Probing the continuities and discontinuities of queer representation and expression in the vast, multiform corpus of French cinema up to 1945, this chapter celebrates moments of queer visual and auditory intimacy and pleasure in both celebrated and little-known or neglected films. It aims to prove that early French cinema, despite its all-too-evident heterosexist matrices and repressive tendencies (notably the negative and often highly crude, fetishizing stereotypes of the “homosexual,” “lesbian,” and “cross-dresser”), also discloses unpredictable and non-normative aesthetic spaces or “interzones”—of filiation, desire, and sensation—that resist easy categorization (social, cultural political), elude the gender fixities of the period, and are rich in radical ambiguity and queer suggestion, even subversion. A new, materialist, queer aesthetics and historiography is proposed that ties early French film production and spectatorship to abiding aspects of the French cinematic tradition such as cinephilia and film criticism.