and its particular influences and innovations.

New Queer Cinema

This volume is a record of a time, the 1990s, and a subject, the New Queer Cinema, and the decades and lineages of representation to which they gave rise. It was then and there that a new class of films and videos found a home and defined an era. These videos and films, so fresh and powerful, decisively shifted modes of representation, exhibition, and reception in ways that continue to evolve today. This book traces their arrival and evolution. 

Max and Mary

The film follows the lives and friendship of two unlikely pen-pals; Mary, a lonely Australian girl, and Max, an overweight American man with Aspergers syndrome. The film is inspired by diretor Adam Elliot's relationship with his pen-friend in New York whom he has been writing to for over twenty years.

Elliot's five films have collectively participated in over seven hundred film festivals and have received over one hundred awards, including an Academy Award. Elliot calls himself an auteur filmmaker and each of his films have a bittersweet nature to them. He does not engage with commercial work and works exclusively on his own film projects. Born with a hereditary physiological tremor, Elliot incorporated his disability into his visual aesthetic with his work displaying uneven lines and an organic feel.

The Nine Old Men: Lessons, Techniques, and Inspiration from Disney's Great Animators

Follow master animator and Disney legend Andreas Deja as he takes you through the minds and works of Walt Disney’s team of core animators, who he affectionately called his "Nine Old Men'. An apprentice to the Nine Old Men himself, Deja gives special attention to each animator and provides a thoughtful analysis on their techniques that include figure drawing, acting, story structure, and execution. Rare sequential drawings from the Disney archives also give you unprecedented access and insight into the most creative minds that changed the course of animation.

The Music of Benjamin Britten

This comprehensive guide to Britten's musical achievement discusses all the published compositions in subdivisions of genre and period, and devotes a separate chapter to each opera. With the help of over 300 music examples and diagrams, musicologist Peter Evans demonstrates Britten's mastery of the art of composition.

Brittan's work has been used extensively in film and TV with Peter Grimes and War Requiem being especially recognisable and ubiquitous, soundtracking emotion and feeling across the years.

West Side Story

The original 1961 film version of the enduring stage play features music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and choreography and co-direction by Jerome Robbins.  It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won 10, including Best Picture (in addition to a special award for Robbins), becoming the record holder for the most wins for a musical. West Side Story is regarded as one of the greatest musicals of all time. The film has been deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1997.

Deep Listening

Pauline Oliveros was a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music, she investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of "deep listening" and "sonic awareness", drawing on metaphors from cybernetics.  This book offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding and provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, mediators and anyone interested in how consciousness may be effected by profound attention to the sonic environment.  

Pauline collaborated widely with artists such as Sonic Youth and composed for short experimental films.
Find out more about Pauline at http://paulineoliveros.us, and http://www.deeplistening.org/,

The Matrix

Conceived, written, and directed by the Wachowskis The Matrix is one of the biggest hits of 1999 and its cinematic and visual language has been hugely influential in the decades since.  

Lana Wachowski is the first major Hollywood director to come out as Trans in 2008, with her sister, Lilly, following in 2016.  Despite the Wachowskis carefully guarded privacy Lana received a 2012 Human Rights Campaign Visability Award with the words...

'I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn't find anyone like me in the world and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others. If I can be that person for someone else, then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value'

The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection

Drawn from one of the world’s greatest private collections of photography. This unrivalled selection of classic modernist images from the 1920s to the 1950s features almost 200 works from more than 60 artists, including seminal figures such as Berenice Abbott, André Kertész, Man Ray, Alexandr Rodchenko and Edward Steichen among many others. The Radical Eye introduces a crucial moment in the history of photography – an exciting rupture often referred to as the ‘coming of age’ of the medium, when artists used photography as a tool through which they could redefine and transform visions of the modern world. Technological advancements gave artists the freedom to experiment and test the limits of the medium and present the world through a new, distinctly modern visual language.

Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar

Almodóvar’s films have proven rich fodder for academia, particularly in film, gender and queer studies. Paul Julian Smith’s Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar was one of the first major studies of the Spanish auteur.  Smith notes the seemingly contradictory attributes which constitute Almodóvar’s work – films about women, Spanish identity and homosexuality which seemingly lampoon and savage these very things – and argues for the importance of understanding the films’ Spanish historical and cultural context in order to understand them properly.

This new edition includes four new chapters, among which is a rare interview with Almodovar himself, a new preface and additional illustrations. 

The Art of Bolt

Byron Howard is the first LGBT+ director to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar twice, and Bolt was his directorial debut.  He focused on character design and animation as shown in this behind the scenes art book which is a beautiful collection of more than 250 pieces of concept art created for the film, including storyboards, digital and pencil sketches, color scripts, maquettes, full-color illustrations, as well as material from the fabled Disney archives. Insightful quotes by Howard and his co-director inform the book and their introduction.